>^-i' ROME AND VENICE, WITH OTHER WANDERINGS II ITALY, H 1866-7. BY GEGKGE AUGUSTUS SALA, AUTHOR OP "aaiebioa ly rHE mids'" or war," etc. 1859. Ecco torno il Francese : Vedete poi 1' esercito che sotto La ruota di Fortuna era caduto, Create il nuovo Re chi si prepara Dall' onta vendicar che ebbe a Novara." Ariosto. Noi siamo padroni delle acque di Lissa." Admiral Persano to General de la Marmora. LONDON: TINSLEY BEOTHERS, 18 CATHEEINE ST., STRAND. 1869, SB i.oNDONr: BOBSON AND SOXS, I'laXTKlIS, PANCUAS BOAD, N.W. ^ TO SHIRLEY BROOKS IS VERY CORDIALLY DEDICATED. ivi8208^6 NOTICE. The Letters forming this volume, with the exception of those headed respectively " On Travelling and Travellers in Italy," and " Eoma Urbs," appeared in the columns of the Daily Telegraphy between the month of April 1866 and the month of February 1867. They are now republished by permission of the Proprietors of that Journal. That which now sees the hght again, under the comprehensive title of Rome and Venice^ is scarcely a fourth part of my original correspondence from, I think, nearly every province of continental Italy, save Calabria. Sicily I did not visit ; and for many reasons, at which I have hinted "in another place," I have cancelled all record of my experiences in the Tyrol with Gaeibaldi — the Washington of Italy: "first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen," but whose reputation has been shame- fully maltreated, within these latter days, in Eng- vi PREFACE. land, simply because he is old, and ^ has failed in two attempts, and because he is too noble and too pure to tell lies, or to disguise his horror and hatred of the cogging and shuffling of diplomacy, and the wickedly impudent impostures of priestcraft. My readers, and especially my critics in the amoene sphere of journalism (how we all loathe one another, to be sure !), may be reasonably congratulated on the excision of three- fourths of my primary mass of matter. The whole would have made a work as in- tolerable as one of Prynne's, — "all rind and no fruit." The piteous entreaties of my terrified Pub- lishers notwithstanding, I had resolved to produce an actual book of " Travels in Italy ;" but better sense prevailed, and I held my hand at the present excerpt. G. A. S. CONTENTS. I I NO. On Travelling and Travellers in Italy PAGE I L The Austrians in Venice . . . . 27 II. From Trieste to Vienna 46 III. The Kaiser .... 61 IV. A Flight from Venice 71 V. Ferrara .... 86 VI. From Ferrara to Eovigo 100 VII. Passage of the Po 116 viii. Theatre at Eovigo 134 IX. The Idle Lake . 150 X. PoNTE d' Arana . 165 XI. Gaffes 175 XII. Venetia 192 XIII. Finis AusTRiiE 200 XIV. The Surrender of Venice . 210 XV. Eve in St. Mark . . 226 XVI. The Plebiscitum . . 236 XVII. Venice restored . 247 XVIII. Entry of the King of Itali r INTO Venice . 267 XIX. Passing through Florence . 284 XX. The Eoad to Eome . 292 " XXI. EoMA Urbs . • Z'^9 XXII. A Eoman Festival . 321 XXIII. The Pope . . • 334 vili CONTENTS, XXIV. Rome and the Romans XXV. CumSTM AS-DAY IN ROME XXVI. Roman " Shaves" XXVII. CosB Di Roma XXVIII. New Year in Rome XXIX. Old Christmas-day XXX. Roman Notes XXXI. The Streets op Rome XXXII. A Day with the Roman Hounds 344 354 364 373 383 397 406 423 453 ROME AND VENICE IN 1866-7. ON TRAVELLING AND TRAVELLERS IN ITALY. There are two ways of doing everything — the poetic and the prosaic. There are some persons so richly endowed with the imaginative faculty that they have heen able to invest the commonest and meanest things of life with an aspect of poetry, or with nobility of thought and language. Thus the sublime Siddons, at the dinner-table, astounded the little footpage, who had handed her a glass of ale by mistake, with an outbreak of blank-verse : " I asked for water, boy ; ye've brought me beer." x4.nd I have heard of a man, of the highest literary attain- ments, but whose pecuniary difficulties were continuous, who would borrow half-a-crown in the Spenserian stanza. Although I have turned a verse occasionally, as husband- men turn a sod, I think I can conscientiously aver that I have not one tittle of poetry in my soul, and that I never wrote, and (what is more) have never striven to write, anything of the nature of lyricism. But I do npt .affect, to despise an art 2 ROME AND VENICE. of which I am ignorant, or to undervalue a gift of which I have been deprived. The grapes are not sour. They arc only as far beyond my reach as that sumptuous bunch of hothouse " sweetwaters," at a guinea a pound, which tempts my eyes, while it derides my pocket, in the central avenue of Covent-garden Market, There are few things easier of accomplishment than to sneer at poets and poetry; and for smartly sour railing, the poet-hater may be commended to old Stephen Gosson, who, falling foul of Homer, tells the story of Mithecus, who was an excellent cook among the Greeks, and as much honoured for his confections as Phidias for his carving. But when he came to Sparta, thinking there for his cunning to be ac- counted a god, the good laws of Lycurgus and customs of the country were too strong for his diet. The governors banished him and his art, and all the inhabitants, following the steps of their predecessors, used not with dainties to provoke appe- tite, but with labour and travail to whet their stomachs to their meat. " I may," says Stephen, " well liken Homer to Mithecus, and poets to cooks; the pleasures of the one winnes the body from labour, and conquereth the sense ; the allurement of the other draws the mind from virtue, and confoundeth wit." It is, I apprehend, very facile to be thus censorious. He who has no palate can say very cutting things about Francatelli or Jules Gouffe ; the man who can neither whistle *'Wapping old Stairs," nor hum ''God save the Queen," is usually ready to sneer at Mozart and Beethoven as " Tweedledum and Tweedledee ;" and if you would hear a good set homily on the nasty, filthy, selfish, idle, health- destrciyin^ haj^it.of smokijig, you should listen to the moralist ON TEAVELTilNG AND TRAVELLERS. 3 whose stomach would be turned by three whiffs of the mildest of havanas. Never was there a more terrific Rhadamanthus than he who sits in judgment on the things which he does not like, or which he cannot do. An author may be a very pungent satirist, but no poet : which may be one of the reasons, per- chance, why the greatest poets have often been so Bcurvily treated by writers of satire : nor have I ever been free from a lurking suspicion that the eminent Juvenal may at one period of his career have essayed to write either eclogues or epics ; that his performances were not very favourably received at fashionable dinner-tables or by the critics of the public baths, and that, soured and disappointed, he avenged himself on the Theseid, and " took it out," as the vulgar saying goes, of poor hoarse Codrus, whose chief faults, it is possible, were to have a wife and a large family, and to suffer from chronic bronchitis. For myself, I can say with candour that I should like very much to be a poet, just as I should like to be Baron Rothschild, or the Marquise de Caux, or Mr. Millais the painter, or a Prime Warden of the Fishmongers' Company. Providence has decreed that I am not to be anything of the kind ; but it is still free to me, I conjecture, to regard the man of millions with admiration and without envy; to go into ecstasies every time I hear Patti sing ; to dwell with €ver-recurring delight on the "Huguenot" and the " Order of Release ;" and to dine at Fishmongers' Hall whenever I am asked, or my liver will endure clear turtle and Steinberg Cabinet. I said there were two ways of doing everything — the poetic 4 ROME AND VENICE. and the prosaic ; or, if you prefer to vary the terpas, the re- fined and the vulgar. It can be no secret to such readers as I possess that I am a Vulgarian, and that I have never swerved from vulgarity of thought and coarseness of style during the twenty years in which I have been writing for a livelihood. Me Boeotum in crasso jurares aere natum. You might swear, finding me anywhere, that I was born in the gi-oss atmosphere of Cockaigne ; although for a man to be a cockney it is by no means necessary that he should have first drawn breath within the sound of Bow bells. He may have a cockney soul. The inmost utterances of his heart may misplace their /t's. Yet it has often struck me that one of the lower animals — say a dog or a pig — coarse as may be its appetites, gross its manners, and unintellectual its organi- sation, may have more and better opportunities of judging the qualities of things which are of the earth earthy, than the Colossus, stalking along sublimely, his head in the clouds, and his nose upraised, in the direction of the Milky Way. It is the ascertained business of a very few persons, in every age, to study the stars,* and of a smaller number still to understand anything of that which they study; whereas the common and petty things of life intimately concern mil- lions upon millions at every hour of the day. Granting, then, * " Count me not, then, with them who, to amaze The people, set them on the stars to gaze ; Insinuating, with much confidence, They are the only men that have science Of some brave creatures ; yea, a world they will Have in each star, though it be past their skill To make it manifest unto a man That reason hath, or tell his fingers can." John Bunyan, Prologue to the Rohj War. ON TEA YELLING AND TKAVELLERS. 5 for the sake of argument, that a cockney and a vulgarian has four short legs — the Colossus has two long ones ; — that his nose, instead of scenting the planets, is the rather disposed to sniffing for foxes, or for truffles underground ; and that his eyes lie naturally close to the earth, it may be conceded, per- haps, that he is sometimes enabled to arrive at a tolerably accurate estimate of the external phenomena of terrestrial nature, and that he may occasionally turn up little specimens of vegetation, or shells, or pebbles, which the Colossus — his nose still among the stars — ^has never seen, cannot see, will not stoop to see, and, in his sublime ignorance, tramples under foot, and crunches into powder. A persuasion that such may be the case, and an idea that the scent-hunting hound, and the truffle-grubbing swine, may in their genera- tion do good service to that cause which we should all have, Titans and Troglodytes, at heart, — the increase of the sum of human knowledge, — are my sole apologies for republishing the papers which form this book. For it appears to me that, from the poetical standard, Italy as a country and the Italians as a nation have been done, literally, to death, and that distance has led such en- chantment to the view taken of the Peninsula, that the eye of appreciation has grown, occasionally, somewhat weak and watery : a circumstance which has led not unfrequently to the confusion of hawks as hernshaws, and to the acceptance of clouds as whales. China, I surmise, is a land about which almost every traveller has told lies. Spain and Eussia are countries which no travellers save Ford in the first, and Mr. Sutherland Edwards in the second case, seem to have under- stood anything worth noting. Germany is a country which § nOMI AND VKNICK. kl Dot worth travelling in to understand, for its only toler- aMe products, its literature and its wines, can bo studied or drunk at Lome ; but Italy is a region about which every teaveller that ever visited it ha» dreamed dreams. The Italians themselves have, perhaps, been at all times the greatest visionai-ies with respect to their own country; and within these latter days the regcnemtion of Italy — may it be permanent ! — has been chiefly the work of a states- man (Count Gavour) whom his enemies declare to have Been no more an Italian than a Shetlander is an EngUsh- Buuu. I hasten, however, to quit this section of the argu- meait; for, were I to continue the discussion as to who is and who is not a good Italian, patriotically considered, I should have Mr. Swinburne battering me with a fiery torch, and telling me that out of the pale of Mazzinism there was no political salvation ; while, if I dared to hint that my own beaai»-ideal of a patriotic Italian was the late Daniel Manin, I might be reminded that the illustrious Venetian in question was by no means an advanced democrat, that he was an uncompromising advocate of a '* strong" govern- ment, and that as a lover of moderate freedom he enjoyed to the last the esteem and admiration of the Emperor Na- poleon in. French travellers in Italy have, perhaps, dreamt fewer cbeams concerning the Peninsula than have the Germans or the English. But their theoiy as to things Italian is decided enough. A Frenchman's political views of the country are very simple, and seldom vary. He is of opinion that Italy should be free ; but he questions the expediency of her being united. His dream is one of a federal Italy ON TRAVELLING AND TRAVELLERS. T governed by native sovereigns, all to be petted, patronised, and protected by the grand French nation. He would re- morselessly drive out the Teutonic invader, — indeed, he has driven him out over and over again ; nor would he install himself as an armed occupant in the invader's place. The first Napoleon might,'''ibyarTtroke of his pen, have united the whole Peninsula under his sceptre ; but he held his hand. He was crowned King of Italy, it is true; but his kingdom comprised only Lombardy and Venetia, with some pai-t of Piedmont, and later the " department of the Tiber" and the " department of Thrasymene" were decreed, under exceptional circumstances — those of the impossibility of bringing an impracticable priest to terms — to be integral parts of the French Empire. He dreamt the federal dream, and made a kingdom, here, for his brother-in-law, and a grand duchy, there, for his sister. Eome excepted, he never held, nor professed to hold, Italy as a conquered country, as the Spaniards had held Naples, and the Austrians Lom- bardo-Venetia. He wished Italy to have her own princes, her own usages, her own judges and magistrates, and her own troops. He exacted merely that social barbarism should be abolished, that the Code Napoleon should supersede the antiquated system of mediaeval jurisprudence, and that all the Italian governments should be amenable to French influence. It need scarcely be said that in the tail of the last sen- tence lies the sting. In my own opinion (and I trust that I am not singular in it) both the first and the third Na- poleon have done an immensity of good in Italy ; but ars I shall frequently have to revert to their Italian work, I 8 ROME AND VENICE. shall not enlarge upon it now.* But had the Bonapartes converted the Italian into a perfect angel (which they have certainly failed in doing), the non-Latin nations would still fiercely denounce the influence of Bonapartism in Italy,, and continue their etale tirades ahout ^* the insatiahle am- bition" of the conqueror of Marengo, and the "occult de- signs" of the victor of Solferino. The non-Latin nations have, I take it, a clear right to talk in that way ; but those who are of the Latin race have as clear a right to talk in their way, and to regard the influence of Cesarism in Italy as much more beneficial than detrimental: — beneficial as being calculated to establish a temporary mezzo termine be- tween the peril of a return to the stupid and cruel despotism * During my sojourn in Italy (I admit the time was one of tremendous political excitement, and that the national vanity was intensely mortified not only by the defeats of Custozza and Lissa, but by the contemptuous cession of Yenetia by tha Austrians, not directly to the Italians, but through the intermediary of France : a scornful flinging away, as though the Kaiser were saying, ** Here, give this dog his bone; and let your General Lebceuf hand it to him; for I will not"), I heard, saw, and read, in conversation, in public orations, in caricatures, and in journals serious and trivial, at least five hundred times the Emperor Napoleon III. compared to Tartuffe, to Timour, to Ignatius Loyola, to Herod, to Commodus, to Amurath, and to Judas Iscariot. In a satirical paper of large circulation, published in Milan (the Spirito Folletto, I think it was called), I noticed one very large cartoon, which was simply a blasphemous travesty of the magnificent Road-to- Calvary picture by Rafaelle, now at Madrid, and known as the " Spasimo di Sicilia." It was Italy who was staggering and fainting under the weight of the Cross ; Rome and Venice were the Holy "Women ; and the Emperor Napoleon was the Roman centurion oh horseback, who sternly orders the procession to move on. This abominable picture was exposed, surrounded by admiring crowds, in the Piazza del Duomo, on the bookstalls by the theatre of La Scala, and at a dozen shops in the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele— three of the most public resorts in Milan. That same evening (an exquisitely beautiful one in August) I strolled far away through the suburbs of Milan, past the great Naumachial circus built by Napoleon L, past the Piazza de' Armi, towards that famous triumphal monument of marble begun under the viceroyalty of Eugene Beauhamais, and dedicated " alle gperanze d' Italia indipendente" by Napoleon I., and ON TRAVELLING AND TRAVELLEES. 9 of the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons on the one hand, and, on the other, the equally dismal danger of rabid Eed Kepub- licanism. The necessity for French influence and protection in Italy must one day — and at no very distant one — cease to exist. But every new nation must remain, for a certain time, in leading-strings ; and in the Italian case which is, the advocates of French influence may argue, best ? — that the guide should be a nurse of a kindred race, and who has already helped to suckle the bantling and place it in terminated by the Austrians, who dubbed it the " Arco della Pace,'''' and covered its sides with tawdry bas-reliefs, and fulsome inscriptions in bad Latin, crying up the virtues of the Emperor Francis, the gaoler of the Spiel- berg. It was thus decorated when I first went to Milan, many years since. But when I revisited the arch that August evening in 1866, it had changed its aspect ; it bare record of the events of 1859, and the inscription beneath the architrave ran, Englished, thus : Napoleon III. AND Victor Emmanuel II. ENTEEING, THEIR ARMS COVERED WITH GLORY, EXULTING MILAN, TORE FROM THIS MARBLE THE IMPRINT OF SLAVERY, AND WROTE, INSTEAD, THAT ITALY WAS FREE. Where would " Milano esultante" have been in '66 but for that " en- trance with arms covered with glory" in 1859 ? Where would Italy have been now, without the help of Napoleon ? Could Victor Emmanuel have won Solferino and Magenta alone ? Without the aid of France, the Piazza de' Armi of Milan would be full at this day of white-coated Austrians, exer- cising " in squadrons and platoons, with their music playing chunes ;" the adjoining Castello would be full, as of old, of political prisoners; and any caricaturist venturing to lampoon the ruling powers would be very sum- marily taken to a guardhouse, strapped down upon a bench, and scourged — it would matter little if the offender were man or woman — within an inch of his or her life. But " exulting Milan" had forgotten the cavaletto and the hastone in 1866 ; just as those liberated Fenian convicts the other day were no sooner freed from picking oakum at Millbank and wheeling bricks at Chatham, than they went home to Ireland and set about abusing the British Government. 10 ROME AND VENICE. the way of walking; or an Austrian corporal, brandishing handcuflfs and willow-rods, or a ranting, raving Ked Eepub- lican, with Pianori's dagger in one hand and Felice Orsini's fulminating bomb-shells in the other ? I must be pardoned on this head for quoting one Italian authority on Italy, when I entreat all English admirers of this beautiful and. interesting land to read M. Cimmino's novel, I Coiu/iurati. Therein — from the testimony of an Italiano italianissimo — ^they may form some idea of the infinite mischief and naisery inflicted on the cause of Italian independence by secret societies and assassination plots ; by Mazzinism, in a word, which has never ceased to retard, instead of ac- celerating, the great cause — that of the creation of a new and healthy member of the European family. I doa^t say that I agree entirely with the ordinary French traveller who pins his faith to Cesarism in general, and M. Thiers' Italian notions in particular; but I do say that a nation which has been more or less enslaved and held cap- tive to the foreign bow and spear for fifteen hundred years has some need of guidance and protection ere she sets en- tirely up for herself as a great European power. Perhaps in a dozen years or so we shall have no kings in Europe at all, and then the Kepublic of Italy may form an import- ant section of the United States of Europe. In the mean time Frenchmen will continue to opine that united Italy, ■with an army thrice as large as she needs, with finances in a state of chronic disorder, with a clergy continually plotting to overthrow the newly-built edifice of freedom, and with a canker-worm at her very heart in the shape of Rome, and its Ponti£f more impracticable than that Pius whom ON TRAVELLING AND TRAVELLERS. U Napoleon I. took into custody, is, if not a failure, a mis- take, and that the next European convulsion will crumble the newly-built edifice to fragments. With regard to Italian literature, the French know well- nigh nothing about it. They sat patiently by while an Italian, the late M. Fiorentino, learned the French lan- guage in order that he might translate Dante for them. They wouldn't read the Inferno when M. Fiorentino had published it ; and at the present moment it is probable that the only notions entertained by the majority of educated Frenchmen touching the works of Italy's greatest poet are de- rived from the drawings of M. G-ustave Dore. Every Italian above the rank of a shopkeeper speaks French ; and not one out of every score of French travellers I met in Italy during nine months could speak twenty words of Italian.* With respect to art, the average Frenchman's Italian creed is as simple and as invariable as his political one. He regards artistic Italy as a mine, and he extracts as much precious metal from it as ever he possibly can, nor will he pay even for smelting the ore if he can help it. The English tourist goes to Italy to buy ancient pictures, or * Nor, much as they vapour about " La Diva," and much as they profess to admire Rossini, and much as they sneer at us as a nation incapable of appreciating classical music, do I think that the French have any sincere love for, or any profound comprehension of, Italian music. The Theatre des Italiens in Paris has always been an exotic, which would have died long ago but for a large subvention from the Government; whereas in England private enterprise and the cooperation of the people have, during a period of a hundred and fifty years, maintained one and sometimes two vast theatres for Italian opera in London. In George the Third's time, even, we had two — the King's Theatre and the Pantheon. Again, there is scarcely a provincial town in England in which, periodically, the very best Italian artists have not been heard. When did Grisi or Mario, Alboni or Lablache, visit Tours,, or Abbeville, or even Bordeaux ? 12 ROME AND VENICE. modern copies ; the wiser Frencliman sends the clever young alumni of the Ecole des Beaux Arts to the Villa Medici, to copy the pictures on the spot, and hring them home to Paris. In art, the Frenchman is the worst customer the Italian can have. He purchases little ; but he observes, imitates, and borrows everything he can lay his mind and hand upon. When he was all-powerful in Italy, he stole. Napoleon would surrender a principality, but he would stick like grim death to an antique cameo. He would part with a kingdom, but a manuscript by Lionardo, or a picture by Kafaelle, was not to be rescued, under compulsion, from his insatiate maw. **'Galli, semper crudeles, rapaces, harharorum omnium Italis infestissimV^ The cruelty and the barbarism may be doubtful ; but of the artistic rapacity of the French there can be no doubt. I have an old catalogue of the contents of the Museum of the Louvre, dated 1812 ; and it is half droll, half melancholy, to follow page after page of the records of impudent plunder. The Venus de' Medici and the Apollo Belvedere, the Trans- figuration and the Communion of St. Jerome — nothing came amiss to these ''cracksmen with a taste." But they did not destroy : they only stole. If they were obliged to bombard a city, they built it up again. Of the long Austrian sway in Italy, no architectural trace is visible now but fortresses and barracks ; whereas, although French domination in the Peninsula endured only from 1804 to 1815, in hundreds of cases, while travelling, when your eye lights on a good road, a well-built bridge, a commodious hospital, a solid quay, a handsome modern theatre, you will, asking, " Chi V ha fatto ?" receive the answer, " Napoleone PrimoJ* i ON TRAVELLING AND TRAVELLEKS. 18 * The veneration still shown by the Italians for the memory of the first Napoleon,* and which is so magnificently ex- pressed by Manzoni in the Cinque Maggio, differs very widely from the feverish and fantastic cultiis accorded to the Corsican by that French people whom he subdued, but whose vanity he flattered by the ephemeral gift of military glory. There can be little doubt that Napoleon's heart was con- stantly and chiefly in Italy, and that he loved Milan more than he loved Paris. In his desolate captivity, Italian was the tongue he liked best to speak; and in Italy his exiled kindred found a home and a respectful welcome. He did great things for Italy, and he would have done infinitely greater and better ones ; but his life was short, and the task was long ; but the occasion was fleeting, and judgment difficult : as many men have discovered since Hippocrates' time. He succeeded, however, in abolishing feudalism. in Italy ; everywhere he reformed the criminal code — save in Tuscany, where it was scarcely susceptible of reformation, and in Kome, where the priests baffled his efforts to reform anything. If his gendarmes were somewhat unscrupulous as to the number of brigands they shot (Fra Diavolo was among the number), there is abundant contemporary testi- mony to prove that, for a time, he extirpated brigandage from the Alps to the Adriatic, and that during his sway there were rooted out those hideous pests to society the hraviy or professional assassins, who, for at least eight cen- turies, had publicly pursued their abhorrent trade throughout taly. If his gendarmes did nothing else, they blew out the * A gold piece of twenty francs is habitually called by the peasantry m north and central Italy " un marengo,^^ AND VENICE. of fiftltflbacBl, tod fiparafacile, and Sparentoro. And let this eepecially be Boted : that bo soon as Napoleon fell, and Italy once more reverted to the Pope, the Bourbons, the Anstnasa, and liioae pale Grand-Dukes, always trembling, tiwt^ rnmd^ to 'isvoke ihe aid of Austrian bayonets, bri- gandism and bnKvoiam revived. Finally, let it be remem- bend, and to his imperishable honour, that the Eepublican General, the Wini Consul, the Emperor, the King of Italy, the "Chief olBwiditti," as he has been called by high Tory xsiticB, inexorably decreed the abolition of that abominable and inhuman outrage to, and desecration of Humanity, -which for ages had been common all over Italy, and the audible evidence of which only lingers at this day in Eome, where it counts yet a few miserable victims among the choristers in the private chapel of the Supreme Pontiff of the Eoman Catholic Church. And now, not ^without perturbation, I approach mine own countrymen who have travelled, or who travel, in Italy. I think they may \)e divided into thi*ee grand classes : the solemn, severe, and classical travellers ; second, the canting and gushing ones ; third, the idiotic plagiarists. Addison justly enjoys a considerable degree of renown as a dassical traveller in Italy. He drags in quotations from iiie ancient poets, it is true, a tort et a travers, in all parts of his interesting work ; but now and again he allows the mellow humour of Sir Roger de Coverley to peep from beneath the ambrosial curls of his periwag, and gives us some very life- like and unaffected touches of Italian manners. Sterne, perhaps, might have written, an he would, the very best book on the social habits of the Italians that has appeared in ON TRAVELLING AND TEAVELLEKS. 15 tlie English language — a book as shrewd and trenchant as that of the President de Brosses in the French ; but Sterne's incurable laziness and perversity, "his essential cussedness,'* as I once heard an American phrase it, prevented him from doing anything thoroughly ; and he teases us only with such delightful but disappointing fragments as the bit about Radicofani, and the Italian lady with whom he went to the oratorio at Milan. The Head Master of English classical travellers in Italy is, without a doubt, the Reverend John Chetwode Eustace, who made the tour of the Peninsula with his patron Lord Brown - low, and in whom may be summed up nearly all the merits and demerits of all the chaplains who have ever made the grand tour with noble lords. To his really sound learning, and genuine love for antiquities, the compilers of Murray's Italian handbooks have been very largely in- debted ; and, although Eustace was a Roman-Catholic priest, his four weighty volumes are generally regarded by the most orthodox Anglicans as a standard of all that is decorous and right-principled in Toryism. Mr. Eustace went to Italy while the French were dominant in the country, and it will be very easily understood that, as a faithful child of the Papacy, he does not approve of the late Napoleon Bonaparte. ''Ban- ditti" is the mildest term he has to bestow on the French armies. Wlien at Verona, he noticed that the French were " detested as the most cruel of the many barbarous tribes that had invaded the devoted country." You may be aware that at Verona there exists, quite intact as to its outward walls, and even susceptible of use as to its interior, a magnificent Roman amphitheatre, capable 16 ROME AND VENICE. of holding twenty-two thousand spectators. For many ages it has heen far too large for any purposes of recreation to which it could be put by the Veronese ; but from time to time some sort otfunciones — to use the convenient Spanish term — have been held within its gray old walls. Now it was an Emperor Joseph patronising a bull-fight in the arena where an Emperor Gallienus had gazed on the combats of gladiators and wild-beasts; now a Pope made a journey hither, and gave his benediction to the closely -packed thousands in the forty-five ranges of seats. Mr. Eustace is inclined to be tolerant towards exhibitions of this nature ; but those wretched French, during their stay in Verona, having erected a wooden theatre near one of the grand portals of the amphitheatre, and caused several farces and pantomimes to be acted there for the amusement of the army, the Keverend Mr. Eustace is " down" upon them immediately. " The sheds and scafi'olding," he writes, ''that composed this miserable edifice were standing in the year 1802, and looked as if intended by the builder as a satire upon the taste of the Grande Nation that could disfigure so noble an arena. The Veronese beheld this characteristic absurdity with indignation, and compared the invaders, not without reason, to the Huns and the Lombards." I have no doubt that they did, and to the Goths, Ostra- goths, and Visigoths likewise; the modern Veronese being a dirty, lazy, good-for-nothing lot, generally speaking, who find it convenient to excuse their own sloth and uncleanli- ness by declaring themselves to be the lineal descendants of ancient Romans, cruelly oppressed by successive hordes of barbarians; but within my own time I have known the ON TKAVELLma AND TRAVELLERS. 17 "noble arena" of these ardent classicists desecrated by all kinds of " miserable edifices" with the full consent and con- currence of the Veronese, who flocked to the edifice, and paid their soldi to see the show. I have seen a horse-riding circus in one corner, and a company of zanni and panto- mimists in another, and Dr. Dulcamara, in his red coat, powdered wig, and top-boots, drawing teeth, and selling vials of the elixir of love in the centre, where Hercules' pillar used to stand. And perhaps there was not much desecration in any of these harmless buffooneries, and they were preferable, in the long-run, to the Austrian Emperor Joseph with his bull-fight, and the Roman Emperor Gallienus with his gladiators and wild-beasts. Eustace, in a solemn ''Preliminary Discourse," has laid down something like a code of rules for the guidance of travellers who intend to visit Italy in the true classical spirit. "Virgil and Horace, Cicero and Livy, should be the inseparable companions of all travellers ; they should occupy a corner in every carriage, and be called forth in every in- terval of leisure to relieve the fatigue and to heighten the pleasure of the journey." This is excellent advice; and, indeed, the majority of educated travellers are given to carrying a copy of Horace (Firmin Didot's exquisite little red-lined edition is at once the most portable and the most legible) ; but in these rapid railroad days, when we have so frequently to change trains, a Murray's guide-book ordi- narily supersedes Virgil, Cicero, and Livy. Very admirable is Mr. Eustace's advice to " diligent travellers" to learn a little of the language before they go to Italy; and very aptly does he quote Bacon's famous re- c 18 BOMB AND VENICE. nindcr that be that travellctli into a country before he hatli •ome eninoioe into the language, ^oeth to school, and not to 4niTeL After this, according to Mr. Eustace, the traveller iJMmH Btudy the history of the different revolutions of Italy, ]ii4«iily before, but during the decline and after the fall of the Roman Empire. " The republican part of Boman his- toiy," he goes on to say, "is considered as purely classical, and as such is presupposed in the first paragraph." Eustace wrote before those sad sceptics Niebuhr and Sii* George Cornewall Lewis had disturbed the learned world with their doubts, else he might have added that much of the repubUcan part of Roman history was considered to be not only " purely classical," but purely mythical. He wrote, too, before the days of Sismondi, or at least before that illustrious historian had published his great work; so the student of Italian history is commended to the Abbate Denino's History qftlie lievolutmis of Italy , and to Roscoe's Lorenzo the Mag- nificent and Leo the Tenth: both books quite worthless as authorities now. The young traveller, too, may read Addison's Dialogues on Medals (and very delightful reading they are, written with the untiring feHcity of that graceful author) ; numismatically, the Dialogues are not worth a brass farthing. Mr. Eustace's model traveller may then turn his attention to architecture, ftnd is counselled to con Dean Aldrich's Elements, " trans- lated by Mr. Smyth, of New College ;" and, if they are acces- sible to him, he should peep into Stuart's Athens, and Wilkins's Magna Grcecia. Then as to sculpture : " Some acquaintance with anatomy is a desirable preliminary to the knowledge of this art;" therefore the tourist would do well to ON TRAVELLING AND TRAVELLEES. 1& attend a few anatomical lectures before he starts. To cul- tivate his taste in pictorial art he should read (shade of my grandfather's pigtail !) Du Fresnoy's Art of Painting, and Sir Joshua Reynolds's '' well-known" Discourses. At music good old Mr. Eustace shakes his head gently, but gravely. Italy, he admits, is the first country in the world for music, both with regard to composition and execution; yet "young travellers ought rather to be cautious against its allurements than ex- j)Osed by preparatory lessons to their dangerous influence." "When Mr. Eustace penned this, Mrs. Billington was the great 2orima donna assoluta of Italy. The model traveller must take maps with him — ^D'Anville's map of ancient, Zannoni's map of modern, Italy. Touching the time selected for travelling, and the route to be taken, the traveller is advised to pass the Alps early in the autumn, and first proceed to Brussels; thence to Liege, Spa (ga7'e a la roulette/), Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, Bonn, and along the banks of the Eliine to Coblentz, Mayence, and Strasburg ; there cross the Rhine to Mannheim ; traverse the Palatinate, the territories of Wittemburg, Bavaria, and Salz- burg ; enter the defiles of the Tyrol, or Rhsetian Alps ; and, passing through Innspruck and Trent, turn to Bassano and to Mestre, whence he may send his carriage by land to Padua, and embark for Venice. From Venice he may go by water up the Brenta to Padua, and visit Arcqua, and then pass onwards to Ferrara and Bologna ; then follow the Via Emilia to Forli, thence proceed to Ravenna and Rimini, make an excursion to San Marino, and advance to Ancona, whence he may visit Ostia. He wiU then continue his journey by Loretto and Macerata to Tolentino ; thence, over the Apen- so ROME AND VENICE. nines, to Foligno, Spoleto and Temi, and so follow the direct road through Civita Castellana, to Rome. He should reach Rome in Novemher, and devote the whole of December "to a first contemplation of the Eternal City, and the consideration of its most striking beauties." He will then proceed to Naples, where the months of January, February, and March will be delightfully employed. In the week before Easter he must be back in Rome. April, May, and June will be given to a leisurely survey of Tibur, Ostia, Antium, Mount Soracte, Praeneste, and the Sabine mountains. The tumuli of the Alban mount may be reserved for the hot months of July and August; and in September it will be time to turn towards Florence, between which and the other Tuscan cities the winter is to be agreeably divided. In the beginning of the next February our indefatigable traveller is to pass the Apennines to Modena, Parma, Piacenza, Lodi, Cremona, Mantua, and Verona. Thence Peschiera and the Lago di Garda are to be explored. After that he may direct his course by Brescia and Bergamo to Milan. Having taken a trip to the Lago di Como and the Lago Maggiore, he may shape his course by Vercelli and Tortona to Genoa. He will then take the road of the Maritime Alps by Savona to Nice, after which he will turn inland to Turin; and I wish him joy of his inland tour, for he will have to go over the unutterably- abominable pass of the Col di Tenda. But for geographical authorities to the contrary, one might think that the Sea of Galilee washed the shores of Nice, and that it was over the Col di Tenda that the demoniac pigs passed. The scenery is magnificent, but every village is one huge hoggery, and every cottage a sty. " Mount Cenis, the ON TRAVELLING AND TRAVELLERS. 21 termination of the traveller's classical tour, tlien rises before him in distant perspective." It will be observed that the Reverend Mr. Eustace does not say one word of getting in or out of Italy by the way of St. Gothard or the Splugen, the Simplon or the Stelvio, or even the minor passes of the Tonale or the Bernardina. The reasons for his reticence: Napoleon was, at the time of Mr. Eustace's visit to the Pen- insula, very busy indeed in making roads through the peaks, passes, and glaciers; but he granted rights of member- ship in his Alpine Club only to himself and to his soldiers. I wonder even that he left Mont Cenis pass and the Cornice road open to Mr. Eustace, and that the good ecclesiastic was not obliged to make the coast of Italy by long sea, say from Gibraltar to Genoa, or from Malta to Venice. Most of us have heard of a celebrated musician who, ere he sat down before his pianoforte to compose, was accustomed to dress himself in his Sunday best, to have his hair frizzed and powdered, and his handkerchief elaborately scented. Numbers of wax -candles were disposed about his room, and a diamond -incrusted snuffbox, filled with the choicest Macabaw, was placed at his elbow. Then, with laced ruffles at his wrists, and jewels on his fingers, he felt himself en train for the cultivation of counterpoint and thorough bass, and proceeded to invent tremendous sonatas. It is difficult to rise from the perusal of a book on Italy by an English traveller without being reminded — the tremendous- ness of the result apart — of the musician who combined composition with coxcombry. The majority of English tour- ists seem to think it essential to dress themselves in their very finest intellectual clothes before they pass the Alps; 22 ROME AND VENICE. and nme out often of them, as I have before hinted, either gash or cant. The poets may be exempted from this cate- gory, since gushing and canting are perfectly admissible in poetry, so long as they are relieved by beauty of language. We do not expect a poet to be logical, or even rational. We only want him to be eloquent. Byron gushes tremendously in Childe Harold about the Coliseum and the Dying Gladiator ; but he gushes milk and honey; or the conduit of his thoughts runs with rich bur- gundy in lieu of water. In his letters, however, to Murray, and in his conversations with his friends, Byron showed that he had a very shrewd, practical, and even humorous appreci- ation of Italy as a land inhabited, not by poetical abstrac- tions, but by substantial human beings ; and there can be Httle doubt that, had Lord Byron chosen to do so, he might have written one of the best prose works on Italy or the Italians with which it was possible to endow his country's literature. The Italy of Samuel Rogers, again, must be criticised not as a book of travels, but as a purely poetical rhapsody, less high-flown than Byron's, but still rose-coloured and myrtle -tinged and orange -flower -flavoured in an elaborate degree ; yet was Samuel Rogers, poet and banker, one of the diyest, 'cutest of men;- and it is clear that he knew all about Italy and the Italians, and could have written in prose most admirably about them. The monkeys are said to forbear from speaking articulately lest their rich relations, mankind, should force them to work. Sam Rogers piped seemingly sweet poetry, lest his countrymen should insist on his telling the truth in prose. ON teaVelling and teavellers. w And why on earth should not the truth be told about this country? Why could not Madame de Stael, hard-headed, clear-sighted daughter ofNecker as she was, tell us real Italian things, instead of gushing and canting as she has done in Corinne ^ Because the Apollo Belvedere and the Transfiguration are in the Vatican, and the Yenus de' Medici is in the Tribune of Florence, is all Italy, from Calabria to the Susa, to be hallowed ground ? Why, there is a splen- did Murillo in our National Gallery; and in the British Museum there are numerous exquisite examples of Greek statuary ; but the possession of those art-treasures does not blind us to the fact that St. Giles's is very near Great Kus- sell-street, Bloomsbury, and that St. Martin's Workhouse is just behind Trafalgar-square. If a man goes to Italy, and discourses^ upon his return about the filth and the barbari^ia to be found in many of its parts ; the half Joey-Grimalidi, half mumbo -jumbo buffoonery and mummery into which the rites of the Eoman Catholic Church have degenerated in Eome and Naples; if he discusses Italian cookery, and alludes to the really important fact that the sausages of Bologna are very much superior to our best Cambridges, — he is told, forsooth, that he is a Philistine, that he has no soul for art, and that he is indifferent to the charms of his^ toric associations. As to being a Philistine, I scarcely know what the term, intellectually used, means, or how it applies. The shallow and conceited sciolist who devised the sneer, in order to insult writers whose minds and views were broader than his, may plume himself mightily on his device ; but twenty years hence, I fancy, we shall trouble ourselves no more 84 ROME AND VENICE. about what a literary Philistine may have been, than we trouble ourselves now about " Delia Crusca," or '' Rosa Matilda," or that " Satanic" school about which poor Southey made such a pother. As for having no soul for art, whether a man has a soul for anything is a fact known only to his Maker and him- self; and by his acts and deeds only are we entitled to sur- mise whether his soul is as broad as the beam of the Great Eastern, or so small and narrow that, as some old writer whose name has escaped me puts it, it is just but a pinch of salt that serves to keep his body from stinking. And, finally, touching the sanctity of historic associations, didn't JuUus Caesar invade England ? and am I thereby to be debarred from talking about a grocer's shop in Snargate- street, Dover, or the table-dlwte at the Lord Warden, or the slipperiness of the Admiralty pier ? Wasn't Constantine the Great born at York? and am I for that reason to be for- bidden to refer to the Doncaster St. Leger ? Every country is full of historical associations. Every country in Europe ; scores of lands in Africa and Italy bear the indelible stamp of the Romans. In the market-places of dirty little Moorish villages in Barbary you will find battered stones, two thou- sand years old, with the inscription, '^ Hie Ccesar transehaty' dimly legible upon them. Julian the Apostate had a palace in Paris; Pontius Pilate, they say, died at Marseilles .(al- though others stand out for the shores ^of the Lake of Lucerne) ; am I in consequence to be warned ofi" from the jewellers' shops of the Rue de la Paix, or the flower-girls of the Cannebiere, or the Bedouin douars of Algeria? Every country has a history ; every country is old ; but the actual ON TRAVELLINa AND TKAVELLEES. 25 modern condition, manners, and circumstances of every land need close and careful study and record, which will be all the more trustworthy if it be constantly compared with the con- ditions, manners, and circumstances which have gone before. It seems to me in the highest degree disastrous that for a real and life-like picture of Italy and the Italians in the last century we should be constrained to go to the smirched pages of the profligate adventurer Jacques Casanova. Yet, with the exceptions of that which Stendhal (Beyle) has writ- ten concerning Italy, and Storey the sculptor's admirable pictures of Koman life, I do not know a single book in which a tangible Italy, and breathing, vascular Italians, are so vividly depicted as by the diverting vagabond whose volu- minous memoirs are at once half the pride and half the shame of autobiographical literature. No doubt that Casa- nova has told an infinity of lies about his amours, and about' the illustrious and the celebrated personages with whom he claims to have rubbed shoulders ; but there is, notwithstand- ing, an amazing quantity of truth in his writings — truth which, perhaps, he told in spite of himself, and to a great extent unconsciously. Be it as it may, he has painted with Mieris-like fidelity the Italy and the Italians of the eighteenth century. But Casanova in his entirety is so in- famous, that a man dare scarcely place his volumes on the sbelves of a library ; the sale of the Memoirs is prohibited by the French police, although it is tolerated * throughout Belgium and Germany; and in England discreet booksellers announce in a whisper to the collectors of facetics that they have a copy of Casanova on hand. It would be a futile task to publish an expurgated edition of the rascally magnum opus. jr ROME AND VENICE. As well might one strive to treat Jean Jacques Rousseau as Dr. Bowdler treated Shakespeare, and bring out an edition oS the Confessions for "family reading;" but it might be fea- sible, I imagine, to collect in a single volume the marrow of Ctaanflra'B descriptions of the cities he visited, and his observations on the men and the manners of his time, kick- ing Casanova himself and his scoundrelly amours entirely on one side. L THE AUSTEIANS IN VENICE. I WAS very tranquilly and happily enjoying the spring- time of the year 1866 in the fair city of Seville, in Andalusia,, revelling in oranges, sweet lemons, early peas, and other luxuries (including that inestimable one of not doing more than I could help), varying existence by occasional trips up- wards to Cordova and downwards to Cadiz, and meditating a trip to Lisbon and Madeira, when, moved by the instiga- tion of the Father of Evil (as the old indictments for high- treason used, in somewhat stronger language, to say), the heart of the Prussian Otto Von Bismark Schonstein, count of that ilk, was stirred up to wrath against the Austrian Graf Mensdorf-Pouilly ; and, these two statesmen pulling the strings of the respective royal and imperial puppets they held in the hollow of their hands, William of Prussia began to shake his fist fiercely at Francis Joseph of Austria, and the Emperor Napoleon III. became (good soul !) infinitely con-