The church of San Marc is rich to excess, and its splendid mosaic pavement is sunk into deep pits with age and the yielding foundations on which its heavy pile is built. Its pictures are not so fine as those of the other churches of Venice, but its age and historic associations make it by far the most interesting.

LETTER XXXII.

VENICE—SCENES BY MOONLIGHT—THE CANALS—THE ARMENIAN ISLAND—THE ISLAND OF THE INSANE—IMPROVEMENTS MADE BY NAPOLEON—SHADED WALKS—PAVILION AND ARTIFICIAL HILL—ANTIDOTES TO SADNESS—PARTIES ON THE CANALS—NARROW STREETS AND SMALL BRIDGES—THE RIALTO—MERCHANTS AND IDLERS—SHELL-WORK AND JEWELRY—POETRY AND HISTORY—GENERAL VIEW OF THE CITY—THE FRIULI MOUNTAINS—THE SHORE OF ITALY—A SILENT PANORAMA—THE ADRIATIC—PROMENADERS AND SITTERS, ETC.

We stepped into the gondola to-night as the shadows of the moon began to be perceptible, with orders to Giuseppe to take us where he would. Abroad in a summer's moonlight in Venice, is a line that might never be written but as the scene of a play. You can not miss pleasure. If it were only the tracking silently and swiftly the bosom of the broader canals lying asleep like streets of molten silver between the marble palaces, or shooting into the dark shadows of the narrower, with the black spirit-like gondolas gliding past, or lying in the shelter of a low and not unoccupied balcony; or did you but loiter on in search of music, lying unperceived beneath the windows of a palace, and listening, half asleep, to the sound of the guitar and the song of the invisible player within; this, with the strange beauty of every building about you, and the loveliness of the magic lights and shadows, were enough to make a night of pleasure, even were no charm of personal adventure to be added to the enumeration.

We glided along under the Rialto, talking of Belvidera, and Othello, and Shylock, and, entering a cross canal, cut the arched shadow of the Bridge of Sighs, hanging like a cobweb in the air, and shot in a moment forth to the full, ample, moonlit bosom of the Giudecca. This is the canal that makes the harbor and washes the stairs of San Marc. The Lido lay off at a mile's distance across the water, and, with the moon riding over it, the bay between us as still as the sky above, and brighter, it looked like a long cloud pencilled like a landscape in the heavens. To the right lay the Armenian island, which Lord Byron visited so often, to study with the fathers at the convent; and, a little nearer the island of the Insane—spite of its misery, asleep, with a most heavenly calmness on the sea. You remember the touching story of the crazed girl, who was sent here with a broken heart, described as putting her hand through the grating at the dash of every passing gondola, with her unvarying and affecting "Venite per me? Venite per me?"

At a corner of the harbor, some three quarters of a mile from San Marc, lies an island once occupied by a convent. Napoleon rased the buildings, and connecting it with the town by a new, handsome street and a bridge, laid out the ground as a public garden. We debarked at the stairs, and passed an hour in strolling through shaded walks, filled with the gay Venetians, who come to enjoy here what they find nowhere else, the smell of grass and green leaves. There is a pavilion upon an artificial hill in the centre, where the best lemonades and ices of Venice are to be found; and it was surrounded to-night by merry groups, amusing themselves with all the heart-cheering gayety of this delightful people. The very sight of them is an antidote to sadness.

In returning to San Marc a large gondola crossed us, filled with ladies and gentlemen, and followed by another with a band of music. This is a common mode of making a party on the canals, and a more agreeable one never was imagined. We ordered the gondolier to follow at a certain distance, and spent an hour or two just keeping within the softened sound of the instruments. How romantic are the veriest, every-day occurrences of this enchanting city.

We have strolled to-day through most of the narrow streets between the Rialto and the San Marc. They are, more properly, alleys. You wind through them at sharp angles, turning constantly, from the interruption of the canals, and crossing the small bridges at every twenty yards. They are dark and cool; and no hoof of any description ever passing through them, the marble flags are always smooth and clean; and with the singular silence, only broken by the shuffling of feet, they are pleasant places to loiter in at noon-day, when the canals are sunny.

We spent a half hour on the Rialto. This is the only bridge across the grand canal, and connects the two main parts of the city. It is, as you see by engravings, a noble span of a single arch, built of pure white marble. You pass it, ascending the arch by a long flight of steps to the apex, and descending again to the opposite side. It is very broad, the centre forming a street, with shops on each side, with alleys outside these, next the parapet, usually occupied by idlers or merchants, probably very much as in the time of Shylock. Here are exposed the cases of shell-work and jewelry for which Venice is famous. The variety and cheapness of these articles are surprising. The Rialto has always been to me, as it is probably to most others, quite the core of romantic locality. I stopped on the upper stair of the arch, and passed my hand across my eyes to recall my idea of it, and realize that I was there. One is disappointed, spite of all the common sense in the world, not to meet Shylock and Antonio and Pierre.

"Shylock and the Moor
And Pierre cannot be swept or worn away,"

says Childe Harold; and that, indeed, is the feeling everywhere in these romantic countries. You cannot separate them from the characters with which poetry or history once peopled them.

At sunset we mounted into the tower of San Marc, to get a general view of the city. The gold-dust atmosphere, so common in Italy at this hour, was all over the broad lagunes and the far stretching city; and she lay beneath us, in the midst of a sea of light, an island far out into the ocean, crowned with towers and churches, and heaped up with all the splendors of architecture. The Friuli mountains rose in the north with the deep blue dyes of distance, breaking up the else level horizon; the shore of Italy lay like a low line-cloud in the west; the spot where the Brenta empties into the sea glowing in the blaze of the sunset. About us lay the smaller islands, the suburbs of the sea-city, and all among them, and up and down the Giudecca, and away off in the lagunes, were sprinkled the thousand gondolas, meeting and crossing in one continued and silent panorama. The Lido, with its long wall hemmed in the bay, and beyond this lay the wide Adriatic. The floor of San Marc's vast square was beneath, dotted over its many-colored marbles with promenaders, its cafÉs swarmed by the sitters outside, and its long arcades thronged. One of my pleasantest hours in Venice was passed here.

LETTER XXXIII.

PALACES—PALAZZO GRIMANI—OLD STATUARY—MALE AND FEMALE CHERUBS—THE BATH OF CLEOPATRA—TITIAN'S PALACE—UNFINISHED PICTURE OF THE GREAT MASTER—HIS MAGDALEN AND BUST—HIS DAUGHTER IN THE ARMS OF A SATYR—BEAUTIFUL FEMALE HEADS—THE CHURCHES OF VENICE—BURIAL-PLACES OF THE DOGES—TOMB OF CANOVA—DEPARTURE FOR VERONA, ETC.

We have passed a day in visiting palaces. There are some eight or ten in Venice, whose galleries are still splendid. We landed first at the stairs of the Palazzo Grimani, and were received by an old family servant, who sat leaning on his knees, and gazing idly into the canal. The court and staircase were ornamented with statuary, that had not been moved for centuries. In the ante-room was a fresco painting by Georgione, in which there were two female cherubs, the first of that sex I ever saw represented. They were beautifully contrasted with the two male cherubs, who completed the picture, and reminded me strongly of Greenough's group in sculpture. After examining several rooms, tapestried and furnished in such a style as befitted the palace of a Venetian noble, when Venice was in her glory, we passed on to the gallery. The best picture in the first room was a large one by Cigoli, the bath of Cleopatra. The four attendants of the fair Egyptian are about her, and one is bathing her feet from a rich vase. Her figure is rather a voluptuous one, and her head is turned, but without alarm, to Antony, who is just putting aside the curtain and entering the room. It is a piece of fine coloring, rather of the Titian school, and one of the few good pictures left by the English, who have bought up almost all the private galleries of Venice.

We stopped next at the stairs of the noble old Barberigo Palace, in which Titian lived and died. We mounted the decaying staircases, imagining the choice spirits of the great painter's time, who had trodden them before us, and (as it was for ages the dwelling of one of the proudest races of Venice) the beauty and rank that had swept up and down those worn slabs of marble on nights of revel, in the days when Venice was a paradise of splendid pleasure. How thickly come romantic fancies in such a place as this. We passed through halls hung with neglected pictures to an inner room, occupied only with those of Titian. Here he painted, and here is a picture half finished, as he left it when he died. His famous Magdalen, hangs on the wall, covered with dirt; and so, indeed, is everything in the palace. The neglect is melancholy. On a marble table stood a plaster bust of Titian, moulded by himself in his old age. It is a most noble head, and it is difficult to look at it, and believe he could have painted a picture which hangs just against it—his own daughter in the arms of a satyr. There is an engraving from it in one of the souvenirs; but instead of a satyr's head, she holds a casket in her hands, which, though it does not sufficiently account for the delight of her countenance, is an improvement upon the original. Here, too, are several slight sketches of female heads, by the same master. Oh how beautiful they are! There is one, less than the size of life, which I would rather have than his Magdalen.

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I have spent my last day in Venice in visiting churches. Their splendor makes the eye ache and the imagination weary. You would think the surplus wealth of half the empires of the world would scarce suffice to fill them as they are. I can give you no descriptions. The gorgeous tombs of the Doges are interesting, and the plain black monument over Marino Faliero made me linger. Canova's tomb is splendid; and the simple slab under your feet in the church of the Frari, where Titian lies with his brief epitaph, is affecting—but, though I shall remember all these, the simplest as well as the grandest, a description would be wearisome to all who had not seen them. This evening at sunset I start in the post-boat for the mainland, on my way to the place of Juliet's tomb—Verona. My friends, the painters, are so attracted with the galleries here that they remain to copy, and I go back alone. Take a short letter from me this time, and expect to hear from me by the next earliest opportunity, and more at length. Adieu.

LETTER XXXIV.

DEPARTURE FROM VENICE—A SUNSET SCENE—PADUA—SPLENDID HOTEL—MANNERS OF THE COUNTRY—VICENZA—MIDNIGHT—LADY RETURNING FROM A PARTY—VERONA—JULIET'S TOMB—THE TOMB OF THE CAPULETS—THE TOMBS OF THE SCALIGERS—TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA—A WALKING CHRONICLE—PALACE OF THE CAPULETS—ONLY COOL PLACE IN AN ITALIAN CITY—BANQUETING HALL OF THE CAPULETS—FACTS AND FICTION, ETC.

We pushed from the post-office stairs in a gondola with six oars at sunset. It was melancholy to leave Venice. A hasty farewell look, as we sped down the grand canal, at the gorgeous palaces, even less famous than beautiful—a glance at the disappearing Rialto, and we shot out into the Giudecca in a blaze of sunset glory. Oh how magnificently looked Venice in that light—rising behind us from the sea—all her superb towers and palaces, turrets and spires, fused into gold; and the waters about her, like a mirror of stained glass, without a ripple!

An hour and a half of hard rowing brought us to the nearest land. You should go to Venice to know how like a dream a reality may be. You will find it difficult to realize, when you smell once more the fresh earth and grass and flowers, and walk about and see fields and mountains, that this city upon the sea exists out of the imagination. You float to it and about it and from it, in their light craft, so aerially, that it seems a vision.

With a drive of two or three hours, half twilight, half moonlight, we entered Padua. It was too late to see the portrait of Petrarch, and I had not time to go to his tomb at Arqua, twelve miles distant, so, musing on Livy and Galileo, to both of whom Padua was a home, I inquired for a cafÉ. A new one had lately been built in the centre of the town, quite the largest and most thronged I ever saw. Eight or ten large, high-roofed halls were open, and filled with tables, at which sat more beauty and fashion than I supposed all Padua could have mustered. I walked through one after another, without finding a seat, and was about turning to go out, and seek a place of less pretension, when an elderly lady, who sat with a party of seven, eating ices, rose, with Italian courtesy, and offered me a chair at their table. I accepted it, and made the acquaintance of eight as agreeable and polished people as it has been my fortune to meet. We parted as if we had known each other as many weeks as minutes. I mention it as an instance of the manners of the country.

Three hours more, through spicy fields and on a road lined with the country-houses of the Venetian nobles, brought us to Vicenza. It was past midnight, and not a soul stirring in the bright moonlit streets. I remember it as a kind of city of the dead. As we passed out of the opposite gate, we detained for a moment a carriage, with servants in splendid liveries, and a lady inside returning from a party, in full dress. I have rarely seen so beautiful a head. The lamps shone strongly on a broad pearl fillet on her forehead, and lighted up features such as we do not often meet even in Italy. A gentleman leaned back in the corner of the carriage, fast asleep—probably her husband!

---

I breakfasted at Verona at seven. A humpbacked cicerone there took me to "Juliet's tomb." A very high wall, green with age, surrounds what was once a cemetery, just outside the city. An old woman answered the bell at the dilapidated gate, and, without saying a word, pointed to an empty granite sarcophagus, raised upon a rude pile of stones. "Questa?" asked I, with a doubtful look. "Questa," said the old woman. "Questa!" said the hunchback. And here, I was to believe, lay the gentle Juliet! There was a raised place in the sarcophagus, with a hollowed socket for the head, and it was about the measure for a woman! I ran my fingers through the cavity, and tried to imagine the dark curls that covered the hand of Father Lawrence as he laid her down in the trance, and fitted her beautiful head softly to the place. But where was "the tomb of the Capulets?" The beldame took me through a cabbage-garden, and drove off a donkey who was feeding on an artichoke that grew on the very spot. "Ecco!" said she, pointing to one of the slightly sunken spots on the surface. I deferred my belief, and paying an extra paul for the privilege of chipping off a fragment of the stone coffin, followed the cicerone.

The tombs of the Scaligers were more authentic. They stand in the centre of the town, with a highly ornamental railing about them, and are a perfect mockery of death with their splendor. If the poets and scholars whom these petty princes drew to their court had been buried in these airy tombs beside them, one would look at them with some interest. Now, one asks, "who were the Scaligers, that their bodies should be lifted high in air in the midst of a city, and kept for ages, in marble and precious stones?" With less ostentation, however, it were pleasant to be so disposed of after death, lifted thus into the sun, and in sight of moving and living creatures.

I inquired for the old palace of the Capulets. The cicerone knew nothing about it, and I dismissed her and went into a cafÉ. "Two gentlemen of Verona" sat on different sides; one reading, the other asleep, with his chin on his cane—an old, white-headed man, of about seventy. I sat down near the old gentleman, and by the time I had eaten my ice, he awoke. I addressed him in Italian, which I speak indifferently; but, stumbling for a word, he politely helped me out in French, and I went on in that language with my inquiries. He was the very man—a walking chronicle of Verona. He took up his hat and cane to conduct me to casa Capuletti, and on the way told me the true history, as I had heard it before, which differs but little, as you know, from Shakspeare's version. The whole story is in the annuals.

After a half hour's walk among the handsomer, and more modern parts of the city, we stopped opposite a house of an antique construction, but newly stuccoed and painted. A wheelwright occupied the lower story, and by the sign, the upper part was used as a tavern. "Impossible!" said I, as I looked at the fresh front and the staring sign. The old gentleman smiled, and kept his cane pointed at it in silence. "It is well authenticated," said he, after enjoying my astonishment a minute or two, "and the interior still bears marks of a palace." We went in and mounted the dirty staircase to a large hall on the second floor. The frescoes and cornices had not been touched, and I invited my kind old friend to an early dinner on the spot. He accepted, and we went back to the cathedral, and sat an hour in the only cool place in an Italian city. The best dinner the house could afford was ready when we returned, and a pleasanter one it has never been my fortune to sit down to; though, for the meats, I have eaten better. That I relished an hour in the very hall where the masque must have been held, to which Romeo ventured in the house of his enemy, to see the fair Juliet, you may easily believe. The wine was not so bad, either, that my imagination did not warm all fiction into fact; and another time, perhaps, I may describe my old friend and the dinner more particularly.

LETTER XXXV.

ANOTHER SHORT LETTER—DEPARTURE FROM VERONA—MANTUA—FLEAS—MODENA—TASSONI'S BUCKET—A MAN GOING TO EXECUTION—THE DUKE OF MODENA—BOLOGNA—AUSTRIAN OFFICERS—THE APPENINES—MOONLIGHT ON THE MOUNTAINS—ENGLISH BRIDAL PARTY—PICTURESQUE SUPPER, ETC.

I left Verona with the courier at sunset, and was at Mantua in a few hours. I went to bed in a dirty hotel, the best in the place, and awoke, bitten at every pore by fleas—the first I have encountered in Italy, strange as it may seem, in a country that swarms with them. For the next twenty-four hours I was in such positive pain that my interest in "Virgil's birthplace" quite evaporated. I hired a caleche, and travelled all night to Modena.

I liked the town as I drove in, and after sleeping an hour or two, I went out in search of "Tassoni's bucket" (which Rogers says is not the true one), and the picture of "Ginevra." The first thing I met was a man going to execution. He was a tall, exceedingly handsome man; and, I thought, a marked gentleman, even in his fetters. He was one of the body-guard of the duke, and had joined a conspiracy against him, in which he had taken the first step by firing at him from a window as he passed. I saw him guillotined, but I will spare you the description. The duke is the worst tyrant in Italy, it is well known, and has been fired at eighteen times in the streets. So said the cicerone, who added, that "the d——l took care of his own." After many fruitless inquiries, I could find nothing of "the picture," and I took my place for Bologna in the afternoon.

I was at Bologna at ten the next morning. As I felt rather indisposed, I retained my seat with the courier for Florence; and, hungry with travel and a long fast, went into a restaurant, to make the best use of the hour given me for refreshment. A party of Austrian officers sat at one end of the only table, breakfasting; and here I experienced the first rudeness I have seen in Europe. I mention it to show its rarity, and the manner in which, even among military men, a quarrel is guarded against or prevented. A young man, who seemed the wit of the party, chose to make comments from time to time on the solidity of what he considered my breakfast. These became at last so pointed, that I was compelled to rise and demand an apology. With one voice, all except the offender, immediately sided with me, and insisted on the justice of the demand, with so many apologies of their own, that I regretted noticing the thing at all. The young man rose, after a minute, and offered me his hand in the frankest manner; and then calling for a fresh bottle, they drank wine with me, and I went back to my breakfast. In America, such an incident would have ended, nine times out of ten, in a duel.

The two mounted gens d'armes, who usually attend the courier at night, joined us as we began to ascend the Appenines. We stopped at eleven to sup on the highest mountain between Bologna and Florence, and I was glad to get to the kitchen fire, the clear moonlight was so cold. Chickens were turning on the long spit, and sounds of high merriment came from the rooms above. A bridal party of English had just arrived, and every chamber and article of provision was engaged. They had nothing to give us. A compliment to the hostess and a bribe to the cook had their usual effect, however; and as one of the dragoons had ridden back a mile or two for my travelling cap, which had dropped off while I was asleep, I invited them both, with the courier, to share my bribed supper. The cloth was spread right before the fire, on the same table with all the cook's paraphernalia, and a merry and picturesque supper we had of it. The rough Tuscan flasks of wine and Etruscan pitchers, the brazen helmets formed on the finest models of the antique, the long mustaches, and dark Italian eyes of the men, all in the bright light of a blazing fire, made a picture that Salvator Rosa would have relished. We had time for a hasty song or two after the dishes were cleared, and then went gayly on our way to Florence.

Excuse the brevity of this epistle, but I must stop here, or lose the opportunity of sending. If my letters do not reach you with the utmost regularity, it is no fault of mine. You can not imagine the difficulty I frequently experience in getting a safe conveyance.

LETTER XXXVI.

BATHS OF LUCCA—SARATOGA OF ITALY—HILL SCENERY—RIVER LIMA—FASHIONABLE LODGINGS—THE VILLA—THE DUKE'S PALACE—MOUNTAINS—VALLEYS—COTTAGES—PEASANTS—WINDING-PATHS—AMUSEMENTS—PRIVATE PARTIES—BALLS—FETES—A CASINO—ORIGINALS OF SCOTT'S DIANA VERNON AND THE MISS PRATT OF THE INHERITANCE—A SUMMER IN ITALY, ETC., ETC.

I spent a week at the baths of Lucca, which is about sixty miles north of Florence, and the Saratoga of Italy. None of the cities are habitable in summer, for the heat, and there flocks all the world to bathe and keep cool by day, and dance and intrigue by night, from spring to autumn. It is very like the month of June in our country in many respects, and the differences are not disagreeable. The scenery is the finest of its kind in Italy. The whole village is built about a bridge across the river Lima, which meets the Serchio a half mile below. On both sides of the stream the mountains rise so abruptly, that the houses are erected against them, and from the summits on both sides you look directly down on the street. Half-way up one of the hills stands a cluster of houses, overlooking the valley to fine advantage, and these are rather the most fashionable lodgings. Round the base of this mountain runs the Lima, and on its banks for a mile is laid out a superb road, at the extremity of which is another cluster of buildings, called the Villa, composed of the duke's palace and baths, and some fifty lodging-houses. This, like the pavilion at Saratoga, is usually occupied by invalids and people of more retired habits. I have found no hill scenery in Europe comparable to the baths of Lucca. The mountains ascend so sharply and join so closely, that two hours of the sun are lost, morning and evening, and the heat is very little felt. The valley is formed by four or five small mountains, which are clothed from the base to the summit with the finest chestnut woods; and dotted over with the nest-like cottages of the Luccese peasants, the smoke from which, morning and evening, breaks through the trees, and steals up to the summits with an effect than which a painter could not conceive anything more beautiful. It is quite a little paradise; and with the drives along the river on each side at the mountain foot, and the trim winding-paths in the hills, there is no lack of opportunity for the freest indulgence of a love of scenery or amusement.

Instead of living as we do in great hotels, the people at these baths take their own lodgings, three or four families in a house, and meet in their drives and walks, or in small exclusive parties. The Duke gives a ball every Tuesday, to which all respectable strangers are invited; and while I was there an Italian prince, who married into the royal family of Spain, gave a grand fete at the theatre. There is usually some party every night, and with the freedom of a watering-place, they are rather the pleasantest I have seen in Italy. The Duke's chamberlain, an Italian cavalier, has the charge of a casino, or public hall, which is open day and night for conversation, dancing and play. The Italians frequent it very much, and it is free to all well-dressed people; and as there is always a band of music, the English sometimes make up a party and spend the evening there in dancing or promenading. It is maintained at the Duke's expense, lights, music, and all, and he finds his equivalent in the profits of the gambling-bank.

I scarce know who of the distinguished people I met there would interest you. The village was full of coroneted carriages, whose masters were nobles of every nation, and every reputation. The originals of two well-known characters happened to be there—Scott's Diana Vernon, and the Miss Pratt of the Inheritance. The former is a Scotch lady, with five or six children; a tall, superb woman still, with the look of a mountain-queen, who rode out every night with two gallant boys mounted on ponies, and dashing after her with the spirit you would bespeak for the sons of Die Vernon. Her husband was the best horseman there, and a "has been" handsome fellow, of about forty-five. An Italian abbÉ came up to her one night, at a small party, and told her he "wondered the king of England did not marry her." "Miss Pratt" was the companion of an English lady of fortune, who lived on the floor below me. She was still what she used to be, a much-laughed-at but much-sought person, and it was quite requisite to know her. She flew into a passion whenever the book was named. The rest of the world there was very much what it is elsewhere—a medley of agreeable and disagreeable, intelligent and stupid, elegant and awkward. The women were perhaps superior in style and manner to those ordinarily met in such places in America, and the men vastly inferior. It is so wherever I have been on the continent.

I remained at the baths a few weeks, recruiting—for the hot weather and travel had, for the first time in my life, worn upon me. They say that a summer in Italy is equal to five years elsewhere, in its ravages upon the constitution, and so I found it.

LETTER XXXVII.

RETURN TO VENICE—CITY OF LUCCA—A MAGNIFICENT WALL—A CULTIVATED AND LOVELY COUNTRY—A COMFORTABLE PALACE—THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF LUCCA—THE APPENINES—MOUNTAIN SCENERY—MODENA—VIEW OF AN IMMENSE PLAIN—VINEYARDS AND FIELDS—AUSTRIAN TROOPS—A PETTY DUKE AND A GREAT TYRANT—SUSPECTED TRAITORS—LADIES UNDER ARREST—MODENESE NOBILITY—SPLENDOR AND MEANNESS—CORREGIO'S BAG OF COPPER COIN—PICTURE GALLERY—CHIEF OF THE CONSPIRATORS—OPPRESSIVE LAWS—ANTIQUITY—MUSEUM—BOLOGNA—MANUSCRIPTS OF TASSO AND ARIOSTO—THE PO—AUSTRIAN CUSTOM-HOUSE—POLICE OFFICERS—DIFFICULTY ON BOARD THE STEAMBOAT—VENICE ONCE MORE, ETC.

After five or six weeks sejour at the baths of Lucca, the only exception to the pleasure of which was an attack of the "country fever," I am again on the road, with a pleasant party, bound for Venice; but passing by cities I had not seen, I have been from one place to another for a week, till I find myself to-day in Modena—a place I might as well not have seen at all as to have hurried through, as I was compelled to do a month or two since. To go back a little, however, our first stopping-place was the city of Lucca, about fifteen miles from the baths; a little, clean, beautiful gem of a town, with a wall three miles round only, and on the top of it a broad carriage road, giving you on every side views of the best cultivated and loveliest country in Italy. The traveller finds nothing so rural and quiet, nothing so happy-looking, in the whole land. The radius to the horizon is nowhere more than five or six miles; and the bright green farms and luxuriant vineyards stretch from the foot of the wall to the summits of the lovely mountains which form the theatre around. It is a very ancient town, but the duchy is so rich and flourishing that it bears none of the marks of decay, so common to even more modern towns in Italy. Here CÆsar is said to have stopped to deliberate on passing the Rubicon.

The palace of the Duke is the prettiest I ever saw. There is not a room in it you could not live in—and no feeling is less common than this in visiting palaces. It is furnished with splendor, too—but with such an eye to comfort, such taste and elegance, that you would respect the prince's affections that should order such a one. The Duke of Lucca, however, is never at home. He is a young man of twenty-eight or thirty, and spends his time and money in travelling, as caprice takes him. He has been now for a year at Vienna, where he spends the revenue of these rich plains most lavishly. The Duchess, too, travels always, but in a different direction, and the people complain loudly of the desertion. For many years they have now been both absent and parted. The Duke is a member of the royal family of Spain, and at the death of Maria Louisa of Parma, he becomes Duke of Parma, and the duchy goes to Tuscany.

From Lucca we crossed the Appenines, by a road seldom travelled, performing the hundred miles to Modena in three days. We suffered, as all must who leave the high roads in continental countries, more privations than the novelty was worth. The mountain scenery was fine, of course, but I think less so than that on the passes between Florence and Bologna, the account of which I wrote a few weeks since. We were too happy to get to Modena.

Modena lies in the vast campagna lying between the Appenines and the Adriatic—an immense plain looking like the sea as far as the eye can stretch from north to south. The view of it from the mountains in descending is magnificent beyond description. The capital of the little duchy lay in the midst of us, like a speck on a green carpet, and smaller towns and rivers varied its else unbroken surface of vineyards and fields. We reached the gates just as a fine sunset was reddening the ramparts and towers, and giving up our passports to the soldier on guard, rattled into the hotel.

The town is full of Austrian troops, and in our walk to the ducal palace we met scarce any one else. The streets look gloomy and neglected, and the people singularly dispirited and poor. This petty Duke of Modena is a man of about fifty, and said to be the greatest tyrant, after Don Miguel, in the world. The prisons are full of suspected traitors; one hundred and thirty of the best families of the duchy are banished for liberal opinions; three hundred and over are now under arrest (among them a considerable number of ladies); and many of the Modenese nobility are now serving in the galleys for conspiracy. He has been shot at eighteen times. The last man who attempted it, as I stated in a former letter, was executed the morning I passed through Modena on my return from Venice. With all this he is a fine soldier, and his capital looks in all respects like a garrison in the first style of discipline. He is just now absent at a chateau three miles in the country.

The palace is a union of splendor and meanness within. The endless succession of state apartments are gorgeously draped and ornamented, but the entrance halls and intermediate passages are furnished with an economy you would scarce find exceeded in the "worst inn's worst room." Modena is Corregio's birthplace, and it was from a Duke of Modena that he received the bag of copper coin which occasioned his death. It was, I think, the meagre reward of his celebrated "Night," and he broke a blood-vessel in carrying it to his house. The Duke has sold this picture, as well as every other sufficiently celebrated to bring a princely price. His gallery is a heap of trash, with but here and there a redeeming thing. Among others, there is a portrait of a boy, I think by Rembrandt, very intellectual and lofty, yet with all the youthfulness of fourteen; and a copy of "Giorgione's mistress," the "love in life" of the Manfrini palace, so admired by Lord Byron. There is also a remarkably fine crucifixion, I forget by whom.

The front of the palace is renowned for its beauty. In a street near it, we passed a house half battered down by cannon. It was the residence of the chief of a late conspiracy, who was betrayed a few hours before his plot was ripe. He refused to surrender, and, before the ducal troops had mastered his house, the revolt commenced and the Duke was driven from Modena. He returned in a week or two with some three thousand Austrians, and has kept possession by their assistance ever since. While we were waiting dinner at the hotel, I took up a volume of the Modenese law, and opened upon a statute forbidding all subjects of the duchy to live out of the Duke's territories under pain of the entire confiscation of their property. They are liable to arrest, also, if it is suspected that they are taking measures to remove. The alternatives are oppression here or poverty elsewhere, and the result is that the Duke has scarce a noble left in his realm.

Modena is a place of great antiquity. It was a strong-hold in the time of CÆsar, and after his death was occupied by Brutus, and besieged by Antony. There are no traces left, except some mutilated and uncertain relics in the museum.

We drove to Bologna the following morning, and I slept once more in Rogers's chamber at "the Pilgrim." I have described this city, which I passed on my way to Venice, so fully before, that I pass it over now with the mere mention. I should not forget, however, my acquaintance with a snuffy little librarian, who showed me the manuscripts of Tasso and Ariosto, with much amusing importance.

We crossed the Po to the Austrian custom-house. Our trunks were turned inside out, our papers and books examined, our passports studied for flaws—as usual. After two hours of vexation, we were permitted to go on board the steamboat, thanking Heaven that our troubles were over for a week or two, and giving Austria the common benediction she gets from travellers. The ropes were cast off from the pier when a police retainer came running to the boat, and ordered our whole party on shore, bag and baggage. Our passports, which had been retained to be sent on to Venice by the captain, were irregular. We had not passed by Florence, and they had not the signature of the Austrian ambassador. We were ordered imperatively back over the Po, with a flat assurance, that, without first going to Florence, we never could see Venice. To the ladies of the party, who had made themselves certain of seeing this romance of cities in twelve hours, it was a sad disappointment, and after seeing them safely seated in the return shallop, I thought I would go and make a desperate appeal to the commissary in person. My nominal commission as attachÉ to the Legation at Paris, served me in this case as it had often done before, and making myself and the honor of the American nation responsible for the innocent designs of a party of ladies upon Venice, the dirty and surly commissary signed our passports and permitted us to remand our baggage.

It was with unmingled pleasure that I saw again the towers and palaces of Venice rising from the sea. The splendid approach to the Piazzetta; the transfer to the gondola and its soft motion; the swift and still glide beneath the balconies of palaces, with whose history I was familiar; and the renewal of my own first impressions in the surprise and delight of others, made up, altogether, a moment of high happiness. There is nothing like—nothing equal to Venice. She is the city of the imagination—the realization of romance—the queen of splendor and softness and luxury. Allow all her decay—feel all her degradation—see the "Huns in her palaces," and the "Greek upon her mart," and, after all, she is alone in the world for beauty, and, spoiled as she has been by successive conquerors, almost for riches too. Her churches of marble, with their floors of precious stones, and walls of gold and mosaic; her ducal palace, with its world of art and massy magnificence; her private palaces, with their fronts of inland gems, and balconies and towers of inimitable workmanship and riches; her lovely islands and mirror-like canals—all distinguish her, and will till the sea rolls over her, as one of the wonders of time.

LETTER XXXVIII.

VENICE—CHURCH OF THE JESUITS—A MARBLE CURTAIN—ORIGINAL OF TITIAN'S MARTYRDOM OF ST. LAWRENCE—A SUMMER MORNING—ARMENIAN ISLAND—VISIT TO A CLOISTER—A CELEBRATED MONK—THE POET'S STUDY—ILLUMINATED COPIES OF THE BIBLE—THE STRANGER'S BOOK—A CLEAN PRINTING-OFFICE—THE HOSPITAL FOR THE INSANE—INNOCENT AND HAPPY-LOOKING MANIACS—THE CELLS FOR UNGOVERNABLE LUNATICS—BARBARITY OF THE KEEPER—MISERABLE PROVISIONS—ANOTHER GLANCE AT THE PRISONS UNDER THE DUCAL PALACE—THE OFFICE OF EXECUTIONER—THE ARSENAL—THE STATE GALLERY—THE ARMOR OF HENRY THE FOURTH—A CURIOUS KEY—MACHINES FOR TORTURE, ETC.

In a first visit to a great European city it is difficult not to let many things escape notice. Among several churches which I did not see when I was here before, is that of the Jesuits. It is a temple worthy of the celebrity of this splendid order. The proportions are finer than those of most of the Venetian churches, and the interior is one tissue of curious marbles and gold. As we entered, we were first struck with the grace and magnificence of a large heavy curtain, hanging over the pulpit, the folds of which, and the figures wrought upon it, struck us as unusually elegant and ingenious. Our astonishment was not lessened when we found it was one solid mass of verd-antique marble. Its sweep over the side and front of the pulpit is as careless as if it were done by the wind. The whole ceiling of the church is covered with sequin gold—the finest that is coined. In one of the side chapels is the famous "Martyrdom of St. Lawrence," by Titian. A fine copy of it (said in the catalogue to be the original) was exhibited in the Boston AthenÆum a year or two since.

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It is Sunday, and the morning has been of a heavenly, summer, sunny calmness, such as is seen often in Italy, and once in a year, perhaps, in New England. It is a kind of atmosphere, that, to breathe is to be grateful and happy. We have been to the Armenian island—a little gem on the bosom of the Lagune, a mile from Venice, where stands the monastery, to which place Lord Byron went daily to study and translate with the fathers. There is just room upon it for a church, a convent, and a little garden. It looks afloat on the water. Our gondola glided up to the clean stone stairs, and we were received by one of the order, a hale but venerable looking monk, in the Armenian dress, the long black cassock and small round cap, his beard long and scattered with gray, and his complexion and eyes of a cheerful, child-like clearness, such as regular and simple habits alone can give. I inquired, as we walked through the cloister, for the father with whom Lord Byron studied, and of whom the poet speaks so often and so highly in his letters. The monk smiled and bowed modestly, and related a little incident that had happened to him at Padua, where he had met two American travellers, who had asked him of himself in the same manner. He had forgotten their names, but from his description I presumed one to have been Professor Longfellow, of Bowdoin University.

The stillness and cleanliness about the convent, as we passed through the cloisters and halls, rendered the impression upon a stranger delightful. We passed the small garden, in which grew a stately oleander in full blossom, and thousands of smaller flowers, in neat beds and vases, and after walking through the church, a plain and pretty one, we came to the library, where the monk had studied with the poet. It is a proper place for study—disturbed by nothing but the dash of oars from a passing gondola, or the screams of a sea-bird, and well furnished with books in every language, and very luxurious chairs. The monk showed us an encyclopÆdia, presented to himself by an English lady of rank, who had visited the convent often. His handsome eyes flashed as he pointed to it on the shelves. We went next into a smaller room, where the more precious manuscripts are deposited, and he showed us curious illuminated copies of the Bible, and gave us the stranger's book to inscribe our names. Byron had scrawled his there before us, and the Empress Maria Louisa had written hers twice on separate visits. The monk then brought us a volume of prayers, in twenty-five languages, translated by himself. We bought copies, and upon some remark of one of the ladies upon his acquirements, he ran from one language to another, speaking English, French, Italian, German, and Dutch, with equal facility. His English was quite wonderful; and a lady from Rotterdam, who was with us, pronounced his Dutch and German excellent. We then bought small histories of the order, written by an English gentleman, who had studied at the island, and passed on to the printing office—the first clean one I ever saw, and quite the best appointed. Here the monks print their Bibles, and prayer-books in really beautiful Armenian type, beside almanacs, and other useful publications for Constantinople, and other parts of Turkey. The monk wrote his name at our request (Pascal Aucher) in the blank leaves of our books, and we parted from him at the water-stairs with sincere regret. I recommend this monastery to all travellers to Venice.

On our return we passed near an island, upon which stands a single building—an insane hospital. I was not very curious to enter it, but the gondolier assured us that it was a common visit for strangers, and we consented to go in. We were received by the keeper, who went through the horrid scene like a regular cicerone, giving us a cold and rapid history of every patient that arrested our attention. The men's apartment was the first, and I should never have supposed them insane. They were all silent, and either read or slept like the inmates of common hospitals. We came to a side door, and as it opened, the confusion of a hundred tongues burst through, and we were introduced into the apartment for women. The noise was deafening. After traversing a short gallery, we entered a large hall, containing perhaps fifty females. There was a simultaneous smoothing back of the hair and prinking of the dress through the room. These the keeper said, were the well-behaved patients, and more innocent and happy-looking people I never saw. If to be happy is to be wise, I should believe with the mad philosopher, that the world and the lunatic should change names. One large, fine-looking woman took upon herself to do the honors of the place, and came forward with a graceful curtesy and a smile of condescension and begged the ladies to take off their bonnets, and offered me a chair. Even with her closely-shaven head and coarse flannel dress, she seemed a lady. The keeper did not know her history. Her attentions were occasionally interrupted by a stolen glance at the keeper, and a shrinking in of the shoulders, like a child that had been whipped. One handsome and perfectly healthy-looking girl of eighteen, walked up and down the hall, with her arms folded, and a sweet smile on her face, apparently lost in pleasing thought, and taking no notice of us. Only one was in bed, and her face might have been a conception of Michael Angelo for horror. Her hair was uncut, and fell over her eyes, her tongue hung from her mouth, her eyes were sunken and restless, and the deadly pallor over features drawn into the intensest look of mental agony, completing a picture that made my heart sick. Her bed was clean, and she was as well cared for as she could be, apparently.

We mounted a flight of stairs to the cells. Here were confined those who were violent and ungovernable. The mingled sounds that came through the gratings as we passed were terrific. Laughter of a demoniac wildness, moans, complaints in every language, screams—every sound that could express impatience and fear and suffering saluted our ears. The keeper opened most of the cells and went in, rousing occasionally one that was asleep, and insisting that all should appear at the grate. I remonstrated of course, against such a piece of barbarity, but he said he did it for all strangers, and took no notice of our pity. The cells were small, just large enough for a bed, upon the post of which hung a small coarse cloth bag, containing two or three loaves of the coarsest bread. There was no other furniture. The beds were bags of straw, without sheets or pillows, and each had a coarse piece of matting for a covering. I expressed some horror at the miserable provision made for their comfort, but was told that they broke and injured themselves with any loose furniture, and were so reckless in their habits, that it was impossible to give them any other bedding than straw, which was changed every day. I observed that each patient had a wisp of long straw tied up in a bundle, given them, as the keeper said, to employ their hands and amuse them. The wooden blind before one of the gratings was removed, and a girl flew to it with the ferocity of a tiger, thrust her hands at us through the bars, and threw her bread out into the passage, with a look of violent and uncontrolled anger such as I never saw. She was tall and very fine-looking. In another cell lay a poor creature, with her face dreadfully torn, and her hands tied strongly behind her. She was tossing about restlessly upon her straw, and muttering to herself indistinctly. The man said she tore her face and bosom whenever she could get her hands free, and was his worst patient. In the last cell was a girl of eleven or twelve years, who began to cry piteously the moment the bolt was drawn. She was in bed, and uncovered her head very unwillingly, and evidently expected to be whipped. There was another range of cells above, but we had seen enough, and were glad to get out upon the calm Lagune. There could scarcely be a stronger contrast than between those two islands lying side by side—the first the very picture of regularity and happiness, and the last a refuge for distraction and misery. The feeling of gratitude to God for reason after such a scene is irresistible.

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In visiting again the prisons under the ducal palace, several additional circumstances were told us. The condemned were compelled to become executioners. They were led from their cells into the dark passage where stood the secret guillotine, and without warning forced to put to death a fellow-creature either by this instrument, or the more horrible method of strangling against a grate. The guide said that the office of executioner was held in such horror that it was impossible to fill it, and hence this dreadful alternative. When a prisoner was about to be executed, his clothes were sent home to his family with the message, that "the state would care for him." How much more agonizing do these circumstances seem, when we remember that most of the victims were men of rank and education, condemned on suspicion of political crimes, and often with families refined to a most unfortunate capacity for mental torture! One ceases to regret the fall of the Venetian republic, when he sees with how much crime and tyranny her splendor was accompanied.

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I saw at the arsenal to-day the model of the "Bucentaur," the state galley in which the Doge of Venice went out annually to marry him to the sea. This poetical relic (which, in Childe Harold's time, "lay rotting unrestored") was burnt by the French—why, I can not conceive. It was a departure from their usual habit of respect to the curious and beautiful; and if they had been jealous of such a vestige of the grandeur of a conquered people, it might at least have been sent to Paris as easily as "Saint Mark's steeds of brass," and would have been as great a curiosity. I would rather have seen the Bucentaur than all their other plunder. The arsenal contains many other treasures. The armor given to the city of Venice by Henry the Fourth is there, and a curious key constructed to shoot poisoned needles, and used by one of the Henrys, I have forgotten which, to despatch any one who offended him in his presence. One or two curious machines for torture were shown us—mortars into which the victim was put, with an iron armor which was screwed down upon him till his head was crushed, or confession stopped the torture.

LETTER XXXIX.

VENICE—SAN MARC'S CHURCH—RECOLLECTIONS OF HOME—FESTA AT THE LIDO—A POETICAL SCENE—AN ITALIAN SUNSET—PALACE OF MANFRINI—PESARO'S PALACE AND COUNTRY RESIDENCE—CHURCH OE SAINT MARY OF NAZARETH—PADUA—THE UNIVERSITY—STATUES OF DISTINGUISHED FOREIGNERS THE PUBLIC PALACE—BUST OF TITUS LIVY—BUST OF PETRARCH—CHURCH OF ST. ANTONY DURING MASS—THE SAINT'S CHIN AND TONGUE—MARTYRDOM OF ST. AGATHA—AUSTRIAN AND GERMAN SOLDIERS—TRAVELLER'S RECORD-BOOK—PETRARCH'S COTTAGE AND TOMB—ITALIAN SUMMER AFTERNOON—THE POET'S HOUSE—A FINE VIEW—THE ROOM WHERE PETRARCH DIED, ETC.

I was loitering down one of the gloomy aisles of San Marc's church, just at twilight this evening, listening to the far-off Ave Maria in one of the distant chapels, when a Boston gentleman, who I did not know was abroad, entered with his family, and passed up to the altar. It is difficult to conceive with what a tide the half-forgotten circumstances of a home, so far away, rush back upon one's heart in a strange land, after a long absence, at the sight of familiar faces. I could realize nothing about me after it—the glittering mosaic of precious stones under my feet, the gold and splendid colors of the roof above me, the echoes of the monotonous chant through the arches—foreign and strange as these circumstances all were. I was irresistibly at home, the familiar pictures of my native place filling my eye, and the recollections of those whom I love and honor there crowding upon my heart with irresistible emotion. The feeling is a painful one, and with the necessity for becoming again a forgetful wanderer, remembering home only as a dream, one shrinks from such things. The reception of a letter, even, destroys a day.

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There has been a grand festa to-day at the Lido. This, you know, is a long island, forming part of the sea-wall of Venice. It is, perhaps, five or six miles long, covered in part with groves of small trees, and a fine green sward; and to the Venetians, to whom leaves and grass are holyday novelties, is the scene of their gayest festas. They were dancing and dining under the trees; and in front of the fort which crowns the island, the Austrian commandant had pitched his tent, and with a band of military music, the officers were waltzing with ladies in a circle of green sward, making altogether a very poetical scene. We passed an hour or two wandering among this gay and unconscious people, and came home by one of the loveliest sunsets that ever melted sea and sky together. Venice looked like a vision of a city hanging in mid-air.

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We have been again to that delightful palace of Manfrini. The "Portia swallowing fire," the Rembrandt portrait, the far-famed "Giorgione, son and wife," and twenty others, which to see is to be charmed, delighted me once more. I believe the surviving Manfrini is the only noble left in Venice. Pesaro, who disdained to live in his country after its liberty was gone, died lately in London. His palace here is the finest structure I have seen, and his country-house on the Brenta is a paradise. It must have been a strong feeling which exiled him from them for eighteen years.

In coming from the Manfrini, we stopped at the church of "St. Mary of Nazareth." This is one of those whose cost might buy a kingdom. Its gold and marbles oppress one with their splendor. In the centre of the ceiling is a striking fresco of the bearing of "Loretto's chapel through the air;" and in one of the corners a lovely portrait of a boy looking over a balustrade, done by the artist fourteen years of age!

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Padua.—We have passed two days in this venerable city of learning, including a visit to Petrarch's tomb at Arqua. The university here is still in its glory, with fifteen hundred students. It has never declined, I believe, since Livy's time. The beautiful inner court has two or three galleries, crowded with the arms of the nobles and distinguished individuals who have received its honors. It has been the "cradle of princes" from every part of Europe.

Around one of the squares of the city, stand forty or fifty statues of the great and distinguished foreigners who have received their education here. It happened to be the month of vacation, and we could not see the interior.

At a public palace, so renowned for the size and singular architecture of its principal hall, we saw a very antique bust of Titus Livy—a fine, cleanly-chiselled, scholastic old head, that looked like the spirit of Latin embodied. We went thence to the Duomo, where they show a beautiful bust of Petrarch, who lived at Padua some of the latter years of his life. It is a softer and more voluptuous countenance than is given him in the pictures.

The church of Saint Antony here has stood just six hundred years. It occupied a century in building, and is a rich and noble old specimen of the taste of the times, with eight cupolas and towers, twenty-seven chapels inside, four immense organs, and countless statues and pictures. Saint Antony's body lies in the midst of the principal chapel, which is surrounded with relievos representing his miracles, done in the best manner of the glorious artists of antiquity. We were there during mass, and the people were nearly suffocating themselves in the press to touch the altar and tomb of the saint. This chapel was formerly lit by massive silver lamps, which Napoleon took, presenting them with their models in gilt. He also exacted from them three thousand sequins for permission to retain the chin and tongue of St. Antony, which works miracles still, and are preserved in a splendid chapel with immense brazen doors. Behind the main altar I saw a harrowing picture by Tiepoli, of the martyrdom of St. Agatha. Her breasts are cut off, and lying in a dish. The expression in the face of the dying woman is painfully well done.

Returning to the inn, we passed a magnificent palace on one of the squares, upon whose marble steps and column-bases, sat hundreds of brutish Austrian troops, smoking and laughing at the passers-by. This is a sight you may see now through all Italy. The palaces of the proudest nobles are turned into barracks for foreign troops, and there is scarce a noble old church or monastery that is not defiled with their filth. The German soldiers are, without exception, the most stolid and disagreeable looking body of men I ever saw; and they have little to soften the indignant feeling with which one sees them rioting in this lovely and oppressed country.

We passed an hour before bedtime in the usual amusement of travellers in a foreign hotel—reading the traveller's record-book. Walter Scott's name was written there, and hundreds of distinguished names besides. I was pleased to find, on a leaf far back, "Edward Everett," written in his own round legible hand. There were at least the names of fifty Americans within the dates of the year past—such a wandering nation we are. Foreigners express their astonishment always at their numbers in these cities.

On the afternoon of the next day, we went to Arqua, on a pilgrimage to Petrarch's cottage and tomb. It was an Italian summer afternoon, and the Euganean hills were rising green and lovely, with the sun an hour high above them, and the yellow of the early sunset already commencing to glow about the horizon.

We left the carriage at the "pellucid lake," and went into the hills a mile, plucking the ripe grapes which hung over the road in profusion. We were soon at the little village and the tomb, which stands just before the church door, "reared in air." The four laurels Byron mentions are dead. We passed up the hill to the poet's house, a rural stone cottage, commanding a lovely view of the campagna from the portico. Sixteen villages may be counted from the door, and the two large towns of Rovigo and Ferrara are distinguishable in a clear atmosphere. It was a retreat fit for a poet. We went through the rooms, and saw the poet's cat, stuffed and exhibited behind a wire grating, his chair and desk, his portrait in fresco, and Laura's, and the small closet-like room where he died. It was an interesting visit, and we returned by the golden twilight of this heavenly climate, repeating Childe Harold, and wishing for his pen to describe afresh the scene about us.

LETTER XL.

EXCURSION FROM VENICE TO VERONA—TRUTH OF BYRON'S DESCRIPTION OF ITALIAN SCENERY—THE LOMBARDY PEASANTRY—APPEARANCE OF THE COUNTRY—MANNER OF CULTIVATING THE VINE ON LIVING TREES—THE VINTAGE—ANOTHER VISIT TO JULIET'S TOMB—THE OPERA AT VERONA—THE PRIMA DONNA—ROMAN AMPHITHEATRE—BOLOGNA AGAIN—MADAME MALIBRAN IN LA GAZZA LADRA—CHEAP LUXURIES—THE PALACE OF THE LAMBACCARI—A MAGDALEN OF GUIDO CARRACCI—CHARLES THE SECOND'S BEAUTIES—VALLEY OF THE ARNO—FLORENCE ONCE MORE.

Our gondola set us on shore at Fusina an hour or two before sunset, with a sky (such as we have had for five months) without a cloud, and the same promise of a golden sunset, to which I have now become so accustomed, that rain and a dark heaven would seem to me almost unnatural. It was the hour and the spot at which Childe Harold must have left Venice, and we look at the "blue Friuli mountains," the "deep-died Brenta," and the "Rhoetian hill," and feel the truth of his description as well as its beauty. The two banks of the Brenta are studded with the palaces of the Venetian nobles for almost twenty miles, and the road runs close to the water on the northern side, following all its graceful windings, and, at every few yards, surprising the traveller with some fresh scene of cultivated beauty, church, palace, or garden, while the gondolas on the stream, and the fair "damas" of Italy sitting under the porticoes, enliven and brighten the picture. These people live out of doors, and the road was thronged with the contadini; and here and there rolled by a carriage, with servants in livery; or a family of the better class on their evening walk, sauntered along at the Italian pace of indolence, and a finer or happier looking race of people would not easily be found. It is difficult to see the athletic frames and dark flashing eyes of the Lombardy peasantry, and remember their degraded condition. You cannot believe it will remain so. If they think at all, they must, in time, feel too deeply to endure.

The guide-book says, the "traveller wants words to express his sensations at the beauty of the country from Padua to Verona." Its beauty is owing to the perfection of a method of cultivation universal in Italy. The fields are divided into handsome squares, by rows of elms or other forest trees, and the vines are trained upon these with all the elegance of holyday festoons, winding about the trunks, and hanging with their heavy clusters from one to the other, the foliage of vine and tree mingled so closely that it appears as if they sprung from the same root. Every square is perfectly enclosed with these fantastic walls of vine-leaves and grapes, and the imagination of a poet could conceive nothing more beautiful for a festival of Bacchus. The ground between is sown with grass or corn. The vines are luxuriant always, and often send their tendrils into the air higher than the topmost branch of the tree, and this extends the whole distance from Padua to Verona, with no interruption except the palaces and gardens of the nobles lying between.

It was just the season for gathering and pressing the grape, and the romantic vineyards were full of the happy peasants, of all ages, mounting the ladders adventurously for the tall clusters, heaping the baskets and carts, driving in the stately gray oxen with their loads, and talking and singing as merrily as if it were Arcadia. Oh how beautiful these scenes are in Italy. The people are picturesque, the land is like the poetry of nature, the habits are all as they were described centuries ago, and as the still living pictures of the glorious old masters represent them. The most every-day traveller smiles and wonders, as he lets down his carriage windows to look at the vintage.

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We have been three or four days in Verona, visiting Juliet's tomb, and riding through the lovely environs. The opera here is excellent, and we went last night to see "Romeo and Juliet" performed in the city renowned by their story. The prima donna was one of those syrens found often in Italy—a young singer of great promise, with that daring brilliancy which practice and maturer science discipline, to my taste, too severely. It was like the wild, ungovernable trill of a bird, and my ear is not so nice yet, that I even would not rather feel a roughness in the harmony than lose it. Malibran delighted me more in America than in Paris.

The opera was over at twelve, and, as we emerged from the crowded lobby, the moon full, and as clear and soft as the eye of a child, burst through the arches of the portico. The theatre is opposite the celebrated Roman amphitheatre, and the wish to visit it by moonlight was expressed spontaneously by the whole party. The custode was roused, and we entered the vast arena and stood in the midst, with the gigantic ranges of stone seats towering up in a receding circle, as if to the very sky, and the lofty arches and echoing dens lying black and silent in the dead shadows of the moon. A hundred thousand people could sit here; and it was in these arenas, scattered through the Roman provinces, that the bloody gladiator fights, and the massacre of Christians, and every scene of horror, amused the subjects of the mighty mistress of the world. You would never believe it, if you could have seen how peacefully the moonlight now sleeps on the moss-gathering walls, and with what untrimmed grace the vines and flowers creep and blossom on the rocky crevices of the windows.

We arrived at Bologna just in time to get to the opera. Malibran in La Gazza Ladra was enough to make one forget more than the fatigue of a day's travel. She sings as well as ever and plays much better, though she had been ill, and looked thin. In the prison scene, she was ghastlier even than the character required. There are few pleasures in Europe like such singing as hers, and the Italians, in their excellent operas, and the cheap rate at which they can be frequented, have a resource corresponding to everything else in their delightful country. Every comfort and luxury is better and cheaper in Italy than elsewhere, and it is a pity that he who can get his wine for three cents a bottle, his dinner and his place at the opera for ten, and has lodgings for anything he chooses to pay, can not find leisure, and does not think it worth the trouble, to look about for means to be free. It is vexatious to see nature lavishing such blessings on slaves.

The next morning we visited a palace, which, as it is not mentioned in the guide-books of travel, I had not before seen—the Lambaccari. It was full of glorious pictures, most of them for sale. Among others we were captivated with a Magdalen of unrivalled sweetness by Guido Carracci. It has been bought since by Mr. Cabot, of Boston, who passed through Bologna the day after, and will be sent to America, I am happy to say, immediately. There were also six of "Charles the Second's beauties,"—portraits of the celebrated women of that gay monarch's court, by Sir Peter Lely—ripe, glowing English women, more voluptuous than chary-looking, but pictures of exquisite workmanship. There were nine or ten apartments to this splendid palace, all crowded with paintings by the first masters, and the surviving Lambaccari is said to be selling them one by one for bread. It is really melancholy to go through Italy, and see how her people are suffering, and her nobles starving under oppression.

We crossed the Appenines in two of the finest days that ever shone, and descending through clouds and mist to the Tuscan frontier, entered the lovely valley of the Arno, sparkling in the sunshine, with all its palaces and spires, as beautiful as ever. I am at Florence once more, and parting from the delightful party with whom I have travelled for two months. I start for Rome to-morrow, in company with five artists.

LETTER XLI.

JOURNEY TO THE ETERNAL CITY—TWO ROADS TO ROME—SIENNA—THE PUBLIC SQUARE—AN ITALIAN FAIR—THE CATHEDRAL—THE LIBRARY—THE THREE GRECIAN GRACES—DANDY OFFICERS—PUBLIC PROMENADE—LANDSCAPE VIEW—LONG GLEN—A WATERFALL—A CULTIVATED VALLEY—THE TOWN OF AQUAPENDENTE—SAN LORENZO—PLINY'S FLOATING ISLANDS—MONTEFIASCONE—VITERBO—PROCESSION OF FLOWER AND DANCING GIRLS TO THE VINTAGE—ASCENT OF THE MONTECIMINO—THE ROAD OF THIEVES—LAKE VICO—BACCANO—MOUNT SORACTE—DOME OF ST. PETER'S, ETC.

I left Florence in company with the five artists mentioned in my last letter, one of them an Englishman, and the other four pensioners of the royal academy at Madrid. The Spaniards had but just arrived in Italy, and could not speak a syllable of the language. The Englishman spoke everything but French, which he avoided learning from principle. He "hated a Frenchman!"

There are two roads to Rome. One goes by Sienna, and is a day shorter; the other by Perugia, the Falls of Terni, Lake Thrasymene, and the Clitumnus. Childe Harold took the latter, and his ten or twelve best cantos describe it. I was compelled to go by Sienna, and shall return, of course, by the other road.

I was at Sienna on the following day. As the second capital of Tuscany, this should be a place of some interest, but an hour or two is more than enough to see all that is attractive. The public square was a gay scene. It was rather singularly situated, lying fifteen or twenty feet lower than the streets about it. I should think there were several thousand people in its area—all buying or selling, and vociferating, as usual, at the top of their voices. We heard the murmur, like the roar of the sea, in all the distant streets. There are few sights more picturesque than an Italian fair, and I strolled about in the crowd for an hour, amused with the fanciful costumes, and endeavoring to make out with the assistance of the eye, what rather distracted my unaccustomed ear—the cries of the various wandering venders of merchandise. The women, who were all from the country, were coarse, and looked well only at a distance.

The cathedral is the great sight of Sienna. It has a rich exterior, encrusted with curiously wrought marbles, and the front, as far as I can judge, is in beautiful taste. The pavement of the interior is very precious, and covered with a wooden platform, which is removed but once a year. The servitor raised a part of it, to show us the workmanship. It was like a drawing in India ink, quite as fine as if pencilled, and representing, as is customary, some miracle of a saint.

A massive iron door, made ingeniously to imitate a rope-netting, opens from the side of the church into the library. It contained some twenty volumes in black letter, bound with enormous clasps and placed upon inclined shelves. It would have been a task for a man of moderate strength to lift either of them from the floor. The little sacristan found great difficulty in only opening one to show us the letter.

In the centre of the chapel on a high pedestal, stands the original antique group, so often copied, of the three Grecian Graces. It is shockingly mutilated; but its original beauty is still in a great measure discernable. Three naked women are an odd ornament for the private chapel of a cathedral.[1] One often wonders, however, in Italian churches, whether his devotion is most called upon by the arts or the Deity.

As we were leaving the church, four young officers passed us in gay uniform, their long steel scabbards rattling on the pavement, and their heavy tread disturbing visibly every person present. As I turned to look after them, with some remark on their coxcombry, they dropped on their knees at the bases of the tall pillars about the altar, and burying their faces in their caps, bowed their heads nearly to the floor, in attitudes of the deepest devotion. Sincere or not, Catholic worshippers of all classes seem absorbed in their religious duties. You can scarce withdraw the attention even of a child in such places. In the six months that I have been in Italy, I never saw anything like irreverence within the church walls.

The public promenade, on the edge of the hill upon which the town is beautifully situated, commands a noble view of the country about. The peculiar landscape of Italy lay before us in all its loveliness—the far-off hills lightly tinted with the divided colors of distance, the atmosphere between absolutely clear and invisible, and villages clustered about, each with its ancient castle on the hill-top above, just as it was settled in feudal times, and as painters and poets would imagine it. You never get a view in this "garden of the world" that would not excuse very extravagant description.

Sienna is said to be the best place for learning the language. Just between Florence and Rome, it combines the "lingua Toscano," with the "bocca Romano"—the Roman pronunciation with the Florentine purity of language. It looks like a dull place, however, and I was very glad after dinner to resume my passport at the gate and get on.

The next morning, after toiling up a considerable ascent, we suddenly rounded the shoulder of a mountain, and found ourselves at the edge of a long glen, walled up at one extremity by a precipice with an old town upon its brow, and a waterfall pouring off at its side, and opening away at the other into a broad, gently-sloped valley, cultivated like a garden as far as the eye could distinguish. I think I have seen an engraving of it in the Landscape Annual. Taken together, it is positively the most beautiful view I ever saw, from the road edge, as you wind up into the town of Acquapendente. The precipice might be a hundred feet, and from its immediate edge were built up the walls of the houses, so that a child at the window might throw its plaything into the bottom of the ravine. It is scarce a pistol-shot across the glen, and the two hills on either side lean off from the level of the town in one long soft declivity to the valley—the little river which pours off the rock at the very base of the church, fretting and fuming its way between to the meadows—its stony bed quite hidden by the thick vegetation of its banks. The bells were ringing to mass, and the echoes came back to us at long distances with every modulation. The streets, as we entered the town, were full of people hurrying to the churches; the women with their red shawls thrown about their heads, and the men with their immense dingy cloaks flung romantically over their shoulders, with a grace, one and all, that in a Parisian dandy, would be attributed to a consummate study of effect. For outline merely, I think there is nothing in costume which can surpass the closely-stockinged leg, heavy cloak, and slouched hat of an Italian peasant. It is added to by his indolent, and, consequently, graceful motion and attitudes. Johnson, in his book on the climate of Italy, says their sloth is induced by malaria. You will see a man watching goats or sheep, with his back against a rock, quite motionless for hours together. His dog feels, apparently, the same influence, and lies couched in his long white hair, with his eyes upon the flock, as lifeless, and almost as picturesque, as his master.

The town of San Lorenzo is a handful of houses on the top of a hill which hangs over Lake Bolsena. You get the first view of the lake as you go out of the gate toward Rome, and descend immediately to its banks. There was a heavy mist upon the water, and we could not see across, but it looked like as quiet and pleasant a shore as might be found in the world—the woods wild, and of uncommonly rich foliage for Italy, and the slopes of the hills beautiful. Saving the road, and here and there a house with no sign of an inhabitant, there can scarcely be a lonelier wilderness in America. We stopped two hours at an inn on its banks, and whether it was the air, or the influence of the perfect stillness about us, my companions went to sleep, and I could scarce resist my own drowsiness.

The mist lifted a little from the lake after dinner, and we saw the two islands said by Pliny to have floated, in his time. They look like the tops of green hills rising from the water.

It is a beautiful country again as you approach Montefiascone. The scenery is finely broken up with glens formed by columns of basalt, giving it a look of great wildness. Montefiascone is built on the river of one of these ravines. We stopped here long enough to get a bottle of the wine for which the place is famous, drinking it to the memory of the "German prelate," who, as Madame Stark relates, "stopped here on his journey to Rome, and died of drinking it to excess." It has degenerated, probably, since his time, or we chanced upon a bad bottle.

The walls of Viterbo are flanked with towers, and have a noble appearance from the hill-side on which the town stands. We arrived too late to see anything of the place. As we were taking coffee at the cafÉ the next morning, a half hour before daylight, we heard music in the street, and looking out at the door, we saw a long procession of young girls, dressed with flowers in their hair, and each playing a kind of cymbal, and half dancing as she went along. Three or four at the head of the procession sung a kind of verse, and the rest joined in a short merry chorus at intervals. It was more like a train of Corybantes than anything I had seen. We inquired the object of it, and were told it was a procession to the vintage. They were going out to pluck the last grapes, and it was the custom to make it a festa. It was a striking scene in the otherwise perfect darkness of the streets, the torch-bearers at the sides waving their flambeaux regularly over their heads, and shouting with the rest in chorus. The measure was quick, and the step very fast. They were gone in an instant. The whole thing was poetical, and in keeping, for Italy. I have never seen it elsewhere.

We left Viterbo on a clear, mild autumnal morning; and I think I never felt the excitement of a delightful climate more thrillingly. The road was wild, and with the long ascent of the Monte-Cimino before us, I left the carriage to its slow pace and went ahead several miles on foot. The first rain of the season had fallen, and the road was moist, and all the spicy herbs of Italy perceptible in the air. Half way up the mountain, I overtook a fat, bald, middle-aged priest, slowly toiling up on his mule. I was passing him with a "buon giorno," when he begged me for my own sake, as well as his, to keep him company. "It was the worst road for thieves," he said, "in all Italy," and he pointed at every short distance to little crosses erected at the road-side, to commemorate the finding of murdered men on the spot. After he had told me several stories of the kind, he elevated his tone, and began to talk of other matters. I think I never heard so loud and long a laugh as his. I ventured to express a wonder at his finding himself so happy in a life of celibacy. He looked at me slily a moment or two as if he were hesitating whether to trust me with his opinions on the subject; but he suddenly seemed to remember his caution, and pointing off to the right, showed me a lake brought into view by the last turn of the road. It was Lake Vico. From the midst of it rose a round mountain covered to the top with luxuriant chestnuts—the lake forming a sort of trench about it, with the hill on which we stood rising directly from the other edge. It was one faultless mirror of green leaves. The two hill sides shadowed it completely. All the views from Monte-Cimino were among the richest in mere nature that I ever saw, and reminded me strongly of the country about the Seneca lake of America. I was on the Cayuga at about the same season three summers ago, and I could have believed myself back again, it was so like my recollection.

We stopped on the fourth night of our journey, seventeen miles from Rome, at a place called Baccano. A ridge of hills rose just before us, from the top of which we were told, we could see St. Peter's. The sun was just dipping under the horizon, and the ascent was three miles. We threw off our cloaks, determining to see Rome before we slept, ran unbreathed to the top of the hill, an effort which so nearly exhausted us, that we could scarce stand long enough upon our feet to search over the broad campagna for the dome.

The sunset had lingered a great while—as it does in Italy. Four or five light feathery streaks of cloud glowed with intense crimson in the west, and on the brow of Mount Soracte, (which I recognised instantly from the graphic simile[2] of Childe Harold), and along on all the ridges of mountain in the east, still played a kind of vanishing reflection, half purple, half gray. With a moment's glance around to catch the outline of the landscape, I felt instinctively where Rome should stand, and my eye fell at once upon "the mighty dome." Jupiter had by this time appeared, and hung right over it, trembling in the sky with its peculiar glory, like a lump of molten spar, and as the color faded from the clouds, and the dark mass of "the eternal city" itself mingled and was lost in the shadows of the campagna, the dome still seemed to catch light, and tower visibly, as if the radiance of the glowing star above fell more directly upon it. We could see it till we could scarcely distinguish each other's features. The dead level of the campagna extended between and beyond for twenty miles, and it looked like a far-off beacon in a dim sea. We sat an hour on the summit of the hill, gazing into the increasing darkness, till our eyes ached. The stars brightened one by one, the mountains grew indistinct, and we rose unwillingly to retrace our steps to Baccano.

LETTER XLII.

FIRST DAY IN ROME—SAINT PETER'S—A SOLITARY MONK—STRANGE MUSIC—MICHAEL ANGELO'S MASTERPIECE—THE MUSEUM—LIKENESS OF YOUNG AUGUSTUS—APOLLO BELVIDERE—THE MEDICEAN VENUS—RAPHAEL'S TRANSFIGURATION—THE PANTHEON—THE BURIAL-PLACE OF CARRACCI AND RAPHAEL—ROMAN FORUM—TEMPLE OF FORTUNE—THE ROSTRUM—PALACE OF THE CESARS—THE RUINS—THE COLISEUM, ETC.

To be rid of the dust of travel, and abroad in a strange and renowned city, is a sensation of no slight pleasure anywhere. To step into the street under these circumstances and inquire for the Roman Forum, was a sufficient advance upon the ordinary feeling to mark a bright day in one's calendar. I was hurrying up the Corso with this object before me a half hour after my arrival in Rome, when an old friend arrested my steps, and begging me to reserve the "Ruins" for moonlight, took me off to St. Peter's.

The faÇade of the church appears alone, as you walk up the street from the castle of St. Angelo. It disappointed me. There is no portico, and it looks flat and bare. But approaching nearer, I stood at the base of the obelisk, and with those two magnificent fountains sending their musical waters, as if to the sky, and the two encircling wings of the church embracing the immense area with its triple colonnades, I felt the grandeur of St. Peter's. I felt it again in the gigantic and richly-wrought porches, and again with indescribable surprise and admiration at the first step on the pavement of the interior. There was not a figure on its immense floor from the door to the altar, and its far-off roof, its mighty pillars, its gold and marbles in such profusion that the eye shrinks from the examination, made their overpowering impression uninterrupted. You feel that it must be a glorious creature that could build such a temple to his Maker.

An organ was playing brokenly in one of the distant chapels, and, drawing insensibly to the music, we found the door half open, and a monk alone, running his fingers over the keys, and stopping sometimes as if to muse, till the echo died and the silence seemed to startle him anew. It was strange music; very irregular, but sweet, and in a less excited moment, I could have sat and listened to it till the sun set.

I strayed down the aisle, and stood before the "Dead Christ" of Michael Angelo. The Saviour lies in the arms of Mary. The limbs hang lifelessly down, and, exquisitely beautiful as they are, express death with a wonderful power. It is the best work of the artist, I think, and the only one I was ever moved in looking at.

The greatest statue and the first picture in the world are under the same roof, and we mounted to the Vatican. The museum is a wilderness of statuary. Old Romans, men and women, stand about you, copied, as you feel when you look on them, from the life; and conceptions of beauty in children, nymphs, and heroes, from minds that conceived beauty in a degree that has never been transcended, confuse and bewilder you with their number and wonderful workmanship. It is like seeing a vision of past ages. It is calling up from Athens and old classic Rome, all that was distinguished and admired of the most polished ages of the world. On the right of the long gallery, as you enter, stands the bust of the "Young Augustus"—a kind of beautiful, angelic likeness of Napoleon, as Napoleon might have been in his youth. It is a boy, but with a serene dignity about the forehead and lips, that makes him visibly a boy-emperor—born for his throne, and conscious of his right to it. There is nothing in marble more perfect, and I never saw anything which made me realize that the Romans of history and poetry were men—nothing which brought them so familiarly to my mind, as the feeling for beauty shown in this infantine bust. I would rather have it than all the gods and heroes of the Vatican.

No cast gives you any idea worth having of the Apollo Belvidere. It is a god-like model of a man. The lightness and the elegance of the limbs; the free, fiery, confident energy of the attitude; the breathing, indignant nostril and lips; the whole statue's mingled and equal grace and power, are, with all its truth to nature, beyond any conception I had formed of manly beauty. It spoils one's eye for common men to look at it. It stands there like a descended angel, with a splendor of form and an air of power, that makes one feel what he should have been, and mortifies him for what he is. Most women whom I have met in Europe, adore the Apollo as far the finest statue in the world, and most men say as much of the Medicean Venus. But, to my eye, the Venus, lovely as she is, compares with the Apollo as a mortal with an angel of light. The latter is incomparably the finest statue. If it were only for its face, it would transcend the other infinitely. The beauty of the Venus is only in the limbs and body. It is a faultless, and withal, modest representation of the flesh and blood beauty of a woman. The Apollo is all this, and has a soul. I have seen women that approached the Venus in form, and had finer faces—I never saw a man that was a shadow of the Apollo in either. It stands as it should, in a room by itself, and is thronged at all hours by female worshippers. They never tire of gazing at it; and I should believe, from the open-mouthed wonder of those whom I met at its pedestal, that the story of the girl who pined and died for love of it, was neither improbable nor singular.

Raphael's "Transfiguration" is agreed to be the finest picture in the world. I had made up my mind to the same opinion from the engravings of it, but was painfully disappointed in the picture. I looked at it from every corner of the room, and asked the custode three times if he was sure this was the original. The color offended my eye, blind as Raphael's name should make it, and I left the room with a sigh, and an unsettled faith in my own taste, that made me seriously unhappy. My complacency was restored a few hours after on hearing that the wonder was entirely in the drawing—the colors having quite changed with time. I bought the engraving immediately, which you have seen too often, of course, to need my commentary. The aerial lightness with which he has hung the figures of the Saviour and the apostles in the air, is a triumph of the pencil over the laws of nature, that seem to have required the power of the miracle itself.

I lost myself in coming home, and following a priest's direction to the Corso, came unexpectedly upon the "Pantheon," which I recognised at once. This wonder of architecture has no questionable beauty. A dunce would not need to be told that it was perfect. Its Corinthian columns fall on the eye with that sense of fulness that seems to answer an instinct of beauty in the very organ. One feels a fault or an excellence in architecture long before he can give the feeling a name; and I can see why, by Childe Harold and others, this heathen temple is called "the pride of Rome," though I cannot venture on a description. The faultless interior is now used as a church, and there lie Annibal Carracci and the divine Raphael—two names worthy of the place, and the last, of a shrine in every bosom capable of a conception of beauty. Glorious Raphael! If there was no other relic in Rome, one would willingly become a pilgrim to his ashes.

With my countryman and friend, Mr. Cleveland, I stood in the Roman forum by the light of a clear half moon. The soft silver rays poured in through the ruined columns of the Temple of Fortune and threw our shadows upon the bases of the tall shafts near the capitol, the remains, I believe, of the temple erected by Augustus to Jupiter Tonans. Impressive things they are, even without their name, standing tall and alone, with their broken capitals wreathed with ivy, and neither roof nor wall to support them, where they were placed by hands that have mouldered for centuries. It is difficult to rally one's senses in such a place, and be awake coldly to the scene. We stood, as we supposed, in the Rostrum. The noble arch, still almost perfect, erected by the senate to Septimius Severus, stood up clear and lofty beside us, the three matchless and lonely columns of the supposed temple of Jupiter Stator threw their shadows across the Forum below, the great arch, built at the conquest of Jerusalem to Titus, was visible in the distance, and above them all, on the gentle ascent of the Palatine, stood the ruined palace of the Cesars, the sharp edges of the demolished walls breaking up through vines and ivy, and the mellow moon of Italy softening rock and foliage into one silver-edged mass of shadow. It seems as if the very genius of the picturesque had arranged these immortal ruins. If the heaps of fresh excavation were but overgrown with grass, no poet nor painter could better image out the Rome of his dream. It surpasses fancy.

We walked on, over fragments of marble columns turned up from the mould, and leaving the majestic arches of the Temple of Peace on our left, passed under the arch of Titus (so dreaded by the Jews), to the Coliseum. This too is magnificently ruined—broken in every part, and yet showing still the brave skeleton of what it was—its gigantic and triple walls, half encircling the silent area, and its rocky seats lifting one above the other amid weeds and ivy, and darkening the dens beneath, whence issued the gladiators, beasts, and Christian martyrs, to be sacrificed for the amusement of Rome. A sentinel paced at the gigantic archway, a capuchin monk, whose duty is to attend the small chapels built around the arena, walked up and down in his russet cowl and sandals, the moon broke through the clefts in the wall, and the whole place was buried in the silence of a wilderness. I have given you the features of the scene—I leave you to people it with your own thoughts. I dare not trust mine to a colder medium than poetry.

LETTER XLIII.

TIVOLI—RUINS OF THE BATHS OF DIOCLETIAN—FALLS OF TIVOLI—CASCATELLI—SUBJECT OF ONE OF COLE'S LANDSCAPES—RUINS OF THE VILLAGE OF MECÆNAS—RUINED VILLA OF ADRIAN—THE FORUM—TEMPLE OF VESTA—THE CLOACA MAXIMA—THE RIVER JUTURNA, ETC.

I have spent a day at Tivoli with Messrs. Auchmuty and Bissell, of our navy, and one or two others, forming quite an American party. We passed the ruins of the baths of Diocletian, with a heavy cloud over our heads; but we were scarce through the gate, when the sun broke through, the rain swept off over Soracte, and the sky was clear till sunset.

I have seen many finer falls than Tivoli; that is, more water, and falling farther; but I do not think there is so pretty a place in the world. A very dirty village, a dirtier hotel, and a cicerone all rags and ruffianism, are somewhat dampers to anticipation. We passed through a broken gate, and with a step, were in a glen of fairy-land; the lightest and loveliest of antique temples on a crag above, a snowy waterfall of some hundred and fifty feet below, grottoes mossed to the mouth at the river's outlet, and all up and down the cleft valley vines twisted in the crevices of rock, and shrubbery hanging on every ledge, with a felicity of taste or nature, or both, that is uncommon even in Italy. The fall itself comes rushing down through a grotto to the face of the precipice, over which it leaps, and looks like a subterranean river just coming to light. Its bed is rough above, and it bursts forth from its cavern in dazzling foam, and falls in one sparry sheet to the gulf. The falls of Montmorenci are not unlike it.

We descended to the bottom, and from the little terrace, wet by the spray, and dark with overhanging rocks, looked up the "cavern of Neptune," a deep passage, through which the divided river rushes to meet the fall in the gulf. Then remounting to the top, we took mules to make the three miles' circuit of the glen, and see what are called the Cascatelli.

No fairy-work could exceed the beauty of the little antique Sybil's temple perched on the top of the crag above the fall. As we rode round the other edge of the glen, it stood opposite us in all the beauty of its light and airy architecture; a thing that might be borne, "like Loretto's chapel, through the air," and seem no miracle.

A mile farther on I began to recognize the features of the scene, at a most lovely point of view. It was the subject of one of Cole's landscapes, which I had seen in Florence; and I need not say to any one who knows the works of this admirable artist, that it was done with truth and taste.[3] The little town of Tivoli hangs on a jutting lap of a mountain, on the side of the ravine opposite to your point of view. From beneath its walls, as if its foundations were laid upon a river's fountains, bursts foaming water in some thirty different falls; and it seems to you as if the long declivities were that moment for the first time overflowed, for the currents go dashing under trees, and overleaping vines and shrubs, appearing and disappearing continually, till they all meet in the quiet bed of the river below. "It was made by Bernini," said the guide, as we stood gazing at it; and, odd as this information sounded, while wondering at a spectacle worthy of the happiest accident of nature, it will explain the phenomena of the place to you—the artist having turned a mountain river from its course, and leading it under the town of Tivoli, threw it over the sides of the precipitous hill upon which it stands. One of the streams appears from beneath the ruins of the "Villa of MecÆnas," which topples over a precipice just below the town, looking over the campagna toward Rome—a situation worthy of the patron of the poets. We rode through the immense subterranean arches, which formed its court, in ascending the mountain again to the town.

Near Tivoli is the ruined villa of Adrian, where was found the Venus de Medicis, and some other of the wonders of antique art. The sun had set, however, and the long campagna of twenty miles lay between us and Rome. We were compelled to leave it unseen. We entered the gates at nine o'clock, unrobbed—rather an unusual good fortune, we were told, for travellers after dark on that lonely waste. Perhaps our number deprived us of the romance.

I left a crowded ball-room at midnight, wearied with a day at Tivoli, and oppressed with an atmosphere breathed by two hundred, dancing and card-playing, Romans and foreigners; and with a step from the portico of the noble palace of our host, came into a broad beam of moonlight, that with the stillness and coolness of the night refreshed me at once, and banished all disposition for sleep. A friend was with me, and I proposed a ramble among the ruins.

The sentinel challenged us as we entered the Forum. The frequent robberies of romantic strangers in this lonely place have made a guard necessary, and they are now stationed from the Arch of Severus to the Coliseum. We passed an hour rambling among the ruins of the temples. Not a footstep was to be heard, nor a sound even from the near city; and the tall columns, with their broken friezes and capitals, and the grand imperishable arches, stood up in the bright light of the moon, looking indeed like monuments of Rome. I am told they are less majestic by daylight. The rubbish and fresh earth injure the effect. But I have as yet seen them in the garb of moonlight only, and I shall carry this impression away. It is to me, now, all that my fancy hoped to find it—its temples and columns just enough in ruin to be affecting and beautiful.

We went thence to the Temple of Vesta. It is shut up in the modern streets, ten or fifteen minutes walk from the Forum. The picture of this perfect temple, and the beautiful purpose of its consecration, have been always prominent in my imaginary Rome. It is worthy of its association—an exquisite round temple, with its simple circle of columns from the base to the roof, a faultless thing in proportion, and as light and floating to the eye as if the wind might lift it. It was no common place to stand beside, and recall the poetical truth and fiction of which it has been the scene—the vestal lamp cherished or neglected by its high-born votaries, their honors if pure, and their dreadful death if faithless. It needed not the heavenly moonlight that broke across its columns to make it a very shrine of fancy.

My companion proposed a visit next to the Cloaca Maxima. A common sewer, after the Temple of Vesta, sounds like an abrupt transition; but the arches beneath which we descended were touched by moonlight, and the vines and ivy crossed our path, and instead of a drain of filth, which the fame of its imperial builder would scarce have sweetened, a rapid stream leaped to the right, and disappeared again beneath the solid masonry, more like a wild brook plunging into a grotto than the thing one expects to find it. The clear little river Juturna (on the banks of which Castor and Pollux watered their foaming horses, when bringing the news of victory to Rome), dashes now through the Cloaca Maxima; and a fresher or purer spot, or waters with a more musical murmur, it has not been my fortune to see. We stopped over a broken column for a drink, and went home, refreshed, to bed.

LETTER XLIV.

MASS IN THE SISTINE CHAPEL—THE CARDINALS—THE "LAST JUDGMENT"—THE POPE OF ROME—THE "ADAM AND EVE" CHANTING OF THE PRIESTS—FESTA AT THE CHURCH OF SAN CARLOS—GREGORY THE SIXTEENTH, HIS EQUIPAGE, TRAIN, ETC.

All the world goes to hear "mass in the Sistine chapel," and all travellers describe it. It occurs infrequently and is performed by the Pope. We were there to-day at ten, crowding at the door with hundreds of foreigners, mostly English, elbowed alternately by priests and ladies, and kept in order by the Swiss guards in their harlequin dresses and long pikes. We were admitted after an hour's pushing, and the guard retreated to the grated door, through which no woman is permitted to pass. Their gay bonnets and feathers clustered behind the gilded bars, and we could admire them for once without the qualifying reflection that they were between us and the show. An hour more was occupied in the entrance, one by one, of some forty cardinals with their rustling silk trains supported by boys in purple. They passed the gate, their train bearers lifted their cassocks and helped them to kneel, a moment's prayer was mumbled, and they took their seats with the same servile assistance. Their attendants placed themselves at their feet, and, taking the prayer-books, the only use of which appeared to be to display their jewelled fingers, they looked over them at the faces behind the grating, and waited for his Holiness.

The intervals of this memory, gave us time to study the famous frescoes for which the Sistine chapel is renowned. The subject is the "Last Judgment." The Saviour sits in the midst, pronouncing the sentence, the wicked plunging from his presence on the left hand, and the righteous ascending with the assistance of angels on the right. The artist had, of course, infinite scope for expression, and the fame of the fresco (which occupies the whole of the wall behind the altar) would seem to argue his success. The light is miserable, however, and incense or lamp-smoke, has obscured the colors, and one looks at it now with little pleasure. As well as I could see, the figure of the Saviour was more that of a tiler throwing down slates from the top of a house in some fear of falling, than the Judge of the world upon his throne. Some of the other parts are better, and one or two naked females figures might once have been beautiful, but one of the succeeding popes ordered them dressed, and they now flaunt at the judgment-seat in colored silks, obscuring both saints and sinners with their finery. There are some redeeming frescoes, also by Michael Angelo, on the ceiling, among them "Adam and Eve," exquisitely done.

The Pope entered by a door at the side of the altar. With him came a host of dignitaries and church servants, and, as he tottered round in front of the altar, to kneel, his cap was taken off and put on, his flowing robes lifted and spread, and he was treated in all respects, as if he were the Deity himself. In fact, the whole service was the worship, not of God, but of the Pope. The cardinals came up, one by one, with their heads bowed, and knelt reverently to kiss his hand and the hem of his white satin dress; his throne was higher than the altar, and ten times as gorgeous; the incense was flung toward him, and his motions from one side of the chapel to the other, were attended with more ceremony and devotion than all the rest of the service together. The chanting commenced with his entrance, and this should have been to God alone, for it was like music from heaven. The choir was composed of priests, who sang from massive volumes bound in golden clasps, in a small side gallery. One stood by the book, turning the leaves as the chant proceeded, and keeping the measure, and the others clustered around with their hands clasped, their heads thrown back, and their eyes closed or fixed upon the turning leaves in such grouping and attitude as you see in pictures of angels singing in the clouds. I have heard wonderful music since I have been on the continent, and have received new ideas of the compass of the human voice, and its capacities for pathos and sweetness. But, after all the wonders of the opera, as it is learned to sing before kings and courts, the chanting of these priests transcended every conception in my mind of music. It was the human voice, cleared of all earthliness, and gushing through its organs with uncontrollable feeling and nature. The burden of the various parts returned continually upon one or two simple notes, the deepest and sweetest in the octave for melody, and occasionally a single voice outran the choir in a passionate repetition of the air, which seemed less like musical contrivance, than an abandonment of soul and voice to a preternatural impulse of devotion. One writes nonsense in describing such things, but there is no other way of conveying an idea of them. The subject is beyond the wildest superlatives.

To-day we have again seen the Pope. It was a festa, and the church of San Carlos was the scene of the ceremonies. His Holiness came in the state-coach with six long-tailed black horses, and all his cardinals in their red and gold carriages in his train. The gaudy procession swept up to the steps, and the father of the church was taken upon the shoulders of his bearers in a chair of gold and crimson, and solemnly borne up the aisle, and deposited within the railings of the altar, where homage was done to him by the cardinals as before, and the half-supernatural music of his choir awaited his motions. The church was half filled with soldiers armed to the teeth, and drawn up on either side, and his body-guard of Roman nobles, stood even within the railing of the altar, capped and motionless, conveying, as everything else does, the irresistible impression that it was the worship of the Pope, not of God.

Gregory the sixteenth, is a small old man, with a large heavy nose, eyes buried in sluggish wrinkles, and a flushed, apoplectic complexion. He sits, or is borne about with his eyes shut, looking quite asleep, even his limbs hanging lifelessly. The gorgeous and heavy papal costumes only render him more insignificant, and when he is borne about, buried in his deep chair, or lost in the corner of his huge black and gold pagoda of a carriage, it is difficult to look at him without a smile. Among his cardinals, however, there are magnificent heads, boldly marked, noble and scholarlike, and I may say, perhaps, that there is no one of them, who had not nature's mark upon him of superiority. They are a dignified and impressive body of men, and their servile homage to the Pope, seems unnatural and disgusting.

LETTER XLV.

ROME—A MORNING IN THE STUDIO OF THORWALDSEN—COLOSSAL STATUE OF THE SAVIOUR—STATUE OF BYRON—GIBSON'S ROOMS—CUPID AND PSYCHE—HYLAS WITH THE RIVER NYMPHS—PALAZZO SPADA—STATUE OF POMPEY—BORGHESE PALACE—PORTRAIT OF CESAR BORGIA—DOSSI'S PSYCHE—SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE—ROOM DEVOTED TO VENUSES—THE SOCIETY OF ROME, ETC.

I have spent a morning in the studio of Thorwaldsen. He is probably the greatest sculptor now living. A colossal statue of Christ, thought by many to be his masterpiece, is the prominent object as you enter. It is a noble conception—the mild majesty of a Saviour expressed in a face of the most dignified human beauty. Perhaps his full-length statue of Byron is inferior to some of his other works, but it interested me, and I spent most of my time in looking at it. It was taken from life; and my friend, Mr. Auchmuty, who was with me, and who had seen Byron frequently on board one of our ships-of-war at Leghorn, thought it the only faithful likeness he had ever seen. The poet is dressed oddly enough, in a morning frock coat, cravat, pantaloons, and shoes; and, unpromising as these materials would seem, the statue is classic and elegant to a very high degree. His coat is held by the two centre buttons in front (a more exquisite cut never came from the hands of a London tailor), swelled out a little above and below by the fleshy roundness of his figure; his cravat is tied loosely, leaving his throat bare (which, by the way, both in the statue and the original, was very beautifully chiselled); and he sits upon a fragment of a column, with a book in one hand and a pencil in the other. A man reading a pleasant poem among the ruins of Rome, and looking up to reflect upon a fine passage before marking it, would assume the attitude and expression exactly. The face has half a smile upon it, and, differing from the Apollo faces usually drawn for Byron, is finer, and more expressive of his character than any I ever met with. Thorwaldsen is a Dane, and is beloved by every one for his simplicity and modesty. I did not see him.

We were afterward at Gibson's rooms. This gentleman is an English artist, apparently about thirty, and full of genius. He has taken some portraits which are esteemed admirable; but his principal labor has been thrown upon the most beautiful fables of antiquity. His various groups and bas-reliefs of Cupid and Psyche are worthy of the beauty of the story. His chef d'oeuvre, I think, is a group of three figures, representing the boy, "Hylas with the river nymphs." He stands between them with the pitcher in his hand, startled with their touch, and listening to their persuasions. The smaller of the two female figures is an almost matchless conception of loveliness. Gibson went round with us kindly, and I was delighted with his modesty of manner, and the apparently completely poetical character of his mind. He has a noble head, a lofty forehead well marked, and a mouth of finely mingled strength and mildness.

We devoted this morning to palaces. At the Palazzo Spada we saw the statue of Pompey, at the base of which Cesar fell. Antiquaries dispute its authenticity, but the evidence is quite strong enough for a poetical belief; and if it were not, one's time is not lost, for the statue is a majestic thing, and well worth the long walk necessary to see it. The mutilated arm, and the hole in the wall behind, remind one of the ludicrous fantasy of the French, who carried it to the Forum to enact "Brutus" at its base.

The Borghese Palace is rich in pictures. The portrait of Cesar Borgia, by Titian, is one of the most striking. It represents that accomplished villain with rather slight features, and, barring a look of cool determination about his well-formed lips, with rather a prepossessing countenance. One detects in it the capabilities of such a character as his, after the original is mentioned; but otherwise he might pass for a handsome gallant, of no more dangerous trait than a fiery temper. Just beyond it is a very strong contrast in a figure of Psyche, by Dossi, of Ferrara. She is coming on tiptoe, with the lamp, to see her lover. The Cupid asleep is not so well done; but for an image of a real woman, unexaggerated and lovely, I have seen nothing which pleases me better than this Psyche. Opposite it hangs a very celebrated Titian, representing "Sacred and Profane Love." Two female figures are sitting by a well—one quite nude, with her hair about her shoulders, and the other dressed, and coiffed a la mode, but looking less modest to my eye than her undraped sister. It is little wonder, however, that a man who could paint his own daughter in the embraces of a satyr (a revolting picture, which I saw in the Barberigo palace at Venice) should fail in drawing the face of Virtue. The coloring of the picture is exquisite, but the design is certainly a failure.

The last room in the palace is devoted to Venuses—all very naked and very bad. There might be forty, I think, and not a limb among them that one's eye would rest upon with the least pleasure for a single moment.

The society of Rome is of course changing continually. At this particular season, strangers from every part of the continent are beginning to arrive, and it promises to be pleasant. I have been at most of the parties during the fortnight that I have been here, but find them thronged with priests, and with only the resident society which is dull. Cards and conversation with people one never saw before, and will certainly never see again, are heavy pastimes. I start for Florence to-morrow, and shall return to Rome for Holy Week, and the spring months.

LETTER XLVI.

ITALIAN AND AMERICAN SKIES—FALLS OF TERNI—THE CLITUMNUS—THE TEMPLE—EFFECTS OF AN EARTHQUAKE AT FOLIGNO—LAKE THRASIMENE—JOURNEY FROM ROME—FLORENCE—FLORENTINE SCENERY—PRINCE PONIATOWSKI—JEROME BONAPARTE AND FAMILY—WANT OF A MINISTER IN ITALY.

I left Rome by the magnificent "Porta del Popolo," as the flush of a pearly and spotless Italian sunrise deepened over Soracte. They are so splendid without clouds—these skies of Italy! so deep to the eye, so radiantly clear! Clouds make the glory of an American sky. The "Indian summer" sunsets excepted, our sun goes down in New England, with the extravagance of a theatrical scene. The clouds are massed and heavy, like piles of gold and fire, and day after day, if you observe them, you are literally astonished with the brilliant phenomena of the west. Here, for seven months, we have had no rain. The sun has risen faultlessly clear, with the same gray, and silver, and rose tints succeeding each other as regularly as the colors in a turning prism, and it has set as constantly in orange, gold, and purple, with scarce the variation of a painter's pallet, from one day to another. It is really most delightful to live under such heavens as these; to be depressed never by a gloomy sky, nor ill from a chance exposure to a chill wind, nor out of humor because the rain or damp keeps you a prisoner at home. You feel the delicious climate in a thousand ways. It is a positive blessing, and were worth more than a fortune, if it were bought and sold. I would rather be poor in Italy, than rich in any other country in the world.

We ascended the mountain that shuts in the campagna on the north, and turned, while the horses breathed, to take a last look at Rome. My two friends, the lieutenants, and myself, occupied the interior of the vetturino, in company with a young Roman woman, who was making her first journey from home. She was going to see her husband. I pointed out of the window to the distant dome of St. Peter's, rising above the thin smoke hung over the city, and she looked at it with the tears streaming from her large black eyes in torrents. She might have cried because she was going to her husband, but I could not divest myself of the fact that she was a Roman, and leaving a home that could be very romantically wept for. She was a fine specimen of this finest of the races of woman—amply proportioned without grossness, and with that certain presence or dignity that rises above manners and rank, common to them all.

We saw beautiful scenery at Narni. The town stands on the edge of a precipice, and the valley, a hundred feet or two below, is coursed by a wild stream, that goes foaming along its bed in a long line of froth for miles away. We dined here, and drove afterward to Terni, where the voiturier stopped for the night, to give us an opportunity to see the Falls.

We drove to the mountain base, three miles, in an old post barouche, and made the ascent on foot. A line of precipices extends along from the summit, and from the third or fourth of these leaps the Velino, clear into the valley. We saw it in front as we went on, and then followed the road round, till we reached the bed of the river behind. The fountain of Egeria is not more secludedly beautiful than its current above the fall. Trees overhang and meet, and flowers spring in wonderful variety on its banks, and the ripple against the roots is heard amid the roar of the cataract, like a sweet, clear voice in a chorus. It is a place in which you half expect to startle a fawn, it looks so unvisited and wild. We wound out through the shrubbery, and gained a projecting point, from which we could see the sheet of the cascade. It is "horribly beautiful" to be sure. Childe Harold's description of it is as true as a drawing.

I should think the quantity of water at Niagara would make five hundred such falls as those of Terni, without exaggeration. It is a "hell of waters," however, notwithstanding, and leaps over with a current all turned into foam by the roughness of its bed above—a circumstance that gives the sheet more richness of surface. Two or three lovely little streams steal off on either side of the fall, as if they shrunk from the leap, and drop down, from rock to rock, till they are lost in the rising mist.

The sun set over the little town of Terni, while we stood silently looking down into the gulf, and the wet spray reminded us that the most romantic people may take cold. We descended to our carriage; and in an hour were sitting around the blazing fire at the post-house, with a motley group of Germans, Swiss, French, and Italians—a mixture of company universal in the public room of an Italian albergo, at night. The coming and going vetturini stop at the same houses throughout, and the concourse is always amusing. We sat till the fire burned low, and then wishing our chance friends a happy night, had the "priests"[4] taken from our beds, and were soon lost to everything but sleep.

Terni was the Italian Tempe, and its beautiful scenery was shown to Cicero, whose excursion hither is recorded. It is part of a long, deep valley, between abrupt ranges of mountains, and abounds in loveliness.

We went to Spoleto, the next morning, to breakfast. It is a very old town, oddly built, and one of its gates still remains, at which Hannibal was repulsed after his victory at Thrasimene. It bears his name in time-worn letters.

At the distance of one post from Spoleto we came to the Clitumnus, a small stream, still, deep, and glassy—the clearest water I ever saw. It looks almost like air. On its bank, facing away from the road, stands the temple, "of small and delicate proportions," mentioned so exquisitely by Childe Harold.

The temple of the Clitumnus might stand in a drawing-room. The stream is a mere brook, and this little marble gem, whose richly fretted columns were raised to its honor with a feeling of beauty that makes one thrill, seems exactly of relative proportions. It is a thing of pure poetry; and to find an antiquity of such perfect preservation, with the small clear stream running still at the base of its faÇade, just as it did when Cicero and his contemporaries passed it on their visits to a country called after the loveliest vale of Greece for its beauty, was a gratification of the highest demand of taste. Childe Harold's lesson,

"Pass not unblest the genius of the place"

was scarce necessary.[5]

We slept at Foligno. For many miles we had observed that the houses were propped in every direction, many of them in ruins apparently recent, and small wooden sheds erected in the midst of the squares, or beside the roads, and crowded with the poor. The next morning we arrived at St. Angelo, and found its gigantic cathedral a heap of ruins. Its painted chapels, to the number of fifteen or sixteen, were half standing in the shattered walls, the altars all exposed, and the interior of the dome one mass of stone and rubbish. It was the first time I had seen the effects of an earthquake. For eight or ten miles further, we found every house cracked and deserted, and the people living like the settlers in a new country, half in the open air. The beggars were innumerable.

We stopped the next night on the shores of lake Thrasimene. For once in my life, I felt that the time spent at school on the "dull drilled lesson," had not been wasted. I was on the battle ground of Hannibal—the "locus aptus insidiis" where the consul Flaminius was snared and beaten by the wily Carthaginian on his march to Rome. I longed for my old copy of Livy "much thumbed," that I might sit on the hill and compare the image in my mind, made by his pithy and sententious description, with the reality.

The battle ground, the scene of the principal slaughter, was beyond the albergo, and the increasing darkness compelled us to defer a visit to it till the next morning. Meantime the lake was beautiful. We were on the eastern side, and the deep-red sky of a departed sunset over the other shore, was reflected glowingly on the water. All around was dark, but the light in the sky and lake seemed to have forgotten to follow. It is a phenomenon peculiar to Italy. The heavens seem "dyed" and steeped in the glory of the sunset.

We drank our host's best bottle of wine, the grape plucked from the battle ground; and if it was not better for the Roman blood that had manured its ancestor, it was better for some other reason.

Early the next morning we were on our way, and wound down into the narrow pass between the lake and the hill, as the sun rose. We crossed the Sanguinetto, a little stream which took its name from the battle. The principal slaughter was just on its banks, and the hills are so steep above it, that everybody who fell near must have rolled into its bed. It crawls on very quietly across the road, its clear stream scarce interrupted by the wheels of the vetturino, which in crossing it, passes from the Roman states into Tuscany. I ran a little up the stream, knelt and drank at a small gurgling fall. The blood of the old Flaminian Cohort spoiled very delicious water, when it mingled with that brook.

We were six days and a half accomplishing the hundred and eighty miles from Rome to Florence—slow travelling—but not too slow in Italy, where every stone has its story, and every ascent of a hill its twenty matchless pictures, sprinkled with ruins, as a painter's eye could not imagine them. We looked down on the Eden-like valley of the Arno at sunrise, and again my heart leaped to see the tall dome of Florence, and the hills all about the queenly city, sparkling with palaces and bright in a sun that shines nowhere so kindly. If there is a spot in the world that could wean one from his native home, it is Florence! "Florence the fair," they call her! I have passed four of the seven months I have been in Italy, here—and I think I shall pass here as great a proportion of the rest of my life. There is nothing that can contribute to comfort and pleasure, that is not within the reach of the smallest means in Florence. I never saw a place where wealth made less distinction. The choicest galleries of art in the world, are open to all comers. The palace of the monarch may be entered and visited, and enjoyed by all. The ducal gardens of the Boboli, rich in everything that can refine nature, and commanding views that no land can equal, cooled by fountains, haunted in every grove by statuary, are the property of the stranger and the citizen alike. Museums, laboratories, libraries, grounds, palaces, are all free as Utopia. You may take any pleasure that others can command, and have any means of instruction, as free as the common air. Where else would one live so pleasantly—so profitably—so wisely.

The society of Florence is of a very fascinating description. The Florentine nobles have a casino, or club-house, to which most of the respectable strangers are invited, and balls are given there once a week, frequently by the duke and his court, and the best society of the place. I attended one on my first arrival from Rome, at which I saw a proportion of beauty which astonished me. The female descendants of the great names in Italian history, seem to me to have almost without exception the mark of noble beauty by nature. The loveliest woman in Florence is a Medici. The two daughters of Capponi, the patriot and the descendant of patriots, are of the finest order of beauty. I could instance many others, the mention of whose names, when I have first seen them, has made my blood start. I think if Italy is ever to be redeemed, she must owe it to her daughters. The men, the brothers of these women, with very rare exceptions, look like the slaves they are, from one end of Italy to the other.

One of the most hospitable houses here, is that of Prince Poniatowski, the brother of the hero of Poland. He has a large family, and his soirÉes are thronged with all that is fair and distinguished. He is a venerable, grayheaded old man, of perhaps seventy, very fond of speaking English, of which rare acquisition abroad he seems a little vain. He gave me the heartiest welcome as an American, and said he loved the nation.

I had the honor of dining, a day or two since, with the Ex-King of Westphalia, Jerome Bonaparte. He lives here with the title of Prince Montfort, conferred on him by his father-in-law, the king of Wurtemburg. Americans are well received at this house also; and his queen, as the prince still calls her, can never say enough in praise of the family of Mr. H., our former secretary of legation at Paris. It is a constantly recurring theme, and ends always with "J'aime beaucoup les Americains." The prince resembles his brother, but has a milder face, and his mouth is less firm and less beautiful than Napoleon's. His second son is most remarkably like the emperor. He is about ten years of age; but except his youth, you can detect no difference between his head and the busts of his uncle. He has a daughter of about twelve, and an elder son at the university of Sienna. His family is large as his queen still keeps up her state, with the ladies of honor and suite. He never goes out, but his house is open every night, and the best society of Florence may be met there almost at the prima sera, or early part of the evening.

The Grand Duke is about to be married, and the court is to be unusually gay in the carnival. Our countryman, Mr. Thorn, was presented some time since, and I am to have that honor in two or three days. By the way, we feel exceedingly in Italy the want of a minister. There is no accredited agent of our government in Tuscany, and there are rarely less than three hundred Americans within its dominions. Fortunately the Marquis Corsi, the grand chamberlain of the duke, offers to act in the capacity of an ambassador, and neglects nothing for our advantage in such matters, but he never fails to express his regret that we should not have some chargÉ d'affaires at his court. We have officers in many parts of the world where they are much less needed.

LETTER XLVII.

FLORENCE—GRAND DUKE OF TUSCANY—THE GRAND CHAMBERLAIN—PRINCE DE LIGNE—THE AUSTRIAN AMBASSADOR—THE MARQUIS TORRIGIANI—LEOPOLD OF TUSCANY—VIEWS OF THE VAL D'ARNO—SPLENDID BALL—TREES OF CANDLES—THE DUKE AND DUCHESS—HIGHBORN ITALIAN AND ENGLISH BEAUTIES, ETC., ETC.

I was presented to the grand Duke of Tuscany yesterday morning, at a private audience. As we have no minister at this court, I drove alone to the ducal palace, and, passing through the body-guard of young nobles, was met at the door of the ante-chamber by the Marquis Corsi, the grand chamberlain. Around a blazing fire, in this room, stood five or six persons, in splendid uniforms, to whom I was introduced on entering. One was the Prince de Ligne—traveling at present in Italy, and waiting to be presented by the Austrian ambassador—a young and remarkably handsome man of twenty-five. He showed a knowledge of America, in the course of a half hour's conversation, which rather surprised me, inquiring particularly about the residences and condition of the United States' ministers whom he had met at the various courts of Europe. The Austrian ambassador, an old, wily-looking man, covered with orders, joined in the conversation and asked after our former minister at Paris, Mr. Brown, remarking that he had done the United States great credit, during his embassy. He had known Mr. Gallatin also, and spoke highly of him. Mr. Van Buren's election to the vice-presidency, after his recall, seemed greatly to surprise him.

The Prince was summoned to the presence of the Duke, and I remained some fifteen minutes in conversation with a venerable and noble-looking man, the Marquis Torrigiani, one of the chamberlains. His eldest son has lately gone upon his travels in the United States, in company with Mr. Thorn, an American gentleman living in Florence. He seemed to think the voyage a great undertaking. Torrigiani is one of the oldest of the Florentine nobles, and his family is in high esteem.

As the Austrian minister came out, the Grand Chamberlain came for me, and I entered the presence of the Duke. He was standing quite alone in a small, plain room, dressed in a simple white uniform, with a star upon his breast—a slender, pale, scholar-like looking young man, of perhaps thirty years. He received me with a pleasant smile, and crossing his hands behind him, came close to me, and commenced questioning me about America. The departure of young Torrigiani for the United States pleased him, and he said he should like to go himself—"but," said he, "a voyage of three thousand miles and back—comment faire!" and he threw out his hands with a look of mock despair that was very expressive. He assured me he felt great pleasure at Mr. Thorn's having taken up his residence in Florence. He had sent for his whole family a few days before, and promised them every attention to their comfort during the absence of Mr. Thorn. He said young Torrigiani was bien instruit, and would travel to advantage, without doubt. At every pause of his inquiries, he looked me full in the eyes, and seemed anxious to yield me the parole and listen. He bowed with a smile, after I had been with him perhaps half an hour, and I took my leave with all the impressions of his character which common report had given me, quite confirmed. He is said to be the best monarch in Europe, and it is written most expressively in his mild, amiable features.

The Duke is very unwilling to marry again, although the crown passes from his family if he die without a male heir. He has two daughters, lovely children, between five and seven, whose mother died not quite a year since. She was unusually beloved, both by her husband and his subjects, and is still talked of by the people, and never without the deepest regret. She was very religious, and is said to have died of a cold taken in doing a severe penance. The Duke watched with her day and night, till she died; and I was told by the old Chamberlain, that he cannot yet speak of her without tears.

With the new year, the Grand Duke of Tuscany threw off his mourning. Not from his countenance, for the sadness of that is habitual; but his equipages have laid off their black trappings, his grooms and outriders are in drab and gold, and, more important to us strangers in his capital, the ducal palace is aired with a weekly reception and ball, as splendid and hospitable as money and taste can make them.

Leopold of Tuscany is said to be the richest individual in Europe. The Palazzo Pitti, in which he lives, seems to confirm it. The exterior is marked with the character of the times in which it was built, and might be that of a fortress—its long, dark front of roughly-hewn stone, with its two slight, out-curving wings, bearing a look of more strength than beauty. The interior is incalculably rich. The suite of halls on the front side is the home of the choicest and most extensive gallery of pictures in the world. The tables of inlaid gems and mosaic, the walls encrusted with relievos, the curious floors, the drapery—all satiate the eye with sumptuousness. It is built against a hill, and I was surprised, on the night of the ball, to find myself alighting from the carriage upon the same floor to which I had mounted from the front by tediously long staircases. The Duke thus rides in his carriage to his upper story—an advantage which saves him no little fatigue and exposure. The gardens of the Boboli, which cover the hill behind, rise far above the turrets of the palace, and command glorious views of the Val d'Arno.

The reception hour at the ball was from eight to nine. We were received at the steps on the garden side of the palace, by a crowd of servants, in livery, under the orders of a fat major-domo, and passing through a long gallery, lined with exotics and grenadiers, we arrived at the anteroom, where the Duke's body-guard of nobles were drawn up in attendance. The band was playing delightfully in the saloon beyond. I had arrived late, having been presented a few days before, and desirous of avoiding the stiffness of the first hour of presentation. The rooms were in a blaze of light from eight trees of candles, cypress-shaped, and reaching from the floor to the ceiling, and the company entirely assembled, crowded them with a dazzling show of jewels, flowers, feathers, and uniforms.

The Duke and the Grand Duchess (the widow of the late Duke) stood in the centre of the room, and in the pauses of conversation, the different ambassadors presented their countrymen. His highness was dressed in a suit of plain black, probably the worst made clothes in Florence. With his pale, timid face, his bent shoulders, an inexpressibly ill-tied cravat, and rank, untrimmed whiskers, he was the most uncourtly person present. His extreme popularity as a monarch is certainly very independent of his personal address. His mother-in-law is about his own age, with marked features, full of talent, a pale, high forehead, and the bearing altogether of a queen. She wore a small diadem of the purest diamonds, and with her height and her flashing jewels, she was conspicuous from every part of the room. She is a high Catholic, and is said to be bending all her powers upon the re-establishment of the Jesuits in Florence.

As soon as the presentations were over, the Grand Duke led out the wife of the English ambassador, and opened the ball with a waltz. He then danced a quadrille with the wife of the French ambassador, and for his next partner selected an American lady—the daughter of Colonel T——, of New York.

The supper rooms were opened early, and among the delicacies of a table loaded with everything rare and luxurious, were a brace or two of pheasants from the Duke's estates in Germany. Duly flavored with truffes, and accompanied with Rhine wines, which deserved the conspicuous place given them upon the royal table—and in this letter.

I hardly dare speak of the degree of beauty in the assembly; it is so difficult to compare a new impression with an old one, and the thing itself is so indefinite. But there were two persons present whose extreme loveliness, as it is not disputed even by admiring envy, may be worth describing, for the sake of the comparison.

The Princess S—— may be twenty-four years of age. She is of the middle height, with the slight stoop in her shoulders, which is rather a grace than a fault. Her bust is exquisitely turned, her neck slender but full, her arms, hands, and feet, those of a Psyche. Her face is the abstraction of highborn Italian beauty—calm, almost to indifference, of an indescribably glowing paleness—a complexion that would be alabaster if it were not for the richness of the blood beneath, betrayed in lips whose depth of color and fineness of curve seem only too curiously beautiful to be the work of nature. Her eyes are dark and large, and must have had an indolent expression in her childhood, but are now the very seat and soul of feeling. A constant trace of pain mars the beauty of her forehead. She dresses her hair with a kind of characteristic departure from the mode, parting its glossy flakes on her brow with nymph-like simplicity, a peculiarity which one regrets not to see in the too Parisian dress of her person. In her manner she is strikingly elegant, but without being absent, she seems to give an unconscious attention to what is about her, and to be gracious and winning without knowing or intending it, merely because she could not listen or speak otherwise. Her voice is sweet, and, in her own Italian, mellow and soft to a degree inconceivable by those who have not heard this delicious language spoken in its native land. With all these advantages, and a look of pride that nothing could insult, there is an expression in her beautiful face that reminds you of her sex and its temptations, and prepares you fully for the history which you may hear from the first woman that stands at your elbow.

The other is that English girl of seventeen, shrinking timidly from the crowd, and leaning with her hands clasped over her father's arm, apparently listening only to the waltz, and unconscious that every eye is fixed upon her in admiration. She has lived all her life in Italy, but has been bred by an English mother, in a retired villa of the Val d'Arno—her character and feelings are those of her race, and nothing of Italy about her, but the glow of its sunny clime in the else spotless snow of her complexion, and an enthusiasm in her downcast eye that you may account for as you will—it is not English! Her form has just ripened into womanhood. The bust still wants fullness, and the step confidence. Her forehead is rather too intellectual to be maidenly; but the droop of her singularly long eye-lashes over eyes that elude the most guarded glance of your own, and the modest expression of her lips closed but not pressed together, redeem her from any look of conscious superiority, and convince you that she only seeks to be unobserved. A single ringlet of golden brown hair falls nearly to her shoulder, catching the light upon its glossy curves with an effect that would enchant a painter. Lilies of the valley, the first of the season, are in her bosom and her hair, and she might be the personification of the flower for delicacy and beauty. You are only disappointed in talking with her. She expresses herself with a nerve and self-command, which, from a slight glance, you did not anticipate. She shrinks from the general eye, but in conversation she is the high-minded woman more than the timid child for which her manner seems to mark her. In either light, she is the very presence of purity. She stands by the side of her not less beautiful rival, like a Madonna by a Magdalen—both seem not at home in the world, but only one could have dropped from heaven.

LETTER XLVIII.

VALLOMBROSA—ITALIAN OXEN—CONVENT—SERVICE IN THE CHAPEL—HOUSE OCCUPIED BY MILTON.

I left Florence for Vallombrosa at daylight on a warm summer's morning, in company with four ladies. We drove along the northern bank of the Arno for four or five miles, passing several beautiful villas, belonging to the Florentine nobles; and, crossing the river by a picturesque bridge, took the road to the village of Pelago, which lies at the foot of the mountain, and is the farthest point to which a carriage can mount. It is about fourteen miles from Florence, and the ascent thence to the convent is nearly three.

We alighted in the centre of the village, in the midst of a ragged troop of women and children, among whom were two idiot beggars; and, while the preparations were making for our ascent, we took chairs in the open square around a basket of cherries, and made a delicious luncheon of fruit and bread, very much to the astonishment of some two hundred spectators.

Our conveyances appeared in the course of half an hour, consisting of two large baskets, each drawn by a pair of oxen and containing two persons, and a small Sardinian pony. The ladies seated themselves with some hesitation in their singular sledges; I mounted the pony, and we made a dusty exit from Pelago, attended to the gate by our gaping friends, who bowed, and wished us the bon viaggio with more gratitude than three Tuscan crazie would buy, I am sure, in any other part of the world.

The gray oxen of Italy are quite a different race from ours, much lighter and quicker, and in a small vehicle they will trot off five or six miles in the hour as freely as a horse. They are exceedingly beautiful. The hide is very fine, of a soft squirrel gray, and as sleek and polished often as that of a well-groomed courser. With their large, bright, intelligent eyes, high-lifted heads, and open nostrils, they are among the finest-looking animals in the world in motion. We soon came to the steep path, and the facility with which our singular equipages mounted was surprising. I followed, as well as I could, on my diminutive pony, my feet touching the ground, and my balance constantly endangered by the contact of stumps and stones—the hard-mouthed little creature taking his own way, in spite of every effort of mine to the contrary.

We stopped to breathe in a deep, cool glen, which lay across our path, the descent into which was very difficult. The road through the bottom of it ran just above the bank of a brook, into which poured a pretty fall of eight or ten feet, and with the spray-wet grass beneath, and the full-leaved chestnuts above, it was as delicious a spot for a rest in a summer noontide as I ever saw. The ladies took out their pencils and sketched it, making a group themselves the while, which added all the picture wanted.

The path wound continually about in the deep woods, with which the mountain is covered, and occasionally from an opening we obtained a view back upon the valley of the Arno, which was exceedingly fine. We came in sight of the convent in about two hours, emerging from the shade of the thick chestnuts into a cultivated lawn, fenced and mown with the nicety of the grass-plot before a cottage, and entering upon a smooth, well-swept pavement, approached the gate of the venerable-looking pile, as anxious for the refreshment of its far-famed hospitality as ever pilgrims were.

An old cheerful-looking monk came out to meet us, and shaking hands with the ladies very cordially, assisted in extracting them from their cramped conveyances. He then led the way to a small stone cottage, a little removed from the convent, quoting gravely by the way the law of the order against the entrance of females over the monastic threshold. We were ushered into a small, neat parlor, with two bedrooms communicating, and two of the servants of the monastery followed, with water and snow-white napkins, the padre degli forestieri, as they called the old monk, who received us, talking most volubly all the while.

The cook appeared presently with a low reverence, and asked what we would like for dinner. He ran over the contents of the larder before we had time to answer his question, enumerating half a dozen kinds of game, and a variety altogether that rather surprised our ideas of monastical severity. His own rosy gills bore testimony that it was not the kitchen of Dennis Bulgruddery.

While dinner was preparing, Father Gasparo proposed a walk. An avenue of the most majestic trees opened immediately away from the little lawn before the cottage door. We followed it perhaps half a mile round the mountain, threading a thick pine forest, till we emerged on the edge of a shelf of greensward, running just under the summit of the hill. From this spot the view was limited only by the power of the eye. The silver line of the Mediterranean off Leghorn is seen hence on a clear day, between which and the mountain lie sixty or seventy miles, wound into the loveliest undulations by the course of the Arno. The vale of this beautiful river, in which Florence stands, was just distinguishable as a mere dell in the prospect. It was one of the sultriest days of August, but the air was vividly fresh, and the sun, with all the strength of the climate of Italy, was unoppressive. We seated ourselves on the small fine grass of the hillside, and with the good old monk narrating passages of his life, enjoyed the glorious scene till the cook's messenger summoned us back to dinner.

We were waited upon at table by two young servitors of the convent, with shaven crowns and long black cassocks, under the direction of Father Gasparo, who sat at a little distance, entertaining us with his inexhaustible stories till the bell rung for the convent supper. The dinner would have graced the table of an emperor. Soup, beef, cutlets, ducks, woodcocks, followed each other, cooked in the most approved manner, with all the accompaniments established by taste and usage; and better wine, white and red, never was pressed from the Tuscan grape. The dessert was various and plentiful; and while we were sitting, after the good father's departure, wondering at the luxuries we had found on a mountain-top, strong coffee and liqueurs were set before us, both of the finest flavor.

I was to sleep myself in the convent. Father Gasparo joined us upon the wooden bench in the avenue, where we were enjoying a brilliant sunset, and informed me that the gates shut at eight. The vesper-bell soon rung, echoing round from the rocks, and I bade my four companions good night, and followed the monk to the cloisters. As we entered the postern, he asked me whether I would go directly to the cell, or attend first the service in the chapel, assisting my decision at the same time by gently slipping his arm through mine and drawing me toward the cloth door, from which a strong peal of the organ was issuing.

We lifted the suspended curtain, and entered a chapel so dimly lit, that I could only judge of its extent from the reverberations of the music. The lamps were all in the choir, behind the altar, and the shuffling footsteps of the gathering monks approached it from every quarter. Father Gasparo led me to the base of a pillar, and telling me to kneel, left me and entered the choir, where he was lost in the depth of one of the old richly-carved seats for a few minutes, appearing again with thirty or forty others, who rose and joined in the chorus of the chant, making the hollow roof ring with the deep unmingled base of their voices.

I stood till I was chilled, listening to the service, and looking at the long line of monks rising and sitting, with their monotonous changes of books and positions, and not knowing which way to go for warmth or retirement. I wandered up and down the dim church during the remaining hour, an unwilling, but not altogether an unamused spectator of the scene. The performers of the service, with the exception of Father Gasparo, were young men from sixteen to twenty; but during my slow turns to and fro on the pavement of the church, fifteen or twenty old monks entered, and, with a bend of the knee before the altar went off into the obscure corners, and knelt motionless at prayer, for almost an hour. I could just distinguish the dark outline of their figures when my eye became accustomed to the imperfect light, and I never saw a finer spectacle of religious devotion.

The convent clock struck ten, and shutting up their "clasped missals," the young monks took their cloaks about them, bent their knees in passing the altar, and disappeared by different doors. Father Gasparo was the last to depart, and our footsteps echoed as we passed through the long cloisters to the cell appropriated for me. We opened one of some twenty small doors, and I was agreeably surprised to find a supper of cold game upon the table, with a bottle of wine, and two plates—the monk intending to give me his company at supper. The cell was hung round with bad engravings of the Virgin, the death of martyrs, crosses, &c., and a small oaken desk stood against the wall beneath a large crucifix, with a prayer-book upon it. The bed was high, ample, and spotlessly white, and relieved the otherwise comfortless look of a stone floor and white-washed walls. I felt the change from summer heat to the keen mountain air, and as I shivered and buttoned my coat, my gay guest threw over me his heavy black cowl of cloth—a dress that, with its closeness and numerous folds, would keep one warm in Siberia. Adding to it his little black scull-cap, he told me, with a hearty laugh, that but for a certain absence of sanctity in the expression of my face, and the uncanonical length of my hair, I looked the monk complete. We had a merry supper. The wine was of a choicer vintage than that we had drank at dinner, and the father answered, upon my discovery of its merits, that he never wasted it upon women.

In the course of the conversation, I found out that my entertainer was a kind of butler, or head-servitor of the convent, and that the great body of the monks were of noble lineage. The feeling of pride still remains among them from the days when the Certosa of Vallombrosa was a residence for princes, before its splendid pictures were pillaged by a foreign army, its wealth scattered, and its numbers diminished. "In those days," said the monk, "we received nothing for our hospitality but the pleasure it gave us"—relieving my mind, by the remark, of what I looked forward to at parting as a delicate point.

My host left me at midnight, and I went to bed, and slept under a thick covering in an Italian August. "The blanched linen, white and lavendered," seemed to have a peculiar charm, for though I had promised to meet my excluded companions at sunrise, on the top of the mountain, I slept soundly till nine, and was obliged to breakfast alone in the refectory of the convent.

We were to dine at three, and start for Florence at four the next day, and we spent our morning in traversing the mountain paths, and getting views on every side. Fifty or a hundred feet above the convent, perched on a rock like an eyry, stands a small building in which Milton is supposed to have lived, during his six weeks sojourn at the convent. It is now fitted up as a nest of small chapels—every one of its six or eight little chambers having an altar. The ladies were not permitted to enter it. I selected the room I presumed the poet must have chosen—the only one commanding the immense view to the west, and, looking from the window, could easily feel the truth of his simile, "thick as leaves in Vallombrosa." It is a mountain of foliage.

Another sumptuous dinner was served, Father Gasparo sitting by, even more voluble than before, the baskets and the pony were brought to the door, and we bade farewell to the old monk with more regret than a day's acquaintance often produces. We reached our carriage in an hour, and were in Florence at eight—having passed, by unanimous opinion, the two brightest days in our calendar of travel.

LETTER XLIX.

HOUSE OF MICHAEL ANGELO—THE ANCIENT CHURCH OF SAN MINIATO—MADAME CATALANI—WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR—MIDNIGHT MASS, ETC.

I went with a party this morning to visit the house of Michael Angelo. It stands as he lived in it, in the Via Ghibellini, and is still in possession of his descendants. It is a neat building of three stories, divided on the second floor into three rooms, shown as those occupied by the painter, sculptor, and poet. The first is panelled and painted by his scholars after his death—each picture representing some incident of his life. There are ten or twelve of these, and several of them are highly beautiful. One near the window represents him in his old age on a visit to "Lorenzo the Magnificent," who commands him to sit in his presence. The Duke is standing before his chair, and the figure of the old man is finely expressive.

The next room appears to have been his parlor, and the furniture is exactly as it stood when he died. In one corner is placed a bust of him in his youth, with his face perfect; and opposite, another, taken from a cast after his nose was broken by a fellow painter in the church of the Carmine. There are also one or two portraits of him, and the resemblance through them all, shows that the likeness we have of him in the engravings are uncommonly correct.

In the inner room, which was his studio, they show his pallet, brushes, pots, maul-sticks, slippers, and easel—all standing carelessly in the little closets around, as if he had left them but yesterday. The walls are painted in fresco, by Angelo himself, and represent groups of all the distinguished philosophers, poets and statesmen of his time. Among them are the heads of Petrarch, Dante, Galileo, and Lorenzo de Medici. It is a noble gallery! perhaps a hundred heads in all.

The descendant of Buonarotti is now an old man, and fortunately rich enough to preserve the house of his great ancestor as an object of curiosity. He has a son, I believe studying the arts at Rome.

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On a beautiful hill which ascends directly from one of the southern gates of Florence, stands a church built so long ago as at the close of the first century. The gate, church, and hill, are all called San Miniato, after a saint buried under the church pavement. A large, and at present flourishing convent, hangs on the side of the hill below, and around the church stand the walls of a strong fortress, built by Michael Angelo. A half mile or more south, across a valley, an old tower rises against the sky, which was erected for the observations of Galileo. A mile to the left, on the same ridge, an old villa is to be seen in which Boccaccio wrote most of his "Hundred Tales of Love." The Arno comes down from Vallombrosa, and passing through Florence at the foot of San Miniato, is seen for three miles further on its way to Pisa; the hill, tower, and convent of Fiesole, where Milton studied and Catiline encamped with his conspirators, rise from the opposite bank of the river; and right below, as if you could leap into the lantern of the dome, nestles the lovely city of Florence, in the lap of the very brightest vale that ever mountain sheltered or river ran through. Such are the temptations to a walk in Italy, and add to it the charms of the climate, and you may understand one of a hundred reasons why it is the land of poetry and romance, and why it so easily becomes the land of a stranger's affection.

The villas which sparkle all over the hills which lean unto Florence, are occupied mainly by foreigners living here for health or luxury, and most of them are known and visited by the floating society of the place. Among them are Madame Catalani, the celebrated singer, who occupies a beautiful palace on the ascent of Fiesole, and Walter Savage Landor, the author of the "Imaginary Conversations," as refined a scholar perhaps as is now living, who is her near neighbor. A pleasant family of my acquaintance lives just back of the fortress of San Miniato, and in walking out to them with a friend yesterday, I visited the church again, and remarked more particularly the features of the scene I have described.

The church of San Miniato was built by Henry I. of Germany, and Cunegonde his wife. The front is pretty—a kind of mixture of Greek and Arabic architecture, crusted with marble. The interior is in the style of the primitive churches, the altar standing in what was called the presbytery, a high platform occupying a third of the nave, with two splendid flights of stairs of the purest white marble. The most curious part of it is the rotunda in the rear, which is lit by five windows of transparent oriental alabaster, each eight or nine feet high and three broad, in single slabs. The sun shone full on one of them while we were there, and the effect was inconceivably rich. It was like a sheet of half molten gold and silver. The transparency of course was irregular, but in the yellow spots of the stone the light came through like the effect of deeply stained glass.

A partly subterranean chapel, six or eight feet lower than the pavement of the church, extends under the presbytery. It is a labyrinth of marble columns which support the platform above, no two of which are alike. The ancient cathedral of Modena is the only church I have seen in Italy built in the same manner.

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The midnight mass on "Christmas eve," is abused in all catholic countries, I believe, as a kind of saturnalia of gallantry. I joined a party of young men who were leaving a ball for the church of the Annunciata, the fashionable rendezvous, and we were set down at the portico when the mass was about half over. The entrances of the open vestibule were thronged to suffocation. People of all ages and conditions were crowding in and out, and the sound of the distant chant at the altar came to our ears as we entered, mingled with every tone of address and reply from the crowd about us. The body of the church was quite obscured with the smoke of the incense. We edged our way on through the press, carried about in the open area of the church by every tide that rushed in from the various doors, till we stopped in a thick eddy in the centre, almost unable to stir a limb. I could see the altar very clearly from this point, and I contented myself with merely observing what was about me, leaving my motions to the impulse of the crowd.

It was a curiously mingled scene. The ceremonies of the altar were going on in all their mysterious splendor. The waving of censers, the kneeling and rising of the gorgeously clad priests, accompanied simultaneously by the pealing of solemn music from the different organs—the countless lights burning upon the altar, and, ranged within the paling, a semicircle of the duke's grenadiers, standing motionless, with their arms presented, while the sentinel paced to and fro, and all kneeling, and grounding arms at the tinkle of the slight bell—were the materials for the back-ground of the picture. In the immense area of the church stood perhaps, four thousand people, one third of whom, doubtless, came to worship. Those who did and those who did not, dropped alike upon the marble pavement at the sound of the bell; and then, as I was heretic enough to stand, I had full opportunity for observing both devotion and intrigue. The latter was amusingly managed. Almost all the pretty and young women were accompanied by an ostensible duenna, and the methods of eluding their vigilance in communication were various. I had detected under a blond wig, in entering, the young ambassador of a foreign court, who being cavaliere servente to one of the most beautiful women in Florence, certainly had no right to the amusement of the hour. We had been carried up the church in the same tide, and when the whole crowd were prostrate, I found him just beyond me, slipping a card into the shoe of an uncommonly pretty girl kneeling before him. She was attended by both father and mother apparently, but as she gave no sign of surprise, except stealing an almost imperceptible glance behind her, I presumed she was not offended. I passed an hour, perhaps, in amused observation of similar matters, most of which could not be well described on paper. It is enough to say, that I do not think more dissolute circumstances accompanied the worship of Venus in the most defiled of heathen temples.

LETTER L.

FLORENCE—VISIT TO THE CHURCH OF SAN GAETANO—PENITENTIAL PROCESSIONS—THE REFUGEE CARLISTS—THE MIRACLE OF RAIN—CHURCH OF THE ANNUNCIATA—TOMB OF GIOVANNI DI BOLOGNA—MASTERPIECE OF ANDREA DEL SARTO, ETC., ETC.

I heard the best passage of the opera of "Romeo and Juliet" delightfully played in the church of San Gaetano this morning. I was coming from the cafÉ, where I had been breakfasting, when the sound of the organ drew me in. The communion was administering at one of the side chapels, the showy Sunday mass was going on at the great altar, and the numerous confession boxes were full of penitents, all female, as usual. As I took a seat near the communicants, the sacred wafer was dipped into the cup and put into the mouth of a young woman kneeling before the railing. She rose soon after, and I was not lightly surprised to find it was a certain errand-girl of a bachelor's washerwoman, as unfit a person for the holy sacrament as wears a petticoat in Florence.

I was drawn by the agreeable odor of the incense to the paling of the high altar. The censers were flung by unseen hands from the doors of the sacristy at the sides, and an unseen chorus of boys in the choir behind, broke in occasionally with the high-keyed chant that echoes with its wild melody from every arch and corner of these immense churches. It seems running upon the highest note that the ear can bear, and yet nothing could be more musical. A man knelt on the pavement near me, with two coarse baskets beside him, and the traces of long and dirty travel from his heels to his hips. He had stopped in to the mass, probably, on his way to market. There can be no greater contrast than that seen in Catholic churches, between the splendor of architecture, renowned pictures, statues and ornaments of silver and gold, and the crowd of tattered, famished, misery-marked worshippers that throng them. I wonder it never occurs to them, that the costly pavement upon which they kneel might feed and clothe them.[6]

Penitential processions are to be met all over Florence to-day, on account of the uncommon degree of sickness. One of them passed under my window just now. They are composed of people of all classes, upon whom it is inflicted as a penance by the priests. A white robe covers them entirely, even the face, and, with their eyes glaring through the two holes made for that purpose, they look like processions of shrouded corpses. Eight of the first carry burning candles of six feet in length, and a company in the rear have the church books, from which they chant, the whole procession joining in a melancholy chorus of three notes. It rains hard to-day, and their white dresses cling to them with a ludicrously ungraceful effect.

Florence is an unhealthful climate in the winter. The tramontane winds come down from the Appenines so sharply, that delicate constitutions, particularly those liable to pulmonary complaints, suffer invariably. There has been a dismal mortality among the Italians. The Marquis Corsi, who presented me at court a week ago (the last day he was out, and the last duty he performed), lies in state, at this moment, in the church of Santa Trinita, and another of the duke's counsellors of state died a few days before. His prime minister, Fossombroni, is dangerously ill also, and all of the same complaint, the mal di petto, as it is called, or disease of the lungs. Corsi is a great loss to Americans. He was the grand chamberlain of court, wealthy and hospitable, and took particular pride in fulfilling the functions of an American ambassador. He was a courtier of the old school, accomplished, elegant, and possessed of universal information.

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The refugee Carlists are celebrating to-day, in the church of Santa Maria Novella, the anniversary of the death of Louis XVI. The bishop of Strasbourg is here, and is performing high mass for the soul of the "martyr," as they term him. Italy is full of the more aristocratic families of France, and it has become mauvais ton in society to advocate the present government of France, or even its principles. They detest Louis Philippe with the virulence of a deadly private enmity, and declare universally, that they will exile themselves till they can return to overthrow him. Among the refugees are great numbers of young men, who are sent away from home with a chivalrous devotion to the cause of the Duchess of Berri, which they avow so constantly in the circles of Italian society, that she seems the exclusive heroine of the day. There was nothing seen of the French exquisites in Florence for a week after she was taken. They were in mourning for the misfortune of their mistress.

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All Florence is ringing with the miracle. The city fountains have for some days been dry, and the whole country was suffering for rain. The day before the moon changed, the procession began, and the day after, when the sky was full of clouds, the holy picture in the church of the Annunciata, "painted by St. Luke himself," was solemnly uncovered. The result was the present miracle of rain, and the priests are preaching upon it from every pulpit. The padrone of my lodgings came in this morning, and told me the circumstances with the most serious astonishment.

I joined the crowd this morning, who are still thronging up the via de Servi to the church of the Annunciata at all hours of the day. The square in front of the church was like a fair—every nook occupied with the little booths of the sellers of rosaries, saints books, and pictures. We were assailed by a troop of pedlars at the door, holding leaden medals and crucifixes, and crying, at the top of their voices, for fidele Christiani to spend a crazie for the love of God.

After crowding up the long cloister with a hundred or two of wretches, steaming from the rain, and fresh from every filthy occupation in the city, we were pushed under the suspended leather door, and reached the nave of the church. In the slow progress we made toward the altar, I had full opportunity to study the fretted-gold ceiling above me, the masterly pictures in the side chapels, the statuary, carving, and general architecture. Description can give you no idea of the waste of splendor in these places.

I stood at last within sight of the miraculous picture. It is painted in fresco, above an altar surrounded with a paling of bronze and marble projecting into the body of the church. Eight or ten massive silver lamps, each one presented by some trade in Florence, hung from the roof of the chapel, burning with a dusky glare in the daylight. A grenadier, with cap and musket, stood on each side of the bronze gate, repressing the eager rush of the crowd. Within, at the side of the altar, stood the officiating priest, a man with a look of intellect and nobleness on his fine features and lofty forehead, that seemed irreconcilable with the folly he was performing. The devotees came in, one by one, as they were admitted by the sentinel, knelt, offered their rosary to the priest, who touched it to the frame of the picture with one hand, and received their money with the other, and then crossing themselves, and pressing the beads to their bosom, passed out at the small door leading into the cloisters.

As the only chance of seeing the picture, I bought a rosary for two crazie (about three cents), and pressed into the throng. In a half hour it came to my turn to pass the guard. The priest took my silver paul, and while he touched the beads to the picture, I had a moment to look at it nearly. I could see nothing but a confused mass of black paint, with an indistinct outline of the head of the Madonna in the centre. The large spiked rays of glory standing out from every side were all I could see in the imperfect light. The richness of the chapel itself, however, was better worth the trouble to see. It is quite encrusted with silver. Silver bassi relievi, two silver candelabra, six feet in height, two very large silver statues of angels, a ciborio (enclosing a most exquisite head of our Saviour, by Andrea del Sarto), a massive silver cornice sustaining a heavily folded silver curtain, and silver lilies and lamps in any quantity all around. I wonder, after the plundering of the church of San Antonio, at Padua, that these useless riches escaped Napoleon.

How some of the priests, who are really learned and clever men, can lend themselves to such barefaced imposture as this miracle, it is difficult to conceive. The picture has been kept as a doer of these miracles, perhaps for a century. It is never uncovered in vain. Supernatural results are certain to follow, and it is done as often as they dare to make a fresh draught on the credulity and money of the people. The story is as follows: "A certain Bartolomeo, while painting a fresco of the annunciation, being at a loss how to make the countenance of the Madonna properly seraphic, fell asleep while pondering over his work; and, on waking, found it executed in a style he was unable to equal." I can only say that St. Luke, or the angel, or whoever did it, was a very indifferent draughtsman. It is ill drawn, and whatever the colors might have been upon the pallet of the sleepy painter, they were not made immortal by angelic use. It is a mass of confused black.

I was glad to get away from the crowd and their mummery, and pay a new tribute of reverence at the tomb of Giovanni di Bologna. He is buried behind the grand altar, in a chapel ornamented at his own expense, and with his own inimitable works. Six bas-reliefs in bronze, than which life itself is not more natural, represent different passages of our Saviour's history. They were done for the Grand Duke, who, at the death of the artist, liberally gave them to ornament his tomb. After the authors of the Venus and the Apollo Belvidere, John of Bologna is, in my judgment, the greatest of sculptors. His mounting Mercury, in the Florence gallery, might have been a theft from heaven for its divine beauty.

In passing out by the cloisters of the adjoining convent, I stopped a moment to see the fresco of the Madonna del Sacco, said to have been the masterpiece of Andrea del Sarto. Michael Angelo and Raphael are said to have "gazed at it unceasingly." It is much defaced, and preserves only its graceful drawing. The countenance of Mary has the beau reste of singular loveliness. The models of this delightful artist (who, by the way, is buried in the vestibule of this same church), must have been the most beautiful in the world. All his pictures move the heart.

LETTER LI.

FLORENTINE PECULIARITIES—SOCIETY—BALLS—DUCAL ENTERTAINMENTS—PRIVILEGE OF STRANGERS—FAMILIES OF HIGH RANK—THE EXCLUSIVES—SOIREES—PARTIES OF A RICH BANKER—PEASANT BEAUTY—VISITERS OF A BARONESS—AWKWARD DEPORTMENT OF A PRINCE—A CONTENTED MARRIED LADY—HUSBANDS, CAVALIERS, AND WIVES—PERSONAL MANNERS—HABITS OF SOCIETY, ETC.

I am about starting on my second visit to Rome, after having passed nearly three months in Florence. As I have seen most of the society of this gayest and fairest of the Italian cities, it may not be uninteresting to depart a little from the traveller's routine by sketching a feature or two.

Florence is a resort for strangers from every part of the world. The gay society is a mixture of all nations, of whom one third may be Florentine, one third English, and the remaining part equally divided between Russians, Germans, French, Poles, and Americans. The English entertain a great deal, and give most of the balls and dinner parties. The Florentines seldom trouble themselves to give parties, but are always at home for visits in the prima sera (from seven till nine), and in their box at the opera. They go, without scruple, to all the strangers' balls, considering courtesy repaid, perhaps, by the weekly reception of the Grand Duke, and a weekly ball at the club-house of young Italian noblemen.

The ducal entertainments occur every Tuesday, and are the most splendid of course. The foreign ministers present all of their countrymen who have been presented at their own courts, and the company is necessarily more select than elsewhere. The Florentines who go to court are about seven hundred, of whom half are invited on each week—strangers, when once presented, having the double privilege of coming uninvited to all. There are several Italian families, of the highest rank, who are seen only here; but, with the single exception of one unmarried girl, of uncommon beauty, who bears a name celebrated in Italian history, they are no loss to general society. Among the foreigners of rank, are three or four German princes, who play high and waltz well, and are remarkable for nothing else; half a dozen star-wearing dukes, counts, and marquises, of all nations and in any quantity, and a few English noblemen and noble ladies—only the latter nation showing their blood at all in their features and bearing.

The most exclusive society is that of the Prince Montfort (Jerome Bonaparte), whose splendid palace is shut entirely against the English, and difficult of access to all. He makes a single exception in favor of a descendant of the Talbots, a lady whose beauty might be an apology for a much graver departure from rule. He has given two grand entertainments since the carnival commenced, to which nothing was wanting but people to enjoy them. The immense rooms were flooded with light, the music was the best Florence could give, the supper might have supped an army—stars and red ribands entered with every fresh comer, but it looked like a "banquet hall deserted." Some thirty ladies, and as many men, were all that Florence contained worthy of the society of the Ex-King. A kinder man in his manners, however, or apparently a more affectionate husband and father, I never saw. He opened the dance by waltzing with the young Princess, his daughter, a lovely girl of fourteen, of whom he seems fond to excess, and he was quite the gayest person in the company till the ball was over. The Ex-Queen, who is a miracle of size, sat on a divan, with her ladies of honor about her, following her husband with her eyes, and enjoying his gayety with the most childish good humor.

The Saturday evening soirÉes, at Prince Poniatowski's (a brother of the hero), are perhaps as agreeable as any in Florence. He has several grown-up sons and daughters married, and, with a very sumptuous palace and great liberality of style, he has made his parties more than usually valued. His eldest daughter is the leader of the fashion, and his second is the "cynosure of all eyes." The old Prince is a tall, bent, venerable man, with snow-white hair, and very peculiarly marked features. He is fond of speaking English, and professes a great affection for America.

Then there are the soirÉes of the rich banker, Fenzi, which, as they are subservient to business, assemble all ranks on the common pretensions of interest. At the last, I saw, among other curiosities, a young girl of eighteen from one of the more common families of Florence—a fine specimen of the peasant beauty of Italy. Her heavily moulded figure, hands, and feet, were quite forgiven when you looked at her dark, deep, indolent eye, and glowing skin, and strongly-lined mouth and forehead. The society was evidently new to her, but she had a manner quite beyond being astonished. It was the kind of animal dignity so universal in the lower classes of this country.

A German baroness of high rank receives on the Mondays, and here one sees foreign society in its highest coloring. The prettiest woman that frequents her parties, is a Genoese marchioness, who has left her husband to live with a Lucchese count, who has left his wife. He is a very accomplished man, with the look of Mephistopheles in the "Devil's Walk," and she is certainly a most fascinating woman. She is received in most of the good society of Florence—a severe, though a very just comment on its character. A Prince, the brother of the King of ——, divided the attention of the company with her last Monday. He is a tall, military-looking man, with very bad manners, ill at ease, and impudent at the same time. He entered with his suite in the middle of a song. The singer stopped, the company rose, the Prince swept about, bowing like a dancing-master, and, after the sensation had subsided, the ladies were taken up and presented to him, one by one. He asked them all the same question, stayed through two songs, which he spoiled by talking loudly all the while, and then bowed himself out in the same awkward style, leaving everybody more happy for his departure.

One gains little by his opportunities of meeting Italian ladies in society. The cavaliere servente flourishes still as in the days of Beppo, and it is to him only that the lady condescends to talk. There is a delicate, refined-looking, little marchioness here, who is remarkable as being the only known Italian lady without a cavalier. They tell you, with an amused smile, "that she is content with her husband." It really seems to be a business of real love between the lady of Italy and her cavalier. Naturally enough too—for her parents marry her without consulting her at all, and she selects a friend afterward, as ladies in other countries select a lover who is to end in a husband. The married couple are never seen together by any accident, and the lady and her cavalier never apart. The latter is always invited with her as a matter of course, and the husband, if there is room, or if he is not forgotten. She is insulted if asked without a cavalier, but is quite indifferent whether her husband goes with her or not. These are points really settled in the policy of society, and the rights of the cavalier are specified in the marriage contracts. I had thought, until I came to Italy, that such things were either a romance, or customs of an age gone by.

I like very much the personal manners of the Italians. They are mild and courteous to the farthest extent of looks and words. They do not entertain, it is true, but their great dim rooms are free to you whenever you can find them at home, and you are at liberty to join the gossiping circle around the lady of the house, or sit at the table and read, or be silent unquestioned. You are let alone, if you seem to choose it, and it is neither commented on, nor thought uncivil, and this I take to be a grand excellence in manners.

The society is dissolute, I think, almost without an exception. The English fall into its habits, with the difference that they do not conceal it so well, and have the appearance of knowing its wrong—which the Italians have not. The latter are very much shocked at the want of propriety in the management of the English. To suffer the particulars of an intrigue to get about is a worse sin, in their eyes, than any violation of the commandments. It is scarce possible for an American to conceive the universal corruption of a society like this of Florence, though, if he were not told of it he would think it all that was delicate and attractive. There are external features in which the society of our own country is far less scrupulous and proper.

LETTER LII.

SIENNA—POGGIOBONSI—BONCONVENTO—ENCOURAGEMENT OF FRENCH ARTISTS BY THEIR GOVERNMENT—ACQUAPENDENTE—POOR BEGGAR, THE ORIGINAL OF A SKETCH BY COLE—BOLSENA—VOLSCENIUM—SCENERY—CURIOUS STATE OF THE CHESTNUT WOODS.

Sienna.—A day and a half on my second journey to Rome. With a party of four nations inside, and two strangers, probably Frenchmen, in the cabriolet, we have jogged on at some three miles in the hour, enjoying the lovely scenery of these lower Appenines at our leisure. We slept last night at Poggiobonsi, a little village on a hill-side, and arrived at Sienna for our mid-day rest. I pencil this note after an hour's ramble over the city, visiting once more the cathedral, with its encrusted marbles and naked graces, and the shell-shaped square in the centre of the city, at the rim of which the eight principal streets terminate. There is a fountain in the midst, surrounded with bassi relievi much disfigured. It was mentioned by Dante. The streets were deserted, it being Sunday, and all the people at the Corso, to see the racing of horses without riders.

Bonconvento.—We sit, with the remains of a traveller's supper on the table—six very social companions. Our cabriolet friends are two French artists, on their way to study at Rome. They are both pensioners of the government, each having gained the annual prize at the academy in his separate branch of art, which entitles him to five years' support in Italy. They are full of enthusiasm, and converse with all the amusing vivacity of their nation. The academy of France send out in this manner five young men annually, who have gained the prizes for painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and engraving.

This is the place where Henry the Seventh of Germany was poisoned by a monk, on his way to Rome. The drug was given to him in the communion cup. The "Ave Marie" was ringing when we drove into town, and I left the carriage and followed the crowd, in the hope of finding an old church where the crime might have been committed. But the priest was mumbling the service in a new chapel, which no romance that I could summon would picture as the scene of a tragedy.

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Acquapendente.—While the dirty customhouse officer is deciphering our passports, in a hole a dog would live in unwillingly, I take out my pencil to mark once more the pleasure I have received from the exquisite scenery of this place. The wild rocks enclosing the little narrow valley below, the waterfalls, the town on its airy perch above, the just starting vegetation of spring, the roads lined with snowdrops, crocuses and violets, have renewed, in a tenfold degree, the delight with which I saw this romantic spot on my former journey to Rome.

We crossed the mountain of Radicofani yesterday, in so thick a mist that I could not even distinguish the ruin of the old castle, towering into the clouds above. The wild, half-naked people thronged about us as before, and I gave another paul to the old beggar with whom I became acquainted by Mr. Cole's graphic sketch. The winter had, apparently, gone hard with him. He was scarce able to come to the carriage window, and coughed so hollowly that I thought he had nearly begged his last pittance.

Bolsena.—we walked in advance of the vetturino along the borders of this lovely and beautiful lake till we are tired. Our artists have taken off their coats with the heat, and sit, a quarter of a mile further on, pointing in every direction at these unparalleled views. The water is as still as a mirror, with a soft mist on its face, and the water-fowl in thousands are diving and floating within gunshot of us. An afternoon in June could not be more summer-like, and this, to a lover of soft climate, is no trifling pleasure.

A mile behind us lies the town, the seat of ancient Volscinium, the capital of the Volscians. The country about is one quarry of ruins, mouldering away in the moss. Nobody can live in health in the neighborhood, and the poor pale wretches who call it a home are in melancholy contrast to the smiling paradise about them. Before us, in the bosom of the lake, lie two green islands, those which Pliny records to have floated in his time and one of which, Martana, a small conical isle, was the scene of the murder of the queen of the Goths, by her cousin Theodatus. She was taken there and strangled. It is difficult to imagine, with such a sea of sunshine around and over it, that it was ever anything but a spot of delight.

The whole neighborhood is covered with rotten trunks of trees—a thing which at first surprised me in a country where wood is so economised. It is accounted for in the French guide-book of one of our party by the fact, that the chestnut woods of Bolsena are considered sacred by the people, from their antiquity, and are never cut. The trees have ripened and fallen and rotted thus for centuries—one cause, perhaps, of the deadly change in the air.

The vetturino comes lumbering up, and I must pocket my pencil and remount.

LETTER LIII.

MONTEFIASCONE—ANECDOTE OF THE WINE—VITERBO—MOUNT CIMINO—TRADITION—VIEW OF ST. PETER'S—ENTRANCE INTO ROME—A STRANGER'S IMPRESSIONS OF THE CITY.

Montefiascone.—We have stopped for the night at the hotel of this place, so renowned for its wine—the remnant of a bottle of which stands, at this moment, twinkling between me and my French companions. The ladies of our party have gone to bed, and left us in the room where sat Jean Defoucris, the merry German monk, who died of excess in drinking the same liquor that flashes through this straw-covered flask. The story is told more fully in the French guide-books. A prelate of Augsbourg, on a pilgrimage to Rome, sent forward his servant with orders to mark every tavern where the wine was good with the word est, in large letters of chalk. On arriving at this hotel, the monk saw the signal thrice written over the door—Est! Est! Est! He put up his mule, and drank of Montefiascone till he died. His servant wrote his epitaph, which is still seen in the church of St. Florian:—

"Est, Est, Est!" is the motto upon the sign of the hotel to this day.

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In wandering about Viterbo in search of amusement, while the horses were baiting, I stumbled upon the shop of an antiquary. After looking over his medals, Etruscan vases, cameos, &c., a very interesting collection, I inquired into the state of trade for such things in Viterbo. He was a cadaverous, melancholy looking old man, with his pockets worn quite out with the habit of thrusting his hands into them, and about his mouth and eye there was the proper virtuoso expression of inquisitiveness and discrimination. He kept also a small cafÉ adjoining his shop, into which we passed, as he shrugged his shoulders at my question. I had wondered to find a vender of costly curiosities in a town of such poverty, and I was not surprised at the sad fortunes which had followed upon his enterprise. They were a base herd, he said, of the people, utterly ignorant of the value of the precious objects he had for sale and he had been compelled to open a cafÉ, and degrade himself by waiting on them for a contemptible crazie worth of coffee, while his lovely antiquities lay unappreciated within. The old gentleman was eloquent upon his misfortunes. He had not been long in trade, and had collected his museum originally for his own amusement. He was an odd specimen, in a small way, of a man who was quite above his sphere, and suffered for his superiority. I bought a pretty intaglio, and bade him farewell, after an hour's acquaintance, with quite the feeling of a friend.

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Mount Cimino rose before us soon after leaving Viterbo, and we walked up most of the long and gentle ascent, inhaling the odor of the spicy plants for which it is famous, and looking out sharply for the brigands with which it is always infested. English carriages are constantly robbed on this part of the route of late. The robbers are met usually in parties of ten and twelve, and, a week before we passed, Lady Berwick (the widow of an English nobleman, and a sister of the famous Harriet Wilson) was stopped and plundered in broad mid-day. The excessive distress among the peasantry of these misgoverned States accounts for these things, and one only wonders why there is not even more robbing among such a starving population. This mountain, by the way, and the pretty lake below it, are spoken of in the Æneid: "Cimini cum monte locum," etc. There is an ancient tradition, that in the crescent-shaped valley which the lake fills, there was formerly a city, which was overwhelmed by the rise of the water, and certain authors state that when the lake is clear, the ruins are still to be seen at the bottom.

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The sun rose upon us as we reached the mountain above Baccano, on the sixth day of our journey, and, by its clear golden flood, we saw the dome of St. Peter's, at a distance of sixteen miles, towering amid the campagna in all its majestic beauty. We descended into the vast plain, and traversed its gentle undulations for two or three hours. With the forenoon well advanced, we turned into the valley of the Tiber, and saw the home of Raphael, a noble chateau on the side of a hill, near the river, and, in the little plain between, the first peach-trees we had seen, in full blossom. The tomb of Nero is on one side of the road, before crossing the Tiber, and on the other a newly painted and staring restaurant, where the modern Roman cockneys drive for punch and ices. The bridge of Pontemolle, by which we passed into the immediate suburb of Rome, was the ancient Pons Æmilius, and here Cicero arrested the conspirators on their way to join Catiline in his camp. It was on the same bridge, too, that Constantine saw his famous vision, and gained his victory over the tyrant Maxentius.

Two miles over the Via Flaminia, between garden walls that were ornamented with sculpture and inscription in the time of Augustus, brought us to the Porta del Popolo. The square within this noble gate is modern, but very imposing. Two streets diverge before you, as far away as you can see into the heart of the city, a magnificent fountain sends up its waters in the centre, the faÇades of two handsome churches face you as you enter, and on the right and left are gardens and palaces of princely splendor. Gay and sumptuous equipages cross it in every direction, driving out to the villa Borghese, and up to the Pincian mount, the splendid troops of the Pope are on guard, and the busy and stirring population of modern Rome swell out to its limit like the ebb and flow of the sea. All this disappoints while it impresses the stranger. He has come to Rome—but it was old Rome that he had pictured to his fancy. The Forum, the ruins of her temples, the palaces of her emperors, the homes of her orators, poets, and patriots, the majestic relics of the once mistress of the world, are the features in his anticipation. But he enters by a modern gate to a modern square, and pays his modern coin to a whiskered officer of customs; and in the place of a venerable Belisarius begging an obolus in classic Latin, he is beset by a troop of lusty and filthy lazzaroni entreating for a baioch in the name of the Madonna, and in effeminate Italian. He drives down the Corso, and reads nothing but French signs, and sees all the familiar wares of his own country exposed for sale, and every other person on the pave is an Englishman, with a narrow-rimmed hat and whalebone stick, and with an hour at the Dogama, where his baggage is turned inside out by a snuffy old man who speaks French, and a reception at a hotel where the porter addresses him in his own language, whatever it may be; he goes to bed under Parisian curtains, and tries to dream of the Rome he could not realize while awake.

LETTER LIV.

APPIAN WAY—TOMB OF CECILIA METELLA—ALBANO—TOMB OF THE CURIATII—ARICIA—TEMPLE OF DIANA—FOUNTAIN OF EGERIA—LAKE OF NEMI—VELLETRI—PONTINE MARSHES—CONVENT—CANAL—TERRACINA—SAN FELICE—FONDI—STORY OF JULIA GONZAGA—CICERO'S GARDEN AND TOMB—MOLA—MINTURNA—RUINS OF AN AMPHITHEATRE AND TEMPLE—FALERNIAN MOUNT AND WINE—THE DOCTOR OF ST. AGATHA—CAPUA—ENTRANCE INTO NAPLES—THE QUEEN.

With the intention of returning to Rome for the ceremonies of the holy week, I have merely passed through on my way to Naples. We left it the morning after our arrival, going by the "Appian way" to mount Albano, which borders the Campagna on the south, at a distance of fifteen miles. This celebrated road is lined with the ruined tombs of the Romans. Off at the right, some four or five miles from the city, rises the fortress-like tomb of Cecilia Metella, so exquisitely mused upon by Childe Harold. This, says Sismondi, with the tombs of Adrian and Augustus, became fortresses of banditti, in the thirteenth century, and were taken by Brancallone, the Bolognese governor of Rome, who hanged the marauders from the walls. It looks little like "a woman's grave."

We changed horses at the pretty village of Albano, and, on leaving it, passed an ancient mausoleum, believed to be the tomb of the Curiatii who fought the Horatii on this spot. It is a large structure, and had originally four pyramids on the corners, two of which only remain.

A mile from Albano lies Aricia, in a country of the loveliest rural beauty. Here was the famous temple of Diana, and here were the lake and grove sacred to the "virgin huntress," and consecrated as her home by peculiar worship. The fountain of Egeria is here, where Numa communed with the nymph, and the lake of Nemi, on the borders of which the temple stood, and which was called Diana's mirror (speculum DianÆ), is at this day, perhaps, one of the sweetest gems of natural scenery in the world.

We slept at Velletri, a pretty town of some twelve thousand inhabitants, which stands on a hill-side, leaning down to the Pontine marshes. It was one of the grand days of carnival, and the streets were full of masks, walking up and down in their ridiculous dresses, and committing every sort of foolery. The next morning, by daylight, we were upon the Pontine marshes, the long thirty miles level of which we passed in an unbroken trot, one part of a day's journey of seventy-five miles, done by the same horses, at the rate of six miles in the hour! They are small, compact animals, and look in good condition, though they do as much habitually.

At a distance of fifteen miles from Velletri, we passed a convent, which is built opposite the spot where St. Paul was met by his friends, on his journey from the seaside to Rome. The canal upon which Horace embarked on his celebrated journey to Brundusium, runs parallel with the road for its whole distance. This marshy desert is inhabited by a race of as wretched beings, perhaps, as are to be found upon the face of the earth. The pestiferous miasma of the pools is certain destruction to health, and the few who are needed at the distant post-houses, crawl out to the road-side like so many victims from a pest-house, stooping with weakness, hollow-eyed, and apparently insensible to everything. The feathered race seems exempt from its influence, and the quantities of game of every known description are incredible. The ground was alive with wild geese, turkeys, pigeons, plover, ducks, and numerous birds we did not know, as far as the eye could distinguish. The travelling books caution against sleeping in the carriage while passing these marshes, but we found it next to impossible to resist the heavy drowsiness of the air.

At Terracina the marshes end, and the long avenue of elms terminates at the foot of a romantic precipice, which is washed by the Mediterranean. The town is most picturesquely built between the rocky wall and the sea. We dined with the hollow murmur of the surf in our ears, and then, presenting our passports, entered the kingdom of Naples. This Terracina, by the way, was the ancient Anxur, which Horace describes in his line—

"Impositum late saxis candentibus Anxur."

For twenty or thirty miles before arriving at Terracina, we had seen before us the headland of Circoeum, lying like a mountain island off the shore. It is usually called San Felice, from the small town seated upon it. This was the ancient abode of the "daughter of the sun," and here were imprisoned, according to Homer, the champions of Ulysses, after their metamorphoses.

From Terracina to Fondi, we followed the old Appian way, a road hedged with flowering myrtles and orange trees laden with fruit. Fondi itself is dirtier than imagination could picture it, and the scowling men in the streets look like myrmidons of Fra Diavolo, their celebrated countryman. This town, however, was the scene of the romantic story of the beautiful Julia Gonzaga, and was destroyed by the corsair Barbarossa, who had intended to present the rarest beauty of Italy to the Sultan. It was to the rocky mountains above the town that she escaped in her night-dress, and lay concealed till the pirate's departure.

In leaving Fondi, we passed the ruined walls of a garden said to have belonged to Cicero, whose tomb is only three leagues distant. Night came on before we reached the tomb, and we were compelled to promise ourselves a pilgrimage to it on our return.

We slept at Mola, and here Cicero was assassinated. The ruins of his country-house are still here. The town lies in the lap of a graceful bay, and in all Italy, it is said, there is no spot more favored by nature. The mountains shelter it from the winds of the north; the soil produces, spontaneously, the orange, the myrtle, the olive, delicious grapes, jasmine, and many odoriferous herbs. This and its neighborhood was called, by the great orator and statesman who selected it for his retreat, "the most beautiful patrimony of the Romans." The Mediterranean spreads out from its bosom, the lovely islands near Naples bound its view, Vesuvius sends up its smoke and fire in the south, and back from its hills stretches a country fertile and beautiful as a paradise. This is a place of great resort for the English and other travellers in the summer. The old palaces are turned into hotels, and we entered our inn through an avenue of shrubs that must have been planted and trimmed for a century.

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We left Mola before dawn and crossed the small river Garigliano as the sun rose. A short distance from the southern bank, we found ourselves in the midst of ruins, the golden beams of the sun pouring upon us through the arches of some once magnificent structure, whose area is now crossed by the road. This was the ancient Minturna, and the ruins are those of an amphitheatre, and a temple of Venus. Some say that it was in the marshes about the now waste city, that the soldier sent by Sylla to kill Marius, found the old hero, and, struck with his noble mien, fell with respect at his feet.

The road soon enters a chain of hills, and the scenery becomes enchanting. At the left of the first ascent lies the Falernian mount, whose wines are immortalized by Horace. It is a beautiful hill, which throws round its shoulder to the south, and is covered with vineyards. I dismounted and walked on while the horses breathed at the post-house of St. Agatha, and was overtaken by a good-natured-looking man, mounted on a mule, of whom I made some inquiry respecting the modern Falernian. He said it was still the best wine of the neighborhood, but was far below its ancient reputation, because never kept long enough to ripen. It is at its prime from the fifteenth to the twentieth year, and is usually drank the first or second. My new acquaintance, I soon found, was the physician of the two or three small villages nested about among the hills and a man of some pretensions to learning. I was delighted with his frank good-humor, and a certain spice of drollery in his description of his patients. The peasants at work in the fields saluted him from any distance as he passed; and the pretty contadini going to St. Agatha with their baskets on their heads, smiled as he nodded, calling them all by name, and I was rather amused than offended with the inquisitiveness he manifested about my age, family, pursuits, and even morals. His mule stopped of its own will, at the door of the apothecary of the small village on the summit of the hill, and as the carriage came in sight the doctor invited me, seizing my hand with a look of friendly sincerity, to stop at St. Agatha on my return, to shoot, and drink Falernian with him for a month. The apothecary stopped the vetturino at the door; and, to the astonishment of my companions within, the doctor seized me in his arms and kissed me on both sides of my face with a volume of blessings and compliments, which I had no breath in my surprise to return. I have made many friends on the road in this country of quick feelings, but the doctor of St. Agatha had a readiness of sympathy which threw all my former experience into the shade.

We dined at Capua, the city whose luxuries enervated Hannibal and his soldiers—the "dives, amorosa, felix" Capua. It is in melancholy contrast with the description now—its streets filthy, and its people looking the antipodes of luxury. The climate should be the same, as we dined with open doors, and with the branch of an orange tree heavy with fruit hanging in at the window, in a month that with us is one of the wintriest.

From Capua to Naples, the distance is but fifteen miles, over a flat, uninteresting country. We entered "this third city in the world" in the middle of the afternoon, and were immediately surrounded with beggars of every conceivable degree of misery. We sat an hour at the gate while our passports were recorded, and the vetturino examined, and then passing up a noble street, entered a dense crowd, through which was creeping slowly a double line of carriages. The mounted dragoons compelled our postillion to fall into the line, and we were two hours following in a fashionable corso with our mud-spattered vehicle and tired horses, surrounded by all that was brilliant and gay in Naples. It was the last day of carnival. Everybody was abroad, and we were forced, however unwillingly to see all the rank and beauty of the city. The carriages in this fine climate are all open, and the ladies were in full dress. As we entered the Toledo, the cavalcade came to a halt, and with hats off and handkerchiefs flying in every direction about them, the young new-married Queen of Naples rode up the middle of the street preceded and followed by outriders in the gayest livery. She has been married about a month, is but seventeen, and is acknowledged to be the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. The description I had heard of her, though very extravagant, had hardly done her justice. She is a little above the middle height, with a fine lift to her head and neck, and a countenance only less modest and maidenly than noble.

LETTER LV.

ROME—FRONT OF ST. PETER'S—EQUIPAGES OF THE CARDINALS—BEGGARS—BODY OF THE CHURCH—TOMB OF ST. PETER—THE TIBER—FORTRESS-TOMB OF ADRIAN—JEWS' QUARTER—FORUM BARBERINI PALACE—PORTRAIT OF BEATRICE CENCI—HER MELANCHOLY HISTORY—PICTURE OF THE FORNARINA—LIKENESS OF GIORGIONE'S MISTRESS—JOSEPH AND POTIPHAR'S WIFE—THE PALACES DORIA AND SCIARRA—PORTRAIT OF OLIVIA WALDACHINI—OF "A CELEBRATED WIDOW"—OF SEMIRAMIS—CLAUDE'S LANDSCAPES—BRILL'S—BRUGHEL'S—NOTTI'S "WOMAN CATCHING FLEAS"—DA VINCI'S QUEEN GIOVANNA—PORTRAIT OF A FEMALE DORIA—PRINCE DORIA—PALACE SCIARRA—BRILL AND BOTH'S LANDSCAPES—CLAUDE'S—PICTURE OF NOAH INTOXICATED—ROMANA'S FORNARINA—DA VINCI'S TWO PICTURES.

Drawn in twenty different directions on starting from my lodgings this morning, I found myself, undecided where to pass my day, in front of St. Peter's. Some gorgeous ceremony was just over, and the sumptuous equipages of the cardinals, blazing in the sun with their mountings of gold and silver, were driving up and dashing away from the end of the long colonnades, producing any effect upon the mind rather than a devout one. I stood admiring their fiery horses and gay liveries, till the last rattled from the square, and then mounted to the deserted church. Its vast vestibule was filled with beggars, diseased in every conceivable manner, halting, groping, and crawling about in search of strangers of whom to implore charity—a contrast to the splendid pavement beneath and the gold and marble above and around, which would reconcile one to see the "mighty dome" melted into alms, and his holiness reduced to a plain chapel and a rusty cassock.

Lifting the curtain I stood in the body of the church. There were perhaps twenty persons, at different distances, on its immense floor, the farthest off (six hundred and fourteen feet from me!) looking like a pigmy in the far perspective. St. Peter's is less like a church than a collection of large churches enclosed under a gigantic roof. The chapels at the sides are larger than most houses of public worship in our country, and of these there may be eight or ten, not included in the effect of the vast interior. One is lost in it. It is a city of columns and sculpture and mosaic. Its walls are encrusted with precious stones and masterly workmanship to the very top, and its wealth may be conceived when you remember that, standing in the centre and raising your eyes aloft, there are four hundred and forty feet between you and the roof of the dome—the height, almost of a mountain.

I walked up toward the tomb of St. Peter, passing in my way a solitary worshipper here and there, upon his knees, and arrested constantly by the exquisite beauty of the statuary with which the columns are carved. Accustomed as we are in America, to churches filled with pews, it is hardly possible to imagine the noble effect of a vast mosaic floor, unencumbered even with a chair, and only broken by a few prostrate figures, just specking its wide area. All Catholic churches are without fixed seats, and St. Peter's seems scarce measurable to the eye, it is so far and clear, from one extremity to the other.

I passed the hundred lamps burning over the tomb of St. Peter, the lovely female statue (covered with a bronze drapery, because its exquisite beauty was thought dangerous to the morality of the young priests), reclining upon the tomb of Paul III., the ethereal figures of Canova's geniuses weeping at the door of the tomb of the Stuarts (where sleeps the pretender Charles Edward), the thousand thousand rich and beautiful monuments of art and taste crowding every corner of this wondrous church—I passed them, I say, with the same lost and unexamining, unparticularizing feeling which I cannot overcome in this place—a mind borne quite off its feet and confused and overwhelmed with the tide of astonishment—the one grand impression of the whole. I dare say, a little more familiarity with St. Peter's will do away the feeling, but I left the church, after two hours loitering in its aisles, despairing, and scarce wishing to examine or make a note.

Those beautiful fountains, moistening the air over the whole area of the column encircled front!—and that tall Egyptian pyramid, sending up its slender and perfect spire between! One lingers about, and turns again and again to gaze around him, as he leaves St. Peter's, in wonder and admiration.

I crossed the Tiber, at the fortress-tomb of Adrian, and thridding the long streets at the western end of Rome, passed through the Jews' quarter, and entered the Forum. The sun lay warm among the ruins of the great temples and columns of ancient Rome, and, seating myself on a fragment of an antique frieze, near the noble arch of Septimius Severus, I gazed on the scene, for the first time, by daylight. I had been in Rome, on my first visit, during the full moon, and my impressions of the Forum with this romantic enhancement were vivid in my memory. One would think it enough to be upon the spot at any time, with light to see it, but what with modern excavations, fresh banks of earth, carts, boys playing at marbles, and wooden sentry-boxes, and what with the Parisian promenade, made by the French through the centre, the imagination is too disturbed and hindered in daylight. The moon gives it all one covering of gray and silver. The old columns stand up in all their solitary majesty, wrecks of beauty and taste; silence leaves the fancy to find a voice for itself; and from the palaces of the Cesars to the prisons of the capitol, the whole train of emperors, senators, conspirators, and citizens, are summoned with but half a thought and the magic glass is filled with moving and re-animated Rome. There, beneath those walls, on the right, in the Mamertine prisons, perished Jugurtha (and there, too, were imprisoned St. Paul and St. Peter), and opposite, upon the Palatine-hill, lived the mighty masters of Rome, in the "palaces of the Cesars," and beneath the majestic arch beyond, were led, as a seal of their slavery, the captives from Jerusalem, and in these temples, whose ruins cast their shadows at my feet, walked and discoursed Cicero and the philosophers, Brutus and the patriots, Catiline and the conspirators, Augustus and the scholars and poets, and the great stranger in Rome, St. Paul, gazing at the false altars, and burning in his heart to reveal to them the "unknown God." What men have crossed the shadows of these very columns! and what thoughts, that have moved the world, have been born beneath them!

The Barberini palace contains three or four masterpieces of painting. The most celebrated is the portrait of Beatrice Cenci, by Guido. The melancholy and strange history of this beautiful girl has been told in a variety of ways, and is probably familiar to every reader. Guido saw her on her way to execution, and has painted her as she was dressed, in the gray habit and head-dress made by her own hands, and finished but an hour before she put it on. There are engravings and copies of the picture all over the world, but none that I have seen give any idea of the excessive gentleness and serenity of the countenance. The eyes retain traces of weeping, but the child-like mouth, the soft, girlish lines of features that look as if they never had worn more than the one expression of youthfulness and affection, are all in repose, and the head is turned over the shoulder with as simple a sweetness as if she had but looked back to say a good-night before going to her chamber to sleep. She little looks like what she was—one of the firmest and boldest spirits whose history is recorded. After murdering her father for his fiendish attempts upon her virtue, she endured every torture rather than disgrace her family by confession, and was only moved from her constancy, at last, by the agonies of her younger brother on the rack. Who would read capabilities like these, in these heavenly and child-like features?

I have tried to purchase the life of the Cenci, in vain. A bookseller told me to-day, that it was a forbidden book, on account of its reflections upon the pope. Immense interest was made for the poor girl, but, it is said, the papal treasury ran low, and if she was pardoned, the large possessions of the Cenci family could not have been confiscated.

The gallery contains also, a delicious picture of the Fornarina by Raphael himself, and a portrait of Giorgione's mistress, as a Carthaginian slave, the same head multiplied so often in his and Titian's pictures. The original of the admirable picture of Joseph and the wife of Potiphar, is also here. A copy of it is in the gallery of Florence.

I have passed a day between the two palaces Doria and Sciarra, nearly opposite each other in the Corso at Rome. The first is an immense gallery of perhaps a thousand pictures, distributed through seven large halls, and four galleries encircling the court. In the first four rooms I found nothing that struck me particularly. In the fifth was a portrait, by an unknown artist, of Olivia Waldachini, the favorite and sister-in-law of Pope Innocent X., a handsome woman, with that round fulness in the throat and neck, which (whether it existed in the originals, or is a part of a painter's ideal of a woman of pleasure), is universal in portraits of that character. In the same room was a portrait of a "celebrated widow," by Vandyck,[7] a had-been beautiful woman, in a staid cap (the hands wonderfully painted), and a large and rich picture of Semiramis, by one of the Carraccis.

In the galleries hung the landscapes by Claude, famous through the world. It is like roving through a paradise, to sit and look at them. His broad green lawns, his half-hidden temples, his life-like luxuriant trees, his fountains, his sunny streams—all flush into the eye like the bright opening of a Utopia, or some dream over a description from Boccaccio. It is what Italy might be in a golden age—her ruins rebuilt into the transparent air, her woods unprofaned, her people pastoral and refined, and every valley a landscape of Arcadia. I can conceive no higher pleasure for the imagination than to see a Claude in travelling through Italy. It is finding a home for one's more visionary fancies—those children of moonshine that one begets in a colder clime, but scarce dares acknowledge till he has seen them under a more congenial sky. More plainly, one does not know whether his abstract imaginations of pastoral life and scenery are not ridiculous and unreal, till he has seen one of these landscapes, and felt steeped, if I may use such a word, in the very loveliness which inspired the pencil of the painter. There he finds the pastures, the groves, the fairy structures, the clear waters, the straying groups, the whole delicious scenery, as bright as in his dreams, and he feels as if he should bless the artist for the liberty to acknowledge freely to himself the possibility of so beautiful a world.

We went on through the long galleries, going back again and again to see the Claudes. In the third division of the gallery were one or two small and bright landscapes, by Brill, that would have enchanted us if seen elsewhere; and four strange pictures, by Breughel, representing the four elements, by a kind of half-poetical, half-supernatural landscapes, one of which had a very lovely view of a distant village. Then there was the famous picture of the "woman catching fleas" by Gherardodelle Notti, a perfect piece of life. She stands close to a lamp, with a vessel of hot water before her, and is just closing her thumb and finger over a flea, which she has detected on the bosom of her dress. Some eight or ten are boiling already in the water, and the expression upon the girl's face is that of the most grave and unconscious interest in her employment. Next to this amusing picture hangs a portrait of Queen Giovanna, of Naples, by Leonardo da Vinci, a copy of which I had seen, much prized, in the possession of the archbishop of Torento. It scarce looks like the talented and ambitious queen she was, but it does full justice to her passion for amorous intrigue—a face full of the woman.

The last picture we came to, was one not even mentioned in the catalogue, an old portrait of one of the females of the Doria family. It was a girl of eighteen, with a kind of face that in life must have been extremely fascinating. While we were looking at it, we heard a kind of gibbering laugh from the outer apartment, and an old man in a cardinal's dress, dwarfish in size, and with deformed and almost useless legs, came shuffling into the gallery, supported by two priests. His features were imbecility itself, rendered almost horrible by the contrast of the cardinal's red cap. The custode took off his hat and bowed low, and the old man gave us a half-bow and a long laugh in passing, and disappeared at the end of the gallery. This was the Prince Doria, the owner of the palace, and a cardinal of Rome! the sole remaining representative of one of the most powerful and ambitious families of Italy! There could not be a more affecting type of the great "mistress of the world" herself. Her very children have dwindled into idiots.

We crossed the Corso to the Palace Sciarra. The collection here is small, but choice. Half a dozen small but exquisite landscapes, by Brill and Both, grace the second room. Here are also three small Claudes, very, very beautiful. In the next room is a finely-colored but most indecent picture of Noah intoxicated, by Andrea Sacchi, and a portrait by Giulio Romano, of Raphael's celebrated Fornarina, to whose lovely face one becomes so accustomed in Italy, that it seems like that of an acquaintance.

In the last room are two of the most celebrated pictures in Rome. The first is by Leonardo da Vinci, and represents Vanity and Modesty, by two females standing together in conversation—one a handsome, gay, volatile looking creature, covered with ornaments, and listening unwillingly to what seems a lecture from the other, upon her foibles. The face of the other is a heavenly conception of woman—earnest, delicate, and lovely—the idea one forms to himself, before intercourse with the world, gives him a distaste for its purity. The moral lesson of the picture is more forcible than language. The painter deserved to have died, as he did, in the arms of an emperor.

The other picture represents two gamblers cheating a youth, a very striking picture of nature. It is common from the engravings. On the opposite side of the room, is a very expressive picture, by Schidone. On the ruins of an old tomb stands a skull, beneath which is written—"I, too, was of Arcadia;" and, at a little distance, gazing at it in attitudes of earnest reflection, stand two shepherds, struck simultaneously with the moral. It is a poetical thought, and wrought out with great truth and skill.

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Our eyes aching and our attention exhausted with pictures, we drove from the Sciarra to the ruined palaces of the Cesars. Here, on an eminence above the Tiber, with the Forum beneath us on one side, the Coliseum on the other, and all the towers and spires of modern and Catholic Rome arising on her many hills beyond, we seated ourselves on fragments of marble, half buried in the grass, and mused away the hours till sunset. On this spot Romulus founded Rome. The princely Augustus, in the last days of her glory, laid here the foundations of his imperial palace, which, continued by Caligula and Tiberius, and completed by Domitian, covered the hill, like a small city. It was a labyrinth of temples, baths, pavilions, fountains, and gardens, with a large theatre at the western extremity; and adjoining the temple of Apollo, was a library filled with the best authors, and ornamented with a colossal bronze statue of Apollo, "of excellent Etruscan workmanship." "Statues of the fifty daughters of Danaus Siuramdert surrounded the portico" (of this same temple), "and opposite them were equestrian statues of their husbands." About a hundred years ago, accident discovered, in the gardens buried in rubbish, a magnificent hall, two hundred feet in length and one hundred and thirty-two in breadth, supposed to have been built by Domitian. It was richly ornamented with statues, and columns of precious marbles, and near it were baths in excellent preservation. "But," says Stark, "immense and superb as was this first-built palace of the Cesars, Nero, whose extravagance and passion for architecture knew no limits, thought it much too small for him, and extended its edifices and gardens from the Palatine to the Esquiline. After the destruction of the whole, by fire, sixty-five years after Christ, he added to it his celebrated 'Golden House,' which extended from one extremity to the other of the Coelian Hill."[8]

The ancient walls, which made the whole of the Mount Palatine a fortress, still hold together its earth and its ruins. It is a broad tabular eminence, worn into footpaths which wind at every moment around broken shafts of marble, fragments of statuary, or broken and ivy-covered fountains. Part of it is cultivated as a vineyard, by the degenerate modern Romans, and the baths, into which the water still pours from aqueducts encrusted with aged stalactites are public washing-places for the contadini, eight or ten of whom were splashing away in their red jackets, with gold bodkins in their hair, while we were moralizing on their worthier progenitors of eighteen centuries ago. It is a beautiful spot of itself, and with the delicious soft sunshine of an Italian spring, the tall green grass beneath our feet, and an air as soft as June just stirring the myrtles and jasmines, growing wild wherever the ruins gave them place, our enjoyment of the overpowering associations of the spot was ample and untroubled. I could wish every refined spirit in the world had shared our pleasant hour upon the Palatine.

ANNUAL DOWRIES TO TWELVE GIRLS—VESPERS IN THE CONVENT OF SANTA TRINITA—RUINS OF ROMAN BATHS—A MAGNIFICENT MODERN CHURCH WITHIN TWO ANCIENT HALLS—GARDENS OF MECÆNAS—TOWER WHENCE NERO SAW ROME ON FIRE—HOUSES OF HORACE AND VIRGIL—BATHS OF TITUS AND CARACALLA.

The yearly ceremony of giving dowries to twelve girls, was performed by the Pope, this morning, in the church built over the ancient temple of Minerva. His Holiness arrived, in state, from the Vatican, at ten, followed by his red troop of cardinals, and preceded by a clerical courier, on a palfrey, and the body-guard of nobles. He blessed the crowd, right and left, with his three fingers (precisely as a Parisian dandy salutes his friend across the street), and, descending from his carriage (which is like a good-sized glass boudoir upon wheels), he was received in the papal sedan, and carried into the church by his Swiss bearers. My legation button carried me through the guard, and I found an excellent place under a cardinal's wing, in the penetralia within the railing of the altar. Mass commenced presently, with a chant from the celebrated choir of St. Peter's. Room was then made through the crowd, the cardinals put on their red caps, and the small procession of twelve young girls entered from a side chapel, bearing each a taper in her hand, and robed to the eyes in white, with a chaplet of flowers round the forehead. I could form no judgment of anything but their eyes and feet. A Roman eye could not be otherwise than fine, and a Roman woman's foot could scarce be other than ugly, and, consequently, there was but one satin slipper in the group that a man might not have worn, and every eye I could see from my position, might have graced an improvisatrice. They stopped in front of the throne, and, giving their long tapers to the servitors, mounted in couples, hand in hand, and kissed the foot of his Holiness, who, at the same time, leaned over and blessed them, and then turning about, walked off again behind the altar in the same order in which they had entered.

The choir now struck up their half-unearthly chant (a music so strangely shrill and clear, that I scarce know whether the sensation is pleasure or pain), the Pope was led from his throne to his sedan, and his mitre changed for a richly jewelled crown, the bearers lifted their burden, the guard presented arms, the cardinals summoned their officious servants to unrobe, and the crowd poured out as it came.

This ceremony, I found upon inquiry, is performed every year, on the day of the annunciation—just nine months before Christmas, and is intended to commemorate the incarnation of our Saviour.

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As I was returning from a twilight stroll upon the Pincian hill this evening, the bells of the convent of Santa Trinita rung to vespers. I had heard of the singing of the nuns in the service at the convent chapel, but the misbehavior of a party of English had excluded foreigners, of late, and it was thought impossible to get admittance. I mounted the steps, however, and rung at the door. It was opened by a pale nun, of thirty, who hesitated a moment, and let me pass. In a small, plain chapel within, the service of the altar was just commencing, and, before I reached a seat, a low plaintive chant commenced, in female voices from the choir. It went on with occasional interruptions from the prayers, for perhaps an hour. I can not describe the excessive mournfulness of the music. One or two familiar hymns occurred in the course of it, like airs in a recitative, the same sung in our churches, but the effect was totally different. The neat, white caps of the nuns were just visible over the railing before the organ, and, as I looked up at them and listened to their melancholy notes, they seemed, to me, mourning over their exclusion from the world. The small white cloud from the censer mounted to the ceiling, and creeping away through the arches, hung over the organ till it was lost to the eye in the dimness of the twilight. It was easy, under the influence of their delightful music, to imagine within it the wings of that tranquilizing resignation, one would think so necessary to keep down the heart in these lonely cloisters.

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The most considerable ruins of ancient Rome are those of the Baths. The Emperors Titus, Caracalla, Nero, and Agrippa, constructed these immense places of luxury, and the remains of them are among the most interesting and beautiful relics to be found in the world. It is possible that my readers have as imperfect an idea of the extent of a Roman bath as I have had, and I may as well quote from the information given by writers on antiquities. "They were open every day, to both sexes. In each of the great baths, there were sixteen hundred seats of marble, for the convenience of the bathers, and three thousand two hundred persons could bathe at the same time. There were splendid porticoes in front for promenade, arcades with shops, in which was found every kind of luxury for the bath, and halls for corporeal exercises, and for the discussion of philosophy; and here the poets read their productions and rhetoricians harangued, and sculptors and painters exhibited their works to the public. The baths were distributed into grand halls, with ceilings enormously high and painted with admirable frescoes, supported on columns of the rarest marble, and the basins were of oriental alabaster, porphyry, and jasper. There were in the centre vast reservoirs, for the swimmers, and crowds of slaves to attend gratuitously upon all who should come."

The baths of Diocletian (which I visited to-day), covered an enormous space. They occupied seven years in building, and were the work of forty thousand Christian slaves, two thirds of whom died of fatigue and misery! Mounting one of the seven hills of Rome, we come to some half-ruined arches, of enormous size, extending a long distance, in the sides of which were built two modern churches. One was the work of Michael Angelo, and one of his happiest efforts. He has turned two of the ancient halls into a magnificent church, in the shape of a Greek cross, leaving in their places eight gigantic columns of granite. After St. Peter's it is the most imposing church in Rome.

We drove thence to the baths of Titus, passing the site of the ancient gardens of MecÆnas, in which still stands the tower from which Nero beheld the conflagration of Rome. The houses of Horace and Virgil communicated with this garden, but they are now undistinguishable. We turned up from the Coliseum to the left, and entered a gate leading to the baths of Titus. Five or six immense arches presented their front to us, in a state of picturesque ruin. We took a guide, and a long pole, with a lamp at the extremity, and descended to the subterranean halls, to see the still inimitable frescoes upon the ceilings. Passing through vast apartments, to the ruined walls of which still clung, here and there, pieces of the finely-colored stucco of the ancients, we entered a suite of long galleries, some forty feet high, the arched roofs of which were painted with the most exquisite art, in a kind of fanciful border-work, enclosing figures and landscapes, in as bright colors as if done yesterday. Farther on was the niche in which was found the famous group of Laocoon, in a room belonging to a subterranean palace of the emperor, communicating with the baths. The Belvedere Meleager was also found here. The imagination loses itself in attempting to conceive the splendor of these under-ground palaces, blazing with artificial light, ornamented with works of art, never equalled, and furnished with all the luxury which an emperor of Rome, in the days when the wealth of the world flowed into her treasury, could command for his pleasure. How short life must have seemed to them, and what a tenfold curse became death and the common ills of existence, interrupting or taking away pleasures so varied and inexhaustible.

These baths were built in the last great days of Rome, and one reads the last stages of national corruption and, perhaps, the secret of her fall, in the character of these ornamented walls. They breathe the very spirit of voluptuousness. Naked female figures fill every plafond, and fauns and satyrs, with the most licentious passions in their faces, support the festoons and hold together the intricate ornament of the frescoes. The statues, the pictures, the object of the place itself, inspired the wish for indulgence, and the history of the private lives of the emperors and wealthier Romans shows the effect in its deepest colors.

We went on to the baths of Caracalla, the largest ruins of Rome. They are just below the palaces of the Cesars, and ten minutes' walk from the Coliseum. It is one labyrinth of gigantic arches and ruined halls, the ivy growing and clinging wherever it can fasten its root, and the whole as fine a picture of decay as imagination could create. This was the favorite haunt of Shelley, and here he wrote his fine tragedy of Prometheus. He could not have selected a more fitting spot for solitary thought. A herd of goats were climbing over one of the walls, and the idle boy who tended them lay asleep in the sun, and every footstep echoed loud through the place. We passed two or three hours rambling about, and regained the populous streets of Rome in the last light of the sunset.

LETTER LVII.

SUMMER WEATHER IN MARCH—BATHS OF CARACALLA—BEGINNING OF THE APPIAN WAY—TOMB OF THE SCIPIOS—CATACOMBS—CHURCH OF SAN SEBASTIANO—YOUNG CAPUCHIN FRIAR—TOMBS OF THE EARLY CHRISTIAN MARTYRS—CHAMBER WHERE THE APOSTLES WORSHIPPED—TOMB OF CECILIA METELLA—THE CAMPAGNA—CIRCUS OF CARACALLA OR ROMULUS—TEMPLE DEDICATED TO RIDICULE—KEATS'S GRAVE—FOUNTAIN OF EGERIA—THE WOOD WHERE NUMA MET THE NYMPH—HOLY WEEK.

The last days of March have come, clothed in sunshine and summer. The grass is tall in the Campagna, the fruit-trees are in blossom, the roses and myrtles are in full flower, the shrubs are in full leaf, the whole country about breathes of June. We left Rome this morning on an excursion to the "Fountain of Egeria." A more heavenly day never broke. The gigantic baths of Caracalla turned us aside once more, and we stopped for an hour in the shade of their romantic arches, admiring the works, while we execrated the character of their ferocious builder.

This is the beginning of the ancient Appian Way, and, a little farther on, sunk in the side of a hill near the road, is the beautiful doric tomb of the Scipios. We alighted at the antique gate, a kind of portico, with seats of stone beneath, and reading the inscription, "Sepulchro degli Scipioni" mounted by ruined steps to the tomb. A boy came out from the house, in the vineyard above, with candles, to show us the interior, but, having no curiosity to see the damp cave from which the sarcophagi have been removed (to the museum), we sat down upon a bank of grass opposite the chaste faÇade, and recalled to memory the early-learnt history of the family once entombed within. The edifice (for it is more like a temple to a river-nymph or a dryad than a tomb) was built by an ancestor of the great Scipio Africanus, and here was deposited the noble dust of his children. One feels, in these places, as if the improvisatore's inspiration was about him—the fancy draws, in such vivid colors, the scenes that have passed where he is standing. The bringing of the dead body of the conqueror of Africa from Rome, the passing of the funeral train beneath the portico, the noble mourners, the crowd of people, the eulogy of perhaps some poet or orator, whose name has descended to us—the air seems to speak, and the gray stones of the monument against which the mourners of the Scipios have leaned, seem to have had life and thought, like the ashes they have sheltered.

We drove on to the Catacombs. Here, the legend says, St. Sebastian was martyred and the modern church of St. Sebastiano stands over the spot. We entered the church, where we found a very handsome young capuchin friar, with his brown cowl and the white cord about his waist, who offered to conduct us to the catacombs. He took three wax-lights from the sacristy, and we entered a side door, behind the tomb of the saint, and commenced a descent of a long flight of stone steps. We reached the bottom and found ourselves upon damp ground, following a narrow passage, so low that I was compelled constantly to stoop, in the sides of which were numerous small niches of the size of a human body. These were the tombs of the early Christian martyrs. We saw near a hundred of them. They were brought from Rome, the scene of their sufferings, and buried in these secret catacombs by the small church of, perhaps, the immediate converts of St. Paul and the apostles. What food for thought is here, for one who finds more interest in the humble traces of the personal followers of Christ, who knew his face and had heard his voice, to all the splendid ruins of the works of the persecuting emperors of his time! Most of the bones have been taken from their places, and are preserved at the museum, or enclosed in the rich sarcophagi raised to the memory of the martyrs in the Catholic churches. Of those that are left we saw one. The niche was closed by a thin slab of marble, through a crack of which the monk put his slender candle. We saw the skeleton as it had fallen from the flesh in decay, untouched, perhaps, since the time of Christ.

We crossed through several cross-passages, and came to a small chamber, excavated simply in the earth, with an earthern altar, and an antique marble cross above. This was the scene of the forbidden worship of the early Christians, and before this very cross, which was, perhaps, then newly selected as the emblem of their faith, met the few dismayed followers of Christ, hidden from their persecutors, while they breathed their forbidden prayers to their lately crucified Master.

We reascended to the light of day by the rough stone steps, worn deep by the feet of those who, for ages, for so many different reasons, have passed up and down; and, taking leave of our capuchin conductor, drove on to the next object upon the road—the tomb of Cecilia Metella. It stands upon a slight elevation, in the Appian Way, a "stern round tower," with the ivy dropping over its turrets and waving from the embrasures, looking more like a castle than a tomb. Here was buried "the wealthiest Roman's wife," or, according to Corinne, his unmarried daughter. It was turned into a fortress by the marauding nobles of the thirteenth century, who sallied from this and the tomb of Adrian, plundering the ill-defended subjects of Pope Innocent IV. till they were taken and hanged from the walls by Brancaleone, the Roman senator. It is built with prodigious strength. We stooped in passing under the low archway, and emerged into the round chamber within, a lofty room, open to the sky, in the circular wall of which there is a niche for a single body. Nothing could exceed the delicacy and fancy with which Childe Harold muses on this spot.

The lofty turrets command a wide view of the Campagna, the long aqueducts stretching past at a short distance, and forming a chain of noble arches from Rome to the mountains of Albano. Cole's picture of the Roman Campagna, as seen from one of these elevations, is, I think, one of the finest landscapes ever painted.

Just below the tomb of Metella, in a flat valley, lie the extensive ruins of what is called the "circus of Caracalla" by some, and the "circus of Romulus" by others—a scarcely distinguishable heap of walls and marble, half buried in the earth and moss; and not far off stands a beautiful ruin of a small temple dedicated (as some say) to Ridicule. One smiles to look at it. If the embodying of that which is powerful, however, should make a deity, the dedication of a temple to ridicule is far from amiss. In our age particularly, one would think, the lamp should be relit, and the reviewers should repair the temple. Poor Keats sleeps in his grave scarce a mile from the spot, a human victim sacrificed, not long ago, upon its highest altar.

In the same valley almost hidden with the luxuriant ivy waving before the entrance, flows the lovely Fountain of Egeria, trickling as clear and musical into its pebbly bed as when visited by the enamored successor of Romulus twenty-five centuries ago! The hill above leans upon the single arch of the small temple which embosoms it, and the green soft meadow spreads away from the floor, with the brightest verdure conceivable. We wound around by a half-worn path in descending the hill, and, putting aside the long branches of ivy, entered an antique chamber, sprinkled with quivering spots of sunshine, at the extremity of which, upon a kind of altar, lay the broken and defaced statue of the nymph. The fountain poured from beneath in two streams as clear as crystal. In the sides of the temple were six empty niches, through one of which stole, from a cleft in the wall, a little stream, which wandered from its way. Flowers, pale with growing in the shade, sprang from the edges of the rivulet as it found its way out, the small creepers, dripping with moisture, hung out from between the diamond-shaped stones of the roof, the air was refreshingly cool, and the leafy door at the entrance, seen against the sky, looked of a transparent green, as vivid as emerald. No fancy could create a sweeter spot. The fountain and the inspiration it breathed into Childe Harold are worthy of each other.

Just above the fountain, on the crest of a hill, stands a thick grove, supposed to occupy the place of the consecrated wood, in which Numa met the nymph. It is dark with shadow, and full of birds, and might afford a fitting retreat for meditation to another king and lawgiver. The fields about it are so thickly studded with flowers, that you cannot step without crushing them, and the whole neighborhood seems a favorite of nature. The rich banker, Torlonia, has bought this and several other classic spots about Rome—possessions for which he is more to be envied than for his purchased dukedom.

All the travelling world assembles at Rome for the ceremonies of the holy week. Naples, Florence, and Pisa, send their hundreds of annual visitors, and the hotels and palaces are crowded with strangers of every nation and rank. It would be difficult to imagine a gayer or busier place than this usually sombre city has become within a few days.

LETTER LVIII.

PALM SUNDAY—SISTINE CHAPEL—ENTRANCE OF THE POPE—THE CHOIR—THE POPE ON HIS THRONE—PRESENTING THE PALMS—PROCESSION—BISHOP ENGLAND'S LECTURE—HOLY TUESDAY—THE MISERERE—ACCIDENTS IN THE CROWD—TENEBRÆ—THE EMBLEMATIC CANDLES—HOLY THURSDAY—FRESCOES OF MICHAEL ANGELO—"CREATION OF EVE"—"LOT INTOXICATED"—DELPHIC SYBIL—POPE WASHING PILGRIMS' FEET—STRIKING RESEMBLANCE OF ONE TO JUDAS—POPE AND CARDINALS WAITING UPON PILGRIMS AT DINNER.

Palm Sunday opens the ceremonies. We drove to the Vatican this morning, at nine, and, after waiting a half hour in the crush, kept back, at the point of the spear, by the Pope's Swiss guard, I succeeded in getting an entrance into the Sistine chapel. Leaving the ladies of the party behind the grate, I passed two more guards, and obtained a seat among the cowled and bearded dignitaries of the church and state within, where I could observe the ceremony with ease.

The Pope entered, borne in his gilded chair by twelve men, and, at the same moment, the chanting from the Sistine choir commenced with one long, piercing note, by a single voice, producing the most impressive effect. He mounted his throne as high as the altar opposite him, and the cardinals went through their obeisances, one by one, their trains supported by their servants, who knelt on the lower steps behind them. The palms stood in a tall heap beside the altar. They were beautifully woven in wands of perhaps six feet in length, with a cross at the top. The cardinal nearest the papal chair mounted first, and a palm was handed him. He laid it across the knees of the Pope, and, as his holiness signed the cross upon it, he stooped, and kissed the embroidered cross upon his foot, then kissed the palm, and taking it in his two hands, descended with it to his seat. The other forty or fifty cardinals did the same, until each was provided with a palm. Some twenty other persons, monks of apparent clerical rank of every order, military men, and members of the Catholic embassies, followed and took palms. A procession was then formed, the cardinals going first with their palms held before them, and the Pope following, in his chair, with a small frame of palmwork in his hands, in which was woven the initial of the Virgin. They passed out of the Sistine chapel, the choir chanting most delightfully, and, having made a tour around the vestibule, returned in the same order.

The ceremony is intended to represent the entrance of the Saviour into Jerusalem. Bishop England, of Charleston, South Carolina, delivered a lecture at the house of the English cardinal Weld, a day or two ago, explanatory of the ceremonies of the Holy week. It was principally an apology for them. He confessed that, to the educated, they appeared empty, and even absurd rites, but they were intended not for the refined, but the vulgar, whom it was necessary to instruct and impress through their outward senses. As nearly all these rites, however, take place in the Sistine chapel, which no person is permitted to enter who is not furnished with a ticket, and in full dress, his argument rather fell to the ground.

With all the vast crowd of strangers in Rome, I went to the Sistine chapel on Holy Tuesday, to hear the far-famed Miserere. It is sung several times during the holy week, by the Pope's choir, and has been described by travellers, of all nations, in the most rapturous terms. The vestibule was a scene of shocking confusion, for an hour, a constant struggle going on between the crowd and the Swiss guard, amounting occasionally to a fight, in which ladies fainted, children screamed, men swore, and, unless by force of contrast, the minds of the audience seemed likely to be little in tune for the music. The chamberlains at last arrived, and two thousand people attempted to get into a small chapel which scarce holds four hundred. Coat-skirts, torn cassocks, hats, gloves, and fragments of ladies' dresses, were thrown up by the suffocating throng, and, in the midst of a confusion beyond description, the mournful notes of the tenebrÆ (or lamentations of Jeremiah) poured in full volume from the choir. Thirteen candles burned in a small pyramid within the paling of the altar, and twelve of these, representing the apostles, were extinguished, one by one (to signify their desertion at the cross), during the singing of the tenebrÆ. The last, which was left burning, represented the mother of Christ. As the last before this was extinguished, the music ceased. The crowd had, by this time, become quiet. The twilight had deepened through the dimly-lit chapel, and the one solitary lamp looked lost at the distance of the altar. Suddenly the miserÉre commenced with one high prolonged note, that sounded like a wail; another joined it, and another and another, and all the different parts came in, with a gradual swell of plaintive and most thrilling harmony, to the full power of the choir. It continued for perhaps half an hour. The music was simple, running upon a few notes, like a dirge, but there were voices in the choir that seemed of a really supernatural sweetness. No instrument could be so clear. The crowd, even in their uncomfortable positions, were breathless with attention, and the effect was universal. It is really extraordinary music, and if but half the rites of the Catholic church had its power over the mind, a visit to Rome would have quite another influence.

The candles were lit, and the motley troop of cardinals and red-legged servitors passed out. The harlequin-looking Swiss guard stood to their tall halberds, the chamberlains and mace-bearers, in their cassock and frills, took care that the males and females should not mix until they reached the door, the Pope disappeared in the sacristy, and the gay world, kept an hour beyond their time, went home to cold dinners.

---

The ceremonies of Holy Thursday commenced with the mass in the Sistine chapel. Tired of seeing genuflections, and listening to a mumbling of which I could not catch a syllable, I took advantage of my privileged seat, in the Ambassador's box, to lean back and study the celebrated frescoes of Michael Angelo upon the ceiling. A little drapery would do no harm to any of them. They illustrate, mainly, passages of scripture history, but the "creation of Eve," in the centre, is an astonishingly fine representation of a naked man and woman, as large as life; and "Lot intoxicated and exposed before his two daughters," is about as immodest a picture, from its admirable expression as well as its nudity, as could easily be drawn. In one corner there is a most beautiful draped figure of the Delphic Sybil—and I think this bit of heathenism is almost the only very decent part of the Pope's most consecrated chapel.

After the mass, the host was carried, with a showy procession, to be deposited among the thousand lamps in the Capella Paolina, and, as soon as it had passed, there was a general rush for the room in which the Pope was to wash the feet of the pilgrims.

Thirteen men, dressed in white, with sandals open at the top, and caps of paper covered with white linen, sat on a high bench, just under a beautiful copy of the last supper of Da Vinci, in gobelin tapestry. It was a small chapel, communicating with the Pope's private apartments. Eleven of the pilgrims were as vulgar and brutal-looking men as could have been found in the world; but of the two in the centre, one was the personification of wild fanaticism. He was pale, emaciated, and abstracted. His hair and beard were neglected, and of a singular blackness. His lips were firmly set in an expression of severity. His brows were gathered gloomily over his eyes, and his glances, occasionally sent among the crowd, were as glaring and flashing as a tiger's. With all this, his countenance was lofty, and if I had seen the face on canvas, as a portrait of a martyr, I should have thought it finely expressive of courage and devotion. The man on his left wept, or pretended to weep, continually; but every person in the room was struck with his extraordinary resemblance to Judas, as he is drawn in the famous picture of the Last Supper. It was the same marked face, the same treacherous, ruffian look, the same style of hair and beard, to a wonder. It is possible that he might have been chosen on purpose, the twelve pilgrims being intended to represent the twelve apostles of whom Judas was one—but if accidental, it was the most remarkable coincidence that ever came under my notice. He looked the hypocrite and traitor complete, and his resemblance to the Judas in the picture directly over his head, would have struck a child.

The Pope soon entered from his apartments, in a purple stole, with a cape of dark crimson satin, and the mitre of silver-cloth, and, casting the incense into the golden censer, the white smoke was flung from side to side before him, till the delightful odor filled the room. A short service was then chanted, and the choir sang a hymn. His Holiness was then unrobed, and a fine napkin, trimmed with lace, was tied about him by the servitors, and with a deacon before him, bearing a splendid pitcher and basin, and a procession behind him, with large bunches of flowers, he crossed to the pilgrims' bench. A priest, in a snow-white tunic, raised and bared the foot of the first. The Pope knelt, took water in his hand, and slightly rubbed the instep, and then drying it well with a napkin, he kissed it.

The assistant-deacon gave a large bunch of flowers and a napkin to the pilgrim, as the Pope left him, and another person in rich garments, followed, with pieces of money presented in a wrapper of white paper. The same ceremony took place with each—one foot only being honored with a lavation. When his Holiness arrived at the "Judas," there was a general stir, and every one was on tip-toe to watch his countenance. He took his handkerchief from his eyes, and looked at the Pope very earnestly, and when the ceremony was finished, he seized the sacred hand, and, imprinting a kiss upon it, flung himself back, and buried his face again in his handkerchief, quite overwhelmed with his feelings. The other pilgrims took it very coolly, comparatively, and one of them seemed rather amused than edified. The Pope returned to his throne, and water was poured over his hands. A cardinal gave him a napkin, his splendid cape was put again over his shoulders, and, with a paternoster the ceremony was over.

Half an hour after, with much crowding and several losses of foothold and temper, I had secured a place in the hall where the apostles, as the pilgrims are called after the washing, were to dine, waited on by the Pope and cardinals. With their gloomy faces and ghastly white caps and white dresses, they looked more like criminals waiting for execution, than guests at a feast. They stood while the Pope went round with a gold pitcher and basin, to wash their hands, and then seating themselves, his Holiness, with a good-natured smile, gave each a dish of soup, and said something in his ear, which had the effect of putting him at his ease. The table was magnificently set out with the plate and provisions of a prince's table, and spite of the thousands of eyes gazing on them, the pilgrims were soon deep in the delicacies of every dish, even the lachrymose Judas himself, eating most voraciously. We left them at their dessert.

LETTER LIX.

SEPULCHRE OF CAIUS CESTIUS—PROTESTANT BURYING GROUND—GRAVES OF KEATS AND SHELLEY—SHELLEY'S LAMENT OVER KEATS—GRAVES OF TWO AMERICANS—BEAUTY OF THE BURIAL PLACE—MONUMENTS OVER TWO INTERESTING YOUNG FEMALES—INSCRIPTION ON KEATS' MONUMENT—THE STYLE OF KEATS' POEMS—GRAVE OF DR. BELL—RESIDENCE AND LITERARY UNDERTAKINGS OF HIS WIDOW.

A beautiful pyramid, a hundred and thirteen feet high, built into the ancient wall of Rome, is the proud Sepulchre of Caius Cestius. It is the most imperishable of the antiquities, standing as perfect after eighteen hundred years as if it were built but yesterday. Just beyond it, on the declivity of a hill, over the ridge of which the wall passes, crowning it with two mouldering towers, lies the Protestant burying-ground. It looks toward Rome, which appears in the distance, between Mount Aventine and a small hill called Mont Testaccio, and leaning to the southeast, the sun lies warm and soft upon its banks, and the grass and wild flowers are there the earliest and tallest of the Campagna. I have been here to-day, to see the graves of Keats and Shelley. With a cloudless sky and the most delicious air ever breathed, we sat down upon the marble slab laid over the ashes of poor Shelley, and read his own lament over Keats, who sleeps just below, at the foot of the hill. The cemetery is rudely formed into three terraces, with walks between, and Shelley's grave and one other, without a name, occupy a small nook above, made by the projections of a mouldering wall-tower, and crowded with ivy and shrubs, and a peculiarly fragrant yellow flower, which perfumes the air around for several feet. The avenue by which you ascend from the gate is lined with high bushes of the marsh-rose in the most luxuriant bloom, and all over the cemetery the grass is thickly mingled with flowers of every die. In his preface to his lament over Keats, Shelley says, "he was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of the Protestants, under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome." It is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. "It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place." If Shelley had chosen his own grave at the time, he would have selected the very spot where he has since been laid—the most sequestered and flowery nook of the place he describes so feelingly. In the last verses of the elegy, he speaks of it again with the same feeling of its beauty:—

Shelley has left no poet behind, who could write so touchingly of his burial-place in turn. He was, indeed, as they have graven on his tombstone, "cor cordium"—the heart of hearts. Dreadfully mistaken as he was in his principles, he was no less the soul of genius than the model of a true heart and of pure intentions. Let who will cast reproach upon his memory, I believe, for one, that his errors were of the kind most venial in the eye of Heaven, and I read, almost like a prophesy, the last lines of his elegy on one he believed had gone before him to a happier world:

On the second terrace of the declivity, are ten or twelve graves, two of which bear the names of Americans who have died in Rome. A portrait carved in bas-relief, upon one of the slabs, told me, without the inscription, that one whom I had known was buried beneath.[9] The slightly rising mound was covered with small violets, half hidden by the grass. It takes away from the pain with which one stands over the grave of an acquaintance or a friend, to see the sun lying so warm upon it, and the flowers springing so profusely and cheerfully. Nature seems to have cared for those who have died so far from home, binding the earth gently over them with grass, and decking it with the most delicate flowers.

A little to the left, on the same bank, is the new-made grave of a very young man, Mr. Elliot. He came abroad for health, and died at Rome, scarce two months since. Without being disgusted with life, one feels, in a place like this, a certain reconciliation, if I may so express it, with the thought of a burial—an almost willingness, if his bed could be laid amid such loveliness, to be brought and left here to his repose. Purely imaginary as any difference in this circumstance is, it must, at least, always affect the sick powerfully; and with the common practice of sending the dying to Italy, as a last hope, I consider the exquisite beauty of this place of burial, as more than a common accident of happiness.

Farther on, upon the same terrace, are two monuments that interested me. One marks the grave of a young English girl,[10] the pride of a noble family, and, as a sculptor told me, who had often seen and admired her, a model of high-born beauty. She was riding with a party on the banks of the Tiber, when her horse became unmanageable, and backed into the river. She sank instantly, and was swept so rapidly away by the current, that her body was not found for many months. Her tombstone is adorned with a bas-relief, representing an angel receiving her from the waves.

The other is the grave of a young lady of twenty, who was at the baths of Lucca, last summer, in pursuit of health. She died at the first approach of winter. I had the melancholy pleasure of knowing her slightly, and we used to meet her in the winding path upon the bank of the romantic river Lima, at evening, borne in a sedan, with her mother and sister walking at her side, the fairest victim consumption ever seized. She had all the peculiar beauty of the disease, the transparent complexion, and the unnaturally bright eye, added to features cast in the clearest and softest mould of female loveliness. She excited general interest even among the gay and dissipated crowd of a watering place; and if her sedan was missed in the evening promenade, the inquiry for her was anxious and universal. She is buried in a place that seems made for such as herself.

We descended to the lower enclosure at the foot of the slight declivity. The first grave here is that of Keats. The inscription on his monument runs thus: "This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who, on his death-bed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be engraved on his tomb: HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRITTEN IN WATER." He died at Rome in 1821. Every reader knows his history and the cause of his death. Shelley says, in the preface to his elegy, "The savage criticism on his poems, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in a rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgments, from more candid critics, of the true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted." Keats was, no doubt, a poet of very uncommon promise. He had all the wealth of genius within him, but he had not learned, before he was killed by criticism, the received, and, therefore, the best manner of producing it for the eye of the world. Had he lived longer, the strength and richness which break continually through the affected style of Endymion and Lamia and his other poems, must have formed themselves into some noble monuments of his powers. As it is, there is not a poet living who could surpass the material of his "Endymion"—a poem, with all its faults, far more full of beauties. But this is not the place for criticism. He is buried fitly for a poet, and sleeps beyond criticism now. Peace to his ashes!

Close to the grave of Keats is that of Dr. Bell, the author of "Observations on Italy." This estimable man, whose comments on the fine arts are, perhaps, as judicious and high-toned as any ever written, has left behind him, in Naples (where he practised his profession for some years), a host of friends, who remember and speak of him as few are remembered and spoken of in this changing and crowded portion of the world. His widow, who edited his works so ably and judiciously, lives still at Naples, and is preparing just now a new edition of his book on Italy. Having known her, and having heard from her own lips many particulars of his life, I felt an additional interest in visiting his grave. Both his monument and Keats's are almost buried in the tall flowering clover of this beautiful place.

LETTER LX.

PRESENTATION AT THE PAPAL COURT—PILGRIMS GOING TO VESPERS—PERFORMANCE OF THE MISERERE—TARPEIAN ROCK—THE FORUM—PALACE OF THE CESARS—COLISEUM.

I have been presented to the Pope this morning, in company with several Americans—Mr. and Mrs. Gray, of Boston, Mr. Atherton and daughters, and Mr. Walsh of Philadelphia, and Mr. Mayer of Baltimore. With the latter gentleman, I arrived rather late, and found that the rest of the party had been already received, and that his Holiness was giving audience, at the moment, to some Russian ladies of rank. Bishop England, of Charleston, however, was good enough to send in once more, and, in the course of a few minutes, the chamberlain in waiting announced to us that Il Padre Santo would receive us. The ante-room was a picturesque and rather peculiar scene. Clusters of priests, of different rank, were scattered about in the corners, dressed in a variety of splendid costumes, white, crimson, and ermine, one or two monks, with their picturesque beards and flowing dresses of gray or brown, were standing near one of the doors, in their habitually humble attitudes; two gentlemen mace-bearers guarded the door of the entrance to the Pope's presence, their silver batons under their arms, and their open breasted cassocks covered with fine lace; the deep bend of the window was occupied by the American party of ladies, in the required black veils; and around the outer door stood the helmeted guard, a dozen stout men-at-arms, forming a forcible contrast to the mild faces and priestly company within.

The mace-bearers lifted the curtain, and the Pope stood before us, in a small plain room. The Irish priest who accompanied us prostrated himself on the floor, and kissed the embroidered slipper, and Bishop England hastily knelt and kissed his hand, turning to present us as he rose. His Holiness smiled, and stepped forward, with a gesture of his hand, as if to prevent our kneeling, and, as the bishop mentioned our names, he looked at us and nodded smilingly, but without speaking to us. Whether he presumed we did not speak the language, or whether he thought us too young to answer for ourselves, he confined his inquiries about us entirely to the good bishop, leaving me, as I wished, at leisure to study his features and manner. It was easy to conceive that the father of the Catholic church stood before me, but I could scarcely realize that it was a sovereign of Europe, and the temporal monarch of millions. He was dressed in a long vesture of snow-white flannel, buttoned together in front, with a large crimson velvet cape over his shoulders, and band and tassels of silver cloth hanging from beneath. A small white scull-cap covered the crown of his head, and his hair, slightly grizzled, fell straight toward a low forehead, expressive of good-nature merely. A large emerald on his finger, and slippers wrought in gold, with a cross on the instep, completed his dress. His face is heavily moulded, but unmarked, and expressive mainly of sloth and kindness; his nose is uncommonly large, rather pendant than prominent, and an incipient double chin, slightly hanging cheeks, and eyes, over which the lids drop, as if in sleep, at the end of every sentence, confirm the general impression of his presence—that of an indolent and good old man. His inquiries were principally of the Catholic church in Baltimore (mentioned by the bishop as the city of Mr. Mayer's residence), of its processions, its degree of state, and whether it was recognised by the government. At the first pause in the conversation, his Holiness smiled and bowed, the Irish priest prostrated himself again, and kissed his foot, and, with a blessing from the father of the church, we retired.

On the evening of holy Thursday, as I was on my way to St. Peter's to hear the miserere once more, I overtook the procession of pilgrims going up to vespers. The men went first in couples, following a cross, and escorted by gentlemen penitents covered conveniently with sackcloth, their eyes peeping through two holes, and their well-polished boots beneath, being the only indications by which their penance could be betrayed to the world. The pilgrims themselves, perhaps a hundred in all, were the dirtiest collection of beggars imaginable, distinguished from the lazars in the street, only by a long staff with a faded bunch of flowers attached to it, and an oil-cloth cape stitched over with scallop-shells. Behind came the female pilgrims, and these were led by the first ladies of rank in Rome. It was really curious to see the mixture of humility and pride. There were, perhaps, fifty ladies of all ages, from sixteen to fifty, walking each between two filthy old women who supported themselves by her arms, while near them, on either side of the procession, followed their splendid equipages, with numerous servants, in livery, on foot, as if to contradict to the world their temporary degradation. The lady penitents, unlike the gentlemen, walked in their ordinary dress. I had several acquaintances among them; and it was inconceivable, to me, how the gay, thoughtless, fashionable creatures I had met in the most luxurious drawing-rooms of Rome, could be prevailed upon to become a part in such a ridiculous parade of humility. The chief penitent, who carried a large, heavy crucifix at the head of the procession, was the Princess ——, at whose weekly soirees and balls assemble all that is gay and pleasure-loving in Rome. Her two nieces, elegant girls of eighteen or twenty, walked at her side, carrying lighted candles, of four or five feet in length, in broad day-light, through the streets!

The procession crept slowly up to the church, and I left them kneeling at the tomb of St. Peter, and went to the side chapel, to listen to the miserere. The choir here is said to be inferior to that in the Sistine chapel, but the circumstances more than make up for the difference, which, after all, it takes a nice ear to detect. I could not but congratulate myself, as I sat down upon the base of a pillar, in the vast aisle, without the chapel where the choir were chanting, with the twilight gathering in the lofty arches, and the candles of the various processions creeping to the consecrated sepulchre from the distant parts of the church. It was so different in that crowded and suffocating chapel of the Vatican, where, fine as was the music, I vowed positively never to subject myself to such annoyance again.

It had become almost dark, when the last candle but one was extinguished in the symbolical pyramid, and the first almost painful note of the miserere wailed out into the vast church of St. Peter. For the next half hour, the kneeling listeners, around the door of the chapel, seemed spell-bound in their motionless attitudes. The darkness thickened, the hundred lamps at the far-off sepulchre of the saint, looked like a galaxy of twinkling points of fire, almost lost in the distance; and from the now perfectly obscured choir, poured, in ever-varying volume, the dirge-like music, in notes inconceivably plaintive and affecting. The power, the mingled mournfulness and sweetness, the impassioned fulness, at one moment, and the lost, shrieking wildness of one solitary voice, at another, carry away the soul like a whirlwind. I have never been so moved by anything. It is not in the scope of language to convey an idea to another of the effect of the miserere.

It was not till several minutes after the music had ceased, that the dark figures rose up from the floor about me. As we approached the door of the church, the full moon, about three hours risen, poured broadly under the arch of the portico, inundating the whole front of the lofty dome with a flood of light, such as falls only on Italy. There seemed to be no atmosphere between. Daylight is scarce more intense. The immense square, with its slender obelisk and embracing crescents of colonnade, lay spread out as definitely to the eye as at noon, and the two famous fountains shot up their clear waters to the sky, the moonlight streamed through the spray, and every drop as visible and bright as a diamond.

I got out of the press of carriages, and took a by-street along the Tiber, to the Coliseum. Passing the Jews' quarter, which shuts at dark by heavy gates, I found myself near the Tarpeian rock, and entered the Forum, behind the ruins of the temple of Fortune. I walked toward the palace of the Cesars, stopping to gaze on the columns, whose shadows have fallen on the same spot, where I now saw them, for sixteen or seventeen centuries. It checks the blood at one's heart, to stand on the spot and remember it. There was not the sound of a footstep through the whole wilderness of the Forum. I traversed it to the arch of Titus in a silence, which, with the majestic ruins around, seemed almost supernatural—the mind was left so absolutely to the powerful associations of the place.

Ten minutes more brought me to the Coliseum. Its gigantic walls, arches on arches, almost to the very clouds, lay half in shadow, half in light, the ivy hung trembling in the night air, from between the cracks of the ruin, and it looked like some mighty wreck in a desert. I entered, and a hundred voices announced to me the presence of half the fashion of Rome. I had forgotten that it was the mode "to go to the Coliseum by moonlight." Here they were dancing and laughing about the arena where thousands of Christians had been torn by wild beasts, for the amusement of the emperors of Rome; where gladiators had fought and died; where the sands beneath their feet were more eloquent of blood than any other spot on the face of the earth—and one sweet voice proposed a dance, and another wished she could have music and supper, and the solemn old arches re-echoed with shouts and laughter. The travestie of the thing was amusing. I mingled in the crowd, and found acquaintances of every nation, and an hour I had devoted to romantic solitude and thought passed away, perhaps, quite as agreeably, in the nonsense of the most thoughtless triflers in society.

LETTER LXI.

VIGILS OVER THE HOST—CEREMONIES OF EASTER SUNDAY—THE PROCESSION—HIGH MASS—THE POPE BLESSING THE PEOPLE—CURIOUS ILLUMINATION—RETURN TO FLORENCE—RURAL FESTA—HOSPITALITY OF THE FLORENTINES—EXPECTED MARRIAGE OF THE GRAND DUKE.

Rome, 1833.—This is Friday of the holy week. The host, which was deposited yesterday amid its thousand lamps in the Paoline chapel, was taken from its place this morning, in solemn procession, and carried back to the Sistine, after lying in the consecrated place twenty-four hours. Vigils were kept over it all night. The Paoline chapel has no windows, and the lights are so disposed as to multiply its receding arches till the eye is lost in them. The altar on which the host lay was piled up to the roof in a pyramid of light, and with the prostrate figures constantly covering the floor, and the motionless soldier in antique armor at the entrance, it was like some scene of wild romance.

The ceremonies of Easter Sunday were performed where all others should have been—in the body of St. Peter's. Two lines of soldiers, forming an aisle up the centre, stretched from the square without the portico to the sacred sepulchre. Two temporary platforms for the various diplomatic corps and other privileged persons occupied the sides, and the remainder of the church was filled by thousands of strangers, Roman peasantry, and contadini (in picturesque red boddices, and with golden bodkins through their hair), from all the neighboring towns.

A loud blast of trumpets, followed by military music, announced the coming of the procession. The two long lines of soldiers presented arms, and the esquires of the Pope entered first, in red robes, followed by the long train of proctors, chamberlains, mitre-bearers, and incense-bearers, the men-at-arms, escorting the procession on either side. Just before the cardinals, came a cross-bearer, supported on either side by men in showy surplices carrying lights, and then came the long and brilliant line of white-headed cardinals, in scarlet and ermine. The military dignitaries of the monarch preceded the Pope, a splendid mass of uniforms, and his Holiness then appeared, supported, in his great gold and velvet chair, upon the shoulders of twelve men, clothed in red damask, with a canopy over his head, sustained by eight gentlemen, in short, violet-colored silk mantles. Six of the Swiss guard (representing the six Catholic canons) walked near the Pope, with drawn swords on their shoulders, and after his chair followed a troop of civil officers, whose appointments I did not think it worth while to enquire. The procession stopped when the Pope was opposite the "chapel of the holy sacrament," and his Holiness descended. The tiara was lifted from his head by a cardinal, and he knelt upon a cushion of velvet and gold to adore the "sacred host," which was exposed upon the altar. After a few minutes he returned to his chair, his tiara was again set on his head, and the music rang out anew, while the procession swept on to the sepulchre.

The spectacle was all splendor. The clear space through the vast area of the church, lined with glittering soldiery, the dazzling gold and crimson of the coming procession, the high papal chair, with the immense fan-banners of peacock's feathers, held aloft, the almost immeasurable dome and mighty pillars, above and around, and the multitudes of silent people, produced a scene which, connected with the idea of religious worship, and added to by the swell of a hundred instruments of music, quite dazzled and overpowered me.

The high mass (performed but three times a year) proceeded. At the latter part of it, the Pope mounted to the altar, and, after various ceremonies, elevated the sacred host. At the instant that the small white wafer was seen between the golden candlesticks, the two immense lines of soldiers dropped upon their knees, and all the people prostrated themselves at the same instant.

This fine scene over, we hurried to the square in front of the church, to secure places for a still finer one—that of the Pope blessing the people. Several thousand troops, cavalry and footmen, were drawn up between the steps and the obelisk, in the centre of the piazza, and the immense area embraced by the two circling colonnades was crowded by, perhaps, a hundred thousand people, with eyes directed to one single point. The variety of bright costumes, the gay liveries of the ambassadors' and cardinals' carriages, the vast body of soldiery, and the magnificent frame of columns and fountains in which this gorgeous picture was contained, formed the grandest scene conceivable.

In a few minutes the Pope appeared in the balcony, over the great door of St. Peter's. Every hat in the vast multitude was lifted and every knee bowed in an instant. Half a nation prostrate together, and one gray old man lifting up his hands to heaven and blessing them!

The cannon of the castle of St. Angelo thundered, the innumerable bells of Rome pealed forth simultaneously, the troops fell into line and motion, and the children of the two hundred and fifty-seventh successor of St. Peter departed blessed.

In the evening all the world assembled to see the illumination, which it is useless to attempt to describe.

The night was cloudy and black, and every line in the architecture of the largest building in the world was defined in light, even to the cross, which, as I have said before, is at the height of a mountain from the base. For about an hour it was a delicate but vast structure of shining lines, like a drawing of a glorious temple on the clouds. At eight, as the clock struck, flakes of fire burst from every point, and the whole building seemed started into flame. It was done by a simultaneous kindling of torches in a thousand points, a man stationed at each. The glare seemed to exceed that of noonday. No description can give an idea of it.

I am not sure that I have not been a little tedious in describing the ceremonies of the holy week. Forsyth says in his bilious book, that he "never could read, and certainly never could write, a description of them." They have struck me, however, as particularly unlike anything ever seen in our own country, and I have endeavored to draw them slightly and with as little particularity as possible. I trust that some of the readers of the Mirror may find them entertaining and novel.

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Florence, 1833.—I found myself at six this morning, where I had found myself at the same hour a year before—in the midst of the rural festa in the Cascine of Florence. The Duke, to-day, breakfasts at his farm. The people of Florence, high and low, come out, and spread their repasts upon the fine sward of the openings in the wood, the roads are watered, and the royal equipages dash backward and forward, while the ladies hang their shawls in the trees, and children and lovers stroll away into the shade, and all looks like a scene from Boccaccio.

I thought it a picturesque and beautiful sight last year, and so described it. But I was a stranger then, newly arrived in Florence, and felt desolate amid the happiness of so many. A few months among so frank and warm-hearted a people as the Tuscans, however, makes one at home. The tradesman and his wife, familiar with your face, and happy to be seen in their holyday dresses, give you the "buon giorno" as you pass, and a cup of red wine or a seat at the cloth on the grass is at your service in almost any group in the prato. I am sure I should not find so many acquaintances in the town in which I have passed my life.

A little beyond the crowd, lies a broad open glade of the greenest grass, in the very centre of the woods of the farm. A broad fringe of shade is flung by the trees along the eastern side, and at their roots cluster the different parties of the nobles and the ambassadors. Their gayly-dressed chasseurs are in waiting, the silver plate quivers and glances, as the chance rays of the sun break through the leaves over head, and at a little distance, in the road, stand their showy equipages in a long line from the great oak to the farmhouse.

In the evening, there was an illumination of the green alleys and the little square in front of the house, and a band of music for the people. Within, the halls were thrown open for a ball. It was given by the Grand Duke to the Duchess of Litchtenberg, the widow of Eugene Beauharnois. The company assembled at eight, and the presentations (two lovely countrywomen of our own among them), were over at nine. The dancing then commenced, and we drove home, through the fading lights still burning in the trees, an hour or two past midnight.

The Grand Duke is about to be married to one of the princesses of Naples, and great preparations are making for the event. He looks little like a bridegroom, with his sad face, and unshorn beard and hair. It is, probably, not a marriage of inclination, for the fat princess expecting him, is every way inferior to the incomparable woman he has lost, and he passed half the last week in a lonely visit to the chamber in which she died, in his palace at Pisa.

LETTER LXII.

BOLOGNA—MALIBRAN—PARMA—NIGHTINGALES OF LOMBARDY—PLACENZA—AUSTRIAN SOLDIERS—THE SIMPLON—MILAN—RESEMBLANCE TO PARIS—THE CATHEDRAL—GUERCINO'S HAGAR—MILANESE COFFEE.

Milan.—My fifth journey over the Apennines—dull of course. On the second evening we were at Bologna. The long colonnades pleased me less than before, with their crowds of foreign officers and ill-dressed inhabitants, and a placard for the opera, announcing Malibran's last night, relieved us of the prospect of a long evening of weariness. The divine music of La Norma and a crowded and brilliant audience, enthusiastic in their applause, seemed to inspire this still incomparable creature even beyond her wont. She sang with a fulness, an abandonment, a passionate energy and sweetness that seemed to come from a soul rapt and possessed beyond control, with the melody it had undertaken. They were never done calling her on the stage after the curtain had fallen. After six re-appearances, she came out once more to the footlights, and murmuring something inaudible from her lips that showed strong agitation, she pressed her hands together, bowed till her long hair, falling over her shoulders, nearly touched her feet, and retired in tears. She is the siren of Europe for me!

I was happy to have no more to do with the Duke of Modena, than to eat a dinner in his capital. We did "not forget the picture," but my inquiries for it were as fruitless as before. I wonder whether the author of the Pleasures of Memory has the pleasure of remembering having seen the picture himself! "Tassoni's bucket which is not the true one," is still shown in the tower, and the keeper will kiss the cross upon his fingers, that Samuel Rogers has written a false line.

At Parma we ate parmesan and saw the Correggio. The angel who holds the book up to the infant Saviour, the female laying her cheek to his feet, the countenance of the holy child himself, are creations that seem apart from all else in the schools of painting. They are like a group, not from life, but from heaven. They are superhuman, and, unlike other pictures of beauty which stir the heart as if they resembled something one had loved or might have loved, these mount into the fancy like things transcending sympathy, and only within reach of an intellectual and elevated wonder. This is the picture that Sir Thomas Lawrence returned six times in one day to see. It is the only thing I saw to admire in the Duchy of Maria Louisa. An Austrian regiment marched into the town as we left it, and an Italian at the gate told us that the Duchess had disbanded her last troops of the country, and supplied their place with these yellow and black Croats and Illyrians. Italy is Austria now to the foot of the Apennines—if not to the top of Radicofani.

Lombardy is full of nightingales. They sing by day, however (as not specified in poetry). They are up quite as early as the lark, and the green hedges are alive with their gurgling and changeful music till twilight. Nothing can exceed the fertility of these endless plains. They are four or five hundred miles of uninterrupted garden. The same eternal level road, the same rows of elms and poplars on either side, the same long, slimy canals, the same square, vine-laced, perfectly green pastures and cornfields, the same shaped houses, the same-voiced beggars with the same sing-song whine, and the same villanous Austrians poring over your passports and asking to be paid for it, from the Alps to the Apennines. It is wearisome, spite of green leaves and nightingales. A bare rock or a good brigand-looking mountain would so refresh the eye!

At Placenza, one of those admirable German bands was playing in the public square, while a small corps of picked men were manoeuvred. Even an Italian, I should think, though he knew and felt it was the music of his oppressors, might have been pleased to listen. And pleased they seemed to be—for there were hundreds of dark-haired and well-made men, with faces and forms for heroes, standing and keeping time with the well-played instruments, as peacefully as if there were no such thing as liberty, and no meaning in the foreign uniforms crowding them from their own pavement. And there were the women of Placenza, nodding from the balconies to the white mustaches and padded coats strutting below, and you would never dream Italy thought herself wronged, watching the exchange of courtesies between her dark-eyed daughters and these fair-haired coxcombs.

We crossed the Po, and entered Austria's nominal dominions. They rummaged our baggage as if they smelt republicanism somewhere, and after showing a strong disposition to retain a volume of very bad poetry as suspicious, and detaining us two long hours, they had the modesty to ask to be paid for letting us off lightly. When we declined it, the chef threatened us a precious searching "the next time." How willingly I would submit to the annoyance to have that next time assured to me! Every step I take toward the bounds of Italy, pulls so upon my heart!

As most travellers come into Italy over the Simplon, Milan makes generally the first enthusiastic chapter in their books. I have reversed the order myself, and have a better right to praise it from comparison. For exterior, there is certainly no city in Italy comparable to it. The streets are broad and noble, the buildings magnificent, the pavement quite the best in Europe, and the Milanese (all of whom I presume I have seen, for it is Sunday, and the streets swarm with them), are better dressed, and look "better to do in the world" than the Tuscans, who are gayer and more Italian, and the Romans, who are graver and vastly handsomer. Milan is quite like Paris. The showy and mirror-lined cafÉs, the elegant shops, the variety of strange people and costumes, and a new gallery lately opened in imitation of the glass-roofed passages of the French capital, make one almost feel that the next turn will bring him upon the Boulevards.

The famous cathedral, nearly completed by Napoleon, is a sort of Aladdin creation, quite too delicate and beautiful for the open air. The filmly traceries of gothic fretwork, the needle-like minarets, the hundreds of beautiful statues with which it is studded, the intricate, graceful, and bewildering architecture of every window and turret, and the frost-like frailness and delicacy of the whole mass, make an effect altogether upon the eye that must stand high on the list of new sensations. It is a vast structure withal, but a middling easterly breeze, one would think in looking at it, would lift it from its base and bear it over the Atlantic like the meshes of a cobweb. Neither interior nor exterior impresses you with the feeling of awe common to other large churches. The sun struggles through the immense windows of painted glass, staining every pillar and carved cornice with the richest hues, and wherever the eye wanders it grows giddy with the wilderness of architecture. The people on their knees are like paintings in the strong artificial light, the checkered pavement seems trembling with a quivering radiance, the altar is far and indistinct, and the lamps burning over the tomb of Saint Carlo, shine out from the centre like gems glistening in the midst of some enchanted hall. This reads very like rhapsody, but it is the way the place impressed me. It is like a great dream. Its excessive beauty scarce seems constant while the eye rests upon it.

The Brera is a noble palace, occupied by the public galleries of statuary and painting. I felt on leaving Florence that I could give pictures a very long holyday. To live on them, as one does in Italy, is like dining from morn till night. The famous Guercino, is at Milan, however, the "Hagar," which Byron talks of so enthusiastically, and I once more surrendered myself to a cicerone. The picture catches your eye on your first entrance. There is that harmony and effect in the color that mark a masterpiece, even in a passing glance. Abraham stands in the centre of the group, a fine, prophet-like, "green old man," with a mild decision in his eye, from which there is evidently no appeal. Sarah has turned her back, and you can just read in the half-profile glance of her face, that there is a little pity mingled in her hard-hearted approval of her rival's banishment. But Hagar—who can describe the world of meaning in her face? The closed lips have in them a calm incredulousness, contradicted with wonderful nature in the flushed and troubled forehead, and the eyes red with long weeping. The gourd of water is hung over her shoulder, her hand is turning her sorrowful boy from the door, and she has looked back once more, with a large tear coursing down her cheek, to read in the face of her master if she is indeed driven forth for ever. It is the instant before pride and despair close over her heart. You see in the picture that the next moment is the crisis of her life. Her gaze is straining upon the old man's lips, and you wait breathlessly to see her draw up her bending form, and depart in proud sorrow for the wilderness. It is a piece of powerful and passionate poetry. It affects you like nothing but a reality. The eyes get warm, and the heart beats quick, and as you walk away you feel as if a load of oppressive sympathy was lifting from your heart.

I have seen little else in Milan, except Austrian soldiers, of whom there are fifteen thousand in this single capital! The government has issued an order to officers not on duty, to appear in citizen's dress, it is supposed, to diminish the appearance of so much military preparation. For the rest, they make a kind of coffee here, by boiling it with cream, which is better than anything of the kind either in Paris or Constantinople; and the Milanese are, for slaves, the most civil people I have seen, after the Florentines. There is little English society here; I know not why, except that the Italians are rich enough to be exclusive and make their houses difficult of access to strangers.

A MELANCHOLY PROCESSION—LAGO MAGGIORE—ISOLA BELLA—THE SIMPLON—MEETING A FELLOW-COUNTRYMAN—THE VALLEY OF THE RHONE.

In going out of the gates of Milan, we met a cart full of peasants, tied together and guarded by gens d'armes, the fifth sight of the kind that has crossed us since we passed the Austrian border. The poor fellows looked very innocent and very sorry. The extent of their offences probably might be the want of a passport, and a desire to step over the limits of his majesty's possessions. A train of beautiful horses, led by soldiers along the ramparts, the property of the Austrian officers, were in melancholy contrast to their sad faces.

The clear snowy Alps soon came in sight, and their cold beauty refreshed us in the midst of a heat that prostrated every nerve in the system. It is only the first of May, and they are mowing the grass everywhere on the road, the trees are in their fullest leaf, the frogs and nightingales singing each other down, and the grasshopper would be a burden. Toward night we crossed the Sardinian frontier, and in an hour were set down at an auberge on the bank of Lake Maggiore, in the little town of Arona. The mountains on the other side of the broad and mirror-like water, are speckled with ruined castles, here and there a boat is leaving its long line of ripples behind in its course, the cattle are loitering home, the peasants sit on the benches before their doors, and all the lovely circumstances of a rural summer's sunset are about us, in one of the very loveliest spots in nature. A very old Florence friend is my companion, and what with mutual reminiscences of sunny Tuscany, and the deepest love in common for the sky over our heads, and the green land around us, we are noting down "red days" in our calendar of travel.

We walked from Arona by sunrise, four or five miles along the borders of Lake Maggiore. The kind-hearted peasants on their way to the market raised their hats to us in passing, and I was happy that the greeting was still "buon giorno." Those dark-lined mountains before us were to separate me too soon from the mellow accents in which it was spoken. As yet, however, it was all Italian—the ultra-marine sky, the clear, half-purpled hills, the inspiring air—we felt in every pulse that it was still Italy.

We were at Baveno at an early hour, and took a boat for Isola Bella. It looks like a gentleman's villa afloat. A boy would throw a stone entirely over it in any direction. It strikes you like a kind of toy as you look at it from a distance, and getting nearer, the illusion scarcely dissipates—for, from the water's edge, the orange-laden terraces are piled one above another like a pyramidal fruit-basket, the villa itself peers above like a sugar castle, and it scarce seems real enough to land upon. We pulled round to the northern side, and disembarked at a broad stone staircase, where a cicerone, with a look of suppressed wisdom, common to his vocation, met us with the offer of his services.

The entrance-hall was hung with old armor, and a magnificent suite of apartments above, opening on all sides upon the lake, was lined thickly with pictures, none of them remarkable except one or two landscapes by the savage Tempesta. Travellers going the other way would probably admire the collection more than we. We were glad to be handed over by our pragmatical custode to a pretty contadina, who announced herself as the gardener's daughter, and gave us each a bunch of roses. It was a proper commencement to an acquaintance upon Isola Bella. She led the way to the water's edge, where, in the foundations of the palace, a suite of eight or ten spacious rooms is constructed a la grotte—with a pavement laid of small stones of different colors, walls and roof of fantastically set shells and pebbles, and statues that seem to have reason in their nudity. The only light came in at the long doors opening down to the lake, and the deep leather sofas, and dark cool atmosphere, with the light break of the waves outside, and the long views away toward Isola Madra, and the far-off opposite shore, composed altogether a most seductive spot for an indolent humor and a summer's day. I shall keep it as a cool recollection till sultry summers trouble me no more.

But the garden was the prettiest place. The lake is lovely enough any way; but to look at it through perspectives of orange alleys, and have the blue mountains broken by stray branches of tulip-trees, clumps of crimson rhododendron, and clusters of citron, yellower than gold; to sit on a garden-seat in the shade of a thousand roses, with sweet-scented shrubs and verbenums, and a mixture of novel and delicious perfumes embalming the air about you, and gaze up at snowy Alps and sharp precipices, and down upon a broad smooth mirror in which the islands lie like clouds, and over which the boats are silently creeping with their white sails, like birds asleep in the sky—why (not to disparage nature), it seems to my poor judgment, that these artificial appliances are an improvement even to Lago Maggiore.

On one side, without the villa walls, are two or three small houses, one of which is occupied as a hotel; and here, if I had a friend with matrimony in his eye, would I strongly recommend lodgings for the honeymoon. A prettier cage for a pair of billing doves no poet would conceive you.

We got on to Domo d'Ossola to sleep, saying many an oft-said thing about the entrance to the valleys of the Alps. They seem common when spoken of, these romantic places, but they are not the less new in the glow of a first impression.

We were a little in start of the sun this morning, and commenced the ascent of the Simplon by a gray summer's dawn, before which the last bright star had not yet faded. From Domo d'Ossola we rose directly into the mountains, and soon wound into the wildest glens by a road which was flung along precipices and over chasms and waterfalls like a waving riband. The horses went on at a round trot, and so skilfully are the difficulties of the ascent surmounted, that we could not believe we had passed the spot that from below hung above us so appallingly. The route follows the foaming river Vedro, which frets and plunges along at its side or beneath its hanging bridges, with the impetuosity of a mountain torrent, where the stream is swollen at every short distance with pretty waterfalls, messengers from the melting snows on the summits. There was one, a water-slide rather than a fall, which I stopped long to admire. It came from near the peak of the mountain, leaping at first from a green clump of firs, and descending a smooth inclined plane, of perhaps two hundred feet. The effect was like drapery of the most delicate lace, dropping into festoons from the hand. The slight waves overtook each other and mingled and separated, always preserving their elliptical and foaming curves, till, in a smooth scoop near the bottom, they gathered into a snowy mass, and leaped into the Vedro in the shape of a twisted shell. If wishing could have witched it into Mr. Cole's sketch-book, he would have a new variety of water for his next composition.

After seven hours' driving, which scarce seemed ascending but for the snow and ice and the clear air it brought us into, we stopped to breakfast at the village of Simplon, "three thousand, two hundred and sixteen feet above the sea level." Here we first realized that we had left Italy. The landlady spoke French and the postillions German! My sentiment has grown threadbare with travel, but I don't mind confessing that the circumstance gave me an unpleasant thickness in the throat. I threw open the southern window, and looked back toward the marshes of Lombardy, and if I did not say the poetical thing, it was because

"It is the silent grief that cuts the heart-strings."

In sober sadness, one may well regret any country where his life has been filled fuller than elsewhere of sunshine and gladness; and such, by a thousand enchantments, has Italy been to me. Its climate is life in my nostrils, its hills and valleys are the poetry of such things, and its marbles, pictures, and palaces, beset the soul like the very necessities of existence. You can exist elsewhere, but oh! you live in Italy!

I was sitting by my English companion on a sledge in front of the hotel, enjoying the sunshine, when the diligence drove up, and six or eight young men alighted. One of them, walking up and down the road to get the cramp of a confined seat out of his legs, addressed a remark to us in English. We had neither of us seen him before, but we exclaimed simultaneously, as he turned away, "That's an American." "How did you know he was not an Englishman?" I asked. "Because," said my friend, "he spoke to us without an introduction and without a reason, as Englishmen are not in the habit of doing, and because he ended his sentence with 'sir,' as no Englishman does except he is talking to an inferior, or wishes to insult you. And how did you know it?" asked he. "Partly by instinct," I answered, "but more, because though a traveller, he wears a new hat that cost him ten dollars, and a new cloak that cost him fifty, (a peculiarly American extravagance,) because he made no inclination of his body either in addressing or leaving us, though his intention was to be civil, and because he used fine dictionary words to express a common idea, which, by the way, too, betrays his southern breeding. And if you want other evidence, he has just asked the gentleman near him to ask the conducteur something about his breakfast, and an American is the only man in the world who ventures to come abroad without at least French enough to keep himself from starving." It may appear ill-natured to write down such criticisms on one's own countryman; but the national peculiarities by which we are distinguished from foreigners, seemed so well defined in this instance, that I thought it worth mentioning. We found afterward that our conjecture was right. His name and country were on the brass plate of his portmanteau in most legible letters, and I recognized it directly as the address of an amiable and excellent man, of whom I had once or twice heard in Italy, though I had never before happened to meet him. Three of the faults oftenest charged upon our countrymen, are over-fine clothes, over fine-words, and over-fine, or over-free manners!

From Simplon we drove two or three miles between heaps of snow, lying in some places from ten to six feet deep. Seven hours before, we had ridden through fields of grain almost ready for the harvest. After passing one or two galleries built over the road to protect it from the avalanches where it ran beneath the loftier precipices, we got out of the snow, and saw Brig, the small town at the foot of the Simplon, on the other side, lying almost directly beneath us. It looked as if one might toss his cap down into its pretty gardens. Yet we were four or five hours in reaching it, by a road that seemed in most parts scarcely to descend at all. The views down the valley of the Rhone, which opened continually before us, were of exquisite beauty, The river itself, which is here near its source, looked like a meadow rivulet in its silver windings, and the gigantic Helvetian Alps which rose in their snow on the other side of the valley, were glittering in the slant rays of a declining sun, and of a grandeur of size and outline which diminished, even more than distance, the river and the clusters of villages at their feet.

LETTER LXIV.

SWITZERLAND—LA VALAIS—THE CRETINS AND THE GOITRES—A FRENCHMAN'S OPINION OF NIAGARA—LAKE LEMAN—CASTLE OF CHILLON—ROCKS OF MEILLERIE—REPUBLICAN AIR—MONT BLANC—GENEVA—THE STEAMER—PARTING SORROW.

We have been two days and a half loitering down through the Swiss canton of Valais, and admiring every hour the magnificence of these snow-capped and green-footed Alps. The little chalets seem just lodged by accident on the crags, or stuck against slopes so steep, that the mowers of the mountain-grass are literally let down by ropes to their dizzy occupation. The goats alone seem to have an exemption from all ordinary laws of gravitation, feeding against cliffs which it makes one giddy to look on only; and the short-waisted girls dropping a courtesy and blushing as they pass the stranger, emerge from the little mountain-paths, and stop by the first spring, to put on their shoes and arrange their ribands coquetishly, before entering the village.

The two dreadful curses of these valleys meet one at every step—the cretins, or natural fools, of which there is at least one in every family; and the goitre or swelled throat, to which there is hardly an exception among the women. It really makes travelling in Switzerland a melancholy business, with all its beauty; at every turn in the road, a gibbering and moaning idiot, and in every group of females, a disgusting array of excrescences too common even to be concealed. Really, to see girls that else were beautiful, arrayed in all their holyday finery, but with a defect that makes them monsters to the unaccustomed eye, their throats swollen to the size of their heads, seems to me one of the most curious and pitiable things I have met in my wanderings. Many attempts have been made to account for the growth of the goitre, but it is yet unexplained. The men are not so subject to it as the women, though among them, even, it is frightfully common. But how account for the continual production by ordinary parents of this brute race of cretins? They all look alike, dwarfish, large-mouthed, grinning, and of hideous features and expression. It is said that the children of strangers, born in the valley, are very likely to be idiots, resembling the cretin exactly. It seems a supernatural curse upon the land. The Valaisians, however, consider it a blessing to have one in the family.

The dress of the women of La Valais is excessively unbecoming, and a pretty face is rare. Their manners are kind and polite, and at the little auberges, where we have stopped on the road, there has been a cleanliness and a generosity in the supply of the table, which prove virtues among them, not found in Italy.

At Turtmann, we made a little excursion into the mountains to see a cascade. It falls about a hundred feet, and has just now more water than usual from the melting of the snows. It is a pretty fall. A Frenchman writes in the book of the hotel, that he has seen Niagara and Trenton Falls, in America, and that they do not compare with the cascade of Turtmann!

From Martigny the scenery began to grow richer, and after passing the celebrated Fall of the Pissevache (which springs from the top of a high Alp almost into the road, and is really a splendid cascade), we approached Lake Leman in a gorgeous sunset. We rose a slight hill, and over the broad sheet of water on the opposite shore, reflected with all its towers in a mirror of gold, lay the castle of Chillon. A bold green mountain, rose steeply behind, the sparkling village of Vevey lay farther down on the water's edge; and away toward the sinking sun, stretched the long chain of the Jura, teinted with all the hues of a dolphin. Never was such a lake of beauty—or it never sat so pointedly for its picture. Mountains and water, chateaux and shallops, vineyards and verdure, could do no more. We left the carriage and walked three or four miles along the southern bank, under the "Rocks of Meillerie," and the spirit of St. Preux's Julie, if she haunt the scene where she caught her death, of a sunset in May, is the most enviable of ghosts. I do not wonder at the prating in albums of Lake Leman. For me, it is (after Val d'Arno from Fiesoli) the ne plus ultra of a scenery Paradise.

We are stopping for the night at St. Gingoulf, on a swelling bank of the lake, and we have been lying under the trees in front of the hotel till the last perceptible teint is gone from the sky over Jura. Two pedestrian gentlemen, with knapsacks and dogs, have just arrived, and a whole family of French people, including parrots and monkeys, came in before us, and are deafening the house with their chattering. A cup of coffee, and then good night!

My companion, who has travelled all over Europe on foot, confirms my opinion that there is no drive on the continent, equal to the forty miles between the rocks of Meillerie and Geneva, on the southern bank of the Leman. The lake is not often much broader than the Hudson, the shores are the noble mountains sung so gloriously by Childe Harold; Vevey, Lausanne, Copet, and a string of smaller villages, all famous in poetry and story, fringe the opposite water's edge with cottages and villages, while you wind for ever along a green lane following the bend of the shore, the road as level as your hall pavement, and green hills massed up with trees and verdure, overshadowing you continually. The world has a great many sweet spots in it, and I have found many a one which would make fitting scenery for the brightest act of life's changeful drama—but here is one, where it seems to me as difficult not to feel genial and kindly, as for Taglioni to keep from floating away like a smoke-curl when she is dancing in La Bayadere.

We passed a bridge and drew in a long breath to try the difference in the air—we were in the republic of Geneva. It smelt very much as it did in the dominions of his majesty of Sardinia—sweet-briar, hawthorn, violets and all. I used to think when I first came from America, that the flowers (republicans by nature as well as birds) were less fragrant under a monarchy.

Mont Blanc loomed up very white in the south, but like other distinguished persons of whom we form an opinion from the description of poets, the "monarch of mountains" did not seem to me so very superior to his fellows. After a look or two at him as we approached Geneva, I ceased straining my head out of the cabriolet, and devoted my eyes to things more within the scale of my affections—the scores of lovely villas sprinkling the hills and valleys by which we approached the city. Sweet—sweet places they are to be sure! And then the month is May, and the straw-bonneted and white-aproned girls, ladies and peasants alike, were all out at their porches and balconies, lover-like couples were sauntering down the park-lanes, one servant passed us with a tri-cornered blue billet-doux between his thumb and finger, the nightingales were singing their very hearts away to the new-blown roses, and a sense of summer and seventeen, days of sunshine and sonnet-making, came over me irresistibly. I should like to see June out in Geneva.

The little steamer that makes the tour of Lake Leman, began to "phiz" by sunrise directly under the windows of our hotel. We were soon on the pier, where our entrance into the boat was obstructed by a weeping cluster of girls, embracing and parting very unwillingly with a young lady of some eighteen years, who was lovely enough to have been wept for by as many grown-up gentlemen. Her own tears were under better government, though her sealed lips showed that she dared not trust herself with her voice. After another and another lingering kiss, the boatman expressed some impatience, and she tore herself from their arms and stepped into the waiting batteau. We were soon along side the steamer, and sooner under way, and then, having given one wave of her handkerchief to the pretty and sad group on the shore, our fair fellow-passenger gave way to her feelings, and sinking upon a seat, burst into a passionate flood of tears. There was no obtruding on such sorrow, and the next hour or two were employed by my imagination in filling up the little drama, of which we had seen but the touching conclusion.

I was pleased to find the boat (a new one) called the "Winkelreid," in compliment to the vessel which makes the same voyage in Cooper's "Headsman of Berne." The day altogether had begun like a chapter in a romance.

"Lake Leman wooed us with its crystal face,"

but there was the filmiest conceivable veil of mist over its unruffled mirror, and the green uplands that rose from its edge had a softness like dreamland upon their verdure. I know not whether the tearful girl whose head was drooping over the railing felt the sympathy, but I could not help thanking nature for her, in my heart, the whole scene was so of the complexion of her own feelings. I could have "thrown my ring into the sea," like Policrates Samius, "to have cause for sadness too."

The "Winkelreid" has (for a republican steamer), rather the aristocratical arrangement of making those who walk aft the funnel pay twice as much as those who choose to promenade forward—for no earthly reason that I can divine, other than that those who pay dearest have the full benefit of the oily gases from the machinery, while the humbler passenger breathes the air of heaven before it has passed through that improving medium. Our youthful Niobe, two French ladies not particularly pretty, an Englishman with a fishing-rod and gun, and a coxcomb of a Swiss artist to whom I had taken a special aversion at Rome, from a criticism I overheard upon my favorite picture in the Colonna, my friends and myself, were the exclusive inhalers of the oleaginous atmosphere of the stern. A crowd of the ark's own miscellaneousness thronged the forecastle—and so you have the programme of a day on Lake Leman.

LETTER LXV.

LAKE LEMAN—AMERICAN APPEARANCE OF THE GENEVESE—STEAMBOAT OF THE RHONE—GIBBON AND ROUSSEAU—ADVENTURE OF THE LILIES—GENEVESE JEWELLERS—RESIDENCE OF VOLTAIRE—BYRON'S NIGHT-CAP—VOLTAIRE'S WALKING-STICK AND STOCKINGS.

The water of Lake Leman looks very like other water, though Byron and Shelley were nearly drowned in it; and Copet, a little village on the Helvetian side, where we left three women and took up one man (the village ought to be very much obliged to us), is no Paradise, though Madame de Stael made it her residence. There are Paradises, however, with very short distances between, all the way down the northern shore; and angels in them, if women are angels—a specimen or two of the sex being visible with the aid of the spyglass, in nearly every balcony and belvidere, looking upon the water. The taste in country-houses seems to be here very much the same as in New England, and quite unlike the half-palace, half-castle style common in Italy and France. Indeed the dress, physiognomy, and manners of old Geneva might make an American Genevese fancy himself at home on the Leman. There is that subdued decency, that grave respectableness, that black-coated, straight-haired, saint-like kind of look which is universal in the small towns of our country, and which is as unlike France and Italy, as a playhouse is unlike a Methodist chapel. You would know the people of Geneva were Calvinists, whisking through the town merely in a diligence.

I lost sight of the town of Morges, eating a tÊte-À-tÊte breakfast with my friend in the cabin. Switzerland is the only place out of America where one gets cream for his coffee. I cry, Morges mercy on that plea.

We were at Lausanne at eleven, having steamed forty miles in five hours. This is not quite up to the thirty-milers on the Hudson, of which I see accounts in the papers, but we had the advantage of not being blown up, either going or coming, and of looking for a continuous minute on a given spot in the scenery. Then we had an iron railing between us and that portion of the passengers who prefer garlic to lavender-water, and we achieved our breakfast without losing our tempers or complexions, in a scramble. The question of superiority between Swiss and American steamers, therefore, depends very much on the value you set on life, temper, and time. For me, as my time is not measured in "diamond sparks," and as my life and temper are the only gifts with which fortune has blessed me, I prefer the Swiss.

Gibbon lived at Lausanne, and wrote here the last chapter of his History of Rome—a circumstance which he records with affection. It is a spot of no ordinary beauty, and the public promenade, where we sat and looked over to Vevey and Chillon, and the Rocks of Meillerie, and talked of Rousseau, and agreed that it was a scene, "faite pour une Julie, pour une Claire, et pour un Saint Preux," is one of the places, where, if I were to "play statue," I should like to grow to my seat, and compromise, merely, for eyesight. We have one thing against Lausanne, however,—it is up hill and a mile from the water; and if Gibbon walked often from Ouchet at noon, and "larded the way" as freely as we, I make myself certain he was not the fat man his biographers have drawn him.

There were some other circumstances at Lausanne which interested us—but which criticism has decided can not be obtruded upon the public. We looked about for "Julie" and "Clare," spite of Rousseau's "ne les y cherchez pas," and gave a blind beggar a sous (all he asked) for a handful of lilies-of-the-valley, pitying him ten times more than if he had lost his eyes out of Switzerland. To be blind on Lake Leman! blind within sight of Mont Blanc! We turned back to drop another sous into his hat, as we reflected upon it.

The return steamer from Vevey (I was sorry not to go to Vevey for Rousseau's sake, and as much for Cooper's), took us up on its way to Geneva, and we had the advantage of seeing the same scenery in a different light. Trees, houses, and mountains, are so much finer seen against the sun, with the deep shadows toward you!

Sitting by the stern, was a fat and fair Frenchwoman, who, like me, had bought lilies, and about as many. With a very natural facility of dramatic position, I imagined it had established a kind of sympathy between us, and proposed to myself, somewhere in the fair hours, to make it serve as an introduction. She went into the cabin after a while, to lunch on cutlets and beer, and returned to the deck without her lilies. Mine lay beside me, within reach of her four fingers; and, as I was making up my mind to offer to replace her loss, she coolly took them up, and without even a French monosyllable, commenced throwing them overboard, stem by stem. It was very clear she had mistaken them for her own. As the last one flew over the tafferel, the gentleman who paid for la biere et les cottelettes, husband or lover, came up with a smile and a flourish, and reminded her that she had left her bouquet between the mustard and the beer bottle. Sequiter, a scene. The lady apologized, and I disclaimed; and the more I insisted on the delight she had given me by throwing my pretty lilies into Lake Leman, the more she made herself unhappy, and insisted on my being inconsolable. One should come abroad to know how much may be said upon throwing overboard a bunch of lilies!

The clouds gathered, and we had some hopes of a storm, but the "darkened Jura" was merely dim, and the "live thunder" waited for another Childe Harold. We were at Geneva at seven, and had the whole population to witness our debarkation. The pier where we landed, and the new bridge across the outlet of the Rhone, are the evening promenade.

The far-famed jewellers of Geneva are rather an aristocratic class of merchants. They are to be sought in chambers, and their treasures are produced box by box, from locked drawers, and bought, if at all, without the pleasure of "beating down." They are, withal, a gentlemanly class of men; and, of the principal one, as many stories are told as of Beau Brummel. He has made a fortune by his shop, and has the manners of a man who can afford to buy the jewels out of a king's crown.

We were sitting at the table d'hote, with about forty people, on the first day of our arrival, when the servant brought us each a gilt-edged note, sealed with an elegant device; invitations, we presumed, to a ball, at least. Mr. So-and-so (I forget the name), begged pardon for the liberty he had taken, and requested us to call at his shop in the Rue de Rhone, and look at his varied assortment of bijouterie. A card was enclosed, and the letter in courtly English. We went, of course; as who would not? The cost to him was a sheet of paper, and the trouble of sending to the hotel for a list of the new arrivals. I recommend the system to all callow Yankees, commencing a "pushing business."

Geneva is full of foreigners in the summer, and it has quite the complexion of an agreeable place. The environs are, of course, unequalled, and the town itself is a stirring and gay capital, full of brilliant shops, handsome streets and promenades, where everything is to be met but pretty women. Female beauty would come to a good market anywhere in Switzerland. We have seen but one pretty girl (our Niobe of the steamer), since we lost sight of Lombardy. They dress well here, and seem modest, and have withal an air of style; but of some five hundred ladies, whom I may have seen in the valley of the Rhone and about this neighborhood, it would puzzle a modern Appelles to compose an endurable Venus. I understand a fair countryman of ours is about taking up her residence in Geneva; and if Lake Leman does not "woo her," and the "live thunder" leap down from Jura, the jewellers, at least, will crown her queen of the Canton, and give her the tiara at cost.

I hope "Maria Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs" will forgive me for having gone to Ferney in an omnibus! Voltaire lived just under the Jura, on a hill-side, overlooking Geneva and the lake, with a landscape before him in the foreground, that a painter could not improve, and Mont Blanc and its neighbor mountains, the breaks to his horizon. At six miles off, Geneva looks very beautifully, astride the exit of the Rhone from the lake; and the lake itself looks more like a broad river, with its edges of verdure and its outer-frame of mountains. We walked up an avenue to a large old villa, embosomed in trees, where an old gardener appeared, to show us the grounds. We said the proper thing under the tree planted by the philosopher, fell in love with the view from twenty points, met an English lady in one of the arbors, the wife of a French nobleman to whom the house belongs, and were bowed into the hall by the old man and handed over to his daughter to be shown the curiosities of the interior. These were Voltaire's rooms, just as he left them. The ridiculous picture of his own apotheosis, painted under his own direction, and representing him offering his Henriade to Apollo, with all the authors of his time dying of envy at his feet, occupies the most conspicuous place over his chamber-door. Within was his bed, the curtains nibbled quite bare by relic-gathering travellers; a portrait of the Empress Catharine, embroidered by her own hand, and presented to Voltaire; his own portrait and Frederick the Great's, and many of the philosophers', including Franklin. A little monument stands opposite the fireplace, with the inscription, "mon esprit est partout, et mon coeur est ici." It is a snug little dormitory, opening with one window to the west; and, to those who admire the character of the once illustrious occupant, a place for very tangible musing. They showed us afterward his walking-stick, a pair of silk-stockings he had half worn, and a night-cap. The last article is getting quite fashionable as a relic of genius. They show Byron's at Venice.

LETTER LXVI.

PRACTICAL BATHOS OF CELEBRATED PLACES—TRAVELLING COMPANIONS AT THE SIMPLON—CUSTOM-HOUSE COMFORTS—TRIALS OF TEMPER—CONQUERED AT LAST!—DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF FRANCE, ITALY, AND SWITZERLAND—FORCE OF POLITENESS.

Whether it was that I had offended the genius of the spot, by coming in an omnibus, or from a desire I never can resist in such places, to travesty and ridicule the mock solemnities with which they are exhibited, certain it is that I left Ferney, without having encountered, even in the shape of a more serious thought, the spirit of Voltaire. One reads the third canto of Childe Harold in his library, and feels as if "Lausanne and Ferney" should be very interesting places to the traveller, and yet when he is shown Gibbon's bower by a fellow scratching his head and hitching up his trousers the while, and the nightcap that enclosed the busy brain from which sprang the fifty brilliant tomes on his shelves, by a country-girl, who hurries through her drilled description, with her eye on the silver douceur in his fingers, he is very likely to rub his hand over his eyes, and disclaim, quite honestly, all pretensions to enthusiasm. And yet, I dare say, I shall have a great deal of pleasure in remembering that I have been at Ferney. As an English traveller would say, "I have done Voltaire!"

Quite of the opinion that it was not doing justice to Geneva to have made but a three days' stay in it, regretting not having seen Sismondi and Simond, and a whole coterie of scholars and authors, whose home it is, and with a mind quite made up to return to Switzerland, when my beaux jours of love, money, and leisure, shall have arrived, I crossed the Rhone at sunrise, and turned my face toward Paris.

The Simplon is much safer travelling than the pass of the Jura. We were all day getting up the mountains by roads that would make me anxious, if there were a neck in the carriage I would rather should not be broken. My company, fortunately, consisted of three Scotch spinsters, who would try any precipice of the Jura, I think, if there were a lover at the bottom. If the horses had backed in the wrong place, it would have been to all three, I am sure, a deliverance from a world in whose volume of happiness,

As to my own neck and my friend's, there is a special providence for bachelors, even if they were of importance enough to merit a care. Spinsters and bachelors, we all arrived safely at Rousses, the entrance to France, and here, if I were to write before repeating the alphabet, you would see what a pen could do in a passion.

The carriage was stopped by three custom-house officers, and taken under a shed, where the doors were closed behind it. We were then required to dismount and give our honors that we had nothing new in the way of clothes; no "jewelry; no unused manufactures of wool, thread, or lace; no silk of floss silk; no polished metals, plated or varnished; no toys, (except a heart each); nor leather, glass, or crystal manufactures." So far, I kept my temper.

Our trunks, carpet-bags, hat-boxes, dressing-cases, and portfeuilles, were then dismounted and critically examined—every dress and article unfolded; shirts, cravats, unmentionables and all, and searched thoroughly by two ruffians, whose fingers were no improvement upon the labors of the washerwoman. In an hour's time or so we were allowed to commence repacking. Still, I kept my temper.

We were then requested to walk into a private room, while the ladies, for the same purpose, were taken, by a woman, into another. Here we were requested to unbutton our coats, and, begging pardon for the liberty, these courteous gentlemen thrust their hands into our pockets, felt in our bosoms, pantaloons, and shoes, examined our hats, and even eyed our "pet curls" very earnestly, in the expectation of finding us crammed with Geneva jewelry. Still, I kept my temper.

Our trunks were then put upon the carriage, and a sealed string put upon them, which we were not to cut till we arrived in Paris. (Nine days!) They then demanded to be paid for the sealing, and the fellows who had unladen the carriage were to be paid for their labor. This done, we were permitted to drive on. Still, I kept my temper!

We arrived, in the evening, at Morez, in a heavy rain. We were sitting around a comfortable fire, and the soup and fish were just brought upon the table. A soldier entered and requested us to walk to the police-office. "But it rains hard, and our dinner is just ready." The man in the mustache was inexorable. The commissary closed his office at eight, and we must go instantly to certify to our passports, and get new ones for the interior. Cloaks and umbrellas were brought, and, bon gre, mal gre, we walked half a mile in the mud and rain to a dirty commissary, who kept us waiting in the dark fifteen minutes, and then, making out a description of the person of each, demanded half a dollar for the new passport, and permitted us to wade back to our dinner. This had occupied an hour, and no improvement to soup or fish. Still, I kept my temper—rather!

The next morning, while we were forgetting the annoyances of the previous night, and admiring the new-pranked livery of May by a glorious sunshine, a civil arretez vous brought up the carriage to the door of another custom-house! The order was to dismount, and down came once more carpet-bags, hat-boxes, and dressing-cases, and a couple of hours were lost again in a fruitless search for contraband articles. When it was all through, and the officers and men paid as before, we were permitted to proceed with the gracious assurance that we should not be troubled again till we got to Paris! I bade the commissary good morning, felicitated him on the liberal institutions of his country and his zeal in the exercise of his own agreeable vocation, and—I am free to confess—lost my temper! Job and Xantippe's husband! could I help it!

I confess I expected better things of France. In Italy, where you come to a new dukedom every half-day, you do not much mind opening your trunks, for they are petty princes and need the pitiful revenue of contraband articles and the officer's fee. Yet even they leave the person of the traveller sacred; and where in the world, except in France, is a party, travelling evidently for pleasure, subjected twice at the same border to the degrading indignity of a search! Ye "hunters of Kentucky"—thank heaven that you can go into Tennessee without having your "plunder" overhauled and your pockets searched by successive parties of scoundrels, whom you are to pay "by order of the government," for their trouble!

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The Simplon, which you pass in a day, divides two nations, each other's physical and moral antipodes. The handsome, picturesque, lazy, unprincipled Italian, is left in the morning in his own dirty and exorbitant inn; and, on the evening of the same day, having crossed but a chain of mountains, you find yourself in a clean auberge, nestled in the bosom of a Swiss valley, another language spoken around you, and in the midst of a people, who seem to require the virtues they possess to compensate them for more than their share of uncomeliness. You travel a day or two down the valley of the Rhone, and when you are become reconciled to cretins and goitres, and ill-dressed and worse formed men and women, you pass in another single day the chain of the Jura, and find yourself in France—a country as different from both Switzerland and Italy, as they are from each other. How is it that these diminutive cantons preserve so completely their nationality? It seems a problem to the traveller who passes from one to the other without leaving his carriage.

One is compelled to like France in spite of himself. You are no sooner over the Jura than you are enslaved, past all possible ill-humor, by the universal politeness. You stop for the night at a place, which, as my friend remarked, resembles an inn only in its in-attention, and after a bad supper, worse beds, and every kind of annoyance, down comes my lady-hostess in the morning to receive her coin, and if you can fly into a passion with such a cap, and such a smile, and such a "bon jour," you are of less penetrable stuff than man is commonly made of.

I loved Italy, but detested the Italians. I detest France, but I can not help liking the French. "Politeness is among the virtues," says the philosopher. Rather, it takes the place of them all. What can you believe ill of a people whose slightest look toward you is made up of grace and kindness.

We are dawdling along thirty miles a day through Burgundy, sick to death of the bare vine-stakes, and longing to see a festooned vineyard of Lombardy. France is such an ugly country! The diligences lumber by, noisy and ludicrous; the cow-tenders wear cocked hats; the beggars are in the true French extreme, theatrical in all their misery; the climate is rainy and cold, and as unlike that of Italy as if a thousand leagues separated them, and the roads are long, straight, dirty, and uneven. There is neither pleasure nor comfort, neither scenery nor antiquities, nor accommodations for the weary—nothing but politeness. And it is odd how it reconciles you to it all.

LETTER LXVII.

PARIS AND LONDON—REASONS FOR LIKING PARIS—JOYOUSNESS OF ITS CITIZENS—LAFAYETTE'S FUNERAL—ROYAL RESPECT AND GRATITUDE—ENGLAND—DOVER—ENGLISH NEATNESS AND COMFORT, AS DISPLAYED IN THE HOTELS, WAITERS, FIRES, BELL-ROPES, LANDSCAPES, WINDOW-CURTAINS, TEA-KETTLES, STAGE-COACHES, HORSES, AND EVERYTHING ELSE—SPECIMEN OF ENGLISH RESERVE—THE GENTLEMAN DRIVER OF FASHION—A CASE FOR MRS. TROLLOPE.

It is pleasant to get back to Paris. One meets everybody there one ever saw; and operas and coffee, Taglioni and Leontine Fay, the belles and the Boulevards, the shops, spectacles, life, lions, and lures to every species of pleasure, rather give you the impression that, outside the barriers of Paris, time is wasted in travel.

What pleasant idlers they look! The very shopkeepers seem standing behind their counters for amusement. The soubrette who sells you a cigar, or ties a crape on your arm (it was for poor old Lafayette), is coiffed as for a ball; the frotteur who takes the dust from your boots, sings his lovesong as he brushes away, the old man has his bouquet in his bosom, and the beggar looks up at the new statue of Napoleon in the Place Vendome—everybody has some touch of fancy, some trace of a heart on the look-out, at least, for pleasure.

I was at Lafayette's funeral. They buried the old patriot like a criminal. Fixed bayonets before and behind his hearse, his own National Guard disarmed, and troops enough to beleaguer a city, were the honors paid by the "citizen king" to the man who had made him! The indignation, the scorn, the bitterness, expressed on every side among the people, and the ill-smothered cries of disgust as the two empty royal carriages went by, in the funeral train, seemed to me strong enough to indicate a settled and universal hostility to the government.

I met Dr. Bowring on the Boulevard after the funeral was over. I had not seen him for two years, but he could talk of nothing but the great event of the day—"You have come in time," he said, "to see how they carried the old general to his grave! What would they say to this in America? Well—let them go on! We shall see what will come of it? They have buried Liberty and Lafayette together—our last hope in Europe is quite dead with him!"

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After three delightful days in Paris we took the northern diligence; and, on the second evening, having passed hastily through Montreuil, Abbeville, Boulogne, and voted the road the dullest couple of hundred miles we had seen in our travels, we were set down in Calais. A stroll through some very indifferent streets, a farewell visit to the last French cafÉ, we were likely to see for a long time, and some unsatisfactory inquiries about Beau Brummel, who is said to live here still, filled up till bedtime our last day on the continent.

The celebrated Countess of Jersey was on board the steamer, and some forty or fifty plebeian stomachs shared with her fashionable ladyship and ourselves the horrors of a passage across the channel. It is rather the most disagreeable sea I ever traversed, though I have seen "the Euxine," "the roughest sea the traveller e'er ——s," etc., according to Don Juan.

I was lying on my back in a berth when the steamer reached her moorings at Dover, and had neither eyes nor disposition to indulge in the proper sentiment on approaching the "white cliffs" of my fatherland. I crawled on deck, and was met by a wind as cold as December, and a crowd of rosy English faces on the pier, wrapped in cloaks and shawls, and indulging curiosity evidently at the expense of a shiver. It was the first of June!

My companion led the way to a hotel, and we were introduced by English waiters (I had not seen such a thing in three years, and it was quite like being waited on by gentlemen), to two blazing coal fires in the "coffee room" of the "Ship." Oh what a comfortable place it appeared! A rich Turkey carpet snugly fitted, nice-rubbed mahogany tables, the morning papers from London, bellropes that would ring the bell, doors that would shut, a landlady that spoke English, and was kind and civil; and, though there were eight or ten people in the room, no noise above the rustle of a newspaper, and positively, rich red damask curtains, neither second-hand nor shabby, to the windows! A greater contrast than this to the things that answer to them on the continent, could scarcely be imagined.

MalgrÉ all my observations on the English, whom I have found elsewhere the most open-hearted and social people in the world, they are said by themselves and others to be just the contrary; and, presuming they were different in England, I had made up my mind to seal my lips in all public places, and be conscious of nobody's existence but my own. There were several elderly persons dining at the different tables; and one party, of a father and son, waited on by their own servants in livery. Candles were brought in, the different cloths were removed; and, as my companion had gone to bed, I took up a newspaper to keep me company over my wine. In the course of an hour, some remark had been addressed to me, provocative of conversation, by almost every individual in the room! The subjects of discussion soon became general, and I have seldom passed a more social and agreeable evening. And so much for the first specimen of English reserve!

The fires were burning brilliantly, and the coffee-room was in the nicest order when we descended to our breakfast at six the next morning. The tea-kettle sung on the hearth, the toast was hot, and done to a turn, and the waiter was neither sleepy nor uncivil—all, again, very unlike a morning at a hotel in la belle France.

The coach rattled up to the door punctually at the hour; and, while they were putting on my way-worn baggage, I stood looking in admiration at the carriage and horses. They were four beautiful bays, in small, neat harness of glazed leather, brass-mounted, their coats shining like a racer's, their small, blood-looking heads curbed up to stand exactly together, and their hoofs blacked and brushed with the polish of a gentleman's boots. The coach was gaudily painted, the only thing out of taste about it; but it was admirably built, the wheel-horses were quite under the coachman's box, and the whole affair, though it would carry twelve or fourteen people, covered less ground than a French one-horse cabriolet. It was altogether quite a study.

We mounted to the top of the coach; "all right," said the ostler, and away shot the four fine creatures, turning their small ears, and stepping together with the ease of a cat, at ten miles in the hour. The driver was dressed like a Broadway idler, and sat in his place, and held his "ribands" and his tandemwhip with a confident air of superiority, as if he were quite convinced that he and his team were beyond criticism—and so they were! I could not but smile at contrasting his silence and the speed and ease with which we went along, with the clumsy, cumbrous diligence or vetturino, and the crying, whipping, cursing and ill-appointed postillions of France and Italy. It seems odd, in a two hours' passage, to pass over such strong lines of national difference—so near, and not even a shading of one into the other.

England is described always very justly, and always in the same words: "it is all one garden." There is not a cottage between Dover and London (seventy miles), where a poet might not be happy to live. I saw a hundred little spots I coveted with quite a heart-ache. There was no poverty on the road. Everybody seemed employed, and everybody well-made and healthy. The relief from the deformity and disease of the wayside beggars of the continent was very striking.

We were at Canterbury before I had time to get accustomed to my seat. The horses had been changed twice; the coach, it seemed to me, hardly stopping while it was done; way-passengers were taken up and put down, with their baggage, without a word, and in half a minute; money was tossed to the keeper of the turnpike gate as we dashed through; the wheels went over the smooth road without noise, and with scarce a sense of motion—it was the perfection of travel.

The new driver from Canterbury rather astonished me. He drove into London every day, and was more of a "swell." He owned the first team himself, four blood horses of great beauty, and it was a sight to see him drive them! His language was free from all slang, and very gentlemanlike and well chosen, and he discussed everything. He found out that I was an American, and said we did not think enough of the memory of Washington. Leaving his bones in the miserable brick tomb, of which he had descriptions, was not, in his opinion, worthy of a country like mine. He went on to criticise Julia Grisi (the new singer just then setting London on fire), hummed airs from "Il Pirati," to show her manner; sang an English song like Braham; gave a decayed Count, who sat on the box, some very sensible advice about the management of a wild son; drew a comparison between French and Italian women (he had travelled); told us who the old Count was in very tolerable French, and preferred Edmund Kean and Fanny Kemble to all actors in the world. His taste and his philosophy, like his driving, were quite unexceptionable. He was, withal, very handsome, and had the easy and respectful manners of a well-bred person. It seemed very odd to give him a shilling at the end of the journey.

At Chatham we took up a very elegantly dressed young man, who had come down on a fishing excursion. He was in the army, and an Irishman. We had not been half an hour on the seat together, before he had discovered, by so many plain questions, that I was an American, a stranger in England, and an acquaintance of a whole regiment of his friends in Malta and Corfu. If this had been a Yankee, thought I, what a chapter it would have made for Basil Hall or Madame Trollope! With all his inquisitiveness I liked my companion, and half accepted his offer to drive me down to Epsom the next day to the races. I know no American who would have beaten that on a stage-coach acquaintance.

LETTER LXVIII.

FIRST VIEW OF LONDON—THE KING'S BIRTHDAY—PROCESSION OF MAIL COACHES—REGENT STREET—LADY BLESSINGTON—THE ORIGINAL PELHAM—BULWER, THE NOVELIST—JOHN GALT—D'ISRAELI, THE AUTHOR OF VIVIAN GREY—RECOLLECTIONS OF BYRON—INFLUENCE OF AMERICAN OPINIONS ON ENGLISH LITERATURE.

London.—From the top of Shooter's Hill we got our first view of London—an indistinct, architectural mass, extending all round to the horizon, and half enveloped in a dim and lurid smoke. "That is St. Paul's!—there is Westminster Abbey!—there is the tower of London!" What directions were these to follow for the first time with the eye!

From Blackheath (seven or eight miles from the centre of London), the beautiful hedges disappeared, and it was one continued mass of buildings. The houses were amazingly small, a kind of thing that would do for an object in an imitation perspective park, but the soul of neatness pervaded them. Trelises were nailed between the little windows, roses quite overshadowed the low doors, a painted fence enclosed the hand's breadth of grass-plot, and very, oh, very sweet faces bent over lapfuls of work beneath the snowy and looped-up curtains. It was all home-like and amiable. There was an affectionateness in the mere outside of every one of them.

After crossing Waterloo Bridge, it was busy work for the eyes. The brilliant shops, the dense crowds of people, the absorbed air of every passenger, the lovely women, the cries, the flying vehicles of every description, passing with the most dangerous speed—accustomed as I am to large cities, it quite made me dizzy. We got into a "jarvey" at the coach-office, and in half an hour I was in comfortable quarters, with windows looking down St. James street, and the most agreeable leaf of my life to turn over. "Great emotions interfere little with the mechanical operations of life," however, and I dressed and dined, though it was my first hour in London.

I was sitting in the little parlor alone over a fried sole and a mutton cutlet, when the waiter came in, and pleading the crowded state of the hotel, asked my permission to spread the other side of the table for a clergyman. I have a kindly preference for the cloth, and made not the slightest objection. Enter a fat man, with top-boots and a hunting-whip, rosy as Bacchus, and excessively out of breath with mounting one flight of stairs. Beefsteak and potatoes, a pot of porter, and a bottle of sherry followed close on his heels. With a single apology for the intrusion, the reverend gentleman fell to, and we ate and drank for a while in true English silence.

"From Oxford, sir, I presume," he said at last, pushing back his plate, with an air of satisfaction.

"No, I had never the pleasure of seeing Oxford."

"R—e—ally! may I take a glass of wine with you, sir?"

We got on swimmingly. He would not believe I had never been in England till the day before, but his cordiality was no colder for that. We exchanged port and sherry, and a most amicable understanding found its way down with the wine. Our table was near the window, and a great crowd began to collect at the corner of St. James' street. It was the king's birth-day, and the people were thronging to see the nobility come in state from the royal levee. The show was less splendid than the same thing in Rome or Vienna, but it excited far more of my admiration. Gaudiness and tinsel were exchanged for plain richness and perfect fitness in the carriages and harness, while the horses were incomparably finer. My friend pointed out to me the different liveries as they turned the corner into Piccadilly, the duke of Wellington's among others. I looked hard to see His Grace; but the two pale and beautiful faces on the back seat, carried nothing like the military nose on the handles of the umbrellas.

The annual procession of mail-coaches followed, and it was hardly less brilliant. The drivers and guard in their bright red and gold uniforms, the admirable horses driven so beautifully, the neat harness, the exactness with which the room of each horse was calculated, and the small space in which he worked, and the compactness and contrivance of the coaches, formed altogether one of the most interesting spectacles I have ever seen. My friend, the clergyman, with whom I had walked out to see them pass, criticised the different teams con amore, but in language which I did not always understand. I asked him once for an explanation; but he looked rather grave, and said something about "gammon," evidently quite sure that my ignorance of London was a mere quiz.

We walked down Piccadilly, and turned into, beyond all comparison, the most handsome street I ever saw. The Toledo of Naples, the Corso of Rome, the Kohl-market of Vienna, the Rue de la Paix and Boulevards of Paris, have each impressed me strongly with their magnificence, but they are really nothing to Regent-street. I had merely time to get a glance at it before dark; but for breadth and convenience, for the elegance and variety of the buildings, though all of the same scale and material, and for the brilliancy and expensiveness of the shops, it seemed to me quite absurd to compare it with anything between New York and Constantinople—Broadway and the Hippodrome included.

It is the custom for the king's tradesmen to illuminate their shops on His Majesty's birth-night, and the principal streets on our return were in a blaze of light. The crowd was immense. None but the lower order seemed abroad, and I cannot describe to you the effect on my feelings on hearing my language spoken by every man, woman, and child, about me. It seemed a completely foreign country in every other respect, different from what I had imagined, different from my own and all that I had seen; and, coming to it last, it seemed to me the farthest off and strangest country of all—and yet the little sweep who went laughing through the crowd, spoke a language that I had heard attempted in vain by thousands of educated people, and that I had grown to consider next to unattainable by others, and almost useless to myself. Still, it did not make me feel at home. Everything else about me was too new. It was like some mysterious change in my own ears—a sudden power of comprehension, such as a man might feel who was cured suddenly of deafness. You can scarcely enter into my feelings till you have had the changes of French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Illyrian, and the mixtures and dialects of each, rung upon your hearing almost exclusively, as I have for years. I wandered about as if I were exercising some supernatural faculty in a dream.

A friend in Italy had kindly given me a letter to Lady Blessington, and with a strong curiosity to see this celebrated lady, I called on the second day after my arrival in London. It was "deep i' the afternoon," but I had not yet learned the full meaning of "town hours." "Her ladyship had not come down to breakfast." I gave the letter and my address to the powdered footman, and had scarce reached home when a note arrived inviting me to call the same evening at ten.

In a long library lined alternately with splendidly bound books and mirrors, and with a deep window of the breadth of the room, opening upon Hyde Park, I found Lady Blessington alone. The picture to my eye as the door opened was a very lovely one. A woman of remarkable beauty half buried in a fauteuil of yellow satin, reading by a magnificent lamp, suspended from the centre of the arched ceiling; sofas, couches, ottomans, and busts, arranged in rather a crowded sumptuousness through the room; enamel tables, covered with expensive and elegant trifles in every corner, and a delicate white hand relieved on the back of a book, to which the eye was attracted by the blaze of its diamond rings. As the servant mentioned my name, she rose and gave me her hand very cordially, and a gentleman entering immediately after, she presented me to her son-in-law, Count D'Orsay, the well-known Pelham of London, and certainly the most splendid specimen of a man, and a well-dressed one that I had ever seen. Tea was brought in immediately, and conversation went swimmingly on.

Her ladyship's inquiries were principally about America, of which, from long absence, I knew very little. She was extremely curious to know the degrees of reputation the present popular authors of England enjoy among us, particularly Bulwer, Galt, and D'Israeli (the author of Vivian Grey.) "If you will come to-morrow night," she said, "you will see Bulwer. I am delighted that he is popular in America. He is envied and abused by all the literary men of London, for nothing, I believe, except that he gets five hundred pounds for his books and they fifty, and knowing this, he chooses to assume a pride (some people call it puppyism), which is only the armor of a sensitive mind, afraid of a wound. He is to his friends, the most frank and gay creature in the world, and open to boyishness with those who he thinks understand and value him. He has a brother Henry, who is as clever as himself in a different vein, and is just now publishing a book on the present state of France. Bulwer's wife, you know, is one of the most beautiful women in London, and his house is the resort of both fashion and talent. He is just now hard at work on a new book, the subject of which is the last days of Pompeii. The hero is a Roman dandy, who wastes himself in luxury, till this great catastrophe rouses him and develops a character of the noblest capabilities. Is Galt much liked?"

I answered to the best of my knowledge that he was not. His life of Byron was a stab at the dead body of the noble poet, which, for one, I never could forgive, and his books were clever, but vulgar. He was evidently not a gentleman in his mind. This was the opinion I had formed in America, and I had never heard another.

"I am sorry for it," said Lady B., "for he is the dearest and best old man in the world. I know him well. He is just on the verge of the grave, but comes to see me now and then, and if you had known how shockingly Byron treated him, you would only wonder at his sparing his memory so much."

"Nil mortuis nisi bonum," I thought would have been a better course. If he had reason to dislike him, he had better not have written since he was dead.

"Perhaps—perhaps. But Galt has been all his life miserably poor, and lived by his books. That must be his apology. Do you know the D'Israeli's in America?"

I assured her ladyship that the "Curiosities of Literature," by the father, and "Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming," by the son, were universally known.

"I am pleased at that, too, for I like them both. D'Israeli the elder, came here with his son the other night. It would have delighted you to see the old man's pride in him. He is very fond of him, and as he was going away, he patted him on the head, and said to me, "take care of him, Lady Blessington, for my sake. He is a clever lad, but he wants ballast. I am glad he has the honor to know you, for you will check him sometimes when I am away!" D'Israeli, the elder, lives in the country, about twenty miles from town, and seldom comes up to London. He is a very plain old man in his manners, as plain as his son is the reverse. D'Israeli, the younger, is quite his own character of Vivian Grey crowded with talent, but very soignÈ of his curls, and a bit of a coxcomb. There is no reserve about him, however, and he is the only joyous dandy I ever saw."

I asked if the account I had seen in some American paper of a literary celebration at Canandaigua, and the engraving of her ladyship's name with some others upon a rock, was not a quiz.

"Oh, by no means. I was equally flattered and amused by the whole affair. I have a great idea of taking a trip to America to see it. Then the letter, commencing 'Most charming Countess—for charming you must be since you have written the conversations of Lord Byron'—oh, it was quite delightful. I have shown it to everybody. By the way, I receive a great many letters from America, from people I never heard of, written in the most extraordinary style of compliment, apparently in perfectly good faith. I hardly know what to make of them."

I accounted for it by the perfect seclusion in which great numbers of cultivated people live in our country, who having neither intrigue, nor fashion, nor twenty other things to occupy their minds as in England, depend entirely upon books, and consider an author who has given them pleasure as a friend. America, I said, has probably more literary enthusiasts than any country in the world; and there are thousands of romantic minds in the interior of New England, who know perfectly every writer this side the water, and hold them all in affectionate veneration, scarcely conceivable by a sophisticated European. If it were not for such readers, literature would be the most thankless of vocations. I, for one, would never write another line.

"And do you think these are the people who write to me? If I could think so, I should be exceedingly happy. People in England are refined down to such heartlessness—criticism, private and public, is so interested and so cold, that it is really delightful to know there is a more generous tribunal. Indeed, I think all our authors now are beginning to write for America. We think already a great deal of your praise or censure."

I asked if her ladyship had known many Americans.

"Not in London, but a great many abroad. I was with Lord Blessington in his yacht at Naples, when the American fleet was lying there, eight or ten years ago, and we were constantly on board your ships. I knew Commodore Creighton and Captain Deacon extremely well, and liked them particularly. They were with us, either on board the yacht or the frigate every evening, and I remember very well the band playing always, "God save the King," as we went up the side. Count d'Orsay here, who spoke very little English at that time, had a great passion for Yankee Doodle, and it was always played at his request."

The Count, who still speaks the language with a very slight accent, but with a choice of words that shows him to be a man of uncommon tact and elegance of mind, inquired after several of the officers, whom I have not the pleasure of knowing. He seemed to remember his visits to the frigate with great pleasure. The conversation, after running upon a variety of topics, which I could not with propriety put into a letter for the public eye, turned very naturally upon Byron. I had frequently seen the Countess Guiccioli on the Continent, and I asked Lady Blessington if she knew her.

"No. We were at Pisa when they were living together, but, though Lord Blessington had the greatest curiosity to see her, Byron would never permit it. 'She has a red head of her own,' said he, 'and don't like to show it.' Byron treated the poor creature dreadfully ill. She feared more than she loved him."

She had told me the same thing herself in Italy.

It would be impossible, of course, to make a full and fair record of a conversation of some hours. I have only noted one or two topics which I thought most likely to interest an American reader. During all this long visit, however, my eyes were very busy in finishing for memory, a portrait of the celebrated and beautiful woman before me.

The portrait of Lady Blessington in the Book of Beauty is not unlike her, but it is still an unfavorable likeness. A picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence hung opposite me, taken, perhaps, at the age of eighteen, which is more like her, and as captivating a representation of a just matured woman, full of loveliness and love, the kind of creature with whose divine sweetness the gazer's heart aches, as ever was drawn in the painter's most inspired hour. The original is now (she confessed it very frankly) forty. She looks something on the sunny side of thirty. Her person is full, but preserves all the fineness of an admirable shape; her foot is not crowded in a satin slipper, for which a Cinderella might long be looked for in vain, and her complexion (an unusually fair skin, with very dark hair and eyebrows), is of even a girlish delicacy and freshness. Her dress of blue satin (if I am describing her like a milliner, it is because I have here and there a reader of the Mirror in my eye who will be amused by it), was cut low and folded across her bosom, in a way to show to advantage the round and sculpture-like curve and whiteness of a pair of exquisite shoulders, while her hair dressed close to her head, and parted simply on her forehead with a rich ferroniere of turquoise, enveloped in clear outline a head with which it would be difficult to find a fault. Her features are regular, and her mouth, the most expressive of them, has a ripe fulness and freedom of play, peculiar to the Irish physiognomy, and expressive of the most unsuspicious good humor. Add to all this a voice merry and sad by turns, but always musical, and manners of the most unpretending elegance, yet even more remarkable for their winning kindness, and you have the most prominent traits of one of the most lovely and fascinating women I have ever seen. Remembering her talents and her rank, and the unenvying admiration she receives from the world of fashion and genius, it would be difficult to reconcile her lot to the "doctrine of compensation."

There is one remark I may as well make here, with regard to the personal descriptions and anecdotes with which my letters from England will of course be filled. It is quite a different thing from publishing such letters in London. America is much farther off from England than England from America. You in New York read the periodicals of this country, and know everything that is done or written here, as if you lived within the sound of Bow-bell. The English, however, just know of our existence, and if they get a general idea twice a year of our progress in politics, they are comparatively well informed. Our periodical literature is never even heard of. Of course there can be no offence to the individuals themselves in anything which a visitor could write, calculated to convey an idea of the person or manners of distinguished people to the American public. I mention it lest, at first thought, I might seem to have abused the hospitality or frankness of those on whom letters of introduction have given me claims for civility.

THE LITERATI OF LONDON.

Spent my first day in London in wandering about the finest part of the West End. It is nonsense to compare it to any other city in the world. From the Horse-Guards to the Regent's Park alone, there is more magnificence in architecture than in the whole of any other metropolis in Europe, and I have seen the most and the best of them. Yet this, though a walk of more than two miles, is but a small part even of the fashionable extremity of London. I am not easily tired in a city; but I walked till I could scarce lift my feet from the ground, and still the parks and noble streets extended before and around me as far as the eye could reach, and strange as they were in reality, the names were as familiar to me as if my childhood had been passed among them. "Bond Street," "Grosvenor Square," "Hyde Park," look new to my eye, but they sound very familiar to my ear.

The equipages of London are much talked of, but they exceed even description. Nothing can be more perfect, or apparently more simple than the gentleman's carriage that passes you in the street. Of a modest color, but the finest material, the crest just visible on the panels, the balance of the body upon its springs, true and easy, the hammercloth and liveries of the neatest and most harmonious colors, the harness slight and elegant, and the horses "the only splendid thing" in the establishment—is a description that answers the most of them. Perhaps the most perfect thing in the world, however, is a St. James's-street stanhope or cabriolet, with its dandy owner on the whip-seat, and the "tiger" beside him. The attitudes of both the gentleman and the "gentleman's gentleman" are studied to a point, but nothing could be more knowing or exquisite than either. The whole affair, from the angle of the bell-crowned hat (the prevailing fashion on the steps of Crockford's at present), to the blood legs of the thorough-bred creature in harness, is absolutely faultless. I have seen many subjects for study in my first day's stroll, but I leave the men and women and some other less important features of London for maturer observation.

In the evening I kept my appointment with Lady Blessington. She had deserted her exquisite library for the drawing-room, and sat, in fuller dress, with six or seven gentlemen about her. I was presented immediately to all, and when the conversation was resumed, I took the opportunity to remark the distinguished coterie with which she was surrounded.

Nearest me sat Smith, the author of "Rejected Addresses"—a hale, handsome man, apparently fifty, with white hair, and a very nobly-formed head and physiognomy. His eye alone, small and with lids contracted into an habitual look of drollery, betrayed the bent of his genius. He held a cripple's crutch in his hand, and though otherwise rather particularly well dressed, wore a pair of large India rubber shoes—the penalty he was paying, doubtless, for the many good dinners he had eaten. He played rather an aside in the conversation, whipping in with a quiz or a witticism whenever he could get an opportunity, but more a listener than a talker.

On the opposite side of Lady B. stood Henry Bulwer, the brother of the novelist, very earnestly engaged in a discussion of some speech of O'Connell's. He is said by many to be as talented as his brother, and has lately published a book on the present state of France. He is a small man, very slight and gentleman-like, a little pitted with the small-pox, and of very winning and persuasive manners. I liked him at the first glance.

His opponent in the argument was Fonblanc, the famous editor of the Examiner, said to be the best political writer of his day. I never saw a much worse face—sallow, seamed and hollow, his teeth irregular, his skin livid, his straight black hair uncombed and straggling over his forehead—he looked as if he might be the gentleman

Whose "coat was red, and whose breeches were blue."

A hollow, croaking voice, and a small, fiery black eye, with a smile like a skeleton's, certainly did not improve his physiognomy. He sat upon his chair very awkwardly, and was very ill-dressed, but every word he uttered, showed him to be a man of claims very superior to exterior attractions. The soft musical voice, and elegant manner of the one, and the satirical, sneering tone and angular gestures of the other, were in very strong contrast.

A German prince, with a star on his breast, trying with all his might, but, from his embarrassed look, quite unsuccessfully, to comprehend the drift of the argument, the Duke de Richelieu, whom I had seen at the court of France, the inheritor of nothing but the name of his great ancestor, a dandy and a fool, making no attempt to listen, a famous traveller just returned from Constantinople; and the splendid person of Count D'Orsay in a careless attitude upon the ottoman, completed the cordon.

I fell into conversation after a while with Smith, who, supposing I might not have heard the names of the others, in the hurry of an introduction, kindly took the trouble to play the dictionary, and added a graphic character of each as he named him. Among other things he talked a great deal of America, and asked me if I knew our distinguished countryman, Washington Irving. I had never been so fortunate as to meet him. "You have lost a great deal," he said, "for never was so delightful a fellow. I was once taken down with him into the country by a merchant, to dinner. Our friend stopped his carriage at the gate of his park, and asked us if we would walk through his grounds to the house. Irving refused and held me down by the coat, so that we drove on to the house together, leaving our host to follow on foot. 'I make it a principle,' said Irving, 'never to walk with a man through his own grounds. I have no idea of praising a thing whether I like it or not. You and I will do them to-morrow morning by ourselves.'" The rest of the company had turned their attention to Smith as he began his story, and there was a universal inquiry after Mr. Irving. Indeed the first question on the lips of every one to whom I am introduced as an American, are of him and Cooper. The latter seems to me to be admired as much here as abroad, in spite of a common impression that he dislikes the nation. No man's works could have higher praise in the general conversation that followed, though several instances were mentioned of his having shown an unconquerable aversion to the English when in England. Lady Blessington mentioned Mr. Bryant, and I was pleased at the immediate tribute paid to his delightful poetry by the talented circle around her.

Toward twelve o'clock, "Mr. Lytton Bulwer" was announced, and enter the author of Pelham. I had made up my mind how he should look, and between prints and descriptions thought I could scarcely be mistaken in my idea of his person. No two things could be more unlike, however, than the ideal Mr. Bulwer in my mind and the real Mr. Bulwer who followed the announcement. Imprimis, the gentleman who entered was not handsome. I beg pardon of the boarding-schools—but he really was not. The engraving of him published some time ago in America is as much like any other man living, and gives you no idea of his head whatever. He is short, very much bent in the back, slightly knock-kneed, and, if my opinion in such matters goes for anything, as ill-dressed a man for a gentleman, as you will find in London. His figure is slight and very badly put together, and the only commendable point in his person, as far as I could see, was the smallest foot I ever saw a man stand upon. Au reste, I liked his manners extremely. He ran up to Lady Blessington, with the joyous heartiness of a boy let out of school; and the "how d'ye, Bulwer!" went round, as he shook hands with everybody, in the style of welcome usually given to "the best fellow in the world." As I had brought a letter of introduction to him from a friend in Italy, Lady Blessington introduced me particularly, and we had a long conversation about Naples and its pleasant society.

Bulwer's head is phrenologically a fine one. His forehead retreats very much, but is very broad and well marked, and the whole air is that of decided mental superiority. His nose is aquiline, and far too large for proportion, though he conceals its extreme prominence by an immense pair of red whiskers, which entirely conceal the lower part of his face in profile. His complexion is fair, his hair profuse, curly, and of a light auburn, his eye not remarkable, and his mouth contradictory, I should think, of all talent. A more good-natured, habitually-smiling, nerveless expression could hardly be imagined. Perhaps my impression is an imperfect one, as he was in the highest spirits, and was not serious the whole evening for a minute—but it is strictly and faithfully my impression.

I can imagine no style of conversation calculated to be more agreeable than Bulwer's. Gay, quick, various, half-satirical, and always fresh and different from everybody else, he seemed to talk because he could not help it, and infected everybody with his spirits. I can not give even the substance of it in a letter, for it was in a great measure local or personal. A great deal of fun was made of a proposal by Lady Blessington to take Bulwer to America and show him at so much a head. She asked me whether I thought it would be a good speculation. I took upon myself to assure her ladyship, that, provided she played showman the "concern," as they would phrase it in America, would be certainly a profitable one. Bulwer said he would rather go in disguise and hear them abuse his books. It would be pleasant, he thought, to hear the opinions of people who judged him neither as a member of parliament nor a dandy—simply a book-maker. Smith asked him if he kept an amanuensis. "No," he said, "I scribble it all out myself, and send it to the press in a most ungentlemanlike hand, half print and half hieroglyphic, with all its imperfections on its head, and correct in the proof—very much to the dissatisfaction of the publisher, who sends me in a bill of sixteen pounds six shillings and fourpence for extra corrections. Then I am free to confess I don't know grammar. Lady Blessington, do you know grammar? I detest grammar. There never was such a thing heard of before Lindley Murray. I wonder what they did for grammar before his day! Oh, the delicious blunders one sees when they are irretrievable! And the best of it is, the critics never get hold of them. Thank Heaven for second editions, that one may scratch out his blots, and go down clean and gentleman-like to posterity!" Smith asked him if he had ever reviewed one of his own books. "No—but I could! And then how I should like to recriminate and defend myself indignantly! I think I could be preciously severe. Depend upon it nobody knows a book's defects half so well as its author. I have a great idea of criticising my works for my posthumous memoirs. Shall I, Smith? Shall I, Lady Blessington?"

Bulwer's voice, like his brother's, is exceedingly lover-like and sweet. His playful tones are quite delicious, and his clear laugh is the soul of sincere and careless merriment.

It is quite impossible to convey in a letter scrawled literally, between the end of a late visit and a tempting pillow, the evanescent and pure spirit of a conversation of wits. I must confine myself, of course, in such sketches, to the mere sentiment of things that concern general literature and ourselves.

"The Rejected Addresses" got upon his crutches about three o'clock in the morning, and I made my exit with the rest, thanking Heaven, that, though in a strange country, my mother tongue was the language of its men of genius.

LETTER LXX.

LONDON—VISIT TO A RACE-COURSE—GIPSIES—THE PRINCESS VICTORIA—SPLENDID APPEARANCE OF THE ENGLISH NOBILITY—A BREAKFAST WITH ELIA AND BRIDGET ELIA—MYSTIFICATION—CHARLES LAMB'S OPINION OF AMERICAN AUTHORS.

I have just returned from Ascot races. Ascot Heath, on which the course is laid out, is a high platform of land, beautifully situated on a hill above Windsor Castle, about twenty-five miles from London. I went down with a party of gentlemen in the morning and returned at evening, doing the distance, with relays of horses in something less than three hours. This, one would think, is very fair speed, but we were passed continually by the "bloods" of the road, in comparison with whom we seemed getting on rather at a snail's pace.

The scenery on the way was truly English—one series of finished landscapes, of every variety of combination. Lawns, fancy-cottages, manor-houses, groves, roses and flower-gardens make up England. It surfeits the eye at last. You could not drop a poet out of the clouds upon any part of it I have seen, where, within five minutes' walk, he would not find himself in Paradise.

We flew past Virginia Water and through the sun-flecked shades of Windsor Park, with the speed of the wind. On reaching the Heath, we dashed out of the road, and cutting through fern and brier, our experienced whip put his wheels on the rim of the course, as near the stands as some thousands of carriages arrived before us would permit, and then, cautioning us to take the bearings of our position, lest we should lose him after the race, he took off his horses, and left us to choose our own places.

A thousand red and yellow flags were flying from as many snowy tents in the midst of the green heath; ballad-singers and bands of music were amusing their little audiences in every direction; splendid markees covering gambling-tables, surrounded the winning-post; groups of country people were busy in every bush, eating and singing, and the great stands were piled with row upon row of human heads waiting anxiously for the exhilarating contest.

Soon after we arrived, the King and royal family drove up the course with twenty carriages, and scores of postillions and outriders in red and gold, flying over the turf as majesty flies in no other country; and, immediately after, the bell rang to clear the course for the race. Such horses! The earth seemed to fling them off as they touched it. The lean jockeys, in their party-colored caps and jackets, rode the fine-limbed, slender creatures up and down together, and then returning to the starting-post, off they shot like so many arrows from the bow.

Whiz! you could tell neither color nor shape as they passed across the eye. Their swiftness was incredible. A horse of Lord Chesterfield's was rather the favorite; and for the sake of his great-grandfather, I had backed him with my small wager, "Glaucus is losing," said some one on the top of a carriage above me, but round they swept again, and I could just see that one glorious creature was doubling the leaps of every other horse, and in a moment Glaucus and Lord Chesterfield had won.

The course between the races is a promenade of some thousands of the best-dressed people in England. I thought I had never seen so many handsome men and women, but particularly men. The nobility of this country, unlike every other, is by far the manliest and finest looking class of its population. The contadini of Rome, the lazzaroni of Naples, the paysans of France, are incomparably more handsome than their superiors in rank, but it is strikingly different here. A set of more elegant and well-proportioned men than those pointed out to me by my friends as the noblemen on the course, I never saw, except only in Greece. The Albanians are seraphs to look at.

Excitement is hungry, and, after the first race, our party produced their baskets and bottles, and spreading out the cold pie and champaign upon the grass, between the wheels of the carriages, we drank Lord Chesterfield's health and ate for our own, in an al fresco style worthy of Italy. Two veritable Bohemians, brown, black-eyed gipsies, the models of those I had seen in their wicker tents in Asia, profited by the liberality of the hour, and came in for an upper crust to a pigeon pie, that, to tell the truth, they seemed to appreciate.

Race followed race, but I am not a contributor to the Sporting Magazine, and could not give you their merits in comprehensible terms if I were.

In one of the intervals, I walked under the King's stand, and saw Her Majesty, the Queen, and the young Princess Victoria, very distinctly. They were listening to a ballad-singer, and leaning over the front of the box with an amused attention, quite as sincere, apparently, as any beggar's in the ring. The Queen is the plainest woman in her dominions, beyond a doubt. The Princess is much better-looking than the pictures of her in the shops, and, for the heir to such a crown as that of England, quite unnecessarily pretty and interesting. She will be sold, poor thing—bartered away by those great dealers in royal hearts, whose grand calculations will not be much consolation to her, if she happens to have a taste of her own.

---

[The following sketch was written a short time previous to the death of Charles Lamb.]

LETTER LXXI.

DINNER AT LADY BLESSINGTON'S—BULWER, D'ISRAELI, PROCTER, FONBLANC, ETC.—ECCENTRICITIES OF BECKFORD, AUTHOR OF VATHEK—D'ISRAELI'S EXTRAORDINARY TALENT AT DESCRIPTION.

Dined at Lady Blessington's, in company with several authors, three or four noblemen, and a clever exquisite or two. The authors were Bulwer, the novelist, and his brother, the statist; Procter (better known as Barry Cornwall), D'Israeli, the author of Vivian Grey; and Fonblanc, of the Examiner. The principal nobleman was Lord Durham, and the principal exquisite (though the word scarce applies to the magnificent scale on which nature has made him, and on which he makes himself), was Count D'Orsay. There were plates for twelve.

I had never seen Procter, and, with my passionate love for his poetry, he was the person at table of the most interest to me. He came late, and as twilight was just darkening the drawing-room, I could only see that a small man followed the announcement, with a remarkably timid manner, and a very white forehead.

D'Israeli had arrived before me, and sat in the deep window, looking out upon Hyde Park, with the last rays of daylight reflected from the gorgeous gold flowers of a splendidly embroidered waistcoat. Patent leather pumps, a white stick, with a black cord and tassel, and a quantity of chains about his neck and pockets, served to make him, even in the dim light, rather a conspicuous object.

Bulwer was very badly dressed, as usual, and wore a flashy waistcoat of the same description as D'Israeli's. Count D'Orsay was very splendid, but very undefinable. He seemed showily dressed till you looked to particulars, and then it seemed only a simple thing, well fitted to a very magnificent person. Lord Albert Conyngham was a dandy of common materials; and my Lord Durham, though he looked a young man, if he passed for a lord at all in America, would pass for a very ill-dressed one.

For Lady Blessington, she is one of the most handsome, and, quite the best-dressed woman in London; and, without farther description, I trust the readers of the Mirror will have little difficulty in imagining a scene that, taking a wild American into the account, was made up of rather various material.

The blaze of lamps on the dinner table was very favorable to my curiosity, and as Procter and D'Israeli sat directly opposite me, I studied their faces to advantage. Barry Cornwall's forehead and eye are all that would strike you in his features. His brows are heavy; and his eye, deeply sunk, has a quick, restless fire, that would have arrested my attention, I think, had I not known he was a poet. His voice has the huskiness and elevation of a man more accustomed to think than converse, and it was never heard except to give a brief and very condensed opinion, or an illustration, admirably to the point, of the subject under discussion. He evidently felt that he was only an observer in the party.

D'Israeli has one of the most remarkable faces I ever saw. He is lividly pale, and but for the energy of his action and the strength of his lungs, would seem a victim to consumption. His eye is black as Erebus, and has the most mocking and lying-in-wait sort of expression conceivable. His mouth is alive with a kind of working and impatient nervousness, and when he has burst forth, as he does constantly, with a particularly successful cataract of expression, it assumes a curl of triumphant scorn that would be worthy of a Mephistopheles. His hair is as extraordinary as his taste in waistcoats. A thick heavy mass of jet black ringlets falls over his left cheek almost to his collarless stock, while on the right temple it is parted and put away with the smooth carefulness of a girl's, and shines most unctiously,

"With thy incomparable oil, Macassar!"

The anxieties of the first course, as usual, kept every mouth occupied for a while, and then the dandies led off with a discussion of Count D'Orsay's rifle match (he is the best rifle-shot in England), and various matters as uninteresting to transatlantic readers. The new poem, Philip Van Artevald's, came up after a while, and was very much over-praised (me judice). Bulwer said, that as the author was the principle writer for the Quarterly Review, it was a pity it was first praised in that periodical, and praised so unqualifiedly. Procter said nothing about it, and I respected his silence; for, as a poet, he must have felt the poverty of the poem, and was probably unwilling to attack a new aspirant in his laurels.

The next book discussed was Beckford's Italy, or rather the next author, for the writer of Vathek is more original, and more talked of than his books, and just now occupies much of the attention of London. Mr. Beckford has been all his life enormously rich, has luxuriated in every country with the fancy of a poet, and the refined splendor of a Sybarite, was the admiration of Lord Byron, who visited him at Cintra, was the owner of Fonthill, and, plus fort encore, his is one of the oldest families in England. What could such a man attempt that would not be considered extraordinary!

D'Israeli was the only one at table who knew him, and the style in which he gave a sketch of his habits and manners, was worthy of himself. I might as well attempt to gather up the foam of the sea, as to convey an idea of the extraordinary language in which he clothed his description. There were, at least, five words in every sentence that must have been very much astonished at the use they were put to, and yet no others apparently, could so well have conveyed his idea. He talked like a race-horse approaching the winning-post, every muscle in action, and the utmost energy of expression flung out in every burst. It is a great pity he is not in parliament.[11]

The particulars he gave of Beckford, though stripped of his gorgeous digressions and parentheses, may be interesting. He lives now at Bath, where he has built a house on two sides of the street, connected by a covered bridge a la Ponte de Sospiri, at Venice. His servants live on one side, and he and his sole companion on the other. This companion is a hideous dwarf, who imagines himself, or is, a Spanish duke; and Mr. Beckford for many years has supported him in a style befitting his rank, treats him with all the deference due to his title, and has, in general, no other society (I should not wonder, myself, if it turned out to be a woman); neither of them is often seen, and when in London, Mr. Beckford is only to be approached through his man of business. If you call, he is not at home. If you would leave a card or address him a note, his servant has strict orders not to take in anything of the kind. At Bath, he has built a high tower, which is a great mystery to the inhabitants. Around the interior, to the very top, it is lined with books, approachable with a light spiral staircase; and in the pavement below, the owner has constructed a double crypt for his own body, and that of his dwarf companion, intending, with a desire for human neighborhood which has not appeared in his life, to leave the library to the city, that all who enjoy it shall pass over the bodies below.

Mr. Beckford thinks very highly of his own books, and talks of his early production (Vathek), in terms of unbounded admiration. He speaks slightingly of Byron, and of his praise, and affects to despise utterly the popular taste. It appeared altogether, from D'Israeli's account, that he is a splendid egotist, determined to free life as much as possible from its usual fetters, and to enjoy it to the highest degree of which his genius, backed by an immense fortune, is capable. He is reputed, however, to be excessively liberal, and to exercise his ingenuity to contrive secret charities in his neighborhood.

Victor Hugo and his extraordinary novels came next under discussion; and D'Israeli, who was fired with his own eloquence, started off, apropos des bottes, with a long story of an empalement he had seen in Upper Egypt. It was as good, and perhaps as authentic, as the description of the chow-chow-tow in Vivian Grey. He had arrived at Cairo on the third day after the man was transfixed by two stakes from hip to shoulder, and he was still alive! The circumstantiality of the account was equally horrible and amusing. Then followed the sufferer's history, with a score of murders and barbarities, heaped together like Martin's Feast of Belshazzer, with a mixture of horror and splendor, that was unparalleled in my experience of improvisation. No mystic priest of the Corybantes could have worked himself up into a finer phrensy of language.

Count D'Orsay kept up, through the whole of the conversation and narration, a running fire of witty parentheses, half French and half English; and with champaign in all the pauses, the hours flew on very dashingly. Lady Blessington left us toward midnight, and then the conversation took a rather political turn, and something was said of O'Connell. D'Israeli's lips were playing upon the edge of a champaign glass, which he had just drained, and off he shot again with a description of an interview he had had with the agitator the day before, ending in a story of an Irish dragoon who was killed in the peninsula. His name was Sarsfield. His arm was shot off, and he was bleeding to death. When told that he could not live, he called for a large silver goblet, out of which he usually drank his claret. He held it to the gushing artery and filled it to the brim with blood, looked at it a moment, turned it out slowly upon the ground, muttering to himself, "If that had been shed for old Ireland!" and expired. You can have no idea how thrillingly this little story was told. Fonblanc, however, who is a cold political satirist, could see nothing in a man's "decanting his claret," that was in the least sublime, and so Vivian Grey got into a passion, and for a while was silent.

Bulwer asked me if there was any distinguished literary American in town. I said, Mr. Slidell one of our best writers, was here.

"Because," said he, "I received, a week or more ago, a letter of introduction by some one from Washington Irving. It lay on the table, when a lady came in to call on my wife, who seized upon it as an autograph, and immediately left town, leaving me with neither name nor address."

There was a general laugh and a cry of "Pelham! Pelham!" as he finished his story. Nobody chose to believe it.

"I think the name was Slidell," said Bulwer.

"Slidell!" said D'Israeli, "I owe him two-pence, by Jove!" and he went on in his dashing way to narrate that he had sat next Mr. Slidell at a bull-fight in Seville, that he wanted to buy a fan to keep off the flies, and having nothing but doubloons in his pocket, Mr. S. had lent him a small Spanish coin to that value, which he owed him to this day.

There was another general laugh, and it was agreed that on the whole the Americans were "done."

Apropos to this, D'Israeli gave us a description in a gorgeous, burlesque, galloping style, of a Spanish bull-fight; and when we were nearly dead with laughing at it, some one made a move, and we went up to Lady Blessington in the drawing-room. Lord Durham requested her ladyship to introduce him, particularly, to D'Israeli (the effect of his eloquence). I sat down in the corner with Sir Martin Shee, the president of the Royal Academy, and had a long talk about Allston and Harding and Cole, whose pictures he knew; and "somewhere in the small hours," we took our leave, and Procter left me at my door in Cavendish street weary, but in a better humor with the world than usual.

LETTER LXXII.

THE ITALIAN OPERA—MADEMOISELLE GRISI—A GLANCE AT LORD BROUGHAM—MRS. NORTON AND LORD SEFTON—RAND, THE AMERICAN PORTRAIT PAINTER—AN EVENING PARTY AT BULWER'S—PALMY STATE OF LITERATURE IN MODERN DAYS—FASHIONABLE NEGLECT OF FEMALES—PERSONAGES PRESENT—SHIEL THE ORATOR, THE PRINCE OF MOSCOWA, MRS. LEICESTER STANHOPE, THE CELEBRATED BEAUTY, ETC., ETC.

Went to the opera to hear Julia Grisi. I stood out the first act in the pit, and saw instances of rudeness in "Fop's-alley," which I had never seen approached in three years on the continent. The high price of tickets, one would think, and the necessity of appearing in full dress, would keep the opera clear of low-bred people; but the conduct to which I refer seemed to excite no surprise and passed off without notice, though, in America, there would have been ample matter for at least, four duels.

Grisi is young, very pretty, and an admirable actress—three great advantages to a singer. Her voice is under absolute command, and she manages it beautifully, but it wants the infusion of Malibran. You merely feel that Grisi is an accomplished artist, while Malibran melts all your criticism into love and admiration. I am easily moved by music, but I came away without much enthusiasm for the present passion of London.

The opera-house is very different from those on the continent. The stage only is lighted abroad, the single lustre from the ceiling just throwing that clair obscure over the boxes, so favorable to Italian complexions and morals. Here, the dress circles are lighted with bright chandeliers, and the whole house sits in such a blaze of light as leaves no approach even, to a lady, unseen. The consequence is that people here dress much more, and the opera, if less interesting to the habituÉ, is a gayer thing to the many.

I went up to Lady Blessington's box for a moment, and found Strangways, the traveller, and several other distinguished men with her. Her ladyship pointed out to me Lord Brougham, flirting desperately with a pretty woman on the opposite side of the house, his mouth going with the convulsive twitch which so disfigures him, and his most unsightly of pug-noses in the strongest relief against the red lining behind. There never was a plainer man. The Honorable Mrs. Norton, Sheridan's daughter, and poetess, sat nearer to us, looking like a queen, certainly one of the most beautiful women I ever looked upon; and the gastronomic and humpbacked Lord Sefton, said to be the best judge of cookery in the world, sat in the "dandy's omnibus," a large box on a level with the stage, leaning forward with his chin on his knuckles, and waiting with evident impatience for the appearance of Fanny Elssler in the ballet. Beauty and all, the English opera-house surpasses anything I have seen in the way of a spectacle.

An evening party at Bulwer's. Not yet perfectly initiated in London hours, I arrived, not far from eleven, and found Mrs. Bulwer alone in her illuminated rooms, whiling away an expectant hour in playing with a King Charles spaniel, that seemed by his fondness and delight to appreciate the excessive loveliness of his mistress. As far off as America, I may express, even in print, an admiration which is no heresy in London.

The author of Pelham is a younger son and depends on his writings for a livelihood, and truly, measuring works of fancy by what they will bring, (not an unfair standard perhaps), a glance around his luxurious and elegant rooms is worth reams of puff in the quarterlies. He lives in the heart of the fashionable quarter of London, where rents are ruinously extravagant, entertains a great deal, and is expensive in all his habits, and for this pay Messrs. Clifford, Pelham, and Aram—(it would seem), most excellent good bankers. As I looked at the beautiful woman seated on the costly ottoman before me, waiting to receive the rank and fashion of London, I thought that old close-fisted literature never had better reason for his partial largess. I half forgave the miser for starving a wilderness of poets.

One of the first persons who came was Lord Byron's sister, a thin, plain, middle-aged woman, of a very serious countenance, and with very cordial and pleasing manners. The rooms soon filled, and two professed singers went industriously to work in their vocation at the piano; but, except one pale man, with staring hair, whom I took to be a poet, nobody pretended to listen.

Every second woman has some strong claim to beauty in England, and the proportion of those who just miss it, by a hair's breadth as it were—who seem really to have been meant for beauties by nature, but by a slip in the moulding or pencilling are imperfect copies of the design—is really extraordinary. One after another entered, as I stood near the door with my old friend Dr. Bowring for a nomenclator, and the word "lovely" or "charming," had not passed my lips before some change in the attitude, or unguarded animation had exposed the flaw, and the hasty homage (for homage it is, and an idolatrous one, that we pay to the beauty of woman), was coldly and unsparingly retracted. From a goddess upon earth to a slighted and unattractive trap for matrimony is a long step, but taken on so slight a defect sometimes, as, were they marble, a sculptor would etch away with his nail.

I was surprised (and I have been struck with the same thing at several parties I have attended in London), at the neglect with which the female part of the assemblage is treated. No young man ever seems to dream of speaking to a lady, except to ask her to dance. There they sit with their mamas, their hands hung over each other before them in the received attitude; and if there happens to be no dancing (as at Bulwer's), looking at a print, or eating an ice, is for them the most enlivening circumstance of the evening. As well as I recollect, it is better managed in America, and certainly society is quite another thing in France and Italy. Late in the evening a charming girl, who is the reigning belle of Naples, came in with her mother from the opera, and I made the remark to her. "I detest England for that very reason," she said frankly. "It is the fashion in London for the young men to prefer everything to the society of women. They have their clubs, their horses, their rowing matches, their hunting and betting, and everything else is a bore! How different are the same men at Naples! They can never get enough of one there! We are surrounded and run after,

"and really, one feels that one is a belle." She mentioned several of the beaux of last winter who had returned to England. "Here I have been in London a month, and these very men that were dying for me, at my side every day on the Strada Nuova, and all but fighting to dance three times with me of an evening, have only left their cards! Not because they care less about me, but because it is 'not the fashion'—it would be talked of at the club, it is 'knowing' to let us alone."

There were only three men in the party, which was a very crowded one, who could come under the head of beaux. Of the remaining part, there was much that was distinguished, both for rank and talent. Sheil, the Irish orator, a small, dark, deceitful, but talented-looking man, with a very disagreeable squeaking voice, stood in a corner, very earnestly engaged in conversation with the aristocratic old Earl of Clarendon. The contrast between the styles of the two men, the courtly and mild elegance of one, and the uneasy and half-bred, but shrewd earnestness of the other, was quite a study. Fonblanc of the Examiner, with his pale and dislocated-looking face, stood in the door-way between the two rooms, making the amiable with a ghastly smile to Lady Stepney. The 'bilious Lord Durham,' as the papers call him, with his Brutus head, and grave, severe countenance, high-bred in his appearance, despite the worst possible coat and trowsers, stood at the pedestal of a beautiful statue, talking politics with Bowring; and near them, leaned over a chair the Prince Moscowa, the son of Marshal Ney, a plain, but determined-looking young man, with his coat buttoned up to his throat, unconscious of everything but the presence of the Honorable Mrs. Leicester Stanhope, a very lovely woman, who was enlightening him in the prettiest English French, upon some point of national differences. Her husband, famous as Lord Byron's companion in Greece, and a great liberal in England, was introduced to me soon after by Bulwer; and we discussed the Bank and the President, with a little assistance from Bowring, who joined us with a paean for the old general and his measures, till it was far into the morning.

LETTER LXXIII.

BREAKFAST WITH BARRY CORNWALL—LUXURY OF THE FOLLOWERS OF THE MODERN MUSE—BEAUTY OF THE DRAMATIC SKETCHES GAINS PROCTOR A WIFE—HAZLITT'S EXTRAORDINARY TASTE FOR THE PICTURESQUE IN WOMEN—COLERIDGE'S OPINION OF CORNWALL.

Breakfasted with Mr. Procter (known better as Barry Cornwall). I gave a partial description of this most delightful of poets in a former letter. In the dazzling circle of rank and talent with which he was surrounded at Lady Blessington's, however, it was difficult to see so shrinkingly modest a man to advantage, and with the exception of the keen gray eye, living with thought and feeling, I should hardly have recognised him, at home, for the same person.

Mr. Procter is a barrister; and his "whereabout" is more like that of a lord chancellor than a poet proper. With the address he had given me at parting, I drove to a large house in Bedford square; and, not accustomed to find the children of the Muses waited on by servants in livery, I made up my mind as I walked up the broad staircase, that I was blundering upon some Mr. Procter of the exchange, whose respect for his poetical namesake, I hoped would smooth my apology for the intrusion. Buried in a deep morocco chair, in a large library, notwithstanding, I found the poet himself—choice old pictures, filling every nook between the book-shelves, tables covered with novels and annuals, rolls of prints, busts and drawings in all corners; and, more important for the nonce, a breakfast table at the poet's elbow, spicily set forth, not with flowers or ambrosia, the canonical food of rhymers, but with cold ham and ducks, hot rolls and butter, coffee-pot and tea-urn—as sensible a breakfast, in short, as the most unpoetical of men could desire.

Procter is indebted to his poetry for a very charming wife, the daughter of Basil Montague, well known as a collector of choice literature, and the friend and patron of literary men. The exquisite beauty of the Dramatic Sketches interested this lovely woman in his favor before she knew him, and, far from worldly-wise as an attachment so grounded would seem, I never saw two people with a more habitual air of happiness. I thought of his touching song,

"How many summers, love,

Hast thou been mine?"