Loiterings in Pleasant Paths

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[ii]

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INTRODUCTION.

WHEN I began the MS. of this book, it was with the intention of including it in the “Common Sense in the Household Series,” in which event it was to be entitled, “Familiar Talks from Afar.”

For reasons that seemed good to my publishers and to me, this purpose was not carried out, except as it has influenced the tone of the composition; given to each chapter the character of experiences remembered and recounted to a few friends by the fireside, rather than that of a sustained and formal narrative, penned in dignified seclusion, amid guide-books and written memoranda.

This is the truthful history of the foreign life of an American family whose main object in “going on a pilgrimage” was the restoration of health to one of its members. In seeking and finding the lost treasure, we found so much else which enriched us for all time, that, in the telling of it, I have been embarrassed by a plethora[iv] of materials. I have described some of the things we wanted to see—as we saw them,—writing con amore, but with such manifold strayings from the beaten track into by-paths and over moors, and in such homely, familiar phrase, that I foresee criticism from the disciples of routine and the sedate students of chronology, topography and general statistics. I comfort myself, under the prospective infliction, with the belief which has not played me false in days past,—to wit: that what I have enjoyed writing some may like to read. I add to this the hope that the fresh-hearted traveler who dares think and feel for, and of himself, in visiting the Old World which is to him the New, may find in this record of how we made it Home to us, practical and valuable hints for the guidance of his wanderings.

Springfield, Mass., April, 1880.

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CONTENTS.

[1]

LOITERINGS IN PLEASANT PATHS.

CHAPTER I.
The Average Briton.

SUNDAY in London: For the first time since our arrival in the city we saw it under what passes in that latitude and language for sunshine. For ten days we had dwelt beneath a curtain of gray crape resting upon the chimney-tops, leaving the pavements dry to dustiness. “Gray crape” is poetical—rather—and sounds better than the truth, which is, that the drapery, without fold or shading, over-canopying us, was precisely in color like very dirty, unbleached muslin, a tint made fashionable within a year or so, under the name of “Queen Isabella’s linen” (“le linge de la Reine Isabeau”). The fixed cloud depressed and oppressed us singularly. It was a black screen set above the eyes, which we were all the while tempted to push up in order to see more clearly and farther,—a heavy hand upon brain and chest. For the opaqueness, the clinging rimes of the “London fog,” we were prepared. Of the mysterious withholding for days and weeks of clouds threatening every minute to fall, we had never heard. We had bought umbrellas at Sangster’s, as does every sensible tourist immediately after securing[2] rooms at a hotel, and never stirred abroad without them; but the pristine plaits had not been disturbed. Struggle as we might with the notion, we could not rid ourselves of the odd impression that the whole nation had gone into mourning. Pleasure-seeking, on the part of sojourners who respected conventionalities, savored of indecorum. We were more at our ease in the crypt of St. Paul’s, and among the dead of Westminster Abbey, than anywhere else, and felt the conclave of murderers, the blood-flecked faces of the severed heads, the genuine lunette and knife of Samson’s guillotine in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, to be “quite the thing in the circumstances.”

The evil, nameless spell was broken by the clangor of the Sabbath bells. “The gray pavilion rose” and did not fall—for twenty-four hours. Strolling through St. James’s Park in the hour preceding sunsetting, we pointed out to one another the pale blue, dappled with white, of the zenith, the reddening mists of the horizon. The ground was strewed with autumnal leaves, russet and brown. The subdued monotony of the two shades of decay did not move us to adverse criticism. The crimsons, golds, and purples that were robing woods we knew of over the water, would be incongruous in this sober-hued land. In the matter of light and color, he who tarries in England in autumn, winter, and early spring, soon learns to be thankful for small favors. We were grateful and satisfied. We were in a mood to be in love with England,—“our old home;” still walked her soil as in a blessed dream, haunted only by sharp dreads of awakening to the knowledge that the realization of the hopes, and longings, and imaginings of many years was made of such stuff as had been our cloud-pictures. We were in process of an experience we were ashamed to speak of until we learned how common it was with other voyagers, whose planning and pining[3] had resembled ours in kind and degree. None of us was willing to say how much time was given to a comical weighing of the identity question, somewhat after the fashion of poor Nelly on the roadside in the moonlight:—If this were England, who then were we? If these pilgrims were ourselves—veritable and unaltered—could it be true that we were here? If I do not express well what was as vague as tormenting, it is not because the system of spiritual and mental acclimation was not a reality.

The Palace of St. James, a range of brick and dinginess, stretched before us as we returned to the starting-point of the walk around the park, taking in the Bird-cage Walk, where Charles II. built his aviaries and lounged, Nelly Gwynne, or the Duchess of Portsmouth, at his side, a basket of puppies hung over his lace collar and ruffled cravat. It is not a palatial pile—even to eyes undried from the juice of Puck’s “little western flower.”

“It would still be a very decent abode for the horses of royalty—hardly for their grooms,” said Caput, critically. “And it is worth looking at when one remembers how long bloody Mary lay there, hideous, forsaken, half dead, the cancerous memories of Calais and Philip’s desertion consuming her vitals. There lived and died the gallant boy who was the eldest son of James I. If he had succeeded to the throne his brother Charles would have worn his head more comfortably and longer upon his shoulders. That is, unless, as in the case of Henry VIII., the manhood of the Prince of Wales had belied the promise of early youth.”

“It was in St. James’s Palace that Charles spent his last night,” I interrupted. It takes a long time for the novice to become accustomed to the strange thrill that vibrates through soul and nerves when such reminiscences overtake him, converting the place whereon he stands into[4] holy ground. I was a novice, and rushed on impetuously. “The rooms in which he slept and made his toilet for the scaffold were in the old Manor-house, a wing of the palace since torn down. Why can’t they let things alone? But the park is here, and—” glancing dubiously along the avenues—“it is just possible—altogether possible—that some of these oldest trees may be the same that stood here then. On that morning, when—you remember?—the ground being covered lightly with snow, the king walked with a quick step across the park to Whitehall, calling to the guard, ‘Step on apace, my good fellows!’”

Measuring with careful eye an air line between the palace and a building with a cupola, on the St. James Street side of the park, we turned our steps along this. The dying leaves rustled under our feet, settling sighingly into the path behind us. The “light snow” had muffled the ring of the “quick step” more like the impatient tread of a bridegroom than that of a doomed man shortening the already brief space betwixt him and fate. Within the shadow of Whitehall, we paused.

“The scaffold was built just without the window of the banqueting-hall,” we reminded each other. “As late as the reign of William and Mary, the king’s blood was visible upon the window-sill. Jacobites made great capital of the insensibility of his granddaughter, who held her drawing-rooms in that very apartment. The crowd must have been densest about here, and spread far into the park. But how can we know just where the scaffold stood? It was low, for the people leaped upon it after the execution and dipped handkerchiefs in the blood, to be laid away as precious relics. Those windows are rather high!” glancing helplessly upward. “And which is the banqueting-hall?”

“Baldeker’s London” was then in press for the rescue of[5] the next season’s traveller from like pits of perplexity. Not having it, and the “hand-books” we had provided ourselves with proving dumb guides in the emergency, the simplest and most natural road out of ignorance was to ask a question or two of some intelligent native-born Londoner.

In this wise, then, we first made the acquaintance of the Average Briton,—a being who figured almost as often in our subsequent wanderings as did the travelling American. I do not undertake to say which was the more ridiculous or vexatious of the two, according as our purpose at the time of meeting them chanced to be diversion or information.

The Average Briton of this Sabbath-day was smug and rotund; in complexion, rubicund; complacent of visage, and a little rolling in gait, being duck-legged. A child trotted by him upon a pair of limbs cut dutifully after the paternal pattern, swinging upon the paternal hand. Upon the other side of the central figure, arrayed in matronly black silk and a velvet hat with a white plume, walked a lady of whom Hawthorne has left us a portrait:

“She has an awful ponderosity of frame, not pulpy, like the looser development of our few fat women, but massive with solid beef and streaky tallow; so that (though struggling manfully against the idea) you inevitably think of her as made up of steaks and sirloins. She imposes awe and respect by the muchness of her personality to such a degree that you probably credit her with far greater moral and intellectual force than she can fairly claim. Without anything positively salient, or actually offensive, or, indeed, unjustly formidable to her neighbors, she has the effect of a seventy-four gun ship in time of peace.” I had ample time to remember and to verify each line of the picture during the parley with her husband that succeeded[6] our encounter. A citizen of London-town was he. We were so far right in our premises. One who had attended “divine service” in the morning; partaken of roast mutton and a pint of half-and-half at an early dinner; who would presently go home from this stretch of the legs, with good appetite and conscience to a “mouthful of somethink ’ot with his tea,” and come up to time with unflagging powers to bread, cheese, cold meat, pickles, and ale, at a nine o’clock supper. Our old home teems with such. Heaven send them length of days and more wit!

Caput stepped into the path of the substantial pair; lifted his hat in recognition of the lady’s presence and apology for the interruption.

“Excuse me, sir—”

I groaned inwardly. Had I not drilled him in the omission of the luckless monosyllable ever since we saw the Highlands of Navesink melt into the horizon? How many times had I iterated and reiterated the adage?—“In England one says ‘sir’ to prince, master, or servant. It is a confession of inferiority, or an insult.” Nature and (American) grace were too strong for me.

“Excuse me, sir! But can you tell me just where the scaffold was erected on which Charles the First was executed?”

The Average Briton stared bovinely. Be sure he did not touch his hat to me, nor echo the “sir,” nor yet betray how flatteringly it fell upon his unaccustomed ear. Being short of stature, he stared at an angle of forty-five degrees to gain his interlocutor’s face, unlocked his shaven jaws and uttered in a rumbling stomach-base the Shibboleth of his tribe and nation:

“I really carnt say!”

Caput fell back in good order—i. e., raising his hat again to the Complete British Matron, whose face had not[7] changed by so much as the twitch of an eyelid while the colloquy was in progress. She paid no attention whatever to the homage offered to the sex through “the muchness of her personality,” nor were the creases in her lord’s double chin deepened by any inclination of his head.

“The fellow is an underbred dolt!” said Caput, looking after them as they sailed along the walk.

“In that case it is a pity you called him ‘sir,’ and said ‘erected’ and ‘executed,’” remarked I, with excruciating mildness. “Here comes another! Ask him where King Charles was beheaded.”

No. 2 was smugger and smoother than No. 1. He had silvery hair and mutton-leg whiskers, and a cable watch-chain trained over a satin waistcoat, adjuncts which imparted a look of yet intenser respectability. There was a moral and social flavor of bank-directorships and alder-manic expectations about him, almost warranting the “sir” which slipped again from the incorrigible tongue.

We had the same answer to a word and intonation. The formula must be taught to them over their crib-rails as our babies are drilled to lisp—“Now I lay me.” Grown reckless and slightly wicked, we accosted ten others in quick succession in every variety of phraseology, of which the subject was susceptible, but always to the same effect. Where stood the scaffold of Charles the First, Charles Stuart, Charles the Martyr, Charles, father of the Merry Monarch, the grandparent of Mary of Orange and Good Queen Anne? Could any man of British mould designate to us the terminus of that quick step over the snowy park on the morning of the 30th of January, 1649, the next stage to that “which, though turbulent and troublesome, would be a very short one, yet would carry him a great way—even from earth to Heaven?”

Eight intelligent Londoners said, “I really carnt say!”[8] more or less drawlingly. Two answered bluntly, “Dawnt know!” over their shoulders, without staying or breaking their saunter. Finally, we espied a youth sitting under a tree—one of those from which the melting snow might have dropped upon the prisoner’s head—why not the thrifty oak he had pointed out to Bishop Juxon in nearing Whitehall, as “the tree planted by my brother Henry?” The youth was neatly dressed, comely of countenance, and he held an open book, his eyes riveted upon the open page.

“That looks promising!” ejaculated Caput. There was genuine respect in his address:

“I beg your pardon for interrupting you, but can you inform me, etc., etc.?”

The student raised his head, and looked at us with lacklustre or abstracted eyes.

“Hey?”

Caput repeated the query distinctly and with emphasis.

“Chawles the First?”

“Yes!” less patiently. “The king whose head was cut off by order of Cromwell’s parliament, under the windows of Whitehall, in 1649?”

“Never heard of him!” rejoined the countryman of Hume, Macaulay, and Froude, resuming his studies.

Caput recoiled as from an electric eel. “I wouldn’t have believed it, had any one else heard and repeated it to me!” gasped he, when out of ear-shot. “Do you suppose there is a hod-carrier in Boston who does not know the history of Faneuil Hall?”

“Hundreds! Hod-carriers are usually of foreign birth.”

“Or a school-boy in America who never heard of Arnold’s treason and André’s fate? Or, for that matter, who cannot, when twelve years old, tell the whole story of King Charles’s death, even to the ‘Remember!’ as he laid his head upon the block?”[9]

I had a new difficulty to present.

“While you have been catechizing the enlightened British public, I have been thinking—and I am afraid we are sentimentalizing in the wrong place. I have harrowing doubts as to this being the real Whitehall. The palace was burned in the time of William and Mary—or a portion of it—and but partially rebuilt by Inigo Jones. There is altogether too much of this to be the genuine article. And it is startlingly modern!”

It was a spacious building, and did not look as if it had a story. The exterior was stuccoed and smoke-blackened, but the London air would have dyed it to such complexion in ten years. A belvidere or cupola finished it above. Beneath this, on the ground-floor, separating the wings, was an archway leading into St. James Street. The citizens whom we had questioned had, with the exception of the student, emerged from or disappeared in this passage from park to thoroughfare. We saw now a sentinel, in red coat and helmet, turn in his beat up and down under the arch.

“Is this Old Whitehall?” we asked.

He shook his head without halting.

“Where is it?”

He pointed to a building on the opposite side of the street. It was two stories—lofty ones—high above the basement. Twenty-one windows shone in the handsome front. We traversed the arched passage, planted ourselves upon the sidewalk and gazed, bewildered, at the one-and-twenty windows. Through which of them had passed the kingly form we seemed to have seen for ourselves, so familiar were the oval face and pointed beard, the great eyes darkened all his life long with prophecy of doom? Through which had been borne the outraged corpse, the bloody drippings staining the sill? Upon what spot of[10] the pavement trodden by the throng of Sabbath idlers had fallen the purple rain from a monarch’s heart? For sweet pity’s sake, had none marked the place by so much as a cross in the flagging? All else around us bore the stamp of a later age. Were the apparently venerable walls pointed out by the sentinel the banqueting-hall where the granddaughter held her court, or was this Inigo Jones’s (the Inevitable) restoration?

“One might imagine regicide so common a crime in England as not to be considered worthy of special note!” we grumbled, a strong sense of injury upon our foiled souls.

Just then down the street strode a policeman, and, at sight of our puzzled faces, hesitated with an inquiring look. I cheerfully offer my testimony here to the civility, intelligence, and general benevolence of the London police. We met them always when we needed their services, and as invariably found them ready and able to do all we required of them, sometimes insisting upon going a block out of their way to show us our route. Perfunctory politeness? It may have been, but it was so much better than none at all, or surly familiarity! The man to whom we now addressed ourselves was tall and brawny, with features that lighted pleasantly in the hearing of our tale of defeat.

“My father used to tell me,” he said, respectful still, but dropping into the easy conversational strain an exceptionally obliging New York “Bobby” might use in like circumstances, “that the king was led out through that window,” indicating, not one of the triple row in the banqueting-room, but a smaller in a lower and older wing, “and executed in front of the main hall. Some say the banqueting-chamber was not burned with the rest of the palace. Others that it was. My father was inclined to[11] believe that this is the original building. I have heard him tell the tale over and over until you might have thought he had been there himself. The Park ran clear up to Old Whitehall then, you see—where this street is now. The crowd covered all this ground where we are standing, the soldiers being nearest the scaffold. That stood, as nearly as I can make out, about there!” tapping the sidewalk with his stick. “A few feet to the right or the left don’t make much difference, you know, sir. It does seem queer, and a little sad, there’s not so much as a stone let into the wall, or a bit of an inscription. But those were rough times, you know.”

“We are very much obliged to you!” Caput said heartily, holding out his hand, the palm significantly inverted.

The man shook his head. “Not at all, sir! Against the rules of the force! I have done nothing worth talking about. If my father were living, now! But people nowadays care less and less for old stories.”

He touched his cap in moving away.

“The truest gentleman we have met this afternoon!” pronounced Caput. “Now, we will go back into the park, out of this bustle, and think it all over!”

This had become already a pet phrase and a pet practice with us. The amateur dramatization, sometimes partially spoken, for the most part silent, was our way of appropriating and assimilating as our very own what we saw and learned. It was a family trick, understood among ourselves. Quiet, freedom from platitudinal queries and comment, and comparative solitude, were the favorable conditions for fullest enjoyment of it.

The student was so absorbed in his book—I hope it was history!—as not to see us when we passed. The sunlight fell aslant upon the dark-red walls of the old palace, lying low, long, and gloomy, across the end of the walk.[12] A stiff, dismal place—yet Elizabeth, in all her glory, had been moderately contented with it. Within a state bed-chamber, yet to be seen, the equivocal circumstances—or the coincidences interpreted as equivocal by the faction hostile to the crown,—attending the birth of the son of James II. and Mary of Modena laid the first stone of the mass of distrust that in the end crushed the hopes of “The Pretender.” The “first gentleman of Europe” opened his baby eyes in this vulgar world under the roof of the house his father had already begun to consider unfit for a king’s dwelling, and to meditate taxation of his American colonies for funds with which to build a greater. Queen Victoria was married in the Chapel of St. James, adjoining the palace. Upon the mantel of the venerable Presence-chamber are the initials of Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn, intertwisted in a loving tangle. They should have been fashioned in wax instead of the sterner substance that had hardly left the carver’s hand for the place of honor in the royal drawing-room before the vane of Henry’s affections veered from Anne to Jane. It is said that he congratulated himself and the new queen upon the involutions of the cipher that might be read almost as plainly “H. J.” as “H. A.” So, there it stands—the sad satire upon wedded love that mocked the eyes of discreet Jane, the one consort who died a natural death while in possession of his very temporary devotion,—and the two Katherines who succeeded her.

By contrast with sombre St. James’s, Buckingham Palace is a meretricious mushroom, scarcely deserving a passing glance. The air was bland for early November, and we sat upon a bench under a tree that let slow, faded leaves down upon our heads while we “thought it all over,” until the gathering glooms in the deep archway, flanked by sentry-boxes, shaped themselves into a procession of[13] the “born and died” in the low-browed chambers. To recite their names would be to give an abstract of the history of the mightiest realm of the earth for four centuries.

And, set apart by supreme sorrow from his fellows, ever foremost in our dream-pictures, walked he, who “made trim,” by his own command, “for his second marriage-day,” hastened through the snowy avenues of the park to find a pillow for the Lord’s anointed upon the headsman’s block before the windows of the banqueting-room of Whitehall.

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CHAPTER II.
Olla Podrida.

IN one week we had been twice to Westminster Abbey, once to the Tower; had seen St. Paul’s, Hyde Park, Tussaud’s Wax Works, Mr. Spurgeon, the New Houses of Parliament, Billingsgate, the Monument, Hyde Park, the British Museum, and more palaces than I can or care to remember. In all this time we had not a ray of sunshine, but neither had a drop of rain fallen. We began to leave umbrellas at home, and to be less susceptible in spirits to the glooming of the dusky canopy upborne by the chimneys. That one clear—for London—Sunday had made the curtain so nearly translucent as to assure us that behind the clouds the sun was still shining, and we took heart of grace for sight-seeing.

But in the course of seven smoky-days we became slightly surfeited with “lions.” Weary, to employ a culinary figure, of heavy roast and boiled, we longed for the variety of spicy entrées—savory “little dishes” not to be found on the carte, and which were not served to the conventional sight-seer. One morning, when the children had gone to “the Zoo” with papa and The Invaluable, Prima—the sharer with me of the aforesaid whim—and myself left the hotel at ten o’clock to carry into effect a carefully-prepared programme. We had made a list of places[15] where “everybody” did not go; which “Golden Guides” and “Weeks in London” omitted entirely, or slurred over with slighting mention; which local ciceroni knew not of, and couriers disdained, but each of which had for us peculiar association and attraction.

Four-wheelers were respectable for unattended women, and cheaper than hansoms. But there was a tincture of adventure in making our tour in one of the latter, not taking into account the advantages of being able to see all in front of us, and the less “stuffy” odor of the interior. Sallying forth, with a pricking, yet delicious sense of questionableness that recalled our school-day pranks, we sought the nearest cab-stand and selected a clean-looking vehicle, drawn by a strong horse with promise of speed in body and legs. The driver was an elderly man in decent garb. The entire establishment seemed safe and reputable so far as the nature of our enterprise could partake of these characteristics. When seated, we gave an order with inward glee, but perfect gravity of demeanor.

“Newgate Prison!”

We had judged shrewdly respecting the qualities of our horse. It was exhilarating, even in the dull, dead atmosphere we could not breathe freely while on foot, to be whirled through the unknown streets, past delightless parks and dolefuller mansions in the West End, in and out of disjointed lanes that ran madly up to one turn and down to another, as if seeking a way out of the mesh of “squares” and “roads” and “rows,”—perceiving satisfiedly, as we did all the time, that we were leaving aristocratic and even respectable purlieus behind as speedily as if our desires, and not the invisible “cabby,” shaped our flight. We brought up with a jerk. Cabs—in the guidance of old or young men—have one manner of stopping;[16] as if the “concern,” driver, horse and hansom, had meant to go on for ever, like Tennyson’s brook, and reversed the design suddenly upon reaching the address given them, perhaps, an hour ago. We jerked up now, in a narrow street shut in on both sides by black walls. The trap above our heads opened.

“Newgate on the right, mem! Old Bailey on the left!”

The little door shut with a snap. We leaned forward for a sight of the prison on the right. Contemptible in dimensions by comparison with the spacious edifice of our imaginations, it was in darksomeness and relentless expression, a stony melancholy that left hope out of the question, just what it should—and must—have been. The pall enwrapping the city was thickest just here, resting, like wide, evil wings upon the clustered roofs we could see over the high wall. The air was lifeless; the street strangely quiet. Besides ourselves we did not see a human being within the abhorrent precincts. The prison-front, facing the smaller “Old Bailey,” is three hundred feet long. In architecture it is English,—bald and ugly as brick, mortar, and iron can make it. In three minutes we loathed the place.

“You can go on!” I called to the pilot, pushing up the flap in the roof. “Drive to the church in which the condemned prisoners used to hear their last sermon.”

“Yes, mem!” Now we detected a rich, full-bodied Scotch brogue in his speech. “Pairhaps ye wouldna’ moind knawing that by that gett—where ye’ll see the bairs—the puir wretches went on the verra same mornin’. Wha passed by that gett never cam’ back.”

It was a dour-looking passage to a disgraceful death; a small door crossed by iron bars, and fastened with a rusty[17] chain. It made us sick to think who had dragged their feet across the dirt-crusted threshold, and when.

The cab jerked up again in half a minute, although we had rushed off at a smart trot that engaged to land us at least a mile off.

“St. Sephulchre’s, mem!”

I have alluded to the difficulty of determining the age of London buildings from the outward appearance. A year in the sooty moisture that bathes them for seven or eight months out of twelve, destroys all fairness of coloring, leaving them without other beauty than such as depends upon symmetrical proportions, graceful outlines and carving. The humidity eats into the pores of the stone as cosmetics impair the texture of a woman’s skin. But St. Sepulchre has a right to be blasé. It antedated the Great Fire of 1666, the noble porch escaping ruin from the flames as by a miracle. It is black, like everything else in the neighborhood, and, to our apprehension, not comely beyond the portico. The interior is as cheerless as the outside, cold and musty. Throughout, the church has the air of a battered crone with the sins of a fast youth upon her conscience. There are vaults beneath the floor, lettered memorial-stones in the aisle, tarnished brasses on the walls. Clammy sweats break out upon floor, walls, pews and altar in damp weather, and this day of our visit had begun to be damp. It was an unwholesome place even to be buried in. What we wanted to see was a flat stone on the southern side of the choir, reached in bright weather by such daring sunbeams as could make their way through a window, the glass of which was both painted and dirty. A brownish-gray stone, rough-grained, and so much defaced that imagination comes to the help of the eyes that strive to read it: “Captain John Smith—Sometime Governour of Virginia and Admirall of New-England.” He died in 1631, aged fifty-two.[18] The Three Turks’ Heads are still discernible upon the escutcheon above the inscription. The rhyming epitaph begins with—

“Here lyes One conquer^d that Hath conquer^d Kings.”

We knew that much and failed to decipher the rest.

Family traditions, tenderly transmitted through eight generations, touching the unwritten life of the famous soldier of fortune, of the brother who was his heir-at-law, and bequeathed the coat-of-arms to American descendants, were our nursery tales. For him whose love of sea and wildwood was a passion captivity nor courts could tame, his burial-place is a sorry one, although esteemed honorable. I think he would have chosen rather an unknown grave upon the border of the Chickahominy or James, the stars, that had guided him through swamp and desert, for tapers, instead of organ-thrill and incense, the song of mockingbirds and scent of pine woods. The more one knows and thinks and sees of St. Sepulchre’s the less tolerant is he of it as a spot of sepulture for this gallant and true knight. They interred him there because it was his parish church. But they—the English—are not backward in removing other people’s bones when it suits their pride or convenience to do so. In the square tower, lately restored, hangs the bell that has tolled for two hundred years when the condemned passed out of the little iron gate we had just seen. They used to hang them at Tyburn, afterward in the street before the prison. Now, executions take place privately within the Newgate walls. In the brave old times, when refinement of torture was appreciated more highly than now as a means of grace and a Christian art, the criminal had the privilege of hearing his own funeral sermon,—which was rarely, we may infer, a panegyric,—seated upon his[19] coffin in the broad aisle of St. Sepulchre’s. There was a plat of flowers then in the tiny yard where the grass cannot sprout now for the coal-dust, and as the poor creature took his place—the service done—upon the coffin in the cart that was to take him to the gallows, a child was put forward to present him with a bouquet of blossoms grown under the droppings of the sanctuary. What manner of herbs could they have been? Rue, rosemary, life-everlasting? Yet they may have had their message to the dim eyes that looked down upon them—for the quailing human heart—of the Father’s love for the lowest and vilest of His created things.

“Temple Bar!” was our next order.

Before we reached it our driver checked his horse of his own accord, got down from his perch at the back, and presented his weather-beaten face at my side.

“I’ve thocht”—respectfully, and with unction learned in the “kirk”—“that it might eenterest the leddies to know that this is the square where mony hundreds of men, wimmen, and, one may say, eenfants, were burrned alive for the sake of the Faith.”

And in saying it, he lifted his hat quite from his head in reverence, we were touched to note, was not meant for us, but as a tribute to those of whom the world was not worthy.

“Smithfield!” we cried in a breath. “Oh! let us get out!”

It is a hollow square, a small, railed-in garden and fountain in the middle; around these extends on three sides an immense market, the pride of modern London, a structure of much pretension, with four towers and a roof, like that of a conservatory, of glass and iron, supported by iron pillars. A very Babel of buying and selling, of hawkers’ and carters’ yells, at that early hour of the day. The stake[20] was near the fine old church of St. Bartholomew, which faces the open space. Excepting the ancient temple, founded in 1102, there is no vestige of the Smithfield (Smooth-field) where Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1305; where the “Gentle Mortimer” of a royal paramour was beheaded in 1330, and, in the reign of Mary I., the “Good Catholic,” three hundred of her subjects, John Rogers and Bradford among them, were burned with as little scruple as the white-aproned butcher in the market-stall near by slices off a prime steak for a customer. The church has been several times restored, but the Norman tower bears the date 1628. It, too, felt the Great Fire, and the heat and smoke of crueller flames, in the midst of which One like unto the Son of Man walked with His children. Against the walls was built the stage for the accommodation of the Lord Mayor of London, the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Bedford, that they might, at their ease, behold Anne Askew burn. They were in too prudent dread of the explosion of the powder-bag tied about her waist to sit near enough to hear her say to the sheriff’s offer of pardon if she would recant—“I came not hither to deny my Lord!”

St. Bartholomew the Great stands yet in Smithfield. Above it bow the heavens that opened to receive the souls born into immortality through the travail of that bloody reign. Forty years ago, they were digging in the ground in front of the church to lay pavements, or gas-pipes, or water-mains, or some other nineteenth-century device, and the picks struck into a mass of charred human bones.

“Unknown!” Stephen Gardiner and his helpers had a brisk run of business between St. Andrew’s Day, 1554, and November 17, 1558. There was no time to gather up the fragments. Ah, well! God and His angels knew where was buried the precious seed of the Church.[21]

How the cockles of our canny Scot’s heart warmed toward us when he perceived that he and we were of one mind anent Smithfield! that we took in, without cavil, the breadth and depth of his words—“The Faith!” During that busy four years tender women, girls and babes in age proved, with strong men, what it meant to “earnestly contend for” it.

In a gush of confidence induced by the kinship of sentiment upon this point, we told our friend what we wanted to see in the city, that day, and why, and found him wonderfully versed in other matters besides martyrology. He named a dozen places of interest not upon our schedule, and volunteered to call out the names of noted localities through the loop-hole overhead, as we passed them. This arrangement insured the success of our escapade, for his judicious selection of routes, so as to waste no time in barren neighborhoods, was only surpassed by the quality of the pellets of information dropped into our ears.

St. John’s gate was, in aspect, the most venerable relic we saw in London. They told us in the office at the gateway that it and the Priory—now destroyed—were built in 1111; but recollecting that the Pope’s confirmation of the first constitution of the Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem bore date of 1113, we nursed some unspoken doubts. The prior who finished the building in 1504 modestly left his family coat-of-arms upon the wall of the small entrance-room, now used as an office. This black and bruised arch marks what was the rallying-point of British chivalry and piety during three crusades. Out of this gate the Hospitaliers drew forth in mingled martial and ecclesiastical array—white gown with the red cross on shoulder, over hauberk and greaves,—at each departure for the Holy Land. Godfrey de Bouillon was an influential member and patron of the Order. Henry[22] VIII. scattered the brethren and pocketed their revenues. His daughter Mary reinstated them in their home and privileges. Her sister Elizabeth would none of them, and that was an end of the controversy, for she lived long enough to enforce her decree.

Cave’s “Gentleman’s Magazine” was published here when gentlemen ceased to ride, booted, spurred, and illiterate, upon the crusades against the Saracen. Johnson, a slovenly provincial usher, having failed as translator and schoolmaster to make a living, applied for, and received from this periodical literary employment—the first paying engagement of his life. For more than a dozen years he was a contributor to the Magazine, and the office above the gate was his favorite lounging-place. As a proof of this they show a chair, ungainly and unclean enough to have been used by him throughout the period of his contributorship.

East of St. John’s Gate we passed a disused intramural cemetery, begloomed on all sides by rows of dingy houses. The rain of “blacks” incessantly descending upon the metropolis collects here in unstirred, sable sheets. Such a pall enfolds the graves of Isaac Watts and Daniel Defoe, whose “Diary of the Great Plague” is a work of more dramatic power than his Robinson Crusoe. A stone’s throw apart from hymnster and romancist, lies a greater than either—the prince of dreamers, John Bunyan.

Temple Bar is—or was, for it has been pulled down since we were there—an arch of Portland stone, and is attributed, I hope, erroneously, to Christopher Wren. Without this information I should have said that it was a wooden structure, badly hacked, gnawed, and besmirched by time, with dirty plaster statues of the two Charleses niched upon one side, and, upon the other, corresponding figures of James I. and Elizabeth. It was much lower[23] than we had supposed, and than it is represented in pictures, and just wide enough to allow two coaches to pass abreast without collision. The roaring tide overflowing the Strand and Fleet Street appeared to squeeze through with difficulty. Above the gate was a row of one-story offices—mere boxes—such as are occupied in our country by newspaper-venders. Within the memory of living men the top of the gate was a thick-set hedge of spikes, reckoned, not very many years back, as one of the bulwarks of English liberties. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century, law-abiding cockneys, on their peregrinations to and from the city, were strengthened in loyalty and veneration for established customs, by the spectacle of rotting and desiccated heads of traitors exposed here. They were tardy in the abolition of object-teaching in Christian England. There were solid oaken gates with real hinges and bars at Temple Gate. When the sovereign paid a visit to the city she was reminded of some agreeable passages between one of her predecessors and the London lords of trade, by finding these closed. Her pursuivant blew a trumpet; there was an exchange of question and reply; the oaken leaves swung back; the Lord Mayor presented his sword to our gracious and sovereign lady, the queen, who returned it to him with an affable smile, and the royal coach was suffered to pass under the Bar. More object-teaching!

From Temple Gate to Temple Gardens was a natural transition. These famous grounds formerly sloped down to the Thames, and were an airy, spacious promenade. Now, one smiles in reading that Suffolk found it a “more convenient” place for private converse than the “Temple Hall.” A talk between four gentlemen of the rank of Plantagenet, Suffolk, Somerset and Warwick, in the pretty plat of grass and flowers, fenced in by iron rails, would[24] have eavesdroppers by the score, and the incident of plucking the roses be overlooked by the gossips of fifty tenement-houses. But the area, sadly circumscribed by the encroachments of business, is a sightly bit of green, intersected by gravel walks, and in the season enlivened by the flaming geraniums that not even London “blacks” can put out of countenance. We really saw rose-trees there in flower, the following August.

In one particular, and one only, the knowledge and zeal of our Scotchman were at fault in the course of our Bohemian expedition. I have said that Baedeker’s excellent “Hand-book for London” was in the printer’s hands just when we needed it most. Therefore we searched vainly in St. Paul’s Churchyard for Dr. Johnson’s Coffee-house, where Boswell hung upon his lumbering periods, as bees upon honeysuckle; for the site of the Queen’s Arms Tavern, also a resort of the literati in the time of the great Lexicographer. We were mortified at our ill-success, chiefly because we ascribed it to the very lame and imperfect descriptions of these places which were all we could offer the Average Britons of whom we made inquiry. We were in no such uncertainty as to the Chapter Coffee-house in Paternoster Row; Mrs. Gaskell had been there before us and left so broad a “blaze” we could hardly miss seeing it.

“Half-way up (the Row), on the left hand side, is the Chapter Coffee-house. It is two hundred years old, or so.... The ceilings of the small rooms were low, and had heavy beams running across them; the walls were wainscoted breast-high; the staircase was shallow, broad, and dark, taking up much space in the centre of the house. This, then, was the Chapter Coffee-house, which, a century ago, was the resort of all the booksellers and publishers; and where the literary hacks, the critics, and even the wits, used to go in search of ideas, or employment.[25] This was the place about which Chatterton wrote, in those delusive letters he sent to his mother at Bristol, while he was starving in London. ‘I am quite familiar at the Chapter Coffee-house, and know all the geniuses there.’ Here he heard of chances of employment; here his letters were to be left.”

Here the Brontë sisters, visiting London upon business connected with “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights,” stayed for two days, resisting the invitation of their publisher to come to his house.

Charlotte’s biographer had gone on to draw for us with graphic pen a scene of later date:

“The high, narrow windows looked into the gloomy Row. The sisters, clinging together on the most remote window-seat, could see nothing of motion or of change in the grim, dark houses opposite, so near and close although the whole breadth of the Row was between. The mighty roar of London was round them, like the sound of an unseen ocean, yet every foot-fall on the pavement below might be heard distinctly in that unfrequented street.”

When we made known our purpose to the guide, who, by this time, had taken upon him the character of protector, likewise, he was puzzled but obedient. He got down at the mouth of the crooked Row and begged permission to do our errand.

“The horse is pairfectly quiet, and there’s quite a dreezle comin’ on.”

This was true. The fog that had seemed dry so long, was falling. The uneven, round stones were very wet. But why not drive down the street until we found the house we were looking for?

He rubbed his grizzled, sandy hair into a mop of perplexity.[26]

“The way is but strait at the best, as ye may pairceive, leddies, and it wad be unco’ nosty to meet a cab, or, mayhap, a four-wheeler in some pairts.”

We primed him with minute directions and let him depart upon the voyage of discovery, while we leaned back under the projecting hood of the carriage, sheltered by it and the queer, wooden folding-doors above our knees, from the “dreezle,” and speculated why “Paternoster” Row should be near to and in a line with “Amen” and “Ave Maria” corners. What august processional had passed that way, and pausing at given stations to say an “Ave,” a “Paternoster,” a united “Amen,” left behind it names that would be repeated as long and ignorantly as the Cross of “Notre Chère Reine” and “La Route du Roi” are murdered into cockney English? That led to the telling of a dispute Caput had had one day with a cabman, who, by the way, had jumped from his box on the road to Hyde Park corner to say: “No, sir, we’re not at H’Apsley ’Ouse yet, sir! But I fancied it might h’interest the lady to know that the pavement we are a-drivin’ over at this h’identical minute, sir, h’is composed h’entirely of wood!”

“We have hundreds of miles of it in America, and wish you had it all!” retorted Caput, amused, but impatient. “Go on!”

Having seen Apsley and Stafford Houses, we bade the fellow take us to a certain number on Oxford Street. He declared there was no such street in the city, and jumped down from his seat to confirm his assertion out of the mouths of three or four other “cabbies” at a hackstand. A brisk altercation ensued, ended by Caput’s exhibition of an open guide-book and pointing to the name.

“Ho! hit’s Hugsfoot Street you mean!” cried the disgusted cockney.[27]

As I finished the anecdote our Scot returned, crestfallen. He did not say we had sent him on a fool’s errand, but we began to suspect it ourselves when we undertook the quest in person. We were wrapped in waterproofs and did not mind the fine, soaking mist, except as it made the strip of flagging next the shops slippery, as with coal-oil. Paternoster Row retains its bookish character. Every second shop was a publisher’s, printer’s, or stationer’s. Everybody was civil. N. B.—Civility is a part of a salesman’s trade in England. But everybody stared blankly at our questions relative to the Chapter Coffee-house, although the very name fixed it in this locality. One and all said, first or last—“I really carn’t say!” and several observed politely that “it was an uncommon nasty day.” One added, “But h’indeed, at this season, we may look for nasty weather.”

One word about this pet adjective of the noble Briton of both sexes. It is quite another thing from the American word, spelled but not pronounced in the same way, and which, with us, seldom passes the lips of well-bred people. An English lady once told me that a hotel she had patronized was “very clean—neat as wax, in fact, and handsomely furnished, but a very-very nasty house!”

She meant, it presently transpired, that the fare was scant in quantity, and the landlord surly. Whatever is disagreeable, mean, unsatisfactory, from any cause whatsoever, is “nasty.” When they would intensify the expression they say “beastly,” and fold over the leaf upon the list of expletives.

We did not find our coffee-house, nor anybody who looked or spoke as if he ever heard of the burly Lichfield bear or his parasite, of Chatterton or Horace Walpole, much less of the Rowley MSS. or the sisters Brontë! Nor were we solaced for the disappointment by driving[28] three miles through the mist to see The Tyburn Tree, to behold an upright slab, like a mile-stone, set upon the inner edge of the sidewalk at the western verge of Hyde Park. A very disconsolate slab, slinking against the fence as if ashamed of itself in so genteel a neighborhood, and of the notorious name cut into its face.

[29]

CHAPTER III.
Spurgeon and Cummings.

MR. SPURGEON and his Tabernacle are “down” in guide-books among the lions of the metropolis. But, in engaging a carriage to take us to the Tabernacle on Sabbath morning, we had to clarify the perceptions of our very decent coachman by informing him that it was hard by the “Elephant and Castle.” Nothing stimulates the wit of the average Briton like the mention of an inn or ale-house, unless it be the gleam of the shilling he is to spend therein.

In anticipation of a crowd, Caput had provided himself with tickets for our party of three. These are given to any respectable traveller who will apply to the agent of the “concern,” in Paternoster Row. To avoid the press of entrance we allowed ourselves an hour for reaching the church. The Corinthian portico was already packed with non-holders of tickets, although it lacked half an hour of the time for service. There were ushers at a gate at the left of the principal entrance, who motioned us to pass. The way lay by a locked box fastened to a post, labelled “For the Lay College,” or words to that effect. In consideration of the gratuity of the tickets, and the manifest convenience of the same, that stranger is indeed a churl, ungrateful, or obtuse to the laws of quid pro quo, who does not drop a coin into the slit, and feel, after the[30] free-will offering, that he has a better right to his seat. A second set of ushers received us in the side vestibule and directed us to go upstairs. The gallery seats are the choice places, and we obeyed with alacrity. A third detachment met us at the top of the steps, looked at and retained our tickets, and stood us in line with fifty other expectants against the inner wall, until he could “h’arrange matters.” Our turn came in about five minutes, and we were agreeably surprised at being installed in the front row, with a clear view of stage and lower pews. In five minutes more an elderly lady in a black silk dress trimmed profusely with guipure lace, a purple velvet hat with a great deal of Chantilly about it, and a white feather atop of all, touched my shoulder from behind, showing me a face like a Magenta hollyhock, but sensible and kind.

“Might I inquire if you got your tickets from Mr. Merryweather?”

I looked at Caput.

“No, madam!” he replied promptly. “I procured them from ——,” giving the Paternoster Row address.

“Possible? But you are strangers?”

He bowed assent.

“And Americans?”

Another bow.

“Then all I ’ave to say is, that it is extror’nary! most extror’nary! I told Mr. Merryweather to give three tickets, with my compliments, to an American party I heard of—one gentleman and a couple of ladies—and I was in hopes they were providentially near my pew.”

She leaned forward, after a minute, to subjoin—“Of course, you are welcome, all the same!”

“That is one comfort!” whispered Prima, as the pew-owner settled back rustlingly into her corner. “In America[31] we should consider her ‘very-very’ impertinent. Do circumstances and people alter cases?”

Ten minutes more and the galleries were packed by the skilled ushers, and the body of the lower floor was three-quarters full of pew-holders. We scanned them carefully and formed an opinion of the social and intellectual status of the Tabernacle congregation we saw no reason to reverse at our second and longer visit to London, two years afterward, when our opportunities of making a correct estimate of pastor and people were better than on this occasion. Caput summed it up.

“I dare affirm that eight out of ten of them misplace their h’s——”

“And say, ‘sir!’” interpolated Prima, gravely.

Yet they looked comfortable in spirit, and, as to body, were decidedly and tawdrily overdressed—the foible of those whose best clothes are too good for every-day wear, and who frequent few places where they can be so well displayed and seen as at church. Somebody assured me once, that white feathers were worn in Great Britain out of compliment to the Prince of Wales, whose three white plumes banded together are conspicuous in all public decorations. If this be true, the prospective monarch may felicitate himself upon the devotion of the Wives and Daughters of England. I have never seen one-half so many sported elsewhere, and they have all seasons for their own.

The last remaining space in our slip was taken up by a pair who arrived somewhat late. The wife was a pretty dumpling of a woman, resplendent in a bronze-colored silk dress, garnie with valenciennes, a seal-skin jacket, and a white hat trebly complimentary to H. R. H. She and her dapper husband squeezed past those already seated, obliging us to rise to escape trampled toes, wedged themselves[32] into the far end of the pew, and a dialogue began in loud whispers.

“I say it’s a shame!”

“If you complain they may say we should a’ come h’earlier.”

“I don’t care! I will ’ave my say! Mr. Smith!” This aloud, beckoning an usher; “I say, Mr. Smith! You’ve put one too many h’in our pew. Its h’abominably crowded!”

The slip was very long. Besides the malcontents, there were five of us, who looked at each other, then at the embarrassed usher. The gentleman next the aisle arose.

“If you can provide me with another seat I will give the lady more room,” he said to the man of business.

With a word of smiling apology to his companion—a sweet-faced woman we supposed was his wife—he followed the guide, and, as the reward of gallantry stood against the wall back of us until the sermon was half done. We did not need to be told what was his nationality. The victorious heroine of the skirmish did not say or look—“I am sorry!” or “Thanks!” only, to her husband,—“Now I can breathe!”

She was civilly attentive to me, who chanced to sit nearest her, handing me a hymn-book and offering her fan as the house grew warm. She evidently had no thought that she had been rude or inhospitable to the stranger within the gates of her Tabernacle.

The great front doors were opened, and in less time than I can write of it the immense audience-chamber, capable of containing 6,500 persons, was filled to overflowing. The rush and buzz were a subdued tumult. Nobody made more noise than was needful in the work of obtaining seats in the most favorable positions left for the multitude who were not regular worshippers there, nor ticket-holders. But I should have considered one of Apollos’s sermons[33] dearly-bought by such long waiting and the race that ended it. The ground-swell of excitement had not entirely subsided when the “ting! ting!” of a little bell was heard. A door opened at the back of the deep platform already edged with rows of privileged men and women, who had come in by this way, and Mr. Spurgeon walked to the front, where were his chair and table.

I have yet to see the person whose feeling at the first sight of the great Baptist preacher was not one of overwhelming disappointment. His legs are short and tremble under the heavy trunk. His forehead is low, with a bush of black hair above it, the brows beetle over small, twinkling eyes, the nose is thick, the mouth large, with a pendulous lower jaw. “Here is an animal!” you say to yourself. “Of the earth, earthy. Of the commonalty, common!”

He moved slowly and painfully, and while preaching, praying and reading, rested his gouty knee upon the seat of a chair and stood upon one leg. His hand, stumpy and ill-formed, although small, grasped the chair-back for further support. If I remember aright, there was no invocation or other preliminary service before he gave out a hymn. His voice is a clear monotone, marvellously sustained. The inflections are slight and few, but exceedingly effective. The ease of elocution that sent every syllable to the farthest corner of the vast building was inimitable and cannot be described.

“We will sing”—he began as naturally as in a prayer-meeting of twenty persons—“We will all sing, with the heart and with the voice, with the spirit, and with understanding, the ——th hymn:

The pronunciation of “mood” rhymed precisely with[34] “good,” and he said “Lard,” instead of “Lord.” But the words had in them the ring of a silver trumpet.

The precentor stood directly in front of the preacher, facing the audience and just within the railing of the stage. The instant the reading of the hymn was over, he raised the tune, the congregation rising. The Niagara of song made me fairly dizzy for a minute. Everybody sang. After a few lines, it was impossible to refrain from singing. One was caught up and swept on by the cataract. He might not know the air. He might have neither ear nor voice for music. He was kept in time and tune by the strong current of sound. There was no organ or other musical instrument, nor was the voice of the precentor especially powerful. It was as if we were guided by one overmastering mind and spirit constraining the least emotional to be “conjubilant in song” with the thousands upon thousands of his fellows. Congregational psalmody, such as this, without previous rehearsal or training, is phenomenal.

A prayer followed, as remarkable in its way as the singing. Comprehensive, devout, simple, it was the pleading of man in the felt presence of his Maker;—the key-note—“Nevertheless, I will talk with Thee!” Next to Mr. Spurgeon’s earnestness his best gift is his command of good, nervous English,—fluency which is never verboseness. Knowing exactly what he means to say, he says it—fully and roundly—and lets it alone thereafter. He is neither scholarly, nor eloquent, in any other sense than in these. He read a chapter, giving an exposition of each verse in terse, familiar phrase. There was another hymn, and he announced his text:

“Rather rejoice because your names are written in Heaven!”

I should hardly name humility as a characteristic of prayer or sermon; yet, for one whose boldness of speech[35] often approximates dogmatism, he is singularly free from self-assertion. His sermon was more like a lecture-room talk than a discourse prepared for, and delivered to a mixed multitude. His quotations from Holy Writ were abundant and apt, evincing a retentive memory and ready wit. One-third of the sermon was in the very words of Scripture. His habitual employment of Bible phrases has lent to his own composition a quaint savor. He makes lavish use of “thee” and “thou,” jumbling these inelegantly with “you” in the same sentence.

For example:—He described a man who had been useful and approved as a church-member: (always addressing his own people)—“The Master has allowed you to work for many days in His vineyard, and paid thee good wages, even given thee souls for thy hire.”

In what shape reverses came to the prosperous laborer we were not told, but that he did see others outstrip him in usefulness and honors:

“You are bidden by the Master to take a lower—maybe the lowest seat. Ah, then, my friend, thou hast the dumps!”

I heard him say in another sermon: “If my Lord were to offer a prize for a joyful Christian I am afraid there are not many of you who would dare try for it. And if you did, I fear me much you would not draw even a third prize.”

Occasionally he is coarse in trope and expression. I hesitate to record a sentence that shocked me to disgust as being not only in atrocious taste and an unfortunate figure of speech, but, to my apprehension, irreverent:

“If we are not filled, it is because we do not hang upon and suck at those blessed breasts of God’s promises as we might and should do.”

His illustrations are like his diction—homely. There was not a new grand thought, nor a beautiful passage,[36] rhetorically considered, in any discourse we ever heard from him; not a trace of such fervid imagination as draws men, sometimes against their will, to hear Gospel truth in Talmage’s Tabernacle, or of Beecher’s magnificent genius. We have, in America, scores of men who are little known outside of their own town, or State, who preach the Word as simply and devoutly; who are, impartially considered, in speech more weighty, in learning incomparably superior to the renowned London Nonconformist. Yet we sat—between six and seven thousand of us—and listened to him for nearly an hour, without restlessness or straying attention. Yes! and went again and again, to discover, if possible, as the boys say of the juggler—“how he did it.”

In giving out the notices for the week, Mr. Spurgeon thanked the regular attendants of the church for having complied with the request he had made on the preceding Sabbath morning, and “stopped away at night,” thus leaving more room for strangers. “I hope still more of you will stop at home this evening,” he concluded in a tone of jolly fellowship the people appeared to comprehend and like. He was clearly thoroughly at one with his flock.

At night we also “stopped away,” but not at home. After much misdirection and searching, we found the alley—it was nothing better—leading to Dr. Cummings’s church in Crown Court, Long Acre. It was small, very small in our sight while the remembered roominess of the Tabernacle lingered with us,—plain as a Primitive Methodist Chapel in the country; badly lighted, and the high, straight pews were not half filled. The author of “Voices of the Dead” and “Lectures upon the Apocalypse” is a gray-haired man a little above medium height. His shoulders were bowed slightly—the bend of the student, not of infirmity; his features were clear-cut and spirituelle.[37] He preached that night in faith and hope that were pathetic to us who had read his prophecies—or his interpretation of Divine prophecy—as long ago as 1850, and recalled the fact that the time set for the fulfilment of some of these had passed.

His text was Rev. i. 3: “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy and keep those things that are written therein—for THE TIME IS AT HAND!”

He believed it. One read it in every word and gesture; in the rapt look of the eyes so long strained with watching for the nearer promise—the dayspring—of His coming; in the calm assurance of mien and tone, the dignity of a seer, whom Heaven was joined with earth to authenticate. He spoke without visible notes; his only gesture a slight lifting of both hands, with a fluttering, outward movement. We listened vainly for some token in his spoken composition of the epigrammatic, often antithetical style, that gives nerve and point to his published writings. The interesting, albeit desultory talk was, he informed us, the first of a series of sermons upon the Apocalypse he designed to deliver in that place from Sabbath to Sabbath. He had been diligently engaged of late in recasting the horoscope of the world. That was not the way he put it. But he did say that he had reviewed the calculations upon which his published “Lectures” were based, and would make known the result of his labors in the projected series.

He preferred, it was said, the obscure corner in which he preached to any other location, and had refused the offer of a lady of rank to build him a better church, in a better neighborhood. I suppose he thought it would outlast him—and into the millennial age.

I read, but yesterday, in an English paper, that he had retired from pulpit duties, in confirmed ill-health, and[38] that after his long life of toil he is very poor. Some of his wealthy friends propose to pension him. And we remember so well when his “Voices of the Night”—“The Day”—“The Dead” were read by more thousands and tens of thousands than now flock to hear Spurgeon; when the “Lectures upon the Apocalypse” were a bugle-call, turning the eyes of the Christian world to the so long rayless East. We recall, too, the title of another of his books, with the vision of the bent figure and eyes grown dim with waiting for the glory to be revealed,—and another text from his beloved Revelation:

“These are they that have come out of Great Tribulation, and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

[39]

CHAPTER IV.
The Two Elizabeths.

IF the English autumn be sad, and the English spring be sour, the smiling beauty of the English summer should expel the memory of gloom and acerbity from the mind of the tourist who is not afflicted with bronchitis. In England they make the ch very hard, and pronounce the i in the second syllable as in kite. They ought to know all about bronchitis, for it lurks in every whiff of east wind, and most of the vanes have rusted upon their pivots in their steadfast pointing to that quarter.

The east wind is not necessarily raw. It was bracing, and the sky blue as that of Italy, when we took a Fourth of July drive of nine hours through the fairest portion of the Isle of Wight. The Tally-Ho was a gorgeous pleasure-coach, all red and yellow. The coachman and guard were in blue coats and brass buttons, red waistcoats, and snowy leather breeches, fitting like the skin; high top-boots and cockaded hats. We had four good horses, the best seats upon the top of the coach, a hamper of luncheon, and as many rugs and shawls as we would have taken on a winter voyage across the Atlantic. There were opaline belts of light upon the sea, such as we had seen from Naples and Sorrento, passing into pearl and faintest blue where the sky met and mingled with the[40] water. Hundreds of sails skimmed the waves like so many white gulls. Here and there a steamer left a dusky trail upon the air. Three were stationary about a dark object near the shore. It looked like a projecting pile the rising tide might cover. The Eurydice, a school-ship of the Royal Navy, had foundered there in a gale six weeks and more agone, carrying upwards of three hundred souls down with her. Day by day these government transports were toiling to raise her and recover the bodies of the boys. A week after we left the island they succeeded in dragging up the water-logged hulk. Only eighteen corpses were found. The sea had washed off and hidden the rest.

England is a garden in June, July, and August. The Isle of Wight is a fairy parterre, set with such wealth of verdure and bloom as never disappoints nor palls upon the sight. The roads are perfect in stability and smoothness, and whether they lie along the edge of the cliffs, or among fertile plains besprinkled with villages and farm-buildings, with an occasional manor-house or venerable ruin, are everywhere fringed by such hedges as flourish nowhere else so bravely as in the British Isles. The hawthorn was out of flower, but blackberries whose blossoms were pink instead of white, trailing briony, sweet-brier, and, daintiest and most luxuriant of all, wild convolvulus, hung with tiny cups of pale rose-color—healed our regrets that we were too late to see and smell the “May” in its best-loved home.

We lunched at Blackgang Chine, spreading our cloth upon the heather a short distance from the brow of the cliff, the sea rolling so far below us that the surf was a whisper and the strollers upon the beach were pigmies. The breadth—the apparent boundlessness of the view were enhanced by the crystalline purity of the atmosphere.[41] In standing upon the precipice, our backs to the shore, looking seaward beyond the purple “Needles” marking the extremest point of the sunken reef, we had an eerie sense of being suspended between sky and ocean;—a lightness of body and freedom of spirit, a contempt for the laws of gravitation, and for the Tally-Ho as a means of locomotion, that were, we decided after comparing notes among ourselves, the next best thing to being sea-fowl.

The principal objects of interest for the day were Carisbrooke Castle and Arreton. Next to the Heidelberg Schloss, Carisbrooke takes rank, in our recollection of ruins many and castles uncountable, for beauty of situation and for careful preservation of original character without injury to picturesqueness. The moat is cushioned with daisied turf, but we crossed it by a stone bridge of a single span. Over the gateway is carved the Woodville coat-of-arms, supported on each side by the “White Rose” of York. The arch is recessed between two fine, round towers. The massive doors, cross-barred with iron, still hang upon their hinges. Passing these, we were in a grassy court-yard of considerable extent. On our left was the shell of the suite of rooms occupied by Charles I. during his imprisonment here, from November 13, 1647, until the latter part of the next year. Ivy clings and creeps through the empty window-frames, and tapestries walls denuded of the “thick hangings and wainscoting” ordered for the royal captive. The floors of the upper story have fallen and the lower is carpeted with grass. Tufts of a pretty pink flower were springing in all the crevices. Ferns grew rank and tall along the inside of the enclosed space. High up in the wall is the outline of a small window, “blocked up in after alterations,” according to the record. Through this the king endeavored to escape on[42] the night of March 20, 1648. Horses were ready in the neighborhood of the Castle, and a vessel awaited the king upon the shore. A brave royalist came close beneath the window and gave the signal.

“Then”—in the words of this man, the only eye-witness of the scene—“His Majesty put himself forward, but, too late, found himself mistaken.”

Charles had declared, when the size of the aperture was under discussion, “Where my head can pass, my body can follow.”

“He, sticking fast between his breast and shoulders and not able to get backward or forward. Whilst he stuck I heard him groan, but could not come to help him, which, you may imagine, was no small affliction to me. So soon as he was in again—to let me see (as I had to my grief heard) the design was broken—he set a candle in the window. If this unfortunate impediment had not happened, his Majesty had certainly then made a good escape.”

The Stuarts were a burden to the land, as a family; but we wished the window had been a few inches broader, and exile, not the block, the end of fight ’twixt king and parliament, as we walked up and down the tilt-yard converted into a promenade and bowling-green for the prisoner while Colonel Hammond was governor of the Castle. Here Charles paced two hours each day, the wide sea and the free ships below him; in plain sight the cove where the little shallop had lain, at anchor, the night of the attempted rescue.

“He was not at all dejected in his spirits,” we read; “but carried himself with the same majesty he had used to do. His hair was all gray, which, making all others very sad, made it thought that he had sorrow in his countenance which appeared only by that shadow.”

In further evidence of his unbroken spirit in this earliest[43] imprisonment, we have the motto “Dum spiro, spero,” written by himself in a book he was fond of reading. Without divining it, he was getting his breath between two tempests. That in these months all that was truly kingly and good within him was nourished into healthy growth we gather, furthermore, in reading that “The Sacred Scriptures he most delighted in; read often in Sand’s Paraphrase of King David’s Psalms and Herbert’s Divine Poems.” Also, that “Spenser’s Faerie Queen was the alleviation of his spirits after serious studies.”

The Bowling Green is little changed in grade and verdure since the semi-daily promenade of the captive monarch streaked it with narrow paths, and since his orphaned son and daughter played bowls together upon the turf two summers afterward. The sward is velvet of thickest pile. There is an English saying that “it takes a century to make a lawn.” This has had more than two in which to grow and green.

We were glad that another party who were with us in the grounds were anxious to see an ancient donkey tread the wheel which draws up a bucket from the well, “144 feet deep, with 37 feet of water” in a building at the side of the Castle. While they tarried to applaud “Jacob’s” feat, we had a quiet quarter of an hour in the upper chamber, where, as a roughly-painted board tells us, “The Princess Elizabeth died.”

Who (in America) has not read the narrative, penned by the thirteen-year-old child, “What the King said to me 29^th of January last, being the last time I had the happiness to see him”? The heart breaks with the mere reading of the title and the fancy of the trembling fingers that wrote it out.

Her father had said to her, “But, sweetheart, thou wilt forget what I tell thee!” “Then, shedding abundance of[44] tears, I told him that I would write down all he said to me.”

We knew, almost to a word, the naïve recital which was the fulfilment of the pledge. We could not have forgotten at Carisbrooke that her father had given her a Bible, saying: “It had been his great comfort and constant companion through all his sorrows, and he hoped it would be hers.” She had been a prisoner in the Castle less than a week when she was caught in a sudden shower while playing with her little brother, the Duke of Gloucester, on the Bowling Green. The wetting “caused her to take cold, and the next day she complained of headache and feverish distemper.” It was a poor bed-chamber for a king’s daughter (with one window, a mere slit in the wall, and one door), in the which she lay for a fortnight, “her disease growing upon her,” until “after many rare ejaculatory expressions, abundantly demonstrating her unparalleled piety, to the eternal honor of her own memory and the astonishment of those who waited upon her, she took leave of the world on Sunday, the 8th of September, 1650.”

That was the way the chaplain and the physician told the story—such a sorrowful little tale when one strips away the sounding polysyllables and cuts short the windings of the sentences!

The warden’s wife was, we know, one of “those who waited upon her.” Hireling hands ministered to her through her “distemper.” In the scanty retinue that attended her to Carisbrooke was one “Judith Briott, her gentlewoman.” We liked to think she must have loved her gentle little mistress. It is possible her tending was as affectionate as the care she might have had, had the mother, to whom the father had sent his love by the daughter’s hand, been with her instead of in France, toying (some say) with a new lover. Yet the child-heart must[45] have yearned for parents, brothers and sisters. On that Sunday morning, an attendant entering with a bowl of bread-and-milk, discovered that the princess had died alone, her cheek pillowed upon the Bible—her father’s legacy.

That small chamber was a sacred spot where we could not but speak low and step softly. It is utterly dismantled. When draped and furnished it may not have been comfortless. It could never have been luxurious. A branch of ivy had thrust itself in at the window through which her dying eyes looked their last upon the sky. Caput reached up silently and broke off a spray. As I write, it climbs up my window-frame, a thrifty vine, that has taken kindly to voyaging and transplanting. To me it is a more valuable memento than the beautiful photograph of the monument erected to Princess Elizabeth’s memory in the Church of St. Thomas, whither “her body was brought (in a borrowed coach) attended with her few late servants.”

Yet the monument is a noble tribute from royalty to the daughter of a royal line. The young girl lies asleep, one hand fallen to her side, the other laid lightly upon her breast, her check turned to rest upon the open Bible. The face is sweet and womanly; the expression peacefully happy. “A token of respect for her virtues, and sympathy for her misfortunes. By Victoria R., 1856.” So reads the inscription.

Imagination leaped a wide chasm of time and station in passing from the state prison-chamber of Carisbrooke to the thatched cottage of The Dairyman’s Daughter; from the marble sculptured by a queen’s command, to the head-stone reared by one charitable admirer of the humble piety of Elizabeth Walbridge. To reach the grave we had to pass through the parish church of Arreton. It is like[46] a hundred other parish churches scattered among the byways of England. The draught from the interior met us when the door grated upon the hinges, cold, damp, and ill-smelling, a smell that left an earthy taste in the mouth. Beneath the stone flooring the noble dead are packed economically as to room. The sexton, who may have been a trifle younger than the building, spoke a dialect we could hardly translate. The church was his pride, and he was sorely grieved when we would have pushed right onward to the burying-ground.

“Ye mun look at ’e brawsses!” he pleaded so tremulously that we halted to note one, on which was the figure of a man in armor, his feet upon a lion couchant.

The date is 1430.

Another “brass” upon a stone pillar bears six verses setting forth the worthy deeds of one William Serle:

“An’ ye woant see ’e rest?” quavered the old sexton at our next movement. “’E be foine brawsses! Quawlity all of um—’e be!”

Seeing our obduracy, he hobbled to the side-door and unlocked it, amid many groans from himself and the rusty wards. The July light and air were welcome after the damp twilight within. In death at least, it would seem to be better with the poor than the “quality,” if sun and breeze[47] are boons. The churchyard is small and ridged closely with graves. The old man led the way between and over these to the last home of the Dairyman’s Daughter. We gathered about it, looked reverently upon the low swell of turf. There is a metrical epitaph, sixteen lines in length, presumably the composition of the lady at whose expense the stone was raised. It begins:

The rest is after the same order, a mechanical jingle in pious measure. It offends one who has not been educated to appreciate the value of post-mortem patronage bestowed by the lofty upon the lowly. It was enough for us to know that the worn body of Legh Richmond’s “Elizabeth” lay there peacefully sleeping away the ages.

We had picked up in a Ventnor bookshop a shabby little copy of Richmond’s “Annals of the Poor,” printed in 1828. It contained a sketch of Mr. Richmond’s life by his son-in-law, The Dairyman’s Daughter, The Negro Servant, and The Young Cottager, the scene of all these narratives being in the Isle of Wight. We reread them with the pensive pleasure one feels in unbinding a pacquet of letters, spotted and yellowed by time, but which hands beloved once pressed, and yielding still the faint fragrance of the rose-leaves we laid away with them when the pages were white and fresh. We, who drew delight with instruction from Sunday-School libraries more than thirty years back, knew Elizabeth, the “Betsey” of father and mother, better than we did our next-door neighbors. Prima and Secunda, allured by my enthusiasm to read the book, declared that her letters to her[48] spiritual adviser “were prosy and priggish,” but that the hold of the story upon my heart was not all the effect of early association was abundantly proved by their respectful mention of her humble piety and triumphant death.

By her side lies the sister at whose funeral Legh Richmond first met his modest heroine. In the same family group sleep the Dairyman and his wife. “The mother died not long after the daughter,” says Mr. Richmond, “and I have good reason to believe that God was merciful to her and took her to Himself. The good old Dairyman died in 1816, aged 84. His end was eminently Christian.”

Elizabeth died May 30, 1801, at the age of thirty-one.

“Pardon!” said a foreign gentleman, one of the party, who, seeing Caput uncover his head at the grave, had done the same. “But will you have the goodness to tell me what it is we have come here to see?”

“The grave of a very good woman,” was the reply.

Legh Richmond tells us little more. Her love for her Saviour, like the broken alabaster-box of ointment in the hand of another woman of far different life, is the sweet savor that has floated down to us through all these years.

I stooped to picked some bearded grasses from the mound. The sexton bent creakingly to aid me, chattering and grinning. He wore a blue frock over his corduroy trousers: his hands and clothes were stained with clay; his sunken cheeks looked like old parchment.

“’A wisht ’a ’ad flowers to gi’ ’e, leddy!” he said. “’A dit troy for one wheele to keep um ’ere. But ’a moight plant um ivery day, and ’ee ud be all goane ’afore tummorrer. He! he! he! ’A—manny leddies cooms ’ere for summat fro’ e’ grave. ’A burried ’er brother over yander!” chucking a pebble to show where—“’a dit! ’E larst of[49] ’e fomily. ’Ees all goane! And ’a’m still aloive and loike to burry a manny more! He! he!”

Our homeward route lay by the Dairyman’s cottage, a long mile from the church. When the coffin of Elizabeth, borne by neighbors’ hands, was followed by the mourners, also on foot, funeral hymns were sung, “at occasional intervals of about five minutes.” As we bowled along the smooth road, Prima, sitting behind me, read aloud from the shabby little volume a description of the surrounding scene, that might, for accuracy of detail, have been written that day:

“A rich and fruitful valley lay immediately beneath. It was adorned with corn-fields and pastures, through which a small river winded in a variety of directions, and many herds grazed upon its banks. A fine range of opposite hills, covered with grazing flocks, terminated with a bold sweep into the ocean, whose blue waves appeared at a distance beyond. Several villages, churches and hamlets were scattered in the valley. The noble mansions of the rich and the lowly cottages of the poor added their respective features to the landscape. The air was mild, and the declining sun occasioned a beautiful interchange of light and shade upon the sides of the hills.”

The annalist adds,—“In the midst of this scene the chief sound that arrested attention was the bell tolling for the funeral of the ‘Dairyman’s Daughter.’”

“A picture by Claude!” commented Caput as the reader paused.

“A draught of old wine that has made the voyage to India and back!” said Dux, our blue-eyed college-boy.

These were the hills that had echoed the funeral psalm; these the cottages in whose doors stood those “whose countenances proclaimed their regard for the departed young woman.” Red brick “cottages,” the little gardens[50] between them and the road crowded with larkspurs, pinks, roses, lavender, and southernwood. They were generally built in solid rows under one roof, the yards separated by palings. There were no basements, the paved floors being laid directly upon the ground. Two rooms upon this floor, and one above in a steep-roofed attic, was the prevailing plan of the tenements. The doors were open, and we could observe, at a passing glance, that some were clean and bright, others squalid, within. All, mean and neat, had flowers in the windows. The Dairyman’s cottage stands detached from other houses with what the neighbors would term “a goodish bit of ground” about it. To the original dwelling that Legh Richmond saw has been joined a two-story wing, also of brick. Beside it the cottage with its thatched roof is a very humble affair. The lane, “quite overshaded with trees and high hedges,” and “the suitable gloom of such an approach to the house of mourning,” are gone, with “the great elm-trees which stood near the house.” The rustling of these,—as he rode by them to see Elizabeth die,—the imagination of the unconscious poet and true child of Nature “indulged itself in thinking were plaintive sighs of sorrow.”

But we saw the upper room with its sloping ceiling, and the window-seat in which “her sister-in-law sat weeping with a child in her lap,” while Elizabeth lay dying upon the bed drawn into the middle of the floor to give her air.

The glory of the sunsetting was over sea and land, painting the sails rose-pink; purpling the lofty downs and mellowing into delicious vagueness the skyey distances—the pathways into the world beyond this island-gem—when we drove into Ventnor. The grounds of the Royal Hotel are high and spacious, with turfy banks rolling from the cliff-brow down to the road, divided by walks laid in[51] snowy shells gathered from the shore. From a tall flag-staff set on the crown of the hill streamed out, proud and straight in the strong sea-breeze—the Stars and Stripes!

We did not cheer it, except in spirit, but the gentlemen waved their hats and the ladies kissed their hands to the grand old standard, and all responded “Amen!” to the deep voice that said, “God bless it, forever!” And with the quick heart-bound that sent smiles to the lips and moisture to the eyes, with longings for the Land always and everywhere dearest to us, came kindlier thoughts than we were wont to indulge of the “Old Home,” which, in the clearer light of a broadening Christian civilization, can, with us, rejoice in the anniversary of a Nation’s Birthday.

[52]

CHAPTER V.
Prince Guy.

LEAMINGTON is in, and of itself, the pleasantest and stupidest town in England. It is a good place in which to sleep and eat and leave the children when the older members of the party desire to make all-day excursions. It is pretty, quiet, healthy, with clean, broad “parades” and shaded parks wherein perambulators are safe from runaway horses and reckless driving. There are countless shops for the sale of expensive fancy articles, notably china and embroidery; more lodging-houses than private dwellings and shops put together. There is a chabybeate spring—fabled to have tasted properly, i. e., chemically, “nasty,” once upon a time—enclosed in a pump-room. Hence “Leamington Spa,” one of the names of the town. And through the Jephson Gardens (supposed to be the Enchanted Ground whereupon Tennyson dreamed out his “Lotos-eaters”) flows the “high-complectioned Leam,” the sleepiest river that ever pretended to go through the motions of running at all. Hawthorne defines the “complexion” to be a “greenish, goose-puddly hue,” but, “disagreeable neither to taste nor smell.” We used to saunter in the gardens after dinner on fine evenings, to promote quiet digestion and drowsiness, and can recommend the prescription. There are churches in Leamington, “high” and “low,” or, as the two[53] factions prefer to call themselves, “Anglican” and “Evangelical;” Nonconformist meeting-houses—Congregational, Wesleyan and Baptist; there are two good circulating libraries, and there is a tradition to the effect that living in hotels and lodgings here was formerly cheap. One fares tolerably there now—and pays for it.

We made Leamington our headquarters for six weeks, Warwickshire being a very mine of historic show-places, and the sleepy Spa easy of access from London, Oxford, Birmingham, and dozens of other cities we must see, while at varying distances of one, five, and ten miles lie Warwick Castle, Kenilworth, Stratford-on-Avon, Charlecote, the home of Sir Thomas Lucy (Justice Shallow), Stoneleigh Abbey—one of the finest country-seats in Great Britain—and Coventry.

The age of Warwick Castle is a mooted point. “Cæsar’s Tower,” ruder in construction than the remainder of the stupendous pile, is said to be eight hundred years old. It looks likely to last eight hundred more. The outer gate is less imposing than the entrance to some barn-yards I have seen, A double-leaved door, neither clean nor massive, was unbolted at our ring by a young girl, who told us that the “H’Earl was sick,” therefore, visitors were not admitted “h’arfter ’arf parst ten.” Once in the grounds, “they might stay so long h’as they were dispoged.”

It is impossible to caricature the dialect of the lower classes of the Mother Country. Even substantial tradesmen, retired merchants and their families who are living—and traveling—upon their money are, by turns, prodigal and niggardly in the use of the unfortunate aspirate that falls naturally into place with us; while servants who have lived for years in the “best families” appear to pride themselves upon the liberties they take with their h’s, mouthing the mutilated words with pomp that is irresistibly[54] comic. We delighted to lay traps for our guides and coachmen, and the yeomen we encountered in walks and drives, by asking information on the subject of Abbeys, Inns, Earls, Horses, Halls, and Ages. In every instance they came gallantly up to our expectations, often transcended our most daring hopes. But we seldom met with a more satisfactory specimen in this line than the antique servitor that kept the lodge of Warwick Castle. She wore a black gown, short-waisted and short-skirted, a large cape of the same stuff, and what Dickens had taught us to call a “mortified” black bonnet of an exaggerated type. The cap-frill within flapped about a face that reminded us of Miss Cushman’s Meg Merrilies. Entering the lodge hastily, after the young woman who had admitted us had begun cataloguing the curiosities collected there, she put her aside with a sweep of her bony arm and an angry, guttural “Ach!” and began the solemnly circumstantial relation she must have rehearsed thousands of times. We beheld “H’earl Guy’s” breast-plate, his sword and battle-axe, the “’orn” of a dun cow slain by him, and divers other bits of old iron, scraps of pottery, etc. But the chef d’œuvre of the custodian was the oration above Sir Guy’s porridge-pot, a monstrous iron vessel set in the centre of the square chamber. Standing over it, a long poker poised in her hand, she enumerated with glowing gusto the ingredients of the punch brewed in the big kettle “when the present H’earl came h’of h’age,” glaring at us from the double pent-house of frill and bonnet. I forget the exact proportions, but they were somewhat in this order:

“H’eighteen gallons o’ rum. Fifteen gallons o’ brandy”—tremendous stress upon each liquor—“One ’undred pounds o’ loaf sugar. H’eleven ’undred lemmings, h’and fifty gallons h’of ’ot water! This h’identikle pot was filled h’and h’emptied, three times that day! H’I myself saw h’it!”[55]

Her greedy gloating upon the minutest elements of the potent compound was elfish and almost terrible. It was like—

the harsh gutturals and suspended iron bar heightening the haggish resemblance. The pot, she proceeded to relate, was “six ’undred years h’old,” and bringing down the poker upon and around the edge, evolving slow gratings and rumblings that crucified our least sensitive nerves, “h’is this h’our without ’ole h’or crack h’as H’I can h’answer for h’and testify!”

The entire exhibition was essentially dramatic and effectively ridiculous. She accepted our gratuity with the same high tragedy air and posed herself above the chaldron for an entering party of visitors.

We sauntered up to the castle along a curving drive between a steep bank overrun with lush ivy and a wall covered with creepers, and overhung by fine old trees. Birds sang in the branches and hopped across the road, the green shade bathed our eyes refreshingly after the glare of the flint-strewn highway outside of the gates. It was a forest dingle, rather than the short avenue to the grandest ancient castle in Three Kingdoms. A broad expanse of turf stretching before the front of the mansion is lost as far as the eye can reach in avenues and plantations of trees. Among these are cedars of Lebanon, brought by crusading Earls from the Holy Land, still vigorously supplying by new growth the waste of centuries. Masses of brilliant flowers relieved the verdure of the level sward, fountains leaped and tinkled in sunny glades, and cut the shadow of leafy vistas with the flash of silver blades. In the principal conservatory stands the celebrated Warwick[56] Vase, brought hither from Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli. Ladders were reared against the barbican wall of great height and thickness, close by Guy’s Tower (erected in 1394). Workmen mounted upon these were scraping mosses and dirt from the interstices of the stones and filling them with new cement. No pains nor expense is spared to preserve the magnificent fortress from the ravages of time and climate. From the foundation of the Castle until now, the family of Warwick, in some of its ramifications—or usurpations—has been in occupation of the demesne and is still represented in the direct line of succession by the present owner. The noble race has battled more successfully with revolution and decay in behalf of house and ancestral home than have most members of the British Peerage whose lineage is of equal antiquity and note.

Opposite the door by which we entered the Great Hall, was a figure of a man on horseback, rider and steed as large as life. The complete suit of armor of the one and the caparisons of the other, were presented by Queen Elizabeth to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, her handsome master-of-horse. From this moment until we quitted the house, we were scarcely, for a moment, out of sight of relics of the parvenu favorite.

It is difficult to appreciate that real people, made of flesh, blood, and sensibilities akin to those of the mass of humankind, live out their daily lives, act out their true characters, indulge in “tiffs” and “makings up,” and have “a good time generally,” in these great houses to which the public are so freely admitted. Neither lives nor homes seem to be their individual and distinctive property. They must be tempted, at times, to doubts of the proprietorship of their own thoughts and enjoy the right of private opinion by stealth.[57]

One thing helped me to picture a social company of friends grouped comfortably, even cozily, in this mighty chamber, the pointed rafters of which met so far above us that the armorial bearings carved between them upon the ceiling were indistinct to near-sighted eyes; where the walls were covered with suits of armor, paintings by renowned masters, and treasures of virtu in furniture and ornament thronged even such spaciousness as that in which the bewildered visitor feels for a moment lost. A great fireplace, with carved oaken mantel, mellow-brown with years, and genuine fire-dogs of corresponding size, yawned in the wall near Leicester’s effigy. Beside this was a stout rack, almost as large as a four-post bedstead, full of substantial logs, each at least five feet long. There must have been a cord of seasoned wood heaped irregularly within bars and cross-pieces. Some was laid ready for lighting in the chimney, kindlings under it. A match was all that was needed to furnish a roaring fire. That would be a feature in the old feudal hall. An antique settle, covered with crimson, stood invitingly near the hearth. One sitting upon it had a view of the lawn sloping down to the river, and the umbrageous depths of the woods beyond; of the jutting end and one remaining pier of the old bridge on the hither bank, the trailing ivy pendants drooping to touch the Avon that mirrored castle-towers, trees, the broken masonry of one bridge and the solid, gray length of the other. In fancying who might have sat here on cool autumn days, looking dreamily from the red recesses of the fireplace to the tranquil picture framed by the window; who walked at twilight upon the polished floor over the sheen of the leaping blaze upon the dark wood; who talked, face to face, heart with heart, about the hearth on stormy winter nights—I had let the others move onward in the lead of the maid-servant who[58] was appointed to show us around. One gets so tired of the sing-song iteration of names and dates that she is well-pleased to let acres of painted canvas, the dry inventory of beds and stools, tables and candlesticks, the list of lords, artists and grandees gabbled over in hashed English, seasoned with pert affectations, slip unheeded by her ears. We accounted it great gain when we were suffered to enjoy in our own way a single picture or a relic that unlocked for us a treasure-closet of memory and fancy.

Drifting dreamily then in the wake of the crowd, I halted between an original portrait of Charles I. and one of his namesake and successor, trying, for the twentieth time, to reconcile the fact of the strong family likeness with the pensive beauty of the father and the coarse ugliness of the son, when strident tones projected well through the nose apprised me that the Traveling American had arrived and was on duty. The maid had waited in the Great Hall to collect a party of ten before beginning the tour. Workmen were hammering somewhere upon or about the vaulted roof, and the woman’s explanations were sometimes drowned by the reverberation. We were not chagrined by the loss. We had guide-books and catalogues, and each had some specific object of interest in view or quest. The Traveling American, benevolent to a nuisance, tall, black-eyed and bearded, with an oily ripple of syllables betraying the training of camp-meeting or political campaign, took up the burden of the girl’s parrot-talk and rolled it over to us, not omitting to inter-lard it with observations deprecatory, appreciative, and critical.

“Original portrait of Henry VIII., by a cotemporary artist—name not known. Holbein—most likely! He was always painting the old tyrant. Considered a very excellent likeness. Although nobody living is authority upon[59] that point. Over the door, two portraits. Small heads, you see, hardly larger than cabinet pictures,—of Mary and Anne Boleyn. Which is which—did you say, my dear? Oh! the one to the left is Anne, Henry’s second wife. Supplanted poor old Kate of Arragon, you remember. What a run of Kates the ugly Blue-beard had! Anne is a pretty, modest-looking girl. The wonder is how she could have married that fat beer-guzzler over yonder, king or no king. Let me see! Didn’t he want to marry Mary, too? ‘Seems to me there is some such story. And she said ‘No, thank you!’ Hers is a nice face, but she isn’t such a beauty as her sister.”

Ad infinitum—and from the outset, ad nauseam, to all except the four ladies of his party. They tittered and nudged one another at each witticism, and looked at us for answering tokens of sympathy. We pressed the maid onward since we were not allowed to precede her; tarried in the rear of the procession as nearly out of ear-shot as might be. But the armory is a succession of narrow rooms, and a pause at the head of the train in the last of the series brought about a “block” of the two parties. Upon a table was a lump of faded velvet and tarnished gold lace, frayed and almost shapeless.

T. A. (beamingly). “The saddle upon which Queen Elizabeth rode, on the occasion of her memorable visit to Kenilworth. She had just given Kenilworth to Leicester, you remember, as a love-token. He was a Warwick (!); so the saddle has naturally remained in the family. An interesting and perfectly authenticated relic. Elizabeth invented side-saddles, as you are all aware. This was manufactured to order. It is something to see the saddle on which Queen Elizabeth rode. And on such an occasion! It makes an individual, as it were—thrill! Clara! where are you, my dear.” A pretty little girl came[60] forward, blushingly. “Put your hand upon it, my child! Now—you can tell them all at home you have had your hand upon the place where Queen Elizabeth sat on!”

“Is there no pound in Warwick for vagrant donkeys?” muttered Lex, a youth in our section of the company.

He had been abroad but three weeks, and the species, if not the genus, was a novelty to him. Nor had we, when as strange to the sight and habits of the creature as was he, any adequate prevision of the annoyance he would become—what a spot, in his ubiquity and irrepressibleness, upon our feasts of sight-seeing. Caput had, as usual, a crumb of consolation for himself and for us when we had shaken ourselves free from our country-people at the castle-door by taking a different route from theirs through the grounds.

“At any rate, he knew who Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth were, and was not altogether ignorant of Leicester and Kenilworth. We need not be utterly ashamed of him. Only—we will wait until he has been to look at the Warwick Vase before we go in. I can live without hearing its history from his lips.”

A notable race have been the Warwicks in English legends and history, for scores of generations. Princely in magnificence; doughty in war; in love, ardent; in ambition, measureless. Under Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart, and Guelph, they have never lacked a man to stand near the throne and maintain worthily their dignity. But, in the long avenue of stateliness there are heads loftier than their fellows. Once in an age, one has stood grandly apart, absorbent of such active interest and living sympathy as we cannot bestow upon family or clan.

As at Carisbrooke, Charles Stuart and his hapless daughter are continually present to our imagination; and the grandmother, whose head, like his, rolled in the sawdust[61] of an English scaffold, glides a pale, lovely shade with us through the passages of Holyrood; as at Kenilworth, we think of Elizabeth, the guest, more than of Leicester, the host, and in Trinity Church at Coventry, pass carelessly by painted windows exquisite in modern workmanship, to seek in an obscure aisle the patched fragment of glass that commemorates the chaste Godiva’s sacrifice for her people,—so there was for us one Lord of Warwick Castle, one Hero of Warwickshire. I shall confess to so many sentimental weaknesses, so many historical heresies in the course of this volume, that I may as well divulge this pampered conceit frankly and without apology.

For us—foremost and pre-eminent among the mighty men of the house of Warwick who have “found their hands” for battle and for statecraft since the foundations of Cæsar’s Tower were laid, stands Earl Guy, Goliath and Paladin of the line. Of his deeds of valor, authentic and mythical, the witch at the Lodge has much to tell—the traditionary lore of the district, more.

“I am not Samson, nor Sir Guy, nor Colbrand,”

Shakspeare makes a man of the people say. Sir Guy overthrew and slew the giant Colbrand in the year 926, according to Dugdale. Is not the story of this and a hundred other feats of arms recorded in the “Booke of the most victoryous Prince Guy of Warwick”? When he fell in love with the Lady Lettice—(or Phillis—traditions disagree about the name), the fairest maiden in the kingdom, she set him on to perform other prodigies of valor in the hope of winning her hand. In joust and in battle-field, at home and afar, he wore her colors in his helmet and her image in his heart.

“She appoynted unto Earl Guy many and grievous[62] tasks, all of which he did. And soe in tyme it came to pass that he married her.”

They lived in Warwick Castle, a fortress then, in reality, and of necessity, for a few peaceful years. How many we do not know, only that children were born unto them, and that Lettice, laying aside the naughtiness of early coquetry, grew gentler, more lovable and more fond each day, while Earl Guy waxed silent and morose under the pressure of a mysterious burden, never shared with the wife he adored and had periled his soul to win. Suddenly and secretly he withdrew to the cell of a holy hermit who lived but three miles away, and was lost to the world he had filled with rumors of “derring-doing.” The Countess Lettice, distracted by grief at the disappearance of her lord, and the failure of her efforts to trace the direction of his flight, without a misgiving that while her detectives—who must have been of the dullest—scoured land and sea in search of the missing giant, he was hidden within sight of the turret-windows of Guy’s Tower—withdrew into the seclusion of her castle and gave herself up to works of piety and benevolence. Guy’s children had her tenderest care; next to them her poor tenantry. Upon stated days of the week a crowd of these pensioners presented themselves at her gates and were fed by her servants. Among them came for—some say, twenty, others, forty years, a beggar, bent in figure, with muffled features, in rags, and unaccompanied by so much as a dog, who silently received his dole of the Countess’s charity and went his way challenged by none. We hope, in hearing it, that the Lady Lettice, her fair face the lovelier for the chastening of her great grief, sometimes showed herself to the waiting petitioners. If she did, weeping had surely dulled her vision that she did not recognize Earl Guy under his labored disguise, for he was a Saul even among brawny Saxons[63] and the semi-barbarous islanders. If the eremite had such chance glimpses of his love, they were the only earthly consolation vouchsafed him in the tedious life of mortification and prayer. While Lettice, in her bower among her maidens, prayed for his return, refusing all intercourse with the gay world, her husband divided his time between the cave where he dwelt alone and the oratory of the hermit-monk where he spent whole days in supplication, prone upon the earth.

Poor, tortured, ignorant soul! grand in remorse and in penance as in war and in love! He confessed often to the monk, seldom speaking to him at other times. The priest kept faithfully the dread secrets confided to him. His absolution, if he granted it, did not ease the burdened soul. The end came when the long exile had dried up life and spirit. From his death-bed Earl Guy sent to his wife, by the hand of one of her hinds, a ring she had given him in the days of their wedded joy, “praying her, for Jesu’s sake to visit the wretch from whom it came.” He died in her faithful arms. They were buried, side by side, near his cave.

This is still pointed out to visitors,—a darksome recess, partly natural, enlarged by burrowing hands,—perhaps by those of the “victoryous Prince Guy.”

I drew from the Leamington Library, one Saturday afternoon, a queer little book, prepared under the auspices of a local archæological society, and treating at some length of recent discoveries in Guy’s Cave by an eminent professor of the comparatively new science of classic archæology. Far up in one corner he had uncovered rude cuttings in the rock, and with infinite patience and ingenuity, obtained an impression of them. The surface of the stone is friable; the letters are such clumsy Runic characters as a warrior of the feudal age would have made had[64] he turned his thoughts to penmanship. The language is a barbarous Anglo-Saxon. But they have made out Lettice’s name, twice repeated, and in another place, Guy’s. This last is appended to a line of prayer for “relief from this heavy”—or “grievous”—“load.”

I read the treatise aloud that evening, excited and triumphant.

“Now, who dare ridicule us for believing in Prince Guy?”

“It all fits in too well,” said candid Prima, sorrowfully.

But the local savans do not discredit the discovery on that account. We drove out to Guy’s Cliff the next afternoon to attend service in the family chapel of the Percys, whose handsome mansion is built hard by. The stables are hewn out of the same rocky ridge in which Guy dug his cell. The chapel occupies the site of the old oratory. The bell was tinkling for the hour of worship as we entered the porch. It is a pretty little building, of gray stone, as are the surrounding offices, and on this occasion was tolerably well filled with servants and tenants of “the Family.” In a front slip sat the worshippers from the Great House—an old lady in widow’s mourning, who was, we were told, Lady Percy, and three portly British matrons, simple in attire and devout in demeanor. A much more august personage, pursy and puffing behind a vast red waistcoat, whom we supposed to be Chief Butler on week days and verger on Sabbath, assigned to us a seat directly back of the ladies, and, what was of more consequence in our eyes, in a line with a niche in which stands a gigantic statue of Earl Guy. This was set up on the site of the oratory, two hundred years after his death, by the first of the Plantagenets, Henry II.

“Our lord, the King, has each day a school for right[65] well-lettered men,” says a chronicler of his reign. “Hence, his conversation that he hath with them is busy discussing of questions. None is more honest than our king in speaking, ne in alms largess. Therefore, as Holy Writ saith, we may say of him—‘His name is a precious ointment, and the alms of him all the church shall take.’”

Whether as an erudite antiquarian, or as a pious son of the church he caused this statue to be placed here, History, nor its elder sister, Tradition informs us. We may surmise shrewdly, and less charitably, that repentant visitings of conscience touching his marital infidelities, or the scandal of Fair Rosamond, or peradventure, the desire to appease the manes of the murdered Becket had something to do with the offering. The effigy was thrown down in the ruin of the oratory in the Civil Wars, and for many years, lay forgotten in the rubbish. The Percys have raised it with reverent hands, and set it—sadly broken and defaced—in the place of honor in their chapel.

There was charming incongruity in the aspect of the towering gray figure, with one uplifted arm from which sword or battle-axe has fallen, and the appointments and occupants of the temple. The head is much disfigured, worn away, more than shattered. But there is majesty in the outlines and attitude. Our eyes strayed to it oftener, dwelt upon it longer, than on the fresh-colored face of the spruce Anglican who intoned the service and read a neat little homily upon the 51st Psalm, prefaced by a modest mention of David’s sin in the matter of Uriah the Hittite. From what depth of blood-guiltiness had our noble recluse entreated deliverance in a day when blood weighed lightly upon the souls of brave men?

The Sabbath light flowed through the stained windows of the chancel and bathed in blessing, the feet of the[66] graven figure; the lifted arm menaced no more, but signified supplication as we prayed:

“Spare Thou those who confess their sins!”

—was tossed aloft in thanksgiving in the last hymn:—

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CHAPTER VI.
Shakspeare and Irving.

WE had “Queen’s weather” for most of our excursions in England, and no fairer day than that on which we went to Stratford-on-Avon.

The denizens of the region give the first sound of a to the name of the quiet river—as in fate. I do not undertake to decide whether they, or we are correct. Their derelictions upon the H question are so flagrant as to breed distrust of all their inventions and practice in pronunciation. (Although we did learn to say “Tems”—very short—for “T’ames.”)

I wish, for the benefit of future tourists who may read these pages, that I had retained the address of the driver—and I believe the owner—of the waggonette we secured for our drives in Warwickshire. It held our party of six comfortably, leaving abundant space in the bottom and under the seats for hamper and wraps, and was a stylish, easy-running vehicle. The coachman was a fine young fellow of, perhaps, six-and-twenty, civil, obliging, and, in our experience, an exceptionally intelligent member of his class. In this conveyance, and with such pilotage, we set out on July 27th, upon one of our red-letter pilgrimages—fore-ordained within our, for once, prophetic souls ever since, as ten-year old children, we used to read Shakspeare secretly in the garret on rainy Saturdays.

It was an old copy relegated to the lumber-chest as too[68] shabby for the family library. One side of the calf-skin cover was gone, and luckily for the morals of the juvenile student, “Venus and Adonis” and most of the sonnets had followed suite. But an engraved head of William Shakspeare was protected by the remaining cover and had left a shadow-picture, in white-and-yellow, upon the tissue-paper next it. After the title-page followed a dozen or so of biography, which we devoured as eagerly as we did “The Tempest,” “Julius Cæsar,” and “Macbeth.” We had read Mrs. Whitney’s always-and-everywhere charming “Sights and Insights,” before and since leaving America, and worn Emory Ann’s “realizing our geography” to shreds by much quoting. To-day, we were realizing our Shakspeare and “Merry” England.

The drive was surpassingly lovely. The smoothness of the road was, in itself, a luxury. It is as evenly-graded and free from stones and ruts as a bowling-alley. One prolific topic of conversation is denied the morning-callers and bashful swains of Warwickshire. They cannot discuss the “state of the roads,” their uniform condition being above criticism. The grass grew quite up to the edge of the highway, but was shaven and weedless as a lawn. There were hedge-rows instead of fences, and at intervals, we had enchanting glimpses up intersecting ways of what we had heard and read of all our lives, yet in which we scarcely believed until we saw, in their beauty and picturesqueness, real lanes. The banks, sloping downward from the hedges into these, were clothed with vines, ferns and field-flowers. One appreciates the exquisite fidelity of such sketches from Nature as,—

[69]

after seeing the lanes between Leamington and Stratford-on-Avon. Double rows of noble trees screened us from the sun for a mile at a time, and the hedges, so skillfully clipped that the sides and rounded tops were never marred by redundant growth, yet bearing no sign of the shears in stubby or naked stems, were walls of richest verdure throughout the route. The freshness and trimness of the English landscape is a joy and wonder forever to those unused to the perfection of agriculture which is the growth of centuries. There is the finish and luxuriance of a pleasure-garden in every prospect in these midland counties, and, forgetting that the soil has acknowledged a master in the husbandman for more than a thousand years, and that, for more than half that time, the highest civilization known to man has held reign in this tiny island, we are tempted to think discontentedly of the contrast offered by our own magnificent, and, by contrast, crude spaces. It was not because of affectation or lack of patriotism that, upon our return home, the straggling fences, clogged with alder and brambles, the ragged pastures and gullied hillsides were a positive pain to sight and heart.

Any one who has seen a good photograph of Shakspeare’s house knows exactly how it looks. The black timbers of the frame-work are visible from the outside. The spaces between the beams are filled with cement or plaster. There are three gables in front, the third, at the upper corner, broader and higher than the others. The chimney is in the end-gable, joining this last at right angles, and is covered with ivy. A pent-house protects the main entrance. Wide latticed windows light the ground-floor; a latticed oriel projects from the second story of the taller division of the building. Smaller casements in line with this are set in each of the principal upper rooms. The house is flush with the street, and is probably smarter in[70] its “restoration,” than when Master John Shakspeare, wool-dealer, lived here. We entered, without intervening vestibule or passage, a square room, the ceiling of which was not eight feet high. A peasant’s kitchen, that was also best-room, with a broken stone floor and plastered walls checquered by hewn beams.

Two sisters, who dressed, looked, moved and spoke absurdly alike, are the custodians of the cottage. One met us with a professional droop of a not-elastic figure, a mechanical smile and an immediate plunge into business:

“After the removal of the Shakspeare family from this humble tenement, it was leased to a prosperous butcher, who occupied this room as a shop. That was, indeed, a sad desecration, and one that accounts for the dilapidation of the floor, it having been shattered by chopping meat upon it.”

No reasonable visitor could desire to linger in the apartment longer than sufficed for the delivery of the comprehensive formula, and she tiptoed into the adjoining room:

“In this the family were accustomed to sit when they were not dressed in their best clothes”—mincingly jocular.

Caput and I, regardless of routine, strayed back into the outer kitchen to get a more satisfactory look, and after our fashion, and that of Mr. Swiveller’s Marchioness, “to make-believe very hard.” We wanted to shut our eyes—and ears—and in a blessed interval of silence, to see the honest dealer in wool—member of the corporation; for two years chamberlain; high bailiff in 1569; and in 1571—his son William being then seven years of age—chief alderman of Stratford, standing in the street-door chatting with a respectful fellow-townsman; Mary his wife, passing from dresser to hearth, and, upon a stool in the chimney corner, the Boy, chin propped upon his hand, thinking—“idling,” his industrious seniors would have said.[71]

We had hardly passed the door of communication when sister No. 1 having transferred the rest of the visitors to No. 2, and sent them up-stairs, reappeared. The same professional dip of the starched figure; the manufactured smile, and, mistaking us for fresh arrivals, she began, without variation of syllable or inflection:

“After the removal of the Shakspeare family from this humble tenement, it was leased to a prosperous butcher, who occupied this room as a shop. That was, indeed, a sad desecration—”

We fled to the upper story. The stairs give upon an ante-chamber corresponding with the back-kitchen. Against the rear-wall, in a gaudy frame, and, itself looking unpicturesquely new and distinct, is the celebrated “Stratford Portrait”—another restoration. It is not spurious, having been the property of a respectable county-family for upwards of a century, and there is abundant documentary testimony of its authenticity. It shows us a handsomer man than do the other pictures of the Great Play-Wright. In fact, it is too good-looking. One could believe it the representment of the jolly, prosperous wool-factor, complacent under the shower of municipal honors. It is difficult to reconcile the smooth, florid face, the scarlet lips, dainty moustache and imperial, with thoughts of Lear, Hamlet, and Coriolanus.

“The room in which Shakspeare was born” was quite full of pilgrims—quiet, well-bred and non-enthusiastic, exclaiming softly over such signatures as Walter Scott’s upon the casement-panes, and Edmund Kean’s upon the side of the chimney devoted to actors’ autographs. They indulged in no conversational raptures—for which we were grateful. But the hum of talk, the rustle and stir were a death-blow to fond and poetic phantasies. We gazed coldly upon the scrawlings that disfigure the walls[72] and blur the windows; incredulously upon the deal table and chairs; critically at the dirty bust which offered still another and a different image of the man we refused to believe came by this shabby portal into the world that was to worship him as the greatest of created intellects. Such disillusions are more common with those who visit old shrines in the rôle of “passionate pilgrims” than they are willing to admit.

I wanted to think of Shakspeare’s cradle and the mother-face above it; how he had been carried by her to the casement—thrown wide on soft summer days like this—and clapped his hands at sight of birds and trees, and boys and girls playing in the street, as my babies, and all other babies, have done from the days of Cain. How he had rolled and crept upon the floor, and caught many a tumble in his trial-steps, and fallen asleep at twilight in the warm covert of mother-arms. I had thought of it a thousand times before; I have been all over it a thousand times since. While on the hallowed spot, I saw the low room, common and homely, with bulging rafters and rough-cast sides, the uneven boards of the floor, brown and blotched—the vulgarity of everything, the consecration of nothing.

The museum in an adjoining room caused a perceptible rise in the spirits, dampened by our inability to “realize,” as conscience decreed, in the birth-chamber. The desk used by Shakspeare at school looked plausible. There were realistic touches in the lid bespattered with ink and hacked by jack-knife. The hinges are of leather. We believed that he kept gingerbread, sausage-roll, toffey, green apples, and cock-chafers with strings tied to their hind legs, in it. We did not quibble over Shakspeare’s signet-ring, engraved with “W. S.” and a lover’s knot. He might have sat in the chair reputed to have been used in the merry club-meetings at the Falcon Inn, the sign of which is to be seen[73] here. His coat-of-arms, a falcon and spear, was proof that his father bore, by right, the grand old name of “gentleman.” One of the very tame dragons in charge of the premises bore down upon us while we were looking at this.

“It is a singular coincidence, too remarkable to be only a coincidence”—her tones a ripple of treacle—“that the falcon should be the bird that shakes its wings most constantly while in flight. Combine this circumstance with the spear, and he is a very dull student of heraldry who cannot trace the derivation of the name of the Immortal Bard.”

Caput set his jaw dumbly. It was Dux, younger and less discreet, who said, “By Jove!”

The crayon head exhibited here is a copy of the “Chandos Portrait,” taken at the age of forty-three. It also is reputed to be an excellent likeness, and resembles neither the bust in the church nor the famous “Death Mask,” of which there is here preserved an admirable photograph. After studying all other pictures extant of him, one reverts to the last-mentioned as the truest embodiment of the ideal Shakspeare we know by his works. The face, sunken and rigid in death, yet bears the impress of a loftier intellectuality and more dignified manhood than do any of the painted and sculptured presentments. The only letter written to Shakspeare, known to be in existence, is preserved in this museum. It is signed by one Richard Quyney, who would like to borrow thirty pounds of the poet. One speculates, in deciphering the yellow-brown leaf that would crumble at a touch, upon the probabilities of the writer having had a favorable reply, and why this particular epistle should have been kept so carefully. It was probably pure accident. It could hardly have been a unique in the owner’s collection if the stories of his rapid[74] prosperity and the character of the boon-companions of his early days be true.

As we paused in the lower front room to strengthen our recollection of the tout ensemble, leaning upon the sill of the window by which the child and boy must often have stood at evening, gazing into the quiet street, or seen the moon rise hundreds of times over the dark line of roofs, custodian No. 1 drooped us a professional adieu, and dividing the wire-and-pulley smile impartially between us and a fresh bevy of pilgrims upon the threshold, commenced with the automatic precision of a cuckoo-clock:

“After the removal of the Shakspeare family from this humble tenement it was leased to a prosperous butcher, who occupied this room as a shop. That was, indeed, a sad desecration—”

“Eight day or daily?” queried Lex, as we walked down the street.

We lingered for a moment at the building to which went Shakspeare as a

It is “the thing” to quote the line before the gray walls capped by mossy slates, of the Grammar-School founded by Henry IV. The quadrangle about which the lecture-rooms and offices are ranged is not large, and is entered by a low gateway. Over the stones of this court-yard Shakspeare’s feet,

Boy-nature, in 1574, was the same, in these respects, as in 1874, Shakspeare and Whittier being judges.[75]

Stratford-on-Avon is a clean, quiet country town, that would have dwindled into a village long ago had not John Shakspeare’s son been born in her High Street. Antique houses, with peaked gables and obtrusive beams, deep-stained by years—(Time’s record is made with inky dyes, and in broad English down-strokes, in this climate)—are to be seen on every street. Every second shop along our route had in its one window a show of what we would call “Shakspeare Notions;” stamped handkerchiefs, mugs, platters, paper-cutters and paper-weights, and a host of photographs, all commemorative of the town and the Man.

“New Place” was purchased by Shakspeare in 1597, and enlarged and adorned as befitted his amended fortunes. We like to hear that, while he lived in London, not a year elapsed without his paying a visit to Stratford, and that in 1613, upon his withdrawal from public life, he made New Place his constant residence, spending his time “in ease, retirement and the society of friends.” In the garden grew, and, long after his death flourished, the mulberry-tree planted by his own hands. In the museum we had seen a goblet carved out of the wood of this tree, and, in a sealed bottle, the purple juice of its berries. New Place did not pass from the poet’s family until the death of his granddaughter, Lady Barnard. It is recorded that, in 1643, this lady and her husband were the hosts of Henrietta Maria, Queen of Charles I. She was thankful in the turmoil and distrust of civil war, to find an asylum for three weeks under the roof that had covered a greater than the lordliest Stuart who ever paltered with a nation’s trust. At Lady Barnard’s decease, New Place was sold, first to one, then another proprietor, until Sir Hugh Clopton remodelled and almost rebuilt the house. After him came the Rev. Francis Gastrell who, in a fit of passion at what he conceived[76] to be the exorbitant tax levied upon the mansion, pulled it down to the foundation-stones. In the same Christian frame of mind, he hewed down the mulberry-tree, then in a vigorous old age, a giant of its tribe, “because so many people stopped in the street to stare at it, thereby inconveniencing himself and family.” Peevish fatuousness that has a parallel in the discontent of the present incumbent of Haworth that, “because he chances to inhabit the parsonage in which the Brontë sisters lived and died, he must be persecuted by throngs of visitors to it and the church.” It is not his fault, he pathetically reminds the public, that people of genius once dwelt there, and he proposes to demonstrate the dissimilarity of those who now occupy it by renovating Haworth Rectory and erecting a new church upon the site of that in which the Brontës are buried.

Of New Place nothing remains but the foundations, swathed in the kindly coverlet of turf, that in England, so soon cloaks deformity with graceful sweeps and swells of verdure. The grounds are tended with pious care, and nobody carps that visitors always loiter here on their way from Shakspeare’s birth-place to his tomb.

We passed to the fane of Holy Trinity between two rows of limes in fullest leaf. The avenue is broad, but the noon beams were severed into finest particles in filtering through the thick green arch; the door closing up the farther end was an arch of grayer glooms. The church-yard is paved with blackened tombstones. The short, rich grass over-spreads mounds and hollows, defines the outlines of the oblong, flat slabs, sprouts in crack and cranny. The peace of the summer heavens rested upon the dear old town—the river slipping silently beneath the bridge in the background—the venerable church, in the vestibule of which we stayed our steps to hearken to music from within. The organist[77] was practising a dreamy voluntary, rising, now, into full chords that left echoes vibrating among the groined arches after he resumed his pensive strain. Walking softly and slowly, lest our tread upon the paved floor might awake dissonant echoes, we gained the chancel. An iron rail hinders the nearer approach to the Grave. This barrier is a recent erection and a work of supererogation, since that sight-seer has not been found so rude as to trample over the sacred dust.

Upon the stone,—even with the rest of the flags—concealing the vault, lay a strip of white cloth, stamped with a fac-simile of the epitaph composed by Shakspeare for his tomb. Volumes have been written to explain its meaning, and treatises to prove that there is nothing recondite in its menace. Since the rail prevented us from getting to that side of the slab next the inner wall of the chancel, we must have read the inscription upside-down but for the convenient copy:

Our eyes returned again and again to the weird lines and the plain stone, as thoughts of what lay beneath it were chased away by the wretched pomp of the monument raised by the nearest relatives of the dead. It is set in the chancel wall about the height of a tall man’s head above the floor and almost directly over the burial-vault. The light from a gorgeous painted window streams upon it. Just beyond, nearer the floor, the effigy of a knight in armor lies upon a recessed sarcophagus. The half-length figure intended for Shakspeare is in an arched niche, the family escutcheon above it. On each side is a naked boy of forbidding countenance. One holds an inverted torch,[78] the other a skull and spade. A second and larger skull surmounts the monument. The marble man—we could not call it Shakspeare—writes, without looking at pen or paper, within an open book, laid upon a cushion. The whole affair, niche, desk, cushion and attitude, reminds one ludicrously of the old-time pulpits likened by Mr. Beecher to a “toddy tumbler with a spoon in it.” The “spoon” in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, wears the dress of a gentleman of his day, a full, loose surcoat, with falling collar and cuffs. The forehead is high and bald, the face smooth as a pippin, the eyes have a bold, hard stare; upon the mouth, and, indeed, upon all the visage, dwells a smirk, aggressive and ineffable. It is the face of a conceited, pompous, heavy fool, which the fine phrenological development of the cranium cannot redeem. We cannot make it to be to us the man whom, according to the stilted lines below,—

“Yet it must have been a likeness,” ventured Caput. “It was seen and approved by his daughters.”

We persisted in our infidelity, and refused to look again at the smirking horror. When it was set up in the mortuary pillory overhead, it was colored from nature. The hair, Vandyke beard, and moustache were auburn, the tight, protuberant eyes hazel, the dress red and black. Seventy years afterward, it was painted white and was probably a shade less odious for the whitewashing. Lately the colors have been restored to their pristine brightness and varnish.

Another flat slab bears the inscription:—

“Heere lyeth interred the body of Anne, Wife
of William Shakespeare who dep’ted this life the
6^th day of Avgt · 1623 · being of the age of · 67 · yeares.”

[79]She was a woman of twenty-five, he a lad of eighteen when they were married,—a circumstance that dampens the romantic imaginings we would fain foster to their full growth, in visiting the vine-draped cottage of Anne Hathaway. We put from us, while standing by the graves of husband and wife, the truth that when he, a hale, handsome gentleman of fifty-three, sat at eventide in the shadow of the mulberry-tree, or, as tradition paints him, leaned upon the half-door of a mercer’s shop and made impromptu epigrams upon passing neighbors,—Anne was a woman of sixty, who had best abide in-doors after the dew began to fall.

We went to the Red Horse Inn by merest accident. We must lunch somewhere, having grown ravenously hungry even in Stratford-on-Avon, and left the choice of a place to the driver of our waggonette. Five minutes’ rattling drive over the primitive pavements between the rows of quaint old houses, and we were in a covered passage laid with round stones. A waiter had his hand upon the door by the time we stopped; whisked us out before we knew where we were, and into a low-ceiled parlor on the ground-floor, looking upon the street. A lumbering mahogany table was in the middle of the floor. Clumsy chairs were marshalled against the wainscot. Old prints hung around the walls. The carpet was very substantial and very ugly. A subtle intuition, a something in the air of the room—maybe, an unseen Presence, arrested me just within the door. I had certainly never been here before, yet I stood still, a bewilderment of reminiscence and association enveloping my senses, like fragrant mist.

“Can this be”—I said slowly, feeling for words—“Geoffrey Crayon’s Parlor?”

I tell the incident just as it occurred. Not one of us knew the name of the inn. Our guide-books did not[80] give it, nor had one of the party bethought him or herself that Washington Irving had ever visited Stratford or left a record of his visit. None of the many tourists who had described the town to us had mentioned the antique hostelry. What followed our entrance came to me,—a “happening” I do not attempt to explain.

The waiter did not smile. English servants consider the play of facial muscles impertinent when addressing superiors. But he answered briskly, as he had opened the carriage-door.

“Yes, mem! Washington Irving’s parlor! Yes, mem!”

“And this is the Red Horse Inn?”

“The Red Horse Inn! Yes, mem!”

“Where, then, is Geoffrey Crayon’s Sceptre?” looking at the grate.

He vanished, and was back in a moment, holding something wrapped in red plush. A steel poker, clean, bright and slender, and, engraved upon one flat side in neat characters,—“Geoffrey Crayon’s Sceptre.”

I took it in speechless reverence. The others gathered about me and it.

“Now”—said Caput, in excruciating and patient politeness, wheeling up the biggest arm-chair,—“if you will have the goodness to sit down, and tell us what it all means!”

I had read the story thirty years before in a bound volume of the “New York Mirror,” itself then, at least ten years old. But it came back to me almost word for word, (what we read in those days, we digested!) as I sat there, the sceptre upon my knee, and rehearsed the tale to the circle of listeners.

Since our return to America I have hunted up the old “Mirror,” and take pleasure in transcribing a portion of Mr. Willis’ pleasant story of the interview between himself[81] and the landlady who remembered Mr. Irving’s visit.

“Mrs. Gardiner proceeded: ‘I was in and out of the coffee-room the night he arrived, mem, and I sees directly, by his modest ways and his timid look, that he was a gentleman, and not fit company for the other travellers. They were all young men, sir, and business travellers, and you know, mem, ignorance takes the advantage of modest merit, and after their dinner they were very noisy and rude. So I says to Sarah, the chambermaid, says I, ‘that nice gentleman can’t get near the fire, and you go and light a fire in number three, and he shall sit alone, and it shan’t cost him nothing, for I like the looks on him.’ Well, mem, he seemed pleased to be alone, and after his tea he puts his legs up over the grate, and there he sits with the poker in his hand till ten o’clock. The other travellers went to bed, and at last the house was as still as midnight, all but a poke in the grate, now and then, in number three, and every time I heard it I jumped up and lit a bed-candle, for I was getting very sleepy, and I hoped he was getting up to ring for a light. Well, mem, I nodded and nodded, and still no ring at the bell. At last I says to Sarah, says I, ‘Go into number three and upset something, for I am sure that gentleman has fallen asleep.’ ‘La, ma’am!’ says Sarah, ‘I don’t dare.’ ‘Well, then,’ says I, ‘I’ll go!’ So I opens the door and I says—‘If you please, sir, did you ring?’ little thinking that question would ever be written down in such a beautiful book, mem.”

(She had already showed to her listeners “a much-worn copy of the Sketch-Book,” in which Mr. Irving records his pilgrimage to Stratford.)

“He sat with his feet on the fender, poking the fire, and a smile on his face, as if some pleasant thought was in his[82] mind. ‘No, ma’am,’ says he, ‘I did not.’ I shuts the door and sits down again, for I hadn’t the heart to tell him it was late, for he was a gentleman not to speak rudely to, mem. Well, it was past twelve o’clock when the bell did ring. ‘There!’ says I to Sarah, ‘thank heaven he has done thinking, and we can go to bed!’ So he walked up stairs with his light, and the next morning he was up early and off to the Shakspeare house....

“There’s a Mr. Vincent that comes here sometimes, and he says to me one day—‘So, Mrs. Gardiner, you’re finely immortalized! Read that!’ So the minnit I read it I remembered who it was and all about it, and I runs and gets the number three poker, and locks it up safe and sound, and by and by I sends it to Brummagem and has his name engraved on it; and here you see it, sir, and I wouldn’t take no money for it.”

Mr. Willis was in Stratford-on-Avon in 1836. In 1877 the “sceptre” was displayed to us, as I have narrated, as one of the valuable properties of the Red Horse Inn, although good Mrs. Gardiner long ago laid down her housekeeping keys forever.

We sat late over the luncheon served in the parlor, which could not have been refurnished since Irving “had his tea” there, too happy in the chance that had brought us to the classic chamber to be otherwise than merry over the stout bill, one-third of which should have been set down to Geoffrey Crayon’s account. The Britons are thorough utilitarians. Nowhere do you get “sentiment gratis.”

We drove home in the summer twilight, that lasts in the British Isles until dawn, and enables one to read with ease until ten o’clock P.M. Our road skirted the confines of Charlecote, the country-seat of the Lucys. The family was at home, and visitors were therefore excluded. It is a[83] fine old place, but the park, which is extensive, looked like a neglected common after the perfectly appointed grounds of Stoneleigh Abbey, through which we passed. The fence enclosing the Charlecote domain was a sort of double hurdle, in miserable repair, and intertwisted with wild vines and brambles. The deer were gathered in groups and herds under oaks that may have sheltered their forefathers in Shakspeare’s youth. Scared by our wheels, rabbits scampered from hedge to coverts of bracken. If the fences were in no better state “in those ruder ages, when”—to quote Shakspeare’s biographer—“the spirit of Robin Hood was yet abroad, and deer and coney-stealing classed, with robbing orchards, among the more adventurous, but ordinary levities of youth,” the trespass for which the Stratford poacher was arraigned was a natural surrender to irresistible temptation, and the deed easily done.

[84]

CHAPTER VII.
Kenilworth.

WE never decided whether it was to our advantage or disappointment that we all re-read the novel of that name before visiting Kenilworth. It is certain that we came away saying bitterly uncharitable things of Oliver Cromwell, to whose command, and not to Time, is due the destruction of one of the finest castles in the realm. Caput, who, after the habit of amateur archæologists, never stirs without an imaginary surveyor’s chain in hand, had studied up the road and ruins in former visits, and acted now as guide and historian. We were loth to accept the country road, narrower and more rutty than any other in the vicinity, as that once filled by the stupendous pageant described by Scott and graver chroniclers as unsurpassed in costliness and display by any in the Elizabethan age. Our surveyor talked of each stage in the progress with the calm confidence of one who had made a part of the procession. We knew to a minute at what hour of the night the queen—having been delayed by a hunt at Warwick Castle—with Leicester at her bridle-rein, passed the brook at the bottom of Castle-hill. A stream so insignificant, and crossed by such a common little bridge, we were ashamed to speak of them in such a connection. The column of courtiers and soldiers thronging the highway was ablaze with the torches carried by Leicester’s[85] men. The castle, illuminated to the topmost battlement, made so brave a show the thrifty virgin needed to feast her eyes often and much upon the splendid beauty of the man at her saddle-bow to console herself for having presented him with Kenilworth and the estates—twenty miles in circumference—pertaining thereunto.

All this was fresh in our minds when we alighted where Leicester sprang from his charger and knelt at the stirrup of his royal mistress in welcome to his “poor abode.” The grand entrance is gone, and most of the outer wall. There is no vestige of the drawbridge on which was stationed the booby-giant with Flibbertigibbet under his cloak. By the present gateway stands a stately lodge, the one habitable building on the grounds. “R. D.” is carved upon the porch-front, and within it, in divers places. Attached to this is a rear extension, so mean in appearance we were savagely delighted to learn that it was put up in Cromwell’s time. Passing these by the payment of a fee, and shaking ourselves free from the briery hold of the women who assaulted us with petitions to buy unripe fruit, photographs, and “Kenilworth Guides,” we saw a long slope of turf rising to the level, whereon are Cæsar’s and Leicester’s Towers, square masses of masonry, crumbling at top and shrouded, for most of their height, in a peculiarly tough and “stocky” species of ivy. The walls of Cæsar’s Tower—the only portion of the original edifice (founded in the reign of Henry I.) now standing—vary from ten to sixteen feet in thickness. Behind these, on still higher ground, are the ruins of the Great Hall, built by John of Gaunt. In length more than eighty feet, in width more than forty, it is, although roofless, magnificent. The Gothic arches of the windows, lighting it from both sides, are perfect and beautiful in outline. Ivy-clumps hang heavy from oriel and buttress. To the left of this is[86] Mervyn’s, or the Strong Tower, a winding stair leading up to the summit. A broken wall makes a feint of enclosing the castle-grounds, seven acres in area, but it may be scaled or entered through gaps at many points. The moat down which the “Lady of the Lake,” floating “on an illuminated movable island,” seemed to walk on the water to offer Elizabeth “the lake, the lodge, the lord,” is a dry ravine, choked with rubbish, overgrown with grass and nettles. The decline of the hill up which we walked to the principal ruins was the “base court.” A temporary bridge, seventy feet long, was thrown over this from the drawbridge to Cæsar’s Tower, and the queen, riding upon it, was greeted by mythological deities, who offered her gifts from vineyard, garden, field, and fen, beginning the ovation where the modern hags had pressed upon us poor pictures, acerb pears and apples.

This, then, was Kenilworth. We strolled into the Banqueting or Great Hall—now floorless—where Elizabeth and Leicester led the minuet on the night when the favorite’s star was highest and brightest; laughing among ourselves, in recalling the Scottish diplomat’s saying that “his queen danced neither so high nor so disposedly” as did the Maiden Monarch. We climbed Mervyn’s Tower in which Amy Robsart had her lodging; looked down into “The Pleasaunce,” a turfy ruin, in its contracted bounds a dismay to us until the surveyor’s chain measured, for our comfort, what must have been the former limits. It is now an irregular area, scarcely more than a strip of ground, and we sought vainly for a nook sufficiently retired to have been the scene of the grotto-meeting between Elizabeth and the deserted wife.

“Of course you are aware that Amy Robsart was never at Kenilworth; that she had been dead two years when Elizabeth visited Leicester here; that he was secretly married[87] again, this time to the beautiful widow of Lord Sheffield, the daughter of Lord William Howard, uncle to the queen?” said Caput, drily.

Argument with an archæologist is as oxygen to fire. We turned upon him, instead, in a crushing body of infidel denial.

“We received, without cavil, your account—and Scott’s—of the torch-light procession, including Elizabeth’s diamonds, after a day’s hunting, and horsemanship; of Leicester’s glittering ‘like a golden image with jewels and cloth of gold.’ We decline to discredit Scott now!”

He shrugged his shoulders; took a commanding position upon the ruined wall; his eyes swept the landscape discontentedly.

“We dwarf the history of Kenilworth to one little week,” he said. “I am tempted to wish that Scott had never written that fiction, splendid as it is. Do you know that Cæsar’s Tower—by the way, it will outlast Leicester’s, whose building, like the founder, lacks integrity—do you know that Cæsar’s Tower was begun early in the twelfth century? that it was the stronghold of Simon de Montfort in his quarrel with Henry III.? Edward Longshanks, then Prince Edward, attacked de Montfort in Sussex, took from him banners and other spoils and drove him back into Kenilworth, which the insurgents held for six months. His father, the Earl of Leicester, met Edward’s army next day on the other side of the Avon—over there!” pointing. “Gazing, as he marched, toward his good castle of Kenilworth, he saw his own banners advancing, and soon perceived that they were borne by the enemy.

“It is over!” said the old warrior. “The Lord have mercy upon our souls, for our bodies are Prince Edward’s!”

“He was killed, fighting like a lion, in the battle that followed. And, all the while, his son, chafing at his inability[88] to help him, lay,—the lion’s cub at bay,—within these walls. There were Leicesters and Leicesters, although some are apt to ignore all except the basest of the name—the Robert Dudley of whom it was said, ‘that he was the son of a duke, the brother of a king, the grandson of an esquire, and the great-grandson of a carpenter; that the carpenter was the only honest man in the family, and the only one of Leicester’s near relatives who died in his bed.’ Edward II.—poor, favorite-ridden wretch! was a prisoner at Kenilworth after the execution of the Despensers, father and son. He was forced to sign his own deposition in the Great Hall, where you thought of nothing just now but Elizabeth’s dancing. The breaking of the white wand,—a part of the ceremonial at a king’s death—by Sir Thomas Blount, before the eyes of the trembling sovereign, is one of the most dramatic events in English history. Another royal imbecile, Henry VI., had an asylum here during Jack Cade’s Rebellion. There was stringent need for such fortresses as Kenilworth and Warwick in those times.”

We heard it all,—and with interest, sitting upon the edge of the ivied wall of Mervyn’s Tower, overlooking a land as fair as Beulah, in alternations of hill and vale; of plains golden with grain, and belts and groves of grand old trees; the many-gabled roofs and turrets of great houses rising from the midst of these, straggling villages of red-brick cottages on the skirts of manorial estates indicating the semi-feudal system still prevailing in the land. The Avon gleamed peacefully between the borders tilled by men who never talk, and most of whom have never heard, of the brave Leicester who fought his last battle where they swing their scythes. Yet he was known to the yeomen of his day as “Sir Simon the Righteous.”

“There were Leicesters and Leicesters,” Caput had[89] truly said, and that the proudest and most magnificent of them all was the most worthless. But when we had picked our way down the broken stairs, and sat in the shadow of Cæsar’s Tower, upon the warm sward, watching men drive the stakes and stretch the cords of a marquee, for the use of a party who were to pic-nic on the morrow among the ruins, we said:—

“To-morrow, we will see Leicester’s Hospital and Leicester’s tomb, at Warwick.”

The walk from Leamington to Warwick was one greatly affected by us as a morning and afternoon “constitutional.” It was delightful in itself, and we never wearied of rambling up one street and down another of the town. We never saw Broek, in Holland, but it cannot be cleaner than this Rip Van Winkle of a Warwickshire village, where the very children are too staid and civil—or too devoid of enterprise—to stare at strangers. A house under fifty years of age would be a disreputable innovation. House-leek, and yellow stone-crop, and moss grow upon the roofs; the windows have small panes, clear and bright, and, between parted muslin curtains, each window-sill has its pots of geraniums and gillyflowers.

We bought some buns in a little shop, the mistress of which was a pretty young woman, with the soft English voice one hears even among the lowly, and the punctilious misapplication of h we should, by this time, have ceased to observe.

“The H’earl h’of Leicester’s ’Ospital h’is a most h’interesting h’object,” she assured us, upon our inquiring the shortest way thither. “H’all strangers who h’admire ’istorical relicts make a point h’of visiting the H’earl h’of Leicester’s ’Ospital.”

The street has been regraded, probably laid out and built up since the “’istorical relict” was founded, in 1571.[90] We would call it a “Refuge,” the object being to provide a home for the old age of a “Master and twelve brethren,” the latter, invalided or superannuated tenants or soldiers, who had spent their best days in the service of the Leicesters. It was a politic stroke to offer the ease, beer, and tobacco of the Refuge as a reward for hard work and hard fighting. We may be sure Robert Dudley did not overlook this. We may hope—if we can—that he had some charitable promptings to the one good deed of his life.

The Hospital is perched high, as if deposited there by the deluge, upon an Ararat platform of its own. The plastered walls are criss-crossed by chocolate-colored beams; the eaves protrude heavily; odd carvings, such as a boy might make with a pocket-knife, divide the second and third stories. It is a picturesque antique. People in America would speak of it, were it set up in one of our suburban towns, as a “remarkable specimen of the Queen Anne style.” One learns not to say such things where Queen Anne is a creature of yesterday. A curious old structure is the “relict,”—we liked and adopted the word,—and so incommodious within we marveled that the brethren, now appointed from Gloucester and Warwickshire, did not “commute,” as did “our twelve poor gentlemen” in Dickens’ Haunted Man. But they still have their “pint”—I need not say of what—a day, and their “pipe o’ baccy,” and keep their coal in a vast, cobwebby hall, in which James I. once dined at a town banquet. They cook their dinners over one big kitchen-fire, but eat them in their own rooms; have daily prayer, each brother using his own prayer-book, in the Gothic chapel over the doorway, the “H’earl of Leicester” staring at them out of the middle of the painted window, and wear blue cloth cloaks in cold weather, or in the street,[91] adorned with silver badges upon the sleeves. These bear the Leicester insignia, the Bear and Ragged Staff, and are said to be the very ones presented by him to the Hospital. Sir Walter Scott is—according to Caput—responsible for the fact that, in the opinion of the ladies of our company, the most valuable articles preserved in the institution are a bit of discolored satin, embroidered by Amy Robsart (at Cumnor-Hall?) with the arms of her faithless lord, and a sampler whereupon, by the aid of a lively imagination, one can trace her initials.

How much of heart-ache and heart-sinking, of hope deferred, and baffled desire may have been stitched into these faded scraps of stuff that have so long outlasted her and her generation! Needlework has been the chosen confidante of women since Eve, with shaking fingers and tear-blinded eyes, quilted together fig-leaves, in token of the transgression that has kept her daughters incessantly busy upon tablier, panier, and jupon.

From the Hospital we went to St. Mary’s Church. There is a cellary smell in all these old stone churches where slumber the mighty dead, suggestive of must, mould, and cockroaches, and on the hottest day a chill, like that of an ice-house. Our every step was upon a grave; the walls were faced with mortuary brasses and tablets. The grating of the ever-rusty lock and hinges awakened groans and whispers in far recesses; our subdued tones were repeated in dreary sighs and mutterings, as if the crowd below stairs were complaining that wealth and fame could not purchase the repose they were denied in life. Our cicerone in St. Mary’s was a pleasant-faced woman, in a bonnet—of course. We never saw a pew-holder or church-guide of her sex, bonnetless while exercising her profession. Usually, the bonnet was black. It was invariably shabby. St. Paul’s interdict against[92] women uncovering the head in church may have set the fashion. Prudent dread of neuralgias, catarrhs and toothaches would be likely to perpetuate it. The guide here neither evaded nor superadded hs, and we made a grateful note of the novelty. She conducted us first to what we knew in our reading as the “Chapel of Richard Beauchamp.”

“The Beechum Chapel? yes, sir!” said our conductress, leading the way briskly along the aisle, through oratory and chantry up a very worn flight of steps, under a graceful archway to a pavement of black-and-white lozenge-shaped marbles. The Founder sleeps in state second to no lord of high degree in the kingdom, if we except Henry VII. whose chapel in Westminster Abbey is yet more elaborate in design and decoration than that of the opulent “Beechums.” The Bear and Ragged Staff hold their own among the stone sculptures of ceiling and walls. The former is studded with shields embossed with the arms of Warwick, and of Warwick and Beauchamp quartered. The stalls are of dark brown oak, carved richly—blank shields, lions, griffins, muzzled and chained bears being the most prominent devices. The “Great Earl,” in full armor of brass, lies at length upon a gray marble sarcophagus. A brazen hoop-work, in shape exactly resembling the frame of a Conestoga wagon-top, is built above him. Statuettes of copper-gilt mourners, representing their surviving kinsmen and kinswomen, occupy fourteen niches in the upright sides of the tomb. Sword and dagger are at his side; a swan watches at his uncovered head, a griffin and bear at his feet; a casque pillows his head; his hands are raised in prayer. The face is deeply lined and marked of feature, the brows seeming to gather frowningly while we gaze. It is a marvelous effigy. The woman looked amazed, Caput disgusted, when we walked around[93] it once, gave a minute and a half to respectful study of the Earl’s face and armor; smiled involuntarily in the reading of how he had “decessed ful cristenly the last day of April, the yeare of oure lord god AMCCCCXXXIX.”—then inquired abruptly:—“Where is the tomb of Queen Elizabeth’s Leicester?”

As a general, Leicester was a notorious failure; in statecraft, a bungler; as a man, he was a transgressor of every law, human and divine; as a conqueror of women’s hearts, he had no peer in his day, and we cannot withhold from him this pitiful meed of honor—if honor it be—when we read that “his most sorrowful wife Lætitia, through a sense of conjugal love and fidelity, hath put up this monument to the best and dearest of husbands.”

“By Jove!” said Dux, again.

“She ought to speak well of him!” retorted Caput. “He murdered her first husband, and repudiated his second wife Douglas Howard (Lady Sheffield) in order to espouse Lettice, not to mention the fact that he had tried ineffectually about the time of the Kenilworth fête, to rid himself of No. 2 by poison. He was a hero of determined measures. Witness the trifling episode of Amy Robsart to which the Earl is indebted for our visit to-day.”

We stood our ground in calm disdain of the thrust; were not to be diverted from our steadfast contemplation of the King of Hearts. That his superb physique was not overpraised by contemporaries, the yellow marble bears satisfactory evidence, yet the chief charm of his face was said to be his eyes. The forehead is lofty; the head nobly-shaped; the nose aquiline; the mouth, even under the heavy moustache, was, we could see, feminine in mould and sweetness. His hands, joined in death, as they seldom were in life, in mute prayer upon his breast, are of patrician beauty. He is clad in full armor, and wears the[94] orders bestowed upon him by his royal and doating mistress. He was sadly out of favor with her at the time of his death in 1588. She survived him fifteen years. If she had turned aside in one of her famous “progresses” to look upon this altar-tomb, would she have smiled, sobbed or sworn upon reading that his third countess had written him down a model Benedict? His sorrowful Lætitia dragged on the load of life for forty-six years after her Leicester’s decease, and now lies by his side also with uplifted praying hands. She is a prim matron, richly bedight “with ruff and cuff and farthingales and things.” The chaste contour and placidity of her features confuse us as to her identity with the “light o’ love” who winked at the murder that made her the wife of Lady Douglas Howard’s husband. The exemplary couple are encompassed by a high and handsomely wrought iron fence; canopied by a sort of temple-front supported by four Corinthian pillars. It is almost unnecessary to remark that the ubiquitous Bear and Ragged Staff mounts guard above this. A few yards away is the statue of a pretty little boy, well-grown for his three years; his chubby cheeks encircled by a lace-frilled cap; an embroidered vestment reaching to his feet. He lies like father and mother, prone on his back, upon a flat tombstone.

“The noble Impe Robert of Dudley,” reads the inscription, with a list of other titles too numerous and ponderous to be jotted down or recollected. The only legitimate son of Amy’s, Douglas’, Elizabeth’s, Lettice’s—Every-woman’s Leicester, and because he stood in the way of the succession of some forgotten uncle or cousin, poisoned to order, by his nurse! “The pity of it!” says First thought at the sight of the innocent baby-face. Second thought—“How well for himself and his kind that his father’s and mother’s son did not mature into manhood!”[95]

Leicester left another boy, the son of Lady Douglas, whom he cast off after she refused to die of the poison that “left her bald.” Warwickshire traditions are rife with stories of her and her child who also bore his father’s name. Miss Strickland adverts to one, still repeated by the gossips of Old Warwick, in which the disowned wife, with disheveled hair and streaming tears, rocks young Robert in her arms, crooning the ballad we mothers have often sung without dreaming of its plaintive origin:—

To this Robert his father bequeathed Kenilworth and its estates in the same will that denied his legitimacy. The heir assumed the title of Earl of Warwick, but “the crown”—alias, Elizabeth—laid claim to and repossessed herself of castle and lands.

Thus, the Hospital is the sole remaining “relict” of the man who turned Queen Bess’s wits out of doors, and while her madness lasted, procured for himself the titles and honors set in array in the Latin epitaph upon his monument.

In another chapel—a much humbler one, octagonal in shape, is the tomb of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. He selected the chamber as the one in which he desired to be buried, and wrote the epitaph:

Upon the sarcophagus were the rusty helmet, sword and other pieces of armor he had worn without fear and without reproach;—a record in Old English outweighing with righteous and thoughtful people, the fulsome Latinity of Leicester’s Grecian altar and the labored magnificence of the “Beechum Chapel.”

[96]

CHAPTER VIII.
Oxford.

IMPRIMIS! we put up at the Mitre Tavern in Oxford.

Nota Bene: never to do it again.

It is an interesting rookery to look at—and to leave. Stuffiness and extortion were words that borrowed new and pregnant meaning from our sojourn in what we were recommended to try, as “a chawming old place. Best of service and cookery, you know, thoroughly respectable and—ah—historic and arntique, and all that, you know!”

Dux, who had noted down the recommendation, proposed at our departure, to add: “Mem.: Never to stop again at a hotel where illuminated texts are hung in every bed-room.”

Opposite the bed allotted to me, who am obliged continually to stay my fearsome soul upon the wholesome promises of daily grace for daily need, upon exhortations to be careful for nothing, and with the day’s sufficiency of evil to cease anxious thought for morrows as rife with trouble,—opposite my bed, where my waking eyes must meet it, was a red blister-plaster:

“Boast not thyself of to-morrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.”

In the adjacent closet, allotted to Prima, the only ornamental object, besides a wash-bowl so huge she had to[97] call in her father to lift and empty it into the tiniest slop-jar ever made, was the reminder in brimstone-blues, “The wages of sin is Death!” One of our collegians was admonished that the “wrath of God abideth upon him,” and the other had a mutilated doctrinal text signifying quite another thing when read in the proper connection. Caput, in his character as Mentor and balance-wheel, checked the boys’ disposition to detect, in the lavishment of Scriptural instruction, a disposition to establish an honest equilibrium with the weighty bills. Extras in one direction, they reasoned, should be met by extras in another.

“All Scripture is profitable,” he reminded the jesters. “It is only by misuse it can be made, for a moment, to appear common, much less, absurd. Therefore,” emphatically, “I object to texts upon hotel walls!”

We were not tempted by in-door luxuries to waste in sleep or sloth the daylight hours, but gave these to very industrious sight-seeing. Yet we came away with appetites whetted, not satisfied by what we had beheld. The very air of the place is redolent of learning and honorable antiquity. Each of the twenty colleges composing the University had a valid and distinctive claim upon our notice. To name the attractions of one—say, Christ Church, or Balliol, would be to fill this chapter with a catalogue of MSS. books, pictures, dates and titles. It is a queer, fascinating, incomparable old city. Few of the streets are broad, none straight. The shops are small, usually ill-lighted and devoted to the needs and tastes of the students. The haberdashers are “gentlemen’s furnishers,” the booksellers’ windows full of text-books in all known tongues, interspersed by the far-famed Oxford Editions of Bibles and Prayer-books. Pastry-cooks are prominent and many. The colleges are imposing in dimensions, some magnificent in architecture. University, the[98] oldest, is said to have been founded by the Great Alfred. Restored in 1229. All are so blackened and battered that the youngest looks at least a century older than the Roman Pantheon. Ancient edifices in the drier, hotter air of Southern Europe have been worn by the friction of ages. The Oxford Colleges are gnawed as by iron teeth. “Worm-eaten,” is the first epithet that comes to the tongue at sight of them. From cornice, walls and sculptures, the stone has been picked away, a grain at a time, until the surface is honeycombed, and to the inexperienced eye, disintegration of the whole seems inevitable. The lugubrious effect of age and seeming dilapidation is sensibly relieved by the reaches of turf, often bordered by gay flowers, forming the quadrangles, or court-yards, enclosed by the buildings.

The quadrangle of Christ Church College was laid out by Cardinal Wolsey, the founder and patron. It is almost square, measuring 264 feet by 261. “Great Tom,” the biggest bell in England—the custodian says, in the world,—hangs in the cupola over the gateway. It weighs 17,000 pounds, and at ten minutes past nine p.m. strikes one hundred and ten times, the number of students “on the foundation.” The pride of this college is the immense refectory, or dining-hall. The ceiling, fifty feet in height, is of solid oak elaborately carved, with graceful pendants, also elegantly wrought. Among the decorations of this roof are the armorial bearings and badges of Henry VIII. and Wolsey. Two rows, a hundred feet in length, of portraits of renowned patrons, graduates and professors of Oxford are set high upon the side-walls. At the upper end of the hall hangs Holbein’s full-length portrait of Henry VIII. The swinish eyes, pendulous cheeks, pursed-up mouth and double chin would be easily caught by any caricaturist, and are as familiar to us as the jaunty set of his flat cap upon the side of his head.[99]

Holbein was a courtier, likewise an artist, who never stooped to caricature. This, the most celebrated likeness of his master, was said to be true to life, yet so ingeniously flattered as to find favor in the sight of the original. Holbein was a master of this species of delicate homage where the rank of the subject made the exercise of it politic. He practised the accomplishment once too often when he painted the miniature of Anne of Cleves. Keeping these things in mind, we saw a bulky trunk capped by the head I have described, one short arm akimbo, the hand resting on his sword-belt, the feet planted far apart to maintain the balance of the bloated column and display the legs he never wearied of praising and stroking. He wears a laced doublet and trunk-hose; a short cloak, lined with ermine, falls back from his shoulders. The portrait-galleries of nations may be safely challenged to furnish a parallel in bestiality and swagger with this figure. Yet the widow of a good man, herself a refined and pious gentlewoman, became without coercion, his sixth queen, and colored with pleasure when, in the view of the court, he paid her the distinguished compliment of laying his ulcerous leg across her lap! Such reminiscences are not sovereign cures for Republicanism.

On one side of Henry hangs the daughter who proved her inheritance of his coarse nature and callous sensibilities, by vaunting her relationship to him who had disgraced and murdered her mother, and declared herself, by act of Parliament, illegitimate. Much is made in Elizabeth’s portraits of her ruff and tower of red hair, of her satin robe “set all over with aglets of two sorts,” of “pearl-work and tassels of gold,” of “costly lace and knotted buttons,” and very little of the pale, high-nosed face. Her eyes are small and black; her mouth has the “purse” of her father’s, her features are expressionless. At the other[100] hand of King Henry is the butcher’s son, created by him Lord Cardinal, cozened, in a playfully rapacious humor, out of Hampton Palace, and cast off like a vile slug from the royal hand when he had had his day and served his monarch’s ends. Wolsey’s portraits are always taken in profile, to conceal the cast in the eye, which was his thorn in the flesh. It is a triumvirate that may well chain feet, eyes, and thought for a much longer time than we could spare for the whole college.

Across this end of the room runs a platform, raised a foot or two from the hall floor. A table, surrounded by chairs, is upon it. Here dine the titled students of Christ Church College (established by the butcher’s boy!)—the élite who sport the proverbial “tufts” upon their Oxford caps. Privileged “dons” preside at their meals, and Bluff King Hal swaggers in such divinity as doth hedge in a king—and his nobles—over their heads. The gentlemen-commoners are so fortunate as to sit nearest this hallowed dais, although upon the lower level of the refectory. The commonest drink small-beer from pewter tankards in the draughts and dimness (social) of the end nearest the door.

Lex’s handsome face was a study when the fitness and beauty of class distinctions in the halls of learning was made patent to him by the civil guide. By the way, he wore a student’s gown, and was, we surmised, a servitor of the college.

“How much light these entertaining items cast upon quotations we have heard, all our lives, without comprehending,” said the audacious youth, eying the informant with ingenuous admiration. “‘High life and below stairs!’ ‘Briton’s sons shall ne’er be slaves!’ ‘Free-born Englishmen’—and the rest of it! There’s nothing else like an old-world education, after all, for adjusting society. Under professors like the Tudors and Stuarts, of course![101] Why, do you know, we ignoramuses over the water would set Bright and Gladstone at the same table with the most empty-pated lord of the lot, and never suspect that we were insulting one of them?”

Caput pulled him away.

“You rascal!” he said, as we followed the servitor to the kitchen. “How dare you make fun of the man to his face?”

“He never guessed it,” replied the other coolly. “It takes a drill and a blast of powder to get a joke into an English skull.”

The kitchen is a vast vault, planned also by Wolsey, whose antecedents should have made him an authority in the culinary kingdom in an era when loins were knighted and entrées an unknown quantity in the composition of good men’s feasts. The high priest of the savory mysteries met us upon the threshold, the grandest specimen, physically, of a man we saw abroad. Herculean in stature and girth, he had a noble head and face, was straight as a Norway pine, and was robed in a voluminous white bib-apron. His voice was singularly deep and musical, his carriage majestic. I wish I could add that he was as conversant with the natural history and rights of the letter H as with the details of his profession and the story of his realm from 1520 downward. He exhibited the Brobdingnagian gridiron used in the time of James I., on which an hundred steaks could be broiled at one and the same time, and enlarged upon the improvements that had superseded the rusty bars and smoky jacks, kept now as curiosities. In one pantry was a vast vessel of ripe apricots, ready-sugared for jam; a huge pasty, hot and fragrant from the oven, stood upon a dresser, encircled by a cohort of tarts.

“H’out h’of term-time we ’ave comparatively little to do,” said the splendid giant. “Therefore I ’ave given most h’of my h’employees a vacation. But there h’are a[102] few h’undergraduates and a tutor h’or two ’ere still, and”—apologetically for mortal frailty—“the h’inner man, h’even h’of scholars must be h’entertained. ’Ence these”—waving a mighty arm toward the pastry.

He pleased us prodigiously, even to the sublime graciousness with which he accepted a douceur at parting. We turned at the end of the passage to look at him—a white-robed Colossus, in the dusky arch of the kitchen doorway. The light from a window touched his hoary hair and the jet-black brows that darkened the full, serious eyes. He was gazing after us, too, and bowed gravely without changing his place.

“Are there photographs of him for sale?” asked we of our guide. “Surely he is one of the college lions?”

“I beg your pardon!”

We directed his attention to the statuesque Anak.

“Oh! he is the cook!” with never a gleam of amusement or surprise.

“Artistically considered,” pursued Prima, with another lingering look, “he is magnificent.”

This time the black-gown was slightly—never so slightly, bewildered.

“He is the cook,” he said.

parodied Dux. “Wordsworth was an Englishman and ‘knew how it was himself.’”

We spent four hours in the Bodleian Library, Museum, and Picture Gallery, leaving them then reluctantly. It was “realizing our history” in earnest to see the portrait of William Prynne, carefully executed, even to Archbishop Laud’s scarlet ear-mark. The clipped organ is turned to[103] the spectator ostentatiously, one fancies, until he bethinks himself that the uncompromising Puritan received the loving admonition of Church and State in both ears, and upon separate occasions. The miniatures of James III. and his wife are here given an honorable position. Some years since the words, “The Pretender,” were scratched by an unknown Jacobite from the gilded frame of the uncrowned king’s picture. The custodian pointed out the erasure with a smile indulgent of the harmless, if petulant freak. It is odd who do such things, and when, so vigilant is the watch kept over visitors. Three of the delicate fingers are gone from the hands of Marie Stuart in Westminster Abbey, and, if I remember aright, as many from the effigy of Elizabeth in the same place.

We paused long at one small faded portrait, far inferior in artistic merit to those about it—the first picture we had seen of Lady Jane Grey. She has a sickly, chalky complexion that might match an American school-girl’s. This may have been caused by the severity of her home discipline and Master Roger Ascham’s much Latin and more Greek. She toiled for him cheerfully, she says, “since he was the first person who ever spake kindly to her.” She was the mistress of five languages and a frightful number of arts and sciences, and married a sour-tempered man, chosen by her father and his, when she was seventeen years old. The lineaments are unformed and redeemed from plainness by large brown eyes. They have an appealing, hunted look that was not all in our fancy. A “slip of a girl” compassionate mothers would name her; frightened at life, or what it was made to be to her by her natural guardians.

Across the gallery are two portraits of Marie Stuart, one of which was painted over the other upon the same canvas. This was discovered by an artist, who then obtained[104] permission from the owners to copy and erase the upper painting. He succeeded in both tasks. The outermost portrait wears a projecting headdress, all buckram, lace, and pearls, and a more ornate robe than the other. A casual glance would incline one to the belief that the faces are likewise dissimilar, but examination shows that they are alike in line and color, the difference in expression being the work of the tawdry coiffure. The lower likeness is so lovely in its thoughtful sweetness as to kindle indignation with astonishment that it should have been so foolishly disfigured. The story is a strange one, but true.

We recognized Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester’s picture, from its resemblance to the effigy upon his tomb, and liked it less than that. The opened eyes are fine in shape and color, but sleepy and sinister, the complexion more sanguine than suits a carpet-knight. There is more of the hunting-squire than the polished courtier in it. Close by is the pleasing face of the royal coquette’s later favorite, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Another profile of Wolsey is not far off. A nobler trio are Erasmus, Hugo Grotius and Thomas Cranmer pendent upon the same side of the gallery.

I once read in a provincial journal a burlesque list of the curiosities in Barnum’s Museum. One item was, “a cup of cream from the milky way—slightly curdled.” Another—“a block from the marble hall the Bohemian girl dreamed she dwelt in.” The nonsense recurred to me when we bent over a glass containing Guy Fawkes’ lantern, “slightly” rusted. In fact, it is riddled by rust, and so far as apparent antiquity goes, might have belonged to Diogenes. The various parts—candle-holder, iron cylinder and cover, lie apart, and with them certificates to the genuineness of the relic. There is the original letter of warning to Lord Mounteagle not to go to the House at[105] the opening of Parliament, “since God and man have conspired to punish the wickedness of the times.” “Parliament shall receive a terrible blow and yet shall not see who hurt them,” is the sentence that led to the search in the cellar and the capture of Fawkes.

Queen Elizabeth’s fruit-plates are upon exhibition here. They are very like the little wooden plaques we now paint for card-receivers and hang about our rooms. The edges are carved and painted, and in the centre of each are four lines of rhyme, usually a caustic fling at matrimony and married people.

The wealth of the Bodleian Library consists in its collection of valuable old books and MSS. In the number and rarity of the latter it disputes the palm with the British Museum. I should not know where to stop were I to begin the enumeration of treasures over which we hung in breathless delight, each one brought forward seeming more wonderful than the last. The illuminated volumes,—written and painted upon such parchment as one must see to believe in, so fine is its texture and so clear the page,—are enough to make a bibliomaniac of the soberest book-lover. A thousand years have not sufficed to dim tints and gilding. Queen Elizabeth, as Princess, “did” Solomon’s Proverbs upon vellum in letters of various styles, all daintily neat. In looking at her Latin exercises and counting up Lady Jane Grey’s acquirements, we cease to boast of the superior educational advantages of the girl of the period. It is experiences such as were ours that morning in the Bodleian Library and during our three days in Oxford that are pin-pricks to the balloon of national and intellectual conceit, not the survey of foreign governments and the study of foreign laws and manner. If the patient and candid sight-seer do not come home a humbler and a wiser man, he had best never stir again beyond the corporate[106] limits of his own little Utica, and pursue contentedly the rôle of the marble in a peck-measure.

Before seeing the “Martyrs’ Monument,” we went to St. Mary’s Church in which Cranmer recanted his recantation. The places of pulpit and reading-desk have been changed since the Archbishop was brought forth from prison and bidden by Dr. Cole, an eminent Oxford divine, make public confession of his faith before the waiting congregation. The church was packed with soldiers, ecclesiastics and the populace. All had heard that the deposed prelate had been persuaded by argument and soothing wiles and the cruel bondage of the fear of death to return to the bosom of Holy Mother Church. Cole had said mass and preached the sermon.

“Dr. Cranmer will now read his confession,” he said and sat down.

“I will make profession of my faith,” said Cranmer, “and with a good will, too!”

We saw the site of the old pulpit in which he arose in saying this; the walls that had given back the tones of a voice that trembled no longer as he proclaimed his late recantation null and void, “inasmuch as he had been wrought upon by the fear of burning to sign them. He believed in the Bible and all the doctrines taught therein which he had wickedly renounced. As for the Pope, he did refuse him and denounce him as the enemy of Heaven.”

“Smite him upon the mouth; and take him away!” roared Cole.

We would presently see where he was chained to the stake and helped tear off his upper garments, as fearing he might again grow cowardly before the burning began. From a different motive,—namely, the dread that his bald head and silvery beard might move the people to rescue,[107] the Lord Overseer of the butchery ordered the firemen to make haste. “The unworthy hand” was burned first. His heart was left whole in the ashes.

“That was the Oxford spirit, three hundred and twenty years ago!” mused Caput, aloud. “Within fifty years, John Henry Newman,—now a Cardinal—was incumbent of St Mary’s.”

“Yes, sir,” responded the pew-opener (with a bonnet on,) who showed the church. “He was one of the first Puseyites.”

“I know!” turning again toward the site of the old pulpit.

A small square of marble, no bigger than a tile, let into the chancel floor, records that in a vault beneath lies “Amy Robsart, first wife of Lord Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.” Her remains were brought hither from Cumnor Hall, which was but three miles from Oxford, and decently interred in a brick grave under the church. Other monument than this insignificant morsel of stone she has none.

The Martyrs’ Memorial is a handsome Gothic structure of magnesian limestone, hexagonal and three-storied, rising into a pinnacle surmounted by a cross. It is in a conspicuous quarter of the city, in the centre of an open square. In arched niches, facing different ways, are Cranmer, in his prelatical robes, Ridley, and Latimer.

“This place hath long groaned for me!” said Latimer, passing through Smithfield, on his way to the tower after his arrest.

But they brought him to Oxford to die.

We checked the carriage and alighted opposite Balliol College. The street is closely built up on both sides, and in the middle, upon one of the paving-stones, is cut a deep cross. This is the true Martyrs’ Memorial. There,[108] Ridley and Latimer “lighted such a candle by the grace of God as shall never be put out.” The much-abused phrase, “baptism of fire,” grows sublime when we read that Latimer was “seen to make motions with his hands as if washing them in the flames, and to stroke his aged face with them.”

Said an American clergyman—and inferentially, a defender of the Faith—“I have no sympathy with those old martyrs. The most charitable of us must confess that they were frightfully and disgustingly obstinate!”

We may forgive them for failing to win the approbation of latter-day sentimentalists when we reflect that but for this, their unamiable idiosyncrasy, neither Protestant England nor Protestant America would to-day exist, even in name. Not very long since, excavations under the sidewalk nearest to the cross-mark in this street revealed the existence here—as a similar accident had in front of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, in London—of a thick stratum of ashes. “Human ashes mixed with wood,” says the report of the discovery printed by an Antiquarian Society—“establishing beyond question that this was where the public burnings were held.” The inhumanity of sweeping such ashes into a heap by the wayside, as one might pile the refuse of a smelting-furnace, is almost as revolting to most people as the disgusting obstinacy of the consumed heretics. We saw another official record, of an earlier date, relative to this locality,—the bills sent by the Sheriff of Oxford to the Queen, after two “public burnings.” One headed—“To burn Latimer and Ridley” has seven items, including “wood-fagots, furze-fagots, chains, and staples,” accumulating into a total of £1, 5s. 9d. “To burn Cranmer” was a cheaper operation. “Furze and wood-fagots,” the carriage of these, and “2 laborers,” cost but “12s. 8d.” Ridley and Latimer suffered for[109] their obstinacy, October 16, 1555; Cranmer in March of the next year.

The walks and drives in and about Oxford are exceedingly beautiful. The “Broad Walk,” in Christ Church Meadows, deserves the eulogiums lavished upon it by tongue and pen. The interlacing tracery of the elms, arched above the smooth, wide avenue; the glimpses to right and left of “sweet fields in living green;” clumps of superb oaks and pretty “pleasances;” the dark-gray towers, domes and spires of the city, and the ivied walls of private and public gardens; the Isis winding beneath willows and between meadows, and dotted, although it was the long vacation, with gliding boats,—all this, viewed in the clear, tender light of the “Queen’s weather” that still followed us on our journeyings, made up a picture we shall carry with us while memory holds dear and pleasant things.

When we go abroad again—(how often and easily the words slip from our lips!) we mean to give three weeks, instead of as many days, to Oxford.

“Honor bright, now!” said Caput, settling into his place, with the rest of us, in the railway carriage, after the last look from the windows upon the receding scene;—“when you say ‘Oxford’ do you think first of Alfred the Great; of Cœur de Lion, who was born there; of William the Conqueror, who had a tough battle to win it; of Cardinal Wolsey—or of Tom Brown?”

“That reminds me!” said Prima, serenely ignoring the query her elders laughingly declined to answer,—“we must get some sandwiches at Rugby. Everybody does.”

We did—all leaving the train to peep into the “Refreshment Room of Mugby Junction,” and quoting, sotto voce, from the sketch which, it is affirmed, has made this, in very truth, what Dickens wrote it down ironically—“the[110] Model Establishment” of the line. “The Boy” has disappeared, or grown up. Mrs. Sniff,—“the one with the small waist buckled in tight in front, and with the lace cuffs at her wrists, which she puts on the edge of the counter and stands a-smoothing while the Public foams,”—has been supplanted by a tidy dame, cherry-cheeked and smiling. She filled our order with polite despatch, and, in her corps of willing assistants one searches uselessly for the “disdaineous females and ferocious old woman,” objurgated by the enraged foreigner; as vainly in the array of tempting edibles upon the counter for “stale pastry and sawdust sangwiches.” We had our railway carriage to ourselves, and, carrying our parcels thither, prepared to make merry.

“I need not explain to this assembly the ingredients and formation of the British Refreshment Sangwich,” began Prima, who knows Dickens better than she does the Catechism.

The sandwich of Rugby,—as revised—is put up by the half-dozen in neat white boxes, tied with ribbons, like choice confections. The ingredients are sweet, white bread, and juicy tongue or ham. The pastry is fresh and flaky, the cakes delicate and toothsome. We kept our sandwich-boxes as souvenirs.

We did not catch a sight of Banbury Cross, or of the young woman with bells on her toes who cantered through our nursery rhyme to that mythical goal. But we did supplement our Mugby Lunch by Banbury cakes, an indigestible and palatable compound.

[111]

CHAPTER IX.
Sky-larks and Stoke-Pogis.

THE only really hot weather we felt in the British Isles fell to our lot at Brighton. The fashionable world was “up in London.” The metropolis is always “up,” go where you will. “The season” takes in July, then everybody stays in the country until after Christmas, usually until April. Benighted Americans exclaim at the unreason of this arrangement, and are told—“It is customary.”

“But you lose the glory of Spring and Summer; and muddy (Anglicé, ‘dirty’) roads and wintry storms must be a serious drawback to country pleasures. We think the American plan more sensible and comfortable.”

“It is not customary with us.”

With the Average Briton, and with multitudes who are above the average in intelligence and breeding, “custom” is an end of all controversy.

For one week of the two we spent in Brighton, it was unequivocally hot. The sea was a burnished mirror between the early morning and evening hours. The Parade and the Links were deserted; the donkey-boys and peripatetic minstrels retired discouraged from the sultry streets. We had a pleasant suite of rooms upon Regency Square and kept tolerably comfortable by lowering the awning of the front balcony and opening all the inner doors and[112] windows to invite the breeze. Our landlord had been a butler in Lord Somebody’s family for twenty-eight years; had married the housekeeper, and with their joint savings and legacies leased the “four-story brick,” No. 60 Regency Square, and kept a first-class lodging-house. Every morning, at nine o’clock, he appeared with slate and pencil for orders for the day. “Breakfast,” “Luncheon,” “Dinner” were written above as many spaces, and beneath each I made out a bill-of-fare. Meals were served to the minute in the back-parlor and the folding-doors, opened by his august hand, revealed him in black coat and white necktie, ready to wait at table. Cookery and service were excellent; the rooms handsomely furnished, including napery, china, silver, and gas. We paid as much as we would have done at a hotel, but were infinitely more contented, having the privacy and many of the comforts of a real home.

Our worthy landlord remonstrated energetically at sight of the open windows; protested against the draughts and our practice of drawing reading-chairs and lounges into the cooling currents.

“The wind is east, sir!” he said to Caput, almost with tears,—“and when it sets in that quarter, draughts are deadly.”

We laughed, thanked him and declared that we were used to east winds, and continued to seek the breeziest places until every one of us was seized with influenza viler than any that ever afflicted us in the middle of a Northern winter. Upon Caput, the most robust of the party, it settled most grievously. The dregs were an attack of bronchitis that defied all remedies for a month, then sent him back to the Continent for cure. I mention this instance of over-confidence in American constitutions and ignorance of the English climate as a warning to others as rash and unlearned.[113]

The wind stayed in the east all the time we were in Brighton and the sun’s ardor did not abate. Our host had a good library,—a rarity in a lodging-house, and we “lazed” away noon-tides, book or fancy-work in hand. We had morning drives into the country and evening rambles in the Pavilion Park, and out upon the splendid pier where the band played until ten o’clock, always concluding, as do all British bands, the world around, with “God save the Queen.” Boy, attended by the devoted Invaluable, divided the day between donkey-rides, playing in the sand,—getting wet through regularly twice per diem, by an in-rolling wave,—and the Aquarium. The latter resort was much affected by us all. It is of itself worth far more than the trouble and cost of a trip from London to Brighton and back.

The restfulness,—the indolence, if you will have it so—of that sojourn in a place where there were few “sights,” and when it was too warm to make a business of visiting such as there were, was a salutary break,—barring the influenza—in our tour. Perhaps our mental digestions are feebler or slower than those of the majority of traveling Americans. But it was a positive necessity for us to be quiet, now and then, for a week or a month, that the work of assimilation and nourishment might progress safely and healthfully. After a score of attempts to bolt an art-gallery, a museum, a cathedral, or a city at one meal, and to follow this up by rapidly successive surfeits, we learned wisdom from the dyspeptic horrors that ensued, and resigned the experiment to others. Nor did we squander time and strength upon a thing to which we were indifferent, merely because Murray or Baedeker prescribed it, or through fear of that social nuisance, the Thorough Traveler. We cultivated a fine obtuseness to the attacks of this personage and never lost an hour’s sleep for his assurance[114] that the one thing worth seeing in Munich was the faïence in a tumbling-down palace only known to virtuosos “who understood the ropes,” and which we, being simple folk unversed in rope-pulling, had not beheld; or that he who omitted to walk the entire length of the Liverpool Docks, or to see the Giant’s Causeway by moonlight, or to go into the Blue Grotto, might better have stayed at home and given his ticket and letter-of-credit to a more appreciative voyager.

Our fortnight at Brighton, then, was one of our resting-spells, and one morning, after a night-shower had freshened the atmosphere, and the wind blew steadily but not too strongly from the sea, we drove, en famille, to the Downs and the Devil’s Dyke, a deep ravine cleaving the Downs into two hills. The devil’s name is a pretty sure guarantee of the picturesque or awful in scenery,—a sort of trade-mark. Our course was through the open, breezy country; the road, fringed and frilled with milk-white daisies and scarlet poppies, overlooking the ocean on one side, bounded upon the other by corn-fields and verdant downs stretching up and afar into the hilly horizon. The evenness of the grass upon these rolling heights, and of the growth of wheat and oats was remarkable, betokening uniformity of fertility and culture unknown in our country. Wheat, oats, barley—all bearded cereals—are “corn” abroad, maize being little known.

Leaving the waggonette at the hotel on the top of the Downs, and turning a deaf ear to the charming of the photographer, whose camera and black cloth were already afield, early in the day as it was, we walked on the ridge for an hour. We trod the springy turf as upon a flowery carpet; the air was balm and cordial; from our height we surveyed five of the richest counties of England, seeming to be spread upon a plane surface, the distance leveling[115] minor inequalities. Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire were a mottled map below our plateau, a string of hamlets marking highways and knotting up, once in a while, into a larger settlement wound about a church. Some of these were very primitive sanctuaries, with thatched roofs and towers, and the straw gables of the cottages were like so many embrowned hay-ricks.

Then and there, our feet deep in wild thyme and a hundred unknown blossoming grasses, the pastoral panorama unrolled for our vision, from the deep blue sea-line to the faint boundary of the far-off hills, the scented breezes filling lungs that panted to inhale yet larger draughts of their cool spiciness—we first heard the larks sing! We had been sceptical about the sky-lark. And since hearing the musical “jug-jug” and broken cadenzas of Italian nightingales, and deciding that the mocking-bird would be a triumphantly-successful rival could he be induced to give moonlight concerts, we had waxed yet more contemptuous of the bird who builds upon the ground, yet is fabled to sing at heaven’s gate. We had seen imported larks, brown, spiritless things, pecking in a home-sickly way at a bit of turf in the corner of their cage, and emitting an infrequent “tweet.” Our hedge-sparrow is a comelier and more interesting bird, and, for all we could see, might sing as well, if he would but apply his mind to the study of the sustained warble.

Our dear friend, Dr. V——, of Rome, once gave me a description of the serenades of the nightingales about his summer home on the Albanian Hills, so exquisite in wording, so pulsing with natural poetry as to transcend the song of any Philomel we ever listened to. I wished for him on the Downs that fervid July morning. I wish for his facile pen the more now when I would tell, and cannot, how the sky-larks sang and with what emotions we hearkened[116] to them. They arose, not singly or in pairs, but by the score, from the expanse of enameled turf, mounting straight and slowly heavenward. Their notes blended in the upper air into a vibrating ecstasy of music. Pure as the odor of the thyme, free as the rush of the sea-air over the heights, warble and trill floated down to us as they soared, always directly up, up, until literally invisible to the naked eye. I brought the field-glass to bear upon two I had thus lost, and saw them sporting in the ether like butterflies, springing and sinking, tossing over and over upon the waves of their own melody, and, all the while, the lower air in which we stood was thrilling as clearly and deliciously with rapturous rivulets of sound as when they were scarce twenty feet above the earth.

Our last memory of Oxford is a landscape—in drawing, graphic and clear as a Millais, rich and mellow as a Claude in coloring. We brought away both picture and poem from Brighton Downs.

It was still summer-time, but summer with a presage of autumn in russet fields and shortening twilights, when we left the railway train at Slough, a station near Windsor Castle, and took a carriage for Stoke-Pogis. This, the “Country Church-yard” of Thomas Gray, is but two and a half miles from the railway, and is gained by a good road winding between hedge-rows and coppices, with frequent views of quiet country homes. The flag flaunting from the highest tower of Windsor was seldom out of sight on the route.

It was impossible to abstain from repeating the couplet, inevitable that it should recur to us, a majestic refrain, at each glimpse of the royal standard. We stopped in the[117] broad shadow of a clump of oaks at the side of the road; passed through a turn-stile and followed a worn foot-path across the fields. The glimmer of a pale, graceful spire among the trees was our guide. About sixty yards beyond the stile is an oblong monument of granite, surmounted by a sarcophagus with steeply-slanting sides and a gabled cover. The paneled sides of the base are covered with selections from Gray’s poems. The turf slopes from this into a shallow moat, on the outer bank of which reclined two boys. They were well-favored fellows, dressed in well-made jackets and trousers, and had, altogether, the air of gentlemen’s sons. While one copied into a blank book the inscription on the side nearest him, his companion was at work upon a tolerable sketch of the monument.

read Caput from the monument. Then, glancing at the sarcophagus: “Can Gray himself be buried here? I thought his grave was in the church-yard?”

The boys wrote and sketched on, deaf and dumb. Caput approached the elder, who may have been fifteen years old.

“I beg your pardon! but can you tell me if this is the burial-place of the poet Gray?”

The lads looked at each other.

“Gray?” said one—

“Poet?” the other.

Then—this is solemn truth, dear Reader!—both uttered, with the unison and monotony of a church-response—“I really carn’t say!”

We pursued the little foot-path to the church. There would surely be some record there to satisfy our query.[118] Stones should have tongues upon the soil that produces the Average Briton. “The summer’s late repentant smile” cast a pensive beauty over the country-side, made of the sequestered church-yard a home fair to see and to be desired when the “inevitable hour” should come. The wall has a luxuriant coping of ivy throughout its length. Prehensile streamers have anchored in the turf below and bound the graves with green withes. The ivy-mantle of the old square tower leaves not a stone visible except where it has been cut away from the window of the belfry. A new steeple rises out of the green mass. A modest and symmetrical pinnacle, but one that displeases prejudice, if not just taste, and which is as yet shunned by the ivy, that congener of honorable antiquity. It clings nowhere more lovingly than to the double gable, under the oriel window of which is the poet’s grave. This is a brick parallelogram covered by a marble slab. Gray’s mother is buried with him. A tablet in the church-wall tells us in which narrow cell he sleeps.

Just across the central alley the sexton was opening an old grave, probably that it might receive another tenant, possibly to remove the remains to another cemetery. A gentleman in clerical dress stood near, with two young girls. The grave-digger and his assistant completed the group. Caput applied to the clergyman, rightly supposing him to be the parish rector, for permission to gather some of the pink thyme and grasses from the base of the brick tomb. During the minute occupied by courteous question and reply, the contents of the grave were exposed to view.

“A ‘mouldering heap’ of dust!” said Caput, coming back to us, “Here and there a crumbling bone. A mat of human hair. Not even the semblance of human shape. That is what mortality means. Gray may have seen the like in this very place.”[119]

We picked buttercups, clover, and thyme, some blades of grass and sprigs of moss, that had their roots in the fissures of the bricks, and as silently quitted the vicinage of the open pit. Every step furnished proof of the fidelity to nature of the imperishable idyl. It was an impossibility—or so we then believed—that it could have been written elsewhere than in that “church-yard.” The moveless arabesques of the rugged elm-boughs slept upon the ridged earth at our left; the yew-tree blackened a corner at the right. The “upland lawn” was bathed in sunshine; the

at whose foot the recluse stretched his listless length at noontide, still leaned over the brook. We stayed our lingering steps to listen to its babbling, and point out the wood and the “’customed hill.”

We rode back to the station by way of the hamlet, into whose uncouth name genius has breathed music, and saw Gray’s home. It is a plain, substantial dwelling, little better than a farm-house. In the garden is a summer-house, in which, it is said, he was fond of sitting while he wrote and read. Constitutionally shy, and of exceeding delicacy of nerve and taste, his thoughtfulness deepened by habitual ill-health,—one comprehends, in seeing Stoke-Pogis, why he should have preferred it to any other abode, yet how, in this seclusion, gravity and dreaming should have become a gentle melancholy tingeing every line we have from his pen. As, when apostrophizing Eton:—

[120]This continual guest, Pain, engendered an indolent habit of body. His ideal Heaven was “where one might lie on the sofa all day and read a novel,” unstung by conscience or the contempt of his kind.

“William Penn was born at Stoke-Pogis!” I remembered, aloud and abruptly.

Caput’s eyes were upon the fast-vanishing spire:

“The Elegy—in which I defy any master of English to find a misapplied word—was written twenty times before it was printed,” he observed sententiously.

“Papa!” from the young lady on the back seat of the carriage—“Now, I thought it was an impromptu——”

“Dashed off upon the backs of a pocketful of letters, between daylight and dark, a flat grave-stone for a desk,—and published in the next morning’s issue of the ‘Stoke-Pogis Banner of Light!’” finished the senior, banteringly.

But there is a lesson, with a moral, in the brief dialogue.

[121]

CHAPTER X.
Our English Cousins.

WE had seen the Carnevale at Rome, and the wild confusion of the moccoletti, which is its finale; festas, in Venice, Milan, and almost every other Italian town where we had stayed overnight. There are more festas than working-days in that laughter-loving land. In Paris we had witnessed illuminations, and a royal funeral, or of such shreds of royalty as appertained unto the dead King of Hanover,—the Prince of Wales, very red of face in the broiling sun, officiating as chief mourner in his mother’s absence. In Geneva we had made merry over the extravaganzas of New Year’s Day, and the comicalities of patriotism that rioted in the Escalade. We were au fait to the beery and musical glories of the German fest. We would see and be in the thick of a British holiday. What better opportunity could we have than was offered by the placards scattered broadcast in the streets, and pasted upon the “hoardings” of Brighton, announcing a mammoth concert in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham; a general muster of Temperance Societies; an awarding of prizes to competitive brass bands, and a prospective convocation of 100,000 souls from every town and shire within a radius of fifty miles? Such facilities for beholding that overgrown monster, the British Public, in his Sunday clothes and best humor—might not occur again—for us—in a half-century.[122]

True, the weather was warm, but the Palace and grounds were spacious. The musical entertainment was not likely to be of the classic order, but it would be something worth the hearing and the telling,—the promised chorus of 5,000 voices, led by the immense organ, in “God save the Queen!” Thus we reasoned away Caput’s predictions that we would be heartily sick of the experiment before the day was half-gone, and thankful to escape, as for our lives, from the hustling auditors of the grand chorus. We yielded one point. Instead of going up to Sydenham in an excursion-train, the better to note the appearance and manners of the Public, we waited for a quieter and later, at regular prices, and so reached the Crystal Palace Station about eleven o’clock.

The punishment of our contumacy began immediately. Wedged in a dark passage with a thousand other steaming bodies, with barely room enough for breathing—not for moving hand or foot—retreat cut off and advance impracticable, we waited until the pen was filled to overflowing by the arrival of the next train before the two-leaved doors at the Palaceward end split suddenly and emptied us into the open air. We made a feint of going through the main building with those of our party who had not already seen it, but every staircase was blocked by ascending and descending droves, and nobody gave an inch to anybody else. The Mothers of England were all there, each with a babe in arms and another tugging at her skirts. Men swore—good-humoredly,—women scolded as naturally as in their own kitchens and butteries, and babies cried without fear or favor. The police kept a wise eye upon the valuables of the Palace, and let the people alone. Repelled in every advance upon art-chamber and conservatory, we collected our flurried forces and withdrew to the grounds. When sore-footed with walking[123] from fountain to flower-bed, the gentlemen watched for and obtained seats for the ladies upon a bench near the stand, where the competitive brass bands were performing, heard, perhaps by themselves and their rivals, but few besides.

The avenues were choked in every direction with swarms of the commonest-looking people our eyes had ever rested upon. Rags and squalor were seldom seen, and the yeomanry and their families were fresh-colored and plump. The representatives from London and other large cities were easily distinguishable by a sharper, sometimes a pinched look, leaden complexions and smarter clothes. There is a Continental saying that in England, blacksmiths make the women’s dresses and men’s hats. If the ladies of rank, beginning with the queen, are notably ill-dressed, what shall we say of the apparel of mechanics’, small tradesmen’s and farmers’ wives and daughters, such as we beheld at Sydenham? Linsey skirts, quite clearing slippered feet and ankles clothed in home-knit hose, were converted into gala-suits by polonaises of low-priced grenadine, or worked muslin of a style twenty years old, and bonnets out-flaunting the geranium-beds. The English gardeners may have borrowed the device of massing lawn-flowers from their countrywomen’s hats. White was in high favor with the young, generally opaque stuffs such as piqué and thick cambric, but we did not see one that was really clean and smooth. Most had evidently done holiday-duty for several seasons and were still considered “fresh enough.” Elderly matrons and spinsters panted in rusty black silk and shiny alpacas, set off by broad cotton lace collars, astounding exhibitions of French lace, cheap flowers and often white feathers, upon hats that had not seen a milliner’s block in a dozen seasons. Old and young were prone to ribbon-sashes with flying or drooping ends,[124] and cotton gloves. Some wore fur tippets over their summer-robes. These we remarked the less for having seen ladies, traveling first-class, with footmen and maids in attendance, wear in August, grenadine and muslin dresses and sealskin jackets.

The women were more easy in their finery than were the men in broadcloth, shirt-fronts and blackened boots. These huddled in awkward groups, talked loudly and laughed blusteringly, while their feminine companions strolled about, exchanging greetings and gossip. The little girls kept close to their mothers in conformity with British traditions on the government of girls of all ages; the small boys munched apples and gingerbread-nuts, and stared stolidly around; those of the bigger lads who could afford the few pence paid for the privilege, rode bicycles up and down the avenues until the blood threatened to start from the pores of their purple faces, and their eyes from the sockets. From that date to this, the picture of a half-grown Briton,—done up to the extreme of uncomfortableness in best jacket and breeches that would “just meet,”—careering violently over the gravel under the fierce July sun, directing two-thirds of his energies to the maintenance of his centre of gravity upon the ticklish seat, the rest to the perpetual motion of arms and legs,—stands with me as the type of the pitiable-ludicrous. Of men, women and children, at least one-half wore ribbon badges, variously lettered and illuminated. Standards were borne in oblique, undress fashion, upon shoulders, and leaned against trees, advertising the presence of “Bands of Hope,” “Rain Drops,” “Rechabites,” “Summer Clouds,” “Snow-Flakes” and “Cooling Springs.” Many men, and of women not a few, had velvet trappings, in shape and size resembling Flemish horse-collars, about their necks, labeled in gold with cabalistic characters, denoting the[125] title borne by the wearer in some one of the Temperance Societies represented.

Caput was right. The element of the picturesque was utterly wanting from the holiday crowd. The naïve jollity that almost compensates for this deficiency in the fests of Deutschland was likewise absent. The brass bands pealed on perseveringly, the crowd shifted lumberingly to and fro, and we grew hungry as well as tired. The Palace Restaurant would be crowded, we knew, but we worked our way thither by a circuitous course, avoiding the densest “jams” in corridors and stairways, and were agreeably surprised at finding less than twenty persons at lunch, and in the long, lofty dining-room, the coolest, quietest retreat we had had that day. The dinner was excellent, the waiters prompt and attentive, and with the feeling that the doors (bolted by the restaurant-prices), were an effectual bulwark against the roaring rabble, we dallied over our dessert as we might in the back drawing-room in Brighton with good Mr. Chipp behind Caput’s chair.

We would fain have lingered in the concert-hall to hear the chorus of five thousand voices upborne by the full swell of the mighty organ. There were the tiers of singers, mostly school-girls in white frocks, piled up to the ceiling, waiting for the signal to rise. Somebody said the organ was preluding, but of this we were not sure, such was the reigning hubbub. The important moment came. The thousands of the choir were upon their feet; opened their mouths as moved by one unseen spring. The conductor swung his bâton with musical emphasis and discretion. The mouths expanded and contracted in good time. We heard not one note of it all. Men shouted to one another and laughed uproariously; women scolded and cackled; babies screamed,—as if music, “heavenly maid,” had never[126] been born, and it was no concern of theirs whether the Queen might, could, would, or should be saved.

Caput put his mouth to my ear.

“This will kill you!” he said, and by dint of strong elbows and broad shoulders, fought a way for us out of the press.

“From all such—and the rest of it!” gasped Prima, when we were seeking lost breath, and smoothing rumpled plumage in the outer air.

That blessed man was magnanimous! He never so much as looked—“You would come!”

He only said solicitously to me—“I am afraid your head aches! Would you like to sit quietly in the shade for awhile before we go home?”

Fallacious dream! The British Public had lunched out-of-doors while we sat at ease within. The park, containing more than two hundred acres, was littered with whitey-brown papers that had enwrapped the “British Sangwich;” empty beer-bottles were piled under the trees, and the late consumers of the regulation-refreshments lounged upon the grass in every shady corner, smoking, talking and snoring. Abandoning the project of rest within the grounds, we walked toward the gate of egress. Everywhere was the same waste of greasy papers, cheese-parings, bacon-rinds and recumbent figures, and, at as many points of our progress we saw three drunken women—too drunk to walk or rise. One lay in the blazing sunshine, untouched by Good Samaritan or paid police, a baby not over two years old sitting by her, crying bitterly. Caput directed a policeman to the shocking spectacle. He shook his head.

“She’s werry drunk!” he admitted. “But she h’aint noisy. We must give the h’attention of the Force to them w’ot h’is!”[127]

It was but two o’clock when we entered the waiting-room of the station. Out-going trains were infrequent at that time of the day, and we must wait an hour. I found a comfortable sofa in the ladies’ parlor and laid down my throbbing head upon a pillow of the spare shawls without which we never stirred abroad. A kindly-faced woman suspended her knitting and asked what she could do for me.

“Maybe the lady would like a cup of tea with a teaspoonful of brandy in it? Or a glass of h’ale?”

I thanked her, but said I only wanted rest and quiet.

“Which I mean to say, mem, it’s ’ard to get to-day. I’ve been ’ere five year, keeper of this ’ere waiting-room, and never ’ave I seen such crowds. The trains h’are a-comin’ h’in constant still, and will, till h’evening. And h’every train, h’it do bring a thousand. A Temperance pic-nic, you see, mem, do allers draw h’uncommon!”

We saw, not of choice, one more fête-day in England—the Bank holiday lately granted to all classes of working-people. It fell on Monday, August 5th, and caught us in London with a day full of not-to-be-deferred engagements, the departure of some of our family-party being near at hand. The Banks, all public offices and shops were closed. The British Museum, Zoölogical Gardens, The Tower and parks would be crowded, we agreed, in modifying our plans. St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey seemed safe. We were right with respect to the Cathedral. An unusually large number of people strayed in and sauntered about, looking at monuments and tablets in church and crypt, but we were free to move and examine. It was a “free day” at the Abbey. The chapels locked at other seasons, and only to be seen in the conduct of a verger, were now open to everybody, and everybody was there. We threaded the passage-ways in the wake of a fleet of[128] cockneys, great and small, to whom the tomb that holds the remains of the Tudor sisters, and on which their greatest queen lies in marble state, signified no more than a revolving doll in a hair-dresser’s window; who slouched aimlessly from Ben Jonson’s bust to Chaucer’s monument, and trod with equal apathy the white slab covering “Old Parr,” and the gray flagging lettered, “Charles Dickens.”

That this judgment of the rank and file is not uncharitable we had proof in the demeanor and talk of the visitors.

“James!” cried a wife to her heedless husband, when abreast of the tomb of Henry III. “You don’t look at nothink you parss. Don’t you see this is the tomb of ’Enry Thirteenth?”

“’Enry or ’Arry!” growled her lord without taking his hands from his pocket—“Wot do I care for he?”

None of the comments, we overheard, upon the treasures of this grandest of burial-places amused us more than the talk of a respectable-looking man with his bright-eyed ten-year old son over the memorial to Sir John Franklin. Beneath a fine bust of the hero-explorer is a bas-relief of the Erebus and Terror locked in the ice.

“See the vessels in the rocks, Pa!” cried the boy. “Or—is it ice?”

“I don’t rightly know, Charley. Don’t touch!”

“I wont, Pa! I just want to read what this is on the ship. E, R, E, B, U, S!—E. R. Bruce! Is he buried here, do you ’spose?”

“In course he is, me lard! They wouldn’t never put h’another man’s name h’upon ’is tombstone—would they?”

It is obviously unfair, say some of those for whom I am writing, to gauge the intelligence and breeding of a great nation by the manners of the lower classes. Should I retort that upon such data, as collected by British tourists in a flying trip through our country, is founded the popular[129] English belief that we are vulgar in manner and speech, superficial in education and crude in thought, I should be told that these are the impressions and opinions of a bygone period,—belong to a generation that read Mrs. Trollope’s and Marryatt’s “Travels,” and Boz’s “American Notes;” that the Briton of to-day harbors neither prejudice nor contempt for us; appreciates all that is praiseworthy in us as individuals and a people; is charitable to our faults. There are Americans resident abroad who will assert this. Some, because having made friends of enlightened English men and women, true and noble, they see the masses through the veil of affectionate regard they have for the few. Others, flattered in every fibre of their petty natures by the notice of those who arrogate superiority of race and training, affect to despise their own land and kind; would rather be Anglicized curs beneath the tables of the nobility than independent citizens of a free and growing country. We know both classes. We met them every day and everywhere for two years. America can justify herself against such children as those I have last described.

But I have somewhat to say about the popular estimate in England of America and Americans, and I foresee that I shall write of other matters with more comfort when I have eased my spirit by a little plain speech upon this subject:

“You agree with me, I am sure, in saying, ‘My country, right or wrong!’” said a dear old English lady, turning to me during a discussion upon the policy of Great Britain with regard to the Russian-Turkish war.

“We say—‘My country, always right!’” replied I, smiling. “We are, as you often tell us, ‘very young’—too young to have committed many national sins. Perhaps when we are a thousand or fifteen hundred years[130] nearer the age of European governments, we, too, may have made dangerous blunders.”

An English gentleman, hearing a portion of this badinage, came up to me.

“You were not in earnest in what you said just now?” he began, interrogatively. “I honor America. I have studied her history, and I hail every step of her march to the place I believe God has assigned her—the leadership of the Christian world. She is fresh and enthusiastic. She is sound to the core. But she does make mistakes. Let us reason together for a little while. There is the Silver Bill, for example.”

“I was talking nonsense,” I said, impulsively. “Mere braggadocio, and in questionable taste. But it irks me that the best and kindest of you patronize my country, and excuse me! that so many who do it know next to nothing about us. Mrs. B—— asked me, just now, if it were ‘quite safe to promenade Broadway unarmed—on account of the savages, you know.’ And when I answered—‘the nearest savages to us are in your Canadian provinces,’ she said, without a tinge of embarrassment—‘Ah! I am very, very excessively ignorant about America. In point of fact, it is a country in which I have no personal interest whatever. I have a son in India, and one in Australia, but no friends on your side of the world.’ Yet she is a lady, well educated and well-born. She has traveled much; speaks several languages, and converses intelligently upon most topics. She is, moreover, too kind to have told me that my country is uninteresting had she dreamed that I could be hurt or offended by the remark. Another lady, a disciple of Dr. Cummings, and his personal friend, asked my countrywoman, Mrs. T——, ‘if she came from America by steamer or by the overland route?’ and a member of Parliament told Mr. J——, the other day, that the ‘North[131] should have let the South go when she tried to separate herself from the Union. The geographical position of the two countries showed they should never have been one nation.’ ‘The hand of the Creator,’ he went on to say, ‘had placed a rocky rampart between them.’ ‘A rocky rampart!’ repeated Mr. J——, his mind running upon Mason’s and Dixon’s line. ‘Yes! The Isthmus of Darien!’

“Americans are accused of over-sensitiveness and boastfulness. Is it natural that we should submit tamely to patronage and criticism from those who calmly avow their ‘excessive ignorance’ of all that pertains to our land and institutions? Can we respect those who assume to teach when they know less upon many subjects than we do? A celebrated English divine once persisted in declaring to my husband that Georgia is a city, not a State. Another informed us that Pennsylvania is the capital of New England. Even my dear Miss W—— cannot be convinced that boys of nine years old are considered minors with us. She says she has been told by those who ought to know that, at that age, they discard parental authority; while her sister questioned me seriously as to the truth of the story that the feet of all American babies—boys and girls—are bandaged in infancy to make them small. Don’t laugh! This is all true, and I have not told you the tenth. The Silver Bill! I have never met another Englishman who knew anything about it!”

My friend laughed, in spite of my injunction.

“It is not ‘natural’ for Americans to ‘submit tamely’ to any kind of injustice, I fancy. But be merciful! Have you read in the ‘Nineteenth Century’ Dr. Dale’s ‘Impressions of America?’”

“I have. They are like himself, honest, sincere, thorough! But I have also read Trollope’s ‘American Senator,’ a product of the nineteenth century that will be read[132] and credited by many who cannot appreciate Dr. Dale’s scholarship and logic. May I tell you an anecdote—true in every particular—to offset the Senator’s behavior in the Earl’s drawing-room? An English novelist, than whom none is better known on both sides of the water, dined, by invitation, at the house of a bona fide Senator in Washington. After dinner he approached the hostess in the drawing-room to take leave.

“‘It is very early yet, Mr.——,’ she said politely.

“‘I know it. But the fact is I must write ten pounds’ worth before I go to bed!’

“Yet this man is especially happy in clever flings at American society. We have faults—many and grievous! But we might drop them the sooner if our monitors were better qualified to instruct us, and would admonish in kindness, not disdain.”

Because he was an Englishman, and I liked him, I withheld from my excited harangue many and yet more atrocious absurdities uttered in my hearing by his compatriots. At this distance and time, and under the shelter of a nom de plume, I may relate an incident I forebore religiously from giving to my transatlantic acquaintances, albeit sorely tempted, occasionally, by their unconscious condescension and simplicity of arrogance—too amusing to be always offensive.

We were taking a cup of “arfternoon tea” with some agreeable English people, who had invited their rector and his wife to meet us. My seat was next the wife, a pretty, refined little woman, who graciously turned the talk into a channel where she fancied I would be at ease. She began to question me about America. Perceiving her motive, and being by this time somewhat weary of cruising in one strait, I, as civilly, fought shy of my native shores, and plied her with queries in my turn. I asked[133] information, among other things, concerning Yorkshire and Haworth, stating our intention of visiting the home and church of the Brontës. The rectoress knew nothing about the topography of Yorkshire, but had heard of the Brontë novels.

“Wasn’t ‘Jane Eyre’ just a little—naughty? I fancy I have heard something of the kind.”

Our English cousins “farncy” quite as often as we “guess,” or “reckon,” or “presume,” and sometimes as incorrectly.

I waived the subject of Jane Eyre’s morals by a brief tribute to the author’s genius, and passed to Mrs. Gaskell’s description of the West Riding town, Haworth. Our hostess caught the word “Keighley.”

“I was in Keighley last year, at a wedding,” she interpolated. “It is near Haworth—did you say? And you have friends in Haworth?”

I explained.

“Ah!” politely. “I did not know Charlotte Brontë ever lived there. Her ‘Jane Eyre’ was a good deal talked about when I was a girl. She was English—did you say?”

Dropping the topic for that of certain local antiquities, I discussed these with my gentle neighbor until I happened to mention the name of an early Saxon king.

“The familiarity, of Americans with early English history quite astonishes me,” she remarked. “I cannot understand why they should be conversant with what concerns them so remotely.”

I suggested that their history was also ours until within a hundred years. That their great men in letters, statesmanship and war belonged to us up to that time as much as to the dwellers upon English soil, the two countries being under one and the same government.[134]

The blue eyes were slightly hazy with bewilderment.

“A hundred years! I beg your pardon—but I fancied—I was surely under the impression that America was discovered more than a hundred years ago?”

“It was!” I hastened to say. “Every American child is taught to say—

But”—feeling that I touched upon delicate ground,—“we were provinces until 1776, when we became a separate government.”

I just avoided adding—“and independent.”

The little lady’s eyes cleared before a gleam that was more than the joy of discovery. It was, in a mild and decorous way, the rapture of creation. Her speech grew animated.

“1776! And last year was 1876! Pardon me! but perhaps you never thought—I would say—has it ever occurred to you that possibly that may have been the reason why your National Exposition was called ‘The Centennial’?”

Magnanimity and politeness are a powerful combination. By their aid, I said—“Very probably!” and sipped my tea as demurely as an Englishwoman could have done in the circumstances.

It is both diverting and exasperating to hear Englishmen sneer openly and coarsely at the attentions bestowed by American gentlemen upon the ladies under their care. Their dogged assumption—and disdainful as dogged—that this is an empty show exacted by us cannot be shaken by the fact of which they certainly are not ignorant,—to wit, that our countrymen are cowards in naught else. I will cite but one of the many illustrations[135] that fell under my eye of their different policy toward the weaker sex. I had climbed the Ventnor Downs one afternoon by the help of my escort, and stood upon the brow of the highest hill, when we espied three English people, known to us by sight, approaching. The short grass was slippery, the direct ascent so steep that the last of the party, a handsome woman of fifty or thereabouts, was obliged, several times, to fall upon her hands and knees to keep from slipping backward. Her son, a robust Oxonian, led the way, cane in hand. Her hale, bluff husband came next, also grasping a stout staff. At the top they stopped to remark upon the beauty of the view and evening, thus giving time to the wife and mother to join them. She was very pale; the sweat streamed down her face; she caught her breath in convulsive gasps. Her attendants smiled good-humoredly.

“Pretty well blown—eh?” said her lord.

Her affectionate son—“Quite knocked-up, in fact!”

Yet these were gentlemen in blood and reputation.

I do not defend the ways and means by which the Travelling American makes his name, and, too often, that of his country a by-word and a hissing in the course of the European tour, which is, in his parlance, “just about the thing” for the opulent butcher, baker, and candlestick-maker, now-a-days. I do affirm that, judging him by the representative of the class corresponding to his in the Mother Country, he is no more blatant and objectionable to people of education and refinement than the Briton who is his fellow-traveller. In aptness and general intelligence he will assuredly bear off the palm. If the American of a higher grade be slow to abandon his provincial accent, and his wife her shrill, “clipping” speech; if what Bayard Taylor termed “the national catarrh” be obstinate in both,—the Englishman has his “aws” and “you knows,” and lumbering[136] articulation; calls the garçon who cannot comprehend his order at the table d’hôte “a stupid ass,” in the hearing of all, declares the weather to be “nosty,” the wine “beastly,” and the soup “filthy,” while I have seen his wife bring her black-nosed pug to dinner with her, and feed him and herself with blanc mange from the same spoon.

We received much courtesy and many kindnesses from English people in their own country and upon the continent; formed friendships with some the memory of which must warm our hearts until they cease to beat. Their statesmen, their scholars, and their philanthropists have, as such, no equals in any clime or age. If we wince under censures we feel are unjust, and under sarcasms that cut the more keenly because edged with truth:—if, when they tell us we are “young,” we are disposed to retort that they are old enough to know and to do better, let us, in solemn remembrance of our kinship in blood and in faith, borrow, in thought, my friend’s advice, and “be merciful.”

[137]

CHAPTER XI.
Over the Channel.

I   LAUGHED once on the route from Dover to Calais. The fact deserves to be jotted down as an “Incident of Travel.” For the boat was crowded, the wind brisk, and we had a “chopping sea” in the Channel. Words of woe upon which we need not expatiate to those who have lost sight of Shakspeare’s Cliff in like circumstances. The voyage was filled with disgust as Longfellow’s Night with music, and with untold misery to all of our party excepting Caput, to whom smooth and turbulent seas are as one. If he has a preference, it is for the latter. He led off in the laugh that extended even to the wretched creature I had known in calmer hours, as Myself.

An elderly lord was on board. A very loud lord as to voice. A mighty lord in rank and honors, if one might judge from the attentions of deck-stewards and some of the initiated passengers. A very big lord as to size. A very rich lord, if the evidence of furred mantles, and a staff of obsequious servants be admitted. A very pompous lord, whose stiffened cravat, beef-steak complexion and goggle-eyes reminded us of “Joey Bagstock, Tough Jo, J. B., sir!”

If, having sunk to the depths of suffering and degradation, we could have slid into a lower deep, it would have been by reason of that man’s struttings and vaporings and[138] bullyings in our sight. He tramped the deck over and upon the feet of those who were too sick, or too much crowded to get out of his path,—courier and valet at his heels, one bearing a furled umbrella and a mackintosh in case it should rain, the other a second furred surtout should “my lord” grow chilly.

“Ill, sir! what do you mean, sir! I am never ill at sea!” he vociferated to the captain, who ventured a query and the offer of his own cabin should his lordship require the refuge.

“Pinafore” had not then been written, and the assertion went unchallenged.

“I have travelled thousands of miles by water, sir, and never known so much as a qualm of sea-sickness—not a qualm, sir! Do you take me for a woman, sir, or a fool?”

In his choler he was more like Bagstock than ever, as he continued his promenade, gurgling and puffing, goggling and wagging his head like an apoplectic china mandarin.

We were in mid-channel where there was a rush of master, servants, and officious deck-hands to the guards, that made the saddest sufferers raise their eyes. In a few minutes, the parting of the group of attendants showed the elderly lord, upon his feet, indeed, but staggering so wildly that the courier and a footman held him up between them while the valet settled his wig and replaced his hat. His complexion was ashes-of-violets, if there be such a tint,—his eyes were as devoid of speculation as those of a boiled fish. The steward picked up his gold-headed cane, but the flabby hands could not grasp it. The captain hastened forward.

“Very sorry, me lud, I’m sure, for the little accident. But it’s a nosty sea, this trip, me lud, as your ludship sees. An uncommon beastly sea! I hope your ludship is not suffering much?”[139]

The British lion awoke in the great man’s bosom. The crimson of rage burned away the ashes. The eyes glared at the luckless official.

“Suffering, sir! Do you suppose I care for suffering? It is the dommed mortification of the thing!”

Then, as I have said, Caput laughed, and the sickest objects on board joined in feeble chorus.

Prima lifted her head from her father’s shoulder. “I am glad I came!” she said, faintly.

So was I—almost—for the scene lacked no element of grotesqueness nor of poetical retribution.

The long room in the Paris station (gare), where newly-arrived travellers await the examination of their luggage, is comfortless, winter and summer. It was never drearier than on one March morning, when, after a night-journey of fifteen hours, we stood, for the want of seats, upon the stone floor, swept by drifts of mist from the open doors, until our chattering teeth made very broken French of our petition to the officers to clear our trunks at their earliest convenience, and let us go somewhere to fire and breakfast. The inspection was the merest form, as we found it everywhere. Perhaps we looked honest (or poor), or our cheerful alacrity in surrendering our keys and entreating prompt attendance, may have had some share in purchasing immunity from the annoyances of search and confiscation complained of by many. One trunk was unlocked; the tray lifted and put back, without the disturbance of a single article; all the luggage received the mystic chalking that pronounced it innocuous to the French Republic; we entered a carriage and gave the order: “61 Avenue Friedland!”

Caput, to whom every quarter of the city and every incident of the Commune Reign of Terror were familiar, pointed out streets and squares, as we rode along, that[140] gained a terrible notoriety through the events of that bloody and fiery era. I recollect leaning forward to look at one street—not a wide one—in which ten thousand dead had lain at one time behind the barricades. For the rest, I was ungratefully inattentive. Paris, in the gray of early morning, looked sleepy, respectable, and dismal. The mist soaked us to the bone; the drive was long; we had void stomachs and aching heads. Some day we might listen to and believe in the tale of her revolutions, her horrors and her glories. Now this was a physical, and therefore, a mental impossibility.

“At last!”

Almost in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe, looming gigantic through the fog, the carriage stopped at a handsome house. A porter came out for our luggage, the concierge gave us into the care of a waiter.

“But yes, monsieur, the rooms were ready. Perfectly. And the fires. Perfectly—perfectly! Monsieur would find all as had been ordered.”

Up we went, two flights of polished stairs,—where never an atom of dust was allowed to settle—along one hall, across an ante-chamber, and the waiter threw back a door. A large chamber stood revealed, made lightsome by two windows; heartsome by a glowing fire of sea-coal. And set in front of the grate was a round table draped whitely, and bearing that ever-blessed sight to a fagged-out woman—a tea equipage. By the time I, as the family invalid, was divested of bonnet and mufflers, and laid in state upon the sofa at one side of the hearth, a tap at the door heralded the entrance of a smiling English housekeeper in a black dress and muslin cap with flowing lappets. She carried a tray; upon it were hissing tea-urn, bread and butter, and light biscuits.

“Miss Campbell hopes the ladies are not very much[141] fatigued after their long journey, and that they will find themselves quite comfortable here.”

How comfortable we were then, and during all the weeks of our stay in Hôtel Campbell; how we learned to know and esteem, as she deserved, the true gentlewoman who presides with gracious dignity at her table, and makes of her house a genuine home for guests from foreign lands, I can only state here in brief. Neither heart nor conscience will let me pass over in silence the debt of gratitude and personal regard we owe her. I shall be only too happy should these lines be the means of directing other travelers to a house that combines, in a remarkable degree, elegance and comfort in a city whose hotels, boarding-houses, and “appartements” seldom possess both.

The March weather of Paris is execrable. Some portion of our disappointment at this may have been due to popular fictions respecting sunny France, and a city so fair that the nations come bending with awe and delight before her magnificence; where good Americans—of the upper tendom—wish to go when they die; the home of summer, butterflies, and Worth! To one who has heard, and, in a measure, credited all this, the fog that hides from him the grand houses across the particular Rue or Avenue in which he lodges, are more penetrating, the winds more bitter, the flint-dust they hurl into his eyes is sharper, the rain, sleet, and snow-flurries that pelt him to shelter more disagreeable—than London fog or Berlin gloom and dampness. There were whole days during which I sat, perforce, by my fire, or, if I ventured to the window to enjoy the prospect of sheets of rain, dropping a wavering curtain between me and the Rothschild mansion opposite, I must wrap my shawl about my shoulders, so “nipping and eager” was the air forcing its way between the joints of the casements.

But there were other days in which out-door existence[142] was tolerable in a fiacre, jealously closed against the whirling dust. Where it all came from we could not tell. The streets of Paris are a miracle of cleanliness. Twice a day they are swept and washed, and the gutters run continually with clear, living water.

The wind was keen, the dust pervasive, the sky a bright, hard blue when we went, for the first time, to the tomb of Napoleon in the Hôtel des Invalides. The blasts held revel in the courtyard we traversed in order to gain the entrance. The sentinels at the gate halted in the lee of the lodges before turning in their rounds to face the dust-laden gusts. Once within the church a great peace fell upon us—sunshine and silence. It was high noon, and the light flowed through the cupola crowning the dome directly into the great circular crypt in the centre of the floor, filling—overflowing it with glory. We leaned upon the railing and looked down. Twenty feet below was the sarcophagus. It is a monolith of porphyry, twelve feet in length, six in breadth, with a projecting base of green granite. Around it, wrought into the tesselated marble pavement, is a mosaic wreath of laurel—glossy green. Between this and the sarcophagus one reads—“Austerlitz, Marengo, Jena, Rivoli,” and a long list of other battle-fields, also in brilliant mosaic. Without this circle, upon the balustrade fencing in the tomb, are twelve statues, representatives of as many victories. A cluster of fresh flowers lay upon the sarcophagus. And upon all, the sunshine, that seemed to strike into the polished red marble and bring out the reflection of hidden flame. It was a strange optical illusion, so powerful one had to struggle to banish the idea that the porphyry was translucent and the glow reddening the sides of the crypt such gleams as one sees in the heart of an opal—“the pearl with a soul in it.” It was easier to give the rein to fancy and think of a[143] Rosicrucian lamp burning above the stilled heart of the entombed Emperor. The quiet of the magnificent burial-place is benignant, not oppressive. In noting the absence of the sentimental fripperies with which the French delight to adorn the tombs of the loved and illustrious dead we could not but hope that the grandeur of the subject wrought within the architect this pure and sublime conception of more than imperial state.

We followed the winding staircase from the right of the high altar,—above which flashes a wonderful golden crucifix—to the door of the crypt. Bertrand on one side, Duroc on the other, guard their sleeping master. “The bivouac of the dead!” The trite words are pregnant with dignity and with power when quoted upon that threshold. Over the doorway is a sentence in French, from Napoleon’s will:

“I desire that my ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the French people, whom I have so much loved.”[A]

The Communists tore down the bronze column in the Place Vendôme. The bas-reliefs, winding from bottom to top, were cast from cannon captured by Napoleon, and his statue surmounted the shaft. They battered the Tuileries, where he had lived, to a yawning ruin, and outraged the artistic sensibilities of the world by setting fire to the Louvre. But, neither paving-stone, nor bomb, nor torch, was flung into the awful circle where rests the hero, with his faithful generals at his feet.

Jerome Bonaparte, his brother’s inferior and puppet, is buried in a chapel at the left of the entrance of the Dôme. A bronze statue of him rests upon his sarcophagus.[144] His eldest son—by his second marriage—is near him. A smaller tomb holds the heart of Jerome’s Queen. Joseph Bonaparte is interred in a chapel opposite, the great door being between the brothers.

We took the Place de la Concorde in our ride uptown. We did this whenever we could without making too long a détour. The Luxor obelisk, three thousand years old, is in the middle of the Square. A beautiful fountain plays upon each side of this, and the winds, having free course in the unsheltered Place, flung the waters madly about. Twelve hundred people were trampled to death here once. A discharge of fireworks in celebration of the marriage of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette caused a panic and a stampede among the horses attached to the vehicles blocking up the great square. They dashed into the dense mass of the populace, and in half-an-hour the disaster was complete. Sixteen years later there was another panic,—another rush of maddened brutes, that lasted eighteen months. Twenty-eight hundred souls were driven to bliss or woe in the hurly-burly—the devil’s dance of the eighteenth century. The bride and groom, whose nuptial festivities had caused the minor catastrophe, duly answered to their names at the calling of the death-roll. The most precious blood of the kingdom was flung to right and left as ruthlessly as the March winds now tore the spray of the fountains.

Nobody knows, they say, exactly where the guillotine stood;—only that it was near the obelisk and the bronze basins, where Tritons and nymphs bathe all day long. We were in the Place one evening when an angry sunset tinged the waters to a fearful red. Passers-by stopped to look at the phenomenon, until quite a crowd collected. A very quiet crowd for Parisians, but eyes sought other eyes meaningly, some in superstitious dread. While we reviewed,[145] mentally, the list of the condemned brought hither in those two years, it would not have seemed strange had the dolphins vomited human blood into the vast pools.

“Monsieur will see the Colonne de Juillet?” said our coachman, who, as we gazed at the fountains on this day, had exchanged some words with a compatriot. “There has been an accident to” (or at) “the Colonne. Monsieur and mesdames will find it interesting, without doubt.” The wind was too sharp for bandying words. We jumped at the conclusion that the colossal Statue of Liberty, poised gingerly upon the gilt globe on the summit of the monument, had been blown down; bade him drive to the spot, and closed the window.

The Colonne de Juillet stands in the Place de la Bastille. No need to tell the story of the prison-fastness. The useless key hangs in the peaceful halls of Mount Vernon. The leveled stones are built into the Bridge de la Concorde. These “French” titles of squares, bridges, and streets, are sometimes apt, oftener fantastic, not infrequently horribly incongruous. The good Archbishop of Paris was shot upon the site of the old Bastille, in the revolution of 1848, pleading with both parties for the cessation of the fratricidal strife, and dying, like his Lord, with a prayer for his murderers upon his lips. Under the Column of July lie buried the victims of still another revolution—that of 1830,—with some who fell at the neighboring barricade, in 1848. One must carry a pocket record of wars and tumults, if he would keep the run of Parisian émeutes.

Our cocher’s information was correct. A throng gathered about the railed-in base of the column. But Liberty still tip-toed upon the gilded world, and the bronze shaft was intact.

“If Monsieur would like to get out”—said the driver[146] at the door—“he can learn all about the accident. Le pauvre diable leaped—it is now less than an hour since.”

“Leaped!” Then the interesting accident was described. A man had jumped down from the top of the monument. They often did it.

We ought to have been shocked. But the absurdity of the misunderstanding, the man’s dramatic enjoyment of the situation, and his manner of communicating the news, rather tempted us to amusement.

“Was he killed?”

“Ah! without doubt, Madame! The colonne has one hundred and fifty-two feet of height. Perfectly killed, Monsieur!”

Impelled by a wicked spirit of perversity, or a more complex caprice, I offered another query:

“What do you suppose he thought of while falling?”

The fellow scanned my impassive face.

“Ah, Madame! of nothing! One never thinks at such a moment. Ma foi! why should he? He will be out of being—rien—in ten seconds. He has no more use for thought. Why think?”

We declined to inspect the stone on which the suicide’s head had struck. Indeed, assented our cocher, where was the use? The body had been removed immediately, and the pavement washed. The police would look to that. Monsieur would see only a wet spot. The wind would soon dry it. Ah! they were skilful (habile) in such accident at the monument. If a man were weary of life, there was no better place for him—and no noise made about it afterward.

“Somehow,” said Prima, presently, “I cannot feel that a Frenchman’s soul is as valuable as ours. They make so light of life and death, and as for Eternity, they resolve it into, as that man said—‘nothing.’”[147]

“‘He giveth to all life and breath and all things, and hath made of one blood all nations of men,’” I quoted, gravely.

I would not admit, unless to myself, that the coachman’s talk of the wet spot upon the pavement and the significant gesture of blowing away a gas, or scent, that had accompanied his “Nothing,” brought to my imagination the figure of a broken phial of spirits of hartshorn—pungent, volatile—rien!

On another windy morning we made one of our favorite “Variety Excursions.” We had spent the previous day at the Louvre, and eyes and minds needed rest. I have seen people who could visit this mine of richest art for seven and eight consecutive days, without suffering from exhaustion or plethora. Three hours at a time insured for me a sleepless night, or dreams thronged with travesties of the beauty in which I had reveled in my waking hours. Instead then, of entering the Louvre on the second day, we checked the carriage on the opposite side of the street before the church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois.

Dionysius the Areopagite, converted by Paul’s sermon on Mars’ Hill, went on a mission to Paris, suffered death for his faith upon Montmartre—probably a corruption of Mons Martyrum,—and was interred upon the site of St. Germain l’Auxerrois. His tomb and chapel are there, in support of the legend. Another chapel is dedicated to “Notre Dame de la Compassion.” The name reads like a sorrowful satire. For we had not come thither out of respect for St Dionysius—alias St. Denis—nor to gaze upon frescoes and paintings—all fine of their kind,—nor to talk of the battle between Bourbons and populace in 1831, when upon the eleventh anniversary of the Duc de Berry’s assassination, as a memorial mass was in progress, the church was stormed by a mob—that canaille-deep that was[148] ever boiling like a pot—the priests violently ejected, the friends of the deceased Duc forced to fly for their lives, and the old church itself closed against priests and worshippers for seven years. It was the royal parish church, for a long time. Catherine de Medicis must have attended it, being a good daughter of the Church. Hence there was especial propriety in her order that from the belfry of this sanctuary should be given the signal for the massacre of her dear son’s heretic subjects on St. Bartholomew’s Night, 1572. From a window in his palace of the Louvre, Charles fired as fast as his guards could load carbines, upon the flying crowds in the streets. In obedience to tradition, a certain window was, up to the beginning of this century, designated as that in which he was stationed on that occasion, and an inscription to this effect was engraved beneath it:

“C’est de cette fenêtre que l’infâme Charles 9 d’exécrable mémoire a tiré sur le peuple avec une carabine.”

“Upon the people!” It was not safe even in 1796 to write that the murdered were Huguenots and that they perished for that cause and none other. The cautious inscription was removed upon the belated discovery that the part of the palace containing this window was not built until the execrable Charles was in his grave. The balcony from which he “drew” upon all who did not wear the white badge of Romanism, was in the front of the palace where the deep boom of the bell must have jarred him to his feet, pealing from midnight to dawn. The government suffered no other knell to sound for the untimely taking-off of nearly one hundred thousand of the best citizens of France.

A modern steeple lifts a stately spire between the church-porch and the adjoining Mayor’s Court. The little old belfry is thrown into background and shadow, as if it[149] sought to slink out of sight and history. We paused beneath it, within the church upon the very spot pressed by the ringer’s feet that awful night. The sacristan stared when we asked what had become of the bell, and why it had not been preserved as a historical relic.

“There is a carillon (chime) in the new steeple. Fine bells, large and musical. Unfortunately, they do not at present play.”

The ceiling of the church is disproportionately low; the windows, splendid with painted glass, light the interior inadequately, even in fine weather. As we paced the aisles the settling of the clouds without was marked by denser shades in the chapels and chancel, blotting out figures and colors in frescoes and paintings, and making ghostly the trio of sculptured angels about the cross rising above the holy-water basin—or bénitier. Fountains of holy-water at each corner of the Place would not be amiss.

The Parisian Panthéon has had a hard struggle for a name. First, it was the Church of Ste. Géneviève, the patron saint of Paris, erected soon after her martyrdom, A.D. 500. The present building, finished in 1790, bore the same title until in 1791, the Convention, in abolishing Religion at large, called it “the Panthéon” and dedicated it to “the great men of a grateful country.” This dedication, erased thirty years afterward, was in 1830, again set upon the façade, and remains there, malgré the decree of Church and State, giving back to it the original name.

Under the impression that Ste. Géneviève was buried in the chapel named for her and the church decorated with scenes from her life, I accosted a gentlemanly priest and asked permission on behalf of a namesake of the girl-saint to lay a rosary entrusted to me, upon her tomb. He heard me kindly, took the chaplet and proceeded to inform me that Ste. Géneviève was burned (brûlée), but that “we have[150] here in her shrine, her hand, miraculously preserved, and her ashes.”

“That must do, I suppose,” said I, as deputy for American Géneviève. The chaplet was laid within the shrine, blessed, crossed and returned to me. I had no misgivings until our third visit to Paris, when, going into St. Étienne du Mont, situated also in the Place du Panthéon, I discovered that Ste. Géneviève had not been burned; had been buried, primarily, in the Panthéon, then removed to St. Étienne du Mont, and had now rested for a thousand years or so, in a tomb grated over to preserve it from being destroyed by the kisses and touches of the faithful. I bought another rosary; the priest undid a little door on the top of the grating, passed the beads through and rubbed them upon the sacred sarcophagus. Novices are liable to such errors and consequent discomfiture.

The Panthéon, imposing in architecture and gorgeous in adornment, assumed to us, through a series of disappointments, the character of a vast receiving-vault. The crypt is massive and spacious, supported by enormous pillars of masonry, and remarkable for a tremendous echo, whereby the clapping of the guide’s hands is magnified and multiplied into a prolonged and deafening cannonade, rolling and bursting through the dark vaults, as if all the sons of thunder once interred (but not staying) here were comparing experiences above their vacated tombs, and suiting actions to words in fighting their battles over again.

Mirabeau’s remains were taken from this crypt for re-interment in Père Lachaise. Marat—the Abimelech of the Jacobin fraternity—was torn from his tomb, tied up in a sack like offal, and thrown into a sewer. There is here a wooden sarcophagus, cheap and pretentious, inscribed with the name of Rousseau and the epitaph—“Here rests the man of Nature and of Truth.” The door is ajar—a hand[151] and wrist thrust forth, upbear a flaming torch—an audacious conception, that startled us when we came unexpectedly upon it.

“A sputtering flambeau in this day and generation,” said Caput.

The guide, not understanding one English word, hastened to inform us that the tomb was empty.

“Where, then, is the body?”

A shrug. “Ah! monsieur, who knows?”

Another wooden structure, with a statue on top, is dedicated, “Aux manes de Voltaire.”

“Poet, historian, philosopher, he exalted the man of intellect and taught him that he should be free. He defended Calas, Sirven, De la Barre, and Montbailly; combated atheists and fanatics; he inspired toleration; he reclaimed the rights of man from servitude and feudalism.” Thus runs the epitaph.

“Empty, also!” said the guide, tapping the sarcophagus. “The body was removed by stealth and buried—who can say where?”

“Was anybody left here?”

“But yes, certainly, monsieur!” and we were showed the tombs—as yet unrifled—of Marshal Lannes, Lagrange, the mathematician, and Soufflot, the architect of the Panthéon; likewise, the vaults in which the Communists stored gunpowder for the purpose of blowing up the edifice. It was a military stronghold in 1848, and again in 1871, and but for the opportune dislodgment of the insurgents at the latter date the splendid pile would have followed the example of the noted dead who slumbered, for a time, beneath her dome—then departed—“who can tell where?”

The Hôtel and Museum de Cluny engaged our time for the rest of the forenoon. A visit to it is a “Variety Excursion” in itself. The hall, fifty feet high, and more than[152] sixty in length, and paved with stone—headless trunks, unlidded sarcophagi, like dry and mouldy bath-tubs; broken marbles carved with pagan devices, and heaps of nameless débris lying about in what is, to the unlearned, meaningless disorder—was the frigidarium, or cold-water baths, belonging to the palace of the Roman Emperor Constantius Chlorus, built between A.D. 290 and 306. It was bleak with the piercing chilliness the rambler in Roman ruins and churches never forgets—which has its acme in the more than deathly cold of that ancient and stupendous refrigerator, St. John of Lateran, and never departs in the hottest noon-tide of burning summer from the frigidaria of Diocletian and Caracalla. But we lingered, shivering, to hear that the Apostate Julian was here proclaimed Emperor by his soldiers in 360, and to see his statue, gray and grim, near an altar of Jupiter, found under the church of Nôtre Dame. Wherever Rome set her foot in her day of power, she stamped hard. Centuries, nor French revolutions can sweep away the traces.

In less than three minutes the guide was pointing out part of Molière’s jaw-bone affixed to a corridor-wall in the Musée. This, directly adjoining the Roman palace, was a “branch establishment” of the celebrated Abbey of Cluny, in Burgundy; next, a royal palace, first occupied by the English widow of Louis XII., sister of Bluff King Hal. “La chambre de la Reine Blanche,” so called because the queens of France wore white for mourning—is now the receptacle of a great collection of musical instruments, numbered and dated. James V. of Scotland married Madeleine, daughter of Francis I., in this place. After the first Revolution, when kings’ houses were as if they had not been, Cluny became state property, and was bought by an archæologist, who converted it into a museum. There are now upward of nine thousand articles on the catalogue. The[153] reader will thankfully excuse me from attempting a summary, but heed the remark that the collection is valuable and varied, and better worth visit and study than any other assortment of relics and ancient works of art we saw in France. The fascination it exerted upon us and others is doubtless, in part, referable to the character of the building in which the collection is stored. Palissy faïence, ivory carvings, rich with the slow, mellow dyes of centuries; enamels in copper, executed for Francis I.; Venetian glasses; old weapons; quaint and ornate tilings; tapestries, more costly than if woof and broidery were pure gold—are tenfold more ravishing when seen in the light from mullioned windows of the fifteenth century, and set in recesses whose carvings vie in beauty and antiquity with the objects enclosed by their walls. Gardens, deep with shade, mossy statues and broken fountains dimly visible in the alleys, great trees tangled and woven into a thick roof over walks and green sward—all curiously quiet in the heart of the restless city, seclude Thermæ and Hôtel in hushed and dusky grandeur.

The Rue St. Jacques, skirting the garden-wall on one side, was an old Roman road. By it we were transported, without too violent transition from the Past, into the Paris of To-Day.

[154]

CHAPTER XII.
Versailles—Expiatory Chapel—Père Lachaise.

THE guide-books say that the visitor to the palace of Versailles is admitted, should he desire it, to five different court-yards. We cared for but one—the cour d’honneur whose gates are crowned with groups emblematical of the victories of le grand Monarque.

It is an immense quadrangle, paved with rough stones, and flanked on three sides by the palace and wings. The central château, facing the entrance, was built by Louis XIII., the wings by Louis XIV. The prevailing color is a dull brick-red; the roofs are of different heights and styles; the effect of the whole far less grand, or even dignified, than we had anticipated. The pavilions to the right and left are lettered, “À toutes les gloires de la France.” Gigantic statues, beginning, on the right hand, with Bayard, “sans peur et sans reproche,” guard both sides of the court. In the centre is a colossal equestrian statue in bronze of Louis XIV., the be-wigged, be-curled, and be-laced darling of himself and a succession of venal courtezans. At the base of this statue we held converse, long and low, of certain things this quadrangle had witnessed when, through it, lay the way to the most luxurious and profligate court that has cursed earth and insulted Heaven since similar follies and crimes wrought the downfall of the Roman Empire. Of the throngs of base parasites that flocked thither in the[155] days when Pompadour and Du Barry held insolent misrule over a weaker, yet more vicious sovereign than Louis XIV. Of the payment exacted for generations of such amazing excesses, when Parisian garrets and slums sent howling creditors by the thousand to settle accounts with Louis XVI. Vast as is the space shut in by palace-walls and folding gates, they filled it with ragged, bare-legged, red-capped demons. Upon the balcony up there, the king, also wearing the red cap, appeared at his good children’s call. Anything for peace and life! Upon the same balcony stood, the same day, his braver wife, between her babes, true royalty sustaining her to endure, without quailing, the volleys of contumely hurled at “the Austrian woman.” Having secured king, queen, and children as hostages for the payment of the national debt of vengeance, the complainants sacked the palace, made an end of its glory as a kingly residence, until Louis Philippe repaired ravages to the extent of his ability, and converted such of the state apartments as he adjudged unnecessary for court uses into an historical picture-gallery.

The history of the French nation—of its monarchs, generals, marshals, victories, coronations, and hundreds of lesser events—is there written upon canvas. Eyes and feet give out and the brain wearies before it is half read. The polished floors, inlaid with different-colored woods, smooth as glass, are torture to the burning soles; the aching in the back of the neck becomes agony. Yet one cannot leave the work unfinished, where every step is a surprise and each glance discovers fresh objects of interest.

“If only we had the moral courage not to look at the painted ceilings!” said Dux, meditatively; “or if it were en règle for a fellow to lie upon his back in order to inspect them!”

We were in the Gallery of Mirrors, two hundred and[156] forty feet long; seventeen windows looking down upon gardens and park, upon fountains, groves, and lakelets; seventeen mirrors opposite these repeating the scenes framed by the casements.

“The ceiling by Lebrun represents scenes in the life of the Grand Monarch,” uttered the guide.

Hence the plaint, echoed groaningly by us all.

The chamber in which Louis XIV. died is furnished very much as it was when he lay breathing more and more faintly, hour after hour, within the big bed lifted by the dais from the floor, that, sleeping or dying, he might lie above the common walks of men. Communicating with the king’s bed-room is the celebrated Salle de l’œil de Bœuf, the ox-eyed window at one side giving the name. The courtiers awaited there each day the announcement that the king was awake and visible, beguiling the tedium of their long attendance by sharp trades in love, court, and state honors. It is a shabby-genteel little room, the hardness, glass and glare that distinguish palatial parlors from those in which sensible, comfort-loving people live, rubbed and tarnished by time and disuse. Filled with a moving throng in gala-apparel, this and the expanse of the royal bed-chamber may have been goodly to behold; untenanted, they are stiff and desolate.

The central balcony, opening from the great chamber—the balcony on which, forty-four years later, Marie Antoinette stood with her children—was, upon the death-night of the king, occupied by impatient officials—impatient, but no longer anxious, for the decease of their lord was certain and not far off. The hangings of the bed, cumbrous with gold embroidery, had been twisted back to give air to the expiring man. As the last sigh fluttered from his lips, the high chamberlain upon the balcony broke his white wand of office, shouting to the crowds in the court-yard,[157] “Le roi est mort!” and, without taking breath, “Vive le roi!”

No incident in French history is more widely known. In talking of it in the bed-chamber and balcony, it was as if we heard it for the first time.

The “little apartments of the queen” were refreshment to our jaded senses and nerves. They are a succession of cozy nooks in a retired wing. Boudoirs, where were the soft lounges and low chairs, excluded by etiquette from the courtly salons; closets, fitted up with writing-desk, chair, and footstool; others, lined on all sides with books; still others, where the queen, whether it were Maria Lesczinski or Marie Antoinette, might sit, with a favorite maid of honor or two, at her embroidery. Through these apartments, all the “home” she had had in the palace, a terrified woman fled to gain a secret door of escape, while the marauders, the delegation from Paris, were yelling and raging for her blood in the corridors and state apartments.

If this row of snug resting and working rooms were the “Innermost” of her domestic life, the Petit Trianon was her play-ground. It is a pretty villa, not more than half as large as the Grand Trianon built for Madame de Maintenon by Louis XIV. Napoleon I. had a suite of small apartments in the Petit Trianon—study, salon, bath and dressing-rooms, and bed-chamber. They are furnished as he left them, even to the hard bed and round, uncompromising pillows. All are hung and upholstered with yellow satin brocade; the floors are polished and waxed, uncarpeted, save for a rug laid here and there. A door in the arras communicates with the Empress’ apartments. The villa was built by Louis XV. for the Du Barry, but interests us chiefly because of Marie Antoinette’s love for it. Her spinnet is in the salon where she[158] received only personal and intimate friends. It is a common-looking affair, the case of inlaid woods ornamented with brass handles and corners. The keys are discolored—some of them silent; the others yielded discordant tinklings as we touched them with reverent fingers. Her work-table is in another room. Her bed is spread with an embroidered satin coverlet, once white. Her monogram and a crown were worked near the bottom. The stitches were cut out by revolutionary scissors, but their imprint remains, enabling one to trace clearly the design. In this room hang her portrait and that of her son, the lost Dauphin, a lovely little fellow, with large, dark-blue eyes like his mother’s, and chestnut hair, falling upon a wide lace collar. His coat is blue; a strap of livelier blue crosses his chest to meet a sword-belt; a star shines upon his left breast, and he carries a rapier jauntily under his arm. His countenance is sweet and ingenuous, but there is a shading of pensiveness or thought in the expression which is unchildlike. It was easy and pleasant to picture him running up and down the marble stairs, and filling the now uninhabited rooms with boyish talk and mirth. It was yet easier to reproduce in imagination the figures of mother and children in the avenues leading to the Swiss village, her favorite and latest toy.

This is quite out of sight of palace and villas. The intervening park was verdant and bright as with June suns, although the season was November, and the sere leaves were falling about us. A miniature lake and the islet in the middle, a circular marble temple upon the island, giving cover to a nude nymph or goddess, were there, when the light steps of royal mother and children skimmed along the path, she, in her shepherdess hat, laughing and jesting with attendants in sylvan dress. The day was very still with the placid melancholy that consists in our country[159] with Indian summer. The smell of withering leaves hung in the air, spiciest in the sunny reaches of the winding road, almost too powerful in shaded glens, heaped with yellow and brown masses. We met but two people in our walk—an old peasant bent low under a bundle of faggots, and an older woman in a red cloak, who may have been a gypsy. The woods are well kept, the brushwood cut out, and the trees, the finest in the vicinity of Paris, carefully pruned of decaying boughs. We saw the village between their boles long before reaching the outermost building—a mill, with peakéd gables and antique chimneys, the hoary stones overgrown with ivy. We mounted the flight of steps leading, on the outside, to the second story; shook the door, in the hope that it might, through inadvertence, have been left unlocked. Hollow echoes from empty rooms answered. Bending over the balustrade, we looked down at the little water-wheel, warped by dryness; at the channel that once led supplies to it from the lake hard by. A close body of woods formed the background of the deserted house. In the water of the lake were reflected the gray and moss-green stones; barred windows; the clinging cloak of ivy; our own forms—the only moving objects in the picture. Louis XVI., amateur locksmith for his own pleasure, played miller here to gratify his wife’s whim, grinding tiny sacks of real corn, and taking pains to become more floury in an hour than a genuine miller would have made himself in six weeks, in order to give vraisemblance to the play enacted by the queen and her coterie. Around the bend of the pond lay the larger cottages which served as kitchen, dining, and ball-rooms. All are built of stone, with benches at the doors where peasants might rest at noon or evening; all are clothed with ivy; all closed and locked. We skirted the lake to get to the laiterie, or dairy. It is a[160] one-storied cottage, with windows in the tiled roof. Long French casements and glazed doors allowed us to get a tolerable view of the interior. The floor, and the ledges running around the room, are marble or smooth stone. Within this building court-gallants churned the milk of the Swiss cows that grazed in the lakeside glades; maids of honor made curds and whey for the noonday dinner, and the leader of the frolic moulded rolls of butter with her beautiful hands, attired like a dairy-maid, and training her facile tongue to speak peasant patois. The industrious ivy climbs to the low-hanging eaves, and, drooping in long sprays that did not sway in the sleeping air, touched the busts of king and queen set upon tall pedestals, the one between the two windows in the side of the house, the other between the glass doors of the front gable. An observatory tower, with railed galleries encircling the first and third stories, is close to the laiterie.

Many sovereigns in France and elsewhere have had expensive playthings. Few have cost the possessors more dearly than did this Swiss hamlet.

Innocent as the pastimes of miller and dairymaid appear to us, the serious student of those times sees plainly that the comedy of happy lowly life was a burning, cankering insult to the apprehension of the starving people to whom the reality of peace and plenty in humble homes, was a tradition antedating the reign of the Great Louis. While their children died of famine, and men prayed vainly for work, the profligate court, to maintain whose pomp the poor man’s earnings were taxed, demeaned their queen and themselves in such senseless mummeries as beguiled Time of weight in the pleasure-grounds of the Petit Trianon.

The Place de la Concorde, from which Marie Antoinette waved farewell to the Tuileries—dearer to her in[161] death than it had been in life—is the connecting link between the toy-village in the Versailles Park and the Expiatory Chapel, in what was formerly the Cemetery of the Madeleine in Paris. Leaving the bustling street, one enters through a lodge, a garden, cheerful in November, with roses and pansies. A broad walk connects the lodge and the tomb-like façade of the chapel. On the right and left of paved way and turf-borders are buried the Swiss Guard, over whose dead bodies the insurgents rushed to seize the queen in the Tuileries, when compromise and the mockery of royalty were at an end. The chapel is small, but handsome. On the right, half-way up its length, is a marble group, life-size, of the kneeling king, looking heavenward from the scaffold, in obedience to the gesture of an angel who addresses him in the last words of his confessor—“Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven!”

Opposite is an exquisite portrait-statue of the queen, her sinking figure supported by Religion. Anguish and resignation are blended in the beautiful face. Her regards, like those of the king, are directed upward. The features of Religion are Madame Elizabeth’s, the faithful sister of Louis, who perished by the guillotine May 12, 1794. Both groups are admirably wrought, and seen in the dim light of the stained windows, impressively life-like.

In the sub-chapel, gained by a winding stair, is an altar of black marble in a recess, marking the spot where the unfortunate pair were interred after their execution. The Madeleine was then unfinished, and in the orchard back of it the dishonored corpse of Louis, and, later, of his widow, were thrust into the ground with no show of respect or decency. The coffins were of plain boards; the severed heads were placed between the feet; quicklime[162] was thrown in to hasten decomposition; the grave or pit was ten feet deep, and the soil carefully leveled. No pains were spared to efface from the face of the earth all traces of the victims of popular fury. But loving eyes noted the sacred place; kept watch above the mouldering remains until the nation turned to mourn over the slaughter wrought by their rage. Husband and wife were removed to the vaults of the Kings of France, at St. Denis, in 1817, by Louis Philippe. The consciences of himself and people fermented actively about that time, touching the erection of a monument expiatoire. The Place de la Concorde was re-christened “Place de Louis XVI.,” with the ulterior design of raising upon the site of his scaffold, obelisk or church, which should bear his name and be a token of his subjects’ contrition. To the like end, the king of the French proposed to change the Temple de la Gloire of Napoleon I.—otherwise the Madeleine—into an expiatory church, dedicated to the manes of Louis XVI., Louis XVII. (the little Dauphin), Marie Antoinette, and Madame Elizabeth, a hapless quartette whose memory needed rehabilitation at the hands of the reigning monarch and his loving subjects, if ever human remorse could atone for human suffering.

The Chapelle Expiatoire is the precipitate and settlement into crystallization of this mental and moral inquietude.

“No, madame!” said the custodian, in a burst of confidence. “We have not here the corpses of Louis XVI. and his queen. Their skeletons repose at St. Denis. But only their bones! For there are here”—touching the black marble altar—“the earth, the lime, the clothing that enclosed their bodies. And upon this spot was their deep, deep grave. People of true sensibility prefer to weep here rather than in the crypt of St. Denis!”[163]

On the same day we saw St. Roch. Bonaparte planted his cannon upon the broad steps, October 3, 1795, and fired into the solid ranks of the advancing Royalists—insurgents now in their turn. The front of the church is scarred by the balls that returned the salute. The chief ornament of the interior is the three celebrated groups of statuary in the Chapelle du Calvaire. These—the Crucifixion, Christ on the Cross, and the Entombment—are marvelous in inception and execution. The small chapel enshrining them becomes holy ground even to the Protestant gazer. They moved us as statuary had never done before. Returning to them, once and again, from other parts of the church, to look silently upon the three stages in the Story that is above all others, we left them finally with lagging tread and many backward glances. At the same end of the church is the altar at which Marie Antoinette received her last communion, on the day of her death.

“Were they here, then?” we asked of the sacristan, pointing to the figures in the Chapelle du Calvaire.

“But certainly, Madame! They are the work, the most famous, of Michel Anguier, who died in 1686. The queen saw them, without doubt.”

While the bland weather lasted, we drove out to Père Lachaise, passing en route, the Prison de la Roquette, in which condemned prisoners are held until executed. The public place of execution is at its gates. This was a slaughter-pen during the Commune. The murdered citizens,—the Archbishop of Paris, and the curé of the Madeleine among them,—were thrown into the fosses communes of Père Lachaise. These common ditches, each capable of containing fifty coffins, are the last homes donated by the city of Paris to the poor who cannot buy graves for themselves. One is thankful to learn that the venerable[164] Archbishop and his companions were soon granted worthier burial. Our cocher told us what may, or may not be true, that the last victim of the guillotine suffered here; likewise that one of the fatal machines is still kept within the walls ready for use.

For a mile—perhaps more—before reaching Père Lachaise, the streets are lined with shops for the exhibition and sale of flowers,—a few natural, many artificial,—wreaths of immortelles, yellow, white and black, and an incredible quantity of bugle and bead garlands, crosses, anchors, stars and other emblematic devices. Windows, open doors, shelves and pavement are piled with them. Plaster lambs and doves and cherubs, porcelain ditto; small glazed pictures of deceased saints, angels and other creatures; sorrowing women weeping over husbands’ death-beds, empty cradles and little graves,—all framed in gilt or black wood,—are among the merchandise offered to the grief-stricken. A few of the mottoes wrought into the immortelle and bead decorations will give a faint idea of the “Frenchiness” of the display.

“Hélas!” “À ma chère femme,” “Chère petite,” “Ah! mon amie,” “Bien-aimée,” “Chérie,” and every given Christian name known in the Gallic tongue.

The famous Cemetery, which contains nearly 20,000 monuments, great and small, is a curious spectacle to those who have hitherto seen only American and English burial-grounds. Père Lachaise is a city of the dead; not “God’s Acre,” or the garden in which precious seed have been committed to the dark, warm, sweet earth in hope of Spring-time and deathless bloom. The streets are badly paved and were so muddy when we were there, that we had to pick our steps warily in climbing the steep avenue beginning at the gates. Odd little constructions, like stone sentry-boxes, rise on both sides of the way. Most[165] of these are surrounded by railings. All have grated doors, through which one can survey the closets within. Flagging floors, plain stone, or plastered walls and ceilings; low shelves or seats at the back, where the meditative mourner may sit to weep her loss, or kneel to pray for the belovéd soul,—these are the same in each. The monotony of the row is broken occasionally by a chapel, an enlarged and ornate edition of the sentry-box, or a monument resembling in form those we were used to see in other cemeteries. The avenues are rather shady in summer. At our November visit, the boughs were nearly bare, and rotting leaves, trampled in the mud of the thoroughfares, made the place more lugubrious. Really cheerful or beautiful it can never be. The flowers set in the narrow beds between tombs and curbings, scarcely alleviate the severely business-like aspect. Still less is this softened by the multitudinous bugled and beaded ornaments depending from the spikes of iron railings, cast upon sarcophagi, and the marble ledges within the gates. All Soul’s Day was not long past and we supposed this accounted for the superabundance of these offerings. We were informed subsequently that there are seldom fewer than we saw at this date. About and within one burial-closet—a family-tomb—we counted fifty-seven bugle wreaths of divers patterns, in all the hues of the rainbow, besides the conventional black-and-white. The parade of mortuary millinery, for a while absurd, became presently sickening, horribly tawdry and glistening. It was a relief to laugh heartily and naturally when we saw a child pick up a garland of shiny purple beads, and set it rakishly upon the bust of Joseph Fourier, the inclination of the decoration over the left eyebrow making him seem to wink waggishly at us, in thorough enjoyment of the situation.

We wanted to be thoughtful and respectful in presence[166] of the dead, but the achievement required an effort which was but lamely successful. Dispirited we did become, by and by, and fatigued with trampling up steep lanes and cross-alleys. Carriages cannot enter the grounds, and even a partial exploration of them is a weariness. We drooped like the weeping-willow set beside Alfred de Musset’s tomb, before we reached it. An attenuated and obstinately disconsolate weeper is the tree planted in obedience to his request:—

The conditions of the sylvan sentinel whose sprays caressed his bust, were, when we beheld it, comically “according to order.” There were not more than six branches upon the tree, a few sickly leaves hanging to each. At its best the foliage must have been “pale” and the shade exceedingly “light.”

The Gothic chapel roofing in the sarcophagus of Abelard and Heloïse, was built of stones from the convent of Paraclet, of which Heloïse was, for nearly half a century, Lady Superior. From this retreat she addressed to her monkish lover letters that might have drawn tears of blood from the heart of a flint; which impelled Abelard to the composition of quires of homilies upon the proper management of the nuns in her charge, including by-laws for conventual housewifery. Under the pointed arches the mediæval lovers rest, side by side, although they were divided in death by the lapse of twenty-two years. Sarcophagus and effigies are very old, having been long kept[167] among the choice antiquities of a Parisian museum and placed in Père Lachaise by the order of Louis Philippe. The monument was originally set up in the Abbey of Heloïse near the provincial town of Nogent-sur-Seine, where the rifled vault is still shown. Prior and abbess slumbered there for almost seven centuries. Their statues are of an old man and old woman, vestiges of former beauty in the chiseled features; more strongly drawn lines of thought and character in brow, lip, and chin. They wear their conventual robes.

Peripatetic skeletons and ashes are à la mode in this polite country. The “manes,” poets and epitaphs are so fond of apostrophizing, should have lively wits and faithful memories if they would keep the run of their mortal parts.

Marshal Ney has neither sentry-box, nor chapel, nor memorial-tablet. His grave is within a square plat, railed in by an iron fence. The turf is fresh above him, and late autumn roses, lush and sweet, were blooming around. The ivy, which grows as freely in France as brambles and bind-weed with us, made a close, green wall of the railing. We plucked a leaf, as a souvenir. It is twice as large as our ivy-leaves, shaded richly with bronze and purple, and whitely veined, and there were hundreds as fine upon the vine.

One path is known as that of the “artistes,” and is much frequented. Upon Talma’s head-stone is carved a tragic mask. Music weeps over the bust of Bellini and beside Chopin’s grave, and, in bas-relief, crowns the sculptured head of Cherubini. Bernardin de St. Pierre lies near Boïeldieu, the operatic composer. Denon, Napoleon’s companion in Egypt, and general director of museums under the Empire, sits in bronze, dark and calm as a dead Pharaoh, in the neighborhood of Madame Blanchard, the[168] aëronaut, who perished in her last ascent. There was a picture of the disaster in Parley’s Magazine, forty years ago. I remembered it—line for line, the bursting flame and smoke, the falling figure—at sight of the inscription setting forth her title to artistic distinction. Upon another avenue lie La Fontaine, Molière,—(another itinerant, re-interred here in 1817,) Laplace, the astronomer, and Manuel Garcia, the gifted father of a more gifted daughter,—Malibran. “Around the corner,” we stumbled, as it were, upon the tomb of Madame de Genlis.

Rachel sleeps apart from Gentile dust in the Jewish quarter of Père Lachaise. Beside the bare stone closet above her vault is a bush of laurestinus, with glossy green leaves. The floor inside was literally heaped with visiting-cards, usually folded down at one corner to signify that he or she, paying the compliment of a post-mortem morning-call, deposited the bit of pasteboard in person. There was at least a half bushel of these touching tributes to dead-and-gone genius. No flowers, natural or false, no immortelles—no bugle wreaths! Only visiting-cards, many engraved with coronets and other heraldic signs, tremendously imposing to simple Republicans. We examined fifty or sixty, returning them to the closet, with scrupulous care, after inspection. Some admirers had added to name and address, a complimentary or regretful phrase that would have titillated the insatiate vanity of the deceased, could she have read it,—wounded to her death as she had been by the success of her rival Ristori. Her votaries may have had this reminiscence of her last days in mind, and a shadowy idea that her “manes,” in hovering about her grave, would be cognizant of their compassionate courtesies.

Most of the offerings were from what we never got out of the habit of styling “foreigners.” There were a few[169] snobbish-looking English cards,—one with a sentence, considerately scribbled in French—“Mille et mille compliments.” So far as our inspection went, there was not one that bore an American address. Nor did we leave ours as exceptions to this deficiency in National appreciation of genius and artistic power—or National paucity of sentimentality.

[170]

CHAPTER XIII.
Southward-Bound.

“DO NOT go to Rome!” friends at home had implored by letter and word of mouth, prior to our sailing from the other side. English acquaintances and friends caught up the cry. In Paris, it swelled into impassioned adjuration, reiterated in so many forms, and at times so numerous and unseasonable that we nervously avoided the remotest allusion to the Eternal City in word. But sleeping and waking thoughts were tormented by mental repetitions that might, or might not be the whispers of guardian angels.

“Do not go to Rome! Do not thou or you go to Rome! Do not ye or you go to Rome!”

Thus ran the changes in the burden of admonition and thought. Especially, “Do not ye or you go to Rome!”

“Go, if you are bent upon it, me dear!” said a kind English lady. “Your husband is robust, and it may be as you and he believe, that your health requires a mild and sedative climate. But do not take your dear daughters. The air of Rome is deadly to young English and American girls. Quite a blight, I assure you!”

Said one of our Paris bankers to Caput:—“I can have no conceivable interest in trying to turn you aside from your projected route, but it is my duty in the cause of common humanity to warn you that you are running into[171] the jaws of danger in taking your family to Rome. We have advices to-day that the corpses of thirteen Americans, most of them women and children,—all dead within the week—are now lying at Maquay and Hooker’s in Rome awaiting transportation to America.”

This was appalling. But matters waxed serious in Paris, too. Indian Summer over, it began to rain. In Scriptural phrase,—“Neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest”—of mist, sleet and showers—“lay upon us.” Deprived of what was my very life—(what little of it remained,) daily exercise in the open air, the cough, insomnia and other terrors that had driven us into exile, increased upon me rapidly and alarmingly. Weakening day by day, it was each morning more difficult to rise and look despairingly from my windows upon the watery heavens and flooded streets. Sunshine and soft airs were abroad somewhere upon the earth. Find them we must before it should be useless to seek them. The leader of the household brigade ordered a movement along the whole line. Like a brood of swallows, we fled southward. “Certainly to Florence. Probably to Rome. Should the skies there prove as ungenial as those of France,—as a last and forlorn hope—to Algiers.” Such were the terms of command.

We arrived in Florence, the Beautiful, at ten o’clock of a December night. The facchini and cocchieri at the station stared wildly when we addressed them in French, became frantic under the volley of Latin Caput hurled upon them, in the mistaken idea that they would understand their ancestral tongue. Italian was, as yet, an unknown realm to us, and our ignominious refuge was in the universal language of signs. Porters and coachmen were quick in interpretation, much of their intercourse with their fellow-countrymen being carried on in like manner. The luggage[172] was identified, piece by piece, and fastened upon the carriages. The human freight was bestowed within, and as Prima dropped upon the seat beside me, she lifted her hand in a vow:

“I begin the study of Italian to-morrow!”

It was raining steadily, the streets were ill-lighted, the pavements wretched; and when a slow drive through tortuous ways brought us to our desired haven, the house was so full that comfortable accommodations for so large a party could not be procured. The proprietor kindly and courteously directed us to a neighboring hotel, which he could conscientiously recommend, and sent an English-speaking waiter—a handsome, quick-witted fellow—to escort us thither and “see that we were not cheated.”

“Babes in the woods—nothing more!” grumbled the high-spirited young woman at my elbow.

She was the mistress of a dozen telling Italian words before she slept. Our bed-rooms and adjoining salon were spacious, gloomy, and cheerless to a degree unknown out of Italy. The hotel had been a palace in the olden times, after the manner of three-fourths of the Italian houses of entertainment. Walls and floor were of stone, the chill of the latter striking through the carpets into our feet My chamber, the largest in the suite, contained two bier-like beds set against the far wall, bureau, dressing-table, wash-stand, six heavy chairs, and a sofa, and, between these, a desolate moor of bare carpeting before one could gain the hearth. This was a full brick in width, bounded in front by a strip of rug hardly wider—at the back by a triangular hole in the wall, in which a chambermaid proceeded, upon our entrance, to build a wood fire. First, a ball of resined shavings was laid upon the bricks; then, a handful of dried twigs; then, small round sticks; then, diminutive logs, split and seasoned, and we had a crackling, fizzing,[173] conceited blaze that swept all the heat with it up the chimney. The Invaluable’s spirit-lamp upon the side-table had more cheer in it. If set down upon the pyramid of Cheops, and told we were to camp there overnight, this feminine Mark Tapley would, in half-an-hour, have made herself and the rest of us at home; got up “a nice tea;” put Boy to bed and sat down beside him, knitting in hand, as composedly as in our nursery over the sea.

Her “comfortable cup of tea” was ready by the time our supper was brought up—a good supper, hot, and served with praiseworthy alacrity. We ate it, and drank our tea, and looked at the fire, conscious that we ought also to feel it, it was such a brisk, fussy little conflagration. Landlord and servants were solicitous and attentive; hot-water bottles were tucked in at the foot of each frozen bed, and we sought our pillows in tolerable spirits.

Mine were at ebb-tide again next morning, as, lying upon the sofa, mummied in shawls, a duvet, covered with satinet and filled with down, on the top of the heap, yet cold under them all, my eyes wandered from the impertinent little fire that did not thaw the air twelve inches beyond the hearth, to the windows so clouded with rain I could hardly see the grim palace opposite, and I wondered why I was there. Was the game worth the expensive candle? Why had I not stayed at home and died like a Christian woman upon a spring-mattress, swathed in thick blankets, environed by friends and all the appliances conducive to euthanasia? I had begged the others to go out on a tour of business and sight-seeing. I should be quite comfortable with my books, and the thought of loneliness was preposterous. Was I not in Florence? Knowing this, it would be a delight to lie still and dream. In truth, I was thoroughly miserable, yet would have died sooner than confess it. I did not touch one of the books laid[174] upon the table beside me, because, I said to my moody self, it was too cold and I too languid to put my hand out from the load of wraps.

There was a tap at the door. It unclosed and shut again softly. An angel glided over the Siberian desert of carpet—before I could exclaim, bent down and kissed me.

“Oh!” I sighed, in hysterical rapture. “I did not know you were in Italy!”

She was staying in the hotel at which we had applied for rooms the night before, and the handsome interpreter, Carlo, had reported our arrival to the Americans in the house.

Shall I be more glad to meet her in heaven than I was on that day to look upon the sweet, womanly face, and hear the cooing voice, whose American intonations touched my heart to melting? She sat with me all the forenoon, the room growing warmer each hour. Her party—also a family one—had now been abroad more than a year. The invalid brother, her especial charge, was wonderfully better for the travel and change of climate. He was far more ill than I when they left home. Of course I would get well! Why not, with such tender nurses and the dear Lord’s blessing? No! it did not “rain always in Florence;” but the rainy season had now set in, and “Frederic and I are going to Rome next week.” I question if she ever named herself, even in thought or prayer, without the prefix of “Frederic.”

“To Rome!” cried I, eagerly. “Dare you!”

My story of longing, discouragement, dreads—that had darkened into superstitious presentiments—followed. The day went smoothly enough after the confession, and the reassurances that it elicited. We secured smaller and brighter bed-rooms, and almost warmed them by ruinously dear fires, devouring as they did basketful after basketful[175] of the Lilliputian logs. It was the business of one facchino to feed the holes in the walls of the three rooms we inhabited in the day-time. Other friends called—cordial and lavish of kind offices and offers as are compatriots when met upon foreign soil. One family—old, old friends of Caput—had, although now resident in Florence, lived for a year in Rome, and laughed to scorn our fears of the climate. They rendered us yet more essential service in suggestions as to clothing, apartments, and general habits of life in Central Italy. To the adoption of these we were, I believe, greatly indebted for the unbroken health which was our portion as a household during our winter in the dear old city.

We were in Florence ten days. Nine were repetitions, “to be continued,” of such weather as we had left in Paris. One was so deliciously lovely that, had not the next proved stormy, we should have postponed our departure. We made the most of the sunshine, taking a carriage, morning and afternoon, for drives in the outskirts of the town and in the suburbs, which must have given her the name of bella. The city proper is undeniably and irremediably ugly. The streets are crooked lanes, in which the meeting of two carriages drives foot-passengers literally to the wall. There are no sidewalks other than the few rows of cobble-stones slanting down from the houses to the gutter separating them from the middle of the thoroughfare. The far-famed palaces are usually built around courtyards, and present to the street walls sternly blank, or frowning with grated windows. If, at long intervals, one has snatches through a gateway of fountains and conservatories, they make the more tedious block after block of lofty edifices that shut out light from the thread-like street—shed chill with darkness into these dismal wells. This is the old city in its winter aspect.[176] Wider and handsome streets border the Arno—a sluggish, turbid creek—and the modern quarters are laid out generously in boulevards and squares. We modified our opinions materially the following year, when weather and physical state were more propitious to favorable judgment. Now, we were impatient to be gone, intolerant of the praises chanted and written of Firenze in so many ages and tongues. The happiest moment of our stay within her gates was when we shook off so much of her mud as the action could dislodge from our feet and seated ourselves in a railway carriage for Rome.

It was a long day’s travel, but the most entrancing we had as yet known. Vallambrosa, Arezzo (the ancient Arretium), Cortona; Lake Thrasymene! The names leaped up at us from the pages of our guide-books. The places for which they stood lay to the right and left of the prosaic railway, like scenes in a phantasmagoria. We had, as was our custom when it could be compassed by fee or argument, secured a compartment to ourselves. There were no critics to sneer, or marvel at our raptures and quotations. Boy, ætat four, whose preparation for the foreign tour had been readings, recitations, and songs from “Lays of Ancient Rome,” in lieu of Mother Goose and Baby’s Opera, and whose personal hand-luggage consisted of a very dog-eared copy of the work, illustrated by stiff engravings from bas-reliefs upon coins and stones—bore a distinguished part in our talk. He would see “purple Apennine,” and was disgusted at the commonplace roofs of Cortona that no longer

At mention of the famous lake, he scrambled down from his seat; made a rush for the window.[177]

“Papa! is that ‘reedy Thrasymene?’ Where is ‘dark Verbenna?’”

As a reward for remembering his lesson so well, he was lifted to the paternal knee, and while the train slowly wound along the upper end of the lake, heard the story of the battle between Hannibal and Flaminius, upon the weedy banks, B. C. 217; saw the defile in which the brave consul was entrapped; where, for hours, the slaughter of the snared and helpless troops went on, until the little river we presently crossed was foul with running blood. It is Sanguinetto to this day.

The vapors of morning were lazily curling up from the lake; dark woods crowd down to the edge on one side; hills dressed in gray olive orchards border another; a bold promontory on the west is capped by an ancient tower. A monastery occupies one of the three islands that dot the surface. A light film, like the breath upon a mirror, veiled the intense blue of the sky—darkened the waters into slaty purple.

A dense fog filled the basin between the hills on the May-day when Rome’s best consul and general marched into it and to his death.

On we swept, past Perugia, capital of old Umbria, one of the twelve chiefest Etruscan cities; overcome and subjugated by the Roman power B. C. 310. It was a battle-field while Antony and Octavius contended for the mastership of Rome; was devastated by Goth, Ghibelline and Guelph; captured successively by Savoyard, Austrian, and Piedmontese. It is better known to this age than by all these events as the home of Perugino, the master of Raphael, and father of the new departure from the ancient school of painting. The view became, each moment, more novel because more Italian. The roads were scantily shaded by pollarded trees—mostly mulberry—from[178] whose branches depended long festoons of vines, linking them together, without a break, for miles. Farms were separated by the same graceful lines of demarcation. Other fences were rare. We did not see “a piece of bad road,” or a mud-hole, in Italy. The road and bridge-builders of the world bequeathed to their posterity one legacy that has never worn out, which bids fair to last while the globe swings through space. As far as the eye could reach along the many country highways we crossed that day, the broad, smooth sweep commanded our wondering admiration. The grade from crown to sides is so nicely calculated that rain-water neither gathers in pools in the road, nor gullies the bed in running off. Vehicles are not compelled, by barbarous “turnpiking,” to keep the middle of the track, thus cutting deep ruts other wheels must follow. It is unusual, in driving, to strike a pebble as large as an egg.

The travellers upon these millennial thoroughfares were not numerous. Peasants on foot drove herds of queer black swine, small and gaunt, in comparison with our obese porkers—vicious-looking creatures, with pointed snouts and long legs. Women, returning from or going to market, had baskets of green stuff strapped upon their backs, and often children in their arms; bare-legged men in conical hats and sheepskin coats, trudged through clouds of white dust, raised by clumsy carts, to which were attached the cream-colored oxen of the Campagna. Great, patient beasts they are, the handsomest of their race, with incredibly long horns symmetrically fashioned and curved. These horns are sold everywhere in Italy as a charm against “the evil eye”—the dread of all classes.

About the middle of the afternoon we descended into the valley of the Tiber—the cleft peak of Soracte (Horace’s Soracte!) visible from afar like a rent cloud. We[179] crossed a bridge built by Augustus; halted for a minute at the Sabine town that gave Numa Pompilius to Rome; watched, with increasing delight, the Sabine and Alban Mountains grow into shape and distinctness; gazed oftenest and longest—as who does not?—at the Dome, faint, for a while, as a bubble blown into the haze of the horizon—more strongly and nobly defined as we neared our goal; crossed the Anio, upon which Romulus and Remus had been set adrift; made a wide détour that, apparently, took us away from, not toward the city, and showed us the long reaches of the aqueducts, black and high, “striding across the Campagna,” in the settling mists of evening. Then ensued an odd jumble of ruins and modern, unfinished buildings, an alternation, as incongruous, of strait and spacious streets, and we steamed slowly into the station. It is near the Baths of Diocletian, and looks like a very audacious interloper by daylight.

It was dusk when our effects were collected, and they and ourselves jolting over miserable pavements toward our hotel in the guardianship of a friend who had kindly met us at the station. By the time we had reached the quarters he had engaged for us; had waited some minutes in a reception-room in the rez-de-chaussée that felt and smelt like a newly-dug grave; had ascended two flights of obdurate stone stairs, cruelly mortifying to feet cramped and tender with long sitting and the hot-water footstools of the railway carriage; had sat for half an hour, shawled and hatted, in chambers more raw and earthy of odor than had been the waiting-room, watching the contest betwixt flame and smoke in the disused chimneys, we discovered and admitted that we were tired to death. Furthermore, that the sensation of wishing oneself really and comfortably deceased, upon attaining this degree of physical[180] depression, is the same in a city almost thirty centuries old, and in a hunter’s camp in the Adirondacks. Even Caput looked vexed, and wondered audibly and repeatedly why fires were not ready in rooms that were positively engaged and ordered to be made comfortable twenty-four hours ago; and the Invaluable, depositing Boy, swathed in railway rugs, upon one of the high, single beds, lest his feet should freeze upon “the murdersome cold floors,” “guessed these Eyetalians aren’t much, if any of fire-makers.” Thereupon, she went down upon her knees to coax into being the smothering blaze, dying upon a cold hearth under unskilfully-laid fuel. The carpet in the salon we had likewise bespoken was not put down until the afternoon of the following day. The fires in all the bed-rooms smoked. By eight o’clock we extinguished the last spark and went to bed. In time, we took these dampers and reactions as a part of a hard day’s work; gained faith in our ability to live until next morning. Being unseasoned at this period, the first night in Rome was torture while we endured it, humiliating in the retrospect.

It rained from dawn to sundown of the next day. Not with melancholy persistency, as in Florence, as if the weather were put out by contract and time no object, but in passionate, fitful showers, making rivers of the streets, separated by intervals of sobbing and moaning winds and angry spits of rain-drops. We stayed in-doors, and, under compulsion, rested. The fires burned better as the chimneys warmed to their work; we unpacked a trunk or two; wrote letters and watched, amused and curious, the proceedings of two men and two women who took eight hours to stretch and tack down the carpet in our salon. Each time one of us peeped, or sauntered in to note and report progress, all four of the work-people intermitted their ceaseless jargon[181] to nod and smile, and say “Domane!” Young travelled in Italy before he wrote “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow!”

Our morrow was brilliantly clear, and freshness like the dewy breath of early Spring was in the air. Our first visit was, of course, to our bankers, and while Caput went in to inquire for letters (and to learn, I may add, that the story of the thirteen American corpses was unsupported by the presence, then or during the entire season, of a single one), we lay back among the carriage-cushions, feeling that we drank in the sunshine at every pore—enjoying as children or Italians might the various and delightful features of the scene.

The sunlight—clarified of all vaporous grossness by the departed tempest—in color, the purest amber; in touch and play beneficent as fairy balm, was everywhere. Upon the worn stones paving the Piazza di Spagna, and upon the Bernini fountain (one of them), the Barcaccia, at the foot of the Spanish Steps,—a boat, commemorating the mimic naval battles held here by Domitian, when the Piazza was a theatre enclosing an artificial lake. Upon beggars lolling along the tawny-gray Steps, and contadini—boys, women, and girls—in fantastic costume, attitudinizing to catch the eye of a chance artist. Upon the column, with the Virgin’s statue on top, Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and David at the base, rusty tears, from unsuspected iron veins, oozing out of the sides,—decreed by Pius IX. in honor of his pet dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Upon the big, dingy College of the Propaganda, founded in 1622, Barberini bees in bas-relief conspicuous among the architectural ornaments. More of Bernini’s work. Urban VIII., his patron, being a Barberini. Upon the Trinita di Monti at the top of the Spanish Staircase, where the nuns sing like imprisoned canaries—as sweetly and as monotonously—on[182] Sabbath afternoons, and all the world goes to hear them. Upon the glittering windows of shops and hotels fronting the Piazza—the centre of English and American colonies in Rome. Upon the white teeth and brown faces of boys—some beautiful as cherubs—who held up great trays of violets for us to buy, and wedded forever our memories of the Piazza and this morning with violet scent. Upon the wrinkles and rags of old women—some hideous as hags—who piped entreaties that we would “per l’amore di Dio” make a selection from their stock of Venetian beads, Naples lava trinkets, and Sorrento wood-work. Upon the portly figure and bland countenance of Mr. Hooker, coming out to welcome us to the city which has given him a home for thirty years, and which he has made home-like to so many of his country-people. Lastly, and to our fancy most brightly, upon the faces of my Florence angel of mercy and her family party, alighting from their carriage at the door of the bank, and hurrying up to exchange greetings with us.

This was our real coming to Rome! Not the damp and despondency of the thirty-six hours lying just behind us; dreariness and doubts never renewed in the five fleet-footed months during which we lingered and lived within her storied gates.

[183]

CHAPTER XIV.
Pope, King, and Forum.

I   WAS sorry to leave the hotel, the name of which I withhold for reasons that will be obvious presently. Not that it was in itself a pleasant caravansary, although eminently respectable, and much affected by Americans and English. Not that the rooms were ever warm, although we wasted our substance in fire-building; or that the one dish of meat at luncheon, or the principal dessert at dinner, always “went around.” We had hired a commodious and sunny “appartamento” of seven well-furnished rooms in Via San Sebastiano—a section of the Piazza di Spagna—and were anxious to begin housekeeping.

I did regret to leave, with the probability of never seeing her again—a choice specimen of the Viatrix Americana, a veritable unique, whose seat was next mine at luncheon and dinner. Our friendship began through my declaration, at her earnest adjuration, of my belief that the “kick-shaws,” as she called them, offered for our consumption were harmless and passably digestible by the Yankee stomach. She was half-starved, poor thing! and after this I cheerfully fulfilled the office of taster, drawing my salary twice per diem in the liberal entertainment of her converse with me. She had been three-quarters of the way around the world, with her husband as banker and escort; was great upon Egyptian donkeys and the domestic entomology[184] of Syria, and could not lisp one word of any dialect excepting that of her native “Vairmount” and of her adopted State, which we will name—Iowa.

“You sight-see so slow!” was her unintentional alliteration, on the fifth day of our acquaintanceship. “Aint bin to see a church yet, hev you?”

I answered, timidly, that I was waiting to grow stronger. “The churches are so cold in Winter that I shall probably put off that part of my sight-seeing until Spring.”

“Good gracious! Be you goin’ to spend the winter here?”

“That is our hope, at present.”

“You’ll be bored to death! You wont see You-rope in ten year, if you take it so easy. We calkerlate to do up Rome under a fortnight. We’ve jest finished up the churches. On an averidge of thirty-five a day! But we hed to work lively. Now we’re at the villers. One on ’em you must see—sick or well. ’Taint so very much of it upstairs. The beautifullest furnitur’ I ever see. Gildin’ and tay-pistry, and velvet and picters and freskies, common as dirt, as you may say. The gardings a sight to behold. You make your husband take you! Set your foot down, for oncet!”

“What villa—did you say?”

“The Land! I don’t bother with the outlandish names. But you’ll find it easy. Napoleon Boneypart did somethin’ or ’nother ther oncet. Or, his son, or nephey, or some of the family. Any way, I do know I never see sech winder-curtains anywhere. Thick as a board! Solid satin. No linin’s, for I fingered ’em and took a peek at the wrong side to be positive. We wound up the churches by goin’ to see the tomb the Pope’s been a buildin’ of for himself. A kind o’ square pit, or cellar right in the middle of the church of What’s-his-name?”[185]

“Santa Maria Maggiore?”

“That’s the feller! You go down by two flights of stun steps. One onto each side of the cellar. Its all open on top, you understand, on a level with the church-floor, and jest veneered with marble. Every color you can think of. Floor jest the same. Old Pope Griggory, he aint buried yet. Lies ’bove-ground, in a red marble box. He can’t be buried for good ’tell Pious, he dies. And he must hev the same spell o’ waitin’ for the next one. Ther’ must be two popes on the top of the yearth at the same time. One live and one dead. Thinks-I, when I looked inter the cryp’—as they call it—jest a-blazin’ and a-dazzlin’ with red, blue, green and yellow, and polished like a new table-knife blade.—If this aint vanity and vexation! I’d ruther hev our fam’ly lot in the buryin’ groun’ to Meekinses Four Corners—(a real nice lot it is! With only one stun’ as yet. ‘To my daughter Almiry Jane, Agéd six months and six days,’) where I could be tucked up, like a lady, safe and snug. Oncet for all and no bones about it!”

On the tenth and last day of our sojourn at the hotel, she went to see the Pope.

“May I come inter your sittin’-room?” was her petition at evening. “I am fairly bustin’ to tell you all about it. And if we go inter the public parler, them Englishers will be makin’ fun behind my back. For, you see, ther’s considerable actin’ to be done to tell it jest right.”

I took her into our salon, established her in an arm-chair, and was attentive. I had seen her in her best black silk with the regulation black lace shawl, which generally does duty as a veil, pinned to her scanty hair. Ladies attending the Pope’s levees must dress in black, without bonnets, the head being covered by a black veil. When thus attired, my acquaintance had wound and hung at least half a peck of rosaries upon her arms, “to have ’em handy for[186] the old cretur’s blessin’.” I was now to hear how her husband had hired at the costumer’s the dress-coat prescribed for gentlemen.

“Come down to his heels, if you’ll believe me! He bein’ a spare man, and by no manner of means tall. Sleeves a mile too long. Collar over his ears. A slice of his bald head showed atop of it like a new moon!”

She stopped to laugh, we all joining in heartily.

“Mr. Smith from St. Lewis,—he was along and his coat was as much too small for him as my husband’s was too big for him. Mr. Smith daresn’t breathe for fear of splittin’ it down the back.”

I recollected the story of Cyrus and the two coats, and restrained the suggestion that they might have exchanged garments.

“Eight francs an hour, they paid—one dollar ’n’ sixty cents good money, for the use of each of the bothering machines. Well! when we was all got up to kill as it were—(’twas some like it!) we druv’ off, two carriage-fulls, to the Pope’s Palace—the Vacuum. Up the marble steps we tugged, through five or six monstrous rooms, all precious marbled and gilded and tapestried, into a long hall, more like a town-meeting house than a parler. Stuffed benches along the side, where we all sat down to wait for the old man. Three mortal hours, he kept us coolin’ of our heels after the time advertised for the levy. I hev washed an’ ironed and churned and done my own housework in my day. I ain’t ashamed to say I’d ruther do a good day’s heft at ’em all, than to pass another sech tiresome mornin’. I don’t call it mannerly to tell people when to come, and then not be ready. Mr. Smith, he nearly died in his tight coat with the circulation stopped into both arms. At last, the door at the bottom of the hall was flung open by a fellow in striped breeches, and in he[187] come. A man in a black gownd to each side on him. He is powerful feeble-lookin’, but I will say, aint quite so ancient as I’d expected to see. He leaned upon the arm of one man. Another went ’round the room with ’em, collectin’ of our names to give ’em to him. I forgot to tell you that everybody dropped on their knees, the minute the door opened and we saw who ’twas. That is, except Mr. Smith. He stood straight up, like a brass post. He says, ‘because American citizens hadn’t oughter bend the knee to no human man.’ I say he was afraid on account of the coat. I didn’t jest like kneelin’ myself. So, I saved my conscience by kinder squattin’! So-fashion!”

I was glad “the Englishers” were not by as she “made a cheese” of her skirts by the side of her chair, and was up again in the next breath.

“He wore a white skull-cap and a long white gownd belted at the waist. Real broadcloth ’twas. I thought, at first, ’twas opery flannel or merino, but when he was a-talkin’ to them next me, I managed to pinch a fold of it. ’Twas cloth—high-priced it must ’a been—soft and solid. But after all that’s said and done, he looks like an ole woman and a fat one. Kind face, he hez, and a sort of sweet, greasy smile onto it the whole time. He blessed us all ’round, and said to the Americans how fond he was of their country, and how he hoped we and our children would come back to the True Fold. It didn’t hurt us none to hev him say it, you know, and we hed a fair look at him while one of the black-gowners was a-translatin’ of it. Ther’ was two sisters of charity or abbesses or nuns, or somethin’ of that sort there, who dropped flat onto their faces on the bare floor when he got to them,—and kissed his slipper. White they was—the slippers, I mean—with a gold cross worked onto them. He gave us all his hand to kiss, with the seal-ring held up. I aint much in the[188] habit of that sort o’ thing, and it did go agin my stomach a leetle. So, I tuk his hand, this way”—seizing mine—“and smacked my lips over it without them a-touchin’ on it.”

Again illustrating the narrative by “acting.”

“I tuk notice ’twas yellow, like old ivory, but flabby, as ’twas to be counted upon at his time o’ life. Well, ’twas a sight to see them charitable sisters mumblin’ and smouchin’ over the Holy Father’s hand, and sayin’ prayers like a house a-fire, after they’d done with his slipper and got up onto their knees; and him a-smiling like a pot of hair-oil, and a-blessin’ on his dear daughters! One of ’em had brought along a new white cap for him, embroidered elegant with crosses and crowns and other rigmarees, by her own hands, most likely. When she giv it to him, still on her knees and a-lookin’ up, worshippin’-like, he very politely tuk off his old one and put on the new. You’d a thought the poor thing would ’a died on that floor of delight when he nodded at her, a smilin’ sweeter than ever, to show how well it fitted. She’ll talk about it to her dyin’ day as the biggest thing that ever happened to her, and never think, I presume, that he must have about a hundred caps, given to him by other abbesses, kickin’ ’round in the Vacuum closets. After he’d done up the row of visitors—a hundred and odd—and blessed all the crosses, and bunches of beads, and flowers, and artificial wreaths, and other gimcracks, and all we had on to boot, he stopped in the middle of the room and made us a little French sermon. Sounded neat—but, of course, I didn’t get a word of it. Then he raised his hand and pronounced the benediction, and toddled out. He rocks considerable in his walk, poor old man! He ain’t long for this world; and, indeed, he hez lived as long as his best friends care to hev him.”[189]

I have had many other descriptions of the Pope’s receptions, which were semi-weekly in this the last year of his life. In the main, these accounts tallied so well with the charcoal sketch furnished by my Yankee-Western dame, that I have given it as nearly as possible as I received it from her lips.

Victor Emmanuel had reigned in Rome six years when we were there. The streets were clean; the police vigilant and obliging; every museum and monastery and library was unbarred by the Deliverer of Italy. Protestant churches were going up within the walls of the city; Protestant service was held wherever and whenever the worshippers willed, without the visible protection of English or American flag. One scarcely recognized in the renovated capital the Rome of which the travelers of ’69 had written, so full and free had been the sweep of the tidal wave of liberty and decency. The Pope, than whom never man had a more favorable opportunity to do all the King had accomplished, and more, was a voluntary prisoner in his palace of a thousand rooms, with a beggarly retinue of five hundred servants, and stables full of useless state-coaches and horses. Whoever would see him shorn of the beams of temporal sovereignty must bend the knee to him as spiritual lord. Without attempting to regulate the consciences or actions of others, we declined to make this show of allegiance. Since attendance in the temple of Rimmon was a matter of individual option, we stayed without—Anglicé—we “stopped away.”

Victor Emmanuel we saw frequently in his rides and drives about Rome, and at various popular gatherings, such as reviews and state gala-days. He was the homeliest and best belovèd man in his dominions. Somewhat above medium height and thick-set, his military bearing, especially upon horseback, barely redeemed his figure from[190] clumsiness. The bull-neck, indicative of the baser qualities, the story of which is a blot upon his early life, upbore a massive head, carried in manly, kingly fashion. His complexion was purple-red; the skin, rough in grain, streaked with darker lines, as if blood-vessels had broken under the surface. The firm mouth was almost buried by the moustache, heavy and black, curling upward until the tips threatened the eyes. The nose thick and retroussé, with wide nostrils, corroborated the testimony of the neck. But, beneath the full forehead, the eyes of the master of men and of himself shone out so expressively that to meet them was to forget blemishes of feature and form, and to do justice to the hero of his age—the Father of United Italy.

Prince Umberto was often his father’s companion in the carriage and on horseback—a much handsomer man, whom all regarded with interest as the king of the future, with no premonition that the eventful race of the stalwart parent was so nearly run, or that the aged Pope, whose serious illnesses were reported from week to week, would survive to send a message of amity to the monarch’s death-bed.

The prettiest sight in Rome was one yet more familiar than that of King and heir-apparent driving in a low carriage on the crowded Pincio, unattended by so much as a single equerry. The Princess Margherita, the people’s idol, took her daily airing as any lady of rank might do, her little son at her side, accompanied by one or two ladies of her modest court, and returning affably the salutations of those who met or passed her. The frank confidence of the royal family in the love of the people was with her a happy unconsciousness of possible danger that stirred the most callous to enthusiasm of loyalty. A murmur of blessing followed her appearance among the populace.[191] They never named her without endearing epithets. During the Carnival, she drove, attended as I have described, down the middle of the Corso, wedged in by a slow-moving line of vehicles, the people packing side-walks and gutters up to the wheels, a storm of cheering and waving caps breaking out along the close files as they recognized her. We were abreast of her several times; saw her bow to this side and that, swaying with laughter while she put up both hands to ward off the rain of bouquets poured upon her from balcony and pavement and carriage, until her coach was full above her lap. The small Prince of Naples, on his part, stood up and flung flowers vigorously to left and right, shouting his delight in the fun.

We were strolling in the grounds of the Villa Borghese, one afternoon, when we espied the scarlet liveries of the Princess approaching along the road. That Boy, who was au fait to many tales of her sweetness and charitable deeds, might have a better look at one who ranked, in his imagination, with the royal heroines of fairy-tales, his father lifted him to a seat upon the rail dividing the foot-path from the drive. As the Princess came up, our group was the only one in the retired spot, and Boy, staring solemnly with his great, gray eyes, at the beautiful lady, of his own accord pulled off his Scotch cap and made a profound obeisance from his perch upon the rail. The Princess smiled brightly and merrily, and, after acknowledging Caput’s lifted hat by a gracious bend of the head, leaned forward to throw a kiss at Boy, as his especial token of favor, while her boy took off and waved his cap with a nod of good-fellowship.

One can believe that with this trivial incident in our minds it hurt us to read, eighteen months later, of the little fellow’s terror at sight of the blood streaming from his father’s arm upon his mother’s dress, and at[192] the clash over his innocent head of loyal sword and assassin’s dagger.

The change in the government of Rome is not more apparent in the improved condition of her streets and in the enforcement of sanitary laws unknown or uncared-for under the ancien régime, than in the aspect of the ruins—her principal attraction for thousands of tourists. The Forum Romanum described by Hawthorne and Howells as a cow-pasture, broken by the protruding tops of buried columns, has been carefully excavated, and the rubbish cleared away down to the original floor of the Basilica Julia, commenced by Julius Cæsar and completed by Augustus. The boundaries of this, which was both Law Court and Exchange, are minutely defined in the will of Augustus, and the measurements have been verified by classic archæologists. The Forum, as now laid bare, is a sunken plain with steep sides, divided into two unequal parts by a modern street crossing it. Under this elevated causeway, one passes through an arch of substantial masonry from the larger division—containing the Comitium, Basilica Julia, Temple of Castor and Pollux, site of Temple of Vesta and the column of Phocas—Byron’s “nameless column with the buried base,” now exposed down to the lettered pedestal—into the smaller enclosure, flanked by the Tabularium on which is built the modern Capitol. On a level with the Etruscan foundation-stones of this are the sites of the Tribune and the Rostrum—fragments of colored marble pavement on which Cicero stood when declaiming against Catiline, eight majestic pillars, the remains of the Temple of Saturn, three that were a part of the Temple of Vespasian, and the arch of Septimius Severus. Upon the front of the latter is still seen the significant erasure made by Caracalla, of his brother Geta’s name, after the latter had fallen by his—Caracalla’s—hand.[193] Near the mighty arch is a conical heap of earth and masonry, which was the Golden Milestone, the centre of Rome and of the world.

There were not many days in the course of that idyllic winter that did not see some of us in the Forum. We haunted it early and late; alighting for a few minutes, en route for other places, to run down the slight wooden stair leading from the street-level, to verify to our complete satisfaction some locality about which we had read or heard, or studied since yesterday’s visit. Or coming, with books and children, when the Tramontana was blowing up and down every street in the city, and we could find no other nook so sheltered and warm as the lee of the wall where once ran the row of butchers’ stalls, from one of which Virginius snatched the knife to slay his daughter. My favorite seat was upon the site of the diminutive Temple of Julius Cæsar (Divus Julius) the first reared in Rome in honor of a mortal. The remnants of the green-and-white pavement show where lay the body of great Cæsar when Mark Antony delivered his funeral oration, and where Tiberius performed the like pious office over the bier of Augustus.

The Via Sacra turns at this point, losing itself in one direction in the bank, which is the limit of the excavation, winding in the other through the centre of the exposed Forum, up to the Capitol foundations. Horace was here persecuted by the bore whose portrait is as true to life now as it was then. Dux read the complaint aloud to us once, with telling effect, substituting “Broadway” for the ancient name. Cicero sauntered along this fashionable promenade as a young man waiting for clients; trod these very stones with the assured step of the successful advocate and famous orator, and upon them dripped the blood from his severed hand and head, and the tongue pierced by Fulvia’s bodkin. Beyond the transversing modern[194] street is a mound, once a judgment-seat. There Brutus sat, his face an iron mask, while his sons were scourged and beheaded before his eyes. In the Comitium was the renowned statue of the she-wolf, now in the Capitoline Museum, which was struck by lightning at the moment of Cæsar’s murder in Pompey’s Theatre. Cæsar passed by this way on the Ides of March from his house over there—the Regia—where were enacted the mysteries of the Bona Dea when Pompeia, Calphurnia’s predecessor, admitted Clodius to the forbidden rites. The soothsayer who cried out to him may have loitered in waiting by the hillock, which is all that is left of Vesta’s Fane, where were kept the sacred geese.

Boy knew each site and meant no disrespect to the “potent, grave, and reverend” heroes who used to pace the ancient street, while entertaining himself by skipping back and forth its entire length so far as it is uncovered, “telling himself a story.” He was always happy when thus allowed to run and murmur, a trick begun by the time he could walk. Content in this knowledge, the Invaluable sat upon the steps of the Basilica Julia, knitting in hand, guarding a square aperture near the Temple of Castor and Pollux, the one danger (to Boy) in the Forum. For, looking into it, one saw the rush of foul waters below hurrying to discharge themselves through the Cloaca Maxima—built by Numa Pompilius—into the Tiber. Here, it is said, yawned the gulf into which Curtius leaped, armed and mounted.

“A quagmire, drained and filled up by an enterprising street contractor of that name,” says Caput, to whom this and a score of other treasured tales of those nebulously olden times are myths with a meaning.

While I rested apart in my sunny corner, and watched the august wraiths trooping past, or pretended to read[195] with eyes that did not see the book on my knees, Boy’s “story-telling” drifted over to me in rhymical ripples:

Or—

“Where is it now, Mamma? And Horatius? and the Great Twin Brethren—and the rest of them?”

“Are gone, my darling!”

[196]

CHAPTER XV.
On Christmas-Day.

ON Christmas-Day, we went, via the Coliseum, for a long drive in the Campagna. The black cross, at the foot of which many prayers have been said for many ages, has disappeared from the centre of the arena. It was necessary to take it down in the course of the excavations that have revealed the subterranean cells whose existence was unsuspected until lately. These are mere pits unroofed by the removal of the floor of the amphitheatre, and in winter are half-full of water left by the overflow of the Tiber and the autumnal rains. The abundant and varied Flora of the Coliseum, including more than three hundred different wild flowers and such affluence of foliage as might almost be catalogued in the terms used to describe the botanical lore of the philosopher-king of Israel: “Trees from the cedar that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall,”—all these have been swept away by the unsparing hand of Signore Rosa, the superintendent to whom the care of the ruins of the old city has been committed. To the artistic eye, the Coliseum and other structures have suffered irretrievable damage through the measures which, he asserts, are indispensable to their preservation. We who never saw the rich fringe of ilex and ivy that made “the outside wall with its top of gigantic stones, seem[197] like a mountain-barrier of bare rock, enclosing a green and varied valley,” forget to regret our loss in congratulating ourselves that filth has been cleared away with the evergreen draperies. Despite the pools of stagnant water now occupying half of the vast circle enclosed by the scraped and mended walls, the Coliseum is not one-tenth as dangerous to the health of him who whiles away a noontide hour there, or threads the corridors by moonlight as when it was far more picturesque.

The sunlight of this Christmas-Day lay peacefully upon and within the walls, as we walked around the circular arcades, and paused in the centre of the floor, looking up to the seats of honor—(the podium) reserved, on the day of dedication, for Titus, his family, the Senate, and the Vestal Virgins. When, according to Merrivale, “the capacity of the vast edifice was tested by the slaughter of five thousand animals in its circuit.”

The site was a drained lake in the gardens of Nero. His colossal statue used to stand upon the little pile of earth on the other side of the street. Twelve thousand captive Jews were overworked to their death in building the mighty monument to the destroyer of Jerusalem. After describing the dedicatory pageant and its items of battles between cranes and pigmies, and of gladiators with women, and a sea-fight for which the arena was converted into a mimic lake, the historian adds: “When all was over, Titus himself was seen to weep, perhaps from fatigue, possibly from vexation and disgust.”

If the last-named emotions had any share in the reactionary hysteria characterized as “effeminate” by his best friends, his successors did not profit by the lesson. Hadrian slaughtered, on a birth-day frolic in the Coliseum, one thousand wild beasts, not to mention less valuable human beings. The prudent Augustus forbade the entrance[198] of the noble classes into the arena as combatants, and to avoid a hustle of death, decreed that not more than sixty pairs of gladiators should be engaged at one time in the fashionable butchery. Commodus had no such scruples on the subject of caste or humanity. His imperial form bound about with a lion’s skin, his locks bedusted with gold, he fought repeatedly upon the bloody sands, killing his man—he being both emperor and beast—in every encounter. Ignatius—reputed to have been one of the children blessed by Our Lord—uttered here his last confession of faith:

“I am as the grain of the field, and must be ground by the teeth of the lions, that I may become bread fit for His table.”

The Christians sought the deserted Coliseum by stealth, that night, to gather the few bones the lions had left. Some of these, his friends, may have been among the one hundred and fifteen “obstinates” drawn up upon the earth scarcely dried from the blood of Ignatius, a line of steady targets for the arrows of skilled bowmen—a kind of archery practice in high favor with Roman clubs just then.

The life-blood that followed the arrow-thrust was a safe and rapid stream to float the soul into harbor. One hour of heaven were worth all the smiting, and thrusting, and tearing, and theirs have been centuries of bliss. But our hearts ached with pain and sympathy inexpressible in the Coliseum, on that Christmas-Day. There is poetic beauty and profound spiritual significance in the churchly fable that Gregory the Great pressed fresh blood from a handful of earth taken from the floor of the amphitheatre.

Thus runs the ancient prophecy.[199]

Plundering cardinals and thrifty popes had never heard the saying, or were strangely indifferent to the fate of their empire and globe for four hundred years of spoliation and desecration. Cardinal Farnese built his palace out of the marble casings. It is amazing even to those who have inspected the massive walls cemented by mortar as hard as the stones it binds together, that the four thousand men appointed to tear down and bear off in twelve hours the materials needed for the Farnese palace, did not demolish or impair the solidity of the whole structure. After abortive attempts on the part of sundry popes to utilize the building by turning the corridors into bazaars and establishing manufactories of woolen goods and saltpetre in the central space, the place was left to quiet decay and religious rites. Clement XI. consecrated it to the memory of the faithful disciples who perished there “for Christ’s sake.” Stations were appointed in the arcades, the black cross was set up and indulgences granted to all believers who would say a prayer at its foot for the rest of the martyrs’ souls. Masses were said every Friday afternoon, each station visited in turn with chant and prayer, and then a sermon preached by a Capuchin friar. Vines thickened and trees shot upward from tier and battlement, night-birds hooted in the upper shades, thieves and lazzaroni prowled below. Dirt and miasma marked the sacred precincts for their own. We can but be grateful that the march of improvement, begun when the Italian troops entered Rome in 1870 through the breach near the Porta Pia, has reached the Coliseum, cleansing and strengthening, although not beautifying it.

About midway between the Forum and Coliseum we had passed—as no Jew ever does—under the Arch of Titus. It spans the Via Sacra, leading right on from the southern gate of the city through the Forum to the Capitol.[200] The pavement of huge square blocks of lava is the same on which rolled, joltingly in their springless chariots, the conquerors returning in triumph with such griefful captives in their train as are sculptured upon the inside of this arch. The Goths, the Middle Ages, and the Popes (or their nephews), dealt terrible blows at the procession of Jewish prisoners, bearing the seven-branched candlestick, the table of shew-bread, and the golden trumpets of the priests. Arms and legs are missing, and features sadly marred. But drooping heads and lax figures, and the less mutilated faces express the utter dejection, the proud but hopeless humiliation of the band who left their happier countrymen dead by famine, crucifixion, the sword and fire, in the ashes of their city.

A rod or two further, and we were in the Via Appia.

“In that vineyard,” said I, pointing to a rickety gate on our left, “are the remains of the Porta Capena, where the surviving Horatius met and killed his sister as she bewailed the death of her lover, the last of the Curatii. Her brother presented himself to her wearing the cloak she had embroidered for and given to her betrothed.”

“The whole story is a highly figurative history of a war between the Romans and Albans,” began Caput, mildly corrective. “The best authorities are agreed that Horatii and Curatii are alike mythical.”

I should have been vexed upon any other day. Had I not seen, beyond the fifth milestone on this very road, the tombs of the six combatants? Had not my girlish heart stood still with awe when Rachel, as Camille, fell dead upon the stage beneath the steel of her irate brother?

I did say—I hope, temperately—“Cicero was welcomed at the Porta Capena, by the Senate and people, on his return from banishment, B. C. 57. That is, if there was ever such a man as Cicero!”[201]

The Baths of Caracalla; the tombs of the Scipios; the Columbaria of the Freedmen of Augustus; the Catacombs of St. Sebastian and of St. Calixtus—are situate upon the Appian Way. Each should have its visit in turn. Any one of them was, in speculators’ slang, “too big a thing” for one Christmas forenoon. We were on pure pleasure bent—not in bondage to Baedeker. A quarter of a mile from the road, still to our left, the ground falls away into a cup-like basin, holding the Fountain of Egeria enshrined in a grove of dark ilex-trees. A couple of miles further, and we passed through the Gate of San Sebastian, supported by two towers in fair preservation. We were still within the corporate limits of Old Rome. At this gate welcoming processions from the city met those who returned to her in triumphal pomp, or guests, to whom the Senate decreed extraordinary honors. A little brook runs across the road at the bottom of the next hill, and, just beyond it, is the ruined tomb of the murdered Geta. At a fork in the highway near this is a dirty little church, set down so close to the road that the mud from passing wheels has spattered the front. Here, according to the legend, Peter, fleeing from Nero’s persecution, met his Lord with His face toward the city.

“Lord! whither goest Thou?” exclaimed the astonished apostle.

“I go to Rome to be again crucified!” answered the Master.

Peter, taking the vision as a token that he should not shrink from martyrdom, returned to Rome.

The chapel—it is nothing more—of “Domine quo vadis” commemorates the interview. We stepped from the carriage upon the broken threshold, and tried the locked door. A priest as slovenly as the building unclosed it. Directly opposite the entrance is a plaster cast of[202] Michael Angelo’s statue of Our Saviour in the act of addressing Peter. The foot extended in the forward step has been almost kissed away by pilgrims. On the right wall is a fresh and flashy, yet graphic fresco of the Lord, walking swiftly toward Rome; upon the left kneels the conscience-smitten Peter. Between them, upon the floor, secured by a grating from the abrading homage of the vulgar, is a copy of the footprints left upon the rock at the spot where the meeting took place. The original is in the church of San Sebastiano. The marble is stained with yellowish blotches. The impression is coarsely cut; the conception is yet coarser. Two brawny, naked feet, enormous in size, plebeian in shape, are set squarely and straight, side by side, as no living man would stand of his own accord. The impudence of these priestly relics would be contemptible only, were the subjects less sacred. We turned away from the “fac-simile” in sad disgust. The legend had been a favorite with us both. We were sorry we had entered the mouldy little barn. The offer of the sacristan to sell us beads, medals, and photographs was in keeping with the rest of the show. We gave him a franc; plucked from the cracked door-stone a bit of pellitory—herba parietina, the sobriquet given to Trajan in derision of his habit of writing his name upon much which he had not built—and returned to our carriage.

The way is bordered, until one reaches the tomb of Cæcilia Metella by vineyard and meadow walls. Most of the stones used in building these were collected from the ancient pavement, or the débris of fortresses and tombs that encumbered this. Imbedded in the mortar, and often defaced by clots and daubs of it, put in beside common rubble-stones and sherds of tufa, are many sculptured fragments. Here, the corner of a richly-carved capital projects from the surface; there, a cluster of flowers, with a[203] serpent stealing out of sight among the leaves. Now, a baby’s head laughs between lumps of travertine or granite; next comes a part of a gladiator’s arm, or the curve of a woman’s neck. The ivy is luxuriantly aggressive and of a species we had never seen elsewhere, gemmed with glossy, saffron-colored berries. “Wee, crimson-tippéd” daisies mingled with grass that is never sere. In March we found anemones of every hue; pink and white cyclamen; wild violets, at once diffusive and retentive of odor, embalming gloves, handkerchiefs, and the much-thumbed leaves of our guide-books; reddish-brown wall-flowers, and hosts of other “wild” blossoms on this road. The dwelling-houses we passed were rude, slight huts, hovels of reeds and straw, often reared upon the foundation of a tomb.

For this Way of Triumph was also the Street of Tombs. Sepulchres, or their ruins, are scattered on every side. We looked past them, where there occurred a break in the road-wall over the billowing Campagna, the arches of ancient and modern aqueducts dwindling into cobweb-lines in the hazy distance; above them at the Sabine and Alban hills, newly capped with snow, while Spring smiled warmly upon the plains at their base. We alighted at the best-known of these homes of the dead, not many of which hold the ashes that gave them names.

Hawthorne describes it in touches few and masterly. “It is built of great blocks of hewn stone on a vast square foundation of rough, agglomerated material, such as composes the mass of all the other ruinous tombs. But, whatever might be the cause, it is in a far better state of preservation than they. On its broad summit rise the battlements of a mediæval fortress, out of the midst of which grow trees, bushes, and thick festoons of ivy. This tomb of a woman has become the dungeon-keep of a castle, and all the care that Cæcilia Metella’s husband[204] could bestow to secure endless peace for her belovèd relics only sufficed to make that handful of precious ashes the nucleus of battles long ages after her death.”

The powerful family of the Gaetani added the battlements that tooth the top of the enormous tower, when they made it their château and fortress in the thirteenth century. The ruins of their church are close to the walls. We paid a trifling fee for the privilege of entering the court-yard of the Tomb where there was nothing to see, and for peeping into the ruinous cellar, once the “cave” where “treasure lay, so locked, so hid”—the sarcophagus about which all these stone swathings were wound as layers of silk and wool about a costly jewel. The empty marble coffin is in a Roman museum. A public-spirited pope ripped off the sculptured casing of the exterior that he might build the Fountain of Trevi. It would be as futile to seek for this woman’s ashes as for those of Wickliffe after the Avon had carried them out to sea.

The dreary road-walls terminate here, but the survey of the tombs diverts the attention from the views of Campagna and mountains. They must have formed an almost continuous block of buildings for miles. The foundations may be traced still, and about these are remnants of the statues and symbolic ornaments that gave them individuality and beauty. The figure which occurred most frequently was that of a man in the dress of a Roman citizen, the arm laid over the breast to hold the toga in place and fold. Most of the heads were missing, and usually the legs, but the torso had always character, sometimes beauty, in it. There were hundreds of them here once, probably mounted sentinel-wise at the doors of the tombs, changeless effigies of men who had been, who were now a pinch of dust, preserved in a sealed urn for fear the wind might take them away.[205]

There is a so-called “restored” tomb near the “fourth mile-stone.” A bas-relief, representing a murder, is let into a brick façade.

“The tomb of Seneca!” said our cocchière, confidently.

“Dubious!” commented the genius of wary common sense upon the front seat. “If he was put to death by Nero’s officers near the fourth mile-stone, is it probable that he was interred on the spot?”

The driver held to his assertion, and I got out to pick daisies and violets growing in the shelter of the ugly red-brick front—there was no back,—souvenirs that lie to-day, faded but fragrant, between the leaves of my Baedeker. Nearly opposite to the round heaps of turf-grown rubbish with solid basement walls, “supposed to be the tombs of the Horatii and Curatii,” across the road and a field, are the ruins of the Villa of Commodus. He wrested this pleasant country-seat from two brothers, who were the Naboths of the coveted possession. Conduits have been dug out from the ruins, stamped with their names, and convicting him mutely but surely of the theft charged upon him by contemporaries. He and his favorite Marcia were sojourning here when the house was “mobbed” by a deputation, several thousand in number, sent from Rome to call him to account for his misdeeds. He pacified them measurably by throwing from an upper window the head of Cleander, his obnoxious premier, and beating out the brains of that official’s child. The Emperor’s Coliseum practice made such an evening’s work a mere bagatelle.

Six miles from Rome is the Rotondo, believed to have been the family mausoleum of a poet-friend of Horace, Massala Corvinus. It is larger than the tomb of the “wealthiest Roman’s wife,” but not so well-preserved. A miserable wine-shop was in the court-yard, and we paid the mistress half-a-franc for permission to mount a flight[206] of easy steps to the summit. Upon the flat roof, formed by the flooring of the upper story, the walls of which are half gone, olive-trees have taken root and overhang the sides. The eye swept the Campagna for miles, followed the Via Appia, stretched like a white ribbon between grassy slopes and sepulchre-ruins, back into Rome and onward to Albano. A faintly-tinged haze brought the mountains nearer, instead of hiding them—purpled the thymy dells between the swells of the far-reaching prairies. Flocks of sheep browsed upon these, attended by shepherds and dogs. A party of English riders cantered by from Rome, the blue habit and scarlet plume of the only lady equestrian made conspicuous by the white road and green banks. Near and far, the course of the ancient highway was defined by masses of masonry in ruins, some overgrown by herbs, vines, and even trees, but most of them naked to the sun and wind. These have not been the destroyers of the tombs. On the contrary, the uncovered foundations are hardened by the action of the elements, until bricks are as unyielding as solid marble and cement is like flint. Nature and neglect are co-workers, whose operations upon buildings raised by man, are far less to be feared in this than in Northern climates. The North, that let loose her brutish hordes upon a land so much fairer than their own that their dull eyes could not be tempted by her beauty except to wanton devastation. They were grown-up children who battered the choicest and most delicate objects for the pleasure of seeing and hearing the crash.

“Some day,” said Caput, wistful lights in the eyes that looked far away to where the road lost itself in the blue hills—“Some day, I mean to drive all the way to the Appii Forum, and follow St. Paul’s track back to the city.”

He brought out his pocket Testament, and, amid the[207] broken walls, the shadows of the olive-boughs flickering upon the page, we read how the Great Apostle longed to “see Rome,” yet knowing that bonds and imprisonment awaited him wherever he went—the Rome he was never to quit as a free man, and where he was to leave a multitude of witnesses to his fidelity and the living power of the Gospel, of which he was an ambassador in bonds. Thence we passed to the few words describing his journey and reception:

“We came the next day unto Puteoli, where we found brethren, and were desired to tarry with them seven days. And so we went toward Rome. And from thence, when the brethren heard of us, they came to meet us as far as Appii Forum and the Three Taverns. Whom, when Paul saw, he thanked God and took courage.”

For some miles the Way has been cleared down to the ancient pavement. It was something to see the stones over which St. Paul had walked.

We took St. Peter’s in our drive home. When one is used to the immensity of its spaces, has accommodated his imagination comfortably to the aisle-vistas and the height of the ceilings, St. Peter’s is the most restful temple in Rome. The equable temperature—never cold in winter, never hot in summer; the solemn quiet of a vastness in which the footfalls upon the floor die away with out echo, and the sound of organ and chant from one of the many chapels only stirs a musical throb which never swells into reverberation; the subdued light—all contribute to the sense of grateful tranquillity that allures one to frequent visits and slow, musing promenades within the magnificent Basilica. Madame de Staël says in one line what others have failed to express in pages of labored rhetoric:

“L’Architecture de St. Pierre est une musique fixée.”[208]

Listening with all our souls, we strolled up one side of the church past the bronze Image, in appearance more Fetish than saint. A statue of Jupiter was melted down to make it. The frown of the Thunderer still contracts the brows that seem to find the round of glory, spoked like a wheel, too heavy. The projecting toe, often renewed, bright as a new brass kettle from the attrition of kisses, rests upon a pedestal five feet, at least, from the floor. Men can conveniently touch it with their lips. Short women stand on tiptoe, and children are lifted to it. Each wipes it carefully before kissing, a ceremony made necessary by a popular trick of the Roman gamins. They watch their chance to anoint the holy toe with damp red pepper, then hide behind a column to note the effect of the next osculation. At the Jubilee of Pius IX., June 16, 1871, they dressed the hideous black effigy in pontifical vestments, laced and embroidered to the last degree of gorgeousness, and fastened the cope of cloth-of-gold with a diamond brooch!

The baldacchino, or canopy, built above the high altar and overshadowing the tomb of St. Peter, is of gilded bronze that once covered the roof of the Pantheon,—another example of popely thrift. Beneath, yawns an open crypt, lined with precious marbles and gained by marble stairs. Upon the encompassing balustrade above is a circle of ever-burning golden lamps, eighty-six in number. Pius VI. (in marble by Canova) kneels forever, as he requested in his will, before the closed door of St. Peter’s tomb, below.

“I wish I could believe that Peter’s bones are there!” Caput broke a long thought-laden pause, given to silent gazing upon the kneeling form. “Roman Catholic historians say that an oratory was erected here above his remains, A.D. 90. The circus of Nero was hereabouts.[209] The chapel was in honor of the thousands who died a martyr’s death in his reign, as well as to mark the spot of Peter’s burial. In the days of Constantine, a Basilica superseded the humble chapel, at which date St. Peter’s bones were encased in a bronze sarcophagus. Five hundred years afterward, the Saracens plundered the Basilica. Did they take Peter—if he were ever here—or in Rome at all? Or, did they spare his bones when they carried off the gilt-bronze coffin and inner casket of pure silver?”

Another silence.

“The Basilica and tomb were here when English Ethelwolf brought his boy Alfred to Rome,” I said aloud.

“But the Popes did their will upon it afterward. Pulled down and built up at the bidding of caprice and architects until not one of the original stones was left upon another. After two centuries of this sort of work—or play—the present church was planned and was one hundred and seventy-odd years in building. I hope Peter’s bones were cared for in the squabble. I should like to believe it!”

We looked for a long minute more at the praying pope. He believed it so much as to desire to kneel there, with clasped hands and bowed head, awaiting through the coming cycles the opening of the sealèd door.

Wanderings in and out of stately chapels ensued, until we had enough of dead popes, marble and bronze.

The surname of Pope Pignatella, signifying “little cream-jug,” suggested to the sculptor the neat conceit of mingling sundry cream-pots with other ornaments of his tomb.

Gregory XIII., he of the Gregorian calendar, is an aged man, invoking the benediction of Heaven upon whomsoever it may concern, while Wisdom, as Minerva, and Faith hold a tablet inscribed—“Novi opera hujus et fidem.”

Urban VIII., the patron of Bernini, is almost forgiven[210] by those who have sickened over the countless and cruel devices of his protégé when one beholds his master-piece of absurdity in his sovereign’s tomb. The pontiff, in the popular attitude of benediction, towers above the black marble coffin, in charge of Prudence and Justice,—the drapery of the latter evidently a decorous afterthought,—while a very airy gilded skeleton is writing, with a dégagé air, the names and titles of Urban upon an obituary list. The Barberini bees crawl over the monument, as busily officious and in as bad taste as was Bernini himself.

Pius VII., the prisoner-Pope of Napoleon I., is there—a mild old man, looking as if he had suffered and forgiven much—sitting dreamily, or drowsily, in a chair, and kept in countenance by Courage and Faith.

Innocent VIII. sleeps, like a tired man, upon his sarcophagus, while his animated Double is enthroned above it, one hand, of course, extended in blessing, the other holding a copy of the sacred lance that pierced the Saviour’s side, presented to him by Bajazet, and by the pope to St. Peter’s.

More interesting to us than these and the tiresome array of the many other pontifical and prelatical personages, was the arch near the front door of the Basilica, which covers the remains of the last of the Stuarts. Canova carved the memorial-stone of James III. (the Pretender), his sons, Charles Edward (the Young Pretender), and Henry, who,—with desperate fidelity worthy of a better cause, wearied out by the successive failures and misfortunes of his race,—gave himself wholly to the Church, devotion to which had cost his father independence, happiness, and England. Henry Stuart died, as we read here, Cardinal York. Marie Clementine Sobieski, wife of James III., named upon the tablet, “Queen of Great Britain, France and Ireland,” who never set foot within the British Empire,—completes[211] the family group. It is said the expenses of these testimonials were defrayed by the then reigning House of Hanover. It could well afford to do it.

In a chapel at the left of the entrance is a mammoth font of dark-red porphyry which has a remarkable—I can hardly say, in view of cognate facts—a singular history. It is the inverted cover of Hadrian’s sarcophagus. Having rested within its depths longer than his life had entitled him to do, this Emperor was ejected and Otho III. took his place. In due season, a pope of a pious and practical turn of mind ousted Otho, and transferred the lid of the coffin to its present place. The bronze fir-cone from the top of the mausoleum of Hadrian, now the Castle of San Angelo, is a prominent ornament in the gardens of the Vatican. Near it are two bronze peacocks, the birds of Juno, from the porch of the same edifice.

“Entirely and throughout consistent,” said Caput, caustically.

“I beg your pardon! Did you address me, sir?” asked a startled voice.

The Traveling American was upon us. Pater Familias, moreover, to the sanguine young people who had attacked systematically, Baedeker, Murray and Forbes in hand—the opposite chapel, the gem of which is Michael Angelo’s Pietà—the Dead Christ upon his mother’s knees. We recognized our interlocutor. A very worthy gentleman, an enterprising and opulent citizen of the New World, whom we had met, last week, in the salon of a friend. He was making, he had informed a listening circle, “the grand European tour for the third time, now, for educational purposes, having brought his boys and girls along. A thing few of our country-people have money and brains to undertake!”

“I was saying”—explained Caput, “that the Popes[212] have done more toward the destruction of the monuments of pagan Rome than barbarians and centuries combined. I lose patience and temper when I see what they have ‘consecrated’ to the use of their Church. Vandalism is an insipid word to employ in this connection.”

Pater Familias put out one foot; lifted a hortatory hand.

“I have learned to cast such considerations behind me, sir! Anachronisms do not trouble me. Nor solecisms, except in artistic execution. I travel with a purpose—that of self-improvement and the foundation, in the bosoms of my family, of true principles of art, the cultivation of the instinct of the beautiful in their souls and in mine. Despising the statistical, and, to a certain degree, the historical, as things of slight moment, I rise into the region of the purely æsthetic. For example:” The hortatory hand pointed to the opposite arch, within which is a gorgeous modern copy, in mosaic, of Raphael’s “Transfiguration.” “For example, pointing to that inimitable masterpiece, I say to my children—‘Do not examine into the ingredients of the pigments staining the canvas, nor criticise, anatomically, the structure of the figures. But catch, if you can, the spirit and tone of the whole composition. Behold, recognize, and make your own the very soul and mood, the inspiration of Michael Angelo!’”

Caput drew out his watch.

“Do you know, my dear,” he said, plaintively, “that it is an hour past our luncheon-time?”

At the bottom of the gentle incline leading from the church-door into the wide Piazza di San Piétro, we stopped for breath and composure.

Caput grew serious in turning to survey the façade of the Basilica, with the guard of saints and their Master upon the balustrade; the Dome, light in semblance as the clouds[213] swimming in summer languor above it, strong as Soracte; the sweep of the colonnades to the right and left, “with the holy ones walking upon their roofs;” the Obelisk of Heliopolis in the centre of the Court and its flashing fountains—the heaven of rich, tender blue—

“That man has crossed the ocean three times to behold all this!” he said. “He can bring his rabble of children to see it with him. While men who could enter the arcana of whose mysteries he prattles; to whom the life he is leading would be like a walk through Paradise—are tied down to desk and drugs and country parishes! That these things exist is a tough problem!”

We told the story, leaving the pathetic enigma out of sight, over our Christmas-dinner, that evening. My Florentine angel of mercy, her brothers and sister, were our guests. Mince and pumpkin pies were not to be thought of, much less obtained here. But our Italian cook had under my eye, stuffed and roasted a turkey, the best we could buy in the poultry-shop just around the corner from the Pantheon. I did not spoil my friends’ appetites by describing the manner of its “taking-off” which may, however, interest poultry-fanciers. I wanted a larger bird than any displayed by the turkey-vender, and he bade me return in fifteen minutes, when he would have just what I desired.

We gave half an hour to a ramble around the square surrounding the Pantheon, the most nearly perfect pagan building in Rome. Urban VIII. abstracted nearly five hundred thousand pounds of gilt bronze from portico and dome, to be wrought into the twisted columns of St. Peter’s baldacchino, and into cannon for the defence of that refuge for scared and hunted popes—the Castle of San Angelo. In recompense for the liberty he had taken with the Temple of all the Gods, he added, by the hand of his[214] obsequious architect, the comical little towers like mustard-pots, known to the people as the “asses’ ears of Bernini.” Another pope, one of the Benedicts, offered no apology in word or deed, for pulling off the rare old marbles facing the inner side of the dome, and using them for the adornment of churches and palaces.

But to our turkey! The merchant had him well in hand when we got back. He had tied a stout twine tightly around the creature’s neck, and while it died by slow strangulation, held it fast between his knees and stripped off the feathers from the palpitating body. All our fowls came to us with this twine necklace knotted about the gullet, and all had a trick of shrinking unaccountably in cooking.

“He is a-swellin’ wisibly before my eyes!” quoted Caput from the elder Weller, as we gazed, horror-stricken, upon the operation.

The merchant laughed—the sweet, childish laugh of the Italian of whatever rank, that showed his snowy teeth and brought sparkle to his black eyes.

“Altro?” he said. “Buono? Bon? Signora like ’im mooch?”

I tried not to remember how little I had liked it when my guests praised the brown, fat bird.

Canned cranberries and tomatoes we had purchased from Brown, the polite English grocer in Via della Croce, who makes a specialty of “American goods.” Nazzari, the Incomparable (in Rome), furnished the dessert. Soup, fish, and some of the vegetables were essentially Italian, and none the worse on that account.

There was a strange commingling and struggle of pain and pleasure in that “make-believe” Christmas-at-home in a foreign land. It was a new and fantastically-wrought link in a golden chain that ran back until lost in the[215] misty brightness of infancy. We gathered about our parlor-fire, for which we had, with some difficulty, procured a Yule-log of respectable dimensions; talked of loved and distant ones and other days; said, with heart and tongue, “Heaven bless the country we love the best, and the friends who, to-night, remember us as we think of them!” We told funny stories, all we could remember, in which the Average Briton and Traveling American figured conspicuously. We laughed amiably at each other’s jokes. We planned days and weeks of sight-seeing and excursions, waxed enthusiastic over the wealth of Roman ruins, and declared ourselves more than satisfied with the experiment of trans-ocean travel.

We were, or should be, on the morrow.

Now, between the eyes of our spirit and the storied riches of this sunbright elysium, the Italia of kings, consuls, emperors, and popes, glided visions of ice-bound rivers and snow-clad hills—of red firesides and jocund frolic, and clan-gatherings, from near and from far—of Christmas stockings, and Christmas trees, and Christmas greetings—of ringing skates, making resonant moonlit nights, and the tintinnabulations of sleigh-bells—of silent grave-yards, where the snow was lying spotless and smooth.

Beneath laugh and jest, and graver talk of visions fulfilled, and projects for future enjoyment—underlying all these was a slow-heaving main, hardly repressed—an indefinable, yet exquisite, heart-ache very far down.

[216]

CHAPTER XVI.
L’Allegro and Il Penseroso.

THERE is music by the best bands in Rome upon the Pincian Hill on Sabbath afternoons. Sitting at the window of our tiny library, affecting to read or write, my eyes wandered continually to the lively scene beyond. My fingers were beating time to the waltzes, overtures, and marches that floated over the wall and down the terraces—over the orange and camellia-trees, the pansy and violet-beds, and lilac-bushes in the court-yard, the pride of our handsome portiere’s heart—up to my Calvinistic ears. Drive and promenade were in full and near view, and up both streamed, for two hours, a tossing tide of carriages and pedestrians. It would flow down in variegated billows when the sun should paint the sky behind St. Peter’s golden-red. Resigning even the pretence of occupation by-and-by, I used to lie back in my easy-chair, my feet upon the fender, hemming in the wood-fire we never suffered to go out, and, watching the pleasure-making on the hill, dream until I forgot myself and the age in which I lived.

At the foot of the Pincio, which now overtops the other hills of Rome, beside the Porta del Popolo, or People’s Gate, are the convent and church of S. Augustine. In the former, Luther dwelt during his stay in the city of his love and longing. At this gate he prostrated himself and[217] kissed the earth in a passion of delight and thankfulness. In the church he celebrated his first mass in Rome, and just before his departure, soon after the change of feeling and purpose which befell him upon the Sacred Staircase, he performed here his last service as a priest of the Romish Church.

S. Augustine’s was raised upon the site of the tomb of Nero—a spot infested, according to tradition, for hundreds of years, by flocks of crows, who built, roosted, and cawed in the neighboring trees, becoming in time such a nuisance as to set one of the popes to dreaming upon the subject. In a vision, it was revealed to him that these noisy rooks were demons contending for or exulting in the possession of the soul of the wicked tyrant—a point on which there could have been little uncertainty, even in the mind of a middle-ages pope. The trees were leveled, and the birds, or devils, scared away by the hammers of workmen employed upon a church paid for by penny collections among the people. The Gate of the People owes its name to this circumstance. Within the antique gateway, Christina of Sweden was welcomed to Rome after her apostasy from Protestantism, cardinals and bishops and a long line of sub-officials meeting her here in stately procession. It is also known as the Flaminian Gate, opening as it does upon the famous Flaminian Way. A side-road, branching off from this a few rods beyond the walls, leads into and through the beautiful grounds of the Villa Borghese.

Turning to the left, after entering the Porta del Popolo, one ascends by a sinuous road the Pincio, or Hill of Gardens. Below lies the Piazza del Popolo, the twin churches opposite the city-gate marking the burial-place of Sylla. The red sandstone obelisk in the middle of the square is from Heliopolis, and the oldest monument in Rome. The most heedless traveler pauses upon the Pincian terraces to[218] look down upon “the flame-shaped column,” which, Merivale tells us, “was a symbol of the sun, and originally bore a blazing orb upon its summit.” Hawthorne reminds us yet more thrillingly that “this monument supplied one of the recollections which Moses and the Israelites bore from Egypt into the desert.” And so strong is the chain with which, in his “Marble Faun,” this subtle and delicate genius has united the historical and the imaginative, one recollects, in the same instant, that the parapet by which he is standing is the one over which Kenyon and Hilda watched the enigmatical pantomime of Miriam and the Model beside the “four-fold fountain” at the base of the obelisk. Nowhere else in Rome is the thoughtful traveler more tempted to borrow from this marvelous romance words descriptive of scene and emotion than when he reaches the “broad and stately walk that skirts the brow” of the Pincio. We read and repeated the paragraph that, to this hour, brings the view to us with the clearness and minuteness of a sun-picture, until it arose of itself to our lips whenever we halted upon the outer edge of the semicircular sweep of wall.

“Beneath them, from the base of the abrupt descent, the city spread wide away in a close contiguity of red-earthen roofs, above which rose eminent the domes of a hundred churches, besides here and there a tower, and the upper windows of some taller, or higher situated palace, looking down on a multitude of palatial abodes. At a distance, ascending out of the central mass of edifices, they could see the top of the Antonine column, and, near it, the circular roof of the Pantheon, looking heavenward with its ever-open eye.”

“The very dust of Rome,” he writes again, “is historic, and inevitably settles on our page and mingles with our ink.”[219]

Thus, the Pincio—the gayest place in Rome on “music-afternoon,” and one of the loveliest at all seasons and every day;—a modern garden, with parterres of ever-green and ever-blooming roses; with modern fountains and plantations, rustic summer-houses and play-grounds, all erected and laid out—if Hare is to be credited—within twenty years, in the “deserted waste where the ghost of Nero was believed to wander” in the dark ages, had its story and its tragedy antedating the bloody death and post-mortem peregrinations of him over whose grave the crows quarrelled at the bottom of the hill. Other gardens smiled here when Lucullus supped in the Hall of Apollo in his Pincian Villa with Cicero and Pompey, and was served with more than imperial luxury. Here, Asiaticus, condemned to die through the machinations of the wickedest woman in Rome, who coveted ground and house, bled himself to death after “he had inspected the pyre prepared for him in his own gardens, and ordered it to be removed to another spot that an umbrageous plantation which overhung it might not be injured by the flames.”

Here grew the tree up which climbed Messalina’s creature on the night of her last and wildest orgy with her lover, and flung down the warning—“I see an awful storm coming from Ostia!” The approaching tempest was the injured husband, Claudius, the Emperor, whose swift advance drove Messalina, half-drunken and half-clad, to a hiding-place “in the shade of her gardens on the Pincio, the price of the blood of the murdered Asiaticus.” There she died. “The hot blood of the wanton smoked on the pavement of his garden, and stained, with a deeper hue, the variegated marbles of Lucullus.”[B]

At the intersection of the two fashionable drives which[220] constitute “the round,”—a circuit that can be accomplished with ease in five minutes—is an obelisk, also Egyptian, erected, primarily, upon the Nile, by Hadrian and his Empress, in memory of the drowned Antinöus.

Urban VIII. left his mark and a memento of the inevitable Bernini on the Pincio, in the Moses Fountain. It commands, through an artful opening in the overhanging trees, an exquisitely lovely view of St. Peter’s, framed in an arch of green. The fountain consists of a circular basin, and, in the middle of this, Jochebed, the mother of Moses, upon an island. She looks heavenward while she stoops to extricate a hydrocephalus babe from a basket much too small for his trunk and limbs, not to say the big head.

Caput’s criticism was professionally indignant.

“It is simply preposterous to fancy that a child with such an abnormal cerebral development could ever have become a leader of armies or a law-giver. The wretched woman naturally avoids the contemplation of the monstrosity she has brought into the world.”

From that section of the Pincian Gardens overlooking the Borghese Villa and grounds projects a portion of the ancient wall of Rome, that was pronounced unsafe and ready to fall in the time of Belisarius. Being miraculously held in place by St. Peter, there is now no real danger, unsteady as it looks, that this end of the Pincio will give way under the weight of the superincumbent wall, and plunge down the precipice among the ilex-trees and stone-pines beneath. In the shadow of this wall, tradition holds that blind Belisarius begged from the passers-by.

With the deepening glow of the sunset—

[221]

the Roman promenaders and riders flock homeward from Borghese and Pincio. Foreigners, less familiar with the character of the unwholesome airs and noxious dews of twilight, linger later until they learn better. Mingling with the flood of black coats that poured down the shorter ascent in sight of my windows were rills of scarlet and purple that puzzled me for awhile. At length I made it my business to examine them more closely from the parlor balcony in their passage through the street at the front of the house.

“There go the ganders!” shouted Boy, who accompanied me to the look-out.

“I should call them flamingoes?” laughed I.

The students in the Propaganda wear long gowns, black, red, or purple, and broad-brimmed hats, each nationality having its uniform. The members of each division take their “constitutional” at morning and evening in a body, striding along with energy that sends their skirts flapping behind them in a gale of their own making. They seldom missed a band-afternoon upon the Pincio, and were a picturesque element in the lively display. Boy’s name for them was an honest mispronunciation of a polysyllable too big for him to handle. But I never saw them stalking in a slender row across the Piazza di Spagna and up the hill without a smile at the random shot. The name had a sort of aptness when fitted to the sober youngsters whose deportment was solemn to grotesqueness by contrast with the volatile crowd they threaded in their progress to the pools of refreshment prescribed as a daily recreation—the fleeting glimpses of the world outside of their pasture.

The gates of the avenues by which access is had to the gardens are closed soon after sundown. No one is allowed to walk there after dark, or remain there overnight. But theatres and other places of amusement are open in the[222] evening, the best operatic and dramatic entertainments being reserved for Sunday night. We wearied soon of the bustle and gayety of such Sabbath afternoons. We could not shut out from our apartment the strains that seduced thought away from the books we would fain study. The tramp and hum of the street were well-nigh as bewildering. In the beginning, to avoid this—afterward, from love of the place and the beauty and quiet that reign there, like the visible benediction of the All-Father—we fell into the practice of driving out every week to the Protestant Cemetery.

Boy was always one of the carriage-party. The streets were a continual carnival to him on this, the Christian’s Lord’s Day, being alive with mountebanks and strolling musicians. Behind the block in which were our apartments was an open square, where a miniature circus was held at least one Sabbath per month, it was said, for the diversion of the boy-prince who is now the heir-apparent. In view of the fact that our heir-apparent was to be educated for Protestant citizenship in America, we preferred for him, as for ourselves, Sabbath meditations among the tombs to the divers temptations of the town—temptations not to be shunned except by locking him up in a windowless closet and stuffing his ears with cotton. The route usually selected, because it was quietest on the holiday that drew the populace elsewhere, granted us peeps at many interesting objects and localities.

In the vestibule of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin is the once-noted Bocca della Verità, or Mouth of Truth—a round, flat wheel, like an overgrown grindstone set on edge, a gaping mouth in the centre. The first time we visited it (it was not on the Sabbath) the Average Briton was before us, and affably volunteered an explanation of the rude mask.[223]

“You see, when a fellah was suspected of perjury—false swearing, you know—he was brought heah and made to put his harnd in those—ah!—confoundedly beastly jaws; when, if he had lied or—ah!—prevaricated, you know, the mouth would shut upon his harnd, and, in short, bit it off! The truth was, I farncy, that there was a fellah behind there with a sword or cleaver, or something of that kind, you know.”

Across the church square, which is adorned by a graceful fountain, often copied in our country, is a small, circular Temple of Vesta, dating back to the reign of Vespasian, if not to Pompey’s time. It is a tiny gem of a ruin, if ruin it can be called. The interior is a chapel, lighted by slits high in the wall. A row of Corinthian columns, but one of them broken, surrounds it; a conical tiled roof covers it. This heathen fane is a favorite subject with painters and photographers. Near it is a much older building—the Temple of Fortune—erected by Servius Tullius, remodeled during the Republic. Other houses have been built into one side, and the spaces between the Ionic columns of the other three been filled in with solid walls to make a larger chamber. It is a church now, dedicated to St. Mary of Egypt.

An alley separates this from the House of Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes. The marble or stucco coating has peeled away from the walls, but, near the eaves are fragments of rich sculpture. The Latin inscription over the doorway has reference to the honors and might of the ancient owners. Beyond these there is not a symptom of beauty or grandeur about the ugly, rectangular homestead. The Tiber rolls near, and its inundations have had much to do with the defacement of the lower part of the house. The suspension-bridge which crosses the slow yellow waters at this point, rests at one end upon piers built by[224] Scipio Africanus. From this bridge—the Ponte Rotto—the pampered body of Heliogabalus was thrown into the river. Further down the stream are the foundations of other piles, which have withstood current and freshet for two thousand years. We always paused when opposite these. Boy knew the point, and never wearied of hearing and telling—

Upon the thither bank were mustered the hosts who made Lars Porsenna “a proud man” “upon the trysting-day.”

From the same shore captive Clelia plunged into the river on horseback, and swam over to the city. A short distance above our halting-place the Cloaca Maxima, a huge, arched opening upon the brink, debouches into the river, still doing service as the chief sewer of Rome.

Macaulay does well to tell us that the current of Father Tiber was “swollen high by mouths of rain” when recounting the exploit of Horatius Coccles. The ramparts from which the Romans frowned upon their foes exist no longer, but the low-lying river gives no exalted estimate of their altitude when

“In point of fact,” as the Average Briton would say, the Tiber is a lazy, muddy water-course, not half as wide, I should say, as the Thames, and less lordly in every way. At its best, i. e., its fullest, it is never grand or dignified;[225] a sulky, unclean parent Rome should be ashamed to claim.

“How dirty Horatius’ clothes must have been when he got out!” said Boy, seriously, eying with strong disfavor the “tawny mane,” sleek to oiliness in the calm afternoon light.

Dredging-boats moor fast to the massive piers of the Pons Sublicius, better known to us as the Horatian Bridge. They were always at work upon the oozy bed of the river, to what end, we could never discover.

The Monte Testaccio, a hill less than two hundred feet high, starts abruptly out of the rough plain in front of the English Cemetery. It is composed entirely of pot-sherds, broken crockery of all kinds, covered with a slow accretion of earth thick enough to sustain scanty vegetation. Why, when, and how, the extraordinary pile of refuse grew into its present proportions, is a mystery. It is older than the Aurelian wall in whose shelter nestles the Protestant burying-ground.

The custodian, always civil and obliging, learned to know and welcome us by and by, and after answering our ring at the gate would say, smilingly:—“You know the way!” and leave us to our wanderings. Boy had permission to fill his cap with scarlet and white camellias which had fallen from the trees growing in the ground and open air at mid-winter. I might pick freely the violets and great, velvet-petaled pansies covering graves and borders. When the guardian of the grounds bade us “Good-day” at our egress, he would add to gentle chidings for the smallness of my bouquet, a bunch of roses, a handful of double purple violets or a spray of camellias. We were at home within the enclosure, to us a little sanctuary where we could be thoughtful, peaceful—hardly sad.[226]

“It is enough to make one in love with death to think of sleeping in so sweet a spot,” wrote Shelley.

“Strangers always ask first for Shelley’s tomb,” said the custodian.

It lies at the top of a steep path, directly against the hoary wall where the ivy clings and flaunts, and the green lizards play in the sunshine, so tame they scarcely stir or hide in the crevices as the visitor’s shadow touches them.

Leigh Hunt and Trelawney have made familiar the strange sequel of a wild, strange life. Overtaken upon the Mediterranean by a sudden squall, Shelley had hardly time to start from his lounging-place on deck, and thrust into his jacket-pocket the copy of Keats’ Lamia he was reading, when the yacht capsized. His body, with that of Williams, his friend and fellow-voyager, was cast on shore by the waves several days afterward, and burned in the presence of Byron, Trelawney, Hunt, and others.

“Shelley, with his Greek enthusiasm, would not have been sorry to foresee this part of his fate,” writes Hunt. Frankincense, wine and spices, together with Keats’ volume found in his pocket, open at the page he had been reading, were added to the flames.

“The yellow sand and blue sky were intensely contrasted with one another,” continues the biographer. “Marble mountains touched the air with coolness, and the flame of the fire bore away toward heaven in vigorous amplitude, waving and quivering with a brightness of inconceivable[227] beauty. It seemed as though it contained the glassy essence of vitality.”

Trelawney’s account of the ceremony is realistic and revolting. The heart remained perfect amid the glowing embers, and Trelawney accredits himself with the pious act of snatching it from the fire. It and the ashes were sent to Rome for interment “in the place which he had so touchingly described in recording its reception of Keats.”

On week-days, the little cemetery which we had to ourselves on Sabbath, is a popular resort for travelers. Instead of the holy calm that to us, had become one with the caressing sunlight and violet-breath, the old wall gives back the chatter of shrill tongues and gruff responses, as American women and English men trip and tramp along the paths in haste to “do” this one of the Roman sights. We were by Shelley’s tomb, one day, when a British matron approached, accompanied by two pretty daughters or nieces. Murray was open in her hand at “Burial-ground—English.”

“Ah, Shelley!” she cooed in the deep chest-voice affected by her class, screwing her eye-glass well in place before bringing it to bear upon the horizontal slab. “The poet and infidel, Shelley, me dears! A man of some note in his day. I went to school with his sister, I remember. Quite a nice girl, too, I assure you. Poor Shelley! it was a pity he imbibed such very-very sad notions upon certain subjects, for he really was not without ability!”

The fancy of how the wayward genius would have listened to these comments above a poet’s grave would have provoked a smile from melancholy itself.

In another quarter of the cemetery rests the mortal part of one whom we knew for ourselves, to have been a good man and a useful. Rev. N. C. Burt, formerly a Baltimore pastor, died in Rome, whither he had come for health, and[228] sleeps under heartsease and violets that are never blighted by winter.

“In so sweet a spot!” We said it aloud, in gathering for his wife a cluster of white violets growing above his heart.

Death and the grave cannot be made less fearful than in this garden of the blest:—

Keats is buried in the old cemetery, of which the new is an adjunct. It is bounded at the back by the Aurelian wall; on two sides, by a dry moat, and the fourth by the pyramid of Cestius. An arched bridge crosses the narrow moat, and the gate is kept locked. On the side of the arch next his grave is a profile head of Keats in basso-relievo; beneath it, this acrostic—

The tomb is an upright head-stone, simple but massive, with the well-known inscription:—

A marble bar runs around the sides and foot, and the space enclosed is literally covered with violets. An English lady pays the expense of their renewal as fast as they die, or are plucked. They must bloom forever upon the grave of Keats. So runs her order.

The custodian added to those he gave us, a rose and a sprig of a fragrant shrub that grew by the head-stone, and wondered politely when I knelt to pick the daisies smiling in the grass.

“I gather and I shall preserve them,” I explained, “because when Keats was dying, he said—‘I feel the daisies growing over me!’”

Daisies thronged the place all winter, and blossomed as abundantly in the sward on the other side of the moat. The most distinct mind-picture I have of those Sabbath afternoon walks and talks among and beside the dead shows me the broken battlements of the wall, the ivy streaming through the useless loop-holes; the flowery slope of the graves down to the moat, on the other side of which lies Keats under his fragrant coverlet; the solemn old pyramid casting a shadow upon turf and tomb, and in the foreground Boy skipping over the grass, “telling himself a story,” very softly because the silent sleepers are so near, or busily picking daisies to add to the basket of flowers that are to fill our salle with perfume until we come again.

“So sweet a spot!”

[230]

CHAPTER XVII.
With the Skeletons.

IN the Piazza Barberini is the Fountain of the Triton by Bernini, one of the least objectionable of his minor works. A chubby, sonsie fellow is the young Triton, embrowned by wind, water and sun, seated in a shell, supported by four dolphins and blowing into a conch with a single eye to business that should, but does not act as a salutary example to the tribe of beggars, models and gossips who congregate around him.

From the right of the spacious square leads the street on which stands the Palace of the Barberini,—I had nearly written the Bee-hive, so intimate grows the association between the powerful family and these busy stingers to one who has studied the Barberini monuments, erected by them while living, and to them when defunct. I have consistently and resolutely refrained, thus far, from plying my readers with art-criticisms—fore-ordained to be skipped—of pictures and statues which do not interest those who have never seen them, and fail to satisfy those who have. I mention the picture of Beatrice Cenci by Guido Reni because it is the most wonderful portrait extant. Before seeing it, I fairly detested the baby-face, with a towel wound about the head, that looked slyly backward at me from the window of every print-shop. Of the principal[231] feature so raved about by Byronic youths and bilious school-girls, it might be said,—

The other lineaments would have been passable in a Paris doll. Believing these caricatures—or some of them—to be tolerable copies of the original, we lived in Rome four months; made ourselves pretty well acquainted with the half-dozen good pictures among the host of poor ones in the Palazzo Doria, and the choice gems in the small Academia di San Luca; we had seen the Aurora of the Rospiglioso, the Antinöus upon the mantel in Villa Albani; Venus Victrix and Daphne in the Borghese, and the unrivaled frescoes upon the walls and ceilings of the Palazzo Farnese, besides going, on an average, once a week to the Capitoline and Vatican museums;—yet never been persuaded by friends wiser or less prejudiced than we, to enter the meagrely supplied art-gallery of the Barberini Palace. When we did go it was with a languor of curiosity clogging our steps and dulling our perceptions, which found no stimulus in the two outer apartments of the suite. There were the usual proportion of Holy Families, Magdalenes, and Portraits, to an unusual number of which conscientious Baedeker had affixed interrogation-points casting worse than doubt upon their origin;—Christ among the Doctors—which it is difficult to imagine was painted by Dürer, but easy to believe was “done” in five days; Raphael’s Fornarina, a shade more brazen and a thought less handsome than the bar-maid of the same title, in the Uffizzi at Florence, and so plainly what she was, one is sorry to trace Raphael’s name upon her bracelet. Then the guide suddenly turned toward the light[232] a small, shabby frame hung upon a hinge—and a soul looked at us!

“The very saddest picture ever painted or conceived. It involved an unfathomable depth of sorrow, the sense of which came to the observer by a sort of intuition.... It is infinitely heart-breaking to meet her glance and to feel that nothing can be done to help or comfort her; neither does she ask help or comfort, knowing the hopelessness of the case better than we do.”

Hawthorne comprehended and expressed the spirit of the composition (if it be a fancy sketch, as latter-day iconoclasts insinuate), and the language of the doomed girl’s eyes. Even he has told but a part of the story; given but a hint of the nature of the charm that holds cool critic and careless stroller spell-bound before this little square of canvas. There is sorcery in it pen nor tongue can define. It haunted and tormented us until the possession was provoking. After coming many times to experience the same thrill—intense to suffering if we gazed long;—after dreaming of her by day and by night, and shunning, more disgustfully than ever, the burlesques in the shops—“the poor girl with the blubbered eyes,”—we tried to forget her. It was weak to be thus swayed by a twenty-inch painting; unworthy of people who fearlessly pronounced Perugino stiff, and had not been overwhelmed to rapturous incoherence by the sprawling anatomical specimens left by Michael Angelo to the guild of art-lovers under the name of the “Last Judgment.” Saying and feeling thus,—we took every opportunity of slipping without premeditation, or subsequent confession into the Barberini Palace;—finally leaving the picture and Rome, no better able to account for our fascination than after our first grudging visit.

Returning to the square of the Triton after one of these bootless excursions, we ascended a short avenue to the[233] plain old church of the Capuchins. A Barberini founded this also, and the convent next door,—a cardinal, and brother to Urban VIII. He made less use of the bees and Bernini in his edifices than did his kinsman. That he had a juster appreciation of true genius, was evinced by his hospitable attentions to Milton when he was in Rome. Church annals record, moreover, the circumstance that Cardinal Barberini availed himself no further of the family wealth and aggrandizement than to give liberally to the poor and endow this church and monastery. He is buried beneath the high altar, and a modest stone bears the oft-borrowed epitaph—“Hic jacet pulvis, cinis, et nihil!”

There are famous paintings in this church,—the chapel nearest the entrance containing Guido Reni’s “St. Michael,” while upon the walls of the next but one is a fine fresco of the “Death of St. Francis,” by Domenichino. The crypts are, however, the popular attraction of the place.

The burial-vaults of the Capuchin brotherhood are not vaults at all in the sense of subterranean chambers. They are four in number, of fair size, open on one side to the corridor which is lighted by grated windows. The inner walls are banks and rows of dried skeletons, whole and dismembered.

“Does it take long to upholster an apartment in this style?” asked Mark Twain, contemplating the decorations of the crypt.

The wicked witticism sounded in our ears in his exquisite drawl, as, amazed to discover how slightly shocked we were, we raised curious eyes to the geometrical figures traced in raised lines upon the ceiling. These are composed of the small bones of the human form, skillfully assorted and matched. Pillars and niches are built of thigh, leg and arm bones. Each niche has its skeleton, stayed[234] in an upright posture by a cord knotted about his waist, securing him to a hook behind. All wear the costume of the order;—a butternut-colored gown, the cowl framing the skull. Some tiny skeletons lie upon compact beds of bones close to the ceiling.

“Children!” we said, in French, to the guide. “How is that?”

“Children of the Barberini,” was the answer. “Therefore, entitled to a place here. Our founder was a Barberini.”

“And were they buried for a while, and then disturbed—dug up?”

“Why not?”

He was a stalwart fellow, with bare, horny feet; a rusty beard falling below his breast; and a surly face, that did not relax at these questions, nor at our comments, in our own tongue, upon what we saw.

The floor of the chambers is light, mellow soil, like that of lately weeded and raked flower-beds. To carry out the conceit, rows of sticks, labeled, were stuck along one side, that might mark seed-rows. So much of the original soil as remains there was brought from Jerusalem. In each grave a deceased monk slumbers twenty-five years, then makes room for the next comer, and is, himself, promoted, intact or piece-meal, as architectural needs demand—

“To a place in the dress, or the family circle,” supplied Prima, with praiseworthy gravity.

Caput, usually an exemplar in the matter of decorum, was now tempted to a quotation as irreverent as the saucy girl’s comment.

“‘Each of the good friars in his turn, enjoys the luxury of a consecrated bed, attended with the slight drawback of being forced to get up long before day-break, as it were, and make room for another lodger.’”[235]

“Miriam’s model, known to the friars as Brother Antonio, was buried in the farthest recess,” said I, leading the way to it. “Do you remember that he lay in state before the altar up-stairs when she and Donatello visited the church? And how the guide explained that a brother, buried thirty years before, had risen to give him place? That is probably the ejected member.”

The worthy designated wore an air of grim jollity, of funereal festivity, indescribable and irresistible. Dangling by the middle from his hempen girdle, his head on one shoulder, his cowl awry, he squinted at us out of its shadow with a leer that would have convicted of drunkenness anybody less holy than a barefoot friar, and less staid of habit than a skeleton of fifty years’ standing. Struggling to maintain composure, I accosted the sacristan. He was standing with his back to us, looking out of the window, and had certainly not seen our smiles.

“Which of these was disinterred last?”

He pointed to one whose robe was less mouldy than the rest, and upon whose chin yet bristled the remnant of a sandy beard.

“Which was his grave?”

Another silent gesture.

“What is the date of the latest interment?”

“1869,” incisively.

“Have there been no deaths in the convent since then?”

“Yes!” The disdainful growl was in good English. “We bury no more in this ground. Victor Emmanuel forbids it!”

An Italian murmur in the depths of his frowsy beard was not a benediction upon the tyrant. Members of monastic orders cursed him more deeply in private, as they would have banned him openly, by bell and by book, had they dared, when he commanded, that same year, the conscription[236] of young men for the Italian army to extend to the native-born neophytes and pupils in convents and church-schools.

“Vittorio Emmanuele!” The musical name was very clearly printed at the foot of a placard, glazed and hung in the vestibule of the Collegio Romano. Guide-books of a date anterior to that enunciated so venomously by our Capuchin, in describing the museum attached to this institution, were fain to add:—“The museum can be seen on Sundays only, 10-11 o’clock, A.M. Ladies not admitted.”

By the grace of the printed proclamation, throwing open the collection of antiquities and library to well-behaved persons of both sexes, we passed the unguarded doors, mounted the stone staircase, dirty as are all Roman stairs, and were, without let or hindrance, in the midst of what we wished to examine and from which there is no conceivable reason for excluding women.

Most of the Catacomb inscriptions that could be removed without injury to the tablets bearing them, have been deposited elsewhere for safe-keeping and more satisfactory inspection than is consistent with the darkness of the underground cemeteries. The shelves, arranged like those in modern vaults, stripped of the stone fronts that once concealed their contents, are still partially filled with fine ashes—sacred dust, mixed with particles from the friable earth walling and flooring the labyrinth of narrow passages. Fragments of sculptured marble lie where they have fallen from broken altars or memorial slabs, and in the wider spaces used as oratories, where burial-rites were performed, and, in times of sorest tribulation, other religious services held, there are traces of frescoes in faded, but still distinguishable colors.

In the Collegio Romano are garnered most interesting[237] specimens of the mural tablets brought from catacombs and columbaria. The Christian Museum of San Giovanni in Laterano embraces a more extensive collection, but in the less spacious corridors and rooms of the Collegio, one sees and studies in comfort and quiet that are not to be had in the more celebrated halls. In the apartment devoted to Christian antiquities are many small marble coffers, sculptured more or less elaborately, taken from columbaria. These were receptacles for the literal ashes of the departed. They are out of keeping with our belief that the early Christians regarded incremation with dread as destructive, in the popular mind, of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. They committed their beloved dead tenderly to the keeping of the earth, with a full recognition of the analogy between this act and seed-planting, so powerfully set forth by St. Paul. Else, why the Catacombs? These cinerary caskets, whether once tenanted by Christian or pagan dust, merit careful notice. They are usually about twelve or fourteen inches in height, and two or three less in width. The lid slopes gently up from the four sides to form a peaked centre like a square house-roof, with pointed turrets or ears at the corners. The covers were firmly cemented in place when deposited in the columbaria. We saw one or two thus secured to protect the contents, but all have probably been broken open, at one time or another, in quest of other treasure than relics precious to none save loving survivors. The lids of many have been lost.

The mural slabs were arranged against the wall as high as a man could reach. The lettering—much of it irregularly and unskillfully done—is more distinct than epitaphs not thirty years old, in our country church-yards. The inscriptions are often ungrammatical and so spelt as to betray the illiterate workman. But there is no doubt what[238] were the belief and trust of those who set them up in the blackness and damps of a Necropolis whose existence was scarcely suspected by their persecutors.

“In Christo, in pace,” is the language of many, the meaning of all. It may be only a cross rudely cut into soft stone; it is often a lamb, sometimes carrying a cross; a dove, a spray meant for olive, in its mouth—dual emblem of peace and the “rest that remaineth.” The Greek Alpha and Omega, repeated again and again, testify that these hunted and smitten ones had read John’s glorious Revelation. On all sides, we saw the, to heathen revilers, mystical cypher, early adopted as a sign and seal by the Christians, a capital P, transfixing a St. Andrew’s Cross.

From one stained little slab, we copied an inscription entire and verbatim.

	Puer Decessit Nomine Dulcis’us	Qui vixit Annos V Mensis VI

Above Benjamin Franklin’s baby-daughter, buried beside him in the almost forgotten corner of an intra-mural graveyard, we can, with pains, read—“The dearest child that ever was.” We thought of it and of another “child” whose brief, beautiful life is summed up in words as apt and almost as few:—

[239]O, holy Nature! the throbbing, piercèd heart of parenthood! the same in the breast of the mother who laid her boy to sleep, until the morning, in the starless night of the Catacombs, as within the Rachel who weeps to-day beside the coffin of her first, or latest-born!

We had seen the wall in Nero’s barracks from which the famous “Graffito Blasphemo” was taken, about ten years before. To behold the sketch itself was one of our errands to this Museum. It is a square of cement, of adamantine hardness, in a black frame, and hangs in a conspicuous position at the end of the principal corridor. The story, as gathered from the caricature and the place in which it was discovered, is probably something like this:—A party of Nero’s soldiery, gathered in a stall or barrack belonging to the Imperial household, amused themselves by ridiculing one of their number who had been converted to Christianity. Paul was, about that time, dwelling in his own hired house in Rome, or as a prisoner awaiting trial or execution. A part of the richly-sculptured marble bar indicating the Tribune in the Basilica Jovis, before which he was tried, is still standing, not a bow-shot from where the lounging guards made a jest of their comrade’s new faith. One of them drew, with the point of his sword, or other sharp instrument, upon the plastered wall, a rough caricature, representing a man with the head of an ass, hanging upon a cross. His hands are bound to the transverse arms, his feet rest upon a shorter cross-piece fastened to the upright beam. From this position, the head looks down upon a small figure below, who raises his hand in a gesture of adoration more intelligible to the pagan of that date than to us. A jumble of Greek and Latin characters, crowded between and under the figures, points the ribald satire, “Alexamenos adores his God.” Nero went to his account. The very site of his Golden House is a matter of dispute[240] among archæologists who have bared the foundations of the palace of the Cæsars. But after eighteen hundred years, when the rubbish was dug out from the soldiers’ quarters, there appeared the blasphemer’s sketch, as distinct as if drawn at last week’s debauch.

From the observatory of the Collegio Romano a signal is given daily, at twelve o’clock, for the firing of the noon cannon from the Castle of San Angelo. As we entered the Piazza di Spagna on our return, the dull boom shook the air. The streets were full of people, the day being a fine one in early Spring, and, as happens every day in the year, every man, from the cocchière upon his box, to the élégant strolling along the shady side of the square to digest his eleven o’clock breakfast, looked at his watch. Not that the Romans are a punctual people, or moderately industrious. “The man who makes haste, dies early,” is one of their mottoes. “Dolce far niente” belongs to them by virtue of tongue and practice. “Lazzaroni” should be spelled with one z, and include, according to the sense thus conveyed to English ears, tens of thousands besides professional beggars.

There is no pleasanter place in which to be lazy than in this bewitching old city. Our own life there was an idyl, rounded and pure, such as does not come twice to the same mortal. The climate, they would have had us believe was the bane of confiding strangers, was to us all blessedness. Not one of us was ill for a day while we resided in the cozy “appartamento” in Via San Sebastiano; nor was there a death, that winter, among American visitors and residents in Rome. For myself, the soft air was curative to the sore lungs; a delicious sedative that quieted the nerves and brought the boon, long and vainly sought—Sleep! My cough left me within a month, not to return while we remained in Italy. We made the natural mistake[241] of tarrying too late in the Spring, unwilling to leave scenes so fair, fraught with such food for Memory and for Imagination. After mid-April, the noon-day heat was debilitating, and I suffered appreciable diminution of vigor.

I do not apologize for these personal details. Knowing how eagerly invalids, and those who have invalid friends, crave information respecting the means that have restored health to others, I write frankly of my own experience in quest of the lost treasure. It would be strange if I could think of Rome and our home there without felt and uttered gratitude. Convalescence was, with me, less a rally of energies to battle with disease and weakness, than a gradual return, by ways of pleasantness and paths of peace, to physical tranquillity, and through rest, to strength. I hardly comprehended, for awhile, that I was really getting better; that I might be well again in time. I only knew that to breathe was no longer pain, nor to live labor that taxed the powers of body and spirit to the utmost. There was so much to draw me away from the contemplation of my own griefs and ailments that I could have supposed the new existence a delusion, my amendment a trick of fancy. I forgot to think of and watch myself. I had all winter but one return—and that a slight one, induced by unusual exertion—of the hæmorrhages that had alarmed us, from time to time, for two years preceding our departure from America. The angel of healing had touched me, and I knew it not.

One morning I had gone, as was my custom, to a window in the salon, so soon as I left my bed-chamber; thrown it open and leaned upon the balcony-railing to taste the freshness of the new day. We clung to our pillows, as a family rule, until the sonorous cry of the vendor of a morning journal arose to our drowsy ears.

“Popolo Ro-ma-a-no!”[242]

“There is Old Popolo!” Boy would shout from his crib. “It is eight o’clock!”

It was half-past eight on the day of which I speak, and the shops were not yet open; the Piazza deserted but for a flock of goats and the attendant contadini who milked them from one door to another for their customers. Birds were twittering among the trees in the Pincian Gardens upon my left; there was a lingering flush of pink in the sky that would be, within an hour and until evening, of the “incomparable sweet” blue, American heavens put on after one thunder-shower, and before another blackens them. In Italy nobody calls the exquisite depth of color “a weather-breeder.” A church-bell was ringing so far away that it was a musical pulse, not a chime. Down the Via della Croce to my right, over half a mile of tiled roofs, round and distinct in the dry, pure atmosphere, towered the Castle of San Angelo—the bronze angel on the summit sheathing the sword of pestilence, as Pope Gregory affirmed he beheld him at the approach to the Tiber of the penitential procession headed by the pontiff. As the goats turned into the Via del Babuino, the faint tinkle of their bells was blent with the happy laugh of a young contadina. I quaffed slow, delicious draughts of refreshment that seemed to touch and lift the heart; that lulled the brain to divinest dreaming.

Then and there, I had a revelation; bowed my soul before my Angel of Annunciation, I should not die, but live. Then and thus, I accepted the conviction that, apart from the intellectual delight I drew from our present life—the ministry of sky and air, of all goodly sights and sounds and the bright-winged fancies that were a continual ecstasy, was to my body—Health! That hour I thanked God and took courage!

[243]

CHAPTER XVIII.
“Paul—a Prisoner.”

JUST outside of the Ostian Gate is the pyramid of Caius Cestius—Tribune, Prætor and Priest, who died thirty years before Christ was born, and left a fortune to be expended in glorification of himself and deeds. The monument is one hundred and twenty feet high, nearly one hundred feet square at the base, built of brick and overlaid with marble slabs. Modeled after the Egyptian mausoleums, and unaccountably spared by Goth and Pope, it stands to-day, after the more merciful wear and tear of twenty centuries, entire, and virtually unharmed. Alexander VII., when he had the rubbish cleared away from the base, also ordered a door to be cut in the side. The body, or ashes of Cestius had been deposited in the centre of the pyramid before its completion, and hermetically inclosed by the stupendous walls. What was done with the handful of dust that had been august and a member of the College of Epulones, appointed to minister by sacrifices to the gods, history does not relate. The great pile contains one empty chamber contemptible in dimensions by comparison with the superficies of the exterior. The walls of this retain signs of frescoes, designed for the delectation of the dead noble, and such ghostly visitants as were able to penetrate the marble facing and twenty feet of brick laid with Roman cement.[244] The custodian of the English burial-ground has the key of Alexander’s door, and shows the vault for a consideration. Nobody goes to see it a second time.

The Ostian Gate is now the Porta S. Paolo, and is a modern structure. Here begins the Via Ostiensis, in St. Paul’s life-time, the thronged road to Rome’s renowned sea-port. Ostia is now a wretched fishing-village of less than one hundred inhabitants. Over the intervening country broods malaria, winter and summer. Conybeare and Howson have told us in words that read like the narrative of an eye-witness, how the route looked when, “through the dust and tumult of that busy throng, the small troop of soldiers”—having Paul in charge—“threaded their way under the bright sky of an Italian midsummer.”

The silence and desolation of the Campagna on the February day of our excursion to Tre Fontane, or Aquas Salvias,—the Tyburn of the Romans under the Emperors, were as depressing as the seen shadow of Death. The sunlight brought out warm umber tints upon the gray sides of the pyramid. Children, ragged and happy, rolled in the dust and basked in the sun before the mean houses on the wayside. Women in short, russet skirts, blue or red bodices, with gay handkerchiefs, folded square, laid upon the top of the head and hanging down the back of the neck, nursed brown babies and spun flax in open doors, or sitting flat upon the ground. Men drank and smoked in and about the wine-shops, talking with such vehemence of gesticulation as would frighten those who did not know that the subject of debate was no more important than the price of macaroni, or the effect of yesterday’s rain upon the growing artichokes.

But, from the moment our short procession of three carriages emerged from the city-gate and took the road to[245] Ostia, the most mercurial spirit amongst us felt the weight as of a remembered sorrow. We had seen the opening in the floor of the lower chapel of S. Pietro in Montorio, where S. Peter’s cross had stood, and the golden sand in which the foot of it was imbedded; groped down the steps of the Mamertine Prison, and felt our way by torchlight around the confines of the cell in which both of the Great Apostles, it is said, perhaps truly, were incarcerated up to the day of their martyrdom. We had surveyed the magnificence, without parallel even in Rome, of the Basilica of St Paul’s Without the Walls; the very sepulchre of St Paul, the ostensible reason for this affluence of ecclesiastical grandeur, and believed exactly as much and as little as we pleased of what the Church told us of localities, and authorities in support of the authenticity of these. But the evidence that St. Paul was beheaded near Rome, in Via Ostiensis, was irrefragable. There was no ground for cavil in the statement, sustained by venerable traditions, that he perished at Tre Fontane.

Half-way between the Gate of St. Paul and the Basilica, is a squalid chapel, the entrance rather lower than the street, with an indifferent bas-relief over the door, of two men locked in one another’s arms. Here—according to the apocryphal epistle of St. Dionysius the Areopagite to Timothy—Peter and Paul, who, Jerome states, were executed upon the same day, parted. Besides the bas-relief, the tablet over the lintel records their farewell words:

“And Paul said unto Peter,—‘Peace be with thee, Foundation of the Church, Shepherd of the Flock of Christ!’”

“And Peter said unto Paul,—‘Go in peace, Preacher of Good Tidings, and Guide of the Salvation of the Just!’”[246]

We were in no mood to make this one of the stations of our pious journey. Nor did we stop at the Basilica, the dingy outside of which offers no promise of the superb interior. Beyond the church spread the sad-colored Campagna, irresponsive to the sunshine, unbroken save by leafless coppices and undulations where the surface rolled into hillocks that caught no light, and into hollows of deeper gloom. A few peasants’ huts upon the edge of a common, and mounds of shapeless ruins, are all the signs of human habitation, past or present. It is unutterably mournful—this “wilderness that moans at the gates” of the seven-hilled city. The sun was oppressive in the unshaded road, although the sky was filmy, and the horses moved sluggishly. Ours was a funeral cortége, following the figure loving fancies set before us in the lonely highway. An old man, enfeebled by imprisonment, by “weariness and painfulness, by watchings often, by hunger and thirst, by fastings often, by cold and nakedness,” yet pressing forward, ready and joyful to be offered. We had read, last night, in anticipation of this pilgrimage, his farewell letter to his adopted son; noted, as we had not in previous perusals, his confident expectation of this event; and the yearning of the great, tender heart over this dearest of earthly friends,—his desire to see him once more before his departure breaking in upon his clearest views of Heaven and the Risen Lord. It was the backward glance of a father from the top of the hill that will hide the group of watching children from his eyes.

“Henceforth, there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord—the righteous Judge—shall give me at that day.”

(This was after he had been brought before Nero the first time, where—“no man stood with me, but all men forsook me.”)[247]

“And not unto me only, but unto all them also that love His appearing.

“Do thy diligence to come shortly unto me!”

And, again:—“The Lord shall deliver me from every evil work, and will preserve me unto His heavenly kingdom. To whom be glory forever and ever! Amen!

“Do thy diligence to come to me before winter!”

He had not thought his end so near, then. The likelihood is that he was hurried to the judgment the second time, and sentence speedily pronounced. He may have been still bewildered by this haste when he walked with his escort, along the road to Ostia. It was June, and the sun beat fiercely upon his head. After the cool twilight of the dungeon, the air must have scorched like furnace-vapors. He would be very weary before the three miles beyond the gates were accomplished, unless the rapturous certainty that he would, that very day, stand face-to-face with Him who also suffered without the gate, lightened the burden of heavy limbs and fainting flesh.

A high wall, rising abruptly from barren fields, incloses three churches, a small monastery, a flower and kitchen-garden, and some rows of thrifty Eucalyptus trees. Thus much we saw, through the grating of the gate, while awaiting the answer to our ring. A monk admitted us. The Convent was made over to the Order of La Trappe in 1868. Twelve brethren, by the help of Eucalyptus and the saints, live here, defying isolation and malaria. Their rules are strict, enjoining many fastings and prayers. They wear sandals instead of shoes, and have, therefore, the shuffling gait inseparably connected, in our minds, with pietistic pretension. A man in loose slippers recalls the impression to this day. The habit of the order is brown cloth, and is worn day and night, without change, for three years, when it is laid aside—or drops off of its own weight[248] and threadbareness—for a new one. Our monk had donned his—we estimated, charitably—just two years and eleven months anterior to our acquaintance with him, and eaten onions three times every day. He was a social brother, alert and garrulous, and shortly grew more gallant to the young ladies of our party than became his asceticism and his paucity of front teeth. He stared open-mouthed—consequently, disagreeably—at our refusal to enter the church nearest the gate.

“It is the church of Santa Maria Scala Cœli!” he represented, earnestly. “Twelve thousand Christian martyrs, who built the Thermæ of Diocletian, slumber beneath it. Holy St. Bernard had here a dream of angels carrying souls up a ladder from purgatory to heaven.”

“Very interesting!” we acknowledged, suavely. “But our time is short!”

The brother regretted. “But messieurs and mesdames will not pass the second door! The church of Saints Vincenzo and Anastasia. Very antique, founded in 625. One sees there, still, frescoes celebrating the deaths of these holy men, by cooking upon a gridiron and by strangling. Mesdemoiselles will enjoy looking upon these.”

Unmoved by his tempting lures, we passed on to the third, last, and evidently, in his opinion, the least attractive of the three edifices—San Paolo alle tre Fontane. He followed, discontented, but always obsequious.

The vestibule walls are adorned with bas-reliefs of St. Paul’s execution in the presence of Roman guards. The pavement of the church is a large and fine mosaic, found in the ruins of ancient Ostia. The subject is the Four Seasons, and the monk, checking us when we would have trodden upon it, threw himself into a studied transport of admiration. There was not another mosaic like it in Italy. Contemplate the brilliant dyes! the graceful contour of[249] the figures! Artists from all lands flocked to the Abbey delle tre Fontane, entreating permission from the Superior to copy it.

We broke the thread impatiently from the reel. We were here to see where St. Paul was beheaded.

“Vraiment?” politely, smothering his chagrin. “But, certainly! Upon that block in the corner!”

It was a pillar, not a block, and marble, not wooden. An imposition so bare-faced did not pass unchallenged. We argued that the pillar was modern in workmanship, and too clean. No blood-stains disfigured its whiteness.

“There had been blood-stains without doubt. Beyond question, also, the kisses and tears of the faithful had erased them.”

But it was absurd, unheard of, to talk of decapitation upon a stone block, waiving objections to the height and shape of this. The axe, in severing the head, would be spoiled utterly by contact with the hard surface beneath.

“So I should have said, Monsieur. It is the dictate of le bon sens, Madame! But me—I am here to repeat what the Church instructs me to say. When I arrive at this so holy place, I find the pillar here, as you see it—protected by an iron rail from destruction at the hands and lips of devotees. I am told, ‘It is the pillar on which was cut off the head of St. Paul the Blessed Martyr.’ Who am I, a poor lay-brother, that I should doubt the decree of the Church?”

Seeing absolution in our faces after this frank confession, he entered, with interest, upon the history of the three fountains enclosed in as many marble altars, ranged at one side of the church. In the front of each is an opening large enough to admit the hand, arm, and a drinking-cup kept ready for dipping. Above each aperture is a head of Paul in bas-relief. In the first, the eyes are open,[250] the features instinct with life. The second portrays the relaxed lineaments of a dying man, the third, the rigidity of death in closed eyelids and sunken cheeks. Keeping close to the letter of the lesson he had been taught, our unsavory cicerone related that the Apostle’s head made three bounds upon the earth after its separation from the body, and that at each touch a fountain had burst forth. To establish the truth of the miracle to unbelievers in all ages, no less than to kindle the enthusiasm of true worshippers at this shrine, the water of the first spring is still warm; of the second, tepid; of the third, ice-cold.

“Will Mademoiselle,” turning to the young girl near him, and grimacing in what was meant to be a fascinating fashion—“Will Mademoiselle vouchsafe to taste the healing waters? For that they are a veritable catholicon is attested by many cures. Or, is it that Mademoiselle is never ill? Her blooming cheeks would say, ‘No.’ Ah, then, so much the better! A draught of the miraculous fountains—accompanied, of course, by an ‘Ave Maria,’ is efficacious in procuring a husband. May he be un bon Catholique!”

But one of the company tasted the waters, and she affirmed roundly—in English, for our benefit, in French for the friar’s—that the temperature of all three was the same.

“That is because you have not faith!” chuckled the lay-brother, throwing what was left in the cup upon the Four Seasons. “The Catholic husband will cure all that!”

His cackling laugh was odious, his torrent of talk wearisome. We hurried to escape them by quitting the church and proffering the gate-fee, a franc for each person. At sight of the money, he ceased laughing and began to whine. The fees were the property of the Convent. For himself,[251] he had no perquisites save such as he earned from the sale of Eucalyptus syrup. Unlocking the door of a store-house, he showed us shelves crowded with bottles of the elixir, prepared by the brethren, and used freely by them in the sickly season. Formerly, we were informed, no one could live here even in winter. The place was a miasmatic swamp, the churches and abbey were almost in ruins. But the monks of La Trappe enjoyed in an extraordinary degree (the whine rising into a sanctimonious sing-song) the favor of Our Lady and the saints. They stayed here, the year around, encouraged by His Holiness the Pope in the cultivation of the Eucalyptus, chiefly, that the elixir might be bestowed upon the contadini who ventured to live in the pestilential district, and charitable forestieri, (foreigners) unused to the climate. We assured him, coldly, that we would not buy medicine we did not need, and satisfied his benevolent intentions us-ward, by paying him for some flowers and pieces of marble we brought away as souvenirs. We left him standing in the gateway, grinning at the young ladies, and breathing so hard that we imagined we smelt garlic and sour wine a hundred yards down the road.

“A filthy cur!” uttered Caput, and nobody said him nay.

Even the demon of malaria might scorn such prey.

We were told by those qualified by long residence in Italy to speak advisedly concerning these matters, that, while the priesthood of that country comprises many men eminent for learning, the mass of minor ecclesiastics, especially in the country, are ignorant and vulgar beyond our powers of credence. For ages, the monastic orders have been a swarm of caterpillars, battening upon the fat of the land, and blighting, while they devoured. To the King, who let the light into their nests, clearing out many,[252] and leaving in the nest only those who were too infirm to begin a work, so unfamiliar to them all, as earning their livelihood—the thanks of civilization and philanthropy are due.

So harshly had our experiences in the church jarred upon the mood in which we had approached it, that we could not, as it were, get back to St. Paul that day. We deferred the pilgrimage to his supposed tomb until we were in better tune.

Tradition—“the elder sister of history”—asserts that as devout men carried Stephen to his burial, Paul’s friends and converts, including persons of influence in the city, even some attachés of the Imperial household, took charge of his remains. It is interesting to note the names of certain disciples, who were, we know, of that faithful band. Clement, of Rome, whose writings and whose Basilica remain with us unto the present day; Claudia, a British Princess, a Christian convert, and the protégée of an Emperor; Pudens, her husband, whose daughter and hers was the foundress of the primitive Cathedral of Rome.

This church—I digress to state—is now joined to a convent in Via Quatro Fontane. It occupies the site of the house of the daughters of Pudens—Prudentia and Praxedes. Or—what is more likely,—it was an enlargement of the family chapel—or “Basilica.” The repute of these sisters, the children of the noble pair who were Paul’s fellow-laborers, has descended to us by more trustworthy channels than those through which church-legends are generally transmitted. In the early persecutions their house was a refuge for the fugitive, a hospital for the wounded and dying,—a sacred morgue for bodies cast forth from torture-chamber and scaffold, to be eaten of dogs and crows. In one of the chapels of the old church is a mosaic of these sisters of mercy, pressing sponges soaked[253] in martyrs’ blood into a golden urn. Another depicts them in the presence of their enthroned Lord, and, standing near, Paul and Peter. The women hold between them the martyr’s crown, earned for themselves by fidelity to the Faith and friends of their parents.

One of Paul’s disciples was a Roman matron named Lucina, who—to return to our tradition—gained possession of the Apostle’s lifeless body, and buried it in her own catacomb or vineyard in the vicinity of the Ostian Gate. Eusebius says the catacomb was shown in his day; Chrysostom, that “the grave of St. Paul is well known.”

“St. Cyprian”—writes Macduff—“is the interpreter, in a single sentence, of the sentiment of the faithful in those ages: ‘To the bodies of those who depart by the outlet of a glorious death, let a more zealous watchfulness be given.’ Can we believe that those who by means of rude sarcophagi and inscriptions in the vaults of the Catacombs, took such pains to mark the dormitory of their sainted dead, would omit rearing a befitting memorial in the case of their illustrious spiritual chief?”

From the same catacomb have been unearthed inscriptions belonging to the Pauline era. The story was so thoroughly believed in the reign of Constantine that he built the original Basilica of St. Paul’s above this catacomb, and placed the bones of Paul, or relics supposed to be his, within the crypt. Since that date, this church has had them in ward.

With these credentials fresh in our memories, we took advantage of a very mild morning whose influences somewhat tempered the chill of aisles and chapels, to make a prolonged examination of San Paolo-fuori-le-mura—St. Paul’s-beyond-the-Wall. The outside is, as I have intimated, tamely ugly. He who passes it by will remember[254] it as the least comely of the hundred unsightly churches in and about the city. From the moment one enters the immense nave,—stands between the columns of yellowish alabaster, presented by Mehemet Ali, which are the prelude to a double rank of eighty monoliths of polished granite, cut from the Simplon,—to his exit, the spectacle is one of bewildering magnificence. Macduff likens the floor to a “sea of glass,” nor is the figure overstrained. The illusion is heightened by the reflection upon the highly-polished surface of the brilliant tints of the series of mosaic medallions, each the portrait of a pope, set in the upper part of the wall and girdling, in a sweep of splendor, nave and transept. The blending and shimmer of the gorgeous colors upon the marble mirror are like the tremulous motion of a lake just touched by the breeze. The costliest marbles, such as we are used to see wrought into small ornaments for the homes of the wealthy, are here employed with lavishness that makes tales of oriental luxury altogether credible, and the Arabian Nights plausible. Alabaster, malachite, rosso and verde-antique are wrought into columns and altars, and each chapel has its especial treasure of sculpture and painting. The pictures in the Chapel of St. Stephen, representing the trial and death of the martyr, would, by themselves, make the church noteworthy.

Surrounded by this inconceivable wealth of splendor, rises a baldacchino surmounted by a dome, supported by four pillars of red alabaster, also the gift of the Turkish Pacha. An angel stands at each corner of the canopy. Within this miniature temple is another, and an older, being the altar-canopy, saved from the fire that, in 1823, destroyed the greater portion of the ancient building. Under this, again, is the marble altar—crimson and emerald—enshrining it is said, the bones of St.[255] Paul. The inscription runs along the four sides of the baldacchino:

A railing, inclosing an area of perhaps a dozen yards, prevents too close an approach to the altar.

“You must first have a permesso from the Pope, or, at least, from a Cardinal,” said a passing verger to whom we communicated our desire to go in. Discovering, upon trial, that the gate was not locked, we felt strongly inclined to make an independent sally, but were withheld by a principle to which we endeavored to be uniformly true,—namely,—obedience to law, and what the usages of the time and place decreed to be order. A priest, belonging, we guessed from his dress, to a higher order than most of those we had encountered in our tour of the building, knelt on the low step surrounding the railing, and while my companions strolled on, I loitered near the forbidden gate, one eye upon him who prayed at the shrine of “Sancte Paule Apostole.” When he arose, I accosted him, having had leisure in which to study a diplomatic address. I chanced to have in the pocket of my cloak a box of Roman pearls and other trinkets I had bought that forenoon. Producing this, as a prefatory measure, and beginning with the conventional, “Pardon, Monsieur!” I informed him in the best French at my command, that I was a stranger and an American—facts he must have gleaned before I had dropped three words;—that, although not a Roman Catholic, I desired to lay these trifles upon the tomb of St. Paul. Not out of custom or superstition, but as I might pick a flower from, or touch, in greeting, the grave of a friend.[256]

He had a noble, gentle face and hearkened kindly to my petition.

“I comprehend!” he said, taking the beads from my hand, and, beckoning up a sacristan, motioned him to open the gate.

“You can enter, Madame!” he continued, with a courteous inclination of the head.

I followed the two; stood by while they bent the knee to the altar-step and made the sign of the cross. The superior priest turned to me.

“You know, do you not, that Timothy is buried here, also,” touching a tablet upon which was cut one word—“Timothei.”

“I hope so!” answered I, wistfully.

Was it wrong to hold lovingly the desire—almost the belief—that the “beloved son” had taken alarm at the import and tone of the second epistle from “Paul the Aged,” and come long enough before winter to brighten his last days? “It is possible,” students and professors of Church History concede to those who crave this rounding of a “finished” life. It seemed almost sure, with Paul’s name above us and Timothy’s under my hand.

My new friend smiled. “We believe it. Timothy’s body was brought to Rome after his martyrdom—he outlived his master many years—and interred beside him in the Catacomb of St. Lucina.”

“I know the legend,” I said; “it is very beautiful.”

“It is customary,” the priest went on to say, “to lay chaplets upon the shrine. But you are an American,” another grave smile. “Would you like to look into the tomb?”

He opened a grating in the front of the altar. By leaning forward, I fancied I saw a dark object in the deep recess.[257]

“The sarcophagus is of silver. A cross of gold lies upon it. Then, there is an outer case.”

He knelt, reached the hand holding the beads as far through the opening as his arm would go, and arose.

“They have touched the coffin of St. Paul!” simply and solemnly.

While they lay over his fingers he crossed the beads, murmured some rapid words.

“My blessing will not hurt them, or you!” restoring them to me with the gentle seriousness that marked his demeanor throughout the little scene.

I thanked him earnestly. Whether he were sincere, or acting a well-conned part, his behavior to me was the perfection of high-toned courtesy, I said that he had done me a kindness, and I meant it.

“It is nothing!” was the rejoinder. “It is I who am grateful for the opportunity to render a stranger, and an American, even so slight a service.”

Some of our party made merry over my adventure; affected to see in my appreciation of the increased value of my blest baubles, deflection from the path of Protestantism rectilinear and undefiled. I think all were slightly scandalized when, turning in their walk across the nave, they saw the tableau within the sacred rail; myself, between two priests, and bending toward the open tomb of St. Paul.

To me it is a pleasing and interesting reminiscence, even if the story of Paul’s and Timothy’s tenancy of the crypt be a monkish figment. And this I am loath to admit.

[258]

CHAPTER XIX.
Tasso and Tusculum.

THE church and convent of S. Onofrio crown the steepest slope of the Janiculan. Our cocchieri always insisted, more or less strenuously, that we should alight at the bottom of the short Salita di S. Onofrio, and ascend on foot while the debilitated horses followed at their ease. Our first drive thither was upon a delicious morning in February, when the atmosphere was crystalline to the Sabine Hills. The terrace before the church-portico was clean and sunny, the prospect so enchanting, that we hung over the parapet guarding the verge of the hill, for a long quarter of an hour. Under the Papacy, S. Onofrio was barred against women, except upon the 25th of April, the anniversary of the death of Torquato Tasso, for whose sake, and that alone, strangers would care to pass the threshold.

Beyond the tomb of Tasso, and that of the lingual prodigy, Cardinal Mezzofanti, the church offers no temptation to sight-seers. We therefore turned almost immediately into the cloisters of the now sparsely inhabited monastery. The young priests and acolytes are winning honest bread by honest labor elsewhere. Gray-bearded monks stumble along the corridors, keep up the daily masses, and sun themselves among the salad and artichoke beds of the garden.[259]

“Slow to learn!” said Caput, shaking his head before a fresco in the side-arcade of the church.

It represented St. Jerome, gaunt, wild-eyed and distraught with the sense of his impotence and sinfulness, at the moment thus described by him;—“How often, when alone in the desert with wild beasts and scorpions, half dead with fasting and penance, have I fancied myself a spectator of the sins of Rome, and of the dances of its young women!”

Victor Emmanuel had biting reasons of his own for knowing what is the sway of the flesh and the devil, leaving the world out of the moral sum. Merciful humanitarian as well as wise ruler, he led would-be saints into the wholesome air of God’s working-day world.

The passage from the church to the conventual buildings is decorated with unlovely scenes from the life of that unlovely hermit, S. Onofrio. His neglected nakedness and ostentatious contempt for the virtue very near akin to commonplace godliness, make one wonder the more at the sweet cleanliness of the halls and rooms nominally under his guardianship.

“Ecco!” said our guide, opening the door of a large chamber.

Directly opposite, in strong relief against the bare wall, stood a man. Dressed in the doublet and hose worn by Italian gentlemen two hundred years ago, he leaned lightly on the nearest wainscot, with the easy grace of one who listens, ready to reply to friend or guest. The beautiful head was slightly bent,—a half-smile lighted features that were else sad. A step into the room, a second’s thought dispelled the illusion. Some of the company said it had never existed for them. For myself, I gladly own that I was startled by the life-like expression of figure and face. It is a fresco, and critics say, cheap and tawdry,—a[260] mere trick, and not good even as a trick. I got used, after awhile, to disagreement with the critics, and when a thing pleased me, liked it, in my own heart, without their permission. This fresco helped me believe that this was Tasso’s room; that he had trodden this floor, perhaps leaned against the wall over there, while he looked from that window upon the Rome that had done him tardy justice by summoning him to receive in her Capitol the laureate’s crown.

Wrecked in love and in ambition; robbed and maligned; deserted by friends and hounded by persecutors; confined for cause as yet unknown, for seven years in a madman’s cell, he was at fifty-one—uncheered by the blaze of popular favor shed upon him at evening-time—bowed in spirit, infirm in body. The Coronation was postponed until Spring in consideration for his feeble health. The ceremony was to surpass all former literary pageants, and preparations for it were in energetic progress when Tasso removed, for rest and recuperation, to the Convent of S. Onofrio. He had worked hard that winter in spite of steadily-declining strength. He would rally his forces against the important day that was to declare his life to have been triumph, not failure. We recall the bitterer address of Wolsey at the door of the convent in which he had come to lay his bones, in reading Tasso’s exclamation to the monks who welcomed him: “My fathers! I have come to die amongst you!” When informed by his physician that the end was very near, he thanked him for the “pleasant news” and blessed Heaven for “a haven so calm after a life so stormy.”

To a friend, he wrote—“I am come to begin my conversation in Heaven in this elevated place.” The Pope sent him absolution under his own hand and seal. “I shall be crowned!” said the dying poet. “Not with laurel,[261] as a poet in the Capitol, but with a better crown of glory in Heaven.”

The monk who watched and prayed with him on the night ending with the dawn of April 25, 1595, caught his last murmur:—

“In manus tuas, Domine!”

He had instructed his friend, Cardinal Aldobrandini, to collect and destroy all his printed works, the mutilation of which had nettled him to frenzy, a few years before. They were nothing to him now; the memories of his turbulent life a dream he would forget “in this elevated place.”

A glass case in this chamber holds a wax cast of his face taken after death. It is brown, cracked, dreesome, the features greatly changed by sorrow and pain from those of a marble bust near by, and very unlike those of the frescoed portrait. The head is small and well-formed, the forehead high, with cavernous temples. A shriveled laurel-wreath is bound about them, discolored and brittle as the wax. The crucifix used by him in his last illness and which was enclasped by his dead hands is also exhibited, with his inkstand, a page of MS. and the iron box in which he lay buried until the erection of his monument. But for the graceful figure upon the wall in the corner by the left-hand window, and the view framed by the casements, we could not have remembered that life, no less than death, had been here;—still less, that this was, in truth, a Coronation-room.

Through the garden a broad alley leads between beds of thrifty vegetables to Tasso’s oak. From the shattered trunk, which has suffered grievously from the winds, shoots a single vigorous branch. We picked ivy and grasses from the earth about the roots where Tasso sat each day, while he could creep so far;—the city at his feet, the Campagna[262] beyond the city unrolled to the base of the mountains, and Heaven beyond the hills. The only immortelle I saw growing in Italy, I found so near to Tasso’s oak that his foot must often have pressed the spot.

At the left of the oak, and winding along the crest of the hill is a terrace bordered by a low, broken wall, bright that day, with mid-winter turf and bloom. Rust-brown and golden wall-flowers were rooted among the stones; pansies smilingly pushed aside the grass to get a good look at the sun; daisies, like happy, lawless children, ran everywhere.

“This is what I crossed the Atlantic to see and to be!” Caput pronounced, deliberately, throwing himself down on the sward, and resting an elbow upon the wall, just where the flowers were thickest, the sunshine warmest, the prospect fairest. “You can go home when you like. I shall remain here until the antiquated fathers up at the house drive me from the premises. I can touch Heaven—as the Turks say—with my finger!”

While we affected to wait upon his pleasure, we remembered that a more genial saint than the patron of the convent—to wit—S. Filippo Neri, was wont to assemble here Roman children and teach them to sing and act his oratorios. What a music-gallery! And what a theme for artist’s brush or pen were those rehearsals under this sky, at this height, with the shadow of Tasso’s oak upon the al fresco concert-hall!

“The view from Tusculum is said to be more beautiful than this,” observed our head, murmurously, from the depths of his Turkish trance. “We will see it before the world is a week older!”

Nevertheless, the earth was two months further on in her swing around the sun, and that sun had kissed into life a thousand blushing flowers, where one had bloomed in[263] February, when we really set out for the site of that venerable town. We had appointed many other seasons for the excursion, and been thwarted in design, crippled in execution. Mrs. Blimber’s avowal that she could go down to the grave in peace could she but once have seen Cicero in his villa at Tusculum, was worn into shreds among us. When we did meet, by appointment, our friends, the V——s at the station in time for the eleven o’clock train to Frascati, we had a story of an inopportune call that had nearly been the fortieth obstacle to the fruition of our scheme.

It was April, but the verdure of early summer was in trees and herbage. Nature never sleeps in Italy. At the worst, she only lapses into drowsiness on winter nights, and, next morning, confesses the breach of decorum with a bewitching smile that earns for her abundant pardon. The exuberance of her mood on this day was tropical and superb. The tall grasses of the Campagna were gleaming surges before the wind, laden with odors stolen from plains of tossing purple spikes—not balls—yet which were clover to taste and smell. Red rivulets of poppies twisted in and out of the corn-fields and splashed up to the edge of the railway, and ox-eyed daisies were foamy masses upon the scarlet streams. Even in Italy, and in spring-tide, the olive is the impersonation of calm melancholy. In all the voluptuous glory of this weather, the olive trees stood pale, passionless, patient, holding on to their hillsides, not for life’s, but for duty’s sake, sustaining resolution and disregarding gravitation, by casting backward, grappling roots above the soil, like anchors played out in rough seas. They could not make the landscape sad, but they chastened it into milder beauty. Between dark clumps of ilex, overtopped by stately stone pines—ruined towers and battlements told their tale of days and races now no more, as the white walls of modern villas, embosomed[264] in groves of nectarine and almond, and flowering-chestnut trees—like sunset clouds for rosy softness—bespoke present affluence and tranquillity in which to enjoy it.

In half an hour we were at the Frascati station. A mile of steep carriage-drive that granted us, at every turn in the ascent, new and delightful views, brought us to the cathedral. It is very ugly and uninteresting except for the circumstance that just within it is the monument dedicated by Cardinal York to his brother, Charles Edward, better known by his sobriquet of “Young Pretender,” than by the string of Latin titles informing us of his inherited rights and claim. Vexatious emptiness though these were, the recitation of them appears to have been the pabulum of soul and spirit to the exiled Stuarts unto the third generation.

We lunched moderately well—being hungry—at the best inn in Frascati, and discarding the donkeys and donkey-boys clustering like flies in the cathedral piazza, we bargained for four “good horses” to take us up to Tusculum. Mrs. V—— was not well, and remained at the hotel while our cavalcade, attended by two guides, wound up the hill. The element of the ludicrous, never lacking upon such expeditions, came promptly and boldly to the front by the time we were fairly mounted, and hung about the party until we alighted in the same spot on our return. Dr. V—— stands six feet, four, in low-heeled slippers, and to him, as seemed fit, was awarded the tallest steed. Prima’s was a gaunt beast, whose sleepy eyes and depressed head bore out the master’s asseveration that he was quiet as a lamb. Caput’s horse was of medium height and abounding in capers, a matter of no moment until it was discovered that my lamb objected to be mounted, and refused to be guided by a woman. After a due amount of prancing and curveting had demonstrated this idiosyncrasy[265] to be no mere notion on my part, a general exchange, leaving out Prima, was effected. I was lifted to the back of the lofty creature who had borne Dr. V——. Caput demanded the privilege of subduing the misogynist. To the lot of our amiable son of Anak fell a Rosinante, who, as respectable perhaps in his way as his rider was in his, became, by the conjunction of the twain, an absurd hexaped that provoked the spectators to roars of laughter, his rider leading and exceeding the rest.

“The tomb of Lucullus!” he sobered us by exclaiming, pointing to a circular mass of masonry by the roadside. “That is to say, the reputed tomb. We know that he was Cicero’s neighbor—that they borrowed one another’s books in person.”

The books that, Cicero tells Atticus, “gave a soul to his house!” The brief, every-day phrase indicative of the neighborliness of the two celebrated Romans made real men of them, and the region familiar ground. The road lay between oaks, chestnuts, laurels, and thickets of laurestinus, the leaves shining as with fresh varnish—straight up the mountain, until it became a shaded lane, paved with polygonal blocks of lava. This is, incontestably, the ancient road to Tusculum, discovered and opened within fifty years. The banks were a mosaic of wild flowers;—the largest daisies and anemones we had yet seen, cyclamen, violets, and scores of others unknown by sight or name to us. In response to our cry of delight, both gentlemen reined in their horses, and Dr. V—— alighted to collect a bouquet. The tightening of Caput’s rein brought his horse’s ears so near his own, he had to throw his head back suddenly to save his face. The animal had a camel’s neck in length and suppleness,—a mule’s in stubbornness, and put upon, or off, his mettle by the abrupt jerk, he gave marvelous illustrations of these qualities. He could waltz[266] upon four legs or upon two; dance fast or slow; rear and kick at once, or stand like a petrifaction under whip, spur, and an enfilading fire of Italian and American expletives; but his neck was ever the feature of the performance. Whether he made of it a rail, an inclined iron plane, the handle of a jug, or a double bow-knot, it was true to one purpose—not to obey rein or rider.

“The wretched brute has no martingale on!” cried the latter, at length. “See, here! you scamp! Ecco! Voilà! V——! what is the Italian for martingale? Ask that fellow what he means by giving such a horse to a lady, or to any one whose life is of any value, without putting curb or martingale upon him?”

The doctor, who, by the way, was once described to me by a Roman shopkeeper as the “tall American, with the long beard, and who speaks Italian so beautifully,” opened parley, when he could control his risibles, with the owner of the “molto buono” animal.

“He says he could not put upon him what he does not possess,” was the epitome of the reply. “That he has but three martingales. And there are four horses. Supply inadequate to demand, my dear fellow! He implores the signore Americano to be reasonable.”

“Reasonable!” The signore swung himself to the ground. “Say to him, with my compliments, that I implore him to take charge of a horse that is altogether worthy,—if that could be—of his master! I shall walk! He ought to be made to ride!”

We begged off the cowering delinquent from this extreme of retribution. Picking up the bridle flung to him, he followed us at a disconsolate and respectful distance. Cicero had a fine, peppery temper of his own. Did he ever have a fracas with his charioteer in this steep lane, I wonder?[267]

We dismounted at what are supposed to be the ruins of his Villa. Some archæologists give the preference to the spot now occupied by the Villa Ruffinella, which we had seen on our way up. The best authorities had decided, at the date of our excursion to Tusculum, that the orator’s favorite residence, “ad latera superiora” of the eminence culminating in the Tusculan fortress, stood nearer the city than was once thought, and that its remains are the thick walls and vaulted doorway we examined in profound belief in this theory. It is not an extensive nor a very picturesque remainder, although the buried foundations may be traced over a vast area. Against the sunniest wall grows an immense ivy-tree, spreading broad arms and tenacious fingers over the brick-work. The side adhering to the wall is flat, of course. We measured the outer surface, at the height of five feet from the ground. It was thirty-nine inches from side to side. This may almost be rated as the diameter, the bark being very slightly protuberant.

For beauty of situation the Villa was without an equal. Forsyth says,—“On the acclivity of the hill were scattered the villas of Balbus, Brutus, Catullus, Metellus, Crassus, Pompey, Cæsar, Gabinus, Lucullus, Lentulus and Varro, so that Cicero was in the midst of his acquaintances and friends.”

“In that place, alone”—wrote Cicero of his Tusculan home to his best friend and correspondent—“do I find rest and repose from all my troubles and toil.”

In his “Essay upon Old Age,” he drawls an attractive picture of the country-life of a gentleman-farmer at that time. I have not room to transcribe it here, faithfully as it portrays the real tastes and longings of the ambitious lawyer and successful politician. “What need”—and there is a sigh for the Tusculan upper hillside in the sentence—“to[268] dwell upon the charm of the green fields, the well-ordered shrubberies, the beauty of vineyards and olive-groves?”

These smile no more about the site of the desolated villa. Terraces, slopes and summits are overgrown with wild grass. A few goats were feeding upon these at the door where little Tullia—the “Tulliola” of the fond father—his “delicia nostræ”—may have frolicked while he watched her from the colonnade overlooking Rome,—or one of “the seats with niches against the wall adorned with pictures;”—or, still, within sound of her voice, wrote in his library to Atticus, that the young lady threatened to sue him, (Atticus,) for breach of contract in not having sent her a promised gift.

The paved road, firm velvet ridges of turf rising between the blocks, runs beyond the Villa, directly to a small theatre. The upper walls are gone, but the foundations are entire, with fifteen rows of seats. It is a semicircular hollow in the turfy bank, excavated by Lucien Bonaparte while he lived at Villa Ruffinella. We descended half a dozen steps and stood upon the stone platform where it is generally believed Cicero held the famous Tusculan Disputations. The topics of these familiar dialogues or talks were “Contempt of Death,” “Constancy in Suffering,” and the like. Did he draw consolation from a review of his own philosophy, upon that bitter day when, deserted by partisans, and chased by his enemies, he withdrew to his beloved “Tusculaneum” and from these heights looked down upon the city whose pride he had been?—

“Rerum, pulcherrima Roma!”

Waiting, doubting, dreading, he at length received the news that a price had been set upon his head, fled in a[269] blind, strange panic; returned upon his steps; again took flight, doubled a second time upon the track, and sat down, stunned and desperate, to await the death-blow.

Instead of the myrtle-tree, thorn-bushes and brambles grow rankly in

“The white streets of Tusculum.”

The reservoir that fed the aqueducts; the ruins of Forum and Theatre; piles of nameless stones breaking through uncultivated moors; on the side nearest Rome, mossy pillars of the old gateway; outside of this, a stone drinking-trough set there in the days of the Consulate, and through which still runs a stream of pure cold water,—this is what is left of the town founded by the son of Circe and Ulysses; erst the stanch ally of Rome, and the queen-city of Latium up to the battle of Lake Regillus. The best view of the encompassing country is to be had a little beyond the gateway. From this point is visible the natural basin, shut in by wooded hills, which contains Lake Regillus, now a stagnant pond, quite dry in summer. Under our feet were the stones from which the hoofs of Mamilius’ dark-gray charger struck fire on the day of battle.

Repeating the rhyme, we looked around to trace the route by which

“Poetry—not history!” objected one.

“Better than statistical facts!” said another.[270]

Glancing in the direction of Rome, we were the witnesses of an extraordinary atmospheric phenomenon. The city, a dozen miles away, was lifted from the plain and floating upon a low-lying band of radiant mist. The dome of St. Peter’s actually appeared to sway and tremble as a balloon strains at its cords. The roofs were silver; the pinnacles aërial towers. Thus the background, while between it and our mountain, the Campagna was a gulf black as death with the shadow of a thundercloud that had come we know not from what quarter. It was not there five minutes ago. We had barely time to exclaim over the marvel of contrasted light and gloom, when the cloud dropped like monstrous bat-wings upon the valley, flew faster than did ever bird of day or night toward us. There was not a roof in Tusculum. The guides brought up the horses in haste, and three of us were in the saddle by the time the first big drops dashed in our faces.

“Ride!” ejaculated the fourth, in response to the supplicating pantomime of the leader of the unmartingaled beast. “On that thing!”

Tusculum rain had not extinguished his sense of injury, and this was insult. There was but one umbrella amongst us, and this was forced upon me. Caput threw my bridle over his arm and walked at my tall horse’s head, calmly regardless of the drenching storm. Dr. V—— and his four-footed adjunct jogged placidly at the head of the line. Next rode Prima, humming softly to herself, while cascades poured from her hat-brim upon her shoulders, and her soaked dress distilled green tears upon the sides of her white horse. We followed, I very high, and selfishly dry. The guides, to whose outer men the plentiful washing was an improvement, straggled along in the rear, leading the recalcitrant horse. It was a forlorn-looking, but perfectly good-humored procession. There was little danger of[271] taking cold from summer rain in this warm air. However this might be, to fret would be childish, to rebel foolishly useless. Caput uttered the only protest against the proceedings of the day, and that not until we left our horses in the piazza in front of the cathedral, and waited in the sunshine succeeding the shower, while the guides were paid.

“I don’t mind the walk up and down the mountain,” beating the wet from his hat, and wiping the drops from his face. “Nor the wetting very much, although my boots are ruined. I do grudge giving ten francs for the privilege of seeing that brigand lead his villanous horse three miles!”

But he paid the bill.

[272]

CHAPTER XX.
From Pompeii to Lake Avernus.

WE were at Naples and Pompeii in the winter, and again in the spring. The Romans aver that most of the foreigners who die in their city with fever, contract the disease in Naples. We credited this so far that we preferred to make short visits to the latter place, and, while there, passed much time in the open air. It is our conviction, moreover, that little is to be apprehended from malaria in the worst-drained city of Italy if visitors will stipulate invariably for bed-room and parlor fires. The climate is deceitful, if not so desperately wicked as many believe. Extremes of heat and cold are alike to be avoided, and the endeavor to do this involves care and expense. It must be remembered that in America we have no such winter suns as those that keep alive the heart of the earth in Southern Europe. Nor are our houses stone grottoes, constructed with express reference to the exclusion of the fierce heats of eight months of the year. The natives affect to despise fires in their houses except a charcoal-blast in the kitchen while meals are cooking, and a brazier, or scaldino of coals in the portière’s lodge, in very cold weather. Our Roman visitors evidently regarded the undying wood-fire in our salle as an extravagant caprice. It was pretty, they admitted. It pleased their æsthetic taste, and they never failed to praise it, in taking their[273] seats as far as possible from it. Indoor life to them is a matter of secondary importance in comparison with driving, walking and visiting. The ladies have few domestic duties, or such intellectual pursuits as would tempt them to sit for hours together at home. Cookery, sewing and housework are done by hirelings, who are plentiful, content with low wages and who live upon salads, black bread and sour wine, never expecting even savory crumbs left by their employers. Americans are apt to construe literally the injunction to live in Rome as the Romans do, leaving out of view the grave consideration that they are not, also, born and bred Italians. They have cold feet incessantly, even at night, they will tell you; are chilled to the marrow by stone walls and floors; the linen sheets are so many snow-drifts; the air of their apartments is that of ice-vaults upon their incoming from outdoor excursions.

“Yet, it is too absurd to have fires in this lovely weather! Who would think of such a thing at home on a June day?”

Forgetting that “at home” the June air would make its way to the inner chambers and modify the temperature of the very cellars. One more sanitary hint, and I leave practical suggestions for the present. Wear thick flannels and woolen stockings in the Italian winter, and keep at hand light shawls or sacques that may be cast about the shoulders indoors, in laying aside the wrappings you have worn in the street. Always recollect that the danger of taking cold is greatest in coming in, not in going out.

The winter weather in Naples was so fine as to banish our fears of illness. We had heard that sea-storms a week long were not uncommon at that season, and to make sure of Pompeii, drove out thither, the day after our arrival. The entrance to the long-entombed city provoked and amused us. The Hôtel Dioméde is to the eye a second-class[274] lager-bier saloon, the name conspicuous above the entrance. A smart and dirty waiter ran down the steps, opened the carriage-door, and ushered us into the restaurant, where the proprietor received us bowingly, and pressed upon us the hospitalities of the establishment.

Crest-fallen at the news that we had lunched, he opined, notwithstanding, that we would purchase something in the Museum, and passed us on to the custodian of the inner room. This was stocked with trinkets, vases, manufactured antiquities, etc., prepared to meet the wants of those travellers to whom a cheap imitation is better than a costly original; people who wear lava brooches and bracelets, crowd their mantels with mock Parian images and talk of “Eyetalians” and “Pompey-eye.” We were not to be stayed, having seen the turf and sky beyond the back-door.

A flight of steps took us up to a high terrace where was the ticket-office. A revolving bar passed us through between two guards. A guide in the same uniform was introduced to us.

“No. 27 will show you whatever you wish to see,” said an officer.

No. 27 touched his cap, and belonged to us henceforth.

No ashes, or scoria heaps yet! No ruins,—no lava! For all we could perceive—no Pompeii. Only a pleasant walk between high turfed banks and portulacca-beds, with Vesuvius, still and majestic, a mile or two away, a plume of white vapor curling slowly above the cone. We traversed a short, covered corridor, and began the ascent of a paved alley—dead walls on each side.

“Porta della Marina! Via della Marina!” said our guide, then, translating into French the information that we had entered Pompeii by the Gate and the Street of the Sea—the highway of city-traffic before the imprisoned demons of the mountain broke bounds.[275]

The streets are all alleys, like this first, laid with heavy polygonal blocks of tufa, and grooved—most deeply and sharply at the corners—by wheels. The ruts of Glaucus’ chariot-wheels! But what were the dimensions of the bronze vehicle “of the most fastidious and graceful fashion,” drawn by two horses of Parthian breed that “glided rapidly” by others of the same build between these blocks of buildings? Or was there a Pompeian law requiring those who went in a certain direction to proceed by specified streets?

We were not prepared for the difficulty of ascertaining which was the West End of the town which Glaucus tells Clodius, “had the brilliancy of luxury without the lassitude of its pomp.” Nearly every house has a shop attached to it. “Stalls” we would style them, in which the brick counter, formerly covered with marble, takes up at least half the room. The shops were closed at night by wooden doors or shutters filling up the entire width of the front. These, having decayed or burned away, the visitor steps from the street into the cell walled in on three sides, and roofless. The entrance to the dwelling had no connection whatever with the stall built on to it. If this was the proprietor’s abode, he, in genuine Epicurean fashion, “sank the shop” out of work-hours. It is supposed that the wealthier citizens rented their street-fronts at a high rate, to tradespeople, without the consequent depreciation of gentility that would befall a member of New York uppertendom, were he to “live over” or back of a “store.” Another surprise was the band-box tenements in which people who made more account of ease and beauty than of their own immortality, contrived to live. The vestibule, running beside the shop-wall from the street into the Lilliputian mansion, is scarcely five feet wide in some of the best houses. The court-yard behind is not larger than[276] a square table-cloth; the fountain-basin in the middle resembles a big punch-bowl. Beyond this, separated now by a marble or paved walk, formerly, also, by a curtain that could be raised or lowered, is a larger court. This part of the building was devoted to such public dealings as the owner might have with the outer world. Here he received office-seekers, beggars and book-agents; paid bills and gave orders. The family court—the peristylium—was still further back, and usually raised by the height of a marble step above the second. This was enclosed by pillars, painted red, a quarter of the way up,—the rest white. Another curtain shut in this sanctum from the general gaze. In the middle of the court was a flower-bed, its centre a fountain. About these three courts were built dining-room, kitchen, dressing- and bed-rooms and other family apartments. The upper stories were of wood and usually occupied as servants’ dormitories. These have slowly mouldered away, having been, some think, calcined by the hot ashes. There are, of course, variations upon this plan, and some mansions of respectable size without the commercial attachment, but the above may serve as an outline draught of the typical Pompeian dwelling, even of the richer classes.

“Have you read the ‘Last Days of Pompeii?’” the guide amazed us by saying when we had wandered in his wake for an hour.

We had a copy with us and showed it to him. He believed it to be an Italian work, it presently appeared, having read it in that language, sans preface, we suppose, for he also accepted it as sober, veracious history. We allowed ourselves to share his delusion in beholding the plot of ground—a sheet would have covered it—in which Nydia tended the flowers of Glaucus; the shrine of the Penates at the back of the peristyle; the triclinum—or[277] banqueting-room in which the young Greek supped with Lepidus, Pansa, Sallust, Clodius and his umbra; where the slave-carver “performed that office upon the Ambracian kid to the sound of music, his knife keeping time, beginning with a low tenor, and accomplishing the arduous feat amidst a magnificent diapason.”

The apartment is, like the others, small but well-proportioned, and the frescoes are still quite distinct. We allotted places to the host and his several guests about an imaginary table, the guide smiling at our animated interest without a misgiving that the dramatis personæ were dream-children of Signore Bulwer’s brain. I dare not attempt his Italianization of the noble author’s title. Workmen were repairing the step by which we left the inner court for the tablium, or master’s office. An accident had shivered the marble sheathing and several bits were cast aside as worthless. With the guide’s sanction, I pocketed them, and afterward had them made into dainty little salvers, purely clear as the finest Parian, or the enamored Glaucus’ ideal of Ione—“that nymph-like beauty which for months had shone down upon the waters of his memory.”

The silence that has its home in the deserted city is something to dream of,—not describe. The town is swept and clean—doubtless cleaner than when the gargoyles on the fountains at every other corner gushed with fresh winter. That the Pompeians were a thirsty race, water- as well as wine-bibbers,—is distinctly proved by the hollows worn in the stone sides of these enclosed hydrants, just where a man would rest his hand and lean his whole weight to swing his body around in order to bring his lips in contact with the stream from the carved spout. No. 27 showed us how it was done and by the simple action made stillness and solitude more profound. Thousands of swarthy hands—the callous palms of laborer and peasant,—must have[278] rested thus for hundreds of years to produce such abrasion of the solid stone. And here were he and five pale-faced strangers,—the only living things in sight in a street of yawning shop-fronts, built in compact blocks; to the right a grove of columns and expanse of tessellated flooring—the Temple of Justice, to which none now resorted, to which none would ever come again for redress or penalty, while Time endures. Wherever the eye fell were temples of deities whose names live only in mythology and in song, the shrines and fanes of a dead Religion. This was the strangest sight of all;—in this professedly Christian land, temples and altars with the traces of slain and bloodless sacrifices that had smoked upon them, to Mercury and Jupiter and Venus. There was the temple of Isis—whose statue we saw, subsequently, in the Neapolitan Museum,—with the chamber where the priests held their foul orgies, and the secret passage by which they reached the speaking-tube concealed in the body of the goddess; and the room in which Calenus and Burbo were found. An earthquake may have overthrown upper chambers and toppled down images but yesterday. Yet it is a city in which there is not the sign of a cross, or other token that Christ was born and died; whose last inhabitants and worshippers ate, drank, married and were given in marriage in the name of Juno, while He walked the earth.

I have said that Pompeii is a band-box edition that looks like a caricature of a town in which men once lived and traded and reveled. The bed-rooms in the houses of Glaucus, Sallust, Pansa and even in Diomed’s Villa, are no larger than the wardrobe closet of a Philadelphia mechanic’s wife. A brick projection fills up one side. On this the bed was laid. In some there are no windows; in others were slits to admit air, but through which, owing to the thickness of the walls and the contiguity of other[279] buildings, little light could have entered. The positive assertion of guide-books that window-glass was unknown to the Pompeians is contradicted by the recent excavation of a house in which a fragment of a pane still adheres to one of these apertures. We saw it and can testify that it was a bit of indubitable glass, set firmly in its casing. How Julia and Ione contrived to light their dressing-rooms sufficiently to make such toilettes as we see in ancient paintings, baffles our invention when we look at the glimmering loop-holes and the tiny lamps that held but a few thimblefuls of perfumed oil. Bulwer calls the cubicula and boudoirs “petty pigeon-holes,” but alleges that these darkened chambers were “the effect of the most elaborate study”—that “they sought coolness and shade.” We are dubious, in reading further of the fair Julia’s toilette-appointments, that her “eye, accustomed to a certain darkness, was sufficiently acute to perceive exactly what colors were the most becoming—what shade of the delicate rouge gave the brightest beam to her dark glance,” etc. In one house of the better—i. e.—larger sort—is a really cozy boudoir, almost big enough to accommodate two people, a dressing-table and a chair. The floor is in mosaic, wrought, as was the Pompeian fashion, of bits of marble, black and white, less than half-an-inch square, set with cement. The central design is a pretty conceit of three doves, rifling a jewel-casket of ropes of pearls. This work, like the image of the bear in the house to which it has given its name, is covered with coarse sand to protect it from the weather. “The fierce dog painted”—in mosaic—“on the threshold” of Glaucus’ house, has been removed, with the immense “Battle of Darius and Alexander,” to the Naples museum.

The variety and affluence of decoration in these dollhouses is bewildering to the Occidental of this century.[280] Every inch of wall and floor was crowded with pictures in fresco and mosaic; statues in bronze and marble adorned recess and court, and if the pearl-ropes perished with her who wore them, there are enough cameos and intaglios of rarest design and cutting; chains, bracelets, tiaras, finger and earrings and necklaces, in the Neapolitan Museum, to indicate what were the other riches of the despoiled casket.

I wish I could talk for awhile about this Museum, so unlike any other in the world. Of its statuary, vases and paintings; of the furniture, so odd and yet so beautiful, taken from the unroofed dwellings; of the contents of baker’s, grocer’s, fruiterer’s, artist’s, jeweller’s and druggist’s shops; of the variety of household implements that were familiar to us through others of like pattern upon the shelves of our own pantries and kitchens. Of patty-pans, fluted cake-moulds with funnels in the middle; of sugar-tongs; ice-pitchers and coffee-urns; of chafing-dishes, colanders and tea-strainers; sugar-scoops and flour-sifters. Of just such oval “gem”-pans, fastened together by the dozen, as I had pleased myself by buying the year before—as “quite a new idea.” When I finally came upon a sheet-iron vessel, identical in size and form with those that await the scavenger upon Fifth Avenue sidewalks; beheld the dent made by the kick of the Pompeian street-boy, the rim scorched by red-hot ashes “heaved” into it by the scullion whose untidiness and irresponsibility foreshadowed the nineteenth-century “help”—I sank upon the edge of a dismantled couch that may have belonged to the Widow Fulvia, profound respect for the wisdom of the Preacher filling my soul and welling up to my tongue!

“Is there anything of which it may be said, ‘See! this is new?’ It hath been already of old time which was before us.”[281]

I did not see clothes-wringer, vertical broiler, or Dover egg-beater, but I make no doubt they were there, tucked away in corners I had not time and strength to explore, behind a sewing-machine and telephone-apparatus.

We have not—as yet—reproduced in America the so-termed nearly extinct volcano of Solfatara. It is near the road from Naples to Baiæ.

I am tempted to lay down my pen in sheer discouragement at the thought of what we saw in that drive of twelve hours, and how little space I ought, in consistency with the plan of this work, to devote to it. Baia was the Newport of Neapolis and other cities of Southern Italy, under the consuls and emperors. Many rich Romans had summer-seats there, and it had, likewise, a national reputation as the abode of philosophers and authors.

“I grant the charms of Baiæ,” Bulwer puts into Glaucus’ mouth. “But I love not the pedants who resort there, and who seem to weigh out their pleasures by the drachm.”

The route thither lies through, or above the grotto of Posilipo, a tunnel built, some assert, by order of Nero—the only commendable deed recorded of him. On the principle, “To him that hath shall be given,” others choose to ascribe the work to Augustus. It is certain that the grotto existed in Nero’s time, as his contemporaries mention its gloom and straitness. The tomb of Virgil is hidden among the vineyards on the hill to the left as one leaves the tunnel, going from Naples. The tomb beside which Petrarch planted a laurel! One of its remote successors still flourishes—somewhat—at the door of the structure which belongs to the class of Columbaria. A good-sized chamber has three windows and a concave ceiling. Around the walls are pigeon-holes for cinerary urns. There was a larger cavity between this room and a[282] rear wall, in which tradition insists Virgil was interred in compliance with his often-expressed desire. Antiquarians and historians have squabbled over the spot until plain people, with straightforward ways of thought, question if Virgil ever lived at Posilipo, or elsewhere than in the imagination of his countrymen. It is recorded that an urn, sealing up his ashes, was here about the middle of the fourteenth century, and that, running around the lip, was the epitaph known to every classic smatterer, beginning—

“Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere.”

Neither urn nor epitaph remains. A later inscription commences, “Qui cineres?” Most visitors “give it up.” But Petrarch was here once, and King Robert of Sicily, who helped Laura’s lover plant the laurel. And Virgil—or his ashes—may have been. We generally gave the departed the benefit of the doubt in such circumstances.

A mile aside from the Baiæ road is the Grotto del Cane, distinguished for dogs and mephitic vapors, which, as Henry Bergh’s country-people, we declined to enter.

Pozzuoli—Puteoli, when Paul landed there, after his shipwreck—is a dirty, sleepy little town, in general complexion so dingy, and in expression so down-hearted, the visitor is inclined to suspect that its self-disgust had something to do with the gradual sinking of its foundations for the last three hundred years. The steps by which St. Paul gained the pier are dimly visible under the waters lapping lazily above them. Nothing seems alive but the breeze, fragrant of sea-brine, and shaking the blue surface of the bay into wavering lines and bars of shaded green, purple, and silver, that were worth seeing if Puteoli was not.

We alighted at the Temple of Serapis, restored by Marcus Aurelius and Septimus Severus. The site has shared the fate of Pozzuoli, having been lowered by a succession of[283] volcanic shocks a dozen feet below its former level. The Egyptian deity was magnificently enthroned before the decline of paganism, and this sea-side country, upon a pedestal in a circular temple, enclosed by a portico of Corinthian columns—African marble—sixteen in number. The pillars have been removed to the royal palace at Caserta, and the salt ooze lies, sullen and green, over their bases. The quadrangle of the temple had once its guard of forty-eight granite columns, and a porch supported by six of marble, three of which are left standing. It is a mournful ruin, the water lying deep in the sunken centre and in pools over the highest part of the uneven pavement, and is not made cheerful by the incongruous addition of bath-houses on one side. Salt springs, some of them hot, broke through the crust at the latest eruption—that which threw up Monte Nuovo in 1538.

Cicero had a villa on this coast—the “Puteolaneum,” beloved only less than Tusculaneum. It was built upon rising ground, now occupied by a vineyard and orchard, but commanding a beautiful view of sea and shore. Here, Hadrian was buried after his decease at Baiæ, A.D. 138, and rested until the construction of his Roman mausoleum.

Passing the amphitheatre of Pozzuoli, crumbled down to the seats, in the arena of which Nero fought in person, and Diocletian fed wild beasts with Christian martyrs by the hundred; by the chapel that commemorates the death of Januarius, the patron saint of Naples, we were in a steep road full of rough stones—a country lane where horses could hardly hold their footing. Here Ernesto, the useful, who was, at once, coachman and guide, informed us regretfully, that we must walk to the gate of Solfatara. Moreover, with augmented regret—that, although he had, up to this point, been able to protect us from the sallies of other ciceroni, at, at least, five places where Baedeker parenthesizes—(“Guide—1[284] franc for each pers.”)—he dared not push righteous audacity too far. The tempers of the Solfatara men were uncertain and hot, like their volcano—(nearly extinct).

“I veel stay ’ere veez de ’orses!” subjoined Ernesto, who means to go to America in eight or ten years’ time, to seek a coachman’s place, and practises English diligently to that end. “You veel meet at de gate von man, verra ceevil, who veel zhow you all!”

The civil man awaited us at the top of the short, sharp climb; undid the gate of the enclosure, and called our attention to the stucco manufactory on the inside of the high fence. In his esteem, it outranked the subterranean works whose bellowing and puffing filled our ears. The earth used for this stucco is a pink pumice or clay, pleasing to the eye and very plastic. The plain is composed entirely of it. Men were digging and donkey-carts transporting it to a long shed by the gate, where a huge wheel ground it into paste. Tumuli of the same, natural and artificial, were scattered over the area, which is an oblong basin among chalky hills. At brief intervals, smoke ascended slowly from cracks in the arid earth which was hot to the touch. A man stood near the volcano (nearly extinct) ready to hurl a big stone upon the ground and awaken hollow echoes that rumbled away until lost in the sea on one hand, among the volcanic hills on the other.

If Solfatara were in her usual mood that day, her reputed half-death is an alarmingly energetic condition. Bunyan saw the place in his dreams twice:

“About the midst of the valley, I perceived the mouth of hell to be. Ever and anon the flame and smoke would come out in abundance, with sparks and hideous noises. The flames would be reaching towards him; also, he heard doleful noises and rushings to and fro.”[285]

Again: “There was a door in the side of a hill. Within, it was very dark and smoky. They also thought that they heard there a rumbling noise as of fire, and a cry as of some tormented, and that they smelt the scent of brimstone. The shepherds told them—‘This is a by-way to hell.’”

So said our very civil man.

“What makes the noise down there?” I asked, loudly, to be heard above the roaring and groaning.

“The fire, Madame!”

“But who keeps up the fires?”

“The devil, Madame, without question. That is his home.”

We listened. The sound, when we were somewhat used to it, had a diabolical rhythm, as of the rise and fall of a thousand pistons, propelled by a head of steam that, without this safety-valve, would rend the solid globe asunder. It was angry, threatening, fiendish. The deep crevice was faced with bright crystals of sulphur that glowed like gems between the bursts of smoke. A man broke off some with a long pole, and dragged them out to cool until we could handle them. The ground is saturated with sulphurous gases, and the lips of the numerous fissures encrusted with sulphites and alum. The idea of the conscious malignity of the volcano was sustained by the warning of two of the men standing near to a gentleman who had lighted a cigar.

“No! no! the signore must not bring that here. She will not allow it. Ecco!” as a volume of stifling vapor gushed out in our direction. “It comes to you, you see!”

“Government monopoly! No interference tolerated,” said Caput, as the offender retreated.

“It is always so! She does not like cigars, nor so much[286] as a match,” was all the solution we could get from the men of the phenomenon. “She will smoke. Nobody else must.”

Fifty yards to the right of the nearly extinct crater is a fountain of hot mud in a little hollow. An ugly, restless thing, that shivers and heaves continually, and, every few moments, spouts like a whale, or an uneasy villain whose conscience periodically betrays him into a visible casting up of mire and dirt. The mud is a greasy black compound of unpleasant ingredients, beginning with brimstone, and, to test the heat, our civil man offered to boil eggs in it.

“Suppose one were to fall in?” queried I, eying the chaldron in expectation of the next upward rush.

“Ah, Madame! he would be boiled also. Unless he should go too soon, all the way down,” pointing ominously.

The horrible stuff trembled, surged in the middle as if a goblin-head were rising—bubbled, and sank with a groan. The imp would try it again presently, perhaps emerge to sight. I continued to gaze.

“Madame!” said a deprecating voice.

My friends had moved away. The guide, in the act of following, had glanced back, and, seeing me motionless beside the mammoth egg-boiler, recalling my question, descried suicidal intent in my eye and mien, and rushed back to avert a contretemps that might hurt his reputation as a safe conductor and civil man.

“The friends of Madame await her,” he said, insinuatingly. “Nor is it good for the lungs of Madame to inhale the gas from the pool,” affecting to cough. “The pool is not handsome. In effect, it is a devil of a place! Will not Madame have the goodness to walk on? There are other things to see, very interesting!”[287]

I laughed, frightening him still more, I fear, for he kept near me all the time we were in the grounds, and whispered significantly to the gate-keeper as I passed out. Hawthorne doubts if his Zenobia would have drowned herself had she foreseen how disfigured a thing would be dragged up by the grappling-hook. Similar knowledge of feminine nature would have corrected our civil man’s suspicion of me. Felo de se in a boiling mud-hole would not tempt the maddest maniac who had, ever in her life, cared to look in her mirror.

Monte Nuovo is a really dead, if not gone, volcano, a mile and a half to the west of Pozzuoli. It came up in a night in 1538—a conical hill of considerable height—a conglomerate of lava, trachyte, pumice and ashes, now covered with shrubs and trees. The earthquake that created it, lowered the coast and cut off Lake Lacrinus from the sea. In mythological days, Hercules built a breakwater here that he might drive the bulls of Geryon from the neighboring marshes. This sank at the Monte Nuovo rising, but can be seen when the water is calm, together with ruined piers and masses of masonry. A road branches off here from the Baiæ thoroughfare to Lake Avernus.

Leaving the carriage on the shore of the latter, we went on foot to the Grotto of the Sibyl. It is a dark, damp opening in the hill on the south side of the lake. Rank vines festoon and evergreen thickets overshadow the mouth. Five or six fellows, with unshorn hair and beards, and in sheepskin coats and hats, clamored for permission to pilot us through the long passage—the fabled entrance of hell—into the central hall which lies midway between Lakes Avernus and Lacrinus.

“Should not be attempted by ladies!” cried Miss M—— from her open Baedeker.[288]

One and all, we raised remonstrative voices against the resolution of our escort to penetrate the recess. Not see it when Homer had sung of it and Virgil depicted the descent of Æneas by this very route to the infernal regions! This was the protest as vehement as our entreaties. One might draw inferences the reverse of complimentary to himself from our alarm. Of what should he be afraid?

Had he heard how our friend, Mr. H——, after being carried in the guide’s arms through the shallow pool covering the grotto-floor, had been set down on the other side and forced to pay ten francs before the wretch would bring him back?

Yes! he had had the tale from the victim’s lips.

“And should I not appear within the hour, send Ernesto in to see what has become of me. Two honest men are a match for six such cutthroats as these. I must own, candidly, that I never beheld worse countenances and toilettes. If they won’t bring me back, I can wade through twelve inches of water. Now, my fine fellows—are you ready?”

They had lighted their candles, strapped their breeches above their knees and looked like utterly disreputable butchers, prepared for the shambles.

We were ill-at-ease about the adventure, but, dissembling this for the sake of appearances, before the brace of desperadoes who had remained outside,—it would seem to watch us—strolled to the edge of the water and sat down in the shade. The lake is a cup, two hundred feet in depth, less than two miles in circumference, with a rich setting of wooded hills. It was joined to Lacrinus in the reign of Augustus by canals, and Roman fleets lay here in a sheltered harbor, Monte Nuovo cut off this communication, traces of which can be seen in both lakes. At the upper end of Avernus are the fine ruins of a Temple of[289] Apollo. We knew the ancient stories of noxious exhalations that killed birds while flying over it, and of other manifest horrors of the location; of gullies, infested by Cimmerian shades; of the Styx, draining its slow waters in their sevenfold circuit of hell, by an underground current from the bottom of this reservoir; of the ghostly boatman, the splash of whose oars could be heard in the breathless solitude of these accursed shores. Upon the hillsides, in the noisome depths of forests polluted by the effluvia of the waters, smoked sacrifices to Hecate.

We saw a placid sheet, mirroring the skies as purely as do Como and Windermere. The ravines were cloaked by chestnuts and laurels, and the hills upon the thither side were clothed with vineyards. A lonely place it is, with a brooding hush upon it that was not wholly imaginary. It is assuredly not unlovely, nor in the slightest degree forbidding. The only uncanny object we found was a vine at the entrance of the grotto. It had a twisting, tough stem, and leaves in shape somewhat resembling the ivy, although larger and more succulent, each marked in white with the distinct impression of a serpent. Upon no two was the image exactly the same in form or position, but the snake was there in all, partly coiled, partly trailing over the dark-green surface, clearly visible even to the scales, the head and, in some, the forked tongue. We remembered the pampered viper of the witch of Vesuvius, and wondered if the Sibylline spell had perpetuated in the leaving of this vine, the image of a favorite familiar, or cursed a hated plant with this brand. We gathered and pressed a handful of the mystic leaves from which the sinuous lines faded with the verdure into a dull brown, after some weeks.

The pair of cutthroats, removed to a barely respectful distance, whispered together as we examined our floral[290] gains, staring at us from under black eyebrows. Traditions, known to the peasants, may have divulged the secret of the odd veining. More likely—our neighbors were objurgating Victor Emmanuel and his obedient soldiery for spoiling the honest trade of brigandage, and reminding one another how their honored ancestors would have fleeced these bold forestieri. Brigandage was a hereditary possession in those fair old times; held in high esteem by those who lived thereby, and, it was murmured, so gently rebuked by the Government that it throve, not withered under the paternal frown. It was openly asserted and generally believed that Cardinal Antonelli came of such thievish and murderous stock, although he died the richest man—save one—in Rome. The declension in Government morals on this head may have had much to do with Caput’s triumphant egress from the cave before the expiration of half the period he had named.

He reported the interior to consist of two narrow passages, ventilated from above, and two chambers hewn in the rock. Through the larger of these lay the entrance to the lower regions. No trace remains of the route. Probably it was closed by earthquakes as useless, so many other avenues to the same locality having been discovered. The smaller room—the Sibyl’s Bath—is floored with mosaic and flooded to the depth of a foot with tepid water, welling up in an adjacent nook. The walls are smoke-blackened, the air is close, the ante-chamber to Hades less imposing and more comfortless than when Ulysses passed this way, and Dido’s perfidious lover was led by the Sibyl through corridor and hall to the shadier realms underneath.

We stopped at a public house upon the Lucrine Lake, for lunch, and were served with Falernian wine of really excellent flavor, and small yellow oysters, tasting so strongly of copper as to be uneatable by us. People get[291] to liking them after many attempts, we were informed by Roman epicures. One American gourmand, who had lived ten years in Italy, was so far denaturalized as to protest that our “natives” are gross in size and texture, and flavorless, when compared with these bilious-looking bivalves.

“Baedeker says they were celebrated in ancient times,” remarked Miss M——.

Glaucus regretted that he could not give his guests the oysters he “had hoped to procure from Britain,” yet subjoins that “they want the richness”—(the copperiness)—“of the Brundusium oyster.”

Old Baiæ is a heap of confusion and desolation that cumbers the hill overlooking the modern town. The only ruins at all suggestive of the state and luxury which were the boast of patrician Rome when Augustus reigned and Horace wrote, are the foundations and part of the walls of the Temples of Mercury and Diana. The former is around building with a domed roof open-eyed at the top, like the Pantheon. Six horrible hags, their parchment dewlaps dangling odiously, their black eyes glittering with hunger and cunning, in rags like tattered bed-quilts, here insist upon dancing the tarantella for the amusement of forestieri. They are always in the temple. They have, presumably, no other abode. In other doomed pleasant palaces than those of Babylon, the imagination takes up Isaiah’s lament:—

“Their houses shall be full of doleful creatures, and the daughters of the owl shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there!”

The Villa Bauli used to stand near Baiæ. Here, Nero plotted his mother’s murder. Another ruined pile was the villa in which he consented, with a feint of reluctance that did not impose upon his accomplice, to the proposition[292] of Anicetus to drown her by the sinking of her galley. Julius Cæsar had a summer residence upon the neighboring heights.

Ernesto brought us back to Naples over the hill of Posilipo, instead of through the tunnel, gaining the summit when the glory of the sunsetting was at fullest tide. Such light and such splendor as were never before—or since—for us upon land or sea. To attempt description in human speech would be, in me, presumption so rank as to verge upon profanation. But when I would renew—in such faint measure as memory and fancy can revive past ecstasy—the scene and emotion that made that evening a joy for ever, I recite to myself words evoked by the view from a true poet-soul and—

[293]

CHAPTER XXI.
“A Sorosis Lark.”

WHEN we left Naples in January the snow lay whitely upon the scarred poll of Vesuvius. Yet, as we drove to the station, we were beset by boys and girls running between the wheels of our carriage and ducking under the horses’ heads, clamorously offering bouquets of roses, violets and camellias that had blossomed in the open gardens. To save the bones, for which they showed no regard, each of us loaded herself with an immense bunch of flowers she was tempted, a dozen times before night, to throw out of the car-window. I counted ten japonicas in mine—white, creamy, and delicate pink—and I paid the black-eyed vender fifty centimes, ten cents, for all.

We ran down to the sea-shore again in April, the laughing, fecund April, that rioted over the Campagna the day we went to Tusculum. Caput was detained in Rome, and I acted as chaperone to five of the brightest, merriest American girls that ever set off upon a pleasure trip. “A Sorosis Lark,” one named it, while another was inquisitive as to the kinship of this bird to Athené’s owl.

We took the railway from Naples to Pompeii. Used as we were to the odd jumble of old and new forced upon our notice on all public lines of travel in the Old World, it yet gave us a queer thrill to hear the station at Pompeii[294] called out in the mechanical sing-song that announces our arrival at “Richmond” or “Jersey City.” No. 27 was already engaged, much to our regret, but he recognized us, and introduced his comrade, No. 18, who, he guaranteed, “would give us satisfaction.” A jolly, kindly old fellow we found him to be, more garrulous than his friend, but so staid and respectable that, when I grew tired, I committed the four younger ladies to his guardianship, and sat me down in company with my dear, and for so long, fellow-traveller, Miss M——, upon the top step of the Temple of Jupiter to rest, promising to rejoin the party at the house of Glaucus.

We spread our shawls upon the marble to make the seat safe and comfortable, and when the voices of guide and girls were lost in the distance, had, to all appearance, the exhumed city for our own. Vesuvius was slightly restless at this date. The night before, we had rushed out upon the balcony of the hotel parlor at a warning cry, and seen the canopy of smoke above the mountain blood-red with reflections from the crater. Now, as we watched the destroyer, fast bulging volumes of vapor, white and gray, rose against the blue heavens. We pictured, by their help, the Cimmerian gloom of the night-in-day that rained ashes and scalding water upon fair and populous Pompeii. Night of eighteen centuries to temple, mart and dwelling, leaving, when the morning came, the bleached skeleton we now looked upon. “The City of the Dead!” repeated Sir Walter Scott, over and again, as he surveyed the disinterred ruins. Life seems absolutely suspended within its gates. While we sat there, we heard neither twittering bird nor chirp of insect. Even the lithe green lizards that frisk over and in other ruined walls, shun these, blasted by the hot showers,—out of mind for forty generations of living men.[295]

We must have rested thus, and chatted softly of these things, for fully half an hour, when a large party, appearing suddenly in the echoless silence, from behind the walls of a neighboring court-yard, stared curiously at us, and we remembered that our being there without a guide was an infringement of rules. The custodian of the strangers assumed, politely, that we had lost our way, and when we named our rendezvous, directed us how to get thither by the shortest route. We were properly grateful, and when his back was turned, chose our own way and time for doing as we pleased. Were we not habitués of Pompeii—friends of older inhabitants than he dreamed of in his round?

We were too early, after all, for the rest, although long after the hour agreed upon for the meeting. While Miss M—— sallied forth on a private exploration of the vicinity, I sat in the shadow of the wall upon the step of the peristyle once adorned by Nydia’s flower-borders, and re-read the description of the scene between her and Glaucus when, upon this very spot, he told the blind girl of his love for the Neapolitan, summoning her from her graceful task of “sprinkling the thirsting plants which seemed to brighten at her approach.” He had bidden her seek him in the triclinum over there—“the chamber of Leda” when she had gathered the flowers he would send to Ione. Here, too, she gave him the philtre that was to win his love, and robbed him of his senses.

The laggards rejoined us before I had become impatient. Gay, fresh voices put phantoms and musing to flight. All were in high good humor. Their guide had allowed them to loiter and investigate to their heart’s content, and presented each with a bit of seasoned soap eighteen hundred years old, which, by the way, we tried that night and proved by the “lathering” to be saponaceous and of good quality. He had dashed their complacency by remarking,[296] without the remotest suspicion that he was uttering dispraise, that he always recognized Americans by their nasal articulation, but reinstated himself in their favor and themselves, also, by expressing surprise and delight that all four could converse fluently in his native tongue. We extended our ramble beyond the Villa of Diomed into the Street of Tombs—the Via Appia—that, in former times, extended, without a break, all the way to Rome.

Was it in ostentatious display of their family mausoleums, or in callous contempt of natural loves and human griefs, or, from a desire to honor the manes of the departed, and remind the living of their mortality, that the traveler to these ancient cities entered them between a double file of the dead? Was there recognition, however vague, of the great fact that, through Death we gain Life?

We were to spend the night at Castellamare, and having, through a provoking blunder for which we could only blame ourselves, missed the five o’clock train, were obliged to remain in the Pompeii station until nine. We had lunched at the restaurant—and a villainous lunch it was—and being hungry and weary, and out of patience with our stupidity, would have been held excusable by charitable people had we been slightly cross. I record that we were not, as an additional proof of the Tapleyish turn of the feminine disposition. I take no credit to myself. I was tired beyond the ability to complain. Laid upon a bench, cushioned by the spare wraps of the party, my head in Prima’s lap, I beheld in admiration I lacked energy to express, the unflagging good-humor of my charges; the “small, sweet courtesies” that made harmless play of badinage and repartee. They called up a boy of ten, the son of the station-master, from his hiding-place behind the door communicating with the family apartments, and talked to him of his life and likings. He was civil, but[297] not clean—a shrewd, knavish sprite, judging from his physiognomy, but a fond brother to the little sister who soon crept after him. She wore a single garment that had, probably, never been whole or neat in her existence of two years. Even “our girls” could not pet her. But they spoke to her kindly as she planted herself before them on her two naked feet, her neck encircled by her brother’s arm, and gave her bon-bons. The boy bade her say, “Grazie!” and supplemented her lisp with “Tank ’oo!” and “Goot morning!”—his whole stock of English.

The four hours passed at last, and we quitted the dim waiting-room for pitchy darkness and pouring rain outside. At Castellamare, we were set down upon an open platform. The clouds were falling upon us in sheets; the wind caught savagely at our light sun-umbrellas, our only defence against the storm. The pavement was ankle-deep in water, and it was ten o’clock at night. We had been recommended to go to Miss Baker’s excellent pension on the hill, but it was a full mile away, and we were wet in an instant. In the dismayed confusion, nobody knew just how it happened, or who first spoke the word of doom, but we packed ourselves and dripping garments into carriages and were driven to the Hôtel Royale. The land-lady—or housekeeper—stationed in the vestibule, took in our plight and her advantage at one fell glance. She met us with a feline smile, and we were hers.

“My mother is not well. We must have a room, with a fire, for her, at once. And not too high up!” said Prima, breathlessly, not waiting to mop her wet face and hair.

Felina smiled more widely; jingled her keys and studied the red rosette of a slipper she put forward for that purpose.

“I have rooms—certainly.”

“Let us see them—please! This lady must not stand here in her wet clothes!” cried all in one voice.[298]

“Here” was a lofty passage whose stone floor was swept by draughts of damp air.

“She will catch her death of cold!” subjoined Prima, frantic.

Felina put out another slipper; assured herself that the rosette was upon it, also. “I have rooms. One large. Two small. On third floor.”

I will not prolong the scene. We stood where we were, in opposition to our entreaties to be allowed to enter the salle, while the negotiation was pending, until we agreed to take her three rooms, unseen, at her prices. Extortionate we knew them to be and said as much to Felina’s face, eliciting a tigerish expansion of the thin lips, and—“As Mesdames like. I have said I have three rooms. One large. Two small.”

Up one hundred (counted) stone stairs we trudged, to a barn of a room, the sea breaking and the winds screaming against the outer walls. There we learned that neither fire nor hot supper was to be our portion that night, and that for meals served in bed-chambers an extra sum must be paid.

“But you said we could not have supper down-stairs at this hour! We have had no dinner. To say nothing of being wet to the skin. Cannot you send up a bowl of hot soup?”

Of course the plea dashed vainly against her smile.

“But,” a touch of disdain for my weakness mingling with it, as she saw the girls wrap me in dry blankets pulled from the bed, lay me upon the sofa, and chafe my feet—“Madame can have a cup of tea should she desire it.”

A very grand butler brought up the tea-equipage at eleven o’clock. Spread upon a broad platter were as many slices of pale, cold mutton as there were starving guests.[299] A roll apiece was in the bread-tray. A canine hunger was upon us. Our teeth chattered with cold and nervousness. We chafed under the knowledge of being cheated, outwitted, outraged. Yet when the supper was set out upon the round table wheeled up to my couch, and we recognized in it the climax of our woes, we shouted with laughter until the waiter grinned in sympathy.

Then—we made a night of it—for two hours. We drained tea-pot and kettle, and would have chewed the tea-leaves had any strength remained in them; drank all the blue milk, and ate every lump of sugar; left not a crumb of roll or meat to tell the tale of the abuse of hotel and padrona with which we seasoned their dryness. We told stories; held discussions, historical, philosophical, and theological; laughed handsomely at each other’s bon-mots, and were secretly vain of our own,—wrapped, all the while, from head to heels in shawls, blankets, and bedspreads, the girls with pillows under their feet to avoid the chill of the flooring. The destined occupants of the small rooms kissed us “Good night,” at last. Prima—still fuming, poor child! and marveling audibly what report she should make to him whose latest words were an exhortation “upon no account to let Mamma take cold,”—tucked me up in one of the single beds, and pinned the flimsy curtains together. They swayed and billowed in the gusts rushing between the joints of the casements. The surf-roar was deafening; the wash of the waves so distinct and sibilant, I fancied sometimes I heard it gurgling over the floor. It was futile to think of sleep, but, after the fatigue and excitement of the day, I watched out the hours between our late bed-time and the dawn, not unhappily.

Castellamare is the ancient Stabiæ—or, more correctly speaking—it occupied the site of that ill-starred town destroyed by the earthquake that forced from Vesuvius ashes[300] and boiling water-spouts upon Pompeii. Here perished the elder Pliny, suffocated by the mephitic vapors of the eruption. By morning the storm had exhausted itself. From my windows I looked down upon the spot where Pliny died, and over a sea of the matchless blue no one will believe in who sees the Bay of Naples in pictures only. Overhead, a sky whose serenity had in it no reminiscence of last night’s rage, bowed over the smiling earth.

We paid for our supper,—a franc for each bit of pallid mutton; half-a-franc for each roll, and as much for every cup of tea; for “service”—two francs each;—for lodgings, five francs for each hard bed, and at the like rate for the stale eggs, burnt toast, and thick chocolate that formed our breakfast. Then, heedless of Felina’s representations that “strangers were always cheated in the town,” we sent out an Italian-speaking committee of two, who hired a carriage and horses at half the sum for which she offered hers, and were off for Sorrento. The drive between the two towns is justly noted for its beauty and variety. The play of prismatic lights upon the sea was exquisitely lovely: Capri was a great amethyst; Ischia and Procida milk-opals in the softly-colored distance, while on, above and below the ridge along which ran the carriage-road, lay Fairy Land—the Delectable Mountains—Heaven come down to earth! Mulberry trees looped together for long miles by swaying vines laden with young grapes; orange and fig-orchards in full bearing; olive-groves, silvery-gray after the rain; all manner of flowering trees, shrubs, and plants; lordly castles upon the high hills; vine-draped cottages nestling in vales and hollows; ravines, dark with green shadows, that let us catch only stray glimpses of flashing torrents and cascades, spanned by bridges built by Augustus or Marcus Aurelius; under our wheels a road of firmest rock, without rut or pebble; between us and the[301] steeps on the verge of which we drove—breast-high parapets adding to our enjoyment of the wonderful scene the quietness of perfect security against the chance of mishap—these were some of the features of the seven most beautiful miles in Southern Europe. The sea-breeze was fresh, not rude, the sky speckless, but the heat temperate.

If we had sought a thorough contrast to the experiences of the previous evening, we could not have attained our end more triumphantly than by pitching our moving tent during our stay in Sorrento at the Hotel Tramontana. It includes under its stretch of roofs the house of Tasso, where he dwelt with his widowed sister, from June, 1577, until the summer of the ensuing year,—retirement which purchased bodily health and peace of mind, that had not been his in court and palace. The situation of the hotel is picturesque, the balconies overhanging the beach, and the seaward outlook is enchanting. All the appointments—not excepting landlady and housekeeper—were admirable—and the terms less exorbitant than Felina’s lowest charges. It was while guests here, and in obedience to information rendered by the hospitable proprietor, that we made our memorable and only raid upon an orange-orchard. Italian oranges, let me say, en passant, are, in their perfection and at the most favorable season, inferior in richness and sweetness to our Havana and Florida fruit. The sourest I ever tasted were bought in Rome, and warranted “dolce.” Single oranges, and oranges in twos and threes, we had eaten from the trees in the garden of the Tramontana Hotel. Oranges by the quantity—as we had vowed to behold and pluck them—were to be had somewhere for the picking. In our character as independent Sorosis larks, we pined for these and liberty—to gather at our will. I have forgotten the name lettered upon the gate-posts at which our cocchière set us down. “Villa”[302] Something or Somebody. We saw no buildings whatsoever, going no further into the estate than the orchard of orange and lemon-trees in luxuriant fruitage, and smaller, sturdier trees, that had borne, earlier in the season, the aromatic dwarf-orange, or mandarino.

“Tutti finiti!” said the gardener when we asked for these.

We consoled ourselves by filling our pockets with fruit when we had eaten all we could. “Could” signifies more than the uninitiated can believe to a group of American girls knee-deep in soft, lush grasses, orange-flower scent distilling into the warm air from a thousand tiny retorts, globes of red-gold hanging thick between them and the sky, and such exuberance of fun as only glad-hearted American girls can know, ruling the hour. We had made, in the hearing of our cocchière, a bargain with the proprietor of the Hesperides. We were to eat all we wanted, and carry away all we could without baskets, and pay him a franc and a half at the gate on our return. I dare not say how many we plucked, sucked dry and threw away empty, or how many more we carried off in the pockets of over-skirts, lower skirts and jackets. We were in the orchard for an hour, wading through the cool grass, making critical selections from the loaded boughs and leisurely regalement upon our spoils, and talking even more nonsense than we had done during the nocturnal revel over cold, white mutton and weak tea at the Hôtel Royale. The gardener followed us wherever we moved, eying us as sourly as if he had lived from childhood upon unripe lemons. At the gate he broke our contract by demanding two francs and a half for the damage done his orchard. With (Italian) tears in his eyes he protested that he had never imagined the possibility of ladies eating so many oranges, or pockets so enormous; that we had consumed[303] the profits of his entire crop in one rapacious hour—and so much more to the like effect that we passed from compassion and repentance to skepticism and indignation, and called up the cocchière as witness and umpire. He scratched his head very hard, and listened very gravely to both sides, before rendering a verdict. Then he hinted gently that, being novices in the business of orchard-raids, we had possibly overacted our parts; that our appetites orange-ward had passed the bounds of the Sorrento imagination, and that American pockets were a trifle larger than those of his country-people. Naturally, since Americans had so much more to put into them. But honor was honor, and a bargain a bargain. What if we were to pay the unconscionable, injured husbandman—whose oranges were the whole living of himself and family—two francs to compensate for his losses and out of sheer charity.

We were willing, the husbandman mournfully resigned, and cocchière received buono mano for his amicable adjustment of the difficulty.

We had a real adventure upon the return trip to Naples. Our party filled a railway carriage with the exception of two seats, one of which was taken by an elderly German, the other by an Italian officer, whose bright eyes and bronzed complexion were brighter and darker for his snowy hair. Ernesto had engaged to meet us at the station at nine o’clock P.M. We had no apprehension on the score of the proprieties with so steady and tried a coachman. But we were loaded down with parcels of Sorrento woodwork, and the streets swarmed with daring thieves. At a former visit to Naples, as we were driving through the Chiaja, the fashionable thoroughfare of the city, a man had sprung upon the carriage-step, snatched a gold chain and locket from the neck of a young lady sitting opposite to me, and made off with his booty before we could call[304] out to Caput who sat beside the coachman. The streets were one blaze of lamps, the hour early dusk; a hundred people must have witnessed the robbery, but nobody interfered.

“We shall have trouble with all these, I am afraid!” remarked I, looking at the bulky bundles.

“You vill, inteet!” struck in the German, respectfully. “I dit haf to bay effer so mooch duty on some photograph I did dake from Bompeii to Naple dis last veek.”

“Duty! in going from one Italian city to another!”

“Duty! and a fery heafy impost it is! Brigand dey are—de Gofferment and all!”

We had spent so much of our substance—rating available funds as such—in the ruinously-fascinating shops of Sorrento that the prospect of duties that might double the sum was no bagatelle. The story sounded incredible. We appealed to the officer, making frank disclosure of our purchases and ignorance of custom-house regulations. He was a handsome man, with a fatherliness of manner in hearkening to our story that won our confidence. It was true, he stated, that imposts were levied by one Italian city and province upon the products of another. Equally true that it was a relic of less enlightened days when union of the different states under one government was a dream, even of wise patriots. He advised us to conceal as many of our parcels under our cloaks as we could, to avoid notice and a scene at the gate of the station. Should we be stopped, he would represent the case in its proper aspect, and do what he could to help us.

“Although”—with a smile—“custom-house officials do not relish interference from any quarter.”

He spoke French fluently, but the conversation that succeeded was in his own tongue. He was a gentleman, intelligent and social, with the gentle, winning courtesy of[305] speech and demeanor that characterizes the well-bred Italian, infinitely more pleasing than the polished hollowness of the Frenchman of equal rank. As we were running into the station he asked permission to carry a large portfolio one of us had bought. His short, military cloak, clasped at the throat, and falling over one arm, hid it entirely.

“And yours?” he turned to Miss M——, whose possessions were most conspicuous of all.

“Tell him,” she said to Prima, in her pleasant, even tones, “that I will hide nothing. I have been all over the Continent with all sorts of things known as contraband in my satchel and trunks, and have never paid a cent of duty. Nobody troubles me. They see that I am an American who speaks no language but her own, therefore is perfectly honest. They would let me pass if I were made of Sorrento wood, carved and inlaid in the most expensive style. You will see! I bear a charmed life.”

I went through the gate first. There was room but for one at a time.

“Le panier,” an officer touched my little basket of oranges.

I opened it.

“You can pass.”

Miss M—— was next. Serene as a May morning in her native Virginia, bending her head slightly and courteously to the myrmidons of the law, as she walked between them, loaded up to the chin with flat, round and irregular packages concerning whose contents there was not a possibility of mistake—she was the impersonation of a conscience void of offence to this or any other government. The officials were alive in a second.

“Sorrento!” ejaculated one, and in French, requested her to step back into the custom-house office.[306]

“I don’t speak French,” said the delinquent, smiling calmly, and passed right on.

Six of them buzzed after, and around her, like so many bees, letting the rest of the party walk unchallenged through the gate.

“I don’t speak Italian!” she observed, with a pitying smile, at their grimacing and posturing. “Not a word! I am sorry I cannot understand you. I am an American!”

Still walking forward, her parcels clasped in her arms.

We laughed. We could not help it. But it was unwise, for the men grew angry as well as vociferous, dancing around their prisoner in a transport of enraged perplexity that put a new face upon the affair. Prima went to the rescue of her undismayed friend. She assured the officers that the lady was really ignorant of their language, and willing to do what was just and right. Calming down, they yet declared that she, and, indeed, all of us, must go into the office, give an account of ourselves, and pay duty upon such contraband articles as we had with us. It might be a form, but it was the law. Where was our gray-haired officer all this while? We had not seen him since he assisted us to alight from the carriage, the precious portfolio held cleverly under his left arm. Now, casting anxious eyes upon the crowd gathering about our devoted band, we looked vainly for the silvery head and military cap, for the gleam of the gold lace upon his one uncovered shoulder. It was plain that he had deserted us at the first note of alarm.

“And my beautiful portfolio!” gasped the late owner thereof.

We were at the gate, Miss M—— the only composed one of the humbled “larks,” the curious throng pressing nearer and closer, when down into their ranks charged a[307] flying figure, careless that the streaming cloak revealed the Sorrento folio—waving a paper in his hand. The officers raised their caps; fell away from us and ordered off the gaping bystanders.

“I am most sorry,” said our deliverer, breathless with haste. “But when I saw the men stop you, I went into the Custom-House to obtain a pass in due form from the chief.”

Prima has it to this day. It certified that the contents of our parcels were “articles de luxe” for our personal use, and ordered that we should be suffered to proceed upon our way unmolested.

“It was the shortest way, and the safest,” pursued our self-constituted escort, walking with us to the carriage. “But allow me to express my sorrow that you were subjected to even a momentary annoyance.”

He handed us into our carriage; regretted that his return that night to Castellamare would prevent him from being of further service to us during our stay in Naples, smiled and disclaimed when we thanked him warmly for his kindness, and uncovered his dear old head as we drove away.

Miss M—— sank back with a long sobbing breath, the first indication of agitation she had displayed since the arrest at the gate:

“I shall love the sight of the Italian uniform as long as I live!” she averred, with heartfelt emphasis.

“So said”—and so do—“all of us!”

[308]

CHAPTER XXII.
In Florence and Pisa.

FLORENCE in May is a very different place from Florence in November. Still it rained every day, or night, of the month we passed there; showers that made the earth greener, the air clearer. We were homesick for Rome, too, although our lodgings with Madame Giotti, then in Via dei Serragli—now in Piazza Soderini, were the next best thing to the sunny appartimento No. 8, Via San Sebastiano, that had been home to us for almost six months.

Madame Bettina Giotti, trim and kindly, who speaks charmingly-quaint English and “likes Americans,” was to us the embodiment of genuine hospitality, irrespective of the relations of landlady and boarder. We had a most comfortable suite of rooms, a private table, where she served us in person, and which was spread with the best food, as to quality, variety and cookery, we had upon the other side of the water—Paris not excepted.

We gave ourselves, thus situated, resolutely and systematically to sight-seeing.

The Invaluable and Boy had a pass that admitted them daily, and at all hours, to the Boboli Gardens, and we left them to their own devices while we spent whole days in the Uffizi and Pitti Galleries, roaming among the tombs of the illustrious dead in S. Croce and S. Lorenzo, studying and enjoying art everywhere in this, her home, and where[309] men most delight to do her honor. History and religion have here their notable shrines, also. Both combine to make the extensive square before the Palazzo Vecchio a spot to which pilgrim-footsteps turn from all quarters of Christendom.

It is the ancient Forum of the Florentine Republic. The surges of commercial and political life yet beat upon and across it. The Palace is old, and replete with interest to the historical student. The Great Hall in its centre was built under the direction of Jerome Savonarola in 1495. Three years later, they put him to death at the stake in the Piazza della Signoria—the square just mentioned—and had the wind set that way, the smoke of his burning must have filled the spacious chamber planned by him while virtual Dictator of Florence. There lies upon the table beside me, a photograph of a rude picture of his martyrdom. The Palace is the same we look upon now, at the side of an area, vaster then than at present, the same lofty, square tower capping the gloomy building. The judges sit upon benches against the outer wall. A temporary gangway extends from their platform to the gibbet in the open space. On this walk the three condemned monks, in white shrouds, each between two confessors in black, toward the fire blazing under the gallows. They burned Savonarola’s body after it had suffered the extremest indignity of the law, such was their lust of rage against the man who had turned their world upside down—the Reformer born out of time by two hundred years. Until very lately it was the custom among the common people to strew with violets, on each anniversary of the event, the pavement on which he perished.

[310]Savonarola had had his autos-da-fé in places as public as the Piazza della Signoria—pyres, on which women cast rouge-pots, and false hair, and all manner of meretricious personal adornments; to whose flames bad books and licentious paintings and statues were resigned by converted authors and owners. The thunders of his invectives against spiritual wickedness in high places, reached and jarred the proudest throne in Christian Europe. To the proffered bribe of a cardinal’s hat, he returned word—“I will have no red hat, but one reddened with mine own blood—the crown given to the saints.”

Pope and rabble granted his wish.

From the scene of his death we drove straight to the Convent of San Marco, his home. Upon the walls and roof of the monastery, the friars fought like trapped wolves on the night of the requisition for their brother. It was he, not they, who surrendered the body of Savonarola to save the sacred place from sack and fire. It was, then, outside of the town that is now packed in dense, high blocks and far-reaching streets all around church and cloisters. These last surround a quadrangle of turf and flowers. The street-gate shut behind us with a resonant clang, and conventual loneliness and quietness were about us. Above the sacristy-door is a fresco of Peter the Martyr, his hand laid upon his mouth, signifying that silence was the rule of the Dominican order. The spirit of the brotherhood lingers here yet, impressing itself upon all who pass within the monastic bounds. We spoke and stepped softly, without bidding on the subject, in going from one to another of the frescoes on the inner walls of the porticoes or open cloisters. They are nearly all from the hand—and heart—of John of Fiesole, known best as Fra Angelico, the monk of sweet and holy memory, who prayed while he painted; whose demons were all amiable[311] failures; whose angel-faces came to him in celestial trances. The unoccupied cells of the monks on the second floor—square closets, each containing a single window, are adorned with pictures of the Passion from his brush. Faded, now—never elaborate in color or finish, each tells its story, and with power. How much more eloquent must that story have been when the solitary inmate of the chamber knelt upon the bare floor, the awful silence that could be heard shutting down upon him—the one token of human sympathy left him, the agonizing image above his oratory!

In Savonarola’s room are his chair, haircloth shirt, MSS., crucifix, and, among other relics, a piece of wood from his gibbet. His portrait hangs over his writing-table. It is a harsh, strong, dark visage in striking profile, the monk’s cowl drawn tightly around it. We obtained photographs of it in the convent, and one of Fra Angelico, a mild, beautiful face, with a happy secret in the large, luminous eyes. Mrs. Browning interprets it:

Yet he was, in religious phrase, the “dear brother” of Savonarola, and, for long in daily companionship with him.

Fra Benedetto, the brother, according to the flesh, of John of Fiesole, was, likewise, an artist. In the library of the convent, together with many other illuminated missals, are the Gospels, exquisitely embellished by him, with miniatures of apostles and saints. A smaller hall, near the library, is lined with an imposing array of flags of all the towns and corporations of Italy, collected here after the Dante Festival, May 14th, 1865.[312]

Dante’s monument, inaugurated at that date, on the six hundredth anniversary of his birth, stands in the Piazza S. Croce, facing the church. A lordly pile in his honor, on the summit of which he sits in sombre sovereignty, takes up much space in the right aisle of this famous fane—“the Pantheon of Modern Italy.” His remains are at Ravenna. The epitaph on his tomb-stone, dictated by himself, styles Florence the “least-loving of all mothers.” She exiled him, setting a price upon his head; made him for nineteen years, he says, “a vessel without sail or rudder, driven to divers ports, estuaries and shores by that hot blast, the breath of grievous poverty.” When she relaxed her persecutions so far as to recall him upon condition of confession and fine, he refused to enter her gates. Upon bended knee, Florence prayed Ravenna to surrender his remains to his “Mother-city” less than a century after he died, a petition oft and piteously renewed. But the plucky little town holds him yet to her heart, and Florence accounts as holy, for his sake, such things as the dirty bench fastened in the wall of a house opposite the Campanile and Cathedral, whereon he used to sit day after day to watch the building of the latter.

The centuries through which this work was dragged were a woful drawback to its external comeliness. Since we saw it, as we learn from the indignant outcries of art-critics, it has been “cleaned.” “A perfectly uninjured building,” wails one, “with every slenderest detail fine and clear as the sunshine that streams on it in mid-summer—is drenched in corrosive liquids until all the outer shell of the delicate outlines is hacked and chipped away, the laborers hammering on at all these exquisite and matchless sculptures as unconcernedly as they would hammer at the blocks of macigno with which they would repave the streets!” I confess—albeit, as I have intimated before,—not[313] an art-critic, that in perusing the above, the “corrosive liquids” ate into my finest sensibilities, and the “hammering” was upon my very heart. But my recollection of the condition of the building in 1877 is not of harmony, or such fineness and clearness as our plaintiff describes. These existed unquestionably in form and proportion. But the walls of black and white marble were “streaky,” soiled and clean portions, fitted together without intervening shading, denoting where the builders of one age left off and those of the next began anew. An attempt to cleanse it, set on foot some years previous, had marred the Duomo yet more. The effect was that of a “half-and-half” penitentiary garment. Those who know edifices like this and the Milan Cathedral, and that one of the “Seven Lamps of Architecture,” Giotti’s Campanile, from photographs, have one advantage over bona fide travelers. The stains and cracks of time are softened into mellow uniformity in the sun-picture that yet preserves faithfully each grace of design and workmanship. He who dreams over the stereoscopic view which brings out carvings and angles, and the expression of the whole building with magic accuracy, is spared the pain of seeing that the miracle of architectural genius in marble or bronze is undeniably and vulgarly dirty. This is especially true of the Baptistery. The bronze doors (I am not going to repeat Michael Angelo’s remark touching them upon the thousandth part of a chance that one man or woman in the United States may not have heard it) are so encrusted with the dust of as many ages as they have hung in their present place that one cannot distinguish between Noah drunk and Noah sober; between Cain slaying his brother and Adam tilling the ground. The interior would be vastly improved, not by hammering workmen, and corrosive liquids, but by a genuine New England house-cleaning.[314] A hogshead of disinfectants would not dispel the mouldy, sickly odor that clings to the walls and unclean floor. All the children born in Florence of Roman Catholic parents are brought hither for baptism. We never peeped in at the mighty door without seeing one or more at the font. After one closer view of the parties to the ceremony, we refrained from approaching that part of the building while it was thus occupied.

We had been for a long drive in the Cascine—the Central Park of the Florentines—extended into the country, and, our hands full of wild flowers, the odors of field and hedge and garden lingering in our senses, alighted at the Baptistery, attracted by the spectacle of a group dimly visible from the sunlit street. It had seemed a pretty fancy to us, this gathering all the lambs of Firenze into one visible earthly fold, and one that peopled the dusky Rotunda with images of innocence and beauty. We would make these definite and lasting by witnessing the solemn rite. A priest in a dirty gown mumbled prayers from a dog-eared book; a grimy-faced boy in a dirtier white petticoat and a dirtiest short-gown, trimmed with cotton-lace, swung a censer too indolently to disturb the foul air. A woman in clothes that were whole, but not clean, held the bambino. I do not like to call it a baby. It was wound from feet to arm-pits, as are all the Italian children of the lower classes, in swaddling-linen, fold upon fold, until the lower part of the body is as stiff as that of a corpse. These wrappings are never loosened during the day. I cannot answer for the fashion of their night-gear. The unhappy little mummy in question was, in complexion, a livid purple, and gasped, all the while, as in the article of death. The cradle-bands had apparently come down to it through a succession of brother and sister bambini, with scanty interference on the part of washerwomen, and bade fair to become[315] its winding-sheet if not soon removed. The priest made the sign of the cross in holy water on the forehead, wrinkled like that of an old man, never pausing in his Latin rattle and swing; the acolyte gave a last, lazy toss to the censer, drawling, “A-a-men!” The woman, as nonchalant as they, covered in the child from the May air with a wadded quilt, wrapping it over the face as Hazael laid the wet cloth upon his master’s, possibly to the same end. The touching rite was disposed of, and the priest shuffled out of one door, the acolyte went whistling out of another.

The accomplished author of “Roba di Roma,” says of swaddling-bands—“There are advantages as well as disadvantages in this method of dressing infants. The child is so well-supported that it can be safely carried anyhow, without breaking its back, or distorting its limbs. It may be laid down anywhere, and even be borne on the head in its little basket without danger of its wriggling out.”

He doubts, moreover, whether the custom be productive of deformity. Perhaps not. But, our attention having been directed by the ceremony just described to what was, to our notion, a barbarous invention for the promotion of infanticide, we noted, henceforward, the proportion of persons diseased and deformed in the lower limbs among the Florentine street population. The result amazed and shocked us. On the afternoon of which I speak, we counted ten cripples upon one block, and the average number of these unfortunates upon others was between seven and eight. Join to the tight bands about their trunks and legs the close linen, or cotton or woollen caps, worn upon their heads, and the lack of daily baths and fresh clothing, and it is easy to explain why cutaneous diseases should be likewise prevalent.

The mural tablets of Florence are a study,—sometimes,[316] a thrilling one. As when, for example, in driving or walking through the old street, neither wide, light, nor picturesque, of S. Martino, we came upon a tall, stone house with queer latticed windows very high up in the thick walls,—and deciphered above the doorway these words:—

“In questa casa degli Alighieri nacque il divina poeta.”
(“In this house of the Alighieri was born the divine poet.”)

There is the tenderness of remorse in the “least-loving mother’s” every mention of her slighted son—now “chapeled in the bye-way out of sight”—to wit,—sleepy little Ravenna.

Bianca Capello—fair, fond and false—lived in what is now a very shabby palace in Via Maggio, bearing the date, “1566.” Amerigo Vespucci was esteemed worthy of a tablet upon a building in the Borgo Ognissanti. Galileo’s house is near the Boboli Gardens, and, removed by a block or two, is the Museum of Natural Sciences, enshrining, as its gem, the Tribuna of Galileo, enriched by his portrait, his statue, paintings illustrative of his life, and instruments used by him in making mathematical and astronomical calculations. His tomb is in the church of S. Croce, almost covered with ascriptions to his learning, valuable scientific discoveries, etc., etc. Of tomb and epitaph the Infallible Mother is the affectionate warden, guarding them, it is to be presumed, as jealously as she once did the canon he was convicted of insulting. “The world moves,” and so must The Church, or be thrown off behind.

“Casa Guidi”! “Twixt church and palace of a Florence street!” From which the clear-eyed poetess bent to gaze upon the hosts who,—[317]

on a day which “had noble use among God’s days!” How well we had known them, and the face that will look from them no more—while as yet the sea divided us from the land of her love and adoption!

Surely, never had poet more prosaic dwelling-place. Casa Guidi is a plain, four-story house, covered with yellowish stucco, lighted by formal rows of rectangular windows, without a morsel of moulding or the suspicion of an arch to relieve the tameness of the front elevation. It opens directly upon the sidewalk of as commonplace a street as Florence can show to the disappointed tourist. Yet we strolled often by it, lingeringly and lovingly; studied with thoughts, many and fond, the simple tablet between the first and second-story casements:

This is a free English translation, but it does not—it cannot, being English—say to ear and soul what the musical flow of the original conveys.

She is buried in that part of grateful Florence known as the English Cemetery. It is smaller than that in Rome, and not comparable to it in loveliness or interest. We coveted for the woman and the poet a corner of the old[318] Aurelian wall beside Shelley instead of the small plot of the main alley of this village of the dead;—Keats’ coverlet of violets rather than the marble sarcophagus, with a pillared base, set hard and flat upon her grave. One panel bears her medallion profile in basso-rilievo, and the initials “E. B. B., 1861.” There was no need to write more. We would have been better satisfied with less—marble! Buttercups and daisies pressed over the closed, cold mouth of the tomb, and a tea-rose tree at the head had strewed it with blushing petals.

Florence is the acknowledged Queen of Modern Art and gives lessons in the same to all civilization. Yet this English Burial-ground can show almost as many specimens of poor taste and mediocre manipulation as there are monuments within its gates;—a puzzle and a pain to those who have luxuriated in galleries and loggie, the very atmosphere of which ought to be, not only inspiration, but education.

Galileo’s Observatory, where he watched the stars pale before the dawn for many happy nights,—and the Villa, in which he lived for the last eleven years of his mortal life,—blind, illustrious, and, if we may believe him, contented;—whither Milton came to visit and console him and was moved to congratulation at the sight of his deep tranquillity,—stand upon a hill from whose brow Florence is, indeed, la Bella. Galileo’s lamp hangs in the Cathedral of Pisa.

Our excursion to this city was in mid-May. It is distant from Florence but four hours by rail. The intervening country is one of the loveliest tracts in Northern Italy. The wheat-fields were ripening into palest green, and every breath of wind that ruffled this revealed the scarlet sheen of the poppy underrobe. The railway banks were beds of mountain-pinks, separated by acres of buttercups[319] and blue flax, clumps of wild roses and geraniums. Up to this we had felt no oppressive heats, fast though the season was advancing, and to-day, while the train was in motion, we rather enjoyed the blaze of sunshine under which the landscape glowed, while we gazed, into more vivid coloring. But the radiations from the white streets of Pisa were blinding. The breeze lost itself among the flat outskirts of the town, and was never suspected inland.

We took carriages at the hotel and drove, untempted to loiterings in the shadeless thoroughfares, directly to the Cathedral. It is fortunate for travelers who come to Pisa in spring or summer, that the four principal objects of interest, all that one cares to see in the whilom “queen of the western waves,” are grouped within a radius of fifty yards from the Duomo. Seeking its shadow from the pitiless sun, we looked up at the Leaning Tower “over the way.” It did not lean as emphatically as we had hoped for, nor was it as high as it should have been. But from the first glimpse of it, its lightness and grace were an agreeable surprise. And it was clean! Seven hundred years have not defiled it to the complexion of the Florentine Duomo, or even to the cloudiness of “that model and mirror of perfect architecture,” Giotto’s Tower. Its eight-storied colonnades of creamy tints passing into white, were cast up upon the deep blue background like the frost arcades raised at night by winter fairies. It was loftier, presently, and as it heightened, inclined more gracefully toward the earth.

“Like an ice-cream obelisk melting at the base,” suggested a heated spectator pensively.

We walked around the beautiful, majestic wonder; gazed up at its bent brow from the overhanging side; measured the dip of the foundation by the deepening of the area in which it is set, and laughed at ourselves for the natural[320] recoil from walls that seemed to be toppling over upon us. While the young people, in the convoy of a guide, climbed the three hundred—save six—stairs winding up to the summit of the Campanile, Caput and I gladly took refuge in the cool dimness of the Cathedral. Seated upon a bench exactly over the spot where Galileo used to set his chair in order to gaze at the mighty chandelier pendent from the ceiling, we, too, watched it.

It is a grand sight—that great bronze lamp, its scores of disused candle-sockets hanging empty from the three broad bands. Five naked boys brace themselves upon their chubby feet against the lower band, and do Caryatide-duty for the upper. Scrolls, branches, and knops are exquisitely wrought, and the length of the chandelier must be at least twelve feet. The sacristan told us, in a subdued voice, how Galileo had the “habitude” of resorting to the church, day after day, and sitting “just here” to think and to pray. How his eyes, fixed mechanically upon the lamp, noted, one day, that the inclination of the long, slender rod to which it is attached was not quite the same at different hours; of his excitement as he divined the cause of the variation; that, after this, he haunted the Duomo continually until he thought out the truth—“or”—crossing himself, apologetically—“the Blessed Virgin revealed it to her faithful worshipper.”

Having Protestant and inconvenient memories, we had our thoughts respecting the reception the discovery, to which the Virgin helped her protégé, had from her other faithful sons. But we liked the story all the same. We were still more pleased when he deserted us to escort two German priests, the only other persons present beside ourselves, to the contemplation of a large picture of the birth of Our Lady. There are many paintings in the Cathedral and some good ones. Ninety-nine and a half per[321] cent. are in honor of the Virgin Mary. The Madonna and Child over the bénitier near the entrance are attributed to Michael Angelo.

We saw all these things while waiting for our juniors; then, went back to our bench and our contemplation of the lamp, until they rejoined us.

The Campo Santo is a quadrangle enclosed by chapels, with corridors open toward the burial-ground, and paved with flat tomb-stones. When the Crusaders of the thirteenth century lost the Holy Land, a pious archbishop of Pisa had between fifty and sixty ship-loads of earth brought hither from Mount Calvary, and made into a last bed for those who loved Jerusalem and mourned her loss. The sacred soil had the property of converting bodies laid within it into dust so quickly and thoroughly that others could follow them within a short time without inconvenience to dead or living. The Campo Santo became tremendously fashionable, and graves were bought at terrifically high prices when one considers the dubious character of the privilege connected with the situation. No interments have been made here for so long that the quadrangle is a smooth lawn edged with flower-borders.

The frescoes of chapels or corridors are the leading curiosity of the place. Guide-books and local inventories, without a gleam of humor, write these down as “remarkable,” “admirable,” “celebrated.” Only by beholding them can one bring himself to believe in the horrible grotesqueness of these Biblical and allegorical scenes. Hideous and blasphemous as they were to me, I bought several photographs that my home-friends might credit my story of mediæval religious art. The lower part of one I draw, at random, from my collection, represents the Creation of Adam. The Creator, a figure with a nimbus about his head, a train of attendants similarly crowned, behind[322] him,—lifts a nude, inert man from the earth. A toothed parapet separates this scene in the Drama of Life from one above, where the same crowned Figure, in the presence of a larger retinue, draws Eve from the side of sleeping Adam. She stares about her in true feminine curiosity, clasping her hands in a gesture of amazement, or delight, designed, no doubt, to contrast strongly, as it does, with the stupid, half-awake air with which Adam comes into the world. The sleeping bridegroom is disturbed by the extraction of his rib, for, without awaking, he puts his hand under his arm, touching Eve’s toe as it leaves his side. The gravest Puritan cannot but see that he is tickled by the operation. The lower section of this panel has Adam, clothed in skins, digging with a rude hoe, in the parallelograms and circles of an Italian garden. The sequence of the narrative is interrupted here to put the curse of labor in more significant juxtaposition with the gift of a wife. At the right-hand corner of the photograph appears what properly belongs to the third place in the series;—the guilty pair crouching together, after the transgression, amid the trees of the garden, and betrayed in their covert by a darting ray of light from heaven. Below this are Adam and Eve, driven by two angels in knight’s armor through the Norman-Gothic door of a machicolated tower. Cain and Abel, quarreling beside an altar modeled after the pulpit of the Pisan Baptistery, are crowded into the background.

The lack of room for the amplification of subjects and the artist’s conceptions of these, led to a terrific “mix” upon the walls, which are literally loaded with frescoes. The entire Book of Genesis is illustrated upon the surface of the North wall, my photograph being a fair specimen of the style of the decorations. The partisans of Pietro di Paccio and of Buffalmacco claim for their respective masters the honor of the upper line of scenes. A Florentine,[323] Benozzo Gozzoli, began with Noah’s drunkenness,—a favorite theme in wine-growing countries—and ran the Jewish history down to the interview of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. To him was awarded the distinction of a grave beneath the history of Joseph.

The two German priests were going into convulsions of merriment before a monstrous spectacle of the Last Judgment and Hell, in which devils in green, red and yellow, are fighting over souls of equivocal reputation, with angels in blue-and-white liveries. The spirits in dispute have so dire a time between them that the terrors of the fate which befall them, when relinquished by the angels, must be materially mitigated by recollections of the escaped horrors of dismemberment. The Inferno of Dante’s countryman the artist, whose name is unknown, is a huge chaldron, crammed with heretics, apostates and Jews. The Chief Cook, his very horns a-tingle with delight, is ramming down some and stirring up others with a big pudding-stick. The priests laughed themselves double over our dumb disgust. Probably they credited the fidelity of the representation less than even we.

The Baptistery is a four-storied rotunda. The lower story is set around with half-columns; the second, with smaller whole pillars. Above this rise two tiers of pointed arches, the first row enclosing niches in which are half-length figures of saints. The upper arches are windows. A fine dome covers all. An octagonal font occupies the centre of the one vaulted chamber whose ceiling is the roof. It is raised by two steps from the floor, and is of white marble carved into patterns as delicate and intricate as the richest lace-work. The pulpit is scarcely less lovely, being adorned with bas-reliefs descriptive of the Life of our Lord from the Annunciation to the Last Judgment. It is a hexagon and there are five of these panels,[324] the sixth side opening upon the steps. The reticulated marble is singularly pure in quality and wrought into elaborateness of finish that has never been excelled.

We were examining it and objurgating the ubiquitous Goth who has mutilated several of the finest figures, when the custodian, standing a little apart from us, sounded three notes in a sonorous baritone. Angel-voices caught them up and repeated them in every variety of harmonious intonation; then, a loftier choir echoed the strains; another and another, and still another until the rejoicings were lost in the heaven of heavens.

We sank upon the steps of the font, and listened, as, in obedience to our wordless gesture, the man, once and again, gave the signal for the unearthly chorus. The voices were human, if human tones are ever perfect in sweetness, roundness and harmony, the transition of the theme from each band of singers to a higher, a complete illusion of the enchained senses. The responses, clear, tender, thrilling, invoked such images as we had seen in the Uffizi and Pitti galleries—concentric circles of cherubim and seraphim and rapturous redeemed ones, with uplifted faces and glad, eager eyes, reflecting the effulgence of the Great White Throne and Him that sat thereon.

Carlo Dolci knew how to paint such, and Raphael, and Fra Angelico. We had heard their quiring while looking upon the pictured canvas. We saw them as we hearkened to the hymning that ascended to the stars.

[325]

CHAPTER XXIII.
“Beautiful Venice.”

FROM Florence we went to Venice—eight days thereafter, to Bologna.

We “did” Venice leisurely and with great delight.

“The one place on the Continent that bored me!” I once heard a young lady declare at an American watering-place;—a sentiment heartily seconded by several others. “You can do everything there in two days!” continued the critic. “After that, it is the stupidest old hole in creation. I thought I should have died!”

Our friend, Miss M—- had been in Venice in December, and described the blackened fronts of palaces dripping and streaming with rain; low clouds excluding the sea-view; lead-colored drains where poets had seen canals, and a depressing silence through which the gondolier’s cry was like—“Bring out your dead!”

We were prepared to behold the ghost of a city, whispering hollowly of a sublime Past;—a monotonous succession of ditches washing the slimy foundations of crumbling walls;—almost the stillness and desolation of a desert. We left Florence on a hot day; the railway train was crowded; the long, dusty ride the least picturesque we had had in Italy. It was late in the afternoon when we alighted at the station-quay and saw our first gondola.[326] It was wedged in with fifty others against the pier, so tightly that the manner of its extrication was a mystery. A bend of the gondolier’s wrist did it all. He had held up his hand, and Caput had nodded. In a minute more he had brought his craft close to our feet, and balanced himself by means of a long pole with a paddle at the end, while he raised his cap and offered his services. He had a family gondola, black as a hearse, a murderous-looking battle-axe, edge outward, fastened to the prow, and seats for six upon the cushions under a striped awning. Our luggage was quickly disengaged from the confused mass discharged from the baggage-car, and stowed away in the bows; we settled ourselves among the cushions and shot out into the canal out of sight and hearing of the noisy station.

We were in Venice! The Bride of the Sea! Venice of the Doges—of the thousand isles—of the cloudy-winged thousand years! Heat, dust, fatigue went out of our minds with the play of the cool air over our faces, the ripple of the salt-water under the keel of our boat. For this was also the Venice of our old-time poetic fancies—not the sad city photographed upon imagination by our friends’ descriptions. The lofty palaces were ancient, blurred and seamed, but not ruinous—the smooth sunniness of the canals allured the eye on to the sea, the highway and bulwark of the city. Groves of masts streaked it here and there, line and spar delicately defined against the flushing west. At longer intervals, government buildings or warehouses sat blackly upon the breast of the water, the tide lapping their thresholds twice a day. Purplish banks, lying close to the horizon in the hazy amber distances, were the lidi and murazzi—(sand hills and embankments)—protecting the Lagune from oceanic irruptions in tempestuous weather. All this was lost, presently,[327] by the narrowing of the watery highway and closer line of buildings. The canals were dull tracks but for the tossing wake in the middle of each as our gondolier cleft a path with his long-armed sweep. His call before turning a corner was a guttural dissyllable, not easy of imitation. Poets—and Mark Twain—say gondoliers used to sing. We never heard them. Our Antonio, our first acquaintance, and our faithful boatman and guide until he deposited us at the station, the morning of our departure—could not sing a note. Nor could any of his professional brethren, he said.

“It was perhaps the sea-fogs that spoiled their throats. Or the exposure in all weathers, signore. The signora would observe that a gondolier’s life was one of hardship, summer and winter. He had no breath to spare for singing. Misericordia, not a great deal! Nor heart for it when the sposa and bambini must have their mouths filled with food. And polenta dearer every season!”

We were Antonio’s friends before we landed at the Hôtel Luna, and had engaged him for a moonlight excursion upon the Grand Lagune that very night. We hired him for the day, next morning, and upon several other successive forenoons.

For Venice did not bore us. The Piazza S. Marco was just around the corner from our quiet but excellent hotel—a matter of a hundred steps, perhaps, on dry land—and the Basilica of S. Marco—the attraction of Venice to us. Prancing over the great entrance are the four bronze horses, stolen from the triumphal arch of Nero by Trajan to adorn his; from Trajan by Constantine for the new city of his founding and name; from Constantine by Doge Dandolo for the Venetian Cathedral; from Venice by Napoleon I. for the arch in the Place Carrousel, finally, restored by the Emperor Francis to St. Mark’s. They are[328] sturdy roadsters, with good “staying” qualities, if one may judge from their build and history, in no wise jaded by their travels and changes of climate, and look fresh, but not impatient for another start.

The pigeons feed in the Piazza at two o’clock every day. It is “the thing” for strangers and native-born strollers to congregate here at that hour to witness the spectacle. About ten minutes before the bell strikes, the birds begin to assemble, crowding the roofs, eaves and window-sills of the surrounding buildings, preening and billing and cooing, with the freedom of privileged guests. At the stroke of the bell they rise, as one bird, into the air for a downward swoop upon the scattered grain. The pavement is covered in an instant with a shifting mass of purple and gray plumage, and the noise of fluttering and murmuring, of pecking bills and clicking feet fills the square. A bevy of their remote ancestors brought, six hundred years ago, dispatches of such importance from the besieged island of Candia to Admiral Dandolo’s fleet, that he sent the carrier-pigeons to Venice with the tidings of his success in taking the island, and the aid they had rendered him. They were put upon the retired list and fed at the public expense—they, their heirs and assigns forever.

The best photographs—and the cheapest—in Italy are to be bought upon the Piazza San Marco. Florian’s celebrated café, is there, and countless shops for the sale of Venetian glass and beads—bijouterie of all sorts, and for the general robbery of travelers—the rule being to ask twice the value of each article when the customer is a foreigner, and to “come down” should the victim object to the proposed fleecing.

The mosaic floor of San Marco billows like the Mer de Glace, having settled in many places. The decorations of façade and interior are oriental in character and color.[329] St. Mark, after much post mortem travel, rests under the high altar. The altar-piece is of enameled silver and gold plate, fretted with jewels. A canopy of verde antique overshadows the holy sepulchre. A second altar is behind the chief shrine. The canopy of this rests upon four columns, curiously twisted. The two forward ones are of alabaster, and semi-translucent.

“Brought hither from Solomon’s Temple after the destruction of Jerusalem,” affirmed our cicerone.

“By whom?”

The inevitable shrug and grimace, embodying civil surprise at the query, and personal irresponsibility for the tradition.

“Ah! the signora can answer that as well as I who have never thought of it until now. Doubtless”—flashing up brilliantly—“San Marco, himself! Who more likely?”

The Battisterio is a gloomy chapel, and as little clean as it is bright. It has more the appearance of a lumber-chamber than a place of worship. But the relics are priceless—the rubbish unique. The bronze font, big enough for a carp-pond, dates from the 16th century, and is presided over by John the Baptist. His head was cut off upon the stone one sees at the left of the altar. Above the latter is another bit of precious quartz or granite, from Mt. Tabor. St. Mark’s has drawn heavily upon the Holy Land, if one-half the valuables stored within the Cathedral are genuine. Sturdy old Doge Dandolo, who pensioned the pigeons after the capitulation of Candia; who, old and purblind, led the Venetians in the recapture of rebellious Zara, and to victory in the siege of Constantinople; who accomplished what Pietro Doria, two hundred years later, boasted that he would do after humbling the arrogant Republic,—bridled the bronze horses and led them whithersoever he would—is entombed in the Baptistery.[330]

With all of what some call its barbaric redundance of ornament and color, and the neglected richness that seems incompatible with the reputed veneration of the Venetians for their renowned Basilica, St. Mark’s works powerfully upon those who are conversant with its history and can appreciate the charm of its quaint magnificence. Talk of “restoration” in this connection is a project to coat the dusky bloom of a Cleopatra with “lily-white.”

One hundred-thirty-and-four years was this thousand-year-old temple in building, and, pending its erection, all homeward-bound vessels were compelled to bring some tribute to the rising structure. The five hundred columns of the façade are of rare marbles thus imported, principally from the Orient. The wall between these is gorgeous with mosaics—not frescos. The domes are begirt with a frontlet of pinnacles. Sultana of the Sea, to whom all kingdoms have paid tribute, she sits upon the shore in calm imperiousness befitting the regal estate confirmed by a decade of centuries. The hack of chisel, the corrosion of acids here will be sacrilege. Yet they say it is ordained that she shall endure the outrage. They may smite,—they cannot belittle her.

We disbelieved in the fragment of the true cross set in a silver column exhibited in the “Treasury;” were disposed to smile at the splinter, or chip, of St. John’s frontal bone “adorning” an agate goblet. We shook our heads over St. Mark’s Episcopal throne as we had at St. Peter’s in Rome, and would not look at the crystal urn said to contain some of the Saviour’s blood. Nor were we credulous as to the authenticity of the capitals brought from the Temple at Jerusalem crowning the pillars of the Entrance-Hall.

But we always stayed our steps at the red porphyry slabs[331] embedded in the floor of the vestibule. Here, Frederic Barbarossa, Emperor of Germany, and twice-crowned King of Italy,—once by Pope, again by the anti-pope of his own setting-up; Conqueror of Poland and Lombardy; the most accomplished, as he was the most heroic warrior in an era when heroism was knightly duty,—knelt to Pope Alexander III., at the pacific instance of Sebastiano Ziani, Doge of Venice. Ten years of excommunication; the disastrous battle on Lake Como, desertion, treachery and disease had tired out, not quelled the haughty spirit. A twenty years’ war, resulting in irrevocable defeat, probably wrought more potently upon reason and will than the Doge’s arguments. His face was of a more burning red than the hair and beard that earned his nickname, as his knee touched the ground.

Schiller makes Marie Stuart protest, after her betrayal into the like act of subserviency to Elizabeth, that she “knelt not to her, but to God!” The poet may have borrowed the equivocation from Barbarossa’s kingly growl—“Non tibi—sed Petro!”

Alexander was pontiff, diplomatist and magnanimous.

“Et mihi, et Petro!” he said,—raising the humbled monarch and giving him the kiss of peace.

Ah! the languorous noons, when we loitered among the shadows of the great Entrance-Hall, the “court of the Gentiles,” “thinking it all over,” the pigeons cooing and strutting on the hot stones outside, while St. Theodore, on his tall shaft, the Winged Lion of S. Marco on his, stood guard over the deserted Piazzetta, and the breeze came up past them from the Adriatic, the Bride of the Doges!

“In signum veri perpetuique dominii!” Thus ran the ceremony of espousal. The King of all Italy, Vittorio Emmanuele, paid a flying visit to the royal palace on the[332] Grand Canal while we were in the city, and the wedded Adriatic took the event as quietly as she had regarded the usurpation of Austrian and French conquerors. “Perpetual” is a term of varied meanings in this world and life.

Three stately cedar masts arise from ornamental pedestals before the church. They were set up in 1505, and the captured banners of Candia, the Morea and Cyprus used to flaunt there upon state festa-days while the doges ruled Venice and the sea. The flag of United Italy is raised upon each on Sabbaths and holidays. On a certain May morning, more than two-and-half centuries agone, other trees adorned the Piazza S. Marco. They had sprung up during the night, and each bore fruit, at the seeing of which men fled affrighted and women swooned. Many of the spectators had been guiltily cognizant of a conspiracy, headed by Spanish agents, to murder Doge, nobles and Council, when they should come to S. Marco on Ascension-Day. The faces of the strangled men swinging, each from his gallows, revealed the awful truth that the Council of Ten had also known of the plot and marked the ringleaders.

We walked across the Rialto; stopped to cheapen Venetian glasses in the tiny shops crowding the streets leading to and from the bridge; bought here ripe, luscious oranges for a reasonable sum from one Jew, and paid three prices to another for a woven grass basket to hold the fruit. It is a Bowery neighborhood, at the best, from the cheap flashiness of which Antonio would withdraw his aristocratic patronage were he now a merchant of Venice. The Rialto is a steep, covered bridge, lighted by green Venetian blinds, that help to make it a common-looking structure. A bright-eyed Italian offered caged birds for sale on the pier where our Antonio and the gondola waited[333] for us. Upon a tray beside him were heaped white cuttle-fish bones for the use of the canaries.

“I do not want a bird,” I said. “But I will buy some of those”—pointing to the cuttle-fish—“as a souvenir of the Rialto.”

He plucked off his tattered cap in a low bow.

“But the signora should not pay for a souvenir of the Rialto! I will give her as many as she wants—gladly.”

He pressed three of the largest upon me, and absolutely refused to accept so much as a centime in return.

“Buono mano!” insisted Caput, holding out a coin.

The Italian put his hands behind his back. “It is nothing! Let it be a souvenir of the Rialto to the signora from a Venetian.”

“Unaccountable!” sighed Caput, as we dropped upon our cushions under the awning.

“Refreshing!” said I, gazing back at the bird-vender until a turn in the canal hid him.

He stands in the foreground of my mind-picture of the Rialto,—hung about from neck to waist-band with rude wooden cages of chirping linnets, canaries and the less expensive goldfinch, the petted “cardellino” of the lower classes. Their fondness for the lively little creature and his comparative worthlessness in the esteem of bird-fanciers gives meaning to Raphael’s lovely “Madonna del Cardellino,” and interprets the tenderness in the eyes of the Divine Child as He arches His hand over the nestling offered him by John.

S. Giovanni e Paolo ranks second to S. Marco in size, impressiveness of architecture and historical interest. It is the burial-place of the Doges. The last of their number, Manini, sleeps in the more modern church of the Gesuiti (the Jesuits). “Æternitati suo Manini cineres” is his only epitaph. His predecessors repose pompously in[334] the old church, begun in the 13th century and completed in the 15th. It feels and smells like an ocean cave. So strong is the briny dampness of flavor that one would hardly wonder to find sea-weed washed up in the chapel-corners. Pietro Mocenigo,—as great in war as Tomaso Mocenigo was in statecraft and finance, has a liberal share of the right aisle. Fifteen statues surround the mausoleum constructed “from the spoils of his enemies.” In the grave he could not relax his hold upon their throats.

“The only horses in Venice!” said a friend to me, once, in showing a photograph of St. Mark’s “team.”

He had been twice to Venice, but he must have skipped SS. Giovanni e Paolo. Whether or not the Doges were, in life, adepts in noble horsemanship, they are addicted to equestrian statues after death. Very high amid the prevailing dampness, stand and paw their marble coursers on the lids of sarcophagi, as stamping to arouse their slumbering masters, and upon wall-shelves and niches. The Chapel of the Rosary, founded in 1571, as a thank-offering of the Republic for the victory of Lepanto, is now a smoke-blackened shell,—the valuable contents, including the original of Titian’s “Death of St. Petrus, Martyr,” having been destroyed by fire in 1868.

The pictured wealth of Venice had not been conceived of by us prior to this visit. Fresh from Florentine galleries as we were, our day in the Accademia delle Belle Arti was a banquet enjoyed the more because it was unexpected. Our surprise was the result of a want of reflection, since we knew that Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Paul Veronese were Venetians. Still, as men and prophets go, that was hardly a reason why we should behold their master-pieces in honored places in their native, or adopted city. Titian’s “Presentation of Mary in the Temple,” and “John the Baptist in the Wilderness,” Bonifazio’s[335] “Banquet of Dives,” “Jesus in the House of Levi” by Paul Veronese—(how well we all know artists and subjects through the “blessed sun-pictures,” and engravings!) are in the Academy of Fine Arts, a suppressed monastery of modest dimensions and appearance, devoted now to better uses than of yore.

The Bridge of Sighs is another covered bridge, but with a level floor and grated, instead of shuttered windows. A row of gargoyles grin upon the lower arch. An allegorical figure which, we guessed, was St. Mark, occupies the centre of the frieze,—a lion on each hand. The Bridge looks like a place accursed. We did not quite like to pass under it. It spans a narrow canal, shut in from the sunshine by the Palace of the Doges on one side, a dingy, darksome prison on the other. The water is inky-black in their shadow. A chill wind draws through the passage on the hottest day. The last glimpse of the world framed by the barred windows, could not have heightened the hardship of leaving it. The prisons are empty dungeons, the walls exuding cold sweats; badly-lighted and worse-ventilated. There is nothing in them to recompense one for the discomfort and depression of a visit.

We entered the Palace of the Doges by the Giant’s Staircase:—

“The gory head rolled down the Giant’s stairs.”

Of course we quoted the line; knowing the while, that Marino Falieri’s head nor foot ever touched the stately flight. He was beheaded, at eighty years of age, at the top of another staircase the site of which is occupied by this. We saw the place where his name should be in the Great Hall of the Doges. The walls are covered with miles of historical canvas. Tintoretto’s gigantic picture,—said to be the largest oil-painting in the world—of[336] “Paradise” fills one end of the chamber. On the other sides are scenes from the history of the Crusades,—notably of the Venetians’ participation in the Holy Wars. The portraits of the Doges are upon the frieze close to the ceiling. We gave none a second glance. The whole procession of ermine and purple mantles and peaked beards did not interest us one-hundredth part as much as did a sable blank directly over the coronation of Baldwin of Flanders by one of the Dandolos.

“Hic est locus Marino Falieri, decapitati pro criminibus.”

Another Doge, whose craft, or inoffensiveness kept his head upon his shoulders, takes up the indefinite series beyond the accusing tablet.

Many of the historical pictures are by noted artists. Paul Veronese and his pupils appear most prominently in the catalogue, although Tintoretto and Bassano did their part, under princely patronage, toward commemorating the glories, civic, ecclesiastic, and naval, of Venice. So much Doge and Pope drove us from the field of observation by the time we had spent an hour in the immense room. The Voting Hall, visited next, afforded neither change nor relief. Thirty-nine Doges could not be forced into the Council Chamber. The faithful Venetians have made a frieze of them, also, at the end of which we read aloud and thankfully, the name of Manini. We had seen his tomb, and remembered him as the last of the worthy old gentlemen. Here we read the history of the Republic again on ceiling and walls, except where a “Last Judgment”—pertinent, but not complimentary—over the entrance, broke the line of battle, which was, invariably, Venetian victory.

The notorious Bocca di Leone is a slit by the side of a[337] door in a second-story room. We were passing it, without notice, when the guide pointed it out. It is no larger than the “slide” in a post-office door, and like it in shape. If it could give breath to all the secrets it swallowed when the Bridge of Sighs was a populous pathway to the dungeons that meant death; when nocturnal hangings, with no public preamble of trial or sentence, were legal executions—the little hole in the wall would be as the mouth—not of the lion—but of hell!

This Palace, whose foundations were laid A. D. 800, is a superb fabric. It was finished in the fourteenth century. It faces the sea on one side, upon another the Piazzetta, where St. Theodore stands aloft, shield and spear in hand, the crocodile under his feet, and the Winged Lion holds open the Book of the Gospels with his paw. A double colonnade of more than a hundred columns, runs around both of these sides. We counted carefully from the main entrance to the ninth and tenth pillars. They are of rich red marble, and between them, in the prosperous days of the Republic, stood the herald while he cried aloud the sentences of death just decreed in the Great Hall. The Doges were crowned upon the upper landing of the Giant’s Staircase. An inner stairway is known as the Scala d’Oro, or Golden Stairs, and in the same Republican age, none could tread it who were not registered among the nobility. We saw the table around which convened the Council of Ten,—perhaps the same over which the Spanish conspiracy was discussed, and on which the death-warrants were penned.

Then we rejoined patient Antonio at the foot of the Piazzetta, and were rowed—or spirited—by winding ways, to the beautiful church of the Franciscans, to see Canova’s monument. It was erected five years after his death, from his own design for Titian’s tomb. The artist within whose[338] soul the exquisite conception grew into form should rest in this mausoleum and none other. The door of the pyramidal tomb is pushed open by a bending figure, (life-size,) in trailing weeds, who looks longingly, yet fearfully, into the inner darkness. She is followed up the short flight of steps by a procession of mourners,—Poetry, and Sculpture, and Painting, among them,—bearing laurels and funereal emblems. Titian’s monument, in another aisle, is a tasteless monstrosity, in comparison with this “rejected” design.

The Franciscan Monastery adjoining the church, contains the archives of Venice since 883. There are not less than fourteen million documents in the collection. So boast the custodians. Three hundred rooms are appropriated for their accommodation.

[339]

CHAPTER XXIV.
Bologna.

I   HAVE recorded the Traveled American girl’s experience in the Venice we mourned at leaving after eight days’ sojourn. In the parlor of the Hôtel Brun, in Bologna, we met the Average Briton, a spinster of linguistic and botanical tastes—artistic too, as presently appeared—who was “stopping overnight,” in the city.

“Where there’s nothing to be seen, me dear,” she asserted to a countrywoman of her own, in our hearing, “unless one has a fondness for sausage. You remarked that they made a course of Bologna sausage at the dinner-table. Ex’tror’nary—was it not? We thought it quite nasty. But Bologna is a filthy old town—not a show-place at all. Nobody stops here unless obliged to do so. We take the early train for Venice. Ah! there is a wealth of art there!”

“Will you walk?” asked Caput of me, so abruptly that the A. B. lifted her eye-glass at him.

The sidewalks are arcades, protected from sun and rain by roofs supported upon arches and pillars. The shops were still open; the pavements alive with strollers and purchasers. A cleanly, wide-awake city it looked to be, even by night, and nowhere that we saw, dull or “filthy.”

“I lose my patience at the contradiction of fools!” ejaculated my escort, unnecessarily, his demeanor having already spoken for him. “That of sinners is a bagatelle[340] compared with it. I will take you to-morrow, first to the University of Bologna, one of the oldest institutions of learning extant. A University founded more than seven hundred and fifty years ago,—if not, as some declare, established by Theodosius in 425, and subsequently restored by Charlemagne. There were often, as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eight, nine, ten thousand students in attendance at once in the various departments, especially in the law-schools taught by the ablest jurists of Europe. In anatomical research and discoveries, the medical department gained almost equal fame. Galvani was a professor here, and from the Bolognese University the knowledge of galvanism spread over the civilized world. You should be proud to know that there were women-professors in this faculty centuries before ‘advanced ideas,’ and the ‘co-education of the sexes,’ became fashionable jargon in America.”

“I have heard of Novella d’Andrea, the Hypatia of the fourteenth century—fabled to have been so beautiful that she was obliged to sit behind a screen when she lectured.”

“Upon Canon Law! The story is true. Inerius introduced here the study of Roman law, and Novella was its able and eloquent expounder. Laura Bassi received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the University about 1700. She was Professor of Mathematics and Physical Science. Madame Manzolini, in the same century, taught Anatomy. Clotilda Tambroni, Professor of Greek, died in 1817. The character of the branches studied and taught by them is the most remarkable thing. Belles-lettres and modern languages would seem more natural.

“Bologna has produced nothing worthy of note except sausages! Yet the king of linguists, Mezzofanti, was, likewise, a professor in this University. Eight popes were[341] born in Bologna, Benedict XIV. among them, and other men far more eminent in their day and in ours, such as Manfredi and Aldobrandini. In the Bolognese Accademia delle Belle Arti are the very best paintings of a school that owes its name to the city. Had that woman ever heard of Francesca Francia, Guido Reni, Domenichino, or the three Caracci? Or, of the museum of Etruscan curiosities in the University Buildings? Of the two Leaning Towers of Bologna? Or, the Campo Santo? Sausage, forsooth! I hate a fool!”

“So did Mr. F’s aunt!” said I, at this climax. We both laughed, and the Average Briton was dismissed for pleasanter topics.

I was almost afraid, after this philippic, to hint that the Leaning Towers, seen by the morrow’s light, were unfortunately like two overgrown factory chimneys, canting tipsily to one side. They are of grimy brick, devoid of ornament, and seven hundred and seventy years old. Ugly, unfinished and useless, they impart a rakish, dissipated air to an otherwise respectable quarter. The junior of the twain, and the shorter, by one hundred and thirty-four feet, exceeds the greater in obliquity. A century since, its inclination was eight feet southward, three feet eastward, and it is said to have persisted in its downward tendency during that hundred years. Its taller mate leans but three feet out of the perpendicular.

Dante honors the shorter and more ungainly tower, by likening to it Antæus, who was but a son of the clod himself. Prima found the passage in the Inferno, and read it to us:

[342]A less mellifluous rhyme arose to English-speaking lips in surveying the incomplete shaft:

When the unstable foundations became an admitted fact, why were not the Asinelli and Garisenda torn down and built upon firmer ground, or the materials otherwise appropriated?

We were bound for the University, having but made a détour in our drive thither, to see what the guide-books catalogued as the “most singular structures in Bologna”—the drunken towers.

The buildings occupied by the famous school of learning are comparatively modern, and were, until 1803, the palace of the Cellesi, a noble family of Bologna. The library of one hundred thousand volumes is arranged in an extensive suite of rooms, frescoed, as are some of the corridors, with the coats of arms of former students in the University.

“What if a student should not have a family escutcheon?” we suggested to our guide.

The objection was as intelligible, we saw, at once, as if we had asked, “Must every student have a head of his own in order to matriculate here?”

While we speculated in our own vernacular as to the number of genuine heraldic emblems four or five hundred American college-boys could collect at such a demand from their Alma Mater, and the guide stood by, puzzled and obsequious, we were accosted in excellent English by a gentleman who had entered from another room.

“Can I be of service to you? We are proud of our University and happy to show it to strangers.”[343]

It was Sig. Giovanni Szedilo, of whose grammar of Egyptian hieroglyphics we afterward heard much, and for the next three hours, he acted as host and interpreter.

The Bolognese Street of Tombs has been uncovered within a decade. It was disclosed by that searcher of depths and bringer of hidden things to light—a railway cutting. The bared sepulchres gave up wonderful treasures, and the ancient University, as next of age in the region, became their keeper. In one room of the museum are large glass cases fastened to the floor, by brickwork, I think. In these lay the exhumed Etruscan skeletons amid their native dust. The removal of the graves with their tenants was so skillfully effected that we saw them exactly as they had lain in the ground. Sons of Anak all—and daughters as well. The women were six feet in length and grandly proportioned. Tarnished bracelets, from which the gems had dropped, encircled the fleshless wrists, and a tiara had slipped from the brow of one with the gentle mouldering back to ashes. “Can a maid forget her ornaments?” The Etruscans believed that she would not be content in the next world—wherever they located it—without them. In the hand of each person lay the small coin that was to pay the Etruscan Charon for the soul’s passage over the dark river. Always a river to Pagan and to Christian, and too deep for man’s fording! Beside the skeleton of a little girl was a tray set out with a doll’s tea-set, as we would call it, pretty little vessels of Etruscan ware, that were a dainty prize of themselves, in a “collector’s” eyes. We would not have touched them had they been exposed to manual examination—although the craze for antique pottery had possessed us for many years. The outstretching of the small arm, the pointing fingers in the direction of the plaything were a sufficient guard.[344] Other toys were laid away with other children; now and then, a vase, or a cup of choicer ware, beside an adult.

“Supposed to be two thousand years old!” said our erudite guide. “We are assisted materially in our computation of dates by the articles buried with them.”

A running lecture upon Etruscan pottery ensued, illustrated by the large and perfectly-assorted collection in the museum. There were five different and well-defined periods in the history of the art, we learned, and how to discern the features of each. We marked its rise and decline from the earthenware pot, roughly engraved and rudely colored, and the dark, or black jug, with slightly raised and more graceful designs upon a smooth surface—to the elegant forms of chalice and vase, embellished with groups of allegorical figures, and painted tales of love and war. These declined in beauty and finish until, about fifty years before the Christian era, all traces of the renowned manufacture were lost.

“There has not been a bit of real Etruscan ware made since that time,” reiterated the connoisseur, accentuating the dictum by tapping gently upon the specimen in his hand, and smiling into our interested faces, “Who asserts the contrary, lies!” yet more suavely.

He blew invisible dust from the precious vase; replaced it tenderly upon its shelf, and passed on to Egyptian mummies with the easy sociability of a contemporary. There are papyrii by the score in the archives of the University, and four thousand ancient MSS. in the “new” buildings which are “all print” to him. He rendered the long-winded hieroglyphical inscriptions upon sarcophagus and tablet as fluently as we would the news summary of Herald, Tribune or Times. A pleasant, gracious gentleman he proved to be withal. His courtesy to the party of strangers whose sole recommendation to his hospitality[345] was their strangerhood, is held by them in grateful remembrance.

S. Petronio, the largest church in Bologna, is, like the Leaning Towers, unfinished, although begun in the fourteenth century. The Emperor Charles V. was crowned here. A vast, hideous barn without, it yet holds some valuables that well repay the trouble of inspection. The marble screens of the chapels; the inlaid and carved stalls, of a clear, dark brown with age; old stained glass that shames the gaudiness of later art; one or two fine groups of sculpture, and a very few good paintings enrich the interior. The astronomer Cassini drew, in 1653, the meridian-line upon the pavement of one of the aisles. Much of the stained glass is from the hand of the celebrated Jacob of Ulm. About the church is a bare, paved space, devoid of ornament or enclosure, that adds to the dreariness of the structure.

Guido Reni is buried in S. Domenico, a smaller edifice, enshrining the remains of its patron saint. The kneeling angel on one side of his tomb, and the figure of St. Petronious (a new worthy to us) upon the other, are by Michael Angelo. Guido Reni painted St. Dominic’s transfiguration within the dome, and, with one of the Caracci, frescoed the Chapel of the Rosary on the left. In the choir is the monument of King Enzio.

We had already seen the house in which he was confined for twenty-two years after the disastrous fight of Fassalta. He was the son of the Emperor Frederic II., and great-grandson of Barbarossa. Like his auburn-haired ancestor, Frederic II. waged war for twenty years with the Papal See, the Bolognese espousing the cause of the latter, and that of the Guelphs. Euzio’s gift from his father of the Kingdom of Sardinia was the pretext of the Pope’s second bull of excommunication against the Emperor,[346] and the cause of the war which resulted for the brave young Prince in life-long captivity. His incarceration was rather the honorable detention of a prisoner-of-state than penal confinement. The Palazzo del Podestà was a luxurious home. Its Great Hall still bears his name. It was not in this audience-chamber that he received the visits of the most beautiful woman in Bologna, Lucia Vendagoli, whom he secretly married. Euzio was, at the time of his capture, but twenty-five years of age. At seventeen, he had fought his first battle under his father’s eye; at nineteen, was King of Sardinia; at twenty, was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial forces. To the bravery and knightly accomplishments of his illustrious great-grandfather, he united personal beauty and grace that made him irresistible to the fair patrician. Her passion for him and her wifely devotion are the theme of numberless ballads and romances, and were the solace of an existence that must else have been insupportable to the caged eagle.

From this union sprang the powerful family of the Bentivogli who carried on the hereditary feud with the Pope until the latter sued for peace and alliance. The Bentivogli were a stirring race and kept Bologna in hot water for as many decades as their founder passed years in the palatial prison. The staircase up which Lucia stole to meet her royal lover; the apartments in which their interviews were held, are still pointed out, although the palace is now a city hall where records are made and preserved.

We drove out to the Campo Santo upon the loveliest of June afternoons, passing, within the town-walls, the house of Rossini, built under his own eye, and the more modest abodes of Guercino and Guido Reni. The frescoes of this last are from the master’s brush, but we had not time to go in to look at them. “Something must be crowded[347] out”—even in Bologna. For example, we visited neither soap nor sausage-factory.

The drives in the environs of the city are extremely beautiful, the roads good. The Campo Santo was, until the beginning of this century, a Carthusian Monastery. The grounds are entered through a gate in walls enclosing church, cloisters and arcades, with a level space literally floored with grave-stones. In this, the common burying-ground, were re-interred the greater part of the bones unearthed by the railway excavations through the Street of Tombs. Etruscans, Guelphs, Ghibellines and modern Bolognese sleep amicably and compactly together. Grass and purple clover spring up between the horizontal stones, and the roses in the path-borders load the air with sweetness. The distinguished dead have monuments in the arcades,—long corridors, filled with single statues and groups, usually admirable in design and workmanship. The vaults of the nobility are here, wealth combining with affection to set fitting tributes above the beloved and departed. There may be, also, a vying of wealth with wealth in the elaborate sculpture and multiplication of figures. I did not think of this in pausing at a father’s tomb on which stood upright a handsome lad of thirteen or thereabouts, the mother’s only surviving child. She had bowed upon his shoulder and buried her face in his neck in an agony of desolation, clinging to him as to earth’s last hope. The boy’s head was erect, and his arm encircled the drooping form. He would play the man-protector, but his eyes were full, and the pouting underlip was held firm by the tightened line of the upper. The careful finish of the details of hair and dress did not detract from the pathos of the group.

“That is not Art!” objected Prima, made critical by Roman art lectures and illustrative galleries.[348]

“No!” I assented. “It is Nature!”

The monument of Lætitia Murat Pepoli, Napoleon’s niece, is here, and a matchless statue of King Murat in full uniform, sword in hand, one advanced foot upon a piece of ordnance. Torn banners, a crown and other trophies of victorious generalship, bestrew the ground. The pose of head, the military carriage, the contained strength of the countenance betoken the master of men and of himself.

A monument representing Christ, attended by angels floating in the air, is a surprisingly lovely bit of “artistic trickery.”

Clotilda Tambroni is buried here, and in the cloisters are the busts of men distinguished in science and in letters, Mezzofanti and Galvani among them. When our erudite Sig. Giovanni seeks Etrurians and Egyptians in the world of shades, the Bolognese will set up his marble presentment beside his peers.

Among the “crowded outs” of Bologna was not the Accademia delle Belle Arti. We almost pitied—under the mollifying and refining influences of our stay within its courts,—the Average British Spinster who had taken the early train for Venice and the “wealth of art there.” Baedeker and his followers designate as the “gem of the collection” Raphael’s picture of S. Cæcilia’s trance while angels discourse heavenly music above her head. One demurs at the decision in beholding, in the same gallery, Guido Reni’s “Crucifixion,” his “Victorious Samson” and “Slaughter of the Innocents;” Domenichino’s “Martyrs,” with supplicating saints and angels in the upper part; the best works of the Caracci and Francesca Francia; Peruginos—for those who like them; more pleasing pictures from Guercino, the Sirani, and a host of artists of less note.[349]

We were to leave the uninteresting city at half-past twelve, the third day after our arrival. The carriages stood at the door of the hotel, piled with luggage, and the party, with one exception, were in their places half an hour before the moment of the train’s departure for Milan. Landlord, waiters, and facchini were paid, vehicles engaged and trunks brought down before Caput’s disappearance. Fifteen minutes of tolerably patient waiting ended in inquiries among ourselves as to who had seen him last and where. He had stepped around into the next street, at eleven o’clock, we were assured by the proprietor. He would be back very soon. Five restless minutes more, and the urbane host ventured to ask if Monsieur had the “habitude” of losing trains. It was the custom of some travelers. And what matter? It was an easy affair to unload and dismiss the carriages and return to our apartments. There were still unvisited attractions in Bologna. His smiles grew broader, our anxiety more active as two, three, four minutes slipped by. The fifth was upon us when a hot and hurrying figure dashed up the street; sprang into the foremost carriage, and we drove off at a gallop to the station. There, we had a breathless rush, as might have been expected,—a scramble for tickets and seats. It was impossible to secure a compartment for our party. The lunch-basket was in one carriage; the fruit-basket in another. Nobody had her own satchel or books. The Invaluable and Boy were separated by four compartments from always-foreboding Mamma. We were fifty miles from the hills of Bologna, and our eyes already sated with the watery flats, rice-fields and broom-stick poplars of Lombardy before we found one another, our respective belongings,—and our tempers.

The cause of the delay and consequent turmoil maintained his equanimity, as was meet. For, had he not had[350] another hour in the University? Did he not offer me, as a peace-gift, photographs of the portraits of the quintette of Lady-professors of Bologna, including the perilously-fair Novella? Was he not brimming and bubbling over with priceless information imparted by the benevolent librarian, and burning benevolently to make us partakers of his knowledge? And, securely buttoned in the breast-pocket of his traveling-coat, did he not possess the Grammar of Egyptian Hieroglyphics, written in flowing Italian by Sig. Giovanni Szedilo?

[351]

CHAPTER XXV.
“Non é Possibile!”

“NON é possibile!” said Boy, turning his flushed face to the pillow, and away from me.

“But it is arrow-root jelly, dear! Try to eat a little!”

“Non é possibile!” murmured the little fellow, dreamily, and fell into a feverish doze.

We were detained ten days in Milan, waiting for letters and to collect luggage. Coolness was not to be had in the city except in the Cathedral, and among the streams, fountains and trees of the Public Gardens. The older members of the party haunted the former place, exploring every part from the private crypt where Carlo Borromeo lies, like a shriveled black walnut, in his casket of rock crystal, enwrapped in cloth-of-gold; a jeweled mitre upon his head, a cross of emerald and diamonds over his breast;—four million francs represented in sarcophagus and ornaments, while beggars swarm upon the church-steps;—to the ascent “from glory to glory,” of the hundred-pinnacled roof. Boy and his devoted attendant frequented the Gardens—“the Publics,” as he called them, as they had what he had named the “Bobbolos” in Florence. We believed him as safe as happy there.

Yet, when he drooped and sickened within a few days after our arrival at Cadenabbia on Lake Como, we feared[352] lest malaria, the pest of Milan, had lurked in the shaded glens, and on the brink of the ponds where he used to feed the swans. The malady proved to be measles, contracted in Lombardy or from some Cadenabbian playmate. It was an easy matter to quarantine our apartments in the quiet hotel we had chosen because we could be better accommodated, as a family, there, than at the larger one lower down the lake. Three of our rooms on the second-floor were en suite. We removed the patient into the farthest of these, a cool, corner bed-room fronting the water, and the Invaluable had entire charge of it. Happily, the only other children in the house were two baby-girls whose parents were Americans, but now resident in Florence. I went immediately to the mother, with the truth, when the eruption appeared. She was a sensible woman, and a thorough lady.

“My girls must have the disease at some time,” she said. “As well now as later. Do not distress yourself.”

Her husband, as considerate of us and as philosophical for their little ones, added some valuable advice to his reassurances,—counsel I am glad to transmit to others who may require the warning.

“Say nothing to the Padrone of the nature of Boy’s ailment. He will, probably, demand a large sum for the damage done his hotel by the rumor of the infectious disease. That is a favorite ‘dodge.’ Travelers must pay for the luxury of illness in a country where there are fewer appliances for the comfort of invalids than anywhere else in Christendom.”

We thanked him for his friendly caution, and followed his directions so faithfully that, to this day, neither landlord nor domestic suspects the harm they sustained through our residence with them. Boy had the measles, as he does everything, with all his might. He could[353] neither taste nor smell, and the sight of food was odious. The room was shaded to densest twilight while the sun was above the horizon, to spare the weak eyes. The gentlest talk and softest songs were required to calm the unrest of fever. When his mind wandered, as it often did, he would speak nothing but Italian, fancying, generally, that he was talking with the padrone and his wife who had petted him abundantly before his illness. Hence, the “non é possible” that had refused his supper.

Seeing him sink into more quiet sleep than he had enjoyed for several days, I set down the rejected cup; stole to the window and unbolted a shutter. The sunny day was passing away, but the lake was a-glow with its farewell. In the garden, separating the hotel from the shore, was a group of American friends who had arrived from Milan two days before. Three or four girls, looking delightfully cool and home-like in their muslin dresses, sat upon low chairs with their fancy-work. The gentlemen wore loose coats and straw hats. The coziness of content,—the reposefulness expressed in attitude and demeanor, were in just harmony with hour and scene. One was reading aloud, and while I looked, the words formed themselves clearly upon my ear. They had talked at dinner, of “Kismet,” then a new sensation in literary circles. But the tuneful measures delivered by the fine voice of the reader were from no modern novel or other ephemeral page:—

I do not apologize for the long quotation. I offer it as a pendant to Buchanan Read’s “Drifting,” that brings before our closed eyes the unrivaled loveliness of the “Vesuvian Bay.” Both are inspired—I use the term reverently—word-paintings. Both excite within the soul of him who has seen Naples from Posilipo and Como from Cadenabbia, something of the sweet madness of poetic dreaming. It is all before us again with the melodious movement of the verse—even to such realistic touches as the trailing hand—

and the tinkle of the floating bells that guide the fisherman by night to his spread net.[355]

I believe Como disappoints nobody. Claude Melnotte’s description of his ideal castle upon its banks reads like a fairy-story. Recalled at Cadenabbia or Bellaggio, it may be aptly likened to a cleverly-painted drop-curtain.

I had been shut up in the darkened room all day; was weary of body, and if not actually anxious, sympathized so earnestly with the little sufferer that my heart was as sore as my nerves were worn. The view—the perfumed air; the on-coming of an evening fairer than the day; the home-comfortableness of the garden-party; the feeling and music of the voice rendering the poem,—perhaps, most of all the poem itself, loved and familiar as it was—were soothing and cordial for sleeplessness, fatigue and the mother’s heart pain. I know no other ache that so surely and soon drains dry the fountain of life and strength as the nameless, terrible “goneness” and sinking I have thus characterized.

The moon arose before the Iris hues faded out from the water. The young people filled two boats and floated away upon the silvery track laid smoothly and broadly from shore to shore. A band was playing at the Hotel Bellevue, half-a-mile away, and the lake lay still, as listening. In the pauses of the music the tinkling of the tiny bells on the nets; the far-off murmur of happy voices, and the yet fainter song of nightingales in the chestnut-grove behind the house filled up the silence. From the richly-wooded hills and clustering villas at the lower end of the lake, my eyes roved along the loftier crests of the opposite heights to the snow-line of the Bernese Alps filling the horizon to my left. We had meant to give but one week to Como, tempting as it was. These seven days were to have been a breathing space after Milanese heats before we essayed the St. Gothard Pass—the gate of Switzerland. A mighty gate and a magnificent, and, up to June 10th,[356] locked fast against us. The band of white radiance, gleaming in the moonlight, like the highway of the blessed ones from earth to heaven, had been a stern “non é possibile!” to our progress before Boy fell ill. A party had passed the barrier on the 7th, but at the cost of great suffering and peril to the invalid of their company,—a report duly conveyed to us, coupled with a warning against similar temerity. Now—upon the 20th—we were a fixed fact, for three weeks, at the least, and had taken our measures accordingly. Matters might have been far worse. For instance, had the civil padrone surmised the character of Boy’s “feverish attack,” or the dear babies B—— caught it from him. We were granted time to write up note-books, arrange photographs and herbarium-albums, and bring up long arrears of correspondence. Had we pressed on over the mountain-wall at the appointed date we should have missed the reunion with the party of eight from lower Italy from whose companionship we were drawing refreshment and sincerest pleasure.

In the center of one leaf of my floral album—right opposite a view of Bellagio and Villa Serbelloni, with the rampart of snow-capped hills rising back of it into the clouds, the shining mirror before it repeating white walls and dark woods, olive-terraces and rose-gardens,—is a single pressed blossom. It is five-petaled, gold-colored; the pistil of deepest orange protected by a thicket of amber floss. The leaves are long, stiff, and were glossy, set in pairs, the one against the other on a brown, woody stem. It grew in the grounds of the Villa Carlotta. The spray of many fountains kept the foliage green, when Bellaggio blazed most fiercely in the June suns, and the lime-walks on the Cadenabbia side were deserted. Boscages of myrtle, of lemon-trees and citron-aloe, honeysuckles, jasmine and magnolias shadowed the alleys.[357] Calla lilies, tall and pure, gave back the moonlight from the fountain-rims, and musk-roses were wooed by the nightingales from moonrise to day-dawn.

This is what my yellow-haired princess says to me, as I unclose the book, and a waft of the perfume she brought from the enchanted regions steals forth. She was bright as the sun, clear as the day, sweeter than the magnolias, when Caput came with her, into Boy’s room the day after my moonlight reverie at the window, and gave her into my hand:

“Mr. R—— S——’s compliments and regrets that you could not join the walking-party.”

She has a page to herself,—the peerless beauty! as the episode of the four days’ visit of our transatlantic friends glows out from the pale level of our social life during our as many weeks’ lingering at Cadenabbia.

We made excursions when Boy was well enough to leave his bed, by boat, by carriage and on foot. We bought in Bellaggio more olive-wood thimble-cases, ink-stands, silk-winders, darning-eggs and paper-cutters than we shall ever get rid of on Christmases and birth-days. We visited silk-factories; penetrated the malodorous recesses of stone cottages to see the loathsome worms gorging themselves with mulberry-leaves; going into silken retirement and enforced fasting after their gluttony, and boiling by the million in a big pot, dirty peasant women catching at the loosened threads and winding them on bobbins until the dead nakedness of the spinner was exposed. We read, studied and wrote in the scorching noons and passed the evenings in walking and sailing. We did not tire of lake or country, but July was late for Italy, and my system may have absorbed poison from the Lombardy marshes. When, on the morning of July 4th, the diligence we had engaged for the journey to Porlezza drove to the door, I[358] was supported down the stairs after a week of pain and debility, and lifted into my place in the coupé, or deep front seat, facing the horses.

Wedged in and stayed by cushions, I soon tested and approved the sagacity of an eminent physician’s advice to invalids—chronic and occasional. “Change air and place, instead of drugging yourself. Move as long as you can stir. When you cannot,—be carried! But, go!”

The air was fresh and invigorating, blowing straight from the mountains. The road wound up and over terraced hills, cultivated to the topmost ridges; through fertile valleys and delicious forest glades, gemmed with wood blossoms. It was haying time. Purple clover and meadow-grasses were swathed, drying, and stacked in a hundred fields, the succulent stems yielding under the tropical sun the balm of a thousand—ten thousand flowers. I have talked of the wild Flora of Italy until the reader may sicken at the hint of further mention of such tapestry as Nature rolled down to our wheel-tracks. Cyclamen, violets, wild peas,—daisies, always and everywhere,—edged and pearled the green carpet. The scenery changed gradually, without loss of beauty, in nearing the Lake of Lugano. Lying among pillows on the deck of the steamer we had taken at Porlezza, I noted that the very mountain shapes were unlike those environing Como, and their coloring darker. There were no more straight brows and abrupt precipices, but one conical height was linked to another, furrowed by foaming cascades, springing from crest and sides, until S. Salvador loomed up before us at the terminus of our twelve-mile sail, majestic and symmetrical, wearing a gray old convent as a bride her nuptial crown.

At the Hotel Belle Vue, on the border of the lake, we tarried two days, to rally strength for the continuous effort[359] of the next week, more than to inspect Lugano and its suburbs. We hired here a carriage, in size and general features resembling a Concord stage. A written contract was signed by both parties. The driver, vehicle and four horses were ours until we should be delivered, baggage and bodies, upon the steamboat plying between Fluelen, at the upper end of the Lake of the Four Cantons, and the town of Lucerne. The diligence was well-hung, fitted up with red velvet seats, soft and elastic; the horses were strong and true,—the driver spoke Italian—not German, which we were beginning to dread. For almost a week we were to be only passengers, free to eat, sleep and see at our will, without the fear of altered prices, extras and other sharp impositions, incessantly weighing upon our foreign-born souls.

How we climbed the Alps is too long a story to relate in detail. Maggiore, the Ticino, Bellinzona, the quiet Sabbath at Faido near the mouth of the St. Gothard tunnel, then building,—I catch the names in fluttering the leaves of our note-books, and each has its story.

Julius Cæsar fought his way from Rome to Gaul through the valley of the Ticino. The plains on each side of the classic river, as level as an Illinois prairie, are a narrow strip between the mighty ranges of snow-mountains. The meadow-farms are divided by hedge-rows and flecked with grazing flocks. Other herds are pastured high up the hill-sides in the summer, the huts of their keepers black or tawny dots, when seen from below. Every few furlongs, cataracts flash into sight, hasting by impetuous leaps, down the rocks to the river, not infrequently dispersing themselves in spray and naught, in the length and number of their bounds.

We crossed the Pass, July 9th—a cloudless day. Since early morning we had been climbing. The road is built[360] and cut into the solid mountain, and barely wide enough to permit the skillfully-conducted passage of two diligences. It winds up and around spurs and shoulders, and is protected at the more dangerous curves and steeper cliffs by stout stone posts. The traveler eyes the thickness and obstinate expression of these with growing satisfaction as the villages below dwindle into toy-hamlets and the fields into dolls’ patchwork-quilts of divers shades of green and yellow; while he makes rapid silent calculations of the distance between them, and their relation to the length and breadth of the stage. Could we go down backward, sideways, anyway, were a horse to balk, or a trace to break, or a wheel come off? Looking directly upward, we saw a tedious succession of terraces, similarly guarded; dizzy inclines that were surely inaccessible to hoof or wheel. The next hour showed us from the most incredible of these, the road from which we had surveyed it.

“I begin to comprehend ‘Excelsior,’” said Secunda, solemnly. “No wonder he died when he got to the top!”

We were nearing the snow-line. We were warmly wrapped, but the increasing frostiness of the air warned us to unfasten shawl-straps and pull from beneath the seats the carriage-rugs we had stowed away at Faido. Caput had spent as much time out of the diligence as in it, in the ascent. A bed of scarlet pinks or blue gentian; a blanket of hoary moss capped with red; a clump of yellow pansies—the tiny “Marguerites” of the Alps,—branchy shrubs of rose-colored rhododendrons;—were continually-recurring temptations to leap over the wheel from his place in the coupé. Once out, it was hardly worth his while to get in again when, for a mile or two ahead, the like attractions, and many others, cushioned the rocks, nodded from their brows and smiled from every crevice. Now, as he came up to the side of the carriage[361] to toss in upon us his burden of beauty, his face was reddened by cold,—not sunburned;—he struck his emptied hands smartly together to quicken the circulation, and the rime began to form upon his moustache. Scanty patches of snow no longer leaked from sheltered nooks across the road. Brown earth and barren rocks were hidden partially, then, entirely,—then, heaped over by the gray drifts. They were gray,—positively grimy. Not quite as dirty as city-snow, but of a genuine pepper-and-salt that was a surprise and a disgust. From below they were as dazzlingly pure as the clouds that caught against them, with the same cold azure shadows in their clefts. We were driving now between cloven banks of packed snow,—six, twelve, twenty feet high, on which the heavens might have showered ashes for as many days and nights as darkness had brooded over Pompeii, so befouled were they. The July sun shone full upon the glistering surface, with no more perceptible effect than if the month had been December. The ingrained dust had been swept from the iron crags jutting into the snow-cutting at the next turn of the pass, and frowning upon us from yet loftier terraces. It was granitic powder, disintegrated and beaten fine by frost and blast.

Once in a while, we passed a low house with deep eaves and great stones laid upon the roof. These supplied refuge at night and in storm, to the goats browsing on Alpine moss and grasses. The herdsmen wore jackets, coats and caps of goat and sheepskin. Wiry dogs, not at all like the pictorial St. Bernard, slunk at their heels, or barked crossly at a straying kid. A clatter of hoofs and rattle of trace-chains upon the upper road prepared us for the appearance of a single horse, trotting steadily by us in the direction from which we had come.

“Has there been an accident?” we inquired.[362]

We might see a coach rolling back upon us next. The driver explained that the summit of the Pass was but a mile or two ahead; that the fourth horse was not needed in the descent and was accordingly released from each diligence at the post-house at the top, and sent home by himself.

He was a saturnine “whip,”—for one who spoke Italian—but he smiled grimly at the next question; “Will he certainly find his way home? Will nobody try to stop, or steal him?”

“It is an everyday affair, Signorina. His supper is at the foot of the hill. Who should stop him, since everybody knows to whom he belongs and whither he goes?”

Peering over the edge of the precipice from my window, I saw the trained creature, already two hundred feet below our level, trotting at the same even gait, down the zigzag highway. Before we had gone half-a-mile further, a second met and passed us, harness on, the traces hooked up out of the way of his heels, going downward at the regulation rate of speed, neither faster nor slower than his predecessor. It was at this point that a volley of soft snow-balls flew against and into the carriage, and from their ambush, behind a drifted heap, emerged Caput and Prima, rosy with laughter and the sharp air. They had left the carriage an hour ago to walk directly across the ice-fields to this height, a straight track of two miles, while we had toiled and doubled over more than six to the rendezvous.

Snow-balling in July! The story of the “three little boys who went out to slide, All on a summer’s day,” need not have been fictitious if they were St. Gothardites. In a trice, Secunda had torn off entangling rugs and was upon the ground, and Boy halloaing vociferously to be allowed a share in the sport. The driver sat upon the box, gazing[363] at his horses’ ears, unmoved by the whizzing missiles, merry shrieks and deafening detonations from the frozen rocks. I was cramped by long sitting, even in my luxurious nest upon the back seat. I would get out. The snow was not white, but it was snow. I longed to feel it crisp and crunch under my feet.

“Is it quite prudent?” remonstrated Miss M——, gently.

“Come on!” encouraged the revelers.

After a dozen trial-steps, I boldly avowed my intention to walk to the nearest curve in the road. Caput gave me his arm and we sent the coach on with the others. The ground was smooth as a skating-pond, but not so slippery. A mountain-wall, five hundred feet high, arose in sheer perpendicular at our left.

“Take it slowly!” cautioned my escort. “You are weak, and the air highly rarefied.”

That, then, was the reason why respiration passed rapidly from difficulty to pain. I should get used to it soon, and to the horrible aching in my right lung. But, when, having walked beyond the lee of the rocky rampart, the breeze from a neighboring glacier struck us in the face, I thought breath was gone forever. In vain Caput, turning my back to the wind, sheltered me with his broad shoulders and assured me the pain would be short-lived. The agony of suffocation went on. I had but one distinct recollection in the half-death:

“A traveler died, last year, near the top of the Pass from collapse of the lungs!” a gentleman had said to another one evening at the hotel as I passed through the hall.

I had scarcely thought of it again until now, when I was dying in the same way. I heard Caput’s shout to the driver; saw mistily the entire party tumble out into the snow, and Prima, plunging down a steep bank to reach us[364] the sooner,—brandy-bottle in hand. As if swallowing were easier than breathing! They got me into my nest again; wound me up in shawls and rugs; poured some wine down my throat; chafed my hands, and, after an age of misery, the tiniest whiff of breath found entrance to the laboring lungs, as when a closed bellows is slowly opened.

The driver, during all this commotion, sat, rigid as the nearest Alp, without abating his scrutiny of his leaders’ ears. Collapsing lungs were no novelty and no terror to him, and none of his business. He had contracted to deliver us, alive or dead—(and our luggage,) upon the deck of the Fluelen steamer within a week, for and in consideration of the sum of so many hundred francs. That was all he knew or cared about the matter. He loosened one of our horses at the post-house on the summit, and the patient beast trotted off down the mountain in the convoy of a dog chained to his collar. The cold was now piercing; the never-thawed ice of the lake before the Hospice, blue and hard as steel. Caput added to his adjurations to haste, a gratuity that touched a chord of natural feeling in the wooden man. He fairly raced down the other side of the mountain, spinning around curves and grating upon the wheel-brakes while our hair stood on end and our teeth were on edge. Down defiles between heights that held up the heavens on each side; on the verge of precipices with the wheels almost scraping upright rocks on the left and grazing the outermost edge on the right; thundering over bridges and flying through the spray of waterfalls, we plunged, ever downward—until, at sunset, we whirled out into the open plain and into the yard of the Hotel Belle Vue at Andermatt.

In ten minutes more, I lay, smothering in the well of one feather-bed, another upon me, and was cold withal. A Swiss maid was building a fire in the stove, within four[365] feet of the bolster. The Invaluable and the spirit-lamp were brewing a comforting cup of tea upon the round stand at my side.

The hotel was excellent, being clean, commodious, well-provisioned and handsomely-appointed as to furniture and service. The rest of the party used it as a center for all-day excursions to the Furca Pass and the Rhone Glacier, while I lay in bed, too worn and miserable to be more than feebly diverted by scraps of conversation that arose to my windows from the piazza and lawn. Such, for example as this:

English Voice—feminine and fat. “I guess you are an American boy, stranger!”

Boy. “What makes you think so?”

E. V. “Oh! I judge—I mean, I guess—by the cut of you.”

Boy (who never “guesses”—) “And I judge you are English. I can tell them wherever I see them.”

E. V. “How—I should like to know?”

Boy (knowing and sententious). “Americans are white and thin. English are fat and red.”

E. V. “Upon me word! You are not very white, I am sure!”

Boy. “Ah! but if you had seen me when I had the measles at Cadenabbia! Misericordia! I was as red as you!”

This chapter has two morals for those whom they may concern.

To Traveling Americans and those who hope to become such: Heed wisely Nature’s emphatic or hinted “Non é possible!” Do not attempt the St. Gothard or Simplon Pass if you have unsound lungs or heart.

To the Average Briton: A monkey is better at cutting capers than an elephant.

[366]

CHAPTER XXVI.
Lucerne and The Rigi.

PHOTOGRAPHS, casts and carvings of the Lucerne Lion are well-nigh as plentiful as copies of the Beatrice of the Palazzo Barberini. All—even the best of these—fall lamentably short of expressing the simple grandeur of Thorwaldsen’s boldest work. The face of a perpendicular sandstone cliff was hewn roughly,—not smoothed nor polished in any part. Half-way up was quarried a niche, and in this, as in his lair, lies a lion, nearly thirty feet long. The splintered shank of a lance projects from his side. The head—broken or bitten off in his mortal throe, lies by the shield of France, which is embossed with the fleur de lys. One huge paw protects the sacred emblem. He has dragged himself, with a final rally of strength to die upon, while caressing it. He will never move again. The limbs are relaxed, the mighty frame stretched by the convulsion that wrenched away his life. He is dead—not daunted;—conquered,—not subdued. The blended grief and ferocity in his face are human and heroic, not brutal. In the rock above and below the den are cut a Latin epitaph, and the names of twenty-six men.

“Helvetiorum fidei ac virtuti. Die X Aug. II et III Sept., 1792;” begins the inscription. The date tells the story.[367]

Who has not read, oft and again, how the Swiss Guard of twenty-six officers and seven hundred and fifty privates were cut to pieces to a man in defence of the royal prisoner of the Tuileries against the mob thirsting for her blood? In the little shop near the monument they show a fac-simile of the king’s order to the Guards to be at the palace upon the fatal day. Trailing vines have crept downward from the top and fissures of the cliff. Tall trees clothe the summit. A pool lies at the base, a slender fountain in the middle. There are always travelers seated upon the benches in front of the railing guarding the water’s brink, contemplating the dead monarch. It is the pride of Lucerne.

Just above it is the Garden of the Glacier, lately uncovered. The earth has been removed with care, revealing cup-like basins in the sandstone, worn by the glacial action of the round stones lying in the bottom of the hollows.

“Do you believe it?” I overheard an American girl ask her cavalier, as they leaned over the railing of a rustic bridge crossing the largest “cup.”

“Not a bit of it! It’s gotten up to order by some of these foreign scientifs. Stones are too round, and the marks of grinding too plain. Fact is—the Glacial Theory is the nobby thing, now-a-days, and if there’s no trick about this concern, it’s proved—clear as print! But they’ve done it too well. Nature doesn’t turn out such smooth jobs.”

It is very smooth work. Those who believe in the authenticity of the record, gaze with awe at the stones, varying in size from a nine-pin ball to boulders of many tons’ weight, forced into their present cavities by the slow rotation of cycles. Ball and boulder have been ground down themselves in all this wear and tear, but the main rock has[368] been the greater sufferer. The glacier was the master and resistless motive-power.

The great Glacier of the Uri-Rothestock was in sight of my bed-room windows, flanked by the eternal snow-line of the Engelberger Alps. Across the lake from the city loomed Mt. Pilatus.

is an English translation of a Lucerne rhyme. Guide-books refer to him as the district-barometer. Our experience—and we watched him narrowly for a month,—proved him to be as unstable as was he for whom he was named. There is a gloomy tarn upon the southern declivity in which Pontius Pilate drowned himself, a remorseful exile, driven from palace, judgment-seat and country, but unable to evade the torment of memory and the accusing vision of “that Just Man.” So runs the popular legend, and that the “cap,” “collar” and “sword” of the mountain rise from this dark and accursed lake. Moreover, it is believed by the peasants that storms follow the approach of a foreigner to the haunted spot. With all his humors and untruthfulness, Pilatus deserves a better name. He is a striking and magnificent accessory to a view that is glorious in every aspect.

Every rood of ground around Lake Lucerne, otherwise known as the Lake of the Four Cantons, is memorable in the history of the gallant little Republic. Near it, Arnold Winkelried gathered into his breast the red sheaf of spears upon the battle-field of Sempach, July 9th, 1386.

The Confederate Brethren of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, met at Rütli upon the very border of the lake, on[369] the night of November 7th, 1307, and swore to give no rest to mind or body until Switzerland should be free.

William Tell was born at Bürglen, a few miles above Fluelen. It is fashionable to call him a myth, and his biography symbolical. If our opinion on this head had been demanded prior to our going to Lucerne, the spirit, if not the letter of our reply would have been akin to Betsey Prig’s “memorable and tremendous words,”—“I don’t believe there’s no sich a person!” By the time we had re-read Schiller’s “William Tell,” and visited, with it in hand, Altorf, Küssnacht and Tell’s Platte, we credited the tales of his being and daring almost as devoutly as do the native Switzers.

Küssnacht is but a couple of miles back from the lake in the midst of a smiling country lying between water and mountains. A crumbling wall on a hill-side to the left of the road was pointed out to us as the remains of Gessler’s Castle, pulled down and burned by the Confederates the year after the Oath of Rütli. The Hollow Way in which Tell shot him is a romantic lane between steep, grassy banks and overhanging trees. It was by this that Gessler approached the tree behind which Tell lay, concealed, cross-bow in hand. The exact place of the tyrant’s death is marked by a little chapel. A fresco in the porch depicts the scene described by Schiller. The purple Alpine heather blossoms up to the church-door, and maiden-hair ferns fringe the foundation walls. The short, warm season in Switzerland is blessed by frequent and copious showers; the face of the earth is freshly green and the herbage almost as luxuriant as are the spring-crops of Italy. We drove a mile beyond the chapel to Immensee, a hamlet upon Lake Zug. Lunch was spread for us at a round table in the lakeside garden of a café. The Rigi rose abruptly from the southern and narrower end of the blue[370] sheet. Drifts of gauzy haze were sailing slowly across the broad brow.

“Almost six thousand feet high!” remarked Prima, following the outlines with thoughtful eyes, “And Zug is thirteen hundred feet deep. Lake Thun fifteen hundred. One’s imagination needs Swiss training in order to grasp such figures.”

The opposite heights were a much lower group, graceful in undulation and form, and heavily wooded. To our right as we sat, was a barren line, like a mountain-road, running sharply down the side of one of the range.

“The Goldau Landslip!” We had heard of it almost as long and frequently as of the Wyllie disaster in the White Mountains. In 1806, a strip of the mountain, one thousand feet long and one hundred thick, slid, on a September afternoon, at first slowly, then, with frightful velocity, until it crashed, three thousand feet below, upon four peaceful villages at the foot of the slope and into the Lake of Lowerz. To this day, a solemn mass is said in the sister-village of Artli, upon the anniversary of the calamity, for the souls of the four hundred-and-odd men, women and children who perished in that one hour. Lowerz, forced thus suddenly from its bed, reared, a tottering wall of waters, eighty feet high, and fell backward upon islands and shores, bearing churches, dwellings and trees before it. It is a mere pond now, a little over a mile wide, and but fifty feet deep, the débris of the slide having settled in it. A peaceful eye of light, it reflected the quiet heavens as we looked back upon it from the hill above Immensee, but the awful track on which neither tree nor bush takes root, leads down into it.

Tell’s Platte—or “Leap”—is marked by a tiny chapel upon the extremest water’s edge near Rütli. Its foundations are built into the rock upon which the patriot sprang[371] from Gessler’s boat. The present shrine belongs probably to the sixteenth century, but the original chapel was consecrated,—declare the annalists of the country, and the English translator of Schiller,—when men who had seen and known Tell were alive and present at the ceremony. An altar stands within the recess—it is only that. The front is arched and pillared, and the steps are washed by the wake of each passing steamer. A great Thanksgiving Mass for Swiss liberty is performed here once in the year, attended by a vast concourse of people in gaily-decorated boats. There is not room on the shelving shore for a congregation.

Altorf is a clean Swiss village where the window-curtains are all white, and most of the casements gay with flowers, and where the children, clean, too, but generally bare-legged and bare-headed, turn out in a body to gather around the strangers who stop to look at the monument. A very undignified memorial it is of the valiant Liberator. A big, burly plaster statue of the father, erected on the ground where Tell stood to shoot at the apple, brandishes the reserved arrow in the face of an imaginary bailiff. “With which I meant to kill you had I hurt my son!” says the inscription on the pedestal. The lime-tree to which the boy Albert was tied to be shot at was one hundred and forty-seven measured paces away. A fountain is there now, adorned by the statue of the magistrate who gave it to the town. Upon the sides of a tower that antedates Tell’s day, are faded frescoes, commemorating the apple-shot, his jump from the rocking boat and Gessler’s death. The Swiss are not enthusiastic idealists. They believe—very much—in a veritable Tell, preserve with jealous and reverential affection all traces of his existence and national services.

Our first ascent of the Rigi was made in company with[372] two of our American “boys,” college-mates who had “run over” to pass a three months’ vacation upon “the other side.” Letters announcing this intention had been sent to us from home, and a later missive from London, containing a copy of their “itinerary,” repeated the invitation to join them at the steamboat landing in Lucerne, July 23d, 4.10 p.m. for a sail up the lake and a night on the Rigi.

“But how very-very extror’nary! Quite American in point of fact!” ejaculated an English lady, to whom I spoke at the lunch-table of our intended excursion. “When you have heard nothing from them in three weeks! They may have altered their plans entirely. You will not meet them, you may be sure.”

I smiled confidently. “The engagement is of six weeks’ standing. They will keep it, or we should have had a telegram.”

The steamboat touched at our side of the lake for passengers and I got on there, while Caput, who had an errand in the town, walked around by the iron bridge. I watched him cross it; noted what we had cause, afterward, to recollect,—the white radiations from the stone pavement that forms the flooring of the long causeway, and that the deck was hot to my feet.

“The intensest sun-blaze I have ever felt!” he said, coming aboard at the railway terminus. “Strangely sickening too! It made the brain reel!”

The train was puffing into the station. Among the earliest to step on the gangway were two bronzed youths on whose beards no foreign razor had fallen. Each carried a small satchel and had no other luggage or impedimenta incompatible with a quick “run.” New Yorkers going out to Newark or Trenton to pass the night with friends would have evinced as much sense of strangeness.

“We planned everything before sailing from home,”[373] they said when we commended their punctuality “Lucerne and the Rigi were written down for to-day.”

They had never seen Lucerne before, but they had “studied it up” and were at home on the lake so soon as they got the points of the compass and we had swung loose from the pier. They would return with us to the town on the morrow and spend a day in seeing it. Including the Lion, of course, and the Glacial Garden and the old covered bridge with the queer paintings of the Dance of Death. And hear the grand organ in the Stifts-Kirche at vespers. The city-walls were better-preserved than they had imagined they would be. The nine watch-towers—where were they? They could count but six. They were on the lookout for the four arms that make the lake cruciform and traced them before we could designate them. Was that old tower in the rear of the handsome château over there the famous Castle of Hapsburg? Pilatus they recognized at a glance, and the different expression of his shore from the cheerful beauty of the Lucerne side, the pleasant town and the rising background of groves and fields, gardens and orchards. Vitznau? Were we there so soon? The sail had been to the full as charming as they had anticipated.

All this was, as the English lady had said, “quite American.” To us, used for many months to alternate douches of British nil admirai-ism and hot baths of Italian and French exaggeration of enthusiasm, the clear, methodical scheme of travel, the intelligent appreciation of all that met the eye, the frank, yet not effusive enjoyment of a holiday, well-earned and worthily-spent, were as refreshing as a dipper of cool water from the homestead spring would have been on that “blazing” day.

If we had never gone up the Mount Washington Railway, the ascent of the Rigi would have been exciting. The cars are less comfortable than those on the New[374] Hampshire mountain, and the passengers all ride up backward, for the better enjoyment of the view,—a miserable arrangement for people of weak stomachs and heads. Mt. Washington had been a thrilling terror that fascinated me as did ghost-stories in my childhood. The Rigi is a series of gentle inclines with but one span of trestle-work that could have scared the most indefatigably-timid woman. But Mt. Washington offers no such prospect as was unfolded for us in wider and more wondrous beauty with each minute. The sun was setting when, instead of entering the Hotel Rigi-Kulm where our rooms had been engaged by telegraph from Lucerne, we walked out upon the plateau on which the house stands. Against the southwestern horizon lay the Schreckhörner, Finsteraarhorn, and—fairest of “maidens,”—the Jungfrau,—faint blushes flickering through the white veils they have worn since the fall of the primeval snow. On the south-east the Bristenstock, Windgelle, Ober-Alp, and a score of minor mounts, unknown to us by name, caught and repeated the reflected fires of the sunset. The air was perfectly still, and the distances so clear as to bring out the lines of heights like penciled curves, that are seldom seen even from an outlook embracing an area of three hundred miles. “Alps on Alps!” Mountain rising behind and overtopping mountain, until the sublime succession melted into the outlined curves just mentioned. In the direction of Lucerne, stretched right beneath us what seemed a level, checkered expanse of farms, groves and villages, lighted, once in a while, by the gleam of a lake (we counted ten without stirring or turning from where we stood) and intersected by an hundred streams. The twilight was gathering upon the plain. When the light had died out from lake and river, we stood in the sunshine, and the snow-summits were deepening into crimson. The[375] air was chill, but we lingered to show our friends the “Alpen-glow,”—to us a daily-renewed and lovely mystery. The lowlands were wrapped in night; the ruddied snows paled into pink,—ashes-of-roses,—dead white. The West was pallid and still. The day had waned and died, blankly and utterly. When, suddenly, from peak to peak, glowed soft flame,—a flush of exquisite rose-color, quivering like wind-blown fire, yet, lasting a whole minute by my watch, ere it trembled again into dead whiteness. Another minute, and the phenomenon recurred, but less vividly. It was a blush that rose and blenched as with a breath slowly drawn and exhaled. One could not but fancy that the white-breasted mountains heaved and fell with the glow in long sighs, before sinking and darkening into slumber.

“It is really night now!” Caput broke the silence. “We will go in. But it was worth staying to see, though one had witnessed the like a thousand times.”

We came out again after an excellent dinner, but the wind had risen, the night was piercingly cold, and we were driven into our beds. By nine o’clock there was nowhere else to go. The lights were extinguished in the salon and main halls, and bed-room fires had not been thought of. The only suggestion of comfort was in the single beds heaped higher than they were broad with blankets and duvets. The window at the foot of my couch was unshuttered. Sleep was slow in coming, while the wind thundered like rock-beaten surf against the house, threatened to burst the rattling casements.

I pulled another pillow under my head, and had a picture before me that made me revel in wakefulness. The moon was up and near the full. The horizon was girdled with effulgence, sparkling, chaste—inconceivable. The valleys were gulfs of purple dusks; the forest-slopes black as death. I could discern the glitter of granitic cliffs, and[376] upon inferior hills, the sheen of snow-banks left in sunless hollows. Had my eyes been sealed, I should have pronounced it a tempestuous night. Could I have closed my ears, the divinest calm had brooded upon the world enclosed within the white mountains.

“The strength of the hills is His also!” The strength of these heights! Serenity of power! The perfectness of Peace!

I did not mean to sleep. There would be other nights,—and days—if I chose to take them—for that. But the bugle-call at half-past three startled me from slumber in which moonlight and mountains were forgotten as though they were not. The snow-tops were dimmer in the dawn than they were under the high moon, the sky behind them dun and sullen. Guests are forbidden by English, French and German placards to “take the blankets from their beds.” The wisdom of the prohibition was palpable to all who assembled upon the plateau to see the sun-rise. The wind was still furious, the morning colder than the night, and, I think, not ten people out of the forty or fifty shiverers present had made a regular toilette. Ladies had thrown on double flannel wrappers, and tied up their heads in hoods and scarfs. Gentlemen had donned dressing-gowns, and some had come forth in slippered haste. All wore cumbrous shawls, waterproof cloaks and railway rugs. One half-frozen Frenchman was enveloped in a strip of bed-side carpet brought from his chamber. A more serious annoyance than cold or gale, was the dust, raised by the latter,—or more correctly speaking, minute grains of attrite granite that offended eyes and nostrils. I had dressed snugly and warmly, and tied a thick veil over my face and ears, but the wind tore viciously at my wraps, and the pulverized particles sifted through the net until I could scarcely breathe, even by turning my back upon it, while[377] my three cavaliers formed a close guard between me and the hurricane. We could not forget discomfort, but we disregarded it when we had cleared our eyes from the stinging sand.

The lower landscape was still in shadow, the mountains wrapped in bluish-gray indistinctness. Presently, warm glows of color suffused the dun vapors of the lower heavens,—saffron and rose and carmine;—quivering arrows of amber light shot upward and outward from an unseen center below the horizon verge,—and, one by one, as beacons respond to the flash of the signal-fire, the loftiest tips of Finsteraarhorn, Schreckhörner, Wetterhorn, the Monch, the Eiger—the Jungfrau—flamed up above the mists. Floods of changeful lights rolled down upon the lesser hills, revealing peak, chasm and valley; pouring, finally, a benign deluge over the plain. It was not a swift, capricious darting of rays hither and yon, but a gradual growth of the power of the light into a fullness of occupation. The sun came in calm stateliness out of his chamber in the east, and the world was awake.

Early as it was, women and boys were threading the crowd with chamois-horn paper-cutters and knobby bunches of dirty Edelweiss and Alpine roses for sale at Rigi-Kulm—(or tip-top) prices. An Englishman, in an Indian-pattern dressing-gown, a smoking-cap bound over his ears with a Madras handkerchief,—swore roughly at them collectively, and at one poor hag in particular, as she offered the shabby bouquet.

“Picked but yesterday, milor’, from the edge of a glacier. Milor’ knows—”with a ghastly smirk—“that the Edelweiss is the betrothal-flower?”

He may have understood the wretched patois of Swiss-German-French. He probably comprehended nothing except that she wanted him to buy what he styled, not inaptly—“filthy[378] rubbish.” But he would have sworn as vehemently in either case, for the wind had tangled him up badly in his voluminous skirts, and while striving to disengage his calves with one hand he held on to his cap—possibly to his peruke—with the other.

“Monsieur!” implored the woman, lifting the flowers to the face of that one of “our boys” nearest me.

He shook his head with a smile,—being American, and a gentleman—gave a look at her pinched visage and poor garments, and his hand moved toward his pocket.

“I don’t want them, you know!” to me. “But—” another merciful glance.

“Combien?” I said to the woman.

She had, in my hearing, asked the Anglo-Indian to give her half a franc for the bunch.

She now protested that the three Edelweiss were cheap at five sous (cents) each, and the three Alpine roses should go as a bargain to “le beau Monsieur” at three cents a piece.

“You are a cheat—and a very foolish one!” I said. To my young friend—“American sympathy is a marketable commodity over here. Only, he who gives it, pays in current coin her who receives it.”

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CHAPTER XXVII.
Personal and Practical.

I   HAVE alluded to the intense blaze of the sun upon the day of our tryst with the newly-arrived travelers. Until then we had not suffered from heat in Switzerland. Our pension was a stone building, with spacious, high-ceiled rooms, in which the breeze from lake and icy mountains was ever astir, and we were rarely abroad excepting at morning and evening.

On our way home the next afternoon, after a delightful sail to Fluelen and back, and a visit to Altorf, we met Boy and nurse at the gate of the public park where he and I went daily for the “milk-cure.” Three or four cows and twice as many goats were driven into the enclosure at five o’clock and tethered at the door of a rustic pavilion. There they were milked, and invalids and children drank the liquid warm from great tumblers like beer-glasses. Goats’ milk had been prescribed for me, and I could endure the taste when it was fresh. When cold, the flavor was peculiar and unpleasant. Boy usually relished his deep draught of cows’ milk, but to-day he would not touch it. He had a grievance, too, that had tried temper and pride.

“Things bother me so, mamma! The people here are so foolish! A woman had some fruit to sell down there by the Schweizerhof and said a long nonsense to me. I said—‘Non capisco Tedeseo!’ and everybody laughed. It’s[380] good Italian, and means—‘I don’t understand a word of your horrid old Dutch!’”

He began to sob. Papa picked him up and carried him to our carriage. When we were in our rooms, the Invaluable had her story to tell. Boy had taken a long walk with his sister in the forenoon and had come home complaining of headache and violent nausea. Seeming better toward evening, he had insisted upon going for his milk, and she had hoped the cooler air would refresh him.

“I want to go back where people have sense and can understand me!” moaned the little fellow. “I’m not a bit sick! I’m discouraged!”

The fever ran high all night. The following day we summoned Dr. Steiger, the best physician in Lucerne. There are few better anywhere. For the next fortnight—the saddest of our exile—his visits were the brightest gleams in the chamber shadowed by such wild fears as we hardly dared avow to one another. Cheerful, intelligent, kindly, the doctor would have been welcome had his treatment of our stricken child been less manifestly skillful.

“He is a sick boy. But you are brave?” looking around at us from his seat at the pillow of the delirious patient. “I will tell you the truth. He has had a coup de soleil. He is likely to have a long fever. It is not typhoid yet, but it may be, by and by. Strangers unused to the sun in Switzerland are often seriously affected by it. When he gets well, you will be careful of him for one, two, three years. Now—we will do our best for him. I have four boys of my own. And—”a quick glance at me—“I know what is the mother’s heart!”

I would not review, even in thought, the three weeks succeeding this decision, were it not that I cannot bring myself to withhold the tribute of grateful hearts—then so heavy! to the abundant goodness of the stranger-physician[381] whose name we had never heard until our boy’s illness, and to the sympathy and active kindness that were our portion from every boarder in a house filled with English and Americans. Jellies, ices, fruit, flowers, toys, were handed in at Boy’s door, with tender inquiries, from hour to hour, as to his condition. Music-loving girls who had scarcely left the piano silent for fifteen minutes during the day and evening, now closed it lest the sufferer should be disturbed by the sound, his chamber being directly over the salon. Every foot trod softly upon the polished floor of the upper hall and the stairs, and offers of personal service were as earnest and frequent as if we had dwelt among our own people. I write it down with a swelling heart that presses the tears to my eyes. For Heaven knows how sore was our need of friendly offices and Good Samaritans at that juncture! The house was handsome, well-furnished and kept beautifully clean. Well people fared comfortably enough. But, for sickness we found, as we had everywhere else—notably at Cadenabbia—no provision whatever, and with regard to dietetic cookery, depths of ignorance that confounded us.

I could not for money—much less for love or pity’s sake—get a cup of gruel or beef-tea made in the kitchen. When Boy was convalescent and his life depended upon the judicious administration of nourishment, I tried to have some oatmeal porridge cooked, according to directions, below stairs, paying well for the privilege. There were two pounds of oatmeal in the package. I ordered half-a-cupful to be boiled a long time in a given quantity of water, stirred up often from the bottom and slightly salted. The cook—a professed cordon bleu—cooked it all at once and sent it up in a prodigious tureen,—a gallon of soft, grayish paste, seasoned with pepper, salt, lemon-peel and chopped garlic!

[382]

I did give the landlady credit for an inexplicable fit of motherly kindness when, at length, fish and birds, nicely broiled, came up, every day or two, to brighten the pale little face laid against the cushions of his lounge; thanked her for them heartily and with emotion.

“It is not’ing!” she said, beaming (as when was she not?) “I only wis’ to know dat de beautiful child ees better. I t’ought he could taste de feesh.”

I was grateful and unsuspicious for a week, recanting, repentantly, the hard things I had said of continental human nature, and admitting Madame to the honorable list of exceptions, headed—far above hers—by Dr. Steiger’s name. Then, chancing to come down-stairs one day, shod with the “shoes of silence” I wore in the sick-room, I trod upon the heels of a handsome young Englishman, almost a stranger to me, who was spending the honeymoon with his bride in Switzerland. He had been three weeks in this house, and we had not exchanged ten sentences with him or his wife. He stood now in the hall, his back toward me, in close conference with Madame, our hostess. He was in sporting-costume, fishing-rod on shoulder. Madame held a fine fish, just caught, and was receiving his instructions delivered in excellent French:

“You will see that it is broiled—with care—you know, and sent, as you have done the others, to the little sick boy in No. 10. And this is for the cook!”

There was the chink of coin. The cook! whom I had feed generously and regularly for preparing the game and fish so acceptable to my child!

I stepped forward. “It is you, then, Mr. N——, whom I should thank!” with a two-edged glance that meant confusion to Madame, acknowledgment and apology to the real benefactor.

The young Briton blushed as if detected in a crime.[383] Madame smiled, without blushing, and bustled off to the kitchen.

Happily, Americans are not without “contrivances” even on the Continent. A summary of ours while the fever-patient needed delicate food such as American nurses and mothers love to prepare, may be useful to other wayfarers on the “road to Jericho.” We carried our spirit-lamp and kettle with us everywhere. Besides these, I bought a small tin saucepan with a cover and a tin plate; made a gridiron of a piece of stout wire, and set up a hospital kitchen in one of our rooms at an open window that took smoke and odor out of the way. Here, for a month, we made beef-tea, broiled birds and steak and chops—the meat bought by ourselves in the town; cooked omelettes, gruel, arrowroot jelly, custards, and boiled the water for our “afternoon tea.” Cream-toast was another culinary success, but the bread was toasted down-stairs by the Invaluable when she could get—as she phrased it—“a chance at the kitchen-fire.” Cream and butter were heated in the covered tin-cup over our lamp.

For fifteen days, the fever ran without intermission, sometimes so fiercely that the brain raged into frenzied wanderings; for three weeks, our Swiss doctor came morning, afternoon or evening—sometimes all three; for a month, our boy was a prisoner to his own room, and we attended upon his convalescence before daring to strike camp and move northward into Germany. And all in consequence of that long walk, without shade of trees or umbrella, under the treacherous Swiss sun! We had had our lesson. I pass it on to those who may be willing to profit thereby.

But for this unfortunate break in our plans we would have had a happy month in Lucerne. We could not stir out of doors without meeting friends from over the sea,[384] and, every day, cards, inscribed with familiar names, were brought in to us. All the American traveling-world goes to the Swiss lakes and crosses the Passes in the short summer. Lucerne is picturesque in itself and environs. The lake ranks next to Como in beauty; the drives and walks in and about it are attractive in scenery and associations. Of the healthfulness of those portions of the town lying along the quay we had grave doubts. The cellars are flooded after every heavy rain, and copious rains are a feature of the climate. Our morning walk for our letters lay past one of the largest hotels, patronized extensively by English and Americans. A rainy night or day was sure to be followed by an opening of the rear basement windows, and a pumping into the gutter of hogsheads of muddy water. The rapid evaporation of the surplus moisture under the mid-day heats must have filled the atmosphere with noxious exhalations.

The evening-scene on the quay was brilliant. Hundreds of strollers thronged the broad walks beneath the trees; the great fountain threw a column of spray fifty feet into the air. A fine band played until ten o’clock before the Hôtel National; pleasure-boats shot to and fro upon the water; the lamps of the long bridge sparkled—a double row—in the glassy depths. Upon certain evenings, the Lion held levees, being illuminated by colored lights thrown upon the massive limbs that seemed to quiver under their play, and upon the roll of honor of those who died for their queen and for their oath’s sake.

Lucerne is very German in tongue and character—a marked and unpleasant change to those who enter Switzerland from the Italian side. Ears used to the flowing numbers of the most musical language spoken by man, are positively pained by the harsh jargon that responds to his effort to make himself intelligible. The English and[385] French of the shopkeepers and waiters, being filtered through the same foul medium, is equally detestable. Our friend, Dr. Steiger, spoke all three languages well and with a scholarly intelligence that made his English a model of conciseness and perspicuity. Our experiences and difficulties with other of the native residents would make a long chapter of cross-purposes.

Three times a week the fruit-market is held in the arcades of the old town. One reaches them by crooked streets and flights of stone steps, beginning in obscure corners and zigzagging down to the green Reuss, swirling under its bridges and foaming past the light-house tower to its confluence with the Lake. The summer fruits were, to our ideas, an incongruous array. Strawberries—the small, dark-red “Alpine,” conical in shape, spicily sweet in flavor; raspberries, white, scarlet and yellow; green and purple figs; nectarines; plums in great variety and abundance; apples, peaches and pears; English medlars and gooseberries; Italian nespoli and early grapes were a tempting variety. We had begun to eat strawberries in April in Rome. We had them on our dessert-table in Geneva in November.

The second time I went to the fruit-market, I took Prima as interpreter. The peasant-hucksters were obtuse to the pantomime I had practised successfully with the Italians. The shine of coin in the left palm while the right hand designated fruit and weight—everything being sold from the scales—elicited only a stolid stare and gruff “Nein,” the intonation of which was the acme of dull indifference. Thick of tongue and slow of wit, they cared as little for what we said as for what we were. Intelligence and curiosity may not always go hand-in-hand, but where both are absent, what the Yankees call “a trade,” is a disheartening enterprise. Having at my side a young[386] lady who “knew” German, I advanced boldly into the aisle between the stalls of the sellers, and said—“Ask this woman the price of those gooseberries.” Big, red and hairy as Esau, they were a lure to American eyes and palates. Prima put the question with a glibness truly pleasing to the maternal heart, however the gutturals might grate upon the ear. The vender’s countenance did not light up, but she answered readily, if monotonously. Prima stared at her, disconcerted.

“What does she say? That is not German!”

Italian and French were tried. The woman gazed heavily at the Wasserthurm, the quaint tower rising from the middle of the river near the covered bridge of the Capelbrücke, and remained as unmoved as that antique land-mark.

“This has ceased to be amusing!” struck in Caput, imperatively, and turning about, made proclamation in the market-place—“Is there nobody here who can speak English?”

A little man peeped from a door behind the stall. “I can!”

The two monosyllables were the “Open Sesame” to the fruity wealth that had been Tantalus apples and a Barmecide banquet and whatever else typifies unfulfilled desire to us, up to the moment of his appearing.

“How odd that the woman should understand me when I did not comprehend a word she said!” meditated our discomfited interpreter, aloud.

The enigma was solved at lunch, where the story was told and the ridiculous element made the most of. A pretty little Russian lady was my vis-à-vis. The Russians we met abroad were, almost without exception, accomplished linguists. They are compelled they say, jestingly, to learn the tongues of other peoples, since few have the[387] courage and patience to master theirs. My neighbor’s English caused us to fall in love with our own language. Her speech with her children was in French, and she conversed with German gentlemen at the table with equal facility.

“Your daughter is quite correct in her description of the Lucerne dialect,” she said, rounding each syllable with slow grace that was not punctiliousness. “It is a vile mongrel of which the inhabitants may well be ashamed. I have much difficulty in comprehending their simplest phrases, and I lived in Germany five years. The Germans would disown the patois. It is a provincial composite. The better classes understand, but will not speak it.”

I take occasion to say here, having enumerated the summer-delicacies offered for sale in the Lucerne market, that those of our countrypeople who visit Europe with the hope of feasting upon such products of orchard and garden as they leave behind them, are doomed to sore disappointment. Years ago, I heard Dr. E. D. G. Prime of the “New York Observer,” in his delightful lecture, “All Around the World,” assert that “the finest fruit-market upon the globe is New York City.” We smiled incredulously, thinking of East Indian pine-apples and mangoes, Seville oranges and Smyrna grapes. We came home from our briefer pilgrimage, wiser, and thankfully content. We murmured, not marveled at the pitiful display of open-air fruit in England, remembering the Frenchman’s declaration that baked apples were the only ripe fruit he had tasted in that cloudy isle. Plums and apricots there are of fair quality, the trees being trained upon sunny walls, but the prices of these are moderate only by contrast with those demanded for other things. Peaches are sixpence—(twelve-and-a-half cents) each. Grapes are reared almost entirely in hot-houses, and sell in Covent Garden market[388] at two and three dollars a pound. Pears, comparable to the Bartlett, Seckel or Flemish Beauty are nowhere to be had, and, in the same celebrated market of fruit and flowers, “American apples” were pressed upon us as the finest, and, therefore, costliest of their kind. Gooseberries are plentiful and quite cheap, as are cherries and currants. Pine-apples in England—“pines”—bring a guinea or a half-guinea apiece, being also, hot-house products.

“Do the poor eat no fruit?” I asked our Leamington fruiterer, an intelligent man whose wares were choice and varied—for that latitude.

“They are permitted to pick blackberries and sloes in the edges. Of course, pines and peaches are forbidden luxuries to people in their station.”

He might have added—“And plums at two cents, apricots at four, pears at five cents apiece, and strawberries”—charged against us by our landlady at half-a-dollar per quart in the height of the season. Tomatoes ranged from six to twelve cents apiece! asparagus was scarce and frightfully dear; green peas, as a spring luxury, were likewise intended for rich men’s tables. For Indian corn, sweet potatoes, egg-plants, Lima and string-beans, summer squash and salsify we inquired in vain. Nor had any English people to whom we named these ever seen them in their country. Many had never so much as heard that such things were, and asked superciliously—“And are they really tolerable—eatable, you know?”

Our English boarders in Lucerne smiled, indulgent of our national peculiarities,—but very broadly—at seeing us one day at the pension-table, eat raw tomatoes as salad, with oil, vinegar, pepper and salt. They were set in the centre of the board as a part of the dessert, but our instructions to the waiters broke up the order of their serving. Madame and daughters confessed, afterward, that they were not[389] certain where they belonged, but had heard that Americans liked tomatoes, and so procured them.

Matters mended, in these respects, as we moved southward. When the weather is too hot, and the climate too unwholesome for foreigners to tarry in Southern France and Italy, the natives revel in berries, peaches and melons. We ate delicious grapes in Florence as late as the first of December, and a few in Rome. By New Year’s Day, not a bunch of fresh ones was exhibited in shops, at this time, filled with sour oranges, sweet, aromatic mandarini, mediocre apples and drying nespoli and medlars. The nespoli, let me remark, is a hybrid between the date and plum, with an added cross of the persimmon. Indeed, it resembles this last in color and shape, also, in the acerbity that mingles with the acid of the unripe fruit. When fully matured they are very good, when partially dried, not unlike dates in appearance and flavor. Medlars are popular in England, and in request in Paris. To us, they were from first to last, disagreeable. To be candid, the taste and texture of the pulp were precisely those of rotten apples. We thought them decayed, until told that they were only fully ripe. In these circumstances how tantalizing were reminiscences of Newtown and Albemarle pippins, of Northern Spy and Seek-no-further! We could have sat us down on the pavement of the Piazza di Spagna, and, hidden by mountains of intolerably tart oranges, plained as did the mixed multitude at Taberah, that our souls were dried away in remembering the winter luxuries of which we did eat freely in our own land; the Catawba, Isabella and Diana grapes, close packed in purple layers in neat boxes for family use, late pears and all-the-year-round sweet oranges; plump, paly-green Malaga and amethyst Lisbon grapes, retailed at thirty and twenty-five cents per pound. Were we not now upon the same side of the ocean[390] with Lisbon and Malaga? It was nearly impossible to credit the scarcity of these sun bright lands in what we had so long received and enjoyed as everyday mercies to people of very moderate means.

As to bananas, we did not see a dozen in two years. I did not taste one in all that time. Desiccated tomatoes and mushrooms are sold in Italian cities by the string. Canned vegetables are an American “notion.” Brown, in the Via della Croce in Rome, had fresh oysters—American—for eighty cents a can. As the daintiest canned peas and the useful champignons are imported by United States grocers direct from France, it was odd that we could not have them, for the asking, in Switzerland and Italy. Esculents for salad grow there out of doors all winter, including several varieties not cultivated with us. Potatoes, spinach, rice, celery,—cooked and raw—onions, cabbage, cauliflower, macaroni, a root known as “dog-fennel,” and,—leading them all in the frequency of its appearing, but not, to most people’s taste, in excellence,—artichokes—are the vegetable bill-of-fare. If there are eight courses at dinner, the probability is that but two of them will be vegetables. An eight-course dinner on the Continent may be a very plain affair, important as it sounds, and the diner-out be hardly able to satisfy a healthy appetite ‘though he partake of each dish. Soup is the first course;—sometimes, nourishing and palatable,—as often, thin and poor. Fish succeeds. If it be salmon, whitebait, whitings, soles or fresh sardines, it is usually good. But, beyond Paris, we were rarely served on the Continent with any of these, except the last-named, that could be truthfully called, “fresh.” The sardines of Naples and Venice, just from the water, are simply delicious.

Meat comes next—a substantial dish, and an entrée of some sort. These are separated by a course consisting of[391] a single vegetable, potatoes or stewed celery or macaroni au gratin, or, perhaps, cauliflower with sauce tartare. Another vegetable precedes the first meat-course. Salad follows the second. Then, we have pastry or some other sweet, and dessert, meaning fruit, nuts and bon-bons. Finally, coffee. The dinner is à la Russe, no dishes being set upon the table, excepting the dessert. The carving is done in another room and the guests are not tempted to gluttony by the amount served to each.

“If they would only give me a potato with my boiled fish!” lamented an American to me, once. “Or serve the green peas with the lamb! And mutton-chops and tomato-sauce are as naturally conjoined in the educated mind as the English q and u!”

On the Continent the exception to the rule he objurgated is the serving of chicken and salad—lettuce, endive or chervil,—together upon a hot plate. The vinegar and oil cool the chicken. The heated plate wilts and toughens the salad. Common sense might have foretold the result. But chicken-and-salad continue to hold their rank in the culinary succession, and are eaten without protest by those who are loudest in ridicule and condemnation of transatlantic solecisms.

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CHAPTER XXVIII.
Home-life in Geneva—Ferney.

OUR German experiences, sadly curtailed as to time by Boy’s sickness, scarcely deserve the title of “loiterings.” We passed two days in Strasburg; as many in Baden-Baden, a day and night at Schaffhausen; a week in Heidelberg; a few hours at Basle, etc., etc., too much in the style of the conventional tourist to accord with our tastes or habits. At Heidelberg our forces were swelled by the addition of another family party, nearly allied to ours in blood and affection. There, we entered upon a three weeks’ tour, a pleasant progress that had no mishap or interruption until we re-crossed the Alps into Switzerland, this time by the Brünig Pass, traveling as we had done over the St. Gothard, en famille, but in two diligences, instead of one, taking in Interlaken, The Staubbach, Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald, the Wengernalp, Freiburg, Bern and a host of other notable places and scenes, and brought up, in tolerable order, if somewhat travel-worn, at ten o’clock one September night, in Geneva.

We were to disband here; one family returning to Germany; Miss M—— going on to Paris; ourselves intending to winter again in Italy. I had enjoyed our month of swift and varied travel the more for the continual consciousness of the increase of health and strength that enabled me to perform it. But I had taken cold somewhere. The old cough and pain possessed me, and for these, said men[393] medical and non-medical, Geneva was the worst place one could select in autumn or winter. The bise, a strong, cold, west wind, blows there five days out of seven; for weeks the sun is not visible for the fog; rain-storms are frequent and severe, and the atmosphere is always chilled by the belt of snow-mountains. This was the meteorological record of the bright little city, supplied by those who should have known of that whereof they spoke.

For three days after our arrival, it sustained this reputation. The bise blew hard and incessantly, filling the air with dust-clouds and beating the lake into an angry sea that flung its waves clear across the Pont du Mont Blanc, the wide, handsome bridge, uniting the two halves of the city. I sat by the fire and coughed, furtively. Caput looked gravely resolute and wrote letters to Florence and Rome. Then, Euroclydon—or Bise,—subsided into calm and sunshine, and we sallied forth, as do bees on early spring-days, to inspect the town—“the richest and most popular in Switzerland.” (Vide Baedeker.)

The air was still cool, as was natural in the last week of September, but as exhilarating as iced champagne. Respiration became suddenly easy, and motion, impulse, not duty. We walked up the Quai Eaux Vives to the first breakwater that checks the too-heavy roll of the waves in stormy weather; watched the wondrous, witching sheen of ultramarine and emerald and pearly bands upon the blue lake; down the broad quay by the English Gardens, through streets of maddening shop-windows, a brilliant display of all that most surely coaxes money from women’s pockets;—jewelry, mosaics, laces, carvings in wood and in ivory, photographs, music-boxes,—a distracting medley, showed to best advantage by the crystalline atmosphere. We crossed to Rousseau’s Island in the middle of the lake by a short chain-bridge attaching it to the Pont des Bergues, and fed[394] the swans who live, eat and sleep upon the water; marked the point where the Rhone shoots in arrowy flight from the crescent-shaped lake to its marriage with the slower Arve below the city. Thence, we wound by way of the Corraterie, a busy street, formerly a fosse, to the Botanical Gardens; skirted the Bastions from which the Savoyards were thrown headlong at the midnight surprise of the “Escalade,”—and were in the “Old Town.” This is an enchanting tangle of narrow, excursive streets, going up and down by irregular flights of stone steps; of antique houses with bulging upper stories and hanging balconies and archways, and courts with fountains where women come to draw water and stay to gossip and look picturesque, in dark, full skirts, red boddices and snowy caps. We passed between the National Cathedral of St. Pierre and the plain church where Père Hyacinthe preached every Sabbath to crowds who admired his eloquence and had no sympathy with his chimerical Reformed Catholicism; along more steep streets into a newer quarter, built up with handsome mansions,—across an open space, climbed a long staircase and were upon the hill on which stands the new Russian Church.

It is a diminutive fabric, made the most of by a gilded dome and four gilt minarets, and by virtue of its situation, contrives to look twice as big as it is, and almost half as large as the old Cathedral which dates from 1024.

Geneva was below us, and diverging from it in every direction, like veins from a heart, were series of villas, châteaux and humbler homes, separated and environed by groves, pleasure-grounds and hedge-rows. The laughing lake, which seldom wears the same expression for an hour at a time, was dotted with boats that had not ventured out of harbor while the wind-storm prevailed. Most of these carried the pretty lateen sail. The illusion of these “goose-winged”[395] barques is perfect and beautiful, especially when a gentle swell of the waves imparts to them the flutter of birds just dipping into, or rising from the surface;—birds statelier than the swans, more airy than the grebe circling above and settling down upon the Pierres du Niton. These are two flat boulders near the shore whereon tradition says Julius Cæsar once sacrificed to Neptune,—probably to propitiate the genius of the bise. Across the water and the strip of level country, a few miles in breadth, were the Juras, older than the Alps, but inferior in grandeur, their crests already powdered with snow. On our side of the lake behind town and ambitious little church,—outlying campagnes (country-seats) and dozens of villages, arose the dark, horizontal front of the Saléve. It is the barrier that excludes from Geneva the view of the chain of Alps visible from its summit. Mont Blanc overtops it, and, to the left of its gleaming dome, the Aiguilles du Midi pierce the sky. Others of the “Mont Blanc Group” succeed, carrying on the royal line as far as the unaided eye can reach. Between these and the city rises the Mole, a rugged pyramid projecting boldly from the plain.

Chamouny, the Mer de Glace, Martigny, Lausanne, Vevay, Chillon, Coppet, Ferney! To all these Geneva was the key. And in itself it was so fair!

We talked less confidently of Italian journeyings, as we descended the hill; more doubtfully with each day of fine weather and rapidly-returning strength. Still, we had no definite purpose of wintering in Geneva, contrary to the advice of physicians and friends. It was less by our own free will than in consequence of a chain of coincident events, which would be tedious in the telling, that December saw us, somewhat to our astonishment, settled in the “Pension Magnenat,” studying and working as systematically as if Italy were three thousand watery miles away.

[396]

That a benignant Providence detained us six months in this place we recognize cheerfully and thankfully. I question if Life has in reserve for us another half-year as care-free and as evenly happy. There are those who rate Geneva as “insufferably slow;” the “stupidest town on the Continent,” “devoid of society except a mélée of Arabs, or the stiffest of exclusive cliques.” Our American “clique” may have been exceptionally congenial that year, but it supplied all we craved, or had leisure to enjoy of social intercourse. Foreigners who remain there after the middle of December, do so with an object. The facilities for instruction in languages, music and painting are excellent. Lectures, scientific and literary, are given throughout the season by University professors and other savans. The prices of board and lessons are moderate, and—an important consideration with us and other families of like views and habits—Sabbath-school and church were easy of access and well-conducted.

There were no “crush” parties, and had they been held nightly, our young people were too busy with better things to attend them. But what with music and painting-classes; German and French “evenings;” reading-clubs in the English classics; the “five o’clock tea” served every afternoon in our salon for all who would come, and of which we never partook alone; what with Thanksgiving Dinner and Christmas merry-making, when our rooms were bowers of holly and such luxuriant mistletoe as we have never seen elsewhere; with New Year Reception and birth-day “surprise;” daily walks in company, and, occasionally a good concert, our happy-family-hood grew and flourished until each accepted his share in it as the shelter of his own vine and fig-tree. We were a lively coterie, even without the divertissements of the parties of pleasure we got up among ourselves to Coppet, Ferney, Chillon and[397] the Saléve. Shall we ever again have such pic-nics as those we made to the top of the Grand Saléve—our observatory-mountain, driving out to the base in strong, open wagons, then ascending on foot or on donkeys?

There are those who will read this page with smiles chastened by tender thoughts of vanished joys, as one by one, the salient features of those holiday excursions recur to mind. Donkeys that would not go, and others that would not stop. The insensate oaf of a driver who walked far ahead of the straggling procession and paid no attention to the calls of bewildered women. The volunteer squad of the stronger sex who strode between the riders and the precipice, and beat back the beasts when they sheered dangerously close to the edge. The gathering of the whole company for rest and survey of the valley, at the stone cross half-way up. The explorations of straggling couples in quest of “short cuts” to the crown of the upper hill, and their return to the main road by help of the bits of paper they had attached to twigs on their way into the labyrinth of brushwood and stones. Who of us can forget the luncheons eaten under the three forlorn trees that feigned to shade the long, low hut on the summit? When, no matter how liberal our provision, something always gave out before the onward rush of appetites quickened by the keen air? How we devoured black bread bought in the Châlet where we had our coffee boiled, and thought it sweeter than Vienna rolls! Do you remember—friends belovéd—now so sadly and widely sundered—the basket of dried thistles proffered gravely, on one occasion, and to whom, when the cry for “bread” was unseemly in vociferation and repetition? And that, when our hunger was appeased, we, on a certain spring day, roamed over the breast of the mighty mount, gathering gentians, yellow violets, orchis and scraggy sprays of hawthorn,[398] sweet with flowers, until tired and happy, we all sat down on the moss-cushions of the highest rocks, and looked at Mont Blanc—so near and yet so far,—stern, pure, impassive,—and hearkened to the cuckoo’s song?

I know, moreover, because I recollect it all so well, that you have not forgotten the as dear delights of talking over scene and adventure and mishap—comic, and that only in the rehearsal,—on the next rainy afternoon. When we circled about the wood-fire, tea-cups in hand, raking open the embers and laying on more fuel that we might see each others’ faces, yet not be obliged to light the lamps while we could persuade ourselves that it was still the twilight-hour. We kept no written record of the merry sayings and witty repartees and “capital” stories of those impromptu conversaziones, but they are all stored up in our memories,—other, and holier passages of our intercourse, where they will be yet more faithfully kept—in our hearts.

If I am disposed to dwell at unreasonable length upon details that seem vapid and irrelevant to any other readers, I cry them, “pardon.” The lapse may be overlooked in one whose life cannot show many such peaceful seasons; to whom the time and opportunity to renew health and youth beside such still waters had not been granted in two decades.

Rome was rest. Geneva was recuperation. I have likened the air of Switzerland to iced champagne. But the buoyancy begotten by it had no reaction: the vigor was stable. I had not quite appreciated this fact when, at Lucerne, I talked with fair tourists from my own land who “would have died of fatigue,” if compelled to walk a couple of miles, at home, yet boasted, and truly, of having tramped up the Rigi and back—a distance of three leagues. But when I walked upon my own feet into Geneva after[399] an afternoon at Ferney, and experienced no evil effects from the feat, we began to discredit scientific analyses, dealing with the preponderance of ozone in the atmosphere, and to revert to tales of fountains of perpetual youth and the Elixir of Life.

The town of Ferney is a mean village four miles-and-a-half from Geneva, and over the French frontier. The château is half-a-mile further;—a square, two-storied house set in extensive and handsome grounds, gardens, lawn, park and wood. It is now the property of a French gentleman who uses it as a country-seat, his chief residence being in Paris. A liveried footman opened the gate at the clang of the bell and showed two apartments that remain as Voltaire left them. These are on the first floor, the entrance-hall, or salon, being the largest. The floor is of polished wood inlaid in a cubic pattern. An immense stove of elaborate workmanship stands against the left wall; a monument of black and gray marble in a niche to the right. A tablet above the urn on the top of this odd construction is inscribed:—

Below is the very French legend:—“Mes manes sont consolés, puisque mon cœur est au milieu de vous.”

“The stove of Voltaire! His monument!” pronounced the servant in slow, distinct accents.

“But his heart is not really there?”

“But no, monsieur. He is interred in Paris. Madame comprehends that this is only an epitaph.”

Inferentially,—a lie.

Pictures hung around the room; one remarkable etching of “Voltaire and his friends;” old engravings and[400] some paintings of little value. The furniture, of the stiffest order of the antique, was covered with faded embroidery.

“The work of Madame du Chatelet, the niece of Voltaire,” continued the footman, demurely.

The next room was his bed-chamber. A narrow bed, head and foot-board covered with damask to match the arras; more embroidered chairs from the niece’s hand, and, just opposite the door, a portrait of Voltaire, painted at the age of twenty-five. A dapper, curled, and be-frilled dandy of the era that produced Chateauneuf, Ninon de l’Enclos and Chaulieu. The visage is already disfigured by the smirk of self-satisfaction he intended should be cynical, which gives to the bust in the outer apartment, and to sketched and engraved likenesses, taken in mature manhood and old age, the look of a sneering monkey. Close to the young Voltaire hung the portrait of Madame du Chatelet.

“The niece of Voltaire!” reiterated the serving-man, pointedly.

There could then be no impropriety in our prolonged survey of the beautiful face. She was the mistress of a fine fortune and château at Cirey, when Voltaire sought a retreat in the neighborhood from governmental wrath, excited by his eulogistic “Lettres sur les Anglais.” She was the ablest mathematician of her time, revelling in the abstruse metaphysics and political economics which were Voltaire’s delight, and so thorough a Latinist that she read the “Principia” in Latin from choice. Her husband was much older than herself, an officer in the French army, and thus furnished with an excuse for absenteeism from the society of a woman too much his superior mentally to be an agreeable help-meet. The Platonic attachment between the accomplished châtelaine and the[401] poet-satirist lasted nineteen years. He was thirty-six when it began. Her death broke what little heart he had. There is a story that he sent his confidential valet into the room where her corpse lay, the night after her demise, to take from her hand a ring he had given her, long ago, containing his miniature. When it was brought to him, he kissed it passionately, and, before fitting it upon his own finger, touched the spring of the seal concealing the picture. It was not his, but the handsomer face of a younger man, that met his eyes, one who had bowed, she would have had Voltaire believe, hopelessly, at her feet. The duped lover bore the dead woman no malice for her perfidy, if the contents of the Ferney apartments be admitted as evidence. On the mantel in the bedroom is a glass case, covering the model designed by him for her sarcophagus. The flat door of the tomb is cleft in twain by the rising figure of the woman, holding in her arms the babe that cost her life and was buried with her.

The Philosopher’s Walk, Voltaire’s favorite promenade, is nearly a hundred yards in length, and completely embowered by pollarded limes, the lateral branches meeting and interlacing over the broad alley. From the parapet of the adjoining terrace can be had, on clear days, a magnificent view, comprehending the Bernese Alps, the Juras, the Aiguilles and their crowned Monarch—Mont Blanc—by day, a silver dome,—at the rising and going down of the sun, a burning altar of morning and evening sacrifice.

“In sight of this, the Man of Ferney could say—‘There is no God!’” interjected an indignant voice, while we hung, entranced, over the wall.

“The ‘Coryphæus of Deism’ never said it!” answered Caput. “His last words,—after he had, to secure for his meagre body the rites of Mother Church, signed a confession of faith in her tenets—were,—‘I die, worshiping[402] God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, but detesting superstition.’”

The philosopher had, presently, another and more enthusiastic defender. I had tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain a photograph of the little church outside the gate of the château. Albeit no artist, except for my own convenience and amusement, I resolved to have something that should look like the interesting relic. While my companions strayed down the pleached walk into the woods, I returned to the entrance, sat down upon the grassy bank opposite the church-front and began to sketch. There was no one in sight when I selected my position, but, pretty soon, a party of three—two ladies and a gentleman—emerged from the gate and stopped within earshot for a parting look at the lowly sanctuary, now a granary.

The Traveling American dashes at dead languages as valiantly as at living.

“Deo erexit Voltaire” is cut into a small tablet below the belfry.

Will it be believed that I heard, actually and literally, the conversation I now write down?

“I call that blasphemous!”

The speaker was a lady, in dress and deportment.

“Heaven-daring blasphemy!” she added, in a low, horrified tone, reading the Latin aloud.

“I don’t see that—exactly,” answered a deeper voice. “It is strange that an infidel, such as Voltaire is usually considered, should build a church at all, but there is nothing wrong——”

“But look at the inscription! ‘God erects it to Voltaire!’ Horrible!”

“I doubt if that is quite the right translation, my love”—began the spouse.

The lady caught him up—“I may not be a classical[403] scholar, but I hope I can read, and I am not altogether ignorant of Latin. And Baedeker says it is an ’ostentatious inscription.’ I suppose Baedeker knows what he is talking about—if I do not!”

They walked off down the lane.

Voltaire built the church for the use of his servants and tenantry. The Bishop refused to consecrate it, and Voltaire created a Bishopric of Ferney. The priest was paid by him and was often one of the château-guests. Upon Sabbath mornings, it was the master’s habit to march into church, attended by visitors and retainers, and engage, with outward decorum, in the service. Religious ceremonies were a necessity for the vulgar and ignorant, as were amusements. He provided for both needs on the same principle.

The building is of stone, with sloping roof and two shed-like wings joined to the central part. A small clock-tower is capped by a weather-cock. There is but one door, now partly boarded up. Over this is a single large window with a Norman arch. It was a perfect October afternoon, dreamy and soft. Chestnuts and limes were yet in full leaf; the garden was gay with flowers untouched by a breath of frost. I had my turfy bank all to myself for half an hour, and in the stillness, could hear the hum of the bees in the red and white clover of the meadow behind me, the voices of men and women in the vineyard, three fields away. It was the vintage-season and they were having rare weather for it. Heavy steps grated upon the road; were checked so near me that I looked up. The intruder was a peasant in faded blue shirt and trowsers, a leather belt, a torn straw hat and wooden shoes, and carried a scythe upon his shoulder. A son of the soil, who grinned and touched his hat when I saw him.

“Pardon, madame!”

[404]

I nodded and went on with my work. He stood as still as the church,—an indigo shadow between me and the sky. I glanced at him again, this time, inquiringly.

“Pardon, madame!”

He was respectful, and had he been rude, I could call through the gate to my friends who were walking in the grounds. There was nothing to alarm me in his proximity, but a certain annoyance at his oversight of my occupation.

“Are you one of the laborers on the estate?” asked I, coldly.

“Madame is right. I am the farm-servant of M. David.”

Who, it was so evident, did not suspect that he was impolite in watching me that I forgave him.

“I am only making a little sketch of the church,” I deigned to explain.

“Est-ce que je vous gêne, Madame?” said the “clod,” deprecatingly. “If so, I will go. I am an ignorant peasant and I never, until now, saw a picture make itself.”

Upon receiving permission to remain, he lowered his scythe and stood leaning upon it, while the poor little picture “made itself.” To put him at his ease, I asked who built the church.

“M. Voltaire. My grandfather has told me of him.”

“What of him?”

“That he built Ferney and would have made of it a great city—much finer than Geneva—perhaps as grand as Paris. Who knows? And free, Madame! He would have had all the people hereabouts”—waving his hand to indicate a circuit of miles—“free, and learnèd, and happy. He was a wise man—this M. Voltaire! un si bon Protestant!”

“Protestant!”

“Mais, oui, parfaitement, Madame! He hated the priests. He succored many distressed Protestants. He was, without doubt, a good Christian.”

[405]

I recollected Calas and Sirven, and refrained from polemics.

“Ferney is free, now that France is a Republic. You vote, and so govern yourselves.”

My friend was out of soundings. “Plaît-il?” staring imbecilely. Then, pulling his thoughts together—“Madame is right. France is a great country. She demands many soldiers. Conscripts are taken every year from Ferney. It maybe I shall go, one day. Unless I can lose these two front teeth, or, by accident, cut off this finger.”

He had his inquiry when the sketch was done.

“The pictures one sees on the walls in Geneva—beasts and people—red and blue and many colors—that are to play in the spectacles—are they made like that?”

I laughed—“They are printed,”—then, as the difficulty of enlightening him on the subject of lithography struck me, I added—“Somebody makes the drawing first.”

He shook his head compassionately. “I never knew how much of work they were! Ah! I shall always think of it when I see them. And of the poor people who draw them!”

“Les Délices”—Voltaire’s home in Geneva prior to his purchase of Ferney, is now a girls’ boarding-school. We had friends there, and were, through the kindness of the Principal, allowed free access to the grounds and such apartments as retained traces of Voltaire’s residence. The house is large and rambling, and Voltaire’s dressing- and bed-rooms are, as at Ferney, upon the ground-floor. The frescoes are fairly distinct, as yet, and the carved mantels unaltered. One long wing is unused and closed. This was the private theatre that shattered, at last, and forever, the brittle friendship between Voltaire and Rousseau.

“You have basely corrupted my Republic!” was the angry protest of the author of “La Nouvelle Héloïse.”

[406]

Voltaire retorted by satire, caustic and pointed;—some say, with the famous sarcasm upon the Canton of Geneva, which is but fifteen miles square:—

“When I shake my wig, I powder the whole Republic!”

The theatre was built, in spite of Rousseau’s remonstrances; actors brought from naughty Paris, and complimentary tickets for the first representation sent to the magnates of Calvin’s city. Not one of these, from the Mayor down to the constable, had any intention of going. All were thrilled with horror at the suspicion that some weak brother might be allured by the forbidden fruit. All were curious to know who the recreant would be, and burning with jealousy for the purity of the public morals. Early in the afternoon of the appointed day, loungers and spies stationed themselves on the bridge and road by which the delinquents must pass to Les Délices. The cordon lengthened and spread until the throng at Voltaire’s gates pressed back upon those pouring out of the city. When the theater-doors were opened, the crowd rushed in, still moved by pietistic and patriotic fervor; the seats were filled and the curtain rose.

Reckoning shrewdly upon the revulsion of the human nature he knew so well, Voltaire sent privily to the Cathedral of St. Pierre for the triangular chair of Calvin preserved there, with holy care, and introduced it among the stage-properties in the last scene. The Genevese municipality recognized it immediately, as did the rest of the spectators, but so intoxicated were they by now with the novel draught of “corrupting” pleasure, that they actually applauded its appearance!

We heard this story from the lips of the Lady-Principal of the pensionnat, upon the threshold of the barred doors of the theatre. Groups of girls sat under the spreading[407] chestnuts; walked, arm-in-arm, up and down the avenues. The casements of the old house were open to the warm air. Boy, who had accompanied us, in defiance of the ordinance excluding young gentlemen, was the cynosure of the merry band, and being spoiled faster than usual by offerings of flowers, confectionery, kisses and coaxing flatteries.

A faintly-worn path beyond the theatre marks “Voltaire’s Walk.” It is shaded by a double row of splendid trees, and at the far end is a mossy stone bench on which he used to sit. It was easy for Fancy to conjure up the picture of what might have been there on the morrow of the theater-opening, and the image of him who was the life of the party, glorying insolently in their triumph. The meager figure wrapped in the gorgeous dressing-gown, remembered still at Les Délices—the sardonic smirk that poisoned equivoque and epigram; the Du Chatelet’s lover-comrade; the friend and slanderer of Frederick the Great; the pupil of the Jesuits, and the bon Chrétien, who “hated the priests;” the philosopher, who died, worshiping his Maker, and at peace with the world,—but who had, living, feared not God, neither regarded Man!

[408]

CHAPTER XXIX.
Calvin—The Diodati House—Primroses.

THE house in which Calvin lived and died has never been photographed. “Madame does not reflect how narrow is the street!” pleaded the picture-dealer to whom I expressed my surprise at this.

But the camera would have been set up in one of the windows across the way had there been a lively demand upon the thrifty Swiss for mementoes of the Reformer. John Calvin is out of fashion on the Continent, and Geneva is not an exception to the prevalent obsoleteness of reverence for his character and doctrines.

“Fanatique!” ejaculated a Genevese lady who worshiped statedly in the Protestant Cathedral, and called herself “dévôte.”

Our friend Mrs. G—— the artist, par excellence, of our happy family, had made an excellent copy of an original portrait of Calvin which M. Reviliod had, as an especial favor, lent her from his fine collection of pictures, a compliment of which we were proud for her. Herself the daughter of a clergyman who had fought a good fight for the truth as he held it, she had copied the picture con amore.

“I have lived in Calvin’s age—not in this, while I painted,” she said when I looked into her parlor to see how the work was getting on. “An age that needed such men! The face is not lovely in any sense, but I have laid[409] in each stroke tenderly. My father used to say that the Church at large owes more to-day to John Calvin than to any other one man who ever lived.”

The face was, as she had said, not lovely. It was not benign. The hollow temples, deep-set eyes; the small, resolute mouth were the lineaments of an ascetic whose warfare with the world, the flesh and the devil—and the church he conceived in his honest, stubborn soul to be a compound of all three—was to the death. He wore the Genevan cap and gown, the latter trimmed with fur. His black beard was long, but scanty. One thin hand was lifted slightly in exhortation. A man of power, he was one whom not many would dare to love.

“Greater in thought and in action than Luther; as brave as Zwingli; as zealous as Knox!” pursued his admirer, touching the canvas lightly with her brush, as if reluctant to demit the work. “Ah, mademoiselle!” to the entering visitor, the Genevese Protestant aforesaid. “You are just in time to see my finished Calvin!”

Then, the Genevese said, with a grimace, “Fanatique! Moi, je déteste cet homme!”

If she had been one man, the artist another—(and unregenerate) I am afraid the predestined portion of the last speaker would have been a blow of the maul-stick.

The Genevese have swung completely around the circle in three hundred years.

“They would be insupportable to me, and I to them!” replied Calvin to the recall of the Council after his two years of banishment.

But how earnestly he served them and Protestantism in the quarter-century that intervened from the time of the refusal and the months during which he lay “long a-dying” in the strait Rue des Chanoines, almost in the shadow of the Cathedral!

[410]

The ground-floor and part of the second-story of the “plain house provided for him,” are now used as a dispensary and doctor’s office,—a charitable institution. A placard at the door sets forth the hours at which patients can be admitted to the consulting-rooms. After Calvin’s death, and until within a few years, it was occupied as a convent and school by a Roman Catholic sisterhood. The building is of brick and “plain” to humbleness, two stories in height, and built around four sides of an open court. We saw the closet in which Calvin studied and wrote—so overwhelmed by preparations for the pulpit, the university lecture-room, and with voluminous correspondence with churches at home and abroad, that he passed whole nights without laying by his pen, and, by day, had not, he says, “time to look up to the light of the blessèd sun;”—and the chamber in which he died. This is low-ceiled and of fair size, wainscoted with dark wood. Over the doors are paneled paintings representing the Four Seasons. These were there during Calvin’s occupancy, as was the carved mantel of black oak. Two windows open upon a balcony hung thickly with ivy.

One speculates fruitlessly touching the incidents of the private life of him of whom it was said that “he was never for one day unfaithful to his apostolate.” We questioned the woman who showed us the house and who said she was a Protestant,—hoping to glean some interesting local traditions. But she knew nothing beyond her lesson—a brief and a dry one. We longed to know if in this apartment came and went the child whose biography is comprised by the father in one line:—

“God gave us a little son. He took him away.”

The mother who “always aided, never opposed” her husband, survived the boy eight years. Calvin never married again. Henceforward, his earthly ties were the Reformed[411] Church and Geneva. “I offer to my God my slain heart as a sacrifice, forcing myself to obedience to His will,” became the motto of a life that had, no more, in it the sweet elements of home-happiness and repose.

The sun set while we stood upon the balcony, the room behind us growing darker and more desolately-silent, while the heavens brightened, ruddying the tiled roofs and time-stained walls of the “Old Town” in which the house stands. The wife may have sat here at even-tide, thinking of the babe that was coming to cheer her lonely, frugal dwelling, and, in those eight childless years, of the little son God took away. Her husband had no time for loverly converse or sad reverie—with his daily sermon every other week; his Theology lectures; his semi-weekly Consistory-meeting; his written controversies with Unitarians and Anabaptists, and the government, in all its details, of a municipality that owned him Dictator of letter and of spirit.

“Geneva”—wrote Knox to a friend during a visit to Calvin’s model town—“is the most perfect school of Christ the world has seen since the days of the Apostles.”

Scoffers said that Calvin resisted the Divine decree in his own case when the physicians pronounced him to be dying from seven mortal diseases. When he could no longer eat or sit up, he dictated, between the paroxysms of nausea and faintness, letters to all parts of Europe to one scribe, comments upon the Book of Joshua to another. He fainted in the pulpit, his sermon unfinished, the last time he was carried to the Cathedral. One month before his death, the most eminent medical authorities in Switzerland declaring that he could not survive a day longer, civil and ecclesiastical officers were collected to receive his solemn farewell. Still he lived—in such agony of[412] body as chills the blood to read of, but in calm joyfulness of soul, until the end of May, almost four months after the Sabbath when he was brought back from the Cathedral fainting—it was believed, in a dying condition. The Battle of Life was with him a favorite figure in speech and writings. How he fought it until the last drop of blood was drained from his veins and heart is worthily told by Theodore Beza.

His handsome face hangs near Calvin’s in the Reviliod Gallery. So genial and débonnaire does this one of the Reformers look that we marvel—not at the charge of French levity brought against him by certain of his confrères—but that he should have loved so well his stern, joyless brother-in-arms. Yet gentle Melanchthon sighs, oppressed by the conviction that “Old Adam is too strong for young Melanchthon,”—“If I could but lay my weary head upon thy” (Calvin’s) “faithful heart and die there!”

Beza carries his affectionate partizanship so far as to defend the burning of Servetus for obstinate heresy, by the Genevan authorities. Men have chosen to execrate Calvin as the author of an act which was in exact accordance with the temper of the State-Church at that time. The Council of Geneva, after long and stirring debate, and much advisement with other Cantons, condemned the Spanish heretic-physician to the stake as a political necessity. Farel was earnest in advocating this extreme penalty of the law, and exhorted him, at the place of execution, to recantation. Melanchthon gave it unqualified, if sorrowful sanction, as did Bullinger. The one voice raised against the horrible cruelty was Calvin’s. He pleaded, vainly—since the man must die—that he should be beheaded, not burnt.

The Genevese declare they do not know “just where” this violation of the avowed principles of Protestantism[413] occurred. The burning-place was upon the Champel, a pretty green hill, south of the city.

Of Calvin, guide-books and travelers have long asserted—“No man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.” The truth being that, several years ago, careful measurement of the cemetery of Plain Palais, and examination of the record of his burial, pointed out the locality he desired should be forgotten lest a costly monument might dishonor the memory of the poverty he had borne for Christ’s sake. His bones rest not many rods from the wall of the burial-ground. A lofty hemlock grows directly upon the grave. The boughs have been torn off by relic-hunters as far up as a tall man can reach. A sloping stone of gray granite, a foot square and about as tall at the highest side, is lettered, “J. C.” That is all. There is no mound to warn aside the unwary foot, although the graves about it are carefully kept, distinguished by memorial-tablets and adorned with flowers. Upon his return from Strasbourg, in compliance with the prayers of Geneva—Canton and town—the people gave him, in addition to the “plain house,” a “piece of cloth for a coat.” The bald covering of earth is all he would accept from them in death.

Plain Palais is a dismal last home even for John Calvin. Low, flat and damp on the sunniest days, it is a pity it should not be, as Baedeker describes it—“disused.” But one passes on the route to Calvin’s grave, the gorgeous red granite tomb of the Duke of Brunswick who bequeathed his wealth to the city. And in our numerous visits to the cemetery we rarely went in or out without meeting a funeral train. The paths are greened by moss-slime, and the short winter afternoons are briefer and gloomier for the mists that begin to rise here by four o’clock.

Very different in location and aspect is the grave of the[414] historian of the Reformation, Merle d’Aubigné. The walk up the quay took us past his former residence, a comfortable homestead, now occupied by his widow. Leaving the lake-edge, about half-a-mile from the town, we turned to the left into a crooked road paved with cobble-stones. High walls, covered with ivy and capped by the foliage of fine old trees, rooted within the grounds, seclude on both sides of the way the campagnes of wealthy Genevese who desert them in the winter for the confined streets and noise of the city. A brook of clear water, issuing from the wall, runs gaily down to the lake. The road winds irregularly up the hill, yet so sharply that we were content to rest on the brow, and, sitting upon a wayside bench, enjoy the view of Lake Leman and the Juras on one hand, the Mont Blanc chain of Alps upon the other. The small cemetery was gained by an abrupt turn to the right and another rise. It is enclosed on all sides by a brick wall, entered through strong iron gates, and, we judged from the lack of traces of recent occupancy, was in truth “disused.” D’Aubigné is buried in a corner remote from the gate. Some of his kindred sleep within the enclosure, but none near him. We had read the names of others of the noble race upon mural brasses in the old Cathedral. He selected the spot of his interment “that he might rise in sight of Mont Blanc at the Last Day.”

So runs the story. It was impressive, told, as we heard it, grouped about the grave, the solemn, eternal whiteness of the mountain in full view. A profile of the historian in bas-relief is upon the head-stone. Climbing roses bound this and the mound with lush withes of grayish-crimson and pale-green, and plumes of golden-rod nodded over his head. The ancient wall is hung and heaped with ivy, as common in Geneva and the neighborhood as the grass and field-flowers.

[415]

We never knew when we had walked far enough in Switzerland. On this afternoon we extended our ramble a mile further up the lake beyond the cemetery, keeping upon the ridge of the range, to the Diodati House. It is one of the old family seats that stud the hill-sides in all directions. Milton was here a welcome guest for months, and under the patronage of the Diodati, a French translation of “Paradise Lost” was printed. A degenerate son of the house, upon a visit to England, became intimate with a poet of different mold. When Byron left his native land after the separation from his wife, he accepted the invitation of young Diodati to his ancestral home. The host became so enamored of his guest’s society that he assigned to him a suite of apartments overlooking the lake, as his own, so long as he would honor him by occupying them. Shelley had rooms in the neighboring village of Cologny. The balcony before the second-story front windows is designated as the habitual lounging-place of the two at sunset and through moonlight evenings. The morals of Diodati the younger were not amended by the companionships of the year spent by Byron in the enjoyment of his hospitality. Tales of the orgies of the comrades are still rife in the region, to the shame of all three. From this balcony Byron witnessed the thunderstorm by night upon Lake Leman, described in the third canto of Childe Harold, written at the Diodati House. Its pictures of the lake-scenery are faithful and beautiful. The opening lines recur to the memory of the least poetical tourist who has ever read them, when he reclines, as we did on that day, and many others, on the lawn before the mansion.

Shelley’s second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, was with her husband, and about the English party collected a jovial company of both sexes for whom the Diodati homestead was the rendezvous. At the close of the year they journeyed southward to Ravenna, to Pisa and to Spezzia, near which latter place Shelley and Williams were drowned.

The old house is very peaceful now in restored respectability. A very Quaker of a campagne, in faded dove-color and broad-brimmed roof, it is square-built like Ferney, and without tower or battlement. So English is its expression of home-comfort in spacious rooms, spreading lawn and clumps of shade-trees, that Byron must have had recalled to him continually the land he affected to despise and hate.

In the Spring, we found our earliest primroses in the Diodati grounds. We had never seen them growing wild before, and emulous parties sallied forth, every day, for fresh spoils of these and the fragrant purple violets, unknown to American fields. A week later, the meadows upon the left bank of the lake were yellow as gold with them. But on the day of my first primrose-hunt they had just begun to show their straw-colored faces, and so tentatively that our quest had to be close and keen. We—two of us—strayed into the grounds of a closed country-house on a warm March afternoon, not sanguine of success after the assurances of sundry laborers and rosy-cheeked nurses whom we had met and catechized, that “les primevères” were never found thereabouts. The day[417] before, two of “our girls” had come in to five o’clock tea, with handfuls of the pale beauties picked in the Diodati woods, so we knew they were above-ground. The lawn chosen by my friend J—— and myself, as the scene of our trespass, was level and open to the sun, except where branchy limes and tent-like chestnuts made cool retreats for the “summer-days a-coming.” The turf was so deep, our feet sank into it, so elastic, it was a joy to tread it. We had gone perhaps twenty yards from the entrance-gates when something smiled up suddenly at us, as if it had, that instant, broken ground. We were down upon our knees in a second, tugging so hard at the prize that the tender stems snapped close to the flowers. Then, perceiving that the stalks were long as well as frail, we dug down through the turf with our gloved fingers, parasol-handles, hair-pins—anything that might penetrate to the root. Not a stick was visible upon the neat lawn. Being only two women, we had not a pocket-knife between us. I would not declare that we would not have used our teeth had nothing better offered, so excited were we over our treasure-trove. They shone at us above the sward on all sides, after we espied that one cluster. The depth of the roots below the surface is amazing. Our digging and scraping assumed the dignity of scientific excavations by the time we had filled handkerchiefs and veils.

The uprooted primroses did not lose their character for bravery. Embedded in a bank of moss laid within a dish, and supplied with moisture, they lived for days, unfurling buds and leaves as assiduously as if the teeming bulk of their native earth had underlain them, subject to the call of the torn fibers. Our “primrose-bank,” renewed again and again in the season of their bloom, was a cherished feature of our salon, that happy Spring-time. The fragrance is faint, but pleasant, and has, in a peculiar degree,[418] the subtle associativeness possessed by some other wood-flowers, granting us, with the inhalation, visions of the banks on which they grew; of tossing brooks and wet, trailing grasses, swinging in the eddying water; of ferny glades, cool in the hottest noons; of moss-grown hollows under shelving rocks; of bird-call; the grasshopper’s rattle and the whirr of the quail;—the thousand nameless pleasures of Memory that are the mesmeric passes with which Imagination beguiles us into forgetfulness of sorrow, time and distance.

[419]

CHAPTER XXX.
Corinne at Coppet.

THE sail of nine miles up the lake to Coppet, the residence, for so long, of Madame de Staël, is one of the pleasantest short excursions enjoined by custom upon the traveler sojourning for a few days in Geneva.

The village is nothing in itself;—a mere appanage, in olden days, of the Neckar estate. The château is reached by a short walk up a quiet street—or road—for there is neither side-walk nor curbing. The house-front is lake-ward, but entrance is had from the street through a paved court-yard at the side. A brick wall surrounds this. A pair of great gates admit the passage of carriages. We were met at each visit, in the lower hall, by a plump housekeeper in white cap and black silk, who showed the mansion and received our douceur at parting, with gentle dignity. The main hall is large and nearly square. Wide settees are set against the walls. A bust of Neckar is in one corner. A flight of oaken stairs, broad and easy, ascends to the upper hall. The floors are of polished wood, as slippery as glass. The salon, entered from the second-story hall, is handsomely plenished with antique furniture and pictures, mostly family portraits. Mad. de Staël is here as Corinne. David was the artist, but the likeness is not pleasing. The “pose” in character is too apparent.[420] The abstracted stare and fixed intellectuality are plainly “done to order.” The Duchess de Broglie, the daughter of the great De Staël, hangs at the other end of the room. As châtelaine of Coppet,—a home preferred by her to Paris salons,—her memory is held in grateful esteem by rich and poor neighbors. Her face is purely and sweetly womanly, with a pensive cast that tells of long-sustained physical or mental pain. She had passed Life’s prime when the portrait was taken, but was still very lovely. In her youth she was far more beautiful and infinitely more amiable than her distinguished mother. Beside the mantel is a painting—cabinet size—of three grandchildren of Madame de Staël, children of her only son by her first marriage. They died in infancy and early youth, and are here depicted sleeping in the arms and against the knees of the Saviour. Design and painting are exquisite.

This salon communicates with another, not quite so large, but more interesting. Neckar is here, as at the height of his splendid career as the prince of financiers; saviour of the realm from bankruptcy; reverenced by the sovereign and adored by the populace.

“I shall never cease to regret”—says the daughter to whom he was ever the greatest and dearest of men—“that it had not pleased God to make me his wife, instead of his child.”

She who was his wife in law, if not in spirit and affection, is also in this gallery of family-pictures—a haughty dame whose hard, passionless features sustain the stories of the severity of discipline practised in the education of her only child. In looking from her to the noble, frank gentleman who lifted her from the station of governess in a Swiss country-house to rank and wealth, one easily comprehends the daughter’s fond partiality for one of her parents.

[421]

“She is well enough!” (“assez bien”—) Madame Neckar would say, with a resigned shrug, when congratulated upon her child’s brilliant success in literature and society. “But nothing to what I would have made her, had not her father interfered.”

The deprecated interference was the result of the decision of the best physician in France that the girl was dying under the mother’s intolerable regimen of study and home-etiquette. She was blooming too rapidly in a social and educational hot-house, and the doctor summoned by the father, earned the mother’s enmity by saving the patient’s life at the price of a long, idle vacation at Coppet.

Madame Neckar was, prior to her marriage, madly beloved by—some say, the betrothed of Gibbon the historian. She wedded Neckar to establish herself well in life. To the same end she married her daughter, at twenty, to Baron de Staël, a Swedish nobleman.

“Her mother had done wrong,” writes sensible Madame de Genlis of Mademoiselle Neckar at sixteen—“in allowing her to spend three-fourths of her time with the throng of wits who continually surrounded her, and who held dissertations with her upon love and the passions.”

These disquisitions and their subjects did not enter into her calculations in accepting the hand of a man double her age. She was weary of her mother’s tyranny and the restraints of singlehood. Married to this good-natured nobleman, who had engaged not to take her to Sweden, she could begin to live. The Baron’s portrait is in the Coppet salon,—at a reasonable remove from his lady-wife, as she liked to keep him when both were alive. A portly figure and round, florid visage, as blank as to expression, as the wall behind him; a fine court-suit, with plenty of gold and thread-lace—these are what the canvas presents to us. Diagonally opposite is David’s celebrated portrait[422] of Anne-Marie-Louise-Germaine, Baronne de Staël-Holstein (née Neckar). A Persian shawl is wound, turban-wise, about her head, dark curls falling below it upon her forehead and bare shoulders. Her short-waisted dress is of crimson silk, with short sleeves. A dark-blue Cashmere shawl falls low upon her skirt, and is caught up by one arm. The other is bare, and lies lightly on a table by which she stands, the hand drooping over the edge. In the right hand, the arm crossing her figure horizontally to hold the shawl, is the green spray without which she would not talk in company. Captious critics affirmed that she held and twirled and gesticulated with the leafy scepter to attract admiration to her beautiful hands. These, her eyes, and her finely-moulded arms were all that commended her to the eye. In form she was clumsy; her complexion was muddy and rough; her mouth large, and her teeth were so prominent that the lips hardly met over them. Yet this portrait, not cloaking these defects, is of the queen this woman undoubtedly was. The head is turned slightly, as in listening,—a thing which, by the way, she never did,—and a little upraised; the eyes are full of life and spirit;—the glow of inspiration, as unlike the factitious animation of the “Corinne” in the other room, as day-light to gas-glare, shines through and from the heavily-cast features. The colors are as rich and fresh as if laid on but yesterday.

Auguste de Staël, her son, at thirty, hangs near, a fresh-colored gentilhomme, without a trace of the refined loveliness of his sister, or of his mother’s genius, in his Swedish physiognomy. Yet, it is related that, when a lad of seventeen, he pleaded well and bravely with Napoleon for the recall of his mother from exile, offering his personal guarantee that she would not meddle with politics were she suffered to return to Paris. Napoleon knew better than[423] to trust her, but he liked the young fellow’s fearlessness so well that he playfully pulled his ear in denying his petition.

Down-stairs are the library and bed-chamber of Madame de Staël, opening by long windows upon balcony and parterre. The bed-room is large, and furnished in a style befitting the fashion, then popular, of using what we regard as the penetralia of a home,—to wit—“my lady’s chamber”—for morning-receptions. The French single bed in a distant corner alone indicates that the occupant of the apartment really slept there. The walls are hung with tapestry,—Gobelin, or a fair imitation of it;—chairs and sofa are embroidered to match, in designs from Æsop’s Fables. A tall mirror is set between the windows. In the center of the room, on a large Turkish rug, is Madame de Staël’s escritoire, at which she always wrote, a chair before it, as she used to have it. It is a cumbrous affair,—long and not high,—with pigeon-holes, carved legs and brass-handled drawers. The mistress, as Sappho, looks down upon it from the wall. We liked this portrait least of all. It is a Bacchante, in inflamed complexion and wild eyes. The original preferred it to all others. The library adjoins the bed-room, and is lined with book-shelves to the ceiling. The floor is polished to glassiness,—the dark wood of doors and casement-frames and the ranks of sober-hued volumes reflected in it, as in a somber pool.

We looked back into the shadow and silence from the threshold, thinking of the goodly company of intellectual athletes who frequented it when the most wonderful woman of her age held court here as regally as when in Paris. De Goncourt described her as a “man of genius, by whose hands France signed a treaty of alliance with existing institutions, and, for a period, accepted the Directory. The daughter of Neckar”—he continues—“forbade France to[424] recall the line of kings; she retained the Republic; she condemned the throne.”

Or, as when forbidden to approach within thirty miles of Paris, she established her household at precisely that distance, and her residence was crowded with guests from the Capital.

“She pretends”—growled the Emperor—“to speak neither of public affairs, nor of me. But it happens invariably that every one comes out of her presence less attached to me than when he went in.”

Hunted to Coppet, she was attended there by Benjamin Constant—“the scribe of her dictation; the aid-de-camp of her thought; the man who almost equaled her in conversational power;”—visited there, by Byron, Schlegel, Sismondi, and so many other men of mark and power that a cordon of French police was drawn about the house near enough to watch all comers and goers without revealing their proximity. Madame Récamier braved the danger of discovery and the consequent wrath of Napoleon by journeying thither by post-carriage from France, expressly to see her persecuted friend. Arriving under cover of the darkness, she tarried but a night, departing early the next morning. So soon as the news could travel to Paris and a post be sent in reply, a messenger overtook her in her Swiss tour with an order from the Emperor, prohibiting her return to the metropolis under penalty of fine and imprisonment.

Above the broad arch of the doorway, within which the two women—one as eminent for her beauty as was the other for her genius, met and parted, is carved the Neckar coat-of-arms. The court-yard is full of flowers, the high iron fence separating it from lawn and park, wreathed with roses and white jasmine. The central building and two wings of the château encompass it on three sides. Great[425] iron gates give egress in the direction of the grounds. These are extensive and of much natural beauty. A road bends around a lawn brightened by beds of geraniums and coleas. An oval pond is in the center, a solitary willow drooping above it. Beyond pool and circling drive, is an old stone bench from which we got the best view of the house. It is of gray stone, shaded darkly by age. Above the second story is a high, sloping roof, pierced by dormer windows and many chimneys. The wings are peaked towers, capped by quaint wooden knops and spires that may be seen far up and down the lake. Masses of chestnuts and limes, diversified by a few hemlocks and spruces, embower the mansion. The undulating line of the Juras is visible above it, like another roof-tree. Branching off from the wider road are foot-paths, overhung by trees. A swift brook is the limit of the lawn at the right. The banks are steep and green with turf and the ivy that has strayed downward from the tree-boles. Lime and poplar leafage make the clear water darkly deep. Foot-bridges span it by which one can pass into the meadows beyond.

“Ah, madame!” said Chateaubriand, while walking in the peaceful demesne with its mistress,—“If the Emperor would but banish me, likewise—to Coppet!”

She paced these walks like a caged lioness; ate her heart out in the fine old house yonder.

“I would rather,” she cried, passionately,—“live in the Rue Jean Pain Mollet, with two thousand francs a year, than upon one hundred thousand at Coppet!”

Her egotism was as magnificent as her genius. For the food of one and the display of the other, Paris was the only place upon the globe.

It was while she lived at Coppet that she made her love-match with De Rocca, a young French officer, and an invalid, absent from the army on furlough at Geneva. He[426] was eminently handsome, and she worshiped beauty. The suit of a man of twenty-two to a widow twenty years his senior, was dangerous flattery to one who drew in admiration as the very breath of life. Other men had paid court to her intellect, her position, her wealth. This man loved the woman he would make his wife.

“My name belongs to Europe!” she replied to his first offer.

“I will love you so well as to make you love me!” was his answer.

The marriage was a secret, kept until disclosed in her will after her death. We gain a glimpse of the morals of the day that is a shock to our ideas of decorum, when we read in the same paragraph of his residence at Coppet; his companionship in her travels, and that their son was born without the revelation of their relation as husband and wife.

It was not until our third trip to Coppet that we were able to see the bust of De Rocca in one of the upper rooms not shown to strangers while the family are at home. It is a beautiful head, with a sweet manliness of look that excuses the seemingly absurd union, to susceptible lady-visitors.

Neither then, nor at any other time, could we prevail upon any employé of the De Broglies (Madame de Staël’s grandson now owns the estate) to unlock the rusty gate of the family cemetery across the road. It is environed by neglected commons, and the brick wall is, at least, ten feet high. It looks like a fortified forest, so dense is the unpruned foliage of the tall trees. We walked all around it, each recalling something he, or she had heard or read of the burial-chapel of the Neckars so safely hidden in the heart of the wood. Of Neckar’s tomb and recumbent statue, and his wife’s at his side. Of their daughter’s request[427] that her grave might not be made a show-place, and the pious respect accorded by her son and daughter and their descendants to a wish so incongruous with the passion for notoriety that swayed her from the nursery to the death-bed.

She had suffered intensely in her latest years. Natural nervousness was aggravated by the use of opium in such quantities to dull severe paroxysms of pain, that it lost its effect as a sedative. She seemed to have forgotten how to sleep. But her mind retained its strength and clearness.

“I know now,” she said, “what the passage from life to death is. The goodness of God makes it easy. Our thoughts become indistinct. The pain is not great.”

The habit of analytical thought was strong to the last.

In spite of the sternly-barred gates, prying curiosity has found its way to the sequestered chapel. At one angle of the wall, out of sight of the house, bricks have been picked out at intervals to supply a foothold for the climber, and the coping is fractured. A gentleman of our party put his toe into a crevice and looked over.

“More than one person has passed in this way,” he said. “The grass is trampled and the underbrush broken. The place is a jungle of matted bushes and large trees.”

He stepped back gently to the ground, and we strolled on.

“Hic tandem quiescit, quæ nunquam quievit,” reads her tombstone. The embosoming trees; the lofty wall; the locked gate are not without their meaning.

God rest her soul in keeping yet more wise and tender!

[428]

CHAPTER XXXI.
Chillon.

THE Castle of Chillon is a whitey-gray pile, with towers of varying heights and black, pointed roofs, like extinguishers, clustering about the central and tallest. The lake washes the base on all sides. A wooden bridge, once a “draw,” joins the fortress to the shore. This was the scene of the casualty to Julie’s child, and his rescue by the mother, resulting in the death of the latter, narrated by Rousseau in the concluding chapters of “La Nouvelle Héloïse.”

In spring and summer, the aspect of the storied prison is not forbidding. The walk from the steamboat is pleasantly shaded throughout much of its length. Trees grow down in the old moat; pretty creeping plants drop in festoons and knots from the top and face of the shore-wall; birds hop and sing in bending branches that dip in the water. The “thousand years of snow on high” are verdant slopes below. “The white-walled distant town,” “the channeled rock,” “the torrent’s leap and gush”—are as familiar to Byron’s reader as the fields and hills about his childhood’s home, distinct as a photograph painted by Swiss sunshine.

The scenery near Chillon is the grandest on Lake Leman, reminding one of the snow-capped ramparts of Lucerne. When, at eleven o’clock of the last day of October,[429] we left the steamboat dock in front of the Hôtel Russie in Geneva, sky and wave were still and smiling. Mont Blanc drew a cowl over his face by the time we touched the Nyon pier. But the ugly old town had never been more nearly sightly. The five Roman towers of the ancient castle were softly outlined against the blue; the browns, grays and blacks of the houses, crowding into the lake, were foil and relief to the scarlet and gold of massy vines, the russet and purple and lemon-yellow of the trees on the esplanade and the steep, winding streets. The cowl unfolded into mantling mist upon “the left bank” (our right) as we sailed by Vevay, the “livest” town on the upper lake. A company of school-boys in uniform were drilling in the parade-ground close to the wharf, to the music of drum and fife, a herd of gamins peering enviously at them between the pales of the fence. Window-gardens were flush with petunias, salvias and pelargoniums. Woodbine streamed, as with living blood, from hotel-balconies and garden-walls. The “grape-cure” was over and the bulk of the vintage gathered, but purple bunches hung still among the dying leaves,—luscious gleanings for the peasant-children trampling the mellow soil with bare toes, and cheering shrilly as the boat glided by. Clarens—“Julie’s” home—a village of pink, buff and pea-green houses, more like painted sugar châteaux than human habitations, harmonized better with the autumnal tints of aspen and poplar than with their vernal green. The chestnut copse, known as the “Bosquet de Julie,”—where she gave the first kiss to her lover, was like fine gold for depth and brilliancy of hue. Montreux lies in the hollow of a crescent-shaped cove, sheltered from adverse winds from whatever quarter, a warm covert for invalids, where roses blossom eternally in sight of never-melted snows. The bristly spines of mountains are its rear-guard, and upon their lower terraces[430] are hedges of evergreen laurels, orchards of figs and pomegranates.

Thus far, we had sunshine and color with us, while, upon the other shore, the stealing fogs kept pace with our progress,—a level line at the lower edge which rested mid-way up the sides of the nearer mountains, but gradually encroaching upon the blue above, until, when we stepped ashore at Chillon, the sun began to look wan. The days were shortening rapidly at this season. To save time, we took a carriage at the wharf and drove directly to the Château through the hamlet that has taken its name.

“God bless the ingoers and outcomers!” is the German legend above the entrance, put there by the pious Bernese in 1643.

Our guide was a rosy Savoyard girl in blue skirt, scarlet bodice and white apron. Dangling a bunch of ponderous keys from her forefinger, she tripped across a courtyard shut in by the tall buildings and peaked roofs, and paved with round stones, to a flight of cellar-steps. Just such cellar-steps as are used by farmers’ wives and dairymaids in going to and from buttery and cream-room. The descent of six or eight stairs, worn and uneven, brought us to the subterranean chapel of the Dukes of Savoy, a long, low room floored with roughened stones, the ceiling supported by four thick pillars, and so dim, on the windowless side, as to cast doubt upon the received theory of its original uses. Although Religion, as understood and practised by thirteenth century lordlings and their vassals, was a thing that lurked in and filled the dark places of the earth. Next, was a small room, not eight feet square, where the condemned by the worshipers in the adjoining chapel, passed the night preceding his execution. A niche in the rear wall was filled to half its height by a sloping ledge,—a rocky bed, inclining upward at the head. On[431] this, the doomed wretch lay until the morning looked in upon his misery through the slit in the outer wall. This series of vaults was supplied with all the ancient improvements for executions. In the third apartment a black bar, extending across the cell, was the gallows, and in the wall near the floor an aperture, now closed with rude masonry, finished the drama with business-like promptness, being the “chute” into eight hundred feet of water.

Two hundred feet, more or less, do not materially alter the story, or diminish or increase the horror.

Bonnivard’s prison—the dungeon of Chillon—is beyond the cell of execution and the last of the grim suite of basement state-apartments. The Prisoner of Chillon may have been the child of the poet’s brain. Bonnivard was not a myth. Three times in arms against the ravening beasts of war, known by the courtesy of history, as Dukes of Savoy, and twice a prisoner, he was, at his second capture, immured in the Castle of Chillon. Six weary years were spent by him in this rocky dungeon. During two of these, he was chained to one of the “seven pillars of Gothic mold” upbearing the ceiling. A stone of irregular shape is embedded in the floor at its base. I sat down upon it; put my feet into the hollow worn by his, as he rested thus, night after night, day by day, year upon year!

The girl had disappeared, in answer to a call from the outer-room. Caput leaned against the pillar beside me. We could just trace the circle beaten out of the solid stone by the prisoner’s measured pacing, around the pillar as far as the chain would let him go,—then, back again. It is plain enough by day, but the light was failing where we[432] were. Caput struck a match and held it close to the mournful little track;—another, that we might decipher Byron’s name upon the “autograph column.” Then, the blue flame expired, and the gloom was deeper than before. We hearkened silently to the lap of the lake against the foundation-stones, and the moan of the rising wind; watched the glimmering slits, without glass or shutters, that admitted light and air.

quoted Caput. “It is worse! The dead do not dream!”

“Or hear!” I shuddered. “That dull ‘wash! wash!’ would drive me mad in a week!”

Our little maid reäppeared, all out of breath, brimful of excuses for having left us so long. We were quitting the dungeon when I detected gleams, as of soft eyes, in the darkest corner.

“Mes fleurs!” smiled the girl. “They are safe here from frost and need rest after blooming so well all summer. I bring them in every winter. Would madame like some?”

She clipped and broke until I checked her liberality. The gleams that had caught my eye were large Marguerites, with lissome, white petals, that scarcely discolored in the pressing and drying.

“If they were mine I should rather leave them to the winds and frost than have them winter here!” I said, touching the branches compassionately.

“Plaît-il?” answered the Savoyard, with wide, innocent eyes.

Across the court-yard, upon the ground-floor of another building, is the chamber of torture. This, too, has its memorial[433] pillar, a slender, wooden post in the middle of the room. To this, the prisoner was bound for scourging.

“Sometimes they used whips,” said the guide. “Sometimes,——” she pointed to scorched places on the seasoned wood.

The flesh tingles at sight of these dumb records, burned in upon the memories of Protestants of that day, as they are into the surface of the post. The scourge, in the cases of extreme offenders against ducal and ecclesiastical law, was of fine wire, tipped with red-hot iron or steel. When these missed the back of the victim, they wrote legibly and lastingly upon the pillar of flagellation. There were other “ancient improvements” here once, but they have been removed.

One of note was exhibited in another room,—“the oubliettes,” sometimes called, “the well of promise.” Both names are significant enough. It is an opening in the floor, fenced in with stout rails. Four stone steps slant downward from the brink. The eye cannot pierce the obscurity of the chasm. To the edge of this, then undefended well, the tried and secretly-condemned prisoner was led, blindfolded, and instructed to step down a staircase that would lead him into the outer air and to liberty. The abyss is eighty feet deep. The bottom was set with sharp knives.

Upon the second floor are the “family rooms,” the Duke’s bed-chamber and the boudoir of the Duchess. This last is not large, and so badly-lighted, that she must have required candles on the toilette-table, except in the brightest weather. The walls are covered with what masons style a “scratch-coat” of mortar. It was hung with tapestry when Chillon was a ducal palace. This boudoir is immediately above the chamber of torture. When we exclaimed at the proximity, the girl explained, naïvely,[434] that their Highnesses did not live here all the year, having other residences. Probably, the operation of rack, spiked helmet and collar, thumb-screw and scourging-post was subject to the convenience of the Duchess. All the same, we wondered how she slept with but the plank flooring between her and what she knew of, down there.

The window of her room frames a superb view, on fine days, of the “wide, long lake,” the towering heights of the Savoy side, and the “small, green isle” with its three trees. Looking out of it, now, we saw only the water darkening under the wreathing mists that had chased us all the way from Nyon, and ruffled by the wind. In the spacious Knight’s Hall to which we went next, we could barely discern the stains on the walls that were once frescos, and make out the design of the carved mantel around the mighty-mouthed chimney-place. The windows are all toward the lake and deeply recessed, with broad inner ledges. Within one of these embrasures we sat, gazing upon the slowly-gathering storm, and listening to the “knocking”—Byron used the right word,—of the sullen waves, our little Savoyard attending motionless upon our pleasure. We were going no further than Montreux that night, and our carriage would wait. We would see—we did see—Chillon upon brighter days and in merrier company. It suited us to linger and dream, in the weird twilight, of what had been in the isolated stronghold,—of what, pray Heaven! could never be again.

The girl brought a lamp to guide us to the Duke’s private chapel. The altar is gone, but the choristers’ seats of carved oak are left. Benches are disposed in orderly rows for the Protestant service, held here twice in the month. Chillon Castle is still a prison,—a cantonal penitentiary,—in plainer English—a county jail. Upon each alternate Sabbath, the inmates are gathered into the[435] chapel, and one of the neighborhood pastors ministers to them.

In the court-yard we stopped to gather some yellow-blossomed moss sprouting between the stones, and our Savoyard damsel added to my bouquet of prison-flowers, scarlet and brown leaves from the woodbine running rankly over the tower in which is the torture-chamber. She stood upon the drawbridge as we drove away, a stalwart young turnkey at her side,—who, by the way, had narrowly missed locking us into the lower cells by mistake. Her smiling face, red bodice and white apron were the only spots of brightness in the gray-and-black picture of the frowning fortress, close-folded in the mists and the rolling glooms of the water.

We thought of the Marguerites in the dungeon.

[436]

The Dinner Year-Book is, in its name, happily descriptive of its purposes and character. It occupies a place which, amid all the publications upon cookery—and their name is Legion—has never yet been occupied.

The author truly says that there have been dinner-giving books published, that is, books of menus for company dinings, “Little Dinners,” for especial occasions, etc., etc.; but that she has never yet met with a practical directory of this important meal for every day in the year. In this volume she has furnished the programme in all its details, and has superintended the preparation of each dish, proceeding even to the proper manner of serving it at table. The book has been prepared for the family, for the home of ordinary means, and it has hit the happy line where elegance and economy meet.

The most numerous testimonials to the value of Marion Harland’s “Common Sense” books which the publishers have received, both in newspaper notices and in private communications, are to the effect—always expressed with some astonishment—that the directions of these receipts, actually followed, produce the promised result. We can prophesy the same for the new volume.

The purchaser will find that he has bought what the name purports—The Dinner Year-Book—a practical guide for the purchase of the material and preparation, serving, etc., of the ordinary home dinner for every day of the year. To these are added twelve company dinners, one for each month, from which a selection can be made—according to the time of the year—equal to any occasion which will be presented to the housekeeper.

This book, however, is not valuable merely as a directory for dinners appropriate to various seasons. It contains the largest number of receipts for soups, fish, meat, vegetables, entrees of all descriptions, and desserts, ever offered to the American public. The material for this work has been collected with great care both at home and abroad, representing the diligent labor of many months. A very marked feature of the new volume, and distinguishing it from any other in the American market, is its series of beautiful colored plates, the entire preparation of which has been the work of the author’s own hand.

⁂ The above books for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent, post or express charges paid, upon receipt of the price by the publishers,

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS,
743 and 745 Broadway New York

[437]

⁂ The above books for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent, post or express charges paid, upon receipt of the price by the publishers,

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS,
743 and 745 Broadway New York

[438]

[439]

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CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, Publishers,
743 and 745 Broadway New York

[440]

There is no historical writer of our time who can rival Mr. Froude in vivid delineation of character, grace and clearness of style, and elegant and solid scholarship. In his Life of Cæsar, all these qualities appear in their fullest perfection, resulting in a fascinating narrative which will be read with keen delight by a multitude of readers, and will enhance, if possible, Mr. Froude’s brilliant reputation.

⁂ For sale by all booksellers, or will be sent, prepaid, upon receipt of price, by

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS,
743 and 745 Broadway, New York.

[441]

The publication of a new novel from Mrs. Burnett’s pen has become an event of more than ordinary moment, both to the critics and the public; and HAWORTH’S fulfills the best anticipations of both. It is in the direct line of development of the author’s strongest traits, and marks a higher point than was reached even in the best passages of her first story.

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CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS,
743 and 745 Broadway, New York.

[442]

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CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS,
743 and 745 Broadway, New York.

[443]

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