George Eliot's Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals. Vol. 2 (of 3)

by George Eliot

CHAPTER X.

Italy, 1860.

We have finished our journey to Italy—the journey I had looked forward to for years, rather with the hope of the new elements it would bring to my culture than with the hope of immediate pleasure. Travelling can hardly be without a continual current of disappointment, if the main object is not the enlargement of one's general life, so as to make even weariness and annoyances enter into the sum of benefit. One great deduction to me from the delight of seeing world-famous objects is the frequent double consciousness which tells me that I am not enjoying the actual vision enough, and that, when higher enjoyment comes with the reproduction of the scenes in my imagination, I shall have lost some of the details, which impress me too feebly in the present, because the faculties are not wrought up into energetic action.

I have no other journal than the briefest record of what we did each day, so I shall put down my recollections whenever I happen to have leisure and inclination—just for the sake of making clear to myself the impressions I have brought away from our three months' travel.

The first striking moment in our journey was when we arrived, I think about eleven o'clock at night, at the point in the ascent of the Mont Cenis where we were to quit the diligences and take to the sledges. After a hasty drink of hot coffee in the roadside inn, our large party—the inmates of three diligences—turned out into the starlight to await the signal for getting into the sledges. That signal seemed to be considerably on in the future—to be arrived at through much confusion of luggage-lifting, voices, and leading about of mules. The human bustle and confusion made a poetic contrast with the sublime stillness of the starlit heavens spread over the snowy table-land and surrounding heights. The keenness of the air contributed strongly to the sense of novelty; we had left our every-day, conventional world quite behind us, and were on a visit to Nature in her private home.

Once closely packed in our sledge, congratulating ourselves that, after all, we were no more squeezed than in our diligence, I gave myself up to as many naps as chose to take possession of me, and actually slept without very considerable interruption till we were near the summit of the mighty pass. Already there was a faint hint of the morning in the starlight, which showed us the vast, sloping snow-fields as we commenced the descent. I got a few glimpses of the pure, far-stretching whiteness before the sharpening edge of cold forced us to close the window. Then there was no more to be seen till it was time to get out of the sledge and ascend the diligence once more; not, however, without a preliminary struggle with the wind, which fairly blew me down on my slippery standing-ground. The rest of our descent showed us fine, varied scenes of mountain and ravine till we got down at Susa, where breakfast and the railway came as a desirable variety after our long mountain journey and long fast. One of our companions had been a gigantic French soldier, who had in charge a bag of government money. He was my vis-à-vis for some time, and cramped my poor legs not a little with his precious bag, which he would by no means part from.

The approach to Turin by the railway gave us a grand view of snowy mountains surrounding the city on three sides. A few hours of rest spent there could leave no very vivid impression. A handsome street, well broken by architectural details, with a glimpse of snowy mountains at the end of the vista, colonnades on each side, and flags waving their bright colors in sign of political joy, is the image that usually rises before me at the mention of Turin. I fancy the said street is the principal one, but in our walk about the town we saw everywhere a similar character of prosperous, well-lodged town existence—only without the colonnades and without the balconies and other details, which make the principal street picturesque. This is the place that Alfieri lived in through many of his young follies, getting tired of it at last for the Piedmontese pettiness of which it was the centre. And now, eighty years later, it is the centre of a widening life which may at last become the life of resuscitated Italy. At the railway station, as we waited to take our departure for Genoa, we had a sight of the man whose name will always be connected with the story of that widening life—Count Cavour—"imitant son portrait," which we had seen in the shops, with unusual closeness. A man pleasant to look upon, with a smile half kind, half caustic; giving you altogether the impression that he thinks of "many matters," but thanks Heaven and makes no boast of them. He was there to meet the Prince de Carignan, who was going to Genoa on his way towards Florence by the same train as ourselves. The prince is a notability with a thick waist, bound in by a gold belt, and with a fat face, predominated over by a large mustache—"Non ragionam di lui." The railway journey from Turin was chiefly distinguished by dust; but I slept through the latter half, without prejudice, however, to the satisfaction with which I lay down in a comfortable bedroom in the Hotel Feder.

In Genoa again on a bright, warm spring morning! I was here eleven years ago, and the image that visit had left in my mind was surprisingly faithful, though fragmentary. The outlook from our hotel was nearly the same as before—over a low building with a colonnade, at the masts of the abundant shipping. But there was a striking change in the interior of the hotel. It was like the other, a palace adapted to the purposes of an inn; but be-carpeted and be-furnished with an exaggeration of English fashion.

We lost no time in turning out, after breakfast, into the morning sunshine. George was enchanted with the aspect of the place, as we drove or walked along the streets. It was his first vision of anything corresponding to his preconception of Italy. After the Adlergasse, in Nürnberg, surely no streets can be more impressive than the Strada Nuova and Strada Nuovissima, at Genoa. In street architecture I can rise to the highest point of the admiration given to the Palladian style. And here in these chief streets of Genoa the palaces have two advantages over those of Florence: they form a series, creating a general impression of grandeur of which each particular palace gets the benefit; and they have the open gateway, showing the cortile within—sometimes containing grand stone staircases. And all this architectural splendor is accompanied with the signs of actual prosperity. Genova la Superba is not a name of the past merely.

We ascended the tower of Santa Maria di Carignano to get a panoramic view of the city, with its embosoming hills and bay—saw the cathedral, with its banded black-and-white marble—the churches of the Annunziata and San Ambrogio, with their wealth of gilding and rich pink-brown marbles—the Palazzo Rosso, with its collection of eminently forgettable pictures—and the pretty gardens of the Palazzo Doria, with their flourishing green close against the sea.

A drive in the direction of the Campo Santo, along the dry, pebbly bed of the river, showed us the terraced hills planted with olives, and many picturesque groups of the common people with mules or on carts; not to mention what gives beauty to every corner of the inhabited world—the groups of children squatting against walls or trotting about by the side of their elders or grinning together over their play.

One of the personages we were pleased to encounter in the streets here was a quack—a Dulcamara—mounted on his carriage and holding forth with much brio before proceeding to take out the tooth of a negro, already seated in preparation.

We left Genoa on the second evening—unhappily, a little too long after sundown, so that we did not get a perfect view of the grand city from the sea. The pale starlight could bring out no color. We had a prosperous passage to Leghorn.

Leghorn on a brilliant, warm morning, with five or six hours before us to fill as agreeably as possible! Of course, the first thought was to go to Pisa, but the train would not start till eleven; so, in the meantime, we took a drive about the prosperous-looking town, and saw the great reservoir which receives the water brought from the distant mountains; a beautiful and interesting sight—to look into the glassy depth and see columns and grand arches reflected as if in mockery and frustration of one's desire to see the bottom. But in one corner the light fell so as to reveal that reality instead of the beautiful illusion. On our way back we passed the Hebrew synagogue, and were glad of our coachman's suggestion that we should enter, seeing it was the Jews' Sabbath.

At Pisa we took a carriage and drove at once to the cathedral, seeing as we went the well-looking lines of building on each side of the Arno.

A wonderful sight is that first glimpse of the cathedral, with the leaning campanile on one side and the baptistery on the other, green turf below, and a clear, blue sky above! The structure of the campanile is exquisitely light and graceful—tier above tier of small circular arches, supported by delicate, round pillars narrowing gradually in circumference, but very slightly, so that there is no striking difference of size between the base and summit. The campanile is all of white marble, but the cathedral has the bands of black and white, softened in effect by the yellowing which time has given to the white. There is a family likeness among all these structures: they all have the delicate little colonnades and circular arches. But the baptistery has stronger traits of the Gothic style in the pinnacles that crown the encircling colonnade.

After some dusty delay outside the railway station we set off back again to Livorno, and forthwith got on board our steamboat again—to awake next morning (being Palm-Sunday) at Civita Vecchia. Much waiting before we were allowed to land; and again much waiting for the clumsy process of "visiting" our luggage. I was amused while sitting at the Dogana, where almost every one was cross and busy, to see a dog making his way quietly out with a bone in his mouth.

Getting into our railway carriage, our vis-à-vis—a stout, amiable, intelligent Livornian, with his wife and son, named Dubreux—exclaimed, "C'en est fini d'un peuple qui n'est pas capable de changer une bêtise comme ça!" George got into pleasant talk with him, and his son, about Edinburgh and the scientific men there—the son having been there for some time in order to go through a course of practical science. The father was a naturalist—an entomologist, I think.

It was an interesting journey from Civita Vecchia to Rome: at first, a scene of rough, hilly character, then a vast plain, frequently marshy, crowded with asphodels, inhabited by buffaloes; here and there a falcon or other slow, large-winged bird floating and alighting.

At last we came in sight of Rome, but there was nothing imposing to be seen. The chief object was what I afterwards knew to be one of the aqueducts, but which I then, in the vagueness of my conceptions, guessed to be the ruins of baths. The railway station where we alighted looked remote and countrified; only the omnibuses and one family carriage were waiting, so that we were obliged to take our chance in one of the omnibuses—that is, the chance of finding no place left for us in the hotels. And so it was. Every one wanted to go to the Hotel d'Angleterre, and every one was disappointed. We, at last, by help of some fellow-travellers, got a small room au troisième at the Hotel d'Amérique; and as soon as that business was settled we walked out to look at Rome—not without a rather heavy load of disappointment on our minds from the vision we had of it from the omnibus windows. A weary length of dirty, uninteresting streets had brought us within sight of the dome of St. Peter's, which was not impressive, seen in a peeping, makeshift manner, just rising above the houses; and the Castle of St. Angelo seemed but a shabby likeness of the engravings. Not one iota had I seen that corresponded with my preconceptions.

Our hotel was in the Strada Babuino, which leads directly from the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza di Spagna. We went to the latter for our first walk, and arriving opposite the high, broad flights of stone steps which lead up to the Trinità di Monte, stopped for the first time with a sense that here was something not quite common and ugly. But I think we got hardly any farther, that evening, than the tall column at the end of the piazza, which celebrates the final settlement by Pius IX. of the Virgin's Immaculate Conception. Oh, yes; I think we wandered farther among narrow and ugly streets, and came into our hotel again still with some dejection at the probable relation our "Rome visited" was to bear to our "Rome unvisited."

Discontented with our little room at an extravagant height of stairs and price, we found and took lodgings the next day in the Corso opposite St. Carlo, with a well-mannered Frenchman named Peureux and his little, dark, Italian wife—and so felt ourselves settled for a month. By this time we were in better spirits; for in the morning we had been to the Capitol (Campidoglio, the modern variant for Capitolium), had ascended the tower, and had driven to the Coliseum. The scene, looking along the Forum to the Arch of Titus, resembled strongly that mixture of ruined grandeur with modern life which I had always had in my imagination at the mention of Rome. The approach to the Capitol from the opposite side is also impressive: on the right hand the broad, steep flight of steps leading up to the Church and Monastery of Ara Cœli, placed, some say, on the site of the Arx; in the front a less steep flight of steps à cordon leading to that lower, flatter portion of the hill which was called the Intermontium, and which now forms a sort of piazza, with the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the centre, and on three sides buildings designed, or rather modified, by Michael Angelo—on the left the Museum, on the right the Museo dei Conservatori, and, on the side opposite the steps, the building devoted to public offices (Palazzo dei Senatori), in the centre of which stands the tower. On each hand, at the summit of the steps, are the two Colossi, less celebrated but hardly less imposing in their calm grandeur than the Colossi of the Quirinal. They are strangely streaked and disfigured by the blackening weather; but their large-eyed, mild might gives one a thrill of awe, half like what might have been felt by the men of old who saw the divine twins watering their steeds when they brought the news of victory.

Perhaps the world can hardly offer a more interesting outlook than that from the tower of the Capitol. The eye leaps first to the mountains that bound the Campagna—the Sabine and Alban Hills and the solitary Soracte farther on to the left. Then, wandering back across the Campagna, it searches for the Sister Hills, hardly distinguishable now as hills. The Palatine is conspicuous enough, marked by the ruins of the Palace of the Cæsars, and rising up beyond the extremity of the Forum. And now, once resting on the Forum, the eye will not readily quit the long area that begins with the Clivus Capitolinus and extends to the Coliseum—an area that was once the very focus of the world. The Campo Vaccino, the site probably of the Comitium, was this first morning covered with carts and animals, mingling a simple form of actual life with those signs of the highly artificial life that had been crowded here in ages gone by: the three Corinthian pillars at the extremity of the Forum, said to have belonged to the Temple of Jupiter Stator; the grand temple of Antoninus and Faustina; the white arch of Titus; the Basilica of Constantine; the temple built by Adrian, with its great, broken granite columns scattered around on the green, rising ground; the huge arc of the Coliseum and the arch of Constantine.

The scenes of these great relics remained our favorite haunt during our stay at Rome; and one day, near the end of it, we entered the enclosure of the Clivus Capitolinus and the excavated space of the Forum. The ruins on the Clivus—the façade of massive columns on the right, called the temple of Vespasian; the two Corinthian columns, called the temple of Saturn, in the centre; and the arch of Septimius Severus on the left—have their rich color set off by the luxuriant green, clothing the lower masonry, which formed the foundations of the crowded buildings on this narrow space, and, as a background to them all, the rough solidity of the ancient wall forming the back of the central building on the Intermontium, and regarded as one of the few remains of Republican constructions. On either hand, at another angle from the arch, the ancient road forming the double ascent of the Clivus is seen, firm and level, with its great blocks of pavement. The arch of Septimius Severus is particularly rich in color; and the poorly executed bas-reliefs of military groups still look out in the grotesque completeness of attitude and expression, even on the sides exposed to the weather. From the Clivus a passage, underneath the present road, leads into the Forum, whose immense pinkish granite columns lie on the weather-worn white marble pavement. The column of Phocas, with its base no longer "buried," stands at the extreme corner nearest the Clivus; and the three elegant columns of the temple (say some) of Jupiter Stator, mark the opposite extremity; between lie traces, utterly confused to all but erudite eyes, of marble steps and of pedestals stripped of their marble.

Let me see what I most delighted in, in Rome. Certainly this drive from the Clivus to the Coliseum was, from first to last, one of the chief things; but there are many objects and many impressions of various kinds which I can reckon up as of almost equal interest: the Coliseum itself, with the view from it; the drive along the Appian Way to the tomb of Cecilia Metella, and the view from thence of the Campagna bridged by the aqueduct; the baths of Titus, with the remnants of their arabesques, seen by the light of torches, in the now damp and gloomy spaces; the glimpse of the Tarpeian rock, with its growth of cactus and rough herbage; the grand, bare arch brickwork of the Palace of the Cæsars rising in huge masses on the Palatine; the theatre of Marcellus bursting suddenly into view from among the crowded mean houses of the modern city, and still more the Temple of Minerva and Temple of Nerva, also set in the crowded city of the present; and the exterior of the Pantheon, if it were not marred by the Papal belfries—these are the traces of ancient Rome that have left the strongest image of themselves in my mind. I ought not to leave out Trajan's column, and the forum in which it stands; though the severe cold tint of the gray granite columns, or fragments of columns, gave this forum rather a dreary effect to me. For vastness there is perhaps nothing more impressive in Rome than the Baths of Caracalla, except the Coliseum; and I remember that it was among them that I first noticed the lovely effect of the giant fennel, luxuriant among the crumbling brickwork.

Among the ancient sculptures I think I must place on a level the Apollo, the Dying Gladiator, and the Lateran Antinous: they affected me equally in different ways. After these I delighted in the Venus of the Capitol, and the Kissing Children in the same room; the Sophocles at the Lateran Museum; the Nile; the black, laughing Centaur at the Capitol; the Laughing Faun in the Vatican; and the Sauroktonos, or Boy with the Lizard, and the sitting statue called Menander. The Faun of Praxiteles, and the old Faun with the infant Bacchus, I had already seen at Munich, else I should have mentioned them among my first favorites. Perhaps the greatest treat we had at the Vatican was the sight of a few statues, including the Apollo, by torchlight—all the more impressive because it was our first sight of the Vatican. Even the mere hurrying along the vast halls, with the fitful torchlight falling on the innumerable statues and busts and bas-reliefs and sarcophagi, would have left a sense of awe at these crowded, silent forms which have the solemnity of suddenly arrested life. Wonderfully grand these halls of the Vatican are; and there is but one complaint to be made against the home provided for this richest collection of antiquities—it is that there is no historical arrangement of them, and no catalogue. The system of classification is based on the history of their collection by the different popes, so that for every other purpose but that of securing to each pope his share of glory, it is a system of helter-skelter.

Of Christian Rome, St. Peter's is, of course, the supreme wonder. The piazza, with Bernini's colonnades, and the gradual slope upward to the mighty temple, gave me always a sense of having entered some millennial new Jerusalem, where all small and shabby things were unknown. But the exterior of the cathedral itself is even ugly; it causes a constant irritation by its partial concealment of the dome. The first impression from the interior was, perhaps, at a higher pitch than any subsequent impression, either of its beauty or vastness; but then, on later visits, the lovely marble, which has a tone at once subdued and warm, was half-covered with hideous red drapery. There is hardly any detail one cares to dwell on in St. Peter's. It is interesting, for once, to look at the mosaic altar-pieces, some of which render with marvellous success such famous pictures as the Transfiguration, the Communion of St. Jerome, and the Entombment or Disentombment of St. Petronilla. And some of the monuments are worth looking at more than once, the chief glory of that kind being Canova's Lions. I was pleased one day to watch a group of poor people looking with an admiration that had a half-childish terror in it at the sleeping lion, and with a sort of daring air thrusting their fingers against the teeth of the waking "mane-bearer."

We ascended the dome near the end of our stay, but the cloudy horizon was not friendly to our distant view, and Rome itself is ugly to a bird's-eye contemplation. The chief interest of the ascent was the vivid realization it gave of the building's enormous size, and after that the sight of the inner courts and garden of the Vatican.

Our most beautiful view of Rome and the Campagna was one we had much earlier in our stay, before the snow had vanished from the mountains; it was from the terrace of the Villa Pamfili Doria.

Of smaller churches I remember especially Santa Maria degli Angeli, a church formed by Michael Angelo by additions to the grand hall in the Baths of Diocletian—the only remaining hall of ancient Rome; and the Church of San Clemente, where there is a chapel painted by Masaccio, as well as a perfect specimen of the ancient enclosure near the tribune, called the presbytery, with the ambones or pulpits from which the lessons and gospel were read. Santa Maria Maggiore is an exquisitely beautiful basilica, rich in marbles from a pagan temple; and the reconstructed San Paolo fuori le Mura is a wonder of wealth and beauty, with its lines of white-marble columns—if one could possibly look with pleasure at such a perverted appliance of money and labor as a church built in an unhealthy solitude. After St. Peter's, however, the next great monument of Christian art is the Sistine Chapel; but since I care for the chapel solely for the sake of its ceiling, I ought rather to number it among my favorite paintings than among the most memorable buildings. Certainly this ceiling of Michael Angelo's is the most wonderful fresco in the world. After it come Raphael's School of Athens and Triumph of Galatea, so far as Rome is concerned. Among oil-paintings there I like best the Madonna di Foligno, for the sake of the cherub who is standing and looking upward; the Perugino also, in the Vatican, and the pretty Sassoferrato, with the clouds budding angels; at the Barberini Palace, Beatrice Cenci, and Una Schiava, by Titian; at the Sciarra Palace, the Joueurs de Violon, by Raphael, another of Titian's golden-haired women, and a sweet Madonna and Child with a bird, by Fra Bartolomeo; at the Borghese Palace, Domenichino's Chase, the Entombment, by Raphael, and the Three Ages—a copy of Titian, by Sassoferrato.

We should have regretted entirely our efforts to get to Rome during the Holy Week, instead of making Florence our first resting-place, if we had not had the compensation for wearisome, empty ceremonies and closed museums in the wonderful spectacle of the illumination of St. Peter's. That, really, is a thing so wondrous, so magically beautiful, that one can't find in one's heart to say it is not worth doing. I remember well the first glimpse we had as we drove out towards it, of the outline of the dome like a new constellation on the black sky. I thought that was the final illumination, and was regretting our tardy arrival, from the détour we had to make, when, as our carriage stopped in front of the cathedral, the great bell sounded, and in an instant the grand illumination flashed out and turned the outline of stars into a palace of gold. Venus looked out palely.

One of the finest positions in Rome is the Monte Cavallo (the Quirinal), the site of the pope's palace, and of the fountain against which are placed the two Colossi—the Castor and Pollux, ascribed, after a lax method of affiliation, to Phidias and Praxiteles. Standing near this fountain one has a real sense of being on a hill; city and distant ridge stretching below. Close by is the Palazzo Rospigliosi, where we went to see Guido's Aurora.

Another spot where I was struck with the view of modern Rome (and that happened rarely) was at San Pietro in Vincoli, on the Esquiline, where we went to see Michael Angelo's Moses. Turning round before one enters the church, a palm-tree in the high foreground relieves very picturesquely the view of the lower distance. The Moses did not affect me agreeably; both the attitude and the expression of the face seemed to me, in that one visit, to have an exaggeration that strained after effect without reaching it. The failure seemed to me of this kind: Moses was an angry man trying to frighten the people by his mien, instead of being rapt by his anger, and terrible without self-consciousness. To look at the statue of Christ, after the other works of Michael Angelo at Rome, was a surprise; in this the fault seems to incline slightly to the namby-pamby. The Pietà in St. Peter's has real tenderness in it.

The visit to the Farnesina was one of the most interesting among our visits to Roman palaces. It is here that Raphael painted the Triumph of Galatea, and here this wonderful fresco is still bright upon the wall. In the same room is a colossal head, drawn by Michael Angelo with a bit of charcoal, by way of carte-de-visite, one day that he called on Daniele di Volterra, who was painting detestably in this room, and happened to be absent. In the entrance-hall, preceding the Galatea room, are the frescoes by Raphael representing the story of Cupid and Psyche; but we did not linger long to look at them, as they disappointed us.

We visited only four artists' studios in Rome: Gibson's, the sculptor; Frey's, the landscape painter; Riedel's, genre painter, and Overbeck's. Gibson's was entirely disappointing to me, so far as his own sculptures are concerned; except the Cacciatore, which he sent to the Great Exhibition, I could see nothing but feeble imitations of the antique—no spontaneity and no vigor. Miss Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci is a pleasing and new conception; and her little Puck a bit of humor that one would like to have if one were a grand seigneur.

Frey is a very meritorious landscape painter—finished in execution and poetic in feeling. His Egyptian scenes—the Simoon, the Pair in the Light of Sunset, and the Island of Philæ—are memorable pictures; so is the View of Athens, with its blue, island-studded sea. Riedel interested us greatly with his account of the coincidence between the views of light and colors at which he had arrived through his artistic experience, and Goethe's theory of colors, with which he became acquainted only after he had thought of putting his own ideas into shape for publication. He says the majority of painters continue their work when the sun shines from the north—they paint with blue light.

But it was our visit to Overbeck that we were most pleased not to have missed. The man himself is more interesting than his pictures: a benevolent calm and quiet conviction breathes from his person and manners. He has a thin, rather high-nosed face, with long gray hair, set off by a maroon velvet cap, and a gray scarf over his shoulders. Some of his cartoons pleased me: one large one of our Saviour passing from the midst of the throng who were going to cast him from the brow of the hill at Capernaum—one foot resting on a cloud borne up by cherubs; and some smaller round cartoons representing the Parable of the Ten Virgins, and applying it to the function of the artist.

We drove about a great deal in Rome, but were rather afflicted in our drives by the unending walls that enclose everything like a garden, even outside the city gates. First among our charming drives was that to the Villa Pamfili Doria—a place which has the beauties of an English park and gardens, with views such as no English park can show; not to speak of the columbarium or ancient Roman burying-place, which has been disinterred in the grounds. The compactest of all burying-places must these columbaria be: little pigeon-holes, tier above tier, for the small urns containing the ashes of the dead. In this one traces of peacocks and other figures in fresco, ornamenting the divisions between the rows, are still visible. We sat down in the sunshine by the side of the water, which is made to fall in a cascade in the grounds fronting the house, and then spreads out into a considerable breadth of mirror for the plantation on the slope which runs along one side of it. On the opposite side is a broad, grassy walk, and here we sat on some blocks of stone, watching the little green lizards. Then we walked on up the slope on the other side, and through a grove of weird ilexes, and across a plantation of tall pines, where we saw the mountains in the far distance. A beautiful spot! We ought to have gone there again.

Another drive was to the Villa Albani, where, again, the view is grand. The precious sculptures once there are all at Munich now; and the most remarkable remnants of the collection are the bas-relief of Antinous, and the Æsop. The Antinous is the least beautiful of all the representations of that sad loveliness that I have seen—be it said in spite of Winckelmann; attitude and face are strongly Egyptian. In an outside pavilion in the garden were some interesting examples of Greek masks.

Our journey to Frascati by railway was fortunate. The day was fine, except, indeed, for the half hour that we were on the heights of Tusculum, and longed for a clear horizon. But the weather was so generally gloomy during our stay in Rome that we were "thankful for small mercies" in the way of sunshine. I enjoyed greatly our excursion up the hill on donkey-back to the ruins of Tusculum—in spite of our loquacious guide, who exasperated George. The sight of the Campagna on one side, and of Mount Algidus, with its snow-capped fellows, and Mount Albano, with Rocca di Papa on its side, and Castel Gandolfo below on the other side, was worth the trouble—to say nothing of the little theatre, which was the most perfect example of an ancient theatre I had then seen in that pre-Pompeian period of my travels. After lunching at Frascati we strolled out to the Villa Aldobrandini, and enjoyed a brighter view of the Campagna in the afternoon sunlight. Then we lingered in a little croft enclosed by plantations, and enjoyed this familiar-looking bit of grass with wild-flowers perhaps more, even, than the greatest novelties. There are fine plantations on the hill behind the villa, and there we wandered till it was time to go back to the railway. A literally grotesque thing in these plantations is the opening of a grotto in the hillside, cut in the form of a huge Greek comic mask. It was a lovely walk from the town downward to the railway station—between the olive-clad slopes looking towards the illimitable plain. Our best view of the aqueducts was on this journey, but it was the tantalizing sort of view one gets from a railway carriage.

Our excursion to Tivoli, reserved till nearly the end of our stay, happened on one of those cruel, seductive days that smile upon you at five o'clock in the morning, to become cold and cloudy at eight, and resolutely rainy at ten. And so we ascended the hill through the vast, venerable olive grove, thinking what would be the effect of sunshine among those gray, fantastically twisted trunks and boughs; and paddled along the wet streets under umbrellas to look at the Temple of the Sibyl, and to descend the ravine of the waterfalls. Yet it was enjoyable; for the rain was not dense enough to shroud the near view of rock and foliage. We looked for the first time at a rock of Travertine, with its curious petrified vegetable forms, and lower down at a mighty cavern, under which the smaller cascade rushes—an awful hollow in the midst of huge, rocky masses. But—rain, rain, rain! No possibility of seeing the Villa of Hadrian, chief wonder of Tivoli: and so we had our carriage covered up and turned homeward in despair.

The last week of our stay we went for the first time to the picture-gallery of the Capitol, where we saw the famous Guercino—the Entombment of Petronilla—which we had already seen in mosaic at St. Peter's. It is a stupendous piece of painting, about which one's only feeling is that it might as well have been left undone. More interesting is the portrait of Michael Angelo, by himself—a deeply melancholy face. And there is also a picture of a bishop, by Giovanni Bellini, which arrested us a long while. After these, I remember most distinctly Veronese's Europa, superior to that we afterwards saw at Venice; a delicious mythological Poussin, all light and joy; and a Sebastian, by Guido, exceptionally beautiful among the many detestable things of his in this gallery.

The Lateran Museum, also, was a sight we had neglected till this last week, though it turned out to be one of the most memorable. In the classical museum are the great Antinous, a Bacchus, and the Sophocles; besides a number of other remains of high interest, especially in the department of architectural decoration. In the museum of Christian antiquities there are, besides sculptures, copies of the frescoes in the Catacombs—invaluable as a record of those perishable remains. If we ever go to Rome again the Lateran Museum will be one of the first places I shall wish to revisit.

We saw the Catacombs of St. Calixtus, on the Appian Way—the long, dark passages, with great oblong hollows in the rock for the bodies long since crumbled, and the one or two openings out of the passages into a rather wider space, called chapels, but no indications of paintings or other detail—our monkish guide being an old man, who spoke with an indistinct grunt that would not have enlightened us if we had asked any questions. In the church through which we entered there is a strangely barbarous reclining statue of St. Sebastian, with arrows sticking all over it.

A spot that touched me deeply was Shelley's grave. The English cemetery in which he lies is the most attractive burying-place I have seen. It lies against the old city walls, close to the Porta San Paolo and the pyramid of Caius Cestius—one of the quietest spots of old Rome. And there, under the shadow of the old walls on one side, and cypresses on the other, lies the Cor cordium, forever at rest from the unloving cavillers of this world, whether or not he may have entered on other purifying struggles in some world unseen by us. The grave of Keats lies far off from Shelley's, unshaded by wall or trees. It is painful to look upon, because of the inscription on the stone, which seems to make him still speak in bitterness from his grave.[11]

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 4th April, 1860.

A wet day for the first time since we left Paris! That assists our consciences considerably in urging us to write our letters on this fourth day at Rome, for I will not pretend that writing a letter, even to you, can be anything more alluring than a duty when there is a blue sky over the Coliseum and the Arch of Constantine, and all the other marvels of this marvellous place. Since our arrival, in the middle of Sunday, I have been gradually rising from the depth of disappointment to an intoxication of delight; and that makes me wish to do for you what no one ever did for me—warn you that you must expect no grand impression on your first entrance into Rome, at least, if you enter it from Civita Vecchia. My heart sank, as it would if you behaved shabbily to me, when I looked through the windows of the omnibus as it passed through street after street of ugly modern Rome, and in that mood the dome of St. Peter's and the Castle of St. Angelo—the only grand objects on our way—could only look disappointing to me. I believe the impression on entering from the Naples side is quite different; there one must get a glimpse of the broken grandeur and Renaissance splendor that one associates with the word "Rome." So keep up your spirits in the omnibus when your turn comes, and believe that you will mount the Capitol the next morning, as we did, and look out on the Forum and the Coliseum, far on to the Alban mountains, with snowy Apennines behind them, and feel—what I leave you to imagine, because the rain has left off, and my husband commands me to put on my bonnet. (Two hours later.) Can you believe that I have not had a headache since we set out? But I would willingly have endured more than one to be less anxious than I am about Mr. Lewes's health. Now that we are just come in from our walk to the Pantheon he is obliged to lie down with terrible oppression of the head; and since we have been in Rome he has been nearly deaf on one side. That is the dark "crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air" just now; everything else in our circumstances here is perfect. We are glad to have been driven into apartments, instead of remaining at the hotel, as we had intended; for we enjoy the abundance of room and the quiet that belong to this mode of life, and we get our cooking and all other comforts in perfection at little more than a third of the hotel prices. Most of the visitors to Rome this season seem to come only for a short stay; and, as apartments can't be taken for less than a month, the hotels are full and the lodgings are empty. Extremely unpleasant for the people who have lodgings to let, but very convenient for us, since we get excellent rooms in a good situation for a moderate price. We have a good little landlady, who can speak nothing but Italian, so that she serves as a parlatrice for us, and awakens our memory of Italian dialogue—a memory which consists chiefly of recollecting Italian words without knowing their meaning, and English words without knowing the Italian for them.

I shall tell you nothing of what we have seen. Have you not a husband who has seen it all, and can tell you much better? Except, perhaps, one sight which might have had some interest for him, namely, Count Cavour, who was waiting with other eminences at the Turin station to receive the Prince de Carignan, the new Viceroy of Tuscany. A really pleasant sight—not the prince, who is a large, stout "mustache," squeezed in at the waist with a gold belt, looking like one of those dressed-up personages who are among the chessmen that the Cavours of the world play their game with. The pleasant sight was Count Cavour, in plainest dress, with a head full of power, mingled with bonhomie. We had several fellow-travellers who belonged to Savoy, and were full of chagrin at the prospect of the French annexation. Our most agreeable companion was a Baron de Magliano, a Neapolitan who has married a French wife with a large fortune, and has been living in France for years, but has now left his wife and children behind for the sake of entering the Sardinian army, and, if possible, helping to turn out the Neapolitan Bourbons. I feel some stirrings of the insurrectionary spirit myself when I see the red pantaloons at every turn in the streets of Rome. I suppose Mrs. Browning could explain to me that this is part of the great idea nourished in the soul of the modern saviour, Louis Napoleon, and that for the French to impose a hateful government on the Romans is the only proper sequence to the story of the French Revolution.

Oh, the beautiful men and women and children here! Such wonderful babies with wise eyes! such grand-featured mothers nursing them! As one drives along the streets sometimes, one sees a madonna and child at every third or fourth upper window; and on Monday a little crippled girl, seated at the door of a church, looked up at us with a face full of such pathetic sweetness and beauty that I think it can hardly leave me again. Yesterday we went to see dear Shelley's tomb, and it was like a personal consolation to me to see that simple outward sign that he is at rest, where no hatred can ever reach him again. Poor Keats's tombstone, with that despairing, bitter inscription, is almost as painful to think of as Swift's.

And what have you been doing, being, or suffering in these long twelve days? While we were standing with weary impatience in the custom-house at Civita Vecchia, Mr. Congreve was delivering his third lecture, and you were listening. And what else? Friday.—Since I wrote my letter we have not been able to get near the post-office. Yesterday was taken up with seeing ceremonies, or, rather, with waiting for them. I knelt down to receive the pope's blessing, remembering what Pius VII. said to the soldier—that he would never be the worse for the blessing of an old man. But, altogether, these ceremonies are a melancholy, hollow business, and we regret bitterly that the Holy Week has taken up our time from better things. I have a cold and headache this morning, and in other ways am not conscious of improvement from the pope's blessing. I may comfort myself with thinking that the King of Sardinia is none the worse for the pope's curse. It is farcical enough that the excommunication is posted up at the Church of St. John Lateran, out of everybody's way, and yet there are police to guard it.

Italy, 1860.

How much more I have to write about Rome! How I should like to linger over every particular object that has left an image in my memory! But here I am only to give a hasty sketch of what we saw and did at each place at which we paused in our three months' life in Italy.

It was on the 29th of April that we left Rome, and on the morning of the 30th we arrived at Naples—under a rainy sky, alas! but not so rainy as to prevent our feeling the beauty of the city and bay, and declaring it to surpass all places we had seen before. The weather cleared up soon after our arrival at the Hotel des Étrangers, and after a few days it became brilliant, showing us the blue sea, the purple mountains, and bright city, in which we had almost disbelieved as we saw them in the pictures. Hardly anything can be more lovely than Naples seen from Posilippo under a blue sky: the irregular outline with which the town meets the sea, jutting out in picturesque masses, then lifted up high on a basis of rock, with the grand Castle of St. Elmo and the monastery on the central height crowning all the rest; the graceful outline of purple Vesuvius rising beyond the Molo, and the line of deeply indented mountains carrying the eye along to the Cape of Sorrento; and, last of all, Capri sleeping between sea and sky in the distance. Crossing the promontory of Posilippo, another wonderful scene presents itself: white Nisida on its island rock; the sweep of bay towards Pozzuoli; beyond that, in fainter colors of farther distance, the Cape of Miseno and the peaks of Ischia.

Our first expedition was to Pozzuoli and Miseno, on a bright, warm day, with a slipshod Neapolitan driver, whom I christened Baboon, and who acted as our charioteer throughout our stay at Naples. Beyond picturesque Pozzuoli, jutting out with precipitous piles of building into the sea, lies Baiæ. Here we halted to look at a great circular temple, where there was a wonderful echo that made whispers circulate and become loud on the opposite side to that on which they were uttered. Here, for our amusement, a young maiden and a little old man danced to the sound of a tambourine and fife. On our way to Baiæ we had stopped to see the Lake Avernus, no longer terrible to behold, and the amphitheatre of Cumæ, now grown over with greensward, and fringed with garden stuff.

From Baiæ we went to Miseno—the Misenum where Pliny was stationed with the fleet—and looked out from the promontory on the lovely isles of Ischia and Procida. On the approach to this promontory lies the Piscina Mirabilis, one of the most striking remains of Roman building. It is a great reservoir, into which one may now descend dryshod and look up at the lofty arches festooned with delicate plants, while the sunlight shoots aslant through the openings above. It was on this drive, coming back towards Pozzuoli, that we saw the Mesembryanthemum in its greatest luxuriance—a star of amethyst with its golden tassel in the centre. The amphitheatre at Pozzuoli is the most interesting in Italy after the Coliseum. The seats are in excellent preservation, and the subterranean structures for water and for the introduction of wild beasts are unique. The temple of Jupiter Serapis is another remarkable ruin, made more peculiar by the intrusion of the water, which makes the central structure, with its great columns, an island to be approached by a plank bridge.

In the views from Capo di Monte—the king's summer residence—and from St. Elmo one enjoys not only the view towards the sea, but the wide, green plain sprinkled with houses and studded with small towns or villages, bounded on the one hand by Vesuvius, and shut in, in every other direction, by the nearer heights close upon Naples, or by the sublimer heights of the distant Apennines. We had the view from St. Elmo on a clear, breezy afternoon, in company with a Frenchman and his wife, come from Rome with his family after a two years' residence there—worth remembering for the pretty bondage the brusque, stern, thin father was under to the tiny, sickly looking boy.

It was a grand drive up to Capo di Monte—between rich plantations, with glimpses, as we went up, of the city lying in picturesque irregularity below; and as we went down, in the other direction, views of distant mountain rising above some pretty accident of roof or groups of trees in the foreground.

One day we went, from this drive, along the Poggio Reale to the cemetery—the most ambitious burying-place I ever saw, with building after building of elaborate architecture, serving as tombs to various Arci-confraternità as well as to private families, all set in the midst of well-kept gardens. The humblest kind of tombs there were long niches for coffins, in a wall bordering the carriage-road, which are simply built up when the coffin is once in—the inscription being added on this final bit of masonry. The lines of lofty sepulchres suggested to one very vividly the probable appearance of the Appian Way when the old Roman tombs were in all their glory.

Our first visit to the Museo Borbonico was devoted to the sculpture, of which there is a precious collection. Of the famous Balbi family, found at Herculaneum, the mother, in grand drapery, wound round her head and body, is the most unforgetable—a really grand woman of fifty, with firm mouth and knitted brow, yet not unbenignant. Farther on in this transverse hall is a Young Faun with the Infant Bacchus—a different conception altogether from the fine Munich statue, but delicious for humor and geniality. Then there is the Aristides—more real and speaking and easy in attitude even than the Sophocles at Rome. Opposite is a lovely Antinous, in no mythological character, but in simple, melancholy beauty. In the centre of the deep recess, in front of which these statues are placed, is the colossal Flora, who holds up her thin dress in too finicking a style for a colossal goddess; and on the floor—to be seen by ascending a platform—is the precious, great mosaic representing the Battle of the Issus, found at Pompeii. It is full of spirit, the ordonnance of the figures is very much after the same style as in the ancient bas-reliefs, and the colors are still vivid enough for us to have a just idea of the effect. In the halls on each side of this central one there are various Bacchuses and Apollos, Atlas groaning under the weight of the Globe, the Farnese Hercules, the Toro Farnese, and, among other things less memorable, a glorious Head of Jupiter.

The bronzes here are even more interesting than the marbles. Among them there is Mercury Resting, the Sleeping Faun, the little Dancing Faun, and the Drunken Faun snapping his fingers, of which there is a marble copy at Munich, with the two remarkable Heads of Plato and Seneca.

But our greatest treat at the Museo Borbonico could only be enjoyed after our visit to Pompeii, where we went, unhappily, in the company of some Russians whose acquaintance G. had made at the table d'hôte. I hope I shall never forget the solemnity of our first entrance into that silent city, and the walk along the street of tombs. After seeing the principal houses we went, as a proper climax, to the Forum, where, among the lines of pedestals and the ruins of temples and tribunal, we could see Vesuvius overlooking us; then to the two theatres, and finally to the amphitheatre.

This visit prepared us to enjoy the collection of piccoli bronzi, of paintings and mosaics at the Museo. Several of the paintings have considerable positive merit. I remember particularly a large one of Orestes and Pylades, which in composition and general conception might have been a picture of yesterday. But the most impressive collection of remains found at Pompeii and Herculaneum is that of the ornaments, articles of food and domestic utensils, pieces of bread, loaves with the bakers' names on them, fruits, corn, various seeds, paste in the vessel, imperfectly mixed, linen just wrung in washing, eggs, oil consolidated in a glass bottle, wine mixed with the lava, and a piece of asbestos; gold lace, a lens, a lantern with sides of talc, gold ornaments of Etruscan character, patty-pans (!), moulds for cakes; ingenious portable cooking apparatus, urn for hot water, portable candelabrum, to be raised or lowered at will, bells, dice, theatre-checks, and endless objects that tell of our close kinship with those old Pompeians. In one of the rooms of this collection there are the Farnese cameos and engraved gems, some of them—especially of the latter—marvellously beautiful, complicated, and exquisitely minute in workmanship. I remember particularly one splendid yellow stone engraved with an elaborate composition of Apollo and his chariot and horses—a masterpiece of delicate form.

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 5th May, 1860

We left Rome a week ago, almost longing, at last, to come southward in search of sunshine. Every one likes to boast of peculiar experience, and we can boast of having gone to Rome in the very worst spring that has been known for the last twenty years. Here, at Naples, we have had some brilliant days, though the wind is still cold, and rain has often fallen heavily in the night. It is the very best change for us after Rome; there is comparatively little art to see, and there is nature in transcendent beauty. We both think it the most beautiful place in the world, and are sceptical about Constantinople, which has not had the advantage of having been seen by us. That is the fashion of travellers, as you know: for you must have been bored many times in your life by people who have insisted on it that you must go and see the thing they have seen—there is nothing like it. We shall bore you in that way, I dare say—so prepare yourself. Our plan at present is to spend the next week in seeing Pæstum, Amalfi, Castellamare, and Sorrento, and drinking in as much of this Southern beauty, in a quiet way, as our souls are capable of absorbing.

The calm blue sea, and the mountains sleeping in the afternoon light, as we have seen them to-day from the height of St. Elmo, make one feel very passive and contemplative, and disinclined to bustle about in search of meaner sights. Yet I confess Pompeii, and the remains of Pompeian art and life in the Museum, have been impressive enough to rival the sea and sky. It is a thing never to be forgotten—that walk through the silent city of the past, and then the sight of utensils and eatables and ornaments and half-washed linen and hundreds of other traces of life so startlingly like our own in its minutest details, suddenly arrested by the fiery deluge. All that you will see some day, and with the advantage of younger eyes than mine.

We expect to reach Florence (by steamboat, alas!) on the 17th, so that if you have the charity to write to me again, address to me there.

We thought the advance to eighteen in the number of hearers was very satisfactory, and rejoiced over it. The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life—the work at home after the holiday is done—is to help in some small, nibbling way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation, and misery on the face of this beautiful earth. I am writing at night—Mr. Lewes is already asleep, else he would say, "Send my kind regards to them all." We have often talked of you, and the thought of seeing you again makes the South Fields look brighter in our imagination than they could have looked from the dreariest part of the world if you had not been living in them.

Italy, 1860.

The pictures at Naples are worth little: the Marriage of St. Catherine, a small picture by Correggio; a Holy Family, by Raphael, with a singularly fine St. Ann, and Titian's Paul the Third, are the only paintings I have registered very distinctly in all the large collection. The much-praised frescoes of the dome in a chapel of the cathedral, and the oil-paintings over the altars, by Domenichino and Spagnoletto, produced no effect on me. Worth more than all these are Giotto's frescoes in the choir of the little old Church of l'Incoronata, though these are not, I think, in Giotto's ripest manner, for they are inferior to his frescoes in the Santa Croce at Florence—more uniform in the type of face.

We went to a Sunday-morning service at the cathedral, and saw a detachment of silver busts of saints ranged around the tribune, Naples being famous for gold and silver sanctities.

When we had been a week at Naples we set off in our carriage with Baboon on an expedition to Pæstum, arriving the first evening at Salerno—beautiful Salerno, with a bay as lovely, though in a different way, as the bay of Naples. It has a larger sweep; grander piles of rocky mountain on the north and northeast; then a stretch of low plain, the mountains receding; and, finally, on the south, another line of mountain coast extending to the promontory of Sicosa.

From Salerno we started early in the morning for Pæstum, with no alloy to the pleasure of the journey but the dust, which was capable of making a simoon under a high wind. For a long way we passed through a well-cultivated plain, the mountains on our left and the sea on our right; but farther on came a swampy, unenclosed space of great extent, inhabited by buffaloes, who lay in groups, comfortably wallowing in the muddy water, with their grand, stupid heads protruding horizontally.

On approaching Pæstum, the first thing one catches sight of is the Temple of Vesta, which is not beautiful either for form or color, so that we began to tremble lest disappointment were to be the harvest of our dusty journey. But the fear was soon displaced by almost rapturous admiration at the sight of the great Temple of Neptune—the finest thing, I verily believe, that we had yet seen in Italy. It has all the requisites to make a building impressive: First, form. What perfect satisfaction and repose for the eye in the calm repetition of those columns; in the proportions of height and length, of front and sides; the right thing is found—it is not being sought after in uneasy labor of detail or exaggeration. Next, color. It is built of Travertine, like the other two temples; but while they have remained, for the most part, a cold gray, this Temple of Neptune has a rich, warm, pinkish brown, that seems to glow and deepen under one's eyes. Lastly, position. It stands on the rich plain, covered with long grass and flowers, in sight of the sea on one hand, and the sublime blue mountains on the other. Many plants caress the ruins; the acanthus is there, and I saw it in green life for the first time; but the majority of the plants on the floor, or bossing the architrave, are familiar to me as home flowers—purple mallows, snapdragons, pink hawksweed, etc. On our way back we saw a herd of buffaloes clustered near a pond, and one of them was rolling himself in the water like a gentleman enjoying his bath.

The next day we went in the morning from Salerno to Amalfi. It is an unspeakably grand drive round the mighty rocks with the sea below; and Amalfi itself surpasses all imagination of a romantic site for a city that once made itself famous in the world. We stupidly neglected seeing the cathedral, but we saw a macaroni-mill and a paper-mill from among the many that are turned by the rushing stream, which, with its precipitous course down the ravine, creates an immense water-power; and we climbed up endless steps to the Capuchin Monastery, to see nothing but a cavern where there are barbarous images and a small cloister with double Gothic arches.

Our way back to La Cava gave us a repetition of the grand drive we had had in the morning by the coast, and beyond that an inland drive of much loveliness, through Claude-like scenes of mountain, trees, and meadows, with picturesque accidents of building, such as single round towers, on the heights. The valley beyond La Cava, in which our hotel lay, is of quite paradisaic beauty; a rich, cultivated spot, with mountains behind and before—those in front varied by ancient buildings that a painter would have chosen to place there; and one of pyramidal shape, steep as an obelisk, is crowned by a monastery, famous for its library of precious MSS. and its archives. We arrived too late for everything except to see the shroud of mist gather and gradually envelop the mountains.

In the morning we set off, again in brightest weather, to Sorrento, coasting the opposite side of the promontory to that which we had passed along the day before, and having on our right hand Naples and the distant Posilippo. The coast on this side is less grand than on the Amalfi side, but it is more friendly as a place for residence. The most charming spot on the way to Sorrento, to my thinking, is Vico, which I should even prefer to Sorrento, because there is no town to be traversed before entering the ravine and climbing the mountain in the background. But I will not undervalue Sorrento, with its orange-groves embalming the air, its glorious sunsets over the sea, setting the gray olives aglow on the hills above us, its walks among the groves and vineyards out to the solitary coast. One day of our stay there we took donkeys and crossed the mountains to the opposite side of the promontory, and saw the Siren Isles—very palpable, unmysterious bits of barren rock now. A great delight to me, in all the excursions round about Naples, was the high cultivation of the soil and the sight of the vines, trained from elm to elm, above some other precious crop carpeting the ground below. On our way back to Naples we visited the silent Pompeii again. That place had such a peculiar influence over me that I could not even look towards the point where it lay on the plain below Vesuvius without a certain thrill.

Amid much dust we arrived at Naples again on Sunday morning, to start by the steamboat for Leghorn on the following Tuesday. But before I quit Naples I must remember the Grotto of Posilippo, a wonderful monument of ancient labor; Virgil's tomb, which repaid us for a steep ascent only by the view of the city and bay; and a villa on the way to Posilippo, with gardens gradually descending to the margin of the sea, where there is a collection of animals, both stuffed and alive. It was there we saw the flying-fish, with their lovely blue fins.

One day and night voyage to Civita Vecchia, and another day and night to Leghorn—wearisome to the flesh that suffers from nausea even on the summer sea! We had another look at dear Pisa under the blue sky, and then on to Florence, which, unlike Rome, looks inviting as one catches sight from the railway of its cupolas and towers and its embosoming hills—the greenest of hills, sprinkled everywhere with white villas. We took up our quarters at the Pension Suisse, and on the first evening we took the most agreeable drive to be had round Florence—the drive to Fiesole. It is in this view that the eye takes in the greatest extent of green, billowy hills, besprinkled with white houses, looking almost like flocks of sheep; the great, silent, uninhabited mountains lie chiefly behind; the plain of the Arno stretches far to the right. I think the view from Fiesole the most beautiful of all; but that from San Miniato, where we went the next evening, has an interest of another kind, because here Florence lies much nearer below, and one can distinguish the various buildings more completely. It is the same with Bellosguardo, in a still more marked degree. What a relief to the eye and the thought, among the huddled roofs of a distant town, to see towers and cupolas rising in abundant variety, as they do at Florence! There is Brunelleschi's mighty dome, and close by it, with its lovely colors not entirely absorbed by distance, Giotto's incomparable Campanile, beautiful as a jewel. Farther on, to the right, is the majestic tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, with the flag waving above it; then the elegant Badia and the Bargello close by; nearer to us the grand Campanile of Santo Spirito and that of Santa Croce; far away, on the left, the cupola of San Lorenzo and the tower of Santa Maria Novella; and, scattered far and near, other cupolas and campaniles of more insignificant shape and history.

Even apart from its venerable historical glory, the exterior of the Duomo is pleasant to behold when the wretched, unfinished façade is quite hidden. The soaring pinnacles over the doors are exquisite; so are the forms of the windows in the great semicircle of the apsis; and on the side where Giotto's Campanile is placed, especially, the white marble has taken on so rich and deep a yellow that the black bands cease to be felt as a fault. The entire view on this side, closed in by Giotto's tower, with its delicate pinkish marble, its delicate Gothic windows with twisted columns, and its tall lightness carrying the eye upward, in contrast with the mighty breadth of the dome, is a thing not easily to be forgotten. The Baptistery, with its paradisaic gates, is close by; but, except in those gates, it has no exterior beauty. The interior is almost awful, with its great dome covered with gigantic early mosaics—the pale, large-eyed Christ surrounded by images of paradise and perdition. The interior of the cathedral is comparatively poor and bare; but it has one great beauty—its colored lanceolate windows. Behind the high-altar is a piece of sculpture—the last under Michael Angelo's hand, intended for his own tomb, and left unfinished. It represents Joseph of Arimathea holding the body of Jesus, with Mary, his mother, on one side, and an apparently angelic form on the other. Joseph is a striking and real figure, with a hood over the head.

For external architecture it is the palaces, the old palaces of the fifteenth century, that one must look at in the streets of Florence. One of the finest was just opposite our hotel, the Palazzo Strozzi, built by Cronaca; perfect in its massiveness, with its iron cressets and rings, as if it had been built only last year. This is the palace that the Pitti was built to outvie (so tradition falsely pretends), and to have an inner court that would contain it. A wonderful union is that Pitti Palace of cyclopean massiveness with stately regularity. Next to the Pitti, I think, comes the Palazzo Riccardi—the house of the Medici—for size and splendor. Then that unique Laurentian library, designed by Michael Angelo; the books ranged on desks in front of seats, so that the appearance of the library resembles that of a chapel with open pews of dark wood. The precious books are all chained to the desk; and here we saw old manuscripts of exquisite neatness, culminating in the Virgil of the fourth century, and the Pandects, said to have been recovered from oblivion at Amalfi, but falsely so said, according to those who are more learned than tradition. Here, too, is a little chapel covered with remarkable frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli.

Grander still, in another style, is the Palazzo Vecchio, with its unique cortile, where the pillars are embossed with arabesque and floral tracery, making a contrast in elaborate ornament with the large simplicity of the exterior building. Here there are precious little works in ivory by Benvenuto Cellini, and other small treasures of art and jewelry, preserved in cabinets in one of the great upper chambers, which are painted all over with frescoes, and have curious inlaid doors showing buildings or figures in wooden mosaic, such as is often seen in great beauty in the stalls of the churches. The great council-chamber is ugly in its ornaments—frescoes and statues in bad taste all round it.

Orcagna's Loggia de' Lanzi is disappointing at the first glance, from its sombre, dirty color; but its beauty grew upon me with longer contemplation. The pillars and groins are very graceful and chaste in ornamentation. Among the statues that are placed under it there is not one I could admire, unless it were the dead body of Ajax with the Greek soldier supporting it. Cellini's Perseus is fantastic. The Bargello, where we went to see Giotto's frescoes (in lamentable condition) was under repair, but I got glimpses of a wonderful inner court, with heraldic carvings and stone stairs and gallery.

Most of the churches in Florence are hideous on the outside—piles of ribbed brickwork awaiting a coat of stone or stucco—looking like skinned animals. The most remarkable exception is Santa Maria Novella, which has an elaborate facing of black and white marble. Both this church and San Lorenzo were under repair in the interior, unfortunately for us; but we could enter Santa Maria so far as to see Orcagna's frescoes of Paradise and Hell. The Hell has been repainted, but the Paradise has not been maltreated in this way; and it is a splendid example of Orcagna's powers—far superior to his frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa. Some of the female forms on the lowest range are of exquisite grace. The splendid chapel in San Lorenzo, containing the tombs of the Medici, is ugly and heavy, with all its precious marbles; and the world-famous statues of Michael Angelo on the tombs in another smaller chapel—the Notte, the Giorno, and the Crepuscolo—remained to us as affected and exaggerated in the original as in copies and casts.

The two churches we frequented most in Florence were Santa Croce and the Carmine. In this last are the great frescoes of Masaccio—chief among them the Raising of the Dead Youth. In the other are Giotto's frescoes revealed from under the whitewash by which they were long covered, like those in the Bargello. Of these the best are the Challenge to Pass through the Fire, in the series representing the history of St. Francis, and the rising of some saint (unknown to me) from his tomb, while Christ extends his arms to receive him above, and wondering venerators look on, on each side. There are large frescoes here of Taddeo Gaddi's also, but they are not good; one sees in him a pupil of Giotto, and nothing more. Besides the frescoes, Santa Croce has its tombs to attract a repeated visit; the tombs of Michael Angelo, Dante, Alfieri, and Machiavelli. Even those tombs of the unknown dead under our feet, with their effigies quite worn down to a mere outline, were not without their interest. I used to feel my heart swell a little at the sight of the inscription on Dante's tomb—"Onorate l'altissimo poeta."

In the Church of the Trinità also there are valuable frescoes by the excellent Domenico Ghirlandajo, the master of Michael Angelo. They represent the history of St. Francis, and happily the best of them is in the best light; it is the death of St. Francis, and is full of natural feeling, with well-marked gradations from deepest sorrow to indifferent spectatorship.

The frescoes I cared for most in all Florence were the few of Fra Angelico's that a donna was allowed to see, in the Convent of San Marco. In the chapter-house, now used as a guard-room, is a large Crucifixion, with the inimitable group of the fainting mother, upheld by St. John and the younger Mary, and clasped round by the kneeling Magdalene. The group of adoring, sorrowing saints on the right hand are admirable for earnest truthfulness of representation. The Christ in this fresco is not good, but there is a deeply impressive original crucified Christ outside in the cloisters; St. Dominic is clasping the cross and looking upward at the agonized Saviour, whose real, pale, calmly enduring face is quite unlike any other Christ I have seen.

I forgot to mention, at Santa Maria Novella, the chapel which is painted with very remarkable frescoes by Simone Memmi and Taddeo Gaddi. The best of these frescoes is the one in which the Dominicans are represented by black and white dogs—Domini Canes. The human groups have high merit for conception and lifelikeness; and they are admirable studies of costume. At this church, too, in the sacristy, is the Madonna della Stella,[12] with an altar-step by Fra Angelico—specimens of his minuter painting in oil. The inner part of the frame is surrounded with his lovely angels, with their seraphic joy and flower-garden coloring.

Last of all the churches we visited San Michele, which had been one of the most familiar to us on the outside, with its statues in niches, and its elaborate Gothic windows, designed by the genius of Orcagna. The great wonder of the interior is the shrine of white marble made to receive the miracle-working image which first caused the consecration of this mundane building, originally a corn-market. Surely this shrine is the most wonderful of all Orcagna's productions; for the beauty of the reliefs he deserves to be placed along with Nicolo Pisano, and for the exquisite Gothic design of the whole he is a compeer of Giotto.

For variety of treasures the Uffizi Gallery is pre-eminent among all public sights in Florence; but the variety is in some degree a cause of comparative unimpressiveness, pictures and statues being crowded together and destroying each other's effect. In statuary it has the great Niobe group; the Venus de Medici; the Wrestlers; the admirable statue of the Knife-Sharpener, supposed to represent the flayer of Marsyas; the Apollino; and the Boy taking a Thorn out of his Foot; with numerous less remarkable antiques. And besides these it has what the Vatican has not—a collection of early Italian sculpture, supreme among which is Giovanni di Bologna's Mercury.[13] Then there is a collection of precious drawings; and there is the cabinet of gems, quite alone in its fantastic, elaborate minuteness of workmanship in rarest materials; and there is another cabinet containing ivory sculptures, cameos, intaglios, and a superlatively fine Niello, as well as Raffaelle porcelain. The pictures here are multitudinous, and among them there is a generous proportion of utterly bad ones. In the entrance gallery, where the early paintings are, is a great Fra Angelico—a Madonna and Child—a triptych, the two side compartments containing very fine figures of saints, and the inner part of the central frame a series of unspeakably lovely angels.[14] Here I always paused with longing, trying to believe that a copyist there could make an imitation angel good enough to be worth buying. Among the other paintings that remain with me, after my visit to the Uffizi, are the portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, by himself; the portrait of Dante, by Filippino Lippi;[15] the Herodias of Luini; Titian's Venus, in the Tribune; Raphael's Madonna and Child with the Bird; and the portrait falsely called the Fornarina; the two remarkable pictures by Ridolfo Ghirlandajo; and the Salutation, by Albertinelli, which hangs opposite; the little prince in pink dress, with two recent teeth, in the next room, by Angelo Bronzino (No. 1155); the small picture of Christ in the Garden, by Lorenzo Credi; Titian's Woman with the Golden Hair, in the Venetian room; Leonardo's Medusa head; and Michael Angelo's ugly Holy Family—these, at least, rise up on a rapid retrospect. Others are in the background; for example, Correggio's Madonna adoring the Infant Christ, in the Tribune.

For pictures, however, the Pitti Palace surpasses the Uffizi. Here the paintings are more choice and not less numerous. The Madonna della Sedia leaves me, with all its beauty, impressed only by the grave gaze of the Infant; but besides this there is another Madonna of Raphael—perhaps the most beautiful of all his earlier ones—the Madonna del Gran Duca, which has the sweet grace and gentleness of its sisters without their sheeplike look. Andrea del Sarto is seen here in his highest glory of oil-painting. There are numerous large pictures of his—Assumptions and the like—of great technical merit; but better than all these I remember a Holy Family, with a very fine St. Ann, and the portraits of himself and his fatal, auburn-haired wife. Of Fra Bartolomeo there is a Pietà of memorable expression,[16] a Madonna enthroned with saints, and his great St. Mark. Of Titian, a Marriage of St. Catherine, of supreme beauty; a Magdalen, failing in expression; and an exquisite portrait of the same woman, who is represented as Venus at the Uffizi. There is a remarkable group of portraits by Rubens—himself, his brother, Lipsius, and Grotius—and a large landscape by him. The only picture of Veronese's that I remember here is a portrait of his wife when her beauty was gone. There is a remarkably fine sea-piece by Salvator Rosa; a striking portrait of Aretino, and a portrait of Vesalius, by Titian; one of Inghirami, by Raphael; a delicious, rosy baby—future cardinal—lying in a silken bed;[17] a placid, contemplative young woman, with her finger between the leaves of a book, by Leonardo da Vinci;[18] a memorable portrait of Philip II., by Titian; a splendid Judith, by Bronzino; a portrait of Rembrandt, by himself, etc., etc.

Andrea del Sarto is seen to advantage at the Pitti Palace; but his chef-d'œuvre is a fresco, unhappily much worn—the Madonna del Sacco—in the cloister of the Annunziata.

For early Florentine paintings the most interesting collection is that of the Accademia. Here we saw a Cimabue, which gave us the best idea of his superiority over the painters who went before him: it is a colossal Madonna enthroned. And on the same wall there is a colossal Madonna by Giotto, which is not only a demonstration that he surpassed his master, but that he had a clear vision of the noble in art. A delightful picture—very much restored, I fear—of the Adoration of the Magi made me acquainted with Gentile da Fabriano. The head of Joseph in this picture is masterly in the delicate rendering of the expression; the three kings are very beautiful in conception; and the attendant group, or rather crowd, shows a remarkable combination of realism with love of the beautiful and splendid.

There is a fine Domenico Ghirlandajo—the Adoration of the Shepherds; a fine Lippo Lippi; and an Assumption, by Perugino, which I like well for its cherubs and angels, and for some of the adoring figures below. In the smaller room there is a lovely Pietà by Fra Angelico; and there is a portrait of Fra Angelico himself by another artist.

One of our drives at Florence, which I have not mentioned, was that to Galileo's Tower, which stands conspicuous on one of the hills close about the town. We ascended it for the sake of looking out over the plain from the same spot as the great man looked from, more than two centuries ago. His portrait is in the Pitti Palace—a grave man with an abbreviated nose, not unlike Mr. Thomas Adolphus Trollope.

One fine day near the end of our stay we made an expedition to Siena—that fine old town built on an abrupt height overlooking a wide, wide plain. We drove about a couple of hours or more, and saw well the exterior of the place—the peculiar piazza or campo in the shape of a scallop-shell, with its large old Palazzo publico, the Porta Ovile and Porta Romana, the archbishop's palace, and the cemetery. Of the churches we saw only the cathedral, the Chapel of St. John the Baptist, and San Domenico. The cathedral has a highly elaborate Gothic façade, but the details of the upper part are unsatisfactory—a square window in the centre shocks the eye, and the gables are not slim and aspiring enough. The interior is full of interest: there is the unique pavement in a sort of marble Niello, presenting Raffaellesque designs by Boccafumi, carrying out the example of the older portions, which are very quaint in their drawing; there is a picture of high interest in the history of early art—a picture by Guido of Siena, who was rather earlier than Cimabue; fine carved stalls and screens in dark wood; and in an adjoining chapel a series of frescoes by Pinturicchio, to which Raphael is said to have contributed designs and workmanship, and wonderfully illuminated old choir-books. The Chapel of St. John the Baptist has a remarkable Gothic façade, and a baptismal font inside, with reliefs wrought by Ghiberti and another Florentine artist. To San Domenico we went for the sake of seeing the famous Madonna by Guido da Siena; I think we held it superior to any Cimabue we had seen. There is a considerable collection of the Siennese artists at the Accademia, but the school had no great genius equal to Giotto to lead it. The Three Graces—an antique to which Canova's modern triad bears a strong resemblance in attitude and style—are also at the Accademia.

An interesting visit we made at Florence was to Michael Angelo's house—Casa Buonarotti—in the Via Ghibellina. This street is striking and characteristic: the houses are all old, with broad eaves, and in some cases with an open upper story, so that the roof forms a sort of pavilion supported on pillars. This is a feature one sees in many parts of Florence. Michael Angelo's house is preserved with great care by his descendants—only one could wish their care had not been shown in giving it entirely new furniture. However, the rooms are the same as those he occupied, and there are many relics of his presence there—his stick, his sword, and many of his drawings. In one room there is a very fine Titian of small size—the principal figure a woman fainting.

The Last Supper—a fresco believed to be by Raphael—is in a room at the Egyptian Museum.[19] The figure of Peter—of which, apparently, there exists various sketches by Raphael's hand—is memorable.

Letter to John Blackwood, 18th May, 1860.

Things really look so threatening in the Neapolitan kingdom that we begin to think ourselves fortunate in having got our visit done. Tuscany is in the highest political spirits for the moment, and of course Victor Emanuel stares at us at every turn here, with the most loyal exaggeration of mustache and intelligent meaning. But we are selfishly careless about dynasties just now, caring more for the doings of Giotto and Brunelleschi than for those of Count Cavour. On a first journey to the greatest centres of art one must be excused for letting one's public spirit go to sleep a little. As for me, I am thrown into a state of humiliating passivity by the sight of the great things done in the far past—it seems as if life were not long enough to learn, and as if my own activity were so completely dwarfed by comparison that I should never have courage for more creation of my own. There is only one thing that has an opposite and stimulating effect: it is the comparative rarity, even here, of great and truthful art, and the abundance of wretched imitation and falsity. Every hand is wanted in the world that can do a little genuine, sincere work.

We are at the quietest hotel in Florence, having sought it out for the sake of getting clear of the stream of English and Americans, in which one finds one's self in all the main tracks of travel, so that one seems at last to be in a perpetual, noisy picnic, obliged to be civil, though with a strong inclination to be sullen. My philanthropy rises several degrees as soon as we are alone.

Letter to Major Blackwood, 27th May, 1860.

I am much obliged to you for writing at once, and so scattering some clouds which had gathered over my mind in consequence of an indication or two in Mr. John Blackwood's previous letter. The Times article arrived on Sunday. It is written in a generous spirit, and with so high a degree of intelligence that I am rather alarmed lest the misapprehensions it exhibits should be due to my defective presentation, rather than to any failure on the part of the critic. I have certainly fulfilled my intention very badly if I have made the Dodson honesty appear "mean and uninteresting," or made the payment of one's debts appear a contemptible virtue in comparison with any sort of "Bohemian" qualities. So far as my own feeling and intention are concerned, no one class of persons or form of character is held up to reprobation or to exclusive admiration. Tom is painted with as much love and pity as Maggie; and I am so far from hating the Dodsons myself that I am rather aghast to find them ticketed with such very ugly adjectives. We intend to leave this place on Friday (3d), and in four days after that we shall be at Venice, in a few days from that time at Milan, and then, by a route at present uncertain, at Berne, where we take up Mr. Lewes's eldest boy, to bring him home with us.

We are particularly happy in our weather, which is unvaryingly fine without excessive heat. There has been a crescendo of enjoyment in our travels; for Florence, from its relation to the history of modern art, has roused a keener interest in us even than Rome, and has stimulated me to entertain rather an ambitious project, which I mean to be a secret from every one but you and Mr. John Blackwood.

Any news of "Clerical Scenes" in its third edition? Or has its appearance been deferred? The smallest details are acceptable to ignorant travellers. We are wondering what was the last good article in Blackwood, and whether Thackeray has gathered up his slack reins in the Cornhill. Literature travels slowly even to this Italian Athens. Hawthorne's book is not to be found here yet in the Tauchnitz edition.

Italy, 1860.

We left Florence on the evening of the 1st of June, by diligence, travelling all night and until eleven the next morning to get to Bologna. I wish we could have made that journey across the Apennines by daylight, though in that case I should have missed certain grand, startling effects that came to me in my occasional wakings. Wonderful heights and depths I saw on each side of us by the fading light of the evening. Then, in the middle of the night, while the lightning was flashing and the sky was heavy with threatening storm-clouds, I waked to find the six horses resolutely refusing or unable to move the diligence—till, at last, two meek oxen were tied to the axle, and their added strength dragged us up the hill. But one of the strangest effects I ever saw was just before dawn, when we seemed to be high up on mighty mountains, which fell precipitously, and showed us the awful, pale horizon far, far below.

The first thing we did at Bologna was to go to the Accademia, where I confirmed myself in my utter dislike of the Bolognese school—the Caraccis and Domenichino et id genus omne—and felt some disappointment in Raphael's St. Cecilia. The pictures of Francia here, to which I had looked forward as likely to give me a fuller and higher idea of him, were less pleasing to me than the smaller specimens of him that I had seen in the Dresden and other galleries. He seems to me to be more limited even than Perugino; but he is a faithful, painstaking painter, with a religious spirit. Agostino Caracci's Communion of St. Jerome is a remarkable picture, with real feeling in it—an exception among all the great pieces of canvas that hang beside it. Domenichino's figure of St. Jerome is a direct plagiarism from that of Agostino; but in other points the two pictures are quite diverse.

The following morning we took a carriage and were diligent in visiting the churches. San Petronio has the melancholy distinction of an exquisite Gothic façade, which is carried up only a little way above the arches of the doorways; the sculptures on these arches are of wonderful beauty. The interior is of lofty, airy, simple Gothic, and it contains some curious old paintings in the various side-chapels—pre-eminent among which are the great frescoes by the so-called Buffalmacco. The Paradise is distinguished in my memory by the fact that the blessed are ranged in seats like the benches of a church or chapel. At Santa Cecilia—now used as a barrack or guard-room—there are two frescoes by Francia, the Marriage and Burial of St. Cecilia, characteristic, but miserably injured. At the great Church of San Domenico the object of chief interest is the tomb of the said saint, by the ever-to-be-honored Nicolo Pisano. I believe this tomb was his first great work, and very remarkable it is; but there is nothing on it equal to the Nativity on the pulpit at Pisa. On this tomb stands a lovely angel, by Michael Angelo. It is small in size, holding a small candle-stick, and is a work of his youth; it shows clearly enough how the feeling for grace and beauty were strong in him, only not strong enough to wrestle with his love of the grandiose and powerful.

The ugly, painful leaning towers of Bologna made me desire not to look at them a second time; but there are fine bits of massive palatial building here and there in the colonnaded streets. We trod the court of the once famous university, where the arms of the various scholars ornament the walls above and below an interior gallery. This building is now, as far as I could understand, a communal school, and the university is transported to another part of the town.

We left Bologna in the afternoon, rested at Ferrara for the night, and passed the Euganean Mountains on our left hand as we approached Padua in the middle of the next day.

After dinner and rest from our dusty journeying we took a carriage and went out to see the town, desiring most of all to see Giotto's Chapel. We paused first, however, at the great Church of San Antonio, which is remarkable both externally and internally. There are two side chapels opposite each other, which are quite unique for contrasted effect. On the one hand is a chapel of oblong form, covered entirely with white marble relievi, golden lamps hanging from the roof; while opposite is a chapel of the same form, covered with frescoes by Avanzi, the artist who seems to have been the link of genius between Giotto and Masaccio. Close by, in a separate building, is the Capella di San Giorgio, also covered with Avanzi's frescoes; and here one may study him more completely, because the light is better than in the church. He has quite a Veronese power of combining his human groups with splendid architecture.

The Arena Chapel stands apart, and is approached, at present, through a pretty garden. Here one is uninterruptedly with Giotto. The whole chapel was designed and painted by himself alone; and it is said that, while he was at work on it, Dante lodged with him at Padua. The nave of the chapel is in tolerably good preservation, but the apsis has suffered severely from damp. It is in this apsis that the lovely Madonna, with the Infant at her breast, is painted in a niche, now quite hidden by some altar-piece or woodwork, which one has to push by in order to see the tenderest bit of Giotto's painting. This chapel must have been a blessed vision when it was fresh from Giotto's hand—the blue, vaulted roof; the exquisite bands of which he was so fond, representing inlaid marble, uniting roof and walls, and forming the divisions between the various frescoes which cover the upper part of the wall. The glory of Paradise at one end, and the histories of Mary and Jesus on the two sides; and the subdued effect of the series of monochromes representing the Virtues and Vices below.

There is a piazza with a plantation and circular public walk, with wildly affected statues of small and great notorieties, which remains with one as a peculiarity of Padua; in general the town is merely old and shabbily Italian, without anything very specific in its aspect.

From Padua to Venice!

It was about ten o'clock on a moonlight night—the 4th of June—that we found ourselves apparently on a railway in the midst of the sea; we were on the bridge across the Lagoon. Soon we were in a gondola on the Grand Canal, looking out at the moonlit buildings and water. What stillness! What beauty! Looking out from the high window of our hotel on the Grand Canal I felt that it was a pity to go to bed. Venice was more beautiful than romances had feigned.

And that was the impression that remained, and even deepened, during our stay of eight days. That quiet which seems the deeper because one hears the delicious dip of the oar (when not disturbed by clamorous church bells) leaves the eye in full liberty and strength to take in the exhaustless loveliness of color and form.

We were in our gondola by nine o'clock the next morning, and, of course, the first point we sought was the Piazza di San Marco. I am glad to find Ruskin calling the Palace of the Doges one of the two most perfect buildings in the world; its only defects, to my feeling, are the feebleness or triviality of the frieze or cornice, and the want of length in the Gothic windows with which the upper wall is pierced. This spot is a focus of architectural wonders; but the palace is the crown of them all. The double tier of columns and arches, with the rich sombreness of their finely outlined shadows, contrast satisfactorily with the warmth and light and more continuous surface of the upper part. Even landing on the Piazzetta, one has a sense, not only of being in an entirely novel scene, but one where the ideas of a foreign race have poured themselves in without yet mingling indistinguishably with the pre-existent Italian life. But this is felt yet more strongly when one has passed along the Piazzetta and arrived in front of San Marco, with its low arches and domes and minarets. But perhaps the most striking point to take one's stand on is just in front of the white marble guard-house flanking the great tower—the guard-house with Sansovino's iron gates before it. On the left is San Marco, with the two square pillars from St. Jean d'Acre standing as isolated trophies; on the right the Piazzetta extends between the Doge's Palace and the Palazzo Reale to the tall columns from Constantinople; and in front is the elaborate gateway leading to the white marble Scala di Giganti, in the courtyard of the Doge's Palace. Passing through this gateway and up this staircase, we entered the gallery which surrounds the court on three sides, and looked down at the fine sculptured vase-like wells below. Then into the great Sala, surrounded with the portraits of the doges; the largest oil-painting here—or perhaps anywhere else—is the Gloria del Paradiso, by Tintoretto, now dark and unlovely. But on the ceiling is a great Paul Veronese—the Apotheosis of Venice—which looks as fresh as if it were painted yesterday, and is a miracle of color and composition—a picture full of glory and joy of an earthly, fleshly kind, but without any touch of coarseness or vulgarity. Below the radiant Venice on her clouds is a balcony filled with upward-looking spectators; and below this gallery is a group of human figures with horses. Next to this Apotheosis, I admire another Coronation of Venice on the ceiling of another Sala, where Venice is sitting enthroned above the globe with her lovely face in half shadow—a creature born with an imperial attitude. There are other Tintorettos, Veroneses, and Palmas in the great halls of this palace; but they left me quite indifferent, and have become vague in my memory. From the splendors of the palace we crossed the Bridge of Sighs to the prisons, and saw the horrible, dark, damp cells that would make the saddest life in the free light and air seem bright and desirable.

The interior of St. Mark's is full of interest, but not of beauty; it is dark and heavy, and ill-suited to the Catholic worship, from the massive piers that obstruct the view everywhere, shut out the sight of ceremony and procession, as we witnessed at our leisure on the day of the great procession of Corpus Christi. But everywhere there are relics of gone-by art to be studied, from mosaics of the Greeks to mosaics of later artists than the Zuccati; old marble statues, embrowned like a meerschaum pipe; amazing sculptures in wood; Sansovino doors, ambitious to rival Ghiberti's; transparent alabaster columns; an ancient Madonna, hung with jewels, transported from St. Sophia, in Constantinople; and everywhere the venerable pavement, once beautiful with its starry patterns in rich marble, now deadened and sunk to unevenness, like the mud floor of a cabin.

Then outside, on the archway of the principal door, there are sculptures of a variety that makes one renounce the study of them in despair at the shortness of one's time—blended fruits and foliage, and human groups and animal forms of all kinds. On our first morning we ascended the great tower, and looked around on the island city and the distant mountains and the distant Adriatic. And on the same day we went to see the Pisani palace—one of the grand old palaces that are going to decay. An Italian artist who resides in one part of this palace interested us by his frank manner, and the glimpse we had of his domesticity with his pretty wife and children. After this we saw the Church of San Sebastiano, where Paul Veronese is buried, with his own paintings around, mingling their color with the light that falls on his tombstone. There is one remarkably fine painting of his here: it represents, I think, some saints going to martyrdom, but, apart from that explanation, is a composition full of vigorous, spirited figures, in which the central ones are two young men leaving some splendid dwelling, on the steps of which stands the mother, pleading and remonstrating—a marvellous figure of an old woman with a bare neck.

But supreme among the pictures at Venice is the Death of Peter the Martyr,[20] now happily removed from its original position as an altar-piece, and placed in a good light in the sacristy of San Giovanni and Paolo (or San Zani Polo, as the Venetians conveniently abbreviate it). In this picture, as in that of the Tribute-money at Dresden, Titian seems to have surpassed himself, and to have reached as high a point in expression as in color. In the same sacristy there was a Crucifixion, by Tintoretto, and a remarkable Madonna with Saints, by Giovanni Bellini; but we were unable to look long away from the Titian to these, although we paid it five visits during our stay. It is near this church that the famous equestrian statue stands, by Verocchio.

Santa Maria della Salute, built as an ex voto by the Republic on the cessation of the plague, is one of the most conspicuous churches in Venice, lifting its white cupolas close on the Grand Canal, where it widens out towards the Giudecca.

Here there are various Tintorettos, but the only one which is not blackened so as to be unintelligible is the Cena, which is represented as a bustling supper party, with attendants and sideboard accessories, in thoroughly Dutch fashion! The great scene of Tintoretto's greatness is held to be the Scuola di San Rocco, of which he had the painting entirely to himself, with his pupils; and here one must admire the vigor and freshness of his conceptions, though I saw nothing that delighted me in expression, and much that was preposterous and ugly. The Crucifixion here is certainly a grand work, to which he seems to have given his best powers; and among the smaller designs, in the two larger halls, there were several of thorough originality—for example, the Annunciation, where Mary is seated in a poor house, with a carpenter's shop adjoining; the Nativity, in the upper story of a stable, of which a section is made so as to show the beasts below; and the Flight into Egypt, with a very charming (European) landscape. In this same building of San Rocco there are some exquisite iron gates, a present from Florence, and some singularly painstaking wood-carving, representing, in one compartment of wainscot, above the seats that surrounded the upper hall, a bookcase filled with old books, an inkstand and pen set in front of one shelf à s'y méprendre.

But of all Tintoretto's paintings the best preserved, and perhaps the most complete in execution, is the Miracle of St. Mark, at the Accademia. We saw it the oftener because we were attracted to the Accademia again and again by Titian's Assumption, which we placed next to Peter the Martyr among the pictures at Venice.

For a thoroughly rapt expression I never saw anything equal to the Virgin in this picture; and the expression is the more remarkable because it is not assisted by the usual devices to express spiritual ecstasy, such as delicacy of feature and temperament, or pale meagreness. Then what cherubs and angelic heads bathed in light! The lower part of the picture has no interest; the attitudes are theatrical; and the Almighty above is as unbeseeming as painted Almighties usually are; but the middle group falls short only of the Sistine Madonna.

Among the Venetian painters Giovanni Bellini shines with a mild, serious light that gives one an affectionate respect towards him. In the Church of the Scalzi there is an exquisite Madonna by him—probably his chef-d'œuvre—comparable to Raphael's for sweetness.

And Palmo Vecchio, too, must be held in grateful reverence for his Santa Barbara, standing in calm, grand beauty above an altar in the Church of Santa Maria Formosa. It is an almost unique presentation of a hero-woman, standing in calm preparation for martyrdom, without the slightest air of pietism, yet with the expression of a mind filled with serious conviction.

We made the journey to Chioggia, but with small pleasure, on account of my illness, which continued all day. Otherwise that long floating over the water, with the forts and mountains looking as if they were suspended in the air, would have been very enjoyable. Of all dreamy delights that of floating in a gondola along the canals and out on the Lagoon is surely the greatest. We were out one night on the Lagoon when the sun was setting, and the wide waters were flushed with the reddened light. I should have liked it to last for hours; it is the sort of scene in which I could most readily forget my own existence and feel melted into the general life.

Another charm of evening-time was to walk up and down the Piazza of San Marco as the stars were brightening and look at the grand, dim buildings, and the flocks of pigeons flitting about them; or to walk on to the Bridge of La Paglia and look along the dark canal that runs under the Bridge of Sighs—its blackness lit up by a gaslight here and there, and the plash of the oar of blackest gondola slowly advancing.

One of our latest visits was to the Palazzo Mamfrini, where there are still the remains of a magnificent collection of pictures—remains still on sale.

The young proprietor was walking about transacting business in the rooms as we passed through them—a handsome, refined-looking man. The chief treasure left—the Entombment, by Titian—is perhaps a superior duplicate of the one in the Louvre. After this we went to a private house (once the house of Bianca Capello) to see a picture which the joint proprietors are anxious to prove to be a Leonardo da Vinci. It is a remarkable—an unforgetable—picture. The subject is the Supper at Emmaus; and the Christ, with open, almost tearful eyes, with loving sadness spread over the regular beauty of his features, is a masterpiece. This head is not like the Leonardo sketch at Milan; and the rest of the picture impressed me strongly with the idea that it is of German, not Italian, origin. Again, the head is not like that of Leonardo's Christ in the National Gallery—it is far finer, to my thinking.

Farewell, lovely Venice! and away to Verona, across the green plains of Lombardy, which can hardly look tempting to an eye still filled with the dreamy beauty it has left behind. Yet I liked our short stay at Verona extremely. The Amphitheatre had the disadvantage of coming after the Coliseum and the Pozzuoli Amphitheatre, and would bear comparison with neither; but the Church of San Zenone was equal in interest to almost any of the churches we had seen in Italy. It is a beautiful specimen of Lombard architecture, undisguised by any modern barbarisms in the interior; and on the walls—now that they have been freed from their coat of whitewash—there are early frescoes of high historical value, some of them—apparently of the Giotto school—showing a remarkable striving after human expression. More than this, there is in one case an under layer of yet older frescoes, partly laid bare, and showing the lower part of figures in mummy-like degradation of drawing; while above these are the upper portion of the later figures in striking juxtaposition with the dead art from which they had sprung with the vitality of a hidden germ. There is a very fine crypt to the church, where the fragments of some ancient sculptures are built in wrong way upwards.

This was the only church we entered at Verona; for we contented ourselves with a general view of the town, driving about to get coups d'œil of the fine old walls, the river, the bridges, and surrounding hills, and mounting up to a high terrace for the sake of a bird's-eye view; this, with a passing sight of the famous tombs of the Scaligers, was all gathered in our four or five hours at Verona.

Heavy rain came on our way to Milan, putting an end to the brilliant weather we had enjoyed ever since our arrival at Naples. The line of road lies through a luxuriant country, and I remember the picturesque appearance of Bergamo—half of it on the level, half of it lifted up on the green hill.

In this second visit of mine to Milan my greatest pleasures were the Brera Gallery and the Ambrosian Library, neither of which I had seen before. The cathedral no longer satisfied my eye in its exterior; and though the interior has very grand effects, there are still disturbing elements.

At the Ambrosian Library we saw MSS. surpassing in interest any even of those we had seen in the Laurentian Library at Florence—illuminated books, sacred and secular, a little Koran, rolled up something after the fashion of a measuring-tape, private letters of Tasso, Galileo, Lucrezia Borgia, etc., and a book full of Leonardo da Vinci's engineering designs. Then, up-stairs, in the picture-gallery, we saw a delicious Holy Family by Luini, of marvellous perfection in its execution, the Cartoon for Raphael's School of Athens, and a precious collection of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo. Among Leonardo's are amazingly grotesque faces, full of humor; among Michael Angelo's is the sketch of the unfortunate Biagio, who figures with ass's ears, in the lower corner of the Last Judgment.

At the Brera, among a host of pictures to which I was indifferent, there were several things that delighted me. Some of Luini's frescoes—especially the burial or transportation of the body of St. Catherine by angels—some single figures of young cherubs, and Joseph and Mary going to their Marriage; the drawing in pastel by Leonardo of the Christ's head, supposed to be a study for the Cena; the Luini Madonna among trellises—an exquisite oil-painting; Gentile Bellini's picture of St. Mark preaching at Alexandria; and the Sposalizio by Raphael.

At the Church of San Maurizio Maggiore we saw Luini's power tested by an abundant opportunity. The walls are almost covered with frescoes by him; but the only remarkable felicity he has is his female figures, which are eminently graceful. He has not power enough for a composition of any high character.

We visited, too, the interesting old Church of San Ambrogio, with its court surrounded by cloisters, its old sculptured pulpit, chair of St. Ambrose, and illuminated choir-books; and we drove to look at the line of old Roman columns, which are almost the solitary remnant of antiquity left in this ancient city—ancient, at least, in its name and site.

We left Milan for Como on a fine Sunday morning, and arrived at beautiful Bellagio by steamer in the evening. Here we spent a delicious day—going to the Villa Somma Riva in the morning, and in the evening to the Serbellone Gardens, from the heights of which we saw the mountain-peaks reddened with the last rays of the sun. The next day we reached lovely Chiavenna, at the foot of the Splügen Pass, and spent the evening in company with a glorious mountain torrent, mountain peaks, huge bowlders, with rippling miniature torrents and lovely young flowers among them, and grassy heights with rich Spanish chestnuts shadowing them. Then, the next morning, we set off by post and climbed the almost perpendicular heights of the Pass—chiefly in heavy rain that would hardly let us discern the patches of snow when we reached the table-land of the summit. About five o'clock we reached grassy Splügen and felt that we had left Italy behind us. Already our driver had been German for the last long post, and now we had come to a hotel where host and waiters were German. Swiss houses of dark wood, outside staircases and broad eaves, stood on the steep, green, and flowery slope that led up to the waterfall; and the hotel and other buildings of masonry were thoroughly German in their aspect. In the evening we enjoyed a walk between the mountains, whose lower sides down to the torrent bed were set with tall, dark pines. But the climax of grand—nay, terrible—scenery came the next day as we traversed the Via Mala.

After this came open green valleys, dotted with white churches and homesteads. We were in Switzerland, and the mighty wall of the Valtelline Alps shut us out from Italy on the 21st of June.

Letter to John Blackwood, 23d June, 1860, from Berne.

Your letter to Florence reached me duly, and I feel as if I had been rather unconscionable in asking for another before our return; but to us, who have been seeing new things every day, a month seems so long a space of time that we can't help fancying there must be a great accumulation of news for us at the end of it.

We had hoped to be at home by the 25th; but we were so enchanted with Venice that we were seduced into staying there a whole week instead of three or four days, and now we must not rob the boys of their two days' holiday with us.

We have had a wonderful journey. From Florence we went to Bologna, Ferrara, and Padua, on our way to Venice; and from Venice we have come by Verona, Milan, and Como, and across the Splügen to Zurich, where we spent yesterday, chiefly in the company of Moleschott the physiologist—an interview that has helped to sharpen Mr. Lewes's appetite for a return to his microscope and dissecting-table. We ought to be forever ashamed of ourselves if we don't work the better for this great holiday. We both feel immensely enriched with new ideas and new veins of interest.

I don't think I can venture to tell you what my great project is by letter, for I am anxious to keep it secret. It will require a great deal of study and labor, and I am athirst to begin.

As for "The Mill," I am in repose about it now I know it has found its way to the great public. Its comparative rank can only be decided after some years have passed, when the judgment upon it is no longer influenced by the recent enthusiasm about "Adam," and by the fact that it has the misfortune to be written by me instead of by Mr. Liggins. I shall like to see Bulwer's criticism, if you will be kind enough to send it me; but I particularly wish not to see any of the newspaper articles.

SUMMARY.

MARCH TO JUNE, 1860.—FIRST JOURNEY TO ITALY.

Crossing Mont Cenis by night in diligence—Turin—Sees Count Cavour—Genoa—Leghorn—Pisa—Civita Vecchia—Disappointment with first sight of Rome—Better spirits after visit to Capitol—View from Capitol—Points most struck with in Rome—Sculpture at Capitol—Sculpture at Vatican first seen by torchlight—St. Peter's—Other churches—Sistine Chapel—Paintings—Illumination of St. Peter's—Disappointment with Michael Angelo's Moses—Visits to artists' studios—Riedel and Overbeck—Pamfili Doria Gardens—Frascati—Tivoli—Pictures at Capitol—Lateran Museum—Shelley's and Keats's graves—Letter to Mrs. Congreve—Pope's blessing—Easter ceremonies—From Rome to Naples—Description—Museo Borbonico—Visit to Pompeii—Solemnity of street of tombs—Letter to Mrs. Congreve—From Naples to Salerno and Pæstum—Temple of Vesta—Temple of Neptune fulfils expectations—Amalfi—Drive to Sorrento—Back to Naples—By steamer to Leghorn—To Florence—Views from Fiesole and Bellosguardo—The Duomo—Baptistery—Palaces—Churches—Dante's tomb—Frescoes—Pictures at the Uffizi—Pictures at the Pitti—Pictures at the Accademia—Expedition to Siena—Back to Florence—Michael Angelo's house—Letter to Blackwood—Dwarfing effect of the past—Letter to Major Blackwood on Times' criticism of "The Mill on the Floss," and first mention of an Italian novel—Leave Florence for Bologna—Churches and pictures—To Padua by Ferrara—The Arena Chapel—Venice by moonlight—Doge's Palace—St. Mark's—Pictures—Scuola di San Rocco—Accademia—Gondola to Chioggia—From Venice to Verona—Milan—Brera Gallery and Ambrosian Library—Disappointment with cathedral—Bellagio—Over Splügen to Switzerland—Letter to Blackwood—Saw Moleschott at Zurich—Home by Berne and Geneva.

---