"March 30.—The dear Mother makes daily progress. She has the sofa in her bedroom, and lies there a great deal in the sunny window.
"I went to Mrs. Lockwood's theatricals, to which, as she said, 'all the people above the rank of a duchess were asked down to the letter M.' The play, L'Aïeule, was wonderfully well done by Princess Radziwill, Princess Pallavicini, Princess Scilla, Duca del Gallo, and others, a most beautiful electric light being let in when the grandmother steals in to give the poison to the sleeping girl."
"May 8.—We leave Rome to-morrow—leave it in a flush of summer glory, in a wealth unspeakable of foliage and flowers, orange blossoms scenting our staircase, the sky deep blue.
"All the last fortnight poor Emma Simpkinson[372] has been terribly ill—a great anxiety to us as to what was best to be done for her, but we hope now that she may be moved to England, and I must go with my restored Mother, who is expanding like a flower in the sunshine.
"This afternoon, at the crowded time, the young Countess Crivelli, the new Austrian Ambassadress, drove down the Corso. At the Porta del Popolo she met her husband's horse without a rider. Much alarmed, she drove on, and a little farther on she found her husband's dead body lying in the road. She picked it up, and drove back down the Corso with the dead man by her side."
Amongst the many English who spent this spring in Rome, I do not find any note, in my diaries, of Lord Houghton, yet his dinners for six in the Via S. Basilio were delightful. His children were real children then, and his son, Robin,[373] a boy of wonderful promise. Lord Houghton was never satisfied with talking well and delightfully himself; his great charm was his evident desire to draw out all the good there was in other people.
JOURNAL.
"Venice, May 10, 1868.—We had a terribly hot journey by Spoleto and Ancona, and came on to Este. It is a long drive up from the station to the primitive little town close under the Euganean Hills, with the ruined castle where the first Guelph was born. The inn (La Speranza) is an old palace, and our sittingroom was thirty-four feet long. The country is luxuriance itself, covered with corn and flax, separated by rows of peach and fig trees, with vines leaping from tree to tree. I drove to Arqua, a most picturesque village in a hollow of the hills. In the little court of the church is Petrarch's tomb, of red Verona marble, and on the high ridge his house, almost unaltered, with old frescoes of his life, his chair, his chest, and his stuffed cat, shrunk almost to a weasel."
"Augsburg, May 24.—From Venice we saw Torcello—the Mother, Lea, and I in a barca gliding over those shallow mysterious waters to the distant island and its decaying church, where we sat to draw near Attila's marble chair half buried in the rank growth of the mallows.
