“Feb. 28, 1879.—You ask if I was alarmed over my lectures with the Prince, and found them difficult. No, not very. From the first I thought of what Johnson told Sir J. Reynolds, and I tried to do the same. He told him that he had ‘early laid it down as a fixed rule to do his best on every occasion, and in every company: to impart whatever he knew in the most forcible language he could put it in, and that by constant practice and by never suffering any careless expressions to escape him, or attempting to deliver his thoughts without arranging them in the clearest manner, it had become habitual to him.’ So you see that I have been fortifying myself by wise advice! And I am sure that it is the way in which things are said that fixes them in the mind.”
Journal.
“Fabj. Altini, the sculptor, says Thorwaldsen declared clay to be the life of art, plaster its death, and marble its resurrection.
“Mrs. F. Walker told me how she went out one evening at Freshwater to meet her brother-in-law and niece as they were returning from an excursion along the cliffs. On her way she saw a lady in deep mourning, with a little boy, emerge apparently from a side path to the one on which she was, and walk on before her. She noticed the lady’s peculiarly light step. Mother and son stopped at a little railed-in enclosure at the top of the hill, and gazed over the railings; then they went on again in front of her. At length, beyond them, Mrs. Walker saw Mr. Palmes and his daughter coming to meet her. Between her and them she saw the lady and boy suddenly disappear—apparently go down some side path leading to the sands; but, when she came to the place, there was no path, the cliff was perfectly precipitous. Miss Palmes equally saw the lady and boy coming towards her, and was greatly agitated by their sudden disappearance.
“Afterwards they found that the same sight was constantly seen there. It was the little boy’s grave into which the two had gazed. He had fallen over the cliff just there and been killed, and was buried by his mother’s wish inside that little circular railing.”
The Prince was in Rome for one night on his way from Naples to Munich, I went to him in the early morning, and was with him till 2 P.M., when he left, spending the time in driving about with him, chiefly to the antiquity shops, in which he always had the greatest delight. The very day after he left I fell in with other royalties, of whom at first I seemed likely to see a great deal. I was at the Princess Giustiniani Bandini’s, when the Hereditary Grand Duke and Duchess of Saxe-Weimar were announced—a very simple homely pair. The lady-in-waiting, hearing my name, most cleverly recollected all about me, and I was presented, and very cordially and kindly received. A few days after, Princess Teano asked me to meet them at dinner. Only the Keudells of the German Embassy and the Minghettis dined besides the family, but an immense party came in the evening. The Hereditary Grand Duke is a weak-looking little man with a very receding forehead. The Grand Duchess (who was his cousin) is a fine big woman—“bel pezzo di carne”—with intense enjoyment and good-humour in everything. “How can anybody be ill, how is it possible that anybody can be unhappy in Rome!” Both talked English perfectly. They arranged then that I should show them the Palatine. But a few days afterwards I heard from the Duchess Sermoneta that the Grand Duchess had said to her that, owing to the furious jealousy of the German archaeologists, she was unable to go with me.
Journal.
“March 17, 1879.—At Mrs. Terry’s I have met again her sister, Mrs. Julia Ward-Howe, the American poetess. When she wanted me to talk to her and I did not, she said, ‘In your case, Mr. Hare, I must pervert a text of Scripture—“to do good and to communicate forget not.”’
“I have seen much, almost daily, of Lord Hylton’s young son, George Jolliffe, for whom I have an affection ever increased by his confidence in me, which makes me feel more of responsibility as an instrument of possible good in his case than I have ever done in any other. He is a delightful companion in Rome, so full of interest and enthusiasm in all we see.... We went together yesterday to the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, where the old blackened portico was hung with bright tapestry, and the whole staircase and rooms strewn with box, because it was the day on which S. Filippo Neri raised the Massimo child from the dead. Most surprising were the masses of people—cobblers and contadini elbowing cardinals up the long staircase, washerwomen on their knees crowding princesses round the altar. Prince Massimo, in full evening dress, received in the anteroom of the chapel, and the Princess (daughter of the Duchesse de Berri) invited every one she knew to have ices and coffee.
“I went afterwards to Miss Howitt, who talked cheerfully about her father. ‘Rome might possibly not be the place to live in, but it certainly was the place to die and be buried in.’ She spoke of the extraordinary shots made at her father’s life by the English newspapers—how one of them described her mother’s daily walk on the Pincio by the side of a Bath-chair which ‘contained an ancient man,’ &c., the fact being that her mother never walked, that her father always walked, and moreover that there was no Bath-chair in Rome.