James came to my room later on, and told me such dreadful stories—he had heard them from Morris—of Lord G. that I really felt my brain turning as I listened to him; that the separation from his wife was all a pretence,—part of a plot arranged between them; that she, under the semblance of desertion, attracted to her the compassion—in some cases the affection—of young men of fortune, from whom her husband exacted the most enormous sums; that James himself had been marked out for a victim in this way; in fact, Kitty, I cannot go on: a web of such infamy was exposed as I firmly believed, till then, impossible to exist, and a degree of baseness laid bare that, for the sake of human nature, I trust has not its parallel.
I can write no more. Tears of shame as well as sorrow are blotting my paper, and in my self-abasement I feel how changed I must have become, when, in reflecting over such disgrace as this, I have a single thought but of contempt for one so lost and dishonored.
Yours in the depth of affliction,
Mary Anne Dodd.
LETTER XXX. KENNY JAMES DODD TO THOMAS PURCELL, ESQ., OF THE GRANGE, BRUFF
Florence.
My dear Tom,—I have had a busy week of it, and even now I scarcely perceive that the day is come when I can rest and repose myself. The pleasure-life of this same capital is a very exhausting process, and to do the thing well, a man's constitution ought to be in as healthy a condition as his cash account! Now, Tom, it is an unhappy fact, that I am a very "low letter" in both person and pocket, and I should be sorely puzzled to say whether I find it harder to dance or to pay for the music!
Don't fancy that I 'm grumbling, now; not a bit of it, old fellow; I have had my day, and as pleasant a one as most men. And if a man starts in life with a strong fund of genial liking for his fellows, enjoying society less for its display than for its own resources in developing the bright side of human nature, take my word for it, he 'll carry on with him, as he goes, memories and recollections enough to make his road agreeable, and, what is far better, to render himself companionable to others.
You tell me you want to hear "all about Florence,"—a modest request, truly! Why, man, I might fill a volume with my own short experiences, and afterwards find that the whole could be condensed into a foot-note for the bottom of a page. In the first place, there are at least half a dozen distinct aspects in this place, which are almost as many cities. There is the Florence of Art,—of pictures, statues, churches, frescos, a town of unbounded treasures in objects of high interest. There are galleries, where a whole life might be passed in cultivating the eye, refining the taste, and elevating the imagination. There is the Florence of Historical Association, with its palaces recalling the feudal age, and its castellated strongholds, telling of the stormy times before the "Medici." There is not a street, there is scarcely a house, whose name does not awaken some stirring event, and bring you back to the period when men were as great in crime as in genius. Here an inscription tells you Benvenuto Cellini lived and labored; yonder was the window of his studio; there the narrow street through which he walked at nightfall, his hand upon his rapier, and his left arm well enveloped in his mantle; there the stone where Dante used to sit; there the villa Boccaccio inhabited; there the lone tower where Galileo watched; there the house, unchanged in everything, of the greatest of them all, Michael Angelo himself. The pen sketches of his glorious conceptions adorn the walls, the half-finished models of his immortal works are on the brackets. That splendid palace on the sunny Arno was Alfieri's. Go where you will, in fact, a gorgeous story of the past reveals itself before you, and you stand before the great triumphs of human genius, with the spirit of the authors around and about you.