Extract from the Journal.
“And so good-night! A wonderful woman! We have been together hours—I do not know how many—to-day, but for the most part with very much company till the very end, when we drove home from the Queen’s party and found Sir William retired with a touch of fever, which concerned the dear creature very much. She would not wait one second to pull off her wrap, but flew to him, only to find him sufficiently recovered to have sunk into the profound sleep which precedes health. Sir William was ailing when we left, I do not know how early in the morning, to see the ruins lately excavated of an ancient Roman city buried by an eruption of the volcano about the time of St. Paul—a circumstance to be noted, because it enables us to judge somewhat the manner of men those Romans were, whom the founders of our wonderful religion were called on in a way to defy. I am inclined to think favourably of them. Pompeji, that was the name of the city, was a favourite haunt of the leading Romans, who founded and administered an empire which our own is only just now beginning to rival in extent, its riches being out of the question. The richest men in Pompeji were content with houses which no farmer in England would tolerate. You could put any house in Pompeji into the big barn at Burnham Thorpe, and they had no marble in them except for fountains and the like; the walls of the rooms and the pillars of the courts both being covered with a hard stucco, simply but elegantly painted. I could have wished that all the relics which the Queen has so carefully collected at her palace at Portici had been left rooted to the spot where they had been found. I wanted to see the brazier full of coals, which were half burnt when the eruption came down, standing where it was when Roman hands filled it with those coals; I wanted to see the charred bread on the table where it was waiting to be eaten; I wanted to see the skeleton of the sentry guarding the place where its owner had looked death in the face. At Portici they are only the playthings of an idle court, which might destroy them if it thought about them. Indeed, I have great fears for them: I must speak to Emma, who takes a scholar’s interest in them, and a more human intelligent interest in them than Sir William, who of course taught her, and is the first sçavant in Italy. The Queen would, I doubt not, give them to her if she asked for them; and if they are not to be at Pompeji, and this country is in a shockingly disturbed condition just now, they had better be put on board the first of my ships that has to go home, and be taken to the Royal Museum in London.
“Marvellously interesting I found it, and the good Queen had a fresh house excavated on purpose for me to see how the things looked when they were found. It was a fine house—one of the best in the city. The frescoes on the walls were equal to most which they have peeled off and carried to Portici. There was a very handsome white marble fountain; there were some fair statuettes and stelæ (whatever are these last for? I had the name from Emma); but the very things I most wished to see were absent—the ruins of a meal on a table, and skeletons in the position in which they were overtaken in the storm. Any articles of household furniture, which Emma says were mostly of bronze, and therefore would not have been consumed, I should have desired to see in the places where they were being used when the end came. But this house might have been the ruins of part of the Pope’s Museum at Rome!
“However, I must confess that the chief interest of the day to me was watching that wonderful woman as she led the way through all these marvels of antiquity, her beautiful face beaming with intelligence and consideration for us; and she was no dry-as-dust, for, in the midst of a disquisition, she would find time to say to me—‘Nelson, I had this shepherdess hat out from England: tell me, am I not too old for it?’ she all the while looking like a girl in the freshness of her teens. All through the day she heaped delicious favours upon unworthy me. It was only perhaps a hand caressingly laid on my shoulder when I was to look at something; or thrust through my arm and let to rest on it when there was an unusually trying walk from excavation to excavation; or a drawing in of skirts to make room for me at her side when a party of us, headed by Emma and the Queen, sat down to the second breakfast with our legs in the deepest fountain we could find. It was dry, and perhaps two feet deep; and I daresay we cut a comical figure enough, looking as if the table and our legs had gone through the floor and left us squatting round a hole. It was Emma’s idea.
“Then there was a storm, which drove us for refuge into the custode’s quarters. Emma was sorely frighted. We were alone, huddled up in a narrow passage. She was so prostrated, and near fainting, that I had to strive to win her with the gentlest caresses to prevent her from succumbing; but when she came to, the storm beginning to abate, she was not angry, but suffered me most graciously. Then we had the drive to Resina. I was driving her caless, and she let herself rest against me in sheer weariness after the agitation of the afternoon, but very trustful.
“Then came that mad supper in the tavern-kitchen, in which Emma, revived by her resting, was a queen of the revels again. What a scene it was! these uncouth beings made to provide a feast, such as one sees in a buffo-comedy, for their Queen, with Emma spurring them on to fresh extravagances, and the Neapolitan Commodore Caracciolo, as I judged, airing a sardonic wit which I missed, being no Italian. And when I could not partake of the dishes of the country, which were mightily rich with their pork and their oil, Emma flew away from the table herself, and catching one of her lackeys made him bring a basket from which she gave me biscuits and fruit, of which I partook sparingly, really that it might not be a fool’s errand for her. Mine host’s wine was very fair. Emma is a splendid creature, with superb health, about which she takes not a thought. She ate their oily dainties with the greatest gusto, because, as she said, their simplicity and plainness were refreshing after the artificial feasts to which she was bound as Ambassador’s wife.
“Refreshed in this simple, plain and hearty fashion, she was all esprit on the remainder of the drive into Naples through the dusk. She was wonderfully animated; and I had from her, in her own natural words, for my benefit, all that she had had from the learned Sir William about the flourishing ports and bathing places, served mostly by Greeks, which had clustered round the vine-clad slopes of Vesuvio before the eruption. I could almost see their destruction, so eloquent were her gestures. And very frequently she would break off suddenly, saying—‘But I am wearying you—I am letting my enthusiasm run away with me. Forgive me, Nelson,’ and this so penitently, with a timid little touch.
“In our caless we drove post haste, so soon as we had left the Queen, to Sir William’s palace on the Chiaja. For we had to dress for dinner with Her Majesty, and a beautiful woman needs time for her toilet; though in this respect Emma is so speedy that ’tis plain that she relies on Nature first, and but little on Art. I had not got into my state uniform above a few minutes, when I beheld her a vision of loveliness.
“We had hoped to have Sir William with us. Common prudence had indeed bade him forego the expedition to Pompeji, from which, with the drenchings we had, he would certainly have come back in a raging fever, even if he could have borne the long hot drive in the morning and the chance of a cold wind coming up as the hours began to throw their shadows. The ruined city is noted for its draughtiness: the wind comes very keenly round the mountain; and I doubt not there is an aguishness in the newly turned soil.
“I cannot well describe my feelings as I sat beside her in the Ambassador’s coach. All day long in her shepherdess hat, she had been half tomboy, half affectionate daughter, always like a fresh young girl. And now, after bare leisure to cool down as I should have thought, she was sitting by my side in a most superb costume—the great lady all over—a veritable queen in condescension. In the short drive from the Embassy to the Royal Palace she was all solicitude for me, fearing a return of the fever after the drenching of the afternoon; but, praise God, I felt no ill result. It is truly wonderful what effect my spirits have upon my health. When I have the enemy within cannon-shot, or the society of those I love, nothing mortal seems able to hurt me.