“It is about a week ago since I had to write to the new Editor of the ‘Fortnightly,’ Mr. Escott—and assure him that I was so tied and bound by old promises ‘to give something to this and that Magazine if I gave at all’—that it became impossible I could oblige anybody in even so trifling a matter. It comes of making rash resolutions—but, once made, there is no escape from the consequence—though I rarely have felt this so much of a hardship as now when I am forced to leave a request of yours uncomplied with. For the rest, I shall indeed rejoice if that abominable and stupid cruelty of pigeon-shooting is put a stop to. The other detestable practice, Vivisection, strikes deeper root, I fear; but God bless whoever tugs at it!
“Ever yours most truly,
“Robert Browning.”
Another of our most frequent visitors at Villa Brichieri was Mr. T. Adolphus Trollope, author of the Girlhood of Catherine de’ Medici, “A Decade of Italian Women” and other books. Though not so successful an author as his brilliant brother Anthony, he was an interesting man, whom we much liked. One day he came up and pressed us to go back with him and pay a visit to a guest at his Villino Trollope in the Piazza Maria Antonia,—a lovely house he had built, with a broad verandah behind it, opening on a garden of cypresses and oranges backed by the old crenelated and Iris-decked walls of Florence. He had, he told us, a most interesting person staying with him and Mrs. Trollope;—Mrs. Lewes—who had written Adam Bede, and was then writing Romola. Miss Blagden alone went with him, and was enchanted, like all the world, with George Eliot.
Mr. Trollope told me many curious facts concerning Italian society which, from his long residence, he knew more intimately than almost any other foreigner. He described the marriage settlement of a nobleman which had actually passed through his hands, wherein the intending husband, with wondrous foresight and precaution, deliberately named three or four gentlemen, amongst whom his future wife might choose her cavaliere servente!
We had several other habitués at our villas; Dall’ Ongaro, a poet and ex-priest; Romanelli, the sculptor; and Miss Linda White, now Madame Villari, the charming authoress and hostess of a brilliant salon, wife of the eminent historian who was recently Minister of Education.
Perhaps the most interesting of our visitors, after Mr. Browning, was Mrs. Beecher Stowe. She impressed me much, and the criticisms I have read of her “Sunny Memories” and other books have failed to diminish my admiration for her. She was one of the few women, I suppose, who have actually felt Fame, as heroes do who receive national Triumphs; and she seemed to be as simple and unpretentious, as little elated as it was possible to be. She had even a trick of looking down as if she had been stared out of countenance; but this was perhaps a part of that singular habit which most Evangelicals of her class exhibited thirty years ago, of shyness in society and inability to converse except with the person seated next them in company. It was the verification after eighteen centuries of the old heathen taunt against the Christians, recorded in the dialogues of Minucius Felix, “In publicam muta, in angulis garrula!” I have recorded elsewhere Mrs. Stowe’s remark when I spoke with grief of the end of Theodore Parker’s work. “Do you think,” she said, suddenly looking up at me with flashing eyes, “that Theodore Parker has no work to do for God now?” I must not repeat again her interesting conversation as we sat on our balcony watching the sun go down over the Val d’ Arno. After much serious talk as to the nearness of the next life, Mrs. Stowe narrated a saying of her boy on which, (as I told her), a good heterodox sermon in my sense might be preached. She taught the child that Anger was sinful, whereupon he asked: “Then why, Mama, does the Bible say so often that God was angry?” She replied motherlike: “You will understand it when you are older.” The boy pondered seriously for awhile and then burst out: “O Mama, I have found it out! God is angry, because God is not a Christian!”
Another of our habitués on my first visit to Florence was Walter Savage Landor. At that time he was, with his dear Pomeranian dog, Giallo, living alone in very ordinary lodgings in Florence, having quarrelled with his family and left his villa in their possession. He had a grand, leonine head with long white hair and beard, and to hear him denouncing his children was to witness a performance of Lear never matched on any stage! He was very kind to me, and we often walked about odd nooks of Florence together, while he poured out reminiscences of Byron and Shelley, some of which I have recorded (Chap. IX., p. 257), and of others of the older generation whom he had known, so that I seemed in touch with them all. He was then about 88 years of age, and perhaps his great and cultivated intellect was already failing. Much that he said in wrath and even fury seemed like raving, but he was gentle as a child to us women, and to his dog whom he passionately loved. When I wrote the first Memorial against Prof. Schiff which started the anti-vivisection crusade, Mr. Landor’s name was one of the first appended to it. He added some words to his signature so fierce and contemptuous that I never dared to publish them!
We also saw much of Dr. Grisanowski, a very clever Pole, who afterwards became a prominent advocate of the science-tortured brutes. When I discussed the matter with him he was entirely on the side of Science. After some years he sent me his deeply thought-out pamphlet, with the endorsement “For Miss Cobbe,—who was right when I was wrong;” a very generous retractation. We also received Mr. Frederick Tennyson, (Lord Tennyson’s brother), Madame Venturi, Madame Alberto Mario, the late Lord Justice Bowen, (then a brilliant young man from Oxford,) and many more.
By far the best and dearest of my friends in Florence however, was one who never came up our hill, and who was already then an aged woman—Mrs. Somerville. I had brought a letter of introduction to her, being anxious to see one who had been such an honour to womanhood; but I expected to find her an incarnation of Science, having very little affinity with such a person as I. Instead of this, I found in her the dearest old lady in all the world, who took me to her heart as if I had been a newly-found daughter, and for whom I soon felt such tender affection that sitting beside her on her sofa, (as I mostly did on account of her deafness) I could hardly keep myself from caressing her. In a letter to Harriet St. Leger I wrote of her: “She is the very ideal of an old lady, so gentle, cordial and dignified, like my mother; and as fresh, eager and intelligent now, as she can ever have been.” Her religious ideas proved to be exactly like my own; and being no doubt somewhat a-thirst for sympathy on a subject on which she felt profoundly, (her daughters differing from her), she opened her heart to me entirely. Here are a few notes I made after talks with her:—