“He was a joiner and lived in Athens at the time when all the good things happened. But his father, the author of his being, as we say, was an English poet and cast him for the part of Lion in Pyramus and Thisbe.”
“What is Thisbe? a wandering knight?”
“No. Thisbe was the lady loved by Pyramus and was acted by Flute the bellows-mender. It’s all in that poet who said what I told you when we were making the Escape from Paris—you remember, about holding the mirror up to nature.”
“I wish I could read your English poets. I like everything English. The Englishmen who come to the teatrino are always good and kind—tutti bravi—I wish I were an Englishman—a real one I mean, like you.”
Here were more compliments, so I replied: “I wish I were a Sicilian buffo.”
“Ah! but you could not be that,” said he. “Now I could have my hair cut short, grow a beard on my chin, a pair of spectacles on my eyes and heels on my boots and then I should only have to be naturalised. But you could never be a buffo—not even an English one.”
“No; I suppose not. You see, I’m too serious. Gildo says I take a gloomy view of life.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “why do you?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “My poor mother—my adorata mamma, as you call her—used to make the same complaint. She thought I inherited my desponding temperament from my father.”
“As you inherited your taste in dress from her.”