Yesterday however shewed me what I knew not had existed—a skew-ball or pye-balled ass, eminently well-proportioned, coated like a racer in an English stud, sixteen hands and a half high, his colour bay and white in large patches, and his temper, as the proprietor told me, singularly docile and gentle. I have longed perhaps to purchase few things in my life more earnestly than this beautiful and useful animal, which I might have had too for two pounds fifteen shillings English, but dared not, lest like Dogberry I should have been written down for an ass by my merry country folks, who, I remember, could not let the Queen of England herself possess in peace a creature of the same kind, but handsomer still, and from a still hotter climate, called the Zebra.
Apropos to quadrupeds, when Portia, in the Merchant of Venice, enumerates her lovers, she names the Neapolitan prince first; who, she says, does nothing, for his part, but talk of his horse, and makes it his greatest boast that he can shoe him himself. This is almost literally true of a nobleman here; and they really do not throw their pains away; for it is surprising to see what command they have their cattle in, though bits are scarcely used among them.
The coat armour of Naples consists of an unbridled horse; and by what I can make out of their character, they much resemble him;
Qualis ubi abruptis fugit præsæpia vinclis
Tandem liber æquus, &c. &c. &c.[2];
generous and gay; headstrong and violent in their disposition; easy to turn, but difficult to stop. No authority is respected by them when some strong passion animates them to fury: yet lazily quiet, and unwilling to stir till accident rouses them to terror, or rage urges them forward to incredible exertions of suddenly-bestowed strength. In the eruption of 1779, their fears and superstitions rose to such a height, that they seized the French ambassador upon the bridge, tore him almost out of his carriage as he fled from Portici, and was met by them upon the Ponte della Maddalena, where they threatened him with instant death if he did not get out of his carriage, and prostrating himself before the statue of St. Januarius, which stands there, intreat his protection for the city. All this, however, Mons. le Comte de Clermont D’Amboise did not comprehend a word of; but taking all the money out of his pocket, threw it down, happily for him, at the feet of the figure, and pacified them at once, gaining time by those means to escape their vengeance.
It was, I think, upon some other occasion that Sir William Hamilton’s book relates their unworthy treatment of the venerable Archbishop, who refused them the relicks with which they had no doubt of saving the menaced town; but every time Vesuvius burns with danger to the city, they scruple not to insult their Sovereign as he flies from it; throwing large stones after his chariot, guards, &c.; making the insurrection, it is sure to occasion, more perilous, if possible, than the volcano itself. And last night when La Montagna fu cattiva[3], as their expression was, our Laquais de Place observed that it might possibly be because so many hereticks and unbelievers had been up it the day before. “Oh! let us,” as King David wisely chose, “fall into the hands of God—not into those of man.”
I wished exceedingly to purchase here the genuine account of Massaniello’s far-famed sedition and revolt, more dreadful in a certain way than any of the earthquakes which have at different times shaken this hollow-founded country. But my friends here tell me it was suppressed, and burned by the hands of the common executioner, with many chastisements beside bestowed upon the writer, who tried to escape, but found it more prudent to submit to justice.
Thomas Agnello was the unluckily-adapted name of the mad fisherman who headed the mob on that truly memorable occasion: but it is not an unusual thing here to cut off the first syllable, and by the figure aphæresis alter the appellation entirely. By that device of dropping the to, he has been called Massaniello; and this is one of their methods to render the patois of Naples as unintelligible to us, as if we had never seen Italy till now; and one is above all things tormented with their way of pronouncing names. Here are Don and Donna again at this town as at Milan however, because the King of Spain, or Ré Cattolico, as these people always call him, has still much influence; and they seem to think nearly as respectfully of him as of their own immediate sovereign, who is however greatly beloved among them; and so he ought to be, for he is the representative of them all. He rides and rows, and hunts the wild boar, and catches fish in the bay, and sells it in the market, as dear as he can too; but gives away the money they pay him for it, and that directly: so that no suspicion of meanness, or of any thing worse than a little rough merriment can be ever attached to his truly-honest, open, undesigning character.