MILAN.
21st June 1786.
After rejoicing over my house and my friends; after asking a hundred questions, and hearing a hundred stories of those long left; after reciprocating common civilities, and talking over common topics, we observed how much the general look of Milan was improved in these last fifteen months; how the town was become neater, the ordinary people smarter, the roads round their city mended, and the beggars cleared away from the streets. We did not find however that the people we talked to were at all charmed with these new advantages: their convents demolished, their processions put an end to, the number of their priests of course contracted, and their church plate carried by cart-loads to the mint; holidays forbidden, and every saint’s name erased from the calendar, excepting only St. Peter and St. Paul; whilst those shopkeepers who worked for monasteries, and those musicians who sung or played in oratorios, are left to find employment how they can;—cloud the countenances of all, and justly; as such sudden and rough reforms shock the feelings of the multitude; offend the delicacy of the nobles; make a general stagnation of business and of pleasure, in a country where both depend upon religious functions; and terrify the clergy into no ill-grounded apprehensions of being found in a few years more wholly useless, and as such dismissed.—Well! whatever is done hastily, can scarcely be done quite well; and wherever much is done, a great part of it will doubtless be done wrong. A considerable portion of all this however will be confessed useful, and even necessary, when the hour of violence on one side, and prejudice on the other, is past away; as the fire of London has been found beneficial by those who live in the newly-restored town. Meantime I think the present precipitation indecent enough for my own part; a thousand little errors would burn out of themselves, were they suffered to die quietly away; and when the morning breaks in naturally, it is superfluous as awkward to put the stars out with one’s fingers, like the Hours in Guercino’s Aurora[38]. Whoever therefore will be at the pains a little to pick their principles, not grasp them by the bunch, will find as many unripe at one end, I believe, as there are rotten at the other: for could we see these hasty innovators erecting public schools for the instruction of the poor, or public work-houses for their employment; did they unlock the treasure-house of true religion, by publishing the Bible in every dialect of their dominions, and oblige their clergy to read it with the souls committed to their charge;—I should have a better idea of their sincerity and disinterested zeal for God’s glory, than they give by tearing down his statues, or those of his blessed Virgin Mother, which Carlo Borromæo set up.
The folly of hanging churches with red damask would surely fade away of itself; among people of good sense and good taste; who could not long be simple enough to suppose, that concealing Greek architecture with such transient finery, and giving to God’s house the air of a tattered theatre, could in any wife promote his service, or their salvation. Many superstitious and many unmeaning ceremonies do die off every day, because unsupported by reason or religion: Doctor Carpanni, a learned lawyer, told me but to-day, that here in Lombardy they had a custom, no longer ago than in his father’s time, of burying a great lord or possessor of lands, with a ceremony of killing on his grave the favourite horse, dog, &c. that he delighted in when alive; a usage borrowed from the Oriental Pagans, who burn even the widows of the deceased upon their funeral pile; and among our monuments in Westminster Abbey, set up in the days of darkness, I have minded now and then the hawk and greyhound of a nobleman lying in marble at his feet; some of our antiquarians should tell us if they killed them.
Another odd affinity strikes me. Half a century ago there was an annual procession at Shrewsbury, called by way of pre-eminence Shrewsbury Show; when a handsome young girl of about twelve years old rode round the town, and wished prosperity to every trade assembled at the fair: I forget what else made the amusement interesting; but have heard my mother tell of the particular beauty of some wench, who was ever after called the Queen, because she had been carried in triumph as such on the day of Shrewsbury Show. Now if nobody gives a better derivation of that old custom, it may perhaps be found a dreg of the Romish superstition, which as many years ago, in various parts of Italy, prompted people to dress up a pretty girl, on the 25th of March, or other season dedicated to the Virgin, and carry her in procession about the streets, singing litanies to her, &c. and ending, in profaneness of admiration, a day begun in idleness and folly. At Rome however no such indecorous absurdities are encouraged: we saw a beautiful figure of the Madonna, dressed from a picture of Guido Rheni, borne about one day; but no human creature in the street offered to kneel, or gave one the slightest reason to say or suppose that she was worshipped: some sweet hymns were sung in her praise, as the procession moved slowly on; but no impropriety could I discern, who watched with great attention.
It is time to have done with all this though, and go see the Ambrosian library; which, as far as I can judge, is perfectly respectable. The Prefect’s politeness kindly offered my curiosity any thing I was particularly anxious to see, and the learned Mr. Dugati was exceedingly obliging. The old Virgil preserved here with Petrarch’s marginal notes in his own hand-writing, interest one much; this little narration, evidently written for his own fancy to feed on, of the day and hour he first felt the impression of Laura’s charms, is the best proof of his genuine passion for that lady, as he certainly never meant for our inspection what he wrote down in his own Virgil. Here is likewise the valuable MS. of Flavius Josephus the Jewish historian, a curiosity deservedly admired and esteemed: it is kept with peculiar care I think, and is in high preservation: A Syriac bible too, very fine indeed, from which I understand they are now going to print off some copies. I have been taught by the scholars not to think a Syriac bible of the Samaritan text so very rare; but the Septuagint in that language is so exceedingly scarce, that many are persuaded this is the only one extant; and as our Lord, in his quotations from the old law, usually cites that version, it is justly preferred to all others. Leonardo da Vinci’s famous folio preserved in this library, for which James I. of England offered three thousand ducats, an event recorded here over the chest that contains it on a tablet of marble, deserves attention and reverence: nothing seems above, nothing below, the observation of that prodigious genius. He has in this, and other volumes of the same curious work, apparently put down every painter’s or mathematician’s thought that crossed his imagination. It is a Leonardiana[39], the common-place book of a great and wise man; nor did our British sovereign ever with more good sense evince his true love of learning, than by his princely offer of its purchase.
Till now the looking at friends, and rarities, and telling old stories, and seeing new sights, &c. has lulled my conscience asleep, nor suffered me to recollect that, dazzled by the brightness of the Corregios at Parma, the account of their press, the finest in Europe, and infinitely superior to our Baskerville, escaped me. They have a glorious collection too of bibles in their library; their illuminations are most delicate, and their bindings pompous, but they possess a modern MS. of such singular perfection, that none of those finished when chirography was more cultivated than it is now, can at all pretend to compare with it. The characters are all gilt, the leaves vellum, the miniatures finished with a degree of nicety rarely found in union, as here, with the utmost elegance and taste. No words I can use will give a just idea of this little MS.: whoever is a true fancier of such things, would find his trouble well repaid, if he left London only to look at it. The book contains private devotions for the duchess with suitable ornaments—I will talk no more of it.
The fine colossal figure of the Virgin Mary in heaven crowned by her Son’s hand, painted in the cieling of some church at Parma, has a bad light, and it is difficult to comprehend its sublimity. One approaches nearer to understand the merits of that singular performance when one looks at Caracci’s copy of it, kept in the Ambrosian library here at Milan. But how was I surprised to hear related as a fact happening to him, the old story told to all who go to see St. Paul’s cathedral in London, of our Sir James Thornhill, who, while he was intent on painting the cupola, walked backward to look at the effect, till, arriving at the very edge of the scaffold, he was in danger of dashing his brains out by falling from that horrible height upon the marble below, had not some bystander possessed readiness of mind to run suddenly forward, and throw a pencil daubed in white stuff which stood near him, at the figure Sir James’s eyes were fixed on, which provoked the painter to follow him threatening, and so saved his life. Could such an accident have happened twice? and is it likely that to either of these persons it ever happened at all? Would such men as Annibal Caracci and Sir James Thornhill have exposed themselves upon an undefended scaffold, without railing it round to prevent their tumbling down, when engaged in a work that would take them many days, nay weeks, to finish it? Impossible! in every nation traditionary tales shake my belief exceedingly; and what astonishes one more than it disgusts, if possible, is to see the same story fitted to more nations than one.
It is now many years since a counsellor related at my house in Surrey the following narration, of which I had then no doubts, or idea of suspicion; for he said he was himself witness to the fact, and laid the scene at St. Edmondsbury, a town in our county of Suffolk: how a man accused of murder, with every corroborating circumstance, escaped by the steady resolution of one juryman, who could not, by any arguments or remonstrances of his companions, be prevailed on to pronounce the fellow guilty, though every possible circumstance combined to ascertain him as the person who took the deceased’s life; and how, after all was over, the juryman confessed privately to the judge, that he himself, by such and such an accident, had killed the farmer, of whose death the other stood accused. This event, true or false, of which I have since found the rudiments in a French Recueil, was told me at Venice by a gentleman as having happened there, under the immediate inspection of a friend he named. Quere, whether any such thing ever happened at all in any time or place? but laxity of narration, and contempt of all exactness, at last extinguish one’s best-founded confidence in the lips of mortal man. It is, however, clearly proved, that no duty is so difficult as to preserve truth in all our transactions, while no transaction is so trifling as to preclude temptation of infringing it: for if there is no interest that prompts a liar, his vanity suffices; nor will we mention the suggestions of cowardice, malignity, or any species of vice, when, as in these last-mentioned stories, many fictions are invented by well-meaning people, who hope to prevent mischief, inculcate the possibility of hanging innocence, &c. and violate truth out of regard to virtue.
Well, well! our good Italians here will not condescend to live or lie, if now and then they scruple not to tell one. No man in this country pretends either to tenderness or to indifference, when he feels no disposition to be indifferent or tender; and so removed are they from all affectation of sensibility or of refinement, that when a conceited Englishman starts back in pretended rapture from a Raphael he has perhaps little taste for, it is difficult to persuade these sincerer people that his transports are possibly put on, only to deceive some of his countrymen who stand by, and who, if he took no notice of so fine a picture, would laugh, and say he had been throwing his time away, without making even the common and necessary improvements expected from every gentleman who travels through Italy; yet surely it is a choice delight to live where the everlasting scourge held over London and Bath, of what will they think? and what will they say? has no existence; and to reflect that I have now sojourned near two years in Italy, and scarcely can name one conceited man, or one affected woman, with whom, in any rank of life, I have been in the least connected.