We returned to our enchanted palace with music playing by our side: I never saw a party of pleasure carried on so happily. The weather was singularly bright and clear, the moon at full, the French-horns breaking the silence of the night, invited echo to answer them. The nine days (and we enjoyed seventeen or eighteen hours out of every twenty-four) seemed nine minutes. When we came home to our country-house in the Varesotto, verses and sonnets saluted our arrival, and congratulated our wedding-day.
The Madonna del Monte was the next show which called us abroad; it is within a few miles of our present sweet habitation, is celebrated for its prospect, and is indeed a very astonishing spot of ground, exhibiting at one view the three cities of Turin, Milan, and Genoa; and leading the eye still forward into the South of France. The lakes, which to those who go o’pleasuring upon them, seem like seas, and very like the mouth of our river Dart, where she disgorges her elegantly-ornamented stream into the harbour at Kingsweare, here afford too little water in proportion, though five in number, and the largest fifty miles round. I scarcely ever saw so much land within the eye from any place. That the road should be adorned with chapels up the mountain is less strange: there is a church dedicated to the Virgin at top. We have one here in Italy in every district almost, as the rage of worshipping on high places, so expressly and repeatedly forbidden in scripture, has lasted surprisingly in the world. Every resting-place is marked, and decorated with statues cut in wood, and painted to imitate human life with very extraordinary skill. They are capital performances of their kind, and most resemble, but I think excel, Mrs. Wright’s finest figures in wax. A convent of nuns, situated on the summit of the hill, where these chapels end in an exceeding pretty church, entertained our large party with the most hospitable kindness; gave us a handsome dinner and delicious dessert. We diverted the ladies with a little concert in return, and passed a truly delightful day.
All the environs of this Varesotto are very charmingly varied with mountains, lakes, and cultivated life; the only fault in our prospect is the want of water. Had I told my companions of yesterday perhaps, that the view from Madonna del Monte reminded me of Chirk Castle Hill in North Wales, they would have laughed; yet from that extraordinary spot are to be distinctly seen several fertile counties, with many great, and many small towns, and a most extensive landscape, watered by the large and navigable rivers Severn and Dee, roughened by the mountains of Merionethshire, and bounded by the Irish sea: I think that view has scarce its equal any where; and, if any where, it is here in the vicinity of Varese, where many gay villas interspersed contribute to variegate and enliven a scene highly finished by the hand of Nature, and wanting little addition from her attendant Art.
Of the noblemen’s feats in the neighbourhood it may indeed be remarked, that however spacious the house, and however splendid the furniture may prove upon examination, however pompous the garden may be to the first glance, and the terraces however magnificent,—spiders are seldom excluded from the mansion, or weeds from the pleasure-ground of the possessor. A climate so warm would afford some excuse for this nastiness, could one observe the inhabitants were discomposed at such an effect from a good cause, or if one could flatter one’s self that they themselves were hurt at it; but when they gravely display an embroidered bed or counterpane worthy of Arachne’s fingers before her metamorphosis, covered over by her present labours, who can forbear laughing?—The gardener in two minutes arriving to assist you up slopes, all flourishing with cat’s-tail and poppy; while your friends cry,—“Here, this is nature! is it not? pure nature!—Tutto naturale si, secondo l’uso Inglese[40].”
Well! we have really passed a prodigiously gay villegiatura here in this charming country, where the snowy cap of the gros St. Bernard cools the air, though at so great a distance; and we have the pleasure of seeing Switzerland, without the pain of feeling its cold, or the fatigue of climbing its glacieres: the Alps of the Grisons rise up like a fortification behind us; the sun glows hot in our rich and fertile valleys, and throws up every vegetable production with all the poignant flavour that Summer can bestow; nor is shade wanting from the walnut and large chesnut trees, under which we often dine, and sing, and play at tarocco, and hear the horns and clarinets, while sipping our ice or swallowing our lemonade. The cicala now feels the genial influence of that heat she requires, but her voice here is weak, compared to the powers she displayed so much to our disturbance in Tuscany; and the lucciola has lost much of her scintillant beauty, but she darts up and down the hedges now and then. Here is an emerald-coloured butterfly, whose name I know not, plays over the lakes and standing pools, in a very pleasing abundance; the most exquisitely-tinted æphemera frolic before one all day long; and Antiope flutters in every parterre, and shares the garden sweets with a pale primrose-coloured creature of her own kind, whose wings are edged with brown, and, if I can remember right, bears the name of hyale. But we are not yet past the residence of scorpions, which certainly do commit suicide when provoked beyond all endurance; a story I had always heard, but never gave much credit to.
But I am disturbed from writing my book by the good-humoured gaiety of our cheerful friends, with whom we never sit down fewer than fourteen or fifteen to table I think, and surely never rise from it without many a genuine burst of honest merriment undisguised by affectation, unfettered by restraint. Our gentlemen make improviso rhymes, and cut comical faces; go out to the field after dinner, and play at a sort of blindman’s buff, which they call breaking the pan; nor do the low ones in company arrange their minds as I see in compliment to the high ones, but tell their opinions with a freedom I little expected to find: mixed society is very rare among them, almost unknown it seems; but when they do mix at a country place like this, the great are kind, to do them justice, and the little not servile. They are wise indeed in making society easy to them, for no human being suffers solitude so ill as does an Italian. An English lady once made me observe, that a cat never purs when she is alone, let her have what meat and warmth she will; I think these social-spirited Milanese are like her, for they can hardly believe that there is existing a person, who would not willingly prefer any company to none: when we were at the islands three weeks ago,—“A charming place,” says one of our companions,—“Cioè con un mondo d’amici cosi[41].”—“But with one’s own family, methinks,” said I, “and a good library of books, and this sweet lake to bathe in:”—“O!” cried they all at once, “Dio ne liberi[42].”—This is national character.
Why there are no birds of the watery kind, coots, wild ducks, cargeese, upon these lakes, nobody informs me: I have been often told that of Geneva swarms with them, and it is but a very few miles off: our people though have little care to ascertain such matters, and no desire at all to investigate effects and causes; those who study among them, study classic authors and learn rhetoric; poetry too is by no means uncultivated at Milan, where the Abate Parini’s satires are admirable, and so esteemed by those who themselves know very well how to write, and how to judge: common philosophy (la physique, as the French call it), geography, astronomy, chymistry, are oddly left behind somehow; and it is to their ignorance of these matters that I am apt to impute Italian credulity, to which every wonder is welcome.
We have now passed one day in Switzerland however, rowing to the little town Lugano over its pretty lake. The mountains at the end are a neat miniature of Vesuvius, Somma, &c.; and the situation altogether looks as a picture of Naples would look, if painted by Brughuel; but not so full of figures. A fanciful traveller too might be tempted to think he could discern some streaks of liberty in the manners of the people, if it were but in the inn-keeper at whose house we dined; this may however be merely my own prejudice, and somebody told me it was so.
We were shewn on one side the water as we went across, a small place called Campioni, which is feudo Imperiale, and governed by the Padre Abate of a neighbouring convent, who has power even over the lives of his subjects for six years; at the expiration of which term another despot of the day is chosen—appointed I should have said; and the last returns to his original state, amenable however for any very shocking thing he may have done during the course of his dictatorship; and no complaint has been ever made yet of any such governor so circumstanced and appointed, whose conduct is commonly but too mild and clement. This I thought worth remarking, as consolatory to one’s feelings.