The cabinet of natural history is exceedingly fine, and the rooms singularly well disposed. There are more cameos at Bologna, and one superior specimen of native gold: every thing else I believe is better here, and such opals did I never see before, no not at Loretto: the petrified lemon and artichoke have no equals, and a brown diamond was new to me to-day. A specimen of sea-salt filled with air bubbles like the rings one buys at Vicenza, is worth going a long way to look at; but the gentleman at Munich, who shewed us the Virgin Mary in a cobweb, had a piece of red silver shot out into a ruby like crystal, more extraordinary than any mineral production I have seen. Our attention was caught by Maria Theresa’s bouquet, but one cannot forget the pearls belonging to the electress of Bavaria.
What seemed, however, most to charm the people who shewed the cabinet, was a snuff-box consisting of various gems, none bigger than a barley-corn, each of prodigious value, and the workmanship of more, every square being inlaid so neatly, and no precious stone repeated, though the number is no less than one hundred and eighty-three; a false bottom besides of gold, opening with a spring touch, and discovering a written catalogue of the jewels in the finest hand-writing, and the smallest possible. This was to me a real curiosity, afforded a new and singular proof of that astonishing power of eye, and delicacy of manual operation, seconded by a patient and persevering attention to things frivolous in themselves, which will be for ever alike neglected by the fire of Italian genius, and disdained by the dignity of British science.
We have seen other sort of things to-day however. The Hungarian and Bohemian robes pleased me best, and the wild unset jewels in the diadem of Transylvania impressed me with a valuable idea of Gothic greatness. The service of gold plate too is very grand from its old-fashioned solidity. I liked it better than I did the snuff-box; and here is a dish in ivory puts one in mind of nothing but Achilles’s shield, so worked is its broad margin with miniature representations of battles, landscapes, &c. three dozen different stories round the dish, one might have looked at it with microscopes for a week together. The porcelane plates have been painted to ridicule Raphael’s pots at Loretto I fancy; Julio Romano’s manner is comically parodied upon one of them.
Prince Lichtenstein’s pictures are charming; a Salmacis in the water by Albano is the best work of that master I ever saw, not diffused as his works commonly are, but all collected somehow, and fine in a way I cannot express for want of more knowledge; very, very fine it is however, and full of expression and character. The Caracci school again.—Here is the whole history of Decius by Rubens too, wonderfully learned; and an assumption of the Virgin so like Mrs. Pritchard our famous actress, no portrait ever represented her so well. A St. Sebastian divinely beautiful, by Vandyke; and a girl playing on the guitar, which you may run round almost, by the coarse but natural hand of Caravagio.
The library is new and splendid, and they buy books for it very liberally. The learned and amiable Abbé Denys shewed me a thousand unmerited civilities, was charmed with the character of Dr. Johnson, and delighted with the story of his conversation at Rouen with Mons. l’Abbé Rossette. This gentleman seems to love England very much, and English literature; spoke of Humphry Prideaux with respect, and has his head full of Ossian’s poetry, of which he can repeat whole pages. He shewed me a fragment of Livy written in the fifth century, a psalter and creed beautifully illuminated of the year nine hundred, and a large portion of St. Mark’s gospel on blue paper of the year three hundred and seven. A Bibbia de Poveri too, as the Italians call it, curious enough; the figures all engraved on wood, and only a text at bottom to explain them.
Winceslaus marked every book he ever possessed, it seems, with the five vowels on the back; and almost every one with some little miniature made by himself, recording his escape from confinement at Prague in Bohemia, where the washer-woman having assisted him to get out of prison under pretence of bathing, he has been very studious to register the event; so much so that even on the margins of his bible he has been tempted to paint past scenes that had better have been blotted from his memory.
The Livy which learned men have hoped to find safe in the seraglio of Constantinople, was burned by their late sultan Amurath, our Abbé Denys tells me; the motive sprung from mistaken piety, but the effect is to be lamented. He shewed me an Alcoran in extremely small characters, surprisingly so indeed, taken out of a Turkish officer’s pocket when John Sobiesky raised the siege of this city in the year 1590, and a preacher took for his text the Sunday after, “There was a man sent from God whose name was John.” I was much amused with a sight of the Mexican MSS and Peruvian quipos; nor are the Turkish figures of Adam and Eve, our Saviour and his mother, less remarkable; but Mahomet surrounded by a glory about his head, a veil concealing his face as too bright for inspection, exceeded all the rest.
Here are many ladies of fashion in this town very eminent for their musical abilities, particularly Mesdemoiselles de Martinas, one of whom is member of the Academies of Berlin and Bologna: the celebrated Metastasio died in their house, after having lived with the family sixty-five years more or less. They set his poetry and sing it very finely, appearing to recollect his conversation and friendship, with infinite tenderness and delight. He was to have been presented to the Pope the very day he died, I understand, and in the delirium which immediately preceded dissolution he raved much of the supposed interview. Unwilling to hear of death, no one was ever permitted even to mention it before him; and nothing put him so certainly out of humour, as finding that rule transgressed even by his nearest friends. Even the small-pox was not to be named in his presence, and whoever did name that disorder, though unconscious of the offence he had given, Metastasio would see him no more. The other peculiarities I could gather from Miss Martinas were these: That he had contentedly lived half a century at Vienna, without ever even wishing to learn its language; that he had never given more than five guineas English money in all that time to the poor; that he always sat in the same seat at church, but never paid for it, and that nobody dared ask him for the trifling sum; that he was grateful and beneficent to the friends who began by being his protectors, but ended much his debtors, for solid benefits as well as for elegant presents, which it was his delight to be perpetually making them, leaving to them at last all he had ever gained without the charge even of a single legacy; observing in his will that it was to them he owed it, and other conduct would in him have been injustice. Such were the sentiments, and such the conduct of this great poet, of whom it is of little consequence to tell, that he never changed the fashion of his wig, the cut or colour of his coat, so that his portrait taken not very long ago looks like those of Boileau or Moliere at the head of their works. His life was arranged with such methodical exactness, that he rose, studied, chatted, slept, and dined at the same hours for fifty years together, enjoying uninterrupted health, which probably gave him that happy sweetness of temper, or habitual gentleness of manners, which never suffered itself to be ruffled, but when his sole injunction was forgotten, and the death of any person whatever was unwittingly mentioned before him. No solicitation had ever prevailed on him to dine from home, nor had his nearest intimates ever seen him eat more than a biscuit with his lemonade, every meal being performed with even mysterious privacy to the last. When his end approached by steps so very rapid, he did not in the least suspect that it was coming; and Mademoiselle Martinas has scarcely yet done rejoicing in the thought that he escaped the preparations he so dreaded. His early passion for a celebrated singer is well known upon the continent; since that affair finished, all his pleasures have been confined to music and conversation. He had the satisfaction of seeing the seventieth edition of his works I think they said, but am ashamed to copy out the number from my own notes, it seems so very strange; and the delight he took in hearing the lady he lived with sing his songs, was visible to every one. An Italian Abate here said, comically enough, “Oh! he looked like a man in the state of beatification always when Mademoiselle de Martinas accompanied his verses with her fine voice and brilliant finger.” The father of Metastasio was a goldsmith at Rome, but his son had so devoted himself to the family he lived with, that he refused to hear, and took pains not to know, whether he had in his latter days any one relation left in the world. On a character so singular I leave my readers to make their own observations and reflections.
Au reste, as the French say; I have no notion that Vienna, sempre ventoso o velenoso[50], can be a very wholesome place to live in; the double windows, double feather-beds, &c. in a room without a chimney, is surely ill contrived; and sleeping smothered up in down so, like a hydrophobous patient in some parts of Ireland, is not particularly agreeable, though I begin to like it better than I did. All external air is shut out in such a manner that I am frighted lest, after a certain time, the room should become like an exhausted receiver, while the wind whirls one about the street in such a manner that it is displeasing to put out one’s head; and a physician from Ragusa settled here told me, that wounded lungs are a common consequence of the triturated stone blown about here; and in fact asthmas and consumptions are their reigning diseases.