Let me remind my readers that in the English burial-place at Naples was laid one of the very greatest and best of Englishwomen—the late Mrs. Somerville—where a marble monument has been placed over her grave by her daughter. It represents her, heroic size, reclining on a classic chair, in somewhat the attitude of the statue of Agrippa in the Vatican. It is a shame that she was not buried in Westminster Abbey. When asked, Dean Stanley assented, as was to be expected, freely to the proposal. Mrs. Somerville’s nephew, Sir William Fraser, promised at once to defray all expenses. There was only one thing further needed, and that was the usual formal request from some public body or official persons to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster. Dean Stanley immediately wrote to the Astronomer Royal and the President of the Royal Society, as representative of the science with which Mrs. Somerville was immediately connected, to ask him to authorize the Dean proceeding in the matter. But that gentleman refused to do so on the ground that he had never read Mrs. Somerville’s books. ‘Whether he had read,’ writes Miss Cobbe, commenting indignantly on the above, ‘one in which she took the opposite side from his in the bitter Adam Le Verrier controversy, it is not for me to say.’ Any way, jealousy, either scientific or masculine, declined to admit Mrs. Somerville’s claim to a place in our national Walhalla, where so many men neither intellectually nor morally her equal have been received.
In one respect Naples has improved since I was here last. The drainage has been rendered better, and the fearful odours that met you at every turn have disappeared. The poor are indolent, dirty, thriftless, and ill-housed; but that does not much matter, as most of their lives are passed in the open air. The convents are suppressed, the schoolmaster is abroad, and they may grow better as the years roll by, and Italy, as a nation, once more becomes great and renowned. But a good deal has yet to be done. I heard of things to be seen in Naples of the most disgraceful and disgusting character. At the dawn of the Reformation Naples took the lead among the Italian cities in the adoption of its principles. Then came a bitter persecution, and the triumphs of the Pope and the Inquisition. As the result, Naples has been given up for years to the most abject superstition, and its people have become the most ignorant and demoralized in Europe. But the city is full of life—far more so than is to be found in any other Italian city. Such talking, shouting, and rushing to and fro can hardly be found anywhere else. Nowhere is there more life than is to be seen on the Toledo. One of the quaintest objects is that of the letter-writer, seated at his desk in the open air, with his clients waiting to have their letters written—some of business, some of love. The cab-driver is better than he looks, and it is not difficult to get along with him. But you must be on your guard with waiters. More than once one has come to me with a bad franc, which he pretended I had given him; but I turned a deaf ear to his complaint, and
If you want to visit Vesuvius, apply at Cook’s offices, where you will find everything arranged for you in the most agreeable manner, and no difficulty of any kind. His funicular railway is one of the wonders of the place. The ascent of the cone requires two hours’ hard walking in deep ashes and on hard rubble lava—an undertaking not very pleasant for people affected with delicate hearts and constitutions, or bordering on old age. Get into one of Cook’s railway cars, and you are up in a few minutes. At the lower station there is an excellent restaurant belonging to the wonderful John Cook, whose headquarters are the Piazzi del Martini. I dined once at his restaurant at the foot of the cone, and it is one of the few dinners in my life to which I look back with pleasure. I had a friend with me, of course. It is never pleasant to travel—at any rate, in a foreign country—alone. We had a good rumpsteak and French beans, an omelette, and a bottle of the wine whose praises were sung by Horace when the world was much younger and fresher than it is now. After dinner we sat on the terrace, drinking black coffee and smoking cigars. Of course, as an Englishman, it gave me pleasure to reflect that our beautiful Princess of Wales had been there before me in 1893, with Victoria of Wales, the Duke of York, and a distinguished suite. As I sat smoking, it seemed to me as if I was monarch of all I surveyed. Naples was at my feet, far away behind was the green Campagna, with but here and there a solitary dwelling, and before me, in all its glory, the bay and its islands. If old Sam Rogers had gone up there to write his ‘Italy,’ I think he would have done better than he did—at any rate, I was never so near heaven before; and this reminds me that I have said nothing of the means of grace available to English Protestants when they come to Naples. There is an English Church in the San Pasquale à Chiagia, a Scotch Presbyterian opposite Cook’s offices, and a Methodist.
There are many ways of getting to Naples. I came this time overland by Paris and Marseilles, and thence, as I have said, by the Midnight Sun. If the weather is fine, and the Bay of Biscay in good form, I prefer to come by the Orient steamers right away from London. You have then no trouble till you land in Naples. We leave Black Care behind as we slip out of English fog and cold into the region of cloudless skies and starry nights. We smoke, or read, or feed, or walk the deck, or talk in the pleasantest manner. Perhaps we get a glimpse of Finisterre. Heroic memories come to us as we pass the seas where the Captain was lost—it is to be feared in consequence of defective seamanship. All along the coast and on those faraway hills the noise of battle rolled, and not in vain, for the struggle that ended in Waterloo placed England in the first rank among the nations of the earth.
As soon as we cross the bay we think of Corunna and Sir John Moore. Afar off are the memorable heights of Torres Vedras. Cape St. Vincent, a bluff sixty feet high, with a convent and a lighthouse, reminds one of the brilliant victory won by Sir John Jervis, with Nelson and Collingwood fighting under him; and in a little while we are at Trafalgar, to which sailors still look as the greatest sea-fight in the history of our land, and as the one that saved the nation; and then you spend a day at Gibraltar. A Yankee friend once said to me, ‘I must go back to America. I can’t stay any longer in Europe; I shall get too conceited if I do.’ I, too, feel conceited as I skirt along that romantic coast, which you sight in a few hours after leaving Plymouth. Englishmen are always grumbling. There is no country like England; and an Englishman who is not proud of his native land, and ready to make every sacrifice for her, ought to be shot, and would be if I had my way.
CHAPTER IV.
POMPEII AND VESUVIUS.
It is needless to write that no one can go to Naples without paying a visit to Pompeii, if he would get a true idea of a Roman city, with its streets, and shops, and baths, and forum, and temples; and it is as well to read over Bulwer’s ‘Last Days of Pompeii’—that master work of genius, compared with which our present popular novels are poor indeed—and then let the reader spend an entire day, if he can, among the Pompeiian remains, in the museum at Naples, which Garibaldi, when Dictator of Naples, handed over to the people. Pompeii is easy of access by the railway, which lands you at the very spot, after a short but pleasant trip. Much can be accomplished there and back for a little more than three francs. On Sundays Pompeii can be visited for nothing; on other days the charge is one franc, and when you have paid the guide the franc, I think you will agree with me that in no other part of the world can you see so much that is truly wonderful at so small an expense. Close to the gate are a hotel—the Hôtel du Diomede—and a restaurant, at either of which you can get all the refreshments you require; and if it is too hot to walk—and in the summer months Pompeii is a very hot place indeed—there are chairs in the grounds in which you can be carried all round and see all that is to be seen at very little personal fatigue.
Pompeii is spread out in an elliptical form on the brow of a hill, and extends over a space of nearly two miles. On one side of you is Vesuvius, and on the other the blue waters of the bay. One of the towns through which you pass in the train is Portici, the ancient Herculaneum; as it is, you are lost in wonder at the awful extent of the catastrophe which turned all this smiling land into a scene of desolation and death, and which, at any rate, led to the extinction of one philosophic career—that of the elder Pliny, a real victim to the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties. At the time of its visitation, Pompeii is reputed to have had a population of about 26,000.