How easy is it in this way to enter another’s soul, to share in its tribulation, to sink as deeply into it as to reach its self-love, and learn how like it is to our own!
My friend Dr. Ewart, a physician now to St. George’s Hospital, and a distinguished writer on chest-affections, sent me a friendly letter to Professor Schiff of Florence, of which I availed myself largely. It was at that time, too, that Madox Brown sent me a letter to Colonel Gillum, at whose house I first met Madame Mazzini. Dr. Schiff had the lead in science on nerve-function, and I constantly attended his demonstrations. They were always performed on anæstheticized dogs. I learned much of him. He was greatly esteemed by the Florentine Government, by whom he was given apartments in the vacated convent of Sta. Annunciata, together with the extensive garden.
Professor Schiff was not a man of the Majendie kind who could drown all consciousness of animal suffering in the pleasure of reading science out of a living book; he was benevolent, and he guarded carefully against the creature on which he operated being alive to pain. But his emotional enemies were too strong for him; they were chiefly some English of fashion, and they got Capponi on their side; the most deservedly esteemed of Florentine nobles, whose residence was opposite to that of the professor.
This led to a correspondence between the neighbours, which ended for a time in Schiff convincing Capponi that no cruelty was practised, and that the operations on animals were painless.
However, Schiff had many animals; the municipality had ordered the police to supply the professor with all stray dogs, for which they could discover no owner. There was one dog amongst these that would bay the moon in spite of every effort to silence its superstitious moanings; and the enemy hearing this, interviewed Capponi again, and told him that Schiff was known to torture his dogs in the night season.
Capponi, in his palace opposite, had only too surely heard those midnight wailings.
The appointment of Professor Schiff to a chair of physiology and to the hospital was a Government one; his diagnosis of disease was regarded as remarkably rapid and successful. At his house, which was graced by Madame Schiff and her daughter, ladies of high culture, I met many interesting persons, one especially, a Moscow lady, who every year went to St. Petersburg, thence to Florence, thence to the Isle of Wight, where she had grandchildren at school and where she visited her friends, Lord and Lady Cottenham.
I speak of this lady because her love of our country almost amounted to a passion. The people, she said, were so kind; strangers would stop to help her from a railway carriage! Then the Isle of Wight, how lovely! Fuchsias flowering in the hedgerows, and climbing up the cottage walls!
As in Germany the “Vicar of Wakefield” is in every cottage, so, she said, is “Paradise Lost” in every Russian home.
I wish that I could give her name.