STEAM-BOATIANA.
The Francesco Primo was to leave the harbour at ten o'clock. Better acquaintance with Mediterannean pyroscaphs, as they call themselves, whose axle-trees turn not except when the police pleases, ought to have led us to all the latitude of uncertainty; but when two hours and more had elapsed with all the passengers aboard, we began to suppose some extraordinary cause for so long a detention. A deputation is accordingly dispatched to the captain, which brings back an abrupt reply, that he is not going yet; and that it is for him and the proprietors to be dissatisfied, who are wasting steam, while we are only losing patience. It shortly transpired that he was under Government orders, and would not proceed for another hour at least, nor even then, unless he received permission from the minister of police. The affair now looked serious. We must have some carbonaro on board, who was, in due time, to be arrested; and no further doubt could remain of this, when, that other hour being past, we saw a longboat leaving shore, with two officers and six stout rowers, who soon brought her under our bow. What can it be? The senior epaulet rises in the boat—the second follows his example—both are on deck; the captain, hitherto unseen, now comes forward with alacrity, and, stretching forward both his hands, receives with profound reverence a thin, square enclosure, with an immense seal attached to it, and retires to put it in a place of safety. The uniforms disappear over the side of the vessel—the paddles begin to paw the water—we swing round—and in a few seconds our prow points for the Sorrentine coast, and we are on our watery way to Sicily. What, then, had detained us? It is always very provoking to have a miserable solution of a promising mystery! We were on the exact spot for a new edition of some "Verbosa et grandis Epistola" from the tyrants of the land; and so it was, but only not from Capreæ or Tiberius this time. Yes! The actual cause of the delay of a great steam-boat, full of passengers, for three hours, attended, among other melancholy results, with that of exciting the choler of a new-made cardinal, was a letter that the Queen of Naples, who had probably overslept herself, had occasion to write to the king on conjugal affairs!—his majesty having left her majesty only the day before, to show himself to his loving subjects at Palermo. Hem! Campania felix! If we were known to be inditing this unreverential passage, and its disloyal apostrophe, we should, no doubt, be invited to leave "Campania the happy" at a day's notice; whereas our comfort is, that this day three months it is quite possible that it will have been read in Bengal!
We are now in the middle of the Bay of Naples; the spot from which panoramas have been so often sketched on that noble elevation, the deck of a lofty ship, swinging on her cables. What numberless sites of unparallelled interest are hence visible to the newly arrived and insatiable stranger! Misenum, Baiæ, Puteoli, Gaurus, Vesuvius, Herculaneum, Pompeii! But the office of the cicerone here cannot—alas for Britain!—be confined to the old classics, or the mere indication of places whose very names are things to conjure with! In America, we converse with nature only, whose voice is in her woods and waterfalls; but, in our threadbare Europe, all sites are historical, and chiefly in one sad sense—for Waterloo only brings up the rear of fields illustrated by the wholesale destruction of mankind! In the position which we now occupy, volumes might be written—ay, and have been written.
Look at that proud, impregnable Castle of St Elmo, culminating over all Naples! Look at those sea-washed fortresses which guard the entrance of her harbour! The garrisons of those strong places having, in the year 1799, from the turn of public affairs, judged it expedient to capitulate to Ferdinand and his allies, on conditions which should leave their honour without blemish, and assure their own safety and that of the city; and this capitulation having been solemnly accepted and ratified by Cardinal Ruffo, as the king's legate and plenipotentiary, by the late Sir Edward Foote, as acting commodore of the British force, and by the representatives of two European governments, officially residing in the revolutionized city, and the surrender of the forts having accordingly taken place, it came to pass, in an evil hour, that Lord Nelson, entering the bay as commander-in-chief, took upon himself the odious responsibility of rescinding the British guarantee, and of supporting Ferdinand, powerless but through him, in his refusal to hold himself bound by a convention made by his own viceroy!—thus delivering over the defenceless city to its own implacable sovereign. Then came a political persecution unknown in the annals of mankind; till, hebetes lasso lictore secures, even Naples could bear no more! The noblest blood and the most distinguished talent were no protection at the bar of a special tribunal, with a low-born monster at its head, not surpassed in its atrocities by the revolutionary tyrants of Paris and of Lyons. The ships shared the infamy; the venerable and noble Caraccioli, seventy-five years of age, himself an admiral, was the first piaculum! Summarily condemned by a court-martial held on board Nelson's flag-ship, he was executed like a felon, and cast overboard from a Neapolitan frigate floating on the same anchorage, and subject to the same authority!
But Nelson's star was then in the ascendant; the presence and notorious influence of Emma Hamilton in these frightful transactions, was unaccountably connived at by the British nation. The officer who has been a party to a convention, which his commander-in-chief thinks proper not only to disapprove but to violate, must inevitably suffer in that fame and popularity which our public services so justly cherish. And in the state of men's passions during that memorable war, so that it were against the French, a successful commander-in-chief could do no wrong! Yet here, probably, the matter would have rested; but when, nine years afterwards, Stanier Clarke so little appreciated the duty of a biographer as to relate a transaction susceptible of no excuse, in terms unjustified by the facts, and sought to render his hero immaculate at the expense of others, the excellent officer whose feelings and character had been so cruelly sacrificed, felt himself compelled at last to publish his "Vindication," judicious in every thing but the title. He most properly printed the Convention itself in the original words, and with all the signatures it bore. Such works, however, even when the affairs they refer to are recent, are never read but by friends—or enemies. A late atonement was made by William IV. in conferring on Sir Edward Foote a titular distinction, which the public heed not; but the tables are now turned, and Europe, taught by Cuoco, Coletta, and by Botta, the great historian of Italy, has irrevocably closed this great account. The name of Foote is recorded in all their pages in terms which, had he seen them, might well have consoled him for the past; while the last and most popular biographer of Nelson (Southey) feels himself compelled to admit, and the frank admission does him infinite honour, that this is a passage of his hero's life which the muse of history "must record with sorrow and with shame."
But the sea spray is dashing splendidly on our bows—we are clearing Capri, and have, as we pass it, a fine view of that high and precipitous rock, thinking of Tiberius and the soothsayer Thrasyllus, and of all the monstrous scenes which those unapproachable cliffs concealed from the indignation even of a Roman world. But twilight was already coming on, and the city and the coast were gradually withdrawn from the panorama—dark night came rushing over the deep, an Italian summer's night, and yet with no stars or moon; meanwhile steadily rides our vessel along the Calabrian waters, confident alike of her strength and her bearings, which we soon left her to pursue, and went down to see what the cabin and the company promised below. And thus the hours passed away; and when the suspended lamp began to burn dimly under the skylight, and grey morning found stealthy admittance through the cabin windows, although we had been unable to sleep, the anticipation of all the marvels we were to see in Sicily had answered the purpose of a night's rest, and sent us active and alert on deck to fresh air and the rising sun. Nor were we a moment too soon. A large flotilla of little boats manœuvring between two of larger size, placed to defend the space destined for their operations, were now in the full activity of the thunny and spada fishery; and a most picturesque rock, right over our bow, proved to be no other than Monte Pelegrino, at the foot of which lay Palermo and our breakfast—in short, after a voyage of little more than a summer's night, we are again on terra firma, if that name can be given to volcanic soils, and long before noon are actively engaged in perambulating the streets of the Sicilian capital of the fæcunda Panormos.
Among the most striking peculiarities of the interior or street views, presented to the stranger's eye at Palermo, are its very unusually situated convents, buildings which, even in cities, are commonly and naturally in retirement; but here, in whichever of the most public ways you walk, a number of extraordinary trellised balconies are observed on the upper stories of almost every large house, while business and bustle of all kinds are transacted as usual in the street below. You may well be surprised to see the nunnery over the Marchande de Modes! The unhappy inmates thus tormented by the sight and sound of worldly activity, have not in Palermo even the solace of a garden; and if these places of more than usual mortification have any connexion with the world without, it is by an under-ground passage to some church in the neighbourhood! Thither repair the poor victims of superstition to warble Aves to the Virgin behind their screens, and then back again to their monotonous cloister. There are twenty-four nunneries in the city of Palermo alone, each containing from thirty to sixty women, and there are as many monasteries! With open doors like coffee-houses, full upon the street, are placed at Palermo innumerable consulting shops of so many lawyers; the earliest to begin business, the last to close, you may have the luxury of law at any hour of the day till bedtime. Nay, your Sicilian lawyer, unlike the lazy tradesman who puts up his shutters and sleeps from twelve to four, takes no siesta; his atra janua lilis is always open, and there sit the firm, one listening to a client, another smoking a cigar, a third chatting with an acquaintance over his coffee or the newspaper. Scarcely less mischievous than these sowers of dissension, is the barber-surgeon, who still flourishes in Trinacria. The bleeding arm over the peruke shop is often to be seen in Rome and Naples; but at Palermo almost at every third house, you read Salassatore over a half-naked figure in wood or canvass, erect like Seneca in his bath, or monumentally recumbent, the blood spouting, like so many Tritons, from twenty orifices at once. Led by professional curiosity, we enter one of these open doors; and, desiring the ordinary service of the razor, and intending to ask some questions parenthetically touching the double craft, we have scarcely occupied the chair, when a smart youth comes up with a razor and a lancet, and quietly asks "Which?" Why, surely he could not think of bleeding us without a warrant for our needing it. "Eperchè? Adesso vi le dîrò subito—Why not? I'll tell you whether you want it without a doctor,"—feeling for our pulse. "Non c'è male—not so much amiss," pursued the functionary; "but a few ounces bleeding would do you no harm! Your hand is hot, it must be several months since you were last bled!" "A year." "Too long: you should be bled, at your age, at least twice a-year if you would keep your health!" "What amount of depletion did he recommend?" "Depende—di sei a dieci oncie," at which portion of the dialogue our mouth was shut to all further interrogations by a copious supply of soap-suds, and now he became the tonsor only, and declares against the mode in which we have our hair cut: "They have cut your hair, Signor, à condannato—nobody adopts the toilette of the guillotine now; it should have been left to grow in front à la Plutus, or have been long at the sides à la Nazarène, which is the mode most of our Sicilian gentlemen prefer." We were about to rise, wash, and depart, but an impediment is offered by the artist. "Non l'ho raffinato ancora, Signor, bisogna raffinarlo un poco!" and before we could arrive at the occult meaning of raffinare, his fingers were exploring very technically and very disagreeably the whole surface over which his razor had travelled, and a number of supplementary scrapings were only stopped by an impatient basta of the victim. Still he was unwilling to part with us. Would we like, now that we are on the spot, to lose a few ounces of blood before he takes a stranger in hand, (who is waiting for the one or other operation;) and, as we most positively declined, he turned to the latter to ask him whether he was come for his "piccolo salassio di sei oncie." "Gia!" said Signor Antonio, taking off his coat, and sitting down with as much sangfroid as if he were going to take his breakfast. "Can you shave me?" asks a third party, standing at the door. "Adesso," after I have bled this gentleman. Such are all the interiors where Salassatore is written over the door; they bleed and they shave indifferently, and doing either, talk of the last take of thunny, the opera that has been or is to be, and the meagre skimmings of their permitted newspaper, which begins probably with the advertisement of a church ceremony, and ends always with a charade—for our subscribers!!
CHURCHES.
The clergy are wealthy, the bishop's salary is 18,000 scudi, and many of the convents are very opulent; but there is scarcely one of the churches which you care to visit twice. Most of them are disgraced by vulgar ornaments, in which respect they surpass even the worst specimens at Naples! Gilt stucco, cut and stamped into flowery compartments, shows off like a huge twelfth cake! but the Matrice or Duomo, and the Saracenic Chapel of the Palazzo Reale, and the cathedral of Monreale, four miles beyond the town, are noble exceptions; these in their several ways are all interesting, both within and without. The old Siculo-Norman archway of Monreale, and its fine bronze gates crusted with a beautiful hard polished coin-like patina, would repay the excursion, even were the interior less fine. Here we have columns from whose high architraves the Gothic arch springs vigorously; walls perfectly covered with old Byzantine mosaics; a roof of marvellous lightness, and almost modern elegance; still the critic, who is bound by métier to find fault with violated canons, will, we must own, be at no loss for a text in the church of Monreale—a building which is, however, of sufficient importance in ecclesiastical architecture to have been designed, measured, and engraved, in whole and in part, in a splendid volume, published in folio, by the Duke of Serra di Falco.