Day after day saw us all busy in ferreting out fine views or old manor-houses—the little Skirrid or old Llangattock. Sometimes we crossed the river and wandered through the delicious lanes of Llanover, or passed through Llanellen on our way to the Blorenge. As our courage and strength expanded, we tried bolder flights—spent a day among the smoke and thunder of the Nantiglo ironworks—with processions of thousands of men hurrying off amidst music, and shouts of the most tremendous loudness, to a dinner at their club. Great, hard-featured, savage-looking fellows they were, though in their holiday attire, and accompanied by one or two of the Bailey family—the real iron kings of the neighbourhood; and a sight of their grim features and brawny arms gave us a more vivid respect for the courage of Sir Thomas Philips, who drove them back from the sack and massacre of Newport; and also a clearer idea of the almost justifiable hardihood of the worshipful Mister Frost, in thinking that with ten or twelve thousand souls, made of fire, and children of the mine, he could upset Old England, and be himself the legitimate successor of King Coal.
Another day we spent among the ruins of Llantony Abbey, one of the finest remains of ecclesiastical architecture in the kingdom. The person who owns the ground and the ruins, is a poet, a philosopher, a scholar, so at least he wishes to be thought; but from the condition of the abbey, (a small pot-house protruding its vulgar sign from one of the noble entrances, and a skittle-ground being established in the main aisle—desolation, neglect, and dirtiness all around,) we formed no very high estimate of the taste or feeling of Mr Walter Savage Landor. If he had no higher object than merely to keep up the beauty of the building, you might expect that he would have guarded it from the degradation of beer, tobacco, and British spirits. A man of a poetical mind would have taken care to prevent such miserable associations as are supplied by a tap and skittle-ground;—a person of loftier and purer sentiments would have shown more reverence for the genius loci, and would have remembered that the walls were once vocal with Christian prayers, and that what in other instances would be only negligence, is profanation here. But probably the innkeeper pays his rent regularly, and we hope will be made the interlocutor in an imaginary conversation with the last abbot of Llantony.
The object we had in coming into Wales was now entirely gained; and after ten weeks most happy wanderings over hill and dale, and constantly breathing the clear fresh air of Monmouthshire, we packed up bag and baggage, and returned to our home with a stock of health laid in for winter use, which will keep us constantly in mind of the benefits we derived from change of scene.
NEAPOLITAN SKETCHES.
Garden of the Villa Reale.
This garden—which, during the winter months, is the lounge of the English idler at Naples, and then looks as flowerless and dingy as Kensington in an east wind—assumes a very different appearance in spring. On the 7th of May, we, who had passed the winter at Rome, were at once struck with the brilliancy of unusual blossoms, and the number of distinguished vegetable foreigners who lifted their heads out of parterres, of the very existence of which in winter one is scarcely conscious. The formal line of clipt Ilex that looks towards the sea, had changed its dusky hue for a warmer tint; statues that had been doing sentinel all the winter without relief, now seem to bend delighted over fragrant flower-beds, and enjoy the spring. Two high shrubs in flower (Metresiglias) hoist from opposite beds, the one its white, the other its red banner. Two of the Muses, the Speciosa and Paravisogna, or bread-tree plant, were raising their light spiry trunks out of a corbeille taller than a life-guardsman. They want no hothouse in Naples:—would you shade your face from the sun, an elsewhere exotic, the Brazilian Camarotta at your feet, furnishes you with a screen. The white flocks of the Acacia verticillata are peeping out from the ranks of those small triangular leaves, which are so singularly attached, without stalks, by one of these angles to the stem. Amidst these pleasant perfumes camphor would be unwelcome, but there is the laurel that yields it. Fennel has here become a tree, in which, like the mustard of the Gospels, the fowls of the air may lodge; we are dwarfs beside it! Three kinds of the soft, slimy Mallow of the Marsh are here so much WOODY and so tall, that we must pick their flowers on tiptoe. The flattened disk of the sky-blue Nana arborea contrasts with the Betula sanguinea, glowing deeply in the flower-bed of many lighter-coloured petals; the sweet-scented African laurel grows against the long-leafed Babylonian willow, which susurrates droopingly over your head, as if it were "by the waters of Babylon." The fountains, with their hydrophilous tribes, add to the charm; and many a beautiful Launaria aquatica had already buoyed himself up on his large cordate leaves on the surface of the tazza, and was filling his vegetable skin with water. All these beauties and peculiarities, a mere scantling of the whole of the Villa Reale, escape the lounger, and the nurserymaids, and children, and those of either sex who have appointments to keep, or to look out for; and the soldiers, and the police, and the Neapolitan nobility and gentry, and the pickpockets, and others:—to the nurseryman and botanist, things not to be forgotten; and at present the weather is not too hot to interfere with their enjoyment.
Servi di Pena.
At Castel Nuovo, a penal settlement of Naples, we held conversation with a man sentenced to the galleys, and wearing, accordingly, a yellow jacket; but yellow is not here, as at Leghorn, the deepest dye. Here, it is red cloth and manacles that go together. We asked him his crime. "Un piccolo omicidio." "A small homicide, provoked by a dispute for a single ducat! I quarrelled with a man now in paradise. I killed him at one stab, but the devil possessed me to give him another colpo di coltello after he had fallen; and as the judges asked me why I did this, and I could not perfectly satisfy them, they concluded I was a sanguinary fellow, and gave me eighteen years galleys—but, as you see, I have no chains; nor ever had—mai! mai!" and he extended his hands in somewhat of the attitude of Raphael's Paul before Festus, to suit the action to the word. "No! he was of a very different order of criminals to a boatful of birboni in red jackets, all bad cases of homicide and robbery!"