Lear.
The romantic traveler who enters Italy at Leghorn, cannot but feel disappointed. No antiquated repose broods, like a dream, over the scene; no architectural wonders arrest the eye. The quays present the same bustle and motley groups observable in every commercial town; and were it not for the galley slaves, whose fetters clank in the thoroughfares, and the admirable bronze group, by Pietro Tacco, around the statue of Ferdinand I., it would be difficult to point out any distinctive feature amid the commonplace associations of the spot. To a stranger’s eye, however, the principal street affords many objects of diversion. The variety of costume and physiognomy is striking in a place where pilgrims and merchants, Turks and Jews, burly friars and delicate invalids are promiscuously clustered; and one cannot long gaze from an adjacent balcony, without discovering some novel specimen of humanity. A more secluded and melancholy resort is the English burying-ground, where hours may be mused away in perusing the inscriptions that commemorate the death of those who breathed their last far from country and home. The cemeteries devoted to foreign sepulture, near some of the Italian cities, are quite impressive in their isolated beauty. There, in the language of a distant country, we read of the young artist suddenly cut off at the dawn of his career, and placed away with a fair monument to guard his memory, by his sorrowful associates, who long since have joined their distant kindred. Another stone marks the crushed hopes of children who brought their dying mother to this clime in the vain expectation to see her revive. Names, too, not unknown to fame, grace these snowy tablets—the last and affecting memorials of departed genius. Monte Nero is an agreeable retreat in the vicinity where the Italians make their villeggiatura, and the foreigners ride in the summer evenings, to inhale the cheering breeze from the sea. Leghorn was formerly subject to Genoa, and remained a comparatively unimportant place until Cosmo I. exchanged for it the Episcopal town of Sarzana. I had quite exhausted the few objects of interest around me, and my outward resources were reduced to hearing Madame Ungher in Lucrezia Borgia in the evening, and dining in the afternoon in the pleasant garden of a popular restaurant; when, one day as I was walking along a crowded street, my attention was arrested by a singular figure ensconced in the doorway of a fashionable inn. It was a lank, sharp-featured man, clad in linsey-woolsey, with a white felt hat on his head and an enormous twisted stick in his hand. He was looking about him with a shrewd gaze in which inquisitiveness and contempt were strangely mingled. The moment I came opposite to him, he drew a very large silver watch from his fob, and, after inspecting it for a moment with an impatient air, exclaimed,
“I say, stranger, what time do they dine in these parts?”
“At this house the dinner hour is about five.”
“Five! why I’m half starved and its only twelve. I can’t stand it later than two. I say, I guess you’re from the States?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you came here to be cured of dyspepsy?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, I’m glad of it, for it’s a plaguy waste of money. I just arrived from New Orleans, and there was a man on board who made the trip all on account of dyspepsy. I as good as told him he was a fool for his pains. I know a thing or two, I guess. You see that stick? Well, with that stick I’ve killed six alligators. There’s only one thing that’s a certain cure for dyspepsy.
“And what’s that?”