As I am far from intending to give my kind readers anything of the nature of a guide-book—a task for which I am utterly unqualified—I will not weary them with an account of how and by what route we found ourselves at the San Marco Hotel at Bologna, the City of Arcades, the capital of jurisprudence, whence came many an astute lawyer, reared in its celebrated university, which has also given the church six sovereign pontiffs, and amongst them the witty and learned Benedict XIV. To Bologna we owe the great school of painting founded by Francia, which boasts of the Caracci, Domenichino, Guido, and his pupil Guercino, besides many others. We thought ourselves unusually accurate and learned, when, on arriving at the Accademia, we asked the surly guardian which way we ought to turn to get to the Pinacoteca; and not till we had, in a more roundabout form, told him we wanted to see the pictures would he condescend from his stolid dignity to tell us where to go. The Francias alone, the S. Cecilia of Raphael, or the Martyrdom of S. Agnes by Domenichino, would be worth a yet longer journey to behold. And the Head of Christ Crowned with Thorns, drawn in crayons by Guido, with stains of damp on the paper, and some slight discoloration from age, leaves an impression on the memory surpassing, to my mind, all that artist's finished paintings. Bologna has set an example our more liberal times, as we are apt to think them, seem unwilling to follow, and are doing so but slowly and grudgingly. The learned ladies [pg 211] who aspire to equality with the other sex might come here in a body, raise the now declining glories of the university, and fill those comparatively empty halls. Bologna has known female lawyers of eminence, and doctors, and at least one surgeon and anatomist of the gentler sex, and has done homage to their learning and merit. Might it not be as well to take advantage of a university so large-minded, and once so celebrated?—convinced, as we are, that if the ladies took the lead, the gentlemen would follow.
We had had the honor many years ago of knowing Cardinal Mezzofanti, so celebrated as a linguist. He was a Bolognese, and had been librarian of the university here, and, when we knew him, occupied an important post in the Vatican library. At that time he had mastered something like forty languages. He told us that, a short time previous, he had been informed there was a poor sailor come to Rome from some out-of-the-way part of the world—Lapland, I believe—who spoke a dialect no one could understand or make anything of; and that the man, being a Catholic, wanted to go to his Easter duties. The cardinal sent for him, and made him discourse in his presence. In two days his eminence was quite ready to hear his confession, and could talk with the man in his own tongue with fluency.
Through the cool, shady arcades of beautiful Bologna we wandered to the Piazza Vittoria Emanuel, which formerly was known by the more honorable name of Piazza del Gigante. The crowd was so great that we could hardly make our way past the groups of peasants and well-to-do farmers, in their warm, brown cloaks, all talking and gesticulating, with apparently nothing else to do. There was a market going on, but not one which seemed of sufficient importance to justify so large a crowd, and which probably collects there daily, about mid-day, out of the abundant leisure which pervades Italian life, even in its most industrious forms. We visited the shrine of S. Dominic, and were long engaged in admiring its extraordinary beauty. The saint died at Bologna in 1221. He was in England when the vision was granted him which revealed to him that, before the next Feast of the Assumption, his earthly career would be closed, and, on arriving at Bologna, had forewarned the students at the university that he was about to leave them. Shortly after, he went to Venice on the affairs of his order. He returned to the monastery of S. Nicholas, at Bologna, in the great heats of the last days of July. The following morning he celebrated his last Mass, and said Office in choir. He then complained of headache, but refused to take any further repose than was obtained by sitting on a sack of wool which happened casually to be at hand. Finding his suffering increase, he sent for the novices, to give them his last exhortation, summing up all in these simple words: “Be filled with charity, keep humility, and observe voluntary poverty.” In the hope that a purer air might benefit their beloved father and founder, they carried him to the Church of S. Mary of the Mount. But the journey, brief as it was, proved rather to have aggravated his condition. Once again he addressed the assembled brethren; and finding that there was some idea of burying him there, instead of in his own monastery, [pg 212] he entreated to be taken back to S. Nicholas, that he might, as he expressed it, be buried beneath the feet of his brothers. They wanted to change his clothes, but discovered he had no others but those he wore. Brother Moneta therefore lent him a habit. He had received the last sacraments at S. Mary's of the Mount; and finding that his disciples, in the excess of their grief, were delaying to read the prayers for the dying, he was the first to beg they would commence. While they prayed around him, his lips silently repeated the words; and when they came to the sentence, “Come to his assistance, ye saints of God. Come forth to meet him, ye angels of the Lord, receiving his soul, and offering it in the sight of the Most High,”[77] he lifted up his hands toward heaven, and at the same moment gave up his pure soul to God.
It was at noon, on Friday, the 6th of August. Thus he reached his home five years before his companion in arms in the warfare of the great church militant, S. Francis of Assisi, who was six years his junior. The last words of the holy dying are ever precious to the Christian world; and it is to be remarked that those of the canonized saints have most frequently been taken from Holy Scripture or from the liturgy of the church. S. Francis died repeating the 141st Psalm; thus his last words were, “Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy name: the just wait for me, until Thou reward me.”
The greater part of our journey to Bologna from Genoa had been through a highly cultivated but flat and uninteresting country. The contrast was great on the railway from Bologna to Florence, with its forty-five tunnels, its sudden turnings and windings, the beautiful valleys of the Apennines, and the mountains themselves looking as if the giant hand of nature had crushed them like rose-leaves, and then flung them down with all the crinkles in them. You look below on fertile fields and beautiful little towns nestling on the sides of green hills, with gardens and meadows smiling in the sunshine. As you are attempting to realize the lovely scene before you, the relentless engine is bringing you nearer to rugged rocks, with hanging woods and fringes of the golden broom. A black cavern yawns in front of you, and in a second you are plunged in darkness. Away you are hurried, with grind, and puff, and roar, regretting the sunny picture from which you have so suddenly been snatched. Just as you are recovering from the shock, again you emerge on a scene as beautiful as the last; and again are you doomed to lose it, almost before your dazzled eyes have recovered from this unnaturally rapid succession of day and night, and which reminded me of a certain planet, where, as astronomers assure us, the inhabitants, if there be any, are exposed to the vicissitudes of several days and nights in the course of our comparatively leisurely space of four-and-twenty hours. I have always ventured to hope they were not also condemned to dress and undress each time; otherwise I think many of them must be tempted to follow the example of that poor gentleman who cut his throat, leaving a paper [pg 213] on the table in which he stated that it was the constant buttoning and unbuttoning which had been too much for him.
Nothing can exceed the beauty of the view as the plain of Tuscany opens before you. We had seen it two-and-twenty years ago, before any railroads were there to cut short the delights of travelling. We had gazed long and lingeringly from out the windows of our travelling-carriage, while the setting sun left his last kiss on the mountain heights, and the evening mists gathered below. I, for one, had never seen it since. But sometimes in my dreams that view had come back to me, and, when I awoke, it Was still there. Sometimes the phantasmagoria of the mind had suddenly unfolded it before my memory without my being able to say when and where I had painted that picture on my brain. And now I saw it again; and suddenly all those broken recollections seemed to gather themselves together, and unroll before me, while my soul whispered, “Here is the reality of what for so many years has haunted you, and which you have so often been tempted to believe was a trick of your imagination. It is a fact; and you can recall it and put it together, piece by piece; as you will do, far more perfectly, the broken and half-forgotten fragments of your life when the barrier of death is passed.”
The only other wide expanse which has left the same impression on my imagination, waking and sleeping, is the view from the beautiful viaduct at Aricia, as it first burst upon me—the vast campagna and the crimson lights of the setting sun.
This was our first visit to Florence since the government had taken possession of the Dominican church and monastery of San Marco, and opened the latter as a museum to the public in 1869; so that my old jealousy that Frank could gaze at those wonderfully lovely angels of Fra Angelico was now at an end. I do not think there is a cell without some exquisitely devotional painting by the monk-artist, whose every picture is an embodied meditation and a prayer. We paused long in the two cells where Savonarola had lived and studied and suffered. The old question forced itself upon me as to what had been the real character of that grand, imposing figure, which fills so large a page in the history of Florence—the hard-featured reformer, the man of relentless will and burning eloquence. Where was the little rift in the flute which jarred that celestial music? Where was the flaw in the gem which spoiled its intrinsic value? And which was the snare in his life which prevented his growing on into heroic virtue? His gifts and graces were immense, and, at one time at least, so supernatural that they seemed at once the guarantee and the pledge that he would die a saint in the highest acceptation of the word. Frank, who has read a great deal about him, written by all sides, is persuaded that it was a form of spiritual pride and dependence on himself that ruined all. Of course, at this distance of time, and judging only from existing documents, no one can say when precisely this began—when the annihilation of self first gave place to an inner complacency; when that heart, covered, as before, with the rude hair-shirt, began to throb with a secret sentiment of personal satisfaction in the graces [pg 214] God had given. It must have been long, if ever, before those set, stern features began to betray that another spirit had entered into the soul of the ascetic monk, which gradually was tarnishing the purity of his spiritual life. But when the end came, and he bowed to death in its most dreadful form, hurried on by the malignity of his enemies—who, having once laid their hand on their prey, feared lest the mercy of Rome should be enlightened to arrest its own mandate—can any doubt that the man who had done so much in a holy cause, and had so decried the pomp and pride of life, found all the graces attached to a great and accepted sacrifice?
We hurry from Florence. And though I might linger over my pages, and make my story more full of information, and possibly of interest, I yet refrain from anything that may trench on the character of mere sketches, which alone I aim at. Frank forms one of a deputation to the Holy Father, and he was to reach Rome by a certain day. We arrived long enough before that date to establish ourselves in a house in the Ripetta, overlooking the yellow Tiber. Charon, mild, modern, and a Roman, ferries his boat just beneath our windows. The rope is fastened to a stake on our balcony, and makes a creaking noise as the boat crosses the river, to which we are so habituated that we think it musical. Charon wears a glazed hat, and affects a nautical air quite uncalled for, considering his limited navigation. For the moderate fee of one half-penny he conveys his passengers to and fro across the classic river. Landed on the opposite shore, we pass along a narrow lane, on one side limited by a high wall, on the other by a green bank paved with violet-leaves. Modern violet-leaves, but doubtless descendants of those that fell beneath the coulter of Cincinnatus' plough along these Quintian fields that early morn when the anxious senate went to call the half-naked hero to another and less peaceful field, and bade him cross the Tiber (where we have done), and turn his plough-share into a sword against those ever-recurring Volsci and Æqui. Let the violets grow, O warrior ploughman! and in a few brief days thou shalt return to find the little purple flowers ready to hail thy triumph. Shall we see Racilia behind the tall vine-poles, bearing the toga that is to cover the brawny shoulders of the noble laborer? Or have these familiar idyls of our early life lost their charm in the sterner and more assured memories of Christian Rome?
The narrow, violet-bordered lane leads into wide fields and to the fortifications of the Castle of Sant' Angelo. We are outside the gates of the city. The white walls of Rome stand glittering in the sunshine to our left; to our right lies the green, undulating Campagna; and before us are the heights of Monte Mario, pine-crowned.