After being gratified for some hours with the cultivated beauty of the scene (rendered more striking by contrast with our late perils), we came to the brow of the hill overlooking Florence, which lay under us, a scene of enchantment, a city planted in a garden, and resembling a rich and varied suburb. The whole presented a brilliant amphitheatre of hill and vale, of buildings, groves, and terraces. The circling heights were crowned with sparkling villas; the varying landscape, above or below, waved in an endless succession of olive-grounds. The olive is not unlike the common willow in shape or colour, and being still in leaf, gave to the middle of winter the appearance of a grey summer. In the midst, the Duomo and other churches raised their heads; vineyards and olive-grounds climbed the hills opposite till they joined a snowy ridge of Apennines rising above the top of Fesole; one plantation or row of trees after another fringed the ground, like rich lace; though you saw it not, there flowed the Arno; every thing was on the noblest scale, yet finished in the minutest part—the perfection of nature and of art, populous, splendid, full of life, yet simple, airy, embowered. Florence in itself is inferior to Bologna, and some other towns; but the view of it and of the immediate neighbourhood is superior to any I have seen. It is, indeed, quite delicious, and presents an endless variety of enchanting walks. It is not merely the number or the exquisiteness or admirable combination of the objects, their forms or colour, but every spot is rich in associations at once the most classical and romantic. From my friend L. H.’s house at Moiano, you see at one view the village of Setiniano, belonging to Michael Angelo’s family, the house in which Machiavel lived, and that where Boccaccio wrote, two ruined castles, in which the rival families of the Gerardeschi and the —— carried on the most deadly strife, and which seem as though they might still rear their mouldering heads against each other; and not far from this the Valley of Ladies (the scene of The Decameron), and Fesole, with the mountains of Perugia beyond. With a view like this, one may think one’s sight ‘enriched,’ in Burns’s phrase. On the ascent towards Fesole is the house where Galileo lived, and where he was imprisoned after his release from the Inquisition, at the time Milton saw him.[[40]] In the town itself are Michael Angelo’s house, the Baptistery, the gates of which he thought worthy to be the gates of Paradise, the Duomo, older than St. Peter’s, the ancient Palace of the Medici family, the Palace Pitti, and here also stands the statue that ‘enchants the world.’ The view along the Arno is certainly delightful, though somewhat confined, and the bridges over it grotesque and old, but beautiful.
The streets of Florence are paved entirely with flag-stones, and it has an odd effect at first to see the horses and carriages drive over them. You get out of their way, however, more easily than in Paris, from not having the slipperiness of the stones to contend with. The streets get dirty after a slight shower, and the next day you have clouds of dust again. Many of the narrower streets are like lofty paved courts, cut through a solid quarry of stone. In general, the public buildings are old, and striking chiefly from their massiness and the quaintness of the style and ornaments. Florence is like a town that has survived itself. It is distinguished by the remains of early and rude grandeur; it is left where it was three hundred years ago. Its history does not seem brought down to the present period. On entering it, you may imagine yourself enclosed in a besieged town; if you turn down any of its inferior streets, you feel as if you might meet the plague still lurking there. Even the walks out of the town are mostly between high stone-walls, which are a bad substitute for hedges. The best and most fashionable is that along the river-side; and the gay dresses and glittering equipages passing under the tall cedar-trees, and with the purple hills in the distance for a back-ground, produce a delightful effect, particularly when seen from the opposite side of the river. The carriages in Florence are numerous and splendid, and rival those in London. Lord Burghersh’s, with its six horses and tall footmen in fine liveries, is only distinguishable from the rest by the little child in a blue velvet hat and coat, looking out at the window. The Corso on Sundays, and on other high days and holidays, is filled with a double row of open carriages, like the ring in Hyde-Park, moving slowly in opposite directions, in which you see the flower of the Florentine nobility. I see no difference between them and the English, except that they are darker and graver. It was Carnival-time when we came, and the town presented something of the same scene that London does at Bartholomew-Fair. The streets were crowded with people, half of them masked. But what soon took off from the gaiety of the motley assemblage was, that you found that the masks were all the same. There was great observance of the season, and great good-will to be pleased, but a dearth of wit and invention. Not merely the uniformity of the masks grew tiresome, but the seeing an inflexible pasteboard countenance moving about upon a living body (and without any thing quaint or extravagant in the actions of the person to justify a resort to so grotesque a disguise) shocked by its unmeaning incongruity. May-day in London is a favourable version of the Carnival here. The finery of the chimney-sweepers is an agreeable and intelligible contrast to their usual squalidness. Their three days’ license has spirit, noise, and mirth in it; whereas the dull eccentricity and mechanical antics of the Carnival are drawled out till they are merged without any violent effort in the solemn farce of Lent. It had been a fine season this year, and it is said that the difference between a good season and a bad one to the trades-people is so great, that it pays the rent of their houses. No one is allowed to wear a mask, after Lent commences, and the priests never mask. There is no need that they should. There is no ringing of bells here as with us (triple bob-majors have not sent their cheering sound into the heart of Italy); but during the whole ten days or fortnight that the Carnival continues, there is a noise and jangling of bells, such as is made by the idle boys in a country town on our Shrove Tuesday. We could not tell exactly what to make of the striking of the clocks at first: at eight they struck two; at twelve six. We thought they were put back to prevent the note of time, or were thrown into confusion to accord with the license of the occasion. A day or two cleared up the mystery, and we found that the clocks here (at least those in our immediate neighbourhood) counted the hours by sixes, instead of going on to twelve—which method, when you are acquainted with it, saves time and patience in telling the hour. I have only heard of two masks that seemed to have any point or humour in them; and one of these was not a mask, but a person who went about with his face uncovered, but keeping it, in spite of every thing he saw or heard, in the same unmoved position as if it were a mask. The other was a person so oddly disguised, that you did not know what to make of him, whether he were man or woman, beast or bird, and who, pretending to be equally at a loss himself, went about asking every one, if they could tell him what he was? A Neapolitan nobleman who was formerly in England (Count Acetto), carried the liberty of masking too far. He went to the English Ambassador’s in the disguise of a monk, carrying a bundle of wood at his back, with a woman’s legs peeping out, and written on a large label, ‘Provision for the Convent.’ The clergy, it is said, interfered, and he has been exiled to Lucca. Lord Burghersh remonstrated loudly at this step, as a violation of the dignity and privileges of Ambassadors. The offence, whatever it was, was committed at his house, and the English Ambassador’s house is supposed to be in England—the absentees here were alarmed, for at this rate strangers might be sent out of the town at an hour’s notice for a jest. The Count called in person on the Grand Duke, who shook him kindly by the hand—the Countess Rinuccini demanded an interview with the Grand Duchess—but the clergy must be respected, and the Count has been sent away. There has been a good deal of talk and bustle about it—ask the opinion of a dry Scotchman, who judges of every thing by precedent, and he will tell you, ‘It is just like our Alien Bill.’ It is a rule here that a priest is never brought upon the stage. How do they contrive to act our Romeo and Juliet? Molière’s Tartuffe is not a priest, but merely a saint. When this play was forbidden to be acted a second time by the Archbishop of Paris, and the audience loudly demanded the reason of its being withdrawn, Molière came forward and said, ‘Monsieur l’Archevêque ne veut pas qu’il soit joué?’ This was a hundred and fifty years ago. With so much wit and sense in the world one wonders that there are any Tartuffes left in it; but for the last hundred and fifty years, it must be confessed, they have had but an uneasy life of it.
Lent is not kept here very strictly. The streets, however, have rather a ‘fishy fume’ in consequence of it; and, generally speaking, the use of garlick, tobacco, cloves and oil gives a medicated taint to the air. The number of pilgrims to Rome, at this season, is diminished from 80 or 90,000 a century ago, to a few hundreds at present. We passed two on the road, with their staff and scrip and motley attire. I did not look at them with any particle of respect. The impression was, that they were either knaves or fools. The farther they come on this errand, the more you have a right to suspect their motives, not that I by any means suppose these are always bad—but those who signalise their zeal by such long marches obtain not only absolution for the past, but extraordinary indulgence for the future, so that if a person meditate any baseness or mischief, a pilgrimage to Rome is his high road to it. The Popish religion is a convenient cloak for crime, an embroidered robe for virtue. It makes the essence of good and ill to depend on rewards and punishments, and places these in the hands of the priests, for the honour of God and the welfare of the church. Their path to Heaven is a kind of gallery directly over the path to Hell; or, rather, it is the same road, only that at the end of it you kneel down, lift up your hands and eyes, and say you have gone wrong, and you are admitted into the right-hand gate, instead of the left-hand one. Hell is said, in the strong language of controversial divinity, to be ‘paved with good intentions.’ Heaven, according to some fanatical creeds, is ‘paved with mock-professions.’ Devotees and proselytes are passed on like wretched paupers, with false certificates of merit, by hypocrites and bigots, who consider submission to their opinions and power as more than equivalent to a conformity to the dictates of reason or the will of God. All this is charged with being a great piece of cant and imposture: it is not more so than human nature itself. Popery is said to be a make-believe religion: man is a make-believe animal—he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part; he is ever at war with himself—his theory with his practice—what he would be (and therefore pretends to be) with what he is; and Popery is an admirable receipt to reconcile his higher and his lower nature in a beautiful equivoque or double-entendre of forms and mysteries,—the palpableness of sense with the dim abstractions of faith, the indulgence of passion with the atonement of confession and abject repentance when the fit is over, the debasement of the actual with the elevation of the ideal part of man’s nature, the Pagan with the Christian religion; to substitute lip-service, genuflections, adoration of images, counting of beads, repeating of Aves for useful works or pure intentions, and to get rid at once of all moral obligation, of all self-control and self-respect, by the proxy of maudlin superstition, by a slavish submission to priests and saints, by prostrating ourselves before them, and entreating them to take our sins and weaknesses upon them, and supply us with a saving grace (at the expence of a routine of empty forms and words) out of the abundance of their merits and imputed righteousness. This religion suits the pride and weakness of man’s intellect, the indolence of his will, the cowardliness of his fears, the vanity of his hopes, his disposition to reap the profits of a good thing and leave the trouble to others, the magnificence of his pretensions with the meanness of his performance, the pampering of his passions, the stifling of his remorse, the making sure of this world and the next, the saving of his soul and the comforting of his body. It is adapted equally to kings and people—to those who love power or dread it—who look up to others as Gods, or who would trample them under their feet as reptiles—to the devotees of show and sound, or the visionary and gloomy recluse—to the hypocrite and bigot—to saints or sinners—to fools or knaves—to men, women, and children. In short, its success is owing to this, that it is a mixture of bitter sweets—that it is a remedy that soothes the disease it affects to cure—that it is not an antidote, but a vent for the peccant humours, the follies and vices of mankind, with a salvo in favour of appearances, a reserve of loftier aspirations (whenever it is convenient to resort to them), and a formal recognition of certain general principles, as a courtesy of speech, or a compromise between the understanding and the passions! Omne tulit punctum. There is nothing to be said against it, but that it is contrary to reason and common sense; and even were they to prevail over it, some other absurdity would start up in its stead, not less mischievous but less amusing; for man cannot exist long without having scope given to his propensity to the marvellous and contradictory. Methodism with us is only a bastard kind of Popery, with which the rabble are intoxicated; and to which even the mistresses of Kings might resort (but for its vulgarity) to repair faded charms with divine graces, to exchange the sighs of passion for the tears of a no less luxurious repentance, and to exert one more act of power by making proselytes of their royal paramours!
The Popish calendar is but a transposition of the Pagan Mythology. The images, shrines, and pictures of the Virgin Mary, that we meet at the corner of every street or turning of a road, are not of modern date, but coeval with the old Greek and Roman superstitions. There were the same shrines and images formerly dedicated to Flora, or Ceres, or Pomona, and the flowers and the urn still remain. The oaths of the common people are to this day more Heathen than Catholic. They swear ‘By the countenance of Bacchus’—‘By the heart of Diana.’ A knavish innkeeper, if you complain of the badness of his wine, swears ‘Per Bacco e per Dio,’ ‘By Bacchus and by God, that it is good!’ I wonder when the change in the forms of image-worship took place in the old Roman States, and what effect it had. I used formerly to wonder how or when the people in the mountains of Cumberland and Westmoreland, and who live in solitudes to which the town of Keswick is the polite world, and its lake ‘the Leman-Lake,’ first passed from Popery to Protestantism, what difference it made in them at the time, or has done to the present day? The answer to this question would go a good way to shew how little the common people know of or care for any theory of religion, considered merely as such. Mr. Southey is on the spot, and might do something towards a solution of the difficulty!
Customs come round. I was surprised to find, at the Hotel of the Four Nations, where we stopped the two first days, that we could have a pudding for dinner (a thing that is not to be had in all France); and I concluded this was a luxury which the Italians had been compelled to adopt from the influx of the English, and the loudness of their demands for comfort. I understand it is more probable that this dish is indigenous rather than naturalized; and that we got it from them in the time of Queen Elizabeth, when our intercourse with Italy was more frequent than it was with France. We might have remained at the Four Nations; for eighteen francs a day, living in a very sumptuous manner; but we have removed to apartments fitted up in the English fashion, for ten piastres (two guineas) a month, and where the whole of our expenses for boiled and roast, with English cups and saucers and steamed potatoes, does not come to thirty shillings a week. We have every English comfort with clearer air and a finer country. It was exceedingly cold when we first came, and we felt it the more from impatience and disappointment. From the thinness of the air there was a feeling of nakedness about you; you seemed as if placed in an empty receiver. Not a particle of warmth or feeling was left in your whole body: it was just as if the spirit of cold had penetrated every part; one might be said to be vitrified. It is now milder (Feb. 23), and like April weather in England. There is a balmy lightness and vernal freshness in the air. Might I once more see the coming on of Spring as erst in the spring-time of my life, it would be here! I cannot speak to the subject of manners in this place, except as to outward appearances, which are the same as in a country town in England. Judging by the fashionable test on this subject, they must be very bad and desperate indeed; for none of that stream of prostitution flows down the streets, that in the British metropolis is supposed to purify the morality of private families, and to carry off every taint of grossness or licentiousness from the female heart. Cecisbeism still prevails here, less in the upper, more in the lower classes; and may serve as a subject for the English to vent their spleen and outrageous love of virtue upon.
Fesole, that makes so striking a point of view near Florence, was one of the twelve old Tuscan cities that existed before the time of the Romans, and afterwards in a state of hostility to them. It is supposed to have been originally founded by a Greek colony that came over with Cecrops, and others go back to the time of Japhet or to Hesiod’s theogony. Florence was not founded till long after. It is said to have occupied the three conically-shaped hills which stand about three miles from Florence. Here was fought the last great battle between Catiline and the Senate; and here the Romans besieged and starved to death an army of the Goths. It is a place of the highest antiquity and renown, but it does not bear the stamp of anything extraordinary upon its face. You stand upon a bleak, rocky hill, without suspecting it to have been the centre of a thronged population, the seat of battles and of mighty events in eldest times. So you pass through cities and stately palaces, and cannot be persuaded that, one day, no trace of them will be left. Italy is not favourable to the look of age or of length of time. The ravages of the climate are less fatal; the oldest places seem rather deserted than mouldering into ruin, and the youth and beauty of surrounding objects mixes itself up even with the traces of devastation and decay. The monuments of antiquity appear to enjoy a green old age in the midst of the smiling productions of modern civilization. The gloom of the seasons does not at any rate add its weight to the gloom and antiquity. It was in Italy, I believe, that Milton had the spirit and buoyancy of imagination to write his Latin sonnet on the Platonic idea of the archetype of the world, where he describes the shadowy cave in which ‘dwelt Eternity’ (otiosa eternitas), and ridicules the apprehension that Nature could ever grow old, or ‘shake her starry head with palsy.’ It has been well observed, that there is more of the germ of Paradise Lost in the author’s early Latin poems, than in his early English ones, which are in a strain rather playful and tender, than stately or sublime. It is said that several of Milton’s Poems, which he wrote at this period, are preserved in manuscript in the libraries in Florence; but it is probable that if so, they are no more than duplicates of those already known, which he gave to friends. His reputation here was high, and delightful to think of; and a volume was dedicated to him by Malatesta, a poet of the day, and a friend of Redi—‘To the ingenuous and learned young Englishman, John Milton.’ When one thinks of the poor figure which our countrymen often make abroad, and also of the supposed reserved habits and puritanical sourness of our great English Epic Poet, one is a little in pain for his reception among foreigners and surprised at his success, for which, perhaps, his other accomplishments (as his skill in music) and his personal advantages, may, in some measure, account. There is another consideration to be added, which is, that Milton did not labour under the disadvantage of addressing foreigners in their native tongue, but conversed with them on equal terms in Latin. That was surely the polite and enviable age of letters, when the learned spoke a common and well-known tongue, instead of petty, huckstering, Gothic dialects of different nations! Now, every one who is not a Frenchman, or who does not gabble French, is no better than a stammerer or a changeling out of his own country. I do not complain of this as a very great grievance; but it certainly prevents those far-famed meetings between learned men of different nations, which are recorded in history, as of Sir Thomas More with Erasmus, and of Milton with the philosophers and poets of Italy.
‘Sweet is the dialect of Arno’s vale:
Though half consumed, I gladly turn to hear.’
So Dante makes one of his heroes exclaim. It is pleasant to hear or speak one’s native tongue when abroad; but possibly the language of that higher and adopted country, which was familiar to the scholar of former times, sounded even sweeter to the ear of friendship or of genius.