10 caverns Charles Dickens's Pictures from Italy. icicles, under and over foaming waterfalls, near places of refuge and galleries of shelter against sudden danger, through over whose arched roofs the avalanches slide in spring, and bury themselves in the unknown gulf beneath. Down, over lofty bridges and through horrible ravines, a little shifting speck in the vast desolation of ice and snow, and monstrous granite rocks; down, through the deep Gorge of the Saltine, and deafened [July, the riven blocks of rock into the level The following is a faithful portrait of the lovely scenery which it describes, and on which our recollection hangs with some touches of pride and satisfaction, for that we were the first, the very first, who ever traversed that beautiful road which winds along this enchanted coast, long before it was opened for public use. "There is nothing in Italy more beautiful to me, than the coast-road between Genoa and Spezzia. On one side,-sometimes far below, sometimes nearly on a level with the road, and often skirted by broken rocks of many shapes, there is the free blue sea, with here and there a picturesque feluca gliding slowly on; on the other side, are lofty hills, ravines besprinkled with white cottages, patches of dark olive woods, country churches with their light open towers, and country houses gaily painted. On every bank and knoll by the wayside, the wild cactus and aloe flourish in exuberant profusion; and the gardens of the bright villages along the road, are seen, all blushing in the summer-time with clusters of the belladonna, and are fragrant in the autumn and winter with golden oranges and lemons. Some of the villages are inhabited, almost exclusively, by fishermen ; and it is pleasant to see their great boats hauled upon the beach, making little patches of shade, where they lie asleep, or where the women and children sit romping and looking out to sea, while they mend their nets upon the shore. There is one town, Camoglia, with its little harbour on the sea, hundreds of feet below the road: where families of mariners live, who, time out of mind, have owned coasting-vessels in that place, and have traded to Spain and elsewhere. Seen from the road above, it is like a tiny model on the margin of the dimpled water, shining in the sun. Descended into, by the winding mule was seen. tracks, it is a perfect miniature of a pri- The scenery of the marble quarries of Carrara has never, to one's knowledge, been so faithfully, or picturesquely described, as in the present volume. We extract a small portion. "As you toil and clamber up one of these steep gorges, [glens that run up into the lofty marble hills,] having left your pony soddening his girths in water, a mile or two lower down, you hear, every now and then, echoing among the hills, in a low tone, more silent than the previous silence, a melancholy warning bugle,-a ten pair, twenty pair, to one block, according to its size; down it must come, this way. In their struggling from stone to stone, with their enormous loads behind them, they die frequently upon the spot; and not they alone; for their passionate drivers, sometimes tumbling down in their energy, are crushed to death beneath the wheels. But it was good five hundred years ago, and it must be good now; and a railroad down one of these steeps (the easiest thing in the world) would be flat blasphemy. When we stood aside, to see one of these cars drawn by only a pair of oxen, (for it had but one small block of marble on it) coming down, I hailed, in my heart, the man who sat upon the heavy yoke, to keep it on the neck of the poor beasts-and who faced backward: not before him-as the very devil of true despotism. He had a great rod in his hand, with an iron point; and when they could plough and force their way through the loose bed of the torrent no longer, and came to a stop, he poked it into their bodies, beat it on their heads, screwed it round and round in their nostrils, got them on a yard or two, in the madness of intense pain; repeated all these persuasions, with increased intensity of purpose, when they stopped again; got them on once more; forced and goaded them to an abrupter point of the descent; and when their writhing and smarting, and the weight behind them, bore them plunging down the precipice in a cloud of scattered water, whirled his rod above his head, and gave a great whoop and hallo, as if he had achieved something, and had no idea that they might shake him off, and blindly mash his brains upon the road in the noon-tide of his triumph," &c. signal to the miners to withdraw. Then, there is a thundering, and echoing from hill to hill, and perhaps a splashing up of great fragments of rock into the air; and on you toil again until some other bugle sounds, in a new direction, and you stop directly, lest you should come within the range of the new explosion. There were numbers of men, working high up in these hills-on the sides-clearing away, and sending down the broken masses of stone and earth to make way for the blocks of marble that had been discovered. As these came rolling down from unseen hands into the narrow valley, I could not help thinking of the deep glen (just the same sort of glen) where the roc left Sinbad the Sailor; and where the merchants from the heights above, flung down great pieces of meat for the diamonds to stick to. There were no eagles here, to darken the sun in their swoop, and pounce upon them; but it was as wild and fierce as if there had been hundreds. But the road, the road down which the marble comes, however immense the blocks! The genius of the country, and the spirit of its institutions, pave the road: repair it, watch it, keep it going! Conceive a channel of water running over a rocky bed, beset with great heaps of stone of all shapes and sizes, winding down the middle of this valley; and that being the road-because it was the road five hundred years ago!-Imagine the clumsy carts of five hundred years ago, being used to this hour, and drawn, as they used to be five hundred years ago, by oxen, whose ancestors were worn to death five hundred years ago, as their unhappy descendants are now, in twelve months, by the suffering and agony of this cruel work. Two pair, four pair, This is a spirited description, but it ends, as usual, with a comic opera, performed in the village, which Mr. Dickens honoured with his presence, sitting of course in the stage box. Mr. Dickens we take to be the only tourist, to whom Pisa would suggest St. Paul's Churchyard, and Mr. Harris, the publisher of children's books. "The moon was shining when we approached Pisa, and for a long time we could see behind the wall the leaning tower, all awry in the uncertain light; the shadowy original of the old pictures in school-books, setting forth the Wonders of the World.' Like most things connected in their first associations with schoolbooks and school-times it was too small. I felt it keenly. It was nothing like so high above the wall as I had hoped. It was another of the many deceptions practised by Mr. Harris, bookseller, at the corner of St. Paul's Churchyard, London. His tower was a fiction, but this was reality, and by comparison, a short reality. Still it looked very well, and very strange, and was quite as much out of the perpendicular as Harris had represented it to be. The quiet air of Pisa, too, the big guardhouse at the gate, with only two little soldiers in it, the streets with scarcely any show of people in them, and the Arno flowing quaintly through the centre of the town, were excellent. So I bore no malice in my heart against Mr. Harris, (remembering his good intentions,) but forgave him before dinner, and went out full of confidence to see the tower next morning. I might have known better, but ness of the structure; nothing can be more remarkable than its general appearance. In the course of the ascent to the top (which is by an easy staircase.) the inclination is not very apparent, but at the summit it becomes so, and gives one the sensation of being in a ship that has heeled over through the action of an ebb tide. The effect upon the low side, so to speak, looking over from the gallery and seeing the shaft recede to its base, is very startling; and I saw a nervous traveller hold on to the tower involuntarily after glancing down, as if he had some idea of propping it up. The view within from the ground, looking up as through a slanting tube, is also very curious. It certainly inclines as much as the most sanguine tourist could desire. The natural impulse of ninety-nine people out of a hundred who were about to recline upon the grass below it to rest, and contemplate the adjacent buildings, would probably be, not to take up their position under the leaning side, it is so very much aslant,” &c. somehow I had expected to see it casting its long shadow on a public street where people came and went all day. It was a surprise to me to find it in a grave re. tired place apart from the general resort, and carpeted with smooth green turf. But the group of buildings clustered on and about this verdant carpet, comp ising the tower, the baptistery, the cathedral, and the Church of the Campo Santo, is per haps the most remarkable and beautiful in the whole world, and from being clustered there, together, away from the ordinary transactions and details of the town, they have a singularly venerable and impressive character. It is the architectural essence of a rich old city, with all its common life and common habitations pressed out and filtered away. Sismondi compares the tower to the usual pictorial representations in children's books of the Tower of Babel. It is a happy simile, and conveys a better idea of the building than chapters of laboured description. Nothing can exceed the grace and lightBut from the Tower, and the wonders of early art in the Campo Santo, and the baptistery, and the cathedral with its gates of glory, the author is soon called off to topics more congenial to his pencil. "If Pisa be the seventh wonder of the world in right of its tower, it may claim to be. at least, the second or third in right of its beggars. They waylay the unhappy visiter at every turn, escort him to every door he enters at, and lie in wait for him with strong reinforcements at every door by which they know he must come out. The grating of the portal on its hinges is the signal for a general shout, and the moment he appears he is hemmed in and fallen upon by heaps of rags and personal distortions. The beggars seem to embody all the trade and enterprise of Pisa. The Coliseum : "Go to the Coliseum . . . . It is no fiction, but plain, sober, honest truth to say, so suggestive and distinct is it at this hour, that for a moment, actually in passing in, they who will may have the whole great pile before them, as it used to be, with thousands of eager faces staring down into the arena, and such a whirl of strife, and blood, and dust going on there as no language can describe. Its solitude, its awful beauty, and its utter desolation, strike upon the stranger, the next moment, like a softened sorrow; and never in his life, perhaps, will he be so moved and overcome by any sight, not immediately connected with his own affections and afflictions. see it crumbling there, an inch a year; its walls and arches overgrown with green; its corridors open to the day; the long To Nothing else is stirring but warm air. Going through the streets, the fronts of the sleepy houses look like backs. They are all so still and quiet, and unlike houses with people in them, that the greater part of the city has the appearance of a city at daybreak, or during a general siesta of the population. Or it is yet more like those backgrounds of houses in common prints, or old engravings, where windows and doors are squarely indicated, and one figure (a beggar of course) is seen walking off by itself into illimitable perspective." grass growing in its porches; young trees of yesterday springing up on its ragged parapets, and bearing fruit: chance produce of the seeds dropped there by the birds who build their nests within its chinks and crannies; to see its Pit of Fight filled up with earth, and the peaceful cross planted in the centre; to climb into its upper halls, and look down on ruin. ruin, ruin, all about it; the triumphal arches of Constantine, Septimius Severus, and Titus; the Roman Forum; the Palace of the Cæsars; the temples of the old religion, fallen down and gone; is to see the ghost of old Rome, wicked, wonderful, old city, haunting the very ground on which its people trod. It is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight, conceivable. Never, in its bloodiest prime, can the sight of the gigantic Coliseum, full and running over with the lustiest life, have moved one heart, as it must move all who look upon it now, a ruin. God be thanked; a ruin! As it tops the other ruins; standing there a mountain among graves: so do its ancient influences outlive all other remnants of the old mytho. logy and old butchery of Rome, in the nature of the fierce and cruel Roman people. The Italian face changes as the visiter approaches the city; its beauty becomes devilish; and there is scarcely one countenance in a hundred, among the common people in the streets, that would not be at home and happy in a renovated Coliseum to-morrow. Here was Rome indeed at last; and such a Rome as no one can imagine in its full and awful grandeur! We wandered out upon the Appian Way, and then went on, through miles of ruined tombs and broken walls, with here and there a desolate and uninhabited house: past the Circus of Romulus, where the course of the chariots, the stations of the judges, competitors, and spectators, are yet as plainly to be seen as in old time: past the tomb of Cecilia Metella; past all inclosure, hedge, or stake, wall or fence: away upon the open Campagna, where, on that side of Rome, nothing is to be beheld but ruin. Except where the distant Apennines bound the view upon the left, the whole wide prospect is one field of ruin. Broken aqueducts, left in the most picturesque and beautiful clusters of arches; broken temples; broken tombs. A desert of decay, sombre and desolate beyond all expression; and with a history in every stone that strews the ground." The following is one of the most lively and amusing little pictures in the book; a lively representation of what we thought the dullest scene we ever witnessed : "Some quarter of an hour of this sort of progress brought us to the Corso; and anything so gay, so bright, and lively as the whole scene there it would be difficult to imagine. From all the innumerable balconies, from the remotest and highest, no less than from the lowest and nearest, hangings of bright red, light green, bright blue, white and gold, were fluttering in the brilliant sunlight. From windows, and from parapets, and tops of houses, streamers of the richest colours, and draperies of the gaudiest and most sparkling hues were floating out upon the street. The buildings seemed to have been literally turned inside out, and to have all their gaiety towards the highway. Shop fronts were taken down, and the windows filled with company, like boxes at a shining theatre; doors were carried off their hinges, and long tapestried groves, hung with garlands of flowers and evergreens, displayed within; builders' scaffoldings were gorgeous temples, radiant in silver, gold, and crimson; and in every nook and corner, from the pavement to the chimney-tops, where women's eyes could glisten, there they danced, and laughed, and sparkled like the light in water. Every sort of bewitching madness of dress was there. Little preposterous scarlet jackets, quaint old stomachers, more wicked than the smartest boddices; Polish pelisses, strained and tight as ripe gooseberries; tiny Greek caps, all awry, and clinging to the dark hair, Heaven knows how; every wild, quaint, bold, shy, pettish madcap fancy had its illustration in a dress; and every fancy was In as dead forgotten by its owner, in the tumult of merriment, as if the three old aqueducts that still remain entire had brought Lethe into Rome upon their sturdy arches that morning. The carriages were now three abreast, in broader places four; often stationary for a long time together; always one close mass of variegated brightness; showing, the whole street-full, through the storm of flowers, like flowers of a larger growth themselves. some the horses were richly caparisoned in magnificent trappings; in others they were decked from head to tail with flowing ribbons. Some were driven by coachmen with enormous double faces; one face leering at the horses, the other corking its extraordinary eyes into the carriage; and both rattling again, under the hail of sugar plums. Other drivers were attired as women, wearing long ringlets and no bonnets, and looking more ridiculous in any real difficulty with the horses (of which in such a concourse there were a great many) than tongue can tell, or pen describe. Instead of sitting in the carriages, upon the seats, the handsome Roman women, to see, and to be seen the better, sit in the heads of the barouches, at this time of general license, with their feet upon the cushions-and oh! the flowing skirts and dainty waists, the blessed shapes and laughing faces, the free, good-humoured, gallant figures that they make! There were great vans, too, full of handsome girls-thirty or more together, perhaps— and the broadsides that were poured into and poured out of these fairy fire-ships splashed the air with flowers and bon bons for ten minutes at a time. Carriages delayed long in one place would begin a deliberate engagement with other carriages, or with people at the lower windows; and the spectators at some upper balcony or window, joining in the fray and attacking both parties, would empty down great bags of confétti, that descended like a cloud, and in an instant made them white as millers. Still carriages on carriages, dresses on dresses, colours on colours, crowds upon crowds, without end. Men and boys clinging to the wheels of coaches, and holding on behind, and following in their wake, and diving in among the horses' feet, to pick up scattered flowers to sell again. Maskers on foot (the drollest generally) in fantastic exaggerations of court dresses, surveying the throng through enormous eye-glasses, and always transported with an extacy of love on the discovery of any particularly old lady at a window. Long strings of Policinelli laying about them, with blown bladders at the ends of sticks; a waggon full of madmen screaming, and tearing to the life; a coachful of grave mamelukes, Whether Mr. and Mrs. Davis exist anywhere, except in the chambers of Mr. Dickens' fancy, which Queen Mab is continually peopling with creatures of her own, we cannot say; but if creations of the brain, they are such as nature and truth would delight to own. It is wonderful what persons, invisible to all others, men of genius contrive to see! with their horse-tail standard set up in the midst; a party of gipsy-women engaged in terrific conflict with a shipful of sailors; a man-monkey on a pole, surrounded with strange animals with pigs' faces, and lions' tails, carried under their arms, or worn gracefully over their shoulders; carriages on carriages, dresses on dresses, colours on colours, crowds upon crowds without end. Not many actual characters sustained, or represented, perhaps, considering the number dressed; but the main pleasure of the scene consisting in its perfect good temper; in its bright, and infinite, and flashing variety; and in its entire abandonment to the mad humour of the time-an abandonment so perfect, so contagious, so irresistible, that the steadiest foreigner fights up to his middle in flowers and sugar-plums, like the wildest Roman of them all, and thinks of nothing else till half-past four o'clock, when he is suddenly reminded (to his great regret) that this is not the whole. business of his existence, by hearing the trumpet sound, and seeing the dragoons begin to clear the street." "We often encountered in these expeditions a company of English tourists, with whom I had an ardent but ungratified longing to establish a speaking acquaintance. They were one Mr. Davis, and a small circle of friends. It was impossible not to know Mrs. Davis's name, from her being always in great request among her party, and her party being everywhere. During the Holy week, they were in every part of every scene of every ceremony. For a fortnight or three weeks before it, they were in every tomb, and every church, and every ruin, and every picture gallery, and I hardly ever observed Mrs. Davis to be silent for a moment. Deep under-ground, high up in St. Peter's, out on the Campagna, and stifling in the Jews' quarter, Mrs. Davis turned up; all the same. I don't think she ever saw anything, or ever looked at anything: and she had always lost something out of a straw hand-basket, and was trying to find it, with all her might and main, among an immense quantity of English halfpence, which lay, like sands upon the sea shore, at the bottom of it. There was a professional Cicerone always attached to the party (which had been brought over from London fifteen or twenty strong, by contract); and if he so much as looked at Mrs. Davis, she invariably cut him short, by saying; There, God bless the man! don't worrit me! I don't understand a word you say, and shouldn't if you was to talk 'till you was black in the face." Mr. Davis always had a snuff-coloured great coat on, and carried a great green umbrella in his hand, and had a slow curiosity constantly devouring him, which prompted him to do extraordinary things, such as taking the covers off urns in tombs, and looking in at the ashes as if they were pickles-and tracing out inscriptions with the ferrule of his umbrella, and saying with intense thoughtfulness, Here's a B, you see, and there's a R, and this is the way we goes on in, is it?' His antiquarian habits occasioned his being frequently in the rear of the rest, and one of the agonies of Mrs. Davis and the party in general, was an ever present fear that Davis would be lost. This caused them to scream for him in the strangest places, and at the most improper seasons; and when he came slowly emerging out of some sepulchre or other, like a peaceful ghoule, saying, 'Here I am!' Mrs. Davis invariably replied, 'You'll be buried alive in a foreign country, Davis, and it's no use trying to prevent you.' Mr. and Mrs. Davis, and their party, |