belief a very sincere, in conduct a most defective one: but if any ratiocination led me away, a fugitive from my father's house, and deaf to the reclamations of my dearest friends, still what could so harden me, as that I should turn into ridicule one who had warned me of danger, and who had offered to accompany me in adversity? I leave him without thanks; I abandon him without regret; and am I never to be reminded of his innocence and gentleness, but when hunger or fortune has led me, "nothing loth," to the " warm precincts" of a pigeon-pie? Afterward I hear of him insulted by the ignorant, persecuted by the bigot, dragged before the judge, delivered to the executioner. What then if this person, whom (say I know no more of him) I know to be the purest, the gentlest, the most beneficent of men, should be ready to die, nay, should have died, for me! Do I want a godhead to shake my heart at this? Humanity, at the report of it, feels it through all her fibres, and drops on the earth in tears. Landor. Preserve this character: foster and encourage these thoughts, which must render you happier and better than any other can do. Nothing of envy will follow them; much of gaiety may; particularly if they assist you in recollecting of what materials our modern greatness is composed, and that the only thing in which monarchs now imitate God, is in forming their first men out of the dust. Better stuff was required for court-equipage in ages esteemed far more barba rous. as they show themselves, encrusted with all the dirtiness they contract in public life, in all the debility of ignorance, in all the distortion of prejudice, in all the reptile trickery of partisanship, who would care about the greater part of what are called the greatest? Principles and ideas are my objects: they must be reflected from high and low, but they must also be exhibited where people can see them best, and are most inclined to look at them. English Visiter. You, by proper attention, or even by abstinence from attack, might have gone out among the commissioners to America. Landor. I go out nowhere: here I live, here I die perhaps. A sea-voyage of very few days, although I suffer no sickness, makes me weary of life itself. What a situation is that, in which, next to the sight of port, a tempest is the thing most desirable! I would not be embarked two months, to possess the kingdom of Montezuma united with that of Aurungzebe. English Visiter. You appear to have no ambition, at least of this kind: you live upon a fifth of your income, willingly or unwillingly, and live handsomely and hospitably: what do you want then? Landor. That which I told you before. . to become a king's friend. Peace, freedom, independence for nations, these shall buy me: and, if nothing but the humiliation of their betters can win the hearts of rulers, I would almost kiss their hands to obtain them. Had avarice or ambition We had then our knights of the pink or guided me, remember I started with a larger the lily or the daisy; pleasant, alert, companion-hereditary estate than those of Pitt, Fox, Canning, able, jovial; at present we have knights of the eating-house, baronets of the whiskey-bottle, lordprovosts of the letter-press, and lords of session at the gazette and magazine. Certain hands, patient (you would swear) of everything but a glove, are armed with clubs and cudgels that seem cognate with them; and certain eyes are peeping forth from their lattices at every inlet of literature, that those who enter without the watchword may be well smitten or well splashed. Formerly titles were inherited by men who could not write; they now are conferred on men who will not let others. Theirs may have been the darker age; ours is the duller. In theirs a high spirit was provoked; in ours proscribed. In theirs the bravest were pre-exhorted me to become one. It would have been eminent; in ours the basest. English Visiter. One objection to your Imaginary Conversations is, that you represent some living characters as speaking with greater powers of mind than they possess, vile as they are in conduct. Landor. It can not be expected, by those who know of what materials the cabinets of Europe are composed, that any person in them should reason so conclusively, and with such illustrations, as some who are introduced. This, if it is a blemish in a book, is one which the book would be worse without. The practice of Shakspeare and Sophocles is a better apology for me than I could offer of my own. If men were to be represented and twenty more such, amounted to; and not scraped together in this, or the last, or the preceding century, in ages of stockjobbing and peculation, of cabinet-adventure and counterfeit nobility. My education, and that which education works upon or produces, was not below theirs: yet certain I am that, if I had applied to be made a tide-waiter on the Thames, the minister would have refused me. In the county where my chief estate lies, a waste and unprofitable one, but the third I believe in extent of any there, it was represented to me that the people were the most lawless in Great Britain; and the two most enlightened among the magistrates wished and a great hindrance to my studies; yet a sense of public good, and a desire to promote it by any sacrifice, induced me to propose the thing to the duke of Beaufort, the lord-lieutenant. He could have heard nothing more of me, good or evil, than that I was a studious man, and that, although I belonged to no society, club, or party, and never sat in my life at a public dinner, I should oppose his family in elections. The information, however probable, was wrong. I had votes in four counties, and could influence fifty or sixty, and perhaps many more; yet I never did or will influence one in any case, nor ever give one while Representation is either cheat or coaxer. The noble duke declined my proposal. These bells recall my attention from what is personal and from what is worthless. English Visiter. How they clatter and jingle! The ringers are pulling every bell-rope in the whole city as fast and as furiously as they can. English Visiter. The death of Ferdinand must be felt as a general and great calamity, thus fixing, as it does, or strongly checking, the levity of the Florentines; a people far indeed from cruel, the least so perhaps of any in Italy, where none deserve the name; but the most selfish, the most ungrateful, the most inconstant. A ruler of the Romans, sick and weary of their baseness, wished they had but one neck. I have often wished the To-day I think my wish is accomplished. Landor. Although there is hardly one of them who would not with whatever ignominy flee from death, were flight possible, yet the appearance of it in others has little terror, little awe. The reason is, the sight is familiar, and unaccompanied by solemnity or decorum. The priests and family, even when the wealthy and distinguished are carried to their last home, walk rapidly along with the bearers of the body, and seem only to be thinking how they shall soonest get it out of the way, and do some other business. Landor. The sound of one only, the largest in the place, tolling slowly at equal intervals, makes a different impression on the hearer. We are impatient of these, which are rung in the same manner to announce a festival: instead of impa-Florentines had as much as one heart among them. tience at the others, we wait in suspense for every stroke, and the pulse of the heart replies to it. No people but the English can endure a long continuation of gravity and sadness: none pay the same respect to the dead. Here not only the poorer, but householders and fathers of families, are thrown together into a covered cart; and when enow of them are collected, they are carried off by night, and cast naked into the ditch in the burial-ground. No sheet about them, no shroud externally, no coffin, no bier, no emblem of mortality; none of sorrow, none of affection, none of hope. Corpses are gathered like rotten gourds and cracked cucumbers, and thrown aside where none could find if any looked for them. Among people in easy circumstances, wife, children, relatives, friends, all leave the house when one of the family is dying: the priest alone remains with him the last sacrament solves and sunders every human tie. The eyes, after wandering over the altered scenes of domestic love, over the silent wastes of friendship, are reconciled to whatever is most lugubrious in death, and are closed at last by mercenaries and strangers. My children were playing on the truly English turf before the Campo Santo in Pisa, when he to whom is committed the business of carrying off the dead, and whose house is in one corner, walked up to them, and bade them come along with him, telling them he would show them two more such pretty little ones. He opened the doors of a carthouse, in which were two covered carts: the larger contained (I hear) several dead bodies, starknaked in the smaller were two infants, with not even a flower shed over them. They had died in the foundling-hospital the night before. Such was their posture, they appeared to hide their faces one from the other in play. As my children had not been playing with them, this appearance struck neither: but the elder said, "Teresa! who shut up these mimmi? I will tell papa. Why do not they come out and play till bed-time?" The "mimmi" had been out, poor little souls! and had played.. till bed-time. English Visiter. And papa, though he could not alter the thing, has been collecting a rod in every walk of his, in high-road or by-road, for those whose negligences and inhumanities are greater in greater matters; which rod some years hence will Scourge many backs, and be laid on by many hands, amid the shouts of nations. Landor. So be it! although he who tied the twigs be never thought of; although he be cast before his time into the cart-house. English Visiter. Religion in fact does not demand much anxiety from us for those who sleep; and Philosophy is indifferent whether the pace with which the defunct are carried to the grave be quick or slow. Landor. Christianity is so kind, that one objection to it, the worst indeed and the weakest, is the impracticability of performing all the kindness it enjoins. It demands no anxiety; it demonstrates on the other hand how every one may be removed. Our English burial service is the most impressive thing to be found in any religion, old or recent: it is framed on the character of the people, and preserves it. I have seen every other part of clerical duty neglected or traversed; but I never saw a clergyman who failed in this, when he consigned his parishioner to the grave. As for philosophy, if our philosophy tell us anything which shocks or troubles or perplexes our humanity, let us doubt it, and let us put off the examination of it a long while. English Visiter. Did you know the Granduke? Landor. I am the only Englishman in Florence who did not attend his court, and the only one he ever omitted to salute. English Visiter. Upon my word, you might have expected it: and yet I hear he received the exiles of Naples, and, when it was told him that his Neapolitan Majesty could not be present at it the few days he was here, if such rebels were admitted, he replied, "It would be hard if kings had not as much liberty as their subjects." Landor. Equitable, humane, incomparable prince! Whatever you hear good and gracious of him, you may well believe. I saw him first at Pisa, where he resided in winter, without pomp and state, and walked about the streets, and in the country, with his son or any other friend. The Pisans, accustomed to meet him every day, noticed him only as they notice a brother or father: he drew no crowd about him. At the extremity of the principal square is an ancient church, dedi cated to Saint Catharine; and in this church there happened to be a festival. As I lose no opportunity of hearing music where people are silent, observing the red silk festoons float over the church-door I went in. There were few present: within the rails I saw only the officiating priests, the Granduke, and Savi the professor of botany, who had entered with him, was seated by him, and spoke to him from time to time. The service being finished, the Granduke bowed with peculiar courtesy, and only to one person; it was in the direction where I stood. Two or three days afterward, a worthy priest who had thrown aside his gown and had taken a uniform, in the course of conversation with me, said gravely, "But really, my dear frind, we may extend too far our prejudices and dislikes. If you could be prevailed upon to go but once to court, you would find him the best soul in the world. Savi tells me you did not return the salute of the Granduke." My heart sank within me, deeper than ever any courtier's did, at the charge of inattention: for it has more room to work in, and takes it all. Ferdinand still continued to notice with his usual condescension and affability my wife and little boy, whom he met every day in some place or other, but always turned his eyes from me. Nevertheless I persevered in repairing my fault, in my own eyes at least. I elevated my hat above my head long before I met him, and passed without a look toward him. He soon forgave me, or forgot me: which answered the same purpose. Princes are more offended at a slight inattention than at almost the worst thing you can do or say or write against them. A dead thorn or the smallest pebble may hurt or molest a Wellington for a moment, according to the part it acts upon: and I, who amid the powerful of the earth am no better, may have pained in my ignorance a ten. derer bosom than beats among the surviving masters of mankind. May Leopold, who applies his studies to the history of his country in order to write it fully and faithfully, illustrate by his life the last pages of it, and, after a longer course, be succeeded by a son as virtuous and affectionate! ... A long silence followed. I was little disposed to converse, or my visiter to go away. We heard a voice of inquiry at the ante-chamber door, and I started to give orders that no person should be admitted, when there stood before me a worthy man, who had offered my family a window in his house yesterday, to see from it the procession of Corpus Domini. After expressing the hope that no accident or indisposition had prevented it, "You have heard, no doubt, the distressing news," added he. "Even those who were unfriendly to Ferdinand and his government, lament his loss, and speak becomingly of his character." English Visiter. We are pained at hearing ill of the living, and at hearing good of the dead of the recently dead at least. Florentine Visiter. You do not appear to unite with us in our regrets your mind is abstracted, your ideas and thoughts absorbed: you want stupendous men, prodigies of genius. Landor. Not I indeed, my friend: I want honest ones: and Ferdinand was both honest and wise. If his wisdom did not fly off perpetually in sparks and splinters, it was only the better and the more useful for it. The greater part of geniuses may be measured by pocket-rules: others require a succession of triangles, must be surveyed from stations upon mountain-heads, and the exact computation of their altitude is to be determined but after some ages. Of these Alps and Ararats, in the various regions of the world there may be five or six perhaps. The heavy stick their poles in them, clamber up, and protest they see nothing extraordinary: the lighter one, more disappointed still, cries, “I thought they were above the clouds! however, I will cut my name upon the summit, and break off something." Florentine Visiter. I was about to mention that Ferdinand was not indeed a subject for trigonometry. In abilities he was on a level, or little more than on a level, with the greater part of mankind: but I believe that no man living had so accurate a judgment where judgment is of most importance. His sense of justice and right was perfect. It was perfect from an exquisite fibre and most delicate tact, and from an early and uninterrupted practice of it. Sovrans are thought not to have the whole of their apanage, unless they have some embossed pieces of wit placed beside them. Ferdinand was not facetious; on the contrary, he was rather grave, and would not have fathered the best joke in the world. And truly I know not how it happens, but we Florentines, who are famous for feigning all other things, never feign wit for anyone. English Visiter. Your Machiavelli, I think, can not be fairly accused of doing it; who, wishing to attribute a few smartnesses, practical and theoretical, to Castruccio Castracani, rather than invent them himself, went back to the ancients for them, and poured them into his havresac dry as date-fruit. Florentine Visiter. Valets and chamberlains, and other attendants on Ferdinand, have related to their friends and acquaintances many of his sayings, which would seem witty and sharp, if good nature did not cover them from point to hilt. The other day, as you know (for I remember you laughed heartily at it), his remark was excellent. The wit was, like the ananas, sharp, sweet, refreshing, beautiful; and it was safely tangible from its seasonable ripeness. English Visiter. Sir, our friend Landor here is a fond lover of wit, but, like many fond lovers, is without the object of his affections. I am sure he will gladly hear the thing over again, if you will favour me by giving us it. Florentine Visiter. When the only son of Marchese Bartolomei had taken a wife without the consent of his family, the father, as you may | sentence of condemnation. Let him rest where suppose, was indignant. He ran to Palazzo Pitti, he is, and be, like others, amenable to the laws." demanded an audience of the Granduke, and was admitted. After he had particularised the whole affair, with comments, no doubt, in abundance, 'Well, my friend, how can I serve you?" said his Highness; "what can I do in the business?" Landor. At my arrival on the continent, it retained among its ruins two public men of worth, Kosciusko and Gianni: the one I had seen in England, the other I visited in Gonoa. He was in his ninetieth year: an age to which no other minister of king or prince or republic has attained. But the evil passions never preyed on the heart of Gianni : he enjoyed good health from good spirits, and those from their only genuine source, a clear conscience. Accustomed, as I had been, to see "My dear marchese, now the thing is done, and can not be undone or altered, would it not be better to be reconciled to the young people?" "Never, never, never, while I have breath in chattering mountebanks leap one after another my body." "Patience! my good Bartolomei! Consider a little! reflect a moment! pray of what age is your son?" "Old enough to be wiser." upon the same stage, and play the same tricks they had exploded, first amid the applauses and afterward amid the execration of the people, I was refreshed and comforted by the calmness and simplicity of this venerable old man. Occasionally "We all are; people say so at least: and he displayed a propensity to satire, not the broadyet .. "He is near upon eighteen." "A mere boy: unfortunately for him just one remove beyond boy's chastisement. I hope you would not punish him, as matters stand." "I came for justice, Highness!" "The laws, you say, will give it: you shall have it; do not doubt it. Be calm; be comforted; think again upon it." "I have thought again and again and more than enough about it. I am resolved to punish him." "Let him have her then. Come Bartolomei, I am going to my piano-forte: would it amuse you?" Highness! I take my leave." The last of his public acts admitting to view the gait and whole gesture of his character, was displayed by him about a month afterward, that is, about a month ago. A person now in Florence had been expelled by their Holinesses of the Sacred Alliance, from France, Spain, and Piedmont, and perhaps from other kingdoms. He came hither without a passport, and was ordered by the president of the buon governo to leave the city. Disconsolate, desolate, desperate, he resolved to present a memorial to the Granduke. "From the various states I have passed through, I can show nothing," said he, "but orders to leave the country." The mild prince sent immediately for the president of the buon governo, who thinking, on such occasions at least, that expedition was best, would have banished the stranger. "If he is, or if you think him to be, a bad subject," said Ferdinand, "it is your office to watch him narrowly. Would you drive him out to save trouble? Shall the whole earth be interdicted to him because he has been troublesome in one part of it, or suspected in another? If he were worthy of imprisonment, there is little doubt that he would have been imprisoned; or if of death, that he would have been executed. They permit him to live, and would leave him no place to live in. He must be somewhere. To hunt and pursue the poor creature through the world, is worse than any faced buffoonery and washy loquacity of his nation, but the apposite and delicate wit which once sparkled in the better societies of Athens and of Paris. He has left behind him a history of his own times, which never will be published in ours. If any leading state of Europe had been governed by such a minister, how harmless would have been the French revolution out of France, how transitory in. Patient, provident, moderate, imperturbable, he knew on all occasions what kind and what intensity of resistance should be opposed to violence and tumult. Florentine Visiter. I will adduce two instances, in which my friend here will correct me, should I anywhere fall into an error. Ricci, bishop of Pistoja and Prato, had excited the indignation of his diocesans, by an attempt to introduce the prayers in Italian, and to abolish some festivals and processions. The populace of Prato, headed by a confraternity, broke forth into acts of rebellion: the bishop's palace was assaulted, his life threatened: the church-bells summoned all true believers to the banner: the broken bones of saints were exposed, and invited others to be broken. Leopold, on hearing it, shocked in his system of policy, forgot at the moment the mildness of his character, and ordered the military at hand to march against the insurgents. Gianni was sent for: he entered the instant this command was issued. "What disturbs your Highness?" said he mildly. "You ought to have been informed, Gianni," answered the Granduke, “that the populace of Prato has resisted my authority and insulted Ricci. My troops march against them." "I have already despatched a stronger force than your Highness has done, which by your permission must remain in the city." "On free-quarters until the madmen are quiet. But how could you collect a stronger force so instantaneously?" “Instead of two regiments, I despatched two crosses; instead of cannon and balls and powder, a nail-box, a hammer, and a napkin. If reinforcements are wanted, we can find a dice-box and a sponge at Corsini's, on good security. At this hour, however, I am persuaded that the confraternity is walking in procession, and extolling to the skies, not your humanity but your devotion." It was so. The maximum or assize had been abolished by Gianni lands and provisions rose in value: the people was discontented, broke into his house, drank his wine, cut his beds in pieces, and carried off the rest of his furniture. Leopold, who had succeeded to the empire, and was residing at Vienna, decreed that the utmost severity should be exercised against all who had borne any part in this sedition. It was difficult to separate the more guilty from the less, as every man convicted of delinquency might hope to extenuate his offence by accusing his enemy of one more flagrant. Gianni, who could neither disobey nor defer the mandate of the emperor, engaged Commendatore Pazzi to invite some hundreds of the people to a banquet in the court-yard of his palace. Now while the other families of those our Florentines, who in ages past had served the bustling little city, were neglected for their obscurity, shunned for their profligacy, or despised for their avarice and baseness, that of Riccardi was still in esteem with the citizens for its splendid hospitality, that of Pazzi for its patronage of the people. The invitation was unsuspected. They met, they feasted, they drank profusely; every man brought forward his merits; what each had done, and what cach was ready to do, was openly declared and carefully recorded. On the following morning, before daybreak, forty were on the road to the galleys: but most of them were soon released. The people is never in such danger as from its idol. English Visiter. Scarcely anything is more interesting than the history of this central hive of honeyed and stinging little creatures, your Florentines. Although they have now lost their original figure and nature for the most-part, and possess not even their own lily to alight on, yet they hum, and show wonderful instinct. They were not created for the gloom of Dante, but they are alive and alert in the daylight of Petrarca and Boccaccio. They live under a government not oppressive, nor troublesome, nor exacting; and in this warm security they inform us that there is in Italy a petty state governed by a woman, who constantly sends after the Opera to the innkeepers of her city, and demands a portion of what has been spent among them within the day by strangers. If many carriages have stopped at their doors, in passing through the place, the same visit is made, the same tax imposed. She has forbidden the exportation of pictures, offering to purchase them at the value: she has taken several to herself, and has never paid for them. Is it not as proper for the Saints of the Holy Alliance to exercise the duties of high police in such instances, as against the public, where great nations, and such as were never subject to them, rise unanimously and demand a reform of government? England maintains a minister at the court of this woman, whose revenues from the territory are little more than his appointments, and whose political influence is weaker than that of one who keeps a gin-shop in Wapping. Landor. What reed or rush, in its rottenest plight, but serves for the spawn of our aristocracy to stick on! Let us leave the thievish sister of the Rey Netto, and return to a prince who had nothing in common with him but the baptismal name. It was feared by the friends of an eloquent pleader, whose conduct in the parliament of Naples gave no party satisfaction, that, at the instigation of the Austrian or French ambassador, he would be excepted from the asylum granted here to the Neapolitan constitutionalists. Whereupon, although I seldom speak on politics, I could not refrain from saying in the presence of a courtlady, "Constitutionalists are unpardonable: we Englishmen have abandoned them in Sicily to the sword and dungeon, and we have deluded and betrayed them in Naples and in Spain: their ruin comes in all directions from us: yet in regard to this gentleman, I can not believe he will be expelled from Tuscany for thinking with every wise and honest man of his country. . I will add, of Europe. True, he expressed his thoughts better than others: but it is as unreasonable to dislike a man because he is eloquent, as it would be to like one because he is a stammerer.” It was mentioned to the Granduke, not in malice, but as the best thing or among the best said the day before. "Dice bene" was his answer. English Visiter. I never could discover the reason why people in authority should exert more power (in other words should give themselves more trouble) in molesting and plaguing their fellow-creatures than in helping them. This is too common in the world, indeed almost general; and I may say with hardly an exception in those who have risen to high station from obscurity. Florentine Visiter. I would not voluntarily illustrate your thesis, if the reflection did not fall upon another admirable feature among his who now is lying under the canopy of death. Our archbishop, three years ago, ordered his six best horses to be harnessed for the richest of his state-carriages, went in it to the palace, remarked to the Granduke that Lent was approaching, that luxury was enormous, that immorality, was universal, and that nothing could arrest it but a rigid observance of the ancient fasts, which had of late times been grievously neglected. In fact, it pained him to report it, the Florentines were known, in that holy season, to eat flesh ! "The fault is in great measure mine," said Ferdinand, "who have enabled them to do it. Immorality, which I hope is not so universal as your lordship thinks, must be discountenanced and checked. Let you and me try.. legumes." The archbishop, the fattest man in Florence, or perhaps in Italy, and accused of excesses which go beyond the stomach a little, reddened at the insinuation, and took his leave. I could recount (for memory in hours like these |
