regularity and ceremony their captains and arbi- Rome, to the injury of the proportions; after trators. Gods and priests were imported from which, he informs us that the gilding of the whole all quarters after every foray, together with oxen, edifice cost 12,000 talents. Now, the hall in the sheep, swine, grain, and household utensils. As, palace of Nero was as large as this temple; the however, from their habits of life, they had brought ground on which it stood was thirtyfold the extent, no women with them, and female captives were and the gilding so general, that it was called the in insufficient number, they took others by fraud Golden House. At the decease of Nero, the masand violence from the villages around. The pasters of the world trembled to enter it; removed toral and unwarlike inhabitants were as submissive from it the works of Phidias and Praxiteles, of to them as they are at present to the native bandits, and perhaps gave them the same assistance and information on their excursions. The Sabines, who afterward became more courageous, from the necessity of discipline forced upon them by incessant aggression, were at this time among the least martial and the least enterprising of nations. Unable to recover their wives and daughters, they soon made peace. Pallavicini. We Ligurians long withstood the Romans and their historians and poets for this reason, while they extol the Sabines, show us no mercy. From your account of our conquerors, it appears that they were at least as uncivilised as any inhabitants of the Peninsula. Landor. More so than any. No spacious and commodious mansion, no august temple, was erected in 500 years: so uncouth was the genius of the people. The magnificence of Syracuse and of Corinth, the most elegant and splendid cities in Europe, left little impression on the destroyers. Their cups were (as they termed it) of barbaric gold, while their temples and the gods within them were of clay. Captured Veii soon supplied Rome with a large assortment of richer images. Lucullus was the first of the nation who had any idea of amplitude in architecture. Julius Cæsar, to whom glory in all her forms and attributes was more familiar than his own Penates, meditated the grandest works of utility and decoration, in the city and out: but he fell a victim to insatiable ambition, and left nothing memorable in his birthplace but Pompey's statue. Augustus did somewhat in adorning the city: but Augustus was no Pericles. Tiberius, melancholy at the loss of a young and beautiful wife borne away from him by policy, sank into that dreadful malady which blighted every branch of the Claudian family, and, instead of embellishing the city with edifices and sculpture, darkened it with disquietudes and suspicions, and retired into a solitude which his enemies have peopled with monsters. Such atrocious lust, incredible even in madness itself, was incompatible with the memory of his loss and with the tenderness of his grief. Nero, in the beginning of his government, and indeed five entire years, a virtuous and beneficent prince, was soon affected by the same insanity, but acting differently on his heart and intellect. He never lost sight of magnificence, and erected a palace before which even the splendours of Pericles fade away. Plutarch, in the Life of Publicola, tells us that he himself had seen at Athens the columns of Pentelican marble for the temple of the Capitoline Jupiter; that their thickness was reduced at Scopas and Lysippus, of Zeuxis and Apelles, of which probably all that were extant were assembled here; poured forth the lava of the precious metal from its ceilings, its architraves and its arches; and constructed out of its kitchens and stables a bath and amphitheatre for the whole Roman people. Pallavicini. Nero seems to have pacified them surprisingly, after burning down their houses. Landor. The conflagration I believe to have arisen from the necessity of purifying the city after an endemical disease, and of leaving no narrow streets in the centre for its recurrence. The extreme love which the populace bore toward Nero long after his death, is a proof that they did not attribute the fire to his cruelty or caprice; and they were abundantly recompensed by his liberality. Nothing was left for the Flavian dynasty but to demolish and reconstruct: nothing for Trajan but to register on marble his rapid victories, leaving his virtues to be inscribed on materials less perishable: nothing for Hadrian but to imitate the finer works of the Athenians. Architecture then sank for ages. The Moors introduced a style of it more fanciful and ornamental, which beside had this advantage; it brought with it no recollections of deterioration and decay. The cathedrals in Spain are the most exquisite models of it: and illuminated manuscripts, which the Arabs, Turks, and Persians, prize highly, gave, I imagine, those ideas on which the French, the Germans, and the English, raised many noble edifices, correcting the heavier and more depressed masses of Italy. Pallavicini. With Saint Paul's and Saint Stephen's before you, cottages are built like castles, and palaces like cottages; and where the edifice is plain and simple, the window is a hole knocked in the wall, looking like an eye without an eyebrow or eyelashes; or else it is situated in the midst of an arch, as if a ruin had been patched up to receive it. Landor. This idea we borrowed from Florence, and very lately. The Florentines turned their shops into palaces when they turned the name of silk-merchant into that of marquis: and the patchwork is equally visible in the house and in the master. Pallavicini. Since I was in England, I understand that absurdities even more ludicrous are come into fashion, and that your architects fall back again on what they denominate the Elizabethan style. In fact, condemned by nature to perennial twilight, you wainscot your apartments with the darkest oak, and impanel it in your ceilings; your windows are divided and traversed by thick | all you purposed to say upon our buildings, let us stone-work; and the panes of glass, extremely | return again to our plants. small, are sometimes made darker by green and purple, and are held together by almost an equal quantity of lead. Pallavicini. Our first object in the garden is profit. The vicinity of Genoa produces a large quantity of lemons, and many families are supported by renting, at about thirty crowns, half an acre or less of lemon ground. Landor. Enter the gardens and approach the vases: do you perceive the rarity, the beauty, the fragrance of the flowers? In one is a bush of box, Landor. True enough: and when we attempt in another a knot of tansy. Neptune is recumto be more classical, we run into as gross absur-bent on a bed of cabbages, and from the shell of dities. Some of us would be Grecian in our a Triton sprout three turnips, to be sold. houses, forgetting that the Greeks made a wide difference between the construction of a house and of a temple. Even if they had not, still the climates of the two countries are so different, that what would be convenient on the shores of the Egean Sea, would be ill placed on the shores of the British Landor. I mentioned the fact at Pisa, with Channel. Exposed to our biting winds, the some doubt and hesitation; and there I learned Corinthian acanthus would soon shed its beautiful from Don Luigi Serviti and Signor Georgio Salfoliage. And what indeed have we to do with vioni, both gentlemen of Massa di Carrara, the ram's skull and horns belonging to the the extraordinary fertility of a lemon-tree. A Ionian ? We, who slay no rams for sacrifice, and | wager was laid in the year 1812 by Signor Antonio to whom, therefore, such a decoration is without | Georgieri, of Massa, with Marchese Calani, of a memorial and without a meaning. But Ionian Spezia, that at Croscello, half a mile from Massa, pilasters are admissible to the fronts of our houses, there was one which would mature, that season, and Ionian columns to our public edifices. How- | 14,000 lemons; it exceeded the quantity. In ever, the ornaments of the capitals should be taken Spain I was informed that a tree in favourable from what is indigenous and appropriate. The portals in England are despicably poor; whereas to these is greatly owing the dignity of the exterior; and the dignity of the interior to the staircase. In this likewise the best houses of London, with very few exceptions, are deficient. Pallavicini. We Genoese are proud of our door-ways. Landor. They are magnificent; so are many in Rome, and some in Milan. We have none in London, and few in the country; where, however, the staircases are better. These are usually oak. I inherit an old ruinous house, containing one up which the tenant rode his horse to stable him. Let us now reflect again a moment on Athens, which I think will be somewhat more to our satisfaction. A city not larger than Liverpool, and whose inhabitants might almost have been lost in Syracuse, produced, within the short period of two centuries, reckoning from the battle of Marathon, a greater number of exquisite models, in war, philosophy, patriotism, oratory, and poetry; in the semi-mechanical arts which accompany or follow them, sculpture and painting; and in the first of the mechanical, architecture; than the remainder of Europe in 6000 years. She rises up again as from a trance, and is pushed back by the whole company of kings. The rulers of nations seem to think they have as much interest in abolishing the traces of her, if they can, as Alexander thought he had to demolish what were considered to be the monuments of the Argonautic Expedition. Darius felt differently. He believed that there is policy in content, both in keeping and causing it; he established by Mardonius a republican form of government in the Grecian cities of Ionia. Pallavicini. Hush! do not speak of republics: the sound may blow a man's head off. We are safer among the trees. And now, if you have said seasons might ripen nearly 3000; in Sicily the same. The fruit, however, of the plant at Croscello is small, of little juice, and bad quality: I presume it to be a wilding. This, and the celebrated vine at Hampton Court, are the two most extraordinary fruit-bearing trees of their kind on record; they have quintupled the most prolific. * We Englishmen talk of planting a garden; the modern Italians and ancient Romans talk of building one." Ours, the most beautiful in the universe, are not exempt from absurdities: but in the shadiness of the English garden it is the love of retirement that triumphs over taste, and over a sense of the inconveniences. Inhabiting a moist and chilly climate, we draw our woods almost into our dining-rooms: you, inhabiting a sultry one, condemn your innocent children to the ordeal of a red-hot gravel. The shallow well, called pescina, in the middle of every garden, contains just enough water to drown them, which happens frequently, and to supply a generation of gnats for the willeggianti. We again may be ridiculed in our turn: our serpentine ditches are fog-beds. You should cover your reservoirs; an old hat or wig would do it; and we should invite our Naiads to dance along the green a good half-mile from our windows. The English are more zealous of introducing new fruits, shrubs, and plants, than other nations : you Italians are less so than any civilised one. Better fruit is eaten in Scotland than in the most fertile and most cultivated parts of your peninsula. As for flowers, there is a greater variety in the worst of your fields than in the best of your gardens. As for shrubs, I have rarely seen a lilac, a laburnum, a mezereon, in any of them: and yet they flourish before almost every cottage in our poorest villages. *Cui Cneius noster locum ubi hortos ædificaret daret. Cic. ad Atticum. Ep. xvi. 1. ix. : Landor. It is among the most magnificent and, what is better, the most elegant, that I have hitherto seen in Italy; for I have not yet visited the Venetian territory, and know merely from engravings the architecture of Palladio. Whose is it? I now come among the ordinary fruits. The currant, the gooseberry, and the raspberry, the most wholesome and not the least delicious, were domesticated among you by the French in some few places they begin to degenerate already. I have eaten good apples in this country, and pears and cherries much better than ours; the other kinds of fruitage appeared to me unfit for the table, not to say uneatable; and as your gentlemen send the best to market, whether the produce of their own gardens or presents, I have probably tasted the most highly-flavoured. Although the sister of Buonaparte introduced peaches, necta- first deserving the name that had ever been rines, and apricots from France, and planted them at Marlia near Lucca, no person cares about taking grafts from them. We wonder in England, when we hear it related by travellers, that peaches in Italy are left under the trees for swine; but, when we ourselves come into the country, our wonder is rather that the swine do not leave them for animals less nice. I have now, Signor Marchese, performed the conditions you imposed on me, to the extent of my observation; hastily, I confess it, and preoccupied by the interest you excited. I may justly call on you to speak as unreservedly and explicitly. Pallavicini. If you insist upon it, I will. Across the road, exactly four paces from your antechamber, were the quarters of your general: exactly forty-eight from his window, out of which he was looking, did this peasant woman lie groaning in labour, when several soldiers entered her bed-room, and carried off the articles most necessary in her condition. Her husband ran under the apartment of the general, which faced the wife's, entreating his compassion. He was driven away. Landor. Was nothing done? Pallavicini. A few threats were added. Pallavicini. Since, sir, we are in the regions of impossibility, do look again, I entreat you, at the palace just before us: and I am greatly mistaken if I cannot fix your attention upon something of higher import than a span of turf. Pallavicini. It belongs to the family of Cambiagi, to which our republic, while it pleased God to preserve it, owed many signal benefits, as doges and as senators. A private man from among them constructed at his own expense the most commodious of our roads, and indeed the formed in Liguria, whether by moderns or ancients, though Marius and Cæsar marched across. Landor. How grand is that flight of steps upon which the children are playing! These are my vases, Marchese, these are my images, these are decorations for architecture, this is ornamental gardening, and suitable to all countries and climates. Take care, blessed creatures!..a fall from such a height! . ... Pallavicini. Over those steps, amid the screams and embraces of those children, with her arms tied behind her, imploring help, pity, mercy, was dragged by the hair the Marchesa Cambiagi. Landor. For what offence? Pallavicini. Because her husband had mastered his prejudices and resigned his privileges. Landor. Signor Marchese! the English general, whatever may be the public opinion of his talents and his principles, could never have known and permitted it. Pallavicini. Perhaps not: I can only declare that his windows were filled with military men, if uniforms make them, and that he was there: this I saw. Your Houses of Parliament, M. Landor, for their own honour, for the honour of the service and of the nation, should have animadverted on such an outrage: he should answer for it. Landor. These two fingers have more power, Marchese, than those two Houses. A pen! he shall live for it. What, with their animadversions, can they do like this? GENERAL KLEBER AND FRENCH OFFICERS. AN English officer was sitting with his back of insects in the sand. No other sound was against the base of the Great Pyramid. He heard. Powder had exploded; life had passed sometimes looked toward those of elder date away; not a vestige remained of either. and ruder materials before him, sometimes "Let us examine his papers," said the nawas absorbed in thought, and sometimes was turalist. observed to write in a pocket-book with great rapidity. "If he were not writing" said a French naturalist to a young ensign "I should imagine him to have lost his eyesight by the ophthalmia. He does not see us : level your rifle we cannot find a greater curiosity." The Arts prevailed: the officer slided with extended arms from his resting-place: the blood, running from his breast, was audible as a swarm "Pardon me, sir," answered the ensign; "my first inquiry on such occasions is what's o'clock? and afterward I pursue my mineralogical researches." At these words he drew forth the dead man's watch, and stuck it into his sash, while with the other hand he snatched out a purse containing some zecchins: every part of the dress was examined, and not quite fruitlessly. "See! a locket with a miniature of a young countenance. woman!" Such it was a modest and lovely tlemen," added he to his staff-officers, "my duty obliges me to hear this unbecoming language on your late commander-in-chief: retire you a few moments. . . Continue." "Ha! ha!" said the ensign; a few touches, a very few touches; I can give them; and Adela I will take this for me. Two inches higher, and the ball had split it: what a thoughtless man he was! There is gold in it too: it weighs heavy. Peste! an old woman at the back! grey as a cat." 'He hates every enemy according to his courage and his virtues: he abominates what he can not debase, at home or abroad.' "Oh!" whispered Kleber to himself, "he knows the man so well." The first then are Nelson and Sir Sydney Smith, whose friends could expect no mercy at his hands. If the report be anything better than an Arabian tale, I will surrender myself to his successor as prisoner of war, and perhaps may be soon exchanged. How will this little leaf reach you? God knows how and when!' "Is there nothing else to examine?" The papers were taken to General Kleber by the naturalist and his associate, with a correct WRITTEN IN ENGLAND ON THE BATTLE OF ABOUKIR. recital of the whole occurrence, excepting the appendages of watch, zecchins, and locket. "I ask no questions: read them, and write them down legibly." He took the paper, tore off the margin, and placed the line in his snuff-box. "Give me that paper in pencil, with the mark of sealing-wax on it." He snatched it, shook some snuff upon it, and shrunk back. It was no sealing-wax: it was a drop of blood; one from the heart; one only; dry, but seeming fresh. 66 Read." Land of all marvels in all ages past, Egypt, I hail thee from a far-off shore; The voice of gladness in thy halls hath ceast! Love, in thy plains and in thy groves is dumb, Stalk slow, with foreheads level to the sky. No errant outcast of a lawless isle, Mocker of heaven and earth, with vows and prayers, And rivet to his wrist the chain he wears. "Defender and passionate lover of thy country," cried Kleber, "thou art less unfortunate than thy auguries. Enthusiastic Englishman! to which of your conquests have ever been imparted the benefits of your laws? Your governors have not even communicated their language to their vassals. Nelson and Sydney are illustrious names: the vilest have often been preferred to them, and severely have they been punished for the importunity of their valour. We Frenchmen have undergone much but throughout the whole territory of France, throughout the range of all her new dominions, not a single man of abilities has been neglected. Remember this, ye who triumph in our excesses. Ye who dread our example, speak plainly; is not this among the examples ye are the least inclined to follow? "Call my staff and a file of soldiers. "Gentlemen, he who lies under the pyramid, "Stop instantly," cried Kleber, rising. "Gen- seems to have possessed a vacant mind and full "Yes, my dear mother, the greatest name that exists among mortals is that of Sydney. He who now bears it in the front of battle, could not succour me I had advanced too far: I am however no prisoner. Take courage, my too fond mother: I am among the Arabs, who detest the French: they liberated me. They report, I know not upon what authority, that Bonaparte has deserted his army, and escaped from Egypt.' not one. heart, qualities unfit for a spy: indeed he was He was the friend and companion of that Sydney Smith who did all the mischief at Toulon, when Elliot filed from the city, and who lately, you must well remember, broke some of our pipes before Acre . . . a ceremony which gave us to understand, without the formalities of diplomacy, that the Grand Signor declined the honour of our company to take our coffee with him at Constantinople." Then turning to the file of soldiers, "A body lies under the Great Pyramid: go, bury it six feet deep. If there is any man among you capable of writing a good epitaph, and such as the brave owe to the brave, he shall have my authority to BISHOP BURNET AND HUMPHREY HARDCASTLE. Hardcastle. I am curious, my lord bishop, to hear somewhat about the flight and escape of my namesake and uncle Sir Humphrey Hardcastle, who was a free-spoken man, witty, choleric, and hospitable, and who can not have been altogether an alien from the researches of your lordship into the history of the two late reigns. Burnet. Why, Mr. Hardcastle, I do well remember the story of that knight, albeit his manners and morals were such as did entertain me little in his favour. For he hunted and drank and fornicated, and (some do aver) swore, which however, mark me, I do not deliver from my own knowledge, nor from any written and grave document. I the more wonder at him, since he had lived among the Roundheads, as they were contemptuously called; and the minister of his parish was Ezekiel Stedman, a puritan of no ill repute. Howbeit he was ensnared by his worldly-mindedness, and fell into evil courses. The Lord, who permitted him a long while to wallow in this mire, caught him by the heel, so to say, as he was coming out, and threw him into great peril in another way. For although he had mended his life, and had espoused Margaret Pouncey, whose mother was a Touchet, two staid women, yet did he truly in a boozingbout, such as some country-gentlemen I could mention do hold after dinner, say of the Duke, "James, a murrain on him! is a papist." Now among his servants was one Will Taunton, a sallow shining-faced knave, sweaty with impudence. I do remember to have seen the said Taunton in the pillory, for some prominent part he had enacted under the doctor Titus Oates; and a country wench, as I suppose her to have been from her apparel and speech, said unto me, plucking my sleeve, "Look, parson, Will's forehead is like a rank mushroom in a rainy morning; and yet, I warrant you, they show it forsooth as the cleanest and honestest part about him." To continue: Will went straightway and communicated the words of his master to Nicolas Shottery, the Duke's valet. Nick gave unto him a shilling, having first spatten thereon, as he, according to his superstition, said, for luck. The Duke ordered to be counted out unto him eight shillings more, together with a rosary, the which as he was afraid of wearing it (for he had not lost all grace) he sold at Richmond for two groats. He was missed in the family, and his roguery was scented. On which, nothing was foolisher, improperer, or unreasonabler, than the desperate push and strain Charles made, put upon it by his brother James, to catch your uncle Hum Hardcastle. Hum had his eye upon him, slipped the noose, and was over into the Low-Countries. Abraham Cowley, one of your Pindaric lyrists, a great stickler for the measures of the First Charles, was posted after him. But he played the said Abraham a scurvy trick, seizing him by his fine flowing curls, on which he prided himself mightily, like another Absalom, cuffing him, and, some do say, kicking him, in such dishonest wise as I care not to mention, to his, the said Abraham's great incommodity and confusion. It is agreed on all hands that he handled him very roughly, sending him back to his master with a flea in his ear, who gave him but cold comfort, and told him it would be an ill compliment to ask him to be seated. "Phil White," added he, "may serve you, Cowley. You need not look back man, nor spread your fingers like a fig-leaf on the place. Phil does not, like Dan Holroyd of Harwick, carry a bottle of peppered brine in his pocket; he is a clever, apposite, upright little prig: I have often had him under my eye close enough, and I promise he may safely be trusted on the blind side of you." Then, after these aggravating and childish words, turning to the Duke, as Abraham was leaving the presence, he is reported to have said, I hope untruly, "But, damn it, brother! the jest would have been heightened if we could have hanged the knave," meaning not indeed his messenger, but the above cited Hum Hardcastle. And on James shaking his head, sighing, and muttering his doubt of the King's sincerity, and his vexation at so bittera disappointment, "Oddsfish! Jim," said his Majesty, "the motion was Hum's own: I gave him no jog, upon my credit! His own choler did |
