If Tivoli does not flourish so frankly on its oil as Frascati on its wine, it is perhaps because it has of late years tacitly prospered as much on the electricity which its wonderful and beautiful waterfalls enable it to furnish as abundantly to Rome as our own Niagara to Buffalo. The scrupulous Hare, whose Walks in Rome include Tivoli, does not, indeed, advise you to visit the electrical works, but he says that if you have not strength enough for all the interests and attractions of Tivoli it will be wise to give yourself entirely to the cascades and to the Villa d'Este, and this was what we instinctively did, but in the reverse order. Chance rewarded us before we left the villa with a sight of the electric plant, which just below the villa walls smokes industriously away with a round, redbrick chimney almost as lofty and as ugly as some chimney in America. On our way to and fro we necessarily passed through the town, which, with its widish but not straightish chief street, I found as clean as Rome itself, and looking, after the long tumult of its history, beginning well back in fable, as peaceable as Montclair, New Jersey. It had its charm, and, if I could have spent two weeks there instead of two hours, I might impart its effect in much more circumstance than I can now promise the reader. Most of my little time I gladly gave to the villa, which, with the manifold classic associations of the region, attracts the stranger and helps the cataracts sum up all that most people can keep of Tivoli.



The Villa d'Este is not yet a ruin, but it is ruinous enough to win the fancy without cumbering it with the mere rubbish of decay. Some neglected pleasances are so far gone that you cannot wish to live in them, but the forgottenness of the Villa d'Este hospitably allured me to instant and permanent occupation, so that when I heard it could now be bought, casino and all, for thirty thousand dollars, nothing but the want of the money kept me from making the purchase. I indeed recognized certain difficulties in living there the year round; but who lives anywhere the year round if he can help it? The casino, standing among the simpler town buildings on the plateau above the gardens, would be a little inclement, for all its frescoing and stuccoing by the sixteenth-century arts, and in its noble halls, amid the painted and modelled figures, the new American proprietor would shiver with the former host and guests after the first autumn chill began; but while it was yet summer it Avould be as delicious there as in the aisles and avenues of the garden which its balustrated terrace looked into. From that level you descend by marble steps which must have some trouble in knowing themselves from the cascades pouring down the broken steeps beside them, and companionably sharing their seclusion among the cypresses and ilexes. You are never out of the sight and sound of the plunging water, which is still trained in falls and fountains, or left to a pathetic dribble through the tattered stucco of the neglected grots. It is now a good three centuries and a half since the Cardinal Ippolito d'.Este had these gardens laid out and his pleasure-house built overlooking them; and his gardener did not plan so substantially as his architect. In fact, you might suppose that the landscapist wrought with an eye to the loveliness of the ruin it all would soon fall into, and, where he used stone, used it fragilely, so that it would ultimately suggest old frayed and broken lace. Clearly he meant some of the cataracts to face one another, and to have a centre from which they could all be seen—say the still, dull-green basin which occupies a large space in the grounds between them. But he must have meant this for a surprise to the spectator, who easily misses it under the trees overleaning the moss-grown walks which hardly kept themselves from running wild. There is a sense of crumbling decorations of statues, broken in their rococo caverns; of cypresses carelessly grouped and fallen out of their proper straightness and slimness; of unkempt bushes crowding the space beneath; of fragmentary gods or giants half hid in the tangling grasses. It all has the air of something impatiently done for eager luxury, and its greatest charm is such as might have been expected to be won from eventual waste and wreck. If there was design in the treatment of the propitious ground, self-shaped to an irregular amphitheatre, it is now obscured, and the cultiavted tourist of our day may reasonably please himself with the belief that he is having a better time there than the academic Roman of the sixteenth century.

Academic it all is, however hastily and nonchalantly, and I feel that I have so signally failed to make the charm of the villa felt that I am going to let a far politer observer celebrate the beauties of the other supreme interest of Tivoli. When Mr. Gray (as the poet loved to be called in print) visited the town with Mr. Walpole in May, 1740, the Villa d'Este by no means shared the honors of the cataracts, and Mr. Gray seems not to have thought it worth seriously describing in his letter to Mr. West, but mocks the casino with a playful mention before proceeding to speak fully, if still playfully, of the great attraction of Tivoli: "Dame Nature... has built here three or four little mountains and laid them out in an irregular semicircle; from certain others behind, at a greater distance, she has drawn a canal into which she has put a little river of hers called the Anio,... which she has no sooner done, but, like a heedless chit, it tumbles down a declivity fifty feet perpendicular, breaks itself all to shatters, and is converted into a shower of rain, where the sun forms many a bow—red, green, blue, and yellow.... By this time it has divided itself, being crossed and opposed by the rocks, into four several streams, each of which, in emulation of the greater one, will tumble down, too: and it does tumble down, but not from an equally elevated place; so that you have at one view all these cascades intermixed with groves of olive and little woods, the mountains rising behind them, and on the top of one (that which forms the extremity of the half-circle's horns) is seated the town itself. At the very extremity of that extremity, on the brink of the precipice, stands the Sibyls' Temple, the remains of a little rotunda, surrounded with its portico, above half of whose beautiful Corinthian pillars are still standing and entire."

For the reader who has been on the spot the poet's words will paint a vivid picture of the scene; for the reader who has not been there, so much the worse; he should lose no time in going, and drinking a cup of the local wine at a table of the restaurant now in possession of Mr. Gray's point of view. I do not know a more filling moment, exclusive of the wine, than he can enjoy there, with those cascades before him and those temples beside him; for Mr. Gray has mentioned only one of the two, I do not know why, that exist on this enchanted spot, and that define their sharp, black shadows as with an inky line just beyond the restaurant tables. One is round and the other oblong, and the round one has been called the Sibyls', though now it is getting itself called Vesta's—the goddess who long unrightfully claimed the temple of Mater Matuta in the Forum Boarium at Rome. As Vesta has lately been dispossessed there by archaeology (which seems in Rome to enjoy the plenary powers of our Boards of Health), she may have been given the Sibyls' Temple at Tivoli in compensation; but all this does not really matter. What really matters is the mighty chasm which yawns away almost from your feet, where you sit, and the cataracts, from their brinks, high or low, plunging into it, and the wavering columns of mist weakly striving upward out of it: the whole hacked by those mountains Mr. Gray mentions, with belts of olive orchard on their flanks, and wild paths furrowing and wrinkling their stern faces. To your right there is a sheeted cataract falling from the basins of the town laundry, where the toil of the washers melts into music, and their chatter, like that of birds, drifts brokenly across the abyss to you. While you sit musing or murmuring in your rapture, two mandolins and a guitar smilingly intrude, and after a prelude of Italian airs swing into strains which presently, through your revery, you recognize as "In the Bowery" and "Just One Girl," and the smile of the two mandolins and the guitar spreads to a grin of sympathy, and you are no longer at the Cafe Sibylla in Tivoli, but in your own Manhattan on some fairy roof-garden, or at some sixty-cent table d'hote, with wine and music included.

It was a fortnight later that we paid our visit to Frascati, not proudly motoring now, but traversing the Campagna on the roof of a populous tram-car, which in its lofty narrowness was of the likeness of an old-fashionable lake propeller. The morning was, like most other mornings in Rome, of an amiability which the afternoons often failed of; but none of us passengers for Frascati doubted its promise as we gathered at the tram-station and tried for tickets at the little booth in a wall sparely containing the official who bade us get them in the car. We all did this, whatever our nation—American, English, German, or Italian—and then we mounted to the hurricane-deck of our propeller and entered into a generous rivalry for the best seats. We had a roof over our heads, and there were curtains which we might have drawn if we could have borne to lose a single glimpse of the landscape, or if we would not rather have suffered the chill which our swift progress evoked from the morning's warmth after we left the shelter of the city streets. We passed through stretches of the ancient aqueducts consorting on familiar terms with rows of shabby tenement-houses, and whisked by the ends of wide, dusty avenues of yet incomplete structure, and by beds of market-gardens, and by simple feeding-places for man and beast, with the tables set close in front of the stalls. An ambitiously frescoed casino had a gigantic peacock painted over a whole story, and the peach-trees were in bloom in the villa spaces. When we struck into the Campagna we found it of like physiognomy with the Campagna toward Tivoli.

There was very little tillage, but wide stretches of grazing-land, with those lumps of turfed or naked antiquity starting out of them, and cattle, sheep, and horses feeding over them, the colts' tails blowing picturesquely in the wind that seemed more and more opposed to our advance. It dropped, at times, where we paused to leave a passenger near one of those suburbs which the tram-lines are building up round Rome, but on our course building so slowly that our passengers had to walk rather far from the stations before they reached home. There were other pedestrians who looked rather English, especially some ladies making for the gate of a kind, sunny walled old villa, where there was a girl singing and a gardener coming slowly down to let them in. Nearer Frascati were many neat, new stone houses, where Eoman families come out to stay the spring and fall seasons, and even the summer. But these looked too freshly like the suburban cottages on a Boston trolley-line; and we perversely found our delight in a fine breadth of brown woods for the very reason of that homelikeness which gave us pause in the houses. The trees looked American; there were American wood-roads penetrating the forest's broken and irregular extent; there was one steep-sided ravine worth any man's American money; and the dead leaves littered the sylvan paths with an allure to the foot which it was hard for the head to resist.

Elsewhere the tram-line that curved upward to Fras-cati was flanked, after it left the Campagna's level, with vineyards as measureless as the olive orchards of Tivoli. There was yet, at the end of March, no sign of leaf on the newly trimmed vines, which were trained on long poles of canes brought together in peaks to support them and netting the hill-slopes with the endless succession of their tops. The eye wearied itself in following them as in following the checkered wiring of the Kentish hop-fields, and was glad to leave them for the closer-set, but never too closely set, palaces of Frascati: the sort of palaces which we call cottages in our summer cities, and the Italians call casinos from the same instinctive modesty. When we began to doubt of our destination, our car passed a long, shaded promenade, and then stopped in a cheerful square amidst hotels and restaurants, with tables hospitably spread on the sidewalks before them.

We decided not to lunch at that early hour, but we could not keep our eyes from feasting, even at eleven o'clock in the morning, on the wonderful prospect that tempted them, on every hand, away from the more immediate affair of choosing one out of the many cabs that thronged about our arriving train. The cabs of Frascati are all finer than the cabs of Rome, and the horses are handsomer and younger and stronger; we could have taken the worst of the equipages that contested our favor and still fared well; but we chose the best—a glittering victoria and an animal of proud action, with a lustrous coat of bay. He wore a ring of joyous bells; he had, indeed, not a headstall of such gay colors as some others; but you cannot have everything, and his driver was of a mental vividness which compensated for all the color wanting in his horse's headstall, and of a personal attraction which made us ambitious for his company on any terms. He quickly reduced us from our vain supposition that carriages in a country-place should be cheaper than in a city; because, as he proved, there were fewer strangers to hire them and they ought logically to be dearer. So far from accepting our modest standards of time and money, he all but persuaded us to employ him for the whole day instead of a few hours at a price beyond our imagination; and he only consented to compromise on a half-day at an increased figure.

We supposed that it was the negotiation which drew and held the attention of all the leisure of Frascati, and that it was the driver and our relation to him rather than the horse and our relation to it that concentrated the public interest in us; and when we had convinced him that we had no wish but to see some of the more immediate and memorable villas, we mounted to our places in the victoria and drove out through the reluctantly parting spectators, who remained looking after us as if unable to disperse to their business or pleasure.



Our driver decided for us to go first to the Villa Falconieri, which had lately been bought and presented by a fond subject to the German Emperor, and by him in turn bestowed on the German Academy at Rome. In the cold, clean, stony streets of Frascati, as we rattled through them, there breathed the odor of the great local industry; and the doorways of many buildings, widening almost in a circle to admit the burly tuns of wine, testified how generally, how almost universally, the vintage of that measureless acreage of grapes around the place employed the inhabitants. But there was little else to impress the observer in Frascati, and we willingly passed out of the town in the road climbing the long incline to the Villa Falconieri, with its glimpses, far and near, of woods and gardens. It was a road so much to our minds that nothing was further from us than the notion that our horse might not like it so well; but, at the first distinct rise, he stopped and wheeled round so abruptly, after first pawing the air, that there could be no doubt where the popular interest we had lately enjoyed in Frascati had really originated. Probably our horse's distinguishing trait was known to everybody in Frascati except his driver. He, at least, showed the greatest surprise at the horse's behavior, as unprecedented in their acquaintance, which he owned was brief, for he had bought him in Rome only the week before. With successive retreats to level ground he put him again and again at the incline, but as soon as the horse felt the ground rising under his feet he lifted them from it and whirled round for another retreat. All this we witnessed from an advantageous point at the roadside which we had taken up at his first show of reluctance; and at last the driver suggested that we should leave it and go on to the Villa Falconieri on foot. On our part, we suggested that he should attempt some other villa which would not involve an objectionable climb. He then proposed the Villa Mandragone, and the horse seemed to agree with us. As we drove again through the clean, cold, stony streets, with the rounded doorways for the wine-casks, we fancied something clearly ironical in the general interest renewed by our return. But we tried to look as if we had merely done the Villa Falconieri with unexampled rapidity, and pushed on to the Villa Mandragone, where, under the roof of interlacing ilex toughs, our horse ought to have been tempted on in a luxurious unconsciousness of anything like an incline. But he was apparently an animal which would have felt the difference between two rose-leaves and one in a flowery path, and just when we were thinking what a delightful time we were having, and beginning to feel a gentle question as to who the pathetic little cripple halting toward us with a color-box and a camp-stool might be, and whether she painted as well as a kind heart could wish, our horse stopped with the suddenness which we knew to be definite. The sensitive creature could not be deceived; he must have reached rising ground, and we sided with him against our driver, who would have pretended it was fancy.

It was now noon, and we drove back to the piazza, agreeing upon a less price in view of the imperfect service rendered, and deciding to collect our thoughts for a new venture over such luncheon as the best hotel could give us. It was not so good a hotel as the lunch it gave. It was beyond the cleansing tide of modernity which has swept the Roman hotels, and was dirty everywhere, but with a specially dirty, large, shabby dining-room, cold and draughty, yet precious for the large, round brazier near our table which kept one side of us warm in romantic mediaeval fashion, and invited us to rise from time to time and thaw our fingers over its blinking coals. The bath in which our chicken had been boiled formed a good soup; there was an admirable pasta and a creditable, if imperfect, conception of beefsteak; and there was a caraffe of new Frascati wine, sweet, like new cider. If we could have asked more, it would not have been more than the young Italian officer who sat in the other corner with his pretty young wife, and who allowed me to weave a whole realistic fiction out of their being at Frascati so out of season.

Just as I was most satisfyingly accounting for them, our late driver alarmed me by appearing at the door and beckoning me to the outside. The occasion was nothing worse than the presence of a man who, he said, was his brother, with a horse which, upon the same authority, was without moral blame or physical blemish. If anything, it preferred a mountain to a plain country, and could be warranted to balk at nothing. The man, who was almost as exemplary as the horse, would assume the unfulfilled contract of the other man and horse with a slight increase of pay; and yet I had my doubts. The day had clouded, and I meekly contended that it was going to rain; but the man explicitly and the horse tacitly scoffed at the notion, and I yielded. I shall always be glad that I did so, for in the keeping of those good creatures the rest of our day was an unalloyed delight. It appeared, upon further acquaintance, that the man paid a hundred dollars for the horse; his brother had paid a hundred and twenty-five for the balker; but it was the belief of our driver that it would be worth the difference when it had reconciled itself to the rising ground of Frascati; as yet it was truly a stranger there. His own horse was used to ups and downs everywhere; they had just come from a long trip, and he was going to drive to Siena and back the next week with two ladies for passengers, who were to pay him five dollars a day for himself and horse and their joint keep. He said the ladies, whose names he gave, were from Boston; he balked at adding Massachusetts, but I am sure the horse would not; and, if I could have hired them both to carry me about Italy indefinitely, I would have gladly paid them five dollars a day as long as I had the money. The fact is, that driver was charming, a man of sense and intelligence, who reflected credit even upon his brother and his brother's horse: one of those perfect Italian temperaments which endear their possessors to the head and heart, so that you wonder, at parting, how you are going to live without them.

We did not excite such vivid interest in Frascati at our second start as at our first; but, as we necessarily passed over the same route again, we had the applause of the children in streets now growing familiar, and a glad welcome back from the pretty girls and blithe matrons of all ages rhythmically washing in the public laundry, who recognized us in our new equipage. The public laundry is always the gayest scene in an Italian town, and probably our adventures continued the subject of joyous comment throughout the day which was now passing only too rapidly for us. We were again on the way to the Villa Falconieri, and while our brave horse is valiantly mounting the steep to its gate this is perhaps as good a place as any to own that the Villa Falconieri and the Villa Man-dragone were the only sights we saw in Frascati. We did, indeed, penetrate the chill interior of the local cathedral, but as we did not know at the time that we were sharing it with the memory of the young Stuart pretender Charles Edward, who died in Frascati, and whose brother, Cardinal York, placed a mural tablet to him in the church, we were conscious of no special claim upon our interest. We ought, of course, to have visited the Villa Aldobrandini and the Villa Ruffinella and the Villa Graziola and the Villa Taverna, but we left all these to the reader, who will want some reason for going to Frascati in person, and to whom I commend them as richly worth crossing the Atlantic for. Doubtless from a like motive we left the ruins of Tusculum unvisited, just as at Tivoli we refrained from diverging to Hadrian's Villa—the two things supremely worthy to be seen in their respective regions. But, if I had seen only half as much as I saw at Frascati—the Villa Falconieri, namely—I should feel forever over-enriched by the experience.

Slowly an ancient servitor, whose family had been in the employ of the Falconieri for a century, advanced as with the burden of their united years and opened the high gate to us and delivered us over to a mild boy. He bestowed on us, for a consideration, a bunch of wild violets, and then, as if to keep us from the too abrupt sight of the repairs and changes going on near the casino, led us first to the fish-pond, in the untouched seclusion of a wooded hill, and silently showed us the magnificent view which the top commanded, if commanded is not too proud a word for a place so pathetic in its endearing neglect. It had once been the haunt of many a gay picnicking crew in hoops and bag-wigs and all the faded fashion of the past, when hosts and guests had planned a wilder escapade than the grove before the casino invited, with its tables of moss-painted marble. There would have been an academic poet, or more than one, in the company, and they would have furnished forth the prospect with phrases far finer than any I have about me, who can only say that the Cam-pagna, clothed in mist and cloud-shadowed, swam round the upland in the colors of a tropic sea.



Our mild boy waited a decent moment, as if to let me do better, and then led down to the casino, round through a wooded valley where there were some men with fowling-pieces, whom I objected to in tones, if not in terms. "What are they shooting?" "They are shooting larks, signore." "What a pity!" "But the larks are leaving Italy, now, and going north." It was a reason, like many another that humanity is put to it in giving, and I do not know that I missed any larks, later, from an English meadow where I saw them spiring up in song, and glad as if none of their friends had been shot at the Villa Falconieri. In fact, I did not see those fowlers actually killing any; and I can still hope they were not very good shots.

The workmen who were putting the place in repair were lunching near the casino, in a litter of lumber and other structural material, but the casino itself seemed as yet unprofaned by their touch. At any rate, we had it quite to ourselves, let wander at will through its cool, bare, still spaces. If there was a great deal to see, there was not much to remember, or to remember so much as the satirical frescos of Pier Leone Ghezzi, who has caricatured himself as well as others in them. They are not bitter satires, but, on the contrary, very charming; and still more charming are the family portraits frescoed round the principal room. Under one curve of the vaulted ceiling the whole family of a given time is shown, half-length but life-size, looking down pleasantly on the unexpected American guests who try to pretend they were invited, or at least came by mistaking the house for another. Better even than this most amiable circle, or half-circle, of father, mother, and daughter are the figures of friends or acquaintances or kinsfolk: figures not only life-size, but full-length, in panels of the walls, in the very act of stepping on the floor and coming forward to greet their host and hostess from the other walls. They did not visibly move during our stay, but I know they only waited for us to go; and that at night, especially when there was a moon, or none, they left their backgrounds and mingled in the polite gayeties of their period. One could hardly help looking over one's shoulder to see if they were not following to that farthermost room called Primavera, which is painted around and aloft like a very bower of spring, with foliage and flowers covering the walls and dropping through the trellis feigned overhead. Of all the caprices of art, which in Italy so loved caprice, I recall no such pleasing playfulness as in the decoration of these rooms. If you pass through the last you may look from the spring within on no fairer spring without bordering the shores of the Campagna sea.

It was so pathetic to imagine the place going out of the right Italian keeping that I attributed a responsive sadness to the tall, handsome, elderly woman who had allowed us the freedom of the casino. Her faded beauty was a little sallow, as the faded beauty of a Roman matron should be, and her large, dark eyes glowed from purpling shadows.

"And the German Emperor owns it now?"

"Yes, they say he has bought it."

"And the Germans will soon be coming?"

"They say."

She would not commit herself but by a tone, an inflection, but we knew very well what she and the frescoed presences about us thought. I wish now I could have stayed behind and got the frescos to tell me just how far I ought recognize her sorrow in my tip, but one must always guess at these things, and I shall never know whether I rewarded the aged gatekeeper according to the century of service his generations had rendered those of the frescos.

We were going now to the Villa Mandragone, but we had not yet the courage for the rise of ground where we had failed before, and we entreated our driver to go round some other way, if he could, and descend rather than ascend to it. He said that was easy, and it was when we came away that we passed through that ilex avenue which we had not yet penetrated in its whole length, and where we now met many foot-passengers, lay and cleric, who added to the character of the scene, and saw again the little cripple artist, now trying to seize its features, or some of them. I did not see whether she was succeeding so well as in pity she might and as I knew she did.

In spite of our triumph with the Villa Mandragone in this second attempt, we can never think it half as charming as the Villa Falconieri. I forget what cardinal it was who built it so spacious and splendid, with three hundred and sixty-five windows, in honor of the calendar as reformed by the reigning pope, Gregory XIII. It is a palace enclosing a quadrangle of whole acres (I will not own to less), with a stately colonnade following as far round as the reader likes. When he passes through all this magnificence he will come out on a grassy terrace, with a fountain below it, and below that again the chromatic ocean of the Cam-pagna (I have said sea often enough). A weird sort of barbaric stateliness is given to the place by the twisted and tapering pillars that rise at the several corners, with colossal masques carven at the top and the sky showing through the eye-hollows, as the flame of torches must often have shown at night. But for all the outlandish suggestion of these pillars, the villa now belongs to the Jesuits, who have a college there, where only the sons of noble families are received for education. As we rounded a sunny wall in driving away, we saw a line of people, old and young of both sexes, but probably not of noble families, seated with their backs against the warm stone eating from comfortable bowls a soup which our driver said was the soup of charity and the daily dole of the fathers to such hungry as came for it. The day was now growing colder than it had been, and we felt that the poor needed all the soup, and hot, that they could get.

After a vain visit to Grotta Ferrata, which was signally disappointing, in spite of the traces of a recent country fair and the historical merits of a church of the Greek rite, with a black-bearded monk coming to show it through a gardened cloister, we were glad to take the tram back to Rome and to get into the snug inside of it. The roof, which had been so popular and populous in the morning, was now so little envied that a fat lady descended from it and wedged herself into a row of the interior where a sylph would have fitted better but might not have added so much to the warmth. No one, myself of the number, thought of getting up, though there were plenty of straps to hang by if one had chosen to stand. This was quite like home, and so was it like home to have the conductor ask me to wait for my change, with all the ensuing fears that wronged the long-delayed remembrance of his debt. In some things it appears that at Rome the Romans do as the Americans do, but I wish we were like them in having such a place as Frascati within easy tram-reach of our cities.



XV. A FEW REMAINING MOMENTS



In the days of the earlier sixties, we youth who wished to be thought elect did not feel ourselves so unless we were deeply read in Hawthorne's romance of The Marble Faun. We made that our aesthetic handbook in Rome, and we devoutly looked up all the places mentioned in it, which were important for being mentioned; though such places as the Tarpeian Rock, the Forum, the Capitoline Museum, and the Villa Bor-ghese might secondarily have their historical or artistic interest. In like manner Story's statue of Cleopatra was to be seen, because it was the "original" of the imaginary sculptor Kenyon's Cleopatra, and a certain mediaeval tower was sacred because it was universally identified as the tower where the heroine Hilda lived dreaming and drawing, and fed the doves that circled around its top. We used to show the new arrivals where Hilda's tower was, and then stand with them watching the pigeons which made it unmistakable. I should then have thought I could never forget it, but I must have passed it several times unnoting in my latest Roman sojourn, when one afternoon in a pilgrimage to the Via del Gambero a contemporary of that earlier day glanced around the narrow piazza through which we were passing and, seeing a cloud of doves wheeling aloft, joyfully shouted, "Look! There is Hilda's tower!" and if Hilda herself had waved to us from its battlements we could not have been surer of it. The present vanished, and we were restored to our citizenship in that Rome of the imagination which is greater than any material Rome, and which it needs no archaeologist to discover in its indestructible integrity.

No one to-day, probably, visits the Capitoline Museum for the Faun of Praxiteles because it gave the romance its name; but at my latest sight of it I remembered it with a thrill of the young piety which first drew me to it, and involuntarily I looked again for the pointed, furry ears, as I had done of old, to make sure that it was really the Marble Faun of Hawthorne. I was now, however, for no merit of mine, in official and scientific company with which it would have been idle to share my satisfaction in the verification of the Faun's ears. Instead of boasting it, I listened to very interesting talk of the deathless Dying Gladiator, who is held to have been originally looked at more from below than he has been seen in modern times, and who is presently to be lifted to something like his antique level. He, in fact, requires this from the spectator who would feel all his pathos, as we realized in sitting down and looking a little upward at him.



In his room and in the succession of the rooms filled with his immortal bronze and marble companions I was as if with ghosts of people I had known in some anterior life. They were so familiar that I felt no need to go about asking their names, even if the archaeologists had in several cases given them new names. I should have known certain of them by traits which remain in the memory long after names have dropped out of it. Julius Caesar, with his long Celtic upper-lip, still looked like the finer sort of Irish-American politician; Tiberius again surprised me with the sort of racial sanity and beauty surviving in his atrocious personality from his mother's blood; but the too Neronian head of Nero, which seems to have been studied from the wild young miscreant when trying to look the part, had an unremembered effect of chubby idiocy. A thing that freshly struck me in the busts of those imperialities, which of course must have been done in their lifetimes, was not merely that the subjects were mostly so ugly and evil but that the artists were apparently safe in showing them so. The men might not have minded that, but how had the sculptors managed to portray the women as they did and live? Perhaps they did not live, or live long; they are a forgotten tribe, and no one can say what became of any given artist after executing the bust of an empress; his own execution may have immediately followed. But what is certain is that those ladies are no lovelier in their looks than they were in their lives; to be sure, in their rank they had not so great need of personal charm as women of the lower class. The most touching face as well as the most dignified and beautiful face among them is that of the seated figure which used to be known as that of Agrippina but which, known now as that of a Roman matron, does not relieve the imperial average of plainness. The rest could rival the average American society woman only in the prevailing modernity of their expression; imperial Rome was very modern, as we all know, and nothing in our own time could be more up to date than the lives and looks of its smart people.

The general impression of the other marbles of the Capitoline Museum remains a composite of standing, sitting, stooping, and leaning figures, of urns and vases, of sarcophaguses and bas-reliefs. If you can be definite about some such delightful presence as that old River dozing over his fountain in the little cold court you see first and last as you come and go, it is more than your reader, if he is as wise as you wish him, can ask of you. I have been wondering whether he could profitably ask of me some record of my experiences in the official and scientific company with which I was honored that day at the Campidoglio; but I should have to offer him again a sort of composite psychograph of objects printed one upon another and hardly separable in their succession. There would be the figure of Marcus Aurelius, commanding us with outstretched arm from the back of the bronze charger which would not obey Michelangelo when he bade it "Go," not because it was not lifelike, but because it was too fat to move. Against the afternoon sky, looking down into the piazza with dreamy unconcern from their vantage would be the statues on the balustrated roof of the museum. There would be the sense, rather than the vision, of the white shoulders of Castor and Pollux beside their steeds above the dark-green garden spaces on either hand; there would be the front of the Church of Ara Coeli visible beyond the insignificance of Rienzi's monument; and filling in the other end of the piazza which Michelangelo imagined, and not the Romans knew, there would be the palace of the senator, to which the mayor and the common council of modern Rome now mount by a double stairway, and presumably meet at the top in proceeding to their municipal labors. Facing the museum would be the palace of the Conservatori, where in the noblest of its splendid halls the present company would find itself in the carved and gilded arm-chairs of the conservators, seated at an afternoon tea-table and restoring itself from the fatigues of more and more antique art in the galleries about. After this there would be the gardened court of the palace, with a thin lawn, and a soft little fountain musing in the midst of it, and the sunset light lifting on the wall where the fragments of Septimius Severus's marble map of Rome order themselves in such coherence as archaeology can suggest for them.

In the palace of the Senator (who was not, as I dare say the reader ignorantly supposes, a residuum of the old Roman senate, but was the dictator whom the mediaeval republic summoned from within or without to be its head and its safeguard from the aristocracy) there would be, beyond the chamber where the actual city council of Rome meets under the presidency of the mayor, the great public rooms bannered and memorialled around with heroic and historic blazons; and last there would be the private room where the syndic devotes himself to civic affairs when he can turn from the sight of the Roman Forum, with a peripatetic archaeologist lecturing a group of earnest Americans, while long, velvety shadows of imperial purple stretch from the sunset on the softly rounded and hollowed ruins of the Palatine.

But, if each of these bare facts could be parted from the others and intelligently presented, what would it avail with the reader who has never seen the originals of my psychograph? It is from some such question, and not from want of a hospitable will, that I hesitate to ask him to go with me on a golden morning of March and spend it in the Villa Medici on the Pincian Hill. If I could I should like to pour its yellowness and mellowness round him, perfumed with a potpourri of associations from the time of Lucullus down through every mediaeval and modern time to that very day, when I knew Carolus Duran to be living somewhere in these beauteous bounds as the head of the French Academy which has its home in them. The academic garden-paths, with a few happy people wandering between their correctly balanced passages of box; the blond facade of the casino looking down with its statues and reliefs on these parterres; a young girl vanishing up an aisle of the grove beside the garden into whatever dream awaited her youth in the leafy dusk; an old American pair gazing after her from the terrace, with the void of the vanished years aching in their hearts for the Rome that was once young with them: does this represent to the reader an appreciable morning in the Villa Medici? He may be grateful to me if he does, and if he likes. I cannot do more for him without doing less, and yet I know it is a palette rather than a picture I am giving him.



All the while I was there, the guest of the French nation by the payment of fifty centimes gate-money, I was obscurely resenting its retention of a place which Bonaparte bestowed upon the First Republic with so much other loot from Italy. But now I have lately heard that the magnanimous Third Republic is going to restore it to the people rightfully its owners, and the remembrance of my morning in the Villa Medici will remain a pure joy. So few joys in this world, even in the very capital of it, are without some touch of abatement. I could not so much as visit the Catacombs of Domatilla without suffering a frustration which, though incidental merely, left a lasting pang of unrequited interest. As we drew toward the place, I saw in a field the beginning of one of those domestic dramas which are not attributable to Italy alone. Three peasants, a man and two women, were engaged in controversy which, on his side, the man supported with both hands flapping wildly at the heads of the women, who alertly dodged and circled around him in the endeavor to close in upon him. It was instantly conjecturable, if not apparent, that they were his wife and daughter, and that he was the worse for the vintage of their home acre, and would be the better for being got into the house and into bed. The conjecture enlisted the worthier instincts of the witness on the side of the mother and daughter; but he was in no hurry to have the animated action brought to a close, and was about to tell his cabman to drive very, very slowly, when suddenly the cab descended into a valley, and when the eager spectator rose to his former level again the stone wall had risen with him, and he never knew the end of that passage of real life.

It was impossible to bid the cabman drive back for the close of the scene; the abrupt conclusion must be accepted as final; but it is proof of the charm I found in the gentle guide who presently began to marshal us among the paths of the subterranean sanctuary and cemetery that for the moment my bitter sense of loss was assuaged, and it only returns now at long intervals. Such as the woman actors in this brief scene were some early Christians might have been, and it must have been the stubborn old pagan spirit I saw surviving in the husband and father. He was probably such a vessel of wrath as, being filled with Bacchus, would have lent itself to the persecuting rage of Domitian and helped drive the emperor's gentle cousin Domatilla into the exile whence she returned to found a Christian cemetery in her villa. One understands, of course, under the villa; for the catacombs in some places reach as many as five levels below the surface. I will not follow the reader with that kind guide who will cheer his wanderings through those sunless corridors of death, where many of the sleepers still lie sealed within their tombs on either hand, and show him by the smoky taper's light the frescos which adorn the cramped chapels. I prefer to stand at the top of the entrance and ask him if he noticed how the artist sometimes seemed not to know whether he was pagan or Christian, and did not mind, for instance, putting a Mercury at the heads of the horses in an Ascent of Elijah. Perhaps the artist was really a pagan and thought a Greek god as good as a Hebrew prophet any day; art was probably one of the last things to be converted, having a presentiment of the dark and bloody themes the new religion would give it to deal with.

The earthy scent of the catacomb will cling to the reader's clothes, and he will have two minds about keeping for a souvenir the taper which he carried, and which the guide wraps in a bit of newspaper for him; he may prefer the flower which he is allowed to gather from the tiny garden at the entrance to the catacombs. Yet these Catacombs of Domatilla are among the cheerfulest of all the catacombs, and a sense of something sweet and appealing invests them from the memory of the gentle lady whose piety consecrated them as the last home of the refugees and martyrs. They are of the more recent Roman excavations, but I do not know whether later or earlier than those which have revealed the house of the two Christian gentlemen, John and Paul, of unknown surname, where they suffered death for their faith, under the Passionist church named for them. Twenty-four rooms on the two stories have been opened, and there are others yet to be opened; when all are laid bare they will perfectly show what a Roman city dwelling of the better sort was like in the mid-imperial time. The plan differs from that of the average Pompeian house as much as the plan of a cross-town New York dwelling would differ from that of the average Newport cottage. The rooms are incomparably smaller than those of the mediaeval palaces of the Roman nobles, and the decoration is sometimes crudely mixed of pagan and Christian themes and motives; the artists, like the painters of the Domatilla catacombs, were probably lingering in the old Greek tradition.

The young Passionist father who showed us through the church and the house under it made us wait half an hour while he finished his lunch, but he was worth waiting for. He was a charming enthusiast for both, radiantly yet reverently exulting in their respective treasures, and justly but not haughtily proud of the newly introduced electricity which lighted the darkness of the underground rooms and corridors. He told us he had been twenty years a missionary in Rumania, where he had possibly acquired the delightful English he spoke. When he would have us follow him he said, "All persons come this way," and he politely spoke of the wicked emperor whose bust was somehow there as Mr. Commodus. With all his gentleness, however, that good father had a certain smiling severity before which the spirit bowed. He had made us wait half an hour before he came to let us into the church, and during the hour we were with him there he kept the door locked against an unlucky lady who arrived just too late to enter with us. Not only this, but he utterly refused to go back with her singly and show her the things we had seen. Perhaps it would not have been decorous; they do not let ladies, either singly or plurally, into the garden of the convent, which is memorable among many other facts as being the retreat of Mr. Commodus when he suffered from sleeplessness, and where he once carelessly left his list of victims lying about, so that his friend Marcia found it and, reading her name in it, joined with other friends in his assassination. The sex has indeed had much restraint to bear from the Church, but in some respects it has been rendered fearless in the assertion of its rights. With poor women one of these is the indefeasible right to ask alms, and I admired the courage, almost the ferocity, of the aged crone whom I had promised charity in coming to the place and who rose up as I was being driven past her, in going away, and stayed my cabman with a clamor which he dared not ignore. Her reproaches continued through the ensuing transaction, and followed him away with stings which instinct and experience taught her how to implant in his tenderest sensibilities.

A chapter much longer than any I have written here might well be devoted to the study of the clerical or secular guides in the minor churches of Rome. They are of every manner and degree of kindliness, mixed with a fair measure of intelligence and a very fitting faith in the legends of their churches. You soon get on terms of impersonal intimacy with them, and you cannot come away without sharing their professional zeal, and distinguishing for the moment in favor of their respective churches above every other. It did not matter whether it was that newest church in the Quartiere dei Prati, or that most venerable among the oldest churches, the Church of San Gregorio: I found a reason for agreeing with the sacristan upon its singular claims. These were especially enforced by the good dame, the only woman sacristan I remember, who would not spare us a single object of interest in San Gregorio's, which is indeed for the visitor of Anglo-Saxon race supremely rich in its associations with the conversions of his ancestors from heathenism.



Being myself of Cymric blood, and of a Christianity several hundred years older than that of the ordinary Anglo-Saxon traveller, I am afraid that it was from a rather patronizing piety that I visited the church where the great St. Gregory dismissed to their mission in England St. Augustine and his fellow-apostles on one of the greatest days of the sixth century. I might have stayed to imagine them kneeling among the people who then thronged the genially irregular piazza, but as we came up some ecclesiastical students were playing ball there, their robes tucked into their girdles for their greater convenience, and we made our way at once into the church. It forms one of a consecrated group of edifices enshrining the memory of the best of the popes, who was also the greatest; and here or in the adjacent convents a score of miracles were wrought through the heavenly beauty of his life. Of these miracles, of whose inspiration you must feel the poetry even if you cannot feel their verity, the loveliest has its substantial witness in one of the little chapels next the church. There you may see with your eyes and touch with your hands the table at which St. Gregory fed every morning twelve poor men, till one morning a thirteenth appeared in the figure of Christ the Lord, as if to own them His disciples. The chapel which enshrines the table is one of three, quaint in form and rich in art, standing in the garden called St. Silvia's, after the mother of St. Gregory. As we came out through it the westering sun poured the narrow court before the chapel full of golden light and threw the black shadow of a cypress across the way that a file of Comaldolese monks were taking to the adjoining convent. They were talking cheerily together, and swung unheeding by in their white robes so near that I could almost feel the waft of them across the centuries that parted their faith and mine.

We had come to St. Gregory's from the Baths of Caracalla, which we had set out to see on the first of our Roman holidays, and, after turning aside for the Coliseum, had now visited on next to the last of them. The stupendous ruin could scarcely have been growing in the ten or twelve weeks that had passed, but a bewildering notion of something like this obsessed me as I saw it bulking aloof in overhanging cliffs and precipices, through the cool and bright April air, against a sky of absolute blue. As if it had been cast up out of the earth in some convulsive throe of nature, it floundered over its vast area in shapeless masses which seemed to have capriciously received the effect of human design in the coping of the inaccessible steeps, in the arches flinging themselves across the spaces between the beetling crags, in the monstrous spring and sweep of the vaults, in the gloom of the cavernous apertures of its Titanic walls. For the moment its immensity dwarfed the image of all the other fragments of the Roman world and set definite bounds to their hugeness in the mind. It seemed to have been not so much a single edifice as a whole city, the dwelling instead of the resort of the multitudes that once thronged it. The traces of the ornamentation which had enriched it everywhere and which it had taken ages of ravage to strip from it, accented its savage majesty, and again the sentiment of spring in the fresh afternoon breeze and sunshine, and the innocent beauty of the blooming peach and cherry in the orchards around, imparted to it a pathos in which one's mere brute wonder was lost. But it was a purely adventitious pathos, and it must be owned here, at the end, that none of the relics of ancient Rome stir a soft emotion in the beholder, and, as for beauty, there is more of it in some ivy-netted fragment of some English abbey which Henry's Cromwell "hammered down" than in the ruin of all the palaces and temples and theatres and circuses and baths of that imperial Rome which the world is so well rid of.



VII. A WEEK AT LEGHORN

We left Rome with such a nostalgic pang in our hearts that we tried to find relief in a name for it, and we called ourselves Romesick. Afterward, when we practised the name with such friends as we could get to listen, they thought we said homesick. Being better instructed, they stared or simpered, and said, "Oh!" That was not all we could have asked, but Rome herself would understand, and, while we were seeking this outlet for our grief, she followed us as far as she could on her poor, broken aqueducts. At places they gave way under her, and she fell down, but scrambled up again on the next stretch of arches, like some fond cripple pursuing a friend on crutches; when at last our train outran them, and there was no longer an arch to halt upon, she gave up the vain chase and turned back within her walls, where we saw her domes and bell-towers fading into the heaven to which they pointed.

It was a heaven of better than absolute blue, for there were soft, white clouds in it, and the air that our Sunday breathed under it was, at the beginning of April, as bland as that of an American May-end. The orchard trees were in bloom—peach and plum, cherry and pear—whenever you chose to look at them, and all nature seemed to rejoice in the cessation of the two days' strike which had now enabled us to drive to the station instead of walking and carrying our bags and bundles. There were so many of these that we had taken two cabs, and at the station our drivers attempted to rejoice with nature in an overcharge that would have recouped them for the loss suffered in their recent leisure. But as we were then leaving Koine, and were not yet melted with the grief of absence, I had the courage to resist their demand. Long before we reached Leghorn I was so Romesick that I would have paid them anything they asked.

When we emerged from the suburbs upon the open Campagna, we passed through many fields of wheat, more than we had yet seen on the grassy waste, but there were also many flocks of sheep feeding with the cattle in pastures. Now and then we passed a wretched hut which seemed to be the dwelling of the shepherds we saw tending the flocks, and here and there we came upon a group of farm buildings, all of straw, whether for man or beast, set within a sort of squalid court, with a frowzy suggestion of old women and children about the doors of the cottages. We saw no men, though there must have been men off at work in the fields with the younger women.

As we drew near Civita Vecchia the sea widened on our view, wild with a wind that seemed to have been blowing ever since the stormy evening in 1865 when, after looking at the tossing ships in the harbor, we decided to take the diligence for Leghorn, rather than the little steamer we had meant to take. From our pleasant train we now patronized Civita Vecchia with a recognition of its picturesqueness, unvexed by the choice that then insisted on itself, though the harbor was as full of shipping as of old. There was time to run out for a cup of coffee at the station buffet, where there had been neither station nor buffet in our young time: but doubtless then as now there had been the lonely graveyard outside the town, with its sea-beaten, seaward wall. We buried there the last of our Roman holidays under a sky that had changed from blue to gray since our journey began, and mournfully set out faces northward in the malarial Maremma.

If the Maremma is as malarial as it is famed, it does not look it. There were stretches of hopeless morass, with wide acreages under water, but mostly, I should say, it was rather a hilly country. Now and then we ran by a stony old town on a distant summit like the outcropping of granite or marble, and there were frequent breadths of woodland, oak and pine and, I dare say, walnut and chestnut. Evidently there had been efforts to reclaim the Maremma from its evil air and make it safely habitable, and the farther we penetrated it the more frequent the evidences were. There were many new buildings of a good sort, and of wood as well as stone; when we came to Grosetto, where we had spent a memorable night after being overturned in the Ombrone, in the attempt of our diligence to pass its flood, we were aware, in the evening light, of a prosperity which, if not excessive for the twoscore years that had passed, was still very noticeable. I should not quite say that the brick wall of the city had been scraped and scrubbed, but it looked very neat and new, and there was a pleasant suburb under it where the moat might have been, and people were coming and going who had almost the effect of commuters; at least, they seemed to have come out to their homes by trolley. We resisted an impulse to dismount and go up to the inn in the heart of the town where we had spent that "night of memory and of sighs."

But we searched the horizon round for the point on the highway where our diligence had failed of the track between the telegraph-poles and softly rolled with us in the muddy waters, like an elephant taking a bath, but, so far from finding it, we could not even find the highway. We began to have our doubts of what we had always believed had happened, and remained as snugly as we could in our compartment, where, to tell the truth, we were not very snug. In too fond a reliance on the almanac, the Italian government had cut off the steam which ought to have heated it, and the cold from the hills, on which we saw snow, pierced our rugs and cushions; but, if we had known what we were coming to in Leghorn, we should have thought ourselves very enviable.

I do not know exactly how far it is from the station in Leghorn to the hotel where we had providently engaged rooms with a fire in at least one of them, but I should say at a rough calculation it was a hundred miles as we covered the distance in a one-horse omnibus, through long, straight streets, after ten o'clock at night. The streets and houses were mostly dark, as houses of good habits should be at that hour, but, after passing through a wide, lonely piazza, we struck into a street longer and straighter than the others, and drew up at our hotel door opposite an hilarious cafe, where there seemed a general rejoicing of some sort. We were unable to make out just what sort, or to join in it without knowing, though it lasted well toward morning, and we were up often during the night to see that the fire did not die out of our one porcelain stove and leave us to perish of cold.

In Leghorn the good Baedeker says that all the hotels are good, and this sweeping verdict may be true if taken in the sense that one is as good as another, but they are of the old Italian type which our winter in Rome had taught us to think obsolete; now we found that it was only obsolescent. We had written to bespeak a room with fire in it, and this was well, for the hotel was otherwise heated only by the bodies of its frequenters, who, when filled with Chianti, might emit a sensible warmth; though it was very modern in being lighted with electricity, and having a lift, in which, after a tepid supper, we were carried to our apartment. We had our landlord's company at supper, and had learned from him that the most eminent of American financiers, who shall not otherwise be identified here, was in the habit, when coming to Leghorn, of letting him know that he was bringing a party of friends, and commanding of him a banquet such as he alone knew how to furnish a millionaire of that princely quality. After that we were not so much surprised as grieved to find that our elderly chambermaid had profited by our absence to gather all the coals out of our one stove into two scaldini, which were bristling before her where she knelt when we opened the door upon her. She apologized, but still she carried away the coals, and we were left to rekindle the zeal of our stove as best we could. It was not a large stove, and it seemed to feel its inadequacy to the office of taking the chill off that vast, dim room, where it cowered, dark and low upon the floor, with a yearning, upward stretch of its pipe lost in space before it reached the lowermost goddess in the allegory frescoed on the ceiling. If it had been a white porcelain stove, that might have helped, but it was of a gloomy earthen color that imparted no more cheer than warmth.

We rebuilt our fire, after many repeated demands for kindling, which had apparently to be sawed and split in a distant wood-yard before we could get it, and then the long, arctic night set in, unrelieved by the noisy gayeties of the cafe across the way. These burst from time to time the thin film of sleep which formed like a coating of ice over the consciousness, and then one could only get up and put more wood into the despairing stove and more clothes on the beds. Well for us that we had thought to bring all our travelling rugs with us in straps, instead of abandoning them with our other baggage in the station till next day! But, even with these heaping the hotel blankets and com-forters, we shivered, and a superannuated odor that had lurked in the recesses of those rooms, to which the sun or wind had never pierced, grew with the growing cold, and haunted the night like something palpable as well as sensible—the materialization of smells dead and buried there long ago. It was wonderful how little way the electric bulb shed its beams in that naughty air; it would not even light the page which at one time was opened in the vain hope that the author would help the benumbing cold to bring torpor if not slumber to the weary brain.

It is really impossible to say where or how we breakfasted, but it was somehow managed, and then search was made by the swiftest conveyance for the hotel which we had heard of outside the city, as helping make Leghorn the watering-place it is for Italians in the summer, and in the winter as being steam-heated and appointed with every modern comfort for the passing or sojourning stranger. It was all that and more, and only for the fear that I should seem to join it in advertising its merits I should like to celebrate it by name. But perhaps it is as well not; if I did, all my readers would swarm upon that hotel, and there would be no room for me, who hope some day to go back there and spend an old age of luxurious leisure. There was not only steam-heat in the public rooms of the ground floor, but there was furnace heat in all the corridors, and there were fireplaces in certain chambers, which also looked out on the sea, to Corsica and Elba and other isles of it, and would be full of sun as soon as the cold rain closed a fortnight's activity. That which diffused a blander atmosphere than steam or radiator, register and hearth, however, was the kind will, the benevolent intelligence, which imagined us, and which would not then let us go. We had become not only agnostic as respected the possibility of warmth in Leghorn, we were open sceptics, aggressive infidels. But the landlord himself followed us from one room to another, lighting fires here and there on the hearth, making us feel the warm air rising from the furnace, calling us to witness by palpation the heat of the radiators, soothing our fears, and coaxing our unfaith. His wife joined him in Italian and his son in English, and, if I do not say that these amiable people were worthy all the prosperity which was not then apparent in their establishment, may I never be comfortably lodged or fed again. Our daily return for what we got was a poor twelve francs each; but fancy a haughty American landlord caressing us with such sweet and reassuring civility for any sum of money! Those gentle people made themselves our friends; there was nothing they would not do, or try to do, for us, in the vast, pink palace where we were never twenty guests together, and mostly eight or ten, with the run of a reading-room where there were the latest papers and periodicals from London and Paris, and with a kitchen whence we were served the best luncheons and dinners we ate in Europe.

The place had the true out-of-season charm. There were two stately dining-rooms besides the one where we dined, and there were pleasant spaces where we had afternoon tea or after-dinner coffee, and from which a magnificent stairway ascended to the upper halls, and a quiet lift waited our orders, with the landlord or his son to take us up; and so lonely and quiet and gentle, with porters and chambermaids speaking beautiful Tuscan, and watchful attendants everywhere prophesying and fulfilling our wants. It was a keeping to make the worst believe in their merit, and we were not the worst. Outside, the environment flattered or rewarded us with a garden of laurel and other evergreens, and with flower-beds where the annuals were beginning to show the gardener's designs in their sprouting seeds. Beyond these ample villa bounds a tram-car murmured to and from the well-removed city, and beyond its track lay a line of open-air theatres and variety shows and bathing establishments, as at our own Atlantic City, but here in enduring masonry instead of the provisional wood of our summer architecture.



This festive preparation intimated the watering-place supremacy which Leghorn enjoys in Italy, and which must make our quiet hotel in the season glisten and twitter and flutter with the vivid national life. The preparation includes a delightful drive by the seashore, with groves and gardens, to the city gate and indefinitely beyond it, which we one day followed as far as an old fort, where a little hotel had nestled with every promise of simple comfort. There was a neighboring village of no very exciting interest, and I do not know that the Italian Naval Academy, which we passed on the way, was very exciting, though with its villa grounds it had a pleasing rural effect. Hard by our hotel, in a piazza that seemed to have nothing to do but surround it, was the colossal bust of an Italian admiral, or the like, which had not the impressiveness of a colossal full-length figure, but which rendered the original with the faithful realism of the Genoese Campo Santo sculpture. In compensation there was, toward the city, near the ship-yards where the great Italian battle-ships are built, the statue of their builder—a man who looked it—standing at large ease, with one hand in his pantaloons pocket, and not apparently conscious of the passer's gaze. Beyond the ship-yard, in which a battle-ship was then receiving the last touches, was a statue for which I could not claim an equal unconsciousness. In fact, it challenged the public attention and even homage as it extended the baton of command and triumphed over the four Moorish or Algerine corsairs who, in their splendid nudity, were chained to the several corners of the monument and owned themselves galley-slaves. The Medicean grand-duke who lords it over them, and who erected this monument in honor of himself for the victories his admirals had gained in sweeping the pirates from the seas, is a very proud presence, and is certainly worthy of the admiration which his bronze requires from the spectator. I instantly suspected this monument of being the chief sculpture of Leghorn, and I did not wonder that a valet de place was lying in wait for me there to make me observe that from a certain point I could get all four of the galley-slaves' noses in perspective at once. Upon experiment I did not find that I could do this, but I imputed my failure to want of merit in myself and not the monument, and I willingly paid half a franc for the suggestion; if all one's failures cost so little, one could save money. I was going then to view at close quarters the port of Leghorn, which is famous for its mole and lighthouse and quarantine, the first of their kind in their time. The old port, with the fortifications, was the work of a natural son of Queen Elizabeth's Earl of Leicester, whose noble origin was so constantly recognized by the Tuscan grand-dukes that he came at last to be accepted as Lord Dudley by the English. From his day, if not from his work, the prosperity of Leghorn began, and the English have always had a great part in it. Early in the nineteenth century there were a score of great British merchants settled there, and, though afterward they declined in number, the trade with England did not decline, and the trade with America has always been such that American merchants and captains have fully shared in the commerce directly or indirectly. Both the old and the new port were a scene of pleasant activity the pleasant afternoon when I visited them, and were full of varied sail as well as many steamers, loading or unloading for or from the Mediterranean ports, east and west, and the Hanseatic cities and the far coasts of Norway.

Any seaport is charming and full of romantic interest, but an Italian port has always a prime picturesqueness. Its sailors are the most ancient mariners, and they look full of history, and capable, each of them, of discovering a continent. I cannot say that I saw any nascent Columbus in the tanned and tarry company I met, but I do not deny that there was one. Leghorn is still in her lusty youth, being not much older than our Boston in the prosperity which has not failed her since the Medici divined her importance toward the close of the sixteenth century, and fortified her harbor till she was one of the strongest places on the Mediterranean. With a hazy general consciousness of her modernity in mind, I had imagined her yet more modern, and I was somewhat surprised to read, in a rather airy and ironical but very capable local guidebook called Su e Giu per Livorno (or Up and Down Leghorn), that the place was settled twenty-six hundred and fifty-six years before Christ. The author records this with a smile, and then, by a leap over some forty centuries, he finds firm footing in the fact that the great Countess Matilde, then much bothering about in the affairs of her Tuscan neighbors everywhere, gave the Livornese coasts to Pisa in 1103. This seems to have been the signal for the Genoese, eleven years later, to ravage and destroy the Pisan settlements; but later the Pisans, confirmed in their possession by the Emperor of Germany, rebuilt and embellished the port. A century after, Charles of Anjou demolished it, and then the Pisans fortified it some more. Then, in the last years of the thirteenth century, the Florentines, Lucchese, and Genoese devastated the whole territory of Pisa, and left Leghorn only one poor little church. Well throughout the fourteenth century there were wars between these republics, and Leghorn suffered the consequences, being, as our author says, "according to custom, assailed, taken, wasted, and destroyed." But before that century was out she seems to have flourished up again, and to have received with all honor Gregory XL, returning from Avignon to Rome and bringing the papacy back from its long exile to the Eternal City.

The Genoese now sold Leghorn to Milan, and in 1407 she was sold to France for twenty-six thousand florins, which seems low for a whole city. But in less than ten years we find the Genoese back again, and strengthening and adorning her at the greatest rate. It was quite time now that she should be visited by a virulent pestilence, and that, having passed to Florence in the meanwhile, she should have been ceded without a blow to Charles VIII. of France. But in a year she was once more in the hold of Florence and helping that republic fight her enemies the Pisans, and her other enemies under the Emperor Maximilian of Germany.

More fortifying, embellishing, and pestilence followed, and in 1429 Michelangelo came to inspect the new fortifications which the Florentine republic had built at Leghorn to repair the damages she had suffered. The next year the republic fell, and Alessandro de' Medici, who came in master at Florence, took Leghorn into the favor which his family continued to show her to the end. The first Cosimo greatly improved her harbor, dug canals, and built forts, but he let the Spaniards, for a pleasure to Charles V., place garrisons in Florence, Pisa, and Leghorn, and the Spaniards remained six years at Leghorn. In the last year of the sixteenth century Ferdinand erected to himself the superb monument with the four captive corsairs at the corners, whose noses I had failed to get in range, and in the meanwhile many great public works had been constructed and the city desolated by another plague. It was now time for the English to appear in those waters, and in 1652 they were defeated by the Dutch off Leghorn. About seventy-five years later the grippe paid Leghorn a first visit, and not long after a violent earthquake shook down many buildings and killed many women and children; but the authorities did what they could to secure the city in future by declaring the day a perpetual fast, and forbidding masking and dancing on it.

No disaster worth recording befell the city till Bonaparte came with the Rights of Man in 1796 and left a French garrison, which evacuated the place the next year, after having levied a fine of two million francs. The year after that Nelson occupied it with eight thousand English troops, and the following year the French reoccupied it and sacked the churches and imposed another fine nearly as great as the first. After the Napoleonic victories in the Italian wars, they seem to have come back again and fined the city two million francs more. They now remained five years, and in the mean time a Livornese, Giovanni Antonio Giaschi, invented a submarine-boat for attacking and destroying war-vessels, and a Spanish ship brought the yellow-fever. In 1808 Napoleon gave all Tuscany, and Leghorn with it, to his sister Elisa, but when in 1814 he was deposed, Leghorn was restored to the Tuscan grand-dukes and garrisoned for them by German troops, an earthquake having profited by the general disorder meantime to pay it another visit. The grand-duke now being driven out of Florence by Murat, he took refuge at Leghorn, which fell a prey to an epidemic of typhus. The first steam-vessel appared there in 1818, and in 1835 the Asiatic cholera; in 1847 a telegraphic line to Pisa was opened.

In 1848 the revolutions prevalent throughout Europe had their effect at Leghorn. The citizens shared in the uprising against the grand-duke, and elected among its representatives F. D. Guerrazzi, once famous as the first of Italian novelists and a man of generous mind and heart, who duly suffered arrest and imprisonment when the grand-duke was restored by the Austrians. He was sentenced to fifteen years' prison with hard labor, but later his sentence was commuted to exile. He lived to return and take part in the Italian unification in 1860, and in 1866 he led the movement against making peace with Austria unless all her Italian-speaking provinces were ceded to Italy. He died in 1873, and is remembered in Leghorn by a monument very ineffective as a whole, but singularly interesting in certain details.

I have omitted from this catalogue of events many of peaceful interest, such as visits from popes, princes, and poets, and I am not sure I have got in all the plagues and earthquakes. Perhaps I have the more willingly suppressed a few war-like facts, in the interest of the superstition I had cherished that Leghorn was without a history, or that it had no more history than, most American cities of equal date with its commercial importance, which began with the wise hospitality of the Medici to merchants of all races and nations, religions and races, settled there, and especially to the Spanish Jews who came in great numbers to the city that it was a common saying that you had as well strike the duke as strike a Jew in Leghorn. Greeks, Turks, Armenians were protected equally with English and Dutch, and infidel and heretic were alike free in their worship. It was the great prison of the galley-slaves, who were chiefly the pirates and corsairs taken on the high seas by the duke's ships. These captives not only served as models for the Moors at the base of his monument, but they must have been very useful in the different public works which he and his successors carried out. Now they and their like are gone, and though the Greeks, the Armenians, the English, and the Scotch still have their churches, I do not suppose there is a mosque in all Leghorn.



I do not speak very confidently, because my researches in that sort were not exhaustive. I indeed visited the cathedral, not wholly because Inigo Jones had something to do in planning it, but because I had formed the habit of visiting churches in Rome, and I mechanically went into one wherever I saw it. Generally speaking, I think that they were rather bare in painting or sculpture, but they were such churches as in America one would go a long way to see and think one's self well rewarded by their objects of interest. I do not know what defence to offer for not having visited the galleries of the Museo Civico, where by actual count in the guide-book I missed one hundred and sixty-nine works of art, though just how many masterpieces I am not able to say: probably one out of every ten was a masterpiece. But, if I did not much resort to the churches and galleries in Leghorn, I roamed gladly through its pleasant streets and squares, and by the shores of the canals which once gave it the name of New Venice, and which still invite the smaller shipping up among its houses in right Venetian fashion. The streets of Leghorn are not so straight as they are long, but many are very straight, and the others are curved rather than crooked. The longest and straight-est were streets of low dwelling-houses, uncommon in Italian towns, where each family lived under its own roof with a little garden behind, and a respective entrance, as people still mostly do in our towns. From the force of the mid-April sun in these streets I realized what they might be in summer, and, if I lived in Leghorn, I would rather live on the sea-front, in one of the comfortable, square, stone villas which border it. But everywhere Leghorn seemed a pleasant place to live, and convenient, with lively shops and cafes and trams and open spaces, and statues and monuments in them. The city, I understood, is of somewhat radical politics, tending from clericalism to socialism; and, like every other Italian city, it is full of patriotic monuments. There is a Victor Emmanuel on horseback, plump and squat, but heroic as always, and a Garibaldi struggling in vain for beauty in his poncho and his round, flat cap; there is a Mazzini, there is a Cavour, and, above all, there is a Guerrazzi, no great thing as to the seated figure, but most interesting, most touching in two of the bas-reliefs below. One represents him proclaiming the provisional government at Florence in 1849, after the expulsion of the grand-duke, where the fact is studied, with the wonderful realism of the Italians, in all its incidents and the costumes of the thronging spectators. The sculptor has hesitated at no top-hat or open umbrella; there are barefooted boys and bareheaded young girls, as well as bearded elders; if my memory serves, the scene is not without a dog or two. But it is the other relief which is so simply and so deeply affecting—the interior of a narrow cell, with one chair and a rude table, at which the patriot novelist wrote his greatest work, The Siege of Florence, and with him standing a little way from it. In spite of the small space and the almost vacant stage, the scene is full of most moving drama, and records a whole Italian epoch, now happily past forever.

These are modern sculptures, and they scarcely contest the palm with the monument of the four galley-slaves and the Medicean grand-duke. In another piazza two princes of the Lorrainese family, if I remember rightly, face each other over its oblong—classic motives, with the figures much undraped, and one of them singularly impressive from the mutton-chop whiskers which modernized him. There are several theatres, and among them a Goldoni theatre, as there should be in a city where the sweet old playwright sojourned for a time and has placed the action of his famous comedy, "La Locandiera." But I was told that the local theatres were not so much frequented by polite people, especially for opera, as the theatre in Pisa, which, if poorer, is prouder in its society than its old-time vassal by the sea, and attracts the fashion of Leghorn during the season.

As Pisa has ceased to be the colony of literary English it once was, in the time of Byron and Hunt and Shelley, to name no others, so Leghorn has ceased to be the mercantile colony of former days. It has still a great deal of commerce with England, but this is no longer carried on by resident merchants, though here and there an English name lingers in the style of a business house; and the distinctive qualities of both colonies are united in the author of a charming book who fills the post of British consul at Leghorn. His Tuscan Towns must not be confused with another book called Tuscan Cities, though, if the traveller chooses to carry both with him about Tuscany, I will not say that he could do better. In Tuscan Cities there is nothing about Leghorn, I believe, but in Tuscan Towns there is a specially delightful chapter about the place, its people, language, and customs which I can commend to the reader as the best corrective of the errors I must have been constantly falling into here.

It was in company no less enviable than this author's that I revisited the port on a gray Sunday afternoon of my stay, and then for the first time visited the ancient fortifications which began to be in the time of the Countess Matilde and intermittently increased under the rule of the Pisan, Genoese, and Florentine republics, until the Medicean grand-dukes amplified them in almost the proportions I saw. The brutal first duke of their line, Alessandro de' Medici, who some say was no Medici, but the bastard of a negro and a washerwoman, stamped his creed in the inscription below his adoptive arms, "Under one Faith and one Law, one Lord," and it was in the palace here, the story goes, that the wicked Cosimo I. killed his son Don Garzia before the eyes of the boy's mother. Anything is imaginable of an early Medicean grand-duke, but in a manner the father's murderous fury was provoked by the fact, if it was a fact, that Don Garzia had just mortally wounded his brother Giovanni. I should like to pretend that the tragedy had wrought in my unconsciousness to the effect of the pensive gloom which the old fortress cast over me, but perhaps I had better not. There are some gray Sunday afternoons of a depressing effect on the spirit which requires no positive or palpable reason.

In any case it was a relief to go from the shadow of the past there through the pleasant city streets to the gentle quiet of the British cemetery, where so many of our race and some even of our own nation are taking their long rest. No one is now buried there, and the place, in the gradual diminution of the English colony at Leghorn, has fallen into a lovely and appealing neglect if not oblivion. Oblivion quite covers its origin, but it is almost as old as Protestantism itself, and, if the ground for it was the gift of the grand-duke who tolerated heretics as well as Jews in the impulse he gave to the city's growth, it would not be strange. The beautiful porch of the English church, for once Greek and not Gothic, fronts upon it, but the dwindling congregation has no care of it, and there is no fund to keep it so much as free from weeds and brambles and the insidious ivy rending its monuments asunder. The afternoon of our visit it was in the sole charge of a large, gray cat, which, after feasting upon the favorite herb, lay stretched in sleep on a sunny bed of catnip under the walls of a mansion near, at whose windows some young girls looked down in a Sunday listlessness, as we wandered about among the "tall cypresses, myrtles, pines, eucalyptus-trees, oleanders, cactuses, huge bushes of monthly roses, a jungle of periwinkles, sarsaparilla, wild irises, violets, and other loveliest of wild flowers." On the forgotten tombs were the touching epitaphs of those who had died in exile, and whose monuments are sometimes here while their ashes lie in Florence or Rome, or wherever else they chanced to meet their end. Among them were the inscriptions on the graves of "William Magee Seton, merchant of New York," who died at Pisa in 1803, and "Henry De Butts, a citizen of Baltimore, N. America," who died at Sarzana; with "James M. Knight, Esq., Captain of Marines, Citizen of the United States of America," who died at Leghorn in 1802; and "Thomas Gamble, Late Captain in the Navy of the United States of America," who died at Pisa in 1818; and doubtless there were other Americans whose tombs I did not see. The memorials of the English were likewise here, whether they died at Leghorn or not; but most of them seem to have ended their lives in that place, where there were once so many English residents, whether for their health or their profit. The youth of some testified to the fact that they had failed to find the air specific for their maladies, and doubtless this would account also for the disproportionate number of noble ladies who rest here, with their hatchments and their coronets and robes of state carven on the stones above them. Among others one reads the titles of "Lady Catharine Burgess born Beauclerk; Jane Isabella, widow of the Earl of Lanesborough and daughter of the Earl of Molesworth; and Catharine Murray, only child of James Murray,... and the Right Honorable Lady Catharine Stewart his Spouse," with knights, admirals, generals, and other military and naval officers a many. Most important of all is the tomb of that strenuous spirit, more potent for good and ill in the English fiction of his time than any other novelist of his time, and second only to Richardson in the wide influence of his literary method, Tobias Smollett, namely, who here ended his long fight with consumption and the indifference of his country to his claims upon her official recognition. After many years of narrow circumstance in the Southern climates where he spent his later life, he tried in vain for that meek hope of literary ambition, a consulate, perhaps the very post that my companion, a hundred and fifty years later, was worthily holding. The truest monument to his stay in Italy is the book of Italian travel that he wrote, and the best effect is that sort of peripatetic novel which he may be said to have invented in Humphrey Clinker, and which has survived the epistolary form into our own time. It is a very simple shaft that rises over his grave, with the brief record, "Memoriae Tobiae Smollett, qui Liburni animam efflavit, 16 Sept., 1773," but it is imaginable with what wrath he would have disputed the record, if it is true, according to all the other authorities, that he exhaled his spirit two years earlier, and how he would have had it out with those "friends and fellow-countrymen" who had the error perpetuated above his helpless dust.

It was not easy to quit the sweetly solemn place or to resist the wish which I have here indulged, that some kinsman or kinswoman of those whom the blossoms and leaves are hiding would come to their rescue from nature now claiming an undue part in them, and obliterating their very memories. One would not have a great deal done, but only enough to save their names from entire oblivion, and with the hope of this I have named some of their names. It might not be too much even for the United Kingdom and the United States, though both very poor nations, to join in contributing the sum necessary for the work. Or some millionaire English duke, or some millionaire American manufacturer, might make the outlay alone; I cannot expect any millionaire author to provide a special fund for the care of the tomb of Smollett.



VIII. OVER AT PISA

If the half-hour between Leghorn and Pisa had been spent in any less lovely transit, I should still be grieving for the loss of the thirty minutes which might so much better have been given to either place. But with the constant line of mountains enclosing the landscape on the right, in all its variety of tillage, pasture-land, vineyard, and orchard, and the unchanging level which had once been the bed of the sea, we were gainers in sort beyond the gift of those cities. We had the company, great part of the way, of more stone-pines than we had seen even between Naples and Rome, here gathering into thick woods, with the light beautiful beneath the spread of their horizontal boughs, there grouped in classic groves, and yonder straying off in twos and threes. We had the canal that of old time made Pisa a port of the Mediterranean, with Leghorn for her servant on the shore (or, if it was not this canal, it was another as straight and long), with a peasant walking beside it, under a light-green umbrella, in the showers which threatened our start but spared our arrival. We had then the city, with its domes and towers, grown full height out of the plain through which the Arno curves in the stateliest crescent of all its course.

The day had turned finer than any other day I can now think of in my whole life, and I was once more in Pisa without the care for its history or art or even novelty which had corroded my mind in former visits. I had been there twice before—once in 1864, when I had done its wonders with all the wonder they merited, and again in 1883, when I had lived its memories on the scene of its manifold and mighty experiences. No distinct light from that learning vexed my present vision, but an agreeable mist of association, nothing certain, nothing tangible remaining, but only a gentle vague involving everything, in which I could possess my soul in peace. In this glimmer I recognized a certain cabman as having been waiting there from the dawn of time, with his dark-eyed little son, to make me his willing captive at something above the tariff rates, but destined by the same fate to serve me well, and to part with me friends at the close of the day for a franc more than the excess agreed upon. It costs so small a sum to corrupt the common carrier in Italy that I hold it wrong to fail of any chance, and this driver had not only a horse of uncommon qualities, but he spoke a beautiful Tuscan, and he had his Pisa at his fingers' ends.



We were of one mind about driving without delay to the famous group which is without rival on the earth, though there may be associated edifices in the red planet Mars that surpass the Cathedral, the Leaning Tower, the Baptistery, and the Campo Santo at Pisa. What genius it was imagined placing them in the pleasant meadow where they sit, just beyond the city streets, I do not know, but it was inspiration beyond any effect of mere taste, and it commanded my worship as much the last as the first time. The meadow still swims round them and breaks in a foam of daisies at their feet; for I take it that it is always mid-April there, and that the grass is as green and the sun as yellow on it as the afternoon we saw it. The sacred edifices are as golden as the light on them, and there is such a joyous lift in the air that it is a wonder they do not swing loose from their foundations and soar away into the celestial blue. For travellers in our willing mood there was, of course, the predestined cicerone waiting for us at the door of the cathedral, who would fix no price for the pleasure he was born to do us, yet still consented to take more than twice that he ought to have had at parting. But he was worth the money; he was worth quite two francs, and, though he was not without the fault of his calling and would have cumbered us with instruction, I will not blame him, for after a moment I perceived that his intelligence was such that I might safely put my hands in my pocket on my shut guide-book and follow him from point to point without fear of missing anything worth noting. Among the things worthiest noting, I saw, as if I had never seen them before, the unforgettable, forgotten Andrea del Sartos, especially the St. Agnes, in whose face you recognize the well-known features of the painter's wife, but with a gentler look than they usually wore in his Madonnas, perhaps because he happened to study these from that difficult lady when she was in her least celestial moods. Besides the masterpieces of other masters, there is a most noble Sodoma, which the great Napoleon carried away to Paris and which the greater French people afterward restored. At every step in the beautiful temple you may well pause, for it abounds in pictures and sculptures, the least of which would enrich St. Peter's at Rome beyond the proudest effect of its poverty-stricken grandeur. Ghirlandajo, Michelangelo, Gaddo Gaddi, John of Bologna—the names came back to me out of a past of my own almost as remote as theirs, while our guide repeated them, in their relation to the sculptures or pictures or architecture, with those of lesser lights of art, and that school of Giotto, of all whose frescos once covering its walls the fire of three hundred years ago has left a few figures clinging to one of the pillars, faint and uncertain as the memories of my own former visits to the church. I did, indeed, remember me of an old bronze lamp, by Vincenzo Possenti, hanging from the roof, which I now revered the third time, at intervals of twenty years; from its oscillation Galileo is said to have got the notion of the pendulum; but it is now tied back with a wire, being no longer needed for such an inspiration. Mostly in this last visit I took Pisa as lightly as at the first, when, as I have noted from the printed witness, I was gayly indifferent to the claims of her objects of interest. If they came in my way, I looked at them, but I did not put myself much about for them. I rested mostly in the twilight of old associations, trusting to the guidance of our cicerone, whom, in some form or under some name, the reader will find waiting for him at the cathedral door as we did. But I have since recurred to the record of my second visit in 1883, with amazement at the exact knowledge of events shown there, which became, in 1908, all a blur of dim conjecture. It appears that I was then acquainted with much more Pisan history than any other author I have found own to. I had also surprising adventures of different kinds, such as my poorer experience of the present cannot parallel. I find, for instance, that in 1883 I gave a needy crone in the cathedral a franc instead of the piece of five centimes which I meant for her, and that the lamp of Galileo did nothing to light the gloom into which this error plunged my spirit.

It appears to have jaundiced my view of the whole cathedral, which I did not find at all comparable to that of Siena, whereas in 1908 I thought it all beautiful. This may have been because I was so newly from the ugliness of the Eoman churches; though I felt, as I had felt before, that the whole group of sacred edifices at Pisa was too suggestive of decorative pastry and confectionery. No more than at the second view of it did I now attempt the ascent of the Leaning Tower; I had discharged this duty for life when I first saw it; with my seventy-one years upon me, I was not willing to climb its winding stairs, and I doubted if I could keep it from falling, as I then did, by inclining myself the other way. I resolved that I would leave this to the new-comer; but I gladly followed our cicerone across the daisied green from the cathedral to the baptistery, where I found the famous echo waiting to welcome me back, and greet me with its angelic sweetness, when the custodian who has it in charge appealed to it; though its voice seemed to have been weakened and coarsened in its forced replies to some rude Americans there, who shouted out to it and mocked at it. One wished to ask them if they did not know that this echo was sacred, and that their challenges of it were a species of sacrilege. But doubtless that would not have availed to silence them. By-and-by they went away, and then we were aware of an interesting group of people by the font near the lovely Lombardic pulpit of Nicola Pisano. They were peasants, by their dress—a young father and mother and a little girl or two, and then a gentle, elderly woman, with a baby in her arms, at which she looked proudly down. They were in their simple best, and they had good Tuscan faces, full of kindness. I ventured some propitiatory coppers with the children, and, when the old woman made them thank me, I thought I could not be mistaken and I ventured further: "You are the grandmother?"