"I have now growled out my growl, and feel better.

"With kind regards, my dear Trollope,

"Faithfully yours,

"CHARLES DICKENS."

* * * * *

In the December of that year came another growl, as follows:—

* * * * *

"KENNEDY'S HOTEL, EDINBURGH.

"MY DEAR TROLLOPE,—I am reading here, and had your letter forwarded to me this morning. The MS. accompanying it was stopped at All The Year Round office (in compliance with general instructions referring to any MS. from you) and was sent straight to the printer.

"Oh dear no! Nobody supposes for a moment that the English Church will follow the Irish Establishment. In the whole great universe of shammery and flummery there is no such idea floating. Everybody knows that the Church of England as an endowed establishment is doomed, and would be, even if its hand were not perpetually hacking at its own throat; but as was observed of an old lady in gloves in one of my Christmas books, 'Let us be polite or die!'

"Anthony's ambition" [in becoming a candidate for Beverley] "is inscrutable to me. Still, it is the ambition of many men; and the honester the man who entertains it, the better for the rest of us, I suppose.

"Ever, my dear Trollope,

"Most cordially yours,

"CHARLES DICKENS."

* * * * *

Here is another "growl," provoked by a species of charlatan, which he, to whom all charlatans were odious, especially abominated—the pietistic charlatan:—

* * * * *

"Oh, we have such a specimen here! a man who discourses extemporaneously, positively without the power of constructing one grammatical sentence; but who is (ungrammatically) deep in Heaven's confidence on the abstrusest points, and discloses some of his private information with an idiotic complacency insupportable to behold.

"We are going to have a bad winter in England too probably. What with Ireland, and what with the last new Government device of getting in the taxes before they are due, and what with vagrants, and what with fever, the prospect is gloomy."

The last letter I ever received from him is dated the 10th of November, 1869. It is a long letter, but I will give only one passage from it, which has, alas! a peculiarly sad and touching significance when read with the remembrance of the catastrophe then hurrying on, which was to put an end to all projects and purposes. I had been suggesting a walking excursion across the Alps. He writes:—

"Walk across the Alps? Lord bless you, I am 'going' to take up my alpenstock and cross all the passes. And, I am 'going' to Italy. I am also 'going' up the Nile to the second cataract; and I am 'going' to Jerusalem, and to India, and likewise to Australia. My only dimness of perception in this wise is, that I don't know when. If I did but know when, I should be so wonderfully clear about it all! At present I can't see even so much as the Simplon in consequence of certain farewell readings and a certain new book (just begun) interposing their dwarfish shadow. But whenever (if ever) I change 'going' into 'coming,' I shall come to see you.

"With kind regards, ever, my dear Trollope,

"Your affectionate friend,

"CHARLES DICKENS."

* * * * *

And those were the last words I ever had from him!



CHAPTER VIII.

In those days—temporibus illis, as the historians of long-forgotten centuries say—there used to be a very general exodus of the English colony at Florence to the baths of Lucca during the summer months. Almost all Italians, who can in anywise afford to do so, leave the great cities nowadays for the seaside, even as those do who have preceded them in the path of modern luxurious living. But at the time of which I am writing the Florentines who did so were few, and almost confined to that inner circle of the fashionable world which partly lived with foreigners, and had adopted in many respects their modes and habits. Those Italians, however, who did leave their Florence homes in the summer, went almost all of them to Leghorn. The baths of Lucca were an especially and almost exclusively English resort.

It was possible to induce the vetturini who supplied carriages and horses for the purpose, to do the journey to the baths in one day, but it was a very long day, and it was necessary to get fresh horses at Lucca. There was no good sleeping-place between Florence and Lucca—nor indeed is there such now—and the journey from the capital of Tuscany to that of the little Duchy of Lucca, now done by rail in less than two hours, was quite enough for a vetturino's pair of horses. And when Lucca was reached there were still fourteen miles, nearly all collar work, between that and the baths, so that the plan more generally preferred was to sleep at Lucca.

The baths (well known to the ancient Romans, of course, as what warm springs throughout Europe were not?) consisted of three settlements, or groups of houses—as they do still, for I revisited the well-remembered place two or three years ago. There was the "Ponte," a considerable village gathered round the lower bridge over the Lima, at which travellers from Florence first arrived. Here were the assembly rooms, the reading room, the principal baths, and the gaming-tables—for in those pleasant wicked days the remote little Lucca baths were little better than Baden subsequently and Monte Carlo now. Only we never, to the best of my memory, suicided ourselves, though it might happen occasionally, that some innkeeper lost the money which ought to have gone to him, because "the bank" had got hold of it first.

Then secondly there was the "Villa," about a mile higher up the lovely little valley of the Lima, so called because the Duke's villa was situated there. The Villa had more the pretension—a very little more—of looking something like a little bit of town. At least it had its one street paved. The ducal villa was among the woods immediately above it.

The third little group of buildings and lodging-houses was called the "Bagni Caldi." The hotter, and, I fancy, the original springs were there, and it was altogether more retired and countrified, nestling closely among the chesnut woods. The whole surrounding country indeed is one great chesnut forest, and the various little villages, most of them picturesque in the highest degree, which crown the summits of the surrounding hills, are all of them closely hedged in by the chesnut woods, which clothe the slopes to the top. These villages burrow in what they live on like mice in a cheese, for many of the inhabitants never taste any other than chesnut flour bread from year's end to year's end.

The inhabitants of these hills, and indeed those of the duchy generally, have throughout Italy the reputation of being morally about the best population in the peninsula. Servants from the Lucchese, and especially from the district I am here speaking of, were, and are still, I believe, much prized. Lucca, as many readers will remember, enjoys among all the descriptive epithets popularly given to the different cities of Italy, that of Lucca la industriosa.

To us migratory English those singularly picturesque villages which capped all the hills, and were reached by curiously ancient paved mule paths zig-sagging up among the chesnut woods, seemed to have been created solely for artistic and picnic purposes. The Saturnian nature of the life lived in them may be conceived from the information once given me by the inhabitants of one of these mountain settlements in reply to some inquiry about the time of day, that it was always noon there when the priest was ready for his dinner.

Such were the summer quarters of the English Florentine colony, temporibus illis. There used to be, I remember, a somewhat amusingly distinctive character attributed, of course in a general way subject to exceptions, to the different groups of the English rusticating world, according to the selection of their quarters in either of the above three little settlements. The "gay" world preferred the "Ponte," where the gaming-tables and ballrooms were. The more strictly "proper" people went to live at the "Villa," where the English Church service was performed. The invalid portion of the society, or those who wished quiet, and especially economy, sought the "Bagni Caldi."

In a general way we all desired economy, and found it. The price at the many hotels was nine pauls a day for board and lodging, including Tuscan wine, and was as much a fixed and invariable matter as a penny for a penny bun. Those who wanted other wine generally brought it with them, by virtue of a ducal ordinance which specially exempted from duty all wine brought by English visitors to the Baths.

I dare say, if I were to pass a summer there now, I should find the atmosphere damp, or the wine sour, or the bread heavy, or the society heavier, or indulge in some such unreasonable and unseasonable grumbles as the near neighbourhood of four-score years is apt to inspire one with; but I used to find it amazingly pleasant once upon a time. It is a singular fact, which the remembrance of those days suggests to me, and which I recommend to the attention of Mr. Galton and his co-investigators, that the girls were prettier then than they are in these days, or that there were more of them! The stupid people, who are always discovering subjective reasons for objective observations, are as impertinent as stupid!

The Duke of Lucca used to do his utmost to make the baths attractive and agreeable. There is no Duke of Lucca now, as all the world knows. The Congress of Vienna put an end to him by ordaining that, when the ducal throne of Parma should become vacant, the reigning Duke of Lucca should succeed to it, while his duchy of Lucca should be united to Florence. This change took place while I was still a Florentine. The Duke of Lucca would none of the new dukedom proposed to him. He abdicated, and his son became Duke of Parma. This son was, in truth, a great ne'er-do-well, and very shortly got murdered in the streets of his new capital by an offended husband.

The change was most unwelcome to Lucca, and especially to the baths, which had thriven and prospered under the fostering care of the old Duke. He used to pass every summer there, and give constant very pleasant, but very little royal, balls at his villa. The Tuscan satirist Giusti, in the celebrated little poem in which he characterises the different reigning sovereigns in the peninsula, calls him the Protestant Don Giovanni, and says that in the roll of tyrants he is neither fish nor flesh.

Of the first two epithets I take it he deserved the second more than the first. His Protestantising tendencies might, I think, have been more accurately described as non-Catholicising. But people are very apt to judge in this matter after the fashion of the would-be dramatist, who, on being assured that he had no genius for tragedy, concluded that he must therefore have one for comedy. The Duke's Protestantism, I suspect, limited itself to, and showed itself in, his dislike and resistance to being bothered by the rulers of neighbouring states into bothering anybody else about their religious opinions. As for his place in the "roll of tyrants," he was always accused of (or praised for) liberalising ideas and tendencies, which would in those days have very soon put an end to him and his tiny duchy, if he had attempted to govern it in accordance with them. As matters were, his "policy," I take it, was pretty well confined to the endeavour to make his sovereignty as little troublesome to himself or anybody else as possible. His subjects were very lightly taxed, for his private property rendered him perfectly independent of them as regarded his own personal expenditure.

The "gayer" part of our little world at the baths used, as I have said, more especially to congregate at the "Ponte," and the more "proper" portion at the "Villa," for, as I have also said, the English Church service was performed there, in a hired room, as I remember, when I first went there. But a church was already in process of being built, mainly by the exertions of a lady, who assuredly cannot be forgotten by any one who ever knew the Baths in those days, or for many years afterwards—Mrs. Stisted. Unlike the rest of the world she lived neither at the "Ponte," nor at the "Villa," nor at the "Bagni Caldi," but at "The Cottage," a little habitation on the bank of the stream about half-way between the "Ponte" and the "Villa." Also unlike all the rest of the world she lived there permanently, for the place was her own, or rather the property of her husband, Colonel Stisted. He was a long, lean, grey, faded, exceedingly mild, and perfectly gentlemanlike old man; but she was one of the queerest people my roving life has ever made me acquainted with.

She was the Queen of the Baths. On one occasion at the ducal villa, his Highness, who spoke English perfectly, said as she entered the room, "Here comes the Queen of the Baths!" "He calls me his Queen," said she, turning to the surrounding circle with a magnificent wave of the hand and delightedly complacent smile. It was not exactly that that the Duke had said, but he was immensely amused, as were we all, for some days afterwards.

She was a stout old lady, with large rubicund face and big blue eyes, surrounded by very abundant grey curls. She used to play, or profess to play, the harp, and adopted, as she explained, a costume for the purpose. This consisted of a loose, flowing garment, much like a muslin surplice, which fell back and allowed the arm to be seen when raised for performance on her favourite instrument. The arm probably was, or had once been, a handsome one. The large grey head, and the large blue eyes, and the drooping curls, were also raised simultaneously, and the player looked singularly like the picture of King David similarly employed, which I have seen as a frontispiece in an old-fashioned prayer-book. But the specialty of the performance was that, as all present always said, no sound whatever was heard to issue from the instrument! "Attitude is everything," as we have heard in connection with other matters; but with dear old Mrs. Stisted at her harp it was absolutely and literally so to the exclusion of all else!

She and the good old colonel—he was a truly good and benevolent man, and, indeed, I believe she was a good and charitable woman, despite her manifold absurdities and eccentricities—used to drive out in the evening among her subjects—her subjects, for neither I nor anybody else ever heard him called King of the Baths!—in an old-fashioned, very shabby and very high-hung phaeton, sometimes with her niece Charlotte—an excellent creature and universal favourite—by her side, and the colonel on the seat behind, ready to offer the hospitality of the place by his side to any mortal so favoured by the queen as to have received such an invitation.

The poor dear old colonel used to play the violoncello, and did at least draw some more or less exquisite sounds from it. But one winter they paid a visit to Rome, and the old man died there. She wished, in accordance doubtless with his desire, to bring back his body to be buried in the place they had inhabited for so many years, and with which their names were so indissolubly entwined in the memory of all who knew them—which means all the generations of nomad frequenters of the Baths for many, many years. The Protestant burial-ground also was recognised as quasi hers, for it is attached to the church which she was mainly instrumental in building. The colonel's body therefore was to be brought back from Rome to be buried at Lucca Baths.

But such an enterprise was not the simplest or easiest thing in the world. There were official difficulties in the way, ecclesiastical difficulties and custom-house difficulties of all sorts. Where there is a will, however, there is a way. But the way which the determined will of the Queen of the Baths discovered for itself upon this occasion was one which would probably have occurred to few people in the world save herself. She hired a vetturino, and told him that he was to convey a servant of hers to the baths of Lucca, who would be in charge of goods which would occupy the entire interior of the carriage. She then obtained, what was often accorded without much difficulty in those days, from both the Pontifical and the Tuscan Governments, a lascia passare for the contents of the carriage as bona fide roba usata—"used up, or second-hand goods." And under this denomination the poor old colonel, packed in the carriage together with his beloved violoncello, passed the gates of Rome and the Tuscan frontier, and arrived safely at the place of his latest destination. The servant who was employed to conduct this singular operation did not above half like the job entrusted to him, and used to tell afterwards how he was frightened out of his wits, and the driver exceedingly astonished, by a sudden pom-m-m from the interior of the carriage, caused by the breaking, in consequence of some atmospheric change, of one of the strings of the violoncello.

Malicious people used to say that the Queen of the Baths was innocent of all deception as regarded the custom-house officials; for that if any article was ever honestly described as roba usata, the old colonel might be so designated.

The queen herself shortly followed (by another conveyance), and was present at the interment, on which occasion she much impressed the population by causing a superb crimson chair to be placed at the head of the grave, in order that she might be present without standing during the service. The chair was well known, because the queen, both at the Baths and at Florence, was in the habit of sending it about to the houses at which she visited, since she preferred doing so to incurring the risk of the less satisfactory accommodation her friends might offer her!

If space and the reader's patience would allow of it, I might gossip on of many more reminiscences of the baths of Lucca, all pleasant or laughable. But I must conclude by the story of a tragedy, which I will tell, because it is, in many respects, curiously characteristic of the time and place.

The Duke, who, as I have said, spoke English perfectly well, was fond of surrounding himself with foreign, and specially English, dependents. He had at the time of which I am speaking, two English—or rather, one English and one Irish—chamberlains, and a third, who, though a German, was, from having married an Englishwoman, and habitually speaking English, and living with Englishmen, much the same, at least to the Duke, as an Englishman. The Englishman was a young man; the German an older man, and the father of a family. And both were good, upright, and honourable men; both long since gone over to the majority.

The Irishman, also a young man, was a bad fellow; but he was an especial favourite with the Duke, who was strongly attached to him. It is not necessary to print his name. He has gone to his account. But it might nevertheless happen that the printing of my story with his name in these pages might still give pain to somebody.

There was also that year an extremely handsome and attractive lady, a widow, at the Baths. I will not give her name either. For though there was no sort of blame or discredit of any kind attached or attachable to her from any part of my story, as she is, I believe, still living, and as the memory of that time cannot but be a painful one to her, it is as well to suppress it. The lady, as I have said, was handsome and young, and of course all the young fellows who got a chance flirted with her—en tout bien tout honneur. But the Irish chamberlain attached himself to her, not with any but perfectly avowable intentions, but more seriously than the other youngsters, and with an altogether serious eye to her very comfortable dower.

Now during that same summer there was at the Baths Mr. Plowden, the banker from Rome. He was then a young man; he has recently died an old one in the Eternal City. His name I mention in telling my story because much blame was cast upon him at the time by people in Rome, in Florence, and at the Baths, who did not know the facts as entirely and accurately as I knew them; and I am able here to declare publicly what I have often declared privately, that he behaved well and blamelessly in the whole matter.

And probably, though I have no distinct recollection that it was so, Plowden may have also been smitten by the lady. Now, whether the Irishman imagined that the young banker was his most formidable rival, or whether there may have been some previous cause of ill-will between the two men, I cannot say, but so it was that the chamberlain sent a challenge to the banker. The latter declined to accept it on the ground that he was a banker and not a fighting man, and that his business position would have been materially injured by his fighting a duel. The Irishman might have made the most of this triumph, such as it was. But he was not content with doing so, and lost none of the opportunities, which the social habits of such a place daily afforded him, for insulting and outraging his enemy. And he was continually boasting to his friends that before the end of the season he would compel him to come out and be shot at.

And before the end of the season came, his persistent efforts were crowned with success. Plowden finding his life altogether intolerable under the harrow of the bully's insolence, at length one day challenged him. Then arose the question of the locality where the duel was to take place. The laws of the duchy were very strict against duelling, and the Duke himself was personally strongly opposed to it. In the case of his own favourite chamberlain, too, his displeasure was likely to be extreme. But in the neighbourhood of the Baths the frontier line which divides the Duchy of Modena from that of Lucca is a very irregular and intricate one. A little below the "Ponte" at the Baths, the Lima falls into the Serchio, and the upper valley of the latter river is of a very romantic and beautiful character. Now we all knew that hereabouts there were portions of Modenese territory interpenetrating that of the Duchy of Lucca, but none of us knew the exact line of the boundary. And the favourite chamberlain, with true Irish impudence, undertook to obtain exact information from the Duke himself.

There was a ball that night, at which the whole of the society were present, and, strange as It may seem, I do not think there was a man there who did not know that the duel was to be fought on the morrow, except the Duke himself. Many of the women even knew it perfectly well. The chamberlain getting the Duke into conversation on the subject of the frontier, learned from him that a certain highly romantic gorge, opening out from the valley of the Serchio, and called Turrite Cava, which he pretended to take an interest in as a place fitted for a picnic, was within the Modenese frontier.

All was arranged, therefore, for the meeting with pistols on the following morning; and the combatants proceeded to the spot fixed on, some five or six miles, I think, from the Baths. Plowden, who, as a sedate business man was less intimate with the generality of the young men at the Baths, was accompanied only by his second; his adversary was attended by a whole cohort of acquaintances—really far more after the fashion of a party going to a picnic, or some other party of pleasure, than in the usual guise of men bent on such an errand.

Plowden had never fired a pistol in his life, and knew about as much of the management of one as an archbishop. The other was an old duellist, and a practised performer with the weapon. All this was perfectly well known, and the young men around the Irishman were earnest with him during their drive to the ground not to take his adversary's life, beseeching him to remember how heavy a load on his mind would such a deed be during the whole future of his own. Not a soul of the whole society of the Baths, who by this time knew what was going on to a man, and almost to a woman (my mother, it may be observed, had not been at the ball, and knew nothing about it), doubted that Plowden was going out to be shot as certainly as a bullock goes into the slaughter house to be killed.

The Irishman, in reply to all the exhortations of his companions, jauntily told them not to distress themselves; he had no intention of killing the fellow, but would content himself with "winging" him. He would have his right arm off as surely as he now had it on!

In the midst of all this the men were put up. At the first shot the Irishman's well-directed bullet whistled close to Plowden's head, but the random shot of the latter struck his adversary full in the groin!

He was hastily carried to a little osteria, which stood (and still stands) by the side of the road which runs up the valley of the Serchio, at no great distance from the mouth of the Turrite Cava gorge. There was a young medical man among those gathered there, who shook his head over the victim, but did not, I thought, seem very well up to dealing with the case.

One of my mother's earliest and most intimate friends at Florence was a Lady Sevestre, who was then at the Baths with her husband, Sir Thomas Sevestre, an old Indian army surgeon. He was a very old man, and was not much known to the younger society of the place. But it struck me that he was the man for the occasion. So I rushed off to the Baths in one of the bagherini (as the little light gigs of the country are called) which had conveyed the parties to the ground, and knocked up Sir Thomas. Of course all the story came new to him, and he was very much inclined to wash his hands of it. But on my representations that a life was at stake, his old professional habits prevailed, and he agreed to go back with me to Turrite Cava.

But no persuasions could induce him to trust himself to a bagherino. And truly it would have shaken the old man well-nigh to pieces. There was no other carriage to be had in a hurry. And at last he allowed me to get an arm-chair rigged with a couple of poles for bearers, and placed himself in it—not before he had taken the precaution of slinging a bottle of pale ale to either pole of his equipage. He wore a very wide-brimmed straw hat, a suit of professional black, and carried a large white sunshade. And thus accoutred, and accompanied by four stalwart bearers, he started, while I ran by the side of the chair, as queer-looking a party as can well be imagined. I can see it all now; and should have been highly amused at the time had I not very strongly suspected that I was taking him to the bedside of a dying man.

And when he reached his patient, a very few minutes sufficed for the old surgeon to pronounce the case an absolutely hopeless one. After a few hours of agony, the bully, who had insisted on bringing this fate on himself, died that same afternoon.

Then came the question who was to tell the Duke. Who it was that undertook that disagreeable but necessary task, I forget. But the Duke came out to the little osteria immediately on hearing of the catastrophe; also the English clergyman officiating at the Baths came out. And the scene in that large, nearly bare, upper chamber of the little inn was a strange one. The clergyman began praying by the dying man's bedside, while the numerous assemblage in the room all kneeled, and the Duke kneeled with them, interrupting the prayers with his sobs after the uncontrolled fashion of the Italians.

He was very, very angry. But in unblushing defiance of all equity and reason, his anger turned wholly against Plowden, who, of course, had placed himself out of the small potentate's reach within a very few minutes after the catastrophe. But the Duke strove by personal application to induce the Grand Duke of Tuscany to banish Plowden from his dominions, which, to the young banker, one branch of whose business was at Florence and one at Rome, would have been a very serious matter. But this, poor old ciuco, more just and reasonable in this case than his brother potentate, the Protestant Don Giovanni of Lucca, refused to do.

So our pleasant time at the Baths, for that season at least, ended tragically enough; and whenever I have since visited that singularly romantic glen of Turrite Cava, its deep rock-sheltered shadows have been peopled for me by the actors in that day's bloody work.



CHAPTER IX.

It was, to the best of my recollection, much about the same time as that visit of Charles Dickens which I have chronicled in the last chapter but one, which turned out to be eventually so fateful a one to me, as the correspondence there given shows, that my mother received another visit, which was destined to play an equally influential part in the directing and fashioning of my life. Equally influential perhaps I ought not to say, inasmuch as one-and-twenty years (with the prospect I hope of more) are more important than seventeen. But both the visits I am speaking of, as having occurred within a few days of each other, were big with fate, to me, in the same department of human affairs.

The visit of Dickens was destined eventually to bring me my second wife, as the reader has seen. The visit of Mr. and Mrs. Garrow to the Via dei Malcontenti, much about the same time, brought me my first.

The Arno and the Tiber both take their rise in the flanks of Falterona. It was on the banks of the first that my first married life was passed; on those of the more southern river that the largest portion of my second wedded happiness was enjoyed.

Why Mr. and Mrs. Garrow called on my mother I do not remember. Somebody had given them letters of introduction to us, but I forget who it was. Mr. Garrow was the son of an Indian officer by a high caste Brahmin woman, to whom he was married. I believe that unions between Englishmen and native women are common enough. But a marriage, such as that of my wife's grandfather I am assured was, is rare, and rarer still a marriage with a woman of high caste. Her name was Sultana. I have never heard of any other name. Joseph Garrow, my father-in-law, was sent to England at an early age, and never again saw either of his parents, who both died young. His grandfather was an old Scotch schoolmaster at Hadley, near Barnet, and his great-uncle was the well known Judge Garrow. My father-in-law carried about with him very unmistakable evidence of his eastern origin in his yellow skin, and the tinge of the white of his eyes, which was almost that of an Indian. He had been educated for the bar, but had never practised, or attempted to do so, having while still a young man married a wife with considerable means. He was a decidedly clever man, especially in an artistic direction, having been a very good musician and performer on the violin, and a draughtsman and caricaturist of considerable talent. The lady he married had been a Miss Abrams, but was at the time he married her the widow of (I believe) a naval officer named Fisher. She had by her first husband one son and one daughter. There had been three Misses Abrams, Jewesses by race undoubtedly, but Christians by baptism, whose parent or parents had come to this country in the suite of some Hanoverian minister, in what capacity I never heard. They were all three exceptionally accomplished musicians, and seem to have been well known in the higher social circles of the musical world. One of the sisters was the authoress of many once well known songs, especially of one song called "Crazy Jane," which had a considerable vogue in its day. I remember hearing old John Cramer say that my mother-in-law could, while hearing a numerous orchestra, single out any instrument which had played a false note—and this he seemed to think a very remarkable and exceptional feat. She was past fifty when Mr. Garrow married her, but she bore him one daughter, and when they came to Florence both girls, Theodosia, Garrow's daughter, and Harriet Fisher, her elder half-sister, were with them, and at their second morning call both came with them.

The closest union and affection subsisted between the two girls, and ever continued till the untimely death of Harriet. But never were two sisters, or half-sisters, or indeed any two girls at all, more unlike each other.

Harriet was neither specially clever nor specially pretty, but she was, I think, perhaps the most absolutely unselfish human being I ever knew, and one of the most loving hearts. And her position was one, that, except in a nature framed of the kindliest clay, and moulded by the rarest perfection of all the gentlest and self-denying virtues, must have soured, or at all events crushed and quenched, the individual placed in such circumstances. She was simply nobody in the family save the ministering angel in the house to all of them. I do not mean that any of the vulgar preferences existed which are sometimes supposed to turn some less favoured member of a household into a Cinderella. There was not the slightest shadow of anything of the sort. But no visitors came to the house or sought the acquaintance of the family for her sake. She had the dear, and, to her, priceless love of her sister. But no admiration, no pride of father or mother fell to her share. Her life was not made brilliant by the notice and friendship of distinguished men. Everything was for the younger sister. And through long years of this eclipse, and to the last, she fairly worshipped the sister who eclipsed her. Garrow, to do him justice, was equally affectionate in his manner to both girls, and entirely impartial in every respect that concerned the material well-being of them. But Theodosia was always placed on a pedestal on which there was no room at all for Harriet. Nor could the closest intimacy with the family discover any faintest desire on her part to share the pedestal She was content and entirely happy in enjoying the reflected brightness of the more gifted sister.

Nor would perhaps a shrewd judge, whose estimate of men and women had been formed by observation of average humanity, have thought that the position which I have described as that of the younger of these two sisters, was altogether a morally wholesome one for her. But the shrewd judge would have been wrong. There never was a humbler, as there never was a more loving soul, than that of the Theodosia Garrow who became, for my perfect happiness, Theodosia Trollope. And it was these two qualities of humbleness and lovingness that, acting like invincible antiseptics on the moral nature, saved her from all "spoiling,"—from any tendency of any amount of flattery and admiration to engender selfishness or self-sufficiency. Nothing more beautiful in the way of family affection could be seen than the tie which united in the closest bonds of sisterly affection those two so differently constituted sisters. Very many saw and knew what Theodosia was as my wife. Very few indeed ever knew what she was in her own home as a sister.

When I married Theodosia Garrow she possessed just one thousand pounds in her own right, and little or no prospect of ever possessing any more; while I on my side possessed nothing at all, save the prospect of a strictly bread and cheese competency at the death of my mother, and "the farm which I carried under my hat," as somebody calls it. The marriage was not made with the full approbation of my father-in-law; but entirely in accordance with the wishes of my mother, who simply, dear soul, saw in it, what she said, that "Theo" was of all the girls she knew, the one she should best like as a daughter-in-law. And here again the wise folks of the world (and I among them!) would hardly have said that the step I then took was calculated, according to all the recognised chances and probabilities of human affairs, to lead to a life of contentment and happiness. I suppose it ought not to have done so! But it did! It would be monstrously inadequate to say that I never repented it. What should I not have lost had I not done it!

As usual my cards turned up trumps! but they began to do so in a way that caused me much, and my wife more, grief at the time. Within two years after my marriage, poor, dear, good, loving Harriet caught small-pox and died! She was much more largely endowed than her half-sister, to whom she bequeathed all she had.

She had a brother, as I have said above. But he had altogether alienated himself from his family by becoming a Roman Catholic priest There was no open quarrel. I met him frequently in after years at Garrow's table at Torquay, and remember his bitter complaints that he was tempted by the appearance of things at table which he ought not to eat. It would have been of no use to give or bequeath money to him, for it would have gone immediately to Romanist ecclesiastical purposes. He had nearly stripped himself of his own considerable means, reserving to himself only the bare competence on which a Catholic priest might live. He was altogether a very queer fish! I remember his coming to me once in tearful but very angry mood, because, as he said, I had guilefully spread snares for his soul! I had not the smallest comprehension of his meaning till I discovered that his woe and wrath were occasioned by my having sent him as a present Berington's Middle Ages. I had fancied that his course of studies and line of thought would have made the book interesting to him, utterly ignorant or oblivious of the fact that it laboured under the disqualification of appearing in the Index.

I take it I knew little about the Index in those days. In after years, when three or four of my own books had been placed in its columns, I was better informed. I remember a very elegant lady who having overheard my present wife mention the fact that a recently published book of mine had been placed in the Index, asked her, with the intention of being extremely polite and complimentary, whether her (my wife's) books had been put in the Index. And when the latter modestly replied that she had not written anything that could merit such a distinction, her interlocutor, patting her on the shoulder with a kindly and patronising air, said "Oh! my dear, I am sure they will be placed there. They certainly ought to be!"

Mrs. Garrow, my wife's mother, was not, I think, an amiable woman. She must have been between seventy and eighty when I first knew her; but she was still vigorous, and had still a pair of what must once have been magnificent, and were still brilliant and fierce black eyes. She was in no wise a clever woman, nor was our dear Harriet a clever girl. Garrow on the other hand and his daughter were both very markedly clever, and this produced a closeness of companionship and alliance between the father and daughter which painfully excited the jealousy of the wife and mother. But it was totally impossible for her to cabal with her daughter against the object of her jealousy. Harriet always seeking to be a peacemaker, was ever, if peace could not be made, stanchly on Theo's side. I am afraid that Mrs. Garrow did not love her second daughter at all; and I am inclined to suspect that my marriage was in some degree facilitated by her desire to get Theo out of the house. She was a very fierce old lady, and did not, I fear, contribute to the happiness of any member of her family.

How well I remember the appearance of Mr. and Mrs. Garrow, and those two girls in my mother's drawing-room in the Via dei Malcontenti. The two girls, I remember, were dressed exactly alike and very dowdily. They had just arrived in Florence from Tours, I think, where they had passed a year, or perhaps two, since quitting "The Braddons" at Torquay; and everything about them from top to toe was provincial, not to say shabby. It was a Friday, my mother's reception day, and the room soon filled with gaily dressed and smart people, with more than one pretty girl among them. But I had already got into conversation with Theodosia Garrow, and, to the gross neglect of my duties as master of the house, and to the scandal of more than one fair lady, so I remained, till a summons more than twice repeated by her father took her away.

It was not that I had fallen in love at first sight, as the phrase is, by any means. But I at once felt that I had got hold of something of a quite other calibre of intelligence from anything I had been recently accustomed to meet with in those around me, and with a moral nature that was sympathetic to my own. And I found it very delightful. It is no doubt true that, had her personal appearance been other than it was, I should not probably have found her conversation equally delightful. But I am sure that it is equally true that had she been in face, figure, and person all she was, and at the same time stupid, or even not sympathetic, I should not have been equally attracted to her.

She was by no means what would have been recognised by most men as a beautiful girl. The specialties of her appearance, in the first place, were in a great measure due to the singular mixture of races from which she had sprung. One half of her blood was Jewish, one quarter Scotch, and one quarter pure Brahmin. Her face was a long oval, too long and too lanky towards the lower part of it for beauty. Her complexion was somewhat dark, and not good. The mouth was mobile, expressive, perhaps more habitually framed for pathos and the gentler feelings, than for laughter. The jaw was narrow, the teeth good and white, but not very regular. She had a magnificent wealth of very dark brown hair, not without a gleam here and there of what descriptive writers, of course, would call gold, but which really was more accurately copper colour. And this grand and luxuriant wealth of hair grew from the roots on the head to the extremity of it, at her waist, when it was let down, in the most beautiful ripples. But the great feature and glory of the face were the eyes, among the largest I ever saw, of a deep clear grey, rather deeply set, and changing in expression with every impression that passed over her mind. The forehead was wide, and largely developed both in those parts of it which are deemed to indicate imaginative and idealistic power, and those that denote strongly marked perceptive and artistic faculties. The latter perhaps were the more prominently marked. The Indian strain showed itself in the perfect gracefulness of a very slender and elastic figure, and in the exquisite elegance and beauty of the modelling of the extremities.

That is not the description of a beautiful girl. But it is the fact that the face and figure very accurately so described were eminently attractive to me physically, as well as the mind and intelligence, which informed them, were spiritually. They were much more attractive to me than those of many a splendidly beautiful girl, the immense superiority of whose beauty nobody knew better than I. Why should this have been so? That is one of the mysteries to the solution of which no moral or physical or psychical research has ever brought us an iota nearer.

I am giving here an account of the first impression my future wife made on me. I had no thought of wooing and winning her, for, as I have said, I was not in a position to marry. Meanwhile she was becoming acclimatised to Florentine society. She no longer looked dowdy when entering a room, but very much the reverse; and the little Florentine world began to recognise that they had got something very much like a new Corinne among them. But of course I rarely got a chance of monopolising her as I had done during that first afternoon. We were however constantly meeting, and were becoming ever more and more close friends. When the Garrows left Florence for the summer, I visited them at Lucerne, and subsequently met them at Venice. It was the year of the meeting of the Scientific Congress in that city.

That was a pleasant autumn in Venice! By that time I had become pretty well over head and ears in love with the girl by whose side I generally contrived to sit in the gondolas, in the Piazza in the evening, etcaetera. It was lovely September weather—just the time for Venice. The summer days were drawing in, but there was the moon, quite light enough on the lagoons; and we were a great deal happier than the day was long.

Those Scientific Congresses, of which that at Venice was the seventh and the last, played a curious part, which has not been much observed or noted by historians, in the story of the winning of Italian independence. I believe that the first congress, at Pisa, I think, was really got up by men of science, with a view to furthering their own objects and pursuits. It was followed by others in successive autumns at Lucca, Milan, Genoa, Naples, Florence, and this seventh and last at Venice. But Italy was in those days thinking of other matters than science. The whole air was full of ideas, very discordant all of them, and vague most of them, of political change. The governments of the peninsula thought twice, and more than twice, before they would grant permission for the first of these meetings. Meetings of any kind were objects of fear and mistrust to the rulers. Those of Tuscany, who were by comparison liberal, and, as known to be such, were more or less objects of suspicion to the Austrian, Roman, and Neapolitan Governments, led the way in giving the permission asked for; and perhaps thought that an assembly of geologists, entomologists, astronomers, and mathematicians might act as a safety valve, and divert men's minds from more dangerous subjects. But the current of the times was running too strongly to be so diverted, and proved too much for the authorities and for the real men of science, who were, at least some of them, anxious to make the congresses really what they professed to be.

Gradually these meetings became more and more mere social gatherings in outward appearance, and revolutionary propagandist assemblies in reality. As regards the former aspect of them, the different cities strove to outdo each other in the magnificence and generosity of their reception of their "scientific" guests. Masses of publications were prepared, especially topographical and historical accounts of the city which played Amphytrion for the occasion, and presented gratuitously to the members of the association. Merely little guide-books, of which a few hundred copies were needed in the case of the earlier meetings, they became in the case of the latter ones at Naples, Genoa, Milan, and Venice, large and magnificently printed tomes, prepared by the most competent authorities and produced at a very great expense.

Venice especially outdid all her rivals, and printed an account of the Queen of the Adriatic, embracing history, topography, science in all its branches, and artistic story, in four huge and magnificent volumes, which remains to the present day by far the best topographical monograph that any city of the peninsula possesses. This truly splendid work, which brought out in the ordinary way could not have been sold for less than six or eight guineas, was presented, together with much other printed matter—an enormous lithographed panorama of Venice and her lagoons some five feet long in a handsome roll cover, I remember among them—to every "member" on his enrolment as such.

Then there were concerts, and excursions, and great daily dinners the gayest and most enjoyable imaginable, at which both sexes were considered to be equally scientific and equally welcome. The dinners were not absolutely gratuitous, but the tickets for them were issued at a price very much inferior to the real cost of the entertainment. And all this it must be understood was done not by any subscription of members scientific or otherwise, but by the city and its municipality; the motive for such expenditure being the highly characteristic Italian one, of rivalling and outdoing in magnificence other cities and municipalities, or in the historical language of Italy, "communes."

Old Rome, with her dependent cities, made no sign during all these autumns of ever increasing festivity. Pity that they should have come to an end before she did so; for at the rate at which things were going, we should all at least have been crowned on the Capitol, if not made Roman senators, pour l'amour du Grec, as the savant says in the Precieuses Ridicules, if we had gone to the Eternal City!

But the fact was, that the soi-disant 'ologists kicked up their heels a little too audaciously at Venice under Austria's nose; and the Government thought it high time to put an end to "science."

For instance, Prince Canino made his appearance in the uniform of the Roman National Guard! This was a little too much; and the Prince, all prince and Buonaparte as he was, was marched off to the frontier. Canino had every right to be there as a man of science; for his acquirements in many branches of science were large and real; and specially as an entomologist he was known to be probably the first in Italy. But he was the man, who, when selling his principality of Canino, insisted on the insertion in the legal instrument of a claim to an additional five pauls (value about two shillings), for the title of prince which was attached to the possessor of the estates he was selling. He was an out-and-out avowed Republican, and was the blackest of black sheep to all the constituted governments of the peninsula. He looked as little as he felt and thought like a prince. He was a paunchy, oily-looking black haired man, whose somewhat heavy face was illumined by a brilliant black eye full of humour and a mouth expressive of good nature and bonhomie. His appearance in the proscribed uniform might have been considered by Austria, if her police authorities could have appreciated the fun of the thing, as wholesomely calculated to throw ridicule on the hated institution. He was utterly unassuming, and good-natured in his manner, and when seen in his ordinary black habiliments looked more like a well-to-do Jewish trader than anything else.

As for the social aspects of these Scientific Congresses, they were becoming every year more festive, and, at all events to the ignoramus outsiders who joined them, more pleasant. My good cousin and old friend, then Colonel, now General, Sir Charles Trollope, was at Venice that autumn. I said on meeting him, "Now the first thing is to, make you a member." "Me! a member of a Scientific Congress!" said he. "God bless you! I am as ignorant as a babe of all possible 'epteras and 'opteras, and 'statics and 'matics!" "Oh! nonsense! we are all men of science here! Come along!"—i.e., to the ducal palace to be inscribed. "But what do you mean to tell them I am?" he asked. "Well! let's see! You must have superintended a course of instruction in the goose-step in your day?" "Rather so!" said he. "Very well, then. You are Instructor in Military Exercises in her B.M. Forces! You are all right! Come along!" And if I had said that he was Trumpeter Major of the 600th Regiment in the British Army, it would doubtless have been equally all right. So said, so done! And I see his bewildered look now, as the four huge volumes, about a load for a porter, to which he had become entitled, together with medals and documents of many kinds, were put into his arms.

Ah! those were pleasant days! And while Italy, under the wing of science, was plotting her independence, I was busy in forging the chains of that dependence which was to be a more unmixed source of happiness to me, than the independence which Italy was compassing has yet proved to her.

Those chains, however, as regarded at all events the outward and visible signs of them, had not got forged yet. I certainly had no "proposed" to Theodosia. In fact, to the very best of my recollection I never did "propose" to her—or "pop," as the hideous phrase is—any decisive question at all. We seem, to my recollection, to have come gradually, insensibly, and mutually to consider it a matter of course that what we wanted was to be married, and that the only matter which needed any words or consideration was the question, how the difficulties in the way of our wishes were to be overcome.

In the autumn of 1847 my mother and I went to pass the winter in Rome. My sister Cecilia's health had been failing; and it began to be feared that there was reason to suspect the approach of the malady which had already destroyed my brother Henry and my younger sister Emily. It was decided therefore that she should pass the winter in Rome. Her husband's avocations made it impossible for him to accompany her thither, and my mother therefore took an apartment there to receive her. It was in a small palazzo in that part of the Via delle Quattro Fontane, which is now situated between the Via Nazionale and the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, to the left of one going towards the latter. There was no Via Nazionale then, and the buildings which now make the Via delle Quattro Fontane a continuous line of street existed only in the case of a few isolated houses and convents. It was a very comfortable apartment, roomy, sunny, and quiet. The house exists still, though somewhat modernised in outward appearance, and is, I think, the second, after one going towards Santa Maria Maggiore has crossed the new Via Nazionale.

But the grand question was, whether it could be brought about that Theodosia Garrow should be permitted to be my mother's guest during that winter. A hint on the matter was quite sufficient for my dear mother, although I do not think that she had yet any idea that I was minded to give her a daughter-in-law. Theodosia's parents had certainly no faintest idea that anything more than ordinary friendship existed between me and their daughter, or, if they had had such, she would certainly have never been allowed to accept my mother's invitation. As for Theodosia herself and her willingness to come, it seems to me, as I look back, that nothing was said between us at all, any more than anything was said about making her my wife. I think it was all taken for granted, sans mot dire, by both of us. But there was one person who knew all about it; knew what was in both our hearts, and was eagerly anxious that the desire of them should be fulfilled. This was the good fairy Harriet Fisher. Without the strenuous exertion of her influence on her mother and Mr. Garrow, the object would hardly have been accomplished. Of course the plea put forward was the great desirability of taking advantage of such an opportunity of seeing Rome.

My sister, whose health, alas! profited nothing by that visit to Rome, and could have been profited by no visit to any place on earth, became strongly attached to Theodosia; and the affection which grew up between them was the more to the honour of both of them, in that they were far as the poles asunder in opinions and habits of thought. My sister was what in those days was called a "Puseyite." Her opinions were formed on the highest High Church model, and her Church opinions made the greatest part, and indeed nearly the whole of her life. Theodosia had no Church opinions at all, High or Low! All her mind and interests were, at all events at that time, turned towards poetry and art. Subsequently she interested herself keenly in political and social questions, but had hardly at that time begun to do so. But she made a conquest of my sister.

Indeed it would have been very difficult for any one to live in the same house with her without loving her. She was so bright, her sympathies so ready, her intelligence so large and varied, that day after day her presence and her conversation were a continual delight; and she was withal diffident of herself, gentle and unassuming to a fault. My mother had already learned to love her truly as a daughter, before there was any apparent probability of her becoming one.

We did not succeed in bearing down all the opposition that in the name of ordinary prudence was made to our marriage, till the spring of forty-eight. We were finally married on the 3rd of April in that year, in the British Minister's chapel in Florence, in the quiet, comfortable way in which we used to do such things in those days.

I told my good friend Mr. Plunkett (he had then become the English representative at the Court of Tuscany), that I wanted to be married the next day. "All right!" said he; "will ten o'clock do?" "Could not be better!" "Very good! Tell Robbins [the then English clergyman] I'll be sure to be there." So at ten the next morning we looked in at the Palazzo Ximenes, and in about ten minutes the business was done!

Of Mr. Robbins, who was as kind and good a little man as could be, I may note, since I have been led to speak of him, the following rather singular circumstance. He was, as I have been told, the son of a Devonshire farmer, and his two sisters were the wives of two of the principal Florentine nobles, one having married the Marchese Inghirami and the other the Marchese Bartolomei. What circumstances led to the accomplishment of a destiny apparently so strange for the family of a Devonshire farmer, I never heard. The clergyman and his sisters were all much my seniors.

After the expeditious ceremony we all—about half a score of us—went off to breakfast at the house of Mr. Garrow in the Piazza di Santa Maria Novella, and before noon my wife and I were off on a ramble among the Tuscan cities.



CHAPTER X.

My very old friend, Colonel Grant—General Grant many years before he died—used to say that if he wished without changing his place himself, to see the greatest possible number of his friends and acquaintances, he should stand perpetually at the foot of the column in the Place Vendome. But it seems to me that at least as advantageous a post of observation for the purpose would be the foot of Giotto's tower in Florence! Who in these days lives and dies without going to Florence; and who goes to Florence without going to gaze on the most perfectly beautiful tower that human hands ever raised?

Let me tell (quite parenthetically) a really good story of that matchless building, which yet however will hardly be appreciated at its full value by those who have never yet seen it. When the Austrian troops were occupying Florence, one of the white-coated officers had planted himself in the Piazza in front of the tower, and was gazing at it earnestly, lost in admiration of its perfect beauty. "Si svita, signore," said a little street urchin, coming up behind him—"It unscrews, sir!" As much as to say, "Wouldn't you like just to take it off bodily and carry it away?" But, as I said, to apprehend the aptitude of the gamin's sneer, one must have oneself looked on the absolute perfection of proportion and harmony of its every part, which really does suggest the idea that the whole might be lifted bodily in one piece from its place on the soil Whether the Austrian had the wit to answer "You are blundering, boy! you are taking me for a Frenchman," I don't know!

But I was saying, when the mention of the celebrated tower led me into telling, before I forgot it, the above story, that Florence was of all the cities of Europe, that in which one might be likely to see the greatest number of old, and make the greatest number of new acquaintances. I lived there for more than thirty years, and the number of persons, chiefly English, American, and Italian, whom I knew during that period is astonishing. The number of them was of course all the greater from the fact that the society, at least so far as English and Americans were concerned, was to a very great degree a floating one. They come back to my memory, when I think of those times, like a long procession of ghosts! Most of them, I suppose, are ghosts by this time. They pass away out of one's ken, and are lost!

Some, thank Heaven, are not lost; and some though lost, will never pass out of ken! If I were writing only for myself, I should like to send my memory roving among all that crowd of phantoms, catch them one after another as they dodge about half eluding one when just on the point of recovering them, and, fixing them in memory's camera, photograph them one after another. But I cannot hope that such a gallery would be as interesting to the reader as it certainly would to me. And I must content myself with recording my recollections of those among them in whom the world may be supposed to take an interest.

Theodosia Garrow, when living with her parents at "The Braddons," at Torquay, had known Elizabeth Barrett. The latter was very much of an invalid at the time; so much so, as I think I have gathered from my wife's talk about those times, as to have prevented her from being a visitor to "The Braddons." But Theodosia was, I take it, to be very frequently found by the side of the sofa to which her friend was more or less confined. I fancy that Mr. Kenyon, who was an old friend and family connection of Elizabeth Barrett's family, and was also intimately acquainted with the Garrows and with Theodosia, must have been the first means of bringing the girls together. There were assuredly very few young women in England at that day to whom Theodosia Garrow in social intercourse would have had to look up, as to one on a higher intellectual level than her own. But Elizabeth Barrett was one of them. I am not talking of acquirements. Nor was my wife thinking of such when she used to speak of the poetess as she had known her at that time. I am talking, as my wife used to talk, of pure native intellectual power. And I consider it to have been no small indication of the capacity of my wife's intelligence, that she so clearly and appreciatingly recognised and measured the distance between her friend's intellect and her own. But this appreciation on the one side was in nowise incompatible with a large and generous amount of admiration on the other. And many a talk in long subsequent years left with me the impression of the high estimation which the gifted poetess had formed of the value of her highly, but not so exceptionally, gifted admirer.

Of course this old friendship paved the way for a new one when the Brownings came to live in Florence. I flatter myself that that would in any case have found some raison d'etre. But the pleasure of the two girls—girls no more in any sense—in meeting again quickened the growth of an intimacy which might otherwise have been slower in ripening.

To say that amid all that frivolous, gay, giddy, and, it must be owned, for the most part very unintellectual society (in the pleasures and pursuits of which, to speak honestly, I took, well pleased, my full share), my visits to Casa Guidi were valued by me as choice morsels of my existence, is to say not half enough. I was conscious even then of coming away from those visits a better man, with higher views and aims. And pray, reader, understand that any such effect was not produced by any talk or look or word of the nature of preaching, or anything approaching to it, but simply by the perception and appreciation of what Elizabeth Barrett Browning was; of the immaculate purity of every thought that passed through her pellucid mind, and the indefeasible nobility of her every idea, sentiment, and opinion. I hope my reader is not so much the slave of conventional phraseology as to imagine that I use the word "purity" in the above sentence in its restricted and one may say technical, sense. I mean the purity of the upper spiritual atmosphere in which she habitually dwelt; the absolute disseverance of her moral as well as her intellectual nature from all those lower thoughts as well as lower passions which smirch the human soul. In mind and heart she was white—stainless. That is what I mean by purity.

Her most intimate friend at Florence was a Miss Isabella Blagden, who lived for many years at Bellosguardo, in a villa commanding a lovely view over Florence and the valley of the Arno from the southern side, looking across it therefore to Fiesole and its villa-and-cypress-covered slopes. Whether the close friendship between Mrs. Browning and Isa Blagden (we all called her Isa always) was first formed in Florence, or had its commencement at an earlier date, I do not know. But Isa was also the intimate and very specially highly-valued friend of my wife and myself. And this also contributed to our common friendship. Isa was (yes, as usual, "was," alas, though she was very much my junior) a very bright, very warm-hearted, very clever little woman, who knew everybody, and was, I think, more universally beloved than any other individual among us. A little volume of her poems was published after her untimely death. They are not such as could take by storm the careless ears of the world, which knows nothing about her, and must, I suppose, be admitted to be marked by that mediocrity which neither gods nor men can tolerate. But it is impossible to read the little volume without perceiving how choice a spirit the authoress must have been, and understanding how it came to pass that she was especially honoured by the close and warm attachment of Mrs. Browning. I have scores of letters signed "Isa," or rather Sibylline leaves scrawled in the vilest handwriting on all sorts of abnormal fragments of paper, and despatched in headlong haste, generally concerning some little projected festivity at Bellosguardo, and advising me of the expected presence of some stranger whom she thought I should like to meet. Very many of such of these fragmentary scribblings, as were written before the Brownings left Florence, contain some word or reference to her beloved "Ba," for such was the pet name used between them, with what meaning or origin I know not.

Dear Isa's death was to me an especially sad one, because I thought, and think, that she need not have died. She lived alone with a couple of old servants, and though she was rich in troops of friends, and there were one or two near her during the day or two of her illness, they did not seem to have managed matters wisely. Our Isa was extremely obstinate about calling in medical advice. It could not be done at a moment's notice, for a message had to be sent and a doctor to come from Florence. And this was not done till the second day of her illness. And I had good reason for thinking that, had she been properly attended to on the first day, her life might have been saved. She would not let her friends send for the doctor, and the friends were unable to make her do so. Unhappily, I was absent for a few days at Siena, and returned to be met by the intelligence that she was dead. It seemed the more sad in that I knew that if I had been there I could have made her call a doctor before it was too late. Browning could also have done so; but it was after the death of Mrs. Browning and his departure from Florence.

How great her sorrow was for the death of her friend, Browning knew, doubtless, but nobody else, I think, in the world save myself.

I have now before me one of her little scraps of letters, in which she encloses one from Mrs. Browning which is of the highest interest. The history and genesis of it is as follows. Shortly after the publication of the well-known and exquisite little poem on the god Pan in the Cornhill Magazine, my brother Anthony wrote me a letter venturing to criticise it, in which he says: "The lines are very beautiful, and the working out of the idea is delicious. But I am inclined to think that she is illustrating an allegory by a thought, rather than a thought by an allegory. The idea of the god destroying the reed in making the instrument has, I imagine, given her occasion to declare that in the sublimation of the poet the man is lost for the ordinary purposes of man's life. It has been thus instead of being the reverse; and I can hardly believe that she herself believes in the doctrine which her fancy has led her to illustrate. A man that can be a poet is so much the more a man in becoming such, and is the more fitted for a man's best work. Nothing is destroyed, and in preparing the instrument for the touch of the musician the gods do nothing for which they need weep. The idea however is beautiful, and it is beautifully worked."

Then follows some verbal criticism which need not be transcribed. Going on to the seventh stanza he says, "In the third line of it, she loses her antithesis. She must spoil her man, as well as make a poet out of him—spoil him as the reed is spoilt. Should we not read the lines thus:—

"'Yet one half beast is the great god Pan Or he would not have laughed by the river. Making a poet he mars a man; The true gods sigh,' &c."?

In justice to my brother's memory I must say that this was not written to me with any such presumptuous idea as that of offering his criticism to the poetess. But I showed the letter to Isa Blagden, and at her request left it with her. A day or two later, she writes to me: "Dear friend,—I send you back your criticism and Mrs. B.'s rejoinder. She made me show it to her, and she wishes you to see her answer." Miss Blagden's words would seem to imply that she thought the criticism mine. And if she did, Mrs. Browning was doubtless led to suppose so too. Yet I think this could hardly have been the case.

Of course my only object in writing all this here is to give the reader the great treat of seeing Mrs. Browning's "rejoinder." It is very highly interesting:—

* * * * *

"DEAREST ISA,—Very gentle my critic is; I am glad I got him out of you. But tell dear Mr. Trollope he is wrong nevertheless" [here it certainly seems that she supposed the criticism to be mine]; "and that my 'thought' was really and decidedly anterior [sic] to my 'allegory.' Moreover, it is my thought still. I meant to say that the poetic organisation implies certain disadvantages; for instance an exaggerated general susceptibility, ...[1] which may be shut up, kept out of the way in every-day life, and must be (or the man is 'marred' indeed, made a Rousseau or a Byron of), but which is necessarily, for all that, cultivated in the very cultivation of art itself. There is an inward reflection and refraction of the heats of life ...[1] doubling pains and pleasures, doubling therefore the motives (passions) of life. I have said something of this in A.L. [Aurora Leigh]. Also there is a passion for essential truth (as apprehended) and a necessity for speaking it out at all risks, inconvenient to personal peace. Add to this and much else the loss of the sweet unconscious cool privacy among the 'reeds' ...[1] which I for one care so much for—the loss of the privilege of being glad or sorry, ill or well, without a 'notice.' That may have its glory to certain minds. But most people would be glad to 'stir their tea in silence' when they are grave, and even to talk nonsense (much too frivolously) when they are merry, without its running the round of the newspapers in two worlds perhaps. You know I don't invent, Isa. In fact, I am sorely tempted to send Mr. Trollope a letter I had this morning, as an illustration of my view, and a reply to his criticism. Only this letter among many begins with too many fair speeches. Still it seems written by somebody in earnest and with a liking for me. Its main object is to complain of the cowardly morality in Pan. Then a stroke on the poems before Congress. The writer has heard that I 'had been to Paris, was feted by the Emperor, and had had my head turned by Imperial flatteries,' in consequence of which I had taken to 'praise and flatter the tyrant, and try to help his selfish ambition.' Well! one should laugh and be wise. But somehow one doesn't laugh. A letter beginning, 'You are a great teacher of truth,' and ending, 'You are a dishonest wretch,' makes you cold somehow, and ill disposed towards the satisfactions of literary distinction. Yes! and be sure, Isa, that the 'true gods sigh,' and have reason to sigh, for the cost and pain of it; sigh only ... don't haggle over the cost; don't grudge a crazia, but.... sigh, sigh ... while they pay honestly.

"On the other hand, there's much light talking and congratulation, excellent returns to the pocket from the poem in the Cornhill; pleasant praise from dear Mr. Trollope.... with all drawbacks: a good opinion from Isa worth its gold—and Pan laughs.

"But he is a beast up to the waist; yes, Mr. Trollope, a beast. He is not a true god.

"And I am neither god nor beast, if you please—only a

"BA."

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: These dots do not indicate any hiatus. They exist in the MS. as here given.]

It seems that she certainly imagined me to be the critic; but must have been subsequently undeceived. I will not venture to say a word on the question of the marring or making of a man which results from the creation of a poet; but if my brother had known Mrs. Browning as well as I knew her, he would not have written that he could "hardly believe that she herself believes in the doctrine that her fancy has led her to illustrate." At all events, the divine afflatus had not so marred the absolutely single-minded truthfulness of the woman in her as to make it possible that she should, for the sake of illustrating, however appositely, any fancy however brilliant, put forth a "doctrine" as believing in it, which she did not believe. It may seem that this is a foolish making of a mountain out of a molehill; but she would not have felt it to be so. She had so high a conception of the poet's office and responsibilities that nothing would have induced her to play at believing for literary purposes any position, or fancy, or imagination, which she did not in her heart of hearts accept.

There was one subject upon which both my wife and I disagreed in opinion with Mrs. Browning; and it was a subject which sat very near her heart, and was much occupying all minds at that time—the phases of Italy's struggle for independence, and especially the part which the Emperor Napoleon the Third was taking in that struggle, and his conduct towards Italy. We were all equally "Italianissimi," as the phrase went then; all equally desirous that Italy should accomplish the union of her disjecta membra, throw off the yoke of the bad governments which had oppressed her, make herself a nation, and do well as such. But we differed widely as to the ultimate utility, the probable results, and, above all, as to the motives of the Emperor's conduct. Mrs. Browning believed in him and trusted him. We did neither. Hence the following interesting and curious letter, written to my wife at Florence by Mrs. Browning, who was passing the summer at Siena. Mrs. Browning felt very warmly upon this subject—so indeed did my wife, differing from her toto coelo upon it. But the difference not only never caused the slightest suspension of cordial feeling between them, but never caused either of them to doubt for a moment that the other was with equal sincerity and equal ardour anxious for the same end. The letter was written, as only the postmark shows, on September 26th, 1859, and was as follows:—

* * * * *

"MY DEAR MRS. TROLLOPE,—I feel doubly ungrateful to you ... for the music (one of the proofs of your multiform faculty) and for your kind and welcome letter, which I have delayed to thank you for. My body lags so behind my soul always, and especially of late, that you must consider my disadvantages in whatever fault is committed by me trying to forgive it.

"Certainly we differ in our estimate of the Italian situation, while loving and desiring for Italy up to the same height and with the same heart.

"For me I persist in looking to facts rather than to words official or unofficial, and in repeating that, 'whereas we were bound, now we are free.'

"'I think, therefore, I am.' Cogito, ergo sum, was, you know, an old formula. Italy thinks (aloud) at Florence and Bologna; therefore she is. And how did that happen? Could it have happened last year, with the Austrians at Bologna, and ready (at a sign) to precipitate themselves into Tuscany? Could it have happened previous to the French intervention? And could it happen now if France used the power she has in Italy against Italy? Why is it that the Times newspaper, which declared ... first that the elections were to be prevented by France, and next that they were to be tampered with ... is not justified before our eyes? I appeal to your sober judgment ... if indeed the Emperor Napoleon desires the restoration of the Dukes!! Is he not all the more admirable for being loyal and holding his hand off while he has fifty thousand men ready to 'protect' us all and prevent the exercise of the people's sovereignty? And he a despot (so called) and accustomed to carry out his desires. Instead of which Tuscans and Romagnoli, Parma and Modena, have had every opportunity allowed them to combine, carry their elections, and express their full minds in assemblies, till the case becomes so complicated and strengthened that her enemies for the most part despair.

"The qualities shown by the Italians—the calm, the dignity, the intelligence, the constancy ... I am as far from not understanding the weight of these virtues as from not admiring them. But the opportunity for exercising them comes from the Emperor Napoleon, and it is good and just for us all to remember this while we admire the most.

"So at least I think; and the Italian official bodies have always admitted it, though individuals seem to me to be too much influenced by the suspicions and calumnies thrown out by foreign journals—English, Prussian, Austrian, and others—which traduce the Emperor's motives in diplomacy, as they traduced them in the war. A prejudice in the eye is as fatal to sight as mote and beam together. And there are things abroad worse than any prejudices—yes, worse!

"It is a fact that the Emperor used his influence with England to get the Tuscan vote accepted by the English Government. Whatever wickedness he meant by that the gods know; and English statesmen suspect ... (or suspected a very short short time ago); but the deed itself is not wicked, and you and I shall not be severe on it whatever bad motive may be imputable.

"So much more I could write ... about Villafranca, but I won't. The Emperor, great man as he is, could not precisely anticipate the high qualities given proof of in the late development of Italian nationality. He made the best terms he could, having had his hand forced. In consequence of this treaty he has carried out his engagement to Austria in certain official forms, knowing well that the free will and choice of the Italians are hindered by none of them; and knowing besides that every apparent coldness and reserve of his towards the peninsula removes a jealousy from England, and instigates her to a more liberal and human bearing than formerly.

"Forgive me for all these words. I am much better, but still not as strong as I was before my attack; only getting strength, I hope.

"Miss Blagden and Miss Field are staying still with us, and are gone to Siena to-day to see certain pictures (which has helped to expose you to this attack). We talk of returning to Florence by the first of October, or soon after, in spite of the revival of fine weather. Mr. Landor is surprisingly improved by the good air here and the repose of mind; walks two miles, and writes alcaics and pentameters on most days ... on his domestic circumstances, and ... I am sorry to say ... Louis Napoleon. But I tell him that I mean him to write an ode on my side of the question before we have done.

"I honour you and your husband for the good work you have both done on behalf of this great cause. But his book[1] we only know yet by the extracts in the Athenaeum, which brings us your excellent articles. May I not thank you for them? And when does Mr. Trollope come back?" [from a flying visit to England]. "We hope not to miss him out of Florence long.

[Footnote 1: Tuscany in 1849 and 1859.]

"Peni's love to Bice.[1] He has been very happy here, galloping through the lanes on a pony the colour of his curls. Then he helps to work in the vineyards and to keep the sheep, having made close friends with the contadini to whom he reads and explains Dall' Ongaro's poems with great applause. By the way, the poet paid us a visit lately, and we liked him much.

[Footnote 1: Browning's boy and my girl.]

"And let me tell Bice's mother another story of Penini. He keeps a journal, be it whispered; I ventured to peep through the leaves the other morning, and came to the following notice: 'This is the happiest day of my hole (sic) life, because dearest Vittorio Emanuele is really nostro re!'

"There's a true Italian for you! But his weak point is spelling.

"Believe me, with my husband's regards,

"Ever truly and affectionately yours,

"ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING."

* * * * *

It may possibly enter into the mind of some one of those who never enjoyed the privilege of knowing Mrs. Browning the woman, to couple together the stupidly calumnious insinuations to which she refers in the first letter I have given, with the admiration she expresses for the third Napoleon in the second letter. I differed from her wholly in her estimate of the man, and in her views of his policy with regard to Italy. And many an argument have I had with her on the subject. And my opinions respecting it were all the more distasteful to her because they concerned the character of the man himself as well as his policy as a ruler. And those talks and arguments have left me probably the only man alive, save one, who knows with such certainty as I know it, and can assert as I can, the absolute absurdity and impossibility of the idea that she, being what she was, could have been bribed by any amount of Imperial or other flattery, not only to profess opinions which she did not veritably hold—this touches her moral nature, perhaps the most pellucidly truthful of any I ever knew—but to hold opinions which she would not have otherwise held. This touches her intellectual nature, which was as incapable of being mystified or modified by any suggestion of vanity, self-love, or gratified pride, as the most judicial-minded judge who ever sat on the bench. Her intellectual view on the matter was, I thought, mystified and modified by the intensity of her love for the Italian cause, and of her hatred for the evils from which she was watching the Italians struggling to liberate themselves.

I heard, probably from herself, of whispered calumnies, such as those she refers to in the first of the two letters given. She despised them then, as those who loved and valued her did, though the sensitive womanly gentleness of her nature made it a pain to her that any fellow-creature, however ignorant and far away from her, should so think of her. And my disgust at a secret attempt to stab has impelled me to say what I know on the subject. But I really think that not only those who knew her as she lived In the flesh, but the tens of thousands who know her as she lives in her written words, cannot but feel my vindication superfluous.

The above long and specially interesting letter is written in very small characters on ten pages of extremely small duodecimo note-paper, as is also the other letter by the same writer given above. Mrs. Browning's handwriting shows ever and anon an odd tendency to form each letter of a word separately—a circumstance which I mention for the sake of remarking that old Huntingford, the Bishop of Hereford, in my young days, between whom and Mrs. Browning there was one thing in common, namely, a love for and familiarity with Greek studies, used to write in the same manner.

The Dall' Ongaro here spoken of was an old friend of ours—of my wife's, if I remember right—before our marriage. He was a Venetian, or rather to speak accurately, I believe, a Dalmatian by birth, but all his culture and sympathies were Venetian. He had in his early youth been destined for the priesthood, but like many another had been driven by the feelings and sympathies engendered by Italy's political struggles to abandon the tonsure for the sake of joining the "patriot" cause. His muse was of the drawing-room school and calibre. But he wrote very many charming little poems breathing the warmest aspirations of the somewhat extreme gauche of that day, especially some stornelli after the Tuscan fashion, which met with a very wide and warm acceptance. I remember one extremely happy, the refrain of which still runs in my head. It is written on the newly-adopted Italian tricolour flag. After characterising each colour separately in a couplet, he ends:—

"E il rosso, il bianco, e il verde, E un terno che si giuoca, e non si perde."

The phrase is borrowed from the language of the lottery. "And the red, and the white, and the green, are a threefold combination" [I am obliged to be horribly prosaic in order to make the allusion intelligible to non-Italian ears!] "on which we may play and be sure not to lose!"

I am tempted to give here another of Mrs. Browning's letters to my first wife, partly by the persuasion that any letter of hers must be a matter of interest to a very large portion of English readers, and partly for the sake of the generously appreciative criticism of one of my brother's books, which I also always considered to be one of his best. I must add that Mrs. Browning's one bit of censure coincides as perfectly with my own judgment. The letter as usual is dateless, but must have been written very shortly after the publication of my brother's novel called The Three Clerks.

"My dear Mrs. Trollope,—I return The Three Clerks with our true thanks and appreciation. We both quite agree with you in considering it the best of the three clever novels before the public. My husband, who can seldom get a novel to hold him, has been held by all three, and by this the strongest. Also it has qualities which the others gave no sign of. For instance, I was wrung to tears by the third volume. What a thoroughly man's book it is! I much admire it, only wishing away, with a vehemence which proves the veracity of my general admiration, the contributions to the Daily Delight—may I dare to say it?

"I do hope you are better. For myself, I have not suffered more than was absolutely necessary in the late unusual weather.

"I heard with concern that Mrs. Trollope" [my mother] "has been less well than usual. But who can wonder, with such cold?

"Most truly yours,

"Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

"Casa Guidi, Wednesday."

Here is also one other little memorial, written not by "Elizabeth Barrett Browning," but by "Elizabeth Barrett." It is interesting on more than one account. It bears no date, save "Beacon Terrace [Torquay], Thursday," But it evidently marks the beginning of acquaintanceship between the two exceptionally, though not equally gifted girls—Elizabeth Barrett and Theodosia Garrow. It is written on a sheet of the very small duodecimo note paper which she was wont to use many years subsequently, but in far more delicate and elegant characters than she used, when much pen-work had produced its usual deteriorating effect on her caligraphy.

* * * * *

"I cannot return the Book of Beauty" [Lady Blessington's annual] "to Miss Garrow without thanking her for allowing me to read in it sooner than I should otherwise have done, those contributions of her own which help to justify its title, and which are indeed sweet and touching verses.

"It is among the vexations brought upon me by my illness, that I still remain personally unacquainted with Miss Garrow, though seeming to myself to know her through those who actually do so. And I should venture to hope that it might be a vexation the first to leave me, if a visit to an invalid condemned to the peine forte et dure of being very silent, notwithstanding her womanhood, were a less gloomy thing. At any rate I am encouraged to thank Miss Fisher and Miss Garrow for their visits of repeated inquiry, and their other very kind attentions, by these written words, rather than by a message. For I am sure that wherever kindness can come thankfulness may, and that whatever intrusion my note can be guilty of, it is excusable by the fact of my being Miss Garrow's

"Sincerely obliged,

"E. BARRETT."

* * * * *

Could anything be more charmingly girlish, or more prettily worded! The diminutive little note seems to have been preserved, an almost solitary survival of the memorials of the days to which it belongs. It must doubtless have been followed by sundry others, but was, I suppose, specially treasured as having been the first step towards a friendship which was already highly valued.

Of course, in the recollections of an Englishman living during those years in Florence, Robert Browning must necessarily stand out in high relief, and in the foremost line. But very obviously this is neither the time nor the place, nor is my dose of presumption sufficient for any attempt at a delineation of the man. To speak of the poet, since I write for Englishmen, would be very superfluous. It may be readily imagined that the "tag-rag and bobtail" of the men who mainly constituted that very pleasant but not very intellectual society, were not likely to be such as Mr. Browning would readily make intimates of. And I think I see in memory's magic glass that the men used to be rather afraid of him. Not that I ever saw him rough or uncourteous with the most exasperating fool that ever rubbed a man's nervous system the wrong way; but there was a quiet, lurking smile which, supported by very few words, used to seem to have the singular property of making the utterers of platitudes and the mistakers of non-sequiturs for sequiturs, uncomfortably aware of the nature of their words within a very few minutes after they had uttered them. I may say, however, that I believe that in any dispute on any sort of subject between any two men in the place, if it had been proposed to submit the matter in dispute for adjudication to Mr. Browning, the proposal would have been jumped at with a greater readiness of consensus than in the case of any other man there.



CHAPTER XI

The Italians, I believe, were "thinking" at a considerably earlier period than that which in the second letter transcribed in the preceding chapter Mrs. Browning seems to have considered as the beginning of their "cogitating" existence, and thinking on the subjects to which she is there adverting. They were "thinking," perhaps, less in Tuscany than in any other part of the peninsula, for they were eating more and better there. They were very lightly taxed. The mezzeria system of agriculture, which, if not absolutely the same, is extremely similar to that which is known as "conacre," rendered the lot of the peasant population very far better and more prosperous than that of the tillers of the earth in any of the other provinces. And upon the whole the people were contented. The Tuscan public was certainly not a "pensive public." They ate their bread not without due condiment of compagnatico,[1] or even their chesnuts in the more remote and primitive mountain districts, drank their sound Tuscan wine from the generous big-bellied Tuscan flasks holding three good bottles, and sang their stornelli in cheerfulness of heart, and had no craving whatsoever for those few special liberties which were denied them.

[Footnote 1: Anything to make the bread "go down," as our people say—a morsel of bacon or sausage, a handful of figs or grapes, or a bit of cheese.]

Epicuri de grege porci! No progress! Yes, I know all that, and am not saying what should have been, but what was. There was no progress! The contadini on the little farm which I came to possess before I left Tuscany cultivated it precisely after the fashion of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and strenuously resisted any suggestion that it could, should, or might be cultivated in any other way. But my contadino inhabited a large and roomy casa colonica; he and his buxom wife, had six stalwart sons, and was the richer man in consequence of having them. No, in my early Florentine days the cogito, ergo sum could not have been predicated of the Tuscans.

But the condition of things in the other states of the peninsula, in Venice and Lombardy under the Austrians, in Naples under the Bourbon kings, in Romagna under the Pope, and very specially in Modena under its dukes of the House of Este, was much otherwise. In those regions the Italians were "thinking" a great deal, and had been thinking for some time past. And somewhere about 1849, those troublesome members of the body social who are not contented with eating, drinking, and singing—cantankerous reading and writing people living in towns, who wanted most unreasonably to say, as the phrase goes, that "their souls were their own" (as if such fee-simple rights ever fall to the lot of any man!)—began in Tuscany to give signs that they also were "thinking."

I remember well that Alberi, the highly accomplished and learned editor of the Reports of the Venetian Ambassadors, and of the great edition of Galileo's works, was the first man who opened my altogether innocent eyes to the fact, that the revolutionary leaven was working in Tuscany, and that there were social breakers ahead! This must have been as early as 1845, or possibly 1844. Alberi himself was a Throne-and-Altar man, who thought for his part, that the amount of proprietorship over his own soul which the existing regime allowed him was enough for his purposes. But, as he confided to me, a very strong current of opinion was beginning to run the other way in Florence, in Leghorn, in Lucca, and many smaller cities—not in Siena, which always was, and is still, a nest of conservative feeling.

Nevertheless there never was, at least in Florence, the strength and bitterness of revolutionary feeling that existed almost everywhere else throughout Italy. I remember a scene which furnished a very remarkable proof of this, and which was at the same time very curiously and significantly characteristic of the Florentine character, at least as it then existed.

It was during the time of the Austrian occupation of Florence. On the whole the Austrian troops behaved well; and their doings, and the spirit in which the job they had in hand was carried out, were very favourably contrasted with the tyranny, the insults, and the aggressive arrogance, with which the French army of occupation afflicted the Romans. The Austrians accordingly were never hated in Florence with the bitter intensity of hate which the French earned in the Eternal City. Nevertheless, there were now and then occasions when the Florentine populace gratified their love of a holiday and testified to the purity of their Italian patriotism by turning out into the streets and kicking up a row.

It was on an occasion of this sort, that the narrow street called Por' Santa Maria, which runs up from the Ponte Vecchio to the Piazza, was thickly crowded with people. A young lieutenant had been sent to that part of the town with a small detachment of cavalry to clear the streets. Judging from the aspect of the people, as his men, coming down the Lung' Arno, turned into the narrow street, he did not half like the job before him. He thought there certainly would be bloodshed. And just as his men were turning the corner and beginning to push their horses into the crowd, one of them slipped sideways on the flagstones, with which, most distressingly to horses not used to them, the streets of Florence are paved, and came down with his rider partly under him.