A MELANCHOLY PROCESSION—LAGO MAGGIORE—ISOLA BELLA—THE SIMPLON—MEETING A FELLOW-COUNTRYMAN—THE VALLEY OF THE RHONE.
In going out of the gates of Milan, we met a cart full of peasants, tied together and guarded bygens d'armes, the fifth sight of the kind that has crossed us since we passed the Austrian border. The poor fellows looked very innocent and very sorry. The extent of their offences probably might be the want of a passport, and a desire to step over the limits of his majesty's possessions. A train of beautiful horses, led by soldiers along the ramparts, the property of the Austrian officers, were in melancholy contrast to their sad faces.
The clear snowy Alps soon came in sight, and their cold beauty refreshed us in the midst of a heat that prostrated every nerve in the system. It is only the first of May, and they are mowing the grass everywhere on the road, the trees are in their fullest leaf, the frogs and nightingales singing each other down, and the grasshopper would be a burden. Toward night we crossed the Sardinian frontier, and in an hour were set down at an auberge on the bank of Lake Maggiore, in the little town ofArona. The mountains on the other side of the broad and mirror-like water, are speckled with ruined castles, here and there a boat is leaving its long line of ripples behind in its course, the cattle are loitering home, the peasants sit on the benches before their doors, and all the lovely circumstances of a rural summer's sunset are about us, in one of the very loveliest spots in nature. A very old Florence friend is my companion, and what with mutual reminiscences of sunny Tuscany, and the deepest love in common for the sky over our heads, and the green land around us, we are noting down "red days" in our calendar of travel.
We walked from Arona by sunrise, four or five miles along the borders of Lake Maggiore. The kind-hearted peasants on their way to the market raised their hats to us in passing, and I was happy that the greeting was still "buon giorno." Those dark-lined mountains before us were to separate me too soon from the mellow accents in which it was spoken. As yet, however, it was all Italian—the ultra-marine sky, the clear, half-purpled hills, the inspiring air—we felt in every pulse that it was still Italy.
We were at Baveno at an early hour, and took a boat forIsola Bella. It looks like a gentleman's villa afloat. A boy would throw a stone entirely over it in any direction. It strikes you like a kind of toy as you look at it from a distance, and getting nearer, the illusion scarcely dissipates—for, from the water's edge, the orange-laden terraces are piled one above another like a pyramidal fruit-basket, the villa itself peers above like a sugar castle, and it scarce seems real enough to land upon. We pulled round to the northern side, and disembarked at a broad stonestaircase, where a cicerone, with a look of suppressed wisdom, common to his vocation, met us with the offer of his services.
The entrance-hall was hung with old armor, and a magnificent suite of apartments above, opening on all sides upon the lake, was lined thickly with pictures, none of them remarkable except one or two landscapes by the savage Tempesta. Travellers going the other way would probably admire the collection more than we. We were glad to be handed over by our pragmatical custode to a pretty contadina, who announced herself as the gardener's daughter, and gave us each a bunch of roses. It was a proper commencement to an acquaintance upon Isola Bella. She led the way to the water's edge, where, in the foundations of the palace, a suite of eight or ten spacious rooms is constructeda la grotte—with a pavement laid of small stones of different colors, walls and roof of fantastically set shells and pebbles, and statues that seem to have reason in their nudity. The only light came in at the long doors opening down to the lake, and the deep leather sofas, and dark cool atmosphere, with the light break of the waves outside, and the long views away toward Isola Madra, and the far-off opposite shore, composed altogether a most seductive spot for an indolent humor and a summer's day. I shall keep it as a cool recollection till sultry summers trouble me no more.
But the garden was the prettiest place. The lake is lovely enough any way; but to look at it through perspectives of orange alleys, and have the blue mountains broken by stray branches of tulip-trees, clumps of crimson rhododendron, and clusters of citron, yellower than gold; to sit on a garden-seat in the shade of a thousand roses, with sweet-scented shrubs and verbenums, and a mixture of novel and delicious perfumes embalming the air aboutyou, and gaze up at snowy Alps and sharp precipices, and down upon a broad smooth mirror in which the islands lie like clouds, and over which the boats are silently creeping with their white sails, like birds asleep in the sky—why (not to disparage nature), it seems to my poor judgment, that these artificial appliances are an improvement even to Lago Maggiore.
On one side, without the villa walls, are two or three small houses, one of which is occupied as a hotel; and here, if I had a friend with matrimony in his eye, would I strongly recommend lodgings for the honeymoon. A prettier cage for a pair of billing doves no poet would conceive you.
We got on to Domo d'Ossola to sleep, saying many an oft-said thing about the entrance to the valleys of the Alps. They seem common when spoken of, these romantic places, but they are not the less new in the glow of a first impression.
We were a little in start of the sun this morning, and commenced the ascent of the Simplon by a gray summer's dawn, before which the last bright star had not yet faded. From Domo d'Ossola we rose directly into the mountains, and soon wound into the wildest glens by a road which was flung along precipices and over chasms and waterfalls like a waving riband. The horses went on at a round trot, and so skilfully are the difficulties of the ascent surmounted, that we could not believe we had passed the spot that from below hung above us so appallingly. The route follows the foaming river Vedro, which frets and plunges along at its side or beneath its hanging bridges, with the impetuosity of a mountain torrent, where the stream is swollen at every short distance with pretty waterfalls, messengers from the melting snows on the summits. There was one, a water-sliderather than a fall, which I stopped long to admire. It came from near the peak ofthe mountain, leaping at first from a green clump of firs, and descending a smooth inclined plane, of perhaps two hundred feet. The effect was like drapery of the most delicate lace, dropping into festoons from the hand. The slight waves overtook each other and mingled and separated, always preserving their elliptical and foaming curves, till, in a smooth scoop near the bottom, they gathered into a snowy mass, and leaped into the Vedro in the shape of a twisted shell. If wishing could have witched it into Mr. Cole's sketch-book, he would have a new variety of water for his next composition.
After seven hours' driving, which scarce seemed ascending but for the snow and ice and the clear air it brought us into, we stopped to breakfast at the village of Simplon, "three thousand, two hundred and sixteen feet above the sea level." Here we first realized that we had left Italy. The landlady spoke French and the postillions German! My sentiment has grown threadbare with travel, but I don't mind confessing that the circumstance gave me an unpleasant thickness in the throat. I threw open the southern window, and looked back toward the marshes of Lombardy, and if I did not say the poetical thing, it was because
"It is the silent grief that cuts the heart-strings."
In sober sadness, one may well regret any country where his life has been filled fuller than elsewhere of sunshine and gladness; and such, by a thousand enchantments, has Italy been to me. Its climate is life in my nostrils, its hills and valleys are the poetry of such things, and its marbles, pictures, and palaces, beset the soul like the very necessities of existence. You can exist elsewhere, but oh! youlivein Italy!
I was sitting by my English companion on a sledge in front of the hotel, enjoying the sunshine, when the diligence drove up, and six or eight young men alighted. One of them, walking up and down the road to get the cramp of a confined seat out of his legs, addressed a remark to us in English. We had neither of us seen him before, but we exclaimed simultaneously, as he turned away, "That's an American." "How did you know he was not an Englishman?" I asked. "Because," said my friend, "he spoke to us without an introduction and without a reason, as Englishmen are not in the habit of doing, and because he ended his sentence with 'sir,' as no Englishman does except he is talking to an inferior, or wishes to insult you. And how did you know it?" asked he. "Partly by instinct," I answered, "but more, because though a traveller, he wears a new hat that cost him ten dollars, and a new cloak that cost him fifty, (a peculiarly American extravagance,) because he made no inclination of his body either in addressing or leaving us, though his intention was to be civil, and because he used fine dictionary words to express a common idea, which, by the way, too, betrays his southern breeding. And if you want other evidence, he has just asked the gentleman near him to ask the conducteur something about his breakfast, and an American is the only man in the world who ventures to come abroad without at least French enough to keep himself from starving." It may appear ill-natured to write down such criticisms on one's own countryman; but the national peculiarities by which we are distinguished from foreigners, seemed so well defined in this instance, that I thought it worth mentioning. We found afterward that our conjecture was right. His name and country were on the brass plate of his portmanteau in most legible letters, and I recognized it directly as the addressof an amiable and excellent man, of whom I had once or twice heard in Italy, though I had never before happened to meet him. Three of the faults oftenest charged upon our countrymen, areover-fine clothes,over fine-words, andover-fine, orover-free manners!
From Simplon we drove two or three miles between heaps of snow, lying in some places from ten to six feet deep. Seven hours before, we had ridden through fields of grain almost ready for the harvest. After passing one or two galleries built over the road to protect it from the avalanches where it ran beneath the loftier precipices, we got out of the snow, and saw Brig, the small town at the foot of the Simplon, on the other side, lying almost directly beneath us. It looked as if one might toss his cap down into its pretty gardens. Yet we were four or five hours in reaching it, by a road that seemed in most parts scarcely to descend at all. The views down the valley of the Rhone, which opened continually before us, were of exquisite beauty, The river itself, which is here near its source, looked like a meadow rivulet in its silver windings, and the gigantic Helvetian Alps which rose in their snow on the other side of the valley, were glittering in the slant rays of a declining sun, and of a grandeur of size and outline which diminished, even more than distance, the river and the clusters of villages at their feet.
SWITZERLAND—LA VALAIS—THE CRETINS AND THE GOITRES—A FRENCHMAN'S OPINION OF NIAGARA—LAKE LEMAN—CASTLE OF CHILLON—ROCKS OF MEILLERIE—REPUBLICAN AIR—MONT BLANC—GENEVA—THE STEAMER—PARTING SORROW.
We have been two days and a half loitering down through the Swiss canton of Valais, and admiring every hour the magnificence of these snow-capped and green-footed Alps. The little chalets seem just lodged by accident on the crags, or stuck against slopes so steep, that the mowers of the mountain-grass are literally let down by ropes to their dizzy occupation. The goats alone seem to have an exemption from all ordinary laws of gravitation, feeding against cliffs which it makes one giddy to look on only; and the short-waisted girls dropping a courtesy and blushing as they pass the stranger, emerge from the little mountain-paths, and stop by the first spring, to put on their shoes and arrange their ribands coquetishly, before entering the village.
The two dreadful curses of these valleys meet one at every step—thecretins, or natural fools, of which there is at least one in every family; and thegoitreor swelled throat, to which there is hardly an exception among the women. It really makes travellingin Switzerland a melancholy business, with all its beauty; at every turn in the road, a gibbering and moaning idiot, and in every group of females, a disgusting array of excrescences too common even to be concealed. Really, to see girls that else were beautiful, arrayed in all their holyday finery, but with a defect that makes them monsters to the unaccustomed eye, their throats swollen to the size of their heads, seems to me one of the most curious and pitiable things I have met in my wanderings. Many attempts have been made to account for the growth of thegoitre, but it is yet unexplained. The men are not so subject to it as the women, though among them, even, it is frightfully common. But how account for the continual production by ordinary parents of this brute race ofcretins? They all look alike, dwarfish, large-mouthed, grinning, and of hideous features and expression. It is said that the children of strangers, born in the valley, are very likely to be idiots, resembling the cretin exactly. It seems a supernatural curse upon the land. The Valaisians, however, consider it a blessing to have one in the family.
The dress of the women of La Valais is excessively unbecoming, and a pretty face is rare. Their manners are kind and polite, and at the littleauberges, where we have stopped on the road, there has been a cleanliness and a generosity in the supply of the table, which prove virtues among them, not found in Italy.
At Turtmann, we made a little excursion into the mountains to see a cascade. It falls about a hundred feet, and has just now more water than usual from the melting of the snows. It is a pretty fall. A Frenchman writes in the book of the hotel, that he has seen Niagara and Trenton Falls, in America, and that they do not compare with the cascade of Turtmann!
From Martigny the scenery began to grow richer, and after passing the celebrated Fall of the Pissevache (which springs from the top of a high Alp almost into the road, and is really a splendid cascade), we approached Lake Leman in a gorgeous sunset. We rose a slight hill, and over the broad sheet of water on the opposite shore, reflected with all its towers in a mirror of gold, lay thecastle of Chillon. A bold green mountain, rose steeply behind, the sparkling village of Vevey lay farther down on the water's edge; and away toward the sinking sun, stretched the long chain of the Jura, teinted with all the hues of a dolphin. Never was such a lake of beauty—or it never sat so pointedly for its picture. Mountains and water, chateaux and shallops, vineyards and verdure, could do no more. We left the carriage and walked three or four miles along the southern bank, under the "Rocks of Meillerie," and the spirit of St. Preux's Julie, if she haunt the scene where she caught her death, of a sunset in May, is the most enviable of ghosts. I do not wonder at the prating in albums of Lake Leman. For me, it is (after Val d'Arno from Fiesoli) thene plus ultraof a scenery Paradise.
We are stopping for the night at St. Gingoulf, on a swelling bank of the lake, and we have been lying under the trees in front of the hotel till the last perceptible teint is gone from the sky over Jura. Two pedestrian gentlemen, with knapsacks and dogs, have just arrived, and a whole family of French people, including parrots and monkeys, came in before us, and are deafening the house with their chattering. A cup of coffee, and then good night!
My companion, who has travelled all over Europe on foot, confirms my opinion that there is no drive on the continent, equalto the forty miles between the rocks of Meillerie and Geneva, on the southern bank of the Leman. The lake is not often much broader than the Hudson, the shores are the noble mountains sung so gloriously by Childe Harold; Vevey, Lausanne, Copet, and a string of smaller villages, all famous in poetry and story, fringe the opposite water's edge with cottages and villages, while you wind for ever along a green lane following the bend of the shore, the road as level as your hall pavement, and green hills massed up with trees and verdure, overshadowing you continually. The world has a great many sweet spots in it, and I have found many a one which would make fitting scenery for the brightest act of life's changeful drama—but here is one, where it seems to me as difficult not to feel genial and kindly, as for Taglioni to keep from floating away like a smoke-curl when she is dancing in La Bayadere.
We passed a bridge and drew in a long breath to try the difference in the air—we were in therepublicof Geneva. It smelt very much as it did in the dominions of his majesty of Sardinia—sweet-briar, hawthorn, violets and all. I used to think when I first came from America, that the flowers (republicans by nature as well as birds) were less fragrant under a monarchy.
Mont Blanc loomed up very white in the south, but like other distinguished persons of whom we form an opinion from the description of poets, the "monarch of mountains" did not seem to me soverysuperior to his fellows. After a look or two at him as we approached Geneva, I ceased straining my head out of the cabriolet, and devoted my eyes to things more within the scale of my affections—the scores of lovely villas sprinkling the hills and valleys by which we approached the city. Sweet—sweetplaces they are to be sure! And then the month is May, and the straw-bonneted and white-aproned girls, ladies and peasants alike, were all out at their porches and balconies, lover-like couples were sauntering down the park-lanes,oneservant passed us with a tri-cornered blue billet-doux between his thumb and finger, the nightingales were singing their very hearts away to the new-blown roses, and a sense of summer and seventeen, days of sunshine and sonnet-making, came over me irresistibly. I should like to see June out in Geneva.
The little steamer that makes the tour of Lake Leman, began to "phiz" by sunrise directly under the windows of our hotel. We were soon on the pier, where our entrance into the boat was obstructed by a weeping cluster of girls, embracing and parting very unwillingly with a young lady of some eighteen years, who was lovely enough to have been wept for by as many grown-up gentlemen. Her own tears were under better government, though her sealed lips showed that she dared not trust herself with her voice. After another and another lingering kiss, the boatman expressed some impatience, and she tore herself from their arms and stepped into the waiting batteau. We were soon along side the steamer, and sooner under way, and then, having given one wave of her handkerchief to the pretty and sad group on the shore, our fair fellow-passenger gave way to her feelings, and sinking upon a seat, burst into a passionate flood of tears. There was no obtruding on such sorrow, and the next hour or two were employed by my imagination in filling up the little drama, of which we had seen but the touching conclusion.
I was pleased to find the boat (a new one) called the "Winkelreid," in compliment to the vessel which makes the samevoyage in Cooper's "Headsman of Berne." The day altogether had begun like a chapter in a romance.
"Lake Leman wooed us with its crystal face,"
but there was the filmiest conceivable veil of mist over its unruffled mirror, and the green uplands that rose from its edge had a softness like dreamland upon their verdure. I know not whether the tearful girl whose head was drooping over the railing felt the sympathy, but I could not help thanking nature for her, in my heart, the whole scene was so of the complexion of her own feelings. I could have "thrown my ring into the sea," like Policrates Samius, "to have cause for sadness too."
The "Winkelreid" has (for a republican steamer), rather the aristocratical arrangement of making those who walkaftthe funnel pay twice as much as those who choose to promenadeforward—for no earthly reason that I can divine, other than that those who pay dearest have the full benefit of the oily gases from the machinery, while the humbler passenger breathes the air of heaven before it has passed through that improving medium. Our youthful Niobe, two French ladies not particularly pretty, an Englishman with a fishing-rod and gun, and a coxcomb of a Swiss artist to whom I had taken a special aversion at Rome, from a criticism I overheard upon my favorite picture in the Colonna, my friends and myself, were the exclusive inhalers of the oleaginous atmosphere of the stern. A crowd of the ark's own miscellaneousness thronged the forecastle—and so you have the programme of a day on Lake Leman.
LAKE LEMAN—AMERICAN APPEARANCE OF THE GENEVESE—STEAMBOAT OF THE RHONE—GIBBON AND ROUSSEAU—ADVENTURE OF THE LILIES—GENEVESE JEWELLERS—RESIDENCE OF VOLTAIRE—BYRON'S NIGHT-CAP—VOLTAIRE'S WALKING-STICK AND STOCKINGS.
The water of Lake Leman looks very like other water, though Byron and Shelley were nearly drowned in it; and Copet, a little village on the Helvetian side, where we left three women and took up one man (the village ought to be very much obliged to us), is no Paradise, though Madame de Stael made it her residence. ThereareParadises, however, with very short distances between, all the way down the northern shore; and angels in them, if women are angels—a specimen or two of the sex being visible with the aid of the spyglass, in nearly every balcony and belvidere, looking upon the water. The taste in country-houses seems to be here very much the same as in New England, and quite unlike the half-palace, half-castle style common in Italy and France. Indeed the dress, physiognomy, and manners of old Geneva might make an American Genevese fancy himself at home on the Leman. There is that subdueddecency, that grave respectableness, that black-coated, straight-haired, saint-like kind of look which is universal in the small towns of our country, and which is as unlike France and Italy, as a playhouse is unlike a Methodist chapel. You would know the people of Geneva were Calvinists, whisking through the town merely in a diligence.
I lost sight of the town of Morges, eating a tête-à-tête breakfast with my friend in the cabin. Switzerland is the only place out of America where one gets cream for his coffee. I cry, Morges mercy on that plea.
We were at Lausanne at eleven, having steamed forty miles in five hours. This is not quite up to the thirty-milers on the Hudson, of which I see accounts in the papers, but we had the advantage of not being blown up, either going or coming, and of looking for a continuous minute on a given spot in the scenery. Then we had an iron railing between us and that portion of the passengers who prefer garlic to lavender-water, and we achieved our breakfast without losing our tempers or complexions, in a scramble. The question of superiority between Swiss and American steamers, therefore, depends very much on the value you set on life, temper, and time. For me, as my time is not measured in "diamond sparks," and as my life and temper are the only gifts with which fortune has blessed me, I prefer the Swiss.
Gibbon lived at Lausanne, and wrote here the last chapter of his History of Rome—a circumstance which he records with affection. It is a spot of no ordinary beauty, and the public promenade, where we sat and looked over to Vevey and Chillon, and the Rocks of Meillerie, and talked of Rousseau, and agreed that it was a scene, "faite pour une Julie, pour une Claire, et pourun Saint Preux," is one of the places, where, if I were to "play statue," I should like to grow to my seat, and compromise, merely, for eyesight. We have one thing against Lausanne, however,—it is up hill and a mile from the water; and if Gibbon walked often from Ouchet at noon, and "larded the way" as freely as we, I make myself certain he was not the fat man his biographers have drawn him.
There were some other circumstances at Lausanne which interestedus—but which criticism has decided can not be obtruded upon the public. We looked about for "Julie" and "Clare," spite of Rousseau's "ne les y cherchez pas," and gave a blind beggar a sous (all he asked) for a handful of lilies-of-the-valley, pitying him ten times more than if he had lost his eyes out of Switzerland. To be blind on Lake Leman! blind within sight of Mont Blanc! We turned back to drop another sous into his hat, as we reflected upon it.
The return steamer from Vevey (I was sorry not to go to Vevey for Rousseau's sake, and as much for Cooper's), took us up on its way to Geneva, and we had the advantage of seeing the same scenery in a different light. Trees, houses, and mountains, are so much finer seenagainstthe sun, with the deep shadows toward you!
Sitting by the stern, was a fat and fair Frenchwoman, who, like me, had bought lilies, and about as many. With a very natural facility of dramatic position, I imagined it had established a kind of sympathy between us, and proposed to myself, somewhere in the fair hours, to make it serve as an introduction. She went into the cabin after a while, to lunch on cutlets and beer, and returned to the deck without her lilies. Mine lay beside me, within reach of her four fingers; and, as I was making up mymind to offer to replace her loss, she coolly took them up, and without even a French monosyllable, commenced throwing them overboard, stem by stem. It was very clear she had mistaken them for her own. As the last one flew over the tafferel, the gentleman who paid forla biere et les cottelettes, husband or lover, came up with a smile and a flourish, and reminded her that she had left her bouquet between the mustard and the beer bottle.Sequiter, a scene. The lady apologized, and I disclaimed; and the more I insisted on the delight she had given me by throwing my pretty lilies into Lake Leman, the more she made herself unhappy, and insisted on my being inconsolable. One should come abroad to know how much may be said upon throwing overboard a bunch of lilies!
The clouds gathered, and we had some hopes of a storm, but the "darkened Jura" was merely dim, and the "live thunder" waited for another Childe Harold. We were at Geneva at seven, and had the whole population to witness our debarkation. The pier where we landed, and the new bridge across the outlet of the Rhone, are the evening promenade.
The far-famed jewellers of Geneva are rather an aristocratic class of merchants. They are to be sought in chambers, and their treasures are produced box by box, from locked drawers, and bought, if at all, without the pleasure of "beating down." They are, withal, a gentlemanly class of men; and, of the principal one, as many stories are told as of Beau Brummel. He has made a fortune by his shop, and has the manners of a man who can afford to buy the jewels out of a king's crown.
We were sitting at thetable d'hote, with about forty people, on the first day of our arrival, when the servant brought us each a gilt-edged note, sealed with an elegant device; invitations, wepresumed, to a ball, at least. Mr. So-and-so (I forget the name), begged pardon for the liberty he had taken, and requested us to call at his shop in the Rue de Rhone, and look at his varied assortment of bijouterie. A card was enclosed, and the letter in courtly English. We went, of course; as who would not? The cost to him was a sheet of paper, and the trouble of sending to the hotel for a list of the new arrivals. I recommend the system to all callow Yankees, commencing a "pushing business."
Geneva is full of foreigners in the summer, and it has quite the complexion of an agreeable place. The environs are, of course, unequalled, and the town itself is a stirring and gay capital, full of brilliant shops, handsome streets and promenades, where everything is to be met but pretty women. Female beauty would come to a good market anywhere in Switzerland. We have seen but one pretty girl (our Niobe of the steamer), since we lost sight of Lombardy. They dress well here, and seem modest, and have withal an air of style; but of some five hundred ladies, whom I may have seen in the valley of the Rhone and about this neighborhood, it would puzzle a modern Appelles to compose an endurable Venus. I understand a fair countryman of ours is about taking up her residence in Geneva; and if Lake Leman does not "woo her," and the "live thunder" leap down from Jura, the jewellers, at least, will crown her queen of the Canton, and give her the tiara at cost.
I hope "Maria Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs" will forgive me for having gone toFerneyin anomnibus! Voltaire lived just under the Jura, on a hill-side, overlooking Geneva and the lake, with a landscape before him in the foreground, that a painter could not improve, and Mont Blanc and its neighbor mountains, the breaks to his horizon. At six miles off, Geneva looks verybeautifully, astride the exit of the Rhone from the lake; and the lake itself looks more like a broad river, with its edges of verdure and its outer-frame of mountains. We walked up an avenue to a large old villa, embosomed in trees, where an old gardener appeared, to show us the grounds. We said the proper thing under the tree planted by the philosopher, fell in love with the view from twenty points, met an English lady in one of the arbors, the wife of a French nobleman to whom the house belongs, and were bowed into the hall by the old man and handed over to his daughter to be shown the curiosities of the interior. These were Voltaire's rooms, just as he left them. The ridiculous picture of his own apotheosis, painted under his own direction, and representing him offering his Henriade to Apollo, with all the authors of his time dying of envy at his feet, occupies the most conspicuous place over his chamber-door. Within was his bed, the curtains nibbled quite bare by relic-gathering travellers; a portrait of the Empress Catharine, embroidered by her own hand, and presented to Voltaire; his own portrait and Frederick the Great's, and many of the philosophers', including Franklin. A little monument stands opposite the fireplace, with the inscription, "mon esprit est partout, et mon cœur est ici." It is a snug little dormitory, opening with one window to the west; and, to those who admire the character of the once illustrious occupant, a place for very tangible musing. They showed us afterward his walking-stick, a pair of silk-stockings he had half worn, and a night-cap. The last article is getting quite fashionable as a relic of genius. They show Byron's at Venice.
PRACTICAL BATHOS OF CELEBRATED PLACES—TRAVELLING COMPANIONS AT THE SIMPLON—CUSTOM-HOUSE COMFORTS—TRIALS OF TEMPER—CONQUERED AT LAST!—DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF FRANCE, ITALY, AND SWITZERLAND—FORCE OF POLITENESS.
Whether it was that I had offended the genius of the spot, by coming in an omnibus, or from a desire I never can resist in such places, to travesty and ridicule the mock solemnities with which they are exhibited, certain it is that I left Ferney, without having encountered, even in the shape of a more serious thought, the spirit of Voltaire. One reads the third canto of Childe Harold in his library, and feels as if "Lausanne and Ferney"shouldbe very interesting places to the traveller, and yet when he is shown Gibbon's bower by a fellow scratching his head and hitching up his trousers the while, and the nightcap that enclosed the busy brain from which sprang the fifty brillianttomeson his shelves, by a country-girl, who hurries through her drilled description, with her eye on the silverdouceurin his fingers, he is very likely to rub his hand over his eyes, and disclaim, quite honestly, all pretensions to enthusiasm. And yet, I dare say, I shall have agreat deal of pleasure in remembering that Ihave beenat Ferney. As an English traveller would say, "I havedoneVoltaire!"
Quite of the opinion that it was not doing justice to Geneva to have made but a three days' stay in it, regretting not having seen Sismondi and Simond, and a whole coterie of scholars and authors, whose home it is, and with a mind quite made up to return to Switzerland, when mybeaux joursof love, money, and leisure, shall have arrived, I crossed the Rhone at sunrise, and turned my face toward Paris.
The Simplon is much safer travelling than the pass of the Jura. We were all day getting up the mountains by roads that would make me anxious, if there were a neck in the carriage I would rather should not be broken. My company, fortunately, consisted of three Scotch spinsters, who would try any precipice of the Jura, I think, if there were a lover at the bottom. If the horses had backed in the wrong place, it would have been to all three, I am sure, a deliverance from a world in whose volume of happiness,
"their leafBy some o'er-hasty angel was misplaced."
"their leaf
By some o'er-hasty angel was misplaced."
As to my own neck and my friend's, there is a special providence for bachelors, even if they were of importance enough to merit a care. Spinsters and bachelors, we all arrived safely at Rousses, the entrance to France, and here, if I were to write before repeating the alphabet, you would see what a pen could do in a passion.
The carriage was stopped by three custom-house officers, and taken under a shed, where the doors were closed behind it. We were then required to dismount and give our honors that we hadnothing new in the way of clothes; no "jewelry; no unused manufactures of wool, thread, or lace; no silk of floss silk; no polished metals, plated or varnished; no toys, (except a heart each); nor leather, glass, or crystal manufactures." So far, I kept my temper.
Our trunks, carpet-bags, hat-boxes, dressing-cases, andportfeuilles, were then dismounted and critically examined—every dress and article unfolded; shirts, cravats, unmentionables and all, and searched thoroughly by two ruffians, whose fingers were no improvement upon the labors of the washerwoman. In an hour's time or so we were allowed to commence repacking. Still, I kept my temper.
We were then requested to walk into a private room, while the ladies, for the same purpose, were taken, by a woman, into another. Here we were requested to unbutton our coats, and, begging pardon for the liberty, these courteous gentlemen thrust their hands into our pockets, felt in our bosoms, pantaloons, and shoes, examined our hats, and even eyed our "pet curls" very earnestly, in the expectation of finding us crammed with Geneva jewelry. Still, I kept my temper.
Our trunks were then put upon the carriage, and a sealed string put upon them, which we were not to cut till we arrived in Paris. (Nine days!) They then demanded to be paid for the sealing, and the fellows who had unladen the carriage were to be paid for their labor. This done, we were permitted to drive on. Still, I kept my temper!
We arrived, in the evening, at Morez, in a heavy rain. We were sitting around a comfortable fire, and the soup and fish were just brought upon the table. A soldier entered and requested us to walk to the police-office. "But it rains hard, and our dinneris just ready." The man in the mustache was inexorable. The commissary closed his office at eight, and we must go instantly to certify to our passports, and get new ones for the interior. Cloaks and umbrellas were brought, and,bon gre,mal gre, we walked half a mile in the mud and rain to a dirty commissary, who kept us waiting in the dark fifteen minutes, and then, making out a description of the person of each, demanded half a dollar for the new passport, and permitted us to wade back to our dinner. This had occupied an hour, and no improvement to soup or fish. Still, I kept my temper—rather!
The next morning, while we were forgetting the annoyances of the previous night, and admiring the new-pranked livery of May by a glorious sunshine, a civilarretez vousbrought up the carriage to the door ofanother custom-house! The order was to dismount, and down came once more carpet-bags, hat-boxes, and dressing-cases, and a couple of hours were lost again in a fruitless search for contraband articles. When it was all through, and the officers and menpaidas before, we were permitted to proceed with the gracious assurance that we should not be troubled again till we got to Paris! I bade the commissary good morning, felicitated him on the liberal institutions of his country and his zeal in the exercise of his own agreeable vocation, and—I am free to confess—lost my temper! Job and Xantippe's husband! could I help it!
I confess I expected better things ofFrance. In Italy, where you come to a new dukedom every half-day, you do not much mind opening your trunks, for they are petty princes and need the pitiful revenue of contraband articles and the officer's fee. Yet even they leave the person of the traveller sacred; and where in the world, except in France, is a party, travelling evidentlyfor pleasure, subjectedtwice at the same borderto the degrading indignity of a search! Ye "hunters of Kentucky"—thank heaven that you can go into Tennessee without having your "plunder" overhauled and your pockets searched by successive parties of scoundrels, whom you are to pay "by order of the government," for their trouble!
The Simplon, which you pass in a day, divides two nations, each other's physical and moral antipodes. The handsome, picturesque, lazy, unprincipled Italian, is left in the morning in his own dirty and exorbitant inn; and, on the evening of the same day, having crossed but a chain of mountains, you find yourself in a clean auberge, nestled in the bosom of a Swiss valley, another language spoken around you, and in the midst of a people, who seem to require the virtues they possess to compensate them for more than their share of uncomeliness. You travel a day or two down the valley of the Rhone, and when you are become reconciled tocretinsandgoitres, and ill-dressed and worse formed men and women, you pass in another single day the chain of the Jura, and find yourself in France—a country as different from both Switzerland and Italy, as they are from each other. How is it that these diminutive cantons preserve so completely their nationality? It seems a problem to the traveller who passes from one to the other without leaving his carriage.
One is compelled to like France in spite of himself. You are no sooner over the Jura than you are enslaved, past all possible ill-humor, by the universal politeness. You stop for the night at a place, which, as my friend remarked, resembles an inn onlyin itsin-attention, and after a bad supper, worse beds, and every kind of annoyance, down comes my lady-hostess in the morning to receive her coin, and if you can fly into a passion withsucha cap, andsucha smile, andsucha "bon jour," you are of less penetrable stuff than man is commonly made of.
I loved Italy, but detested the Italians. I detest France, but I can not help liking the French. "Politeness is among the virtues," says the philosopher. Rather, it takes the place of them all. What can you believe ill of a people whose slightest look toward you is made up of grace and kindness.
We are dawdling along thirty miles a day through Burgundy, sick to death of the bare vine-stakes, and longing to see a festooned vineyard of Lombardy. France is such an ugly country! The diligences lumber by, noisy and ludicrous; the cow-tenders wear cocked hats; the beggars are in the true French extreme, theatrical in all their misery; the climate is rainy and cold, and as unlike that of Italy as if a thousand leagues separated them, and the roads are long, straight, dirty, and uneven. There is neither pleasure nor comfort, neither scenery nor antiquities, nor accommodations for the weary—nothing butpoliteness. And it is odd how it reconciles you to it all.
PARIS AND LONDON—REASONS FOR LIKING PARIS—JOYOUSNESS OF ITS CITIZENS—LAFAYETTE'S FUNERAL—ROYAL RESPECT AND GRATITUDE—ENGLAND—DOVER—ENGLISH NEATNESS AND COMFORT, AS DISPLAYED IN THE HOTELS, WAITERS, FIRES, BELL-ROPES, LANDSCAPES, WINDOW-CURTAINS, TEA-KETTLES, STAGE-COACHES, HORSES, AND EVERYTHING ELSE—SPECIMEN OF ENGLISH RESERVE—THE GENTLEMAN DRIVER OF FASHION—A CASE FOR MRS. TROLLOPE.
It is pleasant to get back to Paris. One meets everybody there one ever saw; and operas and coffee, Taglioni and Leontine Fay, the belles and the Boulevards, the shops, spectacles, life, lions, and lures to every species of pleasure, rather give you the impression that, outside the barriers of Paris, time is wasted in travel.
What pleasant idlers they look! The very shopkeepers seem standing behind their counters for amusement. The soubrette who sells you a cigar, or ties a crape on your arm (it was for poor old Lafayette), is coiffed as for a ball; thefrotteurwho takes the dust from your boots, sings his lovesong as he brushes away, the old man has his bouquet in his bosom, and the beggarlooks up at the new statue of Napoleon in the Place Vendome—everybody has some touch of fancy, some trace of a heart on the look-out, at least, for pleasure.
I was at Lafayette's funeral. They buried the old patriot like a criminal. Fixed bayonets before and behind his hearse, his own National Guard disarmed, and troops enough to beleaguer a city, were the honors paid by the "citizen king" to the man who had made him! The indignation, the scorn, the bitterness, expressed on every side among the people, and the ill-smothered cries of disgust as the twoemptyroyal carriages went by, in the funeral train, seemed to me strong enough to indicate a settled and universal hostility to the government.
I met Dr. Bowring on the Boulevard after the funeral was over. I had not seen him for two years, but he could talk of nothing but the great event of the day—"You have come in time," he said, "to see how they carried the old general to his grave! What would they say to this in America? Well—let them go on! We shall see what will come of it? They have buried Liberty and Lafayette together—our last hope in Europe is quite dead with him!"
After three delightful days in Paris we took the northern diligence; and, on the second evening, having passed hastily through Montreuil, Abbeville, Boulogne, and voted the road the dullest couple of hundred miles we had seen in our travels, we were set down in Calais. A stroll through some very indifferent streets, a farewell visit to the last Frenchcafé, we were likely to see for a long time, and some unsatisfactory inquiries about BeauBrummel, who is said to live here still, filled up till bedtime our last day on the continent.
The celebrated Countess of Jersey was on board the steamer, and some forty or fifty plebeian stomachs shared with her fashionable ladyship and ourselves the horrors of a passage across the channel. It is rather the most disagreeable sea I ever traversed, though Ihaveseen "the Euxine," "the roughest sea the traveller e'er ——s," etc., according to Don Juan.
I was lying on my back in a berth when the steamer reached her moorings at Dover, and had neither eyes nor disposition to indulge in the proper sentiment on approaching the "white cliffs" of my fatherland. I crawled on deck, and was met by a wind as cold as December, and a crowd of rosy English faces on the pier, wrapped in cloaks and shawls, and indulging curiosity evidently at the expense of a shiver. It was the first of June!
My companion led the way to a hotel, and we were introduced byEnglishwaiters (I had not seen such a thing in three years, and it was quite like being waited on by gentlemen), to two blazing coal fires in the "coffee room" of the "Ship." Oh what a comfortable place it appeared! A rich Turkey carpet snugly fitted, nice-rubbed mahogany tables, the morning papers from London, bellropes thatwouldring the bell, doors thatwouldshut, a landlady that spoke English, and was kind and civil; and, though there were eight or ten people in the room, no noise above the rustle of a newspaper, and positively, rich red damask curtains, neither second-hand nor shabby, to the windows! A greater contrast than this to the things that answer to them on the continent, could scarcely be imagined.
Malgréall my observations on the English, whom I have found elsewhere the most open-hearted and social people in theworld, they are said by themselves and others to be just the contrary; and, presuming they were different in England, I had made up my mind to seal my lips in all public places, and be conscious of nobody's existence but my own. There were several elderly persons dining at the different tables; and one party, of a father and son, waited on by their own servants in livery. Candles were brought in, the different cloths were removed; and, as my companion had gone to bed, I took up a newspaper to keep me company over my wine. In the course of an hour, some remark had been addressed to me, provocative of conversation, by almost every individual in the room! The subjects of discussion soon became general, and I have seldom passed a more social and agreeable evening. And so much for the first specimen of English reserve!
The fires were burning brilliantly, and the coffee-room was in the nicest order when we descended to our breakfast at six the next morning. The tea-kettle sung on the hearth, the toast was hot, and done to a turn, and the waiter was neither sleepy nor uncivil—all, again, very unlike a morning at a hotel inla belleFrance.
The coach rattled up to the door punctually at the hour; and, while they were putting on my way-worn baggage, I stood looking in admiration at the carriage and horses. They were four beautiful bays, in small, neat harness of glazed leather, brass-mounted, their coats shining like a racer's, their small, blood-looking heads curbed up to stand exactly together, and their hoofs blacked and brushed with the polish of a gentleman's boots. The coach was gaudily painted, the only thing out of taste about it; but it was admirably built, the wheel-horses were quite under the coachman's box, and the whole affair, though it would carry twelve orfourteen people, covered less ground than a French one-horse cabriolet. It was altogether quite a study.
We mounted to the top of the coach; "all right," said the ostler, and away shot the four fine creatures, turning their small ears, and stepping together with the ease of a cat, at ten miles in the hour. The driver was dressed like a Broadway idler, and sat in his place, and held his "ribands" and his tandemwhip with a confident air of superiority, as if he were quite convinced that he and his team were beyond criticism—and so they were! I could not but smile at contrasting his silence and the speed and ease with which we went along, with the clumsy, cumbrous diligence or vetturino, and the crying, whipping, cursing and ill-appointed postillions of France and Italy. It seems odd, in a two hours' passage, to pass over such strong lines of national difference—so near, and not even a shading of one into the other.
England is described always very justly, and always in the same words: "it is all one garden." There is not a cottage between Dover and London (seventy miles), where a poet might not be happy to live. I saw a hundred little spots I coveted with quite a heart-ache. There was no poverty on the road. Everybody seemed employed, and everybody well-made and healthy. The relief from the deformity and disease of the wayside beggars of the continent was very striking.
We were at Canterbury before I had time to get accustomed to my seat. The horses had been changed twice; the coach, it seemed to me, hardly stopping while it was done; way-passengers were taken up and put down, with their baggage, without a word, and in half a minute; money was tossed to the keeper of the turnpike gate as we dashed through; the wheels went overthe smooth road without noise, and with scarce a sense of motion—it was the perfection of travel.
The new driver from Canterbury rather astonished me. He drove into London every day, and was more of a "swell." He owned the first team himself, four blood horses of great beauty, and it was a sight to see him drive them! His language was free from all slang, and very gentlemanlike and well chosen, and he discussed everything. He found out that I was an American, and said we did not think enough of the memory of Washington. Leaving his bones in the miserable brick tomb, of which he had descriptions, was not, in his opinion, worthy of a country like mine. He went on to criticise Julia Grisi (the new singer just then setting London on fire), hummed airs from "Il Pirati," to show her manner; sang an English song like Braham; gave a decayed Count, who sat on the box, some very sensible advice about the management of a wild son; drew a comparison between French and Italian women (he had travelled); told us who the old Count was in very tolerable French, and preferred Edmund Kean and Fanny Kemble to all actors in the world. His taste and his philosophy, like his driving, were quite unexceptionable. He was, withal, very handsome, and had the easy and respectful manners of a well-bred person. It seemed very odd to give him a shilling at the end of the journey.
At Chatham we took up a very elegantly dressed young man, who had come down on a fishing excursion. He was in the army, and an Irishman. We had not been half an hour on the seat together, before he had discovered, by so many plain questions, that I was an American, a stranger in England, and an acquaintance of a whole regiment of his friends in Malta and Corfu. If this had been a Yankee, thought I, what a chapter itwould have made for Basil Hall or Madame Trollope! With all his inquisitiveness I liked my companion, and half accepted his offer to drive me down to Epsom the next day to the races. I know no American who would have beatenthaton a stage-coach acquaintance.
FIRST VIEW OF LONDON—THE KING'S BIRTHDAY—PROCESSION OF MAIL COACHES—REGENT STREET—LADY BLESSINGTON—THE ORIGINAL PELHAM—BULWER, THE NOVELIST—JOHN GALT—D'ISRAELI, THE AUTHOR OF VIVIAN GREY—RECOLLECTIONS OF BYRON—INFLUENCE OF AMERICAN OPINIONS ON ENGLISH LITERATURE.
London.—From the top of Shooter's Hill we got our first view of London—an indistinct, architectural mass, extending all round to the horizon, and half enveloped in a dim and lurid smoke. "That is St. Paul's!—there is Westminster Abbey!—there is the tower of London!" What directions were these to follow for the first time with the eye!
From Blackheath (seven or eight miles from the centre of London), the beautiful hedges disappeared, and it was one continued mass of buildings. The houses were amazingly small, a kind of thing that would do for an object in an imitation perspective park, but the soul of neatness pervaded them. Trelises were nailed between the little windows, roses quite overshadowed the low doors, a painted fence enclosed the hand's breadth ofgrass-plot, and very, oh,verysweet faces bent over lapfuls of work beneath the snowy and looped-up curtains. It was all home-like and amiable. There was anaffectionatenessin the mere outside of every one of them.
After crossing Waterloo Bridge, it was busy work for the eyes. The brilliant shops, the dense crowds of people, the absorbed air of every passenger, the lovely women, the cries, the flying vehicles of every description, passing with the most dangerous speed—accustomed as I am to large cities, it quite made me dizzy. We got into a "jarvey" at the coach-office, and in half an hour I was in comfortable quarters, with windows looking down St. James street, and the most agreeable leaf of my life to turn over. "Great emotions interfere little with the mechanical operations of life," however, and I dressed and dined, though it was my first hour in London.
I was sitting in the little parlor alone over a fried sole and a mutton cutlet, when the waiter came in, and pleading the crowded state of the hotel, asked my permission to spread the other side of the table for a clergyman. I have a kindly preference for the cloth, and made not the slightest objection. Enter a fat man, with top-boots and a hunting-whip, rosy as Bacchus, and excessively out of breath with mounting one flight of stairs. Beefsteak and potatoes, a pot of porter, and a bottle of sherry followed close on his heels. With a single apology for the intrusion, the reverend gentleman fell to, and we ate and drank for a while in true English silence.
"From Oxford, sir, I presume," he said at last, pushing back his plate, with an air of satisfaction.
"No, I had never the pleasure of seeing Oxford."
"R—e—ally! may I take a glass of wine with you, sir?"
We got on swimmingly. He would not believe I had never been in England till the day before, but his cordiality was no colder for that. We exchanged port and sherry, and a most amicable understanding found its way down with the wine. Our table was near the window, and a great crowd began to collect at the corner of St. James' street. It was the king's birth-day, and the people were thronging to see the nobility come in state from the royallevee. The show was less splendid than the same thing in Rome or Vienna, but it excited far more of my admiration. Gaudiness and tinsel were exchanged for plain richness and perfect fitness in the carriages and harness, while the horses were incomparably finer. My friend pointed out to me the different liveries as they turned the corner into Piccadilly, the duke of Wellington's among others. I looked hard to see His Grace; but the two pale and beautiful faces on the back seat, carried nothing like the military nose on the handles of the umbrellas.
The annual procession of mail-coaches followed, and it was hardly less brilliant. The drivers and guard in their bright red and gold uniforms, the admirable horses driven so beautifully, the neat harness, the exactness with which the room of each horse was calculated, and the small space in which he worked, and the compactness and contrivance of the coaches, formed altogether one of the most interesting spectacles I have ever seen. My friend, the clergyman, with whom I had walked out to see them pass, criticised the different teamscon amore, but in language which I did not always understand. I asked him once for an explanation; but he looked rather grave, and said something about "gammon," evidently quite sure that my ignorance of London was a mere quiz.
We walked down Piccadilly, and turned into, beyond allcomparison, the most handsome street I ever saw. The Toledo of Naples, the Corso of Rome, the Kohl-market of Vienna, the Rue de la Paix and Boulevards of Paris, have each impressed me strongly with their magnificence, but they are really nothing to Regent-street. I had merely time to get a glance at it before dark; but for breadth and convenience, for the elegance and variety of the buildings, though all of the same scale and material, and for the brilliancy and expensiveness of the shops, it seemed to me quite absurd to compare it with anything between New York and Constantinople—Broadway and the Hippodrome included.
It is the custom for the king's tradesmen to illuminate their shops on His Majesty's birth-night, and the principal streets on our return were in a blaze of light. The crowd was immense. None but the lower order seemed abroad, and I cannot describe to you the effect on my feelings on hearing my language spoken by every man, woman, and child, about me. It seemed a completely foreign country in every other respect, different from what I had imagined, different from my own and all that I had seen; and, coming to it last, it seemed to me the farthest off and strangest country of all—and yet the little sweep who went laughing through the crowd, spoke a language that I had heard attempted in vain by thousands of educated people, and that I had grown to consider next to unattainable by others, and almost useless to myself. Still, it did not make me feel at home. Everything else about me was too new. It was like some mysterious change in my own ears—a sudden power of comprehension, such as a man might feel who was cured suddenly of deafness. You can scarcely enter into my feelings till you have had the changes of French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish,Illyrian, and the mixtures and dialects of each, rung upon your hearing almost exclusively, as I have for years. I wandered about as if I were exercising some supernatural faculty in a dream.
A friend in Italy had kindly given me a letter to Lady Blessington, and with a strong curiosity to see this celebrated lady, I called on the second day after my arrival in London. It was "deep i' the afternoon," but I had not yet learned the full meaning of "town hours." "Her ladyship had not come down to breakfast." I gave the letter and my address to the powdered footman, and had scarce reached home when a note arrived inviting me to call the same evening at ten.
In a long library lined alternately with splendidly bound books and mirrors, and with a deep window of the breadth of the room, opening upon Hyde Park, I found Lady Blessington alone. The picture to my eye as the door opened was a very lovely one. A woman of remarkable beauty half buried in a fauteuil of yellow satin, reading by a magnificent lamp, suspended from the centre of the arched ceiling; sofas, couches, ottomans, and busts, arranged in rather a crowded sumptuousness through the room; enamel tables, covered with expensive and elegant trifles in every corner, and a delicate white hand relieved on the back of a book, to which the eye was attracted by the blaze of its diamond rings. As the servant mentioned my name, she rose and gave me her hand very cordially, and a gentleman entering immediately after, she presented me to her son-in-law, Count D'Orsay, the well-known Pelham of London, and certainly the most splendid specimen of a man, and a well-dressed one that I had ever seen. Tea was brought in immediately, and conversation went swimmingly on.
Her ladyship's inquiries were principally about America, of which, from long absence, I knew very little. She was extremely curious to know the degrees of reputation the present popular authors of England enjoy among us, particularly Bulwer, Galt, and D'Israeli (the author of Vivian Grey.) "If you will come to-morrow night," she said, "you will see Bulwer. I am delighted that he is popular in America. He is envied and abused by all the literary men of London, for nothing, I believe, except that he gets five hundred pounds for his books and they fifty, and knowing this, he chooses to assume a pride (some people call it puppyism), which is only the armor of a sensitive mind, afraid of a wound. He is to his friends, the most frank and gay creature in the world, and open to boyishness with those who he thinks understand and value him. He has a brother Henry, who is as clever as himself in a different vein, and is just now publishing a book on the present state of France. Bulwer's wife, you know, is one of the most beautiful women in London, and his house is the resort of both fashion and talent. He is just now hard at work on a new book, the subject of which is the last days of Pompeii. The hero is a Roman dandy, who wastes himself in luxury, till this great catastrophe rouses him and develops a character of the noblest capabilities. Is Galt much liked?"
I answered to the best of my knowledge that he was not. His life of Byron was a stab at the dead body of the noble poet, which, for one, I never could forgive, and his books were clever, but vulgar. He was evidently not a gentleman in his mind. This was the opinion I had formed in America, and I had never heard another.
"I am sorry for it," said Lady B., "for he is the dearest andbest old man in the world. I know him well. He is just on the verge of the grave, but comes to see me now and then, and if you had known how shockingly Byron treated him, you would only wonder at his sparing his memory so much."
"Nil mortuis nisi bonum," I thought would have been a better course. If he had reason to dislike him, he had better not have written since he was dead.
"Perhaps—perhaps. But Galt has been all his life miserably poor, and lived by his books. That must be his apology. Do you know the D'Israeli's in America?"
I assured her ladyship that the "Curiosities of Literature," by the father, and "Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming," by the son, were universally known.
"I am pleased at that, too, for I like them both. D'Israeli the elder, came here with his son the other night. It would have delighted you to see the old man's pride in him. He is very fond of him, and as he was going away, he patted him on the head, and said to me, "take care of him, Lady Blessington, for my sake. He is a clever lad, but he wants ballast. I am glad he has the honor to know you, for you will check him sometimes when I am away!" D'Israeli, the elder, lives in the country, about twenty miles from town, and seldom comes up to London. He is a very plain old man in his manners, as plain as his son is the reverse. D'Israeli, the younger, is quite his own character of Vivian Grey crowded with talent, but verysoignèof his curls, and a bit of a coxcomb. There is no reserve about him, however, and he is the onlyjoyousdandy I ever saw."
I asked if the account I had seen in some American paper of a literary celebration at Canandaigua, and the engraving of her ladyship's name with some others upon a rock, was not a quiz.
"Oh, by no means. I was equally flattered and amused by the whole affair. I have a great idea of taking a trip to America to see it. Then the letter, commencing 'Most charming Countess—for charming you must be since you have written the conversations of Lord Byron'—oh, it was quite delightful. I have shown it to everybody. By the way, I receive a great many letters from America, from people I never heard of, written in the most extraordinary style of compliment, apparently in perfectly good faith. I hardly know what to make of them."
I accounted for it by the perfect seclusion in which great numbers of cultivated people live in our country, who having neither intrigue, nor fashion, nor twenty other things to occupy their minds as in England, depend entirely upon books, and consider an author who has given them pleasure as a friend. America, I said, has probably more literary enthusiasts than any country in the world; and there are thousands of romantic minds in the interior of New England, who know perfectly every writer this side the water, and hold them all in affectionate veneration, scarcely conceivable by a sophisticated European. If it were not for such readers, literature would be the most thankless of vocations. I, for one, would never write another line.
"And do you think these are the people who write to me? If I could think so, I should be exceedingly happy. People in England are refined down to such heartlessness—criticism, private and public, is so interested and so cold, that it is really delightful to know there is a more generous tribunal. Indeed, I think all our authors now are beginning to write for America. We think already a great deal of your praise or censure."
I asked if her ladyship had known many Americans.
"Not in London, but a great many abroad. I was with LordBlessington in his yacht at Naples, when the American fleet was lying there, eight or ten years ago, and we were constantly on board your ships. I knew Commodore Creighton and Captain Deacon extremely well, and liked them particularly. They were with us, either on board the yacht or the frigate every evening, and I remember very well the band playing always, "God save the King," as we went up the side. Count d'Orsay here, who spoke very little English at that time, had a great passion for Yankee Doodle, and it was always played at his request."
The Count, who still speaks the language with a very slight accent, but with a choice of words that shows him to be a man of uncommon tact and elegance of mind, inquired after several of the officers, whom I have not the pleasure of knowing. He seemed to remember his visits to the frigate with great pleasure. The conversation, after running upon a variety of topics, which I could not with propriety put into a letter for the public eye, turned very naturally upon Byron. I had frequently seen the Countess Guiccioli on the Continent, and I asked Lady Blessington if she knew her.
"No. We were at Pisa when they were living together, but, though Lord Blessington had the greatest curiosity to see her, Byron would never permit it. 'She has a red head of her own,' said he, 'and don't like to show it.' Byron treated the poor creature dreadfully ill. She feared more than she loved him."
She had told me the same thing herself in Italy.
It would be impossible, of course, to make a full and fair record of a conversation of some hours. I have only noted one or two topics which I thought most likely to interest an American reader. During all this long visit, however, my eyes were very busy infinishing for memory, a portrait of the celebrated and beautiful woman before me.
The portrait of Lady Blessington in the Book of Beauty is not unlike her, but it is still an unfavorable likeness. A picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence hung opposite me, taken, perhaps, at the age of eighteen, which is more like her, and as captivating a representation of a just matured woman, full of loveliness and love, the kind of creature with whose divine sweetness the gazer's heart aches, as ever was drawn in the painter's most inspired hour. The original is now (she confessed it very frankly) forty. She looks something on the sunny side of thirty. Her person is full, but preserves all the fineness of an admirable shape; her foot is not crowded in a satin slipper, for which a Cinderella might long be looked for in vain, and her complexion (an unusually fair skin, with very dark hair and eyebrows), is of even a girlish delicacy and freshness. Her dress of blue satin (if I am describing her like a milliner, it is because I have here and there a reader of the Mirror in my eye who will be amused by it), was cut low and folded across her bosom, in a way to show to advantage the round and sculpture-like curve and whiteness of a pair of exquisite shoulders, while her hair dressed close to her head, and parted simply on her forehead with a richferroniereof turquoise, enveloped in clear outline a head with which it would be difficult to find a fault. Her features are regular, and her mouth, the most expressive of them, has a ripe fulness and freedom of play, peculiar to the Irish physiognomy, and expressive of the most unsuspicious good humor. Add to all this a voice merry and sad by turns, but always musical, and manners of the most unpretending elegance, yet even more remarkable for their winning kindness, and you have the most prominent traits of one of the most lovely and fascinatingwomen I have ever seen. Remembering her talents and her rank, and the unenvying admiration she receives from the world of fashion and genius, it would be difficult to reconcile her lot to the "doctrine of compensation."
There is one remark I may as well make here, with regard to the personal descriptions and anecdotes with which my letters from England will of course be filled. It is quite a different thing from publishing such letters in London. America is much farther off from England than England from America. You in New York read the periodicals of this country, and know everything that is done or written here, as if you lived within the sound of Bow-bell. The English, however, just know of our existence, and if they get a general idea twice a year of our progress in politics, they are comparatively well informed. Our periodical literature is never even heard of. Of course there can be no offence to the individuals themselves in anything which a visitor could write, calculated to convey an idea of the person or manners of distinguished people to the American public. I mention it lest, at first thought, I might seem to have abused the hospitality or frankness of those on whom letters of introduction have given me claims for civility.