Part 9

To hear birds it is however indispensably necessary that there should be high trees; and except in these parts of Italy, and those about Genoa and Sienna, no timber of any good growth can I find. The _roccolo_ too, and other methods taken to catch small birds, which many delight in eating, and more in taking, lessen the quantity of natural music vexatiously enough; while gaudy insects ill supply their place, and sharpen their stings at pleasure when deprived of their greatest enemies. We are here less tormented than usual however, while the prospects are varied so that every look produces a new and beautiful landscape.

Ancona is a town perfectly agreeable to strangers, from the good humour with which every nation is received, and every religion patiently endured: something of all this the scholars say may be found in the derivation of its name, which being Greek I have nothing to do with. Pliny tells us its original, and says;

A Siculis condita est colonia Ancona[24].

That Dalmatia should be opposite, yet to us at present inaccessible, we all regret; I drank sea water however, so did not leave untasted the waves which Lucan speaks of:

Illic Dalmaticis obnoxia fluctibus Ancon[25].

The fine turbots did not any of them fall to our share; but here are good fish, and, to say true, every thing eatable as much in perfection as possible: I could never since I arrived at Turin find real cause of complaint--_serious_ complaint I mean except at that savage-looking place called Radicofani; and some other petty town in Tuscany, near Sienna, where I eat too many eggs and grapes, because there was nothing else.

Nice accommodations must not be looked for, and need not be regretted, where so much amusement during the day gives one good disposition to sleep sound at night: the worst is, men and women, servants and masters, must often mess together; but if one frets about such things, it is better stay at home. The Italians like travelling in England no better than the English do travelling in Italy; whilst an exorbitant expence is incurred by the journey, not well repaid to them by the waiters white chitterlins, tambour waistcoats, and independent “_No, Sir_,” echoed round a well-furnished inn or tavern; which puts them but in the place of Socrates at the fair, who cried out--“_How many things have these people gathered together that I do not want!_”--A noble Florentine complained exceedingly to me once of the English hotels, where he was made to help pay for those good gold watches the fellows who attended him drew from their pockets; so he set up his quarters comically enough at the waggoners full Moon upon the old bridge at Bath, to be quit of the _schiavitù_, as he called it, of living like a gentleman, “where,” says he, “I am not known to be one.” The truth is, a continental nobleman can have little heart of a country, where, to be treated as a man of fashion, he must absolutely behave as such: his rank is ascertained at _home_, and people’s deportment to him regulated by long-established customs; nor can it be supposed flattering to its prejudices, to feel himself jostled in the street, or driven against upon the road by a rich trader, while he is contriving the cheapest method of going to look over his manufactory. Wealth diffused makes all men comfortable, and leaves no man splendid; gives every body two dishes, but nobody two hundred. Objects of show are therefore unfrequent in England, and a foreigner who travels through our country in search of positive sights, will, after much money spent, go home but poorly entertained:--“There is neither _quaresima_,” will he say, “nor _carnovale_ in _any_ sense of the word, among those insipid islanders.”--For he who does not love our government, and taste our manners which result from it, can never be delighted in England; while the inhabitants of our nation may always be amused in theirs, without any esteem of it at all.

I know not how Ancona produced all these tedious reflexions: it is a trading place, and a sea-port town. Men working in chains upon the new mole did not please me though, and their insensibility shocks one:--“Give a poor thief something, master,” says one impudent fellow;--“_Son stato ladro padrone_[26];”--with a grin. That such people should be corrupt or coarse however is no wonder; what surprised me most was, that when one of our company spoke of his conduct to a man of the town--“Why, what would you have, Sir?”--replies the person applied to--“when the poor creature is _castigato_, it is enough sure, no need to make him be melancholy too:”--and added with true Italian good-nature,--“_Siamo tutti peccatori_[27].”

The mole is a prodigious work indeed; a warm friend to Venice can scarce wish its speedy conclusion, as the useful and necessary parts of the project are already nearly accomplished, and it would be pity to seduce more commerce away from Venice, which has already lost so much.

The triumphal arch of Trajan, described by every traveller, and justly admired by all; white as his virtue, shining as his character, and durable as his fame; fixed our eyes a long time in admiration, and made us, while we examined the beautiful structure, recollect his incomparable qualities to whom it was dedicated,--“_Inter Cæsares optimus_[28],”--says one of their old writers: nor could either column or arch be so sure a proof that he was thought so, as the wish breathed at the inauguration of succeeding emperors; _Sis tu felicior Augusto, melior Trajano_[29].

If these Ancona men were not proud of themselves, one should hate them; descended as they are from those Syracusans liberated by Timoleon, who freed them first from the tyranny of Dionysius; fostered afterwards by Trajan, as peculiarly worth _his_ notice; and patronised in succeeding times by the good Corsini Pope, Clement XII., whose care for them appears by the useful _lazaretto_ he built, “to save,” said he, “our best subjects, our subjects of Ancona.”

But we are hastening forward as fast as our broken carriage will permit, to Padua, where we shall leave it: thither to arrive, we pass through Senegallia, built by the Gauls, and still retaining the Gaulish name, but now little remarkable. What struck me most was my own crossing the _Rubicon_ in my way back to England, and our comfortable return to

BOLOGNA,

After admiring the high forehead and innocent simper of Baroccio’s beauties at Pesaro, where the best European silk now comes from; against which the produce of Rimini vainly endeavours to vie. That town was once an Umbrian colony I think, and there is a fine memorial there where _Diocletianus reposuit_, resolving perhaps to end where Julius Cæsar had begun; he died at Salo however in Dalmatia,

Quâ maris Adriaci longas ferit unda Salones.

Ravenna l’Antica tired more than it pleased us; _Fano_ is a populous pretty little town; but I know no reason why it was originally dedicated to Fortune. Truth is, we are weary of these sacred _fanes_, and long to see once more our amiable friends at Venice and at Milan.

I have missed San Marino at last, but receive kind assurances every day that the loss is small; being now little more than a convent seated on a hill, which affords refuge for robbers; and that the present Pope meditates its destruction as a nuisance to the neighbouring towns. There never was any coin struck there it seems; I thought there had: but the train of reflections excited by even a distant view of it are curious enough as opposed to its protectress Rome; which, founded by robbers and banditti, ends in being the seat of sanctity and priestly government; while San Marino, begun by a hermit, and secluded from all other states for the mere purposes of purer devotion, finishes by its necessary removal as a repository for assassins, and a refuge for those who break the laws with violence.

Such is this variable and capricious world! and so dies away my desire to examine this political curiosity; the extinction of which I am half sorry for. Privation is still a melancholy idea, and were one to hear that the race of wasps were extirpated, it would grieve one.

Bologna affords one time for every meditation. No inn upon the Bath road is more elegant than the Pellegrino; and we regretted our broken equipage the less as it drew us slowly through so sweet a country. The medlar blossoms adorn the hedges with their blanche roses; the hawthorn bushes, later here than with us, perfume them; and the roads, little travelled, do not torment one with the dust as in England, where it not only offends the traveller, but takes away some beauty from the country, by giving a brown or whitish look to the shrubs and trees. We shall repose here very comfortably, or at least change our mode of being busy, which refreshes one perhaps more than positive idleness. “But life,” says some writer, “is a continual fever;” and sure ours has been completely so for these two years. A charming lady of our country, for whom I have the highest esteem, protests she shall be happy to get back to London if it is only for the relief of sitting still, and resolving to see no more sights: exchanging fasto, fiera, and frittura, for a muffin, a mop, and a morning newspaper: three things equally unknown in Italy, as the other three among us.

With regard to pictures however, _l’Appetit vient en mangeant_[30], as I experienced completely when traversing the Zampieri palace with eagerness that increased at every step. I once more half-worshipped the works of divine Guercino. Nothing shall prevent my going to his birth-place at Cento, whether in our way or out of it.

We ran about the Specola again, and received a thousand polite attentions from the gentleman who shewed it. The piece of native gold here is much finer than that we saw among the treasures of Loretto, which being _du nouveau continent_ is always inferior. “But every thing does,” as Mons. de Buffon observes, “degenerate in the West except birds;” and the Brazilian plumage seems to surpass all possibility of further glow. The continent however shews us no specimens preserved half as well as those of Sir Ashton Lever. The marine rarities here at Bologna are very capital; but I saw them to advantage now, in company of Mr. Chappelow. We find this city at once hot, and loud, and pious; less empty of occupation though than last time; for here is a new Gonfaloniere chosen in to-day, and the drums beat, and the trumpets sound, and some donations are distributed about, much in the proportions Tom Davis describes Garrick’s to have been; small pieces of money, and large pieces of cake, with quantities of meat, bread, and birds, borne about the town in procession, to make display of _his_ bounty, who gives all this away at the time he is elected into office. Kids dressed with ribbon therefore, alive and carried on men’s shoulders showily adorned, lambs washed white as snow, and pretty red and white calves hanging their simple faces out of fine gilt baskets, paraded the streets all day. What struck us most however was an ox, handsomer and of a more silvery coat than I thought an ox’s hide capable of being brought to; his horns gold, and a garland of roses between them. This was beautiful; reminded one of all one had ever read and heard of victims going to sacrifice; and put in our heads again the old stories of Hercules, Eurystheus, &c.

At Bologna though, every thing puts people in mind of their _prayers_; so a few good women nothing doubting but when shows were going forward, religious meanings must be near at hand, dropt down on their knees in the street, and recommended themselves, or their dead friends perhaps, to heaven, with fervent and innocent earnestness, while the cattle passed along. An English clergyman in our company, hurt and grieved, yet half-disposed to laugh, cried, _What are these dear creatures muttering about now for, as if their salvation depended upon it?_--It was absurd enough to be sure; but in order to check our tittering disposition, I recollected to him, that I had once heard an ignorant woman in Hertfordshire repeat the absolution herself after the priest, with equally ill-placed fervour: for which he reprimanded her, and afterwards explained to her the grossness of the impropriety. When we have added to our stock of connoisseurship the graceful Sampson, drinking after his victory, by Guido, in this town, we shall quit it, and proceed through empty and deserted Ferrara to

PADUA.

We set out then for Ferrara, in our kind friend’s post-chaise; that is, my maid and I did: our good-natured gentlemen creeping slowly after in the broken coach; and how ended this project for insuring safety? Why in the chaise losing its hind wheel, and in our return to the carriage we had quitted. But it is for ever so, I think;--the sick folks live always, and the well ones die.

We took turn therefore and left our friends; but could not forbear a visit to Cento, where I wished much to see what Guercino had done for the ornament of his native place, and was amply repaid my pains by the sight of one picture, which, for its immediate power over the mind, at least over mine, has no equal even in Palazzo Zampieri. It is a scene highly touching. The appearance of our Saviour to his Mother after his resurrection. The dignity, the divinity of the Christ! the terror-checked transport visible in the parent Saint, whose expressive countenance and pathetic attitude display fervent adoration, maternal tenderness, and meek humility at once! How often have I said, _this_ is the finest picture we have seen yet! when looking on the Caraccis and their school. I will say no more, the painter’s art can go no further than _this_. My partial preference of Guercino to any thing and to every thing, shall not however bribe me to suppress my grief and indignation at his strange method of commemorating his own name over the altar where he was baptised, which shocks every protestant traveller by its profaneness, while the Romanists admire his invention, and applaud his piety. Guercino then, so called because he was the _little one-eyed man_, had a fancy to represent his _real_ appellation of _John Francis Barbieri_ in the church; and took this mode as an ingenious one, painting St. John upon the right hand, St. Francis on the left, as two large full-length figures, and God the Father in the middle with a _long beard_ for _Barbieri_.

This is a mixture of Abel Drugger’s contrivance in the Alchymist, and the infantine folly of three babies I once knew in England, children of a nobleman, who were severely whipt by their governess for playing at Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, sitting upon three chairs, with solemn countenances, in order to impress their tender fancies with a representation of what the good governess innocently and laudably had told them about the mysterious and incomprehensible Trinity. Let me add, that the eldest of these babies was not six years old, and the youngest but four, when they were caught in the blasphemous folly. Our Italians seem to be got very little further at forty.

Padua appears cleaner and prettier than it did last year; but so many things contribute to make me love it better, that it is no wonder one is prejudiced in its favour. It was _so_ difficult to get safe hither, the roads being very bad, the people were so kind when we were here last, and the very inn-keeper and his assistants seemed so obligingly rejoiced to see us again, that I felt my heart quite expand at entering the Aquila d’oro, where we were soon rejoined by Mr. and Mrs. Greatheed, with whom we had parted in the Romagna, when they took the Perugia road, instead of returning by Bologna, a place they had seen before. Had we come three days sooner we might have seen the transit of Mercury from Abate Toaldo’s observatory; but our own transit took up all our thoughts, and it is a very great mercy that we are come safe at last. I think it was as much as four bulls and six horses could do to drag us into Rovigo.

Bologna la Grassa Ma Padua la passa[31],

say the Venetians: and round this town where the heat is indeed prodigious, they get the best vipers for the Venice treacle, I am told. Here are quantities of curious plants to be seen blooming now in the botanical garden, and our kind professor told me I need not languish so for horse chesnuts; for they would all be in flower as we returned up the Brenta from Venice. “They are all in flower _now_, Sir,” said I, “in my own grounds, eight miles from London: but our English oaks are not half so forward as yours are.” He recollected the aphorism so much a favourite with our country folks; how a British heart ought not to dilate with the early sunshine of prosperity, or droop at the first blasts of adverse fortune, as the British oak refuses to put out his leaves at summer’s early felicitations, and scorns to drop them at winter’s first rude shake.

Well! I have once more walked over St. Antony’s church, and examined the bas-reliefs that adorn his shrine; but their effect has ceased. Whoever has spent some time in the Musæum Clementinum is callous to the wonders which sculpture can perform.

Has one not read in Ulloa’s travels, of a resting-place on the side of a Cordillera among the Andes, where the ascending traveller is regularly observed to put on additional clothing, while he who comes down the mountain feels so hot that he throws his clothes away? So it is with the shrine of St. Antonio di Padua, and one’s passion for the sculpture that adorns it: while Santa Giustina’s church regains her power over the mind, a power never missed by simplicity, while great effort has often small effect. But we are hastening to Venice, and shall leave our cares and our coach behind; superfluous as they both are, in a city which admits of neither.

VENICE.

Our watery journey was indeed delightful; friendship, music, poetry combined their charms with those of nature to enchant us, and make one think the passage was too short, though longing to embrace our much-regretted sweet companions. The scent of odoriferous plants, the smoothness of the water, the sweetness of the piano forte, which allured to its banks many of the gay inhabitants, who glad of a change in the variety of their amusements, came down to the shores and danced or sang, as we went by, seized every sense at once, and filled me with unaffected pleasure. I longed to see the weeping willow planted along this elegant stream; but the Venetians like to see nothing weep I fancy: yet the Salix Babylonica would have a fine effect here, and spread to a prodigious growth, like those on which the captive Israelites once hung their harps, on the banks of the river Euphrates. “Of all Europe however,” Millar says, “it prospers best in pensive Britain;”

Nor prov’d the bliss that lulls Italia’s breast, When red-brow’d evening calmly sinks to rest.

These lines, quoted from Merry’s Paulina, remind me of the pleasure we enjoyed in reading that glorious poem as we floated down the Brenta. I have certainly read no poetry since; that would be like looking at Sansovino’s sculpture, after having seen the Apollo, the Venus, and the Flora Farnese. The view of Venice only made us shut the book. Lovely Venice! wise in her councils, grave and steady in her just authority, splendid in her palaces, gay in her casinos, and charming in all.

Fama tra noi Roma pomposa e santa, Venezia ricca, saggia, e signorile[32],

says the Italian who celebrates all their towns by adding a well-adapted epithet to each. But Sannazarius, who experienced in return for it more than even British bounty would have bestowed, exalts it in his famous epigram to a decided preference even over Rome itself.

Viderat Adriacis Venetam Neptunus in undis Stare urbem, et toti ponere jura Mari; Nunc mihi Tarpeias quantum vis Jupiter, arces Objice, et illa tui mœnia Martis ait Sit Pelago Tibrim præfers, urbem aspice utramque Illam homines dices, hanc posuisse Deos.

And now really, if the subject did not bribe me to admiration of them, I should have much ado to think these six lines better worth fifty pounds a piece, the price Sannazarius was paid for them, than many lines I have read; as mythological allusions are always cheaply obtained, and this can hardly be said to run with any peculiar happiness: for if Mars built the Wall, and Jupiter founded the Capitol, how could Neptune justly challenge this last among all people, to look on both, and say, That men built Rome, but the Gods founded Venice. Had he said, that after all their pains, _this_ was the manner in which those two cities would in future times strike all impartial observers, it would have been _enough_; and it would have been _true_, and when fiction has done its best,

Le vray seul est aimable[33].

Here, however, is the best translation or imitation I can make, of the best praise ever given to this justly celebrated city. Baron Cronthal, the learned librarian of Brera, gave me, when at Milan, the epigram, and persuaded me to try at a translation, but I never could succeed till I had been upon the grand canal.

When Neptune first with pleasure and surprise, Proud from her subject sea saw Venice rise; Let Jove, said he, vaunt his fam’d walls no more, Tarpeia’s rock, or Tyber’s fane-full shore; While human hands those glittering fabrics frame, By touch celestial beauteous Venice came.

It is a sweet place sure enough, and the caged[34] nightingales who, when men are most silent, answer each other across the canals, increase the enchantments of Venetian moonlight; while the full gondolas skimming over the tide with a lanthorn in their stern, like glow-worms of a dark evening, dashing the cool wave too as they glide along, leave no moments unmarked by peculiarity of pleasure. The Doge’s wedding has however been less brilliant this year; his galleys have been sent to fight the Turks and Corsairs, and the splendor at home of course suffers some temporary diminution; but the corso of boats in the evening must be for ever charming, and the musical parties upon the water delightful. We passed this morning in Pinelli’s library, a collection so valuable from the frequence of old editions, particularly the old fourteen hundreds as we call them, that it is supposed they will be purchased by some crowned head; and here are specimens of Aldus’s printing too, very curious; but there are too many curiosities,

I’m strangled with the waste fertility,