Chapter 11

This magnificent edifice was designed and built by the Emperor Adrian, who piqued himself on his skill in architecture, and carried his jealousy of other artists so far, as to banish Apollodorus, who had designed the Forum of Trajan. When he had finished the Temple of Venus and Rome, he sent to Apollodorus a plan of his stupendous structure, challenging him to find a single fault in it. The architect severely criticised some trifling oversights; and the Emperor, conscious of the justice of his criticisms, and unable to remedy the defects, ordered him to be strangled. Such was the fate of Apollodorus, whose misfortune it was to have an Emperor for his rival.

They are now clearing the steps which lead to this temple, from which it appears that the length of the portico in front was three hundred feet, and of the side five hundred feet.

While I was among these ruins, I was struck by a little limpid fountain, which gushed from the crumbling wall and lost itself among the fragments of the marble pavement. All looked dreary and desolate; and that part of the ruin which from its situation must have been the _sanctum sanctorum_, the shrine of the divinity of the place, is now a receptacle of filth and every conceivable abomination.

I walked on to the ruins now called the Basilica of Constantine, once the Temple of Peace. This edifice was in a bad style, and constructed at a period when the arts were at a low ebb: yet the ruins are vast and magnificent. The exact direction of the Via Sacra has long been a subject of vehement dispute. They have now laid open a part of it which ran in front of the Basilica: the pavement is about twelve feet below the present pavement of Rome, and the soil turned up in their excavations is formed entirely of crumbled brickwork and mortar, and fragments of marble, porphyry, and granite. I returned by the Forum and the Capitol, through the Forums of Nerva and Trajan, and so over the Monte Cavallo, home.

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23.--Last night we had a numerous party, and Signor P. and his daughter came to sing. _She_ is a private singer of great talent, and came attended by her lover or her _fiancé_; who, according to Italian custom, attends his mistress every where during the few weeks which precede their marriage. He is a young artist, a favourite pupil of Camuccini, and of very quiet, unobtrusive manners. La P. has the misfortune to be plain; her features are irregular, her complexion of a sickly paleness, and though her eyes are large and dark, they appeared totally devoid of lustre and expression. Her plainness, the bad taste of her dress, her awkward figure, and her timid and embarrassed deportment, all furnished matter of amusement and observation to some young people, (English of course,) whose propensities for _quizzing_ exceeded their good breeding and good nature. Though La P. does not understand a word of either French or English, I thought she could not mistake the significant looks and whispers of which she was the object, and I was in pain for her, and for her modest lover. I drew my chair to the piano, and tried to divert her attention by keeping her in conversation, but I could get no farther than a few questions which were answered in monosyllables. At length she sang--and sang divinely: I found the pale automaton had a soul as well as a voice. After giving us, with faultless execution, as well as great expression, some of Rossini's finest songs, she sung the beautiful and difficult cavatina in Otello, "_Assisa al piè d'un Salice_," with the most enchanting style and pathos, and then stood as unmoved as a statue while the company applauded loud and long. A moment afterwards, as she stooped to take up a music book, her lover, who had edged himself by degrees from the door to the piano, bent his head too, and murmured in a low voice, but with the most passionate accent, "O brava, brava cara!" She replied only by a look--but it was such a look! I never saw a human countenance so entirely, so instantaneously changed in character: the vacant eyes kindled and beamed with tenderness: the pale cheek glowed, and a bright smile playing round her mouth, just parted her lips sufficiently to discover a set of teeth like pearls. I could have called her at that moment beautiful; but the change was as transient as sudden--it passed like a gleam of light over her face and vanished, and by the time the book was placed on the desk, she looked as plain, as stupid, and as statue-like as ever. I was the only person who had witnessed this little by-scene; and it gave me pleasant thoughts and interest for the rest of the evening.

Another trait of character occurred afterwards, which amused me, but in a very different style. Our new Danish friend, the Baron B----, told us he had once been present at the decapitation of nine men, having first fortified himself with a large goblet of brandy. After describing the scene in all its horrible details, and assuring us in his bad German French that it was "_une chose bien mauvaise à voir_," I could not help asking him with a shudder, how he felt afterwards; whether it was not weeks or months before the impressions of horror left his mind? He answered with smiling naïveté and taking a pinch of snuff, "_Ma foi! madame, je n'ai pas pu manger de la viande toute cette journée-là?_"

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27.--We drove to the Palazzo Spada, to see the famous Spada Pompey, said to be the very statue at the base of which Cæsar fell. I was pleased to find, contrary to my expectations, that this statue has great intrinsic merit, besides its celebrity, to recommend it. The extremities of the limbs have a certain clumsiness which may perhaps be a feature of resemblance, and not a fault of the sculptor; but the attitude is noble, and the likeness of the head to the undisputed bust of Pompey in the Florentine gallery, struck me immediately. The Palazza Spada, with its splendid architecture, dirt, discomfort, and dilapidation, is a fair specimen of the Roman palaces in general. It contains a corridor, which from an architectural deception appears much longer than it really is. I hate tricks--in architecture especially. We afterwards visited the Pantheon, the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, (an odd combination of names,) and concluded the morning at Canova's. It is one of the pleasures of Rome to lounge in the studj of the best sculptors; and it is at Rome only that sculpture seems to flourish as in its native soil. Rome is truly the _city of the soul_, the home of art and artists. With the divine models of the Vatican ever before their eyes, these inspiring skies above their heads, and the quarries of marble at a convenient distance--it is here only they can conceive and execute those works which are formed from the _beau-idéal_; but it is not here they meet with patronage: the most beautiful things I have seen at the various studj have all been executed for English, German, and Russian noblemen. The names I heard most frequently were those of the Dukes of Bedford and Devonshire, Prince Esterhazy, and the King of England.

Canova has been accused of a want of simplicity, and of giving a too voluptuous expression to some of his figures: with all my admiration of his genius, I confess the censure just. It is particularly observable in the Clori svegliata (the Nymph awakened by Love), the Cupid and Psyche, for Prince Yousouppoff, the Endymion, the Graces, and some others.

In some of Thorwaldson's works there is exquisite grace, simplicity, and expression: the Shepherd Boy, the Adonis, the Jason, and the Hebe, have a great deal of antique spirit. I did not like the colossal Christ which the sculptor has just finished in clay: it is a proof that bulk alone does not constitute sublimity: it is deficient in dignity, or rather in _divinity_.

At Rodolf Schadow's, I was most pleased by the Cupid and the Filatrice. His Cupid is certainly the most beautiful Cupid I ever saw, superior, I think, both to Canova's and to Thorwaldson's. The Filatrice, though so exquisitely natural and graceful, a little disappointed me; I had heard much of it, and had formed in my own imagination an idea different and superior to what I saw. This beautiful figure has repose, simplicity, nature, and grace, but I felt a _want_--the want of some internal sentiment: for instance, if, instead of watching the rotation of her spindle with such industrious attention, the Filatrice had looked careless, or absent, or pensive, or disconsolate, (like Faust's Margaret at her spinning-wheel,) she would have been more interesting--but not perhaps what the sculptor intended to represent.

Schadow is ill, but we were admitted by his order into his private study; we saw there the Bacchante, which he has just finished in clay, and which is to emulate or rival Canova's Dansatrice. He has been at work upon a small but beautiful figure of a piping Shepherd-boy, which is just made out: beside it lay Virgil's Eclogues, and his spectacles were between the leaves.[J]

Almost every thing I saw at Max Laboureur's struck me as vapid and finikin. There were some pretty groups, but nothing to tempt me to visit it again.

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30.--We spent the whole morning at the Villa Albani, where there is a superb collection of antique marbles, most of them brought from the Villa of Adrian at Tivoli. To note down even a few of the objects which pleased me would be an endless task. I think the busts interested me most. There is a basso-relievo of Antinous--the beautiful head declined in his usual pensive attitude: it is the most finished and faultless piece of sculpture in relievo I ever saw; and as perfect and as polished as if it came from the chisel yesterday. There is another basso-relievo of Marcus Aurelius, and Faustina, equal to the last in execution, but not in interest.

We found Rogers in the gardens: the old poet was sunning himself--walking up and down a beautiful marble portico, lined with works of art, with his note-book in his hand. I am told he is now writing a poem of which Italy is the subject; and here, with all the Campagna di Roma spread out before him--above him, the sunshine and the cloudless skies--and all around him, the remains of antiquity in a thousand elegant, or venerable, or fanciful forms: he could not have chosen a more genial spot for inspiration. Though we disturbed his poetical reveries rather abruptly, he met us with his usual amiable courtesy, and conversed most delightfully. I never knew him more pleasant, and never saw him so animated.

Our departure from Rome has been postponed from day to day in consequence of a _trifling_ accident. An Austrian colonel was taken by the banditti near Fondi, and carried up into the mountains: ten thousand scudi were demanded for his ransom; and for many days past, the whole city has been in a state of agitation and suspense about his ultimate fate. The Austrians, roused by the insult, sent a large body of troops (some say three thousand men) against about one hundred and fifty robbers, threatening to exterminate them. They were pursued so closely, that after dragging their unfortunate captive over the mountains from one fastness to another, till he was nearly dead from exhaustion and ill-treatment, they either abandoned or surrendered him without terms. The troops immediately marched back to Naples, and the matter rests here: I cannot learn that any thing farther will be done. The robbers being at present panic-struck by such unusual energy and activity, and driven from their accustomed haunts, by these valorous champions of good order and good policy, it is considered that the road is now more open and safe than it has been for some time, and if nothing new happens to alarm us, we set off on Friday next.

I visited to-day the baths of Dioclesian, and the noble church which Michel Angelo has constructed upon, and out of, their gigantic ruins. It has all that grand simplicity, that _entireness_ which characterizes his works: it contains, too, some admirable pictures. On leaving the church, I saw on each side of the door, the monuments of Salvator Rosa and Carlo Maratti--what a contrast do they exhibit in their genius, in their works, in their characters, in their countenances, in their lives! Near this church (the Santa Maria dei Angeli) is the superb fountain of the Acqua Felice, the first view of which rather disappointed me. I had been told that it represented Moses striking the rock,--a magnificent idea for a fountain! but the execution falls short of the conception. The water, instead of gushing from the rock, is poured out from the mouths of two prodigious lions of basalt, brought, I believe, from Upper Egypt: they seem misplaced here. A little beyond the Ponta Pia is the Campo Scelerato, where the Vestals were interred alive. We afterwards drove to the Santi Apostoli to see the tomb of the excellent Ganganelli, by Canova. Then to Sant' Ignazio, to see the famous ceiling painted in perspective by the jesuit Pozzo. The effect is certainly marvellous, making the interior appear to the eye, at least twice the height it really is; but though the illusion pleased me as a work of art, I thought the trickery unnecessary and misplaced. At the magnificent church of the Gesuiti (where there are two entire columns of giallo antico) I saw a list of relics for which the church is celebrated, and whose efficacy and sanctity were vouched for by a very respectable catalogue of miracles. Among these relics there are a few worth mentioning for their oddity, viz. one of the Virgin's _shifts_, three of her hairs, and the skirt of Joseph's coat.

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31.--We spent nearly the whole day in the gallery of the Vatican, and in the Pauline and Sistine chapels.

_February 1st, at Valletri._--I left Rome this morning exceedingly depressed: Madame de Staël may well call travelling _un triste plaisir_. My depression did not arise from the feeling that I left behind me any thing or any person to regret, but from mixed and melancholy emotions, and partly perhaps from that weakness which makes my hand tremble while I write--which has bound down my mind, and all its best powers, and all its faculties of enjoyment, to a languid passiveness, making me feel at every moment, I am not what I was, or ought to be, or might have been.

We arrived, after a short and most delightful journey by Albano, the Lake Nemi, Gensao, etc. at Velletri, the birth-place of that wretch Octavius, and famous for its wine. The day has been as soft and as sunny as a May-day in England, and the country, through which we travelled but too rapidly, beyond description lovely. The blue Mediterranean spread far to the west, and on the right we had the snowy mountains, with their wild fantastic peaks "rushing on the sky." I felt it all in my heart with a mixture of sadness and delight which I cannot express.

This land was made by nature a paradise: it seems to want no charm, "unborrowed from the eye,"--but how has memory sanctified, history illustrated, and poetry illumined the scenes around us; where every rivulet had its attendant nymph, where every wood was protected by its sylvan divinity; where every tower has its tale of heroism, and "not a mountain lifts its head unsung;" and though the faith, the glory, and the power of the antique time be passed away--still

A spirit hangs, Beautiful region! o'er thy towns and farms, Statues and temples, and memorial tombs.

I can allow that one-half, at least, of the beauty and interest we see, lies in our own souls; that it is our own enthusiasm which sheds this mantle of light over all we behold: but, as colours do not exist in the objects themselves, but in the rays which paint them--so beauty is not less real, is not less BEAUTY, because it exists in the medium through which we view certain objects, rather than in those objects themselves. I have met persons who think they display a vast deal of common sense, and very uncommon strength of mind, in rising superior to all prejudices of education and illusions of romance--to whom enthusiasm is only another name for affectation--who, where the cultivated and the contemplative mind finds ample matter to excite feeling and reflection, give themselves airs of fashionable _nonchalance_, or flippant scorn--to whom the crumbling ruin is so much brick and mortar, no more--to whom the tomb of the Horatii and Curiatii is a _stack of chimneys_, the Pantheon _an old oven_, and the Fountain of Egeria a _pig-sty_. Are such persons aware that in all this there is an affectation, a thousand times more gross and contemptible, than that affectation (too frequent perhaps) which they design to ridicule?

"Whose mind is but the mind of his own eyes, He is a slave--the meanest we can meet."

2.--Our journey to-day has been long, but delightfully diversified, and abounding in classical beauty and interest. I scarce know what to say, now that I open my little book to record my own sensations: they are so many, so various, so painful, so delicious--my senses and my imagination have been so enchanted, my heart so very heavy--where shall I begin?

In some of the scenes of to-day--at Terracina, particularly, there was beauty beyond what I ever beheld or imagined: the scenery of Switzerland is of a different character, and on a different scale: it is beyond comparison grander, more gigantic, more overpowering, but it is not so poetical. Switzerland is not Italy--is not the enchanting _south_. This soft balmy air, these myrtles, orange-groves, palm-trees; these cloudless skies, this bright blue sea, and sunny hills, all breathe of an enchanted land; "a land of Faery."

Between Velletri and Terracina the road runs in one undeviating line through the Pontine Marshes. The accounts we have of the baneful effects of the malaria here, and the absolute solitude, (not a human face or a human habitation intervening from one post-house to another,) invest the wild landscape with a frightful and peculiar character of desolation. As for the mere exterior of the country, I have seen more wretched and sterile looking spots, (in France, for instance,) but none that so affected the imagination and the spirits. On leaving the Pontine Marshes, we came almost suddenly upon the sunny and luxuriant region near Terracina: here was the ancient city of Anxur; and the gothic ruins of the castle of Theodoric, which frown on the steep above, are contrasted with the delicate and Grecian proportions of the temple below. All the country round is famed in classic and poetic lore. The Promontory (once poetically the _island_) of Circe is still the Monte Circello: here was the region of the Lestrygons, and the scene of part of the Æneid and Odyssey; and Corinne has superadded romantic and charming associations quite as delightful, and quite as _true_.

Antiquarians, who, like politicians, "seem to see the things that are not," have placed all along this road, the sites of many a celebrated town and fane--"making hue and cry after many a city which has run away, and by certain marks and tokens pursuing to find it:" as some old author says so quaintly. At every hundred yards, fragments of masonry are seen by the road-side; portions of brickwork, sometimes traced at the bottom of a dry ditch, or incorporated into a fence; sometimes peeping above the myrtle bushes on the wild hills, where the green lizards lie basking and glittering on them in thousands, and the stupid ferocious buffalo, with his fierce red eyes, rubs his hide and glares upon us as we pass. No--not the grandest monuments of Rome--not the Coliseum itself, in all its decaying magnificence, ever inspired me with such profound emotions as did those nameless, shapeless vestiges of the dwellings of man, starting up like memorial tombs in the midst of this savage but luxuriant wilderness. Of the beautiful cities which rose along this lovely coast, the colonies of elegant and polished Greece--one after another swallowed up by the "insatiate maw" of ancient Rome, nothing remains--their sites, their very names have passed away and perished. We might as well hunt after a forgotten dream.

Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride, They had no POET, and they died! In vain they toil'd, in vain they bled, They had no POET--and are dead.

I write this a Gaëta--a name famous in the poetical, the classical, the military story of Italy, from the day of Æneas, from whom it received its appellation, down to the annals of the late war. On the site of our inn, (the Albergo di Cicerone,) stood Cicero's Formian Villa; and in an adjoining grove he was murdered in his litter by the satellites of the Triumviri, as he attempted to escape. I stood to-night on a little terrace, which hung over an orange grove, and enjoyed a scene which I would paint, if words were forms, and hues, and sounds--not else. A beautiful bay, enclosed by the Mola di Gaëta, on one side, and the Promontory of Misenum on the other: the sky studded with stars and reflected in a sea as blue as itself--and so glassy and unruffled, it seemed to slumber in the moonlight: now and then the murmur of a wave, not hoarsely breaking on rock and shingles, but kissing the turfy shore, where oranges and myrtles grew down to the water edge. These, and the remembrances connected with all, and a mind to think, and a heart to feel, and thoughts both of pain and pleasure mingling to render the effect more deep and touching.--Why should I write this? O surely I need not fear that I shall _forget_!

LINES WRITTEN AT MOLA DI GAETA, NEAR THE RUINS OF CICERO'S FORMIAN VILLA.

We wandered through bright climes, and drank the beams Of southern suns: Elysian scenes we view'd, Such as we picture oft in those day dreams That haunt the fancy in her wildest mood. Upon the sea-heat vestiges we stood, Where Cicero dwelt, and watch'd the latest gleams Of rosy light steal o'er the azure flood: And memory conjur'd up most glowing themes, Filling the expanded heart, till it forgot Its own peculiar grief!--O! if the dead Yet haunt our earth, around this hallow'd spot, Hovers sweet Tully's spirit, since it fled The Roman Forum--Forum now no more! Though cold and silent be the sands we tread, Still burns the "eloquent air," and to the shore There rolls no wave, and through the orange shade There sighs no breath, which doth not speak of him, THE FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY: and though dim Her day of empire--and her laurel crown Torn and defaced, and soiled with blood and tears, And her imperial eagles trampled down-- Still with a queen-like grace, Italia wears Her garland of bright names,--her coronal of stars, (Radiant memorials of departed worth!) That shed a glory round her pensive brow, And make her still the worship of the earth!

_Naples. Sunday 3rd._--We left Gaëta early. If the scene was so beautiful in the evening--how bright, how lovely it was this morning! The sun had not long risen; and a soft purple mist hung over part of the sea; while to the north and west the land and water sparkled and glowed in the living light. Some little fishing boats which had just put off, rocked upon the glassy sea, which lent them a gentle motion, though itself appeared all mirror-like and motionless. The orange and lemon trees in full foliage literally bent over the water; and it was so warm at half past eight that I felt their shade a relief.