We left Rome with such a nostalgic pang in our hearts that we tried to
find relief in a name for it, and we called ourselves Romesick.
Afterward, when we practised the name with such friends as we could get
to listen, they thought we said homesick. Being better instructed, they
stared or simpered, and said, “Oh!” That was not all we could have
asked, but Rome herself would understand, and, while we were seeking
this outlet for our grief, she followed us as far as she could on her
poor, broken aqueducts. At places they gave way under her, and she fell
down, but scrambled up again on the next stretch of arches, like some
fond cripple pursuing a friend on crutches; when at last our train
outran them, and there was no longer an arch to halt upon, she gave up
the vain chase and turned back within her walls, where we saw her domes
and bell-towers fading into the heaven to which they pointed.
It was a heaven of better than absolute blue, for there were soft, white
clouds in it, and the air that our Sunday breathed under it was, at the
beginning of April, as bland as that of an American May-end. The orchard
trees were in bloom--peach and plum, cherry and pear--whenever you chose
to look at them, and all nature seemed to rejoice in the cessation of
the two days' strike which had now enabled us to drive to the station
instead of walking and carrying our bags and bundles. There were so many
of these that we had taken two cabs, and at the station our drivers
attempted to rejoice with nature in an overcharge that would have
recouped them for the loss suffered in their recent leisure. But as we
were then leaving Koine, and were not yet melted with the grief of
absence, I had the courage to resist their demand. Long before we
reached Leghorn I was so Romesick that I would have paid them anything
they asked.
When we emerged from the suburbs upon the open Campagna, we passed
through many fields of wheat, more than we had yet seen on the grassy
waste, but there were also many flocks of sheep feeding with the cattle
in pastures. Now and then we passed a wretched hut which seemed to be
the dwelling of the shepherds we saw tending the flocks, and here and
there we came upon a group of farm buildings, all of straw, whether for
man or beast, set within a sort of squalid court, with a frowzy
suggestion of old women and children about the doors of the cottages. We
saw no men, though there must have been men off at work in the fields
with the younger women.
As we drew near Civita Vecchia the sea widened on our view, wild with a
wind that seemed to have been blowing ever since the stormy evening in
1865 when, after looking at the tossing ships in the harbor, we decided
to take the diligence for Leghorn, rather than the little steamer we had
meant to take. From our pleasant train we now patronized Civita Vecchia
with a recognition of its picturesqueness, unvexed by the choice that
then insisted on itself, though the harbor was as full of shipping as of
old. There was time to run out for a cup of coffee at the station
buffet, where there had been neither station nor buffet in our young
time: but doubtless then as now there had been the lonely graveyard
outside the town, with its sea-beaten, seaward wall. We buried there the
last of our Roman holidays under a sky that had changed from blue to
gray since our journey began, and mournfully set out faces northward in
the malarial Maremma.
If the Maremma is as malarial as it is famed, it does not look it. There
were stretches of hopeless morass, with wide acreages under water, but
mostly, I should say, it was rather a hilly country. Now and then we ran
by a stony old town on a distant summit like the outcropping of granite
or marble, and there were frequent breadths of woodland, oak and pine
and, I dare say, walnut and chestnut. Evidently there had been efforts
to reclaim the Maremma from its evil air and make it safely habitable,
and the farther we penetrated it the more frequent the evidences were.
There were many new buildings of a good sort, and of wood as well as
stone; when we came to Grosetto, where we had spent a memorable night
after being overturned in the Ombrone, in the attempt of our diligence
to pass its flood, we were aware, in the evening light, of a prosperity
which, if not excessive for the twoscore years that had passed, was
still very noticeable. I should not quite say that the brick wall of the
city had been scraped and scrubbed, but it looked very neat and new,
and there was a pleasant suburb under it where the moat might have been,
and people were coming and going who had almost the effect of commuters;
at least, they seemed to have come out to their homes by trolley. We
resisted an impulse to dismount and go up to the inn in the heart of the
town where we had spent that “night of memory and of sighs.”
But we searched the horizon round for the point on the highway where our
diligence had failed of the track between the telegraph-poles and softly
rolled with us in the muddy waters, like an elephant taking a bath, but,
so far from finding it, we could not even find the highway. We began to
have our doubts of what we had always believed had happened, and
remained as snugly as we could in our compartment, where, to tell the
truth, we were not very snug. In too fond a reliance on the almanac, the
Italian government had cut off the steam which ought to have heated it,
and the cold from the hills, on which we saw snow, pierced our rugs and
cushions; but, if we had known what we were coming to in Leghorn, we
should have thought ourselves very enviable.
I do not know exactly how far it is from the station in Leghorn to the
hotel where we had providently engaged rooms with a fire in at least one
of them, but I should say at a rough calculation it was a hundred miles
as we covered the distance in a one-horse omnibus, through long,
straight streets, after ten o'clock at night. The streets and houses
were mostly dark, as houses of good habits should be at that hour, but,
after passing through a wide, lonely piazza, we struck into a street
longer and straighter than the others, and drew up at our hotel door
opposite an hilarious cafe, where there seemed a general rejoicing of
some sort. We were unable to make out just what sort, or to join in it
without knowing, though it lasted well toward morning, and we were up
often during the night to see that the fire did not die out of our one
porcelain stove and leave us to perish of cold.
In Leghorn the good Baedeker says that all the hotels are good, and this
sweeping verdict may be true if taken in the sense that one is as good
as another, but they are of the old Italian type which our winter in
Rome had taught us to think obsolete; now we found that it was only
obsolescent. We had written to bespeak a room with fire in it, and this
was well, for the hotel was otherwise heated only by the bodies of its
frequenters, who, when filled with Chianti, might emit a sensible
warmth; though it was very modern in being lighted with electricity, and
having a lift, in which, after a tepid supper, we were carried to our
apartment. We had our landlord's company at supper, and had learned from
him that the most eminent of American financiers, who shall not
otherwise be identified here, was in the habit, when coming to Leghorn,
of letting him know that he was bringing a party of friends, and
commanding of him a banquet such as he alone knew how to furnish a
millionaire of that princely quality. After that we were not so much
surprised as grieved to find that our elderly chambermaid had profited
by our absence to gather all the coals out of our one stove into two
_scaldini,_ which were bristling before her where she knelt when we
opened the door upon her. She apologized, but still she carried away the
coals, and we were left to rekindle the zeal of our stove as best we
could. It was not a large stove, and it seemed to feel its inadequacy to
the office of taking the chill off that vast, dim room, where it
cowered, dark and low upon the floor, with a yearning, upward stretch of
its pipe lost in space before it reached the lowermost goddess in the
allegory frescoed on the ceiling. If it had been a white porcelain
stove, that might have helped, but it was of a gloomy earthen color that
imparted no more cheer than warmth.
We rebuilt our fire, after many repeated demands for kindling, which had
apparently to be sawed and split in a distant wood-yard before we could
get it, and then the long, arctic night set in, unrelieved by the noisy
gayeties of the cafe across the way. These burst from time to time the
thin film of sleep which formed like a coating of ice over the
consciousness, and then one could only get up and put more wood into the
despairing stove and more clothes on the beds. Well for us that we had
thought to bring all our travelling rugs with us in straps, instead of
abandoning them with our other baggage in the station till next day!
But, even with these heaping the hotel blankets and com-forters, we
shivered, and a superannuated odor that had lurked in the recesses of
those rooms, to which the sun or wind had never pierced, grew with the
growing cold, and haunted the night like something palpable as well as
sensible--the materialization of smells dead and buried there long ago.
It was wonderful how little way the electric bulb shed its beams in that
naughty air; it would not even light the page which at one time was
opened in the vain hope that the author would help the benumbing cold to
bring torpor if not slumber to the weary brain.
It is really impossible to say where or how we breakfasted, but it was
somehow managed, and then search was made by the swiftest conveyance for
the hotel which we had heard of outside the city, as helping make
Leghorn the watering-place it is for Italians in the summer, and in the
winter as being steam-heated and appointed with every modern comfort for
the passing or sojourning stranger. It was all that and more, and only
for the fear that I should seem to join it in advertising its merits I
should like to celebrate it by name. But perhaps it is as well not; if I
did, all my readers would swarm upon that hotel, and there would be no
room for me, who hope some day to go back there and spend an old age of
luxurious leisure. There was not only steam-heat in the public rooms of
the ground floor, but there was furnace heat in all the corridors, and
there were fireplaces in certain chambers, which also looked out on the
sea, to Corsica and Elba and other isles of it, and would be full of sun
as soon as the cold rain closed a fortnight's activity. That which
diffused a blander atmosphere than steam or radiator, register and
hearth, however, was the kind will, the benevolent intelligence, which
imagined us, and which would not then let us go. We had become not only
agnostic as respected the possibility of warmth in Leghorn, we were open
sceptics, aggressive infidels. But the landlord himself followed us from
one room to another, lighting fires here and there on the hearth, making
us feel the warm air rising from the furnace, calling us to witness by
palpation the heat of the radiators, soothing our fears, and coaxing our
unfaith. His wife joined him in Italian and his son in English, and, if
I do not say that these amiable people were worthy all the prosperity
which was not then apparent in their establishment, may I never be
comfortably lodged or fed again. Our daily return for what we got was a
poor twelve francs each; but fancy a haughty American landlord caressing
us with such sweet and reassuring civility for any sum of money! Those
gentle people made themselves our friends; there was nothing they would
not do, or try to do, for us, in the vast, pink palace where we were
never twenty guests together, and mostly eight or ten, with the run of a
reading-room where there were the latest papers and periodicals from
London and Paris, and with a kitchen whence we were served the best
luncheons and dinners we ate in Europe.
The place had the true out-of-season charm. There were two stately
dining-rooms besides the one where we dined, and there were pleasant
spaces where we had afternoon tea or after-dinner coffee, and from which
a magnificent stairway ascended to the upper halls, and a quiet lift
waited our orders, with the landlord or his son to take us up; and so
lonely and quiet and gentle, with porters and chambermaids speaking
beautiful Tuscan, and watchful attendants everywhere prophesying and
fulfilling our wants. It was a keeping to make the worst believe in
their merit, and we were not the worst. Outside, the environment
flattered or rewarded us with a garden of laurel and other evergreens,
and with flower-beds where the annuals were beginning to show the
gardener's designs in their sprouting seeds. Beyond these ample villa
bounds a tram-car murmured to and from the well-removed city, and beyond
its track lay a line of open-air theatres and variety shows and bathing
establishments, as at our own Atlantic City, but here in enduring
masonry instead of the provisional wood of our summer architecture.
[Illustration: 45 PIAZZA VICTOR EMANUEL, LEGHORN]
This festive preparation intimated the watering-place supremacy which
Leghorn enjoys in Italy, and which must make our quiet hotel in the
season glisten and twitter and flutter with the vivid national life. The
preparation includes a delightful drive by the seashore, with groves and
gardens, to the city gate and indefinitely beyond it, which we one day
followed as far as an old fort, where a little hotel had nestled with
every promise of simple comfort. There was a neighboring village of no
very exciting interest, and I do not know that the Italian Naval
Academy, which we passed on the way, was very exciting, though with its
villa grounds it had a pleasing rural effect. Hard by our hotel, in a
piazza that seemed to have nothing to do but surround it, was the
colossal bust of an Italian admiral, or the like, which had not the
impressiveness of a colossal full-length figure, but which rendered the
original with the faithful realism of the Genoese Campo Santo sculpture.
In compensation there was, toward the city, near the ship-yards where
the great Italian battle-ships are built, the statue of their builder--a
man who looked it--standing at large ease, with one hand in his
pantaloons pocket, and not apparently conscious of the passer's gaze.
Beyond the ship-yard, in which a battle-ship was then receiving the last
touches, was a statue for which I could not claim an equal
unconsciousness. In fact, it challenged the public attention and even
homage as it extended the baton of command and triumphed over the four
Moorish or Algerine corsairs who, in their splendid nudity, were chained
to the several corners of the monument and owned themselves
galley-slaves. The Medicean grand-duke who lords it over them, and who
erected this monument in honor of himself for the victories his admirals
had gained in sweeping the pirates from the seas, is a very proud
presence, and is certainly worthy of the admiration which his bronze
requires from the spectator. I instantly suspected this monument of
being the chief sculpture of Leghorn, and I did not wonder that a
_valet de place_ was lying in wait for me there to make me observe that
from a certain point I could get all four of the galley-slaves' noses in
perspective at once. Upon experiment I did not find that I could do
this, but I imputed my failure to want of merit in myself and not the
monument, and I willingly paid half a franc for the suggestion; if all
one's failures cost so little, one could save money. I was going then to
view at close quarters the port of Leghorn, which is famous for its mole
and lighthouse and quarantine, the first of their kind in their time.
The old port, with the fortifications, was the work of a natural son of
Queen Elizabeth's Earl of Leicester, whose noble origin was so
constantly recognized by the Tuscan grand-dukes that he came at last to
be accepted as Lord Dudley by the English. From his day, if not from his
work, the prosperity of Leghorn began, and the English have always had a
great part in it. Early in the nineteenth century there were a score of
great British merchants settled there, and, though afterward they
declined in number, the trade with England did not decline, and the
trade with America has always been such that American merchants and
captains have fully shared in the commerce directly or indirectly. Both
the old and the new port were a scene of pleasant activity the pleasant
afternoon when I visited them, and were full of varied sail as well as
many steamers, loading or unloading for or from the Mediterranean ports,
east and west, and the Hanseatic cities and the far coasts of Norway.
Any seaport is charming and full of romantic interest, but an Italian
port has always a prime picturesqueness. Its sailors are the most
ancient mariners, and they look full of history, and capable, each of
them, of discovering a continent. I cannot say that I saw any nascent
Columbus in the tanned and tarry company I met, but I do not deny that
there was one. Leghorn is still in her lusty youth, being not much older
than our Boston in the prosperity which has not failed her since the
Medici divined her importance toward the close of the sixteenth century,
and fortified her harbor till she was one of the strongest places on the
Mediterranean. With a hazy general consciousness of her modernity in
mind, I had imagined her yet more modern, and I was somewhat surprised
to read, in a rather airy and ironical but very capable local guidebook
called _Su e Giu per Livorno_ (or _Up and Down Leghorn),_ that the place
was settled twenty-six hundred and fifty-six years before Christ. The
author records this with a smile, and then, by a leap over some forty
centuries, he finds firm footing in the fact that the great Countess
Matilde, then much bothering about in the affairs of her Tuscan
neighbors everywhere, gave the Livornese coasts to Pisa in 1103. This
seems to have been the signal for the Genoese, eleven years later, to
ravage and destroy the Pisan settlements; but later the Pisans,
confirmed in their possession by the Emperor of Germany, rebuilt and
embellished the port. A century after, Charles of Anjou demolished it,
and then the Pisans fortified it some more. Then, in the last years of
the thirteenth century, the Florentines, Lucchese, and Genoese
devastated the whole territory of Pisa, and left Leghorn only one poor
little church. Well throughout the fourteenth century there were wars
between these republics, and Leghorn suffered the consequences, being,
as our author says, “according to custom, assailed, taken, wasted, and
destroyed.” But before that century was out she seems to have flourished
up again, and to have received with all honor Gregory XL, returning from
Avignon to Rome and bringing the papacy back from its long exile to the
Eternal City.
The Genoese now sold Leghorn to Milan, and in 1407 she was sold to
France for twenty-six thousand florins, which seems low for a whole
city. But in less than ten years we find the Genoese back again, and
strengthening and adorning her at the greatest rate. It was quite time
now that she should be visited by a virulent pestilence, and that,
having passed to Florence in the meanwhile, she should have been ceded
without a blow to Charles VIII. of France. But in a year she was once
more in the hold of Florence and helping that republic fight her enemies
the Pisans, and her other enemies under the Emperor Maximilian of
Germany.
More fortifying, embellishing, and pestilence followed, and in 1429
Michelangelo came to inspect the new fortifications which the Florentine
republic had built at Leghorn to repair the damages she had suffered.
The next year the republic fell, and Alessandro de' Medici, who came in
master at Florence, took Leghorn into the favor which his family
continued to show her to the end. The first Cosimo greatly improved her
harbor, dug canals, and built forts, but he let the Spaniards, for a
pleasure to Charles V., place garrisons in Florence, Pisa, and Leghorn,
and the Spaniards remained six years at Leghorn. In the last year of the
sixteenth century Ferdinand erected to himself the superb monument with
the four captive corsairs at the corners, whose noses I had failed to
get in range, and in the meanwhile many great public works had been
constructed and the city desolated by another plague. It was now time
for the English to appear in those waters, and in 1652 they were
defeated by the Dutch off Leghorn. About seventy-five years later the
grippe paid Leghorn a first visit, and not long after a violent
earthquake shook down many buildings and killed many women and children;
but the authorities did what they could to secure the city in future by
declaring the day a perpetual fast, and forbidding masking and dancing
on it.
No disaster worth recording befell the city till Bonaparte came with the
Rights of Man in 1796 and left a French garrison, which evacuated the
place the next year, after having levied a fine of two million francs.
The year after that Nelson occupied it with eight thousand English
troops, and the following year the French reoccupied it and sacked the
churches and imposed another fine nearly as great as the first. After
the Napoleonic victories in the Italian wars, they seem to have come
back again and fined the city two million francs more. They now remained
five years, and in the mean time a Livornese, Giovanni Antonio Giaschi,
invented a submarine-boat for attacking and destroying war-vessels, and
a Spanish ship brought the yellow-fever. In 1808 Napoleon gave all
Tuscany, and Leghorn with it, to his sister Elisa, but when in 1814 he
was deposed, Leghorn was restored to the Tuscan grand-dukes and
garrisoned for them by German troops, an earthquake having profited by
the general disorder meantime to pay it another visit. The grand-duke
now being driven out of Florence by Murat, he took refuge at Leghorn,
which fell a prey to an epidemic of typhus. The first steam-vessel
appared there in 1818, and in 1835 the Asiatic cholera; in 1847 a
telegraphic line to Pisa was opened.
In 1848 the revolutions prevalent throughout Europe had their effect at
Leghorn. The citizens shared in the uprising against the grand-duke, and
elected among its representatives F. D. Guerrazzi, once famous as the
first of Italian novelists and a man of generous mind and heart, who
duly suffered arrest and imprisonment when the grand-duke was restored
by the Austrians. He was sentenced to fifteen years' prison with hard
labor, but later his sentence was commuted to exile. He lived to return
and take part in the Italian unification in 1860, and in 1866 he led the
movement against making peace with Austria unless all her
Italian-speaking provinces were ceded to Italy. He died in 1873, and is
remembered in Leghorn by a monument very ineffective as a whole, but
singularly interesting in certain details.
I have omitted from this catalogue of events many of peaceful interest,
such as visits from popes, princes, and poets, and I am not sure I have
got in all the plagues and earthquakes. Perhaps I have the more
willingly suppressed a few war-like facts, in the interest of the
superstition I had cherished that Leghorn was without a history, or that
it had no more history than, most American cities of equal date with its
commercial importance, which began with the wise hospitality of the
Medici to merchants of all races and nations, religions and races,
settled there, and especially to the Spanish Jews who came in great
numbers to the city that it was a common saying that you had as well
strike the duke as strike a Jew in Leghorn. Greeks, Turks, Armenians
were protected equally with English and Dutch, and infidel and heretic
were alike free in their worship. It was the great prison of the
galley-slaves, who were chiefly the pirates and corsairs taken on the
high seas by the duke's ships. These captives not only served as models
for the Moors at the base of his monument, but they must have been very
useful in the different public works which he and his successors carried
out. Now they and their like are gone, and though the Greeks, the
Armenians, the English, and the Scotch still have their churches, I do
not suppose there is a mosque in all Leghorn.
[Illustration: 46 THE CANAL AT LEGHORN]
I do not speak very confidently, because my researches in that sort were
not exhaustive. I indeed visited the cathedral, not wholly because Inigo
Jones had something to do in planning it, but because I had formed the
habit of visiting churches in Rome, and I mechanically went into one
wherever I saw it. Generally speaking, I think that they were rather
bare in painting or sculpture, but they were such churches as in America
one would go a long way to see and think one's self well rewarded by
their objects of interest. I do not know what defence to offer for not
having visited the galleries of the Museo Civico, where by actual count
in the guide-book I missed one hundred and sixty-nine works of art,
though just how many masterpieces I am not able to say: probably one out
of every ten was a masterpiece. But, if I did not much resort to the
churches and galleries in Leghorn, I roamed gladly through its pleasant
streets and squares, and by the shores of the canals which once gave it
the name of New Venice, and which still invite the smaller shipping up
among its houses in right Venetian fashion. The streets of Leghorn are
not so straight as they are long, but many are very straight, and the
others are curved rather than crooked. The longest and straight-est were
streets of low dwelling-houses, uncommon in Italian towns, where each
family lived under its own roof with a little garden behind, and a
respective entrance, as people still mostly do in our towns. From the
force of the mid-April sun in these streets I realized what they might
be in summer, and, if I lived in Leghorn, I would rather live on the
sea-front, in one of the comfortable, square, stone villas which border
it. But everywhere Leghorn seemed a pleasant place to live, and
convenient, with lively shops and cafes and trams and open spaces, and
statues and monuments in them. The city, I understood, is of somewhat
radical politics, tending from clericalism to socialism; and, like every
other Italian city, it is full of patriotic monuments. There is a Victor
Emmanuel on horseback, plump and squat, but heroic as always, and a
Garibaldi struggling in vain for beauty in his poncho and his round,
flat cap; there is a Mazzini, there is a Cavour, and, above all, there
is a Guerrazzi, no great thing as to the seated figure, but most
interesting, most touching in two of the bas-reliefs below. One
represents him proclaiming the provisional government at Florence in
1849, after the expulsion of the grand-duke, where the fact is studied,
with the wonderful realism of the Italians, in all its incidents and the
costumes of the thronging spectators. The sculptor has hesitated at no
top-hat or open umbrella; there are barefooted boys and bareheaded young
girls, as well as bearded elders; if my memory serves, the scene is not
without a dog or two. But it is the other relief which is so simply and
so deeply affecting--the interior of a narrow cell, with one chair and a
rude table, at which the patriot novelist wrote his greatest work, _The
Siege of Florence,_ and with him standing a little way from it. In spite
of the small space and the almost vacant stage, the scene is full of
most moving drama, and records a whole Italian epoch, now happily past
forever.
These are modern sculptures, and they scarcely contest the palm with the
monument of the four galley-slaves and the Medicean grand-duke. In
another piazza two princes of the Lorrainese family, if I remember
rightly, face each other over its oblong--classic motives, with the
figures much undraped, and one of them singularly impressive from the
mutton-chop whiskers which modernized him. There are several theatres,
and among them a Goldoni theatre, as there should be in a city where the
sweet old playwright sojourned for a time and has placed the action of
his famous comedy, “La Locandiera.” But I was told that the local
theatres were not so much frequented by polite people, especially for
opera, as the theatre in Pisa, which, if poorer, is prouder in its
society than its old-time vassal by the sea, and attracts the fashion of
Leghorn during the season.
As Pisa has ceased to be the colony of literary English it once was, in
the time of Byron and Hunt and Shelley, to name no others, so Leghorn
has ceased to be the mercantile colony of former days. It has still a
great deal of commerce with England, but this is no longer carried on by
resident merchants, though here and there an English name lingers in the
style of a business house; and the distinctive qualities of both
colonies are united in the author of a charming book who fills the post
of British consul at Leghorn. His _Tuscan Towns_ must not be confused
with another book called _Tuscan Cities,_ though, if the traveller
chooses to carry both with him about Tuscany, I will not say that he
could do better. In _Tuscan Cities_ there is nothing about Leghorn, I
believe, but in _Tuscan Towns_ there is a specially delightful chapter
about the place, its people, language, and customs which I can commend
to the reader as the best corrective of the errors I must have been
constantly falling into here.
It was in company no less enviable than this author's that I revisited
the port on a gray Sunday afternoon of my stay, and then for the first
time visited the ancient fortifications which began to be in the time of
the Countess Matilde and intermittently increased under the rule of the
Pisan, Genoese, and Florentine republics, until the Medicean grand-dukes
amplified them in almost the proportions I saw. The brutal first duke of
their line, Alessandro de' Medici, who some say was no Medici, but the
bastard of a negro and a washerwoman, stamped his creed in the
inscription below his adoptive arms, “Under one Faith and one Law, one
Lord,” and it was in the palace here, the story goes, that the wicked
Cosimo I. killed his son Don Garzia before the eyes of the boy's mother.
Anything is imaginable of an early Medicean grand-duke, but in a manner
the father's murderous fury was provoked by the fact, if it was a fact,
that Don Garzia had just mortally wounded his brother Giovanni. I should
like to pretend that the tragedy had wrought in my unconsciousness to
the effect of the pensive gloom which the old fortress cast over me, but
perhaps I had better not. There are some gray Sunday afternoons of a
depressing effect on the spirit which requires no positive or palpable
reason.
In any case it was a relief to go from the shadow of the past there
through the pleasant city streets to the gentle quiet of the British
cemetery, where so many of our race and some even of our own nation are
taking their long rest. No one is now buried there, and the place, in
the gradual diminution of the English colony at Leghorn, has fallen into
a lovely and appealing neglect if not oblivion. Oblivion quite covers
its origin, but it is almost as old as Protestantism itself, and, if the
ground for it was the gift of the grand-duke who tolerated heretics as
well as Jews in the impulse he gave to the city's growth, it would not
be strange. The beautiful porch of the English church, for once Greek
and not Gothic, fronts upon it, but the dwindling congregation has no
care of it, and there is no fund to keep it so much as free from weeds
and brambles and the insidious ivy rending its monuments asunder. The
afternoon of our visit it was in the sole charge of a large, gray cat,
which, after feasting upon the favorite herb, lay stretched in sleep on
a sunny bed of catnip under the walls of a mansion near, at whose
windows some young girls looked down in a Sunday listlessness, as we
wandered about among the “tall cypresses, myrtles, pines,
eucalyptus-trees, oleanders, cactuses, huge bushes of monthly roses, a
jungle of periwinkles, sarsaparilla, wild irises, violets, and other
loveliest of wild flowers.” On the forgotten tombs were the touching
epitaphs of those who had died in exile, and whose monuments are
sometimes here while their ashes lie in Florence or Rome, or wherever
else they chanced to meet their end. Among them were the inscriptions on
the graves of “William Magee Seton, merchant of New York,” who died at
Pisa in 1803, and “Henry De Butts, a citizen of Baltimore, N. America,”
who died at Sarzana; with “James M. Knight, Esq., Captain of Marines,
Citizen of the United States of America,” who died at Leghorn in 1802;
and “Thomas Gamble, Late Captain in the Navy of the United States of
America,” who died at Pisa in 1818; and doubtless there were other
Americans whose tombs I did not see. The memorials of the English were
likewise here, whether they died at Leghorn or not; but most of them
seem to have ended their lives in that place, where there were once so
many English residents, whether for their health or their profit. The
youth of some testified to the fact that they had failed to find the air
specific for their maladies, and doubtless this would account also for
the disproportionate number of noble ladies who rest here, with their
hatchments and their coronets and robes of state carven on the stones
above them. Among others one reads the titles of “Lady Catharine Burgess
born Beauclerk; Jane Isabella, widow of the Earl of Lanesborough and
daughter of the Earl of Molesworth; and Catharine Murray, only child of
James Murray,... and the Right Honorable Lady Catharine Stewart his
Spouse,” with knights, admirals, generals, and other military and naval
officers a many. Most important of all is the tomb of that strenuous
spirit, more potent for good and ill in the English fiction of his time
than any other novelist of his time, and second only to Richardson in
the wide influence of his literary method, Tobias Smollett, namely, who
here ended his long fight with consumption and the indifference of his
country to his claims upon her official recognition. After many years of
narrow circumstance in the Southern climates where he spent his later
life, he tried in vain for that meek hope of literary ambition, a
consulate, perhaps the very post that my companion, a hundred and fifty
years later, was worthily holding. The truest monument to his stay in
Italy is the book of Italian travel that he wrote, and the best effect
is that sort of peripatetic novel which he may be said to have invented
in _Humphrey Clinker,_ and which has survived the epistolary form into
our own time. It is a very simple shaft that rises over his grave, with
the brief record, “Memoriae Tobiae Smollett, qui Liburni animam
efflavit, 16 Sept., 1773,” but it is imaginable with what wrath he would
have disputed the record, if it is true, according to all the other
authorities, that he exhaled his spirit two years earlier, and how he
would have had it out with those “friends and fellow-countrymen” who had
the error perpetuated above his helpless dust.
It was not easy to quit the sweetly solemn place or to resist the wish
which I have here indulged, that some kinsman or kinswoman of those whom
the blossoms and leaves are hiding would come to their rescue from
nature now claiming an undue part in them, and obliterating their very
memories. One would not have a great deal done, but only enough to save
their names from entire oblivion, and with the hope of this I have named
some of their names. It might not be too much even for the United
Kingdom and the United States, though both very poor nations, to join in
contributing the sum necessary for the work. Or some millionaire English
duke, or some millionaire American manufacturer, might make the outlay
alone; I cannot expect any millionaire author to provide a special fund
for the care of the tomb of Smollett.