If then beneath the deep profound
Retires unseen the slipp’ry ground;
If melted metals pour’d from high
A verdant mountain grows by time,
Where frisking kids can browze and climb,
And softer scenes supply:
Let us who view the varying scene,
And tread th’ instructive paths between,
See famish’d Time his fav’rite sons devour,
Fix’d for an age--then swallow’d in an hour;
Let us at least be early wise,
And forward walk with heav’n-fix’d eyes,
Each flow’ry isle avoid, each precipice despise;
Till, spite of pleasure, fear, or pain,
Eternity’s firm coast we gain,
Whence looking back with alter’d eye,
These fleeting phantoms we’ll descry,
And find alike the song and theme
Was but--an empty, airy dream.
When one has exhausted all the ideas presented to the mind by the sight
of Monte Nuovo, made in one night by the eruption of Solfa Terra, now
sunk into itself and almost extinguished; by the lake Avernus; by the
Phlegræan fields, where Jupiter killed the giants, with such thunderbolts
as fell about our ears the other night I trust, and buried one of them
alive under mount Ætna; when one has seen the Sybil’s grott, and the
Elysian plains, and every seat of fable and of verse; when one has run
about repeating Virgil’s verses and Claudian’s by turns, and handled the
hot sand under the cool waves of Baia; when one has seen Cicero’s villa
and Diana’s temple, and talked about antiquities till one is afraid of
one’s own pedantry, and tired of every one’s else; it is almost time
to recollect realities of more near interest to such of us as are not
ashamed of being Christians, and to remember that it was at Pozzuoli St.
Paul arrived after the storms he met with in these seas. The wind is
still called here _Sieuroc_, o sia _lo vento Greco_; and their manner
of pronouncing it led me to think it might possibly be that called in
Scripture _Euroc_lydon, abbreviated by that grammatical figure, which
lops off the concluding syllables. The old Pastor Patrobas too, who
received and entertained the Apostle here, lies interred under the altar
of an old church at Pozzuoli, made out of the remains of a temple to
Jupiter, whose pillars are in good preservation: I was earnest to see
the place at least, as every thing named in the New Testament is of true
importance, but one meets few people of the same taste: for Romanists
take most delight in venerating traditionary heroes, and Calvinists,
perhaps too easily disgusted, desire to venerate no heroes at all.
Some curious inscriptions here, to me not legible, shew how this poor
country has been overwhelmed by tyrants, earthquakes, Saracens! not
to mention the Goths and Vandals, who however left no traces _but_
desolation: while, as the prophet Joel says, “_The ground was as the
garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness_.”
These Mahometan invaders, less savage, but not less cruel, afforded at
least an unwilling shelter in that which is now their capital, for the
wretched remains of literature. To their misty envelopement of science,
fatigued with struggling against perpetual suffocation, succeeded
imposture, barbarism, and credulity; with superstition at their head, who
still keeps her footing in this country: and inspires such veneration for
St. Januarius, his name, his blood, his statue, &c. that the Neapolitans,
who are famous for blasphemous oaths, and a facility of taking the most
sacred words into their mouths on every, and I may say, on _no_ occasion,
are never heard to repeat _his_ name without pulling off their hat, or
making some reverential sign of worship at the moment. And I have seen
Italians from other states greatly shocked at the grossness of these
their unenlightened neighbours, particularly the half-Indian custom of
burning figures upon their skins with gunpowder: these figures, large,
and oddly displayed too, according to the coarse notions of the wearer.
As the weather is exceedingly warm, and there is little need of clothing
for comfort, our Lazaroni have small care about appearances, and go
with a vast deal of their persons uncovered, except by these strange
ornaments. The man who rows you about this lovely bay, has perhaps the
angel Raphael, or the blessed Virgin Mary, delineated on one brawny
sun-burnt leg, the saint of the town upon the other: his arms represent
the Glory, or the seven spirits of God, or some strange things, while a
brass medal hangs from his neck, expressive of his favourite martyr: whom
they confidently affirm is so madly venerated by these poor uninstructed
mortals, that when the mountain burns, or any great disaster threatens
them, they beg of our Saviour to speak to St. Januarius in their behalf,
and intreat him not to refuse them his assistance. Now though all this
was told me by friends of the Romish persuasion; and told me too with a
just horror of the superstitious folly; I think my remarks and inferences
were not agreeable to them, when expressing my notion that it was only
a relick of the adoration originally paid to Janus in Italy, where the
ground yielding up its frost to the soft breath of the new year, is not
ill-typified by the liquefaction of the blood; a ceremony which has
succeeded to various Pagan ones celebrated by Ovid in the first book
of his Fasti. We know from history too, that perfumes were offered in
_January_ always, to signify the renovation of _sweets_; and this was
so necessary, that I think Tacitus tells us Thrasea was first impeached
for absence at the time of the new year, when in _Janus_’s presence, &c.
good wishes were formed for the Emperor’s felicity; and no word of ill
omen was to be pronounced.--_Cautum erat apud Romanos ne quod mali ominis
verbum calendis_ Januariis _efferretur_; says Pliny: and the _strenæ_
or new-years gifts, called now by the French “les _etrennes_,” and
practised by Lutherans as well as Romanists, is the self-same veneration
of old _Janus_, if fairly traced up to Tatius King of the Sabines, who
sought a laurel bough plucked from the grove of the goddess _Strenia_, or
_Strenua_, and presented it to his favourites on the first of _January_,
from whence the custom arose; and Symmachus, in his tenth book,
twenty-eighth epistle, mentions it clearly when writing to the Emperors
Theodosius and Arcadius--“Strenuarum _usus adolevit auctoritate Tatii
regis, qui verbenas felicis arboris ex luco Strenuæ anni_.”
Octavius Cæsar took the name of Augustus on the first of January in
Janus’s temple, by Plancus’s advice, as a lucky day; and I suppose our
new-year’s ode, sung before the King of England, may be derived from
the same source. The old Fathers of the Church declaimed aloud against
the custom of new-years gifts, because they considered them as of Pagan
original. So much for _Les Etrennes_.
As to _St. Januarius_, there certainly was a martyr of that name at
Naples, and to him was transferred much of the veneration originally
bestowed on the deity from whom he was probably named. One need not
however wander round the world with Banks and Solander, or stare so at
the accounts given us in Cook’s Voyages of _tattowed Indians_, when
Naples will shew one the effects of a like operation, very _very_ little
better executed, on the broad shoulders of numberless Lazaroni; and of
this there is no need to examine books for information, he who runs over
the Chiaja may read in large characters the gross superstition of the
Napolitani, who have no inclination to lose their old classical character
for laziness--
Et in otia natam
Parthenopen;
says Ovid. I wonder however whether our people would work much surrounded
by similar circumstances; I fancy not: Englishmen, poor fellows! must
either work or starve; these folks want for nothing: a house would be an
inconvenience to them; they like to sleep out of doors, and it is plain
they have small care for clothing, as many who possess decent habiliments
enough, I speak of the Lazaroni, throw almost all off till some holiday,
or time of gala, and sit by the sea-side playing at moro with their
fingers.
A Florentine nobleman told me once, that he asked one of these fellows to
carry his portmanteau for him, and offered him a _carline_, no small sum
certainly to a Neapolitan, and rather more in proportion than an English
shilling; he had not twenty yards to go with it: “_Are you hungry,
Master?_” cries the fellow. “_No_,” replied Count Manucci, “_but what of
that?_”--“_Why then no more am I_:” was the answer, “_and it is too hot
weather to carry burthens_:” so turned about upon the other side, and lay
still.
This class of people, amounting to a number that terrifies one but to
think on, some say sixty thousand souls, and experience confirms no less,
give the city an air of gaiety and cheerfulness, and one cannot help
honestly rejoicing in. The Strada del Toledo is one continual crowd:
nothing can exceed the confusion to a walker, and here are little gigs
drawn by one horse, which, without any bit in his mouth, but a string
tied round his nose, tears along with inconceivable rapidity a small
narrow gilt chair, set between the two wheels, and no spring to it, nor
any thing else which can add to the weight; and this flying car is a kind
of _fiacre_ you pay so much for a drive in, I forget the sum.
Horses are particularly handsome in this town, not so large as at
Milan, but very beautiful and spirited; the cream-coloured creatures,
such as draw our king’s state coach, are a common breed here, and shine
like sattin: here are some too of a shining silver white, wonderfully
elegant; and the ladies upon the Corso exhibit a variety scarcely
credible in the colour of their cattle which draw them: but the coaches,
harness, trappings, &c. are vastly inferior to the Milanese, whose
liveries are often splendid; whereas the four or five ill-dressed
strange-looking fellows that disgrace the Neapolitan equipages seem to
be valued only for their number, and have very often much the air of Sir
John Falstaff’s recruits.
Yesterday however shewed me what I knew not had existed--a skew-ball or
pye-balled ass, eminently well-proportioned, coated like a racer in an
English stud, sixteen hands and a half high, his colour bay and white
in large patches, and his temper, as the proprietor told me, singularly
docile and gentle. I have longed perhaps to purchase few things in my
life more earnestly than this beautiful and useful animal, which I might
have had too for two pounds fifteen shillings English, but dared not,
lest like Dogberry I should have been written down for an ass by my merry
country folks, who, I remember, could not let the Queen of England
herself possess in peace a creature of the same kind, but handsomer
still, and from a still hotter climate, called the Zebra.
Apropos to quadrupeds, when Portia, in the Merchant of Venice, enumerates
her lovers, she names the Neapolitan prince first; who, she says, does
nothing, for his part, but talk of his horse, and makes it his greatest
boast that he can shoe him himself. This is almost literally true of a
nobleman here; and they really do not throw their pains away; for it is
surprising to see what command they have their cattle in, though bits are
scarcely used among them.
The coat armour of Naples consists of an unbridled horse; and by what I
can make out of their character, they much resemble him;
Qualis ubi abruptis fugit præsæpia vinclis
Tandem liber æquus, &c. &c. &c.[2];
generous and gay; headstrong and violent in their disposition; easy to
turn, but difficult to stop. No authority is respected by them when some
strong passion animates them to fury: yet lazily quiet, and unwilling
to stir till accident rouses them to terror, or rage urges them forward
to incredible exertions of suddenly-bestowed strength. In the eruption
of 1779, their fears and superstitions rose to such a height, that they
seized the French ambassador upon the bridge, tore him almost out of his
carriage as he fled from Portici, and was met by them upon the Ponte
della Maddalena, where they threatened him with instant death if he did
not get out of his carriage, and prostrating himself before the statue
of St. Januarius, which stands there, intreat his protection for the
city. All this, however, Mons. le Comte de Clermont D’Amboise did not
comprehend a word of; but taking all the money out of his pocket, threw
it down, happily for him, at the feet of the figure, and pacified them at
once, gaining time by those means to escape their vengeance.
It was, I think, upon some other occasion that Sir William Hamilton’s
book relates their unworthy treatment of the venerable Archbishop, who
refused them the relicks with which they had no doubt of saving the
menaced town; but every time Vesuvius burns with danger to the city, they
scruple not to insult their Sovereign as he flies from it; throwing large
stones after his chariot, guards, &c.; making the insurrection, it is
sure to occasion, more perilous, if possible, than the volcano itself.
And last night when _La Montagna fu cattiva_[3], as their expression was,
our Laquais de Place observed that it might possibly be because so many
hereticks and unbelievers had been up it the day before. “Oh! let us,” as
King David wisely chose, “fall into the hands of God--not into those of
man.”
I wished exceedingly to purchase here the genuine account of
Massaniello’s far-famed sedition and revolt, more dreadful in a
certain way than any of the earthquakes which have at different times
shaken this hollow-founded country. But my friends here tell me it was
suppressed, and burned by the hands of the common executioner, with many
chastisements beside bestowed upon the writer, who tried to escape, but
found it more prudent to submit to justice.
Thomas Agnello was the unluckily-adapted name of the mad fisherman who
headed the mob on that truly memorable occasion: but it is not an unusual
thing here to cut off the first syllable, and by the figure aphæresis
alter the appellation entirely. By that device of dropping the _to_, he
has been called Massaniello; and this is one of their methods to render
the patois of Naples as unintelligible to us, as if we had never seen
Italy till now; and one is above all things tormented with their way
of pronouncing names. Here are Don and Donna again at this town as at
Milan however, because the King of Spain, or _Ré Cattolico_, as these
people always call him, has still much influence; and they seem to think
nearly as respectfully of him as of their own immediate sovereign, who
is however greatly beloved among them; and so he ought to be, for he is
the representative of them all. He rides and rows, and hunts the wild
boar, and catches fish in the bay, and sells it in the market, as dear
as he can too; but gives away the money they pay him for it, and that
directly: so that no suspicion of meanness, or of any thing worse than a
little rough merriment can be ever attached to his truly-honest, open,
undesigning character.
Stories of monarchs seldom give me pleasure, who seldom am persuaded to
give credit to tales told of persons few people have any access to, and
whose behaviour towards those few is circumscribed within the laws of
insipid and dull routine; but this prince lives among his subjects with
the old Roman idea of a window before his bosom I believe. They know the
worst of him is that he shoots at the birds, dances with the girls, eats
macaroni, and helps himself to it with his fingers, and rows against the
watermen in the bay, till one of them burst out o’bleeding at the nose
last week, with his uncourtly efforts to outdo the King, who won the
trifling wager by this accident: conquered, laughed, and leaped on shore
amidst the acclamations of the populace, who huzzaed him home to the
palace, from whence he sent double the sum he had won to the waterman’s
wife and children, with other tokens of kindness. Mean time, while he
resolves to be happy himself, he is equally determined to make no man
miserable.
When the Emperor and the Grand Duke talked to him of their new projects
for reformation in the church, he told them he saw little advantage they
brought into _their_ states by these new-fangled notions; that when
he was at Florence and Milan, the deuce a Neapolitan could he find in
either, while his capital was crowded with refugees from thence; that in
short they might do _their_ way, but he would do his; that he had not
now an enemy in the world, public or private; and that he would not make
himself any for the sake of propagating doctrines he did not understand,
and would not take the trouble to study: that he should say his prayers
as he used to do, and had no doubt of their being heard, while he only
begged blessings on his beloved people. So if these wise brothers-in-law
would learn of him to enjoy life, instead of shortening it by unnecessary
cares, he invited them to see him the next morning play a great match at
tennis.
The truth is, the jolly Neapolitans lead a coarse life, but it is an
unoppressed one. Never sure was there in any town a greater shew of
abundance: no settled market in any given place, I think, but every
third shop full of what the French call so properly _ammunition de
Bouche_, while whole boars, kids and small calves dangle from a sort of
neat scaffolding, all with their skins on, and make a pretty appearance.
Poulterers hang up their animals in the feathers too, not lay them on
boards plucked, as at London or Venice.
The Strada del Toledo is at least as long as Oxford Road, and straight
as Bond-street, very wide too, the houses all of stone, and at least
eight stories high. Over the shops live people of fashion I am told, but
the persons of particularly high quality have their palaces in other
parts of the town; which town at last is not a large one, but full as an
egg: and Mr. Clarke, the antiquarian, who resides here always, informed
me that the late distresses in Calabria had driven many families to
Naples this year, beside single wanderers innumerable; which wonderfully
increased the daily throng one sees passing and repassing. To hear the
Lazaroni shout and bawl about the streets night and day, one would really
fancy one’s self in a semi-barbarous nation; and a Milanese officer,
who has lived long among them, protested that the manners of the great
corresponded in every respect with the idea given of them by the little.
His account of female conduct, and that even in the very high ranks,
was such as reminded me of Queen Oberea’s sincerity, when Sir Joseph
Banks joked her about Otoroo. It is however observable, and surely very
praiseworthy, that if the Italians are not ashamed of their crimes,
neither are they ashamed of their contrition. I saw this very morning an
odd scene at church, which, though new to _me_, appeared, perhaps from
its frequent repetition, to strike no one but myself.
A lady with a long white dress, and veiled, came in her carriage, which
waited for her at the door, with her own arms upon it, and three servants
better dressed than is common here, followed and put a lighted taper
in her hand. _En cet état_, as the French say, she moved slowly up the
church, looking like Jane Shore in the last act, but not so feeble; and
being arrived at the steps of the high altar, threw herself quite upon
her face before it, remaining prostrate there at least five minutes, in
the face of the whole congregation, who, equally to my amazement, neither
stared nor sneered, neither laughed nor lamented, but minded their own
private devotions--no mass was saying--till the lady rose, kissed the
steps, and bathed them with her tears, mingled with sobs of no affected
or hypocritical penitence I am sure. Retiring afterwards to her own seat,
where she waited with others the commencement of the sacred office,
having extinguished her candle, and apparently lighted her heart; I felt
mine quite penetrated by her behaviour, and fancied her like our first
parent described by Milton in the same manner:
To confess
Humbly her faults, and pardon beg; with tears
Watering the ground, and with her sighs the air
Frequenting, sent from heart contrite, in sign
Of sorrow unfeign’d, and humiliation meek.
Let not this story, however, mislead any one to think that more general
decorum or true devotion can be found in churches of the Romish
persuasion than in ours--quite the reverse. This burst of penitential
piety was in itself an indecorous thing; but it is the nature and genius
of the people not to mind small matters. Dogs are suffered to run about
and dirty the churches all the time divine service is performing; while
the crying of babies, and the most indecent methods taken by the women
to pacify them, give one still juster offence. There is no treading for
spittle and nastiness of one sort or another, in all the churches of
Italy, whose inhabitants allow the filthiness of Naples, but endeavour to
justify the disorders of other cities; though I do believe nothing ever
equalled the Chiesa de Cavalieri at Pisa, in any Christian land. Santa
Giustina at Padua, the Redentore at Venice, St. Peter’s at Rome, and some
of the least frequented churches at Milan, are exceptions; they are kept
very clean, and do not, by the scandalous neglect of those appointed to
keep them, disgrace the beauty of their buildings.
Here has, however, been a dreadful accident which puts such slight
considerations out of one’s head. A Friar has killed a woman in the
church just by the Crocelle inn, for having refused him favours he
suspected she had granted to another. No step is taken though towards
punishing the murderer, because he is _religioso, è di più cavaliere_.
What a miracle that more such outrages are not daily committed in
a country where profession of sanctity, and real high birth, are
protections from law and justice! Surely nothing but perfect sobriety and
great goodness of disposition can be alleged as a reason why worse is not
done every day. I said so to a gentleman just now, who assured me the
criminal would not escape very severe castigation; and that perhaps the
convent would inflict such severities upon that gentleman as would amply
supply the want of activity in the exertion of civil power.
It is a stupid thing not to mention the common dress of the ordinary
women here, which ladies likewise adopt, if they venture out on foot,
desiring not to be known. Two black silk petticoats then serve entirely
to conceal their whole figure; as when both are tied round their waist,
one is suddenly turned up, and as they pull it quick over their heads, a
loose trimming of narrow black gauze drops over the face, while a hook
and eye fastens all close under the chin, and gives them an air not
unlike our country wenches, who throw the gown tail over their heads,
to protect them from a summer’s shower. The holiday dresses mean time of
the peasants round Naples, are very rich and cumbersome. One often sees
a great coarse raw-boned fellow on a Sunday, panting for heat under a
thick blue velvet coat comically enough; the females in a scarlet cloth
petticoat, with a broad gold lace at the bottom, a jacket open before,
but charged with heavy ornaments, and the head not unbecomingly dressed
with an embroidered handkerchief from Turkey, exactly as one sees them
represented here in prints, which they sell dear enough, God knows;
and ask, as I am informed by the purchasers, not twice or thrice, but
four or five times more than at last they take, as indeed for every
thing one buys here: One portrait is better, however, than a thousand
words, when single figures are to be delineated; but of the Grotta del
Cane, description gives a completer idea than drawing. Both are perhaps
nearly unnecessary indeed, when speaking of a place so often and so
accurately described. What surprised me most among the ceremonies of this
extraordinary place was, that the pent up vapour shut in an excavation
of the rock, should, upon opening the door, gradually move forwards a
few yards, but not rise up above a foot from the surface, nor, by what I
could observe, ever dissipate in air; I think we left it hovering over
the favourite spot, when the poor cur’s nose had been forcibly held in it
for a minute or two, but he took care after his recovery to keep a very
judicious distance. Sporting with animal life is always highly offensive;
and the fellow’s account that his dog was used to the operation, and
had already gone through it eight times, that it did him no harm,
&c. I considered as words used merely to quiet our impatience of the
experiment, which is infinitely more amusing when tried upon a lighted
flambeau, extinguishing it most completely in a moment. What connection
there is between flame and vitality, those who know more of the matter
than I do, must expound. Certain it is, that many sorts of vapour are
equally fatal to both; and where fermentation is either going forward,
or has lately been, people accustomed to such matters always try with a
candle whether the cask is approachable by man or not; and I once saw
a terrifying accident arise in a great brewhouse, from the headstrong
stupidity of a workman who would go down into a vat, the contents of
which had lately been drawn off, without sending his proper præcursor the
candle, to enquire if all was safe. The consequence was half expected by
his companions, who hearing him drop off the steps, and fall flat to the
bottom, began instantly hooking him up again, but there were no signs
of life; some ran for their master, others for a surgeon, but we were
nearest at hand, and recollecting what one had read of the recovery of
dogs at Naples, by tossing them suddenly into the lake Agnano, we made
the men carry their patient to the cooler, and plunging him over head
and ears, restored his life, exactly in the manner of the Grotta del
Cane experiment, which succeeded so completely in this fellow’s case, I
remember, that waking after the temporary suspension, we had much ado
to impress so insensible a mortal with a due sense of the danger his
rashness had incurred.
But it is time to tell of Herculaneum, Pompeia, and Portici; of a
theatre, the scene of gaiety and pleasure, overwhelmed by torrents of
liquid fire! the inhabitants of a whole town surprised by immediate and
unavoidable destruction! Where that very town indeed was built with the
lava produced by former eruptions, one would think it scarce possible
that such calamities could be totally unexpected;--but no matter, life
must go on, though we all know death is coming;--so the bread was baking
in their ovens, the meat was smoking on their dishes, some of their
wine already decanted for use, the rest in large jars (_amphora_), now
petrified with their contents inside, and fixed to the walls of the
cellars in which they stand.--How dreadful are the thoughts which such
a sight suggests! how _very_ horrible the certainty, that such a scene
may be all acted over again to-morrow; and that we, who to-day are
spectators, may become spectacles to travellers of a succeeding century,
who mistaking our bones for those of the Neapolitans, may carry some of
them to their native country back again perhaps; as it came into my head
that a French gentleman was doing, when I saw him put a human bone into
his pocket this morning, and told him I hoped he had got the jaw of a
Gaulish officer, instead of a Roman soldier, for future reflections to
energize upon. Of all single objects offered here to one’s contemplation,
none are more striking than a woman’s foot, the _print_ of her foot I
mean, taken apparently in the very act of running from the river of
melted minerals that surrounded her, and which now serves as an intaglio
to commemorate the misery it caused. Another melancholy proof of what
needs no confirmation, is the impression of a sick female, known to be
so from the _stole_ she wore, a drapery peculiar to the sex; her bed,
converted into a substance like plaster of Paris, still retains the form
and covering of her who perished quietly upon it, without ever making
even an effort to escape.
That one of these towns is crushed, or rather buried, under loads of
heavy lava, and is therefore difficult to disentangle, all have heard;
that Pompeia is only lightly covered with pumice-stones and ashes, is new
to nobody; it is in the power, as a Venetian gentleman said angrily, of
an English hen and chickens to scratch it open in a week, though these
lazy Neapolitans will leave it not half dislodged, before a new eruption
swallows all again.
Our visit to Portici was more than equally provoking in the same way; to
see deposited there all the antiques which are so curious in themselves,
so _very_ valuable when considered as specimens of ancient art, and of
the mode of living practised in ancient Rome, kept at a place where I do
sincerely believe they will be again overwhelmed and confounded among the
king of Naples’s furniture, to the great torture of future antiquarians,
and to the disgrace of present insensibility.
The _triclinia_ and _stibadia_ used at supper by the old Romans prove
the verses which our critics have been working at so long, to have been
at least well explained by them, and do infinite honour to those who,
without the advantage of seeing how the utensils were constructed, knew
perfectly well their way of carrying on life, from their acquaintance
with a language long since _dead_, and I am sure _buried_ under a heap
of rubbish heavier and more difficult to remove than all the lava heaped
on Herculaneum; but it is a source of perpetual wonder, and let me add
perpetual pleasure too, to know that Cicero, and Virgil, and Horace, if
alive, would find their writings as well understood, ay and as perfectly
tasted, by the scholars of Paris and London, as they had ever been by
their own old literary acquaintance.
The sight of the _curule_ chair was charming, and one thought of old
Papyrius, his long white beard, and ivory stick with which he reproved
the insolence of a Gaulish soldier, who, when Brennus entered the city,
seeing all those venerable senators sitting in a row, took them for
inanimate figures, and stroked Papyrius’s beard, to feel whether he was
alive or no. The _curule_ chair was so called from _currus_ a chariot,
and this we examined had holes bored in it, where it had been fixed to
the car: I do think there is just such a one in the British Musæum,
but that did not much engage my attention, so great is the influence
of locality upon the mind. The way in which they decypher the old MSS.
here likewise is pretty and curious, and requires infinite patience,
which as far as they have gone has not been well repaid; the operation
_laboriosius est quam Sibyllæ folia colligere_[4], to use the words of
Politian, whose right name I learned at Florence to be _Messer Angelo di
Monte Pulciano_.
May not, however, a more important consequence than any yet mentioned be
found deducible from what we have seen this day? for if _Jesus Christ_
condescended to use the Roman, or commonly adopted custom of supping on
a _triclinium_ (as it is plain he did by the recumbent posture of St.
John), when eating the Passover for the last time with his disciples at
Jerusalem; that sect of Christians called Romanists ought sure to be
the _last_, not _first_, to exclude from salvation all such of their
brethren as do not receive the Lord’s Supper precisely in _their way_;
when nothing can be clearer, from our blessed Saviour’s example, than
that he thought old forms, if laudable, not necessary or essential to
the well-performing a devotional rite; seeing that to eat the Passover
according to original institution, those who communicated were bound to
take it _standing_, and with a staff in their hands beside as expressive
of more haste.
The Christmas season here at Naples is very pleasingly observed; the
Italians are peculiarly ingenious in adorning their shops I think, and
setting out their wares; every grocer, fruiterer, &c. now mingles orange,
and lemon, and myrtle leaves, among the goods exposed at his door, as we
do greens in the churches of England, but with infinitely more taste; and
this device produces a very fine effect upon the whole, as one drives
along _la Strada del Toledo_, which all morning looks showy from these
decorations, and all evening splendid from the profusion of torches,
flambeaux, &c. that shine with less regularity indeed, but with more
lustre and greater appearance of expensive gaiety, than our neat, clean,
steady London lamps. Some odd, pretty, moveable coffee-houses too, or
lemonade-shops, set on wheels, and adorned, according to the possessor’s
taste, with gilding, painting, &c. and covered with ices, orgeats, and
other refreshments, as in emulation each of the other, and in a strange
variety of shapes and forms too, exquisitely well imagined for the most
part,--help forward the finery of Naples exceedingly: I have counted
thirty of these _galante_ shops on each side the street, which, with
their necessary illuminations, make a brilliant figure by candle-light,
till twelve o’clock, when all the show is over, and every body put out
their lights and quietly lie down to rest. Till that hour, however, few
things can exceed the tumultuous merriment of Naples, while _volantes_,
or running footmen, dressed like tumblers before a show, precede all
carriages of distinction, and endeavour to keep the people from being run
over; yet whilst they are listening to Policinello’s jokes, or to some
such street orator as Dr. Moore describes with equal truth and humour,
they often get crushed and killed; yet, as Pope says,