As half a loaf is better than no bread, so I hope that half a sheet of
paper may be better than none at all, coming from one who is anxious to
live in your memory and friendship. I should have redeemed the pledge I
gave you in this regard long since, but occupation at one time, and
absence from pen and ink at another, have prevented me.
Forster has told you, or will tell you, that I very much wish you to
hear my little Christmas book; and I hope you will meet me, at his
bidding, in Lincoln's Inn Fields. I have tried to strike a blow upon
that part of the brass countenance of wicked Cant, when such a
compliment is sorely needed at this time, and I trust that the result of
my training is at least the exhibition of a strong desire to make it a
staggerer. If _you_ should think at the end of the four rounds (there
are no more) that the said Cant, in the language of _Bell's Life_,
"comes up piping," I shall be very much the better for it.
I am now on my way to Milan; and from thence (after a day or two's rest)
I mean to come to England by the grandest Alpine pass that the snow may
leave open. You know this place as famous of yore for fiddles. I don't
see any here now. But there is a whole street of coppersmiths not far
from this inn; and they throb so d----ably and fitfully, that I thought
I had a palpitation of the heart after dinner just now, and seldom was
more relieved than when I found the noise to be none of mine.
I was rather shocked yesterday (I am not strong in geographical details)
to find that Romeo was only banished twenty-five miles. That is the
distance between Mantua and Verona. The latter is a quaint old place,
with great houses in it that are now solitary and shut up--exactly the
place it ought to be. The former has a great many apothecaries in it at
this moment, who could play that part to the life. For of all the
stagnant ponds I ever beheld, it is the greenest and weediest. I went to
see the old palace of the Capulets, which is still distinguished by
their cognizance (a hat carved in stone on the courtyard wall). It is a
miserable inn. The court was full of crazy coaches, carts, geese, and
pigs, and was ankle-deep in mud and dung. The garden is walled off and
built out. There was nothing to connect it with its old inhabitants, and
a very unsentimental lady at the kitchen door. The Montagues used to
live some two or three miles off in the country. It does not appear
quite clear whether they ever inhabited Verona itself. But there is a
village bearing their name to this day, and traditions of the quarrels
between the two families are still as nearly alive as anything can be,
in such a drowsy neighbourhood.
It was very hearty and good of you, Jerrold, to make that affectionate
mention of the "Carol" in _Punch_, and I assure you it was not lost on
the distant object of your manly regard, but touched him as you wished
and meant it should. I wish we had not lost so much time in improving
our personal knowledge of each other. But I have so steadily read you,
and so selfishly gratified myself in always expressing the admiration
with which your gallant truths inspired me, that I must not call it time
lost, either.
You rather entertained a notion, once, of coming to see me at Genoa. I
shall return straight, on the 9th of December, limiting my stay in town
to one week. Now couldn't you come back with me? The journey, that way,
is very cheap, costing little more than twelve pounds; and I am sure the
gratification to you would be high. I am lodged in quite a wonderful
place, and would put you in a painted room, as big as a church and much
more comfortable. There are pens and ink upon the premises; orange
trees, gardens, battledores and shuttlecocks, rousing wood-fires for
evenings, and a welcome worth having.
Come! Letter from a gentleman in Italy to Bradbury and Evans in London.
Letter from a gentleman in a country gone to sleep to a gentleman in a
country that would go to sleep too, and never wake again, if some people
had their way. You can work in Genoa. The house is used to it. It is
exactly a week's post. Have that portmanteau looked to, and when we
meet, say, "I am coming."
I have never in my life been so struck by any place as by Venice. It is
_the_ wonder of the world. Dreamy, beautiful, inconsistent, impossible,
wicked, shadowy, d----able old place. I entered it by night, and the
sensation of that night and the bright morning that followed is a part
of me for the rest of my existence. And, oh God! the cells below the
water, underneath the Bridge of Sighs; the nook where the monk came at
midnight to confess the political offender; the bench where he was
strangled; the deadly little vault in which they tied him in a sack, and
the stealthy crouching little door through which they hurried him into a
boat, and bore him away to sink him where no fisherman dare cast his
net--all shown by torches that blink and wink, as if they were ashamed
to look upon the gloomy theatre of sad horrors; past and gone as they
are, these things stir a man's blood, like a great wrong or passion of
the instant. And with these in their minds, and with a museum there,
having a chamber full of such frightful instruments of torture as the
devil in a brain fever could scarcely invent, there are hundreds of
parrots, who will declaim to you in speech and print, by the hour
together, on the degeneracy of the times in which a railroad is building
across the water at Venice; instead of going down on their knees, the
drivellers, and thanking Heaven that they live in a time when iron makes
roads, instead of prison bars and engines for driving screws into the
skulls of innocent men. Before God, I could almost turn bloody-minded,
and shoot the parrots of our island with as little compunction as
Robinson Crusoe shot the parrots in his.
I have not been in bed, these ten days, after five in the morning, and
have been, travelling many hours every day. If this be the cause of my
inflicting a very stupid and sleepy letter on you, my dear Jerrold, I
hope it will be a kind of signal at the same time, of my wish to hail
you lovingly even from this sleepy and unpromising state. And believe me
as I am,
Always your Friend and Admirer.
[Sidenote: Mr. Thomas Mitton.]