There are two things that an Englishman understands, hard words and hard
blows. Nothing short of this (generally speaking) excites his attention
or interests him in the least. His neighbours have the benefit of the
one in war time, and his own countrymen of the other in time of peace.
The French express themselves astonished at the feats which our Jack
Tars have so often performed. A fellow in that class of life in England
will strike his hand through a deal board—first, to shew his strength,
which he is proud of; secondly, to give him a sensation, which he is in
want of; lastly to prove his powers of endurance, which he also makes a
boast of. So qualified, a controversy with a cannon-ball is not much out
of his way: a thirty-two pounder is rather an _ugly customer_, but it
presents him with a tangible idea (a thing he is always in search
of)—and, should it take off his head or carry away one of his limbs, he
does not feel the want of the one or care for that of the other.
Naturally obtuse, his feelings become hardened by custom; or if there
are any qualms of repugnance or dismay left, a volley of oaths, a few
coarse jests, and a double allowance of grog soon turn the affair into a
pastime. Stung with wounds, stunned with bruises, bleeding and mangled,
an English sailor never finds himself so much alive as when he is flung
half dead into the cockpit; for he then perceives the extreme
consciousness of his existence in his conflict with external matter, in
the violence of his will, and his obstinate contempt for suffering. He
feels his personal identity on the side of the disagreeable and
repulsive; and it is better to feel it so than to be a stock or a stone,
which is his ordinary state. Pain puts life into him; action, soul:
otherwise, he is a mere log. The English are not like a nation of women.
They are not thin-skinned, nervous, or effeminate, but dull and morbid:
they look danger and difficulty in the face, and shake hands with death
as with a brother. They do not hold up their heads, but they will turn
their backs on no man: they delight in doing and in bearing more than
others: what every one else shrinks from through aversion to labour or
pain, they are attracted to, and go through with, and so far (and so far
only) they are a great people. At least, it cannot be denied that they
are a _pugnacious_ set. Their heads are so full of this, that if a
Frenchman speaks of SCRIBE, the celebrated farce-writer, a young
Englishman present will suppose he means Cribb the boxer; and ten
thousand people assembled at a prize-fight will witness an exhibition of
pugilism with the same breathless attention and delight as the audience
at the _Théatre Français_ listen to the dialogue of Racine or Molière.
Assuredly, _we_ do not pay the same attention to Shakspeare: but at a
boxing-match every Englishman feels his power to give and take blows
increased by sympathy, as at a French theatre every spectator fancies
that the actors on the stage talk, laugh, and make love as he would. A
metaphysician might say, that the English perceive objects chiefly by
their mere material qualities of solidity, inertness, and
impenetrability, or by their own muscular resistance to them; that they
do not care about the colour, taste, smell, the sense of luxury or
pleasure:—they require the heavy, hard, and tangible only, something for
them to grapple with and resist, to try their strength and their
unimpressibility upon. They do not like to smell to a rose, or to taste
of made-dishes, or to listen to soft music, or to look at fine pictures,
or to make or hear fine speeches, or to enjoy themselves or amuse
others; but they will knock any man down who tells them so, and their
sole delight is to be as uncomfortable and disagreeable as possible. To
them the greatest labour is to be pleased: they hate to have nothing to
find fault with: to expect them to smile or to converse on equal terms,
is the heaviest tax you can levy on their want of animal spirits or
intellectual resources. A drop of pleasure is the most difficult thing
to extract from their hard, dry, mechanical, husky frame; a civil word
or look is the last thing they can part with. Hence the
_matter-of-factness_ of their understandings, their tenaciousness of
reason or prejudice, their slowness to distinguish, their backwardness
to yield, their mechanical improvements, their industry, their courage,
their blunt honesty, their dislike to the frivolous and florid, their
love of liberty out of hatred to oppression, and their love of virtue
from their antipathy to vice. Hence also their philosophy, from their
distrust of appearances and unwillingness to be imposed upon; and even
their poetry has its probable source in the same repining, discontented
humour, which flings them from cross-grained realities into the region
of lofty and eager imaginations.[44]—A French gentleman, a man of sense
and wit, expressed his wonder that all the English did not go and live
in the South of France, where they would have a beautiful country, a
fine climate, and every comfort almost for nothing. He did not perceive
that they would go back in shoals from this scene of fancied contentment
to their fogs and sea-coal fires, and that no Englishman can live
without something to complain of. Some persons are sorry to see our
countrymen abroad cheated, laughed at, quarrelling at all the inns they
stop at:—while they are in _hot-water_, while they think themselves
ill-used and have but the spirit to resent it, they are happy. As long
as they can swear, they are excused from being complimentary: if they
have to fight, they need not think: while they are provoked beyond
measure, they are released from the dreadful obligation of being
pleased. Leave them to themselves, and they are dull: introduce them
into company, and they are worse. It is the incapacity of enjoyment that
makes them sullen and ridiculous; the mortification they feel at not
having their own way in everything, and at seeing others delighted
without asking their leave, that makes them haughty and distant. An
Englishman is silent abroad from having nothing to say; and he looks
stupid, because he is so. It is kind words and graceful acts that
afflict his soul—an appearance of happiness, which he suspects to be
insincere because he cannot enter into it, and a flow of animal spirits
which dejects him the more from making him feel the want of it in
himself; pictures that he does not understand, music that he does not
feel, love that he cannot make, suns that shine out of England, and
smiles more radiant than they! Do not stifle him with roses: do not kill
him with kindness: leave him some pretext to grumble, to fret, and
torment himself. Point at him as he drives an English mail-coach about
the streets of Paris or of Rome, to relieve his despair of _éclat_ by
affording him a pretence to horsewhip some one. Be disagreeable, surly,
lying, knavish, impertinent out of compassion; insult, rob him, and he
will thank you; take any thing from him (nay even his life) sooner than
his opinion of himself and his prejudices against others, his moody
dissatisfaction and his contempt for every one who is not in as ill a
humour as he is.
John Bull is certainly a singular animal. It is the being the beast he
is that has made a man of him. If he do not take care what he is about,
the same ungoverned humour will be his ruin. He must have something to
butt at; and it matters little to him whether it be friend or foe,
provided only he can _run-a-muck_. He must have a grievance to solace
him, a bugbear of some sort or other to keep himself in breath:
otherwise, he droops and hangs the head—he is no longer John Bull, but
John Ox, according to a happy allusion of the Poet-Laureate’s. This
necessity of John’s to be repulsive (right or wrong) has been lately
turned against himself, to the detriment of others, and his proper cost.
Formerly, the Pope, the Devil, the Inquisition, and the Bourbons, served
the turn, with all of whom he is at present sworn friends, unless Mr.
Canning should throw out a _tub to a whale_ in South America: then
Bonaparte took the lead for awhile in John’s panic-struck brain; and
latterly, the Whigs and the _Examiner_ newspaper have borne the bell
before all other topics of abuse and obloquy. Formerly, liberty was the
word with John,—now it has become a bye-word. Whoever is not determined
to make a slave and a drudge of him, he defies, he sets at, he tosses in
the air, he tramples under foot; and after having mangled and crushed
whom he pleases, stands stupid and melancholy (_fænum in cornu_) over
the lifeless remains of his victim. When his fury is over, he repents of
what he has done—too late. In his tame fit, and having made a clear
stage of all who would or could direct him right, he is led gently by
the nose by Mr. Croker; and the ‘Stout Gentleman’ gets upon his back,
making a monster of him. Why is there a tablet stuck up in St. Peter’s
at Rome, to the memory of the three last of the Stuarts? Is it a _baisés
mains_ to the Pope, or a compromise with legitimacy? Is the dread of
usurpation become so strong, that a reigning family are half-ready to
acknowledge themselves usurpers, in favour of those who are not likely
to come back to assert their claim, and to countenance the principles
that may keep them on a throne, in lieu of the paradoxes that placed
them there? It is a handsome way of paying for a kingdom with an
epitaph, and of satisfying the pretensions of the living and the dead.
But we did not expel the slavish and tyrannical Stuarts from our soil by
the volcanic eruption of 1688, to send a whining Jesuitical recantation
and _writ of error_ after them to the other world a hundred years
afterwards. But it may be said that the inscription is merely a tribute
of respect to misfortune. What! from that quarter? No! it is a
‘lily-livered,’ polished, courtly, pious monument to the fears that have
so long beset the hearts of Monarchs, to the pale apparitions of Kings
dethroned or beheaded in time past or to come (from that sad example) to
the crimson flush of victory, which has put out the light of truth, and
to the reviving hope of that deathless night of ignorance and
superstition, when they shall once more reign as Gods upon the earth,
and make of their enemies their footstool! Foreigners cannot comprehend
this bear-garden work of ours at all: they ‘perceive a fury, but nothing
wherefore.’ They cannot reconcile the violence of our wills with the
dulness of our apprehensions, nor account for the fuss we make about
nothing; our convulsions and throes without end or object, the pains we
take to defeat ourselves and others, and to undo all that we have ever
done, sooner than any one else should share the benefit of it. They
think it is strange, that out of mere perversity and contradiction we
would rather be slaves ourselves, than suffer others to be free; that we
_back_ out of our most heroic acts and disavow our favourite maxims (the
blood-stained devices in our national coat of arms) the moment we find
others disposed to assent to or imitate us, and that we would willingly
see the last hope of liberty and independence extinguished, sooner than
give the smallest credit to those who sacrifice every thing to keep the
spark alive, or abstain from joining in every species of scurrility,
insult, and calumny against them, if the word is once given by the
whippers-in of power. The English imagination is not _riante_: it
inclines to the gloomy and morbid with a heavy instinctive bias, and
when fear and interest are thrown into the scale, down it goes with a
vengeance that is not to be resisted, and from the effects of which it
is not easy to recover. The enemies of English liberty are aware of this
weakness in the public mind, and make a notable use of it.
‘But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once and smite no more.’
_Give a dog an ill name, and hang him_—so says the proverb. The
courtiers say, ‘Give a _patriot_ an ill name, and ruin him’ alike with
Whig and Tory—with the last, because he hates you as a friend to
freedom; with the first, because he is afraid of being implicated in the
same obloquy with you. This is the reason why the Magdalen Muse of Mr.
Thomas Moore finds a taint in the _Liberal_; why Mr. Hobhouse visits
Pisa, to dissuade Lord Byron from connecting himself with any but
gentlemen-born, for the credit of the popular cause. Set about a false
report or insinuation, and the effect is instantaneous and universally
felt—prove that there is nothing in it, and you are just where you were.
Something wrong somewhere, in reality or imagination, in public or in
private, is necessary to the minds of the English people: bring a charge
against any one, and they hug you to their breasts: attempt to take it
from them, and they resist it as they would an attack upon their persons
or property: a nickname is to their moody, splenetic humour a freehold
estate, from which they will not be ejected by fair means or foul: they
conceive they have a _vested right_ in calumny. No matter how base the
lie, how senseless the jest, it _tells_—because the public appetite
greedily swallows whatever is nauseous and disgusting, and refuses,
through weakness or obstinacy, to disgorge it again. Therefore Mr.
Croker plies his dirty task—and is a Privy-councillor; Mr. Theodore Hook
calls Mr. Waithman ‘Lord Waithman’ once a week, and passes for a wit!
I had the good fortune to meet the other day at Paris with my old
fellow-student Dr. E——, after a lapse of thirty years; he is older than
I by a year or two, and makes it five-and-twenty. He had not been idle
since we parted. He sometimes looked in, after having paid La Place a
visit; and I told him it was almost as if he had called on a star in his
way. It is wonderful how friendship, that has long lain unused,
accumulates like money at compound interest. We had to settle a long
account, and to compare old times and new. He was naturally anxious to
learn the state of our politics and literature, and was not a little
mortified to hear that England, ‘whose boast it was to give out
reformation to the world,’ had changed her motto, and was now bent on
propping up the continental despotisms, and on lashing herself to them.
He was particularly mortified at the degraded state of our public
press—at the systematic organization of a corps of government-critics to
decry every liberal sentiment, and proscribe every liberal writer as an
enemy to the person of the reigning sovereign, only because he did not
avow the principles of the Stuarts. I had some difficulty in making him
understand the full lengths of the malice, the lying, the hypocrisy, the
sleek adulation, the meanness, equivocation, and skulking concealment,
of a _Quarterly Reviewer_,[45]
the reckless blackguardism of _Mr. Blackwood_, and the obtuse drivelling
profligacy of the _John Bull_. He said, ‘It is worse with you than with
us: here an author is obliged to sacrifice twenty mornings and twenty
pair of black silk-stockings, in paying his court to the Editors of
different journals, to ensure a hearing from the public; but with you,
it seems, he must give up his understanding and his character, to
establish a claim to taste or learning.’ He asked if the scandal could
not be disproved, and retorted on the heads of the aggressors: but I
said that these were persons of no character, or studiously screened by
their employers; and besides, the English imagination was a bird of
heavy wing, that, if once dragged through the kennel of Billingsgate
abuse, could not well raise itself out of it again. He could hardly
believe that under the Hanover dynasty (a dynasty founded to secure us
against tyranny) a theatrical licenser had struck the word ‘tyrant’ out
of Mr. Shee’s tragedy, as offensive to ears polite, or as if from this
time forward there could be supposed to be no such thing in _rerum
naturâ_; and that the common ejaculation, ‘Good God!’ was erased from
the same piece, as in a strain of too great levity in this age of cant.
I told him that public opinion in England was at present governed by
half a dozen miscreants, who undertook to bait, hoot, and worry every
man out of his country, or into an obscure grave, with lies and
nicknames, who was not prepared to take the political sacrament of the
day, and use his best endeavours (he and his friends) to banish the last
traces of freedom, truth, and honesty from the land. ‘To be direct and
honest is not safe.’ To be a Reformer, the friend of a Reformer, or the
friend’s friend of a Reformer, is as much as a man’s peace, reputation,
or even life is worth. Answer, if it is not so, pale shade of Keats, or
living mummy of William Gifford! Dr. E—— was unwilling to credit this
statement, but the proofs were too flagrant. He asked me what became of
that band of patriots that swarmed in _our_ younger days, that were so
glowing-hot, desperate, and noisy in the year 1794? I said I could not
tell; but referred him to our present Poet-Laureate for an account of
them!
——‘Can these things be,
And overcome us like a summer-cloud,
Without a special wonder?’
I suspect it is peculiar to the English not to answer the letters of
their friends abroad. They know you are anxious to hear, and have a
surly, sullen pleasure in disappointing you. To oblige is a thing
abhorrent to their imaginations; to be uneasy at not hearing from home
just when one wishes, is a weakness which they cannot encourage. Any
thing like a responsibility attached to their writing is a kind of
restraint upon their free-will, an interference with their independence.
There is a sense of superiority in not letting you know what you wish to
know, and in keeping you in a state of helpless suspense. Besides, they
think you are angry at their not writing, and would make them _if you
could_; and they show their resentment of your impatience and
ingratitude by continuing not to write.—One thing truly edifying in the
accounts from England, is the number of murders and robberies with which
the newspapers abound. One would suppose that the repetition of the
details, week after week, and day after day, might stagger us a little
as to our superlative idea of the goodness, honesty, and industry of the
English people. No such thing: whereas one similar fact occurring once a
year abroad fills us with astonishment, and makes us ready to _dub_ the
Italians (without any further inquiry) a nation of assassins and
banditti. It is not safe to live or travel among them. Is it not
strange, that we should persist in drawing such wilful conclusions from
such groundless premises? A murder or a street-robbery in London is a
matter of course[46]: accumulate a score of these under the most
aggravated circumstances one upon the back of the other, in town and
country, in the course of a few weeks—they all go for nothing; they make
nothing against the English character in the abstract; the force of
prejudice is stronger than the weight of evidence. The process of the
mind is this; and absurd as it appears, is natural enough. We say (to
ourselves) we are English, _we_ are good people, and therefore the
English are good people. We carry a proxy in our bosoms for the national
character in general. Our own motives are ‘very stuff o’ the
conscience,’ and not like those of barbarous foreigners. Besides, we
know many excellent English people, and the mass of the population
cannot be affected in the scale of morality by the outrages of a few
ruffians, which instantly meet with the reward they merit from wholesome
and excellent laws. We are not to be moved from this position, that the
great body of the British public do not live by thieving and cutting the
throats of their neighbours, whatever the accounts in the newspapers
might lead us to suspect. The streets are lined with bakers’, butchers’,
and haberdashers’ shops, instead of night-cellars and gaming-houses; and
are crowded with decent, orderly, well-dressed people, instead of being
rendered impassable by gangs of swindlers and pickpockets. _The
exception does not make the rule._ Nothing can be more clear or proper;
and yet if a single Italian commit a murder or a robbery, we immediately
form an abstraction of this individual case, and because we are ignorant
of the real character of the people or state of manners in a million of
instances, take upon us, like true Englishmen, to fill up the blank,
which is left at the mercy of our horror-struck imaginations, with
bugbears and monsters of every description. We should extend to others
the toleration and the suspense of judgment we claim; and I am sure we
stand in need of it from those who read the important head of ‘ACCIDENTS
AND OFFENCES’ in our Journals. It is true an Italian baker, some time
ago, shut his wife up in an oven, where she was burnt to death; the heir
of a noble family stabbed an old woman to rob her of her money; a lady
of quality had her step-daughter chained to a bed of straw, and fed on
bread and water till she lost her senses. This translated into vulgar
English means that all the bakers’ wives in Italy are burnt by their
husbands at a slow fire; that all the young nobility are common bravoes;
that all the step-mothers exercise unheard-of and unrelenting cruelty on
the children of a former marriage. We only want a striking frontispiece
to make out a tragic volume. As the traveller advances into the country,
robbers and rumours of robbers fly before him with the horizon. In
Italy,
‘Man seldom is—but always to be _robbed_.’
At Turin, they told me it was not wise to travel by a vetturino to
Florence without arms. At Florence, I was told one could not walk out to
look at an old ruin in Rome, without expecting to see a Lazzaroni start
from behind some part of it with a pistol in his hand. ‘There’s no such
thing;’ but hatred has its phantoms as well as fear; and the English
traduce and indulge their prejudices against other nations in order to
have a pretence for maltreating them. This moral delicacy plays an
under-game to their political profligacy. I am at present kept from
proceeding forward to Naples by _imaginary_ bands of brigands that
infest the road the whole way. The fact is, that a gang of banditti, who
had committed a number of atrocities and who had their haunts in the
mountains near Sonino, were taken up about three years ago, to the
amount of two and thirty: four of them were executed at Rome, and their
wives still get their living in this city by sitting as models to
artists, on account of the handsomeness of their features and the
richness of their dresses. As to courtesans, from which one cannot
separate the name of Italy even in idea, I have seen but one person
answering to this description since I came, and I do not even know that
this was one. But I saw a girl in white (an unusual thing) standing at
some distance at the corner of one of the bye-streets in Rome; after
looking round her for a moment, she ran hastily up the street again, as
if in fear of being discovered, and a countryman who was passing with a
cart at the time, stopped to look and hiss after her. If the draymen in
London were to stop to gape and hoot at all the girls they see standing
at the corners of streets in a doubtful capacity, they would have enough
to do. But the tide of public prostitution that pours down all our
streets is considered by some moralists as a drain to carry off the
peccant humours of private life, and to keep the inmost recesses of the
female breast sweet and pure from blemish! If this is to be the test, we
have indeed nearly arrived at the idea of a perfect commonwealth.
_Cicisbeism_ is still kept up in Italy, though somewhat on the decline.
I have nothing to say in favour of that anomaly in vice and virtue. The
English women are particularly shocked at it, who are allowed to hate
their husbands, provided they do not like any body else. It is a kind of
_marriage within a marriage_; it begins with infidelity to end in
constancy; it is not a state of licensed dissipation, but is a real
chain of the affections, superadded to the first formal one, and that
often lasts for life. A gay captain in the Pope’s Guard is selected by a
lady as her _cavalier servente_ in the prime of life, and is seen
digging in the garden of the family in a grey jacket and white hairs
thirty years after. This does not look like a love of change. The
husband is of course always a _fixture_; not so the _cavalier servente_,
who is liable to be removed for a new favourite. In noble families the
lover must be noble; and he must be approved by the husband. A young
officer, who the other day volunteered this service to a beautiful
Marchioness without either of these titles, and was a sort of interloper
on the intended gallant, was sent to Volterra. Whatever is the height to
which this system has been carried, or the level to which it has sunk,
it does not appear to have extinguished jealousy in all its excess as a
part of the national character, as the following story will shew: it is
related by M. Beyle, in his charming little work, entitled _De l’Amour_,
as a companion to the famous one in Dante; and I shall give the whole
passage in his words, as placing the Italian character (in former as
well as latter times) in a striking point of view.
‘I allude,’ he says, ‘to those touching lines of Dante;—
‘Deh! quando tu sarai tornato al mondo,
Ricordati di me, che son la Pia;
Sienna mi fê: disfecemi Maremma:
Salsi colui, che inannellata pria,
Disposando, m’avea con la sua gemma.’—_Purgatorio_, _c._ 5.
‘The woman who speaks with so much reserve, had in secret undergone the
fate of Desdemona, and had it in her power, by a single word, to have
revealed her husband’s crime to the friends whom she had left upon
earth.
‘Nello della Pietra obtained in marriage the hand of Madonna Pia, sole
heiress of the Ptolomei, the richest and most noble family of Sienna.
Her beauty, which was the admiration of all Tuscany, gave rise to a
jealousy in the breast of her husband, that, envenomed by false reports
and by suspicions continually reviving, led to a frightful catastrophe.
It is not easy to determine at this day if his wife was altogether
innocent; but Dante has represented her as such. Her husband carried her
with him into the marshes of Volterra, celebrated then, as now, for the
pestiferous effects of the air. Never would he tell his unhappy wife the
reason of her banishment into so dangerous a place. His pride did not
deign to pronounce either complaint or accusation. He lived with her
alone, in a deserted tower, of which I have been to see the ruins on the
sea-shore; here he never broke his disdainful silence, never replied to
the questions of his youthful bride, never listened to her entreaties.
He waited unmoved by her for the air to produce its fatal effects. The
vapours of this unwholesome swamp were not long in tarnishing features
the most beautiful, they say, that in that age had appeared upon earth.
In a few months she died. Some chroniclers of these remote times report,
that Nello employed the dagger to hasten her end: she died in the
marshes in some horrible manner; but the mode of her death remained a
mystery, even to her contemporaries. Nello della Pietra survived to pass
the rest of his days in a silence which was never broken.
‘Nothing can be conceived more noble or more delicate than the manner in
which the ill-fated Pia addresses herself to Dante. She desires to be
recalled to the memory of the friends whom she had quitted so young: at
the same time, in telling her name and alluding to her husband, she does
not allow herself the smallest complaint against a cruelty unexampled,
but thenceforth irreparable; and merely intimates that he knows the
history of her death. This constancy in vengeance and in suffering is to
be met with, I believe, only among the people of the South. In Piedmont,
I found myself the involuntary witness of a fact almost similar; but I
was at the time ignorant of the details. I was ordered with
five-and-twenty dragoons into the woods that border the Sesia, to
prevent the contraband traffic. On my arrival in the evening at this
wild and solitary place, I distinguished among the trees the ruins of an
old castle: I went to it: to my great surprise, it was inhabited. I
there found a Nobleman of the country, of a very unpromising aspect; a
man six feet in height, and forty years of age: he allowed me a couple
of apartments with a very ill grace. Here I entertained myself by
getting up some pieces of music with my quarter-master: after the
expiration of some days, we discovered that our host kept guard over a
woman whom we called Camilla in jest: we were far from suspecting the
dreadful truth. She died at the end of six weeks. I had the melancholy
curiosity to see her in her coffin; I bribed a monk who had charge of
it, and towards midnight, under pretext of sprinkling the holy water, he
conducted me into the chapel. I there saw one of those fine faces, which
are beautiful even in the bosom of death: she had a large aquiline nose,
of which I never shall forget the noble and expressive outline. I
quitted this mournful spot; but five years after, a detachment of my
regiment accompanying the Emperor to his coronation as King of Italy, I
had the whole story recounted to me. I learned that the jealous husband,
the Count of ——, had one morning found, hanging to his wife’s bedside,
an English watch belonging to a young man in the little town where they
lived. The same day he took her to the ruined castle, in the midst of
the forests of the Sesia. Like Nello della Pietra, he uttered not a
single word. If she made him any request, he presented to her sternly
and in silence the English watch, which he had always about him. In this
manner he passed nearly three years with her. She at length fell a
victim to despair, in the flower of her age. Her husband attempted to
dispatch the owner of the watch with a stiletto, failed, fled to Genoa,
embarked there, and no tidings have been heard of him since. His
property was confiscated.’—_De l’Amour_, vol i. p. 131.
This story is interesting and well told. One such incident, or one page
in Dante or in Spenser is worth all the route between this and Paris,
and all the sights in all the post-roads in Europe. Oh Sienna! if I felt
charmed with thy narrow, tenantless streets, or looked delighted through
thy arched gateway over the subjected plain, it was that some
recollections of Madonna Pia hung upon the beatings of my spirit, and
converted a barren waste into the regions of romance!