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Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General

by Charles Lever · English · Gutenberg #22058 · 385,187 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General

Author: Charles Lever


        
Release date: May 20, 2008 [eBook #22058]
                Most recently updated: September 4, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22058

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CORNELIUS O'DOWD UPON MEN AND WOMEN AND OTHER THINGS IN GENERAL ***




Produced by David Widger





CORNELIUS O’DOWD UPON MEN AND WOMEN AND OTHER THINGS IN GENERAL

By Charles Lever

Originally Published In Blackwood’s Magazine

1864




CONTENTS:

     Myself.

     A Friend Of Gioberts: Being A Reminiscence Of Seventeen Years Ago.

     Garibaldi’s Worshippers.

     Something About Solferino And Ships.

     The Stranger At The Croce Di Malta.

     The Strange Man’s Sorrow.

     Italian Law And Justice.

     The Organ Nuisance And Its Remedy.

     R. N. F. The Great Chevalier D’industrie Of Our Day.

     Gàribàldi

     A New Investment.

     Italian Traits And Characteristics.

     The Decline Of Whist.

     One Of Our “Two Puzzles”.

     A Masterly Inactivity.

     A New Hansard.

     Foreign Clubs.

     A Hint For C. S. Examiners.

     Of Some Old Dogs In Office.

     Decline Of The Drama.

     Pensions For Governors.

     A Grumble.

     Of Our Brothers Beyond The Border.

     The Rule Nisi.

     On Climbing Boys.

     Linguists

     The Old Conjurors And The New.

     Gambling For The Million.

     The Intoxicating Liquors Bill.




TO JOHN ANSTER, ESQ., LL.D.

My dear Anster,

If you knew how often I have thought of you as I was writing this
book,--if you knew how there rose before my mind memories of long ago--of
those glorious evenings with all those fine spirits, to think of whom is
a triumph even with all its sadness,--and if you knew how I long to meet
once more the few soldiers who survive of that “old guard,”--you would
see how naturally I dedicate my volume to him who was the best of us.
Accept it, I beg you, as a token of recollection and regard from your
affectionate friend,

CORNELIUS O’DOWD.

Lago Maggiore, July 20,1864.




NOTICE.

AMIABLE AND ACCOMPLISHED READER,

As I have very little to say for myself that is not said in some of
my opening pages, there is no need that I should delay you on the
threshold.

You will learn, if you take the trouble, by what course of events I came
to my present pursuit, converting myself into what a candid, but not
complimentary, friend has called “a diverting Vagabond.”

The fact was, I gave the world every reasonable opportunity of knowing
that they had a remarkable man amongst them, but, with a stupidity all
their own, they wouldn’t see it; so that when the solicitor who once
gave me a brief died--I believe it was a softening of the brain--I
burned my wig and retired from the profession.

Now, let people say what they may, it is by no means easy to invent a
new line of life; and even if you should, there are scores of people
ready to start up and seize on your discovery; and as I write these
lines I am by no means sure that to-morrow will not see some other
Cornelius O’Dowd inviting the public to a feast of wisdom and
life-knowledge, with perhaps a larger stock than my own of “things not
generally known.” I will disparage no man’s wares. There is, I feel
assured, a market for us all. My rivals, or my imitators, whichever you
like to call them, may prove superior to me; they maybe more ingenious,
more various, more witty, or more profound; but take my word for it,
bland Header, there is always something in the original tap, whether
the liquor be Harvey sauce or L.L. whisky, and such is mine. You are, in
coming to me, frequenting the old house; and if I could only descend to
it, I could print you more testimonials to success than Mr Morrison’s
of the pills, or the other man of cod-liver oil, but I scorn to give the
names, imparted as they were in secret gratitude. One only trick of
the trade I will condescend to--it is to assure you that you had need
to beware of counterfeits, and that no O’Dowderies are genuine except
signed by me.

My heart is broke with requests for my autograph. Will a sympathising
public accept the above--which, of course, will be immediately
photographed.




CORNELIUS O’DOWD




MYSELF.

Bland Reader,--If you ever look into the Irish papers--and I hope
you are not so exclusive regarding them as is Mr Cobden with the
‘Times’--you will see that, under the title, “Landed Estates Court,
County Mayo,” Judge Dobbs has just sold the town and lands of
Kilmuray-nabachlish, Ballaghy, and Gregnaslattery, the property of
Cornelius O’Dowd, Esq. of Dowd’s Folly, in the same county.

Now the above-recited lands, measuring seven hundred and fourteen acres,
two roods, and eleven perches, statute measure, were mine, and I am the
Cornelius O’Dowd, Esq., referred to in the same paragraph.

Though it is perfectly true that, what between mortgages, settlement
claims, and bonds, neither my father nor myself owned these lands any
more than we did the island of Jamaica, it was a great blow to me to be
sold out; for, somehow or other, one can live a long time in Ireland on
parchment--I mean on the mere documents of an estate that has long
since passed away; but if you come once to an open sale and Judge Dobbs,
there’s an end of you, and you’ll not get credit for a pair of shoes the
day after.

My present reason for addressing you does not require that I should go
into my family history, or mention more of myself than that I was called
to the Bar in ‘42; that I stood an unsuccessful election for Athlone;
that I served as a captain in the West Coast Rifles; that I married a
young lady of great personal attractions; and completed my misfortunes
by taking the chairmanship of the Vichnasehneshee silver mines, that
very soon left me with nothing but copper in my own pocket, and sent me
to Judge Dobbs and his Court on the Inns Quay.

Like the rest of my countrymen, I was always hoping the Government would
“do something” for me. I have not missed a levee for fourteen years,
and I have shown the calves of my legs to every viceroyalty since Lord
Clarendon’s day; but though they all joked and talked very pleasantly
with me, none said, “O’Dowd, we must do something for you;” and if it
was to rain commissionerships in lunacy, or prison inspectorships, I
don’t believe one would fall upon C. O’D. I never knew rightly how it
was, but though I was always liked at the Bar mess, and made much of on
circuit, I never got a brief. People were constantly saying to me, “Con,
if you were to do this, that, or t’other,” you’d make a hit; but it
was always conditional on my being somewhere, or doing something that I
never had attempted before.

It was clear, if I was the right man, I wasn’t in the right place; and
this was all the more provoking, because, let me do what I would, some
one was sure to exclaim, “Con, my boy, don’t try that; it is certainly
not your line.” “What a capital agent for a new assurance company you’d
be!” “What a success you’d have had on the stage! You’d have played Sir
Lucius better than any living actor. Why don’t you go on the boards? Why
not start a penny newspaper? Why not give readings?” I wonder why they
didn’t tell me to turn organist or a painter in oils.

“You’re always telling us how much you know of the world, Mr O’Dowd,”
 said my wife; “I wish you could turn the knowledge to some account.”

This was scarcely generous, to say the least of it.

Mrs O’D. knew well that I was vain of the quality--that I regarded it
as a sort of specialty. In fact, deeming, with the poet, that the proper
study of mankind was man, I had devoted a larger share of my life to the
inquiry than quite consisted with professional advancement; and while
others pored over their Blackstone, I was “doing Baden;” and instead of
term reports and Crown cases, I was diverting myself in the Oberland or
on the Lago Maggiore.

“And with all your great knowledge of life,” continued she, “I don’t
exactly see what it has done for you.”

Now, Mrs O’Dowd being, as you may apprehend, a woman, I didn’t waste my
time in arguing with her--I didn’t crush her, as I might, by telling
her that the very highest and noblest of a man’s acquirements are, _ipso
facto_, the least marketable; and that the boasted excellence of all
classical education is in nothing so conspicuous as in the fact that
Greek and Latin cannot be converted into money as readily as vulgar
fractions and a bold handwriting. Being a woman, as I have observed,
Mrs O’D. would have read the argument backwards, and stood out for the
rule-of-three against Sophocles and “all his works.” I simply replied,
with that dignity which is natural to me, “I _am_ proud of my knowledge
of life; I do recognise in myself the analyst of that strange mixture
that makes up human chemistry; but it has never occurred to me to
advertise my discovery for sale, like Holloway’s Pills or somebody’s
cod-liver oil.” “Perhaps you knew nobody would buy it,” cried she,
and flounced out of the room, the bang of the door being one of the
“epigrams in action” wives are skilled in.

Now, with respect to my knowledge of life, I have often compared myself
to those connoisseurs in art who, without a picture or an engraving of
their own, can roam through a gallery, taking the most intense pleasure
in all it contains, gazing with ecstasy at the Raffaeles, and lingering
delighted over the sunny landscapes of Claude. To me the world has,
for years, imparted a sense of much enjoyment. Human nature has been
my gallery, with all its variety, its breadth, its effect, its warm
colouring, and its cold tints.

It has been my pride to think that I can recognise every style and every
“handling,” and that no man could impose a copy upon me for an original.
“And can it be possible,” cried I aloud, “that while picture-dealers
revel in fortune--fellows whose traffic goes no higher than coloured
canvass--that I, the connoisseur of humanity, the moral toxicologist--I,
who read men as I read a French comedy--that I should be obliged to deny
myself the generous claret my doctor thinks essential to my system, and
that repose and change of scene he deems of more consequence to me than
mere physic?”

I do not--I will not--I cannot, believe it. No class of persons could
be less spared than pilots. Without their watchful skill the rich argosy
that has entered the chops of the Channel would never anchor in the
Pool. And are there no sand-banks, no sunk rocks, no hidden reefs, no
insidious shoals, in humanity? Are there no treacherous lee-shores, no
dangerous currents, no breakers? It is amidst these and such as these
I purpose to guide my fellow-men, not pretending for a moment to the
possession of any heaven-born instinct, or any inspired insight into
Nature. No; I have toiled and laboured in the cause. The experience that
I mean to offer for sale I have myself bought, occasionally far more
dearly than I intend to dispose of it. _Haud ignarus mali_; I am willing
to tell where I have been shipwrecked, and who stole my clothes. “Don’t
tell me of your successes,” said a great physician to his colleague,
“tell me of your blunders; tell me of the people you’ve killed.” I am
ready to do this, figuratively of course, for they were all ladies; and
more, I will make no attempt to screen myself from the ridicule that may
attach to an absurd situation, nor conceal those experiences which may
subject me to laughter.

You may deem me boastful if I have to set forth my qualifications; but
what can I do? It is only when I have opened my pack and displayed my
wares that you may feel tempted to buy. I am driven, then, to tell you
that I know everybody that is worth knowing in Europe, and some two or
three in America; that I have been everywhere--eaten of everything--seen
everything. There’s not a railway guard from Norway to Naples doesn’t
grin a recognition to me; not a waiter from the Trois Frères to the
Wilde Mann doesn’t trail his napkin to earth as he sees me. Ministers
speak up when I stroll into the Chamber, and _prima donnas_ soar above
the orchestra, and warble in ecstasy as I enter the pit.

I don’t like--I declare to you I do not like--saying these things; it
smacks of vanity. Now for my plan. I purpose to put these my gifts at
your disposal The year before us will doubtless be an eventful one.
What between Danes, Poles, and Italians, there must be a row somewhere.
The French are very eager for war; and the Austrians, as Paddy
says, “are blue-moulded for want of a beatin’.” There will be grand
“battle-pieces” to paint; but, better than these, portraits, groups,
“tableaux de genre”--Teniers bits, too, at the porch of an ale-house,
and warm little interiors, in the style of Mieris. I shall be
instructive at times--very instructive; and whenever I am very nice
and dull, be assured that I’m “full of information, and know my subject
thoroughly.”

As “your own correspondent,” I am free to go wherever I please. I have
left Mrs O’D. in Ireland, and I revel in an Arcadian liberty. These
are all my credentials; and if with their aid I can furnish you any
amusement as to the goings-on of the world and its wife, or the doings
of that amiable couple in politics, books, theatres, or socialities,
I seek for nothing more congenial to my taste, nor more adapted to my
nature, as a bashful Irishman.

If I will not often obtrude, I will not altogether avoid, my personal
experiences; for there is this to be said, that no testimony is worth
much unless we know something of the temper, the tastes, and the
character of the witness. We have all heard, for instance, of the
gentleman who couldn’t laugh at Munden’s drolleries on the stage for
thinking of a debt of ten pounds that the actor owed him: and this same
spirit has a great deal to do--far more than we like to own--with
our estimate of foreign countries. It is so hard to speak well of the
climate where we had that horrible rheumatism, or laud the honesty of a
people when we think of that rascally scoundrel of the Hotel d’Odessa.
For these reasons I mean to come into the witness-box occasionally, and
give you frankly, not merely my opinions, but the way they were come by.
I don’t affect to be superior to prejudices; I have as many of these as
a porcupine has bristles. There’s all the egotism I mean to inflict on
you, unless it comes under the guise of an incident--“a circumstance
which really occurred to the author”--and now, _en route_.

I wonder am I right in thinking that the present race of travelling
English know less about the Continent and foreigners generally than
their predecessors of, say, five-and-twenty years ago. Railroads and
rapid travelling might be one cause; another is, that English is now
more generally spoken by all foreigners than formerly; and it may be
taken as a maxim, that nothing was ever asked or answered in broken
phraseology that was worth the hearing. People with a limited knowledge
of a strange language do not say what they _wish_, but what they _can_;
and there is no name for the helplessness of him who is tied up in his
preter-pluperfect tense. Now we English are not linguists; even our
diplomatists are remarkable for their little proficiency in French.
I’m not sure that we don’t benefit by this in the long-run. “Reden ist
silber, aber Schweigen ist gold”--“Speech is silver, but silence is
gold,” says the German adage; and what a deal of wisdom have I seen
attributed to a man who was posed by his declensions into a listener!
One of the only countrymen of my own who has made a great career lately
in public life is not a little indebted to deafness for it. He was so
unlike those rash, impetuous, impatient Irish, who _would_ interrupt--he
listened, or seemed to listen, and he even smiled at the sarcasms that
he did not hear.

Listening, if we did but know it, sits more gracefully on us than
speech, when that speech involves the denial of genders, and the utter
confusion of all cases and tenses.

Next to holding their tongues, there’s another thing I wish you English
would do abroad, which is, to dress like sane and responsible people.
Men are simply absurd; but the women, with their ill-behaved hoops and
short petticoats, are positively indecent; but the greatest of all
their travelling offences is the proneness to form acquaintance at
_tables-d’hôte_.

It is, first of all, a rank indiscretion for any but men to dine at
these places. They are almost, as a rule, the resort of all that is
disreputable in both sexes. You are sure to eat badly, and in the very
worst of company. My warning is, however, meant for my countrywomen
only: men can, or at least ought, to take care of themselves. As for
myself, don’t be shocked; but I do like doubtful company--that is, I am
immensely interested by all that class of people which the world calls
adventurers, whether the same be railroad speculators, fortune-hunters,
discoverers of inexhaustible mines, or Garibaldians. Your respectable
man, with a pocket-book well stored with his circular notes, and his
passport in order, is as uninteresting as a “Treckshuyt” on a Dutch
canal; but your “martyr to circumstance” is like a smart felucca in a
strong Levanter; and you can watch his course--how he shakes out his
reefs or shortens sail--how he flaunts out his bunting, or hides his
colours--with an unflagging interest I have often thought what a deal of
cleverness--what stores of practical ability--were lost to the world
in these out-at-elbow fellows, who speak every language fluently,
play every game well, sing pleasingly, dance, ride, row, and shoot,
especially with the pistol, to perfection. There they are, with a mass
of qualities that win success! and, what often is harder, win goodwill
in life! There they are, by some unhappy twist in their natures,
preferring the precarious existence of the race-course or the
billiard-table; while others, with about a tithe of their talents, are
high in place and power. I met one of these men to-day, and a strong
specimen of the class, well dressed, well whiskered, very quiet in
manner, almost subdued in tone, but with a slight restlessness in his
eye that was very significant. We found ourselves at table, over
our coffee, when the others had left, and fell into conversation. He
declined my offered cigar with much courtesy, preferring to smoke
little cigarettes of his own making; and really the manufacture was very
adroit, and, in its way, a study of the maker’s habits. We talked over
the usual topics--the bad dinner we had just eaten, the strange-looking
company, the discomfort of the hotel generally, and suchlike.

“Have we not met before?” asked he, after a pause. “If I don’t mistake,
we dined together aboard of Leslie’s yacht, the Fawn.”

I shook my head. “Only knew Sir Francis Leslie by name; never saw the
Fawn.”

The shot failed, but there was no recoil in his gun, and he merely bowed
a half apology.

“A yacht is a mistake,” added he, after another interval. “One is
obliged to take, not the men one wants, but the fellows who can bear the
sea. Leslie, for instance, had such a set that I left him at Messina.
Strange enough, they took us for pirates there.”

“For pirates!”

“Yes. There were three fishing-boats--what they call _Bilancelle_--some
fifteen or sixteen miles out at sea, and when they saw us coming along
with all canvass set, they hauled up their nets and ran with all speed
for shore. Rather absurd, wasn’t it? but, as I told Leslie about his
friends, ‘the blunder wasn’t so great after all; there was only a vowel
between Raffs and Riffs.’”

The disparagement of “questionable people” is such an old device of
adventurers, that I was really surprised such a master of his art as
my present friend would condescend to it. It belonged altogether to an
inferior practitioner; and, indeed, he quickly saw the effect it had
produced upon me, as he said, “Not that I care a straw for the fellows I
associate with; my theory is, a gentleman can know any one.”

Richard was himself again as he uttered this speech, lying well back
in his chair, and sending a thin cloud of incense from the angle of his
mouth.

“What snobs they were in Brummel’s day, for instance, always asking if
this or that man was fit to be known! Why, sir, it was the very fellows
they tabooed were the cream of the set; ‘it was the cards they threw out
were the trumps.’”

The illustration came so pat that he smiled as he perceived by a twinkle
of my eye that I appreciated it.

“My father,” continued he, “knew Brummel well, and he told me that his
grand defect was a want of personal courage--the very quality, of all
others, his career required. His impertinences always broke down when
brought to this test. I remember an instance he mentioned.

“Amongst the company that frequented Carlton House was a certain old
Admiral P------, whom the Prince was fond of inviting, though he did not
possess a single agreeable quality, or any one convivial gift, except a
great power of drinking the very strongest port without its producing
the slightest show of effect upon him.

“One night Brummel, evidently bent on testing the old sailor’s head,
seated himself next him, making it his business to pass the decanters as
briskly as he could. The admiral asked nothing better; filled and drank
bumpers. Not content with this legitimate test, Brummel watched his
opportunity when the admiral’s head was turned, and filled his glass
up to the brim. Four or five times was the trick repeated, and with
success; when at last the admiral, turning quickly around, caught him in
the very act, with the decanter still in his hand. Fixing his eyes
upon him with the fierceness of a tiger, the old man said, ‘Drink it,
sir--drink it!’ and so terrified was Brummel by the manner and the look
that he raised the glass to his lips and drained it, while all at the
table were convulsed with laughter.”

The Brummel school--that is, the primrose-glove adventurers--were a very
different order of men from the present-day fellows, who take a turn
in Circassia or China, or a campaign with Garibaldi; and who, with all
their defects, are men of mettle and pluck and daring. Of these latter I
found my new acquaintance to be one.

He sketched off the early part of the “expedition” graphically enough
for me, showing the disorder and indiscipline natural to a force
where every nationality of Europe was represented, and not by its most
favourable types.

“I had an Irish servant,” said he, “whose blunders would fill a volume.
His prevailing impression, perhaps not ill-founded on the whole, was,
that we all had come out for pillage; and while a certain reserve
withheld most of us from avowing this fact, he spoke of it openly and
freely, expatiating admiringly on Captain This and Major That, who
had done a fine stroke of work in such a store, or such another
country-house. As for his blunders, they never ceased. I was myself the
victim of an absurd one. On the march from Melazzo I got a severe
strain in the chest by my horse falling and rolling over me. No bone
was broken, but I was much bruised, and a considerable extravasation of
blood took place under the skin. Of course I could not move, and I was
provided with a sort of litter, and slung between two mules. The
doctor prescribed a strong dose of laudanum, which set me to sleep, and
despatched Peter back to Melazzo with an order for a certain ointment,
which he was to bring without delay, as the case was imminent; this was
impressed upon him, as the fellow was much given to wandering off, when
sent of a message, after adventures of his own.

“Fully convinced that I was in danger, away went Peter, very sad about
me, but even more distressed lest he should forget what he was sent for.
He kept repeating the words over and over as he went, till they became
by mere repetition something perfectly incomprehensible, so that when
he reached Melazzo nobody could make head or tail of his message. Group
after group gathered about and interrogated him, and at last, by means
of pantomime, discovered that his master was very ill. Signs were made
to inquire if bleeding was required, or if it was a case for amputation,
but he still shook his head in negative. ‘Is he dying?’ asked one,
making a gesture to indicate lying down. Peter assented. ‘Oh, then it
is the _unzione estrema_ he wants!’ ‘That’s it,’ cried Peter,
joyfully--‘unzione it is.’ Two priests were speedily found and
despatched; and I awoke out of a sound sleep under a tree to see three
lighted candles on each side of me, and two priests in full vestments
standing at my feet and gabbling away in a droning sort of voice,
while Peter blubbered and wrung his hands unceasingly. A jolly burst
of laughter from me soon dispelled the whole illusion, and Peter had to
hide himself for shame for a week after.”

“What became of the fellow--was he killed in the campaign?”

“Killed! nothing of the kind; he rose to be an officer, served on
Nullo’s staff, and is at this very hour in Poland, and, if I mistake
not, a major.”

“Men of this stamp make occasionally great careers,” said I, carelessly.

“No, sir,” replied he, very gravely. “To do anything really brilliant,
the adventurer must have been a gentleman at one time or other: the
common fellow stops short at petty larcenies; the man of good blood
always goes in for the mint.”

“There was, then,” asked I, “a good deal of what the Yankees call
‘pocketing’ in that campaign of Garibaldi’s?”

“Less than one might suppose. Have you not occasionally seen men at a
dinner-party pass this and refuse that, waiting for the haunch, or the
pheasant, or the blackcock that they are certain is coming, when all
of a sudden the jellies and ices make their appearance, and the curtain
falls? So it was with many of us; we were all waiting for Rome, and
licking our lips for the Vatican and the Cardinals’ palaces, when in
came the Piedmontese and finished the entertainment. If I meet you here
to-morrow, I can tell you more about this;” and so saying he arose, gave
me an easy nod, and strolled away.

“Who is that most agreeable gentleman who took his coffee with me?”
 asked I of the waiter as I entered the _salle_.

“It’s the Generale Inglese, who served with Garibaldi.”

“And his name?”

“Ah, _per bacco!_ I never heard his name--Garibaldi calls him Giorgio,
and the ladies who call here to take him out to drive now and then
always say Giorgino--not that he’s so very small, for all that.”

My Garibaldian friend failed in his appointment with me this morning.
We were to have gone together to a gallery, or a collection of ancient
armour, or something of this sort, but he probably saw, as your clever
adventurer _will_ see, with half an eye, that I could be no use
to him--that I was a wayfarer like himself on life’s highroad; and
prudently turned round on his side and went to sleep again.

There is no quality so distinctive in this sort of man or woman--for
adventurer has its feminine--as the rapid intuition with which he seizes
on all available people, and throws aside all the unprofitable ones. A
money-changer detecting a light napoleon is nothing to it. What are the
traits by which they guide their judgment--what the tests by which they
try humanity, I do not know, but that they do read a stranger at first
sight is indisputable. That he found out Cornelius O’Dowd wasn’t a
member of the British Cabinet, or a junior partner in Baring’s, was, you
may sneeringly conjecture, no remarkable evidence of acuteness. But why
should he discover the fact--fact it is--that he’d never be one penny
the richer by knowing me, and that intercourse with me was about as
profitable as playing a match at billiards “for the table”?

Say what people will against roguery and cheating, rail as they may at
the rapacity and rascality one meets with, I declare and protest, after
a good deal of experience, that the world is a very poor world to
him who is not the mark of some roguery! When you are too poor to be
cheated, you are too insignificant to be cherished; and the man that is
not worth humbugging isn’t very far from bankruptcy.

It gave me a sort of shock, therefore, when I saw that my friend took
this view of me, and I strolled down moodily enough to the Chamber of
Deputies. Turin is a dreary city for a lounger; even a resident finds
that he must serve a seven years’ apprenticeship before he gets any
footing in its stiff ungenial society--for of all Italians, nothing
socially is less graceful than a Piedmontese. They have none of the
courteous civility, none of the urbane gentleness of the peninsular
Italians. They are cold, reserved, proud, and eminently awkward; not the
less so, perhaps, that their habitual tongue is the very vilest jargon
that ever disfigured a human mouth. Of course this is an efficient
barrier against intercourse with strangers; and though French is spoken
in society, it bears about the same relation to that language at Paris,
as what is called pigeon-English at Hong-Kong does to the tongue in use
in Belgravia.

When I reached the Palazzo Carignan, as the Chamber is called, the
_séance_ was nearly over, and a scene of considerable uproar prevailed.
There had been a somewhat sharp altercation between General Bixio and
the “Left,” and M. Mordini had repeatedly appealed to the President to
make the General recall some offensive epithets he had bestowed on the
“party of movement.” There were the usual cries and gesticulations,
the shouts of derision, the gestures of menace; and, above all, the
tinkle-tinkle of the Presidents bell, which was no more minded than the
summons for a waiter in an Irish inn; and on they went in this hopeless
way, till some one, I don’t know why, cried out, “That’s enough--we are
satisfied;” by which it seemed that somebody had apologised, but for
what, or how, or to whom, I have not the very vaguest conception.

With all their depreciation of France, the Italians are the most
persistent imitators of Frenchmen, and the Chamber was exactly a copy of
the French Chamber in the old Louis Philippe days--all violence, noise,
sensational intensity, and excitement.

I have often heard public speakers mention the difficulty of adjusting
the voice to the size of a room in which they found themselves for the
first time, and the remark occurred to me as figuratively displaying one
of the difficulties of Italian public men. The speakers in reality never
clearly knew how far their words were to carry--whether they spoke to
the Chamber or to the Country.

Is there or is there not a public opinion in Italy? Can the public
speaker direct his words over the heads of his immediate surrounders
to countless thousands beyond them? If he cannot, Parliament is but a
debating-club, with the disadvantage of not being able to select the
subjects for discussion.

The glow of patriotism is never rightly warm, nor is the metal of party
truly malleable, without the strong blast of a public opinion.

The Turin Chamber has no echo in the country; and, so far as I see,
the Italians are far more eager to learn what is said in the French
Parliament than in their own.

I remember an old waiter at the Hibernian Hotel in Dublin, who got a
prize in the lottery and retired into private life, but who never could
hear a bell ring without crying out, “Coming, sir.” The Italians remind
me greatly of him: they have had such a terrible time of flunkeyism,
that they start at every summons, no matter what hand be on the
bell-rope.

To be sure the French did bully them awfully in the last war. Never was
an alliance more dearly paid for. We ourselves are not a very compliant
or conciliating race, but we can remember what it cost us to submit to
French insolence and pretension in the Crimea; and yet we did submit to
it, not always with a good grace, but in some fashion or other.

Here comes my Garibaldino again, and with a proposal to go down to Genoa
and look at the Italian fleet. I don’t suppose that either of us know
much of the subject; and indeed I feel, in my ignorance, that I might be
a senior Lord of the Admiralty--but that is only another reason for
the inquiry. “One is nothing,” says Mr Puff, “if he ain’t critical” So
Heaven help the Italian navy under the conjoint commentaries of myself
and my friend! Meanwhile, and before we start, one word more of Turin.




A FRIEND OF GIOBERTS: BEING A REMINISCENCE OF SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO.

Here I am at the “Feder” in Turin--as dirty a hotel, be it said
passingly, as you’ll find out of Ireland, and seventeen long years it
is since I saw it first. Italy has changed a good deal in the
meanwhile--changed rulers, landmarks, systems, and ideas; not so my
old acquaintance, the Feder! There’s the dirty waiter flourishing his
dirtier napkin; and there’s the long low-ceilinged _table-d’hôte_ room,
stuffy and smoky, and suffocating as ever; and there are the little
grinning coteries of threes and fours round small tables soaking their
rolls in chocolate, and puffing their “Cavours,” with faces as innocent
of soap as they were before the war of the liberation. After all,
perhaps, I’d have no objection if some friend would cry out, “Why, Con,
my boy, you don’t look a day older than when I saw you here in ‘46, I
think! I protest you have not changed in the least. What _elixir vitæ_
have you swallowed, old fellow? Not a wrinkle, nor a grey hair,” and so
on. And yet seventeen years taken out of the working part of a man’s
life--that period that corresponds with the interval between after
breakfast, we’ll say, and an hour before dinner--makes a great gap in
existence; for I did very little as a boy, being not an early riser,
perhaps, and now, in the evening of my days, I have got a theory that a
man ought to dine early and never work after it. Though I’m half
ashamed, on so short an acquaintance with my reader, to mention a
personal incident, I can scarcely avoid--indeed I cannot avoid--relating
a circumstance connected with my first visit to the “Hotel Feder.”

I was newly married when I came abroad for a short wedding-tour. The
world at that time required new-married people to lay in a small stock
of Continental notions, to assist their connubiality and enable them to
wear the yoke with the graceful ease of foreigners; and so Mrs O’D. and
I started with one heart, one passport, and--what’s not so pleasant--one
hundred pounds, to comply with this ordinance. Of course, once over the
border--once in France--it was enough. So we took up our abode in a
very unpretending little hotel of Boulogne-sur-Mer called “La Cour de
Madrid,” where we boarded for the moderate sum of eleven francs fifty
centimes per diem--the odd fifty being saved by my wife not taking the
post-prandial cup of coffee and rum.

There was not much to see at Boulogne, and we soon saw it. For a week or
so Mrs O’D. used to go out muffled like one of the Sultan’s five hundred
wives, protesting that she’d surely be recognised; but she grew out of
the delusion at last, and discovered that our residence at the Cour de
Madrid as effectually screened us from all remark or all inquiry as if
we had taken up our abode in the Catacombs.

Now when one has got a large stock of any commodity on hand--I don’t
care what it is--there’s nothing so provoking as not to find a market.
Mrs O’D.’s investment was bashfulness. She was determined to be the
most timid, startled, modest, and blushing creature that ever wore
orange-flowers; and yet there was not a man, woman, or child in the
whole town that cared to know whether the act for which she left England
was a matrimony or a murder.

“Don’t you hate this place, Cornelius?”--she never called me Con in the
honeymoon. “Isn’t it the dullest, dreariest hole you have ever been in?”

“Not with you.”

“Then don’t yawn when you say so. I abhor it. It’s dirty, it’s vulgar,
it’s dear.”

“No, no. It ain’t dear, my love; don’t say, dear.”

“Billiards perhaps, and filthy cigars, and that greenish
bitter--anisette, I think they call it--are cheap enough, perhaps; but
these are all luxuries I can’t share in.”

Here was the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand that presaged the first
connubial hurricane. A married friend--one of much experience and
long-suffering--had warned me of this, saying, “Don’t fancy you’ll
escape, old fellow; but do the way the Ministry do about Turkey--put the
evil day off; diplomatise, promise, cajole, threaten a bit if needs be,
but postpone;” and, strong with these precepts, I negotiated, as the
phrase is, and, with a dash of reckless liberality that I tremble at now
as I record it, I said, “You’ve only to say where--nothing but where
to, and I’ll take you--up the Rhine, down the Danube, Egypt, the
Cataracts------”

“I don’t want to go so far,” said she, dryly. “Italy will do.”

This was a stunner. I hoped the impossible would have stopped her, but
she caught at the practicable, and foiled me.

“There’s only one objection,” said I, musing.

“And what may that be? Not money, I hope.”

“Heaven forbid--no. It’s the language. We get on here tolerably well,
for the waiter speaks broken English; but in Italy, dearest, English is
unknown.”

“Let us learn Italian, then. My aunt Groves said I had a remarkable
talent for languages.”

I groaned inwardly at this, for the same aunt Groves had vouched for
a sum of seventeen hundred and odd pounds as her niece’s fortune, but
which was so beautifully “tied up,” as they called it, that neither
Chancellor nor Master were ever equal to the task of untying it.

“Of course, dearest, let us learn Italian;” and I thought how I’d crush
a junior counsel some day with a smashing bit of Dante.

We started that same night--travelled on day after day--crossed
Mont Cenis in a snow-storm, and reached the Feder as wayworn and
wretched-looking a pair as ever travelled on an errand of bliss and
beatitude.

“In for a penny” is very Irish philosophy, but I can’t help that; so I
wrote to my brother Peter to sell out another hundred for me out of the
“Threes,” saying “dear Paulina’s health required a little change to a
milder climate” (it was snowing when I wrote, and the thermometer over
the chimneypiece at 9° Reaumur, with windows that wouldn’t shut, and a
marble floor without carpet)--“that the balmy air of Italy” (my teeth
chattered as I set it down) “would soon restore her; and indeed already
she seemed to feel the change.” That she did, for she was crouching over
a pan of charcoal ashes, with a railroad wrapper over her shoulders.

It’s no use going over what is in every one’s experience on first coming
south of the Alps--the daily, hourly difficulty of not believing that
you have taken a wrong road and got into Siberia; and strangest of
all it is to see how little the natives think of it. I declare I often
thought soap must be a great refrigerant, and I wish some chemist would
inquire into the matter.

“Are we ever to begin this blessed language?” said Mrs O’D. to me, after
four days of close arrest--snow still falling and the thermometer going
daily down, down, lower and lower. Now I had made inquiries the day
before from the landlord, and learned that he knew of a most competent
person, not exactly a regular teacher who would insist upon our going
to work in school fashion, but a man of sense and a gentleman--indeed,
a person of rank and title, with whom the world had gone somewhat badly,
and who was at that very moment suffering for his political opinions,
far in advance, as they were, of those of his age.

“He’s a friend of Gioberti,” whispered the landlord in my ear, while his
features became animated with the most intense significance. Now, I
had never so much as heard of Gioberti, but I felt it would be a
deep disgrace to confess it, and so I only exclaimed, with an air of
half-incredulity, “Indeed!”

“As true as I’m here,” replied he. “He usually drops in about noon to
read the ‘Opinione,’ and, if you permit, I’ll send him up to you. His
name is Count Annibale Castrocaro.”

I hastened forthwith to Mrs O’D., to apprise her of the honour that
awaited us; repeating, a little _in extenso_, all that the host had
said, and finishing with the stunning announcement, “and a friend of
Gio-berti.” Mrs O’Dowd never flinched under the shock, and, too proud to
own her ignorance, she pertly remarked, “I don’t think the more of him
for that.”

I felt that she had beat me, and I sat down abashed and humiliated.
Meanwhile Mrs O’D. retired to make some change of dress; but,
reappearing after a while in her smartest morning toilette, and a very
coquettish little cap, with cherry-coloured ribbons, I saw what the word
Count had done at once.

Just as the clock struck twelve, the waiter flung wide the double doors
of our room, and announced, as pompously as though for royalty, “II
Signor Conte di Castrocaro,” and there entered a tall man slightly
stooping in the shoulders, with a profusion of the very blackest hair
on his neck and shoulders, his age anything from thirty-five to
forty-eight, and his dress a shabby blue surtout, buttoned to the throat
and reaching below the knees. He bowed and slid, and bowed again, till
he came opposite where my wife sat, and then, with rather a dramatic
sort of grace, he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. She
reddened a little, but I saw she wasn’t displeased with the air of
homage that accompanied the ceremony, and she begged him to be seated.

I own I was disappointed with the Count, his hair was so greasy, and
his hands so dirty, and his general get-up so uncared for; but Mrs O’D.
talked away with him very pleasantly, and he replied in his own broken
English, making little grimaces and smiles and gestures, and some very
tender glances, do duty where his parts of speech failed him. In fact, I
watched him as a sort of psychological phenomenon, and I arrived at the
conclusion that this friend of Gioberti’s was a very clever artist.

All was speedily settled for the lessons--hour, terms, and mode of
instruction. It was to be entirely conversational, with a little
theme-writing, no getting by heart, no irregular verbs, no declensions,
no genders. I did beg hard for a little grammar, but he wouldn’t hear of
it. It was against his “system,” and so I gave in.

We began the next day, but the Count ignored me altogether, directing
almost all his attentions to Mrs O’D.; and as I had already some small
knowledge of the elementary part of the language, I was just as well
pleased that she should come up, as it were, to my level. From this
cause I often walked off before the lesson was over, and sometimes,
indeed, I skulked it altogether, finding the system, as well as
Gioberti’s friend, to be an unconscionable bore. Mrs O’D., on the
contrary, displayed an industry I never believed her to possess, and
would pass whole evenings over her exercises, which often covered
several sheets of letter-paper.

We had now been about five weeks in Turin, when my brother wrote to
request I would come back as speedily as I could, that a case in which
I held a brief was high in the cause-list, and would be tried very early
in the session. I own I was not sorry at the recall. I detested the
dreary life I was leading. I hated Turin and its bad feeding and bad
theatres, its rough wines and its rougher inhabitants.

“Did you tell the Count we are off on Saturday?” asked I of Mrs O’D.

“Yes,” said she, dryly.

“I suppose he’s inconsolable,” said I, with a sneer.

“He’s very sorry we’re going, if you mean that, Mr O’Dowd; and so am I
too.”

“Well, so am not I; and you may call me a Dutchman if you catch me here
again.”

“The Count hopes you will permit him to see you. He asked this morning
whether he might call on you about four o’clock.”

“Yes, I’ll see him with sincere pleasure for once,” I cried; “since it
is to say good-bye to him.”

I was in my dressing-room, packing up for the journey, when the Count
was announced and shown in. “Excuse me, Count,” said I, “for receiving
you so informally, but I have a hasty summons to call me back to
England, and no time to spare.”

“I will, notwithstanding, ask you for some of that time, all precious as
it is,” said he in French, and with a serious gravity that I had never
observed in him before.

“Well, sir,” said I, stiffly; “I am at your orders.”

It is now seventeen long years since that interview, and I am free to
own that I have not even yet attained to sufficient calm and temper
to relate what took place. I can but give the substance of our
conversation. It is not over-pleasant to dwell on, but it was to this
purport:--The Count had come to inform me that, without any intention or
endeavour on his part, he had gained Mrs O’Dowd’s affections and won her
heart! Yes, much-valued reader, he made this declaration to me, sitting
opposite to me at the fire, as coolly and unconcernedly as if he was
apologising for having carried off my umbrella by mistake. It is true,
he was most circumstantial in showing that all the ardour was on one
side, and that he, throughout the whole adventure, conducted himself
as became a Gran’ Galantuomo, and the friend of Gioberti, whatever that
might mean.

My amazement--I might almost call it my stupefaction--at the
unparalleled impudence of the man, so overcame me, that I listened to
him without an effort at interruption.

“I have come to you, therefore, to-day,” said he, “to give up her
letters.”

“Her letters!” exclaimed I; “and she has written to you!”

“Twenty-three times in all,” said he, calmly, as he drew a large black
pocket-book from his breast, and took out a considerable roll of papers.
“The earlier ones are less interesting,” said he, turning them over. “It
is about here, No. 14, that they begin to develop feeling. You see she
commences to call me ‘Caro Animale’--she meant to say Annibale, but,
poor dear! she mistook. No. 15 is stronger--‘Animale Mio’--the same
error; and here, in No. 17, she begins, ‘Diletto del mio cuore, quando
non ti vedo, non ti sento, il cielo stesso, non mi sorride piu. Il mio
Tiranno’--that was _you_.”

I caught hold of the poker with a convulsive grasp, but quick as thought
he bounded back behind the table, and drew out a pistol, and cocked it.
I saw that Gioberti’s friend had his wits about him, and resumed the
conversation by remarking that the documents he had shown me were not in
my wife’s handwriting.

“Very true,” said he; “these, as you will perceive by the official
stamp, are sworn copies, duly attested at the Prefettura--the originals
are safe.”

“And with what object,” asked I, gasping--“safe for what?”

“For you, lllustrissimo,” said he, bowing, “when you pay me two thousand
francs for them.”

“I’ll knock your brains out first,” said I, with another clutch at the
poker, but the muzzle of the pistol was now directly in front of me.

“I am moderate in my demands, signor,” said he, quietly; “there are men
in my position would ask you twenty thousand; but I am a galantuomo----”

“And the friend of Gioberti,” added I, with a sneer.

“Precisely so,” said he, bowing with much grace.

I will not weary you, dear reader, with my struggles--conflicts that
almost cost me a seizure on the brain--but hasten to the result. I beat
down the noble Count’s demand to one-half and for a thousand francs
I possessed myself of the fatal originals, written unquestionably and
indisputably by my wife’s hand; and then, giving the Count a final piece
of advice, never to let me see more of him, I hurried off to Mrs O’Dowd.

She was out paying some bills, and only arrived a few minutes before
dinner-hour.

“I want you, madam, for a moment here,” said I, with something of
Othello, in the last act, in my voice and demeanour.

“I suppose I can take off my bonnet and shawl first, Mr O’Dowd,” said
she, snappishly.

“No, madam; you may probably find that you’ll need them both at the end
of our interview.”

“What do you mean, sir?” asked she, haughtily.

“This is no time for grand airs or mock dignity, madam,” said I, with
the tone of the avenging angel. “Do you know these? are these in your
hand? Deny it if you can.”

“Why should I deny it? Of course they’re mine.”

“And you wrote this, and this, and this?” cried I, almost in a scream,
as I shook forth one after another of the letters.

“Don’t you know I did?” said she, as hotly; “and nothing beyond a venial
mistake in one of them!”

“A what, woman? a what?”

“A mere slip of the pen, sir. You know very well how I used to sit up
half the night at my exercises?”

“Exercises!”

“Well, themes, if you like better; the Count made me make clean copies
of them, with all his corrections, and send them to him every day--here
are the rough ones;” and she opened a drawer filled with a mass of
papers all scrawled over and blotted. “And now, sir, once more, what do
you mean?”

I did not wait to answer her, but rushed down to the landlord. “Where
does that Count Castrocaro live?” I asked.

“Nowhere in particular, I believe, sir; and for the present he has left
Turin--started for Genoa by the diligence five minutes ago. He’s a Gran’
Galantuomo, sir,” added he, as I stood stupefied.

“I am aware of that,” said I, as I crept back to my room to finish my
packing.

“Did you settle with the Count?” asked my wife at the door.

“Yes,” said I, with my head buried in my trunk.

“And he was perfectly satisfied?”

“Of course he was--he has every reason to be so.”

“I am glad of it,” said she, moving away--“he had a deal of trouble with
those themes of mine. No one knows what they cost him.” I could have
told what they cost _me_; but I never did, till the present moment.

I need not say with what an appetite I dined on that day, nor with what
abject humility I behaved to my wife, nor how I skulked down in the
evening to the landlord to apologise for not being able to pay the bill
before I left, an unexpected demand having left me short of cash.
All these, seventeen years ago as they are, have not yet lost their
bitterness, nor have I yet arrived at the time when I can think with
composure of this friend of Gioberti.

Admiral Dalrymple tells us, amongst his experiences as a farmer, that he
gave twenty pounds for a dung-hill, “and he’d give ten more to any one
who’d tell him what to do with it.” I strongly suspect this is pretty
much the case with the Italians as regards their fleet. There it is--at
least, there is the beginning of it; and when it shall be complete,
where is it to go? what is it to protect? whom to attack?

The very last thing Italians have in their minds is a war with England.
If we have not done them any great or efficient service, we have always
spoken civilly of them, and bade them a God-speed. But, besides a
certain goodwill that they feel for us, they entertain--as a nation with
a very extended and ill-protected coast-line ought--a considerable dread
of a maritime power that could close every port they possess, and lay
some very important towns in ashes.

Now, it is exactly by the possession of a fleet that, in any future
war between England and France, these people may be obliged to ally
themselves to France. The French will want them in the Mediterranean,
and they cannot refuse when called on.

Count Cavour always kept telling our Foreign Office, “A strong Italy is
the best thing in the world for you. A strong Italy is the surest of all
barriers against France.” There may be some truth in the assertion if
Italy could spring at once--Minerva fashion--all armed and ready for
combat, and stand out as a first-rate power in Europe; but to do this
requires years of preparation, long years too; and it is precisely
in these years of interval that France can become all-dominant in
Italy--the master, and the not very merciful master, of her destinies
in everything. France has the guardianship of Italy--with this addition,
that she can make the minority last as long as she pleases.

Perhaps my Garibaldian companion has impregnated me with an unreasonable
amount of anti-French susceptibility, for certainly he abuses our dear
allies with a zeal and a gusto that does one’s heart good to listen to;
and I do feel like that honest Bull, commemorated by Mathews, that “I
hate prejudice--I hate the French.” So it is: these revolutionists,
these levellers, these men of the people, are never weary of reviling
the French Emperor for being a _parvenu_. Human inconsistency cannot go
much farther than this. Not but I perfectly agree with my Garibaldian,
that we have all agreed to take the most absurdly exaggerated estimate
of the Emperor’s ability. Except in some attempts, and not always
successful attempts, to carry out the policy and plans of the first
Empire, there is really nothing that deserves the name of statesmanship
in his career. Wherever he has ventured on a policy, and accompanied it
by a prediction, it has been a failure. Witness the proud declaration
of Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic, with its corroboration in the
Treaty of Villafranca! The Emperor, in his policy, resembles one of
those whist-players who never plan a game, but play trick by trick, and
rather hope to win by discovering a revoke than from any honest success
of their own hand. It is all the sharp practice of statecraft that
he employs: nor has he many resources in cunning. The same dodge that
served him in the Crimea he revived at Villafranca. It is always the
same ace he has in his sleeve!

The most ardent Imperialist will not pretend to say that he knows his
road out of rome or Mexico, or even Madagascar. For small intrigue,
short speeches to deputations, and mock stag-hunts, he has not his
superior anywhere. And now, here we are in Genoa, at the Hotel Feder,
where poor O’Connell died, and there’s no fleet, not a frigate, in the
port.

“Where are they?”

“At Spezia.”

“Where is Spezia?”

The landlord, to whom this question is propounded, takes out of a
pigeon-hole of his desk a large map and unfolds it, saying, proudly,
“There, sir, that is Spezia--a harbour that could hold Portsmouth,
and Plymouth, and Brest, and Cherbourg “--I’m not sure he didn’t say
Calais--“and yet have room for our Italian fleet, which, in two years’
time, will be one of the first in Europe.”

“The ships are building, I suppose?” said I.

“They are.”

“And where?”

“In America, at Toulon, and in England.”

“None in Italy?”

“Pardon me; there is a corvette on the stocks at Leghorn, and they are
repairing a boiler at Genoa. Ah! Signor John Bull, take care; we have
iron and coal mines, we have oak and hemp, and tallow and tar. There
was a winged lion once that swept the seas before people sang ‘Rule
Britannia.’ History is going to repeat itself.”

“Let me be called at eight to-morrow morning, and my coffee be ready by
nine.”

“And we shall want a vetturino for Spezia,” added my Garibaldian; “let
him be here by eleven.”




GARIBALDI’S WORSHIPPERS.

The road from Genoa to Spezia is one of the most beautiful in Europe. As
the Apennines descend to the sea they form innumerable little bays and
creeks, alongside of which the road winds--now coasting the very shore,
now soaring aloft on high-perched cliffs, and looking down into deep
dells, or to the waving tops of tall pine-trees. Seaward, it is a
succession of yellow-stranded bays, land-locked and narrow; and on the
land side are innumerable valleys, some waving with horse-chestnut and
olive, and others stern and rock-bound, but varying in colour from the
bluish-grey of marble to every shade of porphyry.

For several miles after we left Genoa, the road presented a succession
of handsome villas, which, neglected and uncared for, and in most
part untenanted, were yet so characteristically Italian in all their
vast-ness--their massive style and spacious plan--as to be great
ornaments of the scenery. Their gardens, too--such glorious wildernesses
of rich profusion--where the fig and the oleander, the vine and the
orange, tangle and intertwine--and cactuses, that would form the wonder
of our conservatories, are trained into hedgerows to protect cabbages.
My companion pointed out to me one of these villas on a little jutting
promontory of rock, with a narrow bay on one side, almost hidden by the
overhanging chestnut-trees. “That,” said he, “is the Villa Spinola. It
was from there, after a supper with his friend Vecchi, that Garibaldi
sailed on his expedition to Marsala. A sort of decent secrecy was
maintained as to the departure of the expedition; but the cheers of
those on shore, as the boats pulled off, told that the brave buccaneers
carried with them the heartfelt good wishes of their countrymen.”
 Wandering on in his talk from the campaign of Sicily and Calabria,
my companion spoke of the last wild freak of Garibaldi and the day of
Aspromonte, and finally of the hero’s imprisonment at Varignano, in the
Gulf of Spezia.

It appeared from his account that the poor wounded sufferer would have
fared very ill, had it not been for the provident kindness and care of
his friends in England, who supplied him with everything he could want
and a great deal he could by no possibility make use of. Wine of
every kind, for instance, was largely sent to one who was a confirmed
water-drinker, and who, except when obliged by the impure state of the
water, never ventured to taste wine. If now and then the zealous anxiety
to be of service had its ludicrous side--and packages arrived of which
all the ingenuity of the General’s followers failed to detect what the
meaning might be--there was something very noble and very touching in
this spontaneous sympathy of a whole people, and so Garibaldi felt it.

The personal homage of the admirers--the worshippers they might be
called--was, however, an infliction that often pushed the patience of
Garibaldi’s followers to its limit, and would have overcome the gentle
forbearance of any other living creature than Garibaldi himself. They
came in shoals. Steamboats and diligences were crammed with them, and
the boatmen of Spezia plied as thriving a trade that summer as though
Garibaldi were a saint, at whose shrine the devout of all Europe came to
worship. In vain obstacles were multiplied and difficulties to entrance
invented. In vain it was declared that only a certain number of visitors
were daily admitted, and that the number was already complete. In vain
the doctors announced that the General’s condition was prejudiced, and
his feverish state increased, by these continual invasions. Each new
arrival was sure to imagine that there was something special or peculiar
in his case to make him an exception to any rule of exclusion.

“I knew Garibaldi in Monte Video. You have only to tell him it’s
Tomkins; he’ll be overjoyed to see me.” “I travelled with him from
Manchester to Bridgeport; he’ll remember me when he sees me; I lent him
a wrapper in the train.” “I knew his son Menotti when at school.” “I was
in New York when Garibaldi was a chandler, and I was always asking
for his candles;” such and suchlike were the claims which would not
be denied. At last the infliction became insupportable. Some nights
of unusual pain and suffering required that every precaution against
excitement should be taken, and measures were accordingly concerted how
visitors should be totally excluded. There was this difficulty in the
matter, that it might fall at this precise moment some person of real
consequence might have, or some one whose presence Garibaldi would
really have been well pleased to enjoy. All these considerations were,
however, postponed to the patient’s safety, and an order was sent to
the several hotels where strangers usually stopped to announce that
Garibaldi could not be seen.

“There is a story,” said my companion, “which I have heard more than
once of this period, but for whose authenticity I will certainly not
vouch. _Se non vero e’ ben trovato_, as regards the circumstance. It
was said that a party of English ladies had arrived at the chief hotel,
having come as a deputation from some heaven-knows-what association in
England, to see the General, and make their own report on his health,
his appearance, and what they deemed his prospect of perfect recovery.
They had come a very long journey, endured a considerable share of
fatigues and certain police attentions, which are not exactly what
are called amenities. They had come, besides, on an errand which might
warrant a degree of insistance even were they--which they were not--of
an order that patiently puts up with denial. When their demand for
admission was replied to by a reference to the general order excluding
all visitors, they indignantly refused to be classed in such a category.
They were not idle tourists, or sensation-hunting travellers. They were
a deputation! They came from the Associated Brothers and Sisters
of Freedom--from the Branch Committee of the Ear of Crying
Nationalities--they were not to be sent away in this light and
thoughtless manner.

“The correspondence was animated. It lasted the whole day, and the
last-sent epistle of the ladies bore the date of half-past eleven at
night. This was a document of startling import; for, after expressing,
and not always in most measured phrase, the indignant disappointment of
the writers, it went on to throw out, but in a cloud-like misty sort
of way, the terrible consequences that might ensue when they returned to
England with the story of their rejection.

“Perhaps this was a mere chance shot; at all events, it decided the
battle. The Garibaldians read it as a declaration of strict blockade;
and that, from the hour of these ladies’ arrival in England, all
supplies would be stopped. Now, as it happened that, in by far the
greater number of cases, the articles sent out found their way to the
suite of Garibaldi, not to the General himself, and that cambric shirts
and choice hosiery, silk vests, and fur-lined slippers, became the
ordinary wear of people to whom such luxuries were not known even by
description, it was no mean menace that seemed to declare all this was
to have an end.

“One used to sleep in a rich fur dressing-gown; another took a bottle of
Arundel’s port at his breakfast; a third was habituating himself to that
English liqueur called ‘Punch sauce,’ and so on; and they very reasonably
disliked coming back to the dietary supplied by Victor Emmanuel.

“It was in this critical emergency that an inventive genius developed
itself. There was amongst the suite of Garibaldi an old surgeon, Eipari,
one of the most faithful and attached of all his followers, and who bore
that amount of resemblance to Garibaldi which could be imparted by hair,
mustache, and beard of the same yellowish-red colour, and eyes somewhat
closely set. To put the doctor in bed, and make him personate the
General, was the plan--a plan which, as it was meant to save his chief
some annoyance, he would have acceded to were it to cost him far more
than was now intended.

“To the half-darkened room, therefore, where Eipari lay dressed in
his habitual red shirt, propped up by pillows, the deputation was
introduced. The sight of the hero was, however, too much for them. One
dropped, Madonna-wise, with hands clasped across her bosom, at the foot
of his bed; another fainted as she passed the threshold; a third gained
the bedside to grasp his hand, and sank down in an ecstasy of devotion
to water it with her tears; while the strong-minded woman of the party
took out her scissors and cut four several locks off that dear and noble
head. They sobbed over him--they blubbered over him--they compared him
with his photograph, and declared he was libelled--they showered cards
over him to get his autograph; and when, at length, by persuasion,
not unassisted by mild violence, they were induced to withdraw, they
declared that, for those few moments of ecstasy, they’d have willingly
made a pilgrimage to Mecca.

“It is said,” continued my informant, “that Ripari never could be
induced to give another representation; and that he declared the
luxuries that came from England were dear at the cost of being caressed
by a deputation of sympathisers.

“But to Garibaldi himself, the sympathy and the sympathisers went on to
the last; and kind wishes and winter-clothing still find their way, with
occasionally very tiresome visitors, to the lone rock at Caprera.”




SOMETHING ABOUT SOLFERINO AND SHIPS.

Our host of the Feder was not wrong. There was not a word of
exaggeration in what he said of Spezia. It could contain all the
harbours of France and England, and have room for all the fleets of
Europe besides. About seven miles in depth, and varying in width from
two to three and a half, it is fissured on every side by beautiful
little bays, with deep water everywhere, and not a sunk rock, or shoal,
or a bar, throughout the whole extent. Even the sea-opening of the Gulf
has its protection by the long coast-line of Tuscany, stretching away
to the southward and eastward, so that the security is perfect, and a
vessel once anchored within the headlands between Lerici and Palmaria is
as safe as in dock.

The first idea of making a great arsenal and naval depot of Spezia came
from the Great Emperor. It is said that he was not more than one day
there, but in that time he planned the fort which bears his name, and
showed how the port could be rendered all but impregnable. Cavour took
up the notion, and pursued it with all his wonted energy and activity
during the last three or four years of his life. He carried through the
Chamber his project, and obtained a vote for upwards of two millions
sterling; but his death, which occurred soon after, was a serious blow
to the undertaking; and, like most of the political legacies of the
great statesman, the arsenal of Spezia fell into the hands of weak
executors.

The first great blunder committed was to accord the chief contract to
a bubble company, who sold it, to be again resold; so that it is said
something like fifteen changes of proprietary occurred before the first
spadeful of earth was turned.

The inordinate jealousy Italians have of foreigners, and their fear lest
they should “utilise” Italy, and carry away all her wealth with them,
has been the source of innumerable mistakes. From this, and their
own ignorance of marine engineering, Spezia has already, without the
slightest evidence of a commencement, swallowed up above eight millions
of francs--the only palpable results being the disfigurement of a very
beautiful road, and the bankruptcy of some half-dozen contractors.

There is nothing of which one hears more, than of the readiness and
facility with which an Italian learns a new art or a new trade, adapts
himself to the use of new tools, and acquires a dexterity in the
management of new machinery.

Every newly-come English engineer was struck with this, and expressed
freely his anticipations of what so gifted a people might become.
After a while, however, if questioned, he would confess himself
disappointed--that after the first extraordinary show of intelligence
no progress was made--that they seemed marvellous in the initiative, but
did nothing after. They speedily grew weary of whatever they could do or
say, no matter in what fashion, and impatiently desired to try something
new. The John Bull contentedness to attain perfection in some one
branch, and never ask to go beyond it, was a sentiment they could not
understand. Every one, in fact, would have liked to do everything, and,
as a consequence, do it exceedingly ill.

Assuredly the Count Cavour was the political Marquis de Carabas of
Italy. Everything you see was his! No other head seemed to contrive, no
other eye to see, nor ear to hear. These railroads--as much for military
movements as passenger traffic--this colossal harbour, even to the two
iron-clads that lie there at anchor--were all of his designing. They
are ugly-looking craft, and have a look of pontoons rather than ships
of war; but they are strong, and have a low draught of water, and were
intended especially for the attack of Venice, just when the Emperor
pulled up short at Villafranca. It is not generally known, I believe,
but I can vouch for the fact, that so terrified were the Austrians on
receiving at Venice the disastrous news of Solferino, that three of the
largest steamers of the Austrian Lloyd’s Company were brought up, and
sunk within twelve hours after the battle. So hurriedly was the whole
done that no time was given to remove the steward’s stores, and the
vessels went down as they stood!

This reminds me of a little incident, for whose exact truth I can
guarantee. On the day of the battle of Solferino, the Austrian Envoy
at Rome dined with the Cardinal Antonelli. It was a very joyous little
dinner, each in the highest spirits--satisfied with the present, and
full of hope for the future. The telegram which arrived at mid-day told
that the troops were in motion, and that the artillery fire had already
opened. The position was a noble one--the army full of spirit, and all
confident that before the sun should set the tide of victory would have
turned, and the white legions of the Danube be in hot pursuit of their
flying enemy. Indeed, the Envoy came to dinner fortified with a mass of
letters from men high in command, all of which assumed as indisputable
that the French must be beaten. Of the Italians they never spoke at all.

As the two friends sat over the dessert, they discussed what at that
precise moment might be going on over the battle-field. Was the conflict
still continuing? Had the French reserves been brought up? Had they,
too, been thrown back, beaten and disordered? and where was the fourth
corps under the Prince Napoleon? They were forty thousand strong--could
they have arrived in time from the Po? All these casualties, and many
others, did they talk over, but never once launching a doubt as to the
issue, or ever dreaming that the day was not to reverse all the late
past, and bring back the Austrians in triumph to Milan.

As they sat, the Prefect of Police was announced and introduced. He
came with the list of the persons who were to be arrested and sent to
prison--they were one hundred and eighteen, some of them among the first
families of Rome--so soon as certain tidings of the victory arrived, and
the game of reaction might be safe to begin.

“No news yet, Signor Prefetto! come back at ten,” said the Cardinal

At ten he presented himself once more. The Cardinal and his friend were
taking coffee, but less joyous, it seemed, than before. At least they
looked anxious for news, and started at every noise in the street that
might announce new-come tidings. “We have heard nothing since you were
here,” said the Cardinal. “His Excellency thinks that, at a moment
of immense exigency, they may not have immediately bethought them of
sending off a despatch.”

“There can be no doubt what the news will be when it comes,” said the
Envoy, “and I’d say, make the arrests at once.”

“I don’t know; I’m not sure. I think I’d rather counsel a little more
patience,” said the Cardinal. “What if you were to come back at, let us
say, midnight.” The Prefect bowed, and withdrew.

At midnight it was the same scene, only that the actors were more
agitated; the Envoy, at least, worked up to a degree of impatience that
bordered on fever; for while he persisted in declaring that the result
was certain, he continued to censure, in very-severe terms, the culpable
carelessness of those charged with the transmission of news. “Ah!” cried
he, “there it comes at last!” and a loud summons at the bell resounded
through the house.

“A telegram, Eminence,” said the servant, entering with the despatch.
The Envoy tore it open: there were but two words,--“_Sanglante
déroute_.”

The Cardinal took the paper from the hands of the overwhelmed and
panic-struck minister, and read it. He stood for a few seconds gazing on
the words, not a line or lineament in his face betraying the slightest
emotion; then, turning to the Envoy, he said, “Bon soir; allons dormir;”
 and moved away with his usual quick little step, and retired.

And all this time I have been forgetting the Italian fleet, which lies
yonder beneath me. The Garibaldi, that they took from the Neapolitans;
the Duca di Genova, the Maria Adelaide, and the Regina are there, all
screw-propellers of fifty guns each; the Etna, a steam-corvette; and
some six or seven old sailing craft, used as school ships; and, lastly,
the two cuirassée gunboats, Formidabile and Terribile, and which, with a
jealousy imitated from the French, no one is admitted on board of.
They are provided with “rams” under the water-line, and have a strange
apparatus by which about one-third of the deck towards the bow can be
raised, like the lid of a snuff-box, leaving the forepart of the ship
almost on a level with the water. Under what circumstances, and how,
this provision is to be made available, I have not the very vaguest
conception.

These vessels were never intended as sea-going ships; and the batteries
are an exaggeration of the mistake in the Gloire, for even with the
slightest sea the ports must be closed. Besides this defect, they roll
abominably, and with a full head of steam on they cannot accomplish
seven knots.

Turning from the ships to the harbour, I could not help thinking of
Sydney Smith’s remark on the Reform Club, “I prefer your room to your
company;” for, after all, what a sorry stud it is for such a magnificent
stable! It is but a beginning, you will say. True enough, and so is
everything just now here; but, except the Genoese, the Italians have few
real sailors. There are no deep-sea fisheries, and the small craft which
creep along close to shore are not the nurseries of seamen. The world,
however, has resolved, by a large vote, to be hopeful about Italy; and,
of course, she will have a fleet, as she will have all the trade of the
Levant, immensely productive mines, and vast regions of cotton. “What
for no?” as Meg Dodds says; but I can’t help thinking there are no
people in Europe so much alike as the Italians and the Irish; and I ask
myself, How is it that every one is so sanguine about the one, and
so hopeless about the other? Why do we hear of the capacity and the
intelligence of the former, and only of the latter what pertains to
their ignorance and their sloth? Oh! unjust generation of men! have
not my poor countrymen all the qualities you extol in these same
Peninsulars, plus a few others not to be disparaged?




THE STRANGER AT THE CROCE DI MALTA.

At the Croce di Malta, where we stopped--the Odessa, we heard,
was atrociously bad--we met a somewhat depressed countryman, whose
familiarity with place and people was indicated by several little
traits. He rebuked the waiter for the salad oil, and was speedily
supplied with better; he remonstrated about the wine, and a superior
“cru” was served the day following. The book of the arrivals, too, was
brought to him each day as he sat down to table, and he grunted out,
I remember, in no very complimentary fashion as he read our names,
“Nobodies.”

My Garibaldian friend had gone over to Massa, so that I found myself
alone with this gentleman on the night of my arrival; for, when the
company of the _table-d’hôte_ withdrew, he and I were discovered, as the
stage-people say, seated opposite to each other at the fire.

It blew hard without; the sea beat loudly on the shingly shore, and
even sent some drifts of spray against the windows; while within doors
a cheerful wood-fire blazed on the ample hearth, and the low-ceilinged
room did not look a whit the worse that it suggested snugness instead
of splendour. I had got my cup of coffee and my cognac on a little table
beside me; and while I filled the bowl of my pipe, I bethought me how
cheap and come-at-able are often the materials of our comfort, if one
had but the prudence which ignores all display. My companion, apparently
otherwise occupied in thought, sat gazing moodily at the fire, and to
all seeming unaware of my presence.

“Will my smoking annoy you, sir?” asked I, as I was ready to begin.

“No,” said he, without looking up. “I’d like to know where one could go
to live nowadays if it did.”

“Very true,” said I; “the practice is almost universal”

“So is child-murder, so is profane swearing, so is wearing a beard, and
poisoning by strychnine.”

I was somewhat struck by his enumeration of modern atrocities, and I
said, in a tone intended to invite converse, “You are no admirer, then,
of what some are fain to call progress?”

He started, and, turning a fierce sharp glance on me, said, “I’d rather
you’d touch me with that hot poker there, sir, than hurl that hateful
word at my ears. If there’s a thing I hate the most, it’s what cant--a
vile modern slang--calls ‘Progress.’ You’re just in the spot at this
moment to mark one of its high successes. Do you know Spezia?” “Not in
the least; never was here before.” “Well, sir, I have known it, I’ll not
stop to count how many years; but I knew it when that spot yonder, where
you see that vile tall chimney, with its tail of murky smoke, was a
beautiful little villa, all overgrown with fig and olive trees. Where
you perceive that red glare--the flame of a smelting furnace--there was
an orangery. I ought to know the spot well. There, where a summerhouse
stood, on that rocky point, they have got a crane and a windlass. Now,
turn to this other side. The road you saw to-day, crossed with four
main lines, cut up, almost impassable between mud, rubbish, and fallen
timber, with swampy excavations on one side and brick-fields on the
other, led--ay, and not four years ago--along the margin of the sea,
with a forest of chestnuts on the other side, two lines of acacias
forming a shade along it, so that in the mid-day of an Italian July you
might walk it in delicious shadow. In the Gulf itself the whole scene
was mirrored, and not a headland, nor rock, nor cliff, that was not
pictured below. It was, in a word, a little paradise; nor were the
people all unworthy of their lovely birthplace. They were a quiet,
civil, obliging, simple-minded set--if not inviting strangers to settle
amongst them, never rude or repelling to them; equitable in dealings,
and strange to all disturbance or outrage. What they are now is no more
easy to say than what a rivulet is when a torrent has carried away its
banks and swept its bed. Two thousand navvies, the outsweepings of jails
and the galleys, have come down to the works; a horde of contractors,
sub-contractors, with the several staffs of clerks, inspectors, and
suchlike, have settled on the spot, ravaging its beauty, uprooting its
repose, vulgarising its simple rusticity, and converting the very gem
of the Mediterranean into a dreary swamp--a vast amphitheatre, where
liberated felons, robbing contractors, foul miasma, centrifugal pumps,
and tertian fevers, fight all day for the mastery. And for what?--for
what? To fill the pockets of knavish ministers and thieving
officials--to make an arsenal that will never be finished, for a fleet
that will never be built.” My companion, it is needless to say, was no
optimist; but the strange point was, that while he was unsparing of his
censure on Cavour and the “Piedmontese party,” he was no apologist for
the old state of things in Italy. So far from it, that he launched out
freely in attack of Papal bigotry, superstition, and corruption, and
freely corroborated our own Premier’s assertions, by calling the Pope’s
the “worst government in Europe.” In fact, he showed very clearly that
the smaller states of Italy were well or ill administered in the direct
ratio that they admitted or rejected Papal interference,--Modena being
the worst, and Tuscany the best of them.

Though he certainly knew his subject so far as details went--for he not
merely knew Italy well in its several provinces, but he understood the
characters and tempers of the leading Italians--yet, with all this, I
could not help asking him, If he was not satisfied with the old Italy,
and yet did not like the new, what he did wish for?

“I have my theory on that subject, sir,” said he; “nor am I the less
enamoured of it that I never yet met the man I could induce to adopt
it.”

“It is no worse than the fate of all discoverers, I suppose,” said I;
“Columbus saw land two whole days before his followers.”

“Columbus was a humbug, sir, and no more discovered America than you
did.”

I was so afraid of a digression here that I stammered out a partial
concurrence, and asked for some account of his project for Italy.

“I’d unite her to Greece, sir. These people, with the exception of a
small circle around Rome, are not Latins--they are Greeks. I’d bring
them back to the parent stock, who are the only people in Europe with
craft and subtlety to rule them. Take my word for it, sir, they’d not
cheat the ‘Hellenes’ as they do the French and the English; and as the
only true way to reform a nation is to make vice unprofitable, I’d unite
them to a race that could outrogue and outwit them on every hand. What
is it, I ask you, makes of the sluggish, indolent, careless Irishman,
the prudent, hard-working, prosperous fellow you see him in the States?
Simply the fact, that the craft by which he outwitted John Bull no
longer serves him. The Yankee is too shrewd to be jockeyed by it, and
Paddy must use his hands instead of his head. The same would happen with
the Italian. Give him a Greek master, and you’ll see what he’ll become.”

“But the Greeks, after all,” said I, “do not present such a splendid
example of order and prosperity. They are little better than brigands.”

“And don’t you see why?” broke he in. “Have you ever looked into a
gambling-house when the company had no ‘pigeon,’ and were obliged to
play against each other. They have lost all decency--all the semblance
of good manners and decorum. Whatever little politeness they had put
on to impose upon the outsider was gone, and there they were in all the
naked atrocity of their bad natures. It is thus you see the Greeks. You
have dropped in upon them unfairly; you have invaded a privacy they had
hoped might be respected. Give them a nation to cheat, however; let
the pigeon be introduced, and you’ll not see a better bred and a more
courtly people in Europe.”

That they had great social qualities he proceeded to show from a number
of examples. They were, in fact, in the world of long ago what the
French are to our own day, and there was no reason to suppose that
the race had lost its old characteristics. According to my companion’s
theory, Force had only its brief interval of domination anywhere; the
superior intelligence was sure to gain the upper hand at last; and
we, in our opposition to this law, were supply retarding an inevitable
tendency of nature--protracting the fulfilment of what we could not
prevent.

I got him back from these speculations to speak of himself, and he told
me some experiences which will, perhaps, account for the displeasure
with which he regards the changed fortunes of Spezia. I shall give
his narrative as nearly as I can in his own words, and in a chapter to
itself.




THE STRANGE MAN’S SORROW.

“When I first knew Spezia, it was a very charming spot to pass the
summer in. The English had not found it out A bottle of Harvey sauce or
a copy of ‘Galignani’ had never been seen here; and the morning meal,
which now figures in my bill as ‘Dejeuner complet--two francs.’ was then
called ‘Coffee,’ and priced twopence. I used to pass my day in a small
sail-boat, and in my evenings I played halfpenny whist with the judge
and the commander of the forces and a retired envoy, who, out of a
polite attention to me as a stranger, agreed to play such high stakes
during my sojourn at the Baths.

“They were excellent people, of unblemished character, and a politeness
I have rarely seen equalled. Nobody could sneeze without the whole
company rising to wish him a long and prosperous life, or a male heir
to his name; and as for turning the trump card without a smile and a bow
all round to the party, it was a thing unheard of.

“I thought if I could only secure a spot to live in in such an Arcadia,
it would be charming, but this was a great difficulty. No one had any
accommodation more than he wanted for himself. The very isolation that
gave the place its charm excluded all speculation, and not a house was
to be had. In my voyagings, however, around the Gulf, I landed one
day at a little inlet, surrounded with high lands, and too small to
be called a bay, and there, to my intense astonishment, I discovered a
small villa. It looked exactly like the houses one sees in a toy-shop,
and where you take off the roof to peep in and see how neatly the stairs
are made and the rooms divided; but there was a large garden at one
side and an orangery at the other, and it all looked the neatest and
prettiest little thing one ever saw off the boards of a minor theatre. I
drew my boat on shore and strolled into the garden, but saw no one, not
even a dog. There was a deep well with a draw-bucket, and I filled my
gourd with ice-cold water; and then plucking a ripe orange that had just
given me a bob in the eye, I sat down to eat it. While I was engaged, I
heard a wicket open and shut, and saw an old man, very shabbily dressed,
and with a mushroom straw hat, coming towards me. Before I could make
excuses for my intrusion, he had welcomed me to Pertusola--‘The Nook,’
in English--and invited me to step in and have a glass of wine.

“I took him for the steward or fattore, and acceded, not sorry to ask
some questions about the villa and its owner. He showed me over the
house, explaining with much pride how a certain kitchen-range came from
England, though nobody ever knew the use of it, but it was all very
comfortable. The silk-worms and dried figs and salt-fish occupied more
space, and contributed more odour, perhaps, than a correct taste would
have approved of. Yet there were capabilities--great capabilities;
and so, before I left, I took it from the old gentleman in the
rusty costume, who turned out to be the proprietor, a marquis, the
‘commendatore’ of I don’t know what order, and various other dignities
beside, all recited and set forth in the lease.

“I suppose I have something of Robinson Crusoe in my nature, for I loved
the isolation of this spot immensely. It wasn’t an island, but it was
all but an island. Towards the land, two jutting promontories of rock
denied access to anything not a goat; the sea in front; an impenetrable
pine wood to the rear: and there I lived so happily, so snugly, that
even now, when I want a pleasant theme to doze over beside my wood-fire
of an evening, I just call up Pertusola, and ramble once again through
its olive groves, or watch the sunset tints as they glow over the Carara
mountains.

“I smartened the place up wonderfully, within doors and without. I got
flowers, roots, and annuals, and slips of geraniums, and made the little
plateau under my drawing-room window a blaze of tulips and ranunculuses,
so that the Queen--she was at Spezia for the bathing--came once to see
my garden, as one of the show spots of the place. Her Majesty was as
gracious as only royalty knows how to be, and so were all her suite in
their several ways; but there was one short, fat, pale-faced man, with
enormous spectacles, who, if less polite than the rest, was ten times
as inquisitive. He asked about the soil, and the drainage, the water and
its quality--was it a spring--did it ever fail--and when, and how? Then
as to the bay itself, was it sheltered, and from what winds? What the
anchorage was like--mud--and why mud? And when I said there was always
a breeze even in summer, he eagerly pushed me to explain, why? and I did
explain that there was a cleft or gully between the hills, which acted
as a sort of conductor to the wind; and on this he went back to verify
my statement, and spent some time poking about, examining everything,
and stationing himself here and there on points of rock, to experience
the currents of air. ‘You are right,’ said he, as he got into his boat,
‘quite right; there is a glorious draught here for a smelting-furnace.’

“I thought it odd praise at the time, but before six months I received
notice to quit.

“Pertusola had been sold to a lead company, one of the directors having
strongly recommended the site as an admirable harbour, with good water,
and a perpetual draught of wind, equal to a blast-furnace.”

Looking at the dress-coat in which you once captivated dinner-parties,
on a costeimonger--seeing the strong-boned hunter that has carried you
over post and rail, in a cab,--are sore trials; but nothing, according
to my companion’s description, to the desecration of your house and home
by its conversion into a factory. Such an air of the “Inferno,” too,
pervades the smelting-house, with its lurid glow, its roar, its flash,
and its furious heat, that I could readily forgive him the passionate
warmth with which he described it.

“They had begun that chimney, sir,” cried he, “before I got out of the
house. I had to cross on a plank over a pit before my door, where they
were riddling the ore. The morning I left, I covered my eyes, not to see
the barbaric glee with which they destroyed all around, and I left the
place for ever. I crossed over the Gulf, and I took that house you can
see on the rocky point called Marola. It had no water; there was no
depth to anchor in; and not a breath of air could come at it except in
stillness. No more terrors of smelting-house here, thought I. Well, sir,
I must be brief; the whole is too painful to dwell on. I hadn’t been
eight months there when a little steamer ran in one morning, and
four persons in plain clothes landed from her, and pottered about the
shore--I thought looking for anemones. At last they strolled up to my
house, and asked permission to have a look at the Gulf from my terrace.
I acceded, and in they came. They were all strangers but one, and who do
you think he was? The creature with the large spectacles! My blood ran
cold when I saw him.

“‘You used to live yonder, if I mistake not,’ said he to me, coolly.

“‘Yes, and I might have been living there still,’ replied I, ‘if it
had not been for the prying intrusion of a stranger, to whom I was weak
enough to be polite.’

“He never noticed my taunt in the least, but, calmly opening the window,
passed out upon the terrace. The others speedily gathered around him,
and I saw that he knew the whole place as if it had been his bedroom;
for not only did he describe the exact measurements between various
points, but the depth of water, the character of the bottom, the
currents, and the prevailing winds. He went on, besides, to show how, by
running out a pier here, and a breakwater there--by filling up this, and
deepening that--safe anchorage could be secured in all weathers; while
the headlands could be easily fortified, and ‘at a moderate cost,’ I
quote himself, ‘of say twenty two or three millions of francs, while a
fort erected on the island there would command the whole entrance.’

“‘And who, in the name of all Utopia, wants to force it?’ cried I; for,
as they talked so openly, I thought I might interpose as frankly.

“He never seemed to resent my remark as obtrusive, but said quietly,
‘Who knows? the French perhaps--perhaps your own people one of these
days.’

“I’d like to have said, but I didn’t, ‘We could walk in and walk out
here, with our iron-clads, as coolly as a man goes out in the rain with
a mackintosh.’

“They remained fully an hour, talking as freely as if I was born deaf
and dumb. At last they arose to leave, and the owl-faced man--he looked
exactly like an owl--said, with a little grin, ‘We’re going to disturb
you again.’

“‘How so?’ cried I; ‘you can’t smelt lead here.’

“‘No, but we’re going to make an arsenal. Where you stand now will be a
receiving-dock, and that garden of yours a patent slip. You’ll have to
clear out before the New Year.’

“‘Who is he? who is that with the spectacles?’ asked I of one of the
servants, who waited outside with cloaks and umbrellas.

“‘That’s the Conte di Cavour,’ said the fellow, haughtily; and thus was
the whole murder out at once. They turned me out, sir, in two months,
and I never ventured to take a lease of a place till he died. After that
event, I purchased a little spot on the island of Tino yonder, and built
myself a cottage. They could neither smelt metal nor build a ship there,
and I hugged myself at the thought of safety. But, would you believe
it? last week--only last week--his successor, in rummaging over Cavour’s
papers in the Foreign Office, comes upon a packet labelled ‘Spezia,’ and
discovers a memorandum in these words, ‘The English Admiral, at dinner
to-day, laughed at the idea of defending the mouth of the Gulf from
the island. He said the entrance should be two-thirds closed by a
breakwater, and a strong fort _à fleur d’eau_ built on Tino. I have
thought of it all night; he is perfectly right, and I’ll do it;’ and
here, sir,” said my companion, drawing a paper from his pocket, “is a
‘sommation’ from the minister to surrender my holding on Tino, receiving
a due compensation for the same, and once more betake myself, heaven
knows where; for, though the great Count Cavour is dead and gone,
his grand intentions are turning up every day, out of drawers and
pigeonholes, and I shrewdly suspect that neither Pio Nono nor myself
will live to see the last of them.”




ITALIAN LAW AND JUSTICE.

My Garibaldian friend has returned, but only to bid me good-bye and be
off again. The Government, it would seem, are rather uneasy as to the
movements of the “Beds,” and quietly intimated to my friend that
they were sure he had something particular to do--some urgent private
affairs--at Geneva; and, like the well-bred dog in the story, he does
not wait for any further suggestions, but goes at once.

He revenged himself, however, all the time at breakfast, by talking very
truculently before the waiters of what would happen when Garibaldi took
the field again, and how miserably small Messrs Batazzi & Co. would look
under the circumstances. Indeed, as he warmed with his subject, he
went the length of declaring that, without a very ample apology for the
events of Aspromonte, he did not believe Garibaldi would consent to take
Venice, or drive the French out of Rome.

With a spirit of tantalising he prolonged this same breakfast for
upwards of two hours, during which the officer of the gendarmerie came
and went, and came again, very eager to see him depart, but evidently
with instructions neither to molest nor interfere with him.

“Just look at that beggar,” cried the Garibaldian; “if he has come in
here once during the last hour, he has come a dozen times, and all on my
account! And I mean to smoke three ‘cavours’ over my anisetto before I
leave. Waiter, tell the vetturino he’ll have plenty of time to throw
a feed to his cattle before I start. You know,” added he, “if I was
disposed to be troublesome, I’d not budge: I’d write up to Turin to the
Legation and claim British protection; and I’d have these fellows on the
hip, for they stupidly gave me a reason for my expulsion. They said I
was conspiring. Now I could say, Prove it; and if we only went to law,
it would take ten or twelve years to decide it.”

My companion now went on to show that, by a small expenditure of money
and a very ordinary exercise of ingenuity, a lawsuit need never end
in Italy. “First of all, you could ask the opposite party, Who was his
advocate? and on his naming him, you could immediately set to work to
show that this man was a creature so vile and degraded, no man with
the commonest pretension to honesty would dream of employing him. The
history of his father could be adduced, and any private little anecdotes
of his mother would find a favourable opportunity for mention. Though a
mere skirmish, if judiciously managed, this will occupy a week or two,
and at the same time serve to indicate that you mean to show fight; for
by this time the ‘Legale’s’ blood will be up, and he is certain to make
reprisals on _your_ man, so that for a month or so you and the other
principal are in the position of men who, having come out to fight
a duel, are first gratified with the spectacle of a row between the
seconds. However, at last it is arranged that the lawyers are worthy
of each other; and the next step is to demand the names of all the
witnesses. This opens a campaign of unlimited duration, for, as nobody
is rash enough to trust himself or his cause to real and _bonâ-fide_
testimony, witnesses are usually selected amongst the most astute and
ready-witted persons of your acquaintance.” “Oh,” cried I, “this is a
little too strong, isn’t it?” “Let me give you an instance,” said he,
good-humouredly, and not in the least disposed to be displeased with my
expression of distrust. “Some time back an American gentleman took up
his abode for some weeks on the Chiaja at Naples, and in the same house
there lived an Italian, with whom, from frequently meeting on the stairs
and corridors, a sort of hat-touching acquaintance had grown up. At
length one day, as the American was passing hastily out, the Italian
accosted him with a courteous bow and smile, and said, ‘When will it be
your perfect convenience, signor, to repay me that little loan of two
hundred ducats it was my happy privilege to have lent you last month?’

“The American, astounded as he was, had yet patience to inquire whether
he had not mistaken him for another.

“The other smiled somewhat reproachfully, as he said, ‘I trust, signor,
you are not disposed to ignore the obligation. You are the gentleman who
lives, I believe, on the second floor left?’

“‘Very true; I do live there, and I owe you nothing. I never borrowed a
carlino from you--I never spoke to you before; and if you ever take the
liberty to speak to me again, I’ll knock you down.’

“The Italian smiled again, not so blandly, perhaps, but as
significantly, and saying, ‘We shall see,’ bowed and retired.

“The American thought little more of the matter till, going to the
Prefecture to obtain his visé for Borne, he discovered that his passport
had been stopped, and a detainer put upon him for this debt. He hastened
at once to his Minister, who referred him to the law-adviser of the
Legation for counsel. The man of law looked grave; he neither heeded the
angry denunciations of the enraged Yankee, nor his reiterated assurances
that the whole was an infamous fraud. He simply said, ‘The case is
difficult, but I will do my best.’ After the lapse of about a week, a
message came from the Prefect to say that the stranger’s passport was at
his service whenever he desired to have it.

“‘I knew it would be so!’ cried the American, as he came suddenly upon
his lawyer in the street. ‘I was certain that you were only exaggerating
the difficulty of a matter that must have been so simple; for, as I
never owed the money, there was no reason why I should pay it.’

“‘It was a case for some address, notwithstanding,’ said the other,
shaking his head.

“‘Address! fiddle-stick! It was a plain matter of fact, and needed
neither skill nor cunning. You of course showed that this fellow was a
stranger to me--that we had never interchanged a word till the day he
made this rascally demand?’

“‘I did nothing of the kind, sir. If I had put in so contemptible a
plea, you would have lost your cause. What I did was this: I asked what
testimony he could adduce as to the original loan, and he gave me the
name of one witness, a certain Count well known in this city, who was at
breakfast with him when you called to borrow this money, and who saw the
pieces counted out and placed in your hand.’

“‘You denounced this fellow as a perjurer?’

“‘Far from it, sir. I respect the testimony of a man of station and
family, and I would not insult the feelings of the Count by daring to
impugn it; but as the plaintiff had called only one witness to the loan,
I produced two just as respectable, just as distinguished, who saw you
repay the debt! You are now free; and remember, sir, that wherever
your wanderings lead you, never cease to remember that, whatever be
our demerits at Naples, at least we can say with pride, The laws are
administered with equal justice to all men!’”

The entrance of the gendarme at this moment cut short the question I
was about to ask, whether I was to accept this story as a fact or as a
parable.

“Here he comes again. Only look at the misery in the fellow’s face! and
you see he has his orders evidently enough; and he dare not hurry me. I
think I’ll have a bath before I start.”

“It is scarcely fair, after all,” said I. “I suppose he wants to get
back to his one o’clock dinner.”

“I could no more feel for a gendarme than I could compassionate a
scorpion. Take the best-natured fellow in Europe--the most generous, the
most trustful, the most unsuspecting--make a brigadier of Gendarmerie of
him for three months, and he’ll come out scarcely a shade brighter than
the veriest rascal he has handcuffed! Do you know what our friend yonder
is at now?”

“No. He appears to be trying to take a stain out of one of his yellow
gauntlets.”

“No such thing. He is noting down your features--taking a written
portrait of you, as the man who sat at breakfast with me on a certain
morning of a certain month. Take my word for it, some day or other when
you purchase a hat too tall in the crown, or you are seen to wear your
whiskers a trifle too long or bushy, an intimation will reach you at
your hotel, that the Prefect would like to talk with you; the end of
which will be the question, ‘Whether there is not a friend you are most
anxious to meet in Switzerland, or if you have not an uncle impatient to
see you at Trieste?’ And yet,” added he, after a pause, “the Piedmontese
are models of liberality and legality in comparison with the officials
in the south. In Sicily, for instance, the laws are more corruptly
administered than in Turkey. I’ll tell you a case, which was, however,
more absurd than anything else. An English official, well known at
Messina, and on the most intimate terms with the Prefect, came back from
a short shooting-excursion he had made into the interior, half frantic
with the insolence of the servants at a certain inn. The proprietor
was absent, and the waiter and the cook--not caring, perhaps, to be
disturbed for a single traveller--had first refused flatly to admit him;
and afterwards, when he had obtained entrance, treated him to the worst
of food, intimating at the same time it was better than he was used
to, and plainly giving him to understand that on the very slightest
provocation they were prepared to give him a sound thrashing. Boiling
over with passion, he got back to Messina, and hastened to recount his
misfortunes to his friend in power.

“‘Where did it happen?’ asked the hard-worked Prefect, with folly enough
on his hands without having to deal with the sorrows of Great Britons.

“‘At Spalla deMonte.’

“‘When?’

“‘On Wednesday last, the 23d.’

“‘What do you want me to do with them?’

“‘To punish them, of course.’

“‘How--in what way?’

“‘How do I know? Send them to jail.’

“‘For how long?’

“‘A month if you can--a fortnight at least.’

“‘What are the names?’ asked the Prefect, who all this time continued to
write, filling up certain blanks in some printed formula before him.

“‘How should I know their names? I can only say that one was the cook,
the other the waiter.’

“‘There!’ said the Prefect, tossing two sheets of printed and
written-over paper towards him--‘there! tell the landlord to fill in the
fellows’ names and surnames, and send that document to the Podesta. They
shall have four weeks, and with hard labour.’

“The Englishman went his way rejoicing. He despatched the missive, and
felt his injuries were avenged.

“Two days after, however, a friend dropped in, and in the course of
conversation mentioned that he had just come from Spalla de Monte, where
he had dined so well and met such an intelligent waiter; ‘which, I own,’
said he, ‘surprised me, for I had heard of their having insulted some
traveller last week very grossly.’

“The Englishman hurried off to the Prefecture. ‘We are outraged,
insulted, laughed at!’ cried he: ‘those fellows you ordered to prison
are at large. They mock your authority and despise it.’

“A mounted messenger was sent off at speed to bring up the landlord to
Messina, and he appeared the next morning, pale with fear and trembling.
He owned that the Prefect’s order had duly reached him, that he had
understood it thoroughly; ‘but, Eccellenza,’ said he, crying, ‘it was
the shooting season; people were dropping in every day. Where was I to
find a cook or a waiter? I must have closed the house if I parted with
them; so, not to throw contempt on your worship’s order, I sent two
of the stablemen to jail in their place, and a deal of good it will do
them.’”

While I was laughing heartily at this story, my companion turned towards
the gendarme and said, “Have you made a note of his teeth? you see they
are tolerably regular, but one slightly overlaps the other in front.”

“Signor Générale,” said the other, reddening, “I’ll make a note of
_your_ tongue, which will do quite as well.”

“Bravo!” said the Garibaldian; “better said than I could have given you
credit for. I’ll not keep you any longer from your dinner. Will you bear
me company,” asked he of me, “as far as Chiavari? It’s a fine day, and
we shall have a pleasant drive.”

I agreed, and we started.

The road was interesting, the post-horses which we took at Borghetto
went well, and the cigars were good, and somehow we said very little to
each other as we went.

“This is the real way to travel,” said my companion; “a man to smoke
with and no bother of talking; there’s Chiavari in the hollow.”

I nodded, and never spoke.

“Are you inclined to come on to Genoa?”

“No.”

And soon after we parted--whether ever to meet again or not is not so
easy to say, nor of very much consequence to speculate on.




THE ORGAN NUISANCE AND ITS REMEDY.

There is scarcely any better measure of the amount of comfort a man
enjoys than in the sort of things of which he makes grievances. When
the princess in the Eastern story passed a restless night on account of
the rumpled rose-leaf she lay on, the inference is, that she was not,
like another character of fiction, accustomed to “lie upon straw.”

Thus thinking, I was led to speculate on what a happy people must
inhabit the British Islands, seeing the amount of indignation and
newspaper wrath bestowed upon what is called the Organ Nuisance. Now,
granting that it is not always agreeable to have a nasal version of the
march in ‘William Tell,’ ‘Home, sweet Home,’ or ‘La Donna è mobile,’
under one’s window at meal-times, in the hours of work, or the darker
hours of headache, surely the nation which cries aloud over this as a
national calamity must enjoy no common share of Fortune’s favour, and
have what the Yankees call a “fine time” here below.

Scarcely a week, however, goes over without one of these persecutors of
British ears being brought up to justice, and some dreary penny-a-liner
appears to prosecute in the person of a gentleman of literary pursuits,
whose labours, like those of Mr Babbage, may be lost to the world, if
the law will not hunt down the organs, and cry “Tally high-ho” to the
“grinders.”

It might be grave matter of inquiry whether the passing annoyance
of ‘Cherry ripe’ was not a smaller infliction than some of the tiresome
lucubrations it has helped to muddle; and I half fancy I’d as soon
listen to the thunder as drink the small beer it has soured into
vinegar.

However, as the British Public is resolved on making it a grievance, and
as some distinguished statesman has deemed it worth his while to devise
a bill for its suppression, it is in vain to deny that the evil is one
of magnitude. England has declared she will not be ground down by the
Savoyard, and there is no more to be said of it.

A great authority in matters of evasion once protested that he would
engage to drive a coach-and-six through any Act of Parliament that ever
was framed, and I believe him. So certain is language to be too wide or
too narrow--to embrace too much, and consequently fail in
distinctness, or to include too little, and so defeat the attempt to
particularise--that it does not call for more than an ordinary amount of
acuteness to detect the flaws of such legislation. Then, when it comes
to a discussion, and amendments are moved, and some honourable gentleman
suggests that after the word “Whereas” in section 93 the clause should
run “in no case, save in those to be hereafter specified,” &c., there
comes a degree of confusion and obscurity that invariably renders
the original parent of the measure unable to know his offspring, and
probably intently determined to destroy it. That in their eagerness for
law-making the context of these bills is occasionally overlooked, one
may learn from the case of an Irish measure where a fine was awarded as
the punishment of a particular misdemeanour, and the Act declared that
one-half of the sum should go to the county, one-half to the informer.
Parliament, however, altered the law, but overlooked the context.
Imprisonment with hard labour was decreed as the penalty of the offence,
and the clause remained--“one-half to the county, one-half to the
informer.”

A Judge of no mean acuteness, the Chief Baron O’Grady, once declared,
with respect to an Act against sheep-stealing, that after two careful
readings he could not decide whether the penalties applied to the
owner, of the sheep, the thief, or the sheep itself, for that each
interpretation might be argumentatively sustained.

How will you suppress the organ-grinder after this? What are the limits
of a man’s domicile? How much of the coast does he own beyond his
area-railings? Is No. 48 to be deprived of the ‘Hat-catcher’s Daughter’
because 47 is dyspeptic? Are the maids in 32 not to be cheered by ‘Sich
a gettin’ up stairs’ because there is a nervous invalid in 33? How long
may an organ-man linger in front of a residence to tune or adjust his
barrels--the dreariest of all discords? Can legislation determine how
long or how loud the grand chorus in ‘Nabucco’ should be performed? What
endless litigation will be instituted by any attempt to provide for
all these and a score more of similar casualties, not to speak of the
insolent persecution that may be practised by the performance of tunes
of a party character. Fancy Dr Wiseman composing a pastoral to the air
of ‘Croppies, lie down,’ or the Danish Minister writing a despatch to
the inspiriting strains of ‘Schleswig-Holstein meer-umschlungen.’ There
might come a time, too, when ‘Sie sollen ihm nicht haben’ might grate on
a French ambassador’s ears. Can your Act take cognisance of all these?

I see nothing but inextricable confusion in the attempt--confusion,
difficulty, and defeat. There will be an Act, and an Act to amend that
Act, and another Act to alter so much of such an Act, and then a final
Act to repeal them all; so that at last the mover of a bill on the
subject will be the greatest “organ nuisance” that the world has yet
heard of.

It was “much reflecting” over these things, as my Lord Brougham says,
that I sauntered along the Riviera from Genoa, and came to the little
town of Chiavari, with its long sweep of yellow beach in front and its
glorious grove of orange-trees behind--sure, whether the breeze came
from land or sea, to inhale health and perfume. There is a wide old
Piazza in the centre of the town, with a strange, dreary sort of inn
with a low-arched entrance, under whose shade sit certain dignitaries of
the place of an evening, sipping their coffee and talking over what they
imagine to be the last news of the day. From these “Conscript Fathers” I
learned that Chiavari is the native place of the barrel-organ, that
from this little town go forth to all the dwellers in remotest lands
the grinders of the many-cylindered torment, the persecutor of the
prose-writer, the curse of him who calculates. Just as the valleys of
Savoy supply white-mice men, and Lucca produces image-carriers, so does
Chiavari yield its special product, the organ-grinder. Other towns,
in their ambitions, have attempted the “industry,” but they have
egregiously failed; and Chiavari remains as distinctive in its product
as Spitalfields for its shawls, or Dresden for its china. Whether there
may be some peculiarity in the biceps of the Chiavarian, or some ulnar
development which imparts power to his performance, I know not. I am
forced to own that I have failed to discover to what circumstance or
from what quality this excellence is derivable; but there is the fact,
warranted and confirmed by a statistical return, that but for Chiavari
we should have no barrel-organs.

“Never imagine,” said a wise prelate, “that you will root Popery out of
England till you destroy Oxford. If you want to get rid of the crows,
you must pull down the rookery.” The words of wisdom flashed suddenly
over my mind as I walked across the silent Piazza at midnight; and I
exclaimed--“Yes! here is the true remedy for the evil. With two hours
of a gunboat and four small Armstrongs the thing is done; batter down
Chiavari, and Bab-bage will bless you with his last breath. Pull down
the cookery, and crush the young rooks in the ruins. Smash the cradle
and the babe within it, and you need not fear the man!”

There is a grand justice in the conception that is highly elevating.
There is something eminently fine in making Chiavari, like the Cities
of the Plain, a monument over its own iniquity. Leave not one stone upon
another of it, and there will be peace in our homes and stillness in our
streets. No more shall the black-bearded tormentor terrorise over Baker
Street, or lord it in the Edgeware Road.

Commander Snort of the Sneezer will in a brief forenoon emancipate
not only Europe and America, but the dweller beyond Jordan and the
inhabitant of the diggings by Bendigo. Lay Chiavari in ashes, and you
will no longer need Inspector D, nor ask aid from the head-office. Here
is what the age especially worships, a remedy combining cheapness
with efficiency. It may be said that we have no more right to destroy
Chiavari than Kagosima, but that question is at least debatable. Are not
the headaches of tens of thousands of more avail than the head of one?
What becomes of that noble principle, the greatest happiness of the
greatest number? The Italians, too, might object: true, but they are
neither Americans nor French. They come into the category of states that
may be bullied. The countries which have an extended seaboard and weak
naval armaments are like people with a large glass frontage and no
shutters. There is nothing to prevent us shying a stone at the Italian
window as we pass up to Constantinople, even though we run away
afterwards. I repeat, therefore, the plan is feasible. As to its
cheapness, it would not cost a tithe of what we spent in destroying the
tea-tray fortifications of Satsuma; and as we have a classic turn for
monuments, a pyramid of barrel-organs in Charing Cross might record to a
late posterity the capture of Chiavari.

I am not without a certain sort of self-reproach in all this. I feel
it is a weakness perhaps, but I feel that we are all of us too hard on
these organ fellows--for, after all, are they not, in a certain sense,
the type and embodiment of our age? Is not repetition, reiteration, our
boldest characteristic? Is there, I ask, such a “Grind” in the world as
Locke King, and his motion for Reform? What do you say to “Rest and be
thankful,” and, above all, what to the “Peace-at-any-price people”?

Is ‘Cherry ripe’ more wearisome than these? Would all Chiavari assembled
on Wimbledon make up a drearier discord than a ministerial explanation?
In all your experience of bad music, do you know anything to equal a
Foreign Office despatch? and we are without a remedy against
these. Bring up John Bright to-morrow for incessantly annoying the
neighbourhood of Birmingham, by insane accusations against his own
country and laudations of America, and I doubt if you could find a
magistrate on the bench to commit him; and will you tell me that the
droning whine of ‘Garibaldi’s March’ is worse than this? As to the
_Civis Romanus_ cant, it is too painful to dwell on, now that we are
derided, ridiculed, and sneered at from Stockholm to Stamboul. Like
Canning’s philanthropist, we have been asking every one for his story;
never was there a soul so full of sympathy for sorrow. We have heard the
tale of Italy, the sufferings of the Confederates, the crying wrongs
of Poland, and the still more cruel, because less provoked, trials of
Denmark. We have thrown up hands and eyes--sighed, groaned, wept; we
have even denounced the ill-doers, and said, What a terrible retribution
awaited them! but, like our great prototype, when asked for assistance,
we have said,

“I’ll see you ------ first.”

Let us be merciful, therefore, and think twice before we batter down
Chiavari. The organ nuisance is a bore, no doubt; but what are the most
droning ditties that ever addled a weary head, compared to the tiresome
grind of British moral assistance, and the greatness of that _Civis
Romanus_ who hugs his own importance and helps nobody?




R. N. F. THE GREAT CHEVALIER D’INDUSTRIE OF OUR DAY.

I was struck the other day by an account of an application made to the
Lord Mayor of London by a country clergyman, to give, as a warning to
others, publicity to a letter he had just received from the East. The
clergyman, it seems, had advertised in the ‘Times’ for pupils, and gave
for address a certain letter of the Greek alphabet. To this address
there came in due time an answer from a gentleman, dated Constantinople,
stating that he was an Anglo-Indian on his way to England, to place
his two sons in an educational establishment; but that having, by
an excursion to Jerusalem, exhausted his immediate resources, he was
obliged to defer the prosecution of his journey till the arrival of some
funds he expected from India--certain to arrive in a month or two.
Not wishing, however, to delay the execution of his project, and being
satisfied with the promises held forth by the advertiser, he purposed
placing his sons under his care, and to do so, desired that forty pounds
might be remitted him at once, to pay his journey to England, for which
convenience he, the writer, would not alone be obliged, but also extend
his patronage to the lender, by recommending him to his friend Sir Hugh
Rose, who was himself desirous of sending his sons to be educated in
England. The address of a banker was given to whom the money should be
remitted, and an immediate reply requested, or “application should be
made in some other quarter.”

Now, the clergyman did not answer this strange appeal, but he inserted
another advertisement, changing, however, the symbol by which he was
to be addressed, and appearing in this way to be a different person. To
this new address there came another letter, perfectly identical in style
and matter: the only change was, that the writer was now at the Hôtel
de la Reine d’Angleterre at Buda; but all the former pledges of future
protection were renewed, as well as the request for a prompt reply, or
“application will be made in another quarter.”

The clergyman very properly laid the matter before the Lord Mayor, who,
with equal propriety, stamped the attempt as the device of a swindler,
against which publicity in the newspapers was the best precaution. The
strangest thing of all, however, was, that nobody appeared to know the
offender; nor was there in the ‘Times,’ or in the other newspapers where
the circumstances were detailed, one single surmise as to the identity
of this ingenious individual. It is the more singular, since this man
is a specialty--an actual personification of some of the very subtlest
rogueries of the age we live in!

If any of my readers can recall a very remarkable exposure the ‘Times’
newspaper made some ten or twelve years ago, of a most shameful fraud
practised upon governesses, by which they were induced to deposit a sum
equivalent to their travelling expenses from England to some town on the
Continent, as a guarantee to the employer, they will have discovered
the gentleman with the two sons to be educated--the traveller in Syria,
the friend of Sir Hugh Rose, the Anglo-Indian who expects eight hundred
pounds in two months, but has a present and pressing necessity for
forty.

The governess fraud was ingenious. It was done in this way: An
advertisement appeared in the ‘Times,’ setting forth that an English
gentleman, travelling with his family abroad, wanted a governess--the
conditions liberal, the requirements of a high order. The family
in question, who mixed with the very best society on the Continent,
required that the governess should be a lady of accomplished manners,
and one in every respect qualified for that world of fashion to which
she would be introduced as a member of the advertiser’s family. The
advertiser, however, found that all the English ladies who had hitherto
filled this situation in his family had, through the facilities thus
presented them of entrance into life, made very advantageous marriages;
and to protect himself against the loss entailed by the frequent call on
him for travelling expenses--bringing out new candidates for the hands
of princes and grand-dukes--he proposed that the accepted governess
should deposit with him a sum--say fifty pounds--equivalent to the
charge of the journey; and which, if she married, should be confiscated
to the benefit of her employer.

The scheme was very ingenious; it was, in fact, a lottery in which you
only paid for your ticket when you had drawn a prize. Till the lucky
number turned up, you never parted with your money. Was there ever any
such bribe held forth to a generation of unmarried and marriageable
women? There was everything that could captivate the mind: the tour
on the Continent--the family who loved society and shared it so
generously--the father so parental in his kindness, and who evidently
gave the governess the benediction of a parent on the day she may have
married the count; and all secured for what--for fifty pounds? No; but
for the deposit, the mere storing up of fifty pounds in a strong box;
for if, after two years, the lady neither married nor wished to remain,
she could claim her money and go her way.

The success was immense; and as the advertiser wrote replies from
different towns to different individuals, governesses arrived at
Brussels, at Coblentz, at Frankfort, at Mayence, at Munich, at Nice--and
heaven knows where besides--whose deposits were lodged in the hands of
N. F. That ingenious gentleman straightway departed, and was no more
seen, and only heard of when the distress and misery of these unhappy
ladies had found their way to the public press. The ‘Times,’ with all
that ability and energy it knows how to employ, took the matter up,
published some of the statements--very painful and pathetic they
were--of the unfortunate victims of this fraud, and gave more than
one “leader” to its exposure. Nor was the Government wanting in proper
activity. Orders were sent out from the Foreign Office to the different
legations and consulates abroad, to warn the police in the several
districts against the machinations of this artful scoundrel, should he
chance to be in their neighbourhood. Even more distinct instructions
were sent out to certain legations, by which R. N. F. could be arrested
on charges that would at least secure his detention till the law
officers had declared what steps could be taken in his behalf. It was
not the age of photography, but a very accurate description of the
man’s appearance and address was furnished, and his lofty stature,
broad chest, burly look, and bushy whiskers--a shade between red and
auburn--were all duly posted in each Chancellerie of the Continent.

For a while it seemed as if he lived in retirement--his late success
enabled this to be an “elegant retirement”--and it is said that he
passed it on the Lake of Como, in a villa near that of the once Queen
Caroline. There are traditions of a distinguished stranger--a man of
rank and a man of letters--who lived there estranged from all the
world, and deeply engaged in the education of his two sons. One of these
youths, however, not responding to all this parental devotion, involved
himself in some scrape, fled from his father’s roof, and escaped into
Switzerland. N. F., as soon as he could rally from the first shock of
the news, hastened after, to bring him back, borrowing a carriage from a
neighbouring nobleman in his haste. With this he crossed the frontier
at Chiasso, but never to come back again. The coachman, indeed, brought
tidings of the sale of the equipage, which the illustrious stranger had
disposed of, thus quitting a neighbourhood he could only associate with
a sorrowful past, and a considerable number of debts into the bargain.
Another blank occurs here in history, which autobiography alone perhaps
could fill. It would be unfair and un-philosophical to suppose that
because we cannot trace him he was inactive: we might as reasonably
imply that the moon ceased to move when we lost sight of her. At all
events, towards the end of autumn of that last year of the war in the
Crimea, a stout, well-dressed, portly man, with an air of considerable
assurance, swaggered into the Chancellerie of her Majesty’s Legation at
Munich, notwithstanding the representations of the porter, who would,
if he had dared, have denied him admittance, and asked, in a voice of
authority, if there were no letters there for Captain F. The gentleman
to whom the question was addressed was an attaché of the Legation, and
at that time in “charge” of the mission, the Minister being absent.
Though young in years, F. could scarcely, in the length and breadth of
Europe, have fallen upon one with a more thorough insight into every
phase and form of those mysteries by which the F. category of men exist.
Mr L. was an actual amateur in this way, and was no more the man to be
angry with F. for being a swindler, than with Ristori for being Medea or
Macready being Macbeth. Not that he had the slightest suspicion at the
time of F.’s quality, as he assured him that there were no letters for
that name.

“How provoking!” said the Captain, as he bit his lip. “They will be
so impatient in England,” muttered he to himself, “and I know Sidney
Herbert is sure to blame _me_.” Then he added aloud, “I am at a
dead-lock here. I have come from the Crimea with despatches, and
expected to find money here to carry me on to England; and these stupid
people at the War Office have forgotten all about it. Is it not enough
to provoke a saint?”

“I don’t know; I never was a saint,” said the impassive attaché.

“Well, it’s trying to a sinner,” said F., with a slight laugh; for
he was one of those happy-natured dogs who are not indifferent to the
absurd side of even their own mishaps. “How long does the post take to
England?”

“Three days.”

“And three back--that makes six; a week--an entire week.”

“Omitting Sunday,” said the grave attaché, who really felt an interest
in the other’s dilemma.

“All I can say is, it was no fault of mine,” cried F., after a moment.
“If I am detained here through their negligence, they must make the
best excuse they can. Have you got a cigar?” This was said with his eyes
fixed on a roll of Cubans on the table.

“Take one,” said the other.

“Thanks,” said F., as he selected three. “I’ll drop in to-morrow, and
hope to have better luck.”

“How much money do you want?” asked Mr L.

“Enough to carry me to London.”

“How much is that?”

“Let me see. Strasbourg--Paris, a day at Paris; Cowley might detain me
two days: fifteen or twenty pounds would do it amply.”

“You shall have it.”

“All right,” said F., who walked to the fire, and, lighting his cigar,
smoked away; while the other took some notes from a table-drawer and
counted them.

“Shall I give you a formal receipt for this?” asked F.

“You can tell them at the Office,” said L., as he dipped his pen into
the ink and continued the work he had been previously engaged in. F.
said a few civil words--the offhand gratitude of a man who was fully as
much in the habit of bestowing as of receiving favours, and withdrew. L.
scarcely noticed his departure; he was deep in his despatch, and wrote
on. At length he came to the happy landing-place, that spot of rest for
the weary foot--“I have the honour to be, my Lord,” and he arose and
stood at the fire.

As L. smoked his cigar he reflected, and as he reflected he remembered;
and, to refresh his memory, he took out some papers from a pigeon-hole,
and at last finding what he sought, sat down to read it. The document
was a despatch, dated a couple of years back, instructing H.M.’s
representative at the Court of Munich to secure the person of a certain
N. F., and hold him in durance till application should be made to the
Bavarian Government for his extradition and conveyance to England. Then
followed a very accurate description of the individual--his height,
age, general looks, voice, and manner--every detail of which L. now saw
closely tallied with the appearance of his late visitor.

He pondered for a while over the paper, and then looked at his watch. It
was five o’clock! The first train to Augsburg was to start at six. There
was little time, consequently, to take the steps necessary to arrest a
person on suspicion; for he should first of all have to communicate
with the Minister for Foreign Affairs, who should afterwards back his
application to the Prefect of Police. The case was one for detail,
and for what the Germans insist upon, much writing--and there was very
little time to do it in. L., however, was not one to be easily defeated.

If baffled in one road, he usually found out another. He therefore
wrote a brief note to the Minister, stating that he might require his
assistance at a later hour of the evening, and at a time not usually
official. This done, he despatched another note to Captain E. F., saying
familiarly it was scarcely worth while trying to catch the mail-train
that night, and that perhaps instead he would come over and take a
_tétè-à-tête_ dinner with him at the Legation.

F. was overjoyed as he read it! No man ever felt a higher pleasure in
good company, nor knew better how to make it profitable. If he had been
asked to choose, he would infinitely rather have had the invitation to
dine than the twenty pounds he had pocketed in the morning. The cognate
men of the world--and all members of the diplomatic career are to a
certain extent in this category--were in F.’s estimation the “trump
cards” of the pack, with which he could “score tricks” innumerable, and
so he accepted at once; and, in a very few minutes after his acceptance,
made his appearance in a correct dinner-dress and a most unexceptionable
white tie.

“Couldn’t refuse that pleasant offer of yours, L.” (he was familiar at
once, and called him L.), “and here I am!” said he, as he threw himself
into an easy-chair with all the bland satisfaction of one who looked
forward to a good dinner and a very enjoyable evening.

“I am happy to have secured you,” said L., with a little laugh to
himself at the epigram of his phrase. “Do you like caviar?”

“Delight in it!”

“I have just got some fresh from St Petersburg, and our cook here is
rather successful in his caviar soup. We have a red trout from the
_Tegen See_, a saddle of Tyrol mutton, and a pheasant--_voilà votre
diner!_ but I can promise you a more liberal _carte_ in drinkables; just
say what you like in the way of wine!”

F.’s face beamed over with ecstasy. It was one of the grand moments of
his life; and if he could, hungry as he was, he would have prolonged it!
To be there the guest of her Majesty’s mission; to know, to feel, that
the arms of England were over the door! that he was to be waited on
by flunkies in the livery of the Legation, fed by the cook who had
ministered to official palates, his glass filled with wine from
the cellar of him who represented royalty! These were very glorious
imaginings; and little wonder that F., whose whole life was a Poem in
its way, should feel that they almost overcame him. In fact, like the
woman in the nursery song, he was ready to exclaim, “This is none of
me!” but still there were abundant evidences around him that all was
actual, positive, and real.

“By the way,” said L., in a light, careless way, “did you ever in your
wanderings chance upon a namesake of yours, only that he interpolates
another Christian name, and calls himself R. Napoleon F.?”

The stranger started: the fresh, ruddy glow of his cheek gave way to
a sickly yellow, and, rising from his chair, he said, “Do you mean to
‘split’ on me, sir?”

“I’m afraid, F.,” said the other, jauntily, “the thing looks ugly. You
are R. N. F.!”

“And are you, sir, such a scoundrel--such an assassin--as to ask a man
to your table in order to betray him?”

“These are strong epithets, F., and I’ll not discuss them; but if you
ask, Are you going to dine here today? I’d say, No. And if you should
ask, Where are, you likely to pass the evening? I’d hint, In the city
jail.”

At this F. lost all command over himself, and broke out into a torrent
of the wildest abuse. He was strong of epithets, and did not spare
them. He stormed, he swore, he threatened, he vociferated; but L.,
imperturbable throughout all, only interposed with an occasional mild
remonstrance--a subdued hint--that his language was less than polite or
parliamentary. At length the door opened, two gendarmes appeared, and N.
F. was consigned to their hands and removed.

The accusations against him were manifold; from before and since the day
of the governesses, he had been living a life of dishonesty and fraud.
German law proceedings are not characterised by any rash impetuosity;
the initial steps in F.’s case took about eighteen months, during which
he remained a prisoner. At the end of this time the judges discovered
some informality in his committal; and as L. was absent from Munich,
and no one at the Legation much interested in the case, the man was
liberated on signing a declaration--to which Bavarian authorities,
it would seem, attach value--that he was “a rogue and a vagabond;”
 confessions which the Captain possibly deemed as absurd an act of
“surplusage” as though he were to give a written declaration that he was
a vertebrated animal and a biped.

He went forth once more, and, difficult as it appears to the
intelligence of honest and commonplace folk, he went forth to prosper
and live luxuriously--so gullible is the world, so ready and eager to
be cheated and deceived. Sir Edward Lytton has somewhere declared that
a single number of the ‘Times’ newspaper, taken at random, would be
the very best and most complete picture of our daily life--the fullest
exponent of our notions, wants, wishes, and aspirations. Not a hope, nor
fear, nor prejudice--not a particle of our blind trustfulness, or of our
as blind unbelief, that would not find its reflex in the broadsheet. R.
N. F. had arrived at the same conclusion, only in a more limited sense.
The advertisement columns were all to him. What cared he for foreign
wars, or the state of the Funds? as little did he find interest in
railway intelligence, or “our own correspondent.” What he wanted was,
the people who inquired after a missing relative--a long-lost son or
brother, who was supposed to have died in the Mauritius or Mexico: an
affectionate mother who desired tidings as to the burial-place of a
certain James or John, who had been travelling in a particular year in
the south of Spain: an inquirer for the will of Paul somebody: or
any one who could supply evidence as to the marriage of Sarah Meekins
_alias_ Crouther, supposed to have been celebrated before her Majesty’s
Vice-Consul at Kooroobakaboo--these were the paragraphs that touched
him.

Never was there such a union of intelligence and sympathy as in him! He
knew everybody, and seemed not alone to have been known to, but actually
beloved by, every one. It was in _his_ arms poor Joe died at Aden. _He_
gave away Maria at Tunis. He followed Tom to his grave at Corfu; and he
was the mysterious stranger who, on board the P. and O. boat, offered
his purse to Edward, and was almost offended at being denied. The way in
which this man tracked the stories of families through the few lines
of a newspaper advertisement was positively marvellous. Whatever was
wanting in the way of evidence of this, or clue to that, came at once
into his attributions.

A couple of years ago, an English lady, the wife of a clergyman, passed
a winter at Rome with her daughter, and in the mixed society of that
capital made acquaintance with a Polish Count of most charming manners
and fascinating address. The acquaintance ripened into intimacy, and
ended in an attachment which led to the marriage of the young lady with
the distinguished exile.

On arriving in England, however, it was discovered that the accomplished
Count was a common soldier, and a deserter from the Prussian army; and
means were accordingly had recourse to in order to obtain a divorce, and
the breach of a marriage accomplished under a fraudulent representation.
While the proceedings were but in the initiative, there came a letter
from Oneglia, near Nice, to the afflicted mother of the young lady,
recalling to her mind the elderly gentleman with the blue spectacles who
usually sat next her at the English Church at Rome. He was the writer of
the present letter, who, in turning over the columns of the ‘Times’ read
the melancholy story of her daughter’s betrayal and misery. By one of
those fortunate accidents more frequent in novels than in life, he had
the means of befriending her, and very probably of rescuing her from
her present calamity. He, the writer, had actually been present at the
wedding, and as a witness had signed the marriage-certificate of that
same _soi-disant_ Count Stanislaus Sobieski Something-or-other, at
Lemberg, in the year ‘49, and knew that the unhappy but deserted wife
was yet living. A certain momentary pressure of money prevented his
at once coming to England to testify to this fact; but if a small sum,
sufficient to pay a little balance he owed his innkeeper and wherewithal
to make his journey to England, were forwarded to the address of
Frederick Brooks, Esq., or lodged to his account at the Bank of French &
Co., Florence, he would at once hasten to London and depose formally
to every fact he had stated. By the merest accident I myself saw this
letter, which the lady had, for more accurate information about the
writer, sent to the banker at Florence, and in an instant I detected the
fine Roman hand of R. N. F. It is needless to say that this shot went
wide of the mark.

But that this fellow has lived for upwards of twenty years, travelling
the Continent in every direction, eating and drinking at the best
hotels, frequenting theatres, cafés, and public gardens, denying himself
nothing, is surely a shame and a disgrace to the police of Europe, which
has been usually satisfied to pass him over a frontier, and suffer him
to continue his depredations on the citizens of another state. Of the
obloquy he has brought upon his own country I do not speak. We must, I
take it, have our scoundrels like other people; the only great grievance
here is, that the fellow’s ubiquity is such that it is hard to believe
that the swindler who walked off with the five watches from Hamburg is
the same who, in less than eight days afterwards, borrowed fifty ducats
from a waiter at Naples, and “bolted.”

Of late I have observed he has dropped his second _prénom_ of Napoleon,
and does not call himself by it. There is perhaps in this omission a
delicate forbearance, a sense of refined deference to the other bearer
of that name, whom he recognises as his master.

In the ingenuity of his manifold devices even religion has not escaped
him, and it would be impossible to count how often he has left the
“Establishment” for Rome, been converted, reconverted, reconciled, and
brought home again--always, be it noted, at the special charge of so
much money from the Church Fund, or a subscription from the faithful,
ever zealous and eager to assist a really devout and truly sincere
convert!

That this man is an aspiring and ambitious vagabond may be seen in the
occasional raids he makes into the very best society, without having, at
least to ordinary eyes, anything to obtain in these ventures, beyond the
triumph of seeing himself where exposure and detection would be
certain to be followed by the most condign punishment. At Rome, for
instance--how, I cannot say--he obtained admission to the Duc de
Grammont’s receptions; and at Florence, under the pretext of being
a proprietor, and “a most influential” one, of the ‘Times,’ he
breakfasted, by special invitation, with Baron Ricasoli, and had a long
and most interesting conversation with him as to the conditions--of
course political--on which he would consent to support Italian unity.
These must have been done in pure levity; they were imaginative
excursions, thrown off in the spirit of those fanciful variations great
violinists will now and then indulge in, as though to say, “Is there a
path too intricate for me to thread, is there a pinnacle too fine for me
to balance on?”

A great deal of this fellow’s long impunity results from the shame men
feel in confessing to have been “done” by him. Nobody likes the avowal,
acknowledging, as it does, a certain defect in discrimination, and a
natural reluctance to own to having been the dupe of one of the most
barefaced and vulgar rogues in Europe.

There is one circumstance in this case which might open a very curious
psychological question; it is this: F.’s victims have not in general been
the frank, open, free-giving, or trustful class of men; on the contrary,
they have usually been close-fisted, cold, cautious people, who
weigh carefully what they do, and are rarely the dupes of their own
impulsiveness. F. is an Irishman, and yet his successes have been
far more with English--ay, even with Scotchmen--than with his own
countrymen.

In part this may be accounted for by the fact that F. did not usually
present himself as one in utter want and completely destitute; his
appeal for money was generally made on the ground of some speculation
that was to repay the lender; it was because he knew “something to
your advantage” that he asked for that £10. He addressed himself, in
consequence, to the more mercantile spirit of a richer community--to
those, in fact, who, more conversant with trade, better understood the
meaning of an investment.

But there was another, and, as I take it, a stronger and less fallible
ground for success. This fellow has, what all Irishmen are more or less
gifted with, an immense amount of vitality, a quality which undeniably
makes a man companionable, however little there may be to our taste in
his manner, his education, or his bearing. This same vitality imparts
itself marvellously to the colder temperaments of others, and gives out
its own warmth to natures that never of themselves felt the glow of an
impulse, or the glorious furnace-heat of a rash action.

This was the magnetism he worked with. “Canny” Scotchmen and shrewd
Yankees--ay, even Swiss innkeepers--felt the touch of his quality.
There was, or there seemed to be, a geniality in the fellow that, in its
apparent contempt for all worldliness, threw men off their guard, and
it would have smacked of meanness to distrust a fellow so open and
unguarded.

Now Paddy has seen a good deal of this at home, and could no more be
humbugged by it than he could believe a potato to be a truffle.

F. was too perfect an artist ever to perform in an Irish part to an
Irish audience, and so he owes little or nothing to the land of his
birth.

Apart from his unquestionable success, which of course settles the
question, I would not have called him a great performer--indeed, my
astonishment has always been how he succeeded, or with whom.

“Don’t tell me of Beresford’s blunders,” said the Great Duke after
Albuera. “Did he beat Soult? if so, he was a good officer.”

This man’s triumphs are some twenty odd years of expensive living, with
occasional excursions into good society. He wears broadcloth, and dines
on venison, when his legitimate costume had been the striped uniform of
the galleys, and his diet the black bread of a convict.

The injury these men do in life is not confined to the misery their
heartless frauds inflict, for the very humblest and poorest are often
their victims: they do worse, in the way they sow distrust and suspicion
of really deserving objects, in the pretext they afford the miserly man
to draw closer his purse-strings, and “not be imposed on;” and, worst of
all, in the ill repute they spread of a nation which, not attractive by
the graces of manner or the charms of a winning address, yet cherished
the thought that in truthfulness and fair dealing there was not one
could gainsay it.

As I write, I have just heard tidings of R. N. F. One of our most
distinguished travellers and discoverers, lately returning from Venice
to the South, passed the night at Padua, and met there what he described
as an Indian officer--Major Newton--who was travelling, he said, with a
nephew of Lord Palmer-ston’s.

The Major was a man fall of anecdote, and abounded in knowledge of
people and places; he had apparently been everywhere with everybody,
and, with a communicativeness not always met with in old soldiers, gave
to the stranger a rapid sketch of his own most adventurous life. As the
evening wore on, he told too how he was waiting there for a friend,
a certain N. F., who was no other than himself, the nephew of Lord
Palmerston being represented by his son, an apt youth, who has already
given bright promise of what his later years may develop.

N. F. retired to bed at last, so much overcome by brandy-and-water that
my informant escaped being asked for a loan, which I plainly see he
would not have had the fortitude to have refused; and the following
morning he started so early that N. F., wide awake as he usually is, was
not vigilant enough to have anticipated.

I hope these brief details, _pour servir à l’histoire de Monsieur R. N.
F._, may save some kind-hearted traveller from the designs of a thorough
blackguard, and render his future machinations through the press more
difficult to effect and more certain of exposure.

I had scarcely finished this brief, imperfect sketch, when I read in
‘Galignani’ the following:--

“Swindling on the Continent.--A letter from Venice of March 29 gives us
the following piece of information which may still be of service to some
of our readers, though, from the fact with which it concludes, it
would seem that the proceedings, of the party have been brought to a
standstill, at least for some time. This is not, however, it may be
recollected, the first occasion we have had to bring the conduct of
the individual referred to under the notice of our readers for similar
practices:--

“‘I am informed that one Mr Newton, _alias_ Neville, _alias_ Fane, and
with a dozen other _aliases_, has been arrested at Padua for swindling.
This ubiquitous gentleman has been travelling for some years at the
expense of hotel-keepers, and other geese easily fleeced, on the
Continent In the year 1862, Mr Neville and his two sons made their
suspicious appearance at Venice, and they now, minus the younger son,
have visited Padua as Mr Robert N. Newton and son, taking up their
residence at the Stella d’Oro. They arrived without luggage and without
money, both of which had been lost in the Danube; but they expected
remittances from India! The obliging landlord lent money, purchased
clothes, fed them gloriously, and contrived, between the 8th Feb.
and 25th of March, to become the creditor of Newton and son for 1000
swanzig. The expenses continued, but the remittances never came.
The patient landlord began to lose that virtue, and denounced these
_aliases_ as swindlers. The police of Vienna, hearing of the event, sent
information that these two accommodating gentlemen had practised the
victimising art for two months in December last at the Hotel Regina
Inghilterre, at Pesth, run up a current account of 700 florins, and
decamped; and a hotel-keeper recognised the scamps as having re-resided
at the Luna, in Venice, in 1862, and “plucked some profit from that
pale-faced moon.” Mr Newton’s handwriting proved him to be in 1863
one Major Fane, who had generously proposed to bring all his family,
consisting of ten persons, to pass the winter at the Barbesi Hotel at
Venice, if the proprietor would forward him 700 fr., as, owing to his
wife’s prolonged residence at Rome and Naples, he was short of money,
which, however, he expected, would cease on the arrival of supplies from
Calcutta. These gentlemen are now in durance vile, and there is no
doubt but that this letter will lead to their recognition by many other
victims.’”

Let no sanguine enthusiast for the laws of property imagine, however,
that this great man’s career is now ended, and that R. N. F. will no
more go forth as of old to plunder and to rob. Imprisonment for debt is
a grievous violation of personal liberty certainly, but it is finite;
and some fine morning, when the lark is carolling high in heaven, and
the bright rivulets are laughing in the gay sunlight, R. N. F. will
issue from his dungeon to taste again the sweets of liberty, and to
partake once more of the fleshpots of some confiding landlord. F. is a
man of great resources, doubtless. When he repeats a part, he feels
the same sort of repugnance that Fechter would to giving a fiftieth
representation of Hamlet, but he would bow to the necessity which a
clamorous public imposes, however his own taste might rebel against the
dreariness of the task. Still, I feel assured that he will next appear
in a new part. We shall hear of him--that is certain. He will be in
search of a lost will, by which he would inherit millions, or a Salvator
Rosa that he has been engaged to buy for the Queen, or perhaps he will
be a missionary to assist in that religious movement now observable in
Italy. How dare I presume, in my narrow inventiveness, to suggest to
such a master of the art as he is? I only know that, whether he comes
before the world as the friend of Sir Hugh Rose, a proprietor of the
‘Times,’ the agent of Lord Palmerston, or a recent convert from Popery,
he will sustain his part admirably; and that same world that he has
duped, robbed, and swindled for more than a quarter of a century will
still feed and clothe him--still believe in the luggage that never
comes, and the remittance that will never turn up.

After all, the man must be a greater artist than I was willing to
believe him to be. He must be a deep student of the human heart--not,
perhaps, in its highest moods; and he must well understand how to touch
certain chords which give their response in unlimited confidence and
long credit.

No doubt there must be some wondrous fascination in these changeful
fortunes--these ups and downs of life--otherwise no man could have
gone, as he has, for nigh thirty years, hunted, badgered, insulted,
and imprisoned in almost every capital of Europe, and yet no sooner
liberated than, like a giant refreshed, he again returns to his old
toil, never weary wherever the bread of idleness can be eaten, and where
a lie will pay for his liquor.

Talk of novel-writers--this is the great master of fiction--the man who
brings the product of imagination to the real test of credibility--the
actual interest of his public. Let him fail in his description, his
narrative, the progress of his events, or their probability, and he
is ruined at once. He must not alone arrange the circumstances of his
story, but he must perform the hero, and that, too, as we saw lately
at Padua, without any adventitious aid of dress or costume. I can fancy
what a sorry figure some of our popular tale-writers would present if
they had to appeal to an innkeeper with this poor story of their luggage
lost in the Danube. What a contempt the rascal must have had for Italian
notions of geography, too, when he adopted a river so remote from
where he stood! And yet I’d swear he was as cool, as collected, and as
self-sustained at that moment, as ever was Mr Gladstone in the House as
he rose to move a motion of supply.

Well, he is in Padua now, doubtless dreaming of fresh conquests, and not
impossibly speculating on a world whose gullibility is indeed infinite,
and which actually seems to take the same pleasure in being cheated in
Fact as it does in being deceived in Fiction. Who knows if the time is
not coming when, instead of sending a box of new novels to the country,
some Mr Mudie will despatch one of these R. N. F. folk by a fast
train, with a line to say, “A great success: his Belgian rogueries most
amusing; the exploit at Madrid equal to anything in ‘Gil Bias’.”




GÀRIBÀLDI

We had a very witty Judge in Ireland, who was not very scrupulous about
giving hard knocks to his brothers on the bench, and who, in delivering
a judgment in a cause, found that he was to give the casting-vote
between his two colleagues, who were diametrically opposed to each
other, and who had taken great pains to lay down the reasons for their
several opinions at considerable length. “It now comes to my turn,” said
he, “to declare my view of this case, and fortunately I can afford to
be brief. I agree with my brother B. from the irresistible force of the
admirable argument of my brother M.”

The story occurred to me as I thought over Garibaldi and the
enthusiastic reception you gave him in England; for I really felt, if it
had not been for Carlyle, I might have been a bit of a hero-worshipper
myself The grand frescoes in caricature of the popular historian have,
however, given me a hearty and wholesome disgust to the whole thing; not
to say that, however enthusiastic a man may feel about his idol, he must
be sorely ashamed of his fellow-worshippers. “Lie down with dogs, and
you’ll get up with fleas,” says an old Irish adage; but what, in the
name of all entomology, is a man to get up with who lies down with these
votaries of Garibaldi? So fine a fellow, and so mangy a following, it
would be hard to find. The opportunity for all the blatant balderdash
of shopkeeping eloquence, of that high “Falootin” style so popular over
the Atlantic, of those grand-sounding periods about freedom and love
of country, was not to be lost by a set of people who, in all their
enthusiasm for Garibaldi, are intently bent on making themselves
foreground figures in the tableau that should have been filled by
himself alone.

“Sir Francis Burdett call _you_ his friend!--as well call a Bug his
bedfellow!” said the sturdy old yeoman, whose racy English I should like
to borrow, to characterise the stupid incongruity between Garibaldi and
his worshippers. It is not easy to conceive anything finer, simpler,
more thoroughly unaffected, or more truly dignified, than the man
himself. His noble head; his clear, honest, brown eye; his finely-traced
mouth, beautiful as a woman’s, and only strung up to sternness when
anything ignoble or mean had outraged him; and, last of all, his voice
contains a fascination perfectly irresistible, allied, as you knew and
felt these graces were, with a thoroughly pure, untarnished nature. The
true measure of the man lies in the fact that, though his life has been
a series of the boldest and most daring achievements, his courage is
about the very last quality uppermost in your mind when you meet him.
It is of the winning softness of his look and manner, his kind
thoughtfulness for others, his sincere pity for all suffering, his
gentleness, his modesty, his manly sense of brotherhood with the very
humblest of the men who have loved him, that you think: these are the
traits that throw all his heroism into shadow; and all the glory of the
conqueror pales before the simple virtues of the man.

He never looked to more advantage than in that humble life of Caprera,
where people came and went--some, old and valued friends, whose presence
warmed up their host’s heart; others, mere passing acquaintances, or,
as it might be, not even that; worshippers or curiosity-seekers--living
where and how they could in that many-roomed small house; diving into
the kitchen to boil their coffee; sallying out to the garden to pluck
their radishes; down to the brook for a cress, or to the seaside to
catch a fish,--all more or less busy in the midst of a strange
idleness; for there was not--beyond providing for the mere wants of the
day--anything to be done. The soil would not yield anything. There was
no cultivation outside that little garden, where the grand old soldier
delved, or rested on his spade-handle as he turned his gaze over the
sea, doubtless thinking of the dear land beyond it.

At dinner--and what a strange meal it was--all met, full of the little
incidents of an uneventful day. The veriest trifles they were, but of
interest to those who listened, and to none more than Garibaldi himself,
who liked to hear who had been over to Maddalena, and what sport they
had; or whether Albanesi had taken any mullet, and who it was said he
could mend the boat? and who was to paint her? Not a word was spoken
of the political events of the world, and every mention of them was
as rigidly excluded as though a government spy had been seated at the
table.

He rarely spoke himself, but was a good listener--not merely hearing
with attention, but showing, by an occasional suggestion or a hint, how
his mind speculated on the subject before him. If, however, led to speak
of himself or his exploits, the unaffected ease and simplicity of the
man became at once evident. Never, by any chance, would an expression
escape him that redounded to his own share in any achievement;
without any studied avoidance the matter would somehow escape, or, if
accidentally touched on, be done so very lightly as to make it appear of
no moment whatever.

To have done one-tenth of what Garibaldi has done, a man must
necessarily have thrown aside scruples which he would never have
probably transgressed in his ordinary life. He must have been often
arbitrary, and sometimes almost cruel; and yet, ask his followers, and
they will tell you that punishment scarcely existed in the force under
his immediate command--that the most hardened offender would have
quailed more under a few stern words of reproof from “the General” than
from a sentence that sent him to a prison.

That, to effect his purpose, he would lay hands on what he needed, not
recklessly or indifferently, but thoughtfully and doubtless regretfully,
we all know. I can remember an instance of this kind, related to me by
a British naval officer, who himself was an actor in the scene. “It was
off La Plata,” said my informant, “when Garibaldi was at war with Rosas,
that the frigate I commanded was on that station, as well as a small
gun-brig of the Sardinian navy, whose captain never harassed his men by
exercises of gunnery, and, indeed, whose ship was as free from any ‘beat
to quarters,’ or any sudden summons to prepare for boarders, as though
she had been a floating chapel.

“Garibaldi came alongside me one day to say that he had learned the
Sardinian had several tons of powder on board, with an ample supply
of grape, shell, and canister, not to speak of twelve hundred stand of
admirable arms. ‘I want them all,’ said he; ‘my people are fighting with
staves and knives, and we are totally out of ammunition. I want them,
and he won’t let me have them.’

“‘He could scarcely do so,’ said I, ‘seeing that they belong to his
Government, and are not in _his_ hands to bestow.’

“‘For that reason I must go and take them,’ said Garibaldi. ‘I mean to
board him this very night, and you’ll see if we do not replenish our
powder-flasks.’

“‘In that case,’ said I, ‘I shall have to fire on you. It will be
Piracy; nothing else.’

“‘You’ll not do so;’ said he, smiling.

“‘Yes, I promise you that I will. We are at peace and on good terms with
Sardinia, and I cannot behave other than as a friend to her ships of
war.’

“‘There’s no help for it, then,’ said Garibaldi, ‘if you see the thing
in that light:’ and good-humouredly quitted the subject, and soon after
took his leave.”

“And were you,” asked I of my informant, Captain S.----“were you
perfectly easy after that conversation? I mean, were you fully satisfied
that he would not attempt the matter in some other way?”

“Never more at ease in my life. I knew my man; and that, having left
me under the conviction he had abandoned the exploit, nothing on earth
would have tempted him to renew it in any shape.”

It might be a matter of great doubt whether any greater intellectual
ability would not have rather detracted from than increased Garibaldi’s
power as a popular leader. I myself feel assured that the simplicity,
the trustfulness, the implicit reliance on the goodness of a cause as a
reason for its success, are qualities which no mere mental superiority
could replace in popular estimation. It is actually Love that is
the sentiment the Italians have for him; and I have seen them,
hard-featured, ay, and hard-natured men, moved to tears as the litter
on which Garibaldi lay wounded was carried down to the place of
embarkation.

Garibaldi has always been a thoughtful, silent, reflective man, not
communicative to others, or in any way expansive; and from these
qualities have come alike his successes and his failures. Of the
conversations reported of him by writers I do not believe a syllable. He
speaks very little; and, luckily for him, that little only with those on
whose integrity he can rely not to repeat him.

Cavour, who knew men thoroughly, and studied them just as closely as he
studied events, understood at once that Garibaldi was the man he wanted.
He needed one who should move the national heart--who, sprung from the
people himself, and imbued with all the instincts of his class, should
yet not dissever the cause of liberty from the cause of monarchy. To
attach Garibaldi to the throne was no hard task. The King, who led the
van of his army, was an idol made for such worship as Garibaldi’s. The
monarch who could carry a knapsack and a heavy rifle over the cliffs
of Monte Rosa from sunrise to sunset, and take his meal of hard bread
before he “turned in” at night in a shepherd’s shieling, was a King
after the bold buccaneer’s own heart.

To what end inveigh against the luxuries of a court, its wasteful
splendours, or its costly extravagance, with such an example? This
strong-sinewed, big-boned, unpoetical King has been the hardest nut ever
republicanism had to crack!

It might be possible to overrate the services Garibaldi has rendered
to Italy--it would be totally impossible to exaggerate those he has
rendered the Monarchy; and out of Garibaldi’s devotion to Victor
Emmanuel has sprung that hearty, honest, manly appreciation of the King
which the Italians unquestionably display. A merely political head of
the State, though he were gifted with the highest order of capacity,
would have disappeared altogether from view in the sun-splendour of
Garibaldi’s exploits; not so the King Victor Emmanuel, who only shone
the brighter in the reflected blaze of the hero who was so proud to
serve him.

Yet for all that friendship, and all the acts that grew out of it,
natural and spontaneous as they are, one great mind was needed to guide,
direct, encourage, or restrain. It was Cavour who, behind the scenes,
pulled all the wires; and these heroes--heroes they were too--were but
his puppets.

Cavour died, and then came Aspromonte.

If any other man than Garibaldi had taken the present moment to make
a visit--an almost ostentatious visit--to Mazzini, it might be a grave
question how far all the warm enthusiasm of this popular reception could
be justified. Garibaldi is, however, the one man in Europe from whom
no one expects anything but impulsive action. It is in the very
unreflectiveness of his generosity that he is great. There has not been,
I am assured, for many years back, any very close or intimate friendship
between these two men; but it was quite enough that Mazzini was in
trouble and difficulty, to rally to his side that brave-hearted
comrade who never deserted his wounded. Nor is there in all Garibaldi’s
character anything finer or more exalted than the steadfast adherence he
has ever shown to his early friendships. No flatteries of the great--no
blandishments of courts and courtiers--none of those seductive
influences which are so apt to weave themselves into a man’s nature when
surrounded by continual homage and admiration--not any of these have
corrupted that pure and simple heart; and there is not a presence
so exalted, nor a scene of splendour so imposing, as could prevent
Garibaldi from recognising with eager delight any the very humblest
companion that ever shared hardship and danger beside him.

To have achieved his successes, a man must of necessity have rallied
around him many besides enthusiasts of the cause; he must have recruited
amongst men of broken fortunes--reckless, lawless fellows, who accepted
the buccaneer’s life as a means of wiping off old scores with that old
world “that would have none of them.” It was not amidst the orderly, the
soberly-trained, and well-to-do that he could seek for followers. And
what praise is too great for him who could so inspire this mass, heaving
with passion as it was, with his own noble sentiments, and make them
feel that the work before them--a nation’s regeneration--was a task too
high and too holy to be accomplished by unclean hands? Can any eulogy
exaggerate the services of a man who could so magnetise his fellow-men
as to associate them at once with his nobility of soul, and elevate them
to a standard little short of his own? That he _did_ do this we have the
proof. Pillage was almost unknown amongst the Garibaldians; and these
famished, ill-clad, shoeless men marched on from battle to battle
with scarcely an instance of crime that called for the interference of
military law.

Where is the General who could boast of doing as much? Where is the
leader who could be bold enough to give such a pledge for his followers?
Is there an army in Europe--in the world--for whom as much could be
said?

All honour, therefore, to the man--not whose example only, but whose
very contact suggests high intent and noble action. All honour to
him who brings to a great cause, not alone the dazzling splendour
of heroism, but the more enduring brightness of a pure and unsullied
integrity!

Such a man may be misled; he can never be corrupted.




A NEW INVESTMENT.

I am not so sure how far we ought to be grateful for it, but assuredly
the fact is so, that nothing has so much tended to show the world with
what little wisdom it is governed than the Telegraph. It is not merely
that cabinets are no longer the sole possessors of early intelligence,
though this alone was once a very great privilege; and there is no
over-estimating the power conferred by the exclusive possession of
a piece of important news--a battle won or lost, the outbreak of a
revolution, the overthrow of a throne--even for a few hours before it
became the property of the public. The telegraph, however, is the great
disenchanter. The misty uncertainty, the cloud-like indistinctness that
used of old to envelop all ministerial action, converting Downing
Street into a sort of Olympus, and making a small mythology out of
Precis-writers, is all gone, all dispersed. Three or four cold hard
lines, thin and terse as the wire that conveyed them, are sworn enemies
to all style, and especially to all the evasive cajoleries of those
dissolving views of events diplomacy loves to revel in. What becomes of
the graceful drapery in which statesmen used to clothe the great facts
of the world, when a simple despatch, “fifteen words, exclusive of
the address,” tells the whole story? and when we have read that “the
insurgents are triumphant everywhere, the king left the capital at four
o’clock, a provisional government was proclaimed this morning,” and
suchlike, what do we care for the sonorous periods in which official
priestcraft chants the downfall of a dynasty?

The great stronghold of statecraft was, however, Speculation--I mean
that half-prophetic view of events which we always conceded to those
who looked over the world from a higher window than ourselves. What
has become of this now? Who so bold as to predict what, while he is yet
speaking, may be contradicted? who is there hardy enough to forecast
what the events of the last half-hour may have falsified, and five
minutes more will serve to publish to the whole world?

It may be amusing to read the comments of the speech or the leading
article, but the “despatch” is the substance: and however clever the
variations, the original melody remains unaltered. Let any one imagine
to himself a five-act drama, preceded by a telegraphic intimation of
all its incidents--how insupportable would the slow procession of events
become after such a revelation! Up to this, Ministers performed a sort
of Greek chorus, chanting in ambiguous phrase the woes that invaded
those who differed from them, and the heart-corroding sorrows that sat
below the “gangway.” There has come an end to all this. All the dramatic
devices of those days are gone, and we live in an age in which many
men are their own priests, their lawyers, and their doctors, and where,
certes, each man is his own prophet.

These reflections have been much impressed upon me by a ramble I
took yesterday in company with one of the most agreeable of all our
diplomatists--one of those men who seem to weld into their happy natures
all the qualities which make good companionship, and blend with the
polished manners of a courtier the dash of an Eton boy and the deep
reflectiveness of a man of the world--a man to whom nothing comes wrong,
and whom you would be puzzled to say whether he was more in his element
at a cabinet council, or one of a shooting-party in the Highlands.

“I say, O’Dowd,” cried he, after a pause of some time in our
conversation, “has it never struck you that those tall poles and wires
are destined to be the end of both your trade and mine, and that within
a very few years neither of our occupations will have a representative
left? Take my word for it,” said he, more solemnly, “in less than
ten years from the present date a penny-a-liner will be as rare as
a posthorse, and a post-shay not more a curiosity than a
minister-plenipotentiary.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I am certain of it. People nowadays won’t travel eight miles an hour,
or be satisfied to hear of events ten days after they’ve happened. Life
is too short for all this now, and, as we can’t lengthen our days, we
must shorten our incidents. We are all more or less like that gentleman
Mathews used to tell us of at Boulogne, who said to the waiter, ‘Let me
have some-thing expensive; I am only here for an hour.’ Have you ever
thought seriously on the matter?”

“Never,” said I.

“You ought, then,” said he. “I tell you again, we are all in the same
category with flint locks and wooden ships--we belong to the past. Don’t
you know it? Don’t you feel it?”

“I don’t like to feel it,” said I, peevishly.

“Nonsense!” cried he, laughing. “Self-deception does nothing in the
matter, say what one will. A modern diplomatist is only a ‘smooth-Bore.’
What ‘our own correspondent’ represents, I leave to your own modesty.”

“It will be a bad day for us when the world comes to that knowledge,”
 said I, gloomily.

“Of course it will, but there’s no help for it. Old novels go to the
trunkmakers; second-hand uniforms make the splendour of dignity-balls in
the colonies: who is to say that there may not be a limbo for us also?
At all events, I have a scheme for our transition state--a plan I have
long revolved in my mind--and there’s certainly something in it.

“First of all realise it, as the Yankees say, that neither a government
nor a public will want either of us. When the wires have told that
the Grand-Duke Strong-grog-enofif was assassinated last night, or that
Prince Damisseisen has divorced his wife and married a milliner,
Downing Street and Printing-house Square will agree that all the moral
reflections the events inspire can be written just as well in Piccadilly
as from a palace on the Neva, or a den on the Danube. Gladstone will be
the better pleased, and take another farthing off ‘divi-divi,’ or some
other commodity in general use and of universal appreciation. Don’t you
agree to that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” drawled he out, in mimicry of my tone: “are you so
conceited about your paltry craft that you fancy the world cares for the
manner of it, or that there is really any excellence in the cookery?
Not a bit of it, man. We are bores both of us; and what’s worse--far
worse--we are bygones. Can’t you see that when a man buys a canister
of prepared beef-tea, he never asks any one to pour on the boiling
water--he brews his broth for himself? This is what people do with
the telegrams. They don’t want you or me to come in with the kettle:
besides, all tastes are not alike; one man may like his Bombardment of
Charleston weaker; another might prefer his Polish Massacre more highly
flavoured. This is purely a personal matter. How can you suit the
capricious likings of the million, and of the million--for that’s the
worst of it--the million that don’t want you? What a practical rebuke,
besides, to prosy talkers and the whole long-winded race, the sharp,
short tap of the telegraph! Who would listen to a narrative of Federal
finance when he has read ‘Gold at 204--Chase rigged the market’? Who
asks for strategical reasons in presence of ‘Almighty whipping--lost
eighty thousand--Fourth Michigan skedaddled ‘?

“How graphic will description become--how laconic all comment! You will
no more listen to one of the old circumlocutionary conversers than you
would travel by the waggon, or make a voyage in a collier.

“How, I would ask, could the business of life go on in an age active as
ours if all coinage was in copper, and vast transactions in money should
be all conducted in the base metal? Imagine the great Kings of Finance
counting over the debts of whole nations in penny-pieces, and you have
at once a picture of what, until a few years ago, was our intellectual
condition. How nobly Demosthenic our table-talk will be!--how grandly
abrupt and forensic!

“There is nothing, however, over which I rejoice more than in the
utter extinction of the anecdote-mongers--the insufferable monsters
who related Joe Millers as personal experiences, or gave you their own
versions of something in the morning papers. Thank heaven they are done
for!

“Last of all, the unhappy man who used to be sneered at for his silence
in company, will now be on a par with his fellows. The most bashful will
be able to blurt out, ‘Poles massacred,’ ‘Famine in Ireland,’ ‘Feast at
the Mansion House,’ ‘Collision at Croydon,’ ‘Bank discount eleven.’

“Who will dare to propagate scandal, when all amplification is denied
him? How much adulteration will the liquor bear which is measured by
drop? Nor will the least of our benefits be the long, reflective
pauses--those brilliant ‘flashes of silence’ which will supersede the
noise, turmoil, and confusion of what we used to call conversation. No,
no, Corneli mi. The game is up. ‘Our own Correspondent’ is a piece that
has run its course, and there’s nothing to do but take a farewell
benefit and quit the boards.”

“If I could fall back on my pension like you, I’d perhaps take the
matter easier,” said I, gruffly.

“Well, I think you ought to be pensioned. If I was a Minister, I’d
propose it. My notion is this: The proper subjects for pension are those
who, if not provided for by the State, are likely to starve. They are,
consequently, the class of persons who have devoted their lives to
an unmarketable commodity--such as poonah-painting, Berlin-wool work,
despatch-writing, and suchlike. I’d include ‘penny-a-lining’--don’t be
offended because you get twopence, perhaps. I’d pension the whole of
them--pretty much as I’d buy off the organ-man, and request him to move
on.”

“As, however,” said I, “we are not fortunate enough to figure in the
Estimates, may I ask what is the grand scheme you propose for our
employment?”

“I’m coming to it. I’d have reached it ere this, if you had not required
such a positive demonstration of your utter uselessness. You have
delayed me by what Guizot used to call ‘an obstructive indisposition to
believe.’”

“Go on; I yield--that is, under protest.” “Protest as much as you like.
In diplomacy a protest means, ‘I hope you won’t; but if you will, I
can’t help it,’ _Vide_ the correspondence about the annexation of Nice
and Savoy. Now to my project. It is to start a monster hotel--one of
those gigantic establishments for which the Americans are famous--in
some much-frequented part of Europe, and to engage as part of the
household all the ‘own time’ celebrities of diplomacy and letters. Every
one knows--most of us have, indeed, felt--the desire experienced to see,
meet, and converse with the noticeable men of the world--the people who,
so to say, leave their mark on the age they live in--the cognate
signs of human algebra. Only fancy, then, with what ecstasy would the
traveller read the prospectus of an establishment wherein, as in a
pantheon, all the gods were gathered around him. What would not the
Yankee give for a seat at a table where the great Eltchi ladled out the
soup, and the bland-voiced author of ‘The Woman in White’ lisped out,
‘Sherry, sir?’ Only imagine being handed one’s fish by the envoy
that got us into the Crimean war, or taking a potato served by the
accomplished writer of ‘Orley Farm’! Picture a succession of celebrities
in motion around the table, and conceive, if you can, the vainglorious
sentiment of the man that could say, ‘Lyons, a little more fat;’
or, ‘Carlyle, madeira;’ and imagine the luxury of that cup of tea so
gracefully handed you by ‘Lost and Saved,’ and the culminating pride of
taking your flat candlestick from the fingers of ‘Eleanor’s Victory.’

“Who would not cross the great globe to live in such an atmosphere of
genius and grandeur? for if there be, as there may, souls dead to
the charms of literary greatness, who in this advanced age of ours is
indifferent to the claims of high rank and station and title? Fancy
sending a K.C.B. to call a cab, or ordering a special envoy to fetch the
bootjack! I dare not pursue the theme. I cannot trust myself to dwell
on a subject so imbued with suggestiveness--all the varying and wondrous
combinations such a galaxy of splendour and power would inevitably
produce. What wit, what smartness, what epigram would abound! What
a hailstorm of pleasantries, and what stories of wise aphorisms
and profound reflections! How I see with my mind’s eye the literary
traveller trying to overhear the Attic drolleries of the waiters as they
wash up their glasses, or endeavouring to decoy Boots into a stroll with
a cigar, well knowing his charming article on Dickens.

“The class-writers would of course have their specialties.
‘Soapy-Sponge’ would figure in the stable-yard, and ‘Proverbial
Philosophy’ watch the trains as a touter. Fabulous prices might be
obtained for a room in such an establishment, and every place at the
_table-d’hôte_ should be five guineas at least. For, after all,
what would be an invitation to Compiègne to a sojourn here? Material
advantages might possibly incline to the side of the Imperial board; but
would any one presume to say that the company in the one was equal to
the ‘service’ at the other? Who would barter the glorious reality of
the first for the mean and shallow mockery of the last? Last of all, how
widespread and powerful would be the influence of such an establishment
over the manners of our time! Would Cockneyism, think you, omit its
H’s in presence of that bland individual who offers him cheese? Would
presumption dare to criticise in view of that ‘Quarterly’ man who is
pouring out the bitter beer? What a check on the expansive balderdash of
the ‘gent’ at his dessert to know and feel that ‘Adam Bede’ was behind
him!

“Would Brown venture on that anecdote of Jones if the napkin-in-hand
listener should be an ex-envoy renowned for his story-telling? Who
would break down in his history, enunciate a false quantity, misquote a
speech, or mistake the speaker, in such hearing? Some one might object
to the position and to the functions I assign to persons of a certain
distinction, and say that it was unworthy of an ex-ambassador to act
as a hall-porter, or a celebrated prose-writer to clean the knives. I
confess I do not think so. I shrewdly suspect a great deal of what we
are pleased to call philosophy is only a well-regulated self-esteem,
and that the man who feels himself immeasurably above another in mind,
capacity, and attainments, and yet sees that other vastly superior
in station and condition, has within his heart a pride all the more
exalting that it is stimulated by the sense of a great injustice, and
the profound consciousness that it is to himself, to his own nature, he
must look to redress the balance that fortune would set against him.

“In the brilliant conversation of the servants’ hall, then, would these
many gifted men take their revenge; and what stores of good stories,
what endless drolleries, what views of life, and what traits of
character, would they derive from the daily opportunities! It has
constantly been remarked by foreigners that there is no trait of
our national manners less graceful in itself than the way in which
inferiors, especially menials, are addressed in England. It is alleged,
perhaps with some truth, that we mark every difference of class more
decisively than other nations; and certainly in our treatment of
servants there is none of that same confidential tone so amusing in a
French vaudeville. The scheme I now suggest will be the effective remedy
for this.

“Will Jones, think you, presume to be imperative if it be Alfred
Tennyson who has brought up his hot water? Will Brown be critical about
the polish, if it be Owen Meredith has taken him his boots? Will even
Snooks cry out, ‘Holloa, you fellow!’ to a passing waiter, if the
individual so addressed might chance to be an Oriental Secretary or a
Saturday Reviewer?

“And would the most infatuated of Bagmen venture on what O’Connell used
to call a ‘chuck-under-the-chin manner,’ were the chamber-maid to be
Margaret Maitland?

“Such, in brief, is my plan, O’Dowd; nor is the least of its advantages
that it gets rid of the Pension List, and that beggarly £1200 a-year by
which wealthy England assumes to aid the destitute sons and daughters
of letters. As for myself, I have fixed on my station. I mean to be
swimming-master, and the prospectus shall announce that His Excellency
the late Minister at the Court of-----ducks ladies every morning from
eight till nine. Think over the project, and drop me a hint as to the
sort of place would suit you.”




ITALIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERISTICS.

My diplomatic friend is rarely very serious in his humour; this morning,
however, he was rather disposed that way, and so I took the opportunity
to question him about Italy, a country where he has lived long, and
whose people he certainly understands better than most Englishmen. I
gathered from him that he considered the English were thoroughly
well informed on Italy, but in the most hopeless ignorance as to the
Italians. “As for the house and the furniture, you know it all.” said
he; “but of the company you know positively nothing.”

Byron understood them better than any other Englishman. He had his
admission _par la petite porte_--that is, he gained his knowledge
through his vices; and the Italians were so flattered to see a great
Milor adapt himself so readily to their lax notions and loose morality
that they grew frank and open with him.

His pretended--I suppose it was only pretended--dislike to England
disarmed them, too, of all distrust of him; and for the first time they
felt themselves judged by a man who did not think Charing Cross finer
than the Piazza del Popolo.

Byron’s rank and station gained him a ready acceptance where the masses
of our travelling countrymen would not be received; for the Italians
love rank, and respect all its gradations. Even the republics were great
aristocracies; and in all their imitations of France they have never
affected “equality.” They love splendour too, and display; and in all
their festivals you see something like an effort to recall a time when
their cities were the grandest and their citizens the proudest in all
Europe.

They are a very difficult people to understand. There are not so many
salient points in the Italian as in the German or the Frenchman; his
character is not so strongly accented; his traits are finer--his shades
of temperament more delicate.

Besides this, there is another difficulty: one is immensely aided in
their appreciation of a people by their lighter drama, which is in a
measure a reflex of the daily sayings and doings of those who listen to
it. Now the Italians have no comedy, or next to none; so barren are they
in this respect, that more than once have I asked myself, Can there be
any domesticity in a nation which has not mirrored itself on the stage?
What sort of a substance can that be that never had a shadow?

The immortal Goldoni, as they print him in all the play-bills, is
ineffably stupid, his characters ill drawn, his plots meagre, and his
dialogue as flat as the talk of a three-volume novel. The only palpable
lesson derivable from him is, that all ranks and classes stand pretty
much on an equality, and that as regards modes of expression the count
and his coachman are precisely on a level. There is scarcely a trait of
humour in these pieces--never, by any accident, anything bordering on
wit. The characters talk the veriest commonplaces, and announce the most
humdrum intentions in phraseology as flat and wearisome.

Now you will ask, perhaps, Is this a fair type of the present-day
habits--are the Italians of our time like those of Goldoni’s? My reply
would be, that it would be difficult to imagine a people who have
changed less within a century. The same small topics, the same petty
interests engage them. They display the same ardent enthusiasm about
trifles, and the same thorough indifference to great things, as their
grandfathers; and they are marvellously like the dreary puppets that the
immortal dramatist has given us as their representatives.

It has been reproached to Sheridan, that no people in real life ever
displayed such brilliancy in conversation as the characters in the
‘School for Scandal;’ and tame as Goldoni reads, I verily believe his
dialogue is rather above the level of an Italian salon.

The great interests of Life, the game of politics, the contests and
reverses of party, literature in its various forms, and the sports of
the field, form topics which make the staple of our dinner-talk. Instead
of these the Italians have their one solitary theme--the lapses of their
neighbours, the scandals of the small world around them. Not that they
are uncharitable or malevolent; far from it. They discuss a frailty as a
board of physicians might a malady, and without the slightest thought of
imputing blame to “the patient.” They have now and then a hard word for
an unfortunate husband, but even him they treat rather as one ignorant
of conventional usages and the ways of the polite world, than as a man
radically bad or cruel.

They have in their blood the old Greek sensitiveness to suffering,
and they dislike painful scenes and disastrous catastrophes; and
this sentiment they carry to extremes. Although they have the finest
representative of Othello--Salvini--at this moment in Europe, the
terrible scene of the murder of Desdemona is a shock that many would
shrink from witnessing. They will bear any strain on the imagination,
but their fine-strung nerves revolt against the terrible in action.
To this natural refinement is owing much of that peculiar softness of
manner and reluctance to disoblige which foreigners frequently mistake
for some especial desire to win their favour.

The idleness which would make an Englishman awkward sits gracefully on
the Italian. He knows how to “do nothing” with dignity. Be assured, if
Hercules had been of Anglo-Saxon blood, Omphale would never have set him
down to spin; but being what he was, I could swear he went through his
tomfoolery gracefully.

And with all this, is it not strange that these are the people who
furnish the most reckless political enthusiasts of the world, and who,
year after year, go to the scaffold for “an idea”? There is something
hysterical in this Italian nature, which prompts to paroxysms like
these--some of that impulsive fury which, in the hill-tribes of India,
sends down hordes of fanatics to impale themselves on British bayonets.
The men like Orsini abound--calm of look, mild of speech, and gentle in
manner, and yet ready to commit the greatest of crimes and confront the
most terrible of deaths for a mere speculative notion--the possibility
of certain changes producing certain contingencies, and of which other
changes are to ensue, and Italy become something that she never was
before, nor would the rest of Europe suffer her to remain, if ever she
attained to it.

Wine-tasters tell us it is vain to look for a bottle of unadulterated
port: I should in the same way declare that there are few rarer things
to be found than a purely Italian society. The charm of their glorious
climate; the beauty of their country, the splendour of their cities,
rich in centuries of associations, have attracted strangers from every
corner of the Old World and the New; and the salons of Italy are but
caravanserais, where all nations meet and all tongues are spoken.

The Italians like this; it flatters national pride, and it suits
national indolence. The outer barbarians from the Neva or the Thames
have fine houses and give costly entertainments. Their sterner looks and
more robust habits are meet subject for the faint little jests that are
bandied in some _patois_; and each thinks himself the superior of his
neighbour. But as for the home life of these people, who has seen
it? What is known of it? Into that long, lofty, arched-ceilinged
drawing-room, lighted by its one lamp, where sits the Signora with
her daughter and the grimy-looking, ill-shaven priest, there is not,
perhaps, much temptation to enter, nor is the conversation of a kind
one would care to join in; and there is but this, and the noisy, almost
riotous, reception after the opera, where a dozen people are contending
at “Lansquenet,” while one or perhaps two thump the piano, and some
three or four shout rather than sing the last popular melody of the
season, din being accepted as gaiety, and a clamour that would make
deafness a blessing being taken for the delight of a charmed assembly.

I have been told that Cavour once said, that no great change would be
accomplished in Italy till the Italians introduced the public-school
system of England. So long as the youth of the country were given up
for education to the priests--the most illiterate, narrow-minded, and
bigoted class in Europe--so long would they carry with them through life
the petty prejudices of their early days; or, in emancipating themselves
from these, fall into a scepticism whose baneful distrust would damp
the ardour of all patriotism, and sap the strength of every high and
generous emulation. As the great statesman said, “I want Italians to be
Italians, and not to be bad Frenchmen.”

With a Peninsular Eton or Rugby at work, who is to say what might not
come of a people whose intellectual qualities are unquestionably
so great? The system which imparts to boys the honourable sense of
responsibility, the high value of truthfulness, the scorn of all that is
mean,--this is what is wanting here. Let the Italian start in life with
these, and it would not be easy to set limits to what his country may
become in greatness.

I have never heard of a people with so little self-control; and their
crimes are, in a large majority of cases, the results of some passionate
impulse rather than of a matured determination to do wrong. It is by no
means uncommon to find that your butler or your coachman has taken to
his bed ill of a _rabbia_, as they call it--a fit of passion, in plain
words, brought on by a reproof he has considered unjust. This same
_rabbia_ is occasionally a serious affair. Some short time ago, an
actor, who was hissed off the stage at Turin, went home and died of it;
and within a very few weeks, a case occurred in Florence which would
be laughable if it had not terminated so tragically. One of the new
guardians of the public safety, habited in a strange travestie of an
English police-costume, was followed through the streets by a crowd of
boys, who mocked and jeered him on his dress. Seeing that he resented
their remarks with temper, they only became more aggressive, and at last
went so far as to pursue him through the city with yells and cries. The
man, overcome with passion, got _rabbia_, and died. Ridicule is the one
thing no Italian can bear. When you lose temper with an Italian, and
give way to any show of violence before him, he is triumphant; his cheek
glows, his eye brightens, his chest expands, he sees he has you at a
disadvantage, and regards you as one who in a moment of passion has
thrown his cards on the table and exposed his hand. After this it is
next to impossible to regain your position before him. If you be
calm, however, and if, besides being calm, you can be sarcastic, he is
overcome at once.

It is a rare thing--one of the rarest--to see this weapon employed in
the debates; but when it does occur, it is ever successful. The fact
is, that Wit, which forms the subtlety of other nations, is not subtle
enough for the Italian; and the edge that cuts so cleanly elsewhere
makes a jagged wound with them.

After all, they are very easy to live with. If the social atmosphere
is not very stimulating or invigorating, it is easy to breathe, and
pleasant withal; and one trait of theirs is not without its especial
merit--they are less under the control of conventionalities than any
people I ever heard of, and consequently have few affectations. If they
do assume any little part, or play off any little game, it is with the
palpable object of a distinct gain by it; never is it done for personal
display or individual glory. There are no more snobs in Italy than
there are snakes in Iceland; and that, after all, is, as the world goes,
saying something for a people.

Of all the nations of Europe, I know of none, save Italy, in which the
characters are the same in every class and gradation. The appeal you
would make to the Italian noble must be the same you would address to
the humble peasant on his property. The point of view is invariably
identical; the sympathies are always alike. No matter what differences
education may have instituted and habits implanted, the nobleman and his
lackey think and feel and reason alike. Separate them how you will in
station, and they will still approach the consideration of any subject
in the same spirit, and regard it with the same hopes and fears, the
same expectations and distrusts. To this trait, of whose existence
Cavour well knew, was owing the marvellous unanimity in the nation on
the last war with Austria. The appeal to the prince could be addressed,
and was addressed, to the peasant. There was not an argument that spoke
to the one which was not re-echoed in the heart of the other. In fact,
the chain that binds the social condition of Italy is shorter than
elsewhere, and the extreme links are less remote from each other than
with most nations of Europe.

Every Italian is a conspirator, whether the question be the gravest
or the lightest; all must be done in it ambiguously--secretly--
mysteriously. Whatever is conducted openly is deemed to be done
stupidly. To take a house, buy a horse, or hire a servant without the
intervention of another man to disparage the article, chaffer over the
price, and disgust the vendor, is an act of impetuous folly. “Why didn’t
you tell _me!_” says your friend, “that you wished to have that villa?
My coachman is half-brother to the wife of the _fattore_. I could have
learned everything that could be urged against its convenience, and
learned, besides, what peculiar pressure for money affected the owner.”
 Besides this, everything must be done as though by mere hazard: you
really never knew there was a house there, never noticed it; you even
sneer at the taste of the man who selected the spot, and wonder “what he
meant by it.” In nine cases out of ten the other party is not deceived
by this skirmishing; he fires a little blank-cartridge too, and so goes
on the engagement. All have great patience; life, at least in Italy, is
quite long enough for all this; no one is overburdened with business;
the days are usually wearisome, and the theatres are only open of an
evening!

It is, besides, so pleasant and so interesting to the Italian to pit
his craft against another man’s, and back his own subtlety against his
neighbour’s. It is a sort of gambling of which he never wearies; for
the game is one that demands not merely tact, address, and cunning,
but face, voice, manner, and bearing. It is temperament. Individuality
itself is on the table; and so is it, that you may assume it as certain
that the higher organisation will invariably rise the winner.

Imagine Bull in such a combat, and you have a picture of the most
hopeless incapacity. He frets, fumes, storms, and sulks; but what avails
it? he is “done” in the end; but he is no more aware that the struggle
he has been engaged in is an intellectual one, than was the Bourgeois
Gentilhomme conscious that he had been for forty years “talking prose.”

The Priest was doubtless the great originator of all this mechanism
of secrecy and fraud. For centuries the Church has been the Tyrant of
Italy. The whole fate and fortunes of families depended on the will of
a poor, ill-clad, ignoble-looking creature, who, though he sat at meals
with the master, ate and talked like a menial. To this man was known
everything--all that passed beneath the roof. Not alone was he aware of
the difficulties, the debts, the embarrassments of the family, but to
him were confided their feelings, their shortcomings, their sorrows, and
it might be their shame. From him there was nothing secret; and he sat
there, in the midst of them, a sort of Fate, wielding the power of one
who knew every spring and motive that could stir them, every hope that
could thrill, every terror that could appal them. There was no escape
from him--cold, impassive spectator of good or evil fortune, without one
affection to attach him to life, grimly watching the play of passions
which made men his slaves, and only interested by the exercise of a
power that degraded them. The layman could not outwit him, it is true,
but he could steal something of the

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