The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (Vol. 1&2). Lady Isabel Burton
were long remembered. The driver insisted upon a full gallop, and the protests of the unfortunate Englishman, who declared every quarter of an hour that he was the father of a large family, were utterly disregarded.
The first view of Provence was something entirely new, and the escape was hailed from the flat fields and the long poplar avenues of Central France. Everything, even the most squalid villages, seemed to fall into a picture. It was something like a sun that burst upon the rocks. The olive trees laden with purple fruit were a delight after the apples and pears, and the contrast between the brown rock and the blue Mediterranean, was quite a new sensation. At Marseilles we embarked for Leghorn, which was then, in Italy, very much what Lyons was in France. It was the head-quarters of brigands. Indeed it was reported that a society existed, whose members were pledged to stab their fellow-creatures, whenever they could do it safely. And it was brought to light by the remorse of a son, who had killed his father by mistake. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, with his weak benevolence, was averse to shedding blood, and the worst that these wretches expected was to be dressed in the red or the yellow of the Galeotti, and to sweep the streets and to bully the passenger for bakshish. Another unpleasant development was the quantity of vermin—even the washerwoman's head appeared to be walking off her shoulders. Still there was a touch of Italian art about the place, in the days before politics and polemics had made Italian art, with the sole exception of sculpture, the basest thing on the Continent: the rooms were large, high, and airy, the frescoes on the ceiling were good, and the pictures had not been sold to Englishmen, and replaced by badly coloured daubs, and cheap prints of the illustrated paper type.
Pisa.
After a few days, finding Leghorn utterly unfit to inhabit, my father determined to transfer himself to Pisa. There, after the usual delay, he found a lodging on the wrong side of the Arno—that is to say, the side which does not catch the winter sun—in a huge block of buildings opposite the then highest bridge. Dante's old "Vituperio delle gante" was then the dullest abode known to man, except perhaps his sepulchre. The climate was detestable (Iceland on the non-sunny, Madeira on the sunny side of the river), but the doctors thought it good enough for their patients; consequently it was the hospital of a few sick Britishers upon a large scale. These unfortunates had much better have been left at home instead of being sent to die of discomfort in Tuscany, but there they would have died upon the doctor's hands. The dullness of the place was something preternatural.
The Italians had their own amusements. The principal one was the opera, a perfect den of impurity, where you were choked by the effluvia of pastrane or the brigands' cloaks, which descended from grandfather to grandson. The singing, instrumentation, and acting were equally vile, but the Pisani had not the critical ferocity of the Livornesi, who were used to visit the smallest defect with "Torni in iscena, bestia!" The other form of amusement was the conversazione. Here you entered about six o'clock, and found an enormous room, with a dwarf sofa and an avenue of two lines of chairs projecting from it perpendicularly. You were expected to walk through the latter, which were occupied by the young women, to the former, upon which sat the dowagers, and after the three saluts d'usage and the compliments of the season, you backed out by the way you came in, and then passed the evening leaning over the back of the chair of the fair dame whose cavaliere servente you were supposed to be. Refreshments were an occasional glass of cold water; in luxurious houses there were water ices and sugared wafers. They complain that we English are not happy in society without eating, and I confess that I prefer a good beefsteak to cold water and water ices.
There was no bad feeling between the Italians and English; they simply ignored one another. Nothing could be shadier than the English colony at Pisa. As they had left England, the farther they were the more wretched they became, till they reached the climax at Naples. They had no club, as at Tours, and they met to read their Gagliani at a grocer's shop on the Lung' Arno. They had their parson and doctor and their tea-caddies, but the inhospitable nature of the country—and certainly Italy is the least given to the savage virtue—seemed to have affected the strangers. Equally unknown were the dinner-parties of Tours and the hops of Blois. No one shot and no one fished. A madman used to plunge through the ice on the Lung' Arno in midwinter, but most of them contented themselves with promenading the Quai and basking in its wintry sun till they returned to their stuffy rooms. A good many of them were half-pay officers. Others were Jamaican planters, men who had made their fortunes in trade; the rest were nondescripts whom nobody knew. At times some frightful scandal broke out in consequence of some gentleman who had left his country for his country's good.
The discomforts of Pisa were considerable. The only fireplace in those days was a kind of brazier, put in the middle of the room. The servants were perfect savages, who had to be taught the very elements of service, and often at the end of the third day a great burly peasant would take leave, saying, "Non mi basta l'anima!" My father started a fearful equipage in the shape of a four-wheeled trap, buying for the same a hammer-headed brute of a horse which at once obtained the name of "Dobbin." Dobbin was a perfect demon steed, and caused incalculable misery, as every person was supposed to steal his oats. One of us boys was sent down to superintend his breakfast, dinner, and supper. On journeys it was the same, and we would have been delighted to see Dobbin hanged, drawn, and quartered. We tried riding him in private, but the brute used to plant his forelegs and kick up and down like a rocking-horse. The trap was another subject of intense misery. The wheels were always supposed to be wanting greasing, and as the natives would steal the grease, it was necessary that one of us should always superintend the greasing. There is no greater mistake than that of trying to make boys useful by making them do servant's work.
The work of education went on nimbly, if not merrily. To former masters was added an Italian master, who was at once dubbed "Signor No," on account of the energy of his negation. The French master unfortunately discovered that his three pupils had poetic talents; the consequence was that we were set to write versical descriptions, which we hated worse than Telemachus and the Spectator.
And a new horror appeared in the shape of a violin master. Edward took kindly to the infliction, worked very hard, and became an amateur almost equal to a professional; was offered fair pay as member of an orchestra in Italy, and kept it up after going into the Army, till the calls of the Mess made it such a nuisance that he gave it up; but took to it again later in life con amore. I always hated my fiddle, and after six months it got me into a terrible scrape, and brought the study to an untimely end. Our professor was a thing like Paganini, length without breadth, nerves without flesh, hung on wires, all hair and no brain, except for fiddling. The creature, tortured to madness by a number of false notes, presently addressed his pupil in his grandiloquent Tuscan manner, "Gli altri scolari sono bestie, ma voi siete un Arci-bestia." The "Arci" offended me horribly, and, in a fury of rage, I broke my violin upon my master's head; and then my father made the discovery that his eldest son had no talent for music, and I was not allowed to learn any more.
Amongst the English at Pisa we met with some Irish cousins, whose names had been Conyngham, but they had, for a fortune, very sensibly added "Jones" to it, and who, very foolishly, were ashamed of it ever after. There was a boy, whose face looked as if badly cut out of a half-boiled potato, dotted with freckles so as to resemble a goose's egg. There was a very pretty girl, who afterwards became Mrs. Seaton. The mother was an exceedingly handsome woman of the Spanish type, and it was grand to see her administering correction to "bouldness." They seemed principally to travel in Italy for the purpose of wearing out old clothes, and afterwards delighted in telling how many churches and palaces they had "done" in Rome per diem. The cute Yankee always travels, when he is quite unknown, in his best bib and tucker, reserving his old clothes for his friends who appreciate him. Altogether the C.J.'s were as fair specimens of Northern barbarians invading the South, as have been seen since the days of Brennus.
Siena.
The summer of '32 was passed at Siena, where a large rambling old house was found inside the walls. The venerable town, whose hospitality was confined to an inscription over the city gate, was perhaps one of the dullest places under heaven. No country in the world shows less hospitality—even Italians amongst themselves—than Italy, and in the case of strangers they have perhaps many reasons to justify their churlishness.
Almost all the English at Siena were fugitives from justice, social