long article on Temple. It is superficial; but on that account, among others, I shall be surprised if it does not take. Hayter has painted me for his picture of the House of Commons. I can not judge of his performance. I can only say, as Charles the Second did on a similar occasion, "Odds fish! if I am like this, I am an ugly fellow." Yours ever, T. B. M. In the middle of October Macaulay started for a tour in Italy. Just past middle life, with his mind already full, and his imagination still fresh and his health unbroken, it may be doubted whether any traveler had carried thither a keener expectation of enjoyment since Winckelmann for the first time crossed the Alps. A diary, from which extracts will be given in the course of this chapter, curiously illustrates the feelings with which he regarded the scenes around him. He viewed the works, both of man and of nature, with the eyes of an historian, and not of an artist. The leading features of a tract of country impressed themselves rapidly and indelibly on his observation; all its associations and traditions swept at once across his memory; and every line of good poetry which its fame or its beauty had inspired rose almost involuntarily to his lips. But, compared with the wealth of phrases on which he could draw at will when engaged on the description of human passions, catastrophes, and intrigues, his stock of epithets applicable to mountains, seas, and clouds was singularly scanty; and he had no ambition to enlarge it. When he had recorded the fact that the leaves were green, the sky blue, the plain rich, and the hills clothed with wood, he had said all he had to say, and there was an end of it. He had neither the taste nor the power for rivaling those novelists who have more colors in their vocabulary than ever Turner had on his palette; and who spend over the lingering phases of a single sunset as much ink as Richardson consumed in depicting the death of his villain or the ruin of his heroine. "I have always thought," said Lady Trevelyan, "that your uncle was incomparable in showing a town, or the place where any famous event occurred; but that he did not care for scenery, merely as scenery. He enjoyed the country, in his way. He liked sitting out on a lawn, and seeing grass and flowers around him. Occasionally a view made a great impression on him, such as the view down upon Susa, going over Mont Cenis; but I doubt whether any scene pleased his eye more than his own beloved Holly Lodge, or Mr. Thornton's garden at Battersea Rise. When we were recalling the delights of an excursion among the Surrey hills, or in the by-ways at the English lakes, he would be inclined to ask, 'What went ye out for to see? Yet he readily took in the points of a landscape; and I remember being much struck by his description of the country before you reach Rome, which he gives in "Horatius." When I followed him over that ground many years after, I am sure that I marked the very turn in the road where the lines struck him: From where Cortona lifts to heaven Her diadem of towers; and so on through 'reedy Thrasymene,' and all the other localities of the poem." "Chalons-sur-Saône, Tuesday, October 23d, 1838.-The road from Autun is for some way more beautiful than any thing I had yet seen in France; or, indeed, in that style, anywhere else, except, perhaps, the ascent to the table-land of the Neilgherries. I traversed a winding pass, near two miles in length, running by the side of a murmuring brook, and between hills covered with forest. The landscape appeared in the richest coloring of October, under a sun like that of an English June. The earth was the earth of autumn, but the sky was the sky of summer. The foliage-darkgreen, light-green, purple, red, and yellow-seen by the evening sun, produced the effect of the plumage of the finest Eastern birds. I walked up the pass exceedingly pleased. To enjoy scenery you should ramble amidst it; let the feelings to which it gives rise mingle with other thoughts; look around upon it in intervals of reading; and not go to it as one goes to see the lions fed at a fair. The beautiful is not to be stared at, but to be lived with. I have no pleasure from books which equals that of reading over for the hundredth time great productions which I almost know by heart; and it is just the same with scenery." "Lyons, Thursday, October 25th.—My birthday. Thirty-eight years old. Thought of Job, Swift, and Antony. Dressed, and went down to the steamer. I was delighted by my first sight of the blue, rushing, healthful-looking Rhone. I thought, as I wandered along the quay, of the sin gular love and veneration which rivers excite in those who live on their banks; of the feeling of the Hindoos about the Ganges; of the Hebrews about the Jordan; of the Egyptians about the Nile; of the Romans, Cuique fuit rerum promissa potentia Tibrin; of the Germans about the Rhine. Is it that rivers have, in a greater degree than almost any other inanimate object, the appearance of animation, and something resembling character? They are sometimes slow and darklooking; sometimes fierce and impetuous; sometimes bright, dancing, and almost flippant. The attachment of the French for the Rhone may be explained into a very natural sympathy. It is a vehement, rapid stream. It seems cheerful, and full of animal spirits, even to petulance. But this is all fanciful." "October 26th.-On board the steamer for Avignon. Saw the famous junction of the two rivers, and thought of Lord Chatham's simile.* But his expression 'languid, though of no depth,' is hardly just to the Saône, however just it may be to the Duke of Newcastle. We went down at a noble rate. The day, which had been dank and foggy, became exceedingly beautiful. After we had left Valence the scenery grew wilder: the hills bare and rocky like the sides of Lethe water in Cumberland; the mountains of Dauphiné in the distance reminded me of the outline of Ceylon as I saw it from the sea; and, here and there, I could catch a glimpse of white peaks which I fancied to be the summits of the Alps. I chatted with the French gentlemen on board, and found them intelligent and polite. We talked of their roads and public works, and they complimented me on my knowledge of French history and geography. 'Ah, monsieur, vous avez beaucoup approfondi ces choses-là.' The evening was falling when we came to the Pont St. Esprit, a famous work of the monks, which pretends to no ornament, and needs none." "October 28th.-The day began to break as we descended into Marseilles. It was Sunday; but the town seemed only so much the gayer. I looked hard for churches, but for a long time I saw none. At last I heard bells, and the noise guided me to a chapel, mean inside and mean outside, but crowded as Simeon's church used to be crowded at Cambridge. The mass was nearly over. I staid to the end, wondering that so many reasonable beings could come together to see a man bow, drink, bow again, wipe a * "One fragment of this celebrated oration remains in a state of tolerable preservation. It is the comparison between the coalition of Fox and Newcastle, and the junction of the Rhone and the Saône. 'At Lyons,' said Pitt, 'I was taken to see the place where the two rivers meet; the one gentle, feeble, languid, and, though languid, yet of no depth; the other a boisterous and impetuous torrent. But, different as they are, they meet at last.'"-Macaulay's Essay on Chatham. cup, wrap up a napkin, spread his arms, and gesticulate with his hands; and to hear a low muttering which they could not understand, interrupted by the occasional jingling of a bell. A fine steamer sails to-morrow for Leghorn. I am going to lock this hulking volume up, and I shall next open it in Tuscany." “Wednesday, October 31st.—This was one of the most remarkable days of my life. After being detained, by the idle precautions which are habitual with these small absolute governments, for an hour on deck, that the passengers might be counted; for another hour in a dirty room, that the agent of the police might write down all our names; and for a third hour in another smoky den, while a custom-house officer opened razor-cases to see that they concealed no muslin, and turned over dictionaries to be sure that they contained no treason or blasphemy, I hurried on shore, and by seven in the morning I was in the streets of Genoa. Never had I been more struck and enchanted. There was nothing mean or small to break the charm, as one huge, massy, towering palace succeeded to another. True it is that none of these magnificent piles is a strikingly good architectural composition; but the general effect is majestic beyond description. When the King of Sardinia became sovereign of Genoa, he bought the house of the Durazzo family, and found himself at once lodged as nobly as a great prince need wish to be. What a city, where a king has only to go into the market to buy a Luxembourg, or a St. James's! Next to the palaces, or rather quite as much, I admired the churches. Outside they are poor and bad, but within they dazzled and pleased me more than I can express. It was the awakening of a new sense, the discovery of an unsuspected pleasure. I had drawn all my notions of classical interiors from the cold, white, and naked walls of such buildings as St. Paul's, or St. Geneviève's; but the first church-door that I opened at Genoa let me into another world. One harmonious glow pervaded the whole of the long Corinthian arcade from the entrance to the altar. In this way I passed the day, greatly excited and delighted." With this, perhaps the only jingling sentence which he ever left unblotted, Macaulay closes the account of his first, but far from his last, visit to the queen of the Tyrrhenian sea. To the end of his days, when comparing, as he loved to compare, the claims of European cities to the prize of beauty, he would place at the head of the list the august names of Oxford, Edinburgh, and Genoa. “November 2d.—I shall always have an interesting recollection of Pisa. There is something pleasing in the way in which all the monuments of Pisan greatness lie together, in a place not unlike the close of an English cathedral, surrounded with green turf; still kept in the most perfect preservation, and evidently matters of admiration and of pride to the whole population. Pisa has always had a great hold on my mind: partly from its misfortunes; and partly, I believe, because my first notions about the Italian republics were derived from Sismondi, whom I read while at school and Sismondi, who is, or fancies that he is, of Pisan descent, does all in his power to make the country of his ancestors an object of interest. I like Pisa, too, for having been Ghibelline. After the time of Frederick Barbarossa, my preference, as far as one can have preferences in so wretched a question, are all Ghibelline. "As I approached Florence the day became brighter; and the country looked, not indeed strikingly beautiful, but very pleasing. The sight of the olive-trees interested me much. I had, indeed, seen what I was told were olive-trees, as I was whirled down the Rhone from Lyons to Avignon; but they might, for any thing I saw, have been willows or ash-trees. Now they stood, covered with berries, along the road for miles. I looked at them with the same sort of feeling with which Washington Irving says that he heard the nightingale for the first time when he came to England, after having read descriptions of her in poets from his childhood. I thought of the Hebrews, and their numerous images drawn from the olive; of the veneration in which the tree was held by the Athenians; of Lysias's speech; of the fine ode in the 'Edipus at Colonus;' of Virgil and Lorenzo de' Medici. Surely it is better to travel in mature years, with all these things in one's head, than to rush over the Continent while still a boy!" "Florence, November 3d.-Up before eight, and read Boiardo at breakfast. My rooms look into a court adorned with orange-trees and marble statues. I never look at the statues without thinking of poor Mignon. Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an: I know no two lines in the world which I would sooner have written than those. I went to a Gabinetto Litterario hard by, subscribed, and read the last English newspapers. I crossed the river, and walked through some of the rooms in the Palazzo Pitti; greatly admiring a little painting, by Raphael, from Ezekiel, which was so fine that it almost reconciled me to seeing God the Father on canvas. "Then to the Church of Santa Croce: an ugly, mean outside; and not much to admire in the architecture within, but consecrated by the dust of some of the greatest men that ever lived. It was to me what a first visit to Westminster Abbey would be to an American. The first tomb which caught my eye, as I entered, was that of Michael Angelo. I was much moved, and still more so when, going forward, I saw the stately monument lately erected to Dante. The figure of the poet seemed to me |