"Well might Bishop Heber," I said, "himself a poet and, therefore, presumably a judge of poetry, pronounce a glowing eulogium on the lines Lamia has just quoted. And with what ease Byron passes from them to Velino's 'roar of waters' at Terni! Yet more striking is the sudden transition, immediately afterwards, to Rome, saluting it as his country, the city of the soul, and the Niobe of nations. But, Lamia, recite for us again." Instantly complying, she called on her unerring young memory for stanzas that never can be forgotten by those who know what is great poetry and revere it :

O Rome, my country! city of the soul !
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead Empires, and control
In their shut breasts their petty nursery.

What are our woes and sufferance? Come and see
The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way
O'er steps of broken thrones and temples, ye
Whose agonies are evils of a day.

A World is at our feet, as fragile as our clay.

The Niobe of nations, there she stands,
Childless and crownless in her voiceless woe,
An empty urn within her withered hands,
Whose holy dust was scattered long ago.
The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now.
The very sepulchres lie tenantless

Of their heroic dwellers. Dost thou flow,
Old Tiber, through a marble wilderness?

Rise with thy yellow waves and mantle her distress!

"Here," I said, when Lamia ceased, "are no awkward inversions, no straining after effect, no striving to be original, but, on the contrary, continuous directness of appropriate utterance, manifesting an unsurpassed mastery over language and verse. Well might Ruskin 'declare that Byron had taught him how to write. Well might Goethe and Scott outdo themselves in enthusiasm over their great contemporary, who rode Pegasus as though horse and rider were one. Yet I remember a weekly guide of critical opinion affirming that Byron's poetry was only the apotheosis of commonplace,' and the editor of another weekly paper of yet wider repute declaring that, in his opinion, Scott, the author of the last three hundred lines in Marmion, and perhaps, when at his best, the most Homeric of all our poets, to be only a spirited versifier.' That is what comes of what I think may be called a sybaritic, emasculated taste in poetry. But I believe a reaction is setting in against such lamentable judgments."

"Do you think," asked our Biographer, "they do any harm, or that people in general are much influenced by them?"

"I am disposed," I said, "to think that in periods of mental indolence or excessive receptivity they may seriously mislead for a time. But it is, of course, only for a time. Some foolish fellow may show one the wrong road, when one is exploring; but one finds out the mistake in due course, and ends by hitting the right one again."

"In assigning Raphael the place of primacy as a painter," said Lamia, "which, after so often gazing on his frescoes in the Vatican, and then associating them with his easel pictures in Florence and elsewhere, ought one not to allow that Leonardo da Vinci would have to be bracketed with him, had that incorrigible experimentalist left as large and various a body of finished work?"

"Perhaps so," I answered. "Volume and variety of execution, where the work itself is good, should never be lost sight of, whether in painting or poetry, in estimating the rank of poet or painter in the hierarchy of distinction. Genius of the highest order is essentially fertile, teeming with ideas, and yearning with the desire of bringing them to birth. Its progeny, too, are as multiform as they are numerous. Like the joyful mother of children in the Scriptures, it exults in the unceasing exertion of productive power."

"Then," said Veronica, "Tintoretto, with whom Lamia is but imperfectly acquainted, since she has not been to Venice"

"When am I to be taken there?"

"Some day, I hope," Veronica replied. 'But, as I was going to say, Tintoretto also must not be forgotten; for his genius has covered more wall-space, I should think, than any other painter."

"Between the really great and the really great," said our Biographer, "are not comparisons, save for some illustrative purpose, more than unnecessary? Between those who have what are called certain qualities, and those who have every qualification of their art, equality should not be suggested. But the Great Masters do not compete with, they rather complement and complete each other."

A consentaneous silence fell on us, for twilight, suggestive of thought, and still more of feeling, was beginning to steal among the olive slopes, to darken the leaves of the freshly foliaged vines, and to turn yet more pallid the fantastic branches of the burgeoning fig-trees. We had reached the foot of the incline that leads to Perugia; and, that towering

city being the bourne of our long day's travel, a pair of cream-coloured bovi were waiting, to help our tired team up the ascent at the leisurely pace of the drawers of the plough. Deeper waxed the dusk, for the moon had not yet risen above the mountainous Umbrian horizon, and there was a never-ceasing silvery ululation—is it of sorrow or of rapture? -of the vesper nightingales. Perhaps they sing for joy and rapture both; for, as Wordsworth says, there is a certain mood when

Pleasant thoughts

Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

Then suddenly flitted a fire-fly among the olives, then another, and another, and many another still, and the full moon rolled slowly up on her golden tire above the Umbrian range, and, thus accompanied, we wound up the hill that leads to the once unruly but now peaceful Etruscan city.

There is always a certain tinge of sadness in backwardlooking thought, and Veronica and I could remember that we once spent a delightful month there together, when along the city ramparts there still stood the ruins of the Fortress erected by Paul III., avowedly, as was legibly inscribed on it, to curb the turbulence of its citizens. Our quarters were in an Italian inn abutting on the Corso, and on the window-ledge of our sitting-room we used to eat our ices, sent in from a neighbouring confectioner's, when of an afternoon a military band played just opposite, and the young bloods and sparklingeyed damsels sauntered up and down, and, as Shakespeare puts it,

Entertained the time with thoughts of love.

That, no doubt, is a very agreeable form of entertainment; but the pity of it is that Italian damsels, for the most part, entertain the time with thoughts of nothing else; and the suspicion I have always had that Shakespeare visited Italy is strongly confirmed by his portrayal of the character and conduct of Juliet, not to say of Juliet's nurse. True it is that, in his day, Italians came to England in no small number ; but they were Italian men, Papal Legates and their attendants, scholars of the Renaissance, architects, artists of all kinds, and the rest. But they did not bring their womenkind with them; and English maidens are, in certain respects, to Italian maidens as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine. I do not forget that a very slight foundation of real experience serves a great poet for the raising of a vast idealised superstructure. But some foundation there must be ; and one has difficulty in believing that even the numerous trans

lations into English of Italian books in Shakespeare's time, of themselves enabled him to surmise with such accuracy the Italian temperament he so often portrays in his dramas. Romantic young folks in Italy-and they are all romantic in what the same authority calls "the office and affairs of love"— will inflame each other with a passion that endures for months, aye, even for years, by merely gazing at each other, without any opportunity of exchanged speech ever occurring. Sometimes they will contrive to kneel next each other in cathedral or church, and exchange whispers at the most solemn moments of Mass or Benediction, and name a trysting-hour in the same edifice, where they may bring each other violets or carnations. The girl, no doubt, cannot go there alone; but, if her duenna be any one save her mother, she will have no difficulty in keeping tryst; for almost every Italian woman will help in other folks' amatory manoeuvres with as much zeal as if they were her own. Dante became endlessly enamoured of Beatrice without ever having addressed her. And what says Francesca da Rimini in the greatest of all narrative passages in verse?

Amor che a nullo amato amar perdona.

I am not unaware that the interpretation of it has given rise to controversy; but surely it signifies that they who are loved must perforce love in return. I daresay that was true enough about Shakespeare when he himself was the lover, for, as he says pointedly :

She is a woman, therefore to be wooed,
She is a woman, therefore to be won.

and affirms, further :

that man is no man

If with his tongue he cannot win a woman.

But experience must have shown him that English men and English women, not in themselves unattractive, often love in vain. What a debt we Northern folk owe to Italy! Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Byron, Shelley, drank deep of the Ausonian Helicon, but none of these as deeply of it as Shakespeare.

Of Perugia, too much has recently been written, I tell Lamia, for anything to be said of it here; and I can remember having myself written a paper concerning it which George Henry Lewes, its then editor, published in the Fortnightly Review; and that must be a goodly time ago. Neither need anything be set down here regarding Assisi, though we spent a long day there with Lamia, for it also is now well known to so many of one's countrymen. But I cannot help recalling that Assisi

once seemed deserted of all save the spirit of poverty that animated Saint Francis and his brethren, and what I most vividly remember of its lonely aspect on the occasion of my first visit to it is accurately described in the following lines:

He saw a bent and withered dame advance

Slow toward the shrine, her spindle in her hand,

Singing, to mind her of the days gone by,

A sweet love-ditty, low and plaintively.

There are some simple sights that remain imprinted as pictures in the mind ever after. That was one of them.

"Oh, how delightful!" exclaimed Lamia.

We had just come out of the Cathedral at Arezzo, where we had been gazing at the stained-glass window that Michelangelo said must have fallen from heaven, but which, lovely as it is, seems to me to be surpassed by that at Fairford, in our own dear Island. It was not the window, however, or anything at Arezzo, that caused the above exclamation, but the reading aloud by Veronica of a letter just arrived from Florence, offering us the free use for a week of a villa above Careggi, in the midst of the most beautiful garden and podere imaginable. We had not intended to pass more than a night in Florence, for to all of us hotels, especially in Italy, are a mar-pleasure. They seem to be a mixture of London, Cairo, and New York, in the heart of Tuscany.

Our last day's drive from Rome to Florence was from Arezzo, and the fire-flies were in the soft twilight air by thousands as we descended the hill that, on the Siena road, leads to the Gate that is known as the Porta Romana. The Florentines, too, were in the electrically-lighted streets in equal numbers, and the Duomo, and the Tower of Giotto, and the Palazzo Vecchio soared silently in the moonlight above the humming crowd. The old sense of magical enthralment took possession of us all, and Lamia's eyes gleamed and glittered with delight. Shortly, for Florence, that occupies so large a place in history, in art, and in one's affections, covers but a comparatively small plot of ground,-we were among the fire-flies and the nightingales again, crawling past Careggi, where Lorenzo died, unshriven by Savonarola, and then winding up a smooth gravel drive, bordered by monthly roses and sweet-smelling irises in full bloom, and heard once again the Tuscan welcome and Florentine aspirate from retainers so well known to us of old.

Villa ———, Careggi, Florence. Any one who reads this Diary has some acquaintance perhaps with Lamia's "Winter