Over the dragon is portrayed in innumerable pictures, ancient and modern; some of these are very quaint, more especially one representing the Day of Judgment.

There were two charming old priests, who showed us everything, though we unfortunately could not exchange a word.

The nuns evidently enjoyed their ecclesiastical sight-seeing very much. They were a fine cheery-looking set, of all colours, from the fairest Maltese to the purest Negro. One of these fraternised with me, and spoke of her home far away, and her own people. When some of her sisters were reverently kissing the veritable head of St. George, she whispered to me with a quiet smile that it could not possibly be his head, as no one knew where it was. Evidently she had no great faith in the hydra-headed saints-luckless beings, whose heads, arms, legs, and minor relics are so freely multiplied and scattered over such widely diverse shrines.

A peep into the Mosque of Omar, famous for its age, showed us a place so wretched and dilapidated that there was no temptation to linger; so we drove on through ruinous suburbs, past the old Roman wall and gardens overshadowed by fragrant acacias and tall date palms; then on and on through the sandiest of roads, till we could drive no farther.

Then we struggled on over mountains of rubbish and broken crockery to the long line of busy windmills-hundreds of which stand on these artificial hills to catch each breeze that may follow the course of old Nilus.

Here we sat for hours, making friends with picturesque Bedouins, and for the last time watched the red sun go down in cloudless splendour behind the Pyramids, gleaming on the glittering waters, and shedding its golden glow on the bronzed faces of a people who are not ashamed, at the outgoings of the evening, to bow down and adore the Maker of the Sun.

VOL. CCLIII. NO. 1821.

X

C. F. GORDON CUMMING.

R

METASTASIO.

OME has lately witnessed the centenary of the death of Pietro Metastasio. There was a time when Metastasio ranked with the greatest poets of the civilized world. Wherever men acknowledged the influence of the arts, there homage was offered to his genius and his fame. To-day, a man or woman might be very well read indeed and yet not know one single line of all the many thousand lines that once made Metastasio famous. But those, and there are still happily some, who do read him, most notably the brilliant authoress who chooses to call herself Vernon Lee, can bear witness that, if the courtly Abate was not all that his admirers thought him to be, he is a true poet, that at times he is something very like a great poet, that real genius lurks and lingers in the speeches of his eighteenth-century Greeks and Romans, in the Achilles who snatches a court sword from the gifts of Ulysses, and the Regulus who returns to Carthage in all the glory of a perfect periwig. To the great men of the last century Metastasio seemed a great man. There are some lines in Rousseau's immortal story of the New Héloise in which Metastasio is declared to be "the only poet of the heart, the only genius who can move by the charm of poetic and musical harmony." Alas, today, the lovers of the divine Julie and her faithful Saint-Preux are little better known, little more heeded, than the stately dramas of Metastasio. Mr. Morley has wronged his life of "The Apostle of Affliction, the self-torturing Sophist," by a most unworthy estimate of the noblest romance of the eighteenth century, one of the noblest romances of all time. It may be some comfort to the few admirers of Metastasio to think that others share his fate; that Rousseau, who praised him thus, is underrated by his eloquent biographer; that Voltaire, who ranked him with the Greek dramatists, is chiefly loved for his Pucelle by fierce anti-clericals; that Schlegel, who called Metastasio the Racine of Italy, has long since been shelved as a critic. But Metastasio's life was so strange that it would deserve re-telling were he as poor a playwright as the elder Crébillon that he was not unworthy of the praises of his age I hope to show by the way.

:

The world owed the dramatist Metastasio to one of those curious chances which are so often to be found in the lives of great men, and which sometimes lead us to wonder whether, after all, there may not be many possible great men to whom the chance never comes which had made them into Miltons and Hampdens. Metastasio's chance came in this wise. The Abate Gravina, the great Greek scholar of a time when scholarship meant only the chilliest appreciation of everything that was chilly and hard and motionless in Hellenic life, was walking one day in the streets of Rome and heard a little boy singing to a crowd. Had Gravina turned down another street that day; had he stayed at home and studied his Homer; had he hurried past crowd and boy without turning his thoughtful head towards them,-why then, in all probability, Mozart would never have put music to the "Clemenza di Tito," and the poor beautiful Romanina would not have laid her love, her life, and her fortune at the feet of a forgetful poet. But fortunately for art, Gravina was not too much occupied with thoughts of old Greece or modern Arcadia to stop for a moment. The beauty of the childish face, the sweetness of the childish voice, stirred the heart of the stately scholar with an emotion quite unlike that aroused by the knottiest question of Roman law, or the finest shade of classical disputation; in brief, he adopted as his son the eleven-year-old Pietro Bonaventura Trapassi, the son of a small druggist in a narrow Roman street. Gravina was a famous man. He was professor of civil and canon law in the Roman College di Sapienza; he was the leader of the great revolution against the authority of Crescimbeni, in the once famous, now so utterly forgotten, Arcadian Academy, which had stirred Roman society to its depths, and inspired countless yards of comic verse. Under his teaching and care the druggist's son got his Greekish name that told of his changed condition, and learned to become a little pedant and a little courtier, writing dreary sham-classical dramas, and reciting mechanically extemporised verses to smiling cardinals and pleased princesses. When Gravina did succeed in thoroughly impressing himself and his own narrow knowledge upon his adopted child, he died, and left him a large property. Then the living scholar pedant flung himself promptly into a very different way of life from that which he had known with the scholar and pedant who was dead. Metastasio was young, handsome, clever, rich, and free; he essayed the pleasures of the world, and experimented in all its pastimes and passions with the keenest delight; while his money lasted, he revelled and ruffled it bravely in that quaint wicked Roman world, where love was hooped and plumed and peruked, where sin

was very stately, and where poets and players ran gladly in the train of their prince-patrons, and bowed low enough as they got in and out of their great gilt carriages. But a little of this new life left him at the age of two-and-twenty in comparative poverty, and under the disagreeable necessity of working for his living. Like many another poet, he apprenticed himself to the law, under a famous lawyer in Naples; but his verse got mixed up too much with his legal business, and he could not keep his hand from plays. Chance again, always giving her Metastasio a good turn of her wheel, brought the young man and his verses to the attention of the Neapolitan Viceroy, who promptly commissioned a play. Metastasio, eager for the work, but fearing for his position with his employer, obtained permission to have his play brought out anonymously. When "The Gardens of the Hesperides" was played to the courtly folk of Naples they were delighted with its rococo classicism and its sham pastorality, and they were eager to crown the author. Most eager of all was the actress who had played Venus in the Orti Esperedi. It would have been better for the beautiful Romanina if she had never felt any curiosity to know the author of the fantastic verse her beautiful lips had uttered. But the beautiful Romanina found him out, and having found him out, she fell in love with him. It was not difficult for the amorous actress to convince the gentle poet that love and the crown of laurel were better than the lawyer's desk; so Metastasio said good-bye to the law, and found shelter in the home of the Romanina and her husband, Dominico Bulgarelli.

Here for long enough the young poet lived very happily in the strange artistic society which thronged the Romanina's rooms, and did honour to the handsome brilliant poetic Abate. He wrote texts for operas which were successful, and comic interludes which were more successful still. Then Metastasio came to Rome, still happy with his Romanina, writing vigorously and successfully; but the fame of which he had dreamed was no nearer. He had some success and he was making some money, but he had not as much as he wanted of either; and then-and then-why, the Romanina would not always be young or always beautiful. He had written his "Dido Abandoned" for her; now he was preparing himself to play the part of the "Faithless Æneas." He was in no sense a Fetrarch. He hated sonnets to begin with. They were a Procrustes' bed to him, he said; and some of his which were written to the Romanina are sorry stuff. Nor was he ready with an unending Petrarchean fidelity. So he was not crushed with grief when his intriguing brought him the appointment of successor to the court poet Apos

tolo Zeno of Vienna, and he went away with a light heart, leaving the poor Romanina with a very heavy one indeed. He made a splendid speech to Charles VI. on his arrival: "I know not whether my satisfaction or confusion be greatest to find myself at the feet of your Cæsarean Majesty; it is an honour I have sighed for from my earliest days, and now I not only find myself before the greatest monarch upon earth, but I am here in the glorious character of one of his servants. I am not more conscious of the obligations I am under from such a flattering distinction than I am conscious of my own weakness; and if I could, with the loss of great part of my blood, become a Homer, I would not hesitate a moment to determine my choice. In the mean time, I will use my utmost endeavours to supply with unwearied diligence what may be wanting in ability to serve your Imperial Majesty. I am truly sensible that whatever my incapacity may be, it will always experience the infinite clemency of your Majesty; and I hope that the character of Cæsarean poet will inspire me with what I despair of attaining by my own talents." Fifty years he was to spend in the Cæsarean Court, fortunate enough indeed, but hardly to be considered a happy, a contented, or a very admirable mortal.

was.

Lucky in his lot with women, he soon found another protectress, this time far more powerful than the actress of his youth-the Countess of Althann. Metastasio was the very poet to be as it were adopted by women in this way; but while he took the change composedly enough, the poor Romanina, far away in Rome, began to get exacting. After a time we hear of her setting out to join her forgetful lover, and then of a sudden, somehow-no one quite knew how-whether she killed herself or died with grief, she was out of the way; and Metastasio was very sorry, and he gave gracefully up all the fortune which she had left him, and consoled himself with the stately countess, whose lover, even whose husband, it is said he But he was discontented for all his success. His life was narrow and formal. The Austrian Court was hard and colourless to one whose mind was steeped with memories of an Italian youth, and so he grew old in vain discontent with himself and things about him-seeking for offices and not getting them—a rather melancholy court poet. At last the Countess Althann died, but left him not quite alone. For the third time a woman's name is linked with that of Metastasio-this time said to be an adopted daughter, said even to be a very daughter; no one knows. With her and her relations he lived, and at last died, quietly enough, on April 14, 1782. The life of glitter, and vain desire, and strange success, and querulous disappointment, had come peacefully, if drearily, to an end,