Part 7

A woman here in every stage of life has really a degree of attention shewn her that is surprising:--if conjugal disputes arise in a family, so as to make them become what we call town-talk, the public voice is sure to run against the husband; if separation ensues, all possible countenance is given to the wife, while the gentleman is somewhat less willingly received; and all the stories of past disgusts are related to his prejudice: nor will the lady whom he wishes to serve look very kindly on a man who treats his own wife with unpoliteness. Che cuore deve avere! says she: What a heart he must have! Io non mene fido sicuro: I shall take care not to trust him sure.

National character is a great matter: I did not know there had been such a difference in the ways of thinking, merely from custom and climate, as I see there is; though one has always read of it: it was however entertaining enough to hear a travelled gentleman haranguing away three nights ago at our house in praise of English cleanliness, and telling his auditors how all the men in London, that were noble, put on a clean shirt every day, and the women washed the street before his house-door every morning. "Che schiavitù mai!" exclaimed a lady of quality, who was listening: "ma natural mente farà per commando del principe."--"What a land of slavery!" says Donna Louisa, I heard her; "but it is all done by command of the sovereign, I suppose."

Their ideas of justice are no less singular than of delicacy: but those are more easily accounted for; so is their amiable carriage towards inferiors, calling their own and their friends servants by tender names, and speaking to all below themselves with a graciousness not often used by English men or women even to their equals. The pleasure too which the high people here express when the low ones are diverted, is charming.--We think it vulgar to be merry when the mob is so; but if rolling down a hill, like Greenwich, was the custom here, as with us, all Milan would run to see the sport, and rejoice in the felicity of their fellow-creatures. When I express my admiration of such condescending sweetness, they reply--è un uomo come un altro;--è battezzato come noi; and the like--Why he is a man of the same nature as we: he has been christened as well as ourselves, they reply. Yet do I not for this reason condemn the English as naturally haughty above their continental neighbours. Our government has left so narrow a space between the upper and under ranks of people in Great Britain--while our charitable and truly Christian religion is still so constantly employed in raising the depressed, by giving them means of changing their situation, that if our persons of condition fail even for a moment to watch their post, maintaining by dignity what they or their fathers have acquired by merit, they are instantly and suddenly broken in upon by the well-employed talents, or swiftly-acquired riches, of men born on the other side the thin partition; whilst in Italy the gulph is totally impassable, and birth alone can entitle man or woman to the society of gentlemen and ladies. This firmly-fixed idea of subordination (which I once heard a Venetian say, he believed must exist in heaven from one angel to another) accounts immediately for a little conversation which I am now going to relate.

Here were two men taken up last week, one for murdering his fellow-servant in cold blood, while the undefended creature had the lemonade tray in his hand going in to serve company; the other for breaking the new lamps lately set up with intention to light this town in the manner of the streets at Paris. "I hope," said I, "that they will hang the murderer." "I rather hope," replied a very sensible lady who sate near me, "that they will hang the person who broke the lamps: for," added she, "the first committed his crime only out of revenge, poor fellow! because the other had got his mistress from him by treachery; but this creature has had the impudence to break our fine new lamps, all for the sake of spiting the Arch-duke." The Arch-duke meantime hangs nobody at all; but sets his prisoners to work upon the roads, public buildings, &c. where they labour in their chains; and where, strange to tell! they often insult passengers who refuse them alms when asked as they go by; and, stranger still! they are not punished for it when they do.

Here is certainly much despotic power in Italy, but, I fancy, very little oppression; perhaps authority, once acknowledged, does not delight itself always by the fatigue of exertion. Sat est prostrasse leoni is an old adage, with which perhaps I may be the better acquainted, as it is the motto to my own coat of arms; and unless sovereignty is hungry, for ought I see, he does not certainly devour.

The certainty of their irrevocable doom, softened by kind usage from their superiors, makes, in the mean time, an odd sort of humorous drollery spring up among the common people, who are much happier here at Milan than I expected to find them: every great house giving meat, broth, &c. to poor dependents with liberal good-nature enough, so that mighty little wandering misery is seen in the streets; unlike those of Genoa, who seem mocked with the word liberty, while sorrow, sickness, and the most pinching want, pine at the doors of marble palaces, whose owners are unfeeling as their walls.

Our ordinary people here in Lombardy are well clothed, fat, stout, and merry; and desirous to divert themselves, and their protectors, whom they love at their hearts. There is however a degree of effrontery among the women that amazes me, and of which I had no idea, till a friend shewed me one evening from my own box at the opera, fifty or a hundred low shop-keepers wives, dispersed about the pit at the theatre, dressed in men's clothes, per disimpegno as they call it; that they might be more at liberty forsooth to clap and hiss, and quarrel and jostle, &c. I felt shocked. "One who comes from a free government need not wonder so," said he: "On the contrary, Sir," replied I, "where every body has hopes, at least possibility, of bettering his station, and advancing nearer to the limits of upper life, none except the most abandoned of their species will wholly lose sight of such decorous conduct as alone can grace them when they have reached their wish: whereas your people know their destiny, future as well as present, and think no more of deserving a higher post, than they think of obtaining it." Let me add, however, that if these women were a little riotous during the Easter holidays, they are dilletantes only. In this city no female professors of immorality and open libertinage, disgraceful at once, and pernicious to society, are permitted to range the streets in quest of prey; to the horror of all thinking people, and the ruin of all heedless ones.

With which observation, to continue the tour of Italy, we this day leave, for a twelvemonth at least, Milano il grande, after having spent, though not quite finished the winter in it; as there fell a very heavy snow last Saturday, which hindered our setting out a week ago, though this is the sixth of April; and exactly five months have now since last November been passed among those who have I hope approved our conduct and esteemed our manners. That they should trouble themselves to examine our income, report our phrases, and listen, perhaps with some little mixture of envy, after every instance of unshakable attachment shewn to each other, would be less pleasing; but that I verily believe they have at last dismissed us with general good wishes, proceeding from innate goodness of heart, and the hope of seeing again, in a year's time or so, two people who have supplied so many tables here with materials for conversation, when the fountain of talk was stopt by deficiencies, and the little stream of prattle ceased to murmur for want of a few pebbles to break its course.

We are going to Venice by the way of Cremona, and hope for amusement from external objects: let us at least not deserve or invite disappointment by seeking for pleasure beyond the limits of innocence.

FROM MILAN TO PADUA.

The first evening's drive carried us no farther than Lodi, a place renowned through all Europe for its excellent cheese, as out well-known ballad bears testimony:

Let Lodi or Parmesan bring up the rear.

Those verses were imitated, I fancy, from a French song written by Monsieur des Yveteaux, of whose extraordinary life and death much has been said by his cotemporary wits, particularly how some of them found him playing at shepherd and shepherdess in his own garden with a pretty Savoyard wench, at seventy-eight years old, en habit de berger, avec un chapeau couleur de rose[Footnote: In a pastoral habit, and a hat turned up with pink], &c. when he shewed them the famous lines, Avoir peu de parens, moins de train que de rente, &c. which do certainly bear a very near affinity to our Old Man's Wish, published in Dryden's Miscellanies; who, among other luxuries, resolves to eat Lodi cheese, I remember.

The town, however, bringing no other ideas either new or old to our minds, we went to the opera, and heard Morichelli sing: after which they gave us a new dramatic dance, made upon the story of Don John, or the Libertine; a tale which, whether true or false, fact or fable, has furnished every Christian country in the world, I believe, with some subject of representation. It makes me no sport, however; the idea of an impenitent sinner going to hell is too seriously terrifying to make amusement out of. Let mythology, which is now grown good for little else, be danced upon the stage; where Mr. Vestris may bounce and struggle in the character of Alcides on his funeral pile, with no very glaring impropriety; and such baubles serve beside to keep old classical stories in the heads of our young people; who, if they must have torches to blaze in their eyes, may divert themselves with Pluto catching up Ceres's daughter, and driving her away to Tartarus; but let Don John alone. I have at least half a notion that the horrible history is half true; if so, it is surely very gross to represent it by dancing. Should such false foolish taste prevail in England (but I hope it will not), we might perhaps go happily through the whole book of God's Revenge against Murder, or the Annals of Newgate, on the stage, as a variety of pretty stories may be found there of the same cast; while statues of Hercules and Minerva, with their insignia as heathen deities, might be placed, with equal attention to religion, costume, and general fitness, as decorations for the monuments of Westminster Abbey.

The country we came through to Cremona is rich and fertile, the roads deep and miry of course; very few of the Lombardy poplars, of which I expected to see so many: but Phaeton's sisters seem to have danced all away from the odoriferous banks of the Po, to the green sides of the Thames, I think; meantime here is no other timber in the country but a few straggling ash, and willows without end. The old Eridanus, however, makes a majestic figure at Cremona, and frights the inhabitants when it overflows. There are not many to be frighted though, for the town is thinly peopled; but exquisitely clean, perhaps for that very reason; and the cathedral, of a mixed Grecian and Gothic architecture, has a respectable appearance; while two enormous lions, of red marble, frown at its door, and the crucifixion, painted by Pordenone, with a rough but powerful pencil, strikes one at the entrance: I have seen nothing finer than the figure of the Centurion upon the fore-ground, who seems to cry out, with soldier-like courage and apostolic fervour, Truly this is the Son of God.

The great clock here too is very curious: having, besides the twenty-four hours, a minute and second finger, like a stop watch, and shews the phases of the moon, with her triple rotation clearly to all who walk across the piazza. Yet I trust the dwellers at Cremona are no better astronomers than those who live in other places; to what purpose then all these representations with which Italy is crowded; processions, paintings, &c. besides the moral dances, as they call them now? One word of solid instruction to the ear, conveys more knowledge to the mind at last, than all these marionettes presented to the eye.

The tower of Cremona is of a surprising height and elegant form; we climbed, not without some difficulty, to its top, and saw the flat plains of Lombardy stretched out all round us. Prospects, however, and high towers have I seen; that in Mr. Hoare's grounds, dedicated to King Alfred, is a much finer structure than this, and the view from it much more variegated certainly; I think of greater extent; though there is more dignity in these objects, while the Po twists through them, and distant mountains mingle with the sky at the end of a lengthened horizon.

What I have never seen till now, we were made to observe in the octagon gallery which crowns this pretty structure, where in every compartment there are channels cut in the stone to guide the eye or rest the telescope, that so a spectator need not be fruitlessly teized, as one almost always is, by those who shew one a prospect, with Look there! See there! &c. At this place nothing needs be done but lay the glass or put the eye even with the lines which point to Bergamo, Mantua, or where you please; and look there becomes superfluous as offensive.

The bells in the tower amused us in another way: an old man who has the care of them, delighted much in telling us how he rung tunes upon them before the Duke of Parma, who presented him with money, and bid him ring again: and not a little was the good man amazed, when one of our company sate down and played on them himself: a thing he had never before been witness to, he said, except once, when a surprising musician arrived from England, and performed the like seat: by his description of the person, and the time of his passing through Cremona, we conjectured he meant Dr. Burney.

The most dreadful of all roads carried us next morning to Mantua, where we had letters for an agreeable friend, who neglected nothing that could entertain or instruct us. He shewed me the field where it is supposed the house stood in which Virgil was born, and told me what he knew of the evidence that he was born there: certain it is that much care is taken to keep the place fenced, from an idea of its being the identical spot, and I hope it is so.

The theatres here are beautiful beyond all telling: it is a shame not to take the model of the small one, and build a place of entertainment on the plan. There cannot surely be any plan more elegant.

We had a concert of admirable music at the house of our new acquaintance, in the evening, and were introduced by his means to many people of fashion; the ladies were pretty, and dressed with much taste; no caps at all, but flowers in their heads, and earrings of silver fillagree finely worked; long, light, and thin: I never saw such before, but it would be an exceeding pretty fashion. They hung down quite low upon the neck and shoulders, and had a pleasing effect.

Mantua stands in the middle of a deep swampy marsh, that sends up a thick foggy vapour all winter, a stench intolerable during the summer months. Its inhabitants lament the want of population; and indeed I counted but five carriages in the streets while we remained in the town. Seven thousand Jews occupy a third part of the city, founded by old Tiresias's daughter, where they have a synagogue, and live after their own fashion. The dialect here is closer to that Italian which foreigners learn, and the ladies speak more Tuscan, I think, than at Milan, but it is a lady's town as I told them.

"Ille etiam patriis agmen ciet Ocnus ab oris Fatidicæ Mantûs et Tusci filius amnis, Qui muros matrisque dedit tibi. Mantua nomen."

Ocnus was next, who led his native train Of hardy warriors thro' the wat'ry plain, The son of Manto by the Tuscan stream, From whence the Mantuan town derives its name.

DRYDEN.

The annual fair is what contributes most to keeping their folks alive though, for such are the roads it is scarce possible any strangers should come near them, and our people complain that the inns are very extortionate: here is one building, however, that promises wonders from its prodigious size and magnificence; I only wonder such accommodation should be thought necessary.

The gentleman who shewed us the Ducal palace, seemed himself much struck with its convenience and splendour; but I had seen Versailles, Turin, and Genoa. What can be seen here, and here alone, are the numerous and incomparable works of Giulio Romano; of which no words that I can use would give my readers any adequate idea.--For such excellence language has no praise, and of such performances taste will admit no criticism. The giants could scarcely have been more amazed at Jupiter's thunder, than I was at their painted fall. If Rome is to exhibit any thing beyond this, I shall really be more dazzled than delighted; for imagination will stretch no further, and admiration will endure no more.