mountains were blended with the clouds and stars; their sides were shrouded in mysterious gloom, and it was not till we entered Susa, with its fine old drawbridge and castellated walls, that we found ourselves on terra firma, or breathed common air again. At the inn at Susa, we first perceived the difference of Italian manners; and the next day arrived at Turin, after passing over thirty miles of the straightest, flattest, and dullest road in the world. Here we stopped two days to recruit our strength and look about us.

CHAPTER XV.

My arrival at Turin was the first and only moment of intoxication I have found in Italy. It is a city of palaces. After a change of dress (which, at the end of a long journey, is a great luxury) I walked out, and traversing several clean, spacious streets, came to a promenade outside the town, from which I saw the chain of Alps we had left behind us, rising like a range of marble pillars in the evening sky. Monte Viso and Mount Cenis resembled two pointed cones of ice, shooting up above all the rest. I could distinguish the broad and rapid Po, winding along at the other extremity of the walk, through vineyards and meadow grounds. The trees had on that deep sad foliage, which takes a mellower tinge from being prolonged into the midst of winter, and which I had only seen in pictures. A Monk was walking in a solitary grove at a little distance from the common path. The air was soft and balmy, and I felt transported to another climate-another earth-another sky. The winter was suddenly changed to spring. It was as if I had to begin my life anew. Several young Italian women were walking on the terrace, in English dresses, and with graceful downcast looks, in which

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you might fancy that you read the soul of the Decameron. It was a fine, serious grace, equally remote from French levity and English sullenness, but it was the last I saw of it. I have run the gauntlet of vulgar shapes and horrid faces ever since. The women in Italy (so far as I have seen hitherto) are detestably ugly. They are not even dark and swarthy, but a mixture of brown and red, coarse, marked with the small pox, with pug-features, awkward, ill-made, fierce, dirty, lazy, neither attempting nor hoping to please. Italian beauty (if there is, as I am credibly informed, such a thing) is retired, conventual, denied to the common gaze. It was and it remains a dream to me, a vision of the brain! I returned to the inn (the Pension Suisse) in high spirits, and made a most luxuriant dinner. We had a wild duck equal to what we had in Paris, and the grapes were the finest I ever tasted. Afterwards we went to the Opera, and saw a ballet of action (out-heroding Herod) with all the extravagance of incessant dumb-show and noise, the glittering of armour, the burning of castles, the clattering of horses on and off the stage, and heroines like furies in hysterics. Nothing at Bartholomew Fair was ever in worse taste, noisier, or finer. It was as if a whole people had buried their understandings, their imaginations, and their hearts in their senses; and as if the latter were so jaded and worn out, that they required to be inflamed, dazzled, and urged almost to a kind of frenzy-fever, to feel any thing.

The house was crowded to excess, and dark, all but the stage, which shed a dim, ghastly light on the gilt boxes and the audience. Milton might easily have taken his idea of Pandemonium from the inside of an Italian Theatre, its heat, its gorgeousness, and its gloom. We were at the back of the pit, in which there was only standing room, and leaned against the first row of boxes, full of the Piedmontese Nobility, who talked fast and loud in their harsh guttural dialect, in spite of the repeated admonitions of "a gentle usher, Authority by name," who every five seconds hissed some lady of quality and high breeding whose voice was heard with an eclat above all the rest. No notice whatever was taken of the acting or the singing (which was any thing but Italian, unless Italian at present means a bad imitation of the French) till a comic dance attracted all eyes, and drew forth bursts of enthusiastic approbation. I do not know the performers' names, but a short, squat fellow (a kind of pollard of the green-room) dressed in a brown linsey-woolsey doublet and hose, with round head, round shoulders, short arms and short legs, made love to a fine die-away lady, dressed up in the hoops, lappets and furbelows of the last age, and stumped, nodded, pulled and tugged at his mistress with laudable perseverance, and in determined opposition to the awkward, mawkish graces of an Adonis of a rival, with flowing locks, pink ribbons, yellow kerseymere breeches, and an insipid expression of the utmost

distress. It was an admirable grotesque and fantastic piece of pantomime humour. The little fellow who played the Clown, certainly entered into the part with infinite adroitness and spirit. He merited the teres et rotundus of the poet. He bounded over the stage like a foot-ball, rolled himself up like a hedge-hog, stuck his arms in his sides like fins, rolled his eyes in his head like bullets-and the involuntary plaudits of the audience witnessed the success of his efforts at once to electrify and stultify them! The only annoyance I found at Turin was the number of beggars who are stuck against the walls like fixtures, and expose their diseased, distorted limbs, with no more remorse or feeling than if they did not belong to them, deafening you with one wearisome cry the whole day long.

We were fortunate enough to find a voiture going from Geneva to Florence, with an English lady and her niece-I bargained for the two remaining places for ten guineas, and the journey turned out pleasantly, I believe, to all parties; I am sure it did so to us. We were to be eight days on the road, and to stop two days to rest, once at Parma, and once at Bologna, to see the pictures. Having made this arrangement, I was proceeding over the bridge towards the Observatory that commands a view of the town and the whole surrounding country, and had quite forgotten that I had such a thing as a passport to take with me. I found, however, I had no fewer than four signatures to procure, besides the six that were already