It is
a mistake to hold that the English scribble their names about more
than other people. The Italians like doing this just as well as we
do. Let the reader go to Varallo, for example, and note the names
scratched up from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the
present day, on the walls of the chapel containing the Crucifixion.
Indeed, the Italians seem to have begun the habit long before we
did, for we very rarely find names scratched on English buildings
so long ago as the fifteenth century, whereas in Italy they are
common. The earliest I can call to mind in England at this moment
(of course, excepting the names written in the Beauchamp Tower) is
on the church porch at Harlington, where there is a name cut and
dated in one of the early years of the seventeenth century. I
never even in Italy saw a name scratched on a wall with an earlier
date than 1480.
Why is it, I wonder, that these little bits of soul-fossil as it
were, touch us so much when we come across them? A fossil does not
touch us - while a fly in amber does. Why should a fly in amber
interest us and give us a slightly solemn feeling for a moment,
when the fossil of a megatherium bores us? I give it up; but few
of us can see the lightest trifle scratched off casually and idly
long ago, without liking it better than almost any great thing of
the same, or ever so much earlier date, done with purpose and
intention that it should remain. So when we left S. Cristoforo it
was not the old church, nor the frescoes, but the name of the idle
fellow who had scratched his name "Battista . . . 1485," that we
carried away with us. A little bit of old world life and entire
want of earnestness, preserved as though it were a smile in amber.
In the Val Sesia, several years ago, I bought some tobacco that was
wrapped up for me in a yellow old MS. which I in due course
examined. It was dated 1797, and was a leaf from the book in which
a tanner used to enter the skins which his customers brought him to
be tanned.
"October 24," he writes, "I received from Signora Silvestre, called
the widow, the skin of a goat branded in the neck. - (I am not to
give it up unless they give me proof that she is the rightful
owner.) Mem. I delivered it to Mr. Peter Job (Signor Pietro
Giobbe).
"October 27. - I receive two small skins of a goat, very thin and
branded in the neck, from Giuseppe Gianote of Campertogno.
"October 29. - I receive three skins of a chamois from Signor
Antonio Cinere of Alagna, branded in the neck." Then there is a
subsequent entry written small.
