The Brutal First Duke Of
Their Line, Alessandro De' Medici, Who Some Say Was No Medici, But The
Bastard Of
A negro and a washerwoman, stamped his creed in the
inscription below his adoptive arms, "Under one Faith and one
Law, one
Lord," and it was in the palace here, the story goes, that the wicked
Cosimo I. killed his son Don Garzia before the eyes of the boy's mother.
Anything is imaginable of an early Medicean grand-duke, but in a manner
the father's murderous fury was provoked by the fact, if it was a fact,
that Don Garzia had just mortally wounded his brother Giovanni. I should
like to pretend that the tragedy had wrought in my unconsciousness to
the effect of the pensive gloom which the old fortress cast over me, but
perhaps I had better not. There are some gray Sunday afternoons of a
depressing effect on the spirit which requires no positive or palpable
reason.
In any case it was a relief to go from the shadow of the past there
through the pleasant city streets to the gentle quiet of the British
cemetery, where so many of our race and some even of our own nation are
taking their long rest. No one is now buried there, and the place, in
the gradual diminution of the English colony at Leghorn, has fallen into
a lovely and appealing neglect if not oblivion. Oblivion quite covers
its origin, but it is almost as old as Protestantism itself, and, if the
ground for it was the gift of the grand-duke who tolerated heretics as
well as Jews in the impulse he gave to the city's growth, it would not
be strange. The beautiful porch of the English church, for once Greek
and not Gothic, fronts upon it, but the dwindling congregation has no
care of it, and there is no fund to keep it so much as free from weeds
and brambles and the insidious ivy rending its monuments asunder. The
afternoon of our visit it was in the sole charge of a large, gray cat,
which, after feasting upon the favorite herb, lay stretched in sleep on
a sunny bed of catnip under the walls of a mansion near, at whose
windows some young girls looked down in a Sunday listlessness, as we
wandered about among the "tall cypresses, myrtles, pines,
eucalyptus-trees, oleanders, cactuses, huge bushes of monthly roses, a
jungle of periwinkles, sarsaparilla, wild irises, violets, and other
loveliest of wild flowers." On the forgotten tombs were the touching
epitaphs of those who had died in exile, and whose monuments are
sometimes here while their ashes lie in Florence or Rome, or wherever
else they chanced to meet their end. Among them were the inscriptions on
the graves of "William Magee Seton, merchant of New York," who died at
Pisa in 1803, and "Henry De Butts, a citizen of Baltimore, N. America,"
who died at Sarzana; with "James M. Knight, Esq., Captain of Marines,
Citizen of the United States of America," who died at Leghorn in 1802;
and "Thomas Gamble, Late Captain in the Navy of the United States of
America," who died at Pisa in 1818; and doubtless there were other
Americans whose tombs I did not see.
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