The Memorials Of The English Were
Likewise Here, Whether They Died At Leghorn Or Not; But Most Of Them
Seem To Have Ended Their Lives In That Place, Where There Were Once So
Many English Residents, Whether For Their Health Or Their Profit.
The
youth of some testified to the fact that they had failed to find the air
specific for their
Maladies, and doubtless this would account also for
the disproportionate number of noble ladies who rest here, with their
hatchments and their coronets and robes of state carven on the stones
above them. Among others one reads the titles of "Lady Catharine Burgess
born Beauclerk; Jane Isabella, widow of the Earl of Lanesborough and
daughter of the Earl of Molesworth; and Catharine Murray, only child of
James Murray, . . . and the Right Honorable Lady Catharine Stewart his
Spouse," with knights, admirals, generals, and other military and naval
officers a many. Most important of all is the tomb of that strenuous
spirit, more potent for good and ill in the English fiction of his time
than any other novelist of his time, and second only to Richardson in
the wide influence of his literary method, Tobias Smollett, namely, who
here ended his long fight with consumption and the indifference of his
country to his claims upon her official recognition. After many years of
narrow circumstance in the Southern climates where he spent his later
life, he tried in vain for that meek hope of literary ambition, a
consulate, perhaps the very post that my companion, a hundred and fifty
years later, was worthily holding.
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