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. 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. The truest monument to his stay in
Italy is the book of Italian travel that he wrote, and the best effect
is that sort of peripatetic novel which he may be said to have invented
in _Humphrey Clinker,_ and which has survived the epistolary form into
our own time. It is a very simple shaft that rises over his grave, with
the brief record, "Memoriae Tobiae Smollett, qui Liburni animam
efflavit, 16 Sept., 1773," but it is imaginable with what wrath he would
have disputed the record, if it is true, according to all the other
authorities, that he exhaled his spirit two years earlier, and how he
would have had it out with those "friends and fellow-countrymen" who had
the error perpetuated above his helpless dust.
It was not easy to quit the sweetly solemn place or to resist the wish
which I have here indulged, that some kinsman or kinswoman of those whom
the blossoms and leaves are hiding would come to their rescue from
nature now cleiming an undue part in them, and obliterating their very
memories. One would not have a great deal done, but only enough to save
their names from entire oblivion, and with the hope of this I have named
some of their names. It might not be too much even for the United
Kingdom and the United States, though both very poor nations, to join in
contributing the sum necessary for the work. Or some millionaire English
duke, or some millionaire American manufacturer, might make the outlay
alone; I cannot expect any millionaire author to provide a special fund
for the care of the tomb of Smollett.
VIII
OVER AT PISA
If the half-hour between Leghorn and Pisa had been spent in any less
lovely transit, I should still be grieving for the loss of the thirty
minutes which might so much better have been given to either place.
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