Before The Same Statue Another Distinguished Countryman Used To Pass An Hour Daily.

His acquaintance respected his raptures and kept aloof; but a young lady, whose attention was attracted by sounds that did not seem expressive of admiration, ventured to approach, and found the poet sunk in profound, but not silent, slumber.

From such absurdities as these, or of the enthusiast who went into raptures about the head of the Elgin Ilissos (which is unfortunately a headless trunk), we are happily spared in the pages of Smollett. In him complete absence of gush is accompanied by an independent judgement, for which it may quite safely be claimed that good taste is in the ascendant in the majority of cases.

From Florence Smollett set out in October 1764 for Siena, a distance of forty-two miles, in a good travelling coach; he slept there, and next day, seven and a half miles farther on, at Boon Convento, hard by Montepulciano, now justly celebrated for its wine, he had the amusing adventure with the hostler which gave occasion for his vivid portrait of an Italian uffiziale, and also to that irresistible impulse to cane the insolent hostler, from the ill consequences of which he was only saved by the underling's precipitate flight. The night was spent at Radicofani, five and twenty miles farther on. A clever postilion diversified the route to Viterbo, another forty-three miles. The party was now within sixteen leagues, or ten hours, of Rome. The road from Radicofani was notoriously bad all the way, but Smollett was too excited or too impatient to pay much attention to it. "You may guess what I felt at first sight of the city of Rome."

"When you arrive at Rome," he says later, in somewhat more accustomed vein, "you receive cards from all your country folk in that city. They expect to have the visit returned next day, when they give orders not to be at home, and you never speak to one another in the sequel. This is a refinement in hospitality and politeness which the English have invented by the strength of their own genius without any assistance either from France, Italy, or Lapland." It is needless to recapitulate Smollett's views of Rome. Every one has his own, and a passing traveller's annotations are just about as nourishing to the imagination as a bibliographer's note on the Bible. Smollett speaks in the main judiciously of the Castle of St. Angelo, the Piazza and the interior of St. Peter's, the Pincian, the Forum, the Coliseum, the Baths of Caracalla, and the other famous sights of successive ages. On Roman habits and pastimes and the gullibility of the English cognoscente he speaks with more spice of authority. Upon the whole he is decidedly modest about his virtuoso vein, and when we reflect upon the way in which standards change and idols are shifted from one pedestal to another, it seems a pity that such modesty has not more votaries. In Smollett's time we must remember that Hellenic and primitive art, whether antique or medieval, were unknown or unappreciated.

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