In These Unwonted Circumstances He Is
Constrained To Fall Back On The Hard Water And The Plague Of
Cousins Or Gnats As Affording Him The Legitimate Grievance, In
Whose Absence The Warrior Soul Of The Author Of The Ode To
Independence Could Never Be Content.
VII
For his autumn holiday in 1764 Smollett decided on a jaunt to
Florence and Rome, returning to Nice for the winter; and he
decided to travel as far as Leghorn by sea.
There was choice
between several kinds of small craft which plied along the coast,
and their names recur with cheerful frequency in the pages of
Marryat and other depictors of the Mediterranean. There was the
felucca, an open boat with a tilt over the stern large enough to
freight a post-chaise, and propelled by ten to twelve stout
mariners. To commission such a boat to Genoa, a distance of a
hundred miles, cost four louis. As alternative, there was the
tartane, a sailing vessel with a lateen sail. Addison sailed from
Marseilles to Genoa in a tartane in December 1699: a storm arose,
and the patron alarmed the passengers by confessing his sins (and
such sins!) loudly to a Capuchin friar who happened to be aboard.
Smollett finally decided on a gondola, with four rowers and a
steersman, for which he had to pay nine sequins (4 1/2 louis).
After adventures off Monaco, San Remo, Noli, and elsewhere, the
party are glad to make the famous phones on the Torre della
Lanterna, of which banker Rogers sings in his mediocre verse:
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