What Appeals
To Him Most Is A Monument Of A Whole Past Civilization, Such As
The Pont Du Gard.
His views of art, too, as well as his views of
life, are profoundly influenced by his early training as a
surgeon.
He is not inclined by temperament to be sanguine. His
gaze is often fixed, like that of a doctor, upon the end of life;
and of art, as of nature, he takes a decidedly pathological view.
Yet, upon the whole, far from deriding his artistic impressions,
I think we shall be inclined rather to applaud them, as well for
their sanity as for their undoubted sincerity.
For the return journey to Florence Smollett selected the
alternative route by Narni, Terni, Spoleto, Foligno, Perugia, and
Arezzo, and, by his own account, no traveller ever suffered quite
so much as he did from "dirt," "vermin," "poison," and imposture.
At Foligno, where Goethe also, in his travels a score of years or
so later, had an amusing adventure, Smollett was put into a room
recently occupied by a wild beast (bestia), but the bestia turned
out on investigation to be no more or no less than an "English
heretic." The food was so filthy that it might have turned the
stomach of a muleteer; their coach was nearly shattered to
pieces; frozen with cold and nearly devoured by rats. Mrs.
Smollett wept in silence with horror and fatigue; and the bugs
gave the Doctor a whooping-cough. If Smollett anticipated a
violent death from exhaustion and chagrin in consequence of these
tortures he was completely disappointed.
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