remarkable men. His salutations at beauty, which nothing can mar irre meeting and parting were of the benign-trievably. Besides, is there not 3 est, but he had nothing to say between necessary difference between the chiltimes. He sat with his hands folded in dren of Arno's banks and these their his lap, looking as happy as a pretty revilers from other lands? The latter maid at her first ball. Now and then are the slaves, the blind champions, of he would comb his hair and moustache art. Your born Florentine knows betwith an ivory pocket-comb, and now ter than to worry himself about the and then he would use a tooth-quill. crumbling of one fresco among many, Occasionally he hummed a popular air. or the incongruity of whitewashing His daily beverage was lemon and what is called "an immortal piece of water. When he lifted his arm I could stone-work." Due observation of these see the bare skin through the parting racial dissympathies is convincing on of his shirt. In the forenoon, towards one point. In all physical struggles evening, and well on in the night, I between the north and south the latter caught him in the thrall of the same must go to the wall. There is a giddy diversion. Yet he was always stern, almost ferocious pertinacity and radiant with innate felicity. And strength in the Teuton that the mild there were others, many, like him. or hectic self-gratulatory enthusiasms of the modern Latins cannot stand against. This devotion to the pleasant shadows of propriety is quite a characteristic of certain of the Florentines. They skim the cream of existence, and care little or nothing for what lies underneath. Why should they distress themselves with doubts or unattainable ambitions? they seem to inquire with their ingenuous, unwrinkled countenances. The thing to do is to live easily. That achieved, all worth achieving is achieved. This explains much in modern Florence that has raised the furious ire of more or less illustrious stranger-sojourners in her laughing midst. Our great Ruskin writes of the "Devil-begotten brood" of the Florentines of our day. They "think themselves so civilized, forsooth," he proceeds, "for building a Nuovo Lung' Arno and three manufactory chimneys opposite it, and yet sell butcher's meat, dripping red, peaches, and anchovies side by side; a sight to be seen." The authoress of "Moths" also has not yet wearied of fusillading the tough hide of the city's rulers for their apparent disregard of the first principles of aestheticism. But Florence will put up with worse and far more comprehensible abuse than this, so it may still sip its wine and twiddle its thumbs beneath the soft mantle of its all-enveloping self-esteem. The very raging of its celebrated aliens on such subjects is a tribute to its own One day I went with a fellowcountryman to the Church of S. Spirito. It was the saint's festival. Outside, the morning was hot and still, and you could hear the larks over the red earth and blossoms of the distant fields and gardens. Across the church's threshold, however, all was yellow with candle-light. The atmosphere was sickly sweet and hot, thanks to incense, flowers, warm humanity, and the multitude of untimely tapers. A woman knelt by my side and prayed for certain desirable blessings, with her bright eyes upon the richly garbed officiating clergy by the altar. Two or three amazed tourists stood and contemplated the candles, the worshippers, and the clergy through opera-glasses, passing remarks between their views. I heard a British youth whisper "What rot" none too quietly. Anon the function at the altar reached its zenith. The crowd of worshippers seemed to hold their breath. What was coming next? Why, this: the reverend bishop showed symptoms of fatigue or suffocation. Instantly two of the lesser clergy relieved him of his mitre; the one then respectfully wiped his episcopal brow, while the other, with the palm of his hand, smoothed his sleek hair at the back. Afterwards the function proceeded. In the evening this same church was decorated externally also with countless lights to its weather-vane. There was no wind to spoil the garish spectacle. But there was a vast assemblage of the faithful and the dilettanti in the space about the church, and an infinity of tokens of joy. The word "Bella!" was bandied from tongue to tongue, and from their eyes you would have thought the people had received a national and personal boon of the highest kind. They were the lineal ancestors of those impulsive men and women who, six hundred and more years ago, when Cimabue's Madonna was ready for its shrine, escorted it, with incredible rejoicing and the music of trumpets, from his studio to the church of S. Maria Novella. They recognized in this sadfaced Virgin the source of new emotions; and as such it was exceedingly welcome, quite apart from its religious character. implored to be conscious of the honor done them by the presence in their midst of these "august personages." There is to be, for example, a Battle of Flowers on a certain Sunday, with illuminations to follow. The citizens and others who will hang out carpets and flags from their windows, and adorn their vehicles (or even the chaises they may hire for that purpose) with flowers in as tasteful a manner as possible, will oblige the municipality and at the same time do their own hearts good in the recollection that they are pleasing royalty. The result is admirable. One spends an intoxicating afternoon in streets strewn with violets, appleblossom, and lilies, and sees a thousand pretty girl-faces in the cars as happy as the blue May sky overhead. A race meeting in the park by the green Cascine shows us something more of the Florentine nature. Save among the wealthy sprigs of nobility and others who have the doubtful advantage of foreign travel, there is no betting. The horses run as best they can through the lush grass of the course, and the people clap their hands. It is a spectacle pure and simple; and it is also the glad occasion of other spectacles, such as Punch and Judy, the feats of acrobats, and the fine clothes of fashion. The rich young men of Florence make themselves rather ridiculous in their high collars, primroseyellow gloves, and legs clad in leather from the knees. They also excite the derision of the couple or so of enter So nowadays, when a monarch or two or three come to the city, their majesties are received in the piazza of the railway station with outcries of joy that may well deceive the visitors into fancying that they have some especially amiable quality which endears them to the Florentine heart. Nothing of the kind, in fact. They beget a new emotion, that is all. To the southern nature this is as if handfuls of gold and silver were to be scattered from a carriage. Nay, it is even more; for in the scrambling for the coins some may receive injuries provocative of emotion of quite another kind-and language in keeping. One evening, when I returned to my innprising British bookmakers who cry the in Shoemaker Street, I found Cecca, the maid, voluble and pretty with excitement. "I have seen your dear queen, sir," she said; and then she described the sight, with tears of rapture in her eyes. The innkeeper also referred to my country's sovereign as "la cara regina." The same sensibility on such an occasion pervades the city in all its parts, from the itinerant shirt-seller (who shows you his goods in a café) to the municipal rulers. These at once seize on the pretext for public revels. They issue leaflets in which the citizens are odds in their midst in English. For they are chary of their five-lire pieces, and do not lose with grace, even as they express themselves somewhat queerly in their business transactions in a tongue not their own. But they are not specimens of the true-born Florentine. Their inherited nature has got more than a little adulterated. The very dogs at their heels have been beaten into a mood that compels them to ape the sang froid that is believed to be a feature of the British dog as of the Englishman. They are totally unlike the ordinary dog of Florence, which capers and barks and wags its tail in the grass and flowers of the park with all the vivacious "abandon" of its master or mistress. Between the unspoiled high-born Florentine and the ordinary native there is comparatively little difference on all material points. The one has more money than the other-that is about all. He has a heart of just the same size, and is just as willing to let his heart be the monitor of his actions. From vulgar pride he is gloriously free. John Evelyn, who was here in 1644, makes a note of the conduct of the grand duke, who sold wine in the basement of the Pitti Palace and was not ashamed to do so: "wicker bottles dangling over even the chiefe entrance into the palace, serving for a vintner's bush." It does one good to think of such condescension, assuming, as one well may, that the wine was of fair quality. But Florence has never been disrespectful towards the tradesman since the days of the Medici, with their pawnbroker's sign for a coat of arms. She remembers, too, that more of her geniuses were lowly born than of lofty parentage, and she loves geniuses for the rare emotions with which they provide her. These must, however, be of the first order of great men. Commonplace cleverness is scarcely more than respectable here; and the mere clever person (man or woman) who makes a tiresome claim for recognition as a genius in Florence is likely to become only a butt for the glib jests that fall as easily from Florentine tongues as courtly phrases. I was privileged to bear a letter of introduction to a certain countess well to the front in society here. She received me with the grace one expects in Florentine ladies. But almost her first words were astonishing. "I hope you are not intellectual, Mr.," she said, with rather an anxious smile. Her daughter and the young count, her son, also smiled. Having assured her that I was nothing of the kind, she sighed with relief. And yet she herself was distinctly intellectual, which made the matter seem a trifle odd. The truth was she had but just said "A rivederci!" to one of the lights of English literature, who had, she confessed (and so did her daughter), bored her in a quite pitiable manner. The daughter was cruel enough to compare the poor gentleman to a cloud. "One does not want clouds in May," she added. The young count (an unobtrusive adolescent) agreed. And then, I am afraid, some rather unkind censures were passed upon certain others of my country people as we drank our tea and looked at the sunlight on the orange-trees in the little garden upon which the room opened. I had to congratulate myself that I had gained my footing on the sober grounds of mediocrity. To recommend oneself in Florence it is necessary to be volatile and unpretentious. It isn't at all necessary to De a judge of pictures and statues. This, upon the whole, is a mercy, for Professor Ruskin has made it hard for the average Philistine to express an opinion about Florentine works of art without avowing his own ignorance. raise Florence in a general manner, and you will win the hearts of the Florentines. This is a simple and easy programme. As for the leisured young men of the city, these devote themselves strenuously to but a couple of aims: the garnishing of their own dear persons and the pursuit of fair ladies. In the former particular they are not more eccentric than their peers elsewhere. But in their amorous adventures they are wonderful. One with whom I was acquainted was possessed by three infatuations at once. The ladies in question were entire strangers to him, but he knew their names, their circumstances, the hotels at which they were staying (with mammas, papas, or big brothers), and the shops they patronized. He was deterred by no false modesty from raising his hat to them whenever he met them in the Via Tornabuoni (his favorite lounge) and smiling his sweetest. He had tried a billet-doux on two of them, but had received no answer. He admitted that so far he had not had encouragement from any one of the three; yet he was far from despondent. The most beautiful of them was soon to have a birthday (he had learnt that fact from the subsidized portiere at the hotelHeaven knows how), and he proposed to spend ten lire on her in a magnificent bouquet, in the midst of which there was to be a note containing an eloquent declaration of his heart's passion. He said he was sure he should succeed sooner or later with one of the three, because he had so often before succeeded under similar circumstances. When I mentioned the perils he so audaciously faced at the hands of wrathful parents and brothers, he shrugged his shoulders in contempt of such petty obstacles. "Amico mio," he remarked, with the air of a Solon, "between two hearts that love there is always a way." The Briton is disposed to laugh to scorn such barefaced impertinence in the Florentine youths. But not infrequently impudence gains the day. A lamentable instance of this occurs to my mind. The victim was a conventbred American girl, visiting Florence with her mother. She was beautiful, with strange light-brown eyes, a coquettish demeanor mysteriously out of keeping with the manners one is disposed to believe are inculcated in convents, and a sufficiency of dollars. The rascal who wrecked her was precisely one of these young ruffians of the Via Tornabuoni. He was a count, of course. They are all that, at least. He bored his way into her young heart with the assiduity of a bookworm and the singleness of purpose of a ferret. When she and her mother ate tarts in the swell confectioner's shop near the club, he also was there, with sad, wistful eyes. He won the driver of their hired car to slip something into her hands from "il Signor Conte." He bribed the porter at the pension where they were staying, and so established a channel for his love-letters-on superb thick paper embellished by an insidious gilt coronet. And after a fortnight's wooing of this kind, he got so far that the girl was not unwilling to sit at the VOL. XI. 523 LIVING AGE. open window of her ground-floor room and accept his smiles and greetings from the roadway, and even his letters. The affair ended in a wedding, and a year later in a divorce. This precious count, like so many others of his kidney, was a mere adventurer. The tale of his iniquities would astonish a world used even to the reports of our home divorce proceedings. While I write, I have before me one of his letters to this unfortunate girl. He takes credit in it for the ardor of his Italian heart and the eternity of its passion. But it is a pity some one did not pinch the life out of him as a babe ere he began his career of blind brutish subservience to the dictates of this same heart. Since the time of the "Decameron," love or the semblance thereof has played what one may term an inordinate part in Florentine life. Let the visitor be on his guard when he comes to this beautiful city, with its Fair Ladies' Street and its expansive smiles; and let him be so especially if he have with him a susceptible and pretty wife, sister, or daughter whom he wishes to leave Florence with her affections in much the same state as when she first walked, open-eyed and eager, among the pictures and antiquities of the place. In one of the city's enchanting cemeteries you may read the following epitaph under the marble bust of a girl-"Born for heaven. After eighteen years of life and forty days of love, fled to her home." These words are an epitome of more than one young life upon which Florence has brought the first rough shock of disillusionment. Taine says of the Florentines that they are "actifs sans être affairés." It is a significant phrase. The late lamented Dr. Watts could have given us a fine didactic stanza or two on such a text in such a city. I learnt more on this subject when I left the inn in Shoemaker Street and took up my abode in one of the Lung' Arno pensions. There were no fleas here, and the furniture in my room was a charming study in green and gold. From my window, instead of a couple of absorbed little milliners, I looked upon a barrack exercising ground. | gowns per lady made up enough The bugling was rather a nuisance at times, but the strong colors of the troops, the tight breeches of the lieutenants and captains in command, and their resonant voices were not altogether a change for the worse. And, though the pension was of the best class, it did not need a lynx eye to see that a good deal of an interesting kind was going on in it. Of There were about fifty of us. course we included six or seven unattached English spinster ladies with white hair who knew all that was worth knowing about the rest of us. Also there were two German families; the one from Hamburg, the other headed by a baron and baroness from some small Schloss. Americans, two English parsons and their wives, a newly married and very modest pair from London, a marchese from Naples, two Roman counts, a Dutchman, and a round dozen others made up the housefull. Every room in the pension was occupied, and the dinner-table was a sight to warm the heart of the signora who ran the pension. I never breathed such an atmosphere of ill-suppressed antagonisms as in this establishment. To me, as unattached as the spinsters themselves, it was highly diverting when I was in the humor to amuse myself at the expense of poor human nature. At table I sat between a parson's wife and the eldest daughter of the Hamburg merchant. The latter was a fine statuesque young woman and very candid in certain matters. She could not bear the daughter of the German baron, whose manners were so much more polished than her own, and she liked better to whisper about the girl's deficiencies and pride (so she regarded it) than to discuss the churches and pictures she had visited en famille in the course of the day, Baedeker scrupulously in hand. She was also much put about by the extraordinary number of frocks in which one of the American girls indulged. That, too, she considered bad form, and she asked her stout father if he did not think a mere half-dozen travelling luggage. Papa said, "Ach, yes," very decidedly. Nor did the fair Hamburgher like the powder on certain faces. "It is only when they require it that they use it," she told me a statement not so self-evident as it may seem. She said much more when we were in the drawing-room of evenings; and sometimes she said it in the privacy of one of the pension balconies, towards which she loved to steal when the stars were very bright and there was mandoline music underneath more moving than the piano flourishes indoors. For, though critical in company, she was not devoid of enthusiasm when the right time offered. Being the daughter of a practical man and a German, she contrived not to waste any of the impressions made upon her by the sunny south. It is bold in a man to pass judgment upon a girl, but I believe this Hamburg maiden was a downright good lass in spite of her prejudices and limitations-perhaps, indeed, because of them. There were times subsequently when I thought of profiting by her father's and mother's warm invitation to visit them at their villa on the Elbe. But I have not yet used the opportunity. The parson's wife also was not above being divertingly critical of our company. Several times, however, her husband pulled her up in her remarks with a gentle "Hush, my dear!" of horror, though it was as plain as could be that in his heart he thought her none too severe. I made friends with one of the spinster ladies, a dear old soul with snowwhite hair brushed high from her forehead. She recalled Carmen Sylva's royal words in one of her novels: "White hairs are the flakes of foam which cover the sea after a storm." For I know not how many successive years she had been accustomed to spend the spring months in Florence. Thus she had all the city's gossip at her tongue's end, and delighted to tell it in driblets to my sympathetic ears. It was she who first discerned that the young Dutchman was in love with the |