"The matron of the house obligingly Led him to two large rooms on the first floor, Where he would have more light and liberty, With a good walk along the corridor; Besides which, they expected one or more Nice gentlemen to-morrow afternoon. The gentleman who left the day before-- Poor man! he had a cough would kill him soon-- Ten months he had been with them on the twelfth of June."
This is certainly odd, and the puzzle is that though the author, as we have said, has true and biting humour in him, he never drives his stanza with the conscious _lilt_ that you find in, for example, Byron's use of a substantially kindred measure in "Beppo," or "Morgante Maggiore." Take the first lines that occur to one's mind in the latter:--
"There being a want of water in the place, Orlando, like a trusty brother, said, Morgante, I could wish you in this case To go for water. You shall be obeyed," &c.
Here Byron is making the flat prose of the metre (so to speak), a source of humour in itself: but we cannot find that the author of these "Memories" intends anything of the kind. We agree with some of our brethren in finding the occasional lyrics good, and the opening lines of the seventh canto contain hints of genuine poetic quality. Altogether the book is a noticeable budget of gossip in verse, with not a few strong, pointed passages to relieve the effect of the flat or weak pages; which latter are, to speak the truth, too numerous. We should guess the author to be a very "clubable man."
This is a very pleasant title, at all events, _A Nook in the Appennines, or a Summer Beneath the Chestnuts_, by Leader Scott, author of "The Painter's Ordeal," &c., &c. With twenty-seven Illustrations, chiefly from Original Sketches (C. Kegan Paul & Co.), and the book is pleasant too. Finding the heat at Florence, on the 11th of June--not _last_ June--too much for them, it being 96° in the shade, an English family flee to a nook in the mountains, where an old villa has been got ready for them; and there they sit, "at the receipt of coolness," like Lamb's "gentle giantess," till September. The villa on the Apennines is 2220 feet above the level of the sea, and the thermometer stands only at 70° in the open air. Now 70° is ordinary agreeable summer heat for England; though it is many degrees higher than anything we have seen (up to the middle of July) in England this dreadful year. The illustrations are helpful, and, without being obtrusively antiquarian, have most of them a retrospective or historical interest, as well as the more obvious one which is common to illustrations. The forty short chapters of which the book consists are filled with sketches of the life our English friends lived in the mountain nook, and of the manners and daily lives of the peasantry by whom they were surrounded--and these will be more instructive to a reader who knows a little about the Etruscans than to one who knows nothing of them. The interest of the narrative is never strong, but it is strong enough to carry the attention equably forward to the end, and there is no affectation; but it is a great mistake, and an unkindness to the reader, to omit, in a case of this sort, giving a sufficiently full, complete, and picturesque account of the travelling party themselves. We ought to be told how many there were, their ages, relationships, &c., and something of their previous travelling experience, if any.