singer went a third, and the unfortunate! conductor banged and banged, and flourished his scroll on some principle of his own apparently well satisfied with the whole performance. I never did hear such a discordant din. The heat was intense all this time.

The men in red caps, and with loose coats hanging on their shoulders (they never put them on), were playing bowls, and buying sweetmeats immediately outside the church; and when half-a-dozen of them finished a game, they came into the aisle, crossed themselves with the holy water, knelt on one knee for an instant, and walked off again to play another game at bowls.

In a sort of summer-house, or whatever it may be, in this colonnade, some Englishmen had been living, like grubs in a nut ; but the Jesuits had given them notice to go, and they had gone, and that was shut up too. The house, a wandering, echoing, thundering, barrack of a place, with the lower windows barred up, (as they always are here,) was wide open at the door; and I have no doubt I might have gone in, and gone to bed, and gone dead, and nobody a bit the wiser. Only one suite of rooms on an upper floor was tenanted; and from one of these the voice of a young lady vocalist, practising bravura lustily, came flaunting out upon the silent evening.

Hard by here, there is a large palazzo, I went down into the garden; intended formerly belonging to some member of the to be prim and quaint; with the avenues Brignole family, but just now hired by a and terraces, and orange-trees, and statues, school of Jesuits for their summer quarters. and water in stone basins; and every thing I walked into its dismantled precincts the was green, gaunt, weedy, straggling, underother evening about sunset, and couldn't grown, and overgrown; mildewy, damp, help pacing up and down for a little time, redolent of all sorts of slabby, clammy, drowsily taking in the aspect of the place, creeping, and uncomfortable life. There which is repeated hereabouts in all directions. was nothing bright in the whole scene but I loitered to and fro, under a colonnade, a fire-fly-one solitary fire-fly-showing forming two sides of a weedy, grass-grown against the dark bushes like the last little court-yard, whereof the house formed a speck of the departed glory of the house; third side, and a low terrace-walk, overlook- and even it went flitting up and down at ing the garden, and the neighboring hills, sudden angles, and leaving a place with a the fourth. I don't believe there was an jerk, and describing an irregular circle; uncracked stone in the whole pavement. and returning to the same place with a In the centre was a melancholy statue, so twitch that startled one; as if it were lookpiebald in its decay, that it looked exactly ing for the rest of the glory, and wondering as if it had been covered with sticking- (heaven knows it might!) what had become plaster, and afterwards powdered. The of it. stables, coach-houses, offices, were all empty, all ruinous, all utterly deserted. Doors had lost their hinges, and were holding on by their latches; windows were broken, painted plaster had peeled off, and was lying about in clods.

Fowls and cats had so taken possession of the out-buildings, that I couldn't help thinking of the fairy tales, and eyeing them with suspicion, as transformed retainers, waiting to be changed back again One old Tom, in particular, a scraggy brute, with a hungry green eye, (a poor relation, in reality, I am inclined to think,) came prowling round and round me, as if he half believed, for the moment, that I might be the hero come to marry the lady, and set all to rights; but, discovering his mistake, he suddenly gave a grim snort, and walked away with such a tremendous tail, that he couldn't get into the little hole where he lived, but was obliged to wait outside until his indignation and his tail had gone down together.

V.

FIRST SKETCH OF GENOA. THE STREETS,
SHOPS AND HOUSES.

In the course of two months, the flitting shapes and shadows of that dismal reverie have gradually resolved themselves into familiar forms and substances; and I already begin to think that when the time shall come a year hence, for closing this long holiday, and turning back to England, I may part from Genoa with any thing but a glad heart.

It is a place that " grows upon you" every day. There seems to be always something to find out in it. There are the most extraordinary alleys and by-ways to walk about in. You can lose your way (what a comfort that is, when you are idle !) twenty times a day if you like; and turn up again,

under the most unexpected and surprising high up-a huge marble platform: the door difficulties. It abounds in the strangest less vestibules, massively barred lower wincontrasts, things that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent, delightful, and offensive, break upon the view at every turn.

dows, immense public staircases, thick marble pillars, strong dungeon-like arches, and dreary, dreaming, echoing vaulted chambers; among which the eye wanders again, and again, and again, as every palace

The great majority of the streets are as narrow as any thoroughfare can well be, where people (even Italian people) are sup-is succeeded by another-the terrace garposed to live and walk about; being mere lanes, with here and there kind of well, or breathing-place. The houses are immensely high; painted in all sorts of colours; and are in every stage and state of damage, dirt, and lack of repair. They are commonly let off in floors, or flats, like the houses in the old town of Edinburgh. There are few street doors; the entrance halls are, for the most part, looked upon as public property; and any moderately enterprising scavenger might make a fine fortune by now and then clearing them out. As it is impossible for coaches to penetrate into these streets, there are sedan chairs, gilded and otherwise, for hire in divers places. A great many private chairs are also kept among the nobility and gentry; and at night these are trotted to and fro in all directions, preceded by bearers of great lanthorns, made of linen stretched upon a frame. The sedans and lanthorns are the legitimate successors of the long strings of patient and much-abused mules, that go jingling their little bells through these confined streets all day long; and follow them, as regularly as the stars the sun.

dens between house and house, with green arches of the vine, and groves of orangetrees, and blushing oleander in full bloom, twenty, thirty, forty feet above the streetthe painted halls, mouldering and blotting, and rotting in the damp corners, and still shining out in beautiful colors and voluptuous designs, where the walls are dry-the faded figures on the outsides of the houses, holding wreaths and crowns; and flying upward and downward, and standing in niches; and here and there looking fainter and more feeble than elsewhere, by contrast with some fresh little Cupids, who, on a more recently decorated portion of the front, are stretching out what seems to be the semblance of a blanket, but is, indeed, a sun-dial-the steep, steep, up-hill streets of smaller palaces, (but very large palaces for all that), with marble terraces looking down into close by-ways-the magnificent and innumerable churches; and the rapid passage from a street of stately edifices, into a maze of the vilest squalor, steaming with unwholesome stenches, and swarming with half-naked children, and whole worlds of dirty people-make up, altogether, such When shall I forget the Streets of Pala- a scene of wonder: so lively, and yet so ces-the Strada Nuova and the Strada Bal- dead: so noisy, and yet so quiet so obbi! or how the former looked one summer trusive, and yet so shy and lowering: so day, when I first saw it underneath the wide awake, and yet so fast asleep that it brightest and most intensely blue of summer is a sort of intoxication to a stranger to skies with its narrow perspective of im- walk on, and on, and look about him-a mense mansions, reduced to a tapering and bewildering phantasmagoria, with all the most precious strip of brightness, looking inconsistency of a dream, and all the pain down upon the heavy shade below! A and all the pleasure of an extravagant realbrightness not too common, even in July |ity. and August, to be well esteemed for, if The different uses to which some of these the truth must out, there have not been palaces are applied, all at once, is characeight blue skies in as many midsummer teristic. For instance, the English Bankweeks, saving, sometimes, early in the er (my excellent and hospitable friend) has morning when, looking out to sea, the his office in a good-sized Palazzo in the water and the firmament have been one Strada Nuova. In the hall (every inch of world of deep and brilliant blue. At other which is elaborately painted, but which is times, there have been clouds and haze as dirty as a police station in London,) a enough to make an Englishman grumble in hook-nosed Saracen's Head, with an imhis own climate. mense quantity of black hair, (there is a man attached to it,) sells walking-sticks. On the other side of the door-way, a lady with a showy handkerchief for a headdress, (wife to the Saracen's Head, I be

The endless details of these rich palaces! The great, heavy, stone balconies, one above another, and tier over tier; with here and there, one larger than the rest, towering

tumble-down tenement into a crack or corner, in it has gone. If there be a nook or angle in the wall of a church, or a crevice in any other dead wall of any sort, there you are sure to find some kind of habitation: looking as if it had grown there like a fungus. Against the Government house, against the old Senate house, round about any large building, little shops stick close like parasite vermin to the great carcase. And for all this, look where you may,-up steps, down steps, any where, every where

starting forward, tumbling down, leaning against their neighbors; crippling themselves or their friends, by some means or other; until one, more irregular than the rest, chokes up the way, and you can't see any further.

lieve,) sells articles of her own knitting, and sometimes flowers. A little further in, two or three blind men occasionally beg. Sometimes they are visited by a young man without any legs, on a little go-cart, but who has such a fresh-colored, lively face, and such a respectable, well-conditioned body, that he looks as if he had sunk into the ground up to his middle, or had come, but partially, up a flight of cellar steps to speak to somebody. A little further in, a few men, perhaps, lie asleep in the middle of the day; or they may be chairmen wait--there are irregular houses; receding, ing for their absent freight; if so, they have brought their chairs in with them, and there they stand also. On the left of the hall there is a little room-a hatter's shop. On the first floor, is the English bank. On the first floor, also, is a whole house, and a good large residence too. Heaven knows what there may be above that; but when you are there, you have only just begun to go up stairs. And yet, coming down stairs again, think of this; and passing out at a great crazy door in the back of the hall, instead of turning the other way to get into the street again, it bangs behind youmaking the dismalest and most lonesome echoes-and you stand in a yard (the yard of the same house) which seems to have been unvisited by human foot, for a hundred years. Not a sound disturbs its repose. Not a head, thrust out of any of the grim, dark, jealous windows within sight, makes the weeds in the cracked pavement faint of heart, by suggesting the possibility of there being hands to grub them up. Opposite to you is a giant figure carved in stone; reclining, with an urn, upon a lofty piece of artificial rockwork; and out of the urn, dangles the fag-end of a leaden pipe, which, once upon a time, poured a small torrent down the rocks. But the eye-sockets of the giant are not drier than this channel is now. He seems to have given his urn, which is nearly upside down, a final tilt; and after crying, like a sepulchral child, "All gone!" to have lapsed into a stony silence.

In the streets of shops, the houses are much smaller, but of great size notwithstanding, and extremely high. They are very dirty quite undrained, if my nose be at all reliable and emit a peculiar fragrance; like the smell of very bad cheese, kept in very hot blankets. Notwithstanding the height of the houses, there would seem to have been a lack of room in the city, for new houses are thrust in every where. Wherever it has been possible to cram a Vol. VIII.-No. I.

40

One of the rottenest-looking parts of the town, I think, is down by the landingwharf: though it may be that its being associated with a great deal of rottenness on the evening of our arrival, has stamped it deeper in my mind. Here, again, the houses are very high; and are of an infinite variety of deformed shapes: and have (as most of the houses have) something hanging out of a great many windows, and wafting its frowsy fragrance on the breeze. Sometimes it is a curtain, sometimes it is a carpet, sometimes it is a bed, sometimes it is a whole line full of clothes; but there was almost always something. Before the basements of these houses, is a sort of arcade over the pavement, very massive, dark, and low like an old crypt. The stone, or plaster, of which it was made, has turned quite black; and against every one of these black piles, all sorts of filth and garbage seem to accumulate spontaneously. Beneath some of the arches, the sellers of maccaroni and polenta establish their stalls, which are by no means inviting. The offal of a fish-market, near at hand-that is to say of a back lane, where people sit upon the ground, and on various old bulk-heads and sheds, and sell fish when they have any to dispose of-and of a vegetable market constructed on the same principle — are contributed to the decorations of this quarter; and as all the mercantile business is transacted here, and it is crowded all day, it has a very decided flavor about it. The Porto Franco, or Free Port, (where goods brought in from foreign countries pay no duty until they are sold and taken out, as in a bonded warehouse in England,) is down here also; and two portentous officials, in

cocked hats, stand at the gates to search | you, if they choose, and to keep out monks and ladies. For sanctity as well as beauty has been known to yield to the temptation of smuggling; and in the same way-that is to say, by concealing the smuggled property beneath the loose folds of its dress. So sanctity and beauty may by no means

enter.

VI.

IN GENOA,

ON a summer evening, the Genoese are as fond of putting themselves as their ancestors were of putting houses, in every available inch of space within and about the town. In all the lanes and alleys, and up every little ascent, and on every dwarf In some of the narrow passages, distinct wall, and on every flight of steps, they clustrades congregate. There is a street of ter like bees. Meanwhile (and especially jewellers, and there is a row of booksellers; on Festa-days) the bells of the churches but even down in places where nobody ever ring incessantly; not in peals, or any known can, or ever could, penetrate in a carriage, form of sound, but in a horrible, irregular, there are mighty old palaces shut in among jerking, dingle, dingle, dingle,-with a sudthe gloomiest and closest walls, and almost den stop at every fifteenth dingle or soshut out from the sun. Very few of the which is maddening. This performance is tradesmen have any idea of setting forth usually achieved by a boy, up in the steeple, their goods, or disposing them for show. If who takes hold of the clapper, or a little you, a stranger, want to buy any thing, you rope attached to it, and tries to dingle loudusually look round the shop till you see it;er than every other boy similarly employed. then clutch it, if it be within reach, and inquire how much. Every thing is sold at the most unlikely place. So, if you want coffee, you go to a sweetmeat shop; and if you want meat, you will probably find it behind an old checked curtain, down halfa-dozen steps, in some sequestered nook as hard to find as if the commodity were poison, and Genoa's law were death to any he that uttered it.

The noise is supposed to be particularly obnoxious to Evil Spirits: but looking up into the steeples, and seeing (and hearing) these young Christians thus engaged, one might very naturally mistake them for the Enemy.

Festa-days, early in the autumn, are very numerous. All the shops have been shut up, twice within a week, for these holidays; and one night, all the houses in the neighborhood of a particular church were illuminated, while the church itself was light

Some of the apothecaries' shops are great lounging places. Here, grave men with sticks sit down in the shade for hours to-ed outside, with torches; and a grove of gether, passing a meagre Genoa paper from blazing links was erected, in an open place hand to hand, and talking drowsily and outside one of the city gates. This part of sparingly about the news. Two or three of the ceremony is prettier and more singular these are poor physicians, ready to proclaim a little way in the country, where you can themselves on an emergency, and tear off trace the illuminated cottages all the way with any messenger who may arrive. You up a steep hill side; and where you pass may know them by the way in which they festoons of tapers, wasting away in the starstretch their necks to listen, when you en-light night, before some lonely little house ter, and by the sigh with which they fall upon the road. back again into their dull corners, on find- On these days, they always dress the ing that you only want medicine. Few church of the saint in whose honor the Festa people lounge in the barbers' shops; though is holden, very gaily. Gold embroidered festhey are very numerous, as hardly any man toons of different colors hang from the archshaves himself. But the apothecary's has es; the altar furniture is set forth; and someits group of loungers, who sit back among times even the lofty pillars are swathed the bottles, with their hands folded over from top to bottom in tight-fitting draperies. the tops of their sticks; so still and quiet, The Cathedral is dedicated to St. Lorenzo; that either you don't see them in the dark- and on St. Lorenzo's day we went into it, ened shop, or mistake them-as I did one just as the sun was setting. Although these ghostly man in bottle-green, the other day decorations are usually in very different with a hat like a stopper-for Horse Medi-tast, the effect, just then, was very superb cine.

indeed; for the whole building was dressed in red; and the sinking sun, streaming in through a great red curtain in the chief door-way, made all the gorgeousness its

own. When the sun went down, and it gradually grew quite dark inside, except for a few twinkling tapers on the principal altar, and some small, dangling silver lamps, it was very mysterious and effective. But, sitting in any of the churches towards evening, is like a mild dose of opium.

tain; where, being a devout man, he daily said his prayers to the Virgin in the open air; for his hut was a very poor one. Upon a certain day, the Virgin appeared to him as in the picture, and said, " Why do you pray in the open air, and without a priest?" The peasant explained, because there was With the money collected at a Festa, neither priest nor church at hand-a very they pay for the dressing of the church, and uncommon complaint, indeed, in Italy. “I for the hiring of the band, and for the ta- should wish, then," said the celestial visitpers. If there be any left (which seldom er, "to have a chapel built here, in which happens, I believe) the souls in purgatory the prayers of the Faithful may be offered get the benefit of it. They are also sup- up." "But Santissima Madonna," said the posed to have the benefit of the exertions of peasant, "I am a poor man; and chapels certain small boys, who shake money- cannot be built without money. They boxes before some mysterious little buildings, like rural turnpikes, which (usually shut up close) fly open on Red-letter days, and disclose an image and some flowers inside.

Just without the city gate, on the Albaro road, is a small house, with an altar in it, and a stationary money box-also for the benefit of the souls in Purgatory. Still further to stimulate the charitable, there is a monstrous painting on the plaster, on either side of the grated door, representing a select party of souls frying. One of them has a grey moustache, and an elaborate head of grey hair: as if he had been taken out of a hair-dresser's window and cast into the furnace. And there he is, a most grotesque and hideously comic old soul-forever blistering in the real sun, and melting in the mimic fire, for the gratification and improvement (and the contributions) of the poorer Genoese.*

must be supported, too, Santissima; for to have a chapel and not support it, is a wickedness-a deadly sin." This sentiment gave great satisfaction to the visiter. "Go," said she. "There is such a village in the valley on the left, and such another village in the valley to the right, and such another village elsewhere, that will gladly contribute to the building of a chapel. Go to them! Relate what you have seen and do not doubt that sufficient money will be forthcoming to erect my chapel, or that it will afterwards be handsomely maintained." All of which (miraculously) turned out to be quite true. And in proof of this prediction and revelation, there is the chapel of the Madonna della Guardia, rich and flourishing at this day.

The splendor and variety of the Genoese churches, can hardly be exaggerated. The church of the Annunciata especially-built, like many of the others, at the cost of one There are plenty of Saints' and Virgins' noble family, and now in slow progress of Shrines, of course generally at the corners repair-from the outer door to the utmost of streets. The favorite memento to the height of the high cupola, is so elaborately Faithful, about Genoa, is a painting, repre-painted and set in gold, that it looks (as SIsenting a peasant on his knees, with a spade and some other agricultural implements beside him; and the Madonna, with the Infant Savior in her arms, appearing to him in a cloud. This is the legend of the Madonna della Guardia: a chapel on a mountain within a few miles, which is in high repute. It seems that this peasant lived all alone by himself, tilling some land a-top of the moun

MOND describes it, in his charming book on Italy) like a great enamelled snuff-box. Most of the richer churches contain some beautiful pictures, or other embellishments of great price, almost universally set side by side with sprawling effigies of maudlin monks, and the veriest trash and tinsel ever seen.

It may be a consequence of the frequent direction of the popular mind, and pocket, In mentioning such things as this, I beg it to to the souls in Purgatory, but there is very be expressly understood, that I have no intention to discuss the religious creed of the people, or to little tenderness for the bodies of the dead disparage their religious belief. When any off here. For the very poor, there are, immeshoot of it strikes me as being ridiculous or offen-diately outside one angle of the walls, and sive, I simply write down my own impression of behind a jutting point of the fortification, that particular exhibition or practice, and desire to go no farther. I very earnestly wish my readnear the sea, certain common pits-one for ers to bear this in mind, with a view to future every day in the year-which all remain letters. closed up, until the turn of each comes for