Italie in 1731. But they were certainly no new discovery when he saw them at Genoa in 1706. We have in our possession letters with the wafers still adhering which went from Lisbon to Rome twenty years before that time, and Stolberg observes that there are wafers and wafer-seals in the museum at Portici.

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Evelyn noticed in the Genoese a very different character from that parsimony for which Labat swears at them; he speaks of the magnificent expenditure of the merchants, who, as there was little or no land in which they could invest their property, expended it in marble palaces and costly furniture. He admired their floors of red plaster, which became so hard and received so high a polish, that it might have been mistaken for porphyry, and he wondered that it was not used in England for cabinets and rooms of state. It is indeed surprising that notwithstanding the appalling frequency of fires we should continue to floor our houses with wood, as if to render them as combustible as possible. The aviary in the gardens of Prince Doria's palace pleased him as realizing Bacon's desire, who said he liked not such places, unless they were of that largeness that they might be turffed, and have living plants and bushes set in them that the birds might have more scope and natural nestling, and no foulness appear on the floor.' Trees of more than two feet in diameter were growing in this prodigious cage, besides cypress, myrtles, lentiles, and other rare shrubs, which serve to nestle and perch all sorts of birds, who have air and place enough under their airy canopy, supported with huge iron work stupendous for its fabric and its charge.' Lassels says, that to make the poor birds believe they are rather in a wood than in a prison, the very cage hath put even the wood itself in prison.' It is about an hundred paces long, and fetcheth in a world of laurel and other trees.' This was indeed a splendid aviary, and yet but a splendid folly, effecting that by constraint which might have been accomplished so much more easily by better means. Any garden may be made an aviary without caging it in, by affording to the birds food and protection; for it is surprizing how soon the shyest birds may be taught to come to the hand that feeds them. We have seen wild-ducks come in flocks to a lady's call, and the water-hen hurry to the same voice with as much alacrity as the barn-door fowl.

In his progress through Italy Evelyn's attention, according to the fashion of his age, was chiefly attracted by palaces and pictures, gardens and museums. Picturesque beauty was then so little regarded that Misson advises a traveller not to go on purpose to the Borromean islands unless he had a great deal of leisure: for he says, 'there is nothing very rare or extraordinary in them. A man

who

who never saw but very ordinary things of that nature would doubtless admire these islands if he were suddenly transported thither, but they would never produce the same effect upon one that has seen a little of the world.' Thus he spoke of them, thinking of the islands alone, without the slightest reference to the glorious scenery by which they are surrounded; nor were they in his estimation more interesting for standing in the Lago Maggiore than they would have been in Whittlesea mere! But Evelyn, notwithstanding his taste for grottoes, parterres, and vistas, had a true feeling for better things; and when he got out of the trammels of art was fully capable of enjoying the world of nature. The following description will be read with pleasure, though it should remind the reader of a sublimer picture in Burnet's Telluris Theoria Sacra.

Next morning, we rod by Monte Pientio, or, as vulgarly called, Monte Mantumiato, which is of an excessive height ever and anon peeping above any clowds with its snowy head, till we had climbed to the inn at Radicofany built by Ferdd the greate Duke for the necessary refreshment of travellers in so inhospitable a place. As we ascended we entered a very thick, solid, and dark body of clowds, wch look'd like rocks at a little distance, which lasted neare a mile in going up; they were dry misty vapours, hanging undissolved for a vast thicknesse, and obscuring both the sun and earth so that we seemed to be in the sea rather than in the cloudes, till, having pierced through it we came into a most serene heaven, as if we had been above all human conversation, the mountaine appearing more like a greate island than joyn'd to any other hills, for we could perceive nothing but a sea of thick clouds rowling under our feete like huge waves, ever now and then suffering thee top of some other mountaine to peepe through, which we could discover many miles off; and betweene some breaches of the clouds we could see landskips and villages of the subjacent country. This was one of the most pleasant, newe, and altogether surprizing objects that I had ever behold.

On the sum'it of this horrid rock (for so it is) is built a very strong Fort, garrison'd, and somewhat beneath it is a small towne; the provisions are drawne up with ropes and engines, the precipice being otherwise inaccessable. At one end of the towne lie heapes of rocks so strangely broaken off from the ragged mountaine as would affright one with their horror and menacing postures. Just opposite to the inn gushed out a plentifull and most useful fountaine which falls into a great trough of stone, bearing the Duke of Tuscany's armes. Here we din'd, and I with my black lead pen tooke the prospect.'-vol. i. p. 88.

At Rome he was what he calls very pragmatical, by which he means very busy in going over the regular course of sight-seeing. He engraved his name amongst other travellers' in the globe of St. Peter's cupola, and had the honour, by the special desire of a Dominican friar, of standing godfather to a Turk and a Jew,-a remarkable instance of liberality in the friar, unless he doubted the

sincerity

sincerity of his neophytes, and thought a heretic sponsor good enough for them. Naples he resolved to make the non ultra of his travels; sufficiently sated, he says, with rolling up and down, and resolving within myself to be no longer an individuum vagum, if ever I got home again, since from the report of divers experienced and curious persons I had been assured there was little more to be seen in the rest of the civil world after Italy, France, Flanders, and the Low Country.' The persons who pronounced this opinion must have had little curiosity with their experience, or little experience with their curiosity. The satiety which Evelyn confesses is one which every traveller must sometimes have experienced, in an hour of exhaustion, when he feels the want of that comfort and that perfect rest, one of which can only be enjoyed in his own country, and the other in his own house. But the appetite soon returns for that living knowledge which travelling imparts, and so was it with Evelyn. Finding at Venice an English ship bound for the Holy Land, he determined to visit Syria, Egypt, and Turkey, engaged for his passage, and laid in his sea-stock; but to his great mortification the vessel was pressed for the service of the state to carry provisions to Candia, then newly attacked by the Turks.

Journals and books of travels are among those works which acquire by time more value than they lose they are the subsidiaries of history, and preserve the memory of many things which history disdains to notice, as trifling while they are trivial, but which become objects of curiosity when they are obsolete and ancient. Among the preposterous fashions of the Venetian women Evelyn remarks that they wore very long crisped hair of several streaks and colours, which they made so by a wash, dishevelling it on the brims of a broad hat that had no crown, but in its place a hole through which they put their heads, and they were seen at the windows drying their party-coloured tresses in the sun. This seems to have been peculiar to Venice. Lassels, speaking of the Italians in general, says the women wash their heads ' weekly in a wash made for the nonce, and dry them again in the sun to make their hair yellow, a colour much in vogue there among the ladies.' It was the age of coloured beards in England. The princesses and beauties of chivalrous romances have usually golden or flaxen hair, and for this reason, that when those romances were written all highborn persons were of unmixed Teutonic blood. The predilection which the southern poets of the seventeenth century show for the same colours must be explained by this fashion of staining the hair.

Here Evelyn suffered for the indiscreet use of the hot-bath after the oriental fashion going out immediately into the city after he

had

had been rubbed down and all his pores were open, it cost him one of the greatest colds he ever had in his life. He speaks of the striking silence of Venice, a city in which there was no rattling of coaches nor trampling of horses, and where nothing disturbed the singing of the nightingales which were kept in every shop: shutting your eyes, he says, you would imagine yourself in the country. A man had lately come to his death there by a most uncommon accident; he was doing something to the famous clock in the square of St. Mark, celebrated next to that of Strasburg for its many movements;' and while thus employed he stooped his head just in such a place and in such a point of time, that the quarterboy struck it with his hammer, and knocked him over the battlements. Here and at Naples criminals were executed by a machine like the guillotine. At Padua he was elected Syndicus Artistarum, the greatest honour which could be conferred on a stranger in that University, from which, however, he excused himself because it was chargeable,' and would also have interfered with his intended progress. There he learnt to play on the theorbo; bought for winter provision three thousand weight of grapes and pressed his own wine, which proved excellent;' and in consequence, as he supposed, of drinking it according to the custom cooled with snow and ice, was seized with an angina and sore throat, which had nearly proved fatal; but old Salvatico (that famous physician) made him be cupped and scarified in the back in four places, which began to give him breath and consequent life, for he was in the utmost danger.' There too he attended the famous Anatomy Lecture which was celebrated with extraordinary apparatus, lasting almost a whole month.' During this famous course' three bodies were dissected; those of a man, a woman, and a child. The one,' he says, was performed by Cavalier Vestlingius and Dr. Jo. Athelsteinus Leonanas, of whom I purchased those rare tables of veins and nerves, and caused him to prepare a third of the lungs, liver, and nervi sexti par with the gastric veins, which I sent into England, the first of that kind which had been sent there, and, for aught I know, in the world. When the Anatomy Lectures, which were in the mornings, were ended, I went to see cures done in the hospitals; and certainly, as there are the greatest helps and the most skilful physicians, so there are the most miserable and deplorable objects to exercise upon; nor is there any, I should think, so powerful an argument against the vice reigning in this licentious country, as to be spectator of the misery these poor creatures undergo.'

in

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Having now been two years in Italy he prepared for his return, company with Mr. Abdy, a modest and learned man'-Waller the poet, then newly gotten out of England, after the parliament

had

had extremely worried him, for attempting to put in execution the commission of array'-and one Captain Wray, son of Sir Christopher,' whose father had been in arms against his Majesty, and therefore, says Evelyn, by no means welcome to us. He calls him, however, elsewhere, a good drinking gentleman. They crossed the Simplon by a track which, according to the report of the natives, went above the line of perpetual snow, but which, like the present road, brought them down upon Brigue. Evelyn was indisposed when they arrived at the end of a day's journey at a place called Neveretta, by the head of the lake of Geneva. Being extremely weary,' he says, and complaining of my head, and finding little accommodation in the house, I caused one of our hostesses daughters to be removed out of her bed, and went immediately into it whilst it was yet warm, being so heavy with pain and drowsiness, that I would not stay to have the sheets changed; but I shortly after paid dearly for my impatience, falling sick of the smallpox as soon as I came to Geneva,-for by the smell of frankincense, and the tale the good woman told me of her daughter having had an ague, I afterwards concluded she had been newly recovered of the small pox.' He seems, however, to have erred in supposing that this was his punishment for consenting to sleep in unclean sheets; for it appears that he was at the time sickening with the disease, and the day after he reached Geneva, he was constrained to keep his chamber, with such pains in the head as if his very eyes would have dropped out, and a stinging over the whole body; he had the disorder favourably, notwithstanding bad treatment before it was understood, and worse after it had declared itself.

Evelyn repeats the so often repeated assertion, that the Rhone passes through the lake of Geneva with such velocity as not to mingle with its waters. Of all the fables which credulity delights to believe and propagate, this should appear the most impossible to obtain credit, for the Rhone, when it enters the lake, is both of the colour and consistency of pease-soup, and it issues out of it perfectly clear, and of so deep a blue that no traveller can ever have beheld it without astonishment. Evelyn had seen it in both places, and yet repeats the common story, which had it been fact instead of fable, would have been less remarkable than the actual and as yet unexplained phenomenon of its colour at Geneva. Adultery was then punished with death in that city. Among other military exercises he saw huge balista or cross-bows shot in, being such as they formerly used in wars before great guns were known: they were placed in frames, and had great screws to bend them, doing execution at an incredible distance.' Having reached Paris, rejoiced that he was gotten so near home, and meaning to rest there before he went farther, he past the only time in his whole life that

was