channelled precipices, and hastening into the roughened river at the bottom! Now and then an old foot bridge, with a broken rail, a leaning cross, a cottage, or the ruin of an hermitage! This sounds too bombast and too romantic to one that has not seen it, too cold for one that has. If I could send you my letter post between two lovely tempests that echoed each other's wrath, you might have some idea of this noble roaring scene, as you were reading it. Almost on the summit, upon a fine verdure, but without any prospect, stands the Chartreuse.'[30]
The foregoing passage is dated Aix-in-Savoy, 30 September. Two days later, passing by Annecy, they came to Geneva. Here they stayed a week to see Conway settled, and made a 'solitary journey' back to Lyons, but by a different road, through the spurs of the Jura and across the plains of La Bresse. At Lyons they found letters awaiting them from Sir Robert Walpole, desiring his son to go to Italy—a proposal with which Gray, only too glad to exchange the over-commercial city of Lyons for 'the place in the world that best deserves seeing,' was highly delighted. Accordingly, we speedily find them duly equipped with 'beaver bonnets, beaver gloves, beaver stockings, muffs, and bear-skins' en route for the Alps. At the foot of Mont Cenis their chaise was taken to pieces and loaded on mules, and they themselves were transferred to low matted legless chairs carried on poles—a not unperilous mode of progression, when, as in this case, quarrels took place among the bearers. But the tragedy of the journey happened before they had quitted the chaise. Walpole had a fat little black spaniel of King Charles's breed, named Tory, and he had let the little creature out of the carriage for the air. While it was waddling along contentedly at the horses' heads, a gaunt wolf rushed out of a fir wood, and exit poor Tory before any one had time to snap a pistol. In later years, Gray would perhaps have celebrated this mishap as elegantly as he sang the death of his friend's favourite cat; but in these pre-poetic days he restricts himself to calling it an 'odd accident enough.'[31]
'After eight days' journey through Greenland,'—as Gray puts it to West—they reached Turin, where among other English they found Pope's friend, Joseph Spence, Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Beyond Walpole's going to Court, and their visiting an extraordinary play called La Rappresentazione dell' Anima Dannata (for the benefit of an Hospital), a full and particular account of which is contained in one of Spence's letters to his mother,[32] nothing remarkable seems to have happened to them in the Piedmontese capital. From Turin they went on to Genoa—'the happy country where huge lemons grow' (as Gray quotes, not textually, from Waller)—whose blue sea and vine-trellises they quit reluctantly for Bologna, by way of Tortona, Piacenza, Parma (where they inspect the Correggios in the Duomo), Reggio, and Modena. At Bologna, in the absence of introductions, picture-seeing is their main occupation. 'Except pictures and statues,' writes Walpole, 'we are not very fond of sights. … Now and then we drop in at a procession, or a high mass, hear the music, enjoy a strange attire, and hate the foul monkhood. Last week was the feast of the Immaculate Conception. On the eve we went to the Franciscans' church to hear the academical exercises. There were moult and moult clergy, about two dozen dames, that treated one another with illustrissima and brown kisses, the vice-legate, the gonfalonier, and some senate. The vice-legate … is a young personable person of about twenty, and had on a mighty pretty cardinal-kind of habit; 'twou'd make a delightful masquerade dress. We asked his name: Spinola. What, a nephew of the cardinal-legate? Signor, no; ma credo che gli sia qualche cosa. He sat on the right hand with the gonfalonier in two purple fauteuils. Opposite was a throne of crimson damask, with the device of the Academy, the Gelati;[33] and trimmings of gold. Here sat at a table, in black, the head of the Academy, between the orator and the first poet. At two semicircular tables on either hand sat three poets and three; silent among many candles. The chief made a little introduction, the orator a long Italian vile harangue. Then the chief, the poet, the poets—who were a Franciscan, an Olivetan, an old abbé, and three lay—read their compositions; and to-day they are pasted up in all parts of the town. As we came out of the church, we found all the convent and neighbouring houses lighted all over with lanthorns of red and yellow paper, and two bonfires.'[34]
In the Christmas of 1739, the friends crossed the Apennines, and entered Florence. If they had wanted introductions at Bologna, there was no lack of them in Tuscany, and they were to find one friend who afterwards figured largely in Walpole's correspondence. This was Mr. (afterwards Sir Horace) Mann, British Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of Florence. 'He is the best and most obliging person in the world,' says Gray, and his house, with a brief interval, was their residence for fifteen months. Their letters from Florence are less interesting than those from which quotations have already been made, while their amusements seem to have been more independent of each other than before. Gray occupied himself in the galleries taking the notes of pictures and statuary afterwards published by Mitford, and in forming a collection of MS. music; Walpole, on the other hand, had slightly cooled in his eagerness for the antique, which now 'pleases him calmly.' 'I recollect'—he says—'the joy I used to propose if I could but see the Great Duke's gallery; I walk into it now with as little emotion as I should into St. Paul's. The statues are a congregation of good sort of people that I have a great deal of unruffled regard for.' The fact was, no doubt, that society had now superior attractions. As the son of the English Prime Minister, and with Mann, who was a relation,[35] at his elbow, all doors were open to him. A correct record of his time would probably show an unvaried succession of suppers, balls, and masquerades. In the carnival week, when he snatches 'a little unmasqued moment' to write to West, he says he has done nothing lately 'but slip out of his domino into bed, and out of bed into his domino. The end of the Carnival is frantic, bacchanalian; all the morn one makes parties in masque to the shops and coffee-houses, and all the evening to the operas and balls.' If Gray was of these junketings, his letters do not betray it. He was probably engaged in writing uncomplimentary notes on the Venus de' Medici, or transcribing a score of Pergolesi.
The first interruption to these diversions came in March, when they quitted Florence for Rome in order to witness the coronation of the successor of Clement XII., who had died in the preceding month. On their road from Siena they were passed by a shrill-voiced figure in a red cloak, with a white handkerchief on its head, which they took for a fat old woman, but which afterwards turned out to be Farinelli's rival, Senesino. Rome disappointed them—especially in its inhabitants and general desolation. 'I am very glad,' writes Walpole, 'that I see it while it yet exists;' and he goes on to prophesy that before a great number of years it will cease to exist. 'I am persuaded,' he says again, 'that in an hundred years Rome will not be worth seeing; 'tis less so now than one would believe. All the public pictures are decayed or decaying; the few ruins cannot last long; and the statues and private collections must be sold, from the great poverty of the families.' Perhaps this last consideration, coupled with the depressing character of Roman hospitality ('Roman conversations are dreadful things!' he tells Conway), revived his virtuoso tastes. 'I am far gone in medals, lamps, idols, prints, etc., and all the small commodities to the purchase of which I can attain; I would buy the Coliseum if I could.' Meanwhile as the cardinals are quarrelling, the coronation is still deferred; and they visit Naples, whence they explore Herculaneum, then but recently exposed and identified. But neither Gray nor Walpole waxes very eloquent upon this theme—probably because at this time the excavations were only partial, while Pompeii was, of course, as yet under ground. Walpole's next letter is written from Radicofani—'a vile little town at the foot of an old citadel,' which again is at 'the top of a black barren mountain;' the whole reminding the writer of 'Hamilton's Bawn' in Swift's verses. In this place, although the traditional residence of one of the Three Kings of Cologne, there is but one pen, the property of the Governor, who when Walpole borrows it, sends it to him under 'conduct of a sergeant and two Swiss,' with special injunctions as to its restoration—a precaution which in Walpole's view renders it worthy to be ranked with the other precious relics of the poor Capuchins of the place, concerning which he presently makes rather unkindly fun. A few days later they were once more in the Casa Ambrosio, Mann's pleasant house at Florence, with the river running so close to them that they could fish out of the windows. 'I have a terreno [ground-floor] all to myself,' says Walpole, 'with an open gallery on the Arno, where I am now writing to you [i.e., Conway]. Over against me is the famous Gallery; and, on either hand, two fair bridges. Is not this charming and cool?' Add to which, on the bridges aforesaid, in the serene Italian air, one may linger all night in a dressing-gown, eating iced fruits
