Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 345, July, 1844

The Italian morning presents a beautiful sight on deck to eyes weary and sore with night, as night passes on board steamers. We pass along a coast obviously of singular conformation, and to a geologist, we suppose, full of interest. We encounter a herd of classical dolphins out a-pleasuring. We ask about a pretty little town perched just above the sea, and called Giocosa. By its side lies Tyndaris—classical enough if we spell it right. The snow on Etna is as good as an inscription, and to be read at any distance; but what a deception! they tell us it is thirty miles off, and it seems to rise immediately from behind a ridge of hills close to the shore. The snow cone rises in the midst of other cones, which would appear equally high but for the difference of colour. Patti is a picturesque little borgo, on the hillside, celebrated in Sicily for its manufacture of hardware. In the bay of Melazzo are taken by far the largest supplies of thunny in the whole Mediterranean. From the embayed town so named you have the choice of a cross-road to Messina, (twenty-four miles;) but who would abridge distance and miss the celebrated straits towards which we are rapidly approaching, or lose one hour on land and miss the novelties of volcanic islands, and the first view of Scylla and Charybdis? It is but eight o'clock, but the awning has been stretched over our heads an hour ago. As to breakfast—the meal which is associated with that particular hour of the four-and-twenty to all well regulated minds and stomachs—it consists here of thin veneers of old mahogany-coloured thunny, varnished with oil, and relieved by an incongruous abomination of capers and olives. The cold fowls are infamous. The wine were a disgrace to the sorriest tapster between this and the Alps, and also fiery, like every thing else in this district. Drink it, and doubt not the old result—de conviva Corybanta videbis. (Oh, for muffins and dry toast!) Never mind, we shall soon be at Messina. And now we approach a point from which the lofty Calabrian coast opposite, and the flinty wall of the formidable Scylla, first present themselves, but still as distant objects. In another half hour we are just opposite the redoubtable rock; and here we turn abruptly at right angles to our hitherto course, and find ourselves within the straits, from either side of which the English and the French so often tried the effect of cannon upon each other. It is now what it used to be—fishing ground. The Romans got their finest muræna from the whirlpools of Charybdis.[14 - "Virroni muræna datur, quo maxima venitGurgite de Siculo: nam dum se continet Auster,Contemnunt mediam tem eraria lina Charybdim."JUVENAL, Sat. v. 99.] The shark (cane di mare) abounding here, would make bathing dangerous were the water smooth; but the rapid whirlpools through which our steam-boat dashes on disdainfully, would, at the same time, make it impossible to any thing but a fish. A passenger assured us he had once seen a man lost in the Vistula, who, from being a great swimmer, trusted imprudently to his strength, and was sucked down by a vortex of far less impetuosity, he thought, than this through which we were moving. From this point till we arrived at Messina, as every body was ripe for bathing, the whole conversation turned naturally on the Messina shark, and his trick of snapping at people's legs carelessly left by the owners dangling over the boat's side. We steam up the straits to our anchorage in about three-fourths of an hour. The approach is fine, very fine. A certain Greek, (count, he called himself,) a great traveller, and we afterwards found not a small adventurer, increases the interest of the approach, by telling us that the hills before us, bubbling up like blisters on chalcedony, have a considerable resemblance, though inferior in character, to those which embellish the Bosphorus and the first view of Constantinople. Inferior, no doubt, in the imposing accessories of mosque and minaret, and of cypresses as big as obelisks, which, rising thickly on the heights, give to the city of Constantinople an altogether peculiar and inimitable charm. Messina is beautifully land-locked. The only possible winds that can affect its port are the north-west and south-east. In summer it is said to enjoy more sea breeze than any other place on the Mediterranean. Our Greek friend, however, says that Constantinople is in this respect not only superior to Messina, but to any other place in the seas of Europe. Pity that the fellows are Turks! We did not find much to interest us within the walls of Messina. There was, to be sure, a fine collection of Sicilian birds, amongst which we were surprised to see several of very exotic shape and plumage. One long-legged fellow, dressed in a dirty white Austrian uniform, with large web-feet, on which he seemed to rest with great complacency, particularly arrested our attention. He stood as high as the Venus di Medici, but by no means so gracefully, and thrust his thick carved beak unceremoniously in your face. His card of address was Phoenicopterus antiquorum. The ancients ate him, and he looked as if he would break your nose if you disputed with him. A very large finch, which we have seen for sale about the streets here and elsewhere in Sicily, rejoices in the imposing name of Fringilla cocco thraustis. He wears his black cravat like a bird of pretension, as he evidently is. The puffin (Puffinus Anglorum) also frequents these rocks, though a very long way from the Isle of Wight. No! Messina, though very fine, is not equal to Palermo, with its unrivaled Marina, compared to which Messina is poorly off indeed, in her straggling dirty commerce-doing quay. We went out to see a little garden, which contains half a dozen zare-trees and as many beautiful birds in cages. We are disappointed at the poverty of our dessert in this region of fruitfulness—a few bad oranges, some miserable cherries, and that abomination the green almond. We observe, for the first time, to-day folks eating in the streets the crude contents of a little oval pod, which contains one or two very large peas, twice the size of any others. These are the true cicer, the proper Italian pea. Little bundles of them are tied up for sale at all the fruit stalls, and men are seen all the day long eating these raw peas, and offering them to each other as sugar-plums.

In the Corso we see a kind of temporary theatre, the deal sides of which are gaudily lined with Catania silk, and on its stage a whole dramatis personæ of sacred puppets. It is lighted by tapers of very taper dimensions, and its stalle are to be let for a humble consideration to the faithful or the curious. It turns out to be a religious spectacle, supported on the voluntary system—but there is something for your money. A vast quantity of light framework, to which fireworks, chiefly of the detonating kind, are attached, are already going off, and folk are watching till it be completed. Then the evening's entertainment will begin, and a miser indeed must he be, or beyond measure resourceless, who refuses halfpence for such choice festivities. Desirous to make out the particular representation, we get over the fence in order to examine the figures of the drama on a nearer view. A smartly dressed saint in a court suit, but whom mitre and crosier determine to be a bishop, kneels to a figure in spangles, a virgin as fond of fine clothes as the Greek Panageia; while on the other side, with one or two priests in his train, is seen a crowd in civil costume. A paper cloud above, surrounded by glories of glass and tinsel, is supported by two solid cherubs equal to the occasion, and presents to the intelligent a representation of—we know not what! Fire-works here divide the public with the drum—to one or other all advertisement in Sicily is committed. A sale of fish and flesh, theatric entertainments, processions, and church invitations, are all by tuck of drum, or by squib and cracker. How did they get on before the invention of gunpowder? If a new coffeehouse is established, a couple of drums start it advantageously, and beat like a recruiting party up and down the street, to the dismay of all Forestieri. The drum tells you when the thunny is at a discount, and fire-works are let off at fish stalls when customers are slack.

An old tower, five miles off, is called the telegraph. People go there for the panorama at the expense of three horses and two hours; but you are repaid by two sea views, either of which had been sufficient. Messina, its harbour, the straits, the opposite coast of Calabria, Scylla, and Rhegium, (famed for its bergamot,) are on the immediate shore, and a most striking chain of hills for the background, which, at a greater distance, have for their background the imposing range of the Abruzzi. The Æolian islands rise out of the sea in the happiest positions for effect. Stromboli on the extreme right detaches his grey wreath of smoke, which seems as if it proceeded out of the water, (for Stromboli is very low,) staining for a moment the clear firmament, which rivals it in depth of colour. Some of the volcanic group are so nearly on a level with the water, that they look like the backs of so many leviathans at a halt. The sea itself lies, a waveless mirror, smooth, shining, slippery, and treacherous as a serpent's back—"miseri quibus intentata nites," say we.

JOURNEY TO TAORMINA

We left Messina under a sky which no painter would or could attempt; indeed, it would not have looked well on paper, or out of reality. There are certain unusual, yet magnificent appearances in nature, from which the artist conventionally abstains, not so much from the impotence of art, as that the nearer his approach to success the worse the picture. At one time the colours were like shot or clouded silk, or the beautiful uncertainty of the Palamida of these shores, or the matrix of opal; at another, the Pacific Ocean above, of which the continuity is often for whole months entire, was broken into gigantic continents and a Polynesia of rose-coloured islands that no ships might approach; while in this nether world the middle of the Calabro-Sicilian strait was occupied by a condensation of vapour, (one could never profane them by the term of sea-mist or fog,) the most subtile and attenuated which ever came from the realms of cloud-compelling Jove. This fleecy tissue pursued its deliberate progress from coast to coast, like a cortege of cobwebs carrying a deputation from the power-looms of Arachne in Italy to the rival silk-looms at Catania. We pass the dry beds of mountain torrents at every half mile, ugly gashes on a smooth road; and requiring too much caution to leave one's attention to be engaged by many objects altogether new and beautiful. The rich yellow of the Cactus, and the red of the Pomegranate, and the most tender of all vegetable greens, that of the young mulberry, together with a sweet wilderness of unfamiliar plants, are not to be perfectly enjoyed on a fourfooted animal that stumbles, or on a road full of pitfalls. We shall only say that the Cynara cardunculus, (a singularly fine thistle or wild artichoke;) the prickly uncultivated love-apple, (a beautiful variety of the Solanum,) of which the decoction is not infrequently employed in nephritic complaints; the Ferula, sighing for occupation all along the sea-shore, and shaking its scourge as the wind blows; the Rhododendron, in full blossom, planted amongst the shingles; the Thapsia gargarica, with its silver umbel, looking at a short distance like mica, (an appearance caused by the shining white fringe of the capsule encasing its seed,) and many other strange and beautiful things, were the constant attendants of our march. We counted six or seven varieties of the spurge, (Euphorbium,) each on its milky stem, and in passing through the villages had Carnations as large as Dahlias flung at us by sunburnt urchins posted at their several doors. The sandy shore for many miles is beautifully notched in upon by tiny bays like basins, on which boats lie motionless and baking in the sun, or oscillate under a picturesque rock, immersed up to its shoulders in a green hyaloid, which reflects their forms from a depth of many fathoms. On more open stretches of the shore, long-drawn ripples of waves of tiny dimension are overrunning and treading on one another's heels for miles a-head, and tapping the anchored boat "with gentle blow." The long-horned oxen already spoken of, toil along the seaside road like the horses on our canal banks, and tug the heavy felucca towards Messina—a service, however, sometimes executed by men harnessed to the towing-cord, who, as they go, offend the Sicilian muses by sounds and by words that have little indeed of the Δωριζ αοιδα. The gable ends of cottages often exhibit a very primitive windmill for sawing wood within doors. It is a large wheel, to the spokes of which flappers are adjusted, made of coarse matting, and so placed as to profit by the ordinary sea breeze; and, while the wind is thus sawing his planks for him, the carpenter, at his door, carries on his craft. We pass below not a few fortresses abutting over the sea, or perched on the mountain tops. Many of these are of English construction, and date from the occupation of the island during the French war: in a word, the whole of this Sicilian road is so variously lovely, that if we did not know the cornice between Nice and Genoa, we should say it was quite unrivaled, being at once in lavish possession of all the grand, and most of the milder elements of landscape composition. It is long since it became no wonder to us that the greatest and in fact the only, real pastoral poet should have been a Sicilian; but it is a marvel indeed, that, having forgotten to bring his Eclogues with us, we cannot, through the whole of Sicily, find a copy of Theocitus for sale, though there is a Sicilian translation of him to be had at Palermo. As he progresses thus delightfully, a long-wished for moment awaits the traveller approaching towards Giardini—turning round a far projecting neck of land, Etna is at last before him! A disappointment, however, on the whole is Etna himself, thus introduced. He looks far below his stature, and seems so near, that we would have wagered to get upon his shoulders and pull his ears, and return to the little town to dine; the ascent also, to the eye, seems any thing but steep; nor can you easily be brought to believe that such an expedition is from Giardini a three days' affair, except, indeed, that yonder belt of snow in the midst of this roasting sunshine, has its own interpretation, and cannot be mistaken. Alas! In the midst of all our flowers there was, as there always is, the amari aliquid—it was occasioned here by the flies. They had tasked our improved capacity for bearing annoyances ever since we first set foot in Sicily; but here they are perfectly incontrollable, stinging and buzzing at us without mercy or truce, not to be driven off for a second, nor persuaded to drown themselves on any consideration. Verily, the honey-pots of Hybla itself seem to please these troublesome insects less than the flesh-pots of Egypt.

The next day begins inauspiciously for our ascent to Taormina; but the attendants of the excursion are already making a great noise, without which nothing can be done in either of the two Sicilies. A supply of shabby donkeys are brought and mounted, and, once astride, we begin to ascend, the poor beasts tottering under our weight, and by their constant stumbling affording us little inclination to look about. It takes about three-fourths of an hour of this donkey-riding to reach the old notched wall of the town. Two Taorminian citizens at this moment issue from under its arch, in their way down, and guessing what we are, offer some indifferent coins which do not suit us, but enable us to enter into conversation. We demand and obtain a cicerone, of whom we are glad to get rid after three hours' infliction of his stupidity and endurance of his ignorance, without acquiring one idea, Greek, Roman, Norman, or Saracen, out of all his erudition. After going through the whole tour with such a fellow for a Hermes, we come at last upon the far-famed theatre, where we did not want him. Here, however, a very intelligent attendant, supported by the king of Naples on a suitable pension of five baiocchi a-day, takes us out of the hands of the Philistine, and with a plan of the ground to aid us, proceeds to give an intelligible, and, as appears to us, a true explanation of the different parts of the huge construction, in the area of which we stand delighted. He directed our attention to a large arched tunnel, under and at right angles to the pulpita, and we did not want direction to the thirty-six niches placed at equal distances all round the ellipse, and just over the lowest range of the CUNEI. All niches were, no doubt, for statues; but these might also have been, it pleases some to suppose, for the reverberation of applause; and they quote something about "Resonantia Vasa" from Macrobius, adding, that such niches were once probably lined with brass. Of bolder speculatists, some believe the kennel to have been made with a similar intention. Others hold that it may have been a concealed way for introducing lions and tigers to the arena! Now, what if it were a drain for the waters, which, in bad weather, soon collect to a formidable height in such a situation? Whether for voice, or wild beasts, or drainage, or none of these objects, there it is. As to the first, we cannot help being sceptical. Did it ever occur to an audience to wish the noise they make greater, and contrive expedients for making it so?

We are here high up amidst the mountains, where, we are to remember, as the ancients came not to spend, like ourselves, an idle hour, but to consume most of the day, shelter would be wanted. Two large lateral spaces, or as it were, side chambers, have received this destination at the hands of the antiquary, and have been supposed lobbies for foul weather or for shade at noon. We were made to notice by our guide, what we should else have overlooked, how the main passage described above communicates with several smaller ones in its progress, and that a small stair was a subsequent contrivance or afterthought meant to relieve, on emergency, the overcharged large one; its workmanship and style showed it plainly to have been added when the edifice had already become an antiquity. This altogether peculiar and most interesting building has also suffered still later interpolations: a Saracenic frieze runs round the wall; so that the hands of three widely different nations have been busy on the mountain theatre, which received its first audience twenty-five centuries ago! The view obtained from this spot has often been celebrated, and deserves to be. Such mountains we had often seen before; such a sky is the usual privilege of Sicily; these indented bays, which break so beautifully the line of the coast, had been an object of our daily admiration; the hoary side of the majestic Etna, and Naxos with its castellated isthmus, might be seen from other elevated situations; and the acuminated tops of Mola, with its Saracenic tower, were commanded by neighbouring sites—Taormina alone, and for its own sake, was the great and paramount object in our eyes, and possessed us wholly! We had been following Lyell half the day in antediluvian remains; but what are the bones of Ichthyosauri or Megalotheria to this gigantic skeleton of Doric antiquity, round which lie scattered the sepulchres of its ancient audiences, Greek, Roman, and Oriental—tombs which had become already an object of speculation, and been rifled for arms, vases, or gold rings, before Great Britain had made the first steps beyond painted barbarism!

The eruptions of Etna have all been recorded. Thucydides mentions one of them episodically in the Peloponesian war. From the cooled caldron that simmers under all that snow, has proceeded all the lava that the ancients worked into these their city walls. The houses of Taurominium were built of and upon lava, which it requires a thousand years to disintegrate. After dinner we walk to Naxos, saluting the statue of the patron of a London parish, St Pancras, on our way. He stands on the beach here, and claims, by inscription on his pedestal, to have belonged to the apostolic times, St Peter himself having, he says, appointed him to his bishopric. He is patron of Taormina, where he has possessed himself of a Greek temple; and he also protects the faithful of Giardini. Lucky in his architects has been St Pancras; for many of our readers are familiar with his very elegant modern church in the New Road, modelled, if we have not forgotten, on the Erechtheum, with its Pandrosean Vestries, its upright tiles, and all the subordinate details of Athenian architecture. We met here the subject of many an ancient bas relief done into flesh and blood—a dozen men and boys tripping along the road to the music of a bagpipe, one old Silenus leading the jocund throng, and the whole of them, as the music, such as it was, inspired, leaping about and gesticulating with incredible activity. It was a bacchanalian subject, which we had seen on many a sarcophagus, only that the fellows here were not quite naked, and that we looked in vain for those nascent horns and tails by which the children of Pan and Faunus ought to be identified. We always look out for natural history. Walking in a narrow street, we saw a tortoise, awake for the season, come crawling out to peep at the poultry; his hybernation being over, he wants to be social, and the hens in astonishment chuckle round him, and his tortoiseshell highness seems pleased at their kind enquiries, and keeps bobbing his head in and out of his testudo in a very sentimental manner. Women who want his shell for combs do not frequent these parts, and so, unless a cart pass over him as he returns home, he is in clover.

A bird frequents these parts with a blue chest, called Passer solitarius; he abounds in the rocky crevices. The notes of one, which was shown to us in a cage, sounded sweetly; but, as he was carnivorous, the weather was too hot for us to think of taking him away. We saw two snakes put into the same box: the one, a viper, presently killed the other, and much the larger of the two. Serpents, then, like men, do not, as the Satirist asserts, spare their kind. We are disappointed at not finding any coins, nor any other good souvenirs, to bring away with us. The height of Taormina is sufficient to keep it from fever, which is very prevalent at Giardini below. Its bay was once a great place for catching mullet for the Roman market. It seems to have been the Torbay of Sicily. Some fish love their ease, and rejoice not in turbulent waters. The muræna, or lamprey, on the contrary, was sought in the very whirlpools of Charybdis. The modern Roman, on his own side of Italy, has few turbot, but very good ones are still taken off Ancona, in the Adriatic, where the spatium admirabile Rhombi, as the reader will, or ought to recollect, was taken and sent to Domitian at Albano by Procaccio or Estafetta. Juvenal complains that the Tyrrhene sea was exhausted by the demand for fish, though there was no Lent in those times. If the Catholic clergy insist that there was, we beg to object, that the keepers thereof were probably not in a condition to compete with the Apiciuses of the day, who bought fish for their bodies', and not for their SOULS' SAKE.

CATANIA

Tum Catane nimium ardenti vicina Typhæo.

After a pleasant drive of twenty miles, we find ourselves at Aci-Reale, where a street, called "Galatea," reminds us unexpectedly of a very classical place called Dean's Yard, where we once had doings with Acis, as he figures in Ovid's Metamorphoses. We were here in luck, and, having purchased some fine coins of several of the tyrants of Sicily from the apothecary, proceeded on our way to Catania. In half an hour we reach the basaltic Isles of the Cyclops, and the Castle of Acis, whom the peasants hereabouts tell you was their king, when Sicily was under the Saracenic yoke. The river Lecatia, now lost, is supposed formerly to have issued hereabouts, in the port of Ulysses. Our next move placed us amidst the silk-slops of Catania. We have hardly been five minutes in the town, when offers abound to conduct us up Ætna, in whom, as so much national wealth, the inhabitants seem to take as much interest as in her useful and productive silk-looms. Standing fearless on the pavement of lava that buried their ancient city, they point up with complacency to its fountains above. The mischievous exploits of Ætna, in past times, are in every mouth, and children learn their Ætnean catechism as soon as they are breeched. Ætna here is all in all. Churches are constructed out of his quarried viscera—great men lie in tombs, of which the stones once ran liquid down his flames—snuff is taken out of lava boxes—and devotion carves the crucifix on lava, and numbers its beads on a lava rosary—nay, the apothecary's mortar was sent him down from the great mortar-battery above, and the village belle wears fire-proof bracelets that were once too hot to be meddled with. Go to the museum, and you will call it a museum of Ætnean products. Nodulated, porous, condensed, streaked, spotted, clouded, granulated lava, here assumes the colour, rivals the compactness, sustains the polish, of jasper, of agate, and of marble; indeed it sometimes surpasses, in beautiful veinage, the finest and rarest Marmorean specimens. You would hardly distinguish some of it, worked into jazza or vase, from rosso antico itself. A very old and rusty armoury may, as here, be seen any where; but a row of formidable shark skulls, taken along the coast, and some in the very port of Catania, are rarities on which the ciceroni like to prelect, being furnished with many a story of bathers curtailed by them, and secure a large portion of attention, especially if you were just thinking of a dip. A rather fine collection of bronzes has been made from excavations in the neighbourhood, which, indeed, must always promise to reward research. A figure of Mercury, two and a half feet high, and so exactly similar to that of John of Bologna, that his one seemed an absolute plagiarism, particularly attracted our attention on that account. The great Italian artist, however, had been dead one hundred and fifty years before this bronze was dug up. Next in importance to the bronzes, we esteem the collection of Sicilian, or Græco-Sicilian vases, though inferior in number and selectness to those of the Vatican, or Museo-Borbonico. There is also some ancient sculpture, and some pretty mosaic. Of this composition is a bathfloor, where a family of Cupids, in the centre of the pavement, welcome you with a utere feliciter, (may it do you good.) Round the border, a circle of the personified "months" is artistically chained together, each bearing his Greek name, for fear of a mistake—names not half so good as Sheridan's translation of the Revolutionary calendar—snowy, flowy, blowy—showery, flowery, bowery—moppy, croppy, poppy—breezy, sneezy, freezy. In Catania, we find no lack of coins, nor of sharp-eyed dealers, who know pretty generally their value throughout Europe; but, in order to be quite sure of the price current, ask double what they take from one another, and judge, by your abatement of it, of the state of the market elsewhere. Now mind, sir, when they present you the most impudent forgeries, you are not to get into a passion; but, glancing from the object to the vender, quietly insinuate your want of absolute conviction in a "che vi pare di questa moneta." He now looks at it again, and takes a squint at you; and supposing you smell a rat, probably replies that certainly he bought it for genuine; but you have suggested a doubt, and the piece really begins, even to him, to look suspicious, "anzi à me." You reply coolly, and put it down—"That was just what I was thinking;" and so the affair passes quietly off. And now you may, if you happen to be tender-hearted, say something compassionate to the poor innocent who has been taken in, and proceed to ask him about another; and when you see any thing you long to pocket, enquire what can he afford to let a brother collector (give him a step in rank) have it for; and so go on feeling your way, and never "putting your arm so far out that you cannot comfortably draw it back again." He will probably ask you if you know Mr B—— or C——, (English collectors,) with whom he has had dealings, calling them "stimabili signori;" and, of course, you have no doubt of it, though you never heard of them before. It is also always conciliative to congratulate him on the possession of such and such rare and "belle cose;" and if you thus contrive to get into his good graces, he will deal with you at fair prices, and perhaps amuse you with an account of such tricks as he is not ashamed to have practised on blockheads, who will buy at any cost if the die is fine. Indeed, it has passed into an aphorism among these mezzo-galantuomini, as their countrymen call them, that a fine coin is always worth what you can get for it.

We heard the celebrated organ of St Benedict, which has been praising God in tremendous hallelujahs ever since it was put up, and a hundred years have only matured the richness of its tones. Its voice was gushing out as we entered the church, and filling nave and aisle with a diapason of all that was soft and soothing, as if a choir of Guido's angels had broke out in harmony.

A stream of fresh water issues under the old town-wall, and an immense mass of incumbent lava, of at least ninety feet high, impends just above its source, the water struggling through a mass of rock once liquefied by fire, in as limpid a rill as if it came from limestone, and so excellent in quality that no other is used in Catania. Women with buckets were ascending and descending to fetch supplies out of the lava of the dead city below, for the use of the living town above. Moreover, this is the only point in Catania where the accident of a bit of wall arresting for some time the progress of the lava current, has left the level of the old town to be rigidly ascertained.

Here, as at Aci-Reale, balconies at windows, for the most part supported by brackets, terminating in human heads, give a rich, though rather a heavy, appearance to the street. Much amber is found and worked at Catania. It has been lately discovered in a fossil state, and in contiguity with fossil wood; but we were quite electrified at the price of certain little scent-bottles, and other articles made of this production. You see it in all its possible varieties of colour, opacity, or transparency. The green opalized kind is the most prized, and four pounds was demanded for a pair of pendants of this colour for earrings. Besides the yellow sort, which is common every where, we see the ruby red, which is very rare: some varieties are freckled, and some of the sort which afforded subjects for Martial, and for more than one of the Greek anthologists, with insects in its matrix. This kind, they say, is found exclusively on the coast of Catania. There are such pieces the size of a hand, but it is generally in much smaller bits. Amber lies under, or is formed upon the sand, and abounds most near the embouchure of a small river in this neighbourhood. Many beautiful shells, fossils, and other objects of natural history, appear in the dealers' trays; and polished knife-handles of Sicilian agate may be had at five dollars a dozen.

THE LAST OF THE KNIGHTS

DON JOHN AND THE HERETICS OF FLANDERS

It would almost seem as though chivalry were one of the errors of Popery; so completely did the spirit of the ancient orders of knighthood evaporate at the Reformation! The blind enthusiasm of ignorance having engendered superstitions of every kind and colour, the blow struck at the altar of the master idol proved fatal to all.

In Elizabeth's time, the forms and sentiment of chivalry were kept up by an effort. The parts enacted by Sidney and Raleigh, appear studied rather than instinctive. At all events, the gallant Sir Philip was the last of English knights, as he was the first of his time. Thenceforward, the valour of the country assumed a character more professional.

But a fact thus familiar to us of England, is more remarkable of the rest of Europe. The infallibility of Rome once assailed, every faith was shaken. Loyalty was lessened, chivalry became extinct; expiring in France with Henri IV. and the League—in Portugal with Don Sebastian of Braganza—and in Spain with Charles V., exterminated root and branch by the pen of Cervantes.

One of the most brilliant effervescences, however, of those crumbling institutions, is connected with Spanish history, in the person of Don John of Austria;—a prince who, if consecrated by legitimacy to the annals of the throne, would have glorified the historical page by a thousand heroic incidents. But the sacrament of his baptism being unhappily unpreceded by that of a marriage, he has bequeathed us one of those anomalous existences—one of those incomplete destinies, which embitter our admiration with disappointment and regret.

On both sides of royal blood, Don John was born with qualifications to adorn a throne. It is true that when his infant son was entrusted by Charles V. to the charge of the master of his household, Don Quexada, the emperor simply described him as the offspring of a lady of Ratisbon, named Barbara Blomberg. But the Infanta Clara Eugenia was confidentially informed by her father Philip II., and confidentially informed her satellite La Cuea, that her uncle was "every way of imperial lineage;" and but that he was the offspring of a crime, Don John had doubtless been seated on one of those thrones to which his legitimate brother Philip imparted so little distinction.

Forced by the will of Charles V. to recognize the consanguinity of Don John, and treat him with brotherly regard, one of the objects of the hateful life of the father of Don Carlos seems to have been to thwart the ambitious instincts of his brilliant Faulconbridge. For in the boiling veins of the young prince abided the whole soul of Charles V.,—valour, restlessness, ambition; and his romantic life and mysterious death bear alike the tincture of his parentage.

That was indeed the age of the romance of royalty! Mary at Holyrood,—Elizabeth at Kenilworth—Carlos at the feet of his mother-in-law,—the Béarnais at the gates of Paris,—have engraved their type in the book of universal memory. But Don John escapes notice—a solitary star outshone by dazzling constellations. Commemorated by no medals, flattered by no historiographer, sung by no inspired "godson," anointed by neither pope nor primate, his nook in the temple of fame is out of sight, and forgotten.

Even his master feat, the gaining of the battle of Lepanto, brings chiefly to our recollection that the author of Don Quixote lost his hand in the action; and in the trivial page before us, we dare not call our hero by the name of "Don Juan," (by which he is known in Spanish history,) lest he be mistaken for the popular libertine! And thus, the last of the knights has been stripped of his name by the hero of the "Festin de Pierre," and of his honours by Cervantes, as by Philip II. of a throne.—

Hard fate for one described by all the writers of his time as a model of manly grace and Christian virtue! How charming is the account given by the old Spanish writers of the noble youth, extricated from his convent to be introduced on the high-road to a princely cavalier, surrounded by his retinue, whom he is first desired to salute as a brother, and then required to worship, as the king of Spain! We are told of his joy on discovering his filial relationship to the great emperor, so long the object of his admiration. We are told of his deeds of prowess against the Turks at Lepanto, at Tunis against the Moor. We are told of the proposition of Gregory XIII. that he should be rewarded with the crown of Barbary, and of the desire of the revolted nobility of Belgium, to raise him to their tottering throne; nay, we are even assured that "la couronne d'Hibernie" was offered to his acceptance. And finally, we are told of his untimely death and glorious funeral—mourned by all the knighthood of the land! But we hear and forget. Some mysterious counter-charm has stripped his laurels of their verdure. Even the lesser incidents of the life of Don John are replete with the interest of romance. When appointed by Philip II. governor of the Netherlands, in order that he might deal with the heretics of the Christian faith as with the faithful of Mahomet, such deadly vengeance was vowed against his person by the Protestant party headed by Horn and the Prince of Orange, that it was judged necessary for his highness to perform his journey in disguise. Attired as a Moorish slave, he reached Luxembourg as the attendant of Ottavio Gonzaga, brother of Prince Amalfi, at the very moment the troops of the king of Spain were butchering eight thousand citizens in his revolted city of Antwerp!—

The arrival of the new governor afforded the signal for more pacific measures. The dispositions of Don John were humane—his manners frank. Aware that the Belgian provinces were exhausted by ten years of civil war, and that the pay of the Spanish troops he had to lead against them was so miserably in arrear as to compel them to acts of atrocious spoliation, the hero of Lepanto appears to have done his best to stop the effusion of blood; and, notwithstanding the counteraction of the Prince of Orange, the following spring, peace and an amnesty were proclaimed. The treaty signed at Marche, (known by the name of the Perpetual Edict,) promised as much tranquillity as was compatible with the indignation of a country which had seen the blood of its best and noblest poured forth, and the lives and property of its citizens sacrificed without mercy or calculation.

But, though welcomed to Brussels by the acclamations of the people and the submission of the States, Don John appears to have been fully sensible that his head was within the jaws of the lion. The blood of Egmont had not yet sunk into the earth; the echoes of the edicts of Alva yet lingered in the air; and the very stones of Brussels appeared to rise up and testify against a brother of Philip II.!

Right thankful, therefore, was the young prince when an excuse was afforded for establishing himself in a more tenable position, by an incident which must again be accounted among the romantic adventures of his life. For the sudden journey of the fascinating Margaret of Valois to the springs of Spa, on pretence of indisposition, was generally attributed to a design against the heart of the hero of Lepanto.

A prince so remarkable for his gallantry of knighthood, could do no less than wait upon the sister of the French king, on her passage through Namur; and, once established in the citadel of that stronghold of the royalists, he quitted it no more. In process of time, a camp was formed in the environs, and fortresses erected on the banks of the Meuse under the inspection of Don John; nor was it at first easy to determine whether his measures were actuated by mistrust of the Protestants, or devotion to the worst and most Catholic of wives of the best and most Huguenot of kings.

The blame of posterity, enlightened by the journal of Queen Margaret's proceedings in Belgium, (bequeathed for our edification by the alienated queen of Henri IV.,) has accused Don John of blindness, in the right-loyal reception bestowed on her, and the absolute liberty accorded her during her residence at Spa, where she was opening a road for the arrival of her brother the Duke of Alençon. It is admitted, indeed, that her attack upon his heart met with defeat. But the young governor is said to have made up in chivalrous courtesies for the disappointment of her tender projects; and Margaret, if she did not find a lover at Namur, found the most assiduous of knights.

Many, indeed, believe that his attentions to the French princess were as much a feint as her own illness; and that he was as completely absorbed in keeping at bay his heretic subjects, as her highness by the desire of converting them into the subjects of France. It was only those admitted into the confidence of Don John who possessed the clue to the mystery.

Ottavio Gonzaga, on his return from a mission to Madrid with which he had been charged by Don John, was the first to acquaint him with the suspicions to which the sojourn of Margaret had given rise.

"I own I expected to find your highness in better cheer," said he, when the first compliments had been exchanged. "Such marvels have been recounted in Spain of your fêtes and jousts of honour, that I had prepared myself to hear of nothing at headquarters but the silken pastimes of a court."

"Instead of which," cried Don John, "you find me, as usual, in my steel jerkin, with no milder music at command than the trumpets of my camp; my sole duty, the strengthening of yonder lines," continued he, (pointing from a window of the citadel, near which they were standing, commanding the confluence of the Sambre and Meuse,) "and my utmost diversion, an occasional charge against the boars in yonder forest of Marlagne!"

"I cannot but suppose it more than occasional," rejoined Gonzaga; "for I must pay your highness the ill compliment of avowing, that you appear more worn by fatigue and weather at this moment, and in this sunless clime, than at the height of your glorious labours in the Mediterranean! Namur has already ploughed more wrinkles on your brow than Barbary or Lepanto."

"Say rather in my heart!" cried the impetuous prince. "Since you quitted me, six months ago, my dear Gonzaga, I have known nothing but cares! To you I have no scruple in avowing, that my position in this country is hateful. So long accustomed to war against a barbarous enemy, I could almost fancy myself as much a Moor at heart, as I appeared in visage, when in your service on my way to Luxembourg, whenever I find my sword uplifted against a Christian breast!—Civil war, Ottavio, is a hideous and repugnant thing!"—

"The report is true, then, that your highness has become warmly attached to the people of these rebel provinces?" demanded Gonzaga, not choosing to declare the rumour prevalent in Spain, that an opportunity had been afforded to the prince by the Barlaimont faction, of converting his viceroyalty into the sway of absolute sovereignty.

"So much the reverse, that the evil impression they made on me at my arrival, has increased a hundred-fold! I abhor them yet more and more. Flemings or Brabançons, Hainaulters or Walloons, Catholic or Calvinist, the whole tribe is my aversion; and despite our best endeavours to conceal it, I am convinced the feeling is reciprocal!"

"If your highness was equally candid in your avowals to the Queen of Navarre," observed Gonzaga gravely,—"I can scarcely wonder at the hopes she is said to entertain of having won over the governor of Mons to the French interest, during her transit through Flanders."

"Ay, indeed? Is such her boast?" cried the prince, laughing. "It may indeed be so!—for never saw I a woman less scrupulous in the choice or use of arms to fight her battles. But, trust me, whatever her majesty may have accomplished, is through no aiding or abetting of mine."

"Yet surely the devoted attentions paid her by your highness"—

"My highness made them appear devoted in proportion to his consciousness of their hollowness! But I promise you, my dear Ottavio, there is no tenderer leaning in my heart towards Margaret de Valois, than towards the most thicklipped of the divinities who competed for our smiles at Tunis." Gonzaga shrugged his shoulders. He was convinced that, for once, Don John was sinking the friend in the prince. His prolonged absence had perhaps discharged him from his post as confidant.

"Trust me," cried the young soldier, discerning his misgivings—"I am as sincere in all this as becomes our friendship. But that God has gifted me with a happy temperament, I should scarcely support the disgusts of my present calling. It is much, my dear Gonzaga, to inherit as a birthright the brand of such an ignominy as mine. But as long as I trusted to conquer a happier destiny—to carve out for myself fortunes as glorious as those to which my blood all but entitles me—I bore my cross without repining. It was this ardent hope of distinction that lent vigour to my arm in battle—that taught prudence to my mind in council. I was resolved that even the base-born of Charles V. should die a king!"—

Gonzaga listened in startled silence. To hear the young viceroy thus bold in the avowal of sentiments, which of late he had been hearing imputed to him at the Escurial as the direst of crimes, filled him with amazement.

"But these hopes have expired!" resumed Don John. "The harshness with which, on my return triumphant from Barbary, my brother refused to ratify the propositions of the Vatican in my favour, convinced me that I have nothing to expect from Philip beyond the perpetual servitude of a satellite of the King of Spain."

Gonzaga glanced mechanically round the chamber at the emission of these treasonable words. But there was nothing in its rude stone walls to harbour an eavesdropper.

"Nor is this all!" cried his noble friend. "My discovery of the unbrotherly sentiments of Philip has tended to enlighten me towards the hatefulness of his policy. The reserve of his nature—the harshness of his soul—the austerity of his bigotry—chill me to the marrow!—The Holy Inquisition deserves, in my estimation, a name the very antithesis of holy."

"I beseech your highness!" cried Ottavio Gonzaga—clasping his hands together in an irrepressible panic.

"Never fear, man! There be neither spies nor inquisitors in our camp; and if there were, both they and you must even hear me out!" cried Don John. "There is some comfort in discharging one's heart of matters that have long lain so heavy on it; and I swear to you, Gonzaga, that, instead of feeling surprised to find my cheeks so lank, and my eyes so hollow, you would rather be amazed to find an ounce of flesh upon my bones, did you know how careful are my days, and how sleepless my nights, under the perpetual harassments of civil war!—The haughty burgesses of Ghent, whom I could hate from my soul but that they are townsmen of my illustrious father, the low-minded Walloons, the morose Brugeois, the artful Brabançons—all the varied tribes, in short, of the old Burgundian duchy, seem to vie with each other which shall succeed best in thwarting and humiliating me. And for what do I bear it? What honour or profit shall I reap on my patience? What thanks derive for having wasted my best days and best energies, in bruising with my iron heel the head of the serpent of heresy? Why, even that Philip, for some toy of a mass neglected or an ave forgotten, will perchance give me over to the tender questioning of his grand inquisitor, as the shortest possible answer to my pretensions to a crown,—while the arrogant nobility of Spain, when roused from their apathy towards me by tidings of another Lepanto, a fresh Tunis, will exclaim with modified gratification—'There spoke the blood of Charles the Fifth! Not so ill fought for a bastard!'"