see me at night, armed with all his sins, and turning his bed into a nest of monsters."

"Heaven be praised," cried we, "that he had a taste so retributive! The people under arbitrary governments must needs have a respect for the dishes at court. We now perceive, more than ever, the little insight we have into the uses of things. Formerly one might have imagined that eating and drinking had no use but the vulgar one of sustaining life; but it is manifest that they save the law a great deal of trouble, and the writers of cookery-books can be considered in no other light than as expounders of a criminal code. Really, we shall hereafter approach a dish of turtle with becoming awe, and already begin to look upon a ragout as something very equitable and inflexible."

"You do justice," observed the spirit, "to those eminent dishes, and in the only proper way. People who sit down to a feast with their joyous darting of eyes and rubbing of hands, would have very different sensations, did they know what they were about to attack. You must know, that the souls of tormented animals survive after death, and become instruments of punishment for mankind. Most of these are under my jurisdiction, and form great part of the monstrous shapes that haunt the slumbers of the intemperate. Fish crimped alive, lobsters boiled alive, and pigs whipped to death, become the most active and formidable spirits; and if the object of their vengeance take too many precautions to drown his senses when asleep, there is the subtle and fell Gout waiting to torment his advanced years, a spirit partaking of the double nature of the Night-mare and Salamander, and more terrible than any one of us, inasmuch as he makes his attacks by day as well as by night." "We shudder to think," interrupted we, even of the monstrous combinations which have disturbed our own rest, and formed so horrible a contrast to the gaiety of a social supper." "Oh, as for that matter," said the phantom, in a careless tone, "you know nothing of the horrors of a glutton, or a nefarious debauchee. Suffocation with bolsters, heaping of rocks upon the chest, buryings alive, and strugglings to breathe without a mouth, are among their common-place sufferings. The dying glutton in La Fontaine never was so reasonable, as when he desired to have the remainder of his fish. He was afraid that if he did not immediately go off, he might have a nap before he died, which would have been a thousand times worse than death. Had Apicius, Ciacco the Florentine, Dartineuf, or Vitellius, been able and inclined to paint what they had seen, Callot would have been a mere Cipriani to them. I could produce you a jolly fellow, a corpulent nobleman, from the next hotel, the very counterpart of the glutton in Rubens's Fall of the Damned, who could bring

together a more hideous combination of fancies than are to be found in Milton's Hell. He is not without information, and a disposition naturally good; but a long series of bad habits have made him what they call a man of pleasure, that is to say, he takes all sorts of pains to get a little enjoyment which shall produce him a world of misery. One of his passions, which he will not resist, is for a particular dish, pungent, savoury, and multifarious, which sends him almost every night into Tartarus. At this minute, the spectres of the suppertable are busy with him, and Dante himself could not have worked up a greater horror for the punishment of vice than the one he is undergoing. He fancies that though he is himself, he is nevertheless four different beings at once, of the most odious and contradictory natures, -that his own indescribable feelings are fighting bodily and maliciously with each other,and that there is no chance left him, either for escape, forgetfulness, or cessation." "Gracious powers!" cried we; what, all this punishment for a dish?"

"You do not recollect," answered the spirit, "what an abuse such excesses are of the divine gift of reason, and how they distort the best tendencies of human nature. The whole end of existence is perverted by not taking proper care of the body. This man will rise to-morrow morning, pallid, nervous, and sullen; his feelings must be reinforced with a dram to bear the ensuing afternoon; and I foresee, that the ill-temper arising from his debauch will lead him into a very serious piece of injustice against his neighbour. To the same cause may be traced fifty of the common disquietudes of life, its caprices and irritabilities. To-night a poor fellow is fretful because his supper was not rich enough, but tomorrow night he will be in torture because it was too rich. A hysterical lady shall flatter herself she is sentimentally miserable, when most likely her fine feelings are to be deduced, not from sentiment, but a surfeit. Your Edinburgh wits thought they had laid down a very droll impossibility, when they talked of cutting a man's throat with a pound of pickled salmon; whereas much less dishes have performed as wonderful exploits. I have known a hard egg to fill a household with dismay for days together; a cucumber has disinherited an only son; and a whole province has incurred the royal anger of its master at the instigation of a set of woodcocks."

"It is a thousand pities," said we, "that history, instead of habituating us to love 'the pomp and circumstance' of bad passions, cannot trace the actions of men to their real sources."

wise for knowing little of me. Pray tell your countrymen that they are neither philosophic nor politic in feasting as they do on all occasions, joyful, sorrowful, or indifferent: that good sense, good temper, and the good of their country, are distinct things from indigestion; and that, when they think to show their patriotic devotion by carving and gormandizing, they are no wiser than the bacchanals of old, who took serpents between their teeth, and tortured themselves with knives."

So saying the spectre rose, and stretching out his right hand, with a look which we believe he intended to be friendly, advanced towards us; he then took our hand in his own, and perceiving signs of alarm in our countenance, burst into a fit of laughter, which was the very quintessence of discord, and baffles all description, being a compound of the gabblings of geese, grunting of hogs, quacking of ducks, squabbling of turkeys, and winding up of smoke-jacks. When the fit was pretty well over, he gave us a squeeze of the hand, which made us jump up with a spring of the knees, and gradually enveloping himself in a kind of steam, vanished with a noise like the crash of crockery ware. We looked about us; we found that our right hand, which held the Horace, had got bent under us, and gone to sleep, and that, in our sudden start, we had kicked half the dishes from the supper-table.

1811.

LVII.

THE FLORENTINE LOVERS*. AT the time when Florence was divided into the two fierce parties of Guelfs and Ghibelines, there was great hostility between two families of the name of Bardi and Buondelmonti. It was seldom that love took place between individuals of houses so divided; but, when it did, it was proportionately vehement, either because the individuals themselves were vehement in all their passions, or because love, falling upon two gentle hearts, made them the more pity and love one another, to find themselves in so unnatural a situation.

Of this latter kind was an affection that took place between a young lady of the family of the Bardi, called Dianora d'Amerigo, and a youth of the other family, whose name was Ippolito. The girl was about fifteen, and in the full flower of her beauty and sweetness. Ippolito was about three years older, and looked two or three more, on account of a certain gravity and deep regard in the upper part of his face. You might know by his lips that he could love well, and by his eyes that he could keep the secret. There was a like

*The groundwork of this story is in a late Italian pub. lication called the Florentine Observer, descriptive of the old buildings and other circumstances of local interest in the capital of Tuscany.

ness, as sometimes happens, between the two lovers; and perhaps this was no mean help to their passion; for as we find painters often giving their own faces to their heroes, so the more excusable vanity of lovers delights to find that resemblance in one another, which Plato said was only the divorced half of the original human being rushing into communion with the other.

Be this as it may (and lovers in those times were not ignorant of such speculations), it needed but one sight of Dianora d'Amerigo to make Ippolito fall violently in love with her. It was in church on a great holiday. In the South the church has ever been the place where people fall in love. It is there that the young of both sexes oftenest find themselves in each other's company. There the voluptuous that cannot fix their thoughts upon heaven, find congenial objects, more earthly, to win their attention; and there, the most innocent and devotional spirits, voluptuous also without being aware of it, and not knowing how to vent the grateful pleasure of their hearts, discover their tendency to repose on beings that can show themselves visibly sensible to their joy. The paintings, the perfumes, the music, the kind crucifix, the mixture of aspiration and earthly ceremony, the draperies, the white vestments of young and old, the boys' voices, the giant candles, typical of the seraphic ministrants about God's altar, the meeting of all ages and classes, the echoings of the aisles, the lights and shades of the pillars and vaulted roofs, the very struggle of daylight at the lofty windows, as if earth were at once present and not present,-all have a tendency to confuse the boundaries of this world and the next, and to set the heart floating in that delicious mixture of elevation and humility, which is ready to sympathize with whatever can preserve to it something like its sensations, and save it from the hardness and definite folly of ordinary life. It was in a church that Boccaccio, not merely the voluptuous Boccaccio, who is but half-known by the half-witted, but Boccaccio, the future painter of the Falcon and the Pot of Basil, first saw the beautiful face of his Fiammetta. In a church, Petrarch felt the sweet shadow fall on him that darkened his life for twenty years after. And the fond gratitude of the local historian for a tale of true love, has left it on record, that it was in the church of St. Giovanni at Florence, and on the great day of Pardon, which falls on the 13th of January, that Ippolito de' Buondelmonte became enamoured of Dianora d'Amerigo. [How delicious it is to repeat these beautiful Italian names, when they are not merely names! We find ourselves almost unconsciously writing them in a better hand than the rest; not merely for the sake of the printer, but for the pleasure of lingering upon the sound.]

E

When the people were about to leave church, Ippolito, in turning to speak to an acquaintance, lost sight of his unknown beauty. He made haste to plant himself at the door, telling his companion that he should like to see the ladies come out; for he had not the courage to say which lady. When he saw Dianora appear, he chauged colour, and saw nothing else. Yet though he beheld, and beheld her distinctly, so as to carry away every feature in his heart, it seemed to him afterwards that he had seen her only as in a dream. She glided by him like a thing of heaven, drawing her veil over her head. As he had not the courage to speak of her, he had still less the courage to ask her name; but he was saved the trouble. "God and St. John bless her beautiful face!"

cried a beggar at the door; "she always gives double of any one else."-" Curse her!" muttered Ippolito's acquaintance; "she is one of the Bardi." The ear of the lover heard both these exclamations, and they made an indelible impression. Being a lover of books and poetry, and intimate with the most liberal of the two parties, such as Dante Alighieri (afterwards so famous) and Guido Cavalcanti, Ippolito, though a warm partisan himself, and implicated in a fierce encounter that had lately taken place between some persons on horseback, had been saved from the worst feelings attendant on political hostility; and they now appeared to him odious. He had no thought, it is true, of forgiving one of the old Bardi, who had cut his father down from his horse; but he would now have sentenced the whole party to a milder banishment than before; and to curse a female belonging to it, and that female Dianora!-he differed with the stupid fellow that had done it whenever they met afterwards.

It was a heavy reflection to Ippolito to think that he could not see his mistress in her own house. She had a father and mother living as well as himself, and was surrounded with relations. It was a heavier still that he knew not how to make her sensible of his passion; and the heaviest of all, that being so lovely, she would certainly be carried off by another husband. What was he to do? He had no excuse for writing to her; and as to serenading her under her window, unless he meant to call all the neighbours to witness his temerity, and lose his life at once in that brawling age, it was not to be thought of. He was obliged to content himself with watching, as well as he could, the windows of her abode, following her about whenever he saw her leave it, and with pardonable vanity trying to catch her attention by some little action that should give her a good thought of the stranger; such as anticipating her in giving alms to a beggar. We must even record, that on one occasion he contrived to stumble against a dog and tread on his toes, in order that he might ostenta.

tiously help the poor beast out of the way. But his day of delight was church-day. Not a fast, not a feast did he miss; not a Sunday, nor a saints'-day. "The devotion of that young gentleman," said an old widow-lady, her aunt, who was in the habit of accompanying Dianora, "is indeed edifying; and yet he is a mighty pretty youth, and might waste his time in sins and vanities with the gayest of them."

"Not

And the old widow-lady sighed, doubtless out of a tender pity for the gay. Her recommendation of Ippolito to her niece's notice would have been little applauded by her family; but, to say the truth, she was not responsible. His manoeuvres and constant presence had already gained Dianora's attention; and, with all the unaffected instinct of an Italian, she was not long in suspecting who it was that attracted his devotions, and in wishing very heartily that they might continue. She longed to learn who he was, but felt the same want of courage as he himself had experienced. "Did you observe," said the aunt, one day after leaving church, "how the poor boy blushed, because he did but catch my eye? Truly, such modesty is very rare." "Dear aunt," replied Dianora, with a mixture of real and affected archness, of pleasure and of gratitude, "I thought you never wished me to notice the faces of young men." of young men, niece," returned the aunt, gravely; "not of persons of twenty-eight, or thirty, or so, nor indeed of youths in general, however young; but then this youth is very different; and the most innocent of us may look, once in a way or so, at so very modest and respectful a young gentleman. I say respectful, because when I gave him a slight curtsey of acknowledgment, or so, for making way for me in the aisle, he bowed to me with so solemn and thankful an air, as if the favour had come from me; which was extremely polite; and if he is very handsome, poor boy, how can he help that? Saints have been handsome in their days, ay and young, or their pictures are not at all like, which is impossible; and I am sure St. Dominic himself, in the wax-work, God forgive me! hardly looks sweeter and humbler at the Madonna and Child, than he did at me and you, as we went by." "Dear aunt," rejoined Dianora, “I did not mean to reproach you, I'm sure; but, sweet aunt, we do not know him, you know; and you know-” "Know!" cried the old lady; "I'm sure I know him as well as if he were my own aunt's son; which might not be impossible, though she is a little younger than myself; and if he were my own, I should not be ashamed." "And who then," inquired Dianora, scarcely articulating her words, "who then is he?" "Who?" said the aunt, "why the most edifying young gentleman in all Florence, that's who he is; and it does not signify what he is else, manifestly being a

gentleman as he is, and one of the noblest, I warrant; and I wish you may have no worse husband; child, when you come to marry, though there is time enough to think of that. Young ladies, now-a-days, are always for knowing who everybody is, who he is, and what he is, and whether he is this person or that person, and is of the Grand Prior's side, or the Archbishop's side, and what not; and all this before they will allow him to be even handsome; which, I am sure, was not so in my youngest days. It is all right and proper, if matrimony is concerned, or they are in danger of marrying below their condition, or a profane person, or one that's hideous, or a heretic; but to admire an evident young saint, and one that never misses church, Sunday or saint'sday, or any day for aught that I see, is a thing that, if anything, shows we may hope for the company of young saints hereafter; and if so very edifying a young gentleman is also respectful to the ladies, was not the blessed St. Francis himself of his opinion in that matter? And did not the seraphical St. Teresa admire him the more for it? And does not St. Paul, in his very epistles, send his best respects to the ladies Tryphona and Tryphosa? And was there ever woman in the New Testament (with reverence be it spoken, if we may say women of such blessed females) was there ever woman, I say, in the New Testament, not even excepting Madonna Magdalen who had been possessed with seven devils (which is not so many by half as some ladies I could mention), nor Madonna, the other poor lady, whom the unforgiving hypocrites wanted to stone" (and here the good old lady wept, out of a mixture of devotion and gratitude), "was there one of all these women, or any other, whom our Blessed Lord himself" (and here the tears came into the gentle eyes of Dianora) "did not treat with all that sweetness, and kindness, and tenderness, and brotherly love, which, like all his other actions, and as the seraphical Father Antonio said the other day in the pulpit, proved him to be not only from heaven, but the truest of all nobles on earth, and a natural gentleman born?"

We know not how many more reasons the good old lady would have given, why all the feelings of poor Djanora's heart, not excepting her very religion, which was truly one of them, should induce her to encourage her affection for Ippolito. By the end of this sentence they had arrived at their home, and the poor youth returned to his. We say "poor" of both the lovers, for by this time they had both become sufficiently enamoured to render their cheeks the paler for discovering their respective families, which Dianora had now done as well as Ippolito.

A circumstance on the Sunday following had nearly discovered them, not only to one another, but to all the world. Diarora had

latterly never dared to steal a look at Ippolito, for fear of seeing his eyes upon her; and Ippolito, who was less certain of her regard for him than herself, imagined that he had somehow offended her. A few Sundays before, she had sent him home bounding for joy. There had been two places empty where he was kneeling, one near him, and the other a little farther off. The aunt and the niece, who came in after him, and found themselves at the spot where he was, were perplexed which of the two places to choose; when it seemed to Ippolito that by a little movement of her arm Dianora decided for the one nearest him. He had also another delight. The old lady, in the course of the service, turned to her niece, and asked her why she did not sing as usual. Dianora bowed her head, and in a minute or two afterwards Ippolito heard the sweetest voice in the world, low indeed, almost to a whisper, but audible to him. He thought it trembled; and he trembled also. It seemed to thrill within his spirit, in the same manner that the organ thrills through the body. No such symptom of preference occurred afterwards. The ladies did not come so near him, whatever pains he took to occupy so much room before they came in, and then make room when they appeared. However, he was self-satisfied as well as ingenious enough in his reasonings on the subject, not to lay much stress upon this behaviour, till it lasted week after week, and till he never again found Dianora looking even towards the quarter in which he sat for it is our duty to confess, that if the lovers were two of the devoutest of the congregation, which is certain, they were apt also, at intervals, to be the least attentive; and, furthermore, that they would each pretend to look towards places at a little distance from the desired object, in order that they might take in, with the sidelong power of the eye, the presence and look of one another. But for some time Dianora had ceased even to do this; and though Ippolito gazed on her the more steadfastly, and saw that she was paler than before, he began to persuade himself that it was not on his account. At length, a sort of desperation urged him to get nearer to her, if she would not condescend to come near himself; and, on the Sunday in question, scarcely knowing what he did, or how he saw, felt, or breathed, he knelt right down beside her. There was a pillar next him, which luckily kept him somewhat in the shade; and, for a moment, he leaned his forehead against the cold marble, which revived him. Dianora did not know he was by her. She did not sing: nor did the aunt ask her. She kept one unaltered posture, looking upon her mass-book, and he thought she did this on purpose. Ippolito, who had become weak with his late struggles of mind, felt almost suffocated with his sensations. He was kneeling side by side

with her; her idea, her presence, her very drapery, which was all that he dared to feel himself in contact with, the consciousness of kneeling with her in the presence of Him whom tender hearts implore for pity on their infirmities, all rendered him intensely sensible of his situation. By a strong effort, he endeavoured to turn his self-pity into a feeling entirely religious; but when he put his hands together, he felt the tears ready to gush away so irrepressibly, that he did not dare it. At last the aunt, who had in fact looked about for him, recognized him with some surprise, and more pleasure. She had begun to suspect his secret; and though she knew who he was, and that the two families were at variance, yet a great deal of good nature, a sympathy with pleasures of which no woman had tasted more, and some considerable disputes she had lately with another old lady, her kinswoman, on the subject of politics, determined her upon at least giving the two lovers that sort of encouragement, which arises not so much from any decided object we have in view, as from a certain vague sense of benevolence, mixed with a lurking wish to have our own way. Accordingly, the well-meaning old widow-lady, without much consideration, and loud enough for Ippolito to hear, whispered her niece to let the gentleman next her read in her book, as he seemed to have forgotten to bring his own. Dianora, without lifting her eyes, and never suspecting who it was, moved her book sideways, with a courteous inclination of the head, for the gentleman to take it. He did so. He held it with her. He could not hinder his hand from shaking; but Dianora's reflections were so occupied upon one whom she little thought so near her, that she did not perceive it. At length the book tottered so in his hand, that she could not but notice it. She turned to see if the gentleman was ill; and instantly looked back again. She felt that she herself was too weak to look at him, and whispering to. her aunt, "I am very unwell," the ladies rose and made their way out of the church. As soon as she felt the fresh air she fainted, and was carried home; and it happened, at the same moment, that Ippolito, unable to keep his feelings to himself, leaned upon the marble pillar at which he was kneeling, and groaned aloud. He fancied she had left him in disdain. Luckily for him, a circumstance of this kind was not unknown in a place where penitents would sometimes be overpowered by a sense of their crimes; and though Ippolito was recognised by some, they concluded he had not been the innocent person they supposed. They made up their minds in future that his retired and bookish habits, and his late evident suffering, were alike the result of some dark offence; and among these persons, the acquaintance who had cursed Dianora when he first beheld her, was glad to be one; for without knowing

his passion for her, much less her return of it, which was more than the poor youth knew himself, he envied him for his accomplishments and popularity.

Ippolito dragged himself home, and after endeavouring to move about for a day or two, and to get as far as Dianora's abode,—an attempt he gave up for fear of being unable to come away again,-was fairly obliged to take to his bed. What a mixture of delight, with sorrow, would he have felt, had he known that his mistress was almost in as bad a state! The poor aunt, who soon discovered her niece's secret, now found herself in a dreadful dilemma; and the worst of it was, that being on the female side of the love, and told by Dianora that it would be the death of her if she disclosed it to "him," or anybody connected with him, or, indeed, anybody at all, she did not know what steps to take. However, as she believed that at least death might possibly ensue if the dear young people were not assured of each other's love, and certainly did not believe in any such mortality as her niece spoke of, she was about to make her first election out of two or three measures which she was resolved upon taking, when, luckily for the salvation of Dianora's feelings, she was surprised by a visit from the person whom of all persons in the world she wished to seeIppolito's mother.

The two ladies soon came to a mutual understanding, and separated with comfort for their respective patients. We need not wait to describe how a mother came to the knowledge of her son's wishes; nor will it be necessary to relate how delighted the two lovers were to hear of one another, and to be assured of each other's love. But Ippolito's illness now put on a new aspect; for the certainty of his being welcome to Dianora, and the easiness with which he saw his mother give way to his inclinations, made him impatient for an interview. Dianora was afraid of encountering him as usual in public; and he never ceased urging his mother, till she consented to advise with Dianora's aunt upon what was to be done. Indeed, with the usual weakness of those who take any steps, however likely to produce future trouble, rather than continue a present uneasiness, she herself thought it high time to do something for the poor boy; for the house began to remark on his strange conduct. All his actions were either too quick, or too slow. At one time he would start up to perform the most trivial office of politeness, as if he were going to stop a conflagration; at another, the whole world might move before him without his noticing. He would now leap on his horse, as if the enemy were at the city-gates; and next day, when going to mount it, stop on a sudden, with the reins in his hands, and fall a musing. "What is the matter with the boy?" said his father, who was impatient at