different clime, and are modified accordingly. They do not live upon the same lustrous food, and will never show it in their plumage. Poetry is the internal part, or sentiment, of what is material; and therefore, our thoughts being driven inwards, and rendered imaginative by these very defects of climate which discolour to us the external world, we have had among us some of the greatest poets that ever existed. It is observable, that the greatest poets of Italy came from Tuscany, where there is a great deal of inclemency in the seasons. The painters were from Venice, Rome, and other quarters; some of which, though more northern, are more genially situated. The hills about Florence made Petrarch and Dante well acquainted with winter; and they were also travellers, and unfortunate. These are mighty helps to reflection. Titian and Raphael had nothing to do but to paint under a blue sky half the day, and play with their mistress's locks all the rest of it. Let a painter in cloudy and bill-broking England do this if he can. 9. Completely fair wind at south-west. Saw Montserrat. The sun, reflected on the water from the lee studding-sail, was like shot silk. At half-past seven in the evening, night was risen in the east, while the sun was setting opposite. "Black night has come up already," said the captain. A fair breeze all night and all next day, took us on at the rate of about five miles an hour, very refreshing after the calms and foul winds. We passed the Gulf of Lyons still more pleasantly than we did the Bay of Biscay, for in the latter there was a calm. In both of these places, a little rough handling is generally looked for. A hawk settled on the main-yard, and peered about the birdless main. 11. Light airs not quite fair, till noon, when they returned and were somewhat stronger. (I am thus particular in my daily notices, both to complete the reader's sense of the truth of my narrative, and to give him the benefit of them in case he goes the same road.) The land about Toulon was now visible, and then the Hieres Islands, a French paradise of oranges and sweet airs "Cheer'd with the grateful smell, old Ocean smiles." The perfume exhaling from these and other flowery coasts is no fable, as every one knows who has passed Gibraltar and the coast of Genoa. M. le Franc de Pompignan, in some verses of the commonest French manufacture, tells us, with respect to the Hieres Islands, that Vertumnus, Pomona, Zephyr, &c. "reign there always," and that the place is "the asylum of their loves, and the throne of their empire." Very private and public! "Vertumne, Pomone, Zéphyre Avec Flore y règnent toujours; It was the coast of Provence we were now looking upon, the land of the Troubadours. It seemed but a short cut over to Tripoli, where Geoffrey Rudel went to look upon his mistress and die. But our attention was called off by a less romantic spectacle, a sight unpleasant to an Englishman, the union flag of Genoa and Sardinia hoisted on a boat. An independent flag any kind is something; a good old battered and conquered one is much; but this bit of the of Holy Alliance livery, patched up among his brother servants, by poor Lord Castlereagh, and making its bow in the very seas where Andrew Doria feasted an Emperor and refused a sovereignty, was a baulk of a very melancholy kind of burlesque. The Sardinian was returning with empty wine casks from the French coast; a cargo which, at the hour of the day when we saw it, probably bore the liveliest possible resemblance to the heads whom he served. wind fell in the evening, and there was a dead calm all night. At eleven o'clock, a grampus was heard breathing very hard, but we could not see it on account of the mists, the only ones we had experienced in the Mediterranean. These sounds of great fish in the night-time are very imposing, the creature displacing a world of water about it, as it dips and rises at intervals on its billowy path. The 12. During the night we must have crossed the path which Bonaparte took to Antibes from Elba. We went over it as unconsciously as he now travels round with the globe in his long sleep. Talking with the captain to-day, I learnt that his kindred and he monopolize the whole employment of his owner, and that his father served in it thirty-three years out of fifty. There is always something respectable in continuity and duration, where it is maintained by no ignoble means. If this family should continue to be masters and conductors of vessels for two or three generations more, especially in the same interest, they will have a sort of moral pedigree to show, far beyond those of many proud families, who do nothing at all because their ancestors did something a hundred years back. I will here set down a memorandum, with regard to vessels, which may be useful. The one we sailed in was marked A. I. in the shipping list: that is to say, it stood in the first class of the first rank of sea-worthy vessels; and it is in vessels of this class that people are always anxious to sail. In the present instance, the ship was worthy of the rank it bore: so was the one we buffeted the Channel in; or it would not have held out. But this mark of prime worthiness, A. I., a vessel is allowed to retain only ten years; the consequence of which is, that many ships are built to last only that time; and goods |