ladies who may visit Naples. A man impregnates his skin with the effluvia of tobacco and wine, and offers no such tempting pasture to the herds and flocks of his Neapolitan majesty; but a delicate English lady, in all her cleanliness and loveliness, swarming, as she must be -whew! The English lady, in fact, must leave all her delicacy at home, and all her blushes, unless a small travelling assortment, if she intends to reside among this more than half-naked, and all-alive people. The country about Naples may be an earthly paradise: but it is paradise after the fall, given up to the serpent for an habitation.

CHAP. XVIII.

TRAVELLING IN ITALY.-VETTURINI.-CAPUA.-TERRACINA.PONTINE MARSHES.-MAREMMA.—THE APPROACH TO ROME. -COLISEUM.

THERE are three ways of travelling in Italy. One is to travel post, carrying all England along with you in your own English travelling carriage. With English books, English servants, English habits, and a foreign courier to cheat him, the English traveller may get over a good deal of country, and a good deal of money in this way, without the trouble of taking in any more ideas, or loading the memory with any more weighty matters than in seeing a diorama passing before his eyes. Another way is to travel in your own foreign carriage with hired horses with which the vetturino drives you to your journey's end, at the rate of five-and-twenty or thirty miles a day. There is often the inconvenience attending this way, that as the driver, at the end of his engagement, may have to ride his horses back without any return fare, which he would have if the carriage as well as the horses belonged to him, you are not much cheaper, and are vastly slower in your movements, than with post horses: and the owner, or vetturino, will scarcely come himself to ride back with his horses if he can put off any lad upon you to do the job. The third, and ordinary way of travelling for all ranks in the country, is by a voiturin, or vetturino, who has his own. carriage and horses. They are a class of coach proprietors, many of them intelligent, respectable men, who drive a light carriage of their own that will hold four inside and two outside passengers, and with a pair of gaunt, bony horses. You engage the number of places you want, and the vetturino visits all the inns to find other travellers going the same road to fill up

the empty places. There is, of course, considerable difference in the rates paid, even in the same carriage, for the same distance, as the vetturino will take any fare at last rather than none. It is necessary, also, to have a regular contract in writing, and to insure it by taking an earnest upon it a piece of money from the vetturino, which is returned to him when he is fairly on the road; for in Italy it appears to be the principle in all dealings between man and man-impose if you can. The average expense, travelling in this way, is about 16s. sterling a day for each passenger: but this includes your living on the road, that is, a dinner-breakfast - dinner as to the fare, but breakfast as to the hour, about ten or eleven - a good supper at eight or nine in the evening, and your bed. The vetturino always engages for the living, and the traveller is much better served, and more cheaply, than if he paid for himself. The vetturino form a class all over the Continent, known to each other, and have the innkeepers at their command, because the inn which had the reputation of serving their passengers ill might as well be shut up. An English family travelling in their own carriage with four post horses would not get the best beds or the best fare at every Italian inn, if a known vetturino with his passengers came to the door at the same moment. The ordinary way of their travelling is, to start at four in the morning, and stop at nine or ten. They start again at two and travel till six or seven, and in this way get on for weeks together, at the rate of thirty miles a day. The old-fashioned arrangement of the vetturino undertaking for the lodging and feeding, as well as for the transporting of his passengers, is not, as our English tourists imagine, devised for the sake of saving them from being imposed upon by Italian innkeepers. It is a remnant of ancient manners from the ages of pilgrimages and crusaders, when bands of pious passengers from all parts of Christendom contracted with conductors to lead them to Rome, and purvey for them out and home. It is at

country. It takes him as fast over it as he can go, with the advantage of seeing what is remarkable, and brings him into contact with people of the country, and travellers of all kinds and classes.

We set out early in the morning from Naples by vetturino, and got to Mola de Gaeta for the first night's quarters, stopping in the forenoon, for a few hours, at Capua. The road to Capua is over a highly cultivated fertile plain. The most fertile land in Europe is probably hereabouts, in the plain watered by the Volturno, because, with the finest climate for vegetable production, the soil is a deep black, alluvial, garden mould, which, in any climate, would be rich land; and from its flat surface, and low level, it retains the necessary moisture, or receives it easily by irrigation. The gods, says Polybius, might dispute the possession of such a delicious plain as that of Capua. Yet in this earthly paradise, the people are not merely in rags and wretchedness; it is difficult even to conceive humanity in so low a condition, as you see it in here. In the streets of Capua, you see animals which you can scarcely acknowledge to be human beings. The Esquimaux has a covering for his body, which, even in his rude state, shows a sense of decency, as well as the mere feeling of cold a sense of ornament even may be traced in his seal-skin garment. But here the sense of decency, even in the female animal of the human species, is apparently little higher than among the irrational creatures. How low bad government may reduce the civilisation of a country is impressively brought out here. Come to Capua, all ye conservatives of existing institutions, all ye defenders of things as they are, all ye good, pious, moral gentlemen of England, who look with aversion on every reform, with horror on every social change, come to Capua, and see the working of your principle of conservatism. It is not the wish certainly of the Neapolitan government to have its subjects in a low and miserable condition: but it is the fear of change, our own principle of conservatism-which shuns

all improvement; and where society is not improving, it is retrograding. There is no stand-still in human affairs.

From Mola de Gaeta, where a branch of low hills from the Apennine chain approaches the coast, we travelled next day to Terracina, passing through the beautiful scenery around the little towns of Itri and Fondi. Fondi is more celebrated for the attempt, in 1534, of Hayraddin Barbarossa with a Turkish squadron, to carry off, for the seraglio, the beautiful Countess Julia de Gonzagua, than for the eloquence or logic of Thomas d'Aquinas. Yet here he taught theology. He was a great man in his day, and for generations after his day: for ideas never die, and his may still be influencing theological and metaphysical science.

In this Italian atmosphere, there is a transparency in the shadows seldom seen in our climate in our rural scenery. With us, all that is in shade is indistinctly made out. The shadows in our landscape paintings, and drawings, are often laid in muddy, because, in fact, they often are so in nature-and it is not every painter who is a poet of the brush; who can select, and avoid, or take what nature offers. Copying nature literatim is not painting well. Here objects, even in the deepest shadow of a mountain, are very distinct, both in outline and colour, although kept down, and subdued by the general shade: and this atmospheric peculiarity in the real scenery of Italy gives a peculiar character to the paintings of it, a something different from the way in which the artists of other countries would conceive and express the same objects under the same circumstances.

In strolling about Terracina, in defiance of malaria which has its head quarters here, I came upon a little watermill with a perpendicular shaft turned round by the rill of water striking upon vanes inserted obliquely in it to receive the impulse the mill of the Scandinavian peasant, and still found in the Shetland islands, and some of the Hebrides. How How very little progress