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These threats were put into execution, and yesterday we made a tour of about thirty miles upon the highlands, and visited a variety of castles and palaces. The Conte Nobili conducted us, a noble Lucchese, but born in Flanders and educated at Paris. He possesses the greatest elegance of imagination, and a degree of sensibility rarely met with upon our gross planet.
The Saracens used it in the fourteenth century for making bread, as do the Lucchese to this day; it is, however, lightly esteemed, and not used at all when other corn abounds, but thrown into the hencoop to fatten poultry.
Of an admirable description of the Italians, with their various pursuits and characteristics, though in a few words and with special stress laid on the Lucchese, to whom the work was dedicated, we can give only the title: Forcianae Questiones, by Ortensio Landi, Naples, 1536. Leandro Alberti is not so fruitful as might be expected in his description of the character of the different cities.
But Brown, Piccolomini, Lucchese, and many other veteran officers in the Austrian troops, are respectable enemies. Mr. Pitt seems to me to have almost as many enemies to encounter as his Prussian Majesty. The late Ministry, and the Duke's party, will, I presume, unite against him and his Tory friends; and then quarrel among themselves again.
"Never mind, Count Nobili, don't apologize; I can bear any thing from a young man who celebrates the festival of the Holy Countenance with such magnificence. Per Bacco! you are the best Lucchese in Lucca. I have seen nothing like it since the duke left. My son, it was worthy of the palace you inhabit." Ah! could the marchesa have heard this, she would never have spoken to Trenta again!
Of the one party were Corso and Lottieri, bishop of Florence, with many of the nobility and some of the people; on the other side were the Signory, with the greater part of the people; so that skirmishes took place in many parts of the city. The Signory, seeing their danger great, sent for aid to the Lucchese, and presently all the people of Lucca were in Florence.
"We must not look for whales in the Euxine Sea," says an old writer; and we must not look for great men or great things in little nations to be sure, but let us respect the innocence of childhood, and regard with tenderness the territory of Lucca: where no man has been murdered during the life or memory of any of its peaceful inhabitants; where one robbery alone has been committed for sixteen years; and the thief hanged by a Florentine executioner borrowed for the purpose, no Lucchese being able or willing to undertake so horrible an office, with terrifying circumstances of penitence and public reprehension: where the governed are so few in proportion to the governors; all power being circulated among four hundred and fifty nobles, and the whole country producing scarcely ninety thousand souls.
The men of that time cannot even conceive, in their newly acquired faith and joy in God and His creatures, what feelings must have been uppermost in the men who first set the fashion of adorning churches with men-devouring monsters. Such were my impressions during those days spent among the serene Lucchese churches and their terrible emblems.
The page reappeared, and conducted Dr. Beaton through another suite of splendid apartments, till they came to an ante-room decorated with the portraits of no less remarkable persons than the rebel Duke of Perth and King James VIII., a fact which shows that the Stuarts must have carried their furniture with them, from Rome to a Lucchese villa hired for a few months, with more recklessness than one might have imagined likely in those days of post-chaises.
But, within the limits thus defined, there is no feature capable of richer decoration than the shaft; the most beautiful examples of all I have seen, are the slender pillars, encrusted with arabesques, which flank the portals of the Baptistery and Duomo at Pisa, and some others of the Pisan and Lucchese churches; but the varieties of sculpture and inlaying, with which the small Romanesque shafts, whether Italian or Northern, are adorned when they occupy important positions, are quite endless, and nearly all admirable.
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