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I recall nothing read in that year in Europe which moved me, and I think I read very little, except the local histories of the Tuscan cities which I afterwards wrote of. In fact, it was not till I returned, and took up my life again in Boston, in the old atmosphere of work, that I turned once more to books.
It is the only building of a remarkable character, architecturally speaking, in the city; being the largest, and one of the finest, royal palaces in Europe. It belongs to the Tuscan style, and cost between five and six million dollars a hundred years ago. The base is of granite; but the upper portion is built of a fine white stone, very closely resembling marble.
Hereupon the usually benevolent Dennis protested as he glanced approvingly at the well-kept Tuscan landscape. "Crocker needn't rub it in," he opined. "Why, it's the same scrubby spruce tree from the Plains of Abraham to James's Bay-and Emma, who hated being bored! Why, it's marriage by capture; it's barbaric." "It's worse; it's rheumatic," shuddered Harwood as he declined Marsala and took whisky.
"Sir," she said to Morcerf, "you are most welcome as the friend of my lord and master." This was said in excellent Tuscan, and with that soft Roman accent which makes the language of Dante as sonorous as that of Homer.
Among other themes of which he spoke were the beauty of Naples, the feasting and pleasures of Palermo, the rich abundance of Milan, and the frequent festivals held in other parts of Lombardy not omitting the good cheer of the numerous hostelries in the description of which he broke forth rapturously in the Tuscan language, discoursing of Macarela, Macarroni, and Polastri, with the most cordial goodwill.
One book in particular, entitled Of the Benefits of the Death of Christ, had this fate. It was written in Tuscan, was many times reprinted, and was eagerly read in every part of Italy. But the inquisitors detected in it the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone. They proscribed it; and it is now as hopelessly lost as the second decade of Livy.
Here, indeed, was to be reckoned with that quality of strong common sense, without which she had been no Tuscan girl. She had it in a remarkable degree, as you may judge when I say that it reconciled her to her position of wife to a vast, disorderly, tyrannical man nearly old enough to be her grandfather.
Part of the charm of this work, its grace and purity and finish of expression, is common to all the Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century; for Luca was first of all a worker in marble, and his works in earthenware only transfer to a different material the principles of his sculpture.
In a word, they acted like patriotic Tories, like republican patricians. Therefore they would not ally themselves with tyrants or countenance the enslavement of free cities by armed despots. Their subjugation of the Tuscan burghs to Florence was itself part of a grand republican policy. Cosimo changed all this.
She carried Matilda's thin mind to the farthest bound it could have reached without snapping, through an elegant range of selected histories and harmless feminine classics through Gallic dialogues through Tuscan themes through Teuton verbs yea, across the invaded bounds of astonished Science into the Elementary Ologies.
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