“[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.]”

Unluckily for these ripe and ready youngsters, their papas and mammas (like those of Romeo and Juliet before them) cut each other on the streets of Florence, so that a marriage seems scarcely feasible. Ippolito, however, urges his suit strenuously; and lest his vigour should fail of producing the desired and usual effect, he has recourse to the following most ingenious and irresistible stratagem. “We must even record, that on one occasion he contrived to stumble against a dog, and tread his toes, in order that he might ostentatiously help the poor beast out of the way.” If Towler had given him a good snap on the calf of the leg for his pains, he would, we think, have been cheap of the hydrophobia. But it is at church where most he plies his artillery; and Dianora, who is lucky in an accommodating aunt (not a very usual phenomenon in this country, whatever it may be in Italy) ogles to him after his heart’s desire. The old leering aunt thus pleads Ippolito’s cause unsolicited and without a fee, being an honorary member of the Philanthropical Society of Florence.

“‘If he is very handsome, poor boy, how can he help that? Saints have been handsome in their days, aye, 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——’ ‘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.’”

Pass we over some days or weeks, for we know not which, and at last Ippolito is about to enjoy an interview with Dianora. The impatience of the young gentleman is very natural and affecting, and we do not know whether or not to envy his feelings, and to wish being in his shoes.

“Every step which Ippolito heard on the stair-case he fancied was hers, till it passed the door, and never did morning appear to him at once so delirious and so tiresome. To be in the same house with her, what joy! But to be in the same house with her, and not to be able to tell her his love directly, and ask her for hers, and fold her into his very soul, what impatience and misery! Two or three times there was a knock of some one to be let in; but it was only the gossip, come to inform him that he must be patient, and that she did not know when Madonna Lucrezia would please to bring Dianora, but most likely after dinner, when the visitors retired to sleep a little. Of all impertinent things, dinner appeared to him the most tiresome and unfit. He wondered how any thinking beings, who might take a cake or a cup of wine by the way, and then proceed to love one another, could sit round a great wooden table, patiently eating of this and that nicety; and, above all, how they could sit still afterwards for a moment, and not do any thing else in preference,—stand on their heads, or toss the dishes out of the window.”

Dianora’s old wicked aunt, who had been a rare one in her youth, no doubt, and Goody or Gossip Veronica, another tender-hearted beldam, sneak off to take a drop of comfort, and leave the inflammable and combustible boy and girl to go off like a brace of squibs.

“After dinner, when the other visitors had separated here and there to sleep, Dianora, accompanied by her aunt and Veronica, found herself, to her great astonishment, in the same room with Ippolito; and a few minutes after their introduction to each other, and after one had looked this way, and the other that, and one taken up a book and laid it down again, and both looked out at the window, and each blushed, and either turned pale, and the gentleman adjusted his collar, and the lady her sleeve, and the elder ladies had whispered one another in a corner, Dianora, less to her astonishment than before, was left in the room with him alone. She made a movement as if to follow them, but Ippolito said something, she knew not what, and she remained. She went to the window, looking very serious and pale, and not daring to glance towards him. He intended instantly to go to her, and wondered what had become of his fierce impatience; but the very delay had now something delicious in it. Oh, the happiness of those moments! Oh, the sweet morning-time of those feelings! the doubt which is not doubt, and the hope which is but the coming of certainty!”

“Reader. But, sir, in taking these heavenly flights of yours, you have left your two lovers.

“Author. Surely, madam, I need not inform you that lovers are fond of being left—at least to themselves.

“Reader. But, sir, they are Italians; and I did not think Italian lovers were of this bashful description. I imagined that the moment your two Florentines beheld one another, they would spring into each other’s arms, sending up cries of joy, and—and—

“Author. Tumbling over the two old women by the way. It is a very pretty imagination, madam; but Italians partake of all the feelings common to human nature; and modesty is really not confined to the English, even though they are always saying it is.

“Reader. But I was not speaking of modesty, sir; I was only alluding to a sort of—what shall I say—a kind of irrepressible energy—that which in the Italian character is called violence.”

“Author. I meant nothing personal, madam, believe me, in using the word modesty. You are too charitable, and have too great a regard for my lovers. I was not speaking myself of modesty in any particular sense, but of modesty in general; and all nations, not excepting our beloved and somewhat dictatorial countrymen, have their modesties and immodesties too, from which perhaps their example might instruct one another. With regard to the violence you speak of, and which is energy sometimes, and the weakest of weaknesses at others, according to the character which exhibits it, and the occasion that calls it forth, the Italians, who live in an ardent climate, have undoubtedly shewn more of it than most people; but it is only where their individual character is most irregular, and education and laws at their worst. In general it is nothing but pure self-will, and belongs to the two extremes of the community—the most powerful whose passions have been indulged, and the poorest whose passions have never been instructed. True energy manifests itself, not in violence, but in strength and intensity; and intensity is by its nature discerning, said not to be surpassed in quietness, where quietness is becoming.”

The lady listens with her mouth wide open, no doubt, to some most of this vile slang, and then exclaims,—“You have convinced me, sir—pray, let us proceed!”

The plot now begins to thicken; and having had a love-scene in a church, now for one in a lady’s chamber.

“Ippolito went up to Dianora. She was still looking out of the window, her eye fixed upon the blue mountains in the distance, but conscious of nothing outside the room. She had a light green and gold net on her head, which enclosed her luxuriant hair without violence, and seemed as if it took it up that he might admire the white neck underneath. She felt his breath upon it; and beginning to expect that his lips would follow, raised her hands to her head, as if the net required adjusting. This movement, while it disconcerted him, presented her waist in a point of view so impossible not to touch, that, taking it gently in both his hands, he pressed one at the same time upon her heart, and said, ‘It will forgive me, even for doing this.’ He had reason to say so, for he felt it beat against his fingers, as if it leaped. Dianora, blushing and confused, though feeling abundantly happy, made another movement with her hands, as if to remove his own, but he only detained them on either side. ‘Messer Ippolito,’ said Dianora, in a tone as if to remonstrate, though suffering herself to remain a prisoner, ‘I fear you must think me—’ ‘No, no,’ interrupted Ippolito, ‘you can fear nothing that I think, or that I do. It is I that have to fear year lovely and fearful beauty, which has been ever at the side of my sick-bed, and I thought looked angrily upon me—upon me alone of the whole world.’—‘They told me you had been ill,’ said Dianora, in a very gentle tone; ‘and my aunt perhaps knew that I—thought that I—Have you been very ill?’—And, without thinking, she drew her left hand from under his, and placed it upon it. ‘Very,’ answered Ippolito; ‘do not I look so?’—And saying that, he raised his other hand, and venturing to put it round to the left side of her little dimpled chin, turned her face towards him. Dianora did not think he appeared so ill by a good deal, as he did in the church; but there was enough in his face, ill or well, to make her eye-sight swim as she looked at him; and the next moment her head was upon his shoulder, and his lips descended, welcome, upon hers.

Here the odious Cockney again stops short; and finishes his picture, which seems painted by an eunuch, with a parenthesis manifestly written by a fool.

“We find we are in the habit of using a great number of ands on these occasions. We do not affect it, though we are conscious of it. It is partly, we believe, owing to our recollections of the good faith and simplicity in the old romances, and partly to a certain sense of luxury and continuance which these ands help to link together. It is the fault of ‘the accursed critical spirit,’ which is the bane of these times, that we are obliged to be conscious of the matter at all. But we cannot help not having been born six hundred years ago, and are obliged to be base and reviewatory like the rest. To affect not to be conscious of the critical in these times, would itself be a departure from what is natural; but we notice the necessity only to express our hatred of it, and hereby present the critics (ourselves included, as far as we belong to them) with our hearty discommendations.”

You exquisite idiot! was not one episode about printers’ devils sufficient, but you must, sensualist as you are, turn the small, mean, twinkling eyes of your mind away from the sight on which they had just been floating, to enjoy the still more beastly gratification of contemplating your own cockney charms? You deserve, sir, for this parenthesis, to be hung up by the little finger till you are dead! You are indeed a fine creature!—But hark! hark!

“Dianora had consented to receive her bridegroom in her own apartment at home, that same night, by means of that other old good-natured go-between, yclept a ladder of ropes.”

“Ippolito had noticed a ladder of ropes which was used in his father’s house for some domestic purposes. To say the truth, it was an old servant, and had formerly been much in request for the purpose to which it was now about to be turned by the old gentleman himself. He was indeed a person of a truly orthodox description, having been much given to intrigue in his younger days, being consigned over to avarice in his older, and exhibiting great submission to every thing established, always. Accordingly, he was considered as a personage equally respectable for his virtues, as important from his rank and connexions; and if hundreds of ladders could have risen up in judgment against him, they would only have been considered as what are called in England ‘wild oats;’—wild ladders, which it was natural for every gentleman to plant.”

Ippolito, after all, however, turns out a shilly-shally sort of a fellow, and trembles with fear like an aspen-leaf. Two drunk men are fighting near Di’s window, and he is terrified out of his wits at the clashing of their swords.

“A clashing of swords ensued, and to his great relief the drunkard and his companion were driven on. In a minute or two all was silent. Ippolito gave the signal—it was acknowledged; the rope was fixed; and the lover was about to ascend, when he was startled with a strange diminutive face, smiling at him over a light. His next sensation was to smile at the state of his own nerves; for it was but a few minutes before, that he was regretting he could not put out a lantern that stood burning under a little image of the Virgin. He crossed himself, offered up a prayer for the success of his true love, and again proceeded to mount the ladder.”

As bad luck would have it, two gentlemen, probably out upon similar business, give the view-hollo.