It was some thirty-seven years ago, at Naples, and in the matchless Royal Bourbon Museum, near the end of those sculpture galleries which occupy the whole of the ground floor of that spacious edifice, or the whole of it which lies to the left of the main entrance. I was standing and admiring, perhaps for the hundredth time, that exquisite antique statue of a Roman matron seated on a low-back chair which, without any sufficient reason, is called Agrippina, the mother of Nero.

I know not how long I had been there, when I was startled by an English voice close at my ear, and on turning my head I saw an unmistakable and most interesting-looking English gentleman, in appearance not more than five or six and twenty. There was not much in the remark he had uttered, as if unconsciously; it referred to the gracefulness of the statue; it was little more than a truism or commonplace, but of that sort of commonplace which is not heard from the vulgar; and the tone of voice with which it was delivered struck me as peculiarly soft and touching. The speaker was very evidently in delicate health; he was very thin, and would have been very pale but for a little flush at

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the upper edge of the cheek; his eye was rather sunken or hollow, but at the same time uncommonly quick, brilliant, and glancing; his hair was long and wavy, curling naturally; the expression of the countenance melancholy, but a melancholy frequently irradiated with liveliness and even with joyfulness. Though negligently, he was neatly if not elegantly dressed. He never could have been taken for anything but a true thoroughbred English gentleman, though there were personal peculiarities about him. We fell into talk, just as if we had been old acquaintances.

I told him that the Bonaparte family always chose to consider the sitting Roman matron as the very image of Madame Mère; and that when old Lætitia was here, her daughter Caroline, wife to Murat, and then Queen of Naples, made her sit by the side of the marble and made a large party remark the striking resemblance. I added that, though I had never seen this close juxtaposition, I thought from what I had seen of her at Rome that the mother of Napoleon did really resemble the reputed marble mother of Nero, and that her attitudes and her habitual pose were very like those of the statue.

My unknown friend had not seen Madame Mère; but he said he would think of the statue if he should chance to see her on his way back through Rome. We returned together through the galleries, and as we did so, with frequent halts to look at this work of ancient art or that, I could not help discovering that I was in the society of a rarely-gifted, original-minded, imaginative man—a poet, though he should never have penned a verse. We lingered a considerable time at the pedestal of the Kalipygian Venus, the most exquisitely formed, coquettish, licentious little woman that ever lived in next to immortal marble. “There are people,” said I, “who prefer this glittering little Venus to the Venus di Medici.” “I know it,” said he, “and I know such people; but they are

CHAP. I]

AT THE NAPLES MUSEUM

3

wrong, wrong, unspiritually, carnally, grossly wrong! This is all woman; beautiful, if you will; but all woman, and nothing else; some might call her a strumpet in stone, but I won’t. The Medicean Venus is a goddess, and all over a goddess!” He told me the story, then new to me, of the young French maiden from Provence, who went to Paris while the spoils of Italy were still in the Louvre, saw the Belvedere Apollo, became enamoured, and died of love of that quasi-divine, but cold, inanimate marble. In return I told him a story of quite recent occurrence: how a priest from the provinces, a middle-aged and hitherto discreet man, had been brought to see this luscious little Venus; how, day after day, he had returned to gaze and gloat upon it; and how he had terminated his visits by going stark mad about her, and by being confined, as he then and long afterwards was, in the great lunatic asylum at Aversa. “I pity the French girl much more than the priest,” said my delightful unknown.

Our next pause was, I think, before that simple, magnificent, sublime statue of Aristides, which I always considered one of the greatest treasures of the Neapolitan collection. “I trust,” said my chance companion, “that the man was quite as just as he is said to have been; but I confess I sympathize with the Athenian who voted for his banishment because he was sick and tired of hearing him eternally called ‘The Just.’ And then, Justice, by itself alone, is no such very engaging quality! Had they called him ‘Aristides the Merciful,’ or ‘Aristides the Benevolent,’ as well as ‘Aristides the Just,’ I should think a great deal more of him!” Gabriele Rossetti, with whom at that time I was well acquainted, came up, and alla maniera franca Napolitana entered into conversation with my unknown companion as well as with me. He held a comfortable little place in the Museum, which he owed to old King Ferdinand’s morganatic Sicilian wife, the Princess Partanna; and

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his pay, added to what he got as Improvisatore and Maestro di Poesia, enabled him to eat his macaroni in great ease and comfort.

When the Carbonari and William Pepe made their insane Revolution of 1820, and bullied the old King into swearing to the Spanish Constitution—not one of them knowing what it was—Don Gabriele was not very grateful to the Princess or for the Court patronage; he made himself the Tyrtæus of the Carbonari, wrote revolutionary songs and a play to show how men were to die for their country and the Constitution—which none of them would do—wrote lampoons on his benefactress the Partanna, and then, when the Austrians were coming, fled to an English ship and got to Malta, whence he transferred himself to London, where he died, not long since. I would not be over severe upon him: he was a poet, and he got his head turned by clubs and secret societies. He was a southern Italian, and with a head on fire he took to politics; and never yet did I know an Italian of his class, whether from the South or from the North, embark on the billows of politics without losing rudder and compass, and becoming distraught. Better, a thousand times better, were it for them to improvise, sing, and fiddle. Like nearly every professional Italian litterato, Rossetti was considerably a pedant, and a dreadful fellow after those ancient Greeks and Romans from whom the French poet prayed to be delivered. But he now and then made a happy classical allusion. My dear unknown expressed his astonishment at the vast number of statues, bronzes, vases, and other works of Art that had been discovered, and that were still in process of being discovered, within the limits of the Neapolitan Kingdom.

“Yes,” said Rossetti, “we may say with Pompey that we have but to strike the soil with our foot, and legions arise! Tread where you will, there is a world of buried yet living past beneath you.” This was

CHAP. I]

GABRIELE ROSSETTI

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good; and we felt it, and we told him so. Peggio followed, for the poet repeated the dixit to nearly every foreigner with whom he afterwards came in contact, and he always gave it as a sudden thought. With my own ears I heard him parallel Pompey to Lord Orford, Sir William Gell, Colonel and Mrs. Bonar, Sir William Drummond, Dr. Milnes, and I should fancy half a score more of “us Britishers.” He became rather wearisome to my unknown—to say nothing of myself—the said self being then a petulant youth, always, and even now in decrepitude and age, rather intolerant of a bore. We went upstairs to those wondrous rooms which contain the exhumed wealth of Herculaneum, Pompeii, Stabia, and of only a few other places; thence we went into the library, still one of the best in Europe; and there, being well acquainted with all the librarians, I showed my unknown a number of rare books and some MSS. which he was eager to see. The head sub-librarian, Canonico ——, asked me who my friend was. “Canonico,” said I, “I can’t tell you, for I don’t know even so much as his name. I know only that he is a man of taste, a scholar, and an English gentleman.” “Senza dubbio,” said the Canonico, with one of those nice layings of the hand to the heart, which only Italians can do, come si deve. The day was pretty well consumed; and it was locking-up time at the Museum, and so we left. I had an engagement, but was so delighted with my companion that I believe I should have broken it; but as we were walking down the street which leads to the Toledo, I encountered Maestro Rossini and Giacomo Micheroux, driving in a hack-carriage for Capo di Monte, where we were to dine, at Madame F.’s. They hailed me, and stopped the fiacre. In parting with my unknown I believe we shook hands, and I know that he thanked me in the kindest and most graceful manner for the little trouble I had taken for him in the library.

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“Who is your friend?” said Micheroux. I could only repeat that I did not know. “Why, I thought from your greetings that you were brothers or first cousins. What a mattone (madcap) you are!” said Rossini. “Your friend looked very much like a man of genius,” said Micheroux; “that’s a face one cannot easily forget.” “I thought he looked very much like a mezzo-morte, un etico,” said the Maestro. We had a merry dinner up on the hilltop, as we always had when Rossini was present; but my thoughts several times ran down the hill after my unknown friend.

The next morning I met my unknown at the end of the Toledo, walking with Mr. Roskilly, an English medical practitioner who had married a Sicilian wife and settled down in Naples. “Here he is to speak for himself,” said R., “if this is your man.” My unknown held out his hand, and the good-humoured practitioner said, “Mac, I introduce Mr. Percy B. Shelley; Mr. Shelley, this is Charles MacFarlane.” At that time I had read nothing of Shelley’s but his “Queen Mab,” and its controversial, crotchety, and somewhat violent notes; and I must confess that I thought that both the verse and the prose savoured of insanity.

But, at the same time, from his talk of yesterday, I could have vowed that there were better, higher, and purer things in the man than his “Mab,” and that these, in time, would well forth from him, as water from a perennial fountain. Roskilly, having his patients to visit, gladly left the poet with me, and we two presently arranged a trip to Pompeii. Though it would have been cold wintry weather in England, it was a cheering, glorious day under the unclouded sky and warm sun of Naples. We hired one of those queer national vehicles called a calesso, drawn by two black, fiery little horses, one harnessed between the shafts, and the other running, almost loose, outside the off-shaft. We flew through the air;

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AT POMPEII

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the rapid motion, the breeze from off the bay, the populous, busy, cheerful towns and villages rapidly succeeding each other, the bright sunshine and the varied and exquisite scenery, exhilarated poor Shelley and brought a glow to his cheeks, while I was in that perfect rapture familiar to a youth of nineteen, in perfect health, and with not a care in the world.

We entered the exhumed city, the “City of the Dead,” as Walter Scott called it when he was first conducted thither, not by the barracks of the Roman soldiers, as it is generally entered, but by the Street of Tombs, as it always should be entered. We stayed for hours, and in the scarcely injured house, called La Casa di Pansa, partook of an excellent refection, with fruit and good wine of the vintage of Gragnano, on the shelving hills near Castellamare, all furnished by the provident care of two old ciceroni, who were already my old friends. While standing at the top of the amphitheatre, and looking seaward, the poet was much struck by a small, old castle, built on and quite covering a lava rock, at a very short distance from the shore of the bay; and he was still more interested when I told him the castle had been built by the early Norman conquerors of Apulia, Naples, and Sicily, by one of the heroic race of Guiscard, whose well-authenticated history reads like a romance. On leaving Pompeii, Shelley proposed that we should take a nearer view of the castle, and go down to the beach. This we did, and sat on a lava rock, with the sea almost washing our feet, until sunset. The overpowering beauty of the place, the time and tide, subdued us into a solemn, musing, meditative, and long silence.

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If one is never merry when he hears sweet music, so is he never merry when witnessing a sunset in scenery like this; but my companion’s expressive countenance was languid, despondent, melancholy, quite sad. He did not write them here—he certainly wrote nothing when I was with him, and was not the man to indulge in any such poetical affectations; but he thought here those thrilling verses which in the collection of his minor poems are called “Stanzas, written in dejection, near Naples.” Some of those lines, ever since I first read them, have haunted me, have been upon me like a magic spell; and I really believe that not a day or night have passed without my repeating them to myself, and recalling the image of Shelley as he sat on that seashore, with the glowing sunset shining full on his pale, haggard face.

I might have said, by anticipation, what Byron afterwards said of Tasso and his excessive susceptibilities—

“Of such materials wretched men are made.”

His own “Sensitive Plant” was not so sensitive, so impressionable, as Shelley himself. He was all over feeling, and all his feelings were of the acutest sort. Had he not been drowned as he was, he never could have lasted; the bright, sharp sword had already outworn the scabbard. Twice when, without being observed, I looked earnestly at him, I read on his countenance, and in the whole of his delicate, excited frame, the words, “Death, early death!” Yet—and because he was so impressionable, so thoroughly alive to external nature—we had scarcely got back to our very queer and very rapid conveyance than he rallied, joked in good Italian with our driver, and became most cheerful and facetious. We pulled up in the town of Torre Annunziata, where the best macaroni is manufactured in immense quantities, and as I took him over one of the manufactories, and showed him how they worked the lever by

CHAP. I]

HIS WIFE

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springing up and down, astride of the timber, like little boys playing at see-saw, he showed all the hilarity and fun of a schoolboy. At the door was the usual number of beggars, to call us “milords” and to beg for farthings. Shelley emptied his pockets, and away we went in the calesso. I spoke of the mendicants as “poor creatures.” “Not a bit of it,” said the Poet; “they are happier than I—I dare say they are happier than you. With such a sky over their heads, with no nipping cold, and with full liberty to wander about and beg, they are happy people. Take all the advantages of the climate into the account, and I would ten times rather be a Neapolitan beggar than an English artisan or maid-of-all-work.” He had a fit of moodiness as we rattled over the lava-buried city of Herculaneum, and saw a short column of fire projected from the uppermost crater of Mount Vesuvius; but it soon passed, and we re-entered the city of Naples in a cheerful, talkative disposition.

That evening, I saw his second wife, the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the “twice illustrious, in her sire and mother,” as he has styled her. She was, at that period, a very delicate, elegant, charming person; and there seemed to be great affection and an entire confidence between them.

On the following day I went off on a visit to the old town of Montesarchio, at the very foot of Monte Taburno, Virgil’s mountain, and not far from the ancient city of Beneventum. A day or two after, Shelley left Naples for Rome, being, according to Roskilly, in a very poor way when he started on the journey. I did not see him again till late in the year 1820, and then I saw but little of him, for he was staying at Pisa with Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, Captain Medwin, and one or two others, and I was only passing through Pisa on my way to Florence. I saw him no more, though I was very near meeting

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him at Leghorn in 1822, and just before his boat was capsized in the Gulf of Spezzia. But in the interval I had heard a great deal of him and of his generous doings, from Keats, Severn the painter, Bopp the sculptor, and others; from Italians as well as English; and after his death, when I visited Lerici and the places where he had lived on the Riviera di Genova, I heard a great deal more of his philanthropy, his self-denial, and his active, self-sacrificing benevolence. When weak and ill, and in rough weather, he would cross the mountains in the rear of the Bay, to carry medicine or some succour or comfort to the sick family of a poor chestnut-eating peasant; when in money difficulties of his own, he would give away his last dollar and trust to Providence, or to his credit in the place.* I know for a certainty that when he raised £1,600 to clear Leigh Hunt and his family in England, and to get them out to Italy, he was himself embarrassed; and that Lord Byron, who was to have furnished a part of the funds, left Shelley answerable for the whole, or for very nearly the whole. All that Leigh Hunt says on this subject is entitled to full credit. Perhaps it would have been better if he had never told so many truths about his lordship, in whose house he was for a time living; but he was certainly “hardly entreated” by Don Juan; and in all essentials, Hunt’s benefactor was Shelley, not Byron. Yet Shelley, this practical and daily-practising Christian, had written in a public book the word “Atheist” after his name, and had been from his Etonian days a scoffer at Christianity and a contemner of all revealed religion. A sad mistake, but one from which he was freeing himself at least three years before he perished. But, in fact, his was never atheism, but a sort of indescribable

* In July Byron gave Leigh Hunt “The Vision of Judgment.” On the 21st July Shelley had written to his wife that Byron had offered Hunt the copyright of “The Vision of Judgment” for his first number. “This offer, if sincere, is more than enough to set up the Journal; and if sincere will set everything right.”

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HIS CREED

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pantheism. As far as I could understand him, he had put in the place of the Invisible, this visible and no doubt very beautiful world; and for God the Creator he had substituted God’s Creation. This he worshipped, and this he revered, more fervently, more entirely, than most men revere God Himself. He quibbled about the immortality of the soul, but he infused a soul into matter, and with him matter was to be sentient, eternal, and eternally improving. He shrank with horror from the idea of a “be-all and an end-all”; his soul was too expansive for that. If one could only have made one or two changes in his vocabulary, poor Shelley must have been considered as a reverential, devout man. For God, he read Nature. I do not believe that he could have lived much longer than he did; but I do most thoroughly believe that with him a prolongation of days would have brought a thorough reformation of doctrine; that perishing as he did, he was getting his philosophy and his religion all right. He had become an assiduous reader of the New Testament, and of the most striking books of the Old Testament; evidence of this Biblical reading may be traced in the later of his productions. When his body was found in the Gulf of Spezzia, a well-worn pocket Bible was found in his sea-jacket. With his pen, with his young head inflamed by a liberalism which he did not understand, against tyrants and oppressors in the abstract, or men whom he considered as such, Shelley no doubt could be vituperative, violent, uncharitable, to the utmost extent of his liberalism; but I should say that he never spoke an unkind word of any living creature he had personally known, and that no man could be more averse to uncharitableness of opinion, or calumny, or any species of denigration. It was a mistake, it was one of his many hallucinations, but there was a distinguished man in England whom he considered as his oppressor, as a legal tyrant, and as his mortal enemy; yet in speaking

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of him he said: “No doubt that man has his good qualities, and many of them.”

I may return to poor Shelley again; but, this time, before we part, I would say one word more for him. Delicate, tremulous, nervous, over-sensitive as he was, I firmly believe that for the sake of a principle, or for the sake of covering the weak flank of a friend or of any unfortunate, ill-used person, he would have faced a park of artillery, or have braved the scaffold or the penal fire.