That sings the summer nights, so soft and strong,
To music modulating his sweet throat,

Labors with richness of his varied note,

Yet lifts not unto heaven a holier song,

Than our home bird that, on some leafless thorn,

Hymns his plain chaunt each wint'ry eve and morn"."

We advanced to Novi. The whole of our journey there consisted in threading our way through the belt of rough, woody, Apennines, which stand like green ramparts round about Genoa. Every turn brought us fresh views; every bank was covered with white and blue violets, primroses, snow-drops, and wood anemonies, and the weather was beautiful. Many of the hills reminded us of some Westmoreland mountains. If we are in the habit of looking at people's faces, we often detect likenesses of a peculiar sort, even in foreign lands,-likenesses of such a kind as to lead us to suppose, that if we could see and examine the race of mankind, we might divide off all manner of faces into a certain number of well-defined ones: likenesses, for instance, of this sort :-not only are the features alike, but the gait, the way of managing the limbs, the hair, the tone of voice, the whole moral impress are the same; oftentimes so much the same as to bewilder and astonish us, and confuse our recollections. There is something of the same sort about mountains; and even in the forms of those contorted masses, thrown up by

" Sonnet on Foreign Breviaries, in "The Cathedral," p. 21.

fire, or furrowed and featured by the tremendous pressure of a deluge, nature observes an order; for her treasure-house of shapes is limited, and there is a law in the empire of beautiful forms, so as that, were we in a position to make it, they are capable of classification. This might be made use of in teaching geography, to such as have an instinctive love of natural objects, and an eye for them, but who are unapt to learn that science, either in its principles, or in its enormous multitude of facts. We saw many Apennines to day, not only like Westmoreland mountains in mere outline, but in a hundred other things; the way they turned themselves to other mountains, -what shape those other mountains were of,-the course the torrents took,-where wood was present and where it was absent,-and a certain indescribable general character besides.

Occupied by this sapient and profitable speculation, we reached the little river Serrta, whose waters are almost as blue as those of the Sorgue at Vaucluse. Indeed, it would be a lovely river, if it did not make a broad gravel-bed in winter, in the midst of which its waters are almost lost in warmer weather. We followed the Serrta to Novi, the autumn retirement of the ancient Genoese.

Soon after leaving Novi, we skirted the edge of the plain of Marengo, once a royal Frank chase. The morning sun was just beginning to have power; and the juicy blades of the young corn were sucking nourishment from earth that had, hidden within it,

such fearful sources of fertility. Above, a number of larks were singing merrily and loudly,- singing as if there were no such things as battles. Who would not feel that there was a moral in their thrilling dithyrambs? The road was flat but the country rich and fertile, and many of the villages prettily situated on the lower knolls of a small range of hills, which lay upon our left. We crossed that classic "king of rivers," the Po. It, as well as its brother monarch in France, the impatient Rhone, seem to be tyrannical in their winter rule. There were vestiges of sad desolation all around. Indeed, father Eridanus seems to have a bad character in his own neighbourhood. For we saw a church, some little distance from his banks, consecrated, as the inscription bore, "to St. Laurence, the Deacon, our Patron, that he may ward off diseases and Eridanus." The Po is no good specimen of an inland river, although its waters wander through scenes of almost cumbrous luxuriance. Soon after, the bridge over the Tesino brought us into Pavia, the capital of Alboin. This is the frontier of the noble dominions of the Austrian Kaiser.

Pavia is an interesting city, though the university is a very plain building, and the churches are not picturesque. But it is interesting, because the bark of history has touched there, and brought away many recollections of it. It was the scene of the massacre which was preliminary to the fall of Stilicho, when Honorius wandered about the streets in an agony of fear, and without the imperial ornaments. Nay, it

was for some time the capital of Italy, for here Alboin, the Lombard conqueror, fixed his court, slighting, as Gibbon says, the ancient glories of Milan. Lanfranc of Canterbury, the English primate in the reign of William Rufus, was a native of Pavia. Indeed it is curious that Lombardy should have given us two of our greatest early English prelates, Lanfranc, and St. Anselm. Both were divines of considerable note, Lanfranc for his treatise against Berengarius, and St. Anselm for his logical method. The primacy of both was marked by a considerable deepening and widening of the papal power in the English Church. In modern history, the name of Pavia is famous from the battle of Pavia, where Francis I. was taken prisoner by the Constable de Bourbon, who, like Lord Brooke before Lichfield cathedral, was slain while sacrilegiously scaling the walls of the Eternal City.

It is curious there should have been three contemporary sovereigns in that generation, who were all historically great, yet for none of whom we can feel true respect, nor pay heartfelt honor to their memories. Henry VIII. was great, just as the man who burnt the temple of Ephesus might be great, that is to say, notorious for posthumous mischief. His lust and extravagant expenditure were, in the plans of Providence, the visible engines of the considerable ecclesiastical changes which date from his reign; but which he would have been the last person to bring about, if he might have had Anne Boleyn and church

8

lands on any other terms. Charles V. was great, because to considerable political acuteness he added heartlessness, which enabled him to go straight forward, like a Roman road, without any of those windings or delays which a hundred amiable feelings bring about to defeat political purposes. A poet, for instance, who feels no moral restraint over him either in his choice of subjects, or in his manner of treating them, can for the purposes of present popularity make a little power go further than a great deal will do in the hands of a reverent, cautious Christian. The contest between the reputations of the two modern English poets, whose names come uppermost to our minds at present, is an exemplification of this. We have a foretaste of the judgment of posterity. So it is in politics, when a man has the gift of a hard heart. Francis I. was great, because he revived, at countless cost, expired chivalry in his own person. But all revivals of things which have no intrinsic life are but splendid falshoods. Now chivalry had at no period any life of its own, but only so far as it was moored alongside of the Church. It was when apart from the Church, like freemasonry and temperance societies, an attempt to improve the manners of the times and establish a code of morals upon a basis which never can be the foundation of so massive an edifice. The broad stone of honor sank into the earth when it ceased to rest itself against the corner-stone of the Church. Chi8 • Wordsworth and Byron.

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