The

Contemporary opinion as to the comparative prospects of English and Scots is interesting, for neither nation had as yet done any colonising to speak of. The English, already great at oversea adventure, and steeped in the romance of new worlds, were represented by a muchenduring handful in Virginia, just creeping out of their stockades to raise their first crops of tobacco and maize. It was nearly two centuries before the Lowland Scot became in any serious sense an oversea agricultural settler. The colonial Scot of Ulster had long preceded him across the Atlantic. Pynnar and others, however, thought that the Scots of the Ulster Plantation would stand their transfer better than the English. reasons were fairly obvious, for, though English agriculture, such as it then was, was far ahead of the Scottish practice, the English were accustomed at home to comfortable conditions, the others to a frugal and austere existence. The change of climate, too, from, say Norfolk or Suffolk, to that of undeveloped, undrained Ulster was undoubtedly trying under pioneering conditions, while from the Western Lowlands, at any rate, it was no change at all. These anticipations proved on the whole sound, though they are concerned with an intricate question not here relevant, but often discussed by Ulster writers. One word may be said, and indeed has often been said, namely, that the Ulster Presbyterian of later days did not necessarily imply Scottish origin. For so many English immigrants of Puritan leanings would by temperament, or through intermarriage, prefer the Presbyterian to the Episcopal communion, as to cloud any racial calculations made on this basis.

In conclusion, it may be worth noting that ten years later, in 1629, Charles I ordered another survey of the Plantation, whether with ulterior design or not we do not know. But his commissioners found such laxity in fulfilling the agreements of tenure, that the King resumed possession of all or nearly all the Plantation, restoring it to the owners, of course, on fines and a rise in the head-rent-a more than satisfactory procedure, no doubt, to a Stuart King! It can hardly have endeared him, however, to the Ulster colonists when the test came a dozen years later.

A. G. BRADLEY.

Art. 4.-A LITERARY SHRINE IN ITALY.

A VISITOR to Florence in the old days might well have imagined himself transported to England. It was not necessary for him to travel to London and participate in a London season in order to see an assembly of members of the Upper and Lower Houses, lords and ladies, professors from Oxford and Cambridge, and sages from Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Florence had long been a resort of the cultured English; they were almost as much at home on the banks of the Arno as on the banks of the Thames. And the centre of English social life in Florence was to be found at the villa 'Poggio Gherardo.' A distinguished English authoress is living here who was in touch with the social life of most of the capitals of Europe. I have been there many times when the peace of a lovely spring day rested upon the countryside. Fiesole looks down in commanding beauty from the heights; separated from Fiesole by the gentle undulations which stretch eastwards from Florence. Along the same mountain ridge lies Settignano; and between them, but nearer to Settignano, there rises the ancient crenellated castle of Poggio Gherardo.

Within this castle, rising from amid the dull green of the olive-trees, and upon which the glory of the Middle Ages still rests, were people who knew how consciously to enjoy the loveliness and grandeur by which they were surrounded. The host, Mr James Ross, since dead, who, as banker, had spent many years in Alexandria, was one of the greatest orchid-growers in Europe. When I first visited the orchid-houses at Poggio Gherardo in the spring of 1891 under the guidance of Mrs Ross, they contained 7000 orchids, among which were 1300 different species. The blooms which I saw at that time in all their living beauty in the orchid-houses afterwards met my gaze in the form of paintings; for the orchids reared by her husband were painted by Mrs Ross, and some 750 of these watercolours are now in the Herbarium at Kew.

But the owners of this villa were no mere gardeners. Wanderers who had pilgrimed the world over might take refuge in the peaceful, olive-shaded atmosphere of Poggio Gherardo, over which hovers the spirit of

Boccaccio, and which is adorned with scenes from the 'Decameron.' Mrs Ross has put forward the bold hypothesis that the poet wrote part of his Decameron' here; indeed, she has had the courage to assume that he was not born in Paris, but in Cumignano, close to Florence. If that is so, the ground upon which we were standing had once been trodden by the feet of Boccaccio. If Pampinea, Fiammetta, and the other ladies and the three noble knights of the Decameron' ever really lived and told one another their tales in the days when the plague raged in the glorious city of Florence, the most beautiful of all the cities of Italy,' they may have done so at Poggio Gherardo, for Boccaccio's description seems as though it had been suggested by this villa. The cicadas may still be heard chirping among the olive-trees, as in Boccaccio's day; the green of meadows and gardens is still to be seen here; fresh water and cellars with costly wines' are still to be found; and ladies and gentlemen, assembled there in the 'nineties, still told one another all manner of merry tales.

Our hostess was descended from a line of women whose names belong not only to English literature, but are also closely connected with German literature. Mrs Ross's mother was Lady Duff Gordon, and her grandmother was Mrs Sarah Austin. Both mother and grandmother shone by virtue of their beauty and still more by virtue of their intellect. The portraits of these distinguished women hang in the drawing-room at Poggio Gherardo; at the time of my first visit both had long lain in their graves, the one in Egyptian, the other in English soil. In her portrait, painted by John Linnell, Mrs Sarah Austin, the friend of Guizot and of the philosophers Cousin and Barthélemy SaintHilaire (she used to call them, in jest, her Plato and Aristotle), appears as a sweet, fragile being with a gentle expression in which a refinement of worldly wisdom is evident. The delicate head is supported, as though in meditation, on her hand; curls stray across her brow. It is the picture of a noble and thoughtful woman. After contemplating it, it is easy to understand that this woman was not only a wise helpmate to her husband, but also that great thinkers such as John

Stuart Mill, Grote, and Macaulay, gladly drew from the well of her unfailing intelligence.

Beside her portrait hangs that of her daughter, Lucie Lady Duff Gordon, painted by Henry W. Phillips, and portraying a majestic, Juno-like presence, distinguished and calm as a statue. The great, beautiful eyes look dreamily out; luxuriant tresses crown the lofty brow. Next to this is the portrait of her daughter, our hostess, Mrs Ross, by Leighton. It is evident at first glance that the daughter has inherited her mother's features. But the daughter did not appear before us merely in effigy, and from her lips we heard many details of the lives of her mother and grandmother.

Many of the old pictures that used to adorn the house have since passed into other hands, but the villa still contains a number of drawings and water-colours by painters of the first rank, such as Watts and Leighton. Poggio Gherardo is a museum of relics, the presence of which inspired Mrs Ross with the idea of recalling former days by means of several delightful volumes of reminiscences. For the paintings which were afterwards to beautify her home in Florence had originally come from Esher and Weybridge, and conjured up before our eyes the forms and the environment of those two wonderful women, our hostess's mother and grandmother. In the corridor there hangs a portrait of Henry Hallam, a fine head with a noble brow. From the walls we were greeted by the fur-clad doctrinaire Guizot, by Grote the historian and Cousin the philosopher. In the drawing-room we paid our respects to other ancestors of our hostess, such as her greatgrandmother, Mrs John Taylor, a matron of rosy countenance, who, early in the last century, gathered about her at her home in Norwich the flower of the intellectual life of Norfolk, and divided her time between housekeeping and literature.

Again and again at Poggio Gherardo we turned the leaves of a large album, a collection of autographs such as is seldom to be seen. In this album not only was England represented, but Germany also, and that in the person of her greatest men. There were letters addressed to our hostess herself and to her mother and grandmother. All three have done good service in the

propagation of German literature in England. When still a young girl, Mrs Ross translated into English Sybel's book on the Crusades; her mother, Lady Duff Gordon, translated several of Niebuhr's works and also Heine's poems; by her translation of Ranke's History of the Popes,' her grandmother earned the approval of both Ranke and Macaulay.

Besides this, all three women have achieved original work. Mrs Austin wrote a book on 'German Life'; Lady Duff Gordon, 'Letters from the Cape' and 'Letters from Egypt'; and Mrs Ross is the author of several books on Italy and of a charming volume of memoirs, Three Generations of English Women,' in which appear descriptions of her great-grandmother, Mrs John Taylor, and of her grandmother and mother. She subsequently wrote sequels to this work in the two volumes Early Days Recalled' and 'The Fourth Generation: Reminiscences.' In these last-named books we encounter personalities who moved in London political and literary society in the middle of last century, a society which, in spite of all its marked national characteristics, was in touch with the finest intellectual elements of Parisian life. Members of the Orleans family were regarded with kindly patronage in this circle; and even the future Napoleon III was tolerated, although no more than tolerated. If Mrs Ross should ever have wished to visit the graves of her friends, or rather of the friends of her mother and grandmother, she would have had no difficulty in finding them, for many of these friends had been laid to rest in Westminster Abbey.

At Poggio Gherardo there are a number of letters addressed to Sarah Austin by distinguished German men and women, which have never been published, but appeared to me to be of great interest. Sarah Austin stands out in the intellectual history of England with a double title to renown: first as wife to and collaborator with the great jurist, John Austin, and then as an author and translator who rejoiced in passing on to English readers the finest productions of the German intellect. There was scarcely one German poet or thinker of renown during the decades immediately following Goethe's death with whom she had not corresponded.