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Art. 4.-A LITERARY SHRINE IN ITALY.

A VISITOR to Florence in the old days might well hav imagined himself transported to England. It was no necessary for him to travel to London and participat in a London season in order to see an assembly o members of the Upper and Lower Houses, lords an ladies, professors from Oxford and Cambridge, and sage from Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Florence had long bee a resort of the cultured English; they were almost a much at home on the banks of the Arno as on the bank of the Thames. And the centre of English social life i 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 undula tions 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

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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.

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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.

Contemporary with Carlyle, she seems to range herself with that representative of Goethe in England in the faculty of vice-representative. In Germany, however, where, with her husband, she used to visit such seats of learning as Berlin and Bonn, she was honoured as representing, as it were, in her person the Muse of England. When she went to Germany, she assembled about her the first thinkers of the day, such as the Humboldts, Ranke, Savigny, Schleiermacher, Niebuhr, Bunsen, the Grimms, and such women as Ottilie von Goethe and Bettina von Arnim.

By the book which appeared shortly after Goethe's death in 1833, Characteristics of Goethe, from the German of Falk von Müller and Others'-a threevolume work which is really a collection of translations, including her own translations of Goethe-Mrs Austin associated herself definitely with the circle of devotees at Weimar. It fell now to Goethe's daughter-in-law, Ottilie, the widow of Goethe's only son, to thank her in the name of the illustrious departed. Ottilie, in a letter from Frankfurt a/M, dated Sept. 14, 1833, began by reciting, in excuse for her silence, a catalogue of woes physical and moral. She then went on :

'But this is becoming a kind of autobiography and cannot possibly interest you. I can only add: Forgive me, and believe that I have realised to the full what you have done for me. I say "done for me," and I thank you for your interest in the life and works of my father-in-law and for all your efforts to gain him recognition in your country. No doubt you will agree with me that, so far as our feelings are concerned, the greatest benefit we women can receive is the advancement of the object of our love and admiration.'

Ottilie von Goethe had a special affection for Ireland and the Irish. In collaboration with an Irishman, Mr Des Voeux, she had translated Goethe's 'Torquato Tasso' into English. Hence she now wrote:

'You ask me what I consider most suitable for translation. I think that "Egmont," because of its reference to Ireland and the essentially Irish character of its hero, would be most universally understood, but I must add that I have already made the same suggestion to a friend. No, indeed I cannot advise you to raise a storm of indignation against yourself

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