in the Toledo it has given place to much
finer vehicles. Slight buggies, which take you anywhere for half a
franc, are the favorite means of public conveyance, and the private
turn-outs are of every description and degree. Indeed, all the
Neapolitans take to carriages, and the Strand in London at six o'clock
in the evening is not a greater jam of wheels than the Toledo in the
afternoon. Shopping feels the expansive influence of the out-of-doors
life, and ladies do most of it as they sit in their open carriages
at the shop-doors, ministered to by the neat-handed shopmen. They are
very languid ladies, as they recline upon their carriage cushions;
they are all black-eyed, and of an olive pallor, and have gloomy rings
about their fine eyes, like the dark-faced dandies who bow to them.
This Neapolitan look is very curious, and I have not seen it elsewhere
in Italy; it is a look of peculiar pensiveness, and comes, no doubt,
from the peculiarly heavy growth of lashes which fringes the lower
eyelid. Then there is the weariness in it of all peoples whose summers
are fierce and long.

As the Italians usually dress beyond their means, the dandies of
Naples are very gorgeous. If it is now, say, four o'clock in the
afternoon, they are all coming down the Toledo with the streams
of carriages bound for the long drive around the bay. But our
foot-passers go to walk in the beautiful Villa Reale, between this
course and the sea. The Villa is a slender strip of Paradise, a mile
long; it is rapture to walk in it, and it comes, in description, to
be a garden-grove, with feathery palms, Greekish temples, musical
fountains, white statues of the gods, and groups of fair girls in
spring silks. If I remember aright, the sun is always setting on the
bay, and you cannot tell whether this sunset is cooled by the water
or the water is warmed by the golden light upon it, and upon the city,
and upon all the soft mountain-heights around.

III.

Walking westward through the whole length of the Villa Reale, and
keeping with the crescent shore of the bay, you come, after a while,
to the Grot of Posilippo, which is not a grotto but a tunnel cut for
a carriage-way under the hill. It serves, however, the purpose of a
grotto, if a grotto has any, and is of great length and dimness, and
is all a-twinkle night and day with numberless lamps. Overlooking the
street which passes into it is the tomb of Virgil, and it is this
you have come to see. To reach it,