for the house and the furniture, you know it all." said
he; "but of the company you know positively nothing."

Byron understood them better than any other Englishman. He had his
admission _par la petite porte_--that is, he gained his knowledge
through his vices; and the Italians were so flattered to see a great
Milor adapt himself so readily to their lax notions and loose morality
that they grew frank and open with him.

His pretended--I suppose it was only pretended--dislike to England
disarmed them, too, of all distrust of him; and for the first time they
felt themselves judged by a man who did not think Charing Cross finer
than the Piazza del Popolo.

Byron's rank and station gained him a ready acceptance where the masses
of our travelling countrymen would not be received; for the Italians
love rank, and respect all its gradations. Even the republics were great
aristocracies; and in all their imitations of France they have never
affected "equality." They love splendour too, and display; and in all
their festivals you see something like an effort to recall a time when
their cities were the grandest and their citizens the proudest in all
Europe.

They are a very difficult people to understand. There are not so many
salient points in the Italian as in the German or the Frenchman; his
character is not so strongly accented; his traits are finer--his shades
of temperament more delicate.

Besides this, there is another difficulty: one is immensely aided in
their appreciation of a people by their lighter drama, which is in a
measure a reflex of the daily sayings and doings of those who listen to
it. Now the Italians have no comedy, or next to none; so barren are they
in this respect, that more than once have I asked myself, Can there be
any domesticity in a nation which has not mirrored itself on the stage?
What sort of a substance can that be that never had a shadow?

The immortal Goldoni, as they print him in all the play-bills, is
ineffably stupid, his characters ill drawn, his plots meagre, and his
dialogue as flat as the talk of a three-volume novel. The only palpable
lesson derivable from him is, that all ranks and classes stand pretty
much on an equality, and that as regards modes of expression the count
and his coachman are precisely on a level. There is scarcely a trait of
humour in these pieces--never, by any accident, anything bordering on
wit. The characters talk the veriest commonplaces, and announce the