cientious man, anxious to do his duty, and desirous of the
happiness and well being of his people. But he was by no means a wise
or enlightened man. It could hardly be said that he was popular or
beloved by his subjects at the time when I first knew Florence. The
Tuscans were very far better off than any other Italians at that time,
and they were fully conscious that they were so. But this superiority
was justly credited to the wise rule of the grand duke's father and
grandfather, rather than to any merit of his own. Yet he was liked in
a sort of way--I am afraid I must say in a contemptuous sort of way.
The general notion was that he was what is generally described by the
expressive term "a poor creature." He probably was so, in truth, from
his birth upward. It was said--and I believe with truth--that he had
been in his childish years reared with the greatest difficulty; and
strange as it may seem, it is, I believe, a fact that a wet-nurse made
an important part of the establishment of the prince at the Pitti
Palace till he was about twenty years old. How far physiologists may
deem that such an abnormal circumstance may have been influential in
producing a diathesis of mind and body deficient in vigor, energy and
"hard grit" of any kind, I do not know. But if that is what such a
bringing-up may be expected to produce, then the expectation was in
the case in question certainly justified. Nevertheless, Italians had
been for so many generations and centuries taught by bitter experience
to consider kings and princes of all sorts as malevolent and
maleficent scourges of humanity that a sovereign who really did no
harm to any one was, after a fashion, as I have said, popular.
Accessibility is always one sure means of making a sovereign
acceptable to large classes of his subjects; and nothing could be
easier than to gain access to the presence of Leopold II., grand duke
of Tuscany. A little anecdote of an occurrence that took place at the
time when Lord Holland, to the regret of everybody in Florence,
English or Italian, ceased to be the representative of England at the
grand ducal court, will show the sort of thing that used to prevail in
the matter of the admission of foreigners to the Pitti Palace.

English travelers on the continent of Europe are, and have been for
many years, as it is hardly necessary to state, a very motley and
heterogeneous crowd. The same thing may be said of American travelers
now, but it was not so