unt D'Orsay, I have been beset in I don't know how many ways.
First of all, I went to Marseilles and came back to Genoa. Then I moved
to the Peschiere. Then some people, who had been present at the
Scientific Congress here, made a sudden inroad on that establishment,
and overran it. Then they went away, and I shut myself up for a month,
close and tight, over my little Christmas book, "The Chimes." All my
affections and passions got twined and knotted up in it, and I became as
haggard as a murderer, long before I wrote "The End." When I had done
that, like "_The_ man of Thessaly," who having scratched his eyes out in
a quickset hedge, plunged into a bramble-bush to scratch them in again,
I fled to Venice, to recover the composure I had disturbed. From thence
I went to Verona and to Mantua. And now I am here--just come up from
underground, and earthy all over, from seeing that extraordinary tomb in
which the dead saint lies in an alabaster case, with sparkling jewels
all about him to mock his dusty eyes, not to mention the twenty-franc
pieces which devout votaries were ringing down upon a sort of sky-light
in the cathedral pavement above, as if it were the counter of his
heavenly shop. You know Verona? You know everything in Italy, _I_ know.
The Roman Amphitheatre there delighted me beyond expression. I never saw
anything so full of solemn ancient interest. There are the
four-and-forty rows of seats, as fresh and perfect as if their occupants
had vacated them but yesterday--the entrances, passages, dens, rooms,
corridors, the numbers over some of the arches. An equestrian troop had
been there some days before, and had scooped out a little ring at one
end of the arena, and had their performances in that spot. I should
like to have seen it, of all things, for its very dreariness. Fancy a
handful of people sprinkled over one corner of the great place (the
whole population of Verona wouldn't fill it now); and a spangled
cavalier bowing to the echoes, and the grass-grown walls! I climbed to
the topmost seat, and looked away at the beautiful view for some
minutes; when I turned round, and looked down into the theatre again, it
had exactly the appearance of an immense straw hat, to which the helmet
in the Castle of Otranto was a baby; the rows of seats representing the
different plaits of straw, and the arena the inside of the crown. I had
great expectations of Venice, but they fell immeasurably short of the
wonderful reality. The