e and learn, with results now and then not
a little amusing. The consciousness of wealth disposed him to
intellectual generosity; standing on so firm a pedestal, he did not
mind admitting that others might have a wider outlook. Italy was an
impecunious country; personally and patriotically he had a pleasure in
recognizing the fact, and this made it easier for him to concede the
points of superiority which he had heard attributed to her. Jacob was
rigidly sincere; he had no touch of the snobbery which shows itself in
sham admiration. If he liked a thing he said so, and strongly; if he
felt no liking where his guide-book directed him to be enthusiastic, he
kept silence and cudgelled his brains.

Equally ingenuous was his wife, but with results that argued a
shallower nature. Mrs. Bradshaw had the heartiest and frankest contempt
for all things foreign; in Italy she deemed herself among a people so
inferior to the English that even to discuss the relative merits of the
two nations would have been ludicrous. Life "abroad" she could not take
as a serious thing; it amused or disgusted her, as the case might
be--never occasioned her a grave thought. The proposal of this
excursion, when first made to her, she received with mockery; when she
saw that her husband meant something more than a joke, she took time to
consider, and at length accepted the notion as a freak which possibly
would be entertaining, and might at all events be indulged after a
lifetime of sobriety. Entertainment she found in abundance. Though
natural beauty made little if any appeal to her, she interested herself
greatly in Vesuvius, regarding it as a serio-comic phenomenon which
could only exist in a country inhabited by childish triflers. Her
memory was storing all manner of Italian absurdities--everything being
an absurdity which differed from English habit and custom--to furnish
her with matter for mirthful talk when she got safely back to
Manchester and civilization. With respect to the things which Jacob was
constraining himself to study--antiquities, sculptures, paintings,
stored in the Naples museum--her attitude was one of jocose
indifference or of half-tolerant contempt. Puritanism diluted with
worldliness and a measure of common sense directed her views of art in
general. Works such as the Farnese Hercules and the group about the
Bull she looked upon much as she regarded the wall-scribbling of some
dirty-minded urchin; the robust matron is not horri