PASQUALE; A TALE OF ITALY.

I PASSED the winter of the year 18- at Rome. Those who, like myself, had been living in the Low Countries, with their eight months of Invierno and four of Inferno, can alone estimate the delights of a residence in a climate, where there is rarely either frost or snow, where the air is constantly refreshed by genial showers, and the sky instead of being à la Ruysdael and Van Goen is of that deep blue, that pure aqua-marine which we observe in the landscapes of Titian and Sempesta, and which appears to those who have never been in Italy to exceed nature. An artist and at Rome I may be excused for speaking of painting.

I lodged in a house hanging on the side of the Pincian, and overlooking the Piazza de Spagna, a quarter of the city principally inhabited by foreigners, especially by our own countrymen; who wherever they are almost form a societé apart. Among those with whom I be came intimate was a general officer who had served with distinguished reputation in the campaigns of the Peninsular War, and suf fering from his wounds, had come with his daughter rather to enjoy the benefit of the warm South, than to mix much in the gaieties of the place.

Being an invalid like himself and unable to take much exercise, I had selected and fortunately found a spot, where I could see, as in a map stretched before me, the seven hills; trace those ruins that still attest the grandeur of the Mistress of the World, feed my imagination with her former glories; and enjoy the magnificent spectacle of nearly the whole city, its palaces, and spires, and domes of innumerable temples, with the greatest of them separated as it were from the rest by the yellow Tiber, whose course though hidden from the eye was ever present to the mind. I have seen many enchanting points of view, but perhaps that from my windows, to the painter, the scholar, the antiquary, the devoté, might leave nothing to desire. After I had gazed on it for four months, it was still new to me.

General was during three of these my constant guest; and his amiable and unaffected manners and almost paternal kindness, for I was then beginning life, endeared him to me like a father. He was a man of seventy-six years of age, short in person, and with little of military air in his appearance; but it was in the morale, rather than the physique, that we might recognise the soldier. His countenance was ordinarily composed and placid, notwithstanding the pain to which an unextracted had subjected him at every variation of temperature. He spoke of the exploits of the army in which he had had a command with that modest diffidence which sits so well on bravery-of himself, I have ever thought and spoken of him as completely coming up to my beau-ideal of a British officer.

never.

His daughter, for I must now speak of her, was an old maid of forty, and in person, manners, and acquirements, altogether unworthy of her father. She was short, and much freckled with the small pox; her lips were pinched, and her features contracted, by habitual discon tent and acidity of temper, giving her an expression almost of malig. nity.

No character in the School for Scandal had a tongue more ve.

nomous. Her remarks on her own sex were cutting and caustic, and she looked with an evil and jealous eye on those attentions which the young and the lovely, for Rome was never so full of belle Inglese as that year, received. But if they were not spared, she made still more the theme of her invective the manners of the Roman dames, among whom she did not forget the names of Madame M. M. W. and the still beautiful Pauline Borghese, a living model that revealed the finest forms in the galleries of the Vatican and the Capitol. The cracked voice issuing from her thin and pale lips still ring in my

ears.

But the general, though not altogether blind to her defects which long habit had taught him to palliate or overlook, was the kindest and most indulgent of parents. She was his only child, to whom his wife had died in giving birth, and this circumstance perhaps contributed to endear her the more, and form as it were a double link to his af fections.

Having now introduced you to these two characters, I must draw a third, and the most important one of the piece.

Shortly after the general's arrival at Geneva the preceding summer, he had taken into his service a courier of the name of Pasquale. What his previous history may be or from what part of Italy he came, I know not; but his person was well known to me, from his having been frequently the bearer of notes or messages. He was a dark handsome man, with enormous whiskers and moustachios. Shakspeare says, that black men are pearls in ladies eyes. Geneva being the key as it were to Italy is the great resort of servants out of place; and Pasquale had produced the certificate of an English gentleman-probably forged, or obtained from one of his compatriots who are always ready to accommodate each other in that way. His office was not a menial one. His employment consisted in keeping the accounts, and in ordering post-horses when his master travelled. But Pasquale had chosen the appointment after shrewd observation, and with the tact and knowledge which his worldly experience had given him. He had judged that the general with his wounds and seventy years had not long to live. He supposed him to be rich, and saw that he had an only daughter. True, she was neither young nor gifted with any of the qualities to inspire or consolidate affection!-to make it crystallize, to use the expression of a witty French writer. But was he young himself? Yes! but many years of wretchedness and destitution, perhaps of remorse, had left the traces behind, and added at least ten years to his appearance, if not to his age. Besides, he was a courier-a servant; and yet he thought of Rousseau and Madame de Warrens-of Bergami- In short, the attempt was worth making. She was as good a partie as he could expect, and once obtained d;

"He had

Within the secrets of his power a philtre,
Surer than any instrument of death
In giving death."

It is supposed that it was during a Swiss tour that Pasquale first made an attack on this redoubtable fortress. The infirmities of the general confining him to the main roads, his daughter with her forty years and unpersonable person, without scandal might dispense with a chaperon. In the course of the summer she crossed, à mulet, the

Tete Noir and several other Alpine passes; when by his attentions and kind solicitude for the preservation of her valuable life, he con. trived to insinuate himself into the good graces of this antiquated Amazon. His knowledge of several languages, his talent for music, and his other attainments did not escape observation and admiration; and before they had reached the Simplon, an intimacy was established between them which left the lady nothing to desire, and the courier nothing to wish, but the death of the father, which however in a natural way seemed yet distant. It may be supposed that the person of Miss was the least of her attractions in the eyes of Pasquale. He was aware that the general, a man of high family and connections, would spurn the idea of a courier's marrying his daughter; indeed he knew the world too well to risk the step of eloping, as he might have done, with Miss, the inevitable consequences of which would have been her being disinherited and cast off for ever: but the general once removed, he had the lady's solemn engagement which no doubt would have been kept, to share with him her hand and fortune.

The general however still lingered on: indeed his health so far from deteriorating improved under the influence of a milder climate; and Pasquale impatient at delay resolved to dispatch the ill-fated officer. To have poured into his cup a philtre at once to extinguish life would have proved too dangerous an experiment; would have excited suspicions, and suspicions which might have been fatal to his hopes; he therefore resorted to a mode of treatment equally certain, but more slow in its effects.

There is a poison, the art of composing which was once supposed to have been lost with the celebrated and infamous Madame de Brin villiers, but unhappily without good reason. It is called the Aqua Tofana. It is perfectly limpid and of the colour of water, and strange to say almost tasteless. On the Continent, it is the custom to place before each person at dinner a caraffe of the wine of the country which is drunk in tumblers, as you drink malt liquor at home. The general daily finished one of these, which it was the province of Pasquale, though he did not serve at table, daily to supply, and into this caraffe he daily infused a certain number of drops of this Aqua Tofana-a sufficient quantity in short to effect his diabolical purpose. The daughter drank no wine, and had she even taken a single glass, it would have been attended with little or no danger.

Does not the soul shrink back within itself, and shudder at the deliberate, the cold-blooded, the homœopathic villany of so horrible an act-so savage an atrocity? The human mind may in its casuistry seek to find some justification for Zanga the Moor, for murders committed in the madness, the frenzy, the delirium of passion, or where unutterable wrongs, like those of Beatrice Cenci, drove the sufferer to unutterable deeds to anticipate the wrath of Heaven long delayed; but this--it is like dissecting the living body, destroying life inch by inch in the torture.

It was not long before the general's appearance indicated a change. I was shocked to observe by his hollow eye, and the black circles round them, by his flushed cheek, his burning hand, and quickened pulse, by a nervous irritability unusual to him, and by a short dry cough, that some new and secret disease was seriously undermining his constitution. He complained of thirst which nothing could as

suage, insomnolency, restlessness, as if by the exhaustion of outward nature; if he fell into a heavy slumber, it was troubled by horrid dreams and visions, from which he would start in agony, and though naturally free from superstitious terrors, his heated imagination peopled the air with phantoms, which in his lucid intervals, for he often wandered, he described with such circumstantial minuteness, that the pictures he drew seemed to have a dread reality in them, beyond that of this world. No wonder then that he could not endure solitude. With the affectionate kindness of his nature to all about him, the old man would call for Pasquale, would thank him for his attentions-praise him for his faithful service-commend the sherbet that he made, and received it from no other hand but his.

And yet during the day, the poor general took his walk on the Pincian, ate with his usual appetite, and, alas! drank his accustomed flask of Orvieto. But at night the demons returned to haunt his couch. His physician was a young Englishman, who had just finished his studies, and taken out his diploma at one of the Scotch Universities. But though not deficient in talent, he was unacquainted with the treatment of the disorders peculiar to the climate or the remedies to be adopted. This case however of the general's might well baffle his skill, and set at nought all theories.

My poor friend at length consented, though too late, to send for the most eminent of the Roman practitioners, and scarcely had the patient finished giving him an account of his symptoms, when without hesitation he said, "Signore, siete invenenato!" I was present, and the gene. ral might well be thunderstruck at this hasty and indiscreet announcement. The doctor not only asserted that the malady was occasioned by poison, but even stated the peculiar poison administered to him; and added that there was no antidote which could counteract its deadly and mortal effects.

The first step was to send for the police, and Pasquale and his laquais were examined, but nothing was elicited by the procès verbal. The suspicion was however so strong against them, that they were thrown into prison to await their trial.

In the mean time the general's health suffered an hourly yet gradual deterioration; and life flickered in his wasting frame, like a lamp that is losing its vivifying oil. It was a melancholy sight, heart-rending to those who knew and loved him as I did, to perceive my poor dear friend day after day hanging suspended over the brink of the grave. The consciousness of his approaching end was of itself sufficiently agonising, but it was rendered doubly so by the tortures that accompanied it, the fire within that could not be extinguished-a vitality of death.

Thus perished General . He who had escaped the shock of many a battle-field, who had passed unharmed through showers of balls, was doomed to fall ingloriously and miserably by the hand of an assassin.

It was the Settimana Santa, and his funeral was attended not only by all the English, but most of the foreigners of distinction then assembled to witness its imposing ceremonies. The melancholy cortége took up its long line in the Piazzi de Spagna, preceded by the catafalque, at nine o'clock in the evening, to convey those remains which should have found a distinguished place among the heroes of his country, to the new burial-ground which had been unwillingly accorded, through

the intermediation of Cardinal Gonsalis, by Pope Pius to us heretics. That cemetery being at the farther extremity of the city, the procession would have to traverse its whole length.

You may form some notion of what a funeral by torch-light must be in Rome. And such a funeral! I was never sensible of the marvellous beauty of the ancient statues till I saw them in the halls of the Vatican thus illuminated; but still more sublime was the Eternal City thus seen and on such an occasion.

We viewed on all sides the tottering porticos, the isolated columns, which told of the ravages of the Goths and Vandals,-those hordes who, after gorging themselves with the blood of the vanquished; those barbarians who insatiate of slaughter, when they had nothing living left to destroy, vented their jealous rage on those creations of genius, which like the spectres of their victims seemed to stand in mockery and defiance. Every gorgeous fane, every triumphal arch, every colossal peristyle seemed an insult to those savages, a reproach to their ignorance, a record of their shame. They could shatter the mighty giantess, tear her limb from limb; but the Torso, like that of the Vatican, the admiration of Michael Angelo in his blindness, yet remained to suggest what he had been. They could melt the Roman cement, enwrap her domes in flames, throw down her statues from their heights that frowned on them, and when tired of their labour of destruction cumber the bed of the Tiber with her mutilated fragments; but happily the Iconoclasts had other employment in their sacrilegious hands, other neighbouring cities to ravage,-the abodes of other gods to deface.

It was impossible for the coldest, the most insensible and ignorant of our train, to pass without emotion these monuments of Roman great. ness, seen as they were by the broad effulgence of the torches, that flashing against them reflected their vast outline or individual features, made more distinct by the deep shade, the solid pitchy darkness, in which the background was steeped.

Neither my companion nor myself spoke or expressed our admiration; it was too profound for words. Self absorbed, we allowed our ideas to wander, lost in the past. We neither gave the buildings names, nor suggested doubts as to the period of their construction,-whether they were of the time of Julius Cæsar or of the Antonines.

Nothing to me is so delightful as the mystery, the vagueness that hangs over most of what remains of Rome; for it is this very scepti cism and uncertainty that allow the imagination to revel in a world of dreams, fantasies, and visions, each more enchanting than the last. What is so sublime in poetry as some passage which is made intelligi. ble to us by a sort of divination, not from the construction of the words themselves, but from some profound and metaphysical idea that defined them in the author? But is all poetry to be compared with a nameless ruin? We fill up the breaches that barbarism and time have made, we people the steps of the portico with crowds rushing up them to the festival or the sacrifice,- we clothe in their classical costumes their priests, their senators, their patricians, their half-naked citizens, -we hear their shouts before the doors,-we listen to the brazen chariots ringing on the pavement, the clang of trumpets that announce their consuls surrounded by the lictors or tribunes:-we overlcap the view of ages, and almost forgetting what we are, identify ourselves with the throng.

Awaking from this reverie, I could scarce recall my scattered