Bept. 30. 1854.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



269 



'Novr this is the testimony of one who, in familiar 

 intercourse, had every opportunity of knowing 

 Brydone's character. It does not, it is true, amount 

 to direct proof of the fact questioned, but it is 

 .proof of the truthfulness of the narrator, and of the 

 belief of those best able to form an opinion, which 

 is the utmost the nature of the case now admits 

 of; and when, in addition to this, it is considered 

 that the charge is in itself highly improbable, as 

 Brydone, be his character what it might, would 

 not have ventured to publish a gross falsehood 

 with the certainty of being detected by his com- 

 panions in the ascent of Etna ; that it rests on the 

 loose information picked up by travellers in a 

 country where he had many enemies ; that it is, 

 as Lord Monson says ("N.&Q." Vol. ix., p. 496.), 

 unsupported by internal evidence derived from 

 the inaccuracies which a person describing a 

 scene he never witnessed could not escape ; and 

 that the correctness of his barometric observations 

 furnish strong corroborative evidence of the truth 

 of his narrative ; it will, I think, be seen that pro- 

 bability and credibility are altogether against the 

 accusation. 



A third case is brought forward by your corre- 

 spondent Traveller (Vol. ix., p. 432.), who says 

 he remembers to have read, in a work lay the pre- 

 sent Lord Monson, a denial of a statement of 

 Brydone's, " that he had seen a pyramid in the 

 gardens or grounds of some dignitary in Sicily 

 composed of chamberpots ! " Lord Monson has 

 already pointed out several of Traveller's mis- 

 takes respecting him, and it will be found that he 

 is equally incorrect respecting Brydone. The 

 latter, in his Tour, Let. XXIL, describes a village 

 near Palermo, belonging to a Prince Palagonia, 

 whose madness it was to adorn it with statues of 

 monsters and other absurdities. Of one room in 

 this villa he writes : 



" All the chimney-pieces, windows, and sideboards are 

 <;rowded with pyramids and pillars of teapots, candle- 

 cups, bowls, Clips, saucers, &c., strongly cemented together ; 

 some of these columns are not without their beauty : one of 

 them has a large china chamberpot for its base, and a circle 

 of pretty little flower-pots for its capital ; the shaft of the 

 column is upwards of four feet long, composed entirely of 

 teapots." 



Lord Monson, who visited the same place half 

 a century afterwards, in a note to his work, makes 

 the following allusion to Brydone's description : 



"_ I have since seen General Cockburn's work, in which 

 he justly attacks Brydone for exaggeration, giving at the 

 same time a correct description of "the palace. We, like 

 the general, in vain looked for the pillar of teapots with a 

 certain utensil for its capital." — Extracts from a Journal 

 hj W. J. Monson, p. 97. 



These are, I presume, the passages to which 

 Traveller intended to refer, though it is diffi- 

 cult, after its successive transformations, to re- 

 cognise the sideboard ornament mentioned by 

 Brydone. It is described by him as a column, 



with a china chamberpot for its base. Lord Mon- 

 son promotes the utensil from the base to the 

 capital. Traveller, not satisfied with this, con- 

 verts the column into a pyramid ; the pyramid 

 become too big to st-and inside a house, he trans- 

 fers to the " gardens or grounds," and when there, 

 he builds it up of chamberpots from top to bottom. 

 This is not the way to make out a charge of inac- 

 curacy and exaggeration ; and the memory of your 

 correspondent, to whom I do not impute any in- 

 tentional misrepresentation, has deceived him so 

 far respecting what he has read, that his recol- 

 lection of distant conversations cannot be received 

 as sufficient to prove the Tour " a book of Apo- 

 crypha." 



But to return to the case of exaggeration alleged 

 against Brydone. It will be found that the matter 

 is simply explained by General Cockburn, whose 

 work is referred to above. The general travelled 

 in Sicily upwards of forty years after Brydone. 

 He says, that when he visited the Palagonia villa, 

 its eccentric proprietor was dead, and that his 

 successor was so ashamed of him, that he had had 

 the monsters and singularities about the house 

 taken down and buried {Voyage to Cadiz, Gibral- 

 tar, Sfc, by Lieut.-Gen. Cockburn, vol. i. p. 374. 

 et seq.). It is true that though these facts are 

 told him by " many persons of veracity," he is 

 inclined to doubt them, and accuses Brydone of 

 giving an exaggerated account of the place ; but 

 his ordy reason for disbelief is a very ridiculous 

 one, namely^ that he saw no mark of any fixtures 

 having been removed. Why the monsters and 

 other things should be supposed to be fixtures, I 

 am unable to say, as they certainly are not so 

 described ; but, at all events, this column of tea- 

 pots cannot have been such (though the general, 

 by the way, by talking of it as a pilaster would 

 have it supposed so), and would probably be one 

 of the first things banished by the new proprietor. 

 This simple and obvious explanation is farther 

 confirmed by the fact, that Swinburne, another 

 traveller, who saw the villa only a few years after 

 Brydone, and during the life of the lunatic, de- 

 scribes it very much in the same terms, or, as 

 General Cockburn chooses to express it, is " almost 

 as extravagant as Brydone." 



These are, so far as I am aware (for I have not 

 seen the late Numbers of " N. & Q."), all the 

 cases brought forward against Brydone in your 

 columns. Though most of your correspondents 

 show a fair spirit towards this author, I cannot 

 but think that he has met with unfair treatment 

 from posterity in general. Easy credit has been 

 given by travellers, and others, to every aspersion 

 thrown on the character of one who, by those who 

 knew him, was ever considered an honourable and 

 truthful man. No account has been taken of the 

 prejudices raised against him by the freedom of 

 his writing ; and even his biographers, with un- 



