1831.3 Paragraphs from a Traveller's Portfolio. 305 



luckily had nothing to do with the road, which had no other Macadam 

 than sorne earthquake, or burst of water at the time when the fountains 

 of the great deep were broken up, and Noah cii'cumriavi'gated the world 

 alone. But no English plantation was ever thicker of " firm and fragrant 

 leaf." The road was a bower of myrtles ; which, in this region, like a 

 boarding-school Miss transformed into a city-wife, lose at once their 

 sentiment and their shape, and are fine, broad, flourishing specimens of 

 '^congeniality of circumstances;" with a hundred plants and shrubs 

 besides, with a hundred French names, and all breathing out fresh per- 

 fume on every bird's wing that rustled through them before me j and the 

 ground was a bed of thyme and flowery turf, such as all the art of man 

 could never have raised, within the precincts of the Tuilleries. 



■"" I had here three things that might fill any lover of the lovely in natm*e 

 with food for the next ten years — memory, perfect solitude, and fragrance, 

 undefiled by the infernal cigarrerie that infects France by circles of 

 longitude and latitude, and makes every mouth a chimney. In one of 

 the most glorious of all possible sunsets, I had neai'ly forgotten, what is 

 indispensable to the true delight of the true tourist, that the very spot 

 where I sat had been the scene of some of the most villanous perfor- 

 mances of robbers — I should apologize, banditti — that ever figured in the 

 history of the stiletto ; and that on the very spot against which 1 leaned 

 my telescope, to follow the little barks that were now floating up and 



'flown the Mediterranean like flies in the sunbeam, was erected a cross 

 for the murder of a count from Naples, with liis whole suite,' travelling 

 to espouse some opulent heiress of the gay land of the Provencals. I 

 was making a sketch of the mountains that lay tost round me, with the 

 wildness of clouds after a storm, and almost with their varying lights, and 

 shades ; gold, green, and purple, were beginning to glow on my paper ; 



'file sea beneath was emerging in a long sweep of azure, the sun lying in 

 a vermeil pavilion in the corner, and the moon a crescent, bright as the 

 diamond circlet on the forehead of JNIadame la Marechale de En-bon- 

 Jpoint, and brighter than any tiling else in the world but her eyes, when I 



'was startled by a rusthng near me. I sprang up: — I was, however, 

 gradually re-assured by the sound of a voice, singing some adventure of 

 Roland ; the prince of the preux-chevaliers could not have been invoked 

 by a bandit, and I recovered from my " sense of the stiletto." But I 



'was in the land of the Troubadours ; the minstrel pushed forward through 

 llie shrubs, and I was prepared to honour the art of poetry. — He was 

 the scullion of the French tavern, come out to catch frogs for a fricassee ! 

 Ah, Romance ! another such, a blow would be mortal. 





Nm .Series:— Voh.XU. -iio. G9. 2K ' J ^ ^^y^UMiA/. 



