AT GENOA xlv 



wise too full. He found his fellow-students l not such a bad set of 

 chaps,' and preferred the Piedmontese before the Genoese ; but 

 I suspect he mixed not very freely with either. Not only were 

 his days filled with university work, but his spare hours were fully 

 dedicated to the arts under the eye of a beloved task-mistress. 

 He worked hard and well in the art school, where he obtained a 

 silver medal ' for a couple of legs the size of life drawn from one 

 of Raphael's cartoons.' His holidays were spent in sketching ; 

 his evenings, when they were free, at the theatre. Here at the 

 opera he discovered besides a taste for a new art, the art of 

 music ; and it was, he wrote, ' as if he had found out a heaven 

 on earth.' ' I am so anxious that whatever he professes to 

 know, he should really perfectly possess,' his mother wrote, 

 1 that I spare no pains ; ' neither to him nor to myself, she might 

 have added. And so when he begged to be allowed to learn 

 the piano, she started him with characteristic barbarity on the 

 scales ; and heard in consequence c heart-rending groans ' and 

 saw * anguished claspings of hands ' as he lost his way among 

 their arid intricacies. 



In this picture of the lad at the piano, there is something, The lad 

 for the period, girlish. He was indeed his mother's boy ; and an< !jJ 11 r s 

 it was fortunate his mother was not altogether feminine. She 

 gave her son a womanly delicacy in morals, to a man's taste 

 to his own taste in later life too finely spun, and perhaps more 

 elegant than healthful. She encouraged him besides in drawing- 

 room interests. But in other points her influence was manlike. 

 Filled with the spirit of thoroughness, she taught him to make 

 of the least of these accomplishments a virile task ; and the 

 teaching lasted him through life. Immersed as she was in the 

 day's movements and buzzed about by leading Liberals, she 

 handed on to him her creed in politics : an enduring kindness 

 for Italy, and a loyalty, like that of many clever women, to the 

 Liberal party with but small regard to men or measures. This 

 attitude of mind used often to disappoint me in a man so fond 

 of logic ; but I see now how it was learned from the bright 

 eyes of his mother and to the sound of the cannonades of 1848. 

 To some of her defects, besides, she made him heir. Kind as 



c 2 



