33 8 MORE POT-POURRI 



planting. Sometimes plants are put in entirely out of 

 character with the rest of a garden ; another time trees 

 are planted which, when they grow well, entirely obscure 

 the view or shut out the summer sunset. One curious 

 anachronism I have noticed is that an artist in painting a 

 scene for the background of a Greek or Eoman play intro- 

 duces American plants in his foreground ! So many places 

 are merely spoilt in an effort to improve them, and this is 

 especially the case all round Florence. 



Of all that I have read about Florence since my 

 return I think nothing is more attractively clever or 

 more full of character, both of the place and the writer, 

 than a chapter called ' A Florentine Mosaic ' in ' Tuscan 

 Cities,' a little volume by W. D. Howells, the American. 

 It is published in the ' English Library ' series at Leipzig. 

 Half the book is about Florence. It is a perfectly 

 charming mixture of humour and history, bewildered 

 tourist and most cultivated man of letters. It takes one 

 so instantly into the very heart and core of the Middle 

 Ages that one purrs with a delightful feeling of 'Oh, 

 certainly ! Yes, I always did know all about it.' Popes 

 and Parties, Blacks and Whites, the ins and the outs, etc. 

 Art, which generally forms such a large portion of a book 

 about Florence, is left out altogether, or at any rate is 

 only like a brilliant tapestry background to his living, 

 moving figures. It is so clear and so comprehensive that 

 it satisfies the idle and whets the appetite of those who 

 wish to know more. Mr. Howells has a masterly way 

 of sketching, and his appreciation of the cloisters is so 

 real that, to my mind, he makes one feel it would be 

 worth while to go all the way to Florence to see them 

 and nothing else. Cloisters are, perhaps, the most 

 characteristic things in Italy. He thus writes : 



'The thing that was novel to me, who found the 

 churches of 1883 in Florence so like the churches of 1863 



