THE aUENARD GROUP. 153 



Would we could hit off, h, la Sneyder, in a pen-and- 

 ink sketch, a true life portrait of this striking fish, re- 

 exhibiting him to the reader, as we have ourself seen 

 him in his glory, fat and well-favoured, with sleek sides 

 lustrous from the sheen of new-burnished scales ; now 

 gliding in swan-like dignity through the rippling lymph, 

 with the composed nonchalance of a favourite who has 

 nothing to fear ; and now, as whim or a love of display 

 seized him, bounding with a sudden, loud, echoing plash, 

 several feet out of the water, suddenly to furl his wide- 

 spread fans, and plunge, like a falling star, to the bot- 

 tom. Conscious, however, of possessing no such Dutch 

 artistic capability, we shall not even attempt a likeness 

 we must needs fail in, but proceed instead to sketch the 

 place of an introduction, chronicled with much compla- 

 cency in an old Naples note-book, of which ' ne sit ne- 

 fas' to say that, of the many ceremonials of the sort 

 with other ' distinguished foreigners,' implied in a seven 

 years' continuous residence in the south, few indeed 

 either made so pleasing an impression at the time, or 

 have since afforded so agreeable a retrospect as this, to 

 our buoyant and lively, though, we must admit, rather 

 bouncing and volatile acquaintance — the flying gur- 

 nard. 



Somewhere about a mile out of Naples, on the Baian 

 side of the bay, halfway up that broiling and dusty, but 

 beautiful and quite descriptionless road, the Strada 

 Nuova, with its Kicra-^peK o-)(6ai •yX^pd r aKra iroKva-To^ 

 (jivXai ; above where the last faint fremitus of sound 

 rises from the gurgling rocks ; where the ' nauticum ke- 

 leusma' of the port, and the deafening discords of the 

 Chiaja, harmonized by distance, and blended by bland 

 zephyrs, fall in softest symphony on the lulled listening 

 ear, peacefully and unjarringly as the wave-borne whis- 

 per or the buzz from a reposing hive, stand the high- 

 perched viUa and precipitous vineyards of the Mar- 



H 3 



