University of Virginia Library

65. LETTER LXV.

I have been all day at “the races.” The king of
Naples, who has a great admiration for everything
English, has abandoned the Italian custom of running
horses without riders through the crowded street, and
has laid out a magnificent course on the summit of a
broad hill overlooking the city on the east. Here he
astonishes his subjects with ridden races, and it was
to see one of the best of the season, that the whole
fashionable world of Naples poured out to the campo
this morning. The show of equipages was very brilliant,
the dashing liveries of the various ambassadors,
and the court and nobles of the kingdom, showing on
the bright green-sward to great effect. I never saw a
more even piece of turf, and it was fresh in the just-born
vegetation of spring. The carriages were drawn
up in two lines, nearly half round the course, and for
an hour or two before the races, the king and his brother,
Prince Carlo, rode up and down between with the
royal suite, splendidly mounted, the monarch himself
upon a fiery gray blood horse, of uncommon power
and beauty. The director was an Aragonese nobleman,
cousin to the king, and as perfect a specimen of
the Spanish cavalier as ever figured in the pages of
romance. He was mounted on a Turkish horse, snow-white,
and the finest animal I ever saw; and he carried
all eyes with him, as he dashed up and down, like
a meteor. I like to see a fine specimen of a man, as I
do a fine picture, or an excellent horse, and I think I
never saw a prettier spectacle of its kind, than this
wild steed from the Balkan and his handsome rider.

The king is tall, very fat, but very erect, of a light
complexion, and a good horseman, riding always in
the English style, trotting and rising in his stirrup. —
(He is about twenty-three, and so surprisingly like a
friend of mine in Albany, that the people would raise
their hats to them indiscriminately, I am sure.)
Prince Charles is smaller and less kingly in his appearance,
dresses carelessly and ill, and is surrounded
always in public with half a dozen young Englishmen.
He is said to have been refused lately by the niece of
the wealthiest English nobleman in Italy, a very beautiful
girl of eighteen, who was on the ground to-day
in a chariot and four.

The horses were led up and down — a delicate, fine-limbed
sorrel mare, and a dark chestnut horse, compact
and wiry — both English. The bets were arranged,
the riders weighed, and, at the beat of a bell, off
they went like arrows. Oh what a beautiful sight!
The course was about a mile round, and marked with
red flags at short distances; and as the two flying
creatures described the bright green circle, spread out
like greyhounds, and running with an ease and grace
that seemed entirely without effort, the king dashed
across the field followed by the whole court; the Turkish
steed of Don Giovanni restrained with difficulty
in the rear, and leaping high in the air at every bound,
his nostrils expanded, and his head thrown up with
the peculiar action of his race, while his snow-white
mane and tail flew with every hair free to the wind.
I had, myself, a small bet upon the sorrel. It was
nothing, a pair of gloves with a lady, but as the horses
came round, the sorrel a whip's length a-head, and
both shot by like the wind, scarce touching the earth
apparently, and so even in their speed that the rider
in blue might have kept his hand on the other's back,
the excitement became breathless. Away they went
again, past the starting post, pattering, pattering on
with their slender hoofs, the sorrel still keeping her
ground, and a thousand bright lips wishing the graceful
creature success. Half way round the blue jacket
began to whip. The sorrel still held her way, and I
felt my gloves to be beyond peril. The royal cortége
within the ring spurred across at the top of their speed
to the starting post. The horses came on — their nostrils
open and panting, bounding upon the way with
the same measured leaps a little longer and more
eager than before; the rider of the sorrel leaning over
the neck of his horse with a loose rein, and his whip
hanging untouched from his wrist. Twenty leaps
more! With every one the rider of the chestnut gave
the fine animal a blow. The sorrel sprang desperately

on, every nerve strained to the jump, but at the instant
that they passed the carriage in which I stood, the
chestnut was developing his wiry frame in tremendous
leaps, and had already gained on his opponent the
length of his head. They were lost in the crowd that
broke instantly into the course behind them, and in a
moment after a small red flag was waved from the
stand. My favorite had lost!

The next race was ridden by a young Scotch nobleman,
and the son of the former French ambassador,
upon the horses with which they came to the ground.
It was a match made up on the spot. The Frenchman
was so palpably better mounted, that there was a
general laugh when the ground was cleared and the
two gentlemen spurred up and down to show themselves
as antagonists. The Parisian himself stuffed
his white handkerchief in his bosom, and jammed
down his hat upon his head with a confident laugh,
and among the ladies there was scarce a bet upon the
grave Scotchman, who borrowed a stout whip, and
rode his bony animal between the lines with a hard
rein and his feet set firmly in the stirrups. The
Frenchman generously gave him every advantage, beginning
with the inside of the ring. The bell struck,
and the Scotchman drove his spurs into his horse's
flanks and started away, laying on with his whip most
industriously. His opponent followed, riding very
gracefully, but apparently quite sure that he could
overtake him at any moment, and content for the first
round with merely showing himself off to the best
advantage. Round came Sawney, twenty leaps
ahead, whipping unmercifully still; the blood of his
hired hack completely up, and himself as red in the
face as an alderman, and with his eye fixed only on
the road. The long-tailed bay of the Frenchman
came after, in handsome style, his rider sitting complacently
upright, and gathering up his reins for the
first time to put his horse to his speed. The Scotchman
flogged on. The Frenchman had disdained to
take a whip, but he drove his heels hard into his horse's
sides soon after leaving the post, and leaned forward
quite in earnest. The horses did remarkably well,
both showing much more bottom than was expected.
On they came, the latter gaining a little and working
very hard. Sawney had lost his hat, and his red hair
streamed back from his redder face; but flogging and
spurring, with his teeth shut and his eyes steadily
fixed on the road, he kept the most of his ground and
rode away. They passed me a horse's length apart,
and the Scotchman's whip flying to the last, disappeared
beyond me. He won the race by a couple of
good leaps at least. The king was very much amused,
and rode off laughing heartily, and the discomfited
Frenchman came back to his party with a very ill-concealed
dissatisfaction.

A very amusing race followed between two mid-shipmen
from an English corvette lying in the bay, and
then the long lines of splendid equipages wheeled
into train and dashed off the ground. The road, after
leaving the campo, runs along the edge of the range
of hills enclosing the city, and just below, within a
high white wall, lies the public burial-place of Naples.
I had read so many harrowing descriptions of this
spot, that my curiosity rose as we drove along in sight
of it, and requesting my friends to set me down, I
joined an American of my acquaintance, and we started
to visit it together.

An old man opened the iron door, and we entered a
clean, spacious, and well-paved area, with long rows
of iron rings in the heavy slabs of the pavement.
Without asking a question, the old man walked across
to the farther corner, where stood a moveable lever,
and fastening the chain into the fixture raised the
massive stone cover of a pit. He requested us to
stand back for a few minutes to give the effluvia time
to escape, and then, sheltering our eyes with our hats,
we looked in. You have read of course, that there
are three hundred and sixty-five pits in this place, one
of which is opened every day for the dead of the city.
They are thrown in without shroud or coffin, and the
pit is sealed up at night for a year. They are thirty
or forty feet deep, and each would contain perhaps
two hundred bodies. Lime is thrown upon the daily
heap, and it soon melts into a mass of garbage, and by
the end of the year the bottom of the pit is covered
with dry white bones.

It was some time before we could distinguish any
thing in the darkness of the abyss. Fixing my eyes
on one spot, however, the outlines of a body became
defined gradually, and in a few minutes, sheltering my
eyes completely from the sun above, I could see all
the horrors of the scene but too distinctly. Eight
corpses, all of grown persons, lay in a confused heap
together, as they had been thrown in one after another
in the course of the day. The last was a powerfully
made, gray old man, who had fallen flat on his back,
with his right hand lying across and half covering the
face of a woman. By his full limbs and chest, and
the darker color of his legs below the knee, he was
probably one of the lazzaroni, and had met with a
sudden death. His right heel lay on the forehead of
a young man, emaciated to the last degree, his chest
thrown up as he lay, and his ribs showing like a skeleton
covered with skin. The close black curls of the
latter, as his head rested on another body, were in
such strong relief that I could have counted them.
Off to the right, quite distinct from the heap, lay, in a
beautiful attitude, a girl, as well as I could judge, of
not more than nineteen or twenty. She had fallen on
the pile and rolled or slid away. Her hair was very
long, and covered her left shoulder and bosom; her
arm was across her body, and if her mother had laid
her down to sleep, she could not have disposed her
limbs more decently. The head had fallen a little
away to the right, and the feet, which were small,
even for a lady, were pressed one against the other,
as if she were about turning on her side. The sexton
said that a young man had come with the body,
and was very ill for some time after it was thrown in.
We asked him if respectable people were brought
here. “Yes,” he said, “many. None but the rich
would go to the expense of a separate grave for their
relations. People were often brought in handsome
grave clothes, but they were always stripped before
they were left. The shroud, whenever there was one,
was the perquisite of the undertakers.” And thus are
flung into this noisome pit, like beasts, the greater part
of the population of this vast city — the young and
the old, the vicious and the virtuous together, without
the decency even of a rag to keep up the distinctions
of life! Can human beings thus be thrown away? —
men like ourselves — women, children, like our sisters
and brothers? I never was so humiliated in my life
as by this horrid spectacle. I did not think a man — a
felon even, or a leper — what you will that is guilty or
debased — I did not think anything that had been human
could be so recklessly abandoned. Pah! It
makes one sick at heart! God grant I may never die
at Naples!

While we were recovering from our disgust, the
old man lifted the stone from the pit destined to receive
the dead on the following day. We looked in.
The bottom was strewn with bones, already fleshless
and dry. He wished us to see the dead of several
previous days, but my stomach was already tried to its
utmost. We paid our gratuity, and hurried away.
A few steps from the gate, we met a man bearing a
coffin on his head. Seeing that we came from the
cemetery, he asked us if we wished to look into it
He set it down, and the lid opening with a hinge, we
were horror-struck with the sight of seven dead infants!
The youngest was at least three months old,

the eldest perhaps a year; and they lay heaped together
like so many puppies, one or two of them
spotted with disease, and all wasted to baby-skeletons.
While we were looking at them, six or seven noisy
children ran out from a small house at the road-side
and surrounded the coffin. One was a fine girl of
twelve years of age, and instead of being at all shocked
at the sight, she lifted the whitest of the dead
things, and looked at its face very earnestly, loading it
with all the tenderest diminutives of the language.
The others were busy in pointing to those they
thought had been prettiest, and none of them betrayed
fear or disgust. In answer to a question of my friend
about the marks of disease, the man rudely pulled out
one by the foot that lay below the rest, and holding it
up to show the marks upon it, tossed it again carelessly
into the coffin. He had brought them from the
hospital for infants, and they had died that morning.
The coffin was worn with use. He shut down the
lid, and lifting it again upon his head, went on to the
cemetery, to empty it like so much offal upon the heap
we had seen!

I have been struck repeatedly with the little value
attached to human life in Italy. I have seen several
of these houseless lazzaroni literally dying in the
streets, and no one curious enough to look at them.
The most dreadful sufferings, the most despairing
cries, in the open squares, are passed as unnoticed as
the howling of a dog. The day before yesterday, a
woman fell in the Toledo, in a fit, frothing at the
mouth, and livid with pain; and though the street
was so crowded that one could make his way with difficulty,
three or four ragged children were the only
persons even looking at her.

I have devoted a week to the museum at Naples.
It is a world! Anything like a full description of it
would tire even an antiquary. It is one of those things
(and there are many in Europe) that fortunately compel
travel. You must come abroad to get an idea of it.

The first day I buried myself among the curiosities
found at Pompeii. After walking through the chambers
and streets where they were found, I came to
them naturally with an intense interest. I had visited a
disentombed city, buried for seventeen centuries — had
trodden in their wheel-tracks — had wandered through
their dining rooms, their chambers, their baths, their
theatres, their market-places. And here were gathered
in one place, their pictures, their statues, their
cooking-utensils, their ornaments, the very food as it
was found on their tables! I am puzzled, in looking
over my note-book, to know what to mention. The
catalogue fills a printed volume.

A curious corner in one of the cases was that containing
the articles found on the toilet of the wealthiest
Pompeian's wife. Here were pots of rouge, ivory pins,
necklaces, ear-rings, bracelets, small silver mirrors,
combs, ear-pickers, etc., etc. In the next case were
two loaves of bread, found in a baker's oven, and stamped
with his name. Two large cases of precious gems,
cameos and intaglios of all descriptions, stand in the
centre of this room (among which, by the way, the
most exquisitely done are two which one can not look
at without a blush). Another case is filled with eatables,
found upon the tables — eggs, fish-bones, honey-comb,
grain, fruits, etc. In the repository for ancient
glass are several cinerary urns, in which the ashes of
the dead are perfectly preserved; and numerous small
glass lachrymatories, in which the tears of the survivors
were deposited in the tombs.

The brazen furniture of Pompeii, the lamps particularly,
are of the most curious and beautiful models.
Trees, to which the lamps were suspended like fruit,
vines, statues holding them in their hands, and numerous
other contrivances, were among them, exceeding
far in beauty any similar furniture of our time. It ap
pears that the ancients did not know the use of the
fork, as every other article of table service except this
has been found here.

To conceive the interest attached to the thousand
things in this museum, one must imagine a modern
city, Boston for example, completely buried by an unexpected
and terrific convulsion of nature. Its inhabitants
mostly escape, but from various causes leave
their city entombed, and in a hundred years the grass
grows over it, and its very locality is forgotten. Near
two thousand years elapse, and then a peasant, digging
in the field, strikes upon some of its ruins, and it is unearthed
just as it stands at this moment, with all its
utensils, books, pictures, houses, and streets, in untouched
preservation. What a subject for speculation!
What food for curiosity! What a living and breathing
chapter of history were this! Far more interesting
is Pompeii. For the age in which it flourished
and the characters who trod its streets, are among the
most remarkable in history. This brazen lamp, shown
to me to-day as a curiosity, was lit every evening in
the time of Christ. The handsome chambers through
which I wandered a day or two ago, and from which
were brought this antique chair, were the home of
Sallust, and doubtless had been honored by the visits
of Cicero (whose villa, half-excavated, is near by), and
by all the poets and scholars and statesmen of his
time. One might speculate endlessly thus! And it is
that which makes these lands of forgotten empires so
delightful to the traveller. His mind is fed by the
very air. He needs no amusements, no company, no
books except the history of the place. The spot is
peopled, wherever he may stray, and the common necessities
of life seem to pluck him from a far-reaching
dream, in which he had summoned back receding
ages, and was communing, face to face, with philosophers
and poets and emperors, like a magician before
his mirror. Pompeii and Herculaneum seem to me visions.
I can not shake myself and wake to their reality.
My mind refuses to go back so far. Seventeen
hundred years!

I followed the cicerone on, listening to his astonishing
enumeration, and looking at everything as he pointed
to it, in a kind of stupor. One has but a certain
capacity. We may be over-astonished. Still he went
on in the same every-day tone, talking as indifferently
of this and that surprising antiquity as a pedlar of his
two-penny wares. We went from the bronzes to the
hall of the papyri — thence to the hall of the frescoes,
and beautiful they were. Their very number makes
them indescribable. The next morning we devoted
to the statuary — and of this, if I knew where to begin,
I should like to say a word or two.

First of all comes the Balbi family — father, mother,
sons, and daughters. He was proconsul of Herculaneum,
and by the excellence of the statues, which are
life itself for nature, he and his family were worth the
artist's best effort. He is a fine old Roman himself,
and his wife is a tall, handsome woman, much better-looking
than her daughters. The two Misses Balbi
are modest-looking girls, and that is all. They were
the high-born damsels of Herculaneum, however;
and, if human nature has not changed in seventeen
centuries, they did not want admirers who compared
them to the Venuses who have descended with them
to the “Museo Borbonico.” The eldest son is on
horseback in armor. It is one of the finest equestrian
statues in the world. He is a noble youth, of grave
and handsome features, and sits the superb animal
with the freedom of an Arab and the dignity of a Roman.
It is a beautiful thing. If one had visited these
Balbis, warm and living, in the time of Augustus, he
could scarcely feel more acquainted with them than
after having seen their statues as they stand before
him here.

Come a little farther on! Bacchus on the shoulders

of a faun — a child delighted with a grown-up playfellow.
I have given the same pleasure to just such another
bright “picture in little” of human beauty. It
moves one's heart to see it.

Pass now a whole gallery of Dians, Cupids, Joves,
Mercuries and Apollos, and come to the presence of
Aristides — him whom the Athenians exiled because
they were tired of hearing him called “The Just.”
Canova has marked three spots upon the floor where
the spectator should place himself to see to the best
advantage this renowned statue. He stands wrapped
in his toga, with his head a little inclined, as if in reflection,
and in his face there is a mixture of firmness
and goodness from which you read his character as
clearly as if it were written across his forehead. It
was found at Herculaneum, and is, perhaps, the simplest
and most expressive statue in the world.