George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[344] which have been fully justified; for he satisfied his government during five years of trouble and anxiety in England, including the Russian war, and has been sent here now,—much to his own satisfaction,—on account of the preponderating influence of France. His wife—whom we also knew in Dresden, though he was not then married to her—is a Polish lady, very rich, and by her talent fit to do half the work of his Embassy, any day. Both are very agreeable, courtly people, who have the fame of giving the best dinners that are given in Italy. I have been at one which was given to Count Goyon, the French Commander, on his first arrival here. It was quite beyond any scale I have for measuring such things, but it struck me as more simple in its arrangements and compounds than I expected. . . . .

On our arrival we found, in the hotel where we live, Baron Schack, who wrote the remarkable book you know of on the Spanish Drama, and who has an extraordinary knowledge of Spanish literature, and of everything Spanish, having lived in Spain two or three years, and worked there like a dog.¹ I have had great comfort in him, the more, because, being in very bad health and hardly able to go out at all, he has been glad to have me sit with him, whenever I could find half an hour for it. He is a man of good fortune, but as simple-hearted and unsophisticated a mere German scholar as I have ever known, reading nearly all languages worth it, and talking several, especially English, very well. . . . .

Gregorovius, too, is here, whose remarkable book on Corsica was not only translated into English, but had the honor of a separate translation in the United States. He has been employed the last four years on a history of Rome for the eleven centuries and more that elapsed between its first occupation by the barbarians and its capture by the Constable Bourbon; a well-limited period, taking in what may most fairly be called the Middle Ages. He assigns six years more to his most difficult task, living here meanwhile in straightened circumstances, but with a very bright, cheerful nature, that seems to gild his dark hours as they move on . . . . . I said at the beginning of my letter that Rome is a good place to live in permanently . . . . . Three or four hours every day are spent in going about, often to drive in delicious weather—the roses are in blow, and the camellias just coming out—over the Campagna in an open carriage, with grand ranges of aqueducts on each side, and before us the Alban and Sabine hills. . . . . More often we go to see what you saw in your time and I in mine, but to which I am surprised to find additions of interest much beyond what I expected.