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

[94]

He [Carmignani] entered into the discussion with Rosini, etc., about the line in Ugolino,—

Poscia, piu chel dolor, pote il digiuno,

but there, I think, he took the wrong side; though with Niccolini, perhaps, he would rather err than go right with Rosini. Both, however, are such good-natured men that their literary difference has not broken their personal good-will.

After he was gone I went to see Rosini, whom I found in a literary chaos of books and manuscripts. He showed me a long poem he is now writing on the war of Russia in 1812; the beginning of a history of painting in Italy, to serve as a pendant to Cicognara's ‘History of Sculpture’; a quantity of odes, sonnets, and other melanges, about all which he talked with the most good-humored vanity; and the first part of a romance on the subject of Ugolino, about which he talked with more reserve, but to which, I suspect, he feels that he intrusts a good deal of his reputation. When we had talked an hour or more, he went out with me, . . . . and to the cathedral, where I left him to hear his mass. But he soon rejoined me in the Campo Santo, and we had an interesting walk round its fine cloisters and by its extraordinary monuments of ancient art, about which he has written so pleasant a book. . . . .

Lucca, May 27.—We had to-day, between Pisa and Lucca, one of the most beautiful, nay, I may say delightful, drives that we have had in Europe; the weather perfectly fine and the country sufficiently broken on our right to be picturesque, while in the plain through which we passed the cultivation was so luxuriant—the trees, the whole way, hung with the young and graceful vines in all the freshness of their spring vegetation—that it seemed as if the entire land had just been arrayed for a fete . . . . . Lucca stands delightfully, in the midst of a plain almost unrivalled for fertility, with hills that surround it in every variety of form and character; . . . . and the rich and exact cultivation comes up to the very walls themselves. . . . . The people, though the population is the most dense in Europe,—being 456 to the square mile for the whole territory,—looked comfortable and well-off, so abundant are the resources of its soil, where to-day we have frequently seen, in the same fields, the olive, the vine, wheat, and sometimes figs, and mulberries for silk cultivation, added . . . . At the old Church of the Dominicans . . . . are two pictures by Fra Bartolomeo,—one the Virgin imploring mercy for the people of Lucca; and the other, God the Father, and St. Mary Magdalene and St. Catherine beatified in his