The subsequent years of my residence in Florence were on the whole the most tranquil and the happiest of my mature life.  We all enjoyed it without serious drawback, the routine becoming a visit in early summer to Venice, then visits to the Venetian Tyrol, Cadore, Cortina, and Landro, and the return to Florence in the autumn.  I found in Florence an intellectual life and serenity of which there was no evidence elsewhere, with surroundings of the noblest art of the Renaissance, and an intellectual atmosphere hardly, I think, to be found in any other Italian city.  Amongst our dearest friends were the Villaris, with whom we still remain in cordial sympathy.  I can wish Italy no greater good than the possession of many children like Pasquale Villari.  Our great diplomat George P. Marsh had an unbounded admiration for him—­he used to say, “Villari is an angel;” and he certainly stands at the head of the list of noble Italians I have known for the personal and intellectual virtues and subtlety of appreciation, not rare amongst Italians, but unfortunately to be sought for in their politics in vain.  In Italy as in America men of that type are pushed to the wall and crowded out of the conflicts of political life.

I was finally, after five years of residence, obliged to abandon our home at Florence by the constant recurrence of fevers, which gave us perpetual anxiety as well as perplexity, for there is no malaria in that part of Tuscany.  After an attack which nearly proved fatal to one of the children, my courage gave out, and we broke up housekeeping, and the family, with the exception of myself and my eldest daughter, went back to England.  It was only subsequently that I discovered that the secret of the fevers was in the water drawn from the wells of Florence.  These are sunk in a stratum of gravel in which are countless cesspools, the filtration of which extends through the entire stratum and poisons every well within the limits of their influence.  On my accession in later years to the service of the “Times” as Rome correspondent, I attacked the system of drainage and water supply of Florence in a series of letters, and brought down on my head the most furious abuse which my journalistic life has known, but which ended in the reformation, not yet complete, however, of the water supply of the city, and the admission by the Florentines that if they had attended to my warnings earlier they would have been saved great losses, chief of which was the abandonment of a projected return to Florence by Queen Victoria, on account of a serious epidemic of typhoid which broke out after her first visit.  Like most reformers, I was threatened with violence if I returned to the scene of my labors, to be hailed as a friend when I had been found to be right and my warnings salutary.  But at the moment, the effect of the fevers was to drive me out of Florence, where residence had on many accounts proved most delightful, and send me off again on adventure.