Within a very few weeks of our establishment in Casa Berti my mother’s home became, as usual, a centre of attraction and pleasant intercourse, and her weekly Friday receptions were always crowded.  If I were to tell everything of what I remember in connection with those days, I should produce such a book as non di, non homines, non concessere columnae—­a book such as neither publishers, nor readers, nor the columns of the critical journals would tolerate, and should fill my pages with names, which, however interesting they may still be for me, would hardly have any interest for the public, however gentle or pensive.

One specialty, and that not a pleasant one, of a life so protracted as mine has been in the midst of such a society as that of Florence in those days, is the enormous quantity of the names which turn the tablets of memory into palimpsests, not twice, but fifty times written over!—­unpleasant, not from the thronging in of the motley company, but from the inevitable passing out of them from the field of vision.  One’s recollections come to resemble those of the spectator of a phantasmagoric show.  Processions of heterogeneous figures, almost all of them connected in some way or other with more or less pleasant memories, troop across the magic circle of light, only, alack! to vanish into uttermost night when they pass beyond its limit.  Of course all this is inevitable from the migratory nature of such a society as that which was gathered together on the banks of the Arno.

Some fixtures—­comparatively fixtures—­of course there were, who gave to our moving quicksand-like society some degree of cohesion.

Chief among these was of course the British minister—­at the time of our arrival in Florence, and many years afterwards—­Lord Holland.  A happier instance of the right man in the right place could hardly be met with.  At his great omnium-gatherum dinners and receptions—­his hospitality was of the most catholic and generous sort—­both he and Lady Holland (how pretty she then was there is her very clever portrait by Watts to testify) never failed to win golden opinions from all sorts and conditions of men and women.  And in the smaller circle, which assembled in their rooms yet more frequently, they showed to yet greater advantage, for Lord Holland was one of the most amusing talkers I ever knew.

Of course many of those who ought to have been grateful for their admission to the minister’s large receptions were discontented at not being invited to the smaller ones.  And it was by some of these malcontents with more wit than reason, that Lady Holland was accused of receiving in two very distinct fashions—­en menage and en menagerie.  The mot was a successful one, and nobody was more amused by it than the spirituelle lady of whom it was said.  It was too happy a mot not to have been stolen by divers pilferers of such articles, and adapted to other persons and other occasions.  But it was originally spoken of the time, place, and person here stated to have been the object of it.