“The greatest comfort I experienced,” he says, “in Italy was living in the same neighborhood, and thinking, as I went about, of Boccaccio.  Boccaccio’s father had a house at Maiano, supposed to have been situated at the Fiesolan extremity of the hamlet.  That merry-hearted writer was so fond of the place that he has not only laid the two scenes of the ‘Decameron’ on each side of it, with the valley which his company resorted to in the middle, but has made the two little streams which embrace Maiano, the Affrico and the Mensola, the hero and the heroine of his ‘Nimphale Fiesolano.’  The scene of another of his works is on the banks of the Margnone, a river a little distant; and the ‘Decameron’ is full of the neighboring villages.  Out of the windows of one side of our house we saw the turret of the Villa Gherardi, to which, according to his biographers, his ‘joyous company’ resorted in the first instance.  A house belonging to the Macchiavelli was near, a little to the left; and farther to the left, among the blue hills, was the white village, Settignano, where Michael Angelo was born.  The house is still in possession of the family.  From our windows on the other side we saw, close to us, the Fiesole of antiquity and of Milton, the site of the Boccaccio-house before mentioned; still closer, the Decameron’s Valley of Ladies at our feet; and we looked over toward the quarter of the Mignone and of a house of Dante, and in the distance beheld the mountains of Pistria.  Lastly, from the terrace in front, Florence lay clear and cathedraled before us, with the scene of Redi’s Bacchus rising on the other side of it, and the villa of Arcetri, famous for Galileo.  Hazlitt, who came to see me there, beheld the scene around us with the admiration natural to a lover of old folios and great names, and confessed, in the language of Burns, that it was a sight to enrich the eyes.

“My daily walk was to Fiesole, through a path skirted with wild myrtle and cyclamen; and I stopped at the door of the Doccia, and sate on the pretty melancholy platform behind it, reading, or looking down to Florence.”

This is all very charming, yet hear what the author says further:—­

“Some people, when they return from Italy, say it has no wood, and some a great deal.  The fact is, that many parts of it, Tuscany included, has no wood to speak of:  it wants larger trees interspersed with the small ones, in the manner of our hedge-row elms.  A tree of a reasonable height is a god-send.  The olives are low and hazy-looking, like dry sallows.  You have plenty of these; but to an Englishman, looking from a height, they appear little better than brushwood.  Then there are no meadows, no proper green fields in June; nothing of that luxurious combination of green and russet, of grass, wild flowers, and woods, over which a lover of nature can stroll for hours, with a foot as fresh as the stag’s; unmixed with chalk-dust,