America; five children, for another boy had been born some six months before; Roche, the prince of couriers; “Anne,” apparently the same maid who had accompanied them across the Atlantic; and other dependents:  a somewhat formidable troupe and cavalcade.  Of their mode of travel, and what they saw on the way, or perhaps, more accurately, of what Dickens saw, with those specially keen eyes of his, at Lyons, Avignon, Marseilles, and other places—­one may read the master’s own account in the “Pictures from Italy.”  Marseilles was reached on the 14th of July, and thence a steamer took them, coasting the fairy Mediterranean shores, to Genoa, their ultimate destination, where they landed on the 16th.

The Italy of 1844 was like, and yet unlike the Italy of to-day.  It was the old disunited Italy of several small kingdoms and principalities, the Italy over which lowered the shadow of despotic Austria, and of the Pope’s temporal power, not the Italy which the genius of Cavour has welded into a nation.  It was a land whose interest came altogether from the past, and that lay as it were in the beauty of time’s sunset.  How unlike the United States!  The contrast has always, I confess, seemed to me a piquant one.  It has often struck me with a feeling of quaintness that the two countries which Dickens specially visited and described, were, the one this lovely land of age and hoar antiquity, and the other that young giant land of the West, which is still in the garish strong light of morning, and whose great day is in the future.  Nor, I think, before he had seen both, would Dickens himself have been able to tell on which side his sympathies would lie.  Thoroughly popular in his convictions, thoroughly satisfied that to-day was in all respects better than yesterday, it is clear that he expected to find more pleasure in the brand new Republic than his actual experience warranted.  The roughness of the strong, uncultured young life grated upon him.  It jarred upon his sensibilities.  But of Italy he wrote with very different feeling.  What though the places were dirty, the people shiftless, idle, unpunctual, unbusinesslike, and the fleas as the sand which is upon the sea-shore for multitude?  It mattered not while life was so picturesque and varied, and manners were so full of amenity.  Your inn might be, and probably was, ill-appointed, untidy, the floors of brick, the doors agape, the windows banging—­a contrast in every way to the palatial hotel in New York or Washington.  But then how cheerful and amusing were mine host and hostess, and how smilingly determined all concerned to make things pleasant.  So the artist in Dickens turned from the new to the old, and Italy, as she is wont, cast upon him her spell.