It was long before Livingstone’s health recovered the check to its improvement given by that interview.  However, as the spring advanced he began to regain strength rapidly, and toward the end of May he and I started in the Petrel, which he had just bought, for a cruise in the Mediterranean.

It would seem hard that any one, coasting for the first time along the shores of Italy, and penetrating ever and anon far into the interior, should not feel and display some interest in the succession of pictures, of living Nature and dead Art, that meet you at every step.  I can not say that I ever detected the faintest symptom of such in my companion.  He strayed with me through the old Forum, and through Adrian’s Villa, and lingered by the Alban Lake; but it was more to keep me in countenance than any thing else.  I liked them better this second time of seeing them than I did the first; I doubt if they left an impression on his mind equal to the dimmest photograph that ever was the pride of an amateur and the puzzle of his friends.  The brilliant landscapes made up of bold headlands, hanging woods, and sunny bays fared no better.  Guy did not come on deck for two hours after we cast anchor off Mola di Gaeta.

Our ciceroni were much pained and scandalized at an indifference which exceeded all they had yet encountered in the matter-of-fact Signori Inglesi.  I saw one of them look quite relieved when, after quitting us, he had to listen to an excitable young Jewess endeavoring to express her raptures in the most execrable Italian.  The physical effort it cost her was awful to witness, especially as she was wintering in Italy for her lungs.  O, long-suffering stones of the Coliseum! which returned the most barbarous echo—­the growls from the cells when their tenants scented the Christian; the jargon of the Goth and the Hun; or the lingua Anglo-Romana in bocca Bloomsburiana?  The two first-named classes, at all events, confined themselves to their own dialect, and spoke it, doubtless, with perfect propriety.  However, in the present instance, the custode took the sentimental ebullition of the Maid of Judah for an amende honorable, and rubbed his key complacently.

I do not believe that our travels brought to Guy a single distraction to the great sorrow that all the while held him fast.

A German philosopher under similar circumstances would have written reams and spoken volumes (eating and drinking all the while Pantagruelically), theorizing and abstracting his emotions till they vanished into cloud and vapor.  A true disciple of Rousseau or Lamartine would have analyzed his grief, dividing it into as many channels as Alexander did the Oxus, till the main stream was lost, and each individual rivulet might be crossed dry-shod.  Both would have shed tears perpetual and profuse.  I read the other day of a Frenchman who, in the midst of a mixed assembly, remembering that on that day ten years he had lost a dear friend, instantly went out and wept bitterly.  He was so charmed with the happiness of the thought that, as he says, “I took the resolution henceforth to weep for all whom I have loved, each on the anniversary of their death.”