Sunday.—­Attended divine service at the English ambassador’s, in the morning, and in the evening, not being well enough to go to the Cascine, I remained at home.  I sat down at the window and read Foscolo’s beautiful poem, “I sepoleri:”  the subject of my book, and the sight of Alfieri’s house meeting my eye whenever I looked up, inspired the idea of visiting the Santa Croce again, and I ventured out unattended.  The streets, and particularly the Lung’ Arno, were crowded with gay people in their holiday costumes.  Not even our Hyde Park, on a summer Sunday, ever presented a more lively spectacle or a better dressed mob.  I was often tempted to turn back rather than encounter this moving multitude; but at length I found my way to the Santa Croce, which presented a very different scene.  The service was over; and a few persons were walking up and down the aisles, or kneeling at different altars.  In a chapel on the other side of the cloisters, they were chanting the Via Crucis; and the blended voices swelled and floated round, then died away, then rose again, and at length sunk into silence.  The evening was closing fast, the shadows of the heavy pillars grew darker and darker, the tapers round the high altar twinkled in the distance like dots of light, and the tombs of Michel Angelo, of Galileo, of Machiavelli, and Alfieri, were projected from the deep shadow in indistinct formless masses:  but I needed not to see them to image them before me; for with each and all my fancy was familiar.  I spent about an hour walking up and down—­abandoned to thoughts which were melancholy, but not bitter.  All memory, all feeling, all grief, all pain were swallowed up in the sublime tranquillity which was within me and around me.  How could I think of myself, and of the sorrow which swells at my impatient heart, while all of genius that could die, was sleeping round me; and the spirits of the glorious dead—­they who rose above their fellow men by the might of intellect—­whose aim was excellence, the noble end “that made ambition virtue,” were, or seemed to me, present?—­and if those tombs could have opened their ponderous and marble jaws, what histories of sufferings and persecution, wrongs and wretchedness, might they not reveal!  Galileo—­

                        “chi vide
    Sotto l’etereo padiglion rotarsi
    Piu mondi, e il sole iradiarli immoto.”

pining in the dungeons of the inquisition; Machiavelli,

                “quel grande,
    Che temprando lo scettro a’regnatori,
    Gil allor ne sfronda——­”

tortured and proscribed; Michel Angelo, persecuted by envy; and Alfieri perpetually torn, as he describes himself, by two furies—­“Ira e Malinconia”—­

    “La mente e il cor in perpetua lite.”

But they fulfilled their destinies:  inexorable Fate will be avenged upon the favourites of Heaven and nature.  I can remember but one instance in which the greatly gifted spirit was not also the conspicuously wretched mortal—­our own divine Shakspeare—­and of him we know but little.