A favourite style of mask here, is the dress of an English sailor, straw hats, blue jackets, white trowsers, and very white masks with pink cheeks:  we saw hundreds in this whimsical costume.

13.—­On driving home rather late this evening, and leaving the noise, the crowds, the confusion and festive folly of the Strada di Toledo, we came suddenly upon a scene, which, from its beauty, no less than by the force of contrast, strongly impressed my imagination.  The shore was silent, and almost solitary:  the bay as smooth as a mirror, and as still as a frozen lake; the sky, the sea, the mountains round were all of the same hue, a soft grey tinged with violet, except where the sunset had left a narrow crimson streak along the edge of the sea.  There was not a breeze, not the slightest breath of air, and a single vessel, a frigate with all its white sails crowded, lay motionless as a monument on the bosom of the waters, in which it was reflected as in a mirror.  I have seen the bay more splendidly beautiful; but I never saw so peculiar, so lovely a picture.  It lasted but a short time:  the transparent purple veil became a dusky pall, and night and shadow gradually enveloped the whole.[K]

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How I love these resplendent skies and blue seas!  Nature here seems to celebrate a continual Festa, and to be for ever decked out in holiday costume!  A drive along the “sempre beata Mergellina” to the extremity of the Promontory of Pausilippo is positive enchantment:  thence we looked over a landscape of such splendid and unequalled interest! the shores of Baia, where Cicero, Horace, Virgil, Pliny, Mecaenas, lived; the white towers of Puzzuoli and the Islands of Ischia, Procida, and Nisida.  There was the Sybil’s Cave, Lake Acheron, and the fabled Lethe; there the sepulchre of Misenus, who defied the Triton; and the scene of the whole sixth book of the AEneid, which I am now reading in Annibal Caro’s translation:  there Agrippina mourned Germanicus; and there her daughter fell a victim to her monster of a son.  At our feet lay the lovely little Island of Nisida, the spot on which Brutus and Portia parted for the last time before the battle of Philippi.

To the south of the bay the scenery is not less magnificent, and scarcely less dear to memory:  Naples, rising from the sea like an amphitheatre of white palaces, and towers, and glittering domes:  beyond, Mount Vesuvius, with the smoke curling from its summits like a silver cloud, and forming the only speck upon the intense blue sky; along its base Portici, Annunziata, Torre del Greco, glitter in the sun; every white building—­almost every window in every building, distinct to the eye at the distance of several miles:  farther on, and perched like white nests on the mountainous promontory, lie Castel a Mare, and Sorrento, the birth-place of Tasso, and his asylum when the injuries of his cold-hearted persecutors had stung him to madness, and drove him here for refuge to the arms of his sister.  Yet, farther on, Capua rises from the sea, a beautiful object in itself, but from which the fancy gladly turns to dwell again upon the snowy buildings of Sorrento.