he said, “to leave them with such painful impressions.”  The quilting party had dispersed by that time.  “I believe I recognized the house,” he says; “and I saw two or three old women who might once have formed part of the merry group of girls; but I doubt whether they recognized, in the stout elderly gentleman, thus rattling in his carriage through their streets, the pale young English prisoner of forty years since.”

Bonaparte was emperor.  The whole country was full of suspicion.  The police suspected the traveler, notwithstanding his passport, of being an Englishman and a spy, and dogged him at every step.  He arrived at Avignon, full of enthusiasm at the thought of seeing the tomb of Laura.  “Judge of my surprise,” he writes, “my disappointment, and my indignation, when I was told that the church, tomb, and all were utterly demolished in the time of the Revolution.  Never did the Revolution, its authors and its consequences, receive a more hearty and sincere execration than at that moment.  Throughout the whole of my journey I had found reason to exclaim against it for depriving me of some valuable curiosity or celebrated monument, but this was the severest disappointment it had yet occasioned.”  This view of the Revolution is very characteristic of Irving, and perhaps the first that would occur to a man of letters.  The journey was altogether disagreeable, even to a traveler used to the rough jaunts in an American wilderness:  the inns were miserable; dirt, noise, and insolence reigned without control.  But it never was our author’s habit to stroke the world the wrong way:  “When I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to suit my dinner.”  And he adds:  “There is nothing I dread more than to be taken for one of the Smellfungi of this world.  I therefore endeavor to be pleased with everything about me, and with the masters, mistresses, and servants of the inns, particularly when I perceive they have ’all the dispositions in the world’ to serve me; as Sterne says, ’It is enough for heaven and ought to be enough for me.’”

The traveler was detained at Marseilles, and five weeks at Nice, on one or another frivolous pretext of the police, and did not reach Genoa till the 20th of October.  At Genoa there was a delightful society, and Irving seems to have been more attracted by that than by the historical curiosities.  His health was restored, and his spirits recovered elasticity in the genial hospitality; he was surrounded by friends to whom he became so much attached that it was with pain he parted from them.  The gayety of city life, the levees of the Doge, and the balls, were not unattractive to the handsome young man; but what made Genoa seem like home to him was his intimacy with a few charming families, among whom he mentions those of Mrs. Bird, Madame Gabriac, and Lady Shaftesbury.  From the latter he experienced the most cordial and unreserved friendship; she greatly interested herself in his future, and furnished him with letters from herself and the nobility to persons of the first distinction in Florence, Rome, and Naples.