Italy, through this portal, was capable of casting a spell even upon a traveller so case-hardened as Smollett. The very churches at Pisa are "tolerably ornamented." The Campo Santo and Tower fall in no way short of their reputation, while the brass gates so far excel theirs that Smollett could have stood a whole day to examine and admire them. These agremens may be attributable in some measure to "a very good inn." In stating that galleys were built in the town, Smollett seems to have fallen a victim, for once, to guide-book information. Evelyn mentions that galleys were built there in his time, but that was more than a hundred years before. The slips and dock had long been abandoned, as Smollett is careful to point out in his manuscript notes, now in the British Museum. He also explains with superfluous caution that the Duomo of Pisa is not entirely Gothic. Once arrived in the capital of Tuscany, after admitting that Florence is a noble city, our traveller is anxious to avoid the hackneyed ecstasies and threadbare commonplaces, derived in those days from Vasari through Keysler and other German commentators, whose genius Smollett is inclined to discover rather "in the back than in the brain."
The two pass-words for a would-be connoisseur, according to Goldsmith, were to praise Perugino, and to say that such and such a work would have been much better had the painter devoted more time and study to it. With these alternatives at hand one might pass with credit through any famous continental collection.
Smollett aspired to more independence of thought and opinion, though we perceive at every turn how completely the Protestant prejudice of his "moment" and "milieu" had obtained dominion over him. To his perception monks do not chant or intone, they bawl and bellow their litanies. Flagellants are hired peasants who pad themselves to repletion with women's bodices. The image of the Virgin Mary is bejewelled, hooped, painted, patched, curled, and frizzled in the very extremity of the fashion. No particular attention is paid by the mob to the Crucified One, but as soon as his lady-mother appeared on the shoulders of four lusty friars the whole populace fall upon their knees in the dirt. We have some characteristic criticism and observation of the Florentine nobles, the opera, the improvisatori, [For details as to the eighteenth-century improvisatore and commedia delle arte the reader is referred to Symonds's Carlo Gozzi. See also the Travel Papers of Mrs. Piozzi; Walpole's Letters to Sir Horace Mann, and Doran's Mann and Manners at the Court of Florence. (Vide Appendix A, p. 345)] the buildings, and the cicisbei. Smollett nearly always gives substantial value to his notes, however casual, for he has an historian's eye, and knows the symptoms for which the inquirer who comes after is likely to make inquisition.
Smollett's observations upon the state of Florence in Letters XXVII and XXVIII are by no means devoid of value. The direct rule of the Medici had come to an end in 1737, and Tuscany (which with the exception of the interlude of 1798-1814 remained in Austrian hands down to 1860) was in 1764 governed by the Prince de Craon, viceroy of the Empress Maria Theresa. Florence was, indeed, on the threshold of the sweeping administrative reforms instituted by Peter Leopold, the archduke for whom Smollett relates that they were preparing the Pitti Palace at the time of his stay.
This Prince governed the country as Grand Duke from 1765 to 1790, when he succeeded his brother as Emperor, and left a name in history as the ill-fated Leopold. Few more active exponents of paternal reform are known to history. But the Grand Duke had to deal with a people such as Smollett describes. Conservative to the core, subservient to their religious directors, the "stupid party" in Florence proved themselves clever enough to retard the process of enlightenment by methods at which even Smollett himself might have stood amazed. The traveller touches an interesting source of biography when he refers to the Englishman called Acton, formerly an East India Company captain, now commander of the Emperor's Tuscan Navy, consisting of "a few frigates." This worthy was the old commodore whom Gibbon visited in retirement at Leghorn. The commodore was brother of Gibbon's friend, Dr. Acton, who was settled at Besancon, where his noted son, afterwards Sir John Acton, was born in 1736. Following in the footsteps of his uncle the commodore, who became a Catholic, Smollett tells us, and was promoted Admiral of Tuscany, John Acton entered the Tuscan Marine in 1775.