duced to all the saints of the Pantheon." He reached Naples in time for the Carnival, into which he entered with zest. "Here I am," Sterne wrote to Hall-Stevenson, "as happy as We have a jolly carnival of it a king ** - nothing but operas - punchinelloes - festinoes and masquerades. We (that is, nous autres) are all dressing out for one this night at the Princess Francavivalla, which is to be superb." Thoroughly delighted with what he saw and with what he heard everywhere in Italy, Sterne took elaborate notes on manners and customs for those sketches that were never to be written. One episode of the Italian tour, however, found its way as a digression into the Sentimental Journey - the adventure at Martini's concert in Milan, where Yorick, on entering the hall, ran into the Marquisina de F*** head to head, as she was coming out. That was indeed a sentimental introduction to the intrigue that followed. The lady was the beautiful Marquisina Fagniani, sometime mistress to George Selwyn and the Duke of Queensbury. Yorick met on his journey travellers of various types. While sitting in Monsieur Dessein's désobligeante at Calais, writing about them behind the taffeta curtain, he was approached by two "dear countrymen," one of whom was anxious to discover what was giving motion to the old chaise. That was an Inquisitive Traveller, the man who makes the grand tour for "knowledge and improvements." Sterne advises this kind of traveller to stay at home. "I am of opinion," says Sterne, “that a man would act as wisely, if he could prevail upon himself to live contented without foreign knowledge or foreign improvements, especially if he lives in a country that has no absolute want of either. * Knowledge, in most of its branches, and in most of its affairs, is like music in an Italian street, whereof those may partake who pay nothing." The friend and companion of the Inquisitive Traveller is called the Simple Traveller. He had never heard of a preface being wrote in a désobligeante. He knew where he dined yesterday, and that was all. Then there is the Proud Traveller, who returns from the Continent with a knowledge of the post-roads and nothing more. Mundungus, with an immense fortune, made the whole tour," says Sterne, "going on from Rome to Naples, from Naples to Venice, from Venice to 66 Vienna, -to Dresden, to Berlin, without one generous connection or pleasurable anecdote to tell of; but he had travelled straight on, looking neither to his right hand nor to his left, lest Love or Pity should seduce him out of his road." Finally there is the Splenetic Traveller, "the learned Smelfungus," who "travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to Rome, and so on;- but he set out with the spleen and jaundice; and every object he pass'd by was discoloured or distorted. He wrote an account of them; but 't was nothing but the account of his miserable feelings." This "learned Smelfungus," whom Yorick professes to have come across at Rome and again at Turin, is a thin disguise for Dr. Smollett, the author of Humphry Clinker. Broken in health like Sterne, Smollett also made the grand tour, spending two years abroad; and some time after his return to England, he published two volumes of descriptive letters, under the title of Travels through France and Italy (1766). The book is, as Sterne takes occasion to say, "a sad tale of sorrowful adventures." The inn at a seaport town near Genoa, where the novelist took up his night's lodging, was kept, we are told, by a butcher who "had very much the looks of an assassin. His wife was a great masculine virago, who had all the air of having frequented the slaughter-house. * * * We had a very bad supper, miserably dressed, passed a very disagreeable night, and paid a very extravagant bill in the morning, without being thanked for our custom. I was very glad to get out of the house with my throat uncut." The women of Italy Smollett found "the most haughty, insolent, capricious, and revengeful females on the face of the earth.” The Tuscan speech, so often praised for its sweetness, was to his ear harsh and disagreeable. "It sounds," he said, "as if the speaker had lost his palate. I really imagined the first man I heard speak in Pisa had met with that misfortune in the course of his amours." While in Florence, he was attracted to the Uffizi gallery by the fame of the Venus de Medicis; but he at once discovered that there is "no beauty in the features" of the marvellous statue, and that "the attitude is awkward and out of character." When he reached Rome, he was "much disappointed at the sight of the Pantheon, which," he goes on to say, "looks like a huge cockpit, open at top. *** Within side it has much the air of a mausoleum. It was this appearance which, in all which, in all probability, suggested the thought to Boniface IV. to transport hither eight-and-twenty cart-loads of old rotten bones, dug from different burying-places, and then dedicate it as a church to the blessed Virgin and all the holy martyrs." 66 Sterne set himself point-blank against Smollett, and in a measure against all others that have roamed land or sea since the time of Ulysses. In distinction from them he called himself the Sentimental Traveller. 'My observations," he said, "will be altogether of a different cast from any of my forerunners." Yorick never stops to describe antiquities, churches, and art galleries, or lovely scenery. Town after town is passed without even the mention of their name. Between Paris and Versailles nothing is discovered to his purpose, and so he fills in the interim of the journey with the later history of the starling. He delays his visit to the Louvre and the Luxembourg, and after he has visited them, there is nothing to say. Yorick did not come to France for pictures, statues, or cathedrals. "I conceive," he told Monsieur le Count, "every fair |