How agreeable are the sensations of an enlightened Englisman as he approaches Florence, the Athens of Italy -the centre of gusto-of lounging refinement and elegant ease! No sooner does he enter it, than he feels himself in another world; and absorbed in the blissful novelty of his situation, he every now and then mentally exclaims, "So! I am now in Florence." His soul is elevated within him; and he looks around with a face brimful of complacent satisfaction. By and bye, the stirrings of a noble ambition are at work; and a notable change in his manners and habits ensues. He is now evidently trying to catch the air of the place; grows more melancholy and gentleman-like;" and, at length, in his own conceit, he breathes, moves, and looks the Florentine.

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There are not a few well-disposed but rather timid English travellers, who, though greatly inclined to follow his example, hesitate, from supposing that the object in view is of difficult attainment. In order to remove their apprehensions, and to assist them in their efforts to acquire that desirable finish, the true Florentine cut, I beg leave to propose to them a few simple rules, which were communicated to me by a gentleman distinguished for his tact and closeness of observation, and who has for a long time been a resident in Tuscany.

RULE I.

The dress of the aspirant ought to be recherché ;-due allowance being made for a certain classical negligence.

II.

Travellers are very apt of a morning to wear the black silk neckcloth-a usage for which I am well aware they have very great authorities. I am notwithstanding of opinion, that the black silk neckcloth ought now to be discarded, as an article by far too ordinary and vulgar. A light orange-coloured silk handkerchief, or a fine muslin one, delicately spotted, may be worn in its stead.

III.

The white neckcloth exhibited at all times, tied neatly, or in a negligé manner, may be reckoned a very safe and appropriate wear. It is in perfect

keeping with the localities; and more suitable perhaps than any cheque handkerchief that can be devised.

IV.

;

Certain ingenious and enterprising Anglo-Florentines have proposed that the neckcloth should be laid aside and, that both as a street and conversazione usage, the shirt-collar should be worn as the sole covering of the neck. The idea is a classical one; and the aspirant ought to know, that though, as a mode, it has not hitherto been countenanced to the extent its partisans had hoped for, he may still legitimately practise it, as often as he pleases, in his own apartment, looking out at his window, or leaning over his balcony with a friend. In the last situation, particularly, he may frequently introduce it with very considerable effect.

V.

The hat should be worn slightly inclined to the one side of the heada position indicative, it is generally thought, of dilletante shrewdness and penetration.

VI.

Short coats being a distinguishing appendage of the base mechanical, or sporting traveller, it necessarily follows, that long coats, or frocks, can alone be tolerated.

VII.

A quizzing-glass, or spectacles, are absolutely indispensable. An aspirant may as well have no eyes at all, as appear unprovided with the one or the other of these necessary adjuvants of vision.

VIII.

The demeanour ought to be studiously bland and courteous, with a slight demonstration of conscious dignity; and all intercourse, even with the lowest persons, should be marked by a certain suavity of tone and expression. Consequently, in passing rencounters with Florentine abigails and soubrettes, the small endearments of a gentle smile, and the innocent epithet cara, may be conferred upon them. Any farther notice of them,

The fixed conoscente stare. When duly executed, the eye-brows are at the same time knit, or the skin of the forehead elevated into wrinkles. In the former case, a more intense perception and a more decided spirit of investigation are indicated. In the latter case, the attention seems less strongly awakened; but much that is delicate in remark, and nice in appreciation, may be going forward.

N.B.-It ought not to be forgotten, that the corrugation of the brow, in the second case, is susceptible of ambiguous interpretation; for many ignorant persons mechanically practice it after entering an exhibition-room, and while under their first feelings of stupid indiscriminate amazement.

XII.

The conoscente peer.

It is performed by first nearly closing the eyes, and then quickly reopening them.

When the aspirant repeats the peer three or four times in rapid succession, while continuing to look at one particular object, he rarely fails of doing himself an infinite deal of credit with the uninitiated by-stander.

XIII.

The close compression of the lips, or the fast setting together of the teeth the mouth being opened so as to shew them; the shutting of the one eye, while the entire onus of examination devolves upon the other; the present

ation to the open eye of one or both hands rounded into the form of a hollow tube; one of the hands held up arch-wise before the eyes, so as to regulate at pleasure the admission of light and various other conoscente moring a critical survey, ought to be quite tions in almost constant requisition dufamiliar to the aspirant; and, in order that he may learn to execute them with a graceful dexterity, it were right that he should practise them before a mirror for two or three hours every day.

XIV.

Fits of pensiveness or abstraction.

Those of a lighter description, easily put on and off, and never degenerating into the deep brown study of the mathematician or politician, are extremely graceful in certain situations. Some skill and address are required for their proper management.

During their continuance, the eyes may be thrown upwards to the heavens, straight forwards, or downwards. If the eyes be fine, and of a clear liquid blue, they are much better in the first of these directions. If of a piercing black, they may be thrown into the second. If of an ordinary colour, and without much expression, they may be turned downwards.-It is advisable also, to place the fore and middle fingers of the right hand along the right temple; or, to rest the head gently between the thumb and first and second fingers of either hand, placed in the middle of the forehead. Some persons are in the habit of applying the fore-finger of the right hand along the right side of the nose; but this is injudicious, and ought on no account to be imitated.

XV.

Humming two or three bars of an Italian air.

There are few cccasions where it may not be happily introduced. It amply supplies the lack of conversational talents, and of most others natural or acquired. A person, therefore, who possesses in but a passable degree this exquisite accomplishment, may fearlessly present himself in any given circle of the beau monde. I need hardly add, that some at least of the notes to be sung should be given strisciando

that is to say, sliding and softening them elegantly into each other.

XVI.

There ought always to be lying in the parlour of the aspirant, handsomely bound copies of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, and Alfieri; the lives of the Italian painters; descriptive catalogues of museums, &c. &c. It is absolutely necessary that he pretend a keen relish for the two authors first mentioned; and whether he ever read them or not, he ought frequently to be found by his visitors with the one book or the other lying before him.

XVII.

But here let me caution him against devoting himself exclusively to particular kinds of virtu; let him become neither an absolute man of letters, nor an antiquarian, nor a picture-hunter, nor a collector of statues. For, by so doing, he will render himself incapable of acquiring that composite airiness, those multifarious tints of attic brilliancy, that impalpable varnish of comprehensive but indefinable gusto, which form the essential constituents of the Anglo-Florentine character.

Keeping aloof, therefore, from the dust of old lumber rooms, from the contamination of rusty antique armour, oil-paint, and stucco, let him nevertheless decorate his apartments with neat casts of the Venus de Medicis, the Apollo Belvedere, and the Torso, and let him scatter around it a few mosaic bijoux. It will also be of material advantage to procure one or two small pictures by eminent masters. These, if too dear for purchase, may be hired perhaps for the occasion; but instead of being hung upon the walls, so as to advance the common and vulgar claim to notice, let them be laid down with a seeming carelessness upon a table, or set upon their ends, or placed over the chimney with the back, not the forepart of their frames turned towards the spectator: let them, in short, be disposed in that manner, which appears least to court, while it the more effectually excites curiosity.

XVIII.

The Italian language must of course be an object of peculiar predilection, and when English is spoken, it ought to be used merely as the external frame work, or setting, for enchasing the more precious jewellery of Italian terms or phrases.

An essential grade in the progress of the aspirant consists in his admission into a certain number of conversazioni and accademie, and though his intercourse with the Florentine beau monde may still be very limited, it is incumbent on him to represent himself as fort repandu among its best and highest circles.

The conversazione is the grand theatre of the Anglo-Florentine's display. There he is to be seen standing with submissive softness of manner, tempered by occasional gleams of recollected confidence: his body swayed with an almost imperceptible bend forwards: his eye taking in with mild but quick and comprehensive glance the whole of the congregated guests; resting next, with a fixed but modest earnestness on a fair Signorina, until, a mutual recognition having taken place between them, it drop with ambiguously recondite meaning on the ground. Gradually he moves himself from his position, and gliding to another part of the room, begins to involve himself with a happy ubiquity in each particu lar set of the company. He listens to il Signor Abbate, who, after detailing some threadbare anecdote of Dante or Machiavelli, announces the intended publication of a volume of sonnets by a literary friend. He requests the

Abbé would receive his subscription. He accosts with a becoming freedom il Signor Conte, draws him upon the important subject of his approaching villegiatura, hazards some questions upon the management of his vineyards, and the game produced on his estate, and finishes by requesting his acceptance of an English new patent fowl ing-piece. He arrests the regard of la Signora Marchesa, proceeds to eulogise her bonnet or her shawl, and even descends to her shoes; and as she answers him, feeds on the musical vacuity of her replies. He stumbles on a natural philosopher, and having heard from him a disquisition on the merits of Galvani and Volta, and having assented to their praises, is gratified in return with a mawkish encomium on Newton and Davy. He approaches a young lady eminent (by report) as a musician, a painter, and an improvisatrice; he observes a chair unoccupied near her, and with a tacitly bowing apology, and smile ineffable, immediately fills it. This is the pearly moment, the radiant triumphant period of Anglo-Florentine enjoyment. Viewing her at first unobtrusively, his head towards her in profile, it moves a little more round, a little more yet, and presently it nearly meets her en face. His eyebrows are slightly knit, then elevated. His head is thrown back, is now reared up. Now his chin is pushed forward. Now are his eyes rapidly cast round the room, reverting almost immediately upon the prime object of his attention. They do not fix upon a particular feature, or a particular region of her person, but go coursing up and down the whole of it; they are now at her elbow, the next moment at her feet, and from thence they shoot up suddenly to her face. His countenance in the mean time assumes a smile of celestial good

humour, the expression of which is modified at times by a curling down of the lips as if in playful archness. But is he silent on this occasion? oh no! at a little distance, it is true, you only see his lips move, but go nearer, and their piano accents may be heard. Accompanying them with a fluttering of his perfumed handkerchief, and a slight flourishing exposure of his diamond ring, he continues to prattle on in a current of small neatly pointed questions, mingled with scintillations of petty remark and diminutive criticism, and variegated by the florets of a superficial but ornate adulation.

When the Anglo-Florentine has begun to identify himself with the native inhabitants of the place, and even some time before the period of his supposed naturalization, he must have become the zealous advocate of Italian, and the opponent of English character, manners, and customs. He must have laboured to acquire the smoothness, the reflective finesse, the apparent humility, and absence of selfishness discoverable in his adopted countrymen. He must have become the devoted admirer of the peculiar tournure d'esprit possessed by the Italian female, and must unceasingly be drawing comparisons between her unaffect edness, extraordinary candour and naïveté, warm sensibility and natural gusto, and the cold unmeaning reserve, odious prudery, defective feeling, and glaring awkwardness, of the English woman. Having advanced thus far in his probationary career, he may be pronounced duly qualified for attaining a chief object of his ambition, and by many regarded as the summus honor, the apex of Anglo-Florentine dignity,-I mean the enviable office of cavaliere servente.

STEFANO MEIKLE.

It is

THERE was always something that took my fancy, even from my childhood, in a shipwright's yard. It is a combination of picturesque materials, and I am a dear lover of the graphic art. It is a busy cheerful scene, and so much of the valetudinarian has always hung about me, that objects from without, capable of enlivening the spirits, have never been unwelcome. It is generally a healthy spot; for, whether the effluvia of boiling pitch have or have not the anti-hectic properties which have been attributed to it, yet, at least, it acts as a corrective of many worse sorts of aroma, which float a round the outlets of every town; and at all events the detergent tide washes the base of the yard at its regular periodical visit, twice every day, bringing with it that delightful feeling of freshness which so peculiarly belongs to every portion of the ocean. an eligible place for resting at the end of a walk, since a seat is always at hand within its circuit, a block of wood, an old windlass, the heel of a piece of timber, a prostrate mast or spar, a boat past service, and now turned upside down, or any other of a long list of sea-side et cetera. It is, too, a fit and fertile station, in which one may indulge one's musing mood; the things which present themselves are capable of supplying matter for thinking down hours to moments, if he who sits there have but " the vision and the faculty divine," and be also in the cue for bringing them into play. What more pregnant hint for reflection, than those inhabitants of the sea, manufactured from the produce of our feudal forests, and which are herein embryo? The sight of them suggests the far-off countries, the lone and longstretching coasts, the wide watery wildernesses, the uncouth nations and languages, which those " gay crea tures of the element" may visit, the perilous path in the great waters"

CRABBE'S Borough, Letter I.

which it may be their hap to traverse; the strange, and to landsmen almost unimaginable, disasters which they may be destined to encounter ; a thought also is likely to arise of the singular life of seamen-never a day hardly in the same spot of the globe, and yet always cooped up in the same narrow dwelling-rovers, yet always at home-visitors of the whole world, and yet never out of their own microcosm-surely, if we chew the cud upon these topics, here is full occupation for a vacant half hour or so, and no unpleasing vehicle for the spirit's shorter excursions;

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while fancy, like the finger of a clock,

Runs the great circuit, and is still at home."

And I, too, may as well return more immediately to the subject before me. The yard with which I have been most familiar is a comparatively small one, on the southern coast of Hampshire, and planted at the foot of a borough town, which is built beside an inlet from the sea. Its inost magnificent effort has never aimed at more than the construction of a brig for the coal trade; and even the building of a ship of this size has always been an uncommon occurrence in this unambitious establishment. Sloops, cutters, yachts, and other one-masted vessels are the more usual occupants of the stocks, where they "rise like exhalations from the formal heaps of planks and beams which are piled around the premises; while an undergrowth of boats is continually going forward in the less ostentatious parts of the yard, from the slim fish-like wherry down to the shapeless punt with neither head nor stern. Indeed, our estuary itself admits not of the larger kinds of shipping

-these are the craft our humble river shows, Hoys, pinks, and sloops, brigs, brigantines, and snows."