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THE WORKS
OF
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRIGH
STACKS
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA
PRINTED BY
ARRANGEMENT
WITH
HOUGHTON
MIFFLIN
COMPANY
THE JEFFERSON PRESS
BOSTON NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1883 AND 1893, BY THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
COPYRIGHT, igil, BY MARY ELIZABETH ALDRICH
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
)Q
CONTENTS
PAGE
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
I. PROLOGUE ...... 3
II. DAYS WITH THE DEAD 6
III. BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR . . 22
IV. WAYS AND MANNERS 3!
V. A VISIT TO A CERTAIN OLD GENTLEMAN . . 42
VI. ON A BALCONY 73
VII. SMITH 104
VIII. A DAY IN AFRICA 126
IX. ON GETTING BACK AGAIN i;i
AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA
I. CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH ..... 177
II. ALONG THE WATERSIDE 182
III. A STROLL ABOUT TOWN IQ4
iv. A STROLL ABOUT TOWN (continued] . . . 204
V. OLD STRAWBERRY BANK 225
VI. SOME OLD PORTSMOUTH PROFILES . . . 24!
VII. PERSONAL REMINISCENCES
As for thefe Obferuations which I now exhibite vnto thy
gentle cenfure, take them I pray thee in good part till I pre-
fent better vnto thee after my next trauels.
CORYAT'S CRUDITIES. 1611.
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
PROLOGUE
THE reader will probably not find Ponkapog
set down in any but the very latest gazetteer.
It is the Indian name of a little New England
village, from which the writer sallied forth,
a while ago, on a pilgrimage beyond the sea.
Ponkapog scarcely merits a description, and
Pesth the farthest point east to which his
wanderings led him has been too often de-
scribed. He is thus happily relieved of the
onus of making strictly good the title of these
chapters, whose chief merit, indeed, is that
they treat of neither Pesth nor Ponkapog.
It was a roundabout road the writer took to
reach the Hungarian capital a road that car-
ried him as far north as Inverness, as far south
as Naples, and left him free to saunter leisurely
through Spain and spend a day in Africa.
But the ground he passed over had been worn
4 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
smooth by the feet of millions of tourists and
paved three deep with books of travel. He
was too wise to let anything creep into his
note-book beyond a strip of landscape here
and there, a street scene in sepia, or an outline
sketch of some custom or peculiarity that
chanced to strike his fancy and these he
offers modestly to the reader.
What is newest to one in foreign countries
is not always the people, but their surround-
ings, and those same little details of life and
circumstance which make no impression on a
man in his own land until he returns to it
after a prolonged absence, and then they stand
out very sharply for a while. Neither an Ital-
ian, nor a Frenchman, nor a Saxon is worth
travelling three thousand miles by sea to look
upon. It is Naples, and not the Neapolitan,
that lingers in your memory. If your memory
accepts the Neapolitan, it is always with a bit
of Renaissance architecture adhering to him,
with a stretch of background that shall include
his pathetic donkey, the blue bay, the sullen
peak of Vesuvius, and gray Capri in the dis-
tance. If you could transport the man bodily
to New York, the only thing left to do would
be to drop him into the Hudson. He would
be like Emerson's sparrow, that no longer
pleased when he was removed from the con-
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH c
text of sky and river. It is the details that at-
tract or repel more than we are aware. How
sensitive to details is the eye, unconsciously
taking their stamp on its retina and retaining
the impression forever ! It is many a day since
the writer was in the old walled town of Ches-
ter ; he does not recall a single feature of the
hundreds of men and women he met in those
quiet, gable-shadowed streets ; but on the door
of a house there, in a narrow court, was a gro-
tesque bronze knocker which caught his eye
for an instant in passing : that knocker some-
how screwed itself to his mind without his
cognizance, and now at intervals, even after all
these nights and days, it raps very distinctly
on his memory.
II
DAYS WITH THE DEAD
I
THEY have a fashion across the water, par-
ticularly on the Continent, of making much of
their dead. A fifteenth or a sixteenth century
celebrity is a revenue to the church or town in
which the distinguished ashes may chance to
repose. It would be an interesting operation,
if it were practicable, to draw a line between
the local reverence for the virtues of the de-
ceased and that strictly mundane spirit which
regards him as assets. The two are so nicely
dovetailed that I fancy it would be quite im-
possible, in most instances, to say where the
one ends and the other begins.
In the case of the good Cardinal Borromeo,
for example. The good cardinal died in 1584.
He is one of the loveliest figures in history.
Nobly born, rich, and learned, he devoted him-
self and his riches to holy deeds. The story
of his life is a record of beautiful sacrifices and
unselfish charities. Though his revenue was
princely, his quick sympathies often left him
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 7
as destitute as a Franciscan friar. His vast
possessions finally dwindled to a meagre patri-
mony. During the great plague at Milan, in
1576, he sold what was left of his plate and
furniture to buy bread for the famishing peo-
ple. When he died, all Italy wept for him like
one pair of eyes. He lies in the crypt of the
cathedral at Milan. It is dark down in the
crypt ; but above him are carvings and gildings
and paintings, basking in the mellow light
sifted through the immense choir windows
" Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damasked wings."
Above the fretted roof the countless " statued
pinnacles ' lift themselves into the blue air.
How magical all that delicate needlework of
architecture looks, by moonlight or sunlight !
" O Milan, O the chanting quires,
The giant windows' blazoned fires,
The height, the space, the gloom, the glory !
A mount of marble, a hundred spires ! "
When they show you the embalmed body of
Borromeo for it is really the body and not
merely the sarcophagus they show you the cus-
tode, a priest, lights the high candles on either
side of the silver-encrusted altar. The cardinal's
remains are kept in an hermetically sealed case
of rock crystal set within a massive oak coffin,
one side of which is lowered by a windlass.
8 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
There he lies in his jewelled robes, with his
gloved hands crossed on his bosom and his
costly crosier at his side, just as they laid him
away in 1584. The features are wonderfully
preserved, and have not lost the placid expres-
sion they wore when he fell asleep that look
of dreamy serenity peculiar to the faces of dead
persons. The head is bald, and as black as
ebony. There were services going on, the day
we visited the cathedral. Above us the crowds
came and went on the mosaic pavements, but
no sound of the outside world penetrated to the
dim, begemmed chapel where Carlo Borromeo,
count, cardinal, and saint, takes what rest he
can. We stood silent in the unflaring candle-
light, gazing on the figure which had been so
beloved in Milan three centuries ago. Pre-
sently the black-robed custode turned the noise-
less crank, and the coffin side slowly ascended
to its place. It was all very solemn and impres-
sive too impressive and too solemn altogether
for so small a sum as five francs.
I am but an intermittent worshipper of saints ;
yet I have an ineradicable belief in good men
like Carlo Borromeo, and, as he has long since
finished his earthly tasks, I think it would be
showing the cardinal greater respect to bury
him than to exhibit him. He nearly spoiled
my visit to Milan. I resolved to have no fur-
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 9
ther commerce with the dead, directly or indi-
rectly. But the dead play a very prominent
part in the experience of the wanderer abroad.
The houses in which they were born, the tombs
in which they lie, the localities they made famous
by their good or evil deeds, and the works their
genius left behind them are necessarily the
chief shrines of his pilgrimage. You leave
London with a distincter memory of the monu-
ments in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's
than of the turbulent streams of life that surge
through the Strand. Mr. Blank, to whom you
bore a letter of introduction, is not so real a
person to you as John Milton, whose grave you
saw at St. Giles's, Cripplegate, or De Foe, who
sleeps in the melancholy Bunhill Fields Burial-
Ground. You catch yourself assisting, with
strange relish, at the burning of heretics at
Smithfield. Ridley and Latimer stand before
you in flesh and bone and flame at Oxford.
Thomas a Becket falls stabbed at your feet on
the stone flagging in Canterbury Cathedral.
At Holyrood, are not Darnley and pallid Ruth-
ven in his steel corselet forever creeping up
that narrow spiral staircase leading to the small
cabinet where Rizzio is supping with the luck-
less queen ? You cannot escape these things
if you would. Your railroad carriage takes
you up at one famous grave and sets you down
io FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
at another. Madrid is but a stepping - stone
to the gloomy Escorial, with its underground
library of gilded coffins a library of royal
octavos, one might say, for none but Spanish
kings and queens are shelved there. 1 In Paris,
where the very atmosphere thrills with intense
life, you are brought at each step face to face
with the dead. What shapes are these that flit
in groups up and down the brilliant boulevards ?
They are not sipping absinthe and taking their
ease the poor ghosts, old and new ! Can
you stand in the Place de la Concorde and not
think of the twenty-eight hundred persons who
were guillotined there between 1793 and 1795 ?
A few minutes' walk from the crowded cafes
leads you to the morgue, "the little Doric
morgue," as Browning calls it. The golden
dome of the Invalides keeps perpetually in your
mind "the terror of Europe," held down by
sixty tons of porphyry, in the rotunda. The
neatly swept asphalt under your feet ran blood
but yesterday. Here it was, near the Tuileries,
the insurgents threw up a barricade. Those
white spots which you observe on the fagade of
yonder building, the Madeleine, are bits of new
stone set into the sacrilegious shot-holes. On
1 Spanish post-mortem etiquette excludes the late Queen
Mercedes from this apartment, as none but queens who have
been mothers of kings are allowed sanctuary here.
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH n
the verge of the city, and within sound of its
feverish heart-throb, stretch Pere la Chaise
and Montmartre and Mont Parnasse, pathetic
with renowned names.
I suppose that a taste for churchyards and
cemeteries is a cultivated taste. At home they
were entirely disconnected in my mind with
any thought of enjoyment ; but after a month
on the other side I preferred a metropolitan
graveyard to almost any object of interest that
could be presented to me. A cemetery at
home suggests awkward possibilities ; but no-
thing of the kind occurs to you in rambling
through a foreign burial-ground. As our ga-
mins would say, it is not your funeral. You
wander along the serpentine walk as you would
stroll through a picture-gallery. You as little
think of adding a mound to the one as you
would of contributing a painting to the other.
You survey the monoliths and the bas-reliefs
and the urns and the miniature Athenian tem-
ples from the standpoint of an unbiassed spec-
tator who has paid his admittance fee and
expects entertainment or instruction. Some of
the pleasantest hours I passed in sightseeing
were spent in graveyards. Among the most
notable things we saw were the Jewish ceme-
tery at Prague, with its smoky Gothic syna-
gogue of the thirteenth century (the
12 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
schtile), and the ancient churchyard of St. John
at Nuremberg, where Hans Sachs and many
another worthy of his day lie at rest, and where
the remains of Albrecht Diirer once rested
painter, poet, architect, and engraver, the mas-
ter of almost everything except Mrs. Diirer.
The engraved brass plates the P. P. C. cards,
so to speak, of the departed aristocracy of Nu-
remberg on the horizontal slabs of St. John's
are very quaint, with their crests, and coats-of-
arms, and symbols of gentility. At Prague
the stones are marked with pitchers and hands,
to designate the descendants of the tribes of
Levi and Aaron. They claim to have one stone
that dates as far back as A. D. 606. Some of
the graves are held in great veneration; that
of Rabbi Abignor Kara, who died in 1439, is
often made the point of pilgrimage by Jews
living in distant lands. Within the yard is a
building where the funeral rites are performed,
and grave-clothes are kept for all comers. The
dead millionaire and the dead pauper are ar-
rayed in the same humble garb, and alike given
to earth in a rough board coffin. The Jewish
custom, like death itself, is no respecter of per-
sons. There is a fine austerity in this.
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 13
II
It was always more or less of a satisfaction
to observe that the mortuary sculptures of the
Old World were every whit as hideous as our
own. The sepulchral designs in churches
abroad are generally in the worst style of Mid-
dle Age realism. A half-draped skeleton of
Death, plunging his dart into the bosom of
some emaciated marble girl, seems to have
been a consoling symbol to the survivors a few
centuries ago. This ghastly fancy is constantly
under your eyes. If I call it ghastly I give
expression to the effect it produced on me at
first. It would not be honest for me to affirm
that I did not like it at last. I became so ac-
customed to this skeleton and his brother mon-
strosities that when we visited those three grim
chambers under the Church of the Capuchins
at Rome, and saw the carefully polished skulls
of hundreds of monks wrought into pillars and
arches and set upon shelves, I looked at them
as complacently as if they had been a lot of
exploded percussion-caps. "It is a pity they
can't be used again," I thought ; and that was
all. I began to believe the beautiful economy
of nature to be greatly overrated.
This is the burial-place of the Cappuccini,
who esteem it a blissful privilege to lie here for
14 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
a few years in consecrated earth brought from
Jerusalem, and then, when their graves are
wanted for fresher brothers, to be taken up
and transformed into architectural decorations.
The walls and recesses and arched ceilings of
these chapels (which are beneath the church
but not underground) are thus ornamented
with the brotherhood skilfully arranged in fan-
ciful devices, the finger-joints and the fragile
links of the vertebral column being wrought
into friezes and light cornices, and the larger
bones arranged in diamonds and hearts and
rounds, like the sabres and bayonets in an
armory. Here and there on the ceiling is a com-
plete skeleton set into the plaster, quite sug-
gestive of a cool outline by Flaxman or Retzsch.
The poor monks ! they were not very orna-
mental in life; but time is full of compensa-
tions. Death seems to have relieved them of
one unhappy characteristic. " There is no dis-
agreeable scent," says the author of The Mar-
ble Faun, describing this place, "such as might
have been expected from the decay of so many
holy persons, in whatever odor of sanctity they
may have taken their departure. The same
number of living monks would not smell half so
unexceptionably." The Capuchin golgotha is
more striking than the Roman or the Parisian
catacombs, for the reason that its contracted
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 15
limits do not allow you to escape from the least
of its horrible grotesqueness. In the cata-
combs you are impressed by their extent rather
than by anything else.
Rome is one enormous mausoleum. There
the Past lies visibly stretched upon his bier.
There is no to-day or to-morrow in Rome ; it is
perpetual yesterday. One might lift up a hand-
ful of dust anywhere and say, with the Persian
poet, "This was once man." Where every-
thing has been so long dead, a death of to-day
seems almost an impertinence. How quickly
and with what serene irony the new grave is
absorbed by the universal antiquity of the
place ! The block of marble over Keats does
not appear a day fresher than the neighboring
Pyramid of Caius Cestius. Oddly enough, we
saw no funeral in Rome. In almost every
other large city it was our fate, either as we
entered or departed, to meet a funeral cortege.
Every one stands uncovered as the train crawls
by, the vehicles come to a halt at the curb-
stone, the children stop their play, heads are
bowed, golden locks and gray, on every side.
As I have said, though in a different sense,
they make much of their dead abroad. I was
struck by the contrast the day we reached
home. Driving from the steamer, we encoun-
tered a hearse straggling down Broadway. It
16 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
attracted as much reverential regard as would
be paid to an ice-cart.
I happened to witness a picturesque funeral
in Venice. It was that of a chorus-boy, in a
church on one of the smaller canals somewhere
west of the Rialto. I stumbled on the church
accidentally that forenoon, and was not able to
find it again the next day a circumstance to
which the incident perhaps owes the illusory
atmosphere that envelops it for me. The
building had disappeared, like Aladdin's palace,
in the night.
Mass was being said as I entered. The
great rose window behind the organ and the
chancel windows were darkened with draperies,
and the colossal candles were burning. The
coffin, covered with a heavily embroidered pall,
stood on an elevated platform in front of the
magnificent altar. The inlaid columns glisten-
ing in the candle-light, the smoke of the in-
cense curling lazily up past the baldachino to
the frescoed dome, the priests in elaborate
stoles and chasubles kneeling around the bier
it was like a masterly composed picture.
When the ceremonies were concluded, the
coffin was lifted from the platform by six young
friars and borne to a gondola in waiting at the
steps near the portals. The priests, carrying
a huge golden crucifix and several tall gilt
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 17
torches, unlighted, crowded into the bow and
stern of the floating hearse, which was attached
by a long rope to another gondola occupied by
oarsmen. Following these were two or three
covered gondolas whose connection with the
obsequies was not clear to me, as they appeared
to be empty. Slowly down the narrow canal,
in that dead stillness which reigns in Venice,
swept the sombre flotilla, bearing its uncon-
scious burden to the Campo Santo. The air
was full of vagrant spring scents, and the sky
that arched over all was carved of one vast,
unclouded sapphire. In the deserted church
were two old crones scraping up the drippings
of the wax candles from the tessellated pave-
ment. Nothing except time is wasted in Italy.
I saw a more picturesque though not so
agreeable a funeral in Florence. The night of
our arrival was one of those unearthly moon-
light nights which belong to Italy. The Arno,
changed to a stream of quicksilver, flowed
swiftly through the stone arches of the Ponte
Vecchio under our windows, and lured me with
its beauty out of doors, though a great clock
somewhere near by had just clanged eleven.
By an engraving I had seen in boyhood I recog-
nized the bridge of Taddeo Gaddi, with its
goldsmith shops on either side. They were
closed now, of course. I strolled across the
i8 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
bridge and back again, once or twice, and then
wandered off into a network of dingy streets,
traversed by one street so very narrow that
you saw only a hand's breadth of amethystine
sky between the tops of the tall buildings.
Standing in the middle of the thoroughfare, I
could almost touch the shutters of the shops
right and left. At the upper end of the street,
which was at least three quarters of a mile in
length, the overhanging fronts of the lofty
houses seemed to meet and shut out the dense
moonlight. In the desperate struggle which
took place there between the moon and the
gloom, a hundred fantastic shadows slipped
from coigne and cornice and fell into the street
below, like besiegers flung from the ramparts
of some old castle. Not a human being nor a
light was anywhere visible. Suddenly I saw
what, for an instant, I took to be a falling star
in the extreme distance. It approached in a
zigzag course. It broke into several stars ;
these grew larger ; then I discovered they were
torches. A low monotonous chant, like the dis-
tant chorus of demons in an opera, reached my
ear. The chant momently increased in distinct-
ness, and as the torches drew nearer I saw that
they were carried by fifteen or twenty persons
marching in a square, in the middle of which
was a bier supported by a number of ghostly
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 19
figures. The procession was sweeping down
on me at the rate of six miles an hour ; the
training pall flapped in the wind caused by the
velocity of the march. When the cortege was
within twenty or thirty yards of me, I noticed
that the trestle-bearers and the persons who
held the flambeaux were shrouded from fore-
head to foot in white sheets with holes pierced
for the eyes. I never beheld anything more
devilish. On they came, occupying the whole
width of the narrow street. I had barely time
to crowd myself into a projecting doorway,
when they swept by with a rhythmical swing-
ing gait, to the measure of their awful threnody.
I waited until the muffled chant melted into
the distance and then I made a bee-line for
the hotel.
In Italy the hour of interment is graduated
by the worldly position of the deceased. The
poor are buried in the daytime ; thus the ex-
pense of torches is avoided. Illuminated night-
funerals are reserved for the wealthy and per-
sons of rank. At least, I believe that such is
the regulation, though the reverse of this order
may be the case. At Naples, I know, the in-
terments in the Campo Santo Vecchio take
place a little before sunset. Shelley said of the
Protestant Burying-Ground at Rome that the
spot was lovely enough to make one in love
20 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
with death. Nobody would dream of saying
that about the Campo Santo at Naples a par-
allelogram of several hundred feet in length, en-
closed on three sides by a high wall and on the
fourth by an arcade. In this dreary space, ap-
proached through a dismal avenue of cypresses,
are three hundred and sixty-six deep pits, one
of which is opened each evening to receive the
dead of that day, and then sealed up one
pit for each day of the year. I conjecture that
the extra pit must be for leap-year. Only the
poorest persons, paupers and waifs, are buried
here, if it can be called buried. The body is
usually left unattended at the arcade, to await
its turn.
There is a curious burial custom at Munich.
The law requires that every man, woman, and
child who dies within city limits shall lie in
state for three days in the Leichenhaus (dead
house) of the Gottesacker, the southern ceme-
tery, outside the Sendling Gate. This is to pre-
vent any chance of premature burial, an in-
stance of which, many years ago, gave rise to
the present provision. The Leichenhaus is
comprised of three large chambers or salons, in
which the dead are placed upon raised couches
and surrounded by flowers. A series of wide
windows giving upon the arcade affords the
public an unobstructed view of the interior.
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 21
The spectacle is not so repellent as one might
anticipate. The neatly kept, well-lighted rooms,
the profusion of flowers, and the scrupulous
propriety which prevails in all the arrangements
make the thing as little terrible as possible.
On the Sunday of our visit to the Gottesacker,
the place was unusually full of bodies awaiting
interment old men and women, young girls
and infants. Some were like exquisite statues,
others like wax-figures, and all piteous. At-
tached to the hand of each adult was a string or
wire connected with a bell in the custodian's
apartment. It would be difficult to imagine a
more startling sound than would be the sudden
kling-kling of one of those same bells !
But I have been playing too long what Bal-
zac calls a solo de corbillard.
Ill
BEGGARS, PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR
THERE is one thing that sometimes comes