Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 1.djvu/519

 9 th S. I. JUNK 25, '98.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

511

he was in the habit of frequently staying at Leghorn and Monte Nero, as proved by letters to his friends Caleb White- foord and the eminent John Hunter ; other letters show him to have been at or near Pisa towards the close of his life. Dr. Arm- strong writes to Smollett, March, 1769, " I enioy, with a pleasing sympathy, the agreeable society you find amongst the pro- fessors at Pisa." Again, in June, 1770, "I wrote to my brother from Genoa, and desired him to direct his answer to your care at Pisa." And further support of residence at Pisa, or near that city, is gleaned from the letter in the Gentleman's Magazine for May, 1818, which affords, so far as I am aware, the only explicit record at hand that dwells upon and unmistakably establishes the approximate site of the historian's tomb, showing forth in a very positive manner that in 1818 it was not to be found at Leghorn, but somewhere between Pisa and that seaport town, "on the banks of the Arno." There certainly did exist in Smollett's time a navigable canal II Canale dei Navicelli from the Arno at Pisa to the sea close by Leghorn, and since it would be as absurd to speak of the Arno between Leghorn and Pisa as of the Clyde between Glasgow and Ardrossan, allowance must be made for the limited geographical knowledge of the country possessed by the correspondent of the Gentleman's Magazine, for he might have mistaken the canal (a broad one at that period) for the Arno, as was evidently the case with Shelley when travel- ling upon one occasion from Pisa to Leghorn on the road (campestre), the only land com- munication between the two cities, which lay parallel to the canal almost the entire way. Trelawny thus relates the incident :

"As we turned off the Lung' Arno, a friendly puff of wind relieved the poet of his obnoxious head-gear, and the hat trundled along. I stopped the horses. Shelley, ' Oh ! don't stop ! It will get into the river, and I shall find it at Leghorn.' "

Of such capacity was the canal that an ambassador from Marocco, having stated that the motion of a coach was disagreeable to him, expressed a desire to return to Leghorn from Florence by water, and a Court gondola was prepared for the purpose, and that journey was accomplished in February, 1778. Writing in 1820, Cadell, ' Journey to Carniola, Italy,' &c., speaks of the canal as being navi- gable, the intervening country being thickly wooded and not cultivated. He alludes to the cemetery at Leghorn, " where have died many English of consumption," but is silent on the obelisk. To all intents, Smollett died a heretic, so far as Church discipline was con-

cerned in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, in days as dark as any in the Middle Ages ; we may therefore rest assured that his burial in consecrated ground other than Protestant would not have been tolerated, any more than it would be at the present day. He died as he had lived the greater portion of his agitated life, in very straitened circumstances, so that, upon the fairly safe assumption that he passed away at a villa somewhat nearer to Pisa than to Leghorn, it would have been scarcely possible for his destitute widow to remove his remains even though the two cities are only about twelve miles apart within the short time prescribed by the law of the land, to the comparatively remote ceme- tery at Leghorn. Gentili visited the dying man on 14 Sept. "for the first time," which clearly implies that the Italian was not Smol- lett's habitual medical attendant, but that he had been invited by his friend Dr. Garden to a consultation at the crisis. If what has been advanced be considered without bias, we may conclude as probable that Smollett, in his deplorable condition, died at no great dis- tance from Pisa, a noted sanatorium in his day (Scots Magazine states he died at the baths of Pisa), and that he was interred beside the canal, within the grounds of one of his numerous friends. It is scarcely possible to admit, had he died in such close proximity to Leghorn as to have ensured nis burial there, that the English consular department could have neglected to record the DU rial of a Protestant British subject, and especially of a man of no small reputation. When we read of " so many of his countrymen planting slips of laurel at his tomb," almost to obstruct- ing entrance to the doors (what doors ?), we are forced to admit that, apart from their desire to visit the sepulchre of a famed Scots- man, Pisa had attractions for travellers with which those at Leghorn could not for one instant be ranked not simply because of its superb monuments and on account of its cele- brity as a watering-place, but also because Pisa was, at certain seasons, the favourite villeggiatura of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who betook himself thither annually, attended by the whole of his brilliant Court.

J. BUCHAN TELFER, Captain R.N.

THE PARNELL PEDIGREE (6 th S. viii. 509; ix. 98). During the month of June, in which C. S. Parnell was born, it may be worth while to draw attention to his forefathers. MR. W. MAZIERE BRADY asserts at the first reference that "C. S. Parnell has no blood of Irish princes in his veins." Also Mr. McCarthy, in 'History of Our Own Times,' 1880-97, p. 64,