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 470 The same honest avowal of indifference or distaste, whenever indifference or distaste was felt, which characterised Sir Thomas Talfourd's former "Rambles," is patent here also. It is refreshing to note his candid acknowledgments in every such case. No man was more ready. more eager even, to express in the most cordial way his satisfaction wherever it was felt; but he was above the trick of affecting an enthusiasm he did not feel. He found Versailles "tiresome," and he say so; the "huge morning" he spent there seemed "dragged out into eternity;" and its only consolation was the zest its tediousness imparted to a subsequent resort to claret and champagne. In the Bay of Naples he owns that he has "been more deeply charmed by smaller and less famous bays." At Herculaneum he was "grievously disappointed," and was almost as glad to emerge from its "cold and dark passages that led to nothing," as from a railway tunnel. The dome of St. Peter's, when he first caught sight of it, on the road from Antium, "looked like a haycock," he says, "but soon afterwards assumed the improved aspect of a cow on the top of a malt-house." Entering Rome, he found the "famed Italian sky as filthy as a London fog;" he bewails the only too decisive contrast between the Capitol unvisited and the Capitol explored; and is indignant, for Coriolanus' sake, with that impostor and receptacle for vegetable refuse, the Tarpeian Hill. In Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment" he could see "no presiding majesty; no balance of parts; nothing that stamps even the reality of a moment on the conception; nothing in this gnat handwriting on the wall ;to make mad the guilty and appal the free.'" The "Laocoon" he looked on with any thing but a Winkelman's gaze. And in short, to leave Rome "was to escape," he confesses, "from a region of enchantment into the fresh air of humanity and nature; and, humiliating as the truth may be, I quitted it for ever without a sigh."

For ever! A new and touching emphasis is imparted to the phrase by the stroke which so suddenly laid the kind writer low. With the so recent memory of that stroke, it may seem frivolous, or worse, if we mention as another noticeable point in the "Ramble" his ever freely recorded appreciation of good cheer. But how take account of the "Rambles" at all, and not refer to this feature in the Rambler's individuality?—not, be it observed, that he was a "gastronome," but that he was healthily void of reserve in jotting down his interest in gastronomics. It had been unpardonable in Boswell to omit Dr. Johnson's creed and practice in this line of things. "Some people," quoth the sage, "have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else." So averred a Rambler of last century; a Plain Speaker on this as on most other topics. Now the Rambler with whom we have to do was guiltless of this "foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind." If, at Dieppe, he had to pat up with a "coarse breakfast of blackish bread, cold boiled mutton, and straw-coloured coffee," he thought it a thing to be put down—in his book. He confesses how a due sense of "the eternal fitness of things" enforced on him the duty of drinking the best Burgundy he could procure in Dijon, "in gay defiance to the fever which so strangely but surely lurks beneath the 'sunset glow' of that insidious liquor;" how he "enjoyed some coffee and