Read Ebook: The Atlantic Monthly Volume 05 No. 28 February 1860 A Magazine of Literature Art and Politics by Various

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n Had seen the wonderful shawl begun; It was finished, and folded up with pride, When the vintage purpled the mountain-side; And smiles made light in the violet eyes, At the thought of a lover's pleased surprise.

The spider hung from the budding thorn His baseless web, when the shawl was worn; And the cobwebs, silvered by the dew, With the morning sunshine breaking through, The maiden's toil might well recall, In the vanished year, on the Shetland Shawl.

For the rose had died in the autumn showers, That bloomed in the summer's golden hours; And the shining tissue of hopes and dreams, With misty glories and rainbow gleams Woven within and out, was one Like the slender thread by the spider spun.

As fresh and as pure as the sad young face, The snowy shawl with its clinging grace Seems a fitting veil for a form so fair: But who would think what a tale of care, Of love and grief and faith, might all Be folded up in a Shetland Shawl?

ROBA DI ROMA.

GAMES IN ROME.

This readiness of the Italians to use the knife, for the settlement of every dispute, is generally attributed by foreigners to the passionateness of their nature; but I am inclined to believe that it also results from their entire distrust of the possibility of legal redress in the courts. Where courts are organized as they are in Naples, who but a fool would trust to them? Open tribunals, where justice should be impartially administered, would soon check private assassinations; and were there more honest and efficient police courts, there would be far fewer knives drawn. The Englishman invokes the aid of the law, knowing that he can count upon prompt justice; take that belief from him, he, too, like Harry Gow, would "fight for his own hand." In the half-organized society of the less civilized parts of the United States, the pistol and bowie-knife are as frequent arbiters of disputes as the stiletto is among the Italians. But it would be a gross error to argue from this, that the Americans are violent and passionate by nature; for, among the same people in the older States, where justice is cheaply and strictly administered, the pistol and bowie-knife are almost unknown. Despotism and slavery nurse the passions of men; and wherever law is loose, or courts are venal, public justice assumes the shape of private vengeance. The farther south one goes in Italy, the more frequent is violence and the more unrepressed are the passions. Compare Piedmont with Naples, and the difference is immense. The dregs of vice and violence settle to the south. Rome is worse than Tuscany, and Naples worse than Rome,--not so much because of the nature of the people, as of the government and the laws.

This game is as national to the Italians as cricket to the English; it is not only, as it seems to me, much more interesting than the latter, but requires vastly more strength, agility, and dexterity, to play it well. The Italians give themselves to it with all the enthusiasm of their nature, and many a young fellow injures himself for life by the fierceness of his batting. After the excitement and stir of this game, which only the young and athletic can play well, cricket seems a very dull affair.

"But how under heaven," says the innocent priest, "has it ever got into your head that I can know the five numbers which are to issue in the lottery?"

"Oh, there you are again! I am ready to do all I can to assist you, but this matter of the lottery is impossible; and I must say, that your folly, in supposing I can give you the three lucky numbers, does little credit to your brains."

In not only permitting, but promoting the lottery, Italy is certainly far behind England, France, and America. This system no longer exists with us, except in the disguised shape of gift-enterprises, art-unions, and that unpleasant institution of mendicant robbery called the raffle, and employed specially by those "who have seen better days." But a fair parallel to this rage of the Italians for the lottery is to be found in the love of betting, which is a national characteristic of the English. I do not refer to the bets upon horseflesh at Ascot, Epsom, and Goodwood, by which fortunes change owners in an hour and so many men are ruined, but rather to the general habit of betting upon any and every subject to settle a question, no matter how trivial, for which the Englishman is everywhere renowned on the Continent. Betting is with most other nations a form of speech, but with Englishmen it is a serious fact, and no one will be long in their company without finding an opinion backed up by a bet. It would not be very difficult to parallel those cases where the Italians disregard the solemnity of death, in their eagerness for omens of lottery-numbers, with equally reprehensible and apparently heartless cases of betting in England. Let any one who doubts this examine the betting-books at White's and Brookes's. In them he will find a most startling catalogue of bets,--some so bad as to justify the good parson in Walpole's story, who declared that they were such an impious set in this respect at White's, that, "if the last trump were to sound, they would bet puppet-show against judgment." Let one instance suffice. A man, happening to drop down at the door of White's, was lifted up and carried in. He was insensible, and the question was, whether he were dead or not. Bets were at once given and taken on both sides, and, it being proposed to bleed him, those who had taken odds that he was dead protested, on the ground that the use of the lancet would affect the fairness of the bet. In the matter of play, things have now much changed since the time when Mr. Thynne left the club at White's in disgust, because he had won only twelve hundred guineas in two months. There is also a description of one of Fox's mornings, about the year 1783, which Horace Walpole has left us, and the truth of which Lord Holland admits, which it would be well for those to read who measure out hard justice to the Italians for their love of the lottery. Let us be fair. Italy is in these respects behind England in morals and practice by nearly a century; but it is as idle to argue hard-heartedness in an Italian who counts the drops of blood at a beheading as to suppose that the English have no feeling because in the bet we have mentioned there was a protest against the use of the lancet, or to deny kindliness to a surgeon who lectures on structure and disease while he removes a cancer.

Vehement protests against the lottery and all gaming are as often uttered in Italy as elsewhere; and among them may be cited this eloquent passage from one of the most powerful of her modern writers. Guerrazzi, in the thirteenth chapter of "L'Assedio di Firenze," speaking on this subject, says, "You would in vain seek anything more fatal to men than play. It brings ignorance, poverty, despair, and at last crime.... Gambling forms a precious jewel in the crown of princes."

In a recent work, by the same author, called "L'Asino," occurs the following indignant and satirical passage, which, for the sake of the story, if for no other reason, deserves a place here:--

"In our search for the history of human perfection, shall I speak of Naples or Rome? Alas! At the contemplation of such misery, in vain you constrain your lips to smile; they pout, and the uncalled tears stream over your face. Pity, in these most unhappy countries, blinded with weeping and hoarse with vain supplication, when she has no more voice to cry out to heaven, flies thither, and, kneeling before the throne of God, with outstretched hand, and proffering no word, begs that He will look at her.

"Behold, O Lord, and judge whether our sins were remitted, or whether the sins of others exceed ours.

Some one, I have no doubt, will here be anxious to know the numbers that bubbled up to the surface; but I am very sorry to say that I cannot gratify their laudable curiosity, for the interference of the police prevented the completion of the sorcery. So the curious must be content to consult some other cabalist,--

"sull'arti segrete Di menar la Fortuna per il naso, Pescando il certo nel gran mar del Caso."

FOOTNOTES:

THE AMBER GODS.

Papa made Mr. Dudley stay and dine, and of course we were almost bored to death, when in came Rose again, stealing behind Lu's chair and showering her in the twilight with a rain of May-flowers.

"Now you'll have to gather them again," he said.

"Oh, how exquisite! how delicious! how I thank you!" she exclaimed, without disturbing one, however.

"You won't touch them again? Then I must," he added.

"No! no! Mr. Rose!" I cried. "I'll pick them up and take toll."

"Don't touch them!" said Lu, "they're so sweet!"

"Yes," he murmured lower, "they're like you. I always said so, you remember."

"Oh, yes! and every May-day but the last you have brought them to me."

"Have you the trailing-arbutus there?" asked Mr. Dudley.

"No," returned Rose.

"I thought I detected strawberries," submitted the other,--"a pleasant odor which recalls childhood to memory."

For some noses all sweet scents are lumped in one big strawberry; clovers, or hyacinths, or every laden air indifferently, they still sniff strawberries. Commonplace things!

"Very true, Miss Willoughby. I was born pretty high up in the Green Mountains."

"And so keep your memory green?"

"Strawberries in June," said Rose, good-naturedly. "But fruit out of season is trouble out of reason, the Dream-Book says. It's May now, and these are its blossoms."

"Have you finished your tirade?" asked Rose, indifferently.

"I don't believe you mean so," murmured Lu. "They have a color of their own, almost human, infantine; and when you mass them, the tone is more soft and mellow than a flute. Everybody loves May-flowers."

"Just about. I despise flutes. I like bassoons."

"They are prophets of apple-blossoms."

"Which brings them at once into the culinary."

"There's nothing like them," said Rose, gently, as he knelt by Lu, slowly putting them into order; "nothing but pure, clear things; they're the fruit of snowflakes, the firstlings of the year. When one thinks how sweetly they come from their warm coverts and look into this cold, breezy sky so unshrinkingly, and from what a soil they gather such a wealth of simple beauty, one feels ashamed."

He threw me a cluster, half-hidden in its green towers, and went on, laying one by one and bringing out little effects.

"The sweetest modesty clings to them, which Alphonse Karr denies to the violet, so that they are almost out of place in a drawing-room; one ought to give them there the shelter of their large, kind leaves."

"Hemlock's the only wear," said Louise.

"Or last year's scarlet blackberry triads. Vines together," he suggested.

"But sometimes they forget their nun-like habit," she added, "put on a frolicsome mood, and clamber out and flush all the deep ruts of the carriage-road in Follymill woods, you remember."

"No, no; you are not to bring your old world into my new," objected Rose. "Perhaps they ran out so to greet the winter-worn mariners of Plymouth, and have been pursued by the love of their descendants ever since, they getting charier. Just remember how they grow. Why, you'd never suspect a flower there, till, happening to turn up a leaf, you're in the midst of harvest. You may tramp acres in vain, and within a stone's throw they've been awaiting you. There's something very charming, too, about them in this,--that when the buds are set, and at last a single blossom starts the trail, you plucking at one end of the vine, your heart's delight may touch the other a hundred miles away. Spring's telegraph. So they bind our coast with this network of flower and root."

"Pshaw! I won't believe it. They're everywhere just the same, only underground preparing their little witnesses, whom they send out where most needed. You don't suppose they find much joy in the fellowship of brown pine pins and sad, gray mosses, do you? Some folks say they don't grow away from the shore; but I've found them, I'm sorry to say, up in New Hampshire."

"Why sorry?" asked Lu.

"Oh, I like it best that they need our sea. They're eminently choice for this hour, too, when you scarcely gather their tint,--that tint, as if moonlight should wish to become a flower,--but their fragrance is an atmosphere all about you. How genuinely spicy it is! It's the very quintessence of those regions all whose sweetness exudes in sun-saturated balsams,--the very breath of pine woods and salt sea winds. How could it live away from the sea?"

"Why, Sir," said Mr. Dudley, "you speak as if it were a creature!"

"A hard, woody stem, a green, robust leaf, a delicate, odorous flower, Mr. Dudley, what is it all but an expression of New England character?"

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