xxxii INTRODUCTION

Charles. The dancing was very much more spirited than ours: till twelve o’clock, when all the ladies were taken down to supper. There had meantime been tea, for all who liked it, in a room beyond the library-not tea handed over a counter by confectioners’ girls, as it is in London, making the people’s houses look like railway stations, but tea made at a large comfortable table where people sat down and talked, and in large cups, the tea-maker being one of the Marshal’s aide-de-camps, the Count Thun-the same who met us at the railroad. But at the ladies’ supper the old Marshal was head-waiter himself; he went down and stood at the end of the room, just behind Princess Esterhazy’s chair, seeing that they all had enough; and not only so, but kept running into the kitchen to order things for them, and at last brought out a bowl of soup himself, keeping his aide-de-camps not less busy the whole time; nor that a short one, for the ladies were exceedingly comfortable, and sat at their supper full three-quarters of an hour. This-we hear from the said Count Thun-was as much in politeness to the Marshal as in kindness to themselves; for he is exactly like my mother, nothing annoys him so much as the idea that people have gone away without having been made comfortable; but especially without having enough to eat. ‘Il a toujours peur,’ says his aide-de-camp, ‘qu’on meurt de faim.’ With this substantial attention to all his guests there was great simplicity. The supper looked as if it were meant to be eaten, not to be looked at. There was not a single showy dish nor piece of finery on the table.

“The Maréchale is a very old lady, like most other old ladies. The gentlemen, of course chiefly soldiers, looked all of them like gentlemen and soldiers. I cannot say much for the women. The Countess Minischalchi was there, and looking very beautiful; but she and Effie were, I thought, the only pretty women in the room, and the appearance of the assembly in general did not at all assist the endeavour to suppose oneself in the palace of the Capulets.

“But the exquisite beauty of every scene in the city gains upon me each time that I return to it. We go back to Venice to-morrow; but I hope to wait on the old Marshal once more, when the weather is finer.”

He looked on these gay scenes, it will be remarked, with the eyes of a painter or a poet. They went back to Verona two or three times, and on one of these visits he notes the picturesqueness of the Austrian chivalry:-

“VERONA, 4th June.-... We are excessively petted here. Marshal Radetsky sent Effie his picture yesterday, with his own signature. I wish I could write as well, as dashing and firm as if it had been written

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