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278 PRÆTERITA-II
if not an enthusiastic, was an indefatigable and attentive sight-seeker and seer, everything that Rome had to show; the musical festas especially, whenever his cross-grained boy consented, for Miss Tollemache’s secret sake, to go with him; while Mr. Severn and George Richmond became every day more kindly-nor, we felt, without real pleasure to themselves-helpful to us all. No habitué of the brightest circles of present London Society will doubt the privilege we had in better and better knowing George Richmond. But there is nothing in any circle that ever I saw or heard of, like what Mr. Joseph Severn then was in Rome.1 He understood everybody, native and foreign, civil and ecclesiastic, in what was nicest in them, and never saw anything else than the nicest; or saw what other people got angry about as only a humorous part of the nature of things. It was the nature of things that the Pope should be at St. Peter’s, and the beggars on the Pincian steps. He forgave the Pope his papacy, reverenced the beggar’s beard, and felt that alike the steps of the Pincian, and the Araceli, and the Lateran, and the Capitol, led to heaven, and everybody was going up, somehow; but might be happy where they were in the meantime. Lightly sagacious, lovingly humorous, daintily sentimental, he was in council with the cardinals to-day, and at picnic in Campagna with the brightest English belles to-morrow; and caught the hearts of all in the golden net of his good will and good understanding, as if life were but for him the rippling chant of his favourite song,-
“Gente, e qui l’uccellatore.”2
1 [Joseph Severn (1793-1879), painter; gold medallist, Royal Academy, 1818; accompanied Keats to Italy, 1820, and attended him at his death, 1821; settled at Rome; returned to England, 1841-1860; British Consul at Rome, 1860-1872.]
2 [From the Zauberflöte of Mozart.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
