III. CUMÆ 281

faults, and by no means the constant capacities, should be set forth, carved by the petty justice of the practical cameo. Concerning which, as also other later portraits of me, I will be thus far proud as to tell the disappointed spectator, once for all, that the main good of my face, as of my life, is in the eyes,-and only in those, seen near; that a very dear and wise French friend also told me, a long while after this, that the lips, though not Apolline, were kind: the George the Third and Fourth character I recognize very definitely among my people, as already noticed in my cousin George of Croydon;¹ and of the shape of head, fore and aft, I have my own opinions, but do not think it time, yet, to tell them.

44. I think it, however, quite time to say a little more fully, not only what happened to me, now of age, but what was in me: to which end I permit a passage or two out of my diary, written for the first time this year wholly for my own use, and note of things I saw and thought; and neither to please papa, nor to be printed,-with corrections,-by Mr. Harrison.²

I see, indeed, in turning the old leaves, that I have been a little too morose in my record of impressions on the Riviera. Here is a page more pleasant, giving first sight of a place afterwards much important in my life-the promontory of Sestri di Levante:-

“SESTRI, Nov. 4th (1840).-Very wet all morning; merely able to get the four miles to this most lovely village, the clouds drifting like smoke from the hills, and hanging in wreaths about the white churches on their woody slopes. Kept in here till three, then the clouds broke, and we got up the woody promontory that overhangs the village. The clouds were rising gradually from the Apennines, fragments entangled here and there in the ravines catching the level sunlight like so many tongues of fire; the dark blue outline of the

¹ [See i. § 98; above, p. 88.]

² [See above, p. 246.]

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