Yesterday at S. Luke's a new piece was acted:--_L'Inglicismo in Italia_ (the English in Italy). As there are many Englishmen living in Italy, it is not unnatural that their ways and habits should excite notice, and I expected to learn from this piece what the Italians thought of their rich and welcome visitors. But it was a total failure. There were, of course, (as is always the case here,) some clever scenes between buffoons, but the rest was cast altogether in too grave and heavy a mould, and yet nob a trace of the English good sense: plenty of the ordinary Italian commonplaces of morality, and those, too, upon the very commonest of topics.
And it did not take: indeed, it was on the very point of being hissed off the stage. The actors felt themselves out of their element--not on the strand of Chiozza. As this was the last piece that I saw here, my enthusiasm for these national representations did not seem likely to be increased by this piece of folly.
As I have at last gone through my journal and entered some occasional remarks from my tablets, my proceedings are now enrolled and left to the sentence of my friends. There is, I am conscious, very much in these leaves which I might qualify, enlarge upon, and improve. Let, however, what is written, stand as the memorial of first impressions, which, if not always correct, will nevertheless be ever dear and precious to me. Oh that I could but transmit to my friends a breath merely of this light existence! Verily to the Italian, "ultramontane" is a very vague idea; and to me even--"beyond the Alps," rises very obscurely before my mind, although from out of their mists friendly forms are beckoning to me. It is the climate only that seduces me to prefer awhile these lands to those; for birth and habit forge strong fetters. Here, however, I could not live, nor indeed in any place where I had nothing to occupy my mind; but at present novelty furnishes me here with endless occupation. Architecture rises, like an ancient spirit from the tombs, and bids me study its laws just as people do the rules of a dead language, not in order to practise or to take a living joy in them, but only in order to enable myself in the quiet depths of my own mind to do honor to her existence in bygone ages, and her for ever departed glory. As Palladio everywhere refers one to Vitruvius, I have bought an edition of the latter by Galiani; but this folio suffers in my portmanteau as much as my brain does in the study of it. Palladio by his words and works, by his method and way, both of thinking and of executing, has brought Vitruvius home to me and interpreted him far better than the Italian translator ever can. Vitruvius himself is no easy reading; his book is obscurely written, and requires a critical study. Notwithstanding I have read it through cursorily, and it has left on my mind many a glorious impression. To express my meaning better: I read it like a breviary: more out of devotion, than for instruction. Already the days begin to draw in and allow more time for reading and writing.