THE NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE AND HUMORIST. CONTENTS FOR JULY. THE CASINO. BY L. MARIOTTI. THE ALCALDE of ZaLaMEA. BY JOHN Oxenford MARGARET GRAHAM. BY G. P. R. JAMES, ESQ., Author of "DARNLEY," "Richelieu," &c. THE CHILD AND THE STARS. BY J. E. CARPENTER PAGE . 253 . 269 . 278 289 THE BALLAD OF RUDIGER THE PROUD. BY MRS. PONSONBY ... 298 THE PRIEST OF ISIS. AN EGYPTIAN ROMANCE. BY THE AU REDDING, Esq. 66 THOR OF AZETH, THE EGYPTIAN." WHY IS THY PILLOW WET WITH TEARS ? BY CAROLINE DE CRESPIGNY ASSAM AND THE HILL TRIBES LIFE AND REMINISCENCES OF THOMAS CAMPBELL. ADRIEN ROUX; OR, THE ADVENTURES OF A COURIER. BY DUD- WHICH IS THE PRETTIEST? A GLIMPSE AT THE PARISIAN MEMOIRS OF M. TOURGUENEFF. AN EPISODE IN RUSSIAN LORD CASTLEREAGH'S TRAVELS IN THE EAST THE OPERA-JENNY LIND AS NORMA-SWEDISH MELODIES LITERATURE:-Memoirs of Viscountess Sundon, Mistress of the Robes to Queen Caroline, Consort of George II., including Letters from the most celebrated persons of her Time. Now first published from the originals by Mrs. Thomson.Novels of the Month-Zenon-Fortescue-Jeremiah Parkes-and the Protegé.-Miscellaneous Notices TO CORRESPONDENTS. Mr. AINSWORTH begs it to be distinctly understood that no Contributions whatever sent him, either for the NEW MONTHLY OF AINSWORTH'S MAGAZINES will be returned. All articles are sent at the risk of the writers, who should invariably keep copies. THE JULY NUMBER OF AINSWORTH'S MAGAZINE. EDITED BY W. HARRISON AINSWORTH, ESQ. Contents. I. JAMES THE SECOND; OR, THE REVOLUTION OF 1688. AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE. EDITED BY W. HARRISON BOOK THE THIRD.-Chap. II. How the Earl of Sunderland conformed to BOOK THE FOURTH.-The Invasion.-Chap. I. The Prince of Orange.- II. DECEIVED BY APPEARANCES. BY E. P. ROWSELL, ESQ. III. HE ENVIED NOT THE POMP AND POWER. BY THE REV. JAMES GILBORNE LYONS, LL.D. IV. THE AGENT'S WINDOW. BY MRS. WHITE. V. ALPINE SCENERY. BY THE HON. JULIA MAYNARD. VI. THE EXPEDITION IN DIFFICULTIES. AINSWORTH, ESQ. BY W. FRANCIS I. Ali Pasha, and the Bey of Rawanduz.-II. The British Residency at VII. THE VENETIAN WIFE AND THE COUNCIL OF TEN. VIII. THE BLIND OGRE. A BRETON LEGEND. ESQ. AN BY W. HUGHES, IX. ZEKY NAASHON, THE JEW OF PORTSMOUTH. A YACHT X. LAUNCELOT WIDGE. BY CHARLES HOOTON, ESQ. CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FOURTH.-Launcelot's Marriage with Amelia, and XI. WHAT I LOVE. BY CAROLINE DE CRESPIGNY. CHAPMAN AND HALL, 186, STRAND. NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. THE CASINO. BY L. MARIOTTI. LUNIGIANA, or VAL-DI-MAGRA, is a narrow and deep strip of land on the Apennines, a dainty valley which may well put the most gorgeous descriptions of Rasselas to the blush. It was too rich and fair, too blessed a region for any mortal monarch to lord it all over. Consequently the King of Sardinia, the Duke of Modena, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany have each their own slice. The upper district belongs to the last-named potentate, and forms a separate dependence of the Grand Duchy, hemmed in on all sides by the neighbouring territories. The metropolis of this little Tuscan province is called Pontremoli. Pontremoli-Pons-Remuli, according to some-more probably Ponstremulus-derives its name from a crazy and shaky old bridge in the vicinity of the old town-gate,—a ricketty concern, which has been rocking and swinging, and would, ages ago, have sunk into the torrent beneath, but for the interference of San Giovanni Nepomuceno, the bluff Teutonic saint, Old Nepomuck from Prague, there hung in effigy, with his characteristic crown of five stars, and stretching forth his hand to avert the wrath of flood and avalanche, and supply the defect of solid masonry. Why the good Bohemian bishop, who could not help himself from a fatal tumble from the bridge on the Moldau, should be set up to stay a bridge in its fall, is one of those mysteries of the Roman Catholic Olympus, which mere profanes need not attempt to explain-unless it were by reasons analogous to those which appointed the Virgin saints, Lucy and Apollonia, to guard their worshippers against all ophthalmic and odontalgic diseases; viz., that the latter having every tooth in her mouth drawn, and the former both eyes torn from their sockets, pickled, seasoned, and served up at supper, by the inhumanity of heathenish tyrants, and having, therefore, nothing to apprehend from tooth-ache and sore-eyes on their own account, they are, it is inferred, amply at leisure to take care of other people's infirmities. Thanks, as we said, to the exertions of the saint, in behalf of the structure from which it takes its name, the city of the tumble-down bridge, is as flourishing a place as any other market-town in the Apennines. It lies deep in the valley, in a snug hollow, sheltered on three sides, cloaked and blanketed, as it were, in the deep folds of its bold mountain-range. Up to their summits the hills are one vast chestnut and olive forest. The vineyards bloom on the lower eminences; corn-fields and pasture-grounds spread to the south-west, immediately below the town. A few white dots glimmer through the dense ever-green mantling the heights. These are the church-steeples of Vignola, Bagnone, Filattiera, and other less important hamlets of the district. Else nothing interrupts the sameness of that luxuriant vegetation. The very torrents glide or dash down unseen into the main stream of the Magra-unseen, though by their wild rattling crash, perpetually enlivening the stillness of their Alpine solitude. July.-VOL. LXXX. NO. CCCXIX. Pontremoli is a town of one thousand houses, or fuochi; for hearths are a well-known and most desirable luxury in that high region. Every third house is a wine-shop, or else a nobleman's palace. Often, indeed, the publican's oak-branch hangs on the same door by the side of the patrician's marble escutcheon, for the vineyards of the district are a common source of wealth to great and small, and the broken-down lord disdains not to improve his finances by transacting a little business in the vintner's line, through the agency of his butler or steward, in his own premises. From one corner to the other of the peninsula, Italy is rich in poor nobles. Every village and hamlet, especially in the mountains, has its own nursery of these parasitic weeds. Half-starved counts, and penniless marquises, idle, proud, overbearing in proportion to their insignificance. They are the remnants of the feudal families, which were driven from the towns and plains in republican times. On their mountain-fastnesses they lingered in silence and obscurity, they fastened on their vassals like leeches, they bred like rabbits in their burrows. Together with the laws that swept down their half-obsolete lordly privileges, came the abolition of primogeniture which raised every branch to a level with the parent stem. Every puny lordling stood up, every inch a lord. The eldest brother once reduced to beggary, every cadet of either sex came in for a fair share in the patrimony. From the remotest epochs in medieval history, Lunigiana was the stronghold of Italian feudalism. The Malispini and Pela-vicini, two kindred branches of the house of Este, were, as their names implied, Hard-skinners and Evil-thorns in the sides of their neighbours. But, on the earliest decline of feudal power, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the most generous and enterprising-perhaps also the most needy-members of those families had emigrated to the free cities of Lombardy, Liguria, and Tuscany, there to bring their high blood and mettle to bear on the scramble for honour to which free institutions opened so ample a field; till by their strenuous exertions they re-asserted a power which ephemeral republicanism had wrenched from them. As leaders of the burgher nobility those regenerated patricians held up their head throughout every phasis of Italian decline; and their descendants at the present day, the numerous branches of the Malaspina and Pallavicino (for so they have softened their appellation from its first villanous meaning) enjoy as much consideration as rank and wealth can, in an enslaved country, afford them above the mass of their fellowbondmen. But a sprinkling of both races, together with other houses of less conspicuous descent, always tarried behind; clinging to their native warrens on the Apuan hills with the tenacity of the craven vermin, they have been before compared to; parading their quarters before the gaping rustics of that primitive district, greeting each other with the empty titles their petty sovereigns doled out to them, and giving themselves airs as the crème de la crème, the elder branches, the indigenous and genuine aristocracy of the land. Their ancestors' eyries and rookeries on the Apennine crags were too stately and spacious, or else too bleak and uncomfortable for the stunted and dwindled race, and the sinking fortunes of later generations. A sense of insecurity in their isolated position in olden times, and subsequently that social instinct which impels the Italians to huddle together in their crowded cities, gradually led the lords of Lunigiana to shift their homes to Pontremoli, where, as we have seen, their mansions, in every style of building since the flood, in every state of unrepair, rose up in every direction along the straggling main street of the town. There, draining their vineyards to the last drop, felling their woods to the last stick, and grinding their tenants to the last farthing; haggling and wrangling with money-lending locusts who eat them out of house and home, they labour hard to keep up what they call the lustre of their family-a mere rush-light at the best, which they are compelled to hide under the bushel of a remote and most insignificant province. A few of the most thriving do, indeed, contrive to diversify their paltry existence by spending a Christmas or carnival season at Parma, at Florence, at any of the minor capitals, either as a better sort of upper lacqueys at court, or as spungers and hangers-on at some of their namesakes, and more than questionable relatives. But the travelled members are rare in the community; whilst the vast majority, penury-bound, rise, fall, and rot on the spot, as irremovable as the piers of their paralytic old bridge, ever since good Nepomuck put his miraculous veto on their locomotive propensities. It would be long to enumerate the causes which contribute to render this otherwise fertile and happy valley a true Abyssinian retreat, a kind of Italian Krähwinkle-a hot-bed of hobbies, of silly old notions, which everywhere else have given way, like noxious old weeds, under the hasty tread of civilisation. In the first place, the district is literally and materially inaccessible. There is no way into it. Poor Napoleon (that wag of "Boz" all the time wondering why the Italians should cherish his memory) had done a job for them; and that was a job in his own style. From the Lombard plain, across the Apennine pass of La Cisa, up to the very gates of Pontremoli, he had driven a military road, which was to be prolonged as far as the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Spezia. In beauty and magnificence, no less than in expense and difficulties overcome, the work had little to envy the more renowned achievement of Mount Cenis and the Simplon. The traces of the gigantic enterprise are still recent, enormous chasms in the rocks testifying the strife by which man asserted his sway over stubborn nature; the blasted crags bearing still on their brow the scars and bruises where the fire and sword had struck, as they rose frowning and threatening astride the path, and grappled with all the might of the hundred-handed conqueror; the furrows of the mine still black with the gunpowder which blew the very bowels of the mountain asunder-and along their yawning gaps the trickling waters of the Alpine springs, which, frozen in their fall by the northern blast on a winter's morning, hang on the sable rock in myriads of icicles, all sparkling in the rising sun like diamonds on a suit of jet. All labour lost! Napoleon's successors, to whom a road is an infernal machine, suffered the whole to fall into ruin, and the ill-fated Pontremolese remained there up to the period we are now describing, as effectually shut out of the world as the early colonists of Greenland, since the last European mariners were hopelessly driven back from their ice-bound, inhospitable coast.* The entrance to the valley, moreover, is, especially on its more practicable side, guarded by dragons, dragoons, gaugers, and crocodiles, Scribes and Pharisees, bugbears of the very worst description, stopping the luckless traveller at every corner of the road (such as it is), ransacking his trunks, The road has been since restored and continued as far as Sarzana and La Spezia. |