earty and sincere
execration than at that moment. Throughout the whole of my journey I
had found reason to exclaim against it for depriving me of some
valuable curiosity or celebrated monument, but this was the severest
disappointment it had yet occasioned." This view of the Revolution is
very characteristic of Irving, and perhaps the first that would occur
to a man of letters. The journey was altogether disagreeable, even to
a traveler used to the rough jaunts in an American wilderness: the inns
were miserable; dirt, noise, and insolence reigned without control. But
it never was our author's habit to stroke the world the wrong way: "When
I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to
suit my dinner." And he adds: "There is nothing I dread more than to be
taken for one of the Smellfungi of this world. I therefore endeavor to
be pleased with everything about me, and with the masters, mistresses,
and servants of the inns, particularly when I perceive they have 'all
the dispositions in the world' to serve me; as Sterne says, 'It is
enough for heaven and ought to be enough for me.'"

The traveler was detained at Marseilles, and five weeks at Nice, on one
or another frivolous pretext of the police, and did not reach Genoa till
the 20th of October. At Genoa there was a delightful society, and
Irving seems to have been more attracted by that than by the historical
curiosities. His health was restored, and his spirits recovered
elasticity in the genial hospitality; he was surrounded by friends to
whom he became so much attached that it was with pain he parted from
them. The gayety of city life, the levees of the Doge, and the balls,
were not unattractive to the handsome young man; but what made Genoa
seem like home to him was his intimacy with a few charming families,
among whom he mentions those of Mrs. Bird, Madame Gabriac, and Lady
Shaftesbury. From the latter he experienced the most cordial and
unreserved friendship; she greatly interested herself in his future, and
furnished him with letters from herself and the nobility to persons of
the first distinction in Florence, Rome, and Naples.

Late in December Irving sailed for Sicily in a Genoese packet. Off the
island of Planoca it was overpowered and captured by a little picaroon,
with lateen sails and a couple of guns, and a most villainous crew, in
poverty-stricken garments, rusty cutlasses in their hands and stilettos
and pistols stuck in their waist