the Croce di Malta, "overlooking the port and sea pleasantly and
airily enough, but it was no joke to get so high, and the apartment is
rather vast and faded." The warmth of personal greeting that here
awaited Dickens was given no less to the friends who accompanied him,
and though the reader may not share in such private confidences as would
show the sensation created by his reappearance, and the jovial hours
that were passed among old associates, he will perhaps be interested to
know how far the intervening years had changed the aspect of things and
places made pleasantly familiar to us in his former letters. He wrote to
his sister-in-law that the old walks were pretty much the same as ever
except that there had been building behind the Peschiere up the San
Bartolomeo hill, and the whole town towards San Pietro d'Arena had been
quite changed. The Bisagno looked just the same, stony just then, having
very little water in it; the vicoli were fragrant with the same old
flavour of "very rotten cheese kept in very hot blankets;" and
everywhere he saw the mezzaro as of yore. The Jesuits' College in the
Strada Nuova was become, under the changed government, the Hotel de
Ville, and a splendid caffe with a terrace-garden had arisen between it
and Palaviccini's old palace. "Pal himself has gone to the dogs."
Another new and handsome caffe had been built in the Piazza Carlo
Felice, between the old one of the Bei Arti and the Strada Carlo Felice;
and the Teatro Diurno had now stone galleries and seats, like an ancient
amphitheatre. "The beastly gate and guardhouse in the Albaro road are
still in their dear old beastly state; and the whole of that road is
just as it was. The man without legs is still in the Strada Nuova; but
the beggars in general are all cleared off, and our old one-arm'd
Belisario made a sudden evaporation a year or two ago. I am going to the
Peschiere to-day." To myself he described his former favourite abode as
converted into a girls' college; all the paintings of gods and goddesses
canvassed over, and the gardens gone to ruin; "but O! what a wonderful
place!" He observed an extraordinary increase everywhere else, since he
was last in the splendid city, of "life, growth, and enterprise;" and he
declared his old conviction to be confirmed that for picturesque beauty
and character there was nothing in Italy, Venice excepted, "near
brilliant old Genoa."

The voyage thence to Naples, written from the latter place,