pence
from his patients (quantum mutatus the Nice physician of 1907!) he felt
that he owed it to himself to make this the subject of an independent
investigation. He kept a register of the weather during the whole of
his stay, and his remarks upon the subject are still of historical
interest, although with Teysseire's minutely exact Monograph on the
Climatology of Nice (1881) at his disposal and innumerable commentaries
thereon by specialists, the inquirer of to-day would hardly go to
Smollett for his data. Then, as now, it is curious to find the rumour
current that the climate of Nice was sadly deteriorating. "Nothing to
what it was before the war!" as the grumbler from the South was once
betrayed into saying of the August moon. Smollett's esprit chagrin was
nonplussed at first to find material for complaint against a climate in
which he admits that there was less rain and less wind than in any
other part of the world that he knew. In these unwonted circumstances
he is constrained to fall back on the hard water and the plague of
cousins or gnats as affording him the legitimate grievance, in whose
absence the warrior soul of the author of the Ode to Independence could
never be content.

VII

For his autumn holiday in 1764 Smollett decided on a jaunt to Florence
and Rome, returning to Nice for the winter; and he decided to travel as
far as Leghorn by sea. There was choice between several kinds of small
craft which plied along the coast, and their names recur with cheerful
frequency in the pages of Marryat and other depictors of the
Mediterranean. There was the felucca, an open boat with a tilt over the
stern large enough to freight a post-chaise, and propelled by ten to
twelve stout mariners. To commission such a boat to Genoa, a distance
of a hundred miles, cost four louis. As alternative, there was the
tartane, a sailing vessel with a lateen sail. Addison sailed from
Marseilles to Genoa in a tartane in December 1699: a storm arose, and
the patron alarmed the passengers by confessing his sins (and such
sins!) loudly to a Capuchin friar who happened to be aboard. Smollett
finally decided on a gondola, with four rowers and a steersman, for
which he had to pay nine sequins (4 1/2 louis). After adventures off
Monaco, San Remo, Noli, and elsewhere, the party are glad to make the
famous phones on the Torre della Lanterna, of which banker Rogers sings
in his mediocre verse:

Thy pharos Genoa first displayed itself
B