ity should be followed by a year abroad, and in William Greg's
case it had been postponed for a season by the exigences of business and
the factory at Bury. He went first through France and Switzerland to
Italy. At Florence he steeped himself in Italian, and read Beccaria and
Machiavelli; but he had no daemonic passion (like Macaulay's) for
literature. 'Italian,' he said, 'is a wonderfully poor literature in
everything but poetry, and the poets I am not up to, and I do not think
that I shall take the trouble to study them.' When he reached that city
which usually excites a traveller as no other city on earth can excite
him, dyspepsia, neuralgia, and vapours plunged him into bad spirits, and
prevented him from enjoying either Rome or his books. The sights of Rome
were very different fifty years ago from those that instruct and
fascinate us to-day. Except the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and a few
pillars covered thick with the filth of the modern city, the traveller
found the ancient Rome an undistinguishable heap of bricks. Still, when
we reflect on the profound and undying impression that Rome even then
had made on such men as Goethe, or Winckelmann, or Byron, the
shortcoming must have been partly in the traveller. In truth, Mr. Greg
was not readily stirred either by Goethe's high artistic sense, or by
Byron's romantic sense of the vast pathos of Rome.

I pass my time here [he says] with extreme regularity
and quietness, not knowing, even to speak to, a single
individual in Rome; and the direction to my valet when
I start on my perambulations, 'al Campidoglio,' 'al Foro,'
forms the largest part of my daily utterances.... In a
fit of desperation I took to writing a kind of political
philosophy, in default of my poetical aim, which is quite
gone from me. It is a setting forth of the peculiar political
and religious features of the age, wherein it differs
from all preceding ones, and is entitled the _Genius of the
Nineteenth Century_. I do not know if I shall ever finish
it; but if I could write it as I have imagined it, it will
at least be entitled to come under Mr. Godwin's definition
of eloquence. That gentleman being in a company of
literati, who were comparing their notions of what eloquence
could be defined to consist in, when his opinion
was asked replied, 'Eloquence is truth spoken with fervour.'
I am going on with it, though slowly, and fill up the rest
of my leisure time with