established by the Government within its walls.
Amid those secular shades the old diplomatist and scholar breathed his
last, and could not have done so in a more peaceful spot. But the very
inaccessible nature of the place made it a question of some difficulty
how the body should be transported in properly decorous fashion to the
railway station in the valley below--a difficulty which was solved by
the young scholars of the School of Forestry, who turned out in a body
to have the honour of bearing on their shoulders the remains of the
man whose writings had done so much to awaken the Government to the
necessity of establishing the institution to which they belonged.

Mrs. Marsh, for so many years the brightest ornament of the
Italo-American society, and equally admired and welcomed by the
English colony, first at Florence and then at Rome, still lives for
the equal delight of her friends on the other side of the Atlantic. I
may not, therefore, venture to say more of "what I remember" of her,
than that it abundantly accounts for the feeling of an unfilled void,
which her absence occasioned and occasions in both the American and
English world on the banks of the Tiber.

CHAPTER XV.

It was in the spring of the year 1860 that I first became acquainted
with "George Eliot" and G H. Lewes in Florence. But it was during
their second visit to Italy in 1861 that I saw a good deal more of
them. It was in that year, towards the end of May, that I succeeded
in persuading them to accompany me in a visit to the two celebrated
Tuscan monasteries of Camaldoli and La Vernia. I had visited both on
more than one occasion previously--once with a large and very merry
party of both sexes, of whom Colley Grattan was one--but the excursion
made in company with G.H. Lewes and George Eliot was another-guess
sort of treat, and the days devoted to it stand out in high relief in
my memory as some of the most memorable in my life.

They were anxious to be moving northwards from Florence, and I had
some difficulty in persuading them to undertake the expedition. A
certain weight of responsibility, therefore, lay on me--that folks
whose days were so sure of being turned to good profit, should not by
my fault be led to waste any of them. But I had already seen enough of
both of them to feel sure that the specialties of the very exceptional
little experience I proposed to them would be appreciated and
acceptable. Neither he nor she were fitte