Devonshire Terrace; and so started off for Italy, as I calculate the
dates, on the 1st of July, 1844.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] The profit at the end of 1844 was L726.

CHAPTER VIII.

Ah, those eventful, picturesque, uncomfortable old travelling days,
when railways were unborn, or in their infancy; those interminable old
dusty drives, in diligence or private carriage, along miles and miles
of roads running straight to the low horizon, through a line of tall
poplars, across the plains of France! What an old-world memory it
seems, and yet, as the years go, not so very long since after all. The
party that rumbled from Boulogne to Marseilles in the old "devil of a
coach" aforesaid, "and another conveyance for luggage," and I know not
what other conveyances besides, consisted of Dickens himself; Mrs.
Dickens; her sister, Miss Georgina Hogarth, who had come to live with
them on their return from America; five children, for another boy had
been born some six months before; Roche, the prince of couriers;
"Anne," apparently the same maid who had accompanied them across the
Atlantic; and other dependents: a somewhat formidable troupe and
cavalcade. Of their mode of travel, and what they saw on the way, or
perhaps, more accurately, of what Dickens saw, with those specially
keen eyes of his, at Lyons, Avignon, Marseilles, and other
places--one may read the master's own account in the "Pictures from
Italy." Marseilles was reached on the 14th of July, and thence a
steamer took them, coasting the fairy Mediterranean shores, to Genoa,
their ultimate destination, where they landed on the 16th.

The Italy of 1844 was like, and yet unlike the Italy of to-day. It was
the old disunited Italy of several small kingdoms and principalities,
the Italy over which lowered the shadow of despotic Austria, and of
the Pope's temporal power, not the Italy which the genius of Cavour
has welded into a nation. It was a land whose interest came altogether
from the past, and that lay as it were in the beauty of time's sunset.
How unlike the United States! The contrast has always, I confess,
seemed to me a piquant one. It has often struck me with a feeling of
quaintness that the two countries which Dickens specially visited and
described, were, the one this lovely land of age and hoar antiquity,
and the other that young giant land of the West, which is still in the
garish strong light of morning, and whose great day is in the future.
Nor, I think, be