LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2168, 5 February 1881, Page 3

LITERATURE.

THE MYSTEEY OF LORD BRACKENBTJRY: A NOVEL. BY AMELIA. B. EDWABDS. Author of " Barbara's History," ■' Debonham's Vow." &o. (Continued. Chaptbr xxxvir. THE OSTERIA DEL CAFrELLO. The writer who essays to weave into a single narrative the foots by which the destinies of miiny persons have been governed, must occasionally shift his scenes, and move the hands of his olock. When is it for him that he is hound neither to observe the unities, nor to ehtke his facts in chronologioal sequence. The utmost he need hope to do is to "pigeon-hole*' those facts in his mind ; to disentangle, to coordinate, to distribute them, and to present them to hia readers as oursively and pleasantly as he can. He must be careful not to make too heavy demands on the patience of his fellow travellers. .Above all, let him beware of what nay be called a saltatory style of narrative; for it it disagreeable even in a story to be perpetually hurried from place to place, or to be always going baokwards and forwards.

Still, these Bcene-sittings are occasionally inevitable. Events must be related ss they happened and if it should sometimes seem that incidents and personages not ' germane to the matter,' make unwarrantable intrusion upon a stage already occupied, it must be remembered that life is made up of such intrusions.

Two ships, starting from opposite quarters of the globe, have been known to meet in a foggy night precisely under the line of the equator, escaping collision by almost a miracle. Two rivers, widely remote in their sources, converge as of set purpose, and meet to change the destinies of nations. Other*, like the Tigris and Euphrates, make from aoommoq goal, run parallel for awhile,' and having sought each other ia vain, diverge for ever. Men run against each other, wreck each other, miss eaoh other, just like the ships and the rivers. The comparison is trite enough, but * 'twill serve,' And the purpose it especially serves In this connection is to announce one of these same inevitable shiftings of time and place. We are bound for fresh woods and pastures new.

The scene changes to Verona, To Verona in the month of October, some three weeks, or thereabout!, b< fore the date of Mr MarrabW visit to Old Court. To Verona, and more particularly to an ancient house in a narrow and infinitely dirty bystreet running almost in a line with the Piazza del Brbe— a street of dingy shops and narrow pavementas, of foul gutters, and gloomy archways full of hay waggons and workshops j a street noisy with much hammering of coppersmiths and coopers, and pervaded by wandering odors of fried fish, feather, garlic, and stale cabbage water. Yet, like many another mean and uninviting thoroughfare in many another old Italian city, the Via Gspello has seen better days. Because it is gloomy and narrow it is not necessarily mean. These high, dull houses were anciently the town residences of nobles whose feadal strongholds crowned the spurs of the blue bills for miles around. They built their streets narrow for shade and coolness; and they paoked their houses closely because space within the city walls was precious. The meanness of the street is in its modern uses, its dilapidation. The houses themselves are of noble type, with rustic basements and overhanging eaves, and here and there an ogive window, trefoiled and pilastered, or a fragment of rusty wrought-iron grating, broken, but still beautiful.

One of these houses—not by any means the most picturesque, though one of the largest in the Btreet—has loug been known aa the Oateria del Cappello. A century ago, perhaps, the whole house may have been a flourishing hostelry; but as its prosperity declined, the three inner sides enclosing the conrtyard became gradually sub-let, till the inn consisted (and still consists) of only the lower portion of the street front. Here, on one side of the gateway, was the kitchen, and on the other a cheap trattoria, or dining-room, frequented chiefly by vetturini and peasant farmers. The two floors next above were in pait appropriated to the accommodation ef customers of the same degree, and in part occupied by the landlord end bis family; the top atory, like all the rest of the building, beiog sub-let to families of the artisan class. Seen from the street, it is a grim, desolate, prison-like place, with one lovely Gothic window boarded up, and a bundle of hay hanging over the dark archway. Seen from within on a bright morning, when two sides of the quadrangle are flooded with sunshine, and the gossips are out upon their balconies, and the vetturini are cleaning their carriages in the yard, and the cocks and hens are strutting about in search of what they may find, and all is noise, and life, and chatter, and bustle, it is as lively as a hive full of bees.

Three tiers of open galleries supported on pillars rnn round the three inner sides of the building, and are divided off acoording to the number of window* [pertaining to the ooonpants of the rooms which open upon them. On the middle pillar of the lowest gallery, just opposite the 'porte cochere,' bangs a little wooden pentbonse, containing a half-obliterated painting of the Virgin and Child; while over the archway, on the inner side looking to the courtyard may be seen a sculptured tablet, on whioh is represented a shield with armorial beatings, surmounted, not by a knightly helmet, but by a quaint, hat. It is this bat, this ' oappello,' which gives its name to both street and inn. To say of one of these old palazzi that it is a house with a history, Is a mere truism. The tiraeß in whioh they were built were times of fend and bloodshed, and the difficulty would be to find one whose walls, if they could speak, would have no tale to tell. But the history attaching to this particular bouse is no mere record of murder and rapine. It perpetuates, almost as a matter of course, the memory of a deadly fend ; but it also perpetuates the sweetest, the the saddest love story of the Middle Ages. This Osteria del Cappello—otherwise the Hostelry of the Hat—was once a princely mansion. That Hat was anciently the crest of a noble Veronese family. The bouse wns called the Ossa de Cappelletti; and the Cappelletti were the Capulets of Shakespeare. Here Juliet lived ; and hither, in mask and domino, came Romeo to his hereditary foeman's 'accustomed feast.' The baked meats about whioh old Capulet was so anxions. were oooked, maybe in that very kitchen beside the archway; and the hall in which the guebts danced and made merry won'd surely have been one of these ground floor rooms linking into the courtyard— Ba«ilio the joiner's workshop, perhap«, which ha-j a rare old ceiling; or the long room opposite, which is now divided by a partition, and occupied by two sets of lodgers. A hive indeed! The old roof shelters toce forty or fifty souls; decent, hardworking mechanics with their wives and families—shoemakers, tailors, silk-weavers, journeymen, bakers, stonemasons, corkcutters, leather-dressers, printers, and the like. The men, for the most part, go out daily to their work. The women live half their time in their balconies, gossiping, nursing their babies, darning their busbr.nfls' stocking, and cutting np vegetables for the midday ' mineßtra.' As for the children, whose name is legion, they swarm all over the place, chasing each other about the staircases, playing at hide and seek among the hackney carriages in the courtjard, getting behind the horses' heels in the stable, tumb ing down tho cellar steps, and behaving generally as if they were made of guttapercha, and warranted not to break. It i< early—not quite half-past six—and the vettnrini are busy washing down their carriage wheels, dusting cushions and matp, attending to their horses, and so often going to the well with their buckets that the good houfe nives have hard work to get their pitchers rilled. * tiio I it is always the same game here!' •a* ■ a buxom, brown skinned woman, the wife of a street porter who lives on the

fouth storey ; 'all the wo.ld wanting water at the one moment I'

* I have been waiting with my can these ten minutes by the dock ! grumbles another, ' Eh, that's nothing new I' chimes in * third—a wiry, acid looking body, with » blaok kerchief tied about her head. 'One had need to oome before sunrise, if ona wouldn't lose half the morning. * Then turning sharply upon the vetturini —'Eccot'ahe says, 'why don't yon men carry your buckets to the fountain at the street corner, instead of keeping us poor women waiting our turn to the crink, like • string of theatre folk at the gallery door P It ian't amusing, I can tell you. ' Trndge off to the street fountain yourself, Dame Giannetta,' retorts one of the men. «You haven't to be at the staticn by seven, to meet the first train from Milan.'

_ 'I wouldn't leave cleaning my earrings till the last minute, and then drive my poor home off its lege, if I had,' retorts Dame Giannetta.

'Che I che ! che ! Paolo, whore's the good of answering the women V growls a stout fellow in a green felt hat, who is in the act; of filling his own bucket. 'They are magpies, and must chatter. •Ay ; and they'd gOBsIp their time away all the time whether we kept 'em waiting, or whether we didn't/ adds Paolo, with a shrug.

Whereupon, to the accompaniment of a shrill chorus of reprisals, the women push tbbir way to the front; take the well by storm; and, half scolding, half laughing, keep possession of the crank till their household vessels brim over.

Meanwhile, first one, then another driver, b .'ckles his last strap, fet.hcs his whip from the stable, leads his horse and carriage out of the yard, and drives away. At last bat one remains—a sturdy, fresh-oolored, sulkylooking young fellow, with frizzy black hair, and a carnation stuck behind his ear. A fellow who sports a velvet collar to his coat and a crimson woollen sash about hia waint, and thinks no little of his personal appearance. He is apparently in less baste than his companions; for he stays rubbing up the plated door handles of his vettur* and polishing his window glasses, as if time at this hour of the morning were of no value.

' Look at 'Tonio Morotti, hanging about, as usual, that he may catch a glimpse of Ia Giuliet'a!' laughs one gossip to another. ' Lucky for her! There isn't a steadier lad in the whole quarter.' ' Nor a better looking' 'BO well to do, too!—his own vettora and his own too hacks, and he not twenty* three! *

* They'll make a pretty'pair,' quavers » meek old woman, with skinny hands, bare arms, and naked feet in gaudy wooden ologs,

* I d-.n't know bo mnch about that,' snarls Dame GiannefcU, who had daughter* of her own. 'lt takes two to make a pair, aa aay cobbler will tell 70a. "Fonio's well enough—too abort and thickset to my thinking ; yet well enough aa young men go nowadays. But the Bleasel Virgin only knows what he, or any one else sees in La Ginliotta 1'

(To be continued o« Tuesday.)