Tuscany Da Se, an Ower True Tale (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1859 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV. TUSCANY. I Have said how I found the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1840, and how I left him in 1848. When I returned there, a very few years after, he was--though not then fifty-four years of age--become an old, bent, white-haired, sullen-looking man. The Austrian features, which require the expression of the cheerful, contented consciousness of worth, and right to the esteem of all around, which generally accompanies them, had lost this, and become as it were exaggerated; his urbanity to strangers was gone with it; and he either only spoke shortly, and with evidently impatient emphasis, to those immediately in attendance on his person, or he walked through his splendid--most splendid--reception-rooms, furnished each with whatever other countries excel his own in; lavishing delicacies, if not courtesies on, it might latterly be almost said, all who chose to partake of them, like a troubled spirit, amongst, but not of them; and I can safely declare that from that time forth I never looked upon the Grand Duke of Tuscany without a sensation of pain, such as we feel on looking upon a brokenhearted man. Nor, it must be confessed, was the change confined to him: it had come o'er the whole spirit of the dream--for a dream it is that absolutism can much longer reign in peace in Europe; and while his subjects either reflected back his sullen aspect as they partook of his magnificent sturgeon--an almost unfailing dish at the suppers at the Palazzo Pitti--or looked defiance as they swallowed his champagne; foreigners who never had had even a dream of entering the precincts of their own courts, strutted about through his as if they were conferring, instead of receiving, an honour; and that upon false pretences. In short, Leopold II. was fallen from...