THE SORCERESS.

THE picture-gallery of the Duke of Modena is well known as one of the finest beyond the Alps. But in the private apartments of the palace are some performances, which, whether to escape the eye of French pillage, or from the somewhat jealous spirit of Italian connoisseurship, are kept almost sacredly from the public eye. Circumstances gave me some opportunities of penetrating those Bluebeard chambers, and I was rewarded better than the heroine of the tale, by the discovery of some of the most exquisite works of the native pencil. But among them was one which had a higher interest than its mere beauty of execution. The view of this picture lay under an ultraprohibition, for it was enclosed in a solid bronze case, for which the key was to be sought through as long a file of court guardians as if it had contained the jewels of the crown.

Italy is, like the Apostle's character of the Athenians, to speak in the gentlest terms, "too superstitious;" and the name which the picture has somehow or other

obtained among the people may account for the extreme reluctance with which it is shown. The "Sorceress" is a formidable appellation in any land of the Continent. But, in Italy, it involves fears and horrors, of which it would be equally dangerous to tempt the revival, or ridicule the folly. The original of the picture was unquestionably an extraordinary personage. And it would be an herculean task to divest the multitude, or perhaps many of their superiors, even to this hour, of the impression that the fame and final success of this personage were connected with aids from sources, whose name startles human nature. The picture, however, may yet be shown to strangers by the operation of that spell which acted in my own instance that magic, at least as powerful as any that ever obeyed the calls of modern necromancy—that little glittering talisman, which, emerging from the Englishman's pocket, no sooner touches the foreigner's hand, than he feels an instant impossibility of keeping any secret whatever; and, even before "Open, Sessame!" can be pronounced, expands the inmost recesses of his household and his soul.

The picture is certainly a very noble one. Italy scarcely supplies a more striking example of that power of portraiture which once made the Italian school preeminent in this admirable province of the art. The countenance lives. The character lives in the countenance. Without the slightest labour for effect, without contortion, without study of action, feature, or attitude;

in short, without that profound and perilous determination to enrapture, which makes all French portraits the fac-simile of some figurante of the Opera, or solemn hero of the Français; or that heavy homeliness which makes the majority of English as tranquil as so many plaster-casts; a woman is before us, as we might have seen her in the pride of genius and beauty-with a slight touch of the austere, or perhaps rather the bold

– but still the magnificent Italian, such as the land sometimes sends forth, to vindicate her fame for female loveliness, among the thousands and ten thousands of those harsh, stunted, abrupt, and burnt-up physiognomies with which Italy abounds, perhaps more than any other region of earth-her neighbour, Africa, scarcely excepted.

For some days after I had seen this chef d'œuvre, I was full of the topic, which happened to be a harmless one, as it was wholly among my own countrymen. But to obtain any thing like elucidation on the subject I soon found hopeless. Few had heard of it; fewer, of course, seen it; and none, whatever their curiosity, could extract any thing from the old Cicerone of the palace, but that the whole affair was a prodigious secret-a matter of state, on which a whisper or a shrug might put all parties in the hands of the police. Unhappy news for him and all other Ciceroni, if a shrug could endanger his liberty, for it is the only employment of their shoulders through life! But let no man despair who loves state secrets in Italy. There is always

to be found, even in the very crashing of those jaws with which the Austrian wolf or the Russian bear masticates the infant speculations of the imaginative of Europe, some panting champion of colloquial confidence, some depository of the facts of the prisonhouse, some gay or grave interpreter of those hieroglyphics which are written on the tombs of the dead, or the dungeons of fettered cabinets; who is only longing to be disburthened of his tale, and who, over a cup of coffee, or a glass of Maraschino, divulges histories, which, dropt into any ears but English, would consign the voluble communicant to touch his guitar in the cells of Laybach for life, or carry his hod and pickaxe in the fortifications of Odessa, until they are required to inhume his own luckless mortality.

One evening, at a large party, in which an Italian marchioness, foolish enough to emulate the most foolish of all our customs, crowded about a thousand welldressed and unfortunate people into apartments, large and handsome, it is true, but still, on a hot Italian evening, giving the strongest conceivable resemblance of the Black Hole at Calcutta; half carbonized with the heat, tired to death with abortive attempts to find or make conversation; for which a conversazione is of all earthly contrivances the most incapable; and, if I must stoop to humbler matters-half-starved, for at foreign soirées all the food is so strictly intellectual that a biscuit and a glass of lemonade is a piece of profusion, and even the "cup of cold water" rises