The Argosy — page 297: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

272 A Visit to Mary Cowden-Clarke. It was in 1861 that the sisters, with husband and brother, settled in Genoa, the Cowden-Clarkes, ‘‘ married lovers, ” as they were called to the end, after more than fifty years of wedlock, occupying themselves with literature, reading, working, thinking in unison; Sabilla obliged to refrain from teaching from delicacy of throat and susceptibility to damp, ever active in promoting the cause of good music; Alfred, with engineering skill and fertile invention, turning a ramshackle old house into a quaint and liveable abode, and converting an untended area of ground into a most variegated and delicious garden. To this house flock all the eminent visitors that pass through Genoa, glad to become acquainted with the woman who still preserves the gracious, courtly, old-world manner which our modern life of fret and hurry is fast rendering extinct ; a charm only equalled by her mental viva- city, her cordial, frank and generous address, the zest and charm of her conversation, and, above all, by her perfect womanly gentleness. She is truly a sweet type of womanhood in its noblest expression. It is on Sunday afternoons that the Villa Novello is opened to receive visitors, birds of passage and residents; but the doors are never closed to friends whenever the inmates are well and not too busy with their various avocations. A visit to these rooms affords a biographical synopsis of the life of Mrs. Cowden-Clarke and her sifted family. Having crossed the threshold, we find ourselves in a marble paved Italian hall; a flight of steps of alternate grey and white marble conducts us into another hall, which is the picture gallery of the family. Here hang the paintings, original and copies, executed by the brother, Edward Novello, who did not live to fulfil the promise of his youth. Here, too, hangs a fine portrait of Baron Poerio, one of the many martyrs to Italian freedom ; a likeness of Garibaldi painted by Giovanni Mazzini, and a spirited sketch, by Emma Novello, of Richard Cobden, one of the best likenesses ever taken of the reformer. In this hall, too, stands the testimonial chair America presented to Mrs. Cowden-Clarke, and of which she is justly proud. ‘Her throne,” as her nieces called it when they were children, adding that ‘the ladies and gentlemen of America had put their pocket money together to buy it for auntie.” The names of those who subscribed to it include the brightest and best of those alive in the States in 1851, Longfellow, Washington Irving, Willis, Allibone, Bryant. But what gave Mrs. Cowden-Clarke almost as much pleasure as the chair itself was that not only Daniel Webster’s name was included among these, but that the American gentlemen who called into life the testimonial had the happy thought to send her the identical gold coin that Webster had subscribed, and that she, therefore, enjoyed the sentiment of touching what had passed through his hands. To sentiment of this nature Mrs. Cowden-Clarke is keenly alive, and in her store closets of treasures she guards many such memorials, But she does not guard them so that others may not enjoy them also. Gomicbooks (E(©) m