The American palate would take kindly to a good sweet wine. In Champagne they know this, and sweeten wines for our market as they do no others except what are sent to Russia, remarking of the two great peoples in question, "Barbarians love sugar."

CHAPTER XV.

ITALY.

VER the Somering, and into Italy, Venice,

Florence, Rome, Naples, where Vesuvius, in a ferment, overflows with her ruddy and well-sulphured wines, and we come to Sorrento, on the south side of the Bay of Naples, even unto Villa Rispoli and its orange-groves, and there rest.

I am sure the "Lachryma Christi" they gave at the villa was not genuine, for it was no great things, which every body says the true wine is.

I had heard in France, and also encountered in my reading, so much in disparagement of Italian modes of vine-culture, that I had really paid little attention to it until what I saw during a three weeks' sojourn at Sorrento made me think somewhat on the subject; and reflecting that even in the lazy province of Naples all the people could not be drones, much less fools, and that men whose palates were discriminating and whose fingers were cunning in cookery must

know how to make wine, I made a few turns in the vineyards of the neighborhood, and afterward spent an evening in conversing on the subject with my host, whom I invited to my room for that purpose. His description of the modes of culture in vogue about the Bay-of gathering, fermenting, and keepingthough not applicable, I think, in our own country, and so not worth detailing here, seemed reasonable and proper enough.

For the custom of high training, either on trees or trellis, he could give me no reason; but he might have given this-that in so hot a climate, and on such rich, dark, volcanic soil, grapes grown on low-trained vines would either dry up to a raisin or fall off without ripening. Notwithstanding all said against their methods, I think the Italians know what they are about; and as to their keeping the wine in demijohns and flasks, corked with ollve oil floating in the neck, there may be good reasons for that too. An exceptional soil and climate may very well produce exceptional wines, needing exceptional treatment.

Going among the vineyards near Sorrento, and noticing the vine-dressers at their work, I could see that they were careful and thorough in all they did. The trellis were very high, and were made by driving tall stakes in the ground, and tying to them cross

pieces of cane. Certainly the form was not contrived to favor laziness.

The ground was free of weeds. The space for admitting sun and air was about what it should be. The pruning was being carefully done, according to their system, whatever it was; and by what right could I tell them it was all wrong?

They never vintage until after the autumnal rains have come to swell the fruit, giving for reason that the wine would spoil if they did. This certainly would not be a reason in France, and yet it may be a good one in Southern Italy, for all that.

I remember meeting, while in Naples, a Polish lady who owned vineyards near Florence, and who told me she was determined to adopt the French system of training and pruning, notwithstanding her Italian neighbors warned her it would never do. I remember, too, that a few days afterward, another lady told me her father, a Frenchman, had, in fact, tried the experiment on an Italian vineyard, with the loss of his vines as the result. No one would contend, I think, that the method, so successful in Champagne, of crowding 25,000 plants within the compass of an acre, could possibly do on the warm, rich soil of Naples.

I had heard of the wine of the island of Capri

as excellent, and of the blue grotto there as beautiful, so sailed over to it one day. But the high sea kept us out of the grotto, and the wine was not good, but bad, from the effects of the sulphur cure, they said. There is a remedy for the bad effect in question, which is itself a sulphur cure, and which may not yet be as well known in Italy as it is in France. At any rate, the "lazy Neapolitans" have done what no Americans have yet had the patience to do—they have cured the oïdium.

We remained two days at Capri, where we enjoyed the society of some English artists, who had gone there to paint from living models, whose perfection of form was beyond any thing to be found in England-at reasonable rates. The hotel had been a monastery once, which accounts for the excellence of the wine formerly grown on the island. The progress of the age has expelled the monks, and the progress of the oïdium has spoiled the wine-a judgment, no doubt.

Here comes the question, Were those ages during which monasteries flourished the most, dark ages because good and learned men secluded themselves from the world, hiding in cloisters that wisdom which should have enlightened it, and in cellars the bottledup quintessence of civilization which should have re