"Sunday, April 2, Easter-day.--We set off from Ahamo about 7¼. I walked on for an hour, and then rode forward all the way to Monreale, where I stopped an hour till the others came up. We then proceeded together to Palermo. In the villages we passed, the people were all out in their best clothes, which was a very pretty sight. Bells were clattering everywhere, and _feux de joie_ were fired in several villages as we passed, with a row of little tubes loaded with gunpowder, in the market-places, and processions went about of people in fancy dresses with flags and drums. This religion is most extraordinary. It strikes me as impious; but I suppose it takes possession of the common people sooner than a sensible one." He completed the tour of the island by arriving in Messina, after a most successful attempt to see Mount Etna, on the 14th of April. They left Sicily for Reggio in a boat, and arrived there "with a good ducking." They both went to visit Scylla, which was guarded as a citadel by armed peasants. The sturdy yeomen refused to admit them, whereupon George, with true English curiosity, climbed up the wall to {77} get a peep at the sea, and perhaps inside. Scarcely had he got half-way up when he was taken prisoner by the sentinel. He was accordingly invited to visit the interior of the castle, and had to gaze at the bleak walls of its keep for an hour, until Willoughby procured his release from the commandant. They travelled on, and George does not seem to be satisfied with the people of Salerno, whom he designates as "surly and gothic." He heard his companions had to get an escort of gendarmes, to save them from robbers, all along here. Returns to Naples, April 26, delighted at being safe in life and limb; he goes to the old lodgings to a party, and reflects thus on his return: "I came home about one, rather sad with seeing the representation of what I had enjoyed in the winter--but all the people changed. _Gaiety after all does not pay_." This last sentence is not underlined by Spencer himself. It is done to point a moral that may be necessary for a certain class of persons. It is often supposed that monks, and the like people, paint the world blacker than it is in reality, and that it is a kind of morose sourness of disposition that makes recluses cry down the enjoyments of those outside convent-walls. This line will perhaps defend F. Ignatius from such an imputation. He wrote that after the pure natural enjoyment of scenery had been compared with the excitement of a ball-room; if he thought, in his wildness, that gaiety did not pay, no wonder that his opinion was confirmed in the quiet tameness of his after-life. A passage from the autobiography, omitted above, comes in here opportunely. He was speaking of the absence of the fear of God from his miserable mind:--