I once saw a trial for brigandage in Sicily. (I think it must have been at Girgenti in 1885, but am not quite sure.) This band of brigands never made mistakes. They never tried to rob a man unless he happened to be carrying a good amount of money: they never held a man to ransom unless he was worth ransoming; and they never fixed his ransom at a higher sum than his people could just manage to pay. They evidently had good information; and there were comparatively few people from whom the various bits of information could have come. And now the police had not only got the band of brigands, but had got the members of the syndicate that ran the band. I saw the prisoners in court--they were all inside a great big iron cage like one of the aviaries at the Zoo--and I have never seen more respectable and pious looking people than some of the members of that syndicate. There was a story going round Sicily then of some young scamp, who was hard up, and arranged with brigands to capture him and share the ransom that his parents were quite sure to pay. The parents paid up heavily, and the brigands kept their word and gave him half. I was at Taormina in 1883--it was a quiet place then with only two small inns, not a suburb of hotels, as now--and I was reading in Goethe’s diary of his travels, 7 May 1787, how he sat there in a garden by the sea and planned _Nausikaa_, a five-act tragedy of which he wrote no more than sixty lines. I am only a _Wahrheit_ man myself, and have no _Dichtung_ in me: yet I have imagined Nausicaa in Corfu, when looking at the stone Phæacian ship there; and I have also imagined Ulysses in Sicily, when looking at the seven great rocks the Cyclops hurled at him at Aci; but Taormina brought me down to 735 B.C., with the first Greek colony in Sicily on the little headland there, and all that this portended for Carthage and for Rome. Being a real poet, Goethe only talks geology about the rocks at Aci, and rather regrets he did not picnic there and hammer off some specimens of zeolite. He says the Taormina scenery will provide him with a setting for his play: he will model Ulysses on himself, his own conversation being quite as entertaining and instructive as anything Ulysses can have said to the Phæacians; and he will model Nausicaa on the ladies he left broken-hearted at each place where he stayed. A poet ought not to disclose the sources of his inspiration. One day Petrarch was thinking of Laura till his eyes were filled with tears, and he walked into a brook he did not see: hence _Del mar Tirreno_. And one day Toplady got underneath a rock and kept dry in a storm: hence _Rock of Ages_. Toplady was here the wiser man, and the better poet too, for he says nothing of the rain, whereas Petrarch talks of his wet feet.