It will sound, doubtless, like a very ungenerous speech, when I say that I rejoice that this spot is so little visited--so little frequented--by those hordes of stray and straggling English who lounge about the Continent. I do not say this in any invidious spirit, but simply in the pleasure that I feel in the quiet and seclusion of a place which, should it become by any fatality "the fashion" will inevitably degenerate by all the vulgarities of the change. At present the Riviera--as the coast-line from Genoa to Pisa is called--is little travelled. The steamers passing to Leghorn by the cord of the arch, take away nearly all the tourists, so that Spezia, even as a bathing-place, is little resorted to by strangers. There are none, not one, of the ordinary signs of the watering-place about it. Neither donkeys to hire, nor subscription concerts; not a pony phaeton, a pianist, nor any species of human phenomenon to torment you; and the music of the town band is, I rejoice to say, so execrably bad that even a crowd of twenty cannot be mustered for an audience. Spezia is, therefore, _au naturel_,--and long may it be so! Distant be the day when frescoed buildings shall rise around, to seduce from its tranquil scenery the peaceful lover of nature, and make of him the hot-cheeked gambler or the broken debauchee. I sincerely, hopefully trust this is not to be, at least in our time. We made an excursion this morning by boat to Lerici, to see poor Shelley's house, the same that Byron lived in when here. It stands in the bight of a little bay of its own, and close to the sea; so close, indeed, that the waves were plashing and frothing beneath the arched colonnade on which it is built. It is now in an almost ruinous condition, and the damp, discolored walls and crumbling plaster bespeak neglect and decay. The view from the terrace is glorious; the gulf in its entire extent is before you, and the island of Palmaria stands out boldly, with the tall headlands of Porto Venere, forming the breakwater against the sea. It was here Shelley loved to sit; here, of a summer's night, he often sat till morning, watching the tracts of hill and mountain wax fainter and fainter, till they grew into brightness again with coming day; and it was not far from this, on the low beach of Via Reggio, that he was lost! The old fisherman who showed us the house had known him well, and spoke of his habits as one might have described those of some wayward child. The large and lustrous eyes, the long waving hair, the uncertain step, the look half timid, half daring, had made an impression so strong, that even after long years he could recall and tell of them.