As for my mother, it turned out that she was then selecting her last and final home—­though the end was not, thank God, for many a long year yet.  As for me, the decision arrived at during those walks on Exeter Northernhay, was more momentous still.  For I was choosing the road that led not only to my home for the next half century nearly, but to two marriages, both of them so happy in all respects as rarely to have fallen to the lot of one and the same man!

How little we either of us, my mother and I, saw into the future—­beyond a few immediate inches before our noses!  Truly prudens futuri temporis exitum caliginosa nocte premit Deus! And when I hear talk of “conduct making fate,” I often think—­humbly and gratefully, I trust; marvelling, certainly,—­how far it could have a priori seemed probable, that the conduct of a man who, without either oes in presenti, or any very visible prospect of oes in futuro, turns aside from all the beaten paths of professional industry should have led him to a long life of happiness and content, hardly to be surpassed, and, I should fear, rarely equalled. Deus nobis haec otia fecit!—­Deus, by the intromission of one rarely good mother, and two rarely good, and I may add rarely gifted, wives!

Not that I would have the reader translate “otia” by idleness.  I have written enough to show that my life hitherto had been a full and active one.  And it continued in Italy to be an industrious one.  Translate the word rather into “independence.”  For I worked at work that I liked, and did no taskwork.  Nevertheless, I would not wish to be an evil exemplar, vitiis imitabile, and I don’t recommend you, dear boys, to do as I did.  I have been quite abnormally fortunate.

Well, we thought that we were casting the die of fate on a very subordinate matter, while, lo! it was cast for us by the Supernal Powers after a more far-reaching and over-ruling fashion.

So on the 2nd of September, 1843, we turned our faces southwards and left London for Florence.

We became immediately on arriving in Firenze la gentile (after a little tour in Savoy, introduced as an interlude after our locomotive rambling fashion) the guests of Lady Bulwer, who then inhabited in the Palazzo Passerini an apartment far larger than she needed, till we could find a lodging for ourselves.

We had become acquainted with Lady Bulwer in Paris, and a considerable intimacy arose between her and my mother, whose nature was especially calculated to sympathise with the good qualities which Lady Bulwer unquestionably possessed in a high degree.  She was brilliant, witty, generous, kind, joyous, good-natured, and very handsome.  But she was wholly governed by impulse and unreasoning prejudice; though good-natured, was not always good-humoured; was totally devoid of prudence or judgment, and absolutely incapable of estimating men aright.  She used to think me, for instance, little short of an admirable Crichton!