Dante is, or was a year or two ago, a waiter at Brissago on the Lago Maggiore, only he is better-tempered-looking, and has a more intellectual expression.  He gave me his ideas upon beauty:  “Tutto ch’ e vero e bello,” he exclaimed, with all his old self-confidence.  I am not afraid of Dante.  I know people by their friends, and he went about with Virgil, so I said with some severity, “No, Dante, il naso della Signora Robinson e vero, ma non e bello”; and he admitted I was right.  Beatrice’s name is Towler; she is waitress at a small inn in German Switzerland.  I used to sit at my window and hear people call “Towler, Towler, Towler,” fifty times in a forenoon.  She was the exact antithesis to Abra; Abra, if I remember, used to come before they called her name, but no matter how often they called Towler, everyone came before she did.  I suppose they spelt her name Taula, but to me it sounded Towler; I never, however, met anyone else with this name.  She was a sweet, artless little hussy, who made me play the piano to her, and she said it was lovely.  Of course I only played my own compositions; so I believed her, and it all went off very nicely.  I thought it might save trouble if I did not tell her who she really was, so I said nothing about it.

I met Socrates once.  He was my muleteer on an excursion which I will not name, for fear it should identify the man.  The moment I saw my guide I knew he was somebody, but for the life of me I could not remember who.  All of a sudden it flashed across me that he was Socrates.  He talked enough for six, but it was all in dialetto, so I could not understand him, nor, when I had discovered who he was, did I much try to do so.  He was a good creature, a trifle given to stealing fruit and vegetables, but an amiable man enough.  He had had a long day with his mule and me, and he only asked me five francs.  I gave him ten, for I pitied his poor old patched boots, and there was a meekness about him that touched me.  “And now, Socrates,” said I at parting, “we go on our several ways, you to steal tomatoes, I to filch ideas from other people; for the rest—­ which of these two roads will be the better going, our father which is in heaven knows, but we know not.”

I have never seen Mendelssohn, but there is a fresco of him on the terrace, or open-air dining-room, of an inn at Chiavenna.  He is not called Mendelssohn, but I knew him by his legs.  He is in the costume of a dandy of some five-and-forty years ago, is smoking a cigar, and appears to be making an offer of marriage to his cook.  Beethoven both my friend Mr. H. Festing Jones and I have had the good fortune to meet; he is an engineer now, and does not know one note from another; he has quite lost his deafness, is married, and is, of course, a little squat man with the same refractory hair that he always had.  It was very interesting to watch him, and Jones remarked that before the end of dinner he had become positively