Here indeed he found all the vivacity that Genoa lacked.  Few cities could at first acquaintance be more engaging to the stranger.  Dull and brown as it appeared after the rich tints of Genoa, yet so gloriously did sea and land embrace it, so lavishly the sun gild and the moon silver it, that it seemed steeped in the surrounding hues of nature.  And what a nature to eyes subdued to the sober tints of the north!  Its spectacular quality—­that studied sequence of effects ranging from the translucent outline of Capri and the fantastically blue mountains of the coast, to Vesuvius lifting its torch above the plain—­this prodigal response to fancy’s claims suggested the boundless invention of some great scenic artist, some Olympian Veronese with sea and sky for a palette.  And then the city itself, huddled between bay and mountains, and seething and bubbling like a Titan’s cauldron!  Here was life at its source, not checked, directed, utilised, but gushing forth uncontrollably through every fissure of the brown walls and reeking streets—­love and hatred, mirth and folly, impudence and greed, going naked and unashamed as the lazzaroni on the quays.  The variegated surface of it all was fascinating to Odo.  It set free his powers of purely physical enjoyment, keeping all deeper sensations in abeyance.  These, however, presently found satisfaction in that other hidden beauty of which city and plain were but the sumptuous drapery.  It is hardly too much to say that to the trained eyes of the day the visible Naples hardly existed, so absorbed were they in the perusal of her buried past.  The fever of excavation was on every one.  No social or political problem could find a hearing while the subject of the last coin or bas-relief from Pompeii or Herculanaeum remained undecided.  Odo, at first an amused spectator, gradually found himself engrossed in the fierce quarrels raging over the date of an intaglio or the myth represented on an amphora.  The intrinsic beauty of the objects, and the light they shed on one of the most brilliant phases of human history, were in fact sufficient to justify the prevailing ardour; and the reconstructive habit he had acquired from Crescenti lent a living interest to the driest discussion between rival collectors.

Gradually other influences reasserted themselves.  At the house of Sir William Hamilton, then the centre of the most polished society in Naples, he met not only artists and archeologists, but men of letters and of affairs.  Among these, he was peculiarly drawn to the two distinguished economists, the abate Galiani and the cavaliere Filangieri, in whose company he enjoyed for the first time sound learning unhampered by pedantry.  The lively Galiani proved that social tastes and a broad wit are not incompatible with more serious interests; and Filangieri threw the charm of a graceful personality over any topic he discussed.  In the latter, indeed, courtly, young and romantic, a thinker whose intellectual acuteness was steeped