He was in many respects what people call
"a character," and seemed to fancy himself to have in some degree
proprietary rights over the three celebrated Tuscan monasteries,
Vallombrosa, Camaldoli, and La Vernia. He was well known to the
friars at each of these establishments, and indeed to all the sparse
population of that country-side. He was a very good and competent
guide and courier, possessed with a very amusingly exaggerated notion
of his own importance, and rather bad to turn aside from his own
preconceived and predetermined methods of doing everything that had to
be done. George Eliot at once made a study of him.
I am reminded, too, as I write, of the great amusement with which my
old and highly-valued friend of many years, Alfred Austin, who long
subsequently was making the same excursion with me and both our wives,
listened to an oration of the indispensable Antonio. One of his
baggage horses had strayed and become temporarily lost among the
hills. He was exceedingly wroth, and poured forth his vexation in
a torrent of very unparliamentary language. "_Corpo di Guida!_"
he exclaimed, among a curious assortment of heterogeneous
adjurations--"Body of Judas!" stooping to the ground as he spoke, and
striking the back of his hand against it, with an action that very
graphically represented a singular survival of the classical _testor
inferos!_ Then suddenly changing his mood, he apostrophised the
missing beast with the almost tearful reproach, "There! there now!
Thou hast made me throw away all my devotions! All! And Easter only
just gone!" That is to say, your fault has betrayed me into violence
and bad language, which has begun a new record of offences just after
I had made all clear by my Easter devotions.
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