The Arno Miscellany

Abstract

Robert Merry, Esquire, late of the Horse Guards, paused and looked yet once again across the Corso. Above the average height and powerfully made, he was fair-complexioned with mid brown hair curled over the ears and drawn back at the nape to form a queue. His brow was high and broad, his eyes large and blue, his nose well-shaped, and what with sensual lips and a cleft chin he was indeed a more than presentable person. No wonder that no less a one than Ann, Lady Cowper, wife of the chief figure of the English colony should have fallen a willing victim to his charms! How the years were passing with nothing really to show for them! This was the summer of 1783, and he had been wandering about abroad for three years. The Oziosi? The Oziosi, of Lorenzo Pignotti’s poem, the idlers - but that was like Pignotti; he worked hard, his life was one of virtuous labour, he could afford to write in kindly raillery of “the noble pride of living in idleness.” Pignotti, good fellow, could never be idle. He, Robert Merry, for all his dreams of conquering the world by some means had accomplished nothing yet and would accomplish nothing in the future except further to deplete his already dwindling fortune, unless… Why should not his pen become the sword to lay about the heads of tyrants? And then and there an all-mastering desire came over him to be a poet.