9 th S. I. JUNK 25, '98.]
NOTES AND QUERIES.
511
he was in the habit of frequently staying
at Leghorn and Monte Nero, as proved
by letters to his friends Caleb White-
foord and the eminent John Hunter ; other
letters show him to have been at or near
Pisa towards the close of his life. Dr. Arm-
strong writes to Smollett, March, 1769,
" I enioy, with a pleasing sympathy, the
agreeable society you find amongst the pro-
fessors at Pisa." Again, in June, 1770, "I
wrote to my brother from Genoa, and desired
him to direct his answer to your care at Pisa."
And further support of residence at Pisa, or
near that city, is gleaned from the letter in
the Gentleman's Magazine for May, 1818,
which affords, so far as I am aware, the only
explicit record at hand that dwells upon and
unmistakably establishes the approximate
site of the historian's tomb, showing forth in
a very positive manner that in 1818 it was
not to be found at Leghorn, but somewhere
between Pisa and that seaport town, "on the
banks of the Arno." There certainly did
exist in Smollett's time a navigable canal II
Canale dei Navicelli from the Arno at Pisa
to the sea close by Leghorn, and since it
would be as absurd to speak of the Arno
between Leghorn and Pisa as of the Clyde
between Glasgow and Ardrossan, allowance
must be made for the limited geographical
knowledge of the country possessed by the
correspondent of the Gentleman's Magazine,
for he might have mistaken the canal (a
broad one at that period) for the Arno, as was
evidently the case with Shelley when travel-
ling upon one occasion from Pisa to Leghorn
on the road (campestre), the only land com-
munication between the two cities, which lay
parallel to the canal almost the entire way.
Trelawny thus relates the incident :
"As we turned off the Lung' Arno, a friendly puff of wind relieved the poet of his obnoxious head-gear, and the hat trundled along. I stopped the horses. Shelley, ' Oh ! don't stop ! It will get into the river, and I shall find it at Leghorn.' "
Of such capacity was the canal that an ambassador from Marocco, having stated that the motion of a coach was disagreeable to him, expressed a desire to return to Leghorn from Florence by water, and a Court gondola was prepared for the purpose, and that journey was accomplished in February, 1778. Writing in 1820, Cadell, ' Journey to Carniola, Italy,' &c., speaks of the canal as being navi- gable, the intervening country being thickly wooded and not cultivated. He alludes to the cemetery at Leghorn, " where have died many English of consumption," but is silent on the obelisk. To all intents, Smollett died a heretic, so far as Church discipline was con-
cerned in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, in
days as dark as any in the Middle Ages ; we
may therefore rest assured that his burial in
consecrated ground other than Protestant
would not have been tolerated, any more than
it would be at the present day. He died as
he had lived the greater portion of his agitated
life, in very straitened circumstances, so
that, upon the fairly safe assumption that he
passed away at a villa somewhat nearer to
Pisa than to Leghorn, it would have been
scarcely possible for his destitute widow to
remove his remains even though the two
cities are only about twelve miles apart
within the short time prescribed by the law of
the land, to the comparatively remote ceme-
tery at Leghorn. Gentili visited the dying
man on 14 Sept. "for the first time," which
clearly implies that the Italian was not Smol-
lett's habitual medical attendant, but that he
had been invited by his friend Dr. Garden to
a consultation at the crisis. If what has been
advanced be considered without bias, we may
conclude as probable that Smollett, in his
deplorable condition, died at no great dis-
tance from Pisa, a noted sanatorium in his
day (Scots Magazine states he died at the
baths of Pisa), and that he was interred
beside the canal, within the grounds of one of
his numerous friends. It is scarcely possible
to admit, had he died in such close proximity
to Leghorn as to have ensured nis burial
there, that the English consular department
could have neglected to record the DU rial of
a Protestant British subject, and especially
of a man of no small reputation. When we
read of " so many of his countrymen planting
slips of laurel at his tomb," almost to obstruct-
ing entrance to the doors (what doors ?), we
are forced to admit that, apart from their
desire to visit the sepulchre of a famed Scots-
man, Pisa had attractions for travellers with
which those at Leghorn could not for one
instant be ranked not simply because of its
superb monuments and on account of its cele-
brity as a watering-place, but also because
Pisa was, at certain seasons, the favourite
villeggiatura of the Grand Duke of Tuscany,
who betook himself thither annually, attended
by the whole of his brilliant Court.
J. BUCHAN TELFER, Captain R.N.
THE PARNELL PEDIGREE (6 th S. viii. 509; ix. 98). During the month of June, in which C. S. Parnell was born, it may be worth while to draw attention to his forefathers. MR. W. MAZIERE BRADY asserts at the first reference that "C. S. Parnell has no blood of Irish princes in his veins." Also Mr. McCarthy, in 'History of Our Own Times,' 1880-97, p. 64,
