After a week at Genoa Smollett proceeded along the coast to
Lerici. There, being tired of the sea, the party disembarked, and
proceeded by chaise from Sarzano to Cercio in Modenese territory,
and so into Tuscany, then under the suzerainty of Austria. His
description of Pisa is of an almost sunny gaiety and good humour.
Italy, through this portal, was capable of casting a spell even
upon a traveller so case-hardened as Smollett. The very churches
at Pisa are "tolerably ornamented." The Campo Santo and Tower
fall in no way short of their reputation, while the brass gates
so far excel theirs that Smollett could have stood a whole day to
examine and admire them. These agremens may be attributable in
some measure to "a very good inn." In stating that galleys were
built in the town, Smollett seems to have fallen a victim, for
once, to guide-book information. Evelyn mentions that galleys
were built there in his time, but that was more than a hundred
years before. The slips and dock had long been abandoned, as
Smollett is careful to point out in his manuscript notes, now in
the British Museum. He also explains with superfluous caution
that the Duomo of Pisa is not entirely Gothic. Once arrived in
the capital of Tuscany, after admitting that Florence is a noble
city, our traveller is anxious to avoid the hackneyed ecstasies
and threadbare commonplaces, derived in those days from Vasari
through Keysler and other German commentators, whose genius
Smollett is inclined to discover rather "in the back than in the
brain."

The two pass-words for a would-be connoisseur, according to
Goldsmith, were to praise Perugino, and to say that such and such
a work would have been much better had the painter devoted more