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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14276 ***
+
+ITALIAN JOURNEYS
+
+By
+
+W.D. Howells
+
+1867 and 1895
+
+
+
+
+                                                  PAGE
+CONTENTS.
+
+The Road to Rome from Venice:
+     I. Leaving Venice                              9
+    II. From Padua to Ferrara                      10
+   III. The Picturesque, the Improbable, and
+        the Pathetic in Ferrara                    14
+    IV. Through Bologna to Genoa                   43
+     V. Up and Down Genoa                          52
+    VI. By Sea from Genoa to Naples                65
+   VII. Certain Things in Naples                   75
+  VIII. A Day in Pompeii                           89
+    IX. A Half-hour at Herculaneum                106
+     X. Capri and Capriotes                       116
+    XI. The Protestant Ragged Schools at Naples   136
+   XII. Between Rome and Naples                   147
+  XIII. Roman Pearls                              151
+
+Forza Maggiore                                    178
+
+At Padua                                          196
+
+A Pilgrimage to Petrarch's House at Arquà         216
+
+A Visit to the Cimbri                             235
+
+Minor Travels:
+    I. Pisa                                       251
+   II. The Ferrara Road                           259
+  III. Trieste                                    264
+   IV. Bassano                                    274
+    V. Possagno, Canova's Birthplace              280
+   VI. Como                                       285
+
+Stopping at Vicenza, Verona, and Parma            293
+
+Ducal Mantua                                      321
+
+
+
+
+THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE.
+
+I.
+
+LEAVING VENICE.
+
+We did not know, when we started from home in Venice, on the 8th of
+November, 1864, that we had taken the longest road to Rome. We thought
+that of all the proverbial paths to the Eternal City that leading to
+Padua, and thence through Ferrara and Bologna to Florence, and so
+down the sea-shore from Leghorn to Civita Vecchia, was the best, the
+briefest, and the cheapest. Who could have dreamed that this path,
+so wisely and carefully chosen, would lead us to Genoa, conduct us on
+shipboard, toss us four dizzy days and nights, and set us down, void,
+battered, and bewildered, in Naples? Luckily,
+
+  "The moving accident is not my trade,"
+
+for there are events of this journey (now happily at an end) which,
+if I recounted them with unsparing sincerity, would forever deter the
+reader from taking any road to Rome.
+
+Though, indeed, what is Rome, after all, when you come to it?
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+FROM PADUA TO FERRARA.
+
+As far as to Ferrara there was no sign of deviation from the direct
+line in our road, and the company was well enough. We had a Swiss
+family in the car with us to Padua, and they told us how they were
+going home to their mountains from Russia, where they had spent
+nineteen years of their lives. They were mother and father and only
+daughter and the last, without ever having seen her ancestral country,
+was so Swiss in her yet childish beauty, that she filled the morning
+twilight with vague images of glacial height, blue lake, snug chalet,
+and whatever else of picturesque there is in paint and print about
+Switzerland. Of course, as the light grew brighter these images melted
+away, and left only a little frost upon the window-pane.
+
+The mother was restively anxious at nearing her country, and told us
+every thing of its loveliness and happiness. Nineteen years of absence
+had not robbed it of the poorest charm, and I hope that seeing it
+again took nothing from it. We said how glad we should be if we were
+as near America as she was to Switzerland. "America!" she screamed;
+"you come from America! Dear God, the world is wide--the world is
+wide!" The thought was so paralyzing that it silenced the fat little
+lady for a moment, and gave her husband time to express his sympathy
+with us in our war, which he understood perfectly well. He trusted
+that the revolution to perpetuate slavery must fail, and he hoped that
+the war would soon end, for it made cotton very dear.
+
+Europe is material: I doubt if, after Victor Hugo and Garibaldi, there
+were many upon that continent whose enthusiasm for American
+unity (which is European freedom) was not somewhat chilled by the
+expensiveness of cotton. The fabrics were all doubled in price, and
+every man in Europe paid tribute in hard money to the devotion with
+which we prosecuted the war, and, incidentally, interrupted the
+cultivation of cotton.
+
+We shook hands with our friends, and dismounted at Padua, where we
+were to take the diligence for the Po. In the diligence their loss was
+more than made good by the company of the only honest man in Italy.
+Of course this honest man had been a great sufferer from his own
+countrymen, and I wish that all English and American tourists, who
+think themselves the sole victims of publican rapacity and deceit in
+Italy, could have heard our honest man's talk. The truth is, these
+ingenious people prey upon their own kind with an avidity quite as
+keen as that with which they devour strangers; and I am half-persuaded
+that a ready-witted foreigner fares better among them than a traveller
+of their own nation. Italians will always pretend, on any occasion,
+that you have been plundered much worse than they but the reverse
+often happens. They give little in fees; but their landlord, their
+porter, their driver, and their boatman pillage them with the same
+impunity that they rob an Inglese. As for this honest man in the
+diligence, he had suffered such enormities at the hands of the
+Paduans, from which we had just escaped, and at the hands of the
+Ferrarese, into which we were rushing (at the rate of five miles scant
+an hour), that I was almost minded to stop between the nests of those
+brigands and pass the rest of my days at Rovigo, where the honest man
+lived. His talk was amusingly instructive, and went to illustrate the
+strong municipal spirit which still dominates all Italy, and which is
+more inimical to an effectual unity among Italians than Pope or Kaiser
+has ever been. Our honest man of Rovigo was a foreigner at Padua,
+twenty-five miles north, and a foreigner at Ferrara, twenty-five miles
+south; and throughout Italy the native of one city is an alien in
+another, and is as lawful prey as a Russian or an American with people
+who consider every stranger as sent them by the bounty of Providence
+to be eaten alive. Heaven knows what our honest man had paid at his
+hotel in Padua, but in Ferrara the other week he had been made to give
+five francs apiece for two small roast chickens, besides a fee to
+the waiter; and he pathetically warned us to beware how we dealt with
+Italians. Indeed, I never met a man so thoroughly persuaded of the
+rascality of his nation and of his own exceptional virtue. He took
+snuff with his whole person; and he volunteered, at sight of a
+flock of geese, a recipe which I give the reader: Stuff a goose with
+sausage; let it hang in the weather during the winter; and in the
+spring cut it up and stew it, and you have an excellent and delicate
+soup.
+
+But after all our friend's talk, though constant, became dispiriting,
+and we were willing when he left us. His integrity had, indeed, been
+so oppressive that I was glad to be swindled in the charge for our
+dinner at the Iron Crown, in Rovigo, and rode more cheerfully on to
+Ferrara.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+THE PICTURESQUE, THE IMPROBABLE, AND THE PATHETIC IN FERRARA.
+
+I.
+
+It was one of the fatalities of travel, rather than any real interest
+in the poet, which led me to visit the prison of Tasso on the night of
+our arrival, which was mild and moonlit. The _portier_ at the
+Stella d'Oro suggested the sentimental homage to sorrows which it is
+sometimes difficult to respect, and I went and paid this homage in the
+coal-cellar in which was never imprisoned the poet whose works I had
+not read.
+
+The famous hospital of St. Anna, where Tasso was confined for seven
+years, is still an asylum for the infirm and sick, but it is no longer
+used as a mad-house. It stands on one of the lone, silent Ferrarese
+streets, not far from the Ducal Castle, and it is said that from the
+window of his cell the unhappy poet could behold Leonora in her tower.
+It may be so; certainly those who can believe in the genuineness of
+the cell will have no trouble in believing that the vision of Tasso
+could pierce through several brick walls and a Doric portico, and at
+last comprehend the lady at her casement in the castle. We entered a
+modern gateway, and passed into a hall of the elder edifice, where a
+slim young soldier sat reading a romance of Dumas. This was the keeper
+of Tasso's prison; and knowing me, by the instinct which teaches an
+Italian custodian to distinguish his prey, for a seeker after the True
+and Beautiful, he relinquished his romance, lighted a waxen taper,
+unbolted a heavy door with a dramatic clang, and preceded me to the
+cell of Tasso. We descended a little stairway, and found ourselves in
+a sufficiently spacious court, which was still ampler in the poet's
+time, and was then a garden planted with trees and flowers. On a low
+doorway to the right was inscribed the legend "PRIGIONE DI TASSO," and
+passing through this doorway into a kind of reception-cell, we entered
+the poet's dungeon. It is an oblong room, with a low wagon-roof
+ceiling, under which it is barely possible to stand upright. A single
+narrow window admits the light, and the stone casing of this window
+has a hollow in a certain place, which might well have been worn there
+by the friction of the hand that for seven years passed the prisoner
+his food through the small opening. The young custodian pointed to
+this memento of suffering, without effusion, and he drew my attention
+to other remarkable things in the cell, without troubling himself
+to palliate their improbability in the least. They were his stock in
+trade; you paid your money, and took your choice of believing in
+them or not. On the other hand, my _portier_, an ex-_valet de place_,
+pumped a softly murmuring stream of enthusiasm; and expressed the
+freshest delight in the inspection of each object of interest.
+
+One still faintly discerns among the vast number of names with which
+the walls of the ante-cell are bewritten, that of Lamartine. The name
+of Byron, which was once deeply graven in the stucco, had been scooped
+away by the Grand Duke of Tuscany (so the custodian said), and there
+is only part of a capital B now visible. But the cell itself is still
+fragrant of associations with the noble bard, who, according to the
+story related to Valery, caused himself to be locked up in it, and
+there, with his head fallen upon his breast, and frequently smiting
+his brow, spent two hours in pacing the floor with great strides. It
+is a touching picture; but its pathos becomes somewhat embarrassing
+when you enter the cell, and see the impossibility of taking more than
+three generous paces without turning. When Byron issued forth, after
+this exercise, he said (still according to Valery) to the custodian:
+"I thank thee, good man! The thoughts of Tasso are now all in my mind
+and heart." "A short time after his departure from Ferrara," adds the
+Frenchman, maliciously, "he composed his 'Lament of Tasso,' a mediocre
+result from such inspiration." No doubt all this is colored, for
+the same author adds another tint to heighten the absurdity of the
+spectacle: he declares that Byron spent part of his time in the cell
+in writing upon the ceiling Lamartine's verses on Tasso, which he
+misspelled. The present visitor has no means of judging of the truth
+concerning this, for the lines of the poet have been so smoked by the
+candles of successive pilgrims in their efforts to get light on them,
+that they are now utterly illegible. But if it is uncertain what were
+Byron's emotions on visiting the prison of Tasso, there is no doubt
+about Lady Morgan's: she "experienced a suffocating emotion; her
+heart failed her on entering that cell; and she satisfied a melancholy
+curiosity at the cost of a most painful sensation."
+
+I find this amusing fact stated in a translation of her ladyship's
+own language, in a clever guide-book called _Il Servitore di Piazza_,
+which I bought at Ferrara, and from which, I confess, I have learnt
+all I know to confirm me in my doubt of Tasso's prison. The Count
+Avventi, who writes this book, prefaces it by saying that he is a
+valet de place who knows how to read and write, and he employs these
+unusual gifts with singular candor and clearness. No one, he says,
+before the nineteenth century, ever dreamed of calling the cellar in
+question Tasso's prison, and it was never before that time made the
+shrine of sentimental pilgrimage, though it has since been visited by
+every traveller who has passed through Ferrara. It was used during the
+poet's time to hold charcoal and lime; and not long ago died an old
+servant of the hospital, who remembered its use for that purpose. It
+is damp, close, and dark, and Count Avventi thinks it hardly possible
+that a delicate courtier could have lived seven years in a place
+unwholesome enough to kill a stout laborer in two months; while it
+seems to him not probable that Tasso should have received there the
+visits of princes and other distinguished persons whom Duke Alfonso
+allowed to see him, or that a prisoner who was often permitted to ride
+about the city in a carriage should have been thrust back into such a
+cavern on his return to the hospital. "After this," says our _valet
+de place_ who knows how to read and write, "visit the prison of Tasso,
+certain that _in the hospital of St. Anna_ that great man was confined
+for many years;" and, with this chilly warning, leaves his reader to
+his emotions.
+
+I am afraid that if as frank caution were uttered in regard to other
+memorable places, the objects of interest in Italy would dwindle sadly
+in number, and the _valets de place_, whether they know how to read
+and write or not, would be starved to death. Even the learning of
+Italy is poetic; and an Italian would rather enjoy a fiction than know
+a fact--in which preference I am not ready to pronounce him unwise.
+But this characteristic of his embroiders the stranger's progress
+throughout the whole land with fanciful improbabilities; so that if
+one use his eyes half as much as his wonder, he must see how much
+better it would have been to visit, in fancy, scenes that have an
+interest so largely imaginary. The utmost he can make out of the most
+famous place is, that it is possibly what it is said to be, and
+is more probably as near that as any thing local enterprise could
+furnish. He visits the very cell in which Tasso was confined, and has
+the satisfaction of knowing that it was the charcoal-cellar of the
+hospital in which the poet dwelt. And the _genius loci_--where is
+that? Away in the American woods, very likely, whispering some dreamy,
+credulous youth,--telling him charming fables of its _locus_, and
+proposing to itself to abandon him as soon as he sets foot upon its
+native ground. You see, though I cared little about Tasso, and nothing
+about his prison, I was heavily disappointed in not being able to
+believe in it, and felt somehow that I had been awakened from a
+cherished dream.
+
+
+II.
+
+But I have no right to cast the unbroken shadow of my skepticism upon
+the reader, and so I tell him a story about Ferrara which I actually
+believe. He must know that in Ferrara the streets are marvelous long
+and straight. On the corners formed by the crossing of two of the
+longest and straightest of these streets stand four palaces, in only
+one of which we have a present interest. This palace my guide took
+me to see, after our visit to Tasso's prison, and, standing in its
+shadow, he related to me the occurrence which has given it a sad
+celebrity. It was, in the time of the gifted toxicologist, the
+residence of Lucrezia Borgia, who used to make poisonous little
+suppers there, and ask the best families of Italy to partake of them.
+It happened on one occasion that Lucrezia Borgia was thrust out of
+a ball-room at Venice as a disreputable character, and treated with
+peculiar indignity. She determined to make the Venetians repent their
+unwonted accession of virtue, and she therefore allowed the occurrence
+to be forgotten till the proper moment of her revenge arrived,
+when she gave a supper, and invited to her board eighteen young and
+handsome Venetian nobles. Upon the preparation of this repast she
+bestowed all the resources of her skillful and exquisite knowledge;
+and the result was, the Venetians were so felicitously poisoned
+that they had just time to listen to a speech from the charming and
+ingenious lady of the house before expiring. In this address she
+reminded her guests of the occurrence in the Venetian ball-room, and
+perhaps exulted a little tediously in her present vengeance. She was
+surprised and pained when one of the guests interrupted her, and,
+justifying the treatment she had received at Venice, declared himself
+her natural son. The lady instantly recognized him, and in the sudden
+revulsion of maternal feeling, begged him to take an antidote. This he
+not only refused to do, but continued his dying reproaches, till his
+mother, losing her self-command, drew her poniard and plunged it into
+his heart.
+
+The blood of her son fell upon the table-cloth, and this being hung
+out of the window to dry, the wall received a stain, which neither
+the sun nor rain of centuries sufficed to efface, and which was only
+removed with the masonry, when it became necessary to restore the
+wall under that window, a few months before the time of my visit to
+Ferrara. Accordingly, the blood-stain has now disappeared; but the
+conscientious artist who painted the new wall has faithfully restored
+the tragic spot, by bestowing upon the stucco a bloody dash of
+Venetian red.
+
+
+III.
+
+It would be pleasant and merciful, I think, if old towns, after having
+served a certain number of centuries for the use and pride of men,
+could be released to a gentle, unmolested decay. I, for my part, would
+like to have the ducal cities of North Italy, such as Mantua, Modena,
+Parma, and Ferrara, locked up quietly within their walls, and left to
+crumble and totter and fall, without any harder presence to vex them
+in their decrepitude than that of some gray custodian, who should come
+to the gate with clanking keys, and admit the wandering stranger, if
+he gave signs of a reverent sympathy, to look for a little while upon
+the reserved and dignified desolation. It is a shame to tempt these
+sad old cities into unnatural activity, when they long ago made their
+peace with the world, and would fain be mixing their weary brick
+and mortar with the earth's unbuilded dust; and it is hard for the
+emotional traveller to restrain his sense of outrage at finding them
+inhabited, and their rest broken by sounds of toil, traffic, and
+idleness; at seeing places that would gladly have had done with
+history still doomed to be parts of political systems, to read the
+newspapers, and to expose railway guides and caricatures of the Pope
+and of Napoleon in their shop windows.
+
+Of course, Ferrara was not incorporated into a living nation against
+her will, and I therefore marveled the more that she had become a
+portion of the present kingdom of Italy. The poor little State had
+its day long before ours; it had been a republic, and then subject to
+lords; and then, its lords becoming dukes, it had led a life of gayety
+and glory till its fall, and given the world such names and memories
+as had fairly won it the right to rest forever from making history.
+Its individual existence ended with that of Alfonso II., in 1597, when
+the Pope declared it reverted to the Holy See; and I always fancied
+that it must have received with a spectral, yet courtly kind of
+surprise, those rights of man which bloody-handed France distributed
+to the Italian cities in 1796; that it must have experienced a ghostly
+bewilderment in its rapid transformation, thereafter, under Napoleon,
+into part of the Cispadan Republic, the Cisalpine Republic, the
+Italian Republic, and the Kingdom of Italy, and that it must have sunk
+back again under the rule of the Popes with gratitude and relief at
+last--as phantoms are reputed to be glad when released from haunting
+the world where they once dwelt. I speak of all this, not so much from
+actual knowledge of facts as from personal feeling; for it seems to
+me that if I were a city of the past, and must be inhabited at all,
+I should choose just such priestly domination, assured that though
+it consumed my substance, yet it would be well for my fame and final
+repose. I should like to feel that my old churches were safe from
+demolition: that my old convents and monasteries should always shelter
+the pious indolence of friars and nuns. It would be pleasant to have
+studious monks exploring quaint corners of my unphilosophized annals,
+and gentle, snuff-taking abbés writing up episodes in the history of
+my noble families, and dedicating them to the present heirs of past
+renown; while the thinker and the reviewer should never penetrate
+my archives. Being myself done with war, I should be glad to have my
+people exempt, as they are under the Pope, from military service; and
+I should hope that if the Legates taxed them, the taxes paid would be
+as so many masses said to get my soul out of the purgatory of perished
+capitals. Finally, I should trust that in the sanctified keeping of
+the Legates my mortal part would rest as sweetly as bones laid in
+hallowed earth brought from Jerusalem; and that under their serene
+protection I should be forever secure from being in any way exhumed
+and utilized by the ruthless hand of Progress.
+
+However, as I said, this is a mere personal preference, and other old
+cities might feel differently. Indeed, though disposed to condole with
+Ferrara upon the fact of her having become part of modern Italy, I
+could not deny, on better acquaintance with her, that she was still
+almost entirely of the past. She has certainly missed that ideal
+perfection of non-existence under the Popes which I have just
+depicted, but she is practically almost as profoundly at rest under
+the King of Italy. One may walk long through the longitude and
+rectitude of many of her streets without the encounter of a single
+face: the place, as a whole, is by no means as lively as Pompeii,
+where there are always strangers; perhaps the only cities in the world
+worthy to compete with Ferrara in point of agreeable solitude are
+Mantua and Herculaneum. It is the newer part of the town--the modern
+quarter built before Boston was settled or Ohio was known--which is
+loneliest; and whatever motion and cheerfulness are still felt in
+Ferrara linger fondly about the ancient holds of life--about the
+street before the castle of the Dukes, and in the elder and narrower
+streets branching away from the piazza of the Duomo, where, on market
+days, there is a kind of dreamy tumult. In the Ghetto we were almost
+crowded, and people wanted to sell us things, with an enterprise
+that contrasted strangely with shopkeeping apathy elsewhere. Indeed,
+surprise at the presence of strangers spending two days in Ferrara
+when they could have got away sooner, was the only emotion which the
+whole population agreed in expressing with any degree of energy, but
+into this they seemed to throw their whole vitality. The Italians are
+everywhere an artless race, so far as concerns the gratification of
+their curiosity, from which no consideration of decency deters them.
+Here in Ferrara they turned about and followed us with their eyes,
+came to windows to see us, lay in wait for us at street-corners, and
+openly and audibly debated whether we were English or German. We might
+have thought this interest a tribute to something peculiar in our
+dress or manner, had it not visibly attended other strangers who
+arrived with us. It rose almost into a frenzy of craving to know more
+of us all, when on the third day the whole city assembled before our
+hotel, and witnessed, with a sort of desperate cry, the departure
+of the heavy-laden omnibus which bore us and our luggage from their
+midst.
+
+
+IV.
+
+I doubt if, after St. Mark's in Venice, the Duomo at Parma, and the
+Four Fabrics at Pisa, there is a church more worthy to be seen for
+its quaint, rich architecture, than the Cathedral at Ferrara. It is
+of that beloved Gothic of which eye or soul cannot weary, and we
+continually wandered back to it from other more properly interesting
+objects. It is horribly restored in-doors, and its Renaissance
+splendors soon drove us forth, after we had looked at the Last
+Judgment by Bastianino. The style of this painting is muscular and
+Michelangelic, and the artist's notion of putting his friends in
+heaven and his foes in hell is by no means novel; but he has achieved
+fame for his picture by the original thought of making it his revenge
+for a disappointment in love. The unhappy lady who refused his love
+is represented in the depths, in the attitude of supplicating the pity
+and interest of another maiden in Paradise who accepted Bastianino,
+and who consequently has no mercy on her that snubbed him. But I
+counted of far more value than this fresco the sincere old sculptures
+on the façade of the cathedral, in which the same subject is treated,
+beginning from the moment the archangel's trump has sounded. The
+people getting suddenly out of their graves at the summons are all
+admirable; but the best among them is the excellent man with one
+leg over the side of his coffin, and tugging with both hands to
+pull himself up, while the coffin-lid tumbles off behind. One sees
+instantly that the conscience of this early riser is clean, for he
+makes no miserable attempt to turn over for a nap of a few thousand
+years more, with the pretense that it was not the trump of doom, but
+some other and unimportant noise he had heard. The final reward of the
+blessed is expressed by the repose of one small figure in the lap of
+a colossal effigy, which I understood to mean rest in Abraham's bosom;
+but the artist has bestowed far more interest and feeling upon the
+fate of the damned, who are all boiling in rows of immense pots. It is
+doubtful (considering the droll aspect of heavenly bliss as figured
+in the one small saint and the large patriarch) whether the artist
+intended the condition of his sinners to be so horribly comic as it
+is; but the effect is just as great, for all that, and the slowest
+conscience might well take alarm from the spectacle of fate so
+grotesque and ludicrous; for, wittingly or unwittingly, the artist
+here punishes, as Dante knew best how to do, the folly of sinners as
+well as their wickedness. Boiling is bad enough; but to be boiled in
+an undeniable dinner-pot, like a leg of mutton, is to suffer shame us
+well as agony.
+
+We turned from these horrors, and walked down by the side of the Duomo
+toward the Ghetto, which is not so foul as one could wish a Ghetto
+to be. The Jews were admitted to Ferrara in 1275, and, throughout the
+government of the Dukes, were free to live where they chose in
+the city; but the Pope's Legate assigned them afterward a separate
+quarter, which was closed with gates. Large numbers of Spanish Jews
+fled hither during the persecutions, and there are four synagogues
+for the four languages,--Spanish, German, French, and Italian. Avventi
+mentions, among other interesting facts concerning the Ferrarese Jews,
+that one of their Rabbins, Isaaco degli Abranelli, a man of excellent
+learning in the Scriptures, claimed to be descended from David. His
+children still abide in Ferrara; and it may have been one of his
+kingly line that kept the tempting antiquarian's shop on the corner
+from which you turn up toward the Library. I should think such a man
+would find a sort of melancholy solace in such a place: filled with
+broken and fragmentary glories of every kind, it would serve him for
+that chamber of desolation, set apart in the houses of the Oriental
+Hebrews as a place to bewail themselves in; and, indeed, this idea may
+go far to explain the universal Israelitish fondness for dealing in
+relics and ruins.
+
+
+V.
+
+The Ghetto was in itself indifferent to us; it was merely our way to
+the Library, whither the great memory of Ariosto invited us to see his
+famous relics treasured there.
+
+We found that the dead _literati_ of Ferrara had the place wholly to
+themselves; not a living soul disputed the solitude of the halls with
+the custodians, and the bust of Ariosto looked down from his monument
+upon rows of empty tables, idle chairs, and dusty inkstands.
+
+The poet, who was painted by Titian, has a tomb of abandoned ugliness,
+and sleeps under three epitaphs; while cherubs frescoed on the
+wall behind affect to disclose the mausoleum, by lifting a frescoed
+curtain, but deceive no one who cares to consider how impossible it
+would be for them to perform this service, and caper so ignobly as
+they do at the same time. In fact this tomb of Ariosto shocks with
+its hideousness and levity. It stood formerly in the Church of San
+Benedetto, where it was erected shortly after the poet's death, and it
+was brought to the Library by the French, when they turned the church
+into a barracks for their troops. The poet's dust, therefore, rests
+here, where the worm, working silently through the vellum volumes on
+the shelves, feeds upon the immortality of many other poets. In the
+adjoining hall are the famed and precious manuscripts of Ariosto and
+of Tasso. A special application must be made to the librarian, in
+order to see the fragment of the _Furioso_ in Ariosto's hand, and the
+manuscript copy of the _Gerusalemma_, with the corrections by Tasso.
+There are some pages of Ariosto's Satires, framed and glazed for the
+satisfaction of the less curious; as well as a letter of Tasso's,
+written from the Hospital of St. Anna, which the poet sends to a
+friend, with twelve shirts, and in which he begs that his friend will
+have the shirts mended, and cautions him "not to let them be mixed
+with others." But when the slow custodian had at last unlocked that
+more costly fragment of the _Furioso_, and placed it in my hands, the
+other manuscripts had no value for me. It seems to me that the one
+privilege which travel has reserved to itself, is that of making
+each traveller, in presence of its treasures, forget whatever other
+travellers have said or written about them. I had read so much of
+Ariosto's industry, and of the proof of it in this manuscript, that I
+doubted if I should at last marvel at it. But the wonder remains
+with the relic, and I paid it my homage devoutly and humbly, and was
+disconcerted afterward to read again in my Valery how sensibly all
+others had felt the preciousness of that famous page, which, filled
+with half a score of previous failures, contains in a little open
+space near the margin, the poet's final triumph in a clearly written
+stanza. Scarcely less touching and interesting than Ariosto's painful
+work on these yellow leaves, is the grand and simple tribute which
+another Italian poet was allowed to inscribe on one of them: "Vittorio
+Alfieri beheld and venerated;" and I think, counting over the many
+memorable things I saw on the road to Rome and the way home
+again, this manuscript was the noblest thing and best worthy to be
+remembered.
+
+When at last I turned from it, however, I saw that the custodian had
+another relic of Messer Lodovico, which he was not ashamed to match
+with the manuscript in my interest. This was the bone of one of the
+poet's fingers, which the pious care of Ferrara had picked up from his
+dust (when it was removed from the church to the Library), and
+neatly bottled and labeled. In like manner, they keep a great deal
+of sanctity in bottles with the bones of saints in Italy; but I found
+very little savor of poesy hanging about this literary relic.
+
+As if the melancholy fragment of mortality had marshaled us the way,
+we went from the Library to the house of Ariosto, which stands at the
+end of a long, long street, not far from the railway station. There
+was not a Christian soul, not a boy, not a cat nor a dog to be seen
+in all that long street, at high noon, as we looked down its narrowing
+perspective, and if the poet and his friends have ever a mind for a
+posthumous meeting in his little reddish brick house, there is nothing
+to prevent their assembly, in broad daylight, from any part of the
+neighborhood. There was no presence, however, more spiritual than a
+comely country girl to respond to our summons at the door, and nothing
+but a tub of corn-meal disputed our passage inside. Directly I found
+the house inhabited by living people, I began to be sorry that it was
+not as empty as the Library and the street. Indeed, it is much better
+with Petrarch's house at Arquà, where the grandeur of the past
+is never molested by the small household joys and troubles of the
+present. That house is vacant, and no eyes less tender and fond than
+the poet's visitors may look down from its windows over the slope of
+vines and olives which it crowns; and it seemed hard, here in Ferrara,
+where the houses are so many and the people are so few, that Ariosto's
+house could not be left to him. _Parva sed apta mihi_, he has
+contentedly written upon the front; but I doubt if he finds it large
+enough for another family, though his modern housekeeper reserves him
+certain rooms for visitors. To gain these, you go up to the second
+story--there are but two floors--and cross to the rear of the
+building, where Ariosto's chamber opens out of an ante-room, and looks
+down upon a pinched and faded bit of garden. [In this garden the poet
+spent much of his time--chiefly in plucking up and transplanting the
+unlucky shrubbery, which was never suffered to grow three months
+in the same place,--such was the poet's rage for revision. It was
+probably never a very large or splendid garden, for the reason that
+Ariosto gave when reproached that he who knew so well how to describe
+magnificent palaces should have built such a poor little house: "It
+was easier to make verses than houses, and the fine palaces in his
+poem cost him no money."] In this chamber they say the poet died. It
+is oblong, and not large. I should think the windows and roof were
+of the poet's time, and that every thing else had been restored; I am
+quite sure the chairs and inkstand are kindly-meant inventions;
+for the poet's burly great arm-chair and graceful inkstand are both
+preserved in the Library. But the house is otherwise decent and
+probable; and I do not question but it was in the hall where we
+encountered the meal-tub that the poet kept a copy of his "_Furioso_,"
+subject to the corrections and advice of his visitors.
+
+The ancestral house of the Ariosti has been within a few years
+restored out of all memory and semblance of itself; and my wish to see
+the place in which the poet was born and spent his childhood resulted,
+after infinite search, in finding a building faced newly with stucco
+and newly French-windowed.
+
+Our _portier_ said it was the work of the late English Vice-Consul,
+who had bought the house. When I complained of the sacrilege, he said:
+"Yes, it is true. But then, you must know, the Ariosti were not one of
+the noble families of Ferrara."
+
+
+VI.
+
+The castle of the Dukes of Ferrara, about which cluster so many sad
+and splendid memories, stands in the heart of the city. I think
+that the moonlight which, on the night of our arrival, showed me its
+massive walls rising from the shadowy moat that surrounds them, and
+its four great towers, heavily buttressed, and expanding at the top
+into bulging cornices of cavernous brickwork, could have fallen on
+nothing else in all Italy so picturesque, and so full of the proper
+dread charm of feudal times, as this pile of gloomy and majestic
+strength. The daylight took nothing of this charm from it; for the
+castle stands isolated in the midst of the city, as its founder meant
+that it should [The castle of Ferrara was begun in 1385 by Niccolò
+d'Este to defend himself against the repetition of scenes of tumult,
+in which his princely rights were invaded. One of his tax-gatherers,
+Tommaso da Tortona, had, a short time before, made himself so
+obnoxious to the people by his insolence and severity, that they rose
+against him and demanded his life. He took refuge in the palace of
+his master, which was immediately assailed. The prince's own life was
+threatened, and he was forced to surrender the fugitive to the people,
+who tore Tortona limb from limb, and then, after parading the city
+with the mutilated remains, quietly returned to their allegiance.
+Niccolò, therefore, caused this castle to be built, which he
+strengthened with massive walls and towers commanding the whole city,
+and rendered inaccessible by surrounding it with a deep and wide canal
+from the river Reno.], and modern civilization has not crossed the
+castle moat, to undignify its exterior with any visible touch of the
+present. To be sure, when you enter it, the magnificent life is gone
+out of the old edifice; it is no stately halberdier who stands on
+guard at the gate of the drawbridge, but a stumpy Italian soldier in
+baggy trousers. The castle is full of public offices, and one sees in
+its courts and on its stairways, not brilliant men-at-arms, nor gay
+squires and pages, but whistling messengers going from one office to
+another with docketed papers, and slipshod serving-men carrying the
+clerks their coffee in very dirty little pots. Dreary-looking suitors,
+slowly grinding through the mills of law, or passing in the routine of
+the offices, are the guests encountered in the corridors; and all that
+bright-colored throng of the old days, ladies and lords, is passed
+from the scene. The melodrama is over, friends, and now we have a play
+of real life, founded on fact and inculcating a moral.
+
+Of course the custodians were slow to admit any change of this kind.
+If you could have believed them,--and the poor people told as many
+lies as they could to make you,--you would believe that nothing had
+ever happened of a commonplace nature in this castle. The taking-off
+of Hugo and Parisina they think the great merit of the castle; and one
+of them, seeing us, made haste to light his taper and conduct us down
+to the dungeons where those unhappy lovers were imprisoned. It is the
+misfortune of memorable dungeons to acquire, when put upon show, just
+the reverse of those properties which should raise horror and distress
+in the mind of the beholder. It was impossible to deny that the
+cells of Parisina and of Hugo were both singularly warm, dry, and
+comfortable; and we, who had never been imprisoned in them, found
+it hard to command, for our sensation, the terror and agony of the
+miserable ones who suffered there. We, happy and secure in these
+dungeons, could not think of the guilty and wretched pair bowing
+themselves to the headsman's stroke in the gloomy chamber under the
+Hall of Aurora; nor of the Marquis, in his night-long walk, breaking
+at last into frantic remorse and tears to know that his will had been
+accomplished. Nay, there upon its very scene, the whole tragedy faded
+from us; and, seeing our wonder so cold, the custodian tried to kindle
+it by saying that in the time of the event these cells were much
+dreadfuller than now, which was no doubt true. The floors of the
+dungeons are both below the level of the moat, and the narrow windows,
+or rather crevices to admit the light, were cut in the prodigiously
+thick wall just above the water, and were defended with four
+successive iron gratings. The dungeons are some distance apart: that
+of Hugo was separated from the outer wall of the castle by a narrow
+passage-way, while Parisina's window opened directly upon the moat.
+
+When we ascended again to the court of the castle, the custodian,
+abetted by his wife, would have interested us in two memorable wells
+there, between which, he said, Hugo was beheaded; and unabashed by the
+small success of this fable, he pointed out two windows in converging
+angles overhead, from one of which the Marquis, looking into the
+other, discovered the guilt of the lovers. The windows are now walled
+up, but are neatly represented to the credulous eye by a fresco of
+lattices.
+
+Valery mentions another claim upon the interest of the tourist which
+this castle may make, in the fact that it once sheltered John Calvin,
+who was protected by the Marchioness Renée, wife of Hercules II.; and
+my _Servitore di Piazza_ (the one who knows how to read and write)
+gives the following account of the matter, in speaking of the domestic
+chapel which Renée had built in the castle: "This lady was learned in
+belles-lettres and in the schismatic doctrines which at that time were
+insinuating themselves throughout France and Germany, and with
+which Calvin, Luther, and other proselytes, agitated the people,
+and threatened war to the Catholic religion. Nationally fond of
+innovation, and averse to the court of Rome on account of the
+dissensions between her father and Pope Julius II., Renée began
+to receive the teachings of Calvin, with whom she maintained
+correspondence. Indeed, Calvin himself, under the name of Huppeville,
+visited her in Ferrara, in 1536, and ended by corrupting her mind and
+seducing her into his own errors, which produced discord between
+her and her religious husband, and resulted in his placing her in
+temporary seclusion, in order to attempt her conversion. Hence, the
+chapel is faced with marble, paneled in relief, and studied to avoid
+giving place to saints or images, which were disapproved by the almost
+Anabaptist doctrines of Calvin, then fatally imbibed by the princess."
+
+We would willingly, as Protestants, have visited this wicked chapel;
+but we were prevented from seeing it, as well as the famous frescoes
+of Dosso Dossi in the Hall of Aurora, by the fact that the prefect was
+giving a little dinner (_pranzetto_) in that part of the castle. We
+were not so greatly disappointed in reality as we made believe; but
+our _servitore di piazza_ (the unlettered one) was almost moved to
+_lesa maestà_ with vexation. He had been full of scorching patriotism
+the whole morning; but now electing the unhappy and apologetic
+custodian representative of Piedmontese tyranny, he bitterly assailed
+the government of the king. In the times of His Holiness the Legates
+had made it their pleasure and duty to show the whole castle to
+strangers. But now strangers must be sent away without seeing its
+chief beauties, because, forsooth, the prefect was giving a little
+dinner. Presence of the Devil!
+
+
+VII.
+
+In our visits to the different churches in Ferrara we noticed devotion
+in classes of people who are devout nowhere else in Italy. Not only
+came solid-looking business men to say their prayers, but gay young
+dandies, who knelt and repeated their orisons and then rose and went
+seriously out. In Venice they would have posted themselves against a
+pillar, sucked the heads of their sticks, and made eyes at the young
+ladies kneeling near them. This degree of religion was all the more
+remarkable in Ferrara, because that city had been so many years
+under the Pope, and His Holiness contrives commonly to prevent the
+appearance of religion in young men throughout his dominions.
+
+Valery speaks of the delightful society which he met in the gray old
+town; and it is said that Ferrara has an unusual share of culture in
+her wealthy class, which is large. With such memories of learning and
+literary splendor as belong to her, it would be strange if she did
+not in some form keep alive the sacred flame. But, though there may
+be refinement and erudition in Ferrara, she has given no great name to
+modern Italian literature. Her men of letters seem to be of that race
+of grubs singularly abundant in Italy,--men who dig out of archives
+and libraries some topic of special and momentary interest and print
+it, unstudied and unphilosophized. Their books are material, not
+literature, and it is marvelous how many of them are published. A
+writer on any given subject can heap together from them a mass of fact
+and anecdote invaluable in its way; but it is a mass without life or
+light, and must be vivified by him who uses it before it can serve the
+world, which does not care for its dead local value. It remains to be
+seen whether the free speech and free press of Italy can reawaken the
+intellectual activity of the cities which once gave the land so many
+literary capitals.
+
+What numbers of people used to write verses in Ferrara! By operation
+of the principle which causes things concerning whatever subject you
+happen to be interested in to turn up in every direction, I found a
+volume of these dead-and-gone immortals at a book-stall, one day, in
+Venice. It is a curiously yellow and uncomfortable volume of the year
+1703, printed all in italics. I suppose there are two hundred odd
+rhymers selected from in that book,--and how droll the most of them
+are, with their unmistakable traces of descent from Ariosto, Tasso,
+and Guarini! What acres of enameled meadow there are in those pages!
+Brooks enough to turn all the mills in the world go purling through
+them. I should say some thousands of nymphs are constantly engaged
+in weaving garlands there, and the swains keep such a piping on those
+familiar notes,--_Amore, dolore, crudele_, and _miele_. Poor little
+poets! they knew no other tunes. Do not now weak voices twitter from a
+hundred books, in unconscious imitation of the hour's great singers?
+
+I think some of the pleasantest people in Italy are the army
+gentlemen. There is the race's gentleness in their ways, in spite of
+their ferocious trade, and an American freedom of style. They brag in
+a manner that makes one feel at home immediately; and met in travel,
+they are ready to render any little kindness.
+
+The other year at Reggio (which is not far from Modena) we stopped to
+dine at a restaurant where the whole garrison had its coat off and was
+playing billiards, with the exception of one or two officers, who were
+dining. These rose and bowed as we entered their room, and when the
+waiter pretended that such and such dishes were out (in Italy the
+waiter, for some mysterious reason, always pretends that the best
+dishes are out), they bullied him for the honor of Italy, and made him
+bring them to us. Indeed, I am afraid his life was sadly harassed by
+those brave men. We were in deep despair at finding no French bread,
+and the waiter swore with the utmost pathos that there was none; but
+as soon as his back was turned, a tightly laced little captain rose
+and began to forage for the bread. He opened every drawer and cupboard
+in the room, and finding none, invaded another room, captured several
+loaves from the plates laid there, and brought them back in triumph,
+presenting them to us amid the applause of his comrades. The dismay of
+the waiter, on his return, was ineffable.
+
+Three officers, who dined with us at the _table d'hôte_ of the Stella
+d'Oro in Ferrara (and excellent dinners were those we ate there), were
+visibly anxious to address us, and began not uncivilly, but still
+in order that we should hear, to speculate on our nationality among
+themselves. It appeared that we were Germans; for one of these
+officers, who had formerly been in the Austrian service at Vienna,
+recognized the word _bitter_ in our remarks on the _beccafichi_. As I
+did not care to put these fine fellows to the trouble of hating us for
+others' faults, I made bold to say that we were not Germans, and to
+add that _bitter_ was also an English word. Ah! yes, to be sure, one
+of them admitted; when he was with the Sardinian army in the Crimea,
+he had frequently heard the word used by the English soldiers. He
+nodded confirmation of what he said to his comrades, and then was good
+enough to display what English he knew. It was barely sufficient to
+impress his comrades; but it led the way to a good deal of talk in
+Italian.
+
+"I suppose you gentlemen are all Piedmontese?" I said.
+
+"Not at all," said our Crimean. "I am from Como; this gentleman, il
+signor Conte, (il signor Conte bowed,) is of Piacenza; and our friend
+across the table is Genoese. The army is doing a great deal to unify
+Italy. We are all Italians now, and you see we speak Italian, and not
+our dialects, together."
+
+My cheap remark that it was a fine thing to see them all united under
+one flag, after so many ages of mutual hate and bloodshed, turned the
+talk upon the origin of the Italian flag; and that led our Crimean to
+ask what was the origin of the English colors.
+
+"I scarcely know," I said. "We are Americans."
+
+Our friends at once grew more cordial. "Oh, Americani!" They had great
+pleasure of it. Did we think Signor Leencolen would be reëlected?
+
+I supposed that he had been elected that day, I said.
+
+Ah! this was the election day, then. _Cospetto_!
+
+At this the Genoese frowned superior intelligence, and the Crimean
+gazing admiringly upon him, said he had been nine months at Nuova
+York, and that he had a brother living there. The poor Crimean
+boastfully added that he himself had a cousin in America, and that the
+Americans generally spoke Spanish. The count from Piacenza wore an
+air of pathetic discomfiture, and tried to invent a transatlantic
+relative, as I think, but failed.
+
+I am persuaded that none of these warriors really had kinsmen in
+America, but that they all pretended to have them, out of politeness
+to us, and that they believed each other. It was very kind of them,
+and we were so grateful that we put no embarrassing questions. Indeed,
+the conversation presently took another course, and grew to include
+the whole table.
+
+There was an extremely pretty Italian present with her newly wedded
+husband, who turned out to be a retired officer. He fraternized at
+once with our soldiers, and when we left the table they all rose and
+made military obeisances. Having asked leave to light their cigars,
+they were smoking--the sweet young bride blowing a fairy cloud from
+her rosy lips with the rest. "Indeed," I heard an Italian lady once
+remark, "why should men pretend to deny us the privilege of smoking?
+It is so pleasant and innocent." It is but just to the Italians to
+say that they do not always deny it; and there is, without doubt, a
+certain grace and charm in a pretty _fumatrice_. I suppose it is a
+habit not so pleasing in an ugly or middle-aged woman.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA.
+
+I.
+
+We had intended to stay only one day at Ferrara, but just at that
+time the storms predicted on the Adriatic and Mediterranean coasts, by
+Mathieu de la Drome, had been raging all over Italy, and the railway
+communications were broken in every direction. The magnificent work
+through and under the Apennines, between Bologna and Florence, had
+been washed away by the mountain torrents in a dozen places, and the
+roads over the plains of the Romagna had been sapped by the flood, and
+rendered useless, where not actually laid under water.
+
+On the day of our intended departure we left the hotel, with other
+travellers, gayly incredulous of the landlord's fear that no train
+would start for Bologna. At the station we found a crowd of people
+waiting and hoping, but there was a sickly cast of doubt in some
+faces, and the labeled employés of the railway wore looks of ominous
+importance. Of course the crowd did not lose its temper. It sought
+information of the officials running to and fro with telegrams, in
+a spirit of national sweetness, and consoled itself with saying, as
+Italy has said under all circumstances of difficulty for centuries:
+_Ci vuol pazienza_! At last a blank silence fell upon it, as the
+_Capo-Stazione_ advanced toward a well-dressed man in the crowd, and
+spoke to him quietly. The well-dressed man lifted his forefinger and
+waved it back and forth before his face:--
+
+_The Well-dressed Man_.--Dunque, non si parte più? (No departures,
+then?)
+
+The _Capo-Stazione_ (waving _his_ forefinger in like manner.)--Non si
+parte più. (Like a mournful echo.)
+
+We knew quite as well from this pantomime of negation as from the
+dialogue our sad fate, and submitted to it. Some adventurous spirit
+demanded whether any trains would go on the morrow. The Capo-Stazione,
+with an air of one who would not presume to fathom the designs of
+Providence, responded: "Who knows? To-day, certainly not. To-morrow,
+perhaps. But"--and vanished.
+
+It may give an idea of the Italian way of doing things to say that, as
+we understood, this break in the line was only a few miles in extent,
+that trains could have approached both to and from Bologna, and that
+a little enterprise on the part of the company could have passed
+travellers from one side to the other with very small trouble or
+delay. But the railway company was as much daunted by the inundation
+as a peasant going to market, and for two months after the accident
+no trains carried passengers from one city to the other. No doubt,
+however, the line was under process of very solid repair meanwhile.
+
+For the present the only means of getting to Bologna was by carriage
+on the old highway, and accordingly we took passage thither in the
+omnibus of the Stella d'Oro.
+
+There was little to interest us in the country over which we rode. It
+is perfectly flat, and I suppose the reader knows what quantities
+of hemp and flax are raised there. The land seems poorer than in
+Lombardy, and the farm-houses and peasants' cottages are small and
+mean, though the peasants themselves, when we met them, looked well
+fed, and were certainly well clad. The landscape lay soaking in a
+dreary drizzle the whole way, and the town of Cento when we reached
+it, seemed miserably conscious of being too wet and dirty to go
+in-doors, and was loitering about in the rain. Our arrival gave the
+poor little place a sensation, for I think such a thing as an omnibus
+had not been seen there since the railway of Bologna and Ferrara was
+built. We went into the principal caffè to lunch,--a caffè much too
+large for Cento, with immense red-leather cushioned sofas, and a cold,
+forlorn air of half-starved gentility, a clean, high-roofed caffè and
+a breezy,--and thither the youthful nobility and gentry of the place
+followed us, and ordered a cup of coffee, that they might sit down and
+give us the pleasure of their distinguished company. They put on their
+very finest manners, and took their most captivating attitudes for the
+ladies' sake; and the gentlemen of our party fancied that it was for
+them these young men began to discuss the Roman question. How
+loud they were, and how earnest! And how often they consulted
+the newspapers of the caffè! (Older newspapers I never saw off a
+canal-boat.) I may tire some time of the artless vanity of the young
+Italians, so innocent, so amiable, so transparent, but I think I never
+shall.
+
+The great painter Guercino was born at Cento, and they have a noble
+and beautiful statue of him in the piazza, which the town caused to be
+erected from contributions by all the citizens. Formerly his house
+was kept for a show to the public; it was full of the pictures of the
+painter and many mementos of him; but recently the paintings have been
+taken to the gallery, and the house is now closed. The gallery is,
+consequently, one of the richest second-rate galleries in Italy, and
+one may spend much longer time in it than we gave, with great profit.
+There are some most interesting heads of Christ, painted, as Guercino
+always painted the Saviour, with a great degree of humanity in the
+face. It is an excellent countenance, and full of sweet dignity, but
+quite different from the conventional face of Christ.
+
+
+II.
+
+At night we were again in Bologna, of which we had not seen the gloomy
+arcades for two years. It must be a dreary town at all times: in a
+rain it is horrible; and I think the whole race of arcaded cities,
+Treviso, Padua, and Bologna, are dull, blind, and comfortless. The
+effect of the buildings vaulted above the sidewalks is that of
+a continuous cellarway; your view of the street is constantly
+interrupted by the heavy brick pillars that support the arches; the
+arcades are not even picturesque. Liking always to leave Bologna as
+quickly as possible, and, on this occasion, learning that there was no
+hope of crossing the Apennines to Florence, we made haste to take the
+first train for Genoa, meaning to proceed thence directly to Naples by
+steamer.
+
+It was a motley company that sat down in Hotel Brun the morning
+after our arrival in Bologna to a breakfast of murky coffee and furry
+beefsteaks, associated with sleek, greasy, lukewarm fried potatoes. I
+am sure that if each of our weather-bound pilgrims had told his story,
+we had been as well entertained as those at Canterbury. However, no
+one thought fit to give his narrative but a garrulous old Hebrew from
+London, who told us how he had been made to pay fifteen guineas for a
+carriage to cross the Apennines, and had been obliged to walk part of
+the way at that price. He was evidently proud, now the money was gone,
+of having been cheated of so much; and in him we saw that there was
+at least one human being more odious than a purse-proud
+Englishman--namely, a purse-proud English Jew. He gave his noble name
+after a while, as something too precious to be kept from the
+company, when recommending one of the travellers to go to the Hotel
+d'Angleterre in Rome: "The best 'otel out of England. You may mention
+my name, if you like--Mr. Jonas." The recipient of this favor noted
+down the talismanic words in his pocket-book, and Mr. Jonas, conscious
+of having conferred a benefit on his race, became more odious to it
+than ever. An Englishman is of a composition so uncomfortably original
+that no one can copy him, though many may caricature. I saw an
+American in London once who thought himself an Englishman because he
+wore leg-of-mutton whiskers, declaimed against universal suffrage and
+republics, and had an appetite for high game. He was a hateful animal,
+surely, but he was not the British lion; and this poor Hebrew at
+Bologna was not a whit more successful in his imitation of the
+illustrious brute, though he talked, like him, of nothing but hotels,
+and routes of travel, and hackmen and porters, and seemed to have
+nothing to do in Italy but get through it as quickly and abusively as
+possible.
+
+We were very glad, I say, to part from all this at Bologna and take
+the noon train for Genoa. In our car there were none but Italians,
+and the exchange of "_La Perseveranza_" of Milan for "_Il Popolo_"
+of Turin with one of them quickly opened the way for conversation and
+acquaintance. (_En passant_: I know of no journal in the United States
+whose articles are better than those of the "_Perseveranza_," and it
+was gratifying to an American to read in this ablest journal of Italy
+nothing but applause and encouragement of the national side in our
+late war.) My new-made friend turned out to be a Milanese. He was
+a physician, and had served as a surgeon in the late war of Italian
+independence; but was now placed in a hospital in Milan. There was a
+gentle little blonde with him, and at Piacenza, where we stopped
+for lunch, "You see," said he, indicating the lady, "we are newly
+married,"--which was, indeed, plain enough to any one who looked at
+their joyous faces, and observed how great disposition that little
+blonde had to nestle on the young man's broad shoulder. "I have a
+week's leave from my place," he went on, "and this is our wedding
+journey. We were to have gone to Florence, but it seems we are fated
+not to see that famous city."
+
+He spoke of it as immensely far off, and herein greatly amused us
+Americans, who had outgrown distances.
+
+"So we are going to Genoa instead, for two or three days." "Oh,
+have you ever been at Genoa?" broke in the bride. "What magnificent
+palaces! And then the bay, and the villas in the environs! There is
+the Villa Pallavicini, with beautiful gardens, where an artificial
+shower breaks out from the bushes, and sprinkles the people who pass.
+Such fun!" and she continued to describe vividly a city of which
+she had only heard from her husband; and it was easy to see that she
+walked in paradise wherever he led her.
+
+They say that Italian husbands and wives do not long remain fond
+of each other, but it was impossible in the presence of these happy
+people not to believe in the eternity of their love, and it was hard
+to keep from "dropping into poetry" on account of them. Their bliss
+infected every body in the car, and in spite of the weariness of our
+journey, and the vexation of the misadventures which had succeeded one
+another unsparingly ever since we left home, we found ourselves far on
+the way to Genoa before we thought to grumble at the distance. There
+was with us, besides the bridal party, a lady travelling from Bologna
+to Turin, who had learned English in London, and spoke it much better
+than most Londoners. It is surprising how thoroughly Italians master
+a language so alien to their own as ours, and how frequently you find
+them acquainted with English. From Russia the mania for this tongue
+has spread all over the Continent, and in Italy English seems to be
+prized first among the virtues.
+
+As we drew near Genoa, the moon came out on purpose to show us the
+superb city, and we strove eagerly for a first glimpse of the proud
+capital where Columbus was born. To tell the truth, the glimpse was
+but slight and false, for railways always enter cities by some mean
+level, from which any picturesque view is impossible.
+
+Near the station in Genoa, however, is the weak and ugly monument
+which the municipality has lately raised to Columbus. The moon made
+the best of this, which stands in a wide open space, and contrived,
+with an Italian skill in the arrangement of light, to produce an
+effect of undeniable splendor. On the morrow, we found out by the
+careless candor of the daylight what a uselessly big head Columbus
+had, and how the sculptor had not very happily thought proper to
+represent him with his sea-legs on.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+UP AND DOWN GENOA.
+
+I had my note-book with me on this journey, and pledged myself to
+make notes in it. And, indeed, I did really do something of the kind,
+though the result of my labors is by no means so voluminous as I would
+like it to be, now when the work of wishing there were more notes is
+so easy. We spent but one day in Genoa, and I find such a marvelous
+succinct record of this in my book that I am tempted to give it here,
+after the fashion of that Historical Heavyweight who writes the Life
+of "Frederick the Great."
+
+    "_Genoa, November 13_.--Breakfast _à la fourchette_ excellently
+    and cheaply. I buy a hat. We go to seek the Consul, and, after
+    finding every thing else for two hours, find him. Genoa is the
+    most magnificent city I ever saw; and the new monument to
+    Columbus about the weakest possible monument. Walk through the
+    city with Consul; Doge's palace; cathedral; girl turning
+    somersaults in the street; blind madman on the cathedral steps.
+    We leave for Naples at twelve midnight."
+
+As for the breakfast, it was eaten at one of the many good caffè in
+Genoa, and perhaps some statistician will like to know that for a
+beefsteak and potatoes, with a half-bottle of Ligurian wine, we paid a
+franc. For this money we had also the society of an unoccupied waiter,
+who leaned against a marble column and looked on, with that gentle,
+half-compassionate interest in our appetites, which seems native
+to the tribe of waiters. A slight dash of surprise is in this
+professional manner; and there is a faint smile on the solemn,
+professional countenance, which is perhaps prompted by too intimate
+knowledge of the mysteries of the kitchen and the habits of the cook.
+The man who passes his life among beefsteaks cannot be expected to
+love them, or to regard without wonder the avidity with which others
+devour them. I imagine that service in restaurants must beget simple
+and natural tastes in eating, and that the jaded men who minister
+there to our pampered appetites demand only for themselves--
+
+  "A scrip with herbs and fruits supplied,
+  And water from the spring."
+
+Turning from this thought to the purchase of my hat, I do not believe
+that literary art can interest the reader in that purely personal
+transaction, though I have no doubt that a great deal might be said
+about buying hats as a principle. I prefer, therefore, to pass to our
+search for the Consul.
+
+A former Consul at ----, whom I know, has told me a good many stories
+about the pieces of popular mind which he received at different times
+from the travelling public, in reproof of his difficulty of discovery;
+and I think it must be one of the most jealously guarded rights
+of American citizens in foreign lands to declare the national
+representative hard to find, if there is no other complaint to
+lodge against him. It seems to be, in peculiar degree, a quality of
+consulship at ----, to be found remote and inaccessible. My friend
+says that even at New York, before setting out for his post, when
+inquiring into the history of his predecessors, he heard that they
+were one and all hard to find; and he relates that on the steamer,
+going over, there was a low fellow who set the table in a roar by a
+vulgar anecdote to this effect:--
+
+"There was once a consul at ----, who indicated his office-hours by
+the legend on his door, 'In from ten to one.' An old ship-captain,
+who kept coming for about a week without finding the Consul, at last
+furiously wrote, in the terms of wager, under this legend, 'Ten to one
+you're out!'"
+
+My friend also states that one day a visitor of his remarked: "I'm
+rather surprised to find you in. As a general rule, I never do find
+consuls in." Habitually, his fellow-countrymen entertained him with
+accounts of their misadventures in reaching him. It was useless to
+represent to them that his house was in the most convenient locality
+in ----, where, indeed, no stranger can walk twenty rods from his
+hotel without losing himself; that their guide was an ass, or their
+courier a rogue. They listened to him politely, but they never
+pardoned him in the least; and neither will I forgive the Consul at
+Genoa. I had no earthly consular business with him, but a private
+favor to ask. It was Sunday, and I could not reasonably expect to find
+him at his office, or any body to tell me where he lived; but I have
+seldom had so keen a sense of personal wrong and national neglect as
+in my search for that Consul's house.
+
+In Italy there is no species of fact with which any human being you
+meet will not pretend to have perfect acquaintance, and, of course,
+the driver whose fiacre we took professed himself a complete guide to
+the Consul's whereabouts, and took us successively to the residences
+of the consuls of all the South American republics. It occurred to
+me that it might be well to inquire of these officials where their
+colleague was to be found; but it is true that not one consul of them
+was at home! Their doors were opened by vacant old women, in whom
+a vague intelligence feebly guttered, like the wick of an expiring
+candle, and who, after feigning to throw floods of light on the
+object of my search, successively flickered out, and left me in total
+darkness.
+
+Till that day, I never knew of what lofty flights stairs were capable.
+As out-of-doors, in Genoa, it is either all up or down hill, so
+in-doors it is either all up or down stairs. Ascending and descending,
+in one palace after another, those infinite marble steps, it became
+a question not solved to this hour, whether it was worse to ascend or
+descend,--each ordeal in its turn seemed so much more terrible than
+the other.
+
+At last I resolved to come to an understanding with the driver, and
+I spent what little breath I had left--it was dry and hot as the
+simoom--in blowing up that infamous man. "You are a great driver," I
+said, "not to know your own city. What are you good for if you can't
+take a foreigner to his consul's?" "Signore," answered the driver
+patiently, "you would have to get a book in two volumes by heart,
+in order to be able to find everybody in Genoa. This city is a
+labyrinth."
+
+Truly, it had so proved, and I could scarcely believe in my good luck
+when I actually found my friend, and set out with him on a ramble
+through its toils.
+
+A very great number of the streets in Genoa are footways merely,
+and these are as narrow, as dark, as full of jutting chimney-places,
+balconies, and opened window-shutters, and as picturesque as the
+little alleys in Venice. They wander at will around the bases of the
+gloomy old stone palaces, and seem to have a vagabond fondness for
+creeping down to the port, and losing themselves there in a certain
+cavernous arcade which curves round the water with the flection of the
+shore, and makes itself a twilight at noonday. Under it are clangorous
+shops of iron-smiths, and sizzling shops of marine cooks, and, looking
+down its dim perspective, one beholds chiefly sea-legs coming and
+going, more or less affected by strong waters; and as the faces to
+which these sea-legs belong draw near, one discerns sailors from all
+parts of the world,--tawny men from Sicily and Norway, as diverse in
+their tawniness as olive and train-oil; sharp faces from Nantucket
+and from the Piraeus, likewise mightily different in their sharpness;
+blonde Germans and blonde Englishmen; and now and then a colored
+brother also in the seafaring line, with sea-legs, also, more or less
+affected by strong waters like the rest.
+
+What curious people are these seafarers! They coast the whole world,
+and know nothing of it, being more ignorant and helpless than children
+on shore. I spoke with the Yankee mate of a ship one day at Venice,
+and asked him how he liked the city.
+
+Well, he had not been ashore yet.
+
+He was told he had better go ashore; that the Piazza San Marco was
+worth seeing.
+
+Well, he knew it; he had seen pictures of it; but he guessed he
+wouldn't go ashore.
+
+Why not, now he was here?
+
+Well, he laid out to go ashore the next time he came to Venice.
+
+And so, bless his honest soul, he lay three weeks at Venice with his
+ship, after a voyage of two months, and he sailed away without ever
+setting his foot on that enchanted ground.
+
+I should have liked to stop some of those seafarers and ask them what
+they thought of Genoa.
+
+It must have been in the little streets--impassable for horses--that
+the people sat and talked, as Heine fabled, in their doorways, and
+touched knees with the people sitting and talking on the thresholds
+of the opposite side. But we saw no gossipers there on our Sunday in
+Genoa; and I think the domestic race of Heine's day no longer lives in
+Genoa, for every body we saw on the streets was gayly dressed in the
+idea of the last fashions, and was to be met chiefly in the public
+promenades. The fashions were French; but here still lingers the
+lovely phantom of the old national costume of Genoa, and snow-white
+veils fluttered from many a dark head, and caressed many an olive
+cheek. It is the kindest and charitablest of attirements, this white
+veil, and, while decking beauty to the most perilous effect, befriends
+and modifies age and ugliness.
+
+The pleasure with which I look at the splendor of an Italian crowd in
+winter is always touched with melancholy. I know that, at the time
+of its noonday promenade, it has nothing but a cup of coffee in its
+stomach; that it has emerged from a house as cold and dim as a cellar;
+and that it will presently go home to dine on rice and boiled beef. I
+know that chilblains secretly gnaw the hands inside of its kid gloves,
+and I see in the rawness of its faces the anguish of winter-long
+suffering from cold. But I also look at many in this crowd with the
+eye of the economist, and wonder how people practicing even so great
+self-denial as they can contrive to make so much display on their
+little means,--how those clerks of public offices, who have rarely an
+income of five hundred dollars a year, can dress with such peerless
+gorgeousness. I suppose the national instinct teaches them ways and
+means unknown to us. The passion for dress is universal: the men are
+as fond of it as the women; and, happily, clothes are comparatively
+cheap. It is no great harm in itself, this display: it is only a pity
+that there is often nothing, or worse than nothing, under the shining
+surface.
+
+We walked with the brilliant Genoese crowd upon the hill where the
+public promenade overlooks a landscape of city and country, houses and
+gardens, vines and olives, which it makes the heart ache to behold, it
+is so faultlessly beautiful. Behind us the fountain was--
+
+  "Shaking its loosened silver in the sun;"
+
+the birds were singing; and there were innumerable fair girls going
+by, about whom one might have made romances if one had not known
+better. Our friend pointed out to us the "pink jail" in which Dickens
+lived while at Genoa; and showed us on the brow of a distant upland
+the villa, called _Il Paradiso_, which Byron had occupied. I dare
+say this Genoese joke is already in print: That the Devil reëntered
+Paradise when Byron took this villa. Though, in loveliest Italy, one
+is half-persuaded that the Devil had never left Paradise.
+
+After lingering a little longer on that delicious height, we turned
+and went down for a stroll through the city.
+
+My note-book says that Genoa is the most magnificent city I ever saw,
+and I hold by my note-book, though I hardly know how to prove it.
+Venice is, and remains, the most beautiful city in the world; but her
+ancient rival impresses you with greater splendor. I suppose that
+the exclusively Renaissance architecture, which Ruskin declares the
+architecture of pride, lends itself powerfully to this effect in
+Genoa. It is here in its best mood, and there is little grotesque
+Renaissance to be seen, though the palaces are, as usual, loaded with
+ornament. The Via Nuova is the chief thoroughfare of the city, and the
+crowd pours through this avenue between long lines of palaces. Height
+on height rise the stately, sculptured façades, colonnaded, statued,
+pierced by mighty doorways and lofty windows; and the palaces seem to
+gain a kind of aristocratic _hauteur_ from the fact that there are for
+the most part no sidewalks, and that the carriages, rolling insolently
+through the crowd, threaten constantly to grind the pedestrian up
+against their carven marbles, and immolate him to their stony pride.
+There is something gracious and gentle in the grandeur of Venice,
+and much that the heart loves to cling to; but in Genoa no sense of
+kindliness is touched by the magnificence of the city.
+
+It was an unspeakable relief, after such a street, to come, on a
+sudden, upon the Duomo, one of the few Gothic buildings in Genoa, and
+rest our jaded eyes on that architecture which Heaven seems truly to
+have put into the thoughts of man together with the Christian faith.
+O beloved beauty of aspiring arches, of slender and clustered columns,
+of flowering capitals and window-traceries, of many-carven breadths
+and heights, wherein all Nature breathes and blossoms again! There is
+neither Greek perfection, nor winning Byzantine languor, nor insolent
+Renaissance opulence, which may compare with this loveliness of yours!
+Alas that the interior of this Gothic temple of Genoa should abound in
+the abomination of rococo restoration! They say that the dust of St.
+John the Baptist lies there within a costly shrine; and I wonder that
+it can sleep in peace amid all that heathenish show of bad taste. But
+the poor saints have to suffer a great deal in Italy.
+
+Outside, in the piazza before the church, there was an idle, cruel
+crowd, amusing itself with the efforts of a blind old man to find
+the entrance. He had a number of books which he desperately laid down
+while he ran his helpless hands over the clustered columns, and which
+he then desperately caught up again, in fear of losing them. At other
+times he paused, and wildly clasped his hands upon his eyes, or wildly
+threw up his arms; and then began to run to and fro again uneasily,
+while the crowd laughed and jeered. Doubtless a taint of madness
+afflicted him; but not the less he seemed the type of a blind soul
+that gropes darkly about through life, to find the doorway of some
+divine truth or beauty,--touched by the heavenly harmonies from
+within, and miserably failing, amid the scornful cries and bitter glee
+of those who have no will but to mock aspiration.
+
+The girl turning somersaults in another place had far more popular
+sympathy than the blind madman at the temple door, but she was hardly
+a more cheerful spectacle. For all her festive spangles and fairy-like
+brevity of skirts, she had quite a work-a-day look upon her honest,
+blood-red face, as if this were business though it looked like sport,
+and her part of the diversion were as practical as that of the famous
+captain of the waiters, who gave the act of peeling a sack of potatoes
+a playful effect by standing on his head. The poor damsel was going
+over and over, to the sound of most dismal drumming and braying,
+in front of the immense old palace of the Genoese Doges,--a classic
+building, stilted on a rustic base, and quite worthy of Palladio, if
+any body thinks that is praise.
+
+There was little left of our day when we had dined; but having seen
+the outside of Genoa, and not hoping to see the inside, we found even
+this little heavy on our hands, and were glad as the hour drew near
+when we were to take the steamer for Naples.
+
+It had been one of the noisiest days spent during several years in
+clamorous Italy, whose voiceful uproar strikes to the summits of her
+guardian Alps, and greets the coming stranger, and whose loud Addio
+would stun him at parting, if he had not meanwhile become habituated
+to the operatic pitch of her every-day tones. In Genoa, the hotels,
+taking counsel of the vagabond streets, stand about the cavernous
+arcade already mentioned, and all the noise of the shipping reaches
+their guests. We rose early that Sunday morning to the sound of a
+fleet unloading cargoes of wrought-iron, and of the hard swearing of
+all nations of seafaring men. The whole day long the tumult followed
+us, and seemed to culminate at last in the screams of a parrot, who
+thought it fine to cry, "_Piove! piove! piove_!"--"It rains! it
+rains! it rains!"--and had, no doubt, a secret interest in some
+umbrella-shop. This unprincipled bird dwelt somewhere in the
+neighborhood of the street where you see the awful tablet in the wall
+devoting to infamy the citizens of the old republic that were false to
+their country. The sight of that pitiless stone recalls with a thrill
+the picturesque, unhappy past, with all the wandering, half-benighted
+efforts of the people to rend their liberty from now a foreign and now
+a native lord. At best, they only knew how to avenge their wrongs; but
+now, let us hope, they have learnt, with all Italy, to prevent them.
+The will was never wanting of old to the Ligurian race, and in this
+time they have done their full share to establish Italian freedom.
+
+I do not know why it should have been so surprising to hear the
+boatman who rowed us to the steamer's anchorage speak English; but,
+after his harsh Genoese profanity in getting his boat into open water,
+it was the last thing we expected from him. It had somehow the effect
+of a furious beast addressing you in your native tongue, and
+telling you it was "Wary poordy wedder;" and it made us cling to his
+good-nature with the trembling solicitude of Little Red-Riding-Hood,
+when she begins to have the first faint suspicions of her grandmother.
+However, our boatman was no wild beast, but took our six cents of
+_buonamano_ with the base servility of a Christian man, when he had
+put our luggage in the cabin of the steamer. I wonder how he should
+have known us for Americans? He did so know us, and said he had been
+at New York in better days, when he voyaged upon higher seas than
+those he now navigated.
+
+On board, we watched with compassion an old gentleman in the cabin
+making a hearty meal of sardines and fruit-pie, and I asked him if
+he had ever been at sea. No, he said. I could have wept over that
+innocent old gentleman's childlike confidence of appetite, and
+guileless trust of the deep.
+
+We went on deck, where one of the gentle beings of our party declared
+that she would remain as long as Genoa was in sight; and to tell the
+truth, the scene was worthy of the promised devotion. There, in a
+half-circle before us, blazed the lights of the quay; above these
+twinkled the lamps of the steep streets and climbing palaces; over
+and behind all hung the darkness on the heights,--a sable cloud dotted
+with ruddy points of flame burning in the windows of invisible houses.
+
+  "Merrily did we drop"
+
+down the bay, and presently caught the heavy swell of the open sea.
+The other gentle being of our party then clutched my shoulder with a
+dreadful shudder, and after gasping, "O Mr. Scribbler, why _will_ the
+ship roll so?" was meekly hurried below by her sister, who did not
+return for a last glimpse of Genoa the Proud.
+
+In a moment heaven's sweet pity flapped away as with the sea-gull's
+wings, and I too felt that there was no help for it, and that I must
+go and lie down in the cabin. With anguished eyes I beheld upon the
+shelf opposite to mine the innocent old gentleman who had lately
+supped so confidently on sardines and fruit-pie. He lay upon his back,
+groaning softly to himself.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES.
+
+I.
+
+Like the Englishman who had no prejudices, I do hate a Frenchman; and
+there were many Frenchmen among our passengers on the _Messina_, in
+whose company I could hardly have been happy, had I not seen them
+horribly sea-sick. After the imprudent old gentleman of the sardines
+and fruit-pie, these wretched Gauls were the first to be seized with
+the malady, which became epidemic, and were miserable up to the last
+moment on board. To the enormity of having been born Frenchmen, they
+added the crime of being commercial travellers,--a class of fellow-men
+of whom we know little at home, but who are met everywhere in European
+travel. They spend more than half their lives in movement from place
+to place, and they learn to snatch from every kind of travel its
+meagre comforts, with an insolent disregard of the rights and feelings
+of other passengers. They excuse an abominable trespass with a cool
+"Pardon!" take the best seat everywhere, and especially treat women
+with a savage rudeness, to which an American vainly endeavors to
+accustom his temper. I have seen commercial travellers of all nations,
+and I think I must award the French nation the discredit of producing
+the most odious commercial travellers in the world. The Englishman
+of this species wraps himself in his rugs, and rolls into his corner,
+defiantly, but not aggressively, boorish; the Italian is almost a
+gentleman; the German is apt to take sausage out of a newspaper and
+eat it with his penknife; the Frenchman aggravates human nature beyond
+endurance by his restless ill-breeding, and his evident intention not
+only to keep all his own advantages, but to steal some of yours upon
+the first occasion. There were three of these monsters on our
+steamer: one a slight, bloodless young man, with pale blue eyes and
+an incredulous grin; another, a gigantic full-bearded animal in
+spectacles; the third an infamous plump little creature, in absurdly
+tight pantaloons, with a cast in his eye, and a habit of sucking his
+teeth at table. When this wretch was not writhing in the agonies of
+sea-sickness, he was on deck with his comrades, lecturing them upon
+various things, to which the bloodless young man listened with his
+incredulous grin, and the bearded giant in spectacles attended with a
+choked look about the eyes, like a suffering ox. They were constantly
+staggering in and out of their state-room, which, for my sins, was
+also mine; and opening their abominable commodious travelling bags, or
+brushing their shaggy heads at the reeling mirror, and since they
+were born into the world, I think they had never cleaned their
+finger-nails. They wore their hats at dinner, but always went away,
+after soup, deadly pale.
+
+
+II.
+
+In contrast with these cattle, what polished and courtly gentlemen
+were the sailors and firemen! As for our captain, he would in any
+company have won notice for his gentle and high-bred way; in his place
+at the head of the table among these Frenchmen, he seemed to me the
+finest gentleman I had ever seen. He had spent his whole life at sea,
+and had voyaged in all parts of the world except Japan, where he meant
+some day, he said, to go. He had been first a cabin-boy on a little
+Genoese schooner, and he had gradually risen to the first place on
+a sailing-vessel, and now he had been selected to fill a commander's
+post on this line of steamers. (It is an admirable line of boats,
+not belonging I believe to the Italian government, but much under its
+control, leaving Genoa every day for Leghorn, Naples, Palermo, and
+Ancona, on the Adriatic coast.) The captain had sailed a good deal in
+American waters, but chiefly on the Pacific coast, trading from the
+Spanish republican ports to those of California. He had been in that
+State during its effervescent days, when every thing foul floated
+to the top, and I am afraid he formed there but a bad opinion of our
+people, though he was far too courteous to say outright any thing of
+this sort.
+
+He had very fine, shrewd blue eyes, a lean, weather-beaten, kindly
+face, and a cautious way of saying things. I hardly expected him to
+turn out so red-hot a Democrat as he did on better acquaintance, but
+being a warm friend of man myself, I was not sorry. Garibaldi was
+the beginning and ending of his political faith, as he is with every
+enthusiastic Italian. The honest soul's conception of all concrete
+evil was brought forth in two words, of odd enough application. In
+Europe, and Italy more particularly, true men have suffered chiefly
+from this form of evil, and the captain evidently could conceive of
+no other cause of suffering anywhere. We were talking of the American
+war, and when the captain had asked the usual question, "_Quando
+finirà mai questa guerra_?" and I had responded as usual, "_Ah, ci
+vuol pazienza_!" the captain gave a heavy sigh, and turning his head
+pensively aside, plucked his grapes from the cluster a moment in
+silence.
+
+Then he said: "You Americans are in the habit of attributing this war
+to slavery. The cause is not sufficient."
+
+I ventured to demur and explain. "No," said the captain, "the cause is
+not sufficient. We Italians know the only cause which could produce a
+war like this."
+
+I was naturally anxious to be instructed in the Italian theory, hoping
+it might be profounder than the English notion that we were fighting
+about tariffs.
+
+The captain frowned, looked at me carefully, and then said:--
+
+"In this world there is but one cause of mischief--the Jesuits."
+
+
+III.
+
+The first night out, from Genoa to Leghorn, was bad enough, but that
+which succeeded our departure from the latter port was by far the
+worst of the three we spent in our voyage to Naples. How we envied the
+happy people who went ashore at Leghorn! I think we even envied the
+bones of the Venetians, Pisans, and Genoese who met and slew each
+other in the long-forgotten sea-fights, and sank too deeply through
+the waves to be stirred by their restless tumult. Every one has
+heard tell of how cross and treacherous a sea the Mediterranean is in
+winter, and my own belief is, that he who has merely been sea-sick on
+the Atlantic should give the Mediterranean a trial before professing
+to have suffered every thing of which human nature is capable. Our
+steamer was clean enough and staunch enough, but she was not large--no
+bigger, I thought, than a gondola, that night as the waves tossed her
+to and fro, till unwinged things took flight all through her cabins
+and over her decks. My berth was placed transversely instead of
+lengthwise with the boat,--an ingenious arrangement to heighten
+sea-sick horrors, and dash the blood of the sufferer from brain to
+boots with exaggerated violence at each roll of the boat; and I begged
+the steward to let me sleep upon one of the lockers in the cabin.
+I found many of my agonized species already laid out there; and the
+misery of the three French commercial travellers was so great, that,
+in the excess of my own dolor, it actually afforded me a kind of
+happiness, and I found myself smiling at times to see the giant, with
+the eyes of a choked ox, rise up and faintly bellow. Indeed, there was
+something eldritch and unearthly in the whole business, and I think a
+kind of delirium must have resulted from the sea-sickness. Otherwise,
+I shall not know how to account for having attributed a kind of
+consciousness and individuality to the guide-book of a young American
+who had come aboard at Leghorn. He turned out afterward to be the
+sweetest soul in the world, and I am sorry now that I regarded with
+amusement his failure to smoke off his sickness. He was reading his
+guide-book with great diligence and unconcern, when suddenly I marked
+him lay it softly, softly down, with that excessive deliberation which
+men use at such times, and vanish with great dignity from the
+scene. Thus abandoned to its own devices, this guide-book began its
+night-long riots, setting out upon a tour of the cabin with the first
+lurch of the boat that threw it from the table upon the floor. I heard
+it careen at once wildly to the cabin door, and knock to get out; and
+failing in this, return more deliberately to the stern of the boat,
+interrogating the tables and chairs, which had got their sea-legs on,
+and asking them how they found themselves. Arrived again at the point
+of starting, it seemed to pause a moment, and then I saw it setting
+forth on a voyage of pleasure in the low company of a French hat,
+which, being itself a French book, I suppose it liked. In these
+travels they both ran under the feet of one of the stewards and were
+replaced by an immense _tour de force_ on the table, from which the
+book eloped again,--this time in company with an overcoat; but it
+seemed the coat was too miserable to go far: it stretched itself at
+full length on the floor, and suffered the book to dance over it, back
+and forth, I know not how many times. At last, as the actions of
+the book were becoming unendurable, and the general sea-sickness was
+waxing into a frenzy, a heavy roll, that made the whole ship shriek
+and tremble, threw us all from our lockers; and gathering myself up,
+bruised and sore in every fibre, I lay down again and became sensible
+of a blissful, blissful lull; the machinery had stopped, and with
+the mute hope that we were all going to the bottom, I fell tranquilly
+asleep.
+
+
+IV.
+
+It appeared that the storm had really been dangerous. Instead of being
+only six hours from Naples, as we ought to be at this time, we were
+got no further than Porto Longone, in the Isle of Elba. We woke in a
+quiet, sheltered little bay, whence we could only behold, not feel,
+the storm left far out upon the open sea. From this we turned our
+heavy eyes gladly to the shore, where a white little town was settled,
+like a flight of gulls upon the beach, at the feet of green and
+pleasant hills, whose gentle lines rhymed softly away against the sky.
+At the end of either arm of the embracing land in which we lay, stood
+gray, placid old forts, with peaceful sentries pacing their bastions,
+and weary ships creeping round their feet, under guns looking out so
+kindly and harmlessly, that I think General ---- himself would not
+have hesitated (except, perhaps, from a profound sentiment of regret
+for offering the violence) to attack them. Our port was full of
+frightened shipping--steamers, brigs, and schooners--of all sizes and
+nations; and since it was our misfortune that Napoleon spent his exile
+in Elba at Porto Ferrato instead of Porto Longone, we amused ourselves
+with looking at the vessels and the white town and the soft hills,
+instead of hunting up dead lion's tracks.
+
+Our fellow-passengers began to develop themselves: the regiment of
+soldiers whom we were transporting picturesquely breakfasted forward,
+and the second-cabin people came aft to our deck, while the English
+engineer (there are English engineers on all the Mediterranean
+steamers) planted a camp-stool in a sunny spot, and sat down to read
+the "Birmingham Express."
+
+Our friends of the second cabin were chiefly officers with their wives
+and families, and they talked for the most part of their sufferings
+during the night. They spoke such exquisite Italian that I thought
+them Tuscans, but they told me they were of Sicily, where their
+beautiful speech first had life. Let us hear what they talked of in
+their divine language, and with that ineffable _tonic_ accent which
+no foreigner perfectly acquires, and let us for once translate the
+profanities Pagan and Christian, which adorn common parlance in
+Italy:--
+
+"Ah, my God! how much I suffered!" says a sweet little woman with
+gentle brown eyes, red, red lips, and blameless Greek lines of face.
+"I broke two basins!"
+
+"There were ten broken in all, by Diana!" says this lady's sister.
+
+"Presence of the Devil!" says her husband; and
+
+"Body of Bacchus!" her young brother, puffing his cigar.
+
+"And you, sir," said the lady, turning to a handsome young fellow in
+civil dress, near her, "how did you pass this horrible night?"
+
+"Oh!" says the young man, twirling his heavy blond mustache, "mighty
+well, mighty well!"
+
+"Oh mercy of God! You were not sick?"
+
+"I, signora, am never sea-sick. I am of the navy."
+
+At which they all cry oh, and ah, and declare they are glad of it,
+though why they should have been I don't know to this day.
+
+"I have often wished," added the young man meditatively, and in a
+serious tone, as if he had indeed given the subject much thought,
+"that it might please God to let me be sea-sick once, if only that I
+might know how it feels. But no!" He turned the conversation, as
+if his disappointment were too sore to dwell upon; and hearing our
+English, he made out to let us know that he had been at New York, and
+could spik our language, which he proceeded to do, to the great pride
+of his countrymen, and our own astonishment at the remarkable forms of
+English speech to which he gave utterance.
+
+
+V.
+
+We set out from Porto Longone that night at eight o'clock, and next
+evening, driving through much-abated storm southward into calm waters
+and clear skies, reached Naples. At noon, Monte Circeo where Circe
+led her disreputable life, was a majestic rock against blue heaven
+and broken clouds; after nightfall, and under the risen moon, Vesuvius
+crept softly up from the sea, and stood a graceful steep, with wreaths
+of lightest cloud upon its crest, and the city lamps circling far
+round its bay.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES.
+
+I.
+
+Perhaps some reader of mine who visited Naples under the old disorder
+of things, when the Bourbon and the Camorra reigned, will like to hear
+that the pitched battle which travellers formerly fought, in landing
+from their steamer, is now gone out of fashion. Less truculent boatmen
+I never saw than those who rowed us ashore at Naples; they were so
+quiet and peaceful that they harmonized perfectly with that tranquil
+scene of drowsy-twinkling city lights, slumbrous mountains, and
+calm sea, and, as they dipped softly toward us in the glare of the
+steamer's lamps, I could only think of Tennyson's description:--
+
+  "And round about the keel with faces pale,
+  Dark faces pale against the rosy flame,
+  The mild-eyed melancholy lotus-eaters came."
+
+The mystery of this placidity had been already solved by our captain,
+whom I had asked what price I should bargain to pay from the steamer
+to the shore. "There is a tariff," said he, "and the boatmen keep to
+it. The Neapolitans are good people, (_buona gente_,) and only needed
+justice to make them obedient to the laws." I must say that I found
+this to be true. The fares of all public conveyances are now fixed,
+and the attempts which drivers occasionally make to cheat you, seem
+to be rather the involuntary impulses of old habit than deliberate
+intentions to do you wrong. You pay what is due, and as your man
+merely rumbles internally when you turn away, you must be a very timid
+_signorin_, indeed, if you buy his content with any thing more. I
+fancy that all these things are now much better managed in Italy than
+in America, only we grumble at them there and stand them in silence at
+home. Every one can recall frightful instances of plunder, in which
+he was the victim, at New York--in which the robbery had none of the
+neatness of an operation, as it often has in Italy, but was a brutal
+mutilation. And then as regards civility from the same kind of people
+in the two countries, there is no comparison that holds in favor of
+us. All questions are readily and politely answered in Italian travel,
+and the servants of companies are required to be courteous to the
+public whereas, one is only too glad to receive a silent snub from
+such people at home.
+
+
+II.
+
+The first sun that rose after our arrival in Naples was mild and warm
+as a May sun, though we were quite in the heart of November. We early
+strolled out under it into the crowded ways of the city, and drew near
+as we might to that restless, thronging, gossiping southern life,
+in contrast with which all northern existence seems only a sort of
+hibernation. The long Toledo, on which the magnificence of modern
+Naples is threaded, is the most brilliant and joyous street in
+the world; but I think there is less of the quaintness of Italian
+civilization to be seen in its vivacious crowds than anywhere else
+in Italy. One easily understands how, with its superb length and
+straightness, and its fine, respectable, commonplace-looking houses,
+it should be the pride of a people fond of show; but after Venice and
+Genoa it has no picturesque charm; nay, even busy Milan seems less
+modern and more picturesque. The lines of the lofty palaces on the
+Toledo are seldom broken by the façade of a church or other public
+edifice; and when this does happen, the building is sure to be coldly
+classic or frantically baroque.
+
+You weary of the Toledo's perfect repair, of its monotonous iron
+balconies, its monotonous lofty windows; and it would be insufferable
+if you could not turn out from it at intervals into one of those
+wondrous little streets which branch up on one hand and down on the
+other, rising and falling with flights of steps between the high,
+many-balconied walls. They ring all day with the motleyest life of
+fishermen, fruit-venders, chestnut-roasters, and idlers of every age
+and sex; and there is nothing so full of local color, unless it be the
+little up-and-down-hill streets in Genoa. Like those, the by-streets
+of Naples are only meant for foot-passengers, and a carriage never
+enters them; but sometimes, if you are so blest, you may see a mule
+climbing the long stairways, moving solemnly under a stack of straw,
+or tinkling gayly down-stairs, bestridden by a swarthy, handsome
+peasant--all glittering teeth and eyes and flaming Phrygian cap. The
+rider exchanges lively salutations and sarcasms with the by-standers
+in his way, and perhaps brushes against the bagpipers who bray
+constantly in those hilly defiles. They are in Neapolitan costume,
+these _pifferari_, and have their legs incomprehensibly tied up in the
+stockings and garters affected by the peasantry of the provinces,
+and wear brave red sashes about their waists. They are simple,
+harmless-looking people, and would no doubt rob and kill in the most
+amiable manner, if brigandage came into fashion in their neighborhood.
+
+Sometimes the student of men may witness a Neapolitan quarrel in these
+streets, and may pick up useful ideas of invective from the remarks of
+the fat old women who always take part in the contests. But, though
+we were ten days in Naples, I only saw one quarrel, and I could have
+heard much finer violence of language among the gondoliers at any
+ferry in Venice than I heard in this altercation.
+
+The Neapolitans are, of course, furious in traffic. They sell a great
+deal, and very boisterously, the fruit of the cactus, which is about
+as large as an egg, and which they peel to a very bloody pulp, and lay
+out, a sanguinary presence, on boards for purchase. It is not good
+to the uncultivated taste; but the stranger may stop and drink, with
+relish and refreshment, the orangeade and lemonade mixed with snow and
+sold at the little booths on the street-corners. These stands looks
+much like the shrines of the Madonna in other Italian cities, and a
+friend of ours was led, before looking carefully into their office,
+to argue immense Neapolitan piety from the frequency of their
+ecclesiastical architecture. They are, indeed, the shrines of a god
+much worshiped during the long Neapolitan summers; and it was the
+profound theory of the Bourbon kings of Naples, that, if they kept
+their subjects well supplied with snow to cool their drink, there was
+no fear of revolution. It shows how liable statesmen are to err, that,
+after all, the Neapolitans rose, drove out the Bourbons, and welcomed
+Garibaldi.
+
+The only part of the picturesque life of the side streets which seems
+ever to issue from them into the Toledo is the goatherd with his
+flock of milch-goats, which mingle with the passers in the avenues as
+familiarly as with those of the alley, and thrust aside silk-hidden
+hoops, and brush against dandies' legs, in their course, but keep on
+perfect terms with every body. The goatherd leads the eldest of the
+flock, and the rest follow in docile order and stop as he stops to ask
+at the doors if milk is wanted. When he happens to have an order, one
+of the goats is haled, much against her will, into the entry of a,
+house, and there milked, while the others wait outside alone, nibbling
+and smelling thoughtfully about the masonry. It is noticeable that
+none of the good-natured passers seem to think these goats a great
+nuisance in the crowded street; but all make way for them as if they
+were there by perfect right, and were no inconvenience.
+
+On the Toledo people keep upon the narrow sidewalks, or strike out
+into the carriage-way, with an indifference to hoofs and wheels which
+one, after long residence in tranquil Venice, cannot acquire, in
+view of the furious Neapolitan driving. That old comprehensive gig of
+Naples, with which many pens and pencils have familiarized the reader,
+is nearly as hard to find there now as the _lazzaroni_, who have gone
+out altogether. You may still see it in the remoter quarters of
+the city, with its complement of twelve passengers to one horse,
+distributed, two on each thill, four on the top seats, one at each
+side, and two behind; but in the Toledo it has given place to much
+finer vehicles. Slight buggies, which take you anywhere for half a
+franc, are the favorite means of public conveyance, and the private
+turn-outs are of every description and degree. Indeed, all the
+Neapolitans take to carriages, and the Strand in London at six o'clock
+in the evening is not a greater jam of wheels than the Toledo in the
+afternoon. Shopping feels the expansive influence of the out-of-doors
+life, and ladies do most of it as they sit in their open carriages
+at the shop-doors, ministered to by the neat-handed shopmen. They are
+very languid ladies, as they recline upon their carriage cushions;
+they are all black-eyed, and of an olive pallor, and have gloomy rings
+about their fine eyes, like the dark-faced dandies who bow to them.
+This Neapolitan look is very curious, and I have not seen it elsewhere
+in Italy; it is a look of peculiar pensiveness, and comes, no doubt,
+from the peculiarly heavy growth of lashes which fringes the lower
+eyelid. Then there is the weariness in it of all peoples whose summers
+are fierce and long.
+
+As the Italians usually dress beyond their means, the dandies of
+Naples are very gorgeous. If it is now, say, four o'clock in the
+afternoon, they are all coming down the Toledo with the streams
+of carriages bound for the long drive around the bay. But our
+foot-passers go to walk in the beautiful Villa Reale, between this
+course and the sea. The Villa is a slender strip of Paradise, a mile
+long; it is rapture to walk in it, and it comes, in description, to
+be a garden-grove, with feathery palms, Greekish temples, musical
+fountains, white statues of the gods, and groups of fair girls in
+spring silks. If I remember aright, the sun is always setting on the
+bay, and you cannot tell whether this sunset is cooled by the water
+or the water is warmed by the golden light upon it, and upon the city,
+and upon all the soft mountain-heights around.
+
+
+III.
+
+Walking westward through the whole length of the Villa Reale, and
+keeping with the crescent shore of the bay, you come, after a while,
+to the Grot of Posilippo, which is not a grotto but a tunnel cut for
+a carriage-way under the hill. It serves, however, the purpose of a
+grotto, if a grotto has any, and is of great length and dimness, and
+is all a-twinkle night and day with numberless lamps. Overlooking the
+street which passes into it is the tomb of Virgil, and it is this
+you have come to see. To reach it, you knock first at the door of a
+blacksmith, who calls a species of custodian, and, when this
+latter has opened a gate in a wall, you follow him up-stairs into a
+market-garden.
+
+In one corner, and standing in a leafy and grassy shelter somewhat
+away from the vegetables, is the poet's tomb, which has a kind of
+claim to genuineness by virtue of its improbable appearance. It looks
+more like a bake-oven than even the Pompeian tombs; the masonry is
+antique, and is at least in skillful imitation of the fine Roman work.
+The interior is a small chamber with vaulted or wagon-roof ceiling,
+under which a man may stand upright, and at the end next the street
+is a little stone commemorating the place as Virgil's tomb, which was
+placed there by the Queen of France in 1840, and said by the custodian
+(a singularly dull ass) to be an exact copy of the original, whatever
+the original may have been. This guide could tell us nothing more
+about it, and was too stupidly honest to pretend to know more. The
+laurel planted by Petrarch at the door of the tomb, and renewed
+in later times by Casimir Delavigne, has been succeeded by a third
+laurel. The present twig was so slender, and looked so friendless and
+unprotected, that even enthusiasm for the memory of two poets could
+not be brought to rob it of one of its few leaves; and we contented
+ourselves with plucking some of the grass and weeds that grew
+abundantly on the roof of the tomb.
+
+There was a dusty quiet within the tomb, and a grassy quiet without,
+that pleased exceedingly; but though the memories of the place were
+so high and epic, it only suggested bucolic associations, and, sunken
+into that nook of hill-side verdure, made me think of a spring-house
+on some far-away Ohio farm; a thought that, perhaps, would not have
+offended the poet, who loved and sang of humble country things, and,
+drawing wearily to his rest here, no doubt turned and remembered
+tenderly the rustic days before the excellent veterans of Augustus
+came to exile him from his father's farm at Mantua, and banish him to
+mere glory. But I believe most travellers have much nobler sensations
+in Virgil's tomb, and there is a great deal of testimony borne to
+their lofty sentiments on every scribbleable inch of its walls. Valery
+reminded me that Boccaccio, standing near it of old, first felt his
+fate decided for literature. Did he come there, I wonder, with poor
+Fiammetta, and enter the tomb with her tender hand in his, before ever
+he thought of that cruel absence she tells of? "O donne pietose!" I
+hope so, and that this pilgrimage, half of love and half of letters,
+took place, "nel tempo nel quale la rivestita terra più che tutto
+l'altro anno si mostra bella."
+
+If you ascend from the tomb and turn Naplesward from the crest of the
+hill, you have the loveliest view in the world of the sea and of the
+crescent beach, mightily jeweled at its further horn with the black
+Castel dell' Ovo. Fishermen's children are playing all along the
+foamy border of the sea, and boats are darting out into the surf. The
+present humble muse is not above saying also that the linen which the
+laundresses hang to dry upon lines along the beach takes the sun like
+a dazzling flight of white birds, and gives a breezy life to the scene
+which it could not spare.
+
+
+IV.
+
+There was a little church on our way back from Posilippo, into which
+we lounged a moment, pausing at the altar of some very successful
+saint near the door. Here there were great numbers of the usual
+offerings from the sick whom the saint had eased of their various
+ills,--waxen legs and arms from people who had been in peril of
+losing their limbs, as well as eyes, noses, fingers, and feet, and the
+crutches of those cured of lameness; but we were most amused with the
+waxen effigies of several entire babies hung up about the altar, which
+the poor souls who had been near losing the originals had brought
+there in gratitude to the saint.
+
+Generally, however, the churches of Naples are not very interesting,
+and one who came away without seeing them would have little to regret.
+The pictures are seldom good, and though there are magnificent
+chapels in St. Januarius, and fine Gothic tombs at Santa Chiara,
+the architecture is usually rococo. I fancy that Naples has felt the
+damage of Spanish taste in such things as well as Spanish tyranny in
+others. Indeed, I saw much there which reminded me of what I had read
+about Spain rather than what I had seen in Italy; and all Italian
+writers are agreed in attributing the depravation of Naples to the
+long Spanish dominion. It is well known how the Spaniards rule their
+provinces, and their gloomy despotism was probably never more cruelly
+felt than in Italy, where the people were least able to bear it. I
+had a heart-felt exultation in walking through the quarter of the city
+where the tumults of Massaniello had raged, and, if only for a few
+days, struck mortal terror to the brutal pride of the viceroy; but
+I think I had a better sense of the immense retribution which has
+overtaken all memory of Spanish rule in Naples as we passed through
+the palace of Capo di Monte. This was the most splendid seat of the
+Spanish Bourbon, whose family, inheriting its power from the violence
+of other times, held it with violence in these; and in one of the
+chief saloons of the palace, which is now Victor Emanuel's, were
+pictures representing scenes of the revolution of 1860, while the
+statuette of a Garibaldino, in his red shirt and all his heroic
+rudeness, was defiantly conspicuous on one of the tables.
+
+
+V.
+
+There was nothing else that pleased me as well in the palace, or in
+the grounds about it. These are all laid out in pleasant successions
+of grove, tangled wilderness, and pasture-land, and were thronged,
+the Saturday afternoon of our visit, with all ranks of people, who
+strolled through the beautiful walks and enjoyed themselves in the
+peculiarly peaceful Italian way. Valery says that the Villa Reale in
+the Bourbon time was closed, except for a single day in the year,
+to all but the nobles; and that on this occasion it was filled with
+pretty peasant women, who made it a condition of their marriage
+bargains that their husbands should bring them to the Villa Reale on
+St. Mary's Day. It is now free to all on every day of the year, and
+the grounds of the Palace Capo di Monte are opened every Saturday. I
+liked the pleasant way in which sylvan Nature and Art had made friends
+in these beautiful grounds, in which Nature had consented to overlook
+even the foolish vanity of the long aisles of lime, cut and trimmed in
+formal and fantastic shapes, according to the taste of the silly times
+of bagwigs and patches. On every side wild birds fluttered through
+these absurd trees, and in the thickets lurked innumerable pheasants,
+which occasionally issued forth and stalked in stately, fearless
+groups over the sunset-crimsoned lawns. There was a brown gamekeeper
+for nearly every head of game, wearing a pheasant's wing in his hat
+and carrying a short, heavy sword; and our driver told us, with an
+awful solemnity in his bated breath, that no one might kill this game
+but the king, under penalty of the galleys.
+
+
+VI.
+
+We went one evening to the opera at San Carlo. It is one of the three
+theatres--San Carlo of Naples, La Scala of Milan, and Fenice of
+Venice--on which the Italians pride themselves; and it is certainly
+very large and imposing. The interior has a _bel colpo d'occhio_,
+which is what many Italians chiefly value in morals, manners, and
+architecture; but after this comes great shabbiness of detail. The
+boxes, even of the first order, are paved with brick tiles, and the
+red velvet border of the box which the people see from the pit is not
+supported in style by the seats within, which are merely covered with
+red oil-cloth. The opera we saw was also second-rate, and was to the
+splendor of the scenic arrangements what the oil-cloth was to the
+velvet. The house was full of people, but the dress of the audience
+was not so fine as we had expected in Naples. The evening dress is not
+_de rigueur_ at Italian theatres, and people seemed to have come to
+San Carlo in any pleasant carelessness of costume.
+
+
+VII.
+
+The Italians are simple and natural folks, pleased through all
+their show of conventionality with little things, and as easy and
+unconscious as children in their ways. There happened to be a new
+caffè opened in Naples while we were there, and we had the pleasure
+of seeing all ranks of people affected by its magnificence. Artless
+throngs blocked the sidewalk day and night before its windows, gazing
+upon its mirrors, fountains, and frescos, and regarding the persons
+over their coffee within as beings lifted by sudden magic out of the
+common orbit of life and set dazzling in a higher sphere. All the
+waiters were uniformed and brass-buttoned to blinding effect, and the
+head waiter was a majestic creature in a long blue coat reaching to
+his feet, and armed with a mighty silver-headed staff. This gorgeous
+apparition did nothing but walk up and down, and occasionally advance
+toward the door, as if to disperse the crowds. At such times, however,
+before executing his purpose, he would glance round on the splendors
+they were admiring, and, as if smitten with a sense of the enormous
+cruelty he had meditated in thinking to deprive them of the sight,
+would falter and turn away, leaving his intent unfulfilled.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+A DAY IN POMPEII.
+
+I.
+
+On the second morning after our arrival in Naples, we took the seven
+o'clock train, which leaves the Nineteenth Century for the first cycle
+of the Christian Era, and, skirting the waters of the Neapolitan bay
+almost the whole length of our journey, reached the railway station
+of Pompeii in an hour. As we rode along by that bluest sea, we saw
+the fishing-boats go out, and the foamy waves (which it would be an
+insolent violence to call breakers) come in; we saw the mountains
+slope their tawny and golden manes caressingly downward to the waters,
+where the islands were dozing yet; and landward, on the left, we saw
+Vesuvius, with his brown mantle of ashes drawn close about his throat,
+reclining on the plain, and smoking a bland and thoughtful morning
+pipe, of which the silver fumes curled lightly, lightly upward in the
+sunrise.
+
+We dismounted at the station, walked a few rods eastward through a
+little cotton-field, and found ourselves at the door of Hotel Diomed,
+where we took breakfast for a number of sesterces which I am sure
+it would have made an ancient Pompeian stir in his urn to think of
+paying. But in Italy one learns the chief Italian virtue, patience,
+and we paid our account with the utmost good nature. There was
+compensation in store for us, and the guide whom we found at the gate
+leading up the little hill to Pompeii inclined the disturbed balance
+in favor of our happiness. He was a Roman, spoke Italian that Beatrice
+might have addressed to Dante, and was numbered Twenty-six. I suppose
+it is known that the present Italian Government forbids people to
+be pillaged in any way on its premises, and that the property of the
+State is no longer the traffic of custodians and their pitiless
+race. At Pompeii each person pays two francs for admission, and is
+rigorously forbidden by recurrent sign-boards to offer money to the
+guides. Ventisei (as we shall call him) himself pointed out one of
+these notices in English, and did his duty faithfully without asking
+or receiving fees in money. He was a soldier, like all the other
+guides, and was a most intelligent, obliging fellow, with a
+self-respect and dignity worthy of one of our own volunteer soldiers.
+
+Ventisei took us up the winding slope, and led us out of this living
+world through the Sea-gate of Pompeii back into the dead past--the
+past which, with all its sensuous beauty and grace, and all its
+intellectual power, I am not sorry to have dead, and for the most
+part, buried. Our feet had hardly trodden the lava flagging of the
+narrow streets when we came in sight of the laborers who were exhuming
+the inanimate city. They were few in number, not perhaps a score, and
+they worked tediously, with baskets to carry away the earth from the
+excavation, boys and girls carrying the baskets, and several athletic
+old women plying picks, while an overseer sat in a chair near by, and
+smoked, and directed their exertions.
+
+They dig down about eight or ten feet, uncovering the walls and
+pillars of the houses, and the mason, who is at hand, places little
+iron rivets in the stucco to prevent its fall where it is weak, while
+an artist attends to wash and clean the frescos as fast as they are
+exposed. The soil through which the excavation first passes is not
+of great depth; the ashes which fell damp with scalding rain, in the
+second eruption, are perhaps five feet thick; the rest is of that
+porous stone which descended in small fragments during the first
+eruption. A depth of at least two feet in this stone is always left
+untouched by the laborers till the day when the chief superintendent
+of the work comes out from Naples to see the last layers removed;
+and it is then that the beautiful mosaic pavements of the houses are
+uncovered, and the interesting and valuable objects are nearly always
+found.
+
+The wonder was, seeing how slowly the work proceeded, not that
+two thirds of Pompeii were yet buried, but that one third had been
+exhumed. We left these hopeless toilers, and went down-town into the
+Forum, stepping aside on the way to look into one of the Pompeian
+Courts of Common Pleas.
+
+
+II.
+
+Now Pompeii is, in truth, so full of marvel and surprise, that it
+would be unreasonable to express disappointment with Pompeii in
+fiction. And yet I cannot help it. An exuberant carelessness of phrase
+in most writers and talkers who describe it had led me to expect much
+more than it was possible to find there. In my Pompeii I confess that
+the houses had no roofs--in fact, the rafters which sustained the
+tiles being burnt, how could the roofs help falling in? But otherwise
+my Pompeii was a very complete affair: the walls all rose to their
+full height; doorways and arches were perfect; the columns were all
+unbroken and upright; putting roofs on my Pompeii, you might have
+lived in it very comfortably. The real Pompeii is different. It is
+seldom that any wall is unbroken; most columns are fragmentary; and
+though the ground-plans are always distinct, very few rooms in the
+city are perfect in form, and the whole is much more ruinous than I
+thought.
+
+But this ruin once granted, and the idle disappointment at its
+greatness overcome, there is endless material for study, instruction,
+and delight. It is the revelation of another life, and the utterance
+of the past is here more perfect than anywhere else in the world.
+Indeed, I think that the true friend of Pompeii should make it a
+matter of conscience, on entering the enchanted city, to cast out of
+his knowledge all the rubbish that has fallen into it from novels and
+travels, and to keep merely the facts of the town's luxurious life
+and agonizing death, with such incidents of the eruption as he can
+remember from the description of Pliny. These are the spells to
+which the sorcery yields, and with these in your thought you can
+rehabilitate the city until Ventisei seems to be a _valet de place_ of
+the first century, and yourselves a set of blond barbarians to whom he
+is showing off the splendors of one of the most brilliant towns of the
+empire of Titus. Those sad furrows in the pavement become vocal with
+the joyous rattle of chariot-wheels on a sudden, and you prudently
+step up on the narrow sidewalks and rub along by the little shops
+of wine, and grain, and oil, with which the thrifty voluptuaries of
+Pompeii flanked their street-doors. The counters of these shops run
+across their fronts, and are pierced with round holes on the top,
+through which you see dark depths of oil in the jars below, and not
+sullen lumps of ashes; those stately _amphoræ_ behind are full of
+wine, and in the corners are bags of wheat.
+
+"This house, with a shop on either side, whose is it, XXVI.?"
+
+"It is the house of the great Sallust, my masters. Would you like his
+autograph? I know one of his slaves who would sell it."
+
+You are a good deal stared at, naturally, as you pass by, for people
+in Pompeii have not much to do, and, besides, a Briton is not an
+every-day sight there, as he will be one of these centuries. The skins
+of wild beasts are little worn in Pompeii; and those bold-eyed Roman
+women think it rather odd that we should like to powder our shaggy
+heads with brick-dust. However, these are matters of taste. We, for
+our part, cannot repress a feeling of disgust at the loungers in the
+street, who, XXVI. tells us, are all going to soak themselves half the
+day in the baths yonder; for, if there is in Pompeii one thing more
+offensive than another to our savage sense of propriety, it is the
+personal cleanliness of the inhabitants. We little know what a change
+for the better will be wrought in these people with the lapse of time,
+and that they will yet come to wash themselves but once a year, as we
+do.
+
+(The reader may go on doing this sort of thing at some length for
+himself; and may imagine, if he pleases, a boastful conversation among
+the Pompeians at the baths, in which the barbarians hear how Agricola
+has broken the backbone of a rebellion in Britain; and in which all
+the speakers begin their observations with "Ho! my Lepidus!" and "Ha!
+my Diomed!" In the mean time we return to the present day, and step
+down the Street of Plenty along with Ventisei.)
+
+
+III.
+
+It is proper, after seeing the sites of some of the principal temples
+in Pompeii (such as those of Jupiter and Venus), to cross the fields
+that cover a great breadth of the buried city, and look into the
+amphitheatre, where, as every body knows, the lions had no stomach
+for Glaucus on the morning of the fatal eruption. The fields are now
+planted with cotton, and of course we thought those commonplaces about
+the wonder the Pompeians would feel could they come back to see that
+New-World plant growing above their buried homes. We might have told
+them, the day of our visit, that this cruel plant, so long watered
+with the tears of slaves, and fed with the blood of men, was now an
+exile from its native fields, where war was plowing with sword and
+shot the guilty land, and rooting up the subtlest fibres of the
+oppression in which cotton had grown king. And the ghosts of wicked
+old Pompeii, remembering the manifold sins that called the fires of
+hell to devour her, and thinking on this exiled plant, the latest
+witness of God's unforgetting justice, might well have shuddered,
+through all their shadow, to feel how terribly He destroys the enemies
+of Nature and man.
+
+But the only Pompeian presences which haunted our passage of the
+cotton-field were certain small
+
+  "Phantoms of delight,"
+
+with soft black eyes and graceful ways, who ran before us and plucked
+the bolls of the cotton and sold them to us. Embassies bearing red and
+white grapes were also sent out of the cottages to our excellencies;
+and there was some doubt of the currency of the coin which we gave
+these poor children in return.
+
+There are now but few peasants living on the land over the head of
+Pompeii, and the Government allows no sales of real estate to be made
+except to itself. The people who still dwell here can hardly be said
+to own their possessions, for they are merely allowed to cultivate
+the soil. A guard stationed night and day prevents them from making
+excavations, and they are severely restricted from entering the
+excavated quarters of the city alone.
+
+The cotton whitens over two thirds of Pompeii yet interred: happy the
+generation that lives to learn the wondrous secrets of that sepulchre!
+For, when you have once been at Pompeii, this phantasm of the past
+takes deeper hold on your imagination than any living city, and
+becomes and is the metropolis of your dreamland forever. O marvelous
+city! who shall reveal the cunning of your spell? Something not
+death, something not life--something that is the one when you turn
+to determine its essence as the other! What is it comes to me at this
+distance of that which I saw in Pompeii? The narrow and curving, but
+not crooked streets, with the blazing sun of that Neapolitan November
+falling into them, or clouding their wheel-worn lava with the black,
+black shadows of the many-tinted walls; the houses, and the gay
+columns of white, yellow, and red; the delicate pavements of mosaic;
+the skeletons of dusty cisterns and dead fountains; inanimate garden
+spaces with pygmy statues suited to their littleness; suites of fairy
+bed-chambers, painted with exquisite frescos; dining-halls with
+joyous scenes of hunt and banquet on their walls; the ruinous sites
+of temples; the melancholy emptiness of booths and shops and jolly
+drinking-houses; the lonesome tragic theatre, with a modern Pompeian
+drawing water from a well there; the baths with their roofs perfect
+yet, and the stucco bass-reliefs all but unharmed; around the whole,
+the city wall crowned with slender poplars; outside the gates, the
+long avenue of tombs, and the Appian Way stretching on to Stabiae;
+and, in the distance, Vesuvius, brown and bare, with his fiery breath
+scarce visible against the cloudless heaven;--these are the things
+that float before my fancy as I turn back to look at myself walking
+those enchanted streets, and to wonder if I could ever have been so
+blest.
+
+For there is nothing on the earth, or under it, like Pompeii.
+
+The amphitheatre, to which we came now, after our stroll across the
+cotton-fields, was small, like the vastest things in Pompeii, and had
+nothing of the stately magnificence of the Arena at Verona, nor any
+thing of the Roman Coliseum's melancholy and ruinous grandeur. But its
+littleness made it all the more comfortable and social, and, seated
+upon its benches under a cool awning, one could have almost chatted
+across the arena with one's friends; could have witnessed the
+spectacle on the sands without losing a movement of the quick
+gladiators, or an agony of the victim given to the beasts--which must
+have been very delightful to a Pompeian of companionable habits
+and fine feelings. It is quite impossible, however, that the bouts
+described by Bulwer as taking place all at the same time on the arena
+should really have done so: the combatants would have rolled and
+tumbled and trampled over each other an hundred times in the narrow
+space.
+
+Of all the voices with which it once rang the poor little amphitheatre
+has kept only an echo. But this echo is one of the most perfect ever
+heard: prompt clear, startling, it blew back the light chaff we threw
+to it with amazing vehemence, and almost made us doubt if it were not
+a direct human utterance. Yet how was Ventisei to know our names? And
+there was no one else to call them but ourselves. Our "_dolce duca_"
+gathered a nosegay from the crumbling ledges, and sat down in the cool
+of the once-cruel cells beneath, and put it prettily together for the
+ladies. When we had wearied ourselves with the echo he arose and led
+us back into Pompeii.
+
+
+IV.
+
+The plans of nearly all the houses in the city are alike: the
+entrance-room next the door; the parlor or drawing-room next that;
+then the _impluvium_, or unroofed space in the middle of the house,
+where the rains were caught and drained into the cistern, and where
+the household used to come to wash itself, primitively, as at a pump;
+the little garden, with its painted columns, behind the _impluvium_,
+and, at last, the dining-room. There are minute bed-chambers on either
+side, and, as I said, a shop at one side in front, for the sale of the
+master's grain, wine, and oil. The pavements of all the houses are of
+mosaic, which, in the better sort, is very delicate and beautiful, and
+is found sometimes perfectly uninjured. An exquisite pattern, often
+repeated, is a ground of tiny cubes of white marble with dots of black
+dropped regularly into it. Of course there were many picturesque and
+fanciful designs, of which the best have been removed to the Museum
+in Naples; but several good ones are still left, and (like that of the
+Wild Boar) give names to the houses in which they are found.
+
+But, after all, the great wonder, the glory, of these Pompeian houses
+is in their frescos. If I tried to give an idea of the luxury of color
+in Pompeii, the most gorgeous adjectives would be as poorly able to
+reproduce a vivid and glowing sense of those hues as the photography
+which now copies the drawing of the decorations; so I do not try.
+
+I know it is a cheap and feeble thought, and yet, let the reader
+please to consider: A workman nearly two thousand years laying upon
+the walls those soft lines that went to make up fauns and satyrs,
+nymphs and naiads, heroes and gods and goddesses; and getting weary
+and lying down to sleep, and dreaming of an eruption of the mountain;
+of the city buried under a fiery hail, and slumbering in its bed of
+ashes seventeen centuries; then of its being slowly exhumed, and,
+after another lapse of years, of some one coming to gather the shadow
+of that dreamer's work upon a plate of glass, that he might infinitely
+reproduce it and sell it to tourists at from five francs to fifty
+centimes a copy--I say, consider such a dream, dreamed in the hot
+heart of the day, after certain cups of Vesuvian wine! What a piece of
+_Katzenjämmer_ (I can use no milder term) would that workman think it
+when he woke again! Alas! what is history and the progress of the arts
+and sciences but one long _Katzenjämmer_!
+
+Photography cannot give, any more than I, the colors of the frescos,
+but it can do the drawing better, and, I suspect, the spirit also. I
+used the word workman, and not artist, in speaking of the decoration
+of the walls, for in most cases the painter was only an artisan, and
+did his work probably by the yard, as the artisan who paints walls and
+ceilings in Italy does at this day. But the old workman did his work
+much more skillfully and tastefully than the modern--threw on expanses
+of mellow color, delicately paneled off the places for the scenes, and
+penciled in the figures and draperies (there are usually more of the
+one than the other) with a deft hand. Of course, the houses of the
+rich were adorned by men of talent; but it is surprising to see the
+community of thought and feeling in all this work, whether it be from
+cunninger or clumsier hands. The subjects are nearly always chosen
+from the fables of the gods, and they are in illustration of the
+poets, Homer and the rest. To suit that soft, luxurious life which
+people led in Pompeii, the themes are commonly amorous, and sometimes
+not too chaste; there is much of Bacchus and Ariadne, much of Venus
+and Adonis, and Diana bathes a good deal with her nymphs,--not to
+mention frequent representations of the toilet of that beautiful
+monster which the lascivious art of the time loved to depict. One of
+the most pleasing of all the scenes is that in one of the houses, of
+the Judgment of Paris, in which the shepherd sits upon a bank in
+an attitude of ineffable and flattered importance, with one leg
+carelessly crossing the other, and both hands resting lightly on his
+shepherd's crook, while the goddesses before him await his sentence.
+Naturally the painter has done his best for the victress in this
+rivalry, and you see
+
+  "Idalian Aphrodite beautiful,"
+
+as she should be, but with a warm and piquant spice of girlish
+resentment in her attitude, that Paris should pause for an instant,
+which is altogether delicious.
+
+  "And I beheld great Here's angry eyes."
+
+Awful eyes! How did the painter make them? The wonder of all these
+pagan frescos is the mystery of the eyes--still, beautiful, unhuman.
+You cannot believe that it is wrong for those tranquil-eyed men and
+women to do evil, they look so calm and so unconscious in it all; and
+in the presence of the celestials, as they bend upon you those eternal
+orbs, in whose regard you are but a part of space, you feel that here
+art has achieved the unearthly. I know of no words in literature which
+give a _sense_ (nothing gives the idea) of the _stare_ of these gods,
+except that magnificent line of Kingsley's, describing the advance
+over the sea toward Andromeda of the oblivious and unsympathizing
+Nereids. They floated slowly up, and their eyes
+
+  "Stared on her, silent and still, like the eyes in the house
+  of the idols."
+
+The colors of this fresco of the Judgment of Paris are still so fresh
+and bright, that it photographs very well, but there are other frescos
+wherein there is more visible perfection of line, but in which the
+colors are so dim that they can only be reproduced by drawings. One of
+these is the Wounded Adonis cared for by Venus and the Loves; in which
+the story is treated with a playful pathos wonderfully charming.
+The fair boy leans in the languor of his hurt toward Venus, who sits
+utterly disconsolate beside him, while the Cupids busy themselves
+with such slight surgical offices as Cupids may render: one prepares a
+linen bandage for the wound, another wraps it round the leg of Adonis,
+another supports one of his heavy arms, another finds his own emotions
+too much for him and pauses to weep. It is a pity that the colors of
+this beautiful fresco are grown so dim, and a greater pity that most
+of the other frescos in Pompeii must share its fate, and fade away.
+The hues are vivid when the walls are first uncovered, and the ashes
+washed from the pictures, but then the malice of the elements begins
+anew, and rain and sun draw the life out of tints which the volcano
+failed to obliterate. In nearly all cases they could be preserved
+by throwing a roof above the walls, and it is a wonder that the
+Government does not take this slight trouble to save them.
+
+Among the frescos which told no story but their own, we were most
+pleased with one in a delicately painted little bed-chamber. This
+represented an alarmed and furtive man, whom we at once pronounced The
+Belated Husband, opening a door with a night-latch. Nothing could have
+been better than this miserable wretch's cowardly haste and cautious
+noiselessness in applying his key; apprehension sat upon his brow,
+confusion dwelt in his guilty eye. He had been out till two o'clock
+in the morning, electioneering for Pansa, the friend of the people
+("Pansa, and Roman gladiators," "Pansa, and Christians to the Beasts,"
+was the platform), and he had left his _placens uxor_ at home alone
+with the children, and now within this door that _placens uxor_
+awaited him!
+
+
+V.
+
+You have read, no doubt, of their discovering, a year or two since,
+in making an excavation in a Pompeian street, the molds of four human
+bodies, three women and a man, who fell down, blind and writhing, in
+the storm of fire eighteen hundred years ago; whose shape the settling
+and hardening ashes took; whose flesh wasted away, and whose bones lay
+there in the hollow of the matrix till the cunning of this time found
+them, and, pouring liquid plaster round the skeletons, clothed them
+with human form again, and drew them forth into the world once more.
+There are many things in Pompeii which bring back the gay life of the
+city, but nothing which so vividly reports the terrible manner of her
+death as these effigies of the creatures that actually shared it. The
+man in the last struggle has thrown himself upon his back and taken
+his doom sturdily--there is a sublime calm in his rigid figure. The
+women lie upon their faces, their limbs tossed and distorted, their
+drapery tangled and heaped about them, and in every fibre you see how
+hard they died. One presses her face into her handkerchief to draw
+one last breath unmixed with scalding steam; another's arms are wildly
+thrown abroad to clutch at help; another's hand is appealingly raised,
+and on her slight fingers you see the silver hoops with which her poor
+dead vanity adorned them.
+
+The guide takes you aside from the street into the house where they
+lie, and a dreadful shadow drops upon your heart as you enter their
+presence. Without, the hell-storm seems to fall again, and the whole
+sunny plain to be darkened with its ruin, and the city to send up the
+tumult of her despair.
+
+What is there left in Pompeii to speak of after this? The long street
+of tombs outside the walls? Those that died before the city's burial
+seem to have scarcely a claim to the solemnity of death.
+
+Shall we go see Diomed's Villa, and walk through the freedman's long
+underground vaults, where his friends thought to be safe, and were
+smothered in heaps? The garden-ground grows wild among its broken
+columns with weeds and poplar saplings; in one of the corridors they
+sell photographs, on which, if you please, Ventisei has his bottle,
+or drink-money. So we escape from the doom of the calamity, and so, at
+last, the severely forbidden _buonamano_ is paid. A dog may die many
+deaths besides choking with butter.
+
+We return slowly through the city, where we have spent the whole day,
+from nine till four o'clock. We linger on the way, imploring Ventisei
+if there is not something to be seen in this or that house; we make
+our weariness an excuse for sitting down, and cannot rend ourselves
+from the bliss of being in Pompeii.
+
+At last we leave its gates, and swear each other to come again many
+times while in Naples, and never go again.
+
+Perhaps it was as well. You cannot repeat great happiness.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM.
+
+I.
+
+The road from Naples to Herculaneum is, in fact, one long street; it
+hardly ceases to be city in Naples till it is town at Portici, and in
+the interval it is suburb, running between palatial lines of villas,
+which all have their names ambitiously painted over their doors. Great
+part of the distance this street is bordered by the bay, and, as far
+as this is the case, it is picturesque, as every thing is belonging to
+marine life in Italy. Sea-faring people go lounging up and down among
+the fishermen's boats drawn up on the shore, and among the fishermen's
+wives making nets, while the fishermen's children play and clamber
+everywhere, and over all flap and flutter the clothes hung on poles
+to dry. In this part of the street there are, of course, oysters, and
+grapes, and oranges, and cactus-pulps, and cutlery, and iced drinks
+to sell at various booths; and Commerce is exceedingly dramatic and
+boisterous over the bargains she offers; and equally, of course,
+murderous drinking shops lurk at intervals along the pavement, and
+lure into their recesses mariners of foreign birth, briefly ashore
+from their ships. The New York Coffee House is there to attract my
+maritime fellow-countrymen, and I know that if I look into that place
+of refreshment I shall see their honest, foolish faces flushed with
+drink, and with the excitement of buying the least they can for the
+most money. Poor souls! they shall drink that pleasant morning away
+in the society of Antonino the best of Neapolitans, and at midnight,
+emptied of every soldo, shall arise, wrung with a fearful suspicion
+of treachery, and wander away under Antonino's guidance to seek the
+protection of the Consul; or, taking the law into their own hands,
+shall proceed to clean out, _more Americano_, the New York Coffee
+House, when Antonino shall develop into one of the landlords, and
+deal them the most artistic stab in Naples: handsome, worthy Antonino;
+tender-eyed, subtle, pitiless!
+
+
+II.
+
+Where the road to Herculaneum leaves the bay and its seafaring life,
+it enters, between the walls of lofty, fly-blown houses, a world of
+maccaroni haunted by foul odors, beggars, poultry, and insects. There
+were few people to be seen on the street, but through the open doors
+of the lofty fly-blown houses we saw floury legions at work making
+maccaroni; grinding maccaroni, rolling it, cutting it, hanging it
+in mighty skeins to dry, and gathering it when dried, and putting it
+away. By the frequency of the wine-shops we judged that the legions
+were a thirsty host, and by the number of the barber-surgeons' shops,
+that they were a plethoric and too full-blooded host. The latter shops
+were in the proportion of one to five of the former; and the artist
+who had painted their signs had indulged his fancy in wild excesses of
+phlebotomy. We had found that, as we came south from Venice, science
+grew more and more sanguinary in Italy, and more and more disposed to
+let blood. At Ferrara, even, the propensity began to be manifest on
+the barbers' signs, which displayed the device of an arm lanced at
+the elbow, and jetting the blood by a neatly described curve into a
+tumbler. Further south the same arm was seen to bleed at the wrist
+also; and at Naples an exhaustive treatment of the subject appeared,
+the favorite study of the artist being to represent a nude figure
+reclining in a genteel attitude on a bank of pleasant greensward, and
+bleeding from the elbows, wrists, hands, ankles, and feet.
+
+
+III.
+
+In Naples everywhere one is surprised by the great number of English
+names which appear on business houses, but it was entirely bewildering
+to read a bill affixed to the gate of one of the villas on this road:
+"This Desirable Property for Sale." I should scarcely have cared to
+buy that desirable property, though the neighborhood seemed to be a
+favorite summer resort, and there were villas, as I said, nearly the
+whole way to Portici. Those which stood with their gardens toward the
+bay would have been tolerable, no doubt, if they could have kept their
+windows shut to the vile street before their doors; but the houses
+opposite could have had no escape from its stench and noisomeness. It
+was absolutely the filthiest street I have seen anywhere outside of
+New York, excepting only that little street which, in Herculaneum,
+leads from the theatre to the House of Argo.
+
+This pleasant avenue has a stream of turbid water in its centre,
+bordered by begging children, and is either fouler or cleaner for the
+water, but I shall never know which. It is at a depth of some fifty or
+sixty feet below the elevation on which the present city of Portici is
+built, and is part of the excavation made long ago to reach the plain
+on which Herculaneum stands, buried under its half-score of successive
+layers of lava, and ashes, and Portici. We had the aid of all the
+virtuous poverty and leisure of the modern town--there was a vast
+deal of both, we found--in our search for the staircase by which you
+descend to the classic plain, and it proved a discovery involving the
+outlay of all the copper coin about us, while the sight of the famous
+theatre of Herculaneum was much more expensive than it would have been
+had we come there in the old time to see a play of Plautus or Terence.
+
+As for the theatre, "the large and highly ornamented theatre" of which
+I read, only a little while ago, in an encyclopedia, we found it, by
+the light of our candles, a series of gloomy hollows, of the general
+complexion of coal-bins and potato-cellars. It was never perfectly
+dug out of the lava, and, as is known, it was filled up in the last
+century, together with other excavations, when they endangered the
+foundations of worthless Portici overhead. (I am amused to find myself
+so hot upon the poor property-holders of Portici. I suppose I should
+not myself, even for the cause of antiquity and the knowledge of
+classic civilization, like to have my house tumbled about my ears.)
+But though it was impossible in the theatre of Herculaneum to gain
+any idea of its size or richness, I remembered there the magnificent
+bronzes which had been found in it, and did a hasty reverence to
+the place. Indeed, it is amazing, when one sees how small a part of
+Herculaneum has been uncovered, to consider the number of fine works
+of art in the Museo Borbonico which were taken thence, and which argue
+a much richer and more refined community than that of Pompeii. A third
+of the latter city has now been restored to the light of day; but
+though it has yielded abundance of all the things that illustrate the
+domestic and public life, and the luxury and depravity of those old
+times, and has given the once secret rooms of the museum their worst
+attraction, it still falls far below Herculaneum in the value of its
+contributions to the treasures of classic art, except only in the
+variety and beauty of its exquisite frescos.
+
+The effect of this fact is to stimulate the imagination of the visitor
+to that degree that nothing short of the instant destruction of
+Portici and the excavation of all Herculaneum will satisfy him. If the
+opening of one theatre, and the uncovering of a basilica and two
+or three houses, have given such richness to us, what delight and
+knowledge would not the removal of these obdurate hills of ashes and
+lava bestow!
+
+Emerging from the coal-bins and potato-cellars, the visitor
+extinguishes his candle with a pathetic sigh, profusely rewards the
+custodian (whom he connects in some mysterious way with the ancient
+population of the injured city about him), and, thoughtfully removing
+the tallow from his fingers, follows the course of the vile stream
+already sung, and soon arrives at the gate opening into the exhumed
+quarter of Herculaneum. And there he finds a custodian who enters
+perfectly into his feelings; a custodian who has once been a guide in
+Pompeii, but now despises that wretched town, and would not be
+guide there for any money since he has known the superior life of
+Herculaneum; who, in fine, feels toward Pompeii as a Bostonian feels
+toward New York. Yet the reader would be wrong to form the idea that
+there is bitterness in the disdain of this custodian. On the contrary,
+he is one of the best-natured men in the world. He is a mighty mass of
+pinguid bronze, with a fat lisp, and a broad, sunflower smile, and
+he lectures us with a vast and genial breadth of manner on the
+ruins, contradicting all our guesses at things with a sweet "Perdoni,
+signori! ma----." At the end, we find that he has some medallions of
+lava to sell: there is Victor Emanuel, or, if we are of the _partito
+d'azione_, there is Garibaldi; both warm yet from the crater of
+Vesuvius, and of the same material which destroyed Herculaneum. We
+decline to buy and the custodian makes the national shrug and grimace
+(signifying that we are masters of the situation, and that he washes
+his hands of the consequence of our folly) on the largest scale that
+we have ever seen: his mighty hands are rigidly thrust forth, his
+great lip protruded, his enormous head thrown back to bring his
+face on a level with his chin. The effect is tremendous, but we
+nevertheless feel that he loves us the same.
+
+
+IV.
+
+The afternoon on which we visited Herculaneum was in melancholy
+contrast to the day we spent in Pompeii. The lingering summer had at
+last saddened into something like autumnal gloom, and that blue, blue
+sky of Naples was overcast. So, this second draught of the spirit
+of the past had not only something of the insipidity of custom, but
+brought rather a depression than a lightness to our hearts. There was
+so little of Herculaneum: only a few hundred yards square are exhumed,
+and we counted the houses easily on the fingers of one hand, leaving
+the thumb to stand for the few rods of street that, with its flagging
+of lava and narrow border of foot-walks, lay between; and though the
+custodian, apparently moved at our dejection, said that the excavation
+was to be resumed the very next week, the assurance did little to
+restore our cheerfulness. Indeed, I fancy that these old cities must
+needs be seen in the sunshine by those who would feel what gay lives
+they once led; by dimmer light they are very sullen spectres, and
+their doom still seems to brood upon them. I know that even Pompeii
+could not have been joyous that sunless afternoon, for what there was
+to see of mournful Herculaneum was as brilliant with colors as any
+thing in the former city. Nay, I believe that the tints of the frescos
+and painted columns were even brighter, and that the walls of the
+houses were far less ruinous than those of Pompeii. But no house was
+wholly freed from lava, and the little street ran at the rear of the
+buildings which were supposed to front on some grander avenue not yet
+exhumed. It led down, as the custodian pretended, to a wharf, and he
+showed an iron ring in the wall of the House of Argo, standing at the
+end of the street, to which, he said, his former fellow-citizens used
+to fasten their boats, though it was all dry enough there now.
+
+There is evidence in Herculaneum of much more ambitious domestic
+architecture than seems to have been known in Pompeii. The ground-plan
+of the houses in the two cities is alike; but in the former there was
+often a second story, as was proven by the charred ends of beams still
+protruding from the walls, while in the latter there is only one house
+which is thought to have aspired to a second floor. The House of Argo
+is also much larger than any in Pompeii, and its appointments were
+more magnificent. Indeed, we imagined that in this more purely
+Greek town we felt an atmosphere of better taste in every thing than
+prevailed in the fashionable Roman watering-place, though this, too,
+was a summer resort of the "best society" of the empire. The mosaic
+pavements were exquisite, and the little bed-chambers dainty and
+delicious in their decorations. The lavish delight in color found
+expression in the vividest hues upon the walls, and not only were the
+columns of the garden painted, but the foliage of the capitals was
+variously tinted. The garden of the House of Argo was vaster than any
+of the classic world which we had yet seen, and was superb with a
+long colonnade of unbroken columns. Between these and the walls of
+the houses was a pretty pathway of mosaic, and in the midst once stood
+marble tables, under which the workmen exhuming the city found certain
+crouching skeletons. At one end was the dining-room, of course, and
+painted on the wall was a lady with a parasol.
+
+I thought all Herculaneum sad enough, but the profusion of flowers
+growing wild in this garden gave it a yet more tender and pathetic
+charm. Here--where so long ago the flowers had bloomed, and perished
+in the terrible blossoming of the mountain that sent up its fires
+in the awful similitude of Nature's harmless and lovely forms, and
+showered its destroying petals all abroad--was it not tragic to find
+again the soft tints, the graceful shapes, the sweet perfumes of the
+earth's immortal life? Of them that planted and tended and plucked and
+bore in their bosoms and twined in their hair these fragile children
+of the summer, what witness in the world? Only the crouching skeletons
+under the tables. Alas and alas!
+
+
+V.
+
+The skeletons went with us throughout Herculaneum, and descended
+into the cell, all green with damp, under the basilica, and lay down,
+fettered and manacled in the place of those found there beside the big
+bronze kettle in which the prisoners used to cook their dinners. How
+ghastly the thought of it was! If we had really seen this kettle and
+the skeletons there--as we did not--we could not have suffered more
+than we did. They took all the life out of the House of Perseus, and
+the beauty from his pretty little domestic temple to the Penates, and
+this was all there was left in Herculaneum to see.
+
+"Is there nothing else?" we demand of the custodian.
+
+"Signori, this is all."
+
+"It is mighty little."
+
+"Perdoni, signori! ma----."
+
+"Well," we say sourly to each other, glancing round at the walls of
+the pit, on the bottom of which the bit of city stands, "it is a good
+thing to know that Herculaneum amounts to nothing."
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES.
+
+I.
+
+I have no doubt
+
+  "Calm Capri waits,"
+
+where we left it, in the Gulf of Salerno, for any traveller who may
+choose to pay it a visit; but at the time we were there we felt that
+it was on exhibition for that day only, and would, when we departed,
+disappear in its sapphire sea, and be no more; just as Niagara ceases
+to play as soon as your back is turned, and Venice goes out like a
+pyrotechnic display, and all marvelously grand and lovely things make
+haste to prove their impermanence.
+
+We delayed some days in Naples in hopes of fine weather, and at last
+chose a morning that was warm and cloudy at nine o'clock, and burst
+into frequent passions of rain before we reached Sorrento at noon
+The first half of the journey was made by rail, and brought us to
+Castellamare, whence we took carriage for Sorrento, and oranges, and
+rapture,--winding along the steep shore of the sea, and under the
+brows of wooded hills that rose high above us into the misty weather,
+and caught here and there the sunshine on their tops. In that heavenly
+climate no day can long be out of humor, and at Sorrento we found
+ours very pleasant, and rode delightedly through the devious streets,
+looking up to the terraced orange-groves on one hand, and down to the
+terraced orange-groves on the other, until at a certain turning of the
+way we encountered Antonino Occhio d'Argento, whom fate had appointed
+to be our boatman to Capri. We had never heard of Antonino before, and
+indeed had intended to take a boat from one of the hotels; but when
+this corsair offered us his services, there was that guile in his
+handsome face, that cunning in his dark eyes, that heart could not
+resist, and we halted our carriage and took him at once.
+
+He kept his boat in one of those caverns which honey-comb the cliff
+under Sorrento, and afford a natural and admirable shelter for such
+small craft as may be dragged up out of reach of the waves, and here I
+bargained with him before finally agreeing to go with him to Capri.
+In Italy it is customary for a public carrier when engaged to give
+his employer as a pledge the sum agreed upon for the service, which is
+returned with the amount due him, at the end, if the service has been
+satisfactory; and I demanded of Antonino this _caparra_, as it is
+called. "What _caparra_?" said he, lifting the lid of his wicked eye
+with his forefinger, "this is the best _caparra_," meaning a face
+as honest and trustworthy as the devil's. The stroke confirmed my
+subjection to Antonino, and I took his boat without further parley,
+declining even to feel the muscle of his boatmen's arms, which he
+exposed to my touch in evidence that they were strong enough to row us
+swiftly to Capri. The men were but two in number, but they tossed the
+boat lightly into the surf, and then lifted me aboard, and rowed to
+the little pier from which the ladies and T. got in.
+
+The sun shone, the water danced and sparkled, and presently we raised
+our sail, and took the gale that blew for Capri--an oblong height
+rising ten miles beyond out of the heart of the azure gulf. On the way
+thither there was little interest but that of natural beauty in the
+bold, picturesque coast we skirted for some distance; though on
+one mighty rock there were the ruins of a seaward-looking Temple of
+Hercules, with arches of the unmistakable Roman masonry, below
+which the receding waves rushed and poured over a jetting ledge in a
+thunderous cataract.
+
+Antonino did his best to entertain us, and lectured us unceasingly
+upon his virtue and his wisdom, dwelling greatly on the propriety and
+good policy of always speaking the truth. This spectacle of veracity
+became intolerable after a while, and I was goaded to say: "Oh then,
+if you never tell lies, you expect to go to Paradise." "Not at all,"
+answered Antonino compassionately, "for I have sinned much. But the
+lie doesn't go ahead" (_non va avanti_), added this Machiavelli of
+boatmen; yet I think he was mistaken, for he deceived us with perfect
+ease and admirable success. All along, he had pretended that we could
+see Capri, visit the Blue Grotto, and return that day; but as we drew
+near the island, painful doubts began to trouble him, and he feared
+the sea would be too rough for the Grotto part of the affair. "But
+there will be an old man," he said, with a subtile air of prophecy,
+"waiting for us on the beach. This old man is one of the Government
+guides to the Grotto, and he will say whether it is to be seen
+to-day."
+
+And certainly there was the old man on the beach--a short patriarch,
+with his baldness covered by a kind of bloated woolen sock--a
+blear-eyed sage, and a bare-legged. He waded through the surf toward
+the boat, and when we asked him whether the Grotto was to be seen, he
+paused knee-deep in the water, (at a secret signal from Antonino, as
+I shall always believe,) put on a face of tender solemnity, threw back
+his head a little, brought his hand to his cheek, expanded it, and
+said, "No; to-day, no! To-morrow, yes!" Antonino leaped joyously
+ashore, and delivered us over to the old man, to be guided to the
+Hotel di Londra, while he drew his boat upon the land. He had reason
+to be contented, for this artifice of the patriarch of Capri relieved
+him from the necessity of verifying to me the existence of an officer
+of extraordinary powers in the nature of a consul, who, he said, would
+not permit boats to leave Capri for the main-land after five o'clock
+in the evening.
+
+When it was decided that we should remain on the island till the
+morrow, we found so much time on our hands, after bargaining for
+our lodging at the Hotel di Londra, that we resolved to ascend the
+mountain to the ruins of the palaces of Tiberius, and to this end we
+contracted for the services of certain of the muletresses that had
+gathered about the inn-gate, clamorously offering their beasts. The
+muletresses chosen were a matron of mature years and of a portly habit
+of body; her daughter, a mere child; and her niece, a very pretty girl
+of eighteen, with a voice soft and sweet as a bird's. They placed
+the ladies, one on each mule, and then, while the mother and daughter
+devoted themselves to the hind-quarters of the foremost animal,
+the lovely niece brought up the rear of the second beast, and the
+patriarch went before, and T. and I trudged behind. So the cavalcade
+ascended; first, from the terrace of the hotel overlooking the bit
+of shipping village on the beach, and next from the town of Capri,
+clinging to the hill-sides, midway between sea and sky, until at last
+it reached the heights on which the ruins stand. Our way was through
+narrow lanes, bordered by garden walls; then through narrow streets
+bordered by dirty houses; and then again by gardens, but now of a
+better sort than the first, and belonging to handsome villas.
+
+On the road our pretty muletress gossiped cheerfully, and our
+patriarch gloomily, and between the two we accumulated a store of
+information concerning the present inhabitants of Capri, which, I am
+sorry to say, has now for the most part failed me. I remember that
+they said most of the land-owners at Capri were Neapolitans, and that
+these villas were their country-houses; though they pointed out one
+of the stateliest of the edifices as belonging to a certain English
+physician who had come to visit Capri for a few days, and had now been
+living on the island twenty years, having married (said the
+muletress) the prettiest and poorest girl in the town, from this
+romance--something like which the muletress seemed to think might
+well happen concerning herself--we passed lightly to speak of kindred
+things, the muletress responding gayly between the blows she bestowed
+upon her beast. The accent of these Capriotes has something of German
+harshness and heaviness: they say _non bosso_ instead of _non posso_,
+and _monto_ instead of _mondo_, and interchange the _t_ and _d_ a good
+deal; and they use for father the Latin _pater_, instead of _padre_.
+But this girl's voice, as I said, was very musical, and the island's
+accent was sweet upon her tongue.
+
+_I_.--What is your name?
+
+_She_.--Caterina, little sir (signorin).
+
+_I_.--And how old are you, Caterina?
+
+_She_.--Eighteen, little sir.
+
+_I_.--And you are betrothed?
+
+She feigns not to understand; but the patriarch, who has dropped
+behind to listen to our discourse, explains,--"He asks if you are in
+love."
+
+_She_.--Ah, no! little sir, not yet.
+
+_I_.--No? A little late, it seems to me. I think there must be some
+good-looking youngster who pleases you--no?
+
+_She_.--Ah, no! one must work, one cannot think of marrying. We are
+four sisters, and we have only the _buonamano_ from hiring these
+mules, and we must spin and cook.
+
+_The Patriarch_.--Don't believe her; she has two lovers.
+
+_She._--Ah, no! It isn't true. He tells a fib--he!
+
+But, nevertheless, she seemed to love to be accused of lovers,--such
+is the guile of the female heart in Capri,--and laughed over the
+patriarch's wickedness. She confided that she ate maccaroni once
+a day, and she talked constantly of eating it just as the Northern
+Italians always talk of _polenta._ She was a true daughter of the
+isle, and had never left it but once in her life, when she went to
+Naples. "Naples was beautiful, yes; but one always loves one's own
+country the best." She was very attentive and good, but at the end was
+rapacious of more and more _buonamano_. "Have patience with her, sir,"
+said the blameless Antonino, who witnessed her greediness; "they do
+not understand certain matters here, poor little things!"
+
+As for the patriarch, he was full of learning relative to himself and
+to Capri; and told me with much elaboration that the islanders lived
+chiefly by fishing, and gained something also by their vineyards. But
+they were greatly oppressed by taxes, and the strict enforcement
+of the conscriptions, and they had little love for the Italian
+Government, and wished the Bourbons back again. The Piedmontese,
+indeed, misgoverned them horribly. There was the Blue Grotto, for
+example: formerly travellers paid the guides five, six, ten francs for
+viewing it; but now the Piedmontese had made a tariff, and the poor
+guides could only exact a franc from each person. Things were in a
+ruinous condition.
+
+By this we had arrived at a little inn on the top of the mountain,
+very near the ruins of the palaces, "Here," said the patriarch, "it is
+customary for strangers to drink a bottle of the wine of Tiberius." We
+obediently entered the hostelry, and the landlord--a white-toothed,
+brown-faced, good-humored peasant--gallantly ran forward and presented
+the ladies with bouquets of roses. We thought it a pretty and graceful
+act, but found later that it was to be paid for, like all pretty and
+graceful things in Italy; for when we came to settle for the wine, and
+the landlord wanted more than justice, he urged that he had presented
+the ladies with flowers,--yet he equally gave me his benediction when
+I refused to pay for his politeness.
+
+"Now here," again said the patriarch in a solemn whisper, "you can see
+the Tarantella danced for two francs; whereas down at your inn, if you
+hire the dancers through your landlord, it will cost you five or six
+francs." The difference was tempting, and decided us in favor of an
+immediate Tarantella. The muletresses left their beasts to browse
+about the door of the inn and came into the little public room, where
+were already the wife and sister of the landlord, and took their
+places _vis-à-vis_, while the landlord seized his tambourine and
+beat from it a wild and lively measure. The women were barefooted
+and hoopless, and they gave us the Tarantella with all the beauty of
+natural movement and free floating drapery, and with all that splendid
+grace of pose which animates the antique statues and pictures of
+dancers. They swayed themselves in time with the music; then, filled
+with its passionate impulse, advanced and retreated and whirled
+away;--snapping their fingers above their heads, and looking over
+their shoulders with a gay and a laughing challenge to each other,
+they drifted through the ever-repeated figures of flight and wooing,
+and wove for us pictures of delight that remained upon the brain like
+the effect of long-pondered vivid colors, and still return to illumine
+and complete any representation of that indescribable dance. Heaven
+knows what peril there might have been in the beauty and grace of the
+pretty muletress but for the spectacle of her fat aunt, who, I must
+confess, could only burlesque some of her niece's airiest movements,
+and whose hard-bought buoyancy was at once pathetic and laughable. She
+earned her share of the spoils certainly, and she seemed glad when the
+dance was over, and went contentedly back to her mule.
+
+The patriarch had early retired from the scene as from a vanity with
+which he was too familiar for enjoyment, and I found him, when the
+Tarantella was done, leaning on the curb of the precipitous rock
+immediately behind the inn, over which the Capriotes say Tiberius used
+to cast the victims of his pleasures after he was sated with them.
+These have taken their place in the insular imagination as Christian
+martyrs, though it is probable that the poor souls were any thing but
+Nazarenes. It took a stone thrown from the brink of the rock twenty
+seconds to send back a response from the water below, and the depth
+was too dizzying to look into. So we looked instead toward Amalfi,
+across the Gulf of Salerno, and toward Naples, across her bay. On
+every hand the sea was flushed with sunset, and an unspeakable calm
+dwelt upon it, while the heights rising from it softened and softened
+in the distance, and withdrew themselves into dreams of ghostly
+solitude and phantom city. His late majesty the Emperor Tiberius is
+well known to have been a man of sentiment, and he may often have
+sought this spot to enjoy the evening hour. It was convenient to his
+palace, and he could here give a fillip to his jaded sensibilities
+by popping a boon companion over the cliff, and thus enjoy the fine
+poetic contrast which his perturbed and horrible spirit afforded to
+that scene of innocence and peace. Later he may have come hither also,
+when lust failed, when all the lewd plays and devices of his fancy
+palled upon his senses, when sin had grown insipid and even murder
+ceased to amuse, and his majesty uttered his despair to the Senate in
+that terrible letter: "What to write to you, or how to write, I
+know not; and what not to write at this time, may all the gods and
+goddesses torment me wore than I daily feel that I suffer if I do
+know."
+
+The poor patriarch was also a rascal in his small way, and he
+presently turned to me with a countenance full of cowardly trouble and
+base remorse, "I pray you, little sir, not to tell the landlord
+below there that you have seen the Tarantella danced here; for he has
+daughters and friends to dance it for strangers, and gets a deal of
+money by it. So, if he asks you to see it, do me the pleasure to say,
+lest he should take on (_pigliarsi_) with me about it: 'Thanks, but we
+saw the Tarantella at Pompeii!'" It was the last place in Italy where
+we were likely to have seen the Tarantella; but these simple people
+are improvident in lying, as in every thing else.
+
+The patriarch had a curious spice of malice in him, which prompted
+him to speak evil of all, and to as many as he dared. After we had
+inspected the ruins of the emperor's villa, a clownish imbecile of
+a woman, professing to be the wife of the peasant who had made the
+excavations, came forth out of a cleft in the rock and received
+tribute of us--why, I do not know. The patriarch abetted the
+extortion, but Parthianly remarked, as we turned away, "Her husband
+ought to be here; but this is a _festa_, and he is drinking and gaming
+in the village," while the woman protested that he was sick at home.
+There was also a hermit living in great publicity among the ruins, and
+the patriarch did not spare him a sneering comment. [This hermit I
+have heard was not brought up to the profession of anchorite, but was
+formerly a shoemaker, and according to his own confession abandoned
+his trade because he could better indulge a lethargic habit in the
+character of religious recluse.] He had even a bad word for Tiberius,
+and reproached the emperor for throwing people over the cliff, though
+I think it a sport in which he would himself have liked to join. The
+only human creatures with whom he seemed to be in sympathy were the
+brigands of the main-land, of whom he spoke poetically as exiles and
+fugitives.
+
+As for the palace of Tiberius, which we had come go far and so
+toilsomely to see, it must be confessed there was very little left
+of it. When that well-meaning but mistaken prince died, the Senate
+demolished his pleasure-houses at Capri, and left only those
+fragments of the beautiful brick masonry which yet remain, clinging
+indestructible to the rocks, and strewing the ground with rubbish. The
+recent excavations have discovered nothing besides the uninteresting
+foundations of the building, except a subterranean avenue leading
+from one part of the palace to another: this is walled with delicate
+brickwork, and exquisitely paved with white marble mosaic; and this
+was all that witnessed of the splendor of the wicked emperor. Nature,
+the all-forgetting, all-forgiving, that takes the red battle-field
+into her arms and hides it with blossom and harvest, could not
+remember his iniquity, greater than the multitudinous murder of war.
+The sea, which the despot's lust and fear had made so lonely, slept
+with the white sails of boats secure upon its breast; the little bays
+and inlets, the rocky clefts and woody dells, had forgotten their
+desecration; and the gathering twilight, the sweetness of the
+garden-bordered pathway, and the serenity of the lonely landscape,
+helped us to doubt history.
+
+We slowly returned to the inn by the road we had ascended, noting
+again the mansion of the surprising Englishman who had come to Capri
+for three months and had remained thirty years; passed through the
+darkness of the village,--dropped here and there with the vivid red of
+a lamp,--and so reached the inn at last, where we found the landlord
+ready to have the Tarantella danced for us. We framed a discreeter
+fiction than that prepared for us by the patriarch, and went in to
+dinner, where there were two Danish gentlemen in dispute with as many
+rogues of boatmen, who, having contracted to take them back that night
+to Naples, were now trying to fly their bargain and remain at Capri
+till the morrow. The Danes beat them, however, and then sat down
+to dinner, and to long stories of the imposture and villany of the
+Italians. One of them chiefly bewailed himself that the day before,
+having unwisely eaten a dozen oysters without agreeing first with the
+oyster-man upon the price, he had been obliged to pay this scamp's
+extortionate demand to the full, since he was unable to restore him
+his property. We thought that something like this might have happened
+to an imprudent man in any country, but we did not the less join him
+in abusing the Italians--the purpose for which foreigners chiefly
+visit Italy.
+
+
+II.
+
+Standing on the height among the ruins of Tiberius's palace, the
+patriarch had looked out over the waters, and predicted for the morrow
+the finest weather that had ever been known in that region; but in
+spite of this prophecy the day dawned stormily, and at breakfast time
+we looked out doubtfully on waves lashed by driving rain. The entrance
+to the Blue Grotto, to visit which we had come to Capri, is by a
+semicircular opening, some three feet in width and two feet in height,
+and just large enough to admit a small boat. One lies flat in the
+bottom of this, waits for the impulse of a beneficent wave, and is
+carried through the mouth of the cavern, and rescued from it in like
+manner by some receding billow. When the wind is in the wrong quarter,
+it is impossible to enter the grot at all; and we waited till nine
+o'clock for the storm to abate before we ventured forth. In the mean
+time one of the Danish gentlemen, who--after assisting his companion
+to compel the boatmen to justice the night before--had stayed at
+Capri, and had risen early to see the grotto, returned from it, and we
+besieged him with a hundred questions concerning it. But he preserved
+the wise silence of the boy who goes in to see the six-legged calf,
+and comes out impervious to the curiosity of all the boys who are
+doubtful whether the monster is worth their money. Our Dane would
+merely say that it was now possible to visit the Blue Grotto; that he
+had seen it; that he was glad he _had_ seen it. As to its blueness,
+Messieurs--yes, it is blue. _C'est i dire_....
+
+The ladies had been amusing themselves with a perusal of the hotel
+register, and the notes of admiration or disgust with which the
+different sojourners at the inn had filled it. As a rule, the English
+people found fault with the poor little hostelry and the French people
+praised it. Commander Joshing and Lieutenant Prattent, R.N., of
+the former nation, "were cheated by the donkey women, and thought
+themselves extremely fortunate to have escaped with their lives from
+the effects of Capri vintage. The landlord was an old Cossack." On the
+other hand, we read, "J. Cruttard, homme de lettres, a passè quinze
+jours ici, et n'a eu que des félicités du patron de cêt hôtel et de sa
+famille." Cheerful man of letters! His good-natured record will keep
+green a name little known to literature. Who are G. Bradshaw, Duke
+of New York, and Signori Jones and Andrews, Hereditary Princes of the
+United States? Their patrician names followed the titles of several
+English nobles in the register. But that which most interested the
+ladies in this record was the warning of a terrified British matron
+against any visit to the Blue Grotto except in the very calmest
+weather. The British matron penned her caution after an all but fatal
+experience. The ladies read it aloud to us, and announced that for
+themselves they would be contented with pictures of the Blue Grotto
+and our account of its marvels.
+
+On the beach below the hotel lay the small boats of the guides to the
+Blue Grotto, and we descended to take one of them. The fixed rate is a
+franc for each person. The boatmen wanted five francs for each of us.
+We explained that although not indigenous to Capri, or even Italy,
+we were not of the succulent growth of travellers, and would not be
+eaten. We retired to our vantage ground on the heights. The guides
+called us to the beach again. They would take us for three francs
+apiece, or say six francs for both of us. We withdrew furious to the
+heights again, where we found honest Antonino, who did us the pleasure
+to yell to his fellow-scoundrels on the beach, "You had better take
+these signori for a just price. They are going to the syndic to
+complain of you." At which there arose a lamentable outcry among the
+boatmen, and they called with one voice for us to come down and go
+for a franc apiece. This fable teaches that common-carriers are rogues
+everywhere; but that whereas we are helpless in their hands at home,
+we may bully them into rectitude in Italy, where they are afraid of
+the law.
+
+We had scarcely left the landing of the hotel in the boat of the
+patriarch--for I need hardly say he was first and most rapacious of
+the plundering crew--when we found ourselves in very turbulent waters,
+in the face of mighty bluffs, rising inaccessible from the sea. Here
+and there, where their swarthy fronts were softened with a little
+verdure, goat-paths wound up and down among the rocks; and midway
+between the hotel and the grotto, in a sort of sheltered nook, we saw
+the Roman masonry of certain antique baths--baths of Augustus, says
+Valery; baths of Tiberius, say the Capriotes, zealous for the honor
+of their infamous hero. Howbeit, this was all we saw on the way to
+the Blue Grotto. Every moment the waves rose higher, emulous of the
+bluffs, which would not have afforded a foothold, or any thing to
+cling to, had we been upset and washed against them--and we began
+to talk of the immortality of the soul. As we neared the grotto, the
+patriarch entertained us with stories of the perilous adventures of
+people who insisted upon entering it in stormy weather,--especially
+of a French painter who had been imprisoned in it four days, and kept
+alive only on rum, which the patriarch supplied him, swimming into
+the grotto with a bottle-full at a time. "And behold us arrived,
+gentlemen!" said he, as he brought the boat skillfully around in front
+of the small semicircular opening at the base of the lofty bluff. We
+lie flat on the bottom of the boat, and complete the immersion of that
+part of our clothing which the driving torrents of rain had spared.
+The wave of destiny rises with us upon its breast--sinks, and we are
+inside of the Blue Grotto. Not so much blue as gray, however, and the
+water about the mouth of it green rather than azure. They say that
+on a sunny day both the water and the roof of the cavern are of the
+vividest cerulean tint--and I saw the grotto so represented in the
+windows of the paint-shops at Naples. But to my own experience it did
+not differ from other caves in color or form: there was the customary
+clamminess in the air; the sound of dropping water; the sense of dull
+and stupid solitude,--a little relieved in this case by the mighty
+music of the waves breaking against the rocks outside. The grot is not
+great in extent, and the roof in the rear shelves gradually down to
+the water. Valery says that some remains of a gallery have caused
+the supposition that the grotto was once the scene of Tiberius's
+pleasures; and the Prussian painter who discovered the cave was led
+to seek it by something he had read of a staircase by which Barbarossa
+used to descend into a subterranean retreat from the town of Anacapri
+on the mountain top. The slight fragment of ruin which we saw in one
+corner of the cave might be taken in confirmation of both theories;
+but the patriarch attributed the work to Barbarossa, being probably
+tired at last of hearing Tiberius so much talked about.
+
+We returned, soaked and disappointed, to the hotel, where we found
+Antonino very doubtful about the possibility of getting back that day
+to Sorrento, and disposed, when pooh-poohed out of the notion of bad
+weather, to revive the fiction of a prohibitory consul. He was staying
+in Capri at our expense, and the honest fellow would willingly have
+spent a fortnight there.
+
+We summoned the landlord to settlement, and he came with all his
+household to present the account,--each one full of visible longing,
+yet restrained from asking _buonamano_ by a strong sense of previous
+contract. It was a deadly struggle with them, but they conquered
+themselves, and blessed us as we departed. The pretty muletress took
+leave of us on the beach, and we set sail for Sorrento, the ladies
+crouching in the bottom of the boat, and taking their sea-sickness in
+silence. As we drew near the beautiful town, we saw how it lay on
+a plateau, at the foot of the mountains, but high above the sea.
+Antonino pointed out to us the house of Tasso,--in which the novelist
+Cooper also resided when in Sorrento,--a white house not handsomer nor
+uglier than the rest, with a terrace looking out over the water. The
+bluffs are pierced by numerous arched caverns, as I have said,
+giving shelter to the fishermen's boats, and here and there a devious
+stairway mounts to their crests. Up one of these we walked, noting how
+in the house above us the people, with that puerility usually
+mixed with the Italian love of beauty, had placed painted busts of
+terra-cotta in the windows to simulate persons looking out. There was
+nothing to blame in the breakfast we found ready at the Hotel Rispoli;
+and as for the grove of slender, graceful orange-trees in the midst
+of which the hotel stood, and which had lavished the fruit in every
+direction on the ground, why, I would willingly give for it all the
+currant-bushes, with their promises of jelly and jam, on which I gaze
+at this moment.
+
+Antonino attended us to our carriage when we went away. He had kept
+us all night at Capri, it is true, and he had brought us in at the end
+for a prodigious _buonamano_; yet I cannot escape the conviction that
+he parted from us with an unfulfilled purpose of greater plunder, and
+I have a compassion, which I here declare, for the strangers who fell
+next into his hands. He was good enough at the last moment to say that
+his name, Silver-Eye, was a nickname given him according to a custom
+of the Sorrentines; and he made us a farewell bow that could not be
+bought in America for money.
+
+At the station of Castellamare sat a curious cripple on the stones,--a
+man with little, short, withered legs, and a pleasant face. He showed
+us the ticket-office, and wanted nothing for the politeness. After we
+had been in the waiting-room a brief time, he came swinging himself in
+upon his hands, followed by another person, who, when the cripple had
+planted himself finally and squarely on the ground, whipped out a
+tape from his pocket and took his measure for a suit of clothes,
+the cripple twirling and twisting himself about in every way for the
+tailor's convenience. Nobody was surprised or amused at the sight, and
+when his measure was thus publicly taken, the cripple gravely swung
+himself out as he had swung himself in.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+THE PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES.
+
+I had the pleasure one day of visiting nearly all the free schools
+which the wise philanthropy of the Protestant residents of Naples has
+established in that city. The schools had a peculiar interest for me,
+because I had noticed (in an uncareful fashion enough, no doubt) the
+great changes which had taken place in Italy under its new national
+government, and was desirous to see for myself the sort of progress
+the Italians of the south were making in avenues so long closed to
+them. I believe I have no mania for missionaries; I have heard of the
+converted Jew-and-a-half, and I have thought it a good joke; but
+I cannot help offering a very cordial homage to the truth that the
+missionaries are doing a vast deal of good in Naples, where they are
+not only spreading the gospel, but the spelling-book, the arithmetic,
+and the geography.
+
+It is not to be understood from the word missionaries, that this work
+is done by men especially sent from England or America to perform it.
+The free Protestant schools in Naples are conducted under the auspices
+of the Evangelical Aid Committee,--composed of members of the English
+Church, the Swiss Church, and the Presbyterian Church; the President
+of this committee is Dr. Strange, an Englishman, and the Treasurer
+is Mr. Rogers, the American banker. The missionaries in Naples,
+therefore, are men who have themselves found out their work and
+appointed themselves to do it. The gentleman by whose kindness I was
+permitted to visit the schools was one of these men,--the Rev. Mr.
+Buscarlet, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Naples, a Swiss by
+birth, who had received his education chiefly in Scotland.
+
+He accompanied me to the different schools, and as we walked up the
+long Toledo, and threaded our way through the sprightly Neapolitan
+crowd, he told me of the origin of the schools, and of the peculiar
+difficulties encountered in their foundation and maintenance. They
+are no older than the union of Naples with the Kingdom of Italy, when
+toleration of Protestantism was decreed by law; and from the first,
+their managers proceeded upon a principle of perfect openness and
+candor with the parents who wished to send their children to them.
+They announced that the children would be taught certain branches of
+learning, and that the whole Bible would be placed in their hands,
+to be studied and understood. In spite of this declaration of the
+Protestant character of the schools, the parents of the children
+were so anxious to secure them the benefits of education, that
+they willingly ran the risk of their becoming heretics. They
+were principally people of the lower classes,--laborers, hackmen,
+fishermen, domestics, and very small shopkeepers, but occasionally
+among them were parents able to send their children to other schools,
+yet preferring the thorough and conscientious system practiced in
+these. So the children came, and thanks to the peaceful, uncombative
+nature of Italian boys, who get on with much less waylaying and
+thumping and bullying than boys of northern blood, they have not
+been molested by their companions who still live the wild life of the
+streets, and they have only once suffered through interference of
+the priests. On complaint to the authorities the wrong was promptly
+redressed, and was not again inflicted. Of course these poor little
+people, picked up out of the vileness and ignorance of a city that
+had suffered for ages the most degrading oppression, are by no means
+regenerate yet, but there seems to be great hope for them. Now at
+least they are taught a reasonable and logical morality--and who can
+tell what wonders the novel instruction may not work? They learn for
+the first time that it is a foolish shame to lie and cheat, and it
+would scarcely be surprising if some of them were finally persuaded
+that Honesty is the best Policy--a maxim that few Italians believe.
+And here lies the trouble,--in the unfathomable, disheartening
+duplicity of the race. The children are not quarrelsome, nor cruel,
+nor brutal; but the servile defect of falsehood fixed by long
+generations of slavery in the Italians, is almost ineradicable. The
+fault is worse in Naples than elsewhere in Italy; but how bad it is
+everywhere, not merely travellers, but all residents in Italy, must
+bear witness.
+
+The first school which we visited was a girls' school, in which some
+forty-four little women of all ages, from four to fifteen years,
+were assembled under the charge of a young Corfute girl, an Italian
+Protestant, who had delegated her authority to different children
+under her. The small maidens gathered around their chiefs in groups,
+and read from the book in which they were studying when we appeared.
+Some allowance must be made for difference of the languages, Italian
+being logically spelled and easily pronounced; but I certainly never
+heard American children of their age read nearly so well. They seemed
+also to have a lively understanding of what they read, and to be
+greatly interested in the scriptural stories of which their books were
+made up. They repeated verses from the Bible, and stanzas of poetry,
+all very eagerly and prettily. As bashfulness is scarcely known
+to their race, they had no hesitation in showing off their
+accomplishments before a stranger, and seemed quite delighted with
+his applause. They were not particularly quiet; perhaps with young
+Neapolitans that would be impossible. I saw their copy-books, in which
+the writing was very good, (I am sure the printer would like mine to
+be as legible,) and the books were kept neat and clean, as were the
+hands and faces of the children. Taking the children as one goes in
+the streets of Naples, it would require a day perhaps to find as many
+clean ones as I saw in these schools, where cleanliness is resolutely
+insisted upon. Many of the children were ragged; here and there
+was one hideous with _ophthalmia_; but there was not a clouded
+countenance, nor a dirty hand among them. We should have great hopes
+for a nation of which the children can be taught to wash themselves.
+
+There were fourteen pupils in the boys' superior school, where
+geography, mathematics, linear drawing, French, Italian history, and
+ancient history were taught. A brief examination showed the boys to
+be well up in their studies;--indeed they furnished some recondite
+information about Baffin's Bay for which I should not myself have
+liked to be called on suddenly. Their drawing-books were prodigies of
+neatness, and betrayed that aptness for form and facility of execution
+which are natural to the Italians. Some of these boys had been in the
+schools nearly three years; they were nearly all of the class which
+must otherwise have grown up to hopeless vagabondage; but here they
+were receiving gratis an education that would fit them for employments
+wherein trained intellectual capacity is required. If their education
+went no higher than this, what an advance it would be upon their
+original condition!
+
+In the room devoted to boys of lower grade, I entangled myself in
+difficulties with a bright-eyed young gentleman, whom I asked if he
+liked Italian history better than ancient history. He said he liked
+the latter, especially that of the Romans, much better. "Why, that
+is strange. I should think an Italian boy would like Italian history
+best." "But were not the Romans also Italians, Signore?" I blush to
+say that I basely sneaked out of this trouble by answering that they
+were not like the Italians of the present day,--whatever that meant.
+But indeed all these young persons were startlingly quick with their
+information, and knowing that I knew very little on any subject with
+certainty, I think I was wise to refuse all offers to examine them in
+their studies.
+
+We left this school and returned to the Toledo by one of those
+wonderful little side streets already mentioned, which are forever
+tumultuous with the oddest Neapolitan life--with men quarreling
+themselves purple over small quantities of fish--with asses braying
+loud and clear above their discord--with women roasting pine-cones
+at charcoal fires--with children in the agonies of having their hair
+combed--with degraded poultry and homeless dogs--with fruit-stands
+and green groceries, and the little edifices of ecclesiastical
+architecture for the sale of lemonade--with wandering bag-pipers, and
+herds of nonchalant goats--with horses, and grooms currying them--and
+over all, from vast heights of balcony, with people lazily hanging
+upon rails and looking down on the riot. Reëntering the stream of the
+Toledo, it carried us almost to the Museo Borbonico before we again
+struck aside into one of the smaller streets, whence we climbed quite
+to the top of one of those incredibly high Neapolitan houses. Here,
+crossing an open terrace on the roof, we visited three small rooms, in
+which there were altogether some hundred boys in the first stages
+of reclamation. They were under the immediate superintendence of Mr.
+Buscarlet and he seemed to feel the fondest interest in them. Indeed,
+there was sufficient reason for this: up to a certain point, the
+Neapolitan children learn so rapidly and willingly that it can hardly
+be other than a pleasure to teach them. After this, their zeal flags;
+they know enough; and their parents and friends, far more ignorant
+than they, are perfectly satisfied with their progress. Then the
+difficulties of their teachers begin; but here, in these lowest grade
+schools, they had not yet begun. The boys were still eager to learn,
+and were ardently following the lead of their teachers. They were
+little fellows, nearly all, and none of them had been in school more
+than a year and a half, while some had been there only three or four
+months. They rose up with "_Buon giorno, signori_," as we entered, and
+could hardly be persuaded to lapse back to the duties of life during
+our stay. They had very good faces, indeed, for the most part, and
+even the vicious had intellectual brightness. Just and consistent
+usage has the best influence on them; and one boy was pointed out
+as quite docile and manageable, whose parents had given him up as
+incorrigible before he entered the school. As it was, there was
+something almost pathetic in his good behavior, as being possible to
+him, but utterly alien to his instincts. The boys of these schools
+seldom play truant, and they are never severely beaten in school; when
+quite intractable, notice is given to their parents, and they usually
+return in a more docile state. It sometimes happens that the boys are
+taken away by their parents, from one motive or another; but they find
+their way back again, and are received as if nothing had happened.
+
+The teacher in the first room here is a handsome young Calabrian,
+with the gentlest face and manner,--one of the most efficient teachers
+under Mr. Buscarlet. The boys had out their Bibles when we entered,
+and one after another read passages to us. There were children of
+seven, eight, and nine years, who had been in the school only three
+months, and who read any part of their Bibles with facility and
+correctness; of course, before coming to school they had not known one
+letter from another. The most accomplished scholar was a youngster,
+named Saggiomo, who had received eighteen months' schooling. He was
+consequently very quick indeed, and wanted to answer all the hard
+questions put to the other boys. In fact, all of them were ready
+enough, and there was a great deal of writhing and snapping of fingers
+among those who longed to answer some hesitator's question--just as
+you see in schools at home. They were examined in geography, and
+then in Bible history--particularly Joseph's story. They responded
+in chorus to all demands on this part of study, and could hardly be
+quieted sufficiently to give Saggiomo's little brother, aged five, a
+chance to tell why Joseph's brethren sold him. As soon as he could
+be heard he piped out: "_Perchè Giuseppe aveva dei sogni_!" (Because
+Joseph had dreams.) It was not exactly the right answer, but nobody
+laughed at the little fellow, though they all roared out in correction
+when permitted.
+
+In the next room, boys somewhat older were examined in Italian
+history, and responded correctly and promptly. They were given a
+sum which they performed in a miraculously short time; and their
+copy-books, when shown, were equally creditable to them. Their teacher
+was a Bolognese,--a naturalized Swiss,--who had been a soldier,
+and who maintained strict discipline among his irregulars, without,
+however, any perceptible terrorism.
+
+The amount of work these teachers accomplish in a day is incredible:
+the boys' school opens at eight in the morning and closes at four,
+with intermission of an hour at noon. Then in the evening the same
+men teach a school for adults, and on Sunday have their classes in the
+Sunday-schools. And this the whole year round. Their pay is not great,
+being about twenty dollars a month, and they are evidently not wholly
+self-interested from this fact. The amount of good they accomplish
+under the direction of their superiors is in proportion to the work
+done. To appreciate it, the reader must consider that they take the
+children of the most ignorant and degraded of all the Italians; that
+they cause them to be washed corporeally, first of all, and then set
+about cleansing them morally; and having cleared away as much of the
+inherited corruption of ages as possible, they begin to educate them
+in the various branches of learning. There is no direct proselyting
+in the schools, but the Bible is the first study, and the children
+are constantly examined in it; and the result is at least not
+superstition. The advance upon the old condition of things is
+incalculably great; for till the revolution under Garibaldi in 1860,
+the schools of Naples were all in the hands of the priests or their
+creatures, and the little learning there imparted was as dangerous as
+it could well be made. Now these schools are free, the children
+are honestly and thoroughly taught, and if they are not directly
+instructed in Protestantism, are at least instructed to associate
+religion with morality, probably for the first time in their lives.
+Too much credit cannot be given to the Italian government which has
+acted in such good faith with the men engaged in this work, protecting
+them from all interruption and persecution; but after all, the great
+praise is due to their own wise, unflagging zeal. They have worked
+unostentatiously, making no idle attacks on time-honored prejudices,
+but still having a purpose of enlightenment which they frankly avowed.
+The people whom they seek to benefit judge them by their works, and
+the result is that they have quite as much before them as they can do.
+Their discouragements are great. The day's teaching is often undone at
+home; the boys forget as aptly as they learn; and from the fact that
+only the baser feelings of fear and interest have ever been appealed
+to before in the Neapolitans, they have often to build in treacherous
+places without foundation of good faith or gratitude. Embarrassments
+for want of adequate funds are sometimes felt also. But no one can
+study their operations without feeling that success must attend their
+efforts, with honor to them, and with inestimable benefits to the
+generation which shall one day help to govern free Italy.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES.
+
+One day it became plain even to our reluctance that we could not stay
+in Naples forever, and the next morning we took the train for Rome.
+The Villa Reale put on its most alluring charm to him that ran down
+before breakfast to thrid once more its pathways bordered with palms
+and fountains and statues; the bay beside it purpled and twinkled in
+the light that made silver of the fishermen's sails; far away rose
+Vesuvius with his nightcap of mist still hanging about his shoulders;
+all around rang and rattled Naples. The city was never so fair before,
+nor could ever have been so hard to leave; and at the last moment
+the landlord of the Hotel Washington must needs add a supreme pang by
+developing into a poet, and presenting me with a copy of a comedy
+he had written. The reader who has received at parting from the
+gentlemanly proprietor of one of our palatial hotels his "Ode on the
+Steam Elevator," will conceive of the shame and regret with which I
+thought of having upbraided our landlord about our rooms, of having
+stickled at small preliminaries concerning our contract for board, and
+for having altogether treated him as one of the uninspired. Let me do
+him the tardy justice to say that he keeps, after the Stella d'Oro at
+Ferrara, the best hotel in Italy, and that his comedy was really very
+sprightly. It is no small thing to know how to keep a hotel, as we
+know, and a poet who does it ought to have a double acclaim.
+
+Nobody who cares to travel with decency and comfort can take the
+second-class cars on the road between Naples and Rome, though these
+are perfectly good everywhere else in Italy. The Papal city makes her
+influence felt for shabbiness and uncleanliness wherever she can, and
+her management seems to prevail on this railway. A glance into
+the second-class cars reconciled us to the first-class,--which in
+themselves were bad,--and we took our places almost contentedly.
+
+The road passed through the wildest country we had seen in Italy; and
+presently a rain began to fall and made it drearier than ever. The
+land was much grown up with thickets of hazel, and was here and there
+sparsely wooded with oaks. Under these, hogs were feeding upon the
+acorns, and the wet swine-herds were steaming over fires built at their
+roots. In some places the forest was quite dense; in other places it
+fell entirely away, and left the rocky hill-sides bare, and solitary
+but for the sheep that nibbled at the scanty grass, and the shepherds
+that leaned upon their crooks and motionlessly stared at us as we
+rushed by. As we drew near Rome, the scenery grew lonelier yet; the
+land rose into desolate, sterile, stony heights, without a patch of
+verdure on their nakedness, and at last abruptly dropped into the
+gloomy expanse of the Campagna.
+
+The towns along the route had little to interest us in their looks,
+though at San Germano we caught a glimpse of the famous old convent of
+Monte-Cassino, perched aloft on its cliff and looking like a part of
+the rock on which it was built. Fancy now loves to climb that steep
+acclivity, and wander through the many-volumed library of the ancient
+Benedictine retreat, and on the whole finds it less fatiguing and
+certainly less expensive than actual ascent and acquaintance with
+the monastery would have been. Two Croatian priests, who shared our
+compartment of the railway carriage, first drew our notice to the
+place, and were enthusiastic about it for many miles after it was
+out of sight. What gentle and pleasant men they were, and how hard it
+seemed that they should be priests and Croats! They told us all about
+the city of Spalato, where they lived, and gave us such a glowing
+account of Dalmatian poets and poetry that we began to doubt at last
+if the seat of literature were not somewhere on the east coast of the
+Adriatic; and I hope we left them the impression that the literary
+centre of the world was not a thousand miles from the horse-car office
+in Harvard Square.
+
+Here and there repairs were going forward on the railroad, and most
+of the laborers were women. They were straight and handsome girls,
+and moved with a stately grace under the baskets of earth balanced on
+their heads. Brave black eyes they had, such as love to look and to
+be looked at; they were not in the least hurried by their work, but
+desisted from it to gaze at the passengers whenever the train stopped.
+They all wore their beautiful peasant costume,--the square white linen
+head-dress falling to the shoulders, the crimson bodice, and the red
+scant skirt; and how they contrived to keep themselves so clean at
+their work, and to look so spectacular in it all, remains one of the
+many Italian mysteries.
+
+Another of these mysteries we beheld in the little beggar-boy at
+Isoletta. He stood at the corner of the station quite mute and
+motionless during our pause, and made no sign of supplication or
+entreaty. He let his looks beg for him. He was perfectly beautiful
+and exceedingly picturesque. Where his body was not quite naked, his
+jacket and trousers hung in shreds and points; his long hair grew
+through the top of his hat, and fell over like a plume. Nobody could
+resist him; people ran out of the cars, at the risk of being left
+behind, to put coppers into the little dirty hand held languidly out
+to receive them. The boy thanked none, smiled on none, but looked
+curiously and cautiously at all, with the quick perception and the
+illogical conclusions of his class and race. As we started he did not
+move, but remained in his attitude of listless tranquillity. As we
+glanced back, the mystery of him seemed to be solved for a moment: he
+would stand there till he grew up into a graceful, prayerful, pitiless
+brigand, and then he would rend from travel the tribute now go freely
+given him. But after all, though his future seemed clear, and he
+appeared the type of a strange and hardly reclaimable people, he was
+not quite a solution of the Neapolitan puzzle.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+ROMAN PEARLS.
+
+I.
+
+The first view of the ruins in the Forum brought a keen sense of
+disappointment. I knew that they could only be mere fragments and
+rubbish, but I was not prepared to find them so. I learned that I
+had all along secretly hoped for some dignity of neighborhood, some
+affectionate solicitude on the part of Nature to redeem these works of
+Art from the destruction that had befallen them. But in hollows below
+the level of the dirty cowfield, wandered over by evil-eyed buffaloes,
+and obscenely defiled by wild beasts of men, there stood here an
+arch, there a pillar, yonder a cluster of columns crowned by a bit
+of frieze; and yonder again, a fragment of temple, half-gorged by
+the façade of a hideous Renaissance church; then a height of vaulted
+brick-work, and, leading on to the Coliseum, another arch, and then
+incoherent columns overthrown and mixed with dilapidated walls--mere
+phonographic consonants, dumbly representing the past, out of which
+all vocal glory had departed. The Coliseum itself does not much better
+express a certain phase of Roman life than does the Arena at Verona;
+it is larger only to the foot-rule, and it seemed not grander
+otherwise, while it is vastly more ruinous. Even the Pantheon failed
+to impress me at first sight, though I found myself disposed to return
+to it again and again, and to be more and more affected by it.
+
+Modern Rome appeared, first and last, hideous. It is the least
+interesting town in Italy, and the architecture is hopelessly
+ugly--especially the architecture of the churches. The Papal city
+contrives at the beginning to hide the Imperial city from your
+thought, as it hides it in such a great degree from your eye, and old
+Rome only occurs to you in a sort of stupid wonder over the depth at
+which it is buried. I confess that I was glad to get altogether away
+from it after a first look at the ruins in the Forum, and to take
+refuge in the Conservatorio delle Mendicanti, where we were charged
+to see the little Virginia G. The Conservatorio, though a charitable
+institution, is not so entirely meant for mendicants as its name would
+imply, but none of the many young girls there were the children of
+rich men. They were often enough of parentage actually hungry and
+ragged, but they were often also the daughters of honest poor folk,
+who paid a certain sum toward their maintenance and education in the
+Conservatorio. Such was the case with little Virginia, whose father
+was at Florence, doubly impeded from seeing her by the fact that he
+had fought against the Pope for the Republic of 1848, and by the
+other fact that he had since wrought the Pope a yet deadlier injury by
+turning Protestant.
+
+Ringing a garrulous bell that continued to jingle some time after we
+were admitted, we found ourselves in a sort of reception-room, of the
+general quality of a cellar, and in the presence of a portress who was
+perceptibly preserved from mold only by the great pot of coals that
+stood in the centre of the place. Some young girls, rather pretty than
+not, attended the ancient woman, and kindly acted as the ear-trumpet
+through which our wishes were conveyed to her mind. The Conservatorio
+was not, so far, as conventual as we had imagined it; but as the
+gentleman of the party was strongly guarded by female friends, and
+asked at once to see the Superior, he concluded that there was,
+perhaps, something so unusually reassuring to the recluses in his
+appearance and manner that they had not thought it necessary to behave
+very rigidly. It later occurred to this gentleman that the promptness
+with which the pretty mendicants procured him an interview with the
+Superior had a flavor of self-interest in; and that he who came to the
+Conservatorio in the place of a father might have been for a moment
+ignorantly viewed as a yet dearer and tenderer possibility. From
+whatever danger there was in this error the Superior soon appeared to
+rescue him, and we were invited into a more ceremonious apartment on
+the first floor, and the little Virginia was sent for. The visit
+of the strangers caused a tumult and interest in the quiet old
+Conservatorio of which it is hard to conceive now, and the excitement
+grew tremendous when it appeared that, the signori were Americani and
+Protestanti. We imparted a savor of novelty and importance to Virginia
+herself, and when she appeared, the Superior and her assistant looked
+at her with no small curiosity and awe, of which the little maiden
+instantly became conscious, and began to take advantage. Accompanying
+us over the building and through the grounds, she cut her small
+friends wherever she met them, and was not more than respectful to the
+assistant.
+
+It was from an instinct of hospitality that we were shown the
+Conservatorio, and instructed in regard to all its purposes. We saw
+the neat dormitories with their battalions of little white beds; the
+kitchen with its gigantic coppers for boiling broth, and the refectory
+with the smell of the frugal dinners of generations of mendicants in
+it. The assistant was very proud of the neatness of every thing, and
+was glad to talk of that, or, indeed, any thing else. It appeared that
+the girls were taught reading, writing, and plain sewing when they
+were young, and that the Conservatorio was chiefly sustained by pious
+contributions and bequests. Any lingering notion of the conventual
+character of the place was dispelled by the assistant's hurrying to
+say, "And when we can get the poor things well married, we are glad to
+do so."
+
+"But how does any one ever see them?"
+
+"Eh! well, that is easily managed. Once a month we dress the
+marriageable girls in their best, and take them for a walk in the
+street. If an honest young man falls in love with one of them going
+by, he comes to the Superior, and describes her as well as he can,
+and demands to see her. She is called, and if both are pleased, the
+marriage is arranged. You see it is a very simple affair."
+
+And there was, to the assistant's mind, nothing odd in the whole
+business, insomuch that I felt almost ashamed of marveling at it.
+
+Issuing from the backdoor of the convent, we ascended by stairs and
+gateways into garden spaces, chiefly planted with turnips and the like
+poor but respectable vegetables, and curiously adorned with fragments
+of antique statuary, and here and there a fountain in a corner,
+trickling from moss-grown rocks, and falling into a trough of
+travertine, about the feet of some poor old goddess or Virtue who had
+forgotten what her name was.
+
+Once, the assistant said, speaking as if the thing had been within
+her recollection, though it must have been centuries before, the
+antiquities of the Conservatorio were much more numerous and striking;
+but they were now removed to the different museums. Nevertheless they
+had still a beautiful prospect left, which we were welcome to enjoy if
+we would follow her; and presently, to our surprise, we stepped from
+the garden upon the roof of the Temple of Peace. The assistant had not
+boasted without reason: away before us stretched the Campagna, a level
+waste, and empty, but for the umbrella-palms that here and there
+waved like black plumes upon it, and for the arched lengths of
+the acqueducts that seemed to stalk down from the ages across the
+melancholy expanse like files of giants, with now and then a ruinous
+gap in the line, as if one had fallen out weary by the way. The city
+all around us glittered asleep in the dim December sunshine, and
+far below us,--on the length of the Forum over which the Appian Way
+stretched from the Capitoline Hill under the Arch of Septimius Severus
+and the Arch of Titus to the Arch of Constantine, leaving the Coliseum
+on the left, and losing itself in the foliage of the suburbs,--the
+Past seemed struggling to emerge from the ruins, and to reshape and
+animate itself anew. The effort was more successful than that which we
+had helped the Past to make when standing on the level of the Forum;
+but Antiquity must have been painfully conscious of the incongruity of
+the red-legged Zouaves wandering over the grass, and of the bewildered
+tourists trying to make her out with their Murrays.
+
+In a day or two after this we returned again to our Conservatorio,
+where we found that the excitement created by our first visit had been
+kept fully alive by the events attending the photographing of Virginia
+for her father. Not only Virginia was there to receive us, but her
+grandmother also--an old, old woman, dumb through some infirmity of
+age, who could only weep and smile in token of her content. I think
+she had but a dim idea, after all, of what went on beyond the visible
+fact of Virginia's photograph, and that she did not quite understand
+how we could cause it to be taken for her son. She was deeply
+compassionated by the Superior, who rendered her pity with a great
+deal of gesticulation, casting up her eyes, shrugging her shoulders,
+and sighing grievously. But the assistant's cheerfulness could not be
+abated even by the spectacle of extreme age; and she made the most of
+the whole occasion, recounting with great minuteness all the incidents
+of the visit to the photographer's, and running to get the dress
+Virginia sat in, that we might see how exactly it was given in the
+picture. Then she gave us much discourse concerning the Conservatorio
+and its usages, and seemed not to wish us to think that life there
+was altogether eventless. "Here we have a little amusement also," she
+said. "The girls have their relatives to visit them sometimes, and
+then in the evening they dance. Oh, they enjoy themselves! I am half
+old (_mezzo-vecchia_). I am done with these things. But for youth,
+always kept down, something lively is wanted."
+
+When we took leave of these simple folks, we took leave of almost the
+only natural and unprepared aspect of Italian life which we were to
+see in Rome; but we did not know this at the time.
+
+
+II.
+
+Indeed, it seems to me that all moisture of romance and adventure has
+been wellnigh sucked out of travel in Italy, and that compared with
+the old time, when the happy wayfarer journeyed by vettura through the
+innumerable little states of the Peninsula,--halted every other mile
+to show his passport, and robbed by customs officers in every color of
+shabby uniform and every variety of cocked hat,--the present railroad
+period is one of but stale and insipid flavor. Much of local life and
+color remains, of course; but the hurried traveller sees little of it,
+and, passed from one grand hotel to another, without material change
+in the cooking or the methods of extortion, he might nearly as well
+remain at Paris. The Italians, who live to so great extent by the
+travel through their country, learn our abominable languages and
+minister to our detestable comfort and propriety, till we have slight
+chance to know them as we once could,--musical, picturesque, and full
+of sweet, natural knaveries, graceful falsehood, and all uncleanness.
+Rome really belongs to the Anglo-Saxon nations, and the Pope and the
+past seem to be carried on entirely for our diversion. Every thing is
+systematized as thoroughly as in a museum where the objects are all
+ticketed; and our prejudices are consulted even down to alms-giving,
+Honest Beppo is gone from the steps in the Piazza di Spagna, and now
+the beggars are labeled like policemen, with an immense plate bearing
+the image of St. Peter, so that you may know you give to a worthy
+person when you bestow charity on one of them, and not, alas! to some
+abandoned impostor, as in former days. One of these highly recommended
+mendicants gave the last finish to the system, and begged of us in
+English! No custodian will answer you, if he can help it, in the
+Italian which he speaks so exquisitely, preferring to speak bad French
+instead, and in all the shops on the Corso the English tongue is _de
+rigueur_.
+
+After our dear friends at the Conservatorio, I think we found one of
+the most simple and interesting of Romans in the monk who showed us
+the Catacombs of St. Sebastian. These catacombs, he assured us, were
+not restored like those of St. Calixtus, but were just as the martyrs
+left them; and, as I do not remember to have read anywhere that
+they are formed merely of long, low, narrow, wandering underground
+passages, lined on either side with tombs in tiers like berths on
+a steamer, and expanding here and there into small square chambers,
+bearing the traces of ancient frescos, and evidently used as
+chapels,--I venture to offer the information here. The reader is to
+keep in his mind a darkness broken by the light of wax tapers, a
+close smell, and crookedness and narrowness, or he cannot realize the
+catacombs as they are in fact. Our monkish guide, before entering the
+passage leading from the floor of the church to the tombs, in which
+there was still some "fine small dust" of the martyrs, warned us that
+to touch it was to incur the penalty of excommunication, and then
+gently craved pardon for having mentioned the fact. But, indeed, it
+was only to persons who showed a certain degree of reverence that
+these places were now exhibited; for some Protestants who had been
+permitted there had stolen handfuls of the precious ashes, merely to
+throw away. I assured him that I thought them beasts to do it; and I
+was afterwards puzzled to know what should attract their wantonness in
+the remnants of mortality, hardly to be distinguished from the common
+earth out of which the catacombs were dug.
+
+
+III.
+
+Returning to the church above we found, kneeling before one of the
+altars, two pilgrims,--a man and a woman. The latter was habited in
+a nun-like dress of black, and the former in a long pilgrim's coat of
+coarse blue stuff. He bore a pilgrim's staff in his hand, and showed
+under his close hood a fine, handsome, reverent face, full of a sort
+of tender awe, touched with the pathos of penitence. In attendance
+upon the two was a dapper little silk-hatted man, with rogue so
+plainly written in his devotional countenance that I was not surprised
+to be told that he was a species of spiritual _valet de place_,
+whose occupation it was to attend pilgrims on their tour to the Seven
+Churches at which these devotees pray in Rome, and there to direct
+their orisons and join in them.
+
+It was not to the pilgrims, but to the heretics that the monk now
+uncovered the precious marble slab on which Christ stood when he met
+Peter flying from Rome and turned him back. You are shown the prints
+of the divine feet, which the conscious stone received and keeps
+forever; and near at hand is one of the arrows with which St.
+Sebastian was shot. We looked at these things critically, having to
+pay for the spectacle; but the pilgrims and their guide were all faith
+and wonder.
+
+I remember seeing nothing else so finely superstitious at Rome. In a
+chapel near the Church of St. John Lateran are, as is well known,
+the marble steps which once belonged to Pilate's house, and which the
+Saviour is said to have ascended when he went to trial before Pilate.
+The steps are protected against the wear and tear of devotion by a
+stout casing of wood, and they are constantly covered with penitents,
+who ascend and descend them upon their knees. Most of the pious people
+whom I saw in this act were children, and the boys enjoyed it with a
+good deal of giggling, as a very amusing feat. Some old and haggard
+women gave the scene all the dignity which it possessed; but certain
+well-dressed ladies and gentlemen were undeniably awkward and absurd,
+and I was led to doubt if there were not an incompatibility between
+the abandon of simple faith and the respectability of good clothes.
+
+
+IV.
+
+In all other parts of Italy one hears constant talk among travellers
+of the malaria at Rome, and having seen a case of Roman fever, I know
+it is a thing not to be trifled with. But in Rome itself the malaria
+is laughed at by the foreign residents,--who, nevertheless, go out of
+the city in midsummer. The Romans, to the number of a hundred thousand
+or so, remain there the whole year round, and I am bound to say I
+never saw a healthier, robuster-looking population. The cheeks of the
+French soldiers, too, whom we met at every turn, were red as their
+trousers, and they seemed to flourish on the imputed unwholesomeness
+of the atmosphere. All at Rome are united in declaring that the fever
+exists at Naples, and that sometimes those who have taken it there
+come and die in Rome, in order to give the city a bad name; and I
+think this very likely.
+
+Rome is certainly dirty, however, though there is a fountain in every
+square, and you are never out of the sound of falling water. The Corso
+and some of the principal streets do not so much impress you with
+their filth as with their dullness; but that part of the city where
+some of the most memorable relics of antiquity are to be found is
+unimaginably vile. The least said of the state of the archways of the
+Coliseum the soonest mended; and I have already spoken of the Forum.
+The streets near the Theatre of Pompey are almost impassable, and the
+so-called House of Rienzi is a stable, fortified against approach by
+a _fossé_ of excrement. A noisome smell seems to be esteemed the most
+appropriate offering to the memory of ancient Rome, and I am not sure
+that the moderns are mistaken in this. In the rascal streets in the
+neighborhood of the most august ruins, the people turn round to stare
+at the stranger as he passes them; they are all dirty, and his decency
+must be no less a surprise to them than the neatness of the French
+soldiers amid all the filth is a puzzle to him. We wandered about a
+long time in such places one day, looking for the Tarpeian Rock, less
+for Tarpeia's sake than for the sake of Miriam and Donatello and the
+Model. There are two Tarpeian rocks, between which the stranger takes
+his choice; and we must have chosen the wrong one, for it seemed but
+a shallow gulf compared to that in our fancy. We were somewhat
+disappointed; but then Niagara disappoints one; and as for Mont
+Blanc....
+
+
+V.
+
+It is worth while for every one who goes to Rome to visit the Church
+of St. Peter's; but it is scarcely worth while for me to describe
+it, or for every one to go up into the bronze globe on the top of the
+cupola. In fact, this is a great labor, and there is nothing to
+be seen from the crevices in the ball which cannot be far more
+comfortably seen from the roof of the church below.
+
+The companions of our ascent to the latter point were an English lady
+and gentleman, brother and sister, and both Catholics, as they at once
+told us. The lady and myself spoke for some time in the Tuscan tongue
+before we discovered that neither of us was Italian, after which we
+paid each other some handsome compliments upon fluency and perfection
+of accent. The gentleman was a pleasant purple porpoise from the
+waters of Chili, whither he had wandered from the English coasts in
+early youth. He had two leading ideas: one concerned the Pope, to
+whom he had just been presented, and whom he viewed as the best and
+blandest of beings; the other related to his boy, then in England,
+whom he called Jack Spratt, and considered the grandest and greatest
+of boys. With the view from the roof of the church this gentleman did
+not much trouble himself. He believed Jack Spratt could ride up to the
+roof where we stood on his donkey. As to the great bronze globe which
+we were hurrying to enter he seemed to regard it merely as a rival in
+rotundity, and made not the slightest motion to follow us.
+
+I should be loth to vex the reader with any description of the scene
+before us and beneath us, even if I could faithfully portray it. But I
+recollect, with a pleasure not to be left unrecorded, the sweetness
+of the great fountain playing in the square before the church, and
+the harmony in which the city grew in every direction from it, like
+an emanation from its music, till the last house sank away into
+the pathetic solitude of the Campagna, with nothing beyond but the
+snow-capped mountains lighting up the remotest distance. At the same
+moment I experienced a rapture in reflecting that I had underpaid
+three hackmen during my stay in Rome, and thus contributed to avenge
+my race for ages of oppression.
+
+The vastness of St. Peter's itself is best felt in looking down upon
+the interior from the gallery that surrounds the inside of the dome,
+and in comparing one's own littleness with the greatness of all the
+neighboring mosaics. But as to the beauty of the temple, I could not
+find it without or within.
+
+
+VI.
+
+In Rome one's fellow-tourists are a constant source of gratification
+and surprise. I thought that American travellers were by no means the
+most absurd among those we saw, nor even the loudest in their approval
+of the Eternal City. A certain order of German greenness affords,
+perhaps, the pleasantest pasturage for the ruminating mind. For
+example, at the Villa Ludovisi there was, beside numerous Englishry
+in detached bodies, a troop of Germans, chiefly young men, frugally
+pursuing the Sehenswürdigkeiten in the social manner of their nation.
+They took their enjoyment very noisily, and wrangled together with
+furious amiability as they looked at Guercino's "Aurora." Then two of
+them parted from the rest, and went to a little summer-house in the
+gardens, while the others followed us to the top of the Casino. There
+they caught sight of their friends in the arbor, and the spectacle
+appeared to overwhelm them. They bowed, they took off their hats, they
+waved their handkerchiefs. It was not enough: one young fellow mounted
+on the balustrade of the roof at his neck's risk, lifted his hat on
+his cane and flourished it in greeting to the heart's-friends in the
+arbor, from whom he had parted two minutes before.
+
+In strange contrast to the producer of this enthusiasm, so pumped and
+so unmistakably mixed with beer, a fat and pallid Englishwoman sat
+in a chair upon the roof and coldly, coldly sketched the lovely
+landscape. And she and the blonde young English girl beside her
+pronounced a little dialogue together, which I give, because I saw
+that they meant it for the public:
+
+_The Young Girl_.--I wonder, you knoa, you don't draw-ow St. Petuh's!
+
+_The Artist_.--O ah, you knoa, I can draw-ow St. Petuh's from so
+mennee powints.
+
+I am afraid that the worst form of American greenness appears abroad
+in a desire to be perfectly up in critical appreciation of the arts,
+and to approach the great works in the spirit of the connoisseur. The
+ambition is not altogether a bad one. Still I could not help laughing
+at a fellow-countryman when he told me that he had not yet seen
+Raphael's "Transfiguration," because he wished to prepare his mind for
+understanding the original by first looking at all the copies he could
+find.
+
+
+VII.
+
+The Basilica San Paolo fuori le Mura surpasses every thing in splendor
+of marble and costly stone--porphyry, malachite, alabaster--and luxury
+of gilding that is to be seen at Rome. But I chiefly remember it
+because on the road that leads to it, through scenes as quiet and
+peaceful as if history had never known them, lies the Protestant
+graveyard in which Keats is buried. Quite by chance the driver
+mentioned it, pointing in the direction of the cemetery with his whip.
+We eagerly dismounted and repaired to the gate, where we were met by
+the son of the sexton, who spoke English through the beauteous line of
+a curved Hebrew nose. Perhaps a Christian could not be found in Rome
+to take charge of these heretic graves, though Christians can be got
+to do almost any thing there for money. However, I do not think
+a Catholic would have kept the place in better order, or more
+intelligently understood our reverent curiosity. It was the new
+burial-ground which we had entered, and which is a little to the right
+of the elder cemetery. It was very beautiful and tasteful in every
+way; the names upon the stones were chiefly English and Scotch,
+with here and there an American's. But affection drew us only to the
+prostrate tablet inscribed with the words, "Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cor
+Cordium," and then we were ready to go to the grave of him for whom we
+all feel so deep a tenderness. The grave of John Keats is one of
+few in the old burying-ground, and lies almost in the shadow of the
+pyramid of Caius Cestius; and I could not help thinking of the wonder
+the Roman would have felt could he have known into what unnamable
+richness and beauty his Greek faith had ripened in the heart of the
+poor poet, where it was mixed with so much sorrow. Doubtless, in his
+time, a prominent citizen like Caius Cestius was a leading member of
+the temple in his neighborhood, and regularly attended sacrifice: it
+would have been but decent; and yet I fancied that a man immersed like
+him in affairs might have learned with surprise the inner and more
+fragrant meaning of the symbols with the outside of which his life was
+satisfied; and I was glad to reflect that in our day such a thing is
+impossible.
+
+The grave of our beloved poet is sunken to the level of the common
+earth, and is only marked by the quaintly lettered, simple stone
+bearing the famous epitaph. While at Rome I heard talk of another and
+grander monument which some members of the Keats family were to place
+over the dust of their great kinsman. But, for one, I hope this may
+never be done, even though the original stone should also be left
+there, as was intended. Let the world still keep unchanged this
+shrine, to which it can repair with at once pity and tenderness and
+respect.
+
+A rose-tree and some sweet-smelling bushes grew upon the grave, and
+the roses were in bloom. We asked leave to take one of them; but at
+last could only bring ourselves to gather some of the fallen petals.
+Our Hebrew guide was willing enough, and unconsciously set us a little
+example of wantonness; for while he listened to our explanation of
+the mystery which had puzzled him ever since he had learned English,
+namely, why the stone should say "_writ_ on water," and not _written_,
+he kept plucking mechanically at one of the fragrant shrubs, pinching
+away the leaves, and rending the tender twig, till I, remembering the
+once-sensitive dust from which it grew, waited for the tortured
+tree to cry out to him with a voice of words and blood, "Perchè mi
+schianti?"
+
+
+VIII.
+
+It seems to me that a candid person will wish to pause a little
+before condemning Gibson's colored statues. They have been grossly
+misrepresented. They do not impress one at all as wax-work, and there
+is great wrong in saying that their tinted nakedness suggests impurity
+any more than the white nakedness of other statues. The coloring
+is quite conventional; the flesh is merely warmed with the hue
+representing life; the hair is always a very delicate yellow, the eyes
+a tender violet, and there is no other particularization of color; a
+fillet binding the hair may be gilded,--the hem of a robe traced
+in blue. I, who had just come from seeing the fragments of antique
+statuary in Naples Museum, tinted in the same way, could not feel
+that there was any thing preposterous in Gibson's works, and I am not
+ashamed to say that they gave me pleasure.
+
+As we passed, in his studio, from one room to another, the workman who
+showed the marbles surprised and delighted us by asking if we would
+like to see the sculptor, and took us up into the little room where
+Gibson worked. He was engaged upon a bass-relief,--a visit of Psyche
+to the Zephyrs, or something equally aërial and mythological,--and
+received us very simply and naturally, and at once began with some
+quaint talk about the subject in hand. When we mentioned our pleasure
+in his colored marbles we touched the right spring, and he went on to
+speak of his favorite theory with visible delight, making occasional
+pauses to bestow a touch on the bass-relief, and coming back to his
+theme with that self-corroborative "Yes!" of his, which Hawthorne
+has immortalized. He was dressed with extraordinary slovenliness and
+indifference to clothes, had no collar, I think, and evidently did
+not know what he had on. Every thing about him bespoke the utmost
+unconsciousness and democratic plainness of life, so that I could
+readily believe a story I heard of him. Having dined the greater part
+of his life in Roman restaurants where it is but wholesome to go over
+your plate, glass, spoon, and knife and fork with your napkin before
+using them, the great sculptor had acquired such habits of
+neatness that at table in the most aristocratic house in England
+he absent-mindedly went through all that ceremony of cleansing
+and wiping. It is a story they tell in Rome, where every body is
+anecdoted, and not always so good-naturedly.
+
+
+IX.
+
+One Sunday afternoon we went with some artistic friends to visit the
+studio of the great German painter, Overbeck; and since I first read
+Uhland I have known no pleasure so illogical as I felt in looking at
+this painter's drawings. In the sensuous heart of objective Italy he
+treats the themes of mediæval Catholicism with the most subjective
+feeling, and I thought I perceived in his work the enthusiasm which
+led many Protestant German painters and poets of the romantic school
+back into the twilight of the Romish faith, in the hope that they
+might thus realize to themselves something of the earnestness which
+animated the elder Christian artists. Overbeck's work is beautiful,
+but it is unreal, and expresses the sentiment of no time; as the work
+of the romantic German poets seems without relation to any world men
+ever lived in.
+
+Walking from the painter's house, two of us parted with the rest
+on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, and pursued our
+stroll through the gate of San Lorenzo out upon the Campagna, which
+tempts and tempts the sojourner at Rome, until at last he must go
+and see--if it will give him the fever. And, alas! there I caught the
+Roman fever--the longing that burns one who has once been in Rome to
+go again--that will not be cured by all the cool contemptuous things
+he may think or say of the Eternal City; that fills him with fond
+memories of its fascination, and makes it forever desired.
+
+We walked far down the dusty road beyond the city walls, and then
+struck out from the highway across the wild meadows of the Campagna.
+They were weedy and desolate, seamed by shaggy grass-grown ditches,
+and deeply pitted with holes made in search for catacombs. There was
+here and there a farm-house amid the wide lonesomeness, but oftener
+a round, hollow, roofless tomb, from which the dust and memory of the
+dead had long been blown away, and through the top of which--fringed
+and overhung with grasses, and opening like a great eye--the evening
+sky looked marvelously sad. One of the fields was full of grim,
+wide-horned cattle, and in another there were four or five buffaloes
+lying down and chewing their cuds,--holding their heads horizontally
+in the air, and with an air of gloomy wickedness which nothing could
+exceed in their cruel black eyes, glancing about in visible pursuit
+of some object to toss and gore. There were also many canebrakes,
+in which the wind made a mournful rustling after the sun had set in
+golden glitter on the roofs of the Roman churches and the transparent
+night had fallen upon the scene.
+
+In all our ramble we met not a soul, and I scarcely know what it is
+makes this walk upon the Campagna one of my vividest recollections
+of Rome, unless it be the opportunity it gave me to weary myself upon
+that many-memoried ground as freely as if it had been a woods-pasture
+in Ohio. Nature, where history was so august, was perfectly simple
+and motherly, and did so much to make me at home, that, as the night
+thickened and we plunged here and there into ditches and climbed
+fences, and struggled, heavy-footed, back through the suburbs to
+the city gate, I felt as if half my boyhood had been passed upon the
+Campagna.
+
+
+X.
+
+Pasquino, like most other great people, is not very interesting upon
+close approach. There is no trace now in his aspect to show that he
+has ever been satirical; but the humanity that the sculptor gave him
+is imperishable, though he has lost all character as a public censor.
+The torso is at first glance nothing but a shapeless mass of stone,
+but the life can never die out of that which has been shaped by art
+to the likeness of a man, and a second look restores the lump to
+full possession of form and expression. For this reason I lament that
+statues should ever be restored except by sympathy and imagination.
+
+
+XI.
+
+Regarding the face of Pompey's statue in the Spada Palace, I was more
+struck than ever with a resemblance to American politicians which I
+had noted in all the Roman statues. It is a type of face not now to be
+found in Rome, but frequent enough here, and rather in the South
+than in the North. Pompey was like the pictures of so many Southern
+Congressmen that I wondered whether race had not less to do with
+producing types than had similarity of circumstances; whether a
+republicanism based upon slavery could not so far assimilate character
+as to produce a common aspect in people widely separated by time and
+creeds, but having the same unquestioned habits of command, and the
+same boundless and unscrupulous ambition.
+
+
+XII.
+
+When the Tiber, according to its frequent habit, rises and inundates
+the city, the Pantheon is one of the first places to be flooded--the
+sacristan told us. The water climbs above the altar-tops, sapping,
+in its recession, the cement of the fine marbles which incrust the
+columns, so that about their bases the pieces have to be continually
+renewed. Nothing vexes you so much in the Pantheon as your
+consciousness of these and other repairs. Bad as ruin is, I think I
+would rather have the old temple ruinous in every part than restored
+as you find it. The sacristan felt the wrongs of the place keenly, and
+said, referring to the removal of the bronze roof, which took place
+some centuries ago, "They have robbed us of every thing" (_Ci hanno
+levato tutto_); as if he and the Pantheon were of one blood, and he
+had suffered personal hurt in its spoliation.
+
+What a sense of the wildness everywhere lurking about Rome we had
+given us by that group of peasants who had built a fire of brushwood
+almost within the portico of the Pantheon, and were cooking their
+supper at it, the light of the flames luridly painting their swarthy
+faces!
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Poor little Numero Cinque Via del Gambero has seldom, I imagine, known
+so violent a sensation as that it experienced when, on the day of the
+Immaculate Conception, the Armenian Archbishop rolled up to the door
+in his red coach. The master of the house had always seemed to like
+us; now he appeared with profound respect suffusing, as it were, his
+whole being, and announced, "Signore, it is Monsignore come to take
+you to the Sistine Chapel in his carriage," and drew himself up in a
+line, as much like a series of serving-men as possible, to let us
+pass out. There was a private carriage for the ladies near that of
+Monsignore, for he had already advertised us that the sex were not
+permitted to ride in the red coach. As they appeared, however, he
+renewed his expressions of desolation at being deprived of their
+company, and assured them of his good-will with a multiplicity of
+smiles and nods, intermixed with shrugs of recurrence to his poignant
+regret. But! In fine, it was forbidden!
+
+Monsignore was in full costume, with his best ecclesiastical clothes
+on, and with his great gold chain about his neck. The dress was richer
+than that of the western archbishops; and the long white beard of
+Monsignore made him look much more like a Scriptural monsignore than
+these. He lacked, perhaps, the fine spiritual grace of his brother,
+the Archbishop at Venice, to whose letter of introduction we owed his
+acquaintance and untiring civilities; but if a man cannot be plump and
+spiritual, he can be plump and pleasant, as Monsignore was to the last
+degree. He enlivened our ride with discourse about the Armenians at
+Venice, equally beloved of us; and, arrived at the Sistine Chapel, he
+marshaled the ladies before him, and won them early entrance through
+the crowd of English people crushing one another at the door. Then
+he laid hold upon the captain of the Swiss Guard, who was swift to
+provide them with the best places; and in nowise did he seem one of
+the uninfluential and insignificant priests that About describes the
+archbishops at Rome to be. According to this lively author, a Swiss
+guard was striking back the crowd on some occasion with the butt of
+his halberd, and smote a cardinal on the breast. He instantly
+dropped upon his knees, with "Pardon, Eminenza! I thought it was a
+monsignore!" Even the chief of these handsome fellows had nothing but
+respect and obedience for our Archbishop.
+
+The gentlemen present were separated from the ladies, and in a very
+narrow space outside of the chapel men of every nation were penned up
+together. All talked--several priests as loudly as the rest. But the
+rudest among them were certain Germans, who not only talked but stood
+upon a seat to see better, and were ordered down by one of the Swiss
+with a fierce "_Giù, signore, giù_!" Otherwise the guard kept good
+order in the chapel, and were no doubt as useful and genuine as any
+thing about the poor old Pope. What gorgeous fellows they were, and,
+as soldiers, how absurd! The weapons they bore were as obsolete as the
+excommunication. It was amusing to pass one of these play-soldiers on
+guard at the door of the Vatican--tall, straight, beautiful, superb,
+with his halberd on his shoulder--and then come to a real warrior
+outside, a little, ugly, red-legged French sentinel, with his Minié on
+his arm.
+
+Except for the singing of the Pope's choir--which was angelically
+sweet, and heavenly far above all praise--the religious ceremonies
+affected me, like all others of that faith, as tedious and empty. Each
+of the cardinals, as he entered the chapel, blew a sonorous nose; and
+was received standing by his brother prelates--a grotesque company
+of old-womanish old men in gaudy gowns. One of the last to come was
+Antonelli, who has the very wickedest face in the world. He sat with
+his eyes fastened upon his book, but obviously open at every pore
+to all that went on about him. As he passed out he cast gleaming,
+terrible, sidelong looks upon the people, full of hate and guile.
+
+From where I stood I saw the Pope's face only in profile: it was
+gentle and benign enough, but not great in expression, and the smile
+on it almost degenerated into a simper. His Holiness had a cold; and
+his _recitative_, though full, was not smooth. He was all priest
+when, in the midst of the service, he hawked, held his handkerchief up
+before his face, a little way off, and ruthlessly spat in it!
+
+
+
+
+FORZA MAGGIORE.
+
+I imagine that Grossetto is not a town much known to travel, for it is
+absent from all the guide-books I have looked at. However, it is chief
+in the Maremma, where sweet Pia de' Tolommei languished and perished
+of the poisonous air and her love's cruelty, and where, so many mute
+centuries since, the Etrurian cities flourished and fell. Further, one
+may say that Grossetto is on the diligence road from Civita Vecchia
+to Leghorn, and that in the very heart of the place there is a lovely
+palm-tree, rare, if not sole, in that latitude. This palm stands in a
+well-sheltered, dull little court, out of every thing's way, and turns
+tenderly toward the wall that shields it on the north. It has no other
+company but a beautiful young girl, who leans out of a window high
+over its head, and I have no doubt talks with it. At the moment we
+discovered the friends, the maiden was looking pathetically to the
+northward, while the palm softly stirred and opened its plumes, as a
+bird does when his song is finished; and there is very little question
+but it had just been singing to her that song of which the palms are
+so fond,--
+
+  "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
+  Im Norden auf kahler Höh'."
+
+Grossetto does her utmost to hide the secret of this tree's
+existence, as if a hard, matter-of-fact place ought to be ashamed of
+a sentimentality of the kind. It pretended to be a very worldly town,
+and tried to keep us in the neighborhood of its cathedral, where the
+caffè and shops are, and where, in the evening, four or five officers
+of the garrison clinked their sabres on the stones, and promenaded up
+and down, and as many ladies shopped for gloves; and as many citizens
+sat at the principal caffè and drank black coffee. This was lively
+enough; and we knew that the citizens were talking of the last week's
+news and the Roman question; that the ladies were really looking for
+loves, not gloves; that such of the officers as had no local intrigue
+to keep their hearts at rest were terribly bored, and longed for
+Florence or Milan or Turin.
+
+Besides the social charms of her piazza, Grossetto put forth others
+of an artistic nature. The cathedral was very old and very
+beautiful,--built of alternate lines of red and white marble, and
+lately restored in the best spirit of fidelity and reverence. But
+it was not open, and we were obliged to turn from it to the group of
+statuary in the middle of the piazza, representative of the Maremma
+and Family returning thanks to the Grand Duke Leopold III. of Tuscany
+for his goodness in causing her swamps to be drained. The Maremma and
+her children are arrayed in the scant draperies of Allegory, but
+the Grand Duke is fully dressed, and is shown looking down with some
+surprise at their figures, and with a visible doubt of the propriety
+of their public appearance in that state.
+
+There was also a Museum at Grossetto, and I wonder what was in it?
+
+The wall of the town was perfect yet, though the moat at its feet had
+been so long dry that it was only to be known from the adjacent fields
+by the richness of its soil. The top of the wall had been leveled, and
+planted with shade, and turned into a peaceful promenade, like most of
+such mediæval defenses in Italy; though I am not sure that a little
+military life did not still linger about a bastion here and there.
+From somewhere, when we strolled out early in the morning, to walk
+upon the wall, there came to us a throb of drums; but I believe that
+the only armed men we saw, beside the officers in the piazza, were
+the numerous sportsmen resorting at that season to Grossetto for
+the excellent shooting in the marshes. All the way to Florence we
+continued to meet them and their dogs; and our inn at Grossetto
+overflowed with abundance of game. On the kitchen floor and in the
+court were heaps of larks, pheasants, quails, and beccafichi, at which
+a troop of scullion-boys constantly plucked, and from which the great,
+noble, beautiful, white-aproned cook forever fried, stewed, broiled,
+and roasted. We lived chiefly upon these generous birds during our
+sojourn, and found, when we attempted to vary our bill of fare, that
+the very genteel waiter attending us had few distinct ideas beyond
+them. He was part of the repairs and improvements which that
+hostelry had recently undergone, and had evidently come in with
+the four-pronged forks, the chromo-lithographs of Victor Emanuel,
+Garibaldi, Solferino, and Magenta in the large dining-room, and the
+iron stove in the small one. He had nothing, evidently, in common with
+the brick floors of the bed-chambers, and the ancient rooms with
+great fire-places. He strove to give a Florentine blandishment to the
+rusticity of life in the Maremma; and we felt sure that he must know
+what beefsteak was. When we ordered it, he assumed to be perfectly
+conversant with it, started to bring it, paused, turned, and, with a
+great sacrifice of personal dignity, demanded, "_Bifsteca di manzo, o
+bifsteca di motone_?"--"Beefsteak of beef, or beefsteak of mutton?"
+
+Of Grossetto proper, this is all I remember, if I except a boy whom I
+heard singing after dark in the streets,--
+
+  "Camicia rossa, O Garibaldi!"
+
+The cause of our sojourn there was an instance of _forza maggiore_, as
+the agent of the diligence company defiantly expressed it, in refusing
+us damages for our overturn into the river. It was in the early
+part of the winter when we started from Rome for Venice, and we were
+travelling northward by diligence because the railways were still more
+or less interrupted by the storms and floods predicted of Matthieu
+de la Drôme,--the only reliable prophet France has produced since
+Voltaire;--and if our accident was caused by an overruling Providence,
+the company, according to the very law of its existence, was not
+responsible. To be sure, we did not see how an overruling Providence
+was to blame for loading upon our diligence the baggage of two
+diligences, or for the clumsiness of our driver; but on the other
+hand, it is certain that the company did not make it rain or cause
+the inundation. And, in fine, although we could not have travelled
+by railway, we were masters to have taken the steamer instead of the
+diligence at Civita Vecchia.
+
+The choice of either of these means of travel had presented itself in
+vivid hues of disadvantage all the way from Rome to the Papal port,
+where the French steamer for Leghorn lay dancing a hornpipe upon the
+short, chopping waves, while we approached by railway. We had
+leisure enough to make the decision, if that was all we wanted. Our
+engine-driver had derived his ideas of progress from an Encyclical
+Letter, and the train gave every promise of arriving at Civita Vecchia
+five hundred years behind time. But such was the desolating and
+depressing influence of the weather and the landscape, that we reached
+Civita Vecchia as undecided as we had left Rome. On the one hand,
+there had been the land, soaked and sodden,--wild, shagged with
+scrubby growths of timber and brooded over by sullen clouds, and
+visibly inhabited only by shepherds, leaning upon their staves at
+an angle of forty-five degrees, and looking, in their immovable
+dejection, with their legs wrapped in long-haired goat-skins, like
+satyrs that had been converted, and were trying to do right; turning
+dim faces to us, they warned us with every mute appeal against the
+land, as a waste of mud from one end of Italy to the other. On
+the other hand, there was the sea-wind raving about our train and
+threatening to blow it over, and whenever we drew near the coast,
+heaping the waves upon the beach in thundering menace.
+
+We weakly and fearfully remembered our former journeys by diligence
+over broken railway routes; we recalled our cruel voyage from Genoa to
+Naples by sea; and in a state of pitiable dismay we ate five francs'
+worth at the restaurant of the Civita Vecchia station before we knew
+it, and long before we had made up our minds. Still we might have
+lingered and hesitated, and perhaps returned to Rome at last, but for
+the dramatic resolution of the old man who solicited passengers for
+the diligence, and carried their passports for a final Papal _visa_
+at the police-office. By the account he gave of himself, he was one of
+the best men in the world, and unique in those parts for honesty and
+truthfulness; and he besought us, out of that affectionate interest
+with which our very aspect had inspired him, not to go by steamer, but
+to go by diligence, which in nineteen hours would land us safe,
+and absolutely refreshed by the journey, at the railway station in
+Follonica. And now, once, would we go by diligence? twice, would we
+go? three times, would we go?
+
+"Signore," said our benefactor, angrily, "I lose my time with you;"
+and ran away, to be called back in the course of destiny, as he knew
+well enough, and besought to take us as a special favor.
+
+From the passports he learned that there was official dignity among
+us, and addressed the unworthy bearer of public honors as Eccellenza,
+and, at parting bequeathed his advantage to the conductor, commending
+us all in set terms to his courtesy. He hovered caressingly about us
+as long as we remained, straining politeness to do us some last little
+service; and when the diligence rolled away, he did all that one man
+could to give us a round of applause.
+
+We laughed together at this silly old man, when out of sight; but we
+confessed that, if travel in our own country ever came, with advancing
+corruption, to be treated with the small deceits practiced upon it in
+Italy, it was not likely to be treated with the small civilities also
+there attendant on it,--and so tried to console ourselves.
+
+At the moment of departure, we were surprised to have enter the
+diligence a fellow-countryman, whom we had first seen on the road from
+Naples to Rome. He had since crossed our path with that iteration of
+travel which brings you again and again in view of the same trunks
+and the same tourists in the round of Europe, and finally at Civita
+Vecchia he had turned up, a silent spectator of our scene with the
+agent of the diligence, and had gone off apparently a confirmed
+passenger by steamer. Perhaps a nearer view of the sailor's hornpipe,
+as danced by that vessel in the harbor, shook his resolution. At
+any rate, here he was again, and with his ticket for Follonica,--a
+bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked man, and we will say a citizen of Portland,
+though he was not. For the first time in our long acquaintance with
+one another's faces, we entered into conversation, and wondered
+whether we should find brigands or any thing to eat on the road,
+without expectation of finding either. In respect of robbers, we were
+not disappointed; but shortly after nightfall we stopped at a lonely
+post-house to change horses, and found that the landlord had so far
+counted on our appearance as to have, just roasted and fragrantly
+fuming, a leg of lamb, with certain small fried fish, and a
+sufficiency of bread. It was a very lonely place as I say; the sky was
+gloomy overhead; and the wildness of the landscape all about us gave
+our provision quite a gamy flavor; and brigands could have added
+nothing to our sense of solitude.
+
+The road creeps along the coast for some distance from Civita Vecchia,
+within hearing of the sea, and nowhere widely forsakes it, I believe,
+all the way to Follonica. The country is hilly, and we stopped every
+two hours to change horses; at which times we looked out, and, seeing
+that it was a gray and windy night, though not rainy, exulted that we
+had not taken the steamer. With very little change, the wisdom of
+our decision in favor of the diligence formed the burden of our talk
+during the whole night; and to think of eluded sea-sickness requited
+us in the agony of our break-neck efforts to catch a little sleep, as,
+mounted upon our nightmares, we rode steeple-chases up and down the
+highways and by-ways of horror. Any thing that absolutely awakened us
+was accounted a blessing; and I remember few things in life with so
+keen a pleasure as the summons that came to us to descend from our
+places and cross a river in one boat, while the two diligences of
+our train followed in another. Here we had time to see our
+fellow-passengers, as the pulsating light of their cigars illumined
+their faces, and to discover among them that Italian, common to all
+large companies, who speaks English, and is very eager to practice
+it with you,--who is such a benefactor if you do not know his own
+language, and such a bore if you do. After this, being landed, it was
+rapture to stroll up and down the good road, and feel it hard and real
+under our feet, and not an abysmal impalpability, while all the
+grim shapes of our dreams fled to the spectral line of small boats
+sustaining the ferry-barge, and swaying slowly from it as the drowned
+men at their keels tugged them against the tide.
+
+"_S' accommodino, Signori_!" cries the cheerful voice of the
+conductor, and we ascend to our places in the diligence. The
+nightmares are brought out again; we mount, and renew the
+steeple-chase as before.
+
+Suddenly, it all comes to an end, and we sit wide awake in the
+diligence, amid a silence only broken by the hiss of rain against the
+windows, and the sweep of gusts upon the roof. The diligence stands
+still; there is no rattle of harness, nor other sound to prove that we
+have arrived at the spot by other means than dropping from the clouds.
+The idea that we are passengers in the last diligence destroyed
+before the Deluge, and are now waiting our fate on the highest ground
+accessible to wheels, fades away as the day dimly breaks, and we find
+ourselves planted, as the Italians say, on the banks of another
+river. There is no longer any visible conductor, the horses have been
+spirited away, the driver has vanished.
+
+The rain beats and beats upon the roof, and begins to drop through
+upon us in great, wrathful tears, while the river before us rushes
+away with a momently swelling flood. Enter now from the depths of
+the storm a number of rainy peasants, with our conductor and driver
+perfectly waterlogged, and group themselves on the low, muddy shore,
+near a flat ferry-barge, evidently wanting but a hint of _forza
+maggiore_ to go down with any thing put into it. A moment they
+dispute in pantomime, sending now and then a windy tone of protest
+and expostulation to our ears, and then they drop into a motionless
+silence, and stand there in the tempest, not braving it, but enduring
+it with the pathetic resignation of their race, as if it were some
+form of hopeless political oppression. At last comes the conductor to
+us and says, It is impossible for our diligences to cross in the
+boat, and he has sent for others to meet us on the opposite shore.
+He expected them long before this, but we see! They are not come.
+Patience and malediction!
+
+Remaining planted in these unfriendly circumstances from four o'clock
+till ten, we have still the effrontery to be glad that we did not
+take the steamer. What a storm that must be at sea! When at last
+our connecting diligences appear on the other shore, we are almost
+light-hearted, and make a jest of the Ombrone, as we perilously pass
+it in the ferry-boat too weak for our diligences. Between the landing
+and the vehicles there is a space of heavy mud to cross, and when we
+reach them we find the _coupé_ appointed us occupied by three young
+Englishmen, who insist that they shall be driven to the boat. With
+that graceful superiority which endears their nation to the world, and
+makes the travelling Englishman a universal favorite, they keep
+the seats to which they have no longer any right, while the tempest
+drenches the ladies to whom the places belong; and it is only by the
+_forza maggiore_ of our conductor that they can be dislodged. In
+the mean time the Portland man exchanges with them the assurances of
+personal and national esteem, which that mighty bond of friendship,
+the language of Shakespeare and Milton, enables us to offer so
+idiomatically to our transatlantic cousins.
+
+What Grossetto was like, as we first rode through it, we scarcely
+looked to see. In four or five hours we should strike the railroad at
+Follonica; and we merely asked of intermediate places that they
+should not detain us. We dined in Grossetto at an inn of the Larthian
+period,--a cold inn and a damp, which seemed never to have been
+swept since the broom dropped from the grasp of the last Etrurian
+chambermaid,--and we ate with the two-pronged iron forks of an extinct
+civilization. All the while we dined, a boy tried to kindle a fire
+to warm us, and beguiled his incessant failures with stories of
+inundation on the road ahead of us. But we believed him so little,
+that when he said a certain stream near Grossetto was impassable, our
+company all but hissed him.
+
+When we left the town and hurried into the open country, we perceived
+that he had only too great reason to be an alarmist. Every little
+rill was risen, and boiling over with the pride of harm, and the broad
+fields lay hid under the yellow waters that here and there washed over
+the road. Yet the freshet only presented itself to us as a pleasant
+excitement; and even when we came to a place where the road itself
+was covered for a quarter of a mile, we scarcely looked outside the
+diligence to see how deep the water was. We were surprised when our
+horses were brought to a stand on a rising ground, and the conductor,
+cap in hand, appeared at the door. He was a fat, well-natured man,
+full of a smiling goodwill; and he stood before us in a radiant
+desperation.
+
+Would Eccellenza descend, look at the water in front, and decide
+whether to go on? The conductor desired to content; it displeased him
+to delay,--_ma, in somma_!--the rest was confided to the conductor's
+eloquent shoulders and eyebrows.
+
+Eccellenza, descending, beheld but a disheartening prospect. On every
+hand the country was under water. The two diligences stood on a stone
+bridge spanning the stream, that, now swollen to an angry torrent,
+brawled over a hundred yards of the road before us. Beyond, the ground
+rose, and on its slope stood a farm-house up to its second story in
+water. Without the slightest hope in his purpose and merely as an
+experiment, Eccellenza suggested that a man should be sent in on
+horseback; which being done, man and horse in a moment floundered into
+swimming depths.
+
+The conductor, vigilantly regarding Eccellenza, gave a great shrug of
+desolation.
+
+Eccellenza replied with a foreigner's broken shrug,--a shrug of
+sufficiently correct construction, but wanting the tonic accent,
+as one may say, though expressing, however imperfectly, an equal
+desolation.
+
+It appeared to be the part of wisdom not to go ahead, but to go back
+if we could; and we reëntered the water we had just crossed. It had
+risen a little meanwhile, and the road could now be traced only by the
+telegraph-poles. The diligence before us went safely through; but our
+driver, trusting rather to inspiration than precedent, did not follow
+it carefully, and directly drove us over the side of a small viaduct.
+All the baggage of the train having been lodged upon the roof of our
+diligence, the unwieldy vehicle now lurched heavily, hesitated, as if
+preparing, like Cæsar, to fall decently, and went over on its side
+with a stately deliberation that gave us ample time to arrange our
+plans for getting out.
+
+The torrent was only some three feet deep, but it was swift and muddy,
+and it was with a fine sense of shipwreck that Eccellenza felt his
+boots filling with water, while a conviction that it would have been
+better, after all, to have taken the steamer, struck coldly home to
+him. We opened the window in the top side of the diligence, and
+lifted the ladies through it and the conductor, in the character of
+life-boat, bore them ashore; while the driver cursed his horses in
+a sullen whisper, and could with difficulty be diverted from that
+employment to cut the lines and save one of them from drowning.
+
+Here our compatriot, whose conversation with the Englishman at the
+Ombrone we had lately admired, showed traits of strict and severe
+method which afterward came into even bolder relief. The ladies being
+rescued, he applied himself to the rescue of their hats, cloaks,
+rubbers, muffs, books, and bags, and handed them up through the window
+with tireless perseverance, making an effort to wring or dry each
+article in turn. The other gentleman on top received them all rather
+grimly, and had not perhaps been amused by the situation but for the
+exploit of his hat. It was of the sort called in Italian as in English
+slang a stove-pipe (_canna_), and having been made in Italy, it was
+of course too large for its wearer. It had never been any thing but a
+horror and reproach to him, and he was now inexpressibly delighted
+to see it steal out of the diligence in company with one of the
+red-leather cushions, and glide darkly down the flood. It nodded and
+nodded to the cushion with a superhuman tenderness and elegance, and
+had a preposterous air of whispering, as it drifted out of sight,--
+
+  "It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles,--
+  It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down."
+
+The romantic interest of this episode had hardly died away, when our
+adventure acquired an idyllic flavor from the appearance on the scene
+of four peasants in an ox-cart. These the conductor tried to engage to
+bring out the baggage and right the fallen diligence; and they, after
+making him a little speech upon the value of their health, which
+might be injured, asked him, tentatively, two hundred francs for
+the service. The simple incident enforced the fact already known to
+us,--that, if Italians sometimes take advantage of strangers, they
+are equally willing to prey upon each other; but I doubt if any thing
+could have taught a foreigner the sweetness with which our conductor
+bore the enormity, and turned quietly from those brigands to carry the
+Portland man from the wreck, on which he lingered, to the shore.
+
+Here in the gathering twilight the passengers of both diligences
+grouped themselves, and made merry over the common disaster. As the
+conductor and the drivers brought off the luggage our spirits rose
+with the arrival of each trunk, and we were pleased or not as we found
+it soaked or dry. We applauded and admired the greater sufferers among
+us: a lady who opened a dripping box was felt to have perpetrated a
+pleasantry; and a Brazilian gentleman, whose luggage dropped to pieces
+and was scattered in the flood about the diligence, was looked upon as
+a very subtile humorist. Our own contribution to these witty passages
+was the epigrammatic display of a reeking trunk full of the pretty
+rubbish people bring away from Rome and Naples,--copies of Pompeian
+frescos more ruinous than the originals; photographs floating loose
+from their cards; little earthen busts reduced to the lumpishness of
+common clay; Roman scarfs stained and blotted out of all memory of
+their recent hues; Roman pearls clinging together in clammy masses.
+
+We were a band of brothers and sisters, as we all crowded into one
+diligence and returned to Grossetto. Arrived there, our party, knowing
+that a public conveyance in Italy--and everywhere else--always stops
+at the worst inn in a place, made bold to seek another, and found it
+without ado, though the person who undertook to show it spoke of it
+mysteriously and as of difficult access, and tried to make the simple
+affair as like a scene of grand opera as he could.
+
+We took one of the ancient rooms in which there was a vast fire-place,
+as already mentioned, and we there kindled such a fire as could not
+have been known in that fuel-sparing land for ages. The drying of the
+clothes was an affair that drew out all the energy and method of our
+compatriot, and at a late hour we left him moving about among the
+garments that dangled and dripped from pegs and hooks and lines,
+dealing with them as a physician with his sick, and tenderly nursing
+his dress-coat, which he wrung and shook and smoothed and pulled this
+way and that with a never-satisfied anxiety. At midnight, he hired
+a watcher to keep up the fire and turn the steaming raiment, and,
+returning at four o'clock, found his watcher dead asleep before the
+empty fire-place. But I rather applaud than blame the watcher for
+this. He must have been a man of iron nerve to fall asleep amid all
+that phantasmal show of masks and disguises. What if those reeking
+silks had forsaken their nails, and, decking themselves with the
+blotted Roman scarfs and the slimy Roman pearls, had invited the
+dress-coats to look over the dripping photographs? Or if all those
+drowned garments had assumed the characters of the people whom they
+had grown to resemble, and had sat down to hear the shade of Pia de'
+Tolommei rehearse the story of her sad fate in the Maremma? I say, if
+a watcher could sleep in such company, he was right to do so.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the third day after our return to Grossetto, we gathered together
+our damaged effects, and packed them into refractory trunks. Then
+we held the customary discussion with the landlord concerning the
+effrontery of his account, and drove off once more toward Follonica.
+We could scarcely recognize the route for the one we had recently
+passed over; and it was not until we came to the scene of our wreck,
+and found the diligence stranded high and dry upon the roadside, that
+we could believe the whole landscape about us had been flooded three
+days before. The offending stream had shrunk back to its channel, and
+now seemed to feign an unconsciousness of its late excess, and had
+a virtuous air of not knowing how in the world to account for that
+upturned diligence. The waters, we learned, had begun to subside the
+night after our disaster; and the vehicle might have been righted
+and drawn off--for it was not in the least injured--forty-eight hours
+previously; but I suppose it was not _en règle_ to touch it without
+orders from Rome. I picture it to myself still lying there, in the
+heart of the marshes, and thrilling sympathetic travel with the
+spectacle of its ultimate ruin:
+
+  "Disfecemi Maremma."
+
+We reached Follonica at last, and then the cars hurried us to Leghorn.
+We were thoroughly humbled in spirit, and had no longer any doubt
+that we did ill to take the diligence at Civita Vecchia instead of
+the steamer; for we had been, not nineteen hours, but four days on the
+road, and we had suffered as aforementioned.
+
+But we were destined to be partially restored to our self-esteem, if
+not entirely comforted for our losses, when we sat down to dinner in
+the Hotel Washington, and the urbane head-waiter, catching the drift
+of our English discourse, asked us,--
+
+"Have the signori heard that the French steamer, which left Civita
+Vecchia the same day with their diligence, had to put back and lie in
+port more than two days on account of the storm? She is but now come
+into Leghorn, after a very dangerous passage."
+
+
+
+
+AT PADUA
+
+I.
+
+Those of my readers who have frequented the garden of Doctor
+Rappaccini no doubt recall with perfect distinctness the quaint
+old city of Padua. They remember its miles and miles of dim arcade
+over-roofing the sidewalks everywhere, affording excellent opportunity
+for the flirtation of lovers by day and the vengeance of rivals by
+night. They have seen the now-vacant streets thronged with maskers,
+and the Venetian Podestà going in gorgeous state to and from the vast
+Palazzo della Ragione. They have witnessed ringing tournaments in
+those sad empty squares, and races in the Prato della Valle, and
+many other wonders of different epochs, and their pleasure makes me
+half-sorry that I should have lived for several years within an hour
+by rail from Padua, and should know little or nothing of these great
+sights from actual observation. I take shame to myself for having
+visited Padua so often and so familiarly as I used to do,--for having
+been bored and hungry there,--for having had toothache there, upon one
+occasion,--for having rejoiced more in a cup of coffee at Pedrocchi's
+than in the whole history of Padua,--for having slept repeatedly in
+the bad-bedded hotels of Padua and never once dreamt of Portia,--for
+having been more taken by the _salti mortali_[_Salti mortali_ are
+those prodigious efforts of mental arithmetic by which Italian
+waiters, in verbally presenting your account, arrive at six as the
+product of two and two.] of a waiter who summed up my account at a
+Paduan restaurant, than by all the strategies with which the city has
+been many times captured and recaptured. Had I viewed Padua only over
+the wall of Doctor Rappaccini's garden, how different my impressions
+of the city would now be! This is one of the drawbacks of actual
+knowledge. "Ah! how can you write about Spain when once you have been
+there?" asked Heine of Théophile Gautier setting out on a journey
+thither.
+
+Nevertheless it seems to me that I remember something about Padua with
+a sort of romantic pleasure. There was a certain charm which I can
+dimly recall, in sauntering along the top of the old wall of the
+city, and looking down upon the plumy crests of the Indian corn that
+flourished up so mightily from the dry bed of the moat. At such times
+I could not help figuring to myself the many sieges that the wall had
+known, with the fierce assault by day, the secret attack by night, the
+swarming foe upon the plains below, the bristling arms of the besieged
+upon the wall, the boom of the great mortars made of ropes and leather
+and throwing mighty balls of stone, the stormy flight of arrows, the
+ladders planted against the defenses and staggering headlong into the
+moat, enriched for future agriculture not only by its sluggish waters,
+but by the blood of many men. I suppose that most of these visions
+were old stage spectacles furbished up anew, and that my armies
+were chiefly equipped with their obsolete implements of warfare from
+museums of armor and from cabinets of antiquities; but they were very
+vivid for all that.
+
+I was never able, in passing a certain one of the city gates, to
+divest myself of an historic interest in the great loads of hay
+waiting admission on the outside. For an instant they masked again the
+Venetian troops that, in the War of the League of Cambray, entered the
+city in the hay-carts, shot down the landsknechts at the gates, and,
+uniting with the citizens, cut the German garrison to pieces. But it
+was a thing long past. The German garrison was here again; and the
+heirs of the landsknechts went clanking through the gate to the
+parade-ground, with that fierce clamor of their kettle-drums which is
+so much fiercer because unmingled with the noise of fifes. Once more
+now the Germans are gone, and, let us trust, forever; but when I
+saw them, there seemed little hope of their going. They had a great
+Biergarten on the top of the wall, and they had set up the altars of
+their heavy Bacchus in many parts of the city.
+
+I please myself with thinking that, if I walked on such a spring
+day as this in the arcaded Paduan streets, I should catch glimpses,
+through the gate-ways of the palaces, of gardens full of vivid bloom,
+and of fountains that tinkle there forever. If it were autumn, and
+I were in the great market-place before the Palazzo della Ragione, I
+should hear the baskets of amber-hued and honeyed grapes humming with
+the murmur of multitudinous bees, and making a music as if the wine
+itself were already singing in their gentle hearts. It is a great
+field of succulent verdure, that wide old market-place; and fancy
+loves to browse about among its gay stores of fruits and vegetables,
+brought thither by the world-old peasant-women who have been bringing
+fruits and vegetables to the Paduan market for so many centuries. They
+sit upon the ground before their great panniers, and knit and doze,
+and wake up with a drowsy "_Comandala_?" as you linger to look
+at their grapes. They have each a pair of scales,--the emblem of
+Injustice,--and will weigh you out a scant measure of the fruit if you
+like. Their faces are yellow as parchment, and Time has written them
+so full of wrinkles that there is not room for another line. Doubtless
+these old parchment visages are palimpsests, and would tell the whole
+history of Padua if you could get at each successive inscription.
+Among their primal records there must be some account of the Roman
+city, as each little contadinella remembered it on market-days; and
+one might read of the terror of Attila's sack, a little later, with
+the peasant-maid's personal recollections of the bold Hunnish trooper
+who ate up the grapes in her basket, and kissed her hard, round red
+cheeks,--for in that time she was a blooming girl,--and paid nothing
+for either privilege. What wild and confused reminiscences on the
+wrinkled visage we should find thereafter of the fierce republican
+times, of Ecelino, of the Carraras, of the Venetian rule! And is it
+not sad to think of systems and peoples all passing away, and these
+ancient women lasting still, and still selling grapes in front of the
+Palazzo della Ragione? What a long mortality!
+
+The youngest of their number is a thousand years older than the
+palace, which was begun in the twelfth century, and which is much the
+same now as it was when first completed. I know that, if I entered it,
+I should be sure of finding the great hall of the palace--the vastest
+hall in the world--dim and dull and dusty and delightful, with nothing
+in it except at one end Donatello's colossal marble-headed wooden
+horse of Troy, stared at from the other end by the two dog-faced
+Egyptian women in basalt placed there by Belzoni.
+
+Late in the drowsy summer afternoons I should have the Court of the
+University all to myself, and might study unmolested the blazons of
+the noble youth who have attended the school in different centuries
+ever since 1200, and have left their escutcheons on the walls to
+commemorate them. At the foot of the stairway ascending to the schools
+from the court is the statue of the learned lady who was once a
+professor in the University, and who, if her likeness belie not her
+looks, must have given a great charm to student life in other times.
+At present there are no lady professors at Padua any more than at
+Harvard; and during late years the schools have suffered greatly from
+the interference of the Austrian government, which frequently closed
+them for months, on account of political demonstrations among the
+students. But now there is an end of this and many other stupid
+oppressions; and the time-honored University will doubtless regain
+its ancient importance. Even in 1864 it had nearly fifteen hundred
+students, and one met them everywhere under the arcades, and could
+not well mistake them, with that blended air of pirate and dandy which
+these studious young men loved to assume. They were to be seen a good
+deal on the promenades outside the walls, where the Paduan ladies are
+driven in their carriages in the afternoon, and where one sees the
+blood-horses and fine equipages for which Padua is famous. There used
+once to be races in the Prato della Valle, after the Italian notion of
+horse-races; but these are now discontinued, and there is nothing to
+be found there but the statues of scholars and soldiers and statesmen,
+posted in a circle around the old race-course. If you strolled thither
+about dusk on such a day as this, you might see the statues unbend a
+little from their stony rigidity, and in the failing light nod to each
+other very pleasantly through the trees. And if you stayed in Padua
+over night, what could be better to-morrow morning than a stroll
+through the great Botanical Garden,--the oldest botanical garden in
+the world,--the garden which first received in Europe the strange
+and splendid growths of our hemisphere,--the garden where Doctor
+Rappaccini doubtless found the germ of his mortal plant?
+
+On the whole, I believe I would rather go this moment to Padua than to
+Lowell or Lawrence, or even to Worcester; and as to the disadvantage
+of having seen Padua, I begin to think the whole place has now assumed
+so fantastic a character in my mind that I am almost as well qualified
+to write of it as if I had merely dreamed it.
+
+The day that we first visited the city was very rainy, and we spent
+most of the time in viewing the churches. These, even after the
+churches of Venice, one finds rich in art and historic interest, and
+they in no instance fall into the maniacal excesses of the Renaissance
+to which some of the temples of the latter city abandon themselves.
+Their architecture forms a sort of border-land between the Byzantine
+of Venice and the Lombardic of Verona. The superb domes of St.
+Anthony's emulate those of St. Mark's; and the porticos of other
+Paduan churches rest upon the backs of bird-headed lions and leopards
+that fascinate with their mystery and beauty.
+
+It was the wish to see the attributive Giottos in the Chapter which
+drew us first to St. Anthony's, and we saw them with the satisfaction
+naturally attending the contemplation of frescos discovered only since
+1858, after having been hidden under plaster and whitewash for many
+centuries; but we could not believe that Giotto's fame was destined
+to gain much by their rescue from oblivion. They are in nowise to
+be compared with this master's frescos in the Chapel of the
+Annunziata,--which, indeed, is in every way a place of wonder and
+delight. You reach it by passing through a garden lane bordered with
+roses, and a taciturn gardener comes out with clinking keys, and lets
+you into the chapel, where there is nobody but Giotto and Dante, nor
+seems to have been for ages. Cool it is, and of a pulverous smell, as
+a sacred place should be; a blessed benching goes round the walls, and
+you sit down and take unlimited comfort in the frescos. The gardener
+leaves you alone to the solitude and the silence, in which the talk
+of the painter and the exile is plain enough. Their contemporaries and
+yours are cordial in their gay companionship: through the half-open
+door falls, in a pause of the rain, the same sunshine that they saw
+lie there; the deathless birds that they heard sing out in the garden
+trees; it is the fresh sweetness of the grass mown so many hundred
+years ago that breathes through all the lovely garden grounds.
+
+But in the midst of this pleasant communion with the past, you have
+a lurking pain; for you have hired your brougham by the hour; and you
+presently quit the Chapel of Giotto on this account.
+
+We had chosen our driver from among many other drivers of broughams in
+the vicinity of Pedrocchi's, because he had such an honest look, and
+was not likely, we thought, to deal unfairly with us.
+
+"But first," said the signor who had selected him, "how much is your
+brougham an hour?"
+
+So and so.
+
+"Show me the tariff of fares."
+
+"There is no tariff."
+
+"There is. Show it to me."
+
+"It is lost, signor."
+
+"I think not. It is here in this pocket. Get it out."
+
+The tariff appears, and with it the fact that he had demanded just
+what the boatman of the ballad received in gift,--thrice his fee.
+
+The driver mounted his seat, and served us so faithfully that day in
+Padua that we took him the next day for Arquà. At the end, when he
+had received his due, and a handsome _mancia_ besides, he was still
+unsatisfied, and referred to the tariff in proof that he had been
+under-paid. On that confronted and defeated, he thanked us very
+cordially, gave us the number of his brougham, and begged us to ask
+for him when we came next to Padua and needed a carriage.
+
+From the Chapel of the Annunziata he drove us to the Church of Santa
+Giustina, where is a very famous and noble picture by Romanino. But as
+this writing has nothing in the world to do with art, I here dismiss
+that subject, and with a gross and idle delight follow the sacristan
+down under the church to the prison of Santa Giustina.
+
+Of all the faculties of the mind there is none so little fatiguing to
+exercise as mere wonder; and, for my own sake, I try always to wonder
+at things without the least critical reservation. I therefore, in the
+sense of deglutition, bolted this prison at once, though subsequent
+experiences led me to look with grave indigestion upon the whole idea
+of prisons, their authenticity, and even their existence.
+
+As far as mere dimensions are concerned, the prison of Santa Giustina
+was not a hard one to swallow, being only three feet wide by about
+ten feet in length. In this limited space, Santa Giustina passed five
+years of the paternal reign of Nero (a virtuous and a long-suffering
+prince, whom, singularly enough, no historic artist has yet arisen to
+whitewash), and was then brought out into the larger cell adjoining,
+to suffer a blessed martyrdom. I am not sure now whether the sacristan
+said she was dashed to death on the stones, or cut to pieces with
+knives; but whatever the form of martyrdom, an iron ring in the
+ceiling was employed in it, as I know from seeing the ring,--a
+curiously well-preserved piece of iron-mongery. Within the narrow
+prison of the saint, and just under the grating, through which the
+sacristan thrust his candle to illuminate it, was a mountain of
+candle-drippings,--a monument to the fact that faith still largely
+exists in this doubting world. My own credulity, not only with regard
+to this prison, but also touching the coffin of St. Luke, which I saw
+in the church, had so wrought upon the esteem of the sacristan, that
+he now took me to a well, into which, he said, had been cast the bones
+of three thousand Christian martyrs. He lowered a lantern into the
+well, and assured me that, if I looked through a certain screenwork
+there, I could see the bones. On experiment I could not see the
+bones, but this circumstance did not cause me to doubt their presence,
+particularly as I did see upon the screen a great number of coins
+offered for the repose of the martyrs' souls. I threw down some
+_soldi_, and thus enthralled the sacristan.
+
+If the signor cared to see prisons, he said, the driver must take him
+to those of Ecelino, at present the property of a private gentleman
+near by. As I had just bought a history of Ecelino, at a great
+bargain, from a second-hand book-stall, and had a lively interest in
+all the enormities of that nobleman, I sped the driver instantly to
+the villa of the Signor P----.
+
+It depends here altogether upon the freshness or mustiness of the
+reader's historical reading whether he cares to be reminded more
+particularly who Ecelino was. He flourished balefully in the early
+half of the thirteenth century as lord of Vicenza, Verona, Padua, and
+Brescia, and was defeated and hurt to death in an attempt to possess
+himself of Milan. He was in every respect a remarkable man for
+that time,--fearless, abstemious, continent, avaricious, hardy,
+and unspeakably ambitious and cruel. He survived and suppressed
+innumerable conspiracies, escaping even the thrust of the assassin
+whom the fame of his enormous wickedness had caused the Old Man of the
+Mountain to send against him. As lord of Padua he was more incredibly
+severe and bloody in his rule than as lord of the other cities, for
+the Paduans had been latest free, and conspired the most frequently
+against him. He extirpated whole families on suspicion that a single
+member had been concerned in a meditated revolt. Little children and
+helpless women suffered hideous mutilation and shame at his hands.
+Six prisons in Padua were constantly filled by his arrests. The whole
+country was traversed by witnesses of his cruelties,--men and women
+deprived of an arm or leg, and begging from door to door. He had long
+been excommunicated; at last the Church proclaimed a crusade against
+him, and his lieutenant and nephew--more demoniacal, if possible,
+than himself--was driven out of Padua while he was operating against
+Mantua. Ecelino retired to Verona, and maintained a struggle against
+the crusade for nearly two years longer, with a courage which never
+failed him. Wounded and taken prisoner, the soldiers of the victorious
+army gathered about him, and heaped insult and reproach upon him;
+and one furious peasant, whose brother's feet had been cut off by
+Ecelino's command, dealt the helpless monster four blows upon the head
+with a scythe. By some, Ecelino is said to have died of these wounds
+alone; but by others it is related that his death was a kind of
+suicide, inasmuch as he himself put the case past surgery by tearing
+off the bandages from his hurts, and refusing all medicines.
+
+
+II.
+
+Entering at the enchanted portal of the Villa P----, we found
+ourselves in a realm of wonder. It was our misfortune not to see the
+magician who compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but
+for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his
+greatness. Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but
+lugubrious fancy, which everywhere tended to a monumental and mortuary
+effect. A sort of vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped
+and glimmered the garden. The walls of the vestibule were covered with
+inscriptions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety
+of all ages concerning life and death; we began with Confucius, and
+we ended with Benjamino Franklino. But as if these ideas of mortality
+were not sufficiently depressing, the funereal Signor P---- had
+collected into earthen _amphoræ_ the ashes of the most famous men of
+ancient and modern times, and arranged them so that a sense of their
+number and variety should at once strike his visitor. Each jar was
+conspicuously labeled with the name its illustrious dust had borne
+in life; and if one escaped with comparative cheerfulness from the
+thought that Seneca had died, there were in the very next pot the
+cinders of Napoleon to bully him back to a sense of his mortality.
+
+We were glad to have the gloomy fascination of these objects broken by
+the custodian, who approached to ask if we wished to see the prisons
+of Ecelino, and we willingly followed him into the rain out of our
+sepulchral shelter.
+
+Between the vestibule and the towers of the tyrant lay that garden
+already mentioned, and our guide led us through ranks of weeping
+statuary, and rainy bowers, and showery lanes of shrubbery, until we
+reached the door of his cottage. While he entered to fetch the key
+to the prisons, we noted that the towers were freshly painted and
+in perfect repair; and indeed the custodian said frankly enough, on
+reappearing, that they were merely built over the prisons on the site
+of the original towers. The storied stream of the Bacchiglione sweeps
+through the grounds, and now, swollen by the rainfall, it roared, a
+yellow torrent, under a corner of the prisons. The towers rise from
+masses of foliage, and form no unpleasing feature of what must be, in
+spite of Signor P----, a delightful Italian garden in sunny weather.
+The ground is not so flat as elsewhere in Padua, and this inequality
+gives an additional picturesqueness to the place. But as we were
+come in search of horrors, we scorned these merely lovely things, and
+hastened to immure ourselves in the dungeons below. The custodian,
+lighting a candle, (which ought, we felt, to have been a torch,) went
+before.
+
+We found the cells, though narrow and dark, not uncomfortable, and the
+guide conceded that they had undergone some repairs since Ecelino's
+time. But all the horrors for which we had come were there in perfect
+grisliness, and labeled by the ingenious Signor P---- with Latin
+inscriptions.
+
+In the first cell was a shrine of the Virgin, set in the wall. Beneath
+this, while the wretched prisoner knelt in prayer, a trap-door opened
+and precipitated him upon the points of knives, from which his body
+fell into the Bacchiglione below. In the next cell, held by some rusty
+iron rings to the wall, was a skeleton, hanging by the wrists.
+
+"This," said the guide, "was another punishment of which Ecelino was
+very fond."
+
+A dreadful doubt seized my mind. "Was this skeleton found here?" I
+demanded.
+
+Without faltering an instant, without so much as winking an eye, the
+custodian replied, "_Appunto_."
+
+It was a great relief, and restored me to confidence in the
+establishment. I am at a loss to explain how my faith should have been
+confirmed afterwards by coming upon a guillotine--an awful instrument
+in the likeness of a straw-cutter, with a decapitated wooden figure
+under its blade--which the custodian confessed to be a modern
+improvement placed there by Signor P----. Yet my credulity was so
+strengthened by his candor, that I accepted without hesitation the
+torture of the water-drop when we came to it. The water-jar was as
+well preserved as if placed there but yesterday, and the skeleton
+beneath it--found as we saw it--was entire and perfect.
+
+In the adjoining cell sat a skeleton--found as we saw it--with its
+neck in the clutch of the garrote, which was one of Ecelino's more
+merciful punishments; while in still another cell the ferocity of
+the tyrant appeared in the penalty inflicted upon the wretch whose
+skeleton had been hanging for ages--as we saw it--head downwards from
+the ceiling.
+
+Beyond these, in a yet darker and drearier dungeon, stood a heavy
+oblong wooden box, with two apertures near the top, peering through
+which we found that we were looking into the eyeless sockets of a
+skull. Within this box Ecelino had immured the victim we beheld there,
+and left him to perish in view of the platters of food and goblets of
+drink placed just beyond the reach of his hands. The food we saw was
+of course not the original food.
+
+At last we came to the crowning horror of Villa P----, the supreme
+excess of Ecelino's cruelty. The guide entered the cell before us,
+and, as we gained the threshold, threw the light of his taper vividly
+upon a block that stood in the middle of the floor. Fixed to the
+block by an immense spike driven through from the back was the little
+slender hand of a woman, which lay there just as it had been struck
+from the living arm, and which, after the lapse of so many centuries,
+was still as perfectly preserved as if it had been embalmed. The sight
+had a most cruel fascination; and while one of the horror-seekers
+stood helplessly conjuring to his vision that scene of unknown
+dread,--the shrinking, shrieking woman dragged to the block, the wild,
+shrill, horrible screech following the blow that drove in the spike,
+the merciful swoon after the mutilation,--his companion, with a sudden
+pallor, demanded to be taken instantly away.
+
+In their swift withdrawal, they only glanced at a few detached
+instruments of torture,--all original Ecelinos, but intended for the
+infliction of minor and comparatively unimportant torments,--and then
+they passed from that place of fear.
+
+
+III.
+
+In the evening we sat talking at the Caffè Pedrocchi with an abbate,
+an acquaintance of ours, who was a Professor in the University of
+Padua. Pedrocchi's is the great caffè of Padua, a granite edifice
+of Egyptian architecture, which is the mausoleum of the proprietor's
+fortune. The pecuniary skeleton at the feast, however, does not much
+trouble the guests. They begin early in the evening to gather into the
+elegant saloons of the caffè,--somewhat too large for so small a city
+as Padua,--and they sit there late in the night over their cheerful
+cups and their ices, with their newspapers and their talk. Not so many
+ladies are to be seen as at the caffè in Venice, for it is only in the
+greater cities that they go much to these public places. There are few
+students at Pedrocchi's, for they frequent the cheaper caffè; but you
+may nearly always find there some Professor of the University, and
+on the evening of which I speak there were two present besides our
+abbate. Our friend's great passion was the English language, which
+he understood too well to venture to speak a great deal. He had been
+translating from that tongue into Italian certain American poems, and
+our talk was of these at first. Then we began to talk of distinguished
+American writers, of whom intelligent Italians always know at least
+four, in this succession,--Cooper, Mrs. Stowe, Longfellow, and Irving.
+Mrs. Stowe's _Capanna di Zio Tom_ is, of course universally read; and
+my friend had also read _Il Fiore di Maggio_,--"The May-flower."
+Of Longfellow, the "Evangeline" is familiar to Italians, through a
+translation of the poem; but our abbate knew all the poet's works,
+and one of the other professors present that evening had made such
+faithful study of them as to have produced some translations rendering
+the original with remarkable fidelity and spirit. I have before
+me here his _brochure_, printed last year at Padua, and containing
+versions of "Enceladus," "Excelsior," "A Psalm of Life," "The
+Old Clock on the Stairs," "Sand of the Desert in an Hour-Glass,"
+"Twilight," "Daybreak," "The Quadroon Girl," and "Torquemada,"--pieces
+which give the Italians a fair notion of our poet's lyrical range, and
+which bear witness to Professor Messadaglia's sympathetic and
+familiar knowledge of his works. A young and gifted lady of Parma,
+now unhappily no more, lately published a translation of "The Golden
+Legend;" and Professor Messadaglia, in his Preface, mentions a version
+of another of our poet's longer works on which the translator of the
+"Evangeline" is now engaged.
+
+At last, turning from literature, we spoke with the gentle abbate of
+our day's adventures, and eagerly related that of the Ecelino prisons.
+To have seen them was the most terrific pleasure of our lives.
+
+"Eh!" said our friend, "I believe you."
+
+"We mean those under the Villa P----."
+
+"Exactly."
+
+There was a tone of politely suppressed amusement in the abbate's
+voice; and after a moment's pause, in which we felt our awful
+experience slipping and sliding away from us, we ventured to say, "You
+don't mean that those are _not_ the veritable Ecelino prisons?"
+
+"Certainly they are nothing of the kind. The Ecelino prisons were
+destroyed when the Crusaders took Padua, with the exception of the
+tower, which the Venetian Republic converted into an observatory."
+
+"But at least these prisons are on the site of Ecelino's castle?"
+
+"Nothing of the sort. His castle in that case would have been outside
+of the old city walls."
+
+"And those tortures and the prisons are all"--
+
+"Things got up for show. No doubt, Ecelino used such things, and many
+worse, of which even the ingenuity of Signor P---- cannot conceive.
+But he is an eccentric man, loving the horrors of history, and what he
+can do to realize them he has done in his prisons."
+
+"But the custodian--how could he lie so?"
+
+Our friend shrugged his shoulders. "Eh! easily. And perhaps he even
+believed what he said."
+
+The world began to assume an aspect of bewildering ungenuineness,
+and there seemed to be a treacherous quality of fiction in the ground
+under our feet. Even the play at the pretty little Teatro Sociale
+where we went to pass the rest of the evening appeared hollow and
+improbable. We thought the hero something of a bore, with his patience
+and goodness; and as for the heroine, pursued by the attentions of the
+rich profligate, we doubted if she were any better than she should be.
+
+
+
+
+A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUÀ.
+
+I.
+
+We said, during summer days at Venice, when every _campo_ was a
+furnace seven times heated, and every canal was filled with boiling
+bathers, "As soon as it rains we will go to Arquà." Remembering the
+ardors of an April sun on the long, level roads of plain, we could not
+think of them in August without a sense of dust clogging every pore,
+and eyes that shrank from the vision of their blinding whiteness. So
+we stayed in Venice, waiting for rain, until the summer had almost
+lapsed into autumn; and as the weather cooled before any rain reached
+us, we took the moisture on the main-land for granted, and set out
+under a cloudy and windy sky.
+
+We had to go to Padua by railway, and take carriage thence to Arquà
+upon the road to Ferrara. I believe no rule of human experience was
+violated when it began to rain directly after we reached Padua,
+and continued to rain violently the whole day. We gave up this day
+entirely to the rain, and did not leave Padua until the following
+morning when we count that our pilgrimage to Petrarch's house actually
+began.
+
+The rain had cooled and freshened the air, but it was already too
+late in the season for the summer to recover herself with the elastic
+brilliancy that follows the rain of July or early August; and there
+was I know not what vague sentiment of autumn in the weather. There
+was not yet enough of it to stir the
+
+  "Tears from the depth of some divine despair;"
+
+but in here and there a faded leaf (for in Europe death is not
+glorified to the foliage as in our own land), in the purple of the
+ripening grapes, and in the tawny grass of the pastures, there was
+autumn enough to touch our spirits, and while it hardly affected the
+tone of the landscape, to lay upon us the gentle and pensive spell of
+its presence. Of all the days in the year I would have chosen this to
+go pilgrim to the house of Petrarch.
+
+The Euganean Hills, on one of which the poet's house is built, are
+those mellow heights which you see when you look southwest across the
+lagoon at Venice. In misty weather they are blue, and in clear weather
+silver, and the October sunset loves them. They rise in tender azure
+before you as you issue from the southern gate of Padua, and grow in
+loveliness as you draw nearer to them from the rich plain that washes
+their feet with endless harvests of oil and wine.
+
+Oh beauty that will not let itself be told! Could I not take warning
+from another, and refrain from this fruitless effort of description? A
+friend in Padua had lent me Disraeli's "Venetia," because a passage
+of the story occurs in Petrarch's house at Arquà, and we carried the
+volumes with us on our pilgrimage. I would here quote the description
+of the village, the house, and the hills from this work, as
+faultlessly true, and as affording no just idea of either; but nothing
+of it has remained in my mind except the geological fact that the
+hills are a volcanic range. To tell the truth, the landscape, as we
+rode along, continually took my mind off the book, and I could
+not give that attention either to the elegant language of its
+descriptions, or the adventures of its well-born characters, which
+they deserved. I was even more interested in the disreputable-looking
+person who mounted the box beside our driver directly we got out of
+the city gate, and who invariably commits this infringement upon your
+rights in Italy, no matter how strictly and cunningly you frame your
+contract that no one else is to occupy any part of the carriage but
+yourself. He does not seem to be the acquaintance of the driver, for
+they never exchange a word, and he does not seem to pay any thing for
+the ride. He got down, in this instance, just before we reached the
+little town at which our driver stopped, and asked us if we wished
+to drink a glass of the wine of the country. We did not, but his own
+thirst seemed to answer equally well, and he slaked it cheerfully at
+our cost.
+
+The fields did not present the busy appearance which had delighted
+us on the same road in the spring, but they had that autumnal charm
+already mentioned. Many of the vine-leaves were sear; the red grapes
+were already purple, and the white grapes pearly ripe, and they formed
+a gorgeous necklace for the trees, around which they clung in opulent
+festoons. Then, dearer to our American hearts than this southern
+splendor, were the russet fields of Indian corn, and, scattered among
+the shrunken stalks, great nuggets of the "harmless gold" of pumpkins.
+
+At Battaglia (the village just beyond which you turn off to go to
+Arquà) there was a fair, on the blessed occasion of some saint's day,
+and there were many booths full of fruits, agricultural implements,
+toys, clothes, wooden ware, and the like. There was a great crowd
+and a noise, but, according to the mysterious Italian custom, nobody
+seemed to be buying or selling. I am in the belief that a small
+purchase of grapes we made here on our return was the great
+transaction of the day, unless, indeed, the neat operation in alms
+achieved at our expense by a mendicant villager may be classed
+commercially.
+
+When we turned off from the Rovigo road at Battaglia we were only
+three miles from Arquà.
+
+
+II.
+
+Now, all the way from this turning to the foot of the hill on which
+the village was stretched asleep in the tender sunshine, there was on
+either side of the road a stream of living water. There was no other
+barrier than this between the road and the fields (unless the vines
+swinging from tree to tree formed a barrier), and, as if in graceful
+excuse for the interposition of even these slender streams, Nature
+had lavished such growth of wild flowers and wild berries on the banks
+that it was like a garden avenue, through the fragrance and beauty of
+which we rolled, delighted to silence, almost to sadness.
+
+When we began to climb the hill to Arquà, and the driver stopped to
+breathe his horse, I got out and finished the easy ascent on foot. The
+great marvel to me is that the prospect of the vast plain below, on
+which, turning back, I feasted my vision, should be there yet, and
+always. It had the rare and saddening beauty of evanescence, and awoke
+in me the memory of all beautiful scenery, so that I embroidered the
+landscape with the silver threads of western streams, and bordered it
+with Ohio hills. Ohio hills? When I looked again it was the storied
+Euganean group. But what trans-oceanic bird, voyaging hither, dropped
+from its mouth the blackberry which took root and grew and blossomed
+and ripened, that I might taste Home in it on these classic hills?
+
+I wonder did Petrarch walk often down this road from his house just
+above? I figured him coming to meet me with his book in his hand, in
+his reverend poetic robes, and with his laurel on, over that curious
+kind of bandaging which he seems to have been fond of--looking, in a
+word, for all the world like the neuralgic Petrarch in the pictures.
+
+Drawing nearer, I discerned the apparition to be a robeless, laureless
+lout, who belonged at the village inn. Yet this lout, though not
+Petrarch, had merits. His face and hands, and his legs, as seen from
+his knees down, had the tone of the richest bronze; he wore a mountain
+cap with a long tasseled fall to the back of it; his face was comely
+and his eye beautiful; and he was so nobly ignorant of every thing
+that a colt or young bullock could not have been better company. He
+merely offered to guide us to Petrarch's house, and was silent, except
+when spoken to, from that instant.
+
+I am here tempted to say: Arquà is in the figure of a man stretched
+upon the hill slope. The head, which is Petrarch's house, rests upon
+the summit. The carelessly tossed arms lie abroad from this in one
+direction, and the legs in the opposite quarter. It is a very lank
+and shambling figure, without elegance or much proportion, and the
+attitude is the last wantonness of loafing. We followed our lout
+up the right leg, which is a gentle and easy ascent in the general
+likeness of a street. World-old stone cottages crouch on either side;
+here and there is a more ambitious house in decay; trees wave over
+the street, and down its distance comes an occasional donkey-cart very
+musically and leisurely. By all odds, Arquà and its kind of villages
+are to be preferred to those hamlets of the plain which in Italy cling
+to the white-hot highway without a tree to shelter them, and bake and
+burn there in the merciless sun. Their houses of stuccoed stone are
+crowded as thickly together as city houses, and these wretched little
+villages do their worst to unite the discomforts of town and country
+with a success dreadful to think of. In all countries villages are
+hateful to the heart of civilized man. In the Lombard plains I wonder
+that one stone of them rests upon another.
+
+We reached Petrarch's house before the custodian had arrived to admit
+us, and stood before the high stone wall which shuts in the front of
+the house, and quite hides it from those without. This wall bears
+the inscription, _Casa Petrarca_, and a marble tablet lettered to the
+following effect:--
+
+         SE TI AGITA
+    SACRO AMORE DI PATRIA,
+   T'INCHINA A QUESTE MURA
+  OVE SPIRÃ’ LA GRAND' ANIMA,
+   IL CANTOR DEI SCIPIONI
+         E DI LAURA.
+
+Which may be translated: "If thou art stirred by love of country,
+bow to these walls, whence passed the great soul, the singer of the
+Scipios and of Laura."
+
+Meanwhile we became the centre of a group of the youths of Arquà, who
+had kindly attended our progress in gradually increasing numbers from
+the moment we had entered the village. They were dear little girls and
+boys, and mountain babies, all with sunburnt faces and the gentle and
+the winning ways native to this race, which Nature loves better than
+us of the North. The blonde pilgrim seemed to please them, and they
+evidently took us for _Tedeschi_. You learn to submit to this fate
+in Northern Italy, however ungracefully, for it is the one that
+constantly befalls you outside of the greatest cities. The people know
+about two varieties of foreigners--the Englishman and the German. If,
+therefore, you have not _rosbif_ expressed in every lineament of your
+countenance; if the soles of your boots are less than an inch thick,
+and your clothes are not reduced in color to the invariable and
+maddening tone of the English tweed,--you must resign yourself to be
+a German. All this is grievous to the soul which loves to spread its
+eagle in every land and to be known as American, with star-spangled
+conspicuousness all over the world: but it cannot be helped. I vainly
+tried to explain the geographical, political, and natural difference
+between Tedeschi and Americani to the custodian of Petrarch's house.
+She listened with amiability, shrugged her shoulders hopelessly, and
+said, in her rude Venetian, "_Mi no so miga_" (I don't know at all).
+
+Before she came, I had a mind to prove the celebrity of a poet on the
+spot where he lived and died,--on his very hearthstone, as it were.
+So I asked the lout, who stood gnawing a stick and shifting his weight
+from one foot to the other,--
+
+"When did Petrarch live here?"
+
+"Ah! I don't remember him."
+
+"Who was he?"
+
+"A poet, signor."
+
+Certainly the first response was not encouraging, but the last
+revealed that even to the heavy and clouded soul of this lout the
+divine fame of the poet had penetrated--and he a lout in the village
+where Petrarch lived and ought to be first forgotten. He did not
+know when Petrarch had lived there,--a year ago, perhaps, or many
+centuries,--but he knew that Petrarch was a poet. A weight of
+doubt was lifted from my spirit, and I responded cheerfully to
+some observations on the weather offered by a rustic matron who was
+pitching manure on the little hill-slope near the house. When, at
+last, the custodian came and opened the gate to us, we entered a
+little grassy yard from which a flight of steps led to Petrarch's
+door. A few flowers grew wild among the grass, and a fig-tree leaned
+its boughs against the wall. The figs on it were green, though they
+hung ripe and blackening on every other tree in Arquà. Some ivy clung
+to the stones, and from this and the fig-tree, as we came away, we
+plucked memorial leaves, and blended them with flowers which the youth
+of Arquà picked and forced upon us for remembrance.
+
+A quaint old door opened into the little stone house, and admitted us
+to a kind of wide passage-way with rooms on either side; and at the
+end opposite to which we entered, another door opened upon a balcony.
+From this balcony we looked down on Petrarch's garden, which,
+presently speaking, is but a narrow space with more fruit than flowers
+in it. Did Petrarch use to sit and meditate in this garden? For me I
+should better have liked a chair on the balcony, with the further and
+lovelier prospect on every hand of village-roofs, sloping hills all
+gray with olives, and the broad, blue Lombard plain, sweeping from
+heaven to heaven below.
+
+The walls of the passage-way are frescoed (now very faintly) in
+illustration of the loves of Petrarch and Laura, with verses from the
+sonnets inscribed to explain the illustrations. In all these Laura
+prevails as a lady of a singularly long waist and stiff movements, and
+Petrarch, with his face tied up and a lily in his hand, contemplates
+the flower in mingled botany and toothache. There is occasionally a
+startling literalness in the way the painter has rendered some of
+the verses. I remember with peculiar interest the illustration of a
+lachrymose passage concerning a river of tears, wherein the weeping
+Petrarch, stretched beneath a tree, had already started a small creek
+of tears, which was rapidly swelling to a flood with the torrent from
+his eyes. I attribute these frescos to a later date than that of the
+poet's residence, but the portrait over the door of the bedroom inside
+of the chamber, was of his own time, and taken from him--the custodian
+said. As it seemed to look like all the Petrarchian portraits, I did
+not remark it closely, but rather turned my attention to the walls of
+the chamber, which were thickly over-scribbled with names. They were
+nearly all Italian, and none English so far as I saw. This passion for
+allying one's self to the great, by inscribing one's name on places
+hallowed by them, is certainly very odd; and (I reflected as I added
+our names to the rest) it is, without doubt, the most impertinent and
+idiotic custom in the world. People have thus written themselves down,
+to the contempt of sensible futurity, all over Petrarch's house.
+
+The custodian insisted that the bedroom was just as in the poet's
+time; some rooms beyond it had been restored; the kitchen at its
+side was also repaired. Crossing the passage-way, we now entered the
+dining-room, which was comparatively large and lofty, with a mighty
+and generous fire-place at one end, occupying the whole space left by
+a balcony-window. The floor was paved with tiles, and the window-panes
+were round and small, and set in lead--like the floors and
+window-panes of all the other rooms. A gaudy fresco, representing some
+indelicate female deity, adorned the front of the fire-place, which
+sloped expanding from the ceiling and terminated at the mouth without
+a mantel-piece. The chimney was deep, and told of the cold winters
+in the hills, of which, afterward, the landlady of the village inn
+prattled less eloquently.
+
+From this dining-room opens, to the right, the door of the room which
+they call Petrarch's library; and above the door, set in a marble
+frame, with a glass before it, is all that is mortal of Petrarch's
+cat, except the hair. Whether or not the fur was found incompatible
+with the process of embalming, and therefore removed, or whether it
+has slowly dropped away with the lapse of centuries, I do not know;
+but it is certain the cat is now quite hairless, and has the effect
+of a wash-leather invention in the likeness of a young lamb. On the
+marble slab below there is a Latin inscription, said to be by the
+great poet himself, declaring this cat to have been "second only
+to Laura." We may, therefore, believe its virtues to have been rare
+enough; and cannot well figure to ourselves Petrarch sitting before
+that wide-mouthed fire-place, without beholding also the gifted cat
+that purrs softly at his feet and nestles on his knees, or, with
+thickened tail and lifted back, parades, loftily round his chair in
+the haughty and disdainful manner of cats.
+
+In the library, protected against the predatory enthusiasm of visitors
+by a heavy wire netting, are the desk and chair of Petrarch, which I
+know of no form of words to describe perfectly. The front of the
+desk is of a kind of mosaic in cubes of wood, most of which have been
+carried away. The chair is wide-armed and carved, but the bottom is
+gone, and it has been rudely repaired. The custodian said Petrarch
+died in this chair while he sat writing at his desk in the little nook
+lighted by a single window opening on the left from his library. He
+loved to sit there. As I entered I found he had stepped out for a
+moment, but I know he returned directly after I withdrew.
+
+On one wall of the library (which is a simple oblong room, in nowise
+remarkable) was a copy of verses in a frame, by Cesarotti, and on the
+wall opposite a tribute from Alfieri, both _manu propriâ_. Over and
+above these are many other scribblings; and hanging over the door of
+the poet's little nook was a criminal French lithograph likeness of
+"Pétrarque" when young.
+
+Alfieri's verses are written in ink on the wall, while those of
+Cesarotti are on paper, and framed, I do not remember any reference to
+his visit to Petrarch's house in Alfieri's autobiography, though the
+visit must have taken place in 1783, when he sojourned at Padua, and
+"made the acquaintance of the celebrated Cesarotti, with whose lively
+and courteous manners he was no less satisfied than he had always been
+in reading his (Cesarotti's) most masterly version of 'Ossian.'" It is
+probable that the friends visited the house together. At any rate,
+I care to believe that while Cesarotti sat "composing" his tribute
+comfortably at the table, Alfieri's impetuous soul was lifting his
+tall body on tiptoe to scrawl its inspirations on the plastering.
+
+Do you care, gentle reader, to be reminded that just before this visit
+Alfieri had heard in Venice of the "peace between England and the
+United Colonies," and that he then and there "wrote the fifth ode of
+the 'America Libera,'" and thus finished that poem?
+
+After copying these verses we returned to the dining-room, and while
+one pilgrim strayed idly through the names in the visitor's book,
+the other sketched Petrarch's cat, before mentioned, and Petrarch's
+inkstand of bronze--a graceful little thing, having a cover surmounted
+by a roguish cupid, while the lower part is supported on three lion's
+claws, and just above the feet, at either of the three corners, is an
+exquisite little female bust and head. Thus sketching and idling,
+we held spell-bound our friends the youth of Arquà, as well as our
+driver, who, having brought innumerable people to see the house of
+Petrarch, now for the first time, with great astonishment, beheld the
+inside of it himself.
+
+As to the authenticity of the house I think there can be no doubt, and
+as to the genuineness of the relics there, nothing in the world could
+shake my faith in them, though Muratori certainly characterizes them
+as "superstitions." The great poet was sixty-five years old when he
+came to rest at Arquà, and when, in his own pathetic words, "there
+remained to him only to consider and to desire how to make a good
+end." He says further, at the close of his autobiography: "In one of
+the Euganean hills, near to ten miles from the city of Padua, I have
+built me a house, small but pleasant and decent, in the midst of
+slopes clothed with vines and olives, abundantly sufficient for a
+family not large and discreet. Here I lead my life, and although, as I
+have said, infirm of body, yet tranquil of mind, without excitements,
+without distractions, without cares, reading always, and writing and
+praising God, and thanking God as well for evil as for good; which
+evil, if I err not, is trial merely and not punishment. And all the
+while I pray to Christ that he make good the end of my life, and
+have mercy on me, and forgive me, and even forget my youthful sins;
+wherefore, in this solitude, no words are so sweet to my lips as
+these of the psalm: '_Delicta juventutis meoe, et ignorantias meas ne
+memineris_.' And with every feeling of the heart I pray God, when it
+please Him, to bridle my thoughts, so long unstable and erring; and
+as they have vainly wandered to many things, to turn them all to
+Him--only true, certain, immutable Good."
+
+I venerate the house at Arquà because these sweet and solemn words
+were written in it. We left its revered shelter (after taking a final
+look from the balcony down upon "the slopes clothed with vines and
+olives") and returned to the lower village, where, in the court of the
+little church, we saw the tomb of Petrarch--"an ark of red stone, upon
+four columns likewise of marble." The epitaph is this:--
+
+  "Frigida Francisci lapis hic tegit ossa Petrarcae;
+  Suscipe, Virgo parens, animam; sate Virgine, parce
+  Fessaque jam terris Coeli requiescat in arce."
+
+A head of the poet in bronze surmounts the ark. The housekeeper of the
+parish priest, who ran out to enjoy my admiration and bounty, told me
+a wild local tradition of an attempt on the part of the Florentines
+to steal the bones of Petrarch away from Arquà, in proof of which
+she showed me a block of marble set into the ark, whence she said a
+fragment had been removed by the Florentines. This local tradition I
+afterwards found verified, with names and dates, in a little "Life of
+Petrarch," by F. Leoni, published at Padua in 1843. It appears that
+this curious attempt of the Florentines to do doubtful honor to the
+great citizen whose hereditary civic rights they restored too late
+(about the time he was drawing nigh his "good end" at Arquà), was made
+for them by a certain monk of Portagruaro named Tommaso Martinelli. He
+had a general instruction from his employers to bring away from Arquà
+"any important thing of Petrarch's" that he could; and it occurred to
+this ill-advised friar to "move his bones." He succeeded on a night of
+the year 1630 in stealing the dead poet's arm. The theft being at once
+discovered, the Venetian Republic rested not till the thief was also
+discovered; but what became of the arm or of the sacrilegious monk
+neither the Signor Leoni nor the old women of Arquà give any account.
+The Republic removed the rest of Petrarch's body, which is now said to
+be in the Royal Museum of Madrid.
+
+I was willing to know more of this quaint village of Arquà, and I rang
+at the parish priest's door to beg of him some account of the place,
+if any were printed. But already at one o'clock he had gone to bed for
+a nap, and must on no account be roused till four. It is but a quiet
+life men lead in Arquà, and their souls are in drowsy hands. The
+amount of sleep which this good man gives himself (if he goes to bed
+at 9 P.M. and rises at 9 A.M., with a nap of three hours during the
+day) speaks of a quiet conscience, a good digestion, and uneventful
+days. As I turned this notion over in my mind, my longing to behold
+his reverence increased, that I might read life at Arquà in the smooth
+curves of his well-padded countenance. I thought it must be that
+his "bowels of compassion were well-rounded," and, making sure of
+absolution, I was half-minded, if I got speech with him, to improve
+the occasion by confessing one or two of my blackest sins.
+
+Ought I to say here that, on the occasion of a second visit to Arquà,
+I succeeded in finding this excellent ecclesiastic wide awake at two
+o'clock in the afternoon, and that he granted me an interview at that
+hour? Justice to him, I think, demands this admission of me. He was
+not at all a fat priest, as I had prefigured him, but rather of a
+spare person, and of a brisk and lively manner. At the village inn,
+after listening half an hour to a discourse on nothing but white wine
+from a young priest, who had stopped to drink a glass of it, I was
+put in the way of seeing the priest of Arquà by the former's courtesy.
+Happily enough, his reverence chanced to have the very thing I wanted
+to see--no other than Leoni's "Life of Petrarch," to which I have
+already referred. Courtesy is the blood in an Italian's veins, and I
+need not say that the ecclesiastic of Arquà, seeing my interest in
+the place, was very polite and obliging. But he continued to sleep
+throughout our first stay in Arquà, and I did not see him then.
+
+I strolled up and down the lazy, rambling streets, and chiefly devoted
+myself to watching the young women who were washing clothes at the
+stream running from the "Fountain of Petrarch." Their arms and legs
+were bronzed and bare, and they chattered and laughed gayly at their
+work. Their wash-tubs were formed by a long marble conduit from the
+fountain; their wash-boards, by the inward-sloping conduit-sides; and
+they thrashed and beat the garments clean upon the smooth stone. To
+a girl, their waists were broad and their ankles thick. Above their
+foreheads the hair was cut short, and their "back hair" was gathered
+into a mass, and held together by converging circle of silver pins.
+
+The Piazza della Fontana, in Arquà, is a place some fifty feet in
+length and breadth, and seems to be a favorite place of public resort.
+In the evening, doubtless, it is alive with gossipers, as now with
+workers. It may be that then his reverence, risen from his nap,
+saunters by, and pauses long enough to chuck a pretty girl under the
+chin or pinch an urchin's cheek.
+
+Our dinner was ready by the time I got back to the inn, and we sat
+down to a chicken stewed in oil and a stoup of the white wine of
+Arquà. It was a modest feast, but, being a friend to oil, I found it
+savory, and the wine was both good and strong. While we lingered
+over the repast we speculated somewhat carelessly whether Arquà had
+retained among its simplicities the primitive Italian cheapness of
+which you read much. When our landlord leaned over the table and made
+out our account on it with a bit of chalk, the bill was as follows:--
+
+          Soldi.
+  Chicken   70
+  Bread      8
+  Wine      20
+            --
+  Total     98
+
+It surely was not a costly dinner, yet I could have bought the same
+chicken in Venice for half the money; which is but another proof that
+the demand of the producer is often much larger than the supply of
+the consumer, and that to buy poultry cheaply you must not purchase it
+where raised,--
+
+  ..."On misty mountain ground,
+  Its own vast shadow glory crowned,"--
+
+but rather in a large city after it has been transported forty miles
+or more. Not that we begrudged the thrifty inn-keeper his fee. We paid
+it cheerfully, as well for his own sake as for that of his pleasant
+and neat little wife, who kept the whole inn so sweet and clean; and
+we bade them a most cordial farewell as we drove away from their door.
+
+
+III.
+
+Returning, we stopped at the great castle of the Obizzi (now the
+property of the Duke of Modena), through which we were conducted by a
+surly and humorous _custode_, whose pride in life was that castle and
+its treasures, so that he resented as a personal affront the slightest
+interest in any thing else. He stopped us abruptly in the midst of the
+museum, and, regarding the precious antiques and curiosities around
+him, demanded:
+
+"Does this castle please you?" Then, with a scornful glance at us,
+"Your driver tells me you have been at Arquà? And what did you see at
+Arquà? A shabby little house and a cat without any hair on. I would
+not," said this disdainful _custode_, "go to Arquà if you gave me a
+lemonade."
+
+
+
+
+A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI.
+
+I had often heard in Venice of that ancient people, settled in the
+Alpine hills about the pretty town of Bassano, on the Brenta, whom
+common fame declares to be a remnant of the Cimbrian invaders of Rome,
+broken up in battle, and dispersed along the borders of North Italy,
+by Marius, many centuries ago. So when the soft September weather
+came, last year, we sallied out of Venice, in three, to make
+conquest of whatever was curious in the life and traditions of these
+mountaineers, who dwell in seven villages, and are therefore called
+the people of the Sette Communi among their Italian neighbors. We
+went fully armed with note-book and sketch-book, and prepared to take
+literary possession of our conquest.
+
+From Venice to the city of Vicenza by railroad, it is two hours; and
+thence one must take a carriage to Bassano (which is an opulent and
+busy little grain mart, of some twelve thousand souls, about thirty
+miles north of Venice). We were very glad of the ride across the
+country. By the time we reached the town it was nine o'clock, and
+moonlight, and as we glanced out of our windows we saw the quaint
+up-and-down-hill streets peopled with promenaders, and every body
+in Bassano seemed to be making love. Young girls strolled about the
+picturesque ways with their lovers, and tender couples were cooing
+at the doorways and windows, and the scene had all that surface
+of romance with which the Italians contrive to varnish the real
+commonplaceness of their life. Our ride through the twilight landscape
+had prepared us for the sentiment of Bassano; we had pleased ourselves
+with the spectacle of the peasants returning from their labor in the
+fields, led in troops of eight or ten by stalwart, white-teethed,
+bare-legged maids; and we had reveled in the momentary lordship of
+an old walled town we passed, which at dusk seemed more Gothic and
+Middle-Age than any thing after Verona, with a fine church, and
+turrets and battlements in great plenty. What town it was, or what it
+had been doing there so many ages, I have never sought to know, and I
+should be sorry to learn any thing about it.
+
+The next morning we began those researches for preliminary information
+concerning the Cimbri which turned out so vain. Indeed, as we drew
+near the lurking-places of that ancient people, all knowledge relating
+to them diffused itself into shadowy conjecture. The barber and the
+bookseller differed as to the best means of getting to the Sette
+Communi, and the _caffetiere_ at whose place we took breakfast knew
+nothing at all of the road, except that it was up the mountains, and
+commanded views of scenery which verily, it would not grieve us to
+see. As to the Cimbri, he only knew that they had their own language,
+which was yet harder than the German. The German was hard enough, but
+the Cimbrian! _Corpo_!
+
+At last, hearing of a famous cave there is at Oliero, a town some
+miles further up the Brenta, we determined to go there, and it was a
+fortunate thought, for there we found a nobleman in charge of the cave
+who told us exactly how to reach the Sette Communi. You pass a bridge
+to get out of Bassano--a bridge which spans the crystal swiftness of
+the Brenta, rushing down to the Adriatic from the feet of the Alps on
+the north, and full of voluble mills at Bassano. All along the road to
+Oliero was the finest mountain scenery, Brenta-washed, and picturesque
+with ever-changing lines. Maize grows in the bottom-lands, and
+tobacco, which is guarded in the fields by soldiers for the monopolist
+government. Farm-houses dot the valley, and now and then we passed
+villages, abounding in blonde girls, so rare elsewhere in Italy, but
+here so numerous as to give Titian that type from which he painted.
+
+At Oliero we learned not only which was the road to the Sette Communi,
+but that we were in it, and it was settled that we should come the
+next day and continue in it, with the custodian of the cave, who
+for his breakfast and dinner, and what else we pleased, offered to
+accompany us. We were early at Oliero on the following morning, and
+found our friend in waiting; he mounted beside our driver, and we rode
+up the Brenta to the town of Valstagna where our journey by wheels
+ended, and where we were to take mules for the mountain ascent. Our
+guide, Count Giovanni Bonato (for I may as well give him his title,
+though at this stage of our progress we did not know into what
+patrician care we had fallen), had already told us what the charge
+for mules would be, but it was necessary to go through the ceremony of
+bargain with the muleteer before taking the beasts. Their owner was a
+Cimbrian, with a broad sheepish face, and a heavy, awkward accent of
+Italian which at once more marked his northern race, and made us feel
+comparatively secure from plunder in his hands. He had come down from
+the mountain top the night before, bringing three mules laden with
+charcoal, and he had waited for us till the morning. His beasts were
+furnished with comfortable pads, covered with linen, to ride upon, and
+with halters instead of bridles, and we were prayed to let them have
+their heads in the ascent, and not to try to guide them.
+
+The elegant leisure of Valstagna (and in an Italian town nearly the
+whole population is elegantly at leisure) turned out to witness the
+departure of our expedition; the pretty little blonde wife of our
+inn-keeper, who was to get dinner ready against our return, held up
+her baby to wish us _boun viaggio_, and waved us adieu with the infant
+as with a handkerchief; the chickens and children scattered to right
+and left before our advance; and with Count Giovanni going splendidly
+ahead on foot, and the Cimbrian bringing up the rear, we struck on
+the broad rocky valley between the heights, and presently began the
+ascent. It was a lovely morning; the sun was on the heads of the
+hills, and the shadows clothed them like robes to their feet; and
+I should be glad to feel here and now the sweetness, freshness,
+and purity of the mountain air, that seemed to bathe our souls in a
+childlike delight of life. A noisy brook gurgled through the valley;
+the birds sang from the trees; the Alps rose, crest on crest, around
+us; and soft before us, among the bald peaks showed the wooded
+height where the Cimbrian village of Fozza stood, with a white chapel
+gleaming from the heart of the lofty grove. Along the mountain sides
+the smoke curled from the lonely huts of shepherds, and now and then
+we came upon one of those melancholy refuges which are built in
+the hills for such travellers as are belated in their ways, or are
+overtaken there by storms.
+
+The road for the most part winds by the brink of precipices,--walled
+in with masonry of small stones, where Nature has not shored it up
+with vast monoliths,--and is paved with limestone. It is, of course,
+merely a mule-path, and it was curious to see, and thrilling to
+experience, how the mules, vain of the safety of their foothold, kept
+as near the border of the precipices as possible. For my own part, I
+abandoned to my beast the entire responsibility involved by this line
+of conduct; let the halter hang loose upon his neck, and gave him no
+aid except such slight service as was occasionally to be rendered
+by shutting my eyes and holding my breath. The mule of the fairer
+traveller behind me was not only ambitious of peril like my own, but
+was envious of my beast's captaincy, and continually tried to pass him
+on the outside of the path, to the great dismay of the gentle rider;
+while half-suppressed wails of terror from the second lady in the
+train gave evidence of equal vanity and daring in her mule. Count
+Giovanni strode stolidly before, the Cimbrian came behind, and we
+had little coherent conversation until we stopped under a spreading
+haw-tree, half-way up the mountain, to breathe our adventurous beasts.
+
+Here two of us dismounted, and while one of the ladies sketched the
+other in her novel attitude of cavalier, I listened to the talk of
+Count Giovanni and the Cimbrian. This Cimbrian's name in Italian
+was Lazzaretti, and in his own tongue Brück, which, pronouncing less
+regularly, we made Brick, in compliment to his qualities of good
+fellowship. His broad, honest visage was bordered by a hedge of red
+beard, and a light of dry humor shone upon it: he looked, we thought,
+like a Cornishman, and the contrast between him and the _viso sciolto,
+pensieri stretti_ expression of Count Giovanni was curious enough.
+
+Concerning his people, he knew little; but the Capo-gente of Fozza
+could tell me everything. Various traditions of their origin were
+believed among them; Brick himself held to one that they had first
+come from Denmark. As we sat there under the spreading haw-tree,
+Count Giovanni and I made him give us the Cimbrian equivalent of some
+Italian phrases, which the curious may care to see in correspondence
+with English and German. Of course, German pronunciation must be given
+to the words:--
+
+  _English.         Cimbrian.               German._
+
+  I go,            I gehe,                 Ich gehe.
+  Thou goest,      Du gehst,               Du gehst.
+  He goes,         Ar geht,                Er geht.
+  We go,           Hamish gehen,           Wir gehen.
+  You go,          Hamish setender gehnt,  Ihr geht.
+  They go,         Dandern gehnt,          Sie gehen.
+  I went,          I bin gegehnt,          Ich bin gegangen.
+  Thou wentest,    Du bist gegehnt,        Du bist gegangen.
+  He went,         Der iganget,            Er ist gegangen
+  Good day,        Uter tag,               Guten Tag.
+  Good night,      Uter nast,              Gute Nacht.
+  How do you do?   Bie estater?            Wie steht's?
+  How goes it?     Bie gehts?              Wie geht's?
+  I,               I,                      Ich.
+  Thou,            Du,                     Du.
+  He, she,         Di,                     Er, sie.
+  We,              Borandern,              Wir.
+  You,             Ihrt,                   Ihr.
+  They,            Dandern,                Sie.
+  The head,        Da kof,                 Der Kopf.
+  Breast,          Petten,                 Brust (_Italian_ petto)
+  Face,            Denne,                  Gesicht.
+  Arm,             Arm,                    Arm.
+  Foot,            Vuss,                   Fuss.
+  Finger,          Vinger,                 Finger.
+  Hand,            Hant,                   Hand.
+  Tree,            Pom,                    Baum.
+  Hat,             Hoit,                   Hut.
+  God,             Got,                    Gott.
+  Heaven,          Debelt,                 Himmel.
+  Earth,           Erda,                   Erde.
+  Mountain,        Perk,                   Berg.
+  Valley,          Tal,                    Thal.
+  Man,             Mann,                   Mann.
+  Woman,           Beip,                   Weib.
+  Lady,            Vrau,                   Frau.
+  Child,           Hint,                   Kind.
+  Brother,         Pruder,                 Bruder.
+  Father,          Vada,                   Vater.
+  Mother,          Muter,                  Mutter.
+  Sister,          Schwester,              Schwester,
+  Stone,           Stone,                  Stein.
+
+A general resemblance to German and English will have been observed in
+these fragments of Cimbrian, while other words will have been noticed
+as quite foreign to either.
+
+There was a poor little house of refreshment beside our spreading haw,
+and a withered old woman came out of it and refreshed us with clear
+spring water, and our guides and friends with some bitter berries of
+the mountain, which they admitted were unpleasant to the taste, but
+declared were very good for the blood. When they had sufficiently
+improved their blood, we mounted our mules again, and set out with the
+journey of an hour and a quarter still between us and Fozza.
+
+As we drew near the summit of the mountain our road grew more level,
+and instead of creeping along by the brinks of precipices, we began
+to wind through bits of meadow and pleasant valley walled in by lofty
+heights of rock.
+
+Though September was bland as June at the foot of the mountain, we
+found its breath harsh and cold on these heights; and we remarked that
+though there were here and there breadths of wheat, the land was
+for the most part in sheep pasturage, and the grass looked poor and
+stinted of summer warmth. We met, at times, the shepherds, who seemed
+to be of Italian race, and were of the conventional type of shepherds,
+with regular faces, and two elaborate curls trained upon their cheeks,
+as shepherds are always represented in stone over the gates of villas.
+They bore staves, and their flocks went before them. Encountering us,
+they saluted us courteously, and when we had returned their greeting,
+they cried with one voice,--"Ah, lords! is not this a miserable
+country? The people are poor and the air is cold. It is an unhappy
+land!" And so passed on, profoundly sad; but we could not help smiling
+at the vehement popular desire to have the region abused. We answered
+cheerfully that it was a lovely country. If the air was cold, it was
+also pure.
+
+We now drew in sight of Fozza, and, at the last moment, just before
+parting with Brick, we learned that he had passed a whole year in
+Venice, where he had brought milk from the main-land and sold it in
+the city. He declared frankly that he counted that year worth all the
+other years of his life, and that he would never have come back to his
+native heights but that his father had died, and left his mother and
+young brothers helpless. He was an honest soul, and I gave him two
+florins, which I had tacitly appointed him over and above the bargain,
+with something for the small Brick-bats at home, whom he presently
+brought to kiss our hands at the house of the Capo-gente.
+
+The village of Fozza is built on a grassy, oblong plain on the crest
+of the mountain, which declines from it on three sides, and on the
+north rises high above it into the mists in bleaker and ruggeder
+acclivities. There are not more than thirty houses in the village, and
+I do not think it numbers more than a hundred and fifty souls, if
+it numbers so many. Indeed, it is one of the smallest of the Sette
+Communi, of which the capital, Asiago, contains some thousands of
+people, and lies not far from Vicenza. The poor Fozzatti had a church,
+however, in their village, in spite of its littleness, and they had
+just completed a fine new bell tower, which the Capo-gente deplored,
+and was proud of when I praised it. The church, like all the other
+edifices, was built of stone; and the village at a little distance
+might look like broken crags of rock, so well it consorted with the
+harsh, crude nature about it. Meagre meadowlands, pathetic with tufts
+of a certain pale-blue, tearful flower, stretched about the village
+and southward as far as to that wooded point which had all day been
+our landmark in the ascent.
+
+Our train drew up at the humble door of the Capo-gente (in Fozza all
+doors are alike humble), and, leaving our mules, we entered by his
+wife's invitation, and seated ourselves near the welcome fire of the
+kitchen--welcome, though we knew that all the sunny Lombard plain
+below was purple with grapes and black with figs. Again came from
+the women here the wail of the shepherds: "Ah, lords! is it not a
+miserable land?" and I began to doubt whether the love which I had
+heard mountaineers bore to their inclement heights was not altogether
+fabulous. They made haste to boil us some eggs, and set them before us
+with some unhappy wine, and while we were eating, the Capo-gente came
+in.
+
+He was a very well-mannered person, but had, of course, the
+bashfulness naturally resulting from lonely life at that altitude,
+where contact with the world must be infrequent. His fellow-citizens
+seemed to regard him with a kind of affectionate deference, and some
+of them came in to hear him talk with the strangers. He stood till we
+prayed him to sit down, and he presently consented to take some wine
+with us.
+
+After all, however, he could not tell us much of his people which we
+had not heard before. A tradition existed among them, he said, that
+their ancestors had fled to these Alps from Marius, and that they
+had dwelt for a long time in the hollows and caves of the mountains,
+living and burying their dead in the same secret places. At what time
+they had been converted to Christianity he could not tell; they
+had, up to the beginning of the present century, had little or no
+intercourse with the Italian population by which they were surrounded
+on all sides. Formerly, they did not intermarry with that race, and it
+was seldom that any Cimbrian knew its language. But now intermarriage
+is very frequent; both Italian and Cimbrian are spoken in nearly all
+the families, and the Cimbrian is gradually falling into disuse. They
+still, however, have books of religious instruction in their ancient
+dialect, and until very lately the services of their church were
+performed in Cimbrian.
+
+I begged the Capo to show us some of their books and he brought us
+two,--one a catechism for children, entitled "Dar Kloane Catechism
+vor z' Beloseland vortraghet in z' gaprecht von siben Komünen, un vier
+Halghe Gasang. 1842. Padova." The other book it grieved me to see, for
+it proved that I was not the only one tempted in recent times to
+visit these ancient people, ambitious to bear to them the relation of
+discoverer, as it were. A High-Dutch Columbus, from Vienna, had been
+before me, and I could only come in for Amerigo Vespucci's tempered
+glory. This German savant had dwelt a week in these lonely places,
+patiently compiling a dictionary of their tongue, which, when it was
+printed, he had sent to the Capo. I am magnanimous enough to give
+the name of his book, that the curious may buy it if they like. It
+is called "Johann Andreas Schweller's Cimbrisches Wörterbuch. Joseph
+Bergman. Vienna, 1855."
+
+Concerning the present Cimbri, the Capo said that in his community
+they were chiefly hunters, wood-cutters, and charcoal-burners, and
+that they practiced their primitive crafts in those gloomier and
+wilder heights we saw to the northward, and descended to the towns
+of the plain to make sale of their fagots, charcoal, and wild-beast
+skins. In Asiago and the larger communities they were farmers and
+tradesmen like the Italians; and the Capo believed that the Cimbri, in
+all their villages, numbered near ten thousand. He could tell me of
+no particular customs or usages, and believed they did not differ from
+the Italians now except in race and language. [The English traveller
+Rose, who (to my further discomfiture, I find) visited Asiago in 1817,
+mentions that the Cimbri have the Celtic custom of _waking_ the dead.
+"If a traveller dies by the way, they plant a cross upon the spot,
+and all who pass by cast a stone upon his cairn. Some go in certain
+seasons in the year to high places and woods, where it is supposed
+they worshiped their divinities, but the origin of the custom is
+forgot amongst themselves." If a man dies by violence, they lay him
+out with his hat and shoes on, as if to give him the appearance of a
+wayfarer, and "symbolize one surprised in the great journey of life."
+A woman dying in childbed is dressed for the grave in her bridal
+ornaments. Mr. Rose is very scornful of the notion that these people
+are Cimbri, and holds that it is "more consonant to all the evidence
+of history to say, that the flux and reflux of Teutonic invaders
+at different periods deposited this backwater of barbarians" in the
+district they now inhabit. "The whole space, which in addition to
+the seven burghs contains twenty-four villages, is bounded by rivers,
+alps, and hills. Its most precise limits are the Brenta to the east,
+and the Astico to the west."] They are, of course, subject to the
+Austrian Government, but not so strictly as the Italians are; and
+though they are taxed and made to do military service, they are
+otherwise left to regulate their affairs pretty much at their
+pleasure.
+
+The Capo ended his discourse with much polite regret that he had
+nothing more worthy to tell us; and, as if to make us amends for
+having come so far to learn so little, he said there was a hermit
+living near, whom we might like to see, and sent his son to conduct us
+to the hermitage. It turned out to be the white object which we had
+seen gleaming in the wood on the mountain from so great distance
+below, and the wood turned out to be a pleasant beechen grove, in
+which we found the hermit cutting fagots. He was warmly dressed in
+clothes without rent, and wore the clerical knee-breeches. He saluted
+us with a cricket-like chirpiness of manner, and was greatly amazed to
+hear that we had come all the way from America to visit him. His
+hermitage was built upon the side of a white-washed chapel to St.
+Francis, and contained three or four little rooms or cupboards, in
+which the hermit dwelt and meditated. They opened into the chapel, of
+which the hermit had the care, and which he kept neat and clean like
+himself. He told us proudly that once a year, on the day of the
+titular saint, a priest came and said mass in that chapel, and it was
+easy to see that this was the great occasion of the old man's life.
+For forty years, he said, he had been devout; and for twenty-five he
+had dwelt in this place, where the goodness of God and the charity of
+the poor people around had kept him from want. Altogether, he was a
+pleasant enough hermit, not in the least spiritual, but gentle,
+simple, and evidently sincere. We gave some small coins of silver to
+aid him to continue his life of devotion, and Count Giovanni bestowed
+some coppers with the stately blessing, "_Iddio vi benedica, padre
+mio_."
+
+So we left the hermitage, left Fozza, and started down the mountain
+on foot, for no one may ride down those steeps. Long before we reached
+the bottom, we had learned to loathe mountains and to long for dead
+levels during the rest of life. Yet the descent was picturesque, and
+in some things even more interesting than the ascent had been. We
+met more people: now melancholy shepherds with their flocks; now
+swine-herds and swine-herdesses with herds of wild black pigs of the
+Italian breed; now men driving asses that brayed and woke long, loud,
+and most musical echoes in the hills; now whole peasant families
+driving cows, horses, and mules to the plains below. On the way
+down, fragments of autobiography began, with the opportunities of
+conversation, to come from the Count Giovanni, and we learned that he
+was a private soldier at home on that _permesso_ which the Austrian
+Government frequently gives its less able-bodied men in times of
+peace. He had been at home some years, and did not expect to be again
+called into the service. He liked much better to be in charge of the
+cave at Oliero than to carry the musket, though he confessed that he
+liked to see the world, and that soldiering brought one acquainted
+with many places. He had not many ideas, and the philosophy of his
+life chiefly regarded deportment toward strangers who visited the
+cave. He held it an error in most custodians to show discontent when
+travellers gave them little; and he said that if he received never
+so much, he believed it wise not to betray exultation. "Always be
+contented, and nothing more," said Count Giovanni.
+
+"It is what you people always promise beforehand," I said, "when you
+bargain with strangers, to do them a certain service for what they
+please; but afterward they must pay what you please or have trouble. I
+know you will not be content with what I give you."
+
+"If I am not content," cried Count Giovanni, "call me the greatest ass
+in the world!"
+
+And I am bound to say that, for all I could see through the mask of
+his face, he was satisfied with what I gave him, though it was not
+much.
+
+He had told us casually that he was nephew of a nobleman of a certain
+rich and ancient family in Venice, who sent him money while in the
+army, but this made no great impression on me; and though I knew there
+was enough noble poverty in Italy to have given rise to the proverb,
+_Un conte che non conta, non conta niente_, yet I confess that it was
+with a shock of surprise I heard our guide and servant saluted by
+a lounger in Valstagna with "_Sior conte, servitor suo_!" I looked
+narrowly at him, but there was no ray of feeling or pride visible in
+his pale, languid visage as he responded, "_Buona sera, caro_."
+
+Still, after that revelation we simple plebeians, who had been all day
+heaping shawls and guide-books upon Count Giovanni, demanding menial
+offices from him, and treating him with good-natured slight, felt
+uncomfortable in his presence, and welcomed the appearance of our
+carriage with our driver, who, having started drunk from Bassano in
+the morning, had kept drunk all day at Valstagna, and who now drove us
+back wildly over the road, and almost made us sigh for the security of
+mules ambitious of the brinks of precipices.
+
+
+
+
+MINOR TRAVELS.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+PISA.
+
+I am afraid that the talk of the modern railway traveller, if he is
+honest, must be a great deal of the custodians, the vetturini, and the
+facchini, whose agreeable acquaintance constitutes his chief knowledge
+of the population among which he journeys. We do not nowadays carry
+letters recommending us to citizens of the different places. If we
+did, consider the calamity we should be to the be-travelled Italian
+communities we now bless! No, we buy our through-tickets, and we put
+up at the hotels praised in the hand-book, and are very glad of a
+little conversation with any native, however adulterated he be by
+contact with the world to which we belong. I do not blush to own that
+I love the whole rascal race which ministers to our curiosity and
+preys upon us, and I am not ashamed to have spoken so often in this
+book of the lowly and rapacious but interesting porters who opened to
+me the different gates of that great realm of wonders, Italy. I doubt
+if they can be much known to the dwellers in the land, though they
+are the intimates of all sojourners and passengers; and if I have any
+regret in the matter, it is that I did not more diligently study them
+when I could. The opportunity once lost, seldom recurs; they are all
+but as transitory as the Object of Interest itself, I remember
+that years ago when I first visited Cambridge, there was an old man
+appeared to me in the character of Genius of the College Grounds, who
+showed me all the notable things in our city,--its treasures of art,
+its monuments,--and ended by taking me into his wood-house, and sawing
+me off from a wind-fallen branch of the Washington Elm a bit of the
+sacred wood for a remembrancer. Where now is that old man? He
+no longer exists for me, neither he nor his wood-house nor his
+dwelling-house. Let me look for a month about the College Grounds, and
+I shall not see him. But somewhere in the regions of traveller's faëry
+he still lives, and he appears instantly to the new-comer; he has an
+understanding with the dryads, who keep him supplied with boughs from
+the Washington Elm, and his wood-house is full of them.
+
+Among memorable custodians in Italy was one whom we saw at Pisa, where
+we stopped on our way from Leghorn after our accident in the Maremma,
+and spent an hour in viewing the Quattro Fabbriche. The beautiful old
+town, which every one knows from the report of travellers, one yet
+finds possessed of the incommunicable charm which keeps it forever
+novel to the visitor. Lying upon either side of the broad Arno, it
+mirrors in the flood architecture almost as fair and noble as that
+glassed in the Canalazzo, and its other streets seemed as tranquil
+as the canals of Venice. Those over which we drove, on the day of
+our visit, were paved with broad flag-stones, and gave out scarcely a
+sound under our wheels. It was Sunday, and no one was to be seen. Yet
+the empty and silent city inspired us with no sense of desolation. The
+palaces were in perfect repair; the pavements were clean; behind those
+windows we felt that there must be a good deal of easy, comfortable
+life. It is said that Pisa is one of the few places in Europe where
+the sweet, but timid spirit of Inexpensiveness--everywhere pursued by
+Railways--still lingers, and that you find cheap apartments in those
+well-preserved old palaces. No doubt it would be worth more to live in
+Pisa than it would cost, for the history of the place would alone be
+to any reasonable sojourner a perpetual recompense, and a princely
+income far exceeding his expenditure. To be sure, the Tower of Famine,
+with which we chiefly associate the name of Pisa, has been long razed
+to the ground, and built piecemeal into the neighboring palaces, but
+you may still visit the dead wall which hides from view the place
+where it stood; and you may thence drive on, as we did, to the great
+Piazza where stands the unrivaledest group of architecture in
+the world, after that of St. Mark's Place in Venice. There is the
+wonderful Leaning Tower, there is the old and beautiful Duomo,
+there is the noble Baptistery, there is the lovely Campo-Santo, and
+there--somewhere lurking in portal or behind pillar, and keeping
+out an eagle-eye for the marveling stranger--is the much-experienced
+cicerone who shows you through the edifices. Yours is the
+fourteen-thousandth American family to which he has had the honor of
+acting as guide, and he makes you feel an illogical satisfaction in
+thus becoming a contribution to statistics.
+
+We entered the Duomo, in our new friend's custody, and we saw the
+things which it was well to see. There was mass, or some other
+ceremony, transacting; but as usual it was made as little obtrusive as
+possible, and there was not much to weaken the sense of proprietorship
+with which travellers view objects of interest. Then we ascended the
+Leaning Tower, skillfully preserving its equilibrium as we went by
+an inclination of our persons in a direction opposed to the tower's
+inclination, but perhaps not receiving a full justification of the
+Campanile's appearance in pictures, till we stood at its base, and saw
+its vast bulk and height as it seemed to sway and threaten in the
+blue sky above our heads. There the sensation was too terrible for
+endurance,--even the architectural beauty of the tower could not save
+it from being monstrous to us,--and we were glad to hurry away from it
+to the serenity and solemn loveliness of the Campo Santo.
+
+Here are the frescos painted five hundred years ago to be ruinous and
+ready against the time of your arrival in 1864, and you feel that you
+are the first to enjoy the joke of the Vergognosa, that cunning jade
+who peers through her fingers at the shameful condition of deboshed
+father Noah, and seems to wink one eye of wicked amusement at you.
+Turning afterward to any book written about Italy during the time
+specified, you find your impression of exclusive possession of the
+frescos erroneous, and your muse naturally despairs, where so many
+muses have labored in vain, to give a just idea of the Campo Santo.
+Yet it is most worthy celebration. Those exquisitely arched and
+traceried colonnades seem to grow like the slim cypresses out of the
+sainted earth of Jerusalem; and those old paintings, made when Art
+was--if ever--a Soul, and not as now a mere Intelligence, enforce
+more effectively than their authors conceived the lessons of life and
+death; for they are themselves becoming part of the triumphant decay
+they represent. If it was awful once to look upon that strange scene
+where the gay lords and ladies of the chase come suddenly upon three
+dead men in their coffins, while the devoted hermits enjoy the peace
+of a dismal righteousness on a hill in the background, it is yet more
+tragic to behold it now when the dead men are hardly discernible in
+their coffins, and the hermits are but the vaguest shadows of gloomy
+bliss. Alas! Death mocks even the homage done him by our poor fears
+and hopes: with dust he wipes out dust, and with decay he blots the
+image of decay.
+
+I assure the reader that I made none of these apt reflections in
+the Campo Santo at Pisa, but have written them out this morning in
+Cambridge because there happens to be an east wind blowing. No
+one could have been sad in the company of our cheerful and patient
+cicerone, who, although visibly anxious to get his fourteen-thousandth
+American family away, still would not go till he had shown us that
+monument to a dead enmity which hangs in the Campo Santo. This is the
+mighty chain which the Pisans, in their old wars with the Genoese,
+once stretched across the mouth of their harbor to prevent the
+entrance of the hostile galleys. The Genoese with no great trouble
+carried the chain away, and kept it ever afterward till 1860, when
+Pisa was united to the kingdom of Italy. Then the trophy was restored
+to the Pisans, and with public rejoicings placed in the Campo Santo,
+an emblem of reconciliation and perpetual amity between ancient
+foes. [I read in Mr. Norton's _Notes of Travel and Study in Italy_,
+that he saw in the Campo Santo, as long ago as 1856, "the chains that
+marked the servitude of Pisa, now restored by Florence," and it is
+of course possible that our cicerone may have employed one of those
+chains for the different historical purpose I have mentioned. It would
+be a thousand pities, I think, if a monument of that sort should be
+limited to the commemoration of one fact only.] It is not a very good
+world,--_e pur si muove_.
+
+The Baptistery stands but a step away from the Campo Santo, and our
+guide ushered us into it with the air of one who had till now held in
+reserve his great stroke and was ready to deliver it. Yet I think he
+waited till we had looked at some comparatively trifling sculptures
+by Nicolò Pisano before he raised his voice, and uttered a melodious
+species of howl. While we stood in some amazement at this, the
+conscious structure of the dome caught the sound and prolonged it with
+a variety and sweetness of which I could not have dreamed. The man
+poured out in quick succession his musical wails, and then ceased,
+and a choir of heavenly echoes burst forth in response. There was a
+supernatural beauty in these harmonies of which I despair of giving
+any true idea: they were of such tender and exalted rapture that
+we might well have thought them the voices of young-eyed cherubim,
+singing as they passed through Paradise over that spot of earth where
+we stood. They seemed a celestial compassion that stooped and soothed,
+and rose again in lofty and solemn acclaim, leaving us poor and
+penitent and humbled.
+
+We were long silent, and then broke forth with cries of admiration of
+which the marvelous echo made eloquence.
+
+"Did you ever," said the cicerone after we had left the building,
+"hear such music as that?"
+
+"The papal choir does not equal it," we answered with one voice.
+
+The cicerone was not to be silenced even with such a tribute, and he
+went on:
+
+"Perhaps, as you are Americans, you know Moshu Feelmore, the
+President? No? Ah, what a fine man! You saw that he had his heart
+actually in his hand! Well, one day he said to me here, when I told
+him of the Baptistery echo, 'We have the finest echo in the world in
+the Hall of Congress.' I said nothing, but for answer I merely howled
+a little,--thus! Moshu Feelmore was convinced. Said he, 'There is no
+other echo in the world besides this. You are right.' I am unique,"
+pursued the cicerone, "for making this echo. But," he added with
+a sigh, "it has been my ruin. The English have put me in all the
+guide-books, and sometimes I have to howl twenty times a day. When our
+Victor Emanuel came here I showed him the church, the tower, and the
+Campo Santo. Says the king, 'Pfui!'"--here the cicerone gave that
+sweeping outward motion with both hands by which Italians dismiss a
+trifling subject--"'make me the echo!' I was forced," concluded the
+cicerone with a strong sense of injury in his tone, "to howl half an
+hour without ceasing."
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+THE FERRARA ROAD.
+
+The delight of one of our first journeys over the road between Padua
+and Ferrara was a Roman _cameriere_ out of place, who got into the
+diligence at Ponte Lagoscuro. We were six in all: The Englishman who
+thought it particularly Italian to say "Sì" three times for every
+assent; the Veneto (as the citizen of the province calls himself, the
+native of the city being Veneziano) going home to his farm near Padua;
+the German lady of a sour and dreadful countenance; our two selves,
+and the Roman _cameriere_. The last was worth all the rest--being a
+man of vast general information acquired in the course of service
+with families of all nations, and agreeably communicative. A brisk
+and lively little man, with dancing eyes, beard cut to the mode of the
+Emperor Napoleon, and the impressive habit of tapping himself on the
+teeth with his railroad-guide, and lifting his eyebrows when he
+says any thing specially worthy of remark. He, also, long after the
+conclusion of an observation, comes back to himself approvingly,
+with "_Sì_!" "_Vabene_!" "_Ecco_!" He speaks beautiful Italian and
+constantly, and in a little while we know that he was born at
+Ferrara, bred at Venice, and is now a citizen of Rome. "St. Peter's,
+Signori,--have you ever seen it?--is the first church of the world.
+At Ferrara lived Tasso and Ariosto. Venice is a lovely city. Ah! what
+beauty! But unique. My second country. _Sì, Signori, la mia seconda
+patria_." After a pause, "_Va bene_."
+
+We hint to him that he is extremely fortunate in having so many
+countries, and that it will be difficult to exile so universal a
+citizen, which he takes as a tribute to his worth, smiles and says,
+"Ecco!"
+
+Then he turns to the Veneto, and describes to him the English manner
+of living. "Wonderfully well they eat--the English. Four times a day.
+With rosbif at the dinner. Always, always, always! And tea in the
+evening, with rosbif cold. _Mangiano sempre. Ma bene, dico_." After
+a pause, "_Sì_!" "And the Venetians, they eat well, too. Whence the
+proverb: '_Sulla Riva degli Schiavoni, si mangiano bei bocconi_.'
+('On the Riva degli Schiavoni, you eat fine mouthfuls.') Signori, I am
+going to Venice," concludes the cameriere.
+
+He is the politest man in the world, and the most attentive to ladies.
+The German lady has not spoken a word, possibly not knowing the
+language. Our good cameriere cannot bear this, and commiserates her
+weariness with noble elegance and originality. "_La Signora si trova
+un poco sagrificata_?" ("The lady feels slightly sacrificed!") We all
+smile, and the little man very gladly with us.
+
+"An elegant way of expressing it," we venture to suggest. The Veneto
+roars and roars again, and we all shriek, none louder than the Roman
+himself. We never can get over that idea of being slightly sacrificed,
+and it lasts us the whole way to Padua; and when the Veneto gets down
+at his farm-gate, he first "reverences" us, and then says, "I am very
+sorry for you others who must be still more slightly sacrificed."
+
+At Venice, a week or two later, I meet our cameriere. He is not so
+gay, quite, as he was, and I fancy that he has not found so many _bei
+bocconi_ on the Riva degli Schiavoni, as the proverb and a sanguine
+temperament led him to expect. Do I happen to know, he asks, any
+American family going to Rome and desiring a cameriere?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I write, the Spring is coming in Cambridge, and I cannot help
+thinking, with a little heartache, of how the Spring came to meet us
+once as we rode southward from Venice toward Florence on that road
+from Padua to Ferrara. It had been May for some time in Tuscany,
+and all through the wide plains of Venetia this was the railroad
+landscape: fields tilled and tended as jealously as gardens, and
+waving in wheat, oats, and grass, with here and there the hay cut
+already, and here and there acres of Indian corn. The green of the
+fields was all dashed with the bloody red of poppies; the fig-trees
+hung full of half-grown fruit; the orchards were garlanded with vines,
+which they do not bind to stakes in Italy, but train from tree to
+tree, leaving them to droop in festoons and sway in the wind, with the
+slender native grace of vines. Huge stone farm-houses shelter under
+the same roof the family and all the live stock of the farm; thatched
+cottages thickly dotting the fields, send forth to their cultivation
+the most picturesque peasants,--men and women, pretty young girls in
+broad hats, and wonderful old brown and crooked crones, who seem never
+to have been younger nor fairer. Country roads, level, straight, and
+white, stretch away on either hand, and the constant files of poplars
+escort them wherever they go. All about, the birds sing, and the
+butterflies dance. The milk-white oxen dragging the heavy carts turn
+up their patient heads, with wide-spreading horns and mellow eyes,
+at the passing train; the sunburnt lout behind them suspends the
+application of the goad; unwonted acquiescence stirs in the bosom of
+the firm-minded donkey, and even the matter-of-fact locomotive seems
+to linger as lovingly as a locomotive may along these plains of
+Spring.
+
+At Padua we take a carriage for Ponte Lagoscuro, and having fought the
+customary battle with the vetturino before arriving at the terms of
+contract; having submitted to the successive pillage of the man who
+had held our horses a moment, of the man who tied on the trunk, and
+of the man who hovered obligingly about the carriage, and desired to
+drink our health--with prodigious smacking of whip, and banging of
+wheels, we rattle out of the Stella d'Oro, and set forth from the gate
+of the old city.
+
+I confess that I like posting. There is a freedom and a fine sense of
+proprietorship in that mode of travel, combined with sufficient
+speed, which you do not feel on the railroad. For twenty francs and
+_buonamano_, I had bought my carriage and horses and driver for the
+journey of forty miles, and I began to look round on the landscape
+with a cumulative feeling of ownership in everything I saw. For me,
+old women spinning in old-world fashion, with distaff and spindle,
+flax as white as their own hair, came to roadside doors, or moved
+back and forth under orchard trees. For me, the peasants toiled in the
+fields together, wearing for my sake wide straw hats, or gay ribbons,
+or red caps. The white oxen were willing to mass themselves in
+effective groups, as the ploughman turned the end of his furrow; young
+girls specially appointed themselves to lead horses to springs as we
+passed; children had larger eyes and finer faces and played more
+about the cottage doors, on account of our posting. As for the
+vine-garlanded trees in the orchards, and the opulence of the endless
+fertile plain; the white distance of the road before us with its
+guardian poplars,--I doubt if people in a diligence could have got so
+much of these things as we. Certainly they could not have had all to
+themselves the lordly splendor with which we dashed through gaping
+villages, taking the street from everybody, and fading magnificently
+away upon the road.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+TRIESTE.
+
+If you take the midnight steamer at Venice you reach Trieste by six
+o'clock in the morning, and the hills rise to meet you as you enter
+the broad bay dotted with the sail of fishing-craft. The hills are
+bald and bare, and you find, as you draw near, that the city lies at
+their feet under a veil of mist, or climbs earlier into view along
+their sides. The prospect is singularly devoid of gentle and pleasing
+features, and looking at those rugged acclivities, with their aspect
+of continual bleakness, you readily believe all the stories you have
+heard of that fierce wind called the Bora which sweeps from them
+through Trieste at certain seasons. While it blows, ladies walking
+near the quays are sometimes caught up and set afloat, involuntary
+Galateas, in the bay, and people keep in-doors as much as possible.
+But the Bora, though so sudden and so savage, does give warning of its
+rise, and the peasants avail themselves of this characteristic. They
+station a man on one of the mountain tops, and when he feels the first
+breath of the Bora, he sounds a horn, which is a signal for all within
+hearing to lay hold of something that cannot be blown away, and cling
+to it till the wind falls. This may happen in three days or in nine,
+according to the popular proverbs. "The spectacle of the sea," says
+Dall' Ongaro, in a note to one of his ballads, "while the Bora blows,
+is sublime, and when it ceases the prospect of the surrounding hills
+is delightful. The air, purified by the rapid current, clothes them
+with a rosy veil, and the temperature is instantly softened, even in
+the heart of winter."
+
+The city itself, as you penetrate it, makes good with its stateliness
+and picturesqueness your loss through the grimness of its environs. It
+is in great part new, very clean, and full of the life and movement
+of a prosperous port; but, better than this, so far as the mere
+sight-seer is concerned, it wins a novel charm from the many public
+staircases by which you ascend and descend its hillier quarters, and
+which are made of stone, and lightly railed and balustraded with iron.
+
+Something of all this I noticed in my ride from the landing of the
+steamer to the house of friends in the suburbs, and there I grew
+better disposed toward the hills, which, as I strolled over them,
+I found dotted with lovely villas, and everywhere traversed by
+perfectly-kept carriage-roads, and easy and pleasant foot-paths. It
+was in the spring-time, and the peach-trees and almond-trees hung
+full of blossoms and bees, the lizards lay in the walks absorbing the
+vernal sunshine, the violets and cowslips sweetened all the grassy
+borders. The scene did not want a human interest, for the peasant
+girls were going to market at that hour, and I met them everywhere,
+bearing heavy burdens on their own heads, or hurrying forward with
+their wares on the backs of donkeys. They were as handsome as heart
+could wish, and they wore that Italian costume which is not to be seen
+anywhere in Italy except at Trieste and in the Roman and Neapolitan
+provinces,--a bright bodice and gown, with the head-dress of dazzling
+white linen, square upon the crown, and dropping lightly to the
+shoulders. Later I saw these comely maidens crouching on the ground in
+the market-place, and selling their wares, with much glitter of eyes,
+teeth, and earrings, and a continual babble of bargaining.
+
+It seemed to me that the average of good looks was greater among the
+women of Trieste than among those of Venice, but that the instances of
+striking and exquisite beauty were rarer. At Trieste, too, the Italian
+type, so pure at Venice, is lost or continually modified by the mixed
+character of the population, which perhaps is most noticeable at the
+Merchants' Exchange. This is a vast edifice roofed with glass, where
+are the offices of the great steam navigation company, the Austrian
+Lloyds,--which, far more than the favor of the Imperial government,
+has contributed to the prosperity of Trieste,--and where the
+traffickers of all races meet daily to gossip over the news and the
+prices. Here a Greek or Dalmat talks with an eager Italian or a slow,
+sure Englishman; here the hated Austrian button-holes the Venetian
+or the Magyar; here the Jew meets the Gentile on common ground; here
+Christianity encounters the hoary superstitions of the East, and makes
+a good thing out of them in cotton or grain. All costumes are seen
+here, and all tongues are heard, the native Triestines contributing
+almost as much to the variety of the latter as the foreigners. "In
+regard to language," says Cantù, "though the country is peopled by
+Slavonians, yet the Italian tongue is spreading into the remotest
+villages where a few years since it was not understood. In the city it
+is the common and familiar language; the Slavonians of the North use
+the German for the language of ceremony; those of the South, as well
+as the Israelites, the Italian; while the Protestants use the German,
+the Greeks the Hellenic and Illyric, the _employés_ of the civil
+courts the Italian or the German, the schools now German and now
+Italian, the bar and the pulpit Italian. Most of the inhabitants,
+indeed, are bi-lingual, and very many tri-lingual, without counting
+French, which is understood and spoken from infancy. Italian, German,
+and Greek are written, but the Slavonic little, this having remained
+in the condition of a vulgar tongue. But it would be idle to
+distinguish the population according to language, for the son adopts a
+language different from the father's, and now prefers one language and
+now another; the women incline to the Italian; but those of the upper
+class prefer now German, now French, now English, as, from one decade
+to another, affairs, fashions, and fancies change. This in the salons;
+in the squares and streets, the Venetian dialect is heard."
+
+And with the introduction of the Venetian dialect, Venetian discontent
+seems also to have crept in, and I once heard a Triestine declaim
+against the Imperial government quite in the manner of Venice. It
+struck me that this desire for union with Italy, which he declared
+prevalent in Trieste, must be of very recent growth, since even so
+late as 1848, Trieste had refused to join Venice in the expulsion of
+the Austrians. Indeed, the Triestines have fought the Venetians from
+the first; they stole the Brides of Venice in one of their piratical
+cruises in the lagoons; gave aid and comfort to those enemies of
+Venice, the Visconti, the Carraras, and the Genoese; revolted from St.
+Mark whenever subjected to his banner, and finally, rather than remain
+under his sway, gave themselves five centuries ago to Austria.
+
+The objects of interest in Trieste are not many. There are remains of
+an attributive temple of Jupiter under the Duomo, and there is near
+at hand the Museum of Classical Antiquities founded in honor of
+Winckelmann, murdered at Trieste by that ill-advised Pistojese,
+Ancangeli, who had seen the medals bestowed on the antiquary by Maria
+Theresa and believed him rich. There is also a scientific museum
+founded by the Archduke Maximilian, and, above all, there is the
+beautiful residence of that ill-starred prince,--the Miramare, where
+the half-crazed Empress of the Mexicans vainly waits her husband's
+return from the experiment of paternal government in the New World. It
+would be hard to tell how Art has charmed rock and wave at Miramare,
+until the spur of those rugged Triestine hills, jutting into the sea,
+has been made the seat of ease and luxury, but the visitor is aware of
+the magic as soon as he passes the gate of the palace grounds. These
+are in great part perpendicular, and are over clambered with airy
+stairways climbing to pensile arbors. Where horizontal, they are
+diversified with mimic seas for swans to sail upon, and summer-houses
+for people to lounge in and look at the swans from. On the point of
+land furthest from the acclivity stands the Castle of Miramare, half
+at sea, and half adrift in the clouds above:--
+
+  "And fain it would stoop downward
+  To the mirrored wave below;
+  And fain it would soar upward
+  In the evening's crimson glow."
+
+I remember that a little yacht lay beside the pier at the castle's
+foot, and lazily flapped its sail, while the sea beat inward with as
+languid a pulse. That was some years ago, before Mexico was dreamed of
+at Miramare: now, perchance, she who is one of the most unhappy among
+women looks down distraught from those high windows, and finds in the
+helpless sail and impassive wave the images of her baffled hope, and
+that immeasurable sea which gives back its mariners neither to love
+nor sorrow. I think though she be the wife and daughter of princes, we
+may pity this poor Empress at least as much as we pity the Mexicans to
+whom her dreams have brought so many woes.
+
+It was the midnight following my visit to Miramare when the fiacre
+in which I had quitted my friend's house was drawn up by its greatly
+bewildered driver on the quay near the place where the steamer for
+Venice should be lying. There was no steamer for Venice to be seen.
+The driver swore a little in the polyglot profanities of his native
+city, and descending from his box, went and questioned different
+lights--blue lights, yellow lights, green lights--to be seen at
+different points. To a light, they were ignorant, though eloquent, and
+to pass the time, we drove up and down the quay, and stopped at the
+landings of all the steamers that touch at Trieste. It was a snug
+fiacre enough, but I did not care to spend the night in it, and I
+urged the driver to further inquiry. A wanderer whom we met, declared
+that it was not the night for the Venice steamer; another admitted
+that it might be; a third conversed with the driver in low tones, and
+then leaped upon the box. We drove rapidly away, and before I had, in
+view of this mysterious proceeding, composed a fitting paragraph for
+the _Fatti Diversi_ of the _Osservatore Triestino_, descriptive of the
+state in which the Guardie di Polizia should find me floating in the
+bay, exanimate and evidently the prey of a _triste evvenimento_--the
+driver pulled up once more, and now beside a steamer. It was the
+steamer for Venice, he said, in precisely the tone which he would
+have used had he driven me directly to it without blundering. It was
+breathing heavily, and was just about to depart, but even in the hurry
+of getting on board, I could not help noticing that it seemed to have
+grown a great deal since I had last voyaged in it. There was not
+a soul to be seen except the mute steward who took my satchel, and
+guiding me below into an elegant saloon, instantly left me alone.
+Here again the steamer was vastly enlarged. These were not the narrow
+quarters of the Venice steamer, nor was this lamp, shedding a soft
+light on cushioned seats and paneled doors and wainscotings the sort
+of illumination usual in that humble craft. I rang the small silver
+bell on the long table, and the mute steward appeared.
+
+_Was_ this the steamer for Venice?
+
+_Sicuro_!
+
+All that I could do in comment was to sit down; and in the mean time
+the steamer trembled, groaned, choked, cleared its throat, and we were
+under way.
+
+"The other passengers have all gone to bed, I suppose," I argued
+acutely, seeing none of them. Nevertheless, I thought it odd, and
+it seemed a shrewd means of relief to ring the bell, and pretending
+drowsiness, to ask the steward which was my state-room.
+
+He replied with a curious smile that I could have any of them. Amazed,
+I yet selected a state-room, and while the steward was gone for the
+sheets and pillow-cases, I occupied my time by opening the doors of
+all the other state-rooms. They were empty.
+
+"Am I the only passenger?" I asked, when he returned, with some
+anxiety.
+
+"Precisely," he answered.
+
+I could not proceed and ask if he composed the entire crew--it seemed
+too fearfully probable that he did.
+
+I now suspected that I had taken passage with the Olandese Volante.
+There was nothing in the world for it, however, but to go to bed, and
+there, with the accession of a slight sea-sickness, my views of the
+situation underwent a total change. I had gone down into the Maelstrom
+with the Ancient Mariner--I was a Manuscript Found in a Bottle!
+
+Coming to the surface about six o'clock A.M., I found a daylight as
+cheerful as need be upon the appointments of the elegant cabin, and
+upon the good-natured face of the steward when he brought me the caffè
+latte, and the buttered toast for my breakfast. He said "_Servitor
+suo_!" in a loud and comfortable voice, and I perceived the
+absurdity of having thought that he was in any way related to the
+Nightmare-Death-in-life-that-thicks-man's-blood-with-cold.
+
+"This is not the regular Venice steamer, I suppose," I remarked to the
+steward as he laid my breakfast in state upon the long table.
+
+No. Properly, no boat should have left for Venice last night, which
+was not one of the times of the tri-weekly departure. This was one of
+the steamers of the line between Trieste and Alexandria, and it was
+going at present to take on an extraordinary freight at Venice for
+Egypt. I had been permitted to come on board because my driver said I
+had a return ticket, and would go.
+
+Ascending to the deck I found nothing whatever mysterious in the
+management of the steamer. The captain met me with a bow in the
+gangway; seamen were coiling wet ropes at different points, as they
+always are; the mate was promenading the bridge, and taking the rainy
+weather as it came, with his oil-cloth coat and hat on. The wheel of
+the steamer was as usual chewing the sea, and finding it unpalatable,
+and making vain efforts at expectoration.
+
+We were in sight of the breakwater outside Malamocco, and a pilot-boat
+was making us from the land. Even at this point the innumerable
+fortifications of the Austrians began, and they multiplied as we
+drew near Venice, till we entered the lagoon, and found it a nest of
+fortresses one with another.
+
+Unhappily the day being rainy, Venice did not spring resplendent from
+the sea, as I had always read she would. She rose slowly and languidly
+from the water,--not like a queen, but like the gray, slovenly,
+bedrabbled, heart-broken old slave she really was.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+BASSANO.
+
+I have already told, in recounting the story of our visit to the
+Cimbri, how full of courtship we found the little city of Bassano on
+the evening of our arrival there. Bassano is the birthplace of the
+painter Jacopo da Ponte, who was one of the first Italian painters to
+treat scriptural story as accessory to mere landscape, and who had a
+peculiar fondness for painting Entrances into the Ark, for in these he
+could indulge without stint the taste for pairing-off early acquired
+from observation of local customs in his native town. This was
+the theory offered by one who had imbibed the spirit of subtile
+speculation from Ruskin, and I think it reasonable. At least it does
+not conflict with the fact that there is at Bassano a most excellent
+gallery of paintings entirely devoted to the works of Jacopo da Ponte,
+and his four sons, who are here to be seen to better advantage than
+anywhere else. As few strangers visit Bassano, the gallery is little
+frequented. It is in charge of a very strict old man, who will not
+allow people to look at the pictures till he has shown them the
+adjoining cabinet of geological specimens. It is in vain that you
+assure him of your indifference to these scientific _seccature_; he is
+deaf and you are not suffered to escape a single fossil. He asked us a
+hundred questions, and understood nothing in reply, insomuch that when
+he came to his last inquiry, "Have the Protestants the same God as the
+Catholics?" we were rather glad that he should be obliged to settle
+the fact for himself.
+
+Underneath the gallery was a school of boys, whom as we entered we
+heard humming over the bitter honey which childhood is obliged to
+gather from the opening flowers of orthography. When we passed out,
+the master gave these poor busy bees an atom of holiday, and they all
+swarmed forth together to look at the strangers. The teacher was a
+long, lank man, in a black threadbare coat, and a skull-cap--exactly
+like the schoolmaster in "The Deserted Village." We made a pretense of
+asking him our way to somewhere, and went wrong, and came by accident
+upon a wide flat space, bare as a brick-yard, beside which was
+lettered on a fragment of the old city wall, "Giuoco di Palla." It
+was evidently the playground of the whole city, and it gave us a
+pleasanter idea of life in Bassano than we had yet conceived, to think
+of its entire population playing ball there in the spring afternoons.
+We respected Bassano as much for this as for her diligent remembrance
+of her illustrious dead, of whom she has very great numbers. It
+appeared to us that nearly every other house bore a tablet announcing
+that "Here was born," or "Here died," some great or good man of whom
+no one out of Bassano ever heard. There is enough celebrity in Bassano
+to supply the world; but as laurel is a thing that grows anywhere, I
+covet rather from Bassano the magnificent ivy that covers the portions
+of her ancient wall yet standing. The wall, where visible, is seen to
+be of a pebbly rough-cast, but it is clad almost from the ground
+in glossy ivy, that glitters upon it like chain-mail upon the vast
+shoulders of some giant warrior. The moat beneath is turned into a
+lovely promenade bordered by quiet villas, with rococo shepherds and
+shepherdesses in marble on their gates; where the wall is built to the
+verge of the high ground on which the city stands, there is a swift
+descent to the wide valley of the Brenta waving in corn and vines and
+tobacco.
+
+We went up the Brenta one day as far as Oliero, to visit the famous
+cavern already mentioned, out of which, from the secret heart of the
+hill, gushes one of the foamy affluents of the river. It is reached
+by passing through a paper-mill, fed by the stream, and then through
+a sort of ante-grot, whence stepping-stones are laid in the brawling
+current through a succession of natural compartments with dome-like
+roofs. From the hill overhead hang stalactites of all grotesque and
+fairy shapes, and the rock underfoot is embroidered with fantastic
+designs wrought by the water in the silence and darkness of the
+endless night. At a considerable distance from the mouth of the cavern
+is a wide lake, with a boat upon it, and voyaging to the centre of the
+pool your attention is drawn to the dome above you, which contracts
+into a shaft rising upward to a height as yet unmeasured and even
+unpierced by light. From somewhere in its mysterious ascent, an
+auroral boy, with a tallow candle, produces a so-called effect of
+sunrise, and sheds a sad, disheartening radiance on the lake and the
+cavern sides, which is to sunlight about as the blind creatures of
+subterranean waters are to those of waves that laugh and dance above
+ground. But all caverns are much alike in their depressing and gloomy
+influences, and since there is so great opportunity to be wretched on
+the surface of the earth, why do people visit them? I do not know that
+this is more dispiriting or its stream more Stygian than another.
+
+The wicked memory of the Ecelini survives everywhere in this part of
+Italy, and near the entrance of the Oliero grotto is a hollow in the
+hill something like the apsis of a church, which is popularly believed
+to have been the hiding-place of Cecilia da Baone, one of the many
+unhappy wives of one of the many miserable members of the Ecelino
+family. It is not quite clear when Cecilia should have employed this
+as a place of refuge, and it is certain that she was not the wife of
+Ecelino da Romano, as the neighbors believe at Oliero, but of Ecelino
+il Monaco, his father; yet since her name is associated with the grot,
+let us have her story, which is curiously illustrative of the life of
+the best society in Italy during the thirteenth century. She was the
+only daughter of the rich and potent lord, Manfredo, Count of Baone
+and Abano, who died leaving his heiress to the guardianship of
+Spinabello da Xendrico. When his ward reached womanhood, Spinabello
+cast about him to find a suitable husband for her, and it appeared to
+him that a match with the son of Tiso du Camposampiero promised
+the greatest advantages. Tiso, to whom he proposed the affair, was
+delighted, but desiring first to take counsel with his friends upon
+so important a matter, he confided it for advice to his brother-in-law
+and closest intimate, Ecelino Balbo. It had just happened that Balbo's
+son, Ecelino il Monaco, was at that moment disengaged, having
+been recently divorced from his first wife, the lovely but light
+Speronella; and Balbo falsely went to the greedy guardian of Cecilia,
+and offering him better terms than he could hope for from Tiso,
+secured Cecilia for his son. At this treachery the Camposampieri were
+furious; but they dissembled their anger till the moment of revenge
+arrived, when Cecilia's rejected suitor encountering her upon a
+journey beyond the protection of her husband, violently dishonored his
+successful rival. The unhappy lady returning to Ecelino at Bassano,
+recounted her wrong, and was with a horrible injustice repudiated and
+sent home, while her husband arranged schemes of vengeance in due time
+consummated. Cecilia next married a Venetian noble, and being in
+due time divorced, married yet again, and died the mother of a large
+family of children.
+
+This is a very old scandal, yet I think there was an _habitué_ of the
+caffè in Bassano who could have given some of its particulars from
+personal recollection. He was an old and smoothly shaven gentleman, in
+a scrupulously white waistcoat, whom we saw every evening in a corner
+of the caffè playing solitaire. He talked with no one, saluted no
+one. He drank his glasses of water with anisette, and silently played
+solitaire. There is no good reason to doubt that he had been doing the
+same thing every evening for six hundred years.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+POSSAGNO, CANOVA'S BIRTHPLACE.
+
+It did not take a long time to exhaust the interest of Bassano, but we
+were sorry to leave the place because of the excellence of the inn at
+which we tarried. It was called "Il Mondo," and it had everything
+in it that heart could wish. Our rooms were miracles of neatness and
+comfort; they had the freshness, not the rawness, of recent repair,
+and they opened into the dining-hall, where we were served with
+indescribable salads and risotti. During our sojourn we simply enjoyed
+the house; when we were come away we wondered that so much perfection
+of hotel could exist in so small a town as Bassano. It is one of
+the pleasures of by-way travel in Italy, that you are everywhere
+introduced in character, that you become fictitious and play a part as
+in a novel. To this inn of The World, our driver had brought us with a
+clamor and rattle proportioned to the fee received from us, and
+when, in response to his haughty summons, the cameriere, who had been
+gossiping with the cook, threw open the kitchen door, and stood out to
+welcome us in a broad square of forth-streaming ruddy light, amid the
+lovely odors of broiling and roasting, our driver saluted him with,
+"Receive these gentle folks, and treat them to your very best. They
+are worthy of anything." This at once put us back several centuries,
+and we never ceased to be lords and ladies of the period of Don
+Quixote as long as we rested in that inn.
+
+It was a bright and breezy Sunday when we left "Il Mondo," and gayly
+journeyed toward Treviso, intending to visit Possagno, the birthplace
+of Canova, on our way. The road to the latter place passes through a
+beautiful country, that gently undulates on either hand till in the
+distance it rises into pleasant hills and green mountain heights.
+Possagno itself lies upon the brink of a declivity, down the side of
+which drops terrace after terrace, all planted with vines and figs and
+peaches, to a watercourse below. The ground on which the village is
+built, with its quaint and antiquated stone cottages, slopes gently
+northward, and on a little rise upon the left hand of us coming from
+Bassano, we saw that stately edifice with which Canova has honored his
+humble birthplace. It is a copy of the Pantheon, and it cannot help
+being beautiful and imposing, but it would be utterly out of place in
+any other than an Italian village. Here, however, it consorted well
+enough with the lingering qualities of the old pagan civilization
+still perceptible in Italy. A sense of that past was so strong with
+us as we ascended the broad stairway leading up the slope from the
+village to the level on which the temple stands at the foot of a
+mountain, that we might well have believed we approached an altar
+devoted to the elder worship: through the open doorway and between the
+columns of the portico we could see the priests moving to and fro, and
+the voice of their chanting came out to us like the sound of hymns to
+some of the deities long disowned; and I remembered how Padre L----
+had said to me in Venice, "Our blessed saints are only the old gods
+baptized and christened anew." Within as without, the temple resembled
+the Pantheon, but it had little to show us. The niches designed by
+Canova for statues of the saints are empty yet; but there are busts by
+his own hand of himself and his brother, the Bishop Canova. Among the
+people was the sculptor's niece, whom our guide pointed out to us, and
+who was evidently used to being looked at. She seemed not to dislike
+it, and stared back at us amiably enough, being a good-natured, plump,
+comely dark-faced lady of perhaps fifty years.
+
+Possagno is nothing if not Canova, and our guide, a boy, knew
+all about him,--how, more especially, he had first manifested his
+wonderful genius by modeling a group of sheep out of the dust of the
+highway, and how an Inglese happening along in his carriage, saw the
+boy's work and gave him a plateful of gold napoleons. I dare say
+this is as near the truth as most facts. And is it not better for the
+historic Canova to have begun in this way than to have poorly picked
+up the rudiments of his art in the workshop of his father, a maker of
+altar-pieces and the like for country churches? The Canova family was
+intermarried with the Venetian nobility, and will not credit those
+stories of Canova's beginnings which his townsmen so fondly cherish.
+I believe they would even distrust the butter-lion with which the
+boy-sculptor is said to have adorned the table of the noble Falier,
+and first won his notice.
+
+Besides the temple at Possagno, there is a very pretty gallery
+containing casts of all Canova's works. It is an interesting place,
+where Psyches and Cupids flutter, where Venuses present themselves
+in every variety of attitude, where Sorrows sit upon hard,
+straight-backed classic chairs, and mourn in the society of faithful
+Storks; where the Bereft of this century surround death-beds in Greek
+costume appropriate to the scene; where Muses and Graces sweetly pose
+themselves and insipidly smile, and where the Dancers and Passions,
+though nakeder, are no wickeder than the Saints and Virtues. In all,
+there are a hundred and ninety-five pieces in the gallery, and among
+the rest the statue named George Washington, which was sent to America
+in 1820, and afterwards destroyed by fire in the Capitol. The figure
+is in a sitting posture; naturally, it is in the dress of a Roman
+general; and if it does not look much like George Washington, it does
+resemble Julius Cæsar.
+
+The custodian of the gallery had been Canova'a body-servant, and he
+loved to talk of his master. He had so far imbibed the family spirit
+that he did not like to allow that Canova had ever been other than
+rich and grand, and he begged us not to believe the idle stories of
+his first essays in art. He was delighted with our interest in the
+imperial Washington, and our pleasure in the whole gallery, which we
+viewed with the homage due to the man who had rescued the world from
+Swaggering in sculpture. When we were satisfied, he invited us, with
+his mistress's permission, into the house of the Canovas adjoining
+the gallery; and there we saw many paintings by the sculptor,--pausing
+longest in a lovely little room decorated after the Pompeian manner
+with _scherzi_ in miniature panels representing the jocose classic
+usualities: Cupids escaping from cages, and being sold from them, and
+playing many pranks and games with Nymphs and Graces.
+
+Then Canova was done, and Possagno was finished; and we resumed our
+way to Treviso, a town nearly as much porticoed as Padua, and having a
+memory and hardly any other consciousness. The Duomo, which is perhaps
+the ugliest duomo in the world, contains an "Annunciation," by Titian,
+one of his best paintings; and in the Monte di Pietà is the grand and
+beautiful "Entombment," by which Giorgione is perhaps most worthily
+remembered. The church of San Nicolò is interesting from its quaint
+and pleasing frescos by the school of Giotto. At the railway station
+an admirable old man sells the most delicious white and purple grapes.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+COMO.
+
+My visit to Lake Como has become to me a dream of summer,--a vision
+that remains faded the whole year round, till the blazing heats of
+July bring out the sympathetic tints in which it was vividly painted.
+Then I behold myself again in burning Milan, amidst noises and
+fervors and bustle that seem intolerable after my first six months
+in tranquil, cool, mute Venice. Looking at the great white Cathedral,
+with its infinite pinnacles piercing the cloudless blue, and gathering
+the fierce sun upon it, I half expect to see the whole mass calcined
+by the heat, and crumbling, statue by statue, finial by finial, arch
+by arch, into a vast heap of lime on the Piazza, with a few charred
+English tourists blackening here and there upon the ruin, and
+contributing a smell of burnt leather and Scotch tweed to the horror
+of the scene. All round Milan smokes the great Lombard plain, and
+to the north rises Monte Rosa, her dark head coifed with tantalizing
+snows as with a peasant's white linen kerchief. And I am walking out
+upon that fuming plain as far as to the Arco della Pace, on which
+the bronze horses may melt any minute; or I am sweltering through the
+city's noonday streets, in search of Sant' Ambrogio, or the Cenacolo
+of Da Vinci, or what know I? Coming back to our hotel, "Alla Bella
+Venezia," and greeted on entering by the immense fresco which covers
+one whole side of the court, it appeared to my friend and me no wonder
+that Garibaldi should look so longingly from the prow of a gondola
+toward the airy towers and balloon-like domes that swim above the
+unattainable lagoons of Venice, where the Austrian then lorded it in
+coolness and quietness, while hot, red-shirted Italy was shut out
+upon the dusty plains and stony hills. Our desire for water became
+insufferable; we paid our modest bills, and at six o'clock we took
+the train for Como, where we arrived about the hour when Don Abbondio,
+walking down the lonely path with his book of devotions in his hand,
+gave himself to the Devil on meeting the bravos of Don Rodrigo. I
+counsel the reader to turn to _I Promessi Sposi_, if he would know
+how all the lovely Como country looks at that hour. For me, the ride
+through the evening landscape, and the faint sentiment of pensiveness
+provoked by the smell of the ripening maize, which exhales the same
+sweetness on the way to Como that it does on any Ohio bottom-land,
+have given me an appetite, and I am to dine before wooing the
+descriptive Muse.
+
+After dinner, we find at the door of the hotel an English architect
+whom we know, and we take a boat together for a moonlight row upon the
+lake, and voyage far up the placid water through air that bathes our
+heated senses like dew. How far we have left Milan behind! On the lake
+lies the moon, but the hills are held by mysterious shadows, which for
+the time are as substantial to us as the hills themselves. Hints of
+habitation appear in the twinkling lights along the water's edge, and
+we suspect an alabaster lamp in every casement, and in every invisible
+house a villa such as Claude Melnotte described to Pauline,--and some
+one mouths that well-worn fustian. The rags of sentimentality flutter
+from every crag and olive-tree and orange-tree in all Italy--like the
+wilted paper collars which vulgar tourists leave by our own mountains
+and streams, to commemorate their enjoyment of the landscape.
+
+The town of Como lies, a swarm of lights, behind us; the hills and
+shadows gloom around; the lake is a sheet of tremulous silver. There
+is no telling how we get back to our hotel, or with what satisfied
+hearts we fall asleep in our room there. The steamer starts for the
+head of the lake at eight o'clock in the morning, and we go on board
+at that hour.
+
+There is some pretense of shelter in the awning stretched over the
+after part of the boat; but we do not feel the need of it in the fresh
+morning air, and we get as near the bow as possible, that we may be
+the very first to enjoy the famous beauty of the scenes opening
+before us. A few sails dot the water, and everywhere there are small,
+canopied row-boats, such as we went pleasuring in last night. We reach
+a bend in the lake, and all the roofs and towers of the city of Como
+pass from view, as if they had been so much architecture painted on
+a scene and shifted out of sight at a theatre. But other roofs and
+towers constantly succeed them, not less lovely and picturesque than
+they, with every curve of the many-curving lake. We advance over
+charming expanses of water lying between lofty hills; and as the lake
+is narrow, the voyage is like that of a winding river,--like that of
+the Ohio, but for the primeval wildness of the acclivities that guard
+our Western stream, and the tawniness of its current. Wherever the
+hills do not descend sheer into Como, a pretty town nestles on the
+brink, or, if not a town, then a villa, or else a cottage, if there is
+room for nothing more. Many little towns climb the heights half-way,
+and where the hills are green and cultivated in vines or olives,
+peasants' houses scale them to the crest. They grow loftier and
+loftier as we leave our starting-place farther behind, and as we
+draw near Colico they wear light wreaths of cloud and snow. So cool
+a breeze has drawn down between them all the way that we fancy it to
+have come from them till we stop at Colico, and find that, but for the
+efforts of our honest engine, sweating and toiling in the dark
+below, we should have had no current of air. A burning calm is in
+the atmosphere, and on the broad, flat valley,--out of which a marshy
+stream oozes into the lake,--and on the snow-crowned hills upon the
+left, and on the dirty village of Colico upon the right, and on the
+indolent beggars waiting to welcome us, and sunning their goitres at
+the landing.
+
+The name Colico, indeed, might be literally taken in English as
+descriptive of the local insalubrity. The place was once large, but it
+has fallen away much from sickness, and we found a bill posted in its
+public places inviting emigrants to America on the part of a German
+steamship company. It was the only advertisement of the kind I
+ever saw in Italy, and I judged that the people must be notoriously
+discontented there to make it worth the while of a steamship company
+to tempt from home any of the home-keeping Italian race. And
+yet Colico, though undeniably hot, and openly dirty, and tacitly
+unhealthy, had merits, though the dinner we got there was not among
+its virtues. It had an accessible country about it; that is, its woods
+and fields were not impenetrably walled in from the vagabond foot;
+and after we had dined we went and lay down under some greenly waving
+trees beside a field of corn, and heard the plumed and panoplied maize
+talking to itself of its kindred in America. It always has a welcome
+for tourists of our nation wherever it finds us in Italy; and
+sometimes its sympathy, expressed in a rustling and clashing of its
+long green blades, or in its strong sweet perfume, has, as already
+hinted, made me homesick, though I have been uniformly unaffected by
+potato-patches and tobacco-fields. If only the maize could impart to
+the Italian cooks the beautiful mystery of roasting-ears! Ah! then
+indeed it might claim a full and perfect fraternization from its
+compatriots abroad.
+
+From where we lay beside the corn-field, we could see, through the
+twinkling leaves and the twinkling atmosphere, the great hills across
+the lake, taking their afternoon naps, with their clouds drawn like
+handkerchiefs over their heads. It was very hot, and the red and
+purple ooze of the unwholesome river below "burnt like a witch's
+oils." It was indeed but a fevered joy we snatched from Nature there;
+and I am afraid that we got nothing more comfortable from sentiment,
+when, rising, we wandered off through the unguarded fields toward a
+ruined tower on a hill. It must have been a relic of feudal times,
+and I could easily believe it had been the hold of one of those wicked
+lords who used to rule in the terror of the people beside peaceful and
+happy Como. But the life, good or bad, was utterly gone out of it
+now, and what was left of the tower was a burden to the sense. A few
+scrawny blackberries and other brambles grew out of its fallen stones;
+harsh, dust-dry mosses painted its weather-worn walls with their
+blanched gray and yellow. From its foot, looking out over the valley,
+we saw the road to the Splügen Pass lying white-hot in the valley; and
+while we looked, the diligence appeared, and dashed through the dust
+that rose like a flame before. After that it was a relief to stroll
+in dirty by-ways, past cottages of saffron peasants, and poor stony
+fields that begrudged them a scanty vegetation, back to the steamer
+blistering in the sun.
+
+Now indeed we were glad of the awning, under which a silent crowd of
+people with sunburnt faces waited for the departure of the boat. The
+breeze rose again as the engine resumed its unappreciated labors, and,
+with our head toward Como, we pushed out into the lake. The company
+on board was such as might be expected. There was a German
+landscape-painter, with three heart's-friends beside him; there
+were some German ladies; there were the unfailing Americans and
+the unfailing Englishman; there were some French people; there were
+Italians from the meridional provinces, dark, thin, and enthusiastic,
+with fat silent wives, and a rhythmical speech; there were Milanese
+with their families, out for a holiday,--round-bodied men, with blunt
+square features, and hair and vowels clipped surprisingly short, there
+was a young girl whose face was of the exact type affected in rococo
+sculpture, and at whom one gazed without being able to decide whether
+she was a nymph descended from a villa gate, or a saint come from
+under a broken arch in a Renaissance church. At one of the little
+towns two young Englishmen in knickerbockers came on board, who were
+devoured by the eyes of their fellow-passengers, and between whom and
+our kindly architect there was instantly ratified the tacit treaty of
+non-intercourse which travelling Englishmen observe.
+
+Nothing further interested us on the way to Como, except the gathering
+coolness of the evening air; the shadows creeping higher and higher
+on the hills; the songs of the girls winding yellow silk on the reels
+that hummed through the open windows of the factories on the shore;
+and the appearance of a flag that floated from a shallop before the
+landing of a stately villa. The Italians did not know this banner, and
+the Germans loudly debated its nationality. The Englishmen grinned,
+and the Americans blushed in silence. Of all my memories of that hot
+day on Lake Como, this is burnt the deepest; for the flag was that
+insolent banner which in 1862 proclaimed us a broken people, and
+persuaded willing Europe of our ruin. It has gone down long ago from
+ship and fort and regiment, as well as from the shallop on the
+fair Italian lake. Still, I say, it made Como too hot for us that
+afternoon, and even breathless Milan was afterwards a pleasant
+contrast.
+
+
+
+
+STOPPING AT VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA.
+
+I.
+
+It was after sunset when we arrived in the birthplace of Palladio,
+which we found a fair city in the lap of caressing hills. There are
+pretty villas upon these slopes, and an abundance of shaded walks and
+drives about the houses which were pointed out to us, by the boy who
+carried our light luggage from the railway station, as the property of
+rich citizens "but little less than lords" in quality. A lovely grove
+lay between the station and the city, and our guide not only took us
+voluntarily by the longest route through this, but, after reaching
+the streets, led us by labyrinthine ways to the hotel, in order, he
+afterwards confessed, to show us the city. He was a poet, though in
+that lowly walk of life, and he had done well. No other moment of our
+stay would have served us so well for a first general impression of
+Vicenza as that twilight hour. In its uncertain glimmer we seemed
+to get quite back to the dawn of feudal civilization, when Theodoric
+founded the great Basilica of the city; and as we stood before
+the famous Clock Tower, which rises light and straight as a mast
+eighty-two metres into the air from a base of seven metres, the
+wavering obscurity enhanced the effect by half concealing the tower's
+crest, and letting it soar endlessly upward in the fancy. The Basilica
+is greatly restored by Palladio, and the cold hand of that friend of
+virtuous poverty in architecture lies heavy upon his native city in
+many places. Yet there is still a great deal of Lombardic architecture
+in Vicenza; and we walked through one street of palaces in which
+Venetian Gothic prevailed, so that it seemed as if the Grand Canal had
+but just shrunk away from their bases. When we threw open our window
+at the hotel, we found that it overlooked one of the city gates, from
+which rose a Ghibelline tower with a great bulging cornice, full of
+the beauty and memory of times long before Palladio.
+
+They were rather troublous times, and not to be recalled here in all
+their circumstance; but I think it due to Vicenza, which is now little
+spoken of, even in Italy, and is scarcely known in America, where her
+straw-braid is bought for that of Leghorn, to remind the reader
+that the city was for a long time a republic of very independent and
+warlike stomach. Before she arrived at that state, however, she had
+undergone a great variety of fortunes. The Gauls founded the city
+(as I learn from "The Chronicles of Vicenza," by Battista Pagliarino,
+published at Vicenza in 1563) when Gideon was Judge in Israel, and
+were driven out by the Romans some centuries later. As a matter of
+course, Vicenza was sacked by Attila and conquered by Alboin; after
+which she was ruled by some lords of her own, until she was made
+an imperial city by Henry I. Then she had a government more or less
+republican in form till Frederick Barbarossa burnt her, and "wrapped
+her in ashes," and gave her to his vicar Ecelino da Romano, who "held
+her in cruel tyranny" from 1236 to 1259. The Paduans next ruled
+her forty years, and the Veronese seventy-seven, and the Milanese
+seventeen years; then she reposed in the arms of the Venetian Republic
+till these fell weak and helpless from all the Venetian possessions
+at the threat of Napoleon. Vicenza belonged again to Venice during the
+brief Republic of 1848, but the most memorable battle of that heroic
+but unhappy epoch gave her back to Austria. Now at last, and for the
+first time, she is Italian. Vicenza is
+
+  "Of kindred that have greatly expiated
+  And greatly wept,"
+
+and but that I so long fought against Ecelino da Romano, and the
+imperial interest in Italy, I could readily forgive her all her past
+errors. To us of the Lombard League, it was grievous that she should
+remain so doggishly faithful to her tyrant; though it is to be granted
+that perhaps fear had as much to do with her devotion as favor. The
+defense of 1848 was greatly to her honor, and she took an active part
+in that demonstration against the Austrians which endured from 1859
+till 1866.
+
+Of the demonstration we travellers saw an amusing phase at the
+opera which we attended the evening of our arrival in Vicenza.
+"Nabucodonosor" was the piece to be given in the new open-air theatre
+outside the city walls, whither we walked under the starlight. It
+was a pretty structure of fresh white stucco, oval in form, with some
+graceful architectural pretensions without, and within very charmingly
+galleried; while overhead it was roofed with a blue dome set with such
+starry mosaic as never covered temple or theatre since they used to
+leave their houses of play and worship open to the Attic skies. The
+old Hebrew story had, on this stage brought so near to Nature, effects
+seldom known to opera, and the scene evoked from far-off days the
+awful interest of the Bible histories,--the vague, unfigured oriental
+splendor--the desert--the captive people by the waters of the river of
+Babylon--the shadow and mystery of the prophecies. When the Hebrews,
+chained and toiling on the banks of the Euphrates, lifted their voices
+in lamentation, the sublime music so transfigured the commonplaceness
+of the words, that they meant all deep and unutterable affliction, and
+for a while swept away whatever was false and tawdry in the show, and
+thrilled our hearts with a rapture rarely felt. Yet, as but a moment
+before we had laughed to see Nebuchadnezzar's crown shot off his head
+by a squib visibly directed from the side scenes,--at the point when,
+according to the libretto, "the thunder roars, and a bolt descends
+upon the head of the king,"--so but a moment after some new absurdity
+marred the illusion, and we began to look about the theatre at the
+audience. We then beheld that act of _dimostrazioni_ which I have
+mentioned. In one of the few boxes sat a young and very beautiful
+woman in a dress of white, with a fan which she kept in constant
+movement. It was red on one side, and green on the other, and gave,
+with the white dress, the forbidden Italian colors, while, looked
+at alone, it was innocent of offense. I do not think a soul in the
+theatre was ignorant of the demonstration. A satisfied consciousness
+was reflected from the faces of the Italians, and I saw two Austrian
+officers exchange looks of good-natured intelligence, after a glance
+at the fair patriot. I wonder what those poor people do, now they
+are free, and deprived of the sweet, perilous luxury of defying their
+tyrants by constant acts of subtle disdain? Life in Venetia must be
+very dull: no more explosion of pasteboard petards; no more treason
+in bouquets; no more stealthy inscriptions on the walls--it must be
+insufferably dull. _Ebbene, pazienza_! Perhaps Victor Emanuel may
+betray them yet.
+
+A spirit of lawless effrontery, indeed, seemed to pervade the whole
+audience in the theatre that night at Vicenza, and to extend to the
+ministers of the law themselves. There were large placards everywhere
+posted, notifying the people that it was forbidden to smoke in the
+theatre, and that smokers were liable to expulsion; but except for
+ourselves, and the fair patriot in the box, I think every body there
+was smoking and the policemen set the example of anarchy by smoking
+the longest and worst cigars of all. I am sure that the captive
+Hebrews all held lighted cigarettes behind their backs, and that
+Nebuchadnezzar, condemned to the grass of the field, conscientiously
+gave himself up to the Virginia weed behind the scenes.
+
+Before I fell asleep that night, the moon rose over the top of the
+feudal tower, in front of our hotel, and produced some very pretty
+effects with the battlements. Early in the morning a regiment of
+Croats marched through the gate below the tower, their band playing
+"The Young Recruit." These advantages of situation were not charged in
+our bill; but, even if they had been, I should still advise my reader
+to go, when in Vicenza, if he loves a pleasant landlord and a good
+dinner, to the Hotel de la Ville, which he will find almost at his
+sole disposition for however long time he may stay. His meals will be
+served him in a vast dining-hall, as bare as a barn or a palace, but
+for the pleasant, absurd old paintings on the wall, representing, as
+I suppose, Cleopatra applying the Asp, Susannah and the Elders, the
+Roman Lucrezia, and other moral and appetizing histories. I take it
+there is a quaint side-table or two lost midway of the wall, and that
+an old woodcut picture of the Most Noble City of Venice hangs over
+each. I know that there is a screen at one end of the apartment behind
+which the landlord invisibly assumes the head waiter; and I suspect
+that at the moment of sitting down at meat, you hear two Englishmen
+talking--as they pass along the neighboring corridor--of wine, in
+dissatisfied chest-tones. This hotel is of course built round a court,
+in which there is a stable and--exposed to the weather--a diligence,
+and two or three carriages and a driver, and an ostler chewing straw,
+and a pump and a grape-vine. Why the hotel, therefore, does not smell
+like a stable, from garret to cellar, I am utterly at a loss to know.
+I state the fact that it does not, and that every other hotel in Italy
+does smell of stable as if cattle had been immemorially pastured in
+its halls, and horses housed in its bed-chambers,--or as if its only
+guests were centaurs on their travels.
+
+From the Museo Civico, whither we repaired first in the morning, and
+where there are some beautiful Montagnas, and an assortment of good
+and bad works by other masters, we went to the Campo Santo, which is
+worthy to be seen, if only because of the beautiful Laschi monument by
+Vela, one of the greatest modern sculptors. It is nothing more than
+a very simple tomb, at the door of which stands a figure in
+flowing drapery, with folded hands and uplifted eyes in an attitude
+exquisitely expressive of grief. The figure is said to be the portrait
+statue of the widow of him within the tomb, and the face is very
+beautiful. We asked if the widow was still young, and the custodian
+answered us in terms that ought to endear him to all women, if not
+to our whole mortal race,--"Oh quite young, yet. She is perhaps fifty
+years old."
+
+After the Campo Santo one ought to go to that theatre which Palladio
+built for the representation of classic tragedy, and which is perhaps
+the perfectest reproduction of the Greek theatre in the world. Alfieri
+is the only poet of modern times, whose works have been judged worthy
+of this stage, and no drama has been given on it since 1857, when the
+"Oedipus Tyrannus" of Sophocles was played. We found it very silent
+and dusty, and were much sadder as we walked through its gayly
+frescoed, desolate anterooms than we had been in the Campo Santo. Here
+used to sit, at coffee and bassett, the merry people who owned the now
+empty seats of the theatre,--lord, and lady, and abbé--who affected
+to be entertained by the scenes upon the stage. Upon my word, I
+should like to know what has become, in the other world, of those poor
+pleasurers of the past whose memory makes one so sad upon the scenes
+of their enjoyment here! I suppose they have something quite as
+unreal, yonder, to satisfy them as they had on earth, and that they
+still play at happiness in the old rococo way, though it is hard to
+conceive of any fiction outside of Italy so perfect and so entirely
+suited to their unreality as this classic theatre. It is a Greek
+theatre, for Greek tragedies; but it could never have been for
+popular amusement, and it was not open to the air, though it had a
+sky skillfully painted in the centre of the roof. The proscenium is a
+Greek façade, in three stories, such as never was seen in Greece;
+and the architecture of the three streets running back from the
+proscenium, and forming the one unchangeable scene of all the dramas,
+is--like the statues in the niches and on the gallery inclosing the
+auditorium--Greek in the most fashionable Vicentine taste. It must
+have been but an operatic chorus that sang in the semicircular space
+just below the stage and in front of the audience. Admit and forget
+these small blemishes and aberrations, however, and what a marvelous
+thing Palladio's theatre is! The sky above the stage is a wonderful
+trick, and those three streets--one in the centre and serving as
+entrance for the royal persons of the drama, one at the right for
+the nobles, and one at the left for the citizens--present unsurpassed
+effects of illusion. They are not painted, but modeled in stucco. In
+perspective they seem each half a mile long, but entering them you
+find that they run back from the proscenium only some fifteen feet,
+the fronts of the houses and the statues upon them decreasing in
+recession with a well-ordered abruptness. The semicircular gallery
+above the auditorium is of stone, and forty statues of marble crown
+its colonnade, or occupy niches between the columns.
+
+
+II.
+
+It was curious to pass, with the impression left by this costly and
+ingenious toy upon our minds, at once to the amphitheatre in Verona,
+which, next to the Coliseum, has, of all the works bequeathed us
+by the ancient Roman world, the greatest claim upon the wonder and
+imagination. Indeed, it makes even a stronger appeal to the fancy. We
+know who built the Coliseum, but in its unstoried origin, the Veronese
+arena has the mystery of the Pyramids. Was its founder Augustus,
+or Vitellus, or Antoninus, or Maximian, or the Republic of Verona?
+Nothing is certain but that it was conceived and reared by some mighty
+prince or people, and that it yet remains in such perfection that the
+great shows of two thousand years ago might take place in it to-day.
+It is so suggestive of the fierce and splendid spectacles of Roman
+times that the ring left by a modern circus on the arena, and absurdly
+dwarfed by the vast space of the oval, had an impertinence which
+we hotly resented, looking down on it from the highest grade of the
+interior. It then lay fifty feet below us, in the middle of an ellipse
+five hundred feet in length and four hundred in breadth, and capable
+of holding fifty thousand spectators. The seats that the multitudes
+pressed of old are perfect, yet; scarce a stone has been removed from
+the interior; the aedile and the prefect might take their places again
+in the balustraded tribunes above the great entrance at either end of
+the arena, and scarcely see that they were changed. Nay, the victims
+and the gladiators might return to the cells below the seats of the
+people, and not know they had left them for a day; the wild beasts
+might leap into the arena from dens as secure and strong as when first
+built. The ruin within seems only to begin with the aqueduct, which
+was used to flood the arena for the naval shows, but which is now
+choked with the dust of ages. Without, however, is plain enough the
+doom which is written against all the work of human hands, and which,
+unknown of the builders, is among the memorable things placed in the
+corner-stone of every edifice. Of the outer wall that rose high over
+the highest seats of the amphitheatre, and encircled it with stately
+corridors, giving it vaster amplitude and grace, the earthquake of six
+centuries ago spared only a fragment that now threatens above one of
+the narrow Veronese streets. Blacksmiths, wagon-makers, and workers
+in clangorous metals have made shops of the lower corridors of the old
+arena, and it is friends and neighbors with the modern life about it,
+as such things usually are in Italy. Fortunately for the stranger, the
+Piazza Bra flanks it on one hand, and across this it has a magnificent
+approach. It is not less happy in being little known to sentiment, and
+the traveller who visits it by moonlight, has a full sense of grandeur
+and pathos, without any of the sheepishness attending homage to that
+battered old coquette, the Coliseum, which so many emotional people
+have sighed over, kissing and afterwards telling.
+
+But he who would know the innocent charm of a ruin as yet almost
+wholly uncourted by travel, must go to the Roman theatre in Verona.
+It is not a favorite of the hand-books; and we were decided to see it
+chiefly by a visit to the Museum, where, besides an admirable gallery
+of paintings, there is a most interesting collection of antiques in
+bronze and marble found in excavating the theatre. The ancient edifice
+had been completely buried, and a quarter of the town was built over
+it, as Portici is built over Herculaneum, and on the very top stood a
+Jesuit convent. One day, some children, playing in the garden of one
+of the shabby houses, suddenly vanished from sight. Their mother ran
+like one mad (I am telling the story in the words of the peasant who
+related it to me) to the spot where they had last been seen, and fell
+herself into an opening of the earth there. The outcry raised by these
+unfortunates brought a number of men to their aid, and in digging to
+get them out, an old marble stairway was discovered. This was about
+twenty-five years ago. A certain gentleman named Monga owned the land,
+and he immediately began to make excavations. He was a rich man, but
+considered rather whimsical (if my peasant represented the opinion
+of his neighbors), and as the excavation ate a great deal of money
+(_mangiava molti soldi_), his sons discontinued the work after his
+death, and nothing has been done for some time, now. The peasant
+in charge was not a person of imaginative mind, though he said the
+theatre (supposed to have been built in the time of Augustus)
+was completed two thousand years before Christ. He had a purely
+conventional admiration of the work, which he expressed at regular
+intervals, by stopping short in his course, waving both hands over the
+ruins, and crying in a sepulchral voice, "_Qual' opera_!" However,
+as he took us faithfully into every part of it, there is no reason to
+complain of him.
+
+We crossed three or four streets, and entered at several different
+gates, in order to see the uncovered parts of the work, which could
+have been but a small proportion of the whole. The excavation has been
+carried down thirty and forty feet below the foundations of the modern
+houses, revealing the stone seats of the auditorium, the corridors
+beneath them, and the canals and other apparatus for naval shows, as
+in the great Amphitheatre. These works are even more stupendous than
+those of the Amphitheatre, for in many cases they are not constructed,
+but hewn out of the living rock, so that in this light the theatre is
+a gigantic sculpture. Below all are cut channels to collect and carry
+off the water of the springs in which the rock abounds. The depth of
+one of these channels near the Jesuit convent must be fifty feet below
+the present surface. Only in one place does the ancient edifice rise
+near the top of the ground, and there is uncovered the arched front
+of what was once a family-box at the theatre, with the owner's name
+graven upon the arch. Many poor little houses have of course been
+demolished to carry on the excavations, and to the walls that joined
+them cling memorials of the simple life that once inhabited them. To
+one of the buildings hung a melancholy fire-place left blackened with
+smoke, and battered with use, but witnessing that it had once been the
+heart of a home. It was far more touching than any thing in the
+elder ruin; and I think nothing could have so vividly expressed the
+difference which, in spite of all the resemblances noticeable in
+Italy, exists between the ancient and modern civilization, as that
+family-box at the theatre and this simple fireside.
+
+I do not now remember what fortunate chance it was that discovered
+to us the house of the Capulets, and I incline to believe that we
+gravitated toward it by operation of well-known natural principles
+which bring travellers acquainted with improbabilities wherever they
+go. We found it a very old and time-worn edifice, built round an
+ample court, and we knew it, as we had been told we should, by the cap
+carven in stone above the interior of the grand portal. The family,
+anciently one of the principal of Verona, has fallen from much of its
+former greatness. On the occasion of our visit, Juliet, very dowdily
+dressed, looked down from the top of a long, dirty staircase which
+descended into the court, and seemed interested to see us; while her
+mother caressed with one hand a large yellow mastiff, and distracted
+it from its first impulse to fly upon us poor children of sentiment.
+There was a great deal of stable litter, and many empty carts standing
+about in the court; and if I might hazard the opinion formed upon
+these and other appearances, I should say that old Capulet has now
+gone to keeping a hotel, united with the retail liquor business, both
+in a small way.
+
+Nothing could be more natural, after seeing the house of the Capulets,
+than a wish to see Juliet's Tomb, which is visited by all strangers,
+and is the common property of the hand-books. It formerly stood in a
+garden, where, up to the beginning of this century, it served, says my
+"Viaggio in Italia," "for the basest uses,"--just as the sacred prison
+of Tasso was used for a charcoal bin. We found the sarcophagus under
+a shed in one corner of the garden of the Orfanotrofio delle
+Franceschine, and had to confess to each other that it looked like a
+horse-trough roughly hewn out of stone. The garden, said the boy
+in charge of the moving monument, had been the burial-place of the
+Capulets, and this tomb being found in the middle of the garden, was
+easily recognized as that of Juliet. Its genuineness, as well as its
+employment in the ruse of the lovers, was proven beyond cavil by a
+slight hollow cut for the head to rest in, and a hole at the foot "to
+breathe through," as the boy said. Does not the fact that this relic
+has to be protected from the depredations of travellers, who could
+otherwise carry it away piecemeal, speak eloquently of a large amount
+of vulgar and rapacious innocence drifting about the world?
+
+It is well to see even such idle and foolish curiosities, however, in
+a city like Verona, for the mere going to and fro in search of them
+through her streets is full of instruction and delight. To my mind, no
+city has a fairer place than she that sits beside the eager Adige, and
+breathes the keen air of mountains white with snows in winter, green
+and purple with vineyards in summer, and forever rich with marble.
+Around Verona stretch those gardened plains of Lombardy, on which
+Nature, who dotes on Italy, and seems but a step-mother to all
+transalpine lands, has lavished every gift of beauty and fertility.
+Within the city's walls, what store of art and history! Her
+market-places have been the scenes of a thousand tragic or ridiculous
+dramas; her quaint and narrow streets are ballads and legends full
+of love-making and murder; the empty, grass-grown piazzas before
+her churches are tales that are told of municipal and ecclesiastical
+splendor. Her nobles sleep in marble tombs so beautiful that the dust
+in them ought to be envied by living men in Verona; her lords lie in
+perpetual state in the heart of the city, in magnificent sepulchres of
+such grace and opulence, that, unless a language be invented full
+of lance-headed characters, and Gothic vagaries of arch and finial,
+flower and fruit, bird and beast, they can never be described. Sacred
+be their rest from pen of mine, Verona! Nay, while I would fain bring
+the whole city before my reader's fancy, I am loath and afraid to
+touch any thing in it with my poor art: either the tawny river,
+spanned with many beautiful bridges, and murmurous with mills afloat
+and turned by the rapid current; or the thoroughfares with their
+passengers and bright shops and caffès; or the grim old feudal towers;
+or the age-embrowned palaces, eloquent in their haughty strength of
+the times when they were family fortresses; or the churches with the
+red pillars of their porticos resting upon the backs of eagle-headed
+lions; or even the white-coated garrison (now there no more), with its
+heavy-footed rank and file, its handsome and resplendent officers,
+its bristling fortifications, its horses and artillery, crowding the
+piazzas of churches turned into barracks. All these things haunt my
+memory, but I could only at best thinly sketch them in meagre black
+and white. Verona is an almost purely Gothic city in her architecture,
+and her churches are more worthy to be seen than any others in North
+Italy, outside of Venice. San Zenone, with the quaint bronzes on its
+doors representing in the rudeness of the first period of art the
+incidents of the Old Testament and the miracles of the saints--with
+the allegorical sculptures surrounding the interior and exterior of
+the portico, and illustrating, among other things, the creation of
+Eve with absolute literalness--with its beautiful and solemn crypt
+in which the dust of the titular saint lies entombed--with its minute
+windows, and its vast columns sustaining the roof upon capitals of
+every bizarre and fantastic device--is doubtless most abundant in that
+Gothic spirit, now grotesque and now earnest, which somewhere appears
+in all the churches of Verona; which has carven upon the façade of
+the Duomo the statues of Orlando and Olliviero, heroes of romance, and
+near them has placed the scandalous figure of a pig in a monk's robe
+and cowl, with a breviary in his paw; which has reared the exquisite
+monument of Guglielmo da Castelbarco before the church of St.
+Anastasia, and has produced the tombs of the Scaligeri before the
+chapel of Santa Maria Antica.
+
+I have already pledged myself not to attempt any description of these
+tombs, and shall not fall now. But I bought in the. English tongue, as
+written at Verona, some "Notices," kept for sale by the sacristan,
+"of the Ancient Churg of Our Lady, and of the Tombs of the most
+illustrious Family Della-Scala," and from these I think it no
+dereliction to quote _verbatim_. First is the tomb of San Francesco,
+who was "surnamed the Great by reason of his valor." "With him the
+Great Alighieri and other exiles took refuge. We see his figure
+extended upon a bed, and above his statue on horsebac with the vizor
+down, and his crest falling behind his shoulders, his horse covered
+with mail. The columns and capitals are wonderful." "Within the
+Cemetery to the right leaning against the walls of the church is the
+tomb of John Scaliger." "In the side of this tomb near the wall of
+Sacristy, you see the urn that encloses the ashes of Martin I.," "who
+was traitorously killed on the 17th of October 1277 by Scaramello of
+the Scaramelli, who wished to revenge the honor of a young lady of his
+family." "The Mausoleum that is in the side facing the Place encloses
+the Martin II.'s ashes.... This building is sumptuous and wonderful
+because it stands on four columns, each of which has an architrave
+of nine feet. On the beams stands a very large square of marble that
+forms the floor, on which stands the urn of the Defunct. Four other
+columns support the vault that covers the urn; and the rest is adorned
+by facts of Old Testament. Upon the Summit is the equestrian statue as
+large as life." Of "Can Signorius," whose tomb is the most splendid
+of all, the "Notices" say: "He spent two thousand florins of gold,
+in order to prepare his own sepulchre while he was yet alive, and
+to surpass the magnificence of his predecessors. The monument is as
+magnificent as the contracted space allows. Six columns support the
+floor of marble on which it stands covered with figures. Six other
+columns support the top, on that is the Scaliger's statues....
+The monument is surrounded by an enclosure of red marble, with six
+pillars, on which are square capitols with armed Saints. The rails of
+iron with the Arms of the Scala, are worked with a beauty wonderful
+for that age," or, I may add, for any age. These "rails" are an
+exquisite net-work of iron wrought by hand, with an art emulous of
+that of Nicolò Caparra at Florence. The chief device employed is a
+ladder (_scala_) constantly repeated in the centres of quatre-foils;
+and the whole fabric is still so flexible and perfect, after the lapse
+of centuries, that the net may be shaken throughout by a touch. Four
+other tombs of the Scaligeri are here, among which the "Notices"
+particularly mention that of Alboin della Scala: "He was one of the
+Ghibelline party, as the arms on his urn schew, that is a staircase
+risen by an eagle--wherefore Dante said, _In sulla Scala porta il
+santo Uccello_."
+
+I should have been glad to meet the author of these delightful
+histories, but in his absence we fared well enough with the sacristan.
+When, a few hours before we left Verona, we came for a last look it
+the beautiful sepulchres, he recognized us, and seeing a sketch-book
+in the party, he invited us within the inclosure again, and then ran
+and fetched chairs for us to sit upon--nay, even placed chairs for
+us to rest our feet on. Winning and exuberant courtesy of the Italian
+race! If I had never acknowledged it before, I must do homage to it
+now, remembering the sweetness of the sacristans and custodians of
+Verona. They were all men of the most sympathetic natures. He at San
+Zenone seemed never to have met with real friends till we expressed
+pleasure in the magnificent Mantegna, which is the pride of his
+church. "What coloring!" he cried, and then triumphantly took us into
+the crypt: "What a magnificent crypt! What works they executed
+in those days, there!" At San Giorgio Maggiore, where there are a
+Tintoretto and a Veronese, and four horrible swindling big pictures by
+Romanino, I discovered to my great dismay that I had in my pocket but
+five soldi, which I offered with much abasement and many apologies
+to the sacristan; but he received them as if they had been so many
+napoleons, prayed me not to speak of embarrassment, and declared that
+his labors in our behalf had been nothing but pleasure. At Santa
+Maria in Organo, where are the wonderful _intagli_ of Fra Giovanni da
+Verona, the sacristan fully shared our sorrow that the best pictures
+could not be unveiled as it was Holy Week. He was also moved with us
+at the gradual decay of the _intagli_, and led us to believe that, to
+a man of so much sensibility, the general ruinous state of the church
+was an inexpressible affliction; and we rejoiced for his sake that it
+should possess at least one piece of art in perfect repair. This was
+a modern work, that day exposed for the first time, and it represented
+in a group of wooden figures The Death of St. Joseph. The Virgin and
+Christ supported the dying saint on either hand; and as the whole was
+vividly colored, and rays of glory in pink and yellow gauze descended
+upon Joseph's head, nothing could have been more impressive.
+
+
+III.
+
+Parma is laid out with a regularity which may be called characteristic
+of the great ducal cities of Italy, and which it fully shares with
+Mantua, Ferrara, and Bologna. The signorial cities, Verona, Vicenza,
+Padua, and Treviso, are far more picturesque, and Parma excels only in
+the number and beauty of her fountains. It is a city of gloomy aspect,
+says Valery, who possibly entered it in a pensive frame of mind, for
+its sadness did not impress us. We had just come from Modena, where
+the badness of our hotel enveloped the city in an atmosphere of
+profound melancholy. In fact, it will not do to trust to travellers in
+any thing. I, for example, have just now spoken of the many beautiful
+fountains in Parma because I think it right to uphold the statement
+of M. Richard's hand-book; but I only remember seeing one fountain,
+passably handsome, there. My Lord Corke, who was at Parma in 1754,
+says nothing of fountains, and Richard Lasells, Gent., who was there a
+century earlier, merely speaks of the fountains in the Duke's
+gardens, which, together with his Grace's "wild beasts" and "exquisite
+coaches," and "admirable Theater to exhibit Operas in," "the Domo,
+whose Cupola was painted by the rare hand of Corregio," and the church
+of the Capuchins, where Alexander Farnese is buried, were "the Chief
+thing to be seen in Parma" at that day.
+
+The wild beasts have long ago run away with the exquisite coaches, but
+the other wonders named by Master Lasells are still extant in Parma,
+together with some things he does not name. Our minds, in going
+thither, were mainly bent upon Correggio and his works, and while our
+dinner was cooking at the admirable Albergo della Posta, we went
+off to feast upon the perennial Hash of Frogs in the dome of the
+Cathedral. This is one of the finest Gothic churches in Italy, and
+vividly recalls Verona, while it has a quite unique and most beautiful
+feature in the three light-columned galleries, that traverse the
+façade one above another. Close at hand stands the ancient Baptistery,
+hardly less peculiar and beautiful; but, after all, it is the work of
+the great painter which gives the temple its chief right to wonder and
+reverence. We found the fresco, of course, much wasted, and at first
+glance, before the innumerable arms and legs had time to order and
+attribute themselves to their respective bodies, we felt the
+justice of the undying spite which called this divinest of frescos a
+_guazzetto di rane_. But in another moment it appeared to us the most
+sublime conception of the Assumption ever painted, and we did not find
+Caracci's praise too warm where he says: "And I still remain stupefied
+with the sight of so grand a work--every thing so well conceived--so
+well seen from below--with so much severity, yet with so much judgment
+and so much grace; with a coloring which is of very flesh." The height
+of the fresco above the floor of the church is so vast that it
+might well appear like a heavenly scene to the reeling sense of the
+spectator. Brain, nerve, and muscle were strained to utter exhaustion
+in a very few minutes, and we came away with our admiration only
+half-satisfied, and resolved to ascend the cupola next day, and see
+the fresco on something like equal terms. In one sort we did thus
+approach it, and as we looked at the gracious floating figures of the
+heavenly company through the apertures of the dome, they did seem to
+adopt us and make us part of the painting. But the tremendous depth,
+over which they drifted so lightly, it dizzied us to look into; and
+I am not certain that I should counsel travellers to repeat our
+experience. Where still perfect, the fresco can only gain from
+close inspection,--it is painted with such exquisite and jealous
+perfection,--yet the whole effect is now better from below, for the
+decay is less apparent; and besides, life is short, and the stairway
+by which one ascends to the dome is in every way too exigent. It is
+with the most astounding sense of contrast that you pass from the
+Assumption to the contemplation of that other famous roof frescoed by
+Correggio, in the Monastero di San Paolo. You might almost touch
+the ceiling with your hand, it hovers so low with its counterfeit of
+vine-clambered trellis-work, and its pretty boys looking roguishly
+through the embowering leaves. It is altogether the loveliest room
+in the world; and if the Diana in her car on the chimney is truly a
+portrait of the abbess for whom the chamber was decorated, she was
+altogether worthy of it, and one is glad to think of her enjoying life
+in the fashion amiably permitted to nuns in the fifteenth century.
+What curious scenes the gayety of this little chamber conjures up, and
+what a vivid comment it is upon the age and people that produced it!
+This is one of the things that makes a single hour of travel worth
+whole years of historic study, and which casts its light upon all
+future reading. Here, no doubt, the sweet little abbess, with the
+noblest and prettiest of her nuns about her, received the polite
+world, and made a cheerful thing of devotion, while all over
+transalpine Europe the sour-hearted Reformers were destroying pleasant
+monasteries like this. The light-hearted lady-nuns and their gentlemen
+friends looked on heresy as a deadly sin, and they had little reason
+to regard it with favor. It certainly made life harder for them in
+time, for it made reform within the Church as well as without, so that
+at last the lovely Chamber of St. Paul was closed against the public
+for more than two centuries.
+
+All Parma is full of Correggio, as Venice is of Titian and Tintoretto,
+as Naples of Spagnoletto, as Mantua of Giulio Romano, as Vicenza of
+Palladio, as Bassano of Da Ponte, as Bologna of Guido Reni. I have
+elsewhere noticed how ineffaceably and exclusively the manner of the
+masters seems to have stamped itself upon the art of the cities where
+they severally wrought,--how at Parma Correggio yet lives in all the
+sketchy mouths of all the pictures painted there since his time. One
+might almost believe, hearing the Parmesans talk, that his manner had
+infected their dialect, and that they fashioned their lazy, incomplete
+utterance with the careless lips of his nymphs and angels. They almost
+entirely suppress the last syllable of every word, and not with
+a quick precision, as people do in Venice or Milan, but with an
+ineffable languor, as if language were not worth the effort of
+enunciation; while they rise and lapse several times in each sentence,
+and sink so sweetly and sadly away upon the closing vocable that the
+listener can scarcely repress his tears. In this melancholy
+rhythm, one of the citizens recounted to me the whole story of the
+assassination of the last Duke of Parma in 1850; and left me as softly
+moved as if I had been listening to a tale of hapless love. Yet it was
+an ugly story, and after the enchantment of the recital passed away, I
+perceived that when the Duke was killed justice was done on one of the
+maddest and wickedest tyrants that ever harassed an unhappy city.
+
+The Parmesans remember Maria Louisa, Napoleon's wife, with pleasant
+enough feelings, and she seems to have been good to them after the
+manner of sovereigns, enriching their city with art, and beautifying
+it in many ways, besides doing works of private charity and
+beneficence. Her daughter by a second marriage, the Countess
+Sanvitali, still lives in Parma; and in one of the halls of the
+Academy of Fine Arts the Duchess herself survives in the marble of
+Canova. It was she who caused the two great pictures of Correggio,
+the St. Jerome and the Madonna della Scodella, to be placed alone in
+separate apartments hung with silk, in which the painter's initial A
+is endlessly interwoven. "The Night," to which the St. Jerome is "The
+Day," is in the gallery at Dresden, but Parma could have kept nothing
+more representative of her great painter's power than this "Day." It
+is "the bridal of the earth and sky," and all sweetness, brightness,
+and tender shadow are in it. Many other excellent works of Correggio,
+Caracci, Parmigianino, and masters of different schools are in this
+gallery, but it is the good fortune of travellers, who have to see so
+much, that the memory of the very best alone distinctly remains. Nay,
+in the presence of prime beauty nothing else exists, and we found
+that the church of the Steccata, where Parmigianino's sublime "Moses
+breaking the Tables of the Law" is visible in the midst of a multitude
+of other figures on the vault, really contained nothing at last but
+that august and awful presence.
+
+Undoubtedly the best gallery of classical antiquities in North Italy
+is that of Parma, which has derived all its precious relics from the
+little city of Valleja alone. It is a fine foretaste of Pompeii
+and the wonders of the Museo Borbonico at Naples, with its antique
+frescos, and marble, and bronzes. I think nothing better has come out
+of Herculaneum than the comic statuette of "Hercules Drunk." He is in
+bronze, and the drunkest man who has descended to us from the elder
+world; he reels backward, and leers knowingly upon you, while one hand
+hangs stiffly at his side, and the other faintly clasps a wine-cup--a
+burly, worthless, disgraceful demigod.
+
+The great Farnese Theatre was, as we have seen, admired by Lasells;
+but Lord Corke found it a "useless structure" though immense. "The
+same spirit that raised the Colossus at Rhodes," he says, "raised the
+theatre at Parma; that insatiable spirit and lust of Fame which would
+brave the Almighty by fixing eternity to the name of a perishable
+being." If it was indeed this spirit, I am bound to say that it did
+not build so wisely at Parma as at Rhodes. The play-house that Ranuzio
+I. constructed in 1628, to do honor to Cosmo II. de' Medici (pausing
+at Parma on his way to visit the tomb of San Carlo Borromeo), and that
+for a century afterward was the scene of the most brilliant spectacles
+in the world, is now one of the dismalest and dustiest of ruins. This
+_Theatrum orbis miraculum_ was built and ornamented with the
+most perishable materials, and even its size has shrunken as the
+imaginations of men have contracted under the strong light of later
+days. When it was first opened, it was believed to hold fourteen
+thousand spectators; at a later _fête_ it held only ten thousand; the
+last published description fixes its capacity at five thousand; and
+it is certain that for many and many a year it has held only the stray
+tourists who have looked in upon its desolation. The gay paintings
+hang in shreds and tatters from the roof; dust is thick upon the seats
+and in the boxes, and on the leads that line the space once flooded
+for naval games. The poor plaster statues stand naked and forlorn amid
+the ruin of which they are part; and the great stage, from which
+the curtain has rotted away, yawns dark and empty before the empty
+auditorium.
+
+
+
+
+DUCAL MANTUA.
+
+In that desperate depth of Hell where Dante beholds the Diviners
+doomed to pace with backward-twisted faces, and turn forever on the
+past the rainy eyes once bent too daringly on the future, the sweet
+guide of the Tuscan poet points out among the damned the daughter of a
+Theban king, and discourses to his charge:--
+
+  Manto was she: through many lands she went
+    Seeking, and paused where I was born, at last.
+    Therefore I choose thou be on me intent
+  A little. When from life her father passed,
+    And they of Bacchus' city became slaves,
+    Long time about the world the daughter cast.
+  Up in fair Italy is a lake that laves
+    The feet of Alps that lock in Germany:
+    Benaco called....
+  And Peschiera in strong harness sits
+    To front the Brescians and the Bergamasques,
+    Where one down-curving shore the other meets.
+  There all the gathered waters outward flow
+    That may not in Benaco's bosom rest,
+    And down through, pastures green a river go.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    As far as to Governo, where, its quest
+  Ended at last, it falls into me Po.
+    But far it has not sought before a plain
+    It finds and floods, out-creeping wide and slow
+  To be the steaming summer's offense and bane.
+    Here passing by, the fierce, unfriendly maid
+    Saw land in the middle of the sullen main,
+  Wild and unpeopled, and here, unafraid
+    Of human neighborhood, she made her lair,
+    Rested, and with her menials wrought her trade,
+  And lived, and left her empty body there.
+    Then the sparse people that were scattered near
+    Gathered upon that island, everywhere
+  Compassed about with swamps and kept from fear.
+    They built their city above the witch's grave,
+    And for her sake that first made dwelling there
+  The name of Mantua to their city gave.
+
+To this account of the first settlement of Mantua Virgil adds a
+warning to his charge to distrust all other histories of the city's
+foundation; and Dante is so thoroughly persuaded of its truth, that
+he declares all other histories shall be to him as so many lifeless
+embers. Nevertheless, divers chroniclers of Mantua reject the
+tradition here given as fabulous; and the carefullest and most
+ruthless of these traces the city's origin, not to the unfriendly
+maid, but to the Etruscan King Ocno, fixing the precise date of its
+foundation at thirty years before the Trojan war, one thousand five
+hundred and thirty-nine years after the creation of the world, three
+hundred years before Rome, and nine hundred and fifteen years after
+the flood, while Abimelech was judge in Israel. "And whoever," says
+the compiler of the "Flower of the Mantuan Chroniclers" (it is a very
+dry and musty flower, indeed), citing doughty authorities for all his
+facts and figures,--"whoever wishes to understand this more curiously,
+let him read the said authors, and he will be satisfied."
+
+But I am as little disposed to unsettle the reader's faith in
+the Virgilian tradition, as to part with my own; and I therefore
+uncandidly hold back the names of the authorities cited. This
+tradition was in fact the only thing concerning Mantuan history
+present to my thoughts as I rode toward the city, one afternoon of a
+pleasant Lombard spring; and when I came in sight of the ancient hold
+of sorcery, with the languid waters of its lagoons lying sick at
+its feet, I recognized at least the topographical truth of Virgil's
+description. But old and mighty walls now surround the spot which
+Manto found sterile and lonely in the heart of the swamp formed by the
+Mincio, no longer Benaco; and the dust of the witch is multitudinously
+hidden under the edifices of a city whose mighty domes, towers, and
+spires make its approach one of the stateliest in the world. It is a
+prospect on which you may dwell long as you draw toward the city, for
+the road from the railway station winds through some two miles of flat
+meadow-land before it reaches the gate of the stronghold which the
+Italians call the first hope of the winner of the land, and the last
+hope of the loser of Italy. Indeed, there is no haste in any of the
+means of access to Mantua. It lies scarce forty miles south of Verona,
+and you are three hours in journeying this distance in the placid
+railway train,--a distance which Romeo, returning to Verona from his
+exile in Mantua, no doubt travelled in less time. There is abundant
+leisure to study the scenery on the way; but it scarcely repays the
+perusal, for it lacks the beauty of the usual Lombard landscape.
+The soil is red, stony, and sterile; the orchard-trees are scant and
+slender, and not wedded with the caressing vines which elsewhere in
+North Italy garland happier trees and stretch gracefully from trunk to
+trunk. Especially the landscape looks sad and shabby about the little
+village of Villafranca, where, in 1864, the dejected prospect seemed
+incapable of a smile even in spring; as if it had lost all hope and
+cheerfulness since the peace was made which confirmed Venetia to the
+alien. It said as plainly as real estate could express the national
+sentiment, "Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!" and crept sullenly out of
+sight, as our pensive train resumed its meditative progress. No doubt
+this poor landscape _was_ imbued, in its dull, earthy way, with a
+feeling that the coming of Garibaldi would irrigate and fertilize it
+into a paradise; as at Venice the gondoliers believed that his army
+would bring in its train cheap wine and hordes of rich and helpless
+Englishmen bent on perpetual tours of the Grand Canal without
+understanding as to price.
+
+But within and without Mantua was a strong argument against
+possibility of change in the political condition of this part of
+Italy. Compassed about by the corruption of the swamps and the
+sluggish breadth of the river, the city is no less mighty in her
+artificial defenses than in this natural strength of her position;
+and the Croats of her garrison were as frequent in her sad, handsome
+streets, as the priests in Rome. Three lakes secure her from approach
+upon the east, north, and south; on the west is a vast intrenched
+camp, which can be flooded at pleasure from one of the lakes; while
+the water runs three fathoms deep at the feet of the solid brick walls
+all round the city. There are five gates giving access by drawbridges
+from the town to the fortressed posts on every side, and commanding
+with their guns the roads that lead to them. The outlying forts, with
+the citadel, are four in number, and are each capable of holding
+from two to three thousand men. The intrenched camp, for cavalry and
+artillery, and the barracks of the city itself, can receive a garrison
+of from thirty to forty thousand men; and the measureless depths of
+the air are full of the fever that fights in defense of Mantua, and
+serves with equal zeal whoever is master of the place, let him be
+French, Italian, or Austrian, so only that he have an unacclimated
+enemy before him.
+
+I confess that little of this formidable military knowledge burdened
+me on the occasion of my visit to Mantua, and I have already confessed
+that I was but very imperfectly informed of the history of the city.
+But indeed, if the reader dealt candidly with himself, how much
+could he profess to know of Mantuan history? The ladies all have
+some erudite associations with the place as giving the term of
+_mantua-making_ to the art of dress, and most persons have heard that
+Mantua's law was once death to any he that uttered mortal drugs there,
+and that the place was till a few years since an Austrian fortress
+on the Mincio. Of Giulio Romano, and his works to Mantua, a good
+many have heard; and there is something known to the reader of the
+punctuated edition of Browning about Sordello. But of the Gonzagas of
+Mantua, and their duchy, what do you know, gentle reader?
+
+For myself, when in Mantua, I tried to make a virtue of my want of
+information, and fancied that a sort of general ignorance was
+more favorable to my enjoyment of what I saw there than thorough
+acquaintance with the city's history would have been. It certainly
+enabled me to accept all the poetic fiction of the custodians, and
+to embroider with their pleasing improbabilities the business-like
+succinctness of the guide-books; to make out of the twilight which
+involved all impressions a misty and heroic picture of the Mantuan
+past, wherein her great men appeared with a stately and gigantic
+uncertainty of outline, and mixed with dim scenes of battle, intrigue,
+and riot, and were gone before Fact could lay her finger on any shape,
+and swear that it was called so, and did so and so. But even if there
+had been neither pleasure nor profit in this ignorance, the means of
+dispelling it are so scant in modern literature that it might well
+have been excused in a far more earnest traveller. The difficulty,
+indeed, which I afterwards experienced in trying to learn something of
+Mantua, is my best excuse for writing of its history here.
+
+I fancy that the few recent books on the subject are not in the hands
+of most readers, and I have a comforting belief that scarcely a
+reader of mine has been a reader of the "Grande Illustrazione de
+Lombardo-Veneto."[Mantova e Sua Provincia, per 'Avvocato Bartolomeo
+Arrighi: _Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto, ossia Storia delle
+Città, des Borghi, Communi, Castelli, etc., fino ai Tempi moderni.
+Per Cura di Cesare Cantù, e a' altri Literati_. Milano, 1859.] Yet
+I suppose that he forms some notion of this work from its title, and
+figures to himself a physical bulk of six volumes,--large, abounding
+in ill-printed wood-cuts, and having the appalling features which
+repel our race from pictorial history-books generally.
+
+The "Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto" includes notice of all
+those dear and famous cities of North Italy which we know,--of Verona,
+Vicenza, Padua, Venice, Mantua, Modena, Brescia, Bergamo, and the
+rest; but here we have only to do with the part which concerns Mantua.
+This is written by the advocate Bartolomeo Arrighi, whose ingenious
+avoidance of all that might make his theme attractive could not
+be sufficiently celebrated here, and may therefore be left to the
+reader's fancy. There is little in his paper to leaven statistical
+heaviness; and in recounting one of the most picturesque histories,
+he contrives to give merely a list of the events and a diagram of
+the scenes. Whatever illustrated character in princes or people he
+carefully excludes, and the raciness of anecdote and the flavor
+of manner and epoch distil not into his compilation from the elder
+historiographers. I have therefore to go back, in my present purpose,
+to the authors whose substance he has desiccated; and with their help,
+and that of one or two antiquated authors of this century, I shall try
+to rehabilitate the ducal state of Mantua,
+
+  "Which was an image of the mighty world,"
+
+and present some shadow of its microcosmal life. The story has the
+completeness of a tragedy; but it runs over many centuries, and it
+ends like a farce, though it ends with a death. One feels, indeed,
+almost as great satisfaction in the catastrophe as the Mantuans
+themselves, who terminated their national existence and parted from
+their last Duke with something like exultation.
+
+As I recall my own impressions of the city, I doubt if any good or bad
+fortune could rouse her to such positive emotion now. She seemed
+sunken, that dull April evening of our visit, into an abiding lethargy;
+as if perfect repose, and oblivion from the many-troubled past,--from
+the renown of all former famine, fire, intrigue, slaughter, and
+sack,--were to be preferred by the ghost of a once populous and haughty
+capital to the most splendid memories of national life. Certainly, the
+phantom of bygone Mantuan greatness did not haunt the idle tourists who
+strolled through her wide streets, enjoying their quiet beauty and
+regularity, and finding them, despite their empty, melancholy air, full
+of something that reminded of home. Coming from a land where there is a
+vast deal of length, breadth, and rectitude in streets, as well as human
+nature, they could not, of course, feel that wonder in the Mantuan
+avenues which inspired a Venetian ambassador, two centuries since, to
+write the Serenest Senate in praise of their marvelous extent and
+straightness; but they were still conscious of a certain expansive
+difference from Gothic Verona and narrow Venice. The windows of the
+ground-floors were grated to the prison-like effect common throughout
+Italy; but people evidently lived upon the ground-floors, and at many of
+the iron-barred windows fair young prisoners sat and looked out upon the
+streets, or laughed and chatted together. About the open doorways,
+moreover, people lounged gossiping; and the interiors of the
+entry-halls, as they appeared to the passing glance, were clean, and had
+not that forbidding, inhospitable air characteristic of most
+house-entrances in North Italy. But sculptured Venice and Verona had
+unfitted the travellers for pleasure in the stucco of Mantua; and they
+had an immense scorn for the large and beautiful palaces of which the
+before-quoted ambassador speaks, because they found them faced with
+cunningly-moulded plaster instead of carven stone. Nevertheless, they
+could not help a kind of half-tender respect for the old town. It shares
+the domestic character of its scenes with the other ducal cities,
+Modena, Parma, and Ferrara; and this character is, perhaps, proper to
+all long and intensely municipalized communities. But Mantua has a
+ghostly calm wholly its own; and this was not in the least broken that
+evening by chatters at thresholds, and pretty laughers at grated
+windows. It was very, very quiet. Perhaps half a score of carriages
+rumbled by us in our long walk, and we met some scattered promenaders.
+But for the most part the streets were quite empty; and even in the
+chief piazza, where there was still some belated show of buying and
+selling, and about the doors of the caffès, where there was a good deal
+of languid loafing, there was no indecency of noise or bustle There were
+visibly few people in the place, and it was in decay; but it was not
+squalid in its lapse. The streets were scrupulously neat and clean, and
+the stuccoed houses were all painted of that pale saffron hue which
+gives such unquestionable respectability to New England towns. Before we
+returned to our lodgings, Mantua had turned into twilight; and we walked
+homeward through a placid and dignified gloom, nowhere broken by the
+flare of gas, and only remotely affected, here and there, by the light
+of lamps of oil, faintly twinkling in a disheartened Mantuan fashion.
+
+If you turn this pensive light upon the yellow pages of those old
+chronicles of which I spoke, it reveals pictures fit to raise both
+pity and wonder for the past of this city,--pictures full of the glory
+of struggles for freedom, of the splendor of wise princes, of the
+comfort of a prosperous and contented people, of the grateful fruits
+of protected arts and civilization; but likewise stained with images
+of unspeakable filth and wickedness, baseness and cruelty, incredible
+shame, suffering, and sin.
+
+Long before the birth of Christ, the Gauls drive out the Etruscans
+from Mantua, and aggrandize and beautify the city, to be in their turn
+expelled by the Romans, under whom Mantua again waxes strong and fair.
+In this time, the wife of a farmer not far from the city dreams a
+marvelous dream of bringing forth a laurel-bough, and in due time
+bears into the world the chiefest of all Mantuans, with a smile upon
+his face. This is a poet, and they call his name Virgil. He goes from
+his native city to Rome, when ripe for glory, and has there the good
+fortune to win back his father's farm, which the greedy veterans of
+Augustus, then settled in the Cremonese, had annexed to the spoils
+bestowed upon them by the Emperor. Later in this Roman time, and only
+three years after the death of Him whom the poet all but prophesied,
+another grand event marks an epoch in Mantuan history. According to
+the pious legend, the soldier Longinus, who pierced the side of Christ
+as he hung upon the cross, has been converted by a miracle; wiping
+away that costly blood from his spear-head, and then drawing his hand
+across his eyes, he is suddenly healed of his near-sightedness, and
+stricken with the full wonder of conviction. He gathers anxiously the
+precious drops of blood from his weapon into the phial from which
+the vinegar mixed with gall was poured, and, forsaking his life of
+soldier, he wanders with his new-won faith and his priceless treasure
+to Mantua, where it is destined to work famous miracles, and to be
+the most valued possession of the city to all after-time. The saint
+himself, preaching the Gospel of Christ, suffers martyrdom under
+Tiberius; his tongue is cut out, and his body is burnt; and his ashes
+are buried at Mantua, forgotten, and found again in after ages
+with due signs and miraculous portents. The Romans give a civil
+tranquillity to Mantua; but it is not till three centuries after
+Christ that the persecutions of the Christians cease. Then the temples
+of the gods are thrown down, and churches are built; and the city goes
+forward to share the destinies of the Christianized empire, and be
+spoiled by the barbarians. In 407 the Goths take it, and the Vandals
+in their turn sack and waste it, and scatter its people, who return
+again after the storm, and rebuild their city. Attila, marching to
+destroy it, is met at Governo (as you see in Raphael's fresco in
+the Vatican) by Pope Leo I., who conjures him to spare the city, and
+threatens him with Divine vengeance if he refuse; above the pontiff's
+head two wrathful angels, bearing drawn swords, menace the Hun with
+death if he advance; and, thus miraculously admonished, he turns aside
+from Mantua and spares it. The citizens successfully resist an attack
+of Alboin; but the Longobards afterwards, unrestrained by the visions
+of Attila, beat the Mantuans and take the city. From the Lombards the
+Greeks, sent thither by the Exarch of Ravenna, captured Mantua
+about the end of the sixth century; and then, the Lombards turning
+immediately to besiege it again, the Greeks defend their prize long
+and valiantly, but in the end are overpowered. They are allowed to
+retire with their men and arms to Ravenna, and the Lombards dismantle
+the city.
+
+Concerning our poor Mantua under Lombard rule there is but little
+known, except that she went to war with the Cremonese; and it may be
+fairly supposed that she was, like her neighbors, completely involved
+in foreign and domestic discords of every kind. That war with the
+Cremonese was about the possession of the river Ollio; and the
+Mantuans came off victors in it, slaying immense numbers of the enemy,
+and taking some thousands of them prisoners, whom their countrymen
+ransomed on condition of building one of the gates of Mantua with
+materials from the Cremonese territory, and mortar mixed with water
+from the disputed Ollio. The reader easily conceives how bitter a pill
+this must have been for the high-toned Cremonese gentlemen of that
+day.
+
+When Charlemagne made himself master of Italy, the Mantuan lands and
+Mantuan men were divided up among the brave soldiers who had helped to
+enslave the country. These warriors of Charlemagne became counts; and
+the _contadini_, or inhabitants of each _contado_ (county), became
+absolutely dependent on their will and pleasure. It is recorded (to
+the confusion of those who think primitive barbarism is virtue) that
+the corruption of those rude and brutal old times was great, that all
+classes were sunk in vice, and that the clergy were especially venal
+and abominable. After the death of Charlemagne, in the ninth century,
+wars broke out all over Italy between the factions supporting
+different aspirants to his power; and we may be sure that Mantua had
+some share in the common quarrel. As I have found no explicit record
+of this period, I distribute to the city, as her portion of the
+calamities, at least two sieges, one capture and sack, and a
+decimation by famine and pestilence. We certainly read that, fifty
+years later, the Emperor Rudolph attacked it with his Hungarians, took
+it, pillaged it, and put great part of its people to the sword. During
+the siege, some pious Mantuans had buried (to save them from the
+religious foe) the blood of Christ, and part of the sponge which had
+held the gall and vinegar, together with the body of St. Longinus.
+Most unluckily, however, these excellent men were put to the sword,
+and all knowledge of the place of sepulture perished with them.
+
+At the end of these wars Mantua received a lord, by appointment of the
+Emperor, and the first lord's son married the daughter of the Duke
+of Lorraine, from which union was born the great Countess Matilda.
+Boniface was the happy bridegroom's name, and the wedding had a wild
+splendor and profuse barbaric jollity about it, which it is pleasant
+enough to read of after so much cutting and slashing. The viands were
+passed round on horseback to the guests, and the horses were shod
+with silver shoes loosely nailed on, that they might drop off and be
+scrambled for by the people. Oxen were roasted whole, as at a Kentucky
+barbecue; and wine was drawn from wells with buckets hung on silver
+chains. It was the first great display of that magnificence of which
+after princes of Mantua were so fond; and the wretched hinds out of
+whose sweat it came no doubt thought it very fine.
+
+Of course Lord Boniface had his wars. There was a plot to depose
+him discovered in Mantua, and the plotters fled to Verona. Boniface
+demanded them; but the Veronese answered stoutly that theirs was
+a free city, and no man should be taken from it against his will.
+Boniface marched to attack them; and the Veronese were such fools as
+to call the Duke of Austria to their aid, promising submission to his
+government in return for his help. It was then that Austria first put
+her finger into the Italian _pasticcio_, where she kept it so many
+centuries. But the Austrian governor whom the Duke set over the
+Veronese made himself intolerable,--the Austrian governor always
+does,--and they drove him out of the city. On this the Duke turns
+about, unites with Boniface, takes Verona and sacks it.
+
+An altogether pleasanter incident of Boniface's domination was the
+miraculous discovery of the sacred relics, buried and lost during the
+sack of Mantua by the Hungarians. The place of sepulture was revealed
+thrice to a blind pauper in a dream. People dug where he bade them
+and found the relics. Immediately on its exhumation the Blood wrought
+innumerable miracles; and the fame of it grew so great, that the Pope
+came to see it, attended by such concourse of the people that they
+were obliged to sleep in the streets. It was an age that drew the
+mantle of exterior devotion and laborious penances and pilgrimages
+over the most hideous crimes and unnatural sins. But perhaps the poor
+believers who slept in the streets of Mantua on that occasion were
+none the worse for their faith when the Pope pronounced the Blood
+genuine and blessed it. I am sure that for some days of enthusiasm
+they abstained from the violence of war, and paused a little in that
+career of vice and wickedness of which one reads in Italian history,
+with the full conviction that Sodom and Gomorrah also were facts, and
+not merely allegory. I have no doubt that the blind beggar believed
+that Heaven had revealed to him the place where the Blood was buried,
+that the Pope believed in the verity of the relic, and that the devout
+multitudes were helped and uplifted in their gross faith by this
+visible witness to the truth that Christ had died for them upon the
+bloody tree. Poor souls! they had much to contend with in the way to
+any good. The leaven of the old pleasure-making pagan civilization
+was in them yet (it is in the Italians to this day); and centuries
+of Northern invasion had made them fierce and cruel, without teaching
+them Northern virtues. Nay, I question much if their invaders had so
+many rugged virtues to teach as some people would have us think. They
+seem to have liked well the sweet corruptions of the land, and the
+studied debaucheries of ages of sin, and to have enjoyed them as
+furiously and clumsily as bears do the hoarded honey of civilized
+bees.
+
+After the death of Boniface the lordship of Mantua fell to his famous
+daughter, Matilda, of whom most have heard. She was a woman of strong
+will and strong mind; she held her own, and rent from others with a
+mighty hand, till she had united nearly all Lombardy under her
+rule. She was not much given to the domestic affections; she had two
+husbands (successively), and, if the truth must be told, divorced them
+both: one because he wished to share her sovereignty, perhaps usurp
+it; and the other because he was not warm enough friend of religion.
+She had no children, and, indeed, in her last marriage contract it was
+expressly provided that the spouses were to live in chastity together,
+and as much asunder as possible, Matilda having scruples. She was
+a great friend to learning,--founded libraries, established the
+law schools at Bologna, caused the codification of the canon law,
+corresponded with distant nations, and spoke all the different
+languages of her soldiers. More than literature, however, she loved
+the Church; and fought on the side of Pope Gregory VII in his wars
+with the Emperor Henry IV. Henry therefore took Mantua from her in
+1091, and up to the year 1111 the city enjoyed a kind of republican
+government under his protection. In that year Henry made peace with
+Matilda, and appointed her his vice-regent in Italy; but the Mantuans,
+after twenty years of freedom, were in no humor to feel the weight of
+the mailed hand of this strong-minded lady. She was then, moreover,
+nigh to her death; and, hearing that her physicians had given her up,
+the Mantuans refused submission. The great Countess rose irefully from
+her deathbed, and, gathering her army, led it in person, as she always
+did, laid siege to Mantua by land and water, entered the city in 1114,
+and did not die till a year after. Such is female resolution.
+
+The Mantuans now founded a republican government, having unlimited
+immunities and privileges from the Emperor, whose power over them
+extended merely to the investure of their consuls. Their republic was
+democratic, the legislative council of nine rectors and three curators
+being elective by the whole people. This government, or something like
+it, endured for more than a century, during which period the Mantuans
+seem to have done nothing but war with their neighbors in every
+direction,--with the Veronese chiefly, with the Cremonese a good
+deal, with the Paduans, with the Ferrarese, with the Modenese and the
+Bolognese: indeed, we count up twelve of these wars. Like the English
+of their time, the Mantuans were famous bowmen, and their shafts took
+flight all over Lombardy. At the same time they did not omit to fight
+each other at home; and it must have been a dullish kind of day
+in Mantua when there was no street-battle between families of the
+factious nobility. Dante has peopled his Hell from the Italy of this
+time, and he might have gone farther and fared worse for a type of
+the infernal state. The spectacle of these countless little Italian
+powers, racked, and torn, and blazing with pride, aggression,
+and disorder, within and without,--full of intrigue, anguish, and
+shame,--each with its petty thief or victorious faction making war
+upon the other, and bubbling over with local ambitions, personal
+rivalries, and lusts,--is a spectacle which the traveller of to-day,
+passing over the countless forgotten battle-fields, and hurried from
+one famous city to another by railroad, can scarcely conjure up.
+Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, Mantua Vicenza, Verona,
+Bassano,--all are now at peace with each other, and firmly united in
+the national sentiment that travellers were meant to be eaten alive
+by Italians. Poor old cities! it is hard to conceive of their bygone
+animosities; still harder to believe that all the villages squatting
+on the long white roads, and waking up to beg of you as your diligence
+passes, were once embroiled in deadly and incessant wars. Municipal
+pride is a good thing, and discentralization is well; and we have to
+thank these intensely local little states for genius triply crowned
+with the glories of literature, art, and science, which Italy might
+not have produced if she had been united, and if the little states had
+loved themselves less and Italy more. Though, after all, there is
+the doubt whether it is not better to bless one's obscure and happy
+children with peace and safety, than to give to the world a score of
+great names at the cost to millions of incalculable misery.
+
+Besides their local wars and domestic feuds the Mantuans had
+troubles on a much larger scale,--troubles, indeed, which the Emperor
+Barbarossa laid out for all Italy. In Carlyle's History of Frederick
+the Great you can read a pleasanter account of the Emperor's business
+at Roncaglia about this time than our Italian chroniclers will give
+you. Carlyle loves a tyrant; and if the tyrant is a ruffian and bully,
+and especially a German, there are hardly any lengths to which that
+historian will not go in praise of him. Truly, one would hardly
+guess, from that picture of Frederick Redbeard at Roncaglia, with
+the standard set before his tent, inviting all men to come and have
+justice done them, that the Emperor was actually at Roncaglia for
+the purpose of conspiring with his Diet to take away every vestige
+of liberty and independence from miserable Italy. Among other cities
+Mantua lost her freedom at this Diet, and was ruled by an imperial
+governor and by consuls of Frederick's nomination till 1167, when she
+joined the famous Lombard League against him. The leagued cities
+beat the Emperor at Legnano, and received back their liberties by the
+treaty of Costanza in 1183; after which, Frederick having withdrawn to
+Germany, they fell to fighting among themselves again with redoubled
+zeal, and rent their league into as many pieces as there had been
+parties to it. In 1236 the Germans again invaded Lombardy, under
+Frederick II.; and aided by the troops of the Ghibelline cities,
+Verona, Padua, Vicenza, and Treviso, besieged Mantua, which
+surrendered to this formidable union of forces, thus becoming once
+more an imperial city, and irreparably fracturing the Lombard League.
+It does not appear, however, that her ancient liberties were withdrawn
+by Frederick II.; and we read that the local wars went on after this
+with as little interruption as before. The wars went on as usual, and
+on the old terms with Verona and Cremona; and there is little in
+their history to interest us. But in 1256 the famous tyrant of Padua,
+Eccelino da Romano, who aspired to the dominion of Lombardy, gathered
+his forces, and went and sat down before Mantua. The Mantuans refused
+to surrender at his summons; and Eccelino, who had very little notion
+of what the Paduans were doing in his absence, swore that he would cut
+down the vines in those pleasant Mantuan vineyards, plant new ones,
+and drink the wine of their grapes before ever he raised the siege.
+But meantime that conspiracy which ended in Eccelino's ruin had
+declared itself in Padua, and the tyrant was forced to abandon the
+siege and look to his dominion of other cities.
+
+After which there was something like peace in Mantua for twenty years,
+and the city waxed prosperous. Indeed, neither industry nor learning
+had wholly perished during the wars of the republic, and the people
+built grist-mills on the Mincio, and cultivated belles-lettres to
+some degree. Men of heavier science likewise nourished, and we read of
+jurists and astronomers born in those troublous days, as well as of a
+distinguished physician, who wrote a ponderous dictionary of simples,
+and dedicated it to King Robert of Naples. But by far the greatest
+Mantuan of this time was he of whom readers have heard something from
+a modern poet. He is the haughty Lombard soul, "in the movement of the
+eyes honest and slow," whom Dante, ascending the inexplicable heights
+of Purgatory, beheld; and who, summoning all himself, leaped to the
+heart of Virgil when he named Mantua: "O Mantuan! I am Sordello, of
+thine own land!"
+
+Of Virgil the superstition of the Middle Ages had made a kind of
+wizard, and of Sordello the old writers fable all manner of wonders;
+he is both knight and poet, and has adventures scarcely less
+surprising than those of Amadis of Gaul. It is pretty nearly certain
+that he was born in 1189 of the Visconti di Goito, in the Mantuan
+country, and that he married Beatrice, a sister of Eccelino, and had
+amours with the youngest sister of this tyrant, the pretty Cunizza,
+whom Dante places in his "Paradiso." This final disposition of
+Cunizza, whom we should hardly think now of assigning a place among
+the blest, surprised some people even in that day, it seems; for an
+old commentator defends it, saying: "Cunizza was always, it is true,
+tender and amorous, and properly called a daughter of Venus; but she
+was also compassionate, benign, and merciful toward those unhappy ones
+whom her brother cruelly tormented. Therefore the poet is right
+in feigning to find her in the sphere of Venus. _For if the gentle
+Cyprians deified their Venus, and the Romans their Flora, how much
+more honestly may a Christian poet save Cunizza_." The lady, whose
+salvation is on these grounds inexpugnably accomplished, was married
+to Count Sanbonifazio of Padua, in her twenty-fourth year; and
+Sordello was early called to this nobleman's court, having already
+given proofs of his poetic genius. He fell in love with Cunizza, whom
+her lord, becoming the enemy of the Eccelini, began to ill-treat. A
+curious glimpse of the manners and morals of that day is afforded by
+the fact, that the brothers of Cunizza conspired to effect her escape
+with Sordella from her husband's court, and that, under the protection
+of Eccelino da Romano, the lovers were left unmolested to their
+amours. Eccelino, indeed, loved this weak sister with extraordinary
+tenderness, and we read of a marvelous complaisance to her amorous
+intrigues by a man who cared nothing himself for women. Cunizza lived
+in one of her brother's palaces at Verona, and used to receive there
+the visits of Sordello after Eccelino had determined to separate them.
+The poet entered the palace by a back door, to reach which he must
+pass through a very filthy alley; and a servant was stationed there to
+carry Sordello to and fro upon his back. One night Eccelino took the
+servant's place, bore the poet to the palace door, and on his return
+carried him back to the mouth of the alley, where he revealed
+himself, to the natural surprise and pain of Sordello, who could have
+reasonably expected anything but the mild reproof and warning given
+him by his truculent brother-in-law: "Ora ti basti, Sordello. Non
+venir più per questa vile strada ad opere ancor più vili."--"Let this
+suffice thee, Sordello. Come no more by this vile path to yet viler
+deeds."
+
+It was probably after this amour ended that Sordello sat out upon his
+travels, visiting most courts, and dwelling long in Provence, where
+he learned to poetize in the Provençal tongue, in which he thereafter
+chiefly wrote, and composed many songs. He did not, however, neglect
+his Lombard language, but composed in it a treatise on the art of
+defending towns. The Mantuan historian, Volta, says that some of
+Sordello's Provençal poems exist in manuscript in the Vatican and
+Chigi libraries at Rome, in the Laurentian at Florence, and the
+Estense at Modena. He was versed in arms as well as letters, and
+he caused Mantua to be surrounded with fosses five miles beyond her
+walls; and the republic having lodged sovereign powers in his hands
+when Eccelino besieged the city, Sordello conducted the defense with
+great courage and ability, and did not at all betray the place to his
+obliging brother-in-law, as the latter expected. Verci, from whose
+"History of the Eccelini" we have drawn the account of Sordello's
+intrigue with Cunizza, says: "The writers represent this Sordello as
+the most polite, the most gentle, the most generous man of his time,
+of middle stature, of beautiful aspect and fine person, of lofty
+bearing, agile and dexterous, instructed in letters, and a good poet,
+as his Provençal poems manifest. To these qualities he united military
+valor in such degree that no knight of his time could stand before
+him." He was properly the first Lord of Mantua, and the republic seems
+to have died with him in 1284.
+
+The madness which comes upon a people about to be enslaved commonly
+makes them the agents of their own undoing. The time had now come for
+the destruction of the last vestiges of liberty in Mantua, and the
+Mantuans, in their assembly of the Four Hundred and Ninety, voted full
+power into the hands of the destroyer. That Pinamonte Bonacolsi whom
+Dante mentions in the twentieth canto of the "Inferno," had been
+elected captain of the republic, and, feigning to fear aggression from
+the Marquis of Ferrara, he demanded of the people the right to banish
+all enemies of the state. This reasonable demand was granted, and
+the captain banished, as is well known, all enemies of Pinamonte
+Bonacolsi. After that, having things his own way, he began to favor
+public tranquillity, abolished family feuds and the ancient amusement
+of street-battles, and led his enslaved country in the paths of
+material prosperity; for which he was no doubt lauded in his day
+by those who thought the Mantuans were not prepared for freedom.
+He resolved to make the captaincy of the republic hereditary in the
+Bonacolsi family; and when he died, in 1293, his power descended to
+his son Bordellone. This Bordellone seems to have been a generous and
+merciful captain enough, but he loved ease and pleasure; and a rough
+nephew of his, Guido Botticella, conspired against him to that degree
+that Bordellone thought best, for peace and quietness' sake, to
+abdicate in his favor. Guido had the customary war with the Marquis of
+Ferrara, and then died, and was succeeded by his brother Passerino, a
+very bad person, whose son at last brought his whole family to grief.
+The Emperor made him vicar of Modena; and he used the Modenese very
+cruelly, and shut up Francesco Pico and his sons in a tower, where he
+starved them, as the Pisans did Ugolino. In those days, also, the Pope
+was living at Avignon, and people used to send him money and other
+comforts there out of Italy. An officer of Passerino's, being of
+Ghibelline politics, attacked one of these richly laden emissaries,
+and took his spoils, dividing them with Passerino. For this the Pope
+naturally excommunicated the captain of Mantua, and thereupon his
+neighbors made a great deal of pious war upon him. But he beat the
+Bolognese, the most pious of his foes, near Montevoglio, and with his
+Modenese took from them that famous bucket, about which Tassoni
+made his great Bernesque epic, "The Rape of the Bucket" (_La Secchia
+Rapita_), and which still hangs in the tower of the Duomo at Modena.
+Meantime, while Passerino had done everything to settle himself
+comfortably and permanently in the tyranny of Mantua, his worthless
+son Francesco fell in love with the wife of Filippino Gonzaga.
+
+According to the old Mantuan chronicles the Gonzagas were of a royal
+German line, and had fixed themselves in the Mantuan territory in 770
+where they built a castle beyond Po, and began at once to take part in
+public affairs. They had now grown to be a family of such consequence
+that they could not be offended with impunity, and it was a great
+misfortune to the Bonacolsi that Francesco happened to covet Filippino
+Gonzaga's wife. As to the poor lady herself, it is of infinite
+consequence to her eternal health whether she was guilty or no, but to
+us still on earth, it seems scarcely worth while to inquire, after so
+great lapse of time. History, however, rather favors the notion of
+her innocence; and it is said that Francesco, unable to overcome her
+virtue, took away her good fame by evil reports. At the same time he
+was greatly wroth--it is scarcely possible to write seriously of these
+ridiculous, wicked old shadows--that this lady's husband should have
+fallen in love with a pretty concubine of his, Bonacolsi's; and, after
+publicly defaming Filippino's wife, he threatened to kill him for this
+passion. The insult and the menace sank deep into the bitter hearts
+of the Gonzagas; and the head of that proud race, Filippino's uncle,
+Luigi Gonzaga, resolved to avenge the family dishonor. He was a secret
+and taciturn man, and a pious adulator of his line has praised him
+for the success with which he dissembled his hatred of the Bonacolsi,
+while conspiring to sweep them and their dominion away. He won over
+adherents among the Mantuans, and then made a league with Can Grande
+of Verona to divide the spoils of the Bonacolsi; and so, one morning,
+having bribed the guards to open the city gates, he entered Mantua
+at the head of the banded forces. The population was roused with
+patriotic cries of "Long live the Mantuan people!" and, as usual,
+believed, poor souls, that some good was meant them by those who came
+to overthrow their tyrants. The Bonacolsi were dreaming that pleasant
+morning of anything but ruin, and they offered no resistance to the
+insurrection till it burst out in the great square before the Castello
+di Corte. They then made a feeble sally from the castle, but were
+swiftly driven back, and Passerino, wounded to death under the great
+Gothic archway of the palace, as he retreated, dropped from his
+languid hands the bridle-rein of his charger and the reins of that
+government with which he had so long galled Mantua. The unhappy
+Francesco fled to the cathedral for protection; but the Gonzagas slew
+him at the foot of the altar, with tortures so hideous and incredible,
+that I am glad to have our friend, the advocate Arrighi, deny the fact
+altogether. Passerino's brother, a bishop, was flung into a tower to
+starve, that the Picos might be avenged; and the city of Mantua was
+liberated.
+
+In that day, when you freed a city from a tyrant, you gave it up to be
+pillaged by the army of liberation; and Mantua was now sacked by
+her deliverers. Can Grande's share of the booty alone amounted to a
+hundred thousand gold florins (about two hundred and fifty thousand
+dollars). The Mantuans, far from imitating the ungrateful Paduans,
+who, when the Crusaders liberated them from Eccelino, grudged these
+brave fellows three days' pillage of their city, and even wished back
+their old tyrant,--the Mantuans, we say, seemed not in the least
+to mind being devoured, but gratefully elected the Gonzaga their
+captain-general, and purchased him absolution from the Pope for his
+crimes committed in the sack. They got this absolution for twenty
+thousand gold florins; and the Pope probably sold it cheap,
+remembering his old grudge against the Bonacolsi, whom the Gonzaga had
+overthrown. All this was in the year of grace 1328.
+
+I confess that I am never weary of reading of these good, heroic,
+virtuous old times in Italy, and that I am here tempted to digress
+into declamation about them. There is no study more curious and
+interesting, and I am fond of tracing the two elements of character
+visible in Italian society, and every individual Italian, as they flow
+down from the remotest times to these: the one element, that capacity
+for intellectual culture of the highest degree; the other element,
+that utter untamableness of passion and feeling. The presence of these
+contradictory elements seems to influence every relation of Italian
+life;--to make it capable of splendor, but barren of comfort; to
+endear beauty, but not goodness, to the Italian; to lead him to
+recognize and celebrate virtues, but not to practice them; to produce
+a civilization of the mind, and not of the soul.
+
+When Luigi Gonzaga was made lord of Mantua, he left his castle beyond
+Po, to dwell in the city. In this castle he had dwelt, like other
+lords of his time, in the likeness of a king, spending regally and
+keeping state and open house in an edifice strongly built about with
+walls, encircled with ditches passable by a single drawbridge, and
+guarded day and night, from castle moat to castle crest, by armed
+vassals. Hundreds ate daily at his board, which was heaped with a rude
+and rich profusion, and furnished with carven goblets and plate of
+gold and silver. In fair weather the banquet-hall stood open to all
+the winds that blew; in foul, the guests were sheltered from the storm
+by curtains of oiled linen, and the place was lighted with torches
+borne by splendidly attired pages. The great saloons of the castle
+were decked with tapestries of Flanders and Damascus, and the floor
+was strewn with straw or rushes. The bed in which the lord and lady
+slept was the couch of a monarch; the household herded together in the
+empty chambers, and lay upon the floor like swine. The garden-fields
+about the castle smiled with generous harvests; the peasant lay
+down after his toil, at night, in deadly fear of invasion from some
+neighboring state, which should rob him of everything, dishonor his
+wife and daughters, and slay him upon the smoking ruins of his home.
+
+In the city to which this lord repaired, the houses were built
+here and there at caprice, without numbers or regularity, and only
+distinguished by the figure of a saint, or some pious motto painted
+above the door. Cattle wandered at will through the crooked, narrow,
+and filthy streets, which rang with the clamor of frequent feud, and
+reeked with the blood of the embattled citizens; over all the squalor
+and wickedness rose the loveliest temples that ever blossomed from
+man's love of the beautiful, to the honor and glory of God.
+
+In this time Crusaders went to take the Lord's sepulchre from the
+infidel, while their brothers left at home rose against one another,
+each petty state against its neighbor, in unsparing wars of rapine
+and devastation,--wars that slew, or, less mercifully, mutilated
+prisoners,--that snatched the babe from the embrace of its violated
+mother, and dashed out its brains upon the desolated hearth. A
+hopeless, hellish time of sack, plunder, murder, famine, plague, and
+unnatural crime; a glorious age, in which flourished the gentlest and
+sweetest poet that ever sang, and the grimmest and grandest that ever
+upbraided a godless generation for its sins,--in which Petrarch was
+crowned with laurel at Rome, and Dante wandered in despair from court
+to court, learning in the bitterness of his exile's heart,
+
+  "come sa di sale
+  Lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
+  Lo scendere e il salir per l'altrui scale."
+
+It was a time ignorant of the simplest comfort, but debauched with the
+vices of luxury; in which cities repressed the license of their people
+by laws regulating the length of women's gowns and the outlays
+at weddings and funerals. Every wild misdeed and filthy crime was
+committed, and punished by terrible penalties, or atoned for by fines.
+A fierce democracy reigned, banishing nobles, razing their palaces,
+and ploughing up the salt-sown sites; till at last, in the uttermost
+paroxysm of madness, it delivered itself up to lords to be defended
+from itself, and was crushed into the abjectest depths of slavery.
+Literature and architecture flourished, and the sister arts were born
+amid the struggles of human nature convulsed with every abominable
+passion.
+
+For nearly four hundred years the Gonzagas continued to rule the city,
+which the first prince of their line, having well-nigh destroyed,
+now rebuilt and restored to greater splendor than ever; and it is the
+Mantua of the Gonzagas which travellers of this day look upon when
+they visit the famous old city. Their pride and their wealth adorned
+it; their wisdom and prudence made it rich and prosperous; their
+valor glorified it; their crimes stain its annals with infamy; their
+wickedness and weakness ruined it and brought it low. They were a
+race full of hereditary traits of magnificence, but one reads their
+history, and learns to love, of all their long succession, only one or
+two in their pride, learns to pity only one or two in their fall. They
+were patriotic, but the patriotism of despotic princes is self-love.
+They were liberal--in spending the revenues of the state for the glory
+of their family. They were brave, and led many nameless Mantuans
+to die in forgotten battles for alien quarrels which they never
+understood.
+
+The succession of the Gonzagas was of four captains, ending in 1407;
+four marquises, ending in 1484; and ten dukes, ending in 1708.
+
+The first of the captains was Luigi, as we know. In his time the great
+Gothic fabric of the Castello di Corte was built; and having rebuilt
+the portions of the city wasted by the sack, he devoted himself,
+as far as might be in that age, to the arts of peace; and it is
+remembered of him that he tried to cure the Mantuan air of its
+feverish unwholesomeness by draining the swampy environs. During his
+time, Petrarch, making a sentimental journey to the birthplace of
+Virgil, was splendidly entertained and greatly honored by him. For the
+rest, Can Grande of Verona was by no means content with his hundred
+thousand golden florins of spoil from the sack of the city, but
+aspired to its seigniory, declaring that he had understood Gonzaga
+to have promised him it as the condition of alliance against the
+Bonacolsi. Gonzaga construed the contract differently, and had so
+little idea of parting with his opinion, that he fought the Scaligero
+on this point of difference till he died, which befell thirty years
+after his election to the captaincy.
+
+Him his son Guido succeeded,--a prince already old at the time of his
+father's death, and of feeble spirit. He shared his dominion with his
+son Ugolino, excluding the younger brothers from the dominion. These,
+indignant at the partiality, one night slew their brother Ugolino at a
+supper he was giving; and being thereupon admitted to a share in their
+father's government, had no trouble in obtaining the pardon of the
+Pope and Emperor. One of the murderers died before the father; the
+other, named Ludovico, was, on the death of Guido, in 1370, elected to
+the captaincy, and ruled long, wisely, and well. He loved a peaceful
+life; and though the Emperor confirmed him in the honors conferred on
+him by the Mantuans, and made him Vicar imperial, Ludovico declined to
+take part with Ghibellines against Guelphs, remained quietly at home,
+and spent himself much in good works, as if he would thus expiate his
+bloody crime. He gathered artists, poets, and learned men about him,
+and did much to foster all arts. In his time, Mantua had rest from
+war, and grew to have twenty-eight thousand inhabitants; but it was
+not in the nature of a city of the Middle Ages to be long without a
+calamity of some sort, and it is a kind of relief to know that Mantua,
+under this peaceful prince, was well-nigh depopulated by a pestilence.
+
+In 1381 he died, and with his son Francesco the blood-letting began
+again. Indeed, this captain spent nearly his whole life in war with
+those pleasant people, the Visconti of Milan. He had married the
+daughter of Barnabo Visconti, but discovering her to be unfaithful to
+him, or believing her so, he caused her to be put to death, refusing
+all her family's intercessions for mercy. After that, a heavy sadness
+fell upon him, and he wandered aimlessly about in many Italian
+cities, and at last married a second time, taking to wife Margherita
+Malatesta. He was a prince of high and generous soul and of manly
+greatness rare in his time. There came once a creature of the Visconti
+to him, with a plot for secretly taking off his masters; but the
+Gonzaga (he must have been thought an eccentric man by his neighbors)
+dismissed the wretch with scornful horror. I am sure the reader will
+be glad to know that he finally beat the Visconti in fair fight, and
+(the pest still raging in Mantua) lived to make a pilgrimage to the
+Holy Land. When he returned, he compiled the city's statutes, divided
+the town into four districts, and named its streets. So he died.
+
+And after this prince had made his end, there came another Francesco,
+or Gianfrancesco, who was created Marquis of Mantua by the Emperor
+Sigismund. He was a friend of war, and having been the ward of
+the Venetian Republic (Venice was fond of this kind of trust, and
+sometimes adopted princely persons as her children, among whom the
+reader will of course remember the Queen of Cyprus, and the charming
+Bianca Capello, whose personal attractions and singularly skillful
+knowledge of the use of poisons made her Grand Duchess of Tuscany
+some years after she eloped from Venice), he became the leader of
+her armies on the death of Carmagnola, who survived the triumphal
+reception given him by the Serenest Senate only a very short time. [It
+seems scarcely worth while to state the fact that Carmagnola,
+suspected of treasonable correspondence with the Visconti, was
+recalled to Venice to receive distinguished honors from the republic.
+The Senate was sitting in the hall of the Grand Council when he
+appeared, and they detained him there with various compliments till
+night fell. Then instead of lights, the Sbirri appeared, and seized
+Carmagnola. "I am a dead man," he exclaimed, on beholding them. And
+so indeed he was; for, three days after, he was led out of prison,
+and beheaded between the pillars of the Piazzetta.] The Gonzaga
+took Verona and Padua for the republic, and met the Milanese in many
+battles. Venice was then fat and insolently profuse with the spoils
+of the Orient, and it is probable that the Marquis of Mantua acquired
+there that taste for splendor which he introduced into his hitherto
+frugal little state. We read of his being in Venice in 1414, when the
+Jewelers and Goldsmiths' Guild gave a tournament in the Piazza San
+Marco, offering as prizes to the victorious lances a collar enriched
+with pearls and diamonds, the work of the jewelers, and two helmets
+excellently wrought by the goldsmiths. On this occasion the Gonzaga,
+with two hundred and sixty Mantuan gentlemen, mounted on superb
+horses, contested the prizes with the Marquis of Ferrara, at the
+head of two hundred Ferrarese, equally mounted, and attended by their
+squires and pages, magnificently dressed. There were sixty thousand
+spectators of the encounter. "Both the Marquises," says Mutinelli
+in his "Annali Urbani," "being each assisted by fourteen well-armed
+cavaliers, combated valorously at the barrier, and were both judged
+worthy of the first prize: a Mantuan cavalier took the second."
+
+The Marquis Gonzaga was the first of his line who began that royal
+luxury of palaces with which Mantua was adorned. He commenced the
+Ducal Palace; but before he went far with the work, he fell a prey to
+the science then much affected by Italian princes, but still awaiting
+its last refinement from the gifted Lucrezia Borgia. The poor Marquis
+was poisoned by his wife's paramour, and died in the year 1444.
+Against this prince, our advocate Arrighi records the vandalism of
+causing to be thrown down and broken in pieces the antique statue
+of Virgil, which stood in one of the public places of Mantua, and of
+which the head is still shown in the Museum of the city. In all times,
+the Mantuans had honored, in diverse ways, their great poet, and at
+certain epochs had coined money bearing his face. With the common
+people he had a kind of worship (more likely as wizard than as poet),
+and they celebrated annually some now-forgotten event by assembling
+with songs and dances about the statue of Virgil, which was destroyed
+by the uncle of the Marquis, Malatesta, rather than by the Marquis's
+own order. This ill-conditioned person is supposed to have been
+"vexed because our Mantuan people thought it their highest glory to be
+fellow-citizens of the prince of poets." We can better sympathize with
+the advocate's indignation at this barbarity, than with his blame of
+Francesco for having consented, by his acceptance of the marquisate,
+to become a prince of the Roman Empire. Mantua was thus subjected
+to the Emperors, but liberty had long been extinguished; and the
+voluntary election of the Council, which bestowed the captaincy on
+each succeeding generation of the Gonzagas, was a mere matter of form,
+and of course.
+
+The next prince, Lodovico Gonzaga, was an austere man, and had been
+bred in a hard school, if I may believe some of our old chroniclers,
+whom, indeed, I sometimes suspect of being not altogether faithful. It
+is said that his father loved his younger brother better than him,
+and that Lodovico ran away in his boyhood, and took refuge with his
+father's hereditary enemies, the Visconti. To make dates agree,
+it must have been the last of these, for the line failed during
+Lodovico's time, and he had wars with the succeeding Sforza. In the
+day of his escapade, Milan was at war with Mantua and with Venice, and
+the Marquis Gonzaga was at the head of the united armies, as we have
+already seen. So the father and son met in several battles; though
+the Visconti, out of love for the boy, and from a sentiment of piety
+somewhat amazing in them, contrived that he should never actually
+encounter his parent face to face. Lodovico came home after the wars,
+wearing a long beard; and his mother called her son "the Turk," a
+nickname that he never lost.
+
+Il Turco was a lover of the arts and of letters, and he did many
+works to enrich and beautify the city. He established the first
+printing-office in Mantua, where the first book printed was the
+"Decamerone" of Boccaccio. He founded a college of advocates, and he
+dug canals for irrigation; and the prosperity of Mantuan manufacturers
+in his time may be inferred from the fact that, when the King of
+Denmark paid him a visit, in 1474, the merchants decked their shops
+with five thousand pieces of fine Mantuan cloth.
+
+The Marquis made his brilliant little court the resort of the arts and
+letters; and hither from Florence came once the elegant Politian, who
+composed his tragedy of "Orfeo" in Mantua, and caused it to be first
+represented before Lodovico. But it must be confessed that this was
+a soil in which art flourished better than literature, and that even
+born Mantuan poets went off, after a while, and blossomed in other
+air. The painter Mantegna, whom the Marquis invited from Padua, passed
+his whole life here, painting for the Marquis in the palaces and
+churches. The prince loved him, and gave him a house, and bestowed
+other honors upon him; and Mantegna executed for Lodovico his famous
+pictures representing the Triumph of Julius Cæsar. [Now at Hamilton
+Court, in England.] It was divided into nine compartments, and, as a
+frieze, went round the upper part of Lodovico's newly erected palace
+of San Sebastian. Mantegna also painted a hall in the Castello di
+Corte, called the Stanza di Mantegna, and there, among other subjects
+of fable and of war, made the portraits of Lodovico and his wife. It
+was partly the wish to see such works of Mantegna as still remained in
+Mantua that took us thither; and it was chiefly this wish that carried
+us, the morning after our arrival, to the Castello di Corte, or the
+Ducal Palace. Our thirst for Mantegnas was destined to be in no degree
+satisfied in this pile, but it was full of things to tempt us to
+forget Mantegna, and to make us more and more interested in the
+Gonzagas and their Mantua.
+
+It is taken for granted that no human being ever yet gained an idea of
+any building from the most artful description of it; but if the reader
+cares to fancy a wide piazza, or open square, with a church upon the
+left hand, immense, uninteresting edifices on the right, and an ugly
+bishop's palace of Renaissance taste behind him, he may figure before
+him as vastly and magnificently as he pleases the superb Gothic front
+of the Castello di Corte. This façade is the only one in Italy that
+reminds you of the most beautiful building in the world, the Ducal
+Palace at Venice; and it does this merely by right of its short
+pillars and deep Gothic arches in the ground story, and the great
+breadth of wall that rises above them, unbroken by the second line of
+columns which relieves and lightens this wall in the Venetian palace.
+It stands at an extremity of the city, upon the edge of the broad
+fresh-water lagoon, and is of such extent as to include within its
+walls a whole court-city of theatre, church, stables, playground,
+course for riding, and several streets. There is a far older edifice
+adjoining the Castello di Corte, which Guido Bonacolsi began, and
+which witnessed the bloody end of his line, when Louis Gonzaga
+surprised and slew his last successor. But the palace itself is all
+the work of the Gonzagas, and it remains the monument of their kingly
+state and splendid pride.
+
+It was the misfortune of the present writer to be recognized by the
+_employé_ (formerly of Venice) who gives the permissions to travellers
+to visit the palace, and to be addressed in the presence of the
+_Custode_ by the dignified title to which his presence did so little
+honor. This circumstance threw upon the Custode, a naturally tedious
+and oppressive old man, the responsibility of being doubly prolix and
+garrulous. He reveled in his office of showing the palace, and did
+homage to the visitor's charge and nation by an infinite expansion
+upon all possible points of interest, lest he should go away
+imperfectly informed of anything. By dint of frequent encounter with
+strangers, this Custode had picked up many shreds and fragments
+of many languages, and did not permit the travellers to consider
+themselves as having at all understood him until he had repeated
+everything in Italian, English, French, and German. He led the
+way with his polyglot babble through an endless number of those
+magnificent and uninteresting chambers which palaces seem specially
+built to contain, that men may be content to dwell in the humbler
+dullness of their own houses; and though the travellers often prayed
+him to show them the apartments containing the works of Mantegna,
+they really got to see nothing of this painter's in the Ducal Palace,
+except, here and there, some evanescent frescoes, which the Custode
+would not go beyond a _si crede_ in attributing to him. Indeed, it is
+known that the works of Mantegna suffered grievously in the wars of
+the last century, and his memory has faded so dim in this palace where
+he wrought, that the guide could not understand the curiosity of the
+foreigners concerning the old painter; and certainly Giulio Romano has
+stamped himself more ineffaceably than Mantegna upon Mantua.
+
+In the Ducal Palace are seen vividly contrasted the fineness and
+strength, the delicacy and courage of the fancy, which, rather than
+the higher gift of imagination, characterize Giulio's work. There is
+such an airy refinement and subtile grace in the pretty grotesques
+with which he decorates a chamber; there is such daring luxury of
+color and design in the pictures for which his grand halls are merely
+the frames. No doubt I could make fine speeches about these paintings;
+but who, not seeing them, would be the wiser, after the best
+description and the choicest critical disquisition? In fact, our
+travellers themselves found it pleasanter, after a while, to yield to
+the guidance of the Custode, and to enjoy the stupider marvels of the
+place, than to do the set and difficult admiration of the works of
+art. So, passing the apartments in good preservation (the Austrian
+Emperors had taken good care of some parts of the palace of one of
+their first Italian possessions), they did justice to the splendor
+of the satin beds and the other upholstery work; they admired rich
+carpentering and costly toys; they dwelt on marvelous tapestries
+(among which the tapestry copies of Raphael's cartoons, woven at
+Mantua in the fifteenth century, are certainly worthy of wonder);
+and they expressed the proper amazement at the miracles of art which
+caused figures frescoed in the ceilings to turn with them, and follow
+and face them from whatever part of the room they chose to look. Nay,
+they even enjoyed the Hall of the Rivers, on the sides of which the
+usual river-gods were painted, in the company of the usual pottery,
+from which they pour their founts, and at the end of which there
+was an abominable little grotto of what people call, in modern
+landscape-gardening, rock-work, out of the despair with which its
+unmeaning ugliness fills them. There were busts of several Mantuan
+duchesses in the gallery, which were interesting, and the pictures
+were so bad as to molest no one. There was, besides all this, a
+hanging garden in this small Babylon, on which the travellers looked
+with a doleful regret that they were no longer of the age when a
+hanging garden would have brought supreme comfort to the soul. It
+occupied a spacious oblong, had a fountain and statues, trees and
+flowers, and would certainly have been taken for the surface of the
+earth, had not the Custode proudly pointed out that it was on a level
+with the second floor, on which they stood.
+
+After that they wandered through a series of unused, dismantled
+apartments and halls, melancholy with faded fresco, dropping stucco,
+and mutilated statues of plaster, and came at last upon a balcony
+overlooking the Cavallerizza, which one of the early dukes built after
+a design by the inevitable Giulio Romano. It is a large square, and
+was meant for the diversion of riding on horseback. Balconies go all
+found it between those thick columns, finely twisted, as we see
+them in that cartoon of Raphael, "The Healing of the Lame Man at the
+Beautiful Gate of the Temple"; and here once stood the jolly dukes and
+the jolly ladies of their light-hearted court, and there below rode
+the gay, insolent, intriguing courtiers, and outside groaned the
+city under the heavy extortions of the tax-gatherers. It is all in
+weather-worn stucco, and the handsome square is planted with trees.
+The turf was now cut and carved by the heavy wheels of the Austrian
+baggage-wagons constantly passing through the court to carry munitions
+to the fortress outside, whose black guns grimly overlook the dead
+lagoon. A sense of desolation had crept over the sight-seers, with
+that strange sickness of heart which one feels in the presence of ruin
+not to be lamented, and which deepened into actual pain as the Custode
+clapped his hands and the echo buffeted itself against the forlorn
+stucco, and up from the trees rose a score of sullen, slumberous owls,
+and flapped heavily across the lonesome air with melancholy cries. It
+only needed, to crush these poor strangers, that final touch which the
+Custode gave, as they passed from the palace through the hall in which
+are painted the Gonzagas, and in which he pointed out the last Duke of
+Mantua, saying he was deposed by the Emperor for felony, and somehow
+conveying the idea of horse-stealing and counterfeiting on the part of
+his Grace.
+
+A very different man from this rogue was our old friend Lodovico, who
+also, however, had his troubles. He was an enemy of the Ghibellines,
+and fought them a great deal. Of course he had the habitual wars with
+Milan, and he was obliged to do battle with his own brother Carlo
+to some extent. This Gonzaga had been taken prisoner by Sforza; and
+Lodovico, having paid for him a ransom of sixty thousand florins of
+gold (which Carlo was scarcely worth), seized the fraternal lands, and
+held them in pledge of repayment. Carlo could not pay, and tried
+to get back his possessions by war. Vexed with these and other
+contentions, Lodovico was also unhappy in his son, whose romance I
+may best tell in the words of the history [Volta: _Storia di Mantova_.],
+from which I take it:
+
+    "Lodovico Gonzaga, having agreed with the Duke of Bavaria to
+    take his daughter Margherita as wife for his (Lodovico's)
+    first-born, Federico, and the young man having refused her,
+    Lodovico was so much enraged that he sought to imprison him;
+    but the Marchioness Barbara, mother of Federico, caused him to
+    fly from the city till his father's anger should be abated.
+    Federico departed with six attendants [The _Fioretto delle
+    Cronache_ says "persons of gentle condition."]; but this flight
+    caused still greater displeasure to his father, who now
+    declared him banished, and threatened with heavy penalties any
+    one who should give him help or favor. Federico, therefore,
+    wandered about with these six attendants in diverse places, and
+    finally arrived in Naples; but having already spent all his
+    substance, and not daring to make himself known for fear of his
+    father, he fell into great want, and so into severe sickness.
+    His companions having nothing wherewith to live, and not
+    knowing any trade by which to gain their bread, did menial
+    services fit for day-laborers, and sustained their lord with
+    their earnings, he remaining hidden in a poor woman's house
+    where they all dwelt.
+
+    "The Marchioness had sent many messengers in divers provinces
+    with money to find her son, but they never heard any news of
+    him; so that they thought him dead, not hearing anything,
+    either, of his attendants. Now it happened that one of those
+    who sought Federico came to Naples, and presented himself to
+    the king with a letter from the said lady, praying that he
+    should make search in his territory for a company of seven men,
+    giving the name and description of each. The king caused this
+    search to be made by the heads of the district; and one of
+    these heads told how in his district there were six Lombard men
+    (not knowing of Federico, who lay ill), but that they were
+    laborers and of base condition. The king determined to see
+    them; and they being come before him, he demanded who they
+    were, and how many; as they were not willing to discover their
+    lord, on being asked their names they gave others, so that the
+    king, not being able to learn anything, would have dismissed
+    them. But the messenger sent by the Marchioness knew them, and
+    said to the king, 'Sire, these are the attendants of him whom I
+    seek; but they have changed their names.' The king caused them
+    to be separated one from another, and then asked them of their
+    Lord; and they, finding themselves separated, minutely narrated
+    everything; and the king immediately sent for Federico, whom
+    his officers found miserably ill on a heap of straw. He was
+    brought to the palace, where the king ordered him to be cared
+    for, sending the messenger back to his mother to advise her how
+    the men had been found and in what great misery. The
+    Marchioness went to her husband, and, having cast herself at
+    his feet, besought him of a grace. The Marquis answered that he
+    would grant everything, so it did not treat of Federico. Then
+    the lady opened him the letter of the king of Naples, which had
+    such effect that it softened the soul of the Marquis, showing
+    him in how great misery his son had been; and so, giving the
+    letter to the Marchioness, he said, 'Do that which pleases
+    you.' The Marchioness straightway sent the prince money, and
+    clothes to clothe him, in order that he should return to
+    Mantua; and having come, the son cast himself at his father's
+    feet, imploring pardon for himself and for his attendants; and
+    he pardoned them, and gave those attendants enough to live
+    honorably and like noblemen, and they were called The Faithful
+    of the House of Gonzaga, and from them come the _Fedeli_ of
+    Mantua.
+
+    "The Marquis then, not to break faith, caused Federico to take
+    Margherita, daughter of the Duke of Bavaria, for his wife, and
+    celebrated the nuptials splendidly; so that there remained the
+    greatest love between father and son."
+
+The son succeeded to the father's dominion in 1478; and it is recorded
+of him in the "Flower of the Chronicles," that he was a hater of
+idleness, and a just man, greatly beloved by his people. They chiefly
+objected to him that he placed a Jew, Eusebio Malatesta, at the head
+of civil affairs; and this Jew was indeed the cause of great mischief:
+for Ridolfo Gonzaga coming to reside with his wife for a time at the
+court of his brother, the Marquis, Malatesta fell in love with
+her. She repelled him, and the bitter Jew thereupon so poisoned her
+husband's mind with accusations against her chastity, that he took her
+home to his town of Lazzaro, and there put the unhappy and innocent
+lady to death by the headsman's hand in the great square of the city.
+
+Federico was Marquis only six years, and died in 1484, leaving
+his marquisate to his son Francesco, the most ambitious, warlike,
+restless, splendid prince of his magnificent race. This Gonzaga wore a
+beard, and brought the custom into fashion in Italy again. He founded
+the famous breed of Mantuan horses, and gave them about free-handedly
+to other sovereigns of his acquaintance. To the English king he
+presented a steed which, if we may trust history, could have been sold
+for almost its weight in gold. He was so fond of hunting that he kept
+two hundred dogs of the chase, and one hundred and fifty birds of
+prey.
+
+Of course this Gonzaga was a soldier, and indeed he loved war better
+even than hunting, and delighted so much in personal feats of arms
+that, concealing his name and quality, in order that the combat should
+be in all things equal, he was wont to challenge renowned champions
+wherever he heard of them, and to meet them in the lists. Great part
+of his life was spent in the field; and he fought in turn on nearly
+all sides of the political questions then agitating Italy. In 1495
+he was at the head of the Venetian and other Italian troops when they
+beat the French under Charles VIII. at Taro, and made so little use
+of their victory as to let their vanquished invaders escape from them
+after all. Nevertheless, if the Gonzaga did not here show himself a
+great general, he did great feats of personal valor, penetrating to
+the midst of the French forces, wounding the king, and with his own
+hand taking prisoner the great Bastard of Bourbon. Venice paid him
+ten thousand ducats for gaining the victory, such as it was, and when
+peace was made he went to visit the French king at Vercelli; and there
+Charles gave his guest a present of two magnificent horses, which the
+Gonzaga returned yet more splendidly in kind. About five years later
+he was again at war with the French, and helped the Aragonese drive
+them out of Naples. In 1506, Pope Julius II. made him leader of the
+armies of the Church (for he had now quitted the Venetian service),
+and he reduced the city of Bologna to obedience to the Holy See. In
+1509 he joined the League of Cambray against Venice, and, being made
+Imperial Captain-General, was taken prisoner by the Venetians. They
+liberated him, however, the following year; and in 1513 we find him at
+the head of the league against the French.
+
+A curious anecdote of this Gonzaga's hospitality is also illustrative
+of the anomalous life of those times, when good faith had as little
+to do with the intercourse of nations as at present; but good fortune,
+when she appeared in the world, liked to put on a romantic and
+melodramatic guise. An ambassador from the Grand Turk on his way to
+Rome was taken by an enemy of the Pope, despoiled of all his money,
+and left planted, as the Italians expressively say, at Ancona.
+This ambassador was come to concert with Alexander VI. the death of
+Bajazet's brother, prisoner in the Pope's hands, and he bore the Pope
+a present of 50,000 gold ducats. It was Gian Della Rovere who seized
+and spoiled him, and sent the papers (letters of the Pope and Sultan)
+to Charles VIII. of France, to whom Alexander had been obliged to give
+the Grand Turk's brother. The magnificent Gonzaga hears of the Turk's
+embarrassing mischance, sends and fetches him to Mantua, clothes him,
+puts abundant money in his purse, and dispatches him on his way. The
+Sultan, in reward of this courtesy to his servant, gave a number of
+fine horses to the Marquis, who, possibly being tired of presenting
+his own horses, returned the Porte a ship-load of excellent Mantuan
+cheeses. This interchange of compliments seems to have led to a kind
+of romantic friendship between the Gonzaga and the Grand Turk, who did
+occasionally interest himself in the affairs of the Christian dogs;
+and who, when Francesco lay prisoner at Venice, actually wrote to the
+Serenest Senate, and asked his release as a personal grace to him, the
+Grand Turk. And Francesco was, thereupon, let go; the canny republic
+being willing to do the Sultan any sort of cheap favor.
+
+This Gonzaga, being so much engaged in war, seems to have had little
+time for the adornment of his capital. The Church of Our Lady of
+Victory is the only edifice which he added to it; and this was merely
+in glorification of his own triumph over the French at Taro. Mantegna
+painted an altar-piece for it, representing the Marquis and his wife
+on their knees before the Virgin, in act of rendering her thanks for
+the victory. The French nation avenged itself for whatever wrong was
+done its pride in this picture by stealing it away from Mantua in
+Napoleon's time; and it now hangs in the gallery of the Louvre.
+
+Francesco died in 1519; and after him his son, Federico II., the first
+Duke of Mantua, reigned some twenty-one years, and died in 1540. The
+marquisate in his time was made a duchy by the Emperor Charles V.,
+to whom the Gonzaga had given efficient aid in his wars against the
+French. This was in the year 1530; and three years later, when the
+Duke of Monferrato died, and the inheritance of his opulent little
+state was disputed by the Duke of Savoy, by the Marquis of Saluzzo,
+and by the Gonzaga, who had married the late Duke's daughter,
+Charles's influence secured it to the Mantuan. The dominions of the
+Gonzagas had now reached their utmost extent, and these dominions
+were not curtailed till the deposition of Fernando Carlo in 1708, when
+Monferrato was adjudged to the Duke of Savoy, and afterwards confirmed
+to him by treaty. It was separated from the capital of the Gonzagas by
+a wide extent of alien territory, but they held it with a strong
+hand, embellished the city, and founded there the strongest citadel in
+Italy.
+
+Federico, after his wars for the Emperor, appears to have reposed in
+peace for the rest of his days, and to have devoted himself to the
+adornment of Mantua and the aggrandizing of his family. His court
+was the home of many artists; and Titian painted for him the Twelve
+Cæsars, which the Germans stole when they sacked the city in 1630.
+But his great agent and best beloved genius was Giulio Pippi, called
+Romano, who was conducted to Mantua by pleasant Count Baldassare
+Castiglione.
+
+Pleasant Count Baldassare Castiglione! whose incomparable book of the
+"Cortigiano" succeeded in teaching his countrymen every gentlemanly
+grace but virtue. He was born at Casatico in the Mantovano, in the
+year 1476, and went in his boyhood to be schooled at Milan, where he
+learnt the profession of arms. From Milan he went to Rome, where
+he exercised his profession of arms till the year 1504, when he was
+called to gentler uses at the court of the elegant Dukes of Urbino. He
+lived there as courtier and court-poet, and he returned to Rome as the
+ambassador from Urbino. Meantime his liege, Francesco Gonzaga, was but
+poorly pleased that so brilliant a Mantuan should spend his life in
+the service and ornament of other princes, and Castiglione came back
+to his native country about the year 1516. He married in Mantua, and
+there finished his famous book of "The Courtier," and succeeded in
+winning back the favor of his prince. Federico, the Duke, made him
+ambassador to Rome in 1528; and Baldassare did his master two signal
+services there,--he procured him to be named head of all the Papal
+forces, and he found him Giulio Romano. So the Duke suffered him to
+go as the Pope's Nuncio to Spain, and Baldassare finished his courtly
+days at Toledo in 1529.
+
+The poet made a detour to Mantua on his way to Spain, taking with
+him the painter, whom the Duke received with many caresses, as Vasari
+says, presented him a house honorably furnished, ordered provision for
+him and his pupils, gave them certain brave suits of velvet and satin,
+and, seeing that Giulio had no horse, called for his own favorite
+Luggieri, and bestowed it on him. Ah! they knew how to receive
+painters, those fine princes, who had merely to put their hands into
+their people's pocket, and take out what florins they liked. So the
+Duke presently set the artist to work, riding out with him through the
+gate of San Bastiano to some stables about a bow-shot from the walls,
+in the midst of a flat meadow, where he told Giulio that he would be
+glad (if it could be done without destroying the old walls) to have
+such buildings added to the stables as would serve him for a kind of
+lodge, to come out and merrily sup in when he liked. Whereupon Giulio
+began to think out the famous Palazzo del T.
+
+This painter is an unlucky kind of man, to whom all criticism seems
+to have agreed to attribute great power and deny great praise.
+Castiglione had found him at Rome, after the death of his master
+Raphael, when his genius, for good or for ill, began for the first
+time to find original expression. At Mantua, where he spent all the
+rest of his busy life, it is impossible not to feel in some degree
+the force of this genius. As in Venice all the Madonnas in the
+street-corner shrines have some touch of color to confess the
+painter's subjection to Titian or Tintoretto; as in Vicenza the
+edifices are all in Greekish taste, and stilted upon pedestals in
+honor and homage to Palladio; as in Parma Correggio has never died,
+but lives to this day in the mouths and chiaroscuro effects of all the
+figures in all the pictures painted there;--so in Mantua Giulio Romano
+is to be found in the lines of every painting and every palace. It is
+wonderful to see, in these little Italian cities which have been the
+homes of great men, how no succeeding generation has dared to wrong
+the memory of them by departing in the least from their precepts
+upon art. One fancies, for instance, the immense scorn with which the
+Vicentines would greet the audacity of any young architect who dared
+to think Gothic instead of Palladian Greek, and how they would put
+him to shame by asking him if he knew more than Palladio about
+architecture! It seems that original art cannot arise in the presence
+of the great virtues and the great errors of the past; and Italian art
+of this day seems incapable of even the feeble, mortal life of other
+modern art, in the midst of so much immortality.
+
+Giulio Romano did a little of everything for the Dukes of
+Mantua,--from painting the most delicate and improper little fresco
+for a bed-chamber to restraining the Po and the Mincio with immense
+dikes, restoring ancient edifices and building new ones, draining
+swamps and demolishing and reconstructing whole streets, painting
+palaces and churches, and designing the city slaughter-house. He grew
+old and very rich in the service of the Gonzagas; but though Mrs.
+Jameson says he commanded respect by a sense of his own dignity as an
+artist, the Bishop of Casale, who wrote the "Annali di Mantova," says
+that the want of nobility and purity in his style, and his "gallant
+inventions, were conformable to his own sensual life, and that he did
+not disdain to prostitute himself to the infamies of Aretino."
+
+His great architectural work in Mantua is the Palazzo del T, or Tè,
+as it is now written. It was first called Palazzo del T, from the
+convergence of roads there in the form of that letter; and the modern
+Mantuans call it Del Tè, from the superstition, transmitted to us by
+the Custode of the Ducal Palace, that the Gonzagas merely used it
+on pleasant afternoons to take tea in! so curiously has latter-day
+guidemanship interpreted the jolly purpose expressed by the Duke to
+Giulio. I say nothing to control the reader's choice between T and Tè,
+and merely adhere to the elder style out of reverence for the past.
+It is certain that the air of the plain on which the palace stands
+is most unwholesome; and it may have been true that the dukes never
+passed the night there. Federico did not intend to build more than
+a lodge in this place; but fascinated with the design offered him
+by Giulio, he caused the artist to go on, and contrive him a palace
+instead. It stands, as Vasari says, about a good bow-shot from one of
+the city's gates; and going out to see the palace on our second day
+in Mantua, we crossed a drawbridge guarded by Austrian soldiers. Below
+languished a bed of sullen ooze, tangled and thickly grown with long,
+villainous grasses, and sending up a damp and deathly stench, which
+made all the faces we saw look feverish and sallow. Already at that
+early season the air was foul and heavy, and the sun, faintly making
+himself seen through the dun sky of the dull spring day, seemed sick
+to look upon the place, where indeed the only happy and lively things
+were the clouds of gnats that danced before us, and welcomed us to the
+Palazzo del T. Damp ditches surround the palace, in which these gnats
+seemed to have peculiar pleasure; and they took possession of the
+portico of the stately entrance of the edifice as we went in, and held
+it faithfully till we returned.
+
+In one of the first large rooms are the life-size portraits of the
+six finest horses of the Gonzaga stud, painted by the pupils of Giulio
+Romano, after the master's designs. The paintings attest the beauty of
+the Mantuan horses, and the pride and fondness of their ducal owners;
+and trustworthy critics have praised their eminent truth. But it is
+only the artist or the hippanthrop who can delight in them long; and
+we presently left them for the other chambers, in which the invention
+of Giulio had been used to please himself rather than his master.
+I scarcely mean to name the wonders of the palace, having, indeed,
+general associations with them, rather than particular recollections
+of them.
+
+One of the most famous rooms is the Chamber of Psyche (the apartments
+are not of great size), of which the ceiling is by Giulio and the
+walls are by his pupils. The whole illustrates, with every variety
+of fantastic invention, the story of Psyche, as told by Apuleius, and
+deserves to be curiously studied as a part of the fair outside of a
+superb and corrupt age, the inside of which was full of rottenness.
+The civilization of Italy, as a growth from the earliest Pagan times,
+and only modified by Christianity and the admixture of Northern blood
+and thought, is yet to be carefully analyzed; and until this analysis
+is made, discussion of certain features must necessarily be incomplete
+and unsatisfactory. No one, however, can stand in this Chamber of
+Psyche, and not feel how great reality the old mythology must still
+have had, not only for the artists who painted the room, but for
+the people who inhabited it and enjoyed it. I do not say that they
+believed it as they believed in the vital articles of Christian faith,
+but that they accepted it with the same spirit as they accepted the
+martyrology of the Church; and that to the fine gentlemen and ladies
+of the court, those jolly satyrs and careless nymphs, those Cupids
+and Psyches, and Dianas and Venuses, were of the same verity as the
+Fathers of the Desert, the Devil, and the great body of the saints.
+If they did not pray to them, they swore by them, and their names were
+much oftener on their lips; and the art of the time was so thoroughly
+Pagan, that it forgot all Christian holiness, and clung only to
+heathen beauty. When it had not actually a mythologic subject to deal
+with, it paganized Christian themes. St. Sebastian was made to look
+like Apollo, and Mary Magdalene was merely a tearful, triste Venus.
+There is scarcely a ray of feeling in Italian art since Raphael's
+time which suggests Christianity in the artist, or teaches it to the
+beholder. In confessedly Pagan subjects it was happiest, as in
+the life of Psyche, in this room; and here it inculcated a gay and
+spirited license, and an elegant absence of delicacy, which is still
+observable in Italian life. It would be instructive to know in what
+spirit the common Mantuans of his day looked upon the inventions of
+the painter, and how far the courtly circle which frequented this room
+went in discussion and comment on its subjects; they were not
+nice people, and probably had no nasty ideas about the unspeakable
+indecency of some of the scenes. [The ruin in the famous room frescoed
+with the Fall of the Giants commences on the very door-jambs, which
+are painted in broken and tumbling brick-work; and throughout there is
+a prodigiousness which does not surprise, and a bigness which does not
+impress; and the treatment of the subject can only be expressed by
+the Westernism _powerfully weak_. In Kugler's _Hand-book of Italian
+Painting_ are two illustrations, representing parts of the fresco,
+which give a fair idea of the whole.]
+
+Returning to the city we visited the house of Giulio Romano, which
+stands in one of the fine, lonesome streets, and at the outside
+of which we looked. The artist designed it himself; and it is very
+pretty, with delicacy of feeling in the fine stucco ornamentation, but
+is not otherwise interesting.
+
+We passed it, continuing our way toward the Arsenal, near which we had
+seen the women at work washing the linen coats of the garrison in the
+twilight of the evening before; and we now saw them again from the
+bridge, on which we paused to look at a picturesque bit of modern
+life in Mantua. The washing-machine (when the successful instrument
+is invented) may do its work as well, but not so charmingly, as these
+Mantuan girls did. They washed the linen in a clear, swift-running
+stream, diverted from the dam of the Mincio to furnish mill-power
+within the city wall; and we could look down the watercourse past
+old arcades of masonry half submerged in it, past pleasant angles of
+houses and a lazy mill-wheel turning slowly, slowly, till our view
+ended in the gallery of a time-worn palace, through the columns of
+which was seen the blue sky. Under the bridge the stream ran very
+strong and lucid, over long, green, undulating water-grasses, which it
+loved to dimple over and play with. On the right were the laundresses
+under the eaves of a wooden shed, each kneeling, as their custom is,
+in a three-sided box, and leaning forward over the washboard that
+sloped down into the water. As they washed they held the linen in one
+hand, and rubbed it with the other; then heaped it into a mass upon
+the board and beat it with great two-handed blows of a stick. They
+sang, meanwhile, one of those plaintive airs of which the Italian
+peasants are fond, and which rose in indescribable pathos, pulsing
+with their blows, and rhythmic with the graceful movement of their
+forms. Many of the women were young,--though they were of all
+ages,--and the prettiest among them was third from where we stood
+upon the bridge. She caught sight of the sketch-book which one of the
+travellers carried, and pointed it out to the rest, who could hardly
+settle to their work to be sketched. Presently an idle baker, whose
+shop adjoined the bridge, came out and leaned upon the parapet, and
+bantered the girls. "They are drawing the prettiest," he said, at
+which they all bridled a little; and she who knew herself to be
+prettiest hung her head and rubbed furiously at the linen. Long before
+the artist had finished the sketch, the lazy, good-humored crowd which
+the public practice of the fine arts always attract in Italy, had
+surrounded the strangers, and were applauding, commenting, comparing,
+and absorbing every stroke as it was made. When the book was closed
+and they walked away, a number of boys straggled after them some
+spaces, inspired by a curious longing and regret, like that which
+leads boys to the eager inspection of fireworks when they have gone
+out. We lost them at the first turning of the street, whither the
+melancholy chorus of the women's song had also followed us, and where
+it died pathetically away.
+
+In the evening we walked to the Piazza Virgiliana, the beautiful space
+laid out and planted with trees by the French, at the beginning of
+this century in honor of the great Mantuan poet. One of its bounds is
+the shore of the lake which surrounds the city, and from which now
+rose ghostly vapors on the still twilight air. Down the slow, dull
+current moved one of the picturesque black boats of the Po; and
+beyond, the level landscape had a pleasant desolation that recalled
+the scenery of the Middle Mississippi. It might have been here in this
+very water that the first-born of our first Duke of Mantua fell from
+his boat while hunting water-fowl in 1550, and took a fever of which
+he died only a short time after his accession to the sovereignty of
+the duchy. At any rate, the fact of the accident brings me back from
+lounging up and down Mantua to my grave duty of chronicler.
+Francesco's father had left him in childhood to the care of his uncle,
+the Cardinal Hercules, who ruled Mantua with a firm and able hand,
+increasing the income of the state, spending less upon the ducal stud,
+and cutting down the number of mouths at the ducal table from eight
+hundred to three hundred and fifty-one. His justice tended to severity
+rather than mercy; but reformers of our own time will argue well of
+his heart, that he founded in that time a place of refuge and
+retirement for abandoned women. Good Catholics will also be pleased to
+know that he was very efficient in suppressing the black heresy of
+Calvin, which had crept into Mantua in his day,--probably from
+Ferrara, where the black heretic himself was then, or about then, in
+hiding under the protection of the ill-advised Marchioness Renée. The
+good Cardinal received the Pope's applause for his energy in this
+matter, and I doubt not his hand fell heavily on the Calvinists. Of
+the Duke who died so young, the Venetian ambassador thought it worth
+while to write what I think it worth while to quote, as illustrating
+the desire of the Senate to have careful knowledge of its neighbors:
+"He is a boy of melancholy complexion. His eyes are full of spirit,
+but he does not delight in childish things, and seems secretly proud
+of being lord. He has an excellent memory, and shows much inclination
+for letters."
+
+His brother Guglielmo, who succeeded him in 1550, seems to have
+had the same affection for learning; but he was willful, harsh, and
+cruelly ambitious, and cared, an old writer says, for nothing so
+much as perpetuating the race of the Gonzagas in Mantua. He was a
+hunchback, and some of his family (who could not have understood his
+character) tried to persuade him not to assume the ducal dignity; but
+his haughty temper soon righted him in their esteem, and it is said
+that all the courtiers put on humps in honor of the Duke. He was not
+a great warrior, and there are few picturesque incidents in his reign.
+Indeed, nearly the last of these in Mantuan history was the coronation
+at Mantua of the excellent poet Lodovico Ariosto, by Charles V., in
+1532, Federico II. reigning. But the Mantuans of Guglielmo's day were
+not without their sensations, for three Japanese ambassadors passed
+through their city on the way to Rome. They were also awakened to
+religious zeal by the reappearance of Protestantism among them. The
+heresy was happily suppressed by the Inquisition, acting under Pius
+V., though with small thanks to Duke William, who seems to have taken
+no fervent part in the persecutions. "The proceedings," says Cantù,
+writing before slavery had been abolished, "were marked by those
+punishments which free America inflicts upon the negroes to-day,
+and which a high conception of the mission of the Church moves us
+to deplore." The Duke must have made haste after this to reconcile
+himself with the Church; for we read that two years later he was
+permitted to take a particle of the blood of Christ from the church of
+St. Andrea to that of Sta. Barbara, where he deposited it in a box of
+crystal and gold, and caused his statue to be placed before the shrine
+in the act of adoring the relic.
+
+Duke William managed his finances so well as to leave his spendthrift
+son Vincenzo a large sum of money to make away with after his death.
+Part of this, indeed, he had earned by obedience to his father's
+wishes in the article of matrimony. The prince was in love with the
+niece of the Duke of Bavaria, very lovely and certainly high-born
+enough, but having unhappily only sixty thousand crowns to her
+portion. So she was not to be thought of, and Vincenzo married the
+sister of the Duke of Parma, of whom he grew so fond, that, though
+two years of marriage brought them no children, he could scarce
+be persuaded to suffer her divorce on account of sterility. This
+happened, however, and the prince's affections were next engaged by
+the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The lady had a portion
+of three hundred thousand crowns, which entirely charmed the
+frugal-minded Duke William, and Vincenzo married her, after certain
+diplomatic preliminaries demanded by the circumstances, which scarcely
+bear statement in English, and which the present history would blush
+to give even in Italian.
+
+Indeed, he was a great beast, this splendid Vincenzo, both by his own
+fault and that of others; but it ought to be remembered of him, that
+at his solicitation the most clement lord of Ferrara liberated from
+durance in the hospital of St. Anna his poet Tasso, whom he had kept
+shut in that mad-house seven years. On his delivery, Tasso addressed
+his "Discorso" to Vincenzo's kinsman, the learned Cardinal Scipio
+Gonzaga; and to this prelate he submitted for correction the
+"Gerusalemme," as did Guarini his "Pastor Fido."
+
+When Vincenzo came to power he found a fat treasury, which he enjoyed
+after the fashion of the time, and which, having a princely passion
+for every costly pleasure, he soon emptied. He was crowned in 1587;
+and on his coronation day rode through the streets throwing gold to
+the people, after the manner of the Mantuan Dukes. He kept up an army
+of six thousand men, among a population of eighty thousand all told;
+and maintained as his guard "fifty archers on horseback, who also
+served with the arquebuse, and fifty light-horsemen for the guard of
+his own person, who were all excellently mounted, the Duke possessing
+such a noble stud of horses that he always had five hundred at
+his service, and kept in stable one hundred and fifty of marvelous
+beauty." He lent the Spanish king two hundred thousand pounds out
+of his father's sparings; and when the Archduchess of Austria,
+Margherita, passed through Mantua on her way to wed Philip II. of
+Spain, he gave her a diamond ring worth twelve thousand crowns. Next
+after women, he was madly fond of the theatre, and spent immense sums
+for actors. He would not, indeed, cede in splendor to the greatest
+monarchs, and in his reign of fifteen years he squandered fifty
+million crowns! No one will be surprised to learn from a contemporary
+writer in Mantua, that this excellent prince was adorned with all
+the Christian virtues; nor to be told by a later historian, that in
+Vincenzo's time Mantua was the most corrupt city in Europe. A satire
+of the year 1601, which this writer (Maffei) reduces to prose, says
+of that period: "Everywhere in Mantua are seen feasts, jousts, masks,
+banquets, plays, music, balls, delights, dancing. To these, the
+young girls," an enormity in Italy, "as well as the matrons, go in
+magnificent dresses; and even the churches are scenes of love-making.
+Good mothers, instead of teaching their daughters the use of the
+needle, teach them the arts of rouging, dressing, singing, and
+dancing. Naples and Milan scarcely produce silk enough, or India and
+Peru gold and gems enough, to deck out female impudence and pride.
+Courtiers and warriors perfume themselves as delicately as ladies;
+and even the food is scented, that the mouth may exhale fragrance.
+The galleries and halls of the houses are painted full of the loves
+of Mars and Venus, Leda and the Swan, Jove and Danae, while the
+devout solace themselves with such sacred subjects as Susannah and the
+Elders. The flower of chastity seems withered in Mantua. No longer in
+Lydia nor in Cyprus, but in Mantua, is fixed the realm of pleasure."
+The Mantuans were a different people in the old republican times, when
+a fine was imposed for blasphemy, and the blasphemer put into a basket
+and drowned in the lake, if he did not pay within fifteen days; which
+must have made profanity a luxury even to the rich. But in that day
+a man had to pay twenty soldi (seventy-five cents) if he spoke to
+a woman in church; and women were not allowed even the moderate
+diversion of going to funerals, and could not wear silk lace about the
+neck, nor have dresses that dragged more than a yard, nor crowns of
+pearls or gems, nor belts worth more than ten livres (twenty-five
+dollars), nor purses worth more than fifteen soldi (fifty cents.)
+
+Possibly as an antidote for the corruption brought into the world with
+Vincenzo, there was another Gonzaga born about the same period, who
+became in due time Saint Louis Gonzaga, and remains to this day one of
+the most powerful friends of virtue to whom a good Catholic can pray.
+He is particularly recommended by his biographer, the Jesuit Father
+Cesari, in cases of carnal temptation, and improving stories are told
+Italian youth of the miracles he works under such circumstances. He
+vowed chastity for his own part at an age when most children do not
+know good from evil, and he carried the fulfillment of this vow to
+such extreme, that, being one day at play of forfeits with other
+boys and girls, and being required to kiss--not one of the little
+maidens--but her _shadow_ on the wall, he would not, preferring to
+lose his pawn. Everybody, I think, will agree with Father Cesari that
+it would be hard to draw chastity finer than this.
+
+San Luigi Gonzaga descended from that Ridolfo who put his wife to
+death, and his father was Marquis of Castiglione delle Stivere. He was
+born in 1568, and, being the first son, was heir to the marquisate;
+but from his earliest years he had a call to the Church. His family
+did everything possible to dissuade him--his father with harshness,
+and his uncle, Duke William of Mantua, with tenderness--from his
+vocation. The latter even sent a "bishop of rare eloquence" to labor
+with the boy at Castiglione; but everything was done in vain. In due
+time Luigi joined the Company of Jesus, renounced this world, and
+died at Rome in the odor of sanctity, after doing such good works as
+surprised every one. His brother Ridolfo succeeded to the marquisate,
+and fell into a quarrel with Duke William about lands, which dispute
+Luigi composed before his death. About all which the reverend Jesuit
+Father Tolomei has shown how far heaviness can go in the dramatic
+form, and has written a pitiless play, wherein everybody goes into a
+convent with the fall of the curtain. Till the reader has read this
+play, he has never (properly speaking) been bored. For the happiness
+of mankind, it has not been translated out of the original Italian.
+
+From the time of the first Vincenzo's death, there are only two tragic
+events which lift the character of Mantuan history above the quality
+of _chronique scandaleuse_, namely, the Duke Ferdinand's repudiation
+of Camilla Faa di Casale, and the sack of Mantua in 1630. The first of
+these events followed close upon the demise of the splendid Vincenzo;
+for his son Francesco reigned but a short time, and died, leaving a
+little daughter of three years to the guardianship of her uncle,
+the Cardinal Ferdinand. The law of the Mantuan succession excluded
+females; and Ferdinand, dispensed from his ecclesiastical functions
+by the Pope, ascended the ducal throne. In 1615, not long after his
+accession, as the chronicles relate, in passing through a chamber
+of the palace he saw a young girl playing upon a cithern, and being
+himself young, and of the ardent temper of the Gonzagas, he fell in
+love with the fair minstrel. She was the daughter of a noble servant
+of the Duke, who had once been his ambassador to the court of the Duke
+of Savoy, and was called Count Ardizzo Faa Monferrino di Casale; but
+his Grace did not on that account hesitate to attempt corrupting her;
+indeed, a courtly father of that day might well be supposed to have
+few scruples that would interfere with a gracious sovereign's designs
+upon his daughter. Singularly enough, the chastity of Camilla was
+so well guarded that the ex-cardinal was at last forced to propose
+marriage. It seems that the poor girl loved her ducal wooer; and
+besides, the ducal crown was a glittering temptation, and she
+consented to a marriage which, for state and family reasons, was made
+secret. When the fact was bruited, it raised the wrath and ridicule
+of Ferdinand's family, and the Duke's sister Margaret, Duchess of
+Ferrara, had so lofty a disdain of his _mésalliance_ with an inferior,
+that she drove him to desperation with her sarcasms. About this time
+Camilla's father died, with strong evidences of poisoning; and the
+wife being left helpless and friendless, her noble husband resorted to
+the artifice of feigning that there had never been any marriage, and
+thus sought to appease his family. Unhappily, however, he had given
+her a certificate of matrimony, which she refused to surrender when
+he put her away, so that the Duke, desiring afterwards to espouse
+the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was obliged to present
+a counterfeit certificate to his bride, who believed it the real
+marriage contract, and destroyed it. When the Duchess discovered the
+imposition, she would not rest till she had wrung the real document
+from Camilla, under the threat of putting her son to death. The
+miserable mother then retired to a convent, and died of a broken
+heart, while Ferdinand bastardized his only legitimate son, a noble
+boy, whom his mother had prettily called Jacinth. After this, a
+kind of retribution, amid all his political successes, seems to have
+pursued the guilty Duke. His second wife was too fat to bear children,
+but not to bear malice; and she never ceased to distrust and reproach
+the Duke, whom she could not believe in anything since the affair
+of the counterfeit marriage contract. She was very religious, and
+embittered Ferdinand's days with continued sermons and reproofs,
+and made him order, in the merry Mantuan court, all the devotions
+commanded by her confessor.
+
+So Ferdinand died childless, and, it is said, in sore remorse, and was
+succeeded in 1626 by his brother Vincenzo, another hope of the faith
+and light of the Church. His brief reign lasted but one year, and
+was ignoble as it was brief, and fitly ended the direct line of the
+Gonzagas. Vincenzo, though an ecclesiastic, never studied anything,
+and was disgracefully ignorant. Lacking the hereditary love of
+letters, he had not the warlike boldness of his race; and resembled
+his ancestors only in the love he bore to horses, hunting, and women.
+He was enamored of the widow of one of his kinsmen, a woman no longer
+young, but of still agreeable person, strong will, and quick wit,
+and of a fascinating presence, which Vincenzo could not resist. The
+excellent prince was wooing her, with a view to seduction, when he
+received the nomination of cardinal from Pope Paul V. He pressed his
+suit, but the lady would consent to nothing but marriage, and Vincenzo
+bundled up the cardinal's purple and sent it back, with a very
+careless and ill-mannered letter to the ireful Pope, who swore never
+to make another Gonzaga cardinal. He then married the widow, but soon
+wearied of her, and spent the rest of his days in vain attempts
+to secure a divorce, in order to be restored to his ecclesiastical
+benefices. And one Christmas morning _he_ died childless; and three
+years later the famous sack of Mantua took place. The events leading
+to this crime are part of one of the most complicated episodes of
+Italian history.
+
+Ferdinand, as guardian of his brother's daughter Maria, claimed
+the Duchy of Monferrato as part of his dominion; but his claim was
+disputed by Maria's grandfather, the Duke of Savoy, who contended that
+it reverted to him, on the death of his daughter, as a fief which had
+been added to Mantua merely by the intermarriage of the Gonzagas with
+his family. He was supported in this claim by the Spaniards, then at
+Milan. The Venetians and the German Emperor supported Ferdinand, and
+the French advanced the claim of a third, a descendant of Lodovico
+Gonzaga, who had left Mantua a century before, and entered upon the
+inheritance of the Duchy of Nevers-Rethel. The Duke of Savoy was one
+of the boldest of his warlike race; and the Italians had great hopes
+of him as one great enough to drive the barbarians out of Italy. But
+nearly three centuries more were wanted to raise his family to the
+magnitude of a national purpose; and Carlo Emanuel spent his greatness
+in disputes with the petty princes about him. In this dispute for
+Monferrato he was worsted; for at the treaty of Pavia, Monferrato was
+assured to Duke Ferdinand of Mantua.
+
+Ferdinand afterwards died without issue, and Vincenzo likewise died
+childless; and Charles Gonzaga of Nevers-Rethel, who had married
+Maria, Ferdinand's ward, became heir to the Duchy of Mantua, but his
+right was disputed by Ferrante Gonzaga of Guastalla. Charles hurriedly
+and half secretly introduced himself into Mantua without consultation
+with Venetian, Spaniard, or German. While Duke Olivares of Spain was
+meditating his recognition, his officer at Milan tried to seize Mantua
+and failed; but the German Emperor had been even more deeply offended,
+and claimed the remission of Charles's rights as a feudatory of the
+Roman Empire, until he should have regularly invested him. Charles
+prepared for defense. Meanwhile Spain and Savoy seized Monferrato, but
+they were afterwards defeated by the French, and the Spanish Milanese
+was overrun by the Venetians and Mantuans. The German Emperor then
+sent down his Landsknechts, and in 1630 besieged Mantua, while the
+French promised help and gave none, and the Pope exhorted Charles
+to submit. The Venetians, occupied with the Uskok pirates, could do
+little in his defense. To the horrors of this unequal and desperate
+war were added those of famine; and the Jews, passing between the camp
+and the city, brought a pest from the army into Mantua, which raged
+with extraordinary violence among the hungry and miserable people. In
+vain they formed processions, and carried the blood of Christ about
+the city. So many died that there were not boats enough to bear them
+away to their sepulture in the lakes, and the bodies rotted in the
+streets. There was not wanting at this time the presence of a traitor
+in the devoted city; and that this wretch was a Swiss will be a
+matter of no surprise. The despicable valor of these republicans has
+everywhere formed the best defense of tyrants, and their fidelity has
+always been at the service of the highest bidder. The recreant was
+a lieutenant in the Swiss Guard of the Duke; and when he had led the
+Germans into Mantua, and received the reward of his infamy, two German
+soldiers, placed over him for his protection, killed him and plundered
+him of his spoil.
+
+The sack now began, and lasted three days, with unspeakable horrors.
+The Germans (then the most slavish and merciless of soldiers) violated
+Mantuan women, and buried their victims alive. The harlots of their
+camp cast off their rags, and robing themselves in the richest spoils
+they could find, rioted with brutal insult through the streets, and
+added the shame of drunken orgies to the dreadful scene of blood and
+tears. The Jews were driven forth almost naked from the Ghetto. The
+precious monuments of ages were destroyed; or such as the fury of the
+soldiers spared, the avarice of their generals consumed; and pictures,
+statues, and other works of art were stolen and carried away. The
+churches were plundered, the sacred houses of religion were sacked,
+and the nuns who did not meet a worse fate went begging through the
+streets.
+
+The imperial general, Aldringher, had, immediately upon entering the
+city, appropriated the Ducal Palace to himself as his share of the
+booty. He placed a strong guard around it, and spoiled it at leisure
+and systematically, and gained fabulous sums from the robbery. After
+the sack was ended, he levied upon the population (from whom his
+soldiers had forced everything that terror and torture could wring
+from them) four contributions, amounting to a hundred thousand
+doubloons. This population had, during the siege and sack, been
+reduced from thirty to twelve thousand; and Aldringher had so
+thoroughly accomplished his part of the spoliation, that the Duke
+Charles, returning after the withdrawal of the Germans, could not find
+in the Ducal Palace so much as a bench to sit upon. He and his family
+had fled half naked from their beds on the entry of the Germans, and,
+after a pause in the citadel, had withdrawn to Ariano, whence the
+Duke sent ambassadors to Vienna to expose his miserable fate to
+the Emperor. The conduct of Aldringher was severely rebuked at the
+capital; and the Empress sent Carlo's wife ten thousand zecchini, with
+which they returned at length to Mantua. It is melancholy to read how
+his neighbors had to compassionate his destitution: how the Grand Duke
+of Tuscany sent him upholstery for two state chambers; how the Duke
+of Parma supplied his table-service; how Alfonso of Modena gave him
+a hundred pairs of oxen, and as many peasants to till his desolated
+lands. His people always looked upon him with evil eyes, as the cause
+of their woes; and after a reign of ten years he died of a broken
+heart, or, as some thought, of poison.
+
+Carlo had appointed as his successor his nephew and namesake, who
+succeeded to the throne ten years after his uncle's death, the
+princess Maria Gonzaga being regent during his minority. Carlo II.
+early manifested the amorous disposition of his blood, but his
+reign was not distinguished by remarkable events. He was of imperial
+politics during those interminable French-Austrian wars, and the
+French desolated his dominions more or less. In the time of this
+Carlo II., we read of the Jews being condemned to pay the wages of
+the Duke's archers for the extremely improbable crime of killing some
+Hebrews who had been converted; and there is account of the Duchess
+going on foot to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Grace, to render thanks
+for her son's recovery from a fever, and her daughter's recovery from
+the bite of a monkey. Mantua must also have regained something of its
+former gayety; for in 1652 the Austrian Archdukes and the Medici spent
+Carnival there. Carlo II. died, like his father, with suspicions of
+poisoning, and undoubted evidences of debauchery. He was a generous
+and amiable prince; and, though a shameless profligate, was beloved by
+his subjects, with whom, no doubt, his profligacy was not a reproach.
+
+Ferdinand Carlo, whose ignoble reign lasted from 1665 to 1708, was
+the last and basest of his race. The histories of his country do not
+attribute a single virtue to this unhappy prince, who seems to have
+united in himself all the vices of all the Gonzagas. He was licentious
+and depraved as the first Vincenzo, and he had not Vincenzo's
+courage; he was luxurious as the second Francesco, but had none of
+his generosity; he taxed his people heavily that he might meanly enjoy
+their substance without making them even the poor return of national
+glory; he was grasping as Guglielmo, but saved nothing to the state;
+he was as timid as the second Vincenzo, and yet made a feint of making
+war, and went to Hungary at one time to fight against the Turk. But he
+loved far better to go to Venice in his gilded barge, and to spend his
+Carnivals amid the infinite variety of that city's dissoluteness. He
+was so ignorant as scarcely to be able to write his name; but he knew
+all vicious things from his cradle, as if, indeed, he had been gifted
+to know them by instinct through the profligacy of his parents. It is
+said that even the degraded Mantuans blushed to be ruled by so dull
+and ignorant a wretch; but in his time, nevertheless, Mantua was all
+rejoicings, promenades, pleasure-voyages, and merry-makings. "The
+Duke recruited women from every country to stock his palace," says an
+Italian author, "where they played, sang, and made merry at his will
+and theirs." "In Venice," says Volta, "he surrendered himself to such
+diversions without shame, or stint of expense. He not only took part
+in all public entertainments and pleasures of that capital, but he
+held a most luxurious and gallant court of his own; and all night long
+his palace was the scene of theatrical representations by dissolute
+women, with music and banqueting, so that he had a worse name than
+Sardanapalus of old." He sneaked away to these gross delights in 1700,
+while the Emperor was at war with the Spaniards, and left his Duchess
+(a brave and noble woman, the daughter of Ferrante Gonzaga, Duke of
+Guastalla) to take care of the duchy, then in great part occupied by
+Spanish and French forces. This was the War of the Spanish Succession;
+and it used up poor Ferdinand, who had not a shadow of interest in
+it. He had sold the fortress of Casale to the French in 1681, feigning
+that they had taken it from him by fraud: and now he declared that
+he was forced to admit eight thousand French and Spanish troops into
+Mantua. Perhaps indeed he was, but the Emperor never would believe it;
+and he pronounced Ferdinand guilty of felony against the Empire, and
+deposed him from his duchy. The Duke appealed against this sentence to
+the Diet of Ratisbon, and, pending the Diet's decision, made a journey
+of pleasure to France, where the Grand Monarch named him generalissimo
+of the French forces in Italy, though he never commanded them. He
+came back to Mantua after a little, and built himself a splendid
+theatre,--the cheerful Duke.
+
+But his end was near. The French and Austrians made peace in 1707; and
+next year, Monferrato having fallen to Savoy, the Austrians entered
+Mantua, whence the Duke promptly fled. The Austrians marched into
+Mantua on the 29th of February, that being leap-year, and Ferdinand
+came back no more. Indeed, trusting in false hopes of restoration
+held out to him by Venice and France, he died on the 5th of the July
+following, at Padua,--it was said by poison, but more probably of sin
+and sorrow. So ended Ducal Mantua.
+
+The Austrians held the city till 1797. The French Revolution took
+it and kept it till 1799, and then left it to the Austrians for two
+years. Then the Cisalpine Republic possessed it till 1802; and then it
+was made part of the Kingdom of Italy, and so continued twelve years;
+after which it fell again to Austria. In 1848, there was a revolution,
+and the Austrian soldiers stole the precious silver case that held
+the phial of the true blood. Now at last it belongs to the Kingdom
+of Italy, with the other forts of the Quadrilateral--thanks to the
+Prussian needle-gun.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Italian Journeys, by William Dean Howells
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14276 ***
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+    <title>
+      Italian Journeys, by W.D. Howells
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14276 ***</div>
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      ITALIAN JOURNEYS
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By W.D. Howells
+    </h2>
+    <h4>
+      1867 and 1895
+    </h4>
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <b>THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE.</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> I.&mdash;LEAVING VENICE. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> II.&mdash;FROM PADUA TO FERRARA. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> III.&mdash;THE PICTURESQUE, THE IMPROBABLE, AND
+      THE PATHETIC IN FERRARA. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> I. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> II. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> III. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> IV. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> V. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> VI. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> VII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> IV.&mdash;THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> V.&mdash;UP AND DOWN GENOA. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> VI.&mdash;BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> VII.&mdash;CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> VIII.&mdash;A DAY IN POMPEII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> IX.&mdash;A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> X.&mdash;CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> XI.&mdash;THE PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT
+      NAPLES. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> XII.&mdash;BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> XIII.&mdash;ROMAN PEARLS. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> FORZA MAGGIORE. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> AT PADUA </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUÀ. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> <b>MINOR TRAVELS.</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> I.&mdash;PISA. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> II.&mdash;THE FERRARA ROAD. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0029"> III.&mdash;TRIESTE. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0030"> IV.&mdash;BASSANO. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0031"> V.&mdash;POSSAGNO, CANOVA'S BIRTHPLACE. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0032"> VI.&mdash;COMO. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0033"> STOPPING AT VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0034"> DUCAL MANTUA. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.&mdash;LEAVING VENICE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We did not know, when we started from home in Venice, on the 8th of
+      November, 1864, that we had taken the longest road to Rome. We thought
+      that of all the proverbial paths to the Eternal City that leading to
+      Padua, and thence through Ferrara and Bologna to Florence, and so down the
+      sea-shore from Leghorn to Civita Vecchia, was the best, the briefest, and
+      the cheapest. Who could have dreamed that this path, so wisely and
+      carefully chosen, would lead us to Genoa, conduct us on shipboard, toss us
+      four dizzy days and nights, and set us down, void, battered, and
+      bewildered, in Naples? Luckily,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "The moving accident is not my trade,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      for there are events of this journey (now happily at an end) which, if I
+      recounted them with unsparing sincerity, would forever deter the reader
+      from taking any road to Rome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though, indeed, what is Rome, after all, when you come to it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.&mdash;FROM PADUA TO FERRARA.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As far as to Ferrara there was no sign of deviation from the direct line
+      in our road, and the company was well enough. We had a Swiss family in the
+      car with us to Padua, and they told us how they were going home to their
+      mountains from Russia, where they had spent nineteen years of their lives.
+      They were mother and father and only daughter and the last, without ever
+      having seen her ancestral country, was so Swiss in her yet childish
+      beauty, that she filled the morning twilight with vague images of glacial
+      height, blue lake, snug chalet, and whatever else of picturesque there is
+      in paint and print about Switzerland. Of course, as the light grew
+      brighter these images melted away, and left only a little frost upon the
+      window-pane.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mother was restively anxious at nearing her country, and told us every
+      thing of its loveliness and happiness. Nineteen years of absence had not
+      robbed it of the poorest charm, and I hope that seeing it again took
+      nothing from it. We said how glad we should be if we were as near America
+      as she was to Switzerland. "America!" she screamed; "you come from
+      America! Dear God, the world is wide&mdash;the world is wide!" The thought
+      was so paralyzing that it silenced the fat little lady for a moment, and
+      gave her husband time to express his sympathy with us in our war, which he
+      understood perfectly well. He trusted that the revolution to perpetuate
+      slavery must fail, and he hoped that the war would soon end, for it made
+      cotton very dear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Europe is material: I doubt if, after Victor Hugo and Garibaldi, there
+      were many upon that continent whose enthusiasm for American unity (which
+      is European freedom) was not somewhat chilled by the expensiveness of
+      cotton. The fabrics were all doubled in price, and every man in Europe
+      paid tribute in hard money to the devotion with which we prosecuted the
+      war, and, incidentally, interrupted the cultivation of cotton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We shook hands with our friends, and dismounted at Padua, where we were to
+      take the diligence for the Po. In the diligence their loss was more than
+      made good by the company of the only honest man in Italy. Of course this
+      honest man had been a great sufferer from his own countrymen, and I wish
+      that all English and American tourists, who think themselves the sole
+      victims of publican rapacity and deceit in Italy, could have heard our
+      honest man's talk. The truth is, these ingenious people prey upon their
+      own kind with an avidity quite as keen as that with which they devour
+      strangers; and I am half-persuaded that a ready-witted foreigner fares
+      better among them than a traveller of their own nation. Italians will
+      always pretend, on any occasion, that you have been plundered much worse
+      than they but the reverse often happens. They give little in fees; but
+      their landlord, their porter, their driver, and their boatman pillage them
+      with the same impunity that they rob an Inglese. As for this honest man in
+      the diligence, he had suffered such enormities at the hands of the
+      Paduans, from which we had just escaped, and at the hands of the
+      Ferrarese, into which we were rushing (at the rate of five miles scant an
+      hour), that I was almost minded to stop between the nests of those
+      brigands and pass the rest of my days at Rovigo, where the honest man
+      lived. His talk was amusingly instructive, and went to illustrate the
+      strong municipal spirit which still dominates all Italy, and which is more
+      inimical to an effectual unity among Italians than Pope or Kaiser has ever
+      been. Our honest man of Rovigo was a foreigner at Padua, twenty-five miles
+      north, and a foreigner at Ferrara, twenty-five miles south; and throughout
+      Italy the native of one city is an alien in another, and is as lawful prey
+      as a Russian or an American with people who consider every stranger as
+      sent them by the bounty of Providence to be eaten alive. Heaven knows what
+      our honest man had paid at his hotel in Padua, but in Ferrara the other
+      week he had been made to give five francs apiece for two small roast
+      chickens, besides a fee to the waiter; and he pathetically warned us to
+      beware how we dealt with Italians. Indeed, I never met a man so thoroughly
+      persuaded of the rascality of his nation and of his own exceptional
+      virtue. He took snuff with his whole person; and he volunteered, at sight
+      of a flock of geese, a recipe which I give the reader: Stuff a goose with
+      sausage; let it hang in the weather during the winter; and in the spring
+      cut it up and stew it, and you have an excellent and delicate soup.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But after all our friend's talk, though constant, became dispiriting, and
+      we were willing when he left us. His integrity had, indeed, been so
+      oppressive that I was glad to be swindled in the charge for our dinner at
+      the Iron Crown, in Rovigo, and rode more cheerfully on to Ferrara.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.&mdash;THE PICTURESQUE, THE IMPROBABLE, AND THE PATHETIC IN FERRARA.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was one of the fatalities of travel, rather than any real interest in
+      the poet, which led me to visit the prison of Tasso on the night of our
+      arrival, which was mild and moonlit. The <i>portier</i> at the Stella
+      d'Oro suggested the sentimental homage to sorrows which it is sometimes
+      difficult to respect, and I went and paid this homage in the coal-cellar
+      in which was never imprisoned the poet whose works I had not read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The famous hospital of St. Anna, where Tasso was confined for seven years,
+      is still an asylum for the infirm and sick, but it is no longer used as a
+      mad-house. It stands on one of the lone, silent Ferrarese streets, not far
+      from the Ducal Castle, and it is said that from the window of his cell the
+      unhappy poet could behold Leonora in her tower. It may be so; certainly
+      those who can believe in the genuineness of the cell will have no trouble
+      in believing that the vision of Tasso could pierce through several brick
+      walls and a Doric portico, and at last comprehend the lady at her casement
+      in the castle. We entered a modern gateway, and passed into a hall of the
+      elder edifice, where a slim young soldier sat reading a romance of Dumas.
+      This was the keeper of Tasso's prison; and knowing me, by the instinct
+      which teaches an Italian custodian to distinguish his prey, for a seeker
+      after the True and Beautiful, he relinquished his romance, lighted a waxen
+      taper, unbolted a heavy door with a dramatic clang, and preceded me to the
+      cell of Tasso. We descended a little stairway, and found ourselves in a
+      sufficiently spacious court, which was still ampler in the poet's time,
+      and was then a garden planted with trees and flowers. On a low doorway to
+      the right was inscribed the legend "PRIGIONE DI TASSO," and passing
+      through this doorway into a kind of reception-cell, we entered the poet's
+      dungeon. It is an oblong room, with a low wagon-roof ceiling, under which
+      it is barely possible to stand upright. A single narrow window admits the
+      light, and the stone casing of this window has a hollow in a certain
+      place, which might well have been worn there by the friction of the hand
+      that for seven years passed the prisoner his food through the small
+      opening. The young custodian pointed to this memento of suffering, without
+      effusion, and he drew my attention to other remarkable things in the cell,
+      without troubling himself to palliate their improbability in the least.
+      They were his stock in trade; you paid your money, and took your choice of
+      believing in them or not. On the other hand, my <i>portier</i>, an ex-<i>valet
+      de place</i>, pumped a softly murmuring stream of enthusiasm; and
+      expressed the freshest delight in the inspection of each object of
+      interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One still faintly discerns among the vast number of names with which the
+      walls of the ante-cell are bewritten, that of Lamartine. The name of
+      Byron, which was once deeply graven in the stucco, had been scooped away
+      by the Grand Duke of Tuscany (so the custodian said), and there is only
+      part of a capital B now visible. But the cell itself is still fragrant of
+      associations with the noble bard, who, according to the story related to
+      Valery, caused himself to be locked up in it, and there, with his head
+      fallen upon his breast, and frequently smiting his brow, spent two hours
+      in pacing the floor with great strides. It is a touching picture; but its
+      pathos becomes somewhat embarrassing when you enter the cell, and see the
+      impossibility of taking more than three generous paces without turning.
+      When Byron issued forth, after this exercise, he said (still according to
+      Valery) to the custodian: "I thank thee, good man! The thoughts of Tasso
+      are now all in my mind and heart." "A short time after his departure from
+      Ferrara," adds the Frenchman, maliciously, "he composed his 'Lament of
+      Tasso,' a mediocre result from such inspiration." No doubt all this is
+      colored, for the same author adds another tint to heighten the absurdity
+      of the spectacle: he declares that Byron spent part of his time in the
+      cell in writing upon the ceiling Lamartine's verses on Tasso, which he
+      misspelled. The present visitor has no means of judging of the truth
+      concerning this, for the lines of the poet have been so smoked by the
+      candles of successive pilgrims in their efforts to get light on them, that
+      they are now utterly illegible. But if it is uncertain what were Byron's
+      emotions on visiting the prison of Tasso, there is no doubt about Lady
+      Morgan's: she "experienced a suffocating emotion; her heart failed her on
+      entering that cell; and she satisfied a melancholy curiosity at the cost
+      of a most painful sensation."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I find this amusing fact stated in a translation of her ladyship's own
+      language, in a clever guide-book called <i>Il Servitore di Piazza</i>,
+      which I bought at Ferrara, and from which, I confess, I have learnt all I
+      know to confirm me in my doubt of Tasso's prison. The Count Avventi, who
+      writes this book, prefaces it by saying that he is a valet de place who
+      knows how to read and write, and he employs these unusual gifts with
+      singular candor and clearness. No one, he says, before the nineteenth
+      century, ever dreamed of calling the cellar in question Tasso's prison,
+      and it was never before that time made the shrine of sentimental
+      pilgrimage, though it has since been visited by every traveller who has
+      passed through Ferrara. It was used during the poet's time to hold
+      charcoal and lime; and not long ago died an old servant of the hospital,
+      who remembered its use for that purpose. It is damp, close, and dark, and
+      Count Avventi thinks it hardly possible that a delicate courtier could
+      have lived seven years in a place unwholesome enough to kill a stout
+      laborer in two months; while it seems to him not probable that Tasso
+      should have received there the visits of princes and other distinguished
+      persons whom Duke Alfonso allowed to see him, or that a prisoner who was
+      often permitted to ride about the city in a carriage should have been
+      thrust back into such a cavern on his return to the hospital. "After
+      this," says our <i>valet de place</i> who knows how to read and write,
+      "visit the prison of Tasso, certain that <i>in the hospital of St. Anna</i>
+      that great man was confined for many years;" and, with this chilly
+      warning, leaves his reader to his emotions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am afraid that if as frank caution were uttered in regard to other
+      memorable places, the objects of interest in Italy would dwindle sadly in
+      number, and the <i>valets de place</i>, whether they know how to read and
+      write or not, would be starved to death. Even the learning of Italy is
+      poetic; and an Italian would rather enjoy a fiction than know a fact&mdash;in
+      which preference I am not ready to pronounce him unwise. But this
+      characteristic of his embroiders the stranger's progress throughout the
+      whole land with fanciful improbabilities; so that if one use his eyes half
+      as much as his wonder, he must see how much better it would have been to
+      visit, in fancy, scenes that have an interest so largely imaginary. The
+      utmost he can make out of the most famous place is, that it is possibly
+      what it is said to be, and is more probably as near that as any thing
+      local enterprise could furnish. He visits the very cell in which Tasso was
+      confined, and has the satisfaction of knowing that it was the
+      charcoal-cellar of the hospital in which the poet dwelt. And the <i>genius
+      loci</i>&mdash;where is that? Away in the American woods, very likely,
+      whispering some dreamy, credulous youth,&mdash;telling him charming fables
+      of its <i>locus</i>, and proposing to itself to abandon him as soon as he
+      sets foot upon its native ground. You see, though I cared little about
+      Tasso, and nothing about his prison, I was heavily disappointed in not
+      being able to believe in it, and felt somehow that I had been awakened
+      from a cherished dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But I have no right to cast the unbroken shadow of my skepticism upon the
+      reader, and so I tell him a story about Ferrara which I actually believe.
+      He must know that in Ferrara the streets are marvelous long and straight.
+      On the corners formed by the crossing of two of the longest and
+      straightest of these streets stand four palaces, in only one of which we
+      have a present interest. This palace my guide took me to see, after our
+      visit to Tasso's prison, and, standing in its shadow, he related to me the
+      occurrence which has given it a sad celebrity. It was, in the time of the
+      gifted toxicologist, the residence of Lucrezia Borgia, who used to make
+      poisonous little suppers there, and ask the best families of Italy to
+      partake of them. It happened on one occasion that Lucrezia Borgia was
+      thrust out of a ball-room at Venice as a disreputable character, and
+      treated with peculiar indignity. She determined to make the Venetians
+      repent their unwonted accession of virtue, and she therefore allowed the
+      occurrence to be forgotten till the proper moment of her revenge arrived,
+      when she gave a supper, and invited to her board eighteen young and
+      handsome Venetian nobles. Upon the preparation of this repast she bestowed
+      all the resources of her skillful and exquisite knowledge; and the result
+      was, the Venetians were so felicitously poisoned that they had just time
+      to listen to a speech from the charming and ingenious lady of the house
+      before expiring. In this address she reminded her guests of the occurrence
+      in the Venetian ball-room, and perhaps exulted a little tediously in her
+      present vengeance. She was surprised and pained when one of the guests
+      interrupted her, and, justifying the treatment she had received at Venice,
+      declared himself her natural son. The lady instantly recognized him, and
+      in the sudden revulsion of maternal feeling, begged him to take an
+      antidote. This he not only refused to do, but continued his dying
+      reproaches, till his mother, losing her self-command, drew her poniard and
+      plunged it into his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The blood of her son fell upon the table-cloth, and this being hung out of
+      the window to dry, the wall received a stain, which neither the sun nor
+      rain of centuries sufficed to efface, and which was only removed with the
+      masonry, when it became necessary to restore the wall under that window, a
+      few months before the time of my visit to Ferrara. Accordingly, the
+      blood-stain has now disappeared; but the conscientious artist who painted
+      the new wall has faithfully restored the tragic spot, by bestowing upon
+      the stucco a bloody dash of Venetian red.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It would be pleasant and merciful, I think, if old towns, after having
+      served a certain number of centuries for the use and pride of men, could
+      be released to a gentle, unmolested decay. I, for my part, would like to
+      have the ducal cities of North Italy, such as Mantua, Modena, Parma, and
+      Ferrara, locked up quietly within their walls, and left to crumble and
+      totter and fall, without any harder presence to vex them in their
+      decrepitude than that of some gray custodian, who should come to the gate
+      with clanking keys, and admit the wandering stranger, if he gave signs of
+      a reverent sympathy, to look for a little while upon the reserved and
+      dignified desolation. It is a shame to tempt these sad old cities into
+      unnatural activity, when they long ago made their peace with the world,
+      and would fain be mixing their weary brick and mortar with the earth's
+      unbuilded dust; and it is hard for the emotional traveller to restrain his
+      sense of outrage at finding them inhabited, and their rest broken by
+      sounds of toil, traffic, and idleness; at seeing places that would gladly
+      have had done with history still doomed to be parts of political systems,
+      to read the newspapers, and to expose railway guides and caricatures of
+      the Pope and of Napoleon in their shop windows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, Ferrara was not incorporated into a living nation against her
+      will, and I therefore marveled the more that she had become a portion of
+      the present kingdom of Italy. The poor little State had its day long
+      before ours; it had been a republic, and then subject to lords; and then,
+      its lords becoming dukes, it had led a life of gayety and glory till its
+      fall, and given the world such names and memories as had fairly won it the
+      right to rest forever from making history. Its individual existence ended
+      with that of Alfonso II., in 1597, when the Pope declared it reverted to
+      the Holy See; and I always fancied that it must have received with a
+      spectral, yet courtly kind of surprise, those rights of man which
+      bloody-handed France distributed to the Italian cities in 1796; that it
+      must have experienced a ghostly bewilderment in its rapid transformation,
+      thereafter, under Napoleon, into part of the Cispadan Republic, the
+      Cisalpine Republic, the Italian Republic, and the Kingdom of Italy, and
+      that it must have sunk back again under the rule of the Popes with
+      gratitude and relief at last&mdash;as phantoms are reputed to be glad when
+      released from haunting the world where they once dwelt. I speak of all
+      this, not so much from actual knowledge of facts as from personal feeling;
+      for it seems to me that if I were a city of the past, and must be
+      inhabited at all, I should choose just such priestly domination, assured
+      that though it consumed my substance, yet it would be well for my fame and
+      final repose. I should like to feel that my old churches were safe from
+      demolition: that my old convents and monasteries should always shelter the
+      pious indolence of friars and nuns. It would be pleasant to have studious
+      monks exploring quaint corners of my unphilosophized annals, and gentle,
+      snuff-taking abbés writing up episodes in the history of my noble
+      families, and dedicating them to the present heirs of past renown; while
+      the thinker and the reviewer should never penetrate my archives. Being
+      myself done with war, I should be glad to have my people exempt, as they
+      are under the Pope, from military service; and I should hope that if the
+      Legates taxed them, the taxes paid would be as so many masses said to get
+      my soul out of the purgatory of perished capitals. Finally, I should trust
+      that in the sanctified keeping of the Legates my mortal part would rest as
+      sweetly as bones laid in hallowed earth brought from Jerusalem; and that
+      under their serene protection I should be forever secure from being in any
+      way exhumed and utilized by the ruthless hand of Progress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, as I said, this is a mere personal preference, and other old
+      cities might feel differently. Indeed, though disposed to condole with
+      Ferrara upon the fact of her having become part of modern Italy, I could
+      not deny, on better acquaintance with her, that she was still almost
+      entirely of the past. She has certainly missed that ideal perfection of
+      non-existence under the Popes which I have just depicted, but she is
+      practically almost as profoundly at rest under the King of Italy. One may
+      walk long through the longitude and rectitude of many of her streets
+      without the encounter of a single face: the place, as a whole, is by no
+      means as lively as Pompeii, where there are always strangers; perhaps the
+      only cities in the world worthy to compete with Ferrara in point of
+      agreeable solitude are Mantua and Herculaneum. It is the newer part of the
+      town&mdash;the modern quarter built before Boston was settled or Ohio was
+      known&mdash;which is loneliest; and whatever motion and cheerfulness are
+      still felt in Ferrara linger fondly about the ancient holds of life&mdash;about
+      the street before the castle of the Dukes, and in the elder and narrower
+      streets branching away from the piazza of the Duomo, where, on market
+      days, there is a kind of dreamy tumult. In the Ghetto we were almost
+      crowded, and people wanted to sell us things, with an enterprise that
+      contrasted strangely with shopkeeping apathy elsewhere. Indeed, surprise
+      at the presence of strangers spending two days in Ferrara when they could
+      have got away sooner, was the only emotion which the whole population
+      agreed in expressing with any degree of energy, but into this they seemed
+      to throw their whole vitality. The Italians are everywhere an artless
+      race, so far as concerns the gratification of their curiosity, from which
+      no consideration of decency deters them. Here in Ferrara they turned about
+      and followed us with their eyes, came to windows to see us, lay in wait
+      for us at street-corners, and openly and audibly debated whether we were
+      English or German. We might have thought this interest a tribute to
+      something peculiar in our dress or manner, had it not visibly attended
+      other strangers who arrived with us. It rose almost into a frenzy of
+      craving to know more of us all, when on the third day the whole city
+      assembled before our hotel, and witnessed, with a sort of desperate cry,
+      the departure of the heavy-laden omnibus which bore us and our luggage
+      from their midst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I doubt if, after St. Mark's in Venice, the Duomo at Parma, and the Four
+      Fabrics at Pisa, there is a church more worthy to be seen for its quaint,
+      rich architecture, than the Cathedral at Ferrara. It is of that beloved
+      Gothic of which eye or soul cannot weary, and we continually wandered back
+      to it from other more properly interesting objects. It is horribly
+      restored in-doors, and its Renaissance splendors soon drove us forth,
+      after we had looked at the Last Judgment by Bastianino. The style of this
+      painting is muscular and Michelangelic, and the artist's notion of putting
+      his friends in heaven and his foes in hell is by no means novel; but he
+      has achieved fame for his picture by the original thought of making it his
+      revenge for a disappointment in love. The unhappy lady who refused his
+      love is represented in the depths, in the attitude of supplicating the
+      pity and interest of another maiden in Paradise who accepted Bastianino,
+      and who consequently has no mercy on her that snubbed him. But I counted
+      of far more value than this fresco the sincere old sculptures on the
+      façade of the cathedral, in which the same subject is treated, beginning
+      from the moment the archangel's trump has sounded. The people getting
+      suddenly out of their graves at the summons are all admirable; but the
+      best among them is the excellent man with one leg over the side of his
+      coffin, and tugging with both hands to pull himself up, while the
+      coffin-lid tumbles off behind. One sees instantly that the conscience of
+      this early riser is clean, for he makes no miserable attempt to turn over
+      for a nap of a few thousand years more, with the pretense that it was not
+      the trump of doom, but some other and unimportant noise he had heard. The
+      final reward of the blessed is expressed by the repose of one small figure
+      in the lap of a colossal effigy, which I understood to mean rest in
+      Abraham's bosom; but the artist has bestowed far more interest and feeling
+      upon the fate of the damned, who are all boiling in rows of immense pots.
+      It is doubtful (considering the droll aspect of heavenly bliss as figured
+      in the one small saint and the large patriarch) whether the artist
+      intended the condition of his sinners to be so horribly comic as it is;
+      but the effect is just as great, for all that, and the slowest conscience
+      might well take alarm from the spectacle of fate so grotesque and
+      ludicrous; for, wittingly or unwittingly, the artist here punishes, as
+      Dante knew best how to do, the folly of sinners as well as their
+      wickedness. Boiling is bad enough; but to be boiled in an undeniable
+      dinner-pot, like a leg of mutton, is to suffer shame us well as agony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We turned from these horrors, and walked down by the side of the Duomo
+      toward the Ghetto, which is not so foul as one could wish a Ghetto to be.
+      The Jews were admitted to Ferrara in 1275, and, throughout the government
+      of the Dukes, were free to live where they chose in the city; but the
+      Pope's Legate assigned them afterward a separate quarter, which was closed
+      with gates. Large numbers of Spanish Jews fled hither during the
+      persecutions, and there are four synagogues for the four languages,&mdash;Spanish,
+      German, French, and Italian. Avventi mentions, among other interesting
+      facts concerning the Ferrarese Jews, that one of their Rabbins, Isaaco
+      degli Abranelli, a man of excellent learning in the Scriptures, claimed to
+      be descended from David. His children still abide in Ferrara; and it may
+      have been one of his kingly line that kept the tempting antiquarian's shop
+      on the corner from which you turn up toward the Library. I should think
+      such a man would find a sort of melancholy solace in such a place: filled
+      with broken and fragmentary glories of every kind, it would serve him for
+      that chamber of desolation, set apart in the houses of the Oriental
+      Hebrews as a place to bewail themselves in; and, indeed, this idea may go
+      far to explain the universal Israelitish fondness for dealing in relics
+      and ruins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Ghetto was in itself indifferent to us; it was merely our way to the
+      Library, whither the great memory of Ariosto invited us to see his famous
+      relics treasured there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We found that the dead <i>literati</i> of Ferrara had the place wholly to
+      themselves; not a living soul disputed the solitude of the halls with the
+      custodians, and the bust of Ariosto looked down from his monument upon
+      rows of empty tables, idle chairs, and dusty inkstands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The poet, who was painted by Titian, has a tomb of abandoned ugliness, and
+      sleeps under three epitaphs; while cherubs frescoed on the wall behind
+      affect to disclose the mausoleum, by lifting a frescoed curtain, but
+      deceive no one who cares to consider how impossible it would be for them
+      to perform this service, and caper so ignobly as they do at the same time.
+      In fact this tomb of Ariosto shocks with its hideousness and levity. It
+      stood formerly in the Church of San Benedetto, where it was erected
+      shortly after the poet's death, and it was brought to the Library by the
+      French, when they turned the church into a barracks for their troops. The
+      poet's dust, therefore, rests here, where the worm, working silently
+      through the vellum volumes on the shelves, feeds upon the immortality of
+      many other poets. In the adjoining hall are the famed and precious
+      manuscripts of Ariosto and of Tasso. A special application must be made to
+      the librarian, in order to see the fragment of the <i>Furioso</i> in
+      Ariosto's hand, and the manuscript copy of the <i>Gerusalemma</i>, with
+      the corrections by Tasso. There are some pages of Ariosto's Satires,
+      framed and glazed for the satisfaction of the less curious; as well as a
+      letter of Tasso's, written from the Hospital of St. Anna, which the poet
+      sends to a friend, with twelve shirts, and in which he begs that his
+      friend will have the shirts mended, and cautions him "not to let them be
+      mixed with others." But when the slow custodian had at last unlocked that
+      more costly fragment of the <i>Furioso</i>, and placed it in my hands, the
+      other manuscripts had no value for me. It seems to me that the one
+      privilege which travel has reserved to itself, is that of making each
+      traveller, in presence of its treasures, forget whatever other travellers
+      have said or written about them. I had read so much of Ariosto's industry,
+      and of the proof of it in this manuscript, that I doubted if I should at
+      last marvel at it. But the wonder remains with the relic, and I paid it my
+      homage devoutly and humbly, and was disconcerted afterward to read again
+      in my Valery how sensibly all others had felt the preciousness of that
+      famous page, which, filled with half a score of previous failures,
+      contains in a little open space near the margin, the poet's final triumph
+      in a clearly written stanza. Scarcely less touching and interesting than
+      Ariosto's painful work on these yellow leaves, is the grand and simple
+      tribute which another Italian poet was allowed to inscribe on one of them:
+      "Vittorio Alfieri beheld and venerated;" and I think, counting over the
+      many memorable things I saw on the road to Rome and the way home again,
+      this manuscript was the noblest thing and best worthy to be remembered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When at last I turned from it, however, I saw that the custodian had
+      another relic of Messer Lodovico, which he was not ashamed to match with
+      the manuscript in my interest. This was the bone of one of the poet's
+      fingers, which the pious care of Ferrara had picked up from his dust (when
+      it was removed from the church to the Library), and neatly bottled and
+      labeled. In like manner, they keep a great deal of sanctity in bottles
+      with the bones of saints in Italy; but I found very little savor of poesy
+      hanging about this literary relic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As if the melancholy fragment of mortality had marshaled us the way, we
+      went from the Library to the house of Ariosto, which stands at the end of
+      a long, long street, not far from the railway station. There was not a
+      Christian soul, not a boy, not a cat nor a dog to be seen in all that long
+      street, at high noon, as we looked down its narrowing perspective, and if
+      the poet and his friends have ever a mind for a posthumous meeting in his
+      little reddish brick house, there is nothing to prevent their assembly, in
+      broad daylight, from any part of the neighborhood. There was no presence,
+      however, more spiritual than a comely country girl to respond to our
+      summons at the door, and nothing but a tub of corn-meal disputed our
+      passage inside. Directly I found the house inhabited by living people, I
+      began to be sorry that it was not as empty as the Library and the street.
+      Indeed, it is much better with Petrarch's house at Arquà, where the
+      grandeur of the past is never molested by the small household joys and
+      troubles of the present. That house is vacant, and no eyes less tender and
+      fond than the poet's visitors may look down from its windows over the
+      slope of vines and olives which it crowns; and it seemed hard, here in
+      Ferrara, where the houses are so many and the people are so few, that
+      Ariosto's house could not be left to him. <i>Parva sed apta mihi</i>, he
+      has contentedly written upon the front; but I doubt if he finds it large
+      enough for another family, though his modern housekeeper reserves him
+      certain rooms for visitors. To gain these, you go up to the second story&mdash;there
+      are but two floors&mdash;and cross to the rear of the building, where
+      Ariosto's chamber opens out of an ante-room, and looks down upon a pinched
+      and faded bit of garden. [In this garden the poet spent much of his time&mdash;chiefly
+      in plucking up and transplanting the unlucky shrubbery, which was never
+      suffered to grow three months in the same place,&mdash;such was the poet's
+      rage for revision. It was probably never a very large or splendid garden,
+      for the reason that Ariosto gave when reproached that he who knew so well
+      how to describe magnificent palaces should have built such a poor little
+      house: "It was easier to make verses than houses, and the fine palaces in
+      his poem cost him no money."] In this chamber they say the poet died. It
+      is oblong, and not large. I should think the windows and roof were of the
+      poet's time, and that every thing else had been restored; I am quite sure
+      the chairs and inkstand are kindly-meant inventions; for the poet's burly
+      great arm-chair and graceful inkstand are both preserved in the Library.
+      But the house is otherwise decent and probable; and I do not question but
+      it was in the hall where we encountered the meal-tub that the poet kept a
+      copy of his "<i>Furioso</i>," subject to the corrections and advice of his
+      visitors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ancestral house of the Ariosti has been within a few years restored
+      out of all memory and semblance of itself; and my wish to see the place in
+      which the poet was born and spent his childhood resulted, after infinite
+      search, in finding a building faced newly with stucco and newly
+      French-windowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our <i>portier</i> said it was the work of the late English Vice-Consul,
+      who had bought the house. When I complained of the sacrilege, he said:
+      "Yes, it is true. But then, you must know, the Ariosti were not one of the
+      noble families of Ferrara."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The castle of the Dukes of Ferrara, about which cluster so many sad and
+      splendid memories, stands in the heart of the city. I think that the
+      moonlight which, on the night of our arrival, showed me its massive walls
+      rising from the shadowy moat that surrounds them, and its four great
+      towers, heavily buttressed, and expanding at the top into bulging cornices
+      of cavernous brickwork, could have fallen on nothing else in all Italy so
+      picturesque, and so full of the proper dread charm of feudal times, as
+      this pile of gloomy and majestic strength. The daylight took nothing of
+      this charm from it; for the castle stands isolated in the midst of the
+      city, as its founder meant that it should [The castle of Ferrara was begun
+      in 1385 by Niccolò d'Este to defend himself against the repetition of
+      scenes of tumult, in which his princely rights were invaded. One of his
+      tax-gatherers, Tommaso da Tortona, had, a short time before, made himself
+      so obnoxious to the people by his insolence and severity, that they rose
+      against him and demanded his life. He took refuge in the palace of his
+      master, which was immediately assailed. The prince's own life was
+      threatened, and he was forced to surrender the fugitive to the people, who
+      tore Tortona limb from limb, and then, after parading the city with the
+      mutilated remains, quietly returned to their allegiance. Niccolò,
+      therefore, caused this castle to be built, which he strengthened with
+      massive walls and towers commanding the whole city, and rendered
+      inaccessible by surrounding it with a deep and wide canal from the river
+      Reno.], and modern civilization has not crossed the castle moat, to
+      undignify its exterior with any visible touch of the present. To be sure,
+      when you enter it, the magnificent life is gone out of the old edifice; it
+      is no stately halberdier who stands on guard at the gate of the
+      drawbridge, but a stumpy Italian soldier in baggy trousers. The castle is
+      full of public offices, and one sees in its courts and on its stairways,
+      not brilliant men-at-arms, nor gay squires and pages, but whistling
+      messengers going from one office to another with docketed papers, and
+      slipshod serving-men carrying the clerks their coffee in very dirty little
+      pots. Dreary-looking suitors, slowly grinding through the mills of law, or
+      passing in the routine of the offices, are the guests encountered in the
+      corridors; and all that bright-colored throng of the old days, ladies and
+      lords, is passed from the scene. The melodrama is over, friends, and now
+      we have a play of real life, founded on fact and inculcating a moral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course the custodians were slow to admit any change of this kind. If
+      you could have believed them,&mdash;and the poor people told as many lies
+      as they could to make you,&mdash;you would believe that nothing had ever
+      happened of a commonplace nature in this castle. The taking-off of Hugo
+      and Parisina they think the great merit of the castle; and one of them,
+      seeing us, made haste to light his taper and conduct us down to the
+      dungeons where those unhappy lovers were imprisoned. It is the misfortune
+      of memorable dungeons to acquire, when put upon show, just the reverse of
+      those properties which should raise horror and distress in the mind of the
+      beholder. It was impossible to deny that the cells of Parisina and of Hugo
+      were both singularly warm, dry, and comfortable; and we, who had never
+      been imprisoned in them, found it hard to command, for our sensation, the
+      terror and agony of the miserable ones who suffered there. We, happy and
+      secure in these dungeons, could not think of the guilty and wretched pair
+      bowing themselves to the headsman's stroke in the gloomy chamber under the
+      Hall of Aurora; nor of the Marquis, in his night-long walk, breaking at
+      last into frantic remorse and tears to know that his will had been
+      accomplished. Nay, there upon its very scene, the whole tragedy faded from
+      us; and, seeing our wonder so cold, the custodian tried to kindle it by
+      saying that in the time of the event these cells were much dreadfuller
+      than now, which was no doubt true. The floors of the dungeons are both
+      below the level of the moat, and the narrow windows, or rather crevices to
+      admit the light, were cut in the prodigiously thick wall just above the
+      water, and were defended with four successive iron gratings. The dungeons
+      are some distance apart: that of Hugo was separated from the outer wall of
+      the castle by a narrow passage-way, while Parisina's window opened
+      directly upon the moat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we ascended again to the court of the castle, the custodian, abetted
+      by his wife, would have interested us in two memorable wells there,
+      between which, he said, Hugo was beheaded; and unabashed by the small
+      success of this fable, he pointed out two windows in converging angles
+      overhead, from one of which the Marquis, looking into the other,
+      discovered the guilt of the lovers. The windows are now walled up, but are
+      neatly represented to the credulous eye by a fresco of lattices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Valery mentions another claim upon the interest of the tourist which this
+      castle may make, in the fact that it once sheltered John Calvin, who was
+      protected by the Marchioness Renée, wife of Hercules II.; and my <i>Servitore
+      di Piazza</i> (the one who knows how to read and write) gives the
+      following account of the matter, in speaking of the domestic chapel which
+      Renée had built in the castle: "This lady was learned in belles-lettres
+      and in the schismatic doctrines which at that time were insinuating
+      themselves throughout France and Germany, and with which Calvin, Luther,
+      and other proselytes, agitated the people, and threatened war to the
+      Catholic religion. Nationally fond of innovation, and averse to the court
+      of Rome on account of the dissensions between her father and Pope Julius
+      II., Renée began to receive the teachings of Calvin, with whom she
+      maintained correspondence. Indeed, Calvin himself, under the name of
+      Huppeville, visited her in Ferrara, in 1536, and ended by corrupting her
+      mind and seducing her into his own errors, which produced discord between
+      her and her religious husband, and resulted in his placing her in
+      temporary seclusion, in order to attempt her conversion. Hence, the chapel
+      is faced with marble, paneled in relief, and studied to avoid giving place
+      to saints or images, which were disapproved by the almost Anabaptist
+      doctrines of Calvin, then fatally imbibed by the princess."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We would willingly, as Protestants, have visited this wicked chapel; but
+      we were prevented from seeing it, as well as the famous frescoes of Dosso
+      Dossi in the Hall of Aurora, by the fact that the prefect was giving a
+      little dinner (<i>pranzetto</i>) in that part of the castle. We were not
+      so greatly disappointed in reality as we made believe; but our <i>servitore
+      di piazza</i> (the unlettered one) was almost moved to <i>lesa maestà</i>
+      with vexation. He had been full of scorching patriotism the whole morning;
+      but now electing the unhappy and apologetic custodian representative of
+      Piedmontese tyranny, he bitterly assailed the government of the king. In
+      the times of His Holiness the Legates had made it their pleasure and duty
+      to show the whole castle to strangers. But now strangers must be sent away
+      without seeing its chief beauties, because, forsooth, the prefect was
+      giving a little dinner. Presence of the Devil!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In our visits to the different churches in Ferrara we noticed devotion in
+      classes of people who are devout nowhere else in Italy. Not only came
+      solid-looking business men to say their prayers, but gay young dandies,
+      who knelt and repeated their orisons and then rose and went seriously out.
+      In Venice they would have posted themselves against a pillar, sucked the
+      heads of their sticks, and made eyes at the young ladies kneeling near
+      them. This degree of religion was all the more remarkable in Ferrara,
+      because that city had been so many years under the Pope, and His Holiness
+      contrives commonly to prevent the appearance of religion in young men
+      throughout his dominions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Valery speaks of the delightful society which he met in the gray old town;
+      and it is said that Ferrara has an unusual share of culture in her wealthy
+      class, which is large. With such memories of learning and literary
+      splendor as belong to her, it would be strange if she did not in some form
+      keep alive the sacred flame. But, though there may be refinement and
+      erudition in Ferrara, she has given no great name to modern Italian
+      literature. Her men of letters seem to be of that race of grubs singularly
+      abundant in Italy,&mdash;men who dig out of archives and libraries some
+      topic of special and momentary interest and print it, unstudied and
+      unphilosophized. Their books are material, not literature, and it is
+      marvelous how many of them are published. A writer on any given subject
+      can heap together from them a mass of fact and anecdote invaluable in its
+      way; but it is a mass without life or light, and must be vivified by him
+      who uses it before it can serve the world, which does not care for its
+      dead local value. It remains to be seen whether the free speech and free
+      press of Italy can reawaken the intellectual activity of the cities which
+      once gave the land so many literary capitals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What numbers of people used to write verses in Ferrara! By operation of
+      the principle which causes things concerning whatever subject you happen
+      to be interested in to turn up in every direction, I found a volume of
+      these dead-and-gone immortals at a book-stall, one day, in Venice. It is a
+      curiously yellow and uncomfortable volume of the year 1703, printed all in
+      italics. I suppose there are two hundred odd rhymers selected from in that
+      book,&mdash;and how droll the most of them are, with their unmistakable
+      traces of descent from Ariosto, Tasso, and Guarini! What acres of enameled
+      meadow there are in those pages! Brooks enough to turn all the mills in
+      the world go purling through them. I should say some thousands of nymphs
+      are constantly engaged in weaving garlands there, and the swains keep such
+      a piping on those familiar notes,&mdash;<i>Amore, dolore, crudele</i>, and
+      <i>miele</i>. Poor little poets! they knew no other tunes. Do not now weak
+      voices twitter from a hundred books, in unconscious imitation of the
+      hour's great singers?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think some of the pleasantest people in Italy are the army gentlemen.
+      There is the race's gentleness in their ways, in spite of their ferocious
+      trade, and an American freedom of style. They brag in a manner that makes
+      one feel at home immediately; and met in travel, they are ready to render
+      any little kindness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other year at Reggio (which is not far from Modena) we stopped to dine
+      at a restaurant where the whole garrison had its coat off and was playing
+      billiards, with the exception of one or two officers, who were dining.
+      These rose and bowed as we entered their room, and when the waiter
+      pretended that such and such dishes were out (in Italy the waiter, for
+      some mysterious reason, always pretends that the best dishes are out),
+      they bullied him for the honor of Italy, and made him bring them to us.
+      Indeed, I am afraid his life was sadly harassed by those brave men. We
+      were in deep despair at finding no French bread, and the waiter swore with
+      the utmost pathos that there was none; but as soon as his back was turned,
+      a tightly laced little captain rose and began to forage for the bread. He
+      opened every drawer and cupboard in the room, and finding none, invaded
+      another room, captured several loaves from the plates laid there, and
+      brought them back in triumph, presenting them to us amid the applause of
+      his comrades. The dismay of the waiter, on his return, was ineffable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three officers, who dined with us at the <i>table d'hôte</i> of the Stella
+      d'Oro in Ferrara (and excellent dinners were those we ate there), were
+      visibly anxious to address us, and began not uncivilly, but still in order
+      that we should hear, to speculate on our nationality among themselves. It
+      appeared that we were Germans; for one of these officers, who had formerly
+      been in the Austrian service at Vienna, recognized the word <i>bitter</i>
+      in our remarks on the <i>beccafichi</i>. As I did not care to put these
+      fine fellows to the trouble of hating us for others' faults, I made bold
+      to say that we were not Germans, and to add that <i>bitter</i> was also an
+      English word. Ah! yes, to be sure, one of them admitted; when he was with
+      the Sardinian army in the Crimea, he had frequently heard the word used by
+      the English soldiers. He nodded confirmation of what he said to his
+      comrades, and then was good enough to display what English he knew. It was
+      barely sufficient to impress his comrades; but it led the way to a good
+      deal of talk in Italian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I suppose you gentlemen are all Piedmontese?" I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Not at all," said our Crimean. "I am from Como; this gentleman, il signor
+      Conte, (il signor Conte bowed,) is of Piacenza; and our friend across the
+      table is Genoese. The army is doing a great deal to unify Italy. We are
+      all Italians now, and you see we speak Italian, and not our dialects,
+      together."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My cheap remark that it was a fine thing to see them all united under one
+      flag, after so many ages of mutual hate and bloodshed, turned the talk
+      upon the origin of the Italian flag; and that led our Crimean to ask what
+      was the origin of the English colors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I scarcely know," I said. "We are Americans."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our friends at once grew more cordial. "Oh, Americani!" They had great
+      pleasure of it. Did we think Signor Leencolen would be reëlected?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I supposed that he had been elected that day, I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah! this was the election day, then. <i>Cospetto</i>!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this the Genoese frowned superior intelligence, and the Crimean gazing
+      admiringly upon him, said he had been nine months at Nuova York, and that
+      he had a brother living there. The poor Crimean boastfully added that he
+      himself had a cousin in America, and that the Americans generally spoke
+      Spanish. The count from Piacenza wore an air of pathetic discomfiture, and
+      tried to invent a transatlantic relative, as I think, but failed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am persuaded that none of these warriors really had kinsmen in America,
+      but that they all pretended to have them, out of politeness to us, and
+      that they believed each other. It was very kind of them, and we were so
+      grateful that we put no embarrassing questions. Indeed, the conversation
+      presently took another course, and grew to include the whole table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an extremely pretty Italian present with her newly wedded
+      husband, who turned out to be a retired officer. He fraternized at once
+      with our soldiers, and when we left the table they all rose and made
+      military obeisances. Having asked leave to light their cigars, they were
+      smoking&mdash;the sweet young bride blowing a fairy cloud from her rosy
+      lips with the rest. "Indeed," I heard an Italian lady once remark, "why
+      should men pretend to deny us the privilege of smoking? It is so pleasant
+      and innocent." It is but just to the Italians to say that they do not
+      always deny it; and there is, without doubt, a certain grace and charm in
+      a pretty <i>fumatrice</i>. I suppose it is a habit not so pleasing in an
+      ugly or middle-aged woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.&mdash;THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We had intended to stay only one day at Ferrara, but just at that time the
+      storms predicted on the Adriatic and Mediterranean coasts, by Mathieu de
+      la Drome, had been raging all over Italy, and the railway communications
+      were broken in every direction. The magnificent work through and under the
+      Apennines, between Bologna and Florence, had been washed away by the
+      mountain torrents in a dozen places, and the roads over the plains of the
+      Romagna had been sapped by the flood, and rendered useless, where not
+      actually laid under water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the day of our intended departure we left the hotel, with other
+      travellers, gayly incredulous of the landlord's fear that no train would
+      start for Bologna. At the station we found a crowd of people waiting and
+      hoping, but there was a sickly cast of doubt in some faces, and the
+      labeled employés of the railway wore looks of ominous importance. Of
+      course the crowd did not lose its temper. It sought information of the
+      officials running to and fro with telegrams, in a spirit of national
+      sweetness, and consoled itself with saying, as Italy has said under all
+      circumstances of difficulty for centuries: <i>Ci vuol pazienza</i>! At
+      last a blank silence fell upon it, as the <i>Capo-Stazione</i> advanced
+      toward a well-dressed man in the crowd, and spoke to him quietly. The
+      well-dressed man lifted his forefinger and waved it back and forth before
+      his face:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>The Well-dressed Man</i>.&mdash;Dunque, non si parte più? (No
+      departures, then?)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>Capo-Stazione</i> (waving <i>his</i> forefinger in like manner.)&mdash;Non
+      si parte più. (Like a mournful echo.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We knew quite as well from this pantomime of negation as from the dialogue
+      our sad fate, and submitted to it. Some adventurous spirit demanded
+      whether any trains would go on the morrow. The Capo-Stazione, with an air
+      of one who would not presume to fathom the designs of Providence,
+      responded: "Who knows? To-day, certainly not. To-morrow, perhaps. But"&mdash;and
+      vanished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may give an idea of the Italian way of doing things to say that, as we
+      understood, this break in the line was only a few miles in extent, that
+      trains could have approached both to and from Bologna, and that a little
+      enterprise on the part of the company could have passed travellers from
+      one side to the other with very small trouble or delay. But the railway
+      company was as much daunted by the inundation as a peasant going to
+      market, and for two months after the accident no trains carried passengers
+      from one city to the other. No doubt, however, the line was under process
+      of very solid repair meanwhile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the present the only means of getting to Bologna was by carriage on
+      the old highway, and accordingly we took passage thither in the omnibus of
+      the Stella d'Oro.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was little to interest us in the country over which we rode. It is
+      perfectly flat, and I suppose the reader knows what quantities of hemp and
+      flax are raised there. The land seems poorer than in Lombardy, and the
+      farm-houses and peasants' cottages are small and mean, though the peasants
+      themselves, when we met them, looked well fed, and were certainly well
+      clad. The landscape lay soaking in a dreary drizzle the whole way, and the
+      town of Cento when we reached it, seemed miserably conscious of being too
+      wet and dirty to go in-doors, and was loitering about in the rain. Our
+      arrival gave the poor little place a sensation, for I think such a thing
+      as an omnibus had not been seen there since the railway of Bologna and
+      Ferrara was built. We went into the principal caffè to lunch,&mdash;a
+      caffè much too large for Cento, with immense red-leather cushioned sofas,
+      and a cold, forlorn air of half-starved gentility, a clean, high-roofed
+      caffè and a breezy,&mdash;and thither the youthful nobility and gentry of
+      the place followed us, and ordered a cup of coffee, that they might sit
+      down and give us the pleasure of their distinguished company. They put on
+      their very finest manners, and took their most captivating attitudes for
+      the ladies' sake; and the gentlemen of our party fancied that it was for
+      them these young men began to discuss the Roman question. How loud they
+      were, and how earnest! And how often they consulted the newspapers of the
+      caffè! (Older newspapers I never saw off a canal-boat.) I may tire some
+      time of the artless vanity of the young Italians, so innocent, so amiable,
+      so transparent, but I think I never shall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great painter Guercino was born at Cento, and they have a noble and
+      beautiful statue of him in the piazza, which the town caused to be erected
+      from contributions by all the citizens. Formerly his house was kept for a
+      show to the public; it was full of the pictures of the painter and many
+      mementos of him; but recently the paintings have been taken to the
+      gallery, and the house is now closed. The gallery is, consequently, one of
+      the richest second-rate galleries in Italy, and one may spend much longer
+      time in it than we gave, with great profit. There are some most
+      interesting heads of Christ, painted, as Guercino always painted the
+      Saviour, with a great degree of humanity in the face. It is an excellent
+      countenance, and full of sweet dignity, but quite different from the
+      conventional face of Christ.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      At night we were again in Bologna, of which we had not seen the gloomy
+      arcades for two years. It must be a dreary town at all times: in a rain it
+      is horrible; and I think the whole race of arcaded cities, Treviso, Padua,
+      and Bologna, are dull, blind, and comfortless. The effect of the buildings
+      vaulted above the sidewalks is that of a continuous cellarway; your view
+      of the street is constantly interrupted by the heavy brick pillars that
+      support the arches; the arcades are not even picturesque. Liking always to
+      leave Bologna as quickly as possible, and, on this occasion, learning that
+      there was no hope of crossing the Apennines to Florence, we made haste to
+      take the first train for Genoa, meaning to proceed thence directly to
+      Naples by steamer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a motley company that sat down in Hotel Brun the morning after our
+      arrival in Bologna to a breakfast of murky coffee and furry beefsteaks,
+      associated with sleek, greasy, lukewarm fried potatoes. I am sure that if
+      each of our weather-bound pilgrims had told his story, we had been as well
+      entertained as those at Canterbury. However, no one thought fit to give
+      his narrative but a garrulous old Hebrew from London, who told us how he
+      had been made to pay fifteen guineas for a carriage to cross the
+      Apennines, and had been obliged to walk part of the way at that price. He
+      was evidently proud, now the money was gone, of having been cheated of so
+      much; and in him we saw that there was at least one human being more
+      odious than a purse-proud Englishman&mdash;namely, a purse-proud English
+      Jew. He gave his noble name after a while, as something too precious to be
+      kept from the company, when recommending one of the travellers to go to
+      the Hotel d'Angleterre in Rome: "The best 'otel out of England. You may
+      mention my name, if you like&mdash;Mr. Jonas." The recipient of this favor
+      noted down the talismanic words in his pocket-book, and Mr. Jonas,
+      conscious of having conferred a benefit on his race, became more odious to
+      it than ever. An Englishman is of a composition so uncomfortably original
+      that no one can copy him, though many may caricature. I saw an American in
+      London once who thought himself an Englishman because he wore
+      leg-of-mutton whiskers, declaimed against universal suffrage and
+      republics, and had an appetite for high game. He was a hateful animal,
+      surely, but he was not the British lion; and this poor Hebrew at Bologna
+      was not a whit more successful in his imitation of the illustrious brute,
+      though he talked, like him, of nothing but hotels, and routes of travel,
+      and hackmen and porters, and seemed to have nothing to do in Italy but get
+      through it as quickly and abusively as possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were very glad, I say, to part from all this at Bologna and take the
+      noon train for Genoa. In our car there were none but Italians, and the
+      exchange of "<i>La Perseveranza</i>" of Milan for "<i>Il Popolo</i>" of
+      Turin with one of them quickly opened the way for conversation and
+      acquaintance. (<i>En passant</i>: I know of no journal in the United
+      States whose articles are better than those of the "<i>Perseveranza</i>,"
+      and it was gratifying to an American to read in this ablest journal of
+      Italy nothing but applause and encouragement of the national side in our
+      late war.) My new-made friend turned out to be a Milanese. He was a
+      physician, and had served as a surgeon in the late war of Italian
+      independence; but was now placed in a hospital in Milan. There was a
+      gentle little blonde with him, and at Piacenza, where we stopped for
+      lunch, "You see," said he, indicating the lady, "we are newly married,"&mdash;which
+      was, indeed, plain enough to any one who looked at their joyous faces, and
+      observed how great disposition that little blonde had to nestle on the
+      young man's broad shoulder. "I have a week's leave from my place," he went
+      on, "and this is our wedding journey. We were to have gone to Florence,
+      but it seems we are fated not to see that famous city."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke of it as immensely far off, and herein greatly amused us
+      Americans, who had outgrown distances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "So we are going to Genoa instead, for two or three days." "Oh, have you
+      ever been at Genoa?" broke in the bride. "What magnificent palaces! And
+      then the bay, and the villas in the environs! There is the Villa
+      Pallavicini, with beautiful gardens, where an artificial shower breaks out
+      from the bushes, and sprinkles the people who pass. Such fun!" and she
+      continued to describe vividly a city of which she had only heard from her
+      husband; and it was easy to see that she walked in paradise wherever he
+      led her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They say that Italian husbands and wives do not long remain fond of each
+      other, but it was impossible in the presence of these happy people not to
+      believe in the eternity of their love, and it was hard to keep from
+      "dropping into poetry" on account of them. Their bliss infected every body
+      in the car, and in spite of the weariness of our journey, and the vexation
+      of the misadventures which had succeeded one another unsparingly ever
+      since we left home, we found ourselves far on the way to Genoa before we
+      thought to grumble at the distance. There was with us, besides the bridal
+      party, a lady travelling from Bologna to Turin, who had learned English in
+      London, and spoke it much better than most Londoners. It is surprising how
+      thoroughly Italians master a language so alien to their own as ours, and
+      how frequently you find them acquainted with English. From Russia the
+      mania for this tongue has spread all over the Continent, and in Italy
+      English seems to be prized first among the virtues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we drew near Genoa, the moon came out on purpose to show us the superb
+      city, and we strove eagerly for a first glimpse of the proud capital where
+      Columbus was born. To tell the truth, the glimpse was but slight and
+      false, for railways always enter cities by some mean level, from which any
+      picturesque view is impossible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Near the station in Genoa, however, is the weak and ugly monument which
+      the municipality has lately raised to Columbus. The moon made the best of
+      this, which stands in a wide open space, and contrived, with an Italian
+      skill in the arrangement of light, to produce an effect of undeniable
+      splendor. On the morrow, we found out by the careless candor of the
+      daylight what a uselessly big head Columbus had, and how the sculptor had
+      not very happily thought proper to represent him with his sea-legs on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.&mdash;UP AND DOWN GENOA.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I had my note-book with me on this journey, and pledged myself to make
+      notes in it. And, indeed, I did really do something of the kind, though
+      the result of my labors is by no means so voluminous as I would like it to
+      be, now when the work of wishing there were more notes is so easy. We
+      spent but one day in Genoa, and I find such a marvelous succinct record of
+      this in my book that I am tempted to give it here, after the fashion of
+      that Historical Heavyweight who writes the Life of "Frederick the Great."
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    "<i>Genoa, November 13</i>.&mdash;Breakfast <i>à la fourchette</i> excellently
+    and cheaply. I buy a hat. We go to seek the Consul, and, after
+    finding every thing else for two hours, find him. Genoa is the
+    most magnificent city I ever saw; and the new monument to
+    Columbus about the weakest possible monument. Walk through the
+    city with Consul; Doge's palace; cathedral; girl turning
+    somersaults in the street; blind madman on the cathedral steps.
+    We leave for Naples at twelve midnight."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      As for the breakfast, it was eaten at one of the many good caffè in Genoa,
+      and perhaps some statistician will like to know that for a beefsteak and
+      potatoes, with a half-bottle of Ligurian wine, we paid a franc. For this
+      money we had also the society of an unoccupied waiter, who leaned against
+      a marble column and looked on, with that gentle, half-compassionate
+      interest in our appetites, which seems native to the tribe of waiters. A
+      slight dash of surprise is in this professional manner; and there is a
+      faint smile on the solemn, professional countenance, which is perhaps
+      prompted by too intimate knowledge of the mysteries of the kitchen and the
+      habits of the cook. The man who passes his life among beefsteaks cannot be
+      expected to love them, or to regard without wonder the avidity with which
+      others devour them. I imagine that service in restaurants must beget
+      simple and natural tastes in eating, and that the jaded men who minister
+      there to our pampered appetites demand only for themselves&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "A scrip with herbs and fruits supplied,
+  And water from the spring."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Turning from this thought to the purchase of my hat, I do not believe that
+      literary art can interest the reader in that purely personal transaction,
+      though I have no doubt that a great deal might be said about buying hats
+      as a principle. I prefer, therefore, to pass to our search for the Consul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A former Consul at &mdash;&mdash;, whom I know, has told me a good many
+      stories about the pieces of popular mind which he received at different
+      times from the travelling public, in reproof of his difficulty of
+      discovery; and I think it must be one of the most jealously guarded rights
+      of American citizens in foreign lands to declare the national
+      representative hard to find, if there is no other complaint to lodge
+      against him. It seems to be, in peculiar degree, a quality of consulship
+      at &mdash;&mdash;, to be found remote and inaccessible. My friend says
+      that even at New York, before setting out for his post, when inquiring
+      into the history of his predecessors, he heard that they were one and all
+      hard to find; and he relates that on the steamer, going over, there was a
+      low fellow who set the table in a roar by a vulgar anecdote to this
+      effect:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "There was once a consul at &mdash;&mdash;, who indicated his office-hours
+      by the legend on his door, 'In from ten to one.' An old ship-captain, who
+      kept coming for about a week without finding the Consul, at last furiously
+      wrote, in the terms of wager, under this legend, 'Ten to one you're out!'"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My friend also states that one day a visitor of his remarked: "I'm rather
+      surprised to find you in. As a general rule, I never do find consuls in."
+      Habitually, his fellow-countrymen entertained him with accounts of their
+      misadventures in reaching him. It was useless to represent to them that
+      his house was in the most convenient locality in &mdash;&mdash;, where,
+      indeed, no stranger can walk twenty rods from his hotel without losing
+      himself; that their guide was an ass, or their courier a rogue. They
+      listened to him politely, but they never pardoned him in the least; and
+      neither will I forgive the Consul at Genoa. I had no earthly consular
+      business with him, but a private favor to ask. It was Sunday, and I could
+      not reasonably expect to find him at his office, or any body to tell me
+      where he lived; but I have seldom had so keen a sense of personal wrong
+      and national neglect as in my search for that Consul's house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Italy there is no species of fact with which any human being you meet
+      will not pretend to have perfect acquaintance, and, of course, the driver
+      whose fiacre we took professed himself a complete guide to the Consul's
+      whereabouts, and took us successively to the residences of the consuls of
+      all the South American republics. It occurred to me that it might be well
+      to inquire of these officials where their colleague was to be found; but
+      it is true that not one consul of them was at home! Their doors were
+      opened by vacant old women, in whom a vague intelligence feebly guttered,
+      like the wick of an expiring candle, and who, after feigning to throw
+      floods of light on the object of my search, successively flickered out,
+      and left me in total darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Till that day, I never knew of what lofty flights stairs were capable. As
+      out-of-doors, in Genoa, it is either all up or down hill, so in-doors it
+      is either all up or down stairs. Ascending and descending, in one palace
+      after another, those infinite marble steps, it became a question not
+      solved to this hour, whether it was worse to ascend or descend,&mdash;each
+      ordeal in its turn seemed so much more terrible than the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last I resolved to come to an understanding with the driver, and I
+      spent what little breath I had left&mdash;it was dry and hot as the simoom&mdash;in
+      blowing up that infamous man. "You are a great driver," I said, "not to
+      know your own city. What are you good for if you can't take a foreigner to
+      his consul's?" "Signore," answered the driver patiently, "you would have
+      to get a book in two volumes by heart, in order to be able to find
+      everybody in Genoa. This city is a labyrinth."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Truly, it had so proved, and I could scarcely believe in my good luck when
+      I actually found my friend, and set out with him on a ramble through its
+      toils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A very great number of the streets in Genoa are footways merely, and these
+      are as narrow, as dark, as full of jutting chimney-places, balconies, and
+      opened window-shutters, and as picturesque as the little alleys in Venice.
+      They wander at will around the bases of the gloomy old stone palaces, and
+      seem to have a vagabond fondness for creeping down to the port, and losing
+      themselves there in a certain cavernous arcade which curves round the
+      water with the flection of the shore, and makes itself a twilight at
+      noonday. Under it are clangorous shops of iron-smiths, and sizzling shops
+      of marine cooks, and, looking down its dim perspective, one beholds
+      chiefly sea-legs coming and going, more or less affected by strong waters;
+      and as the faces to which these sea-legs belong draw near, one discerns
+      sailors from all parts of the world,&mdash;tawny men from Sicily and
+      Norway, as diverse in their tawniness as olive and train-oil; sharp faces
+      from Nantucket and from the Piraeus, likewise mightily different in their
+      sharpness; blonde Germans and blonde Englishmen; and now and then a
+      colored brother also in the seafaring line, with sea-legs, also, more or
+      less affected by strong waters like the rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What curious people are these seafarers! They coast the whole world, and
+      know nothing of it, being more ignorant and helpless than children on
+      shore. I spoke with the Yankee mate of a ship one day at Venice, and asked
+      him how he liked the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, he had not been ashore yet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was told he had better go ashore; that the Piazza San Marco was worth
+      seeing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, he knew it; he had seen pictures of it; but he guessed he wouldn't
+      go ashore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why not, now he was here?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, he laid out to go ashore the next time he came to Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so, bless his honest soul, he lay three weeks at Venice with his ship,
+      after a voyage of two months, and he sailed away without ever setting his
+      foot on that enchanted ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I should have liked to stop some of those seafarers and ask them what they
+      thought of Genoa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must have been in the little streets&mdash;impassable for horses&mdash;that
+      the people sat and talked, as Heine fabled, in their doorways, and touched
+      knees with the people sitting and talking on the thresholds of the
+      opposite side. But we saw no gossipers there on our Sunday in Genoa; and I
+      think the domestic race of Heine's day no longer lives in Genoa, for every
+      body we saw on the streets was gayly dressed in the idea of the last
+      fashions, and was to be met chiefly in the public promenades. The fashions
+      were French; but here still lingers the lovely phantom of the old national
+      costume of Genoa, and snow-white veils fluttered from many a dark head,
+      and caressed many an olive cheek. It is the kindest and charitablest of
+      attirements, this white veil, and, while decking beauty to the most
+      perilous effect, befriends and modifies age and ugliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The pleasure with which I look at the splendor of an Italian crowd in
+      winter is always touched with melancholy. I know that, at the time of its
+      noonday promenade, it has nothing but a cup of coffee in its stomach; that
+      it has emerged from a house as cold and dim as a cellar; and that it will
+      presently go home to dine on rice and boiled beef. I know that chilblains
+      secretly gnaw the hands inside of its kid gloves, and I see in the rawness
+      of its faces the anguish of winter-long suffering from cold. But I also
+      look at many in this crowd with the eye of the economist, and wonder how
+      people practicing even so great self-denial as they can contrive to make
+      so much display on their little means,&mdash;how those clerks of public
+      offices, who have rarely an income of five hundred dollars a year, can
+      dress with such peerless gorgeousness. I suppose the national instinct
+      teaches them ways and means unknown to us. The passion for dress is
+      universal: the men are as fond of it as the women; and, happily, clothes
+      are comparatively cheap. It is no great harm in itself, this display: it
+      is only a pity that there is often nothing, or worse than nothing, under
+      the shining surface.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We walked with the brilliant Genoese crowd upon the hill where the public
+      promenade overlooks a landscape of city and country, houses and gardens,
+      vines and olives, which it makes the heart ache to behold, it is so
+      faultlessly beautiful. Behind us the fountain was&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Shaking its loosened silver in the sun;"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      the birds were singing; and there were innumerable fair girls going by,
+      about whom one might have made romances if one had not known better. Our
+      friend pointed out to us the "pink jail" in which Dickens lived while at
+      Genoa; and showed us on the brow of a distant upland the villa, called <i>Il
+      Paradiso</i>, which Byron had occupied. I dare say this Genoese joke is
+      already in print: That the Devil reëntered Paradise when Byron took this
+      villa. Though, in loveliest Italy, one is half-persuaded that the Devil
+      had never left Paradise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After lingering a little longer on that delicious height, we turned and
+      went down for a stroll through the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My note-book says that Genoa is the most magnificent city I ever saw, and
+      I hold by my note-book, though I hardly know how to prove it. Venice is,
+      and remains, the most beautiful city in the world; but her ancient rival
+      impresses you with greater splendor. I suppose that the exclusively
+      Renaissance architecture, which Ruskin declares the architecture of pride,
+      lends itself powerfully to this effect in Genoa. It is here in its best
+      mood, and there is little grotesque Renaissance to be seen, though the
+      palaces are, as usual, loaded with ornament. The Via Nuova is the chief
+      thoroughfare of the city, and the crowd pours through this avenue between
+      long lines of palaces. Height on height rise the stately, sculptured
+      façades, colonnaded, statued, pierced by mighty doorways and lofty
+      windows; and the palaces seem to gain a kind of aristocratic <i>hauteur</i>
+      from the fact that there are for the most part no sidewalks, and that the
+      carriages, rolling insolently through the crowd, threaten constantly to
+      grind the pedestrian up against their carven marbles, and immolate him to
+      their stony pride. There is something gracious and gentle in the grandeur
+      of Venice, and much that the heart loves to cling to; but in Genoa no
+      sense of kindliness is touched by the magnificence of the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an unspeakable relief, after such a street, to come, on a sudden,
+      upon the Duomo, one of the few Gothic buildings in Genoa, and rest our
+      jaded eyes on that architecture which Heaven seems truly to have put into
+      the thoughts of man together with the Christian faith. O beloved beauty of
+      aspiring arches, of slender and clustered columns, of flowering capitals
+      and window-traceries, of many-carven breadths and heights, wherein all
+      Nature breathes and blossoms again! There is neither Greek perfection, nor
+      winning Byzantine languor, nor insolent Renaissance opulence, which may
+      compare with this loveliness of yours! Alas that the interior of this
+      Gothic temple of Genoa should abound in the abomination of rococo
+      restoration! They say that the dust of St. John the Baptist lies there
+      within a costly shrine; and I wonder that it can sleep in peace amid all
+      that heathenish show of bad taste. But the poor saints have to suffer a
+      great deal in Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Outside, in the piazza before the church, there was an idle, cruel crowd,
+      amusing itself with the efforts of a blind old man to find the entrance.
+      He had a number of books which he desperately laid down while he ran his
+      helpless hands over the clustered columns, and which he then desperately
+      caught up again, in fear of losing them. At other times he paused, and
+      wildly clasped his hands upon his eyes, or wildly threw up his arms; and
+      then began to run to and fro again uneasily, while the crowd laughed and
+      jeered. Doubtless a taint of madness afflicted him; but not the less he
+      seemed the type of a blind soul that gropes darkly about through life, to
+      find the doorway of some divine truth or beauty,&mdash;touched by the
+      heavenly harmonies from within, and miserably failing, amid the scornful
+      cries and bitter glee of those who have no will but to mock aspiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl turning somersaults in another place had far more popular
+      sympathy than the blind madman at the temple door, but she was hardly a
+      more cheerful spectacle. For all her festive spangles and fairy-like
+      brevity of skirts, she had quite a work-a-day look upon her honest,
+      blood-red face, as if this were business though it looked like sport, and
+      her part of the diversion were as practical as that of the famous captain
+      of the waiters, who gave the act of peeling a sack of potatoes a playful
+      effect by standing on his head. The poor damsel was going over and over,
+      to the sound of most dismal drumming and braying, in front of the immense
+      old palace of the Genoese Doges,&mdash;a classic building, stilted on a
+      rustic base, and quite worthy of Palladio, if any body thinks that is
+      praise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was little left of our day when we had dined; but having seen the
+      outside of Genoa, and not hoping to see the inside, we found even this
+      little heavy on our hands, and were glad as the hour drew near when we
+      were to take the steamer for Naples.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had been one of the noisiest days spent during several years in
+      clamorous Italy, whose voiceful uproar strikes to the summits of her
+      guardian Alps, and greets the coming stranger, and whose loud Addio would
+      stun him at parting, if he had not meanwhile become habituated to the
+      operatic pitch of her every-day tones. In Genoa, the hotels, taking
+      counsel of the vagabond streets, stand about the cavernous arcade already
+      mentioned, and all the noise of the shipping reaches their guests. We rose
+      early that Sunday morning to the sound of a fleet unloading cargoes of
+      wrought-iron, and of the hard swearing of all nations of seafaring men.
+      The whole day long the tumult followed us, and seemed to culminate at last
+      in the screams of a parrot, who thought it fine to cry, "<i>Piove! piove!
+      piove</i>!"&mdash;"It rains! it rains! it rains!"&mdash;and had, no doubt,
+      a secret interest in some umbrella-shop. This unprincipled bird dwelt
+      somewhere in the neighborhood of the street where you see the awful tablet
+      in the wall devoting to infamy the citizens of the old republic that were
+      false to their country. The sight of that pitiless stone recalls with a
+      thrill the picturesque, unhappy past, with all the wandering,
+      half-benighted efforts of the people to rend their liberty from now a
+      foreign and now a native lord. At best, they only knew how to avenge their
+      wrongs; but now, let us hope, they have learnt, with all Italy, to prevent
+      them. The will was never wanting of old to the Ligurian race, and in this
+      time they have done their full share to establish Italian freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know why it should have been so surprising to hear the boatman
+      who rowed us to the steamer's anchorage speak English; but, after his
+      harsh Genoese profanity in getting his boat into open water, it was the
+      last thing we expected from him. It had somehow the effect of a furious
+      beast addressing you in your native tongue, and telling you it was "Wary
+      poordy wedder;" and it made us cling to his good-nature with the trembling
+      solicitude of Little Red-Riding-Hood, when she begins to have the first
+      faint suspicions of her grandmother. However, our boatman was no wild
+      beast, but took our six cents of <i>buonamano</i> with the base servility
+      of a Christian man, when he had put our luggage in the cabin of the
+      steamer. I wonder how he should have known us for Americans? He did so
+      know us, and said he had been at New York in better days, when he voyaged
+      upon higher seas than those he now navigated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On board, we watched with compassion an old gentleman in the cabin making
+      a hearty meal of sardines and fruit-pie, and I asked him if he had ever
+      been at sea. No, he said. I could have wept over that innocent old
+      gentleman's childlike confidence of appetite, and guileless trust of the
+      deep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We went on deck, where one of the gentle beings of our party declared that
+      she would remain as long as Genoa was in sight; and to tell the truth, the
+      scene was worthy of the promised devotion. There, in a half-circle before
+      us, blazed the lights of the quay; above these twinkled the lamps of the
+      steep streets and climbing palaces; over and behind all hung the darkness
+      on the heights,&mdash;a sable cloud dotted with ruddy points of flame
+      burning in the windows of invisible houses.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Merrily did we drop"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      down the bay, and presently caught the heavy swell of the open sea. The
+      other gentle being of our party then clutched my shoulder with a dreadful
+      shudder, and after gasping, "O Mr. Scribbler, why <i>will</i> the ship
+      roll so?" was meekly hurried below by her sister, who did not return for a
+      last glimpse of Genoa the Proud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a moment heaven's sweet pity flapped away as with the sea-gull's wings,
+      and I too felt that there was no help for it, and that I must go and lie
+      down in the cabin. With anguished eyes I beheld upon the shelf opposite to
+      mine the innocent old gentleman who had lately supped so confidently on
+      sardines and fruit-pie. He lay upon his back, groaning softly to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.&mdash;BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Like the Englishman who had no prejudices, I do hate a Frenchman; and
+      there were many Frenchmen among our passengers on the <i>Messina</i>, in
+      whose company I could hardly have been happy, had I not seen them horribly
+      sea-sick. After the imprudent old gentleman of the sardines and fruit-pie,
+      these wretched Gauls were the first to be seized with the malady, which
+      became epidemic, and were miserable up to the last moment on board. To the
+      enormity of having been born Frenchmen, they added the crime of being
+      commercial travellers,&mdash;a class of fellow-men of whom we know little
+      at home, but who are met everywhere in European travel. They spend more
+      than half their lives in movement from place to place, and they learn to
+      snatch from every kind of travel its meagre comforts, with an insolent
+      disregard of the rights and feelings of other passengers. They excuse an
+      abominable trespass with a cool "Pardon!" take the best seat everywhere,
+      and especially treat women with a savage rudeness, to which an American
+      vainly endeavors to accustom his temper. I have seen commercial travellers
+      of all nations, and I think I must award the French nation the discredit
+      of producing the most odious commercial travellers in the world. The
+      Englishman of this species wraps himself in his rugs, and rolls into his
+      corner, defiantly, but not aggressively, boorish; the Italian is almost a
+      gentleman; the German is apt to take sausage out of a newspaper and eat it
+      with his penknife; the Frenchman aggravates human nature beyond endurance
+      by his restless ill-breeding, and his evident intention not only to keep
+      all his own advantages, but to steal some of yours upon the first
+      occasion. There were three of these monsters on our steamer: one a slight,
+      bloodless young man, with pale blue eyes and an incredulous grin; another,
+      a gigantic full-bearded animal in spectacles; the third an infamous plump
+      little creature, in absurdly tight pantaloons, with a cast in his eye, and
+      a habit of sucking his teeth at table. When this wretch was not writhing
+      in the agonies of sea-sickness, he was on deck with his comrades,
+      lecturing them upon various things, to which the bloodless young man
+      listened with his incredulous grin, and the bearded giant in spectacles
+      attended with a choked look about the eyes, like a suffering ox. They were
+      constantly staggering in and out of their state-room, which, for my sins,
+      was also mine; and opening their abominable commodious travelling bags, or
+      brushing their shaggy heads at the reeling mirror, and since they were
+      born into the world, I think they had never cleaned their finger-nails.
+      They wore their hats at dinner, but always went away, after soup, deadly
+      pale.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In contrast with these cattle, what polished and courtly gentlemen were
+      the sailors and firemen! As for our captain, he would in any company have
+      won notice for his gentle and high-bred way; in his place at the head of
+      the table among these Frenchmen, he seemed to me the finest gentleman I
+      had ever seen. He had spent his whole life at sea, and had voyaged in all
+      parts of the world except Japan, where he meant some day, he said, to go.
+      He had been first a cabin-boy on a little Genoese schooner, and he had
+      gradually risen to the first place on a sailing-vessel, and now he had
+      been selected to fill a commander's post on this line of steamers. (It is
+      an admirable line of boats, not belonging I believe to the Italian
+      government, but much under its control, leaving Genoa every day for
+      Leghorn, Naples, Palermo, and Ancona, on the Adriatic coast.) The captain
+      had sailed a good deal in American waters, but chiefly on the Pacific
+      coast, trading from the Spanish republican ports to those of California.
+      He had been in that State during its effervescent days, when every thing
+      foul floated to the top, and I am afraid he formed there but a bad opinion
+      of our people, though he was far too courteous to say outright any thing
+      of this sort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had very fine, shrewd blue eyes, a lean, weather-beaten, kindly face,
+      and a cautious way of saying things. I hardly expected him to turn out so
+      red-hot a Democrat as he did on better acquaintance, but being a warm
+      friend of man myself, I was not sorry. Garibaldi was the beginning and
+      ending of his political faith, as he is with every enthusiastic Italian.
+      The honest soul's conception of all concrete evil was brought forth in two
+      words, of odd enough application. In Europe, and Italy more particularly,
+      true men have suffered chiefly from this form of evil, and the captain
+      evidently could conceive of no other cause of suffering anywhere. We were
+      talking of the American war, and when the captain had asked the usual
+      question, "<i>Quando finirà mai questa guerra</i>?" and I had responded as
+      usual, "<i>Ah, ci vuol pazienza</i>!" the captain gave a heavy sigh, and
+      turning his head pensively aside, plucked his grapes from the cluster a
+      moment in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he said: "You Americans are in the habit of attributing this war to
+      slavery. The cause is not sufficient."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ventured to demur and explain. "No," said the captain, "the cause is not
+      sufficient. We Italians know the only cause which could produce a war like
+      this."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was naturally anxious to be instructed in the Italian theory, hoping it
+      might be profounder than the English notion that we were fighting about
+      tariffs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain frowned, looked at me carefully, and then said:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "In this world there is but one cause of mischief&mdash;the Jesuits."
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The first night out, from Genoa to Leghorn, was bad enough, but that which
+      succeeded our departure from the latter port was by far the worst of the
+      three we spent in our voyage to Naples. How we envied the happy people who
+      went ashore at Leghorn! I think we even envied the bones of the Venetians,
+      Pisans, and Genoese who met and slew each other in the long-forgotten
+      sea-fights, and sank too deeply through the waves to be stirred by their
+      restless tumult. Every one has heard tell of how cross and treacherous a
+      sea the Mediterranean is in winter, and my own belief is, that he who has
+      merely been sea-sick on the Atlantic should give the Mediterranean a trial
+      before professing to have suffered every thing of which human nature is
+      capable. Our steamer was clean enough and staunch enough, but she was not
+      large&mdash;no bigger, I thought, than a gondola, that night as the waves
+      tossed her to and fro, till unwinged things took flight all through her
+      cabins and over her decks. My berth was placed transversely instead of
+      lengthwise with the boat,&mdash;an ingenious arrangement to heighten
+      sea-sick horrors, and dash the blood of the sufferer from brain to boots
+      with exaggerated violence at each roll of the boat; and I begged the
+      steward to let me sleep upon one of the lockers in the cabin. I found many
+      of my agonized species already laid out there; and the misery of the three
+      French commercial travellers was so great, that, in the excess of my own
+      dolor, it actually afforded me a kind of happiness, and I found myself
+      smiling at times to see the giant, with the eyes of a choked ox, rise up
+      and faintly bellow. Indeed, there was something eldritch and unearthly in
+      the whole business, and I think a kind of delirium must have resulted from
+      the sea-sickness. Otherwise, I shall not know how to account for having
+      attributed a kind of consciousness and individuality to the guide-book of
+      a young American who had come aboard at Leghorn. He turned out afterward
+      to be the sweetest soul in the world, and I am sorry now that I regarded
+      with amusement his failure to smoke off his sickness. He was reading his
+      guide-book with great diligence and unconcern, when suddenly I marked him
+      lay it softly, softly down, with that excessive deliberation which men use
+      at such times, and vanish with great dignity from the scene. Thus
+      abandoned to its own devices, this guide-book began its night-long riots,
+      setting out upon a tour of the cabin with the first lurch of the boat that
+      threw it from the table upon the floor. I heard it careen at once wildly
+      to the cabin door, and knock to get out; and failing in this, return more
+      deliberately to the stern of the boat, interrogating the tables and
+      chairs, which had got their sea-legs on, and asking them how they found
+      themselves. Arrived again at the point of starting, it seemed to pause a
+      moment, and then I saw it setting forth on a voyage of pleasure in the low
+      company of a French hat, which, being itself a French book, I suppose it
+      liked. In these travels they both ran under the feet of one of the
+      stewards and were replaced by an immense <i>tour de force</i> on the
+      table, from which the book eloped again,&mdash;this time in company with
+      an overcoat; but it seemed the coat was too miserable to go far: it
+      stretched itself at full length on the floor, and suffered the book to
+      dance over it, back and forth, I know not how many times. At last, as the
+      actions of the book were becoming unendurable, and the general
+      sea-sickness was waxing into a frenzy, a heavy roll, that made the whole
+      ship shriek and tremble, threw us all from our lockers; and gathering
+      myself up, bruised and sore in every fibre, I lay down again and became
+      sensible of a blissful, blissful lull; the machinery had stopped, and with
+      the mute hope that we were all going to the bottom, I fell tranquilly
+      asleep.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It appeared that the storm had really been dangerous. Instead of being
+      only six hours from Naples, as we ought to be at this time, we were got no
+      further than Porto Longone, in the Isle of Elba. We woke in a quiet,
+      sheltered little bay, whence we could only behold, not feel, the storm
+      left far out upon the open sea. From this we turned our heavy eyes gladly
+      to the shore, where a white little town was settled, like a flight of
+      gulls upon the beach, at the feet of green and pleasant hills, whose
+      gentle lines rhymed softly away against the sky. At the end of either arm
+      of the embracing land in which we lay, stood gray, placid old forts, with
+      peaceful sentries pacing their bastions, and weary ships creeping round
+      their feet, under guns looking out so kindly and harmlessly, that I think
+      General &mdash;&mdash; himself would not have hesitated (except, perhaps,
+      from a profound sentiment of regret for offering the violence) to attack
+      them. Our port was full of frightened shipping&mdash;steamers, brigs, and
+      schooners&mdash;of all sizes and nations; and since it was our misfortune
+      that Napoleon spent his exile in Elba at Porto Ferrato instead of Porto
+      Longone, we amused ourselves with looking at the vessels and the white
+      town and the soft hills, instead of hunting up dead lion's tracks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our fellow-passengers began to develop themselves: the regiment of
+      soldiers whom we were transporting picturesquely breakfasted forward, and
+      the second-cabin people came aft to our deck, while the English engineer
+      (there are English engineers on all the Mediterranean steamers) planted a
+      camp-stool in a sunny spot, and sat down to read the "Birmingham Express."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our friends of the second cabin were chiefly officers with their wives and
+      families, and they talked for the most part of their sufferings during the
+      night. They spoke such exquisite Italian that I thought them Tuscans, but
+      they told me they were of Sicily, where their beautiful speech first had
+      life. Let us hear what they talked of in their divine language, and with
+      that ineffable <i>tonic</i> accent which no foreigner perfectly acquires,
+      and let us for once translate the profanities Pagan and Christian, which
+      adorn common parlance in Italy:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ah, my God! how much I suffered!" says a sweet little woman with gentle
+      brown eyes, red, red lips, and blameless Greek lines of face. "I broke two
+      basins!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "There were ten broken in all, by Diana!" says this lady's sister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Presence of the Devil!" says her husband; and
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Body of Bacchus!" her young brother, puffing his cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "And you, sir," said the lady, turning to a handsome young fellow in civil
+      dress, near her, "how did you pass this horrible night?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh!" says the young man, twirling his heavy blond mustache, "mighty well,
+      mighty well!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh mercy of God! You were not sick?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I, signora, am never sea-sick. I am of the navy."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At which they all cry oh, and ah, and declare they are glad of it, though
+      why they should have been I don't know to this day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I have often wished," added the young man meditatively, and in a serious
+      tone, as if he had indeed given the subject much thought, "that it might
+      please God to let me be sea-sick once, if only that I might know how it
+      feels. But no!" He turned the conversation, as if his disappointment were
+      too sore to dwell upon; and hearing our English, he made out to let us
+      know that he had been at New York, and could spik our language, which he
+      proceeded to do, to the great pride of his countrymen, and our own
+      astonishment at the remarkable forms of English speech to which he gave
+      utterance.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We set out from Porto Longone that night at eight o'clock, and next
+      evening, driving through much-abated storm southward into calm waters and
+      clear skies, reached Naples. At noon, Monte Circeo where Circe led her
+      disreputable life, was a majestic rock against blue heaven and broken
+      clouds; after nightfall, and under the risen moon, Vesuvius crept softly
+      up from the sea, and stood a graceful steep, with wreaths of lightest
+      cloud upon its crest, and the city lamps circling far round its bay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII.&mdash;CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps some reader of mine who visited Naples under the old disorder of
+      things, when the Bourbon and the Camorra reigned, will like to hear that
+      the pitched battle which travellers formerly fought, in landing from their
+      steamer, is now gone out of fashion. Less truculent boatmen I never saw
+      than those who rowed us ashore at Naples; they were so quiet and peaceful
+      that they harmonized perfectly with that tranquil scene of
+      drowsy-twinkling city lights, slumbrous mountains, and calm sea, and, as
+      they dipped softly toward us in the glare of the steamer's lamps, I could
+      only think of Tennyson's description:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "And round about the keel with faces pale,
+  Dark faces pale against the rosy flame,
+  The mild-eyed melancholy lotus-eaters came."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The mystery of this placidity had been already solved by our captain, whom
+      I had asked what price I should bargain to pay from the steamer to the
+      shore. "There is a tariff," said he, "and the boatmen keep to it. The
+      Neapolitans are good people, (<i>buona gente</i>,) and only needed justice
+      to make them obedient to the laws." I must say that I found this to be
+      true. The fares of all public conveyances are now fixed, and the attempts
+      which drivers occasionally make to cheat you, seem to be rather the
+      involuntary impulses of old habit than deliberate intentions to do you
+      wrong. You pay what is due, and as your man merely rumbles internally when
+      you turn away, you must be a very timid <i>signorin</i>, indeed, if you
+      buy his content with any thing more. I fancy that all these things are now
+      much better managed in Italy than in America, only we grumble at them
+      there and stand them in silence at home. Every one can recall frightful
+      instances of plunder, in which he was the victim, at New York&mdash;in
+      which the robbery had none of the neatness of an operation, as it often
+      has in Italy, but was a brutal mutilation. And then as regards civility
+      from the same kind of people in the two countries, there is no comparison
+      that holds in favor of us. All questions are readily and politely answered
+      in Italian travel, and the servants of companies are required to be
+      courteous to the public whereas, one is only too glad to receive a silent
+      snub from such people at home.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The first sun that rose after our arrival in Naples was mild and warm as a
+      May sun, though we were quite in the heart of November. We early strolled
+      out under it into the crowded ways of the city, and drew near as we might
+      to that restless, thronging, gossiping southern life, in contrast with
+      which all northern existence seems only a sort of hibernation. The long
+      Toledo, on which the magnificence of modern Naples is threaded, is the
+      most brilliant and joyous street in the world; but I think there is less
+      of the quaintness of Italian civilization to be seen in its vivacious
+      crowds than anywhere else in Italy. One easily understands how, with its
+      superb length and straightness, and its fine, respectable,
+      commonplace-looking houses, it should be the pride of a people fond of
+      show; but after Venice and Genoa it has no picturesque charm; nay, even
+      busy Milan seems less modern and more picturesque. The lines of the lofty
+      palaces on the Toledo are seldom broken by the façade of a church or other
+      public edifice; and when this does happen, the building is sure to be
+      coldly classic or frantically baroque.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You weary of the Toledo's perfect repair, of its monotonous iron
+      balconies, its monotonous lofty windows; and it would be insufferable if
+      you could not turn out from it at intervals into one of those wondrous
+      little streets which branch up on one hand and down on the other, rising
+      and falling with flights of steps between the high, many-balconied walls.
+      They ring all day with the motleyest life of fishermen, fruit-venders,
+      chestnut-roasters, and idlers of every age and sex; and there is nothing
+      so full of local color, unless it be the little up-and-down-hill streets
+      in Genoa. Like those, the by-streets of Naples are only meant for
+      foot-passengers, and a carriage never enters them; but sometimes, if you
+      are so blest, you may see a mule climbing the long stairways, moving
+      solemnly under a stack of straw, or tinkling gayly down-stairs, bestridden
+      by a swarthy, handsome peasant&mdash;all glittering teeth and eyes and
+      flaming Phrygian cap. The rider exchanges lively salutations and sarcasms
+      with the by-standers in his way, and perhaps brushes against the bagpipers
+      who bray constantly in those hilly defiles. They are in Neapolitan
+      costume, these <i>pifferari</i>, and have their legs incomprehensibly tied
+      up in the stockings and garters affected by the peasantry of the
+      provinces, and wear brave red sashes about their waists. They are simple,
+      harmless-looking people, and would no doubt rob and kill in the most
+      amiable manner, if brigandage came into fashion in their neighborhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes the student of men may witness a Neapolitan quarrel in these
+      streets, and may pick up useful ideas of invective from the remarks of the
+      fat old women who always take part in the contests. But, though we were
+      ten days in Naples, I only saw one quarrel, and I could have heard much
+      finer violence of language among the gondoliers at any ferry in Venice
+      than I heard in this altercation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Neapolitans are, of course, furious in traffic. They sell a great
+      deal, and very boisterously, the fruit of the cactus, which is about as
+      large as an egg, and which they peel to a very bloody pulp, and lay out, a
+      sanguinary presence, on boards for purchase. It is not good to the
+      uncultivated taste; but the stranger may stop and drink, with relish and
+      refreshment, the orangeade and lemonade mixed with snow and sold at the
+      little booths on the street-corners. These stands looks much like the
+      shrines of the Madonna in other Italian cities, and a friend of ours was
+      led, before looking carefully into their office, to argue immense
+      Neapolitan piety from the frequency of their ecclesiastical architecture.
+      They are, indeed, the shrines of a god much worshiped during the long
+      Neapolitan summers; and it was the profound theory of the Bourbon kings of
+      Naples, that, if they kept their subjects well supplied with snow to cool
+      their drink, there was no fear of revolution. It shows how liable
+      statesmen are to err, that, after all, the Neapolitans rose, drove out the
+      Bourbons, and welcomed Garibaldi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The only part of the picturesque life of the side streets which seems ever
+      to issue from them into the Toledo is the goatherd with his flock of
+      milch-goats, which mingle with the passers in the avenues as familiarly as
+      with those of the alley, and thrust aside silk-hidden hoops, and brush
+      against dandies' legs, in their course, but keep on perfect terms with
+      every body. The goatherd leads the eldest of the flock, and the rest
+      follow in docile order and stop as he stops to ask at the doors if milk is
+      wanted. When he happens to have an order, one of the goats is haled, much
+      against her will, into the entry of a, house, and there milked, while the
+      others wait outside alone, nibbling and smelling thoughtfully about the
+      masonry. It is noticeable that none of the good-natured passers seem to
+      think these goats a great nuisance in the crowded street; but all make way
+      for them as if they were there by perfect right, and were no
+      inconvenience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the Toledo people keep upon the narrow sidewalks, or strike out into
+      the carriage-way, with an indifference to hoofs and wheels which one,
+      after long residence in tranquil Venice, cannot acquire, in view of the
+      furious Neapolitan driving. That old comprehensive gig of Naples, with
+      which many pens and pencils have familiarized the reader, is nearly as
+      hard to find there now as the <i>lazzaroni</i>, who have gone out
+      altogether. You may still see it in the remoter quarters of the city, with
+      its complement of twelve passengers to one horse, distributed, two on each
+      thill, four on the top seats, one at each side, and two behind; but in the
+      Toledo it has given place to much finer vehicles. Slight buggies, which
+      take you anywhere for half a franc, are the favorite means of public
+      conveyance, and the private turn-outs are of every description and degree.
+      Indeed, all the Neapolitans take to carriages, and the Strand in London at
+      six o'clock in the evening is not a greater jam of wheels than the Toledo
+      in the afternoon. Shopping feels the expansive influence of the
+      out-of-doors life, and ladies do most of it as they sit in their open
+      carriages at the shop-doors, ministered to by the neat-handed shopmen.
+      They are very languid ladies, as they recline upon their carriage
+      cushions; they are all black-eyed, and of an olive pallor, and have gloomy
+      rings about their fine eyes, like the dark-faced dandies who bow to them.
+      This Neapolitan look is very curious, and I have not seen it elsewhere in
+      Italy; it is a look of peculiar pensiveness, and comes, no doubt, from the
+      peculiarly heavy growth of lashes which fringes the lower eyelid. Then
+      there is the weariness in it of all peoples whose summers are fierce and
+      long.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the Italians usually dress beyond their means, the dandies of Naples
+      are very gorgeous. If it is now, say, four o'clock in the afternoon, they
+      are all coming down the Toledo with the streams of carriages bound for the
+      long drive around the bay. But our foot-passers go to walk in the
+      beautiful Villa Reale, between this course and the sea. The Villa is a
+      slender strip of Paradise, a mile long; it is rapture to walk in it, and
+      it comes, in description, to be a garden-grove, with feathery palms,
+      Greekish temples, musical fountains, white statues of the gods, and groups
+      of fair girls in spring silks. If I remember aright, the sun is always
+      setting on the bay, and you cannot tell whether this sunset is cooled by
+      the water or the water is warmed by the golden light upon it, and upon the
+      city, and upon all the soft mountain-heights around.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Walking westward through the whole length of the Villa Reale, and keeping
+      with the crescent shore of the bay, you come, after a while, to the Grot
+      of Posilippo, which is not a grotto but a tunnel cut for a carriage-way
+      under the hill. It serves, however, the purpose of a grotto, if a grotto
+      has any, and is of great length and dimness, and is all a-twinkle night
+      and day with numberless lamps. Overlooking the street which passes into it
+      is the tomb of Virgil, and it is this you have come to see. To reach it,
+      you knock first at the door of a blacksmith, who calls a species of
+      custodian, and, when this latter has opened a gate in a wall, you follow
+      him up-stairs into a market-garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one corner, and standing in a leafy and grassy shelter somewhat away
+      from the vegetables, is the poet's tomb, which has a kind of claim to
+      genuineness by virtue of its improbable appearance. It looks more like a
+      bake-oven than even the Pompeian tombs; the masonry is antique, and is at
+      least in skillful imitation of the fine Roman work. The interior is a
+      small chamber with vaulted or wagon-roof ceiling, under which a man may
+      stand upright, and at the end next the street is a little stone
+      commemorating the place as Virgil's tomb, which was placed there by the
+      Queen of France in 1840, and said by the custodian (a singularly dull ass)
+      to be an exact copy of the original, whatever the original may have been.
+      This guide could tell us nothing more about it, and was too stupidly
+      honest to pretend to know more. The laurel planted by Petrarch at the door
+      of the tomb, and renewed in later times by Casimir Delavigne, has been
+      succeeded by a third laurel. The present twig was so slender, and looked
+      so friendless and unprotected, that even enthusiasm for the memory of two
+      poets could not be brought to rob it of one of its few leaves; and we
+      contented ourselves with plucking some of the grass and weeds that grew
+      abundantly on the roof of the tomb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a dusty quiet within the tomb, and a grassy quiet without, that
+      pleased exceedingly; but though the memories of the place were so high and
+      epic, it only suggested bucolic associations, and, sunken into that nook
+      of hill-side verdure, made me think of a spring-house on some far-away
+      Ohio farm; a thought that, perhaps, would not have offended the poet, who
+      loved and sang of humble country things, and, drawing wearily to his rest
+      here, no doubt turned and remembered tenderly the rustic days before the
+      excellent veterans of Augustus came to exile him from his father's farm at
+      Mantua, and banish him to mere glory. But I believe most travellers have
+      much nobler sensations in Virgil's tomb, and there is a great deal of
+      testimony borne to their lofty sentiments on every scribbleable inch of
+      its walls. Valery reminded me that Boccaccio, standing near it of old,
+      first felt his fate decided for literature. Did he come there, I wonder,
+      with poor Fiammetta, and enter the tomb with her tender hand in his,
+      before ever he thought of that cruel absence she tells of? "O donne
+      pietose!" I hope so, and that this pilgrimage, half of love and half of
+      letters, took place, "nel tempo nel quale la rivestita terra più che tutto
+      l'altro anno si mostra bella."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you ascend from the tomb and turn Naplesward from the crest of the
+      hill, you have the loveliest view in the world of the sea and of the
+      crescent beach, mightily jeweled at its further horn with the black Castel
+      dell' Ovo. Fishermen's children are playing all along the foamy border of
+      the sea, and boats are darting out into the surf. The present humble muse
+      is not above saying also that the linen which the laundresses hang to dry
+      upon lines along the beach takes the sun like a dazzling flight of white
+      birds, and gives a breezy life to the scene which it could not spare.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      There was a little church on our way back from Posilippo, into which we
+      lounged a moment, pausing at the altar of some very successful saint near
+      the door. Here there were great numbers of the usual offerings from the
+      sick whom the saint had eased of their various ills,&mdash;waxen legs and
+      arms from people who had been in peril of losing their limbs, as well as
+      eyes, noses, fingers, and feet, and the crutches of those cured of
+      lameness; but we were most amused with the waxen effigies of several
+      entire babies hung up about the altar, which the poor souls who had been
+      near losing the originals had brought there in gratitude to the saint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Generally, however, the churches of Naples are not very interesting, and
+      one who came away without seeing them would have little to regret. The
+      pictures are seldom good, and though there are magnificent chapels in St.
+      Januarius, and fine Gothic tombs at Santa Chiara, the architecture is
+      usually rococo. I fancy that Naples has felt the damage of Spanish taste
+      in such things as well as Spanish tyranny in others. Indeed, I saw much
+      there which reminded me of what I had read about Spain rather than what I
+      had seen in Italy; and all Italian writers are agreed in attributing the
+      depravation of Naples to the long Spanish dominion. It is well known how
+      the Spaniards rule their provinces, and their gloomy despotism was
+      probably never more cruelly felt than in Italy, where the people were
+      least able to bear it. I had a heart-felt exultation in walking through
+      the quarter of the city where the tumults of Massaniello had raged, and,
+      if only for a few days, struck mortal terror to the brutal pride of the
+      viceroy; but I think I had a better sense of the immense retribution which
+      has overtaken all memory of Spanish rule in Naples as we passed through
+      the palace of Capo di Monte. This was the most splendid seat of the
+      Spanish Bourbon, whose family, inheriting its power from the violence of
+      other times, held it with violence in these; and in one of the chief
+      saloons of the palace, which is now Victor Emanuel's, were pictures
+      representing scenes of the revolution of 1860, while the statuette of a
+      Garibaldino, in his red shirt and all his heroic rudeness, was defiantly
+      conspicuous on one of the tables.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      There was nothing else that pleased me as well in the palace, or in the
+      grounds about it. These are all laid out in pleasant successions of grove,
+      tangled wilderness, and pasture-land, and were thronged, the Saturday
+      afternoon of our visit, with all ranks of people, who strolled through the
+      beautiful walks and enjoyed themselves in the peculiarly peaceful Italian
+      way. Valery says that the Villa Reale in the Bourbon time was closed,
+      except for a single day in the year, to all but the nobles; and that on
+      this occasion it was filled with pretty peasant women, who made it a
+      condition of their marriage bargains that their husbands should bring them
+      to the Villa Reale on St. Mary's Day. It is now free to all on every day
+      of the year, and the grounds of the Palace Capo di Monte are opened every
+      Saturday. I liked the pleasant way in which sylvan Nature and Art had made
+      friends in these beautiful grounds, in which Nature had consented to
+      overlook even the foolish vanity of the long aisles of lime, cut and
+      trimmed in formal and fantastic shapes, according to the taste of the
+      silly times of bagwigs and patches. On every side wild birds fluttered
+      through these absurd trees, and in the thickets lurked innumerable
+      pheasants, which occasionally issued forth and stalked in stately,
+      fearless groups over the sunset-crimsoned lawns. There was a brown
+      gamekeeper for nearly every head of game, wearing a pheasant's wing in his
+      hat and carrying a short, heavy sword; and our driver told us, with an
+      awful solemnity in his bated breath, that no one might kill this game but
+      the king, under penalty of the galleys.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VI.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We went one evening to the opera at San Carlo. It is one of the three
+      theatres&mdash;San Carlo of Naples, La Scala of Milan, and Fenice of
+      Venice&mdash;on which the Italians pride themselves; and it is certainly
+      very large and imposing. The interior has a <i>bel colpo d'occhio</i>,
+      which is what many Italians chiefly value in morals, manners, and
+      architecture; but after this comes great shabbiness of detail. The boxes,
+      even of the first order, are paved with brick tiles, and the red velvet
+      border of the box which the people see from the pit is not supported in
+      style by the seats within, which are merely covered with red oil-cloth.
+      The opera we saw was also second-rate, and was to the splendor of the
+      scenic arrangements what the oil-cloth was to the velvet. The house was
+      full of people, but the dress of the audience was not so fine as we had
+      expected in Naples. The evening dress is not <i>de rigueur</i> at Italian
+      theatres, and people seemed to have come to San Carlo in any pleasant
+      carelessness of costume.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The Italians are simple and natural folks, pleased through all their show
+      of conventionality with little things, and as easy and unconscious as
+      children in their ways. There happened to be a new caffè opened in Naples
+      while we were there, and we had the pleasure of seeing all ranks of people
+      affected by its magnificence. Artless throngs blocked the sidewalk day and
+      night before its windows, gazing upon its mirrors, fountains, and frescos,
+      and regarding the persons over their coffee within as beings lifted by
+      sudden magic out of the common orbit of life and set dazzling in a higher
+      sphere. All the waiters were uniformed and brass-buttoned to blinding
+      effect, and the head waiter was a majestic creature in a long blue coat
+      reaching to his feet, and armed with a mighty silver-headed staff. This
+      gorgeous apparition did nothing but walk up and down, and occasionally
+      advance toward the door, as if to disperse the crowds. At such times,
+      however, before executing his purpose, he would glance round on the
+      splendors they were admiring, and, as if smitten with a sense of the
+      enormous cruelty he had meditated in thinking to deprive them of the
+      sight, would falter and turn away, leaving his intent unfulfilled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII.&mdash;A DAY IN POMPEII.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      On the second morning after our arrival in Naples, we took the seven
+      o'clock train, which leaves the Nineteenth Century for the first cycle of
+      the Christian Era, and, skirting the waters of the Neapolitan bay almost
+      the whole length of our journey, reached the railway station of Pompeii in
+      an hour. As we rode along by that bluest sea, we saw the fishing-boats go
+      out, and the foamy waves (which it would be an insolent violence to call
+      breakers) come in; we saw the mountains slope their tawny and golden manes
+      caressingly downward to the waters, where the islands were dozing yet; and
+      landward, on the left, we saw Vesuvius, with his brown mantle of ashes
+      drawn close about his throat, reclining on the plain, and smoking a bland
+      and thoughtful morning pipe, of which the silver fumes curled lightly,
+      lightly upward in the sunrise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We dismounted at the station, walked a few rods eastward through a little
+      cotton-field, and found ourselves at the door of Hotel Diomed, where we
+      took breakfast for a number of sesterces which I am sure it would have
+      made an ancient Pompeian stir in his urn to think of paying. But in Italy
+      one learns the chief Italian virtue, patience, and we paid our account
+      with the utmost good nature. There was compensation in store for us, and
+      the guide whom we found at the gate leading up the little hill to Pompeii
+      inclined the disturbed balance in favor of our happiness. He was a Roman,
+      spoke Italian that Beatrice might have addressed to Dante, and was
+      numbered Twenty-six. I suppose it is known that the present Italian
+      Government forbids people to be pillaged in any way on its premises, and
+      that the property of the State is no longer the traffic of custodians and
+      their pitiless race. At Pompeii each person pays two francs for admission,
+      and is rigorously forbidden by recurrent sign-boards to offer money to the
+      guides. Ventisei (as we shall call him) himself pointed out one of these
+      notices in English, and did his duty faithfully without asking or
+      receiving fees in money. He was a soldier, like all the other guides, and
+      was a most intelligent, obliging fellow, with a self-respect and dignity
+      worthy of one of our own volunteer soldiers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ventisei took us up the winding slope, and led us out of this living world
+      through the Sea-gate of Pompeii back into the dead past&mdash;the past
+      which, with all its sensuous beauty and grace, and all its intellectual
+      power, I am not sorry to have dead, and for the most part, buried. Our
+      feet had hardly trodden the lava flagging of the narrow streets when we
+      came in sight of the laborers who were exhuming the inanimate city. They
+      were few in number, not perhaps a score, and they worked tediously, with
+      baskets to carry away the earth from the excavation, boys and girls
+      carrying the baskets, and several athletic old women plying picks, while
+      an overseer sat in a chair near by, and smoked, and directed their
+      exertions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They dig down about eight or ten feet, uncovering the walls and pillars of
+      the houses, and the mason, who is at hand, places little iron rivets in
+      the stucco to prevent its fall where it is weak, while an artist attends
+      to wash and clean the frescos as fast as they are exposed. The soil
+      through which the excavation first passes is not of great depth; the ashes
+      which fell damp with scalding rain, in the second eruption, are perhaps
+      five feet thick; the rest is of that porous stone which descended in small
+      fragments during the first eruption. A depth of at least two feet in this
+      stone is always left untouched by the laborers till the day when the chief
+      superintendent of the work comes out from Naples to see the last layers
+      removed; and it is then that the beautiful mosaic pavements of the houses
+      are uncovered, and the interesting and valuable objects are nearly always
+      found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wonder was, seeing how slowly the work proceeded, not that two thirds
+      of Pompeii were yet buried, but that one third had been exhumed. We left
+      these hopeless toilers, and went down-town into the Forum, stepping aside
+      on the way to look into one of the Pompeian Courts of Common Pleas.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Now Pompeii is, in truth, so full of marvel and surprise, that it would be
+      unreasonable to express disappointment with Pompeii in fiction. And yet I
+      cannot help it. An exuberant carelessness of phrase in most writers and
+      talkers who describe it had led me to expect much more than it was
+      possible to find there. In my Pompeii I confess that the houses had no
+      roofs&mdash;in fact, the rafters which sustained the tiles being burnt,
+      how could the roofs help falling in? But otherwise my Pompeii was a very
+      complete affair: the walls all rose to their full height; doorways and
+      arches were perfect; the columns were all unbroken and upright; putting
+      roofs on my Pompeii, you might have lived in it very comfortably. The real
+      Pompeii is different. It is seldom that any wall is unbroken; most columns
+      are fragmentary; and though the ground-plans are always distinct, very few
+      rooms in the city are perfect in form, and the whole is much more ruinous
+      than I thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this ruin once granted, and the idle disappointment at its greatness
+      overcome, there is endless material for study, instruction, and delight.
+      It is the revelation of another life, and the utterance of the past is
+      here more perfect than anywhere else in the world. Indeed, I think that
+      the true friend of Pompeii should make it a matter of conscience, on
+      entering the enchanted city, to cast out of his knowledge all the rubbish
+      that has fallen into it from novels and travels, and to keep merely the
+      facts of the town's luxurious life and agonizing death, with such
+      incidents of the eruption as he can remember from the description of
+      Pliny. These are the spells to which the sorcery yields, and with these in
+      your thought you can rehabilitate the city until Ventisei seems to be a <i>valet
+      de place</i> of the first century, and yourselves a set of blond
+      barbarians to whom he is showing off the splendors of one of the most
+      brilliant towns of the empire of Titus. Those sad furrows in the pavement
+      become vocal with the joyous rattle of chariot-wheels on a sudden, and you
+      prudently step up on the narrow sidewalks and rub along by the little
+      shops of wine, and grain, and oil, with which the thrifty voluptuaries of
+      Pompeii flanked their street-doors. The counters of these shops run across
+      their fronts, and are pierced with round holes on the top, through which
+      you see dark depths of oil in the jars below, and not sullen lumps of
+      ashes; those stately <i>amphoræ</i> behind are full of wine, and in the
+      corners are bags of wheat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "This house, with a shop on either side, whose is it, XXVI.?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It is the house of the great Sallust, my masters. Would you like his
+      autograph? I know one of his slaves who would sell it."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You are a good deal stared at, naturally, as you pass by, for people in
+      Pompeii have not much to do, and, besides, a Briton is not an every-day
+      sight there, as he will be one of these centuries. The skins of wild
+      beasts are little worn in Pompeii; and those bold-eyed Roman women think
+      it rather odd that we should like to powder our shaggy heads with
+      brick-dust. However, these are matters of taste. We, for our part, cannot
+      repress a feeling of disgust at the loungers in the street, who, XXVI.
+      tells us, are all going to soak themselves half the day in the baths
+      yonder; for, if there is in Pompeii one thing more offensive than another
+      to our savage sense of propriety, it is the personal cleanliness of the
+      inhabitants. We little know what a change for the better will be wrought
+      in these people with the lapse of time, and that they will yet come to
+      wash themselves but once a year, as we do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (The reader may go on doing this sort of thing at some length for himself;
+      and may imagine, if he pleases, a boastful conversation among the
+      Pompeians at the baths, in which the barbarians hear how Agricola has
+      broken the backbone of a rebellion in Britain; and in which all the
+      speakers begin their observations with "Ho! my Lepidus!" and "Ha! my
+      Diomed!" In the mean time we return to the present day, and step down the
+      Street of Plenty along with Ventisei.)
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It is proper, after seeing the sites of some of the principal temples in
+      Pompeii (such as those of Jupiter and Venus), to cross the fields that
+      cover a great breadth of the buried city, and look into the amphitheatre,
+      where, as every body knows, the lions had no stomach for Glaucus on the
+      morning of the fatal eruption. The fields are now planted with cotton, and
+      of course we thought those commonplaces about the wonder the Pompeians
+      would feel could they come back to see that New-World plant growing above
+      their buried homes. We might have told them, the day of our visit, that
+      this cruel plant, so long watered with the tears of slaves, and fed with
+      the blood of men, was now an exile from its native fields, where war was
+      plowing with sword and shot the guilty land, and rooting up the subtlest
+      fibres of the oppression in which cotton had grown king. And the ghosts of
+      wicked old Pompeii, remembering the manifold sins that called the fires of
+      hell to devour her, and thinking on this exiled plant, the latest witness
+      of God's unforgetting justice, might well have shuddered, through all
+      their shadow, to feel how terribly He destroys the enemies of Nature and
+      man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the only Pompeian presences which haunted our passage of the
+      cotton-field were certain small
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Phantoms of delight,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      with soft black eyes and graceful ways, who ran before us and plucked the
+      bolls of the cotton and sold them to us. Embassies bearing red and white
+      grapes were also sent out of the cottages to our excellencies; and there
+      was some doubt of the currency of the coin which we gave these poor
+      children in return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are now but few peasants living on the land over the head of
+      Pompeii, and the Government allows no sales of real estate to be made
+      except to itself. The people who still dwell here can hardly be said to
+      own their possessions, for they are merely allowed to cultivate the soil.
+      A guard stationed night and day prevents them from making excavations, and
+      they are severely restricted from entering the excavated quarters of the
+      city alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cotton whitens over two thirds of Pompeii yet interred: happy the
+      generation that lives to learn the wondrous secrets of that sepulchre!
+      For, when you have once been at Pompeii, this phantasm of the past takes
+      deeper hold on your imagination than any living city, and becomes and is
+      the metropolis of your dreamland forever. O marvelous city! who shall
+      reveal the cunning of your spell? Something not death, something not life&mdash;something
+      that is the one when you turn to determine its essence as the other! What
+      is it comes to me at this distance of that which I saw in Pompeii? The
+      narrow and curving, but not crooked streets, with the blazing sun of that
+      Neapolitan November falling into them, or clouding their wheel-worn lava
+      with the black, black shadows of the many-tinted walls; the houses, and
+      the gay columns of white, yellow, and red; the delicate pavements of
+      mosaic; the skeletons of dusty cisterns and dead fountains; inanimate
+      garden spaces with pygmy statues suited to their littleness; suites of
+      fairy bed-chambers, painted with exquisite frescos; dining-halls with
+      joyous scenes of hunt and banquet on their walls; the ruinous sites of
+      temples; the melancholy emptiness of booths and shops and jolly
+      drinking-houses; the lonesome tragic theatre, with a modern Pompeian
+      drawing water from a well there; the baths with their roofs perfect yet,
+      and the stucco bass-reliefs all but unharmed; around the whole, the city
+      wall crowned with slender poplars; outside the gates, the long avenue of
+      tombs, and the Appian Way stretching on to Stabiae; and, in the distance,
+      Vesuvius, brown and bare, with his fiery breath scarce visible against the
+      cloudless heaven;&mdash;these are the things that float before my fancy as
+      I turn back to look at myself walking those enchanted streets, and to
+      wonder if I could ever have been so blest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For there is nothing on the earth, or under it, like Pompeii.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The amphitheatre, to which we came now, after our stroll across the
+      cotton-fields, was small, like the vastest things in Pompeii, and had
+      nothing of the stately magnificence of the Arena at Verona, nor any thing
+      of the Roman Coliseum's melancholy and ruinous grandeur. But its
+      littleness made it all the more comfortable and social, and, seated upon
+      its benches under a cool awning, one could have almost chatted across the
+      arena with one's friends; could have witnessed the spectacle on the sands
+      without losing a movement of the quick gladiators, or an agony of the
+      victim given to the beasts&mdash;which must have been very delightful to a
+      Pompeian of companionable habits and fine feelings. It is quite
+      impossible, however, that the bouts described by Bulwer as taking place
+      all at the same time on the arena should really have done so: the
+      combatants would have rolled and tumbled and trampled over each other an
+      hundred times in the narrow space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all the voices with which it once rang the poor little amphitheatre has
+      kept only an echo. But this echo is one of the most perfect ever heard:
+      prompt clear, startling, it blew back the light chaff we threw to it with
+      amazing vehemence, and almost made us doubt if it were not a direct human
+      utterance. Yet how was Ventisei to know our names? And there was no one
+      else to call them but ourselves. Our "<i>dolce duca</i>" gathered a
+      nosegay from the crumbling ledges, and sat down in the cool of the
+      once-cruel cells beneath, and put it prettily together for the ladies.
+      When we had wearied ourselves with the echo he arose and led us back into
+      Pompeii.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The plans of nearly all the houses in the city are alike: the
+      entrance-room next the door; the parlor or drawing-room next that; then
+      the <i>impluvium</i>, or unroofed space in the middle of the house, where
+      the rains were caught and drained into the cistern, and where the
+      household used to come to wash itself, primitively, as at a pump; the
+      little garden, with its painted columns, behind the <i>impluvium</i>, and,
+      at last, the dining-room. There are minute bed-chambers on either side,
+      and, as I said, a shop at one side in front, for the sale of the master's
+      grain, wine, and oil. The pavements of all the houses are of mosaic,
+      which, in the better sort, is very delicate and beautiful, and is found
+      sometimes perfectly uninjured. An exquisite pattern, often repeated, is a
+      ground of tiny cubes of white marble with dots of black dropped regularly
+      into it. Of course there were many picturesque and fanciful designs, of
+      which the best have been removed to the Museum in Naples; but several good
+      ones are still left, and (like that of the Wild Boar) give names to the
+      houses in which they are found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, after all, the great wonder, the glory, of these Pompeian houses is
+      in their frescos. If I tried to give an idea of the luxury of color in
+      Pompeii, the most gorgeous adjectives would be as poorly able to reproduce
+      a vivid and glowing sense of those hues as the photography which now
+      copies the drawing of the decorations; so I do not try.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know it is a cheap and feeble thought, and yet, let the reader please to
+      consider: A workman nearly two thousand years laying upon the walls those
+      soft lines that went to make up fauns and satyrs, nymphs and naiads,
+      heroes and gods and goddesses; and getting weary and lying down to sleep,
+      and dreaming of an eruption of the mountain; of the city buried under a
+      fiery hail, and slumbering in its bed of ashes seventeen centuries; then
+      of its being slowly exhumed, and, after another lapse of years, of some
+      one coming to gather the shadow of that dreamer's work upon a plate of
+      glass, that he might infinitely reproduce it and sell it to tourists at
+      from five francs to fifty centimes a copy&mdash;I say, consider such a
+      dream, dreamed in the hot heart of the day, after certain cups of Vesuvian
+      wine! What a piece of <i>Katzenjämmer</i> (I can use no milder term) would
+      that workman think it when he woke again! Alas! what is history and the
+      progress of the arts and sciences but one long <i>Katzenjämmer</i>!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Photography cannot give, any more than I, the colors of the frescos, but
+      it can do the drawing better, and, I suspect, the spirit also. I used the
+      word workman, and not artist, in speaking of the decoration of the walls,
+      for in most cases the painter was only an artisan, and did his work
+      probably by the yard, as the artisan who paints walls and ceilings in
+      Italy does at this day. But the old workman did his work much more
+      skillfully and tastefully than the modern&mdash;threw on expanses of
+      mellow color, delicately paneled off the places for the scenes, and
+      penciled in the figures and draperies (there are usually more of the one
+      than the other) with a deft hand. Of course, the houses of the rich were
+      adorned by men of talent; but it is surprising to see the community of
+      thought and feeling in all this work, whether it be from cunninger or
+      clumsier hands. The subjects are nearly always chosen from the fables of
+      the gods, and they are in illustration of the poets, Homer and the rest.
+      To suit that soft, luxurious life which people led in Pompeii, the themes
+      are commonly amorous, and sometimes not too chaste; there is much of
+      Bacchus and Ariadne, much of Venus and Adonis, and Diana bathes a good
+      deal with her nymphs,&mdash;not to mention frequent representations of the
+      toilet of that beautiful monster which the lascivious art of the time
+      loved to depict. One of the most pleasing of all the scenes is that in one
+      of the houses, of the Judgment of Paris, in which the shepherd sits upon a
+      bank in an attitude of ineffable and flattered importance, with one leg
+      carelessly crossing the other, and both hands resting lightly on his
+      shepherd's crook, while the goddesses before him await his sentence.
+      Naturally the painter has done his best for the victress in this rivalry,
+      and you see
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Idalian Aphrodite beautiful,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      as she should be, but with a warm and piquant spice of girlish resentment
+      in her attitude, that Paris should pause for an instant, which is
+      altogether delicious.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "And I beheld great Here's angry eyes."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Awful eyes! How did the painter make them? The wonder of all these pagan
+      frescos is the mystery of the eyes&mdash;still, beautiful, unhuman. You
+      cannot believe that it is wrong for those tranquil-eyed men and women to
+      do evil, they look so calm and so unconscious in it all; and in the
+      presence of the celestials, as they bend upon you those eternal orbs, in
+      whose regard you are but a part of space, you feel that here art has
+      achieved the unearthly. I know of no words in literature which give a <i>sense</i>
+      (nothing gives the idea) of the <i>stare</i> of these gods, except that
+      magnificent line of Kingsley's, describing the advance over the sea toward
+      Andromeda of the oblivious and unsympathizing Nereids. They floated slowly
+      up, and their eyes
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Stared on her, silent and still, like the eyes in the house
+  of the idols."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The colors of this fresco of the Judgment of Paris are still so fresh and
+      bright, that it photographs very well, but there are other frescos wherein
+      there is more visible perfection of line, but in which the colors are so
+      dim that they can only be reproduced by drawings. One of these is the
+      Wounded Adonis cared for by Venus and the Loves; in which the story is
+      treated with a playful pathos wonderfully charming. The fair boy leans in
+      the languor of his hurt toward Venus, who sits utterly disconsolate beside
+      him, while the Cupids busy themselves with such slight surgical offices as
+      Cupids may render: one prepares a linen bandage for the wound, another
+      wraps it round the leg of Adonis, another supports one of his heavy arms,
+      another finds his own emotions too much for him and pauses to weep. It is
+      a pity that the colors of this beautiful fresco are grown so dim, and a
+      greater pity that most of the other frescos in Pompeii must share its
+      fate, and fade away. The hues are vivid when the walls are first
+      uncovered, and the ashes washed from the pictures, but then the malice of
+      the elements begins anew, and rain and sun draw the life out of tints
+      which the volcano failed to obliterate. In nearly all cases they could be
+      preserved by throwing a roof above the walls, and it is a wonder that the
+      Government does not take this slight trouble to save them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the frescos which told no story but their own, we were most pleased
+      with one in a delicately painted little bed-chamber. This represented an
+      alarmed and furtive man, whom we at once pronounced The Belated Husband,
+      opening a door with a night-latch. Nothing could have been better than
+      this miserable wretch's cowardly haste and cautious noiselessness in
+      applying his key; apprehension sat upon his brow, confusion dwelt in his
+      guilty eye. He had been out till two o'clock in the morning,
+      electioneering for Pansa, the friend of the people ("Pansa, and Roman
+      gladiators," "Pansa, and Christians to the Beasts," was the platform), and
+      he had left his <i>placens uxor</i> at home alone with the children, and
+      now within this door that <i>placens uxor</i> awaited him!
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      You have read, no doubt, of their discovering, a year or two since, in
+      making an excavation in a Pompeian street, the molds of four human bodies,
+      three women and a man, who fell down, blind and writhing, in the storm of
+      fire eighteen hundred years ago; whose shape the settling and hardening
+      ashes took; whose flesh wasted away, and whose bones lay there in the
+      hollow of the matrix till the cunning of this time found them, and,
+      pouring liquid plaster round the skeletons, clothed them with human form
+      again, and drew them forth into the world once more. There are many things
+      in Pompeii which bring back the gay life of the city, but nothing which so
+      vividly reports the terrible manner of her death as these effigies of the
+      creatures that actually shared it. The man in the last struggle has thrown
+      himself upon his back and taken his doom sturdily&mdash;there is a sublime
+      calm in his rigid figure. The women lie upon their faces, their limbs
+      tossed and distorted, their drapery tangled and heaped about them, and in
+      every fibre you see how hard they died. One presses her face into her
+      handkerchief to draw one last breath unmixed with scalding steam;
+      another's arms are wildly thrown abroad to clutch at help; another's hand
+      is appealingly raised, and on her slight fingers you see the silver hoops
+      with which her poor dead vanity adorned them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The guide takes you aside from the street into the house where they lie,
+      and a dreadful shadow drops upon your heart as you enter their presence.
+      Without, the hell-storm seems to fall again, and the whole sunny plain to
+      be darkened with its ruin, and the city to send up the tumult of her
+      despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is there left in Pompeii to speak of after this? The long street of
+      tombs outside the walls? Those that died before the city's burial seem to
+      have scarcely a claim to the solemnity of death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shall we go see Diomed's Villa, and walk through the freedman's long
+      underground vaults, where his friends thought to be safe, and were
+      smothered in heaps? The garden-ground grows wild among its broken columns
+      with weeds and poplar saplings; in one of the corridors they sell
+      photographs, on which, if you please, Ventisei has his bottle, or
+      drink-money. So we escape from the doom of the calamity, and so, at last,
+      the severely forbidden <i>buonamano</i> is paid. A dog may die many deaths
+      besides choking with butter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We return slowly through the city, where we have spent the whole day, from
+      nine till four o'clock. We linger on the way, imploring Ventisei if there
+      is not something to be seen in this or that house; we make our weariness
+      an excuse for sitting down, and cannot rend ourselves from the bliss of
+      being in Pompeii.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last we leave its gates, and swear each other to come again many times
+      while in Naples, and never go again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps it was as well. You cannot repeat great happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX.&mdash;A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The road from Naples to Herculaneum is, in fact, one long street; it
+      hardly ceases to be city in Naples till it is town at Portici, and in the
+      interval it is suburb, running between palatial lines of villas, which all
+      have their names ambitiously painted over their doors. Great part of the
+      distance this street is bordered by the bay, and, as far as this is the
+      case, it is picturesque, as every thing is belonging to marine life in
+      Italy. Sea-faring people go lounging up and down among the fishermen's
+      boats drawn up on the shore, and among the fishermen's wives making nets,
+      while the fishermen's children play and clamber everywhere, and over all
+      flap and flutter the clothes hung on poles to dry. In this part of the
+      street there are, of course, oysters, and grapes, and oranges, and
+      cactus-pulps, and cutlery, and iced drinks to sell at various booths; and
+      Commerce is exceedingly dramatic and boisterous over the bargains she
+      offers; and equally, of course, murderous drinking shops lurk at intervals
+      along the pavement, and lure into their recesses mariners of foreign
+      birth, briefly ashore from their ships. The New York Coffee House is there
+      to attract my maritime fellow-countrymen, and I know that if I look into
+      that place of refreshment I shall see their honest, foolish faces flushed
+      with drink, and with the excitement of buying the least they can for the
+      most money. Poor souls! they shall drink that pleasant morning away in the
+      society of Antonino the best of Neapolitans, and at midnight, emptied of
+      every soldo, shall arise, wrung with a fearful suspicion of treachery, and
+      wander away under Antonino's guidance to seek the protection of the
+      Consul; or, taking the law into their own hands, shall proceed to clean
+      out, <i>more Americano</i>, the New York Coffee House, when Antonino shall
+      develop into one of the landlords, and deal them the most artistic stab in
+      Naples: handsome, worthy Antonino; tender-eyed, subtle, pitiless!
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Where the road to Herculaneum leaves the bay and its seafaring life, it
+      enters, between the walls of lofty, fly-blown houses, a world of maccaroni
+      haunted by foul odors, beggars, poultry, and insects. There were few
+      people to be seen on the street, but through the open doors of the lofty
+      fly-blown houses we saw floury legions at work making maccaroni; grinding
+      maccaroni, rolling it, cutting it, hanging it in mighty skeins to dry, and
+      gathering it when dried, and putting it away. By the frequency of the
+      wine-shops we judged that the legions were a thirsty host, and by the
+      number of the barber-surgeons' shops, that they were a plethoric and too
+      full-blooded host. The latter shops were in the proportion of one to five
+      of the former; and the artist who had painted their signs had indulged his
+      fancy in wild excesses of phlebotomy. We had found that, as we came south
+      from Venice, science grew more and more sanguinary in Italy, and more and
+      more disposed to let blood. At Ferrara, even, the propensity began to be
+      manifest on the barbers' signs, which displayed the device of an arm
+      lanced at the elbow, and jetting the blood by a neatly described curve
+      into a tumbler. Further south the same arm was seen to bleed at the wrist
+      also; and at Naples an exhaustive treatment of the subject appeared, the
+      favorite study of the artist being to represent a nude figure reclining in
+      a genteel attitude on a bank of pleasant greensward, and bleeding from the
+      elbows, wrists, hands, ankles, and feet.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In Naples everywhere one is surprised by the great number of English names
+      which appear on business houses, but it was entirely bewildering to read a
+      bill affixed to the gate of one of the villas on this road: "This
+      Desirable Property for Sale." I should scarcely have cared to buy that
+      desirable property, though the neighborhood seemed to be a favorite summer
+      resort, and there were villas, as I said, nearly the whole way to Portici.
+      Those which stood with their gardens toward the bay would have been
+      tolerable, no doubt, if they could have kept their windows shut to the
+      vile street before their doors; but the houses opposite could have had no
+      escape from its stench and noisomeness. It was absolutely the filthiest
+      street I have seen anywhere outside of New York, excepting only that
+      little street which, in Herculaneum, leads from the theatre to the House
+      of Argo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This pleasant avenue has a stream of turbid water in its centre, bordered
+      by begging children, and is either fouler or cleaner for the water, but I
+      shall never know which. It is at a depth of some fifty or sixty feet below
+      the elevation on which the present city of Portici is built, and is part
+      of the excavation made long ago to reach the plain on which Herculaneum
+      stands, buried under its half-score of successive layers of lava, and
+      ashes, and Portici. We had the aid of all the virtuous poverty and leisure
+      of the modern town&mdash;there was a vast deal of both, we found&mdash;in
+      our search for the staircase by which you descend to the classic plain,
+      and it proved a discovery involving the outlay of all the copper coin
+      about us, while the sight of the famous theatre of Herculaneum was much
+      more expensive than it would have been had we come there in the old time
+      to see a play of Plautus or Terence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the theatre, "the large and highly ornamented theatre" of which I
+      read, only a little while ago, in an encyclopedia, we found it, by the
+      light of our candles, a series of gloomy hollows, of the general
+      complexion of coal-bins and potato-cellars. It was never perfectly dug out
+      of the lava, and, as is known, it was filled up in the last century,
+      together with other excavations, when they endangered the foundations of
+      worthless Portici overhead. (I am amused to find myself so hot upon the
+      poor property-holders of Portici. I suppose I should not myself, even for
+      the cause of antiquity and the knowledge of classic civilization, like to
+      have my house tumbled about my ears.) But though it was impossible in the
+      theatre of Herculaneum to gain any idea of its size or richness, I
+      remembered there the magnificent bronzes which had been found in it, and
+      did a hasty reverence to the place. Indeed, it is amazing, when one sees
+      how small a part of Herculaneum has been uncovered, to consider the number
+      of fine works of art in the Museo Borbonico which were taken thence, and
+      which argue a much richer and more refined community than that of Pompeii.
+      A third of the latter city has now been restored to the light of day; but
+      though it has yielded abundance of all the things that illustrate the
+      domestic and public life, and the luxury and depravity of those old times,
+      and has given the once secret rooms of the museum their worst attraction,
+      it still falls far below Herculaneum in the value of its contributions to
+      the treasures of classic art, except only in the variety and beauty of its
+      exquisite frescos.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effect of this fact is to stimulate the imagination of the visitor to
+      that degree that nothing short of the instant destruction of Portici and
+      the excavation of all Herculaneum will satisfy him. If the opening of one
+      theatre, and the uncovering of a basilica and two or three houses, have
+      given such richness to us, what delight and knowledge would not the
+      removal of these obdurate hills of ashes and lava bestow!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Emerging from the coal-bins and potato-cellars, the visitor extinguishes
+      his candle with a pathetic sigh, profusely rewards the custodian (whom he
+      connects in some mysterious way with the ancient population of the injured
+      city about him), and, thoughtfully removing the tallow from his fingers,
+      follows the course of the vile stream already sung, and soon arrives at
+      the gate opening into the exhumed quarter of Herculaneum. And there he
+      finds a custodian who enters perfectly into his feelings; a custodian who
+      has once been a guide in Pompeii, but now despises that wretched town, and
+      would not be guide there for any money since he has known the superior
+      life of Herculaneum; who, in fine, feels toward Pompeii as a Bostonian
+      feels toward New York. Yet the reader would be wrong to form the idea that
+      there is bitterness in the disdain of this custodian. On the contrary, he
+      is one of the best-natured men in the world. He is a mighty mass of
+      pinguid bronze, with a fat lisp, and a broad, sunflower smile, and he
+      lectures us with a vast and genial breadth of manner on the ruins,
+      contradicting all our guesses at things with a sweet "Perdoni, signori! ma&mdash;&mdash;."
+      At the end, we find that he has some medallions of lava to sell: there is
+      Victor Emanuel, or, if we are of the <i>partito d'azione</i>, there is
+      Garibaldi; both warm yet from the crater of Vesuvius, and of the same
+      material which destroyed Herculaneum. We decline to buy and the custodian
+      makes the national shrug and grimace (signifying that we are masters of
+      the situation, and that he washes his hands of the consequence of our
+      folly) on the largest scale that we have ever seen: his mighty hands are
+      rigidly thrust forth, his great lip protruded, his enormous head thrown
+      back to bring his face on a level with his chin. The effect is tremendous,
+      but we nevertheless feel that he loves us the same.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The afternoon on which we visited Herculaneum was in melancholy contrast
+      to the day we spent in Pompeii. The lingering summer had at last saddened
+      into something like autumnal gloom, and that blue, blue sky of Naples was
+      overcast. So, this second draught of the spirit of the past had not only
+      something of the insipidity of custom, but brought rather a depression
+      than a lightness to our hearts. There was so little of Herculaneum: only a
+      few hundred yards square are exhumed, and we counted the houses easily on
+      the fingers of one hand, leaving the thumb to stand for the few rods of
+      street that, with its flagging of lava and narrow border of foot-walks,
+      lay between; and though the custodian, apparently moved at our dejection,
+      said that the excavation was to be resumed the very next week, the
+      assurance did little to restore our cheerfulness. Indeed, I fancy that
+      these old cities must needs be seen in the sunshine by those who would
+      feel what gay lives they once led; by dimmer light they are very sullen
+      spectres, and their doom still seems to brood upon them. I know that even
+      Pompeii could not have been joyous that sunless afternoon, for what there
+      was to see of mournful Herculaneum was as brilliant with colors as any
+      thing in the former city. Nay, I believe that the tints of the frescos and
+      painted columns were even brighter, and that the walls of the houses were
+      far less ruinous than those of Pompeii. But no house was wholly freed from
+      lava, and the little street ran at the rear of the buildings which were
+      supposed to front on some grander avenue not yet exhumed. It led down, as
+      the custodian pretended, to a wharf, and he showed an iron ring in the
+      wall of the House of Argo, standing at the end of the street, to which, he
+      said, his former fellow-citizens used to fasten their boats, though it was
+      all dry enough there now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is evidence in Herculaneum of much more ambitious domestic
+      architecture than seems to have been known in Pompeii. The ground-plan of
+      the houses in the two cities is alike; but in the former there was often a
+      second story, as was proven by the charred ends of beams still protruding
+      from the walls, while in the latter there is only one house which is
+      thought to have aspired to a second floor. The House of Argo is also much
+      larger than any in Pompeii, and its appointments were more magnificent.
+      Indeed, we imagined that in this more purely Greek town we felt an
+      atmosphere of better taste in every thing than prevailed in the
+      fashionable Roman watering-place, though this, too, was a summer resort of
+      the "best society" of the empire. The mosaic pavements were exquisite, and
+      the little bed-chambers dainty and delicious in their decorations. The
+      lavish delight in color found expression in the vividest hues upon the
+      walls, and not only were the columns of the garden painted, but the
+      foliage of the capitals was variously tinted. The garden of the House of
+      Argo was vaster than any of the classic world which we had yet seen, and
+      was superb with a long colonnade of unbroken columns. Between these and
+      the walls of the houses was a pretty pathway of mosaic, and in the midst
+      once stood marble tables, under which the workmen exhuming the city found
+      certain crouching skeletons. At one end was the dining-room, of course,
+      and painted on the wall was a lady with a parasol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought all Herculaneum sad enough, but the profusion of flowers growing
+      wild in this garden gave it a yet more tender and pathetic charm. Here&mdash;where
+      so long ago the flowers had bloomed, and perished in the terrible
+      blossoming of the mountain that sent up its fires in the awful similitude
+      of Nature's harmless and lovely forms, and showered its destroying petals
+      all abroad&mdash;was it not tragic to find again the soft tints, the
+      graceful shapes, the sweet perfumes of the earth's immortal life? Of them
+      that planted and tended and plucked and bore in their bosoms and twined in
+      their hair these fragile children of the summer, what witness in the
+      world? Only the crouching skeletons under the tables. Alas and alas!
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The skeletons went with us throughout Herculaneum, and descended into the
+      cell, all green with damp, under the basilica, and lay down, fettered and
+      manacled in the place of those found there beside the big bronze kettle in
+      which the prisoners used to cook their dinners. How ghastly the thought of
+      it was! If we had really seen this kettle and the skeletons there&mdash;as
+      we did not&mdash;we could not have suffered more than we did. They took
+      all the life out of the House of Perseus, and the beauty from his pretty
+      little domestic temple to the Penates, and this was all there was left in
+      Herculaneum to see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Is there nothing else?" we demand of the custodian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Signori, this is all."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It is mighty little."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Perdoni, signori! ma&mdash;&mdash;."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well," we say sourly to each other, glancing round at the walls of the
+      pit, on the bottom of which the bit of city stands, "it is a good thing to
+      know that Herculaneum amounts to nothing."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X.&mdash;CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I have no doubt
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Calm Capri waits,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      where we left it, in the Gulf of Salerno, for any traveller who may choose
+      to pay it a visit; but at the time we were there we felt that it was on
+      exhibition for that day only, and would, when we departed, disappear in
+      its sapphire sea, and be no more; just as Niagara ceases to play as soon
+      as your back is turned, and Venice goes out like a pyrotechnic display,
+      and all marvelously grand and lovely things make haste to prove their
+      impermanence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We delayed some days in Naples in hopes of fine weather, and at last chose
+      a morning that was warm and cloudy at nine o'clock, and burst into
+      frequent passions of rain before we reached Sorrento at noon The first
+      half of the journey was made by rail, and brought us to Castellamare,
+      whence we took carriage for Sorrento, and oranges, and rapture,&mdash;winding
+      along the steep shore of the sea, and under the brows of wooded hills that
+      rose high above us into the misty weather, and caught here and there the
+      sunshine on their tops. In that heavenly climate no day can long be out of
+      humor, and at Sorrento we found ours very pleasant, and rode delightedly
+      through the devious streets, looking up to the terraced orange-groves on
+      one hand, and down to the terraced orange-groves on the other, until at a
+      certain turning of the way we encountered Antonino Occhio d'Argento, whom
+      fate had appointed to be our boatman to Capri. We had never heard of
+      Antonino before, and indeed had intended to take a boat from one of the
+      hotels; but when this corsair offered us his services, there was that
+      guile in his handsome face, that cunning in his dark eyes, that heart
+      could not resist, and we halted our carriage and took him at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kept his boat in one of those caverns which honey-comb the cliff under
+      Sorrento, and afford a natural and admirable shelter for such small craft
+      as may be dragged up out of reach of the waves, and here I bargained with
+      him before finally agreeing to go with him to Capri. In Italy it is
+      customary for a public carrier when engaged to give his employer as a
+      pledge the sum agreed upon for the service, which is returned with the
+      amount due him, at the end, if the service has been satisfactory; and I
+      demanded of Antonino this <i>caparra</i>, as it is called. "What <i>caparra</i>?"
+      said he, lifting the lid of his wicked eye with his forefinger, "this is
+      the best <i>caparra</i>," meaning a face as honest and trustworthy as the
+      devil's. The stroke confirmed my subjection to Antonino, and I took his
+      boat without further parley, declining even to feel the muscle of his
+      boatmen's arms, which he exposed to my touch in evidence that they were
+      strong enough to row us swiftly to Capri. The men were but two in number,
+      but they tossed the boat lightly into the surf, and then lifted me aboard,
+      and rowed to the little pier from which the ladies and T. got in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sun shone, the water danced and sparkled, and presently we raised our
+      sail, and took the gale that blew for Capri&mdash;an oblong height rising
+      ten miles beyond out of the heart of the azure gulf. On the way thither
+      there was little interest but that of natural beauty in the bold,
+      picturesque coast we skirted for some distance; though on one mighty rock
+      there were the ruins of a seaward-looking Temple of Hercules, with arches
+      of the unmistakable Roman masonry, below which the receding waves rushed
+      and poured over a jetting ledge in a thunderous cataract.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Antonino did his best to entertain us, and lectured us unceasingly upon
+      his virtue and his wisdom, dwelling greatly on the propriety and good
+      policy of always speaking the truth. This spectacle of veracity became
+      intolerable after a while, and I was goaded to say: "Oh then, if you never
+      tell lies, you expect to go to Paradise." "Not at all," answered Antonino
+      compassionately, "for I have sinned much. But the lie doesn't go ahead" (<i>non
+      va avanti</i>), added this Machiavelli of boatmen; yet I think he was
+      mistaken, for he deceived us with perfect ease and admirable success. All
+      along, he had pretended that we could see Capri, visit the Blue Grotto,
+      and return that day; but as we drew near the island, painful doubts began
+      to trouble him, and he feared the sea would be too rough for the Grotto
+      part of the affair. "But there will be an old man," he said, with a
+      subtile air of prophecy, "waiting for us on the beach. This old man is one
+      of the Government guides to the Grotto, and he will say whether it is to
+      be seen to-day."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And certainly there was the old man on the beach&mdash;a short patriarch,
+      with his baldness covered by a kind of bloated woolen sock&mdash;a
+      blear-eyed sage, and a bare-legged. He waded through the surf toward the
+      boat, and when we asked him whether the Grotto was to be seen, he paused
+      knee-deep in the water, (at a secret signal from Antonino, as I shall
+      always believe,) put on a face of tender solemnity, threw back his head a
+      little, brought his hand to his cheek, expanded it, and said, "No; to-day,
+      no! To-morrow, yes!" Antonino leaped joyously ashore, and delivered us
+      over to the old man, to be guided to the Hotel di Londra, while he drew
+      his boat upon the land. He had reason to be contented, for this artifice
+      of the patriarch of Capri relieved him from the necessity of verifying to
+      me the existence of an officer of extraordinary powers in the nature of a
+      consul, who, he said, would not permit boats to leave Capri for the
+      main-land after five o'clock in the evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When it was decided that we should remain on the island till the morrow,
+      we found so much time on our hands, after bargaining for our lodging at
+      the Hotel di Londra, that we resolved to ascend the mountain to the ruins
+      of the palaces of Tiberius, and to this end we contracted for the services
+      of certain of the muletresses that had gathered about the inn-gate,
+      clamorously offering their beasts. The muletresses chosen were a matron of
+      mature years and of a portly habit of body; her daughter, a mere child;
+      and her niece, a very pretty girl of eighteen, with a voice soft and sweet
+      as a bird's. They placed the ladies, one on each mule, and then, while the
+      mother and daughter devoted themselves to the hind-quarters of the
+      foremost animal, the lovely niece brought up the rear of the second beast,
+      and the patriarch went before, and T. and I trudged behind. So the
+      cavalcade ascended; first, from the terrace of the hotel overlooking the
+      bit of shipping village on the beach, and next from the town of Capri,
+      clinging to the hill-sides, midway between sea and sky, until at last it
+      reached the heights on which the ruins stand. Our way was through narrow
+      lanes, bordered by garden walls; then through narrow streets bordered by
+      dirty houses; and then again by gardens, but now of a better sort than the
+      first, and belonging to handsome villas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the road our pretty muletress gossiped cheerfully, and our patriarch
+      gloomily, and between the two we accumulated a store of information
+      concerning the present inhabitants of Capri, which, I am sorry to say, has
+      now for the most part failed me. I remember that they said most of the
+      land-owners at Capri were Neapolitans, and that these villas were their
+      country-houses; though they pointed out one of the stateliest of the
+      edifices as belonging to a certain English physician who had come to visit
+      Capri for a few days, and had now been living on the island twenty years,
+      having married (said the muletress) the prettiest and poorest girl in the
+      town, from this romance&mdash;something like which the muletress seemed to
+      think might well happen concerning herself&mdash;we passed lightly to
+      speak of kindred things, the muletress responding gayly between the blows
+      she bestowed upon her beast. The accent of these Capriotes has something
+      of German harshness and heaviness: they say <i>non bosso</i> instead of <i>non
+      posso</i>, and <i>monto</i> instead of <i>mondo</i>, and interchange the
+      <i>t</i> and <i>d</i> a good deal; and they use for father the Latin <i>pater</i>,
+      instead of <i>padre</i>. But this girl's voice, as I said, was very
+      musical, and the island's accent was sweet upon her tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>I</i>.&mdash;What is your name?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>She</i>.&mdash;Caterina, little sir (signorin).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>I</i>.&mdash;And how old are you, Caterina?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>She</i>.&mdash;Eighteen, little sir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>I</i>.&mdash;And you are betrothed?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She feigns not to understand; but the patriarch, who has dropped behind to
+      listen to our discourse, explains,&mdash;"He asks if you are in love."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>She</i>.&mdash;Ah, no! little sir, not yet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>I</i>.&mdash;No? A little late, it seems to me. I think there must be
+      some good-looking youngster who pleases you&mdash;no?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>She</i>.&mdash;Ah, no! one must work, one cannot think of marrying. We
+      are four sisters, and we have only the <i>buonamano</i> from hiring these
+      mules, and we must spin and cook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>The Patriarch</i>.&mdash;Don't believe her; she has two lovers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>She.</i>&mdash;Ah, no! It isn't true. He tells a fib&mdash;he!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, nevertheless, she seemed to love to be accused of lovers,&mdash;such
+      is the guile of the female heart in Capri,&mdash;and laughed over the
+      patriarch's wickedness. She confided that she ate maccaroni once a day,
+      and she talked constantly of eating it just as the Northern Italians
+      always talk of <i>polenta.</i> She was a true daughter of the isle, and
+      had never left it but once in her life, when she went to Naples. "Naples
+      was beautiful, yes; but one always loves one's own country the best." She
+      was very attentive and good, but at the end was rapacious of more and more
+      <i>buonamano</i>. "Have patience with her, sir," said the blameless
+      Antonino, who witnessed her greediness; "they do not understand certain
+      matters here, poor little things!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the patriarch, he was full of learning relative to himself and to
+      Capri; and told me with much elaboration that the islanders lived chiefly
+      by fishing, and gained something also by their vineyards. But they were
+      greatly oppressed by taxes, and the strict enforcement of the
+      conscriptions, and they had little love for the Italian Government, and
+      wished the Bourbons back again. The Piedmontese, indeed, misgoverned them
+      horribly. There was the Blue Grotto, for example: formerly travellers paid
+      the guides five, six, ten francs for viewing it; but now the Piedmontese
+      had made a tariff, and the poor guides could only exact a franc from each
+      person. Things were in a ruinous condition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this we had arrived at a little inn on the top of the mountain, very
+      near the ruins of the palaces, "Here," said the patriarch, "it is
+      customary for strangers to drink a bottle of the wine of Tiberius." We
+      obediently entered the hostelry, and the landlord&mdash;a white-toothed,
+      brown-faced, good-humored peasant&mdash;gallantly ran forward and
+      presented the ladies with bouquets of roses. We thought it a pretty and
+      graceful act, but found later that it was to be paid for, like all pretty
+      and graceful things in Italy; for when we came to settle for the wine, and
+      the landlord wanted more than justice, he urged that he had presented the
+      ladies with flowers,&mdash;yet he equally gave me his benediction when I
+      refused to pay for his politeness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Now here," again said the patriarch in a solemn whisper, "you can see the
+      Tarantella danced for two francs; whereas down at your inn, if you hire
+      the dancers through your landlord, it will cost you five or six francs."
+      The difference was tempting, and decided us in favor of an immediate
+      Tarantella. The muletresses left their beasts to browse about the door of
+      the inn and came into the little public room, where were already the wife
+      and sister of the landlord, and took their places <i>vis-à-vis</i>, while
+      the landlord seized his tambourine and beat from it a wild and lively
+      measure. The women were barefooted and hoopless, and they gave us the
+      Tarantella with all the beauty of natural movement and free floating
+      drapery, and with all that splendid grace of pose which animates the
+      antique statues and pictures of dancers. They swayed themselves in time
+      with the music; then, filled with its passionate impulse, advanced and
+      retreated and whirled away;&mdash;snapping their fingers above their
+      heads, and looking over their shoulders with a gay and a laughing
+      challenge to each other, they drifted through the ever-repeated figures of
+      flight and wooing, and wove for us pictures of delight that remained upon
+      the brain like the effect of long-pondered vivid colors, and still return
+      to illumine and complete any representation of that indescribable dance.
+      Heaven knows what peril there might have been in the beauty and grace of
+      the pretty muletress but for the spectacle of her fat aunt, who, I must
+      confess, could only burlesque some of her niece's airiest movements, and
+      whose hard-bought buoyancy was at once pathetic and laughable. She earned
+      her share of the spoils certainly, and she seemed glad when the dance was
+      over, and went contentedly back to her mule.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The patriarch had early retired from the scene as from a vanity with which
+      he was too familiar for enjoyment, and I found him, when the Tarantella
+      was done, leaning on the curb of the precipitous rock immediately behind
+      the inn, over which the Capriotes say Tiberius used to cast the victims of
+      his pleasures after he was sated with them. These have taken their place
+      in the insular imagination as Christian martyrs, though it is probable
+      that the poor souls were any thing but Nazarenes. It took a stone thrown
+      from the brink of the rock twenty seconds to send back a response from the
+      water below, and the depth was too dizzying to look into. So we looked
+      instead toward Amalfi, across the Gulf of Salerno, and toward Naples,
+      across her bay. On every hand the sea was flushed with sunset, and an
+      unspeakable calm dwelt upon it, while the heights rising from it softened
+      and softened in the distance, and withdrew themselves into dreams of
+      ghostly solitude and phantom city. His late majesty the Emperor Tiberius
+      is well known to have been a man of sentiment, and he may often have
+      sought this spot to enjoy the evening hour. It was convenient to his
+      palace, and he could here give a fillip to his jaded sensibilities by
+      popping a boon companion over the cliff, and thus enjoy the fine poetic
+      contrast which his perturbed and horrible spirit afforded to that scene of
+      innocence and peace. Later he may have come hither also, when lust failed,
+      when all the lewd plays and devices of his fancy palled upon his senses,
+      when sin had grown insipid and even murder ceased to amuse, and his
+      majesty uttered his despair to the Senate in that terrible letter: "What
+      to write to you, or how to write, I know not; and what not to write at
+      this time, may all the gods and goddesses torment me wore than I daily
+      feel that I suffer if I do know."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The poor patriarch was also a rascal in his small way, and he presently
+      turned to me with a countenance full of cowardly trouble and base remorse,
+      "I pray you, little sir, not to tell the landlord below there that you
+      have seen the Tarantella danced here; for he has daughters and friends to
+      dance it for strangers, and gets a deal of money by it. So, if he asks you
+      to see it, do me the pleasure to say, lest he should take on (<i>pigliarsi</i>)
+      with me about it: 'Thanks, but we saw the Tarantella at Pompeii!'" It was
+      the last place in Italy where we were likely to have seen the Tarantella;
+      but these simple people are improvident in lying, as in every thing else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The patriarch had a curious spice of malice in him, which prompted him to
+      speak evil of all, and to as many as he dared. After we had inspected the
+      ruins of the emperor's villa, a clownish imbecile of a woman, professing
+      to be the wife of the peasant who had made the excavations, came forth out
+      of a cleft in the rock and received tribute of us&mdash;why, I do not
+      know. The patriarch abetted the extortion, but Parthianly remarked, as we
+      turned away, "Her husband ought to be here; but this is a <i>festa</i>,
+      and he is drinking and gaming in the village," while the woman protested
+      that he was sick at home. There was also a hermit living in great
+      publicity among the ruins, and the patriarch did not spare him a sneering
+      comment. [This hermit I have heard was not brought up to the profession of
+      anchorite, but was formerly a shoemaker, and according to his own
+      confession abandoned his trade because he could better indulge a lethargic
+      habit in the character of religious recluse.] He had even a bad word for
+      Tiberius, and reproached the emperor for throwing people over the cliff,
+      though I think it a sport in which he would himself have liked to join.
+      The only human creatures with whom he seemed to be in sympathy were the
+      brigands of the main-land, of whom he spoke poetically as exiles and
+      fugitives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the palace of Tiberius, which we had come go far and so toilsomely
+      to see, it must be confessed there was very little left of it. When that
+      well-meaning but mistaken prince died, the Senate demolished his
+      pleasure-houses at Capri, and left only those fragments of the beautiful
+      brick masonry which yet remain, clinging indestructible to the rocks, and
+      strewing the ground with rubbish. The recent excavations have discovered
+      nothing besides the uninteresting foundations of the building, except a
+      subterranean avenue leading from one part of the palace to another: this
+      is walled with delicate brickwork, and exquisitely paved with white marble
+      mosaic; and this was all that witnessed of the splendor of the wicked
+      emperor. Nature, the all-forgetting, all-forgiving, that takes the red
+      battle-field into her arms and hides it with blossom and harvest, could
+      not remember his iniquity, greater than the multitudinous murder of war.
+      The sea, which the despot's lust and fear had made so lonely, slept with
+      the white sails of boats secure upon its breast; the little bays and
+      inlets, the rocky clefts and woody dells, had forgotten their desecration;
+      and the gathering twilight, the sweetness of the garden-bordered pathway,
+      and the serenity of the lonely landscape, helped us to doubt history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We slowly returned to the inn by the road we had ascended, noting again
+      the mansion of the surprising Englishman who had come to Capri for three
+      months and had remained thirty years; passed through the darkness of the
+      village,&mdash;dropped here and there with the vivid red of a lamp,&mdash;and
+      so reached the inn at last, where we found the landlord ready to have the
+      Tarantella danced for us. We framed a discreeter fiction than that
+      prepared for us by the patriarch, and went in to dinner, where there were
+      two Danish gentlemen in dispute with as many rogues of boatmen, who,
+      having contracted to take them back that night to Naples, were now trying
+      to fly their bargain and remain at Capri till the morrow. The Danes beat
+      them, however, and then sat down to dinner, and to long stories of the
+      imposture and villany of the Italians. One of them chiefly bewailed
+      himself that the day before, having unwisely eaten a dozen oysters without
+      agreeing first with the oyster-man upon the price, he had been obliged to
+      pay this scamp's extortionate demand to the full, since he was unable to
+      restore him his property. We thought that something like this might have
+      happened to an imprudent man in any country, but we did not the less join
+      him in abusing the Italians&mdash;the purpose for which foreigners chiefly
+      visit Italy.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Standing on the height among the ruins of Tiberius's palace, the patriarch
+      had looked out over the waters, and predicted for the morrow the finest
+      weather that had ever been known in that region; but in spite of this
+      prophecy the day dawned stormily, and at breakfast time we looked out
+      doubtfully on waves lashed by driving rain. The entrance to the Blue
+      Grotto, to visit which we had come to Capri, is by a semicircular opening,
+      some three feet in width and two feet in height, and just large enough to
+      admit a small boat. One lies flat in the bottom of this, waits for the
+      impulse of a beneficent wave, and is carried through the mouth of the
+      cavern, and rescued from it in like manner by some receding billow. When
+      the wind is in the wrong quarter, it is impossible to enter the grot at
+      all; and we waited till nine o'clock for the storm to abate before we
+      ventured forth. In the mean time one of the Danish gentlemen, who&mdash;after
+      assisting his companion to compel the boatmen to justice the night before&mdash;had
+      stayed at Capri, and had risen early to see the grotto, returned from it,
+      and we besieged him with a hundred questions concerning it. But he
+      preserved the wise silence of the boy who goes in to see the six-legged
+      calf, and comes out impervious to the curiosity of all the boys who are
+      doubtful whether the monster is worth their money. Our Dane would merely
+      say that it was now possible to visit the Blue Grotto; that he had seen
+      it; that he was glad he <i>had</i> seen it. As to its blueness, Messieurs&mdash;yes,
+      it is blue. <i>C'est i dire</i>....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ladies had been amusing themselves with a perusal of the hotel
+      register, and the notes of admiration or disgust with which the different
+      sojourners at the inn had filled it. As a rule, the English people found
+      fault with the poor little hostelry and the French people praised it.
+      Commander Joshing and Lieutenant Prattent, R.N., of the former nation,
+      "were cheated by the donkey women, and thought themselves extremely
+      fortunate to have escaped with their lives from the effects of Capri
+      vintage. The landlord was an old Cossack." On the other hand, we read, "J.
+      Cruttard, homme de lettres, a passè quinze jours ici, et n'a eu que des
+      félicités du patron de cêt hôtel et de sa famille." Cheerful man of
+      letters! His good-natured record will keep green a name little known to
+      literature. Who are G. Bradshaw, Duke of New York, and Signori Jones and
+      Andrews, Hereditary Princes of the United States? Their patrician names
+      followed the titles of several English nobles in the register. But that
+      which most interested the ladies in this record was the warning of a
+      terrified British matron against any visit to the Blue Grotto except in
+      the very calmest weather. The British matron penned her caution after an
+      all but fatal experience. The ladies read it aloud to us, and announced
+      that for themselves they would be contented with pictures of the Blue
+      Grotto and our account of its marvels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the beach below the hotel lay the small boats of the guides to the Blue
+      Grotto, and we descended to take one of them. The fixed rate is a franc
+      for each person. The boatmen wanted five francs for each of us. We
+      explained that although not indigenous to Capri, or even Italy, we were
+      not of the succulent growth of travellers, and would not be eaten. We
+      retired to our vantage ground on the heights. The guides called us to the
+      beach again. They would take us for three francs apiece, or say six francs
+      for both of us. We withdrew furious to the heights again, where we found
+      honest Antonino, who did us the pleasure to yell to his fellow-scoundrels
+      on the beach, "You had better take these signori for a just price. They
+      are going to the syndic to complain of you." At which there arose a
+      lamentable outcry among the boatmen, and they called with one voice for us
+      to come down and go for a franc apiece. This fable teaches that
+      common-carriers are rogues everywhere; but that whereas we are helpless in
+      their hands at home, we may bully them into rectitude in Italy, where they
+      are afraid of the law.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had scarcely left the landing of the hotel in the boat of the patriarch&mdash;for
+      I need hardly say he was first and most rapacious of the plundering crew&mdash;when
+      we found ourselves in very turbulent waters, in the face of mighty bluffs,
+      rising inaccessible from the sea. Here and there, where their swarthy
+      fronts were softened with a little verdure, goat-paths wound up and down
+      among the rocks; and midway between the hotel and the grotto, in a sort of
+      sheltered nook, we saw the Roman masonry of certain antique baths&mdash;baths
+      of Augustus, says Valery; baths of Tiberius, say the Capriotes, zealous
+      for the honor of their infamous hero. Howbeit, this was all we saw on the
+      way to the Blue Grotto. Every moment the waves rose higher, emulous of the
+      bluffs, which would not have afforded a foothold, or any thing to cling
+      to, had we been upset and washed against them&mdash;and we began to talk
+      of the immortality of the soul. As we neared the grotto, the patriarch
+      entertained us with stories of the perilous adventures of people who
+      insisted upon entering it in stormy weather,&mdash;especially of a French
+      painter who had been imprisoned in it four days, and kept alive only on
+      rum, which the patriarch supplied him, swimming into the grotto with a
+      bottle-full at a time. "And behold us arrived, gentlemen!" said he, as he
+      brought the boat skillfully around in front of the small semicircular
+      opening at the base of the lofty bluff. We lie flat on the bottom of the
+      boat, and complete the immersion of that part of our clothing which the
+      driving torrents of rain had spared. The wave of destiny rises with us
+      upon its breast&mdash;sinks, and we are inside of the Blue Grotto. Not so
+      much blue as gray, however, and the water about the mouth of it green
+      rather than azure. They say that on a sunny day both the water and the
+      roof of the cavern are of the vividest cerulean tint&mdash;and I saw the
+      grotto so represented in the windows of the paint-shops at Naples. But to
+      my own experience it did not differ from other caves in color or form:
+      there was the customary clamminess in the air; the sound of dropping
+      water; the sense of dull and stupid solitude,&mdash;a little relieved in
+      this case by the mighty music of the waves breaking against the rocks
+      outside. The grot is not great in extent, and the roof in the rear shelves
+      gradually down to the water. Valery says that some remains of a gallery
+      have caused the supposition that the grotto was once the scene of
+      Tiberius's pleasures; and the Prussian painter who discovered the cave was
+      led to seek it by something he had read of a staircase by which Barbarossa
+      used to descend into a subterranean retreat from the town of Anacapri on
+      the mountain top. The slight fragment of ruin which we saw in one corner
+      of the cave might be taken in confirmation of both theories; but the
+      patriarch attributed the work to Barbarossa, being probably tired at last
+      of hearing Tiberius so much talked about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We returned, soaked and disappointed, to the hotel, where we found
+      Antonino very doubtful about the possibility of getting back that day to
+      Sorrento, and disposed, when pooh-poohed out of the notion of bad weather,
+      to revive the fiction of a prohibitory consul. He was staying in Capri at
+      our expense, and the honest fellow would willingly have spent a fortnight
+      there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We summoned the landlord to settlement, and he came with all his household
+      to present the account,&mdash;each one full of visible longing, yet
+      restrained from asking <i>buonamano</i> by a strong sense of previous
+      contract. It was a deadly struggle with them, but they conquered
+      themselves, and blessed us as we departed. The pretty muletress took leave
+      of us on the beach, and we set sail for Sorrento, the ladies crouching in
+      the bottom of the boat, and taking their sea-sickness in silence. As we
+      drew near the beautiful town, we saw how it lay on a plateau, at the foot
+      of the mountains, but high above the sea. Antonino pointed out to us the
+      house of Tasso,&mdash;in which the novelist Cooper also resided when in
+      Sorrento,&mdash;a white house not handsomer nor uglier than the rest, with
+      a terrace looking out over the water. The bluffs are pierced by numerous
+      arched caverns, as I have said, giving shelter to the fishermen's boats,
+      and here and there a devious stairway mounts to their crests. Up one of
+      these we walked, noting how in the house above us the people, with that
+      puerility usually mixed with the Italian love of beauty, had placed
+      painted busts of terra-cotta in the windows to simulate persons looking
+      out. There was nothing to blame in the breakfast we found ready at the
+      Hotel Rispoli; and as for the grove of slender, graceful orange-trees in
+      the midst of which the hotel stood, and which had lavished the fruit in
+      every direction on the ground, why, I would willingly give for it all the
+      currant-bushes, with their promises of jelly and jam, on which I gaze at
+      this moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Antonino attended us to our carriage when we went away. He had kept us all
+      night at Capri, it is true, and he had brought us in at the end for a
+      prodigious <i>buonamano</i>; yet I cannot escape the conviction that he
+      parted from us with an unfulfilled purpose of greater plunder, and I have
+      a compassion, which I here declare, for the strangers who fell next into
+      his hands. He was good enough at the last moment to say that his name,
+      Silver-Eye, was a nickname given him according to a custom of the
+      Sorrentines; and he made us a farewell bow that could not be bought in
+      America for money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the station of Castellamare sat a curious cripple on the stones,&mdash;a
+      man with little, short, withered legs, and a pleasant face. He showed us
+      the ticket-office, and wanted nothing for the politeness. After we had
+      been in the waiting-room a brief time, he came swinging himself in upon
+      his hands, followed by another person, who, when the cripple had planted
+      himself finally and squarely on the ground, whipped out a tape from his
+      pocket and took his measure for a suit of clothes, the cripple twirling
+      and twisting himself about in every way for the tailor's convenience.
+      Nobody was surprised or amused at the sight, and when his measure was thus
+      publicly taken, the cripple gravely swung himself out as he had swung
+      himself in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI.&mdash;THE PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I had the pleasure one day of visiting nearly all the free schools which
+      the wise philanthropy of the Protestant residents of Naples has
+      established in that city. The schools had a peculiar interest for me,
+      because I had noticed (in an uncareful fashion enough, no doubt) the great
+      changes which had taken place in Italy under its new national government,
+      and was desirous to see for myself the sort of progress the Italians of
+      the south were making in avenues so long closed to them. I believe I have
+      no mania for missionaries; I have heard of the converted Jew-and-a-half,
+      and I have thought it a good joke; but I cannot help offering a very
+      cordial homage to the truth that the missionaries are doing a vast deal of
+      good in Naples, where they are not only spreading the gospel, but the
+      spelling-book, the arithmetic, and the geography.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not to be understood from the word missionaries, that this work is
+      done by men especially sent from England or America to perform it. The
+      free Protestant schools in Naples are conducted under the auspices of the
+      Evangelical Aid Committee,&mdash;composed of members of the English
+      Church, the Swiss Church, and the Presbyterian Church; the President of
+      this committee is Dr. Strange, an Englishman, and the Treasurer is Mr.
+      Rogers, the American banker. The missionaries in Naples, therefore, are
+      men who have themselves found out their work and appointed themselves to
+      do it. The gentleman by whose kindness I was permitted to visit the
+      schools was one of these men,&mdash;the Rev. Mr. Buscarlet, the pastor of
+      the Presbyterian Church in Naples, a Swiss by birth, who had received his
+      education chiefly in Scotland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He accompanied me to the different schools, and as we walked up the long
+      Toledo, and threaded our way through the sprightly Neapolitan crowd, he
+      told me of the origin of the schools, and of the peculiar difficulties
+      encountered in their foundation and maintenance. They are no older than
+      the union of Naples with the Kingdom of Italy, when toleration of
+      Protestantism was decreed by law; and from the first, their managers
+      proceeded upon a principle of perfect openness and candor with the parents
+      who wished to send their children to them. They announced that the
+      children would be taught certain branches of learning, and that the whole
+      Bible would be placed in their hands, to be studied and understood. In
+      spite of this declaration of the Protestant character of the schools, the
+      parents of the children were so anxious to secure them the benefits of
+      education, that they willingly ran the risk of their becoming heretics.
+      They were principally people of the lower classes,&mdash;laborers,
+      hackmen, fishermen, domestics, and very small shopkeepers, but
+      occasionally among them were parents able to send their children to other
+      schools, yet preferring the thorough and conscientious system practiced in
+      these. So the children came, and thanks to the peaceful, uncombative
+      nature of Italian boys, who get on with much less waylaying and thumping
+      and bullying than boys of northern blood, they have not been molested by
+      their companions who still live the wild life of the streets, and they
+      have only once suffered through interference of the priests. On complaint
+      to the authorities the wrong was promptly redressed, and was not again
+      inflicted. Of course these poor little people, picked up out of the
+      vileness and ignorance of a city that had suffered for ages the most
+      degrading oppression, are by no means regenerate yet, but there seems to
+      be great hope for them. Now at least they are taught a reasonable and
+      logical morality&mdash;and who can tell what wonders the novel instruction
+      may not work? They learn for the first time that it is a foolish shame to
+      lie and cheat, and it would scarcely be surprising if some of them were
+      finally persuaded that Honesty is the best Policy&mdash;a maxim that few
+      Italians believe. And here lies the trouble,&mdash;in the unfathomable,
+      disheartening duplicity of the race. The children are not quarrelsome, nor
+      cruel, nor brutal; but the servile defect of falsehood fixed by long
+      generations of slavery in the Italians, is almost ineradicable. The fault
+      is worse in Naples than elsewhere in Italy; but how bad it is everywhere,
+      not merely travellers, but all residents in Italy, must bear witness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first school which we visited was a girls' school, in which some
+      forty-four little women of all ages, from four to fifteen years, were
+      assembled under the charge of a young Corfute girl, an Italian Protestant,
+      who had delegated her authority to different children under her. The small
+      maidens gathered around their chiefs in groups, and read from the book in
+      which they were studying when we appeared. Some allowance must be made for
+      difference of the languages, Italian being logically spelled and easily
+      pronounced; but I certainly never heard American children of their age
+      read nearly so well. They seemed also to have a lively understanding of
+      what they read, and to be greatly interested in the scriptural stories of
+      which their books were made up. They repeated verses from the Bible, and
+      stanzas of poetry, all very eagerly and prettily. As bashfulness is
+      scarcely known to their race, they had no hesitation in showing off their
+      accomplishments before a stranger, and seemed quite delighted with his
+      applause. They were not particularly quiet; perhaps with young Neapolitans
+      that would be impossible. I saw their copy-books, in which the writing was
+      very good, (I am sure the printer would like mine to be as legible,) and
+      the books were kept neat and clean, as were the hands and faces of the
+      children. Taking the children as one goes in the streets of Naples, it
+      would require a day perhaps to find as many clean ones as I saw in these
+      schools, where cleanliness is resolutely insisted upon. Many of the
+      children were ragged; here and there was one hideous with <i>ophthalmia</i>;
+      but there was not a clouded countenance, nor a dirty hand among them. We
+      should have great hopes for a nation of which the children can be taught
+      to wash themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were fourteen pupils in the boys' superior school, where geography,
+      mathematics, linear drawing, French, Italian history, and ancient history
+      were taught. A brief examination showed the boys to be well up in their
+      studies;&mdash;indeed they furnished some recondite information about
+      Baffin's Bay for which I should not myself have liked to be called on
+      suddenly. Their drawing-books were prodigies of neatness, and betrayed
+      that aptness for form and facility of execution which are natural to the
+      Italians. Some of these boys had been in the schools nearly three years;
+      they were nearly all of the class which must otherwise have grown up to
+      hopeless vagabondage; but here they were receiving gratis an education
+      that would fit them for employments wherein trained intellectual capacity
+      is required. If their education went no higher than this, what an advance
+      it would be upon their original condition!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the room devoted to boys of lower grade, I entangled myself in
+      difficulties with a bright-eyed young gentleman, whom I asked if he liked
+      Italian history better than ancient history. He said he liked the latter,
+      especially that of the Romans, much better. "Why, that is strange. I
+      should think an Italian boy would like Italian history best." "But were
+      not the Romans also Italians, Signore?" I blush to say that I basely
+      sneaked out of this trouble by answering that they were not like the
+      Italians of the present day,&mdash;whatever that meant. But indeed all
+      these young persons were startlingly quick with their information, and
+      knowing that I knew very little on any subject with certainty, I think I
+      was wise to refuse all offers to examine them in their studies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We left this school and returned to the Toledo by one of those wonderful
+      little side streets already mentioned, which are forever tumultuous with
+      the oddest Neapolitan life&mdash;with men quarreling themselves purple
+      over small quantities of fish&mdash;with asses braying loud and clear
+      above their discord&mdash;with women roasting pine-cones at charcoal fires&mdash;with
+      children in the agonies of having their hair combed&mdash;with degraded
+      poultry and homeless dogs&mdash;with fruit-stands and green groceries, and
+      the little edifices of ecclesiastical architecture for the sale of
+      lemonade&mdash;with wandering bag-pipers, and herds of nonchalant goats&mdash;with
+      horses, and grooms currying them&mdash;and over all, from vast heights of
+      balcony, with people lazily hanging upon rails and looking down on the
+      riot. Reëntering the stream of the Toledo, it carried us almost to the
+      Museo Borbonico before we again struck aside into one of the smaller
+      streets, whence we climbed quite to the top of one of those incredibly
+      high Neapolitan houses. Here, crossing an open terrace on the roof, we
+      visited three small rooms, in which there were altogether some hundred
+      boys in the first stages of reclamation. They were under the immediate
+      superintendence of Mr. Buscarlet and he seemed to feel the fondest
+      interest in them. Indeed, there was sufficient reason for this: up to a
+      certain point, the Neapolitan children learn so rapidly and willingly that
+      it can hardly be other than a pleasure to teach them. After this, their
+      zeal flags; they know enough; and their parents and friends, far more
+      ignorant than they, are perfectly satisfied with their progress. Then the
+      difficulties of their teachers begin; but here, in these lowest grade
+      schools, they had not yet begun. The boys were still eager to learn, and
+      were ardently following the lead of their teachers. They were little
+      fellows, nearly all, and none of them had been in school more than a year
+      and a half, while some had been there only three or four months. They rose
+      up with "<i>Buon giorno, signori</i>," as we entered, and could hardly be
+      persuaded to lapse back to the duties of life during our stay. They had
+      very good faces, indeed, for the most part, and even the vicious had
+      intellectual brightness. Just and consistent usage has the best influence
+      on them; and one boy was pointed out as quite docile and manageable, whose
+      parents had given him up as incorrigible before he entered the school. As
+      it was, there was something almost pathetic in his good behavior, as being
+      possible to him, but utterly alien to his instincts. The boys of these
+      schools seldom play truant, and they are never severely beaten in school;
+      when quite intractable, notice is given to their parents, and they usually
+      return in a more docile state. It sometimes happens that the boys are
+      taken away by their parents, from one motive or another; but they find
+      their way back again, and are received as if nothing had happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The teacher in the first room here is a handsome young Calabrian, with the
+      gentlest face and manner,&mdash;one of the most efficient teachers under
+      Mr. Buscarlet. The boys had out their Bibles when we entered, and one
+      after another read passages to us. There were children of seven, eight,
+      and nine years, who had been in the school only three months, and who read
+      any part of their Bibles with facility and correctness; of course, before
+      coming to school they had not known one letter from another. The most
+      accomplished scholar was a youngster, named Saggiomo, who had received
+      eighteen months' schooling. He was consequently very quick indeed, and
+      wanted to answer all the hard questions put to the other boys. In fact,
+      all of them were ready enough, and there was a great deal of writhing and
+      snapping of fingers among those who longed to answer some hesitator's
+      question&mdash;just as you see in schools at home. They were examined in
+      geography, and then in Bible history&mdash;particularly Joseph's story.
+      They responded in chorus to all demands on this part of study, and could
+      hardly be quieted sufficiently to give Saggiomo's little brother, aged
+      five, a chance to tell why Joseph's brethren sold him. As soon as he could
+      be heard he piped out: "<i>Perchè Giuseppe aveva dei sogni</i>!" (Because
+      Joseph had dreams.) It was not exactly the right answer, but nobody
+      laughed at the little fellow, though they all roared out in correction
+      when permitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the next room, boys somewhat older were examined in Italian history,
+      and responded correctly and promptly. They were given a sum which they
+      performed in a miraculously short time; and their copy-books, when shown,
+      were equally creditable to them. Their teacher was a Bolognese,&mdash;a
+      naturalized Swiss,&mdash;who had been a soldier, and who maintained strict
+      discipline among his irregulars, without, however, any perceptible
+      terrorism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The amount of work these teachers accomplish in a day is incredible: the
+      boys' school opens at eight in the morning and closes at four, with
+      intermission of an hour at noon. Then in the evening the same men teach a
+      school for adults, and on Sunday have their classes in the Sunday-schools.
+      And this the whole year round. Their pay is not great, being about twenty
+      dollars a month, and they are evidently not wholly self-interested from
+      this fact. The amount of good they accomplish under the direction of their
+      superiors is in proportion to the work done. To appreciate it, the reader
+      must consider that they take the children of the most ignorant and
+      degraded of all the Italians; that they cause them to be washed
+      corporeally, first of all, and then set about cleansing them morally; and
+      having cleared away as much of the inherited corruption of ages as
+      possible, they begin to educate them in the various branches of learning.
+      There is no direct proselyting in the schools, but the Bible is the first
+      study, and the children are constantly examined in it; and the result is
+      at least not superstition. The advance upon the old condition of things is
+      incalculably great; for till the revolution under Garibaldi in 1860, the
+      schools of Naples were all in the hands of the priests or their creatures,
+      and the little learning there imparted was as dangerous as it could well
+      be made. Now these schools are free, the children are honestly and
+      thoroughly taught, and if they are not directly instructed in
+      Protestantism, are at least instructed to associate religion with
+      morality, probably for the first time in their lives. Too much credit
+      cannot be given to the Italian government which has acted in such good
+      faith with the men engaged in this work, protecting them from all
+      interruption and persecution; but after all, the great praise is due to
+      their own wise, unflagging zeal. They have worked unostentatiously, making
+      no idle attacks on time-honored prejudices, but still having a purpose of
+      enlightenment which they frankly avowed. The people whom they seek to
+      benefit judge them by their works, and the result is that they have quite
+      as much before them as they can do. Their discouragements are great. The
+      day's teaching is often undone at home; the boys forget as aptly as they
+      learn; and from the fact that only the baser feelings of fear and interest
+      have ever been appealed to before in the Neapolitans, they have often to
+      build in treacherous places without foundation of good faith or gratitude.
+      Embarrassments for want of adequate funds are sometimes felt also. But no
+      one can study their operations without feeling that success must attend
+      their efforts, with honor to them, and with inestimable benefits to the
+      generation which shall one day help to govern free Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII.&mdash;BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One day it became plain even to our reluctance that we could not stay in
+      Naples forever, and the next morning we took the train for Rome. The Villa
+      Reale put on its most alluring charm to him that ran down before breakfast
+      to thrid once more its pathways bordered with palms and fountains and
+      statues; the bay beside it purpled and twinkled in the light that made
+      silver of the fishermen's sails; far away rose Vesuvius with his nightcap
+      of mist still hanging about his shoulders; all around rang and rattled
+      Naples. The city was never so fair before, nor could ever have been so
+      hard to leave; and at the last moment the landlord of the Hotel Washington
+      must needs add a supreme pang by developing into a poet, and presenting me
+      with a copy of a comedy he had written. The reader who has received at
+      parting from the gentlemanly proprietor of one of our palatial hotels his
+      "Ode on the Steam Elevator," will conceive of the shame and regret with
+      which I thought of having upbraided our landlord about our rooms, of
+      having stickled at small preliminaries concerning our contract for board,
+      and for having altogether treated him as one of the uninspired. Let me do
+      him the tardy justice to say that he keeps, after the Stella d'Oro at
+      Ferrara, the best hotel in Italy, and that his comedy was really very
+      sprightly. It is no small thing to know how to keep a hotel, as we know,
+      and a poet who does it ought to have a double acclaim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody who cares to travel with decency and comfort can take the
+      second-class cars on the road between Naples and Rome, though these are
+      perfectly good everywhere else in Italy. The Papal city makes her
+      influence felt for shabbiness and uncleanliness wherever she can, and her
+      management seems to prevail on this railway. A glance into the
+      second-class cars reconciled us to the first-class,&mdash;which in
+      themselves were bad,&mdash;and we took our places almost contentedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The road passed through the wildest country we had seen in Italy; and
+      presently a rain began to fall and made it drearier than ever. The land
+      was much grown up with thickets of hazel, and was here and there sparsely
+      wooded with oaks. Under these, hogs were feeding upon the acorns, and the
+      wet swine-herds were steaming over fires built at their roots. In some
+      places the forest was quite dense; in other places it fell entirely away,
+      and left the rocky hill-sides bare, and solitary but for the sheep that
+      nibbled at the scanty grass, and the shepherds that leaned upon their
+      crooks and motionlessly stared at us as we rushed by. As we drew near
+      Rome, the scenery grew lonelier yet; the land rose into desolate, sterile,
+      stony heights, without a patch of verdure on their nakedness, and at last
+      abruptly dropped into the gloomy expanse of the Campagna.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The towns along the route had little to interest us in their looks, though
+      at San Germano we caught a glimpse of the famous old convent of
+      Monte-Cassino, perched aloft on its cliff and looking like a part of the
+      rock on which it was built. Fancy now loves to climb that steep acclivity,
+      and wander through the many-volumed library of the ancient Benedictine
+      retreat, and on the whole finds it less fatiguing and certainly less
+      expensive than actual ascent and acquaintance with the monastery would
+      have been. Two Croatian priests, who shared our compartment of the railway
+      carriage, first drew our notice to the place, and were enthusiastic about
+      it for many miles after it was out of sight. What gentle and pleasant men
+      they were, and how hard it seemed that they should be priests and Croats!
+      They told us all about the city of Spalato, where they lived, and gave us
+      such a glowing account of Dalmatian poets and poetry that we began to
+      doubt at last if the seat of literature were not somewhere on the east
+      coast of the Adriatic; and I hope we left them the impression that the
+      literary centre of the world was not a thousand miles from the horse-car
+      office in Harvard Square.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here and there repairs were going forward on the railroad, and most of the
+      laborers were women. They were straight and handsome girls, and moved with
+      a stately grace under the baskets of earth balanced on their heads. Brave
+      black eyes they had, such as love to look and to be looked at; they were
+      not in the least hurried by their work, but desisted from it to gaze at
+      the passengers whenever the train stopped. They all wore their beautiful
+      peasant costume,&mdash;the square white linen head-dress falling to the
+      shoulders, the crimson bodice, and the red scant skirt; and how they
+      contrived to keep themselves so clean at their work, and to look so
+      spectacular in it all, remains one of the many Italian mysteries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another of these mysteries we beheld in the little beggar-boy at Isoletta.
+      He stood at the corner of the station quite mute and motionless during our
+      pause, and made no sign of supplication or entreaty. He let his looks beg
+      for him. He was perfectly beautiful and exceedingly picturesque. Where his
+      body was not quite naked, his jacket and trousers hung in shreds and
+      points; his long hair grew through the top of his hat, and fell over like
+      a plume. Nobody could resist him; people ran out of the cars, at the risk
+      of being left behind, to put coppers into the little dirty hand held
+      languidly out to receive them. The boy thanked none, smiled on none, but
+      looked curiously and cautiously at all, with the quick perception and the
+      illogical conclusions of his class and race. As we started he did not
+      move, but remained in his attitude of listless tranquillity. As we glanced
+      back, the mystery of him seemed to be solved for a moment: he would stand
+      there till he grew up into a graceful, prayerful, pitiless brigand, and
+      then he would rend from travel the tribute now go freely given him. But
+      after all, though his future seemed clear, and he appeared the type of a
+      strange and hardly reclaimable people, he was not quite a solution of the
+      Neapolitan puzzle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIII.&mdash;ROMAN PEARLS.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The first view of the ruins in the Forum brought a keen sense of
+      disappointment. I knew that they could only be mere fragments and rubbish,
+      but I was not prepared to find them so. I learned that I had all along
+      secretly hoped for some dignity of neighborhood, some affectionate
+      solicitude on the part of Nature to redeem these works of Art from the
+      destruction that had befallen them. But in hollows below the level of the
+      dirty cowfield, wandered over by evil-eyed buffaloes, and obscenely
+      defiled by wild beasts of men, there stood here an arch, there a pillar,
+      yonder a cluster of columns crowned by a bit of frieze; and yonder again,
+      a fragment of temple, half-gorged by the façade of a hideous Renaissance
+      church; then a height of vaulted brick-work, and, leading on to the
+      Coliseum, another arch, and then incoherent columns overthrown and mixed
+      with dilapidated walls&mdash;mere phonographic consonants, dumbly
+      representing the past, out of which all vocal glory had departed. The
+      Coliseum itself does not much better express a certain phase of Roman life
+      than does the Arena at Verona; it is larger only to the foot-rule, and it
+      seemed not grander otherwise, while it is vastly more ruinous. Even the
+      Pantheon failed to impress me at first sight, though I found myself
+      disposed to return to it again and again, and to be more and more affected
+      by it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Modern Rome appeared, first and last, hideous. It is the least interesting
+      town in Italy, and the architecture is hopelessly ugly&mdash;especially
+      the architecture of the churches. The Papal city contrives at the
+      beginning to hide the Imperial city from your thought, as it hides it in
+      such a great degree from your eye, and old Rome only occurs to you in a
+      sort of stupid wonder over the depth at which it is buried. I confess that
+      I was glad to get altogether away from it after a first look at the ruins
+      in the Forum, and to take refuge in the Conservatorio delle Mendicanti,
+      where we were charged to see the little Virginia G. The Conservatorio,
+      though a charitable institution, is not so entirely meant for mendicants
+      as its name would imply, but none of the many young girls there were the
+      children of rich men. They were often enough of parentage actually hungry
+      and ragged, but they were often also the daughters of honest poor folk,
+      who paid a certain sum toward their maintenance and education in the
+      Conservatorio. Such was the case with little Virginia, whose father was at
+      Florence, doubly impeded from seeing her by the fact that he had fought
+      against the Pope for the Republic of 1848, and by the other fact that he
+      had since wrought the Pope a yet deadlier injury by turning Protestant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ringing a garrulous bell that continued to jingle some time after we were
+      admitted, we found ourselves in a sort of reception-room, of the general
+      quality of a cellar, and in the presence of a portress who was perceptibly
+      preserved from mold only by the great pot of coals that stood in the
+      centre of the place. Some young girls, rather pretty than not, attended
+      the ancient woman, and kindly acted as the ear-trumpet through which our
+      wishes were conveyed to her mind. The Conservatorio was not, so far, as
+      conventual as we had imagined it; but as the gentleman of the party was
+      strongly guarded by female friends, and asked at once to see the Superior,
+      he concluded that there was, perhaps, something so unusually reassuring to
+      the recluses in his appearance and manner that they had not thought it
+      necessary to behave very rigidly. It later occurred to this gentleman that
+      the promptness with which the pretty mendicants procured him an interview
+      with the Superior had a flavor of self-interest in; and that he who came
+      to the Conservatorio in the place of a father might have been for a moment
+      ignorantly viewed as a yet dearer and tenderer possibility. From whatever
+      danger there was in this error the Superior soon appeared to rescue him,
+      and we were invited into a more ceremonious apartment on the first floor,
+      and the little Virginia was sent for. The visit of the strangers caused a
+      tumult and interest in the quiet old Conservatorio of which it is hard to
+      conceive now, and the excitement grew tremendous when it appeared that,
+      the signori were Americani and Protestanti. We imparted a savor of novelty
+      and importance to Virginia herself, and when she appeared, the Superior
+      and her assistant looked at her with no small curiosity and awe, of which
+      the little maiden instantly became conscious, and began to take advantage.
+      Accompanying us over the building and through the grounds, she cut her
+      small friends wherever she met them, and was not more than respectful to
+      the assistant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was from an instinct of hospitality that we were shown the
+      Conservatorio, and instructed in regard to all its purposes. We saw the
+      neat dormitories with their battalions of little white beds; the kitchen
+      with its gigantic coppers for boiling broth, and the refectory with the
+      smell of the frugal dinners of generations of mendicants in it. The
+      assistant was very proud of the neatness of every thing, and was glad to
+      talk of that, or, indeed, any thing else. It appeared that the girls were
+      taught reading, writing, and plain sewing when they were young, and that
+      the Conservatorio was chiefly sustained by pious contributions and
+      bequests. Any lingering notion of the conventual character of the place
+      was dispelled by the assistant's hurrying to say, "And when we can get the
+      poor things well married, we are glad to do so."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But how does any one ever see them?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Eh! well, that is easily managed. Once a month we dress the marriageable
+      girls in their best, and take them for a walk in the street. If an honest
+      young man falls in love with one of them going by, he comes to the
+      Superior, and describes her as well as he can, and demands to see her. She
+      is called, and if both are pleased, the marriage is arranged. You see it
+      is a very simple affair."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there was, to the assistant's mind, nothing odd in the whole business,
+      insomuch that I felt almost ashamed of marveling at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Issuing from the backdoor of the convent, we ascended by stairs and
+      gateways into garden spaces, chiefly planted with turnips and the like
+      poor but respectable vegetables, and curiously adorned with fragments of
+      antique statuary, and here and there a fountain in a corner, trickling
+      from moss-grown rocks, and falling into a trough of travertine, about the
+      feet of some poor old goddess or Virtue who had forgotten what her name
+      was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once, the assistant said, speaking as if the thing had been within her
+      recollection, though it must have been centuries before, the antiquities
+      of the Conservatorio were much more numerous and striking; but they were
+      now removed to the different museums. Nevertheless they had still a
+      beautiful prospect left, which we were welcome to enjoy if we would follow
+      her; and presently, to our surprise, we stepped from the garden upon the
+      roof of the Temple of Peace. The assistant had not boasted without reason:
+      away before us stretched the Campagna, a level waste, and empty, but for
+      the umbrella-palms that here and there waved like black plumes upon it,
+      and for the arched lengths of the acqueducts that seemed to stalk down
+      from the ages across the melancholy expanse like files of giants, with now
+      and then a ruinous gap in the line, as if one had fallen out weary by the
+      way. The city all around us glittered asleep in the dim December sunshine,
+      and far below us,&mdash;on the length of the Forum over which the Appian
+      Way stretched from the Capitoline Hill under the Arch of Septimius Severus
+      and the Arch of Titus to the Arch of Constantine, leaving the Coliseum on
+      the left, and losing itself in the foliage of the suburbs,&mdash;the Past
+      seemed struggling to emerge from the ruins, and to reshape and animate
+      itself anew. The effort was more successful than that which we had helped
+      the Past to make when standing on the level of the Forum; but Antiquity
+      must have been painfully conscious of the incongruity of the red-legged
+      Zouaves wandering over the grass, and of the bewildered tourists trying to
+      make her out with their Murrays.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a day or two after this we returned again to our Conservatorio, where
+      we found that the excitement created by our first visit had been kept
+      fully alive by the events attending the photographing of Virginia for her
+      father. Not only Virginia was there to receive us, but her grandmother
+      also&mdash;an old, old woman, dumb through some infirmity of age, who
+      could only weep and smile in token of her content. I think she had but a
+      dim idea, after all, of what went on beyond the visible fact of Virginia's
+      photograph, and that she did not quite understand how we could cause it to
+      be taken for her son. She was deeply compassionated by the Superior, who
+      rendered her pity with a great deal of gesticulation, casting up her eyes,
+      shrugging her shoulders, and sighing grievously. But the assistant's
+      cheerfulness could not be abated even by the spectacle of extreme age; and
+      she made the most of the whole occasion, recounting with great minuteness
+      all the incidents of the visit to the photographer's, and running to get
+      the dress Virginia sat in, that we might see how exactly it was given in
+      the picture. Then she gave us much discourse concerning the Conservatorio
+      and its usages, and seemed not to wish us to think that life there was
+      altogether eventless. "Here we have a little amusement also," she said.
+      "The girls have their relatives to visit them sometimes, and then in the
+      evening they dance. Oh, they enjoy themselves! I am half old (<i>mezzo-vecchia</i>).
+      I am done with these things. But for youth, always kept down, something
+      lively is wanted."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we took leave of these simple folks, we took leave of almost the only
+      natural and unprepared aspect of Italian life which we were to see in
+      Rome; but we did not know this at the time.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, it seems to me that all moisture of romance and adventure has been
+      wellnigh sucked out of travel in Italy, and that compared with the old
+      time, when the happy wayfarer journeyed by vettura through the innumerable
+      little states of the Peninsula,&mdash;halted every other mile to show his
+      passport, and robbed by customs officers in every color of shabby uniform
+      and every variety of cocked hat,&mdash;the present railroad period is one
+      of but stale and insipid flavor. Much of local life and color remains, of
+      course; but the hurried traveller sees little of it, and, passed from one
+      grand hotel to another, without material change in the cooking or the
+      methods of extortion, he might nearly as well remain at Paris. The
+      Italians, who live to so great extent by the travel through their country,
+      learn our abominable languages and minister to our detestable comfort and
+      propriety, till we have slight chance to know them as we once could,&mdash;musical,
+      picturesque, and full of sweet, natural knaveries, graceful falsehood, and
+      all uncleanness. Rome really belongs to the Anglo-Saxon nations, and the
+      Pope and the past seem to be carried on entirely for our diversion. Every
+      thing is systematized as thoroughly as in a museum where the objects are
+      all ticketed; and our prejudices are consulted even down to alms-giving,
+      Honest Beppo is gone from the steps in the Piazza di Spagna, and now the
+      beggars are labeled like policemen, with an immense plate bearing the
+      image of St. Peter, so that you may know you give to a worthy person when
+      you bestow charity on one of them, and not, alas! to some abandoned
+      impostor, as in former days. One of these highly recommended mendicants
+      gave the last finish to the system, and begged of us in English! No
+      custodian will answer you, if he can help it, in the Italian which he
+      speaks so exquisitely, preferring to speak bad French instead, and in all
+      the shops on the Corso the English tongue is <i>de rigueur</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After our dear friends at the Conservatorio, I think we found one of the
+      most simple and interesting of Romans in the monk who showed us the
+      Catacombs of St. Sebastian. These catacombs, he assured us, were not
+      restored like those of St. Calixtus, but were just as the martyrs left
+      them; and, as I do not remember to have read anywhere that they are formed
+      merely of long, low, narrow, wandering underground passages, lined on
+      either side with tombs in tiers like berths on a steamer, and expanding
+      here and there into small square chambers, bearing the traces of ancient
+      frescos, and evidently used as chapels,&mdash;I venture to offer the
+      information here. The reader is to keep in his mind a darkness broken by
+      the light of wax tapers, a close smell, and crookedness and narrowness, or
+      he cannot realize the catacombs as they are in fact. Our monkish guide,
+      before entering the passage leading from the floor of the church to the
+      tombs, in which there was still some "fine small dust" of the martyrs,
+      warned us that to touch it was to incur the penalty of excommunication,
+      and then gently craved pardon for having mentioned the fact. But, indeed,
+      it was only to persons who showed a certain degree of reverence that these
+      places were now exhibited; for some Protestants who had been permitted
+      there had stolen handfuls of the precious ashes, merely to throw away. I
+      assured him that I thought them beasts to do it; and I was afterwards
+      puzzled to know what should attract their wantonness in the remnants of
+      mortality, hardly to be distinguished from the common earth out of which
+      the catacombs were dug.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Returning to the church above we found, kneeling before one of the altars,
+      two pilgrims,&mdash;a man and a woman. The latter was habited in a
+      nun-like dress of black, and the former in a long pilgrim's coat of coarse
+      blue stuff. He bore a pilgrim's staff in his hand, and showed under his
+      close hood a fine, handsome, reverent face, full of a sort of tender awe,
+      touched with the pathos of penitence. In attendance upon the two was a
+      dapper little silk-hatted man, with rogue so plainly written in his
+      devotional countenance that I was not surprised to be told that he was a
+      species of spiritual <i>valet de place</i>, whose occupation it was to
+      attend pilgrims on their tour to the Seven Churches at which these
+      devotees pray in Rome, and there to direct their orisons and join in them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not to the pilgrims, but to the heretics that the monk now
+      uncovered the precious marble slab on which Christ stood when he met Peter
+      flying from Rome and turned him back. You are shown the prints of the
+      divine feet, which the conscious stone received and keeps forever; and
+      near at hand is one of the arrows with which St. Sebastian was shot. We
+      looked at these things critically, having to pay for the spectacle; but
+      the pilgrims and their guide were all faith and wonder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember seeing nothing else so finely superstitious at Rome. In a
+      chapel near the Church of St. John Lateran are, as is well known, the
+      marble steps which once belonged to Pilate's house, and which the Saviour
+      is said to have ascended when he went to trial before Pilate. The steps
+      are protected against the wear and tear of devotion by a stout casing of
+      wood, and they are constantly covered with penitents, who ascend and
+      descend them upon their knees. Most of the pious people whom I saw in this
+      act were children, and the boys enjoyed it with a good deal of giggling,
+      as a very amusing feat. Some old and haggard women gave the scene all the
+      dignity which it possessed; but certain well-dressed ladies and gentlemen
+      were undeniably awkward and absurd, and I was led to doubt if there were
+      not an incompatibility between the abandon of simple faith and the
+      respectability of good clothes.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In all other parts of Italy one hears constant talk among travellers of
+      the malaria at Rome, and having seen a case of Roman fever, I know it is a
+      thing not to be trifled with. But in Rome itself the malaria is laughed at
+      by the foreign residents,&mdash;who, nevertheless, go out of the city in
+      midsummer. The Romans, to the number of a hundred thousand or so, remain
+      there the whole year round, and I am bound to say I never saw a healthier,
+      robuster-looking population. The cheeks of the French soldiers, too, whom
+      we met at every turn, were red as their trousers, and they seemed to
+      flourish on the imputed unwholesomeness of the atmosphere. All at Rome are
+      united in declaring that the fever exists at Naples, and that sometimes
+      those who have taken it there come and die in Rome, in order to give the
+      city a bad name; and I think this very likely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rome is certainly dirty, however, though there is a fountain in every
+      square, and you are never out of the sound of falling water. The Corso and
+      some of the principal streets do not so much impress you with their filth
+      as with their dullness; but that part of the city where some of the most
+      memorable relics of antiquity are to be found is unimaginably vile. The
+      least said of the state of the archways of the Coliseum the soonest
+      mended; and I have already spoken of the Forum. The streets near the
+      Theatre of Pompey are almost impassable, and the so-called House of Rienzi
+      is a stable, fortified against approach by a <i>fossé</i> of excrement. A
+      noisome smell seems to be esteemed the most appropriate offering to the
+      memory of ancient Rome, and I am not sure that the moderns are mistaken in
+      this. In the rascal streets in the neighborhood of the most august ruins,
+      the people turn round to stare at the stranger as he passes them; they are
+      all dirty, and his decency must be no less a surprise to them than the
+      neatness of the French soldiers amid all the filth is a puzzle to him. We
+      wandered about a long time in such places one day, looking for the
+      Tarpeian Rock, less for Tarpeia's sake than for the sake of Miriam and
+      Donatello and the Model. There are two Tarpeian rocks, between which the
+      stranger takes his choice; and we must have chosen the wrong one, for it
+      seemed but a shallow gulf compared to that in our fancy. We were somewhat
+      disappointed; but then Niagara disappoints one; and as for Mont Blanc....
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It is worth while for every one who goes to Rome to visit the Church of
+      St. Peter's; but it is scarcely worth while for me to describe it, or for
+      every one to go up into the bronze globe on the top of the cupola. In
+      fact, this is a great labor, and there is nothing to be seen from the
+      crevices in the ball which cannot be far more comfortably seen from the
+      roof of the church below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The companions of our ascent to the latter point were an English lady and
+      gentleman, brother and sister, and both Catholics, as they at once told
+      us. The lady and myself spoke for some time in the Tuscan tongue before we
+      discovered that neither of us was Italian, after which we paid each other
+      some handsome compliments upon fluency and perfection of accent. The
+      gentleman was a pleasant purple porpoise from the waters of Chili, whither
+      he had wandered from the English coasts in early youth. He had two leading
+      ideas: one concerned the Pope, to whom he had just been presented, and
+      whom he viewed as the best and blandest of beings; the other related to
+      his boy, then in England, whom he called Jack Spratt, and considered the
+      grandest and greatest of boys. With the view from the roof of the church
+      this gentleman did not much trouble himself. He believed Jack Spratt could
+      ride up to the roof where we stood on his donkey. As to the great bronze
+      globe which we were hurrying to enter he seemed to regard it merely as a
+      rival in rotundity, and made not the slightest motion to follow us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I should be loth to vex the reader with any description of the scene
+      before us and beneath us, even if I could faithfully portray it. But I
+      recollect, with a pleasure not to be left unrecorded, the sweetness of the
+      great fountain playing in the square before the church, and the harmony in
+      which the city grew in every direction from it, like an emanation from its
+      music, till the last house sank away into the pathetic solitude of the
+      Campagna, with nothing beyond but the snow-capped mountains lighting up
+      the remotest distance. At the same moment I experienced a rapture in
+      reflecting that I had underpaid three hackmen during my stay in Rome, and
+      thus contributed to avenge my race for ages of oppression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The vastness of St. Peter's itself is best felt in looking down upon the
+      interior from the gallery that surrounds the inside of the dome, and in
+      comparing one's own littleness with the greatness of all the neighboring
+      mosaics. But as to the beauty of the temple, I could not find it without
+      or within.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VI.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In Rome one's fellow-tourists are a constant source of gratification and
+      surprise. I thought that American travellers were by no means the most
+      absurd among those we saw, nor even the loudest in their approval of the
+      Eternal City. A certain order of German greenness affords, perhaps, the
+      pleasantest pasturage for the ruminating mind. For example, at the Villa
+      Ludovisi there was, beside numerous Englishry in detached bodies, a troop
+      of Germans, chiefly young men, frugally pursuing the Sehenswürdigkeiten in
+      the social manner of their nation. They took their enjoyment very noisily,
+      and wrangled together with furious amiability as they looked at Guercino's
+      "Aurora." Then two of them parted from the rest, and went to a little
+      summer-house in the gardens, while the others followed us to the top of
+      the Casino. There they caught sight of their friends in the arbor, and the
+      spectacle appeared to overwhelm them. They bowed, they took off their
+      hats, they waved their handkerchiefs. It was not enough: one young fellow
+      mounted on the balustrade of the roof at his neck's risk, lifted his hat
+      on his cane and flourished it in greeting to the heart's-friends in the
+      arbor, from whom he had parted two minutes before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In strange contrast to the producer of this enthusiasm, so pumped and so
+      unmistakably mixed with beer, a fat and pallid Englishwoman sat in a chair
+      upon the roof and coldly, coldly sketched the lovely landscape. And she
+      and the blonde young English girl beside her pronounced a little dialogue
+      together, which I give, because I saw that they meant it for the public:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>The Young Girl</i>.&mdash;I wonder, you knoa, you don't draw-ow St.
+      Petuh's!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>The Artist</i>.&mdash;O ah, you knoa, I can draw-ow St. Petuh's from so
+      mennee powints.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am afraid that the worst form of American greenness appears abroad in a
+      desire to be perfectly up in critical appreciation of the arts, and to
+      approach the great works in the spirit of the connoisseur. The ambition is
+      not altogether a bad one. Still I could not help laughing at a
+      fellow-countryman when he told me that he had not yet seen Raphael's
+      "Transfiguration," because he wished to prepare his mind for understanding
+      the original by first looking at all the copies he could find.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The Basilica San Paolo fuori le Mura surpasses every thing in splendor of
+      marble and costly stone&mdash;porphyry, malachite, alabaster&mdash;and
+      luxury of gilding that is to be seen at Rome. But I chiefly remember it
+      because on the road that leads to it, through scenes as quiet and peaceful
+      as if history had never known them, lies the Protestant graveyard in which
+      Keats is buried. Quite by chance the driver mentioned it, pointing in the
+      direction of the cemetery with his whip. We eagerly dismounted and
+      repaired to the gate, where we were met by the son of the sexton, who
+      spoke English through the beauteous line of a curved Hebrew nose. Perhaps
+      a Christian could not be found in Rome to take charge of these heretic
+      graves, though Christians can be got to do almost any thing there for
+      money. However, I do not think a Catholic would have kept the place in
+      better order, or more intelligently understood our reverent curiosity. It
+      was the new burial-ground which we had entered, and which is a little to
+      the right of the elder cemetery. It was very beautiful and tasteful in
+      every way; the names upon the stones were chiefly English and Scotch, with
+      here and there an American's. But affection drew us only to the prostrate
+      tablet inscribed with the words, "Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cor Cordium," and
+      then we were ready to go to the grave of him for whom we all feel so deep
+      a tenderness. The grave of John Keats is one of few in the old
+      burying-ground, and lies almost in the shadow of the pyramid of Caius
+      Cestius; and I could not help thinking of the wonder the Roman would have
+      felt could he have known into what unnamable richness and beauty his Greek
+      faith had ripened in the heart of the poor poet, where it was mixed with
+      so much sorrow. Doubtless, in his time, a prominent citizen like Caius
+      Cestius was a leading member of the temple in his neighborhood, and
+      regularly attended sacrifice: it would have been but decent; and yet I
+      fancied that a man immersed like him in affairs might have learned with
+      surprise the inner and more fragrant meaning of the symbols with the
+      outside of which his life was satisfied; and I was glad to reflect that in
+      our day such a thing is impossible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The grave of our beloved poet is sunken to the level of the common earth,
+      and is only marked by the quaintly lettered, simple stone bearing the
+      famous epitaph. While at Rome I heard talk of another and grander monument
+      which some members of the Keats family were to place over the dust of
+      their great kinsman. But, for one, I hope this may never be done, even
+      though the original stone should also be left there, as was intended. Let
+      the world still keep unchanged this shrine, to which it can repair with at
+      once pity and tenderness and respect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A rose-tree and some sweet-smelling bushes grew upon the grave, and the
+      roses were in bloom. We asked leave to take one of them; but at last could
+      only bring ourselves to gather some of the fallen petals. Our Hebrew guide
+      was willing enough, and unconsciously set us a little example of
+      wantonness; for while he listened to our explanation of the mystery which
+      had puzzled him ever since he had learned English, namely, why the stone
+      should say "<i>writ</i> on water," and not <i>written</i>, he kept
+      plucking mechanically at one of the fragrant shrubs, pinching away the
+      leaves, and rending the tender twig, till I, remembering the
+      once-sensitive dust from which it grew, waited for the tortured tree to
+      cry out to him with a voice of words and blood, "Perchè mi schianti?"
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VIII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It seems to me that a candid person will wish to pause a little before
+      condemning Gibson's colored statues. They have been grossly
+      misrepresented. They do not impress one at all as wax-work, and there is
+      great wrong in saying that their tinted nakedness suggests impurity any
+      more than the white nakedness of other statues. The coloring is quite
+      conventional; the flesh is merely warmed with the hue representing life;
+      the hair is always a very delicate yellow, the eyes a tender violet, and
+      there is no other particularization of color; a fillet binding the hair
+      may be gilded,&mdash;the hem of a robe traced in blue. I, who had just
+      come from seeing the fragments of antique statuary in Naples Museum,
+      tinted in the same way, could not feel that there was any thing
+      preposterous in Gibson's works, and I am not ashamed to say that they gave
+      me pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we passed, in his studio, from one room to another, the workman who
+      showed the marbles surprised and delighted us by asking if we would like
+      to see the sculptor, and took us up into the little room where Gibson
+      worked. He was engaged upon a bass-relief,&mdash;a visit of Psyche to the
+      Zephyrs, or something equally aërial and mythological,&mdash;and received
+      us very simply and naturally, and at once began with some quaint talk
+      about the subject in hand. When we mentioned our pleasure in his colored
+      marbles we touched the right spring, and he went on to speak of his
+      favorite theory with visible delight, making occasional pauses to bestow a
+      touch on the bass-relief, and coming back to his theme with that
+      self-corroborative "Yes!" of his, which Hawthorne has immortalized. He was
+      dressed with extraordinary slovenliness and indifference to clothes, had
+      no collar, I think, and evidently did not know what he had on. Every thing
+      about him bespoke the utmost unconsciousness and democratic plainness of
+      life, so that I could readily believe a story I heard of him. Having dined
+      the greater part of his life in Roman restaurants where it is but
+      wholesome to go over your plate, glass, spoon, and knife and fork with
+      your napkin before using them, the great sculptor had acquired such habits
+      of neatness that at table in the most aristocratic house in England he
+      absent-mindedly went through all that ceremony of cleansing and wiping. It
+      is a story they tell in Rome, where every body is anecdoted, and not
+      always so good-naturedly.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IX.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      One Sunday afternoon we went with some artistic friends to visit the
+      studio of the great German painter, Overbeck; and since I first read
+      Uhland I have known no pleasure so illogical as I felt in looking at this
+      painter's drawings. In the sensuous heart of objective Italy he treats the
+      themes of mediæval Catholicism with the most subjective feeling, and I
+      thought I perceived in his work the enthusiasm which led many Protestant
+      German painters and poets of the romantic school back into the twilight of
+      the Romish faith, in the hope that they might thus realize to themselves
+      something of the earnestness which animated the elder Christian artists.
+      Overbeck's work is beautiful, but it is unreal, and expresses the
+      sentiment of no time; as the work of the romantic German poets seems
+      without relation to any world men ever lived in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Walking from the painter's house, two of us parted with the rest on the
+      steps of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, and pursued our stroll
+      through the gate of San Lorenzo out upon the Campagna, which tempts and
+      tempts the sojourner at Rome, until at last he must go and see&mdash;if it
+      will give him the fever. And, alas! there I caught the Roman fever&mdash;the
+      longing that burns one who has once been in Rome to go again&mdash;that
+      will not be cured by all the cool contemptuous things he may think or say
+      of the Eternal City; that fills him with fond memories of its fascination,
+      and makes it forever desired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We walked far down the dusty road beyond the city walls, and then struck
+      out from the highway across the wild meadows of the Campagna. They were
+      weedy and desolate, seamed by shaggy grass-grown ditches, and deeply
+      pitted with holes made in search for catacombs. There was here and there a
+      farm-house amid the wide lonesomeness, but oftener a round, hollow,
+      roofless tomb, from which the dust and memory of the dead had long been
+      blown away, and through the top of which&mdash;fringed and overhung with
+      grasses, and opening like a great eye&mdash;the evening sky looked
+      marvelously sad. One of the fields was full of grim, wide-horned cattle,
+      and in another there were four or five buffaloes lying down and chewing
+      their cuds,&mdash;holding their heads horizontally in the air, and with an
+      air of gloomy wickedness which nothing could exceed in their cruel black
+      eyes, glancing about in visible pursuit of some object to toss and gore.
+      There were also many canebrakes, in which the wind made a mournful
+      rustling after the sun had set in golden glitter on the roofs of the Roman
+      churches and the transparent night had fallen upon the scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all our ramble we met not a soul, and I scarcely know what it is makes
+      this walk upon the Campagna one of my vividest recollections of Rome,
+      unless it be the opportunity it gave me to weary myself upon that
+      many-memoried ground as freely as if it had been a woods-pasture in Ohio.
+      Nature, where history was so august, was perfectly simple and motherly,
+      and did so much to make me at home, that, as the night thickened and we
+      plunged here and there into ditches and climbed fences, and struggled,
+      heavy-footed, back through the suburbs to the city gate, I felt as if half
+      my boyhood had been passed upon the Campagna.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      X.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Pasquino, like most other great people, is not very interesting upon close
+      approach. There is no trace now in his aspect to show that he has ever
+      been satirical; but the humanity that the sculptor gave him is
+      imperishable, though he has lost all character as a public censor. The
+      torso is at first glance nothing but a shapeless mass of stone, but the
+      life can never die out of that which has been shaped by art to the
+      likeness of a man, and a second look restores the lump to full possession
+      of form and expression. For this reason I lament that statues should ever
+      be restored except by sympathy and imagination.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XI.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Regarding the face of Pompey's statue in the Spada Palace, I was more
+      struck than ever with a resemblance to American politicians which I had
+      noted in all the Roman statues. It is a type of face not now to be found
+      in Rome, but frequent enough here, and rather in the South than in the
+      North. Pompey was like the pictures of so many Southern Congressmen that I
+      wondered whether race had not less to do with producing types than had
+      similarity of circumstances; whether a republicanism based upon slavery
+      could not so far assimilate character as to produce a common aspect in
+      people widely separated by time and creeds, but having the same
+      unquestioned habits of command, and the same boundless and unscrupulous
+      ambition.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      When the Tiber, according to its frequent habit, rises and inundates the
+      city, the Pantheon is one of the first places to be flooded&mdash;the
+      sacristan told us. The water climbs above the altar-tops, sapping, in its
+      recession, the cement of the fine marbles which incrust the columns, so
+      that about their bases the pieces have to be continually renewed. Nothing
+      vexes you so much in the Pantheon as your consciousness of these and other
+      repairs. Bad as ruin is, I think I would rather have the old temple
+      ruinous in every part than restored as you find it. The sacristan felt the
+      wrongs of the place keenly, and said, referring to the removal of the
+      bronze roof, which took place some centuries ago, "They have robbed us of
+      every thing" (<i>Ci hanno levato tutto</i>); as if he and the Pantheon
+      were of one blood, and he had suffered personal hurt in its spoliation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What a sense of the wildness everywhere lurking about Rome we had given us
+      by that group of peasants who had built a fire of brushwood almost within
+      the portico of the Pantheon, and were cooking their supper at it, the
+      light of the flames luridly painting their swarthy faces!
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XIII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Poor little Numero Cinque Via del Gambero has seldom, I imagine, known so
+      violent a sensation as that it experienced when, on the day of the
+      Immaculate Conception, the Armenian Archbishop rolled up to the door in
+      his red coach. The master of the house had always seemed to like us; now
+      he appeared with profound respect suffusing, as it were, his whole being,
+      and announced, "Signore, it is Monsignore come to take you to the Sistine
+      Chapel in his carriage," and drew himself up in a line, as much like a
+      series of serving-men as possible, to let us pass out. There was a private
+      carriage for the ladies near that of Monsignore, for he had already
+      advertised us that the sex were not permitted to ride in the red coach. As
+      they appeared, however, he renewed his expressions of desolation at being
+      deprived of their company, and assured them of his good-will with a
+      multiplicity of smiles and nods, intermixed with shrugs of recurrence to
+      his poignant regret. But! In fine, it was forbidden!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monsignore was in full costume, with his best ecclesiastical clothes on,
+      and with his great gold chain about his neck. The dress was richer than
+      that of the western archbishops; and the long white beard of Monsignore
+      made him look much more like a Scriptural monsignore than these. He
+      lacked, perhaps, the fine spiritual grace of his brother, the Archbishop
+      at Venice, to whose letter of introduction we owed his acquaintance and
+      untiring civilities; but if a man cannot be plump and spiritual, he can be
+      plump and pleasant, as Monsignore was to the last degree. He enlivened our
+      ride with discourse about the Armenians at Venice, equally beloved of us;
+      and, arrived at the Sistine Chapel, he marshaled the ladies before him,
+      and won them early entrance through the crowd of English people crushing
+      one another at the door. Then he laid hold upon the captain of the Swiss
+      Guard, who was swift to provide them with the best places; and in nowise
+      did he seem one of the uninfluential and insignificant priests that About
+      describes the archbishops at Rome to be. According to this lively author,
+      a Swiss guard was striking back the crowd on some occasion with the butt
+      of his halberd, and smote a cardinal on the breast. He instantly dropped
+      upon his knees, with "Pardon, Eminenza! I thought it was a monsignore!"
+      Even the chief of these handsome fellows had nothing but respect and
+      obedience for our Archbishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gentlemen present were separated from the ladies, and in a very narrow
+      space outside of the chapel men of every nation were penned up together.
+      All talked&mdash;several priests as loudly as the rest. But the rudest
+      among them were certain Germans, who not only talked but stood upon a seat
+      to see better, and were ordered down by one of the Swiss with a fierce "<i>Giù,
+      signore, giù</i>!" Otherwise the guard kept good order in the chapel, and
+      were no doubt as useful and genuine as any thing about the poor old Pope.
+      What gorgeous fellows they were, and, as soldiers, how absurd! The weapons
+      they bore were as obsolete as the excommunication. It was amusing to pass
+      one of these play-soldiers on guard at the door of the Vatican&mdash;tall,
+      straight, beautiful, superb, with his halberd on his shoulder&mdash;and
+      then come to a real warrior outside, a little, ugly, red-legged French
+      sentinel, with his Minié on his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Except for the singing of the Pope's choir&mdash;which was angelically
+      sweet, and heavenly far above all praise&mdash;the religious ceremonies
+      affected me, like all others of that faith, as tedious and empty. Each of
+      the cardinals, as he entered the chapel, blew a sonorous nose; and was
+      received standing by his brother prelates&mdash;a grotesque company of
+      old-womanish old men in gaudy gowns. One of the last to come was
+      Antonelli, who has the very wickedest face in the world. He sat with his
+      eyes fastened upon his book, but obviously open at every pore to all that
+      went on about him. As he passed out he cast gleaming, terrible, sidelong
+      looks upon the people, full of hate and guile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From where I stood I saw the Pope's face only in profile: it was gentle
+      and benign enough, but not great in expression, and the smile on it almost
+      degenerated into a simper. His Holiness had a cold; and his <i>recitative</i>,
+      though full, was not smooth. He was all priest when, in the midst of the
+      service, he hawked, held his handkerchief up before his face, a little way
+      off, and ruthlessly spat in it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      FORZA MAGGIORE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I imagine that Grossetto is not a town much known to travel, for it is
+      absent from all the guide-books I have looked at. However, it is chief in
+      the Maremma, where sweet Pia de' Tolommei languished and perished of the
+      poisonous air and her love's cruelty, and where, so many mute centuries
+      since, the Etrurian cities flourished and fell. Further, one may say that
+      Grossetto is on the diligence road from Civita Vecchia to Leghorn, and
+      that in the very heart of the place there is a lovely palm-tree, rare, if
+      not sole, in that latitude. This palm stands in a well-sheltered, dull
+      little court, out of every thing's way, and turns tenderly toward the wall
+      that shields it on the north. It has no other company but a beautiful
+      young girl, who leans out of a window high over its head, and I have no
+      doubt talks with it. At the moment we discovered the friends, the maiden
+      was looking pathetically to the northward, while the palm softly stirred
+      and opened its plumes, as a bird does when his song is finished; and there
+      is very little question but it had just been singing to her that song of
+      which the palms are so fond,&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
+  Im Norden auf kahler Höh'."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Grossetto does her utmost to hide the secret of this tree's existence, as
+      if a hard, matter-of-fact place ought to be ashamed of a sentimentality of
+      the kind. It pretended to be a very worldly town, and tried to keep us in
+      the neighborhood of its cathedral, where the caffè and shops are, and
+      where, in the evening, four or five officers of the garrison clinked their
+      sabres on the stones, and promenaded up and down, and as many ladies
+      shopped for gloves; and as many citizens sat at the principal caffè and
+      drank black coffee. This was lively enough; and we knew that the citizens
+      were talking of the last week's news and the Roman question; that the
+      ladies were really looking for loves, not gloves; that such of the
+      officers as had no local intrigue to keep their hearts at rest were
+      terribly bored, and longed for Florence or Milan or Turin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides the social charms of her piazza, Grossetto put forth others of an
+      artistic nature. The cathedral was very old and very beautiful,&mdash;built
+      of alternate lines of red and white marble, and lately restored in the
+      best spirit of fidelity and reverence. But it was not open, and we were
+      obliged to turn from it to the group of statuary in the middle of the
+      piazza, representative of the Maremma and Family returning thanks to the
+      Grand Duke Leopold III. of Tuscany for his goodness in causing her swamps
+      to be drained. The Maremma and her children are arrayed in the scant
+      draperies of Allegory, but the Grand Duke is fully dressed, and is shown
+      looking down with some surprise at their figures, and with a visible doubt
+      of the propriety of their public appearance in that state.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was also a Museum at Grossetto, and I wonder what was in it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wall of the town was perfect yet, though the moat at its feet had been
+      so long dry that it was only to be known from the adjacent fields by the
+      richness of its soil. The top of the wall had been leveled, and planted
+      with shade, and turned into a peaceful promenade, like most of such
+      mediæval defenses in Italy; though I am not sure that a little military
+      life did not still linger about a bastion here and there. From somewhere,
+      when we strolled out early in the morning, to walk upon the wall, there
+      came to us a throb of drums; but I believe that the only armed men we saw,
+      beside the officers in the piazza, were the numerous sportsmen resorting
+      at that season to Grossetto for the excellent shooting in the marshes. All
+      the way to Florence we continued to meet them and their dogs; and our inn
+      at Grossetto overflowed with abundance of game. On the kitchen floor and
+      in the court were heaps of larks, pheasants, quails, and beccafichi, at
+      which a troop of scullion-boys constantly plucked, and from which the
+      great, noble, beautiful, white-aproned cook forever fried, stewed,
+      broiled, and roasted. We lived chiefly upon these generous birds during
+      our sojourn, and found, when we attempted to vary our bill of fare, that
+      the very genteel waiter attending us had few distinct ideas beyond them.
+      He was part of the repairs and improvements which that hostelry had
+      recently undergone, and had evidently come in with the four-pronged forks,
+      the chromo-lithographs of Victor Emanuel, Garibaldi, Solferino, and
+      Magenta in the large dining-room, and the iron stove in the small one. He
+      had nothing, evidently, in common with the brick floors of the
+      bed-chambers, and the ancient rooms with great fire-places. He strove to
+      give a Florentine blandishment to the rusticity of life in the Maremma;
+      and we felt sure that he must know what beefsteak was. When we ordered it,
+      he assumed to be perfectly conversant with it, started to bring it,
+      paused, turned, and, with a great sacrifice of personal dignity, demanded,
+      "<i>Bifsteca di manzo, o bifsteca di motone</i>?"&mdash;"Beefsteak of
+      beef, or beefsteak of mutton?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of Grossetto proper, this is all I remember, if I except a boy whom I
+      heard singing after dark in the streets,&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Camicia rossa, O Garibaldi!"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The cause of our sojourn there was an instance of <i>forza maggiore</i>,
+      as the agent of the diligence company defiantly expressed it, in refusing
+      us damages for our overturn into the river. It was in the early part of
+      the winter when we started from Rome for Venice, and we were travelling
+      northward by diligence because the railways were still more or less
+      interrupted by the storms and floods predicted of Matthieu de la Drôme,&mdash;the
+      only reliable prophet France has produced since Voltaire;&mdash;and if our
+      accident was caused by an overruling Providence, the company, according to
+      the very law of its existence, was not responsible. To be sure, we did not
+      see how an overruling Providence was to blame for loading upon our
+      diligence the baggage of two diligences, or for the clumsiness of our
+      driver; but on the other hand, it is certain that the company did not make
+      it rain or cause the inundation. And, in fine, although we could not have
+      travelled by railway, we were masters to have taken the steamer instead of
+      the diligence at Civita Vecchia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The choice of either of these means of travel had presented itself in
+      vivid hues of disadvantage all the way from Rome to the Papal port, where
+      the French steamer for Leghorn lay dancing a hornpipe upon the short,
+      chopping waves, while we approached by railway. We had leisure enough to
+      make the decision, if that was all we wanted. Our engine-driver had
+      derived his ideas of progress from an Encyclical Letter, and the train
+      gave every promise of arriving at Civita Vecchia five hundred years behind
+      time. But such was the desolating and depressing influence of the weather
+      and the landscape, that we reached Civita Vecchia as undecided as we had
+      left Rome. On the one hand, there had been the land, soaked and sodden,&mdash;wild,
+      shagged with scrubby growths of timber and brooded over by sullen clouds,
+      and visibly inhabited only by shepherds, leaning upon their staves at an
+      angle of forty-five degrees, and looking, in their immovable dejection,
+      with their legs wrapped in long-haired goat-skins, like satyrs that had
+      been converted, and were trying to do right; turning dim faces to us, they
+      warned us with every mute appeal against the land, as a waste of mud from
+      one end of Italy to the other. On the other hand, there was the sea-wind
+      raving about our train and threatening to blow it over, and whenever we
+      drew near the coast, heaping the waves upon the beach in thundering
+      menace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We weakly and fearfully remembered our former journeys by diligence over
+      broken railway routes; we recalled our cruel voyage from Genoa to Naples
+      by sea; and in a state of pitiable dismay we ate five francs' worth at the
+      restaurant of the Civita Vecchia station before we knew it, and long
+      before we had made up our minds. Still we might have lingered and
+      hesitated, and perhaps returned to Rome at last, but for the dramatic
+      resolution of the old man who solicited passengers for the diligence, and
+      carried their passports for a final Papal <i>visa</i> at the
+      police-office. By the account he gave of himself, he was one of the best
+      men in the world, and unique in those parts for honesty and truthfulness;
+      and he besought us, out of that affectionate interest with which our very
+      aspect had inspired him, not to go by steamer, but to go by diligence,
+      which in nineteen hours would land us safe, and absolutely refreshed by
+      the journey, at the railway station in Follonica. And now, once, would we
+      go by diligence? twice, would we go? three times, would we go?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Signore," said our benefactor, angrily, "I lose my time with you;" and
+      ran away, to be called back in the course of destiny, as he knew well
+      enough, and besought to take us as a special favor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the passports he learned that there was official dignity among us,
+      and addressed the unworthy bearer of public honors as Eccellenza, and, at
+      parting bequeathed his advantage to the conductor, commending us all in
+      set terms to his courtesy. He hovered caressingly about us as long as we
+      remained, straining politeness to do us some last little service; and when
+      the diligence rolled away, he did all that one man could to give us a
+      round of applause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We laughed together at this silly old man, when out of sight; but we
+      confessed that, if travel in our own country ever came, with advancing
+      corruption, to be treated with the small deceits practiced upon it in
+      Italy, it was not likely to be treated with the small civilities also
+      there attendant on it,&mdash;and so tried to console ourselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the moment of departure, we were surprised to have enter the diligence
+      a fellow-countryman, whom we had first seen on the road from Naples to
+      Rome. He had since crossed our path with that iteration of travel which
+      brings you again and again in view of the same trunks and the same
+      tourists in the round of Europe, and finally at Civita Vecchia he had
+      turned up, a silent spectator of our scene with the agent of the
+      diligence, and had gone off apparently a confirmed passenger by steamer.
+      Perhaps a nearer view of the sailor's hornpipe, as danced by that vessel
+      in the harbor, shook his resolution. At any rate, here he was again, and
+      with his ticket for Follonica,&mdash;a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked man, and
+      we will say a citizen of Portland, though he was not. For the first time
+      in our long acquaintance with one another's faces, we entered into
+      conversation, and wondered whether we should find brigands or any thing to
+      eat on the road, without expectation of finding either. In respect of
+      robbers, we were not disappointed; but shortly after nightfall we stopped
+      at a lonely post-house to change horses, and found that the landlord had
+      so far counted on our appearance as to have, just roasted and fragrantly
+      fuming, a leg of lamb, with certain small fried fish, and a sufficiency of
+      bread. It was a very lonely place as I say; the sky was gloomy overhead;
+      and the wildness of the landscape all about us gave our provision quite a
+      gamy flavor; and brigands could have added nothing to our sense of
+      solitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The road creeps along the coast for some distance from Civita Vecchia,
+      within hearing of the sea, and nowhere widely forsakes it, I believe, all
+      the way to Follonica. The country is hilly, and we stopped every two hours
+      to change horses; at which times we looked out, and, seeing that it was a
+      gray and windy night, though not rainy, exulted that we had not taken the
+      steamer. With very little change, the wisdom of our decision in favor of
+      the diligence formed the burden of our talk during the whole night; and to
+      think of eluded sea-sickness requited us in the agony of our break-neck
+      efforts to catch a little sleep, as, mounted upon our nightmares, we rode
+      steeple-chases up and down the highways and by-ways of horror. Any thing
+      that absolutely awakened us was accounted a blessing; and I remember few
+      things in life with so keen a pleasure as the summons that came to us to
+      descend from our places and cross a river in one boat, while the two
+      diligences of our train followed in another. Here we had time to see our
+      fellow-passengers, as the pulsating light of their cigars illumined their
+      faces, and to discover among them that Italian, common to all large
+      companies, who speaks English, and is very eager to practice it with you,&mdash;who
+      is such a benefactor if you do not know his own language, and such a bore
+      if you do. After this, being landed, it was rapture to stroll up and down
+      the good road, and feel it hard and real under our feet, and not an
+      abysmal impalpability, while all the grim shapes of our dreams fled to the
+      spectral line of small boats sustaining the ferry-barge, and swaying
+      slowly from it as the drowned men at their keels tugged them against the
+      tide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "<i>S' accommodino, Signori</i>!" cries the cheerful voice of the
+      conductor, and we ascend to our places in the diligence. The nightmares
+      are brought out again; we mount, and renew the steeple-chase as before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly, it all comes to an end, and we sit wide awake in the diligence,
+      amid a silence only broken by the hiss of rain against the windows, and
+      the sweep of gusts upon the roof. The diligence stands still; there is no
+      rattle of harness, nor other sound to prove that we have arrived at the
+      spot by other means than dropping from the clouds. The idea that we are
+      passengers in the last diligence destroyed before the Deluge, and are now
+      waiting our fate on the highest ground accessible to wheels, fades away as
+      the day dimly breaks, and we find ourselves planted, as the Italians say,
+      on the banks of another river. There is no longer any visible conductor,
+      the horses have been spirited away, the driver has vanished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rain beats and beats upon the roof, and begins to drop through upon us
+      in great, wrathful tears, while the river before us rushes away with a
+      momently swelling flood. Enter now from the depths of the storm a number
+      of rainy peasants, with our conductor and driver perfectly waterlogged,
+      and group themselves on the low, muddy shore, near a flat ferry-barge,
+      evidently wanting but a hint of <i>forza maggiore</i> to go down with any
+      thing put into it. A moment they dispute in pantomime, sending now and
+      then a windy tone of protest and expostulation to our ears, and then they
+      drop into a motionless silence, and stand there in the tempest, not
+      braving it, but enduring it with the pathetic resignation of their race,
+      as if it were some form of hopeless political oppression. At last comes
+      the conductor to us and says, It is impossible for our diligences to cross
+      in the boat, and he has sent for others to meet us on the opposite shore.
+      He expected them long before this, but we see! They are not come. Patience
+      and malediction!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Remaining planted in these unfriendly circumstances from four o'clock till
+      ten, we have still the effrontery to be glad that we did not take the
+      steamer. What a storm that must be at sea! When at last our connecting
+      diligences appear on the other shore, we are almost light-hearted, and
+      make a jest of the Ombrone, as we perilously pass it in the ferry-boat too
+      weak for our diligences. Between the landing and the vehicles there is a
+      space of heavy mud to cross, and when we reach them we find the <i>coupé</i>
+      appointed us occupied by three young Englishmen, who insist that they
+      shall be driven to the boat. With that graceful superiority which endears
+      their nation to the world, and makes the travelling Englishman a universal
+      favorite, they keep the seats to which they have no longer any right,
+      while the tempest drenches the ladies to whom the places belong; and it is
+      only by the <i>forza maggiore</i> of our conductor that they can be
+      dislodged. In the mean time the Portland man exchanges with them the
+      assurances of personal and national esteem, which that mighty bond of
+      friendship, the language of Shakespeare and Milton, enables us to offer so
+      idiomatically to our transatlantic cousins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What Grossetto was like, as we first rode through it, we scarcely looked
+      to see. In four or five hours we should strike the railroad at Follonica;
+      and we merely asked of intermediate places that they should not detain us.
+      We dined in Grossetto at an inn of the Larthian period,&mdash;a cold inn
+      and a damp, which seemed never to have been swept since the broom dropped
+      from the grasp of the last Etrurian chambermaid,&mdash;and we ate with the
+      two-pronged iron forks of an extinct civilization. All the while we dined,
+      a boy tried to kindle a fire to warm us, and beguiled his incessant
+      failures with stories of inundation on the road ahead of us. But we
+      believed him so little, that when he said a certain stream near Grossetto
+      was impassable, our company all but hissed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we left the town and hurried into the open country, we perceived that
+      he had only too great reason to be an alarmist. Every little rill was
+      risen, and boiling over with the pride of harm, and the broad fields lay
+      hid under the yellow waters that here and there washed over the road. Yet
+      the freshet only presented itself to us as a pleasant excitement; and even
+      when we came to a place where the road itself was covered for a quarter of
+      a mile, we scarcely looked outside the diligence to see how deep the water
+      was. We were surprised when our horses were brought to a stand on a rising
+      ground, and the conductor, cap in hand, appeared at the door. He was a
+      fat, well-natured man, full of a smiling goodwill; and he stood before us
+      in a radiant desperation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Would Eccellenza descend, look at the water in front, and decide whether
+      to go on? The conductor desired to content; it displeased him to delay,&mdash;<i>ma,
+      in somma</i>!&mdash;the rest was confided to the conductor's eloquent
+      shoulders and eyebrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Eccellenza, descending, beheld but a disheartening prospect. On every hand
+      the country was under water. The two diligences stood on a stone bridge
+      spanning the stream, that, now swollen to an angry torrent, brawled over a
+      hundred yards of the road before us. Beyond, the ground rose, and on its
+      slope stood a farm-house up to its second story in water. Without the
+      slightest hope in his purpose and merely as an experiment, Eccellenza
+      suggested that a man should be sent in on horseback; which being done, man
+      and horse in a moment floundered into swimming depths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conductor, vigilantly regarding Eccellenza, gave a great shrug of
+      desolation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Eccellenza replied with a foreigner's broken shrug,&mdash;a shrug of
+      sufficiently correct construction, but wanting the tonic accent, as one
+      may say, though expressing, however imperfectly, an equal desolation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It appeared to be the part of wisdom not to go ahead, but to go back if we
+      could; and we reëntered the water we had just crossed. It had risen a
+      little meanwhile, and the road could now be traced only by the
+      telegraph-poles. The diligence before us went safely through; but our
+      driver, trusting rather to inspiration than precedent, did not follow it
+      carefully, and directly drove us over the side of a small viaduct. All the
+      baggage of the train having been lodged upon the roof of our diligence,
+      the unwieldy vehicle now lurched heavily, hesitated, as if preparing, like
+      Cæsar, to fall decently, and went over on its side with a stately
+      deliberation that gave us ample time to arrange our plans for getting out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The torrent was only some three feet deep, but it was swift and muddy, and
+      it was with a fine sense of shipwreck that Eccellenza felt his boots
+      filling with water, while a conviction that it would have been better,
+      after all, to have taken the steamer, struck coldly home to him. We opened
+      the window in the top side of the diligence, and lifted the ladies through
+      it and the conductor, in the character of life-boat, bore them ashore;
+      while the driver cursed his horses in a sullen whisper, and could with
+      difficulty be diverted from that employment to cut the lines and save one
+      of them from drowning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here our compatriot, whose conversation with the Englishman at the Ombrone
+      we had lately admired, showed traits of strict and severe method which
+      afterward came into even bolder relief. The ladies being rescued, he
+      applied himself to the rescue of their hats, cloaks, rubbers, muffs,
+      books, and bags, and handed them up through the window with tireless
+      perseverance, making an effort to wring or dry each article in turn. The
+      other gentleman on top received them all rather grimly, and had not
+      perhaps been amused by the situation but for the exploit of his hat. It
+      was of the sort called in Italian as in English slang a stove-pipe (<i>canna</i>),
+      and having been made in Italy, it was of course too large for its wearer.
+      It had never been any thing but a horror and reproach to him, and he was
+      now inexpressibly delighted to see it steal out of the diligence in
+      company with one of the red-leather cushions, and glide darkly down the
+      flood. It nodded and nodded to the cushion with a superhuman tenderness
+      and elegance, and had a preposterous air of whispering, as it drifted out
+      of sight,&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles,&mdash;
+  It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The romantic interest of this episode had hardly died away, when our
+      adventure acquired an idyllic flavor from the appearance on the scene of
+      four peasants in an ox-cart. These the conductor tried to engage to bring
+      out the baggage and right the fallen diligence; and they, after making him
+      a little speech upon the value of their health, which might be injured,
+      asked him, tentatively, two hundred francs for the service. The simple
+      incident enforced the fact already known to us,&mdash;that, if Italians
+      sometimes take advantage of strangers, they are equally willing to prey
+      upon each other; but I doubt if any thing could have taught a foreigner
+      the sweetness with which our conductor bore the enormity, and turned
+      quietly from those brigands to carry the Portland man from the wreck, on
+      which he lingered, to the shore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here in the gathering twilight the passengers of both diligences grouped
+      themselves, and made merry over the common disaster. As the conductor and
+      the drivers brought off the luggage our spirits rose with the arrival of
+      each trunk, and we were pleased or not as we found it soaked or dry. We
+      applauded and admired the greater sufferers among us: a lady who opened a
+      dripping box was felt to have perpetrated a pleasantry; and a Brazilian
+      gentleman, whose luggage dropped to pieces and was scattered in the flood
+      about the diligence, was looked upon as a very subtile humorist. Our own
+      contribution to these witty passages was the epigrammatic display of a
+      reeking trunk full of the pretty rubbish people bring away from Rome and
+      Naples,&mdash;copies of Pompeian frescos more ruinous than the originals;
+      photographs floating loose from their cards; little earthen busts reduced
+      to the lumpishness of common clay; Roman scarfs stained and blotted out of
+      all memory of their recent hues; Roman pearls clinging together in clammy
+      masses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were a band of brothers and sisters, as we all crowded into one
+      diligence and returned to Grossetto. Arrived there, our party, knowing
+      that a public conveyance in Italy&mdash;and everywhere else&mdash;always
+      stops at the worst inn in a place, made bold to seek another, and found it
+      without ado, though the person who undertook to show it spoke of it
+      mysteriously and as of difficult access, and tried to make the simple
+      affair as like a scene of grand opera as he could.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We took one of the ancient rooms in which there was a vast fire-place, as
+      already mentioned, and we there kindled such a fire as could not have been
+      known in that fuel-sparing land for ages. The drying of the clothes was an
+      affair that drew out all the energy and method of our compatriot, and at a
+      late hour we left him moving about among the garments that dangled and
+      dripped from pegs and hooks and lines, dealing with them as a physician
+      with his sick, and tenderly nursing his dress-coat, which he wrung and
+      shook and smoothed and pulled this way and that with a never-satisfied
+      anxiety. At midnight, he hired a watcher to keep up the fire and turn the
+      steaming raiment, and, returning at four o'clock, found his watcher dead
+      asleep before the empty fire-place. But I rather applaud than blame the
+      watcher for this. He must have been a man of iron nerve to fall asleep
+      amid all that phantasmal show of masks and disguises. What if those
+      reeking silks had forsaken their nails, and, decking themselves with the
+      blotted Roman scarfs and the slimy Roman pearls, had invited the
+      dress-coats to look over the dripping photographs? Or if all those drowned
+      garments had assumed the characters of the people whom they had grown to
+      resemble, and had sat down to hear the shade of Pia de' Tolommei rehearse
+      the story of her sad fate in the Maremma? I say, if a watcher could sleep
+      in such company, he was right to do so.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      On the third day after our return to Grossetto, we gathered together our
+      damaged effects, and packed them into refractory trunks. Then we held the
+      customary discussion with the landlord concerning the effrontery of his
+      account, and drove off once more toward Follonica. We could scarcely
+      recognize the route for the one we had recently passed over; and it was
+      not until we came to the scene of our wreck, and found the diligence
+      stranded high and dry upon the roadside, that we could believe the whole
+      landscape about us had been flooded three days before. The offending
+      stream had shrunk back to its channel, and now seemed to feign an
+      unconsciousness of its late excess, and had a virtuous air of not knowing
+      how in the world to account for that upturned diligence. The waters, we
+      learned, had begun to subside the night after our disaster; and the
+      vehicle might have been righted and drawn off&mdash;for it was not in the
+      least injured&mdash;forty-eight hours previously; but I suppose it was not
+      <i>en règle</i> to touch it without orders from Rome. I picture it to
+      myself still lying there, in the heart of the marshes, and thrilling
+      sympathetic travel with the spectacle of its ultimate ruin:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Disfecemi Maremma."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      We reached Follonica at last, and then the cars hurried us to Leghorn. We
+      were thoroughly humbled in spirit, and had no longer any doubt that we did
+      ill to take the diligence at Civita Vecchia instead of the steamer; for we
+      had been, not nineteen hours, but four days on the road, and we had
+      suffered as aforementioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But we were destined to be partially restored to our self-esteem, if not
+      entirely comforted for our losses, when we sat down to dinner in the Hotel
+      Washington, and the urbane head-waiter, catching the drift of our English
+      discourse, asked us,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Have the signori heard that the French steamer, which left Civita Vecchia
+      the same day with their diligence, had to put back and lie in port more
+      than two days on account of the storm? She is but now come into Leghorn,
+      after a very dangerous passage."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      AT PADUA
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Those of my readers who have frequented the garden of Doctor Rappaccini no
+      doubt recall with perfect distinctness the quaint old city of Padua. They
+      remember its miles and miles of dim arcade over-roofing the sidewalks
+      everywhere, affording excellent opportunity for the flirtation of lovers
+      by day and the vengeance of rivals by night. They have seen the now-vacant
+      streets thronged with maskers, and the Venetian Podestà going in gorgeous
+      state to and from the vast Palazzo della Ragione. They have witnessed
+      ringing tournaments in those sad empty squares, and races in the Prato
+      della Valle, and many other wonders of different epochs, and their
+      pleasure makes me half-sorry that I should have lived for several years
+      within an hour by rail from Padua, and should know little or nothing of
+      these great sights from actual observation. I take shame to myself for
+      having visited Padua so often and so familiarly as I used to do,&mdash;for
+      having been bored and hungry there,&mdash;for having had toothache there,
+      upon one occasion,&mdash;for having rejoiced more in a cup of coffee at
+      Pedrocchi's than in the whole history of Padua,&mdash;for having slept
+      repeatedly in the bad-bedded hotels of Padua and never once dreamt of
+      Portia,&mdash;for having been more taken by the <i>salti mortali</i>[<i>Salti
+      mortali</i> are those prodigious efforts of mental arithmetic by which
+      Italian waiters, in verbally presenting your account, arrive at six as the
+      product of two and two.] of a waiter who summed up my account at a Paduan
+      restaurant, than by all the strategies with which the city has been many
+      times captured and recaptured. Had I viewed Padua only over the wall of
+      Doctor Rappaccini's garden, how different my impressions of the city would
+      now be! This is one of the drawbacks of actual knowledge. "Ah! how can you
+      write about Spain when once you have been there?" asked Heine of Théophile
+      Gautier setting out on a journey thither.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless it seems to me that I remember something about Padua with a
+      sort of romantic pleasure. There was a certain charm which I can dimly
+      recall, in sauntering along the top of the old wall of the city, and
+      looking down upon the plumy crests of the Indian corn that flourished up
+      so mightily from the dry bed of the moat. At such times I could not help
+      figuring to myself the many sieges that the wall had known, with the
+      fierce assault by day, the secret attack by night, the swarming foe upon
+      the plains below, the bristling arms of the besieged upon the wall, the
+      boom of the great mortars made of ropes and leather and throwing mighty
+      balls of stone, the stormy flight of arrows, the ladders planted against
+      the defenses and staggering headlong into the moat, enriched for future
+      agriculture not only by its sluggish waters, but by the blood of many men.
+      I suppose that most of these visions were old stage spectacles furbished
+      up anew, and that my armies were chiefly equipped with their obsolete
+      implements of warfare from museums of armor and from cabinets of
+      antiquities; but they were very vivid for all that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was never able, in passing a certain one of the city gates, to divest
+      myself of an historic interest in the great loads of hay waiting admission
+      on the outside. For an instant they masked again the Venetian troops that,
+      in the War of the League of Cambray, entered the city in the hay-carts,
+      shot down the landsknechts at the gates, and, uniting with the citizens,
+      cut the German garrison to pieces. But it was a thing long past. The
+      German garrison was here again; and the heirs of the landsknechts went
+      clanking through the gate to the parade-ground, with that fierce clamor of
+      their kettle-drums which is so much fiercer because unmingled with the
+      noise of fifes. Once more now the Germans are gone, and, let us trust,
+      forever; but when I saw them, there seemed little hope of their going.
+      They had a great Biergarten on the top of the wall, and they had set up
+      the altars of their heavy Bacchus in many parts of the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I please myself with thinking that, if I walked on such a spring day as
+      this in the arcaded Paduan streets, I should catch glimpses, through the
+      gate-ways of the palaces, of gardens full of vivid bloom, and of fountains
+      that tinkle there forever. If it were autumn, and I were in the great
+      market-place before the Palazzo della Ragione, I should hear the baskets
+      of amber-hued and honeyed grapes humming with the murmur of multitudinous
+      bees, and making a music as if the wine itself were already singing in
+      their gentle hearts. It is a great field of succulent verdure, that wide
+      old market-place; and fancy loves to browse about among its gay stores of
+      fruits and vegetables, brought thither by the world-old peasant-women who
+      have been bringing fruits and vegetables to the Paduan market for so many
+      centuries. They sit upon the ground before their great panniers, and knit
+      and doze, and wake up with a drowsy "<i>Comandala</i>?" as you linger to
+      look at their grapes. They have each a pair of scales,&mdash;the emblem of
+      Injustice,&mdash;and will weigh you out a scant measure of the fruit if
+      you like. Their faces are yellow as parchment, and Time has written them
+      so full of wrinkles that there is not room for another line. Doubtless
+      these old parchment visages are palimpsests, and would tell the whole
+      history of Padua if you could get at each successive inscription. Among
+      their primal records there must be some account of the Roman city, as each
+      little contadinella remembered it on market-days; and one might read of
+      the terror of Attila's sack, a little later, with the peasant-maid's
+      personal recollections of the bold Hunnish trooper who ate up the grapes
+      in her basket, and kissed her hard, round red cheeks,&mdash;for in that
+      time she was a blooming girl,&mdash;and paid nothing for either privilege.
+      What wild and confused reminiscences on the wrinkled visage we should find
+      thereafter of the fierce republican times, of Ecelino, of the Carraras, of
+      the Venetian rule! And is it not sad to think of systems and peoples all
+      passing away, and these ancient women lasting still, and still selling
+      grapes in front of the Palazzo della Ragione? What a long mortality!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The youngest of their number is a thousand years older than the palace,
+      which was begun in the twelfth century, and which is much the same now as
+      it was when first completed. I know that, if I entered it, I should be
+      sure of finding the great hall of the palace&mdash;the vastest hall in the
+      world&mdash;dim and dull and dusty and delightful, with nothing in it
+      except at one end Donatello's colossal marble-headed wooden horse of Troy,
+      stared at from the other end by the two dog-faced Egyptian women in basalt
+      placed there by Belzoni.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late in the drowsy summer afternoons I should have the Court of the
+      University all to myself, and might study unmolested the blazons of the
+      noble youth who have attended the school in different centuries ever since
+      1200, and have left their escutcheons on the walls to commemorate them. At
+      the foot of the stairway ascending to the schools from the court is the
+      statue of the learned lady who was once a professor in the University, and
+      who, if her likeness belie not her looks, must have given a great charm to
+      student life in other times. At present there are no lady professors at
+      Padua any more than at Harvard; and during late years the schools have
+      suffered greatly from the interference of the Austrian government, which
+      frequently closed them for months, on account of political demonstrations
+      among the students. But now there is an end of this and many other stupid
+      oppressions; and the time-honored University will doubtless regain its
+      ancient importance. Even in 1864 it had nearly fifteen hundred students,
+      and one met them everywhere under the arcades, and could not well mistake
+      them, with that blended air of pirate and dandy which these studious young
+      men loved to assume. They were to be seen a good deal on the promenades
+      outside the walls, where the Paduan ladies are driven in their carriages
+      in the afternoon, and where one sees the blood-horses and fine equipages
+      for which Padua is famous. There used once to be races in the Prato della
+      Valle, after the Italian notion of horse-races; but these are now
+      discontinued, and there is nothing to be found there but the statues of
+      scholars and soldiers and statesmen, posted in a circle around the old
+      race-course. If you strolled thither about dusk on such a day as this, you
+      might see the statues unbend a little from their stony rigidity, and in
+      the failing light nod to each other very pleasantly through the trees. And
+      if you stayed in Padua over night, what could be better to-morrow morning
+      than a stroll through the great Botanical Garden,&mdash;the oldest
+      botanical garden in the world,&mdash;the garden which first received in
+      Europe the strange and splendid growths of our hemisphere,&mdash;the
+      garden where Doctor Rappaccini doubtless found the germ of his mortal
+      plant?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the whole, I believe I would rather go this moment to Padua than to
+      Lowell or Lawrence, or even to Worcester; and as to the disadvantage of
+      having seen Padua, I begin to think the whole place has now assumed so
+      fantastic a character in my mind that I am almost as well qualified to
+      write of it as if I had merely dreamed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day that we first visited the city was very rainy, and we spent most
+      of the time in viewing the churches. These, even after the churches of
+      Venice, one finds rich in art and historic interest, and they in no
+      instance fall into the maniacal excesses of the Renaissance to which some
+      of the temples of the latter city abandon themselves. Their architecture
+      forms a sort of border-land between the Byzantine of Venice and the
+      Lombardic of Verona. The superb domes of St. Anthony's emulate those of
+      St. Mark's; and the porticos of other Paduan churches rest upon the backs
+      of bird-headed lions and leopards that fascinate with their mystery and
+      beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the wish to see the attributive Giottos in the Chapter which drew
+      us first to St. Anthony's, and we saw them with the satisfaction naturally
+      attending the contemplation of frescos discovered only since 1858, after
+      having been hidden under plaster and whitewash for many centuries; but we
+      could not believe that Giotto's fame was destined to gain much by their
+      rescue from oblivion. They are in nowise to be compared with this master's
+      frescos in the Chapel of the Annunziata,&mdash;which, indeed, is in every
+      way a place of wonder and delight. You reach it by passing through a
+      garden lane bordered with roses, and a taciturn gardener comes out with
+      clinking keys, and lets you into the chapel, where there is nobody but
+      Giotto and Dante, nor seems to have been for ages. Cool it is, and of a
+      pulverous smell, as a sacred place should be; a blessed benching goes
+      round the walls, and you sit down and take unlimited comfort in the
+      frescos. The gardener leaves you alone to the solitude and the silence, in
+      which the talk of the painter and the exile is plain enough. Their
+      contemporaries and yours are cordial in their gay companionship: through
+      the half-open door falls, in a pause of the rain, the same sunshine that
+      they saw lie there; the deathless birds that they heard sing out in the
+      garden trees; it is the fresh sweetness of the grass mown so many hundred
+      years ago that breathes through all the lovely garden grounds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the midst of this pleasant communion with the past, you have a
+      lurking pain; for you have hired your brougham by the hour; and you
+      presently quit the Chapel of Giotto on this account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had chosen our driver from among many other drivers of broughams in the
+      vicinity of Pedrocchi's, because he had such an honest look, and was not
+      likely, we thought, to deal unfairly with us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But first," said the signor who had selected him, "how much is your
+      brougham an hour?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So and so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Show me the tariff of fares."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "There is no tariff."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "There is. Show it to me."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It is lost, signor."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I think not. It is here in this pocket. Get it out."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tariff appears, and with it the fact that he had demanded just what
+      the boatman of the ballad received in gift,&mdash;thrice his fee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The driver mounted his seat, and served us so faithfully that day in Padua
+      that we took him the next day for Arquà. At the end, when he had received
+      his due, and a handsome <i>mancia</i> besides, he was still unsatisfied,
+      and referred to the tariff in proof that he had been under-paid. On that
+      confronted and defeated, he thanked us very cordially, gave us the number
+      of his brougham, and begged us to ask for him when we came next to Padua
+      and needed a carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the Chapel of the Annunziata he drove us to the Church of Santa
+      Giustina, where is a very famous and noble picture by Romanino. But as
+      this writing has nothing in the world to do with art, I here dismiss that
+      subject, and with a gross and idle delight follow the sacristan down under
+      the church to the prison of Santa Giustina.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all the faculties of the mind there is none so little fatiguing to
+      exercise as mere wonder; and, for my own sake, I try always to wonder at
+      things without the least critical reservation. I therefore, in the sense
+      of deglutition, bolted this prison at once, though subsequent experiences
+      led me to look with grave indigestion upon the whole idea of prisons,
+      their authenticity, and even their existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As far as mere dimensions are concerned, the prison of Santa Giustina was
+      not a hard one to swallow, being only three feet wide by about ten feet in
+      length. In this limited space, Santa Giustina passed five years of the
+      paternal reign of Nero (a virtuous and a long-suffering prince, whom,
+      singularly enough, no historic artist has yet arisen to whitewash), and
+      was then brought out into the larger cell adjoining, to suffer a blessed
+      martyrdom. I am not sure now whether the sacristan said she was dashed to
+      death on the stones, or cut to pieces with knives; but whatever the form
+      of martyrdom, an iron ring in the ceiling was employed in it, as I know
+      from seeing the ring,&mdash;a curiously well-preserved piece of
+      iron-mongery. Within the narrow prison of the saint, and just under the
+      grating, through which the sacristan thrust his candle to illuminate it,
+      was a mountain of candle-drippings,&mdash;a monument to the fact that
+      faith still largely exists in this doubting world. My own credulity, not
+      only with regard to this prison, but also touching the coffin of St. Luke,
+      which I saw in the church, had so wrought upon the esteem of the
+      sacristan, that he now took me to a well, into which, he said, had been
+      cast the bones of three thousand Christian martyrs. He lowered a lantern
+      into the well, and assured me that, if I looked through a certain
+      screenwork there, I could see the bones. On experiment I could not see the
+      bones, but this circumstance did not cause me to doubt their presence,
+      particularly as I did see upon the screen a great number of coins offered
+      for the repose of the martyrs' souls. I threw down some <i>soldi</i>, and
+      thus enthralled the sacristan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the signor cared to see prisons, he said, the driver must take him to
+      those of Ecelino, at present the property of a private gentleman near by.
+      As I had just bought a history of Ecelino, at a great bargain, from a
+      second-hand book-stall, and had a lively interest in all the enormities of
+      that nobleman, I sped the driver instantly to the villa of the Signor P&mdash;&mdash;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It depends here altogether upon the freshness or mustiness of the reader's
+      historical reading whether he cares to be reminded more particularly who
+      Ecelino was. He flourished balefully in the early half of the thirteenth
+      century as lord of Vicenza, Verona, Padua, and Brescia, and was defeated
+      and hurt to death in an attempt to possess himself of Milan. He was in
+      every respect a remarkable man for that time,&mdash;fearless, abstemious,
+      continent, avaricious, hardy, and unspeakably ambitious and cruel. He
+      survived and suppressed innumerable conspiracies, escaping even the thrust
+      of the assassin whom the fame of his enormous wickedness had caused the
+      Old Man of the Mountain to send against him. As lord of Padua he was more
+      incredibly severe and bloody in his rule than as lord of the other cities,
+      for the Paduans had been latest free, and conspired the most frequently
+      against him. He extirpated whole families on suspicion that a single
+      member had been concerned in a meditated revolt. Little children and
+      helpless women suffered hideous mutilation and shame at his hands. Six
+      prisons in Padua were constantly filled by his arrests. The whole country
+      was traversed by witnesses of his cruelties,&mdash;men and women deprived
+      of an arm or leg, and begging from door to door. He had long been
+      excommunicated; at last the Church proclaimed a crusade against him, and
+      his lieutenant and nephew&mdash;more demoniacal, if possible, than himself&mdash;was
+      driven out of Padua while he was operating against Mantua. Ecelino retired
+      to Verona, and maintained a struggle against the crusade for nearly two
+      years longer, with a courage which never failed him. Wounded and taken
+      prisoner, the soldiers of the victorious army gathered about him, and
+      heaped insult and reproach upon him; and one furious peasant, whose
+      brother's feet had been cut off by Ecelino's command, dealt the helpless
+      monster four blows upon the head with a scythe. By some, Ecelino is said
+      to have died of these wounds alone; but by others it is related that his
+      death was a kind of suicide, inasmuch as he himself put the case past
+      surgery by tearing off the bandages from his hurts, and refusing all
+      medicines.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Entering at the enchanted portal of the Villa P&mdash;&mdash;, we found
+      ourselves in a realm of wonder. It was our misfortune not to see the
+      magician who compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but for that
+      very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his greatness.
+      Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy,
+      which everywhere tended to a monumental and mortuary effect. A sort of
+      vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped and glimmered the
+      garden. The walls of the vestibule were covered with inscriptions setting
+      forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety of all ages concerning
+      life and death; we began with Confucius, and we ended with Benjamino
+      Franklino. But as if these ideas of mortality were not sufficiently
+      depressing, the funereal Signor P&mdash;&mdash; had collected into earthen
+      <i>amphoræ</i> the ashes of the most famous men of ancient and modern
+      times, and arranged them so that a sense of their number and variety
+      should at once strike his visitor. Each jar was conspicuously labeled with
+      the name its illustrious dust had borne in life; and if one escaped with
+      comparative cheerfulness from the thought that Seneca had died, there were
+      in the very next pot the cinders of Napoleon to bully him back to a sense
+      of his mortality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were glad to have the gloomy fascination of these objects broken by the
+      custodian, who approached to ask if we wished to see the prisons of
+      Ecelino, and we willingly followed him into the rain out of our sepulchral
+      shelter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Between the vestibule and the towers of the tyrant lay that garden already
+      mentioned, and our guide led us through ranks of weeping statuary, and
+      rainy bowers, and showery lanes of shrubbery, until we reached the door of
+      his cottage. While he entered to fetch the key to the prisons, we noted
+      that the towers were freshly painted and in perfect repair; and indeed the
+      custodian said frankly enough, on reappearing, that they were merely built
+      over the prisons on the site of the original towers. The storied stream of
+      the Bacchiglione sweeps through the grounds, and now, swollen by the
+      rainfall, it roared, a yellow torrent, under a corner of the prisons. The
+      towers rise from masses of foliage, and form no unpleasing feature of what
+      must be, in spite of Signor P&mdash;&mdash;, a delightful Italian garden
+      in sunny weather. The ground is not so flat as elsewhere in Padua, and
+      this inequality gives an additional picturesqueness to the place. But as
+      we were come in search of horrors, we scorned these merely lovely things,
+      and hastened to immure ourselves in the dungeons below. The custodian,
+      lighting a candle, (which ought, we felt, to have been a torch,) went
+      before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We found the cells, though narrow and dark, not uncomfortable, and the
+      guide conceded that they had undergone some repairs since Ecelino's time.
+      But all the horrors for which we had come were there in perfect
+      grisliness, and labeled by the ingenious Signor P&mdash;&mdash; with Latin
+      inscriptions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first cell was a shrine of the Virgin, set in the wall. Beneath
+      this, while the wretched prisoner knelt in prayer, a trap-door opened and
+      precipitated him upon the points of knives, from which his body fell into
+      the Bacchiglione below. In the next cell, held by some rusty iron rings to
+      the wall, was a skeleton, hanging by the wrists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "This," said the guide, "was another punishment of which Ecelino was very
+      fond."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A dreadful doubt seized my mind. "Was this skeleton found here?" I
+      demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without faltering an instant, without so much as winking an eye, the
+      custodian replied, "<i>Appunto</i>."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a great relief, and restored me to confidence in the establishment.
+      I am at a loss to explain how my faith should have been confirmed
+      afterwards by coming upon a guillotine&mdash;an awful instrument in the
+      likeness of a straw-cutter, with a decapitated wooden figure under its
+      blade&mdash;which the custodian confessed to be a modern improvement
+      placed there by Signor P&mdash;&mdash;. Yet my credulity was so
+      strengthened by his candor, that I accepted without hesitation the torture
+      of the water-drop when we came to it. The water-jar was as well preserved
+      as if placed there but yesterday, and the skeleton beneath it&mdash;found
+      as we saw it&mdash;was entire and perfect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the adjoining cell sat a skeleton&mdash;found as we saw it&mdash;with
+      its neck in the clutch of the garrote, which was one of Ecelino's more
+      merciful punishments; while in still another cell the ferocity of the
+      tyrant appeared in the penalty inflicted upon the wretch whose skeleton
+      had been hanging for ages&mdash;as we saw it&mdash;head downwards from the
+      ceiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond these, in a yet darker and drearier dungeon, stood a heavy oblong
+      wooden box, with two apertures near the top, peering through which we
+      found that we were looking into the eyeless sockets of a skull. Within
+      this box Ecelino had immured the victim we beheld there, and left him to
+      perish in view of the platters of food and goblets of drink placed just
+      beyond the reach of his hands. The food we saw was of course not the
+      original food.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last we came to the crowning horror of Villa P&mdash;&mdash;, the
+      supreme excess of Ecelino's cruelty. The guide entered the cell before us,
+      and, as we gained the threshold, threw the light of his taper vividly upon
+      a block that stood in the middle of the floor. Fixed to the block by an
+      immense spike driven through from the back was the little slender hand of
+      a woman, which lay there just as it had been struck from the living arm,
+      and which, after the lapse of so many centuries, was still as perfectly
+      preserved as if it had been embalmed. The sight had a most cruel
+      fascination; and while one of the horror-seekers stood helplessly
+      conjuring to his vision that scene of unknown dread,&mdash;the shrinking,
+      shrieking woman dragged to the block, the wild, shrill, horrible screech
+      following the blow that drove in the spike, the merciful swoon after the
+      mutilation,&mdash;his companion, with a sudden pallor, demanded to be
+      taken instantly away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In their swift withdrawal, they only glanced at a few detached instruments
+      of torture,&mdash;all original Ecelinos, but intended for the infliction
+      of minor and comparatively unimportant torments,&mdash;and then they
+      passed from that place of fear.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In the evening we sat talking at the Caffè Pedrocchi with an abbate, an
+      acquaintance of ours, who was a Professor in the University of Padua.
+      Pedrocchi's is the great caffè of Padua, a granite edifice of Egyptian
+      architecture, which is the mausoleum of the proprietor's fortune. The
+      pecuniary skeleton at the feast, however, does not much trouble the
+      guests. They begin early in the evening to gather into the elegant saloons
+      of the caffè,&mdash;somewhat too large for so small a city as Padua,&mdash;and
+      they sit there late in the night over their cheerful cups and their ices,
+      with their newspapers and their talk. Not so many ladies are to be seen as
+      at the caffè in Venice, for it is only in the greater cities that they go
+      much to these public places. There are few students at Pedrocchi's, for
+      they frequent the cheaper caffè; but you may nearly always find there some
+      Professor of the University, and on the evening of which I speak there
+      were two present besides our abbate. Our friend's great passion was the
+      English language, which he understood too well to venture to speak a great
+      deal. He had been translating from that tongue into Italian certain
+      American poems, and our talk was of these at first. Then we began to talk
+      of distinguished American writers, of whom intelligent Italians always
+      know at least four, in this succession,&mdash;Cooper, Mrs. Stowe,
+      Longfellow, and Irving. Mrs. Stowe's <i>Capanna di Zio Tom</i> is, of
+      course universally read; and my friend had also read <i>Il Fiore di Maggio</i>,&mdash;"The
+      May-flower." Of Longfellow, the "Evangeline" is familiar to Italians,
+      through a translation of the poem; but our abbate knew all the poet's
+      works, and one of the other professors present that evening had made such
+      faithful study of them as to have produced some translations rendering the
+      original with remarkable fidelity and spirit. I have before me here his <i>brochure</i>,
+      printed last year at Padua, and containing versions of "Enceladus,"
+      "Excelsior," "A Psalm of Life," "The Old Clock on the Stairs," "Sand of
+      the Desert in an Hour-Glass," "Twilight," "Daybreak," "The Quadroon Girl,"
+      and "Torquemada,"&mdash;pieces which give the Italians a fair notion of
+      our poet's lyrical range, and which bear witness to Professor
+      Messadaglia's sympathetic and familiar knowledge of his works. A young and
+      gifted lady of Parma, now unhappily no more, lately published a
+      translation of "The Golden Legend;" and Professor Messadaglia, in his
+      Preface, mentions a version of another of our poet's longer works on which
+      the translator of the "Evangeline" is now engaged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, turning from literature, we spoke with the gentle abbate of our
+      day's adventures, and eagerly related that of the Ecelino prisons. To have
+      seen them was the most terrific pleasure of our lives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Eh!" said our friend, "I believe you."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "We mean those under the Villa P&mdash;&mdash;."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Exactly."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a tone of politely suppressed amusement in the abbate's voice;
+      and after a moment's pause, in which we felt our awful experience slipping
+      and sliding away from us, we ventured to say, "You don't mean that those
+      are <i>not</i> the veritable Ecelino prisons?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Certainly they are nothing of the kind. The Ecelino prisons were
+      destroyed when the Crusaders took Padua, with the exception of the tower,
+      which the Venetian Republic converted into an observatory."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But at least these prisons are on the site of Ecelino's castle?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Nothing of the sort. His castle in that case would have been outside of
+      the old city walls."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "And those tortures and the prisons are all"&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Things got up for show. No doubt, Ecelino used such things, and many
+      worse, of which even the ingenuity of Signor P&mdash;&mdash; cannot
+      conceive. But he is an eccentric man, loving the horrors of history, and
+      what he can do to realize them he has done in his prisons."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But the custodian&mdash;how could he lie so?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our friend shrugged his shoulders. "Eh! easily. And perhaps he even
+      believed what he said."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The world began to assume an aspect of bewildering ungenuineness, and
+      there seemed to be a treacherous quality of fiction in the ground under
+      our feet. Even the play at the pretty little Teatro Sociale where we went
+      to pass the rest of the evening appeared hollow and improbable. We thought
+      the hero something of a bore, with his patience and goodness; and as for
+      the heroine, pursued by the attentions of the rich profligate, we doubted
+      if she were any better than she should be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUÀ.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We said, during summer days at Venice, when every <i>campo</i> was a
+      furnace seven times heated, and every canal was filled with boiling
+      bathers, "As soon as it rains we will go to Arquà." Remembering the ardors
+      of an April sun on the long, level roads of plain, we could not think of
+      them in August without a sense of dust clogging every pore, and eyes that
+      shrank from the vision of their blinding whiteness. So we stayed in
+      Venice, waiting for rain, until the summer had almost lapsed into autumn;
+      and as the weather cooled before any rain reached us, we took the moisture
+      on the main-land for granted, and set out under a cloudy and windy sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had to go to Padua by railway, and take carriage thence to Arquà upon
+      the road to Ferrara. I believe no rule of human experience was violated
+      when it began to rain directly after we reached Padua, and continued to
+      rain violently the whole day. We gave up this day entirely to the rain,
+      and did not leave Padua until the following morning when we count that our
+      pilgrimage to Petrarch's house actually began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rain had cooled and freshened the air, but it was already too late in
+      the season for the summer to recover herself with the elastic brilliancy
+      that follows the rain of July or early August; and there was I know not
+      what vague sentiment of autumn in the weather. There was not yet enough of
+      it to stir the
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Tears from the depth of some divine despair;"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      but in here and there a faded leaf (for in Europe death is not glorified
+      to the foliage as in our own land), in the purple of the ripening grapes,
+      and in the tawny grass of the pastures, there was autumn enough to touch
+      our spirits, and while it hardly affected the tone of the landscape, to
+      lay upon us the gentle and pensive spell of its presence. Of all the days
+      in the year I would have chosen this to go pilgrim to the house of
+      Petrarch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Euganean Hills, on one of which the poet's house is built, are those
+      mellow heights which you see when you look southwest across the lagoon at
+      Venice. In misty weather they are blue, and in clear weather silver, and
+      the October sunset loves them. They rise in tender azure before you as you
+      issue from the southern gate of Padua, and grow in loveliness as you draw
+      nearer to them from the rich plain that washes their feet with endless
+      harvests of oil and wine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh beauty that will not let itself be told! Could I not take warning from
+      another, and refrain from this fruitless effort of description? A friend
+      in Padua had lent me Disraeli's "Venetia," because a passage of the story
+      occurs in Petrarch's house at Arquà, and we carried the volumes with us on
+      our pilgrimage. I would here quote the description of the village, the
+      house, and the hills from this work, as faultlessly true, and as affording
+      no just idea of either; but nothing of it has remained in my mind except
+      the geological fact that the hills are a volcanic range. To tell the
+      truth, the landscape, as we rode along, continually took my mind off the
+      book, and I could not give that attention either to the elegant language
+      of its descriptions, or the adventures of its well-born characters, which
+      they deserved. I was even more interested in the disreputable-looking
+      person who mounted the box beside our driver directly we got out of the
+      city gate, and who invariably commits this infringement upon your rights
+      in Italy, no matter how strictly and cunningly you frame your contract
+      that no one else is to occupy any part of the carriage but yourself. He
+      does not seem to be the acquaintance of the driver, for they never
+      exchange a word, and he does not seem to pay any thing for the ride. He
+      got down, in this instance, just before we reached the little town at
+      which our driver stopped, and asked us if we wished to drink a glass of
+      the wine of the country. We did not, but his own thirst seemed to answer
+      equally well, and he slaked it cheerfully at our cost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fields did not present the busy appearance which had delighted us on
+      the same road in the spring, but they had that autumnal charm already
+      mentioned. Many of the vine-leaves were sear; the red grapes were already
+      purple, and the white grapes pearly ripe, and they formed a gorgeous
+      necklace for the trees, around which they clung in opulent festoons. Then,
+      dearer to our American hearts than this southern splendor, were the russet
+      fields of Indian corn, and, scattered among the shrunken stalks, great
+      nuggets of the "harmless gold" of pumpkins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Battaglia (the village just beyond which you turn off to go to Arquà)
+      there was a fair, on the blessed occasion of some saint's day, and there
+      were many booths full of fruits, agricultural implements, toys, clothes,
+      wooden ware, and the like. There was a great crowd and a noise, but,
+      according to the mysterious Italian custom, nobody seemed to be buying or
+      selling. I am in the belief that a small purchase of grapes we made here
+      on our return was the great transaction of the day, unless, indeed, the
+      neat operation in alms achieved at our expense by a mendicant villager may
+      be classed commercially.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we turned off from the Rovigo road at Battaglia we were only three
+      miles from Arquà.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Now, all the way from this turning to the foot of the hill on which the
+      village was stretched asleep in the tender sunshine, there was on either
+      side of the road a stream of living water. There was no other barrier than
+      this between the road and the fields (unless the vines swinging from tree
+      to tree formed a barrier), and, as if in graceful excuse for the
+      interposition of even these slender streams, Nature had lavished such
+      growth of wild flowers and wild berries on the banks that it was like a
+      garden avenue, through the fragrance and beauty of which we rolled,
+      delighted to silence, almost to sadness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we began to climb the hill to Arquà, and the driver stopped to
+      breathe his horse, I got out and finished the easy ascent on foot. The
+      great marvel to me is that the prospect of the vast plain below, on which,
+      turning back, I feasted my vision, should be there yet, and always. It had
+      the rare and saddening beauty of evanescence, and awoke in me the memory
+      of all beautiful scenery, so that I embroidered the landscape with the
+      silver threads of western streams, and bordered it with Ohio hills. Ohio
+      hills? When I looked again it was the storied Euganean group. But what
+      trans-oceanic bird, voyaging hither, dropped from its mouth the blackberry
+      which took root and grew and blossomed and ripened, that I might taste
+      Home in it on these classic hills?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wonder did Petrarch walk often down this road from his house just above?
+      I figured him coming to meet me with his book in his hand, in his reverend
+      poetic robes, and with his laurel on, over that curious kind of bandaging
+      which he seems to have been fond of&mdash;looking, in a word, for all the
+      world like the neuralgic Petrarch in the pictures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Drawing nearer, I discerned the apparition to be a robeless, laureless
+      lout, who belonged at the village inn. Yet this lout, though not Petrarch,
+      had merits. His face and hands, and his legs, as seen from his knees down,
+      had the tone of the richest bronze; he wore a mountain cap with a long
+      tasseled fall to the back of it; his face was comely and his eye
+      beautiful; and he was so nobly ignorant of every thing that a colt or
+      young bullock could not have been better company. He merely offered to
+      guide us to Petrarch's house, and was silent, except when spoken to, from
+      that instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am here tempted to say: Arquà is in the figure of a man stretched upon
+      the hill slope. The head, which is Petrarch's house, rests upon the
+      summit. The carelessly tossed arms lie abroad from this in one direction,
+      and the legs in the opposite quarter. It is a very lank and shambling
+      figure, without elegance or much proportion, and the attitude is the last
+      wantonness of loafing. We followed our lout up the right leg, which is a
+      gentle and easy ascent in the general likeness of a street. World-old
+      stone cottages crouch on either side; here and there is a more ambitious
+      house in decay; trees wave over the street, and down its distance comes an
+      occasional donkey-cart very musically and leisurely. By all odds, Arquà
+      and its kind of villages are to be preferred to those hamlets of the plain
+      which in Italy cling to the white-hot highway without a tree to shelter
+      them, and bake and burn there in the merciless sun. Their houses of
+      stuccoed stone are crowded as thickly together as city houses, and these
+      wretched little villages do their worst to unite the discomforts of town
+      and country with a success dreadful to think of. In all countries villages
+      are hateful to the heart of civilized man. In the Lombard plains I wonder
+      that one stone of them rests upon another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We reached Petrarch's house before the custodian had arrived to admit us,
+      and stood before the high stone wall which shuts in the front of the
+      house, and quite hides it from those without. This wall bears the
+      inscription, <i>Casa Petrarca</i>, and a marble tablet lettered to the
+      following effect:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+         SE TI AGITA
+    SACRO AMORE DI PATRIA,
+   T'INCHINA A QUESTE MURA
+  OVE SPIRÃ’ LA GRAND' ANIMA,
+   IL CANTOR DEI SCIPIONI
+         E DI LAURA.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Which may be translated: "If thou art stirred by love of country, bow to
+      these walls, whence passed the great soul, the singer of the Scipios and
+      of Laura."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile we became the centre of a group of the youths of Arquà, who had
+      kindly attended our progress in gradually increasing numbers from the
+      moment we had entered the village. They were dear little girls and boys,
+      and mountain babies, all with sunburnt faces and the gentle and the
+      winning ways native to this race, which Nature loves better than us of the
+      North. The blonde pilgrim seemed to please them, and they evidently took
+      us for <i>Tedeschi</i>. You learn to submit to this fate in Northern
+      Italy, however ungracefully, for it is the one that constantly befalls you
+      outside of the greatest cities. The people know about two varieties of
+      foreigners&mdash;the Englishman and the German. If, therefore, you have
+      not <i>rosbif</i> expressed in every lineament of your countenance; if the
+      soles of your boots are less than an inch thick, and your clothes are not
+      reduced in color to the invariable and maddening tone of the English
+      tweed,&mdash;you must resign yourself to be a German. All this is grievous
+      to the soul which loves to spread its eagle in every land and to be known
+      as American, with star-spangled conspicuousness all over the world: but it
+      cannot be helped. I vainly tried to explain the geographical, political,
+      and natural difference between Tedeschi and Americani to the custodian of
+      Petrarch's house. She listened with amiability, shrugged her shoulders
+      hopelessly, and said, in her rude Venetian, "<i>Mi no so miga</i>" (I
+      don't know at all).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before she came, I had a mind to prove the celebrity of a poet on the spot
+      where he lived and died,&mdash;on his very hearthstone, as it were. So I
+      asked the lout, who stood gnawing a stick and shifting his weight from one
+      foot to the other,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "When did Petrarch live here?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ah! I don't remember him."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Who was he?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "A poet, signor."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Certainly the first response was not encouraging, but the last revealed
+      that even to the heavy and clouded soul of this lout the divine fame of
+      the poet had penetrated&mdash;and he a lout in the village where Petrarch
+      lived and ought to be first forgotten. He did not know when Petrarch had
+      lived there,&mdash;a year ago, perhaps, or many centuries,&mdash;but he
+      knew that Petrarch was a poet. A weight of doubt was lifted from my
+      spirit, and I responded cheerfully to some observations on the weather
+      offered by a rustic matron who was pitching manure on the little
+      hill-slope near the house. When, at last, the custodian came and opened
+      the gate to us, we entered a little grassy yard from which a flight of
+      steps led to Petrarch's door. A few flowers grew wild among the grass, and
+      a fig-tree leaned its boughs against the wall. The figs on it were green,
+      though they hung ripe and blackening on every other tree in Arquà. Some
+      ivy clung to the stones, and from this and the fig-tree, as we came away,
+      we plucked memorial leaves, and blended them with flowers which the youth
+      of Arquà picked and forced upon us for remembrance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A quaint old door opened into the little stone house, and admitted us to a
+      kind of wide passage-way with rooms on either side; and at the end
+      opposite to which we entered, another door opened upon a balcony. From
+      this balcony we looked down on Petrarch's garden, which, presently
+      speaking, is but a narrow space with more fruit than flowers in it. Did
+      Petrarch use to sit and meditate in this garden? For me I should better
+      have liked a chair on the balcony, with the further and lovelier prospect
+      on every hand of village-roofs, sloping hills all gray with olives, and
+      the broad, blue Lombard plain, sweeping from heaven to heaven below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The walls of the passage-way are frescoed (now very faintly) in
+      illustration of the loves of Petrarch and Laura, with verses from the
+      sonnets inscribed to explain the illustrations. In all these Laura
+      prevails as a lady of a singularly long waist and stiff movements, and
+      Petrarch, with his face tied up and a lily in his hand, contemplates the
+      flower in mingled botany and toothache. There is occasionally a startling
+      literalness in the way the painter has rendered some of the verses. I
+      remember with peculiar interest the illustration of a lachrymose passage
+      concerning a river of tears, wherein the weeping Petrarch, stretched
+      beneath a tree, had already started a small creek of tears, which was
+      rapidly swelling to a flood with the torrent from his eyes. I attribute
+      these frescos to a later date than that of the poet's residence, but the
+      portrait over the door of the bedroom inside of the chamber, was of his
+      own time, and taken from him&mdash;the custodian said. As it seemed to
+      look like all the Petrarchian portraits, I did not remark it closely, but
+      rather turned my attention to the walls of the chamber, which were thickly
+      over-scribbled with names. They were nearly all Italian, and none English
+      so far as I saw. This passion for allying one's self to the great, by
+      inscribing one's name on places hallowed by them, is certainly very odd;
+      and (I reflected as I added our names to the rest) it is, without doubt,
+      the most impertinent and idiotic custom in the world. People have thus
+      written themselves down, to the contempt of sensible futurity, all over
+      Petrarch's house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The custodian insisted that the bedroom was just as in the poet's time;
+      some rooms beyond it had been restored; the kitchen at its side was also
+      repaired. Crossing the passage-way, we now entered the dining-room, which
+      was comparatively large and lofty, with a mighty and generous fire-place
+      at one end, occupying the whole space left by a balcony-window. The floor
+      was paved with tiles, and the window-panes were round and small, and set
+      in lead&mdash;like the floors and window-panes of all the other rooms. A
+      gaudy fresco, representing some indelicate female deity, adorned the front
+      of the fire-place, which sloped expanding from the ceiling and terminated
+      at the mouth without a mantel-piece. The chimney was deep, and told of the
+      cold winters in the hills, of which, afterward, the landlady of the
+      village inn prattled less eloquently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this dining-room opens, to the right, the door of the room which they
+      call Petrarch's library; and above the door, set in a marble frame, with a
+      glass before it, is all that is mortal of Petrarch's cat, except the hair.
+      Whether or not the fur was found incompatible with the process of
+      embalming, and therefore removed, or whether it has slowly dropped away
+      with the lapse of centuries, I do not know; but it is certain the cat is
+      now quite hairless, and has the effect of a wash-leather invention in the
+      likeness of a young lamb. On the marble slab below there is a Latin
+      inscription, said to be by the great poet himself, declaring this cat to
+      have been "second only to Laura." We may, therefore, believe its virtues
+      to have been rare enough; and cannot well figure to ourselves Petrarch
+      sitting before that wide-mouthed fire-place, without beholding also the
+      gifted cat that purrs softly at his feet and nestles on his knees, or,
+      with thickened tail and lifted back, parades, loftily round his chair in
+      the haughty and disdainful manner of cats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the library, protected against the predatory enthusiasm of visitors by
+      a heavy wire netting, are the desk and chair of Petrarch, which I know of
+      no form of words to describe perfectly. The front of the desk is of a kind
+      of mosaic in cubes of wood, most of which have been carried away. The
+      chair is wide-armed and carved, but the bottom is gone, and it has been
+      rudely repaired. The custodian said Petrarch died in this chair while he
+      sat writing at his desk in the little nook lighted by a single window
+      opening on the left from his library. He loved to sit there. As I entered
+      I found he had stepped out for a moment, but I know he returned directly
+      after I withdrew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On one wall of the library (which is a simple oblong room, in nowise
+      remarkable) was a copy of verses in a frame, by Cesarotti, and on the wall
+      opposite a tribute from Alfieri, both <i>manu propriâ</i>. Over and above
+      these are many other scribblings; and hanging over the door of the poet's
+      little nook was a criminal French lithograph likeness of "Pétrarque" when
+      young.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alfieri's verses are written in ink on the wall, while those of Cesarotti
+      are on paper, and framed, I do not remember any reference to his visit to
+      Petrarch's house in Alfieri's autobiography, though the visit must have
+      taken place in 1783, when he sojourned at Padua, and "made the
+      acquaintance of the celebrated Cesarotti, with whose lively and courteous
+      manners he was no less satisfied than he had always been in reading his
+      (Cesarotti's) most masterly version of 'Ossian.'" It is probable that the
+      friends visited the house together. At any rate, I care to believe that
+      while Cesarotti sat "composing" his tribute comfortably at the table,
+      Alfieri's impetuous soul was lifting his tall body on tiptoe to scrawl its
+      inspirations on the plastering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Do you care, gentle reader, to be reminded that just before this visit
+      Alfieri had heard in Venice of the "peace between England and the United
+      Colonies," and that he then and there "wrote the fifth ode of the 'America
+      Libera,'" and thus finished that poem?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After copying these verses we returned to the dining-room, and while one
+      pilgrim strayed idly through the names in the visitor's book, the other
+      sketched Petrarch's cat, before mentioned, and Petrarch's inkstand of
+      bronze&mdash;a graceful little thing, having a cover surmounted by a
+      roguish cupid, while the lower part is supported on three lion's claws,
+      and just above the feet, at either of the three corners, is an exquisite
+      little female bust and head. Thus sketching and idling, we held
+      spell-bound our friends the youth of Arquà, as well as our driver, who,
+      having brought innumerable people to see the house of Petrarch, now for
+      the first time, with great astonishment, beheld the inside of it himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to the authenticity of the house I think there can be no doubt, and as
+      to the genuineness of the relics there, nothing in the world could shake
+      my faith in them, though Muratori certainly characterizes them as
+      "superstitions." The great poet was sixty-five years old when he came to
+      rest at Arquà, and when, in his own pathetic words, "there remained to him
+      only to consider and to desire how to make a good end." He says further,
+      at the close of his autobiography: "In one of the Euganean hills, near to
+      ten miles from the city of Padua, I have built me a house, small but
+      pleasant and decent, in the midst of slopes clothed with vines and olives,
+      abundantly sufficient for a family not large and discreet. Here I lead my
+      life, and although, as I have said, infirm of body, yet tranquil of mind,
+      without excitements, without distractions, without cares, reading always,
+      and writing and praising God, and thanking God as well for evil as for
+      good; which evil, if I err not, is trial merely and not punishment. And
+      all the while I pray to Christ that he make good the end of my life, and
+      have mercy on me, and forgive me, and even forget my youthful sins;
+      wherefore, in this solitude, no words are so sweet to my lips as these of
+      the psalm: '<i>Delicta juventutis meoe, et ignorantias meas ne memineris</i>.'
+      And with every feeling of the heart I pray God, when it please Him, to
+      bridle my thoughts, so long unstable and erring; and as they have vainly
+      wandered to many things, to turn them all to Him&mdash;only true, certain,
+      immutable Good."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I venerate the house at Arquà because these sweet and solemn words were
+      written in it. We left its revered shelter (after taking a final look from
+      the balcony down upon "the slopes clothed with vines and olives") and
+      returned to the lower village, where, in the court of the little church,
+      we saw the tomb of Petrarch&mdash;"an ark of red stone, upon four columns
+      likewise of marble." The epitaph is this:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Frigida Francisci lapis hic tegit ossa Petrarcae;
+  Suscipe, Virgo parens, animam; sate Virgine, parce
+  Fessaque jam terris Coeli requiescat in arce."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      A head of the poet in bronze surmounts the ark. The housekeeper of the
+      parish priest, who ran out to enjoy my admiration and bounty, told me a
+      wild local tradition of an attempt on the part of the Florentines to steal
+      the bones of Petrarch away from Arquà, in proof of which she showed me a
+      block of marble set into the ark, whence she said a fragment had been
+      removed by the Florentines. This local tradition I afterwards found
+      verified, with names and dates, in a little "Life of Petrarch," by F.
+      Leoni, published at Padua in 1843. It appears that this curious attempt of
+      the Florentines to do doubtful honor to the great citizen whose hereditary
+      civic rights they restored too late (about the time he was drawing nigh
+      his "good end" at Arquà), was made for them by a certain monk of
+      Portagruaro named Tommaso Martinelli. He had a general instruction from
+      his employers to bring away from Arquà "any important thing of Petrarch's"
+      that he could; and it occurred to this ill-advised friar to "move his
+      bones." He succeeded on a night of the year 1630 in stealing the dead
+      poet's arm. The theft being at once discovered, the Venetian Republic
+      rested not till the thief was also discovered; but what became of the arm
+      or of the sacrilegious monk neither the Signor Leoni nor the old women of
+      Arquà give any account. The Republic removed the rest of Petrarch's body,
+      which is now said to be in the Royal Museum of Madrid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was willing to know more of this quaint village of Arquà, and I rang at
+      the parish priest's door to beg of him some account of the place, if any
+      were printed. But already at one o'clock he had gone to bed for a nap, and
+      must on no account be roused till four. It is but a quiet life men lead in
+      Arquà, and their souls are in drowsy hands. The amount of sleep which this
+      good man gives himself (if he goes to bed at 9 P.M. and rises at 9 A.M.,
+      with a nap of three hours during the day) speaks of a quiet conscience, a
+      good digestion, and uneventful days. As I turned this notion over in my
+      mind, my longing to behold his reverence increased, that I might read life
+      at Arquà in the smooth curves of his well-padded countenance. I thought it
+      must be that his "bowels of compassion were well-rounded," and, making
+      sure of absolution, I was half-minded, if I got speech with him, to
+      improve the occasion by confessing one or two of my blackest sins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ought I to say here that, on the occasion of a second visit to Arquà, I
+      succeeded in finding this excellent ecclesiastic wide awake at two o'clock
+      in the afternoon, and that he granted me an interview at that hour?
+      Justice to him, I think, demands this admission of me. He was not at all a
+      fat priest, as I had prefigured him, but rather of a spare person, and of
+      a brisk and lively manner. At the village inn, after listening half an
+      hour to a discourse on nothing but white wine from a young priest, who had
+      stopped to drink a glass of it, I was put in the way of seeing the priest
+      of Arquà by the former's courtesy. Happily enough, his reverence chanced
+      to have the very thing I wanted to see&mdash;no other than Leoni's "Life
+      of Petrarch," to which I have already referred. Courtesy is the blood in
+      an Italian's veins, and I need not say that the ecclesiastic of Arquà,
+      seeing my interest in the place, was very polite and obliging. But he
+      continued to sleep throughout our first stay in Arquà, and I did not see
+      him then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I strolled up and down the lazy, rambling streets, and chiefly devoted
+      myself to watching the young women who were washing clothes at the stream
+      running from the "Fountain of Petrarch." Their arms and legs were bronzed
+      and bare, and they chattered and laughed gayly at their work. Their
+      wash-tubs were formed by a long marble conduit from the fountain; their
+      wash-boards, by the inward-sloping conduit-sides; and they thrashed and
+      beat the garments clean upon the smooth stone. To a girl, their waists
+      were broad and their ankles thick. Above their foreheads the hair was cut
+      short, and their "back hair" was gathered into a mass, and held together
+      by converging circle of silver pins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Piazza della Fontana, in Arquà, is a place some fifty feet in length
+      and breadth, and seems to be a favorite place of public resort. In the
+      evening, doubtless, it is alive with gossipers, as now with workers. It
+      may be that then his reverence, risen from his nap, saunters by, and
+      pauses long enough to chuck a pretty girl under the chin or pinch an
+      urchin's cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our dinner was ready by the time I got back to the inn, and we sat down to
+      a chicken stewed in oil and a stoup of the white wine of Arquà. It was a
+      modest feast, but, being a friend to oil, I found it savory, and the wine
+      was both good and strong. While we lingered over the repast we speculated
+      somewhat carelessly whether Arquà had retained among its simplicities the
+      primitive Italian cheapness of which you read much. When our landlord
+      leaned over the table and made out our account on it with a bit of chalk,
+      the bill was as follows:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          Soldi.
+  Chicken   70
+  Bread      8
+  Wine      20
+            &mdash;
+  Total     98
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It surely was not a costly dinner, yet I could have bought the same
+      chicken in Venice for half the money; which is but another proof that the
+      demand of the producer is often much larger than the supply of the
+      consumer, and that to buy poultry cheaply you must not purchase it where
+      raised,&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  ..."On misty mountain ground,
+  Its own vast shadow glory crowned,"&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      but rather in a large city after it has been transported forty miles or
+      more. Not that we begrudged the thrifty inn-keeper his fee. We paid it
+      cheerfully, as well for his own sake as for that of his pleasant and neat
+      little wife, who kept the whole inn so sweet and clean; and we bade them a
+      most cordial farewell as we drove away from their door.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Returning, we stopped at the great castle of the Obizzi (now the property
+      of the Duke of Modena), through which we were conducted by a surly and
+      humorous <i>custode</i>, whose pride in life was that castle and its
+      treasures, so that he resented as a personal affront the slightest
+      interest in any thing else. He stopped us abruptly in the midst of the
+      museum, and, regarding the precious antiques and curiosities around him,
+      demanded:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Does this castle please you?" Then, with a scornful glance at us, "Your
+      driver tells me you have been at Arquà? And what did you see at Arquà? A
+      shabby little house and a cat without any hair on. I would not," said this
+      disdainful <i>custode</i>, "go to Arquà if you gave me a lemonade."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I had often heard in Venice of that ancient people, settled in the Alpine
+      hills about the pretty town of Bassano, on the Brenta, whom common fame
+      declares to be a remnant of the Cimbrian invaders of Rome, broken up in
+      battle, and dispersed along the borders of North Italy, by Marius, many
+      centuries ago. So when the soft September weather came, last year, we
+      sallied out of Venice, in three, to make conquest of whatever was curious
+      in the life and traditions of these mountaineers, who dwell in seven
+      villages, and are therefore called the people of the Sette Communi among
+      their Italian neighbors. We went fully armed with note-book and
+      sketch-book, and prepared to take literary possession of our conquest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From Venice to the city of Vicenza by railroad, it is two hours; and
+      thence one must take a carriage to Bassano (which is an opulent and busy
+      little grain mart, of some twelve thousand souls, about thirty miles north
+      of Venice). We were very glad of the ride across the country. By the time
+      we reached the town it was nine o'clock, and moonlight, and as we glanced
+      out of our windows we saw the quaint up-and-down-hill streets peopled with
+      promenaders, and every body in Bassano seemed to be making love. Young
+      girls strolled about the picturesque ways with their lovers, and tender
+      couples were cooing at the doorways and windows, and the scene had all
+      that surface of romance with which the Italians contrive to varnish the
+      real commonplaceness of their life. Our ride through the twilight
+      landscape had prepared us for the sentiment of Bassano; we had pleased
+      ourselves with the spectacle of the peasants returning from their labor in
+      the fields, led in troops of eight or ten by stalwart, white-teethed,
+      bare-legged maids; and we had reveled in the momentary lordship of an old
+      walled town we passed, which at dusk seemed more Gothic and Middle-Age
+      than any thing after Verona, with a fine church, and turrets and
+      battlements in great plenty. What town it was, or what it had been doing
+      there so many ages, I have never sought to know, and I should be sorry to
+      learn any thing about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning we began those researches for preliminary information
+      concerning the Cimbri which turned out so vain. Indeed, as we drew near
+      the lurking-places of that ancient people, all knowledge relating to them
+      diffused itself into shadowy conjecture. The barber and the bookseller
+      differed as to the best means of getting to the Sette Communi, and the <i>caffetiere</i>
+      at whose place we took breakfast knew nothing at all of the road, except
+      that it was up the mountains, and commanded views of scenery which verily,
+      it would not grieve us to see. As to the Cimbri, he only knew that they
+      had their own language, which was yet harder than the German. The German
+      was hard enough, but the Cimbrian! <i>Corpo</i>!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, hearing of a famous cave there is at Oliero, a town some miles
+      further up the Brenta, we determined to go there, and it was a fortunate
+      thought, for there we found a nobleman in charge of the cave who told us
+      exactly how to reach the Sette Communi. You pass a bridge to get out of
+      Bassano&mdash;a bridge which spans the crystal swiftness of the Brenta,
+      rushing down to the Adriatic from the feet of the Alps on the north, and
+      full of voluble mills at Bassano. All along the road to Oliero was the
+      finest mountain scenery, Brenta-washed, and picturesque with ever-changing
+      lines. Maize grows in the bottom-lands, and tobacco, which is guarded in
+      the fields by soldiers for the monopolist government. Farm-houses dot the
+      valley, and now and then we passed villages, abounding in blonde girls, so
+      rare elsewhere in Italy, but here so numerous as to give Titian that type
+      from which he painted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Oliero we learned not only which was the road to the Sette Communi, but
+      that we were in it, and it was settled that we should come the next day
+      and continue in it, with the custodian of the cave, who for his breakfast
+      and dinner, and what else we pleased, offered to accompany us. We were
+      early at Oliero on the following morning, and found our friend in waiting;
+      he mounted beside our driver, and we rode up the Brenta to the town of
+      Valstagna where our journey by wheels ended, and where we were to take
+      mules for the mountain ascent. Our guide, Count Giovanni Bonato (for I may
+      as well give him his title, though at this stage of our progress we did
+      not know into what patrician care we had fallen), had already told us what
+      the charge for mules would be, but it was necessary to go through the
+      ceremony of bargain with the muleteer before taking the beasts. Their
+      owner was a Cimbrian, with a broad sheepish face, and a heavy, awkward
+      accent of Italian which at once more marked his northern race, and made us
+      feel comparatively secure from plunder in his hands. He had come down from
+      the mountain top the night before, bringing three mules laden with
+      charcoal, and he had waited for us till the morning. His beasts were
+      furnished with comfortable pads, covered with linen, to ride upon, and
+      with halters instead of bridles, and we were prayed to let them have their
+      heads in the ascent, and not to try to guide them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The elegant leisure of Valstagna (and in an Italian town nearly the whole
+      population is elegantly at leisure) turned out to witness the departure of
+      our expedition; the pretty little blonde wife of our inn-keeper, who was
+      to get dinner ready against our return, held up her baby to wish us <i>boun
+      viaggio</i>, and waved us adieu with the infant as with a handkerchief;
+      the chickens and children scattered to right and left before our advance;
+      and with Count Giovanni going splendidly ahead on foot, and the Cimbrian
+      bringing up the rear, we struck on the broad rocky valley between the
+      heights, and presently began the ascent. It was a lovely morning; the sun
+      was on the heads of the hills, and the shadows clothed them like robes to
+      their feet; and I should be glad to feel here and now the sweetness,
+      freshness, and purity of the mountain air, that seemed to bathe our souls
+      in a childlike delight of life. A noisy brook gurgled through the valley;
+      the birds sang from the trees; the Alps rose, crest on crest, around us;
+      and soft before us, among the bald peaks showed the wooded height where
+      the Cimbrian village of Fozza stood, with a white chapel gleaming from the
+      heart of the lofty grove. Along the mountain sides the smoke curled from
+      the lonely huts of shepherds, and now and then we came upon one of those
+      melancholy refuges which are built in the hills for such travellers as are
+      belated in their ways, or are overtaken there by storms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The road for the most part winds by the brink of precipices,&mdash;walled
+      in with masonry of small stones, where Nature has not shored it up with
+      vast monoliths,&mdash;and is paved with limestone. It is, of course,
+      merely a mule-path, and it was curious to see, and thrilling to
+      experience, how the mules, vain of the safety of their foothold, kept as
+      near the border of the precipices as possible. For my own part, I
+      abandoned to my beast the entire responsibility involved by this line of
+      conduct; let the halter hang loose upon his neck, and gave him no aid
+      except such slight service as was occasionally to be rendered by shutting
+      my eyes and holding my breath. The mule of the fairer traveller behind me
+      was not only ambitious of peril like my own, but was envious of my beast's
+      captaincy, and continually tried to pass him on the outside of the path,
+      to the great dismay of the gentle rider; while half-suppressed wails of
+      terror from the second lady in the train gave evidence of equal vanity and
+      daring in her mule. Count Giovanni strode stolidly before, the Cimbrian
+      came behind, and we had little coherent conversation until we stopped
+      under a spreading haw-tree, half-way up the mountain, to breathe our
+      adventurous beasts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here two of us dismounted, and while one of the ladies sketched the other
+      in her novel attitude of cavalier, I listened to the talk of Count
+      Giovanni and the Cimbrian. This Cimbrian's name in Italian was Lazzaretti,
+      and in his own tongue Brück, which, pronouncing less regularly, we made
+      Brick, in compliment to his qualities of good fellowship. His broad,
+      honest visage was bordered by a hedge of red beard, and a light of dry
+      humor shone upon it: he looked, we thought, like a Cornishman, and the
+      contrast between him and the <i>viso sciolto, pensieri stretti</i>
+      expression of Count Giovanni was curious enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Concerning his people, he knew little; but the Capo-gente of Fozza could
+      tell me everything. Various traditions of their origin were believed among
+      them; Brick himself held to one that they had first come from Denmark. As
+      we sat there under the spreading haw-tree, Count Giovanni and I made him
+      give us the Cimbrian equivalent of some Italian phrases, which the curious
+      may care to see in correspondence with English and German. Of course,
+      German pronunciation must be given to the words:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  <i>English.         Cimbrian.               German.</i>
+
+  I go,            I gehe,                 Ich gehe.
+  Thou goest,      Du gehst,               Du gehst.
+  He goes,         Ar geht,                Er geht.
+  We go,           Hamish gehen,           Wir gehen.
+  You go,          Hamish setender gehnt,  Ihr geht.
+  They go,         Dandern gehnt,          Sie gehen.
+  I went,          I bin gegehnt,          Ich bin gegangen.
+  Thou wentest,    Du bist gegehnt,        Du bist gegangen.
+  He went,         Der iganget,            Er ist gegangen
+  Good day,        Uter tag,               Guten Tag.
+  Good night,      Uter nast,              Gute Nacht.
+  How do you do?   Bie estater?            Wie steht's?
+  How goes it?     Bie gehts?              Wie geht's?
+  I,               I,                      Ich.
+  Thou,            Du,                     Du.
+  He, she,         Di,                     Er, sie.
+  We,              Borandern,              Wir.
+  You,             Ihrt,                   Ihr.
+  They,            Dandern,                Sie.
+  The head,        Da kof,                 Der Kopf.
+  Breast,          Petten,                 Brust (<i>Italian</i> petto)
+  Face,            Denne,                  Gesicht.
+  Arm,             Arm,                    Arm.
+  Foot,            Vuss,                   Fuss.
+  Finger,          Vinger,                 Finger.
+  Hand,            Hant,                   Hand.
+  Tree,            Pom,                    Baum.
+  Hat,             Hoit,                   Hut.
+  God,             Got,                    Gott.
+  Heaven,          Debelt,                 Himmel.
+  Earth,           Erda,                   Erde.
+  Mountain,        Perk,                   Berg.
+  Valley,          Tal,                    Thal.
+  Man,             Mann,                   Mann.
+  Woman,           Beip,                   Weib.
+  Lady,            Vrau,                   Frau.
+  Child,           Hint,                   Kind.
+  Brother,         Pruder,                 Bruder.
+  Father,          Vada,                   Vater.
+  Mother,          Muter,                  Mutter.
+  Sister,          Schwester,              Schwester,
+  Stone,           Stone,                  Stein.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      A general resemblance to German and English will have been observed in
+      these fragments of Cimbrian, while other words will have been noticed as
+      quite foreign to either.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a poor little house of refreshment beside our spreading haw, and
+      a withered old woman came out of it and refreshed us with clear spring
+      water, and our guides and friends with some bitter berries of the
+      mountain, which they admitted were unpleasant to the taste, but declared
+      were very good for the blood. When they had sufficiently improved their
+      blood, we mounted our mules again, and set out with the journey of an hour
+      and a quarter still between us and Fozza.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we drew near the summit of the mountain our road grew more level, and
+      instead of creeping along by the brinks of precipices, we began to wind
+      through bits of meadow and pleasant valley walled in by lofty heights of
+      rock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though September was bland as June at the foot of the mountain, we found
+      its breath harsh and cold on these heights; and we remarked that though
+      there were here and there breadths of wheat, the land was for the most
+      part in sheep pasturage, and the grass looked poor and stinted of summer
+      warmth. We met, at times, the shepherds, who seemed to be of Italian race,
+      and were of the conventional type of shepherds, with regular faces, and
+      two elaborate curls trained upon their cheeks, as shepherds are always
+      represented in stone over the gates of villas. They bore staves, and their
+      flocks went before them. Encountering us, they saluted us courteously, and
+      when we had returned their greeting, they cried with one voice,&mdash;"Ah,
+      lords! is not this a miserable country? The people are poor and the air is
+      cold. It is an unhappy land!" And so passed on, profoundly sad; but we
+      could not help smiling at the vehement popular desire to have the region
+      abused. We answered cheerfully that it was a lovely country. If the air
+      was cold, it was also pure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We now drew in sight of Fozza, and, at the last moment, just before
+      parting with Brick, we learned that he had passed a whole year in Venice,
+      where he had brought milk from the main-land and sold it in the city. He
+      declared frankly that he counted that year worth all the other years of
+      his life, and that he would never have come back to his native heights but
+      that his father had died, and left his mother and young brothers helpless.
+      He was an honest soul, and I gave him two florins, which I had tacitly
+      appointed him over and above the bargain, with something for the small
+      Brick-bats at home, whom he presently brought to kiss our hands at the
+      house of the Capo-gente.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The village of Fozza is built on a grassy, oblong plain on the crest of
+      the mountain, which declines from it on three sides, and on the north
+      rises high above it into the mists in bleaker and ruggeder acclivities.
+      There are not more than thirty houses in the village, and I do not think
+      it numbers more than a hundred and fifty souls, if it numbers so many.
+      Indeed, it is one of the smallest of the Sette Communi, of which the
+      capital, Asiago, contains some thousands of people, and lies not far from
+      Vicenza. The poor Fozzatti had a church, however, in their village, in
+      spite of its littleness, and they had just completed a fine new bell
+      tower, which the Capo-gente deplored, and was proud of when I praised it.
+      The church, like all the other edifices, was built of stone; and the
+      village at a little distance might look like broken crags of rock, so well
+      it consorted with the harsh, crude nature about it. Meagre meadowlands,
+      pathetic with tufts of a certain pale-blue, tearful flower, stretched
+      about the village and southward as far as to that wooded point which had
+      all day been our landmark in the ascent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our train drew up at the humble door of the Capo-gente (in Fozza all doors
+      are alike humble), and, leaving our mules, we entered by his wife's
+      invitation, and seated ourselves near the welcome fire of the kitchen&mdash;welcome,
+      though we knew that all the sunny Lombard plain below was purple with
+      grapes and black with figs. Again came from the women here the wail of the
+      shepherds: "Ah, lords! is it not a miserable land?" and I began to doubt
+      whether the love which I had heard mountaineers bore to their inclement
+      heights was not altogether fabulous. They made haste to boil us some eggs,
+      and set them before us with some unhappy wine, and while we were eating,
+      the Capo-gente came in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a very well-mannered person, but had, of course, the bashfulness
+      naturally resulting from lonely life at that altitude, where contact with
+      the world must be infrequent. His fellow-citizens seemed to regard him
+      with a kind of affectionate deference, and some of them came in to hear
+      him talk with the strangers. He stood till we prayed him to sit down, and
+      he presently consented to take some wine with us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After all, however, he could not tell us much of his people which we had
+      not heard before. A tradition existed among them, he said, that their
+      ancestors had fled to these Alps from Marius, and that they had dwelt for
+      a long time in the hollows and caves of the mountains, living and burying
+      their dead in the same secret places. At what time they had been converted
+      to Christianity he could not tell; they had, up to the beginning of the
+      present century, had little or no intercourse with the Italian population
+      by which they were surrounded on all sides. Formerly, they did not
+      intermarry with that race, and it was seldom that any Cimbrian knew its
+      language. But now intermarriage is very frequent; both Italian and
+      Cimbrian are spoken in nearly all the families, and the Cimbrian is
+      gradually falling into disuse. They still, however, have books of
+      religious instruction in their ancient dialect, and until very lately the
+      services of their church were performed in Cimbrian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I begged the Capo to show us some of their books and he brought us two,&mdash;one
+      a catechism for children, entitled "Dar Kloane Catechism vor z' Beloseland
+      vortraghet in z' gaprecht von siben Komünen, un vier Halghe Gasang. 1842.
+      Padova." The other book it grieved me to see, for it proved that I was not
+      the only one tempted in recent times to visit these ancient people,
+      ambitious to bear to them the relation of discoverer, as it were. A
+      High-Dutch Columbus, from Vienna, had been before me, and I could only
+      come in for Amerigo Vespucci's tempered glory. This German savant had
+      dwelt a week in these lonely places, patiently compiling a dictionary of
+      their tongue, which, when it was printed, he had sent to the Capo. I am
+      magnanimous enough to give the name of his book, that the curious may buy
+      it if they like. It is called "Johann Andreas Schweller's Cimbrisches
+      Wörterbuch. Joseph Bergman. Vienna, 1855."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Concerning the present Cimbri, the Capo said that in his community they
+      were chiefly hunters, wood-cutters, and charcoal-burners, and that they
+      practiced their primitive crafts in those gloomier and wilder heights we
+      saw to the northward, and descended to the towns of the plain to make sale
+      of their fagots, charcoal, and wild-beast skins. In Asiago and the larger
+      communities they were farmers and tradesmen like the Italians; and the
+      Capo believed that the Cimbri, in all their villages, numbered near ten
+      thousand. He could tell me of no particular customs or usages, and
+      believed they did not differ from the Italians now except in race and
+      language. [The English traveller Rose, who (to my further discomfiture, I
+      find) visited Asiago in 1817, mentions that the Cimbri have the Celtic
+      custom of <i>waking</i> the dead. "If a traveller dies by the way, they
+      plant a cross upon the spot, and all who pass by cast a stone upon his
+      cairn. Some go in certain seasons in the year to high places and woods,
+      where it is supposed they worshiped their divinities, but the origin of
+      the custom is forgot amongst themselves." If a man dies by violence, they
+      lay him out with his hat and shoes on, as if to give him the appearance of
+      a wayfarer, and "symbolize one surprised in the great journey of life." A
+      woman dying in childbed is dressed for the grave in her bridal ornaments.
+      Mr. Rose is very scornful of the notion that these people are Cimbri, and
+      holds that it is "more consonant to all the evidence of history to say,
+      that the flux and reflux of Teutonic invaders at different periods
+      deposited this backwater of barbarians" in the district they now inhabit.
+      "The whole space, which in addition to the seven burghs contains
+      twenty-four villages, is bounded by rivers, alps, and hills. Its most
+      precise limits are the Brenta to the east, and the Astico to the west."]
+      They are, of course, subject to the Austrian Government, but not so
+      strictly as the Italians are; and though they are taxed and made to do
+      military service, they are otherwise left to regulate their affairs pretty
+      much at their pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Capo ended his discourse with much polite regret that he had nothing
+      more worthy to tell us; and, as if to make us amends for having come so
+      far to learn so little, he said there was a hermit living near, whom we
+      might like to see, and sent his son to conduct us to the hermitage. It
+      turned out to be the white object which we had seen gleaming in the wood
+      on the mountain from so great distance below, and the wood turned out to
+      be a pleasant beechen grove, in which we found the hermit cutting fagots.
+      He was warmly dressed in clothes without rent, and wore the clerical
+      knee-breeches. He saluted us with a cricket-like chirpiness of manner, and
+      was greatly amazed to hear that we had come all the way from America to
+      visit him. His hermitage was built upon the side of a white-washed chapel
+      to St. Francis, and contained three or four little rooms or cupboards, in
+      which the hermit dwelt and meditated. They opened into the chapel, of
+      which the hermit had the care, and which he kept neat and clean like
+      himself. He told us proudly that once a year, on the day of the titular
+      saint, a priest came and said mass in that chapel, and it was easy to see
+      that this was the great occasion of the old man's life. For forty years,
+      he said, he had been devout; and for twenty-five he had dwelt in this
+      place, where the goodness of God and the charity of the poor people around
+      had kept him from want. Altogether, he was a pleasant enough hermit, not
+      in the least spiritual, but gentle, simple, and evidently sincere. We gave
+      some small coins of silver to aid him to continue his life of devotion,
+      and Count Giovanni bestowed some coppers with the stately blessing, "<i>Iddio
+      vi benedica, padre mio</i>."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So we left the hermitage, left Fozza, and started down the mountain on
+      foot, for no one may ride down those steeps. Long before we reached the
+      bottom, we had learned to loathe mountains and to long for dead levels
+      during the rest of life. Yet the descent was picturesque, and in some
+      things even more interesting than the ascent had been. We met more people:
+      now melancholy shepherds with their flocks; now swine-herds and
+      swine-herdesses with herds of wild black pigs of the Italian breed; now
+      men driving asses that brayed and woke long, loud, and most musical echoes
+      in the hills; now whole peasant families driving cows, horses, and mules
+      to the plains below. On the way down, fragments of autobiography began,
+      with the opportunities of conversation, to come from the Count Giovanni,
+      and we learned that he was a private soldier at home on that <i>permesso</i>
+      which the Austrian Government frequently gives its less able-bodied men in
+      times of peace. He had been at home some years, and did not expect to be
+      again called into the service. He liked much better to be in charge of the
+      cave at Oliero than to carry the musket, though he confessed that he liked
+      to see the world, and that soldiering brought one acquainted with many
+      places. He had not many ideas, and the philosophy of his life chiefly
+      regarded deportment toward strangers who visited the cave. He held it an
+      error in most custodians to show discontent when travellers gave them
+      little; and he said that if he received never so much, he believed it wise
+      not to betray exultation. "Always be contented, and nothing more," said
+      Count Giovanni.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It is what you people always promise beforehand," I said, "when you
+      bargain with strangers, to do them a certain service for what they please;
+      but afterward they must pay what you please or have trouble. I know you
+      will not be content with what I give you."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "If I am not content," cried Count Giovanni, "call me the greatest ass in
+      the world!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I am bound to say that, for all I could see through the mask of his
+      face, he was satisfied with what I gave him, though it was not much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had told us casually that he was nephew of a nobleman of a certain rich
+      and ancient family in Venice, who sent him money while in the army, but
+      this made no great impression on me; and though I knew there was enough
+      noble poverty in Italy to have given rise to the proverb, <i>Un conte che
+      non conta, non conta niente</i>, yet I confess that it was with a shock of
+      surprise I heard our guide and servant saluted by a lounger in Valstagna
+      with "<i>Sior conte, servitor suo</i>!" I looked narrowly at him, but
+      there was no ray of feeling or pride visible in his pale, languid visage
+      as he responded, "<i>Buona sera, caro</i>."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still, after that revelation we simple plebeians, who had been all day
+      heaping shawls and guide-books upon Count Giovanni, demanding menial
+      offices from him, and treating him with good-natured slight, felt
+      uncomfortable in his presence, and welcomed the appearance of our carriage
+      with our driver, who, having started drunk from Bassano in the morning,
+      had kept drunk all day at Valstagna, and who now drove us back wildly over
+      the road, and almost made us sigh for the security of mules ambitious of
+      the brinks of precipices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      MINOR TRAVELS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.&mdash;PISA.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I am afraid that the talk of the modern railway traveller, if he is
+      honest, must be a great deal of the custodians, the vetturini, and the
+      facchini, whose agreeable acquaintance constitutes his chief knowledge of
+      the population among which he journeys. We do not nowadays carry letters
+      recommending us to citizens of the different places. If we did, consider
+      the calamity we should be to the be-travelled Italian communities we now
+      bless! No, we buy our through-tickets, and we put up at the hotels praised
+      in the hand-book, and are very glad of a little conversation with any
+      native, however adulterated he be by contact with the world to which we
+      belong. I do not blush to own that I love the whole rascal race which
+      ministers to our curiosity and preys upon us, and I am not ashamed to have
+      spoken so often in this book of the lowly and rapacious but interesting
+      porters who opened to me the different gates of that great realm of
+      wonders, Italy. I doubt if they can be much known to the dwellers in the
+      land, though they are the intimates of all sojourners and passengers; and
+      if I have any regret in the matter, it is that I did not more diligently
+      study them when I could. The opportunity once lost, seldom recurs; they
+      are all but as transitory as the Object of Interest itself, I remember
+      that years ago when I first visited Cambridge, there was an old man
+      appeared to me in the character of Genius of the College Grounds, who
+      showed me all the notable things in our city,&mdash;its treasures of art,
+      its monuments,&mdash;and ended by taking me into his wood-house, and
+      sawing me off from a wind-fallen branch of the Washington Elm a bit of the
+      sacred wood for a remembrancer. Where now is that old man? He no longer
+      exists for me, neither he nor his wood-house nor his dwelling-house. Let
+      me look for a month about the College Grounds, and I shall not see him.
+      But somewhere in the regions of traveller's faëry he still lives, and he
+      appears instantly to the new-comer; he has an understanding with the
+      dryads, who keep him supplied with boughs from the Washington Elm, and his
+      wood-house is full of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among memorable custodians in Italy was one whom we saw at Pisa, where we
+      stopped on our way from Leghorn after our accident in the Maremma, and
+      spent an hour in viewing the Quattro Fabbriche. The beautiful old town,
+      which every one knows from the report of travellers, one yet finds
+      possessed of the incommunicable charm which keeps it forever novel to the
+      visitor. Lying upon either side of the broad Arno, it mirrors in the flood
+      architecture almost as fair and noble as that glassed in the Canalazzo,
+      and its other streets seemed as tranquil as the canals of Venice. Those
+      over which we drove, on the day of our visit, were paved with broad
+      flag-stones, and gave out scarcely a sound under our wheels. It was
+      Sunday, and no one was to be seen. Yet the empty and silent city inspired
+      us with no sense of desolation. The palaces were in perfect repair; the
+      pavements were clean; behind those windows we felt that there must be a
+      good deal of easy, comfortable life. It is said that Pisa is one of the
+      few places in Europe where the sweet, but timid spirit of Inexpensiveness&mdash;everywhere
+      pursued by Railways&mdash;still lingers, and that you find cheap
+      apartments in those well-preserved old palaces. No doubt it would be worth
+      more to live in Pisa than it would cost, for the history of the place
+      would alone be to any reasonable sojourner a perpetual recompense, and a
+      princely income far exceeding his expenditure. To be sure, the Tower of
+      Famine, with which we chiefly associate the name of Pisa, has been long
+      razed to the ground, and built piecemeal into the neighboring palaces, but
+      you may still visit the dead wall which hides from view the place where it
+      stood; and you may thence drive on, as we did, to the great Piazza where
+      stands the unrivaledest group of architecture in the world, after that of
+      St. Mark's Place in Venice. There is the wonderful Leaning Tower, there is
+      the old and beautiful Duomo, there is the noble Baptistery, there is the
+      lovely Campo-Santo, and there&mdash;somewhere lurking in portal or behind
+      pillar, and keeping out an eagle-eye for the marveling stranger&mdash;is
+      the much-experienced cicerone who shows you through the edifices. Yours is
+      the fourteen-thousandth American family to which he has had the honor of
+      acting as guide, and he makes you feel an illogical satisfaction in thus
+      becoming a contribution to statistics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We entered the Duomo, in our new friend's custody, and we saw the things
+      which it was well to see. There was mass, or some other ceremony,
+      transacting; but as usual it was made as little obtrusive as possible, and
+      there was not much to weaken the sense of proprietorship with which
+      travellers view objects of interest. Then we ascended the Leaning Tower,
+      skillfully preserving its equilibrium as we went by an inclination of our
+      persons in a direction opposed to the tower's inclination, but perhaps not
+      receiving a full justification of the Campanile's appearance in pictures,
+      till we stood at its base, and saw its vast bulk and height as it seemed
+      to sway and threaten in the blue sky above our heads. There the sensation
+      was too terrible for endurance,&mdash;even the architectural beauty of the
+      tower could not save it from being monstrous to us,&mdash;and we were glad
+      to hurry away from it to the serenity and solemn loveliness of the Campo
+      Santo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here are the frescos painted five hundred years ago to be ruinous and
+      ready against the time of your arrival in 1864, and you feel that you are
+      the first to enjoy the joke of the Vergognosa, that cunning jade who peers
+      through her fingers at the shameful condition of deboshed father Noah, and
+      seems to wink one eye of wicked amusement at you. Turning afterward to any
+      book written about Italy during the time specified, you find your
+      impression of exclusive possession of the frescos erroneous, and your muse
+      naturally despairs, where so many muses have labored in vain, to give a
+      just idea of the Campo Santo. Yet it is most worthy celebration. Those
+      exquisitely arched and traceried colonnades seem to grow like the slim
+      cypresses out of the sainted earth of Jerusalem; and those old paintings,
+      made when Art was&mdash;if ever&mdash;a Soul, and not as now a mere
+      Intelligence, enforce more effectively than their authors conceived the
+      lessons of life and death; for they are themselves becoming part of the
+      triumphant decay they represent. If it was awful once to look upon that
+      strange scene where the gay lords and ladies of the chase come suddenly
+      upon three dead men in their coffins, while the devoted hermits enjoy the
+      peace of a dismal righteousness on a hill in the background, it is yet
+      more tragic to behold it now when the dead men are hardly discernible in
+      their coffins, and the hermits are but the vaguest shadows of gloomy
+      bliss. Alas! Death mocks even the homage done him by our poor fears and
+      hopes: with dust he wipes out dust, and with decay he blots the image of
+      decay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I assure the reader that I made none of these apt reflections in the Campo
+      Santo at Pisa, but have written them out this morning in Cambridge because
+      there happens to be an east wind blowing. No one could have been sad in
+      the company of our cheerful and patient cicerone, who, although visibly
+      anxious to get his fourteen-thousandth American family away, still would
+      not go till he had shown us that monument to a dead enmity which hangs in
+      the Campo Santo. This is the mighty chain which the Pisans, in their old
+      wars with the Genoese, once stretched across the mouth of their harbor to
+      prevent the entrance of the hostile galleys. The Genoese with no great
+      trouble carried the chain away, and kept it ever afterward till 1860, when
+      Pisa was united to the kingdom of Italy. Then the trophy was restored to
+      the Pisans, and with public rejoicings placed in the Campo Santo, an
+      emblem of reconciliation and perpetual amity between ancient foes. [I read
+      in Mr. Norton's <i>Notes of Travel and Study in Italy</i>, that he saw in
+      the Campo Santo, as long ago as 1856, "the chains that marked the
+      servitude of Pisa, now restored by Florence," and it is of course possible
+      that our cicerone may have employed one of those chains for the different
+      historical purpose I have mentioned. It would be a thousand pities, I
+      think, if a monument of that sort should be limited to the commemoration
+      of one fact only.] It is not a very good world,&mdash;<i>e pur si muove</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Baptistery stands but a step away from the Campo Santo, and our guide
+      ushered us into it with the air of one who had till now held in reserve
+      his great stroke and was ready to deliver it. Yet I think he waited till
+      we had looked at some comparatively trifling sculptures by Nicolò Pisano
+      before he raised his voice, and uttered a melodious species of howl. While
+      we stood in some amazement at this, the conscious structure of the dome
+      caught the sound and prolonged it with a variety and sweetness of which I
+      could not have dreamed. The man poured out in quick succession his musical
+      wails, and then ceased, and a choir of heavenly echoes burst forth in
+      response. There was a supernatural beauty in these harmonies of which I
+      despair of giving any true idea: they were of such tender and exalted
+      rapture that we might well have thought them the voices of young-eyed
+      cherubim, singing as they passed through Paradise over that spot of earth
+      where we stood. They seemed a celestial compassion that stooped and
+      soothed, and rose again in lofty and solemn acclaim, leaving us poor and
+      penitent and humbled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were long silent, and then broke forth with cries of admiration of
+      which the marvelous echo made eloquence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Did you ever," said the cicerone after we had left the building, "hear
+      such music as that?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The papal choir does not equal it," we answered with one voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cicerone was not to be silenced even with such a tribute, and he went
+      on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Perhaps, as you are Americans, you know Moshu Feelmore, the President?
+      No? Ah, what a fine man! You saw that he had his heart actually in his
+      hand! Well, one day he said to me here, when I told him of the Baptistery
+      echo, 'We have the finest echo in the world in the Hall of Congress.' I
+      said nothing, but for answer I merely howled a little,&mdash;thus! Moshu
+      Feelmore was convinced. Said he, 'There is no other echo in the world
+      besides this. You are right.' I am unique," pursued the cicerone, "for
+      making this echo. But," he added with a sigh, "it has been my ruin. The
+      English have put me in all the guide-books, and sometimes I have to howl
+      twenty times a day. When our Victor Emanuel came here I showed him the
+      church, the tower, and the Campo Santo. Says the king, 'Pfui!'"&mdash;here
+      the cicerone gave that sweeping outward motion with both hands by which
+      Italians dismiss a trifling subject&mdash;"'make me the echo!' I was
+      forced," concluded the cicerone with a strong sense of injury in his tone,
+      "to howl half an hour without ceasing."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.&mdash;THE FERRARA ROAD.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The delight of one of our first journeys over the road between Padua and
+      Ferrara was a Roman <i>cameriere</i> out of place, who got into the
+      diligence at Ponte Lagoscuro. We were six in all: The Englishman who
+      thought it particularly Italian to say "Sì" three times for every assent;
+      the Veneto (as the citizen of the province calls himself, the native of
+      the city being Veneziano) going home to his farm near Padua; the German
+      lady of a sour and dreadful countenance; our two selves, and the Roman <i>cameriere</i>.
+      The last was worth all the rest&mdash;being a man of vast general
+      information acquired in the course of service with families of all
+      nations, and agreeably communicative. A brisk and lively little man, with
+      dancing eyes, beard cut to the mode of the Emperor Napoleon, and the
+      impressive habit of tapping himself on the teeth with his railroad-guide,
+      and lifting his eyebrows when he says any thing specially worthy of
+      remark. He, also, long after the conclusion of an observation, comes back
+      to himself approvingly, with "<i>Sì</i>!" "<i>Vabene</i>!" "<i>Ecco</i>!"
+      He speaks beautiful Italian and constantly, and in a little while we know
+      that he was born at Ferrara, bred at Venice, and is now a citizen of Rome.
+      "St. Peter's, Signori,&mdash;have you ever seen it?&mdash;is the first
+      church of the world. At Ferrara lived Tasso and Ariosto. Venice is a
+      lovely city. Ah! what beauty! But unique. My second country. <i>Sì,
+      Signori, la mia seconda patria</i>." After a pause, "<i>Va bene</i>."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We hint to him that he is extremely fortunate in having so many countries,
+      and that it will be difficult to exile so universal a citizen, which he
+      takes as a tribute to his worth, smiles and says, "Ecco!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he turns to the Veneto, and describes to him the English manner of
+      living. "Wonderfully well they eat&mdash;the English. Four times a day.
+      With rosbif at the dinner. Always, always, always! And tea in the evening,
+      with rosbif cold. <i>Mangiano sempre. Ma bene, dico</i>." After a pause, "<i>Sì</i>!"
+      "And the Venetians, they eat well, too. Whence the proverb: '<i>Sulla Riva
+      degli Schiavoni, si mangiano bei bocconi</i>.' ('On the Riva degli
+      Schiavoni, you eat fine mouthfuls.') Signori, I am going to Venice,"
+      concludes the cameriere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He is the politest man in the world, and the most attentive to ladies. The
+      German lady has not spoken a word, possibly not knowing the language. Our
+      good cameriere cannot bear this, and commiserates her weariness with noble
+      elegance and originality. "<i>La Signora si trova un poco sagrificata</i>?"
+      ("The lady feels slightly sacrificed!") We all smile, and the little man
+      very gladly with us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "An elegant way of expressing it," we venture to suggest. The Veneto roars
+      and roars again, and we all shriek, none louder than the Roman himself. We
+      never can get over that idea of being slightly sacrificed, and it lasts us
+      the whole way to Padua; and when the Veneto gets down at his farm-gate, he
+      first "reverences" us, and then says, "I am very sorry for you others who
+      must be still more slightly sacrificed."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Venice, a week or two later, I meet our cameriere. He is not so gay,
+      quite, as he was, and I fancy that he has not found so many <i>bei bocconi</i>
+      on the Riva degli Schiavoni, as the proverb and a sanguine temperament led
+      him to expect. Do I happen to know, he asks, any American family going to
+      Rome and desiring a cameriere?
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      As I write, the Spring is coming in Cambridge, and I cannot help thinking,
+      with a little heartache, of how the Spring came to meet us once as we rode
+      southward from Venice toward Florence on that road from Padua to Ferrara.
+      It had been May for some time in Tuscany, and all through the wide plains
+      of Venetia this was the railroad landscape: fields tilled and tended as
+      jealously as gardens, and waving in wheat, oats, and grass, with here and
+      there the hay cut already, and here and there acres of Indian corn. The
+      green of the fields was all dashed with the bloody red of poppies; the
+      fig-trees hung full of half-grown fruit; the orchards were garlanded with
+      vines, which they do not bind to stakes in Italy, but train from tree to
+      tree, leaving them to droop in festoons and sway in the wind, with the
+      slender native grace of vines. Huge stone farm-houses shelter under the
+      same roof the family and all the live stock of the farm; thatched cottages
+      thickly dotting the fields, send forth to their cultivation the most
+      picturesque peasants,&mdash;men and women, pretty young girls in broad
+      hats, and wonderful old brown and crooked crones, who seem never to have
+      been younger nor fairer. Country roads, level, straight, and white,
+      stretch away on either hand, and the constant files of poplars escort them
+      wherever they go. All about, the birds sing, and the butterflies dance.
+      The milk-white oxen dragging the heavy carts turn up their patient heads,
+      with wide-spreading horns and mellow eyes, at the passing train; the
+      sunburnt lout behind them suspends the application of the goad; unwonted
+      acquiescence stirs in the bosom of the firm-minded donkey, and even the
+      matter-of-fact locomotive seems to linger as lovingly as a locomotive may
+      along these plains of Spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Padua we take a carriage for Ponte Lagoscuro, and having fought the
+      customary battle with the vetturino before arriving at the terms of
+      contract; having submitted to the successive pillage of the man who had
+      held our horses a moment, of the man who tied on the trunk, and of the man
+      who hovered obligingly about the carriage, and desired to drink our health&mdash;with
+      prodigious smacking of whip, and banging of wheels, we rattle out of the
+      Stella d'Oro, and set forth from the gate of the old city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess that I like posting. There is a freedom and a fine sense of
+      proprietorship in that mode of travel, combined with sufficient speed,
+      which you do not feel on the railroad. For twenty francs and <i>buonamano</i>,
+      I had bought my carriage and horses and driver for the journey of forty
+      miles, and I began to look round on the landscape with a cumulative
+      feeling of ownership in everything I saw. For me, old women spinning in
+      old-world fashion, with distaff and spindle, flax as white as their own
+      hair, came to roadside doors, or moved back and forth under orchard trees.
+      For me, the peasants toiled in the fields together, wearing for my sake
+      wide straw hats, or gay ribbons, or red caps. The white oxen were willing
+      to mass themselves in effective groups, as the ploughman turned the end of
+      his furrow; young girls specially appointed themselves to lead horses to
+      springs as we passed; children had larger eyes and finer faces and played
+      more about the cottage doors, on account of our posting. As for the
+      vine-garlanded trees in the orchards, and the opulence of the endless
+      fertile plain; the white distance of the road before us with its guardian
+      poplars,&mdash;I doubt if people in a diligence could have got so much of
+      these things as we. Certainly they could not have had all to themselves
+      the lordly splendor with which we dashed through gaping villages, taking
+      the street from everybody, and fading magnificently away upon the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0029" id="link2H_4_0029"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.&mdash;TRIESTE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      If you take the midnight steamer at Venice you reach Trieste by six
+      o'clock in the morning, and the hills rise to meet you as you enter the
+      broad bay dotted with the sail of fishing-craft. The hills are bald and
+      bare, and you find, as you draw near, that the city lies at their feet
+      under a veil of mist, or climbs earlier into view along their sides. The
+      prospect is singularly devoid of gentle and pleasing features, and looking
+      at those rugged acclivities, with their aspect of continual bleakness, you
+      readily believe all the stories you have heard of that fierce wind called
+      the Bora which sweeps from them through Trieste at certain seasons. While
+      it blows, ladies walking near the quays are sometimes caught up and set
+      afloat, involuntary Galateas, in the bay, and people keep in-doors as much
+      as possible. But the Bora, though so sudden and so savage, does give
+      warning of its rise, and the peasants avail themselves of this
+      characteristic. They station a man on one of the mountain tops, and when
+      he feels the first breath of the Bora, he sounds a horn, which is a signal
+      for all within hearing to lay hold of something that cannot be blown away,
+      and cling to it till the wind falls. This may happen in three days or in
+      nine, according to the popular proverbs. "The spectacle of the sea," says
+      Dall' Ongaro, in a note to one of his ballads, "while the Bora blows, is
+      sublime, and when it ceases the prospect of the surrounding hills is
+      delightful. The air, purified by the rapid current, clothes them with a
+      rosy veil, and the temperature is instantly softened, even in the heart of
+      winter."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The city itself, as you penetrate it, makes good with its stateliness and
+      picturesqueness your loss through the grimness of its environs. It is in
+      great part new, very clean, and full of the life and movement of a
+      prosperous port; but, better than this, so far as the mere sight-seer is
+      concerned, it wins a novel charm from the many public staircases by which
+      you ascend and descend its hillier quarters, and which are made of stone,
+      and lightly railed and balustraded with iron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something of all this I noticed in my ride from the landing of the steamer
+      to the house of friends in the suburbs, and there I grew better disposed
+      toward the hills, which, as I strolled over them, I found dotted with
+      lovely villas, and everywhere traversed by perfectly-kept carriage-roads,
+      and easy and pleasant foot-paths. It was in the spring-time, and the
+      peach-trees and almond-trees hung full of blossoms and bees, the lizards
+      lay in the walks absorbing the vernal sunshine, the violets and cowslips
+      sweetened all the grassy borders. The scene did not want a human interest,
+      for the peasant girls were going to market at that hour, and I met them
+      everywhere, bearing heavy burdens on their own heads, or hurrying forward
+      with their wares on the backs of donkeys. They were as handsome as heart
+      could wish, and they wore that Italian costume which is not to be seen
+      anywhere in Italy except at Trieste and in the Roman and Neapolitan
+      provinces,&mdash;a bright bodice and gown, with the head-dress of dazzling
+      white linen, square upon the crown, and dropping lightly to the shoulders.
+      Later I saw these comely maidens crouching on the ground in the
+      market-place, and selling their wares, with much glitter of eyes, teeth,
+      and earrings, and a continual babble of bargaining.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to me that the average of good looks was greater among the women
+      of Trieste than among those of Venice, but that the instances of striking
+      and exquisite beauty were rarer. At Trieste, too, the Italian type, so
+      pure at Venice, is lost or continually modified by the mixed character of
+      the population, which perhaps is most noticeable at the Merchants'
+      Exchange. This is a vast edifice roofed with glass, where are the offices
+      of the great steam navigation company, the Austrian Lloyds,&mdash;which,
+      far more than the favor of the Imperial government, has contributed to the
+      prosperity of Trieste,&mdash;and where the traffickers of all races meet
+      daily to gossip over the news and the prices. Here a Greek or Dalmat talks
+      with an eager Italian or a slow, sure Englishman; here the hated Austrian
+      button-holes the Venetian or the Magyar; here the Jew meets the Gentile on
+      common ground; here Christianity encounters the hoary superstitions of the
+      East, and makes a good thing out of them in cotton or grain. All costumes
+      are seen here, and all tongues are heard, the native Triestines
+      contributing almost as much to the variety of the latter as the
+      foreigners. "In regard to language," says Cantù, "though the country is
+      peopled by Slavonians, yet the Italian tongue is spreading into the
+      remotest villages where a few years since it was not understood. In the
+      city it is the common and familiar language; the Slavonians of the North
+      use the German for the language of ceremony; those of the South, as well
+      as the Israelites, the Italian; while the Protestants use the German, the
+      Greeks the Hellenic and Illyric, the <i>employés</i> of the civil courts
+      the Italian or the German, the schools now German and now Italian, the bar
+      and the pulpit Italian. Most of the inhabitants, indeed, are bi-lingual,
+      and very many tri-lingual, without counting French, which is understood
+      and spoken from infancy. Italian, German, and Greek are written, but the
+      Slavonic little, this having remained in the condition of a vulgar tongue.
+      But it would be idle to distinguish the population according to language,
+      for the son adopts a language different from the father's, and now prefers
+      one language and now another; the women incline to the Italian; but those
+      of the upper class prefer now German, now French, now English, as, from
+      one decade to another, affairs, fashions, and fancies change. This in the
+      salons; in the squares and streets, the Venetian dialect is heard."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And with the introduction of the Venetian dialect, Venetian discontent
+      seems also to have crept in, and I once heard a Triestine declaim against
+      the Imperial government quite in the manner of Venice. It struck me that
+      this desire for union with Italy, which he declared prevalent in Trieste,
+      must be of very recent growth, since even so late as 1848, Trieste had
+      refused to join Venice in the expulsion of the Austrians. Indeed, the
+      Triestines have fought the Venetians from the first; they stole the Brides
+      of Venice in one of their piratical cruises in the lagoons; gave aid and
+      comfort to those enemies of Venice, the Visconti, the Carraras, and the
+      Genoese; revolted from St. Mark whenever subjected to his banner, and
+      finally, rather than remain under his sway, gave themselves five centuries
+      ago to Austria.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The objects of interest in Trieste are not many. There are remains of an
+      attributive temple of Jupiter under the Duomo, and there is near at hand
+      the Museum of Classical Antiquities founded in honor of Winckelmann,
+      murdered at Trieste by that ill-advised Pistojese, Ancangeli, who had seen
+      the medals bestowed on the antiquary by Maria Theresa and believed him
+      rich. There is also a scientific museum founded by the Archduke
+      Maximilian, and, above all, there is the beautiful residence of that
+      ill-starred prince,&mdash;the Miramare, where the half-crazed Empress of
+      the Mexicans vainly waits her husband's return from the experiment of
+      paternal government in the New World. It would be hard to tell how Art has
+      charmed rock and wave at Miramare, until the spur of those rugged
+      Triestine hills, jutting into the sea, has been made the seat of ease and
+      luxury, but the visitor is aware of the magic as soon as he passes the
+      gate of the palace grounds. These are in great part perpendicular, and are
+      over clambered with airy stairways climbing to pensile arbors. Where
+      horizontal, they are diversified with mimic seas for swans to sail upon,
+      and summer-houses for people to lounge in and look at the swans from. On
+      the point of land furthest from the acclivity stands the Castle of
+      Miramare, half at sea, and half adrift in the clouds above:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "And fain it would stoop downward
+  To the mirrored wave below;
+  And fain it would soar upward
+  In the evening's crimson glow."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I remember that a little yacht lay beside the pier at the castle's foot,
+      and lazily flapped its sail, while the sea beat inward with as languid a
+      pulse. That was some years ago, before Mexico was dreamed of at Miramare:
+      now, perchance, she who is one of the most unhappy among women looks down
+      distraught from those high windows, and finds in the helpless sail and
+      impassive wave the images of her baffled hope, and that immeasurable sea
+      which gives back its mariners neither to love nor sorrow. I think though
+      she be the wife and daughter of princes, we may pity this poor Empress at
+      least as much as we pity the Mexicans to whom her dreams have brought so
+      many woes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the midnight following my visit to Miramare when the fiacre in
+      which I had quitted my friend's house was drawn up by its greatly
+      bewildered driver on the quay near the place where the steamer for Venice
+      should be lying. There was no steamer for Venice to be seen. The driver
+      swore a little in the polyglot profanities of his native city, and
+      descending from his box, went and questioned different lights&mdash;blue
+      lights, yellow lights, green lights&mdash;to be seen at different points.
+      To a light, they were ignorant, though eloquent, and to pass the time, we
+      drove up and down the quay, and stopped at the landings of all the
+      steamers that touch at Trieste. It was a snug fiacre enough, but I did not
+      care to spend the night in it, and I urged the driver to further inquiry.
+      A wanderer whom we met, declared that it was not the night for the Venice
+      steamer; another admitted that it might be; a third conversed with the
+      driver in low tones, and then leaped upon the box. We drove rapidly away,
+      and before I had, in view of this mysterious proceeding, composed a
+      fitting paragraph for the <i>Fatti Diversi</i> of the <i>Osservatore
+      Triestino</i>, descriptive of the state in which the Guardie di Polizia
+      should find me floating in the bay, exanimate and evidently the prey of a
+      <i>triste evvenimento</i>&mdash;the driver pulled up once more, and now
+      beside a steamer. It was the steamer for Venice, he said, in precisely the
+      tone which he would have used had he driven me directly to it without
+      blundering. It was breathing heavily, and was just about to depart, but
+      even in the hurry of getting on board, I could not help noticing that it
+      seemed to have grown a great deal since I had last voyaged in it. There
+      was not a soul to be seen except the mute steward who took my satchel, and
+      guiding me below into an elegant saloon, instantly left me alone. Here
+      again the steamer was vastly enlarged. These were not the narrow quarters
+      of the Venice steamer, nor was this lamp, shedding a soft light on
+      cushioned seats and paneled doors and wainscotings the sort of
+      illumination usual in that humble craft. I rang the small silver bell on
+      the long table, and the mute steward appeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Was</i> this the steamer for Venice?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Sicuro</i>!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All that I could do in comment was to sit down; and in the mean time the
+      steamer trembled, groaned, choked, cleared its throat, and we were under
+      way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The other passengers have all gone to bed, I suppose," I argued acutely,
+      seeing none of them. Nevertheless, I thought it odd, and it seemed a
+      shrewd means of relief to ring the bell, and pretending drowsiness, to ask
+      the steward which was my state-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He replied with a curious smile that I could have any of them. Amazed, I
+      yet selected a state-room, and while the steward was gone for the sheets
+      and pillow-cases, I occupied my time by opening the doors of all the other
+      state-rooms. They were empty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Am I the only passenger?" I asked, when he returned, with some anxiety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Precisely," he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not proceed and ask if he composed the entire crew&mdash;it seemed
+      too fearfully probable that he did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I now suspected that I had taken passage with the Olandese Volante. There
+      was nothing in the world for it, however, but to go to bed, and there,
+      with the accession of a slight sea-sickness, my views of the situation
+      underwent a total change. I had gone down into the Maelstrom with the
+      Ancient Mariner&mdash;I was a Manuscript Found in a Bottle!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Coming to the surface about six o'clock A.M., I found a daylight as
+      cheerful as need be upon the appointments of the elegant cabin, and upon
+      the good-natured face of the steward when he brought me the caffè latte,
+      and the buttered toast for my breakfast. He said "<i>Servitor suo</i>!" in
+      a loud and comfortable voice, and I perceived the absurdity of having
+      thought that he was in any way related to the
+      Nightmare-Death-in-life-that-thicks-man's-blood-with-cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "This is not the regular Venice steamer, I suppose," I remarked to the
+      steward as he laid my breakfast in state upon the long table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No. Properly, no boat should have left for Venice last night, which was
+      not one of the times of the tri-weekly departure. This was one of the
+      steamers of the line between Trieste and Alexandria, and it was going at
+      present to take on an extraordinary freight at Venice for Egypt. I had
+      been permitted to come on board because my driver said I had a return
+      ticket, and would go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ascending to the deck I found nothing whatever mysterious in the
+      management of the steamer. The captain met me with a bow in the gangway;
+      seamen were coiling wet ropes at different points, as they always are; the
+      mate was promenading the bridge, and taking the rainy weather as it came,
+      with his oil-cloth coat and hat on. The wheel of the steamer was as usual
+      chewing the sea, and finding it unpalatable, and making vain efforts at
+      expectoration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were in sight of the breakwater outside Malamocco, and a pilot-boat was
+      making us from the land. Even at this point the innumerable fortifications
+      of the Austrians began, and they multiplied as we drew near Venice, till
+      we entered the lagoon, and found it a nest of fortresses one with another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unhappily the day being rainy, Venice did not spring resplendent from the
+      sea, as I had always read she would. She rose slowly and languidly from
+      the water,&mdash;not like a queen, but like the gray, slovenly,
+      bedrabbled, heart-broken old slave she really was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0030" id="link2H_4_0030"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.&mdash;BASSANO.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I have already told, in recounting the story of our visit to the Cimbri,
+      how full of courtship we found the little city of Bassano on the evening
+      of our arrival there. Bassano is the birthplace of the painter Jacopo da
+      Ponte, who was one of the first Italian painters to treat scriptural story
+      as accessory to mere landscape, and who had a peculiar fondness for
+      painting Entrances into the Ark, for in these he could indulge without
+      stint the taste for pairing-off early acquired from observation of local
+      customs in his native town. This was the theory offered by one who had
+      imbibed the spirit of subtile speculation from Ruskin, and I think it
+      reasonable. At least it does not conflict with the fact that there is at
+      Bassano a most excellent gallery of paintings entirely devoted to the
+      works of Jacopo da Ponte, and his four sons, who are here to be seen to
+      better advantage than anywhere else. As few strangers visit Bassano, the
+      gallery is little frequented. It is in charge of a very strict old man,
+      who will not allow people to look at the pictures till he has shown them
+      the adjoining cabinet of geological specimens. It is in vain that you
+      assure him of your indifference to these scientific <i>seccature</i>; he
+      is deaf and you are not suffered to escape a single fossil. He asked us a
+      hundred questions, and understood nothing in reply, insomuch that when he
+      came to his last inquiry, "Have the Protestants the same God as the
+      Catholics?" we were rather glad that he should be obliged to settle the
+      fact for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Underneath the gallery was a school of boys, whom as we entered we heard
+      humming over the bitter honey which childhood is obliged to gather from
+      the opening flowers of orthography. When we passed out, the master gave
+      these poor busy bees an atom of holiday, and they all swarmed forth
+      together to look at the strangers. The teacher was a long, lank man, in a
+      black threadbare coat, and a skull-cap&mdash;exactly like the schoolmaster
+      in "The Deserted Village." We made a pretense of asking him our way to
+      somewhere, and went wrong, and came by accident upon a wide flat space,
+      bare as a brick-yard, beside which was lettered on a fragment of the old
+      city wall, "Giuoco di Palla." It was evidently the playground of the whole
+      city, and it gave us a pleasanter idea of life in Bassano than we had yet
+      conceived, to think of its entire population playing ball there in the
+      spring afternoons. We respected Bassano as much for this as for her
+      diligent remembrance of her illustrious dead, of whom she has very great
+      numbers. It appeared to us that nearly every other house bore a tablet
+      announcing that "Here was born," or "Here died," some great or good man of
+      whom no one out of Bassano ever heard. There is enough celebrity in
+      Bassano to supply the world; but as laurel is a thing that grows anywhere,
+      I covet rather from Bassano the magnificent ivy that covers the portions
+      of her ancient wall yet standing. The wall, where visible, is seen to be
+      of a pebbly rough-cast, but it is clad almost from the ground in glossy
+      ivy, that glitters upon it like chain-mail upon the vast shoulders of some
+      giant warrior. The moat beneath is turned into a lovely promenade bordered
+      by quiet villas, with rococo shepherds and shepherdesses in marble on
+      their gates; where the wall is built to the verge of the high ground on
+      which the city stands, there is a swift descent to the wide valley of the
+      Brenta waving in corn and vines and tobacco.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We went up the Brenta one day as far as Oliero, to visit the famous cavern
+      already mentioned, out of which, from the secret heart of the hill, gushes
+      one of the foamy affluents of the river. It is reached by passing through
+      a paper-mill, fed by the stream, and then through a sort of ante-grot,
+      whence stepping-stones are laid in the brawling current through a
+      succession of natural compartments with dome-like roofs. From the hill
+      overhead hang stalactites of all grotesque and fairy shapes, and the rock
+      underfoot is embroidered with fantastic designs wrought by the water in
+      the silence and darkness of the endless night. At a considerable distance
+      from the mouth of the cavern is a wide lake, with a boat upon it, and
+      voyaging to the centre of the pool your attention is drawn to the dome
+      above you, which contracts into a shaft rising upward to a height as yet
+      unmeasured and even unpierced by light. From somewhere in its mysterious
+      ascent, an auroral boy, with a tallow candle, produces a so-called effect
+      of sunrise, and sheds a sad, disheartening radiance on the lake and the
+      cavern sides, which is to sunlight about as the blind creatures of
+      subterranean waters are to those of waves that laugh and dance above
+      ground. But all caverns are much alike in their depressing and gloomy
+      influences, and since there is so great opportunity to be wretched on the
+      surface of the earth, why do people visit them? I do not know that this is
+      more dispiriting or its stream more Stygian than another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wicked memory of the Ecelini survives everywhere in this part of
+      Italy, and near the entrance of the Oliero grotto is a hollow in the hill
+      something like the apsis of a church, which is popularly believed to have
+      been the hiding-place of Cecilia da Baone, one of the many unhappy wives
+      of one of the many miserable members of the Ecelino family. It is not
+      quite clear when Cecilia should have employed this as a place of refuge,
+      and it is certain that she was not the wife of Ecelino da Romano, as the
+      neighbors believe at Oliero, but of Ecelino il Monaco, his father; yet
+      since her name is associated with the grot, let us have her story, which
+      is curiously illustrative of the life of the best society in Italy during
+      the thirteenth century. She was the only daughter of the rich and potent
+      lord, Manfredo, Count of Baone and Abano, who died leaving his heiress to
+      the guardianship of Spinabello da Xendrico. When his ward reached
+      womanhood, Spinabello cast about him to find a suitable husband for her,
+      and it appeared to him that a match with the son of Tiso du Camposampiero
+      promised the greatest advantages. Tiso, to whom he proposed the affair,
+      was delighted, but desiring first to take counsel with his friends upon so
+      important a matter, he confided it for advice to his brother-in-law and
+      closest intimate, Ecelino Balbo. It had just happened that Balbo's son,
+      Ecelino il Monaco, was at that moment disengaged, having been recently
+      divorced from his first wife, the lovely but light Speronella; and Balbo
+      falsely went to the greedy guardian of Cecilia, and offering him better
+      terms than he could hope for from Tiso, secured Cecilia for his son. At
+      this treachery the Camposampieri were furious; but they dissembled their
+      anger till the moment of revenge arrived, when Cecilia's rejected suitor
+      encountering her upon a journey beyond the protection of her husband,
+      violently dishonored his successful rival. The unhappy lady returning to
+      Ecelino at Bassano, recounted her wrong, and was with a horrible injustice
+      repudiated and sent home, while her husband arranged schemes of vengeance
+      in due time consummated. Cecilia next married a Venetian noble, and being
+      in due time divorced, married yet again, and died the mother of a large
+      family of children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is a very old scandal, yet I think there was an <i>habitué</i> of the
+      caffè in Bassano who could have given some of its particulars from
+      personal recollection. He was an old and smoothly shaven gentleman, in a
+      scrupulously white waistcoat, whom we saw every evening in a corner of the
+      caffè playing solitaire. He talked with no one, saluted no one. He drank
+      his glasses of water with anisette, and silently played solitaire. There
+      is no good reason to doubt that he had been doing the same thing every
+      evening for six hundred years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0031" id="link2H_4_0031"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.&mdash;POSSAGNO, CANOVA'S BIRTHPLACE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It did not take a long time to exhaust the interest of Bassano, but we
+      were sorry to leave the place because of the excellence of the inn at
+      which we tarried. It was called "Il Mondo," and it had everything in it
+      that heart could wish. Our rooms were miracles of neatness and comfort;
+      they had the freshness, not the rawness, of recent repair, and they opened
+      into the dining-hall, where we were served with indescribable salads and
+      risotti. During our sojourn we simply enjoyed the house; when we were come
+      away we wondered that so much perfection of hotel could exist in so small
+      a town as Bassano. It is one of the pleasures of by-way travel in Italy,
+      that you are everywhere introduced in character, that you become
+      fictitious and play a part as in a novel. To this inn of The World, our
+      driver had brought us with a clamor and rattle proportioned to the fee
+      received from us, and when, in response to his haughty summons, the
+      cameriere, who had been gossiping with the cook, threw open the kitchen
+      door, and stood out to welcome us in a broad square of forth-streaming
+      ruddy light, amid the lovely odors of broiling and roasting, our driver
+      saluted him with, "Receive these gentle folks, and treat them to your very
+      best. They are worthy of anything." This at once put us back several
+      centuries, and we never ceased to be lords and ladies of the period of Don
+      Quixote as long as we rested in that inn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a bright and breezy Sunday when we left "Il Mondo," and gayly
+      journeyed toward Treviso, intending to visit Possagno, the birthplace of
+      Canova, on our way. The road to the latter place passes through a
+      beautiful country, that gently undulates on either hand till in the
+      distance it rises into pleasant hills and green mountain heights. Possagno
+      itself lies upon the brink of a declivity, down the side of which drops
+      terrace after terrace, all planted with vines and figs and peaches, to a
+      watercourse below. The ground on which the village is built, with its
+      quaint and antiquated stone cottages, slopes gently northward, and on a
+      little rise upon the left hand of us coming from Bassano, we saw that
+      stately edifice with which Canova has honored his humble birthplace. It is
+      a copy of the Pantheon, and it cannot help being beautiful and imposing,
+      but it would be utterly out of place in any other than an Italian village.
+      Here, however, it consorted well enough with the lingering qualities of
+      the old pagan civilization still perceptible in Italy. A sense of that
+      past was so strong with us as we ascended the broad stairway leading up
+      the slope from the village to the level on which the temple stands at the
+      foot of a mountain, that we might well have believed we approached an
+      altar devoted to the elder worship: through the open doorway and between
+      the columns of the portico we could see the priests moving to and fro, and
+      the voice of their chanting came out to us like the sound of hymns to some
+      of the deities long disowned; and I remembered how Padre L&mdash;&mdash;
+      had said to me in Venice, "Our blessed saints are only the old gods
+      baptized and christened anew." Within as without, the temple resembled the
+      Pantheon, but it had little to show us. The niches designed by Canova for
+      statues of the saints are empty yet; but there are busts by his own hand
+      of himself and his brother, the Bishop Canova. Among the people was the
+      sculptor's niece, whom our guide pointed out to us, and who was evidently
+      used to being looked at. She seemed not to dislike it, and stared back at
+      us amiably enough, being a good-natured, plump, comely dark-faced lady of
+      perhaps fifty years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Possagno is nothing if not Canova, and our guide, a boy, knew all about
+      him,&mdash;how, more especially, he had first manifested his wonderful
+      genius by modeling a group of sheep out of the dust of the highway, and
+      how an Inglese happening along in his carriage, saw the boy's work and
+      gave him a plateful of gold napoleons. I dare say this is as near the
+      truth as most facts. And is it not better for the historic Canova to have
+      begun in this way than to have poorly picked up the rudiments of his art
+      in the workshop of his father, a maker of altar-pieces and the like for
+      country churches? The Canova family was intermarried with the Venetian
+      nobility, and will not credit those stories of Canova's beginnings which
+      his townsmen so fondly cherish. I believe they would even distrust the
+      butter-lion with which the boy-sculptor is said to have adorned the table
+      of the noble Falier, and first won his notice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides the temple at Possagno, there is a very pretty gallery containing
+      casts of all Canova's works. It is an interesting place, where Psyches and
+      Cupids flutter, where Venuses present themselves in every variety of
+      attitude, where Sorrows sit upon hard, straight-backed classic chairs, and
+      mourn in the society of faithful Storks; where the Bereft of this century
+      surround death-beds in Greek costume appropriate to the scene; where Muses
+      and Graces sweetly pose themselves and insipidly smile, and where the
+      Dancers and Passions, though nakeder, are no wickeder than the Saints and
+      Virtues. In all, there are a hundred and ninety-five pieces in the
+      gallery, and among the rest the statue named George Washington, which was
+      sent to America in 1820, and afterwards destroyed by fire in the Capitol.
+      The figure is in a sitting posture; naturally, it is in the dress of a
+      Roman general; and if it does not look much like George Washington, it
+      does resemble Julius Cæsar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The custodian of the gallery had been Canova'a body-servant, and he loved
+      to talk of his master. He had so far imbibed the family spirit that he did
+      not like to allow that Canova had ever been other than rich and grand, and
+      he begged us not to believe the idle stories of his first essays in art.
+      He was delighted with our interest in the imperial Washington, and our
+      pleasure in the whole gallery, which we viewed with the homage due to the
+      man who had rescued the world from Swaggering in sculpture. When we were
+      satisfied, he invited us, with his mistress's permission, into the house
+      of the Canovas adjoining the gallery; and there we saw many paintings by
+      the sculptor,&mdash;pausing longest in a lovely little room decorated
+      after the Pompeian manner with <i>scherzi</i> in miniature panels
+      representing the jocose classic usualities: Cupids escaping from cages,
+      and being sold from them, and playing many pranks and games with Nymphs
+      and Graces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Canova was done, and Possagno was finished; and we resumed our way to
+      Treviso, a town nearly as much porticoed as Padua, and having a memory and
+      hardly any other consciousness. The Duomo, which is perhaps the ugliest
+      duomo in the world, contains an "Annunciation," by Titian, one of his best
+      paintings; and in the Monte di Pietà is the grand and beautiful
+      "Entombment," by which Giorgione is perhaps most worthily remembered. The
+      church of San Nicolò is interesting from its quaint and pleasing frescos
+      by the school of Giotto. At the railway station an admirable old man sells
+      the most delicious white and purple grapes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0032" id="link2H_4_0032"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.&mdash;COMO.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      My visit to Lake Como has become to me a dream of summer,&mdash;a vision
+      that remains faded the whole year round, till the blazing heats of July
+      bring out the sympathetic tints in which it was vividly painted. Then I
+      behold myself again in burning Milan, amidst noises and fervors and bustle
+      that seem intolerable after my first six months in tranquil, cool, mute
+      Venice. Looking at the great white Cathedral, with its infinite pinnacles
+      piercing the cloudless blue, and gathering the fierce sun upon it, I half
+      expect to see the whole mass calcined by the heat, and crumbling, statue
+      by statue, finial by finial, arch by arch, into a vast heap of lime on the
+      Piazza, with a few charred English tourists blackening here and there upon
+      the ruin, and contributing a smell of burnt leather and Scotch tweed to
+      the horror of the scene. All round Milan smokes the great Lombard plain,
+      and to the north rises Monte Rosa, her dark head coifed with tantalizing
+      snows as with a peasant's white linen kerchief. And I am walking out upon
+      that fuming plain as far as to the Arco della Pace, on which the bronze
+      horses may melt any minute; or I am sweltering through the city's noonday
+      streets, in search of Sant' Ambrogio, or the Cenacolo of Da Vinci, or what
+      know I? Coming back to our hotel, "Alla Bella Venezia," and greeted on
+      entering by the immense fresco which covers one whole side of the court,
+      it appeared to my friend and me no wonder that Garibaldi should look so
+      longingly from the prow of a gondola toward the airy towers and
+      balloon-like domes that swim above the unattainable lagoons of Venice,
+      where the Austrian then lorded it in coolness and quietness, while hot,
+      red-shirted Italy was shut out upon the dusty plains and stony hills. Our
+      desire for water became insufferable; we paid our modest bills, and at six
+      o'clock we took the train for Como, where we arrived about the hour when
+      Don Abbondio, walking down the lonely path with his book of devotions in
+      his hand, gave himself to the Devil on meeting the bravos of Don Rodrigo.
+      I counsel the reader to turn to <i>I Promessi Sposi</i>, if he would know
+      how all the lovely Como country looks at that hour. For me, the ride
+      through the evening landscape, and the faint sentiment of pensiveness
+      provoked by the smell of the ripening maize, which exhales the same
+      sweetness on the way to Como that it does on any Ohio bottom-land, have
+      given me an appetite, and I am to dine before wooing the descriptive Muse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After dinner, we find at the door of the hotel an English architect whom
+      we know, and we take a boat together for a moonlight row upon the lake,
+      and voyage far up the placid water through air that bathes our heated
+      senses like dew. How far we have left Milan behind! On the lake lies the
+      moon, but the hills are held by mysterious shadows, which for the time are
+      as substantial to us as the hills themselves. Hints of habitation appear
+      in the twinkling lights along the water's edge, and we suspect an
+      alabaster lamp in every casement, and in every invisible house a villa
+      such as Claude Melnotte described to Pauline,&mdash;and some one mouths
+      that well-worn fustian. The rags of sentimentality flutter from every crag
+      and olive-tree and orange-tree in all Italy&mdash;like the wilted paper
+      collars which vulgar tourists leave by our own mountains and streams, to
+      commemorate their enjoyment of the landscape.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The town of Como lies, a swarm of lights, behind us; the hills and shadows
+      gloom around; the lake is a sheet of tremulous silver. There is no telling
+      how we get back to our hotel, or with what satisfied hearts we fall asleep
+      in our room there. The steamer starts for the head of the lake at eight
+      o'clock in the morning, and we go on board at that hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is some pretense of shelter in the awning stretched over the after
+      part of the boat; but we do not feel the need of it in the fresh morning
+      air, and we get as near the bow as possible, that we may be the very first
+      to enjoy the famous beauty of the scenes opening before us. A few sails
+      dot the water, and everywhere there are small, canopied row-boats, such as
+      we went pleasuring in last night. We reach a bend in the lake, and all the
+      roofs and towers of the city of Como pass from view, as if they had been
+      so much architecture painted on a scene and shifted out of sight at a
+      theatre. But other roofs and towers constantly succeed them, not less
+      lovely and picturesque than they, with every curve of the many-curving
+      lake. We advance over charming expanses of water lying between lofty
+      hills; and as the lake is narrow, the voyage is like that of a winding
+      river,&mdash;like that of the Ohio, but for the primeval wildness of the
+      acclivities that guard our Western stream, and the tawniness of its
+      current. Wherever the hills do not descend sheer into Como, a pretty town
+      nestles on the brink, or, if not a town, then a villa, or else a cottage,
+      if there is room for nothing more. Many little towns climb the heights
+      half-way, and where the hills are green and cultivated in vines or olives,
+      peasants' houses scale them to the crest. They grow loftier and loftier as
+      we leave our starting-place farther behind, and as we draw near Colico
+      they wear light wreaths of cloud and snow. So cool a breeze has drawn down
+      between them all the way that we fancy it to have come from them till we
+      stop at Colico, and find that, but for the efforts of our honest engine,
+      sweating and toiling in the dark below, we should have had no current of
+      air. A burning calm is in the atmosphere, and on the broad, flat valley,&mdash;out
+      of which a marshy stream oozes into the lake,&mdash;and on the
+      snow-crowned hills upon the left, and on the dirty village of Colico upon
+      the right, and on the indolent beggars waiting to welcome us, and sunning
+      their goitres at the landing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The name Colico, indeed, might be literally taken in English as
+      descriptive of the local insalubrity. The place was once large, but it has
+      fallen away much from sickness, and we found a bill posted in its public
+      places inviting emigrants to America on the part of a German steamship
+      company. It was the only advertisement of the kind I ever saw in Italy,
+      and I judged that the people must be notoriously discontented there to
+      make it worth the while of a steamship company to tempt from home any of
+      the home-keeping Italian race. And yet Colico, though undeniably hot, and
+      openly dirty, and tacitly unhealthy, had merits, though the dinner we got
+      there was not among its virtues. It had an accessible country about it;
+      that is, its woods and fields were not impenetrably walled in from the
+      vagabond foot; and after we had dined we went and lay down under some
+      greenly waving trees beside a field of corn, and heard the plumed and
+      panoplied maize talking to itself of its kindred in America. It always has
+      a welcome for tourists of our nation wherever it finds us in Italy; and
+      sometimes its sympathy, expressed in a rustling and clashing of its long
+      green blades, or in its strong sweet perfume, has, as already hinted, made
+      me homesick, though I have been uniformly unaffected by potato-patches and
+      tobacco-fields. If only the maize could impart to the Italian cooks the
+      beautiful mystery of roasting-ears! Ah! then indeed it might claim a full
+      and perfect fraternization from its compatriots abroad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From where we lay beside the corn-field, we could see, through the
+      twinkling leaves and the twinkling atmosphere, the great hills across the
+      lake, taking their afternoon naps, with their clouds drawn like
+      handkerchiefs over their heads. It was very hot, and the red and purple
+      ooze of the unwholesome river below "burnt like a witch's oils." It was
+      indeed but a fevered joy we snatched from Nature there; and I am afraid
+      that we got nothing more comfortable from sentiment, when, rising, we
+      wandered off through the unguarded fields toward a ruined tower on a hill.
+      It must have been a relic of feudal times, and I could easily believe it
+      had been the hold of one of those wicked lords who used to rule in the
+      terror of the people beside peaceful and happy Como. But the life, good or
+      bad, was utterly gone out of it now, and what was left of the tower was a
+      burden to the sense. A few scrawny blackberries and other brambles grew
+      out of its fallen stones; harsh, dust-dry mosses painted its weather-worn
+      walls with their blanched gray and yellow. From its foot, looking out over
+      the valley, we saw the road to the Splügen Pass lying white-hot in the
+      valley; and while we looked, the diligence appeared, and dashed through
+      the dust that rose like a flame before. After that it was a relief to
+      stroll in dirty by-ways, past cottages of saffron peasants, and poor stony
+      fields that begrudged them a scanty vegetation, back to the steamer
+      blistering in the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now indeed we were glad of the awning, under which a silent crowd of
+      people with sunburnt faces waited for the departure of the boat. The
+      breeze rose again as the engine resumed its unappreciated labors, and,
+      with our head toward Como, we pushed out into the lake. The company on
+      board was such as might be expected. There was a German landscape-painter,
+      with three heart's-friends beside him; there were some German ladies;
+      there were the unfailing Americans and the unfailing Englishman; there
+      were some French people; there were Italians from the meridional
+      provinces, dark, thin, and enthusiastic, with fat silent wives, and a
+      rhythmical speech; there were Milanese with their families, out for a
+      holiday,&mdash;round-bodied men, with blunt square features, and hair and
+      vowels clipped surprisingly short, there was a young girl whose face was
+      of the exact type affected in rococo sculpture, and at whom one gazed
+      without being able to decide whether she was a nymph descended from a
+      villa gate, or a saint come from under a broken arch in a Renaissance
+      church. At one of the little towns two young Englishmen in knickerbockers
+      came on board, who were devoured by the eyes of their fellow-passengers,
+      and between whom and our kindly architect there was instantly ratified the
+      tacit treaty of non-intercourse which travelling Englishmen observe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing further interested us on the way to Como, except the gathering
+      coolness of the evening air; the shadows creeping higher and higher on the
+      hills; the songs of the girls winding yellow silk on the reels that hummed
+      through the open windows of the factories on the shore; and the appearance
+      of a flag that floated from a shallop before the landing of a stately
+      villa. The Italians did not know this banner, and the Germans loudly
+      debated its nationality. The Englishmen grinned, and the Americans blushed
+      in silence. Of all my memories of that hot day on Lake Como, this is burnt
+      the deepest; for the flag was that insolent banner which in 1862
+      proclaimed us a broken people, and persuaded willing Europe of our ruin.
+      It has gone down long ago from ship and fort and regiment, as well as from
+      the shallop on the fair Italian lake. Still, I say, it made Como too hot
+      for us that afternoon, and even breathless Milan was afterwards a pleasant
+      contrast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0033" id="link2H_4_0033"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      STOPPING AT VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It was after sunset when we arrived in the birthplace of Palladio, which
+      we found a fair city in the lap of caressing hills. There are pretty
+      villas upon these slopes, and an abundance of shaded walks and drives
+      about the houses which were pointed out to us, by the boy who carried our
+      light luggage from the railway station, as the property of rich citizens
+      "but little less than lords" in quality. A lovely grove lay between the
+      station and the city, and our guide not only took us voluntarily by the
+      longest route through this, but, after reaching the streets, led us by
+      labyrinthine ways to the hotel, in order, he afterwards confessed, to show
+      us the city. He was a poet, though in that lowly walk of life, and he had
+      done well. No other moment of our stay would have served us so well for a
+      first general impression of Vicenza as that twilight hour. In its
+      uncertain glimmer we seemed to get quite back to the dawn of feudal
+      civilization, when Theodoric founded the great Basilica of the city; and
+      as we stood before the famous Clock Tower, which rises light and straight
+      as a mast eighty-two metres into the air from a base of seven metres, the
+      wavering obscurity enhanced the effect by half concealing the tower's
+      crest, and letting it soar endlessly upward in the fancy. The Basilica is
+      greatly restored by Palladio, and the cold hand of that friend of virtuous
+      poverty in architecture lies heavy upon his native city in many places.
+      Yet there is still a great deal of Lombardic architecture in Vicenza; and
+      we walked through one street of palaces in which Venetian Gothic
+      prevailed, so that it seemed as if the Grand Canal had but just shrunk
+      away from their bases. When we threw open our window at the hotel, we
+      found that it overlooked one of the city gates, from which rose a
+      Ghibelline tower with a great bulging cornice, full of the beauty and
+      memory of times long before Palladio.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were rather troublous times, and not to be recalled here in all their
+      circumstance; but I think it due to Vicenza, which is now little spoken
+      of, even in Italy, and is scarcely known in America, where her straw-braid
+      is bought for that of Leghorn, to remind the reader that the city was for
+      a long time a republic of very independent and warlike stomach. Before she
+      arrived at that state, however, she had undergone a great variety of
+      fortunes. The Gauls founded the city (as I learn from "The Chronicles of
+      Vicenza," by Battista Pagliarino, published at Vicenza in 1563) when
+      Gideon was Judge in Israel, and were driven out by the Romans some
+      centuries later. As a matter of course, Vicenza was sacked by Attila and
+      conquered by Alboin; after which she was ruled by some lords of her own,
+      until she was made an imperial city by Henry I. Then she had a government
+      more or less republican in form till Frederick Barbarossa burnt her, and
+      "wrapped her in ashes," and gave her to his vicar Ecelino da Romano, who
+      "held her in cruel tyranny" from 1236 to 1259. The Paduans next ruled her
+      forty years, and the Veronese seventy-seven, and the Milanese seventeen
+      years; then she reposed in the arms of the Venetian Republic till these
+      fell weak and helpless from all the Venetian possessions at the threat of
+      Napoleon. Vicenza belonged again to Venice during the brief Republic of
+      1848, but the most memorable battle of that heroic but unhappy epoch gave
+      her back to Austria. Now at last, and for the first time, she is Italian.
+      Vicenza is
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Of kindred that have greatly expiated
+  And greatly wept,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and but that I so long fought against Ecelino da Romano, and the imperial
+      interest in Italy, I could readily forgive her all her past errors. To us
+      of the Lombard League, it was grievous that she should remain so doggishly
+      faithful to her tyrant; though it is to be granted that perhaps fear had
+      as much to do with her devotion as favor. The defense of 1848 was greatly
+      to her honor, and she took an active part in that demonstration against
+      the Austrians which endured from 1859 till 1866.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the demonstration we travellers saw an amusing phase at the opera which
+      we attended the evening of our arrival in Vicenza. "Nabucodonosor" was the
+      piece to be given in the new open-air theatre outside the city walls,
+      whither we walked under the starlight. It was a pretty structure of fresh
+      white stucco, oval in form, with some graceful architectural pretensions
+      without, and within very charmingly galleried; while overhead it was
+      roofed with a blue dome set with such starry mosaic as never covered
+      temple or theatre since they used to leave their houses of play and
+      worship open to the Attic skies. The old Hebrew story had, on this stage
+      brought so near to Nature, effects seldom known to opera, and the scene
+      evoked from far-off days the awful interest of the Bible histories,&mdash;the
+      vague, unfigured oriental splendor&mdash;the desert&mdash;the captive
+      people by the waters of the river of Babylon&mdash;the shadow and mystery
+      of the prophecies. When the Hebrews, chained and toiling on the banks of
+      the Euphrates, lifted their voices in lamentation, the sublime music so
+      transfigured the commonplaceness of the words, that they meant all deep
+      and unutterable affliction, and for a while swept away whatever was false
+      and tawdry in the show, and thrilled our hearts with a rapture rarely
+      felt. Yet, as but a moment before we had laughed to see Nebuchadnezzar's
+      crown shot off his head by a squib visibly directed from the side scenes,&mdash;at
+      the point when, according to the libretto, "the thunder roars, and a bolt
+      descends upon the head of the king,"&mdash;so but a moment after some new
+      absurdity marred the illusion, and we began to look about the theatre at
+      the audience. We then beheld that act of <i>dimostrazioni</i> which I have
+      mentioned. In one of the few boxes sat a young and very beautiful woman in
+      a dress of white, with a fan which she kept in constant movement. It was
+      red on one side, and green on the other, and gave, with the white dress,
+      the forbidden Italian colors, while, looked at alone, it was innocent of
+      offense. I do not think a soul in the theatre was ignorant of the
+      demonstration. A satisfied consciousness was reflected from the faces of
+      the Italians, and I saw two Austrian officers exchange looks of
+      good-natured intelligence, after a glance at the fair patriot. I wonder
+      what those poor people do, now they are free, and deprived of the sweet,
+      perilous luxury of defying their tyrants by constant acts of subtle
+      disdain? Life in Venetia must be very dull: no more explosion of
+      pasteboard petards; no more treason in bouquets; no more stealthy
+      inscriptions on the walls&mdash;it must be insufferably dull. <i>Ebbene,
+      pazienza</i>! Perhaps Victor Emanuel may betray them yet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A spirit of lawless effrontery, indeed, seemed to pervade the whole
+      audience in the theatre that night at Vicenza, and to extend to the
+      ministers of the law themselves. There were large placards everywhere
+      posted, notifying the people that it was forbidden to smoke in the
+      theatre, and that smokers were liable to expulsion; but except for
+      ourselves, and the fair patriot in the box, I think every body there was
+      smoking and the policemen set the example of anarchy by smoking the
+      longest and worst cigars of all. I am sure that the captive Hebrews all
+      held lighted cigarettes behind their backs, and that Nebuchadnezzar,
+      condemned to the grass of the field, conscientiously gave himself up to
+      the Virginia weed behind the scenes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before I fell asleep that night, the moon rose over the top of the feudal
+      tower, in front of our hotel, and produced some very pretty effects with
+      the battlements. Early in the morning a regiment of Croats marched through
+      the gate below the tower, their band playing "The Young Recruit." These
+      advantages of situation were not charged in our bill; but, even if they
+      had been, I should still advise my reader to go, when in Vicenza, if he
+      loves a pleasant landlord and a good dinner, to the Hotel de la Ville,
+      which he will find almost at his sole disposition for however long time he
+      may stay. His meals will be served him in a vast dining-hall, as bare as a
+      barn or a palace, but for the pleasant, absurd old paintings on the wall,
+      representing, as I suppose, Cleopatra applying the Asp, Susannah and the
+      Elders, the Roman Lucrezia, and other moral and appetizing histories. I
+      take it there is a quaint side-table or two lost midway of the wall, and
+      that an old woodcut picture of the Most Noble City of Venice hangs over
+      each. I know that there is a screen at one end of the apartment behind
+      which the landlord invisibly assumes the head waiter; and I suspect that
+      at the moment of sitting down at meat, you hear two Englishmen talking&mdash;as
+      they pass along the neighboring corridor&mdash;of wine, in dissatisfied
+      chest-tones. This hotel is of course built round a court, in which there
+      is a stable and&mdash;exposed to the weather&mdash;a diligence, and two or
+      three carriages and a driver, and an ostler chewing straw, and a pump and
+      a grape-vine. Why the hotel, therefore, does not smell like a stable, from
+      garret to cellar, I am utterly at a loss to know. I state the fact that it
+      does not, and that every other hotel in Italy does smell of stable as if
+      cattle had been immemorially pastured in its halls, and horses housed in
+      its bed-chambers,&mdash;or as if its only guests were centaurs on their
+      travels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the Museo Civico, whither we repaired first in the morning, and where
+      there are some beautiful Montagnas, and an assortment of good and bad
+      works by other masters, we went to the Campo Santo, which is worthy to be
+      seen, if only because of the beautiful Laschi monument by Vela, one of the
+      greatest modern sculptors. It is nothing more than a very simple tomb, at
+      the door of which stands a figure in flowing drapery, with folded hands
+      and uplifted eyes in an attitude exquisitely expressive of grief. The
+      figure is said to be the portrait statue of the widow of him within the
+      tomb, and the face is very beautiful. We asked if the widow was still
+      young, and the custodian answered us in terms that ought to endear him to
+      all women, if not to our whole mortal race,&mdash;"Oh quite young, yet.
+      She is perhaps fifty years old."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the Campo Santo one ought to go to that theatre which Palladio built
+      for the representation of classic tragedy, and which is perhaps the
+      perfectest reproduction of the Greek theatre in the world. Alfieri is the
+      only poet of modern times, whose works have been judged worthy of this
+      stage, and no drama has been given on it since 1857, when the "Oedipus
+      Tyrannus" of Sophocles was played. We found it very silent and dusty, and
+      were much sadder as we walked through its gayly frescoed, desolate
+      anterooms than we had been in the Campo Santo. Here used to sit, at coffee
+      and bassett, the merry people who owned the now empty seats of the
+      theatre,&mdash;lord, and lady, and abbé&mdash;who affected to be
+      entertained by the scenes upon the stage. Upon my word, I should like to
+      know what has become, in the other world, of those poor pleasurers of the
+      past whose memory makes one so sad upon the scenes of their enjoyment
+      here! I suppose they have something quite as unreal, yonder, to satisfy
+      them as they had on earth, and that they still play at happiness in the
+      old rococo way, though it is hard to conceive of any fiction outside of
+      Italy so perfect and so entirely suited to their unreality as this classic
+      theatre. It is a Greek theatre, for Greek tragedies; but it could never
+      have been for popular amusement, and it was not open to the air, though it
+      had a sky skillfully painted in the centre of the roof. The proscenium is
+      a Greek façade, in three stories, such as never was seen in Greece; and
+      the architecture of the three streets running back from the proscenium,
+      and forming the one unchangeable scene of all the dramas, is&mdash;like
+      the statues in the niches and on the gallery inclosing the auditorium&mdash;Greek
+      in the most fashionable Vicentine taste. It must have been but an operatic
+      chorus that sang in the semicircular space just below the stage and in
+      front of the audience. Admit and forget these small blemishes and
+      aberrations, however, and what a marvelous thing Palladio's theatre is!
+      The sky above the stage is a wonderful trick, and those three streets&mdash;one
+      in the centre and serving as entrance for the royal persons of the drama,
+      one at the right for the nobles, and one at the left for the citizens&mdash;present
+      unsurpassed effects of illusion. They are not painted, but modeled in
+      stucco. In perspective they seem each half a mile long, but entering them
+      you find that they run back from the proscenium only some fifteen feet,
+      the fronts of the houses and the statues upon them decreasing in recession
+      with a well-ordered abruptness. The semicircular gallery above the
+      auditorium is of stone, and forty statues of marble crown its colonnade,
+      or occupy niches between the columns.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It was curious to pass, with the impression left by this costly and
+      ingenious toy upon our minds, at once to the amphitheatre in Verona,
+      which, next to the Coliseum, has, of all the works bequeathed us by the
+      ancient Roman world, the greatest claim upon the wonder and imagination.
+      Indeed, it makes even a stronger appeal to the fancy. We know who built
+      the Coliseum, but in its unstoried origin, the Veronese arena has the
+      mystery of the Pyramids. Was its founder Augustus, or Vitellus, or
+      Antoninus, or Maximian, or the Republic of Verona? Nothing is certain but
+      that it was conceived and reared by some mighty prince or people, and that
+      it yet remains in such perfection that the great shows of two thousand
+      years ago might take place in it to-day. It is so suggestive of the fierce
+      and splendid spectacles of Roman times that the ring left by a modern
+      circus on the arena, and absurdly dwarfed by the vast space of the oval,
+      had an impertinence which we hotly resented, looking down on it from the
+      highest grade of the interior. It then lay fifty feet below us, in the
+      middle of an ellipse five hundred feet in length and four hundred in
+      breadth, and capable of holding fifty thousand spectators. The seats that
+      the multitudes pressed of old are perfect, yet; scarce a stone has been
+      removed from the interior; the aedile and the prefect might take their
+      places again in the balustraded tribunes above the great entrance at
+      either end of the arena, and scarcely see that they were changed. Nay, the
+      victims and the gladiators might return to the cells below the seats of
+      the people, and not know they had left them for a day; the wild beasts
+      might leap into the arena from dens as secure and strong as when first
+      built. The ruin within seems only to begin with the aqueduct, which was
+      used to flood the arena for the naval shows, but which is now choked with
+      the dust of ages. Without, however, is plain enough the doom which is
+      written against all the work of human hands, and which, unknown of the
+      builders, is among the memorable things placed in the corner-stone of
+      every edifice. Of the outer wall that rose high over the highest seats of
+      the amphitheatre, and encircled it with stately corridors, giving it
+      vaster amplitude and grace, the earthquake of six centuries ago spared
+      only a fragment that now threatens above one of the narrow Veronese
+      streets. Blacksmiths, wagon-makers, and workers in clangorous metals have
+      made shops of the lower corridors of the old arena, and it is friends and
+      neighbors with the modern life about it, as such things usually are in
+      Italy. Fortunately for the stranger, the Piazza Bra flanks it on one hand,
+      and across this it has a magnificent approach. It is not less happy in
+      being little known to sentiment, and the traveller who visits it by
+      moonlight, has a full sense of grandeur and pathos, without any of the
+      sheepishness attending homage to that battered old coquette, the Coliseum,
+      which so many emotional people have sighed over, kissing and afterwards
+      telling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he who would know the innocent charm of a ruin as yet almost wholly
+      uncourted by travel, must go to the Roman theatre in Verona. It is not a
+      favorite of the hand-books; and we were decided to see it chiefly by a
+      visit to the Museum, where, besides an admirable gallery of paintings,
+      there is a most interesting collection of antiques in bronze and marble
+      found in excavating the theatre. The ancient edifice had been completely
+      buried, and a quarter of the town was built over it, as Portici is built
+      over Herculaneum, and on the very top stood a Jesuit convent. One day,
+      some children, playing in the garden of one of the shabby houses, suddenly
+      vanished from sight. Their mother ran like one mad (I am telling the story
+      in the words of the peasant who related it to me) to the spot where they
+      had last been seen, and fell herself into an opening of the earth there.
+      The outcry raised by these unfortunates brought a number of men to their
+      aid, and in digging to get them out, an old marble stairway was
+      discovered. This was about twenty-five years ago. A certain gentleman
+      named Monga owned the land, and he immediately began to make excavations.
+      He was a rich man, but considered rather whimsical (if my peasant
+      represented the opinion of his neighbors), and as the excavation ate a
+      great deal of money (<i>mangiava molti soldi</i>), his sons discontinued
+      the work after his death, and nothing has been done for some time, now.
+      The peasant in charge was not a person of imaginative mind, though he said
+      the theatre (supposed to have been built in the time of Augustus) was
+      completed two thousand years before Christ. He had a purely conventional
+      admiration of the work, which he expressed at regular intervals, by
+      stopping short in his course, waving both hands over the ruins, and crying
+      in a sepulchral voice, "<i>Qual' opera</i>!" However, as he took us
+      faithfully into every part of it, there is no reason to complain of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We crossed three or four streets, and entered at several different gates,
+      in order to see the uncovered parts of the work, which could have been but
+      a small proportion of the whole. The excavation has been carried down
+      thirty and forty feet below the foundations of the modern houses,
+      revealing the stone seats of the auditorium, the corridors beneath them,
+      and the canals and other apparatus for naval shows, as in the great
+      Amphitheatre. These works are even more stupendous than those of the
+      Amphitheatre, for in many cases they are not constructed, but hewn out of
+      the living rock, so that in this light the theatre is a gigantic
+      sculpture. Below all are cut channels to collect and carry off the water
+      of the springs in which the rock abounds. The depth of one of these
+      channels near the Jesuit convent must be fifty feet below the present
+      surface. Only in one place does the ancient edifice rise near the top of
+      the ground, and there is uncovered the arched front of what was once a
+      family-box at the theatre, with the owner's name graven upon the arch.
+      Many poor little houses have of course been demolished to carry on the
+      excavations, and to the walls that joined them cling memorials of the
+      simple life that once inhabited them. To one of the buildings hung a
+      melancholy fire-place left blackened with smoke, and battered with use,
+      but witnessing that it had once been the heart of a home. It was far more
+      touching than any thing in the elder ruin; and I think nothing could have
+      so vividly expressed the difference which, in spite of all the
+      resemblances noticeable in Italy, exists between the ancient and modern
+      civilization, as that family-box at the theatre and this simple fireside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not now remember what fortunate chance it was that discovered to us
+      the house of the Capulets, and I incline to believe that we gravitated
+      toward it by operation of well-known natural principles which bring
+      travellers acquainted with improbabilities wherever they go. We found it a
+      very old and time-worn edifice, built round an ample court, and we knew
+      it, as we had been told we should, by the cap carven in stone above the
+      interior of the grand portal. The family, anciently one of the principal
+      of Verona, has fallen from much of its former greatness. On the occasion
+      of our visit, Juliet, very dowdily dressed, looked down from the top of a
+      long, dirty staircase which descended into the court, and seemed
+      interested to see us; while her mother caressed with one hand a large
+      yellow mastiff, and distracted it from its first impulse to fly upon us
+      poor children of sentiment. There was a great deal of stable litter, and
+      many empty carts standing about in the court; and if I might hazard the
+      opinion formed upon these and other appearances, I should say that old
+      Capulet has now gone to keeping a hotel, united with the retail liquor
+      business, both in a small way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing could be more natural, after seeing the house of the Capulets,
+      than a wish to see Juliet's Tomb, which is visited by all strangers, and
+      is the common property of the hand-books. It formerly stood in a garden,
+      where, up to the beginning of this century, it served, says my "Viaggio in
+      Italia," "for the basest uses,"&mdash;just as the sacred prison of Tasso
+      was used for a charcoal bin. We found the sarcophagus under a shed in one
+      corner of the garden of the Orfanotrofio delle Franceschine, and had to
+      confess to each other that it looked like a horse-trough roughly hewn out
+      of stone. The garden, said the boy in charge of the moving monument, had
+      been the burial-place of the Capulets, and this tomb being found in the
+      middle of the garden, was easily recognized as that of Juliet. Its
+      genuineness, as well as its employment in the ruse of the lovers, was
+      proven beyond cavil by a slight hollow cut for the head to rest in, and a
+      hole at the foot "to breathe through," as the boy said. Does not the fact
+      that this relic has to be protected from the depredations of travellers,
+      who could otherwise carry it away piecemeal, speak eloquently of a large
+      amount of vulgar and rapacious innocence drifting about the world?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is well to see even such idle and foolish curiosities, however, in a
+      city like Verona, for the mere going to and fro in search of them through
+      her streets is full of instruction and delight. To my mind, no city has a
+      fairer place than she that sits beside the eager Adige, and breathes the
+      keen air of mountains white with snows in winter, green and purple with
+      vineyards in summer, and forever rich with marble. Around Verona stretch
+      those gardened plains of Lombardy, on which Nature, who dotes on Italy,
+      and seems but a step-mother to all transalpine lands, has lavished every
+      gift of beauty and fertility. Within the city's walls, what store of art
+      and history! Her market-places have been the scenes of a thousand tragic
+      or ridiculous dramas; her quaint and narrow streets are ballads and
+      legends full of love-making and murder; the empty, grass-grown piazzas
+      before her churches are tales that are told of municipal and
+      ecclesiastical splendor. Her nobles sleep in marble tombs so beautiful
+      that the dust in them ought to be envied by living men in Verona; her
+      lords lie in perpetual state in the heart of the city, in magnificent
+      sepulchres of such grace and opulence, that, unless a language be invented
+      full of lance-headed characters, and Gothic vagaries of arch and finial,
+      flower and fruit, bird and beast, they can never be described. Sacred be
+      their rest from pen of mine, Verona! Nay, while I would fain bring the
+      whole city before my reader's fancy, I am loath and afraid to touch any
+      thing in it with my poor art: either the tawny river, spanned with many
+      beautiful bridges, and murmurous with mills afloat and turned by the rapid
+      current; or the thoroughfares with their passengers and bright shops and
+      caffès; or the grim old feudal towers; or the age-embrowned palaces,
+      eloquent in their haughty strength of the times when they were family
+      fortresses; or the churches with the red pillars of their porticos resting
+      upon the backs of eagle-headed lions; or even the white-coated garrison
+      (now there no more), with its heavy-footed rank and file, its handsome and
+      resplendent officers, its bristling fortifications, its horses and
+      artillery, crowding the piazzas of churches turned into barracks. All
+      these things haunt my memory, but I could only at best thinly sketch them
+      in meagre black and white. Verona is an almost purely Gothic city in her
+      architecture, and her churches are more worthy to be seen than any others
+      in North Italy, outside of Venice. San Zenone, with the quaint bronzes on
+      its doors representing in the rudeness of the first period of art the
+      incidents of the Old Testament and the miracles of the saints&mdash;with
+      the allegorical sculptures surrounding the interior and exterior of the
+      portico, and illustrating, among other things, the creation of Eve with
+      absolute literalness&mdash;with its beautiful and solemn crypt in which
+      the dust of the titular saint lies entombed&mdash;with its minute windows,
+      and its vast columns sustaining the roof upon capitals of every bizarre
+      and fantastic device&mdash;is doubtless most abundant in that Gothic
+      spirit, now grotesque and now earnest, which somewhere appears in all the
+      churches of Verona; which has carven upon the façade of the Duomo the
+      statues of Orlando and Olliviero, heroes of romance, and near them has
+      placed the scandalous figure of a pig in a monk's robe and cowl, with a
+      breviary in his paw; which has reared the exquisite monument of Guglielmo
+      da Castelbarco before the church of St. Anastasia, and has produced the
+      tombs of the Scaligeri before the chapel of Santa Maria Antica.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have already pledged myself not to attempt any description of these
+      tombs, and shall not fall now. But I bought in the. English tongue, as
+      written at Verona, some "Notices," kept for sale by the sacristan, "of the
+      Ancient Churg of Our Lady, and of the Tombs of the most illustrious Family
+      Della-Scala," and from these I think it no dereliction to quote <i>verbatim</i>.
+      First is the tomb of San Francesco, who was "surnamed the Great by reason
+      of his valor." "With him the Great Alighieri and other exiles took refuge.
+      We see his figure extended upon a bed, and above his statue on horsebac
+      with the vizor down, and his crest falling behind his shoulders, his horse
+      covered with mail. The columns and capitals are wonderful." "Within the
+      Cemetery to the right leaning against the walls of the church is the tomb
+      of John Scaliger." "In the side of this tomb near the wall of Sacristy,
+      you see the urn that encloses the ashes of Martin I.," "who was
+      traitorously killed on the 17th of October 1277 by Scaramello of the
+      Scaramelli, who wished to revenge the honor of a young lady of his
+      family." "The Mausoleum that is in the side facing the Place encloses the
+      Martin II.'s ashes.... This building is sumptuous and wonderful because it
+      stands on four columns, each of which has an architrave of nine feet. On
+      the beams stands a very large square of marble that forms the floor, on
+      which stands the urn of the Defunct. Four other columns support the vault
+      that covers the urn; and the rest is adorned by facts of Old Testament.
+      Upon the Summit is the equestrian statue as large as life." Of "Can
+      Signorius," whose tomb is the most splendid of all, the "Notices" say: "He
+      spent two thousand florins of gold, in order to prepare his own sepulchre
+      while he was yet alive, and to surpass the magnificence of his
+      predecessors. The monument is as magnificent as the contracted space
+      allows. Six columns support the floor of marble on which it stands covered
+      with figures. Six other columns support the top, on that is the Scaliger's
+      statues.... The monument is surrounded by an enclosure of red marble, with
+      six pillars, on which are square capitols with armed Saints. The rails of
+      iron with the Arms of the Scala, are worked with a beauty wonderful for
+      that age," or, I may add, for any age. These "rails" are an exquisite
+      net-work of iron wrought by hand, with an art emulous of that of Nicolò
+      Caparra at Florence. The chief device employed is a ladder (<i>scala</i>)
+      constantly repeated in the centres of quatre-foils; and the whole fabric
+      is still so flexible and perfect, after the lapse of centuries, that the
+      net may be shaken throughout by a touch. Four other tombs of the Scaligeri
+      are here, among which the "Notices" particularly mention that of Alboin
+      della Scala: "He was one of the Ghibelline party, as the arms on his urn
+      schew, that is a staircase risen by an eagle&mdash;wherefore Dante said,
+      <i>In sulla Scala porta il santo Uccello</i>."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I should have been glad to meet the author of these delightful histories,
+      but in his absence we fared well enough with the sacristan. When, a few
+      hours before we left Verona, we came for a last look it the beautiful
+      sepulchres, he recognized us, and seeing a sketch-book in the party, he
+      invited us within the inclosure again, and then ran and fetched chairs for
+      us to sit upon&mdash;nay, even placed chairs for us to rest our feet on.
+      Winning and exuberant courtesy of the Italian race! If I had never
+      acknowledged it before, I must do homage to it now, remembering the
+      sweetness of the sacristans and custodians of Verona. They were all men of
+      the most sympathetic natures. He at San Zenone seemed never to have met
+      with real friends till we expressed pleasure in the magnificent Mantegna,
+      which is the pride of his church. "What coloring!" he cried, and then
+      triumphantly took us into the crypt: "What a magnificent crypt! What works
+      they executed in those days, there!" At San Giorgio Maggiore, where there
+      are a Tintoretto and a Veronese, and four horrible swindling big pictures
+      by Romanino, I discovered to my great dismay that I had in my pocket but
+      five soldi, which I offered with much abasement and many apologies to the
+      sacristan; but he received them as if they had been so many napoleons,
+      prayed me not to speak of embarrassment, and declared that his labors in
+      our behalf had been nothing but pleasure. At Santa Maria in Organo, where
+      are the wonderful <i>intagli</i> of Fra Giovanni da Verona, the sacristan
+      fully shared our sorrow that the best pictures could not be unveiled as it
+      was Holy Week. He was also moved with us at the gradual decay of the <i>intagli</i>,
+      and led us to believe that, to a man of so much sensibility, the general
+      ruinous state of the church was an inexpressible affliction; and we
+      rejoiced for his sake that it should possess at least one piece of art in
+      perfect repair. This was a modern work, that day exposed for the first
+      time, and it represented in a group of wooden figures The Death of St.
+      Joseph. The Virgin and Christ supported the dying saint on either hand;
+      and as the whole was vividly colored, and rays of glory in pink and yellow
+      gauze descended upon Joseph's head, nothing could have been more
+      impressive.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Parma is laid out with a regularity which may be called characteristic of
+      the great ducal cities of Italy, and which it fully shares with Mantua,
+      Ferrara, and Bologna. The signorial cities, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and
+      Treviso, are far more picturesque, and Parma excels only in the number and
+      beauty of her fountains. It is a city of gloomy aspect, says Valery, who
+      possibly entered it in a pensive frame of mind, for its sadness did not
+      impress us. We had just come from Modena, where the badness of our hotel
+      enveloped the city in an atmosphere of profound melancholy. In fact, it
+      will not do to trust to travellers in any thing. I, for example, have just
+      now spoken of the many beautiful fountains in Parma because I think it
+      right to uphold the statement of M. Richard's hand-book; but I only
+      remember seeing one fountain, passably handsome, there. My Lord Corke, who
+      was at Parma in 1754, says nothing of fountains, and Richard Lasells,
+      Gent., who was there a century earlier, merely speaks of the fountains in
+      the Duke's gardens, which, together with his Grace's "wild beasts" and
+      "exquisite coaches," and "admirable Theater to exhibit Operas in," "the
+      Domo, whose Cupola was painted by the rare hand of Corregio," and the
+      church of the Capuchins, where Alexander Farnese is buried, were "the
+      Chief thing to be seen in Parma" at that day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wild beasts have long ago run away with the exquisite coaches, but the
+      other wonders named by Master Lasells are still extant in Parma, together
+      with some things he does not name. Our minds, in going thither, were
+      mainly bent upon Correggio and his works, and while our dinner was cooking
+      at the admirable Albergo della Posta, we went off to feast upon the
+      perennial Hash of Frogs in the dome of the Cathedral. This is one of the
+      finest Gothic churches in Italy, and vividly recalls Verona, while it has
+      a quite unique and most beautiful feature in the three light-columned
+      galleries, that traverse the façade one above another. Close at hand
+      stands the ancient Baptistery, hardly less peculiar and beautiful; but,
+      after all, it is the work of the great painter which gives the temple its
+      chief right to wonder and reverence. We found the fresco, of course, much
+      wasted, and at first glance, before the innumerable arms and legs had time
+      to order and attribute themselves to their respective bodies, we felt the
+      justice of the undying spite which called this divinest of frescos a <i>guazzetto
+      di rane</i>. But in another moment it appeared to us the most sublime
+      conception of the Assumption ever painted, and we did not find Caracci's
+      praise too warm where he says: "And I still remain stupefied with the
+      sight of so grand a work&mdash;every thing so well conceived&mdash;so well
+      seen from below&mdash;with so much severity, yet with so much judgment and
+      so much grace; with a coloring which is of very flesh." The height of the
+      fresco above the floor of the church is so vast that it might well appear
+      like a heavenly scene to the reeling sense of the spectator. Brain, nerve,
+      and muscle were strained to utter exhaustion in a very few minutes, and we
+      came away with our admiration only half-satisfied, and resolved to ascend
+      the cupola next day, and see the fresco on something like equal terms. In
+      one sort we did thus approach it, and as we looked at the gracious
+      floating figures of the heavenly company through the apertures of the
+      dome, they did seem to adopt us and make us part of the painting. But the
+      tremendous depth, over which they drifted so lightly, it dizzied us to
+      look into; and I am not certain that I should counsel travellers to repeat
+      our experience. Where still perfect, the fresco can only gain from close
+      inspection,&mdash;it is painted with such exquisite and jealous
+      perfection,&mdash;yet the whole effect is now better from below, for the
+      decay is less apparent; and besides, life is short, and the stairway by
+      which one ascends to the dome is in every way too exigent. It is with the
+      most astounding sense of contrast that you pass from the Assumption to the
+      contemplation of that other famous roof frescoed by Correggio, in the
+      Monastero di San Paolo. You might almost touch the ceiling with your hand,
+      it hovers so low with its counterfeit of vine-clambered trellis-work, and
+      its pretty boys looking roguishly through the embowering leaves. It is
+      altogether the loveliest room in the world; and if the Diana in her car on
+      the chimney is truly a portrait of the abbess for whom the chamber was
+      decorated, she was altogether worthy of it, and one is glad to think of
+      her enjoying life in the fashion amiably permitted to nuns in the
+      fifteenth century. What curious scenes the gayety of this little chamber
+      conjures up, and what a vivid comment it is upon the age and people that
+      produced it! This is one of the things that makes a single hour of travel
+      worth whole years of historic study, and which casts its light upon all
+      future reading. Here, no doubt, the sweet little abbess, with the noblest
+      and prettiest of her nuns about her, received the polite world, and made a
+      cheerful thing of devotion, while all over transalpine Europe the
+      sour-hearted Reformers were destroying pleasant monasteries like this. The
+      light-hearted lady-nuns and their gentlemen friends looked on heresy as a
+      deadly sin, and they had little reason to regard it with favor. It
+      certainly made life harder for them in time, for it made reform within the
+      Church as well as without, so that at last the lovely Chamber of St. Paul
+      was closed against the public for more than two centuries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All Parma is full of Correggio, as Venice is of Titian and Tintoretto, as
+      Naples of Spagnoletto, as Mantua of Giulio Romano, as Vicenza of Palladio,
+      as Bassano of Da Ponte, as Bologna of Guido Reni. I have elsewhere noticed
+      how ineffaceably and exclusively the manner of the masters seems to have
+      stamped itself upon the art of the cities where they severally wrought,&mdash;how
+      at Parma Correggio yet lives in all the sketchy mouths of all the pictures
+      painted there since his time. One might almost believe, hearing the
+      Parmesans talk, that his manner had infected their dialect, and that they
+      fashioned their lazy, incomplete utterance with the careless lips of his
+      nymphs and angels. They almost entirely suppress the last syllable of
+      every word, and not with a quick precision, as people do in Venice or
+      Milan, but with an ineffable languor, as if language were not worth the
+      effort of enunciation; while they rise and lapse several times in each
+      sentence, and sink so sweetly and sadly away upon the closing vocable that
+      the listener can scarcely repress his tears. In this melancholy rhythm,
+      one of the citizens recounted to me the whole story of the assassination
+      of the last Duke of Parma in 1850; and left me as softly moved as if I had
+      been listening to a tale of hapless love. Yet it was an ugly story, and
+      after the enchantment of the recital passed away, I perceived that when
+      the Duke was killed justice was done on one of the maddest and wickedest
+      tyrants that ever harassed an unhappy city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Parmesans remember Maria Louisa, Napoleon's wife, with pleasant enough
+      feelings, and she seems to have been good to them after the manner of
+      sovereigns, enriching their city with art, and beautifying it in many
+      ways, besides doing works of private charity and beneficence. Her daughter
+      by a second marriage, the Countess Sanvitali, still lives in Parma; and in
+      one of the halls of the Academy of Fine Arts the Duchess herself survives
+      in the marble of Canova. It was she who caused the two great pictures of
+      Correggio, the St. Jerome and the Madonna della Scodella, to be placed
+      alone in separate apartments hung with silk, in which the painter's
+      initial A is endlessly interwoven. "The Night," to which the St. Jerome is
+      "The Day," is in the gallery at Dresden, but Parma could have kept nothing
+      more representative of her great painter's power than this "Day." It is
+      "the bridal of the earth and sky," and all sweetness, brightness, and
+      tender shadow are in it. Many other excellent works of Correggio, Caracci,
+      Parmigianino, and masters of different schools are in this gallery, but it
+      is the good fortune of travellers, who have to see so much, that the
+      memory of the very best alone distinctly remains. Nay, in the presence of
+      prime beauty nothing else exists, and we found that the church of the
+      Steccata, where Parmigianino's sublime "Moses breaking the Tables of the
+      Law" is visible in the midst of a multitude of other figures on the vault,
+      really contained nothing at last but that august and awful presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Undoubtedly the best gallery of classical antiquities in North Italy is
+      that of Parma, which has derived all its precious relics from the little
+      city of Valleja alone. It is a fine foretaste of Pompeii and the wonders
+      of the Museo Borbonico at Naples, with its antique frescos, and marble,
+      and bronzes. I think nothing better has come out of Herculaneum than the
+      comic statuette of "Hercules Drunk." He is in bronze, and the drunkest man
+      who has descended to us from the elder world; he reels backward, and leers
+      knowingly upon you, while one hand hangs stiffly at his side, and the
+      other faintly clasps a wine-cup&mdash;a burly, worthless, disgraceful
+      demigod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great Farnese Theatre was, as we have seen, admired by Lasells; but
+      Lord Corke found it a "useless structure" though immense. "The same spirit
+      that raised the Colossus at Rhodes," he says, "raised the theatre at
+      Parma; that insatiable spirit and lust of Fame which would brave the
+      Almighty by fixing eternity to the name of a perishable being." If it was
+      indeed this spirit, I am bound to say that it did not build so wisely at
+      Parma as at Rhodes. The play-house that Ranuzio I. constructed in 1628, to
+      do honor to Cosmo II. de' Medici (pausing at Parma on his way to visit the
+      tomb of San Carlo Borromeo), and that for a century afterward was the
+      scene of the most brilliant spectacles in the world, is now one of the
+      dismalest and dustiest of ruins. This <i>Theatrum orbis miraculum</i> was
+      built and ornamented with the most perishable materials, and even its size
+      has shrunken as the imaginations of men have contracted under the strong
+      light of later days. When it was first opened, it was believed to hold
+      fourteen thousand spectators; at a later <i>fête</i> it held only ten
+      thousand; the last published description fixes its capacity at five
+      thousand; and it is certain that for many and many a year it has held only
+      the stray tourists who have looked in upon its desolation. The gay
+      paintings hang in shreds and tatters from the roof; dust is thick upon the
+      seats and in the boxes, and on the leads that line the space once flooded
+      for naval games. The poor plaster statues stand naked and forlorn amid the
+      ruin of which they are part; and the great stage, from which the curtain
+      has rotted away, yawns dark and empty before the empty auditorium.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0034" id="link2H_4_0034"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      DUCAL MANTUA.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In that desperate depth of Hell where Dante beholds the Diviners doomed to
+      pace with backward-twisted faces, and turn forever on the past the rainy
+      eyes once bent too daringly on the future, the sweet guide of the Tuscan
+      poet points out among the damned the daughter of a Theban king, and
+      discourses to his charge:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  Manto was she: through many lands she went
+    Seeking, and paused where I was born, at last.
+    Therefore I choose thou be on me intent
+  A little. When from life her father passed,
+    And they of Bacchus' city became slaves,
+    Long time about the world the daughter cast.
+  Up in fair Italy is a lake that laves
+    The feet of Alps that lock in Germany:
+    Benaco called....
+  And Peschiera in strong harness sits
+    To front the Brescians and the Bergamasques,
+    Where one down-curving shore the other meets.
+  There all the gathered waters outward flow
+    That may not in Benaco's bosom rest,
+    And down through, pastures green a river go.
+
+</pre>
+    <hr />
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    As far as to Governo, where, its quest
+  Ended at last, it falls into me Po.
+    But far it has not sought before a plain
+    It finds and floods, out-creeping wide and slow
+  To be the steaming summer's offense and bane.
+    Here passing by, the fierce, unfriendly maid
+    Saw land in the middle of the sullen main,
+  Wild and unpeopled, and here, unafraid
+    Of human neighborhood, she made her lair,
+    Rested, and with her menials wrought her trade,
+  And lived, and left her empty body there.
+    Then the sparse people that were scattered near
+    Gathered upon that island, everywhere
+  Compassed about with swamps and kept from fear.
+    They built their city above the witch's grave,
+    And for her sake that first made dwelling there
+  The name of Mantua to their city gave.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      To this account of the first settlement of Mantua Virgil adds a warning to
+      his charge to distrust all other histories of the city's foundation; and
+      Dante is so thoroughly persuaded of its truth, that he declares all other
+      histories shall be to him as so many lifeless embers. Nevertheless, divers
+      chroniclers of Mantua reject the tradition here given as fabulous; and the
+      carefullest and most ruthless of these traces the city's origin, not to
+      the unfriendly maid, but to the Etruscan King Ocno, fixing the precise
+      date of its foundation at thirty years before the Trojan war, one thousand
+      five hundred and thirty-nine years after the creation of the world, three
+      hundred years before Rome, and nine hundred and fifteen years after the
+      flood, while Abimelech was judge in Israel. "And whoever," says the
+      compiler of the "Flower of the Mantuan Chroniclers" (it is a very dry and
+      musty flower, indeed), citing doughty authorities for all his facts and
+      figures,&mdash;"whoever wishes to understand this more curiously, let him
+      read the said authors, and he will be satisfied."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I am as little disposed to unsettle the reader's faith in the
+      Virgilian tradition, as to part with my own; and I therefore uncandidly
+      hold back the names of the authorities cited. This tradition was in fact
+      the only thing concerning Mantuan history present to my thoughts as I rode
+      toward the city, one afternoon of a pleasant Lombard spring; and when I
+      came in sight of the ancient hold of sorcery, with the languid waters of
+      its lagoons lying sick at its feet, I recognized at least the
+      topographical truth of Virgil's description. But old and mighty walls now
+      surround the spot which Manto found sterile and lonely in the heart of the
+      swamp formed by the Mincio, no longer Benaco; and the dust of the witch is
+      multitudinously hidden under the edifices of a city whose mighty domes,
+      towers, and spires make its approach one of the stateliest in the world.
+      It is a prospect on which you may dwell long as you draw toward the city,
+      for the road from the railway station winds through some two miles of flat
+      meadow-land before it reaches the gate of the stronghold which the
+      Italians call the first hope of the winner of the land, and the last hope
+      of the loser of Italy. Indeed, there is no haste in any of the means of
+      access to Mantua. It lies scarce forty miles south of Verona, and you are
+      three hours in journeying this distance in the placid railway train,&mdash;a
+      distance which Romeo, returning to Verona from his exile in Mantua, no
+      doubt travelled in less time. There is abundant leisure to study the
+      scenery on the way; but it scarcely repays the perusal, for it lacks the
+      beauty of the usual Lombard landscape. The soil is red, stony, and
+      sterile; the orchard-trees are scant and slender, and not wedded with the
+      caressing vines which elsewhere in North Italy garland happier trees and
+      stretch gracefully from trunk to trunk. Especially the landscape looks sad
+      and shabby about the little village of Villafranca, where, in 1864, the
+      dejected prospect seemed incapable of a smile even in spring; as if it had
+      lost all hope and cheerfulness since the peace was made which confirmed
+      Venetia to the alien. It said as plainly as real estate could express the
+      national sentiment, "Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!" and crept sullenly out
+      of sight, as our pensive train resumed its meditative progress. No doubt
+      this poor landscape <i>was</i> imbued, in its dull, earthy way, with a
+      feeling that the coming of Garibaldi would irrigate and fertilize it into
+      a paradise; as at Venice the gondoliers believed that his army would bring
+      in its train cheap wine and hordes of rich and helpless Englishmen bent on
+      perpetual tours of the Grand Canal without understanding as to price.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But within and without Mantua was a strong argument against possibility of
+      change in the political condition of this part of Italy. Compassed about
+      by the corruption of the swamps and the sluggish breadth of the river, the
+      city is no less mighty in her artificial defenses than in this natural
+      strength of her position; and the Croats of her garrison were as frequent
+      in her sad, handsome streets, as the priests in Rome. Three lakes secure
+      her from approach upon the east, north, and south; on the west is a vast
+      intrenched camp, which can be flooded at pleasure from one of the lakes;
+      while the water runs three fathoms deep at the feet of the solid brick
+      walls all round the city. There are five gates giving access by
+      drawbridges from the town to the fortressed posts on every side, and
+      commanding with their guns the roads that lead to them. The outlying
+      forts, with the citadel, are four in number, and are each capable of
+      holding from two to three thousand men. The intrenched camp, for cavalry
+      and artillery, and the barracks of the city itself, can receive a garrison
+      of from thirty to forty thousand men; and the measureless depths of the
+      air are full of the fever that fights in defense of Mantua, and serves
+      with equal zeal whoever is master of the place, let him be French,
+      Italian, or Austrian, so only that he have an unacclimated enemy before
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess that little of this formidable military knowledge burdened me on
+      the occasion of my visit to Mantua, and I have already confessed that I
+      was but very imperfectly informed of the history of the city. But indeed,
+      if the reader dealt candidly with himself, how much could he profess to
+      know of Mantuan history? The ladies all have some erudite associations
+      with the place as giving the term of <i>mantua-making</i> to the art of
+      dress, and most persons have heard that Mantua's law was once death to any
+      he that uttered mortal drugs there, and that the place was till a few
+      years since an Austrian fortress on the Mincio. Of Giulio Romano, and his
+      works to Mantua, a good many have heard; and there is something known to
+      the reader of the punctuated edition of Browning about Sordello. But of
+      the Gonzagas of Mantua, and their duchy, what do you know, gentle reader?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For myself, when in Mantua, I tried to make a virtue of my want of
+      information, and fancied that a sort of general ignorance was more
+      favorable to my enjoyment of what I saw there than thorough acquaintance
+      with the city's history would have been. It certainly enabled me to accept
+      all the poetic fiction of the custodians, and to embroider with their
+      pleasing improbabilities the business-like succinctness of the
+      guide-books; to make out of the twilight which involved all impressions a
+      misty and heroic picture of the Mantuan past, wherein her great men
+      appeared with a stately and gigantic uncertainty of outline, and mixed
+      with dim scenes of battle, intrigue, and riot, and were gone before Fact
+      could lay her finger on any shape, and swear that it was called so, and
+      did so and so. But even if there had been neither pleasure nor profit in
+      this ignorance, the means of dispelling it are so scant in modern
+      literature that it might well have been excused in a far more earnest
+      traveller. The difficulty, indeed, which I afterwards experienced in
+      trying to learn something of Mantua, is my best excuse for writing of its
+      history here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fancy that the few recent books on the subject are not in the hands of
+      most readers, and I have a comforting belief that scarcely a reader of
+      mine has been a reader of the "Grande Illustrazione de
+      Lombardo-Veneto."[Mantova e Sua Provincia, per 'Avvocato Bartolomeo
+      Arrighi: <i>Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto, ossia Storia delle
+      Città, des Borghi, Communi, Castelli, etc., fino ai Tempi moderni. Per
+      Cura di Cesare Cantù, e a' altri Literati</i>. Milano, 1859.] Yet I
+      suppose that he forms some notion of this work from its title, and figures
+      to himself a physical bulk of six volumes,&mdash;large, abounding in
+      ill-printed wood-cuts, and having the appalling features which repel our
+      race from pictorial history-books generally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The "Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto" includes notice of all
+      those dear and famous cities of North Italy which we know,&mdash;of
+      Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Venice, Mantua, Modena, Brescia, Bergamo, and the
+      rest; but here we have only to do with the part which concerns Mantua.
+      This is written by the advocate Bartolomeo Arrighi, whose ingenious
+      avoidance of all that might make his theme attractive could not be
+      sufficiently celebrated here, and may therefore be left to the reader's
+      fancy. There is little in his paper to leaven statistical heaviness; and
+      in recounting one of the most picturesque histories, he contrives to give
+      merely a list of the events and a diagram of the scenes. Whatever
+      illustrated character in princes or people he carefully excludes, and the
+      raciness of anecdote and the flavor of manner and epoch distil not into
+      his compilation from the elder historiographers. I have therefore to go
+      back, in my present purpose, to the authors whose substance he has
+      desiccated; and with their help, and that of one or two antiquated authors
+      of this century, I shall try to rehabilitate the ducal state of Mantua,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Which was an image of the mighty world,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and present some shadow of its microcosmal life. The story has the
+      completeness of a tragedy; but it runs over many centuries, and it ends
+      like a farce, though it ends with a death. One feels, indeed, almost as
+      great satisfaction in the catastrophe as the Mantuans themselves, who
+      terminated their national existence and parted from their last Duke with
+      something like exultation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I recall my own impressions of the city, I doubt if any good or bad
+      fortune could rouse her to such positive emotion now. She seemed sunken,
+      that dull April evening of our visit, into an abiding lethargy; as if
+      perfect repose, and oblivion from the many-troubled past,&mdash;from the
+      renown of all former famine, fire, intrigue, slaughter, and sack,&mdash;were
+      to be preferred by the ghost of a once populous and haughty capital to the
+      most splendid memories of national life. Certainly, the phantom of bygone
+      Mantuan greatness did not haunt the idle tourists who strolled through her
+      wide streets, enjoying their quiet beauty and regularity, and finding
+      them, despite their empty, melancholy air, full of something that reminded
+      of home. Coming from a land where there is a vast deal of length, breadth,
+      and rectitude in streets, as well as human nature, they could not, of
+      course, feel that wonder in the Mantuan avenues which inspired a Venetian
+      ambassador, two centuries since, to write the Serenest Senate in praise of
+      their marvelous extent and straightness; but they were still conscious of
+      a certain expansive difference from Gothic Verona and narrow Venice. The
+      windows of the ground-floors were grated to the prison-like effect common
+      throughout Italy; but people evidently lived upon the ground-floors, and
+      at many of the iron-barred windows fair young prisoners sat and looked out
+      upon the streets, or laughed and chatted together. About the open
+      doorways, moreover, people lounged gossiping; and the interiors of the
+      entry-halls, as they appeared to the passing glance, were clean, and had
+      not that forbidding, inhospitable air characteristic of most
+      house-entrances in North Italy. But sculptured Venice and Verona had
+      unfitted the travellers for pleasure in the stucco of Mantua; and they had
+      an immense scorn for the large and beautiful palaces of which the
+      before-quoted ambassador speaks, because they found them faced with
+      cunningly-moulded plaster instead of carven stone. Nevertheless, they
+      could not help a kind of half-tender respect for the old town. It shares
+      the domestic character of its scenes with the other ducal cities, Modena,
+      Parma, and Ferrara; and this character is, perhaps, proper to all long and
+      intensely municipalized communities. But Mantua has a ghostly calm wholly
+      its own; and this was not in the least broken that evening by chatters at
+      thresholds, and pretty laughers at grated windows. It was very, very
+      quiet. Perhaps half a score of carriages rumbled by us in our long walk,
+      and we met some scattered promenaders. But for the most part the streets
+      were quite empty; and even in the chief piazza, where there was still some
+      belated show of buying and selling, and about the doors of the caffès,
+      where there was a good deal of languid loafing, there was no indecency of
+      noise or bustle There were visibly few people in the place, and it was in
+      decay; but it was not squalid in its lapse. The streets were scrupulously
+      neat and clean, and the stuccoed houses were all painted of that pale
+      saffron hue which gives such unquestionable respectability to New England
+      towns. Before we returned to our lodgings, Mantua had turned into
+      twilight; and we walked homeward through a placid and dignified gloom,
+      nowhere broken by the flare of gas, and only remotely affected, here and
+      there, by the light of lamps of oil, faintly twinkling in a disheartened
+      Mantuan fashion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you turn this pensive light upon the yellow pages of those old
+      chronicles of which I spoke, it reveals pictures fit to raise both pity
+      and wonder for the past of this city,&mdash;pictures full of the glory of
+      struggles for freedom, of the splendor of wise princes, of the comfort of
+      a prosperous and contented people, of the grateful fruits of protected
+      arts and civilization; but likewise stained with images of unspeakable
+      filth and wickedness, baseness and cruelty, incredible shame, suffering,
+      and sin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long before the birth of Christ, the Gauls drive out the Etruscans from
+      Mantua, and aggrandize and beautify the city, to be in their turn expelled
+      by the Romans, under whom Mantua again waxes strong and fair. In this
+      time, the wife of a farmer not far from the city dreams a marvelous dream
+      of bringing forth a laurel-bough, and in due time bears into the world the
+      chiefest of all Mantuans, with a smile upon his face. This is a poet, and
+      they call his name Virgil. He goes from his native city to Rome, when ripe
+      for glory, and has there the good fortune to win back his father's farm,
+      which the greedy veterans of Augustus, then settled in the Cremonese, had
+      annexed to the spoils bestowed upon them by the Emperor. Later in this
+      Roman time, and only three years after the death of Him whom the poet all
+      but prophesied, another grand event marks an epoch in Mantuan history.
+      According to the pious legend, the soldier Longinus, who pierced the side
+      of Christ as he hung upon the cross, has been converted by a miracle;
+      wiping away that costly blood from his spear-head, and then drawing his
+      hand across his eyes, he is suddenly healed of his near-sightedness, and
+      stricken with the full wonder of conviction. He gathers anxiously the
+      precious drops of blood from his weapon into the phial from which the
+      vinegar mixed with gall was poured, and, forsaking his life of soldier, he
+      wanders with his new-won faith and his priceless treasure to Mantua, where
+      it is destined to work famous miracles, and to be the most valued
+      possession of the city to all after-time. The saint himself, preaching the
+      Gospel of Christ, suffers martyrdom under Tiberius; his tongue is cut out,
+      and his body is burnt; and his ashes are buried at Mantua, forgotten, and
+      found again in after ages with due signs and miraculous portents. The
+      Romans give a civil tranquillity to Mantua; but it is not till three
+      centuries after Christ that the persecutions of the Christians cease. Then
+      the temples of the gods are thrown down, and churches are built; and the
+      city goes forward to share the destinies of the Christianized empire, and
+      be spoiled by the barbarians. In 407 the Goths take it, and the Vandals in
+      their turn sack and waste it, and scatter its people, who return again
+      after the storm, and rebuild their city. Attila, marching to destroy it,
+      is met at Governo (as you see in Raphael's fresco in the Vatican) by Pope
+      Leo I., who conjures him to spare the city, and threatens him with Divine
+      vengeance if he refuse; above the pontiff's head two wrathful angels,
+      bearing drawn swords, menace the Hun with death if he advance; and, thus
+      miraculously admonished, he turns aside from Mantua and spares it. The
+      citizens successfully resist an attack of Alboin; but the Longobards
+      afterwards, unrestrained by the visions of Attila, beat the Mantuans and
+      take the city. From the Lombards the Greeks, sent thither by the Exarch of
+      Ravenna, captured Mantua about the end of the sixth century; and then, the
+      Lombards turning immediately to besiege it again, the Greeks defend their
+      prize long and valiantly, but in the end are overpowered. They are allowed
+      to retire with their men and arms to Ravenna, and the Lombards dismantle
+      the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Concerning our poor Mantua under Lombard rule there is but little known,
+      except that she went to war with the Cremonese; and it may be fairly
+      supposed that she was, like her neighbors, completely involved in foreign
+      and domestic discords of every kind. That war with the Cremonese was about
+      the possession of the river Ollio; and the Mantuans came off victors in
+      it, slaying immense numbers of the enemy, and taking some thousands of
+      them prisoners, whom their countrymen ransomed on condition of building
+      one of the gates of Mantua with materials from the Cremonese territory,
+      and mortar mixed with water from the disputed Ollio. The reader easily
+      conceives how bitter a pill this must have been for the high-toned
+      Cremonese gentlemen of that day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Charlemagne made himself master of Italy, the Mantuan lands and
+      Mantuan men were divided up among the brave soldiers who had helped to
+      enslave the country. These warriors of Charlemagne became counts; and the
+      <i>contadini</i>, or inhabitants of each <i>contado</i> (county), became
+      absolutely dependent on their will and pleasure. It is recorded (to the
+      confusion of those who think primitive barbarism is virtue) that the
+      corruption of those rude and brutal old times was great, that all classes
+      were sunk in vice, and that the clergy were especially venal and
+      abominable. After the death of Charlemagne, in the ninth century, wars
+      broke out all over Italy between the factions supporting different
+      aspirants to his power; and we may be sure that Mantua had some share in
+      the common quarrel. As I have found no explicit record of this period, I
+      distribute to the city, as her portion of the calamities, at least two
+      sieges, one capture and sack, and a decimation by famine and pestilence.
+      We certainly read that, fifty years later, the Emperor Rudolph attacked it
+      with his Hungarians, took it, pillaged it, and put great part of its
+      people to the sword. During the siege, some pious Mantuans had buried (to
+      save them from the religious foe) the blood of Christ, and part of the
+      sponge which had held the gall and vinegar, together with the body of St.
+      Longinus. Most unluckily, however, these excellent men were put to the
+      sword, and all knowledge of the place of sepulture perished with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the end of these wars Mantua received a lord, by appointment of the
+      Emperor, and the first lord's son married the daughter of the Duke of
+      Lorraine, from which union was born the great Countess Matilda. Boniface
+      was the happy bridegroom's name, and the wedding had a wild splendor and
+      profuse barbaric jollity about it, which it is pleasant enough to read of
+      after so much cutting and slashing. The viands were passed round on
+      horseback to the guests, and the horses were shod with silver shoes
+      loosely nailed on, that they might drop off and be scrambled for by the
+      people. Oxen were roasted whole, as at a Kentucky barbecue; and wine was
+      drawn from wells with buckets hung on silver chains. It was the first
+      great display of that magnificence of which after princes of Mantua were
+      so fond; and the wretched hinds out of whose sweat it came no doubt
+      thought it very fine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course Lord Boniface had his wars. There was a plot to depose him
+      discovered in Mantua, and the plotters fled to Verona. Boniface demanded
+      them; but the Veronese answered stoutly that theirs was a free city, and
+      no man should be taken from it against his will. Boniface marched to
+      attack them; and the Veronese were such fools as to call the Duke of
+      Austria to their aid, promising submission to his government in return for
+      his help. It was then that Austria first put her finger into the Italian
+      <i>pasticcio</i>, where she kept it so many centuries. But the Austrian
+      governor whom the Duke set over the Veronese made himself intolerable,&mdash;the
+      Austrian governor always does,&mdash;and they drove him out of the city.
+      On this the Duke turns about, unites with Boniface, takes Verona and sacks
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An altogether pleasanter incident of Boniface's domination was the
+      miraculous discovery of the sacred relics, buried and lost during the sack
+      of Mantua by the Hungarians. The place of sepulture was revealed thrice to
+      a blind pauper in a dream. People dug where he bade them and found the
+      relics. Immediately on its exhumation the Blood wrought innumerable
+      miracles; and the fame of it grew so great, that the Pope came to see it,
+      attended by such concourse of the people that they were obliged to sleep
+      in the streets. It was an age that drew the mantle of exterior devotion
+      and laborious penances and pilgrimages over the most hideous crimes and
+      unnatural sins. But perhaps the poor believers who slept in the streets of
+      Mantua on that occasion were none the worse for their faith when the Pope
+      pronounced the Blood genuine and blessed it. I am sure that for some days
+      of enthusiasm they abstained from the violence of war, and paused a little
+      in that career of vice and wickedness of which one reads in Italian
+      history, with the full conviction that Sodom and Gomorrah also were facts,
+      and not merely allegory. I have no doubt that the blind beggar believed
+      that Heaven had revealed to him the place where the Blood was buried, that
+      the Pope believed in the verity of the relic, and that the devout
+      multitudes were helped and uplifted in their gross faith by this visible
+      witness to the truth that Christ had died for them upon the bloody tree.
+      Poor souls! they had much to contend with in the way to any good. The
+      leaven of the old pleasure-making pagan civilization was in them yet (it
+      is in the Italians to this day); and centuries of Northern invasion had
+      made them fierce and cruel, without teaching them Northern virtues. Nay, I
+      question much if their invaders had so many rugged virtues to teach as
+      some people would have us think. They seem to have liked well the sweet
+      corruptions of the land, and the studied debaucheries of ages of sin, and
+      to have enjoyed them as furiously and clumsily as bears do the hoarded
+      honey of civilized bees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the death of Boniface the lordship of Mantua fell to his famous
+      daughter, Matilda, of whom most have heard. She was a woman of strong will
+      and strong mind; she held her own, and rent from others with a mighty
+      hand, till she had united nearly all Lombardy under her rule. She was not
+      much given to the domestic affections; she had two husbands
+      (successively), and, if the truth must be told, divorced them both: one
+      because he wished to share her sovereignty, perhaps usurp it; and the
+      other because he was not warm enough friend of religion. She had no
+      children, and, indeed, in her last marriage contract it was expressly
+      provided that the spouses were to live in chastity together, and as much
+      asunder as possible, Matilda having scruples. She was a great friend to
+      learning,&mdash;founded libraries, established the law schools at Bologna,
+      caused the codification of the canon law, corresponded with distant
+      nations, and spoke all the different languages of her soldiers. More than
+      literature, however, she loved the Church; and fought on the side of Pope
+      Gregory VII in his wars with the Emperor Henry IV. Henry therefore took
+      Mantua from her in 1091, and up to the year 1111 the city enjoyed a kind
+      of republican government under his protection. In that year Henry made
+      peace with Matilda, and appointed her his vice-regent in Italy; but the
+      Mantuans, after twenty years of freedom, were in no humor to feel the
+      weight of the mailed hand of this strong-minded lady. She was then,
+      moreover, nigh to her death; and, hearing that her physicians had given
+      her up, the Mantuans refused submission. The great Countess rose irefully
+      from her deathbed, and, gathering her army, led it in person, as she
+      always did, laid siege to Mantua by land and water, entered the city in
+      1114, and did not die till a year after. Such is female resolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Mantuans now founded a republican government, having unlimited
+      immunities and privileges from the Emperor, whose power over them extended
+      merely to the investure of their consuls. Their republic was democratic,
+      the legislative council of nine rectors and three curators being elective
+      by the whole people. This government, or something like it, endured for
+      more than a century, during which period the Mantuans seem to have done
+      nothing but war with their neighbors in every direction,&mdash;with the
+      Veronese chiefly, with the Cremonese a good deal, with the Paduans, with
+      the Ferrarese, with the Modenese and the Bolognese: indeed, we count up
+      twelve of these wars. Like the English of their time, the Mantuans were
+      famous bowmen, and their shafts took flight all over Lombardy. At the same
+      time they did not omit to fight each other at home; and it must have been
+      a dullish kind of day in Mantua when there was no street-battle between
+      families of the factious nobility. Dante has peopled his Hell from the
+      Italy of this time, and he might have gone farther and fared worse for a
+      type of the infernal state. The spectacle of these countless little
+      Italian powers, racked, and torn, and blazing with pride, aggression, and
+      disorder, within and without,&mdash;full of intrigue, anguish, and shame,&mdash;each
+      with its petty thief or victorious faction making war upon the other, and
+      bubbling over with local ambitions, personal rivalries, and lusts,&mdash;is
+      a spectacle which the traveller of to-day, passing over the countless
+      forgotten battle-fields, and hurried from one famous city to another by
+      railroad, can scarcely conjure up. Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua,
+      Mantua Vicenza, Verona, Bassano,&mdash;all are now at peace with each
+      other, and firmly united in the national sentiment that travellers were
+      meant to be eaten alive by Italians. Poor old cities! it is hard to
+      conceive of their bygone animosities; still harder to believe that all the
+      villages squatting on the long white roads, and waking up to beg of you as
+      your diligence passes, were once embroiled in deadly and incessant wars.
+      Municipal pride is a good thing, and discentralization is well; and we
+      have to thank these intensely local little states for genius triply
+      crowned with the glories of literature, art, and science, which Italy
+      might not have produced if she had been united, and if the little states
+      had loved themselves less and Italy more. Though, after all, there is the
+      doubt whether it is not better to bless one's obscure and happy children
+      with peace and safety, than to give to the world a score of great names at
+      the cost to millions of incalculable misery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides their local wars and domestic feuds the Mantuans had troubles on a
+      much larger scale,&mdash;troubles, indeed, which the Emperor Barbarossa
+      laid out for all Italy. In Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great you
+      can read a pleasanter account of the Emperor's business at Roncaglia about
+      this time than our Italian chroniclers will give you. Carlyle loves a
+      tyrant; and if the tyrant is a ruffian and bully, and especially a German,
+      there are hardly any lengths to which that historian will not go in praise
+      of him. Truly, one would hardly guess, from that picture of Frederick
+      Redbeard at Roncaglia, with the standard set before his tent, inviting all
+      men to come and have justice done them, that the Emperor was actually at
+      Roncaglia for the purpose of conspiring with his Diet to take away every
+      vestige of liberty and independence from miserable Italy. Among other
+      cities Mantua lost her freedom at this Diet, and was ruled by an imperial
+      governor and by consuls of Frederick's nomination till 1167, when she
+      joined the famous Lombard League against him. The leagued cities beat the
+      Emperor at Legnano, and received back their liberties by the treaty of
+      Costanza in 1183; after which, Frederick having withdrawn to Germany, they
+      fell to fighting among themselves again with redoubled zeal, and rent
+      their league into as many pieces as there had been parties to it. In 1236
+      the Germans again invaded Lombardy, under Frederick II.; and aided by the
+      troops of the Ghibelline cities, Verona, Padua, Vicenza, and Treviso,
+      besieged Mantua, which surrendered to this formidable union of forces,
+      thus becoming once more an imperial city, and irreparably fracturing the
+      Lombard League. It does not appear, however, that her ancient liberties
+      were withdrawn by Frederick II.; and we read that the local wars went on
+      after this with as little interruption as before. The wars went on as
+      usual, and on the old terms with Verona and Cremona; and there is little
+      in their history to interest us. But in 1256 the famous tyrant of Padua,
+      Eccelino da Romano, who aspired to the dominion of Lombardy, gathered his
+      forces, and went and sat down before Mantua. The Mantuans refused to
+      surrender at his summons; and Eccelino, who had very little notion of what
+      the Paduans were doing in his absence, swore that he would cut down the
+      vines in those pleasant Mantuan vineyards, plant new ones, and drink the
+      wine of their grapes before ever he raised the siege. But meantime that
+      conspiracy which ended in Eccelino's ruin had declared itself in Padua,
+      and the tyrant was forced to abandon the siege and look to his dominion of
+      other cities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After which there was something like peace in Mantua for twenty years, and
+      the city waxed prosperous. Indeed, neither industry nor learning had
+      wholly perished during the wars of the republic, and the people built
+      grist-mills on the Mincio, and cultivated belles-lettres to some degree.
+      Men of heavier science likewise nourished, and we read of jurists and
+      astronomers born in those troublous days, as well as of a distinguished
+      physician, who wrote a ponderous dictionary of simples, and dedicated it
+      to King Robert of Naples. But by far the greatest Mantuan of this time was
+      he of whom readers have heard something from a modern poet. He is the
+      haughty Lombard soul, "in the movement of the eyes honest and slow," whom
+      Dante, ascending the inexplicable heights of Purgatory, beheld; and who,
+      summoning all himself, leaped to the heart of Virgil when he named Mantua:
+      "O Mantuan! I am Sordello, of thine own land!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of Virgil the superstition of the Middle Ages had made a kind of wizard,
+      and of Sordello the old writers fable all manner of wonders; he is both
+      knight and poet, and has adventures scarcely less surprising than those of
+      Amadis of Gaul. It is pretty nearly certain that he was born in 1189 of
+      the Visconti di Goito, in the Mantuan country, and that he married
+      Beatrice, a sister of Eccelino, and had amours with the youngest sister of
+      this tyrant, the pretty Cunizza, whom Dante places in his "Paradiso." This
+      final disposition of Cunizza, whom we should hardly think now of assigning
+      a place among the blest, surprised some people even in that day, it seems;
+      for an old commentator defends it, saying: "Cunizza was always, it is
+      true, tender and amorous, and properly called a daughter of Venus; but she
+      was also compassionate, benign, and merciful toward those unhappy ones
+      whom her brother cruelly tormented. Therefore the poet is right in
+      feigning to find her in the sphere of Venus. <i>For if the gentle Cyprians
+      deified their Venus, and the Romans their Flora, how much more honestly
+      may a Christian poet save Cunizza</i>." The lady, whose salvation is on
+      these grounds inexpugnably accomplished, was married to Count Sanbonifazio
+      of Padua, in her twenty-fourth year; and Sordello was early called to this
+      nobleman's court, having already given proofs of his poetic genius. He
+      fell in love with Cunizza, whom her lord, becoming the enemy of the
+      Eccelini, began to ill-treat. A curious glimpse of the manners and morals
+      of that day is afforded by the fact, that the brothers of Cunizza
+      conspired to effect her escape with Sordella from her husband's court, and
+      that, under the protection of Eccelino da Romano, the lovers were left
+      unmolested to their amours. Eccelino, indeed, loved this weak sister with
+      extraordinary tenderness, and we read of a marvelous complaisance to her
+      amorous intrigues by a man who cared nothing himself for women. Cunizza
+      lived in one of her brother's palaces at Verona, and used to receive there
+      the visits of Sordello after Eccelino had determined to separate them. The
+      poet entered the palace by a back door, to reach which he must pass
+      through a very filthy alley; and a servant was stationed there to carry
+      Sordello to and fro upon his back. One night Eccelino took the servant's
+      place, bore the poet to the palace door, and on his return carried him
+      back to the mouth of the alley, where he revealed himself, to the natural
+      surprise and pain of Sordello, who could have reasonably expected anything
+      but the mild reproof and warning given him by his truculent
+      brother-in-law: "Ora ti basti, Sordello. Non venir più per questa vile
+      strada ad opere ancor più vili."&mdash;"Let this suffice thee, Sordello.
+      Come no more by this vile path to yet viler deeds."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was probably after this amour ended that Sordello sat out upon his
+      travels, visiting most courts, and dwelling long in Provence, where he
+      learned to poetize in the Provençal tongue, in which he thereafter chiefly
+      wrote, and composed many songs. He did not, however, neglect his Lombard
+      language, but composed in it a treatise on the art of defending towns. The
+      Mantuan historian, Volta, says that some of Sordello's Provençal poems
+      exist in manuscript in the Vatican and Chigi libraries at Rome, in the
+      Laurentian at Florence, and the Estense at Modena. He was versed in arms
+      as well as letters, and he caused Mantua to be surrounded with fosses five
+      miles beyond her walls; and the republic having lodged sovereign powers in
+      his hands when Eccelino besieged the city, Sordello conducted the defense
+      with great courage and ability, and did not at all betray the place to his
+      obliging brother-in-law, as the latter expected. Verci, from whose
+      "History of the Eccelini" we have drawn the account of Sordello's intrigue
+      with Cunizza, says: "The writers represent this Sordello as the most
+      polite, the most gentle, the most generous man of his time, of middle
+      stature, of beautiful aspect and fine person, of lofty bearing, agile and
+      dexterous, instructed in letters, and a good poet, as his Provençal poems
+      manifest. To these qualities he united military valor in such degree that
+      no knight of his time could stand before him." He was properly the first
+      Lord of Mantua, and the republic seems to have died with him in 1284.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The madness which comes upon a people about to be enslaved commonly makes
+      them the agents of their own undoing. The time had now come for the
+      destruction of the last vestiges of liberty in Mantua, and the Mantuans,
+      in their assembly of the Four Hundred and Ninety, voted full power into
+      the hands of the destroyer. That Pinamonte Bonacolsi whom Dante mentions
+      in the twentieth canto of the "Inferno," had been elected captain of the
+      republic, and, feigning to fear aggression from the Marquis of Ferrara, he
+      demanded of the people the right to banish all enemies of the state. This
+      reasonable demand was granted, and the captain banished, as is well known,
+      all enemies of Pinamonte Bonacolsi. After that, having things his own way,
+      he began to favor public tranquillity, abolished family feuds and the
+      ancient amusement of street-battles, and led his enslaved country in the
+      paths of material prosperity; for which he was no doubt lauded in his day
+      by those who thought the Mantuans were not prepared for freedom. He
+      resolved to make the captaincy of the republic hereditary in the Bonacolsi
+      family; and when he died, in 1293, his power descended to his son
+      Bordellone. This Bordellone seems to have been a generous and merciful
+      captain enough, but he loved ease and pleasure; and a rough nephew of his,
+      Guido Botticella, conspired against him to that degree that Bordellone
+      thought best, for peace and quietness' sake, to abdicate in his favor.
+      Guido had the customary war with the Marquis of Ferrara, and then died,
+      and was succeeded by his brother Passerino, a very bad person, whose son
+      at last brought his whole family to grief. The Emperor made him vicar of
+      Modena; and he used the Modenese very cruelly, and shut up Francesco Pico
+      and his sons in a tower, where he starved them, as the Pisans did Ugolino.
+      In those days, also, the Pope was living at Avignon, and people used to
+      send him money and other comforts there out of Italy. An officer of
+      Passerino's, being of Ghibelline politics, attacked one of these richly
+      laden emissaries, and took his spoils, dividing them with Passerino. For
+      this the Pope naturally excommunicated the captain of Mantua, and
+      thereupon his neighbors made a great deal of pious war upon him. But he
+      beat the Bolognese, the most pious of his foes, near Montevoglio, and with
+      his Modenese took from them that famous bucket, about which Tassoni made
+      his great Bernesque epic, "The Rape of the Bucket" (<i>La Secchia Rapita</i>),
+      and which still hangs in the tower of the Duomo at Modena. Meantime, while
+      Passerino had done everything to settle himself comfortably and
+      permanently in the tyranny of Mantua, his worthless son Francesco fell in
+      love with the wife of Filippino Gonzaga.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to the old Mantuan chronicles the Gonzagas were of a royal
+      German line, and had fixed themselves in the Mantuan territory in 770
+      where they built a castle beyond Po, and began at once to take part in
+      public affairs. They had now grown to be a family of such consequence that
+      they could not be offended with impunity, and it was a great misfortune to
+      the Bonacolsi that Francesco happened to covet Filippino Gonzaga's wife.
+      As to the poor lady herself, it is of infinite consequence to her eternal
+      health whether she was guilty or no, but to us still on earth, it seems
+      scarcely worth while to inquire, after so great lapse of time. History,
+      however, rather favors the notion of her innocence; and it is said that
+      Francesco, unable to overcome her virtue, took away her good fame by evil
+      reports. At the same time he was greatly wroth&mdash;it is scarcely
+      possible to write seriously of these ridiculous, wicked old shadows&mdash;that
+      this lady's husband should have fallen in love with a pretty concubine of
+      his, Bonacolsi's; and, after publicly defaming Filippino's wife, he
+      threatened to kill him for this passion. The insult and the menace sank
+      deep into the bitter hearts of the Gonzagas; and the head of that proud
+      race, Filippino's uncle, Luigi Gonzaga, resolved to avenge the family
+      dishonor. He was a secret and taciturn man, and a pious adulator of his
+      line has praised him for the success with which he dissembled his hatred
+      of the Bonacolsi, while conspiring to sweep them and their dominion away.
+      He won over adherents among the Mantuans, and then made a league with Can
+      Grande of Verona to divide the spoils of the Bonacolsi; and so, one
+      morning, having bribed the guards to open the city gates, he entered
+      Mantua at the head of the banded forces. The population was roused with
+      patriotic cries of "Long live the Mantuan people!" and, as usual,
+      believed, poor souls, that some good was meant them by those who came to
+      overthrow their tyrants. The Bonacolsi were dreaming that pleasant morning
+      of anything but ruin, and they offered no resistance to the insurrection
+      till it burst out in the great square before the Castello di Corte. They
+      then made a feeble sally from the castle, but were swiftly driven back,
+      and Passerino, wounded to death under the great Gothic archway of the
+      palace, as he retreated, dropped from his languid hands the bridle-rein of
+      his charger and the reins of that government with which he had so long
+      galled Mantua. The unhappy Francesco fled to the cathedral for protection;
+      but the Gonzagas slew him at the foot of the altar, with tortures so
+      hideous and incredible, that I am glad to have our friend, the advocate
+      Arrighi, deny the fact altogether. Passerino's brother, a bishop, was
+      flung into a tower to starve, that the Picos might be avenged; and the
+      city of Mantua was liberated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that day, when you freed a city from a tyrant, you gave it up to be
+      pillaged by the army of liberation; and Mantua was now sacked by her
+      deliverers. Can Grande's share of the booty alone amounted to a hundred
+      thousand gold florins (about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars). The
+      Mantuans, far from imitating the ungrateful Paduans, who, when the
+      Crusaders liberated them from Eccelino, grudged these brave fellows three
+      days' pillage of their city, and even wished back their old tyrant,&mdash;the
+      Mantuans, we say, seemed not in the least to mind being devoured, but
+      gratefully elected the Gonzaga their captain-general, and purchased him
+      absolution from the Pope for his crimes committed in the sack. They got
+      this absolution for twenty thousand gold florins; and the Pope probably
+      sold it cheap, remembering his old grudge against the Bonacolsi, whom the
+      Gonzaga had overthrown. All this was in the year of grace 1328.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess that I am never weary of reading of these good, heroic, virtuous
+      old times in Italy, and that I am here tempted to digress into declamation
+      about them. There is no study more curious and interesting, and I am fond
+      of tracing the two elements of character visible in Italian society, and
+      every individual Italian, as they flow down from the remotest times to
+      these: the one element, that capacity for intellectual culture of the
+      highest degree; the other element, that utter untamableness of passion and
+      feeling. The presence of these contradictory elements seems to influence
+      every relation of Italian life;&mdash;to make it capable of splendor, but
+      barren of comfort; to endear beauty, but not goodness, to the Italian; to
+      lead him to recognize and celebrate virtues, but not to practice them; to
+      produce a civilization of the mind, and not of the soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Luigi Gonzaga was made lord of Mantua, he left his castle beyond Po,
+      to dwell in the city. In this castle he had dwelt, like other lords of his
+      time, in the likeness of a king, spending regally and keeping state and
+      open house in an edifice strongly built about with walls, encircled with
+      ditches passable by a single drawbridge, and guarded day and night, from
+      castle moat to castle crest, by armed vassals. Hundreds ate daily at his
+      board, which was heaped with a rude and rich profusion, and furnished with
+      carven goblets and plate of gold and silver. In fair weather the
+      banquet-hall stood open to all the winds that blew; in foul, the guests
+      were sheltered from the storm by curtains of oiled linen, and the place
+      was lighted with torches borne by splendidly attired pages. The great
+      saloons of the castle were decked with tapestries of Flanders and
+      Damascus, and the floor was strewn with straw or rushes. The bed in which
+      the lord and lady slept was the couch of a monarch; the household herded
+      together in the empty chambers, and lay upon the floor like swine. The
+      garden-fields about the castle smiled with generous harvests; the peasant
+      lay down after his toil, at night, in deadly fear of invasion from some
+      neighboring state, which should rob him of everything, dishonor his wife
+      and daughters, and slay him upon the smoking ruins of his home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the city to which this lord repaired, the houses were built here and
+      there at caprice, without numbers or regularity, and only distinguished by
+      the figure of a saint, or some pious motto painted above the door. Cattle
+      wandered at will through the crooked, narrow, and filthy streets, which
+      rang with the clamor of frequent feud, and reeked with the blood of the
+      embattled citizens; over all the squalor and wickedness rose the loveliest
+      temples that ever blossomed from man's love of the beautiful, to the honor
+      and glory of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this time Crusaders went to take the Lord's sepulchre from the infidel,
+      while their brothers left at home rose against one another, each petty
+      state against its neighbor, in unsparing wars of rapine and devastation,&mdash;wars
+      that slew, or, less mercifully, mutilated prisoners,&mdash;that snatched
+      the babe from the embrace of its violated mother, and dashed out its
+      brains upon the desolated hearth. A hopeless, hellish time of sack,
+      plunder, murder, famine, plague, and unnatural crime; a glorious age, in
+      which flourished the gentlest and sweetest poet that ever sang, and the
+      grimmest and grandest that ever upbraided a godless generation for its
+      sins,&mdash;in which Petrarch was crowned with laurel at Rome, and Dante
+      wandered in despair from court to court, learning in the bitterness of his
+      exile's heart,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "come sa di sale
+  Lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
+  Lo scendere e il salir per l'altrui scale."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It was a time ignorant of the simplest comfort, but debauched with the
+      vices of luxury; in which cities repressed the license of their people by
+      laws regulating the length of women's gowns and the outlays at weddings
+      and funerals. Every wild misdeed and filthy crime was committed, and
+      punished by terrible penalties, or atoned for by fines. A fierce democracy
+      reigned, banishing nobles, razing their palaces, and ploughing up the
+      salt-sown sites; till at last, in the uttermost paroxysm of madness, it
+      delivered itself up to lords to be defended from itself, and was crushed
+      into the abjectest depths of slavery. Literature and architecture
+      flourished, and the sister arts were born amid the struggles of human
+      nature convulsed with every abominable passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For nearly four hundred years the Gonzagas continued to rule the city,
+      which the first prince of their line, having well-nigh destroyed, now
+      rebuilt and restored to greater splendor than ever; and it is the Mantua
+      of the Gonzagas which travellers of this day look upon when they visit the
+      famous old city. Their pride and their wealth adorned it; their wisdom and
+      prudence made it rich and prosperous; their valor glorified it; their
+      crimes stain its annals with infamy; their wickedness and weakness ruined
+      it and brought it low. They were a race full of hereditary traits of
+      magnificence, but one reads their history, and learns to love, of all
+      their long succession, only one or two in their pride, learns to pity only
+      one or two in their fall. They were patriotic, but the patriotism of
+      despotic princes is self-love. They were liberal&mdash;in spending the
+      revenues of the state for the glory of their family. They were brave, and
+      led many nameless Mantuans to die in forgotten battles for alien quarrels
+      which they never understood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The succession of the Gonzagas was of four captains, ending in 1407; four
+      marquises, ending in 1484; and ten dukes, ending in 1708.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first of the captains was Luigi, as we know. In his time the great
+      Gothic fabric of the Castello di Corte was built; and having rebuilt the
+      portions of the city wasted by the sack, he devoted himself, as far as
+      might be in that age, to the arts of peace; and it is remembered of him
+      that he tried to cure the Mantuan air of its feverish unwholesomeness by
+      draining the swampy environs. During his time, Petrarch, making a
+      sentimental journey to the birthplace of Virgil, was splendidly
+      entertained and greatly honored by him. For the rest, Can Grande of Verona
+      was by no means content with his hundred thousand golden florins of spoil
+      from the sack of the city, but aspired to its seigniory, declaring that he
+      had understood Gonzaga to have promised him it as the condition of
+      alliance against the Bonacolsi. Gonzaga construed the contract
+      differently, and had so little idea of parting with his opinion, that he
+      fought the Scaligero on this point of difference till he died, which
+      befell thirty years after his election to the captaincy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Him his son Guido succeeded,&mdash;a prince already old at the time of his
+      father's death, and of feeble spirit. He shared his dominion with his son
+      Ugolino, excluding the younger brothers from the dominion. These,
+      indignant at the partiality, one night slew their brother Ugolino at a
+      supper he was giving; and being thereupon admitted to a share in their
+      father's government, had no trouble in obtaining the pardon of the Pope
+      and Emperor. One of the murderers died before the father; the other, named
+      Ludovico, was, on the death of Guido, in 1370, elected to the captaincy,
+      and ruled long, wisely, and well. He loved a peaceful life; and though the
+      Emperor confirmed him in the honors conferred on him by the Mantuans, and
+      made him Vicar imperial, Ludovico declined to take part with Ghibellines
+      against Guelphs, remained quietly at home, and spent himself much in good
+      works, as if he would thus expiate his bloody crime. He gathered artists,
+      poets, and learned men about him, and did much to foster all arts. In his
+      time, Mantua had rest from war, and grew to have twenty-eight thousand
+      inhabitants; but it was not in the nature of a city of the Middle Ages to
+      be long without a calamity of some sort, and it is a kind of relief to
+      know that Mantua, under this peaceful prince, was well-nigh depopulated by
+      a pestilence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1381 he died, and with his son Francesco the blood-letting began again.
+      Indeed, this captain spent nearly his whole life in war with those
+      pleasant people, the Visconti of Milan. He had married the daughter of
+      Barnabo Visconti, but discovering her to be unfaithful to him, or
+      believing her so, he caused her to be put to death, refusing all her
+      family's intercessions for mercy. After that, a heavy sadness fell upon
+      him, and he wandered aimlessly about in many Italian cities, and at last
+      married a second time, taking to wife Margherita Malatesta. He was a
+      prince of high and generous soul and of manly greatness rare in his time.
+      There came once a creature of the Visconti to him, with a plot for
+      secretly taking off his masters; but the Gonzaga (he must have been
+      thought an eccentric man by his neighbors) dismissed the wretch with
+      scornful horror. I am sure the reader will be glad to know that he finally
+      beat the Visconti in fair fight, and (the pest still raging in Mantua)
+      lived to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. When he returned, he compiled
+      the city's statutes, divided the town into four districts, and named its
+      streets. So he died.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And after this prince had made his end, there came another Francesco, or
+      Gianfrancesco, who was created Marquis of Mantua by the Emperor Sigismund.
+      He was a friend of war, and having been the ward of the Venetian Republic
+      (Venice was fond of this kind of trust, and sometimes adopted princely
+      persons as her children, among whom the reader will of course remember the
+      Queen of Cyprus, and the charming Bianca Capello, whose personal
+      attractions and singularly skillful knowledge of the use of poisons made
+      her Grand Duchess of Tuscany some years after she eloped from Venice), he
+      became the leader of her armies on the death of Carmagnola, who survived
+      the triumphal reception given him by the Serenest Senate only a very short
+      time. [It seems scarcely worth while to state the fact that Carmagnola,
+      suspected of treasonable correspondence with the Visconti, was recalled to
+      Venice to receive distinguished honors from the republic. The Senate was
+      sitting in the hall of the Grand Council when he appeared, and they
+      detained him there with various compliments till night fell. Then instead
+      of lights, the Sbirri appeared, and seized Carmagnola. "I am a dead man,"
+      he exclaimed, on beholding them. And so indeed he was; for, three days
+      after, he was led out of prison, and beheaded between the pillars of the
+      Piazzetta.] The Gonzaga took Verona and Padua for the republic, and met
+      the Milanese in many battles. Venice was then fat and insolently profuse
+      with the spoils of the Orient, and it is probable that the Marquis of
+      Mantua acquired there that taste for splendor which he introduced into his
+      hitherto frugal little state. We read of his being in Venice in 1414, when
+      the Jewelers and Goldsmiths' Guild gave a tournament in the Piazza San
+      Marco, offering as prizes to the victorious lances a collar enriched with
+      pearls and diamonds, the work of the jewelers, and two helmets excellently
+      wrought by the goldsmiths. On this occasion the Gonzaga, with two hundred
+      and sixty Mantuan gentlemen, mounted on superb horses, contested the
+      prizes with the Marquis of Ferrara, at the head of two hundred Ferrarese,
+      equally mounted, and attended by their squires and pages, magnificently
+      dressed. There were sixty thousand spectators of the encounter. "Both the
+      Marquises," says Mutinelli in his "Annali Urbani," "being each assisted by
+      fourteen well-armed cavaliers, combated valorously at the barrier, and
+      were both judged worthy of the first prize: a Mantuan cavalier took the
+      second."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Marquis Gonzaga was the first of his line who began that royal luxury
+      of palaces with which Mantua was adorned. He commenced the Ducal Palace;
+      but before he went far with the work, he fell a prey to the science then
+      much affected by Italian princes, but still awaiting its last refinement
+      from the gifted Lucrezia Borgia. The poor Marquis was poisoned by his
+      wife's paramour, and died in the year 1444. Against this prince, our
+      advocate Arrighi records the vandalism of causing to be thrown down and
+      broken in pieces the antique statue of Virgil, which stood in one of the
+      public places of Mantua, and of which the head is still shown in the
+      Museum of the city. In all times, the Mantuans had honored, in diverse
+      ways, their great poet, and at certain epochs had coined money bearing his
+      face. With the common people he had a kind of worship (more likely as
+      wizard than as poet), and they celebrated annually some now-forgotten
+      event by assembling with songs and dances about the statue of Virgil,
+      which was destroyed by the uncle of the Marquis, Malatesta, rather than by
+      the Marquis's own order. This ill-conditioned person is supposed to have
+      been "vexed because our Mantuan people thought it their highest glory to
+      be fellow-citizens of the prince of poets." We can better sympathize with
+      the advocate's indignation at this barbarity, than with his blame of
+      Francesco for having consented, by his acceptance of the marquisate, to
+      become a prince of the Roman Empire. Mantua was thus subjected to the
+      Emperors, but liberty had long been extinguished; and the voluntary
+      election of the Council, which bestowed the captaincy on each succeeding
+      generation of the Gonzagas, was a mere matter of form, and of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next prince, Lodovico Gonzaga, was an austere man, and had been bred
+      in a hard school, if I may believe some of our old chroniclers, whom,
+      indeed, I sometimes suspect of being not altogether faithful. It is said
+      that his father loved his younger brother better than him, and that
+      Lodovico ran away in his boyhood, and took refuge with his father's
+      hereditary enemies, the Visconti. To make dates agree, it must have been
+      the last of these, for the line failed during Lodovico's time, and he had
+      wars with the succeeding Sforza. In the day of his escapade, Milan was at
+      war with Mantua and with Venice, and the Marquis Gonzaga was at the head
+      of the united armies, as we have already seen. So the father and son met
+      in several battles; though the Visconti, out of love for the boy, and from
+      a sentiment of piety somewhat amazing in them, contrived that he should
+      never actually encounter his parent face to face. Lodovico came home after
+      the wars, wearing a long beard; and his mother called her son "the Turk,"
+      a nickname that he never lost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Il Turco was a lover of the arts and of letters, and he did many works to
+      enrich and beautify the city. He established the first printing-office in
+      Mantua, where the first book printed was the "Decamerone" of Boccaccio. He
+      founded a college of advocates, and he dug canals for irrigation; and the
+      prosperity of Mantuan manufacturers in his time may be inferred from the
+      fact that, when the King of Denmark paid him a visit, in 1474, the
+      merchants decked their shops with five thousand pieces of fine Mantuan
+      cloth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Marquis made his brilliant little court the resort of the arts and
+      letters; and hither from Florence came once the elegant Politian, who
+      composed his tragedy of "Orfeo" in Mantua, and caused it to be first
+      represented before Lodovico. But it must be confessed that this was a soil
+      in which art flourished better than literature, and that even born Mantuan
+      poets went off, after a while, and blossomed in other air. The painter
+      Mantegna, whom the Marquis invited from Padua, passed his whole life here,
+      painting for the Marquis in the palaces and churches. The prince loved
+      him, and gave him a house, and bestowed other honors upon him; and
+      Mantegna executed for Lodovico his famous pictures representing the
+      Triumph of Julius Cæsar. [Now at Hamilton Court, in England.] It was
+      divided into nine compartments, and, as a frieze, went round the upper
+      part of Lodovico's newly erected palace of San Sebastian. Mantegna also
+      painted a hall in the Castello di Corte, called the Stanza di Mantegna,
+      and there, among other subjects of fable and of war, made the portraits of
+      Lodovico and his wife. It was partly the wish to see such works of
+      Mantegna as still remained in Mantua that took us thither; and it was
+      chiefly this wish that carried us, the morning after our arrival, to the
+      Castello di Corte, or the Ducal Palace. Our thirst for Mantegnas was
+      destined to be in no degree satisfied in this pile, but it was full of
+      things to tempt us to forget Mantegna, and to make us more and more
+      interested in the Gonzagas and their Mantua.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is taken for granted that no human being ever yet gained an idea of any
+      building from the most artful description of it; but if the reader cares
+      to fancy a wide piazza, or open square, with a church upon the left hand,
+      immense, uninteresting edifices on the right, and an ugly bishop's palace
+      of Renaissance taste behind him, he may figure before him as vastly and
+      magnificently as he pleases the superb Gothic front of the Castello di
+      Corte. This façade is the only one in Italy that reminds you of the most
+      beautiful building in the world, the Ducal Palace at Venice; and it does
+      this merely by right of its short pillars and deep Gothic arches in the
+      ground story, and the great breadth of wall that rises above them,
+      unbroken by the second line of columns which relieves and lightens this
+      wall in the Venetian palace. It stands at an extremity of the city, upon
+      the edge of the broad fresh-water lagoon, and is of such extent as to
+      include within its walls a whole court-city of theatre, church, stables,
+      playground, course for riding, and several streets. There is a far older
+      edifice adjoining the Castello di Corte, which Guido Bonacolsi began, and
+      which witnessed the bloody end of his line, when Louis Gonzaga surprised
+      and slew his last successor. But the palace itself is all the work of the
+      Gonzagas, and it remains the monument of their kingly state and splendid
+      pride.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the misfortune of the present writer to be recognized by the <i>employé</i>
+      (formerly of Venice) who gives the permissions to travellers to visit the
+      palace, and to be addressed in the presence of the <i>Custode</i> by the
+      dignified title to which his presence did so little honor. This
+      circumstance threw upon the Custode, a naturally tedious and oppressive
+      old man, the responsibility of being doubly prolix and garrulous. He
+      reveled in his office of showing the palace, and did homage to the
+      visitor's charge and nation by an infinite expansion upon all possible
+      points of interest, lest he should go away imperfectly informed of
+      anything. By dint of frequent encounter with strangers, this Custode had
+      picked up many shreds and fragments of many languages, and did not permit
+      the travellers to consider themselves as having at all understood him
+      until he had repeated everything in Italian, English, French, and German.
+      He led the way with his polyglot babble through an endless number of those
+      magnificent and uninteresting chambers which palaces seem specially built
+      to contain, that men may be content to dwell in the humbler dullness of
+      their own houses; and though the travellers often prayed him to show them
+      the apartments containing the works of Mantegna, they really got to see
+      nothing of this painter's in the Ducal Palace, except, here and there,
+      some evanescent frescoes, which the Custode would not go beyond a <i>si
+      crede</i> in attributing to him. Indeed, it is known that the works of
+      Mantegna suffered grievously in the wars of the last century, and his
+      memory has faded so dim in this palace where he wrought, that the guide
+      could not understand the curiosity of the foreigners concerning the old
+      painter; and certainly Giulio Romano has stamped himself more ineffaceably
+      than Mantegna upon Mantua.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the Ducal Palace are seen vividly contrasted the fineness and strength,
+      the delicacy and courage of the fancy, which, rather than the higher gift
+      of imagination, characterize Giulio's work. There is such an airy
+      refinement and subtile grace in the pretty grotesques with which he
+      decorates a chamber; there is such daring luxury of color and design in
+      the pictures for which his grand halls are merely the frames. No doubt I
+      could make fine speeches about these paintings; but who, not seeing them,
+      would be the wiser, after the best description and the choicest critical
+      disquisition? In fact, our travellers themselves found it pleasanter,
+      after a while, to yield to the guidance of the Custode, and to enjoy the
+      stupider marvels of the place, than to do the set and difficult admiration
+      of the works of art. So, passing the apartments in good preservation (the
+      Austrian Emperors had taken good care of some parts of the palace of one
+      of their first Italian possessions), they did justice to the splendor of
+      the satin beds and the other upholstery work; they admired rich
+      carpentering and costly toys; they dwelt on marvelous tapestries (among
+      which the tapestry copies of Raphael's cartoons, woven at Mantua in the
+      fifteenth century, are certainly worthy of wonder); and they expressed the
+      proper amazement at the miracles of art which caused figures frescoed in
+      the ceilings to turn with them, and follow and face them from whatever
+      part of the room they chose to look. Nay, they even enjoyed the Hall of
+      the Rivers, on the sides of which the usual river-gods were painted, in
+      the company of the usual pottery, from which they pour their founts, and
+      at the end of which there was an abominable little grotto of what people
+      call, in modern landscape-gardening, rock-work, out of the despair with
+      which its unmeaning ugliness fills them. There were busts of several
+      Mantuan duchesses in the gallery, which were interesting, and the pictures
+      were so bad as to molest no one. There was, besides all this, a hanging
+      garden in this small Babylon, on which the travellers looked with a
+      doleful regret that they were no longer of the age when a hanging garden
+      would have brought supreme comfort to the soul. It occupied a spacious
+      oblong, had a fountain and statues, trees and flowers, and would certainly
+      have been taken for the surface of the earth, had not the Custode proudly
+      pointed out that it was on a level with the second floor, on which they
+      stood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that they wandered through a series of unused, dismantled apartments
+      and halls, melancholy with faded fresco, dropping stucco, and mutilated
+      statues of plaster, and came at last upon a balcony overlooking the
+      Cavallerizza, which one of the early dukes built after a design by the
+      inevitable Giulio Romano. It is a large square, and was meant for the
+      diversion of riding on horseback. Balconies go all found it between those
+      thick columns, finely twisted, as we see them in that cartoon of Raphael,
+      "The Healing of the Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple"; and
+      here once stood the jolly dukes and the jolly ladies of their
+      light-hearted court, and there below rode the gay, insolent, intriguing
+      courtiers, and outside groaned the city under the heavy extortions of the
+      tax-gatherers. It is all in weather-worn stucco, and the handsome square
+      is planted with trees. The turf was now cut and carved by the heavy wheels
+      of the Austrian baggage-wagons constantly passing through the court to
+      carry munitions to the fortress outside, whose black guns grimly overlook
+      the dead lagoon. A sense of desolation had crept over the sight-seers,
+      with that strange sickness of heart which one feels in the presence of
+      ruin not to be lamented, and which deepened into actual pain as the
+      Custode clapped his hands and the echo buffeted itself against the forlorn
+      stucco, and up from the trees rose a score of sullen, slumberous owls, and
+      flapped heavily across the lonesome air with melancholy cries. It only
+      needed, to crush these poor strangers, that final touch which the Custode
+      gave, as they passed from the palace through the hall in which are painted
+      the Gonzagas, and in which he pointed out the last Duke of Mantua, saying
+      he was deposed by the Emperor for felony, and somehow conveying the idea
+      of horse-stealing and counterfeiting on the part of his Grace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A very different man from this rogue was our old friend Lodovico, who
+      also, however, had his troubles. He was an enemy of the Ghibellines, and
+      fought them a great deal. Of course he had the habitual wars with Milan,
+      and he was obliged to do battle with his own brother Carlo to some extent.
+      This Gonzaga had been taken prisoner by Sforza; and Lodovico, having paid
+      for him a ransom of sixty thousand florins of gold (which Carlo was
+      scarcely worth), seized the fraternal lands, and held them in pledge of
+      repayment. Carlo could not pay, and tried to get back his possessions by
+      war. Vexed with these and other contentions, Lodovico was also unhappy in
+      his son, whose romance I may best tell in the words of the history [Volta:
+      <i>Storia di Mantova</i>.], from which I take it:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    "Lodovico Gonzaga, having agreed with the Duke of Bavaria to
+    take his daughter Margherita as wife for his (Lodovico's)
+    first-born, Federico, and the young man having refused her,
+    Lodovico was so much enraged that he sought to imprison him;
+    but the Marchioness Barbara, mother of Federico, caused him to
+    fly from the city till his father's anger should be abated.
+    Federico departed with six attendants [The <i>Fioretto delle
+    Cronache</i> says "persons of gentle condition."]; but this flight
+    caused still greater displeasure to his father, who now
+    declared him banished, and threatened with heavy penalties any
+    one who should give him help or favor. Federico, therefore,
+    wandered about with these six attendants in diverse places, and
+    finally arrived in Naples; but having already spent all his
+    substance, and not daring to make himself known for fear of his
+    father, he fell into great want, and so into severe sickness.
+    His companions having nothing wherewith to live, and not
+    knowing any trade by which to gain their bread, did menial
+    services fit for day-laborers, and sustained their lord with
+    their earnings, he remaining hidden in a poor woman's house
+    where they all dwelt.
+
+    "The Marchioness had sent many messengers in divers provinces
+    with money to find her son, but they never heard any news of
+    him; so that they thought him dead, not hearing anything,
+    either, of his attendants. Now it happened that one of those
+    who sought Federico came to Naples, and presented himself to
+    the king with a letter from the said lady, praying that he
+    should make search in his territory for a company of seven men,
+    giving the name and description of each. The king caused this
+    search to be made by the heads of the district; and one of
+    these heads told how in his district there were six Lombard men
+    (not knowing of Federico, who lay ill), but that they were
+    laborers and of base condition. The king determined to see
+    them; and they being come before him, he demanded who they
+    were, and how many; as they were not willing to discover their
+    lord, on being asked their names they gave others, so that the
+    king, not being able to learn anything, would have dismissed
+    them. But the messenger sent by the Marchioness knew them, and
+    said to the king, 'Sire, these are the attendants of him whom I
+    seek; but they have changed their names.' The king caused them
+    to be separated one from another, and then asked them of their
+    Lord; and they, finding themselves separated, minutely narrated
+    everything; and the king immediately sent for Federico, whom
+    his officers found miserably ill on a heap of straw. He was
+    brought to the palace, where the king ordered him to be cared
+    for, sending the messenger back to his mother to advise her how
+    the men had been found and in what great misery. The
+    Marchioness went to her husband, and, having cast herself at
+    his feet, besought him of a grace. The Marquis answered that he
+    would grant everything, so it did not treat of Federico. Then
+    the lady opened him the letter of the king of Naples, which had
+    such effect that it softened the soul of the Marquis, showing
+    him in how great misery his son had been; and so, giving the
+    letter to the Marchioness, he said, 'Do that which pleases
+    you.' The Marchioness straightway sent the prince money, and
+    clothes to clothe him, in order that he should return to
+    Mantua; and having come, the son cast himself at his father's
+    feet, imploring pardon for himself and for his attendants; and
+    he pardoned them, and gave those attendants enough to live
+    honorably and like noblemen, and they were called The Faithful
+    of the House of Gonzaga, and from them come the <i>Fedeli</i> of
+    Mantua.
+
+    "The Marquis then, not to break faith, caused Federico to take
+    Margherita, daughter of the Duke of Bavaria, for his wife, and
+    celebrated the nuptials splendidly; so that there remained the
+    greatest love between father and son."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The son succeeded to the father's dominion in 1478; and it is recorded of
+      him in the "Flower of the Chronicles," that he was a hater of idleness,
+      and a just man, greatly beloved by his people. They chiefly objected to
+      him that he placed a Jew, Eusebio Malatesta, at the head of civil affairs;
+      and this Jew was indeed the cause of great mischief: for Ridolfo Gonzaga
+      coming to reside with his wife for a time at the court of his brother, the
+      Marquis, Malatesta fell in love with her. She repelled him, and the bitter
+      Jew thereupon so poisoned her husband's mind with accusations against her
+      chastity, that he took her home to his town of Lazzaro, and there put the
+      unhappy and innocent lady to death by the headsman's hand in the great
+      square of the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Federico was Marquis only six years, and died in 1484, leaving his
+      marquisate to his son Francesco, the most ambitious, warlike, restless,
+      splendid prince of his magnificent race. This Gonzaga wore a beard, and
+      brought the custom into fashion in Italy again. He founded the famous
+      breed of Mantuan horses, and gave them about free-handedly to other
+      sovereigns of his acquaintance. To the English king he presented a steed
+      which, if we may trust history, could have been sold for almost its weight
+      in gold. He was so fond of hunting that he kept two hundred dogs of the
+      chase, and one hundred and fifty birds of prey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course this Gonzaga was a soldier, and indeed he loved war better even
+      than hunting, and delighted so much in personal feats of arms that,
+      concealing his name and quality, in order that the combat should be in all
+      things equal, he was wont to challenge renowned champions wherever he
+      heard of them, and to meet them in the lists. Great part of his life was
+      spent in the field; and he fought in turn on nearly all sides of the
+      political questions then agitating Italy. In 1495 he was at the head of
+      the Venetian and other Italian troops when they beat the French under
+      Charles VIII. at Taro, and made so little use of their victory as to let
+      their vanquished invaders escape from them after all. Nevertheless, if the
+      Gonzaga did not here show himself a great general, he did great feats of
+      personal valor, penetrating to the midst of the French forces, wounding
+      the king, and with his own hand taking prisoner the great Bastard of
+      Bourbon. Venice paid him ten thousand ducats for gaining the victory, such
+      as it was, and when peace was made he went to visit the French king at
+      Vercelli; and there Charles gave his guest a present of two magnificent
+      horses, which the Gonzaga returned yet more splendidly in kind. About five
+      years later he was again at war with the French, and helped the Aragonese
+      drive them out of Naples. In 1506, Pope Julius II. made him leader of the
+      armies of the Church (for he had now quitted the Venetian service), and he
+      reduced the city of Bologna to obedience to the Holy See. In 1509 he
+      joined the League of Cambray against Venice, and, being made Imperial
+      Captain-General, was taken prisoner by the Venetians. They liberated him,
+      however, the following year; and in 1513 we find him at the head of the
+      league against the French.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A curious anecdote of this Gonzaga's hospitality is also illustrative of
+      the anomalous life of those times, when good faith had as little to do
+      with the intercourse of nations as at present; but good fortune, when she
+      appeared in the world, liked to put on a romantic and melodramatic guise.
+      An ambassador from the Grand Turk on his way to Rome was taken by an enemy
+      of the Pope, despoiled of all his money, and left planted, as the Italians
+      expressively say, at Ancona. This ambassador was come to concert with
+      Alexander VI. the death of Bajazet's brother, prisoner in the Pope's
+      hands, and he bore the Pope a present of 50,000 gold ducats. It was Gian
+      Della Rovere who seized and spoiled him, and sent the papers (letters of
+      the Pope and Sultan) to Charles VIII. of France, to whom Alexander had
+      been obliged to give the Grand Turk's brother. The magnificent Gonzaga
+      hears of the Turk's embarrassing mischance, sends and fetches him to
+      Mantua, clothes him, puts abundant money in his purse, and dispatches him
+      on his way. The Sultan, in reward of this courtesy to his servant, gave a
+      number of fine horses to the Marquis, who, possibly being tired of
+      presenting his own horses, returned the Porte a ship-load of excellent
+      Mantuan cheeses. This interchange of compliments seems to have led to a
+      kind of romantic friendship between the Gonzaga and the Grand Turk, who
+      did occasionally interest himself in the affairs of the Christian dogs;
+      and who, when Francesco lay prisoner at Venice, actually wrote to the
+      Serenest Senate, and asked his release as a personal grace to him, the
+      Grand Turk. And Francesco was, thereupon, let go; the canny republic being
+      willing to do the Sultan any sort of cheap favor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Gonzaga, being so much engaged in war, seems to have had little time
+      for the adornment of his capital. The Church of Our Lady of Victory is the
+      only edifice which he added to it; and this was merely in glorification of
+      his own triumph over the French at Taro. Mantegna painted an altar-piece
+      for it, representing the Marquis and his wife on their knees before the
+      Virgin, in act of rendering her thanks for the victory. The French nation
+      avenged itself for whatever wrong was done its pride in this picture by
+      stealing it away from Mantua in Napoleon's time; and it now hangs in the
+      gallery of the Louvre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Francesco died in 1519; and after him his son, Federico II., the first
+      Duke of Mantua, reigned some twenty-one years, and died in 1540. The
+      marquisate in his time was made a duchy by the Emperor Charles V., to whom
+      the Gonzaga had given efficient aid in his wars against the French. This
+      was in the year 1530; and three years later, when the Duke of Monferrato
+      died, and the inheritance of his opulent little state was disputed by the
+      Duke of Savoy, by the Marquis of Saluzzo, and by the Gonzaga, who had
+      married the late Duke's daughter, Charles's influence secured it to the
+      Mantuan. The dominions of the Gonzagas had now reached their utmost
+      extent, and these dominions were not curtailed till the deposition of
+      Fernando Carlo in 1708, when Monferrato was adjudged to the Duke of Savoy,
+      and afterwards confirmed to him by treaty. It was separated from the
+      capital of the Gonzagas by a wide extent of alien territory, but they held
+      it with a strong hand, embellished the city, and founded there the
+      strongest citadel in Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Federico, after his wars for the Emperor, appears to have reposed in peace
+      for the rest of his days, and to have devoted himself to the adornment of
+      Mantua and the aggrandizing of his family. His court was the home of many
+      artists; and Titian painted for him the Twelve Cæsars, which the Germans
+      stole when they sacked the city in 1630. But his great agent and best
+      beloved genius was Giulio Pippi, called Romano, who was conducted to
+      Mantua by pleasant Count Baldassare Castiglione.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pleasant Count Baldassare Castiglione! whose incomparable book of the
+      "Cortigiano" succeeded in teaching his countrymen every gentlemanly grace
+      but virtue. He was born at Casatico in the Mantovano, in the year 1476,
+      and went in his boyhood to be schooled at Milan, where he learnt the
+      profession of arms. From Milan he went to Rome, where he exercised his
+      profession of arms till the year 1504, when he was called to gentler uses
+      at the court of the elegant Dukes of Urbino. He lived there as courtier
+      and court-poet, and he returned to Rome as the ambassador from Urbino.
+      Meantime his liege, Francesco Gonzaga, was but poorly pleased that so
+      brilliant a Mantuan should spend his life in the service and ornament of
+      other princes, and Castiglione came back to his native country about the
+      year 1516. He married in Mantua, and there finished his famous book of
+      "The Courtier," and succeeded in winning back the favor of his prince.
+      Federico, the Duke, made him ambassador to Rome in 1528; and Baldassare
+      did his master two signal services there,&mdash;he procured him to be
+      named head of all the Papal forces, and he found him Giulio Romano. So the
+      Duke suffered him to go as the Pope's Nuncio to Spain, and Baldassare
+      finished his courtly days at Toledo in 1529.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The poet made a detour to Mantua on his way to Spain, taking with him the
+      painter, whom the Duke received with many caresses, as Vasari says,
+      presented him a house honorably furnished, ordered provision for him and
+      his pupils, gave them certain brave suits of velvet and satin, and, seeing
+      that Giulio had no horse, called for his own favorite Luggieri, and
+      bestowed it on him. Ah! they knew how to receive painters, those fine
+      princes, who had merely to put their hands into their people's pocket, and
+      take out what florins they liked. So the Duke presently set the artist to
+      work, riding out with him through the gate of San Bastiano to some stables
+      about a bow-shot from the walls, in the midst of a flat meadow, where he
+      told Giulio that he would be glad (if it could be done without destroying
+      the old walls) to have such buildings added to the stables as would serve
+      him for a kind of lodge, to come out and merrily sup in when he liked.
+      Whereupon Giulio began to think out the famous Palazzo del T.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This painter is an unlucky kind of man, to whom all criticism seems to
+      have agreed to attribute great power and deny great praise. Castiglione
+      had found him at Rome, after the death of his master Raphael, when his
+      genius, for good or for ill, began for the first time to find original
+      expression. At Mantua, where he spent all the rest of his busy life, it is
+      impossible not to feel in some degree the force of this genius. As in
+      Venice all the Madonnas in the street-corner shrines have some touch of
+      color to confess the painter's subjection to Titian or Tintoretto; as in
+      Vicenza the edifices are all in Greekish taste, and stilted upon pedestals
+      in honor and homage to Palladio; as in Parma Correggio has never died, but
+      lives to this day in the mouths and chiaroscuro effects of all the figures
+      in all the pictures painted there;&mdash;so in Mantua Giulio Romano is to
+      be found in the lines of every painting and every palace. It is wonderful
+      to see, in these little Italian cities which have been the homes of great
+      men, how no succeeding generation has dared to wrong the memory of them by
+      departing in the least from their precepts upon art. One fancies, for
+      instance, the immense scorn with which the Vicentines would greet the
+      audacity of any young architect who dared to think Gothic instead of
+      Palladian Greek, and how they would put him to shame by asking him if he
+      knew more than Palladio about architecture! It seems that original art
+      cannot arise in the presence of the great virtues and the great errors of
+      the past; and Italian art of this day seems incapable of even the feeble,
+      mortal life of other modern art, in the midst of so much immortality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Giulio Romano did a little of everything for the Dukes of Mantua,&mdash;from
+      painting the most delicate and improper little fresco for a bed-chamber to
+      restraining the Po and the Mincio with immense dikes, restoring ancient
+      edifices and building new ones, draining swamps and demolishing and
+      reconstructing whole streets, painting palaces and churches, and designing
+      the city slaughter-house. He grew old and very rich in the service of the
+      Gonzagas; but though Mrs. Jameson says he commanded respect by a sense of
+      his own dignity as an artist, the Bishop of Casale, who wrote the "Annali
+      di Mantova," says that the want of nobility and purity in his style, and
+      his "gallant inventions, were conformable to his own sensual life, and
+      that he did not disdain to prostitute himself to the infamies of Aretino."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His great architectural work in Mantua is the Palazzo del T, or Tè, as it
+      is now written. It was first called Palazzo del T, from the convergence of
+      roads there in the form of that letter; and the modern Mantuans call it
+      Del Tè, from the superstition, transmitted to us by the Custode of the
+      Ducal Palace, that the Gonzagas merely used it on pleasant afternoons to
+      take tea in! so curiously has latter-day guidemanship interpreted the
+      jolly purpose expressed by the Duke to Giulio. I say nothing to control
+      the reader's choice between T and Tè, and merely adhere to the elder style
+      out of reverence for the past. It is certain that the air of the plain on
+      which the palace stands is most unwholesome; and it may have been true
+      that the dukes never passed the night there. Federico did not intend to
+      build more than a lodge in this place; but fascinated with the design
+      offered him by Giulio, he caused the artist to go on, and contrive him a
+      palace instead. It stands, as Vasari says, about a good bow-shot from one
+      of the city's gates; and going out to see the palace on our second day in
+      Mantua, we crossed a drawbridge guarded by Austrian soldiers. Below
+      languished a bed of sullen ooze, tangled and thickly grown with long,
+      villainous grasses, and sending up a damp and deathly stench, which made
+      all the faces we saw look feverish and sallow. Already at that early
+      season the air was foul and heavy, and the sun, faintly making himself
+      seen through the dun sky of the dull spring day, seemed sick to look upon
+      the place, where indeed the only happy and lively things were the clouds
+      of gnats that danced before us, and welcomed us to the Palazzo del T. Damp
+      ditches surround the palace, in which these gnats seemed to have peculiar
+      pleasure; and they took possession of the portico of the stately entrance
+      of the edifice as we went in, and held it faithfully till we returned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one of the first large rooms are the life-size portraits of the six
+      finest horses of the Gonzaga stud, painted by the pupils of Giulio Romano,
+      after the master's designs. The paintings attest the beauty of the Mantuan
+      horses, and the pride and fondness of their ducal owners; and trustworthy
+      critics have praised their eminent truth. But it is only the artist or the
+      hippanthrop who can delight in them long; and we presently left them for
+      the other chambers, in which the invention of Giulio had been used to
+      please himself rather than his master. I scarcely mean to name the wonders
+      of the palace, having, indeed, general associations with them, rather than
+      particular recollections of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the most famous rooms is the Chamber of Psyche (the apartments are
+      not of great size), of which the ceiling is by Giulio and the walls are by
+      his pupils. The whole illustrates, with every variety of fantastic
+      invention, the story of Psyche, as told by Apuleius, and deserves to be
+      curiously studied as a part of the fair outside of a superb and corrupt
+      age, the inside of which was full of rottenness. The civilization of
+      Italy, as a growth from the earliest Pagan times, and only modified by
+      Christianity and the admixture of Northern blood and thought, is yet to be
+      carefully analyzed; and until this analysis is made, discussion of certain
+      features must necessarily be incomplete and unsatisfactory. No one,
+      however, can stand in this Chamber of Psyche, and not feel how great
+      reality the old mythology must still have had, not only for the artists
+      who painted the room, but for the people who inhabited it and enjoyed it.
+      I do not say that they believed it as they believed in the vital articles
+      of Christian faith, but that they accepted it with the same spirit as they
+      accepted the martyrology of the Church; and that to the fine gentlemen and
+      ladies of the court, those jolly satyrs and careless nymphs, those Cupids
+      and Psyches, and Dianas and Venuses, were of the same verity as the
+      Fathers of the Desert, the Devil, and the great body of the saints. If
+      they did not pray to them, they swore by them, and their names were much
+      oftener on their lips; and the art of the time was so thoroughly Pagan,
+      that it forgot all Christian holiness, and clung only to heathen beauty.
+      When it had not actually a mythologic subject to deal with, it paganized
+      Christian themes. St. Sebastian was made to look like Apollo, and Mary
+      Magdalene was merely a tearful, triste Venus. There is scarcely a ray of
+      feeling in Italian art since Raphael's time which suggests Christianity in
+      the artist, or teaches it to the beholder. In confessedly Pagan subjects
+      it was happiest, as in the life of Psyche, in this room; and here it
+      inculcated a gay and spirited license, and an elegant absence of delicacy,
+      which is still observable in Italian life. It would be instructive to know
+      in what spirit the common Mantuans of his day looked upon the inventions
+      of the painter, and how far the courtly circle which frequented this room
+      went in discussion and comment on its subjects; they were not nice people,
+      and probably had no nasty ideas about the unspeakable indecency of some of
+      the scenes. [The ruin in the famous room frescoed with the Fall of the
+      Giants commences on the very door-jambs, which are painted in broken and
+      tumbling brick-work; and throughout there is a prodigiousness which does
+      not surprise, and a bigness which does not impress; and the treatment of
+      the subject can only be expressed by the Westernism <i>powerfully weak</i>.
+      In Kugler's <i>Hand-book of Italian Painting</i> are two illustrations,
+      representing parts of the fresco, which give a fair idea of the whole.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Returning to the city we visited the house of Giulio Romano, which stands
+      in one of the fine, lonesome streets, and at the outside of which we
+      looked. The artist designed it himself; and it is very pretty, with
+      delicacy of feeling in the fine stucco ornamentation, but is not otherwise
+      interesting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We passed it, continuing our way toward the Arsenal, near which we had
+      seen the women at work washing the linen coats of the garrison in the
+      twilight of the evening before; and we now saw them again from the bridge,
+      on which we paused to look at a picturesque bit of modern life in Mantua.
+      The washing-machine (when the successful instrument is invented) may do
+      its work as well, but not so charmingly, as these Mantuan girls did. They
+      washed the linen in a clear, swift-running stream, diverted from the dam
+      of the Mincio to furnish mill-power within the city wall; and we could
+      look down the watercourse past old arcades of masonry half submerged in
+      it, past pleasant angles of houses and a lazy mill-wheel turning slowly,
+      slowly, till our view ended in the gallery of a time-worn palace, through
+      the columns of which was seen the blue sky. Under the bridge the stream
+      ran very strong and lucid, over long, green, undulating water-grasses,
+      which it loved to dimple over and play with. On the right were the
+      laundresses under the eaves of a wooden shed, each kneeling, as their
+      custom is, in a three-sided box, and leaning forward over the washboard
+      that sloped down into the water. As they washed they held the linen in one
+      hand, and rubbed it with the other; then heaped it into a mass upon the
+      board and beat it with great two-handed blows of a stick. They sang,
+      meanwhile, one of those plaintive airs of which the Italian peasants are
+      fond, and which rose in indescribable pathos, pulsing with their blows,
+      and rhythmic with the graceful movement of their forms. Many of the women
+      were young,&mdash;though they were of all ages,&mdash;and the prettiest
+      among them was third from where we stood upon the bridge. She caught sight
+      of the sketch-book which one of the travellers carried, and pointed it out
+      to the rest, who could hardly settle to their work to be sketched.
+      Presently an idle baker, whose shop adjoined the bridge, came out and
+      leaned upon the parapet, and bantered the girls. "They are drawing the
+      prettiest," he said, at which they all bridled a little; and she who knew
+      herself to be prettiest hung her head and rubbed furiously at the linen.
+      Long before the artist had finished the sketch, the lazy, good-humored
+      crowd which the public practice of the fine arts always attract in Italy,
+      had surrounded the strangers, and were applauding, commenting, comparing,
+      and absorbing every stroke as it was made. When the book was closed and
+      they walked away, a number of boys straggled after them some spaces,
+      inspired by a curious longing and regret, like that which leads boys to
+      the eager inspection of fireworks when they have gone out. We lost them at
+      the first turning of the street, whither the melancholy chorus of the
+      women's song had also followed us, and where it died pathetically away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the evening we walked to the Piazza Virgiliana, the beautiful space
+      laid out and planted with trees by the French, at the beginning of this
+      century in honor of the great Mantuan poet. One of its bounds is the shore
+      of the lake which surrounds the city, and from which now rose ghostly
+      vapors on the still twilight air. Down the slow, dull current moved one of
+      the picturesque black boats of the Po; and beyond, the level landscape had
+      a pleasant desolation that recalled the scenery of the Middle Mississippi.
+      It might have been here in this very water that the first-born of our
+      first Duke of Mantua fell from his boat while hunting water-fowl in 1550,
+      and took a fever of which he died only a short time after his accession to
+      the sovereignty of the duchy. At any rate, the fact of the accident brings
+      me back from lounging up and down Mantua to my grave duty of chronicler.
+      Francesco's father had left him in childhood to the care of his uncle, the
+      Cardinal Hercules, who ruled Mantua with a firm and able hand, increasing
+      the income of the state, spending less upon the ducal stud, and cutting
+      down the number of mouths at the ducal table from eight hundred to three
+      hundred and fifty-one. His justice tended to severity rather than mercy;
+      but reformers of our own time will argue well of his heart, that he
+      founded in that time a place of refuge and retirement for abandoned women.
+      Good Catholics will also be pleased to know that he was very efficient in
+      suppressing the black heresy of Calvin, which had crept into Mantua in his
+      day,&mdash;probably from Ferrara, where the black heretic himself was
+      then, or about then, in hiding under the protection of the ill-advised
+      Marchioness Renée. The good Cardinal received the Pope's applause for his
+      energy in this matter, and I doubt not his hand fell heavily on the
+      Calvinists. Of the Duke who died so young, the Venetian ambassador thought
+      it worth while to write what I think it worth while to quote, as
+      illustrating the desire of the Senate to have careful knowledge of its
+      neighbors: "He is a boy of melancholy complexion. His eyes are full of
+      spirit, but he does not delight in childish things, and seems secretly
+      proud of being lord. He has an excellent memory, and shows much
+      inclination for letters."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His brother Guglielmo, who succeeded him in 1550, seems to have had the
+      same affection for learning; but he was willful, harsh, and cruelly
+      ambitious, and cared, an old writer says, for nothing so much as
+      perpetuating the race of the Gonzagas in Mantua. He was a hunchback, and
+      some of his family (who could not have understood his character) tried to
+      persuade him not to assume the ducal dignity; but his haughty temper soon
+      righted him in their esteem, and it is said that all the courtiers put on
+      humps in honor of the Duke. He was not a great warrior, and there are few
+      picturesque incidents in his reign. Indeed, nearly the last of these in
+      Mantuan history was the coronation at Mantua of the excellent poet
+      Lodovico Ariosto, by Charles V., in 1532, Federico II. reigning. But the
+      Mantuans of Guglielmo's day were not without their sensations, for three
+      Japanese ambassadors passed through their city on the way to Rome. They
+      were also awakened to religious zeal by the reappearance of Protestantism
+      among them. The heresy was happily suppressed by the Inquisition, acting
+      under Pius V., though with small thanks to Duke William, who seems to have
+      taken no fervent part in the persecutions. "The proceedings," says Cantù,
+      writing before slavery had been abolished, "were marked by those
+      punishments which free America inflicts upon the negroes to-day, and which
+      a high conception of the mission of the Church moves us to deplore." The
+      Duke must have made haste after this to reconcile himself with the Church;
+      for we read that two years later he was permitted to take a particle of
+      the blood of Christ from the church of St. Andrea to that of Sta. Barbara,
+      where he deposited it in a box of crystal and gold, and caused his statue
+      to be placed before the shrine in the act of adoring the relic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Duke William managed his finances so well as to leave his spendthrift son
+      Vincenzo a large sum of money to make away with after his death. Part of
+      this, indeed, he had earned by obedience to his father's wishes in the
+      article of matrimony. The prince was in love with the niece of the Duke of
+      Bavaria, very lovely and certainly high-born enough, but having unhappily
+      only sixty thousand crowns to her portion. So she was not to be thought
+      of, and Vincenzo married the sister of the Duke of Parma, of whom he grew
+      so fond, that, though two years of marriage brought them no children, he
+      could scarce be persuaded to suffer her divorce on account of sterility.
+      This happened, however, and the prince's affections were next engaged by
+      the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The lady had a portion of three
+      hundred thousand crowns, which entirely charmed the frugal-minded Duke
+      William, and Vincenzo married her, after certain diplomatic preliminaries
+      demanded by the circumstances, which scarcely bear statement in English,
+      and which the present history would blush to give even in Italian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, he was a great beast, this splendid Vincenzo, both by his own
+      fault and that of others; but it ought to be remembered of him, that at
+      his solicitation the most clement lord of Ferrara liberated from durance
+      in the hospital of St. Anna his poet Tasso, whom he had kept shut in that
+      mad-house seven years. On his delivery, Tasso addressed his "Discorso" to
+      Vincenzo's kinsman, the learned Cardinal Scipio Gonzaga; and to this
+      prelate he submitted for correction the "Gerusalemme," as did Guarini his
+      "Pastor Fido."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Vincenzo came to power he found a fat treasury, which he enjoyed
+      after the fashion of the time, and which, having a princely passion for
+      every costly pleasure, he soon emptied. He was crowned in 1587; and on his
+      coronation day rode through the streets throwing gold to the people, after
+      the manner of the Mantuan Dukes. He kept up an army of six thousand men,
+      among a population of eighty thousand all told; and maintained as his
+      guard "fifty archers on horseback, who also served with the arquebuse, and
+      fifty light-horsemen for the guard of his own person, who were all
+      excellently mounted, the Duke possessing such a noble stud of horses that
+      he always had five hundred at his service, and kept in stable one hundred
+      and fifty of marvelous beauty." He lent the Spanish king two hundred
+      thousand pounds out of his father's sparings; and when the Archduchess of
+      Austria, Margherita, passed through Mantua on her way to wed Philip II. of
+      Spain, he gave her a diamond ring worth twelve thousand crowns. Next after
+      women, he was madly fond of the theatre, and spent immense sums for
+      actors. He would not, indeed, cede in splendor to the greatest monarchs,
+      and in his reign of fifteen years he squandered fifty million crowns! No
+      one will be surprised to learn from a contemporary writer in Mantua, that
+      this excellent prince was adorned with all the Christian virtues; nor to
+      be told by a later historian, that in Vincenzo's time Mantua was the most
+      corrupt city in Europe. A satire of the year 1601, which this writer
+      (Maffei) reduces to prose, says of that period: "Everywhere in Mantua are
+      seen feasts, jousts, masks, banquets, plays, music, balls, delights,
+      dancing. To these, the young girls," an enormity in Italy, "as well as the
+      matrons, go in magnificent dresses; and even the churches are scenes of
+      love-making. Good mothers, instead of teaching their daughters the use of
+      the needle, teach them the arts of rouging, dressing, singing, and
+      dancing. Naples and Milan scarcely produce silk enough, or India and Peru
+      gold and gems enough, to deck out female impudence and pride. Courtiers
+      and warriors perfume themselves as delicately as ladies; and even the food
+      is scented, that the mouth may exhale fragrance. The galleries and halls
+      of the houses are painted full of the loves of Mars and Venus, Leda and
+      the Swan, Jove and Danae, while the devout solace themselves with such
+      sacred subjects as Susannah and the Elders. The flower of chastity seems
+      withered in Mantua. No longer in Lydia nor in Cyprus, but in Mantua, is
+      fixed the realm of pleasure." The Mantuans were a different people in the
+      old republican times, when a fine was imposed for blasphemy, and the
+      blasphemer put into a basket and drowned in the lake, if he did not pay
+      within fifteen days; which must have made profanity a luxury even to the
+      rich. But in that day a man had to pay twenty soldi (seventy-five cents)
+      if he spoke to a woman in church; and women were not allowed even the
+      moderate diversion of going to funerals, and could not wear silk lace
+      about the neck, nor have dresses that dragged more than a yard, nor crowns
+      of pearls or gems, nor belts worth more than ten livres (twenty-five
+      dollars), nor purses worth more than fifteen soldi (fifty cents.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Possibly as an antidote for the corruption brought into the world with
+      Vincenzo, there was another Gonzaga born about the same period, who became
+      in due time Saint Louis Gonzaga, and remains to this day one of the most
+      powerful friends of virtue to whom a good Catholic can pray. He is
+      particularly recommended by his biographer, the Jesuit Father Cesari, in
+      cases of carnal temptation, and improving stories are told Italian youth
+      of the miracles he works under such circumstances. He vowed chastity for
+      his own part at an age when most children do not know good from evil, and
+      he carried the fulfillment of this vow to such extreme, that, being one
+      day at play of forfeits with other boys and girls, and being required to
+      kiss&mdash;not one of the little maidens&mdash;but her <i>shadow</i> on
+      the wall, he would not, preferring to lose his pawn. Everybody, I think,
+      will agree with Father Cesari that it would be hard to draw chastity finer
+      than this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      San Luigi Gonzaga descended from that Ridolfo who put his wife to death,
+      and his father was Marquis of Castiglione delle Stivere. He was born in
+      1568, and, being the first son, was heir to the marquisate; but from his
+      earliest years he had a call to the Church. His family did everything
+      possible to dissuade him&mdash;his father with harshness, and his uncle,
+      Duke William of Mantua, with tenderness&mdash;from his vocation. The
+      latter even sent a "bishop of rare eloquence" to labor with the boy at
+      Castiglione; but everything was done in vain. In due time Luigi joined the
+      Company of Jesus, renounced this world, and died at Rome in the odor of
+      sanctity, after doing such good works as surprised every one. His brother
+      Ridolfo succeeded to the marquisate, and fell into a quarrel with Duke
+      William about lands, which dispute Luigi composed before his death. About
+      all which the reverend Jesuit Father Tolomei has shown how far heaviness
+      can go in the dramatic form, and has written a pitiless play, wherein
+      everybody goes into a convent with the fall of the curtain. Till the
+      reader has read this play, he has never (properly speaking) been bored.
+      For the happiness of mankind, it has not been translated out of the
+      original Italian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the time of the first Vincenzo's death, there are only two tragic
+      events which lift the character of Mantuan history above the quality of <i>chronique
+      scandaleuse</i>, namely, the Duke Ferdinand's repudiation of Camilla Faa
+      di Casale, and the sack of Mantua in 1630. The first of these events
+      followed close upon the demise of the splendid Vincenzo; for his son
+      Francesco reigned but a short time, and died, leaving a little daughter of
+      three years to the guardianship of her uncle, the Cardinal Ferdinand. The
+      law of the Mantuan succession excluded females; and Ferdinand, dispensed
+      from his ecclesiastical functions by the Pope, ascended the ducal throne.
+      In 1615, not long after his accession, as the chronicles relate, in
+      passing through a chamber of the palace he saw a young girl playing upon a
+      cithern, and being himself young, and of the ardent temper of the
+      Gonzagas, he fell in love with the fair minstrel. She was the daughter of
+      a noble servant of the Duke, who had once been his ambassador to the court
+      of the Duke of Savoy, and was called Count Ardizzo Faa Monferrino di
+      Casale; but his Grace did not on that account hesitate to attempt
+      corrupting her; indeed, a courtly father of that day might well be
+      supposed to have few scruples that would interfere with a gracious
+      sovereign's designs upon his daughter. Singularly enough, the chastity of
+      Camilla was so well guarded that the ex-cardinal was at last forced to
+      propose marriage. It seems that the poor girl loved her ducal wooer; and
+      besides, the ducal crown was a glittering temptation, and she consented to
+      a marriage which, for state and family reasons, was made secret. When the
+      fact was bruited, it raised the wrath and ridicule of Ferdinand's family,
+      and the Duke's sister Margaret, Duchess of Ferrara, had so lofty a disdain
+      of his <i>mésalliance</i> with an inferior, that she drove him to
+      desperation with her sarcasms. About this time Camilla's father died, with
+      strong evidences of poisoning; and the wife being left helpless and
+      friendless, her noble husband resorted to the artifice of feigning that
+      there had never been any marriage, and thus sought to appease his family.
+      Unhappily, however, he had given her a certificate of matrimony, which she
+      refused to surrender when he put her away, so that the Duke, desiring
+      afterwards to espouse the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was
+      obliged to present a counterfeit certificate to his bride, who believed it
+      the real marriage contract, and destroyed it. When the Duchess discovered
+      the imposition, she would not rest till she had wrung the real document
+      from Camilla, under the threat of putting her son to death. The miserable
+      mother then retired to a convent, and died of a broken heart, while
+      Ferdinand bastardized his only legitimate son, a noble boy, whom his
+      mother had prettily called Jacinth. After this, a kind of retribution,
+      amid all his political successes, seems to have pursued the guilty Duke.
+      His second wife was too fat to bear children, but not to bear malice; and
+      she never ceased to distrust and reproach the Duke, whom she could not
+      believe in anything since the affair of the counterfeit marriage contract.
+      She was very religious, and embittered Ferdinand's days with continued
+      sermons and reproofs, and made him order, in the merry Mantuan court, all
+      the devotions commanded by her confessor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So Ferdinand died childless, and, it is said, in sore remorse, and was
+      succeeded in 1626 by his brother Vincenzo, another hope of the faith and
+      light of the Church. His brief reign lasted but one year, and was ignoble
+      as it was brief, and fitly ended the direct line of the Gonzagas.
+      Vincenzo, though an ecclesiastic, never studied anything, and was
+      disgracefully ignorant. Lacking the hereditary love of letters, he had not
+      the warlike boldness of his race; and resembled his ancestors only in the
+      love he bore to horses, hunting, and women. He was enamored of the widow
+      of one of his kinsmen, a woman no longer young, but of still agreeable
+      person, strong will, and quick wit, and of a fascinating presence, which
+      Vincenzo could not resist. The excellent prince was wooing her, with a
+      view to seduction, when he received the nomination of cardinal from Pope
+      Paul V. He pressed his suit, but the lady would consent to nothing but
+      marriage, and Vincenzo bundled up the cardinal's purple and sent it back,
+      with a very careless and ill-mannered letter to the ireful Pope, who swore
+      never to make another Gonzaga cardinal. He then married the widow, but
+      soon wearied of her, and spent the rest of his days in vain attempts to
+      secure a divorce, in order to be restored to his ecclesiastical benefices.
+      And one Christmas morning <i>he</i> died childless; and three years later
+      the famous sack of Mantua took place. The events leading to this crime are
+      part of one of the most complicated episodes of Italian history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ferdinand, as guardian of his brother's daughter Maria, claimed the Duchy
+      of Monferrato as part of his dominion; but his claim was disputed by
+      Maria's grandfather, the Duke of Savoy, who contended that it reverted to
+      him, on the death of his daughter, as a fief which had been added to
+      Mantua merely by the intermarriage of the Gonzagas with his family. He was
+      supported in this claim by the Spaniards, then at Milan. The Venetians and
+      the German Emperor supported Ferdinand, and the French advanced the claim
+      of a third, a descendant of Lodovico Gonzaga, who had left Mantua a
+      century before, and entered upon the inheritance of the Duchy of
+      Nevers-Rethel. The Duke of Savoy was one of the boldest of his warlike
+      race; and the Italians had great hopes of him as one great enough to drive
+      the barbarians out of Italy. But nearly three centuries more were wanted
+      to raise his family to the magnitude of a national purpose; and Carlo
+      Emanuel spent his greatness in disputes with the petty princes about him.
+      In this dispute for Monferrato he was worsted; for at the treaty of Pavia,
+      Monferrato was assured to Duke Ferdinand of Mantua.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ferdinand afterwards died without issue, and Vincenzo likewise died
+      childless; and Charles Gonzaga of Nevers-Rethel, who had married Maria,
+      Ferdinand's ward, became heir to the Duchy of Mantua, but his right was
+      disputed by Ferrante Gonzaga of Guastalla. Charles hurriedly and half
+      secretly introduced himself into Mantua without consultation with
+      Venetian, Spaniard, or German. While Duke Olivares of Spain was meditating
+      his recognition, his officer at Milan tried to seize Mantua and failed;
+      but the German Emperor had been even more deeply offended, and claimed the
+      remission of Charles's rights as a feudatory of the Roman Empire, until he
+      should have regularly invested him. Charles prepared for defense.
+      Meanwhile Spain and Savoy seized Monferrato, but they were afterwards
+      defeated by the French, and the Spanish Milanese was overrun by the
+      Venetians and Mantuans. The German Emperor then sent down his
+      Landsknechts, and in 1630 besieged Mantua, while the French promised help
+      and gave none, and the Pope exhorted Charles to submit. The Venetians,
+      occupied with the Uskok pirates, could do little in his defense. To the
+      horrors of this unequal and desperate war were added those of famine; and
+      the Jews, passing between the camp and the city, brought a pest from the
+      army into Mantua, which raged with extraordinary violence among the hungry
+      and miserable people. In vain they formed processions, and carried the
+      blood of Christ about the city. So many died that there were not boats
+      enough to bear them away to their sepulture in the lakes, and the bodies
+      rotted in the streets. There was not wanting at this time the presence of
+      a traitor in the devoted city; and that this wretch was a Swiss will be a
+      matter of no surprise. The despicable valor of these republicans has
+      everywhere formed the best defense of tyrants, and their fidelity has
+      always been at the service of the highest bidder. The recreant was a
+      lieutenant in the Swiss Guard of the Duke; and when he had led the Germans
+      into Mantua, and received the reward of his infamy, two German soldiers,
+      placed over him for his protection, killed him and plundered him of his
+      spoil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sack now began, and lasted three days, with unspeakable horrors. The
+      Germans (then the most slavish and merciless of soldiers) violated Mantuan
+      women, and buried their victims alive. The harlots of their camp cast off
+      their rags, and robing themselves in the richest spoils they could find,
+      rioted with brutal insult through the streets, and added the shame of
+      drunken orgies to the dreadful scene of blood and tears. The Jews were
+      driven forth almost naked from the Ghetto. The precious monuments of ages
+      were destroyed; or such as the fury of the soldiers spared, the avarice of
+      their generals consumed; and pictures, statues, and other works of art
+      were stolen and carried away. The churches were plundered, the sacred
+      houses of religion were sacked, and the nuns who did not meet a worse fate
+      went begging through the streets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The imperial general, Aldringher, had, immediately upon entering the city,
+      appropriated the Ducal Palace to himself as his share of the booty. He
+      placed a strong guard around it, and spoiled it at leisure and
+      systematically, and gained fabulous sums from the robbery. After the sack
+      was ended, he levied upon the population (from whom his soldiers had
+      forced everything that terror and torture could wring from them) four
+      contributions, amounting to a hundred thousand doubloons. This population
+      had, during the siege and sack, been reduced from thirty to twelve
+      thousand; and Aldringher had so thoroughly accomplished his part of the
+      spoliation, that the Duke Charles, returning after the withdrawal of the
+      Germans, could not find in the Ducal Palace so much as a bench to sit
+      upon. He and his family had fled half naked from their beds on the entry
+      of the Germans, and, after a pause in the citadel, had withdrawn to
+      Ariano, whence the Duke sent ambassadors to Vienna to expose his miserable
+      fate to the Emperor. The conduct of Aldringher was severely rebuked at the
+      capital; and the Empress sent Carlo's wife ten thousand zecchini, with
+      which they returned at length to Mantua. It is melancholy to read how his
+      neighbors had to compassionate his destitution: how the Grand Duke of
+      Tuscany sent him upholstery for two state chambers; how the Duke of Parma
+      supplied his table-service; how Alfonso of Modena gave him a hundred pairs
+      of oxen, and as many peasants to till his desolated lands. His people
+      always looked upon him with evil eyes, as the cause of their woes; and
+      after a reign of ten years he died of a broken heart, or, as some thought,
+      of poison.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Carlo had appointed as his successor his nephew and namesake, who
+      succeeded to the throne ten years after his uncle's death, the princess
+      Maria Gonzaga being regent during his minority. Carlo II. early manifested
+      the amorous disposition of his blood, but his reign was not distinguished
+      by remarkable events. He was of imperial politics during those
+      interminable French-Austrian wars, and the French desolated his dominions
+      more or less. In the time of this Carlo II., we read of the Jews being
+      condemned to pay the wages of the Duke's archers for the extremely
+      improbable crime of killing some Hebrews who had been converted; and there
+      is account of the Duchess going on foot to the sanctuary of Our Lady of
+      Grace, to render thanks for her son's recovery from a fever, and her
+      daughter's recovery from the bite of a monkey. Mantua must also have
+      regained something of its former gayety; for in 1652 the Austrian
+      Archdukes and the Medici spent Carnival there. Carlo II. died, like his
+      father, with suspicions of poisoning, and undoubted evidences of
+      debauchery. He was a generous and amiable prince; and, though a shameless
+      profligate, was beloved by his subjects, with whom, no doubt, his
+      profligacy was not a reproach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ferdinand Carlo, whose ignoble reign lasted from 1665 to 1708, was the
+      last and basest of his race. The histories of his country do not attribute
+      a single virtue to this unhappy prince, who seems to have united in
+      himself all the vices of all the Gonzagas. He was licentious and depraved
+      as the first Vincenzo, and he had not Vincenzo's courage; he was luxurious
+      as the second Francesco, but had none of his generosity; he taxed his
+      people heavily that he might meanly enjoy their substance without making
+      them even the poor return of national glory; he was grasping as Guglielmo,
+      but saved nothing to the state; he was as timid as the second Vincenzo,
+      and yet made a feint of making war, and went to Hungary at one time to
+      fight against the Turk. But he loved far better to go to Venice in his
+      gilded barge, and to spend his Carnivals amid the infinite variety of that
+      city's dissoluteness. He was so ignorant as scarcely to be able to write
+      his name; but he knew all vicious things from his cradle, as if, indeed,
+      he had been gifted to know them by instinct through the profligacy of his
+      parents. It is said that even the degraded Mantuans blushed to be ruled by
+      so dull and ignorant a wretch; but in his time, nevertheless, Mantua was
+      all rejoicings, promenades, pleasure-voyages, and merry-makings. "The Duke
+      recruited women from every country to stock his palace," says an Italian
+      author, "where they played, sang, and made merry at his will and theirs."
+      "In Venice," says Volta, "he surrendered himself to such diversions
+      without shame, or stint of expense. He not only took part in all public
+      entertainments and pleasures of that capital, but he held a most luxurious
+      and gallant court of his own; and all night long his palace was the scene
+      of theatrical representations by dissolute women, with music and
+      banqueting, so that he had a worse name than Sardanapalus of old." He
+      sneaked away to these gross delights in 1700, while the Emperor was at war
+      with the Spaniards, and left his Duchess (a brave and noble woman, the
+      daughter of Ferrante Gonzaga, Duke of Guastalla) to take care of the
+      duchy, then in great part occupied by Spanish and French forces. This was
+      the War of the Spanish Succession; and it used up poor Ferdinand, who had
+      not a shadow of interest in it. He had sold the fortress of Casale to the
+      French in 1681, feigning that they had taken it from him by fraud: and now
+      he declared that he was forced to admit eight thousand French and Spanish
+      troops into Mantua. Perhaps indeed he was, but the Emperor never would
+      believe it; and he pronounced Ferdinand guilty of felony against the
+      Empire, and deposed him from his duchy. The Duke appealed against this
+      sentence to the Diet of Ratisbon, and, pending the Diet's decision, made a
+      journey of pleasure to France, where the Grand Monarch named him
+      generalissimo of the French forces in Italy, though he never commanded
+      them. He came back to Mantua after a little, and built himself a splendid
+      theatre,&mdash;the cheerful Duke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But his end was near. The French and Austrians made peace in 1707; and
+      next year, Monferrato having fallen to Savoy, the Austrians entered
+      Mantua, whence the Duke promptly fled. The Austrians marched into Mantua
+      on the 29th of February, that being leap-year, and Ferdinand came back no
+      more. Indeed, trusting in false hopes of restoration held out to him by
+      Venice and France, he died on the 5th of the July following, at Padua,&mdash;it
+      was said by poison, but more probably of sin and sorrow. So ended Ducal
+      Mantua.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Austrians held the city till 1797. The French Revolution took it and
+      kept it till 1799, and then left it to the Austrians for two years. Then
+      the Cisalpine Republic possessed it till 1802; and then it was made part
+      of the Kingdom of Italy, and so continued twelve years; after which it
+      fell again to Austria. In 1848, there was a revolution, and the Austrian
+      soldiers stole the precious silver case that held the phial of the true
+      blood. Now at last it belongs to the Kingdom of Italy, with the other
+      forts of the Quadrilateral&mdash;thanks to the Prussian needle-gun.
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+  <div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14276 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #14276 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14276)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Italian Journeys, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Italian Journeys
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: December 6, 2004 [EBook #14276]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ITALIAN JOURNEYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Carla Kruger and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ITALIAN JOURNEYS
+
+By
+
+W.D. Howells
+
+1867 and 1895
+
+
+
+
+                                                  PAGE
+CONTENTS.
+
+The Road to Rome from Venice:
+     I. Leaving Venice                              9
+    II. From Padua to Ferrara                      10
+   III. The Picturesque, the Improbable, and
+        the Pathetic in Ferrara                    14
+    IV. Through Bologna to Genoa                   43
+     V. Up and Down Genoa                          52
+    VI. By Sea from Genoa to Naples                65
+   VII. Certain Things in Naples                   75
+  VIII. A Day in Pompeii                           89
+    IX. A Half-hour at Herculaneum                106
+     X. Capri and Capriotes                       116
+    XI. The Protestant Ragged Schools at Naples   136
+   XII. Between Rome and Naples                   147
+  XIII. Roman Pearls                              151
+
+Forza Maggiore                                    178
+
+At Padua                                          196
+
+A Pilgrimage to Petrarch's House at Arquà         216
+
+A Visit to the Cimbri                             235
+
+Minor Travels:
+    I. Pisa                                       251
+   II. The Ferrara Road                           259
+  III. Trieste                                    264
+   IV. Bassano                                    274
+    V. Possagno, Canova's Birthplace              280
+   VI. Como                                       285
+
+Stopping at Vicenza, Verona, and Parma            293
+
+Ducal Mantua                                      321
+
+
+
+
+THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE.
+
+I.
+
+LEAVING VENICE.
+
+We did not know, when we started from home in Venice, on the 8th of
+November, 1864, that we had taken the longest road to Rome. We thought
+that of all the proverbial paths to the Eternal City that leading to
+Padua, and thence through Ferrara and Bologna to Florence, and so
+down the sea-shore from Leghorn to Civita Vecchia, was the best, the
+briefest, and the cheapest. Who could have dreamed that this path,
+so wisely and carefully chosen, would lead us to Genoa, conduct us on
+shipboard, toss us four dizzy days and nights, and set us down, void,
+battered, and bewildered, in Naples? Luckily,
+
+  "The moving accident is not my trade,"
+
+for there are events of this journey (now happily at an end) which,
+if I recounted them with unsparing sincerity, would forever deter the
+reader from taking any road to Rome.
+
+Though, indeed, what is Rome, after all, when you come to it?
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+FROM PADUA TO FERRARA.
+
+As far as to Ferrara there was no sign of deviation from the direct
+line in our road, and the company was well enough. We had a Swiss
+family in the car with us to Padua, and they told us how they were
+going home to their mountains from Russia, where they had spent
+nineteen years of their lives. They were mother and father and only
+daughter and the last, without ever having seen her ancestral country,
+was so Swiss in her yet childish beauty, that she filled the morning
+twilight with vague images of glacial height, blue lake, snug chalet,
+and whatever else of picturesque there is in paint and print about
+Switzerland. Of course, as the light grew brighter these images melted
+away, and left only a little frost upon the window-pane.
+
+The mother was restively anxious at nearing her country, and told us
+every thing of its loveliness and happiness. Nineteen years of absence
+had not robbed it of the poorest charm, and I hope that seeing it
+again took nothing from it. We said how glad we should be if we were
+as near America as she was to Switzerland. "America!" she screamed;
+"you come from America! Dear God, the world is wide--the world is
+wide!" The thought was so paralyzing that it silenced the fat little
+lady for a moment, and gave her husband time to express his sympathy
+with us in our war, which he understood perfectly well. He trusted
+that the revolution to perpetuate slavery must fail, and he hoped that
+the war would soon end, for it made cotton very dear.
+
+Europe is material: I doubt if, after Victor Hugo and Garibaldi, there
+were many upon that continent whose enthusiasm for American
+unity (which is European freedom) was not somewhat chilled by the
+expensiveness of cotton. The fabrics were all doubled in price, and
+every man in Europe paid tribute in hard money to the devotion with
+which we prosecuted the war, and, incidentally, interrupted the
+cultivation of cotton.
+
+We shook hands with our friends, and dismounted at Padua, where we
+were to take the diligence for the Po. In the diligence their loss was
+more than made good by the company of the only honest man in Italy.
+Of course this honest man had been a great sufferer from his own
+countrymen, and I wish that all English and American tourists, who
+think themselves the sole victims of publican rapacity and deceit in
+Italy, could have heard our honest man's talk. The truth is, these
+ingenious people prey upon their own kind with an avidity quite as
+keen as that with which they devour strangers; and I am half-persuaded
+that a ready-witted foreigner fares better among them than a traveller
+of their own nation. Italians will always pretend, on any occasion,
+that you have been plundered much worse than they but the reverse
+often happens. They give little in fees; but their landlord, their
+porter, their driver, and their boatman pillage them with the same
+impunity that they rob an Inglese. As for this honest man in the
+diligence, he had suffered such enormities at the hands of the
+Paduans, from which we had just escaped, and at the hands of the
+Ferrarese, into which we were rushing (at the rate of five miles scant
+an hour), that I was almost minded to stop between the nests of those
+brigands and pass the rest of my days at Rovigo, where the honest man
+lived. His talk was amusingly instructive, and went to illustrate the
+strong municipal spirit which still dominates all Italy, and which is
+more inimical to an effectual unity among Italians than Pope or Kaiser
+has ever been. Our honest man of Rovigo was a foreigner at Padua,
+twenty-five miles north, and a foreigner at Ferrara, twenty-five miles
+south; and throughout Italy the native of one city is an alien in
+another, and is as lawful prey as a Russian or an American with people
+who consider every stranger as sent them by the bounty of Providence
+to be eaten alive. Heaven knows what our honest man had paid at his
+hotel in Padua, but in Ferrara the other week he had been made to give
+five francs apiece for two small roast chickens, besides a fee to
+the waiter; and he pathetically warned us to beware how we dealt with
+Italians. Indeed, I never met a man so thoroughly persuaded of the
+rascality of his nation and of his own exceptional virtue. He took
+snuff with his whole person; and he volunteered, at sight of a
+flock of geese, a recipe which I give the reader: Stuff a goose with
+sausage; let it hang in the weather during the winter; and in the
+spring cut it up and stew it, and you have an excellent and delicate
+soup.
+
+But after all our friend's talk, though constant, became dispiriting,
+and we were willing when he left us. His integrity had, indeed, been
+so oppressive that I was glad to be swindled in the charge for our
+dinner at the Iron Crown, in Rovigo, and rode more cheerfully on to
+Ferrara.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+THE PICTURESQUE, THE IMPROBABLE, AND THE PATHETIC IN FERRARA.
+
+I.
+
+It was one of the fatalities of travel, rather than any real interest
+in the poet, which led me to visit the prison of Tasso on the night of
+our arrival, which was mild and moonlit. The _portier_ at the
+Stella d'Oro suggested the sentimental homage to sorrows which it is
+sometimes difficult to respect, and I went and paid this homage in the
+coal-cellar in which was never imprisoned the poet whose works I had
+not read.
+
+The famous hospital of St. Anna, where Tasso was confined for seven
+years, is still an asylum for the infirm and sick, but it is no longer
+used as a mad-house. It stands on one of the lone, silent Ferrarese
+streets, not far from the Ducal Castle, and it is said that from the
+window of his cell the unhappy poet could behold Leonora in her tower.
+It may be so; certainly those who can believe in the genuineness of
+the cell will have no trouble in believing that the vision of Tasso
+could pierce through several brick walls and a Doric portico, and at
+last comprehend the lady at her casement in the castle. We entered a
+modern gateway, and passed into a hall of the elder edifice, where a
+slim young soldier sat reading a romance of Dumas. This was the keeper
+of Tasso's prison; and knowing me, by the instinct which teaches an
+Italian custodian to distinguish his prey, for a seeker after the True
+and Beautiful, he relinquished his romance, lighted a waxen taper,
+unbolted a heavy door with a dramatic clang, and preceded me to the
+cell of Tasso. We descended a little stairway, and found ourselves in
+a sufficiently spacious court, which was still ampler in the poet's
+time, and was then a garden planted with trees and flowers. On a low
+doorway to the right was inscribed the legend "PRIGIONE DI TASSO," and
+passing through this doorway into a kind of reception-cell, we entered
+the poet's dungeon. It is an oblong room, with a low wagon-roof
+ceiling, under which it is barely possible to stand upright. A single
+narrow window admits the light, and the stone casing of this window
+has a hollow in a certain place, which might well have been worn there
+by the friction of the hand that for seven years passed the prisoner
+his food through the small opening. The young custodian pointed to
+this memento of suffering, without effusion, and he drew my attention
+to other remarkable things in the cell, without troubling himself
+to palliate their improbability in the least. They were his stock in
+trade; you paid your money, and took your choice of believing in
+them or not. On the other hand, my _portier_, an ex-_valet de place_,
+pumped a softly murmuring stream of enthusiasm; and expressed the
+freshest delight in the inspection of each object of interest.
+
+One still faintly discerns among the vast number of names with which
+the walls of the ante-cell are bewritten, that of Lamartine. The name
+of Byron, which was once deeply graven in the stucco, had been scooped
+away by the Grand Duke of Tuscany (so the custodian said), and there
+is only part of a capital B now visible. But the cell itself is still
+fragrant of associations with the noble bard, who, according to the
+story related to Valery, caused himself to be locked up in it, and
+there, with his head fallen upon his breast, and frequently smiting
+his brow, spent two hours in pacing the floor with great strides. It
+is a touching picture; but its pathos becomes somewhat embarrassing
+when you enter the cell, and see the impossibility of taking more than
+three generous paces without turning. When Byron issued forth, after
+this exercise, he said (still according to Valery) to the custodian:
+"I thank thee, good man! The thoughts of Tasso are now all in my mind
+and heart." "A short time after his departure from Ferrara," adds the
+Frenchman, maliciously, "he composed his 'Lament of Tasso,' a mediocre
+result from such inspiration." No doubt all this is colored, for
+the same author adds another tint to heighten the absurdity of the
+spectacle: he declares that Byron spent part of his time in the cell
+in writing upon the ceiling Lamartine's verses on Tasso, which he
+misspelled. The present visitor has no means of judging of the truth
+concerning this, for the lines of the poet have been so smoked by the
+candles of successive pilgrims in their efforts to get light on them,
+that they are now utterly illegible. But if it is uncertain what were
+Byron's emotions on visiting the prison of Tasso, there is no doubt
+about Lady Morgan's: she "experienced a suffocating emotion; her
+heart failed her on entering that cell; and she satisfied a melancholy
+curiosity at the cost of a most painful sensation."
+
+I find this amusing fact stated in a translation of her ladyship's
+own language, in a clever guide-book called _Il Servitore di Piazza_,
+which I bought at Ferrara, and from which, I confess, I have learnt
+all I know to confirm me in my doubt of Tasso's prison. The Count
+Avventi, who writes this book, prefaces it by saying that he is a
+valet de place who knows how to read and write, and he employs these
+unusual gifts with singular candor and clearness. No one, he says,
+before the nineteenth century, ever dreamed of calling the cellar in
+question Tasso's prison, and it was never before that time made the
+shrine of sentimental pilgrimage, though it has since been visited by
+every traveller who has passed through Ferrara. It was used during the
+poet's time to hold charcoal and lime; and not long ago died an old
+servant of the hospital, who remembered its use for that purpose. It
+is damp, close, and dark, and Count Avventi thinks it hardly possible
+that a delicate courtier could have lived seven years in a place
+unwholesome enough to kill a stout laborer in two months; while it
+seems to him not probable that Tasso should have received there the
+visits of princes and other distinguished persons whom Duke Alfonso
+allowed to see him, or that a prisoner who was often permitted to ride
+about the city in a carriage should have been thrust back into such a
+cavern on his return to the hospital. "After this," says our _valet
+de place_ who knows how to read and write, "visit the prison of Tasso,
+certain that _in the hospital of St. Anna_ that great man was confined
+for many years;" and, with this chilly warning, leaves his reader to
+his emotions.
+
+I am afraid that if as frank caution were uttered in regard to other
+memorable places, the objects of interest in Italy would dwindle sadly
+in number, and the _valets de place_, whether they know how to read
+and write or not, would be starved to death. Even the learning of
+Italy is poetic; and an Italian would rather enjoy a fiction than know
+a fact--in which preference I am not ready to pronounce him unwise.
+But this characteristic of his embroiders the stranger's progress
+throughout the whole land with fanciful improbabilities; so that if
+one use his eyes half as much as his wonder, he must see how much
+better it would have been to visit, in fancy, scenes that have an
+interest so largely imaginary. The utmost he can make out of the most
+famous place is, that it is possibly what it is said to be, and
+is more probably as near that as any thing local enterprise could
+furnish. He visits the very cell in which Tasso was confined, and has
+the satisfaction of knowing that it was the charcoal-cellar of the
+hospital in which the poet dwelt. And the _genius loci_--where is
+that? Away in the American woods, very likely, whispering some dreamy,
+credulous youth,--telling him charming fables of its _locus_, and
+proposing to itself to abandon him as soon as he sets foot upon its
+native ground. You see, though I cared little about Tasso, and nothing
+about his prison, I was heavily disappointed in not being able to
+believe in it, and felt somehow that I had been awakened from a
+cherished dream.
+
+
+II.
+
+But I have no right to cast the unbroken shadow of my skepticism upon
+the reader, and so I tell him a story about Ferrara which I actually
+believe. He must know that in Ferrara the streets are marvelous long
+and straight. On the corners formed by the crossing of two of the
+longest and straightest of these streets stand four palaces, in only
+one of which we have a present interest. This palace my guide took
+me to see, after our visit to Tasso's prison, and, standing in its
+shadow, he related to me the occurrence which has given it a sad
+celebrity. It was, in the time of the gifted toxicologist, the
+residence of Lucrezia Borgia, who used to make poisonous little
+suppers there, and ask the best families of Italy to partake of them.
+It happened on one occasion that Lucrezia Borgia was thrust out of
+a ball-room at Venice as a disreputable character, and treated with
+peculiar indignity. She determined to make the Venetians repent their
+unwonted accession of virtue, and she therefore allowed the occurrence
+to be forgotten till the proper moment of her revenge arrived,
+when she gave a supper, and invited to her board eighteen young and
+handsome Venetian nobles. Upon the preparation of this repast she
+bestowed all the resources of her skillful and exquisite knowledge;
+and the result was, the Venetians were so felicitously poisoned
+that they had just time to listen to a speech from the charming and
+ingenious lady of the house before expiring. In this address she
+reminded her guests of the occurrence in the Venetian ball-room, and
+perhaps exulted a little tediously in her present vengeance. She was
+surprised and pained when one of the guests interrupted her, and,
+justifying the treatment she had received at Venice, declared himself
+her natural son. The lady instantly recognized him, and in the sudden
+revulsion of maternal feeling, begged him to take an antidote. This he
+not only refused to do, but continued his dying reproaches, till his
+mother, losing her self-command, drew her poniard and plunged it into
+his heart.
+
+The blood of her son fell upon the table-cloth, and this being hung
+out of the window to dry, the wall received a stain, which neither
+the sun nor rain of centuries sufficed to efface, and which was only
+removed with the masonry, when it became necessary to restore the
+wall under that window, a few months before the time of my visit to
+Ferrara. Accordingly, the blood-stain has now disappeared; but the
+conscientious artist who painted the new wall has faithfully restored
+the tragic spot, by bestowing upon the stucco a bloody dash of
+Venetian red.
+
+
+III.
+
+It would be pleasant and merciful, I think, if old towns, after having
+served a certain number of centuries for the use and pride of men,
+could be released to a gentle, unmolested decay. I, for my part, would
+like to have the ducal cities of North Italy, such as Mantua, Modena,
+Parma, and Ferrara, locked up quietly within their walls, and left to
+crumble and totter and fall, without any harder presence to vex them
+in their decrepitude than that of some gray custodian, who should come
+to the gate with clanking keys, and admit the wandering stranger, if
+he gave signs of a reverent sympathy, to look for a little while upon
+the reserved and dignified desolation. It is a shame to tempt these
+sad old cities into unnatural activity, when they long ago made their
+peace with the world, and would fain be mixing their weary brick
+and mortar with the earth's unbuilded dust; and it is hard for the
+emotional traveller to restrain his sense of outrage at finding them
+inhabited, and their rest broken by sounds of toil, traffic, and
+idleness; at seeing places that would gladly have had done with
+history still doomed to be parts of political systems, to read the
+newspapers, and to expose railway guides and caricatures of the Pope
+and of Napoleon in their shop windows.
+
+Of course, Ferrara was not incorporated into a living nation against
+her will, and I therefore marveled the more that she had become a
+portion of the present kingdom of Italy. The poor little State had
+its day long before ours; it had been a republic, and then subject to
+lords; and then, its lords becoming dukes, it had led a life of gayety
+and glory till its fall, and given the world such names and memories
+as had fairly won it the right to rest forever from making history.
+Its individual existence ended with that of Alfonso II., in 1597, when
+the Pope declared it reverted to the Holy See; and I always fancied
+that it must have received with a spectral, yet courtly kind of
+surprise, those rights of man which bloody-handed France distributed
+to the Italian cities in 1796; that it must have experienced a ghostly
+bewilderment in its rapid transformation, thereafter, under Napoleon,
+into part of the Cispadan Republic, the Cisalpine Republic, the
+Italian Republic, and the Kingdom of Italy, and that it must have sunk
+back again under the rule of the Popes with gratitude and relief at
+last--as phantoms are reputed to be glad when released from haunting
+the world where they once dwelt. I speak of all this, not so much from
+actual knowledge of facts as from personal feeling; for it seems to
+me that if I were a city of the past, and must be inhabited at all,
+I should choose just such priestly domination, assured that though
+it consumed my substance, yet it would be well for my fame and final
+repose. I should like to feel that my old churches were safe from
+demolition: that my old convents and monasteries should always shelter
+the pious indolence of friars and nuns. It would be pleasant to have
+studious monks exploring quaint corners of my unphilosophized annals,
+and gentle, snuff-taking abbés writing up episodes in the history of
+my noble families, and dedicating them to the present heirs of past
+renown; while the thinker and the reviewer should never penetrate
+my archives. Being myself done with war, I should be glad to have my
+people exempt, as they are under the Pope, from military service; and
+I should hope that if the Legates taxed them, the taxes paid would be
+as so many masses said to get my soul out of the purgatory of perished
+capitals. Finally, I should trust that in the sanctified keeping of
+the Legates my mortal part would rest as sweetly as bones laid in
+hallowed earth brought from Jerusalem; and that under their serene
+protection I should be forever secure from being in any way exhumed
+and utilized by the ruthless hand of Progress.
+
+However, as I said, this is a mere personal preference, and other old
+cities might feel differently. Indeed, though disposed to condole with
+Ferrara upon the fact of her having become part of modern Italy, I
+could not deny, on better acquaintance with her, that she was still
+almost entirely of the past. She has certainly missed that ideal
+perfection of non-existence under the Popes which I have just
+depicted, but she is practically almost as profoundly at rest under
+the King of Italy. One may walk long through the longitude and
+rectitude of many of her streets without the encounter of a single
+face: the place, as a whole, is by no means as lively as Pompeii,
+where there are always strangers; perhaps the only cities in the world
+worthy to compete with Ferrara in point of agreeable solitude are
+Mantua and Herculaneum. It is the newer part of the town--the modern
+quarter built before Boston was settled or Ohio was known--which is
+loneliest; and whatever motion and cheerfulness are still felt in
+Ferrara linger fondly about the ancient holds of life--about the
+street before the castle of the Dukes, and in the elder and narrower
+streets branching away from the piazza of the Duomo, where, on market
+days, there is a kind of dreamy tumult. In the Ghetto we were almost
+crowded, and people wanted to sell us things, with an enterprise
+that contrasted strangely with shopkeeping apathy elsewhere. Indeed,
+surprise at the presence of strangers spending two days in Ferrara
+when they could have got away sooner, was the only emotion which the
+whole population agreed in expressing with any degree of energy, but
+into this they seemed to throw their whole vitality. The Italians are
+everywhere an artless race, so far as concerns the gratification of
+their curiosity, from which no consideration of decency deters them.
+Here in Ferrara they turned about and followed us with their eyes,
+came to windows to see us, lay in wait for us at street-corners, and
+openly and audibly debated whether we were English or German. We might
+have thought this interest a tribute to something peculiar in our
+dress or manner, had it not visibly attended other strangers who
+arrived with us. It rose almost into a frenzy of craving to know more
+of us all, when on the third day the whole city assembled before our
+hotel, and witnessed, with a sort of desperate cry, the departure
+of the heavy-laden omnibus which bore us and our luggage from their
+midst.
+
+
+IV.
+
+I doubt if, after St. Mark's in Venice, the Duomo at Parma, and the
+Four Fabrics at Pisa, there is a church more worthy to be seen for
+its quaint, rich architecture, than the Cathedral at Ferrara. It is
+of that beloved Gothic of which eye or soul cannot weary, and we
+continually wandered back to it from other more properly interesting
+objects. It is horribly restored in-doors, and its Renaissance
+splendors soon drove us forth, after we had looked at the Last
+Judgment by Bastianino. The style of this painting is muscular and
+Michelangelic, and the artist's notion of putting his friends in
+heaven and his foes in hell is by no means novel; but he has achieved
+fame for his picture by the original thought of making it his revenge
+for a disappointment in love. The unhappy lady who refused his love
+is represented in the depths, in the attitude of supplicating the pity
+and interest of another maiden in Paradise who accepted Bastianino,
+and who consequently has no mercy on her that snubbed him. But I
+counted of far more value than this fresco the sincere old sculptures
+on the façade of the cathedral, in which the same subject is treated,
+beginning from the moment the archangel's trump has sounded. The
+people getting suddenly out of their graves at the summons are all
+admirable; but the best among them is the excellent man with one
+leg over the side of his coffin, and tugging with both hands to
+pull himself up, while the coffin-lid tumbles off behind. One sees
+instantly that the conscience of this early riser is clean, for he
+makes no miserable attempt to turn over for a nap of a few thousand
+years more, with the pretense that it was not the trump of doom, but
+some other and unimportant noise he had heard. The final reward of the
+blessed is expressed by the repose of one small figure in the lap of
+a colossal effigy, which I understood to mean rest in Abraham's bosom;
+but the artist has bestowed far more interest and feeling upon the
+fate of the damned, who are all boiling in rows of immense pots. It is
+doubtful (considering the droll aspect of heavenly bliss as figured
+in the one small saint and the large patriarch) whether the artist
+intended the condition of his sinners to be so horribly comic as it
+is; but the effect is just as great, for all that, and the slowest
+conscience might well take alarm from the spectacle of fate so
+grotesque and ludicrous; for, wittingly or unwittingly, the artist
+here punishes, as Dante knew best how to do, the folly of sinners as
+well as their wickedness. Boiling is bad enough; but to be boiled in
+an undeniable dinner-pot, like a leg of mutton, is to suffer shame us
+well as agony.
+
+We turned from these horrors, and walked down by the side of the Duomo
+toward the Ghetto, which is not so foul as one could wish a Ghetto
+to be. The Jews were admitted to Ferrara in 1275, and, throughout the
+government of the Dukes, were free to live where they chose in
+the city; but the Pope's Legate assigned them afterward a separate
+quarter, which was closed with gates. Large numbers of Spanish Jews
+fled hither during the persecutions, and there are four synagogues
+for the four languages,--Spanish, German, French, and Italian. Avventi
+mentions, among other interesting facts concerning the Ferrarese Jews,
+that one of their Rabbins, Isaaco degli Abranelli, a man of excellent
+learning in the Scriptures, claimed to be descended from David. His
+children still abide in Ferrara; and it may have been one of his
+kingly line that kept the tempting antiquarian's shop on the corner
+from which you turn up toward the Library. I should think such a man
+would find a sort of melancholy solace in such a place: filled with
+broken and fragmentary glories of every kind, it would serve him for
+that chamber of desolation, set apart in the houses of the Oriental
+Hebrews as a place to bewail themselves in; and, indeed, this idea may
+go far to explain the universal Israelitish fondness for dealing in
+relics and ruins.
+
+
+V.
+
+The Ghetto was in itself indifferent to us; it was merely our way to
+the Library, whither the great memory of Ariosto invited us to see his
+famous relics treasured there.
+
+We found that the dead _literati_ of Ferrara had the place wholly to
+themselves; not a living soul disputed the solitude of the halls with
+the custodians, and the bust of Ariosto looked down from his monument
+upon rows of empty tables, idle chairs, and dusty inkstands.
+
+The poet, who was painted by Titian, has a tomb of abandoned ugliness,
+and sleeps under three epitaphs; while cherubs frescoed on the
+wall behind affect to disclose the mausoleum, by lifting a frescoed
+curtain, but deceive no one who cares to consider how impossible it
+would be for them to perform this service, and caper so ignobly as
+they do at the same time. In fact this tomb of Ariosto shocks with
+its hideousness and levity. It stood formerly in the Church of San
+Benedetto, where it was erected shortly after the poet's death, and it
+was brought to the Library by the French, when they turned the church
+into a barracks for their troops. The poet's dust, therefore, rests
+here, where the worm, working silently through the vellum volumes on
+the shelves, feeds upon the immortality of many other poets. In the
+adjoining hall are the famed and precious manuscripts of Ariosto and
+of Tasso. A special application must be made to the librarian, in
+order to see the fragment of the _Furioso_ in Ariosto's hand, and the
+manuscript copy of the _Gerusalemma_, with the corrections by Tasso.
+There are some pages of Ariosto's Satires, framed and glazed for the
+satisfaction of the less curious; as well as a letter of Tasso's,
+written from the Hospital of St. Anna, which the poet sends to a
+friend, with twelve shirts, and in which he begs that his friend will
+have the shirts mended, and cautions him "not to let them be mixed
+with others." But when the slow custodian had at last unlocked that
+more costly fragment of the _Furioso_, and placed it in my hands, the
+other manuscripts had no value for me. It seems to me that the one
+privilege which travel has reserved to itself, is that of making
+each traveller, in presence of its treasures, forget whatever other
+travellers have said or written about them. I had read so much of
+Ariosto's industry, and of the proof of it in this manuscript, that I
+doubted if I should at last marvel at it. But the wonder remains
+with the relic, and I paid it my homage devoutly and humbly, and was
+disconcerted afterward to read again in my Valery how sensibly all
+others had felt the preciousness of that famous page, which, filled
+with half a score of previous failures, contains in a little open
+space near the margin, the poet's final triumph in a clearly written
+stanza. Scarcely less touching and interesting than Ariosto's painful
+work on these yellow leaves, is the grand and simple tribute which
+another Italian poet was allowed to inscribe on one of them: "Vittorio
+Alfieri beheld and venerated;" and I think, counting over the many
+memorable things I saw on the road to Rome and the way home
+again, this manuscript was the noblest thing and best worthy to be
+remembered.
+
+When at last I turned from it, however, I saw that the custodian had
+another relic of Messer Lodovico, which he was not ashamed to match
+with the manuscript in my interest. This was the bone of one of the
+poet's fingers, which the pious care of Ferrara had picked up from his
+dust (when it was removed from the church to the Library), and
+neatly bottled and labeled. In like manner, they keep a great deal
+of sanctity in bottles with the bones of saints in Italy; but I found
+very little savor of poesy hanging about this literary relic.
+
+As if the melancholy fragment of mortality had marshaled us the way,
+we went from the Library to the house of Ariosto, which stands at the
+end of a long, long street, not far from the railway station. There
+was not a Christian soul, not a boy, not a cat nor a dog to be seen
+in all that long street, at high noon, as we looked down its narrowing
+perspective, and if the poet and his friends have ever a mind for a
+posthumous meeting in his little reddish brick house, there is nothing
+to prevent their assembly, in broad daylight, from any part of the
+neighborhood. There was no presence, however, more spiritual than a
+comely country girl to respond to our summons at the door, and nothing
+but a tub of corn-meal disputed our passage inside. Directly I found
+the house inhabited by living people, I began to be sorry that it was
+not as empty as the Library and the street. Indeed, it is much better
+with Petrarch's house at Arquà, where the grandeur of the past
+is never molested by the small household joys and troubles of the
+present. That house is vacant, and no eyes less tender and fond than
+the poet's visitors may look down from its windows over the slope of
+vines and olives which it crowns; and it seemed hard, here in Ferrara,
+where the houses are so many and the people are so few, that Ariosto's
+house could not be left to him. _Parva sed apta mihi_, he has
+contentedly written upon the front; but I doubt if he finds it large
+enough for another family, though his modern housekeeper reserves him
+certain rooms for visitors. To gain these, you go up to the second
+story--there are but two floors--and cross to the rear of the
+building, where Ariosto's chamber opens out of an ante-room, and looks
+down upon a pinched and faded bit of garden. [In this garden the poet
+spent much of his time--chiefly in plucking up and transplanting the
+unlucky shrubbery, which was never suffered to grow three months
+in the same place,--such was the poet's rage for revision. It was
+probably never a very large or splendid garden, for the reason that
+Ariosto gave when reproached that he who knew so well how to describe
+magnificent palaces should have built such a poor little house: "It
+was easier to make verses than houses, and the fine palaces in his
+poem cost him no money."] In this chamber they say the poet died. It
+is oblong, and not large. I should think the windows and roof were
+of the poet's time, and that every thing else had been restored; I am
+quite sure the chairs and inkstand are kindly-meant inventions;
+for the poet's burly great arm-chair and graceful inkstand are both
+preserved in the Library. But the house is otherwise decent and
+probable; and I do not question but it was in the hall where we
+encountered the meal-tub that the poet kept a copy of his "_Furioso_,"
+subject to the corrections and advice of his visitors.
+
+The ancestral house of the Ariosti has been within a few years
+restored out of all memory and semblance of itself; and my wish to see
+the place in which the poet was born and spent his childhood resulted,
+after infinite search, in finding a building faced newly with stucco
+and newly French-windowed.
+
+Our _portier_ said it was the work of the late English Vice-Consul,
+who had bought the house. When I complained of the sacrilege, he said:
+"Yes, it is true. But then, you must know, the Ariosti were not one of
+the noble families of Ferrara."
+
+
+VI.
+
+The castle of the Dukes of Ferrara, about which cluster so many sad
+and splendid memories, stands in the heart of the city. I think
+that the moonlight which, on the night of our arrival, showed me its
+massive walls rising from the shadowy moat that surrounds them, and
+its four great towers, heavily buttressed, and expanding at the top
+into bulging cornices of cavernous brickwork, could have fallen on
+nothing else in all Italy so picturesque, and so full of the proper
+dread charm of feudal times, as this pile of gloomy and majestic
+strength. The daylight took nothing of this charm from it; for the
+castle stands isolated in the midst of the city, as its founder meant
+that it should [The castle of Ferrara was begun in 1385 by Niccolò
+d'Este to defend himself against the repetition of scenes of tumult,
+in which his princely rights were invaded. One of his tax-gatherers,
+Tommaso da Tortona, had, a short time before, made himself so
+obnoxious to the people by his insolence and severity, that they rose
+against him and demanded his life. He took refuge in the palace of
+his master, which was immediately assailed. The prince's own life was
+threatened, and he was forced to surrender the fugitive to the people,
+who tore Tortona limb from limb, and then, after parading the city
+with the mutilated remains, quietly returned to their allegiance.
+Niccolò, therefore, caused this castle to be built, which he
+strengthened with massive walls and towers commanding the whole city,
+and rendered inaccessible by surrounding it with a deep and wide canal
+from the river Reno.], and modern civilization has not crossed the
+castle moat, to undignify its exterior with any visible touch of the
+present. To be sure, when you enter it, the magnificent life is gone
+out of the old edifice; it is no stately halberdier who stands on
+guard at the gate of the drawbridge, but a stumpy Italian soldier in
+baggy trousers. The castle is full of public offices, and one sees in
+its courts and on its stairways, not brilliant men-at-arms, nor gay
+squires and pages, but whistling messengers going from one office to
+another with docketed papers, and slipshod serving-men carrying the
+clerks their coffee in very dirty little pots. Dreary-looking suitors,
+slowly grinding through the mills of law, or passing in the routine of
+the offices, are the guests encountered in the corridors; and all that
+bright-colored throng of the old days, ladies and lords, is passed
+from the scene. The melodrama is over, friends, and now we have a play
+of real life, founded on fact and inculcating a moral.
+
+Of course the custodians were slow to admit any change of this kind.
+If you could have believed them,--and the poor people told as many
+lies as they could to make you,--you would believe that nothing had
+ever happened of a commonplace nature in this castle. The taking-off
+of Hugo and Parisina they think the great merit of the castle; and one
+of them, seeing us, made haste to light his taper and conduct us down
+to the dungeons where those unhappy lovers were imprisoned. It is the
+misfortune of memorable dungeons to acquire, when put upon show, just
+the reverse of those properties which should raise horror and distress
+in the mind of the beholder. It was impossible to deny that the
+cells of Parisina and of Hugo were both singularly warm, dry, and
+comfortable; and we, who had never been imprisoned in them, found
+it hard to command, for our sensation, the terror and agony of the
+miserable ones who suffered there. We, happy and secure in these
+dungeons, could not think of the guilty and wretched pair bowing
+themselves to the headsman's stroke in the gloomy chamber under the
+Hall of Aurora; nor of the Marquis, in his night-long walk, breaking
+at last into frantic remorse and tears to know that his will had been
+accomplished. Nay, there upon its very scene, the whole tragedy faded
+from us; and, seeing our wonder so cold, the custodian tried to kindle
+it by saying that in the time of the event these cells were much
+dreadfuller than now, which was no doubt true. The floors of the
+dungeons are both below the level of the moat, and the narrow windows,
+or rather crevices to admit the light, were cut in the prodigiously
+thick wall just above the water, and were defended with four
+successive iron gratings. The dungeons are some distance apart: that
+of Hugo was separated from the outer wall of the castle by a narrow
+passage-way, while Parisina's window opened directly upon the moat.
+
+When we ascended again to the court of the castle, the custodian,
+abetted by his wife, would have interested us in two memorable wells
+there, between which, he said, Hugo was beheaded; and unabashed by the
+small success of this fable, he pointed out two windows in converging
+angles overhead, from one of which the Marquis, looking into the
+other, discovered the guilt of the lovers. The windows are now walled
+up, but are neatly represented to the credulous eye by a fresco of
+lattices.
+
+Valery mentions another claim upon the interest of the tourist which
+this castle may make, in the fact that it once sheltered John Calvin,
+who was protected by the Marchioness Renée, wife of Hercules II.; and
+my _Servitore di Piazza_ (the one who knows how to read and write)
+gives the following account of the matter, in speaking of the domestic
+chapel which Renée had built in the castle: "This lady was learned in
+belles-lettres and in the schismatic doctrines which at that time were
+insinuating themselves throughout France and Germany, and with
+which Calvin, Luther, and other proselytes, agitated the people,
+and threatened war to the Catholic religion. Nationally fond of
+innovation, and averse to the court of Rome on account of the
+dissensions between her father and Pope Julius II., Renée began
+to receive the teachings of Calvin, with whom she maintained
+correspondence. Indeed, Calvin himself, under the name of Huppeville,
+visited her in Ferrara, in 1536, and ended by corrupting her mind and
+seducing her into his own errors, which produced discord between
+her and her religious husband, and resulted in his placing her in
+temporary seclusion, in order to attempt her conversion. Hence, the
+chapel is faced with marble, paneled in relief, and studied to avoid
+giving place to saints or images, which were disapproved by the almost
+Anabaptist doctrines of Calvin, then fatally imbibed by the princess."
+
+We would willingly, as Protestants, have visited this wicked chapel;
+but we were prevented from seeing it, as well as the famous frescoes
+of Dosso Dossi in the Hall of Aurora, by the fact that the prefect was
+giving a little dinner (_pranzetto_) in that part of the castle. We
+were not so greatly disappointed in reality as we made believe; but
+our _servitore di piazza_ (the unlettered one) was almost moved to
+_lesa maestà_ with vexation. He had been full of scorching patriotism
+the whole morning; but now electing the unhappy and apologetic
+custodian representative of Piedmontese tyranny, he bitterly assailed
+the government of the king. In the times of His Holiness the Legates
+had made it their pleasure and duty to show the whole castle to
+strangers. But now strangers must be sent away without seeing its
+chief beauties, because, forsooth, the prefect was giving a little
+dinner. Presence of the Devil!
+
+
+VII.
+
+In our visits to the different churches in Ferrara we noticed devotion
+in classes of people who are devout nowhere else in Italy. Not only
+came solid-looking business men to say their prayers, but gay young
+dandies, who knelt and repeated their orisons and then rose and went
+seriously out. In Venice they would have posted themselves against a
+pillar, sucked the heads of their sticks, and made eyes at the young
+ladies kneeling near them. This degree of religion was all the more
+remarkable in Ferrara, because that city had been so many years
+under the Pope, and His Holiness contrives commonly to prevent the
+appearance of religion in young men throughout his dominions.
+
+Valery speaks of the delightful society which he met in the gray old
+town; and it is said that Ferrara has an unusual share of culture in
+her wealthy class, which is large. With such memories of learning and
+literary splendor as belong to her, it would be strange if she did
+not in some form keep alive the sacred flame. But, though there may
+be refinement and erudition in Ferrara, she has given no great name to
+modern Italian literature. Her men of letters seem to be of that race
+of grubs singularly abundant in Italy,--men who dig out of archives
+and libraries some topic of special and momentary interest and print
+it, unstudied and unphilosophized. Their books are material, not
+literature, and it is marvelous how many of them are published. A
+writer on any given subject can heap together from them a mass of fact
+and anecdote invaluable in its way; but it is a mass without life or
+light, and must be vivified by him who uses it before it can serve the
+world, which does not care for its dead local value. It remains to be
+seen whether the free speech and free press of Italy can reawaken the
+intellectual activity of the cities which once gave the land so many
+literary capitals.
+
+What numbers of people used to write verses in Ferrara! By operation
+of the principle which causes things concerning whatever subject you
+happen to be interested in to turn up in every direction, I found a
+volume of these dead-and-gone immortals at a book-stall, one day, in
+Venice. It is a curiously yellow and uncomfortable volume of the year
+1703, printed all in italics. I suppose there are two hundred odd
+rhymers selected from in that book,--and how droll the most of them
+are, with their unmistakable traces of descent from Ariosto, Tasso,
+and Guarini! What acres of enameled meadow there are in those pages!
+Brooks enough to turn all the mills in the world go purling through
+them. I should say some thousands of nymphs are constantly engaged
+in weaving garlands there, and the swains keep such a piping on those
+familiar notes,--_Amore, dolore, crudele_, and _miele_. Poor little
+poets! they knew no other tunes. Do not now weak voices twitter from a
+hundred books, in unconscious imitation of the hour's great singers?
+
+I think some of the pleasantest people in Italy are the army
+gentlemen. There is the race's gentleness in their ways, in spite of
+their ferocious trade, and an American freedom of style. They brag in
+a manner that makes one feel at home immediately; and met in travel,
+they are ready to render any little kindness.
+
+The other year at Reggio (which is not far from Modena) we stopped to
+dine at a restaurant where the whole garrison had its coat off and was
+playing billiards, with the exception of one or two officers, who were
+dining. These rose and bowed as we entered their room, and when the
+waiter pretended that such and such dishes were out (in Italy the
+waiter, for some mysterious reason, always pretends that the best
+dishes are out), they bullied him for the honor of Italy, and made him
+bring them to us. Indeed, I am afraid his life was sadly harassed by
+those brave men. We were in deep despair at finding no French bread,
+and the waiter swore with the utmost pathos that there was none; but
+as soon as his back was turned, a tightly laced little captain rose
+and began to forage for the bread. He opened every drawer and cupboard
+in the room, and finding none, invaded another room, captured several
+loaves from the plates laid there, and brought them back in triumph,
+presenting them to us amid the applause of his comrades. The dismay of
+the waiter, on his return, was ineffable.
+
+Three officers, who dined with us at the _table d'hôte_ of the Stella
+d'Oro in Ferrara (and excellent dinners were those we ate there), were
+visibly anxious to address us, and began not uncivilly, but still
+in order that we should hear, to speculate on our nationality among
+themselves. It appeared that we were Germans; for one of these
+officers, who had formerly been in the Austrian service at Vienna,
+recognized the word _bitter_ in our remarks on the _beccafichi_. As I
+did not care to put these fine fellows to the trouble of hating us for
+others' faults, I made bold to say that we were not Germans, and to
+add that _bitter_ was also an English word. Ah! yes, to be sure, one
+of them admitted; when he was with the Sardinian army in the Crimea,
+he had frequently heard the word used by the English soldiers. He
+nodded confirmation of what he said to his comrades, and then was good
+enough to display what English he knew. It was barely sufficient to
+impress his comrades; but it led the way to a good deal of talk in
+Italian.
+
+"I suppose you gentlemen are all Piedmontese?" I said.
+
+"Not at all," said our Crimean. "I am from Como; this gentleman, il
+signor Conte, (il signor Conte bowed,) is of Piacenza; and our friend
+across the table is Genoese. The army is doing a great deal to unify
+Italy. We are all Italians now, and you see we speak Italian, and not
+our dialects, together."
+
+My cheap remark that it was a fine thing to see them all united under
+one flag, after so many ages of mutual hate and bloodshed, turned the
+talk upon the origin of the Italian flag; and that led our Crimean to
+ask what was the origin of the English colors.
+
+"I scarcely know," I said. "We are Americans."
+
+Our friends at once grew more cordial. "Oh, Americani!" They had great
+pleasure of it. Did we think Signor Leencolen would be reëlected?
+
+I supposed that he had been elected that day, I said.
+
+Ah! this was the election day, then. _Cospetto_!
+
+At this the Genoese frowned superior intelligence, and the Crimean
+gazing admiringly upon him, said he had been nine months at Nuova
+York, and that he had a brother living there. The poor Crimean
+boastfully added that he himself had a cousin in America, and that the
+Americans generally spoke Spanish. The count from Piacenza wore an
+air of pathetic discomfiture, and tried to invent a transatlantic
+relative, as I think, but failed.
+
+I am persuaded that none of these warriors really had kinsmen in
+America, but that they all pretended to have them, out of politeness
+to us, and that they believed each other. It was very kind of them,
+and we were so grateful that we put no embarrassing questions. Indeed,
+the conversation presently took another course, and grew to include
+the whole table.
+
+There was an extremely pretty Italian present with her newly wedded
+husband, who turned out to be a retired officer. He fraternized at
+once with our soldiers, and when we left the table they all rose and
+made military obeisances. Having asked leave to light their cigars,
+they were smoking--the sweet young bride blowing a fairy cloud from
+her rosy lips with the rest. "Indeed," I heard an Italian lady once
+remark, "why should men pretend to deny us the privilege of smoking?
+It is so pleasant and innocent." It is but just to the Italians to
+say that they do not always deny it; and there is, without doubt, a
+certain grace and charm in a pretty _fumatrice_. I suppose it is a
+habit not so pleasing in an ugly or middle-aged woman.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA.
+
+I.
+
+We had intended to stay only one day at Ferrara, but just at that
+time the storms predicted on the Adriatic and Mediterranean coasts, by
+Mathieu de la Drome, had been raging all over Italy, and the railway
+communications were broken in every direction. The magnificent work
+through and under the Apennines, between Bologna and Florence, had
+been washed away by the mountain torrents in a dozen places, and the
+roads over the plains of the Romagna had been sapped by the flood, and
+rendered useless, where not actually laid under water.
+
+On the day of our intended departure we left the hotel, with other
+travellers, gayly incredulous of the landlord's fear that no train
+would start for Bologna. At the station we found a crowd of people
+waiting and hoping, but there was a sickly cast of doubt in some
+faces, and the labeled employés of the railway wore looks of ominous
+importance. Of course the crowd did not lose its temper. It sought
+information of the officials running to and fro with telegrams, in
+a spirit of national sweetness, and consoled itself with saying, as
+Italy has said under all circumstances of difficulty for centuries:
+_Ci vuol pazienza_! At last a blank silence fell upon it, as the
+_Capo-Stazione_ advanced toward a well-dressed man in the crowd, and
+spoke to him quietly. The well-dressed man lifted his forefinger and
+waved it back and forth before his face:--
+
+_The Well-dressed Man_.--Dunque, non si parte più? (No departures,
+then?)
+
+The _Capo-Stazione_ (waving _his_ forefinger in like manner.)--Non si
+parte più. (Like a mournful echo.)
+
+We knew quite as well from this pantomime of negation as from the
+dialogue our sad fate, and submitted to it. Some adventurous spirit
+demanded whether any trains would go on the morrow. The Capo-Stazione,
+with an air of one who would not presume to fathom the designs of
+Providence, responded: "Who knows? To-day, certainly not. To-morrow,
+perhaps. But"--and vanished.
+
+It may give an idea of the Italian way of doing things to say that, as
+we understood, this break in the line was only a few miles in extent,
+that trains could have approached both to and from Bologna, and that
+a little enterprise on the part of the company could have passed
+travellers from one side to the other with very small trouble or
+delay. But the railway company was as much daunted by the inundation
+as a peasant going to market, and for two months after the accident
+no trains carried passengers from one city to the other. No doubt,
+however, the line was under process of very solid repair meanwhile.
+
+For the present the only means of getting to Bologna was by carriage
+on the old highway, and accordingly we took passage thither in the
+omnibus of the Stella d'Oro.
+
+There was little to interest us in the country over which we rode. It
+is perfectly flat, and I suppose the reader knows what quantities
+of hemp and flax are raised there. The land seems poorer than in
+Lombardy, and the farm-houses and peasants' cottages are small and
+mean, though the peasants themselves, when we met them, looked well
+fed, and were certainly well clad. The landscape lay soaking in a
+dreary drizzle the whole way, and the town of Cento when we reached
+it, seemed miserably conscious of being too wet and dirty to go
+in-doors, and was loitering about in the rain. Our arrival gave the
+poor little place a sensation, for I think such a thing as an omnibus
+had not been seen there since the railway of Bologna and Ferrara was
+built. We went into the principal caffè to lunch,--a caffè much too
+large for Cento, with immense red-leather cushioned sofas, and a cold,
+forlorn air of half-starved gentility, a clean, high-roofed caffè and
+a breezy,--and thither the youthful nobility and gentry of the place
+followed us, and ordered a cup of coffee, that they might sit down and
+give us the pleasure of their distinguished company. They put on their
+very finest manners, and took their most captivating attitudes for the
+ladies' sake; and the gentlemen of our party fancied that it was for
+them these young men began to discuss the Roman question. How
+loud they were, and how earnest! And how often they consulted
+the newspapers of the caffè! (Older newspapers I never saw off a
+canal-boat.) I may tire some time of the artless vanity of the young
+Italians, so innocent, so amiable, so transparent, but I think I never
+shall.
+
+The great painter Guercino was born at Cento, and they have a noble
+and beautiful statue of him in the piazza, which the town caused to be
+erected from contributions by all the citizens. Formerly his house
+was kept for a show to the public; it was full of the pictures of the
+painter and many mementos of him; but recently the paintings have been
+taken to the gallery, and the house is now closed. The gallery is,
+consequently, one of the richest second-rate galleries in Italy, and
+one may spend much longer time in it than we gave, with great profit.
+There are some most interesting heads of Christ, painted, as Guercino
+always painted the Saviour, with a great degree of humanity in the
+face. It is an excellent countenance, and full of sweet dignity, but
+quite different from the conventional face of Christ.
+
+
+II.
+
+At night we were again in Bologna, of which we had not seen the gloomy
+arcades for two years. It must be a dreary town at all times: in a
+rain it is horrible; and I think the whole race of arcaded cities,
+Treviso, Padua, and Bologna, are dull, blind, and comfortless. The
+effect of the buildings vaulted above the sidewalks is that of
+a continuous cellarway; your view of the street is constantly
+interrupted by the heavy brick pillars that support the arches; the
+arcades are not even picturesque. Liking always to leave Bologna as
+quickly as possible, and, on this occasion, learning that there was no
+hope of crossing the Apennines to Florence, we made haste to take the
+first train for Genoa, meaning to proceed thence directly to Naples by
+steamer.
+
+It was a motley company that sat down in Hotel Brun the morning
+after our arrival in Bologna to a breakfast of murky coffee and furry
+beefsteaks, associated with sleek, greasy, lukewarm fried potatoes. I
+am sure that if each of our weather-bound pilgrims had told his story,
+we had been as well entertained as those at Canterbury. However, no
+one thought fit to give his narrative but a garrulous old Hebrew from
+London, who told us how he had been made to pay fifteen guineas for a
+carriage to cross the Apennines, and had been obliged to walk part of
+the way at that price. He was evidently proud, now the money was gone,
+of having been cheated of so much; and in him we saw that there was
+at least one human being more odious than a purse-proud
+Englishman--namely, a purse-proud English Jew. He gave his noble name
+after a while, as something too precious to be kept from the
+company, when recommending one of the travellers to go to the Hotel
+d'Angleterre in Rome: "The best 'otel out of England. You may mention
+my name, if you like--Mr. Jonas." The recipient of this favor noted
+down the talismanic words in his pocket-book, and Mr. Jonas, conscious
+of having conferred a benefit on his race, became more odious to it
+than ever. An Englishman is of a composition so uncomfortably original
+that no one can copy him, though many may caricature. I saw an
+American in London once who thought himself an Englishman because he
+wore leg-of-mutton whiskers, declaimed against universal suffrage and
+republics, and had an appetite for high game. He was a hateful animal,
+surely, but he was not the British lion; and this poor Hebrew at
+Bologna was not a whit more successful in his imitation of the
+illustrious brute, though he talked, like him, of nothing but hotels,
+and routes of travel, and hackmen and porters, and seemed to have
+nothing to do in Italy but get through it as quickly and abusively as
+possible.
+
+We were very glad, I say, to part from all this at Bologna and take
+the noon train for Genoa. In our car there were none but Italians,
+and the exchange of "_La Perseveranza_" of Milan for "_Il Popolo_"
+of Turin with one of them quickly opened the way for conversation and
+acquaintance. (_En passant_: I know of no journal in the United States
+whose articles are better than those of the "_Perseveranza_," and it
+was gratifying to an American to read in this ablest journal of Italy
+nothing but applause and encouragement of the national side in our
+late war.) My new-made friend turned out to be a Milanese. He was
+a physician, and had served as a surgeon in the late war of Italian
+independence; but was now placed in a hospital in Milan. There was a
+gentle little blonde with him, and at Piacenza, where we stopped
+for lunch, "You see," said he, indicating the lady, "we are newly
+married,"--which was, indeed, plain enough to any one who looked at
+their joyous faces, and observed how great disposition that little
+blonde had to nestle on the young man's broad shoulder. "I have a
+week's leave from my place," he went on, "and this is our wedding
+journey. We were to have gone to Florence, but it seems we are fated
+not to see that famous city."
+
+He spoke of it as immensely far off, and herein greatly amused us
+Americans, who had outgrown distances.
+
+"So we are going to Genoa instead, for two or three days." "Oh,
+have you ever been at Genoa?" broke in the bride. "What magnificent
+palaces! And then the bay, and the villas in the environs! There is
+the Villa Pallavicini, with beautiful gardens, where an artificial
+shower breaks out from the bushes, and sprinkles the people who pass.
+Such fun!" and she continued to describe vividly a city of which
+she had only heard from her husband; and it was easy to see that she
+walked in paradise wherever he led her.
+
+They say that Italian husbands and wives do not long remain fond
+of each other, but it was impossible in the presence of these happy
+people not to believe in the eternity of their love, and it was hard
+to keep from "dropping into poetry" on account of them. Their bliss
+infected every body in the car, and in spite of the weariness of our
+journey, and the vexation of the misadventures which had succeeded one
+another unsparingly ever since we left home, we found ourselves far on
+the way to Genoa before we thought to grumble at the distance. There
+was with us, besides the bridal party, a lady travelling from Bologna
+to Turin, who had learned English in London, and spoke it much better
+than most Londoners. It is surprising how thoroughly Italians master
+a language so alien to their own as ours, and how frequently you find
+them acquainted with English. From Russia the mania for this tongue
+has spread all over the Continent, and in Italy English seems to be
+prized first among the virtues.
+
+As we drew near Genoa, the moon came out on purpose to show us the
+superb city, and we strove eagerly for a first glimpse of the proud
+capital where Columbus was born. To tell the truth, the glimpse was
+but slight and false, for railways always enter cities by some mean
+level, from which any picturesque view is impossible.
+
+Near the station in Genoa, however, is the weak and ugly monument
+which the municipality has lately raised to Columbus. The moon made
+the best of this, which stands in a wide open space, and contrived,
+with an Italian skill in the arrangement of light, to produce an
+effect of undeniable splendor. On the morrow, we found out by the
+careless candor of the daylight what a uselessly big head Columbus
+had, and how the sculptor had not very happily thought proper to
+represent him with his sea-legs on.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+UP AND DOWN GENOA.
+
+I had my note-book with me on this journey, and pledged myself to
+make notes in it. And, indeed, I did really do something of the kind,
+though the result of my labors is by no means so voluminous as I would
+like it to be, now when the work of wishing there were more notes is
+so easy. We spent but one day in Genoa, and I find such a marvelous
+succinct record of this in my book that I am tempted to give it here,
+after the fashion of that Historical Heavyweight who writes the Life
+of "Frederick the Great."
+
+    "_Genoa, November 13_.--Breakfast _à la fourchette_ excellently
+    and cheaply. I buy a hat. We go to seek the Consul, and, after
+    finding every thing else for two hours, find him. Genoa is the
+    most magnificent city I ever saw; and the new monument to
+    Columbus about the weakest possible monument. Walk through the
+    city with Consul; Doge's palace; cathedral; girl turning
+    somersaults in the street; blind madman on the cathedral steps.
+    We leave for Naples at twelve midnight."
+
+As for the breakfast, it was eaten at one of the many good caffè in
+Genoa, and perhaps some statistician will like to know that for a
+beefsteak and potatoes, with a half-bottle of Ligurian wine, we paid a
+franc. For this money we had also the society of an unoccupied waiter,
+who leaned against a marble column and looked on, with that gentle,
+half-compassionate interest in our appetites, which seems native
+to the tribe of waiters. A slight dash of surprise is in this
+professional manner; and there is a faint smile on the solemn,
+professional countenance, which is perhaps prompted by too intimate
+knowledge of the mysteries of the kitchen and the habits of the cook.
+The man who passes his life among beefsteaks cannot be expected to
+love them, or to regard without wonder the avidity with which others
+devour them. I imagine that service in restaurants must beget simple
+and natural tastes in eating, and that the jaded men who minister
+there to our pampered appetites demand only for themselves--
+
+  "A scrip with herbs and fruits supplied,
+  And water from the spring."
+
+Turning from this thought to the purchase of my hat, I do not believe
+that literary art can interest the reader in that purely personal
+transaction, though I have no doubt that a great deal might be said
+about buying hats as a principle. I prefer, therefore, to pass to our
+search for the Consul.
+
+A former Consul at ----, whom I know, has told me a good many stories
+about the pieces of popular mind which he received at different times
+from the travelling public, in reproof of his difficulty of discovery;
+and I think it must be one of the most jealously guarded rights
+of American citizens in foreign lands to declare the national
+representative hard to find, if there is no other complaint to
+lodge against him. It seems to be, in peculiar degree, a quality of
+consulship at ----, to be found remote and inaccessible. My friend
+says that even at New York, before setting out for his post, when
+inquiring into the history of his predecessors, he heard that they
+were one and all hard to find; and he relates that on the steamer,
+going over, there was a low fellow who set the table in a roar by a
+vulgar anecdote to this effect:--
+
+"There was once a consul at ----, who indicated his office-hours by
+the legend on his door, 'In from ten to one.' An old ship-captain,
+who kept coming for about a week without finding the Consul, at last
+furiously wrote, in the terms of wager, under this legend, 'Ten to one
+you're out!'"
+
+My friend also states that one day a visitor of his remarked: "I'm
+rather surprised to find you in. As a general rule, I never do find
+consuls in." Habitually, his fellow-countrymen entertained him with
+accounts of their misadventures in reaching him. It was useless to
+represent to them that his house was in the most convenient locality
+in ----, where, indeed, no stranger can walk twenty rods from his
+hotel without losing himself; that their guide was an ass, or their
+courier a rogue. They listened to him politely, but they never
+pardoned him in the least; and neither will I forgive the Consul at
+Genoa. I had no earthly consular business with him, but a private
+favor to ask. It was Sunday, and I could not reasonably expect to find
+him at his office, or any body to tell me where he lived; but I have
+seldom had so keen a sense of personal wrong and national neglect as
+in my search for that Consul's house.
+
+In Italy there is no species of fact with which any human being you
+meet will not pretend to have perfect acquaintance, and, of course,
+the driver whose fiacre we took professed himself a complete guide to
+the Consul's whereabouts, and took us successively to the residences
+of the consuls of all the South American republics. It occurred to
+me that it might be well to inquire of these officials where their
+colleague was to be found; but it is true that not one consul of them
+was at home! Their doors were opened by vacant old women, in whom
+a vague intelligence feebly guttered, like the wick of an expiring
+candle, and who, after feigning to throw floods of light on the
+object of my search, successively flickered out, and left me in total
+darkness.
+
+Till that day, I never knew of what lofty flights stairs were capable.
+As out-of-doors, in Genoa, it is either all up or down hill, so
+in-doors it is either all up or down stairs. Ascending and descending,
+in one palace after another, those infinite marble steps, it became
+a question not solved to this hour, whether it was worse to ascend or
+descend,--each ordeal in its turn seemed so much more terrible than
+the other.
+
+At last I resolved to come to an understanding with the driver, and
+I spent what little breath I had left--it was dry and hot as the
+simoom--in blowing up that infamous man. "You are a great driver," I
+said, "not to know your own city. What are you good for if you can't
+take a foreigner to his consul's?" "Signore," answered the driver
+patiently, "you would have to get a book in two volumes by heart,
+in order to be able to find everybody in Genoa. This city is a
+labyrinth."
+
+Truly, it had so proved, and I could scarcely believe in my good luck
+when I actually found my friend, and set out with him on a ramble
+through its toils.
+
+A very great number of the streets in Genoa are footways merely,
+and these are as narrow, as dark, as full of jutting chimney-places,
+balconies, and opened window-shutters, and as picturesque as the
+little alleys in Venice. They wander at will around the bases of the
+gloomy old stone palaces, and seem to have a vagabond fondness for
+creeping down to the port, and losing themselves there in a certain
+cavernous arcade which curves round the water with the flection of the
+shore, and makes itself a twilight at noonday. Under it are clangorous
+shops of iron-smiths, and sizzling shops of marine cooks, and, looking
+down its dim perspective, one beholds chiefly sea-legs coming and
+going, more or less affected by strong waters; and as the faces to
+which these sea-legs belong draw near, one discerns sailors from all
+parts of the world,--tawny men from Sicily and Norway, as diverse in
+their tawniness as olive and train-oil; sharp faces from Nantucket
+and from the Piraeus, likewise mightily different in their sharpness;
+blonde Germans and blonde Englishmen; and now and then a colored
+brother also in the seafaring line, with sea-legs, also, more or less
+affected by strong waters like the rest.
+
+What curious people are these seafarers! They coast the whole world,
+and know nothing of it, being more ignorant and helpless than children
+on shore. I spoke with the Yankee mate of a ship one day at Venice,
+and asked him how he liked the city.
+
+Well, he had not been ashore yet.
+
+He was told he had better go ashore; that the Piazza San Marco was
+worth seeing.
+
+Well, he knew it; he had seen pictures of it; but he guessed he
+wouldn't go ashore.
+
+Why not, now he was here?
+
+Well, he laid out to go ashore the next time he came to Venice.
+
+And so, bless his honest soul, he lay three weeks at Venice with his
+ship, after a voyage of two months, and he sailed away without ever
+setting his foot on that enchanted ground.
+
+I should have liked to stop some of those seafarers and ask them what
+they thought of Genoa.
+
+It must have been in the little streets--impassable for horses--that
+the people sat and talked, as Heine fabled, in their doorways, and
+touched knees with the people sitting and talking on the thresholds
+of the opposite side. But we saw no gossipers there on our Sunday in
+Genoa; and I think the domestic race of Heine's day no longer lives in
+Genoa, for every body we saw on the streets was gayly dressed in the
+idea of the last fashions, and was to be met chiefly in the public
+promenades. The fashions were French; but here still lingers the
+lovely phantom of the old national costume of Genoa, and snow-white
+veils fluttered from many a dark head, and caressed many an olive
+cheek. It is the kindest and charitablest of attirements, this white
+veil, and, while decking beauty to the most perilous effect, befriends
+and modifies age and ugliness.
+
+The pleasure with which I look at the splendor of an Italian crowd in
+winter is always touched with melancholy. I know that, at the time
+of its noonday promenade, it has nothing but a cup of coffee in its
+stomach; that it has emerged from a house as cold and dim as a cellar;
+and that it will presently go home to dine on rice and boiled beef. I
+know that chilblains secretly gnaw the hands inside of its kid gloves,
+and I see in the rawness of its faces the anguish of winter-long
+suffering from cold. But I also look at many in this crowd with the
+eye of the economist, and wonder how people practicing even so great
+self-denial as they can contrive to make so much display on their
+little means,--how those clerks of public offices, who have rarely an
+income of five hundred dollars a year, can dress with such peerless
+gorgeousness. I suppose the national instinct teaches them ways and
+means unknown to us. The passion for dress is universal: the men are
+as fond of it as the women; and, happily, clothes are comparatively
+cheap. It is no great harm in itself, this display: it is only a pity
+that there is often nothing, or worse than nothing, under the shining
+surface.
+
+We walked with the brilliant Genoese crowd upon the hill where the
+public promenade overlooks a landscape of city and country, houses and
+gardens, vines and olives, which it makes the heart ache to behold, it
+is so faultlessly beautiful. Behind us the fountain was--
+
+  "Shaking its loosened silver in the sun;"
+
+the birds were singing; and there were innumerable fair girls going
+by, about whom one might have made romances if one had not known
+better. Our friend pointed out to us the "pink jail" in which Dickens
+lived while at Genoa; and showed us on the brow of a distant upland
+the villa, called _Il Paradiso_, which Byron had occupied. I dare
+say this Genoese joke is already in print: That the Devil reëntered
+Paradise when Byron took this villa. Though, in loveliest Italy, one
+is half-persuaded that the Devil had never left Paradise.
+
+After lingering a little longer on that delicious height, we turned
+and went down for a stroll through the city.
+
+My note-book says that Genoa is the most magnificent city I ever saw,
+and I hold by my note-book, though I hardly know how to prove it.
+Venice is, and remains, the most beautiful city in the world; but her
+ancient rival impresses you with greater splendor. I suppose that
+the exclusively Renaissance architecture, which Ruskin declares the
+architecture of pride, lends itself powerfully to this effect in
+Genoa. It is here in its best mood, and there is little grotesque
+Renaissance to be seen, though the palaces are, as usual, loaded with
+ornament. The Via Nuova is the chief thoroughfare of the city, and the
+crowd pours through this avenue between long lines of palaces. Height
+on height rise the stately, sculptured façades, colonnaded, statued,
+pierced by mighty doorways and lofty windows; and the palaces seem to
+gain a kind of aristocratic _hauteur_ from the fact that there are for
+the most part no sidewalks, and that the carriages, rolling insolently
+through the crowd, threaten constantly to grind the pedestrian up
+against their carven marbles, and immolate him to their stony pride.
+There is something gracious and gentle in the grandeur of Venice,
+and much that the heart loves to cling to; but in Genoa no sense of
+kindliness is touched by the magnificence of the city.
+
+It was an unspeakable relief, after such a street, to come, on a
+sudden, upon the Duomo, one of the few Gothic buildings in Genoa, and
+rest our jaded eyes on that architecture which Heaven seems truly to
+have put into the thoughts of man together with the Christian faith.
+O beloved beauty of aspiring arches, of slender and clustered columns,
+of flowering capitals and window-traceries, of many-carven breadths
+and heights, wherein all Nature breathes and blossoms again! There is
+neither Greek perfection, nor winning Byzantine languor, nor insolent
+Renaissance opulence, which may compare with this loveliness of yours!
+Alas that the interior of this Gothic temple of Genoa should abound in
+the abomination of rococo restoration! They say that the dust of St.
+John the Baptist lies there within a costly shrine; and I wonder that
+it can sleep in peace amid all that heathenish show of bad taste. But
+the poor saints have to suffer a great deal in Italy.
+
+Outside, in the piazza before the church, there was an idle, cruel
+crowd, amusing itself with the efforts of a blind old man to find
+the entrance. He had a number of books which he desperately laid down
+while he ran his helpless hands over the clustered columns, and which
+he then desperately caught up again, in fear of losing them. At other
+times he paused, and wildly clasped his hands upon his eyes, or wildly
+threw up his arms; and then began to run to and fro again uneasily,
+while the crowd laughed and jeered. Doubtless a taint of madness
+afflicted him; but not the less he seemed the type of a blind soul
+that gropes darkly about through life, to find the doorway of some
+divine truth or beauty,--touched by the heavenly harmonies from
+within, and miserably failing, amid the scornful cries and bitter glee
+of those who have no will but to mock aspiration.
+
+The girl turning somersaults in another place had far more popular
+sympathy than the blind madman at the temple door, but she was hardly
+a more cheerful spectacle. For all her festive spangles and fairy-like
+brevity of skirts, she had quite a work-a-day look upon her honest,
+blood-red face, as if this were business though it looked like sport,
+and her part of the diversion were as practical as that of the famous
+captain of the waiters, who gave the act of peeling a sack of potatoes
+a playful effect by standing on his head. The poor damsel was going
+over and over, to the sound of most dismal drumming and braying,
+in front of the immense old palace of the Genoese Doges,--a classic
+building, stilted on a rustic base, and quite worthy of Palladio, if
+any body thinks that is praise.
+
+There was little left of our day when we had dined; but having seen
+the outside of Genoa, and not hoping to see the inside, we found even
+this little heavy on our hands, and were glad as the hour drew near
+when we were to take the steamer for Naples.
+
+It had been one of the noisiest days spent during several years in
+clamorous Italy, whose voiceful uproar strikes to the summits of her
+guardian Alps, and greets the coming stranger, and whose loud Addio
+would stun him at parting, if he had not meanwhile become habituated
+to the operatic pitch of her every-day tones. In Genoa, the hotels,
+taking counsel of the vagabond streets, stand about the cavernous
+arcade already mentioned, and all the noise of the shipping reaches
+their guests. We rose early that Sunday morning to the sound of a
+fleet unloading cargoes of wrought-iron, and of the hard swearing of
+all nations of seafaring men. The whole day long the tumult followed
+us, and seemed to culminate at last in the screams of a parrot, who
+thought it fine to cry, "_Piove! piove! piove_!"--"It rains! it
+rains! it rains!"--and had, no doubt, a secret interest in some
+umbrella-shop. This unprincipled bird dwelt somewhere in the
+neighborhood of the street where you see the awful tablet in the wall
+devoting to infamy the citizens of the old republic that were false to
+their country. The sight of that pitiless stone recalls with a thrill
+the picturesque, unhappy past, with all the wandering, half-benighted
+efforts of the people to rend their liberty from now a foreign and now
+a native lord. At best, they only knew how to avenge their wrongs; but
+now, let us hope, they have learnt, with all Italy, to prevent them.
+The will was never wanting of old to the Ligurian race, and in this
+time they have done their full share to establish Italian freedom.
+
+I do not know why it should have been so surprising to hear the
+boatman who rowed us to the steamer's anchorage speak English; but,
+after his harsh Genoese profanity in getting his boat into open water,
+it was the last thing we expected from him. It had somehow the effect
+of a furious beast addressing you in your native tongue, and
+telling you it was "Wary poordy wedder;" and it made us cling to his
+good-nature with the trembling solicitude of Little Red-Riding-Hood,
+when she begins to have the first faint suspicions of her grandmother.
+However, our boatman was no wild beast, but took our six cents of
+_buonamano_ with the base servility of a Christian man, when he had
+put our luggage in the cabin of the steamer. I wonder how he should
+have known us for Americans? He did so know us, and said he had been
+at New York in better days, when he voyaged upon higher seas than
+those he now navigated.
+
+On board, we watched with compassion an old gentleman in the cabin
+making a hearty meal of sardines and fruit-pie, and I asked him if
+he had ever been at sea. No, he said. I could have wept over that
+innocent old gentleman's childlike confidence of appetite, and
+guileless trust of the deep.
+
+We went on deck, where one of the gentle beings of our party declared
+that she would remain as long as Genoa was in sight; and to tell the
+truth, the scene was worthy of the promised devotion. There, in a
+half-circle before us, blazed the lights of the quay; above these
+twinkled the lamps of the steep streets and climbing palaces; over
+and behind all hung the darkness on the heights,--a sable cloud dotted
+with ruddy points of flame burning in the windows of invisible houses.
+
+  "Merrily did we drop"
+
+down the bay, and presently caught the heavy swell of the open sea.
+The other gentle being of our party then clutched my shoulder with a
+dreadful shudder, and after gasping, "O Mr. Scribbler, why _will_ the
+ship roll so?" was meekly hurried below by her sister, who did not
+return for a last glimpse of Genoa the Proud.
+
+In a moment heaven's sweet pity flapped away as with the sea-gull's
+wings, and I too felt that there was no help for it, and that I must
+go and lie down in the cabin. With anguished eyes I beheld upon the
+shelf opposite to mine the innocent old gentleman who had lately
+supped so confidently on sardines and fruit-pie. He lay upon his back,
+groaning softly to himself.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES.
+
+I.
+
+Like the Englishman who had no prejudices, I do hate a Frenchman; and
+there were many Frenchmen among our passengers on the _Messina_, in
+whose company I could hardly have been happy, had I not seen them
+horribly sea-sick. After the imprudent old gentleman of the sardines
+and fruit-pie, these wretched Gauls were the first to be seized with
+the malady, which became epidemic, and were miserable up to the last
+moment on board. To the enormity of having been born Frenchmen, they
+added the crime of being commercial travellers,--a class of fellow-men
+of whom we know little at home, but who are met everywhere in European
+travel. They spend more than half their lives in movement from place
+to place, and they learn to snatch from every kind of travel its
+meagre comforts, with an insolent disregard of the rights and feelings
+of other passengers. They excuse an abominable trespass with a cool
+"Pardon!" take the best seat everywhere, and especially treat women
+with a savage rudeness, to which an American vainly endeavors to
+accustom his temper. I have seen commercial travellers of all nations,
+and I think I must award the French nation the discredit of producing
+the most odious commercial travellers in the world. The Englishman
+of this species wraps himself in his rugs, and rolls into his corner,
+defiantly, but not aggressively, boorish; the Italian is almost a
+gentleman; the German is apt to take sausage out of a newspaper and
+eat it with his penknife; the Frenchman aggravates human nature beyond
+endurance by his restless ill-breeding, and his evident intention not
+only to keep all his own advantages, but to steal some of yours upon
+the first occasion. There were three of these monsters on our
+steamer: one a slight, bloodless young man, with pale blue eyes and
+an incredulous grin; another, a gigantic full-bearded animal in
+spectacles; the third an infamous plump little creature, in absurdly
+tight pantaloons, with a cast in his eye, and a habit of sucking his
+teeth at table. When this wretch was not writhing in the agonies of
+sea-sickness, he was on deck with his comrades, lecturing them upon
+various things, to which the bloodless young man listened with his
+incredulous grin, and the bearded giant in spectacles attended with a
+choked look about the eyes, like a suffering ox. They were constantly
+staggering in and out of their state-room, which, for my sins, was
+also mine; and opening their abominable commodious travelling bags, or
+brushing their shaggy heads at the reeling mirror, and since they
+were born into the world, I think they had never cleaned their
+finger-nails. They wore their hats at dinner, but always went away,
+after soup, deadly pale.
+
+
+II.
+
+In contrast with these cattle, what polished and courtly gentlemen
+were the sailors and firemen! As for our captain, he would in any
+company have won notice for his gentle and high-bred way; in his place
+at the head of the table among these Frenchmen, he seemed to me the
+finest gentleman I had ever seen. He had spent his whole life at sea,
+and had voyaged in all parts of the world except Japan, where he meant
+some day, he said, to go. He had been first a cabin-boy on a little
+Genoese schooner, and he had gradually risen to the first place on
+a sailing-vessel, and now he had been selected to fill a commander's
+post on this line of steamers. (It is an admirable line of boats,
+not belonging I believe to the Italian government, but much under its
+control, leaving Genoa every day for Leghorn, Naples, Palermo, and
+Ancona, on the Adriatic coast.) The captain had sailed a good deal in
+American waters, but chiefly on the Pacific coast, trading from the
+Spanish republican ports to those of California. He had been in that
+State during its effervescent days, when every thing foul floated
+to the top, and I am afraid he formed there but a bad opinion of our
+people, though he was far too courteous to say outright any thing of
+this sort.
+
+He had very fine, shrewd blue eyes, a lean, weather-beaten, kindly
+face, and a cautious way of saying things. I hardly expected him to
+turn out so red-hot a Democrat as he did on better acquaintance, but
+being a warm friend of man myself, I was not sorry. Garibaldi was
+the beginning and ending of his political faith, as he is with every
+enthusiastic Italian. The honest soul's conception of all concrete
+evil was brought forth in two words, of odd enough application. In
+Europe, and Italy more particularly, true men have suffered chiefly
+from this form of evil, and the captain evidently could conceive of
+no other cause of suffering anywhere. We were talking of the American
+war, and when the captain had asked the usual question, "_Quando
+finirà mai questa guerra_?" and I had responded as usual, "_Ah, ci
+vuol pazienza_!" the captain gave a heavy sigh, and turning his head
+pensively aside, plucked his grapes from the cluster a moment in
+silence.
+
+Then he said: "You Americans are in the habit of attributing this war
+to slavery. The cause is not sufficient."
+
+I ventured to demur and explain. "No," said the captain, "the cause is
+not sufficient. We Italians know the only cause which could produce a
+war like this."
+
+I was naturally anxious to be instructed in the Italian theory, hoping
+it might be profounder than the English notion that we were fighting
+about tariffs.
+
+The captain frowned, looked at me carefully, and then said:--
+
+"In this world there is but one cause of mischief--the Jesuits."
+
+
+III.
+
+The first night out, from Genoa to Leghorn, was bad enough, but that
+which succeeded our departure from the latter port was by far the
+worst of the three we spent in our voyage to Naples. How we envied the
+happy people who went ashore at Leghorn! I think we even envied the
+bones of the Venetians, Pisans, and Genoese who met and slew each
+other in the long-forgotten sea-fights, and sank too deeply through
+the waves to be stirred by their restless tumult. Every one has
+heard tell of how cross and treacherous a sea the Mediterranean is in
+winter, and my own belief is, that he who has merely been sea-sick on
+the Atlantic should give the Mediterranean a trial before professing
+to have suffered every thing of which human nature is capable. Our
+steamer was clean enough and staunch enough, but she was not large--no
+bigger, I thought, than a gondola, that night as the waves tossed her
+to and fro, till unwinged things took flight all through her cabins
+and over her decks. My berth was placed transversely instead of
+lengthwise with the boat,--an ingenious arrangement to heighten
+sea-sick horrors, and dash the blood of the sufferer from brain to
+boots with exaggerated violence at each roll of the boat; and I begged
+the steward to let me sleep upon one of the lockers in the cabin.
+I found many of my agonized species already laid out there; and the
+misery of the three French commercial travellers was so great, that,
+in the excess of my own dolor, it actually afforded me a kind of
+happiness, and I found myself smiling at times to see the giant, with
+the eyes of a choked ox, rise up and faintly bellow. Indeed, there was
+something eldritch and unearthly in the whole business, and I think a
+kind of delirium must have resulted from the sea-sickness. Otherwise,
+I shall not know how to account for having attributed a kind of
+consciousness and individuality to the guide-book of a young American
+who had come aboard at Leghorn. He turned out afterward to be the
+sweetest soul in the world, and I am sorry now that I regarded with
+amusement his failure to smoke off his sickness. He was reading his
+guide-book with great diligence and unconcern, when suddenly I marked
+him lay it softly, softly down, with that excessive deliberation which
+men use at such times, and vanish with great dignity from the
+scene. Thus abandoned to its own devices, this guide-book began its
+night-long riots, setting out upon a tour of the cabin with the first
+lurch of the boat that threw it from the table upon the floor. I heard
+it careen at once wildly to the cabin door, and knock to get out; and
+failing in this, return more deliberately to the stern of the boat,
+interrogating the tables and chairs, which had got their sea-legs on,
+and asking them how they found themselves. Arrived again at the point
+of starting, it seemed to pause a moment, and then I saw it setting
+forth on a voyage of pleasure in the low company of a French hat,
+which, being itself a French book, I suppose it liked. In these
+travels they both ran under the feet of one of the stewards and were
+replaced by an immense _tour de force_ on the table, from which the
+book eloped again,--this time in company with an overcoat; but it
+seemed the coat was too miserable to go far: it stretched itself at
+full length on the floor, and suffered the book to dance over it, back
+and forth, I know not how many times. At last, as the actions of
+the book were becoming unendurable, and the general sea-sickness was
+waxing into a frenzy, a heavy roll, that made the whole ship shriek
+and tremble, threw us all from our lockers; and gathering myself up,
+bruised and sore in every fibre, I lay down again and became sensible
+of a blissful, blissful lull; the machinery had stopped, and with
+the mute hope that we were all going to the bottom, I fell tranquilly
+asleep.
+
+
+IV.
+
+It appeared that the storm had really been dangerous. Instead of being
+only six hours from Naples, as we ought to be at this time, we were
+got no further than Porto Longone, in the Isle of Elba. We woke in a
+quiet, sheltered little bay, whence we could only behold, not feel,
+the storm left far out upon the open sea. From this we turned our
+heavy eyes gladly to the shore, where a white little town was settled,
+like a flight of gulls upon the beach, at the feet of green and
+pleasant hills, whose gentle lines rhymed softly away against the sky.
+At the end of either arm of the embracing land in which we lay, stood
+gray, placid old forts, with peaceful sentries pacing their bastions,
+and weary ships creeping round their feet, under guns looking out so
+kindly and harmlessly, that I think General ---- himself would not
+have hesitated (except, perhaps, from a profound sentiment of regret
+for offering the violence) to attack them. Our port was full of
+frightened shipping--steamers, brigs, and schooners--of all sizes and
+nations; and since it was our misfortune that Napoleon spent his exile
+in Elba at Porto Ferrato instead of Porto Longone, we amused ourselves
+with looking at the vessels and the white town and the soft hills,
+instead of hunting up dead lion's tracks.
+
+Our fellow-passengers began to develop themselves: the regiment of
+soldiers whom we were transporting picturesquely breakfasted forward,
+and the second-cabin people came aft to our deck, while the English
+engineer (there are English engineers on all the Mediterranean
+steamers) planted a camp-stool in a sunny spot, and sat down to read
+the "Birmingham Express."
+
+Our friends of the second cabin were chiefly officers with their wives
+and families, and they talked for the most part of their sufferings
+during the night. They spoke such exquisite Italian that I thought
+them Tuscans, but they told me they were of Sicily, where their
+beautiful speech first had life. Let us hear what they talked of in
+their divine language, and with that ineffable _tonic_ accent which
+no foreigner perfectly acquires, and let us for once translate the
+profanities Pagan and Christian, which adorn common parlance in
+Italy:--
+
+"Ah, my God! how much I suffered!" says a sweet little woman with
+gentle brown eyes, red, red lips, and blameless Greek lines of face.
+"I broke two basins!"
+
+"There were ten broken in all, by Diana!" says this lady's sister.
+
+"Presence of the Devil!" says her husband; and
+
+"Body of Bacchus!" her young brother, puffing his cigar.
+
+"And you, sir," said the lady, turning to a handsome young fellow in
+civil dress, near her, "how did you pass this horrible night?"
+
+"Oh!" says the young man, twirling his heavy blond mustache, "mighty
+well, mighty well!"
+
+"Oh mercy of God! You were not sick?"
+
+"I, signora, am never sea-sick. I am of the navy."
+
+At which they all cry oh, and ah, and declare they are glad of it,
+though why they should have been I don't know to this day.
+
+"I have often wished," added the young man meditatively, and in a
+serious tone, as if he had indeed given the subject much thought,
+"that it might please God to let me be sea-sick once, if only that I
+might know how it feels. But no!" He turned the conversation, as
+if his disappointment were too sore to dwell upon; and hearing our
+English, he made out to let us know that he had been at New York, and
+could spik our language, which he proceeded to do, to the great pride
+of his countrymen, and our own astonishment at the remarkable forms of
+English speech to which he gave utterance.
+
+
+V.
+
+We set out from Porto Longone that night at eight o'clock, and next
+evening, driving through much-abated storm southward into calm waters
+and clear skies, reached Naples. At noon, Monte Circeo where Circe
+led her disreputable life, was a majestic rock against blue heaven
+and broken clouds; after nightfall, and under the risen moon, Vesuvius
+crept softly up from the sea, and stood a graceful steep, with wreaths
+of lightest cloud upon its crest, and the city lamps circling far
+round its bay.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES.
+
+I.
+
+Perhaps some reader of mine who visited Naples under the old disorder
+of things, when the Bourbon and the Camorra reigned, will like to hear
+that the pitched battle which travellers formerly fought, in landing
+from their steamer, is now gone out of fashion. Less truculent boatmen
+I never saw than those who rowed us ashore at Naples; they were so
+quiet and peaceful that they harmonized perfectly with that tranquil
+scene of drowsy-twinkling city lights, slumbrous mountains, and
+calm sea, and, as they dipped softly toward us in the glare of the
+steamer's lamps, I could only think of Tennyson's description:--
+
+  "And round about the keel with faces pale,
+  Dark faces pale against the rosy flame,
+  The mild-eyed melancholy lotus-eaters came."
+
+The mystery of this placidity had been already solved by our captain,
+whom I had asked what price I should bargain to pay from the steamer
+to the shore. "There is a tariff," said he, "and the boatmen keep to
+it. The Neapolitans are good people, (_buona gente_,) and only needed
+justice to make them obedient to the laws." I must say that I found
+this to be true. The fares of all public conveyances are now fixed,
+and the attempts which drivers occasionally make to cheat you, seem
+to be rather the involuntary impulses of old habit than deliberate
+intentions to do you wrong. You pay what is due, and as your man
+merely rumbles internally when you turn away, you must be a very timid
+_signorin_, indeed, if you buy his content with any thing more. I
+fancy that all these things are now much better managed in Italy than
+in America, only we grumble at them there and stand them in silence at
+home. Every one can recall frightful instances of plunder, in which
+he was the victim, at New York--in which the robbery had none of the
+neatness of an operation, as it often has in Italy, but was a brutal
+mutilation. And then as regards civility from the same kind of people
+in the two countries, there is no comparison that holds in favor of
+us. All questions are readily and politely answered in Italian travel,
+and the servants of companies are required to be courteous to the
+public whereas, one is only too glad to receive a silent snub from
+such people at home.
+
+
+II.
+
+The first sun that rose after our arrival in Naples was mild and warm
+as a May sun, though we were quite in the heart of November. We early
+strolled out under it into the crowded ways of the city, and drew near
+as we might to that restless, thronging, gossiping southern life,
+in contrast with which all northern existence seems only a sort of
+hibernation. The long Toledo, on which the magnificence of modern
+Naples is threaded, is the most brilliant and joyous street in
+the world; but I think there is less of the quaintness of Italian
+civilization to be seen in its vivacious crowds than anywhere else
+in Italy. One easily understands how, with its superb length and
+straightness, and its fine, respectable, commonplace-looking houses,
+it should be the pride of a people fond of show; but after Venice and
+Genoa it has no picturesque charm; nay, even busy Milan seems less
+modern and more picturesque. The lines of the lofty palaces on the
+Toledo are seldom broken by the façade of a church or other public
+edifice; and when this does happen, the building is sure to be coldly
+classic or frantically baroque.
+
+You weary of the Toledo's perfect repair, of its monotonous iron
+balconies, its monotonous lofty windows; and it would be insufferable
+if you could not turn out from it at intervals into one of those
+wondrous little streets which branch up on one hand and down on the
+other, rising and falling with flights of steps between the high,
+many-balconied walls. They ring all day with the motleyest life of
+fishermen, fruit-venders, chestnut-roasters, and idlers of every age
+and sex; and there is nothing so full of local color, unless it be the
+little up-and-down-hill streets in Genoa. Like those, the by-streets
+of Naples are only meant for foot-passengers, and a carriage never
+enters them; but sometimes, if you are so blest, you may see a mule
+climbing the long stairways, moving solemnly under a stack of straw,
+or tinkling gayly down-stairs, bestridden by a swarthy, handsome
+peasant--all glittering teeth and eyes and flaming Phrygian cap. The
+rider exchanges lively salutations and sarcasms with the by-standers
+in his way, and perhaps brushes against the bagpipers who bray
+constantly in those hilly defiles. They are in Neapolitan costume,
+these _pifferari_, and have their legs incomprehensibly tied up in the
+stockings and garters affected by the peasantry of the provinces,
+and wear brave red sashes about their waists. They are simple,
+harmless-looking people, and would no doubt rob and kill in the most
+amiable manner, if brigandage came into fashion in their neighborhood.
+
+Sometimes the student of men may witness a Neapolitan quarrel in these
+streets, and may pick up useful ideas of invective from the remarks of
+the fat old women who always take part in the contests. But, though
+we were ten days in Naples, I only saw one quarrel, and I could have
+heard much finer violence of language among the gondoliers at any
+ferry in Venice than I heard in this altercation.
+
+The Neapolitans are, of course, furious in traffic. They sell a great
+deal, and very boisterously, the fruit of the cactus, which is about
+as large as an egg, and which they peel to a very bloody pulp, and lay
+out, a sanguinary presence, on boards for purchase. It is not good
+to the uncultivated taste; but the stranger may stop and drink, with
+relish and refreshment, the orangeade and lemonade mixed with snow and
+sold at the little booths on the street-corners. These stands looks
+much like the shrines of the Madonna in other Italian cities, and a
+friend of ours was led, before looking carefully into their office,
+to argue immense Neapolitan piety from the frequency of their
+ecclesiastical architecture. They are, indeed, the shrines of a god
+much worshiped during the long Neapolitan summers; and it was the
+profound theory of the Bourbon kings of Naples, that, if they kept
+their subjects well supplied with snow to cool their drink, there was
+no fear of revolution. It shows how liable statesmen are to err, that,
+after all, the Neapolitans rose, drove out the Bourbons, and welcomed
+Garibaldi.
+
+The only part of the picturesque life of the side streets which seems
+ever to issue from them into the Toledo is the goatherd with his
+flock of milch-goats, which mingle with the passers in the avenues as
+familiarly as with those of the alley, and thrust aside silk-hidden
+hoops, and brush against dandies' legs, in their course, but keep on
+perfect terms with every body. The goatherd leads the eldest of the
+flock, and the rest follow in docile order and stop as he stops to ask
+at the doors if milk is wanted. When he happens to have an order, one
+of the goats is haled, much against her will, into the entry of a,
+house, and there milked, while the others wait outside alone, nibbling
+and smelling thoughtfully about the masonry. It is noticeable that
+none of the good-natured passers seem to think these goats a great
+nuisance in the crowded street; but all make way for them as if they
+were there by perfect right, and were no inconvenience.
+
+On the Toledo people keep upon the narrow sidewalks, or strike out
+into the carriage-way, with an indifference to hoofs and wheels which
+one, after long residence in tranquil Venice, cannot acquire, in
+view of the furious Neapolitan driving. That old comprehensive gig of
+Naples, with which many pens and pencils have familiarized the reader,
+is nearly as hard to find there now as the _lazzaroni_, who have gone
+out altogether. You may still see it in the remoter quarters of
+the city, with its complement of twelve passengers to one horse,
+distributed, two on each thill, four on the top seats, one at each
+side, and two behind; but in the Toledo it has given place to much
+finer vehicles. Slight buggies, which take you anywhere for half a
+franc, are the favorite means of public conveyance, and the private
+turn-outs are of every description and degree. Indeed, all the
+Neapolitans take to carriages, and the Strand in London at six o'clock
+in the evening is not a greater jam of wheels than the Toledo in the
+afternoon. Shopping feels the expansive influence of the out-of-doors
+life, and ladies do most of it as they sit in their open carriages
+at the shop-doors, ministered to by the neat-handed shopmen. They are
+very languid ladies, as they recline upon their carriage cushions;
+they are all black-eyed, and of an olive pallor, and have gloomy rings
+about their fine eyes, like the dark-faced dandies who bow to them.
+This Neapolitan look is very curious, and I have not seen it elsewhere
+in Italy; it is a look of peculiar pensiveness, and comes, no doubt,
+from the peculiarly heavy growth of lashes which fringes the lower
+eyelid. Then there is the weariness in it of all peoples whose summers
+are fierce and long.
+
+As the Italians usually dress beyond their means, the dandies of
+Naples are very gorgeous. If it is now, say, four o'clock in the
+afternoon, they are all coming down the Toledo with the streams
+of carriages bound for the long drive around the bay. But our
+foot-passers go to walk in the beautiful Villa Reale, between this
+course and the sea. The Villa is a slender strip of Paradise, a mile
+long; it is rapture to walk in it, and it comes, in description, to
+be a garden-grove, with feathery palms, Greekish temples, musical
+fountains, white statues of the gods, and groups of fair girls in
+spring silks. If I remember aright, the sun is always setting on the
+bay, and you cannot tell whether this sunset is cooled by the water
+or the water is warmed by the golden light upon it, and upon the city,
+and upon all the soft mountain-heights around.
+
+
+III.
+
+Walking westward through the whole length of the Villa Reale, and
+keeping with the crescent shore of the bay, you come, after a while,
+to the Grot of Posilippo, which is not a grotto but a tunnel cut for
+a carriage-way under the hill. It serves, however, the purpose of a
+grotto, if a grotto has any, and is of great length and dimness, and
+is all a-twinkle night and day with numberless lamps. Overlooking the
+street which passes into it is the tomb of Virgil, and it is this
+you have come to see. To reach it, you knock first at the door of a
+blacksmith, who calls a species of custodian, and, when this
+latter has opened a gate in a wall, you follow him up-stairs into a
+market-garden.
+
+In one corner, and standing in a leafy and grassy shelter somewhat
+away from the vegetables, is the poet's tomb, which has a kind of
+claim to genuineness by virtue of its improbable appearance. It looks
+more like a bake-oven than even the Pompeian tombs; the masonry is
+antique, and is at least in skillful imitation of the fine Roman work.
+The interior is a small chamber with vaulted or wagon-roof ceiling,
+under which a man may stand upright, and at the end next the street
+is a little stone commemorating the place as Virgil's tomb, which was
+placed there by the Queen of France in 1840, and said by the custodian
+(a singularly dull ass) to be an exact copy of the original, whatever
+the original may have been. This guide could tell us nothing more
+about it, and was too stupidly honest to pretend to know more. The
+laurel planted by Petrarch at the door of the tomb, and renewed
+in later times by Casimir Delavigne, has been succeeded by a third
+laurel. The present twig was so slender, and looked so friendless and
+unprotected, that even enthusiasm for the memory of two poets could
+not be brought to rob it of one of its few leaves; and we contented
+ourselves with plucking some of the grass and weeds that grew
+abundantly on the roof of the tomb.
+
+There was a dusty quiet within the tomb, and a grassy quiet without,
+that pleased exceedingly; but though the memories of the place were
+so high and epic, it only suggested bucolic associations, and, sunken
+into that nook of hill-side verdure, made me think of a spring-house
+on some far-away Ohio farm; a thought that, perhaps, would not have
+offended the poet, who loved and sang of humble country things, and,
+drawing wearily to his rest here, no doubt turned and remembered
+tenderly the rustic days before the excellent veterans of Augustus
+came to exile him from his father's farm at Mantua, and banish him to
+mere glory. But I believe most travellers have much nobler sensations
+in Virgil's tomb, and there is a great deal of testimony borne to
+their lofty sentiments on every scribbleable inch of its walls. Valery
+reminded me that Boccaccio, standing near it of old, first felt his
+fate decided for literature. Did he come there, I wonder, with poor
+Fiammetta, and enter the tomb with her tender hand in his, before ever
+he thought of that cruel absence she tells of? "O donne pietose!" I
+hope so, and that this pilgrimage, half of love and half of letters,
+took place, "nel tempo nel quale la rivestita terra più che tutto
+l'altro anno si mostra bella."
+
+If you ascend from the tomb and turn Naplesward from the crest of the
+hill, you have the loveliest view in the world of the sea and of the
+crescent beach, mightily jeweled at its further horn with the black
+Castel dell' Ovo. Fishermen's children are playing all along the
+foamy border of the sea, and boats are darting out into the surf. The
+present humble muse is not above saying also that the linen which the
+laundresses hang to dry upon lines along the beach takes the sun like
+a dazzling flight of white birds, and gives a breezy life to the scene
+which it could not spare.
+
+
+IV.
+
+There was a little church on our way back from Posilippo, into which
+we lounged a moment, pausing at the altar of some very successful
+saint near the door. Here there were great numbers of the usual
+offerings from the sick whom the saint had eased of their various
+ills,--waxen legs and arms from people who had been in peril of
+losing their limbs, as well as eyes, noses, fingers, and feet, and the
+crutches of those cured of lameness; but we were most amused with the
+waxen effigies of several entire babies hung up about the altar, which
+the poor souls who had been near losing the originals had brought
+there in gratitude to the saint.
+
+Generally, however, the churches of Naples are not very interesting,
+and one who came away without seeing them would have little to regret.
+The pictures are seldom good, and though there are magnificent
+chapels in St. Januarius, and fine Gothic tombs at Santa Chiara,
+the architecture is usually rococo. I fancy that Naples has felt the
+damage of Spanish taste in such things as well as Spanish tyranny in
+others. Indeed, I saw much there which reminded me of what I had read
+about Spain rather than what I had seen in Italy; and all Italian
+writers are agreed in attributing the depravation of Naples to the
+long Spanish dominion. It is well known how the Spaniards rule their
+provinces, and their gloomy despotism was probably never more cruelly
+felt than in Italy, where the people were least able to bear it. I
+had a heart-felt exultation in walking through the quarter of the city
+where the tumults of Massaniello had raged, and, if only for a few
+days, struck mortal terror to the brutal pride of the viceroy; but
+I think I had a better sense of the immense retribution which has
+overtaken all memory of Spanish rule in Naples as we passed through
+the palace of Capo di Monte. This was the most splendid seat of the
+Spanish Bourbon, whose family, inheriting its power from the violence
+of other times, held it with violence in these; and in one of the
+chief saloons of the palace, which is now Victor Emanuel's, were
+pictures representing scenes of the revolution of 1860, while the
+statuette of a Garibaldino, in his red shirt and all his heroic
+rudeness, was defiantly conspicuous on one of the tables.
+
+
+V.
+
+There was nothing else that pleased me as well in the palace, or in
+the grounds about it. These are all laid out in pleasant successions
+of grove, tangled wilderness, and pasture-land, and were thronged,
+the Saturday afternoon of our visit, with all ranks of people, who
+strolled through the beautiful walks and enjoyed themselves in the
+peculiarly peaceful Italian way. Valery says that the Villa Reale in
+the Bourbon time was closed, except for a single day in the year,
+to all but the nobles; and that on this occasion it was filled with
+pretty peasant women, who made it a condition of their marriage
+bargains that their husbands should bring them to the Villa Reale on
+St. Mary's Day. It is now free to all on every day of the year, and
+the grounds of the Palace Capo di Monte are opened every Saturday. I
+liked the pleasant way in which sylvan Nature and Art had made friends
+in these beautiful grounds, in which Nature had consented to overlook
+even the foolish vanity of the long aisles of lime, cut and trimmed in
+formal and fantastic shapes, according to the taste of the silly times
+of bagwigs and patches. On every side wild birds fluttered through
+these absurd trees, and in the thickets lurked innumerable pheasants,
+which occasionally issued forth and stalked in stately, fearless
+groups over the sunset-crimsoned lawns. There was a brown gamekeeper
+for nearly every head of game, wearing a pheasant's wing in his hat
+and carrying a short, heavy sword; and our driver told us, with an
+awful solemnity in his bated breath, that no one might kill this game
+but the king, under penalty of the galleys.
+
+
+VI.
+
+We went one evening to the opera at San Carlo. It is one of the three
+theatres--San Carlo of Naples, La Scala of Milan, and Fenice of
+Venice--on which the Italians pride themselves; and it is certainly
+very large and imposing. The interior has a _bel colpo d'occhio_,
+which is what many Italians chiefly value in morals, manners, and
+architecture; but after this comes great shabbiness of detail. The
+boxes, even of the first order, are paved with brick tiles, and the
+red velvet border of the box which the people see from the pit is not
+supported in style by the seats within, which are merely covered with
+red oil-cloth. The opera we saw was also second-rate, and was to the
+splendor of the scenic arrangements what the oil-cloth was to the
+velvet. The house was full of people, but the dress of the audience
+was not so fine as we had expected in Naples. The evening dress is not
+_de rigueur_ at Italian theatres, and people seemed to have come to
+San Carlo in any pleasant carelessness of costume.
+
+
+VII.
+
+The Italians are simple and natural folks, pleased through all
+their show of conventionality with little things, and as easy and
+unconscious as children in their ways. There happened to be a new
+caffè opened in Naples while we were there, and we had the pleasure
+of seeing all ranks of people affected by its magnificence. Artless
+throngs blocked the sidewalk day and night before its windows, gazing
+upon its mirrors, fountains, and frescos, and regarding the persons
+over their coffee within as beings lifted by sudden magic out of the
+common orbit of life and set dazzling in a higher sphere. All the
+waiters were uniformed and brass-buttoned to blinding effect, and the
+head waiter was a majestic creature in a long blue coat reaching to
+his feet, and armed with a mighty silver-headed staff. This gorgeous
+apparition did nothing but walk up and down, and occasionally advance
+toward the door, as if to disperse the crowds. At such times, however,
+before executing his purpose, he would glance round on the splendors
+they were admiring, and, as if smitten with a sense of the enormous
+cruelty he had meditated in thinking to deprive them of the sight,
+would falter and turn away, leaving his intent unfulfilled.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+A DAY IN POMPEII.
+
+I.
+
+On the second morning after our arrival in Naples, we took the seven
+o'clock train, which leaves the Nineteenth Century for the first cycle
+of the Christian Era, and, skirting the waters of the Neapolitan bay
+almost the whole length of our journey, reached the railway station
+of Pompeii in an hour. As we rode along by that bluest sea, we saw
+the fishing-boats go out, and the foamy waves (which it would be an
+insolent violence to call breakers) come in; we saw the mountains
+slope their tawny and golden manes caressingly downward to the waters,
+where the islands were dozing yet; and landward, on the left, we saw
+Vesuvius, with his brown mantle of ashes drawn close about his throat,
+reclining on the plain, and smoking a bland and thoughtful morning
+pipe, of which the silver fumes curled lightly, lightly upward in the
+sunrise.
+
+We dismounted at the station, walked a few rods eastward through a
+little cotton-field, and found ourselves at the door of Hotel Diomed,
+where we took breakfast for a number of sesterces which I am sure
+it would have made an ancient Pompeian stir in his urn to think of
+paying. But in Italy one learns the chief Italian virtue, patience,
+and we paid our account with the utmost good nature. There was
+compensation in store for us, and the guide whom we found at the gate
+leading up the little hill to Pompeii inclined the disturbed balance
+in favor of our happiness. He was a Roman, spoke Italian that Beatrice
+might have addressed to Dante, and was numbered Twenty-six. I suppose
+it is known that the present Italian Government forbids people to
+be pillaged in any way on its premises, and that the property of the
+State is no longer the traffic of custodians and their pitiless
+race. At Pompeii each person pays two francs for admission, and is
+rigorously forbidden by recurrent sign-boards to offer money to the
+guides. Ventisei (as we shall call him) himself pointed out one of
+these notices in English, and did his duty faithfully without asking
+or receiving fees in money. He was a soldier, like all the other
+guides, and was a most intelligent, obliging fellow, with a
+self-respect and dignity worthy of one of our own volunteer soldiers.
+
+Ventisei took us up the winding slope, and led us out of this living
+world through the Sea-gate of Pompeii back into the dead past--the
+past which, with all its sensuous beauty and grace, and all its
+intellectual power, I am not sorry to have dead, and for the most
+part, buried. Our feet had hardly trodden the lava flagging of the
+narrow streets when we came in sight of the laborers who were exhuming
+the inanimate city. They were few in number, not perhaps a score, and
+they worked tediously, with baskets to carry away the earth from the
+excavation, boys and girls carrying the baskets, and several athletic
+old women plying picks, while an overseer sat in a chair near by, and
+smoked, and directed their exertions.
+
+They dig down about eight or ten feet, uncovering the walls and
+pillars of the houses, and the mason, who is at hand, places little
+iron rivets in the stucco to prevent its fall where it is weak, while
+an artist attends to wash and clean the frescos as fast as they are
+exposed. The soil through which the excavation first passes is not
+of great depth; the ashes which fell damp with scalding rain, in the
+second eruption, are perhaps five feet thick; the rest is of that
+porous stone which descended in small fragments during the first
+eruption. A depth of at least two feet in this stone is always left
+untouched by the laborers till the day when the chief superintendent
+of the work comes out from Naples to see the last layers removed;
+and it is then that the beautiful mosaic pavements of the houses are
+uncovered, and the interesting and valuable objects are nearly always
+found.
+
+The wonder was, seeing how slowly the work proceeded, not that
+two thirds of Pompeii were yet buried, but that one third had been
+exhumed. We left these hopeless toilers, and went down-town into the
+Forum, stepping aside on the way to look into one of the Pompeian
+Courts of Common Pleas.
+
+
+II.
+
+Now Pompeii is, in truth, so full of marvel and surprise, that it
+would be unreasonable to express disappointment with Pompeii in
+fiction. And yet I cannot help it. An exuberant carelessness of phrase
+in most writers and talkers who describe it had led me to expect much
+more than it was possible to find there. In my Pompeii I confess that
+the houses had no roofs--in fact, the rafters which sustained the
+tiles being burnt, how could the roofs help falling in? But otherwise
+my Pompeii was a very complete affair: the walls all rose to their
+full height; doorways and arches were perfect; the columns were all
+unbroken and upright; putting roofs on my Pompeii, you might have
+lived in it very comfortably. The real Pompeii is different. It is
+seldom that any wall is unbroken; most columns are fragmentary; and
+though the ground-plans are always distinct, very few rooms in the
+city are perfect in form, and the whole is much more ruinous than I
+thought.
+
+But this ruin once granted, and the idle disappointment at its
+greatness overcome, there is endless material for study, instruction,
+and delight. It is the revelation of another life, and the utterance
+of the past is here more perfect than anywhere else in the world.
+Indeed, I think that the true friend of Pompeii should make it a
+matter of conscience, on entering the enchanted city, to cast out of
+his knowledge all the rubbish that has fallen into it from novels and
+travels, and to keep merely the facts of the town's luxurious life
+and agonizing death, with such incidents of the eruption as he can
+remember from the description of Pliny. These are the spells to
+which the sorcery yields, and with these in your thought you can
+rehabilitate the city until Ventisei seems to be a _valet de place_ of
+the first century, and yourselves a set of blond barbarians to whom he
+is showing off the splendors of one of the most brilliant towns of the
+empire of Titus. Those sad furrows in the pavement become vocal with
+the joyous rattle of chariot-wheels on a sudden, and you prudently
+step up on the narrow sidewalks and rub along by the little shops
+of wine, and grain, and oil, with which the thrifty voluptuaries of
+Pompeii flanked their street-doors. The counters of these shops run
+across their fronts, and are pierced with round holes on the top,
+through which you see dark depths of oil in the jars below, and not
+sullen lumps of ashes; those stately _amphoræ_ behind are full of
+wine, and in the corners are bags of wheat.
+
+"This house, with a shop on either side, whose is it, XXVI.?"
+
+"It is the house of the great Sallust, my masters. Would you like his
+autograph? I know one of his slaves who would sell it."
+
+You are a good deal stared at, naturally, as you pass by, for people
+in Pompeii have not much to do, and, besides, a Briton is not an
+every-day sight there, as he will be one of these centuries. The skins
+of wild beasts are little worn in Pompeii; and those bold-eyed Roman
+women think it rather odd that we should like to powder our shaggy
+heads with brick-dust. However, these are matters of taste. We, for
+our part, cannot repress a feeling of disgust at the loungers in the
+street, who, XXVI. tells us, are all going to soak themselves half the
+day in the baths yonder; for, if there is in Pompeii one thing more
+offensive than another to our savage sense of propriety, it is the
+personal cleanliness of the inhabitants. We little know what a change
+for the better will be wrought in these people with the lapse of time,
+and that they will yet come to wash themselves but once a year, as we
+do.
+
+(The reader may go on doing this sort of thing at some length for
+himself; and may imagine, if he pleases, a boastful conversation among
+the Pompeians at the baths, in which the barbarians hear how Agricola
+has broken the backbone of a rebellion in Britain; and in which all
+the speakers begin their observations with "Ho! my Lepidus!" and "Ha!
+my Diomed!" In the mean time we return to the present day, and step
+down the Street of Plenty along with Ventisei.)
+
+
+III.
+
+It is proper, after seeing the sites of some of the principal temples
+in Pompeii (such as those of Jupiter and Venus), to cross the fields
+that cover a great breadth of the buried city, and look into the
+amphitheatre, where, as every body knows, the lions had no stomach
+for Glaucus on the morning of the fatal eruption. The fields are now
+planted with cotton, and of course we thought those commonplaces about
+the wonder the Pompeians would feel could they come back to see that
+New-World plant growing above their buried homes. We might have told
+them, the day of our visit, that this cruel plant, so long watered
+with the tears of slaves, and fed with the blood of men, was now an
+exile from its native fields, where war was plowing with sword and
+shot the guilty land, and rooting up the subtlest fibres of the
+oppression in which cotton had grown king. And the ghosts of wicked
+old Pompeii, remembering the manifold sins that called the fires of
+hell to devour her, and thinking on this exiled plant, the latest
+witness of God's unforgetting justice, might well have shuddered,
+through all their shadow, to feel how terribly He destroys the enemies
+of Nature and man.
+
+But the only Pompeian presences which haunted our passage of the
+cotton-field were certain small
+
+  "Phantoms of delight,"
+
+with soft black eyes and graceful ways, who ran before us and plucked
+the bolls of the cotton and sold them to us. Embassies bearing red and
+white grapes were also sent out of the cottages to our excellencies;
+and there was some doubt of the currency of the coin which we gave
+these poor children in return.
+
+There are now but few peasants living on the land over the head of
+Pompeii, and the Government allows no sales of real estate to be made
+except to itself. The people who still dwell here can hardly be said
+to own their possessions, for they are merely allowed to cultivate
+the soil. A guard stationed night and day prevents them from making
+excavations, and they are severely restricted from entering the
+excavated quarters of the city alone.
+
+The cotton whitens over two thirds of Pompeii yet interred: happy the
+generation that lives to learn the wondrous secrets of that sepulchre!
+For, when you have once been at Pompeii, this phantasm of the past
+takes deeper hold on your imagination than any living city, and
+becomes and is the metropolis of your dreamland forever. O marvelous
+city! who shall reveal the cunning of your spell? Something not
+death, something not life--something that is the one when you turn
+to determine its essence as the other! What is it comes to me at this
+distance of that which I saw in Pompeii? The narrow and curving, but
+not crooked streets, with the blazing sun of that Neapolitan November
+falling into them, or clouding their wheel-worn lava with the black,
+black shadows of the many-tinted walls; the houses, and the gay
+columns of white, yellow, and red; the delicate pavements of mosaic;
+the skeletons of dusty cisterns and dead fountains; inanimate garden
+spaces with pygmy statues suited to their littleness; suites of fairy
+bed-chambers, painted with exquisite frescos; dining-halls with
+joyous scenes of hunt and banquet on their walls; the ruinous sites
+of temples; the melancholy emptiness of booths and shops and jolly
+drinking-houses; the lonesome tragic theatre, with a modern Pompeian
+drawing water from a well there; the baths with their roofs perfect
+yet, and the stucco bass-reliefs all but unharmed; around the whole,
+the city wall crowned with slender poplars; outside the gates, the
+long avenue of tombs, and the Appian Way stretching on to Stabiae;
+and, in the distance, Vesuvius, brown and bare, with his fiery breath
+scarce visible against the cloudless heaven;--these are the things
+that float before my fancy as I turn back to look at myself walking
+those enchanted streets, and to wonder if I could ever have been so
+blest.
+
+For there is nothing on the earth, or under it, like Pompeii.
+
+The amphitheatre, to which we came now, after our stroll across the
+cotton-fields, was small, like the vastest things in Pompeii, and had
+nothing of the stately magnificence of the Arena at Verona, nor any
+thing of the Roman Coliseum's melancholy and ruinous grandeur. But its
+littleness made it all the more comfortable and social, and, seated
+upon its benches under a cool awning, one could have almost chatted
+across the arena with one's friends; could have witnessed the
+spectacle on the sands without losing a movement of the quick
+gladiators, or an agony of the victim given to the beasts--which must
+have been very delightful to a Pompeian of companionable habits
+and fine feelings. It is quite impossible, however, that the bouts
+described by Bulwer as taking place all at the same time on the arena
+should really have done so: the combatants would have rolled and
+tumbled and trampled over each other an hundred times in the narrow
+space.
+
+Of all the voices with which it once rang the poor little amphitheatre
+has kept only an echo. But this echo is one of the most perfect ever
+heard: prompt clear, startling, it blew back the light chaff we threw
+to it with amazing vehemence, and almost made us doubt if it were not
+a direct human utterance. Yet how was Ventisei to know our names? And
+there was no one else to call them but ourselves. Our "_dolce duca_"
+gathered a nosegay from the crumbling ledges, and sat down in the cool
+of the once-cruel cells beneath, and put it prettily together for the
+ladies. When we had wearied ourselves with the echo he arose and led
+us back into Pompeii.
+
+
+IV.
+
+The plans of nearly all the houses in the city are alike: the
+entrance-room next the door; the parlor or drawing-room next that;
+then the _impluvium_, or unroofed space in the middle of the house,
+where the rains were caught and drained into the cistern, and where
+the household used to come to wash itself, primitively, as at a pump;
+the little garden, with its painted columns, behind the _impluvium_,
+and, at last, the dining-room. There are minute bed-chambers on either
+side, and, as I said, a shop at one side in front, for the sale of the
+master's grain, wine, and oil. The pavements of all the houses are of
+mosaic, which, in the better sort, is very delicate and beautiful, and
+is found sometimes perfectly uninjured. An exquisite pattern, often
+repeated, is a ground of tiny cubes of white marble with dots of black
+dropped regularly into it. Of course there were many picturesque and
+fanciful designs, of which the best have been removed to the Museum
+in Naples; but several good ones are still left, and (like that of the
+Wild Boar) give names to the houses in which they are found.
+
+But, after all, the great wonder, the glory, of these Pompeian houses
+is in their frescos. If I tried to give an idea of the luxury of color
+in Pompeii, the most gorgeous adjectives would be as poorly able to
+reproduce a vivid and glowing sense of those hues as the photography
+which now copies the drawing of the decorations; so I do not try.
+
+I know it is a cheap and feeble thought, and yet, let the reader
+please to consider: A workman nearly two thousand years laying upon
+the walls those soft lines that went to make up fauns and satyrs,
+nymphs and naiads, heroes and gods and goddesses; and getting weary
+and lying down to sleep, and dreaming of an eruption of the mountain;
+of the city buried under a fiery hail, and slumbering in its bed of
+ashes seventeen centuries; then of its being slowly exhumed, and,
+after another lapse of years, of some one coming to gather the shadow
+of that dreamer's work upon a plate of glass, that he might infinitely
+reproduce it and sell it to tourists at from five francs to fifty
+centimes a copy--I say, consider such a dream, dreamed in the hot
+heart of the day, after certain cups of Vesuvian wine! What a piece of
+_Katzenjämmer_ (I can use no milder term) would that workman think it
+when he woke again! Alas! what is history and the progress of the arts
+and sciences but one long _Katzenjämmer_!
+
+Photography cannot give, any more than I, the colors of the frescos,
+but it can do the drawing better, and, I suspect, the spirit also. I
+used the word workman, and not artist, in speaking of the decoration
+of the walls, for in most cases the painter was only an artisan, and
+did his work probably by the yard, as the artisan who paints walls and
+ceilings in Italy does at this day. But the old workman did his work
+much more skillfully and tastefully than the modern--threw on expanses
+of mellow color, delicately paneled off the places for the scenes, and
+penciled in the figures and draperies (there are usually more of the
+one than the other) with a deft hand. Of course, the houses of the
+rich were adorned by men of talent; but it is surprising to see the
+community of thought and feeling in all this work, whether it be from
+cunninger or clumsier hands. The subjects are nearly always chosen
+from the fables of the gods, and they are in illustration of the
+poets, Homer and the rest. To suit that soft, luxurious life which
+people led in Pompeii, the themes are commonly amorous, and sometimes
+not too chaste; there is much of Bacchus and Ariadne, much of Venus
+and Adonis, and Diana bathes a good deal with her nymphs,--not to
+mention frequent representations of the toilet of that beautiful
+monster which the lascivious art of the time loved to depict. One of
+the most pleasing of all the scenes is that in one of the houses, of
+the Judgment of Paris, in which the shepherd sits upon a bank in
+an attitude of ineffable and flattered importance, with one leg
+carelessly crossing the other, and both hands resting lightly on his
+shepherd's crook, while the goddesses before him await his sentence.
+Naturally the painter has done his best for the victress in this
+rivalry, and you see
+
+  "Idalian Aphrodite beautiful,"
+
+as she should be, but with a warm and piquant spice of girlish
+resentment in her attitude, that Paris should pause for an instant,
+which is altogether delicious.
+
+  "And I beheld great Here's angry eyes."
+
+Awful eyes! How did the painter make them? The wonder of all these
+pagan frescos is the mystery of the eyes--still, beautiful, unhuman.
+You cannot believe that it is wrong for those tranquil-eyed men and
+women to do evil, they look so calm and so unconscious in it all; and
+in the presence of the celestials, as they bend upon you those eternal
+orbs, in whose regard you are but a part of space, you feel that here
+art has achieved the unearthly. I know of no words in literature which
+give a _sense_ (nothing gives the idea) of the _stare_ of these gods,
+except that magnificent line of Kingsley's, describing the advance
+over the sea toward Andromeda of the oblivious and unsympathizing
+Nereids. They floated slowly up, and their eyes
+
+  "Stared on her, silent and still, like the eyes in the house
+  of the idols."
+
+The colors of this fresco of the Judgment of Paris are still so fresh
+and bright, that it photographs very well, but there are other frescos
+wherein there is more visible perfection of line, but in which the
+colors are so dim that they can only be reproduced by drawings. One of
+these is the Wounded Adonis cared for by Venus and the Loves; in which
+the story is treated with a playful pathos wonderfully charming.
+The fair boy leans in the languor of his hurt toward Venus, who sits
+utterly disconsolate beside him, while the Cupids busy themselves
+with such slight surgical offices as Cupids may render: one prepares a
+linen bandage for the wound, another wraps it round the leg of Adonis,
+another supports one of his heavy arms, another finds his own emotions
+too much for him and pauses to weep. It is a pity that the colors of
+this beautiful fresco are grown so dim, and a greater pity that most
+of the other frescos in Pompeii must share its fate, and fade away.
+The hues are vivid when the walls are first uncovered, and the ashes
+washed from the pictures, but then the malice of the elements begins
+anew, and rain and sun draw the life out of tints which the volcano
+failed to obliterate. In nearly all cases they could be preserved
+by throwing a roof above the walls, and it is a wonder that the
+Government does not take this slight trouble to save them.
+
+Among the frescos which told no story but their own, we were most
+pleased with one in a delicately painted little bed-chamber. This
+represented an alarmed and furtive man, whom we at once pronounced The
+Belated Husband, opening a door with a night-latch. Nothing could have
+been better than this miserable wretch's cowardly haste and cautious
+noiselessness in applying his key; apprehension sat upon his brow,
+confusion dwelt in his guilty eye. He had been out till two o'clock
+in the morning, electioneering for Pansa, the friend of the people
+("Pansa, and Roman gladiators," "Pansa, and Christians to the Beasts,"
+was the platform), and he had left his _placens uxor_ at home alone
+with the children, and now within this door that _placens uxor_
+awaited him!
+
+
+V.
+
+You have read, no doubt, of their discovering, a year or two since,
+in making an excavation in a Pompeian street, the molds of four human
+bodies, three women and a man, who fell down, blind and writhing, in
+the storm of fire eighteen hundred years ago; whose shape the settling
+and hardening ashes took; whose flesh wasted away, and whose bones lay
+there in the hollow of the matrix till the cunning of this time found
+them, and, pouring liquid plaster round the skeletons, clothed them
+with human form again, and drew them forth into the world once more.
+There are many things in Pompeii which bring back the gay life of the
+city, but nothing which so vividly reports the terrible manner of her
+death as these effigies of the creatures that actually shared it. The
+man in the last struggle has thrown himself upon his back and taken
+his doom sturdily--there is a sublime calm in his rigid figure. The
+women lie upon their faces, their limbs tossed and distorted, their
+drapery tangled and heaped about them, and in every fibre you see how
+hard they died. One presses her face into her handkerchief to draw
+one last breath unmixed with scalding steam; another's arms are wildly
+thrown abroad to clutch at help; another's hand is appealingly raised,
+and on her slight fingers you see the silver hoops with which her poor
+dead vanity adorned them.
+
+The guide takes you aside from the street into the house where they
+lie, and a dreadful shadow drops upon your heart as you enter their
+presence. Without, the hell-storm seems to fall again, and the whole
+sunny plain to be darkened with its ruin, and the city to send up the
+tumult of her despair.
+
+What is there left in Pompeii to speak of after this? The long street
+of tombs outside the walls? Those that died before the city's burial
+seem to have scarcely a claim to the solemnity of death.
+
+Shall we go see Diomed's Villa, and walk through the freedman's long
+underground vaults, where his friends thought to be safe, and were
+smothered in heaps? The garden-ground grows wild among its broken
+columns with weeds and poplar saplings; in one of the corridors they
+sell photographs, on which, if you please, Ventisei has his bottle,
+or drink-money. So we escape from the doom of the calamity, and so, at
+last, the severely forbidden _buonamano_ is paid. A dog may die many
+deaths besides choking with butter.
+
+We return slowly through the city, where we have spent the whole day,
+from nine till four o'clock. We linger on the way, imploring Ventisei
+if there is not something to be seen in this or that house; we make
+our weariness an excuse for sitting down, and cannot rend ourselves
+from the bliss of being in Pompeii.
+
+At last we leave its gates, and swear each other to come again many
+times while in Naples, and never go again.
+
+Perhaps it was as well. You cannot repeat great happiness.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM.
+
+I.
+
+The road from Naples to Herculaneum is, in fact, one long street; it
+hardly ceases to be city in Naples till it is town at Portici, and in
+the interval it is suburb, running between palatial lines of villas,
+which all have their names ambitiously painted over their doors. Great
+part of the distance this street is bordered by the bay, and, as far
+as this is the case, it is picturesque, as every thing is belonging to
+marine life in Italy. Sea-faring people go lounging up and down among
+the fishermen's boats drawn up on the shore, and among the fishermen's
+wives making nets, while the fishermen's children play and clamber
+everywhere, and over all flap and flutter the clothes hung on poles
+to dry. In this part of the street there are, of course, oysters, and
+grapes, and oranges, and cactus-pulps, and cutlery, and iced drinks
+to sell at various booths; and Commerce is exceedingly dramatic and
+boisterous over the bargains she offers; and equally, of course,
+murderous drinking shops lurk at intervals along the pavement, and
+lure into their recesses mariners of foreign birth, briefly ashore
+from their ships. The New York Coffee House is there to attract my
+maritime fellow-countrymen, and I know that if I look into that place
+of refreshment I shall see their honest, foolish faces flushed with
+drink, and with the excitement of buying the least they can for the
+most money. Poor souls! they shall drink that pleasant morning away
+in the society of Antonino the best of Neapolitans, and at midnight,
+emptied of every soldo, shall arise, wrung with a fearful suspicion
+of treachery, and wander away under Antonino's guidance to seek the
+protection of the Consul; or, taking the law into their own hands,
+shall proceed to clean out, _more Americano_, the New York Coffee
+House, when Antonino shall develop into one of the landlords, and
+deal them the most artistic stab in Naples: handsome, worthy Antonino;
+tender-eyed, subtle, pitiless!
+
+
+II.
+
+Where the road to Herculaneum leaves the bay and its seafaring life,
+it enters, between the walls of lofty, fly-blown houses, a world of
+maccaroni haunted by foul odors, beggars, poultry, and insects. There
+were few people to be seen on the street, but through the open doors
+of the lofty fly-blown houses we saw floury legions at work making
+maccaroni; grinding maccaroni, rolling it, cutting it, hanging it
+in mighty skeins to dry, and gathering it when dried, and putting it
+away. By the frequency of the wine-shops we judged that the legions
+were a thirsty host, and by the number of the barber-surgeons' shops,
+that they were a plethoric and too full-blooded host. The latter shops
+were in the proportion of one to five of the former; and the artist
+who had painted their signs had indulged his fancy in wild excesses of
+phlebotomy. We had found that, as we came south from Venice, science
+grew more and more sanguinary in Italy, and more and more disposed to
+let blood. At Ferrara, even, the propensity began to be manifest on
+the barbers' signs, which displayed the device of an arm lanced at
+the elbow, and jetting the blood by a neatly described curve into a
+tumbler. Further south the same arm was seen to bleed at the wrist
+also; and at Naples an exhaustive treatment of the subject appeared,
+the favorite study of the artist being to represent a nude figure
+reclining in a genteel attitude on a bank of pleasant greensward, and
+bleeding from the elbows, wrists, hands, ankles, and feet.
+
+
+III.
+
+In Naples everywhere one is surprised by the great number of English
+names which appear on business houses, but it was entirely bewildering
+to read a bill affixed to the gate of one of the villas on this road:
+"This Desirable Property for Sale." I should scarcely have cared to
+buy that desirable property, though the neighborhood seemed to be a
+favorite summer resort, and there were villas, as I said, nearly the
+whole way to Portici. Those which stood with their gardens toward the
+bay would have been tolerable, no doubt, if they could have kept their
+windows shut to the vile street before their doors; but the houses
+opposite could have had no escape from its stench and noisomeness. It
+was absolutely the filthiest street I have seen anywhere outside of
+New York, excepting only that little street which, in Herculaneum,
+leads from the theatre to the House of Argo.
+
+This pleasant avenue has a stream of turbid water in its centre,
+bordered by begging children, and is either fouler or cleaner for the
+water, but I shall never know which. It is at a depth of some fifty or
+sixty feet below the elevation on which the present city of Portici is
+built, and is part of the excavation made long ago to reach the plain
+on which Herculaneum stands, buried under its half-score of successive
+layers of lava, and ashes, and Portici. We had the aid of all the
+virtuous poverty and leisure of the modern town--there was a vast
+deal of both, we found--in our search for the staircase by which you
+descend to the classic plain, and it proved a discovery involving the
+outlay of all the copper coin about us, while the sight of the famous
+theatre of Herculaneum was much more expensive than it would have been
+had we come there in the old time to see a play of Plautus or Terence.
+
+As for the theatre, "the large and highly ornamented theatre" of which
+I read, only a little while ago, in an encyclopedia, we found it, by
+the light of our candles, a series of gloomy hollows, of the general
+complexion of coal-bins and potato-cellars. It was never perfectly
+dug out of the lava, and, as is known, it was filled up in the last
+century, together with other excavations, when they endangered the
+foundations of worthless Portici overhead. (I am amused to find myself
+so hot upon the poor property-holders of Portici. I suppose I should
+not myself, even for the cause of antiquity and the knowledge of
+classic civilization, like to have my house tumbled about my ears.)
+But though it was impossible in the theatre of Herculaneum to gain
+any idea of its size or richness, I remembered there the magnificent
+bronzes which had been found in it, and did a hasty reverence to
+the place. Indeed, it is amazing, when one sees how small a part of
+Herculaneum has been uncovered, to consider the number of fine works
+of art in the Museo Borbonico which were taken thence, and which argue
+a much richer and more refined community than that of Pompeii. A third
+of the latter city has now been restored to the light of day; but
+though it has yielded abundance of all the things that illustrate the
+domestic and public life, and the luxury and depravity of those old
+times, and has given the once secret rooms of the museum their worst
+attraction, it still falls far below Herculaneum in the value of its
+contributions to the treasures of classic art, except only in the
+variety and beauty of its exquisite frescos.
+
+The effect of this fact is to stimulate the imagination of the visitor
+to that degree that nothing short of the instant destruction of
+Portici and the excavation of all Herculaneum will satisfy him. If the
+opening of one theatre, and the uncovering of a basilica and two
+or three houses, have given such richness to us, what delight and
+knowledge would not the removal of these obdurate hills of ashes and
+lava bestow!
+
+Emerging from the coal-bins and potato-cellars, the visitor
+extinguishes his candle with a pathetic sigh, profusely rewards the
+custodian (whom he connects in some mysterious way with the ancient
+population of the injured city about him), and, thoughtfully removing
+the tallow from his fingers, follows the course of the vile stream
+already sung, and soon arrives at the gate opening into the exhumed
+quarter of Herculaneum. And there he finds a custodian who enters
+perfectly into his feelings; a custodian who has once been a guide in
+Pompeii, but now despises that wretched town, and would not be
+guide there for any money since he has known the superior life of
+Herculaneum; who, in fine, feels toward Pompeii as a Bostonian feels
+toward New York. Yet the reader would be wrong to form the idea that
+there is bitterness in the disdain of this custodian. On the contrary,
+he is one of the best-natured men in the world. He is a mighty mass of
+pinguid bronze, with a fat lisp, and a broad, sunflower smile, and
+he lectures us with a vast and genial breadth of manner on the
+ruins, contradicting all our guesses at things with a sweet "Perdoni,
+signori! ma----." At the end, we find that he has some medallions of
+lava to sell: there is Victor Emanuel, or, if we are of the _partito
+d'azione_, there is Garibaldi; both warm yet from the crater of
+Vesuvius, and of the same material which destroyed Herculaneum. We
+decline to buy and the custodian makes the national shrug and grimace
+(signifying that we are masters of the situation, and that he washes
+his hands of the consequence of our folly) on the largest scale that
+we have ever seen: his mighty hands are rigidly thrust forth, his
+great lip protruded, his enormous head thrown back to bring his
+face on a level with his chin. The effect is tremendous, but we
+nevertheless feel that he loves us the same.
+
+
+IV.
+
+The afternoon on which we visited Herculaneum was in melancholy
+contrast to the day we spent in Pompeii. The lingering summer had at
+last saddened into something like autumnal gloom, and that blue, blue
+sky of Naples was overcast. So, this second draught of the spirit
+of the past had not only something of the insipidity of custom, but
+brought rather a depression than a lightness to our hearts. There was
+so little of Herculaneum: only a few hundred yards square are exhumed,
+and we counted the houses easily on the fingers of one hand, leaving
+the thumb to stand for the few rods of street that, with its flagging
+of lava and narrow border of foot-walks, lay between; and though the
+custodian, apparently moved at our dejection, said that the excavation
+was to be resumed the very next week, the assurance did little to
+restore our cheerfulness. Indeed, I fancy that these old cities must
+needs be seen in the sunshine by those who would feel what gay lives
+they once led; by dimmer light they are very sullen spectres, and
+their doom still seems to brood upon them. I know that even Pompeii
+could not have been joyous that sunless afternoon, for what there was
+to see of mournful Herculaneum was as brilliant with colors as any
+thing in the former city. Nay, I believe that the tints of the frescos
+and painted columns were even brighter, and that the walls of the
+houses were far less ruinous than those of Pompeii. But no house was
+wholly freed from lava, and the little street ran at the rear of the
+buildings which were supposed to front on some grander avenue not yet
+exhumed. It led down, as the custodian pretended, to a wharf, and he
+showed an iron ring in the wall of the House of Argo, standing at the
+end of the street, to which, he said, his former fellow-citizens used
+to fasten their boats, though it was all dry enough there now.
+
+There is evidence in Herculaneum of much more ambitious domestic
+architecture than seems to have been known in Pompeii. The ground-plan
+of the houses in the two cities is alike; but in the former there was
+often a second story, as was proven by the charred ends of beams still
+protruding from the walls, while in the latter there is only one house
+which is thought to have aspired to a second floor. The House of Argo
+is also much larger than any in Pompeii, and its appointments were
+more magnificent. Indeed, we imagined that in this more purely
+Greek town we felt an atmosphere of better taste in every thing than
+prevailed in the fashionable Roman watering-place, though this, too,
+was a summer resort of the "best society" of the empire. The mosaic
+pavements were exquisite, and the little bed-chambers dainty and
+delicious in their decorations. The lavish delight in color found
+expression in the vividest hues upon the walls, and not only were the
+columns of the garden painted, but the foliage of the capitals was
+variously tinted. The garden of the House of Argo was vaster than any
+of the classic world which we had yet seen, and was superb with a
+long colonnade of unbroken columns. Between these and the walls of
+the houses was a pretty pathway of mosaic, and in the midst once stood
+marble tables, under which the workmen exhuming the city found certain
+crouching skeletons. At one end was the dining-room, of course, and
+painted on the wall was a lady with a parasol.
+
+I thought all Herculaneum sad enough, but the profusion of flowers
+growing wild in this garden gave it a yet more tender and pathetic
+charm. Here--where so long ago the flowers had bloomed, and perished
+in the terrible blossoming of the mountain that sent up its fires
+in the awful similitude of Nature's harmless and lovely forms, and
+showered its destroying petals all abroad--was it not tragic to find
+again the soft tints, the graceful shapes, the sweet perfumes of the
+earth's immortal life? Of them that planted and tended and plucked and
+bore in their bosoms and twined in their hair these fragile children
+of the summer, what witness in the world? Only the crouching skeletons
+under the tables. Alas and alas!
+
+
+V.
+
+The skeletons went with us throughout Herculaneum, and descended
+into the cell, all green with damp, under the basilica, and lay down,
+fettered and manacled in the place of those found there beside the big
+bronze kettle in which the prisoners used to cook their dinners. How
+ghastly the thought of it was! If we had really seen this kettle and
+the skeletons there--as we did not--we could not have suffered more
+than we did. They took all the life out of the House of Perseus, and
+the beauty from his pretty little domestic temple to the Penates, and
+this was all there was left in Herculaneum to see.
+
+"Is there nothing else?" we demand of the custodian.
+
+"Signori, this is all."
+
+"It is mighty little."
+
+"Perdoni, signori! ma----."
+
+"Well," we say sourly to each other, glancing round at the walls of
+the pit, on the bottom of which the bit of city stands, "it is a good
+thing to know that Herculaneum amounts to nothing."
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES.
+
+I.
+
+I have no doubt
+
+  "Calm Capri waits,"
+
+where we left it, in the Gulf of Salerno, for any traveller who may
+choose to pay it a visit; but at the time we were there we felt that
+it was on exhibition for that day only, and would, when we departed,
+disappear in its sapphire sea, and be no more; just as Niagara ceases
+to play as soon as your back is turned, and Venice goes out like a
+pyrotechnic display, and all marvelously grand and lovely things make
+haste to prove their impermanence.
+
+We delayed some days in Naples in hopes of fine weather, and at last
+chose a morning that was warm and cloudy at nine o'clock, and burst
+into frequent passions of rain before we reached Sorrento at noon
+The first half of the journey was made by rail, and brought us to
+Castellamare, whence we took carriage for Sorrento, and oranges, and
+rapture,--winding along the steep shore of the sea, and under the
+brows of wooded hills that rose high above us into the misty weather,
+and caught here and there the sunshine on their tops. In that heavenly
+climate no day can long be out of humor, and at Sorrento we found
+ours very pleasant, and rode delightedly through the devious streets,
+looking up to the terraced orange-groves on one hand, and down to the
+terraced orange-groves on the other, until at a certain turning of the
+way we encountered Antonino Occhio d'Argento, whom fate had appointed
+to be our boatman to Capri. We had never heard of Antonino before, and
+indeed had intended to take a boat from one of the hotels; but when
+this corsair offered us his services, there was that guile in his
+handsome face, that cunning in his dark eyes, that heart could not
+resist, and we halted our carriage and took him at once.
+
+He kept his boat in one of those caverns which honey-comb the cliff
+under Sorrento, and afford a natural and admirable shelter for such
+small craft as may be dragged up out of reach of the waves, and here I
+bargained with him before finally agreeing to go with him to Capri.
+In Italy it is customary for a public carrier when engaged to give
+his employer as a pledge the sum agreed upon for the service, which is
+returned with the amount due him, at the end, if the service has been
+satisfactory; and I demanded of Antonino this _caparra_, as it is
+called. "What _caparra_?" said he, lifting the lid of his wicked eye
+with his forefinger, "this is the best _caparra_," meaning a face
+as honest and trustworthy as the devil's. The stroke confirmed my
+subjection to Antonino, and I took his boat without further parley,
+declining even to feel the muscle of his boatmen's arms, which he
+exposed to my touch in evidence that they were strong enough to row us
+swiftly to Capri. The men were but two in number, but they tossed the
+boat lightly into the surf, and then lifted me aboard, and rowed to
+the little pier from which the ladies and T. got in.
+
+The sun shone, the water danced and sparkled, and presently we raised
+our sail, and took the gale that blew for Capri--an oblong height
+rising ten miles beyond out of the heart of the azure gulf. On the way
+thither there was little interest but that of natural beauty in the
+bold, picturesque coast we skirted for some distance; though on
+one mighty rock there were the ruins of a seaward-looking Temple of
+Hercules, with arches of the unmistakable Roman masonry, below
+which the receding waves rushed and poured over a jetting ledge in a
+thunderous cataract.
+
+Antonino did his best to entertain us, and lectured us unceasingly
+upon his virtue and his wisdom, dwelling greatly on the propriety and
+good policy of always speaking the truth. This spectacle of veracity
+became intolerable after a while, and I was goaded to say: "Oh then,
+if you never tell lies, you expect to go to Paradise." "Not at all,"
+answered Antonino compassionately, "for I have sinned much. But the
+lie doesn't go ahead" (_non va avanti_), added this Machiavelli of
+boatmen; yet I think he was mistaken, for he deceived us with perfect
+ease and admirable success. All along, he had pretended that we could
+see Capri, visit the Blue Grotto, and return that day; but as we drew
+near the island, painful doubts began to trouble him, and he feared
+the sea would be too rough for the Grotto part of the affair. "But
+there will be an old man," he said, with a subtile air of prophecy,
+"waiting for us on the beach. This old man is one of the Government
+guides to the Grotto, and he will say whether it is to be seen
+to-day."
+
+And certainly there was the old man on the beach--a short patriarch,
+with his baldness covered by a kind of bloated woolen sock--a
+blear-eyed sage, and a bare-legged. He waded through the surf toward
+the boat, and when we asked him whether the Grotto was to be seen, he
+paused knee-deep in the water, (at a secret signal from Antonino, as
+I shall always believe,) put on a face of tender solemnity, threw back
+his head a little, brought his hand to his cheek, expanded it, and
+said, "No; to-day, no! To-morrow, yes!" Antonino leaped joyously
+ashore, and delivered us over to the old man, to be guided to the
+Hotel di Londra, while he drew his boat upon the land. He had reason
+to be contented, for this artifice of the patriarch of Capri relieved
+him from the necessity of verifying to me the existence of an officer
+of extraordinary powers in the nature of a consul, who, he said, would
+not permit boats to leave Capri for the main-land after five o'clock
+in the evening.
+
+When it was decided that we should remain on the island till the
+morrow, we found so much time on our hands, after bargaining for
+our lodging at the Hotel di Londra, that we resolved to ascend the
+mountain to the ruins of the palaces of Tiberius, and to this end we
+contracted for the services of certain of the muletresses that had
+gathered about the inn-gate, clamorously offering their beasts. The
+muletresses chosen were a matron of mature years and of a portly habit
+of body; her daughter, a mere child; and her niece, a very pretty girl
+of eighteen, with a voice soft and sweet as a bird's. They placed
+the ladies, one on each mule, and then, while the mother and daughter
+devoted themselves to the hind-quarters of the foremost animal,
+the lovely niece brought up the rear of the second beast, and the
+patriarch went before, and T. and I trudged behind. So the cavalcade
+ascended; first, from the terrace of the hotel overlooking the bit
+of shipping village on the beach, and next from the town of Capri,
+clinging to the hill-sides, midway between sea and sky, until at last
+it reached the heights on which the ruins stand. Our way was through
+narrow lanes, bordered by garden walls; then through narrow streets
+bordered by dirty houses; and then again by gardens, but now of a
+better sort than the first, and belonging to handsome villas.
+
+On the road our pretty muletress gossiped cheerfully, and our
+patriarch gloomily, and between the two we accumulated a store of
+information concerning the present inhabitants of Capri, which, I am
+sorry to say, has now for the most part failed me. I remember that
+they said most of the land-owners at Capri were Neapolitans, and that
+these villas were their country-houses; though they pointed out one
+of the stateliest of the edifices as belonging to a certain English
+physician who had come to visit Capri for a few days, and had now been
+living on the island twenty years, having married (said the
+muletress) the prettiest and poorest girl in the town, from this
+romance--something like which the muletress seemed to think might
+well happen concerning herself--we passed lightly to speak of kindred
+things, the muletress responding gayly between the blows she bestowed
+upon her beast. The accent of these Capriotes has something of German
+harshness and heaviness: they say _non bosso_ instead of _non posso_,
+and _monto_ instead of _mondo_, and interchange the _t_ and _d_ a good
+deal; and they use for father the Latin _pater_, instead of _padre_.
+But this girl's voice, as I said, was very musical, and the island's
+accent was sweet upon her tongue.
+
+_I_.--What is your name?
+
+_She_.--Caterina, little sir (signorin).
+
+_I_.--And how old are you, Caterina?
+
+_She_.--Eighteen, little sir.
+
+_I_.--And you are betrothed?
+
+She feigns not to understand; but the patriarch, who has dropped
+behind to listen to our discourse, explains,--"He asks if you are in
+love."
+
+_She_.--Ah, no! little sir, not yet.
+
+_I_.--No? A little late, it seems to me. I think there must be some
+good-looking youngster who pleases you--no?
+
+_She_.--Ah, no! one must work, one cannot think of marrying. We are
+four sisters, and we have only the _buonamano_ from hiring these
+mules, and we must spin and cook.
+
+_The Patriarch_.--Don't believe her; she has two lovers.
+
+_She._--Ah, no! It isn't true. He tells a fib--he!
+
+But, nevertheless, she seemed to love to be accused of lovers,--such
+is the guile of the female heart in Capri,--and laughed over the
+patriarch's wickedness. She confided that she ate maccaroni once
+a day, and she talked constantly of eating it just as the Northern
+Italians always talk of _polenta._ She was a true daughter of the
+isle, and had never left it but once in her life, when she went to
+Naples. "Naples was beautiful, yes; but one always loves one's own
+country the best." She was very attentive and good, but at the end was
+rapacious of more and more _buonamano_. "Have patience with her, sir,"
+said the blameless Antonino, who witnessed her greediness; "they do
+not understand certain matters here, poor little things!"
+
+As for the patriarch, he was full of learning relative to himself and
+to Capri; and told me with much elaboration that the islanders lived
+chiefly by fishing, and gained something also by their vineyards. But
+they were greatly oppressed by taxes, and the strict enforcement
+of the conscriptions, and they had little love for the Italian
+Government, and wished the Bourbons back again. The Piedmontese,
+indeed, misgoverned them horribly. There was the Blue Grotto, for
+example: formerly travellers paid the guides five, six, ten francs for
+viewing it; but now the Piedmontese had made a tariff, and the poor
+guides could only exact a franc from each person. Things were in a
+ruinous condition.
+
+By this we had arrived at a little inn on the top of the mountain,
+very near the ruins of the palaces, "Here," said the patriarch, "it is
+customary for strangers to drink a bottle of the wine of Tiberius." We
+obediently entered the hostelry, and the landlord--a white-toothed,
+brown-faced, good-humored peasant--gallantly ran forward and presented
+the ladies with bouquets of roses. We thought it a pretty and graceful
+act, but found later that it was to be paid for, like all pretty and
+graceful things in Italy; for when we came to settle for the wine, and
+the landlord wanted more than justice, he urged that he had presented
+the ladies with flowers,--yet he equally gave me his benediction when
+I refused to pay for his politeness.
+
+"Now here," again said the patriarch in a solemn whisper, "you can see
+the Tarantella danced for two francs; whereas down at your inn, if you
+hire the dancers through your landlord, it will cost you five or six
+francs." The difference was tempting, and decided us in favor of an
+immediate Tarantella. The muletresses left their beasts to browse
+about the door of the inn and came into the little public room, where
+were already the wife and sister of the landlord, and took their
+places _vis-à-vis_, while the landlord seized his tambourine and
+beat from it a wild and lively measure. The women were barefooted
+and hoopless, and they gave us the Tarantella with all the beauty of
+natural movement and free floating drapery, and with all that splendid
+grace of pose which animates the antique statues and pictures of
+dancers. They swayed themselves in time with the music; then, filled
+with its passionate impulse, advanced and retreated and whirled
+away;--snapping their fingers above their heads, and looking over
+their shoulders with a gay and a laughing challenge to each other,
+they drifted through the ever-repeated figures of flight and wooing,
+and wove for us pictures of delight that remained upon the brain like
+the effect of long-pondered vivid colors, and still return to illumine
+and complete any representation of that indescribable dance. Heaven
+knows what peril there might have been in the beauty and grace of the
+pretty muletress but for the spectacle of her fat aunt, who, I must
+confess, could only burlesque some of her niece's airiest movements,
+and whose hard-bought buoyancy was at once pathetic and laughable. She
+earned her share of the spoils certainly, and she seemed glad when the
+dance was over, and went contentedly back to her mule.
+
+The patriarch had early retired from the scene as from a vanity with
+which he was too familiar for enjoyment, and I found him, when the
+Tarantella was done, leaning on the curb of the precipitous rock
+immediately behind the inn, over which the Capriotes say Tiberius used
+to cast the victims of his pleasures after he was sated with them.
+These have taken their place in the insular imagination as Christian
+martyrs, though it is probable that the poor souls were any thing but
+Nazarenes. It took a stone thrown from the brink of the rock twenty
+seconds to send back a response from the water below, and the depth
+was too dizzying to look into. So we looked instead toward Amalfi,
+across the Gulf of Salerno, and toward Naples, across her bay. On
+every hand the sea was flushed with sunset, and an unspeakable calm
+dwelt upon it, while the heights rising from it softened and softened
+in the distance, and withdrew themselves into dreams of ghostly
+solitude and phantom city. His late majesty the Emperor Tiberius is
+well known to have been a man of sentiment, and he may often have
+sought this spot to enjoy the evening hour. It was convenient to his
+palace, and he could here give a fillip to his jaded sensibilities
+by popping a boon companion over the cliff, and thus enjoy the fine
+poetic contrast which his perturbed and horrible spirit afforded to
+that scene of innocence and peace. Later he may have come hither also,
+when lust failed, when all the lewd plays and devices of his fancy
+palled upon his senses, when sin had grown insipid and even murder
+ceased to amuse, and his majesty uttered his despair to the Senate in
+that terrible letter: "What to write to you, or how to write, I
+know not; and what not to write at this time, may all the gods and
+goddesses torment me wore than I daily feel that I suffer if I do
+know."
+
+The poor patriarch was also a rascal in his small way, and he
+presently turned to me with a countenance full of cowardly trouble and
+base remorse, "I pray you, little sir, not to tell the landlord
+below there that you have seen the Tarantella danced here; for he has
+daughters and friends to dance it for strangers, and gets a deal of
+money by it. So, if he asks you to see it, do me the pleasure to say,
+lest he should take on (_pigliarsi_) with me about it: 'Thanks, but we
+saw the Tarantella at Pompeii!'" It was the last place in Italy where
+we were likely to have seen the Tarantella; but these simple people
+are improvident in lying, as in every thing else.
+
+The patriarch had a curious spice of malice in him, which prompted
+him to speak evil of all, and to as many as he dared. After we had
+inspected the ruins of the emperor's villa, a clownish imbecile of
+a woman, professing to be the wife of the peasant who had made the
+excavations, came forth out of a cleft in the rock and received
+tribute of us--why, I do not know. The patriarch abetted the
+extortion, but Parthianly remarked, as we turned away, "Her husband
+ought to be here; but this is a _festa_, and he is drinking and gaming
+in the village," while the woman protested that he was sick at home.
+There was also a hermit living in great publicity among the ruins, and
+the patriarch did not spare him a sneering comment. [This hermit I
+have heard was not brought up to the profession of anchorite, but was
+formerly a shoemaker, and according to his own confession abandoned
+his trade because he could better indulge a lethargic habit in the
+character of religious recluse.] He had even a bad word for Tiberius,
+and reproached the emperor for throwing people over the cliff, though
+I think it a sport in which he would himself have liked to join. The
+only human creatures with whom he seemed to be in sympathy were the
+brigands of the main-land, of whom he spoke poetically as exiles and
+fugitives.
+
+As for the palace of Tiberius, which we had come go far and so
+toilsomely to see, it must be confessed there was very little left
+of it. When that well-meaning but mistaken prince died, the Senate
+demolished his pleasure-houses at Capri, and left only those
+fragments of the beautiful brick masonry which yet remain, clinging
+indestructible to the rocks, and strewing the ground with rubbish. The
+recent excavations have discovered nothing besides the uninteresting
+foundations of the building, except a subterranean avenue leading
+from one part of the palace to another: this is walled with delicate
+brickwork, and exquisitely paved with white marble mosaic; and this
+was all that witnessed of the splendor of the wicked emperor. Nature,
+the all-forgetting, all-forgiving, that takes the red battle-field
+into her arms and hides it with blossom and harvest, could not
+remember his iniquity, greater than the multitudinous murder of war.
+The sea, which the despot's lust and fear had made so lonely, slept
+with the white sails of boats secure upon its breast; the little bays
+and inlets, the rocky clefts and woody dells, had forgotten their
+desecration; and the gathering twilight, the sweetness of the
+garden-bordered pathway, and the serenity of the lonely landscape,
+helped us to doubt history.
+
+We slowly returned to the inn by the road we had ascended, noting
+again the mansion of the surprising Englishman who had come to Capri
+for three months and had remained thirty years; passed through the
+darkness of the village,--dropped here and there with the vivid red of
+a lamp,--and so reached the inn at last, where we found the landlord
+ready to have the Tarantella danced for us. We framed a discreeter
+fiction than that prepared for us by the patriarch, and went in to
+dinner, where there were two Danish gentlemen in dispute with as many
+rogues of boatmen, who, having contracted to take them back that night
+to Naples, were now trying to fly their bargain and remain at Capri
+till the morrow. The Danes beat them, however, and then sat down
+to dinner, and to long stories of the imposture and villany of the
+Italians. One of them chiefly bewailed himself that the day before,
+having unwisely eaten a dozen oysters without agreeing first with the
+oyster-man upon the price, he had been obliged to pay this scamp's
+extortionate demand to the full, since he was unable to restore him
+his property. We thought that something like this might have happened
+to an imprudent man in any country, but we did not the less join him
+in abusing the Italians--the purpose for which foreigners chiefly
+visit Italy.
+
+
+II.
+
+Standing on the height among the ruins of Tiberius's palace, the
+patriarch had looked out over the waters, and predicted for the morrow
+the finest weather that had ever been known in that region; but in
+spite of this prophecy the day dawned stormily, and at breakfast time
+we looked out doubtfully on waves lashed by driving rain. The entrance
+to the Blue Grotto, to visit which we had come to Capri, is by a
+semicircular opening, some three feet in width and two feet in height,
+and just large enough to admit a small boat. One lies flat in the
+bottom of this, waits for the impulse of a beneficent wave, and is
+carried through the mouth of the cavern, and rescued from it in like
+manner by some receding billow. When the wind is in the wrong quarter,
+it is impossible to enter the grot at all; and we waited till nine
+o'clock for the storm to abate before we ventured forth. In the mean
+time one of the Danish gentlemen, who--after assisting his companion
+to compel the boatmen to justice the night before--had stayed at
+Capri, and had risen early to see the grotto, returned from it, and we
+besieged him with a hundred questions concerning it. But he preserved
+the wise silence of the boy who goes in to see the six-legged calf,
+and comes out impervious to the curiosity of all the boys who are
+doubtful whether the monster is worth their money. Our Dane would
+merely say that it was now possible to visit the Blue Grotto; that he
+had seen it; that he was glad he _had_ seen it. As to its blueness,
+Messieurs--yes, it is blue. _C'est i dire_....
+
+The ladies had been amusing themselves with a perusal of the hotel
+register, and the notes of admiration or disgust with which the
+different sojourners at the inn had filled it. As a rule, the English
+people found fault with the poor little hostelry and the French people
+praised it. Commander Joshing and Lieutenant Prattent, R.N., of
+the former nation, "were cheated by the donkey women, and thought
+themselves extremely fortunate to have escaped with their lives from
+the effects of Capri vintage. The landlord was an old Cossack." On the
+other hand, we read, "J. Cruttard, homme de lettres, a passè quinze
+jours ici, et n'a eu que des félicités du patron de cêt hôtel et de sa
+famille." Cheerful man of letters! His good-natured record will keep
+green a name little known to literature. Who are G. Bradshaw, Duke
+of New York, and Signori Jones and Andrews, Hereditary Princes of the
+United States? Their patrician names followed the titles of several
+English nobles in the register. But that which most interested the
+ladies in this record was the warning of a terrified British matron
+against any visit to the Blue Grotto except in the very calmest
+weather. The British matron penned her caution after an all but fatal
+experience. The ladies read it aloud to us, and announced that for
+themselves they would be contented with pictures of the Blue Grotto
+and our account of its marvels.
+
+On the beach below the hotel lay the small boats of the guides to the
+Blue Grotto, and we descended to take one of them. The fixed rate is a
+franc for each person. The boatmen wanted five francs for each of us.
+We explained that although not indigenous to Capri, or even Italy,
+we were not of the succulent growth of travellers, and would not be
+eaten. We retired to our vantage ground on the heights. The guides
+called us to the beach again. They would take us for three francs
+apiece, or say six francs for both of us. We withdrew furious to the
+heights again, where we found honest Antonino, who did us the pleasure
+to yell to his fellow-scoundrels on the beach, "You had better take
+these signori for a just price. They are going to the syndic to
+complain of you." At which there arose a lamentable outcry among the
+boatmen, and they called with one voice for us to come down and go
+for a franc apiece. This fable teaches that common-carriers are rogues
+everywhere; but that whereas we are helpless in their hands at home,
+we may bully them into rectitude in Italy, where they are afraid of
+the law.
+
+We had scarcely left the landing of the hotel in the boat of the
+patriarch--for I need hardly say he was first and most rapacious of
+the plundering crew--when we found ourselves in very turbulent waters,
+in the face of mighty bluffs, rising inaccessible from the sea. Here
+and there, where their swarthy fronts were softened with a little
+verdure, goat-paths wound up and down among the rocks; and midway
+between the hotel and the grotto, in a sort of sheltered nook, we saw
+the Roman masonry of certain antique baths--baths of Augustus, says
+Valery; baths of Tiberius, say the Capriotes, zealous for the honor
+of their infamous hero. Howbeit, this was all we saw on the way to
+the Blue Grotto. Every moment the waves rose higher, emulous of the
+bluffs, which would not have afforded a foothold, or any thing to
+cling to, had we been upset and washed against them--and we began
+to talk of the immortality of the soul. As we neared the grotto, the
+patriarch entertained us with stories of the perilous adventures of
+people who insisted upon entering it in stormy weather,--especially
+of a French painter who had been imprisoned in it four days, and kept
+alive only on rum, which the patriarch supplied him, swimming into
+the grotto with a bottle-full at a time. "And behold us arrived,
+gentlemen!" said he, as he brought the boat skillfully around in front
+of the small semicircular opening at the base of the lofty bluff. We
+lie flat on the bottom of the boat, and complete the immersion of that
+part of our clothing which the driving torrents of rain had spared.
+The wave of destiny rises with us upon its breast--sinks, and we are
+inside of the Blue Grotto. Not so much blue as gray, however, and the
+water about the mouth of it green rather than azure. They say that
+on a sunny day both the water and the roof of the cavern are of the
+vividest cerulean tint--and I saw the grotto so represented in the
+windows of the paint-shops at Naples. But to my own experience it did
+not differ from other caves in color or form: there was the customary
+clamminess in the air; the sound of dropping water; the sense of dull
+and stupid solitude,--a little relieved in this case by the mighty
+music of the waves breaking against the rocks outside. The grot is not
+great in extent, and the roof in the rear shelves gradually down to
+the water. Valery says that some remains of a gallery have caused
+the supposition that the grotto was once the scene of Tiberius's
+pleasures; and the Prussian painter who discovered the cave was led
+to seek it by something he had read of a staircase by which Barbarossa
+used to descend into a subterranean retreat from the town of Anacapri
+on the mountain top. The slight fragment of ruin which we saw in one
+corner of the cave might be taken in confirmation of both theories;
+but the patriarch attributed the work to Barbarossa, being probably
+tired at last of hearing Tiberius so much talked about.
+
+We returned, soaked and disappointed, to the hotel, where we found
+Antonino very doubtful about the possibility of getting back that day
+to Sorrento, and disposed, when pooh-poohed out of the notion of bad
+weather, to revive the fiction of a prohibitory consul. He was staying
+in Capri at our expense, and the honest fellow would willingly have
+spent a fortnight there.
+
+We summoned the landlord to settlement, and he came with all his
+household to present the account,--each one full of visible longing,
+yet restrained from asking _buonamano_ by a strong sense of previous
+contract. It was a deadly struggle with them, but they conquered
+themselves, and blessed us as we departed. The pretty muletress took
+leave of us on the beach, and we set sail for Sorrento, the ladies
+crouching in the bottom of the boat, and taking their sea-sickness in
+silence. As we drew near the beautiful town, we saw how it lay on
+a plateau, at the foot of the mountains, but high above the sea.
+Antonino pointed out to us the house of Tasso,--in which the novelist
+Cooper also resided when in Sorrento,--a white house not handsomer nor
+uglier than the rest, with a terrace looking out over the water. The
+bluffs are pierced by numerous arched caverns, as I have said,
+giving shelter to the fishermen's boats, and here and there a devious
+stairway mounts to their crests. Up one of these we walked, noting how
+in the house above us the people, with that puerility usually
+mixed with the Italian love of beauty, had placed painted busts of
+terra-cotta in the windows to simulate persons looking out. There was
+nothing to blame in the breakfast we found ready at the Hotel Rispoli;
+and as for the grove of slender, graceful orange-trees in the midst
+of which the hotel stood, and which had lavished the fruit in every
+direction on the ground, why, I would willingly give for it all the
+currant-bushes, with their promises of jelly and jam, on which I gaze
+at this moment.
+
+Antonino attended us to our carriage when we went away. He had kept
+us all night at Capri, it is true, and he had brought us in at the end
+for a prodigious _buonamano_; yet I cannot escape the conviction that
+he parted from us with an unfulfilled purpose of greater plunder, and
+I have a compassion, which I here declare, for the strangers who fell
+next into his hands. He was good enough at the last moment to say that
+his name, Silver-Eye, was a nickname given him according to a custom
+of the Sorrentines; and he made us a farewell bow that could not be
+bought in America for money.
+
+At the station of Castellamare sat a curious cripple on the stones,--a
+man with little, short, withered legs, and a pleasant face. He showed
+us the ticket-office, and wanted nothing for the politeness. After we
+had been in the waiting-room a brief time, he came swinging himself in
+upon his hands, followed by another person, who, when the cripple had
+planted himself finally and squarely on the ground, whipped out a
+tape from his pocket and took his measure for a suit of clothes,
+the cripple twirling and twisting himself about in every way for the
+tailor's convenience. Nobody was surprised or amused at the sight, and
+when his measure was thus publicly taken, the cripple gravely swung
+himself out as he had swung himself in.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+THE PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES.
+
+I had the pleasure one day of visiting nearly all the free schools
+which the wise philanthropy of the Protestant residents of Naples has
+established in that city. The schools had a peculiar interest for me,
+because I had noticed (in an uncareful fashion enough, no doubt) the
+great changes which had taken place in Italy under its new national
+government, and was desirous to see for myself the sort of progress
+the Italians of the south were making in avenues so long closed to
+them. I believe I have no mania for missionaries; I have heard of the
+converted Jew-and-a-half, and I have thought it a good joke; but
+I cannot help offering a very cordial homage to the truth that the
+missionaries are doing a vast deal of good in Naples, where they are
+not only spreading the gospel, but the spelling-book, the arithmetic,
+and the geography.
+
+It is not to be understood from the word missionaries, that this work
+is done by men especially sent from England or America to perform it.
+The free Protestant schools in Naples are conducted under the auspices
+of the Evangelical Aid Committee,--composed of members of the English
+Church, the Swiss Church, and the Presbyterian Church; the President
+of this committee is Dr. Strange, an Englishman, and the Treasurer
+is Mr. Rogers, the American banker. The missionaries in Naples,
+therefore, are men who have themselves found out their work and
+appointed themselves to do it. The gentleman by whose kindness I was
+permitted to visit the schools was one of these men,--the Rev. Mr.
+Buscarlet, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Naples, a Swiss by
+birth, who had received his education chiefly in Scotland.
+
+He accompanied me to the different schools, and as we walked up the
+long Toledo, and threaded our way through the sprightly Neapolitan
+crowd, he told me of the origin of the schools, and of the peculiar
+difficulties encountered in their foundation and maintenance. They
+are no older than the union of Naples with the Kingdom of Italy, when
+toleration of Protestantism was decreed by law; and from the first,
+their managers proceeded upon a principle of perfect openness and
+candor with the parents who wished to send their children to them.
+They announced that the children would be taught certain branches of
+learning, and that the whole Bible would be placed in their hands,
+to be studied and understood. In spite of this declaration of the
+Protestant character of the schools, the parents of the children
+were so anxious to secure them the benefits of education, that
+they willingly ran the risk of their becoming heretics. They
+were principally people of the lower classes,--laborers, hackmen,
+fishermen, domestics, and very small shopkeepers, but occasionally
+among them were parents able to send their children to other schools,
+yet preferring the thorough and conscientious system practiced in
+these. So the children came, and thanks to the peaceful, uncombative
+nature of Italian boys, who get on with much less waylaying and
+thumping and bullying than boys of northern blood, they have not
+been molested by their companions who still live the wild life of the
+streets, and they have only once suffered through interference of
+the priests. On complaint to the authorities the wrong was promptly
+redressed, and was not again inflicted. Of course these poor little
+people, picked up out of the vileness and ignorance of a city that
+had suffered for ages the most degrading oppression, are by no means
+regenerate yet, but there seems to be great hope for them. Now at
+least they are taught a reasonable and logical morality--and who can
+tell what wonders the novel instruction may not work? They learn for
+the first time that it is a foolish shame to lie and cheat, and it
+would scarcely be surprising if some of them were finally persuaded
+that Honesty is the best Policy--a maxim that few Italians believe.
+And here lies the trouble,--in the unfathomable, disheartening
+duplicity of the race. The children are not quarrelsome, nor cruel,
+nor brutal; but the servile defect of falsehood fixed by long
+generations of slavery in the Italians, is almost ineradicable. The
+fault is worse in Naples than elsewhere in Italy; but how bad it is
+everywhere, not merely travellers, but all residents in Italy, must
+bear witness.
+
+The first school which we visited was a girls' school, in which some
+forty-four little women of all ages, from four to fifteen years,
+were assembled under the charge of a young Corfute girl, an Italian
+Protestant, who had delegated her authority to different children
+under her. The small maidens gathered around their chiefs in groups,
+and read from the book in which they were studying when we appeared.
+Some allowance must be made for difference of the languages, Italian
+being logically spelled and easily pronounced; but I certainly never
+heard American children of their age read nearly so well. They seemed
+also to have a lively understanding of what they read, and to be
+greatly interested in the scriptural stories of which their books were
+made up. They repeated verses from the Bible, and stanzas of poetry,
+all very eagerly and prettily. As bashfulness is scarcely known
+to their race, they had no hesitation in showing off their
+accomplishments before a stranger, and seemed quite delighted with
+his applause. They were not particularly quiet; perhaps with young
+Neapolitans that would be impossible. I saw their copy-books, in which
+the writing was very good, (I am sure the printer would like mine to
+be as legible,) and the books were kept neat and clean, as were the
+hands and faces of the children. Taking the children as one goes in
+the streets of Naples, it would require a day perhaps to find as many
+clean ones as I saw in these schools, where cleanliness is resolutely
+insisted upon. Many of the children were ragged; here and there
+was one hideous with _ophthalmia_; but there was not a clouded
+countenance, nor a dirty hand among them. We should have great hopes
+for a nation of which the children can be taught to wash themselves.
+
+There were fourteen pupils in the boys' superior school, where
+geography, mathematics, linear drawing, French, Italian history, and
+ancient history were taught. A brief examination showed the boys to
+be well up in their studies;--indeed they furnished some recondite
+information about Baffin's Bay for which I should not myself have
+liked to be called on suddenly. Their drawing-books were prodigies of
+neatness, and betrayed that aptness for form and facility of execution
+which are natural to the Italians. Some of these boys had been in the
+schools nearly three years; they were nearly all of the class which
+must otherwise have grown up to hopeless vagabondage; but here they
+were receiving gratis an education that would fit them for employments
+wherein trained intellectual capacity is required. If their education
+went no higher than this, what an advance it would be upon their
+original condition!
+
+In the room devoted to boys of lower grade, I entangled myself in
+difficulties with a bright-eyed young gentleman, whom I asked if he
+liked Italian history better than ancient history. He said he liked
+the latter, especially that of the Romans, much better. "Why, that
+is strange. I should think an Italian boy would like Italian history
+best." "But were not the Romans also Italians, Signore?" I blush to
+say that I basely sneaked out of this trouble by answering that they
+were not like the Italians of the present day,--whatever that meant.
+But indeed all these young persons were startlingly quick with their
+information, and knowing that I knew very little on any subject with
+certainty, I think I was wise to refuse all offers to examine them in
+their studies.
+
+We left this school and returned to the Toledo by one of those
+wonderful little side streets already mentioned, which are forever
+tumultuous with the oddest Neapolitan life--with men quarreling
+themselves purple over small quantities of fish--with asses braying
+loud and clear above their discord--with women roasting pine-cones
+at charcoal fires--with children in the agonies of having their hair
+combed--with degraded poultry and homeless dogs--with fruit-stands
+and green groceries, and the little edifices of ecclesiastical
+architecture for the sale of lemonade--with wandering bag-pipers, and
+herds of nonchalant goats--with horses, and grooms currying them--and
+over all, from vast heights of balcony, with people lazily hanging
+upon rails and looking down on the riot. Reëntering the stream of the
+Toledo, it carried us almost to the Museo Borbonico before we again
+struck aside into one of the smaller streets, whence we climbed quite
+to the top of one of those incredibly high Neapolitan houses. Here,
+crossing an open terrace on the roof, we visited three small rooms, in
+which there were altogether some hundred boys in the first stages
+of reclamation. They were under the immediate superintendence of Mr.
+Buscarlet and he seemed to feel the fondest interest in them. Indeed,
+there was sufficient reason for this: up to a certain point, the
+Neapolitan children learn so rapidly and willingly that it can hardly
+be other than a pleasure to teach them. After this, their zeal flags;
+they know enough; and their parents and friends, far more ignorant
+than they, are perfectly satisfied with their progress. Then the
+difficulties of their teachers begin; but here, in these lowest grade
+schools, they had not yet begun. The boys were still eager to learn,
+and were ardently following the lead of their teachers. They were
+little fellows, nearly all, and none of them had been in school more
+than a year and a half, while some had been there only three or four
+months. They rose up with "_Buon giorno, signori_," as we entered, and
+could hardly be persuaded to lapse back to the duties of life during
+our stay. They had very good faces, indeed, for the most part, and
+even the vicious had intellectual brightness. Just and consistent
+usage has the best influence on them; and one boy was pointed out
+as quite docile and manageable, whose parents had given him up as
+incorrigible before he entered the school. As it was, there was
+something almost pathetic in his good behavior, as being possible to
+him, but utterly alien to his instincts. The boys of these schools
+seldom play truant, and they are never severely beaten in school; when
+quite intractable, notice is given to their parents, and they usually
+return in a more docile state. It sometimes happens that the boys are
+taken away by their parents, from one motive or another; but they find
+their way back again, and are received as if nothing had happened.
+
+The teacher in the first room here is a handsome young Calabrian,
+with the gentlest face and manner,--one of the most efficient teachers
+under Mr. Buscarlet. The boys had out their Bibles when we entered,
+and one after another read passages to us. There were children of
+seven, eight, and nine years, who had been in the school only three
+months, and who read any part of their Bibles with facility and
+correctness; of course, before coming to school they had not known one
+letter from another. The most accomplished scholar was a youngster,
+named Saggiomo, who had received eighteen months' schooling. He was
+consequently very quick indeed, and wanted to answer all the hard
+questions put to the other boys. In fact, all of them were ready
+enough, and there was a great deal of writhing and snapping of fingers
+among those who longed to answer some hesitator's question--just as
+you see in schools at home. They were examined in geography, and
+then in Bible history--particularly Joseph's story. They responded
+in chorus to all demands on this part of study, and could hardly be
+quieted sufficiently to give Saggiomo's little brother, aged five, a
+chance to tell why Joseph's brethren sold him. As soon as he could
+be heard he piped out: "_Perchè Giuseppe aveva dei sogni_!" (Because
+Joseph had dreams.) It was not exactly the right answer, but nobody
+laughed at the little fellow, though they all roared out in correction
+when permitted.
+
+In the next room, boys somewhat older were examined in Italian
+history, and responded correctly and promptly. They were given a
+sum which they performed in a miraculously short time; and their
+copy-books, when shown, were equally creditable to them. Their teacher
+was a Bolognese,--a naturalized Swiss,--who had been a soldier,
+and who maintained strict discipline among his irregulars, without,
+however, any perceptible terrorism.
+
+The amount of work these teachers accomplish in a day is incredible:
+the boys' school opens at eight in the morning and closes at four,
+with intermission of an hour at noon. Then in the evening the same
+men teach a school for adults, and on Sunday have their classes in the
+Sunday-schools. And this the whole year round. Their pay is not great,
+being about twenty dollars a month, and they are evidently not wholly
+self-interested from this fact. The amount of good they accomplish
+under the direction of their superiors is in proportion to the work
+done. To appreciate it, the reader must consider that they take the
+children of the most ignorant and degraded of all the Italians; that
+they cause them to be washed corporeally, first of all, and then set
+about cleansing them morally; and having cleared away as much of the
+inherited corruption of ages as possible, they begin to educate them
+in the various branches of learning. There is no direct proselyting
+in the schools, but the Bible is the first study, and the children
+are constantly examined in it; and the result is at least not
+superstition. The advance upon the old condition of things is
+incalculably great; for till the revolution under Garibaldi in 1860,
+the schools of Naples were all in the hands of the priests or their
+creatures, and the little learning there imparted was as dangerous as
+it could well be made. Now these schools are free, the children
+are honestly and thoroughly taught, and if they are not directly
+instructed in Protestantism, are at least instructed to associate
+religion with morality, probably for the first time in their lives.
+Too much credit cannot be given to the Italian government which has
+acted in such good faith with the men engaged in this work, protecting
+them from all interruption and persecution; but after all, the great
+praise is due to their own wise, unflagging zeal. They have worked
+unostentatiously, making no idle attacks on time-honored prejudices,
+but still having a purpose of enlightenment which they frankly avowed.
+The people whom they seek to benefit judge them by their works, and
+the result is that they have quite as much before them as they can do.
+Their discouragements are great. The day's teaching is often undone at
+home; the boys forget as aptly as they learn; and from the fact that
+only the baser feelings of fear and interest have ever been appealed
+to before in the Neapolitans, they have often to build in treacherous
+places without foundation of good faith or gratitude. Embarrassments
+for want of adequate funds are sometimes felt also. But no one can
+study their operations without feeling that success must attend their
+efforts, with honor to them, and with inestimable benefits to the
+generation which shall one day help to govern free Italy.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES.
+
+One day it became plain even to our reluctance that we could not stay
+in Naples forever, and the next morning we took the train for Rome.
+The Villa Reale put on its most alluring charm to him that ran down
+before breakfast to thrid once more its pathways bordered with palms
+and fountains and statues; the bay beside it purpled and twinkled in
+the light that made silver of the fishermen's sails; far away rose
+Vesuvius with his nightcap of mist still hanging about his shoulders;
+all around rang and rattled Naples. The city was never so fair before,
+nor could ever have been so hard to leave; and at the last moment
+the landlord of the Hotel Washington must needs add a supreme pang by
+developing into a poet, and presenting me with a copy of a comedy
+he had written. The reader who has received at parting from the
+gentlemanly proprietor of one of our palatial hotels his "Ode on the
+Steam Elevator," will conceive of the shame and regret with which I
+thought of having upbraided our landlord about our rooms, of having
+stickled at small preliminaries concerning our contract for board, and
+for having altogether treated him as one of the uninspired. Let me do
+him the tardy justice to say that he keeps, after the Stella d'Oro at
+Ferrara, the best hotel in Italy, and that his comedy was really very
+sprightly. It is no small thing to know how to keep a hotel, as we
+know, and a poet who does it ought to have a double acclaim.
+
+Nobody who cares to travel with decency and comfort can take the
+second-class cars on the road between Naples and Rome, though these
+are perfectly good everywhere else in Italy. The Papal city makes her
+influence felt for shabbiness and uncleanliness wherever she can, and
+her management seems to prevail on this railway. A glance into
+the second-class cars reconciled us to the first-class,--which in
+themselves were bad,--and we took our places almost contentedly.
+
+The road passed through the wildest country we had seen in Italy; and
+presently a rain began to fall and made it drearier than ever. The
+land was much grown up with thickets of hazel, and was here and there
+sparsely wooded with oaks. Under these, hogs were feeding upon the
+acorns, and the wet swine-herds were steaming over fires built at their
+roots. In some places the forest was quite dense; in other places it
+fell entirely away, and left the rocky hill-sides bare, and solitary
+but for the sheep that nibbled at the scanty grass, and the shepherds
+that leaned upon their crooks and motionlessly stared at us as we
+rushed by. As we drew near Rome, the scenery grew lonelier yet; the
+land rose into desolate, sterile, stony heights, without a patch of
+verdure on their nakedness, and at last abruptly dropped into the
+gloomy expanse of the Campagna.
+
+The towns along the route had little to interest us in their looks,
+though at San Germano we caught a glimpse of the famous old convent of
+Monte-Cassino, perched aloft on its cliff and looking like a part of
+the rock on which it was built. Fancy now loves to climb that steep
+acclivity, and wander through the many-volumed library of the ancient
+Benedictine retreat, and on the whole finds it less fatiguing and
+certainly less expensive than actual ascent and acquaintance with
+the monastery would have been. Two Croatian priests, who shared our
+compartment of the railway carriage, first drew our notice to the
+place, and were enthusiastic about it for many miles after it was
+out of sight. What gentle and pleasant men they were, and how hard it
+seemed that they should be priests and Croats! They told us all about
+the city of Spalato, where they lived, and gave us such a glowing
+account of Dalmatian poets and poetry that we began to doubt at last
+if the seat of literature were not somewhere on the east coast of the
+Adriatic; and I hope we left them the impression that the literary
+centre of the world was not a thousand miles from the horse-car office
+in Harvard Square.
+
+Here and there repairs were going forward on the railroad, and most
+of the laborers were women. They were straight and handsome girls,
+and moved with a stately grace under the baskets of earth balanced on
+their heads. Brave black eyes they had, such as love to look and to
+be looked at; they were not in the least hurried by their work, but
+desisted from it to gaze at the passengers whenever the train stopped.
+They all wore their beautiful peasant costume,--the square white linen
+head-dress falling to the shoulders, the crimson bodice, and the red
+scant skirt; and how they contrived to keep themselves so clean at
+their work, and to look so spectacular in it all, remains one of the
+many Italian mysteries.
+
+Another of these mysteries we beheld in the little beggar-boy at
+Isoletta. He stood at the corner of the station quite mute and
+motionless during our pause, and made no sign of supplication or
+entreaty. He let his looks beg for him. He was perfectly beautiful
+and exceedingly picturesque. Where his body was not quite naked, his
+jacket and trousers hung in shreds and points; his long hair grew
+through the top of his hat, and fell over like a plume. Nobody could
+resist him; people ran out of the cars, at the risk of being left
+behind, to put coppers into the little dirty hand held languidly out
+to receive them. The boy thanked none, smiled on none, but looked
+curiously and cautiously at all, with the quick perception and the
+illogical conclusions of his class and race. As we started he did not
+move, but remained in his attitude of listless tranquillity. As we
+glanced back, the mystery of him seemed to be solved for a moment: he
+would stand there till he grew up into a graceful, prayerful, pitiless
+brigand, and then he would rend from travel the tribute now go freely
+given him. But after all, though his future seemed clear, and he
+appeared the type of a strange and hardly reclaimable people, he was
+not quite a solution of the Neapolitan puzzle.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+ROMAN PEARLS.
+
+I.
+
+The first view of the ruins in the Forum brought a keen sense of
+disappointment. I knew that they could only be mere fragments and
+rubbish, but I was not prepared to find them so. I learned that I
+had all along secretly hoped for some dignity of neighborhood, some
+affectionate solicitude on the part of Nature to redeem these works of
+Art from the destruction that had befallen them. But in hollows below
+the level of the dirty cowfield, wandered over by evil-eyed buffaloes,
+and obscenely defiled by wild beasts of men, there stood here an
+arch, there a pillar, yonder a cluster of columns crowned by a bit
+of frieze; and yonder again, a fragment of temple, half-gorged by
+the façade of a hideous Renaissance church; then a height of vaulted
+brick-work, and, leading on to the Coliseum, another arch, and then
+incoherent columns overthrown and mixed with dilapidated walls--mere
+phonographic consonants, dumbly representing the past, out of which
+all vocal glory had departed. The Coliseum itself does not much better
+express a certain phase of Roman life than does the Arena at Verona;
+it is larger only to the foot-rule, and it seemed not grander
+otherwise, while it is vastly more ruinous. Even the Pantheon failed
+to impress me at first sight, though I found myself disposed to return
+to it again and again, and to be more and more affected by it.
+
+Modern Rome appeared, first and last, hideous. It is the least
+interesting town in Italy, and the architecture is hopelessly
+ugly--especially the architecture of the churches. The Papal city
+contrives at the beginning to hide the Imperial city from your
+thought, as it hides it in such a great degree from your eye, and old
+Rome only occurs to you in a sort of stupid wonder over the depth at
+which it is buried. I confess that I was glad to get altogether away
+from it after a first look at the ruins in the Forum, and to take
+refuge in the Conservatorio delle Mendicanti, where we were charged
+to see the little Virginia G. The Conservatorio, though a charitable
+institution, is not so entirely meant for mendicants as its name would
+imply, but none of the many young girls there were the children of
+rich men. They were often enough of parentage actually hungry and
+ragged, but they were often also the daughters of honest poor folk,
+who paid a certain sum toward their maintenance and education in the
+Conservatorio. Such was the case with little Virginia, whose father
+was at Florence, doubly impeded from seeing her by the fact that he
+had fought against the Pope for the Republic of 1848, and by the
+other fact that he had since wrought the Pope a yet deadlier injury by
+turning Protestant.
+
+Ringing a garrulous bell that continued to jingle some time after we
+were admitted, we found ourselves in a sort of reception-room, of the
+general quality of a cellar, and in the presence of a portress who was
+perceptibly preserved from mold only by the great pot of coals that
+stood in the centre of the place. Some young girls, rather pretty than
+not, attended the ancient woman, and kindly acted as the ear-trumpet
+through which our wishes were conveyed to her mind. The Conservatorio
+was not, so far, as conventual as we had imagined it; but as the
+gentleman of the party was strongly guarded by female friends, and
+asked at once to see the Superior, he concluded that there was,
+perhaps, something so unusually reassuring to the recluses in his
+appearance and manner that they had not thought it necessary to behave
+very rigidly. It later occurred to this gentleman that the promptness
+with which the pretty mendicants procured him an interview with the
+Superior had a flavor of self-interest in; and that he who came to the
+Conservatorio in the place of a father might have been for a moment
+ignorantly viewed as a yet dearer and tenderer possibility. From
+whatever danger there was in this error the Superior soon appeared to
+rescue him, and we were invited into a more ceremonious apartment on
+the first floor, and the little Virginia was sent for. The visit
+of the strangers caused a tumult and interest in the quiet old
+Conservatorio of which it is hard to conceive now, and the excitement
+grew tremendous when it appeared that, the signori were Americani and
+Protestanti. We imparted a savor of novelty and importance to Virginia
+herself, and when she appeared, the Superior and her assistant looked
+at her with no small curiosity and awe, of which the little maiden
+instantly became conscious, and began to take advantage. Accompanying
+us over the building and through the grounds, she cut her small
+friends wherever she met them, and was not more than respectful to the
+assistant.
+
+It was from an instinct of hospitality that we were shown the
+Conservatorio, and instructed in regard to all its purposes. We saw
+the neat dormitories with their battalions of little white beds; the
+kitchen with its gigantic coppers for boiling broth, and the refectory
+with the smell of the frugal dinners of generations of mendicants in
+it. The assistant was very proud of the neatness of every thing, and
+was glad to talk of that, or, indeed, any thing else. It appeared that
+the girls were taught reading, writing, and plain sewing when they
+were young, and that the Conservatorio was chiefly sustained by pious
+contributions and bequests. Any lingering notion of the conventual
+character of the place was dispelled by the assistant's hurrying to
+say, "And when we can get the poor things well married, we are glad to
+do so."
+
+"But how does any one ever see them?"
+
+"Eh! well, that is easily managed. Once a month we dress the
+marriageable girls in their best, and take them for a walk in the
+street. If an honest young man falls in love with one of them going
+by, he comes to the Superior, and describes her as well as he can,
+and demands to see her. She is called, and if both are pleased, the
+marriage is arranged. You see it is a very simple affair."
+
+And there was, to the assistant's mind, nothing odd in the whole
+business, insomuch that I felt almost ashamed of marveling at it.
+
+Issuing from the backdoor of the convent, we ascended by stairs and
+gateways into garden spaces, chiefly planted with turnips and the like
+poor but respectable vegetables, and curiously adorned with fragments
+of antique statuary, and here and there a fountain in a corner,
+trickling from moss-grown rocks, and falling into a trough of
+travertine, about the feet of some poor old goddess or Virtue who had
+forgotten what her name was.
+
+Once, the assistant said, speaking as if the thing had been within
+her recollection, though it must have been centuries before, the
+antiquities of the Conservatorio were much more numerous and striking;
+but they were now removed to the different museums. Nevertheless they
+had still a beautiful prospect left, which we were welcome to enjoy if
+we would follow her; and presently, to our surprise, we stepped from
+the garden upon the roof of the Temple of Peace. The assistant had not
+boasted without reason: away before us stretched the Campagna, a level
+waste, and empty, but for the umbrella-palms that here and there
+waved like black plumes upon it, and for the arched lengths of
+the acqueducts that seemed to stalk down from the ages across the
+melancholy expanse like files of giants, with now and then a ruinous
+gap in the line, as if one had fallen out weary by the way. The city
+all around us glittered asleep in the dim December sunshine, and
+far below us,--on the length of the Forum over which the Appian Way
+stretched from the Capitoline Hill under the Arch of Septimius Severus
+and the Arch of Titus to the Arch of Constantine, leaving the Coliseum
+on the left, and losing itself in the foliage of the suburbs,--the
+Past seemed struggling to emerge from the ruins, and to reshape and
+animate itself anew. The effort was more successful than that which we
+had helped the Past to make when standing on the level of the Forum;
+but Antiquity must have been painfully conscious of the incongruity of
+the red-legged Zouaves wandering over the grass, and of the bewildered
+tourists trying to make her out with their Murrays.
+
+In a day or two after this we returned again to our Conservatorio,
+where we found that the excitement created by our first visit had been
+kept fully alive by the events attending the photographing of Virginia
+for her father. Not only Virginia was there to receive us, but her
+grandmother also--an old, old woman, dumb through some infirmity of
+age, who could only weep and smile in token of her content. I think
+she had but a dim idea, after all, of what went on beyond the visible
+fact of Virginia's photograph, and that she did not quite understand
+how we could cause it to be taken for her son. She was deeply
+compassionated by the Superior, who rendered her pity with a great
+deal of gesticulation, casting up her eyes, shrugging her shoulders,
+and sighing grievously. But the assistant's cheerfulness could not be
+abated even by the spectacle of extreme age; and she made the most of
+the whole occasion, recounting with great minuteness all the incidents
+of the visit to the photographer's, and running to get the dress
+Virginia sat in, that we might see how exactly it was given in the
+picture. Then she gave us much discourse concerning the Conservatorio
+and its usages, and seemed not to wish us to think that life there
+was altogether eventless. "Here we have a little amusement also," she
+said. "The girls have their relatives to visit them sometimes, and
+then in the evening they dance. Oh, they enjoy themselves! I am half
+old (_mezzo-vecchia_). I am done with these things. But for youth,
+always kept down, something lively is wanted."
+
+When we took leave of these simple folks, we took leave of almost the
+only natural and unprepared aspect of Italian life which we were to
+see in Rome; but we did not know this at the time.
+
+
+II.
+
+Indeed, it seems to me that all moisture of romance and adventure has
+been wellnigh sucked out of travel in Italy, and that compared with
+the old time, when the happy wayfarer journeyed by vettura through the
+innumerable little states of the Peninsula,--halted every other mile
+to show his passport, and robbed by customs officers in every color of
+shabby uniform and every variety of cocked hat,--the present railroad
+period is one of but stale and insipid flavor. Much of local life and
+color remains, of course; but the hurried traveller sees little of it,
+and, passed from one grand hotel to another, without material change
+in the cooking or the methods of extortion, he might nearly as well
+remain at Paris. The Italians, who live to so great extent by the
+travel through their country, learn our abominable languages and
+minister to our detestable comfort and propriety, till we have slight
+chance to know them as we once could,--musical, picturesque, and full
+of sweet, natural knaveries, graceful falsehood, and all uncleanness.
+Rome really belongs to the Anglo-Saxon nations, and the Pope and the
+past seem to be carried on entirely for our diversion. Every thing is
+systematized as thoroughly as in a museum where the objects are all
+ticketed; and our prejudices are consulted even down to alms-giving,
+Honest Beppo is gone from the steps in the Piazza di Spagna, and now
+the beggars are labeled like policemen, with an immense plate bearing
+the image of St. Peter, so that you may know you give to a worthy
+person when you bestow charity on one of them, and not, alas! to some
+abandoned impostor, as in former days. One of these highly recommended
+mendicants gave the last finish to the system, and begged of us in
+English! No custodian will answer you, if he can help it, in the
+Italian which he speaks so exquisitely, preferring to speak bad French
+instead, and in all the shops on the Corso the English tongue is _de
+rigueur_.
+
+After our dear friends at the Conservatorio, I think we found one of
+the most simple and interesting of Romans in the monk who showed us
+the Catacombs of St. Sebastian. These catacombs, he assured us, were
+not restored like those of St. Calixtus, but were just as the martyrs
+left them; and, as I do not remember to have read anywhere that
+they are formed merely of long, low, narrow, wandering underground
+passages, lined on either side with tombs in tiers like berths on
+a steamer, and expanding here and there into small square chambers,
+bearing the traces of ancient frescos, and evidently used as
+chapels,--I venture to offer the information here. The reader is to
+keep in his mind a darkness broken by the light of wax tapers, a
+close smell, and crookedness and narrowness, or he cannot realize the
+catacombs as they are in fact. Our monkish guide, before entering the
+passage leading from the floor of the church to the tombs, in which
+there was still some "fine small dust" of the martyrs, warned us that
+to touch it was to incur the penalty of excommunication, and then
+gently craved pardon for having mentioned the fact. But, indeed, it
+was only to persons who showed a certain degree of reverence that
+these places were now exhibited; for some Protestants who had been
+permitted there had stolen handfuls of the precious ashes, merely to
+throw away. I assured him that I thought them beasts to do it; and I
+was afterwards puzzled to know what should attract their wantonness in
+the remnants of mortality, hardly to be distinguished from the common
+earth out of which the catacombs were dug.
+
+
+III.
+
+Returning to the church above we found, kneeling before one of the
+altars, two pilgrims,--a man and a woman. The latter was habited in
+a nun-like dress of black, and the former in a long pilgrim's coat of
+coarse blue stuff. He bore a pilgrim's staff in his hand, and showed
+under his close hood a fine, handsome, reverent face, full of a sort
+of tender awe, touched with the pathos of penitence. In attendance
+upon the two was a dapper little silk-hatted man, with rogue so
+plainly written in his devotional countenance that I was not surprised
+to be told that he was a species of spiritual _valet de place_,
+whose occupation it was to attend pilgrims on their tour to the Seven
+Churches at which these devotees pray in Rome, and there to direct
+their orisons and join in them.
+
+It was not to the pilgrims, but to the heretics that the monk now
+uncovered the precious marble slab on which Christ stood when he met
+Peter flying from Rome and turned him back. You are shown the prints
+of the divine feet, which the conscious stone received and keeps
+forever; and near at hand is one of the arrows with which St.
+Sebastian was shot. We looked at these things critically, having to
+pay for the spectacle; but the pilgrims and their guide were all faith
+and wonder.
+
+I remember seeing nothing else so finely superstitious at Rome. In a
+chapel near the Church of St. John Lateran are, as is well known,
+the marble steps which once belonged to Pilate's house, and which the
+Saviour is said to have ascended when he went to trial before Pilate.
+The steps are protected against the wear and tear of devotion by a
+stout casing of wood, and they are constantly covered with penitents,
+who ascend and descend them upon their knees. Most of the pious people
+whom I saw in this act were children, and the boys enjoyed it with a
+good deal of giggling, as a very amusing feat. Some old and haggard
+women gave the scene all the dignity which it possessed; but certain
+well-dressed ladies and gentlemen were undeniably awkward and absurd,
+and I was led to doubt if there were not an incompatibility between
+the abandon of simple faith and the respectability of good clothes.
+
+
+IV.
+
+In all other parts of Italy one hears constant talk among travellers
+of the malaria at Rome, and having seen a case of Roman fever, I know
+it is a thing not to be trifled with. But in Rome itself the malaria
+is laughed at by the foreign residents,--who, nevertheless, go out of
+the city in midsummer. The Romans, to the number of a hundred thousand
+or so, remain there the whole year round, and I am bound to say I
+never saw a healthier, robuster-looking population. The cheeks of the
+French soldiers, too, whom we met at every turn, were red as their
+trousers, and they seemed to flourish on the imputed unwholesomeness
+of the atmosphere. All at Rome are united in declaring that the fever
+exists at Naples, and that sometimes those who have taken it there
+come and die in Rome, in order to give the city a bad name; and I
+think this very likely.
+
+Rome is certainly dirty, however, though there is a fountain in every
+square, and you are never out of the sound of falling water. The Corso
+and some of the principal streets do not so much impress you with
+their filth as with their dullness; but that part of the city where
+some of the most memorable relics of antiquity are to be found is
+unimaginably vile. The least said of the state of the archways of the
+Coliseum the soonest mended; and I have already spoken of the Forum.
+The streets near the Theatre of Pompey are almost impassable, and the
+so-called House of Rienzi is a stable, fortified against approach by
+a _fossé_ of excrement. A noisome smell seems to be esteemed the most
+appropriate offering to the memory of ancient Rome, and I am not sure
+that the moderns are mistaken in this. In the rascal streets in the
+neighborhood of the most august ruins, the people turn round to stare
+at the stranger as he passes them; they are all dirty, and his decency
+must be no less a surprise to them than the neatness of the French
+soldiers amid all the filth is a puzzle to him. We wandered about a
+long time in such places one day, looking for the Tarpeian Rock, less
+for Tarpeia's sake than for the sake of Miriam and Donatello and the
+Model. There are two Tarpeian rocks, between which the stranger takes
+his choice; and we must have chosen the wrong one, for it seemed but
+a shallow gulf compared to that in our fancy. We were somewhat
+disappointed; but then Niagara disappoints one; and as for Mont
+Blanc....
+
+
+V.
+
+It is worth while for every one who goes to Rome to visit the Church
+of St. Peter's; but it is scarcely worth while for me to describe
+it, or for every one to go up into the bronze globe on the top of the
+cupola. In fact, this is a great labor, and there is nothing to
+be seen from the crevices in the ball which cannot be far more
+comfortably seen from the roof of the church below.
+
+The companions of our ascent to the latter point were an English lady
+and gentleman, brother and sister, and both Catholics, as they at once
+told us. The lady and myself spoke for some time in the Tuscan tongue
+before we discovered that neither of us was Italian, after which we
+paid each other some handsome compliments upon fluency and perfection
+of accent. The gentleman was a pleasant purple porpoise from the
+waters of Chili, whither he had wandered from the English coasts in
+early youth. He had two leading ideas: one concerned the Pope, to
+whom he had just been presented, and whom he viewed as the best and
+blandest of beings; the other related to his boy, then in England,
+whom he called Jack Spratt, and considered the grandest and greatest
+of boys. With the view from the roof of the church this gentleman did
+not much trouble himself. He believed Jack Spratt could ride up to the
+roof where we stood on his donkey. As to the great bronze globe which
+we were hurrying to enter he seemed to regard it merely as a rival in
+rotundity, and made not the slightest motion to follow us.
+
+I should be loth to vex the reader with any description of the scene
+before us and beneath us, even if I could faithfully portray it. But I
+recollect, with a pleasure not to be left unrecorded, the sweetness
+of the great fountain playing in the square before the church, and
+the harmony in which the city grew in every direction from it, like
+an emanation from its music, till the last house sank away into
+the pathetic solitude of the Campagna, with nothing beyond but the
+snow-capped mountains lighting up the remotest distance. At the same
+moment I experienced a rapture in reflecting that I had underpaid
+three hackmen during my stay in Rome, and thus contributed to avenge
+my race for ages of oppression.
+
+The vastness of St. Peter's itself is best felt in looking down upon
+the interior from the gallery that surrounds the inside of the dome,
+and in comparing one's own littleness with the greatness of all the
+neighboring mosaics. But as to the beauty of the temple, I could not
+find it without or within.
+
+
+VI.
+
+In Rome one's fellow-tourists are a constant source of gratification
+and surprise. I thought that American travellers were by no means the
+most absurd among those we saw, nor even the loudest in their approval
+of the Eternal City. A certain order of German greenness affords,
+perhaps, the pleasantest pasturage for the ruminating mind. For
+example, at the Villa Ludovisi there was, beside numerous Englishry
+in detached bodies, a troop of Germans, chiefly young men, frugally
+pursuing the Sehenswürdigkeiten in the social manner of their nation.
+They took their enjoyment very noisily, and wrangled together with
+furious amiability as they looked at Guercino's "Aurora." Then two of
+them parted from the rest, and went to a little summer-house in the
+gardens, while the others followed us to the top of the Casino. There
+they caught sight of their friends in the arbor, and the spectacle
+appeared to overwhelm them. They bowed, they took off their hats, they
+waved their handkerchiefs. It was not enough: one young fellow mounted
+on the balustrade of the roof at his neck's risk, lifted his hat on
+his cane and flourished it in greeting to the heart's-friends in the
+arbor, from whom he had parted two minutes before.
+
+In strange contrast to the producer of this enthusiasm, so pumped and
+so unmistakably mixed with beer, a fat and pallid Englishwoman sat
+in a chair upon the roof and coldly, coldly sketched the lovely
+landscape. And she and the blonde young English girl beside her
+pronounced a little dialogue together, which I give, because I saw
+that they meant it for the public:
+
+_The Young Girl_.--I wonder, you knoa, you don't draw-ow St. Petuh's!
+
+_The Artist_.--O ah, you knoa, I can draw-ow St. Petuh's from so
+mennee powints.
+
+I am afraid that the worst form of American greenness appears abroad
+in a desire to be perfectly up in critical appreciation of the arts,
+and to approach the great works in the spirit of the connoisseur. The
+ambition is not altogether a bad one. Still I could not help laughing
+at a fellow-countryman when he told me that he had not yet seen
+Raphael's "Transfiguration," because he wished to prepare his mind for
+understanding the original by first looking at all the copies he could
+find.
+
+
+VII.
+
+The Basilica San Paolo fuori le Mura surpasses every thing in splendor
+of marble and costly stone--porphyry, malachite, alabaster--and luxury
+of gilding that is to be seen at Rome. But I chiefly remember it
+because on the road that leads to it, through scenes as quiet and
+peaceful as if history had never known them, lies the Protestant
+graveyard in which Keats is buried. Quite by chance the driver
+mentioned it, pointing in the direction of the cemetery with his whip.
+We eagerly dismounted and repaired to the gate, where we were met by
+the son of the sexton, who spoke English through the beauteous line of
+a curved Hebrew nose. Perhaps a Christian could not be found in Rome
+to take charge of these heretic graves, though Christians can be got
+to do almost any thing there for money. However, I do not think
+a Catholic would have kept the place in better order, or more
+intelligently understood our reverent curiosity. It was the new
+burial-ground which we had entered, and which is a little to the right
+of the elder cemetery. It was very beautiful and tasteful in every
+way; the names upon the stones were chiefly English and Scotch,
+with here and there an American's. But affection drew us only to the
+prostrate tablet inscribed with the words, "Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cor
+Cordium," and then we were ready to go to the grave of him for whom we
+all feel so deep a tenderness. The grave of John Keats is one of
+few in the old burying-ground, and lies almost in the shadow of the
+pyramid of Caius Cestius; and I could not help thinking of the wonder
+the Roman would have felt could he have known into what unnamable
+richness and beauty his Greek faith had ripened in the heart of the
+poor poet, where it was mixed with so much sorrow. Doubtless, in his
+time, a prominent citizen like Caius Cestius was a leading member of
+the temple in his neighborhood, and regularly attended sacrifice: it
+would have been but decent; and yet I fancied that a man immersed like
+him in affairs might have learned with surprise the inner and more
+fragrant meaning of the symbols with the outside of which his life was
+satisfied; and I was glad to reflect that in our day such a thing is
+impossible.
+
+The grave of our beloved poet is sunken to the level of the common
+earth, and is only marked by the quaintly lettered, simple stone
+bearing the famous epitaph. While at Rome I heard talk of another and
+grander monument which some members of the Keats family were to place
+over the dust of their great kinsman. But, for one, I hope this may
+never be done, even though the original stone should also be left
+there, as was intended. Let the world still keep unchanged this
+shrine, to which it can repair with at once pity and tenderness and
+respect.
+
+A rose-tree and some sweet-smelling bushes grew upon the grave, and
+the roses were in bloom. We asked leave to take one of them; but at
+last could only bring ourselves to gather some of the fallen petals.
+Our Hebrew guide was willing enough, and unconsciously set us a little
+example of wantonness; for while he listened to our explanation of
+the mystery which had puzzled him ever since he had learned English,
+namely, why the stone should say "_writ_ on water," and not _written_,
+he kept plucking mechanically at one of the fragrant shrubs, pinching
+away the leaves, and rending the tender twig, till I, remembering the
+once-sensitive dust from which it grew, waited for the tortured
+tree to cry out to him with a voice of words and blood, "Perchè mi
+schianti?"
+
+
+VIII.
+
+It seems to me that a candid person will wish to pause a little
+before condemning Gibson's colored statues. They have been grossly
+misrepresented. They do not impress one at all as wax-work, and there
+is great wrong in saying that their tinted nakedness suggests impurity
+any more than the white nakedness of other statues. The coloring
+is quite conventional; the flesh is merely warmed with the hue
+representing life; the hair is always a very delicate yellow, the eyes
+a tender violet, and there is no other particularization of color; a
+fillet binding the hair may be gilded,--the hem of a robe traced
+in blue. I, who had just come from seeing the fragments of antique
+statuary in Naples Museum, tinted in the same way, could not feel
+that there was any thing preposterous in Gibson's works, and I am not
+ashamed to say that they gave me pleasure.
+
+As we passed, in his studio, from one room to another, the workman who
+showed the marbles surprised and delighted us by asking if we would
+like to see the sculptor, and took us up into the little room where
+Gibson worked. He was engaged upon a bass-relief,--a visit of Psyche
+to the Zephyrs, or something equally aërial and mythological,--and
+received us very simply and naturally, and at once began with some
+quaint talk about the subject in hand. When we mentioned our pleasure
+in his colored marbles we touched the right spring, and he went on to
+speak of his favorite theory with visible delight, making occasional
+pauses to bestow a touch on the bass-relief, and coming back to his
+theme with that self-corroborative "Yes!" of his, which Hawthorne
+has immortalized. He was dressed with extraordinary slovenliness and
+indifference to clothes, had no collar, I think, and evidently did
+not know what he had on. Every thing about him bespoke the utmost
+unconsciousness and democratic plainness of life, so that I could
+readily believe a story I heard of him. Having dined the greater part
+of his life in Roman restaurants where it is but wholesome to go over
+your plate, glass, spoon, and knife and fork with your napkin before
+using them, the great sculptor had acquired such habits of
+neatness that at table in the most aristocratic house in England
+he absent-mindedly went through all that ceremony of cleansing
+and wiping. It is a story they tell in Rome, where every body is
+anecdoted, and not always so good-naturedly.
+
+
+IX.
+
+One Sunday afternoon we went with some artistic friends to visit the
+studio of the great German painter, Overbeck; and since I first read
+Uhland I have known no pleasure so illogical as I felt in looking at
+this painter's drawings. In the sensuous heart of objective Italy he
+treats the themes of mediæval Catholicism with the most subjective
+feeling, and I thought I perceived in his work the enthusiasm which
+led many Protestant German painters and poets of the romantic school
+back into the twilight of the Romish faith, in the hope that they
+might thus realize to themselves something of the earnestness which
+animated the elder Christian artists. Overbeck's work is beautiful,
+but it is unreal, and expresses the sentiment of no time; as the work
+of the romantic German poets seems without relation to any world men
+ever lived in.
+
+Walking from the painter's house, two of us parted with the rest
+on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, and pursued our
+stroll through the gate of San Lorenzo out upon the Campagna, which
+tempts and tempts the sojourner at Rome, until at last he must go
+and see--if it will give him the fever. And, alas! there I caught the
+Roman fever--the longing that burns one who has once been in Rome to
+go again--that will not be cured by all the cool contemptuous things
+he may think or say of the Eternal City; that fills him with fond
+memories of its fascination, and makes it forever desired.
+
+We walked far down the dusty road beyond the city walls, and then
+struck out from the highway across the wild meadows of the Campagna.
+They were weedy and desolate, seamed by shaggy grass-grown ditches,
+and deeply pitted with holes made in search for catacombs. There was
+here and there a farm-house amid the wide lonesomeness, but oftener
+a round, hollow, roofless tomb, from which the dust and memory of the
+dead had long been blown away, and through the top of which--fringed
+and overhung with grasses, and opening like a great eye--the evening
+sky looked marvelously sad. One of the fields was full of grim,
+wide-horned cattle, and in another there were four or five buffaloes
+lying down and chewing their cuds,--holding their heads horizontally
+in the air, and with an air of gloomy wickedness which nothing could
+exceed in their cruel black eyes, glancing about in visible pursuit
+of some object to toss and gore. There were also many canebrakes,
+in which the wind made a mournful rustling after the sun had set in
+golden glitter on the roofs of the Roman churches and the transparent
+night had fallen upon the scene.
+
+In all our ramble we met not a soul, and I scarcely know what it is
+makes this walk upon the Campagna one of my vividest recollections
+of Rome, unless it be the opportunity it gave me to weary myself upon
+that many-memoried ground as freely as if it had been a woods-pasture
+in Ohio. Nature, where history was so august, was perfectly simple
+and motherly, and did so much to make me at home, that, as the night
+thickened and we plunged here and there into ditches and climbed
+fences, and struggled, heavy-footed, back through the suburbs to
+the city gate, I felt as if half my boyhood had been passed upon the
+Campagna.
+
+
+X.
+
+Pasquino, like most other great people, is not very interesting upon
+close approach. There is no trace now in his aspect to show that he
+has ever been satirical; but the humanity that the sculptor gave him
+is imperishable, though he has lost all character as a public censor.
+The torso is at first glance nothing but a shapeless mass of stone,
+but the life can never die out of that which has been shaped by art
+to the likeness of a man, and a second look restores the lump to
+full possession of form and expression. For this reason I lament that
+statues should ever be restored except by sympathy and imagination.
+
+
+XI.
+
+Regarding the face of Pompey's statue in the Spada Palace, I was more
+struck than ever with a resemblance to American politicians which I
+had noted in all the Roman statues. It is a type of face not now to be
+found in Rome, but frequent enough here, and rather in the South
+than in the North. Pompey was like the pictures of so many Southern
+Congressmen that I wondered whether race had not less to do with
+producing types than had similarity of circumstances; whether a
+republicanism based upon slavery could not so far assimilate character
+as to produce a common aspect in people widely separated by time and
+creeds, but having the same unquestioned habits of command, and the
+same boundless and unscrupulous ambition.
+
+
+XII.
+
+When the Tiber, according to its frequent habit, rises and inundates
+the city, the Pantheon is one of the first places to be flooded--the
+sacristan told us. The water climbs above the altar-tops, sapping,
+in its recession, the cement of the fine marbles which incrust the
+columns, so that about their bases the pieces have to be continually
+renewed. Nothing vexes you so much in the Pantheon as your
+consciousness of these and other repairs. Bad as ruin is, I think I
+would rather have the old temple ruinous in every part than restored
+as you find it. The sacristan felt the wrongs of the place keenly, and
+said, referring to the removal of the bronze roof, which took place
+some centuries ago, "They have robbed us of every thing" (_Ci hanno
+levato tutto_); as if he and the Pantheon were of one blood, and he
+had suffered personal hurt in its spoliation.
+
+What a sense of the wildness everywhere lurking about Rome we had
+given us by that group of peasants who had built a fire of brushwood
+almost within the portico of the Pantheon, and were cooking their
+supper at it, the light of the flames luridly painting their swarthy
+faces!
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Poor little Numero Cinque Via del Gambero has seldom, I imagine, known
+so violent a sensation as that it experienced when, on the day of the
+Immaculate Conception, the Armenian Archbishop rolled up to the door
+in his red coach. The master of the house had always seemed to like
+us; now he appeared with profound respect suffusing, as it were, his
+whole being, and announced, "Signore, it is Monsignore come to take
+you to the Sistine Chapel in his carriage," and drew himself up in a
+line, as much like a series of serving-men as possible, to let us
+pass out. There was a private carriage for the ladies near that of
+Monsignore, for he had already advertised us that the sex were not
+permitted to ride in the red coach. As they appeared, however, he
+renewed his expressions of desolation at being deprived of their
+company, and assured them of his good-will with a multiplicity of
+smiles and nods, intermixed with shrugs of recurrence to his poignant
+regret. But! In fine, it was forbidden!
+
+Monsignore was in full costume, with his best ecclesiastical clothes
+on, and with his great gold chain about his neck. The dress was richer
+than that of the western archbishops; and the long white beard of
+Monsignore made him look much more like a Scriptural monsignore than
+these. He lacked, perhaps, the fine spiritual grace of his brother,
+the Archbishop at Venice, to whose letter of introduction we owed his
+acquaintance and untiring civilities; but if a man cannot be plump and
+spiritual, he can be plump and pleasant, as Monsignore was to the last
+degree. He enlivened our ride with discourse about the Armenians at
+Venice, equally beloved of us; and, arrived at the Sistine Chapel, he
+marshaled the ladies before him, and won them early entrance through
+the crowd of English people crushing one another at the door. Then
+he laid hold upon the captain of the Swiss Guard, who was swift to
+provide them with the best places; and in nowise did he seem one of
+the uninfluential and insignificant priests that About describes the
+archbishops at Rome to be. According to this lively author, a Swiss
+guard was striking back the crowd on some occasion with the butt of
+his halberd, and smote a cardinal on the breast. He instantly
+dropped upon his knees, with "Pardon, Eminenza! I thought it was a
+monsignore!" Even the chief of these handsome fellows had nothing but
+respect and obedience for our Archbishop.
+
+The gentlemen present were separated from the ladies, and in a very
+narrow space outside of the chapel men of every nation were penned up
+together. All talked--several priests as loudly as the rest. But the
+rudest among them were certain Germans, who not only talked but stood
+upon a seat to see better, and were ordered down by one of the Swiss
+with a fierce "_Giù, signore, giù_!" Otherwise the guard kept good
+order in the chapel, and were no doubt as useful and genuine as any
+thing about the poor old Pope. What gorgeous fellows they were, and,
+as soldiers, how absurd! The weapons they bore were as obsolete as the
+excommunication. It was amusing to pass one of these play-soldiers on
+guard at the door of the Vatican--tall, straight, beautiful, superb,
+with his halberd on his shoulder--and then come to a real warrior
+outside, a little, ugly, red-legged French sentinel, with his Minié on
+his arm.
+
+Except for the singing of the Pope's choir--which was angelically
+sweet, and heavenly far above all praise--the religious ceremonies
+affected me, like all others of that faith, as tedious and empty. Each
+of the cardinals, as he entered the chapel, blew a sonorous nose; and
+was received standing by his brother prelates--a grotesque company
+of old-womanish old men in gaudy gowns. One of the last to come was
+Antonelli, who has the very wickedest face in the world. He sat with
+his eyes fastened upon his book, but obviously open at every pore
+to all that went on about him. As he passed out he cast gleaming,
+terrible, sidelong looks upon the people, full of hate and guile.
+
+From where I stood I saw the Pope's face only in profile: it was
+gentle and benign enough, but not great in expression, and the smile
+on it almost degenerated into a simper. His Holiness had a cold; and
+his _recitative_, though full, was not smooth. He was all priest
+when, in the midst of the service, he hawked, held his handkerchief up
+before his face, a little way off, and ruthlessly spat in it!
+
+
+
+
+FORZA MAGGIORE.
+
+I imagine that Grossetto is not a town much known to travel, for it is
+absent from all the guide-books I have looked at. However, it is chief
+in the Maremma, where sweet Pia de' Tolommei languished and perished
+of the poisonous air and her love's cruelty, and where, so many mute
+centuries since, the Etrurian cities flourished and fell. Further, one
+may say that Grossetto is on the diligence road from Civita Vecchia
+to Leghorn, and that in the very heart of the place there is a lovely
+palm-tree, rare, if not sole, in that latitude. This palm stands in a
+well-sheltered, dull little court, out of every thing's way, and turns
+tenderly toward the wall that shields it on the north. It has no other
+company but a beautiful young girl, who leans out of a window high
+over its head, and I have no doubt talks with it. At the moment we
+discovered the friends, the maiden was looking pathetically to the
+northward, while the palm softly stirred and opened its plumes, as a
+bird does when his song is finished; and there is very little question
+but it had just been singing to her that song of which the palms are
+so fond,--
+
+  "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
+  Im Norden auf kahler Höh'."
+
+Grossetto does her utmost to hide the secret of this tree's
+existence, as if a hard, matter-of-fact place ought to be ashamed of
+a sentimentality of the kind. It pretended to be a very worldly town,
+and tried to keep us in the neighborhood of its cathedral, where the
+caffè and shops are, and where, in the evening, four or five officers
+of the garrison clinked their sabres on the stones, and promenaded up
+and down, and as many ladies shopped for gloves; and as many citizens
+sat at the principal caffè and drank black coffee. This was lively
+enough; and we knew that the citizens were talking of the last week's
+news and the Roman question; that the ladies were really looking for
+loves, not gloves; that such of the officers as had no local intrigue
+to keep their hearts at rest were terribly bored, and longed for
+Florence or Milan or Turin.
+
+Besides the social charms of her piazza, Grossetto put forth others
+of an artistic nature. The cathedral was very old and very
+beautiful,--built of alternate lines of red and white marble, and
+lately restored in the best spirit of fidelity and reverence. But
+it was not open, and we were obliged to turn from it to the group of
+statuary in the middle of the piazza, representative of the Maremma
+and Family returning thanks to the Grand Duke Leopold III. of Tuscany
+for his goodness in causing her swamps to be drained. The Maremma and
+her children are arrayed in the scant draperies of Allegory, but
+the Grand Duke is fully dressed, and is shown looking down with some
+surprise at their figures, and with a visible doubt of the propriety
+of their public appearance in that state.
+
+There was also a Museum at Grossetto, and I wonder what was in it?
+
+The wall of the town was perfect yet, though the moat at its feet had
+been so long dry that it was only to be known from the adjacent fields
+by the richness of its soil. The top of the wall had been leveled, and
+planted with shade, and turned into a peaceful promenade, like most of
+such mediæval defenses in Italy; though I am not sure that a little
+military life did not still linger about a bastion here and there.
+From somewhere, when we strolled out early in the morning, to walk
+upon the wall, there came to us a throb of drums; but I believe that
+the only armed men we saw, beside the officers in the piazza, were
+the numerous sportsmen resorting at that season to Grossetto for
+the excellent shooting in the marshes. All the way to Florence we
+continued to meet them and their dogs; and our inn at Grossetto
+overflowed with abundance of game. On the kitchen floor and in the
+court were heaps of larks, pheasants, quails, and beccafichi, at which
+a troop of scullion-boys constantly plucked, and from which the great,
+noble, beautiful, white-aproned cook forever fried, stewed, broiled,
+and roasted. We lived chiefly upon these generous birds during our
+sojourn, and found, when we attempted to vary our bill of fare, that
+the very genteel waiter attending us had few distinct ideas beyond
+them. He was part of the repairs and improvements which that
+hostelry had recently undergone, and had evidently come in with
+the four-pronged forks, the chromo-lithographs of Victor Emanuel,
+Garibaldi, Solferino, and Magenta in the large dining-room, and the
+iron stove in the small one. He had nothing, evidently, in common with
+the brick floors of the bed-chambers, and the ancient rooms with
+great fire-places. He strove to give a Florentine blandishment to the
+rusticity of life in the Maremma; and we felt sure that he must know
+what beefsteak was. When we ordered it, he assumed to be perfectly
+conversant with it, started to bring it, paused, turned, and, with a
+great sacrifice of personal dignity, demanded, "_Bifsteca di manzo, o
+bifsteca di motone_?"--"Beefsteak of beef, or beefsteak of mutton?"
+
+Of Grossetto proper, this is all I remember, if I except a boy whom I
+heard singing after dark in the streets,--
+
+  "Camicia rossa, O Garibaldi!"
+
+The cause of our sojourn there was an instance of _forza maggiore_, as
+the agent of the diligence company defiantly expressed it, in refusing
+us damages for our overturn into the river. It was in the early
+part of the winter when we started from Rome for Venice, and we were
+travelling northward by diligence because the railways were still more
+or less interrupted by the storms and floods predicted of Matthieu
+de la Drôme,--the only reliable prophet France has produced since
+Voltaire;--and if our accident was caused by an overruling Providence,
+the company, according to the very law of its existence, was not
+responsible. To be sure, we did not see how an overruling Providence
+was to blame for loading upon our diligence the baggage of two
+diligences, or for the clumsiness of our driver; but on the other
+hand, it is certain that the company did not make it rain or cause
+the inundation. And, in fine, although we could not have travelled
+by railway, we were masters to have taken the steamer instead of the
+diligence at Civita Vecchia.
+
+The choice of either of these means of travel had presented itself in
+vivid hues of disadvantage all the way from Rome to the Papal port,
+where the French steamer for Leghorn lay dancing a hornpipe upon the
+short, chopping waves, while we approached by railway. We had
+leisure enough to make the decision, if that was all we wanted. Our
+engine-driver had derived his ideas of progress from an Encyclical
+Letter, and the train gave every promise of arriving at Civita Vecchia
+five hundred years behind time. But such was the desolating and
+depressing influence of the weather and the landscape, that we reached
+Civita Vecchia as undecided as we had left Rome. On the one hand,
+there had been the land, soaked and sodden,--wild, shagged with
+scrubby growths of timber and brooded over by sullen clouds, and
+visibly inhabited only by shepherds, leaning upon their staves at
+an angle of forty-five degrees, and looking, in their immovable
+dejection, with their legs wrapped in long-haired goat-skins, like
+satyrs that had been converted, and were trying to do right; turning
+dim faces to us, they warned us with every mute appeal against the
+land, as a waste of mud from one end of Italy to the other. On
+the other hand, there was the sea-wind raving about our train and
+threatening to blow it over, and whenever we drew near the coast,
+heaping the waves upon the beach in thundering menace.
+
+We weakly and fearfully remembered our former journeys by diligence
+over broken railway routes; we recalled our cruel voyage from Genoa to
+Naples by sea; and in a state of pitiable dismay we ate five francs'
+worth at the restaurant of the Civita Vecchia station before we knew
+it, and long before we had made up our minds. Still we might have
+lingered and hesitated, and perhaps returned to Rome at last, but for
+the dramatic resolution of the old man who solicited passengers for
+the diligence, and carried their passports for a final Papal _visa_
+at the police-office. By the account he gave of himself, he was one of
+the best men in the world, and unique in those parts for honesty and
+truthfulness; and he besought us, out of that affectionate interest
+with which our very aspect had inspired him, not to go by steamer, but
+to go by diligence, which in nineteen hours would land us safe,
+and absolutely refreshed by the journey, at the railway station in
+Follonica. And now, once, would we go by diligence? twice, would we
+go? three times, would we go?
+
+"Signore," said our benefactor, angrily, "I lose my time with you;"
+and ran away, to be called back in the course of destiny, as he knew
+well enough, and besought to take us as a special favor.
+
+From the passports he learned that there was official dignity among
+us, and addressed the unworthy bearer of public honors as Eccellenza,
+and, at parting bequeathed his advantage to the conductor, commending
+us all in set terms to his courtesy. He hovered caressingly about us
+as long as we remained, straining politeness to do us some last little
+service; and when the diligence rolled away, he did all that one man
+could to give us a round of applause.
+
+We laughed together at this silly old man, when out of sight; but we
+confessed that, if travel in our own country ever came, with advancing
+corruption, to be treated with the small deceits practiced upon it in
+Italy, it was not likely to be treated with the small civilities also
+there attendant on it,--and so tried to console ourselves.
+
+At the moment of departure, we were surprised to have enter the
+diligence a fellow-countryman, whom we had first seen on the road from
+Naples to Rome. He had since crossed our path with that iteration of
+travel which brings you again and again in view of the same trunks
+and the same tourists in the round of Europe, and finally at Civita
+Vecchia he had turned up, a silent spectator of our scene with the
+agent of the diligence, and had gone off apparently a confirmed
+passenger by steamer. Perhaps a nearer view of the sailor's hornpipe,
+as danced by that vessel in the harbor, shook his resolution. At
+any rate, here he was again, and with his ticket for Follonica,--a
+bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked man, and we will say a citizen of Portland,
+though he was not. For the first time in our long acquaintance with
+one another's faces, we entered into conversation, and wondered
+whether we should find brigands or any thing to eat on the road,
+without expectation of finding either. In respect of robbers, we were
+not disappointed; but shortly after nightfall we stopped at a lonely
+post-house to change horses, and found that the landlord had so far
+counted on our appearance as to have, just roasted and fragrantly
+fuming, a leg of lamb, with certain small fried fish, and a
+sufficiency of bread. It was a very lonely place as I say; the sky was
+gloomy overhead; and the wildness of the landscape all about us gave
+our provision quite a gamy flavor; and brigands could have added
+nothing to our sense of solitude.
+
+The road creeps along the coast for some distance from Civita Vecchia,
+within hearing of the sea, and nowhere widely forsakes it, I believe,
+all the way to Follonica. The country is hilly, and we stopped every
+two hours to change horses; at which times we looked out, and, seeing
+that it was a gray and windy night, though not rainy, exulted that we
+had not taken the steamer. With very little change, the wisdom of
+our decision in favor of the diligence formed the burden of our talk
+during the whole night; and to think of eluded sea-sickness requited
+us in the agony of our break-neck efforts to catch a little sleep, as,
+mounted upon our nightmares, we rode steeple-chases up and down the
+highways and by-ways of horror. Any thing that absolutely awakened us
+was accounted a blessing; and I remember few things in life with so
+keen a pleasure as the summons that came to us to descend from our
+places and cross a river in one boat, while the two diligences of
+our train followed in another. Here we had time to see our
+fellow-passengers, as the pulsating light of their cigars illumined
+their faces, and to discover among them that Italian, common to all
+large companies, who speaks English, and is very eager to practice
+it with you,--who is such a benefactor if you do not know his own
+language, and such a bore if you do. After this, being landed, it was
+rapture to stroll up and down the good road, and feel it hard and real
+under our feet, and not an abysmal impalpability, while all the
+grim shapes of our dreams fled to the spectral line of small boats
+sustaining the ferry-barge, and swaying slowly from it as the drowned
+men at their keels tugged them against the tide.
+
+"_S' accommodino, Signori_!" cries the cheerful voice of the
+conductor, and we ascend to our places in the diligence. The
+nightmares are brought out again; we mount, and renew the
+steeple-chase as before.
+
+Suddenly, it all comes to an end, and we sit wide awake in the
+diligence, amid a silence only broken by the hiss of rain against the
+windows, and the sweep of gusts upon the roof. The diligence stands
+still; there is no rattle of harness, nor other sound to prove that we
+have arrived at the spot by other means than dropping from the clouds.
+The idea that we are passengers in the last diligence destroyed
+before the Deluge, and are now waiting our fate on the highest ground
+accessible to wheels, fades away as the day dimly breaks, and we find
+ourselves planted, as the Italians say, on the banks of another
+river. There is no longer any visible conductor, the horses have been
+spirited away, the driver has vanished.
+
+The rain beats and beats upon the roof, and begins to drop through
+upon us in great, wrathful tears, while the river before us rushes
+away with a momently swelling flood. Enter now from the depths of
+the storm a number of rainy peasants, with our conductor and driver
+perfectly waterlogged, and group themselves on the low, muddy shore,
+near a flat ferry-barge, evidently wanting but a hint of _forza
+maggiore_ to go down with any thing put into it. A moment they
+dispute in pantomime, sending now and then a windy tone of protest
+and expostulation to our ears, and then they drop into a motionless
+silence, and stand there in the tempest, not braving it, but enduring
+it with the pathetic resignation of their race, as if it were some
+form of hopeless political oppression. At last comes the conductor to
+us and says, It is impossible for our diligences to cross in the
+boat, and he has sent for others to meet us on the opposite shore.
+He expected them long before this, but we see! They are not come.
+Patience and malediction!
+
+Remaining planted in these unfriendly circumstances from four o'clock
+till ten, we have still the effrontery to be glad that we did not
+take the steamer. What a storm that must be at sea! When at last
+our connecting diligences appear on the other shore, we are almost
+light-hearted, and make a jest of the Ombrone, as we perilously pass
+it in the ferry-boat too weak for our diligences. Between the landing
+and the vehicles there is a space of heavy mud to cross, and when we
+reach them we find the _coupé_ appointed us occupied by three young
+Englishmen, who insist that they shall be driven to the boat. With
+that graceful superiority which endears their nation to the world, and
+makes the travelling Englishman a universal favorite, they keep
+the seats to which they have no longer any right, while the tempest
+drenches the ladies to whom the places belong; and it is only by the
+_forza maggiore_ of our conductor that they can be dislodged. In
+the mean time the Portland man exchanges with them the assurances of
+personal and national esteem, which that mighty bond of friendship,
+the language of Shakespeare and Milton, enables us to offer so
+idiomatically to our transatlantic cousins.
+
+What Grossetto was like, as we first rode through it, we scarcely
+looked to see. In four or five hours we should strike the railroad at
+Follonica; and we merely asked of intermediate places that they
+should not detain us. We dined in Grossetto at an inn of the Larthian
+period,--a cold inn and a damp, which seemed never to have been
+swept since the broom dropped from the grasp of the last Etrurian
+chambermaid,--and we ate with the two-pronged iron forks of an extinct
+civilization. All the while we dined, a boy tried to kindle a fire
+to warm us, and beguiled his incessant failures with stories of
+inundation on the road ahead of us. But we believed him so little,
+that when he said a certain stream near Grossetto was impassable, our
+company all but hissed him.
+
+When we left the town and hurried into the open country, we perceived
+that he had only too great reason to be an alarmist. Every little
+rill was risen, and boiling over with the pride of harm, and the broad
+fields lay hid under the yellow waters that here and there washed over
+the road. Yet the freshet only presented itself to us as a pleasant
+excitement; and even when we came to a place where the road itself
+was covered for a quarter of a mile, we scarcely looked outside the
+diligence to see how deep the water was. We were surprised when our
+horses were brought to a stand on a rising ground, and the conductor,
+cap in hand, appeared at the door. He was a fat, well-natured man,
+full of a smiling goodwill; and he stood before us in a radiant
+desperation.
+
+Would Eccellenza descend, look at the water in front, and decide
+whether to go on? The conductor desired to content; it displeased him
+to delay,--_ma, in somma_!--the rest was confided to the conductor's
+eloquent shoulders and eyebrows.
+
+Eccellenza, descending, beheld but a disheartening prospect. On every
+hand the country was under water. The two diligences stood on a stone
+bridge spanning the stream, that, now swollen to an angry torrent,
+brawled over a hundred yards of the road before us. Beyond, the ground
+rose, and on its slope stood a farm-house up to its second story in
+water. Without the slightest hope in his purpose and merely as an
+experiment, Eccellenza suggested that a man should be sent in on
+horseback; which being done, man and horse in a moment floundered into
+swimming depths.
+
+The conductor, vigilantly regarding Eccellenza, gave a great shrug of
+desolation.
+
+Eccellenza replied with a foreigner's broken shrug,--a shrug of
+sufficiently correct construction, but wanting the tonic accent,
+as one may say, though expressing, however imperfectly, an equal
+desolation.
+
+It appeared to be the part of wisdom not to go ahead, but to go back
+if we could; and we reëntered the water we had just crossed. It had
+risen a little meanwhile, and the road could now be traced only by the
+telegraph-poles. The diligence before us went safely through; but our
+driver, trusting rather to inspiration than precedent, did not follow
+it carefully, and directly drove us over the side of a small viaduct.
+All the baggage of the train having been lodged upon the roof of our
+diligence, the unwieldy vehicle now lurched heavily, hesitated, as if
+preparing, like Cæsar, to fall decently, and went over on its side
+with a stately deliberation that gave us ample time to arrange our
+plans for getting out.
+
+The torrent was only some three feet deep, but it was swift and muddy,
+and it was with a fine sense of shipwreck that Eccellenza felt his
+boots filling with water, while a conviction that it would have been
+better, after all, to have taken the steamer, struck coldly home to
+him. We opened the window in the top side of the diligence, and
+lifted the ladies through it and the conductor, in the character of
+life-boat, bore them ashore; while the driver cursed his horses in
+a sullen whisper, and could with difficulty be diverted from that
+employment to cut the lines and save one of them from drowning.
+
+Here our compatriot, whose conversation with the Englishman at the
+Ombrone we had lately admired, showed traits of strict and severe
+method which afterward came into even bolder relief. The ladies being
+rescued, he applied himself to the rescue of their hats, cloaks,
+rubbers, muffs, books, and bags, and handed them up through the window
+with tireless perseverance, making an effort to wring or dry each
+article in turn. The other gentleman on top received them all rather
+grimly, and had not perhaps been amused by the situation but for the
+exploit of his hat. It was of the sort called in Italian as in English
+slang a stove-pipe (_canna_), and having been made in Italy, it was
+of course too large for its wearer. It had never been any thing but a
+horror and reproach to him, and he was now inexpressibly delighted
+to see it steal out of the diligence in company with one of the
+red-leather cushions, and glide darkly down the flood. It nodded and
+nodded to the cushion with a superhuman tenderness and elegance, and
+had a preposterous air of whispering, as it drifted out of sight,--
+
+  "It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles,--
+  It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down."
+
+The romantic interest of this episode had hardly died away, when our
+adventure acquired an idyllic flavor from the appearance on the scene
+of four peasants in an ox-cart. These the conductor tried to engage to
+bring out the baggage and right the fallen diligence; and they, after
+making him a little speech upon the value of their health, which
+might be injured, asked him, tentatively, two hundred francs for
+the service. The simple incident enforced the fact already known to
+us,--that, if Italians sometimes take advantage of strangers, they
+are equally willing to prey upon each other; but I doubt if any thing
+could have taught a foreigner the sweetness with which our conductor
+bore the enormity, and turned quietly from those brigands to carry the
+Portland man from the wreck, on which he lingered, to the shore.
+
+Here in the gathering twilight the passengers of both diligences
+grouped themselves, and made merry over the common disaster. As the
+conductor and the drivers brought off the luggage our spirits rose
+with the arrival of each trunk, and we were pleased or not as we found
+it soaked or dry. We applauded and admired the greater sufferers among
+us: a lady who opened a dripping box was felt to have perpetrated a
+pleasantry; and a Brazilian gentleman, whose luggage dropped to pieces
+and was scattered in the flood about the diligence, was looked upon as
+a very subtile humorist. Our own contribution to these witty passages
+was the epigrammatic display of a reeking trunk full of the pretty
+rubbish people bring away from Rome and Naples,--copies of Pompeian
+frescos more ruinous than the originals; photographs floating loose
+from their cards; little earthen busts reduced to the lumpishness of
+common clay; Roman scarfs stained and blotted out of all memory of
+their recent hues; Roman pearls clinging together in clammy masses.
+
+We were a band of brothers and sisters, as we all crowded into one
+diligence and returned to Grossetto. Arrived there, our party, knowing
+that a public conveyance in Italy--and everywhere else--always stops
+at the worst inn in a place, made bold to seek another, and found it
+without ado, though the person who undertook to show it spoke of it
+mysteriously and as of difficult access, and tried to make the simple
+affair as like a scene of grand opera as he could.
+
+We took one of the ancient rooms in which there was a vast fire-place,
+as already mentioned, and we there kindled such a fire as could not
+have been known in that fuel-sparing land for ages. The drying of the
+clothes was an affair that drew out all the energy and method of our
+compatriot, and at a late hour we left him moving about among the
+garments that dangled and dripped from pegs and hooks and lines,
+dealing with them as a physician with his sick, and tenderly nursing
+his dress-coat, which he wrung and shook and smoothed and pulled this
+way and that with a never-satisfied anxiety. At midnight, he hired
+a watcher to keep up the fire and turn the steaming raiment, and,
+returning at four o'clock, found his watcher dead asleep before the
+empty fire-place. But I rather applaud than blame the watcher for
+this. He must have been a man of iron nerve to fall asleep amid all
+that phantasmal show of masks and disguises. What if those reeking
+silks had forsaken their nails, and, decking themselves with the
+blotted Roman scarfs and the slimy Roman pearls, had invited the
+dress-coats to look over the dripping photographs? Or if all those
+drowned garments had assumed the characters of the people whom they
+had grown to resemble, and had sat down to hear the shade of Pia de'
+Tolommei rehearse the story of her sad fate in the Maremma? I say, if
+a watcher could sleep in such company, he was right to do so.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the third day after our return to Grossetto, we gathered together
+our damaged effects, and packed them into refractory trunks. Then
+we held the customary discussion with the landlord concerning the
+effrontery of his account, and drove off once more toward Follonica.
+We could scarcely recognize the route for the one we had recently
+passed over; and it was not until we came to the scene of our wreck,
+and found the diligence stranded high and dry upon the roadside, that
+we could believe the whole landscape about us had been flooded three
+days before. The offending stream had shrunk back to its channel, and
+now seemed to feign an unconsciousness of its late excess, and had
+a virtuous air of not knowing how in the world to account for that
+upturned diligence. The waters, we learned, had begun to subside the
+night after our disaster; and the vehicle might have been righted
+and drawn off--for it was not in the least injured--forty-eight hours
+previously; but I suppose it was not _en règle_ to touch it without
+orders from Rome. I picture it to myself still lying there, in the
+heart of the marshes, and thrilling sympathetic travel with the
+spectacle of its ultimate ruin:
+
+  "Disfecemi Maremma."
+
+We reached Follonica at last, and then the cars hurried us to Leghorn.
+We were thoroughly humbled in spirit, and had no longer any doubt
+that we did ill to take the diligence at Civita Vecchia instead of
+the steamer; for we had been, not nineteen hours, but four days on the
+road, and we had suffered as aforementioned.
+
+But we were destined to be partially restored to our self-esteem, if
+not entirely comforted for our losses, when we sat down to dinner in
+the Hotel Washington, and the urbane head-waiter, catching the drift
+of our English discourse, asked us,--
+
+"Have the signori heard that the French steamer, which left Civita
+Vecchia the same day with their diligence, had to put back and lie in
+port more than two days on account of the storm? She is but now come
+into Leghorn, after a very dangerous passage."
+
+
+
+
+AT PADUA
+
+I.
+
+Those of my readers who have frequented the garden of Doctor
+Rappaccini no doubt recall with perfect distinctness the quaint
+old city of Padua. They remember its miles and miles of dim arcade
+over-roofing the sidewalks everywhere, affording excellent opportunity
+for the flirtation of lovers by day and the vengeance of rivals by
+night. They have seen the now-vacant streets thronged with maskers,
+and the Venetian Podestà going in gorgeous state to and from the vast
+Palazzo della Ragione. They have witnessed ringing tournaments in
+those sad empty squares, and races in the Prato della Valle, and
+many other wonders of different epochs, and their pleasure makes me
+half-sorry that I should have lived for several years within an hour
+by rail from Padua, and should know little or nothing of these great
+sights from actual observation. I take shame to myself for having
+visited Padua so often and so familiarly as I used to do,--for having
+been bored and hungry there,--for having had toothache there, upon one
+occasion,--for having rejoiced more in a cup of coffee at Pedrocchi's
+than in the whole history of Padua,--for having slept repeatedly in
+the bad-bedded hotels of Padua and never once dreamt of Portia,--for
+having been more taken by the _salti mortali_[_Salti mortali_ are
+those prodigious efforts of mental arithmetic by which Italian
+waiters, in verbally presenting your account, arrive at six as the
+product of two and two.] of a waiter who summed up my account at a
+Paduan restaurant, than by all the strategies with which the city has
+been many times captured and recaptured. Had I viewed Padua only over
+the wall of Doctor Rappaccini's garden, how different my impressions
+of the city would now be! This is one of the drawbacks of actual
+knowledge. "Ah! how can you write about Spain when once you have been
+there?" asked Heine of Théophile Gautier setting out on a journey
+thither.
+
+Nevertheless it seems to me that I remember something about Padua with
+a sort of romantic pleasure. There was a certain charm which I can
+dimly recall, in sauntering along the top of the old wall of the
+city, and looking down upon the plumy crests of the Indian corn that
+flourished up so mightily from the dry bed of the moat. At such times
+I could not help figuring to myself the many sieges that the wall had
+known, with the fierce assault by day, the secret attack by night, the
+swarming foe upon the plains below, the bristling arms of the besieged
+upon the wall, the boom of the great mortars made of ropes and leather
+and throwing mighty balls of stone, the stormy flight of arrows, the
+ladders planted against the defenses and staggering headlong into the
+moat, enriched for future agriculture not only by its sluggish waters,
+but by the blood of many men. I suppose that most of these visions
+were old stage spectacles furbished up anew, and that my armies
+were chiefly equipped with their obsolete implements of warfare from
+museums of armor and from cabinets of antiquities; but they were very
+vivid for all that.
+
+I was never able, in passing a certain one of the city gates, to
+divest myself of an historic interest in the great loads of hay
+waiting admission on the outside. For an instant they masked again the
+Venetian troops that, in the War of the League of Cambray, entered the
+city in the hay-carts, shot down the landsknechts at the gates, and,
+uniting with the citizens, cut the German garrison to pieces. But it
+was a thing long past. The German garrison was here again; and the
+heirs of the landsknechts went clanking through the gate to the
+parade-ground, with that fierce clamor of their kettle-drums which is
+so much fiercer because unmingled with the noise of fifes. Once more
+now the Germans are gone, and, let us trust, forever; but when I
+saw them, there seemed little hope of their going. They had a great
+Biergarten on the top of the wall, and they had set up the altars of
+their heavy Bacchus in many parts of the city.
+
+I please myself with thinking that, if I walked on such a spring
+day as this in the arcaded Paduan streets, I should catch glimpses,
+through the gate-ways of the palaces, of gardens full of vivid bloom,
+and of fountains that tinkle there forever. If it were autumn, and
+I were in the great market-place before the Palazzo della Ragione, I
+should hear the baskets of amber-hued and honeyed grapes humming with
+the murmur of multitudinous bees, and making a music as if the wine
+itself were already singing in their gentle hearts. It is a great
+field of succulent verdure, that wide old market-place; and fancy
+loves to browse about among its gay stores of fruits and vegetables,
+brought thither by the world-old peasant-women who have been bringing
+fruits and vegetables to the Paduan market for so many centuries. They
+sit upon the ground before their great panniers, and knit and doze,
+and wake up with a drowsy "_Comandala_?" as you linger to look
+at their grapes. They have each a pair of scales,--the emblem of
+Injustice,--and will weigh you out a scant measure of the fruit if you
+like. Their faces are yellow as parchment, and Time has written them
+so full of wrinkles that there is not room for another line. Doubtless
+these old parchment visages are palimpsests, and would tell the whole
+history of Padua if you could get at each successive inscription.
+Among their primal records there must be some account of the Roman
+city, as each little contadinella remembered it on market-days; and
+one might read of the terror of Attila's sack, a little later, with
+the peasant-maid's personal recollections of the bold Hunnish trooper
+who ate up the grapes in her basket, and kissed her hard, round red
+cheeks,--for in that time she was a blooming girl,--and paid nothing
+for either privilege. What wild and confused reminiscences on the
+wrinkled visage we should find thereafter of the fierce republican
+times, of Ecelino, of the Carraras, of the Venetian rule! And is it
+not sad to think of systems and peoples all passing away, and these
+ancient women lasting still, and still selling grapes in front of the
+Palazzo della Ragione? What a long mortality!
+
+The youngest of their number is a thousand years older than the
+palace, which was begun in the twelfth century, and which is much the
+same now as it was when first completed. I know that, if I entered it,
+I should be sure of finding the great hall of the palace--the vastest
+hall in the world--dim and dull and dusty and delightful, with nothing
+in it except at one end Donatello's colossal marble-headed wooden
+horse of Troy, stared at from the other end by the two dog-faced
+Egyptian women in basalt placed there by Belzoni.
+
+Late in the drowsy summer afternoons I should have the Court of the
+University all to myself, and might study unmolested the blazons of
+the noble youth who have attended the school in different centuries
+ever since 1200, and have left their escutcheons on the walls to
+commemorate them. At the foot of the stairway ascending to the schools
+from the court is the statue of the learned lady who was once a
+professor in the University, and who, if her likeness belie not her
+looks, must have given a great charm to student life in other times.
+At present there are no lady professors at Padua any more than at
+Harvard; and during late years the schools have suffered greatly from
+the interference of the Austrian government, which frequently closed
+them for months, on account of political demonstrations among the
+students. But now there is an end of this and many other stupid
+oppressions; and the time-honored University will doubtless regain
+its ancient importance. Even in 1864 it had nearly fifteen hundred
+students, and one met them everywhere under the arcades, and could
+not well mistake them, with that blended air of pirate and dandy which
+these studious young men loved to assume. They were to be seen a good
+deal on the promenades outside the walls, where the Paduan ladies are
+driven in their carriages in the afternoon, and where one sees the
+blood-horses and fine equipages for which Padua is famous. There used
+once to be races in the Prato della Valle, after the Italian notion of
+horse-races; but these are now discontinued, and there is nothing to
+be found there but the statues of scholars and soldiers and statesmen,
+posted in a circle around the old race-course. If you strolled thither
+about dusk on such a day as this, you might see the statues unbend a
+little from their stony rigidity, and in the failing light nod to each
+other very pleasantly through the trees. And if you stayed in Padua
+over night, what could be better to-morrow morning than a stroll
+through the great Botanical Garden,--the oldest botanical garden in
+the world,--the garden which first received in Europe the strange
+and splendid growths of our hemisphere,--the garden where Doctor
+Rappaccini doubtless found the germ of his mortal plant?
+
+On the whole, I believe I would rather go this moment to Padua than to
+Lowell or Lawrence, or even to Worcester; and as to the disadvantage
+of having seen Padua, I begin to think the whole place has now assumed
+so fantastic a character in my mind that I am almost as well qualified
+to write of it as if I had merely dreamed it.
+
+The day that we first visited the city was very rainy, and we spent
+most of the time in viewing the churches. These, even after the
+churches of Venice, one finds rich in art and historic interest, and
+they in no instance fall into the maniacal excesses of the Renaissance
+to which some of the temples of the latter city abandon themselves.
+Their architecture forms a sort of border-land between the Byzantine
+of Venice and the Lombardic of Verona. The superb domes of St.
+Anthony's emulate those of St. Mark's; and the porticos of other
+Paduan churches rest upon the backs of bird-headed lions and leopards
+that fascinate with their mystery and beauty.
+
+It was the wish to see the attributive Giottos in the Chapter which
+drew us first to St. Anthony's, and we saw them with the satisfaction
+naturally attending the contemplation of frescos discovered only since
+1858, after having been hidden under plaster and whitewash for many
+centuries; but we could not believe that Giotto's fame was destined
+to gain much by their rescue from oblivion. They are in nowise to
+be compared with this master's frescos in the Chapel of the
+Annunziata,--which, indeed, is in every way a place of wonder and
+delight. You reach it by passing through a garden lane bordered with
+roses, and a taciturn gardener comes out with clinking keys, and lets
+you into the chapel, where there is nobody but Giotto and Dante, nor
+seems to have been for ages. Cool it is, and of a pulverous smell, as
+a sacred place should be; a blessed benching goes round the walls, and
+you sit down and take unlimited comfort in the frescos. The gardener
+leaves you alone to the solitude and the silence, in which the talk
+of the painter and the exile is plain enough. Their contemporaries and
+yours are cordial in their gay companionship: through the half-open
+door falls, in a pause of the rain, the same sunshine that they saw
+lie there; the deathless birds that they heard sing out in the garden
+trees; it is the fresh sweetness of the grass mown so many hundred
+years ago that breathes through all the lovely garden grounds.
+
+But in the midst of this pleasant communion with the past, you have
+a lurking pain; for you have hired your brougham by the hour; and you
+presently quit the Chapel of Giotto on this account.
+
+We had chosen our driver from among many other drivers of broughams in
+the vicinity of Pedrocchi's, because he had such an honest look, and
+was not likely, we thought, to deal unfairly with us.
+
+"But first," said the signor who had selected him, "how much is your
+brougham an hour?"
+
+So and so.
+
+"Show me the tariff of fares."
+
+"There is no tariff."
+
+"There is. Show it to me."
+
+"It is lost, signor."
+
+"I think not. It is here in this pocket. Get it out."
+
+The tariff appears, and with it the fact that he had demanded just
+what the boatman of the ballad received in gift,--thrice his fee.
+
+The driver mounted his seat, and served us so faithfully that day in
+Padua that we took him the next day for Arquà. At the end, when he
+had received his due, and a handsome _mancia_ besides, he was still
+unsatisfied, and referred to the tariff in proof that he had been
+under-paid. On that confronted and defeated, he thanked us very
+cordially, gave us the number of his brougham, and begged us to ask
+for him when we came next to Padua and needed a carriage.
+
+From the Chapel of the Annunziata he drove us to the Church of Santa
+Giustina, where is a very famous and noble picture by Romanino. But as
+this writing has nothing in the world to do with art, I here dismiss
+that subject, and with a gross and idle delight follow the sacristan
+down under the church to the prison of Santa Giustina.
+
+Of all the faculties of the mind there is none so little fatiguing to
+exercise as mere wonder; and, for my own sake, I try always to wonder
+at things without the least critical reservation. I therefore, in the
+sense of deglutition, bolted this prison at once, though subsequent
+experiences led me to look with grave indigestion upon the whole idea
+of prisons, their authenticity, and even their existence.
+
+As far as mere dimensions are concerned, the prison of Santa Giustina
+was not a hard one to swallow, being only three feet wide by about
+ten feet in length. In this limited space, Santa Giustina passed five
+years of the paternal reign of Nero (a virtuous and a long-suffering
+prince, whom, singularly enough, no historic artist has yet arisen to
+whitewash), and was then brought out into the larger cell adjoining,
+to suffer a blessed martyrdom. I am not sure now whether the sacristan
+said she was dashed to death on the stones, or cut to pieces with
+knives; but whatever the form of martyrdom, an iron ring in the
+ceiling was employed in it, as I know from seeing the ring,--a
+curiously well-preserved piece of iron-mongery. Within the narrow
+prison of the saint, and just under the grating, through which the
+sacristan thrust his candle to illuminate it, was a mountain of
+candle-drippings,--a monument to the fact that faith still largely
+exists in this doubting world. My own credulity, not only with regard
+to this prison, but also touching the coffin of St. Luke, which I saw
+in the church, had so wrought upon the esteem of the sacristan, that
+he now took me to a well, into which, he said, had been cast the bones
+of three thousand Christian martyrs. He lowered a lantern into the
+well, and assured me that, if I looked through a certain screenwork
+there, I could see the bones. On experiment I could not see the
+bones, but this circumstance did not cause me to doubt their presence,
+particularly as I did see upon the screen a great number of coins
+offered for the repose of the martyrs' souls. I threw down some
+_soldi_, and thus enthralled the sacristan.
+
+If the signor cared to see prisons, he said, the driver must take him
+to those of Ecelino, at present the property of a private gentleman
+near by. As I had just bought a history of Ecelino, at a great
+bargain, from a second-hand book-stall, and had a lively interest in
+all the enormities of that nobleman, I sped the driver instantly to
+the villa of the Signor P----.
+
+It depends here altogether upon the freshness or mustiness of the
+reader's historical reading whether he cares to be reminded more
+particularly who Ecelino was. He flourished balefully in the early
+half of the thirteenth century as lord of Vicenza, Verona, Padua, and
+Brescia, and was defeated and hurt to death in an attempt to possess
+himself of Milan. He was in every respect a remarkable man for
+that time,--fearless, abstemious, continent, avaricious, hardy,
+and unspeakably ambitious and cruel. He survived and suppressed
+innumerable conspiracies, escaping even the thrust of the assassin
+whom the fame of his enormous wickedness had caused the Old Man of the
+Mountain to send against him. As lord of Padua he was more incredibly
+severe and bloody in his rule than as lord of the other cities, for
+the Paduans had been latest free, and conspired the most frequently
+against him. He extirpated whole families on suspicion that a single
+member had been concerned in a meditated revolt. Little children and
+helpless women suffered hideous mutilation and shame at his hands.
+Six prisons in Padua were constantly filled by his arrests. The whole
+country was traversed by witnesses of his cruelties,--men and women
+deprived of an arm or leg, and begging from door to door. He had long
+been excommunicated; at last the Church proclaimed a crusade against
+him, and his lieutenant and nephew--more demoniacal, if possible,
+than himself--was driven out of Padua while he was operating against
+Mantua. Ecelino retired to Verona, and maintained a struggle against
+the crusade for nearly two years longer, with a courage which never
+failed him. Wounded and taken prisoner, the soldiers of the victorious
+army gathered about him, and heaped insult and reproach upon him;
+and one furious peasant, whose brother's feet had been cut off by
+Ecelino's command, dealt the helpless monster four blows upon the head
+with a scythe. By some, Ecelino is said to have died of these wounds
+alone; but by others it is related that his death was a kind of
+suicide, inasmuch as he himself put the case past surgery by tearing
+off the bandages from his hurts, and refusing all medicines.
+
+
+II.
+
+Entering at the enchanted portal of the Villa P----, we found
+ourselves in a realm of wonder. It was our misfortune not to see the
+magician who compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but
+for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his
+greatness. Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but
+lugubrious fancy, which everywhere tended to a monumental and mortuary
+effect. A sort of vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped
+and glimmered the garden. The walls of the vestibule were covered with
+inscriptions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety
+of all ages concerning life and death; we began with Confucius, and
+we ended with Benjamino Franklino. But as if these ideas of mortality
+were not sufficiently depressing, the funereal Signor P---- had
+collected into earthen _amphoræ_ the ashes of the most famous men of
+ancient and modern times, and arranged them so that a sense of their
+number and variety should at once strike his visitor. Each jar was
+conspicuously labeled with the name its illustrious dust had borne
+in life; and if one escaped with comparative cheerfulness from the
+thought that Seneca had died, there were in the very next pot the
+cinders of Napoleon to bully him back to a sense of his mortality.
+
+We were glad to have the gloomy fascination of these objects broken by
+the custodian, who approached to ask if we wished to see the prisons
+of Ecelino, and we willingly followed him into the rain out of our
+sepulchral shelter.
+
+Between the vestibule and the towers of the tyrant lay that garden
+already mentioned, and our guide led us through ranks of weeping
+statuary, and rainy bowers, and showery lanes of shrubbery, until we
+reached the door of his cottage. While he entered to fetch the key
+to the prisons, we noted that the towers were freshly painted and
+in perfect repair; and indeed the custodian said frankly enough, on
+reappearing, that they were merely built over the prisons on the site
+of the original towers. The storied stream of the Bacchiglione sweeps
+through the grounds, and now, swollen by the rainfall, it roared, a
+yellow torrent, under a corner of the prisons. The towers rise from
+masses of foliage, and form no unpleasing feature of what must be, in
+spite of Signor P----, a delightful Italian garden in sunny weather.
+The ground is not so flat as elsewhere in Padua, and this inequality
+gives an additional picturesqueness to the place. But as we were
+come in search of horrors, we scorned these merely lovely things, and
+hastened to immure ourselves in the dungeons below. The custodian,
+lighting a candle, (which ought, we felt, to have been a torch,) went
+before.
+
+We found the cells, though narrow and dark, not uncomfortable, and the
+guide conceded that they had undergone some repairs since Ecelino's
+time. But all the horrors for which we had come were there in perfect
+grisliness, and labeled by the ingenious Signor P---- with Latin
+inscriptions.
+
+In the first cell was a shrine of the Virgin, set in the wall. Beneath
+this, while the wretched prisoner knelt in prayer, a trap-door opened
+and precipitated him upon the points of knives, from which his body
+fell into the Bacchiglione below. In the next cell, held by some rusty
+iron rings to the wall, was a skeleton, hanging by the wrists.
+
+"This," said the guide, "was another punishment of which Ecelino was
+very fond."
+
+A dreadful doubt seized my mind. "Was this skeleton found here?" I
+demanded.
+
+Without faltering an instant, without so much as winking an eye, the
+custodian replied, "_Appunto_."
+
+It was a great relief, and restored me to confidence in the
+establishment. I am at a loss to explain how my faith should have been
+confirmed afterwards by coming upon a guillotine--an awful instrument
+in the likeness of a straw-cutter, with a decapitated wooden figure
+under its blade--which the custodian confessed to be a modern
+improvement placed there by Signor P----. Yet my credulity was so
+strengthened by his candor, that I accepted without hesitation the
+torture of the water-drop when we came to it. The water-jar was as
+well preserved as if placed there but yesterday, and the skeleton
+beneath it--found as we saw it--was entire and perfect.
+
+In the adjoining cell sat a skeleton--found as we saw it--with its
+neck in the clutch of the garrote, which was one of Ecelino's more
+merciful punishments; while in still another cell the ferocity of
+the tyrant appeared in the penalty inflicted upon the wretch whose
+skeleton had been hanging for ages--as we saw it--head downwards from
+the ceiling.
+
+Beyond these, in a yet darker and drearier dungeon, stood a heavy
+oblong wooden box, with two apertures near the top, peering through
+which we found that we were looking into the eyeless sockets of a
+skull. Within this box Ecelino had immured the victim we beheld there,
+and left him to perish in view of the platters of food and goblets of
+drink placed just beyond the reach of his hands. The food we saw was
+of course not the original food.
+
+At last we came to the crowning horror of Villa P----, the supreme
+excess of Ecelino's cruelty. The guide entered the cell before us,
+and, as we gained the threshold, threw the light of his taper vividly
+upon a block that stood in the middle of the floor. Fixed to the
+block by an immense spike driven through from the back was the little
+slender hand of a woman, which lay there just as it had been struck
+from the living arm, and which, after the lapse of so many centuries,
+was still as perfectly preserved as if it had been embalmed. The sight
+had a most cruel fascination; and while one of the horror-seekers
+stood helplessly conjuring to his vision that scene of unknown
+dread,--the shrinking, shrieking woman dragged to the block, the wild,
+shrill, horrible screech following the blow that drove in the spike,
+the merciful swoon after the mutilation,--his companion, with a sudden
+pallor, demanded to be taken instantly away.
+
+In their swift withdrawal, they only glanced at a few detached
+instruments of torture,--all original Ecelinos, but intended for the
+infliction of minor and comparatively unimportant torments,--and then
+they passed from that place of fear.
+
+
+III.
+
+In the evening we sat talking at the Caffè Pedrocchi with an abbate,
+an acquaintance of ours, who was a Professor in the University of
+Padua. Pedrocchi's is the great caffè of Padua, a granite edifice
+of Egyptian architecture, which is the mausoleum of the proprietor's
+fortune. The pecuniary skeleton at the feast, however, does not much
+trouble the guests. They begin early in the evening to gather into the
+elegant saloons of the caffè,--somewhat too large for so small a city
+as Padua,--and they sit there late in the night over their cheerful
+cups and their ices, with their newspapers and their talk. Not so many
+ladies are to be seen as at the caffè in Venice, for it is only in the
+greater cities that they go much to these public places. There are few
+students at Pedrocchi's, for they frequent the cheaper caffè; but you
+may nearly always find there some Professor of the University, and
+on the evening of which I speak there were two present besides our
+abbate. Our friend's great passion was the English language, which
+he understood too well to venture to speak a great deal. He had been
+translating from that tongue into Italian certain American poems, and
+our talk was of these at first. Then we began to talk of distinguished
+American writers, of whom intelligent Italians always know at least
+four, in this succession,--Cooper, Mrs. Stowe, Longfellow, and Irving.
+Mrs. Stowe's _Capanna di Zio Tom_ is, of course universally read; and
+my friend had also read _Il Fiore di Maggio_,--"The May-flower."
+Of Longfellow, the "Evangeline" is familiar to Italians, through a
+translation of the poem; but our abbate knew all the poet's works,
+and one of the other professors present that evening had made such
+faithful study of them as to have produced some translations rendering
+the original with remarkable fidelity and spirit. I have before
+me here his _brochure_, printed last year at Padua, and containing
+versions of "Enceladus," "Excelsior," "A Psalm of Life," "The
+Old Clock on the Stairs," "Sand of the Desert in an Hour-Glass,"
+"Twilight," "Daybreak," "The Quadroon Girl," and "Torquemada,"--pieces
+which give the Italians a fair notion of our poet's lyrical range, and
+which bear witness to Professor Messadaglia's sympathetic and
+familiar knowledge of his works. A young and gifted lady of Parma,
+now unhappily no more, lately published a translation of "The Golden
+Legend;" and Professor Messadaglia, in his Preface, mentions a version
+of another of our poet's longer works on which the translator of the
+"Evangeline" is now engaged.
+
+At last, turning from literature, we spoke with the gentle abbate of
+our day's adventures, and eagerly related that of the Ecelino prisons.
+To have seen them was the most terrific pleasure of our lives.
+
+"Eh!" said our friend, "I believe you."
+
+"We mean those under the Villa P----."
+
+"Exactly."
+
+There was a tone of politely suppressed amusement in the abbate's
+voice; and after a moment's pause, in which we felt our awful
+experience slipping and sliding away from us, we ventured to say, "You
+don't mean that those are _not_ the veritable Ecelino prisons?"
+
+"Certainly they are nothing of the kind. The Ecelino prisons were
+destroyed when the Crusaders took Padua, with the exception of the
+tower, which the Venetian Republic converted into an observatory."
+
+"But at least these prisons are on the site of Ecelino's castle?"
+
+"Nothing of the sort. His castle in that case would have been outside
+of the old city walls."
+
+"And those tortures and the prisons are all"--
+
+"Things got up for show. No doubt, Ecelino used such things, and many
+worse, of which even the ingenuity of Signor P---- cannot conceive.
+But he is an eccentric man, loving the horrors of history, and what he
+can do to realize them he has done in his prisons."
+
+"But the custodian--how could he lie so?"
+
+Our friend shrugged his shoulders. "Eh! easily. And perhaps he even
+believed what he said."
+
+The world began to assume an aspect of bewildering ungenuineness,
+and there seemed to be a treacherous quality of fiction in the ground
+under our feet. Even the play at the pretty little Teatro Sociale
+where we went to pass the rest of the evening appeared hollow and
+improbable. We thought the hero something of a bore, with his patience
+and goodness; and as for the heroine, pursued by the attentions of the
+rich profligate, we doubted if she were any better than she should be.
+
+
+
+
+A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUÀ.
+
+I.
+
+We said, during summer days at Venice, when every _campo_ was a
+furnace seven times heated, and every canal was filled with boiling
+bathers, "As soon as it rains we will go to Arquà." Remembering the
+ardors of an April sun on the long, level roads of plain, we could not
+think of them in August without a sense of dust clogging every pore,
+and eyes that shrank from the vision of their blinding whiteness. So
+we stayed in Venice, waiting for rain, until the summer had almost
+lapsed into autumn; and as the weather cooled before any rain reached
+us, we took the moisture on the main-land for granted, and set out
+under a cloudy and windy sky.
+
+We had to go to Padua by railway, and take carriage thence to Arquà
+upon the road to Ferrara. I believe no rule of human experience was
+violated when it began to rain directly after we reached Padua,
+and continued to rain violently the whole day. We gave up this day
+entirely to the rain, and did not leave Padua until the following
+morning when we count that our pilgrimage to Petrarch's house actually
+began.
+
+The rain had cooled and freshened the air, but it was already too
+late in the season for the summer to recover herself with the elastic
+brilliancy that follows the rain of July or early August; and there
+was I know not what vague sentiment of autumn in the weather. There
+was not yet enough of it to stir the
+
+  "Tears from the depth of some divine despair;"
+
+but in here and there a faded leaf (for in Europe death is not
+glorified to the foliage as in our own land), in the purple of the
+ripening grapes, and in the tawny grass of the pastures, there was
+autumn enough to touch our spirits, and while it hardly affected the
+tone of the landscape, to lay upon us the gentle and pensive spell of
+its presence. Of all the days in the year I would have chosen this to
+go pilgrim to the house of Petrarch.
+
+The Euganean Hills, on one of which the poet's house is built, are
+those mellow heights which you see when you look southwest across the
+lagoon at Venice. In misty weather they are blue, and in clear weather
+silver, and the October sunset loves them. They rise in tender azure
+before you as you issue from the southern gate of Padua, and grow in
+loveliness as you draw nearer to them from the rich plain that washes
+their feet with endless harvests of oil and wine.
+
+Oh beauty that will not let itself be told! Could I not take warning
+from another, and refrain from this fruitless effort of description? A
+friend in Padua had lent me Disraeli's "Venetia," because a passage
+of the story occurs in Petrarch's house at Arquà, and we carried the
+volumes with us on our pilgrimage. I would here quote the description
+of the village, the house, and the hills from this work, as
+faultlessly true, and as affording no just idea of either; but nothing
+of it has remained in my mind except the geological fact that the
+hills are a volcanic range. To tell the truth, the landscape, as we
+rode along, continually took my mind off the book, and I could
+not give that attention either to the elegant language of its
+descriptions, or the adventures of its well-born characters, which
+they deserved. I was even more interested in the disreputable-looking
+person who mounted the box beside our driver directly we got out of
+the city gate, and who invariably commits this infringement upon your
+rights in Italy, no matter how strictly and cunningly you frame your
+contract that no one else is to occupy any part of the carriage but
+yourself. He does not seem to be the acquaintance of the driver, for
+they never exchange a word, and he does not seem to pay any thing for
+the ride. He got down, in this instance, just before we reached the
+little town at which our driver stopped, and asked us if we wished
+to drink a glass of the wine of the country. We did not, but his own
+thirst seemed to answer equally well, and he slaked it cheerfully at
+our cost.
+
+The fields did not present the busy appearance which had delighted
+us on the same road in the spring, but they had that autumnal charm
+already mentioned. Many of the vine-leaves were sear; the red grapes
+were already purple, and the white grapes pearly ripe, and they formed
+a gorgeous necklace for the trees, around which they clung in opulent
+festoons. Then, dearer to our American hearts than this southern
+splendor, were the russet fields of Indian corn, and, scattered among
+the shrunken stalks, great nuggets of the "harmless gold" of pumpkins.
+
+At Battaglia (the village just beyond which you turn off to go to
+Arquà) there was a fair, on the blessed occasion of some saint's day,
+and there were many booths full of fruits, agricultural implements,
+toys, clothes, wooden ware, and the like. There was a great crowd
+and a noise, but, according to the mysterious Italian custom, nobody
+seemed to be buying or selling. I am in the belief that a small
+purchase of grapes we made here on our return was the great
+transaction of the day, unless, indeed, the neat operation in alms
+achieved at our expense by a mendicant villager may be classed
+commercially.
+
+When we turned off from the Rovigo road at Battaglia we were only
+three miles from Arquà.
+
+
+II.
+
+Now, all the way from this turning to the foot of the hill on which
+the village was stretched asleep in the tender sunshine, there was on
+either side of the road a stream of living water. There was no other
+barrier than this between the road and the fields (unless the vines
+swinging from tree to tree formed a barrier), and, as if in graceful
+excuse for the interposition of even these slender streams, Nature
+had lavished such growth of wild flowers and wild berries on the banks
+that it was like a garden avenue, through the fragrance and beauty of
+which we rolled, delighted to silence, almost to sadness.
+
+When we began to climb the hill to Arquà, and the driver stopped to
+breathe his horse, I got out and finished the easy ascent on foot. The
+great marvel to me is that the prospect of the vast plain below, on
+which, turning back, I feasted my vision, should be there yet, and
+always. It had the rare and saddening beauty of evanescence, and awoke
+in me the memory of all beautiful scenery, so that I embroidered the
+landscape with the silver threads of western streams, and bordered it
+with Ohio hills. Ohio hills? When I looked again it was the storied
+Euganean group. But what trans-oceanic bird, voyaging hither, dropped
+from its mouth the blackberry which took root and grew and blossomed
+and ripened, that I might taste Home in it on these classic hills?
+
+I wonder did Petrarch walk often down this road from his house just
+above? I figured him coming to meet me with his book in his hand, in
+his reverend poetic robes, and with his laurel on, over that curious
+kind of bandaging which he seems to have been fond of--looking, in a
+word, for all the world like the neuralgic Petrarch in the pictures.
+
+Drawing nearer, I discerned the apparition to be a robeless, laureless
+lout, who belonged at the village inn. Yet this lout, though not
+Petrarch, had merits. His face and hands, and his legs, as seen from
+his knees down, had the tone of the richest bronze; he wore a mountain
+cap with a long tasseled fall to the back of it; his face was comely
+and his eye beautiful; and he was so nobly ignorant of every thing
+that a colt or young bullock could not have been better company. He
+merely offered to guide us to Petrarch's house, and was silent, except
+when spoken to, from that instant.
+
+I am here tempted to say: Arquà is in the figure of a man stretched
+upon the hill slope. The head, which is Petrarch's house, rests upon
+the summit. The carelessly tossed arms lie abroad from this in one
+direction, and the legs in the opposite quarter. It is a very lank
+and shambling figure, without elegance or much proportion, and the
+attitude is the last wantonness of loafing. We followed our lout
+up the right leg, which is a gentle and easy ascent in the general
+likeness of a street. World-old stone cottages crouch on either side;
+here and there is a more ambitious house in decay; trees wave over
+the street, and down its distance comes an occasional donkey-cart very
+musically and leisurely. By all odds, Arquà and its kind of villages
+are to be preferred to those hamlets of the plain which in Italy cling
+to the white-hot highway without a tree to shelter them, and bake and
+burn there in the merciless sun. Their houses of stuccoed stone are
+crowded as thickly together as city houses, and these wretched little
+villages do their worst to unite the discomforts of town and country
+with a success dreadful to think of. In all countries villages are
+hateful to the heart of civilized man. In the Lombard plains I wonder
+that one stone of them rests upon another.
+
+We reached Petrarch's house before the custodian had arrived to admit
+us, and stood before the high stone wall which shuts in the front of
+the house, and quite hides it from those without. This wall bears
+the inscription, _Casa Petrarca_, and a marble tablet lettered to the
+following effect:--
+
+         SE TI AGITA
+    SACRO AMORE DI PATRIA,
+   T'INCHINA A QUESTE MURA
+  OVE SPIRÒ LA GRAND' ANIMA,
+   IL CANTOR DEI SCIPIONI
+         E DI LAURA.
+
+Which may be translated: "If thou art stirred by love of country,
+bow to these walls, whence passed the great soul, the singer of the
+Scipios and of Laura."
+
+Meanwhile we became the centre of a group of the youths of Arquà, who
+had kindly attended our progress in gradually increasing numbers from
+the moment we had entered the village. They were dear little girls and
+boys, and mountain babies, all with sunburnt faces and the gentle and
+the winning ways native to this race, which Nature loves better than
+us of the North. The blonde pilgrim seemed to please them, and they
+evidently took us for _Tedeschi_. You learn to submit to this fate
+in Northern Italy, however ungracefully, for it is the one that
+constantly befalls you outside of the greatest cities. The people know
+about two varieties of foreigners--the Englishman and the German. If,
+therefore, you have not _rosbif_ expressed in every lineament of your
+countenance; if the soles of your boots are less than an inch thick,
+and your clothes are not reduced in color to the invariable and
+maddening tone of the English tweed,--you must resign yourself to be
+a German. All this is grievous to the soul which loves to spread its
+eagle in every land and to be known as American, with star-spangled
+conspicuousness all over the world: but it cannot be helped. I vainly
+tried to explain the geographical, political, and natural difference
+between Tedeschi and Americani to the custodian of Petrarch's house.
+She listened with amiability, shrugged her shoulders hopelessly, and
+said, in her rude Venetian, "_Mi no so miga_" (I don't know at all).
+
+Before she came, I had a mind to prove the celebrity of a poet on the
+spot where he lived and died,--on his very hearthstone, as it were.
+So I asked the lout, who stood gnawing a stick and shifting his weight
+from one foot to the other,--
+
+"When did Petrarch live here?"
+
+"Ah! I don't remember him."
+
+"Who was he?"
+
+"A poet, signor."
+
+Certainly the first response was not encouraging, but the last
+revealed that even to the heavy and clouded soul of this lout the
+divine fame of the poet had penetrated--and he a lout in the village
+where Petrarch lived and ought to be first forgotten. He did not
+know when Petrarch had lived there,--a year ago, perhaps, or many
+centuries,--but he knew that Petrarch was a poet. A weight of
+doubt was lifted from my spirit, and I responded cheerfully to
+some observations on the weather offered by a rustic matron who was
+pitching manure on the little hill-slope near the house. When, at
+last, the custodian came and opened the gate to us, we entered a
+little grassy yard from which a flight of steps led to Petrarch's
+door. A few flowers grew wild among the grass, and a fig-tree leaned
+its boughs against the wall. The figs on it were green, though they
+hung ripe and blackening on every other tree in Arquà. Some ivy clung
+to the stones, and from this and the fig-tree, as we came away, we
+plucked memorial leaves, and blended them with flowers which the youth
+of Arquà picked and forced upon us for remembrance.
+
+A quaint old door opened into the little stone house, and admitted us
+to a kind of wide passage-way with rooms on either side; and at the
+end opposite to which we entered, another door opened upon a balcony.
+From this balcony we looked down on Petrarch's garden, which,
+presently speaking, is but a narrow space with more fruit than flowers
+in it. Did Petrarch use to sit and meditate in this garden? For me I
+should better have liked a chair on the balcony, with the further and
+lovelier prospect on every hand of village-roofs, sloping hills all
+gray with olives, and the broad, blue Lombard plain, sweeping from
+heaven to heaven below.
+
+The walls of the passage-way are frescoed (now very faintly) in
+illustration of the loves of Petrarch and Laura, with verses from the
+sonnets inscribed to explain the illustrations. In all these Laura
+prevails as a lady of a singularly long waist and stiff movements, and
+Petrarch, with his face tied up and a lily in his hand, contemplates
+the flower in mingled botany and toothache. There is occasionally a
+startling literalness in the way the painter has rendered some of
+the verses. I remember with peculiar interest the illustration of a
+lachrymose passage concerning a river of tears, wherein the weeping
+Petrarch, stretched beneath a tree, had already started a small creek
+of tears, which was rapidly swelling to a flood with the torrent from
+his eyes. I attribute these frescos to a later date than that of the
+poet's residence, but the portrait over the door of the bedroom inside
+of the chamber, was of his own time, and taken from him--the custodian
+said. As it seemed to look like all the Petrarchian portraits, I did
+not remark it closely, but rather turned my attention to the walls of
+the chamber, which were thickly over-scribbled with names. They were
+nearly all Italian, and none English so far as I saw. This passion for
+allying one's self to the great, by inscribing one's name on places
+hallowed by them, is certainly very odd; and (I reflected as I added
+our names to the rest) it is, without doubt, the most impertinent and
+idiotic custom in the world. People have thus written themselves down,
+to the contempt of sensible futurity, all over Petrarch's house.
+
+The custodian insisted that the bedroom was just as in the poet's
+time; some rooms beyond it had been restored; the kitchen at its
+side was also repaired. Crossing the passage-way, we now entered the
+dining-room, which was comparatively large and lofty, with a mighty
+and generous fire-place at one end, occupying the whole space left by
+a balcony-window. The floor was paved with tiles, and the window-panes
+were round and small, and set in lead--like the floors and
+window-panes of all the other rooms. A gaudy fresco, representing some
+indelicate female deity, adorned the front of the fire-place, which
+sloped expanding from the ceiling and terminated at the mouth without
+a mantel-piece. The chimney was deep, and told of the cold winters
+in the hills, of which, afterward, the landlady of the village inn
+prattled less eloquently.
+
+From this dining-room opens, to the right, the door of the room which
+they call Petrarch's library; and above the door, set in a marble
+frame, with a glass before it, is all that is mortal of Petrarch's
+cat, except the hair. Whether or not the fur was found incompatible
+with the process of embalming, and therefore removed, or whether it
+has slowly dropped away with the lapse of centuries, I do not know;
+but it is certain the cat is now quite hairless, and has the effect
+of a wash-leather invention in the likeness of a young lamb. On the
+marble slab below there is a Latin inscription, said to be by the
+great poet himself, declaring this cat to have been "second only
+to Laura." We may, therefore, believe its virtues to have been rare
+enough; and cannot well figure to ourselves Petrarch sitting before
+that wide-mouthed fire-place, without beholding also the gifted cat
+that purrs softly at his feet and nestles on his knees, or, with
+thickened tail and lifted back, parades, loftily round his chair in
+the haughty and disdainful manner of cats.
+
+In the library, protected against the predatory enthusiasm of visitors
+by a heavy wire netting, are the desk and chair of Petrarch, which I
+know of no form of words to describe perfectly. The front of the
+desk is of a kind of mosaic in cubes of wood, most of which have been
+carried away. The chair is wide-armed and carved, but the bottom is
+gone, and it has been rudely repaired. The custodian said Petrarch
+died in this chair while he sat writing at his desk in the little nook
+lighted by a single window opening on the left from his library. He
+loved to sit there. As I entered I found he had stepped out for a
+moment, but I know he returned directly after I withdrew.
+
+On one wall of the library (which is a simple oblong room, in nowise
+remarkable) was a copy of verses in a frame, by Cesarotti, and on the
+wall opposite a tribute from Alfieri, both _manu propriâ_. Over and
+above these are many other scribblings; and hanging over the door of
+the poet's little nook was a criminal French lithograph likeness of
+"Pétrarque" when young.
+
+Alfieri's verses are written in ink on the wall, while those of
+Cesarotti are on paper, and framed, I do not remember any reference to
+his visit to Petrarch's house in Alfieri's autobiography, though the
+visit must have taken place in 1783, when he sojourned at Padua, and
+"made the acquaintance of the celebrated Cesarotti, with whose lively
+and courteous manners he was no less satisfied than he had always been
+in reading his (Cesarotti's) most masterly version of 'Ossian.'" It is
+probable that the friends visited the house together. At any rate,
+I care to believe that while Cesarotti sat "composing" his tribute
+comfortably at the table, Alfieri's impetuous soul was lifting his
+tall body on tiptoe to scrawl its inspirations on the plastering.
+
+Do you care, gentle reader, to be reminded that just before this visit
+Alfieri had heard in Venice of the "peace between England and the
+United Colonies," and that he then and there "wrote the fifth ode of
+the 'America Libera,'" and thus finished that poem?
+
+After copying these verses we returned to the dining-room, and while
+one pilgrim strayed idly through the names in the visitor's book,
+the other sketched Petrarch's cat, before mentioned, and Petrarch's
+inkstand of bronze--a graceful little thing, having a cover surmounted
+by a roguish cupid, while the lower part is supported on three lion's
+claws, and just above the feet, at either of the three corners, is an
+exquisite little female bust and head. Thus sketching and idling,
+we held spell-bound our friends the youth of Arquà, as well as our
+driver, who, having brought innumerable people to see the house of
+Petrarch, now for the first time, with great astonishment, beheld the
+inside of it himself.
+
+As to the authenticity of the house I think there can be no doubt, and
+as to the genuineness of the relics there, nothing in the world could
+shake my faith in them, though Muratori certainly characterizes them
+as "superstitions." The great poet was sixty-five years old when he
+came to rest at Arquà, and when, in his own pathetic words, "there
+remained to him only to consider and to desire how to make a good
+end." He says further, at the close of his autobiography: "In one of
+the Euganean hills, near to ten miles from the city of Padua, I have
+built me a house, small but pleasant and decent, in the midst of
+slopes clothed with vines and olives, abundantly sufficient for a
+family not large and discreet. Here I lead my life, and although, as I
+have said, infirm of body, yet tranquil of mind, without excitements,
+without distractions, without cares, reading always, and writing and
+praising God, and thanking God as well for evil as for good; which
+evil, if I err not, is trial merely and not punishment. And all the
+while I pray to Christ that he make good the end of my life, and
+have mercy on me, and forgive me, and even forget my youthful sins;
+wherefore, in this solitude, no words are so sweet to my lips as
+these of the psalm: '_Delicta juventutis meoe, et ignorantias meas ne
+memineris_.' And with every feeling of the heart I pray God, when it
+please Him, to bridle my thoughts, so long unstable and erring; and
+as they have vainly wandered to many things, to turn them all to
+Him--only true, certain, immutable Good."
+
+I venerate the house at Arquà because these sweet and solemn words
+were written in it. We left its revered shelter (after taking a final
+look from the balcony down upon "the slopes clothed with vines and
+olives") and returned to the lower village, where, in the court of the
+little church, we saw the tomb of Petrarch--"an ark of red stone, upon
+four columns likewise of marble." The epitaph is this:--
+
+  "Frigida Francisci lapis hic tegit ossa Petrarcae;
+  Suscipe, Virgo parens, animam; sate Virgine, parce
+  Fessaque jam terris Coeli requiescat in arce."
+
+A head of the poet in bronze surmounts the ark. The housekeeper of the
+parish priest, who ran out to enjoy my admiration and bounty, told me
+a wild local tradition of an attempt on the part of the Florentines
+to steal the bones of Petrarch away from Arquà, in proof of which
+she showed me a block of marble set into the ark, whence she said a
+fragment had been removed by the Florentines. This local tradition I
+afterwards found verified, with names and dates, in a little "Life of
+Petrarch," by F. Leoni, published at Padua in 1843. It appears that
+this curious attempt of the Florentines to do doubtful honor to the
+great citizen whose hereditary civic rights they restored too late
+(about the time he was drawing nigh his "good end" at Arquà), was made
+for them by a certain monk of Portagruaro named Tommaso Martinelli. He
+had a general instruction from his employers to bring away from Arquà
+"any important thing of Petrarch's" that he could; and it occurred to
+this ill-advised friar to "move his bones." He succeeded on a night of
+the year 1630 in stealing the dead poet's arm. The theft being at once
+discovered, the Venetian Republic rested not till the thief was also
+discovered; but what became of the arm or of the sacrilegious monk
+neither the Signor Leoni nor the old women of Arquà give any account.
+The Republic removed the rest of Petrarch's body, which is now said to
+be in the Royal Museum of Madrid.
+
+I was willing to know more of this quaint village of Arquà, and I rang
+at the parish priest's door to beg of him some account of the place,
+if any were printed. But already at one o'clock he had gone to bed for
+a nap, and must on no account be roused till four. It is but a quiet
+life men lead in Arquà, and their souls are in drowsy hands. The
+amount of sleep which this good man gives himself (if he goes to bed
+at 9 P.M. and rises at 9 A.M., with a nap of three hours during the
+day) speaks of a quiet conscience, a good digestion, and uneventful
+days. As I turned this notion over in my mind, my longing to behold
+his reverence increased, that I might read life at Arquà in the smooth
+curves of his well-padded countenance. I thought it must be that
+his "bowels of compassion were well-rounded," and, making sure of
+absolution, I was half-minded, if I got speech with him, to improve
+the occasion by confessing one or two of my blackest sins.
+
+Ought I to say here that, on the occasion of a second visit to Arquà,
+I succeeded in finding this excellent ecclesiastic wide awake at two
+o'clock in the afternoon, and that he granted me an interview at that
+hour? Justice to him, I think, demands this admission of me. He was
+not at all a fat priest, as I had prefigured him, but rather of a
+spare person, and of a brisk and lively manner. At the village inn,
+after listening half an hour to a discourse on nothing but white wine
+from a young priest, who had stopped to drink a glass of it, I was
+put in the way of seeing the priest of Arquà by the former's courtesy.
+Happily enough, his reverence chanced to have the very thing I wanted
+to see--no other than Leoni's "Life of Petrarch," to which I have
+already referred. Courtesy is the blood in an Italian's veins, and I
+need not say that the ecclesiastic of Arquà, seeing my interest in
+the place, was very polite and obliging. But he continued to sleep
+throughout our first stay in Arquà, and I did not see him then.
+
+I strolled up and down the lazy, rambling streets, and chiefly devoted
+myself to watching the young women who were washing clothes at the
+stream running from the "Fountain of Petrarch." Their arms and legs
+were bronzed and bare, and they chattered and laughed gayly at their
+work. Their wash-tubs were formed by a long marble conduit from the
+fountain; their wash-boards, by the inward-sloping conduit-sides; and
+they thrashed and beat the garments clean upon the smooth stone. To
+a girl, their waists were broad and their ankles thick. Above their
+foreheads the hair was cut short, and their "back hair" was gathered
+into a mass, and held together by converging circle of silver pins.
+
+The Piazza della Fontana, in Arquà, is a place some fifty feet in
+length and breadth, and seems to be a favorite place of public resort.
+In the evening, doubtless, it is alive with gossipers, as now with
+workers. It may be that then his reverence, risen from his nap,
+saunters by, and pauses long enough to chuck a pretty girl under the
+chin or pinch an urchin's cheek.
+
+Our dinner was ready by the time I got back to the inn, and we sat
+down to a chicken stewed in oil and a stoup of the white wine of
+Arquà. It was a modest feast, but, being a friend to oil, I found it
+savory, and the wine was both good and strong. While we lingered
+over the repast we speculated somewhat carelessly whether Arquà had
+retained among its simplicities the primitive Italian cheapness of
+which you read much. When our landlord leaned over the table and made
+out our account on it with a bit of chalk, the bill was as follows:--
+
+          Soldi.
+  Chicken   70
+  Bread      8
+  Wine      20
+            --
+  Total     98
+
+It surely was not a costly dinner, yet I could have bought the same
+chicken in Venice for half the money; which is but another proof that
+the demand of the producer is often much larger than the supply of
+the consumer, and that to buy poultry cheaply you must not purchase it
+where raised,--
+
+  ..."On misty mountain ground,
+  Its own vast shadow glory crowned,"--
+
+but rather in a large city after it has been transported forty miles
+or more. Not that we begrudged the thrifty inn-keeper his fee. We paid
+it cheerfully, as well for his own sake as for that of his pleasant
+and neat little wife, who kept the whole inn so sweet and clean; and
+we bade them a most cordial farewell as we drove away from their door.
+
+
+III.
+
+Returning, we stopped at the great castle of the Obizzi (now the
+property of the Duke of Modena), through which we were conducted by a
+surly and humorous _custode_, whose pride in life was that castle and
+its treasures, so that he resented as a personal affront the slightest
+interest in any thing else. He stopped us abruptly in the midst of the
+museum, and, regarding the precious antiques and curiosities around
+him, demanded:
+
+"Does this castle please you?" Then, with a scornful glance at us,
+"Your driver tells me you have been at Arquà? And what did you see at
+Arquà? A shabby little house and a cat without any hair on. I would
+not," said this disdainful _custode_, "go to Arquà if you gave me a
+lemonade."
+
+
+
+
+A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI.
+
+I had often heard in Venice of that ancient people, settled in the
+Alpine hills about the pretty town of Bassano, on the Brenta, whom
+common fame declares to be a remnant of the Cimbrian invaders of Rome,
+broken up in battle, and dispersed along the borders of North Italy,
+by Marius, many centuries ago. So when the soft September weather
+came, last year, we sallied out of Venice, in three, to make
+conquest of whatever was curious in the life and traditions of these
+mountaineers, who dwell in seven villages, and are therefore called
+the people of the Sette Communi among their Italian neighbors. We
+went fully armed with note-book and sketch-book, and prepared to take
+literary possession of our conquest.
+
+From Venice to the city of Vicenza by railroad, it is two hours; and
+thence one must take a carriage to Bassano (which is an opulent and
+busy little grain mart, of some twelve thousand souls, about thirty
+miles north of Venice). We were very glad of the ride across the
+country. By the time we reached the town it was nine o'clock, and
+moonlight, and as we glanced out of our windows we saw the quaint
+up-and-down-hill streets peopled with promenaders, and every body
+in Bassano seemed to be making love. Young girls strolled about the
+picturesque ways with their lovers, and tender couples were cooing
+at the doorways and windows, and the scene had all that surface
+of romance with which the Italians contrive to varnish the real
+commonplaceness of their life. Our ride through the twilight landscape
+had prepared us for the sentiment of Bassano; we had pleased ourselves
+with the spectacle of the peasants returning from their labor in the
+fields, led in troops of eight or ten by stalwart, white-teethed,
+bare-legged maids; and we had reveled in the momentary lordship of
+an old walled town we passed, which at dusk seemed more Gothic and
+Middle-Age than any thing after Verona, with a fine church, and
+turrets and battlements in great plenty. What town it was, or what it
+had been doing there so many ages, I have never sought to know, and I
+should be sorry to learn any thing about it.
+
+The next morning we began those researches for preliminary information
+concerning the Cimbri which turned out so vain. Indeed, as we drew
+near the lurking-places of that ancient people, all knowledge relating
+to them diffused itself into shadowy conjecture. The barber and the
+bookseller differed as to the best means of getting to the Sette
+Communi, and the _caffetiere_ at whose place we took breakfast knew
+nothing at all of the road, except that it was up the mountains, and
+commanded views of scenery which verily, it would not grieve us to
+see. As to the Cimbri, he only knew that they had their own language,
+which was yet harder than the German. The German was hard enough, but
+the Cimbrian! _Corpo_!
+
+At last, hearing of a famous cave there is at Oliero, a town some
+miles further up the Brenta, we determined to go there, and it was a
+fortunate thought, for there we found a nobleman in charge of the cave
+who told us exactly how to reach the Sette Communi. You pass a bridge
+to get out of Bassano--a bridge which spans the crystal swiftness of
+the Brenta, rushing down to the Adriatic from the feet of the Alps on
+the north, and full of voluble mills at Bassano. All along the road to
+Oliero was the finest mountain scenery, Brenta-washed, and picturesque
+with ever-changing lines. Maize grows in the bottom-lands, and
+tobacco, which is guarded in the fields by soldiers for the monopolist
+government. Farm-houses dot the valley, and now and then we passed
+villages, abounding in blonde girls, so rare elsewhere in Italy, but
+here so numerous as to give Titian that type from which he painted.
+
+At Oliero we learned not only which was the road to the Sette Communi,
+but that we were in it, and it was settled that we should come the
+next day and continue in it, with the custodian of the cave, who
+for his breakfast and dinner, and what else we pleased, offered to
+accompany us. We were early at Oliero on the following morning, and
+found our friend in waiting; he mounted beside our driver, and we rode
+up the Brenta to the town of Valstagna where our journey by wheels
+ended, and where we were to take mules for the mountain ascent. Our
+guide, Count Giovanni Bonato (for I may as well give him his title,
+though at this stage of our progress we did not know into what
+patrician care we had fallen), had already told us what the charge
+for mules would be, but it was necessary to go through the ceremony of
+bargain with the muleteer before taking the beasts. Their owner was a
+Cimbrian, with a broad sheepish face, and a heavy, awkward accent of
+Italian which at once more marked his northern race, and made us feel
+comparatively secure from plunder in his hands. He had come down from
+the mountain top the night before, bringing three mules laden with
+charcoal, and he had waited for us till the morning. His beasts were
+furnished with comfortable pads, covered with linen, to ride upon, and
+with halters instead of bridles, and we were prayed to let them have
+their heads in the ascent, and not to try to guide them.
+
+The elegant leisure of Valstagna (and in an Italian town nearly the
+whole population is elegantly at leisure) turned out to witness the
+departure of our expedition; the pretty little blonde wife of our
+inn-keeper, who was to get dinner ready against our return, held up
+her baby to wish us _boun viaggio_, and waved us adieu with the infant
+as with a handkerchief; the chickens and children scattered to right
+and left before our advance; and with Count Giovanni going splendidly
+ahead on foot, and the Cimbrian bringing up the rear, we struck on
+the broad rocky valley between the heights, and presently began the
+ascent. It was a lovely morning; the sun was on the heads of the
+hills, and the shadows clothed them like robes to their feet; and
+I should be glad to feel here and now the sweetness, freshness,
+and purity of the mountain air, that seemed to bathe our souls in a
+childlike delight of life. A noisy brook gurgled through the valley;
+the birds sang from the trees; the Alps rose, crest on crest, around
+us; and soft before us, among the bald peaks showed the wooded
+height where the Cimbrian village of Fozza stood, with a white chapel
+gleaming from the heart of the lofty grove. Along the mountain sides
+the smoke curled from the lonely huts of shepherds, and now and then
+we came upon one of those melancholy refuges which are built in
+the hills for such travellers as are belated in their ways, or are
+overtaken there by storms.
+
+The road for the most part winds by the brink of precipices,--walled
+in with masonry of small stones, where Nature has not shored it up
+with vast monoliths,--and is paved with limestone. It is, of course,
+merely a mule-path, and it was curious to see, and thrilling to
+experience, how the mules, vain of the safety of their foothold, kept
+as near the border of the precipices as possible. For my own part, I
+abandoned to my beast the entire responsibility involved by this line
+of conduct; let the halter hang loose upon his neck, and gave him no
+aid except such slight service as was occasionally to be rendered
+by shutting my eyes and holding my breath. The mule of the fairer
+traveller behind me was not only ambitious of peril like my own, but
+was envious of my beast's captaincy, and continually tried to pass him
+on the outside of the path, to the great dismay of the gentle rider;
+while half-suppressed wails of terror from the second lady in the
+train gave evidence of equal vanity and daring in her mule. Count
+Giovanni strode stolidly before, the Cimbrian came behind, and we
+had little coherent conversation until we stopped under a spreading
+haw-tree, half-way up the mountain, to breathe our adventurous beasts.
+
+Here two of us dismounted, and while one of the ladies sketched the
+other in her novel attitude of cavalier, I listened to the talk of
+Count Giovanni and the Cimbrian. This Cimbrian's name in Italian
+was Lazzaretti, and in his own tongue Brück, which, pronouncing less
+regularly, we made Brick, in compliment to his qualities of good
+fellowship. His broad, honest visage was bordered by a hedge of red
+beard, and a light of dry humor shone upon it: he looked, we thought,
+like a Cornishman, and the contrast between him and the _viso sciolto,
+pensieri stretti_ expression of Count Giovanni was curious enough.
+
+Concerning his people, he knew little; but the Capo-gente of Fozza
+could tell me everything. Various traditions of their origin were
+believed among them; Brick himself held to one that they had first
+come from Denmark. As we sat there under the spreading haw-tree,
+Count Giovanni and I made him give us the Cimbrian equivalent of some
+Italian phrases, which the curious may care to see in correspondence
+with English and German. Of course, German pronunciation must be given
+to the words:--
+
+  _English.         Cimbrian.               German._
+
+  I go,            I gehe,                 Ich gehe.
+  Thou goest,      Du gehst,               Du gehst.
+  He goes,         Ar geht,                Er geht.
+  We go,           Hamish gehen,           Wir gehen.
+  You go,          Hamish setender gehnt,  Ihr geht.
+  They go,         Dandern gehnt,          Sie gehen.
+  I went,          I bin gegehnt,          Ich bin gegangen.
+  Thou wentest,    Du bist gegehnt,        Du bist gegangen.
+  He went,         Der iganget,            Er ist gegangen
+  Good day,        Uter tag,               Guten Tag.
+  Good night,      Uter nast,              Gute Nacht.
+  How do you do?   Bie estater?            Wie steht's?
+  How goes it?     Bie gehts?              Wie geht's?
+  I,               I,                      Ich.
+  Thou,            Du,                     Du.
+  He, she,         Di,                     Er, sie.
+  We,              Borandern,              Wir.
+  You,             Ihrt,                   Ihr.
+  They,            Dandern,                Sie.
+  The head,        Da kof,                 Der Kopf.
+  Breast,          Petten,                 Brust (_Italian_ petto)
+  Face,            Denne,                  Gesicht.
+  Arm,             Arm,                    Arm.
+  Foot,            Vuss,                   Fuss.
+  Finger,          Vinger,                 Finger.
+  Hand,            Hant,                   Hand.
+  Tree,            Pom,                    Baum.
+  Hat,             Hoit,                   Hut.
+  God,             Got,                    Gott.
+  Heaven,          Debelt,                 Himmel.
+  Earth,           Erda,                   Erde.
+  Mountain,        Perk,                   Berg.
+  Valley,          Tal,                    Thal.
+  Man,             Mann,                   Mann.
+  Woman,           Beip,                   Weib.
+  Lady,            Vrau,                   Frau.
+  Child,           Hint,                   Kind.
+  Brother,         Pruder,                 Bruder.
+  Father,          Vada,                   Vater.
+  Mother,          Muter,                  Mutter.
+  Sister,          Schwester,              Schwester,
+  Stone,           Stone,                  Stein.
+
+A general resemblance to German and English will have been observed in
+these fragments of Cimbrian, while other words will have been noticed
+as quite foreign to either.
+
+There was a poor little house of refreshment beside our spreading haw,
+and a withered old woman came out of it and refreshed us with clear
+spring water, and our guides and friends with some bitter berries of
+the mountain, which they admitted were unpleasant to the taste, but
+declared were very good for the blood. When they had sufficiently
+improved their blood, we mounted our mules again, and set out with the
+journey of an hour and a quarter still between us and Fozza.
+
+As we drew near the summit of the mountain our road grew more level,
+and instead of creeping along by the brinks of precipices, we began
+to wind through bits of meadow and pleasant valley walled in by lofty
+heights of rock.
+
+Though September was bland as June at the foot of the mountain, we
+found its breath harsh and cold on these heights; and we remarked that
+though there were here and there breadths of wheat, the land was
+for the most part in sheep pasturage, and the grass looked poor and
+stinted of summer warmth. We met, at times, the shepherds, who seemed
+to be of Italian race, and were of the conventional type of shepherds,
+with regular faces, and two elaborate curls trained upon their cheeks,
+as shepherds are always represented in stone over the gates of villas.
+They bore staves, and their flocks went before them. Encountering us,
+they saluted us courteously, and when we had returned their greeting,
+they cried with one voice,--"Ah, lords! is not this a miserable
+country? The people are poor and the air is cold. It is an unhappy
+land!" And so passed on, profoundly sad; but we could not help smiling
+at the vehement popular desire to have the region abused. We answered
+cheerfully that it was a lovely country. If the air was cold, it was
+also pure.
+
+We now drew in sight of Fozza, and, at the last moment, just before
+parting with Brick, we learned that he had passed a whole year in
+Venice, where he had brought milk from the main-land and sold it in
+the city. He declared frankly that he counted that year worth all the
+other years of his life, and that he would never have come back to his
+native heights but that his father had died, and left his mother and
+young brothers helpless. He was an honest soul, and I gave him two
+florins, which I had tacitly appointed him over and above the bargain,
+with something for the small Brick-bats at home, whom he presently
+brought to kiss our hands at the house of the Capo-gente.
+
+The village of Fozza is built on a grassy, oblong plain on the crest
+of the mountain, which declines from it on three sides, and on the
+north rises high above it into the mists in bleaker and ruggeder
+acclivities. There are not more than thirty houses in the village, and
+I do not think it numbers more than a hundred and fifty souls, if
+it numbers so many. Indeed, it is one of the smallest of the Sette
+Communi, of which the capital, Asiago, contains some thousands of
+people, and lies not far from Vicenza. The poor Fozzatti had a church,
+however, in their village, in spite of its littleness, and they had
+just completed a fine new bell tower, which the Capo-gente deplored,
+and was proud of when I praised it. The church, like all the other
+edifices, was built of stone; and the village at a little distance
+might look like broken crags of rock, so well it consorted with the
+harsh, crude nature about it. Meagre meadowlands, pathetic with tufts
+of a certain pale-blue, tearful flower, stretched about the village
+and southward as far as to that wooded point which had all day been
+our landmark in the ascent.
+
+Our train drew up at the humble door of the Capo-gente (in Fozza all
+doors are alike humble), and, leaving our mules, we entered by his
+wife's invitation, and seated ourselves near the welcome fire of the
+kitchen--welcome, though we knew that all the sunny Lombard plain
+below was purple with grapes and black with figs. Again came from
+the women here the wail of the shepherds: "Ah, lords! is it not a
+miserable land?" and I began to doubt whether the love which I had
+heard mountaineers bore to their inclement heights was not altogether
+fabulous. They made haste to boil us some eggs, and set them before us
+with some unhappy wine, and while we were eating, the Capo-gente came
+in.
+
+He was a very well-mannered person, but had, of course, the
+bashfulness naturally resulting from lonely life at that altitude,
+where contact with the world must be infrequent. His fellow-citizens
+seemed to regard him with a kind of affectionate deference, and some
+of them came in to hear him talk with the strangers. He stood till we
+prayed him to sit down, and he presently consented to take some wine
+with us.
+
+After all, however, he could not tell us much of his people which we
+had not heard before. A tradition existed among them, he said, that
+their ancestors had fled to these Alps from Marius, and that they
+had dwelt for a long time in the hollows and caves of the mountains,
+living and burying their dead in the same secret places. At what time
+they had been converted to Christianity he could not tell; they
+had, up to the beginning of the present century, had little or no
+intercourse with the Italian population by which they were surrounded
+on all sides. Formerly, they did not intermarry with that race, and it
+was seldom that any Cimbrian knew its language. But now intermarriage
+is very frequent; both Italian and Cimbrian are spoken in nearly all
+the families, and the Cimbrian is gradually falling into disuse. They
+still, however, have books of religious instruction in their ancient
+dialect, and until very lately the services of their church were
+performed in Cimbrian.
+
+I begged the Capo to show us some of their books and he brought us
+two,--one a catechism for children, entitled "Dar Kloane Catechism
+vor z' Beloseland vortraghet in z' gaprecht von siben Komünen, un vier
+Halghe Gasang. 1842. Padova." The other book it grieved me to see, for
+it proved that I was not the only one tempted in recent times to
+visit these ancient people, ambitious to bear to them the relation of
+discoverer, as it were. A High-Dutch Columbus, from Vienna, had been
+before me, and I could only come in for Amerigo Vespucci's tempered
+glory. This German savant had dwelt a week in these lonely places,
+patiently compiling a dictionary of their tongue, which, when it was
+printed, he had sent to the Capo. I am magnanimous enough to give
+the name of his book, that the curious may buy it if they like. It
+is called "Johann Andreas Schweller's Cimbrisches Wörterbuch. Joseph
+Bergman. Vienna, 1855."
+
+Concerning the present Cimbri, the Capo said that in his community
+they were chiefly hunters, wood-cutters, and charcoal-burners, and
+that they practiced their primitive crafts in those gloomier and
+wilder heights we saw to the northward, and descended to the towns
+of the plain to make sale of their fagots, charcoal, and wild-beast
+skins. In Asiago and the larger communities they were farmers and
+tradesmen like the Italians; and the Capo believed that the Cimbri, in
+all their villages, numbered near ten thousand. He could tell me of
+no particular customs or usages, and believed they did not differ from
+the Italians now except in race and language. [The English traveller
+Rose, who (to my further discomfiture, I find) visited Asiago in 1817,
+mentions that the Cimbri have the Celtic custom of _waking_ the dead.
+"If a traveller dies by the way, they plant a cross upon the spot,
+and all who pass by cast a stone upon his cairn. Some go in certain
+seasons in the year to high places and woods, where it is supposed
+they worshiped their divinities, but the origin of the custom is
+forgot amongst themselves." If a man dies by violence, they lay him
+out with his hat and shoes on, as if to give him the appearance of a
+wayfarer, and "symbolize one surprised in the great journey of life."
+A woman dying in childbed is dressed for the grave in her bridal
+ornaments. Mr. Rose is very scornful of the notion that these people
+are Cimbri, and holds that it is "more consonant to all the evidence
+of history to say, that the flux and reflux of Teutonic invaders
+at different periods deposited this backwater of barbarians" in the
+district they now inhabit. "The whole space, which in addition to
+the seven burghs contains twenty-four villages, is bounded by rivers,
+alps, and hills. Its most precise limits are the Brenta to the east,
+and the Astico to the west."] They are, of course, subject to the
+Austrian Government, but not so strictly as the Italians are; and
+though they are taxed and made to do military service, they are
+otherwise left to regulate their affairs pretty much at their
+pleasure.
+
+The Capo ended his discourse with much polite regret that he had
+nothing more worthy to tell us; and, as if to make us amends for
+having come so far to learn so little, he said there was a hermit
+living near, whom we might like to see, and sent his son to conduct us
+to the hermitage. It turned out to be the white object which we had
+seen gleaming in the wood on the mountain from so great distance
+below, and the wood turned out to be a pleasant beechen grove, in
+which we found the hermit cutting fagots. He was warmly dressed in
+clothes without rent, and wore the clerical knee-breeches. He saluted
+us with a cricket-like chirpiness of manner, and was greatly amazed to
+hear that we had come all the way from America to visit him. His
+hermitage was built upon the side of a white-washed chapel to St.
+Francis, and contained three or four little rooms or cupboards, in
+which the hermit dwelt and meditated. They opened into the chapel, of
+which the hermit had the care, and which he kept neat and clean like
+himself. He told us proudly that once a year, on the day of the
+titular saint, a priest came and said mass in that chapel, and it was
+easy to see that this was the great occasion of the old man's life.
+For forty years, he said, he had been devout; and for twenty-five he
+had dwelt in this place, where the goodness of God and the charity of
+the poor people around had kept him from want. Altogether, he was a
+pleasant enough hermit, not in the least spiritual, but gentle,
+simple, and evidently sincere. We gave some small coins of silver to
+aid him to continue his life of devotion, and Count Giovanni bestowed
+some coppers with the stately blessing, "_Iddio vi benedica, padre
+mio_."
+
+So we left the hermitage, left Fozza, and started down the mountain
+on foot, for no one may ride down those steeps. Long before we reached
+the bottom, we had learned to loathe mountains and to long for dead
+levels during the rest of life. Yet the descent was picturesque, and
+in some things even more interesting than the ascent had been. We
+met more people: now melancholy shepherds with their flocks; now
+swine-herds and swine-herdesses with herds of wild black pigs of the
+Italian breed; now men driving asses that brayed and woke long, loud,
+and most musical echoes in the hills; now whole peasant families
+driving cows, horses, and mules to the plains below. On the way
+down, fragments of autobiography began, with the opportunities of
+conversation, to come from the Count Giovanni, and we learned that he
+was a private soldier at home on that _permesso_ which the Austrian
+Government frequently gives its less able-bodied men in times of
+peace. He had been at home some years, and did not expect to be again
+called into the service. He liked much better to be in charge of the
+cave at Oliero than to carry the musket, though he confessed that he
+liked to see the world, and that soldiering brought one acquainted
+with many places. He had not many ideas, and the philosophy of his
+life chiefly regarded deportment toward strangers who visited the
+cave. He held it an error in most custodians to show discontent when
+travellers gave them little; and he said that if he received never
+so much, he believed it wise not to betray exultation. "Always be
+contented, and nothing more," said Count Giovanni.
+
+"It is what you people always promise beforehand," I said, "when you
+bargain with strangers, to do them a certain service for what they
+please; but afterward they must pay what you please or have trouble. I
+know you will not be content with what I give you."
+
+"If I am not content," cried Count Giovanni, "call me the greatest ass
+in the world!"
+
+And I am bound to say that, for all I could see through the mask of
+his face, he was satisfied with what I gave him, though it was not
+much.
+
+He had told us casually that he was nephew of a nobleman of a certain
+rich and ancient family in Venice, who sent him money while in the
+army, but this made no great impression on me; and though I knew there
+was enough noble poverty in Italy to have given rise to the proverb,
+_Un conte che non conta, non conta niente_, yet I confess that it was
+with a shock of surprise I heard our guide and servant saluted by
+a lounger in Valstagna with "_Sior conte, servitor suo_!" I looked
+narrowly at him, but there was no ray of feeling or pride visible in
+his pale, languid visage as he responded, "_Buona sera, caro_."
+
+Still, after that revelation we simple plebeians, who had been all day
+heaping shawls and guide-books upon Count Giovanni, demanding menial
+offices from him, and treating him with good-natured slight, felt
+uncomfortable in his presence, and welcomed the appearance of our
+carriage with our driver, who, having started drunk from Bassano in
+the morning, had kept drunk all day at Valstagna, and who now drove us
+back wildly over the road, and almost made us sigh for the security of
+mules ambitious of the brinks of precipices.
+
+
+
+
+MINOR TRAVELS.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+PISA.
+
+I am afraid that the talk of the modern railway traveller, if he is
+honest, must be a great deal of the custodians, the vetturini, and the
+facchini, whose agreeable acquaintance constitutes his chief knowledge
+of the population among which he journeys. We do not nowadays carry
+letters recommending us to citizens of the different places. If we
+did, consider the calamity we should be to the be-travelled Italian
+communities we now bless! No, we buy our through-tickets, and we put
+up at the hotels praised in the hand-book, and are very glad of a
+little conversation with any native, however adulterated he be by
+contact with the world to which we belong. I do not blush to own that
+I love the whole rascal race which ministers to our curiosity and
+preys upon us, and I am not ashamed to have spoken so often in this
+book of the lowly and rapacious but interesting porters who opened to
+me the different gates of that great realm of wonders, Italy. I doubt
+if they can be much known to the dwellers in the land, though they
+are the intimates of all sojourners and passengers; and if I have any
+regret in the matter, it is that I did not more diligently study them
+when I could. The opportunity once lost, seldom recurs; they are all
+but as transitory as the Object of Interest itself, I remember
+that years ago when I first visited Cambridge, there was an old man
+appeared to me in the character of Genius of the College Grounds, who
+showed me all the notable things in our city,--its treasures of art,
+its monuments,--and ended by taking me into his wood-house, and sawing
+me off from a wind-fallen branch of the Washington Elm a bit of the
+sacred wood for a remembrancer. Where now is that old man? He
+no longer exists for me, neither he nor his wood-house nor his
+dwelling-house. Let me look for a month about the College Grounds, and
+I shall not see him. But somewhere in the regions of traveller's faëry
+he still lives, and he appears instantly to the new-comer; he has an
+understanding with the dryads, who keep him supplied with boughs from
+the Washington Elm, and his wood-house is full of them.
+
+Among memorable custodians in Italy was one whom we saw at Pisa, where
+we stopped on our way from Leghorn after our accident in the Maremma,
+and spent an hour in viewing the Quattro Fabbriche. The beautiful old
+town, which every one knows from the report of travellers, one yet
+finds possessed of the incommunicable charm which keeps it forever
+novel to the visitor. Lying upon either side of the broad Arno, it
+mirrors in the flood architecture almost as fair and noble as that
+glassed in the Canalazzo, and its other streets seemed as tranquil
+as the canals of Venice. Those over which we drove, on the day of
+our visit, were paved with broad flag-stones, and gave out scarcely a
+sound under our wheels. It was Sunday, and no one was to be seen. Yet
+the empty and silent city inspired us with no sense of desolation. The
+palaces were in perfect repair; the pavements were clean; behind those
+windows we felt that there must be a good deal of easy, comfortable
+life. It is said that Pisa is one of the few places in Europe where
+the sweet, but timid spirit of Inexpensiveness--everywhere pursued by
+Railways--still lingers, and that you find cheap apartments in those
+well-preserved old palaces. No doubt it would be worth more to live in
+Pisa than it would cost, for the history of the place would alone be
+to any reasonable sojourner a perpetual recompense, and a princely
+income far exceeding his expenditure. To be sure, the Tower of Famine,
+with which we chiefly associate the name of Pisa, has been long razed
+to the ground, and built piecemeal into the neighboring palaces, but
+you may still visit the dead wall which hides from view the place
+where it stood; and you may thence drive on, as we did, to the great
+Piazza where stands the unrivaledest group of architecture in
+the world, after that of St. Mark's Place in Venice. There is the
+wonderful Leaning Tower, there is the old and beautiful Duomo,
+there is the noble Baptistery, there is the lovely Campo-Santo, and
+there--somewhere lurking in portal or behind pillar, and keeping
+out an eagle-eye for the marveling stranger--is the much-experienced
+cicerone who shows you through the edifices. Yours is the
+fourteen-thousandth American family to which he has had the honor of
+acting as guide, and he makes you feel an illogical satisfaction in
+thus becoming a contribution to statistics.
+
+We entered the Duomo, in our new friend's custody, and we saw the
+things which it was well to see. There was mass, or some other
+ceremony, transacting; but as usual it was made as little obtrusive as
+possible, and there was not much to weaken the sense of proprietorship
+with which travellers view objects of interest. Then we ascended the
+Leaning Tower, skillfully preserving its equilibrium as we went by
+an inclination of our persons in a direction opposed to the tower's
+inclination, but perhaps not receiving a full justification of the
+Campanile's appearance in pictures, till we stood at its base, and saw
+its vast bulk and height as it seemed to sway and threaten in the
+blue sky above our heads. There the sensation was too terrible for
+endurance,--even the architectural beauty of the tower could not save
+it from being monstrous to us,--and we were glad to hurry away from it
+to the serenity and solemn loveliness of the Campo Santo.
+
+Here are the frescos painted five hundred years ago to be ruinous and
+ready against the time of your arrival in 1864, and you feel that you
+are the first to enjoy the joke of the Vergognosa, that cunning jade
+who peers through her fingers at the shameful condition of deboshed
+father Noah, and seems to wink one eye of wicked amusement at you.
+Turning afterward to any book written about Italy during the time
+specified, you find your impression of exclusive possession of the
+frescos erroneous, and your muse naturally despairs, where so many
+muses have labored in vain, to give a just idea of the Campo Santo.
+Yet it is most worthy celebration. Those exquisitely arched and
+traceried colonnades seem to grow like the slim cypresses out of the
+sainted earth of Jerusalem; and those old paintings, made when Art
+was--if ever--a Soul, and not as now a mere Intelligence, enforce
+more effectively than their authors conceived the lessons of life and
+death; for they are themselves becoming part of the triumphant decay
+they represent. If it was awful once to look upon that strange scene
+where the gay lords and ladies of the chase come suddenly upon three
+dead men in their coffins, while the devoted hermits enjoy the peace
+of a dismal righteousness on a hill in the background, it is yet more
+tragic to behold it now when the dead men are hardly discernible in
+their coffins, and the hermits are but the vaguest shadows of gloomy
+bliss. Alas! Death mocks even the homage done him by our poor fears
+and hopes: with dust he wipes out dust, and with decay he blots the
+image of decay.
+
+I assure the reader that I made none of these apt reflections in
+the Campo Santo at Pisa, but have written them out this morning in
+Cambridge because there happens to be an east wind blowing. No
+one could have been sad in the company of our cheerful and patient
+cicerone, who, although visibly anxious to get his fourteen-thousandth
+American family away, still would not go till he had shown us that
+monument to a dead enmity which hangs in the Campo Santo. This is the
+mighty chain which the Pisans, in their old wars with the Genoese,
+once stretched across the mouth of their harbor to prevent the
+entrance of the hostile galleys. The Genoese with no great trouble
+carried the chain away, and kept it ever afterward till 1860, when
+Pisa was united to the kingdom of Italy. Then the trophy was restored
+to the Pisans, and with public rejoicings placed in the Campo Santo,
+an emblem of reconciliation and perpetual amity between ancient
+foes. [I read in Mr. Norton's _Notes of Travel and Study in Italy_,
+that he saw in the Campo Santo, as long ago as 1856, "the chains that
+marked the servitude of Pisa, now restored by Florence," and it is
+of course possible that our cicerone may have employed one of those
+chains for the different historical purpose I have mentioned. It would
+be a thousand pities, I think, if a monument of that sort should be
+limited to the commemoration of one fact only.] It is not a very good
+world,--_e pur si muove_.
+
+The Baptistery stands but a step away from the Campo Santo, and our
+guide ushered us into it with the air of one who had till now held in
+reserve his great stroke and was ready to deliver it. Yet I think he
+waited till we had looked at some comparatively trifling sculptures
+by Nicolò Pisano before he raised his voice, and uttered a melodious
+species of howl. While we stood in some amazement at this, the
+conscious structure of the dome caught the sound and prolonged it with
+a variety and sweetness of which I could not have dreamed. The man
+poured out in quick succession his musical wails, and then ceased,
+and a choir of heavenly echoes burst forth in response. There was a
+supernatural beauty in these harmonies of which I despair of giving
+any true idea: they were of such tender and exalted rapture that
+we might well have thought them the voices of young-eyed cherubim,
+singing as they passed through Paradise over that spot of earth where
+we stood. They seemed a celestial compassion that stooped and soothed,
+and rose again in lofty and solemn acclaim, leaving us poor and
+penitent and humbled.
+
+We were long silent, and then broke forth with cries of admiration of
+which the marvelous echo made eloquence.
+
+"Did you ever," said the cicerone after we had left the building,
+"hear such music as that?"
+
+"The papal choir does not equal it," we answered with one voice.
+
+The cicerone was not to be silenced even with such a tribute, and he
+went on:
+
+"Perhaps, as you are Americans, you know Moshu Feelmore, the
+President? No? Ah, what a fine man! You saw that he had his heart
+actually in his hand! Well, one day he said to me here, when I told
+him of the Baptistery echo, 'We have the finest echo in the world in
+the Hall of Congress.' I said nothing, but for answer I merely howled
+a little,--thus! Moshu Feelmore was convinced. Said he, 'There is no
+other echo in the world besides this. You are right.' I am unique,"
+pursued the cicerone, "for making this echo. But," he added with
+a sigh, "it has been my ruin. The English have put me in all the
+guide-books, and sometimes I have to howl twenty times a day. When our
+Victor Emanuel came here I showed him the church, the tower, and the
+Campo Santo. Says the king, 'Pfui!'"--here the cicerone gave that
+sweeping outward motion with both hands by which Italians dismiss a
+trifling subject--"'make me the echo!' I was forced," concluded the
+cicerone with a strong sense of injury in his tone, "to howl half an
+hour without ceasing."
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+THE FERRARA ROAD.
+
+The delight of one of our first journeys over the road between Padua
+and Ferrara was a Roman _cameriere_ out of place, who got into the
+diligence at Ponte Lagoscuro. We were six in all: The Englishman who
+thought it particularly Italian to say "Sì" three times for every
+assent; the Veneto (as the citizen of the province calls himself, the
+native of the city being Veneziano) going home to his farm near Padua;
+the German lady of a sour and dreadful countenance; our two selves,
+and the Roman _cameriere_. The last was worth all the rest--being a
+man of vast general information acquired in the course of service
+with families of all nations, and agreeably communicative. A brisk
+and lively little man, with dancing eyes, beard cut to the mode of the
+Emperor Napoleon, and the impressive habit of tapping himself on the
+teeth with his railroad-guide, and lifting his eyebrows when he
+says any thing specially worthy of remark. He, also, long after the
+conclusion of an observation, comes back to himself approvingly,
+with "_Sì_!" "_Vabene_!" "_Ecco_!" He speaks beautiful Italian and
+constantly, and in a little while we know that he was born at
+Ferrara, bred at Venice, and is now a citizen of Rome. "St. Peter's,
+Signori,--have you ever seen it?--is the first church of the world.
+At Ferrara lived Tasso and Ariosto. Venice is a lovely city. Ah! what
+beauty! But unique. My second country. _Sì, Signori, la mia seconda
+patria_." After a pause, "_Va bene_."
+
+We hint to him that he is extremely fortunate in having so many
+countries, and that it will be difficult to exile so universal a
+citizen, which he takes as a tribute to his worth, smiles and says,
+"Ecco!"
+
+Then he turns to the Veneto, and describes to him the English manner
+of living. "Wonderfully well they eat--the English. Four times a day.
+With rosbif at the dinner. Always, always, always! And tea in the
+evening, with rosbif cold. _Mangiano sempre. Ma bene, dico_." After
+a pause, "_Sì_!" "And the Venetians, they eat well, too. Whence the
+proverb: '_Sulla Riva degli Schiavoni, si mangiano bei bocconi_.'
+('On the Riva degli Schiavoni, you eat fine mouthfuls.') Signori, I am
+going to Venice," concludes the cameriere.
+
+He is the politest man in the world, and the most attentive to ladies.
+The German lady has not spoken a word, possibly not knowing the
+language. Our good cameriere cannot bear this, and commiserates her
+weariness with noble elegance and originality. "_La Signora si trova
+un poco sagrificata_?" ("The lady feels slightly sacrificed!") We all
+smile, and the little man very gladly with us.
+
+"An elegant way of expressing it," we venture to suggest. The Veneto
+roars and roars again, and we all shriek, none louder than the Roman
+himself. We never can get over that idea of being slightly sacrificed,
+and it lasts us the whole way to Padua; and when the Veneto gets down
+at his farm-gate, he first "reverences" us, and then says, "I am very
+sorry for you others who must be still more slightly sacrificed."
+
+At Venice, a week or two later, I meet our cameriere. He is not so
+gay, quite, as he was, and I fancy that he has not found so many _bei
+bocconi_ on the Riva degli Schiavoni, as the proverb and a sanguine
+temperament led him to expect. Do I happen to know, he asks, any
+American family going to Rome and desiring a cameriere?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I write, the Spring is coming in Cambridge, and I cannot help
+thinking, with a little heartache, of how the Spring came to meet us
+once as we rode southward from Venice toward Florence on that road
+from Padua to Ferrara. It had been May for some time in Tuscany,
+and all through the wide plains of Venetia this was the railroad
+landscape: fields tilled and tended as jealously as gardens, and
+waving in wheat, oats, and grass, with here and there the hay cut
+already, and here and there acres of Indian corn. The green of the
+fields was all dashed with the bloody red of poppies; the fig-trees
+hung full of half-grown fruit; the orchards were garlanded with vines,
+which they do not bind to stakes in Italy, but train from tree to
+tree, leaving them to droop in festoons and sway in the wind, with the
+slender native grace of vines. Huge stone farm-houses shelter under
+the same roof the family and all the live stock of the farm; thatched
+cottages thickly dotting the fields, send forth to their cultivation
+the most picturesque peasants,--men and women, pretty young girls in
+broad hats, and wonderful old brown and crooked crones, who seem never
+to have been younger nor fairer. Country roads, level, straight, and
+white, stretch away on either hand, and the constant files of poplars
+escort them wherever they go. All about, the birds sing, and the
+butterflies dance. The milk-white oxen dragging the heavy carts turn
+up their patient heads, with wide-spreading horns and mellow eyes,
+at the passing train; the sunburnt lout behind them suspends the
+application of the goad; unwonted acquiescence stirs in the bosom of
+the firm-minded donkey, and even the matter-of-fact locomotive seems
+to linger as lovingly as a locomotive may along these plains of
+Spring.
+
+At Padua we take a carriage for Ponte Lagoscuro, and having fought the
+customary battle with the vetturino before arriving at the terms of
+contract; having submitted to the successive pillage of the man who
+had held our horses a moment, of the man who tied on the trunk, and
+of the man who hovered obligingly about the carriage, and desired to
+drink our health--with prodigious smacking of whip, and banging of
+wheels, we rattle out of the Stella d'Oro, and set forth from the gate
+of the old city.
+
+I confess that I like posting. There is a freedom and a fine sense of
+proprietorship in that mode of travel, combined with sufficient
+speed, which you do not feel on the railroad. For twenty francs and
+_buonamano_, I had bought my carriage and horses and driver for the
+journey of forty miles, and I began to look round on the landscape
+with a cumulative feeling of ownership in everything I saw. For me,
+old women spinning in old-world fashion, with distaff and spindle,
+flax as white as their own hair, came to roadside doors, or moved
+back and forth under orchard trees. For me, the peasants toiled in the
+fields together, wearing for my sake wide straw hats, or gay ribbons,
+or red caps. The white oxen were willing to mass themselves in
+effective groups, as the ploughman turned the end of his furrow; young
+girls specially appointed themselves to lead horses to springs as we
+passed; children had larger eyes and finer faces and played more
+about the cottage doors, on account of our posting. As for the
+vine-garlanded trees in the orchards, and the opulence of the endless
+fertile plain; the white distance of the road before us with its
+guardian poplars,--I doubt if people in a diligence could have got so
+much of these things as we. Certainly they could not have had all to
+themselves the lordly splendor with which we dashed through gaping
+villages, taking the street from everybody, and fading magnificently
+away upon the road.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+TRIESTE.
+
+If you take the midnight steamer at Venice you reach Trieste by six
+o'clock in the morning, and the hills rise to meet you as you enter
+the broad bay dotted with the sail of fishing-craft. The hills are
+bald and bare, and you find, as you draw near, that the city lies at
+their feet under a veil of mist, or climbs earlier into view along
+their sides. The prospect is singularly devoid of gentle and pleasing
+features, and looking at those rugged acclivities, with their aspect
+of continual bleakness, you readily believe all the stories you have
+heard of that fierce wind called the Bora which sweeps from them
+through Trieste at certain seasons. While it blows, ladies walking
+near the quays are sometimes caught up and set afloat, involuntary
+Galateas, in the bay, and people keep in-doors as much as possible.
+But the Bora, though so sudden and so savage, does give warning of its
+rise, and the peasants avail themselves of this characteristic. They
+station a man on one of the mountain tops, and when he feels the first
+breath of the Bora, he sounds a horn, which is a signal for all within
+hearing to lay hold of something that cannot be blown away, and cling
+to it till the wind falls. This may happen in three days or in nine,
+according to the popular proverbs. "The spectacle of the sea," says
+Dall' Ongaro, in a note to one of his ballads, "while the Bora blows,
+is sublime, and when it ceases the prospect of the surrounding hills
+is delightful. The air, purified by the rapid current, clothes them
+with a rosy veil, and the temperature is instantly softened, even in
+the heart of winter."
+
+The city itself, as you penetrate it, makes good with its stateliness
+and picturesqueness your loss through the grimness of its environs. It
+is in great part new, very clean, and full of the life and movement
+of a prosperous port; but, better than this, so far as the mere
+sight-seer is concerned, it wins a novel charm from the many public
+staircases by which you ascend and descend its hillier quarters, and
+which are made of stone, and lightly railed and balustraded with iron.
+
+Something of all this I noticed in my ride from the landing of the
+steamer to the house of friends in the suburbs, and there I grew
+better disposed toward the hills, which, as I strolled over them,
+I found dotted with lovely villas, and everywhere traversed by
+perfectly-kept carriage-roads, and easy and pleasant foot-paths. It
+was in the spring-time, and the peach-trees and almond-trees hung
+full of blossoms and bees, the lizards lay in the walks absorbing the
+vernal sunshine, the violets and cowslips sweetened all the grassy
+borders. The scene did not want a human interest, for the peasant
+girls were going to market at that hour, and I met them everywhere,
+bearing heavy burdens on their own heads, or hurrying forward with
+their wares on the backs of donkeys. They were as handsome as heart
+could wish, and they wore that Italian costume which is not to be seen
+anywhere in Italy except at Trieste and in the Roman and Neapolitan
+provinces,--a bright bodice and gown, with the head-dress of dazzling
+white linen, square upon the crown, and dropping lightly to the
+shoulders. Later I saw these comely maidens crouching on the ground in
+the market-place, and selling their wares, with much glitter of eyes,
+teeth, and earrings, and a continual babble of bargaining.
+
+It seemed to me that the average of good looks was greater among the
+women of Trieste than among those of Venice, but that the instances of
+striking and exquisite beauty were rarer. At Trieste, too, the Italian
+type, so pure at Venice, is lost or continually modified by the mixed
+character of the population, which perhaps is most noticeable at the
+Merchants' Exchange. This is a vast edifice roofed with glass, where
+are the offices of the great steam navigation company, the Austrian
+Lloyds,--which, far more than the favor of the Imperial government,
+has contributed to the prosperity of Trieste,--and where the
+traffickers of all races meet daily to gossip over the news and the
+prices. Here a Greek or Dalmat talks with an eager Italian or a slow,
+sure Englishman; here the hated Austrian button-holes the Venetian
+or the Magyar; here the Jew meets the Gentile on common ground; here
+Christianity encounters the hoary superstitions of the East, and makes
+a good thing out of them in cotton or grain. All costumes are seen
+here, and all tongues are heard, the native Triestines contributing
+almost as much to the variety of the latter as the foreigners. "In
+regard to language," says Cantù, "though the country is peopled by
+Slavonians, yet the Italian tongue is spreading into the remotest
+villages where a few years since it was not understood. In the city it
+is the common and familiar language; the Slavonians of the North use
+the German for the language of ceremony; those of the South, as well
+as the Israelites, the Italian; while the Protestants use the German,
+the Greeks the Hellenic and Illyric, the _employés_ of the civil
+courts the Italian or the German, the schools now German and now
+Italian, the bar and the pulpit Italian. Most of the inhabitants,
+indeed, are bi-lingual, and very many tri-lingual, without counting
+French, which is understood and spoken from infancy. Italian, German,
+and Greek are written, but the Slavonic little, this having remained
+in the condition of a vulgar tongue. But it would be idle to
+distinguish the population according to language, for the son adopts a
+language different from the father's, and now prefers one language and
+now another; the women incline to the Italian; but those of the upper
+class prefer now German, now French, now English, as, from one decade
+to another, affairs, fashions, and fancies change. This in the salons;
+in the squares and streets, the Venetian dialect is heard."
+
+And with the introduction of the Venetian dialect, Venetian discontent
+seems also to have crept in, and I once heard a Triestine declaim
+against the Imperial government quite in the manner of Venice. It
+struck me that this desire for union with Italy, which he declared
+prevalent in Trieste, must be of very recent growth, since even so
+late as 1848, Trieste had refused to join Venice in the expulsion of
+the Austrians. Indeed, the Triestines have fought the Venetians from
+the first; they stole the Brides of Venice in one of their piratical
+cruises in the lagoons; gave aid and comfort to those enemies of
+Venice, the Visconti, the Carraras, and the Genoese; revolted from St.
+Mark whenever subjected to his banner, and finally, rather than remain
+under his sway, gave themselves five centuries ago to Austria.
+
+The objects of interest in Trieste are not many. There are remains of
+an attributive temple of Jupiter under the Duomo, and there is near
+at hand the Museum of Classical Antiquities founded in honor of
+Winckelmann, murdered at Trieste by that ill-advised Pistojese,
+Ancangeli, who had seen the medals bestowed on the antiquary by Maria
+Theresa and believed him rich. There is also a scientific museum
+founded by the Archduke Maximilian, and, above all, there is the
+beautiful residence of that ill-starred prince,--the Miramare, where
+the half-crazed Empress of the Mexicans vainly waits her husband's
+return from the experiment of paternal government in the New World. It
+would be hard to tell how Art has charmed rock and wave at Miramare,
+until the spur of those rugged Triestine hills, jutting into the sea,
+has been made the seat of ease and luxury, but the visitor is aware of
+the magic as soon as he passes the gate of the palace grounds. These
+are in great part perpendicular, and are over clambered with airy
+stairways climbing to pensile arbors. Where horizontal, they are
+diversified with mimic seas for swans to sail upon, and summer-houses
+for people to lounge in and look at the swans from. On the point of
+land furthest from the acclivity stands the Castle of Miramare, half
+at sea, and half adrift in the clouds above:--
+
+  "And fain it would stoop downward
+  To the mirrored wave below;
+  And fain it would soar upward
+  In the evening's crimson glow."
+
+I remember that a little yacht lay beside the pier at the castle's
+foot, and lazily flapped its sail, while the sea beat inward with as
+languid a pulse. That was some years ago, before Mexico was dreamed of
+at Miramare: now, perchance, she who is one of the most unhappy among
+women looks down distraught from those high windows, and finds in the
+helpless sail and impassive wave the images of her baffled hope, and
+that immeasurable sea which gives back its mariners neither to love
+nor sorrow. I think though she be the wife and daughter of princes, we
+may pity this poor Empress at least as much as we pity the Mexicans to
+whom her dreams have brought so many woes.
+
+It was the midnight following my visit to Miramare when the fiacre
+in which I had quitted my friend's house was drawn up by its greatly
+bewildered driver on the quay near the place where the steamer for
+Venice should be lying. There was no steamer for Venice to be seen.
+The driver swore a little in the polyglot profanities of his native
+city, and descending from his box, went and questioned different
+lights--blue lights, yellow lights, green lights--to be seen at
+different points. To a light, they were ignorant, though eloquent, and
+to pass the time, we drove up and down the quay, and stopped at the
+landings of all the steamers that touch at Trieste. It was a snug
+fiacre enough, but I did not care to spend the night in it, and I
+urged the driver to further inquiry. A wanderer whom we met, declared
+that it was not the night for the Venice steamer; another admitted
+that it might be; a third conversed with the driver in low tones, and
+then leaped upon the box. We drove rapidly away, and before I had, in
+view of this mysterious proceeding, composed a fitting paragraph for
+the _Fatti Diversi_ of the _Osservatore Triestino_, descriptive of the
+state in which the Guardie di Polizia should find me floating in the
+bay, exanimate and evidently the prey of a _triste evvenimento_--the
+driver pulled up once more, and now beside a steamer. It was the
+steamer for Venice, he said, in precisely the tone which he would
+have used had he driven me directly to it without blundering. It was
+breathing heavily, and was just about to depart, but even in the hurry
+of getting on board, I could not help noticing that it seemed to have
+grown a great deal since I had last voyaged in it. There was not
+a soul to be seen except the mute steward who took my satchel, and
+guiding me below into an elegant saloon, instantly left me alone.
+Here again the steamer was vastly enlarged. These were not the narrow
+quarters of the Venice steamer, nor was this lamp, shedding a soft
+light on cushioned seats and paneled doors and wainscotings the sort
+of illumination usual in that humble craft. I rang the small silver
+bell on the long table, and the mute steward appeared.
+
+_Was_ this the steamer for Venice?
+
+_Sicuro_!
+
+All that I could do in comment was to sit down; and in the mean time
+the steamer trembled, groaned, choked, cleared its throat, and we were
+under way.
+
+"The other passengers have all gone to bed, I suppose," I argued
+acutely, seeing none of them. Nevertheless, I thought it odd, and
+it seemed a shrewd means of relief to ring the bell, and pretending
+drowsiness, to ask the steward which was my state-room.
+
+He replied with a curious smile that I could have any of them. Amazed,
+I yet selected a state-room, and while the steward was gone for the
+sheets and pillow-cases, I occupied my time by opening the doors of
+all the other state-rooms. They were empty.
+
+"Am I the only passenger?" I asked, when he returned, with some
+anxiety.
+
+"Precisely," he answered.
+
+I could not proceed and ask if he composed the entire crew--it seemed
+too fearfully probable that he did.
+
+I now suspected that I had taken passage with the Olandese Volante.
+There was nothing in the world for it, however, but to go to bed, and
+there, with the accession of a slight sea-sickness, my views of the
+situation underwent a total change. I had gone down into the Maelstrom
+with the Ancient Mariner--I was a Manuscript Found in a Bottle!
+
+Coming to the surface about six o'clock A.M., I found a daylight as
+cheerful as need be upon the appointments of the elegant cabin, and
+upon the good-natured face of the steward when he brought me the caffè
+latte, and the buttered toast for my breakfast. He said "_Servitor
+suo_!" in a loud and comfortable voice, and I perceived the
+absurdity of having thought that he was in any way related to the
+Nightmare-Death-in-life-that-thicks-man's-blood-with-cold.
+
+"This is not the regular Venice steamer, I suppose," I remarked to the
+steward as he laid my breakfast in state upon the long table.
+
+No. Properly, no boat should have left for Venice last night, which
+was not one of the times of the tri-weekly departure. This was one of
+the steamers of the line between Trieste and Alexandria, and it was
+going at present to take on an extraordinary freight at Venice for
+Egypt. I had been permitted to come on board because my driver said I
+had a return ticket, and would go.
+
+Ascending to the deck I found nothing whatever mysterious in the
+management of the steamer. The captain met me with a bow in the
+gangway; seamen were coiling wet ropes at different points, as they
+always are; the mate was promenading the bridge, and taking the rainy
+weather as it came, with his oil-cloth coat and hat on. The wheel of
+the steamer was as usual chewing the sea, and finding it unpalatable,
+and making vain efforts at expectoration.
+
+We were in sight of the breakwater outside Malamocco, and a pilot-boat
+was making us from the land. Even at this point the innumerable
+fortifications of the Austrians began, and they multiplied as we
+drew near Venice, till we entered the lagoon, and found it a nest of
+fortresses one with another.
+
+Unhappily the day being rainy, Venice did not spring resplendent from
+the sea, as I had always read she would. She rose slowly and languidly
+from the water,--not like a queen, but like the gray, slovenly,
+bedrabbled, heart-broken old slave she really was.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+BASSANO.
+
+I have already told, in recounting the story of our visit to the
+Cimbri, how full of courtship we found the little city of Bassano on
+the evening of our arrival there. Bassano is the birthplace of the
+painter Jacopo da Ponte, who was one of the first Italian painters to
+treat scriptural story as accessory to mere landscape, and who had a
+peculiar fondness for painting Entrances into the Ark, for in these he
+could indulge without stint the taste for pairing-off early acquired
+from observation of local customs in his native town. This was
+the theory offered by one who had imbibed the spirit of subtile
+speculation from Ruskin, and I think it reasonable. At least it does
+not conflict with the fact that there is at Bassano a most excellent
+gallery of paintings entirely devoted to the works of Jacopo da Ponte,
+and his four sons, who are here to be seen to better advantage than
+anywhere else. As few strangers visit Bassano, the gallery is little
+frequented. It is in charge of a very strict old man, who will not
+allow people to look at the pictures till he has shown them the
+adjoining cabinet of geological specimens. It is in vain that you
+assure him of your indifference to these scientific _seccature_; he is
+deaf and you are not suffered to escape a single fossil. He asked us a
+hundred questions, and understood nothing in reply, insomuch that when
+he came to his last inquiry, "Have the Protestants the same God as the
+Catholics?" we were rather glad that he should be obliged to settle
+the fact for himself.
+
+Underneath the gallery was a school of boys, whom as we entered we
+heard humming over the bitter honey which childhood is obliged to
+gather from the opening flowers of orthography. When we passed out,
+the master gave these poor busy bees an atom of holiday, and they all
+swarmed forth together to look at the strangers. The teacher was a
+long, lank man, in a black threadbare coat, and a skull-cap--exactly
+like the schoolmaster in "The Deserted Village." We made a pretense of
+asking him our way to somewhere, and went wrong, and came by accident
+upon a wide flat space, bare as a brick-yard, beside which was
+lettered on a fragment of the old city wall, "Giuoco di Palla." It
+was evidently the playground of the whole city, and it gave us a
+pleasanter idea of life in Bassano than we had yet conceived, to think
+of its entire population playing ball there in the spring afternoons.
+We respected Bassano as much for this as for her diligent remembrance
+of her illustrious dead, of whom she has very great numbers. It
+appeared to us that nearly every other house bore a tablet announcing
+that "Here was born," or "Here died," some great or good man of whom
+no one out of Bassano ever heard. There is enough celebrity in Bassano
+to supply the world; but as laurel is a thing that grows anywhere, I
+covet rather from Bassano the magnificent ivy that covers the portions
+of her ancient wall yet standing. The wall, where visible, is seen to
+be of a pebbly rough-cast, but it is clad almost from the ground
+in glossy ivy, that glitters upon it like chain-mail upon the vast
+shoulders of some giant warrior. The moat beneath is turned into a
+lovely promenade bordered by quiet villas, with rococo shepherds and
+shepherdesses in marble on their gates; where the wall is built to the
+verge of the high ground on which the city stands, there is a swift
+descent to the wide valley of the Brenta waving in corn and vines and
+tobacco.
+
+We went up the Brenta one day as far as Oliero, to visit the famous
+cavern already mentioned, out of which, from the secret heart of the
+hill, gushes one of the foamy affluents of the river. It is reached
+by passing through a paper-mill, fed by the stream, and then through
+a sort of ante-grot, whence stepping-stones are laid in the brawling
+current through a succession of natural compartments with dome-like
+roofs. From the hill overhead hang stalactites of all grotesque and
+fairy shapes, and the rock underfoot is embroidered with fantastic
+designs wrought by the water in the silence and darkness of the
+endless night. At a considerable distance from the mouth of the cavern
+is a wide lake, with a boat upon it, and voyaging to the centre of the
+pool your attention is drawn to the dome above you, which contracts
+into a shaft rising upward to a height as yet unmeasured and even
+unpierced by light. From somewhere in its mysterious ascent, an
+auroral boy, with a tallow candle, produces a so-called effect of
+sunrise, and sheds a sad, disheartening radiance on the lake and the
+cavern sides, which is to sunlight about as the blind creatures of
+subterranean waters are to those of waves that laugh and dance above
+ground. But all caverns are much alike in their depressing and gloomy
+influences, and since there is so great opportunity to be wretched on
+the surface of the earth, why do people visit them? I do not know that
+this is more dispiriting or its stream more Stygian than another.
+
+The wicked memory of the Ecelini survives everywhere in this part of
+Italy, and near the entrance of the Oliero grotto is a hollow in the
+hill something like the apsis of a church, which is popularly believed
+to have been the hiding-place of Cecilia da Baone, one of the many
+unhappy wives of one of the many miserable members of the Ecelino
+family. It is not quite clear when Cecilia should have employed this
+as a place of refuge, and it is certain that she was not the wife of
+Ecelino da Romano, as the neighbors believe at Oliero, but of Ecelino
+il Monaco, his father; yet since her name is associated with the grot,
+let us have her story, which is curiously illustrative of the life of
+the best society in Italy during the thirteenth century. She was the
+only daughter of the rich and potent lord, Manfredo, Count of Baone
+and Abano, who died leaving his heiress to the guardianship of
+Spinabello da Xendrico. When his ward reached womanhood, Spinabello
+cast about him to find a suitable husband for her, and it appeared to
+him that a match with the son of Tiso du Camposampiero promised
+the greatest advantages. Tiso, to whom he proposed the affair, was
+delighted, but desiring first to take counsel with his friends upon
+so important a matter, he confided it for advice to his brother-in-law
+and closest intimate, Ecelino Balbo. It had just happened that Balbo's
+son, Ecelino il Monaco, was at that moment disengaged, having
+been recently divorced from his first wife, the lovely but light
+Speronella; and Balbo falsely went to the greedy guardian of Cecilia,
+and offering him better terms than he could hope for from Tiso,
+secured Cecilia for his son. At this treachery the Camposampieri were
+furious; but they dissembled their anger till the moment of revenge
+arrived, when Cecilia's rejected suitor encountering her upon a
+journey beyond the protection of her husband, violently dishonored his
+successful rival. The unhappy lady returning to Ecelino at Bassano,
+recounted her wrong, and was with a horrible injustice repudiated and
+sent home, while her husband arranged schemes of vengeance in due time
+consummated. Cecilia next married a Venetian noble, and being in
+due time divorced, married yet again, and died the mother of a large
+family of children.
+
+This is a very old scandal, yet I think there was an _habitué_ of the
+caffè in Bassano who could have given some of its particulars from
+personal recollection. He was an old and smoothly shaven gentleman, in
+a scrupulously white waistcoat, whom we saw every evening in a corner
+of the caffè playing solitaire. He talked with no one, saluted no
+one. He drank his glasses of water with anisette, and silently played
+solitaire. There is no good reason to doubt that he had been doing the
+same thing every evening for six hundred years.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+POSSAGNO, CANOVA'S BIRTHPLACE.
+
+It did not take a long time to exhaust the interest of Bassano, but we
+were sorry to leave the place because of the excellence of the inn at
+which we tarried. It was called "Il Mondo," and it had everything
+in it that heart could wish. Our rooms were miracles of neatness and
+comfort; they had the freshness, not the rawness, of recent repair,
+and they opened into the dining-hall, where we were served with
+indescribable salads and risotti. During our sojourn we simply enjoyed
+the house; when we were come away we wondered that so much perfection
+of hotel could exist in so small a town as Bassano. It is one of
+the pleasures of by-way travel in Italy, that you are everywhere
+introduced in character, that you become fictitious and play a part as
+in a novel. To this inn of The World, our driver had brought us with a
+clamor and rattle proportioned to the fee received from us, and
+when, in response to his haughty summons, the cameriere, who had been
+gossiping with the cook, threw open the kitchen door, and stood out to
+welcome us in a broad square of forth-streaming ruddy light, amid the
+lovely odors of broiling and roasting, our driver saluted him with,
+"Receive these gentle folks, and treat them to your very best. They
+are worthy of anything." This at once put us back several centuries,
+and we never ceased to be lords and ladies of the period of Don
+Quixote as long as we rested in that inn.
+
+It was a bright and breezy Sunday when we left "Il Mondo," and gayly
+journeyed toward Treviso, intending to visit Possagno, the birthplace
+of Canova, on our way. The road to the latter place passes through a
+beautiful country, that gently undulates on either hand till in the
+distance it rises into pleasant hills and green mountain heights.
+Possagno itself lies upon the brink of a declivity, down the side of
+which drops terrace after terrace, all planted with vines and figs and
+peaches, to a watercourse below. The ground on which the village is
+built, with its quaint and antiquated stone cottages, slopes gently
+northward, and on a little rise upon the left hand of us coming from
+Bassano, we saw that stately edifice with which Canova has honored his
+humble birthplace. It is a copy of the Pantheon, and it cannot help
+being beautiful and imposing, but it would be utterly out of place in
+any other than an Italian village. Here, however, it consorted well
+enough with the lingering qualities of the old pagan civilization
+still perceptible in Italy. A sense of that past was so strong with
+us as we ascended the broad stairway leading up the slope from the
+village to the level on which the temple stands at the foot of a
+mountain, that we might well have believed we approached an altar
+devoted to the elder worship: through the open doorway and between the
+columns of the portico we could see the priests moving to and fro, and
+the voice of their chanting came out to us like the sound of hymns to
+some of the deities long disowned; and I remembered how Padre L----
+had said to me in Venice, "Our blessed saints are only the old gods
+baptized and christened anew." Within as without, the temple resembled
+the Pantheon, but it had little to show us. The niches designed by
+Canova for statues of the saints are empty yet; but there are busts by
+his own hand of himself and his brother, the Bishop Canova. Among the
+people was the sculptor's niece, whom our guide pointed out to us, and
+who was evidently used to being looked at. She seemed not to dislike
+it, and stared back at us amiably enough, being a good-natured, plump,
+comely dark-faced lady of perhaps fifty years.
+
+Possagno is nothing if not Canova, and our guide, a boy, knew
+all about him,--how, more especially, he had first manifested his
+wonderful genius by modeling a group of sheep out of the dust of the
+highway, and how an Inglese happening along in his carriage, saw the
+boy's work and gave him a plateful of gold napoleons. I dare say
+this is as near the truth as most facts. And is it not better for the
+historic Canova to have begun in this way than to have poorly picked
+up the rudiments of his art in the workshop of his father, a maker of
+altar-pieces and the like for country churches? The Canova family was
+intermarried with the Venetian nobility, and will not credit those
+stories of Canova's beginnings which his townsmen so fondly cherish.
+I believe they would even distrust the butter-lion with which the
+boy-sculptor is said to have adorned the table of the noble Falier,
+and first won his notice.
+
+Besides the temple at Possagno, there is a very pretty gallery
+containing casts of all Canova's works. It is an interesting place,
+where Psyches and Cupids flutter, where Venuses present themselves
+in every variety of attitude, where Sorrows sit upon hard,
+straight-backed classic chairs, and mourn in the society of faithful
+Storks; where the Bereft of this century surround death-beds in Greek
+costume appropriate to the scene; where Muses and Graces sweetly pose
+themselves and insipidly smile, and where the Dancers and Passions,
+though nakeder, are no wickeder than the Saints and Virtues. In all,
+there are a hundred and ninety-five pieces in the gallery, and among
+the rest the statue named George Washington, which was sent to America
+in 1820, and afterwards destroyed by fire in the Capitol. The figure
+is in a sitting posture; naturally, it is in the dress of a Roman
+general; and if it does not look much like George Washington, it does
+resemble Julius Cæsar.
+
+The custodian of the gallery had been Canova'a body-servant, and he
+loved to talk of his master. He had so far imbibed the family spirit
+that he did not like to allow that Canova had ever been other than
+rich and grand, and he begged us not to believe the idle stories of
+his first essays in art. He was delighted with our interest in the
+imperial Washington, and our pleasure in the whole gallery, which we
+viewed with the homage due to the man who had rescued the world from
+Swaggering in sculpture. When we were satisfied, he invited us, with
+his mistress's permission, into the house of the Canovas adjoining
+the gallery; and there we saw many paintings by the sculptor,--pausing
+longest in a lovely little room decorated after the Pompeian manner
+with _scherzi_ in miniature panels representing the jocose classic
+usualities: Cupids escaping from cages, and being sold from them, and
+playing many pranks and games with Nymphs and Graces.
+
+Then Canova was done, and Possagno was finished; and we resumed our
+way to Treviso, a town nearly as much porticoed as Padua, and having a
+memory and hardly any other consciousness. The Duomo, which is perhaps
+the ugliest duomo in the world, contains an "Annunciation," by Titian,
+one of his best paintings; and in the Monte di Pietà is the grand and
+beautiful "Entombment," by which Giorgione is perhaps most worthily
+remembered. The church of San Nicolò is interesting from its quaint
+and pleasing frescos by the school of Giotto. At the railway station
+an admirable old man sells the most delicious white and purple grapes.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+COMO.
+
+My visit to Lake Como has become to me a dream of summer,--a vision
+that remains faded the whole year round, till the blazing heats of
+July bring out the sympathetic tints in which it was vividly painted.
+Then I behold myself again in burning Milan, amidst noises and
+fervors and bustle that seem intolerable after my first six months
+in tranquil, cool, mute Venice. Looking at the great white Cathedral,
+with its infinite pinnacles piercing the cloudless blue, and gathering
+the fierce sun upon it, I half expect to see the whole mass calcined
+by the heat, and crumbling, statue by statue, finial by finial, arch
+by arch, into a vast heap of lime on the Piazza, with a few charred
+English tourists blackening here and there upon the ruin, and
+contributing a smell of burnt leather and Scotch tweed to the horror
+of the scene. All round Milan smokes the great Lombard plain, and
+to the north rises Monte Rosa, her dark head coifed with tantalizing
+snows as with a peasant's white linen kerchief. And I am walking out
+upon that fuming plain as far as to the Arco della Pace, on which
+the bronze horses may melt any minute; or I am sweltering through the
+city's noonday streets, in search of Sant' Ambrogio, or the Cenacolo
+of Da Vinci, or what know I? Coming back to our hotel, "Alla Bella
+Venezia," and greeted on entering by the immense fresco which covers
+one whole side of the court, it appeared to my friend and me no wonder
+that Garibaldi should look so longingly from the prow of a gondola
+toward the airy towers and balloon-like domes that swim above the
+unattainable lagoons of Venice, where the Austrian then lorded it in
+coolness and quietness, while hot, red-shirted Italy was shut out
+upon the dusty plains and stony hills. Our desire for water became
+insufferable; we paid our modest bills, and at six o'clock we took
+the train for Como, where we arrived about the hour when Don Abbondio,
+walking down the lonely path with his book of devotions in his hand,
+gave himself to the Devil on meeting the bravos of Don Rodrigo. I
+counsel the reader to turn to _I Promessi Sposi_, if he would know
+how all the lovely Como country looks at that hour. For me, the ride
+through the evening landscape, and the faint sentiment of pensiveness
+provoked by the smell of the ripening maize, which exhales the same
+sweetness on the way to Como that it does on any Ohio bottom-land,
+have given me an appetite, and I am to dine before wooing the
+descriptive Muse.
+
+After dinner, we find at the door of the hotel an English architect
+whom we know, and we take a boat together for a moonlight row upon the
+lake, and voyage far up the placid water through air that bathes our
+heated senses like dew. How far we have left Milan behind! On the lake
+lies the moon, but the hills are held by mysterious shadows, which for
+the time are as substantial to us as the hills themselves. Hints of
+habitation appear in the twinkling lights along the water's edge, and
+we suspect an alabaster lamp in every casement, and in every invisible
+house a villa such as Claude Melnotte described to Pauline,--and some
+one mouths that well-worn fustian. The rags of sentimentality flutter
+from every crag and olive-tree and orange-tree in all Italy--like the
+wilted paper collars which vulgar tourists leave by our own mountains
+and streams, to commemorate their enjoyment of the landscape.
+
+The town of Como lies, a swarm of lights, behind us; the hills and
+shadows gloom around; the lake is a sheet of tremulous silver. There
+is no telling how we get back to our hotel, or with what satisfied
+hearts we fall asleep in our room there. The steamer starts for the
+head of the lake at eight o'clock in the morning, and we go on board
+at that hour.
+
+There is some pretense of shelter in the awning stretched over the
+after part of the boat; but we do not feel the need of it in the fresh
+morning air, and we get as near the bow as possible, that we may be
+the very first to enjoy the famous beauty of the scenes opening
+before us. A few sails dot the water, and everywhere there are small,
+canopied row-boats, such as we went pleasuring in last night. We reach
+a bend in the lake, and all the roofs and towers of the city of Como
+pass from view, as if they had been so much architecture painted on
+a scene and shifted out of sight at a theatre. But other roofs and
+towers constantly succeed them, not less lovely and picturesque than
+they, with every curve of the many-curving lake. We advance over
+charming expanses of water lying between lofty hills; and as the lake
+is narrow, the voyage is like that of a winding river,--like that of
+the Ohio, but for the primeval wildness of the acclivities that guard
+our Western stream, and the tawniness of its current. Wherever the
+hills do not descend sheer into Como, a pretty town nestles on the
+brink, or, if not a town, then a villa, or else a cottage, if there is
+room for nothing more. Many little towns climb the heights half-way,
+and where the hills are green and cultivated in vines or olives,
+peasants' houses scale them to the crest. They grow loftier and
+loftier as we leave our starting-place farther behind, and as we
+draw near Colico they wear light wreaths of cloud and snow. So cool
+a breeze has drawn down between them all the way that we fancy it to
+have come from them till we stop at Colico, and find that, but for the
+efforts of our honest engine, sweating and toiling in the dark
+below, we should have had no current of air. A burning calm is in
+the atmosphere, and on the broad, flat valley,--out of which a marshy
+stream oozes into the lake,--and on the snow-crowned hills upon the
+left, and on the dirty village of Colico upon the right, and on the
+indolent beggars waiting to welcome us, and sunning their goitres at
+the landing.
+
+The name Colico, indeed, might be literally taken in English as
+descriptive of the local insalubrity. The place was once large, but it
+has fallen away much from sickness, and we found a bill posted in its
+public places inviting emigrants to America on the part of a German
+steamship company. It was the only advertisement of the kind I
+ever saw in Italy, and I judged that the people must be notoriously
+discontented there to make it worth the while of a steamship company
+to tempt from home any of the home-keeping Italian race. And
+yet Colico, though undeniably hot, and openly dirty, and tacitly
+unhealthy, had merits, though the dinner we got there was not among
+its virtues. It had an accessible country about it; that is, its woods
+and fields were not impenetrably walled in from the vagabond foot;
+and after we had dined we went and lay down under some greenly waving
+trees beside a field of corn, and heard the plumed and panoplied maize
+talking to itself of its kindred in America. It always has a welcome
+for tourists of our nation wherever it finds us in Italy; and
+sometimes its sympathy, expressed in a rustling and clashing of its
+long green blades, or in its strong sweet perfume, has, as already
+hinted, made me homesick, though I have been uniformly unaffected by
+potato-patches and tobacco-fields. If only the maize could impart to
+the Italian cooks the beautiful mystery of roasting-ears! Ah! then
+indeed it might claim a full and perfect fraternization from its
+compatriots abroad.
+
+From where we lay beside the corn-field, we could see, through the
+twinkling leaves and the twinkling atmosphere, the great hills across
+the lake, taking their afternoon naps, with their clouds drawn like
+handkerchiefs over their heads. It was very hot, and the red and
+purple ooze of the unwholesome river below "burnt like a witch's
+oils." It was indeed but a fevered joy we snatched from Nature there;
+and I am afraid that we got nothing more comfortable from sentiment,
+when, rising, we wandered off through the unguarded fields toward a
+ruined tower on a hill. It must have been a relic of feudal times,
+and I could easily believe it had been the hold of one of those wicked
+lords who used to rule in the terror of the people beside peaceful and
+happy Como. But the life, good or bad, was utterly gone out of it
+now, and what was left of the tower was a burden to the sense. A few
+scrawny blackberries and other brambles grew out of its fallen stones;
+harsh, dust-dry mosses painted its weather-worn walls with their
+blanched gray and yellow. From its foot, looking out over the valley,
+we saw the road to the Splügen Pass lying white-hot in the valley; and
+while we looked, the diligence appeared, and dashed through the dust
+that rose like a flame before. After that it was a relief to stroll
+in dirty by-ways, past cottages of saffron peasants, and poor stony
+fields that begrudged them a scanty vegetation, back to the steamer
+blistering in the sun.
+
+Now indeed we were glad of the awning, under which a silent crowd of
+people with sunburnt faces waited for the departure of the boat. The
+breeze rose again as the engine resumed its unappreciated labors, and,
+with our head toward Como, we pushed out into the lake. The company
+on board was such as might be expected. There was a German
+landscape-painter, with three heart's-friends beside him; there
+were some German ladies; there were the unfailing Americans and
+the unfailing Englishman; there were some French people; there were
+Italians from the meridional provinces, dark, thin, and enthusiastic,
+with fat silent wives, and a rhythmical speech; there were Milanese
+with their families, out for a holiday,--round-bodied men, with blunt
+square features, and hair and vowels clipped surprisingly short, there
+was a young girl whose face was of the exact type affected in rococo
+sculpture, and at whom one gazed without being able to decide whether
+she was a nymph descended from a villa gate, or a saint come from
+under a broken arch in a Renaissance church. At one of the little
+towns two young Englishmen in knickerbockers came on board, who were
+devoured by the eyes of their fellow-passengers, and between whom and
+our kindly architect there was instantly ratified the tacit treaty of
+non-intercourse which travelling Englishmen observe.
+
+Nothing further interested us on the way to Como, except the gathering
+coolness of the evening air; the shadows creeping higher and higher
+on the hills; the songs of the girls winding yellow silk on the reels
+that hummed through the open windows of the factories on the shore;
+and the appearance of a flag that floated from a shallop before the
+landing of a stately villa. The Italians did not know this banner, and
+the Germans loudly debated its nationality. The Englishmen grinned,
+and the Americans blushed in silence. Of all my memories of that hot
+day on Lake Como, this is burnt the deepest; for the flag was that
+insolent banner which in 1862 proclaimed us a broken people, and
+persuaded willing Europe of our ruin. It has gone down long ago from
+ship and fort and regiment, as well as from the shallop on the
+fair Italian lake. Still, I say, it made Como too hot for us that
+afternoon, and even breathless Milan was afterwards a pleasant
+contrast.
+
+
+
+
+STOPPING AT VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA.
+
+I.
+
+It was after sunset when we arrived in the birthplace of Palladio,
+which we found a fair city in the lap of caressing hills. There are
+pretty villas upon these slopes, and an abundance of shaded walks and
+drives about the houses which were pointed out to us, by the boy who
+carried our light luggage from the railway station, as the property of
+rich citizens "but little less than lords" in quality. A lovely grove
+lay between the station and the city, and our guide not only took us
+voluntarily by the longest route through this, but, after reaching
+the streets, led us by labyrinthine ways to the hotel, in order, he
+afterwards confessed, to show us the city. He was a poet, though in
+that lowly walk of life, and he had done well. No other moment of our
+stay would have served us so well for a first general impression of
+Vicenza as that twilight hour. In its uncertain glimmer we seemed
+to get quite back to the dawn of feudal civilization, when Theodoric
+founded the great Basilica of the city; and as we stood before
+the famous Clock Tower, which rises light and straight as a mast
+eighty-two metres into the air from a base of seven metres, the
+wavering obscurity enhanced the effect by half concealing the tower's
+crest, and letting it soar endlessly upward in the fancy. The Basilica
+is greatly restored by Palladio, and the cold hand of that friend of
+virtuous poverty in architecture lies heavy upon his native city in
+many places. Yet there is still a great deal of Lombardic architecture
+in Vicenza; and we walked through one street of palaces in which
+Venetian Gothic prevailed, so that it seemed as if the Grand Canal had
+but just shrunk away from their bases. When we threw open our window
+at the hotel, we found that it overlooked one of the city gates, from
+which rose a Ghibelline tower with a great bulging cornice, full of
+the beauty and memory of times long before Palladio.
+
+They were rather troublous times, and not to be recalled here in all
+their circumstance; but I think it due to Vicenza, which is now little
+spoken of, even in Italy, and is scarcely known in America, where her
+straw-braid is bought for that of Leghorn, to remind the reader
+that the city was for a long time a republic of very independent and
+warlike stomach. Before she arrived at that state, however, she had
+undergone a great variety of fortunes. The Gauls founded the city
+(as I learn from "The Chronicles of Vicenza," by Battista Pagliarino,
+published at Vicenza in 1563) when Gideon was Judge in Israel, and
+were driven out by the Romans some centuries later. As a matter of
+course, Vicenza was sacked by Attila and conquered by Alboin; after
+which she was ruled by some lords of her own, until she was made
+an imperial city by Henry I. Then she had a government more or less
+republican in form till Frederick Barbarossa burnt her, and "wrapped
+her in ashes," and gave her to his vicar Ecelino da Romano, who "held
+her in cruel tyranny" from 1236 to 1259. The Paduans next ruled
+her forty years, and the Veronese seventy-seven, and the Milanese
+seventeen years; then she reposed in the arms of the Venetian Republic
+till these fell weak and helpless from all the Venetian possessions
+at the threat of Napoleon. Vicenza belonged again to Venice during the
+brief Republic of 1848, but the most memorable battle of that heroic
+but unhappy epoch gave her back to Austria. Now at last, and for the
+first time, she is Italian. Vicenza is
+
+  "Of kindred that have greatly expiated
+  And greatly wept,"
+
+and but that I so long fought against Ecelino da Romano, and the
+imperial interest in Italy, I could readily forgive her all her past
+errors. To us of the Lombard League, it was grievous that she should
+remain so doggishly faithful to her tyrant; though it is to be granted
+that perhaps fear had as much to do with her devotion as favor. The
+defense of 1848 was greatly to her honor, and she took an active part
+in that demonstration against the Austrians which endured from 1859
+till 1866.
+
+Of the demonstration we travellers saw an amusing phase at the
+opera which we attended the evening of our arrival in Vicenza.
+"Nabucodonosor" was the piece to be given in the new open-air theatre
+outside the city walls, whither we walked under the starlight. It
+was a pretty structure of fresh white stucco, oval in form, with some
+graceful architectural pretensions without, and within very charmingly
+galleried; while overhead it was roofed with a blue dome set with such
+starry mosaic as never covered temple or theatre since they used to
+leave their houses of play and worship open to the Attic skies. The
+old Hebrew story had, on this stage brought so near to Nature, effects
+seldom known to opera, and the scene evoked from far-off days the
+awful interest of the Bible histories,--the vague, unfigured oriental
+splendor--the desert--the captive people by the waters of the river of
+Babylon--the shadow and mystery of the prophecies. When the Hebrews,
+chained and toiling on the banks of the Euphrates, lifted their voices
+in lamentation, the sublime music so transfigured the commonplaceness
+of the words, that they meant all deep and unutterable affliction, and
+for a while swept away whatever was false and tawdry in the show, and
+thrilled our hearts with a rapture rarely felt. Yet, as but a moment
+before we had laughed to see Nebuchadnezzar's crown shot off his head
+by a squib visibly directed from the side scenes,--at the point when,
+according to the libretto, "the thunder roars, and a bolt descends
+upon the head of the king,"--so but a moment after some new absurdity
+marred the illusion, and we began to look about the theatre at the
+audience. We then beheld that act of _dimostrazioni_ which I have
+mentioned. In one of the few boxes sat a young and very beautiful
+woman in a dress of white, with a fan which she kept in constant
+movement. It was red on one side, and green on the other, and gave,
+with the white dress, the forbidden Italian colors, while, looked
+at alone, it was innocent of offense. I do not think a soul in the
+theatre was ignorant of the demonstration. A satisfied consciousness
+was reflected from the faces of the Italians, and I saw two Austrian
+officers exchange looks of good-natured intelligence, after a glance
+at the fair patriot. I wonder what those poor people do, now they
+are free, and deprived of the sweet, perilous luxury of defying their
+tyrants by constant acts of subtle disdain? Life in Venetia must be
+very dull: no more explosion of pasteboard petards; no more treason
+in bouquets; no more stealthy inscriptions on the walls--it must be
+insufferably dull. _Ebbene, pazienza_! Perhaps Victor Emanuel may
+betray them yet.
+
+A spirit of lawless effrontery, indeed, seemed to pervade the whole
+audience in the theatre that night at Vicenza, and to extend to the
+ministers of the law themselves. There were large placards everywhere
+posted, notifying the people that it was forbidden to smoke in the
+theatre, and that smokers were liable to expulsion; but except for
+ourselves, and the fair patriot in the box, I think every body there
+was smoking and the policemen set the example of anarchy by smoking
+the longest and worst cigars of all. I am sure that the captive
+Hebrews all held lighted cigarettes behind their backs, and that
+Nebuchadnezzar, condemned to the grass of the field, conscientiously
+gave himself up to the Virginia weed behind the scenes.
+
+Before I fell asleep that night, the moon rose over the top of the
+feudal tower, in front of our hotel, and produced some very pretty
+effects with the battlements. Early in the morning a regiment of
+Croats marched through the gate below the tower, their band playing
+"The Young Recruit." These advantages of situation were not charged in
+our bill; but, even if they had been, I should still advise my reader
+to go, when in Vicenza, if he loves a pleasant landlord and a good
+dinner, to the Hotel de la Ville, which he will find almost at his
+sole disposition for however long time he may stay. His meals will be
+served him in a vast dining-hall, as bare as a barn or a palace, but
+for the pleasant, absurd old paintings on the wall, representing, as
+I suppose, Cleopatra applying the Asp, Susannah and the Elders, the
+Roman Lucrezia, and other moral and appetizing histories. I take it
+there is a quaint side-table or two lost midway of the wall, and that
+an old woodcut picture of the Most Noble City of Venice hangs over
+each. I know that there is a screen at one end of the apartment behind
+which the landlord invisibly assumes the head waiter; and I suspect
+that at the moment of sitting down at meat, you hear two Englishmen
+talking--as they pass along the neighboring corridor--of wine, in
+dissatisfied chest-tones. This hotel is of course built round a court,
+in which there is a stable and--exposed to the weather--a diligence,
+and two or three carriages and a driver, and an ostler chewing straw,
+and a pump and a grape-vine. Why the hotel, therefore, does not smell
+like a stable, from garret to cellar, I am utterly at a loss to know.
+I state the fact that it does not, and that every other hotel in Italy
+does smell of stable as if cattle had been immemorially pastured in
+its halls, and horses housed in its bed-chambers,--or as if its only
+guests were centaurs on their travels.
+
+From the Museo Civico, whither we repaired first in the morning, and
+where there are some beautiful Montagnas, and an assortment of good
+and bad works by other masters, we went to the Campo Santo, which is
+worthy to be seen, if only because of the beautiful Laschi monument by
+Vela, one of the greatest modern sculptors. It is nothing more than
+a very simple tomb, at the door of which stands a figure in
+flowing drapery, with folded hands and uplifted eyes in an attitude
+exquisitely expressive of grief. The figure is said to be the portrait
+statue of the widow of him within the tomb, and the face is very
+beautiful. We asked if the widow was still young, and the custodian
+answered us in terms that ought to endear him to all women, if not
+to our whole mortal race,--"Oh quite young, yet. She is perhaps fifty
+years old."
+
+After the Campo Santo one ought to go to that theatre which Palladio
+built for the representation of classic tragedy, and which is perhaps
+the perfectest reproduction of the Greek theatre in the world. Alfieri
+is the only poet of modern times, whose works have been judged worthy
+of this stage, and no drama has been given on it since 1857, when the
+"Oedipus Tyrannus" of Sophocles was played. We found it very silent
+and dusty, and were much sadder as we walked through its gayly
+frescoed, desolate anterooms than we had been in the Campo Santo. Here
+used to sit, at coffee and bassett, the merry people who owned the now
+empty seats of the theatre,--lord, and lady, and abbé--who affected
+to be entertained by the scenes upon the stage. Upon my word, I
+should like to know what has become, in the other world, of those poor
+pleasurers of the past whose memory makes one so sad upon the scenes
+of their enjoyment here! I suppose they have something quite as
+unreal, yonder, to satisfy them as they had on earth, and that they
+still play at happiness in the old rococo way, though it is hard to
+conceive of any fiction outside of Italy so perfect and so entirely
+suited to their unreality as this classic theatre. It is a Greek
+theatre, for Greek tragedies; but it could never have been for
+popular amusement, and it was not open to the air, though it had a
+sky skillfully painted in the centre of the roof. The proscenium is a
+Greek façade, in three stories, such as never was seen in Greece;
+and the architecture of the three streets running back from the
+proscenium, and forming the one unchangeable scene of all the dramas,
+is--like the statues in the niches and on the gallery inclosing the
+auditorium--Greek in the most fashionable Vicentine taste. It must
+have been but an operatic chorus that sang in the semicircular space
+just below the stage and in front of the audience. Admit and forget
+these small blemishes and aberrations, however, and what a marvelous
+thing Palladio's theatre is! The sky above the stage is a wonderful
+trick, and those three streets--one in the centre and serving as
+entrance for the royal persons of the drama, one at the right for
+the nobles, and one at the left for the citizens--present unsurpassed
+effects of illusion. They are not painted, but modeled in stucco. In
+perspective they seem each half a mile long, but entering them you
+find that they run back from the proscenium only some fifteen feet,
+the fronts of the houses and the statues upon them decreasing in
+recession with a well-ordered abruptness. The semicircular gallery
+above the auditorium is of stone, and forty statues of marble crown
+its colonnade, or occupy niches between the columns.
+
+
+II.
+
+It was curious to pass, with the impression left by this costly and
+ingenious toy upon our minds, at once to the amphitheatre in Verona,
+which, next to the Coliseum, has, of all the works bequeathed us
+by the ancient Roman world, the greatest claim upon the wonder and
+imagination. Indeed, it makes even a stronger appeal to the fancy. We
+know who built the Coliseum, but in its unstoried origin, the Veronese
+arena has the mystery of the Pyramids. Was its founder Augustus,
+or Vitellus, or Antoninus, or Maximian, or the Republic of Verona?
+Nothing is certain but that it was conceived and reared by some mighty
+prince or people, and that it yet remains in such perfection that the
+great shows of two thousand years ago might take place in it to-day.
+It is so suggestive of the fierce and splendid spectacles of Roman
+times that the ring left by a modern circus on the arena, and absurdly
+dwarfed by the vast space of the oval, had an impertinence which
+we hotly resented, looking down on it from the highest grade of the
+interior. It then lay fifty feet below us, in the middle of an ellipse
+five hundred feet in length and four hundred in breadth, and capable
+of holding fifty thousand spectators. The seats that the multitudes
+pressed of old are perfect, yet; scarce a stone has been removed from
+the interior; the aedile and the prefect might take their places again
+in the balustraded tribunes above the great entrance at either end of
+the arena, and scarcely see that they were changed. Nay, the victims
+and the gladiators might return to the cells below the seats of the
+people, and not know they had left them for a day; the wild beasts
+might leap into the arena from dens as secure and strong as when first
+built. The ruin within seems only to begin with the aqueduct, which
+was used to flood the arena for the naval shows, but which is now
+choked with the dust of ages. Without, however, is plain enough the
+doom which is written against all the work of human hands, and which,
+unknown of the builders, is among the memorable things placed in the
+corner-stone of every edifice. Of the outer wall that rose high over
+the highest seats of the amphitheatre, and encircled it with stately
+corridors, giving it vaster amplitude and grace, the earthquake of six
+centuries ago spared only a fragment that now threatens above one of
+the narrow Veronese streets. Blacksmiths, wagon-makers, and workers
+in clangorous metals have made shops of the lower corridors of the old
+arena, and it is friends and neighbors with the modern life about it,
+as such things usually are in Italy. Fortunately for the stranger, the
+Piazza Bra flanks it on one hand, and across this it has a magnificent
+approach. It is not less happy in being little known to sentiment, and
+the traveller who visits it by moonlight, has a full sense of grandeur
+and pathos, without any of the sheepishness attending homage to that
+battered old coquette, the Coliseum, which so many emotional people
+have sighed over, kissing and afterwards telling.
+
+But he who would know the innocent charm of a ruin as yet almost
+wholly uncourted by travel, must go to the Roman theatre in Verona.
+It is not a favorite of the hand-books; and we were decided to see it
+chiefly by a visit to the Museum, where, besides an admirable gallery
+of paintings, there is a most interesting collection of antiques in
+bronze and marble found in excavating the theatre. The ancient edifice
+had been completely buried, and a quarter of the town was built over
+it, as Portici is built over Herculaneum, and on the very top stood a
+Jesuit convent. One day, some children, playing in the garden of one
+of the shabby houses, suddenly vanished from sight. Their mother ran
+like one mad (I am telling the story in the words of the peasant who
+related it to me) to the spot where they had last been seen, and fell
+herself into an opening of the earth there. The outcry raised by these
+unfortunates brought a number of men to their aid, and in digging to
+get them out, an old marble stairway was discovered. This was about
+twenty-five years ago. A certain gentleman named Monga owned the land,
+and he immediately began to make excavations. He was a rich man, but
+considered rather whimsical (if my peasant represented the opinion
+of his neighbors), and as the excavation ate a great deal of money
+(_mangiava molti soldi_), his sons discontinued the work after his
+death, and nothing has been done for some time, now. The peasant
+in charge was not a person of imaginative mind, though he said the
+theatre (supposed to have been built in the time of Augustus)
+was completed two thousand years before Christ. He had a purely
+conventional admiration of the work, which he expressed at regular
+intervals, by stopping short in his course, waving both hands over the
+ruins, and crying in a sepulchral voice, "_Qual' opera_!" However,
+as he took us faithfully into every part of it, there is no reason to
+complain of him.
+
+We crossed three or four streets, and entered at several different
+gates, in order to see the uncovered parts of the work, which could
+have been but a small proportion of the whole. The excavation has been
+carried down thirty and forty feet below the foundations of the modern
+houses, revealing the stone seats of the auditorium, the corridors
+beneath them, and the canals and other apparatus for naval shows, as
+in the great Amphitheatre. These works are even more stupendous than
+those of the Amphitheatre, for in many cases they are not constructed,
+but hewn out of the living rock, so that in this light the theatre is
+a gigantic sculpture. Below all are cut channels to collect and carry
+off the water of the springs in which the rock abounds. The depth of
+one of these channels near the Jesuit convent must be fifty feet below
+the present surface. Only in one place does the ancient edifice rise
+near the top of the ground, and there is uncovered the arched front
+of what was once a family-box at the theatre, with the owner's name
+graven upon the arch. Many poor little houses have of course been
+demolished to carry on the excavations, and to the walls that joined
+them cling memorials of the simple life that once inhabited them. To
+one of the buildings hung a melancholy fire-place left blackened with
+smoke, and battered with use, but witnessing that it had once been the
+heart of a home. It was far more touching than any thing in the
+elder ruin; and I think nothing could have so vividly expressed the
+difference which, in spite of all the resemblances noticeable in
+Italy, exists between the ancient and modern civilization, as that
+family-box at the theatre and this simple fireside.
+
+I do not now remember what fortunate chance it was that discovered
+to us the house of the Capulets, and I incline to believe that we
+gravitated toward it by operation of well-known natural principles
+which bring travellers acquainted with improbabilities wherever they
+go. We found it a very old and time-worn edifice, built round an
+ample court, and we knew it, as we had been told we should, by the cap
+carven in stone above the interior of the grand portal. The family,
+anciently one of the principal of Verona, has fallen from much of its
+former greatness. On the occasion of our visit, Juliet, very dowdily
+dressed, looked down from the top of a long, dirty staircase which
+descended into the court, and seemed interested to see us; while her
+mother caressed with one hand a large yellow mastiff, and distracted
+it from its first impulse to fly upon us poor children of sentiment.
+There was a great deal of stable litter, and many empty carts standing
+about in the court; and if I might hazard the opinion formed upon
+these and other appearances, I should say that old Capulet has now
+gone to keeping a hotel, united with the retail liquor business, both
+in a small way.
+
+Nothing could be more natural, after seeing the house of the Capulets,
+than a wish to see Juliet's Tomb, which is visited by all strangers,
+and is the common property of the hand-books. It formerly stood in a
+garden, where, up to the beginning of this century, it served, says my
+"Viaggio in Italia," "for the basest uses,"--just as the sacred prison
+of Tasso was used for a charcoal bin. We found the sarcophagus under
+a shed in one corner of the garden of the Orfanotrofio delle
+Franceschine, and had to confess to each other that it looked like a
+horse-trough roughly hewn out of stone. The garden, said the boy
+in charge of the moving monument, had been the burial-place of the
+Capulets, and this tomb being found in the middle of the garden, was
+easily recognized as that of Juliet. Its genuineness, as well as its
+employment in the ruse of the lovers, was proven beyond cavil by a
+slight hollow cut for the head to rest in, and a hole at the foot "to
+breathe through," as the boy said. Does not the fact that this relic
+has to be protected from the depredations of travellers, who could
+otherwise carry it away piecemeal, speak eloquently of a large amount
+of vulgar and rapacious innocence drifting about the world?
+
+It is well to see even such idle and foolish curiosities, however, in
+a city like Verona, for the mere going to and fro in search of them
+through her streets is full of instruction and delight. To my mind, no
+city has a fairer place than she that sits beside the eager Adige, and
+breathes the keen air of mountains white with snows in winter, green
+and purple with vineyards in summer, and forever rich with marble.
+Around Verona stretch those gardened plains of Lombardy, on which
+Nature, who dotes on Italy, and seems but a step-mother to all
+transalpine lands, has lavished every gift of beauty and fertility.
+Within the city's walls, what store of art and history! Her
+market-places have been the scenes of a thousand tragic or ridiculous
+dramas; her quaint and narrow streets are ballads and legends full
+of love-making and murder; the empty, grass-grown piazzas before
+her churches are tales that are told of municipal and ecclesiastical
+splendor. Her nobles sleep in marble tombs so beautiful that the dust
+in them ought to be envied by living men in Verona; her lords lie in
+perpetual state in the heart of the city, in magnificent sepulchres of
+such grace and opulence, that, unless a language be invented full
+of lance-headed characters, and Gothic vagaries of arch and finial,
+flower and fruit, bird and beast, they can never be described. Sacred
+be their rest from pen of mine, Verona! Nay, while I would fain bring
+the whole city before my reader's fancy, I am loath and afraid to
+touch any thing in it with my poor art: either the tawny river,
+spanned with many beautiful bridges, and murmurous with mills afloat
+and turned by the rapid current; or the thoroughfares with their
+passengers and bright shops and caffès; or the grim old feudal towers;
+or the age-embrowned palaces, eloquent in their haughty strength of
+the times when they were family fortresses; or the churches with the
+red pillars of their porticos resting upon the backs of eagle-headed
+lions; or even the white-coated garrison (now there no more), with its
+heavy-footed rank and file, its handsome and resplendent officers,
+its bristling fortifications, its horses and artillery, crowding the
+piazzas of churches turned into barracks. All these things haunt my
+memory, but I could only at best thinly sketch them in meagre black
+and white. Verona is an almost purely Gothic city in her architecture,
+and her churches are more worthy to be seen than any others in North
+Italy, outside of Venice. San Zenone, with the quaint bronzes on its
+doors representing in the rudeness of the first period of art the
+incidents of the Old Testament and the miracles of the saints--with
+the allegorical sculptures surrounding the interior and exterior of
+the portico, and illustrating, among other things, the creation of
+Eve with absolute literalness--with its beautiful and solemn crypt
+in which the dust of the titular saint lies entombed--with its minute
+windows, and its vast columns sustaining the roof upon capitals of
+every bizarre and fantastic device--is doubtless most abundant in that
+Gothic spirit, now grotesque and now earnest, which somewhere appears
+in all the churches of Verona; which has carven upon the façade of
+the Duomo the statues of Orlando and Olliviero, heroes of romance, and
+near them has placed the scandalous figure of a pig in a monk's robe
+and cowl, with a breviary in his paw; which has reared the exquisite
+monument of Guglielmo da Castelbarco before the church of St.
+Anastasia, and has produced the tombs of the Scaligeri before the
+chapel of Santa Maria Antica.
+
+I have already pledged myself not to attempt any description of these
+tombs, and shall not fall now. But I bought in the. English tongue, as
+written at Verona, some "Notices," kept for sale by the sacristan,
+"of the Ancient Churg of Our Lady, and of the Tombs of the most
+illustrious Family Della-Scala," and from these I think it no
+dereliction to quote _verbatim_. First is the tomb of San Francesco,
+who was "surnamed the Great by reason of his valor." "With him the
+Great Alighieri and other exiles took refuge. We see his figure
+extended upon a bed, and above his statue on horsebac with the vizor
+down, and his crest falling behind his shoulders, his horse covered
+with mail. The columns and capitals are wonderful." "Within the
+Cemetery to the right leaning against the walls of the church is the
+tomb of John Scaliger." "In the side of this tomb near the wall of
+Sacristy, you see the urn that encloses the ashes of Martin I.," "who
+was traitorously killed on the 17th of October 1277 by Scaramello of
+the Scaramelli, who wished to revenge the honor of a young lady of his
+family." "The Mausoleum that is in the side facing the Place encloses
+the Martin II.'s ashes.... This building is sumptuous and wonderful
+because it stands on four columns, each of which has an architrave
+of nine feet. On the beams stands a very large square of marble that
+forms the floor, on which stands the urn of the Defunct. Four other
+columns support the vault that covers the urn; and the rest is adorned
+by facts of Old Testament. Upon the Summit is the equestrian statue as
+large as life." Of "Can Signorius," whose tomb is the most splendid
+of all, the "Notices" say: "He spent two thousand florins of gold,
+in order to prepare his own sepulchre while he was yet alive, and
+to surpass the magnificence of his predecessors. The monument is as
+magnificent as the contracted space allows. Six columns support the
+floor of marble on which it stands covered with figures. Six other
+columns support the top, on that is the Scaliger's statues....
+The monument is surrounded by an enclosure of red marble, with six
+pillars, on which are square capitols with armed Saints. The rails of
+iron with the Arms of the Scala, are worked with a beauty wonderful
+for that age," or, I may add, for any age. These "rails" are an
+exquisite net-work of iron wrought by hand, with an art emulous of
+that of Nicolò Caparra at Florence. The chief device employed is a
+ladder (_scala_) constantly repeated in the centres of quatre-foils;
+and the whole fabric is still so flexible and perfect, after the lapse
+of centuries, that the net may be shaken throughout by a touch. Four
+other tombs of the Scaligeri are here, among which the "Notices"
+particularly mention that of Alboin della Scala: "He was one of the
+Ghibelline party, as the arms on his urn schew, that is a staircase
+risen by an eagle--wherefore Dante said, _In sulla Scala porta il
+santo Uccello_."
+
+I should have been glad to meet the author of these delightful
+histories, but in his absence we fared well enough with the sacristan.
+When, a few hours before we left Verona, we came for a last look it
+the beautiful sepulchres, he recognized us, and seeing a sketch-book
+in the party, he invited us within the inclosure again, and then ran
+and fetched chairs for us to sit upon--nay, even placed chairs for
+us to rest our feet on. Winning and exuberant courtesy of the Italian
+race! If I had never acknowledged it before, I must do homage to it
+now, remembering the sweetness of the sacristans and custodians of
+Verona. They were all men of the most sympathetic natures. He at San
+Zenone seemed never to have met with real friends till we expressed
+pleasure in the magnificent Mantegna, which is the pride of his
+church. "What coloring!" he cried, and then triumphantly took us into
+the crypt: "What a magnificent crypt! What works they executed
+in those days, there!" At San Giorgio Maggiore, where there are a
+Tintoretto and a Veronese, and four horrible swindling big pictures by
+Romanino, I discovered to my great dismay that I had in my pocket but
+five soldi, which I offered with much abasement and many apologies
+to the sacristan; but he received them as if they had been so many
+napoleons, prayed me not to speak of embarrassment, and declared that
+his labors in our behalf had been nothing but pleasure. At Santa
+Maria in Organo, where are the wonderful _intagli_ of Fra Giovanni da
+Verona, the sacristan fully shared our sorrow that the best pictures
+could not be unveiled as it was Holy Week. He was also moved with us
+at the gradual decay of the _intagli_, and led us to believe that, to
+a man of so much sensibility, the general ruinous state of the church
+was an inexpressible affliction; and we rejoiced for his sake that it
+should possess at least one piece of art in perfect repair. This was
+a modern work, that day exposed for the first time, and it represented
+in a group of wooden figures The Death of St. Joseph. The Virgin and
+Christ supported the dying saint on either hand; and as the whole was
+vividly colored, and rays of glory in pink and yellow gauze descended
+upon Joseph's head, nothing could have been more impressive.
+
+
+III.
+
+Parma is laid out with a regularity which may be called characteristic
+of the great ducal cities of Italy, and which it fully shares with
+Mantua, Ferrara, and Bologna. The signorial cities, Verona, Vicenza,
+Padua, and Treviso, are far more picturesque, and Parma excels only in
+the number and beauty of her fountains. It is a city of gloomy aspect,
+says Valery, who possibly entered it in a pensive frame of mind, for
+its sadness did not impress us. We had just come from Modena, where
+the badness of our hotel enveloped the city in an atmosphere of
+profound melancholy. In fact, it will not do to trust to travellers in
+any thing. I, for example, have just now spoken of the many beautiful
+fountains in Parma because I think it right to uphold the statement
+of M. Richard's hand-book; but I only remember seeing one fountain,
+passably handsome, there. My Lord Corke, who was at Parma in 1754,
+says nothing of fountains, and Richard Lasells, Gent., who was there a
+century earlier, merely speaks of the fountains in the Duke's
+gardens, which, together with his Grace's "wild beasts" and "exquisite
+coaches," and "admirable Theater to exhibit Operas in," "the Domo,
+whose Cupola was painted by the rare hand of Corregio," and the church
+of the Capuchins, where Alexander Farnese is buried, were "the Chief
+thing to be seen in Parma" at that day.
+
+The wild beasts have long ago run away with the exquisite coaches, but
+the other wonders named by Master Lasells are still extant in Parma,
+together with some things he does not name. Our minds, in going
+thither, were mainly bent upon Correggio and his works, and while our
+dinner was cooking at the admirable Albergo della Posta, we went
+off to feast upon the perennial Hash of Frogs in the dome of the
+Cathedral. This is one of the finest Gothic churches in Italy, and
+vividly recalls Verona, while it has a quite unique and most beautiful
+feature in the three light-columned galleries, that traverse the
+façade one above another. Close at hand stands the ancient Baptistery,
+hardly less peculiar and beautiful; but, after all, it is the work of
+the great painter which gives the temple its chief right to wonder and
+reverence. We found the fresco, of course, much wasted, and at first
+glance, before the innumerable arms and legs had time to order and
+attribute themselves to their respective bodies, we felt the
+justice of the undying spite which called this divinest of frescos a
+_guazzetto di rane_. But in another moment it appeared to us the most
+sublime conception of the Assumption ever painted, and we did not find
+Caracci's praise too warm where he says: "And I still remain stupefied
+with the sight of so grand a work--every thing so well conceived--so
+well seen from below--with so much severity, yet with so much judgment
+and so much grace; with a coloring which is of very flesh." The height
+of the fresco above the floor of the church is so vast that it
+might well appear like a heavenly scene to the reeling sense of the
+spectator. Brain, nerve, and muscle were strained to utter exhaustion
+in a very few minutes, and we came away with our admiration only
+half-satisfied, and resolved to ascend the cupola next day, and see
+the fresco on something like equal terms. In one sort we did thus
+approach it, and as we looked at the gracious floating figures of the
+heavenly company through the apertures of the dome, they did seem to
+adopt us and make us part of the painting. But the tremendous depth,
+over which they drifted so lightly, it dizzied us to look into; and
+I am not certain that I should counsel travellers to repeat our
+experience. Where still perfect, the fresco can only gain from
+close inspection,--it is painted with such exquisite and jealous
+perfection,--yet the whole effect is now better from below, for the
+decay is less apparent; and besides, life is short, and the stairway
+by which one ascends to the dome is in every way too exigent. It is
+with the most astounding sense of contrast that you pass from the
+Assumption to the contemplation of that other famous roof frescoed by
+Correggio, in the Monastero di San Paolo. You might almost touch
+the ceiling with your hand, it hovers so low with its counterfeit of
+vine-clambered trellis-work, and its pretty boys looking roguishly
+through the embowering leaves. It is altogether the loveliest room
+in the world; and if the Diana in her car on the chimney is truly a
+portrait of the abbess for whom the chamber was decorated, she was
+altogether worthy of it, and one is glad to think of her enjoying life
+in the fashion amiably permitted to nuns in the fifteenth century.
+What curious scenes the gayety of this little chamber conjures up, and
+what a vivid comment it is upon the age and people that produced it!
+This is one of the things that makes a single hour of travel worth
+whole years of historic study, and which casts its light upon all
+future reading. Here, no doubt, the sweet little abbess, with the
+noblest and prettiest of her nuns about her, received the polite
+world, and made a cheerful thing of devotion, while all over
+transalpine Europe the sour-hearted Reformers were destroying pleasant
+monasteries like this. The light-hearted lady-nuns and their gentlemen
+friends looked on heresy as a deadly sin, and they had little reason
+to regard it with favor. It certainly made life harder for them in
+time, for it made reform within the Church as well as without, so that
+at last the lovely Chamber of St. Paul was closed against the public
+for more than two centuries.
+
+All Parma is full of Correggio, as Venice is of Titian and Tintoretto,
+as Naples of Spagnoletto, as Mantua of Giulio Romano, as Vicenza of
+Palladio, as Bassano of Da Ponte, as Bologna of Guido Reni. I have
+elsewhere noticed how ineffaceably and exclusively the manner of the
+masters seems to have stamped itself upon the art of the cities where
+they severally wrought,--how at Parma Correggio yet lives in all the
+sketchy mouths of all the pictures painted there since his time. One
+might almost believe, hearing the Parmesans talk, that his manner had
+infected their dialect, and that they fashioned their lazy, incomplete
+utterance with the careless lips of his nymphs and angels. They almost
+entirely suppress the last syllable of every word, and not with
+a quick precision, as people do in Venice or Milan, but with an
+ineffable languor, as if language were not worth the effort of
+enunciation; while they rise and lapse several times in each sentence,
+and sink so sweetly and sadly away upon the closing vocable that the
+listener can scarcely repress his tears. In this melancholy
+rhythm, one of the citizens recounted to me the whole story of the
+assassination of the last Duke of Parma in 1850; and left me as softly
+moved as if I had been listening to a tale of hapless love. Yet it was
+an ugly story, and after the enchantment of the recital passed away, I
+perceived that when the Duke was killed justice was done on one of the
+maddest and wickedest tyrants that ever harassed an unhappy city.
+
+The Parmesans remember Maria Louisa, Napoleon's wife, with pleasant
+enough feelings, and she seems to have been good to them after the
+manner of sovereigns, enriching their city with art, and beautifying
+it in many ways, besides doing works of private charity and
+beneficence. Her daughter by a second marriage, the Countess
+Sanvitali, still lives in Parma; and in one of the halls of the
+Academy of Fine Arts the Duchess herself survives in the marble of
+Canova. It was she who caused the two great pictures of Correggio,
+the St. Jerome and the Madonna della Scodella, to be placed alone in
+separate apartments hung with silk, in which the painter's initial A
+is endlessly interwoven. "The Night," to which the St. Jerome is "The
+Day," is in the gallery at Dresden, but Parma could have kept nothing
+more representative of her great painter's power than this "Day." It
+is "the bridal of the earth and sky," and all sweetness, brightness,
+and tender shadow are in it. Many other excellent works of Correggio,
+Caracci, Parmigianino, and masters of different schools are in this
+gallery, but it is the good fortune of travellers, who have to see so
+much, that the memory of the very best alone distinctly remains. Nay,
+in the presence of prime beauty nothing else exists, and we found
+that the church of the Steccata, where Parmigianino's sublime "Moses
+breaking the Tables of the Law" is visible in the midst of a multitude
+of other figures on the vault, really contained nothing at last but
+that august and awful presence.
+
+Undoubtedly the best gallery of classical antiquities in North Italy
+is that of Parma, which has derived all its precious relics from the
+little city of Valleja alone. It is a fine foretaste of Pompeii
+and the wonders of the Museo Borbonico at Naples, with its antique
+frescos, and marble, and bronzes. I think nothing better has come out
+of Herculaneum than the comic statuette of "Hercules Drunk." He is in
+bronze, and the drunkest man who has descended to us from the elder
+world; he reels backward, and leers knowingly upon you, while one hand
+hangs stiffly at his side, and the other faintly clasps a wine-cup--a
+burly, worthless, disgraceful demigod.
+
+The great Farnese Theatre was, as we have seen, admired by Lasells;
+but Lord Corke found it a "useless structure" though immense. "The
+same spirit that raised the Colossus at Rhodes," he says, "raised the
+theatre at Parma; that insatiable spirit and lust of Fame which would
+brave the Almighty by fixing eternity to the name of a perishable
+being." If it was indeed this spirit, I am bound to say that it did
+not build so wisely at Parma as at Rhodes. The play-house that Ranuzio
+I. constructed in 1628, to do honor to Cosmo II. de' Medici (pausing
+at Parma on his way to visit the tomb of San Carlo Borromeo), and that
+for a century afterward was the scene of the most brilliant spectacles
+in the world, is now one of the dismalest and dustiest of ruins. This
+_Theatrum orbis miraculum_ was built and ornamented with the
+most perishable materials, and even its size has shrunken as the
+imaginations of men have contracted under the strong light of later
+days. When it was first opened, it was believed to hold fourteen
+thousand spectators; at a later _fête_ it held only ten thousand; the
+last published description fixes its capacity at five thousand; and
+it is certain that for many and many a year it has held only the stray
+tourists who have looked in upon its desolation. The gay paintings
+hang in shreds and tatters from the roof; dust is thick upon the seats
+and in the boxes, and on the leads that line the space once flooded
+for naval games. The poor plaster statues stand naked and forlorn amid
+the ruin of which they are part; and the great stage, from which
+the curtain has rotted away, yawns dark and empty before the empty
+auditorium.
+
+
+
+
+DUCAL MANTUA.
+
+In that desperate depth of Hell where Dante beholds the Diviners
+doomed to pace with backward-twisted faces, and turn forever on the
+past the rainy eyes once bent too daringly on the future, the sweet
+guide of the Tuscan poet points out among the damned the daughter of a
+Theban king, and discourses to his charge:--
+
+  Manto was she: through many lands she went
+    Seeking, and paused where I was born, at last.
+    Therefore I choose thou be on me intent
+  A little. When from life her father passed,
+    And they of Bacchus' city became slaves,
+    Long time about the world the daughter cast.
+  Up in fair Italy is a lake that laves
+    The feet of Alps that lock in Germany:
+    Benaco called....
+  And Peschiera in strong harness sits
+    To front the Brescians and the Bergamasques,
+    Where one down-curving shore the other meets.
+  There all the gathered waters outward flow
+    That may not in Benaco's bosom rest,
+    And down through, pastures green a river go.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    As far as to Governo, where, its quest
+  Ended at last, it falls into me Po.
+    But far it has not sought before a plain
+    It finds and floods, out-creeping wide and slow
+  To be the steaming summer's offense and bane.
+    Here passing by, the fierce, unfriendly maid
+    Saw land in the middle of the sullen main,
+  Wild and unpeopled, and here, unafraid
+    Of human neighborhood, she made her lair,
+    Rested, and with her menials wrought her trade,
+  And lived, and left her empty body there.
+    Then the sparse people that were scattered near
+    Gathered upon that island, everywhere
+  Compassed about with swamps and kept from fear.
+    They built their city above the witch's grave,
+    And for her sake that first made dwelling there
+  The name of Mantua to their city gave.
+
+To this account of the first settlement of Mantua Virgil adds a
+warning to his charge to distrust all other histories of the city's
+foundation; and Dante is so thoroughly persuaded of its truth, that
+he declares all other histories shall be to him as so many lifeless
+embers. Nevertheless, divers chroniclers of Mantua reject the
+tradition here given as fabulous; and the carefullest and most
+ruthless of these traces the city's origin, not to the unfriendly
+maid, but to the Etruscan King Ocno, fixing the precise date of its
+foundation at thirty years before the Trojan war, one thousand five
+hundred and thirty-nine years after the creation of the world, three
+hundred years before Rome, and nine hundred and fifteen years after
+the flood, while Abimelech was judge in Israel. "And whoever," says
+the compiler of the "Flower of the Mantuan Chroniclers" (it is a very
+dry and musty flower, indeed), citing doughty authorities for all his
+facts and figures,--"whoever wishes to understand this more curiously,
+let him read the said authors, and he will be satisfied."
+
+But I am as little disposed to unsettle the reader's faith in
+the Virgilian tradition, as to part with my own; and I therefore
+uncandidly hold back the names of the authorities cited. This
+tradition was in fact the only thing concerning Mantuan history
+present to my thoughts as I rode toward the city, one afternoon of a
+pleasant Lombard spring; and when I came in sight of the ancient hold
+of sorcery, with the languid waters of its lagoons lying sick at
+its feet, I recognized at least the topographical truth of Virgil's
+description. But old and mighty walls now surround the spot which
+Manto found sterile and lonely in the heart of the swamp formed by the
+Mincio, no longer Benaco; and the dust of the witch is multitudinously
+hidden under the edifices of a city whose mighty domes, towers, and
+spires make its approach one of the stateliest in the world. It is a
+prospect on which you may dwell long as you draw toward the city, for
+the road from the railway station winds through some two miles of flat
+meadow-land before it reaches the gate of the stronghold which the
+Italians call the first hope of the winner of the land, and the last
+hope of the loser of Italy. Indeed, there is no haste in any of the
+means of access to Mantua. It lies scarce forty miles south of Verona,
+and you are three hours in journeying this distance in the placid
+railway train,--a distance which Romeo, returning to Verona from his
+exile in Mantua, no doubt travelled in less time. There is abundant
+leisure to study the scenery on the way; but it scarcely repays the
+perusal, for it lacks the beauty of the usual Lombard landscape.
+The soil is red, stony, and sterile; the orchard-trees are scant and
+slender, and not wedded with the caressing vines which elsewhere in
+North Italy garland happier trees and stretch gracefully from trunk to
+trunk. Especially the landscape looks sad and shabby about the little
+village of Villafranca, where, in 1864, the dejected prospect seemed
+incapable of a smile even in spring; as if it had lost all hope and
+cheerfulness since the peace was made which confirmed Venetia to the
+alien. It said as plainly as real estate could express the national
+sentiment, "Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!" and crept sullenly out of
+sight, as our pensive train resumed its meditative progress. No doubt
+this poor landscape _was_ imbued, in its dull, earthy way, with a
+feeling that the coming of Garibaldi would irrigate and fertilize it
+into a paradise; as at Venice the gondoliers believed that his army
+would bring in its train cheap wine and hordes of rich and helpless
+Englishmen bent on perpetual tours of the Grand Canal without
+understanding as to price.
+
+But within and without Mantua was a strong argument against
+possibility of change in the political condition of this part of
+Italy. Compassed about by the corruption of the swamps and the
+sluggish breadth of the river, the city is no less mighty in her
+artificial defenses than in this natural strength of her position;
+and the Croats of her garrison were as frequent in her sad, handsome
+streets, as the priests in Rome. Three lakes secure her from approach
+upon the east, north, and south; on the west is a vast intrenched
+camp, which can be flooded at pleasure from one of the lakes; while
+the water runs three fathoms deep at the feet of the solid brick walls
+all round the city. There are five gates giving access by drawbridges
+from the town to the fortressed posts on every side, and commanding
+with their guns the roads that lead to them. The outlying forts, with
+the citadel, are four in number, and are each capable of holding
+from two to three thousand men. The intrenched camp, for cavalry and
+artillery, and the barracks of the city itself, can receive a garrison
+of from thirty to forty thousand men; and the measureless depths of
+the air are full of the fever that fights in defense of Mantua, and
+serves with equal zeal whoever is master of the place, let him be
+French, Italian, or Austrian, so only that he have an unacclimated
+enemy before him.
+
+I confess that little of this formidable military knowledge burdened
+me on the occasion of my visit to Mantua, and I have already confessed
+that I was but very imperfectly informed of the history of the city.
+But indeed, if the reader dealt candidly with himself, how much
+could he profess to know of Mantuan history? The ladies all have
+some erudite associations with the place as giving the term of
+_mantua-making_ to the art of dress, and most persons have heard that
+Mantua's law was once death to any he that uttered mortal drugs there,
+and that the place was till a few years since an Austrian fortress
+on the Mincio. Of Giulio Romano, and his works to Mantua, a good
+many have heard; and there is something known to the reader of the
+punctuated edition of Browning about Sordello. But of the Gonzagas of
+Mantua, and their duchy, what do you know, gentle reader?
+
+For myself, when in Mantua, I tried to make a virtue of my want of
+information, and fancied that a sort of general ignorance was
+more favorable to my enjoyment of what I saw there than thorough
+acquaintance with the city's history would have been. It certainly
+enabled me to accept all the poetic fiction of the custodians, and
+to embroider with their pleasing improbabilities the business-like
+succinctness of the guide-books; to make out of the twilight which
+involved all impressions a misty and heroic picture of the Mantuan
+past, wherein her great men appeared with a stately and gigantic
+uncertainty of outline, and mixed with dim scenes of battle, intrigue,
+and riot, and were gone before Fact could lay her finger on any shape,
+and swear that it was called so, and did so and so. But even if there
+had been neither pleasure nor profit in this ignorance, the means of
+dispelling it are so scant in modern literature that it might well
+have been excused in a far more earnest traveller. The difficulty,
+indeed, which I afterwards experienced in trying to learn something of
+Mantua, is my best excuse for writing of its history here.
+
+I fancy that the few recent books on the subject are not in the hands
+of most readers, and I have a comforting belief that scarcely a
+reader of mine has been a reader of the "Grande Illustrazione de
+Lombardo-Veneto."[Mantova e Sua Provincia, per 'Avvocato Bartolomeo
+Arrighi: _Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto, ossia Storia delle
+Città, des Borghi, Communi, Castelli, etc., fino ai Tempi moderni.
+Per Cura di Cesare Cantù, e a' altri Literati_. Milano, 1859.] Yet
+I suppose that he forms some notion of this work from its title, and
+figures to himself a physical bulk of six volumes,--large, abounding
+in ill-printed wood-cuts, and having the appalling features which
+repel our race from pictorial history-books generally.
+
+The "Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto" includes notice of all
+those dear and famous cities of North Italy which we know,--of Verona,
+Vicenza, Padua, Venice, Mantua, Modena, Brescia, Bergamo, and the
+rest; but here we have only to do with the part which concerns Mantua.
+This is written by the advocate Bartolomeo Arrighi, whose ingenious
+avoidance of all that might make his theme attractive could not
+be sufficiently celebrated here, and may therefore be left to the
+reader's fancy. There is little in his paper to leaven statistical
+heaviness; and in recounting one of the most picturesque histories,
+he contrives to give merely a list of the events and a diagram of
+the scenes. Whatever illustrated character in princes or people he
+carefully excludes, and the raciness of anecdote and the flavor
+of manner and epoch distil not into his compilation from the elder
+historiographers. I have therefore to go back, in my present purpose,
+to the authors whose substance he has desiccated; and with their help,
+and that of one or two antiquated authors of this century, I shall try
+to rehabilitate the ducal state of Mantua,
+
+  "Which was an image of the mighty world,"
+
+and present some shadow of its microcosmal life. The story has the
+completeness of a tragedy; but it runs over many centuries, and it
+ends like a farce, though it ends with a death. One feels, indeed,
+almost as great satisfaction in the catastrophe as the Mantuans
+themselves, who terminated their national existence and parted from
+their last Duke with something like exultation.
+
+As I recall my own impressions of the city, I doubt if any good or bad
+fortune could rouse her to such positive emotion now. She seemed
+sunken, that dull April evening of our visit, into an abiding lethargy;
+as if perfect repose, and oblivion from the many-troubled past,--from
+the renown of all former famine, fire, intrigue, slaughter, and
+sack,--were to be preferred by the ghost of a once populous and haughty
+capital to the most splendid memories of national life. Certainly, the
+phantom of bygone Mantuan greatness did not haunt the idle tourists who
+strolled through her wide streets, enjoying their quiet beauty and
+regularity, and finding them, despite their empty, melancholy air, full
+of something that reminded of home. Coming from a land where there is a
+vast deal of length, breadth, and rectitude in streets, as well as human
+nature, they could not, of course, feel that wonder in the Mantuan
+avenues which inspired a Venetian ambassador, two centuries since, to
+write the Serenest Senate in praise of their marvelous extent and
+straightness; but they were still conscious of a certain expansive
+difference from Gothic Verona and narrow Venice. The windows of the
+ground-floors were grated to the prison-like effect common throughout
+Italy; but people evidently lived upon the ground-floors, and at many of
+the iron-barred windows fair young prisoners sat and looked out upon the
+streets, or laughed and chatted together. About the open doorways,
+moreover, people lounged gossiping; and the interiors of the
+entry-halls, as they appeared to the passing glance, were clean, and had
+not that forbidding, inhospitable air characteristic of most
+house-entrances in North Italy. But sculptured Venice and Verona had
+unfitted the travellers for pleasure in the stucco of Mantua; and they
+had an immense scorn for the large and beautiful palaces of which the
+before-quoted ambassador speaks, because they found them faced with
+cunningly-moulded plaster instead of carven stone. Nevertheless, they
+could not help a kind of half-tender respect for the old town. It shares
+the domestic character of its scenes with the other ducal cities,
+Modena, Parma, and Ferrara; and this character is, perhaps, proper to
+all long and intensely municipalized communities. But Mantua has a
+ghostly calm wholly its own; and this was not in the least broken that
+evening by chatters at thresholds, and pretty laughers at grated
+windows. It was very, very quiet. Perhaps half a score of carriages
+rumbled by us in our long walk, and we met some scattered promenaders.
+But for the most part the streets were quite empty; and even in the
+chief piazza, where there was still some belated show of buying and
+selling, and about the doors of the caffès, where there was a good deal
+of languid loafing, there was no indecency of noise or bustle There were
+visibly few people in the place, and it was in decay; but it was not
+squalid in its lapse. The streets were scrupulously neat and clean, and
+the stuccoed houses were all painted of that pale saffron hue which
+gives such unquestionable respectability to New England towns. Before we
+returned to our lodgings, Mantua had turned into twilight; and we walked
+homeward through a placid and dignified gloom, nowhere broken by the
+flare of gas, and only remotely affected, here and there, by the light
+of lamps of oil, faintly twinkling in a disheartened Mantuan fashion.
+
+If you turn this pensive light upon the yellow pages of those old
+chronicles of which I spoke, it reveals pictures fit to raise both
+pity and wonder for the past of this city,--pictures full of the glory
+of struggles for freedom, of the splendor of wise princes, of the
+comfort of a prosperous and contented people, of the grateful fruits
+of protected arts and civilization; but likewise stained with images
+of unspeakable filth and wickedness, baseness and cruelty, incredible
+shame, suffering, and sin.
+
+Long before the birth of Christ, the Gauls drive out the Etruscans
+from Mantua, and aggrandize and beautify the city, to be in their turn
+expelled by the Romans, under whom Mantua again waxes strong and fair.
+In this time, the wife of a farmer not far from the city dreams a
+marvelous dream of bringing forth a laurel-bough, and in due time
+bears into the world the chiefest of all Mantuans, with a smile upon
+his face. This is a poet, and they call his name Virgil. He goes from
+his native city to Rome, when ripe for glory, and has there the good
+fortune to win back his father's farm, which the greedy veterans of
+Augustus, then settled in the Cremonese, had annexed to the spoils
+bestowed upon them by the Emperor. Later in this Roman time, and only
+three years after the death of Him whom the poet all but prophesied,
+another grand event marks an epoch in Mantuan history. According to
+the pious legend, the soldier Longinus, who pierced the side of Christ
+as he hung upon the cross, has been converted by a miracle; wiping
+away that costly blood from his spear-head, and then drawing his hand
+across his eyes, he is suddenly healed of his near-sightedness, and
+stricken with the full wonder of conviction. He gathers anxiously the
+precious drops of blood from his weapon into the phial from which
+the vinegar mixed with gall was poured, and, forsaking his life of
+soldier, he wanders with his new-won faith and his priceless treasure
+to Mantua, where it is destined to work famous miracles, and to be
+the most valued possession of the city to all after-time. The saint
+himself, preaching the Gospel of Christ, suffers martyrdom under
+Tiberius; his tongue is cut out, and his body is burnt; and his ashes
+are buried at Mantua, forgotten, and found again in after ages
+with due signs and miraculous portents. The Romans give a civil
+tranquillity to Mantua; but it is not till three centuries after
+Christ that the persecutions of the Christians cease. Then the temples
+of the gods are thrown down, and churches are built; and the city goes
+forward to share the destinies of the Christianized empire, and be
+spoiled by the barbarians. In 407 the Goths take it, and the Vandals
+in their turn sack and waste it, and scatter its people, who return
+again after the storm, and rebuild their city. Attila, marching to
+destroy it, is met at Governo (as you see in Raphael's fresco in
+the Vatican) by Pope Leo I., who conjures him to spare the city, and
+threatens him with Divine vengeance if he refuse; above the pontiff's
+head two wrathful angels, bearing drawn swords, menace the Hun with
+death if he advance; and, thus miraculously admonished, he turns aside
+from Mantua and spares it. The citizens successfully resist an attack
+of Alboin; but the Longobards afterwards, unrestrained by the visions
+of Attila, beat the Mantuans and take the city. From the Lombards the
+Greeks, sent thither by the Exarch of Ravenna, captured Mantua
+about the end of the sixth century; and then, the Lombards turning
+immediately to besiege it again, the Greeks defend their prize long
+and valiantly, but in the end are overpowered. They are allowed to
+retire with their men and arms to Ravenna, and the Lombards dismantle
+the city.
+
+Concerning our poor Mantua under Lombard rule there is but little
+known, except that she went to war with the Cremonese; and it may be
+fairly supposed that she was, like her neighbors, completely involved
+in foreign and domestic discords of every kind. That war with the
+Cremonese was about the possession of the river Ollio; and the
+Mantuans came off victors in it, slaying immense numbers of the enemy,
+and taking some thousands of them prisoners, whom their countrymen
+ransomed on condition of building one of the gates of Mantua with
+materials from the Cremonese territory, and mortar mixed with water
+from the disputed Ollio. The reader easily conceives how bitter a pill
+this must have been for the high-toned Cremonese gentlemen of that
+day.
+
+When Charlemagne made himself master of Italy, the Mantuan lands and
+Mantuan men were divided up among the brave soldiers who had helped to
+enslave the country. These warriors of Charlemagne became counts; and
+the _contadini_, or inhabitants of each _contado_ (county), became
+absolutely dependent on their will and pleasure. It is recorded (to
+the confusion of those who think primitive barbarism is virtue) that
+the corruption of those rude and brutal old times was great, that all
+classes were sunk in vice, and that the clergy were especially venal
+and abominable. After the death of Charlemagne, in the ninth century,
+wars broke out all over Italy between the factions supporting
+different aspirants to his power; and we may be sure that Mantua had
+some share in the common quarrel. As I have found no explicit record
+of this period, I distribute to the city, as her portion of the
+calamities, at least two sieges, one capture and sack, and a
+decimation by famine and pestilence. We certainly read that, fifty
+years later, the Emperor Rudolph attacked it with his Hungarians, took
+it, pillaged it, and put great part of its people to the sword. During
+the siege, some pious Mantuans had buried (to save them from the
+religious foe) the blood of Christ, and part of the sponge which had
+held the gall and vinegar, together with the body of St. Longinus.
+Most unluckily, however, these excellent men were put to the sword,
+and all knowledge of the place of sepulture perished with them.
+
+At the end of these wars Mantua received a lord, by appointment of the
+Emperor, and the first lord's son married the daughter of the Duke
+of Lorraine, from which union was born the great Countess Matilda.
+Boniface was the happy bridegroom's name, and the wedding had a wild
+splendor and profuse barbaric jollity about it, which it is pleasant
+enough to read of after so much cutting and slashing. The viands were
+passed round on horseback to the guests, and the horses were shod
+with silver shoes loosely nailed on, that they might drop off and be
+scrambled for by the people. Oxen were roasted whole, as at a Kentucky
+barbecue; and wine was drawn from wells with buckets hung on silver
+chains. It was the first great display of that magnificence of which
+after princes of Mantua were so fond; and the wretched hinds out of
+whose sweat it came no doubt thought it very fine.
+
+Of course Lord Boniface had his wars. There was a plot to depose
+him discovered in Mantua, and the plotters fled to Verona. Boniface
+demanded them; but the Veronese answered stoutly that theirs was
+a free city, and no man should be taken from it against his will.
+Boniface marched to attack them; and the Veronese were such fools as
+to call the Duke of Austria to their aid, promising submission to his
+government in return for his help. It was then that Austria first put
+her finger into the Italian _pasticcio_, where she kept it so many
+centuries. But the Austrian governor whom the Duke set over the
+Veronese made himself intolerable,--the Austrian governor always
+does,--and they drove him out of the city. On this the Duke turns
+about, unites with Boniface, takes Verona and sacks it.
+
+An altogether pleasanter incident of Boniface's domination was the
+miraculous discovery of the sacred relics, buried and lost during the
+sack of Mantua by the Hungarians. The place of sepulture was revealed
+thrice to a blind pauper in a dream. People dug where he bade them
+and found the relics. Immediately on its exhumation the Blood wrought
+innumerable miracles; and the fame of it grew so great, that the Pope
+came to see it, attended by such concourse of the people that they
+were obliged to sleep in the streets. It was an age that drew the
+mantle of exterior devotion and laborious penances and pilgrimages
+over the most hideous crimes and unnatural sins. But perhaps the poor
+believers who slept in the streets of Mantua on that occasion were
+none the worse for their faith when the Pope pronounced the Blood
+genuine and blessed it. I am sure that for some days of enthusiasm
+they abstained from the violence of war, and paused a little in that
+career of vice and wickedness of which one reads in Italian history,
+with the full conviction that Sodom and Gomorrah also were facts, and
+not merely allegory. I have no doubt that the blind beggar believed
+that Heaven had revealed to him the place where the Blood was buried,
+that the Pope believed in the verity of the relic, and that the devout
+multitudes were helped and uplifted in their gross faith by this
+visible witness to the truth that Christ had died for them upon the
+bloody tree. Poor souls! they had much to contend with in the way to
+any good. The leaven of the old pleasure-making pagan civilization
+was in them yet (it is in the Italians to this day); and centuries
+of Northern invasion had made them fierce and cruel, without teaching
+them Northern virtues. Nay, I question much if their invaders had so
+many rugged virtues to teach as some people would have us think. They
+seem to have liked well the sweet corruptions of the land, and the
+studied debaucheries of ages of sin, and to have enjoyed them as
+furiously and clumsily as bears do the hoarded honey of civilized
+bees.
+
+After the death of Boniface the lordship of Mantua fell to his famous
+daughter, Matilda, of whom most have heard. She was a woman of strong
+will and strong mind; she held her own, and rent from others with a
+mighty hand, till she had united nearly all Lombardy under her
+rule. She was not much given to the domestic affections; she had two
+husbands (successively), and, if the truth must be told, divorced them
+both: one because he wished to share her sovereignty, perhaps usurp
+it; and the other because he was not warm enough friend of religion.
+She had no children, and, indeed, in her last marriage contract it was
+expressly provided that the spouses were to live in chastity together,
+and as much asunder as possible, Matilda having scruples. She was
+a great friend to learning,--founded libraries, established the
+law schools at Bologna, caused the codification of the canon law,
+corresponded with distant nations, and spoke all the different
+languages of her soldiers. More than literature, however, she loved
+the Church; and fought on the side of Pope Gregory VII in his wars
+with the Emperor Henry IV. Henry therefore took Mantua from her in
+1091, and up to the year 1111 the city enjoyed a kind of republican
+government under his protection. In that year Henry made peace with
+Matilda, and appointed her his vice-regent in Italy; but the Mantuans,
+after twenty years of freedom, were in no humor to feel the weight of
+the mailed hand of this strong-minded lady. She was then, moreover,
+nigh to her death; and, hearing that her physicians had given her up,
+the Mantuans refused submission. The great Countess rose irefully from
+her deathbed, and, gathering her army, led it in person, as she always
+did, laid siege to Mantua by land and water, entered the city in 1114,
+and did not die till a year after. Such is female resolution.
+
+The Mantuans now founded a republican government, having unlimited
+immunities and privileges from the Emperor, whose power over them
+extended merely to the investure of their consuls. Their republic was
+democratic, the legislative council of nine rectors and three curators
+being elective by the whole people. This government, or something like
+it, endured for more than a century, during which period the Mantuans
+seem to have done nothing but war with their neighbors in every
+direction,--with the Veronese chiefly, with the Cremonese a good
+deal, with the Paduans, with the Ferrarese, with the Modenese and the
+Bolognese: indeed, we count up twelve of these wars. Like the English
+of their time, the Mantuans were famous bowmen, and their shafts took
+flight all over Lombardy. At the same time they did not omit to fight
+each other at home; and it must have been a dullish kind of day
+in Mantua when there was no street-battle between families of the
+factious nobility. Dante has peopled his Hell from the Italy of this
+time, and he might have gone farther and fared worse for a type of
+the infernal state. The spectacle of these countless little Italian
+powers, racked, and torn, and blazing with pride, aggression,
+and disorder, within and without,--full of intrigue, anguish, and
+shame,--each with its petty thief or victorious faction making war
+upon the other, and bubbling over with local ambitions, personal
+rivalries, and lusts,--is a spectacle which the traveller of to-day,
+passing over the countless forgotten battle-fields, and hurried from
+one famous city to another by railroad, can scarcely conjure up.
+Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, Mantua Vicenza, Verona,
+Bassano,--all are now at peace with each other, and firmly united in
+the national sentiment that travellers were meant to be eaten alive
+by Italians. Poor old cities! it is hard to conceive of their bygone
+animosities; still harder to believe that all the villages squatting
+on the long white roads, and waking up to beg of you as your diligence
+passes, were once embroiled in deadly and incessant wars. Municipal
+pride is a good thing, and discentralization is well; and we have to
+thank these intensely local little states for genius triply crowned
+with the glories of literature, art, and science, which Italy might
+not have produced if she had been united, and if the little states had
+loved themselves less and Italy more. Though, after all, there is
+the doubt whether it is not better to bless one's obscure and happy
+children with peace and safety, than to give to the world a score of
+great names at the cost to millions of incalculable misery.
+
+Besides their local wars and domestic feuds the Mantuans had
+troubles on a much larger scale,--troubles, indeed, which the Emperor
+Barbarossa laid out for all Italy. In Carlyle's History of Frederick
+the Great you can read a pleasanter account of the Emperor's business
+at Roncaglia about this time than our Italian chroniclers will give
+you. Carlyle loves a tyrant; and if the tyrant is a ruffian and bully,
+and especially a German, there are hardly any lengths to which that
+historian will not go in praise of him. Truly, one would hardly
+guess, from that picture of Frederick Redbeard at Roncaglia, with
+the standard set before his tent, inviting all men to come and have
+justice done them, that the Emperor was actually at Roncaglia for
+the purpose of conspiring with his Diet to take away every vestige
+of liberty and independence from miserable Italy. Among other cities
+Mantua lost her freedom at this Diet, and was ruled by an imperial
+governor and by consuls of Frederick's nomination till 1167, when she
+joined the famous Lombard League against him. The leagued cities
+beat the Emperor at Legnano, and received back their liberties by the
+treaty of Costanza in 1183; after which, Frederick having withdrawn to
+Germany, they fell to fighting among themselves again with redoubled
+zeal, and rent their league into as many pieces as there had been
+parties to it. In 1236 the Germans again invaded Lombardy, under
+Frederick II.; and aided by the troops of the Ghibelline cities,
+Verona, Padua, Vicenza, and Treviso, besieged Mantua, which
+surrendered to this formidable union of forces, thus becoming once
+more an imperial city, and irreparably fracturing the Lombard League.
+It does not appear, however, that her ancient liberties were withdrawn
+by Frederick II.; and we read that the local wars went on after this
+with as little interruption as before. The wars went on as usual, and
+on the old terms with Verona and Cremona; and there is little in
+their history to interest us. But in 1256 the famous tyrant of Padua,
+Eccelino da Romano, who aspired to the dominion of Lombardy, gathered
+his forces, and went and sat down before Mantua. The Mantuans refused
+to surrender at his summons; and Eccelino, who had very little notion
+of what the Paduans were doing in his absence, swore that he would cut
+down the vines in those pleasant Mantuan vineyards, plant new ones,
+and drink the wine of their grapes before ever he raised the siege.
+But meantime that conspiracy which ended in Eccelino's ruin had
+declared itself in Padua, and the tyrant was forced to abandon the
+siege and look to his dominion of other cities.
+
+After which there was something like peace in Mantua for twenty years,
+and the city waxed prosperous. Indeed, neither industry nor learning
+had wholly perished during the wars of the republic, and the people
+built grist-mills on the Mincio, and cultivated belles-lettres to
+some degree. Men of heavier science likewise nourished, and we read of
+jurists and astronomers born in those troublous days, as well as of a
+distinguished physician, who wrote a ponderous dictionary of simples,
+and dedicated it to King Robert of Naples. But by far the greatest
+Mantuan of this time was he of whom readers have heard something from
+a modern poet. He is the haughty Lombard soul, "in the movement of the
+eyes honest and slow," whom Dante, ascending the inexplicable heights
+of Purgatory, beheld; and who, summoning all himself, leaped to the
+heart of Virgil when he named Mantua: "O Mantuan! I am Sordello, of
+thine own land!"
+
+Of Virgil the superstition of the Middle Ages had made a kind of
+wizard, and of Sordello the old writers fable all manner of wonders;
+he is both knight and poet, and has adventures scarcely less
+surprising than those of Amadis of Gaul. It is pretty nearly certain
+that he was born in 1189 of the Visconti di Goito, in the Mantuan
+country, and that he married Beatrice, a sister of Eccelino, and had
+amours with the youngest sister of this tyrant, the pretty Cunizza,
+whom Dante places in his "Paradiso." This final disposition of
+Cunizza, whom we should hardly think now of assigning a place among
+the blest, surprised some people even in that day, it seems; for an
+old commentator defends it, saying: "Cunizza was always, it is true,
+tender and amorous, and properly called a daughter of Venus; but she
+was also compassionate, benign, and merciful toward those unhappy ones
+whom her brother cruelly tormented. Therefore the poet is right
+in feigning to find her in the sphere of Venus. _For if the gentle
+Cyprians deified their Venus, and the Romans their Flora, how much
+more honestly may a Christian poet save Cunizza_." The lady, whose
+salvation is on these grounds inexpugnably accomplished, was married
+to Count Sanbonifazio of Padua, in her twenty-fourth year; and
+Sordello was early called to this nobleman's court, having already
+given proofs of his poetic genius. He fell in love with Cunizza, whom
+her lord, becoming the enemy of the Eccelini, began to ill-treat. A
+curious glimpse of the manners and morals of that day is afforded by
+the fact, that the brothers of Cunizza conspired to effect her escape
+with Sordella from her husband's court, and that, under the protection
+of Eccelino da Romano, the lovers were left unmolested to their
+amours. Eccelino, indeed, loved this weak sister with extraordinary
+tenderness, and we read of a marvelous complaisance to her amorous
+intrigues by a man who cared nothing himself for women. Cunizza lived
+in one of her brother's palaces at Verona, and used to receive there
+the visits of Sordello after Eccelino had determined to separate them.
+The poet entered the palace by a back door, to reach which he must
+pass through a very filthy alley; and a servant was stationed there to
+carry Sordello to and fro upon his back. One night Eccelino took the
+servant's place, bore the poet to the palace door, and on his return
+carried him back to the mouth of the alley, where he revealed
+himself, to the natural surprise and pain of Sordello, who could have
+reasonably expected anything but the mild reproof and warning given
+him by his truculent brother-in-law: "Ora ti basti, Sordello. Non
+venir più per questa vile strada ad opere ancor più vili."--"Let this
+suffice thee, Sordello. Come no more by this vile path to yet viler
+deeds."
+
+It was probably after this amour ended that Sordello sat out upon his
+travels, visiting most courts, and dwelling long in Provence, where
+he learned to poetize in the Provençal tongue, in which he thereafter
+chiefly wrote, and composed many songs. He did not, however, neglect
+his Lombard language, but composed in it a treatise on the art of
+defending towns. The Mantuan historian, Volta, says that some of
+Sordello's Provençal poems exist in manuscript in the Vatican and
+Chigi libraries at Rome, in the Laurentian at Florence, and the
+Estense at Modena. He was versed in arms as well as letters, and
+he caused Mantua to be surrounded with fosses five miles beyond her
+walls; and the republic having lodged sovereign powers in his hands
+when Eccelino besieged the city, Sordello conducted the defense with
+great courage and ability, and did not at all betray the place to his
+obliging brother-in-law, as the latter expected. Verci, from whose
+"History of the Eccelini" we have drawn the account of Sordello's
+intrigue with Cunizza, says: "The writers represent this Sordello as
+the most polite, the most gentle, the most generous man of his time,
+of middle stature, of beautiful aspect and fine person, of lofty
+bearing, agile and dexterous, instructed in letters, and a good poet,
+as his Provençal poems manifest. To these qualities he united military
+valor in such degree that no knight of his time could stand before
+him." He was properly the first Lord of Mantua, and the republic seems
+to have died with him in 1284.
+
+The madness which comes upon a people about to be enslaved commonly
+makes them the agents of their own undoing. The time had now come for
+the destruction of the last vestiges of liberty in Mantua, and the
+Mantuans, in their assembly of the Four Hundred and Ninety, voted full
+power into the hands of the destroyer. That Pinamonte Bonacolsi whom
+Dante mentions in the twentieth canto of the "Inferno," had been
+elected captain of the republic, and, feigning to fear aggression from
+the Marquis of Ferrara, he demanded of the people the right to banish
+all enemies of the state. This reasonable demand was granted, and
+the captain banished, as is well known, all enemies of Pinamonte
+Bonacolsi. After that, having things his own way, he began to favor
+public tranquillity, abolished family feuds and the ancient amusement
+of street-battles, and led his enslaved country in the paths of
+material prosperity; for which he was no doubt lauded in his day
+by those who thought the Mantuans were not prepared for freedom.
+He resolved to make the captaincy of the republic hereditary in the
+Bonacolsi family; and when he died, in 1293, his power descended to
+his son Bordellone. This Bordellone seems to have been a generous and
+merciful captain enough, but he loved ease and pleasure; and a rough
+nephew of his, Guido Botticella, conspired against him to that degree
+that Bordellone thought best, for peace and quietness' sake, to
+abdicate in his favor. Guido had the customary war with the Marquis of
+Ferrara, and then died, and was succeeded by his brother Passerino, a
+very bad person, whose son at last brought his whole family to grief.
+The Emperor made him vicar of Modena; and he used the Modenese very
+cruelly, and shut up Francesco Pico and his sons in a tower, where he
+starved them, as the Pisans did Ugolino. In those days, also, the Pope
+was living at Avignon, and people used to send him money and other
+comforts there out of Italy. An officer of Passerino's, being of
+Ghibelline politics, attacked one of these richly laden emissaries,
+and took his spoils, dividing them with Passerino. For this the Pope
+naturally excommunicated the captain of Mantua, and thereupon his
+neighbors made a great deal of pious war upon him. But he beat the
+Bolognese, the most pious of his foes, near Montevoglio, and with his
+Modenese took from them that famous bucket, about which Tassoni
+made his great Bernesque epic, "The Rape of the Bucket" (_La Secchia
+Rapita_), and which still hangs in the tower of the Duomo at Modena.
+Meantime, while Passerino had done everything to settle himself
+comfortably and permanently in the tyranny of Mantua, his worthless
+son Francesco fell in love with the wife of Filippino Gonzaga.
+
+According to the old Mantuan chronicles the Gonzagas were of a royal
+German line, and had fixed themselves in the Mantuan territory in 770
+where they built a castle beyond Po, and began at once to take part in
+public affairs. They had now grown to be a family of such consequence
+that they could not be offended with impunity, and it was a great
+misfortune to the Bonacolsi that Francesco happened to covet Filippino
+Gonzaga's wife. As to the poor lady herself, it is of infinite
+consequence to her eternal health whether she was guilty or no, but to
+us still on earth, it seems scarcely worth while to inquire, after so
+great lapse of time. History, however, rather favors the notion of
+her innocence; and it is said that Francesco, unable to overcome her
+virtue, took away her good fame by evil reports. At the same time he
+was greatly wroth--it is scarcely possible to write seriously of these
+ridiculous, wicked old shadows--that this lady's husband should have
+fallen in love with a pretty concubine of his, Bonacolsi's; and, after
+publicly defaming Filippino's wife, he threatened to kill him for this
+passion. The insult and the menace sank deep into the bitter hearts
+of the Gonzagas; and the head of that proud race, Filippino's uncle,
+Luigi Gonzaga, resolved to avenge the family dishonor. He was a secret
+and taciturn man, and a pious adulator of his line has praised him
+for the success with which he dissembled his hatred of the Bonacolsi,
+while conspiring to sweep them and their dominion away. He won over
+adherents among the Mantuans, and then made a league with Can Grande
+of Verona to divide the spoils of the Bonacolsi; and so, one morning,
+having bribed the guards to open the city gates, he entered Mantua
+at the head of the banded forces. The population was roused with
+patriotic cries of "Long live the Mantuan people!" and, as usual,
+believed, poor souls, that some good was meant them by those who came
+to overthrow their tyrants. The Bonacolsi were dreaming that pleasant
+morning of anything but ruin, and they offered no resistance to the
+insurrection till it burst out in the great square before the Castello
+di Corte. They then made a feeble sally from the castle, but were
+swiftly driven back, and Passerino, wounded to death under the great
+Gothic archway of the palace, as he retreated, dropped from his
+languid hands the bridle-rein of his charger and the reins of that
+government with which he had so long galled Mantua. The unhappy
+Francesco fled to the cathedral for protection; but the Gonzagas slew
+him at the foot of the altar, with tortures so hideous and incredible,
+that I am glad to have our friend, the advocate Arrighi, deny the fact
+altogether. Passerino's brother, a bishop, was flung into a tower to
+starve, that the Picos might be avenged; and the city of Mantua was
+liberated.
+
+In that day, when you freed a city from a tyrant, you gave it up to be
+pillaged by the army of liberation; and Mantua was now sacked by
+her deliverers. Can Grande's share of the booty alone amounted to a
+hundred thousand gold florins (about two hundred and fifty thousand
+dollars). The Mantuans, far from imitating the ungrateful Paduans,
+who, when the Crusaders liberated them from Eccelino, grudged these
+brave fellows three days' pillage of their city, and even wished back
+their old tyrant,--the Mantuans, we say, seemed not in the least
+to mind being devoured, but gratefully elected the Gonzaga their
+captain-general, and purchased him absolution from the Pope for his
+crimes committed in the sack. They got this absolution for twenty
+thousand gold florins; and the Pope probably sold it cheap,
+remembering his old grudge against the Bonacolsi, whom the Gonzaga had
+overthrown. All this was in the year of grace 1328.
+
+I confess that I am never weary of reading of these good, heroic,
+virtuous old times in Italy, and that I am here tempted to digress
+into declamation about them. There is no study more curious and
+interesting, and I am fond of tracing the two elements of character
+visible in Italian society, and every individual Italian, as they flow
+down from the remotest times to these: the one element, that capacity
+for intellectual culture of the highest degree; the other element,
+that utter untamableness of passion and feeling. The presence of these
+contradictory elements seems to influence every relation of Italian
+life;--to make it capable of splendor, but barren of comfort; to
+endear beauty, but not goodness, to the Italian; to lead him to
+recognize and celebrate virtues, but not to practice them; to produce
+a civilization of the mind, and not of the soul.
+
+When Luigi Gonzaga was made lord of Mantua, he left his castle beyond
+Po, to dwell in the city. In this castle he had dwelt, like other
+lords of his time, in the likeness of a king, spending regally and
+keeping state and open house in an edifice strongly built about with
+walls, encircled with ditches passable by a single drawbridge, and
+guarded day and night, from castle moat to castle crest, by armed
+vassals. Hundreds ate daily at his board, which was heaped with a rude
+and rich profusion, and furnished with carven goblets and plate of
+gold and silver. In fair weather the banquet-hall stood open to all
+the winds that blew; in foul, the guests were sheltered from the storm
+by curtains of oiled linen, and the place was lighted with torches
+borne by splendidly attired pages. The great saloons of the castle
+were decked with tapestries of Flanders and Damascus, and the floor
+was strewn with straw or rushes. The bed in which the lord and lady
+slept was the couch of a monarch; the household herded together in the
+empty chambers, and lay upon the floor like swine. The garden-fields
+about the castle smiled with generous harvests; the peasant lay
+down after his toil, at night, in deadly fear of invasion from some
+neighboring state, which should rob him of everything, dishonor his
+wife and daughters, and slay him upon the smoking ruins of his home.
+
+In the city to which this lord repaired, the houses were built
+here and there at caprice, without numbers or regularity, and only
+distinguished by the figure of a saint, or some pious motto painted
+above the door. Cattle wandered at will through the crooked, narrow,
+and filthy streets, which rang with the clamor of frequent feud, and
+reeked with the blood of the embattled citizens; over all the squalor
+and wickedness rose the loveliest temples that ever blossomed from
+man's love of the beautiful, to the honor and glory of God.
+
+In this time Crusaders went to take the Lord's sepulchre from the
+infidel, while their brothers left at home rose against one another,
+each petty state against its neighbor, in unsparing wars of rapine
+and devastation,--wars that slew, or, less mercifully, mutilated
+prisoners,--that snatched the babe from the embrace of its violated
+mother, and dashed out its brains upon the desolated hearth. A
+hopeless, hellish time of sack, plunder, murder, famine, plague, and
+unnatural crime; a glorious age, in which flourished the gentlest and
+sweetest poet that ever sang, and the grimmest and grandest that ever
+upbraided a godless generation for its sins,--in which Petrarch was
+crowned with laurel at Rome, and Dante wandered in despair from court
+to court, learning in the bitterness of his exile's heart,
+
+  "come sa di sale
+  Lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
+  Lo scendere e il salir per l'altrui scale."
+
+It was a time ignorant of the simplest comfort, but debauched with the
+vices of luxury; in which cities repressed the license of their people
+by laws regulating the length of women's gowns and the outlays
+at weddings and funerals. Every wild misdeed and filthy crime was
+committed, and punished by terrible penalties, or atoned for by fines.
+A fierce democracy reigned, banishing nobles, razing their palaces,
+and ploughing up the salt-sown sites; till at last, in the uttermost
+paroxysm of madness, it delivered itself up to lords to be defended
+from itself, and was crushed into the abjectest depths of slavery.
+Literature and architecture flourished, and the sister arts were born
+amid the struggles of human nature convulsed with every abominable
+passion.
+
+For nearly four hundred years the Gonzagas continued to rule the city,
+which the first prince of their line, having well-nigh destroyed,
+now rebuilt and restored to greater splendor than ever; and it is the
+Mantua of the Gonzagas which travellers of this day look upon when
+they visit the famous old city. Their pride and their wealth adorned
+it; their wisdom and prudence made it rich and prosperous; their
+valor glorified it; their crimes stain its annals with infamy; their
+wickedness and weakness ruined it and brought it low. They were a
+race full of hereditary traits of magnificence, but one reads their
+history, and learns to love, of all their long succession, only one or
+two in their pride, learns to pity only one or two in their fall. They
+were patriotic, but the patriotism of despotic princes is self-love.
+They were liberal--in spending the revenues of the state for the glory
+of their family. They were brave, and led many nameless Mantuans
+to die in forgotten battles for alien quarrels which they never
+understood.
+
+The succession of the Gonzagas was of four captains, ending in 1407;
+four marquises, ending in 1484; and ten dukes, ending in 1708.
+
+The first of the captains was Luigi, as we know. In his time the great
+Gothic fabric of the Castello di Corte was built; and having rebuilt
+the portions of the city wasted by the sack, he devoted himself,
+as far as might be in that age, to the arts of peace; and it is
+remembered of him that he tried to cure the Mantuan air of its
+feverish unwholesomeness by draining the swampy environs. During his
+time, Petrarch, making a sentimental journey to the birthplace of
+Virgil, was splendidly entertained and greatly honored by him. For the
+rest, Can Grande of Verona was by no means content with his hundred
+thousand golden florins of spoil from the sack of the city, but
+aspired to its seigniory, declaring that he had understood Gonzaga
+to have promised him it as the condition of alliance against the
+Bonacolsi. Gonzaga construed the contract differently, and had so
+little idea of parting with his opinion, that he fought the Scaligero
+on this point of difference till he died, which befell thirty years
+after his election to the captaincy.
+
+Him his son Guido succeeded,--a prince already old at the time of his
+father's death, and of feeble spirit. He shared his dominion with his
+son Ugolino, excluding the younger brothers from the dominion. These,
+indignant at the partiality, one night slew their brother Ugolino at a
+supper he was giving; and being thereupon admitted to a share in their
+father's government, had no trouble in obtaining the pardon of the
+Pope and Emperor. One of the murderers died before the father; the
+other, named Ludovico, was, on the death of Guido, in 1370, elected to
+the captaincy, and ruled long, wisely, and well. He loved a peaceful
+life; and though the Emperor confirmed him in the honors conferred on
+him by the Mantuans, and made him Vicar imperial, Ludovico declined to
+take part with Ghibellines against Guelphs, remained quietly at home,
+and spent himself much in good works, as if he would thus expiate his
+bloody crime. He gathered artists, poets, and learned men about him,
+and did much to foster all arts. In his time, Mantua had rest from
+war, and grew to have twenty-eight thousand inhabitants; but it was
+not in the nature of a city of the Middle Ages to be long without a
+calamity of some sort, and it is a kind of relief to know that Mantua,
+under this peaceful prince, was well-nigh depopulated by a pestilence.
+
+In 1381 he died, and with his son Francesco the blood-letting began
+again. Indeed, this captain spent nearly his whole life in war with
+those pleasant people, the Visconti of Milan. He had married the
+daughter of Barnabo Visconti, but discovering her to be unfaithful to
+him, or believing her so, he caused her to be put to death, refusing
+all her family's intercessions for mercy. After that, a heavy sadness
+fell upon him, and he wandered aimlessly about in many Italian
+cities, and at last married a second time, taking to wife Margherita
+Malatesta. He was a prince of high and generous soul and of manly
+greatness rare in his time. There came once a creature of the Visconti
+to him, with a plot for secretly taking off his masters; but the
+Gonzaga (he must have been thought an eccentric man by his neighbors)
+dismissed the wretch with scornful horror. I am sure the reader will
+be glad to know that he finally beat the Visconti in fair fight, and
+(the pest still raging in Mantua) lived to make a pilgrimage to the
+Holy Land. When he returned, he compiled the city's statutes, divided
+the town into four districts, and named its streets. So he died.
+
+And after this prince had made his end, there came another Francesco,
+or Gianfrancesco, who was created Marquis of Mantua by the Emperor
+Sigismund. He was a friend of war, and having been the ward of
+the Venetian Republic (Venice was fond of this kind of trust, and
+sometimes adopted princely persons as her children, among whom the
+reader will of course remember the Queen of Cyprus, and the charming
+Bianca Capello, whose personal attractions and singularly skillful
+knowledge of the use of poisons made her Grand Duchess of Tuscany
+some years after she eloped from Venice), he became the leader of
+her armies on the death of Carmagnola, who survived the triumphal
+reception given him by the Serenest Senate only a very short time. [It
+seems scarcely worth while to state the fact that Carmagnola,
+suspected of treasonable correspondence with the Visconti, was
+recalled to Venice to receive distinguished honors from the republic.
+The Senate was sitting in the hall of the Grand Council when he
+appeared, and they detained him there with various compliments till
+night fell. Then instead of lights, the Sbirri appeared, and seized
+Carmagnola. "I am a dead man," he exclaimed, on beholding them. And
+so indeed he was; for, three days after, he was led out of prison,
+and beheaded between the pillars of the Piazzetta.] The Gonzaga
+took Verona and Padua for the republic, and met the Milanese in many
+battles. Venice was then fat and insolently profuse with the spoils
+of the Orient, and it is probable that the Marquis of Mantua acquired
+there that taste for splendor which he introduced into his hitherto
+frugal little state. We read of his being in Venice in 1414, when the
+Jewelers and Goldsmiths' Guild gave a tournament in the Piazza San
+Marco, offering as prizes to the victorious lances a collar enriched
+with pearls and diamonds, the work of the jewelers, and two helmets
+excellently wrought by the goldsmiths. On this occasion the Gonzaga,
+with two hundred and sixty Mantuan gentlemen, mounted on superb
+horses, contested the prizes with the Marquis of Ferrara, at the
+head of two hundred Ferrarese, equally mounted, and attended by their
+squires and pages, magnificently dressed. There were sixty thousand
+spectators of the encounter. "Both the Marquises," says Mutinelli
+in his "Annali Urbani," "being each assisted by fourteen well-armed
+cavaliers, combated valorously at the barrier, and were both judged
+worthy of the first prize: a Mantuan cavalier took the second."
+
+The Marquis Gonzaga was the first of his line who began that royal
+luxury of palaces with which Mantua was adorned. He commenced the
+Ducal Palace; but before he went far with the work, he fell a prey to
+the science then much affected by Italian princes, but still awaiting
+its last refinement from the gifted Lucrezia Borgia. The poor Marquis
+was poisoned by his wife's paramour, and died in the year 1444.
+Against this prince, our advocate Arrighi records the vandalism of
+causing to be thrown down and broken in pieces the antique statue
+of Virgil, which stood in one of the public places of Mantua, and of
+which the head is still shown in the Museum of the city. In all times,
+the Mantuans had honored, in diverse ways, their great poet, and at
+certain epochs had coined money bearing his face. With the common
+people he had a kind of worship (more likely as wizard than as poet),
+and they celebrated annually some now-forgotten event by assembling
+with songs and dances about the statue of Virgil, which was destroyed
+by the uncle of the Marquis, Malatesta, rather than by the Marquis's
+own order. This ill-conditioned person is supposed to have been
+"vexed because our Mantuan people thought it their highest glory to be
+fellow-citizens of the prince of poets." We can better sympathize with
+the advocate's indignation at this barbarity, than with his blame of
+Francesco for having consented, by his acceptance of the marquisate,
+to become a prince of the Roman Empire. Mantua was thus subjected
+to the Emperors, but liberty had long been extinguished; and the
+voluntary election of the Council, which bestowed the captaincy on
+each succeeding generation of the Gonzagas, was a mere matter of form,
+and of course.
+
+The next prince, Lodovico Gonzaga, was an austere man, and had been
+bred in a hard school, if I may believe some of our old chroniclers,
+whom, indeed, I sometimes suspect of being not altogether faithful. It
+is said that his father loved his younger brother better than him,
+and that Lodovico ran away in his boyhood, and took refuge with his
+father's hereditary enemies, the Visconti. To make dates agree,
+it must have been the last of these, for the line failed during
+Lodovico's time, and he had wars with the succeeding Sforza. In the
+day of his escapade, Milan was at war with Mantua and with Venice, and
+the Marquis Gonzaga was at the head of the united armies, as we have
+already seen. So the father and son met in several battles; though
+the Visconti, out of love for the boy, and from a sentiment of piety
+somewhat amazing in them, contrived that he should never actually
+encounter his parent face to face. Lodovico came home after the wars,
+wearing a long beard; and his mother called her son "the Turk," a
+nickname that he never lost.
+
+Il Turco was a lover of the arts and of letters, and he did many
+works to enrich and beautify the city. He established the first
+printing-office in Mantua, where the first book printed was the
+"Decamerone" of Boccaccio. He founded a college of advocates, and he
+dug canals for irrigation; and the prosperity of Mantuan manufacturers
+in his time may be inferred from the fact that, when the King of
+Denmark paid him a visit, in 1474, the merchants decked their shops
+with five thousand pieces of fine Mantuan cloth.
+
+The Marquis made his brilliant little court the resort of the arts and
+letters; and hither from Florence came once the elegant Politian, who
+composed his tragedy of "Orfeo" in Mantua, and caused it to be first
+represented before Lodovico. But it must be confessed that this was
+a soil in which art flourished better than literature, and that even
+born Mantuan poets went off, after a while, and blossomed in other
+air. The painter Mantegna, whom the Marquis invited from Padua, passed
+his whole life here, painting for the Marquis in the palaces and
+churches. The prince loved him, and gave him a house, and bestowed
+other honors upon him; and Mantegna executed for Lodovico his famous
+pictures representing the Triumph of Julius Cæsar. [Now at Hamilton
+Court, in England.] It was divided into nine compartments, and, as a
+frieze, went round the upper part of Lodovico's newly erected palace
+of San Sebastian. Mantegna also painted a hall in the Castello di
+Corte, called the Stanza di Mantegna, and there, among other subjects
+of fable and of war, made the portraits of Lodovico and his wife. It
+was partly the wish to see such works of Mantegna as still remained in
+Mantua that took us thither; and it was chiefly this wish that carried
+us, the morning after our arrival, to the Castello di Corte, or the
+Ducal Palace. Our thirst for Mantegnas was destined to be in no degree
+satisfied in this pile, but it was full of things to tempt us to
+forget Mantegna, and to make us more and more interested in the
+Gonzagas and their Mantua.
+
+It is taken for granted that no human being ever yet gained an idea of
+any building from the most artful description of it; but if the reader
+cares to fancy a wide piazza, or open square, with a church upon the
+left hand, immense, uninteresting edifices on the right, and an ugly
+bishop's palace of Renaissance taste behind him, he may figure before
+him as vastly and magnificently as he pleases the superb Gothic front
+of the Castello di Corte. This façade is the only one in Italy that
+reminds you of the most beautiful building in the world, the Ducal
+Palace at Venice; and it does this merely by right of its short
+pillars and deep Gothic arches in the ground story, and the great
+breadth of wall that rises above them, unbroken by the second line of
+columns which relieves and lightens this wall in the Venetian palace.
+It stands at an extremity of the city, upon the edge of the broad
+fresh-water lagoon, and is of such extent as to include within its
+walls a whole court-city of theatre, church, stables, playground,
+course for riding, and several streets. There is a far older edifice
+adjoining the Castello di Corte, which Guido Bonacolsi began, and
+which witnessed the bloody end of his line, when Louis Gonzaga
+surprised and slew his last successor. But the palace itself is all
+the work of the Gonzagas, and it remains the monument of their kingly
+state and splendid pride.
+
+It was the misfortune of the present writer to be recognized by the
+_employé_ (formerly of Venice) who gives the permissions to travellers
+to visit the palace, and to be addressed in the presence of the
+_Custode_ by the dignified title to which his presence did so little
+honor. This circumstance threw upon the Custode, a naturally tedious
+and oppressive old man, the responsibility of being doubly prolix and
+garrulous. He reveled in his office of showing the palace, and did
+homage to the visitor's charge and nation by an infinite expansion
+upon all possible points of interest, lest he should go away
+imperfectly informed of anything. By dint of frequent encounter with
+strangers, this Custode had picked up many shreds and fragments
+of many languages, and did not permit the travellers to consider
+themselves as having at all understood him until he had repeated
+everything in Italian, English, French, and German. He led the
+way with his polyglot babble through an endless number of those
+magnificent and uninteresting chambers which palaces seem specially
+built to contain, that men may be content to dwell in the humbler
+dullness of their own houses; and though the travellers often prayed
+him to show them the apartments containing the works of Mantegna,
+they really got to see nothing of this painter's in the Ducal Palace,
+except, here and there, some evanescent frescoes, which the Custode
+would not go beyond a _si crede_ in attributing to him. Indeed, it is
+known that the works of Mantegna suffered grievously in the wars of
+the last century, and his memory has faded so dim in this palace where
+he wrought, that the guide could not understand the curiosity of the
+foreigners concerning the old painter; and certainly Giulio Romano has
+stamped himself more ineffaceably than Mantegna upon Mantua.
+
+In the Ducal Palace are seen vividly contrasted the fineness and
+strength, the delicacy and courage of the fancy, which, rather than
+the higher gift of imagination, characterize Giulio's work. There is
+such an airy refinement and subtile grace in the pretty grotesques
+with which he decorates a chamber; there is such daring luxury of
+color and design in the pictures for which his grand halls are merely
+the frames. No doubt I could make fine speeches about these paintings;
+but who, not seeing them, would be the wiser, after the best
+description and the choicest critical disquisition? In fact, our
+travellers themselves found it pleasanter, after a while, to yield to
+the guidance of the Custode, and to enjoy the stupider marvels of the
+place, than to do the set and difficult admiration of the works of
+art. So, passing the apartments in good preservation (the Austrian
+Emperors had taken good care of some parts of the palace of one of
+their first Italian possessions), they did justice to the splendor
+of the satin beds and the other upholstery work; they admired rich
+carpentering and costly toys; they dwelt on marvelous tapestries
+(among which the tapestry copies of Raphael's cartoons, woven at
+Mantua in the fifteenth century, are certainly worthy of wonder);
+and they expressed the proper amazement at the miracles of art which
+caused figures frescoed in the ceilings to turn with them, and follow
+and face them from whatever part of the room they chose to look. Nay,
+they even enjoyed the Hall of the Rivers, on the sides of which the
+usual river-gods were painted, in the company of the usual pottery,
+from which they pour their founts, and at the end of which there
+was an abominable little grotto of what people call, in modern
+landscape-gardening, rock-work, out of the despair with which its
+unmeaning ugliness fills them. There were busts of several Mantuan
+duchesses in the gallery, which were interesting, and the pictures
+were so bad as to molest no one. There was, besides all this, a
+hanging garden in this small Babylon, on which the travellers looked
+with a doleful regret that they were no longer of the age when a
+hanging garden would have brought supreme comfort to the soul. It
+occupied a spacious oblong, had a fountain and statues, trees and
+flowers, and would certainly have been taken for the surface of the
+earth, had not the Custode proudly pointed out that it was on a level
+with the second floor, on which they stood.
+
+After that they wandered through a series of unused, dismantled
+apartments and halls, melancholy with faded fresco, dropping stucco,
+and mutilated statues of plaster, and came at last upon a balcony
+overlooking the Cavallerizza, which one of the early dukes built after
+a design by the inevitable Giulio Romano. It is a large square, and
+was meant for the diversion of riding on horseback. Balconies go all
+found it between those thick columns, finely twisted, as we see
+them in that cartoon of Raphael, "The Healing of the Lame Man at the
+Beautiful Gate of the Temple"; and here once stood the jolly dukes and
+the jolly ladies of their light-hearted court, and there below rode
+the gay, insolent, intriguing courtiers, and outside groaned the
+city under the heavy extortions of the tax-gatherers. It is all in
+weather-worn stucco, and the handsome square is planted with trees.
+The turf was now cut and carved by the heavy wheels of the Austrian
+baggage-wagons constantly passing through the court to carry munitions
+to the fortress outside, whose black guns grimly overlook the dead
+lagoon. A sense of desolation had crept over the sight-seers, with
+that strange sickness of heart which one feels in the presence of ruin
+not to be lamented, and which deepened into actual pain as the Custode
+clapped his hands and the echo buffeted itself against the forlorn
+stucco, and up from the trees rose a score of sullen, slumberous owls,
+and flapped heavily across the lonesome air with melancholy cries. It
+only needed, to crush these poor strangers, that final touch which the
+Custode gave, as they passed from the palace through the hall in which
+are painted the Gonzagas, and in which he pointed out the last Duke of
+Mantua, saying he was deposed by the Emperor for felony, and somehow
+conveying the idea of horse-stealing and counterfeiting on the part of
+his Grace.
+
+A very different man from this rogue was our old friend Lodovico, who
+also, however, had his troubles. He was an enemy of the Ghibellines,
+and fought them a great deal. Of course he had the habitual wars with
+Milan, and he was obliged to do battle with his own brother Carlo
+to some extent. This Gonzaga had been taken prisoner by Sforza; and
+Lodovico, having paid for him a ransom of sixty thousand florins of
+gold (which Carlo was scarcely worth), seized the fraternal lands, and
+held them in pledge of repayment. Carlo could not pay, and tried
+to get back his possessions by war. Vexed with these and other
+contentions, Lodovico was also unhappy in his son, whose romance I
+may best tell in the words of the history [Volta: _Storia di Mantova_.],
+from which I take it:
+
+    "Lodovico Gonzaga, having agreed with the Duke of Bavaria to
+    take his daughter Margherita as wife for his (Lodovico's)
+    first-born, Federico, and the young man having refused her,
+    Lodovico was so much enraged that he sought to imprison him;
+    but the Marchioness Barbara, mother of Federico, caused him to
+    fly from the city till his father's anger should be abated.
+    Federico departed with six attendants [The _Fioretto delle
+    Cronache_ says "persons of gentle condition."]; but this flight
+    caused still greater displeasure to his father, who now
+    declared him banished, and threatened with heavy penalties any
+    one who should give him help or favor. Federico, therefore,
+    wandered about with these six attendants in diverse places, and
+    finally arrived in Naples; but having already spent all his
+    substance, and not daring to make himself known for fear of his
+    father, he fell into great want, and so into severe sickness.
+    His companions having nothing wherewith to live, and not
+    knowing any trade by which to gain their bread, did menial
+    services fit for day-laborers, and sustained their lord with
+    their earnings, he remaining hidden in a poor woman's house
+    where they all dwelt.
+
+    "The Marchioness had sent many messengers in divers provinces
+    with money to find her son, but they never heard any news of
+    him; so that they thought him dead, not hearing anything,
+    either, of his attendants. Now it happened that one of those
+    who sought Federico came to Naples, and presented himself to
+    the king with a letter from the said lady, praying that he
+    should make search in his territory for a company of seven men,
+    giving the name and description of each. The king caused this
+    search to be made by the heads of the district; and one of
+    these heads told how in his district there were six Lombard men
+    (not knowing of Federico, who lay ill), but that they were
+    laborers and of base condition. The king determined to see
+    them; and they being come before him, he demanded who they
+    were, and how many; as they were not willing to discover their
+    lord, on being asked their names they gave others, so that the
+    king, not being able to learn anything, would have dismissed
+    them. But the messenger sent by the Marchioness knew them, and
+    said to the king, 'Sire, these are the attendants of him whom I
+    seek; but they have changed their names.' The king caused them
+    to be separated one from another, and then asked them of their
+    Lord; and they, finding themselves separated, minutely narrated
+    everything; and the king immediately sent for Federico, whom
+    his officers found miserably ill on a heap of straw. He was
+    brought to the palace, where the king ordered him to be cared
+    for, sending the messenger back to his mother to advise her how
+    the men had been found and in what great misery. The
+    Marchioness went to her husband, and, having cast herself at
+    his feet, besought him of a grace. The Marquis answered that he
+    would grant everything, so it did not treat of Federico. Then
+    the lady opened him the letter of the king of Naples, which had
+    such effect that it softened the soul of the Marquis, showing
+    him in how great misery his son had been; and so, giving the
+    letter to the Marchioness, he said, 'Do that which pleases
+    you.' The Marchioness straightway sent the prince money, and
+    clothes to clothe him, in order that he should return to
+    Mantua; and having come, the son cast himself at his father's
+    feet, imploring pardon for himself and for his attendants; and
+    he pardoned them, and gave those attendants enough to live
+    honorably and like noblemen, and they were called The Faithful
+    of the House of Gonzaga, and from them come the _Fedeli_ of
+    Mantua.
+
+    "The Marquis then, not to break faith, caused Federico to take
+    Margherita, daughter of the Duke of Bavaria, for his wife, and
+    celebrated the nuptials splendidly; so that there remained the
+    greatest love between father and son."
+
+The son succeeded to the father's dominion in 1478; and it is recorded
+of him in the "Flower of the Chronicles," that he was a hater of
+idleness, and a just man, greatly beloved by his people. They chiefly
+objected to him that he placed a Jew, Eusebio Malatesta, at the head
+of civil affairs; and this Jew was indeed the cause of great mischief:
+for Ridolfo Gonzaga coming to reside with his wife for a time at the
+court of his brother, the Marquis, Malatesta fell in love with
+her. She repelled him, and the bitter Jew thereupon so poisoned her
+husband's mind with accusations against her chastity, that he took her
+home to his town of Lazzaro, and there put the unhappy and innocent
+lady to death by the headsman's hand in the great square of the city.
+
+Federico was Marquis only six years, and died in 1484, leaving
+his marquisate to his son Francesco, the most ambitious, warlike,
+restless, splendid prince of his magnificent race. This Gonzaga wore a
+beard, and brought the custom into fashion in Italy again. He founded
+the famous breed of Mantuan horses, and gave them about free-handedly
+to other sovereigns of his acquaintance. To the English king he
+presented a steed which, if we may trust history, could have been sold
+for almost its weight in gold. He was so fond of hunting that he kept
+two hundred dogs of the chase, and one hundred and fifty birds of
+prey.
+
+Of course this Gonzaga was a soldier, and indeed he loved war better
+even than hunting, and delighted so much in personal feats of arms
+that, concealing his name and quality, in order that the combat should
+be in all things equal, he was wont to challenge renowned champions
+wherever he heard of them, and to meet them in the lists. Great part
+of his life was spent in the field; and he fought in turn on nearly
+all sides of the political questions then agitating Italy. In 1495
+he was at the head of the Venetian and other Italian troops when they
+beat the French under Charles VIII. at Taro, and made so little use
+of their victory as to let their vanquished invaders escape from them
+after all. Nevertheless, if the Gonzaga did not here show himself a
+great general, he did great feats of personal valor, penetrating to
+the midst of the French forces, wounding the king, and with his own
+hand taking prisoner the great Bastard of Bourbon. Venice paid him
+ten thousand ducats for gaining the victory, such as it was, and when
+peace was made he went to visit the French king at Vercelli; and there
+Charles gave his guest a present of two magnificent horses, which the
+Gonzaga returned yet more splendidly in kind. About five years later
+he was again at war with the French, and helped the Aragonese drive
+them out of Naples. In 1506, Pope Julius II. made him leader of the
+armies of the Church (for he had now quitted the Venetian service),
+and he reduced the city of Bologna to obedience to the Holy See. In
+1509 he joined the League of Cambray against Venice, and, being made
+Imperial Captain-General, was taken prisoner by the Venetians. They
+liberated him, however, the following year; and in 1513 we find him at
+the head of the league against the French.
+
+A curious anecdote of this Gonzaga's hospitality is also illustrative
+of the anomalous life of those times, when good faith had as little
+to do with the intercourse of nations as at present; but good fortune,
+when she appeared in the world, liked to put on a romantic and
+melodramatic guise. An ambassador from the Grand Turk on his way to
+Rome was taken by an enemy of the Pope, despoiled of all his money,
+and left planted, as the Italians expressively say, at Ancona.
+This ambassador was come to concert with Alexander VI. the death of
+Bajazet's brother, prisoner in the Pope's hands, and he bore the Pope
+a present of 50,000 gold ducats. It was Gian Della Rovere who seized
+and spoiled him, and sent the papers (letters of the Pope and Sultan)
+to Charles VIII. of France, to whom Alexander had been obliged to give
+the Grand Turk's brother. The magnificent Gonzaga hears of the Turk's
+embarrassing mischance, sends and fetches him to Mantua, clothes him,
+puts abundant money in his purse, and dispatches him on his way. The
+Sultan, in reward of this courtesy to his servant, gave a number of
+fine horses to the Marquis, who, possibly being tired of presenting
+his own horses, returned the Porte a ship-load of excellent Mantuan
+cheeses. This interchange of compliments seems to have led to a kind
+of romantic friendship between the Gonzaga and the Grand Turk, who did
+occasionally interest himself in the affairs of the Christian dogs;
+and who, when Francesco lay prisoner at Venice, actually wrote to the
+Serenest Senate, and asked his release as a personal grace to him, the
+Grand Turk. And Francesco was, thereupon, let go; the canny republic
+being willing to do the Sultan any sort of cheap favor.
+
+This Gonzaga, being so much engaged in war, seems to have had little
+time for the adornment of his capital. The Church of Our Lady of
+Victory is the only edifice which he added to it; and this was merely
+in glorification of his own triumph over the French at Taro. Mantegna
+painted an altar-piece for it, representing the Marquis and his wife
+on their knees before the Virgin, in act of rendering her thanks for
+the victory. The French nation avenged itself for whatever wrong was
+done its pride in this picture by stealing it away from Mantua in
+Napoleon's time; and it now hangs in the gallery of the Louvre.
+
+Francesco died in 1519; and after him his son, Federico II., the first
+Duke of Mantua, reigned some twenty-one years, and died in 1540. The
+marquisate in his time was made a duchy by the Emperor Charles V.,
+to whom the Gonzaga had given efficient aid in his wars against the
+French. This was in the year 1530; and three years later, when the
+Duke of Monferrato died, and the inheritance of his opulent little
+state was disputed by the Duke of Savoy, by the Marquis of Saluzzo,
+and by the Gonzaga, who had married the late Duke's daughter,
+Charles's influence secured it to the Mantuan. The dominions of the
+Gonzagas had now reached their utmost extent, and these dominions
+were not curtailed till the deposition of Fernando Carlo in 1708, when
+Monferrato was adjudged to the Duke of Savoy, and afterwards confirmed
+to him by treaty. It was separated from the capital of the Gonzagas by
+a wide extent of alien territory, but they held it with a strong
+hand, embellished the city, and founded there the strongest citadel in
+Italy.
+
+Federico, after his wars for the Emperor, appears to have reposed in
+peace for the rest of his days, and to have devoted himself to the
+adornment of Mantua and the aggrandizing of his family. His court
+was the home of many artists; and Titian painted for him the Twelve
+Cæsars, which the Germans stole when they sacked the city in 1630.
+But his great agent and best beloved genius was Giulio Pippi, called
+Romano, who was conducted to Mantua by pleasant Count Baldassare
+Castiglione.
+
+Pleasant Count Baldassare Castiglione! whose incomparable book of the
+"Cortigiano" succeeded in teaching his countrymen every gentlemanly
+grace but virtue. He was born at Casatico in the Mantovano, in the
+year 1476, and went in his boyhood to be schooled at Milan, where he
+learnt the profession of arms. From Milan he went to Rome, where
+he exercised his profession of arms till the year 1504, when he was
+called to gentler uses at the court of the elegant Dukes of Urbino. He
+lived there as courtier and court-poet, and he returned to Rome as the
+ambassador from Urbino. Meantime his liege, Francesco Gonzaga, was but
+poorly pleased that so brilliant a Mantuan should spend his life in
+the service and ornament of other princes, and Castiglione came back
+to his native country about the year 1516. He married in Mantua, and
+there finished his famous book of "The Courtier," and succeeded in
+winning back the favor of his prince. Federico, the Duke, made him
+ambassador to Rome in 1528; and Baldassare did his master two signal
+services there,--he procured him to be named head of all the Papal
+forces, and he found him Giulio Romano. So the Duke suffered him to
+go as the Pope's Nuncio to Spain, and Baldassare finished his courtly
+days at Toledo in 1529.
+
+The poet made a detour to Mantua on his way to Spain, taking with
+him the painter, whom the Duke received with many caresses, as Vasari
+says, presented him a house honorably furnished, ordered provision for
+him and his pupils, gave them certain brave suits of velvet and satin,
+and, seeing that Giulio had no horse, called for his own favorite
+Luggieri, and bestowed it on him. Ah! they knew how to receive
+painters, those fine princes, who had merely to put their hands into
+their people's pocket, and take out what florins they liked. So the
+Duke presently set the artist to work, riding out with him through the
+gate of San Bastiano to some stables about a bow-shot from the walls,
+in the midst of a flat meadow, where he told Giulio that he would be
+glad (if it could be done without destroying the old walls) to have
+such buildings added to the stables as would serve him for a kind of
+lodge, to come out and merrily sup in when he liked. Whereupon Giulio
+began to think out the famous Palazzo del T.
+
+This painter is an unlucky kind of man, to whom all criticism seems
+to have agreed to attribute great power and deny great praise.
+Castiglione had found him at Rome, after the death of his master
+Raphael, when his genius, for good or for ill, began for the first
+time to find original expression. At Mantua, where he spent all the
+rest of his busy life, it is impossible not to feel in some degree
+the force of this genius. As in Venice all the Madonnas in the
+street-corner shrines have some touch of color to confess the
+painter's subjection to Titian or Tintoretto; as in Vicenza the
+edifices are all in Greekish taste, and stilted upon pedestals in
+honor and homage to Palladio; as in Parma Correggio has never died,
+but lives to this day in the mouths and chiaroscuro effects of all the
+figures in all the pictures painted there;--so in Mantua Giulio Romano
+is to be found in the lines of every painting and every palace. It is
+wonderful to see, in these little Italian cities which have been the
+homes of great men, how no succeeding generation has dared to wrong
+the memory of them by departing in the least from their precepts
+upon art. One fancies, for instance, the immense scorn with which the
+Vicentines would greet the audacity of any young architect who dared
+to think Gothic instead of Palladian Greek, and how they would put
+him to shame by asking him if he knew more than Palladio about
+architecture! It seems that original art cannot arise in the presence
+of the great virtues and the great errors of the past; and Italian art
+of this day seems incapable of even the feeble, mortal life of other
+modern art, in the midst of so much immortality.
+
+Giulio Romano did a little of everything for the Dukes of
+Mantua,--from painting the most delicate and improper little fresco
+for a bed-chamber to restraining the Po and the Mincio with immense
+dikes, restoring ancient edifices and building new ones, draining
+swamps and demolishing and reconstructing whole streets, painting
+palaces and churches, and designing the city slaughter-house. He grew
+old and very rich in the service of the Gonzagas; but though Mrs.
+Jameson says he commanded respect by a sense of his own dignity as an
+artist, the Bishop of Casale, who wrote the "Annali di Mantova," says
+that the want of nobility and purity in his style, and his "gallant
+inventions, were conformable to his own sensual life, and that he did
+not disdain to prostitute himself to the infamies of Aretino."
+
+His great architectural work in Mantua is the Palazzo del T, or Tè,
+as it is now written. It was first called Palazzo del T, from the
+convergence of roads there in the form of that letter; and the modern
+Mantuans call it Del Tè, from the superstition, transmitted to us by
+the Custode of the Ducal Palace, that the Gonzagas merely used it
+on pleasant afternoons to take tea in! so curiously has latter-day
+guidemanship interpreted the jolly purpose expressed by the Duke to
+Giulio. I say nothing to control the reader's choice between T and Tè,
+and merely adhere to the elder style out of reverence for the past.
+It is certain that the air of the plain on which the palace stands
+is most unwholesome; and it may have been true that the dukes never
+passed the night there. Federico did not intend to build more than
+a lodge in this place; but fascinated with the design offered him
+by Giulio, he caused the artist to go on, and contrive him a palace
+instead. It stands, as Vasari says, about a good bow-shot from one of
+the city's gates; and going out to see the palace on our second day
+in Mantua, we crossed a drawbridge guarded by Austrian soldiers. Below
+languished a bed of sullen ooze, tangled and thickly grown with long,
+villainous grasses, and sending up a damp and deathly stench, which
+made all the faces we saw look feverish and sallow. Already at that
+early season the air was foul and heavy, and the sun, faintly making
+himself seen through the dun sky of the dull spring day, seemed sick
+to look upon the place, where indeed the only happy and lively things
+were the clouds of gnats that danced before us, and welcomed us to the
+Palazzo del T. Damp ditches surround the palace, in which these gnats
+seemed to have peculiar pleasure; and they took possession of the
+portico of the stately entrance of the edifice as we went in, and held
+it faithfully till we returned.
+
+In one of the first large rooms are the life-size portraits of the
+six finest horses of the Gonzaga stud, painted by the pupils of Giulio
+Romano, after the master's designs. The paintings attest the beauty of
+the Mantuan horses, and the pride and fondness of their ducal owners;
+and trustworthy critics have praised their eminent truth. But it is
+only the artist or the hippanthrop who can delight in them long; and
+we presently left them for the other chambers, in which the invention
+of Giulio had been used to please himself rather than his master.
+I scarcely mean to name the wonders of the palace, having, indeed,
+general associations with them, rather than particular recollections
+of them.
+
+One of the most famous rooms is the Chamber of Psyche (the apartments
+are not of great size), of which the ceiling is by Giulio and the
+walls are by his pupils. The whole illustrates, with every variety
+of fantastic invention, the story of Psyche, as told by Apuleius, and
+deserves to be curiously studied as a part of the fair outside of a
+superb and corrupt age, the inside of which was full of rottenness.
+The civilization of Italy, as a growth from the earliest Pagan times,
+and only modified by Christianity and the admixture of Northern blood
+and thought, is yet to be carefully analyzed; and until this analysis
+is made, discussion of certain features must necessarily be incomplete
+and unsatisfactory. No one, however, can stand in this Chamber of
+Psyche, and not feel how great reality the old mythology must still
+have had, not only for the artists who painted the room, but for
+the people who inhabited it and enjoyed it. I do not say that they
+believed it as they believed in the vital articles of Christian faith,
+but that they accepted it with the same spirit as they accepted the
+martyrology of the Church; and that to the fine gentlemen and ladies
+of the court, those jolly satyrs and careless nymphs, those Cupids
+and Psyches, and Dianas and Venuses, were of the same verity as the
+Fathers of the Desert, the Devil, and the great body of the saints.
+If they did not pray to them, they swore by them, and their names were
+much oftener on their lips; and the art of the time was so thoroughly
+Pagan, that it forgot all Christian holiness, and clung only to
+heathen beauty. When it had not actually a mythologic subject to deal
+with, it paganized Christian themes. St. Sebastian was made to look
+like Apollo, and Mary Magdalene was merely a tearful, triste Venus.
+There is scarcely a ray of feeling in Italian art since Raphael's
+time which suggests Christianity in the artist, or teaches it to the
+beholder. In confessedly Pagan subjects it was happiest, as in
+the life of Psyche, in this room; and here it inculcated a gay and
+spirited license, and an elegant absence of delicacy, which is still
+observable in Italian life. It would be instructive to know in what
+spirit the common Mantuans of his day looked upon the inventions of
+the painter, and how far the courtly circle which frequented this room
+went in discussion and comment on its subjects; they were not
+nice people, and probably had no nasty ideas about the unspeakable
+indecency of some of the scenes. [The ruin in the famous room frescoed
+with the Fall of the Giants commences on the very door-jambs, which
+are painted in broken and tumbling brick-work; and throughout there is
+a prodigiousness which does not surprise, and a bigness which does not
+impress; and the treatment of the subject can only be expressed by
+the Westernism _powerfully weak_. In Kugler's _Hand-book of Italian
+Painting_ are two illustrations, representing parts of the fresco,
+which give a fair idea of the whole.]
+
+Returning to the city we visited the house of Giulio Romano, which
+stands in one of the fine, lonesome streets, and at the outside
+of which we looked. The artist designed it himself; and it is very
+pretty, with delicacy of feeling in the fine stucco ornamentation, but
+is not otherwise interesting.
+
+We passed it, continuing our way toward the Arsenal, near which we had
+seen the women at work washing the linen coats of the garrison in the
+twilight of the evening before; and we now saw them again from the
+bridge, on which we paused to look at a picturesque bit of modern
+life in Mantua. The washing-machine (when the successful instrument
+is invented) may do its work as well, but not so charmingly, as these
+Mantuan girls did. They washed the linen in a clear, swift-running
+stream, diverted from the dam of the Mincio to furnish mill-power
+within the city wall; and we could look down the watercourse past
+old arcades of masonry half submerged in it, past pleasant angles of
+houses and a lazy mill-wheel turning slowly, slowly, till our view
+ended in the gallery of a time-worn palace, through the columns of
+which was seen the blue sky. Under the bridge the stream ran very
+strong and lucid, over long, green, undulating water-grasses, which it
+loved to dimple over and play with. On the right were the laundresses
+under the eaves of a wooden shed, each kneeling, as their custom is,
+in a three-sided box, and leaning forward over the washboard that
+sloped down into the water. As they washed they held the linen in one
+hand, and rubbed it with the other; then heaped it into a mass upon
+the board and beat it with great two-handed blows of a stick. They
+sang, meanwhile, one of those plaintive airs of which the Italian
+peasants are fond, and which rose in indescribable pathos, pulsing
+with their blows, and rhythmic with the graceful movement of their
+forms. Many of the women were young,--though they were of all
+ages,--and the prettiest among them was third from where we stood
+upon the bridge. She caught sight of the sketch-book which one of the
+travellers carried, and pointed it out to the rest, who could hardly
+settle to their work to be sketched. Presently an idle baker, whose
+shop adjoined the bridge, came out and leaned upon the parapet, and
+bantered the girls. "They are drawing the prettiest," he said, at
+which they all bridled a little; and she who knew herself to be
+prettiest hung her head and rubbed furiously at the linen. Long before
+the artist had finished the sketch, the lazy, good-humored crowd which
+the public practice of the fine arts always attract in Italy, had
+surrounded the strangers, and were applauding, commenting, comparing,
+and absorbing every stroke as it was made. When the book was closed
+and they walked away, a number of boys straggled after them some
+spaces, inspired by a curious longing and regret, like that which
+leads boys to the eager inspection of fireworks when they have gone
+out. We lost them at the first turning of the street, whither the
+melancholy chorus of the women's song had also followed us, and where
+it died pathetically away.
+
+In the evening we walked to the Piazza Virgiliana, the beautiful space
+laid out and planted with trees by the French, at the beginning of
+this century in honor of the great Mantuan poet. One of its bounds is
+the shore of the lake which surrounds the city, and from which now
+rose ghostly vapors on the still twilight air. Down the slow, dull
+current moved one of the picturesque black boats of the Po; and
+beyond, the level landscape had a pleasant desolation that recalled
+the scenery of the Middle Mississippi. It might have been here in this
+very water that the first-born of our first Duke of Mantua fell from
+his boat while hunting water-fowl in 1550, and took a fever of which
+he died only a short time after his accession to the sovereignty of
+the duchy. At any rate, the fact of the accident brings me back from
+lounging up and down Mantua to my grave duty of chronicler.
+Francesco's father had left him in childhood to the care of his uncle,
+the Cardinal Hercules, who ruled Mantua with a firm and able hand,
+increasing the income of the state, spending less upon the ducal stud,
+and cutting down the number of mouths at the ducal table from eight
+hundred to three hundred and fifty-one. His justice tended to severity
+rather than mercy; but reformers of our own time will argue well of
+his heart, that he founded in that time a place of refuge and
+retirement for abandoned women. Good Catholics will also be pleased to
+know that he was very efficient in suppressing the black heresy of
+Calvin, which had crept into Mantua in his day,--probably from
+Ferrara, where the black heretic himself was then, or about then, in
+hiding under the protection of the ill-advised Marchioness Renée. The
+good Cardinal received the Pope's applause for his energy in this
+matter, and I doubt not his hand fell heavily on the Calvinists. Of
+the Duke who died so young, the Venetian ambassador thought it worth
+while to write what I think it worth while to quote, as illustrating
+the desire of the Senate to have careful knowledge of its neighbors:
+"He is a boy of melancholy complexion. His eyes are full of spirit,
+but he does not delight in childish things, and seems secretly proud
+of being lord. He has an excellent memory, and shows much inclination
+for letters."
+
+His brother Guglielmo, who succeeded him in 1550, seems to have
+had the same affection for learning; but he was willful, harsh, and
+cruelly ambitious, and cared, an old writer says, for nothing so
+much as perpetuating the race of the Gonzagas in Mantua. He was a
+hunchback, and some of his family (who could not have understood his
+character) tried to persuade him not to assume the ducal dignity; but
+his haughty temper soon righted him in their esteem, and it is said
+that all the courtiers put on humps in honor of the Duke. He was not
+a great warrior, and there are few picturesque incidents in his reign.
+Indeed, nearly the last of these in Mantuan history was the coronation
+at Mantua of the excellent poet Lodovico Ariosto, by Charles V., in
+1532, Federico II. reigning. But the Mantuans of Guglielmo's day were
+not without their sensations, for three Japanese ambassadors passed
+through their city on the way to Rome. They were also awakened to
+religious zeal by the reappearance of Protestantism among them. The
+heresy was happily suppressed by the Inquisition, acting under Pius
+V., though with small thanks to Duke William, who seems to have taken
+no fervent part in the persecutions. "The proceedings," says Cantù,
+writing before slavery had been abolished, "were marked by those
+punishments which free America inflicts upon the negroes to-day,
+and which a high conception of the mission of the Church moves us
+to deplore." The Duke must have made haste after this to reconcile
+himself with the Church; for we read that two years later he was
+permitted to take a particle of the blood of Christ from the church of
+St. Andrea to that of Sta. Barbara, where he deposited it in a box of
+crystal and gold, and caused his statue to be placed before the shrine
+in the act of adoring the relic.
+
+Duke William managed his finances so well as to leave his spendthrift
+son Vincenzo a large sum of money to make away with after his death.
+Part of this, indeed, he had earned by obedience to his father's
+wishes in the article of matrimony. The prince was in love with the
+niece of the Duke of Bavaria, very lovely and certainly high-born
+enough, but having unhappily only sixty thousand crowns to her
+portion. So she was not to be thought of, and Vincenzo married the
+sister of the Duke of Parma, of whom he grew so fond, that, though
+two years of marriage brought them no children, he could scarce
+be persuaded to suffer her divorce on account of sterility. This
+happened, however, and the prince's affections were next engaged by
+the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The lady had a portion
+of three hundred thousand crowns, which entirely charmed the
+frugal-minded Duke William, and Vincenzo married her, after certain
+diplomatic preliminaries demanded by the circumstances, which scarcely
+bear statement in English, and which the present history would blush
+to give even in Italian.
+
+Indeed, he was a great beast, this splendid Vincenzo, both by his own
+fault and that of others; but it ought to be remembered of him, that
+at his solicitation the most clement lord of Ferrara liberated from
+durance in the hospital of St. Anna his poet Tasso, whom he had kept
+shut in that mad-house seven years. On his delivery, Tasso addressed
+his "Discorso" to Vincenzo's kinsman, the learned Cardinal Scipio
+Gonzaga; and to this prelate he submitted for correction the
+"Gerusalemme," as did Guarini his "Pastor Fido."
+
+When Vincenzo came to power he found a fat treasury, which he enjoyed
+after the fashion of the time, and which, having a princely passion
+for every costly pleasure, he soon emptied. He was crowned in 1587;
+and on his coronation day rode through the streets throwing gold to
+the people, after the manner of the Mantuan Dukes. He kept up an army
+of six thousand men, among a population of eighty thousand all told;
+and maintained as his guard "fifty archers on horseback, who also
+served with the arquebuse, and fifty light-horsemen for the guard of
+his own person, who were all excellently mounted, the Duke possessing
+such a noble stud of horses that he always had five hundred at
+his service, and kept in stable one hundred and fifty of marvelous
+beauty." He lent the Spanish king two hundred thousand pounds out
+of his father's sparings; and when the Archduchess of Austria,
+Margherita, passed through Mantua on her way to wed Philip II. of
+Spain, he gave her a diamond ring worth twelve thousand crowns. Next
+after women, he was madly fond of the theatre, and spent immense sums
+for actors. He would not, indeed, cede in splendor to the greatest
+monarchs, and in his reign of fifteen years he squandered fifty
+million crowns! No one will be surprised to learn from a contemporary
+writer in Mantua, that this excellent prince was adorned with all
+the Christian virtues; nor to be told by a later historian, that in
+Vincenzo's time Mantua was the most corrupt city in Europe. A satire
+of the year 1601, which this writer (Maffei) reduces to prose, says
+of that period: "Everywhere in Mantua are seen feasts, jousts, masks,
+banquets, plays, music, balls, delights, dancing. To these, the
+young girls," an enormity in Italy, "as well as the matrons, go in
+magnificent dresses; and even the churches are scenes of love-making.
+Good mothers, instead of teaching their daughters the use of the
+needle, teach them the arts of rouging, dressing, singing, and
+dancing. Naples and Milan scarcely produce silk enough, or India and
+Peru gold and gems enough, to deck out female impudence and pride.
+Courtiers and warriors perfume themselves as delicately as ladies;
+and even the food is scented, that the mouth may exhale fragrance.
+The galleries and halls of the houses are painted full of the loves
+of Mars and Venus, Leda and the Swan, Jove and Danae, while the
+devout solace themselves with such sacred subjects as Susannah and the
+Elders. The flower of chastity seems withered in Mantua. No longer in
+Lydia nor in Cyprus, but in Mantua, is fixed the realm of pleasure."
+The Mantuans were a different people in the old republican times, when
+a fine was imposed for blasphemy, and the blasphemer put into a basket
+and drowned in the lake, if he did not pay within fifteen days; which
+must have made profanity a luxury even to the rich. But in that day
+a man had to pay twenty soldi (seventy-five cents) if he spoke to
+a woman in church; and women were not allowed even the moderate
+diversion of going to funerals, and could not wear silk lace about the
+neck, nor have dresses that dragged more than a yard, nor crowns of
+pearls or gems, nor belts worth more than ten livres (twenty-five
+dollars), nor purses worth more than fifteen soldi (fifty cents.)
+
+Possibly as an antidote for the corruption brought into the world with
+Vincenzo, there was another Gonzaga born about the same period, who
+became in due time Saint Louis Gonzaga, and remains to this day one of
+the most powerful friends of virtue to whom a good Catholic can pray.
+He is particularly recommended by his biographer, the Jesuit Father
+Cesari, in cases of carnal temptation, and improving stories are told
+Italian youth of the miracles he works under such circumstances. He
+vowed chastity for his own part at an age when most children do not
+know good from evil, and he carried the fulfillment of this vow to
+such extreme, that, being one day at play of forfeits with other
+boys and girls, and being required to kiss--not one of the little
+maidens--but her _shadow_ on the wall, he would not, preferring to
+lose his pawn. Everybody, I think, will agree with Father Cesari that
+it would be hard to draw chastity finer than this.
+
+San Luigi Gonzaga descended from that Ridolfo who put his wife to
+death, and his father was Marquis of Castiglione delle Stivere. He was
+born in 1568, and, being the first son, was heir to the marquisate;
+but from his earliest years he had a call to the Church. His family
+did everything possible to dissuade him--his father with harshness,
+and his uncle, Duke William of Mantua, with tenderness--from his
+vocation. The latter even sent a "bishop of rare eloquence" to labor
+with the boy at Castiglione; but everything was done in vain. In due
+time Luigi joined the Company of Jesus, renounced this world, and
+died at Rome in the odor of sanctity, after doing such good works as
+surprised every one. His brother Ridolfo succeeded to the marquisate,
+and fell into a quarrel with Duke William about lands, which dispute
+Luigi composed before his death. About all which the reverend Jesuit
+Father Tolomei has shown how far heaviness can go in the dramatic
+form, and has written a pitiless play, wherein everybody goes into a
+convent with the fall of the curtain. Till the reader has read this
+play, he has never (properly speaking) been bored. For the happiness
+of mankind, it has not been translated out of the original Italian.
+
+From the time of the first Vincenzo's death, there are only two tragic
+events which lift the character of Mantuan history above the quality
+of _chronique scandaleuse_, namely, the Duke Ferdinand's repudiation
+of Camilla Faa di Casale, and the sack of Mantua in 1630. The first of
+these events followed close upon the demise of the splendid Vincenzo;
+for his son Francesco reigned but a short time, and died, leaving a
+little daughter of three years to the guardianship of her uncle,
+the Cardinal Ferdinand. The law of the Mantuan succession excluded
+females; and Ferdinand, dispensed from his ecclesiastical functions
+by the Pope, ascended the ducal throne. In 1615, not long after his
+accession, as the chronicles relate, in passing through a chamber
+of the palace he saw a young girl playing upon a cithern, and being
+himself young, and of the ardent temper of the Gonzagas, he fell in
+love with the fair minstrel. She was the daughter of a noble servant
+of the Duke, who had once been his ambassador to the court of the Duke
+of Savoy, and was called Count Ardizzo Faa Monferrino di Casale; but
+his Grace did not on that account hesitate to attempt corrupting her;
+indeed, a courtly father of that day might well be supposed to have
+few scruples that would interfere with a gracious sovereign's designs
+upon his daughter. Singularly enough, the chastity of Camilla was
+so well guarded that the ex-cardinal was at last forced to propose
+marriage. It seems that the poor girl loved her ducal wooer; and
+besides, the ducal crown was a glittering temptation, and she
+consented to a marriage which, for state and family reasons, was made
+secret. When the fact was bruited, it raised the wrath and ridicule
+of Ferdinand's family, and the Duke's sister Margaret, Duchess of
+Ferrara, had so lofty a disdain of his _mésalliance_ with an inferior,
+that she drove him to desperation with her sarcasms. About this time
+Camilla's father died, with strong evidences of poisoning; and the
+wife being left helpless and friendless, her noble husband resorted to
+the artifice of feigning that there had never been any marriage, and
+thus sought to appease his family. Unhappily, however, he had given
+her a certificate of matrimony, which she refused to surrender when
+he put her away, so that the Duke, desiring afterwards to espouse
+the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was obliged to present
+a counterfeit certificate to his bride, who believed it the real
+marriage contract, and destroyed it. When the Duchess discovered the
+imposition, she would not rest till she had wrung the real document
+from Camilla, under the threat of putting her son to death. The
+miserable mother then retired to a convent, and died of a broken
+heart, while Ferdinand bastardized his only legitimate son, a noble
+boy, whom his mother had prettily called Jacinth. After this, a
+kind of retribution, amid all his political successes, seems to have
+pursued the guilty Duke. His second wife was too fat to bear children,
+but not to bear malice; and she never ceased to distrust and reproach
+the Duke, whom she could not believe in anything since the affair
+of the counterfeit marriage contract. She was very religious, and
+embittered Ferdinand's days with continued sermons and reproofs,
+and made him order, in the merry Mantuan court, all the devotions
+commanded by her confessor.
+
+So Ferdinand died childless, and, it is said, in sore remorse, and was
+succeeded in 1626 by his brother Vincenzo, another hope of the faith
+and light of the Church. His brief reign lasted but one year, and
+was ignoble as it was brief, and fitly ended the direct line of the
+Gonzagas. Vincenzo, though an ecclesiastic, never studied anything,
+and was disgracefully ignorant. Lacking the hereditary love of
+letters, he had not the warlike boldness of his race; and resembled
+his ancestors only in the love he bore to horses, hunting, and women.
+He was enamored of the widow of one of his kinsmen, a woman no longer
+young, but of still agreeable person, strong will, and quick wit,
+and of a fascinating presence, which Vincenzo could not resist. The
+excellent prince was wooing her, with a view to seduction, when he
+received the nomination of cardinal from Pope Paul V. He pressed his
+suit, but the lady would consent to nothing but marriage, and Vincenzo
+bundled up the cardinal's purple and sent it back, with a very
+careless and ill-mannered letter to the ireful Pope, who swore never
+to make another Gonzaga cardinal. He then married the widow, but soon
+wearied of her, and spent the rest of his days in vain attempts
+to secure a divorce, in order to be restored to his ecclesiastical
+benefices. And one Christmas morning _he_ died childless; and three
+years later the famous sack of Mantua took place. The events leading
+to this crime are part of one of the most complicated episodes of
+Italian history.
+
+Ferdinand, as guardian of his brother's daughter Maria, claimed
+the Duchy of Monferrato as part of his dominion; but his claim was
+disputed by Maria's grandfather, the Duke of Savoy, who contended that
+it reverted to him, on the death of his daughter, as a fief which had
+been added to Mantua merely by the intermarriage of the Gonzagas with
+his family. He was supported in this claim by the Spaniards, then at
+Milan. The Venetians and the German Emperor supported Ferdinand, and
+the French advanced the claim of a third, a descendant of Lodovico
+Gonzaga, who had left Mantua a century before, and entered upon the
+inheritance of the Duchy of Nevers-Rethel. The Duke of Savoy was one
+of the boldest of his warlike race; and the Italians had great hopes
+of him as one great enough to drive the barbarians out of Italy. But
+nearly three centuries more were wanted to raise his family to the
+magnitude of a national purpose; and Carlo Emanuel spent his greatness
+in disputes with the petty princes about him. In this dispute for
+Monferrato he was worsted; for at the treaty of Pavia, Monferrato was
+assured to Duke Ferdinand of Mantua.
+
+Ferdinand afterwards died without issue, and Vincenzo likewise died
+childless; and Charles Gonzaga of Nevers-Rethel, who had married
+Maria, Ferdinand's ward, became heir to the Duchy of Mantua, but his
+right was disputed by Ferrante Gonzaga of Guastalla. Charles hurriedly
+and half secretly introduced himself into Mantua without consultation
+with Venetian, Spaniard, or German. While Duke Olivares of Spain was
+meditating his recognition, his officer at Milan tried to seize Mantua
+and failed; but the German Emperor had been even more deeply offended,
+and claimed the remission of Charles's rights as a feudatory of the
+Roman Empire, until he should have regularly invested him. Charles
+prepared for defense. Meanwhile Spain and Savoy seized Monferrato, but
+they were afterwards defeated by the French, and the Spanish Milanese
+was overrun by the Venetians and Mantuans. The German Emperor then
+sent down his Landsknechts, and in 1630 besieged Mantua, while the
+French promised help and gave none, and the Pope exhorted Charles
+to submit. The Venetians, occupied with the Uskok pirates, could do
+little in his defense. To the horrors of this unequal and desperate
+war were added those of famine; and the Jews, passing between the camp
+and the city, brought a pest from the army into Mantua, which raged
+with extraordinary violence among the hungry and miserable people. In
+vain they formed processions, and carried the blood of Christ about
+the city. So many died that there were not boats enough to bear them
+away to their sepulture in the lakes, and the bodies rotted in the
+streets. There was not wanting at this time the presence of a traitor
+in the devoted city; and that this wretch was a Swiss will be a
+matter of no surprise. The despicable valor of these republicans has
+everywhere formed the best defense of tyrants, and their fidelity has
+always been at the service of the highest bidder. The recreant was
+a lieutenant in the Swiss Guard of the Duke; and when he had led the
+Germans into Mantua, and received the reward of his infamy, two German
+soldiers, placed over him for his protection, killed him and plundered
+him of his spoil.
+
+The sack now began, and lasted three days, with unspeakable horrors.
+The Germans (then the most slavish and merciless of soldiers) violated
+Mantuan women, and buried their victims alive. The harlots of their
+camp cast off their rags, and robing themselves in the richest spoils
+they could find, rioted with brutal insult through the streets, and
+added the shame of drunken orgies to the dreadful scene of blood and
+tears. The Jews were driven forth almost naked from the Ghetto. The
+precious monuments of ages were destroyed; or such as the fury of the
+soldiers spared, the avarice of their generals consumed; and pictures,
+statues, and other works of art were stolen and carried away. The
+churches were plundered, the sacred houses of religion were sacked,
+and the nuns who did not meet a worse fate went begging through the
+streets.
+
+The imperial general, Aldringher, had, immediately upon entering the
+city, appropriated the Ducal Palace to himself as his share of the
+booty. He placed a strong guard around it, and spoiled it at leisure
+and systematically, and gained fabulous sums from the robbery. After
+the sack was ended, he levied upon the population (from whom his
+soldiers had forced everything that terror and torture could wring
+from them) four contributions, amounting to a hundred thousand
+doubloons. This population had, during the siege and sack, been
+reduced from thirty to twelve thousand; and Aldringher had so
+thoroughly accomplished his part of the spoliation, that the Duke
+Charles, returning after the withdrawal of the Germans, could not find
+in the Ducal Palace so much as a bench to sit upon. He and his family
+had fled half naked from their beds on the entry of the Germans, and,
+after a pause in the citadel, had withdrawn to Ariano, whence the
+Duke sent ambassadors to Vienna to expose his miserable fate to
+the Emperor. The conduct of Aldringher was severely rebuked at the
+capital; and the Empress sent Carlo's wife ten thousand zecchini, with
+which they returned at length to Mantua. It is melancholy to read how
+his neighbors had to compassionate his destitution: how the Grand Duke
+of Tuscany sent him upholstery for two state chambers; how the Duke
+of Parma supplied his table-service; how Alfonso of Modena gave him
+a hundred pairs of oxen, and as many peasants to till his desolated
+lands. His people always looked upon him with evil eyes, as the cause
+of their woes; and after a reign of ten years he died of a broken
+heart, or, as some thought, of poison.
+
+Carlo had appointed as his successor his nephew and namesake, who
+succeeded to the throne ten years after his uncle's death, the
+princess Maria Gonzaga being regent during his minority. Carlo II.
+early manifested the amorous disposition of his blood, but his
+reign was not distinguished by remarkable events. He was of imperial
+politics during those interminable French-Austrian wars, and the
+French desolated his dominions more or less. In the time of this
+Carlo II., we read of the Jews being condemned to pay the wages of
+the Duke's archers for the extremely improbable crime of killing some
+Hebrews who had been converted; and there is account of the Duchess
+going on foot to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Grace, to render thanks
+for her son's recovery from a fever, and her daughter's recovery from
+the bite of a monkey. Mantua must also have regained something of its
+former gayety; for in 1652 the Austrian Archdukes and the Medici spent
+Carnival there. Carlo II. died, like his father, with suspicions of
+poisoning, and undoubted evidences of debauchery. He was a generous
+and amiable prince; and, though a shameless profligate, was beloved by
+his subjects, with whom, no doubt, his profligacy was not a reproach.
+
+Ferdinand Carlo, whose ignoble reign lasted from 1665 to 1708, was
+the last and basest of his race. The histories of his country do not
+attribute a single virtue to this unhappy prince, who seems to have
+united in himself all the vices of all the Gonzagas. He was licentious
+and depraved as the first Vincenzo, and he had not Vincenzo's
+courage; he was luxurious as the second Francesco, but had none of
+his generosity; he taxed his people heavily that he might meanly enjoy
+their substance without making them even the poor return of national
+glory; he was grasping as Guglielmo, but saved nothing to the state;
+he was as timid as the second Vincenzo, and yet made a feint of making
+war, and went to Hungary at one time to fight against the Turk. But he
+loved far better to go to Venice in his gilded barge, and to spend his
+Carnivals amid the infinite variety of that city's dissoluteness. He
+was so ignorant as scarcely to be able to write his name; but he knew
+all vicious things from his cradle, as if, indeed, he had been gifted
+to know them by instinct through the profligacy of his parents. It is
+said that even the degraded Mantuans blushed to be ruled by so dull
+and ignorant a wretch; but in his time, nevertheless, Mantua was all
+rejoicings, promenades, pleasure-voyages, and merry-makings. "The
+Duke recruited women from every country to stock his palace," says an
+Italian author, "where they played, sang, and made merry at his will
+and theirs." "In Venice," says Volta, "he surrendered himself to such
+diversions without shame, or stint of expense. He not only took part
+in all public entertainments and pleasures of that capital, but he
+held a most luxurious and gallant court of his own; and all night long
+his palace was the scene of theatrical representations by dissolute
+women, with music and banqueting, so that he had a worse name than
+Sardanapalus of old." He sneaked away to these gross delights in 1700,
+while the Emperor was at war with the Spaniards, and left his Duchess
+(a brave and noble woman, the daughter of Ferrante Gonzaga, Duke of
+Guastalla) to take care of the duchy, then in great part occupied by
+Spanish and French forces. This was the War of the Spanish Succession;
+and it used up poor Ferdinand, who had not a shadow of interest in
+it. He had sold the fortress of Casale to the French in 1681, feigning
+that they had taken it from him by fraud: and now he declared that
+he was forced to admit eight thousand French and Spanish troops into
+Mantua. Perhaps indeed he was, but the Emperor never would believe it;
+and he pronounced Ferdinand guilty of felony against the Empire, and
+deposed him from his duchy. The Duke appealed against this sentence to
+the Diet of Ratisbon, and, pending the Diet's decision, made a journey
+of pleasure to France, where the Grand Monarch named him generalissimo
+of the French forces in Italy, though he never commanded them. He
+came back to Mantua after a little, and built himself a splendid
+theatre,--the cheerful Duke.
+
+But his end was near. The French and Austrians made peace in 1707; and
+next year, Monferrato having fallen to Savoy, the Austrians entered
+Mantua, whence the Duke promptly fled. The Austrians marched into
+Mantua on the 29th of February, that being leap-year, and Ferdinand
+came back no more. Indeed, trusting in false hopes of restoration
+held out to him by Venice and France, he died on the 5th of the July
+following, at Padua,--it was said by poison, but more probably of sin
+and sorrow. So ended Ducal Mantua.
+
+The Austrians held the city till 1797. The French Revolution took
+it and kept it till 1799, and then left it to the Austrians for two
+years. Then the Cisalpine Republic possessed it till 1802; and then it
+was made part of the Kingdom of Italy, and so continued twelve years;
+after which it fell again to Austria. In 1848, there was a revolution,
+and the Austrian soldiers stole the precious silver case that held
+the phial of the true blood. Now at last it belongs to the Kingdom
+of Italy, with the other forts of the Quadrilateral--thanks to the
+Prussian needle-gun.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Italian Journeys, by William Dean Howells
+
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+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Italian Journeys, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Italian Journeys
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: December 6, 2004 [EBook #14276]
+Last Updated: August 26, 2018
+
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ITALIAN JOURNEYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Etext produced by Ted Garvin, Carla Kruger and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+HTML file produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      ITALIAN JOURNEYS
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By W.D. Howells
+    </h2>
+    <h4>
+      1867 and 1895
+    </h4>
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <b>THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE.</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> I.&mdash;LEAVING VENICE. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> II.&mdash;FROM PADUA TO FERRARA. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> III.&mdash;THE PICTURESQUE, THE IMPROBABLE, AND
+      THE PATHETIC IN FERRARA. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> I. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> II. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> III. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> IV. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> V. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> VI. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> VII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> IV.&mdash;THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> V.&mdash;UP AND DOWN GENOA. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> VI.&mdash;BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> VII.&mdash;CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> VIII.&mdash;A DAY IN POMPEII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> IX.&mdash;A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> X.&mdash;CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> XI.&mdash;THE PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT
+      NAPLES. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> XII.&mdash;BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> XIII.&mdash;ROMAN PEARLS. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> FORZA MAGGIORE. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> AT PADUA </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUÀ. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> <b>MINOR TRAVELS.</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> I.&mdash;PISA. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> II.&mdash;THE FERRARA ROAD. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0029"> III.&mdash;TRIESTE. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0030"> IV.&mdash;BASSANO. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0031"> V.&mdash;POSSAGNO, CANOVA'S BIRTHPLACE. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0032"> VI.&mdash;COMO. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0033"> STOPPING AT VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0034"> DUCAL MANTUA. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.&mdash;LEAVING VENICE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We did not know, when we started from home in Venice, on the 8th of
+      November, 1864, that we had taken the longest road to Rome. We thought
+      that of all the proverbial paths to the Eternal City that leading to
+      Padua, and thence through Ferrara and Bologna to Florence, and so down the
+      sea-shore from Leghorn to Civita Vecchia, was the best, the briefest, and
+      the cheapest. Who could have dreamed that this path, so wisely and
+      carefully chosen, would lead us to Genoa, conduct us on shipboard, toss us
+      four dizzy days and nights, and set us down, void, battered, and
+      bewildered, in Naples? Luckily,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "The moving accident is not my trade,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      for there are events of this journey (now happily at an end) which, if I
+      recounted them with unsparing sincerity, would forever deter the reader
+      from taking any road to Rome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though, indeed, what is Rome, after all, when you come to it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.&mdash;FROM PADUA TO FERRARA.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As far as to Ferrara there was no sign of deviation from the direct line
+      in our road, and the company was well enough. We had a Swiss family in the
+      car with us to Padua, and they told us how they were going home to their
+      mountains from Russia, where they had spent nineteen years of their lives.
+      They were mother and father and only daughter and the last, without ever
+      having seen her ancestral country, was so Swiss in her yet childish
+      beauty, that she filled the morning twilight with vague images of glacial
+      height, blue lake, snug chalet, and whatever else of picturesque there is
+      in paint and print about Switzerland. Of course, as the light grew
+      brighter these images melted away, and left only a little frost upon the
+      window-pane.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mother was restively anxious at nearing her country, and told us every
+      thing of its loveliness and happiness. Nineteen years of absence had not
+      robbed it of the poorest charm, and I hope that seeing it again took
+      nothing from it. We said how glad we should be if we were as near America
+      as she was to Switzerland. "America!" she screamed; "you come from
+      America! Dear God, the world is wide&mdash;the world is wide!" The thought
+      was so paralyzing that it silenced the fat little lady for a moment, and
+      gave her husband time to express his sympathy with us in our war, which he
+      understood perfectly well. He trusted that the revolution to perpetuate
+      slavery must fail, and he hoped that the war would soon end, for it made
+      cotton very dear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Europe is material: I doubt if, after Victor Hugo and Garibaldi, there
+      were many upon that continent whose enthusiasm for American unity (which
+      is European freedom) was not somewhat chilled by the expensiveness of
+      cotton. The fabrics were all doubled in price, and every man in Europe
+      paid tribute in hard money to the devotion with which we prosecuted the
+      war, and, incidentally, interrupted the cultivation of cotton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We shook hands with our friends, and dismounted at Padua, where we were to
+      take the diligence for the Po. In the diligence their loss was more than
+      made good by the company of the only honest man in Italy. Of course this
+      honest man had been a great sufferer from his own countrymen, and I wish
+      that all English and American tourists, who think themselves the sole
+      victims of publican rapacity and deceit in Italy, could have heard our
+      honest man's talk. The truth is, these ingenious people prey upon their
+      own kind with an avidity quite as keen as that with which they devour
+      strangers; and I am half-persuaded that a ready-witted foreigner fares
+      better among them than a traveller of their own nation. Italians will
+      always pretend, on any occasion, that you have been plundered much worse
+      than they but the reverse often happens. They give little in fees; but
+      their landlord, their porter, their driver, and their boatman pillage them
+      with the same impunity that they rob an Inglese. As for this honest man in
+      the diligence, he had suffered such enormities at the hands of the
+      Paduans, from which we had just escaped, and at the hands of the
+      Ferrarese, into which we were rushing (at the rate of five miles scant an
+      hour), that I was almost minded to stop between the nests of those
+      brigands and pass the rest of my days at Rovigo, where the honest man
+      lived. His talk was amusingly instructive, and went to illustrate the
+      strong municipal spirit which still dominates all Italy, and which is more
+      inimical to an effectual unity among Italians than Pope or Kaiser has ever
+      been. Our honest man of Rovigo was a foreigner at Padua, twenty-five miles
+      north, and a foreigner at Ferrara, twenty-five miles south; and throughout
+      Italy the native of one city is an alien in another, and is as lawful prey
+      as a Russian or an American with people who consider every stranger as
+      sent them by the bounty of Providence to be eaten alive. Heaven knows what
+      our honest man had paid at his hotel in Padua, but in Ferrara the other
+      week he had been made to give five francs apiece for two small roast
+      chickens, besides a fee to the waiter; and he pathetically warned us to
+      beware how we dealt with Italians. Indeed, I never met a man so thoroughly
+      persuaded of the rascality of his nation and of his own exceptional
+      virtue. He took snuff with his whole person; and he volunteered, at sight
+      of a flock of geese, a recipe which I give the reader: Stuff a goose with
+      sausage; let it hang in the weather during the winter; and in the spring
+      cut it up and stew it, and you have an excellent and delicate soup.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But after all our friend's talk, though constant, became dispiriting, and
+      we were willing when he left us. His integrity had, indeed, been so
+      oppressive that I was glad to be swindled in the charge for our dinner at
+      the Iron Crown, in Rovigo, and rode more cheerfully on to Ferrara.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.&mdash;THE PICTURESQUE, THE IMPROBABLE, AND THE PATHETIC IN FERRARA.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was one of the fatalities of travel, rather than any real interest in
+      the poet, which led me to visit the prison of Tasso on the night of our
+      arrival, which was mild and moonlit. The <i>portier</i> at the Stella
+      d'Oro suggested the sentimental homage to sorrows which it is sometimes
+      difficult to respect, and I went and paid this homage in the coal-cellar
+      in which was never imprisoned the poet whose works I had not read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The famous hospital of St. Anna, where Tasso was confined for seven years,
+      is still an asylum for the infirm and sick, but it is no longer used as a
+      mad-house. It stands on one of the lone, silent Ferrarese streets, not far
+      from the Ducal Castle, and it is said that from the window of his cell the
+      unhappy poet could behold Leonora in her tower. It may be so; certainly
+      those who can believe in the genuineness of the cell will have no trouble
+      in believing that the vision of Tasso could pierce through several brick
+      walls and a Doric portico, and at last comprehend the lady at her casement
+      in the castle. We entered a modern gateway, and passed into a hall of the
+      elder edifice, where a slim young soldier sat reading a romance of Dumas.
+      This was the keeper of Tasso's prison; and knowing me, by the instinct
+      which teaches an Italian custodian to distinguish his prey, for a seeker
+      after the True and Beautiful, he relinquished his romance, lighted a waxen
+      taper, unbolted a heavy door with a dramatic clang, and preceded me to the
+      cell of Tasso. We descended a little stairway, and found ourselves in a
+      sufficiently spacious court, which was still ampler in the poet's time,
+      and was then a garden planted with trees and flowers. On a low doorway to
+      the right was inscribed the legend "PRIGIONE DI TASSO," and passing
+      through this doorway into a kind of reception-cell, we entered the poet's
+      dungeon. It is an oblong room, with a low wagon-roof ceiling, under which
+      it is barely possible to stand upright. A single narrow window admits the
+      light, and the stone casing of this window has a hollow in a certain
+      place, which might well have been worn there by the friction of the hand
+      that for seven years passed the prisoner his food through the small
+      opening. The young custodian pointed to this memento of suffering, without
+      effusion, and he drew my attention to other remarkable things in the cell,
+      without troubling himself to palliate their improbability in the least.
+      They were his stock in trade; you paid your money, and took your choice of
+      believing in them or not. On the other hand, my <i>portier</i>, an ex-<i>valet
+      de place</i>, pumped a softly murmuring stream of enthusiasm; and
+      expressed the freshest delight in the inspection of each object of
+      interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One still faintly discerns among the vast number of names with which the
+      walls of the ante-cell are bewritten, that of Lamartine. The name of
+      Byron, which was once deeply graven in the stucco, had been scooped away
+      by the Grand Duke of Tuscany (so the custodian said), and there is only
+      part of a capital B now visible. But the cell itself is still fragrant of
+      associations with the noble bard, who, according to the story related to
+      Valery, caused himself to be locked up in it, and there, with his head
+      fallen upon his breast, and frequently smiting his brow, spent two hours
+      in pacing the floor with great strides. It is a touching picture; but its
+      pathos becomes somewhat embarrassing when you enter the cell, and see the
+      impossibility of taking more than three generous paces without turning.
+      When Byron issued forth, after this exercise, he said (still according to
+      Valery) to the custodian: "I thank thee, good man! The thoughts of Tasso
+      are now all in my mind and heart." "A short time after his departure from
+      Ferrara," adds the Frenchman, maliciously, "he composed his 'Lament of
+      Tasso,' a mediocre result from such inspiration." No doubt all this is
+      colored, for the same author adds another tint to heighten the absurdity
+      of the spectacle: he declares that Byron spent part of his time in the
+      cell in writing upon the ceiling Lamartine's verses on Tasso, which he
+      misspelled. The present visitor has no means of judging of the truth
+      concerning this, for the lines of the poet have been so smoked by the
+      candles of successive pilgrims in their efforts to get light on them, that
+      they are now utterly illegible. But if it is uncertain what were Byron's
+      emotions on visiting the prison of Tasso, there is no doubt about Lady
+      Morgan's: she "experienced a suffocating emotion; her heart failed her on
+      entering that cell; and she satisfied a melancholy curiosity at the cost
+      of a most painful sensation."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I find this amusing fact stated in a translation of her ladyship's own
+      language, in a clever guide-book called <i>Il Servitore di Piazza</i>,
+      which I bought at Ferrara, and from which, I confess, I have learnt all I
+      know to confirm me in my doubt of Tasso's prison. The Count Avventi, who
+      writes this book, prefaces it by saying that he is a valet de place who
+      knows how to read and write, and he employs these unusual gifts with
+      singular candor and clearness. No one, he says, before the nineteenth
+      century, ever dreamed of calling the cellar in question Tasso's prison,
+      and it was never before that time made the shrine of sentimental
+      pilgrimage, though it has since been visited by every traveller who has
+      passed through Ferrara. It was used during the poet's time to hold
+      charcoal and lime; and not long ago died an old servant of the hospital,
+      who remembered its use for that purpose. It is damp, close, and dark, and
+      Count Avventi thinks it hardly possible that a delicate courtier could
+      have lived seven years in a place unwholesome enough to kill a stout
+      laborer in two months; while it seems to him not probable that Tasso
+      should have received there the visits of princes and other distinguished
+      persons whom Duke Alfonso allowed to see him, or that a prisoner who was
+      often permitted to ride about the city in a carriage should have been
+      thrust back into such a cavern on his return to the hospital. "After
+      this," says our <i>valet de place</i> who knows how to read and write,
+      "visit the prison of Tasso, certain that <i>in the hospital of St. Anna</i>
+      that great man was confined for many years;" and, with this chilly
+      warning, leaves his reader to his emotions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am afraid that if as frank caution were uttered in regard to other
+      memorable places, the objects of interest in Italy would dwindle sadly in
+      number, and the <i>valets de place</i>, whether they know how to read and
+      write or not, would be starved to death. Even the learning of Italy is
+      poetic; and an Italian would rather enjoy a fiction than know a fact&mdash;in
+      which preference I am not ready to pronounce him unwise. But this
+      characteristic of his embroiders the stranger's progress throughout the
+      whole land with fanciful improbabilities; so that if one use his eyes half
+      as much as his wonder, he must see how much better it would have been to
+      visit, in fancy, scenes that have an interest so largely imaginary. The
+      utmost he can make out of the most famous place is, that it is possibly
+      what it is said to be, and is more probably as near that as any thing
+      local enterprise could furnish. He visits the very cell in which Tasso was
+      confined, and has the satisfaction of knowing that it was the
+      charcoal-cellar of the hospital in which the poet dwelt. And the <i>genius
+      loci</i>&mdash;where is that? Away in the American woods, very likely,
+      whispering some dreamy, credulous youth,&mdash;telling him charming fables
+      of its <i>locus</i>, and proposing to itself to abandon him as soon as he
+      sets foot upon its native ground. You see, though I cared little about
+      Tasso, and nothing about his prison, I was heavily disappointed in not
+      being able to believe in it, and felt somehow that I had been awakened
+      from a cherished dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But I have no right to cast the unbroken shadow of my skepticism upon the
+      reader, and so I tell him a story about Ferrara which I actually believe.
+      He must know that in Ferrara the streets are marvelous long and straight.
+      On the corners formed by the crossing of two of the longest and
+      straightest of these streets stand four palaces, in only one of which we
+      have a present interest. This palace my guide took me to see, after our
+      visit to Tasso's prison, and, standing in its shadow, he related to me the
+      occurrence which has given it a sad celebrity. It was, in the time of the
+      gifted toxicologist, the residence of Lucrezia Borgia, who used to make
+      poisonous little suppers there, and ask the best families of Italy to
+      partake of them. It happened on one occasion that Lucrezia Borgia was
+      thrust out of a ball-room at Venice as a disreputable character, and
+      treated with peculiar indignity. She determined to make the Venetians
+      repent their unwonted accession of virtue, and she therefore allowed the
+      occurrence to be forgotten till the proper moment of her revenge arrived,
+      when she gave a supper, and invited to her board eighteen young and
+      handsome Venetian nobles. Upon the preparation of this repast she bestowed
+      all the resources of her skillful and exquisite knowledge; and the result
+      was, the Venetians were so felicitously poisoned that they had just time
+      to listen to a speech from the charming and ingenious lady of the house
+      before expiring. In this address she reminded her guests of the occurrence
+      in the Venetian ball-room, and perhaps exulted a little tediously in her
+      present vengeance. She was surprised and pained when one of the guests
+      interrupted her, and, justifying the treatment she had received at Venice,
+      declared himself her natural son. The lady instantly recognized him, and
+      in the sudden revulsion of maternal feeling, begged him to take an
+      antidote. This he not only refused to do, but continued his dying
+      reproaches, till his mother, losing her self-command, drew her poniard and
+      plunged it into his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The blood of her son fell upon the table-cloth, and this being hung out of
+      the window to dry, the wall received a stain, which neither the sun nor
+      rain of centuries sufficed to efface, and which was only removed with the
+      masonry, when it became necessary to restore the wall under that window, a
+      few months before the time of my visit to Ferrara. Accordingly, the
+      blood-stain has now disappeared; but the conscientious artist who painted
+      the new wall has faithfully restored the tragic spot, by bestowing upon
+      the stucco a bloody dash of Venetian red.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It would be pleasant and merciful, I think, if old towns, after having
+      served a certain number of centuries for the use and pride of men, could
+      be released to a gentle, unmolested decay. I, for my part, would like to
+      have the ducal cities of North Italy, such as Mantua, Modena, Parma, and
+      Ferrara, locked up quietly within their walls, and left to crumble and
+      totter and fall, without any harder presence to vex them in their
+      decrepitude than that of some gray custodian, who should come to the gate
+      with clanking keys, and admit the wandering stranger, if he gave signs of
+      a reverent sympathy, to look for a little while upon the reserved and
+      dignified desolation. It is a shame to tempt these sad old cities into
+      unnatural activity, when they long ago made their peace with the world,
+      and would fain be mixing their weary brick and mortar with the earth's
+      unbuilded dust; and it is hard for the emotional traveller to restrain his
+      sense of outrage at finding them inhabited, and their rest broken by
+      sounds of toil, traffic, and idleness; at seeing places that would gladly
+      have had done with history still doomed to be parts of political systems,
+      to read the newspapers, and to expose railway guides and caricatures of
+      the Pope and of Napoleon in their shop windows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, Ferrara was not incorporated into a living nation against her
+      will, and I therefore marveled the more that she had become a portion of
+      the present kingdom of Italy. The poor little State had its day long
+      before ours; it had been a republic, and then subject to lords; and then,
+      its lords becoming dukes, it had led a life of gayety and glory till its
+      fall, and given the world such names and memories as had fairly won it the
+      right to rest forever from making history. Its individual existence ended
+      with that of Alfonso II., in 1597, when the Pope declared it reverted to
+      the Holy See; and I always fancied that it must have received with a
+      spectral, yet courtly kind of surprise, those rights of man which
+      bloody-handed France distributed to the Italian cities in 1796; that it
+      must have experienced a ghostly bewilderment in its rapid transformation,
+      thereafter, under Napoleon, into part of the Cispadan Republic, the
+      Cisalpine Republic, the Italian Republic, and the Kingdom of Italy, and
+      that it must have sunk back again under the rule of the Popes with
+      gratitude and relief at last&mdash;as phantoms are reputed to be glad when
+      released from haunting the world where they once dwelt. I speak of all
+      this, not so much from actual knowledge of facts as from personal feeling;
+      for it seems to me that if I were a city of the past, and must be
+      inhabited at all, I should choose just such priestly domination, assured
+      that though it consumed my substance, yet it would be well for my fame and
+      final repose. I should like to feel that my old churches were safe from
+      demolition: that my old convents and monasteries should always shelter the
+      pious indolence of friars and nuns. It would be pleasant to have studious
+      monks exploring quaint corners of my unphilosophized annals, and gentle,
+      snuff-taking abbés writing up episodes in the history of my noble
+      families, and dedicating them to the present heirs of past renown; while
+      the thinker and the reviewer should never penetrate my archives. Being
+      myself done with war, I should be glad to have my people exempt, as they
+      are under the Pope, from military service; and I should hope that if the
+      Legates taxed them, the taxes paid would be as so many masses said to get
+      my soul out of the purgatory of perished capitals. Finally, I should trust
+      that in the sanctified keeping of the Legates my mortal part would rest as
+      sweetly as bones laid in hallowed earth brought from Jerusalem; and that
+      under their serene protection I should be forever secure from being in any
+      way exhumed and utilized by the ruthless hand of Progress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, as I said, this is a mere personal preference, and other old
+      cities might feel differently. Indeed, though disposed to condole with
+      Ferrara upon the fact of her having become part of modern Italy, I could
+      not deny, on better acquaintance with her, that she was still almost
+      entirely of the past. She has certainly missed that ideal perfection of
+      non-existence under the Popes which I have just depicted, but she is
+      practically almost as profoundly at rest under the King of Italy. One may
+      walk long through the longitude and rectitude of many of her streets
+      without the encounter of a single face: the place, as a whole, is by no
+      means as lively as Pompeii, where there are always strangers; perhaps the
+      only cities in the world worthy to compete with Ferrara in point of
+      agreeable solitude are Mantua and Herculaneum. It is the newer part of the
+      town&mdash;the modern quarter built before Boston was settled or Ohio was
+      known&mdash;which is loneliest; and whatever motion and cheerfulness are
+      still felt in Ferrara linger fondly about the ancient holds of life&mdash;about
+      the street before the castle of the Dukes, and in the elder and narrower
+      streets branching away from the piazza of the Duomo, where, on market
+      days, there is a kind of dreamy tumult. In the Ghetto we were almost
+      crowded, and people wanted to sell us things, with an enterprise that
+      contrasted strangely with shopkeeping apathy elsewhere. Indeed, surprise
+      at the presence of strangers spending two days in Ferrara when they could
+      have got away sooner, was the only emotion which the whole population
+      agreed in expressing with any degree of energy, but into this they seemed
+      to throw their whole vitality. The Italians are everywhere an artless
+      race, so far as concerns the gratification of their curiosity, from which
+      no consideration of decency deters them. Here in Ferrara they turned about
+      and followed us with their eyes, came to windows to see us, lay in wait
+      for us at street-corners, and openly and audibly debated whether we were
+      English or German. We might have thought this interest a tribute to
+      something peculiar in our dress or manner, had it not visibly attended
+      other strangers who arrived with us. It rose almost into a frenzy of
+      craving to know more of us all, when on the third day the whole city
+      assembled before our hotel, and witnessed, with a sort of desperate cry,
+      the departure of the heavy-laden omnibus which bore us and our luggage
+      from their midst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I doubt if, after St. Mark's in Venice, the Duomo at Parma, and the Four
+      Fabrics at Pisa, there is a church more worthy to be seen for its quaint,
+      rich architecture, than the Cathedral at Ferrara. It is of that beloved
+      Gothic of which eye or soul cannot weary, and we continually wandered back
+      to it from other more properly interesting objects. It is horribly
+      restored in-doors, and its Renaissance splendors soon drove us forth,
+      after we had looked at the Last Judgment by Bastianino. The style of this
+      painting is muscular and Michelangelic, and the artist's notion of putting
+      his friends in heaven and his foes in hell is by no means novel; but he
+      has achieved fame for his picture by the original thought of making it his
+      revenge for a disappointment in love. The unhappy lady who refused his
+      love is represented in the depths, in the attitude of supplicating the
+      pity and interest of another maiden in Paradise who accepted Bastianino,
+      and who consequently has no mercy on her that snubbed him. But I counted
+      of far more value than this fresco the sincere old sculptures on the
+      façade of the cathedral, in which the same subject is treated, beginning
+      from the moment the archangel's trump has sounded. The people getting
+      suddenly out of their graves at the summons are all admirable; but the
+      best among them is the excellent man with one leg over the side of his
+      coffin, and tugging with both hands to pull himself up, while the
+      coffin-lid tumbles off behind. One sees instantly that the conscience of
+      this early riser is clean, for he makes no miserable attempt to turn over
+      for a nap of a few thousand years more, with the pretense that it was not
+      the trump of doom, but some other and unimportant noise he had heard. The
+      final reward of the blessed is expressed by the repose of one small figure
+      in the lap of a colossal effigy, which I understood to mean rest in
+      Abraham's bosom; but the artist has bestowed far more interest and feeling
+      upon the fate of the damned, who are all boiling in rows of immense pots.
+      It is doubtful (considering the droll aspect of heavenly bliss as figured
+      in the one small saint and the large patriarch) whether the artist
+      intended the condition of his sinners to be so horribly comic as it is;
+      but the effect is just as great, for all that, and the slowest conscience
+      might well take alarm from the spectacle of fate so grotesque and
+      ludicrous; for, wittingly or unwittingly, the artist here punishes, as
+      Dante knew best how to do, the folly of sinners as well as their
+      wickedness. Boiling is bad enough; but to be boiled in an undeniable
+      dinner-pot, like a leg of mutton, is to suffer shame us well as agony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We turned from these horrors, and walked down by the side of the Duomo
+      toward the Ghetto, which is not so foul as one could wish a Ghetto to be.
+      The Jews were admitted to Ferrara in 1275, and, throughout the government
+      of the Dukes, were free to live where they chose in the city; but the
+      Pope's Legate assigned them afterward a separate quarter, which was closed
+      with gates. Large numbers of Spanish Jews fled hither during the
+      persecutions, and there are four synagogues for the four languages,&mdash;Spanish,
+      German, French, and Italian. Avventi mentions, among other interesting
+      facts concerning the Ferrarese Jews, that one of their Rabbins, Isaaco
+      degli Abranelli, a man of excellent learning in the Scriptures, claimed to
+      be descended from David. His children still abide in Ferrara; and it may
+      have been one of his kingly line that kept the tempting antiquarian's shop
+      on the corner from which you turn up toward the Library. I should think
+      such a man would find a sort of melancholy solace in such a place: filled
+      with broken and fragmentary glories of every kind, it would serve him for
+      that chamber of desolation, set apart in the houses of the Oriental
+      Hebrews as a place to bewail themselves in; and, indeed, this idea may go
+      far to explain the universal Israelitish fondness for dealing in relics
+      and ruins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Ghetto was in itself indifferent to us; it was merely our way to the
+      Library, whither the great memory of Ariosto invited us to see his famous
+      relics treasured there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We found that the dead <i>literati</i> of Ferrara had the place wholly to
+      themselves; not a living soul disputed the solitude of the halls with the
+      custodians, and the bust of Ariosto looked down from his monument upon
+      rows of empty tables, idle chairs, and dusty inkstands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The poet, who was painted by Titian, has a tomb of abandoned ugliness, and
+      sleeps under three epitaphs; while cherubs frescoed on the wall behind
+      affect to disclose the mausoleum, by lifting a frescoed curtain, but
+      deceive no one who cares to consider how impossible it would be for them
+      to perform this service, and caper so ignobly as they do at the same time.
+      In fact this tomb of Ariosto shocks with its hideousness and levity. It
+      stood formerly in the Church of San Benedetto, where it was erected
+      shortly after the poet's death, and it was brought to the Library by the
+      French, when they turned the church into a barracks for their troops. The
+      poet's dust, therefore, rests here, where the worm, working silently
+      through the vellum volumes on the shelves, feeds upon the immortality of
+      many other poets. In the adjoining hall are the famed and precious
+      manuscripts of Ariosto and of Tasso. A special application must be made to
+      the librarian, in order to see the fragment of the <i>Furioso</i> in
+      Ariosto's hand, and the manuscript copy of the <i>Gerusalemma</i>, with
+      the corrections by Tasso. There are some pages of Ariosto's Satires,
+      framed and glazed for the satisfaction of the less curious; as well as a
+      letter of Tasso's, written from the Hospital of St. Anna, which the poet
+      sends to a friend, with twelve shirts, and in which he begs that his
+      friend will have the shirts mended, and cautions him "not to let them be
+      mixed with others." But when the slow custodian had at last unlocked that
+      more costly fragment of the <i>Furioso</i>, and placed it in my hands, the
+      other manuscripts had no value for me. It seems to me that the one
+      privilege which travel has reserved to itself, is that of making each
+      traveller, in presence of its treasures, forget whatever other travellers
+      have said or written about them. I had read so much of Ariosto's industry,
+      and of the proof of it in this manuscript, that I doubted if I should at
+      last marvel at it. But the wonder remains with the relic, and I paid it my
+      homage devoutly and humbly, and was disconcerted afterward to read again
+      in my Valery how sensibly all others had felt the preciousness of that
+      famous page, which, filled with half a score of previous failures,
+      contains in a little open space near the margin, the poet's final triumph
+      in a clearly written stanza. Scarcely less touching and interesting than
+      Ariosto's painful work on these yellow leaves, is the grand and simple
+      tribute which another Italian poet was allowed to inscribe on one of them:
+      "Vittorio Alfieri beheld and venerated;" and I think, counting over the
+      many memorable things I saw on the road to Rome and the way home again,
+      this manuscript was the noblest thing and best worthy to be remembered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When at last I turned from it, however, I saw that the custodian had
+      another relic of Messer Lodovico, which he was not ashamed to match with
+      the manuscript in my interest. This was the bone of one of the poet's
+      fingers, which the pious care of Ferrara had picked up from his dust (when
+      it was removed from the church to the Library), and neatly bottled and
+      labeled. In like manner, they keep a great deal of sanctity in bottles
+      with the bones of saints in Italy; but I found very little savor of poesy
+      hanging about this literary relic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As if the melancholy fragment of mortality had marshaled us the way, we
+      went from the Library to the house of Ariosto, which stands at the end of
+      a long, long street, not far from the railway station. There was not a
+      Christian soul, not a boy, not a cat nor a dog to be seen in all that long
+      street, at high noon, as we looked down its narrowing perspective, and if
+      the poet and his friends have ever a mind for a posthumous meeting in his
+      little reddish brick house, there is nothing to prevent their assembly, in
+      broad daylight, from any part of the neighborhood. There was no presence,
+      however, more spiritual than a comely country girl to respond to our
+      summons at the door, and nothing but a tub of corn-meal disputed our
+      passage inside. Directly I found the house inhabited by living people, I
+      began to be sorry that it was not as empty as the Library and the street.
+      Indeed, it is much better with Petrarch's house at Arquà, where the
+      grandeur of the past is never molested by the small household joys and
+      troubles of the present. That house is vacant, and no eyes less tender and
+      fond than the poet's visitors may look down from its windows over the
+      slope of vines and olives which it crowns; and it seemed hard, here in
+      Ferrara, where the houses are so many and the people are so few, that
+      Ariosto's house could not be left to him. <i>Parva sed apta mihi</i>, he
+      has contentedly written upon the front; but I doubt if he finds it large
+      enough for another family, though his modern housekeeper reserves him
+      certain rooms for visitors. To gain these, you go up to the second story&mdash;there
+      are but two floors&mdash;and cross to the rear of the building, where
+      Ariosto's chamber opens out of an ante-room, and looks down upon a pinched
+      and faded bit of garden. [In this garden the poet spent much of his time&mdash;chiefly
+      in plucking up and transplanting the unlucky shrubbery, which was never
+      suffered to grow three months in the same place,&mdash;such was the poet's
+      rage for revision. It was probably never a very large or splendid garden,
+      for the reason that Ariosto gave when reproached that he who knew so well
+      how to describe magnificent palaces should have built such a poor little
+      house: "It was easier to make verses than houses, and the fine palaces in
+      his poem cost him no money."] In this chamber they say the poet died. It
+      is oblong, and not large. I should think the windows and roof were of the
+      poet's time, and that every thing else had been restored; I am quite sure
+      the chairs and inkstand are kindly-meant inventions; for the poet's burly
+      great arm-chair and graceful inkstand are both preserved in the Library.
+      But the house is otherwise decent and probable; and I do not question but
+      it was in the hall where we encountered the meal-tub that the poet kept a
+      copy of his "<i>Furioso</i>," subject to the corrections and advice of his
+      visitors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ancestral house of the Ariosti has been within a few years restored
+      out of all memory and semblance of itself; and my wish to see the place in
+      which the poet was born and spent his childhood resulted, after infinite
+      search, in finding a building faced newly with stucco and newly
+      French-windowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our <i>portier</i> said it was the work of the late English Vice-Consul,
+      who had bought the house. When I complained of the sacrilege, he said:
+      "Yes, it is true. But then, you must know, the Ariosti were not one of the
+      noble families of Ferrara."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The castle of the Dukes of Ferrara, about which cluster so many sad and
+      splendid memories, stands in the heart of the city. I think that the
+      moonlight which, on the night of our arrival, showed me its massive walls
+      rising from the shadowy moat that surrounds them, and its four great
+      towers, heavily buttressed, and expanding at the top into bulging cornices
+      of cavernous brickwork, could have fallen on nothing else in all Italy so
+      picturesque, and so full of the proper dread charm of feudal times, as
+      this pile of gloomy and majestic strength. The daylight took nothing of
+      this charm from it; for the castle stands isolated in the midst of the
+      city, as its founder meant that it should [The castle of Ferrara was begun
+      in 1385 by Niccolò d'Este to defend himself against the repetition of
+      scenes of tumult, in which his princely rights were invaded. One of his
+      tax-gatherers, Tommaso da Tortona, had, a short time before, made himself
+      so obnoxious to the people by his insolence and severity, that they rose
+      against him and demanded his life. He took refuge in the palace of his
+      master, which was immediately assailed. The prince's own life was
+      threatened, and he was forced to surrender the fugitive to the people, who
+      tore Tortona limb from limb, and then, after parading the city with the
+      mutilated remains, quietly returned to their allegiance. Niccolò,
+      therefore, caused this castle to be built, which he strengthened with
+      massive walls and towers commanding the whole city, and rendered
+      inaccessible by surrounding it with a deep and wide canal from the river
+      Reno.], and modern civilization has not crossed the castle moat, to
+      undignify its exterior with any visible touch of the present. To be sure,
+      when you enter it, the magnificent life is gone out of the old edifice; it
+      is no stately halberdier who stands on guard at the gate of the
+      drawbridge, but a stumpy Italian soldier in baggy trousers. The castle is
+      full of public offices, and one sees in its courts and on its stairways,
+      not brilliant men-at-arms, nor gay squires and pages, but whistling
+      messengers going from one office to another with docketed papers, and
+      slipshod serving-men carrying the clerks their coffee in very dirty little
+      pots. Dreary-looking suitors, slowly grinding through the mills of law, or
+      passing in the routine of the offices, are the guests encountered in the
+      corridors; and all that bright-colored throng of the old days, ladies and
+      lords, is passed from the scene. The melodrama is over, friends, and now
+      we have a play of real life, founded on fact and inculcating a moral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course the custodians were slow to admit any change of this kind. If
+      you could have believed them,&mdash;and the poor people told as many lies
+      as they could to make you,&mdash;you would believe that nothing had ever
+      happened of a commonplace nature in this castle. The taking-off of Hugo
+      and Parisina they think the great merit of the castle; and one of them,
+      seeing us, made haste to light his taper and conduct us down to the
+      dungeons where those unhappy lovers were imprisoned. It is the misfortune
+      of memorable dungeons to acquire, when put upon show, just the reverse of
+      those properties which should raise horror and distress in the mind of the
+      beholder. It was impossible to deny that the cells of Parisina and of Hugo
+      were both singularly warm, dry, and comfortable; and we, who had never
+      been imprisoned in them, found it hard to command, for our sensation, the
+      terror and agony of the miserable ones who suffered there. We, happy and
+      secure in these dungeons, could not think of the guilty and wretched pair
+      bowing themselves to the headsman's stroke in the gloomy chamber under the
+      Hall of Aurora; nor of the Marquis, in his night-long walk, breaking at
+      last into frantic remorse and tears to know that his will had been
+      accomplished. Nay, there upon its very scene, the whole tragedy faded from
+      us; and, seeing our wonder so cold, the custodian tried to kindle it by
+      saying that in the time of the event these cells were much dreadfuller
+      than now, which was no doubt true. The floors of the dungeons are both
+      below the level of the moat, and the narrow windows, or rather crevices to
+      admit the light, were cut in the prodigiously thick wall just above the
+      water, and were defended with four successive iron gratings. The dungeons
+      are some distance apart: that of Hugo was separated from the outer wall of
+      the castle by a narrow passage-way, while Parisina's window opened
+      directly upon the moat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we ascended again to the court of the castle, the custodian, abetted
+      by his wife, would have interested us in two memorable wells there,
+      between which, he said, Hugo was beheaded; and unabashed by the small
+      success of this fable, he pointed out two windows in converging angles
+      overhead, from one of which the Marquis, looking into the other,
+      discovered the guilt of the lovers. The windows are now walled up, but are
+      neatly represented to the credulous eye by a fresco of lattices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Valery mentions another claim upon the interest of the tourist which this
+      castle may make, in the fact that it once sheltered John Calvin, who was
+      protected by the Marchioness Renée, wife of Hercules II.; and my <i>Servitore
+      di Piazza</i> (the one who knows how to read and write) gives the
+      following account of the matter, in speaking of the domestic chapel which
+      Renée had built in the castle: "This lady was learned in belles-lettres
+      and in the schismatic doctrines which at that time were insinuating
+      themselves throughout France and Germany, and with which Calvin, Luther,
+      and other proselytes, agitated the people, and threatened war to the
+      Catholic religion. Nationally fond of innovation, and averse to the court
+      of Rome on account of the dissensions between her father and Pope Julius
+      II., Renée began to receive the teachings of Calvin, with whom she
+      maintained correspondence. Indeed, Calvin himself, under the name of
+      Huppeville, visited her in Ferrara, in 1536, and ended by corrupting her
+      mind and seducing her into his own errors, which produced discord between
+      her and her religious husband, and resulted in his placing her in
+      temporary seclusion, in order to attempt her conversion. Hence, the chapel
+      is faced with marble, paneled in relief, and studied to avoid giving place
+      to saints or images, which were disapproved by the almost Anabaptist
+      doctrines of Calvin, then fatally imbibed by the princess."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We would willingly, as Protestants, have visited this wicked chapel; but
+      we were prevented from seeing it, as well as the famous frescoes of Dosso
+      Dossi in the Hall of Aurora, by the fact that the prefect was giving a
+      little dinner (<i>pranzetto</i>) in that part of the castle. We were not
+      so greatly disappointed in reality as we made believe; but our <i>servitore
+      di piazza</i> (the unlettered one) was almost moved to <i>lesa maestà</i>
+      with vexation. He had been full of scorching patriotism the whole morning;
+      but now electing the unhappy and apologetic custodian representative of
+      Piedmontese tyranny, he bitterly assailed the government of the king. In
+      the times of His Holiness the Legates had made it their pleasure and duty
+      to show the whole castle to strangers. But now strangers must be sent away
+      without seeing its chief beauties, because, forsooth, the prefect was
+      giving a little dinner. Presence of the Devil!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In our visits to the different churches in Ferrara we noticed devotion in
+      classes of people who are devout nowhere else in Italy. Not only came
+      solid-looking business men to say their prayers, but gay young dandies,
+      who knelt and repeated their orisons and then rose and went seriously out.
+      In Venice they would have posted themselves against a pillar, sucked the
+      heads of their sticks, and made eyes at the young ladies kneeling near
+      them. This degree of religion was all the more remarkable in Ferrara,
+      because that city had been so many years under the Pope, and His Holiness
+      contrives commonly to prevent the appearance of religion in young men
+      throughout his dominions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Valery speaks of the delightful society which he met in the gray old town;
+      and it is said that Ferrara has an unusual share of culture in her wealthy
+      class, which is large. With such memories of learning and literary
+      splendor as belong to her, it would be strange if she did not in some form
+      keep alive the sacred flame. But, though there may be refinement and
+      erudition in Ferrara, she has given no great name to modern Italian
+      literature. Her men of letters seem to be of that race of grubs singularly
+      abundant in Italy,&mdash;men who dig out of archives and libraries some
+      topic of special and momentary interest and print it, unstudied and
+      unphilosophized. Their books are material, not literature, and it is
+      marvelous how many of them are published. A writer on any given subject
+      can heap together from them a mass of fact and anecdote invaluable in its
+      way; but it is a mass without life or light, and must be vivified by him
+      who uses it before it can serve the world, which does not care for its
+      dead local value. It remains to be seen whether the free speech and free
+      press of Italy can reawaken the intellectual activity of the cities which
+      once gave the land so many literary capitals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What numbers of people used to write verses in Ferrara! By operation of
+      the principle which causes things concerning whatever subject you happen
+      to be interested in to turn up in every direction, I found a volume of
+      these dead-and-gone immortals at a book-stall, one day, in Venice. It is a
+      curiously yellow and uncomfortable volume of the year 1703, printed all in
+      italics. I suppose there are two hundred odd rhymers selected from in that
+      book,&mdash;and how droll the most of them are, with their unmistakable
+      traces of descent from Ariosto, Tasso, and Guarini! What acres of enameled
+      meadow there are in those pages! Brooks enough to turn all the mills in
+      the world go purling through them. I should say some thousands of nymphs
+      are constantly engaged in weaving garlands there, and the swains keep such
+      a piping on those familiar notes,&mdash;<i>Amore, dolore, crudele</i>, and
+      <i>miele</i>. Poor little poets! they knew no other tunes. Do not now weak
+      voices twitter from a hundred books, in unconscious imitation of the
+      hour's great singers?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think some of the pleasantest people in Italy are the army gentlemen.
+      There is the race's gentleness in their ways, in spite of their ferocious
+      trade, and an American freedom of style. They brag in a manner that makes
+      one feel at home immediately; and met in travel, they are ready to render
+      any little kindness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other year at Reggio (which is not far from Modena) we stopped to dine
+      at a restaurant where the whole garrison had its coat off and was playing
+      billiards, with the exception of one or two officers, who were dining.
+      These rose and bowed as we entered their room, and when the waiter
+      pretended that such and such dishes were out (in Italy the waiter, for
+      some mysterious reason, always pretends that the best dishes are out),
+      they bullied him for the honor of Italy, and made him bring them to us.
+      Indeed, I am afraid his life was sadly harassed by those brave men. We
+      were in deep despair at finding no French bread, and the waiter swore with
+      the utmost pathos that there was none; but as soon as his back was turned,
+      a tightly laced little captain rose and began to forage for the bread. He
+      opened every drawer and cupboard in the room, and finding none, invaded
+      another room, captured several loaves from the plates laid there, and
+      brought them back in triumph, presenting them to us amid the applause of
+      his comrades. The dismay of the waiter, on his return, was ineffable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three officers, who dined with us at the <i>table d'hôte</i> of the Stella
+      d'Oro in Ferrara (and excellent dinners were those we ate there), were
+      visibly anxious to address us, and began not uncivilly, but still in order
+      that we should hear, to speculate on our nationality among themselves. It
+      appeared that we were Germans; for one of these officers, who had formerly
+      been in the Austrian service at Vienna, recognized the word <i>bitter</i>
+      in our remarks on the <i>beccafichi</i>. As I did not care to put these
+      fine fellows to the trouble of hating us for others' faults, I made bold
+      to say that we were not Germans, and to add that <i>bitter</i> was also an
+      English word. Ah! yes, to be sure, one of them admitted; when he was with
+      the Sardinian army in the Crimea, he had frequently heard the word used by
+      the English soldiers. He nodded confirmation of what he said to his
+      comrades, and then was good enough to display what English he knew. It was
+      barely sufficient to impress his comrades; but it led the way to a good
+      deal of talk in Italian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I suppose you gentlemen are all Piedmontese?" I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Not at all," said our Crimean. "I am from Como; this gentleman, il signor
+      Conte, (il signor Conte bowed,) is of Piacenza; and our friend across the
+      table is Genoese. The army is doing a great deal to unify Italy. We are
+      all Italians now, and you see we speak Italian, and not our dialects,
+      together."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My cheap remark that it was a fine thing to see them all united under one
+      flag, after so many ages of mutual hate and bloodshed, turned the talk
+      upon the origin of the Italian flag; and that led our Crimean to ask what
+      was the origin of the English colors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I scarcely know," I said. "We are Americans."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our friends at once grew more cordial. "Oh, Americani!" They had great
+      pleasure of it. Did we think Signor Leencolen would be reëlected?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I supposed that he had been elected that day, I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah! this was the election day, then. <i>Cospetto</i>!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this the Genoese frowned superior intelligence, and the Crimean gazing
+      admiringly upon him, said he had been nine months at Nuova York, and that
+      he had a brother living there. The poor Crimean boastfully added that he
+      himself had a cousin in America, and that the Americans generally spoke
+      Spanish. The count from Piacenza wore an air of pathetic discomfiture, and
+      tried to invent a transatlantic relative, as I think, but failed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am persuaded that none of these warriors really had kinsmen in America,
+      but that they all pretended to have them, out of politeness to us, and
+      that they believed each other. It was very kind of them, and we were so
+      grateful that we put no embarrassing questions. Indeed, the conversation
+      presently took another course, and grew to include the whole table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an extremely pretty Italian present with her newly wedded
+      husband, who turned out to be a retired officer. He fraternized at once
+      with our soldiers, and when we left the table they all rose and made
+      military obeisances. Having asked leave to light their cigars, they were
+      smoking&mdash;the sweet young bride blowing a fairy cloud from her rosy
+      lips with the rest. "Indeed," I heard an Italian lady once remark, "why
+      should men pretend to deny us the privilege of smoking? It is so pleasant
+      and innocent." It is but just to the Italians to say that they do not
+      always deny it; and there is, without doubt, a certain grace and charm in
+      a pretty <i>fumatrice</i>. I suppose it is a habit not so pleasing in an
+      ugly or middle-aged woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.&mdash;THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We had intended to stay only one day at Ferrara, but just at that time the
+      storms predicted on the Adriatic and Mediterranean coasts, by Mathieu de
+      la Drome, had been raging all over Italy, and the railway communications
+      were broken in every direction. The magnificent work through and under the
+      Apennines, between Bologna and Florence, had been washed away by the
+      mountain torrents in a dozen places, and the roads over the plains of the
+      Romagna had been sapped by the flood, and rendered useless, where not
+      actually laid under water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the day of our intended departure we left the hotel, with other
+      travellers, gayly incredulous of the landlord's fear that no train would
+      start for Bologna. At the station we found a crowd of people waiting and
+      hoping, but there was a sickly cast of doubt in some faces, and the
+      labeled employés of the railway wore looks of ominous importance. Of
+      course the crowd did not lose its temper. It sought information of the
+      officials running to and fro with telegrams, in a spirit of national
+      sweetness, and consoled itself with saying, as Italy has said under all
+      circumstances of difficulty for centuries: <i>Ci vuol pazienza</i>! At
+      last a blank silence fell upon it, as the <i>Capo-Stazione</i> advanced
+      toward a well-dressed man in the crowd, and spoke to him quietly. The
+      well-dressed man lifted his forefinger and waved it back and forth before
+      his face:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>The Well-dressed Man</i>.&mdash;Dunque, non si parte più? (No
+      departures, then?)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>Capo-Stazione</i> (waving <i>his</i> forefinger in like manner.)&mdash;Non
+      si parte più. (Like a mournful echo.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We knew quite as well from this pantomime of negation as from the dialogue
+      our sad fate, and submitted to it. Some adventurous spirit demanded
+      whether any trains would go on the morrow. The Capo-Stazione, with an air
+      of one who would not presume to fathom the designs of Providence,
+      responded: "Who knows? To-day, certainly not. To-morrow, perhaps. But"&mdash;and
+      vanished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may give an idea of the Italian way of doing things to say that, as we
+      understood, this break in the line was only a few miles in extent, that
+      trains could have approached both to and from Bologna, and that a little
+      enterprise on the part of the company could have passed travellers from
+      one side to the other with very small trouble or delay. But the railway
+      company was as much daunted by the inundation as a peasant going to
+      market, and for two months after the accident no trains carried passengers
+      from one city to the other. No doubt, however, the line was under process
+      of very solid repair meanwhile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the present the only means of getting to Bologna was by carriage on
+      the old highway, and accordingly we took passage thither in the omnibus of
+      the Stella d'Oro.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was little to interest us in the country over which we rode. It is
+      perfectly flat, and I suppose the reader knows what quantities of hemp and
+      flax are raised there. The land seems poorer than in Lombardy, and the
+      farm-houses and peasants' cottages are small and mean, though the peasants
+      themselves, when we met them, looked well fed, and were certainly well
+      clad. The landscape lay soaking in a dreary drizzle the whole way, and the
+      town of Cento when we reached it, seemed miserably conscious of being too
+      wet and dirty to go in-doors, and was loitering about in the rain. Our
+      arrival gave the poor little place a sensation, for I think such a thing
+      as an omnibus had not been seen there since the railway of Bologna and
+      Ferrara was built. We went into the principal caffè to lunch,&mdash;a
+      caffè much too large for Cento, with immense red-leather cushioned sofas,
+      and a cold, forlorn air of half-starved gentility, a clean, high-roofed
+      caffè and a breezy,&mdash;and thither the youthful nobility and gentry of
+      the place followed us, and ordered a cup of coffee, that they might sit
+      down and give us the pleasure of their distinguished company. They put on
+      their very finest manners, and took their most captivating attitudes for
+      the ladies' sake; and the gentlemen of our party fancied that it was for
+      them these young men began to discuss the Roman question. How loud they
+      were, and how earnest! And how often they consulted the newspapers of the
+      caffè! (Older newspapers I never saw off a canal-boat.) I may tire some
+      time of the artless vanity of the young Italians, so innocent, so amiable,
+      so transparent, but I think I never shall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great painter Guercino was born at Cento, and they have a noble and
+      beautiful statue of him in the piazza, which the town caused to be erected
+      from contributions by all the citizens. Formerly his house was kept for a
+      show to the public; it was full of the pictures of the painter and many
+      mementos of him; but recently the paintings have been taken to the
+      gallery, and the house is now closed. The gallery is, consequently, one of
+      the richest second-rate galleries in Italy, and one may spend much longer
+      time in it than we gave, with great profit. There are some most
+      interesting heads of Christ, painted, as Guercino always painted the
+      Saviour, with a great degree of humanity in the face. It is an excellent
+      countenance, and full of sweet dignity, but quite different from the
+      conventional face of Christ.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      At night we were again in Bologna, of which we had not seen the gloomy
+      arcades for two years. It must be a dreary town at all times: in a rain it
+      is horrible; and I think the whole race of arcaded cities, Treviso, Padua,
+      and Bologna, are dull, blind, and comfortless. The effect of the buildings
+      vaulted above the sidewalks is that of a continuous cellarway; your view
+      of the street is constantly interrupted by the heavy brick pillars that
+      support the arches; the arcades are not even picturesque. Liking always to
+      leave Bologna as quickly as possible, and, on this occasion, learning that
+      there was no hope of crossing the Apennines to Florence, we made haste to
+      take the first train for Genoa, meaning to proceed thence directly to
+      Naples by steamer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a motley company that sat down in Hotel Brun the morning after our
+      arrival in Bologna to a breakfast of murky coffee and furry beefsteaks,
+      associated with sleek, greasy, lukewarm fried potatoes. I am sure that if
+      each of our weather-bound pilgrims had told his story, we had been as well
+      entertained as those at Canterbury. However, no one thought fit to give
+      his narrative but a garrulous old Hebrew from London, who told us how he
+      had been made to pay fifteen guineas for a carriage to cross the
+      Apennines, and had been obliged to walk part of the way at that price. He
+      was evidently proud, now the money was gone, of having been cheated of so
+      much; and in him we saw that there was at least one human being more
+      odious than a purse-proud Englishman&mdash;namely, a purse-proud English
+      Jew. He gave his noble name after a while, as something too precious to be
+      kept from the company, when recommending one of the travellers to go to
+      the Hotel d'Angleterre in Rome: "The best 'otel out of England. You may
+      mention my name, if you like&mdash;Mr. Jonas." The recipient of this favor
+      noted down the talismanic words in his pocket-book, and Mr. Jonas,
+      conscious of having conferred a benefit on his race, became more odious to
+      it than ever. An Englishman is of a composition so uncomfortably original
+      that no one can copy him, though many may caricature. I saw an American in
+      London once who thought himself an Englishman because he wore
+      leg-of-mutton whiskers, declaimed against universal suffrage and
+      republics, and had an appetite for high game. He was a hateful animal,
+      surely, but he was not the British lion; and this poor Hebrew at Bologna
+      was not a whit more successful in his imitation of the illustrious brute,
+      though he talked, like him, of nothing but hotels, and routes of travel,
+      and hackmen and porters, and seemed to have nothing to do in Italy but get
+      through it as quickly and abusively as possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were very glad, I say, to part from all this at Bologna and take the
+      noon train for Genoa. In our car there were none but Italians, and the
+      exchange of "<i>La Perseveranza</i>" of Milan for "<i>Il Popolo</i>" of
+      Turin with one of them quickly opened the way for conversation and
+      acquaintance. (<i>En passant</i>: I know of no journal in the United
+      States whose articles are better than those of the "<i>Perseveranza</i>,"
+      and it was gratifying to an American to read in this ablest journal of
+      Italy nothing but applause and encouragement of the national side in our
+      late war.) My new-made friend turned out to be a Milanese. He was a
+      physician, and had served as a surgeon in the late war of Italian
+      independence; but was now placed in a hospital in Milan. There was a
+      gentle little blonde with him, and at Piacenza, where we stopped for
+      lunch, "You see," said he, indicating the lady, "we are newly married,"&mdash;which
+      was, indeed, plain enough to any one who looked at their joyous faces, and
+      observed how great disposition that little blonde had to nestle on the
+      young man's broad shoulder. "I have a week's leave from my place," he went
+      on, "and this is our wedding journey. We were to have gone to Florence,
+      but it seems we are fated not to see that famous city."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke of it as immensely far off, and herein greatly amused us
+      Americans, who had outgrown distances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "So we are going to Genoa instead, for two or three days." "Oh, have you
+      ever been at Genoa?" broke in the bride. "What magnificent palaces! And
+      then the bay, and the villas in the environs! There is the Villa
+      Pallavicini, with beautiful gardens, where an artificial shower breaks out
+      from the bushes, and sprinkles the people who pass. Such fun!" and she
+      continued to describe vividly a city of which she had only heard from her
+      husband; and it was easy to see that she walked in paradise wherever he
+      led her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They say that Italian husbands and wives do not long remain fond of each
+      other, but it was impossible in the presence of these happy people not to
+      believe in the eternity of their love, and it was hard to keep from
+      "dropping into poetry" on account of them. Their bliss infected every body
+      in the car, and in spite of the weariness of our journey, and the vexation
+      of the misadventures which had succeeded one another unsparingly ever
+      since we left home, we found ourselves far on the way to Genoa before we
+      thought to grumble at the distance. There was with us, besides the bridal
+      party, a lady travelling from Bologna to Turin, who had learned English in
+      London, and spoke it much better than most Londoners. It is surprising how
+      thoroughly Italians master a language so alien to their own as ours, and
+      how frequently you find them acquainted with English. From Russia the
+      mania for this tongue has spread all over the Continent, and in Italy
+      English seems to be prized first among the virtues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we drew near Genoa, the moon came out on purpose to show us the superb
+      city, and we strove eagerly for a first glimpse of the proud capital where
+      Columbus was born. To tell the truth, the glimpse was but slight and
+      false, for railways always enter cities by some mean level, from which any
+      picturesque view is impossible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Near the station in Genoa, however, is the weak and ugly monument which
+      the municipality has lately raised to Columbus. The moon made the best of
+      this, which stands in a wide open space, and contrived, with an Italian
+      skill in the arrangement of light, to produce an effect of undeniable
+      splendor. On the morrow, we found out by the careless candor of the
+      daylight what a uselessly big head Columbus had, and how the sculptor had
+      not very happily thought proper to represent him with his sea-legs on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.&mdash;UP AND DOWN GENOA.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I had my note-book with me on this journey, and pledged myself to make
+      notes in it. And, indeed, I did really do something of the kind, though
+      the result of my labors is by no means so voluminous as I would like it to
+      be, now when the work of wishing there were more notes is so easy. We
+      spent but one day in Genoa, and I find such a marvelous succinct record of
+      this in my book that I am tempted to give it here, after the fashion of
+      that Historical Heavyweight who writes the Life of "Frederick the Great."
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    "<i>Genoa, November 13</i>.&mdash;Breakfast <i>à la fourchette</i> excellently
+    and cheaply. I buy a hat. We go to seek the Consul, and, after
+    finding every thing else for two hours, find him. Genoa is the
+    most magnificent city I ever saw; and the new monument to
+    Columbus about the weakest possible monument. Walk through the
+    city with Consul; Doge's palace; cathedral; girl turning
+    somersaults in the street; blind madman on the cathedral steps.
+    We leave for Naples at twelve midnight."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      As for the breakfast, it was eaten at one of the many good caffè in Genoa,
+      and perhaps some statistician will like to know that for a beefsteak and
+      potatoes, with a half-bottle of Ligurian wine, we paid a franc. For this
+      money we had also the society of an unoccupied waiter, who leaned against
+      a marble column and looked on, with that gentle, half-compassionate
+      interest in our appetites, which seems native to the tribe of waiters. A
+      slight dash of surprise is in this professional manner; and there is a
+      faint smile on the solemn, professional countenance, which is perhaps
+      prompted by too intimate knowledge of the mysteries of the kitchen and the
+      habits of the cook. The man who passes his life among beefsteaks cannot be
+      expected to love them, or to regard without wonder the avidity with which
+      others devour them. I imagine that service in restaurants must beget
+      simple and natural tastes in eating, and that the jaded men who minister
+      there to our pampered appetites demand only for themselves&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "A scrip with herbs and fruits supplied,
+  And water from the spring."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Turning from this thought to the purchase of my hat, I do not believe that
+      literary art can interest the reader in that purely personal transaction,
+      though I have no doubt that a great deal might be said about buying hats
+      as a principle. I prefer, therefore, to pass to our search for the Consul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A former Consul at &mdash;&mdash;, whom I know, has told me a good many
+      stories about the pieces of popular mind which he received at different
+      times from the travelling public, in reproof of his difficulty of
+      discovery; and I think it must be one of the most jealously guarded rights
+      of American citizens in foreign lands to declare the national
+      representative hard to find, if there is no other complaint to lodge
+      against him. It seems to be, in peculiar degree, a quality of consulship
+      at &mdash;&mdash;, to be found remote and inaccessible. My friend says
+      that even at New York, before setting out for his post, when inquiring
+      into the history of his predecessors, he heard that they were one and all
+      hard to find; and he relates that on the steamer, going over, there was a
+      low fellow who set the table in a roar by a vulgar anecdote to this
+      effect:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "There was once a consul at &mdash;&mdash;, who indicated his office-hours
+      by the legend on his door, 'In from ten to one.' An old ship-captain, who
+      kept coming for about a week without finding the Consul, at last furiously
+      wrote, in the terms of wager, under this legend, 'Ten to one you're out!'"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My friend also states that one day a visitor of his remarked: "I'm rather
+      surprised to find you in. As a general rule, I never do find consuls in."
+      Habitually, his fellow-countrymen entertained him with accounts of their
+      misadventures in reaching him. It was useless to represent to them that
+      his house was in the most convenient locality in &mdash;&mdash;, where,
+      indeed, no stranger can walk twenty rods from his hotel without losing
+      himself; that their guide was an ass, or their courier a rogue. They
+      listened to him politely, but they never pardoned him in the least; and
+      neither will I forgive the Consul at Genoa. I had no earthly consular
+      business with him, but a private favor to ask. It was Sunday, and I could
+      not reasonably expect to find him at his office, or any body to tell me
+      where he lived; but I have seldom had so keen a sense of personal wrong
+      and national neglect as in my search for that Consul's house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Italy there is no species of fact with which any human being you meet
+      will not pretend to have perfect acquaintance, and, of course, the driver
+      whose fiacre we took professed himself a complete guide to the Consul's
+      whereabouts, and took us successively to the residences of the consuls of
+      all the South American republics. It occurred to me that it might be well
+      to inquire of these officials where their colleague was to be found; but
+      it is true that not one consul of them was at home! Their doors were
+      opened by vacant old women, in whom a vague intelligence feebly guttered,
+      like the wick of an expiring candle, and who, after feigning to throw
+      floods of light on the object of my search, successively flickered out,
+      and left me in total darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Till that day, I never knew of what lofty flights stairs were capable. As
+      out-of-doors, in Genoa, it is either all up or down hill, so in-doors it
+      is either all up or down stairs. Ascending and descending, in one palace
+      after another, those infinite marble steps, it became a question not
+      solved to this hour, whether it was worse to ascend or descend,&mdash;each
+      ordeal in its turn seemed so much more terrible than the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last I resolved to come to an understanding with the driver, and I
+      spent what little breath I had left&mdash;it was dry and hot as the simoom&mdash;in
+      blowing up that infamous man. "You are a great driver," I said, "not to
+      know your own city. What are you good for if you can't take a foreigner to
+      his consul's?" "Signore," answered the driver patiently, "you would have
+      to get a book in two volumes by heart, in order to be able to find
+      everybody in Genoa. This city is a labyrinth."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Truly, it had so proved, and I could scarcely believe in my good luck when
+      I actually found my friend, and set out with him on a ramble through its
+      toils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A very great number of the streets in Genoa are footways merely, and these
+      are as narrow, as dark, as full of jutting chimney-places, balconies, and
+      opened window-shutters, and as picturesque as the little alleys in Venice.
+      They wander at will around the bases of the gloomy old stone palaces, and
+      seem to have a vagabond fondness for creeping down to the port, and losing
+      themselves there in a certain cavernous arcade which curves round the
+      water with the flection of the shore, and makes itself a twilight at
+      noonday. Under it are clangorous shops of iron-smiths, and sizzling shops
+      of marine cooks, and, looking down its dim perspective, one beholds
+      chiefly sea-legs coming and going, more or less affected by strong waters;
+      and as the faces to which these sea-legs belong draw near, one discerns
+      sailors from all parts of the world,&mdash;tawny men from Sicily and
+      Norway, as diverse in their tawniness as olive and train-oil; sharp faces
+      from Nantucket and from the Piraeus, likewise mightily different in their
+      sharpness; blonde Germans and blonde Englishmen; and now and then a
+      colored brother also in the seafaring line, with sea-legs, also, more or
+      less affected by strong waters like the rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What curious people are these seafarers! They coast the whole world, and
+      know nothing of it, being more ignorant and helpless than children on
+      shore. I spoke with the Yankee mate of a ship one day at Venice, and asked
+      him how he liked the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, he had not been ashore yet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was told he had better go ashore; that the Piazza San Marco was worth
+      seeing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, he knew it; he had seen pictures of it; but he guessed he wouldn't
+      go ashore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why not, now he was here?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, he laid out to go ashore the next time he came to Venice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so, bless his honest soul, he lay three weeks at Venice with his ship,
+      after a voyage of two months, and he sailed away without ever setting his
+      foot on that enchanted ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I should have liked to stop some of those seafarers and ask them what they
+      thought of Genoa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must have been in the little streets&mdash;impassable for horses&mdash;that
+      the people sat and talked, as Heine fabled, in their doorways, and touched
+      knees with the people sitting and talking on the thresholds of the
+      opposite side. But we saw no gossipers there on our Sunday in Genoa; and I
+      think the domestic race of Heine's day no longer lives in Genoa, for every
+      body we saw on the streets was gayly dressed in the idea of the last
+      fashions, and was to be met chiefly in the public promenades. The fashions
+      were French; but here still lingers the lovely phantom of the old national
+      costume of Genoa, and snow-white veils fluttered from many a dark head,
+      and caressed many an olive cheek. It is the kindest and charitablest of
+      attirements, this white veil, and, while decking beauty to the most
+      perilous effect, befriends and modifies age and ugliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The pleasure with which I look at the splendor of an Italian crowd in
+      winter is always touched with melancholy. I know that, at the time of its
+      noonday promenade, it has nothing but a cup of coffee in its stomach; that
+      it has emerged from a house as cold and dim as a cellar; and that it will
+      presently go home to dine on rice and boiled beef. I know that chilblains
+      secretly gnaw the hands inside of its kid gloves, and I see in the rawness
+      of its faces the anguish of winter-long suffering from cold. But I also
+      look at many in this crowd with the eye of the economist, and wonder how
+      people practicing even so great self-denial as they can contrive to make
+      so much display on their little means,&mdash;how those clerks of public
+      offices, who have rarely an income of five hundred dollars a year, can
+      dress with such peerless gorgeousness. I suppose the national instinct
+      teaches them ways and means unknown to us. The passion for dress is
+      universal: the men are as fond of it as the women; and, happily, clothes
+      are comparatively cheap. It is no great harm in itself, this display: it
+      is only a pity that there is often nothing, or worse than nothing, under
+      the shining surface.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We walked with the brilliant Genoese crowd upon the hill where the public
+      promenade overlooks a landscape of city and country, houses and gardens,
+      vines and olives, which it makes the heart ache to behold, it is so
+      faultlessly beautiful. Behind us the fountain was&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Shaking its loosened silver in the sun;"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      the birds were singing; and there were innumerable fair girls going by,
+      about whom one might have made romances if one had not known better. Our
+      friend pointed out to us the "pink jail" in which Dickens lived while at
+      Genoa; and showed us on the brow of a distant upland the villa, called <i>Il
+      Paradiso</i>, which Byron had occupied. I dare say this Genoese joke is
+      already in print: That the Devil reëntered Paradise when Byron took this
+      villa. Though, in loveliest Italy, one is half-persuaded that the Devil
+      had never left Paradise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After lingering a little longer on that delicious height, we turned and
+      went down for a stroll through the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My note-book says that Genoa is the most magnificent city I ever saw, and
+      I hold by my note-book, though I hardly know how to prove it. Venice is,
+      and remains, the most beautiful city in the world; but her ancient rival
+      impresses you with greater splendor. I suppose that the exclusively
+      Renaissance architecture, which Ruskin declares the architecture of pride,
+      lends itself powerfully to this effect in Genoa. It is here in its best
+      mood, and there is little grotesque Renaissance to be seen, though the
+      palaces are, as usual, loaded with ornament. The Via Nuova is the chief
+      thoroughfare of the city, and the crowd pours through this avenue between
+      long lines of palaces. Height on height rise the stately, sculptured
+      façades, colonnaded, statued, pierced by mighty doorways and lofty
+      windows; and the palaces seem to gain a kind of aristocratic <i>hauteur</i>
+      from the fact that there are for the most part no sidewalks, and that the
+      carriages, rolling insolently through the crowd, threaten constantly to
+      grind the pedestrian up against their carven marbles, and immolate him to
+      their stony pride. There is something gracious and gentle in the grandeur
+      of Venice, and much that the heart loves to cling to; but in Genoa no
+      sense of kindliness is touched by the magnificence of the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an unspeakable relief, after such a street, to come, on a sudden,
+      upon the Duomo, one of the few Gothic buildings in Genoa, and rest our
+      jaded eyes on that architecture which Heaven seems truly to have put into
+      the thoughts of man together with the Christian faith. O beloved beauty of
+      aspiring arches, of slender and clustered columns, of flowering capitals
+      and window-traceries, of many-carven breadths and heights, wherein all
+      Nature breathes and blossoms again! There is neither Greek perfection, nor
+      winning Byzantine languor, nor insolent Renaissance opulence, which may
+      compare with this loveliness of yours! Alas that the interior of this
+      Gothic temple of Genoa should abound in the abomination of rococo
+      restoration! They say that the dust of St. John the Baptist lies there
+      within a costly shrine; and I wonder that it can sleep in peace amid all
+      that heathenish show of bad taste. But the poor saints have to suffer a
+      great deal in Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Outside, in the piazza before the church, there was an idle, cruel crowd,
+      amusing itself with the efforts of a blind old man to find the entrance.
+      He had a number of books which he desperately laid down while he ran his
+      helpless hands over the clustered columns, and which he then desperately
+      caught up again, in fear of losing them. At other times he paused, and
+      wildly clasped his hands upon his eyes, or wildly threw up his arms; and
+      then began to run to and fro again uneasily, while the crowd laughed and
+      jeered. Doubtless a taint of madness afflicted him; but not the less he
+      seemed the type of a blind soul that gropes darkly about through life, to
+      find the doorway of some divine truth or beauty,&mdash;touched by the
+      heavenly harmonies from within, and miserably failing, amid the scornful
+      cries and bitter glee of those who have no will but to mock aspiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl turning somersaults in another place had far more popular
+      sympathy than the blind madman at the temple door, but she was hardly a
+      more cheerful spectacle. For all her festive spangles and fairy-like
+      brevity of skirts, she had quite a work-a-day look upon her honest,
+      blood-red face, as if this were business though it looked like sport, and
+      her part of the diversion were as practical as that of the famous captain
+      of the waiters, who gave the act of peeling a sack of potatoes a playful
+      effect by standing on his head. The poor damsel was going over and over,
+      to the sound of most dismal drumming and braying, in front of the immense
+      old palace of the Genoese Doges,&mdash;a classic building, stilted on a
+      rustic base, and quite worthy of Palladio, if any body thinks that is
+      praise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was little left of our day when we had dined; but having seen the
+      outside of Genoa, and not hoping to see the inside, we found even this
+      little heavy on our hands, and were glad as the hour drew near when we
+      were to take the steamer for Naples.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had been one of the noisiest days spent during several years in
+      clamorous Italy, whose voiceful uproar strikes to the summits of her
+      guardian Alps, and greets the coming stranger, and whose loud Addio would
+      stun him at parting, if he had not meanwhile become habituated to the
+      operatic pitch of her every-day tones. In Genoa, the hotels, taking
+      counsel of the vagabond streets, stand about the cavernous arcade already
+      mentioned, and all the noise of the shipping reaches their guests. We rose
+      early that Sunday morning to the sound of a fleet unloading cargoes of
+      wrought-iron, and of the hard swearing of all nations of seafaring men.
+      The whole day long the tumult followed us, and seemed to culminate at last
+      in the screams of a parrot, who thought it fine to cry, "<i>Piove! piove!
+      piove</i>!"&mdash;"It rains! it rains! it rains!"&mdash;and had, no doubt,
+      a secret interest in some umbrella-shop. This unprincipled bird dwelt
+      somewhere in the neighborhood of the street where you see the awful tablet
+      in the wall devoting to infamy the citizens of the old republic that were
+      false to their country. The sight of that pitiless stone recalls with a
+      thrill the picturesque, unhappy past, with all the wandering,
+      half-benighted efforts of the people to rend their liberty from now a
+      foreign and now a native lord. At best, they only knew how to avenge their
+      wrongs; but now, let us hope, they have learnt, with all Italy, to prevent
+      them. The will was never wanting of old to the Ligurian race, and in this
+      time they have done their full share to establish Italian freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know why it should have been so surprising to hear the boatman
+      who rowed us to the steamer's anchorage speak English; but, after his
+      harsh Genoese profanity in getting his boat into open water, it was the
+      last thing we expected from him. It had somehow the effect of a furious
+      beast addressing you in your native tongue, and telling you it was "Wary
+      poordy wedder;" and it made us cling to his good-nature with the trembling
+      solicitude of Little Red-Riding-Hood, when she begins to have the first
+      faint suspicions of her grandmother. However, our boatman was no wild
+      beast, but took our six cents of <i>buonamano</i> with the base servility
+      of a Christian man, when he had put our luggage in the cabin of the
+      steamer. I wonder how he should have known us for Americans? He did so
+      know us, and said he had been at New York in better days, when he voyaged
+      upon higher seas than those he now navigated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On board, we watched with compassion an old gentleman in the cabin making
+      a hearty meal of sardines and fruit-pie, and I asked him if he had ever
+      been at sea. No, he said. I could have wept over that innocent old
+      gentleman's childlike confidence of appetite, and guileless trust of the
+      deep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We went on deck, where one of the gentle beings of our party declared that
+      she would remain as long as Genoa was in sight; and to tell the truth, the
+      scene was worthy of the promised devotion. There, in a half-circle before
+      us, blazed the lights of the quay; above these twinkled the lamps of the
+      steep streets and climbing palaces; over and behind all hung the darkness
+      on the heights,&mdash;a sable cloud dotted with ruddy points of flame
+      burning in the windows of invisible houses.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Merrily did we drop"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      down the bay, and presently caught the heavy swell of the open sea. The
+      other gentle being of our party then clutched my shoulder with a dreadful
+      shudder, and after gasping, "O Mr. Scribbler, why <i>will</i> the ship
+      roll so?" was meekly hurried below by her sister, who did not return for a
+      last glimpse of Genoa the Proud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a moment heaven's sweet pity flapped away as with the sea-gull's wings,
+      and I too felt that there was no help for it, and that I must go and lie
+      down in the cabin. With anguished eyes I beheld upon the shelf opposite to
+      mine the innocent old gentleman who had lately supped so confidently on
+      sardines and fruit-pie. He lay upon his back, groaning softly to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.&mdash;BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Like the Englishman who had no prejudices, I do hate a Frenchman; and
+      there were many Frenchmen among our passengers on the <i>Messina</i>, in
+      whose company I could hardly have been happy, had I not seen them horribly
+      sea-sick. After the imprudent old gentleman of the sardines and fruit-pie,
+      these wretched Gauls were the first to be seized with the malady, which
+      became epidemic, and were miserable up to the last moment on board. To the
+      enormity of having been born Frenchmen, they added the crime of being
+      commercial travellers,&mdash;a class of fellow-men of whom we know little
+      at home, but who are met everywhere in European travel. They spend more
+      than half their lives in movement from place to place, and they learn to
+      snatch from every kind of travel its meagre comforts, with an insolent
+      disregard of the rights and feelings of other passengers. They excuse an
+      abominable trespass with a cool "Pardon!" take the best seat everywhere,
+      and especially treat women with a savage rudeness, to which an American
+      vainly endeavors to accustom his temper. I have seen commercial travellers
+      of all nations, and I think I must award the French nation the discredit
+      of producing the most odious commercial travellers in the world. The
+      Englishman of this species wraps himself in his rugs, and rolls into his
+      corner, defiantly, but not aggressively, boorish; the Italian is almost a
+      gentleman; the German is apt to take sausage out of a newspaper and eat it
+      with his penknife; the Frenchman aggravates human nature beyond endurance
+      by his restless ill-breeding, and his evident intention not only to keep
+      all his own advantages, but to steal some of yours upon the first
+      occasion. There were three of these monsters on our steamer: one a slight,
+      bloodless young man, with pale blue eyes and an incredulous grin; another,
+      a gigantic full-bearded animal in spectacles; the third an infamous plump
+      little creature, in absurdly tight pantaloons, with a cast in his eye, and
+      a habit of sucking his teeth at table. When this wretch was not writhing
+      in the agonies of sea-sickness, he was on deck with his comrades,
+      lecturing them upon various things, to which the bloodless young man
+      listened with his incredulous grin, and the bearded giant in spectacles
+      attended with a choked look about the eyes, like a suffering ox. They were
+      constantly staggering in and out of their state-room, which, for my sins,
+      was also mine; and opening their abominable commodious travelling bags, or
+      brushing their shaggy heads at the reeling mirror, and since they were
+      born into the world, I think they had never cleaned their finger-nails.
+      They wore their hats at dinner, but always went away, after soup, deadly
+      pale.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In contrast with these cattle, what polished and courtly gentlemen were
+      the sailors and firemen! As for our captain, he would in any company have
+      won notice for his gentle and high-bred way; in his place at the head of
+      the table among these Frenchmen, he seemed to me the finest gentleman I
+      had ever seen. He had spent his whole life at sea, and had voyaged in all
+      parts of the world except Japan, where he meant some day, he said, to go.
+      He had been first a cabin-boy on a little Genoese schooner, and he had
+      gradually risen to the first place on a sailing-vessel, and now he had
+      been selected to fill a commander's post on this line of steamers. (It is
+      an admirable line of boats, not belonging I believe to the Italian
+      government, but much under its control, leaving Genoa every day for
+      Leghorn, Naples, Palermo, and Ancona, on the Adriatic coast.) The captain
+      had sailed a good deal in American waters, but chiefly on the Pacific
+      coast, trading from the Spanish republican ports to those of California.
+      He had been in that State during its effervescent days, when every thing
+      foul floated to the top, and I am afraid he formed there but a bad opinion
+      of our people, though he was far too courteous to say outright any thing
+      of this sort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had very fine, shrewd blue eyes, a lean, weather-beaten, kindly face,
+      and a cautious way of saying things. I hardly expected him to turn out so
+      red-hot a Democrat as he did on better acquaintance, but being a warm
+      friend of man myself, I was not sorry. Garibaldi was the beginning and
+      ending of his political faith, as he is with every enthusiastic Italian.
+      The honest soul's conception of all concrete evil was brought forth in two
+      words, of odd enough application. In Europe, and Italy more particularly,
+      true men have suffered chiefly from this form of evil, and the captain
+      evidently could conceive of no other cause of suffering anywhere. We were
+      talking of the American war, and when the captain had asked the usual
+      question, "<i>Quando finirà mai questa guerra</i>?" and I had responded as
+      usual, "<i>Ah, ci vuol pazienza</i>!" the captain gave a heavy sigh, and
+      turning his head pensively aside, plucked his grapes from the cluster a
+      moment in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he said: "You Americans are in the habit of attributing this war to
+      slavery. The cause is not sufficient."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ventured to demur and explain. "No," said the captain, "the cause is not
+      sufficient. We Italians know the only cause which could produce a war like
+      this."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was naturally anxious to be instructed in the Italian theory, hoping it
+      might be profounder than the English notion that we were fighting about
+      tariffs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain frowned, looked at me carefully, and then said:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "In this world there is but one cause of mischief&mdash;the Jesuits."
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The first night out, from Genoa to Leghorn, was bad enough, but that which
+      succeeded our departure from the latter port was by far the worst of the
+      three we spent in our voyage to Naples. How we envied the happy people who
+      went ashore at Leghorn! I think we even envied the bones of the Venetians,
+      Pisans, and Genoese who met and slew each other in the long-forgotten
+      sea-fights, and sank too deeply through the waves to be stirred by their
+      restless tumult. Every one has heard tell of how cross and treacherous a
+      sea the Mediterranean is in winter, and my own belief is, that he who has
+      merely been sea-sick on the Atlantic should give the Mediterranean a trial
+      before professing to have suffered every thing of which human nature is
+      capable. Our steamer was clean enough and staunch enough, but she was not
+      large&mdash;no bigger, I thought, than a gondola, that night as the waves
+      tossed her to and fro, till unwinged things took flight all through her
+      cabins and over her decks. My berth was placed transversely instead of
+      lengthwise with the boat,&mdash;an ingenious arrangement to heighten
+      sea-sick horrors, and dash the blood of the sufferer from brain to boots
+      with exaggerated violence at each roll of the boat; and I begged the
+      steward to let me sleep upon one of the lockers in the cabin. I found many
+      of my agonized species already laid out there; and the misery of the three
+      French commercial travellers was so great, that, in the excess of my own
+      dolor, it actually afforded me a kind of happiness, and I found myself
+      smiling at times to see the giant, with the eyes of a choked ox, rise up
+      and faintly bellow. Indeed, there was something eldritch and unearthly in
+      the whole business, and I think a kind of delirium must have resulted from
+      the sea-sickness. Otherwise, I shall not know how to account for having
+      attributed a kind of consciousness and individuality to the guide-book of
+      a young American who had come aboard at Leghorn. He turned out afterward
+      to be the sweetest soul in the world, and I am sorry now that I regarded
+      with amusement his failure to smoke off his sickness. He was reading his
+      guide-book with great diligence and unconcern, when suddenly I marked him
+      lay it softly, softly down, with that excessive deliberation which men use
+      at such times, and vanish with great dignity from the scene. Thus
+      abandoned to its own devices, this guide-book began its night-long riots,
+      setting out upon a tour of the cabin with the first lurch of the boat that
+      threw it from the table upon the floor. I heard it careen at once wildly
+      to the cabin door, and knock to get out; and failing in this, return more
+      deliberately to the stern of the boat, interrogating the tables and
+      chairs, which had got their sea-legs on, and asking them how they found
+      themselves. Arrived again at the point of starting, it seemed to pause a
+      moment, and then I saw it setting forth on a voyage of pleasure in the low
+      company of a French hat, which, being itself a French book, I suppose it
+      liked. In these travels they both ran under the feet of one of the
+      stewards and were replaced by an immense <i>tour de force</i> on the
+      table, from which the book eloped again,&mdash;this time in company with
+      an overcoat; but it seemed the coat was too miserable to go far: it
+      stretched itself at full length on the floor, and suffered the book to
+      dance over it, back and forth, I know not how many times. At last, as the
+      actions of the book were becoming unendurable, and the general
+      sea-sickness was waxing into a frenzy, a heavy roll, that made the whole
+      ship shriek and tremble, threw us all from our lockers; and gathering
+      myself up, bruised and sore in every fibre, I lay down again and became
+      sensible of a blissful, blissful lull; the machinery had stopped, and with
+      the mute hope that we were all going to the bottom, I fell tranquilly
+      asleep.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It appeared that the storm had really been dangerous. Instead of being
+      only six hours from Naples, as we ought to be at this time, we were got no
+      further than Porto Longone, in the Isle of Elba. We woke in a quiet,
+      sheltered little bay, whence we could only behold, not feel, the storm
+      left far out upon the open sea. From this we turned our heavy eyes gladly
+      to the shore, where a white little town was settled, like a flight of
+      gulls upon the beach, at the feet of green and pleasant hills, whose
+      gentle lines rhymed softly away against the sky. At the end of either arm
+      of the embracing land in which we lay, stood gray, placid old forts, with
+      peaceful sentries pacing their bastions, and weary ships creeping round
+      their feet, under guns looking out so kindly and harmlessly, that I think
+      General &mdash;&mdash; himself would not have hesitated (except, perhaps,
+      from a profound sentiment of regret for offering the violence) to attack
+      them. Our port was full of frightened shipping&mdash;steamers, brigs, and
+      schooners&mdash;of all sizes and nations; and since it was our misfortune
+      that Napoleon spent his exile in Elba at Porto Ferrato instead of Porto
+      Longone, we amused ourselves with looking at the vessels and the white
+      town and the soft hills, instead of hunting up dead lion's tracks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our fellow-passengers began to develop themselves: the regiment of
+      soldiers whom we were transporting picturesquely breakfasted forward, and
+      the second-cabin people came aft to our deck, while the English engineer
+      (there are English engineers on all the Mediterranean steamers) planted a
+      camp-stool in a sunny spot, and sat down to read the "Birmingham Express."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our friends of the second cabin were chiefly officers with their wives and
+      families, and they talked for the most part of their sufferings during the
+      night. They spoke such exquisite Italian that I thought them Tuscans, but
+      they told me they were of Sicily, where their beautiful speech first had
+      life. Let us hear what they talked of in their divine language, and with
+      that ineffable <i>tonic</i> accent which no foreigner perfectly acquires,
+      and let us for once translate the profanities Pagan and Christian, which
+      adorn common parlance in Italy:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ah, my God! how much I suffered!" says a sweet little woman with gentle
+      brown eyes, red, red lips, and blameless Greek lines of face. "I broke two
+      basins!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "There were ten broken in all, by Diana!" says this lady's sister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Presence of the Devil!" says her husband; and
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Body of Bacchus!" her young brother, puffing his cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "And you, sir," said the lady, turning to a handsome young fellow in civil
+      dress, near her, "how did you pass this horrible night?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh!" says the young man, twirling his heavy blond mustache, "mighty well,
+      mighty well!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh mercy of God! You were not sick?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I, signora, am never sea-sick. I am of the navy."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At which they all cry oh, and ah, and declare they are glad of it, though
+      why they should have been I don't know to this day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I have often wished," added the young man meditatively, and in a serious
+      tone, as if he had indeed given the subject much thought, "that it might
+      please God to let me be sea-sick once, if only that I might know how it
+      feels. But no!" He turned the conversation, as if his disappointment were
+      too sore to dwell upon; and hearing our English, he made out to let us
+      know that he had been at New York, and could spik our language, which he
+      proceeded to do, to the great pride of his countrymen, and our own
+      astonishment at the remarkable forms of English speech to which he gave
+      utterance.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We set out from Porto Longone that night at eight o'clock, and next
+      evening, driving through much-abated storm southward into calm waters and
+      clear skies, reached Naples. At noon, Monte Circeo where Circe led her
+      disreputable life, was a majestic rock against blue heaven and broken
+      clouds; after nightfall, and under the risen moon, Vesuvius crept softly
+      up from the sea, and stood a graceful steep, with wreaths of lightest
+      cloud upon its crest, and the city lamps circling far round its bay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII.&mdash;CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps some reader of mine who visited Naples under the old disorder of
+      things, when the Bourbon and the Camorra reigned, will like to hear that
+      the pitched battle which travellers formerly fought, in landing from their
+      steamer, is now gone out of fashion. Less truculent boatmen I never saw
+      than those who rowed us ashore at Naples; they were so quiet and peaceful
+      that they harmonized perfectly with that tranquil scene of
+      drowsy-twinkling city lights, slumbrous mountains, and calm sea, and, as
+      they dipped softly toward us in the glare of the steamer's lamps, I could
+      only think of Tennyson's description:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "And round about the keel with faces pale,
+  Dark faces pale against the rosy flame,
+  The mild-eyed melancholy lotus-eaters came."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The mystery of this placidity had been already solved by our captain, whom
+      I had asked what price I should bargain to pay from the steamer to the
+      shore. "There is a tariff," said he, "and the boatmen keep to it. The
+      Neapolitans are good people, (<i>buona gente</i>,) and only needed justice
+      to make them obedient to the laws." I must say that I found this to be
+      true. The fares of all public conveyances are now fixed, and the attempts
+      which drivers occasionally make to cheat you, seem to be rather the
+      involuntary impulses of old habit than deliberate intentions to do you
+      wrong. You pay what is due, and as your man merely rumbles internally when
+      you turn away, you must be a very timid <i>signorin</i>, indeed, if you
+      buy his content with any thing more. I fancy that all these things are now
+      much better managed in Italy than in America, only we grumble at them
+      there and stand them in silence at home. Every one can recall frightful
+      instances of plunder, in which he was the victim, at New York&mdash;in
+      which the robbery had none of the neatness of an operation, as it often
+      has in Italy, but was a brutal mutilation. And then as regards civility
+      from the same kind of people in the two countries, there is no comparison
+      that holds in favor of us. All questions are readily and politely answered
+      in Italian travel, and the servants of companies are required to be
+      courteous to the public whereas, one is only too glad to receive a silent
+      snub from such people at home.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The first sun that rose after our arrival in Naples was mild and warm as a
+      May sun, though we were quite in the heart of November. We early strolled
+      out under it into the crowded ways of the city, and drew near as we might
+      to that restless, thronging, gossiping southern life, in contrast with
+      which all northern existence seems only a sort of hibernation. The long
+      Toledo, on which the magnificence of modern Naples is threaded, is the
+      most brilliant and joyous street in the world; but I think there is less
+      of the quaintness of Italian civilization to be seen in its vivacious
+      crowds than anywhere else in Italy. One easily understands how, with its
+      superb length and straightness, and its fine, respectable,
+      commonplace-looking houses, it should be the pride of a people fond of
+      show; but after Venice and Genoa it has no picturesque charm; nay, even
+      busy Milan seems less modern and more picturesque. The lines of the lofty
+      palaces on the Toledo are seldom broken by the façade of a church or other
+      public edifice; and when this does happen, the building is sure to be
+      coldly classic or frantically baroque.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You weary of the Toledo's perfect repair, of its monotonous iron
+      balconies, its monotonous lofty windows; and it would be insufferable if
+      you could not turn out from it at intervals into one of those wondrous
+      little streets which branch up on one hand and down on the other, rising
+      and falling with flights of steps between the high, many-balconied walls.
+      They ring all day with the motleyest life of fishermen, fruit-venders,
+      chestnut-roasters, and idlers of every age and sex; and there is nothing
+      so full of local color, unless it be the little up-and-down-hill streets
+      in Genoa. Like those, the by-streets of Naples are only meant for
+      foot-passengers, and a carriage never enters them; but sometimes, if you
+      are so blest, you may see a mule climbing the long stairways, moving
+      solemnly under a stack of straw, or tinkling gayly down-stairs, bestridden
+      by a swarthy, handsome peasant&mdash;all glittering teeth and eyes and
+      flaming Phrygian cap. The rider exchanges lively salutations and sarcasms
+      with the by-standers in his way, and perhaps brushes against the bagpipers
+      who bray constantly in those hilly defiles. They are in Neapolitan
+      costume, these <i>pifferari</i>, and have their legs incomprehensibly tied
+      up in the stockings and garters affected by the peasantry of the
+      provinces, and wear brave red sashes about their waists. They are simple,
+      harmless-looking people, and would no doubt rob and kill in the most
+      amiable manner, if brigandage came into fashion in their neighborhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes the student of men may witness a Neapolitan quarrel in these
+      streets, and may pick up useful ideas of invective from the remarks of the
+      fat old women who always take part in the contests. But, though we were
+      ten days in Naples, I only saw one quarrel, and I could have heard much
+      finer violence of language among the gondoliers at any ferry in Venice
+      than I heard in this altercation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Neapolitans are, of course, furious in traffic. They sell a great
+      deal, and very boisterously, the fruit of the cactus, which is about as
+      large as an egg, and which they peel to a very bloody pulp, and lay out, a
+      sanguinary presence, on boards for purchase. It is not good to the
+      uncultivated taste; but the stranger may stop and drink, with relish and
+      refreshment, the orangeade and lemonade mixed with snow and sold at the
+      little booths on the street-corners. These stands looks much like the
+      shrines of the Madonna in other Italian cities, and a friend of ours was
+      led, before looking carefully into their office, to argue immense
+      Neapolitan piety from the frequency of their ecclesiastical architecture.
+      They are, indeed, the shrines of a god much worshiped during the long
+      Neapolitan summers; and it was the profound theory of the Bourbon kings of
+      Naples, that, if they kept their subjects well supplied with snow to cool
+      their drink, there was no fear of revolution. It shows how liable
+      statesmen are to err, that, after all, the Neapolitans rose, drove out the
+      Bourbons, and welcomed Garibaldi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The only part of the picturesque life of the side streets which seems ever
+      to issue from them into the Toledo is the goatherd with his flock of
+      milch-goats, which mingle with the passers in the avenues as familiarly as
+      with those of the alley, and thrust aside silk-hidden hoops, and brush
+      against dandies' legs, in their course, but keep on perfect terms with
+      every body. The goatherd leads the eldest of the flock, and the rest
+      follow in docile order and stop as he stops to ask at the doors if milk is
+      wanted. When he happens to have an order, one of the goats is haled, much
+      against her will, into the entry of a, house, and there milked, while the
+      others wait outside alone, nibbling and smelling thoughtfully about the
+      masonry. It is noticeable that none of the good-natured passers seem to
+      think these goats a great nuisance in the crowded street; but all make way
+      for them as if they were there by perfect right, and were no
+      inconvenience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the Toledo people keep upon the narrow sidewalks, or strike out into
+      the carriage-way, with an indifference to hoofs and wheels which one,
+      after long residence in tranquil Venice, cannot acquire, in view of the
+      furious Neapolitan driving. That old comprehensive gig of Naples, with
+      which many pens and pencils have familiarized the reader, is nearly as
+      hard to find there now as the <i>lazzaroni</i>, who have gone out
+      altogether. You may still see it in the remoter quarters of the city, with
+      its complement of twelve passengers to one horse, distributed, two on each
+      thill, four on the top seats, one at each side, and two behind; but in the
+      Toledo it has given place to much finer vehicles. Slight buggies, which
+      take you anywhere for half a franc, are the favorite means of public
+      conveyance, and the private turn-outs are of every description and degree.
+      Indeed, all the Neapolitans take to carriages, and the Strand in London at
+      six o'clock in the evening is not a greater jam of wheels than the Toledo
+      in the afternoon. Shopping feels the expansive influence of the
+      out-of-doors life, and ladies do most of it as they sit in their open
+      carriages at the shop-doors, ministered to by the neat-handed shopmen.
+      They are very languid ladies, as they recline upon their carriage
+      cushions; they are all black-eyed, and of an olive pallor, and have gloomy
+      rings about their fine eyes, like the dark-faced dandies who bow to them.
+      This Neapolitan look is very curious, and I have not seen it elsewhere in
+      Italy; it is a look of peculiar pensiveness, and comes, no doubt, from the
+      peculiarly heavy growth of lashes which fringes the lower eyelid. Then
+      there is the weariness in it of all peoples whose summers are fierce and
+      long.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the Italians usually dress beyond their means, the dandies of Naples
+      are very gorgeous. If it is now, say, four o'clock in the afternoon, they
+      are all coming down the Toledo with the streams of carriages bound for the
+      long drive around the bay. But our foot-passers go to walk in the
+      beautiful Villa Reale, between this course and the sea. The Villa is a
+      slender strip of Paradise, a mile long; it is rapture to walk in it, and
+      it comes, in description, to be a garden-grove, with feathery palms,
+      Greekish temples, musical fountains, white statues of the gods, and groups
+      of fair girls in spring silks. If I remember aright, the sun is always
+      setting on the bay, and you cannot tell whether this sunset is cooled by
+      the water or the water is warmed by the golden light upon it, and upon the
+      city, and upon all the soft mountain-heights around.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Walking westward through the whole length of the Villa Reale, and keeping
+      with the crescent shore of the bay, you come, after a while, to the Grot
+      of Posilippo, which is not a grotto but a tunnel cut for a carriage-way
+      under the hill. It serves, however, the purpose of a grotto, if a grotto
+      has any, and is of great length and dimness, and is all a-twinkle night
+      and day with numberless lamps. Overlooking the street which passes into it
+      is the tomb of Virgil, and it is this you have come to see. To reach it,
+      you knock first at the door of a blacksmith, who calls a species of
+      custodian, and, when this latter has opened a gate in a wall, you follow
+      him up-stairs into a market-garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one corner, and standing in a leafy and grassy shelter somewhat away
+      from the vegetables, is the poet's tomb, which has a kind of claim to
+      genuineness by virtue of its improbable appearance. It looks more like a
+      bake-oven than even the Pompeian tombs; the masonry is antique, and is at
+      least in skillful imitation of the fine Roman work. The interior is a
+      small chamber with vaulted or wagon-roof ceiling, under which a man may
+      stand upright, and at the end next the street is a little stone
+      commemorating the place as Virgil's tomb, which was placed there by the
+      Queen of France in 1840, and said by the custodian (a singularly dull ass)
+      to be an exact copy of the original, whatever the original may have been.
+      This guide could tell us nothing more about it, and was too stupidly
+      honest to pretend to know more. The laurel planted by Petrarch at the door
+      of the tomb, and renewed in later times by Casimir Delavigne, has been
+      succeeded by a third laurel. The present twig was so slender, and looked
+      so friendless and unprotected, that even enthusiasm for the memory of two
+      poets could not be brought to rob it of one of its few leaves; and we
+      contented ourselves with plucking some of the grass and weeds that grew
+      abundantly on the roof of the tomb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a dusty quiet within the tomb, and a grassy quiet without, that
+      pleased exceedingly; but though the memories of the place were so high and
+      epic, it only suggested bucolic associations, and, sunken into that nook
+      of hill-side verdure, made me think of a spring-house on some far-away
+      Ohio farm; a thought that, perhaps, would not have offended the poet, who
+      loved and sang of humble country things, and, drawing wearily to his rest
+      here, no doubt turned and remembered tenderly the rustic days before the
+      excellent veterans of Augustus came to exile him from his father's farm at
+      Mantua, and banish him to mere glory. But I believe most travellers have
+      much nobler sensations in Virgil's tomb, and there is a great deal of
+      testimony borne to their lofty sentiments on every scribbleable inch of
+      its walls. Valery reminded me that Boccaccio, standing near it of old,
+      first felt his fate decided for literature. Did he come there, I wonder,
+      with poor Fiammetta, and enter the tomb with her tender hand in his,
+      before ever he thought of that cruel absence she tells of? "O donne
+      pietose!" I hope so, and that this pilgrimage, half of love and half of
+      letters, took place, "nel tempo nel quale la rivestita terra più che tutto
+      l'altro anno si mostra bella."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you ascend from the tomb and turn Naplesward from the crest of the
+      hill, you have the loveliest view in the world of the sea and of the
+      crescent beach, mightily jeweled at its further horn with the black Castel
+      dell' Ovo. Fishermen's children are playing all along the foamy border of
+      the sea, and boats are darting out into the surf. The present humble muse
+      is not above saying also that the linen which the laundresses hang to dry
+      upon lines along the beach takes the sun like a dazzling flight of white
+      birds, and gives a breezy life to the scene which it could not spare.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      There was a little church on our way back from Posilippo, into which we
+      lounged a moment, pausing at the altar of some very successful saint near
+      the door. Here there were great numbers of the usual offerings from the
+      sick whom the saint had eased of their various ills,&mdash;waxen legs and
+      arms from people who had been in peril of losing their limbs, as well as
+      eyes, noses, fingers, and feet, and the crutches of those cured of
+      lameness; but we were most amused with the waxen effigies of several
+      entire babies hung up about the altar, which the poor souls who had been
+      near losing the originals had brought there in gratitude to the saint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Generally, however, the churches of Naples are not very interesting, and
+      one who came away without seeing them would have little to regret. The
+      pictures are seldom good, and though there are magnificent chapels in St.
+      Januarius, and fine Gothic tombs at Santa Chiara, the architecture is
+      usually rococo. I fancy that Naples has felt the damage of Spanish taste
+      in such things as well as Spanish tyranny in others. Indeed, I saw much
+      there which reminded me of what I had read about Spain rather than what I
+      had seen in Italy; and all Italian writers are agreed in attributing the
+      depravation of Naples to the long Spanish dominion. It is well known how
+      the Spaniards rule their provinces, and their gloomy despotism was
+      probably never more cruelly felt than in Italy, where the people were
+      least able to bear it. I had a heart-felt exultation in walking through
+      the quarter of the city where the tumults of Massaniello had raged, and,
+      if only for a few days, struck mortal terror to the brutal pride of the
+      viceroy; but I think I had a better sense of the immense retribution which
+      has overtaken all memory of Spanish rule in Naples as we passed through
+      the palace of Capo di Monte. This was the most splendid seat of the
+      Spanish Bourbon, whose family, inheriting its power from the violence of
+      other times, held it with violence in these; and in one of the chief
+      saloons of the palace, which is now Victor Emanuel's, were pictures
+      representing scenes of the revolution of 1860, while the statuette of a
+      Garibaldino, in his red shirt and all his heroic rudeness, was defiantly
+      conspicuous on one of the tables.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      There was nothing else that pleased me as well in the palace, or in the
+      grounds about it. These are all laid out in pleasant successions of grove,
+      tangled wilderness, and pasture-land, and were thronged, the Saturday
+      afternoon of our visit, with all ranks of people, who strolled through the
+      beautiful walks and enjoyed themselves in the peculiarly peaceful Italian
+      way. Valery says that the Villa Reale in the Bourbon time was closed,
+      except for a single day in the year, to all but the nobles; and that on
+      this occasion it was filled with pretty peasant women, who made it a
+      condition of their marriage bargains that their husbands should bring them
+      to the Villa Reale on St. Mary's Day. It is now free to all on every day
+      of the year, and the grounds of the Palace Capo di Monte are opened every
+      Saturday. I liked the pleasant way in which sylvan Nature and Art had made
+      friends in these beautiful grounds, in which Nature had consented to
+      overlook even the foolish vanity of the long aisles of lime, cut and
+      trimmed in formal and fantastic shapes, according to the taste of the
+      silly times of bagwigs and patches. On every side wild birds fluttered
+      through these absurd trees, and in the thickets lurked innumerable
+      pheasants, which occasionally issued forth and stalked in stately,
+      fearless groups over the sunset-crimsoned lawns. There was a brown
+      gamekeeper for nearly every head of game, wearing a pheasant's wing in his
+      hat and carrying a short, heavy sword; and our driver told us, with an
+      awful solemnity in his bated breath, that no one might kill this game but
+      the king, under penalty of the galleys.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VI.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We went one evening to the opera at San Carlo. It is one of the three
+      theatres&mdash;San Carlo of Naples, La Scala of Milan, and Fenice of
+      Venice&mdash;on which the Italians pride themselves; and it is certainly
+      very large and imposing. The interior has a <i>bel colpo d'occhio</i>,
+      which is what many Italians chiefly value in morals, manners, and
+      architecture; but after this comes great shabbiness of detail. The boxes,
+      even of the first order, are paved with brick tiles, and the red velvet
+      border of the box which the people see from the pit is not supported in
+      style by the seats within, which are merely covered with red oil-cloth.
+      The opera we saw was also second-rate, and was to the splendor of the
+      scenic arrangements what the oil-cloth was to the velvet. The house was
+      full of people, but the dress of the audience was not so fine as we had
+      expected in Naples. The evening dress is not <i>de rigueur</i> at Italian
+      theatres, and people seemed to have come to San Carlo in any pleasant
+      carelessness of costume.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The Italians are simple and natural folks, pleased through all their show
+      of conventionality with little things, and as easy and unconscious as
+      children in their ways. There happened to be a new caffè opened in Naples
+      while we were there, and we had the pleasure of seeing all ranks of people
+      affected by its magnificence. Artless throngs blocked the sidewalk day and
+      night before its windows, gazing upon its mirrors, fountains, and frescos,
+      and regarding the persons over their coffee within as beings lifted by
+      sudden magic out of the common orbit of life and set dazzling in a higher
+      sphere. All the waiters were uniformed and brass-buttoned to blinding
+      effect, and the head waiter was a majestic creature in a long blue coat
+      reaching to his feet, and armed with a mighty silver-headed staff. This
+      gorgeous apparition did nothing but walk up and down, and occasionally
+      advance toward the door, as if to disperse the crowds. At such times,
+      however, before executing his purpose, he would glance round on the
+      splendors they were admiring, and, as if smitten with a sense of the
+      enormous cruelty he had meditated in thinking to deprive them of the
+      sight, would falter and turn away, leaving his intent unfulfilled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII.&mdash;A DAY IN POMPEII.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      On the second morning after our arrival in Naples, we took the seven
+      o'clock train, which leaves the Nineteenth Century for the first cycle of
+      the Christian Era, and, skirting the waters of the Neapolitan bay almost
+      the whole length of our journey, reached the railway station of Pompeii in
+      an hour. As we rode along by that bluest sea, we saw the fishing-boats go
+      out, and the foamy waves (which it would be an insolent violence to call
+      breakers) come in; we saw the mountains slope their tawny and golden manes
+      caressingly downward to the waters, where the islands were dozing yet; and
+      landward, on the left, we saw Vesuvius, with his brown mantle of ashes
+      drawn close about his throat, reclining on the plain, and smoking a bland
+      and thoughtful morning pipe, of which the silver fumes curled lightly,
+      lightly upward in the sunrise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We dismounted at the station, walked a few rods eastward through a little
+      cotton-field, and found ourselves at the door of Hotel Diomed, where we
+      took breakfast for a number of sesterces which I am sure it would have
+      made an ancient Pompeian stir in his urn to think of paying. But in Italy
+      one learns the chief Italian virtue, patience, and we paid our account
+      with the utmost good nature. There was compensation in store for us, and
+      the guide whom we found at the gate leading up the little hill to Pompeii
+      inclined the disturbed balance in favor of our happiness. He was a Roman,
+      spoke Italian that Beatrice might have addressed to Dante, and was
+      numbered Twenty-six. I suppose it is known that the present Italian
+      Government forbids people to be pillaged in any way on its premises, and
+      that the property of the State is no longer the traffic of custodians and
+      their pitiless race. At Pompeii each person pays two francs for admission,
+      and is rigorously forbidden by recurrent sign-boards to offer money to the
+      guides. Ventisei (as we shall call him) himself pointed out one of these
+      notices in English, and did his duty faithfully without asking or
+      receiving fees in money. He was a soldier, like all the other guides, and
+      was a most intelligent, obliging fellow, with a self-respect and dignity
+      worthy of one of our own volunteer soldiers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ventisei took us up the winding slope, and led us out of this living world
+      through the Sea-gate of Pompeii back into the dead past&mdash;the past
+      which, with all its sensuous beauty and grace, and all its intellectual
+      power, I am not sorry to have dead, and for the most part, buried. Our
+      feet had hardly trodden the lava flagging of the narrow streets when we
+      came in sight of the laborers who were exhuming the inanimate city. They
+      were few in number, not perhaps a score, and they worked tediously, with
+      baskets to carry away the earth from the excavation, boys and girls
+      carrying the baskets, and several athletic old women plying picks, while
+      an overseer sat in a chair near by, and smoked, and directed their
+      exertions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They dig down about eight or ten feet, uncovering the walls and pillars of
+      the houses, and the mason, who is at hand, places little iron rivets in
+      the stucco to prevent its fall where it is weak, while an artist attends
+      to wash and clean the frescos as fast as they are exposed. The soil
+      through which the excavation first passes is not of great depth; the ashes
+      which fell damp with scalding rain, in the second eruption, are perhaps
+      five feet thick; the rest is of that porous stone which descended in small
+      fragments during the first eruption. A depth of at least two feet in this
+      stone is always left untouched by the laborers till the day when the chief
+      superintendent of the work comes out from Naples to see the last layers
+      removed; and it is then that the beautiful mosaic pavements of the houses
+      are uncovered, and the interesting and valuable objects are nearly always
+      found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wonder was, seeing how slowly the work proceeded, not that two thirds
+      of Pompeii were yet buried, but that one third had been exhumed. We left
+      these hopeless toilers, and went down-town into the Forum, stepping aside
+      on the way to look into one of the Pompeian Courts of Common Pleas.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Now Pompeii is, in truth, so full of marvel and surprise, that it would be
+      unreasonable to express disappointment with Pompeii in fiction. And yet I
+      cannot help it. An exuberant carelessness of phrase in most writers and
+      talkers who describe it had led me to expect much more than it was
+      possible to find there. In my Pompeii I confess that the houses had no
+      roofs&mdash;in fact, the rafters which sustained the tiles being burnt,
+      how could the roofs help falling in? But otherwise my Pompeii was a very
+      complete affair: the walls all rose to their full height; doorways and
+      arches were perfect; the columns were all unbroken and upright; putting
+      roofs on my Pompeii, you might have lived in it very comfortably. The real
+      Pompeii is different. It is seldom that any wall is unbroken; most columns
+      are fragmentary; and though the ground-plans are always distinct, very few
+      rooms in the city are perfect in form, and the whole is much more ruinous
+      than I thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this ruin once granted, and the idle disappointment at its greatness
+      overcome, there is endless material for study, instruction, and delight.
+      It is the revelation of another life, and the utterance of the past is
+      here more perfect than anywhere else in the world. Indeed, I think that
+      the true friend of Pompeii should make it a matter of conscience, on
+      entering the enchanted city, to cast out of his knowledge all the rubbish
+      that has fallen into it from novels and travels, and to keep merely the
+      facts of the town's luxurious life and agonizing death, with such
+      incidents of the eruption as he can remember from the description of
+      Pliny. These are the spells to which the sorcery yields, and with these in
+      your thought you can rehabilitate the city until Ventisei seems to be a <i>valet
+      de place</i> of the first century, and yourselves a set of blond
+      barbarians to whom he is showing off the splendors of one of the most
+      brilliant towns of the empire of Titus. Those sad furrows in the pavement
+      become vocal with the joyous rattle of chariot-wheels on a sudden, and you
+      prudently step up on the narrow sidewalks and rub along by the little
+      shops of wine, and grain, and oil, with which the thrifty voluptuaries of
+      Pompeii flanked their street-doors. The counters of these shops run across
+      their fronts, and are pierced with round holes on the top, through which
+      you see dark depths of oil in the jars below, and not sullen lumps of
+      ashes; those stately <i>amphoræ</i> behind are full of wine, and in the
+      corners are bags of wheat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "This house, with a shop on either side, whose is it, XXVI.?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It is the house of the great Sallust, my masters. Would you like his
+      autograph? I know one of his slaves who would sell it."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You are a good deal stared at, naturally, as you pass by, for people in
+      Pompeii have not much to do, and, besides, a Briton is not an every-day
+      sight there, as he will be one of these centuries. The skins of wild
+      beasts are little worn in Pompeii; and those bold-eyed Roman women think
+      it rather odd that we should like to powder our shaggy heads with
+      brick-dust. However, these are matters of taste. We, for our part, cannot
+      repress a feeling of disgust at the loungers in the street, who, XXVI.
+      tells us, are all going to soak themselves half the day in the baths
+      yonder; for, if there is in Pompeii one thing more offensive than another
+      to our savage sense of propriety, it is the personal cleanliness of the
+      inhabitants. We little know what a change for the better will be wrought
+      in these people with the lapse of time, and that they will yet come to
+      wash themselves but once a year, as we do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (The reader may go on doing this sort of thing at some length for himself;
+      and may imagine, if he pleases, a boastful conversation among the
+      Pompeians at the baths, in which the barbarians hear how Agricola has
+      broken the backbone of a rebellion in Britain; and in which all the
+      speakers begin their observations with "Ho! my Lepidus!" and "Ha! my
+      Diomed!" In the mean time we return to the present day, and step down the
+      Street of Plenty along with Ventisei.)
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It is proper, after seeing the sites of some of the principal temples in
+      Pompeii (such as those of Jupiter and Venus), to cross the fields that
+      cover a great breadth of the buried city, and look into the amphitheatre,
+      where, as every body knows, the lions had no stomach for Glaucus on the
+      morning of the fatal eruption. The fields are now planted with cotton, and
+      of course we thought those commonplaces about the wonder the Pompeians
+      would feel could they come back to see that New-World plant growing above
+      their buried homes. We might have told them, the day of our visit, that
+      this cruel plant, so long watered with the tears of slaves, and fed with
+      the blood of men, was now an exile from its native fields, where war was
+      plowing with sword and shot the guilty land, and rooting up the subtlest
+      fibres of the oppression in which cotton had grown king. And the ghosts of
+      wicked old Pompeii, remembering the manifold sins that called the fires of
+      hell to devour her, and thinking on this exiled plant, the latest witness
+      of God's unforgetting justice, might well have shuddered, through all
+      their shadow, to feel how terribly He destroys the enemies of Nature and
+      man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the only Pompeian presences which haunted our passage of the
+      cotton-field were certain small
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Phantoms of delight,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      with soft black eyes and graceful ways, who ran before us and plucked the
+      bolls of the cotton and sold them to us. Embassies bearing red and white
+      grapes were also sent out of the cottages to our excellencies; and there
+      was some doubt of the currency of the coin which we gave these poor
+      children in return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are now but few peasants living on the land over the head of
+      Pompeii, and the Government allows no sales of real estate to be made
+      except to itself. The people who still dwell here can hardly be said to
+      own their possessions, for they are merely allowed to cultivate the soil.
+      A guard stationed night and day prevents them from making excavations, and
+      they are severely restricted from entering the excavated quarters of the
+      city alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cotton whitens over two thirds of Pompeii yet interred: happy the
+      generation that lives to learn the wondrous secrets of that sepulchre!
+      For, when you have once been at Pompeii, this phantasm of the past takes
+      deeper hold on your imagination than any living city, and becomes and is
+      the metropolis of your dreamland forever. O marvelous city! who shall
+      reveal the cunning of your spell? Something not death, something not life&mdash;something
+      that is the one when you turn to determine its essence as the other! What
+      is it comes to me at this distance of that which I saw in Pompeii? The
+      narrow and curving, but not crooked streets, with the blazing sun of that
+      Neapolitan November falling into them, or clouding their wheel-worn lava
+      with the black, black shadows of the many-tinted walls; the houses, and
+      the gay columns of white, yellow, and red; the delicate pavements of
+      mosaic; the skeletons of dusty cisterns and dead fountains; inanimate
+      garden spaces with pygmy statues suited to their littleness; suites of
+      fairy bed-chambers, painted with exquisite frescos; dining-halls with
+      joyous scenes of hunt and banquet on their walls; the ruinous sites of
+      temples; the melancholy emptiness of booths and shops and jolly
+      drinking-houses; the lonesome tragic theatre, with a modern Pompeian
+      drawing water from a well there; the baths with their roofs perfect yet,
+      and the stucco bass-reliefs all but unharmed; around the whole, the city
+      wall crowned with slender poplars; outside the gates, the long avenue of
+      tombs, and the Appian Way stretching on to Stabiae; and, in the distance,
+      Vesuvius, brown and bare, with his fiery breath scarce visible against the
+      cloudless heaven;&mdash;these are the things that float before my fancy as
+      I turn back to look at myself walking those enchanted streets, and to
+      wonder if I could ever have been so blest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For there is nothing on the earth, or under it, like Pompeii.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The amphitheatre, to which we came now, after our stroll across the
+      cotton-fields, was small, like the vastest things in Pompeii, and had
+      nothing of the stately magnificence of the Arena at Verona, nor any thing
+      of the Roman Coliseum's melancholy and ruinous grandeur. But its
+      littleness made it all the more comfortable and social, and, seated upon
+      its benches under a cool awning, one could have almost chatted across the
+      arena with one's friends; could have witnessed the spectacle on the sands
+      without losing a movement of the quick gladiators, or an agony of the
+      victim given to the beasts&mdash;which must have been very delightful to a
+      Pompeian of companionable habits and fine feelings. It is quite
+      impossible, however, that the bouts described by Bulwer as taking place
+      all at the same time on the arena should really have done so: the
+      combatants would have rolled and tumbled and trampled over each other an
+      hundred times in the narrow space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all the voices with which it once rang the poor little amphitheatre has
+      kept only an echo. But this echo is one of the most perfect ever heard:
+      prompt clear, startling, it blew back the light chaff we threw to it with
+      amazing vehemence, and almost made us doubt if it were not a direct human
+      utterance. Yet how was Ventisei to know our names? And there was no one
+      else to call them but ourselves. Our "<i>dolce duca</i>" gathered a
+      nosegay from the crumbling ledges, and sat down in the cool of the
+      once-cruel cells beneath, and put it prettily together for the ladies.
+      When we had wearied ourselves with the echo he arose and led us back into
+      Pompeii.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The plans of nearly all the houses in the city are alike: the
+      entrance-room next the door; the parlor or drawing-room next that; then
+      the <i>impluvium</i>, or unroofed space in the middle of the house, where
+      the rains were caught and drained into the cistern, and where the
+      household used to come to wash itself, primitively, as at a pump; the
+      little garden, with its painted columns, behind the <i>impluvium</i>, and,
+      at last, the dining-room. There are minute bed-chambers on either side,
+      and, as I said, a shop at one side in front, for the sale of the master's
+      grain, wine, and oil. The pavements of all the houses are of mosaic,
+      which, in the better sort, is very delicate and beautiful, and is found
+      sometimes perfectly uninjured. An exquisite pattern, often repeated, is a
+      ground of tiny cubes of white marble with dots of black dropped regularly
+      into it. Of course there were many picturesque and fanciful designs, of
+      which the best have been removed to the Museum in Naples; but several good
+      ones are still left, and (like that of the Wild Boar) give names to the
+      houses in which they are found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, after all, the great wonder, the glory, of these Pompeian houses is
+      in their frescos. If I tried to give an idea of the luxury of color in
+      Pompeii, the most gorgeous adjectives would be as poorly able to reproduce
+      a vivid and glowing sense of those hues as the photography which now
+      copies the drawing of the decorations; so I do not try.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know it is a cheap and feeble thought, and yet, let the reader please to
+      consider: A workman nearly two thousand years laying upon the walls those
+      soft lines that went to make up fauns and satyrs, nymphs and naiads,
+      heroes and gods and goddesses; and getting weary and lying down to sleep,
+      and dreaming of an eruption of the mountain; of the city buried under a
+      fiery hail, and slumbering in its bed of ashes seventeen centuries; then
+      of its being slowly exhumed, and, after another lapse of years, of some
+      one coming to gather the shadow of that dreamer's work upon a plate of
+      glass, that he might infinitely reproduce it and sell it to tourists at
+      from five francs to fifty centimes a copy&mdash;I say, consider such a
+      dream, dreamed in the hot heart of the day, after certain cups of Vesuvian
+      wine! What a piece of <i>Katzenjämmer</i> (I can use no milder term) would
+      that workman think it when he woke again! Alas! what is history and the
+      progress of the arts and sciences but one long <i>Katzenjämmer</i>!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Photography cannot give, any more than I, the colors of the frescos, but
+      it can do the drawing better, and, I suspect, the spirit also. I used the
+      word workman, and not artist, in speaking of the decoration of the walls,
+      for in most cases the painter was only an artisan, and did his work
+      probably by the yard, as the artisan who paints walls and ceilings in
+      Italy does at this day. But the old workman did his work much more
+      skillfully and tastefully than the modern&mdash;threw on expanses of
+      mellow color, delicately paneled off the places for the scenes, and
+      penciled in the figures and draperies (there are usually more of the one
+      than the other) with a deft hand. Of course, the houses of the rich were
+      adorned by men of talent; but it is surprising to see the community of
+      thought and feeling in all this work, whether it be from cunninger or
+      clumsier hands. The subjects are nearly always chosen from the fables of
+      the gods, and they are in illustration of the poets, Homer and the rest.
+      To suit that soft, luxurious life which people led in Pompeii, the themes
+      are commonly amorous, and sometimes not too chaste; there is much of
+      Bacchus and Ariadne, much of Venus and Adonis, and Diana bathes a good
+      deal with her nymphs,&mdash;not to mention frequent representations of the
+      toilet of that beautiful monster which the lascivious art of the time
+      loved to depict. One of the most pleasing of all the scenes is that in one
+      of the houses, of the Judgment of Paris, in which the shepherd sits upon a
+      bank in an attitude of ineffable and flattered importance, with one leg
+      carelessly crossing the other, and both hands resting lightly on his
+      shepherd's crook, while the goddesses before him await his sentence.
+      Naturally the painter has done his best for the victress in this rivalry,
+      and you see
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Idalian Aphrodite beautiful,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      as she should be, but with a warm and piquant spice of girlish resentment
+      in her attitude, that Paris should pause for an instant, which is
+      altogether delicious.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "And I beheld great Here's angry eyes."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Awful eyes! How did the painter make them? The wonder of all these pagan
+      frescos is the mystery of the eyes&mdash;still, beautiful, unhuman. You
+      cannot believe that it is wrong for those tranquil-eyed men and women to
+      do evil, they look so calm and so unconscious in it all; and in the
+      presence of the celestials, as they bend upon you those eternal orbs, in
+      whose regard you are but a part of space, you feel that here art has
+      achieved the unearthly. I know of no words in literature which give a <i>sense</i>
+      (nothing gives the idea) of the <i>stare</i> of these gods, except that
+      magnificent line of Kingsley's, describing the advance over the sea toward
+      Andromeda of the oblivious and unsympathizing Nereids. They floated slowly
+      up, and their eyes
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Stared on her, silent and still, like the eyes in the house
+  of the idols."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The colors of this fresco of the Judgment of Paris are still so fresh and
+      bright, that it photographs very well, but there are other frescos wherein
+      there is more visible perfection of line, but in which the colors are so
+      dim that they can only be reproduced by drawings. One of these is the
+      Wounded Adonis cared for by Venus and the Loves; in which the story is
+      treated with a playful pathos wonderfully charming. The fair boy leans in
+      the languor of his hurt toward Venus, who sits utterly disconsolate beside
+      him, while the Cupids busy themselves with such slight surgical offices as
+      Cupids may render: one prepares a linen bandage for the wound, another
+      wraps it round the leg of Adonis, another supports one of his heavy arms,
+      another finds his own emotions too much for him and pauses to weep. It is
+      a pity that the colors of this beautiful fresco are grown so dim, and a
+      greater pity that most of the other frescos in Pompeii must share its
+      fate, and fade away. The hues are vivid when the walls are first
+      uncovered, and the ashes washed from the pictures, but then the malice of
+      the elements begins anew, and rain and sun draw the life out of tints
+      which the volcano failed to obliterate. In nearly all cases they could be
+      preserved by throwing a roof above the walls, and it is a wonder that the
+      Government does not take this slight trouble to save them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the frescos which told no story but their own, we were most pleased
+      with one in a delicately painted little bed-chamber. This represented an
+      alarmed and furtive man, whom we at once pronounced The Belated Husband,
+      opening a door with a night-latch. Nothing could have been better than
+      this miserable wretch's cowardly haste and cautious noiselessness in
+      applying his key; apprehension sat upon his brow, confusion dwelt in his
+      guilty eye. He had been out till two o'clock in the morning,
+      electioneering for Pansa, the friend of the people ("Pansa, and Roman
+      gladiators," "Pansa, and Christians to the Beasts," was the platform), and
+      he had left his <i>placens uxor</i> at home alone with the children, and
+      now within this door that <i>placens uxor</i> awaited him!
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      You have read, no doubt, of their discovering, a year or two since, in
+      making an excavation in a Pompeian street, the molds of four human bodies,
+      three women and a man, who fell down, blind and writhing, in the storm of
+      fire eighteen hundred years ago; whose shape the settling and hardening
+      ashes took; whose flesh wasted away, and whose bones lay there in the
+      hollow of the matrix till the cunning of this time found them, and,
+      pouring liquid plaster round the skeletons, clothed them with human form
+      again, and drew them forth into the world once more. There are many things
+      in Pompeii which bring back the gay life of the city, but nothing which so
+      vividly reports the terrible manner of her death as these effigies of the
+      creatures that actually shared it. The man in the last struggle has thrown
+      himself upon his back and taken his doom sturdily&mdash;there is a sublime
+      calm in his rigid figure. The women lie upon their faces, their limbs
+      tossed and distorted, their drapery tangled and heaped about them, and in
+      every fibre you see how hard they died. One presses her face into her
+      handkerchief to draw one last breath unmixed with scalding steam;
+      another's arms are wildly thrown abroad to clutch at help; another's hand
+      is appealingly raised, and on her slight fingers you see the silver hoops
+      with which her poor dead vanity adorned them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The guide takes you aside from the street into the house where they lie,
+      and a dreadful shadow drops upon your heart as you enter their presence.
+      Without, the hell-storm seems to fall again, and the whole sunny plain to
+      be darkened with its ruin, and the city to send up the tumult of her
+      despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is there left in Pompeii to speak of after this? The long street of
+      tombs outside the walls? Those that died before the city's burial seem to
+      have scarcely a claim to the solemnity of death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shall we go see Diomed's Villa, and walk through the freedman's long
+      underground vaults, where his friends thought to be safe, and were
+      smothered in heaps? The garden-ground grows wild among its broken columns
+      with weeds and poplar saplings; in one of the corridors they sell
+      photographs, on which, if you please, Ventisei has his bottle, or
+      drink-money. So we escape from the doom of the calamity, and so, at last,
+      the severely forbidden <i>buonamano</i> is paid. A dog may die many deaths
+      besides choking with butter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We return slowly through the city, where we have spent the whole day, from
+      nine till four o'clock. We linger on the way, imploring Ventisei if there
+      is not something to be seen in this or that house; we make our weariness
+      an excuse for sitting down, and cannot rend ourselves from the bliss of
+      being in Pompeii.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last we leave its gates, and swear each other to come again many times
+      while in Naples, and never go again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps it was as well. You cannot repeat great happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX.&mdash;A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The road from Naples to Herculaneum is, in fact, one long street; it
+      hardly ceases to be city in Naples till it is town at Portici, and in the
+      interval it is suburb, running between palatial lines of villas, which all
+      have their names ambitiously painted over their doors. Great part of the
+      distance this street is bordered by the bay, and, as far as this is the
+      case, it is picturesque, as every thing is belonging to marine life in
+      Italy. Sea-faring people go lounging up and down among the fishermen's
+      boats drawn up on the shore, and among the fishermen's wives making nets,
+      while the fishermen's children play and clamber everywhere, and over all
+      flap and flutter the clothes hung on poles to dry. In this part of the
+      street there are, of course, oysters, and grapes, and oranges, and
+      cactus-pulps, and cutlery, and iced drinks to sell at various booths; and
+      Commerce is exceedingly dramatic and boisterous over the bargains she
+      offers; and equally, of course, murderous drinking shops lurk at intervals
+      along the pavement, and lure into their recesses mariners of foreign
+      birth, briefly ashore from their ships. The New York Coffee House is there
+      to attract my maritime fellow-countrymen, and I know that if I look into
+      that place of refreshment I shall see their honest, foolish faces flushed
+      with drink, and with the excitement of buying the least they can for the
+      most money. Poor souls! they shall drink that pleasant morning away in the
+      society of Antonino the best of Neapolitans, and at midnight, emptied of
+      every soldo, shall arise, wrung with a fearful suspicion of treachery, and
+      wander away under Antonino's guidance to seek the protection of the
+      Consul; or, taking the law into their own hands, shall proceed to clean
+      out, <i>more Americano</i>, the New York Coffee House, when Antonino shall
+      develop into one of the landlords, and deal them the most artistic stab in
+      Naples: handsome, worthy Antonino; tender-eyed, subtle, pitiless!
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Where the road to Herculaneum leaves the bay and its seafaring life, it
+      enters, between the walls of lofty, fly-blown houses, a world of maccaroni
+      haunted by foul odors, beggars, poultry, and insects. There were few
+      people to be seen on the street, but through the open doors of the lofty
+      fly-blown houses we saw floury legions at work making maccaroni; grinding
+      maccaroni, rolling it, cutting it, hanging it in mighty skeins to dry, and
+      gathering it when dried, and putting it away. By the frequency of the
+      wine-shops we judged that the legions were a thirsty host, and by the
+      number of the barber-surgeons' shops, that they were a plethoric and too
+      full-blooded host. The latter shops were in the proportion of one to five
+      of the former; and the artist who had painted their signs had indulged his
+      fancy in wild excesses of phlebotomy. We had found that, as we came south
+      from Venice, science grew more and more sanguinary in Italy, and more and
+      more disposed to let blood. At Ferrara, even, the propensity began to be
+      manifest on the barbers' signs, which displayed the device of an arm
+      lanced at the elbow, and jetting the blood by a neatly described curve
+      into a tumbler. Further south the same arm was seen to bleed at the wrist
+      also; and at Naples an exhaustive treatment of the subject appeared, the
+      favorite study of the artist being to represent a nude figure reclining in
+      a genteel attitude on a bank of pleasant greensward, and bleeding from the
+      elbows, wrists, hands, ankles, and feet.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In Naples everywhere one is surprised by the great number of English names
+      which appear on business houses, but it was entirely bewildering to read a
+      bill affixed to the gate of one of the villas on this road: "This
+      Desirable Property for Sale." I should scarcely have cared to buy that
+      desirable property, though the neighborhood seemed to be a favorite summer
+      resort, and there were villas, as I said, nearly the whole way to Portici.
+      Those which stood with their gardens toward the bay would have been
+      tolerable, no doubt, if they could have kept their windows shut to the
+      vile street before their doors; but the houses opposite could have had no
+      escape from its stench and noisomeness. It was absolutely the filthiest
+      street I have seen anywhere outside of New York, excepting only that
+      little street which, in Herculaneum, leads from the theatre to the House
+      of Argo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This pleasant avenue has a stream of turbid water in its centre, bordered
+      by begging children, and is either fouler or cleaner for the water, but I
+      shall never know which. It is at a depth of some fifty or sixty feet below
+      the elevation on which the present city of Portici is built, and is part
+      of the excavation made long ago to reach the plain on which Herculaneum
+      stands, buried under its half-score of successive layers of lava, and
+      ashes, and Portici. We had the aid of all the virtuous poverty and leisure
+      of the modern town&mdash;there was a vast deal of both, we found&mdash;in
+      our search for the staircase by which you descend to the classic plain,
+      and it proved a discovery involving the outlay of all the copper coin
+      about us, while the sight of the famous theatre of Herculaneum was much
+      more expensive than it would have been had we come there in the old time
+      to see a play of Plautus or Terence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the theatre, "the large and highly ornamented theatre" of which I
+      read, only a little while ago, in an encyclopedia, we found it, by the
+      light of our candles, a series of gloomy hollows, of the general
+      complexion of coal-bins and potato-cellars. It was never perfectly dug out
+      of the lava, and, as is known, it was filled up in the last century,
+      together with other excavations, when they endangered the foundations of
+      worthless Portici overhead. (I am amused to find myself so hot upon the
+      poor property-holders of Portici. I suppose I should not myself, even for
+      the cause of antiquity and the knowledge of classic civilization, like to
+      have my house tumbled about my ears.) But though it was impossible in the
+      theatre of Herculaneum to gain any idea of its size or richness, I
+      remembered there the magnificent bronzes which had been found in it, and
+      did a hasty reverence to the place. Indeed, it is amazing, when one sees
+      how small a part of Herculaneum has been uncovered, to consider the number
+      of fine works of art in the Museo Borbonico which were taken thence, and
+      which argue a much richer and more refined community than that of Pompeii.
+      A third of the latter city has now been restored to the light of day; but
+      though it has yielded abundance of all the things that illustrate the
+      domestic and public life, and the luxury and depravity of those old times,
+      and has given the once secret rooms of the museum their worst attraction,
+      it still falls far below Herculaneum in the value of its contributions to
+      the treasures of classic art, except only in the variety and beauty of its
+      exquisite frescos.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effect of this fact is to stimulate the imagination of the visitor to
+      that degree that nothing short of the instant destruction of Portici and
+      the excavation of all Herculaneum will satisfy him. If the opening of one
+      theatre, and the uncovering of a basilica and two or three houses, have
+      given such richness to us, what delight and knowledge would not the
+      removal of these obdurate hills of ashes and lava bestow!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Emerging from the coal-bins and potato-cellars, the visitor extinguishes
+      his candle with a pathetic sigh, profusely rewards the custodian (whom he
+      connects in some mysterious way with the ancient population of the injured
+      city about him), and, thoughtfully removing the tallow from his fingers,
+      follows the course of the vile stream already sung, and soon arrives at
+      the gate opening into the exhumed quarter of Herculaneum. And there he
+      finds a custodian who enters perfectly into his feelings; a custodian who
+      has once been a guide in Pompeii, but now despises that wretched town, and
+      would not be guide there for any money since he has known the superior
+      life of Herculaneum; who, in fine, feels toward Pompeii as a Bostonian
+      feels toward New York. Yet the reader would be wrong to form the idea that
+      there is bitterness in the disdain of this custodian. On the contrary, he
+      is one of the best-natured men in the world. He is a mighty mass of
+      pinguid bronze, with a fat lisp, and a broad, sunflower smile, and he
+      lectures us with a vast and genial breadth of manner on the ruins,
+      contradicting all our guesses at things with a sweet "Perdoni, signori! ma&mdash;&mdash;."
+      At the end, we find that he has some medallions of lava to sell: there is
+      Victor Emanuel, or, if we are of the <i>partito d'azione</i>, there is
+      Garibaldi; both warm yet from the crater of Vesuvius, and of the same
+      material which destroyed Herculaneum. We decline to buy and the custodian
+      makes the national shrug and grimace (signifying that we are masters of
+      the situation, and that he washes his hands of the consequence of our
+      folly) on the largest scale that we have ever seen: his mighty hands are
+      rigidly thrust forth, his great lip protruded, his enormous head thrown
+      back to bring his face on a level with his chin. The effect is tremendous,
+      but we nevertheless feel that he loves us the same.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The afternoon on which we visited Herculaneum was in melancholy contrast
+      to the day we spent in Pompeii. The lingering summer had at last saddened
+      into something like autumnal gloom, and that blue, blue sky of Naples was
+      overcast. So, this second draught of the spirit of the past had not only
+      something of the insipidity of custom, but brought rather a depression
+      than a lightness to our hearts. There was so little of Herculaneum: only a
+      few hundred yards square are exhumed, and we counted the houses easily on
+      the fingers of one hand, leaving the thumb to stand for the few rods of
+      street that, with its flagging of lava and narrow border of foot-walks,
+      lay between; and though the custodian, apparently moved at our dejection,
+      said that the excavation was to be resumed the very next week, the
+      assurance did little to restore our cheerfulness. Indeed, I fancy that
+      these old cities must needs be seen in the sunshine by those who would
+      feel what gay lives they once led; by dimmer light they are very sullen
+      spectres, and their doom still seems to brood upon them. I know that even
+      Pompeii could not have been joyous that sunless afternoon, for what there
+      was to see of mournful Herculaneum was as brilliant with colors as any
+      thing in the former city. Nay, I believe that the tints of the frescos and
+      painted columns were even brighter, and that the walls of the houses were
+      far less ruinous than those of Pompeii. But no house was wholly freed from
+      lava, and the little street ran at the rear of the buildings which were
+      supposed to front on some grander avenue not yet exhumed. It led down, as
+      the custodian pretended, to a wharf, and he showed an iron ring in the
+      wall of the House of Argo, standing at the end of the street, to which, he
+      said, his former fellow-citizens used to fasten their boats, though it was
+      all dry enough there now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is evidence in Herculaneum of much more ambitious domestic
+      architecture than seems to have been known in Pompeii. The ground-plan of
+      the houses in the two cities is alike; but in the former there was often a
+      second story, as was proven by the charred ends of beams still protruding
+      from the walls, while in the latter there is only one house which is
+      thought to have aspired to a second floor. The House of Argo is also much
+      larger than any in Pompeii, and its appointments were more magnificent.
+      Indeed, we imagined that in this more purely Greek town we felt an
+      atmosphere of better taste in every thing than prevailed in the
+      fashionable Roman watering-place, though this, too, was a summer resort of
+      the "best society" of the empire. The mosaic pavements were exquisite, and
+      the little bed-chambers dainty and delicious in their decorations. The
+      lavish delight in color found expression in the vividest hues upon the
+      walls, and not only were the columns of the garden painted, but the
+      foliage of the capitals was variously tinted. The garden of the House of
+      Argo was vaster than any of the classic world which we had yet seen, and
+      was superb with a long colonnade of unbroken columns. Between these and
+      the walls of the houses was a pretty pathway of mosaic, and in the midst
+      once stood marble tables, under which the workmen exhuming the city found
+      certain crouching skeletons. At one end was the dining-room, of course,
+      and painted on the wall was a lady with a parasol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought all Herculaneum sad enough, but the profusion of flowers growing
+      wild in this garden gave it a yet more tender and pathetic charm. Here&mdash;where
+      so long ago the flowers had bloomed, and perished in the terrible
+      blossoming of the mountain that sent up its fires in the awful similitude
+      of Nature's harmless and lovely forms, and showered its destroying petals
+      all abroad&mdash;was it not tragic to find again the soft tints, the
+      graceful shapes, the sweet perfumes of the earth's immortal life? Of them
+      that planted and tended and plucked and bore in their bosoms and twined in
+      their hair these fragile children of the summer, what witness in the
+      world? Only the crouching skeletons under the tables. Alas and alas!
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The skeletons went with us throughout Herculaneum, and descended into the
+      cell, all green with damp, under the basilica, and lay down, fettered and
+      manacled in the place of those found there beside the big bronze kettle in
+      which the prisoners used to cook their dinners. How ghastly the thought of
+      it was! If we had really seen this kettle and the skeletons there&mdash;as
+      we did not&mdash;we could not have suffered more than we did. They took
+      all the life out of the House of Perseus, and the beauty from his pretty
+      little domestic temple to the Penates, and this was all there was left in
+      Herculaneum to see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Is there nothing else?" we demand of the custodian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Signori, this is all."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It is mighty little."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Perdoni, signori! ma&mdash;&mdash;."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well," we say sourly to each other, glancing round at the walls of the
+      pit, on the bottom of which the bit of city stands, "it is a good thing to
+      know that Herculaneum amounts to nothing."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X.&mdash;CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I have no doubt
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Calm Capri waits,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      where we left it, in the Gulf of Salerno, for any traveller who may choose
+      to pay it a visit; but at the time we were there we felt that it was on
+      exhibition for that day only, and would, when we departed, disappear in
+      its sapphire sea, and be no more; just as Niagara ceases to play as soon
+      as your back is turned, and Venice goes out like a pyrotechnic display,
+      and all marvelously grand and lovely things make haste to prove their
+      impermanence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We delayed some days in Naples in hopes of fine weather, and at last chose
+      a morning that was warm and cloudy at nine o'clock, and burst into
+      frequent passions of rain before we reached Sorrento at noon The first
+      half of the journey was made by rail, and brought us to Castellamare,
+      whence we took carriage for Sorrento, and oranges, and rapture,&mdash;winding
+      along the steep shore of the sea, and under the brows of wooded hills that
+      rose high above us into the misty weather, and caught here and there the
+      sunshine on their tops. In that heavenly climate no day can long be out of
+      humor, and at Sorrento we found ours very pleasant, and rode delightedly
+      through the devious streets, looking up to the terraced orange-groves on
+      one hand, and down to the terraced orange-groves on the other, until at a
+      certain turning of the way we encountered Antonino Occhio d'Argento, whom
+      fate had appointed to be our boatman to Capri. We had never heard of
+      Antonino before, and indeed had intended to take a boat from one of the
+      hotels; but when this corsair offered us his services, there was that
+      guile in his handsome face, that cunning in his dark eyes, that heart
+      could not resist, and we halted our carriage and took him at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kept his boat in one of those caverns which honey-comb the cliff under
+      Sorrento, and afford a natural and admirable shelter for such small craft
+      as may be dragged up out of reach of the waves, and here I bargained with
+      him before finally agreeing to go with him to Capri. In Italy it is
+      customary for a public carrier when engaged to give his employer as a
+      pledge the sum agreed upon for the service, which is returned with the
+      amount due him, at the end, if the service has been satisfactory; and I
+      demanded of Antonino this <i>caparra</i>, as it is called. "What <i>caparra</i>?"
+      said he, lifting the lid of his wicked eye with his forefinger, "this is
+      the best <i>caparra</i>," meaning a face as honest and trustworthy as the
+      devil's. The stroke confirmed my subjection to Antonino, and I took his
+      boat without further parley, declining even to feel the muscle of his
+      boatmen's arms, which he exposed to my touch in evidence that they were
+      strong enough to row us swiftly to Capri. The men were but two in number,
+      but they tossed the boat lightly into the surf, and then lifted me aboard,
+      and rowed to the little pier from which the ladies and T. got in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sun shone, the water danced and sparkled, and presently we raised our
+      sail, and took the gale that blew for Capri&mdash;an oblong height rising
+      ten miles beyond out of the heart of the azure gulf. On the way thither
+      there was little interest but that of natural beauty in the bold,
+      picturesque coast we skirted for some distance; though on one mighty rock
+      there were the ruins of a seaward-looking Temple of Hercules, with arches
+      of the unmistakable Roman masonry, below which the receding waves rushed
+      and poured over a jetting ledge in a thunderous cataract.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Antonino did his best to entertain us, and lectured us unceasingly upon
+      his virtue and his wisdom, dwelling greatly on the propriety and good
+      policy of always speaking the truth. This spectacle of veracity became
+      intolerable after a while, and I was goaded to say: "Oh then, if you never
+      tell lies, you expect to go to Paradise." "Not at all," answered Antonino
+      compassionately, "for I have sinned much. But the lie doesn't go ahead" (<i>non
+      va avanti</i>), added this Machiavelli of boatmen; yet I think he was
+      mistaken, for he deceived us with perfect ease and admirable success. All
+      along, he had pretended that we could see Capri, visit the Blue Grotto,
+      and return that day; but as we drew near the island, painful doubts began
+      to trouble him, and he feared the sea would be too rough for the Grotto
+      part of the affair. "But there will be an old man," he said, with a
+      subtile air of prophecy, "waiting for us on the beach. This old man is one
+      of the Government guides to the Grotto, and he will say whether it is to
+      be seen to-day."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And certainly there was the old man on the beach&mdash;a short patriarch,
+      with his baldness covered by a kind of bloated woolen sock&mdash;a
+      blear-eyed sage, and a bare-legged. He waded through the surf toward the
+      boat, and when we asked him whether the Grotto was to be seen, he paused
+      knee-deep in the water, (at a secret signal from Antonino, as I shall
+      always believe,) put on a face of tender solemnity, threw back his head a
+      little, brought his hand to his cheek, expanded it, and said, "No; to-day,
+      no! To-morrow, yes!" Antonino leaped joyously ashore, and delivered us
+      over to the old man, to be guided to the Hotel di Londra, while he drew
+      his boat upon the land. He had reason to be contented, for this artifice
+      of the patriarch of Capri relieved him from the necessity of verifying to
+      me the existence of an officer of extraordinary powers in the nature of a
+      consul, who, he said, would not permit boats to leave Capri for the
+      main-land after five o'clock in the evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When it was decided that we should remain on the island till the morrow,
+      we found so much time on our hands, after bargaining for our lodging at
+      the Hotel di Londra, that we resolved to ascend the mountain to the ruins
+      of the palaces of Tiberius, and to this end we contracted for the services
+      of certain of the muletresses that had gathered about the inn-gate,
+      clamorously offering their beasts. The muletresses chosen were a matron of
+      mature years and of a portly habit of body; her daughter, a mere child;
+      and her niece, a very pretty girl of eighteen, with a voice soft and sweet
+      as a bird's. They placed the ladies, one on each mule, and then, while the
+      mother and daughter devoted themselves to the hind-quarters of the
+      foremost animal, the lovely niece brought up the rear of the second beast,
+      and the patriarch went before, and T. and I trudged behind. So the
+      cavalcade ascended; first, from the terrace of the hotel overlooking the
+      bit of shipping village on the beach, and next from the town of Capri,
+      clinging to the hill-sides, midway between sea and sky, until at last it
+      reached the heights on which the ruins stand. Our way was through narrow
+      lanes, bordered by garden walls; then through narrow streets bordered by
+      dirty houses; and then again by gardens, but now of a better sort than the
+      first, and belonging to handsome villas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the road our pretty muletress gossiped cheerfully, and our patriarch
+      gloomily, and between the two we accumulated a store of information
+      concerning the present inhabitants of Capri, which, I am sorry to say, has
+      now for the most part failed me. I remember that they said most of the
+      land-owners at Capri were Neapolitans, and that these villas were their
+      country-houses; though they pointed out one of the stateliest of the
+      edifices as belonging to a certain English physician who had come to visit
+      Capri for a few days, and had now been living on the island twenty years,
+      having married (said the muletress) the prettiest and poorest girl in the
+      town, from this romance&mdash;something like which the muletress seemed to
+      think might well happen concerning herself&mdash;we passed lightly to
+      speak of kindred things, the muletress responding gayly between the blows
+      she bestowed upon her beast. The accent of these Capriotes has something
+      of German harshness and heaviness: they say <i>non bosso</i> instead of <i>non
+      posso</i>, and <i>monto</i> instead of <i>mondo</i>, and interchange the
+      <i>t</i> and <i>d</i> a good deal; and they use for father the Latin <i>pater</i>,
+      instead of <i>padre</i>. But this girl's voice, as I said, was very
+      musical, and the island's accent was sweet upon her tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>I</i>.&mdash;What is your name?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>She</i>.&mdash;Caterina, little sir (signorin).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>I</i>.&mdash;And how old are you, Caterina?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>She</i>.&mdash;Eighteen, little sir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>I</i>.&mdash;And you are betrothed?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She feigns not to understand; but the patriarch, who has dropped behind to
+      listen to our discourse, explains,&mdash;"He asks if you are in love."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>She</i>.&mdash;Ah, no! little sir, not yet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>I</i>.&mdash;No? A little late, it seems to me. I think there must be
+      some good-looking youngster who pleases you&mdash;no?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>She</i>.&mdash;Ah, no! one must work, one cannot think of marrying. We
+      are four sisters, and we have only the <i>buonamano</i> from hiring these
+      mules, and we must spin and cook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>The Patriarch</i>.&mdash;Don't believe her; she has two lovers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>She.</i>&mdash;Ah, no! It isn't true. He tells a fib&mdash;he!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, nevertheless, she seemed to love to be accused of lovers,&mdash;such
+      is the guile of the female heart in Capri,&mdash;and laughed over the
+      patriarch's wickedness. She confided that she ate maccaroni once a day,
+      and she talked constantly of eating it just as the Northern Italians
+      always talk of <i>polenta.</i> She was a true daughter of the isle, and
+      had never left it but once in her life, when she went to Naples. "Naples
+      was beautiful, yes; but one always loves one's own country the best." She
+      was very attentive and good, but at the end was rapacious of more and more
+      <i>buonamano</i>. "Have patience with her, sir," said the blameless
+      Antonino, who witnessed her greediness; "they do not understand certain
+      matters here, poor little things!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the patriarch, he was full of learning relative to himself and to
+      Capri; and told me with much elaboration that the islanders lived chiefly
+      by fishing, and gained something also by their vineyards. But they were
+      greatly oppressed by taxes, and the strict enforcement of the
+      conscriptions, and they had little love for the Italian Government, and
+      wished the Bourbons back again. The Piedmontese, indeed, misgoverned them
+      horribly. There was the Blue Grotto, for example: formerly travellers paid
+      the guides five, six, ten francs for viewing it; but now the Piedmontese
+      had made a tariff, and the poor guides could only exact a franc from each
+      person. Things were in a ruinous condition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this we had arrived at a little inn on the top of the mountain, very
+      near the ruins of the palaces, "Here," said the patriarch, "it is
+      customary for strangers to drink a bottle of the wine of Tiberius." We
+      obediently entered the hostelry, and the landlord&mdash;a white-toothed,
+      brown-faced, good-humored peasant&mdash;gallantly ran forward and
+      presented the ladies with bouquets of roses. We thought it a pretty and
+      graceful act, but found later that it was to be paid for, like all pretty
+      and graceful things in Italy; for when we came to settle for the wine, and
+      the landlord wanted more than justice, he urged that he had presented the
+      ladies with flowers,&mdash;yet he equally gave me his benediction when I
+      refused to pay for his politeness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Now here," again said the patriarch in a solemn whisper, "you can see the
+      Tarantella danced for two francs; whereas down at your inn, if you hire
+      the dancers through your landlord, it will cost you five or six francs."
+      The difference was tempting, and decided us in favor of an immediate
+      Tarantella. The muletresses left their beasts to browse about the door of
+      the inn and came into the little public room, where were already the wife
+      and sister of the landlord, and took their places <i>vis-à-vis</i>, while
+      the landlord seized his tambourine and beat from it a wild and lively
+      measure. The women were barefooted and hoopless, and they gave us the
+      Tarantella with all the beauty of natural movement and free floating
+      drapery, and with all that splendid grace of pose which animates the
+      antique statues and pictures of dancers. They swayed themselves in time
+      with the music; then, filled with its passionate impulse, advanced and
+      retreated and whirled away;&mdash;snapping their fingers above their
+      heads, and looking over their shoulders with a gay and a laughing
+      challenge to each other, they drifted through the ever-repeated figures of
+      flight and wooing, and wove for us pictures of delight that remained upon
+      the brain like the effect of long-pondered vivid colors, and still return
+      to illumine and complete any representation of that indescribable dance.
+      Heaven knows what peril there might have been in the beauty and grace of
+      the pretty muletress but for the spectacle of her fat aunt, who, I must
+      confess, could only burlesque some of her niece's airiest movements, and
+      whose hard-bought buoyancy was at once pathetic and laughable. She earned
+      her share of the spoils certainly, and she seemed glad when the dance was
+      over, and went contentedly back to her mule.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The patriarch had early retired from the scene as from a vanity with which
+      he was too familiar for enjoyment, and I found him, when the Tarantella
+      was done, leaning on the curb of the precipitous rock immediately behind
+      the inn, over which the Capriotes say Tiberius used to cast the victims of
+      his pleasures after he was sated with them. These have taken their place
+      in the insular imagination as Christian martyrs, though it is probable
+      that the poor souls were any thing but Nazarenes. It took a stone thrown
+      from the brink of the rock twenty seconds to send back a response from the
+      water below, and the depth was too dizzying to look into. So we looked
+      instead toward Amalfi, across the Gulf of Salerno, and toward Naples,
+      across her bay. On every hand the sea was flushed with sunset, and an
+      unspeakable calm dwelt upon it, while the heights rising from it softened
+      and softened in the distance, and withdrew themselves into dreams of
+      ghostly solitude and phantom city. His late majesty the Emperor Tiberius
+      is well known to have been a man of sentiment, and he may often have
+      sought this spot to enjoy the evening hour. It was convenient to his
+      palace, and he could here give a fillip to his jaded sensibilities by
+      popping a boon companion over the cliff, and thus enjoy the fine poetic
+      contrast which his perturbed and horrible spirit afforded to that scene of
+      innocence and peace. Later he may have come hither also, when lust failed,
+      when all the lewd plays and devices of his fancy palled upon his senses,
+      when sin had grown insipid and even murder ceased to amuse, and his
+      majesty uttered his despair to the Senate in that terrible letter: "What
+      to write to you, or how to write, I know not; and what not to write at
+      this time, may all the gods and goddesses torment me wore than I daily
+      feel that I suffer if I do know."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The poor patriarch was also a rascal in his small way, and he presently
+      turned to me with a countenance full of cowardly trouble and base remorse,
+      "I pray you, little sir, not to tell the landlord below there that you
+      have seen the Tarantella danced here; for he has daughters and friends to
+      dance it for strangers, and gets a deal of money by it. So, if he asks you
+      to see it, do me the pleasure to say, lest he should take on (<i>pigliarsi</i>)
+      with me about it: 'Thanks, but we saw the Tarantella at Pompeii!'" It was
+      the last place in Italy where we were likely to have seen the Tarantella;
+      but these simple people are improvident in lying, as in every thing else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The patriarch had a curious spice of malice in him, which prompted him to
+      speak evil of all, and to as many as he dared. After we had inspected the
+      ruins of the emperor's villa, a clownish imbecile of a woman, professing
+      to be the wife of the peasant who had made the excavations, came forth out
+      of a cleft in the rock and received tribute of us&mdash;why, I do not
+      know. The patriarch abetted the extortion, but Parthianly remarked, as we
+      turned away, "Her husband ought to be here; but this is a <i>festa</i>,
+      and he is drinking and gaming in the village," while the woman protested
+      that he was sick at home. There was also a hermit living in great
+      publicity among the ruins, and the patriarch did not spare him a sneering
+      comment. [This hermit I have heard was not brought up to the profession of
+      anchorite, but was formerly a shoemaker, and according to his own
+      confession abandoned his trade because he could better indulge a lethargic
+      habit in the character of religious recluse.] He had even a bad word for
+      Tiberius, and reproached the emperor for throwing people over the cliff,
+      though I think it a sport in which he would himself have liked to join.
+      The only human creatures with whom he seemed to be in sympathy were the
+      brigands of the main-land, of whom he spoke poetically as exiles and
+      fugitives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the palace of Tiberius, which we had come go far and so toilsomely
+      to see, it must be confessed there was very little left of it. When that
+      well-meaning but mistaken prince died, the Senate demolished his
+      pleasure-houses at Capri, and left only those fragments of the beautiful
+      brick masonry which yet remain, clinging indestructible to the rocks, and
+      strewing the ground with rubbish. The recent excavations have discovered
+      nothing besides the uninteresting foundations of the building, except a
+      subterranean avenue leading from one part of the palace to another: this
+      is walled with delicate brickwork, and exquisitely paved with white marble
+      mosaic; and this was all that witnessed of the splendor of the wicked
+      emperor. Nature, the all-forgetting, all-forgiving, that takes the red
+      battle-field into her arms and hides it with blossom and harvest, could
+      not remember his iniquity, greater than the multitudinous murder of war.
+      The sea, which the despot's lust and fear had made so lonely, slept with
+      the white sails of boats secure upon its breast; the little bays and
+      inlets, the rocky clefts and woody dells, had forgotten their desecration;
+      and the gathering twilight, the sweetness of the garden-bordered pathway,
+      and the serenity of the lonely landscape, helped us to doubt history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We slowly returned to the inn by the road we had ascended, noting again
+      the mansion of the surprising Englishman who had come to Capri for three
+      months and had remained thirty years; passed through the darkness of the
+      village,&mdash;dropped here and there with the vivid red of a lamp,&mdash;and
+      so reached the inn at last, where we found the landlord ready to have the
+      Tarantella danced for us. We framed a discreeter fiction than that
+      prepared for us by the patriarch, and went in to dinner, where there were
+      two Danish gentlemen in dispute with as many rogues of boatmen, who,
+      having contracted to take them back that night to Naples, were now trying
+      to fly their bargain and remain at Capri till the morrow. The Danes beat
+      them, however, and then sat down to dinner, and to long stories of the
+      imposture and villany of the Italians. One of them chiefly bewailed
+      himself that the day before, having unwisely eaten a dozen oysters without
+      agreeing first with the oyster-man upon the price, he had been obliged to
+      pay this scamp's extortionate demand to the full, since he was unable to
+      restore him his property. We thought that something like this might have
+      happened to an imprudent man in any country, but we did not the less join
+      him in abusing the Italians&mdash;the purpose for which foreigners chiefly
+      visit Italy.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Standing on the height among the ruins of Tiberius's palace, the patriarch
+      had looked out over the waters, and predicted for the morrow the finest
+      weather that had ever been known in that region; but in spite of this
+      prophecy the day dawned stormily, and at breakfast time we looked out
+      doubtfully on waves lashed by driving rain. The entrance to the Blue
+      Grotto, to visit which we had come to Capri, is by a semicircular opening,
+      some three feet in width and two feet in height, and just large enough to
+      admit a small boat. One lies flat in the bottom of this, waits for the
+      impulse of a beneficent wave, and is carried through the mouth of the
+      cavern, and rescued from it in like manner by some receding billow. When
+      the wind is in the wrong quarter, it is impossible to enter the grot at
+      all; and we waited till nine o'clock for the storm to abate before we
+      ventured forth. In the mean time one of the Danish gentlemen, who&mdash;after
+      assisting his companion to compel the boatmen to justice the night before&mdash;had
+      stayed at Capri, and had risen early to see the grotto, returned from it,
+      and we besieged him with a hundred questions concerning it. But he
+      preserved the wise silence of the boy who goes in to see the six-legged
+      calf, and comes out impervious to the curiosity of all the boys who are
+      doubtful whether the monster is worth their money. Our Dane would merely
+      say that it was now possible to visit the Blue Grotto; that he had seen
+      it; that he was glad he <i>had</i> seen it. As to its blueness, Messieurs&mdash;yes,
+      it is blue. <i>C'est i dire</i>....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ladies had been amusing themselves with a perusal of the hotel
+      register, and the notes of admiration or disgust with which the different
+      sojourners at the inn had filled it. As a rule, the English people found
+      fault with the poor little hostelry and the French people praised it.
+      Commander Joshing and Lieutenant Prattent, R.N., of the former nation,
+      "were cheated by the donkey women, and thought themselves extremely
+      fortunate to have escaped with their lives from the effects of Capri
+      vintage. The landlord was an old Cossack." On the other hand, we read, "J.
+      Cruttard, homme de lettres, a passè quinze jours ici, et n'a eu que des
+      félicités du patron de cêt hôtel et de sa famille." Cheerful man of
+      letters! His good-natured record will keep green a name little known to
+      literature. Who are G. Bradshaw, Duke of New York, and Signori Jones and
+      Andrews, Hereditary Princes of the United States? Their patrician names
+      followed the titles of several English nobles in the register. But that
+      which most interested the ladies in this record was the warning of a
+      terrified British matron against any visit to the Blue Grotto except in
+      the very calmest weather. The British matron penned her caution after an
+      all but fatal experience. The ladies read it aloud to us, and announced
+      that for themselves they would be contented with pictures of the Blue
+      Grotto and our account of its marvels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the beach below the hotel lay the small boats of the guides to the Blue
+      Grotto, and we descended to take one of them. The fixed rate is a franc
+      for each person. The boatmen wanted five francs for each of us. We
+      explained that although not indigenous to Capri, or even Italy, we were
+      not of the succulent growth of travellers, and would not be eaten. We
+      retired to our vantage ground on the heights. The guides called us to the
+      beach again. They would take us for three francs apiece, or say six francs
+      for both of us. We withdrew furious to the heights again, where we found
+      honest Antonino, who did us the pleasure to yell to his fellow-scoundrels
+      on the beach, "You had better take these signori for a just price. They
+      are going to the syndic to complain of you." At which there arose a
+      lamentable outcry among the boatmen, and they called with one voice for us
+      to come down and go for a franc apiece. This fable teaches that
+      common-carriers are rogues everywhere; but that whereas we are helpless in
+      their hands at home, we may bully them into rectitude in Italy, where they
+      are afraid of the law.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had scarcely left the landing of the hotel in the boat of the patriarch&mdash;for
+      I need hardly say he was first and most rapacious of the plundering crew&mdash;when
+      we found ourselves in very turbulent waters, in the face of mighty bluffs,
+      rising inaccessible from the sea. Here and there, where their swarthy
+      fronts were softened with a little verdure, goat-paths wound up and down
+      among the rocks; and midway between the hotel and the grotto, in a sort of
+      sheltered nook, we saw the Roman masonry of certain antique baths&mdash;baths
+      of Augustus, says Valery; baths of Tiberius, say the Capriotes, zealous
+      for the honor of their infamous hero. Howbeit, this was all we saw on the
+      way to the Blue Grotto. Every moment the waves rose higher, emulous of the
+      bluffs, which would not have afforded a foothold, or any thing to cling
+      to, had we been upset and washed against them&mdash;and we began to talk
+      of the immortality of the soul. As we neared the grotto, the patriarch
+      entertained us with stories of the perilous adventures of people who
+      insisted upon entering it in stormy weather,&mdash;especially of a French
+      painter who had been imprisoned in it four days, and kept alive only on
+      rum, which the patriarch supplied him, swimming into the grotto with a
+      bottle-full at a time. "And behold us arrived, gentlemen!" said he, as he
+      brought the boat skillfully around in front of the small semicircular
+      opening at the base of the lofty bluff. We lie flat on the bottom of the
+      boat, and complete the immersion of that part of our clothing which the
+      driving torrents of rain had spared. The wave of destiny rises with us
+      upon its breast&mdash;sinks, and we are inside of the Blue Grotto. Not so
+      much blue as gray, however, and the water about the mouth of it green
+      rather than azure. They say that on a sunny day both the water and the
+      roof of the cavern are of the vividest cerulean tint&mdash;and I saw the
+      grotto so represented in the windows of the paint-shops at Naples. But to
+      my own experience it did not differ from other caves in color or form:
+      there was the customary clamminess in the air; the sound of dropping
+      water; the sense of dull and stupid solitude,&mdash;a little relieved in
+      this case by the mighty music of the waves breaking against the rocks
+      outside. The grot is not great in extent, and the roof in the rear shelves
+      gradually down to the water. Valery says that some remains of a gallery
+      have caused the supposition that the grotto was once the scene of
+      Tiberius's pleasures; and the Prussian painter who discovered the cave was
+      led to seek it by something he had read of a staircase by which Barbarossa
+      used to descend into a subterranean retreat from the town of Anacapri on
+      the mountain top. The slight fragment of ruin which we saw in one corner
+      of the cave might be taken in confirmation of both theories; but the
+      patriarch attributed the work to Barbarossa, being probably tired at last
+      of hearing Tiberius so much talked about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We returned, soaked and disappointed, to the hotel, where we found
+      Antonino very doubtful about the possibility of getting back that day to
+      Sorrento, and disposed, when pooh-poohed out of the notion of bad weather,
+      to revive the fiction of a prohibitory consul. He was staying in Capri at
+      our expense, and the honest fellow would willingly have spent a fortnight
+      there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We summoned the landlord to settlement, and he came with all his household
+      to present the account,&mdash;each one full of visible longing, yet
+      restrained from asking <i>buonamano</i> by a strong sense of previous
+      contract. It was a deadly struggle with them, but they conquered
+      themselves, and blessed us as we departed. The pretty muletress took leave
+      of us on the beach, and we set sail for Sorrento, the ladies crouching in
+      the bottom of the boat, and taking their sea-sickness in silence. As we
+      drew near the beautiful town, we saw how it lay on a plateau, at the foot
+      of the mountains, but high above the sea. Antonino pointed out to us the
+      house of Tasso,&mdash;in which the novelist Cooper also resided when in
+      Sorrento,&mdash;a white house not handsomer nor uglier than the rest, with
+      a terrace looking out over the water. The bluffs are pierced by numerous
+      arched caverns, as I have said, giving shelter to the fishermen's boats,
+      and here and there a devious stairway mounts to their crests. Up one of
+      these we walked, noting how in the house above us the people, with that
+      puerility usually mixed with the Italian love of beauty, had placed
+      painted busts of terra-cotta in the windows to simulate persons looking
+      out. There was nothing to blame in the breakfast we found ready at the
+      Hotel Rispoli; and as for the grove of slender, graceful orange-trees in
+      the midst of which the hotel stood, and which had lavished the fruit in
+      every direction on the ground, why, I would willingly give for it all the
+      currant-bushes, with their promises of jelly and jam, on which I gaze at
+      this moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Antonino attended us to our carriage when we went away. He had kept us all
+      night at Capri, it is true, and he had brought us in at the end for a
+      prodigious <i>buonamano</i>; yet I cannot escape the conviction that he
+      parted from us with an unfulfilled purpose of greater plunder, and I have
+      a compassion, which I here declare, for the strangers who fell next into
+      his hands. He was good enough at the last moment to say that his name,
+      Silver-Eye, was a nickname given him according to a custom of the
+      Sorrentines; and he made us a farewell bow that could not be bought in
+      America for money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the station of Castellamare sat a curious cripple on the stones,&mdash;a
+      man with little, short, withered legs, and a pleasant face. He showed us
+      the ticket-office, and wanted nothing for the politeness. After we had
+      been in the waiting-room a brief time, he came swinging himself in upon
+      his hands, followed by another person, who, when the cripple had planted
+      himself finally and squarely on the ground, whipped out a tape from his
+      pocket and took his measure for a suit of clothes, the cripple twirling
+      and twisting himself about in every way for the tailor's convenience.
+      Nobody was surprised or amused at the sight, and when his measure was thus
+      publicly taken, the cripple gravely swung himself out as he had swung
+      himself in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI.&mdash;THE PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I had the pleasure one day of visiting nearly all the free schools which
+      the wise philanthropy of the Protestant residents of Naples has
+      established in that city. The schools had a peculiar interest for me,
+      because I had noticed (in an uncareful fashion enough, no doubt) the great
+      changes which had taken place in Italy under its new national government,
+      and was desirous to see for myself the sort of progress the Italians of
+      the south were making in avenues so long closed to them. I believe I have
+      no mania for missionaries; I have heard of the converted Jew-and-a-half,
+      and I have thought it a good joke; but I cannot help offering a very
+      cordial homage to the truth that the missionaries are doing a vast deal of
+      good in Naples, where they are not only spreading the gospel, but the
+      spelling-book, the arithmetic, and the geography.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not to be understood from the word missionaries, that this work is
+      done by men especially sent from England or America to perform it. The
+      free Protestant schools in Naples are conducted under the auspices of the
+      Evangelical Aid Committee,&mdash;composed of members of the English
+      Church, the Swiss Church, and the Presbyterian Church; the President of
+      this committee is Dr. Strange, an Englishman, and the Treasurer is Mr.
+      Rogers, the American banker. The missionaries in Naples, therefore, are
+      men who have themselves found out their work and appointed themselves to
+      do it. The gentleman by whose kindness I was permitted to visit the
+      schools was one of these men,&mdash;the Rev. Mr. Buscarlet, the pastor of
+      the Presbyterian Church in Naples, a Swiss by birth, who had received his
+      education chiefly in Scotland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He accompanied me to the different schools, and as we walked up the long
+      Toledo, and threaded our way through the sprightly Neapolitan crowd, he
+      told me of the origin of the schools, and of the peculiar difficulties
+      encountered in their foundation and maintenance. They are no older than
+      the union of Naples with the Kingdom of Italy, when toleration of
+      Protestantism was decreed by law; and from the first, their managers
+      proceeded upon a principle of perfect openness and candor with the parents
+      who wished to send their children to them. They announced that the
+      children would be taught certain branches of learning, and that the whole
+      Bible would be placed in their hands, to be studied and understood. In
+      spite of this declaration of the Protestant character of the schools, the
+      parents of the children were so anxious to secure them the benefits of
+      education, that they willingly ran the risk of their becoming heretics.
+      They were principally people of the lower classes,&mdash;laborers,
+      hackmen, fishermen, domestics, and very small shopkeepers, but
+      occasionally among them were parents able to send their children to other
+      schools, yet preferring the thorough and conscientious system practiced in
+      these. So the children came, and thanks to the peaceful, uncombative
+      nature of Italian boys, who get on with much less waylaying and thumping
+      and bullying than boys of northern blood, they have not been molested by
+      their companions who still live the wild life of the streets, and they
+      have only once suffered through interference of the priests. On complaint
+      to the authorities the wrong was promptly redressed, and was not again
+      inflicted. Of course these poor little people, picked up out of the
+      vileness and ignorance of a city that had suffered for ages the most
+      degrading oppression, are by no means regenerate yet, but there seems to
+      be great hope for them. Now at least they are taught a reasonable and
+      logical morality&mdash;and who can tell what wonders the novel instruction
+      may not work? They learn for the first time that it is a foolish shame to
+      lie and cheat, and it would scarcely be surprising if some of them were
+      finally persuaded that Honesty is the best Policy&mdash;a maxim that few
+      Italians believe. And here lies the trouble,&mdash;in the unfathomable,
+      disheartening duplicity of the race. The children are not quarrelsome, nor
+      cruel, nor brutal; but the servile defect of falsehood fixed by long
+      generations of slavery in the Italians, is almost ineradicable. The fault
+      is worse in Naples than elsewhere in Italy; but how bad it is everywhere,
+      not merely travellers, but all residents in Italy, must bear witness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first school which we visited was a girls' school, in which some
+      forty-four little women of all ages, from four to fifteen years, were
+      assembled under the charge of a young Corfute girl, an Italian Protestant,
+      who had delegated her authority to different children under her. The small
+      maidens gathered around their chiefs in groups, and read from the book in
+      which they were studying when we appeared. Some allowance must be made for
+      difference of the languages, Italian being logically spelled and easily
+      pronounced; but I certainly never heard American children of their age
+      read nearly so well. They seemed also to have a lively understanding of
+      what they read, and to be greatly interested in the scriptural stories of
+      which their books were made up. They repeated verses from the Bible, and
+      stanzas of poetry, all very eagerly and prettily. As bashfulness is
+      scarcely known to their race, they had no hesitation in showing off their
+      accomplishments before a stranger, and seemed quite delighted with his
+      applause. They were not particularly quiet; perhaps with young Neapolitans
+      that would be impossible. I saw their copy-books, in which the writing was
+      very good, (I am sure the printer would like mine to be as legible,) and
+      the books were kept neat and clean, as were the hands and faces of the
+      children. Taking the children as one goes in the streets of Naples, it
+      would require a day perhaps to find as many clean ones as I saw in these
+      schools, where cleanliness is resolutely insisted upon. Many of the
+      children were ragged; here and there was one hideous with <i>ophthalmia</i>;
+      but there was not a clouded countenance, nor a dirty hand among them. We
+      should have great hopes for a nation of which the children can be taught
+      to wash themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were fourteen pupils in the boys' superior school, where geography,
+      mathematics, linear drawing, French, Italian history, and ancient history
+      were taught. A brief examination showed the boys to be well up in their
+      studies;&mdash;indeed they furnished some recondite information about
+      Baffin's Bay for which I should not myself have liked to be called on
+      suddenly. Their drawing-books were prodigies of neatness, and betrayed
+      that aptness for form and facility of execution which are natural to the
+      Italians. Some of these boys had been in the schools nearly three years;
+      they were nearly all of the class which must otherwise have grown up to
+      hopeless vagabondage; but here they were receiving gratis an education
+      that would fit them for employments wherein trained intellectual capacity
+      is required. If their education went no higher than this, what an advance
+      it would be upon their original condition!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the room devoted to boys of lower grade, I entangled myself in
+      difficulties with a bright-eyed young gentleman, whom I asked if he liked
+      Italian history better than ancient history. He said he liked the latter,
+      especially that of the Romans, much better. "Why, that is strange. I
+      should think an Italian boy would like Italian history best." "But were
+      not the Romans also Italians, Signore?" I blush to say that I basely
+      sneaked out of this trouble by answering that they were not like the
+      Italians of the present day,&mdash;whatever that meant. But indeed all
+      these young persons were startlingly quick with their information, and
+      knowing that I knew very little on any subject with certainty, I think I
+      was wise to refuse all offers to examine them in their studies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We left this school and returned to the Toledo by one of those wonderful
+      little side streets already mentioned, which are forever tumultuous with
+      the oddest Neapolitan life&mdash;with men quarreling themselves purple
+      over small quantities of fish&mdash;with asses braying loud and clear
+      above their discord&mdash;with women roasting pine-cones at charcoal fires&mdash;with
+      children in the agonies of having their hair combed&mdash;with degraded
+      poultry and homeless dogs&mdash;with fruit-stands and green groceries, and
+      the little edifices of ecclesiastical architecture for the sale of
+      lemonade&mdash;with wandering bag-pipers, and herds of nonchalant goats&mdash;with
+      horses, and grooms currying them&mdash;and over all, from vast heights of
+      balcony, with people lazily hanging upon rails and looking down on the
+      riot. Reëntering the stream of the Toledo, it carried us almost to the
+      Museo Borbonico before we again struck aside into one of the smaller
+      streets, whence we climbed quite to the top of one of those incredibly
+      high Neapolitan houses. Here, crossing an open terrace on the roof, we
+      visited three small rooms, in which there were altogether some hundred
+      boys in the first stages of reclamation. They were under the immediate
+      superintendence of Mr. Buscarlet and he seemed to feel the fondest
+      interest in them. Indeed, there was sufficient reason for this: up to a
+      certain point, the Neapolitan children learn so rapidly and willingly that
+      it can hardly be other than a pleasure to teach them. After this, their
+      zeal flags; they know enough; and their parents and friends, far more
+      ignorant than they, are perfectly satisfied with their progress. Then the
+      difficulties of their teachers begin; but here, in these lowest grade
+      schools, they had not yet begun. The boys were still eager to learn, and
+      were ardently following the lead of their teachers. They were little
+      fellows, nearly all, and none of them had been in school more than a year
+      and a half, while some had been there only three or four months. They rose
+      up with "<i>Buon giorno, signori</i>," as we entered, and could hardly be
+      persuaded to lapse back to the duties of life during our stay. They had
+      very good faces, indeed, for the most part, and even the vicious had
+      intellectual brightness. Just and consistent usage has the best influence
+      on them; and one boy was pointed out as quite docile and manageable, whose
+      parents had given him up as incorrigible before he entered the school. As
+      it was, there was something almost pathetic in his good behavior, as being
+      possible to him, but utterly alien to his instincts. The boys of these
+      schools seldom play truant, and they are never severely beaten in school;
+      when quite intractable, notice is given to their parents, and they usually
+      return in a more docile state. It sometimes happens that the boys are
+      taken away by their parents, from one motive or another; but they find
+      their way back again, and are received as if nothing had happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The teacher in the first room here is a handsome young Calabrian, with the
+      gentlest face and manner,&mdash;one of the most efficient teachers under
+      Mr. Buscarlet. The boys had out their Bibles when we entered, and one
+      after another read passages to us. There were children of seven, eight,
+      and nine years, who had been in the school only three months, and who read
+      any part of their Bibles with facility and correctness; of course, before
+      coming to school they had not known one letter from another. The most
+      accomplished scholar was a youngster, named Saggiomo, who had received
+      eighteen months' schooling. He was consequently very quick indeed, and
+      wanted to answer all the hard questions put to the other boys. In fact,
+      all of them were ready enough, and there was a great deal of writhing and
+      snapping of fingers among those who longed to answer some hesitator's
+      question&mdash;just as you see in schools at home. They were examined in
+      geography, and then in Bible history&mdash;particularly Joseph's story.
+      They responded in chorus to all demands on this part of study, and could
+      hardly be quieted sufficiently to give Saggiomo's little brother, aged
+      five, a chance to tell why Joseph's brethren sold him. As soon as he could
+      be heard he piped out: "<i>Perchè Giuseppe aveva dei sogni</i>!" (Because
+      Joseph had dreams.) It was not exactly the right answer, but nobody
+      laughed at the little fellow, though they all roared out in correction
+      when permitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the next room, boys somewhat older were examined in Italian history,
+      and responded correctly and promptly. They were given a sum which they
+      performed in a miraculously short time; and their copy-books, when shown,
+      were equally creditable to them. Their teacher was a Bolognese,&mdash;a
+      naturalized Swiss,&mdash;who had been a soldier, and who maintained strict
+      discipline among his irregulars, without, however, any perceptible
+      terrorism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The amount of work these teachers accomplish in a day is incredible: the
+      boys' school opens at eight in the morning and closes at four, with
+      intermission of an hour at noon. Then in the evening the same men teach a
+      school for adults, and on Sunday have their classes in the Sunday-schools.
+      And this the whole year round. Their pay is not great, being about twenty
+      dollars a month, and they are evidently not wholly self-interested from
+      this fact. The amount of good they accomplish under the direction of their
+      superiors is in proportion to the work done. To appreciate it, the reader
+      must consider that they take the children of the most ignorant and
+      degraded of all the Italians; that they cause them to be washed
+      corporeally, first of all, and then set about cleansing them morally; and
+      having cleared away as much of the inherited corruption of ages as
+      possible, they begin to educate them in the various branches of learning.
+      There is no direct proselyting in the schools, but the Bible is the first
+      study, and the children are constantly examined in it; and the result is
+      at least not superstition. The advance upon the old condition of things is
+      incalculably great; for till the revolution under Garibaldi in 1860, the
+      schools of Naples were all in the hands of the priests or their creatures,
+      and the little learning there imparted was as dangerous as it could well
+      be made. Now these schools are free, the children are honestly and
+      thoroughly taught, and if they are not directly instructed in
+      Protestantism, are at least instructed to associate religion with
+      morality, probably for the first time in their lives. Too much credit
+      cannot be given to the Italian government which has acted in such good
+      faith with the men engaged in this work, protecting them from all
+      interruption and persecution; but after all, the great praise is due to
+      their own wise, unflagging zeal. They have worked unostentatiously, making
+      no idle attacks on time-honored prejudices, but still having a purpose of
+      enlightenment which they frankly avowed. The people whom they seek to
+      benefit judge them by their works, and the result is that they have quite
+      as much before them as they can do. Their discouragements are great. The
+      day's teaching is often undone at home; the boys forget as aptly as they
+      learn; and from the fact that only the baser feelings of fear and interest
+      have ever been appealed to before in the Neapolitans, they have often to
+      build in treacherous places without foundation of good faith or gratitude.
+      Embarrassments for want of adequate funds are sometimes felt also. But no
+      one can study their operations without feeling that success must attend
+      their efforts, with honor to them, and with inestimable benefits to the
+      generation which shall one day help to govern free Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII.&mdash;BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One day it became plain even to our reluctance that we could not stay in
+      Naples forever, and the next morning we took the train for Rome. The Villa
+      Reale put on its most alluring charm to him that ran down before breakfast
+      to thrid once more its pathways bordered with palms and fountains and
+      statues; the bay beside it purpled and twinkled in the light that made
+      silver of the fishermen's sails; far away rose Vesuvius with his nightcap
+      of mist still hanging about his shoulders; all around rang and rattled
+      Naples. The city was never so fair before, nor could ever have been so
+      hard to leave; and at the last moment the landlord of the Hotel Washington
+      must needs add a supreme pang by developing into a poet, and presenting me
+      with a copy of a comedy he had written. The reader who has received at
+      parting from the gentlemanly proprietor of one of our palatial hotels his
+      "Ode on the Steam Elevator," will conceive of the shame and regret with
+      which I thought of having upbraided our landlord about our rooms, of
+      having stickled at small preliminaries concerning our contract for board,
+      and for having altogether treated him as one of the uninspired. Let me do
+      him the tardy justice to say that he keeps, after the Stella d'Oro at
+      Ferrara, the best hotel in Italy, and that his comedy was really very
+      sprightly. It is no small thing to know how to keep a hotel, as we know,
+      and a poet who does it ought to have a double acclaim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody who cares to travel with decency and comfort can take the
+      second-class cars on the road between Naples and Rome, though these are
+      perfectly good everywhere else in Italy. The Papal city makes her
+      influence felt for shabbiness and uncleanliness wherever she can, and her
+      management seems to prevail on this railway. A glance into the
+      second-class cars reconciled us to the first-class,&mdash;which in
+      themselves were bad,&mdash;and we took our places almost contentedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The road passed through the wildest country we had seen in Italy; and
+      presently a rain began to fall and made it drearier than ever. The land
+      was much grown up with thickets of hazel, and was here and there sparsely
+      wooded with oaks. Under these, hogs were feeding upon the acorns, and the
+      wet swine-herds were steaming over fires built at their roots. In some
+      places the forest was quite dense; in other places it fell entirely away,
+      and left the rocky hill-sides bare, and solitary but for the sheep that
+      nibbled at the scanty grass, and the shepherds that leaned upon their
+      crooks and motionlessly stared at us as we rushed by. As we drew near
+      Rome, the scenery grew lonelier yet; the land rose into desolate, sterile,
+      stony heights, without a patch of verdure on their nakedness, and at last
+      abruptly dropped into the gloomy expanse of the Campagna.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The towns along the route had little to interest us in their looks, though
+      at San Germano we caught a glimpse of the famous old convent of
+      Monte-Cassino, perched aloft on its cliff and looking like a part of the
+      rock on which it was built. Fancy now loves to climb that steep acclivity,
+      and wander through the many-volumed library of the ancient Benedictine
+      retreat, and on the whole finds it less fatiguing and certainly less
+      expensive than actual ascent and acquaintance with the monastery would
+      have been. Two Croatian priests, who shared our compartment of the railway
+      carriage, first drew our notice to the place, and were enthusiastic about
+      it for many miles after it was out of sight. What gentle and pleasant men
+      they were, and how hard it seemed that they should be priests and Croats!
+      They told us all about the city of Spalato, where they lived, and gave us
+      such a glowing account of Dalmatian poets and poetry that we began to
+      doubt at last if the seat of literature were not somewhere on the east
+      coast of the Adriatic; and I hope we left them the impression that the
+      literary centre of the world was not a thousand miles from the horse-car
+      office in Harvard Square.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here and there repairs were going forward on the railroad, and most of the
+      laborers were women. They were straight and handsome girls, and moved with
+      a stately grace under the baskets of earth balanced on their heads. Brave
+      black eyes they had, such as love to look and to be looked at; they were
+      not in the least hurried by their work, but desisted from it to gaze at
+      the passengers whenever the train stopped. They all wore their beautiful
+      peasant costume,&mdash;the square white linen head-dress falling to the
+      shoulders, the crimson bodice, and the red scant skirt; and how they
+      contrived to keep themselves so clean at their work, and to look so
+      spectacular in it all, remains one of the many Italian mysteries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another of these mysteries we beheld in the little beggar-boy at Isoletta.
+      He stood at the corner of the station quite mute and motionless during our
+      pause, and made no sign of supplication or entreaty. He let his looks beg
+      for him. He was perfectly beautiful and exceedingly picturesque. Where his
+      body was not quite naked, his jacket and trousers hung in shreds and
+      points; his long hair grew through the top of his hat, and fell over like
+      a plume. Nobody could resist him; people ran out of the cars, at the risk
+      of being left behind, to put coppers into the little dirty hand held
+      languidly out to receive them. The boy thanked none, smiled on none, but
+      looked curiously and cautiously at all, with the quick perception and the
+      illogical conclusions of his class and race. As we started he did not
+      move, but remained in his attitude of listless tranquillity. As we glanced
+      back, the mystery of him seemed to be solved for a moment: he would stand
+      there till he grew up into a graceful, prayerful, pitiless brigand, and
+      then he would rend from travel the tribute now go freely given him. But
+      after all, though his future seemed clear, and he appeared the type of a
+      strange and hardly reclaimable people, he was not quite a solution of the
+      Neapolitan puzzle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIII.&mdash;ROMAN PEARLS.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The first view of the ruins in the Forum brought a keen sense of
+      disappointment. I knew that they could only be mere fragments and rubbish,
+      but I was not prepared to find them so. I learned that I had all along
+      secretly hoped for some dignity of neighborhood, some affectionate
+      solicitude on the part of Nature to redeem these works of Art from the
+      destruction that had befallen them. But in hollows below the level of the
+      dirty cowfield, wandered over by evil-eyed buffaloes, and obscenely
+      defiled by wild beasts of men, there stood here an arch, there a pillar,
+      yonder a cluster of columns crowned by a bit of frieze; and yonder again,
+      a fragment of temple, half-gorged by the façade of a hideous Renaissance
+      church; then a height of vaulted brick-work, and, leading on to the
+      Coliseum, another arch, and then incoherent columns overthrown and mixed
+      with dilapidated walls&mdash;mere phonographic consonants, dumbly
+      representing the past, out of which all vocal glory had departed. The
+      Coliseum itself does not much better express a certain phase of Roman life
+      than does the Arena at Verona; it is larger only to the foot-rule, and it
+      seemed not grander otherwise, while it is vastly more ruinous. Even the
+      Pantheon failed to impress me at first sight, though I found myself
+      disposed to return to it again and again, and to be more and more affected
+      by it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Modern Rome appeared, first and last, hideous. It is the least interesting
+      town in Italy, and the architecture is hopelessly ugly&mdash;especially
+      the architecture of the churches. The Papal city contrives at the
+      beginning to hide the Imperial city from your thought, as it hides it in
+      such a great degree from your eye, and old Rome only occurs to you in a
+      sort of stupid wonder over the depth at which it is buried. I confess that
+      I was glad to get altogether away from it after a first look at the ruins
+      in the Forum, and to take refuge in the Conservatorio delle Mendicanti,
+      where we were charged to see the little Virginia G. The Conservatorio,
+      though a charitable institution, is not so entirely meant for mendicants
+      as its name would imply, but none of the many young girls there were the
+      children of rich men. They were often enough of parentage actually hungry
+      and ragged, but they were often also the daughters of honest poor folk,
+      who paid a certain sum toward their maintenance and education in the
+      Conservatorio. Such was the case with little Virginia, whose father was at
+      Florence, doubly impeded from seeing her by the fact that he had fought
+      against the Pope for the Republic of 1848, and by the other fact that he
+      had since wrought the Pope a yet deadlier injury by turning Protestant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ringing a garrulous bell that continued to jingle some time after we were
+      admitted, we found ourselves in a sort of reception-room, of the general
+      quality of a cellar, and in the presence of a portress who was perceptibly
+      preserved from mold only by the great pot of coals that stood in the
+      centre of the place. Some young girls, rather pretty than not, attended
+      the ancient woman, and kindly acted as the ear-trumpet through which our
+      wishes were conveyed to her mind. The Conservatorio was not, so far, as
+      conventual as we had imagined it; but as the gentleman of the party was
+      strongly guarded by female friends, and asked at once to see the Superior,
+      he concluded that there was, perhaps, something so unusually reassuring to
+      the recluses in his appearance and manner that they had not thought it
+      necessary to behave very rigidly. It later occurred to this gentleman that
+      the promptness with which the pretty mendicants procured him an interview
+      with the Superior had a flavor of self-interest in; and that he who came
+      to the Conservatorio in the place of a father might have been for a moment
+      ignorantly viewed as a yet dearer and tenderer possibility. From whatever
+      danger there was in this error the Superior soon appeared to rescue him,
+      and we were invited into a more ceremonious apartment on the first floor,
+      and the little Virginia was sent for. The visit of the strangers caused a
+      tumult and interest in the quiet old Conservatorio of which it is hard to
+      conceive now, and the excitement grew tremendous when it appeared that,
+      the signori were Americani and Protestanti. We imparted a savor of novelty
+      and importance to Virginia herself, and when she appeared, the Superior
+      and her assistant looked at her with no small curiosity and awe, of which
+      the little maiden instantly became conscious, and began to take advantage.
+      Accompanying us over the building and through the grounds, she cut her
+      small friends wherever she met them, and was not more than respectful to
+      the assistant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was from an instinct of hospitality that we were shown the
+      Conservatorio, and instructed in regard to all its purposes. We saw the
+      neat dormitories with their battalions of little white beds; the kitchen
+      with its gigantic coppers for boiling broth, and the refectory with the
+      smell of the frugal dinners of generations of mendicants in it. The
+      assistant was very proud of the neatness of every thing, and was glad to
+      talk of that, or, indeed, any thing else. It appeared that the girls were
+      taught reading, writing, and plain sewing when they were young, and that
+      the Conservatorio was chiefly sustained by pious contributions and
+      bequests. Any lingering notion of the conventual character of the place
+      was dispelled by the assistant's hurrying to say, "And when we can get the
+      poor things well married, we are glad to do so."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But how does any one ever see them?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Eh! well, that is easily managed. Once a month we dress the marriageable
+      girls in their best, and take them for a walk in the street. If an honest
+      young man falls in love with one of them going by, he comes to the
+      Superior, and describes her as well as he can, and demands to see her. She
+      is called, and if both are pleased, the marriage is arranged. You see it
+      is a very simple affair."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there was, to the assistant's mind, nothing odd in the whole business,
+      insomuch that I felt almost ashamed of marveling at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Issuing from the backdoor of the convent, we ascended by stairs and
+      gateways into garden spaces, chiefly planted with turnips and the like
+      poor but respectable vegetables, and curiously adorned with fragments of
+      antique statuary, and here and there a fountain in a corner, trickling
+      from moss-grown rocks, and falling into a trough of travertine, about the
+      feet of some poor old goddess or Virtue who had forgotten what her name
+      was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once, the assistant said, speaking as if the thing had been within her
+      recollection, though it must have been centuries before, the antiquities
+      of the Conservatorio were much more numerous and striking; but they were
+      now removed to the different museums. Nevertheless they had still a
+      beautiful prospect left, which we were welcome to enjoy if we would follow
+      her; and presently, to our surprise, we stepped from the garden upon the
+      roof of the Temple of Peace. The assistant had not boasted without reason:
+      away before us stretched the Campagna, a level waste, and empty, but for
+      the umbrella-palms that here and there waved like black plumes upon it,
+      and for the arched lengths of the acqueducts that seemed to stalk down
+      from the ages across the melancholy expanse like files of giants, with now
+      and then a ruinous gap in the line, as if one had fallen out weary by the
+      way. The city all around us glittered asleep in the dim December sunshine,
+      and far below us,&mdash;on the length of the Forum over which the Appian
+      Way stretched from the Capitoline Hill under the Arch of Septimius Severus
+      and the Arch of Titus to the Arch of Constantine, leaving the Coliseum on
+      the left, and losing itself in the foliage of the suburbs,&mdash;the Past
+      seemed struggling to emerge from the ruins, and to reshape and animate
+      itself anew. The effort was more successful than that which we had helped
+      the Past to make when standing on the level of the Forum; but Antiquity
+      must have been painfully conscious of the incongruity of the red-legged
+      Zouaves wandering over the grass, and of the bewildered tourists trying to
+      make her out with their Murrays.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a day or two after this we returned again to our Conservatorio, where
+      we found that the excitement created by our first visit had been kept
+      fully alive by the events attending the photographing of Virginia for her
+      father. Not only Virginia was there to receive us, but her grandmother
+      also&mdash;an old, old woman, dumb through some infirmity of age, who
+      could only weep and smile in token of her content. I think she had but a
+      dim idea, after all, of what went on beyond the visible fact of Virginia's
+      photograph, and that she did not quite understand how we could cause it to
+      be taken for her son. She was deeply compassionated by the Superior, who
+      rendered her pity with a great deal of gesticulation, casting up her eyes,
+      shrugging her shoulders, and sighing grievously. But the assistant's
+      cheerfulness could not be abated even by the spectacle of extreme age; and
+      she made the most of the whole occasion, recounting with great minuteness
+      all the incidents of the visit to the photographer's, and running to get
+      the dress Virginia sat in, that we might see how exactly it was given in
+      the picture. Then she gave us much discourse concerning the Conservatorio
+      and its usages, and seemed not to wish us to think that life there was
+      altogether eventless. "Here we have a little amusement also," she said.
+      "The girls have their relatives to visit them sometimes, and then in the
+      evening they dance. Oh, they enjoy themselves! I am half old (<i>mezzo-vecchia</i>).
+      I am done with these things. But for youth, always kept down, something
+      lively is wanted."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we took leave of these simple folks, we took leave of almost the only
+      natural and unprepared aspect of Italian life which we were to see in
+      Rome; but we did not know this at the time.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, it seems to me that all moisture of romance and adventure has been
+      wellnigh sucked out of travel in Italy, and that compared with the old
+      time, when the happy wayfarer journeyed by vettura through the innumerable
+      little states of the Peninsula,&mdash;halted every other mile to show his
+      passport, and robbed by customs officers in every color of shabby uniform
+      and every variety of cocked hat,&mdash;the present railroad period is one
+      of but stale and insipid flavor. Much of local life and color remains, of
+      course; but the hurried traveller sees little of it, and, passed from one
+      grand hotel to another, without material change in the cooking or the
+      methods of extortion, he might nearly as well remain at Paris. The
+      Italians, who live to so great extent by the travel through their country,
+      learn our abominable languages and minister to our detestable comfort and
+      propriety, till we have slight chance to know them as we once could,&mdash;musical,
+      picturesque, and full of sweet, natural knaveries, graceful falsehood, and
+      all uncleanness. Rome really belongs to the Anglo-Saxon nations, and the
+      Pope and the past seem to be carried on entirely for our diversion. Every
+      thing is systematized as thoroughly as in a museum where the objects are
+      all ticketed; and our prejudices are consulted even down to alms-giving,
+      Honest Beppo is gone from the steps in the Piazza di Spagna, and now the
+      beggars are labeled like policemen, with an immense plate bearing the
+      image of St. Peter, so that you may know you give to a worthy person when
+      you bestow charity on one of them, and not, alas! to some abandoned
+      impostor, as in former days. One of these highly recommended mendicants
+      gave the last finish to the system, and begged of us in English! No
+      custodian will answer you, if he can help it, in the Italian which he
+      speaks so exquisitely, preferring to speak bad French instead, and in all
+      the shops on the Corso the English tongue is <i>de rigueur</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After our dear friends at the Conservatorio, I think we found one of the
+      most simple and interesting of Romans in the monk who showed us the
+      Catacombs of St. Sebastian. These catacombs, he assured us, were not
+      restored like those of St. Calixtus, but were just as the martyrs left
+      them; and, as I do not remember to have read anywhere that they are formed
+      merely of long, low, narrow, wandering underground passages, lined on
+      either side with tombs in tiers like berths on a steamer, and expanding
+      here and there into small square chambers, bearing the traces of ancient
+      frescos, and evidently used as chapels,&mdash;I venture to offer the
+      information here. The reader is to keep in his mind a darkness broken by
+      the light of wax tapers, a close smell, and crookedness and narrowness, or
+      he cannot realize the catacombs as they are in fact. Our monkish guide,
+      before entering the passage leading from the floor of the church to the
+      tombs, in which there was still some "fine small dust" of the martyrs,
+      warned us that to touch it was to incur the penalty of excommunication,
+      and then gently craved pardon for having mentioned the fact. But, indeed,
+      it was only to persons who showed a certain degree of reverence that these
+      places were now exhibited; for some Protestants who had been permitted
+      there had stolen handfuls of the precious ashes, merely to throw away. I
+      assured him that I thought them beasts to do it; and I was afterwards
+      puzzled to know what should attract their wantonness in the remnants of
+      mortality, hardly to be distinguished from the common earth out of which
+      the catacombs were dug.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Returning to the church above we found, kneeling before one of the altars,
+      two pilgrims,&mdash;a man and a woman. The latter was habited in a
+      nun-like dress of black, and the former in a long pilgrim's coat of coarse
+      blue stuff. He bore a pilgrim's staff in his hand, and showed under his
+      close hood a fine, handsome, reverent face, full of a sort of tender awe,
+      touched with the pathos of penitence. In attendance upon the two was a
+      dapper little silk-hatted man, with rogue so plainly written in his
+      devotional countenance that I was not surprised to be told that he was a
+      species of spiritual <i>valet de place</i>, whose occupation it was to
+      attend pilgrims on their tour to the Seven Churches at which these
+      devotees pray in Rome, and there to direct their orisons and join in them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not to the pilgrims, but to the heretics that the monk now
+      uncovered the precious marble slab on which Christ stood when he met Peter
+      flying from Rome and turned him back. You are shown the prints of the
+      divine feet, which the conscious stone received and keeps forever; and
+      near at hand is one of the arrows with which St. Sebastian was shot. We
+      looked at these things critically, having to pay for the spectacle; but
+      the pilgrims and their guide were all faith and wonder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember seeing nothing else so finely superstitious at Rome. In a
+      chapel near the Church of St. John Lateran are, as is well known, the
+      marble steps which once belonged to Pilate's house, and which the Saviour
+      is said to have ascended when he went to trial before Pilate. The steps
+      are protected against the wear and tear of devotion by a stout casing of
+      wood, and they are constantly covered with penitents, who ascend and
+      descend them upon their knees. Most of the pious people whom I saw in this
+      act were children, and the boys enjoyed it with a good deal of giggling,
+      as a very amusing feat. Some old and haggard women gave the scene all the
+      dignity which it possessed; but certain well-dressed ladies and gentlemen
+      were undeniably awkward and absurd, and I was led to doubt if there were
+      not an incompatibility between the abandon of simple faith and the
+      respectability of good clothes.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In all other parts of Italy one hears constant talk among travellers of
+      the malaria at Rome, and having seen a case of Roman fever, I know it is a
+      thing not to be trifled with. But in Rome itself the malaria is laughed at
+      by the foreign residents,&mdash;who, nevertheless, go out of the city in
+      midsummer. The Romans, to the number of a hundred thousand or so, remain
+      there the whole year round, and I am bound to say I never saw a healthier,
+      robuster-looking population. The cheeks of the French soldiers, too, whom
+      we met at every turn, were red as their trousers, and they seemed to
+      flourish on the imputed unwholesomeness of the atmosphere. All at Rome are
+      united in declaring that the fever exists at Naples, and that sometimes
+      those who have taken it there come and die in Rome, in order to give the
+      city a bad name; and I think this very likely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rome is certainly dirty, however, though there is a fountain in every
+      square, and you are never out of the sound of falling water. The Corso and
+      some of the principal streets do not so much impress you with their filth
+      as with their dullness; but that part of the city where some of the most
+      memorable relics of antiquity are to be found is unimaginably vile. The
+      least said of the state of the archways of the Coliseum the soonest
+      mended; and I have already spoken of the Forum. The streets near the
+      Theatre of Pompey are almost impassable, and the so-called House of Rienzi
+      is a stable, fortified against approach by a <i>fossé</i> of excrement. A
+      noisome smell seems to be esteemed the most appropriate offering to the
+      memory of ancient Rome, and I am not sure that the moderns are mistaken in
+      this. In the rascal streets in the neighborhood of the most august ruins,
+      the people turn round to stare at the stranger as he passes them; they are
+      all dirty, and his decency must be no less a surprise to them than the
+      neatness of the French soldiers amid all the filth is a puzzle to him. We
+      wandered about a long time in such places one day, looking for the
+      Tarpeian Rock, less for Tarpeia's sake than for the sake of Miriam and
+      Donatello and the Model. There are two Tarpeian rocks, between which the
+      stranger takes his choice; and we must have chosen the wrong one, for it
+      seemed but a shallow gulf compared to that in our fancy. We were somewhat
+      disappointed; but then Niagara disappoints one; and as for Mont Blanc....
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It is worth while for every one who goes to Rome to visit the Church of
+      St. Peter's; but it is scarcely worth while for me to describe it, or for
+      every one to go up into the bronze globe on the top of the cupola. In
+      fact, this is a great labor, and there is nothing to be seen from the
+      crevices in the ball which cannot be far more comfortably seen from the
+      roof of the church below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The companions of our ascent to the latter point were an English lady and
+      gentleman, brother and sister, and both Catholics, as they at once told
+      us. The lady and myself spoke for some time in the Tuscan tongue before we
+      discovered that neither of us was Italian, after which we paid each other
+      some handsome compliments upon fluency and perfection of accent. The
+      gentleman was a pleasant purple porpoise from the waters of Chili, whither
+      he had wandered from the English coasts in early youth. He had two leading
+      ideas: one concerned the Pope, to whom he had just been presented, and
+      whom he viewed as the best and blandest of beings; the other related to
+      his boy, then in England, whom he called Jack Spratt, and considered the
+      grandest and greatest of boys. With the view from the roof of the church
+      this gentleman did not much trouble himself. He believed Jack Spratt could
+      ride up to the roof where we stood on his donkey. As to the great bronze
+      globe which we were hurrying to enter he seemed to regard it merely as a
+      rival in rotundity, and made not the slightest motion to follow us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I should be loth to vex the reader with any description of the scene
+      before us and beneath us, even if I could faithfully portray it. But I
+      recollect, with a pleasure not to be left unrecorded, the sweetness of the
+      great fountain playing in the square before the church, and the harmony in
+      which the city grew in every direction from it, like an emanation from its
+      music, till the last house sank away into the pathetic solitude of the
+      Campagna, with nothing beyond but the snow-capped mountains lighting up
+      the remotest distance. At the same moment I experienced a rapture in
+      reflecting that I had underpaid three hackmen during my stay in Rome, and
+      thus contributed to avenge my race for ages of oppression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The vastness of St. Peter's itself is best felt in looking down upon the
+      interior from the gallery that surrounds the inside of the dome, and in
+      comparing one's own littleness with the greatness of all the neighboring
+      mosaics. But as to the beauty of the temple, I could not find it without
+      or within.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VI.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In Rome one's fellow-tourists are a constant source of gratification and
+      surprise. I thought that American travellers were by no means the most
+      absurd among those we saw, nor even the loudest in their approval of the
+      Eternal City. A certain order of German greenness affords, perhaps, the
+      pleasantest pasturage for the ruminating mind. For example, at the Villa
+      Ludovisi there was, beside numerous Englishry in detached bodies, a troop
+      of Germans, chiefly young men, frugally pursuing the Sehenswürdigkeiten in
+      the social manner of their nation. They took their enjoyment very noisily,
+      and wrangled together with furious amiability as they looked at Guercino's
+      "Aurora." Then two of them parted from the rest, and went to a little
+      summer-house in the gardens, while the others followed us to the top of
+      the Casino. There they caught sight of their friends in the arbor, and the
+      spectacle appeared to overwhelm them. They bowed, they took off their
+      hats, they waved their handkerchiefs. It was not enough: one young fellow
+      mounted on the balustrade of the roof at his neck's risk, lifted his hat
+      on his cane and flourished it in greeting to the heart's-friends in the
+      arbor, from whom he had parted two minutes before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In strange contrast to the producer of this enthusiasm, so pumped and so
+      unmistakably mixed with beer, a fat and pallid Englishwoman sat in a chair
+      upon the roof and coldly, coldly sketched the lovely landscape. And she
+      and the blonde young English girl beside her pronounced a little dialogue
+      together, which I give, because I saw that they meant it for the public:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>The Young Girl</i>.&mdash;I wonder, you knoa, you don't draw-ow St.
+      Petuh's!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>The Artist</i>.&mdash;O ah, you knoa, I can draw-ow St. Petuh's from so
+      mennee powints.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am afraid that the worst form of American greenness appears abroad in a
+      desire to be perfectly up in critical appreciation of the arts, and to
+      approach the great works in the spirit of the connoisseur. The ambition is
+      not altogether a bad one. Still I could not help laughing at a
+      fellow-countryman when he told me that he had not yet seen Raphael's
+      "Transfiguration," because he wished to prepare his mind for understanding
+      the original by first looking at all the copies he could find.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The Basilica San Paolo fuori le Mura surpasses every thing in splendor of
+      marble and costly stone&mdash;porphyry, malachite, alabaster&mdash;and
+      luxury of gilding that is to be seen at Rome. But I chiefly remember it
+      because on the road that leads to it, through scenes as quiet and peaceful
+      as if history had never known them, lies the Protestant graveyard in which
+      Keats is buried. Quite by chance the driver mentioned it, pointing in the
+      direction of the cemetery with his whip. We eagerly dismounted and
+      repaired to the gate, where we were met by the son of the sexton, who
+      spoke English through the beauteous line of a curved Hebrew nose. Perhaps
+      a Christian could not be found in Rome to take charge of these heretic
+      graves, though Christians can be got to do almost any thing there for
+      money. However, I do not think a Catholic would have kept the place in
+      better order, or more intelligently understood our reverent curiosity. It
+      was the new burial-ground which we had entered, and which is a little to
+      the right of the elder cemetery. It was very beautiful and tasteful in
+      every way; the names upon the stones were chiefly English and Scotch, with
+      here and there an American's. But affection drew us only to the prostrate
+      tablet inscribed with the words, "Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cor Cordium," and
+      then we were ready to go to the grave of him for whom we all feel so deep
+      a tenderness. The grave of John Keats is one of few in the old
+      burying-ground, and lies almost in the shadow of the pyramid of Caius
+      Cestius; and I could not help thinking of the wonder the Roman would have
+      felt could he have known into what unnamable richness and beauty his Greek
+      faith had ripened in the heart of the poor poet, where it was mixed with
+      so much sorrow. Doubtless, in his time, a prominent citizen like Caius
+      Cestius was a leading member of the temple in his neighborhood, and
+      regularly attended sacrifice: it would have been but decent; and yet I
+      fancied that a man immersed like him in affairs might have learned with
+      surprise the inner and more fragrant meaning of the symbols with the
+      outside of which his life was satisfied; and I was glad to reflect that in
+      our day such a thing is impossible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The grave of our beloved poet is sunken to the level of the common earth,
+      and is only marked by the quaintly lettered, simple stone bearing the
+      famous epitaph. While at Rome I heard talk of another and grander monument
+      which some members of the Keats family were to place over the dust of
+      their great kinsman. But, for one, I hope this may never be done, even
+      though the original stone should also be left there, as was intended. Let
+      the world still keep unchanged this shrine, to which it can repair with at
+      once pity and tenderness and respect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A rose-tree and some sweet-smelling bushes grew upon the grave, and the
+      roses were in bloom. We asked leave to take one of them; but at last could
+      only bring ourselves to gather some of the fallen petals. Our Hebrew guide
+      was willing enough, and unconsciously set us a little example of
+      wantonness; for while he listened to our explanation of the mystery which
+      had puzzled him ever since he had learned English, namely, why the stone
+      should say "<i>writ</i> on water," and not <i>written</i>, he kept
+      plucking mechanically at one of the fragrant shrubs, pinching away the
+      leaves, and rending the tender twig, till I, remembering the
+      once-sensitive dust from which it grew, waited for the tortured tree to
+      cry out to him with a voice of words and blood, "Perchè mi schianti?"
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VIII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It seems to me that a candid person will wish to pause a little before
+      condemning Gibson's colored statues. They have been grossly
+      misrepresented. They do not impress one at all as wax-work, and there is
+      great wrong in saying that their tinted nakedness suggests impurity any
+      more than the white nakedness of other statues. The coloring is quite
+      conventional; the flesh is merely warmed with the hue representing life;
+      the hair is always a very delicate yellow, the eyes a tender violet, and
+      there is no other particularization of color; a fillet binding the hair
+      may be gilded,&mdash;the hem of a robe traced in blue. I, who had just
+      come from seeing the fragments of antique statuary in Naples Museum,
+      tinted in the same way, could not feel that there was any thing
+      preposterous in Gibson's works, and I am not ashamed to say that they gave
+      me pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we passed, in his studio, from one room to another, the workman who
+      showed the marbles surprised and delighted us by asking if we would like
+      to see the sculptor, and took us up into the little room where Gibson
+      worked. He was engaged upon a bass-relief,&mdash;a visit of Psyche to the
+      Zephyrs, or something equally aërial and mythological,&mdash;and received
+      us very simply and naturally, and at once began with some quaint talk
+      about the subject in hand. When we mentioned our pleasure in his colored
+      marbles we touched the right spring, and he went on to speak of his
+      favorite theory with visible delight, making occasional pauses to bestow a
+      touch on the bass-relief, and coming back to his theme with that
+      self-corroborative "Yes!" of his, which Hawthorne has immortalized. He was
+      dressed with extraordinary slovenliness and indifference to clothes, had
+      no collar, I think, and evidently did not know what he had on. Every thing
+      about him bespoke the utmost unconsciousness and democratic plainness of
+      life, so that I could readily believe a story I heard of him. Having dined
+      the greater part of his life in Roman restaurants where it is but
+      wholesome to go over your plate, glass, spoon, and knife and fork with
+      your napkin before using them, the great sculptor had acquired such habits
+      of neatness that at table in the most aristocratic house in England he
+      absent-mindedly went through all that ceremony of cleansing and wiping. It
+      is a story they tell in Rome, where every body is anecdoted, and not
+      always so good-naturedly.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IX.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      One Sunday afternoon we went with some artistic friends to visit the
+      studio of the great German painter, Overbeck; and since I first read
+      Uhland I have known no pleasure so illogical as I felt in looking at this
+      painter's drawings. In the sensuous heart of objective Italy he treats the
+      themes of mediæval Catholicism with the most subjective feeling, and I
+      thought I perceived in his work the enthusiasm which led many Protestant
+      German painters and poets of the romantic school back into the twilight of
+      the Romish faith, in the hope that they might thus realize to themselves
+      something of the earnestness which animated the elder Christian artists.
+      Overbeck's work is beautiful, but it is unreal, and expresses the
+      sentiment of no time; as the work of the romantic German poets seems
+      without relation to any world men ever lived in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Walking from the painter's house, two of us parted with the rest on the
+      steps of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, and pursued our stroll
+      through the gate of San Lorenzo out upon the Campagna, which tempts and
+      tempts the sojourner at Rome, until at last he must go and see&mdash;if it
+      will give him the fever. And, alas! there I caught the Roman fever&mdash;the
+      longing that burns one who has once been in Rome to go again&mdash;that
+      will not be cured by all the cool contemptuous things he may think or say
+      of the Eternal City; that fills him with fond memories of its fascination,
+      and makes it forever desired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We walked far down the dusty road beyond the city walls, and then struck
+      out from the highway across the wild meadows of the Campagna. They were
+      weedy and desolate, seamed by shaggy grass-grown ditches, and deeply
+      pitted with holes made in search for catacombs. There was here and there a
+      farm-house amid the wide lonesomeness, but oftener a round, hollow,
+      roofless tomb, from which the dust and memory of the dead had long been
+      blown away, and through the top of which&mdash;fringed and overhung with
+      grasses, and opening like a great eye&mdash;the evening sky looked
+      marvelously sad. One of the fields was full of grim, wide-horned cattle,
+      and in another there were four or five buffaloes lying down and chewing
+      their cuds,&mdash;holding their heads horizontally in the air, and with an
+      air of gloomy wickedness which nothing could exceed in their cruel black
+      eyes, glancing about in visible pursuit of some object to toss and gore.
+      There were also many canebrakes, in which the wind made a mournful
+      rustling after the sun had set in golden glitter on the roofs of the Roman
+      churches and the transparent night had fallen upon the scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all our ramble we met not a soul, and I scarcely know what it is makes
+      this walk upon the Campagna one of my vividest recollections of Rome,
+      unless it be the opportunity it gave me to weary myself upon that
+      many-memoried ground as freely as if it had been a woods-pasture in Ohio.
+      Nature, where history was so august, was perfectly simple and motherly,
+      and did so much to make me at home, that, as the night thickened and we
+      plunged here and there into ditches and climbed fences, and struggled,
+      heavy-footed, back through the suburbs to the city gate, I felt as if half
+      my boyhood had been passed upon the Campagna.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      X.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Pasquino, like most other great people, is not very interesting upon close
+      approach. There is no trace now in his aspect to show that he has ever
+      been satirical; but the humanity that the sculptor gave him is
+      imperishable, though he has lost all character as a public censor. The
+      torso is at first glance nothing but a shapeless mass of stone, but the
+      life can never die out of that which has been shaped by art to the
+      likeness of a man, and a second look restores the lump to full possession
+      of form and expression. For this reason I lament that statues should ever
+      be restored except by sympathy and imagination.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XI.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Regarding the face of Pompey's statue in the Spada Palace, I was more
+      struck than ever with a resemblance to American politicians which I had
+      noted in all the Roman statues. It is a type of face not now to be found
+      in Rome, but frequent enough here, and rather in the South than in the
+      North. Pompey was like the pictures of so many Southern Congressmen that I
+      wondered whether race had not less to do with producing types than had
+      similarity of circumstances; whether a republicanism based upon slavery
+      could not so far assimilate character as to produce a common aspect in
+      people widely separated by time and creeds, but having the same
+      unquestioned habits of command, and the same boundless and unscrupulous
+      ambition.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      When the Tiber, according to its frequent habit, rises and inundates the
+      city, the Pantheon is one of the first places to be flooded&mdash;the
+      sacristan told us. The water climbs above the altar-tops, sapping, in its
+      recession, the cement of the fine marbles which incrust the columns, so
+      that about their bases the pieces have to be continually renewed. Nothing
+      vexes you so much in the Pantheon as your consciousness of these and other
+      repairs. Bad as ruin is, I think I would rather have the old temple
+      ruinous in every part than restored as you find it. The sacristan felt the
+      wrongs of the place keenly, and said, referring to the removal of the
+      bronze roof, which took place some centuries ago, "They have robbed us of
+      every thing" (<i>Ci hanno levato tutto</i>); as if he and the Pantheon
+      were of one blood, and he had suffered personal hurt in its spoliation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What a sense of the wildness everywhere lurking about Rome we had given us
+      by that group of peasants who had built a fire of brushwood almost within
+      the portico of the Pantheon, and were cooking their supper at it, the
+      light of the flames luridly painting their swarthy faces!
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XIII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Poor little Numero Cinque Via del Gambero has seldom, I imagine, known so
+      violent a sensation as that it experienced when, on the day of the
+      Immaculate Conception, the Armenian Archbishop rolled up to the door in
+      his red coach. The master of the house had always seemed to like us; now
+      he appeared with profound respect suffusing, as it were, his whole being,
+      and announced, "Signore, it is Monsignore come to take you to the Sistine
+      Chapel in his carriage," and drew himself up in a line, as much like a
+      series of serving-men as possible, to let us pass out. There was a private
+      carriage for the ladies near that of Monsignore, for he had already
+      advertised us that the sex were not permitted to ride in the red coach. As
+      they appeared, however, he renewed his expressions of desolation at being
+      deprived of their company, and assured them of his good-will with a
+      multiplicity of smiles and nods, intermixed with shrugs of recurrence to
+      his poignant regret. But! In fine, it was forbidden!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monsignore was in full costume, with his best ecclesiastical clothes on,
+      and with his great gold chain about his neck. The dress was richer than
+      that of the western archbishops; and the long white beard of Monsignore
+      made him look much more like a Scriptural monsignore than these. He
+      lacked, perhaps, the fine spiritual grace of his brother, the Archbishop
+      at Venice, to whose letter of introduction we owed his acquaintance and
+      untiring civilities; but if a man cannot be plump and spiritual, he can be
+      plump and pleasant, as Monsignore was to the last degree. He enlivened our
+      ride with discourse about the Armenians at Venice, equally beloved of us;
+      and, arrived at the Sistine Chapel, he marshaled the ladies before him,
+      and won them early entrance through the crowd of English people crushing
+      one another at the door. Then he laid hold upon the captain of the Swiss
+      Guard, who was swift to provide them with the best places; and in nowise
+      did he seem one of the uninfluential and insignificant priests that About
+      describes the archbishops at Rome to be. According to this lively author,
+      a Swiss guard was striking back the crowd on some occasion with the butt
+      of his halberd, and smote a cardinal on the breast. He instantly dropped
+      upon his knees, with "Pardon, Eminenza! I thought it was a monsignore!"
+      Even the chief of these handsome fellows had nothing but respect and
+      obedience for our Archbishop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gentlemen present were separated from the ladies, and in a very narrow
+      space outside of the chapel men of every nation were penned up together.
+      All talked&mdash;several priests as loudly as the rest. But the rudest
+      among them were certain Germans, who not only talked but stood upon a seat
+      to see better, and were ordered down by one of the Swiss with a fierce "<i>Giù,
+      signore, giù</i>!" Otherwise the guard kept good order in the chapel, and
+      were no doubt as useful and genuine as any thing about the poor old Pope.
+      What gorgeous fellows they were, and, as soldiers, how absurd! The weapons
+      they bore were as obsolete as the excommunication. It was amusing to pass
+      one of these play-soldiers on guard at the door of the Vatican&mdash;tall,
+      straight, beautiful, superb, with his halberd on his shoulder&mdash;and
+      then come to a real warrior outside, a little, ugly, red-legged French
+      sentinel, with his Minié on his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Except for the singing of the Pope's choir&mdash;which was angelically
+      sweet, and heavenly far above all praise&mdash;the religious ceremonies
+      affected me, like all others of that faith, as tedious and empty. Each of
+      the cardinals, as he entered the chapel, blew a sonorous nose; and was
+      received standing by his brother prelates&mdash;a grotesque company of
+      old-womanish old men in gaudy gowns. One of the last to come was
+      Antonelli, who has the very wickedest face in the world. He sat with his
+      eyes fastened upon his book, but obviously open at every pore to all that
+      went on about him. As he passed out he cast gleaming, terrible, sidelong
+      looks upon the people, full of hate and guile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From where I stood I saw the Pope's face only in profile: it was gentle
+      and benign enough, but not great in expression, and the smile on it almost
+      degenerated into a simper. His Holiness had a cold; and his <i>recitative</i>,
+      though full, was not smooth. He was all priest when, in the midst of the
+      service, he hawked, held his handkerchief up before his face, a little way
+      off, and ruthlessly spat in it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      FORZA MAGGIORE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I imagine that Grossetto is not a town much known to travel, for it is
+      absent from all the guide-books I have looked at. However, it is chief in
+      the Maremma, where sweet Pia de' Tolommei languished and perished of the
+      poisonous air and her love's cruelty, and where, so many mute centuries
+      since, the Etrurian cities flourished and fell. Further, one may say that
+      Grossetto is on the diligence road from Civita Vecchia to Leghorn, and
+      that in the very heart of the place there is a lovely palm-tree, rare, if
+      not sole, in that latitude. This palm stands in a well-sheltered, dull
+      little court, out of every thing's way, and turns tenderly toward the wall
+      that shields it on the north. It has no other company but a beautiful
+      young girl, who leans out of a window high over its head, and I have no
+      doubt talks with it. At the moment we discovered the friends, the maiden
+      was looking pathetically to the northward, while the palm softly stirred
+      and opened its plumes, as a bird does when his song is finished; and there
+      is very little question but it had just been singing to her that song of
+      which the palms are so fond,&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
+  Im Norden auf kahler Höh'."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Grossetto does her utmost to hide the secret of this tree's existence, as
+      if a hard, matter-of-fact place ought to be ashamed of a sentimentality of
+      the kind. It pretended to be a very worldly town, and tried to keep us in
+      the neighborhood of its cathedral, where the caffè and shops are, and
+      where, in the evening, four or five officers of the garrison clinked their
+      sabres on the stones, and promenaded up and down, and as many ladies
+      shopped for gloves; and as many citizens sat at the principal caffè and
+      drank black coffee. This was lively enough; and we knew that the citizens
+      were talking of the last week's news and the Roman question; that the
+      ladies were really looking for loves, not gloves; that such of the
+      officers as had no local intrigue to keep their hearts at rest were
+      terribly bored, and longed for Florence or Milan or Turin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides the social charms of her piazza, Grossetto put forth others of an
+      artistic nature. The cathedral was very old and very beautiful,&mdash;built
+      of alternate lines of red and white marble, and lately restored in the
+      best spirit of fidelity and reverence. But it was not open, and we were
+      obliged to turn from it to the group of statuary in the middle of the
+      piazza, representative of the Maremma and Family returning thanks to the
+      Grand Duke Leopold III. of Tuscany for his goodness in causing her swamps
+      to be drained. The Maremma and her children are arrayed in the scant
+      draperies of Allegory, but the Grand Duke is fully dressed, and is shown
+      looking down with some surprise at their figures, and with a visible doubt
+      of the propriety of their public appearance in that state.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was also a Museum at Grossetto, and I wonder what was in it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wall of the town was perfect yet, though the moat at its feet had been
+      so long dry that it was only to be known from the adjacent fields by the
+      richness of its soil. The top of the wall had been leveled, and planted
+      with shade, and turned into a peaceful promenade, like most of such
+      mediæval defenses in Italy; though I am not sure that a little military
+      life did not still linger about a bastion here and there. From somewhere,
+      when we strolled out early in the morning, to walk upon the wall, there
+      came to us a throb of drums; but I believe that the only armed men we saw,
+      beside the officers in the piazza, were the numerous sportsmen resorting
+      at that season to Grossetto for the excellent shooting in the marshes. All
+      the way to Florence we continued to meet them and their dogs; and our inn
+      at Grossetto overflowed with abundance of game. On the kitchen floor and
+      in the court were heaps of larks, pheasants, quails, and beccafichi, at
+      which a troop of scullion-boys constantly plucked, and from which the
+      great, noble, beautiful, white-aproned cook forever fried, stewed,
+      broiled, and roasted. We lived chiefly upon these generous birds during
+      our sojourn, and found, when we attempted to vary our bill of fare, that
+      the very genteel waiter attending us had few distinct ideas beyond them.
+      He was part of the repairs and improvements which that hostelry had
+      recently undergone, and had evidently come in with the four-pronged forks,
+      the chromo-lithographs of Victor Emanuel, Garibaldi, Solferino, and
+      Magenta in the large dining-room, and the iron stove in the small one. He
+      had nothing, evidently, in common with the brick floors of the
+      bed-chambers, and the ancient rooms with great fire-places. He strove to
+      give a Florentine blandishment to the rusticity of life in the Maremma;
+      and we felt sure that he must know what beefsteak was. When we ordered it,
+      he assumed to be perfectly conversant with it, started to bring it,
+      paused, turned, and, with a great sacrifice of personal dignity, demanded,
+      "<i>Bifsteca di manzo, o bifsteca di motone</i>?"&mdash;"Beefsteak of
+      beef, or beefsteak of mutton?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of Grossetto proper, this is all I remember, if I except a boy whom I
+      heard singing after dark in the streets,&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Camicia rossa, O Garibaldi!"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The cause of our sojourn there was an instance of <i>forza maggiore</i>,
+      as the agent of the diligence company defiantly expressed it, in refusing
+      us damages for our overturn into the river. It was in the early part of
+      the winter when we started from Rome for Venice, and we were travelling
+      northward by diligence because the railways were still more or less
+      interrupted by the storms and floods predicted of Matthieu de la Drôme,&mdash;the
+      only reliable prophet France has produced since Voltaire;&mdash;and if our
+      accident was caused by an overruling Providence, the company, according to
+      the very law of its existence, was not responsible. To be sure, we did not
+      see how an overruling Providence was to blame for loading upon our
+      diligence the baggage of two diligences, or for the clumsiness of our
+      driver; but on the other hand, it is certain that the company did not make
+      it rain or cause the inundation. And, in fine, although we could not have
+      travelled by railway, we were masters to have taken the steamer instead of
+      the diligence at Civita Vecchia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The choice of either of these means of travel had presented itself in
+      vivid hues of disadvantage all the way from Rome to the Papal port, where
+      the French steamer for Leghorn lay dancing a hornpipe upon the short,
+      chopping waves, while we approached by railway. We had leisure enough to
+      make the decision, if that was all we wanted. Our engine-driver had
+      derived his ideas of progress from an Encyclical Letter, and the train
+      gave every promise of arriving at Civita Vecchia five hundred years behind
+      time. But such was the desolating and depressing influence of the weather
+      and the landscape, that we reached Civita Vecchia as undecided as we had
+      left Rome. On the one hand, there had been the land, soaked and sodden,&mdash;wild,
+      shagged with scrubby growths of timber and brooded over by sullen clouds,
+      and visibly inhabited only by shepherds, leaning upon their staves at an
+      angle of forty-five degrees, and looking, in their immovable dejection,
+      with their legs wrapped in long-haired goat-skins, like satyrs that had
+      been converted, and were trying to do right; turning dim faces to us, they
+      warned us with every mute appeal against the land, as a waste of mud from
+      one end of Italy to the other. On the other hand, there was the sea-wind
+      raving about our train and threatening to blow it over, and whenever we
+      drew near the coast, heaping the waves upon the beach in thundering
+      menace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We weakly and fearfully remembered our former journeys by diligence over
+      broken railway routes; we recalled our cruel voyage from Genoa to Naples
+      by sea; and in a state of pitiable dismay we ate five francs' worth at the
+      restaurant of the Civita Vecchia station before we knew it, and long
+      before we had made up our minds. Still we might have lingered and
+      hesitated, and perhaps returned to Rome at last, but for the dramatic
+      resolution of the old man who solicited passengers for the diligence, and
+      carried their passports for a final Papal <i>visa</i> at the
+      police-office. By the account he gave of himself, he was one of the best
+      men in the world, and unique in those parts for honesty and truthfulness;
+      and he besought us, out of that affectionate interest with which our very
+      aspect had inspired him, not to go by steamer, but to go by diligence,
+      which in nineteen hours would land us safe, and absolutely refreshed by
+      the journey, at the railway station in Follonica. And now, once, would we
+      go by diligence? twice, would we go? three times, would we go?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Signore," said our benefactor, angrily, "I lose my time with you;" and
+      ran away, to be called back in the course of destiny, as he knew well
+      enough, and besought to take us as a special favor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the passports he learned that there was official dignity among us,
+      and addressed the unworthy bearer of public honors as Eccellenza, and, at
+      parting bequeathed his advantage to the conductor, commending us all in
+      set terms to his courtesy. He hovered caressingly about us as long as we
+      remained, straining politeness to do us some last little service; and when
+      the diligence rolled away, he did all that one man could to give us a
+      round of applause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We laughed together at this silly old man, when out of sight; but we
+      confessed that, if travel in our own country ever came, with advancing
+      corruption, to be treated with the small deceits practiced upon it in
+      Italy, it was not likely to be treated with the small civilities also
+      there attendant on it,&mdash;and so tried to console ourselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the moment of departure, we were surprised to have enter the diligence
+      a fellow-countryman, whom we had first seen on the road from Naples to
+      Rome. He had since crossed our path with that iteration of travel which
+      brings you again and again in view of the same trunks and the same
+      tourists in the round of Europe, and finally at Civita Vecchia he had
+      turned up, a silent spectator of our scene with the agent of the
+      diligence, and had gone off apparently a confirmed passenger by steamer.
+      Perhaps a nearer view of the sailor's hornpipe, as danced by that vessel
+      in the harbor, shook his resolution. At any rate, here he was again, and
+      with his ticket for Follonica,&mdash;a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked man, and
+      we will say a citizen of Portland, though he was not. For the first time
+      in our long acquaintance with one another's faces, we entered into
+      conversation, and wondered whether we should find brigands or any thing to
+      eat on the road, without expectation of finding either. In respect of
+      robbers, we were not disappointed; but shortly after nightfall we stopped
+      at a lonely post-house to change horses, and found that the landlord had
+      so far counted on our appearance as to have, just roasted and fragrantly
+      fuming, a leg of lamb, with certain small fried fish, and a sufficiency of
+      bread. It was a very lonely place as I say; the sky was gloomy overhead;
+      and the wildness of the landscape all about us gave our provision quite a
+      gamy flavor; and brigands could have added nothing to our sense of
+      solitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The road creeps along the coast for some distance from Civita Vecchia,
+      within hearing of the sea, and nowhere widely forsakes it, I believe, all
+      the way to Follonica. The country is hilly, and we stopped every two hours
+      to change horses; at which times we looked out, and, seeing that it was a
+      gray and windy night, though not rainy, exulted that we had not taken the
+      steamer. With very little change, the wisdom of our decision in favor of
+      the diligence formed the burden of our talk during the whole night; and to
+      think of eluded sea-sickness requited us in the agony of our break-neck
+      efforts to catch a little sleep, as, mounted upon our nightmares, we rode
+      steeple-chases up and down the highways and by-ways of horror. Any thing
+      that absolutely awakened us was accounted a blessing; and I remember few
+      things in life with so keen a pleasure as the summons that came to us to
+      descend from our places and cross a river in one boat, while the two
+      diligences of our train followed in another. Here we had time to see our
+      fellow-passengers, as the pulsating light of their cigars illumined their
+      faces, and to discover among them that Italian, common to all large
+      companies, who speaks English, and is very eager to practice it with you,&mdash;who
+      is such a benefactor if you do not know his own language, and such a bore
+      if you do. After this, being landed, it was rapture to stroll up and down
+      the good road, and feel it hard and real under our feet, and not an
+      abysmal impalpability, while all the grim shapes of our dreams fled to the
+      spectral line of small boats sustaining the ferry-barge, and swaying
+      slowly from it as the drowned men at their keels tugged them against the
+      tide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "<i>S' accommodino, Signori</i>!" cries the cheerful voice of the
+      conductor, and we ascend to our places in the diligence. The nightmares
+      are brought out again; we mount, and renew the steeple-chase as before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly, it all comes to an end, and we sit wide awake in the diligence,
+      amid a silence only broken by the hiss of rain against the windows, and
+      the sweep of gusts upon the roof. The diligence stands still; there is no
+      rattle of harness, nor other sound to prove that we have arrived at the
+      spot by other means than dropping from the clouds. The idea that we are
+      passengers in the last diligence destroyed before the Deluge, and are now
+      waiting our fate on the highest ground accessible to wheels, fades away as
+      the day dimly breaks, and we find ourselves planted, as the Italians say,
+      on the banks of another river. There is no longer any visible conductor,
+      the horses have been spirited away, the driver has vanished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rain beats and beats upon the roof, and begins to drop through upon us
+      in great, wrathful tears, while the river before us rushes away with a
+      momently swelling flood. Enter now from the depths of the storm a number
+      of rainy peasants, with our conductor and driver perfectly waterlogged,
+      and group themselves on the low, muddy shore, near a flat ferry-barge,
+      evidently wanting but a hint of <i>forza maggiore</i> to go down with any
+      thing put into it. A moment they dispute in pantomime, sending now and
+      then a windy tone of protest and expostulation to our ears, and then they
+      drop into a motionless silence, and stand there in the tempest, not
+      braving it, but enduring it with the pathetic resignation of their race,
+      as if it were some form of hopeless political oppression. At last comes
+      the conductor to us and says, It is impossible for our diligences to cross
+      in the boat, and he has sent for others to meet us on the opposite shore.
+      He expected them long before this, but we see! They are not come. Patience
+      and malediction!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Remaining planted in these unfriendly circumstances from four o'clock till
+      ten, we have still the effrontery to be glad that we did not take the
+      steamer. What a storm that must be at sea! When at last our connecting
+      diligences appear on the other shore, we are almost light-hearted, and
+      make a jest of the Ombrone, as we perilously pass it in the ferry-boat too
+      weak for our diligences. Between the landing and the vehicles there is a
+      space of heavy mud to cross, and when we reach them we find the <i>coupé</i>
+      appointed us occupied by three young Englishmen, who insist that they
+      shall be driven to the boat. With that graceful superiority which endears
+      their nation to the world, and makes the travelling Englishman a universal
+      favorite, they keep the seats to which they have no longer any right,
+      while the tempest drenches the ladies to whom the places belong; and it is
+      only by the <i>forza maggiore</i> of our conductor that they can be
+      dislodged. In the mean time the Portland man exchanges with them the
+      assurances of personal and national esteem, which that mighty bond of
+      friendship, the language of Shakespeare and Milton, enables us to offer so
+      idiomatically to our transatlantic cousins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What Grossetto was like, as we first rode through it, we scarcely looked
+      to see. In four or five hours we should strike the railroad at Follonica;
+      and we merely asked of intermediate places that they should not detain us.
+      We dined in Grossetto at an inn of the Larthian period,&mdash;a cold inn
+      and a damp, which seemed never to have been swept since the broom dropped
+      from the grasp of the last Etrurian chambermaid,&mdash;and we ate with the
+      two-pronged iron forks of an extinct civilization. All the while we dined,
+      a boy tried to kindle a fire to warm us, and beguiled his incessant
+      failures with stories of inundation on the road ahead of us. But we
+      believed him so little, that when he said a certain stream near Grossetto
+      was impassable, our company all but hissed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we left the town and hurried into the open country, we perceived that
+      he had only too great reason to be an alarmist. Every little rill was
+      risen, and boiling over with the pride of harm, and the broad fields lay
+      hid under the yellow waters that here and there washed over the road. Yet
+      the freshet only presented itself to us as a pleasant excitement; and even
+      when we came to a place where the road itself was covered for a quarter of
+      a mile, we scarcely looked outside the diligence to see how deep the water
+      was. We were surprised when our horses were brought to a stand on a rising
+      ground, and the conductor, cap in hand, appeared at the door. He was a
+      fat, well-natured man, full of a smiling goodwill; and he stood before us
+      in a radiant desperation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Would Eccellenza descend, look at the water in front, and decide whether
+      to go on? The conductor desired to content; it displeased him to delay,&mdash;<i>ma,
+      in somma</i>!&mdash;the rest was confided to the conductor's eloquent
+      shoulders and eyebrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Eccellenza, descending, beheld but a disheartening prospect. On every hand
+      the country was under water. The two diligences stood on a stone bridge
+      spanning the stream, that, now swollen to an angry torrent, brawled over a
+      hundred yards of the road before us. Beyond, the ground rose, and on its
+      slope stood a farm-house up to its second story in water. Without the
+      slightest hope in his purpose and merely as an experiment, Eccellenza
+      suggested that a man should be sent in on horseback; which being done, man
+      and horse in a moment floundered into swimming depths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conductor, vigilantly regarding Eccellenza, gave a great shrug of
+      desolation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Eccellenza replied with a foreigner's broken shrug,&mdash;a shrug of
+      sufficiently correct construction, but wanting the tonic accent, as one
+      may say, though expressing, however imperfectly, an equal desolation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It appeared to be the part of wisdom not to go ahead, but to go back if we
+      could; and we reëntered the water we had just crossed. It had risen a
+      little meanwhile, and the road could now be traced only by the
+      telegraph-poles. The diligence before us went safely through; but our
+      driver, trusting rather to inspiration than precedent, did not follow it
+      carefully, and directly drove us over the side of a small viaduct. All the
+      baggage of the train having been lodged upon the roof of our diligence,
+      the unwieldy vehicle now lurched heavily, hesitated, as if preparing, like
+      Cæsar, to fall decently, and went over on its side with a stately
+      deliberation that gave us ample time to arrange our plans for getting out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The torrent was only some three feet deep, but it was swift and muddy, and
+      it was with a fine sense of shipwreck that Eccellenza felt his boots
+      filling with water, while a conviction that it would have been better,
+      after all, to have taken the steamer, struck coldly home to him. We opened
+      the window in the top side of the diligence, and lifted the ladies through
+      it and the conductor, in the character of life-boat, bore them ashore;
+      while the driver cursed his horses in a sullen whisper, and could with
+      difficulty be diverted from that employment to cut the lines and save one
+      of them from drowning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here our compatriot, whose conversation with the Englishman at the Ombrone
+      we had lately admired, showed traits of strict and severe method which
+      afterward came into even bolder relief. The ladies being rescued, he
+      applied himself to the rescue of their hats, cloaks, rubbers, muffs,
+      books, and bags, and handed them up through the window with tireless
+      perseverance, making an effort to wring or dry each article in turn. The
+      other gentleman on top received them all rather grimly, and had not
+      perhaps been amused by the situation but for the exploit of his hat. It
+      was of the sort called in Italian as in English slang a stove-pipe (<i>canna</i>),
+      and having been made in Italy, it was of course too large for its wearer.
+      It had never been any thing but a horror and reproach to him, and he was
+      now inexpressibly delighted to see it steal out of the diligence in
+      company with one of the red-leather cushions, and glide darkly down the
+      flood. It nodded and nodded to the cushion with a superhuman tenderness
+      and elegance, and had a preposterous air of whispering, as it drifted out
+      of sight,&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles,&mdash;
+  It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The romantic interest of this episode had hardly died away, when our
+      adventure acquired an idyllic flavor from the appearance on the scene of
+      four peasants in an ox-cart. These the conductor tried to engage to bring
+      out the baggage and right the fallen diligence; and they, after making him
+      a little speech upon the value of their health, which might be injured,
+      asked him, tentatively, two hundred francs for the service. The simple
+      incident enforced the fact already known to us,&mdash;that, if Italians
+      sometimes take advantage of strangers, they are equally willing to prey
+      upon each other; but I doubt if any thing could have taught a foreigner
+      the sweetness with which our conductor bore the enormity, and turned
+      quietly from those brigands to carry the Portland man from the wreck, on
+      which he lingered, to the shore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here in the gathering twilight the passengers of both diligences grouped
+      themselves, and made merry over the common disaster. As the conductor and
+      the drivers brought off the luggage our spirits rose with the arrival of
+      each trunk, and we were pleased or not as we found it soaked or dry. We
+      applauded and admired the greater sufferers among us: a lady who opened a
+      dripping box was felt to have perpetrated a pleasantry; and a Brazilian
+      gentleman, whose luggage dropped to pieces and was scattered in the flood
+      about the diligence, was looked upon as a very subtile humorist. Our own
+      contribution to these witty passages was the epigrammatic display of a
+      reeking trunk full of the pretty rubbish people bring away from Rome and
+      Naples,&mdash;copies of Pompeian frescos more ruinous than the originals;
+      photographs floating loose from their cards; little earthen busts reduced
+      to the lumpishness of common clay; Roman scarfs stained and blotted out of
+      all memory of their recent hues; Roman pearls clinging together in clammy
+      masses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were a band of brothers and sisters, as we all crowded into one
+      diligence and returned to Grossetto. Arrived there, our party, knowing
+      that a public conveyance in Italy&mdash;and everywhere else&mdash;always
+      stops at the worst inn in a place, made bold to seek another, and found it
+      without ado, though the person who undertook to show it spoke of it
+      mysteriously and as of difficult access, and tried to make the simple
+      affair as like a scene of grand opera as he could.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We took one of the ancient rooms in which there was a vast fire-place, as
+      already mentioned, and we there kindled such a fire as could not have been
+      known in that fuel-sparing land for ages. The drying of the clothes was an
+      affair that drew out all the energy and method of our compatriot, and at a
+      late hour we left him moving about among the garments that dangled and
+      dripped from pegs and hooks and lines, dealing with them as a physician
+      with his sick, and tenderly nursing his dress-coat, which he wrung and
+      shook and smoothed and pulled this way and that with a never-satisfied
+      anxiety. At midnight, he hired a watcher to keep up the fire and turn the
+      steaming raiment, and, returning at four o'clock, found his watcher dead
+      asleep before the empty fire-place. But I rather applaud than blame the
+      watcher for this. He must have been a man of iron nerve to fall asleep
+      amid all that phantasmal show of masks and disguises. What if those
+      reeking silks had forsaken their nails, and, decking themselves with the
+      blotted Roman scarfs and the slimy Roman pearls, had invited the
+      dress-coats to look over the dripping photographs? Or if all those drowned
+      garments had assumed the characters of the people whom they had grown to
+      resemble, and had sat down to hear the shade of Pia de' Tolommei rehearse
+      the story of her sad fate in the Maremma? I say, if a watcher could sleep
+      in such company, he was right to do so.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      On the third day after our return to Grossetto, we gathered together our
+      damaged effects, and packed them into refractory trunks. Then we held the
+      customary discussion with the landlord concerning the effrontery of his
+      account, and drove off once more toward Follonica. We could scarcely
+      recognize the route for the one we had recently passed over; and it was
+      not until we came to the scene of our wreck, and found the diligence
+      stranded high and dry upon the roadside, that we could believe the whole
+      landscape about us had been flooded three days before. The offending
+      stream had shrunk back to its channel, and now seemed to feign an
+      unconsciousness of its late excess, and had a virtuous air of not knowing
+      how in the world to account for that upturned diligence. The waters, we
+      learned, had begun to subside the night after our disaster; and the
+      vehicle might have been righted and drawn off&mdash;for it was not in the
+      least injured&mdash;forty-eight hours previously; but I suppose it was not
+      <i>en règle</i> to touch it without orders from Rome. I picture it to
+      myself still lying there, in the heart of the marshes, and thrilling
+      sympathetic travel with the spectacle of its ultimate ruin:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Disfecemi Maremma."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      We reached Follonica at last, and then the cars hurried us to Leghorn. We
+      were thoroughly humbled in spirit, and had no longer any doubt that we did
+      ill to take the diligence at Civita Vecchia instead of the steamer; for we
+      had been, not nineteen hours, but four days on the road, and we had
+      suffered as aforementioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But we were destined to be partially restored to our self-esteem, if not
+      entirely comforted for our losses, when we sat down to dinner in the Hotel
+      Washington, and the urbane head-waiter, catching the drift of our English
+      discourse, asked us,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Have the signori heard that the French steamer, which left Civita Vecchia
+      the same day with their diligence, had to put back and lie in port more
+      than two days on account of the storm? She is but now come into Leghorn,
+      after a very dangerous passage."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      AT PADUA
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Those of my readers who have frequented the garden of Doctor Rappaccini no
+      doubt recall with perfect distinctness the quaint old city of Padua. They
+      remember its miles and miles of dim arcade over-roofing the sidewalks
+      everywhere, affording excellent opportunity for the flirtation of lovers
+      by day and the vengeance of rivals by night. They have seen the now-vacant
+      streets thronged with maskers, and the Venetian Podestà going in gorgeous
+      state to and from the vast Palazzo della Ragione. They have witnessed
+      ringing tournaments in those sad empty squares, and races in the Prato
+      della Valle, and many other wonders of different epochs, and their
+      pleasure makes me half-sorry that I should have lived for several years
+      within an hour by rail from Padua, and should know little or nothing of
+      these great sights from actual observation. I take shame to myself for
+      having visited Padua so often and so familiarly as I used to do,&mdash;for
+      having been bored and hungry there,&mdash;for having had toothache there,
+      upon one occasion,&mdash;for having rejoiced more in a cup of coffee at
+      Pedrocchi's than in the whole history of Padua,&mdash;for having slept
+      repeatedly in the bad-bedded hotels of Padua and never once dreamt of
+      Portia,&mdash;for having been more taken by the <i>salti mortali</i>[<i>Salti
+      mortali</i> are those prodigious efforts of mental arithmetic by which
+      Italian waiters, in verbally presenting your account, arrive at six as the
+      product of two and two.] of a waiter who summed up my account at a Paduan
+      restaurant, than by all the strategies with which the city has been many
+      times captured and recaptured. Had I viewed Padua only over the wall of
+      Doctor Rappaccini's garden, how different my impressions of the city would
+      now be! This is one of the drawbacks of actual knowledge. "Ah! how can you
+      write about Spain when once you have been there?" asked Heine of Théophile
+      Gautier setting out on a journey thither.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless it seems to me that I remember something about Padua with a
+      sort of romantic pleasure. There was a certain charm which I can dimly
+      recall, in sauntering along the top of the old wall of the city, and
+      looking down upon the plumy crests of the Indian corn that flourished up
+      so mightily from the dry bed of the moat. At such times I could not help
+      figuring to myself the many sieges that the wall had known, with the
+      fierce assault by day, the secret attack by night, the swarming foe upon
+      the plains below, the bristling arms of the besieged upon the wall, the
+      boom of the great mortars made of ropes and leather and throwing mighty
+      balls of stone, the stormy flight of arrows, the ladders planted against
+      the defenses and staggering headlong into the moat, enriched for future
+      agriculture not only by its sluggish waters, but by the blood of many men.
+      I suppose that most of these visions were old stage spectacles furbished
+      up anew, and that my armies were chiefly equipped with their obsolete
+      implements of warfare from museums of armor and from cabinets of
+      antiquities; but they were very vivid for all that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was never able, in passing a certain one of the city gates, to divest
+      myself of an historic interest in the great loads of hay waiting admission
+      on the outside. For an instant they masked again the Venetian troops that,
+      in the War of the League of Cambray, entered the city in the hay-carts,
+      shot down the landsknechts at the gates, and, uniting with the citizens,
+      cut the German garrison to pieces. But it was a thing long past. The
+      German garrison was here again; and the heirs of the landsknechts went
+      clanking through the gate to the parade-ground, with that fierce clamor of
+      their kettle-drums which is so much fiercer because unmingled with the
+      noise of fifes. Once more now the Germans are gone, and, let us trust,
+      forever; but when I saw them, there seemed little hope of their going.
+      They had a great Biergarten on the top of the wall, and they had set up
+      the altars of their heavy Bacchus in many parts of the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I please myself with thinking that, if I walked on such a spring day as
+      this in the arcaded Paduan streets, I should catch glimpses, through the
+      gate-ways of the palaces, of gardens full of vivid bloom, and of fountains
+      that tinkle there forever. If it were autumn, and I were in the great
+      market-place before the Palazzo della Ragione, I should hear the baskets
+      of amber-hued and honeyed grapes humming with the murmur of multitudinous
+      bees, and making a music as if the wine itself were already singing in
+      their gentle hearts. It is a great field of succulent verdure, that wide
+      old market-place; and fancy loves to browse about among its gay stores of
+      fruits and vegetables, brought thither by the world-old peasant-women who
+      have been bringing fruits and vegetables to the Paduan market for so many
+      centuries. They sit upon the ground before their great panniers, and knit
+      and doze, and wake up with a drowsy "<i>Comandala</i>?" as you linger to
+      look at their grapes. They have each a pair of scales,&mdash;the emblem of
+      Injustice,&mdash;and will weigh you out a scant measure of the fruit if
+      you like. Their faces are yellow as parchment, and Time has written them
+      so full of wrinkles that there is not room for another line. Doubtless
+      these old parchment visages are palimpsests, and would tell the whole
+      history of Padua if you could get at each successive inscription. Among
+      their primal records there must be some account of the Roman city, as each
+      little contadinella remembered it on market-days; and one might read of
+      the terror of Attila's sack, a little later, with the peasant-maid's
+      personal recollections of the bold Hunnish trooper who ate up the grapes
+      in her basket, and kissed her hard, round red cheeks,&mdash;for in that
+      time she was a blooming girl,&mdash;and paid nothing for either privilege.
+      What wild and confused reminiscences on the wrinkled visage we should find
+      thereafter of the fierce republican times, of Ecelino, of the Carraras, of
+      the Venetian rule! And is it not sad to think of systems and peoples all
+      passing away, and these ancient women lasting still, and still selling
+      grapes in front of the Palazzo della Ragione? What a long mortality!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The youngest of their number is a thousand years older than the palace,
+      which was begun in the twelfth century, and which is much the same now as
+      it was when first completed. I know that, if I entered it, I should be
+      sure of finding the great hall of the palace&mdash;the vastest hall in the
+      world&mdash;dim and dull and dusty and delightful, with nothing in it
+      except at one end Donatello's colossal marble-headed wooden horse of Troy,
+      stared at from the other end by the two dog-faced Egyptian women in basalt
+      placed there by Belzoni.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late in the drowsy summer afternoons I should have the Court of the
+      University all to myself, and might study unmolested the blazons of the
+      noble youth who have attended the school in different centuries ever since
+      1200, and have left their escutcheons on the walls to commemorate them. At
+      the foot of the stairway ascending to the schools from the court is the
+      statue of the learned lady who was once a professor in the University, and
+      who, if her likeness belie not her looks, must have given a great charm to
+      student life in other times. At present there are no lady professors at
+      Padua any more than at Harvard; and during late years the schools have
+      suffered greatly from the interference of the Austrian government, which
+      frequently closed them for months, on account of political demonstrations
+      among the students. But now there is an end of this and many other stupid
+      oppressions; and the time-honored University will doubtless regain its
+      ancient importance. Even in 1864 it had nearly fifteen hundred students,
+      and one met them everywhere under the arcades, and could not well mistake
+      them, with that blended air of pirate and dandy which these studious young
+      men loved to assume. They were to be seen a good deal on the promenades
+      outside the walls, where the Paduan ladies are driven in their carriages
+      in the afternoon, and where one sees the blood-horses and fine equipages
+      for which Padua is famous. There used once to be races in the Prato della
+      Valle, after the Italian notion of horse-races; but these are now
+      discontinued, and there is nothing to be found there but the statues of
+      scholars and soldiers and statesmen, posted in a circle around the old
+      race-course. If you strolled thither about dusk on such a day as this, you
+      might see the statues unbend a little from their stony rigidity, and in
+      the failing light nod to each other very pleasantly through the trees. And
+      if you stayed in Padua over night, what could be better to-morrow morning
+      than a stroll through the great Botanical Garden,&mdash;the oldest
+      botanical garden in the world,&mdash;the garden which first received in
+      Europe the strange and splendid growths of our hemisphere,&mdash;the
+      garden where Doctor Rappaccini doubtless found the germ of his mortal
+      plant?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the whole, I believe I would rather go this moment to Padua than to
+      Lowell or Lawrence, or even to Worcester; and as to the disadvantage of
+      having seen Padua, I begin to think the whole place has now assumed so
+      fantastic a character in my mind that I am almost as well qualified to
+      write of it as if I had merely dreamed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day that we first visited the city was very rainy, and we spent most
+      of the time in viewing the churches. These, even after the churches of
+      Venice, one finds rich in art and historic interest, and they in no
+      instance fall into the maniacal excesses of the Renaissance to which some
+      of the temples of the latter city abandon themselves. Their architecture
+      forms a sort of border-land between the Byzantine of Venice and the
+      Lombardic of Verona. The superb domes of St. Anthony's emulate those of
+      St. Mark's; and the porticos of other Paduan churches rest upon the backs
+      of bird-headed lions and leopards that fascinate with their mystery and
+      beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the wish to see the attributive Giottos in the Chapter which drew
+      us first to St. Anthony's, and we saw them with the satisfaction naturally
+      attending the contemplation of frescos discovered only since 1858, after
+      having been hidden under plaster and whitewash for many centuries; but we
+      could not believe that Giotto's fame was destined to gain much by their
+      rescue from oblivion. They are in nowise to be compared with this master's
+      frescos in the Chapel of the Annunziata,&mdash;which, indeed, is in every
+      way a place of wonder and delight. You reach it by passing through a
+      garden lane bordered with roses, and a taciturn gardener comes out with
+      clinking keys, and lets you into the chapel, where there is nobody but
+      Giotto and Dante, nor seems to have been for ages. Cool it is, and of a
+      pulverous smell, as a sacred place should be; a blessed benching goes
+      round the walls, and you sit down and take unlimited comfort in the
+      frescos. The gardener leaves you alone to the solitude and the silence, in
+      which the talk of the painter and the exile is plain enough. Their
+      contemporaries and yours are cordial in their gay companionship: through
+      the half-open door falls, in a pause of the rain, the same sunshine that
+      they saw lie there; the deathless birds that they heard sing out in the
+      garden trees; it is the fresh sweetness of the grass mown so many hundred
+      years ago that breathes through all the lovely garden grounds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the midst of this pleasant communion with the past, you have a
+      lurking pain; for you have hired your brougham by the hour; and you
+      presently quit the Chapel of Giotto on this account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had chosen our driver from among many other drivers of broughams in the
+      vicinity of Pedrocchi's, because he had such an honest look, and was not
+      likely, we thought, to deal unfairly with us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But first," said the signor who had selected him, "how much is your
+      brougham an hour?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So and so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Show me the tariff of fares."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "There is no tariff."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "There is. Show it to me."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It is lost, signor."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I think not. It is here in this pocket. Get it out."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tariff appears, and with it the fact that he had demanded just what
+      the boatman of the ballad received in gift,&mdash;thrice his fee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The driver mounted his seat, and served us so faithfully that day in Padua
+      that we took him the next day for Arquà. At the end, when he had received
+      his due, and a handsome <i>mancia</i> besides, he was still unsatisfied,
+      and referred to the tariff in proof that he had been under-paid. On that
+      confronted and defeated, he thanked us very cordially, gave us the number
+      of his brougham, and begged us to ask for him when we came next to Padua
+      and needed a carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the Chapel of the Annunziata he drove us to the Church of Santa
+      Giustina, where is a very famous and noble picture by Romanino. But as
+      this writing has nothing in the world to do with art, I here dismiss that
+      subject, and with a gross and idle delight follow the sacristan down under
+      the church to the prison of Santa Giustina.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all the faculties of the mind there is none so little fatiguing to
+      exercise as mere wonder; and, for my own sake, I try always to wonder at
+      things without the least critical reservation. I therefore, in the sense
+      of deglutition, bolted this prison at once, though subsequent experiences
+      led me to look with grave indigestion upon the whole idea of prisons,
+      their authenticity, and even their existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As far as mere dimensions are concerned, the prison of Santa Giustina was
+      not a hard one to swallow, being only three feet wide by about ten feet in
+      length. In this limited space, Santa Giustina passed five years of the
+      paternal reign of Nero (a virtuous and a long-suffering prince, whom,
+      singularly enough, no historic artist has yet arisen to whitewash), and
+      was then brought out into the larger cell adjoining, to suffer a blessed
+      martyrdom. I am not sure now whether the sacristan said she was dashed to
+      death on the stones, or cut to pieces with knives; but whatever the form
+      of martyrdom, an iron ring in the ceiling was employed in it, as I know
+      from seeing the ring,&mdash;a curiously well-preserved piece of
+      iron-mongery. Within the narrow prison of the saint, and just under the
+      grating, through which the sacristan thrust his candle to illuminate it,
+      was a mountain of candle-drippings,&mdash;a monument to the fact that
+      faith still largely exists in this doubting world. My own credulity, not
+      only with regard to this prison, but also touching the coffin of St. Luke,
+      which I saw in the church, had so wrought upon the esteem of the
+      sacristan, that he now took me to a well, into which, he said, had been
+      cast the bones of three thousand Christian martyrs. He lowered a lantern
+      into the well, and assured me that, if I looked through a certain
+      screenwork there, I could see the bones. On experiment I could not see the
+      bones, but this circumstance did not cause me to doubt their presence,
+      particularly as I did see upon the screen a great number of coins offered
+      for the repose of the martyrs' souls. I threw down some <i>soldi</i>, and
+      thus enthralled the sacristan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the signor cared to see prisons, he said, the driver must take him to
+      those of Ecelino, at present the property of a private gentleman near by.
+      As I had just bought a history of Ecelino, at a great bargain, from a
+      second-hand book-stall, and had a lively interest in all the enormities of
+      that nobleman, I sped the driver instantly to the villa of the Signor P&mdash;&mdash;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It depends here altogether upon the freshness or mustiness of the reader's
+      historical reading whether he cares to be reminded more particularly who
+      Ecelino was. He flourished balefully in the early half of the thirteenth
+      century as lord of Vicenza, Verona, Padua, and Brescia, and was defeated
+      and hurt to death in an attempt to possess himself of Milan. He was in
+      every respect a remarkable man for that time,&mdash;fearless, abstemious,
+      continent, avaricious, hardy, and unspeakably ambitious and cruel. He
+      survived and suppressed innumerable conspiracies, escaping even the thrust
+      of the assassin whom the fame of his enormous wickedness had caused the
+      Old Man of the Mountain to send against him. As lord of Padua he was more
+      incredibly severe and bloody in his rule than as lord of the other cities,
+      for the Paduans had been latest free, and conspired the most frequently
+      against him. He extirpated whole families on suspicion that a single
+      member had been concerned in a meditated revolt. Little children and
+      helpless women suffered hideous mutilation and shame at his hands. Six
+      prisons in Padua were constantly filled by his arrests. The whole country
+      was traversed by witnesses of his cruelties,&mdash;men and women deprived
+      of an arm or leg, and begging from door to door. He had long been
+      excommunicated; at last the Church proclaimed a crusade against him, and
+      his lieutenant and nephew&mdash;more demoniacal, if possible, than himself&mdash;was
+      driven out of Padua while he was operating against Mantua. Ecelino retired
+      to Verona, and maintained a struggle against the crusade for nearly two
+      years longer, with a courage which never failed him. Wounded and taken
+      prisoner, the soldiers of the victorious army gathered about him, and
+      heaped insult and reproach upon him; and one furious peasant, whose
+      brother's feet had been cut off by Ecelino's command, dealt the helpless
+      monster four blows upon the head with a scythe. By some, Ecelino is said
+      to have died of these wounds alone; but by others it is related that his
+      death was a kind of suicide, inasmuch as he himself put the case past
+      surgery by tearing off the bandages from his hurts, and refusing all
+      medicines.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Entering at the enchanted portal of the Villa P&mdash;&mdash;, we found
+      ourselves in a realm of wonder. It was our misfortune not to see the
+      magician who compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but for that
+      very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his greatness.
+      Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy,
+      which everywhere tended to a monumental and mortuary effect. A sort of
+      vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped and glimmered the
+      garden. The walls of the vestibule were covered with inscriptions setting
+      forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety of all ages concerning
+      life and death; we began with Confucius, and we ended with Benjamino
+      Franklino. But as if these ideas of mortality were not sufficiently
+      depressing, the funereal Signor P&mdash;&mdash; had collected into earthen
+      <i>amphoræ</i> the ashes of the most famous men of ancient and modern
+      times, and arranged them so that a sense of their number and variety
+      should at once strike his visitor. Each jar was conspicuously labeled with
+      the name its illustrious dust had borne in life; and if one escaped with
+      comparative cheerfulness from the thought that Seneca had died, there were
+      in the very next pot the cinders of Napoleon to bully him back to a sense
+      of his mortality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were glad to have the gloomy fascination of these objects broken by the
+      custodian, who approached to ask if we wished to see the prisons of
+      Ecelino, and we willingly followed him into the rain out of our sepulchral
+      shelter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Between the vestibule and the towers of the tyrant lay that garden already
+      mentioned, and our guide led us through ranks of weeping statuary, and
+      rainy bowers, and showery lanes of shrubbery, until we reached the door of
+      his cottage. While he entered to fetch the key to the prisons, we noted
+      that the towers were freshly painted and in perfect repair; and indeed the
+      custodian said frankly enough, on reappearing, that they were merely built
+      over the prisons on the site of the original towers. The storied stream of
+      the Bacchiglione sweeps through the grounds, and now, swollen by the
+      rainfall, it roared, a yellow torrent, under a corner of the prisons. The
+      towers rise from masses of foliage, and form no unpleasing feature of what
+      must be, in spite of Signor P&mdash;&mdash;, a delightful Italian garden
+      in sunny weather. The ground is not so flat as elsewhere in Padua, and
+      this inequality gives an additional picturesqueness to the place. But as
+      we were come in search of horrors, we scorned these merely lovely things,
+      and hastened to immure ourselves in the dungeons below. The custodian,
+      lighting a candle, (which ought, we felt, to have been a torch,) went
+      before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We found the cells, though narrow and dark, not uncomfortable, and the
+      guide conceded that they had undergone some repairs since Ecelino's time.
+      But all the horrors for which we had come were there in perfect
+      grisliness, and labeled by the ingenious Signor P&mdash;&mdash; with Latin
+      inscriptions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first cell was a shrine of the Virgin, set in the wall. Beneath
+      this, while the wretched prisoner knelt in prayer, a trap-door opened and
+      precipitated him upon the points of knives, from which his body fell into
+      the Bacchiglione below. In the next cell, held by some rusty iron rings to
+      the wall, was a skeleton, hanging by the wrists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "This," said the guide, "was another punishment of which Ecelino was very
+      fond."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A dreadful doubt seized my mind. "Was this skeleton found here?" I
+      demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without faltering an instant, without so much as winking an eye, the
+      custodian replied, "<i>Appunto</i>."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a great relief, and restored me to confidence in the establishment.
+      I am at a loss to explain how my faith should have been confirmed
+      afterwards by coming upon a guillotine&mdash;an awful instrument in the
+      likeness of a straw-cutter, with a decapitated wooden figure under its
+      blade&mdash;which the custodian confessed to be a modern improvement
+      placed there by Signor P&mdash;&mdash;. Yet my credulity was so
+      strengthened by his candor, that I accepted without hesitation the torture
+      of the water-drop when we came to it. The water-jar was as well preserved
+      as if placed there but yesterday, and the skeleton beneath it&mdash;found
+      as we saw it&mdash;was entire and perfect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the adjoining cell sat a skeleton&mdash;found as we saw it&mdash;with
+      its neck in the clutch of the garrote, which was one of Ecelino's more
+      merciful punishments; while in still another cell the ferocity of the
+      tyrant appeared in the penalty inflicted upon the wretch whose skeleton
+      had been hanging for ages&mdash;as we saw it&mdash;head downwards from the
+      ceiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond these, in a yet darker and drearier dungeon, stood a heavy oblong
+      wooden box, with two apertures near the top, peering through which we
+      found that we were looking into the eyeless sockets of a skull. Within
+      this box Ecelino had immured the victim we beheld there, and left him to
+      perish in view of the platters of food and goblets of drink placed just
+      beyond the reach of his hands. The food we saw was of course not the
+      original food.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last we came to the crowning horror of Villa P&mdash;&mdash;, the
+      supreme excess of Ecelino's cruelty. The guide entered the cell before us,
+      and, as we gained the threshold, threw the light of his taper vividly upon
+      a block that stood in the middle of the floor. Fixed to the block by an
+      immense spike driven through from the back was the little slender hand of
+      a woman, which lay there just as it had been struck from the living arm,
+      and which, after the lapse of so many centuries, was still as perfectly
+      preserved as if it had been embalmed. The sight had a most cruel
+      fascination; and while one of the horror-seekers stood helplessly
+      conjuring to his vision that scene of unknown dread,&mdash;the shrinking,
+      shrieking woman dragged to the block, the wild, shrill, horrible screech
+      following the blow that drove in the spike, the merciful swoon after the
+      mutilation,&mdash;his companion, with a sudden pallor, demanded to be
+      taken instantly away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In their swift withdrawal, they only glanced at a few detached instruments
+      of torture,&mdash;all original Ecelinos, but intended for the infliction
+      of minor and comparatively unimportant torments,&mdash;and then they
+      passed from that place of fear.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In the evening we sat talking at the Caffè Pedrocchi with an abbate, an
+      acquaintance of ours, who was a Professor in the University of Padua.
+      Pedrocchi's is the great caffè of Padua, a granite edifice of Egyptian
+      architecture, which is the mausoleum of the proprietor's fortune. The
+      pecuniary skeleton at the feast, however, does not much trouble the
+      guests. They begin early in the evening to gather into the elegant saloons
+      of the caffè,&mdash;somewhat too large for so small a city as Padua,&mdash;and
+      they sit there late in the night over their cheerful cups and their ices,
+      with their newspapers and their talk. Not so many ladies are to be seen as
+      at the caffè in Venice, for it is only in the greater cities that they go
+      much to these public places. There are few students at Pedrocchi's, for
+      they frequent the cheaper caffè; but you may nearly always find there some
+      Professor of the University, and on the evening of which I speak there
+      were two present besides our abbate. Our friend's great passion was the
+      English language, which he understood too well to venture to speak a great
+      deal. He had been translating from that tongue into Italian certain
+      American poems, and our talk was of these at first. Then we began to talk
+      of distinguished American writers, of whom intelligent Italians always
+      know at least four, in this succession,&mdash;Cooper, Mrs. Stowe,
+      Longfellow, and Irving. Mrs. Stowe's <i>Capanna di Zio Tom</i> is, of
+      course universally read; and my friend had also read <i>Il Fiore di Maggio</i>,&mdash;"The
+      May-flower." Of Longfellow, the "Evangeline" is familiar to Italians,
+      through a translation of the poem; but our abbate knew all the poet's
+      works, and one of the other professors present that evening had made such
+      faithful study of them as to have produced some translations rendering the
+      original with remarkable fidelity and spirit. I have before me here his <i>brochure</i>,
+      printed last year at Padua, and containing versions of "Enceladus,"
+      "Excelsior," "A Psalm of Life," "The Old Clock on the Stairs," "Sand of
+      the Desert in an Hour-Glass," "Twilight," "Daybreak," "The Quadroon Girl,"
+      and "Torquemada,"&mdash;pieces which give the Italians a fair notion of
+      our poet's lyrical range, and which bear witness to Professor
+      Messadaglia's sympathetic and familiar knowledge of his works. A young and
+      gifted lady of Parma, now unhappily no more, lately published a
+      translation of "The Golden Legend;" and Professor Messadaglia, in his
+      Preface, mentions a version of another of our poet's longer works on which
+      the translator of the "Evangeline" is now engaged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, turning from literature, we spoke with the gentle abbate of our
+      day's adventures, and eagerly related that of the Ecelino prisons. To have
+      seen them was the most terrific pleasure of our lives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Eh!" said our friend, "I believe you."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "We mean those under the Villa P&mdash;&mdash;."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Exactly."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a tone of politely suppressed amusement in the abbate's voice;
+      and after a moment's pause, in which we felt our awful experience slipping
+      and sliding away from us, we ventured to say, "You don't mean that those
+      are <i>not</i> the veritable Ecelino prisons?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Certainly they are nothing of the kind. The Ecelino prisons were
+      destroyed when the Crusaders took Padua, with the exception of the tower,
+      which the Venetian Republic converted into an observatory."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But at least these prisons are on the site of Ecelino's castle?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Nothing of the sort. His castle in that case would have been outside of
+      the old city walls."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "And those tortures and the prisons are all"&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Things got up for show. No doubt, Ecelino used such things, and many
+      worse, of which even the ingenuity of Signor P&mdash;&mdash; cannot
+      conceive. But he is an eccentric man, loving the horrors of history, and
+      what he can do to realize them he has done in his prisons."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But the custodian&mdash;how could he lie so?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our friend shrugged his shoulders. "Eh! easily. And perhaps he even
+      believed what he said."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The world began to assume an aspect of bewildering ungenuineness, and
+      there seemed to be a treacherous quality of fiction in the ground under
+      our feet. Even the play at the pretty little Teatro Sociale where we went
+      to pass the rest of the evening appeared hollow and improbable. We thought
+      the hero something of a bore, with his patience and goodness; and as for
+      the heroine, pursued by the attentions of the rich profligate, we doubted
+      if she were any better than she should be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUÀ.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We said, during summer days at Venice, when every <i>campo</i> was a
+      furnace seven times heated, and every canal was filled with boiling
+      bathers, "As soon as it rains we will go to Arquà." Remembering the ardors
+      of an April sun on the long, level roads of plain, we could not think of
+      them in August without a sense of dust clogging every pore, and eyes that
+      shrank from the vision of their blinding whiteness. So we stayed in
+      Venice, waiting for rain, until the summer had almost lapsed into autumn;
+      and as the weather cooled before any rain reached us, we took the moisture
+      on the main-land for granted, and set out under a cloudy and windy sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had to go to Padua by railway, and take carriage thence to Arquà upon
+      the road to Ferrara. I believe no rule of human experience was violated
+      when it began to rain directly after we reached Padua, and continued to
+      rain violently the whole day. We gave up this day entirely to the rain,
+      and did not leave Padua until the following morning when we count that our
+      pilgrimage to Petrarch's house actually began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rain had cooled and freshened the air, but it was already too late in
+      the season for the summer to recover herself with the elastic brilliancy
+      that follows the rain of July or early August; and there was I know not
+      what vague sentiment of autumn in the weather. There was not yet enough of
+      it to stir the
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Tears from the depth of some divine despair;"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      but in here and there a faded leaf (for in Europe death is not glorified
+      to the foliage as in our own land), in the purple of the ripening grapes,
+      and in the tawny grass of the pastures, there was autumn enough to touch
+      our spirits, and while it hardly affected the tone of the landscape, to
+      lay upon us the gentle and pensive spell of its presence. Of all the days
+      in the year I would have chosen this to go pilgrim to the house of
+      Petrarch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Euganean Hills, on one of which the poet's house is built, are those
+      mellow heights which you see when you look southwest across the lagoon at
+      Venice. In misty weather they are blue, and in clear weather silver, and
+      the October sunset loves them. They rise in tender azure before you as you
+      issue from the southern gate of Padua, and grow in loveliness as you draw
+      nearer to them from the rich plain that washes their feet with endless
+      harvests of oil and wine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh beauty that will not let itself be told! Could I not take warning from
+      another, and refrain from this fruitless effort of description? A friend
+      in Padua had lent me Disraeli's "Venetia," because a passage of the story
+      occurs in Petrarch's house at Arquà, and we carried the volumes with us on
+      our pilgrimage. I would here quote the description of the village, the
+      house, and the hills from this work, as faultlessly true, and as affording
+      no just idea of either; but nothing of it has remained in my mind except
+      the geological fact that the hills are a volcanic range. To tell the
+      truth, the landscape, as we rode along, continually took my mind off the
+      book, and I could not give that attention either to the elegant language
+      of its descriptions, or the adventures of its well-born characters, which
+      they deserved. I was even more interested in the disreputable-looking
+      person who mounted the box beside our driver directly we got out of the
+      city gate, and who invariably commits this infringement upon your rights
+      in Italy, no matter how strictly and cunningly you frame your contract
+      that no one else is to occupy any part of the carriage but yourself. He
+      does not seem to be the acquaintance of the driver, for they never
+      exchange a word, and he does not seem to pay any thing for the ride. He
+      got down, in this instance, just before we reached the little town at
+      which our driver stopped, and asked us if we wished to drink a glass of
+      the wine of the country. We did not, but his own thirst seemed to answer
+      equally well, and he slaked it cheerfully at our cost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fields did not present the busy appearance which had delighted us on
+      the same road in the spring, but they had that autumnal charm already
+      mentioned. Many of the vine-leaves were sear; the red grapes were already
+      purple, and the white grapes pearly ripe, and they formed a gorgeous
+      necklace for the trees, around which they clung in opulent festoons. Then,
+      dearer to our American hearts than this southern splendor, were the russet
+      fields of Indian corn, and, scattered among the shrunken stalks, great
+      nuggets of the "harmless gold" of pumpkins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Battaglia (the village just beyond which you turn off to go to Arquà)
+      there was a fair, on the blessed occasion of some saint's day, and there
+      were many booths full of fruits, agricultural implements, toys, clothes,
+      wooden ware, and the like. There was a great crowd and a noise, but,
+      according to the mysterious Italian custom, nobody seemed to be buying or
+      selling. I am in the belief that a small purchase of grapes we made here
+      on our return was the great transaction of the day, unless, indeed, the
+      neat operation in alms achieved at our expense by a mendicant villager may
+      be classed commercially.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we turned off from the Rovigo road at Battaglia we were only three
+      miles from Arquà.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Now, all the way from this turning to the foot of the hill on which the
+      village was stretched asleep in the tender sunshine, there was on either
+      side of the road a stream of living water. There was no other barrier than
+      this between the road and the fields (unless the vines swinging from tree
+      to tree formed a barrier), and, as if in graceful excuse for the
+      interposition of even these slender streams, Nature had lavished such
+      growth of wild flowers and wild berries on the banks that it was like a
+      garden avenue, through the fragrance and beauty of which we rolled,
+      delighted to silence, almost to sadness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we began to climb the hill to Arquà, and the driver stopped to
+      breathe his horse, I got out and finished the easy ascent on foot. The
+      great marvel to me is that the prospect of the vast plain below, on which,
+      turning back, I feasted my vision, should be there yet, and always. It had
+      the rare and saddening beauty of evanescence, and awoke in me the memory
+      of all beautiful scenery, so that I embroidered the landscape with the
+      silver threads of western streams, and bordered it with Ohio hills. Ohio
+      hills? When I looked again it was the storied Euganean group. But what
+      trans-oceanic bird, voyaging hither, dropped from its mouth the blackberry
+      which took root and grew and blossomed and ripened, that I might taste
+      Home in it on these classic hills?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wonder did Petrarch walk often down this road from his house just above?
+      I figured him coming to meet me with his book in his hand, in his reverend
+      poetic robes, and with his laurel on, over that curious kind of bandaging
+      which he seems to have been fond of&mdash;looking, in a word, for all the
+      world like the neuralgic Petrarch in the pictures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Drawing nearer, I discerned the apparition to be a robeless, laureless
+      lout, who belonged at the village inn. Yet this lout, though not Petrarch,
+      had merits. His face and hands, and his legs, as seen from his knees down,
+      had the tone of the richest bronze; he wore a mountain cap with a long
+      tasseled fall to the back of it; his face was comely and his eye
+      beautiful; and he was so nobly ignorant of every thing that a colt or
+      young bullock could not have been better company. He merely offered to
+      guide us to Petrarch's house, and was silent, except when spoken to, from
+      that instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am here tempted to say: Arquà is in the figure of a man stretched upon
+      the hill slope. The head, which is Petrarch's house, rests upon the
+      summit. The carelessly tossed arms lie abroad from this in one direction,
+      and the legs in the opposite quarter. It is a very lank and shambling
+      figure, without elegance or much proportion, and the attitude is the last
+      wantonness of loafing. We followed our lout up the right leg, which is a
+      gentle and easy ascent in the general likeness of a street. World-old
+      stone cottages crouch on either side; here and there is a more ambitious
+      house in decay; trees wave over the street, and down its distance comes an
+      occasional donkey-cart very musically and leisurely. By all odds, Arquà
+      and its kind of villages are to be preferred to those hamlets of the plain
+      which in Italy cling to the white-hot highway without a tree to shelter
+      them, and bake and burn there in the merciless sun. Their houses of
+      stuccoed stone are crowded as thickly together as city houses, and these
+      wretched little villages do their worst to unite the discomforts of town
+      and country with a success dreadful to think of. In all countries villages
+      are hateful to the heart of civilized man. In the Lombard plains I wonder
+      that one stone of them rests upon another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We reached Petrarch's house before the custodian had arrived to admit us,
+      and stood before the high stone wall which shuts in the front of the
+      house, and quite hides it from those without. This wall bears the
+      inscription, <i>Casa Petrarca</i>, and a marble tablet lettered to the
+      following effect:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+         SE TI AGITA
+    SACRO AMORE DI PATRIA,
+   T'INCHINA A QUESTE MURA
+  OVE SPIRÒ LA GRAND' ANIMA,
+   IL CANTOR DEI SCIPIONI
+         E DI LAURA.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Which may be translated: "If thou art stirred by love of country, bow to
+      these walls, whence passed the great soul, the singer of the Scipios and
+      of Laura."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile we became the centre of a group of the youths of Arquà, who had
+      kindly attended our progress in gradually increasing numbers from the
+      moment we had entered the village. They were dear little girls and boys,
+      and mountain babies, all with sunburnt faces and the gentle and the
+      winning ways native to this race, which Nature loves better than us of the
+      North. The blonde pilgrim seemed to please them, and they evidently took
+      us for <i>Tedeschi</i>. You learn to submit to this fate in Northern
+      Italy, however ungracefully, for it is the one that constantly befalls you
+      outside of the greatest cities. The people know about two varieties of
+      foreigners&mdash;the Englishman and the German. If, therefore, you have
+      not <i>rosbif</i> expressed in every lineament of your countenance; if the
+      soles of your boots are less than an inch thick, and your clothes are not
+      reduced in color to the invariable and maddening tone of the English
+      tweed,&mdash;you must resign yourself to be a German. All this is grievous
+      to the soul which loves to spread its eagle in every land and to be known
+      as American, with star-spangled conspicuousness all over the world: but it
+      cannot be helped. I vainly tried to explain the geographical, political,
+      and natural difference between Tedeschi and Americani to the custodian of
+      Petrarch's house. She listened with amiability, shrugged her shoulders
+      hopelessly, and said, in her rude Venetian, "<i>Mi no so miga</i>" (I
+      don't know at all).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before she came, I had a mind to prove the celebrity of a poet on the spot
+      where he lived and died,&mdash;on his very hearthstone, as it were. So I
+      asked the lout, who stood gnawing a stick and shifting his weight from one
+      foot to the other,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "When did Petrarch live here?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Ah! I don't remember him."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Who was he?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "A poet, signor."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Certainly the first response was not encouraging, but the last revealed
+      that even to the heavy and clouded soul of this lout the divine fame of
+      the poet had penetrated&mdash;and he a lout in the village where Petrarch
+      lived and ought to be first forgotten. He did not know when Petrarch had
+      lived there,&mdash;a year ago, perhaps, or many centuries,&mdash;but he
+      knew that Petrarch was a poet. A weight of doubt was lifted from my
+      spirit, and I responded cheerfully to some observations on the weather
+      offered by a rustic matron who was pitching manure on the little
+      hill-slope near the house. When, at last, the custodian came and opened
+      the gate to us, we entered a little grassy yard from which a flight of
+      steps led to Petrarch's door. A few flowers grew wild among the grass, and
+      a fig-tree leaned its boughs against the wall. The figs on it were green,
+      though they hung ripe and blackening on every other tree in Arquà. Some
+      ivy clung to the stones, and from this and the fig-tree, as we came away,
+      we plucked memorial leaves, and blended them with flowers which the youth
+      of Arquà picked and forced upon us for remembrance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A quaint old door opened into the little stone house, and admitted us to a
+      kind of wide passage-way with rooms on either side; and at the end
+      opposite to which we entered, another door opened upon a balcony. From
+      this balcony we looked down on Petrarch's garden, which, presently
+      speaking, is but a narrow space with more fruit than flowers in it. Did
+      Petrarch use to sit and meditate in this garden? For me I should better
+      have liked a chair on the balcony, with the further and lovelier prospect
+      on every hand of village-roofs, sloping hills all gray with olives, and
+      the broad, blue Lombard plain, sweeping from heaven to heaven below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The walls of the passage-way are frescoed (now very faintly) in
+      illustration of the loves of Petrarch and Laura, with verses from the
+      sonnets inscribed to explain the illustrations. In all these Laura
+      prevails as a lady of a singularly long waist and stiff movements, and
+      Petrarch, with his face tied up and a lily in his hand, contemplates the
+      flower in mingled botany and toothache. There is occasionally a startling
+      literalness in the way the painter has rendered some of the verses. I
+      remember with peculiar interest the illustration of a lachrymose passage
+      concerning a river of tears, wherein the weeping Petrarch, stretched
+      beneath a tree, had already started a small creek of tears, which was
+      rapidly swelling to a flood with the torrent from his eyes. I attribute
+      these frescos to a later date than that of the poet's residence, but the
+      portrait over the door of the bedroom inside of the chamber, was of his
+      own time, and taken from him&mdash;the custodian said. As it seemed to
+      look like all the Petrarchian portraits, I did not remark it closely, but
+      rather turned my attention to the walls of the chamber, which were thickly
+      over-scribbled with names. They were nearly all Italian, and none English
+      so far as I saw. This passion for allying one's self to the great, by
+      inscribing one's name on places hallowed by them, is certainly very odd;
+      and (I reflected as I added our names to the rest) it is, without doubt,
+      the most impertinent and idiotic custom in the world. People have thus
+      written themselves down, to the contempt of sensible futurity, all over
+      Petrarch's house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The custodian insisted that the bedroom was just as in the poet's time;
+      some rooms beyond it had been restored; the kitchen at its side was also
+      repaired. Crossing the passage-way, we now entered the dining-room, which
+      was comparatively large and lofty, with a mighty and generous fire-place
+      at one end, occupying the whole space left by a balcony-window. The floor
+      was paved with tiles, and the window-panes were round and small, and set
+      in lead&mdash;like the floors and window-panes of all the other rooms. A
+      gaudy fresco, representing some indelicate female deity, adorned the front
+      of the fire-place, which sloped expanding from the ceiling and terminated
+      at the mouth without a mantel-piece. The chimney was deep, and told of the
+      cold winters in the hills, of which, afterward, the landlady of the
+      village inn prattled less eloquently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this dining-room opens, to the right, the door of the room which they
+      call Petrarch's library; and above the door, set in a marble frame, with a
+      glass before it, is all that is mortal of Petrarch's cat, except the hair.
+      Whether or not the fur was found incompatible with the process of
+      embalming, and therefore removed, or whether it has slowly dropped away
+      with the lapse of centuries, I do not know; but it is certain the cat is
+      now quite hairless, and has the effect of a wash-leather invention in the
+      likeness of a young lamb. On the marble slab below there is a Latin
+      inscription, said to be by the great poet himself, declaring this cat to
+      have been "second only to Laura." We may, therefore, believe its virtues
+      to have been rare enough; and cannot well figure to ourselves Petrarch
+      sitting before that wide-mouthed fire-place, without beholding also the
+      gifted cat that purrs softly at his feet and nestles on his knees, or,
+      with thickened tail and lifted back, parades, loftily round his chair in
+      the haughty and disdainful manner of cats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the library, protected against the predatory enthusiasm of visitors by
+      a heavy wire netting, are the desk and chair of Petrarch, which I know of
+      no form of words to describe perfectly. The front of the desk is of a kind
+      of mosaic in cubes of wood, most of which have been carried away. The
+      chair is wide-armed and carved, but the bottom is gone, and it has been
+      rudely repaired. The custodian said Petrarch died in this chair while he
+      sat writing at his desk in the little nook lighted by a single window
+      opening on the left from his library. He loved to sit there. As I entered
+      I found he had stepped out for a moment, but I know he returned directly
+      after I withdrew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On one wall of the library (which is a simple oblong room, in nowise
+      remarkable) was a copy of verses in a frame, by Cesarotti, and on the wall
+      opposite a tribute from Alfieri, both <i>manu propriâ</i>. Over and above
+      these are many other scribblings; and hanging over the door of the poet's
+      little nook was a criminal French lithograph likeness of "Pétrarque" when
+      young.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alfieri's verses are written in ink on the wall, while those of Cesarotti
+      are on paper, and framed, I do not remember any reference to his visit to
+      Petrarch's house in Alfieri's autobiography, though the visit must have
+      taken place in 1783, when he sojourned at Padua, and "made the
+      acquaintance of the celebrated Cesarotti, with whose lively and courteous
+      manners he was no less satisfied than he had always been in reading his
+      (Cesarotti's) most masterly version of 'Ossian.'" It is probable that the
+      friends visited the house together. At any rate, I care to believe that
+      while Cesarotti sat "composing" his tribute comfortably at the table,
+      Alfieri's impetuous soul was lifting his tall body on tiptoe to scrawl its
+      inspirations on the plastering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Do you care, gentle reader, to be reminded that just before this visit
+      Alfieri had heard in Venice of the "peace between England and the United
+      Colonies," and that he then and there "wrote the fifth ode of the 'America
+      Libera,'" and thus finished that poem?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After copying these verses we returned to the dining-room, and while one
+      pilgrim strayed idly through the names in the visitor's book, the other
+      sketched Petrarch's cat, before mentioned, and Petrarch's inkstand of
+      bronze&mdash;a graceful little thing, having a cover surmounted by a
+      roguish cupid, while the lower part is supported on three lion's claws,
+      and just above the feet, at either of the three corners, is an exquisite
+      little female bust and head. Thus sketching and idling, we held
+      spell-bound our friends the youth of Arquà, as well as our driver, who,
+      having brought innumerable people to see the house of Petrarch, now for
+      the first time, with great astonishment, beheld the inside of it himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to the authenticity of the house I think there can be no doubt, and as
+      to the genuineness of the relics there, nothing in the world could shake
+      my faith in them, though Muratori certainly characterizes them as
+      "superstitions." The great poet was sixty-five years old when he came to
+      rest at Arquà, and when, in his own pathetic words, "there remained to him
+      only to consider and to desire how to make a good end." He says further,
+      at the close of his autobiography: "In one of the Euganean hills, near to
+      ten miles from the city of Padua, I have built me a house, small but
+      pleasant and decent, in the midst of slopes clothed with vines and olives,
+      abundantly sufficient for a family not large and discreet. Here I lead my
+      life, and although, as I have said, infirm of body, yet tranquil of mind,
+      without excitements, without distractions, without cares, reading always,
+      and writing and praising God, and thanking God as well for evil as for
+      good; which evil, if I err not, is trial merely and not punishment. And
+      all the while I pray to Christ that he make good the end of my life, and
+      have mercy on me, and forgive me, and even forget my youthful sins;
+      wherefore, in this solitude, no words are so sweet to my lips as these of
+      the psalm: '<i>Delicta juventutis meoe, et ignorantias meas ne memineris</i>.'
+      And with every feeling of the heart I pray God, when it please Him, to
+      bridle my thoughts, so long unstable and erring; and as they have vainly
+      wandered to many things, to turn them all to Him&mdash;only true, certain,
+      immutable Good."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I venerate the house at Arquà because these sweet and solemn words were
+      written in it. We left its revered shelter (after taking a final look from
+      the balcony down upon "the slopes clothed with vines and olives") and
+      returned to the lower village, where, in the court of the little church,
+      we saw the tomb of Petrarch&mdash;"an ark of red stone, upon four columns
+      likewise of marble." The epitaph is this:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Frigida Francisci lapis hic tegit ossa Petrarcae;
+  Suscipe, Virgo parens, animam; sate Virgine, parce
+  Fessaque jam terris Coeli requiescat in arce."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      A head of the poet in bronze surmounts the ark. The housekeeper of the
+      parish priest, who ran out to enjoy my admiration and bounty, told me a
+      wild local tradition of an attempt on the part of the Florentines to steal
+      the bones of Petrarch away from Arquà, in proof of which she showed me a
+      block of marble set into the ark, whence she said a fragment had been
+      removed by the Florentines. This local tradition I afterwards found
+      verified, with names and dates, in a little "Life of Petrarch," by F.
+      Leoni, published at Padua in 1843. It appears that this curious attempt of
+      the Florentines to do doubtful honor to the great citizen whose hereditary
+      civic rights they restored too late (about the time he was drawing nigh
+      his "good end" at Arquà), was made for them by a certain monk of
+      Portagruaro named Tommaso Martinelli. He had a general instruction from
+      his employers to bring away from Arquà "any important thing of Petrarch's"
+      that he could; and it occurred to this ill-advised friar to "move his
+      bones." He succeeded on a night of the year 1630 in stealing the dead
+      poet's arm. The theft being at once discovered, the Venetian Republic
+      rested not till the thief was also discovered; but what became of the arm
+      or of the sacrilegious monk neither the Signor Leoni nor the old women of
+      Arquà give any account. The Republic removed the rest of Petrarch's body,
+      which is now said to be in the Royal Museum of Madrid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was willing to know more of this quaint village of Arquà, and I rang at
+      the parish priest's door to beg of him some account of the place, if any
+      were printed. But already at one o'clock he had gone to bed for a nap, and
+      must on no account be roused till four. It is but a quiet life men lead in
+      Arquà, and their souls are in drowsy hands. The amount of sleep which this
+      good man gives himself (if he goes to bed at 9 P.M. and rises at 9 A.M.,
+      with a nap of three hours during the day) speaks of a quiet conscience, a
+      good digestion, and uneventful days. As I turned this notion over in my
+      mind, my longing to behold his reverence increased, that I might read life
+      at Arquà in the smooth curves of his well-padded countenance. I thought it
+      must be that his "bowels of compassion were well-rounded," and, making
+      sure of absolution, I was half-minded, if I got speech with him, to
+      improve the occasion by confessing one or two of my blackest sins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ought I to say here that, on the occasion of a second visit to Arquà, I
+      succeeded in finding this excellent ecclesiastic wide awake at two o'clock
+      in the afternoon, and that he granted me an interview at that hour?
+      Justice to him, I think, demands this admission of me. He was not at all a
+      fat priest, as I had prefigured him, but rather of a spare person, and of
+      a brisk and lively manner. At the village inn, after listening half an
+      hour to a discourse on nothing but white wine from a young priest, who had
+      stopped to drink a glass of it, I was put in the way of seeing the priest
+      of Arquà by the former's courtesy. Happily enough, his reverence chanced
+      to have the very thing I wanted to see&mdash;no other than Leoni's "Life
+      of Petrarch," to which I have already referred. Courtesy is the blood in
+      an Italian's veins, and I need not say that the ecclesiastic of Arquà,
+      seeing my interest in the place, was very polite and obliging. But he
+      continued to sleep throughout our first stay in Arquà, and I did not see
+      him then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I strolled up and down the lazy, rambling streets, and chiefly devoted
+      myself to watching the young women who were washing clothes at the stream
+      running from the "Fountain of Petrarch." Their arms and legs were bronzed
+      and bare, and they chattered and laughed gayly at their work. Their
+      wash-tubs were formed by a long marble conduit from the fountain; their
+      wash-boards, by the inward-sloping conduit-sides; and they thrashed and
+      beat the garments clean upon the smooth stone. To a girl, their waists
+      were broad and their ankles thick. Above their foreheads the hair was cut
+      short, and their "back hair" was gathered into a mass, and held together
+      by converging circle of silver pins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Piazza della Fontana, in Arquà, is a place some fifty feet in length
+      and breadth, and seems to be a favorite place of public resort. In the
+      evening, doubtless, it is alive with gossipers, as now with workers. It
+      may be that then his reverence, risen from his nap, saunters by, and
+      pauses long enough to chuck a pretty girl under the chin or pinch an
+      urchin's cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our dinner was ready by the time I got back to the inn, and we sat down to
+      a chicken stewed in oil and a stoup of the white wine of Arquà. It was a
+      modest feast, but, being a friend to oil, I found it savory, and the wine
+      was both good and strong. While we lingered over the repast we speculated
+      somewhat carelessly whether Arquà had retained among its simplicities the
+      primitive Italian cheapness of which you read much. When our landlord
+      leaned over the table and made out our account on it with a bit of chalk,
+      the bill was as follows:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          Soldi.
+  Chicken   70
+  Bread      8
+  Wine      20
+            &mdash;
+  Total     98
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It surely was not a costly dinner, yet I could have bought the same
+      chicken in Venice for half the money; which is but another proof that the
+      demand of the producer is often much larger than the supply of the
+      consumer, and that to buy poultry cheaply you must not purchase it where
+      raised,&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  ..."On misty mountain ground,
+  Its own vast shadow glory crowned,"&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      but rather in a large city after it has been transported forty miles or
+      more. Not that we begrudged the thrifty inn-keeper his fee. We paid it
+      cheerfully, as well for his own sake as for that of his pleasant and neat
+      little wife, who kept the whole inn so sweet and clean; and we bade them a
+      most cordial farewell as we drove away from their door.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Returning, we stopped at the great castle of the Obizzi (now the property
+      of the Duke of Modena), through which we were conducted by a surly and
+      humorous <i>custode</i>, whose pride in life was that castle and its
+      treasures, so that he resented as a personal affront the slightest
+      interest in any thing else. He stopped us abruptly in the midst of the
+      museum, and, regarding the precious antiques and curiosities around him,
+      demanded:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Does this castle please you?" Then, with a scornful glance at us, "Your
+      driver tells me you have been at Arquà? And what did you see at Arquà? A
+      shabby little house and a cat without any hair on. I would not," said this
+      disdainful <i>custode</i>, "go to Arquà if you gave me a lemonade."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I had often heard in Venice of that ancient people, settled in the Alpine
+      hills about the pretty town of Bassano, on the Brenta, whom common fame
+      declares to be a remnant of the Cimbrian invaders of Rome, broken up in
+      battle, and dispersed along the borders of North Italy, by Marius, many
+      centuries ago. So when the soft September weather came, last year, we
+      sallied out of Venice, in three, to make conquest of whatever was curious
+      in the life and traditions of these mountaineers, who dwell in seven
+      villages, and are therefore called the people of the Sette Communi among
+      their Italian neighbors. We went fully armed with note-book and
+      sketch-book, and prepared to take literary possession of our conquest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From Venice to the city of Vicenza by railroad, it is two hours; and
+      thence one must take a carriage to Bassano (which is an opulent and busy
+      little grain mart, of some twelve thousand souls, about thirty miles north
+      of Venice). We were very glad of the ride across the country. By the time
+      we reached the town it was nine o'clock, and moonlight, and as we glanced
+      out of our windows we saw the quaint up-and-down-hill streets peopled with
+      promenaders, and every body in Bassano seemed to be making love. Young
+      girls strolled about the picturesque ways with their lovers, and tender
+      couples were cooing at the doorways and windows, and the scene had all
+      that surface of romance with which the Italians contrive to varnish the
+      real commonplaceness of their life. Our ride through the twilight
+      landscape had prepared us for the sentiment of Bassano; we had pleased
+      ourselves with the spectacle of the peasants returning from their labor in
+      the fields, led in troops of eight or ten by stalwart, white-teethed,
+      bare-legged maids; and we had reveled in the momentary lordship of an old
+      walled town we passed, which at dusk seemed more Gothic and Middle-Age
+      than any thing after Verona, with a fine church, and turrets and
+      battlements in great plenty. What town it was, or what it had been doing
+      there so many ages, I have never sought to know, and I should be sorry to
+      learn any thing about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning we began those researches for preliminary information
+      concerning the Cimbri which turned out so vain. Indeed, as we drew near
+      the lurking-places of that ancient people, all knowledge relating to them
+      diffused itself into shadowy conjecture. The barber and the bookseller
+      differed as to the best means of getting to the Sette Communi, and the <i>caffetiere</i>
+      at whose place we took breakfast knew nothing at all of the road, except
+      that it was up the mountains, and commanded views of scenery which verily,
+      it would not grieve us to see. As to the Cimbri, he only knew that they
+      had their own language, which was yet harder than the German. The German
+      was hard enough, but the Cimbrian! <i>Corpo</i>!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, hearing of a famous cave there is at Oliero, a town some miles
+      further up the Brenta, we determined to go there, and it was a fortunate
+      thought, for there we found a nobleman in charge of the cave who told us
+      exactly how to reach the Sette Communi. You pass a bridge to get out of
+      Bassano&mdash;a bridge which spans the crystal swiftness of the Brenta,
+      rushing down to the Adriatic from the feet of the Alps on the north, and
+      full of voluble mills at Bassano. All along the road to Oliero was the
+      finest mountain scenery, Brenta-washed, and picturesque with ever-changing
+      lines. Maize grows in the bottom-lands, and tobacco, which is guarded in
+      the fields by soldiers for the monopolist government. Farm-houses dot the
+      valley, and now and then we passed villages, abounding in blonde girls, so
+      rare elsewhere in Italy, but here so numerous as to give Titian that type
+      from which he painted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Oliero we learned not only which was the road to the Sette Communi, but
+      that we were in it, and it was settled that we should come the next day
+      and continue in it, with the custodian of the cave, who for his breakfast
+      and dinner, and what else we pleased, offered to accompany us. We were
+      early at Oliero on the following morning, and found our friend in waiting;
+      he mounted beside our driver, and we rode up the Brenta to the town of
+      Valstagna where our journey by wheels ended, and where we were to take
+      mules for the mountain ascent. Our guide, Count Giovanni Bonato (for I may
+      as well give him his title, though at this stage of our progress we did
+      not know into what patrician care we had fallen), had already told us what
+      the charge for mules would be, but it was necessary to go through the
+      ceremony of bargain with the muleteer before taking the beasts. Their
+      owner was a Cimbrian, with a broad sheepish face, and a heavy, awkward
+      accent of Italian which at once more marked his northern race, and made us
+      feel comparatively secure from plunder in his hands. He had come down from
+      the mountain top the night before, bringing three mules laden with
+      charcoal, and he had waited for us till the morning. His beasts were
+      furnished with comfortable pads, covered with linen, to ride upon, and
+      with halters instead of bridles, and we were prayed to let them have their
+      heads in the ascent, and not to try to guide them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The elegant leisure of Valstagna (and in an Italian town nearly the whole
+      population is elegantly at leisure) turned out to witness the departure of
+      our expedition; the pretty little blonde wife of our inn-keeper, who was
+      to get dinner ready against our return, held up her baby to wish us <i>boun
+      viaggio</i>, and waved us adieu with the infant as with a handkerchief;
+      the chickens and children scattered to right and left before our advance;
+      and with Count Giovanni going splendidly ahead on foot, and the Cimbrian
+      bringing up the rear, we struck on the broad rocky valley between the
+      heights, and presently began the ascent. It was a lovely morning; the sun
+      was on the heads of the hills, and the shadows clothed them like robes to
+      their feet; and I should be glad to feel here and now the sweetness,
+      freshness, and purity of the mountain air, that seemed to bathe our souls
+      in a childlike delight of life. A noisy brook gurgled through the valley;
+      the birds sang from the trees; the Alps rose, crest on crest, around us;
+      and soft before us, among the bald peaks showed the wooded height where
+      the Cimbrian village of Fozza stood, with a white chapel gleaming from the
+      heart of the lofty grove. Along the mountain sides the smoke curled from
+      the lonely huts of shepherds, and now and then we came upon one of those
+      melancholy refuges which are built in the hills for such travellers as are
+      belated in their ways, or are overtaken there by storms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The road for the most part winds by the brink of precipices,&mdash;walled
+      in with masonry of small stones, where Nature has not shored it up with
+      vast monoliths,&mdash;and is paved with limestone. It is, of course,
+      merely a mule-path, and it was curious to see, and thrilling to
+      experience, how the mules, vain of the safety of their foothold, kept as
+      near the border of the precipices as possible. For my own part, I
+      abandoned to my beast the entire responsibility involved by this line of
+      conduct; let the halter hang loose upon his neck, and gave him no aid
+      except such slight service as was occasionally to be rendered by shutting
+      my eyes and holding my breath. The mule of the fairer traveller behind me
+      was not only ambitious of peril like my own, but was envious of my beast's
+      captaincy, and continually tried to pass him on the outside of the path,
+      to the great dismay of the gentle rider; while half-suppressed wails of
+      terror from the second lady in the train gave evidence of equal vanity and
+      daring in her mule. Count Giovanni strode stolidly before, the Cimbrian
+      came behind, and we had little coherent conversation until we stopped
+      under a spreading haw-tree, half-way up the mountain, to breathe our
+      adventurous beasts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here two of us dismounted, and while one of the ladies sketched the other
+      in her novel attitude of cavalier, I listened to the talk of Count
+      Giovanni and the Cimbrian. This Cimbrian's name in Italian was Lazzaretti,
+      and in his own tongue Brück, which, pronouncing less regularly, we made
+      Brick, in compliment to his qualities of good fellowship. His broad,
+      honest visage was bordered by a hedge of red beard, and a light of dry
+      humor shone upon it: he looked, we thought, like a Cornishman, and the
+      contrast between him and the <i>viso sciolto, pensieri stretti</i>
+      expression of Count Giovanni was curious enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Concerning his people, he knew little; but the Capo-gente of Fozza could
+      tell me everything. Various traditions of their origin were believed among
+      them; Brick himself held to one that they had first come from Denmark. As
+      we sat there under the spreading haw-tree, Count Giovanni and I made him
+      give us the Cimbrian equivalent of some Italian phrases, which the curious
+      may care to see in correspondence with English and German. Of course,
+      German pronunciation must be given to the words:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  <i>English.         Cimbrian.               German.</i>
+
+  I go,            I gehe,                 Ich gehe.
+  Thou goest,      Du gehst,               Du gehst.
+  He goes,         Ar geht,                Er geht.
+  We go,           Hamish gehen,           Wir gehen.
+  You go,          Hamish setender gehnt,  Ihr geht.
+  They go,         Dandern gehnt,          Sie gehen.
+  I went,          I bin gegehnt,          Ich bin gegangen.
+  Thou wentest,    Du bist gegehnt,        Du bist gegangen.
+  He went,         Der iganget,            Er ist gegangen
+  Good day,        Uter tag,               Guten Tag.
+  Good night,      Uter nast,              Gute Nacht.
+  How do you do?   Bie estater?            Wie steht's?
+  How goes it?     Bie gehts?              Wie geht's?
+  I,               I,                      Ich.
+  Thou,            Du,                     Du.
+  He, she,         Di,                     Er, sie.
+  We,              Borandern,              Wir.
+  You,             Ihrt,                   Ihr.
+  They,            Dandern,                Sie.
+  The head,        Da kof,                 Der Kopf.
+  Breast,          Petten,                 Brust (<i>Italian</i> petto)
+  Face,            Denne,                  Gesicht.
+  Arm,             Arm,                    Arm.
+  Foot,            Vuss,                   Fuss.
+  Finger,          Vinger,                 Finger.
+  Hand,            Hant,                   Hand.
+  Tree,            Pom,                    Baum.
+  Hat,             Hoit,                   Hut.
+  God,             Got,                    Gott.
+  Heaven,          Debelt,                 Himmel.
+  Earth,           Erda,                   Erde.
+  Mountain,        Perk,                   Berg.
+  Valley,          Tal,                    Thal.
+  Man,             Mann,                   Mann.
+  Woman,           Beip,                   Weib.
+  Lady,            Vrau,                   Frau.
+  Child,           Hint,                   Kind.
+  Brother,         Pruder,                 Bruder.
+  Father,          Vada,                   Vater.
+  Mother,          Muter,                  Mutter.
+  Sister,          Schwester,              Schwester,
+  Stone,           Stone,                  Stein.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      A general resemblance to German and English will have been observed in
+      these fragments of Cimbrian, while other words will have been noticed as
+      quite foreign to either.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a poor little house of refreshment beside our spreading haw, and
+      a withered old woman came out of it and refreshed us with clear spring
+      water, and our guides and friends with some bitter berries of the
+      mountain, which they admitted were unpleasant to the taste, but declared
+      were very good for the blood. When they had sufficiently improved their
+      blood, we mounted our mules again, and set out with the journey of an hour
+      and a quarter still between us and Fozza.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we drew near the summit of the mountain our road grew more level, and
+      instead of creeping along by the brinks of precipices, we began to wind
+      through bits of meadow and pleasant valley walled in by lofty heights of
+      rock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though September was bland as June at the foot of the mountain, we found
+      its breath harsh and cold on these heights; and we remarked that though
+      there were here and there breadths of wheat, the land was for the most
+      part in sheep pasturage, and the grass looked poor and stinted of summer
+      warmth. We met, at times, the shepherds, who seemed to be of Italian race,
+      and were of the conventional type of shepherds, with regular faces, and
+      two elaborate curls trained upon their cheeks, as shepherds are always
+      represented in stone over the gates of villas. They bore staves, and their
+      flocks went before them. Encountering us, they saluted us courteously, and
+      when we had returned their greeting, they cried with one voice,&mdash;"Ah,
+      lords! is not this a miserable country? The people are poor and the air is
+      cold. It is an unhappy land!" And so passed on, profoundly sad; but we
+      could not help smiling at the vehement popular desire to have the region
+      abused. We answered cheerfully that it was a lovely country. If the air
+      was cold, it was also pure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We now drew in sight of Fozza, and, at the last moment, just before
+      parting with Brick, we learned that he had passed a whole year in Venice,
+      where he had brought milk from the main-land and sold it in the city. He
+      declared frankly that he counted that year worth all the other years of
+      his life, and that he would never have come back to his native heights but
+      that his father had died, and left his mother and young brothers helpless.
+      He was an honest soul, and I gave him two florins, which I had tacitly
+      appointed him over and above the bargain, with something for the small
+      Brick-bats at home, whom he presently brought to kiss our hands at the
+      house of the Capo-gente.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The village of Fozza is built on a grassy, oblong plain on the crest of
+      the mountain, which declines from it on three sides, and on the north
+      rises high above it into the mists in bleaker and ruggeder acclivities.
+      There are not more than thirty houses in the village, and I do not think
+      it numbers more than a hundred and fifty souls, if it numbers so many.
+      Indeed, it is one of the smallest of the Sette Communi, of which the
+      capital, Asiago, contains some thousands of people, and lies not far from
+      Vicenza. The poor Fozzatti had a church, however, in their village, in
+      spite of its littleness, and they had just completed a fine new bell
+      tower, which the Capo-gente deplored, and was proud of when I praised it.
+      The church, like all the other edifices, was built of stone; and the
+      village at a little distance might look like broken crags of rock, so well
+      it consorted with the harsh, crude nature about it. Meagre meadowlands,
+      pathetic with tufts of a certain pale-blue, tearful flower, stretched
+      about the village and southward as far as to that wooded point which had
+      all day been our landmark in the ascent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our train drew up at the humble door of the Capo-gente (in Fozza all doors
+      are alike humble), and, leaving our mules, we entered by his wife's
+      invitation, and seated ourselves near the welcome fire of the kitchen&mdash;welcome,
+      though we knew that all the sunny Lombard plain below was purple with
+      grapes and black with figs. Again came from the women here the wail of the
+      shepherds: "Ah, lords! is it not a miserable land?" and I began to doubt
+      whether the love which I had heard mountaineers bore to their inclement
+      heights was not altogether fabulous. They made haste to boil us some eggs,
+      and set them before us with some unhappy wine, and while we were eating,
+      the Capo-gente came in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a very well-mannered person, but had, of course, the bashfulness
+      naturally resulting from lonely life at that altitude, where contact with
+      the world must be infrequent. His fellow-citizens seemed to regard him
+      with a kind of affectionate deference, and some of them came in to hear
+      him talk with the strangers. He stood till we prayed him to sit down, and
+      he presently consented to take some wine with us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After all, however, he could not tell us much of his people which we had
+      not heard before. A tradition existed among them, he said, that their
+      ancestors had fled to these Alps from Marius, and that they had dwelt for
+      a long time in the hollows and caves of the mountains, living and burying
+      their dead in the same secret places. At what time they had been converted
+      to Christianity he could not tell; they had, up to the beginning of the
+      present century, had little or no intercourse with the Italian population
+      by which they were surrounded on all sides. Formerly, they did not
+      intermarry with that race, and it was seldom that any Cimbrian knew its
+      language. But now intermarriage is very frequent; both Italian and
+      Cimbrian are spoken in nearly all the families, and the Cimbrian is
+      gradually falling into disuse. They still, however, have books of
+      religious instruction in their ancient dialect, and until very lately the
+      services of their church were performed in Cimbrian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I begged the Capo to show us some of their books and he brought us two,&mdash;one
+      a catechism for children, entitled "Dar Kloane Catechism vor z' Beloseland
+      vortraghet in z' gaprecht von siben Komünen, un vier Halghe Gasang. 1842.
+      Padova." The other book it grieved me to see, for it proved that I was not
+      the only one tempted in recent times to visit these ancient people,
+      ambitious to bear to them the relation of discoverer, as it were. A
+      High-Dutch Columbus, from Vienna, had been before me, and I could only
+      come in for Amerigo Vespucci's tempered glory. This German savant had
+      dwelt a week in these lonely places, patiently compiling a dictionary of
+      their tongue, which, when it was printed, he had sent to the Capo. I am
+      magnanimous enough to give the name of his book, that the curious may buy
+      it if they like. It is called "Johann Andreas Schweller's Cimbrisches
+      Wörterbuch. Joseph Bergman. Vienna, 1855."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Concerning the present Cimbri, the Capo said that in his community they
+      were chiefly hunters, wood-cutters, and charcoal-burners, and that they
+      practiced their primitive crafts in those gloomier and wilder heights we
+      saw to the northward, and descended to the towns of the plain to make sale
+      of their fagots, charcoal, and wild-beast skins. In Asiago and the larger
+      communities they were farmers and tradesmen like the Italians; and the
+      Capo believed that the Cimbri, in all their villages, numbered near ten
+      thousand. He could tell me of no particular customs or usages, and
+      believed they did not differ from the Italians now except in race and
+      language. [The English traveller Rose, who (to my further discomfiture, I
+      find) visited Asiago in 1817, mentions that the Cimbri have the Celtic
+      custom of <i>waking</i> the dead. "If a traveller dies by the way, they
+      plant a cross upon the spot, and all who pass by cast a stone upon his
+      cairn. Some go in certain seasons in the year to high places and woods,
+      where it is supposed they worshiped their divinities, but the origin of
+      the custom is forgot amongst themselves." If a man dies by violence, they
+      lay him out with his hat and shoes on, as if to give him the appearance of
+      a wayfarer, and "symbolize one surprised in the great journey of life." A
+      woman dying in childbed is dressed for the grave in her bridal ornaments.
+      Mr. Rose is very scornful of the notion that these people are Cimbri, and
+      holds that it is "more consonant to all the evidence of history to say,
+      that the flux and reflux of Teutonic invaders at different periods
+      deposited this backwater of barbarians" in the district they now inhabit.
+      "The whole space, which in addition to the seven burghs contains
+      twenty-four villages, is bounded by rivers, alps, and hills. Its most
+      precise limits are the Brenta to the east, and the Astico to the west."]
+      They are, of course, subject to the Austrian Government, but not so
+      strictly as the Italians are; and though they are taxed and made to do
+      military service, they are otherwise left to regulate their affairs pretty
+      much at their pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Capo ended his discourse with much polite regret that he had nothing
+      more worthy to tell us; and, as if to make us amends for having come so
+      far to learn so little, he said there was a hermit living near, whom we
+      might like to see, and sent his son to conduct us to the hermitage. It
+      turned out to be the white object which we had seen gleaming in the wood
+      on the mountain from so great distance below, and the wood turned out to
+      be a pleasant beechen grove, in which we found the hermit cutting fagots.
+      He was warmly dressed in clothes without rent, and wore the clerical
+      knee-breeches. He saluted us with a cricket-like chirpiness of manner, and
+      was greatly amazed to hear that we had come all the way from America to
+      visit him. His hermitage was built upon the side of a white-washed chapel
+      to St. Francis, and contained three or four little rooms or cupboards, in
+      which the hermit dwelt and meditated. They opened into the chapel, of
+      which the hermit had the care, and which he kept neat and clean like
+      himself. He told us proudly that once a year, on the day of the titular
+      saint, a priest came and said mass in that chapel, and it was easy to see
+      that this was the great occasion of the old man's life. For forty years,
+      he said, he had been devout; and for twenty-five he had dwelt in this
+      place, where the goodness of God and the charity of the poor people around
+      had kept him from want. Altogether, he was a pleasant enough hermit, not
+      in the least spiritual, but gentle, simple, and evidently sincere. We gave
+      some small coins of silver to aid him to continue his life of devotion,
+      and Count Giovanni bestowed some coppers with the stately blessing, "<i>Iddio
+      vi benedica, padre mio</i>."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So we left the hermitage, left Fozza, and started down the mountain on
+      foot, for no one may ride down those steeps. Long before we reached the
+      bottom, we had learned to loathe mountains and to long for dead levels
+      during the rest of life. Yet the descent was picturesque, and in some
+      things even more interesting than the ascent had been. We met more people:
+      now melancholy shepherds with their flocks; now swine-herds and
+      swine-herdesses with herds of wild black pigs of the Italian breed; now
+      men driving asses that brayed and woke long, loud, and most musical echoes
+      in the hills; now whole peasant families driving cows, horses, and mules
+      to the plains below. On the way down, fragments of autobiography began,
+      with the opportunities of conversation, to come from the Count Giovanni,
+      and we learned that he was a private soldier at home on that <i>permesso</i>
+      which the Austrian Government frequently gives its less able-bodied men in
+      times of peace. He had been at home some years, and did not expect to be
+      again called into the service. He liked much better to be in charge of the
+      cave at Oliero than to carry the musket, though he confessed that he liked
+      to see the world, and that soldiering brought one acquainted with many
+      places. He had not many ideas, and the philosophy of his life chiefly
+      regarded deportment toward strangers who visited the cave. He held it an
+      error in most custodians to show discontent when travellers gave them
+      little; and he said that if he received never so much, he believed it wise
+      not to betray exultation. "Always be contented, and nothing more," said
+      Count Giovanni.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It is what you people always promise beforehand," I said, "when you
+      bargain with strangers, to do them a certain service for what they please;
+      but afterward they must pay what you please or have trouble. I know you
+      will not be content with what I give you."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "If I am not content," cried Count Giovanni, "call me the greatest ass in
+      the world!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I am bound to say that, for all I could see through the mask of his
+      face, he was satisfied with what I gave him, though it was not much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had told us casually that he was nephew of a nobleman of a certain rich
+      and ancient family in Venice, who sent him money while in the army, but
+      this made no great impression on me; and though I knew there was enough
+      noble poverty in Italy to have given rise to the proverb, <i>Un conte che
+      non conta, non conta niente</i>, yet I confess that it was with a shock of
+      surprise I heard our guide and servant saluted by a lounger in Valstagna
+      with "<i>Sior conte, servitor suo</i>!" I looked narrowly at him, but
+      there was no ray of feeling or pride visible in his pale, languid visage
+      as he responded, "<i>Buona sera, caro</i>."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still, after that revelation we simple plebeians, who had been all day
+      heaping shawls and guide-books upon Count Giovanni, demanding menial
+      offices from him, and treating him with good-natured slight, felt
+      uncomfortable in his presence, and welcomed the appearance of our carriage
+      with our driver, who, having started drunk from Bassano in the morning,
+      had kept drunk all day at Valstagna, and who now drove us back wildly over
+      the road, and almost made us sigh for the security of mules ambitious of
+      the brinks of precipices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      MINOR TRAVELS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.&mdash;PISA.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I am afraid that the talk of the modern railway traveller, if he is
+      honest, must be a great deal of the custodians, the vetturini, and the
+      facchini, whose agreeable acquaintance constitutes his chief knowledge of
+      the population among which he journeys. We do not nowadays carry letters
+      recommending us to citizens of the different places. If we did, consider
+      the calamity we should be to the be-travelled Italian communities we now
+      bless! No, we buy our through-tickets, and we put up at the hotels praised
+      in the hand-book, and are very glad of a little conversation with any
+      native, however adulterated he be by contact with the world to which we
+      belong. I do not blush to own that I love the whole rascal race which
+      ministers to our curiosity and preys upon us, and I am not ashamed to have
+      spoken so often in this book of the lowly and rapacious but interesting
+      porters who opened to me the different gates of that great realm of
+      wonders, Italy. I doubt if they can be much known to the dwellers in the
+      land, though they are the intimates of all sojourners and passengers; and
+      if I have any regret in the matter, it is that I did not more diligently
+      study them when I could. The opportunity once lost, seldom recurs; they
+      are all but as transitory as the Object of Interest itself, I remember
+      that years ago when I first visited Cambridge, there was an old man
+      appeared to me in the character of Genius of the College Grounds, who
+      showed me all the notable things in our city,&mdash;its treasures of art,
+      its monuments,&mdash;and ended by taking me into his wood-house, and
+      sawing me off from a wind-fallen branch of the Washington Elm a bit of the
+      sacred wood for a remembrancer. Where now is that old man? He no longer
+      exists for me, neither he nor his wood-house nor his dwelling-house. Let
+      me look for a month about the College Grounds, and I shall not see him.
+      But somewhere in the regions of traveller's faëry he still lives, and he
+      appears instantly to the new-comer; he has an understanding with the
+      dryads, who keep him supplied with boughs from the Washington Elm, and his
+      wood-house is full of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among memorable custodians in Italy was one whom we saw at Pisa, where we
+      stopped on our way from Leghorn after our accident in the Maremma, and
+      spent an hour in viewing the Quattro Fabbriche. The beautiful old town,
+      which every one knows from the report of travellers, one yet finds
+      possessed of the incommunicable charm which keeps it forever novel to the
+      visitor. Lying upon either side of the broad Arno, it mirrors in the flood
+      architecture almost as fair and noble as that glassed in the Canalazzo,
+      and its other streets seemed as tranquil as the canals of Venice. Those
+      over which we drove, on the day of our visit, were paved with broad
+      flag-stones, and gave out scarcely a sound under our wheels. It was
+      Sunday, and no one was to be seen. Yet the empty and silent city inspired
+      us with no sense of desolation. The palaces were in perfect repair; the
+      pavements were clean; behind those windows we felt that there must be a
+      good deal of easy, comfortable life. It is said that Pisa is one of the
+      few places in Europe where the sweet, but timid spirit of Inexpensiveness&mdash;everywhere
+      pursued by Railways&mdash;still lingers, and that you find cheap
+      apartments in those well-preserved old palaces. No doubt it would be worth
+      more to live in Pisa than it would cost, for the history of the place
+      would alone be to any reasonable sojourner a perpetual recompense, and a
+      princely income far exceeding his expenditure. To be sure, the Tower of
+      Famine, with which we chiefly associate the name of Pisa, has been long
+      razed to the ground, and built piecemeal into the neighboring palaces, but
+      you may still visit the dead wall which hides from view the place where it
+      stood; and you may thence drive on, as we did, to the great Piazza where
+      stands the unrivaledest group of architecture in the world, after that of
+      St. Mark's Place in Venice. There is the wonderful Leaning Tower, there is
+      the old and beautiful Duomo, there is the noble Baptistery, there is the
+      lovely Campo-Santo, and there&mdash;somewhere lurking in portal or behind
+      pillar, and keeping out an eagle-eye for the marveling stranger&mdash;is
+      the much-experienced cicerone who shows you through the edifices. Yours is
+      the fourteen-thousandth American family to which he has had the honor of
+      acting as guide, and he makes you feel an illogical satisfaction in thus
+      becoming a contribution to statistics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We entered the Duomo, in our new friend's custody, and we saw the things
+      which it was well to see. There was mass, or some other ceremony,
+      transacting; but as usual it was made as little obtrusive as possible, and
+      there was not much to weaken the sense of proprietorship with which
+      travellers view objects of interest. Then we ascended the Leaning Tower,
+      skillfully preserving its equilibrium as we went by an inclination of our
+      persons in a direction opposed to the tower's inclination, but perhaps not
+      receiving a full justification of the Campanile's appearance in pictures,
+      till we stood at its base, and saw its vast bulk and height as it seemed
+      to sway and threaten in the blue sky above our heads. There the sensation
+      was too terrible for endurance,&mdash;even the architectural beauty of the
+      tower could not save it from being monstrous to us,&mdash;and we were glad
+      to hurry away from it to the serenity and solemn loveliness of the Campo
+      Santo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here are the frescos painted five hundred years ago to be ruinous and
+      ready against the time of your arrival in 1864, and you feel that you are
+      the first to enjoy the joke of the Vergognosa, that cunning jade who peers
+      through her fingers at the shameful condition of deboshed father Noah, and
+      seems to wink one eye of wicked amusement at you. Turning afterward to any
+      book written about Italy during the time specified, you find your
+      impression of exclusive possession of the frescos erroneous, and your muse
+      naturally despairs, where so many muses have labored in vain, to give a
+      just idea of the Campo Santo. Yet it is most worthy celebration. Those
+      exquisitely arched and traceried colonnades seem to grow like the slim
+      cypresses out of the sainted earth of Jerusalem; and those old paintings,
+      made when Art was&mdash;if ever&mdash;a Soul, and not as now a mere
+      Intelligence, enforce more effectively than their authors conceived the
+      lessons of life and death; for they are themselves becoming part of the
+      triumphant decay they represent. If it was awful once to look upon that
+      strange scene where the gay lords and ladies of the chase come suddenly
+      upon three dead men in their coffins, while the devoted hermits enjoy the
+      peace of a dismal righteousness on a hill in the background, it is yet
+      more tragic to behold it now when the dead men are hardly discernible in
+      their coffins, and the hermits are but the vaguest shadows of gloomy
+      bliss. Alas! Death mocks even the homage done him by our poor fears and
+      hopes: with dust he wipes out dust, and with decay he blots the image of
+      decay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I assure the reader that I made none of these apt reflections in the Campo
+      Santo at Pisa, but have written them out this morning in Cambridge because
+      there happens to be an east wind blowing. No one could have been sad in
+      the company of our cheerful and patient cicerone, who, although visibly
+      anxious to get his fourteen-thousandth American family away, still would
+      not go till he had shown us that monument to a dead enmity which hangs in
+      the Campo Santo. This is the mighty chain which the Pisans, in their old
+      wars with the Genoese, once stretched across the mouth of their harbor to
+      prevent the entrance of the hostile galleys. The Genoese with no great
+      trouble carried the chain away, and kept it ever afterward till 1860, when
+      Pisa was united to the kingdom of Italy. Then the trophy was restored to
+      the Pisans, and with public rejoicings placed in the Campo Santo, an
+      emblem of reconciliation and perpetual amity between ancient foes. [I read
+      in Mr. Norton's <i>Notes of Travel and Study in Italy</i>, that he saw in
+      the Campo Santo, as long ago as 1856, "the chains that marked the
+      servitude of Pisa, now restored by Florence," and it is of course possible
+      that our cicerone may have employed one of those chains for the different
+      historical purpose I have mentioned. It would be a thousand pities, I
+      think, if a monument of that sort should be limited to the commemoration
+      of one fact only.] It is not a very good world,&mdash;<i>e pur si muove</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Baptistery stands but a step away from the Campo Santo, and our guide
+      ushered us into it with the air of one who had till now held in reserve
+      his great stroke and was ready to deliver it. Yet I think he waited till
+      we had looked at some comparatively trifling sculptures by Nicolò Pisano
+      before he raised his voice, and uttered a melodious species of howl. While
+      we stood in some amazement at this, the conscious structure of the dome
+      caught the sound and prolonged it with a variety and sweetness of which I
+      could not have dreamed. The man poured out in quick succession his musical
+      wails, and then ceased, and a choir of heavenly echoes burst forth in
+      response. There was a supernatural beauty in these harmonies of which I
+      despair of giving any true idea: they were of such tender and exalted
+      rapture that we might well have thought them the voices of young-eyed
+      cherubim, singing as they passed through Paradise over that spot of earth
+      where we stood. They seemed a celestial compassion that stooped and
+      soothed, and rose again in lofty and solemn acclaim, leaving us poor and
+      penitent and humbled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were long silent, and then broke forth with cries of admiration of
+      which the marvelous echo made eloquence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Did you ever," said the cicerone after we had left the building, "hear
+      such music as that?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The papal choir does not equal it," we answered with one voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cicerone was not to be silenced even with such a tribute, and he went
+      on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Perhaps, as you are Americans, you know Moshu Feelmore, the President?
+      No? Ah, what a fine man! You saw that he had his heart actually in his
+      hand! Well, one day he said to me here, when I told him of the Baptistery
+      echo, 'We have the finest echo in the world in the Hall of Congress.' I
+      said nothing, but for answer I merely howled a little,&mdash;thus! Moshu
+      Feelmore was convinced. Said he, 'There is no other echo in the world
+      besides this. You are right.' I am unique," pursued the cicerone, "for
+      making this echo. But," he added with a sigh, "it has been my ruin. The
+      English have put me in all the guide-books, and sometimes I have to howl
+      twenty times a day. When our Victor Emanuel came here I showed him the
+      church, the tower, and the Campo Santo. Says the king, 'Pfui!'"&mdash;here
+      the cicerone gave that sweeping outward motion with both hands by which
+      Italians dismiss a trifling subject&mdash;"'make me the echo!' I was
+      forced," concluded the cicerone with a strong sense of injury in his tone,
+      "to howl half an hour without ceasing."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.&mdash;THE FERRARA ROAD.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The delight of one of our first journeys over the road between Padua and
+      Ferrara was a Roman <i>cameriere</i> out of place, who got into the
+      diligence at Ponte Lagoscuro. We were six in all: The Englishman who
+      thought it particularly Italian to say "Sì" three times for every assent;
+      the Veneto (as the citizen of the province calls himself, the native of
+      the city being Veneziano) going home to his farm near Padua; the German
+      lady of a sour and dreadful countenance; our two selves, and the Roman <i>cameriere</i>.
+      The last was worth all the rest&mdash;being a man of vast general
+      information acquired in the course of service with families of all
+      nations, and agreeably communicative. A brisk and lively little man, with
+      dancing eyes, beard cut to the mode of the Emperor Napoleon, and the
+      impressive habit of tapping himself on the teeth with his railroad-guide,
+      and lifting his eyebrows when he says any thing specially worthy of
+      remark. He, also, long after the conclusion of an observation, comes back
+      to himself approvingly, with "<i>Sì</i>!" "<i>Vabene</i>!" "<i>Ecco</i>!"
+      He speaks beautiful Italian and constantly, and in a little while we know
+      that he was born at Ferrara, bred at Venice, and is now a citizen of Rome.
+      "St. Peter's, Signori,&mdash;have you ever seen it?&mdash;is the first
+      church of the world. At Ferrara lived Tasso and Ariosto. Venice is a
+      lovely city. Ah! what beauty! But unique. My second country. <i>Sì,
+      Signori, la mia seconda patria</i>." After a pause, "<i>Va bene</i>."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We hint to him that he is extremely fortunate in having so many countries,
+      and that it will be difficult to exile so universal a citizen, which he
+      takes as a tribute to his worth, smiles and says, "Ecco!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he turns to the Veneto, and describes to him the English manner of
+      living. "Wonderfully well they eat&mdash;the English. Four times a day.
+      With rosbif at the dinner. Always, always, always! And tea in the evening,
+      with rosbif cold. <i>Mangiano sempre. Ma bene, dico</i>." After a pause, "<i>Sì</i>!"
+      "And the Venetians, they eat well, too. Whence the proverb: '<i>Sulla Riva
+      degli Schiavoni, si mangiano bei bocconi</i>.' ('On the Riva degli
+      Schiavoni, you eat fine mouthfuls.') Signori, I am going to Venice,"
+      concludes the cameriere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He is the politest man in the world, and the most attentive to ladies. The
+      German lady has not spoken a word, possibly not knowing the language. Our
+      good cameriere cannot bear this, and commiserates her weariness with noble
+      elegance and originality. "<i>La Signora si trova un poco sagrificata</i>?"
+      ("The lady feels slightly sacrificed!") We all smile, and the little man
+      very gladly with us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "An elegant way of expressing it," we venture to suggest. The Veneto roars
+      and roars again, and we all shriek, none louder than the Roman himself. We
+      never can get over that idea of being slightly sacrificed, and it lasts us
+      the whole way to Padua; and when the Veneto gets down at his farm-gate, he
+      first "reverences" us, and then says, "I am very sorry for you others who
+      must be still more slightly sacrificed."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Venice, a week or two later, I meet our cameriere. He is not so gay,
+      quite, as he was, and I fancy that he has not found so many <i>bei bocconi</i>
+      on the Riva degli Schiavoni, as the proverb and a sanguine temperament led
+      him to expect. Do I happen to know, he asks, any American family going to
+      Rome and desiring a cameriere?
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      As I write, the Spring is coming in Cambridge, and I cannot help thinking,
+      with a little heartache, of how the Spring came to meet us once as we rode
+      southward from Venice toward Florence on that road from Padua to Ferrara.
+      It had been May for some time in Tuscany, and all through the wide plains
+      of Venetia this was the railroad landscape: fields tilled and tended as
+      jealously as gardens, and waving in wheat, oats, and grass, with here and
+      there the hay cut already, and here and there acres of Indian corn. The
+      green of the fields was all dashed with the bloody red of poppies; the
+      fig-trees hung full of half-grown fruit; the orchards were garlanded with
+      vines, which they do not bind to stakes in Italy, but train from tree to
+      tree, leaving them to droop in festoons and sway in the wind, with the
+      slender native grace of vines. Huge stone farm-houses shelter under the
+      same roof the family and all the live stock of the farm; thatched cottages
+      thickly dotting the fields, send forth to their cultivation the most
+      picturesque peasants,&mdash;men and women, pretty young girls in broad
+      hats, and wonderful old brown and crooked crones, who seem never to have
+      been younger nor fairer. Country roads, level, straight, and white,
+      stretch away on either hand, and the constant files of poplars escort them
+      wherever they go. All about, the birds sing, and the butterflies dance.
+      The milk-white oxen dragging the heavy carts turn up their patient heads,
+      with wide-spreading horns and mellow eyes, at the passing train; the
+      sunburnt lout behind them suspends the application of the goad; unwonted
+      acquiescence stirs in the bosom of the firm-minded donkey, and even the
+      matter-of-fact locomotive seems to linger as lovingly as a locomotive may
+      along these plains of Spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Padua we take a carriage for Ponte Lagoscuro, and having fought the
+      customary battle with the vetturino before arriving at the terms of
+      contract; having submitted to the successive pillage of the man who had
+      held our horses a moment, of the man who tied on the trunk, and of the man
+      who hovered obligingly about the carriage, and desired to drink our health&mdash;with
+      prodigious smacking of whip, and banging of wheels, we rattle out of the
+      Stella d'Oro, and set forth from the gate of the old city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess that I like posting. There is a freedom and a fine sense of
+      proprietorship in that mode of travel, combined with sufficient speed,
+      which you do not feel on the railroad. For twenty francs and <i>buonamano</i>,
+      I had bought my carriage and horses and driver for the journey of forty
+      miles, and I began to look round on the landscape with a cumulative
+      feeling of ownership in everything I saw. For me, old women spinning in
+      old-world fashion, with distaff and spindle, flax as white as their own
+      hair, came to roadside doors, or moved back and forth under orchard trees.
+      For me, the peasants toiled in the fields together, wearing for my sake
+      wide straw hats, or gay ribbons, or red caps. The white oxen were willing
+      to mass themselves in effective groups, as the ploughman turned the end of
+      his furrow; young girls specially appointed themselves to lead horses to
+      springs as we passed; children had larger eyes and finer faces and played
+      more about the cottage doors, on account of our posting. As for the
+      vine-garlanded trees in the orchards, and the opulence of the endless
+      fertile plain; the white distance of the road before us with its guardian
+      poplars,&mdash;I doubt if people in a diligence could have got so much of
+      these things as we. Certainly they could not have had all to themselves
+      the lordly splendor with which we dashed through gaping villages, taking
+      the street from everybody, and fading magnificently away upon the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0029" id="link2H_4_0029"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.&mdash;TRIESTE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      If you take the midnight steamer at Venice you reach Trieste by six
+      o'clock in the morning, and the hills rise to meet you as you enter the
+      broad bay dotted with the sail of fishing-craft. The hills are bald and
+      bare, and you find, as you draw near, that the city lies at their feet
+      under a veil of mist, or climbs earlier into view along their sides. The
+      prospect is singularly devoid of gentle and pleasing features, and looking
+      at those rugged acclivities, with their aspect of continual bleakness, you
+      readily believe all the stories you have heard of that fierce wind called
+      the Bora which sweeps from them through Trieste at certain seasons. While
+      it blows, ladies walking near the quays are sometimes caught up and set
+      afloat, involuntary Galateas, in the bay, and people keep in-doors as much
+      as possible. But the Bora, though so sudden and so savage, does give
+      warning of its rise, and the peasants avail themselves of this
+      characteristic. They station a man on one of the mountain tops, and when
+      he feels the first breath of the Bora, he sounds a horn, which is a signal
+      for all within hearing to lay hold of something that cannot be blown away,
+      and cling to it till the wind falls. This may happen in three days or in
+      nine, according to the popular proverbs. "The spectacle of the sea," says
+      Dall' Ongaro, in a note to one of his ballads, "while the Bora blows, is
+      sublime, and when it ceases the prospect of the surrounding hills is
+      delightful. The air, purified by the rapid current, clothes them with a
+      rosy veil, and the temperature is instantly softened, even in the heart of
+      winter."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The city itself, as you penetrate it, makes good with its stateliness and
+      picturesqueness your loss through the grimness of its environs. It is in
+      great part new, very clean, and full of the life and movement of a
+      prosperous port; but, better than this, so far as the mere sight-seer is
+      concerned, it wins a novel charm from the many public staircases by which
+      you ascend and descend its hillier quarters, and which are made of stone,
+      and lightly railed and balustraded with iron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something of all this I noticed in my ride from the landing of the steamer
+      to the house of friends in the suburbs, and there I grew better disposed
+      toward the hills, which, as I strolled over them, I found dotted with
+      lovely villas, and everywhere traversed by perfectly-kept carriage-roads,
+      and easy and pleasant foot-paths. It was in the spring-time, and the
+      peach-trees and almond-trees hung full of blossoms and bees, the lizards
+      lay in the walks absorbing the vernal sunshine, the violets and cowslips
+      sweetened all the grassy borders. The scene did not want a human interest,
+      for the peasant girls were going to market at that hour, and I met them
+      everywhere, bearing heavy burdens on their own heads, or hurrying forward
+      with their wares on the backs of donkeys. They were as handsome as heart
+      could wish, and they wore that Italian costume which is not to be seen
+      anywhere in Italy except at Trieste and in the Roman and Neapolitan
+      provinces,&mdash;a bright bodice and gown, with the head-dress of dazzling
+      white linen, square upon the crown, and dropping lightly to the shoulders.
+      Later I saw these comely maidens crouching on the ground in the
+      market-place, and selling their wares, with much glitter of eyes, teeth,
+      and earrings, and a continual babble of bargaining.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to me that the average of good looks was greater among the women
+      of Trieste than among those of Venice, but that the instances of striking
+      and exquisite beauty were rarer. At Trieste, too, the Italian type, so
+      pure at Venice, is lost or continually modified by the mixed character of
+      the population, which perhaps is most noticeable at the Merchants'
+      Exchange. This is a vast edifice roofed with glass, where are the offices
+      of the great steam navigation company, the Austrian Lloyds,&mdash;which,
+      far more than the favor of the Imperial government, has contributed to the
+      prosperity of Trieste,&mdash;and where the traffickers of all races meet
+      daily to gossip over the news and the prices. Here a Greek or Dalmat talks
+      with an eager Italian or a slow, sure Englishman; here the hated Austrian
+      button-holes the Venetian or the Magyar; here the Jew meets the Gentile on
+      common ground; here Christianity encounters the hoary superstitions of the
+      East, and makes a good thing out of them in cotton or grain. All costumes
+      are seen here, and all tongues are heard, the native Triestines
+      contributing almost as much to the variety of the latter as the
+      foreigners. "In regard to language," says Cantù, "though the country is
+      peopled by Slavonians, yet the Italian tongue is spreading into the
+      remotest villages where a few years since it was not understood. In the
+      city it is the common and familiar language; the Slavonians of the North
+      use the German for the language of ceremony; those of the South, as well
+      as the Israelites, the Italian; while the Protestants use the German, the
+      Greeks the Hellenic and Illyric, the <i>employés</i> of the civil courts
+      the Italian or the German, the schools now German and now Italian, the bar
+      and the pulpit Italian. Most of the inhabitants, indeed, are bi-lingual,
+      and very many tri-lingual, without counting French, which is understood
+      and spoken from infancy. Italian, German, and Greek are written, but the
+      Slavonic little, this having remained in the condition of a vulgar tongue.
+      But it would be idle to distinguish the population according to language,
+      for the son adopts a language different from the father's, and now prefers
+      one language and now another; the women incline to the Italian; but those
+      of the upper class prefer now German, now French, now English, as, from
+      one decade to another, affairs, fashions, and fancies change. This in the
+      salons; in the squares and streets, the Venetian dialect is heard."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And with the introduction of the Venetian dialect, Venetian discontent
+      seems also to have crept in, and I once heard a Triestine declaim against
+      the Imperial government quite in the manner of Venice. It struck me that
+      this desire for union with Italy, which he declared prevalent in Trieste,
+      must be of very recent growth, since even so late as 1848, Trieste had
+      refused to join Venice in the expulsion of the Austrians. Indeed, the
+      Triestines have fought the Venetians from the first; they stole the Brides
+      of Venice in one of their piratical cruises in the lagoons; gave aid and
+      comfort to those enemies of Venice, the Visconti, the Carraras, and the
+      Genoese; revolted from St. Mark whenever subjected to his banner, and
+      finally, rather than remain under his sway, gave themselves five centuries
+      ago to Austria.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The objects of interest in Trieste are not many. There are remains of an
+      attributive temple of Jupiter under the Duomo, and there is near at hand
+      the Museum of Classical Antiquities founded in honor of Winckelmann,
+      murdered at Trieste by that ill-advised Pistojese, Ancangeli, who had seen
+      the medals bestowed on the antiquary by Maria Theresa and believed him
+      rich. There is also a scientific museum founded by the Archduke
+      Maximilian, and, above all, there is the beautiful residence of that
+      ill-starred prince,&mdash;the Miramare, where the half-crazed Empress of
+      the Mexicans vainly waits her husband's return from the experiment of
+      paternal government in the New World. It would be hard to tell how Art has
+      charmed rock and wave at Miramare, until the spur of those rugged
+      Triestine hills, jutting into the sea, has been made the seat of ease and
+      luxury, but the visitor is aware of the magic as soon as he passes the
+      gate of the palace grounds. These are in great part perpendicular, and are
+      over clambered with airy stairways climbing to pensile arbors. Where
+      horizontal, they are diversified with mimic seas for swans to sail upon,
+      and summer-houses for people to lounge in and look at the swans from. On
+      the point of land furthest from the acclivity stands the Castle of
+      Miramare, half at sea, and half adrift in the clouds above:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "And fain it would stoop downward
+  To the mirrored wave below;
+  And fain it would soar upward
+  In the evening's crimson glow."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I remember that a little yacht lay beside the pier at the castle's foot,
+      and lazily flapped its sail, while the sea beat inward with as languid a
+      pulse. That was some years ago, before Mexico was dreamed of at Miramare:
+      now, perchance, she who is one of the most unhappy among women looks down
+      distraught from those high windows, and finds in the helpless sail and
+      impassive wave the images of her baffled hope, and that immeasurable sea
+      which gives back its mariners neither to love nor sorrow. I think though
+      she be the wife and daughter of princes, we may pity this poor Empress at
+      least as much as we pity the Mexicans to whom her dreams have brought so
+      many woes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the midnight following my visit to Miramare when the fiacre in
+      which I had quitted my friend's house was drawn up by its greatly
+      bewildered driver on the quay near the place where the steamer for Venice
+      should be lying. There was no steamer for Venice to be seen. The driver
+      swore a little in the polyglot profanities of his native city, and
+      descending from his box, went and questioned different lights&mdash;blue
+      lights, yellow lights, green lights&mdash;to be seen at different points.
+      To a light, they were ignorant, though eloquent, and to pass the time, we
+      drove up and down the quay, and stopped at the landings of all the
+      steamers that touch at Trieste. It was a snug fiacre enough, but I did not
+      care to spend the night in it, and I urged the driver to further inquiry.
+      A wanderer whom we met, declared that it was not the night for the Venice
+      steamer; another admitted that it might be; a third conversed with the
+      driver in low tones, and then leaped upon the box. We drove rapidly away,
+      and before I had, in view of this mysterious proceeding, composed a
+      fitting paragraph for the <i>Fatti Diversi</i> of the <i>Osservatore
+      Triestino</i>, descriptive of the state in which the Guardie di Polizia
+      should find me floating in the bay, exanimate and evidently the prey of a
+      <i>triste evvenimento</i>&mdash;the driver pulled up once more, and now
+      beside a steamer. It was the steamer for Venice, he said, in precisely the
+      tone which he would have used had he driven me directly to it without
+      blundering. It was breathing heavily, and was just about to depart, but
+      even in the hurry of getting on board, I could not help noticing that it
+      seemed to have grown a great deal since I had last voyaged in it. There
+      was not a soul to be seen except the mute steward who took my satchel, and
+      guiding me below into an elegant saloon, instantly left me alone. Here
+      again the steamer was vastly enlarged. These were not the narrow quarters
+      of the Venice steamer, nor was this lamp, shedding a soft light on
+      cushioned seats and paneled doors and wainscotings the sort of
+      illumination usual in that humble craft. I rang the small silver bell on
+      the long table, and the mute steward appeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Was</i> this the steamer for Venice?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Sicuro</i>!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All that I could do in comment was to sit down; and in the mean time the
+      steamer trembled, groaned, choked, cleared its throat, and we were under
+      way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The other passengers have all gone to bed, I suppose," I argued acutely,
+      seeing none of them. Nevertheless, I thought it odd, and it seemed a
+      shrewd means of relief to ring the bell, and pretending drowsiness, to ask
+      the steward which was my state-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He replied with a curious smile that I could have any of them. Amazed, I
+      yet selected a state-room, and while the steward was gone for the sheets
+      and pillow-cases, I occupied my time by opening the doors of all the other
+      state-rooms. They were empty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Am I the only passenger?" I asked, when he returned, with some anxiety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Precisely," he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not proceed and ask if he composed the entire crew&mdash;it seemed
+      too fearfully probable that he did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I now suspected that I had taken passage with the Olandese Volante. There
+      was nothing in the world for it, however, but to go to bed, and there,
+      with the accession of a slight sea-sickness, my views of the situation
+      underwent a total change. I had gone down into the Maelstrom with the
+      Ancient Mariner&mdash;I was a Manuscript Found in a Bottle!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Coming to the surface about six o'clock A.M., I found a daylight as
+      cheerful as need be upon the appointments of the elegant cabin, and upon
+      the good-natured face of the steward when he brought me the caffè latte,
+      and the buttered toast for my breakfast. He said "<i>Servitor suo</i>!" in
+      a loud and comfortable voice, and I perceived the absurdity of having
+      thought that he was in any way related to the
+      Nightmare-Death-in-life-that-thicks-man's-blood-with-cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "This is not the regular Venice steamer, I suppose," I remarked to the
+      steward as he laid my breakfast in state upon the long table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No. Properly, no boat should have left for Venice last night, which was
+      not one of the times of the tri-weekly departure. This was one of the
+      steamers of the line between Trieste and Alexandria, and it was going at
+      present to take on an extraordinary freight at Venice for Egypt. I had
+      been permitted to come on board because my driver said I had a return
+      ticket, and would go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ascending to the deck I found nothing whatever mysterious in the
+      management of the steamer. The captain met me with a bow in the gangway;
+      seamen were coiling wet ropes at different points, as they always are; the
+      mate was promenading the bridge, and taking the rainy weather as it came,
+      with his oil-cloth coat and hat on. The wheel of the steamer was as usual
+      chewing the sea, and finding it unpalatable, and making vain efforts at
+      expectoration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were in sight of the breakwater outside Malamocco, and a pilot-boat was
+      making us from the land. Even at this point the innumerable fortifications
+      of the Austrians began, and they multiplied as we drew near Venice, till
+      we entered the lagoon, and found it a nest of fortresses one with another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unhappily the day being rainy, Venice did not spring resplendent from the
+      sea, as I had always read she would. She rose slowly and languidly from
+      the water,&mdash;not like a queen, but like the gray, slovenly,
+      bedrabbled, heart-broken old slave she really was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0030" id="link2H_4_0030"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.&mdash;BASSANO.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I have already told, in recounting the story of our visit to the Cimbri,
+      how full of courtship we found the little city of Bassano on the evening
+      of our arrival there. Bassano is the birthplace of the painter Jacopo da
+      Ponte, who was one of the first Italian painters to treat scriptural story
+      as accessory to mere landscape, and who had a peculiar fondness for
+      painting Entrances into the Ark, for in these he could indulge without
+      stint the taste for pairing-off early acquired from observation of local
+      customs in his native town. This was the theory offered by one who had
+      imbibed the spirit of subtile speculation from Ruskin, and I think it
+      reasonable. At least it does not conflict with the fact that there is at
+      Bassano a most excellent gallery of paintings entirely devoted to the
+      works of Jacopo da Ponte, and his four sons, who are here to be seen to
+      better advantage than anywhere else. As few strangers visit Bassano, the
+      gallery is little frequented. It is in charge of a very strict old man,
+      who will not allow people to look at the pictures till he has shown them
+      the adjoining cabinet of geological specimens. It is in vain that you
+      assure him of your indifference to these scientific <i>seccature</i>; he
+      is deaf and you are not suffered to escape a single fossil. He asked us a
+      hundred questions, and understood nothing in reply, insomuch that when he
+      came to his last inquiry, "Have the Protestants the same God as the
+      Catholics?" we were rather glad that he should be obliged to settle the
+      fact for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Underneath the gallery was a school of boys, whom as we entered we heard
+      humming over the bitter honey which childhood is obliged to gather from
+      the opening flowers of orthography. When we passed out, the master gave
+      these poor busy bees an atom of holiday, and they all swarmed forth
+      together to look at the strangers. The teacher was a long, lank man, in a
+      black threadbare coat, and a skull-cap&mdash;exactly like the schoolmaster
+      in "The Deserted Village." We made a pretense of asking him our way to
+      somewhere, and went wrong, and came by accident upon a wide flat space,
+      bare as a brick-yard, beside which was lettered on a fragment of the old
+      city wall, "Giuoco di Palla." It was evidently the playground of the whole
+      city, and it gave us a pleasanter idea of life in Bassano than we had yet
+      conceived, to think of its entire population playing ball there in the
+      spring afternoons. We respected Bassano as much for this as for her
+      diligent remembrance of her illustrious dead, of whom she has very great
+      numbers. It appeared to us that nearly every other house bore a tablet
+      announcing that "Here was born," or "Here died," some great or good man of
+      whom no one out of Bassano ever heard. There is enough celebrity in
+      Bassano to supply the world; but as laurel is a thing that grows anywhere,
+      I covet rather from Bassano the magnificent ivy that covers the portions
+      of her ancient wall yet standing. The wall, where visible, is seen to be
+      of a pebbly rough-cast, but it is clad almost from the ground in glossy
+      ivy, that glitters upon it like chain-mail upon the vast shoulders of some
+      giant warrior. The moat beneath is turned into a lovely promenade bordered
+      by quiet villas, with rococo shepherds and shepherdesses in marble on
+      their gates; where the wall is built to the verge of the high ground on
+      which the city stands, there is a swift descent to the wide valley of the
+      Brenta waving in corn and vines and tobacco.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We went up the Brenta one day as far as Oliero, to visit the famous cavern
+      already mentioned, out of which, from the secret heart of the hill, gushes
+      one of the foamy affluents of the river. It is reached by passing through
+      a paper-mill, fed by the stream, and then through a sort of ante-grot,
+      whence stepping-stones are laid in the brawling current through a
+      succession of natural compartments with dome-like roofs. From the hill
+      overhead hang stalactites of all grotesque and fairy shapes, and the rock
+      underfoot is embroidered with fantastic designs wrought by the water in
+      the silence and darkness of the endless night. At a considerable distance
+      from the mouth of the cavern is a wide lake, with a boat upon it, and
+      voyaging to the centre of the pool your attention is drawn to the dome
+      above you, which contracts into a shaft rising upward to a height as yet
+      unmeasured and even unpierced by light. From somewhere in its mysterious
+      ascent, an auroral boy, with a tallow candle, produces a so-called effect
+      of sunrise, and sheds a sad, disheartening radiance on the lake and the
+      cavern sides, which is to sunlight about as the blind creatures of
+      subterranean waters are to those of waves that laugh and dance above
+      ground. But all caverns are much alike in their depressing and gloomy
+      influences, and since there is so great opportunity to be wretched on the
+      surface of the earth, why do people visit them? I do not know that this is
+      more dispiriting or its stream more Stygian than another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wicked memory of the Ecelini survives everywhere in this part of
+      Italy, and near the entrance of the Oliero grotto is a hollow in the hill
+      something like the apsis of a church, which is popularly believed to have
+      been the hiding-place of Cecilia da Baone, one of the many unhappy wives
+      of one of the many miserable members of the Ecelino family. It is not
+      quite clear when Cecilia should have employed this as a place of refuge,
+      and it is certain that she was not the wife of Ecelino da Romano, as the
+      neighbors believe at Oliero, but of Ecelino il Monaco, his father; yet
+      since her name is associated with the grot, let us have her story, which
+      is curiously illustrative of the life of the best society in Italy during
+      the thirteenth century. She was the only daughter of the rich and potent
+      lord, Manfredo, Count of Baone and Abano, who died leaving his heiress to
+      the guardianship of Spinabello da Xendrico. When his ward reached
+      womanhood, Spinabello cast about him to find a suitable husband for her,
+      and it appeared to him that a match with the son of Tiso du Camposampiero
+      promised the greatest advantages. Tiso, to whom he proposed the affair,
+      was delighted, but desiring first to take counsel with his friends upon so
+      important a matter, he confided it for advice to his brother-in-law and
+      closest intimate, Ecelino Balbo. It had just happened that Balbo's son,
+      Ecelino il Monaco, was at that moment disengaged, having been recently
+      divorced from his first wife, the lovely but light Speronella; and Balbo
+      falsely went to the greedy guardian of Cecilia, and offering him better
+      terms than he could hope for from Tiso, secured Cecilia for his son. At
+      this treachery the Camposampieri were furious; but they dissembled their
+      anger till the moment of revenge arrived, when Cecilia's rejected suitor
+      encountering her upon a journey beyond the protection of her husband,
+      violently dishonored his successful rival. The unhappy lady returning to
+      Ecelino at Bassano, recounted her wrong, and was with a horrible injustice
+      repudiated and sent home, while her husband arranged schemes of vengeance
+      in due time consummated. Cecilia next married a Venetian noble, and being
+      in due time divorced, married yet again, and died the mother of a large
+      family of children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is a very old scandal, yet I think there was an <i>habitué</i> of the
+      caffè in Bassano who could have given some of its particulars from
+      personal recollection. He was an old and smoothly shaven gentleman, in a
+      scrupulously white waistcoat, whom we saw every evening in a corner of the
+      caffè playing solitaire. He talked with no one, saluted no one. He drank
+      his glasses of water with anisette, and silently played solitaire. There
+      is no good reason to doubt that he had been doing the same thing every
+      evening for six hundred years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0031" id="link2H_4_0031"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.&mdash;POSSAGNO, CANOVA'S BIRTHPLACE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It did not take a long time to exhaust the interest of Bassano, but we
+      were sorry to leave the place because of the excellence of the inn at
+      which we tarried. It was called "Il Mondo," and it had everything in it
+      that heart could wish. Our rooms were miracles of neatness and comfort;
+      they had the freshness, not the rawness, of recent repair, and they opened
+      into the dining-hall, where we were served with indescribable salads and
+      risotti. During our sojourn we simply enjoyed the house; when we were come
+      away we wondered that so much perfection of hotel could exist in so small
+      a town as Bassano. It is one of the pleasures of by-way travel in Italy,
+      that you are everywhere introduced in character, that you become
+      fictitious and play a part as in a novel. To this inn of The World, our
+      driver had brought us with a clamor and rattle proportioned to the fee
+      received from us, and when, in response to his haughty summons, the
+      cameriere, who had been gossiping with the cook, threw open the kitchen
+      door, and stood out to welcome us in a broad square of forth-streaming
+      ruddy light, amid the lovely odors of broiling and roasting, our driver
+      saluted him with, "Receive these gentle folks, and treat them to your very
+      best. They are worthy of anything." This at once put us back several
+      centuries, and we never ceased to be lords and ladies of the period of Don
+      Quixote as long as we rested in that inn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a bright and breezy Sunday when we left "Il Mondo," and gayly
+      journeyed toward Treviso, intending to visit Possagno, the birthplace of
+      Canova, on our way. The road to the latter place passes through a
+      beautiful country, that gently undulates on either hand till in the
+      distance it rises into pleasant hills and green mountain heights. Possagno
+      itself lies upon the brink of a declivity, down the side of which drops
+      terrace after terrace, all planted with vines and figs and peaches, to a
+      watercourse below. The ground on which the village is built, with its
+      quaint and antiquated stone cottages, slopes gently northward, and on a
+      little rise upon the left hand of us coming from Bassano, we saw that
+      stately edifice with which Canova has honored his humble birthplace. It is
+      a copy of the Pantheon, and it cannot help being beautiful and imposing,
+      but it would be utterly out of place in any other than an Italian village.
+      Here, however, it consorted well enough with the lingering qualities of
+      the old pagan civilization still perceptible in Italy. A sense of that
+      past was so strong with us as we ascended the broad stairway leading up
+      the slope from the village to the level on which the temple stands at the
+      foot of a mountain, that we might well have believed we approached an
+      altar devoted to the elder worship: through the open doorway and between
+      the columns of the portico we could see the priests moving to and fro, and
+      the voice of their chanting came out to us like the sound of hymns to some
+      of the deities long disowned; and I remembered how Padre L&mdash;&mdash;
+      had said to me in Venice, "Our blessed saints are only the old gods
+      baptized and christened anew." Within as without, the temple resembled the
+      Pantheon, but it had little to show us. The niches designed by Canova for
+      statues of the saints are empty yet; but there are busts by his own hand
+      of himself and his brother, the Bishop Canova. Among the people was the
+      sculptor's niece, whom our guide pointed out to us, and who was evidently
+      used to being looked at. She seemed not to dislike it, and stared back at
+      us amiably enough, being a good-natured, plump, comely dark-faced lady of
+      perhaps fifty years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Possagno is nothing if not Canova, and our guide, a boy, knew all about
+      him,&mdash;how, more especially, he had first manifested his wonderful
+      genius by modeling a group of sheep out of the dust of the highway, and
+      how an Inglese happening along in his carriage, saw the boy's work and
+      gave him a plateful of gold napoleons. I dare say this is as near the
+      truth as most facts. And is it not better for the historic Canova to have
+      begun in this way than to have poorly picked up the rudiments of his art
+      in the workshop of his father, a maker of altar-pieces and the like for
+      country churches? The Canova family was intermarried with the Venetian
+      nobility, and will not credit those stories of Canova's beginnings which
+      his townsmen so fondly cherish. I believe they would even distrust the
+      butter-lion with which the boy-sculptor is said to have adorned the table
+      of the noble Falier, and first won his notice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides the temple at Possagno, there is a very pretty gallery containing
+      casts of all Canova's works. It is an interesting place, where Psyches and
+      Cupids flutter, where Venuses present themselves in every variety of
+      attitude, where Sorrows sit upon hard, straight-backed classic chairs, and
+      mourn in the society of faithful Storks; where the Bereft of this century
+      surround death-beds in Greek costume appropriate to the scene; where Muses
+      and Graces sweetly pose themselves and insipidly smile, and where the
+      Dancers and Passions, though nakeder, are no wickeder than the Saints and
+      Virtues. In all, there are a hundred and ninety-five pieces in the
+      gallery, and among the rest the statue named George Washington, which was
+      sent to America in 1820, and afterwards destroyed by fire in the Capitol.
+      The figure is in a sitting posture; naturally, it is in the dress of a
+      Roman general; and if it does not look much like George Washington, it
+      does resemble Julius Cæsar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The custodian of the gallery had been Canova'a body-servant, and he loved
+      to talk of his master. He had so far imbibed the family spirit that he did
+      not like to allow that Canova had ever been other than rich and grand, and
+      he begged us not to believe the idle stories of his first essays in art.
+      He was delighted with our interest in the imperial Washington, and our
+      pleasure in the whole gallery, which we viewed with the homage due to the
+      man who had rescued the world from Swaggering in sculpture. When we were
+      satisfied, he invited us, with his mistress's permission, into the house
+      of the Canovas adjoining the gallery; and there we saw many paintings by
+      the sculptor,&mdash;pausing longest in a lovely little room decorated
+      after the Pompeian manner with <i>scherzi</i> in miniature panels
+      representing the jocose classic usualities: Cupids escaping from cages,
+      and being sold from them, and playing many pranks and games with Nymphs
+      and Graces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Canova was done, and Possagno was finished; and we resumed our way to
+      Treviso, a town nearly as much porticoed as Padua, and having a memory and
+      hardly any other consciousness. The Duomo, which is perhaps the ugliest
+      duomo in the world, contains an "Annunciation," by Titian, one of his best
+      paintings; and in the Monte di Pietà is the grand and beautiful
+      "Entombment," by which Giorgione is perhaps most worthily remembered. The
+      church of San Nicolò is interesting from its quaint and pleasing frescos
+      by the school of Giotto. At the railway station an admirable old man sells
+      the most delicious white and purple grapes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0032" id="link2H_4_0032"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.&mdash;COMO.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      My visit to Lake Como has become to me a dream of summer,&mdash;a vision
+      that remains faded the whole year round, till the blazing heats of July
+      bring out the sympathetic tints in which it was vividly painted. Then I
+      behold myself again in burning Milan, amidst noises and fervors and bustle
+      that seem intolerable after my first six months in tranquil, cool, mute
+      Venice. Looking at the great white Cathedral, with its infinite pinnacles
+      piercing the cloudless blue, and gathering the fierce sun upon it, I half
+      expect to see the whole mass calcined by the heat, and crumbling, statue
+      by statue, finial by finial, arch by arch, into a vast heap of lime on the
+      Piazza, with a few charred English tourists blackening here and there upon
+      the ruin, and contributing a smell of burnt leather and Scotch tweed to
+      the horror of the scene. All round Milan smokes the great Lombard plain,
+      and to the north rises Monte Rosa, her dark head coifed with tantalizing
+      snows as with a peasant's white linen kerchief. And I am walking out upon
+      that fuming plain as far as to the Arco della Pace, on which the bronze
+      horses may melt any minute; or I am sweltering through the city's noonday
+      streets, in search of Sant' Ambrogio, or the Cenacolo of Da Vinci, or what
+      know I? Coming back to our hotel, "Alla Bella Venezia," and greeted on
+      entering by the immense fresco which covers one whole side of the court,
+      it appeared to my friend and me no wonder that Garibaldi should look so
+      longingly from the prow of a gondola toward the airy towers and
+      balloon-like domes that swim above the unattainable lagoons of Venice,
+      where the Austrian then lorded it in coolness and quietness, while hot,
+      red-shirted Italy was shut out upon the dusty plains and stony hills. Our
+      desire for water became insufferable; we paid our modest bills, and at six
+      o'clock we took the train for Como, where we arrived about the hour when
+      Don Abbondio, walking down the lonely path with his book of devotions in
+      his hand, gave himself to the Devil on meeting the bravos of Don Rodrigo.
+      I counsel the reader to turn to <i>I Promessi Sposi</i>, if he would know
+      how all the lovely Como country looks at that hour. For me, the ride
+      through the evening landscape, and the faint sentiment of pensiveness
+      provoked by the smell of the ripening maize, which exhales the same
+      sweetness on the way to Como that it does on any Ohio bottom-land, have
+      given me an appetite, and I am to dine before wooing the descriptive Muse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After dinner, we find at the door of the hotel an English architect whom
+      we know, and we take a boat together for a moonlight row upon the lake,
+      and voyage far up the placid water through air that bathes our heated
+      senses like dew. How far we have left Milan behind! On the lake lies the
+      moon, but the hills are held by mysterious shadows, which for the time are
+      as substantial to us as the hills themselves. Hints of habitation appear
+      in the twinkling lights along the water's edge, and we suspect an
+      alabaster lamp in every casement, and in every invisible house a villa
+      such as Claude Melnotte described to Pauline,&mdash;and some one mouths
+      that well-worn fustian. The rags of sentimentality flutter from every crag
+      and olive-tree and orange-tree in all Italy&mdash;like the wilted paper
+      collars which vulgar tourists leave by our own mountains and streams, to
+      commemorate their enjoyment of the landscape.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The town of Como lies, a swarm of lights, behind us; the hills and shadows
+      gloom around; the lake is a sheet of tremulous silver. There is no telling
+      how we get back to our hotel, or with what satisfied hearts we fall asleep
+      in our room there. The steamer starts for the head of the lake at eight
+      o'clock in the morning, and we go on board at that hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is some pretense of shelter in the awning stretched over the after
+      part of the boat; but we do not feel the need of it in the fresh morning
+      air, and we get as near the bow as possible, that we may be the very first
+      to enjoy the famous beauty of the scenes opening before us. A few sails
+      dot the water, and everywhere there are small, canopied row-boats, such as
+      we went pleasuring in last night. We reach a bend in the lake, and all the
+      roofs and towers of the city of Como pass from view, as if they had been
+      so much architecture painted on a scene and shifted out of sight at a
+      theatre. But other roofs and towers constantly succeed them, not less
+      lovely and picturesque than they, with every curve of the many-curving
+      lake. We advance over charming expanses of water lying between lofty
+      hills; and as the lake is narrow, the voyage is like that of a winding
+      river,&mdash;like that of the Ohio, but for the primeval wildness of the
+      acclivities that guard our Western stream, and the tawniness of its
+      current. Wherever the hills do not descend sheer into Como, a pretty town
+      nestles on the brink, or, if not a town, then a villa, or else a cottage,
+      if there is room for nothing more. Many little towns climb the heights
+      half-way, and where the hills are green and cultivated in vines or olives,
+      peasants' houses scale them to the crest. They grow loftier and loftier as
+      we leave our starting-place farther behind, and as we draw near Colico
+      they wear light wreaths of cloud and snow. So cool a breeze has drawn down
+      between them all the way that we fancy it to have come from them till we
+      stop at Colico, and find that, but for the efforts of our honest engine,
+      sweating and toiling in the dark below, we should have had no current of
+      air. A burning calm is in the atmosphere, and on the broad, flat valley,&mdash;out
+      of which a marshy stream oozes into the lake,&mdash;and on the
+      snow-crowned hills upon the left, and on the dirty village of Colico upon
+      the right, and on the indolent beggars waiting to welcome us, and sunning
+      their goitres at the landing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The name Colico, indeed, might be literally taken in English as
+      descriptive of the local insalubrity. The place was once large, but it has
+      fallen away much from sickness, and we found a bill posted in its public
+      places inviting emigrants to America on the part of a German steamship
+      company. It was the only advertisement of the kind I ever saw in Italy,
+      and I judged that the people must be notoriously discontented there to
+      make it worth the while of a steamship company to tempt from home any of
+      the home-keeping Italian race. And yet Colico, though undeniably hot, and
+      openly dirty, and tacitly unhealthy, had merits, though the dinner we got
+      there was not among its virtues. It had an accessible country about it;
+      that is, its woods and fields were not impenetrably walled in from the
+      vagabond foot; and after we had dined we went and lay down under some
+      greenly waving trees beside a field of corn, and heard the plumed and
+      panoplied maize talking to itself of its kindred in America. It always has
+      a welcome for tourists of our nation wherever it finds us in Italy; and
+      sometimes its sympathy, expressed in a rustling and clashing of its long
+      green blades, or in its strong sweet perfume, has, as already hinted, made
+      me homesick, though I have been uniformly unaffected by potato-patches and
+      tobacco-fields. If only the maize could impart to the Italian cooks the
+      beautiful mystery of roasting-ears! Ah! then indeed it might claim a full
+      and perfect fraternization from its compatriots abroad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From where we lay beside the corn-field, we could see, through the
+      twinkling leaves and the twinkling atmosphere, the great hills across the
+      lake, taking their afternoon naps, with their clouds drawn like
+      handkerchiefs over their heads. It was very hot, and the red and purple
+      ooze of the unwholesome river below "burnt like a witch's oils." It was
+      indeed but a fevered joy we snatched from Nature there; and I am afraid
+      that we got nothing more comfortable from sentiment, when, rising, we
+      wandered off through the unguarded fields toward a ruined tower on a hill.
+      It must have been a relic of feudal times, and I could easily believe it
+      had been the hold of one of those wicked lords who used to rule in the
+      terror of the people beside peaceful and happy Como. But the life, good or
+      bad, was utterly gone out of it now, and what was left of the tower was a
+      burden to the sense. A few scrawny blackberries and other brambles grew
+      out of its fallen stones; harsh, dust-dry mosses painted its weather-worn
+      walls with their blanched gray and yellow. From its foot, looking out over
+      the valley, we saw the road to the Splügen Pass lying white-hot in the
+      valley; and while we looked, the diligence appeared, and dashed through
+      the dust that rose like a flame before. After that it was a relief to
+      stroll in dirty by-ways, past cottages of saffron peasants, and poor stony
+      fields that begrudged them a scanty vegetation, back to the steamer
+      blistering in the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now indeed we were glad of the awning, under which a silent crowd of
+      people with sunburnt faces waited for the departure of the boat. The
+      breeze rose again as the engine resumed its unappreciated labors, and,
+      with our head toward Como, we pushed out into the lake. The company on
+      board was such as might be expected. There was a German landscape-painter,
+      with three heart's-friends beside him; there were some German ladies;
+      there were the unfailing Americans and the unfailing Englishman; there
+      were some French people; there were Italians from the meridional
+      provinces, dark, thin, and enthusiastic, with fat silent wives, and a
+      rhythmical speech; there were Milanese with their families, out for a
+      holiday,&mdash;round-bodied men, with blunt square features, and hair and
+      vowels clipped surprisingly short, there was a young girl whose face was
+      of the exact type affected in rococo sculpture, and at whom one gazed
+      without being able to decide whether she was a nymph descended from a
+      villa gate, or a saint come from under a broken arch in a Renaissance
+      church. At one of the little towns two young Englishmen in knickerbockers
+      came on board, who were devoured by the eyes of their fellow-passengers,
+      and between whom and our kindly architect there was instantly ratified the
+      tacit treaty of non-intercourse which travelling Englishmen observe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing further interested us on the way to Como, except the gathering
+      coolness of the evening air; the shadows creeping higher and higher on the
+      hills; the songs of the girls winding yellow silk on the reels that hummed
+      through the open windows of the factories on the shore; and the appearance
+      of a flag that floated from a shallop before the landing of a stately
+      villa. The Italians did not know this banner, and the Germans loudly
+      debated its nationality. The Englishmen grinned, and the Americans blushed
+      in silence. Of all my memories of that hot day on Lake Como, this is burnt
+      the deepest; for the flag was that insolent banner which in 1862
+      proclaimed us a broken people, and persuaded willing Europe of our ruin.
+      It has gone down long ago from ship and fort and regiment, as well as from
+      the shallop on the fair Italian lake. Still, I say, it made Como too hot
+      for us that afternoon, and even breathless Milan was afterwards a pleasant
+      contrast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0033" id="link2H_4_0033"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      STOPPING AT VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It was after sunset when we arrived in the birthplace of Palladio, which
+      we found a fair city in the lap of caressing hills. There are pretty
+      villas upon these slopes, and an abundance of shaded walks and drives
+      about the houses which were pointed out to us, by the boy who carried our
+      light luggage from the railway station, as the property of rich citizens
+      "but little less than lords" in quality. A lovely grove lay between the
+      station and the city, and our guide not only took us voluntarily by the
+      longest route through this, but, after reaching the streets, led us by
+      labyrinthine ways to the hotel, in order, he afterwards confessed, to show
+      us the city. He was a poet, though in that lowly walk of life, and he had
+      done well. No other moment of our stay would have served us so well for a
+      first general impression of Vicenza as that twilight hour. In its
+      uncertain glimmer we seemed to get quite back to the dawn of feudal
+      civilization, when Theodoric founded the great Basilica of the city; and
+      as we stood before the famous Clock Tower, which rises light and straight
+      as a mast eighty-two metres into the air from a base of seven metres, the
+      wavering obscurity enhanced the effect by half concealing the tower's
+      crest, and letting it soar endlessly upward in the fancy. The Basilica is
+      greatly restored by Palladio, and the cold hand of that friend of virtuous
+      poverty in architecture lies heavy upon his native city in many places.
+      Yet there is still a great deal of Lombardic architecture in Vicenza; and
+      we walked through one street of palaces in which Venetian Gothic
+      prevailed, so that it seemed as if the Grand Canal had but just shrunk
+      away from their bases. When we threw open our window at the hotel, we
+      found that it overlooked one of the city gates, from which rose a
+      Ghibelline tower with a great bulging cornice, full of the beauty and
+      memory of times long before Palladio.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were rather troublous times, and not to be recalled here in all their
+      circumstance; but I think it due to Vicenza, which is now little spoken
+      of, even in Italy, and is scarcely known in America, where her straw-braid
+      is bought for that of Leghorn, to remind the reader that the city was for
+      a long time a republic of very independent and warlike stomach. Before she
+      arrived at that state, however, she had undergone a great variety of
+      fortunes. The Gauls founded the city (as I learn from "The Chronicles of
+      Vicenza," by Battista Pagliarino, published at Vicenza in 1563) when
+      Gideon was Judge in Israel, and were driven out by the Romans some
+      centuries later. As a matter of course, Vicenza was sacked by Attila and
+      conquered by Alboin; after which she was ruled by some lords of her own,
+      until she was made an imperial city by Henry I. Then she had a government
+      more or less republican in form till Frederick Barbarossa burnt her, and
+      "wrapped her in ashes," and gave her to his vicar Ecelino da Romano, who
+      "held her in cruel tyranny" from 1236 to 1259. The Paduans next ruled her
+      forty years, and the Veronese seventy-seven, and the Milanese seventeen
+      years; then she reposed in the arms of the Venetian Republic till these
+      fell weak and helpless from all the Venetian possessions at the threat of
+      Napoleon. Vicenza belonged again to Venice during the brief Republic of
+      1848, but the most memorable battle of that heroic but unhappy epoch gave
+      her back to Austria. Now at last, and for the first time, she is Italian.
+      Vicenza is
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Of kindred that have greatly expiated
+  And greatly wept,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and but that I so long fought against Ecelino da Romano, and the imperial
+      interest in Italy, I could readily forgive her all her past errors. To us
+      of the Lombard League, it was grievous that she should remain so doggishly
+      faithful to her tyrant; though it is to be granted that perhaps fear had
+      as much to do with her devotion as favor. The defense of 1848 was greatly
+      to her honor, and she took an active part in that demonstration against
+      the Austrians which endured from 1859 till 1866.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the demonstration we travellers saw an amusing phase at the opera which
+      we attended the evening of our arrival in Vicenza. "Nabucodonosor" was the
+      piece to be given in the new open-air theatre outside the city walls,
+      whither we walked under the starlight. It was a pretty structure of fresh
+      white stucco, oval in form, with some graceful architectural pretensions
+      without, and within very charmingly galleried; while overhead it was
+      roofed with a blue dome set with such starry mosaic as never covered
+      temple or theatre since they used to leave their houses of play and
+      worship open to the Attic skies. The old Hebrew story had, on this stage
+      brought so near to Nature, effects seldom known to opera, and the scene
+      evoked from far-off days the awful interest of the Bible histories,&mdash;the
+      vague, unfigured oriental splendor&mdash;the desert&mdash;the captive
+      people by the waters of the river of Babylon&mdash;the shadow and mystery
+      of the prophecies. When the Hebrews, chained and toiling on the banks of
+      the Euphrates, lifted their voices in lamentation, the sublime music so
+      transfigured the commonplaceness of the words, that they meant all deep
+      and unutterable affliction, and for a while swept away whatever was false
+      and tawdry in the show, and thrilled our hearts with a rapture rarely
+      felt. Yet, as but a moment before we had laughed to see Nebuchadnezzar's
+      crown shot off his head by a squib visibly directed from the side scenes,&mdash;at
+      the point when, according to the libretto, "the thunder roars, and a bolt
+      descends upon the head of the king,"&mdash;so but a moment after some new
+      absurdity marred the illusion, and we began to look about the theatre at
+      the audience. We then beheld that act of <i>dimostrazioni</i> which I have
+      mentioned. In one of the few boxes sat a young and very beautiful woman in
+      a dress of white, with a fan which she kept in constant movement. It was
+      red on one side, and green on the other, and gave, with the white dress,
+      the forbidden Italian colors, while, looked at alone, it was innocent of
+      offense. I do not think a soul in the theatre was ignorant of the
+      demonstration. A satisfied consciousness was reflected from the faces of
+      the Italians, and I saw two Austrian officers exchange looks of
+      good-natured intelligence, after a glance at the fair patriot. I wonder
+      what those poor people do, now they are free, and deprived of the sweet,
+      perilous luxury of defying their tyrants by constant acts of subtle
+      disdain? Life in Venetia must be very dull: no more explosion of
+      pasteboard petards; no more treason in bouquets; no more stealthy
+      inscriptions on the walls&mdash;it must be insufferably dull. <i>Ebbene,
+      pazienza</i>! Perhaps Victor Emanuel may betray them yet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A spirit of lawless effrontery, indeed, seemed to pervade the whole
+      audience in the theatre that night at Vicenza, and to extend to the
+      ministers of the law themselves. There were large placards everywhere
+      posted, notifying the people that it was forbidden to smoke in the
+      theatre, and that smokers were liable to expulsion; but except for
+      ourselves, and the fair patriot in the box, I think every body there was
+      smoking and the policemen set the example of anarchy by smoking the
+      longest and worst cigars of all. I am sure that the captive Hebrews all
+      held lighted cigarettes behind their backs, and that Nebuchadnezzar,
+      condemned to the grass of the field, conscientiously gave himself up to
+      the Virginia weed behind the scenes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before I fell asleep that night, the moon rose over the top of the feudal
+      tower, in front of our hotel, and produced some very pretty effects with
+      the battlements. Early in the morning a regiment of Croats marched through
+      the gate below the tower, their band playing "The Young Recruit." These
+      advantages of situation were not charged in our bill; but, even if they
+      had been, I should still advise my reader to go, when in Vicenza, if he
+      loves a pleasant landlord and a good dinner, to the Hotel de la Ville,
+      which he will find almost at his sole disposition for however long time he
+      may stay. His meals will be served him in a vast dining-hall, as bare as a
+      barn or a palace, but for the pleasant, absurd old paintings on the wall,
+      representing, as I suppose, Cleopatra applying the Asp, Susannah and the
+      Elders, the Roman Lucrezia, and other moral and appetizing histories. I
+      take it there is a quaint side-table or two lost midway of the wall, and
+      that an old woodcut picture of the Most Noble City of Venice hangs over
+      each. I know that there is a screen at one end of the apartment behind
+      which the landlord invisibly assumes the head waiter; and I suspect that
+      at the moment of sitting down at meat, you hear two Englishmen talking&mdash;as
+      they pass along the neighboring corridor&mdash;of wine, in dissatisfied
+      chest-tones. This hotel is of course built round a court, in which there
+      is a stable and&mdash;exposed to the weather&mdash;a diligence, and two or
+      three carriages and a driver, and an ostler chewing straw, and a pump and
+      a grape-vine. Why the hotel, therefore, does not smell like a stable, from
+      garret to cellar, I am utterly at a loss to know. I state the fact that it
+      does not, and that every other hotel in Italy does smell of stable as if
+      cattle had been immemorially pastured in its halls, and horses housed in
+      its bed-chambers,&mdash;or as if its only guests were centaurs on their
+      travels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the Museo Civico, whither we repaired first in the morning, and where
+      there are some beautiful Montagnas, and an assortment of good and bad
+      works by other masters, we went to the Campo Santo, which is worthy to be
+      seen, if only because of the beautiful Laschi monument by Vela, one of the
+      greatest modern sculptors. It is nothing more than a very simple tomb, at
+      the door of which stands a figure in flowing drapery, with folded hands
+      and uplifted eyes in an attitude exquisitely expressive of grief. The
+      figure is said to be the portrait statue of the widow of him within the
+      tomb, and the face is very beautiful. We asked if the widow was still
+      young, and the custodian answered us in terms that ought to endear him to
+      all women, if not to our whole mortal race,&mdash;"Oh quite young, yet.
+      She is perhaps fifty years old."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the Campo Santo one ought to go to that theatre which Palladio built
+      for the representation of classic tragedy, and which is perhaps the
+      perfectest reproduction of the Greek theatre in the world. Alfieri is the
+      only poet of modern times, whose works have been judged worthy of this
+      stage, and no drama has been given on it since 1857, when the "Oedipus
+      Tyrannus" of Sophocles was played. We found it very silent and dusty, and
+      were much sadder as we walked through its gayly frescoed, desolate
+      anterooms than we had been in the Campo Santo. Here used to sit, at coffee
+      and bassett, the merry people who owned the now empty seats of the
+      theatre,&mdash;lord, and lady, and abbé&mdash;who affected to be
+      entertained by the scenes upon the stage. Upon my word, I should like to
+      know what has become, in the other world, of those poor pleasurers of the
+      past whose memory makes one so sad upon the scenes of their enjoyment
+      here! I suppose they have something quite as unreal, yonder, to satisfy
+      them as they had on earth, and that they still play at happiness in the
+      old rococo way, though it is hard to conceive of any fiction outside of
+      Italy so perfect and so entirely suited to their unreality as this classic
+      theatre. It is a Greek theatre, for Greek tragedies; but it could never
+      have been for popular amusement, and it was not open to the air, though it
+      had a sky skillfully painted in the centre of the roof. The proscenium is
+      a Greek façade, in three stories, such as never was seen in Greece; and
+      the architecture of the three streets running back from the proscenium,
+      and forming the one unchangeable scene of all the dramas, is&mdash;like
+      the statues in the niches and on the gallery inclosing the auditorium&mdash;Greek
+      in the most fashionable Vicentine taste. It must have been but an operatic
+      chorus that sang in the semicircular space just below the stage and in
+      front of the audience. Admit and forget these small blemishes and
+      aberrations, however, and what a marvelous thing Palladio's theatre is!
+      The sky above the stage is a wonderful trick, and those three streets&mdash;one
+      in the centre and serving as entrance for the royal persons of the drama,
+      one at the right for the nobles, and one at the left for the citizens&mdash;present
+      unsurpassed effects of illusion. They are not painted, but modeled in
+      stucco. In perspective they seem each half a mile long, but entering them
+      you find that they run back from the proscenium only some fifteen feet,
+      the fronts of the houses and the statues upon them decreasing in recession
+      with a well-ordered abruptness. The semicircular gallery above the
+      auditorium is of stone, and forty statues of marble crown its colonnade,
+      or occupy niches between the columns.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It was curious to pass, with the impression left by this costly and
+      ingenious toy upon our minds, at once to the amphitheatre in Verona,
+      which, next to the Coliseum, has, of all the works bequeathed us by the
+      ancient Roman world, the greatest claim upon the wonder and imagination.
+      Indeed, it makes even a stronger appeal to the fancy. We know who built
+      the Coliseum, but in its unstoried origin, the Veronese arena has the
+      mystery of the Pyramids. Was its founder Augustus, or Vitellus, or
+      Antoninus, or Maximian, or the Republic of Verona? Nothing is certain but
+      that it was conceived and reared by some mighty prince or people, and that
+      it yet remains in such perfection that the great shows of two thousand
+      years ago might take place in it to-day. It is so suggestive of the fierce
+      and splendid spectacles of Roman times that the ring left by a modern
+      circus on the arena, and absurdly dwarfed by the vast space of the oval,
+      had an impertinence which we hotly resented, looking down on it from the
+      highest grade of the interior. It then lay fifty feet below us, in the
+      middle of an ellipse five hundred feet in length and four hundred in
+      breadth, and capable of holding fifty thousand spectators. The seats that
+      the multitudes pressed of old are perfect, yet; scarce a stone has been
+      removed from the interior; the aedile and the prefect might take their
+      places again in the balustraded tribunes above the great entrance at
+      either end of the arena, and scarcely see that they were changed. Nay, the
+      victims and the gladiators might return to the cells below the seats of
+      the people, and not know they had left them for a day; the wild beasts
+      might leap into the arena from dens as secure and strong as when first
+      built. The ruin within seems only to begin with the aqueduct, which was
+      used to flood the arena for the naval shows, but which is now choked with
+      the dust of ages. Without, however, is plain enough the doom which is
+      written against all the work of human hands, and which, unknown of the
+      builders, is among the memorable things placed in the corner-stone of
+      every edifice. Of the outer wall that rose high over the highest seats of
+      the amphitheatre, and encircled it with stately corridors, giving it
+      vaster amplitude and grace, the earthquake of six centuries ago spared
+      only a fragment that now threatens above one of the narrow Veronese
+      streets. Blacksmiths, wagon-makers, and workers in clangorous metals have
+      made shops of the lower corridors of the old arena, and it is friends and
+      neighbors with the modern life about it, as such things usually are in
+      Italy. Fortunately for the stranger, the Piazza Bra flanks it on one hand,
+      and across this it has a magnificent approach. It is not less happy in
+      being little known to sentiment, and the traveller who visits it by
+      moonlight, has a full sense of grandeur and pathos, without any of the
+      sheepishness attending homage to that battered old coquette, the Coliseum,
+      which so many emotional people have sighed over, kissing and afterwards
+      telling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he who would know the innocent charm of a ruin as yet almost wholly
+      uncourted by travel, must go to the Roman theatre in Verona. It is not a
+      favorite of the hand-books; and we were decided to see it chiefly by a
+      visit to the Museum, where, besides an admirable gallery of paintings,
+      there is a most interesting collection of antiques in bronze and marble
+      found in excavating the theatre. The ancient edifice had been completely
+      buried, and a quarter of the town was built over it, as Portici is built
+      over Herculaneum, and on the very top stood a Jesuit convent. One day,
+      some children, playing in the garden of one of the shabby houses, suddenly
+      vanished from sight. Their mother ran like one mad (I am telling the story
+      in the words of the peasant who related it to me) to the spot where they
+      had last been seen, and fell herself into an opening of the earth there.
+      The outcry raised by these unfortunates brought a number of men to their
+      aid, and in digging to get them out, an old marble stairway was
+      discovered. This was about twenty-five years ago. A certain gentleman
+      named Monga owned the land, and he immediately began to make excavations.
+      He was a rich man, but considered rather whimsical (if my peasant
+      represented the opinion of his neighbors), and as the excavation ate a
+      great deal of money (<i>mangiava molti soldi</i>), his sons discontinued
+      the work after his death, and nothing has been done for some time, now.
+      The peasant in charge was not a person of imaginative mind, though he said
+      the theatre (supposed to have been built in the time of Augustus) was
+      completed two thousand years before Christ. He had a purely conventional
+      admiration of the work, which he expressed at regular intervals, by
+      stopping short in his course, waving both hands over the ruins, and crying
+      in a sepulchral voice, "<i>Qual' opera</i>!" However, as he took us
+      faithfully into every part of it, there is no reason to complain of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We crossed three or four streets, and entered at several different gates,
+      in order to see the uncovered parts of the work, which could have been but
+      a small proportion of the whole. The excavation has been carried down
+      thirty and forty feet below the foundations of the modern houses,
+      revealing the stone seats of the auditorium, the corridors beneath them,
+      and the canals and other apparatus for naval shows, as in the great
+      Amphitheatre. These works are even more stupendous than those of the
+      Amphitheatre, for in many cases they are not constructed, but hewn out of
+      the living rock, so that in this light the theatre is a gigantic
+      sculpture. Below all are cut channels to collect and carry off the water
+      of the springs in which the rock abounds. The depth of one of these
+      channels near the Jesuit convent must be fifty feet below the present
+      surface. Only in one place does the ancient edifice rise near the top of
+      the ground, and there is uncovered the arched front of what was once a
+      family-box at the theatre, with the owner's name graven upon the arch.
+      Many poor little houses have of course been demolished to carry on the
+      excavations, and to the walls that joined them cling memorials of the
+      simple life that once inhabited them. To one of the buildings hung a
+      melancholy fire-place left blackened with smoke, and battered with use,
+      but witnessing that it had once been the heart of a home. It was far more
+      touching than any thing in the elder ruin; and I think nothing could have
+      so vividly expressed the difference which, in spite of all the
+      resemblances noticeable in Italy, exists between the ancient and modern
+      civilization, as that family-box at the theatre and this simple fireside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not now remember what fortunate chance it was that discovered to us
+      the house of the Capulets, and I incline to believe that we gravitated
+      toward it by operation of well-known natural principles which bring
+      travellers acquainted with improbabilities wherever they go. We found it a
+      very old and time-worn edifice, built round an ample court, and we knew
+      it, as we had been told we should, by the cap carven in stone above the
+      interior of the grand portal. The family, anciently one of the principal
+      of Verona, has fallen from much of its former greatness. On the occasion
+      of our visit, Juliet, very dowdily dressed, looked down from the top of a
+      long, dirty staircase which descended into the court, and seemed
+      interested to see us; while her mother caressed with one hand a large
+      yellow mastiff, and distracted it from its first impulse to fly upon us
+      poor children of sentiment. There was a great deal of stable litter, and
+      many empty carts standing about in the court; and if I might hazard the
+      opinion formed upon these and other appearances, I should say that old
+      Capulet has now gone to keeping a hotel, united with the retail liquor
+      business, both in a small way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing could be more natural, after seeing the house of the Capulets,
+      than a wish to see Juliet's Tomb, which is visited by all strangers, and
+      is the common property of the hand-books. It formerly stood in a garden,
+      where, up to the beginning of this century, it served, says my "Viaggio in
+      Italia," "for the basest uses,"&mdash;just as the sacred prison of Tasso
+      was used for a charcoal bin. We found the sarcophagus under a shed in one
+      corner of the garden of the Orfanotrofio delle Franceschine, and had to
+      confess to each other that it looked like a horse-trough roughly hewn out
+      of stone. The garden, said the boy in charge of the moving monument, had
+      been the burial-place of the Capulets, and this tomb being found in the
+      middle of the garden, was easily recognized as that of Juliet. Its
+      genuineness, as well as its employment in the ruse of the lovers, was
+      proven beyond cavil by a slight hollow cut for the head to rest in, and a
+      hole at the foot "to breathe through," as the boy said. Does not the fact
+      that this relic has to be protected from the depredations of travellers,
+      who could otherwise carry it away piecemeal, speak eloquently of a large
+      amount of vulgar and rapacious innocence drifting about the world?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is well to see even such idle and foolish curiosities, however, in a
+      city like Verona, for the mere going to and fro in search of them through
+      her streets is full of instruction and delight. To my mind, no city has a
+      fairer place than she that sits beside the eager Adige, and breathes the
+      keen air of mountains white with snows in winter, green and purple with
+      vineyards in summer, and forever rich with marble. Around Verona stretch
+      those gardened plains of Lombardy, on which Nature, who dotes on Italy,
+      and seems but a step-mother to all transalpine lands, has lavished every
+      gift of beauty and fertility. Within the city's walls, what store of art
+      and history! Her market-places have been the scenes of a thousand tragic
+      or ridiculous dramas; her quaint and narrow streets are ballads and
+      legends full of love-making and murder; the empty, grass-grown piazzas
+      before her churches are tales that are told of municipal and
+      ecclesiastical splendor. Her nobles sleep in marble tombs so beautiful
+      that the dust in them ought to be envied by living men in Verona; her
+      lords lie in perpetual state in the heart of the city, in magnificent
+      sepulchres of such grace and opulence, that, unless a language be invented
+      full of lance-headed characters, and Gothic vagaries of arch and finial,
+      flower and fruit, bird and beast, they can never be described. Sacred be
+      their rest from pen of mine, Verona! Nay, while I would fain bring the
+      whole city before my reader's fancy, I am loath and afraid to touch any
+      thing in it with my poor art: either the tawny river, spanned with many
+      beautiful bridges, and murmurous with mills afloat and turned by the rapid
+      current; or the thoroughfares with their passengers and bright shops and
+      caffès; or the grim old feudal towers; or the age-embrowned palaces,
+      eloquent in their haughty strength of the times when they were family
+      fortresses; or the churches with the red pillars of their porticos resting
+      upon the backs of eagle-headed lions; or even the white-coated garrison
+      (now there no more), with its heavy-footed rank and file, its handsome and
+      resplendent officers, its bristling fortifications, its horses and
+      artillery, crowding the piazzas of churches turned into barracks. All
+      these things haunt my memory, but I could only at best thinly sketch them
+      in meagre black and white. Verona is an almost purely Gothic city in her
+      architecture, and her churches are more worthy to be seen than any others
+      in North Italy, outside of Venice. San Zenone, with the quaint bronzes on
+      its doors representing in the rudeness of the first period of art the
+      incidents of the Old Testament and the miracles of the saints&mdash;with
+      the allegorical sculptures surrounding the interior and exterior of the
+      portico, and illustrating, among other things, the creation of Eve with
+      absolute literalness&mdash;with its beautiful and solemn crypt in which
+      the dust of the titular saint lies entombed&mdash;with its minute windows,
+      and its vast columns sustaining the roof upon capitals of every bizarre
+      and fantastic device&mdash;is doubtless most abundant in that Gothic
+      spirit, now grotesque and now earnest, which somewhere appears in all the
+      churches of Verona; which has carven upon the façade of the Duomo the
+      statues of Orlando and Olliviero, heroes of romance, and near them has
+      placed the scandalous figure of a pig in a monk's robe and cowl, with a
+      breviary in his paw; which has reared the exquisite monument of Guglielmo
+      da Castelbarco before the church of St. Anastasia, and has produced the
+      tombs of the Scaligeri before the chapel of Santa Maria Antica.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have already pledged myself not to attempt any description of these
+      tombs, and shall not fall now. But I bought in the. English tongue, as
+      written at Verona, some "Notices," kept for sale by the sacristan, "of the
+      Ancient Churg of Our Lady, and of the Tombs of the most illustrious Family
+      Della-Scala," and from these I think it no dereliction to quote <i>verbatim</i>.
+      First is the tomb of San Francesco, who was "surnamed the Great by reason
+      of his valor." "With him the Great Alighieri and other exiles took refuge.
+      We see his figure extended upon a bed, and above his statue on horsebac
+      with the vizor down, and his crest falling behind his shoulders, his horse
+      covered with mail. The columns and capitals are wonderful." "Within the
+      Cemetery to the right leaning against the walls of the church is the tomb
+      of John Scaliger." "In the side of this tomb near the wall of Sacristy,
+      you see the urn that encloses the ashes of Martin I.," "who was
+      traitorously killed on the 17th of October 1277 by Scaramello of the
+      Scaramelli, who wished to revenge the honor of a young lady of his
+      family." "The Mausoleum that is in the side facing the Place encloses the
+      Martin II.'s ashes.... This building is sumptuous and wonderful because it
+      stands on four columns, each of which has an architrave of nine feet. On
+      the beams stands a very large square of marble that forms the floor, on
+      which stands the urn of the Defunct. Four other columns support the vault
+      that covers the urn; and the rest is adorned by facts of Old Testament.
+      Upon the Summit is the equestrian statue as large as life." Of "Can
+      Signorius," whose tomb is the most splendid of all, the "Notices" say: "He
+      spent two thousand florins of gold, in order to prepare his own sepulchre
+      while he was yet alive, and to surpass the magnificence of his
+      predecessors. The monument is as magnificent as the contracted space
+      allows. Six columns support the floor of marble on which it stands covered
+      with figures. Six other columns support the top, on that is the Scaliger's
+      statues.... The monument is surrounded by an enclosure of red marble, with
+      six pillars, on which are square capitols with armed Saints. The rails of
+      iron with the Arms of the Scala, are worked with a beauty wonderful for
+      that age," or, I may add, for any age. These "rails" are an exquisite
+      net-work of iron wrought by hand, with an art emulous of that of Nicolò
+      Caparra at Florence. The chief device employed is a ladder (<i>scala</i>)
+      constantly repeated in the centres of quatre-foils; and the whole fabric
+      is still so flexible and perfect, after the lapse of centuries, that the
+      net may be shaken throughout by a touch. Four other tombs of the Scaligeri
+      are here, among which the "Notices" particularly mention that of Alboin
+      della Scala: "He was one of the Ghibelline party, as the arms on his urn
+      schew, that is a staircase risen by an eagle&mdash;wherefore Dante said,
+      <i>In sulla Scala porta il santo Uccello</i>."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I should have been glad to meet the author of these delightful histories,
+      but in his absence we fared well enough with the sacristan. When, a few
+      hours before we left Verona, we came for a last look it the beautiful
+      sepulchres, he recognized us, and seeing a sketch-book in the party, he
+      invited us within the inclosure again, and then ran and fetched chairs for
+      us to sit upon&mdash;nay, even placed chairs for us to rest our feet on.
+      Winning and exuberant courtesy of the Italian race! If I had never
+      acknowledged it before, I must do homage to it now, remembering the
+      sweetness of the sacristans and custodians of Verona. They were all men of
+      the most sympathetic natures. He at San Zenone seemed never to have met
+      with real friends till we expressed pleasure in the magnificent Mantegna,
+      which is the pride of his church. "What coloring!" he cried, and then
+      triumphantly took us into the crypt: "What a magnificent crypt! What works
+      they executed in those days, there!" At San Giorgio Maggiore, where there
+      are a Tintoretto and a Veronese, and four horrible swindling big pictures
+      by Romanino, I discovered to my great dismay that I had in my pocket but
+      five soldi, which I offered with much abasement and many apologies to the
+      sacristan; but he received them as if they had been so many napoleons,
+      prayed me not to speak of embarrassment, and declared that his labors in
+      our behalf had been nothing but pleasure. At Santa Maria in Organo, where
+      are the wonderful <i>intagli</i> of Fra Giovanni da Verona, the sacristan
+      fully shared our sorrow that the best pictures could not be unveiled as it
+      was Holy Week. He was also moved with us at the gradual decay of the <i>intagli</i>,
+      and led us to believe that, to a man of so much sensibility, the general
+      ruinous state of the church was an inexpressible affliction; and we
+      rejoiced for his sake that it should possess at least one piece of art in
+      perfect repair. This was a modern work, that day exposed for the first
+      time, and it represented in a group of wooden figures The Death of St.
+      Joseph. The Virgin and Christ supported the dying saint on either hand;
+      and as the whole was vividly colored, and rays of glory in pink and yellow
+      gauze descended upon Joseph's head, nothing could have been more
+      impressive.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Parma is laid out with a regularity which may be called characteristic of
+      the great ducal cities of Italy, and which it fully shares with Mantua,
+      Ferrara, and Bologna. The signorial cities, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and
+      Treviso, are far more picturesque, and Parma excels only in the number and
+      beauty of her fountains. It is a city of gloomy aspect, says Valery, who
+      possibly entered it in a pensive frame of mind, for its sadness did not
+      impress us. We had just come from Modena, where the badness of our hotel
+      enveloped the city in an atmosphere of profound melancholy. In fact, it
+      will not do to trust to travellers in any thing. I, for example, have just
+      now spoken of the many beautiful fountains in Parma because I think it
+      right to uphold the statement of M. Richard's hand-book; but I only
+      remember seeing one fountain, passably handsome, there. My Lord Corke, who
+      was at Parma in 1754, says nothing of fountains, and Richard Lasells,
+      Gent., who was there a century earlier, merely speaks of the fountains in
+      the Duke's gardens, which, together with his Grace's "wild beasts" and
+      "exquisite coaches," and "admirable Theater to exhibit Operas in," "the
+      Domo, whose Cupola was painted by the rare hand of Corregio," and the
+      church of the Capuchins, where Alexander Farnese is buried, were "the
+      Chief thing to be seen in Parma" at that day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wild beasts have long ago run away with the exquisite coaches, but the
+      other wonders named by Master Lasells are still extant in Parma, together
+      with some things he does not name. Our minds, in going thither, were
+      mainly bent upon Correggio and his works, and while our dinner was cooking
+      at the admirable Albergo della Posta, we went off to feast upon the
+      perennial Hash of Frogs in the dome of the Cathedral. This is one of the
+      finest Gothic churches in Italy, and vividly recalls Verona, while it has
+      a quite unique and most beautiful feature in the three light-columned
+      galleries, that traverse the façade one above another. Close at hand
+      stands the ancient Baptistery, hardly less peculiar and beautiful; but,
+      after all, it is the work of the great painter which gives the temple its
+      chief right to wonder and reverence. We found the fresco, of course, much
+      wasted, and at first glance, before the innumerable arms and legs had time
+      to order and attribute themselves to their respective bodies, we felt the
+      justice of the undying spite which called this divinest of frescos a <i>guazzetto
+      di rane</i>. But in another moment it appeared to us the most sublime
+      conception of the Assumption ever painted, and we did not find Caracci's
+      praise too warm where he says: "And I still remain stupefied with the
+      sight of so grand a work&mdash;every thing so well conceived&mdash;so well
+      seen from below&mdash;with so much severity, yet with so much judgment and
+      so much grace; with a coloring which is of very flesh." The height of the
+      fresco above the floor of the church is so vast that it might well appear
+      like a heavenly scene to the reeling sense of the spectator. Brain, nerve,
+      and muscle were strained to utter exhaustion in a very few minutes, and we
+      came away with our admiration only half-satisfied, and resolved to ascend
+      the cupola next day, and see the fresco on something like equal terms. In
+      one sort we did thus approach it, and as we looked at the gracious
+      floating figures of the heavenly company through the apertures of the
+      dome, they did seem to adopt us and make us part of the painting. But the
+      tremendous depth, over which they drifted so lightly, it dizzied us to
+      look into; and I am not certain that I should counsel travellers to repeat
+      our experience. Where still perfect, the fresco can only gain from close
+      inspection,&mdash;it is painted with such exquisite and jealous
+      perfection,&mdash;yet the whole effect is now better from below, for the
+      decay is less apparent; and besides, life is short, and the stairway by
+      which one ascends to the dome is in every way too exigent. It is with the
+      most astounding sense of contrast that you pass from the Assumption to the
+      contemplation of that other famous roof frescoed by Correggio, in the
+      Monastero di San Paolo. You might almost touch the ceiling with your hand,
+      it hovers so low with its counterfeit of vine-clambered trellis-work, and
+      its pretty boys looking roguishly through the embowering leaves. It is
+      altogether the loveliest room in the world; and if the Diana in her car on
+      the chimney is truly a portrait of the abbess for whom the chamber was
+      decorated, she was altogether worthy of it, and one is glad to think of
+      her enjoying life in the fashion amiably permitted to nuns in the
+      fifteenth century. What curious scenes the gayety of this little chamber
+      conjures up, and what a vivid comment it is upon the age and people that
+      produced it! This is one of the things that makes a single hour of travel
+      worth whole years of historic study, and which casts its light upon all
+      future reading. Here, no doubt, the sweet little abbess, with the noblest
+      and prettiest of her nuns about her, received the polite world, and made a
+      cheerful thing of devotion, while all over transalpine Europe the
+      sour-hearted Reformers were destroying pleasant monasteries like this. The
+      light-hearted lady-nuns and their gentlemen friends looked on heresy as a
+      deadly sin, and they had little reason to regard it with favor. It
+      certainly made life harder for them in time, for it made reform within the
+      Church as well as without, so that at last the lovely Chamber of St. Paul
+      was closed against the public for more than two centuries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All Parma is full of Correggio, as Venice is of Titian and Tintoretto, as
+      Naples of Spagnoletto, as Mantua of Giulio Romano, as Vicenza of Palladio,
+      as Bassano of Da Ponte, as Bologna of Guido Reni. I have elsewhere noticed
+      how ineffaceably and exclusively the manner of the masters seems to have
+      stamped itself upon the art of the cities where they severally wrought,&mdash;how
+      at Parma Correggio yet lives in all the sketchy mouths of all the pictures
+      painted there since his time. One might almost believe, hearing the
+      Parmesans talk, that his manner had infected their dialect, and that they
+      fashioned their lazy, incomplete utterance with the careless lips of his
+      nymphs and angels. They almost entirely suppress the last syllable of
+      every word, and not with a quick precision, as people do in Venice or
+      Milan, but with an ineffable languor, as if language were not worth the
+      effort of enunciation; while they rise and lapse several times in each
+      sentence, and sink so sweetly and sadly away upon the closing vocable that
+      the listener can scarcely repress his tears. In this melancholy rhythm,
+      one of the citizens recounted to me the whole story of the assassination
+      of the last Duke of Parma in 1850; and left me as softly moved as if I had
+      been listening to a tale of hapless love. Yet it was an ugly story, and
+      after the enchantment of the recital passed away, I perceived that when
+      the Duke was killed justice was done on one of the maddest and wickedest
+      tyrants that ever harassed an unhappy city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Parmesans remember Maria Louisa, Napoleon's wife, with pleasant enough
+      feelings, and she seems to have been good to them after the manner of
+      sovereigns, enriching their city with art, and beautifying it in many
+      ways, besides doing works of private charity and beneficence. Her daughter
+      by a second marriage, the Countess Sanvitali, still lives in Parma; and in
+      one of the halls of the Academy of Fine Arts the Duchess herself survives
+      in the marble of Canova. It was she who caused the two great pictures of
+      Correggio, the St. Jerome and the Madonna della Scodella, to be placed
+      alone in separate apartments hung with silk, in which the painter's
+      initial A is endlessly interwoven. "The Night," to which the St. Jerome is
+      "The Day," is in the gallery at Dresden, but Parma could have kept nothing
+      more representative of her great painter's power than this "Day." It is
+      "the bridal of the earth and sky," and all sweetness, brightness, and
+      tender shadow are in it. Many other excellent works of Correggio, Caracci,
+      Parmigianino, and masters of different schools are in this gallery, but it
+      is the good fortune of travellers, who have to see so much, that the
+      memory of the very best alone distinctly remains. Nay, in the presence of
+      prime beauty nothing else exists, and we found that the church of the
+      Steccata, where Parmigianino's sublime "Moses breaking the Tables of the
+      Law" is visible in the midst of a multitude of other figures on the vault,
+      really contained nothing at last but that august and awful presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Undoubtedly the best gallery of classical antiquities in North Italy is
+      that of Parma, which has derived all its precious relics from the little
+      city of Valleja alone. It is a fine foretaste of Pompeii and the wonders
+      of the Museo Borbonico at Naples, with its antique frescos, and marble,
+      and bronzes. I think nothing better has come out of Herculaneum than the
+      comic statuette of "Hercules Drunk." He is in bronze, and the drunkest man
+      who has descended to us from the elder world; he reels backward, and leers
+      knowingly upon you, while one hand hangs stiffly at his side, and the
+      other faintly clasps a wine-cup&mdash;a burly, worthless, disgraceful
+      demigod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great Farnese Theatre was, as we have seen, admired by Lasells; but
+      Lord Corke found it a "useless structure" though immense. "The same spirit
+      that raised the Colossus at Rhodes," he says, "raised the theatre at
+      Parma; that insatiable spirit and lust of Fame which would brave the
+      Almighty by fixing eternity to the name of a perishable being." If it was
+      indeed this spirit, I am bound to say that it did not build so wisely at
+      Parma as at Rhodes. The play-house that Ranuzio I. constructed in 1628, to
+      do honor to Cosmo II. de' Medici (pausing at Parma on his way to visit the
+      tomb of San Carlo Borromeo), and that for a century afterward was the
+      scene of the most brilliant spectacles in the world, is now one of the
+      dismalest and dustiest of ruins. This <i>Theatrum orbis miraculum</i> was
+      built and ornamented with the most perishable materials, and even its size
+      has shrunken as the imaginations of men have contracted under the strong
+      light of later days. When it was first opened, it was believed to hold
+      fourteen thousand spectators; at a later <i>fête</i> it held only ten
+      thousand; the last published description fixes its capacity at five
+      thousand; and it is certain that for many and many a year it has held only
+      the stray tourists who have looked in upon its desolation. The gay
+      paintings hang in shreds and tatters from the roof; dust is thick upon the
+      seats and in the boxes, and on the leads that line the space once flooded
+      for naval games. The poor plaster statues stand naked and forlorn amid the
+      ruin of which they are part; and the great stage, from which the curtain
+      has rotted away, yawns dark and empty before the empty auditorium.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0034" id="link2H_4_0034"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      DUCAL MANTUA.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In that desperate depth of Hell where Dante beholds the Diviners doomed to
+      pace with backward-twisted faces, and turn forever on the past the rainy
+      eyes once bent too daringly on the future, the sweet guide of the Tuscan
+      poet points out among the damned the daughter of a Theban king, and
+      discourses to his charge:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  Manto was she: through many lands she went
+    Seeking, and paused where I was born, at last.
+    Therefore I choose thou be on me intent
+  A little. When from life her father passed,
+    And they of Bacchus' city became slaves,
+    Long time about the world the daughter cast.
+  Up in fair Italy is a lake that laves
+    The feet of Alps that lock in Germany:
+    Benaco called....
+  And Peschiera in strong harness sits
+    To front the Brescians and the Bergamasques,
+    Where one down-curving shore the other meets.
+  There all the gathered waters outward flow
+    That may not in Benaco's bosom rest,
+    And down through, pastures green a river go.
+
+</pre>
+    <hr />
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    As far as to Governo, where, its quest
+  Ended at last, it falls into me Po.
+    But far it has not sought before a plain
+    It finds and floods, out-creeping wide and slow
+  To be the steaming summer's offense and bane.
+    Here passing by, the fierce, unfriendly maid
+    Saw land in the middle of the sullen main,
+  Wild and unpeopled, and here, unafraid
+    Of human neighborhood, she made her lair,
+    Rested, and with her menials wrought her trade,
+  And lived, and left her empty body there.
+    Then the sparse people that were scattered near
+    Gathered upon that island, everywhere
+  Compassed about with swamps and kept from fear.
+    They built their city above the witch's grave,
+    And for her sake that first made dwelling there
+  The name of Mantua to their city gave.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      To this account of the first settlement of Mantua Virgil adds a warning to
+      his charge to distrust all other histories of the city's foundation; and
+      Dante is so thoroughly persuaded of its truth, that he declares all other
+      histories shall be to him as so many lifeless embers. Nevertheless, divers
+      chroniclers of Mantua reject the tradition here given as fabulous; and the
+      carefullest and most ruthless of these traces the city's origin, not to
+      the unfriendly maid, but to the Etruscan King Ocno, fixing the precise
+      date of its foundation at thirty years before the Trojan war, one thousand
+      five hundred and thirty-nine years after the creation of the world, three
+      hundred years before Rome, and nine hundred and fifteen years after the
+      flood, while Abimelech was judge in Israel. "And whoever," says the
+      compiler of the "Flower of the Mantuan Chroniclers" (it is a very dry and
+      musty flower, indeed), citing doughty authorities for all his facts and
+      figures,&mdash;"whoever wishes to understand this more curiously, let him
+      read the said authors, and he will be satisfied."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I am as little disposed to unsettle the reader's faith in the
+      Virgilian tradition, as to part with my own; and I therefore uncandidly
+      hold back the names of the authorities cited. This tradition was in fact
+      the only thing concerning Mantuan history present to my thoughts as I rode
+      toward the city, one afternoon of a pleasant Lombard spring; and when I
+      came in sight of the ancient hold of sorcery, with the languid waters of
+      its lagoons lying sick at its feet, I recognized at least the
+      topographical truth of Virgil's description. But old and mighty walls now
+      surround the spot which Manto found sterile and lonely in the heart of the
+      swamp formed by the Mincio, no longer Benaco; and the dust of the witch is
+      multitudinously hidden under the edifices of a city whose mighty domes,
+      towers, and spires make its approach one of the stateliest in the world.
+      It is a prospect on which you may dwell long as you draw toward the city,
+      for the road from the railway station winds through some two miles of flat
+      meadow-land before it reaches the gate of the stronghold which the
+      Italians call the first hope of the winner of the land, and the last hope
+      of the loser of Italy. Indeed, there is no haste in any of the means of
+      access to Mantua. It lies scarce forty miles south of Verona, and you are
+      three hours in journeying this distance in the placid railway train,&mdash;a
+      distance which Romeo, returning to Verona from his exile in Mantua, no
+      doubt travelled in less time. There is abundant leisure to study the
+      scenery on the way; but it scarcely repays the perusal, for it lacks the
+      beauty of the usual Lombard landscape. The soil is red, stony, and
+      sterile; the orchard-trees are scant and slender, and not wedded with the
+      caressing vines which elsewhere in North Italy garland happier trees and
+      stretch gracefully from trunk to trunk. Especially the landscape looks sad
+      and shabby about the little village of Villafranca, where, in 1864, the
+      dejected prospect seemed incapable of a smile even in spring; as if it had
+      lost all hope and cheerfulness since the peace was made which confirmed
+      Venetia to the alien. It said as plainly as real estate could express the
+      national sentiment, "Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!" and crept sullenly out
+      of sight, as our pensive train resumed its meditative progress. No doubt
+      this poor landscape <i>was</i> imbued, in its dull, earthy way, with a
+      feeling that the coming of Garibaldi would irrigate and fertilize it into
+      a paradise; as at Venice the gondoliers believed that his army would bring
+      in its train cheap wine and hordes of rich and helpless Englishmen bent on
+      perpetual tours of the Grand Canal without understanding as to price.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But within and without Mantua was a strong argument against possibility of
+      change in the political condition of this part of Italy. Compassed about
+      by the corruption of the swamps and the sluggish breadth of the river, the
+      city is no less mighty in her artificial defenses than in this natural
+      strength of her position; and the Croats of her garrison were as frequent
+      in her sad, handsome streets, as the priests in Rome. Three lakes secure
+      her from approach upon the east, north, and south; on the west is a vast
+      intrenched camp, which can be flooded at pleasure from one of the lakes;
+      while the water runs three fathoms deep at the feet of the solid brick
+      walls all round the city. There are five gates giving access by
+      drawbridges from the town to the fortressed posts on every side, and
+      commanding with their guns the roads that lead to them. The outlying
+      forts, with the citadel, are four in number, and are each capable of
+      holding from two to three thousand men. The intrenched camp, for cavalry
+      and artillery, and the barracks of the city itself, can receive a garrison
+      of from thirty to forty thousand men; and the measureless depths of the
+      air are full of the fever that fights in defense of Mantua, and serves
+      with equal zeal whoever is master of the place, let him be French,
+      Italian, or Austrian, so only that he have an unacclimated enemy before
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess that little of this formidable military knowledge burdened me on
+      the occasion of my visit to Mantua, and I have already confessed that I
+      was but very imperfectly informed of the history of the city. But indeed,
+      if the reader dealt candidly with himself, how much could he profess to
+      know of Mantuan history? The ladies all have some erudite associations
+      with the place as giving the term of <i>mantua-making</i> to the art of
+      dress, and most persons have heard that Mantua's law was once death to any
+      he that uttered mortal drugs there, and that the place was till a few
+      years since an Austrian fortress on the Mincio. Of Giulio Romano, and his
+      works to Mantua, a good many have heard; and there is something known to
+      the reader of the punctuated edition of Browning about Sordello. But of
+      the Gonzagas of Mantua, and their duchy, what do you know, gentle reader?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For myself, when in Mantua, I tried to make a virtue of my want of
+      information, and fancied that a sort of general ignorance was more
+      favorable to my enjoyment of what I saw there than thorough acquaintance
+      with the city's history would have been. It certainly enabled me to accept
+      all the poetic fiction of the custodians, and to embroider with their
+      pleasing improbabilities the business-like succinctness of the
+      guide-books; to make out of the twilight which involved all impressions a
+      misty and heroic picture of the Mantuan past, wherein her great men
+      appeared with a stately and gigantic uncertainty of outline, and mixed
+      with dim scenes of battle, intrigue, and riot, and were gone before Fact
+      could lay her finger on any shape, and swear that it was called so, and
+      did so and so. But even if there had been neither pleasure nor profit in
+      this ignorance, the means of dispelling it are so scant in modern
+      literature that it might well have been excused in a far more earnest
+      traveller. The difficulty, indeed, which I afterwards experienced in
+      trying to learn something of Mantua, is my best excuse for writing of its
+      history here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fancy that the few recent books on the subject are not in the hands of
+      most readers, and I have a comforting belief that scarcely a reader of
+      mine has been a reader of the "Grande Illustrazione de
+      Lombardo-Veneto."[Mantova e Sua Provincia, per 'Avvocato Bartolomeo
+      Arrighi: <i>Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto, ossia Storia delle
+      Città, des Borghi, Communi, Castelli, etc., fino ai Tempi moderni. Per
+      Cura di Cesare Cantù, e a' altri Literati</i>. Milano, 1859.] Yet I
+      suppose that he forms some notion of this work from its title, and figures
+      to himself a physical bulk of six volumes,&mdash;large, abounding in
+      ill-printed wood-cuts, and having the appalling features which repel our
+      race from pictorial history-books generally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The "Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto" includes notice of all
+      those dear and famous cities of North Italy which we know,&mdash;of
+      Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Venice, Mantua, Modena, Brescia, Bergamo, and the
+      rest; but here we have only to do with the part which concerns Mantua.
+      This is written by the advocate Bartolomeo Arrighi, whose ingenious
+      avoidance of all that might make his theme attractive could not be
+      sufficiently celebrated here, and may therefore be left to the reader's
+      fancy. There is little in his paper to leaven statistical heaviness; and
+      in recounting one of the most picturesque histories, he contrives to give
+      merely a list of the events and a diagram of the scenes. Whatever
+      illustrated character in princes or people he carefully excludes, and the
+      raciness of anecdote and the flavor of manner and epoch distil not into
+      his compilation from the elder historiographers. I have therefore to go
+      back, in my present purpose, to the authors whose substance he has
+      desiccated; and with their help, and that of one or two antiquated authors
+      of this century, I shall try to rehabilitate the ducal state of Mantua,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Which was an image of the mighty world,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and present some shadow of its microcosmal life. The story has the
+      completeness of a tragedy; but it runs over many centuries, and it ends
+      like a farce, though it ends with a death. One feels, indeed, almost as
+      great satisfaction in the catastrophe as the Mantuans themselves, who
+      terminated their national existence and parted from their last Duke with
+      something like exultation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I recall my own impressions of the city, I doubt if any good or bad
+      fortune could rouse her to such positive emotion now. She seemed sunken,
+      that dull April evening of our visit, into an abiding lethargy; as if
+      perfect repose, and oblivion from the many-troubled past,&mdash;from the
+      renown of all former famine, fire, intrigue, slaughter, and sack,&mdash;were
+      to be preferred by the ghost of a once populous and haughty capital to the
+      most splendid memories of national life. Certainly, the phantom of bygone
+      Mantuan greatness did not haunt the idle tourists who strolled through her
+      wide streets, enjoying their quiet beauty and regularity, and finding
+      them, despite their empty, melancholy air, full of something that reminded
+      of home. Coming from a land where there is a vast deal of length, breadth,
+      and rectitude in streets, as well as human nature, they could not, of
+      course, feel that wonder in the Mantuan avenues which inspired a Venetian
+      ambassador, two centuries since, to write the Serenest Senate in praise of
+      their marvelous extent and straightness; but they were still conscious of
+      a certain expansive difference from Gothic Verona and narrow Venice. The
+      windows of the ground-floors were grated to the prison-like effect common
+      throughout Italy; but people evidently lived upon the ground-floors, and
+      at many of the iron-barred windows fair young prisoners sat and looked out
+      upon the streets, or laughed and chatted together. About the open
+      doorways, moreover, people lounged gossiping; and the interiors of the
+      entry-halls, as they appeared to the passing glance, were clean, and had
+      not that forbidding, inhospitable air characteristic of most
+      house-entrances in North Italy. But sculptured Venice and Verona had
+      unfitted the travellers for pleasure in the stucco of Mantua; and they had
+      an immense scorn for the large and beautiful palaces of which the
+      before-quoted ambassador speaks, because they found them faced with
+      cunningly-moulded plaster instead of carven stone. Nevertheless, they
+      could not help a kind of half-tender respect for the old town. It shares
+      the domestic character of its scenes with the other ducal cities, Modena,
+      Parma, and Ferrara; and this character is, perhaps, proper to all long and
+      intensely municipalized communities. But Mantua has a ghostly calm wholly
+      its own; and this was not in the least broken that evening by chatters at
+      thresholds, and pretty laughers at grated windows. It was very, very
+      quiet. Perhaps half a score of carriages rumbled by us in our long walk,
+      and we met some scattered promenaders. But for the most part the streets
+      were quite empty; and even in the chief piazza, where there was still some
+      belated show of buying and selling, and about the doors of the caffès,
+      where there was a good deal of languid loafing, there was no indecency of
+      noise or bustle There were visibly few people in the place, and it was in
+      decay; but it was not squalid in its lapse. The streets were scrupulously
+      neat and clean, and the stuccoed houses were all painted of that pale
+      saffron hue which gives such unquestionable respectability to New England
+      towns. Before we returned to our lodgings, Mantua had turned into
+      twilight; and we walked homeward through a placid and dignified gloom,
+      nowhere broken by the flare of gas, and only remotely affected, here and
+      there, by the light of lamps of oil, faintly twinkling in a disheartened
+      Mantuan fashion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you turn this pensive light upon the yellow pages of those old
+      chronicles of which I spoke, it reveals pictures fit to raise both pity
+      and wonder for the past of this city,&mdash;pictures full of the glory of
+      struggles for freedom, of the splendor of wise princes, of the comfort of
+      a prosperous and contented people, of the grateful fruits of protected
+      arts and civilization; but likewise stained with images of unspeakable
+      filth and wickedness, baseness and cruelty, incredible shame, suffering,
+      and sin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long before the birth of Christ, the Gauls drive out the Etruscans from
+      Mantua, and aggrandize and beautify the city, to be in their turn expelled
+      by the Romans, under whom Mantua again waxes strong and fair. In this
+      time, the wife of a farmer not far from the city dreams a marvelous dream
+      of bringing forth a laurel-bough, and in due time bears into the world the
+      chiefest of all Mantuans, with a smile upon his face. This is a poet, and
+      they call his name Virgil. He goes from his native city to Rome, when ripe
+      for glory, and has there the good fortune to win back his father's farm,
+      which the greedy veterans of Augustus, then settled in the Cremonese, had
+      annexed to the spoils bestowed upon them by the Emperor. Later in this
+      Roman time, and only three years after the death of Him whom the poet all
+      but prophesied, another grand event marks an epoch in Mantuan history.
+      According to the pious legend, the soldier Longinus, who pierced the side
+      of Christ as he hung upon the cross, has been converted by a miracle;
+      wiping away that costly blood from his spear-head, and then drawing his
+      hand across his eyes, he is suddenly healed of his near-sightedness, and
+      stricken with the full wonder of conviction. He gathers anxiously the
+      precious drops of blood from his weapon into the phial from which the
+      vinegar mixed with gall was poured, and, forsaking his life of soldier, he
+      wanders with his new-won faith and his priceless treasure to Mantua, where
+      it is destined to work famous miracles, and to be the most valued
+      possession of the city to all after-time. The saint himself, preaching the
+      Gospel of Christ, suffers martyrdom under Tiberius; his tongue is cut out,
+      and his body is burnt; and his ashes are buried at Mantua, forgotten, and
+      found again in after ages with due signs and miraculous portents. The
+      Romans give a civil tranquillity to Mantua; but it is not till three
+      centuries after Christ that the persecutions of the Christians cease. Then
+      the temples of the gods are thrown down, and churches are built; and the
+      city goes forward to share the destinies of the Christianized empire, and
+      be spoiled by the barbarians. In 407 the Goths take it, and the Vandals in
+      their turn sack and waste it, and scatter its people, who return again
+      after the storm, and rebuild their city. Attila, marching to destroy it,
+      is met at Governo (as you see in Raphael's fresco in the Vatican) by Pope
+      Leo I., who conjures him to spare the city, and threatens him with Divine
+      vengeance if he refuse; above the pontiff's head two wrathful angels,
+      bearing drawn swords, menace the Hun with death if he advance; and, thus
+      miraculously admonished, he turns aside from Mantua and spares it. The
+      citizens successfully resist an attack of Alboin; but the Longobards
+      afterwards, unrestrained by the visions of Attila, beat the Mantuans and
+      take the city. From the Lombards the Greeks, sent thither by the Exarch of
+      Ravenna, captured Mantua about the end of the sixth century; and then, the
+      Lombards turning immediately to besiege it again, the Greeks defend their
+      prize long and valiantly, but in the end are overpowered. They are allowed
+      to retire with their men and arms to Ravenna, and the Lombards dismantle
+      the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Concerning our poor Mantua under Lombard rule there is but little known,
+      except that she went to war with the Cremonese; and it may be fairly
+      supposed that she was, like her neighbors, completely involved in foreign
+      and domestic discords of every kind. That war with the Cremonese was about
+      the possession of the river Ollio; and the Mantuans came off victors in
+      it, slaying immense numbers of the enemy, and taking some thousands of
+      them prisoners, whom their countrymen ransomed on condition of building
+      one of the gates of Mantua with materials from the Cremonese territory,
+      and mortar mixed with water from the disputed Ollio. The reader easily
+      conceives how bitter a pill this must have been for the high-toned
+      Cremonese gentlemen of that day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Charlemagne made himself master of Italy, the Mantuan lands and
+      Mantuan men were divided up among the brave soldiers who had helped to
+      enslave the country. These warriors of Charlemagne became counts; and the
+      <i>contadini</i>, or inhabitants of each <i>contado</i> (county), became
+      absolutely dependent on their will and pleasure. It is recorded (to the
+      confusion of those who think primitive barbarism is virtue) that the
+      corruption of those rude and brutal old times was great, that all classes
+      were sunk in vice, and that the clergy were especially venal and
+      abominable. After the death of Charlemagne, in the ninth century, wars
+      broke out all over Italy between the factions supporting different
+      aspirants to his power; and we may be sure that Mantua had some share in
+      the common quarrel. As I have found no explicit record of this period, I
+      distribute to the city, as her portion of the calamities, at least two
+      sieges, one capture and sack, and a decimation by famine and pestilence.
+      We certainly read that, fifty years later, the Emperor Rudolph attacked it
+      with his Hungarians, took it, pillaged it, and put great part of its
+      people to the sword. During the siege, some pious Mantuans had buried (to
+      save them from the religious foe) the blood of Christ, and part of the
+      sponge which had held the gall and vinegar, together with the body of St.
+      Longinus. Most unluckily, however, these excellent men were put to the
+      sword, and all knowledge of the place of sepulture perished with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the end of these wars Mantua received a lord, by appointment of the
+      Emperor, and the first lord's son married the daughter of the Duke of
+      Lorraine, from which union was born the great Countess Matilda. Boniface
+      was the happy bridegroom's name, and the wedding had a wild splendor and
+      profuse barbaric jollity about it, which it is pleasant enough to read of
+      after so much cutting and slashing. The viands were passed round on
+      horseback to the guests, and the horses were shod with silver shoes
+      loosely nailed on, that they might drop off and be scrambled for by the
+      people. Oxen were roasted whole, as at a Kentucky barbecue; and wine was
+      drawn from wells with buckets hung on silver chains. It was the first
+      great display of that magnificence of which after princes of Mantua were
+      so fond; and the wretched hinds out of whose sweat it came no doubt
+      thought it very fine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course Lord Boniface had his wars. There was a plot to depose him
+      discovered in Mantua, and the plotters fled to Verona. Boniface demanded
+      them; but the Veronese answered stoutly that theirs was a free city, and
+      no man should be taken from it against his will. Boniface marched to
+      attack them; and the Veronese were such fools as to call the Duke of
+      Austria to their aid, promising submission to his government in return for
+      his help. It was then that Austria first put her finger into the Italian
+      <i>pasticcio</i>, where she kept it so many centuries. But the Austrian
+      governor whom the Duke set over the Veronese made himself intolerable,&mdash;the
+      Austrian governor always does,&mdash;and they drove him out of the city.
+      On this the Duke turns about, unites with Boniface, takes Verona and sacks
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An altogether pleasanter incident of Boniface's domination was the
+      miraculous discovery of the sacred relics, buried and lost during the sack
+      of Mantua by the Hungarians. The place of sepulture was revealed thrice to
+      a blind pauper in a dream. People dug where he bade them and found the
+      relics. Immediately on its exhumation the Blood wrought innumerable
+      miracles; and the fame of it grew so great, that the Pope came to see it,
+      attended by such concourse of the people that they were obliged to sleep
+      in the streets. It was an age that drew the mantle of exterior devotion
+      and laborious penances and pilgrimages over the most hideous crimes and
+      unnatural sins. But perhaps the poor believers who slept in the streets of
+      Mantua on that occasion were none the worse for their faith when the Pope
+      pronounced the Blood genuine and blessed it. I am sure that for some days
+      of enthusiasm they abstained from the violence of war, and paused a little
+      in that career of vice and wickedness of which one reads in Italian
+      history, with the full conviction that Sodom and Gomorrah also were facts,
+      and not merely allegory. I have no doubt that the blind beggar believed
+      that Heaven had revealed to him the place where the Blood was buried, that
+      the Pope believed in the verity of the relic, and that the devout
+      multitudes were helped and uplifted in their gross faith by this visible
+      witness to the truth that Christ had died for them upon the bloody tree.
+      Poor souls! they had much to contend with in the way to any good. The
+      leaven of the old pleasure-making pagan civilization was in them yet (it
+      is in the Italians to this day); and centuries of Northern invasion had
+      made them fierce and cruel, without teaching them Northern virtues. Nay, I
+      question much if their invaders had so many rugged virtues to teach as
+      some people would have us think. They seem to have liked well the sweet
+      corruptions of the land, and the studied debaucheries of ages of sin, and
+      to have enjoyed them as furiously and clumsily as bears do the hoarded
+      honey of civilized bees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the death of Boniface the lordship of Mantua fell to his famous
+      daughter, Matilda, of whom most have heard. She was a woman of strong will
+      and strong mind; she held her own, and rent from others with a mighty
+      hand, till she had united nearly all Lombardy under her rule. She was not
+      much given to the domestic affections; she had two husbands
+      (successively), and, if the truth must be told, divorced them both: one
+      because he wished to share her sovereignty, perhaps usurp it; and the
+      other because he was not warm enough friend of religion. She had no
+      children, and, indeed, in her last marriage contract it was expressly
+      provided that the spouses were to live in chastity together, and as much
+      asunder as possible, Matilda having scruples. She was a great friend to
+      learning,&mdash;founded libraries, established the law schools at Bologna,
+      caused the codification of the canon law, corresponded with distant
+      nations, and spoke all the different languages of her soldiers. More than
+      literature, however, she loved the Church; and fought on the side of Pope
+      Gregory VII in his wars with the Emperor Henry IV. Henry therefore took
+      Mantua from her in 1091, and up to the year 1111 the city enjoyed a kind
+      of republican government under his protection. In that year Henry made
+      peace with Matilda, and appointed her his vice-regent in Italy; but the
+      Mantuans, after twenty years of freedom, were in no humor to feel the
+      weight of the mailed hand of this strong-minded lady. She was then,
+      moreover, nigh to her death; and, hearing that her physicians had given
+      her up, the Mantuans refused submission. The great Countess rose irefully
+      from her deathbed, and, gathering her army, led it in person, as she
+      always did, laid siege to Mantua by land and water, entered the city in
+      1114, and did not die till a year after. Such is female resolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Mantuans now founded a republican government, having unlimited
+      immunities and privileges from the Emperor, whose power over them extended
+      merely to the investure of their consuls. Their republic was democratic,
+      the legislative council of nine rectors and three curators being elective
+      by the whole people. This government, or something like it, endured for
+      more than a century, during which period the Mantuans seem to have done
+      nothing but war with their neighbors in every direction,&mdash;with the
+      Veronese chiefly, with the Cremonese a good deal, with the Paduans, with
+      the Ferrarese, with the Modenese and the Bolognese: indeed, we count up
+      twelve of these wars. Like the English of their time, the Mantuans were
+      famous bowmen, and their shafts took flight all over Lombardy. At the same
+      time they did not omit to fight each other at home; and it must have been
+      a dullish kind of day in Mantua when there was no street-battle between
+      families of the factious nobility. Dante has peopled his Hell from the
+      Italy of this time, and he might have gone farther and fared worse for a
+      type of the infernal state. The spectacle of these countless little
+      Italian powers, racked, and torn, and blazing with pride, aggression, and
+      disorder, within and without,&mdash;full of intrigue, anguish, and shame,&mdash;each
+      with its petty thief or victorious faction making war upon the other, and
+      bubbling over with local ambitions, personal rivalries, and lusts,&mdash;is
+      a spectacle which the traveller of to-day, passing over the countless
+      forgotten battle-fields, and hurried from one famous city to another by
+      railroad, can scarcely conjure up. Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua,
+      Mantua Vicenza, Verona, Bassano,&mdash;all are now at peace with each
+      other, and firmly united in the national sentiment that travellers were
+      meant to be eaten alive by Italians. Poor old cities! it is hard to
+      conceive of their bygone animosities; still harder to believe that all the
+      villages squatting on the long white roads, and waking up to beg of you as
+      your diligence passes, were once embroiled in deadly and incessant wars.
+      Municipal pride is a good thing, and discentralization is well; and we
+      have to thank these intensely local little states for genius triply
+      crowned with the glories of literature, art, and science, which Italy
+      might not have produced if she had been united, and if the little states
+      had loved themselves less and Italy more. Though, after all, there is the
+      doubt whether it is not better to bless one's obscure and happy children
+      with peace and safety, than to give to the world a score of great names at
+      the cost to millions of incalculable misery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides their local wars and domestic feuds the Mantuans had troubles on a
+      much larger scale,&mdash;troubles, indeed, which the Emperor Barbarossa
+      laid out for all Italy. In Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great you
+      can read a pleasanter account of the Emperor's business at Roncaglia about
+      this time than our Italian chroniclers will give you. Carlyle loves a
+      tyrant; and if the tyrant is a ruffian and bully, and especially a German,
+      there are hardly any lengths to which that historian will not go in praise
+      of him. Truly, one would hardly guess, from that picture of Frederick
+      Redbeard at Roncaglia, with the standard set before his tent, inviting all
+      men to come and have justice done them, that the Emperor was actually at
+      Roncaglia for the purpose of conspiring with his Diet to take away every
+      vestige of liberty and independence from miserable Italy. Among other
+      cities Mantua lost her freedom at this Diet, and was ruled by an imperial
+      governor and by consuls of Frederick's nomination till 1167, when she
+      joined the famous Lombard League against him. The leagued cities beat the
+      Emperor at Legnano, and received back their liberties by the treaty of
+      Costanza in 1183; after which, Frederick having withdrawn to Germany, they
+      fell to fighting among themselves again with redoubled zeal, and rent
+      their league into as many pieces as there had been parties to it. In 1236
+      the Germans again invaded Lombardy, under Frederick II.; and aided by the
+      troops of the Ghibelline cities, Verona, Padua, Vicenza, and Treviso,
+      besieged Mantua, which surrendered to this formidable union of forces,
+      thus becoming once more an imperial city, and irreparably fracturing the
+      Lombard League. It does not appear, however, that her ancient liberties
+      were withdrawn by Frederick II.; and we read that the local wars went on
+      after this with as little interruption as before. The wars went on as
+      usual, and on the old terms with Verona and Cremona; and there is little
+      in their history to interest us. But in 1256 the famous tyrant of Padua,
+      Eccelino da Romano, who aspired to the dominion of Lombardy, gathered his
+      forces, and went and sat down before Mantua. The Mantuans refused to
+      surrender at his summons; and Eccelino, who had very little notion of what
+      the Paduans were doing in his absence, swore that he would cut down the
+      vines in those pleasant Mantuan vineyards, plant new ones, and drink the
+      wine of their grapes before ever he raised the siege. But meantime that
+      conspiracy which ended in Eccelino's ruin had declared itself in Padua,
+      and the tyrant was forced to abandon the siege and look to his dominion of
+      other cities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After which there was something like peace in Mantua for twenty years, and
+      the city waxed prosperous. Indeed, neither industry nor learning had
+      wholly perished during the wars of the republic, and the people built
+      grist-mills on the Mincio, and cultivated belles-lettres to some degree.
+      Men of heavier science likewise nourished, and we read of jurists and
+      astronomers born in those troublous days, as well as of a distinguished
+      physician, who wrote a ponderous dictionary of simples, and dedicated it
+      to King Robert of Naples. But by far the greatest Mantuan of this time was
+      he of whom readers have heard something from a modern poet. He is the
+      haughty Lombard soul, "in the movement of the eyes honest and slow," whom
+      Dante, ascending the inexplicable heights of Purgatory, beheld; and who,
+      summoning all himself, leaped to the heart of Virgil when he named Mantua:
+      "O Mantuan! I am Sordello, of thine own land!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of Virgil the superstition of the Middle Ages had made a kind of wizard,
+      and of Sordello the old writers fable all manner of wonders; he is both
+      knight and poet, and has adventures scarcely less surprising than those of
+      Amadis of Gaul. It is pretty nearly certain that he was born in 1189 of
+      the Visconti di Goito, in the Mantuan country, and that he married
+      Beatrice, a sister of Eccelino, and had amours with the youngest sister of
+      this tyrant, the pretty Cunizza, whom Dante places in his "Paradiso." This
+      final disposition of Cunizza, whom we should hardly think now of assigning
+      a place among the blest, surprised some people even in that day, it seems;
+      for an old commentator defends it, saying: "Cunizza was always, it is
+      true, tender and amorous, and properly called a daughter of Venus; but she
+      was also compassionate, benign, and merciful toward those unhappy ones
+      whom her brother cruelly tormented. Therefore the poet is right in
+      feigning to find her in the sphere of Venus. <i>For if the gentle Cyprians
+      deified their Venus, and the Romans their Flora, how much more honestly
+      may a Christian poet save Cunizza</i>." The lady, whose salvation is on
+      these grounds inexpugnably accomplished, was married to Count Sanbonifazio
+      of Padua, in her twenty-fourth year; and Sordello was early called to this
+      nobleman's court, having already given proofs of his poetic genius. He
+      fell in love with Cunizza, whom her lord, becoming the enemy of the
+      Eccelini, began to ill-treat. A curious glimpse of the manners and morals
+      of that day is afforded by the fact, that the brothers of Cunizza
+      conspired to effect her escape with Sordella from her husband's court, and
+      that, under the protection of Eccelino da Romano, the lovers were left
+      unmolested to their amours. Eccelino, indeed, loved this weak sister with
+      extraordinary tenderness, and we read of a marvelous complaisance to her
+      amorous intrigues by a man who cared nothing himself for women. Cunizza
+      lived in one of her brother's palaces at Verona, and used to receive there
+      the visits of Sordello after Eccelino had determined to separate them. The
+      poet entered the palace by a back door, to reach which he must pass
+      through a very filthy alley; and a servant was stationed there to carry
+      Sordello to and fro upon his back. One night Eccelino took the servant's
+      place, bore the poet to the palace door, and on his return carried him
+      back to the mouth of the alley, where he revealed himself, to the natural
+      surprise and pain of Sordello, who could have reasonably expected anything
+      but the mild reproof and warning given him by his truculent
+      brother-in-law: "Ora ti basti, Sordello. Non venir più per questa vile
+      strada ad opere ancor più vili."&mdash;"Let this suffice thee, Sordello.
+      Come no more by this vile path to yet viler deeds."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was probably after this amour ended that Sordello sat out upon his
+      travels, visiting most courts, and dwelling long in Provence, where he
+      learned to poetize in the Provençal tongue, in which he thereafter chiefly
+      wrote, and composed many songs. He did not, however, neglect his Lombard
+      language, but composed in it a treatise on the art of defending towns. The
+      Mantuan historian, Volta, says that some of Sordello's Provençal poems
+      exist in manuscript in the Vatican and Chigi libraries at Rome, in the
+      Laurentian at Florence, and the Estense at Modena. He was versed in arms
+      as well as letters, and he caused Mantua to be surrounded with fosses five
+      miles beyond her walls; and the republic having lodged sovereign powers in
+      his hands when Eccelino besieged the city, Sordello conducted the defense
+      with great courage and ability, and did not at all betray the place to his
+      obliging brother-in-law, as the latter expected. Verci, from whose
+      "History of the Eccelini" we have drawn the account of Sordello's intrigue
+      with Cunizza, says: "The writers represent this Sordello as the most
+      polite, the most gentle, the most generous man of his time, of middle
+      stature, of beautiful aspect and fine person, of lofty bearing, agile and
+      dexterous, instructed in letters, and a good poet, as his Provençal poems
+      manifest. To these qualities he united military valor in such degree that
+      no knight of his time could stand before him." He was properly the first
+      Lord of Mantua, and the republic seems to have died with him in 1284.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The madness which comes upon a people about to be enslaved commonly makes
+      them the agents of their own undoing. The time had now come for the
+      destruction of the last vestiges of liberty in Mantua, and the Mantuans,
+      in their assembly of the Four Hundred and Ninety, voted full power into
+      the hands of the destroyer. That Pinamonte Bonacolsi whom Dante mentions
+      in the twentieth canto of the "Inferno," had been elected captain of the
+      republic, and, feigning to fear aggression from the Marquis of Ferrara, he
+      demanded of the people the right to banish all enemies of the state. This
+      reasonable demand was granted, and the captain banished, as is well known,
+      all enemies of Pinamonte Bonacolsi. After that, having things his own way,
+      he began to favor public tranquillity, abolished family feuds and the
+      ancient amusement of street-battles, and led his enslaved country in the
+      paths of material prosperity; for which he was no doubt lauded in his day
+      by those who thought the Mantuans were not prepared for freedom. He
+      resolved to make the captaincy of the republic hereditary in the Bonacolsi
+      family; and when he died, in 1293, his power descended to his son
+      Bordellone. This Bordellone seems to have been a generous and merciful
+      captain enough, but he loved ease and pleasure; and a rough nephew of his,
+      Guido Botticella, conspired against him to that degree that Bordellone
+      thought best, for peace and quietness' sake, to abdicate in his favor.
+      Guido had the customary war with the Marquis of Ferrara, and then died,
+      and was succeeded by his brother Passerino, a very bad person, whose son
+      at last brought his whole family to grief. The Emperor made him vicar of
+      Modena; and he used the Modenese very cruelly, and shut up Francesco Pico
+      and his sons in a tower, where he starved them, as the Pisans did Ugolino.
+      In those days, also, the Pope was living at Avignon, and people used to
+      send him money and other comforts there out of Italy. An officer of
+      Passerino's, being of Ghibelline politics, attacked one of these richly
+      laden emissaries, and took his spoils, dividing them with Passerino. For
+      this the Pope naturally excommunicated the captain of Mantua, and
+      thereupon his neighbors made a great deal of pious war upon him. But he
+      beat the Bolognese, the most pious of his foes, near Montevoglio, and with
+      his Modenese took from them that famous bucket, about which Tassoni made
+      his great Bernesque epic, "The Rape of the Bucket" (<i>La Secchia Rapita</i>),
+      and which still hangs in the tower of the Duomo at Modena. Meantime, while
+      Passerino had done everything to settle himself comfortably and
+      permanently in the tyranny of Mantua, his worthless son Francesco fell in
+      love with the wife of Filippino Gonzaga.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to the old Mantuan chronicles the Gonzagas were of a royal
+      German line, and had fixed themselves in the Mantuan territory in 770
+      where they built a castle beyond Po, and began at once to take part in
+      public affairs. They had now grown to be a family of such consequence that
+      they could not be offended with impunity, and it was a great misfortune to
+      the Bonacolsi that Francesco happened to covet Filippino Gonzaga's wife.
+      As to the poor lady herself, it is of infinite consequence to her eternal
+      health whether she was guilty or no, but to us still on earth, it seems
+      scarcely worth while to inquire, after so great lapse of time. History,
+      however, rather favors the notion of her innocence; and it is said that
+      Francesco, unable to overcome her virtue, took away her good fame by evil
+      reports. At the same time he was greatly wroth&mdash;it is scarcely
+      possible to write seriously of these ridiculous, wicked old shadows&mdash;that
+      this lady's husband should have fallen in love with a pretty concubine of
+      his, Bonacolsi's; and, after publicly defaming Filippino's wife, he
+      threatened to kill him for this passion. The insult and the menace sank
+      deep into the bitter hearts of the Gonzagas; and the head of that proud
+      race, Filippino's uncle, Luigi Gonzaga, resolved to avenge the family
+      dishonor. He was a secret and taciturn man, and a pious adulator of his
+      line has praised him for the success with which he dissembled his hatred
+      of the Bonacolsi, while conspiring to sweep them and their dominion away.
+      He won over adherents among the Mantuans, and then made a league with Can
+      Grande of Verona to divide the spoils of the Bonacolsi; and so, one
+      morning, having bribed the guards to open the city gates, he entered
+      Mantua at the head of the banded forces. The population was roused with
+      patriotic cries of "Long live the Mantuan people!" and, as usual,
+      believed, poor souls, that some good was meant them by those who came to
+      overthrow their tyrants. The Bonacolsi were dreaming that pleasant morning
+      of anything but ruin, and they offered no resistance to the insurrection
+      till it burst out in the great square before the Castello di Corte. They
+      then made a feeble sally from the castle, but were swiftly driven back,
+      and Passerino, wounded to death under the great Gothic archway of the
+      palace, as he retreated, dropped from his languid hands the bridle-rein of
+      his charger and the reins of that government with which he had so long
+      galled Mantua. The unhappy Francesco fled to the cathedral for protection;
+      but the Gonzagas slew him at the foot of the altar, with tortures so
+      hideous and incredible, that I am glad to have our friend, the advocate
+      Arrighi, deny the fact altogether. Passerino's brother, a bishop, was
+      flung into a tower to starve, that the Picos might be avenged; and the
+      city of Mantua was liberated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that day, when you freed a city from a tyrant, you gave it up to be
+      pillaged by the army of liberation; and Mantua was now sacked by her
+      deliverers. Can Grande's share of the booty alone amounted to a hundred
+      thousand gold florins (about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars). The
+      Mantuans, far from imitating the ungrateful Paduans, who, when the
+      Crusaders liberated them from Eccelino, grudged these brave fellows three
+      days' pillage of their city, and even wished back their old tyrant,&mdash;the
+      Mantuans, we say, seemed not in the least to mind being devoured, but
+      gratefully elected the Gonzaga their captain-general, and purchased him
+      absolution from the Pope for his crimes committed in the sack. They got
+      this absolution for twenty thousand gold florins; and the Pope probably
+      sold it cheap, remembering his old grudge against the Bonacolsi, whom the
+      Gonzaga had overthrown. All this was in the year of grace 1328.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess that I am never weary of reading of these good, heroic, virtuous
+      old times in Italy, and that I am here tempted to digress into declamation
+      about them. There is no study more curious and interesting, and I am fond
+      of tracing the two elements of character visible in Italian society, and
+      every individual Italian, as they flow down from the remotest times to
+      these: the one element, that capacity for intellectual culture of the
+      highest degree; the other element, that utter untamableness of passion and
+      feeling. The presence of these contradictory elements seems to influence
+      every relation of Italian life;&mdash;to make it capable of splendor, but
+      barren of comfort; to endear beauty, but not goodness, to the Italian; to
+      lead him to recognize and celebrate virtues, but not to practice them; to
+      produce a civilization of the mind, and not of the soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Luigi Gonzaga was made lord of Mantua, he left his castle beyond Po,
+      to dwell in the city. In this castle he had dwelt, like other lords of his
+      time, in the likeness of a king, spending regally and keeping state and
+      open house in an edifice strongly built about with walls, encircled with
+      ditches passable by a single drawbridge, and guarded day and night, from
+      castle moat to castle crest, by armed vassals. Hundreds ate daily at his
+      board, which was heaped with a rude and rich profusion, and furnished with
+      carven goblets and plate of gold and silver. In fair weather the
+      banquet-hall stood open to all the winds that blew; in foul, the guests
+      were sheltered from the storm by curtains of oiled linen, and the place
+      was lighted with torches borne by splendidly attired pages. The great
+      saloons of the castle were decked with tapestries of Flanders and
+      Damascus, and the floor was strewn with straw or rushes. The bed in which
+      the lord and lady slept was the couch of a monarch; the household herded
+      together in the empty chambers, and lay upon the floor like swine. The
+      garden-fields about the castle smiled with generous harvests; the peasant
+      lay down after his toil, at night, in deadly fear of invasion from some
+      neighboring state, which should rob him of everything, dishonor his wife
+      and daughters, and slay him upon the smoking ruins of his home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the city to which this lord repaired, the houses were built here and
+      there at caprice, without numbers or regularity, and only distinguished by
+      the figure of a saint, or some pious motto painted above the door. Cattle
+      wandered at will through the crooked, narrow, and filthy streets, which
+      rang with the clamor of frequent feud, and reeked with the blood of the
+      embattled citizens; over all the squalor and wickedness rose the loveliest
+      temples that ever blossomed from man's love of the beautiful, to the honor
+      and glory of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this time Crusaders went to take the Lord's sepulchre from the infidel,
+      while their brothers left at home rose against one another, each petty
+      state against its neighbor, in unsparing wars of rapine and devastation,&mdash;wars
+      that slew, or, less mercifully, mutilated prisoners,&mdash;that snatched
+      the babe from the embrace of its violated mother, and dashed out its
+      brains upon the desolated hearth. A hopeless, hellish time of sack,
+      plunder, murder, famine, plague, and unnatural crime; a glorious age, in
+      which flourished the gentlest and sweetest poet that ever sang, and the
+      grimmest and grandest that ever upbraided a godless generation for its
+      sins,&mdash;in which Petrarch was crowned with laurel at Rome, and Dante
+      wandered in despair from court to court, learning in the bitterness of his
+      exile's heart,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "come sa di sale
+  Lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
+  Lo scendere e il salir per l'altrui scale."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It was a time ignorant of the simplest comfort, but debauched with the
+      vices of luxury; in which cities repressed the license of their people by
+      laws regulating the length of women's gowns and the outlays at weddings
+      and funerals. Every wild misdeed and filthy crime was committed, and
+      punished by terrible penalties, or atoned for by fines. A fierce democracy
+      reigned, banishing nobles, razing their palaces, and ploughing up the
+      salt-sown sites; till at last, in the uttermost paroxysm of madness, it
+      delivered itself up to lords to be defended from itself, and was crushed
+      into the abjectest depths of slavery. Literature and architecture
+      flourished, and the sister arts were born amid the struggles of human
+      nature convulsed with every abominable passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For nearly four hundred years the Gonzagas continued to rule the city,
+      which the first prince of their line, having well-nigh destroyed, now
+      rebuilt and restored to greater splendor than ever; and it is the Mantua
+      of the Gonzagas which travellers of this day look upon when they visit the
+      famous old city. Their pride and their wealth adorned it; their wisdom and
+      prudence made it rich and prosperous; their valor glorified it; their
+      crimes stain its annals with infamy; their wickedness and weakness ruined
+      it and brought it low. They were a race full of hereditary traits of
+      magnificence, but one reads their history, and learns to love, of all
+      their long succession, only one or two in their pride, learns to pity only
+      one or two in their fall. They were patriotic, but the patriotism of
+      despotic princes is self-love. They were liberal&mdash;in spending the
+      revenues of the state for the glory of their family. They were brave, and
+      led many nameless Mantuans to die in forgotten battles for alien quarrels
+      which they never understood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The succession of the Gonzagas was of four captains, ending in 1407; four
+      marquises, ending in 1484; and ten dukes, ending in 1708.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first of the captains was Luigi, as we know. In his time the great
+      Gothic fabric of the Castello di Corte was built; and having rebuilt the
+      portions of the city wasted by the sack, he devoted himself, as far as
+      might be in that age, to the arts of peace; and it is remembered of him
+      that he tried to cure the Mantuan air of its feverish unwholesomeness by
+      draining the swampy environs. During his time, Petrarch, making a
+      sentimental journey to the birthplace of Virgil, was splendidly
+      entertained and greatly honored by him. For the rest, Can Grande of Verona
+      was by no means content with his hundred thousand golden florins of spoil
+      from the sack of the city, but aspired to its seigniory, declaring that he
+      had understood Gonzaga to have promised him it as the condition of
+      alliance against the Bonacolsi. Gonzaga construed the contract
+      differently, and had so little idea of parting with his opinion, that he
+      fought the Scaligero on this point of difference till he died, which
+      befell thirty years after his election to the captaincy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Him his son Guido succeeded,&mdash;a prince already old at the time of his
+      father's death, and of feeble spirit. He shared his dominion with his son
+      Ugolino, excluding the younger brothers from the dominion. These,
+      indignant at the partiality, one night slew their brother Ugolino at a
+      supper he was giving; and being thereupon admitted to a share in their
+      father's government, had no trouble in obtaining the pardon of the Pope
+      and Emperor. One of the murderers died before the father; the other, named
+      Ludovico, was, on the death of Guido, in 1370, elected to the captaincy,
+      and ruled long, wisely, and well. He loved a peaceful life; and though the
+      Emperor confirmed him in the honors conferred on him by the Mantuans, and
+      made him Vicar imperial, Ludovico declined to take part with Ghibellines
+      against Guelphs, remained quietly at home, and spent himself much in good
+      works, as if he would thus expiate his bloody crime. He gathered artists,
+      poets, and learned men about him, and did much to foster all arts. In his
+      time, Mantua had rest from war, and grew to have twenty-eight thousand
+      inhabitants; but it was not in the nature of a city of the Middle Ages to
+      be long without a calamity of some sort, and it is a kind of relief to
+      know that Mantua, under this peaceful prince, was well-nigh depopulated by
+      a pestilence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1381 he died, and with his son Francesco the blood-letting began again.
+      Indeed, this captain spent nearly his whole life in war with those
+      pleasant people, the Visconti of Milan. He had married the daughter of
+      Barnabo Visconti, but discovering her to be unfaithful to him, or
+      believing her so, he caused her to be put to death, refusing all her
+      family's intercessions for mercy. After that, a heavy sadness fell upon
+      him, and he wandered aimlessly about in many Italian cities, and at last
+      married a second time, taking to wife Margherita Malatesta. He was a
+      prince of high and generous soul and of manly greatness rare in his time.
+      There came once a creature of the Visconti to him, with a plot for
+      secretly taking off his masters; but the Gonzaga (he must have been
+      thought an eccentric man by his neighbors) dismissed the wretch with
+      scornful horror. I am sure the reader will be glad to know that he finally
+      beat the Visconti in fair fight, and (the pest still raging in Mantua)
+      lived to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. When he returned, he compiled
+      the city's statutes, divided the town into four districts, and named its
+      streets. So he died.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And after this prince had made his end, there came another Francesco, or
+      Gianfrancesco, who was created Marquis of Mantua by the Emperor Sigismund.
+      He was a friend of war, and having been the ward of the Venetian Republic
+      (Venice was fond of this kind of trust, and sometimes adopted princely
+      persons as her children, among whom the reader will of course remember the
+      Queen of Cyprus, and the charming Bianca Capello, whose personal
+      attractions and singularly skillful knowledge of the use of poisons made
+      her Grand Duchess of Tuscany some years after she eloped from Venice), he
+      became the leader of her armies on the death of Carmagnola, who survived
+      the triumphal reception given him by the Serenest Senate only a very short
+      time. [It seems scarcely worth while to state the fact that Carmagnola,
+      suspected of treasonable correspondence with the Visconti, was recalled to
+      Venice to receive distinguished honors from the republic. The Senate was
+      sitting in the hall of the Grand Council when he appeared, and they
+      detained him there with various compliments till night fell. Then instead
+      of lights, the Sbirri appeared, and seized Carmagnola. "I am a dead man,"
+      he exclaimed, on beholding them. And so indeed he was; for, three days
+      after, he was led out of prison, and beheaded between the pillars of the
+      Piazzetta.] The Gonzaga took Verona and Padua for the republic, and met
+      the Milanese in many battles. Venice was then fat and insolently profuse
+      with the spoils of the Orient, and it is probable that the Marquis of
+      Mantua acquired there that taste for splendor which he introduced into his
+      hitherto frugal little state. We read of his being in Venice in 1414, when
+      the Jewelers and Goldsmiths' Guild gave a tournament in the Piazza San
+      Marco, offering as prizes to the victorious lances a collar enriched with
+      pearls and diamonds, the work of the jewelers, and two helmets excellently
+      wrought by the goldsmiths. On this occasion the Gonzaga, with two hundred
+      and sixty Mantuan gentlemen, mounted on superb horses, contested the
+      prizes with the Marquis of Ferrara, at the head of two hundred Ferrarese,
+      equally mounted, and attended by their squires and pages, magnificently
+      dressed. There were sixty thousand spectators of the encounter. "Both the
+      Marquises," says Mutinelli in his "Annali Urbani," "being each assisted by
+      fourteen well-armed cavaliers, combated valorously at the barrier, and
+      were both judged worthy of the first prize: a Mantuan cavalier took the
+      second."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Marquis Gonzaga was the first of his line who began that royal luxury
+      of palaces with which Mantua was adorned. He commenced the Ducal Palace;
+      but before he went far with the work, he fell a prey to the science then
+      much affected by Italian princes, but still awaiting its last refinement
+      from the gifted Lucrezia Borgia. The poor Marquis was poisoned by his
+      wife's paramour, and died in the year 1444. Against this prince, our
+      advocate Arrighi records the vandalism of causing to be thrown down and
+      broken in pieces the antique statue of Virgil, which stood in one of the
+      public places of Mantua, and of which the head is still shown in the
+      Museum of the city. In all times, the Mantuans had honored, in diverse
+      ways, their great poet, and at certain epochs had coined money bearing his
+      face. With the common people he had a kind of worship (more likely as
+      wizard than as poet), and they celebrated annually some now-forgotten
+      event by assembling with songs and dances about the statue of Virgil,
+      which was destroyed by the uncle of the Marquis, Malatesta, rather than by
+      the Marquis's own order. This ill-conditioned person is supposed to have
+      been "vexed because our Mantuan people thought it their highest glory to
+      be fellow-citizens of the prince of poets." We can better sympathize with
+      the advocate's indignation at this barbarity, than with his blame of
+      Francesco for having consented, by his acceptance of the marquisate, to
+      become a prince of the Roman Empire. Mantua was thus subjected to the
+      Emperors, but liberty had long been extinguished; and the voluntary
+      election of the Council, which bestowed the captaincy on each succeeding
+      generation of the Gonzagas, was a mere matter of form, and of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next prince, Lodovico Gonzaga, was an austere man, and had been bred
+      in a hard school, if I may believe some of our old chroniclers, whom,
+      indeed, I sometimes suspect of being not altogether faithful. It is said
+      that his father loved his younger brother better than him, and that
+      Lodovico ran away in his boyhood, and took refuge with his father's
+      hereditary enemies, the Visconti. To make dates agree, it must have been
+      the last of these, for the line failed during Lodovico's time, and he had
+      wars with the succeeding Sforza. In the day of his escapade, Milan was at
+      war with Mantua and with Venice, and the Marquis Gonzaga was at the head
+      of the united armies, as we have already seen. So the father and son met
+      in several battles; though the Visconti, out of love for the boy, and from
+      a sentiment of piety somewhat amazing in them, contrived that he should
+      never actually encounter his parent face to face. Lodovico came home after
+      the wars, wearing a long beard; and his mother called her son "the Turk,"
+      a nickname that he never lost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Il Turco was a lover of the arts and of letters, and he did many works to
+      enrich and beautify the city. He established the first printing-office in
+      Mantua, where the first book printed was the "Decamerone" of Boccaccio. He
+      founded a college of advocates, and he dug canals for irrigation; and the
+      prosperity of Mantuan manufacturers in his time may be inferred from the
+      fact that, when the King of Denmark paid him a visit, in 1474, the
+      merchants decked their shops with five thousand pieces of fine Mantuan
+      cloth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Marquis made his brilliant little court the resort of the arts and
+      letters; and hither from Florence came once the elegant Politian, who
+      composed his tragedy of "Orfeo" in Mantua, and caused it to be first
+      represented before Lodovico. But it must be confessed that this was a soil
+      in which art flourished better than literature, and that even born Mantuan
+      poets went off, after a while, and blossomed in other air. The painter
+      Mantegna, whom the Marquis invited from Padua, passed his whole life here,
+      painting for the Marquis in the palaces and churches. The prince loved
+      him, and gave him a house, and bestowed other honors upon him; and
+      Mantegna executed for Lodovico his famous pictures representing the
+      Triumph of Julius Cæsar. [Now at Hamilton Court, in England.] It was
+      divided into nine compartments, and, as a frieze, went round the upper
+      part of Lodovico's newly erected palace of San Sebastian. Mantegna also
+      painted a hall in the Castello di Corte, called the Stanza di Mantegna,
+      and there, among other subjects of fable and of war, made the portraits of
+      Lodovico and his wife. It was partly the wish to see such works of
+      Mantegna as still remained in Mantua that took us thither; and it was
+      chiefly this wish that carried us, the morning after our arrival, to the
+      Castello di Corte, or the Ducal Palace. Our thirst for Mantegnas was
+      destined to be in no degree satisfied in this pile, but it was full of
+      things to tempt us to forget Mantegna, and to make us more and more
+      interested in the Gonzagas and their Mantua.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is taken for granted that no human being ever yet gained an idea of any
+      building from the most artful description of it; but if the reader cares
+      to fancy a wide piazza, or open square, with a church upon the left hand,
+      immense, uninteresting edifices on the right, and an ugly bishop's palace
+      of Renaissance taste behind him, he may figure before him as vastly and
+      magnificently as he pleases the superb Gothic front of the Castello di
+      Corte. This façade is the only one in Italy that reminds you of the most
+      beautiful building in the world, the Ducal Palace at Venice; and it does
+      this merely by right of its short pillars and deep Gothic arches in the
+      ground story, and the great breadth of wall that rises above them,
+      unbroken by the second line of columns which relieves and lightens this
+      wall in the Venetian palace. It stands at an extremity of the city, upon
+      the edge of the broad fresh-water lagoon, and is of such extent as to
+      include within its walls a whole court-city of theatre, church, stables,
+      playground, course for riding, and several streets. There is a far older
+      edifice adjoining the Castello di Corte, which Guido Bonacolsi began, and
+      which witnessed the bloody end of his line, when Louis Gonzaga surprised
+      and slew his last successor. But the palace itself is all the work of the
+      Gonzagas, and it remains the monument of their kingly state and splendid
+      pride.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the misfortune of the present writer to be recognized by the <i>employé</i>
+      (formerly of Venice) who gives the permissions to travellers to visit the
+      palace, and to be addressed in the presence of the <i>Custode</i> by the
+      dignified title to which his presence did so little honor. This
+      circumstance threw upon the Custode, a naturally tedious and oppressive
+      old man, the responsibility of being doubly prolix and garrulous. He
+      reveled in his office of showing the palace, and did homage to the
+      visitor's charge and nation by an infinite expansion upon all possible
+      points of interest, lest he should go away imperfectly informed of
+      anything. By dint of frequent encounter with strangers, this Custode had
+      picked up many shreds and fragments of many languages, and did not permit
+      the travellers to consider themselves as having at all understood him
+      until he had repeated everything in Italian, English, French, and German.
+      He led the way with his polyglot babble through an endless number of those
+      magnificent and uninteresting chambers which palaces seem specially built
+      to contain, that men may be content to dwell in the humbler dullness of
+      their own houses; and though the travellers often prayed him to show them
+      the apartments containing the works of Mantegna, they really got to see
+      nothing of this painter's in the Ducal Palace, except, here and there,
+      some evanescent frescoes, which the Custode would not go beyond a <i>si
+      crede</i> in attributing to him. Indeed, it is known that the works of
+      Mantegna suffered grievously in the wars of the last century, and his
+      memory has faded so dim in this palace where he wrought, that the guide
+      could not understand the curiosity of the foreigners concerning the old
+      painter; and certainly Giulio Romano has stamped himself more ineffaceably
+      than Mantegna upon Mantua.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the Ducal Palace are seen vividly contrasted the fineness and strength,
+      the delicacy and courage of the fancy, which, rather than the higher gift
+      of imagination, characterize Giulio's work. There is such an airy
+      refinement and subtile grace in the pretty grotesques with which he
+      decorates a chamber; there is such daring luxury of color and design in
+      the pictures for which his grand halls are merely the frames. No doubt I
+      could make fine speeches about these paintings; but who, not seeing them,
+      would be the wiser, after the best description and the choicest critical
+      disquisition? In fact, our travellers themselves found it pleasanter,
+      after a while, to yield to the guidance of the Custode, and to enjoy the
+      stupider marvels of the place, than to do the set and difficult admiration
+      of the works of art. So, passing the apartments in good preservation (the
+      Austrian Emperors had taken good care of some parts of the palace of one
+      of their first Italian possessions), they did justice to the splendor of
+      the satin beds and the other upholstery work; they admired rich
+      carpentering and costly toys; they dwelt on marvelous tapestries (among
+      which the tapestry copies of Raphael's cartoons, woven at Mantua in the
+      fifteenth century, are certainly worthy of wonder); and they expressed the
+      proper amazement at the miracles of art which caused figures frescoed in
+      the ceilings to turn with them, and follow and face them from whatever
+      part of the room they chose to look. Nay, they even enjoyed the Hall of
+      the Rivers, on the sides of which the usual river-gods were painted, in
+      the company of the usual pottery, from which they pour their founts, and
+      at the end of which there was an abominable little grotto of what people
+      call, in modern landscape-gardening, rock-work, out of the despair with
+      which its unmeaning ugliness fills them. There were busts of several
+      Mantuan duchesses in the gallery, which were interesting, and the pictures
+      were so bad as to molest no one. There was, besides all this, a hanging
+      garden in this small Babylon, on which the travellers looked with a
+      doleful regret that they were no longer of the age when a hanging garden
+      would have brought supreme comfort to the soul. It occupied a spacious
+      oblong, had a fountain and statues, trees and flowers, and would certainly
+      have been taken for the surface of the earth, had not the Custode proudly
+      pointed out that it was on a level with the second floor, on which they
+      stood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that they wandered through a series of unused, dismantled apartments
+      and halls, melancholy with faded fresco, dropping stucco, and mutilated
+      statues of plaster, and came at last upon a balcony overlooking the
+      Cavallerizza, which one of the early dukes built after a design by the
+      inevitable Giulio Romano. It is a large square, and was meant for the
+      diversion of riding on horseback. Balconies go all found it between those
+      thick columns, finely twisted, as we see them in that cartoon of Raphael,
+      "The Healing of the Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple"; and
+      here once stood the jolly dukes and the jolly ladies of their
+      light-hearted court, and there below rode the gay, insolent, intriguing
+      courtiers, and outside groaned the city under the heavy extortions of the
+      tax-gatherers. It is all in weather-worn stucco, and the handsome square
+      is planted with trees. The turf was now cut and carved by the heavy wheels
+      of the Austrian baggage-wagons constantly passing through the court to
+      carry munitions to the fortress outside, whose black guns grimly overlook
+      the dead lagoon. A sense of desolation had crept over the sight-seers,
+      with that strange sickness of heart which one feels in the presence of
+      ruin not to be lamented, and which deepened into actual pain as the
+      Custode clapped his hands and the echo buffeted itself against the forlorn
+      stucco, and up from the trees rose a score of sullen, slumberous owls, and
+      flapped heavily across the lonesome air with melancholy cries. It only
+      needed, to crush these poor strangers, that final touch which the Custode
+      gave, as they passed from the palace through the hall in which are painted
+      the Gonzagas, and in which he pointed out the last Duke of Mantua, saying
+      he was deposed by the Emperor for felony, and somehow conveying the idea
+      of horse-stealing and counterfeiting on the part of his Grace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A very different man from this rogue was our old friend Lodovico, who
+      also, however, had his troubles. He was an enemy of the Ghibellines, and
+      fought them a great deal. Of course he had the habitual wars with Milan,
+      and he was obliged to do battle with his own brother Carlo to some extent.
+      This Gonzaga had been taken prisoner by Sforza; and Lodovico, having paid
+      for him a ransom of sixty thousand florins of gold (which Carlo was
+      scarcely worth), seized the fraternal lands, and held them in pledge of
+      repayment. Carlo could not pay, and tried to get back his possessions by
+      war. Vexed with these and other contentions, Lodovico was also unhappy in
+      his son, whose romance I may best tell in the words of the history [Volta:
+      <i>Storia di Mantova</i>.], from which I take it:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    "Lodovico Gonzaga, having agreed with the Duke of Bavaria to
+    take his daughter Margherita as wife for his (Lodovico's)
+    first-born, Federico, and the young man having refused her,
+    Lodovico was so much enraged that he sought to imprison him;
+    but the Marchioness Barbara, mother of Federico, caused him to
+    fly from the city till his father's anger should be abated.
+    Federico departed with six attendants [The <i>Fioretto delle
+    Cronache</i> says "persons of gentle condition."]; but this flight
+    caused still greater displeasure to his father, who now
+    declared him banished, and threatened with heavy penalties any
+    one who should give him help or favor. Federico, therefore,
+    wandered about with these six attendants in diverse places, and
+    finally arrived in Naples; but having already spent all his
+    substance, and not daring to make himself known for fear of his
+    father, he fell into great want, and so into severe sickness.
+    His companions having nothing wherewith to live, and not
+    knowing any trade by which to gain their bread, did menial
+    services fit for day-laborers, and sustained their lord with
+    their earnings, he remaining hidden in a poor woman's house
+    where they all dwelt.
+
+    "The Marchioness had sent many messengers in divers provinces
+    with money to find her son, but they never heard any news of
+    him; so that they thought him dead, not hearing anything,
+    either, of his attendants. Now it happened that one of those
+    who sought Federico came to Naples, and presented himself to
+    the king with a letter from the said lady, praying that he
+    should make search in his territory for a company of seven men,
+    giving the name and description of each. The king caused this
+    search to be made by the heads of the district; and one of
+    these heads told how in his district there were six Lombard men
+    (not knowing of Federico, who lay ill), but that they were
+    laborers and of base condition. The king determined to see
+    them; and they being come before him, he demanded who they
+    were, and how many; as they were not willing to discover their
+    lord, on being asked their names they gave others, so that the
+    king, not being able to learn anything, would have dismissed
+    them. But the messenger sent by the Marchioness knew them, and
+    said to the king, 'Sire, these are the attendants of him whom I
+    seek; but they have changed their names.' The king caused them
+    to be separated one from another, and then asked them of their
+    Lord; and they, finding themselves separated, minutely narrated
+    everything; and the king immediately sent for Federico, whom
+    his officers found miserably ill on a heap of straw. He was
+    brought to the palace, where the king ordered him to be cared
+    for, sending the messenger back to his mother to advise her how
+    the men had been found and in what great misery. The
+    Marchioness went to her husband, and, having cast herself at
+    his feet, besought him of a grace. The Marquis answered that he
+    would grant everything, so it did not treat of Federico. Then
+    the lady opened him the letter of the king of Naples, which had
+    such effect that it softened the soul of the Marquis, showing
+    him in how great misery his son had been; and so, giving the
+    letter to the Marchioness, he said, 'Do that which pleases
+    you.' The Marchioness straightway sent the prince money, and
+    clothes to clothe him, in order that he should return to
+    Mantua; and having come, the son cast himself at his father's
+    feet, imploring pardon for himself and for his attendants; and
+    he pardoned them, and gave those attendants enough to live
+    honorably and like noblemen, and they were called The Faithful
+    of the House of Gonzaga, and from them come the <i>Fedeli</i> of
+    Mantua.
+
+    "The Marquis then, not to break faith, caused Federico to take
+    Margherita, daughter of the Duke of Bavaria, for his wife, and
+    celebrated the nuptials splendidly; so that there remained the
+    greatest love between father and son."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The son succeeded to the father's dominion in 1478; and it is recorded of
+      him in the "Flower of the Chronicles," that he was a hater of idleness,
+      and a just man, greatly beloved by his people. They chiefly objected to
+      him that he placed a Jew, Eusebio Malatesta, at the head of civil affairs;
+      and this Jew was indeed the cause of great mischief: for Ridolfo Gonzaga
+      coming to reside with his wife for a time at the court of his brother, the
+      Marquis, Malatesta fell in love with her. She repelled him, and the bitter
+      Jew thereupon so poisoned her husband's mind with accusations against her
+      chastity, that he took her home to his town of Lazzaro, and there put the
+      unhappy and innocent lady to death by the headsman's hand in the great
+      square of the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Federico was Marquis only six years, and died in 1484, leaving his
+      marquisate to his son Francesco, the most ambitious, warlike, restless,
+      splendid prince of his magnificent race. This Gonzaga wore a beard, and
+      brought the custom into fashion in Italy again. He founded the famous
+      breed of Mantuan horses, and gave them about free-handedly to other
+      sovereigns of his acquaintance. To the English king he presented a steed
+      which, if we may trust history, could have been sold for almost its weight
+      in gold. He was so fond of hunting that he kept two hundred dogs of the
+      chase, and one hundred and fifty birds of prey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course this Gonzaga was a soldier, and indeed he loved war better even
+      than hunting, and delighted so much in personal feats of arms that,
+      concealing his name and quality, in order that the combat should be in all
+      things equal, he was wont to challenge renowned champions wherever he
+      heard of them, and to meet them in the lists. Great part of his life was
+      spent in the field; and he fought in turn on nearly all sides of the
+      political questions then agitating Italy. In 1495 he was at the head of
+      the Venetian and other Italian troops when they beat the French under
+      Charles VIII. at Taro, and made so little use of their victory as to let
+      their vanquished invaders escape from them after all. Nevertheless, if the
+      Gonzaga did not here show himself a great general, he did great feats of
+      personal valor, penetrating to the midst of the French forces, wounding
+      the king, and with his own hand taking prisoner the great Bastard of
+      Bourbon. Venice paid him ten thousand ducats for gaining the victory, such
+      as it was, and when peace was made he went to visit the French king at
+      Vercelli; and there Charles gave his guest a present of two magnificent
+      horses, which the Gonzaga returned yet more splendidly in kind. About five
+      years later he was again at war with the French, and helped the Aragonese
+      drive them out of Naples. In 1506, Pope Julius II. made him leader of the
+      armies of the Church (for he had now quitted the Venetian service), and he
+      reduced the city of Bologna to obedience to the Holy See. In 1509 he
+      joined the League of Cambray against Venice, and, being made Imperial
+      Captain-General, was taken prisoner by the Venetians. They liberated him,
+      however, the following year; and in 1513 we find him at the head of the
+      league against the French.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A curious anecdote of this Gonzaga's hospitality is also illustrative of
+      the anomalous life of those times, when good faith had as little to do
+      with the intercourse of nations as at present; but good fortune, when she
+      appeared in the world, liked to put on a romantic and melodramatic guise.
+      An ambassador from the Grand Turk on his way to Rome was taken by an enemy
+      of the Pope, despoiled of all his money, and left planted, as the Italians
+      expressively say, at Ancona. This ambassador was come to concert with
+      Alexander VI. the death of Bajazet's brother, prisoner in the Pope's
+      hands, and he bore the Pope a present of 50,000 gold ducats. It was Gian
+      Della Rovere who seized and spoiled him, and sent the papers (letters of
+      the Pope and Sultan) to Charles VIII. of France, to whom Alexander had
+      been obliged to give the Grand Turk's brother. The magnificent Gonzaga
+      hears of the Turk's embarrassing mischance, sends and fetches him to
+      Mantua, clothes him, puts abundant money in his purse, and dispatches him
+      on his way. The Sultan, in reward of this courtesy to his servant, gave a
+      number of fine horses to the Marquis, who, possibly being tired of
+      presenting his own horses, returned the Porte a ship-load of excellent
+      Mantuan cheeses. This interchange of compliments seems to have led to a
+      kind of romantic friendship between the Gonzaga and the Grand Turk, who
+      did occasionally interest himself in the affairs of the Christian dogs;
+      and who, when Francesco lay prisoner at Venice, actually wrote to the
+      Serenest Senate, and asked his release as a personal grace to him, the
+      Grand Turk. And Francesco was, thereupon, let go; the canny republic being
+      willing to do the Sultan any sort of cheap favor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Gonzaga, being so much engaged in war, seems to have had little time
+      for the adornment of his capital. The Church of Our Lady of Victory is the
+      only edifice which he added to it; and this was merely in glorification of
+      his own triumph over the French at Taro. Mantegna painted an altar-piece
+      for it, representing the Marquis and his wife on their knees before the
+      Virgin, in act of rendering her thanks for the victory. The French nation
+      avenged itself for whatever wrong was done its pride in this picture by
+      stealing it away from Mantua in Napoleon's time; and it now hangs in the
+      gallery of the Louvre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Francesco died in 1519; and after him his son, Federico II., the first
+      Duke of Mantua, reigned some twenty-one years, and died in 1540. The
+      marquisate in his time was made a duchy by the Emperor Charles V., to whom
+      the Gonzaga had given efficient aid in his wars against the French. This
+      was in the year 1530; and three years later, when the Duke of Monferrato
+      died, and the inheritance of his opulent little state was disputed by the
+      Duke of Savoy, by the Marquis of Saluzzo, and by the Gonzaga, who had
+      married the late Duke's daughter, Charles's influence secured it to the
+      Mantuan. The dominions of the Gonzagas had now reached their utmost
+      extent, and these dominions were not curtailed till the deposition of
+      Fernando Carlo in 1708, when Monferrato was adjudged to the Duke of Savoy,
+      and afterwards confirmed to him by treaty. It was separated from the
+      capital of the Gonzagas by a wide extent of alien territory, but they held
+      it with a strong hand, embellished the city, and founded there the
+      strongest citadel in Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Federico, after his wars for the Emperor, appears to have reposed in peace
+      for the rest of his days, and to have devoted himself to the adornment of
+      Mantua and the aggrandizing of his family. His court was the home of many
+      artists; and Titian painted for him the Twelve Cæsars, which the Germans
+      stole when they sacked the city in 1630. But his great agent and best
+      beloved genius was Giulio Pippi, called Romano, who was conducted to
+      Mantua by pleasant Count Baldassare Castiglione.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pleasant Count Baldassare Castiglione! whose incomparable book of the
+      "Cortigiano" succeeded in teaching his countrymen every gentlemanly grace
+      but virtue. He was born at Casatico in the Mantovano, in the year 1476,
+      and went in his boyhood to be schooled at Milan, where he learnt the
+      profession of arms. From Milan he went to Rome, where he exercised his
+      profession of arms till the year 1504, when he was called to gentler uses
+      at the court of the elegant Dukes of Urbino. He lived there as courtier
+      and court-poet, and he returned to Rome as the ambassador from Urbino.
+      Meantime his liege, Francesco Gonzaga, was but poorly pleased that so
+      brilliant a Mantuan should spend his life in the service and ornament of
+      other princes, and Castiglione came back to his native country about the
+      year 1516. He married in Mantua, and there finished his famous book of
+      "The Courtier," and succeeded in winning back the favor of his prince.
+      Federico, the Duke, made him ambassador to Rome in 1528; and Baldassare
+      did his master two signal services there,&mdash;he procured him to be
+      named head of all the Papal forces, and he found him Giulio Romano. So the
+      Duke suffered him to go as the Pope's Nuncio to Spain, and Baldassare
+      finished his courtly days at Toledo in 1529.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The poet made a detour to Mantua on his way to Spain, taking with him the
+      painter, whom the Duke received with many caresses, as Vasari says,
+      presented him a house honorably furnished, ordered provision for him and
+      his pupils, gave them certain brave suits of velvet and satin, and, seeing
+      that Giulio had no horse, called for his own favorite Luggieri, and
+      bestowed it on him. Ah! they knew how to receive painters, those fine
+      princes, who had merely to put their hands into their people's pocket, and
+      take out what florins they liked. So the Duke presently set the artist to
+      work, riding out with him through the gate of San Bastiano to some stables
+      about a bow-shot from the walls, in the midst of a flat meadow, where he
+      told Giulio that he would be glad (if it could be done without destroying
+      the old walls) to have such buildings added to the stables as would serve
+      him for a kind of lodge, to come out and merrily sup in when he liked.
+      Whereupon Giulio began to think out the famous Palazzo del T.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This painter is an unlucky kind of man, to whom all criticism seems to
+      have agreed to attribute great power and deny great praise. Castiglione
+      had found him at Rome, after the death of his master Raphael, when his
+      genius, for good or for ill, began for the first time to find original
+      expression. At Mantua, where he spent all the rest of his busy life, it is
+      impossible not to feel in some degree the force of this genius. As in
+      Venice all the Madonnas in the street-corner shrines have some touch of
+      color to confess the painter's subjection to Titian or Tintoretto; as in
+      Vicenza the edifices are all in Greekish taste, and stilted upon pedestals
+      in honor and homage to Palladio; as in Parma Correggio has never died, but
+      lives to this day in the mouths and chiaroscuro effects of all the figures
+      in all the pictures painted there;&mdash;so in Mantua Giulio Romano is to
+      be found in the lines of every painting and every palace. It is wonderful
+      to see, in these little Italian cities which have been the homes of great
+      men, how no succeeding generation has dared to wrong the memory of them by
+      departing in the least from their precepts upon art. One fancies, for
+      instance, the immense scorn with which the Vicentines would greet the
+      audacity of any young architect who dared to think Gothic instead of
+      Palladian Greek, and how they would put him to shame by asking him if he
+      knew more than Palladio about architecture! It seems that original art
+      cannot arise in the presence of the great virtues and the great errors of
+      the past; and Italian art of this day seems incapable of even the feeble,
+      mortal life of other modern art, in the midst of so much immortality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Giulio Romano did a little of everything for the Dukes of Mantua,&mdash;from
+      painting the most delicate and improper little fresco for a bed-chamber to
+      restraining the Po and the Mincio with immense dikes, restoring ancient
+      edifices and building new ones, draining swamps and demolishing and
+      reconstructing whole streets, painting palaces and churches, and designing
+      the city slaughter-house. He grew old and very rich in the service of the
+      Gonzagas; but though Mrs. Jameson says he commanded respect by a sense of
+      his own dignity as an artist, the Bishop of Casale, who wrote the "Annali
+      di Mantova," says that the want of nobility and purity in his style, and
+      his "gallant inventions, were conformable to his own sensual life, and
+      that he did not disdain to prostitute himself to the infamies of Aretino."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His great architectural work in Mantua is the Palazzo del T, or Tè, as it
+      is now written. It was first called Palazzo del T, from the convergence of
+      roads there in the form of that letter; and the modern Mantuans call it
+      Del Tè, from the superstition, transmitted to us by the Custode of the
+      Ducal Palace, that the Gonzagas merely used it on pleasant afternoons to
+      take tea in! so curiously has latter-day guidemanship interpreted the
+      jolly purpose expressed by the Duke to Giulio. I say nothing to control
+      the reader's choice between T and Tè, and merely adhere to the elder style
+      out of reverence for the past. It is certain that the air of the plain on
+      which the palace stands is most unwholesome; and it may have been true
+      that the dukes never passed the night there. Federico did not intend to
+      build more than a lodge in this place; but fascinated with the design
+      offered him by Giulio, he caused the artist to go on, and contrive him a
+      palace instead. It stands, as Vasari says, about a good bow-shot from one
+      of the city's gates; and going out to see the palace on our second day in
+      Mantua, we crossed a drawbridge guarded by Austrian soldiers. Below
+      languished a bed of sullen ooze, tangled and thickly grown with long,
+      villainous grasses, and sending up a damp and deathly stench, which made
+      all the faces we saw look feverish and sallow. Already at that early
+      season the air was foul and heavy, and the sun, faintly making himself
+      seen through the dun sky of the dull spring day, seemed sick to look upon
+      the place, where indeed the only happy and lively things were the clouds
+      of gnats that danced before us, and welcomed us to the Palazzo del T. Damp
+      ditches surround the palace, in which these gnats seemed to have peculiar
+      pleasure; and they took possession of the portico of the stately entrance
+      of the edifice as we went in, and held it faithfully till we returned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one of the first large rooms are the life-size portraits of the six
+      finest horses of the Gonzaga stud, painted by the pupils of Giulio Romano,
+      after the master's designs. The paintings attest the beauty of the Mantuan
+      horses, and the pride and fondness of their ducal owners; and trustworthy
+      critics have praised their eminent truth. But it is only the artist or the
+      hippanthrop who can delight in them long; and we presently left them for
+      the other chambers, in which the invention of Giulio had been used to
+      please himself rather than his master. I scarcely mean to name the wonders
+      of the palace, having, indeed, general associations with them, rather than
+      particular recollections of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the most famous rooms is the Chamber of Psyche (the apartments are
+      not of great size), of which the ceiling is by Giulio and the walls are by
+      his pupils. The whole illustrates, with every variety of fantastic
+      invention, the story of Psyche, as told by Apuleius, and deserves to be
+      curiously studied as a part of the fair outside of a superb and corrupt
+      age, the inside of which was full of rottenness. The civilization of
+      Italy, as a growth from the earliest Pagan times, and only modified by
+      Christianity and the admixture of Northern blood and thought, is yet to be
+      carefully analyzed; and until this analysis is made, discussion of certain
+      features must necessarily be incomplete and unsatisfactory. No one,
+      however, can stand in this Chamber of Psyche, and not feel how great
+      reality the old mythology must still have had, not only for the artists
+      who painted the room, but for the people who inhabited it and enjoyed it.
+      I do not say that they believed it as they believed in the vital articles
+      of Christian faith, but that they accepted it with the same spirit as they
+      accepted the martyrology of the Church; and that to the fine gentlemen and
+      ladies of the court, those jolly satyrs and careless nymphs, those Cupids
+      and Psyches, and Dianas and Venuses, were of the same verity as the
+      Fathers of the Desert, the Devil, and the great body of the saints. If
+      they did not pray to them, they swore by them, and their names were much
+      oftener on their lips; and the art of the time was so thoroughly Pagan,
+      that it forgot all Christian holiness, and clung only to heathen beauty.
+      When it had not actually a mythologic subject to deal with, it paganized
+      Christian themes. St. Sebastian was made to look like Apollo, and Mary
+      Magdalene was merely a tearful, triste Venus. There is scarcely a ray of
+      feeling in Italian art since Raphael's time which suggests Christianity in
+      the artist, or teaches it to the beholder. In confessedly Pagan subjects
+      it was happiest, as in the life of Psyche, in this room; and here it
+      inculcated a gay and spirited license, and an elegant absence of delicacy,
+      which is still observable in Italian life. It would be instructive to know
+      in what spirit the common Mantuans of his day looked upon the inventions
+      of the painter, and how far the courtly circle which frequented this room
+      went in discussion and comment on its subjects; they were not nice people,
+      and probably had no nasty ideas about the unspeakable indecency of some of
+      the scenes. [The ruin in the famous room frescoed with the Fall of the
+      Giants commences on the very door-jambs, which are painted in broken and
+      tumbling brick-work; and throughout there is a prodigiousness which does
+      not surprise, and a bigness which does not impress; and the treatment of
+      the subject can only be expressed by the Westernism <i>powerfully weak</i>.
+      In Kugler's <i>Hand-book of Italian Painting</i> are two illustrations,
+      representing parts of the fresco, which give a fair idea of the whole.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Returning to the city we visited the house of Giulio Romano, which stands
+      in one of the fine, lonesome streets, and at the outside of which we
+      looked. The artist designed it himself; and it is very pretty, with
+      delicacy of feeling in the fine stucco ornamentation, but is not otherwise
+      interesting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We passed it, continuing our way toward the Arsenal, near which we had
+      seen the women at work washing the linen coats of the garrison in the
+      twilight of the evening before; and we now saw them again from the bridge,
+      on which we paused to look at a picturesque bit of modern life in Mantua.
+      The washing-machine (when the successful instrument is invented) may do
+      its work as well, but not so charmingly, as these Mantuan girls did. They
+      washed the linen in a clear, swift-running stream, diverted from the dam
+      of the Mincio to furnish mill-power within the city wall; and we could
+      look down the watercourse past old arcades of masonry half submerged in
+      it, past pleasant angles of houses and a lazy mill-wheel turning slowly,
+      slowly, till our view ended in the gallery of a time-worn palace, through
+      the columns of which was seen the blue sky. Under the bridge the stream
+      ran very strong and lucid, over long, green, undulating water-grasses,
+      which it loved to dimple over and play with. On the right were the
+      laundresses under the eaves of a wooden shed, each kneeling, as their
+      custom is, in a three-sided box, and leaning forward over the washboard
+      that sloped down into the water. As they washed they held the linen in one
+      hand, and rubbed it with the other; then heaped it into a mass upon the
+      board and beat it with great two-handed blows of a stick. They sang,
+      meanwhile, one of those plaintive airs of which the Italian peasants are
+      fond, and which rose in indescribable pathos, pulsing with their blows,
+      and rhythmic with the graceful movement of their forms. Many of the women
+      were young,&mdash;though they were of all ages,&mdash;and the prettiest
+      among them was third from where we stood upon the bridge. She caught sight
+      of the sketch-book which one of the travellers carried, and pointed it out
+      to the rest, who could hardly settle to their work to be sketched.
+      Presently an idle baker, whose shop adjoined the bridge, came out and
+      leaned upon the parapet, and bantered the girls. "They are drawing the
+      prettiest," he said, at which they all bridled a little; and she who knew
+      herself to be prettiest hung her head and rubbed furiously at the linen.
+      Long before the artist had finished the sketch, the lazy, good-humored
+      crowd which the public practice of the fine arts always attract in Italy,
+      had surrounded the strangers, and were applauding, commenting, comparing,
+      and absorbing every stroke as it was made. When the book was closed and
+      they walked away, a number of boys straggled after them some spaces,
+      inspired by a curious longing and regret, like that which leads boys to
+      the eager inspection of fireworks when they have gone out. We lost them at
+      the first turning of the street, whither the melancholy chorus of the
+      women's song had also followed us, and where it died pathetically away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the evening we walked to the Piazza Virgiliana, the beautiful space
+      laid out and planted with trees by the French, at the beginning of this
+      century in honor of the great Mantuan poet. One of its bounds is the shore
+      of the lake which surrounds the city, and from which now rose ghostly
+      vapors on the still twilight air. Down the slow, dull current moved one of
+      the picturesque black boats of the Po; and beyond, the level landscape had
+      a pleasant desolation that recalled the scenery of the Middle Mississippi.
+      It might have been here in this very water that the first-born of our
+      first Duke of Mantua fell from his boat while hunting water-fowl in 1550,
+      and took a fever of which he died only a short time after his accession to
+      the sovereignty of the duchy. At any rate, the fact of the accident brings
+      me back from lounging up and down Mantua to my grave duty of chronicler.
+      Francesco's father had left him in childhood to the care of his uncle, the
+      Cardinal Hercules, who ruled Mantua with a firm and able hand, increasing
+      the income of the state, spending less upon the ducal stud, and cutting
+      down the number of mouths at the ducal table from eight hundred to three
+      hundred and fifty-one. His justice tended to severity rather than mercy;
+      but reformers of our own time will argue well of his heart, that he
+      founded in that time a place of refuge and retirement for abandoned women.
+      Good Catholics will also be pleased to know that he was very efficient in
+      suppressing the black heresy of Calvin, which had crept into Mantua in his
+      day,&mdash;probably from Ferrara, where the black heretic himself was
+      then, or about then, in hiding under the protection of the ill-advised
+      Marchioness Renée. The good Cardinal received the Pope's applause for his
+      energy in this matter, and I doubt not his hand fell heavily on the
+      Calvinists. Of the Duke who died so young, the Venetian ambassador thought
+      it worth while to write what I think it worth while to quote, as
+      illustrating the desire of the Senate to have careful knowledge of its
+      neighbors: "He is a boy of melancholy complexion. His eyes are full of
+      spirit, but he does not delight in childish things, and seems secretly
+      proud of being lord. He has an excellent memory, and shows much
+      inclination for letters."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His brother Guglielmo, who succeeded him in 1550, seems to have had the
+      same affection for learning; but he was willful, harsh, and cruelly
+      ambitious, and cared, an old writer says, for nothing so much as
+      perpetuating the race of the Gonzagas in Mantua. He was a hunchback, and
+      some of his family (who could not have understood his character) tried to
+      persuade him not to assume the ducal dignity; but his haughty temper soon
+      righted him in their esteem, and it is said that all the courtiers put on
+      humps in honor of the Duke. He was not a great warrior, and there are few
+      picturesque incidents in his reign. Indeed, nearly the last of these in
+      Mantuan history was the coronation at Mantua of the excellent poet
+      Lodovico Ariosto, by Charles V., in 1532, Federico II. reigning. But the
+      Mantuans of Guglielmo's day were not without their sensations, for three
+      Japanese ambassadors passed through their city on the way to Rome. They
+      were also awakened to religious zeal by the reappearance of Protestantism
+      among them. The heresy was happily suppressed by the Inquisition, acting
+      under Pius V., though with small thanks to Duke William, who seems to have
+      taken no fervent part in the persecutions. "The proceedings," says Cantù,
+      writing before slavery had been abolished, "were marked by those
+      punishments which free America inflicts upon the negroes to-day, and which
+      a high conception of the mission of the Church moves us to deplore." The
+      Duke must have made haste after this to reconcile himself with the Church;
+      for we read that two years later he was permitted to take a particle of
+      the blood of Christ from the church of St. Andrea to that of Sta. Barbara,
+      where he deposited it in a box of crystal and gold, and caused his statue
+      to be placed before the shrine in the act of adoring the relic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Duke William managed his finances so well as to leave his spendthrift son
+      Vincenzo a large sum of money to make away with after his death. Part of
+      this, indeed, he had earned by obedience to his father's wishes in the
+      article of matrimony. The prince was in love with the niece of the Duke of
+      Bavaria, very lovely and certainly high-born enough, but having unhappily
+      only sixty thousand crowns to her portion. So she was not to be thought
+      of, and Vincenzo married the sister of the Duke of Parma, of whom he grew
+      so fond, that, though two years of marriage brought them no children, he
+      could scarce be persuaded to suffer her divorce on account of sterility.
+      This happened, however, and the prince's affections were next engaged by
+      the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The lady had a portion of three
+      hundred thousand crowns, which entirely charmed the frugal-minded Duke
+      William, and Vincenzo married her, after certain diplomatic preliminaries
+      demanded by the circumstances, which scarcely bear statement in English,
+      and which the present history would blush to give even in Italian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, he was a great beast, this splendid Vincenzo, both by his own
+      fault and that of others; but it ought to be remembered of him, that at
+      his solicitation the most clement lord of Ferrara liberated from durance
+      in the hospital of St. Anna his poet Tasso, whom he had kept shut in that
+      mad-house seven years. On his delivery, Tasso addressed his "Discorso" to
+      Vincenzo's kinsman, the learned Cardinal Scipio Gonzaga; and to this
+      prelate he submitted for correction the "Gerusalemme," as did Guarini his
+      "Pastor Fido."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Vincenzo came to power he found a fat treasury, which he enjoyed
+      after the fashion of the time, and which, having a princely passion for
+      every costly pleasure, he soon emptied. He was crowned in 1587; and on his
+      coronation day rode through the streets throwing gold to the people, after
+      the manner of the Mantuan Dukes. He kept up an army of six thousand men,
+      among a population of eighty thousand all told; and maintained as his
+      guard "fifty archers on horseback, who also served with the arquebuse, and
+      fifty light-horsemen for the guard of his own person, who were all
+      excellently mounted, the Duke possessing such a noble stud of horses that
+      he always had five hundred at his service, and kept in stable one hundred
+      and fifty of marvelous beauty." He lent the Spanish king two hundred
+      thousand pounds out of his father's sparings; and when the Archduchess of
+      Austria, Margherita, passed through Mantua on her way to wed Philip II. of
+      Spain, he gave her a diamond ring worth twelve thousand crowns. Next after
+      women, he was madly fond of the theatre, and spent immense sums for
+      actors. He would not, indeed, cede in splendor to the greatest monarchs,
+      and in his reign of fifteen years he squandered fifty million crowns! No
+      one will be surprised to learn from a contemporary writer in Mantua, that
+      this excellent prince was adorned with all the Christian virtues; nor to
+      be told by a later historian, that in Vincenzo's time Mantua was the most
+      corrupt city in Europe. A satire of the year 1601, which this writer
+      (Maffei) reduces to prose, says of that period: "Everywhere in Mantua are
+      seen feasts, jousts, masks, banquets, plays, music, balls, delights,
+      dancing. To these, the young girls," an enormity in Italy, "as well as the
+      matrons, go in magnificent dresses; and even the churches are scenes of
+      love-making. Good mothers, instead of teaching their daughters the use of
+      the needle, teach them the arts of rouging, dressing, singing, and
+      dancing. Naples and Milan scarcely produce silk enough, or India and Peru
+      gold and gems enough, to deck out female impudence and pride. Courtiers
+      and warriors perfume themselves as delicately as ladies; and even the food
+      is scented, that the mouth may exhale fragrance. The galleries and halls
+      of the houses are painted full of the loves of Mars and Venus, Leda and
+      the Swan, Jove and Danae, while the devout solace themselves with such
+      sacred subjects as Susannah and the Elders. The flower of chastity seems
+      withered in Mantua. No longer in Lydia nor in Cyprus, but in Mantua, is
+      fixed the realm of pleasure." The Mantuans were a different people in the
+      old republican times, when a fine was imposed for blasphemy, and the
+      blasphemer put into a basket and drowned in the lake, if he did not pay
+      within fifteen days; which must have made profanity a luxury even to the
+      rich. But in that day a man had to pay twenty soldi (seventy-five cents)
+      if he spoke to a woman in church; and women were not allowed even the
+      moderate diversion of going to funerals, and could not wear silk lace
+      about the neck, nor have dresses that dragged more than a yard, nor crowns
+      of pearls or gems, nor belts worth more than ten livres (twenty-five
+      dollars), nor purses worth more than fifteen soldi (fifty cents.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Possibly as an antidote for the corruption brought into the world with
+      Vincenzo, there was another Gonzaga born about the same period, who became
+      in due time Saint Louis Gonzaga, and remains to this day one of the most
+      powerful friends of virtue to whom a good Catholic can pray. He is
+      particularly recommended by his biographer, the Jesuit Father Cesari, in
+      cases of carnal temptation, and improving stories are told Italian youth
+      of the miracles he works under such circumstances. He vowed chastity for
+      his own part at an age when most children do not know good from evil, and
+      he carried the fulfillment of this vow to such extreme, that, being one
+      day at play of forfeits with other boys and girls, and being required to
+      kiss&mdash;not one of the little maidens&mdash;but her <i>shadow</i> on
+      the wall, he would not, preferring to lose his pawn. Everybody, I think,
+      will agree with Father Cesari that it would be hard to draw chastity finer
+      than this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      San Luigi Gonzaga descended from that Ridolfo who put his wife to death,
+      and his father was Marquis of Castiglione delle Stivere. He was born in
+      1568, and, being the first son, was heir to the marquisate; but from his
+      earliest years he had a call to the Church. His family did everything
+      possible to dissuade him&mdash;his father with harshness, and his uncle,
+      Duke William of Mantua, with tenderness&mdash;from his vocation. The
+      latter even sent a "bishop of rare eloquence" to labor with the boy at
+      Castiglione; but everything was done in vain. In due time Luigi joined the
+      Company of Jesus, renounced this world, and died at Rome in the odor of
+      sanctity, after doing such good works as surprised every one. His brother
+      Ridolfo succeeded to the marquisate, and fell into a quarrel with Duke
+      William about lands, which dispute Luigi composed before his death. About
+      all which the reverend Jesuit Father Tolomei has shown how far heaviness
+      can go in the dramatic form, and has written a pitiless play, wherein
+      everybody goes into a convent with the fall of the curtain. Till the
+      reader has read this play, he has never (properly speaking) been bored.
+      For the happiness of mankind, it has not been translated out of the
+      original Italian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the time of the first Vincenzo's death, there are only two tragic
+      events which lift the character of Mantuan history above the quality of <i>chronique
+      scandaleuse</i>, namely, the Duke Ferdinand's repudiation of Camilla Faa
+      di Casale, and the sack of Mantua in 1630. The first of these events
+      followed close upon the demise of the splendid Vincenzo; for his son
+      Francesco reigned but a short time, and died, leaving a little daughter of
+      three years to the guardianship of her uncle, the Cardinal Ferdinand. The
+      law of the Mantuan succession excluded females; and Ferdinand, dispensed
+      from his ecclesiastical functions by the Pope, ascended the ducal throne.
+      In 1615, not long after his accession, as the chronicles relate, in
+      passing through a chamber of the palace he saw a young girl playing upon a
+      cithern, and being himself young, and of the ardent temper of the
+      Gonzagas, he fell in love with the fair minstrel. She was the daughter of
+      a noble servant of the Duke, who had once been his ambassador to the court
+      of the Duke of Savoy, and was called Count Ardizzo Faa Monferrino di
+      Casale; but his Grace did not on that account hesitate to attempt
+      corrupting her; indeed, a courtly father of that day might well be
+      supposed to have few scruples that would interfere with a gracious
+      sovereign's designs upon his daughter. Singularly enough, the chastity of
+      Camilla was so well guarded that the ex-cardinal was at last forced to
+      propose marriage. It seems that the poor girl loved her ducal wooer; and
+      besides, the ducal crown was a glittering temptation, and she consented to
+      a marriage which, for state and family reasons, was made secret. When the
+      fact was bruited, it raised the wrath and ridicule of Ferdinand's family,
+      and the Duke's sister Margaret, Duchess of Ferrara, had so lofty a disdain
+      of his <i>mésalliance</i> with an inferior, that she drove him to
+      desperation with her sarcasms. About this time Camilla's father died, with
+      strong evidences of poisoning; and the wife being left helpless and
+      friendless, her noble husband resorted to the artifice of feigning that
+      there had never been any marriage, and thus sought to appease his family.
+      Unhappily, however, he had given her a certificate of matrimony, which she
+      refused to surrender when he put her away, so that the Duke, desiring
+      afterwards to espouse the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was
+      obliged to present a counterfeit certificate to his bride, who believed it
+      the real marriage contract, and destroyed it. When the Duchess discovered
+      the imposition, she would not rest till she had wrung the real document
+      from Camilla, under the threat of putting her son to death. The miserable
+      mother then retired to a convent, and died of a broken heart, while
+      Ferdinand bastardized his only legitimate son, a noble boy, whom his
+      mother had prettily called Jacinth. After this, a kind of retribution,
+      amid all his political successes, seems to have pursued the guilty Duke.
+      His second wife was too fat to bear children, but not to bear malice; and
+      she never ceased to distrust and reproach the Duke, whom she could not
+      believe in anything since the affair of the counterfeit marriage contract.
+      She was very religious, and embittered Ferdinand's days with continued
+      sermons and reproofs, and made him order, in the merry Mantuan court, all
+      the devotions commanded by her confessor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So Ferdinand died childless, and, it is said, in sore remorse, and was
+      succeeded in 1626 by his brother Vincenzo, another hope of the faith and
+      light of the Church. His brief reign lasted but one year, and was ignoble
+      as it was brief, and fitly ended the direct line of the Gonzagas.
+      Vincenzo, though an ecclesiastic, never studied anything, and was
+      disgracefully ignorant. Lacking the hereditary love of letters, he had not
+      the warlike boldness of his race; and resembled his ancestors only in the
+      love he bore to horses, hunting, and women. He was enamored of the widow
+      of one of his kinsmen, a woman no longer young, but of still agreeable
+      person, strong will, and quick wit, and of a fascinating presence, which
+      Vincenzo could not resist. The excellent prince was wooing her, with a
+      view to seduction, when he received the nomination of cardinal from Pope
+      Paul V. He pressed his suit, but the lady would consent to nothing but
+      marriage, and Vincenzo bundled up the cardinal's purple and sent it back,
+      with a very careless and ill-mannered letter to the ireful Pope, who swore
+      never to make another Gonzaga cardinal. He then married the widow, but
+      soon wearied of her, and spent the rest of his days in vain attempts to
+      secure a divorce, in order to be restored to his ecclesiastical benefices.
+      And one Christmas morning <i>he</i> died childless; and three years later
+      the famous sack of Mantua took place. The events leading to this crime are
+      part of one of the most complicated episodes of Italian history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ferdinand, as guardian of his brother's daughter Maria, claimed the Duchy
+      of Monferrato as part of his dominion; but his claim was disputed by
+      Maria's grandfather, the Duke of Savoy, who contended that it reverted to
+      him, on the death of his daughter, as a fief which had been added to
+      Mantua merely by the intermarriage of the Gonzagas with his family. He was
+      supported in this claim by the Spaniards, then at Milan. The Venetians and
+      the German Emperor supported Ferdinand, and the French advanced the claim
+      of a third, a descendant of Lodovico Gonzaga, who had left Mantua a
+      century before, and entered upon the inheritance of the Duchy of
+      Nevers-Rethel. The Duke of Savoy was one of the boldest of his warlike
+      race; and the Italians had great hopes of him as one great enough to drive
+      the barbarians out of Italy. But nearly three centuries more were wanted
+      to raise his family to the magnitude of a national purpose; and Carlo
+      Emanuel spent his greatness in disputes with the petty princes about him.
+      In this dispute for Monferrato he was worsted; for at the treaty of Pavia,
+      Monferrato was assured to Duke Ferdinand of Mantua.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ferdinand afterwards died without issue, and Vincenzo likewise died
+      childless; and Charles Gonzaga of Nevers-Rethel, who had married Maria,
+      Ferdinand's ward, became heir to the Duchy of Mantua, but his right was
+      disputed by Ferrante Gonzaga of Guastalla. Charles hurriedly and half
+      secretly introduced himself into Mantua without consultation with
+      Venetian, Spaniard, or German. While Duke Olivares of Spain was meditating
+      his recognition, his officer at Milan tried to seize Mantua and failed;
+      but the German Emperor had been even more deeply offended, and claimed the
+      remission of Charles's rights as a feudatory of the Roman Empire, until he
+      should have regularly invested him. Charles prepared for defense.
+      Meanwhile Spain and Savoy seized Monferrato, but they were afterwards
+      defeated by the French, and the Spanish Milanese was overrun by the
+      Venetians and Mantuans. The German Emperor then sent down his
+      Landsknechts, and in 1630 besieged Mantua, while the French promised help
+      and gave none, and the Pope exhorted Charles to submit. The Venetians,
+      occupied with the Uskok pirates, could do little in his defense. To the
+      horrors of this unequal and desperate war were added those of famine; and
+      the Jews, passing between the camp and the city, brought a pest from the
+      army into Mantua, which raged with extraordinary violence among the hungry
+      and miserable people. In vain they formed processions, and carried the
+      blood of Christ about the city. So many died that there were not boats
+      enough to bear them away to their sepulture in the lakes, and the bodies
+      rotted in the streets. There was not wanting at this time the presence of
+      a traitor in the devoted city; and that this wretch was a Swiss will be a
+      matter of no surprise. The despicable valor of these republicans has
+      everywhere formed the best defense of tyrants, and their fidelity has
+      always been at the service of the highest bidder. The recreant was a
+      lieutenant in the Swiss Guard of the Duke; and when he had led the Germans
+      into Mantua, and received the reward of his infamy, two German soldiers,
+      placed over him for his protection, killed him and plundered him of his
+      spoil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sack now began, and lasted three days, with unspeakable horrors. The
+      Germans (then the most slavish and merciless of soldiers) violated Mantuan
+      women, and buried their victims alive. The harlots of their camp cast off
+      their rags, and robing themselves in the richest spoils they could find,
+      rioted with brutal insult through the streets, and added the shame of
+      drunken orgies to the dreadful scene of blood and tears. The Jews were
+      driven forth almost naked from the Ghetto. The precious monuments of ages
+      were destroyed; or such as the fury of the soldiers spared, the avarice of
+      their generals consumed; and pictures, statues, and other works of art
+      were stolen and carried away. The churches were plundered, the sacred
+      houses of religion were sacked, and the nuns who did not meet a worse fate
+      went begging through the streets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The imperial general, Aldringher, had, immediately upon entering the city,
+      appropriated the Ducal Palace to himself as his share of the booty. He
+      placed a strong guard around it, and spoiled it at leisure and
+      systematically, and gained fabulous sums from the robbery. After the sack
+      was ended, he levied upon the population (from whom his soldiers had
+      forced everything that terror and torture could wring from them) four
+      contributions, amounting to a hundred thousand doubloons. This population
+      had, during the siege and sack, been reduced from thirty to twelve
+      thousand; and Aldringher had so thoroughly accomplished his part of the
+      spoliation, that the Duke Charles, returning after the withdrawal of the
+      Germans, could not find in the Ducal Palace so much as a bench to sit
+      upon. He and his family had fled half naked from their beds on the entry
+      of the Germans, and, after a pause in the citadel, had withdrawn to
+      Ariano, whence the Duke sent ambassadors to Vienna to expose his miserable
+      fate to the Emperor. The conduct of Aldringher was severely rebuked at the
+      capital; and the Empress sent Carlo's wife ten thousand zecchini, with
+      which they returned at length to Mantua. It is melancholy to read how his
+      neighbors had to compassionate his destitution: how the Grand Duke of
+      Tuscany sent him upholstery for two state chambers; how the Duke of Parma
+      supplied his table-service; how Alfonso of Modena gave him a hundred pairs
+      of oxen, and as many peasants to till his desolated lands. His people
+      always looked upon him with evil eyes, as the cause of their woes; and
+      after a reign of ten years he died of a broken heart, or, as some thought,
+      of poison.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Carlo had appointed as his successor his nephew and namesake, who
+      succeeded to the throne ten years after his uncle's death, the princess
+      Maria Gonzaga being regent during his minority. Carlo II. early manifested
+      the amorous disposition of his blood, but his reign was not distinguished
+      by remarkable events. He was of imperial politics during those
+      interminable French-Austrian wars, and the French desolated his dominions
+      more or less. In the time of this Carlo II., we read of the Jews being
+      condemned to pay the wages of the Duke's archers for the extremely
+      improbable crime of killing some Hebrews who had been converted; and there
+      is account of the Duchess going on foot to the sanctuary of Our Lady of
+      Grace, to render thanks for her son's recovery from a fever, and her
+      daughter's recovery from the bite of a monkey. Mantua must also have
+      regained something of its former gayety; for in 1652 the Austrian
+      Archdukes and the Medici spent Carnival there. Carlo II. died, like his
+      father, with suspicions of poisoning, and undoubted evidences of
+      debauchery. He was a generous and amiable prince; and, though a shameless
+      profligate, was beloved by his subjects, with whom, no doubt, his
+      profligacy was not a reproach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ferdinand Carlo, whose ignoble reign lasted from 1665 to 1708, was the
+      last and basest of his race. The histories of his country do not attribute
+      a single virtue to this unhappy prince, who seems to have united in
+      himself all the vices of all the Gonzagas. He was licentious and depraved
+      as the first Vincenzo, and he had not Vincenzo's courage; he was luxurious
+      as the second Francesco, but had none of his generosity; he taxed his
+      people heavily that he might meanly enjoy their substance without making
+      them even the poor return of national glory; he was grasping as Guglielmo,
+      but saved nothing to the state; he was as timid as the second Vincenzo,
+      and yet made a feint of making war, and went to Hungary at one time to
+      fight against the Turk. But he loved far better to go to Venice in his
+      gilded barge, and to spend his Carnivals amid the infinite variety of that
+      city's dissoluteness. He was so ignorant as scarcely to be able to write
+      his name; but he knew all vicious things from his cradle, as if, indeed,
+      he had been gifted to know them by instinct through the profligacy of his
+      parents. It is said that even the degraded Mantuans blushed to be ruled by
+      so dull and ignorant a wretch; but in his time, nevertheless, Mantua was
+      all rejoicings, promenades, pleasure-voyages, and merry-makings. "The Duke
+      recruited women from every country to stock his palace," says an Italian
+      author, "where they played, sang, and made merry at his will and theirs."
+      "In Venice," says Volta, "he surrendered himself to such diversions
+      without shame, or stint of expense. He not only took part in all public
+      entertainments and pleasures of that capital, but he held a most luxurious
+      and gallant court of his own; and all night long his palace was the scene
+      of theatrical representations by dissolute women, with music and
+      banqueting, so that he had a worse name than Sardanapalus of old." He
+      sneaked away to these gross delights in 1700, while the Emperor was at war
+      with the Spaniards, and left his Duchess (a brave and noble woman, the
+      daughter of Ferrante Gonzaga, Duke of Guastalla) to take care of the
+      duchy, then in great part occupied by Spanish and French forces. This was
+      the War of the Spanish Succession; and it used up poor Ferdinand, who had
+      not a shadow of interest in it. He had sold the fortress of Casale to the
+      French in 1681, feigning that they had taken it from him by fraud: and now
+      he declared that he was forced to admit eight thousand French and Spanish
+      troops into Mantua. Perhaps indeed he was, but the Emperor never would
+      believe it; and he pronounced Ferdinand guilty of felony against the
+      Empire, and deposed him from his duchy. The Duke appealed against this
+      sentence to the Diet of Ratisbon, and, pending the Diet's decision, made a
+      journey of pleasure to France, where the Grand Monarch named him
+      generalissimo of the French forces in Italy, though he never commanded
+      them. He came back to Mantua after a little, and built himself a splendid
+      theatre,&mdash;the cheerful Duke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But his end was near. The French and Austrians made peace in 1707; and
+      next year, Monferrato having fallen to Savoy, the Austrians entered
+      Mantua, whence the Duke promptly fled. The Austrians marched into Mantua
+      on the 29th of February, that being leap-year, and Ferdinand came back no
+      more. Indeed, trusting in false hopes of restoration held out to him by
+      Venice and France, he died on the 5th of the July following, at Padua,&mdash;it
+      was said by poison, but more probably of sin and sorrow. So ended Ducal
+      Mantua.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Austrians held the city till 1797. The French Revolution took it and
+      kept it till 1799, and then left it to the Austrians for two years. Then
+      the Cisalpine Republic possessed it till 1802; and then it was made part
+      of the Kingdom of Italy, and so continued twelve years; after which it
+      fell again to Austria. In 1848, there was a revolution, and the Austrian
+      soldiers stole the precious silver case that held the phial of the true
+      blood. Now at last it belongs to the Kingdom of Italy, with the other
+      forts of the Quadrilateral&mdash;thanks to the Prussian needle-gun.
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Italian Journeys, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Italian Journeys
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: December 6, 2004 [EBook #14276]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ITALIAN JOURNEYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Carla Kruger and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ITALIAN JOURNEYS
+
+By
+
+W.D. Howells
+
+1867 and 1895
+
+
+
+
+                                                  PAGE
+CONTENTS.
+
+The Road to Rome from Venice:
+     I. Leaving Venice                              9
+    II. From Padua to Ferrara                      10
+   III. The Picturesque, the Improbable, and
+        the Pathetic in Ferrara                    14
+    IV. Through Bologna to Genoa                   43
+     V. Up and Down Genoa                          52
+    VI. By Sea from Genoa to Naples                65
+   VII. Certain Things in Naples                   75
+  VIII. A Day in Pompeii                           89
+    IX. A Half-hour at Herculaneum                106
+     X. Capri and Capriotes                       116
+    XI. The Protestant Ragged Schools at Naples   136
+   XII. Between Rome and Naples                   147
+  XIII. Roman Pearls                              151
+
+Forza Maggiore                                    178
+
+At Padua                                          196
+
+A Pilgrimage to Petrarch's House at Arqua         216
+
+A Visit to the Cimbri                             235
+
+Minor Travels:
+    I. Pisa                                       251
+   II. The Ferrara Road                           259
+  III. Trieste                                    264
+   IV. Bassano                                    274
+    V. Possagno, Canova's Birthplace              280
+   VI. Como                                       285
+
+Stopping at Vicenza, Verona, and Parma            293
+
+Ducal Mantua                                      321
+
+
+
+
+THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE.
+
+I.
+
+LEAVING VENICE.
+
+We did not know, when we started from home in Venice, on the 8th of
+November, 1864, that we had taken the longest road to Rome. We thought
+that of all the proverbial paths to the Eternal City that leading to
+Padua, and thence through Ferrara and Bologna to Florence, and so
+down the sea-shore from Leghorn to Civita Vecchia, was the best, the
+briefest, and the cheapest. Who could have dreamed that this path,
+so wisely and carefully chosen, would lead us to Genoa, conduct us on
+shipboard, toss us four dizzy days and nights, and set us down, void,
+battered, and bewildered, in Naples? Luckily,
+
+  "The moving accident is not my trade,"
+
+for there are events of this journey (now happily at an end) which,
+if I recounted them with unsparing sincerity, would forever deter the
+reader from taking any road to Rome.
+
+Though, indeed, what is Rome, after all, when you come to it?
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+FROM PADUA TO FERRARA.
+
+As far as to Ferrara there was no sign of deviation from the direct
+line in our road, and the company was well enough. We had a Swiss
+family in the car with us to Padua, and they told us how they were
+going home to their mountains from Russia, where they had spent
+nineteen years of their lives. They were mother and father and only
+daughter and the last, without ever having seen her ancestral country,
+was so Swiss in her yet childish beauty, that she filled the morning
+twilight with vague images of glacial height, blue lake, snug chalet,
+and whatever else of picturesque there is in paint and print about
+Switzerland. Of course, as the light grew brighter these images melted
+away, and left only a little frost upon the window-pane.
+
+The mother was restively anxious at nearing her country, and told us
+every thing of its loveliness and happiness. Nineteen years of absence
+had not robbed it of the poorest charm, and I hope that seeing it
+again took nothing from it. We said how glad we should be if we were
+as near America as she was to Switzerland. "America!" she screamed;
+"you come from America! Dear God, the world is wide--the world is
+wide!" The thought was so paralyzing that it silenced the fat little
+lady for a moment, and gave her husband time to express his sympathy
+with us in our war, which he understood perfectly well. He trusted
+that the revolution to perpetuate slavery must fail, and he hoped that
+the war would soon end, for it made cotton very dear.
+
+Europe is material: I doubt if, after Victor Hugo and Garibaldi, there
+were many upon that continent whose enthusiasm for American
+unity (which is European freedom) was not somewhat chilled by the
+expensiveness of cotton. The fabrics were all doubled in price, and
+every man in Europe paid tribute in hard money to the devotion with
+which we prosecuted the war, and, incidentally, interrupted the
+cultivation of cotton.
+
+We shook hands with our friends, and dismounted at Padua, where we
+were to take the diligence for the Po. In the diligence their loss was
+more than made good by the company of the only honest man in Italy.
+Of course this honest man had been a great sufferer from his own
+countrymen, and I wish that all English and American tourists, who
+think themselves the sole victims of publican rapacity and deceit in
+Italy, could have heard our honest man's talk. The truth is, these
+ingenious people prey upon their own kind with an avidity quite as
+keen as that with which they devour strangers; and I am half-persuaded
+that a ready-witted foreigner fares better among them than a traveller
+of their own nation. Italians will always pretend, on any occasion,
+that you have been plundered much worse than they but the reverse
+often happens. They give little in fees; but their landlord, their
+porter, their driver, and their boatman pillage them with the same
+impunity that they rob an Inglese. As for this honest man in the
+diligence, he had suffered such enormities at the hands of the
+Paduans, from which we had just escaped, and at the hands of the
+Ferrarese, into which we were rushing (at the rate of five miles scant
+an hour), that I was almost minded to stop between the nests of those
+brigands and pass the rest of my days at Rovigo, where the honest man
+lived. His talk was amusingly instructive, and went to illustrate the
+strong municipal spirit which still dominates all Italy, and which is
+more inimical to an effectual unity among Italians than Pope or Kaiser
+has ever been. Our honest man of Rovigo was a foreigner at Padua,
+twenty-five miles north, and a foreigner at Ferrara, twenty-five miles
+south; and throughout Italy the native of one city is an alien in
+another, and is as lawful prey as a Russian or an American with people
+who consider every stranger as sent them by the bounty of Providence
+to be eaten alive. Heaven knows what our honest man had paid at his
+hotel in Padua, but in Ferrara the other week he had been made to give
+five francs apiece for two small roast chickens, besides a fee to
+the waiter; and he pathetically warned us to beware how we dealt with
+Italians. Indeed, I never met a man so thoroughly persuaded of the
+rascality of his nation and of his own exceptional virtue. He took
+snuff with his whole person; and he volunteered, at sight of a
+flock of geese, a recipe which I give the reader: Stuff a goose with
+sausage; let it hang in the weather during the winter; and in the
+spring cut it up and stew it, and you have an excellent and delicate
+soup.
+
+But after all our friend's talk, though constant, became dispiriting,
+and we were willing when he left us. His integrity had, indeed, been
+so oppressive that I was glad to be swindled in the charge for our
+dinner at the Iron Crown, in Rovigo, and rode more cheerfully on to
+Ferrara.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+THE PICTURESQUE, THE IMPROBABLE, AND THE PATHETIC IN FERRARA.
+
+I.
+
+It was one of the fatalities of travel, rather than any real interest
+in the poet, which led me to visit the prison of Tasso on the night of
+our arrival, which was mild and moonlit. The _portier_ at the
+Stella d'Oro suggested the sentimental homage to sorrows which it is
+sometimes difficult to respect, and I went and paid this homage in the
+coal-cellar in which was never imprisoned the poet whose works I had
+not read.
+
+The famous hospital of St. Anna, where Tasso was confined for seven
+years, is still an asylum for the infirm and sick, but it is no longer
+used as a mad-house. It stands on one of the lone, silent Ferrarese
+streets, not far from the Ducal Castle, and it is said that from the
+window of his cell the unhappy poet could behold Leonora in her tower.
+It may be so; certainly those who can believe in the genuineness of
+the cell will have no trouble in believing that the vision of Tasso
+could pierce through several brick walls and a Doric portico, and at
+last comprehend the lady at her casement in the castle. We entered a
+modern gateway, and passed into a hall of the elder edifice, where a
+slim young soldier sat reading a romance of Dumas. This was the keeper
+of Tasso's prison; and knowing me, by the instinct which teaches an
+Italian custodian to distinguish his prey, for a seeker after the True
+and Beautiful, he relinquished his romance, lighted a waxen taper,
+unbolted a heavy door with a dramatic clang, and preceded me to the
+cell of Tasso. We descended a little stairway, and found ourselves in
+a sufficiently spacious court, which was still ampler in the poet's
+time, and was then a garden planted with trees and flowers. On a low
+doorway to the right was inscribed the legend "PRIGIONE DI TASSO," and
+passing through this doorway into a kind of reception-cell, we entered
+the poet's dungeon. It is an oblong room, with a low wagon-roof
+ceiling, under which it is barely possible to stand upright. A single
+narrow window admits the light, and the stone casing of this window
+has a hollow in a certain place, which might well have been worn there
+by the friction of the hand that for seven years passed the prisoner
+his food through the small opening. The young custodian pointed to
+this memento of suffering, without effusion, and he drew my attention
+to other remarkable things in the cell, without troubling himself
+to palliate their improbability in the least. They were his stock in
+trade; you paid your money, and took your choice of believing in
+them or not. On the other hand, my _portier_, an ex-_valet de place_,
+pumped a softly murmuring stream of enthusiasm; and expressed the
+freshest delight in the inspection of each object of interest.
+
+One still faintly discerns among the vast number of names with which
+the walls of the ante-cell are bewritten, that of Lamartine. The name
+of Byron, which was once deeply graven in the stucco, had been scooped
+away by the Grand Duke of Tuscany (so the custodian said), and there
+is only part of a capital B now visible. But the cell itself is still
+fragrant of associations with the noble bard, who, according to the
+story related to Valery, caused himself to be locked up in it, and
+there, with his head fallen upon his breast, and frequently smiting
+his brow, spent two hours in pacing the floor with great strides. It
+is a touching picture; but its pathos becomes somewhat embarrassing
+when you enter the cell, and see the impossibility of taking more than
+three generous paces without turning. When Byron issued forth, after
+this exercise, he said (still according to Valery) to the custodian:
+"I thank thee, good man! The thoughts of Tasso are now all in my mind
+and heart." "A short time after his departure from Ferrara," adds the
+Frenchman, maliciously, "he composed his 'Lament of Tasso,' a mediocre
+result from such inspiration." No doubt all this is colored, for
+the same author adds another tint to heighten the absurdity of the
+spectacle: he declares that Byron spent part of his time in the cell
+in writing upon the ceiling Lamartine's verses on Tasso, which he
+misspelled. The present visitor has no means of judging of the truth
+concerning this, for the lines of the poet have been so smoked by the
+candles of successive pilgrims in their efforts to get light on them,
+that they are now utterly illegible. But if it is uncertain what were
+Byron's emotions on visiting the prison of Tasso, there is no doubt
+about Lady Morgan's: she "experienced a suffocating emotion; her
+heart failed her on entering that cell; and she satisfied a melancholy
+curiosity at the cost of a most painful sensation."
+
+I find this amusing fact stated in a translation of her ladyship's
+own language, in a clever guide-book called _Il Servitore di Piazza_,
+which I bought at Ferrara, and from which, I confess, I have learnt
+all I know to confirm me in my doubt of Tasso's prison. The Count
+Avventi, who writes this book, prefaces it by saying that he is a
+valet de place who knows how to read and write, and he employs these
+unusual gifts with singular candor and clearness. No one, he says,
+before the nineteenth century, ever dreamed of calling the cellar in
+question Tasso's prison, and it was never before that time made the
+shrine of sentimental pilgrimage, though it has since been visited by
+every traveller who has passed through Ferrara. It was used during the
+poet's time to hold charcoal and lime; and not long ago died an old
+servant of the hospital, who remembered its use for that purpose. It
+is damp, close, and dark, and Count Avventi thinks it hardly possible
+that a delicate courtier could have lived seven years in a place
+unwholesome enough to kill a stout laborer in two months; while it
+seems to him not probable that Tasso should have received there the
+visits of princes and other distinguished persons whom Duke Alfonso
+allowed to see him, or that a prisoner who was often permitted to ride
+about the city in a carriage should have been thrust back into such a
+cavern on his return to the hospital. "After this," says our _valet
+de place_ who knows how to read and write, "visit the prison of Tasso,
+certain that _in the hospital of St. Anna_ that great man was confined
+for many years;" and, with this chilly warning, leaves his reader to
+his emotions.
+
+I am afraid that if as frank caution were uttered in regard to other
+memorable places, the objects of interest in Italy would dwindle sadly
+in number, and the _valets de place_, whether they know how to read
+and write or not, would be starved to death. Even the learning of
+Italy is poetic; and an Italian would rather enjoy a fiction than know
+a fact--in which preference I am not ready to pronounce him unwise.
+But this characteristic of his embroiders the stranger's progress
+throughout the whole land with fanciful improbabilities; so that if
+one use his eyes half as much as his wonder, he must see how much
+better it would have been to visit, in fancy, scenes that have an
+interest so largely imaginary. The utmost he can make out of the most
+famous place is, that it is possibly what it is said to be, and
+is more probably as near that as any thing local enterprise could
+furnish. He visits the very cell in which Tasso was confined, and has
+the satisfaction of knowing that it was the charcoal-cellar of the
+hospital in which the poet dwelt. And the _genius loci_--where is
+that? Away in the American woods, very likely, whispering some dreamy,
+credulous youth,--telling him charming fables of its _locus_, and
+proposing to itself to abandon him as soon as he sets foot upon its
+native ground. You see, though I cared little about Tasso, and nothing
+about his prison, I was heavily disappointed in not being able to
+believe in it, and felt somehow that I had been awakened from a
+cherished dream.
+
+
+II.
+
+But I have no right to cast the unbroken shadow of my skepticism upon
+the reader, and so I tell him a story about Ferrara which I actually
+believe. He must know that in Ferrara the streets are marvelous long
+and straight. On the corners formed by the crossing of two of the
+longest and straightest of these streets stand four palaces, in only
+one of which we have a present interest. This palace my guide took
+me to see, after our visit to Tasso's prison, and, standing in its
+shadow, he related to me the occurrence which has given it a sad
+celebrity. It was, in the time of the gifted toxicologist, the
+residence of Lucrezia Borgia, who used to make poisonous little
+suppers there, and ask the best families of Italy to partake of them.
+It happened on one occasion that Lucrezia Borgia was thrust out of
+a ball-room at Venice as a disreputable character, and treated with
+peculiar indignity. She determined to make the Venetians repent their
+unwonted accession of virtue, and she therefore allowed the occurrence
+to be forgotten till the proper moment of her revenge arrived,
+when she gave a supper, and invited to her board eighteen young and
+handsome Venetian nobles. Upon the preparation of this repast she
+bestowed all the resources of her skillful and exquisite knowledge;
+and the result was, the Venetians were so felicitously poisoned
+that they had just time to listen to a speech from the charming and
+ingenious lady of the house before expiring. In this address she
+reminded her guests of the occurrence in the Venetian ball-room, and
+perhaps exulted a little tediously in her present vengeance. She was
+surprised and pained when one of the guests interrupted her, and,
+justifying the treatment she had received at Venice, declared himself
+her natural son. The lady instantly recognized him, and in the sudden
+revulsion of maternal feeling, begged him to take an antidote. This he
+not only refused to do, but continued his dying reproaches, till his
+mother, losing her self-command, drew her poniard and plunged it into
+his heart.
+
+The blood of her son fell upon the table-cloth, and this being hung
+out of the window to dry, the wall received a stain, which neither
+the sun nor rain of centuries sufficed to efface, and which was only
+removed with the masonry, when it became necessary to restore the
+wall under that window, a few months before the time of my visit to
+Ferrara. Accordingly, the blood-stain has now disappeared; but the
+conscientious artist who painted the new wall has faithfully restored
+the tragic spot, by bestowing upon the stucco a bloody dash of
+Venetian red.
+
+
+III.
+
+It would be pleasant and merciful, I think, if old towns, after having
+served a certain number of centuries for the use and pride of men,
+could be released to a gentle, unmolested decay. I, for my part, would
+like to have the ducal cities of North Italy, such as Mantua, Modena,
+Parma, and Ferrara, locked up quietly within their walls, and left to
+crumble and totter and fall, without any harder presence to vex them
+in their decrepitude than that of some gray custodian, who should come
+to the gate with clanking keys, and admit the wandering stranger, if
+he gave signs of a reverent sympathy, to look for a little while upon
+the reserved and dignified desolation. It is a shame to tempt these
+sad old cities into unnatural activity, when they long ago made their
+peace with the world, and would fain be mixing their weary brick
+and mortar with the earth's unbuilded dust; and it is hard for the
+emotional traveller to restrain his sense of outrage at finding them
+inhabited, and their rest broken by sounds of toil, traffic, and
+idleness; at seeing places that would gladly have had done with
+history still doomed to be parts of political systems, to read the
+newspapers, and to expose railway guides and caricatures of the Pope
+and of Napoleon in their shop windows.
+
+Of course, Ferrara was not incorporated into a living nation against
+her will, and I therefore marveled the more that she had become a
+portion of the present kingdom of Italy. The poor little State had
+its day long before ours; it had been a republic, and then subject to
+lords; and then, its lords becoming dukes, it had led a life of gayety
+and glory till its fall, and given the world such names and memories
+as had fairly won it the right to rest forever from making history.
+Its individual existence ended with that of Alfonso II., in 1597, when
+the Pope declared it reverted to the Holy See; and I always fancied
+that it must have received with a spectral, yet courtly kind of
+surprise, those rights of man which bloody-handed France distributed
+to the Italian cities in 1796; that it must have experienced a ghostly
+bewilderment in its rapid transformation, thereafter, under Napoleon,
+into part of the Cispadan Republic, the Cisalpine Republic, the
+Italian Republic, and the Kingdom of Italy, and that it must have sunk
+back again under the rule of the Popes with gratitude and relief at
+last--as phantoms are reputed to be glad when released from haunting
+the world where they once dwelt. I speak of all this, not so much from
+actual knowledge of facts as from personal feeling; for it seems to
+me that if I were a city of the past, and must be inhabited at all,
+I should choose just such priestly domination, assured that though
+it consumed my substance, yet it would be well for my fame and final
+repose. I should like to feel that my old churches were safe from
+demolition: that my old convents and monasteries should always shelter
+the pious indolence of friars and nuns. It would be pleasant to have
+studious monks exploring quaint corners of my unphilosophized annals,
+and gentle, snuff-taking abbes writing up episodes in the history of
+my noble families, and dedicating them to the present heirs of past
+renown; while the thinker and the reviewer should never penetrate
+my archives. Being myself done with war, I should be glad to have my
+people exempt, as they are under the Pope, from military service; and
+I should hope that if the Legates taxed them, the taxes paid would be
+as so many masses said to get my soul out of the purgatory of perished
+capitals. Finally, I should trust that in the sanctified keeping of
+the Legates my mortal part would rest as sweetly as bones laid in
+hallowed earth brought from Jerusalem; and that under their serene
+protection I should be forever secure from being in any way exhumed
+and utilized by the ruthless hand of Progress.
+
+However, as I said, this is a mere personal preference, and other old
+cities might feel differently. Indeed, though disposed to condole with
+Ferrara upon the fact of her having become part of modern Italy, I
+could not deny, on better acquaintance with her, that she was still
+almost entirely of the past. She has certainly missed that ideal
+perfection of non-existence under the Popes which I have just
+depicted, but she is practically almost as profoundly at rest under
+the King of Italy. One may walk long through the longitude and
+rectitude of many of her streets without the encounter of a single
+face: the place, as a whole, is by no means as lively as Pompeii,
+where there are always strangers; perhaps the only cities in the world
+worthy to compete with Ferrara in point of agreeable solitude are
+Mantua and Herculaneum. It is the newer part of the town--the modern
+quarter built before Boston was settled or Ohio was known--which is
+loneliest; and whatever motion and cheerfulness are still felt in
+Ferrara linger fondly about the ancient holds of life--about the
+street before the castle of the Dukes, and in the elder and narrower
+streets branching away from the piazza of the Duomo, where, on market
+days, there is a kind of dreamy tumult. In the Ghetto we were almost
+crowded, and people wanted to sell us things, with an enterprise
+that contrasted strangely with shopkeeping apathy elsewhere. Indeed,
+surprise at the presence of strangers spending two days in Ferrara
+when they could have got away sooner, was the only emotion which the
+whole population agreed in expressing with any degree of energy, but
+into this they seemed to throw their whole vitality. The Italians are
+everywhere an artless race, so far as concerns the gratification of
+their curiosity, from which no consideration of decency deters them.
+Here in Ferrara they turned about and followed us with their eyes,
+came to windows to see us, lay in wait for us at street-corners, and
+openly and audibly debated whether we were English or German. We might
+have thought this interest a tribute to something peculiar in our
+dress or manner, had it not visibly attended other strangers who
+arrived with us. It rose almost into a frenzy of craving to know more
+of us all, when on the third day the whole city assembled before our
+hotel, and witnessed, with a sort of desperate cry, the departure
+of the heavy-laden omnibus which bore us and our luggage from their
+midst.
+
+
+IV.
+
+I doubt if, after St. Mark's in Venice, the Duomo at Parma, and the
+Four Fabrics at Pisa, there is a church more worthy to be seen for
+its quaint, rich architecture, than the Cathedral at Ferrara. It is
+of that beloved Gothic of which eye or soul cannot weary, and we
+continually wandered back to it from other more properly interesting
+objects. It is horribly restored in-doors, and its Renaissance
+splendors soon drove us forth, after we had looked at the Last
+Judgment by Bastianino. The style of this painting is muscular and
+Michelangelic, and the artist's notion of putting his friends in
+heaven and his foes in hell is by no means novel; but he has achieved
+fame for his picture by the original thought of making it his revenge
+for a disappointment in love. The unhappy lady who refused his love
+is represented in the depths, in the attitude of supplicating the pity
+and interest of another maiden in Paradise who accepted Bastianino,
+and who consequently has no mercy on her that snubbed him. But I
+counted of far more value than this fresco the sincere old sculptures
+on the facade of the cathedral, in which the same subject is treated,
+beginning from the moment the archangel's trump has sounded. The
+people getting suddenly out of their graves at the summons are all
+admirable; but the best among them is the excellent man with one
+leg over the side of his coffin, and tugging with both hands to
+pull himself up, while the coffin-lid tumbles off behind. One sees
+instantly that the conscience of this early riser is clean, for he
+makes no miserable attempt to turn over for a nap of a few thousand
+years more, with the pretense that it was not the trump of doom, but
+some other and unimportant noise he had heard. The final reward of the
+blessed is expressed by the repose of one small figure in the lap of
+a colossal effigy, which I understood to mean rest in Abraham's bosom;
+but the artist has bestowed far more interest and feeling upon the
+fate of the damned, who are all boiling in rows of immense pots. It is
+doubtful (considering the droll aspect of heavenly bliss as figured
+in the one small saint and the large patriarch) whether the artist
+intended the condition of his sinners to be so horribly comic as it
+is; but the effect is just as great, for all that, and the slowest
+conscience might well take alarm from the spectacle of fate so
+grotesque and ludicrous; for, wittingly or unwittingly, the artist
+here punishes, as Dante knew best how to do, the folly of sinners as
+well as their wickedness. Boiling is bad enough; but to be boiled in
+an undeniable dinner-pot, like a leg of mutton, is to suffer shame us
+well as agony.
+
+We turned from these horrors, and walked down by the side of the Duomo
+toward the Ghetto, which is not so foul as one could wish a Ghetto
+to be. The Jews were admitted to Ferrara in 1275, and, throughout the
+government of the Dukes, were free to live where they chose in
+the city; but the Pope's Legate assigned them afterward a separate
+quarter, which was closed with gates. Large numbers of Spanish Jews
+fled hither during the persecutions, and there are four synagogues
+for the four languages,--Spanish, German, French, and Italian. Avventi
+mentions, among other interesting facts concerning the Ferrarese Jews,
+that one of their Rabbins, Isaaco degli Abranelli, a man of excellent
+learning in the Scriptures, claimed to be descended from David. His
+children still abide in Ferrara; and it may have been one of his
+kingly line that kept the tempting antiquarian's shop on the corner
+from which you turn up toward the Library. I should think such a man
+would find a sort of melancholy solace in such a place: filled with
+broken and fragmentary glories of every kind, it would serve him for
+that chamber of desolation, set apart in the houses of the Oriental
+Hebrews as a place to bewail themselves in; and, indeed, this idea may
+go far to explain the universal Israelitish fondness for dealing in
+relics and ruins.
+
+
+V.
+
+The Ghetto was in itself indifferent to us; it was merely our way to
+the Library, whither the great memory of Ariosto invited us to see his
+famous relics treasured there.
+
+We found that the dead _literati_ of Ferrara had the place wholly to
+themselves; not a living soul disputed the solitude of the halls with
+the custodians, and the bust of Ariosto looked down from his monument
+upon rows of empty tables, idle chairs, and dusty inkstands.
+
+The poet, who was painted by Titian, has a tomb of abandoned ugliness,
+and sleeps under three epitaphs; while cherubs frescoed on the
+wall behind affect to disclose the mausoleum, by lifting a frescoed
+curtain, but deceive no one who cares to consider how impossible it
+would be for them to perform this service, and caper so ignobly as
+they do at the same time. In fact this tomb of Ariosto shocks with
+its hideousness and levity. It stood formerly in the Church of San
+Benedetto, where it was erected shortly after the poet's death, and it
+was brought to the Library by the French, when they turned the church
+into a barracks for their troops. The poet's dust, therefore, rests
+here, where the worm, working silently through the vellum volumes on
+the shelves, feeds upon the immortality of many other poets. In the
+adjoining hall are the famed and precious manuscripts of Ariosto and
+of Tasso. A special application must be made to the librarian, in
+order to see the fragment of the _Furioso_ in Ariosto's hand, and the
+manuscript copy of the _Gerusalemma_, with the corrections by Tasso.
+There are some pages of Ariosto's Satires, framed and glazed for the
+satisfaction of the less curious; as well as a letter of Tasso's,
+written from the Hospital of St. Anna, which the poet sends to a
+friend, with twelve shirts, and in which he begs that his friend will
+have the shirts mended, and cautions him "not to let them be mixed
+with others." But when the slow custodian had at last unlocked that
+more costly fragment of the _Furioso_, and placed it in my hands, the
+other manuscripts had no value for me. It seems to me that the one
+privilege which travel has reserved to itself, is that of making
+each traveller, in presence of its treasures, forget whatever other
+travellers have said or written about them. I had read so much of
+Ariosto's industry, and of the proof of it in this manuscript, that I
+doubted if I should at last marvel at it. But the wonder remains
+with the relic, and I paid it my homage devoutly and humbly, and was
+disconcerted afterward to read again in my Valery how sensibly all
+others had felt the preciousness of that famous page, which, filled
+with half a score of previous failures, contains in a little open
+space near the margin, the poet's final triumph in a clearly written
+stanza. Scarcely less touching and interesting than Ariosto's painful
+work on these yellow leaves, is the grand and simple tribute which
+another Italian poet was allowed to inscribe on one of them: "Vittorio
+Alfieri beheld and venerated;" and I think, counting over the many
+memorable things I saw on the road to Rome and the way home
+again, this manuscript was the noblest thing and best worthy to be
+remembered.
+
+When at last I turned from it, however, I saw that the custodian had
+another relic of Messer Lodovico, which he was not ashamed to match
+with the manuscript in my interest. This was the bone of one of the
+poet's fingers, which the pious care of Ferrara had picked up from his
+dust (when it was removed from the church to the Library), and
+neatly bottled and labeled. In like manner, they keep a great deal
+of sanctity in bottles with the bones of saints in Italy; but I found
+very little savor of poesy hanging about this literary relic.
+
+As if the melancholy fragment of mortality had marshaled us the way,
+we went from the Library to the house of Ariosto, which stands at the
+end of a long, long street, not far from the railway station. There
+was not a Christian soul, not a boy, not a cat nor a dog to be seen
+in all that long street, at high noon, as we looked down its narrowing
+perspective, and if the poet and his friends have ever a mind for a
+posthumous meeting in his little reddish brick house, there is nothing
+to prevent their assembly, in broad daylight, from any part of the
+neighborhood. There was no presence, however, more spiritual than a
+comely country girl to respond to our summons at the door, and nothing
+but a tub of corn-meal disputed our passage inside. Directly I found
+the house inhabited by living people, I began to be sorry that it was
+not as empty as the Library and the street. Indeed, it is much better
+with Petrarch's house at Arqua, where the grandeur of the past
+is never molested by the small household joys and troubles of the
+present. That house is vacant, and no eyes less tender and fond than
+the poet's visitors may look down from its windows over the slope of
+vines and olives which it crowns; and it seemed hard, here in Ferrara,
+where the houses are so many and the people are so few, that Ariosto's
+house could not be left to him. _Parva sed apta mihi_, he has
+contentedly written upon the front; but I doubt if he finds it large
+enough for another family, though his modern housekeeper reserves him
+certain rooms for visitors. To gain these, you go up to the second
+story--there are but two floors--and cross to the rear of the
+building, where Ariosto's chamber opens out of an ante-room, and looks
+down upon a pinched and faded bit of garden. [In this garden the poet
+spent much of his time--chiefly in plucking up and transplanting the
+unlucky shrubbery, which was never suffered to grow three months
+in the same place,--such was the poet's rage for revision. It was
+probably never a very large or splendid garden, for the reason that
+Ariosto gave when reproached that he who knew so well how to describe
+magnificent palaces should have built such a poor little house: "It
+was easier to make verses than houses, and the fine palaces in his
+poem cost him no money."] In this chamber they say the poet died. It
+is oblong, and not large. I should think the windows and roof were
+of the poet's time, and that every thing else had been restored; I am
+quite sure the chairs and inkstand are kindly-meant inventions;
+for the poet's burly great arm-chair and graceful inkstand are both
+preserved in the Library. But the house is otherwise decent and
+probable; and I do not question but it was in the hall where we
+encountered the meal-tub that the poet kept a copy of his "_Furioso_,"
+subject to the corrections and advice of his visitors.
+
+The ancestral house of the Ariosti has been within a few years
+restored out of all memory and semblance of itself; and my wish to see
+the place in which the poet was born and spent his childhood resulted,
+after infinite search, in finding a building faced newly with stucco
+and newly French-windowed.
+
+Our _portier_ said it was the work of the late English Vice-Consul,
+who had bought the house. When I complained of the sacrilege, he said:
+"Yes, it is true. But then, you must know, the Ariosti were not one of
+the noble families of Ferrara."
+
+
+VI.
+
+The castle of the Dukes of Ferrara, about which cluster so many sad
+and splendid memories, stands in the heart of the city. I think
+that the moonlight which, on the night of our arrival, showed me its
+massive walls rising from the shadowy moat that surrounds them, and
+its four great towers, heavily buttressed, and expanding at the top
+into bulging cornices of cavernous brickwork, could have fallen on
+nothing else in all Italy so picturesque, and so full of the proper
+dread charm of feudal times, as this pile of gloomy and majestic
+strength. The daylight took nothing of this charm from it; for the
+castle stands isolated in the midst of the city, as its founder meant
+that it should [The castle of Ferrara was begun in 1385 by Niccolo
+d'Este to defend himself against the repetition of scenes of tumult,
+in which his princely rights were invaded. One of his tax-gatherers,
+Tommaso da Tortona, had, a short time before, made himself so
+obnoxious to the people by his insolence and severity, that they rose
+against him and demanded his life. He took refuge in the palace of
+his master, which was immediately assailed. The prince's own life was
+threatened, and he was forced to surrender the fugitive to the people,
+who tore Tortona limb from limb, and then, after parading the city
+with the mutilated remains, quietly returned to their allegiance.
+Niccolo, therefore, caused this castle to be built, which he
+strengthened with massive walls and towers commanding the whole city,
+and rendered inaccessible by surrounding it with a deep and wide canal
+from the river Reno.], and modern civilization has not crossed the
+castle moat, to undignify its exterior with any visible touch of the
+present. To be sure, when you enter it, the magnificent life is gone
+out of the old edifice; it is no stately halberdier who stands on
+guard at the gate of the drawbridge, but a stumpy Italian soldier in
+baggy trousers. The castle is full of public offices, and one sees in
+its courts and on its stairways, not brilliant men-at-arms, nor gay
+squires and pages, but whistling messengers going from one office to
+another with docketed papers, and slipshod serving-men carrying the
+clerks their coffee in very dirty little pots. Dreary-looking suitors,
+slowly grinding through the mills of law, or passing in the routine of
+the offices, are the guests encountered in the corridors; and all that
+bright-colored throng of the old days, ladies and lords, is passed
+from the scene. The melodrama is over, friends, and now we have a play
+of real life, founded on fact and inculcating a moral.
+
+Of course the custodians were slow to admit any change of this kind.
+If you could have believed them,--and the poor people told as many
+lies as they could to make you,--you would believe that nothing had
+ever happened of a commonplace nature in this castle. The taking-off
+of Hugo and Parisina they think the great merit of the castle; and one
+of them, seeing us, made haste to light his taper and conduct us down
+to the dungeons where those unhappy lovers were imprisoned. It is the
+misfortune of memorable dungeons to acquire, when put upon show, just
+the reverse of those properties which should raise horror and distress
+in the mind of the beholder. It was impossible to deny that the
+cells of Parisina and of Hugo were both singularly warm, dry, and
+comfortable; and we, who had never been imprisoned in them, found
+it hard to command, for our sensation, the terror and agony of the
+miserable ones who suffered there. We, happy and secure in these
+dungeons, could not think of the guilty and wretched pair bowing
+themselves to the headsman's stroke in the gloomy chamber under the
+Hall of Aurora; nor of the Marquis, in his night-long walk, breaking
+at last into frantic remorse and tears to know that his will had been
+accomplished. Nay, there upon its very scene, the whole tragedy faded
+from us; and, seeing our wonder so cold, the custodian tried to kindle
+it by saying that in the time of the event these cells were much
+dreadfuller than now, which was no doubt true. The floors of the
+dungeons are both below the level of the moat, and the narrow windows,
+or rather crevices to admit the light, were cut in the prodigiously
+thick wall just above the water, and were defended with four
+successive iron gratings. The dungeons are some distance apart: that
+of Hugo was separated from the outer wall of the castle by a narrow
+passage-way, while Parisina's window opened directly upon the moat.
+
+When we ascended again to the court of the castle, the custodian,
+abetted by his wife, would have interested us in two memorable wells
+there, between which, he said, Hugo was beheaded; and unabashed by the
+small success of this fable, he pointed out two windows in converging
+angles overhead, from one of which the Marquis, looking into the
+other, discovered the guilt of the lovers. The windows are now walled
+up, but are neatly represented to the credulous eye by a fresco of
+lattices.
+
+Valery mentions another claim upon the interest of the tourist which
+this castle may make, in the fact that it once sheltered John Calvin,
+who was protected by the Marchioness Renee, wife of Hercules II.; and
+my _Servitore di Piazza_ (the one who knows how to read and write)
+gives the following account of the matter, in speaking of the domestic
+chapel which Renee had built in the castle: "This lady was learned in
+belles-lettres and in the schismatic doctrines which at that time were
+insinuating themselves throughout France and Germany, and with
+which Calvin, Luther, and other proselytes, agitated the people,
+and threatened war to the Catholic religion. Nationally fond of
+innovation, and averse to the court of Rome on account of the
+dissensions between her father and Pope Julius II., Renee began
+to receive the teachings of Calvin, with whom she maintained
+correspondence. Indeed, Calvin himself, under the name of Huppeville,
+visited her in Ferrara, in 1536, and ended by corrupting her mind and
+seducing her into his own errors, which produced discord between
+her and her religious husband, and resulted in his placing her in
+temporary seclusion, in order to attempt her conversion. Hence, the
+chapel is faced with marble, paneled in relief, and studied to avoid
+giving place to saints or images, which were disapproved by the almost
+Anabaptist doctrines of Calvin, then fatally imbibed by the princess."
+
+We would willingly, as Protestants, have visited this wicked chapel;
+but we were prevented from seeing it, as well as the famous frescoes
+of Dosso Dossi in the Hall of Aurora, by the fact that the prefect was
+giving a little dinner (_pranzetto_) in that part of the castle. We
+were not so greatly disappointed in reality as we made believe; but
+our _servitore di piazza_ (the unlettered one) was almost moved to
+_lesa maesta_ with vexation. He had been full of scorching patriotism
+the whole morning; but now electing the unhappy and apologetic
+custodian representative of Piedmontese tyranny, he bitterly assailed
+the government of the king. In the times of His Holiness the Legates
+had made it their pleasure and duty to show the whole castle to
+strangers. But now strangers must be sent away without seeing its
+chief beauties, because, forsooth, the prefect was giving a little
+dinner. Presence of the Devil!
+
+
+VII.
+
+In our visits to the different churches in Ferrara we noticed devotion
+in classes of people who are devout nowhere else in Italy. Not only
+came solid-looking business men to say their prayers, but gay young
+dandies, who knelt and repeated their orisons and then rose and went
+seriously out. In Venice they would have posted themselves against a
+pillar, sucked the heads of their sticks, and made eyes at the young
+ladies kneeling near them. This degree of religion was all the more
+remarkable in Ferrara, because that city had been so many years
+under the Pope, and His Holiness contrives commonly to prevent the
+appearance of religion in young men throughout his dominions.
+
+Valery speaks of the delightful society which he met in the gray old
+town; and it is said that Ferrara has an unusual share of culture in
+her wealthy class, which is large. With such memories of learning and
+literary splendor as belong to her, it would be strange if she did
+not in some form keep alive the sacred flame. But, though there may
+be refinement and erudition in Ferrara, she has given no great name to
+modern Italian literature. Her men of letters seem to be of that race
+of grubs singularly abundant in Italy,--men who dig out of archives
+and libraries some topic of special and momentary interest and print
+it, unstudied and unphilosophized. Their books are material, not
+literature, and it is marvelous how many of them are published. A
+writer on any given subject can heap together from them a mass of fact
+and anecdote invaluable in its way; but it is a mass without life or
+light, and must be vivified by him who uses it before it can serve the
+world, which does not care for its dead local value. It remains to be
+seen whether the free speech and free press of Italy can reawaken the
+intellectual activity of the cities which once gave the land so many
+literary capitals.
+
+What numbers of people used to write verses in Ferrara! By operation
+of the principle which causes things concerning whatever subject you
+happen to be interested in to turn up in every direction, I found a
+volume of these dead-and-gone immortals at a book-stall, one day, in
+Venice. It is a curiously yellow and uncomfortable volume of the year
+1703, printed all in italics. I suppose there are two hundred odd
+rhymers selected from in that book,--and how droll the most of them
+are, with their unmistakable traces of descent from Ariosto, Tasso,
+and Guarini! What acres of enameled meadow there are in those pages!
+Brooks enough to turn all the mills in the world go purling through
+them. I should say some thousands of nymphs are constantly engaged
+in weaving garlands there, and the swains keep such a piping on those
+familiar notes,--_Amore, dolore, crudele_, and _miele_. Poor little
+poets! they knew no other tunes. Do not now weak voices twitter from a
+hundred books, in unconscious imitation of the hour's great singers?
+
+I think some of the pleasantest people in Italy are the army
+gentlemen. There is the race's gentleness in their ways, in spite of
+their ferocious trade, and an American freedom of style. They brag in
+a manner that makes one feel at home immediately; and met in travel,
+they are ready to render any little kindness.
+
+The other year at Reggio (which is not far from Modena) we stopped to
+dine at a restaurant where the whole garrison had its coat off and was
+playing billiards, with the exception of one or two officers, who were
+dining. These rose and bowed as we entered their room, and when the
+waiter pretended that such and such dishes were out (in Italy the
+waiter, for some mysterious reason, always pretends that the best
+dishes are out), they bullied him for the honor of Italy, and made him
+bring them to us. Indeed, I am afraid his life was sadly harassed by
+those brave men. We were in deep despair at finding no French bread,
+and the waiter swore with the utmost pathos that there was none; but
+as soon as his back was turned, a tightly laced little captain rose
+and began to forage for the bread. He opened every drawer and cupboard
+in the room, and finding none, invaded another room, captured several
+loaves from the plates laid there, and brought them back in triumph,
+presenting them to us amid the applause of his comrades. The dismay of
+the waiter, on his return, was ineffable.
+
+Three officers, who dined with us at the _table d'hote_ of the Stella
+d'Oro in Ferrara (and excellent dinners were those we ate there), were
+visibly anxious to address us, and began not uncivilly, but still
+in order that we should hear, to speculate on our nationality among
+themselves. It appeared that we were Germans; for one of these
+officers, who had formerly been in the Austrian service at Vienna,
+recognized the word _bitter_ in our remarks on the _beccafichi_. As I
+did not care to put these fine fellows to the trouble of hating us for
+others' faults, I made bold to say that we were not Germans, and to
+add that _bitter_ was also an English word. Ah! yes, to be sure, one
+of them admitted; when he was with the Sardinian army in the Crimea,
+he had frequently heard the word used by the English soldiers. He
+nodded confirmation of what he said to his comrades, and then was good
+enough to display what English he knew. It was barely sufficient to
+impress his comrades; but it led the way to a good deal of talk in
+Italian.
+
+"I suppose you gentlemen are all Piedmontese?" I said.
+
+"Not at all," said our Crimean. "I am from Como; this gentleman, il
+signor Conte, (il signor Conte bowed,) is of Piacenza; and our friend
+across the table is Genoese. The army is doing a great deal to unify
+Italy. We are all Italians now, and you see we speak Italian, and not
+our dialects, together."
+
+My cheap remark that it was a fine thing to see them all united under
+one flag, after so many ages of mutual hate and bloodshed, turned the
+talk upon the origin of the Italian flag; and that led our Crimean to
+ask what was the origin of the English colors.
+
+"I scarcely know," I said. "We are Americans."
+
+Our friends at once grew more cordial. "Oh, Americani!" They had great
+pleasure of it. Did we think Signor Leencolen would be reelected?
+
+I supposed that he had been elected that day, I said.
+
+Ah! this was the election day, then. _Cospetto_!
+
+At this the Genoese frowned superior intelligence, and the Crimean
+gazing admiringly upon him, said he had been nine months at Nuova
+York, and that he had a brother living there. The poor Crimean
+boastfully added that he himself had a cousin in America, and that the
+Americans generally spoke Spanish. The count from Piacenza wore an
+air of pathetic discomfiture, and tried to invent a transatlantic
+relative, as I think, but failed.
+
+I am persuaded that none of these warriors really had kinsmen in
+America, but that they all pretended to have them, out of politeness
+to us, and that they believed each other. It was very kind of them,
+and we were so grateful that we put no embarrassing questions. Indeed,
+the conversation presently took another course, and grew to include
+the whole table.
+
+There was an extremely pretty Italian present with her newly wedded
+husband, who turned out to be a retired officer. He fraternized at
+once with our soldiers, and when we left the table they all rose and
+made military obeisances. Having asked leave to light their cigars,
+they were smoking--the sweet young bride blowing a fairy cloud from
+her rosy lips with the rest. "Indeed," I heard an Italian lady once
+remark, "why should men pretend to deny us the privilege of smoking?
+It is so pleasant and innocent." It is but just to the Italians to
+say that they do not always deny it; and there is, without doubt, a
+certain grace and charm in a pretty _fumatrice_. I suppose it is a
+habit not so pleasing in an ugly or middle-aged woman.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA.
+
+I.
+
+We had intended to stay only one day at Ferrara, but just at that
+time the storms predicted on the Adriatic and Mediterranean coasts, by
+Mathieu de la Drome, had been raging all over Italy, and the railway
+communications were broken in every direction. The magnificent work
+through and under the Apennines, between Bologna and Florence, had
+been washed away by the mountain torrents in a dozen places, and the
+roads over the plains of the Romagna had been sapped by the flood, and
+rendered useless, where not actually laid under water.
+
+On the day of our intended departure we left the hotel, with other
+travellers, gayly incredulous of the landlord's fear that no train
+would start for Bologna. At the station we found a crowd of people
+waiting and hoping, but there was a sickly cast of doubt in some
+faces, and the labeled employes of the railway wore looks of ominous
+importance. Of course the crowd did not lose its temper. It sought
+information of the officials running to and fro with telegrams, in
+a spirit of national sweetness, and consoled itself with saying, as
+Italy has said under all circumstances of difficulty for centuries:
+_Ci vuol pazienza_! At last a blank silence fell upon it, as the
+_Capo-Stazione_ advanced toward a well-dressed man in the crowd, and
+spoke to him quietly. The well-dressed man lifted his forefinger and
+waved it back and forth before his face:--
+
+_The Well-dressed Man_.--Dunque, non si parte piu? (No departures,
+then?)
+
+The _Capo-Stazione_ (waving _his_ forefinger in like manner.)--Non si
+parte piu. (Like a mournful echo.)
+
+We knew quite as well from this pantomime of negation as from the
+dialogue our sad fate, and submitted to it. Some adventurous spirit
+demanded whether any trains would go on the morrow. The Capo-Stazione,
+with an air of one who would not presume to fathom the designs of
+Providence, responded: "Who knows? To-day, certainly not. To-morrow,
+perhaps. But"--and vanished.
+
+It may give an idea of the Italian way of doing things to say that, as
+we understood, this break in the line was only a few miles in extent,
+that trains could have approached both to and from Bologna, and that
+a little enterprise on the part of the company could have passed
+travellers from one side to the other with very small trouble or
+delay. But the railway company was as much daunted by the inundation
+as a peasant going to market, and for two months after the accident
+no trains carried passengers from one city to the other. No doubt,
+however, the line was under process of very solid repair meanwhile.
+
+For the present the only means of getting to Bologna was by carriage
+on the old highway, and accordingly we took passage thither in the
+omnibus of the Stella d'Oro.
+
+There was little to interest us in the country over which we rode. It
+is perfectly flat, and I suppose the reader knows what quantities
+of hemp and flax are raised there. The land seems poorer than in
+Lombardy, and the farm-houses and peasants' cottages are small and
+mean, though the peasants themselves, when we met them, looked well
+fed, and were certainly well clad. The landscape lay soaking in a
+dreary drizzle the whole way, and the town of Cento when we reached
+it, seemed miserably conscious of being too wet and dirty to go
+in-doors, and was loitering about in the rain. Our arrival gave the
+poor little place a sensation, for I think such a thing as an omnibus
+had not been seen there since the railway of Bologna and Ferrara was
+built. We went into the principal caffe to lunch,--a caffe much too
+large for Cento, with immense red-leather cushioned sofas, and a cold,
+forlorn air of half-starved gentility, a clean, high-roofed caffe and
+a breezy,--and thither the youthful nobility and gentry of the place
+followed us, and ordered a cup of coffee, that they might sit down and
+give us the pleasure of their distinguished company. They put on their
+very finest manners, and took their most captivating attitudes for the
+ladies' sake; and the gentlemen of our party fancied that it was for
+them these young men began to discuss the Roman question. How
+loud they were, and how earnest! And how often they consulted
+the newspapers of the caffe! (Older newspapers I never saw off a
+canal-boat.) I may tire some time of the artless vanity of the young
+Italians, so innocent, so amiable, so transparent, but I think I never
+shall.
+
+The great painter Guercino was born at Cento, and they have a noble
+and beautiful statue of him in the piazza, which the town caused to be
+erected from contributions by all the citizens. Formerly his house
+was kept for a show to the public; it was full of the pictures of the
+painter and many mementos of him; but recently the paintings have been
+taken to the gallery, and the house is now closed. The gallery is,
+consequently, one of the richest second-rate galleries in Italy, and
+one may spend much longer time in it than we gave, with great profit.
+There are some most interesting heads of Christ, painted, as Guercino
+always painted the Saviour, with a great degree of humanity in the
+face. It is an excellent countenance, and full of sweet dignity, but
+quite different from the conventional face of Christ.
+
+
+II.
+
+At night we were again in Bologna, of which we had not seen the gloomy
+arcades for two years. It must be a dreary town at all times: in a
+rain it is horrible; and I think the whole race of arcaded cities,
+Treviso, Padua, and Bologna, are dull, blind, and comfortless. The
+effect of the buildings vaulted above the sidewalks is that of
+a continuous cellarway; your view of the street is constantly
+interrupted by the heavy brick pillars that support the arches; the
+arcades are not even picturesque. Liking always to leave Bologna as
+quickly as possible, and, on this occasion, learning that there was no
+hope of crossing the Apennines to Florence, we made haste to take the
+first train for Genoa, meaning to proceed thence directly to Naples by
+steamer.
+
+It was a motley company that sat down in Hotel Brun the morning
+after our arrival in Bologna to a breakfast of murky coffee and furry
+beefsteaks, associated with sleek, greasy, lukewarm fried potatoes. I
+am sure that if each of our weather-bound pilgrims had told his story,
+we had been as well entertained as those at Canterbury. However, no
+one thought fit to give his narrative but a garrulous old Hebrew from
+London, who told us how he had been made to pay fifteen guineas for a
+carriage to cross the Apennines, and had been obliged to walk part of
+the way at that price. He was evidently proud, now the money was gone,
+of having been cheated of so much; and in him we saw that there was
+at least one human being more odious than a purse-proud
+Englishman--namely, a purse-proud English Jew. He gave his noble name
+after a while, as something too precious to be kept from the
+company, when recommending one of the travellers to go to the Hotel
+d'Angleterre in Rome: "The best 'otel out of England. You may mention
+my name, if you like--Mr. Jonas." The recipient of this favor noted
+down the talismanic words in his pocket-book, and Mr. Jonas, conscious
+of having conferred a benefit on his race, became more odious to it
+than ever. An Englishman is of a composition so uncomfortably original
+that no one can copy him, though many may caricature. I saw an
+American in London once who thought himself an Englishman because he
+wore leg-of-mutton whiskers, declaimed against universal suffrage and
+republics, and had an appetite for high game. He was a hateful animal,
+surely, but he was not the British lion; and this poor Hebrew at
+Bologna was not a whit more successful in his imitation of the
+illustrious brute, though he talked, like him, of nothing but hotels,
+and routes of travel, and hackmen and porters, and seemed to have
+nothing to do in Italy but get through it as quickly and abusively as
+possible.
+
+We were very glad, I say, to part from all this at Bologna and take
+the noon train for Genoa. In our car there were none but Italians,
+and the exchange of "_La Perseveranza_" of Milan for "_Il Popolo_"
+of Turin with one of them quickly opened the way for conversation and
+acquaintance. (_En passant_: I know of no journal in the United States
+whose articles are better than those of the "_Perseveranza_," and it
+was gratifying to an American to read in this ablest journal of Italy
+nothing but applause and encouragement of the national side in our
+late war.) My new-made friend turned out to be a Milanese. He was
+a physician, and had served as a surgeon in the late war of Italian
+independence; but was now placed in a hospital in Milan. There was a
+gentle little blonde with him, and at Piacenza, where we stopped
+for lunch, "You see," said he, indicating the lady, "we are newly
+married,"--which was, indeed, plain enough to any one who looked at
+their joyous faces, and observed how great disposition that little
+blonde had to nestle on the young man's broad shoulder. "I have a
+week's leave from my place," he went on, "and this is our wedding
+journey. We were to have gone to Florence, but it seems we are fated
+not to see that famous city."
+
+He spoke of it as immensely far off, and herein greatly amused us
+Americans, who had outgrown distances.
+
+"So we are going to Genoa instead, for two or three days." "Oh,
+have you ever been at Genoa?" broke in the bride. "What magnificent
+palaces! And then the bay, and the villas in the environs! There is
+the Villa Pallavicini, with beautiful gardens, where an artificial
+shower breaks out from the bushes, and sprinkles the people who pass.
+Such fun!" and she continued to describe vividly a city of which
+she had only heard from her husband; and it was easy to see that she
+walked in paradise wherever he led her.
+
+They say that Italian husbands and wives do not long remain fond
+of each other, but it was impossible in the presence of these happy
+people not to believe in the eternity of their love, and it was hard
+to keep from "dropping into poetry" on account of them. Their bliss
+infected every body in the car, and in spite of the weariness of our
+journey, and the vexation of the misadventures which had succeeded one
+another unsparingly ever since we left home, we found ourselves far on
+the way to Genoa before we thought to grumble at the distance. There
+was with us, besides the bridal party, a lady travelling from Bologna
+to Turin, who had learned English in London, and spoke it much better
+than most Londoners. It is surprising how thoroughly Italians master
+a language so alien to their own as ours, and how frequently you find
+them acquainted with English. From Russia the mania for this tongue
+has spread all over the Continent, and in Italy English seems to be
+prized first among the virtues.
+
+As we drew near Genoa, the moon came out on purpose to show us the
+superb city, and we strove eagerly for a first glimpse of the proud
+capital where Columbus was born. To tell the truth, the glimpse was
+but slight and false, for railways always enter cities by some mean
+level, from which any picturesque view is impossible.
+
+Near the station in Genoa, however, is the weak and ugly monument
+which the municipality has lately raised to Columbus. The moon made
+the best of this, which stands in a wide open space, and contrived,
+with an Italian skill in the arrangement of light, to produce an
+effect of undeniable splendor. On the morrow, we found out by the
+careless candor of the daylight what a uselessly big head Columbus
+had, and how the sculptor had not very happily thought proper to
+represent him with his sea-legs on.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+UP AND DOWN GENOA.
+
+I had my note-book with me on this journey, and pledged myself to
+make notes in it. And, indeed, I did really do something of the kind,
+though the result of my labors is by no means so voluminous as I would
+like it to be, now when the work of wishing there were more notes is
+so easy. We spent but one day in Genoa, and I find such a marvelous
+succinct record of this in my book that I am tempted to give it here,
+after the fashion of that Historical Heavyweight who writes the Life
+of "Frederick the Great."
+
+    "_Genoa, November 13_.--Breakfast _a la fourchette_ excellently
+    and cheaply. I buy a hat. We go to seek the Consul, and, after
+    finding every thing else for two hours, find him. Genoa is the
+    most magnificent city I ever saw; and the new monument to
+    Columbus about the weakest possible monument. Walk through the
+    city with Consul; Doge's palace; cathedral; girl turning
+    somersaults in the street; blind madman on the cathedral steps.
+    We leave for Naples at twelve midnight."
+
+As for the breakfast, it was eaten at one of the many good caffe in
+Genoa, and perhaps some statistician will like to know that for a
+beefsteak and potatoes, with a half-bottle of Ligurian wine, we paid a
+franc. For this money we had also the society of an unoccupied waiter,
+who leaned against a marble column and looked on, with that gentle,
+half-compassionate interest in our appetites, which seems native
+to the tribe of waiters. A slight dash of surprise is in this
+professional manner; and there is a faint smile on the solemn,
+professional countenance, which is perhaps prompted by too intimate
+knowledge of the mysteries of the kitchen and the habits of the cook.
+The man who passes his life among beefsteaks cannot be expected to
+love them, or to regard without wonder the avidity with which others
+devour them. I imagine that service in restaurants must beget simple
+and natural tastes in eating, and that the jaded men who minister
+there to our pampered appetites demand only for themselves--
+
+  "A scrip with herbs and fruits supplied,
+  And water from the spring."
+
+Turning from this thought to the purchase of my hat, I do not believe
+that literary art can interest the reader in that purely personal
+transaction, though I have no doubt that a great deal might be said
+about buying hats as a principle. I prefer, therefore, to pass to our
+search for the Consul.
+
+A former Consul at ----, whom I know, has told me a good many stories
+about the pieces of popular mind which he received at different times
+from the travelling public, in reproof of his difficulty of discovery;
+and I think it must be one of the most jealously guarded rights
+of American citizens in foreign lands to declare the national
+representative hard to find, if there is no other complaint to
+lodge against him. It seems to be, in peculiar degree, a quality of
+consulship at ----, to be found remote and inaccessible. My friend
+says that even at New York, before setting out for his post, when
+inquiring into the history of his predecessors, he heard that they
+were one and all hard to find; and he relates that on the steamer,
+going over, there was a low fellow who set the table in a roar by a
+vulgar anecdote to this effect:--
+
+"There was once a consul at ----, who indicated his office-hours by
+the legend on his door, 'In from ten to one.' An old ship-captain,
+who kept coming for about a week without finding the Consul, at last
+furiously wrote, in the terms of wager, under this legend, 'Ten to one
+you're out!'"
+
+My friend also states that one day a visitor of his remarked: "I'm
+rather surprised to find you in. As a general rule, I never do find
+consuls in." Habitually, his fellow-countrymen entertained him with
+accounts of their misadventures in reaching him. It was useless to
+represent to them that his house was in the most convenient locality
+in ----, where, indeed, no stranger can walk twenty rods from his
+hotel without losing himself; that their guide was an ass, or their
+courier a rogue. They listened to him politely, but they never
+pardoned him in the least; and neither will I forgive the Consul at
+Genoa. I had no earthly consular business with him, but a private
+favor to ask. It was Sunday, and I could not reasonably expect to find
+him at his office, or any body to tell me where he lived; but I have
+seldom had so keen a sense of personal wrong and national neglect as
+in my search for that Consul's house.
+
+In Italy there is no species of fact with which any human being you
+meet will not pretend to have perfect acquaintance, and, of course,
+the driver whose fiacre we took professed himself a complete guide to
+the Consul's whereabouts, and took us successively to the residences
+of the consuls of all the South American republics. It occurred to
+me that it might be well to inquire of these officials where their
+colleague was to be found; but it is true that not one consul of them
+was at home! Their doors were opened by vacant old women, in whom
+a vague intelligence feebly guttered, like the wick of an expiring
+candle, and who, after feigning to throw floods of light on the
+object of my search, successively flickered out, and left me in total
+darkness.
+
+Till that day, I never knew of what lofty flights stairs were capable.
+As out-of-doors, in Genoa, it is either all up or down hill, so
+in-doors it is either all up or down stairs. Ascending and descending,
+in one palace after another, those infinite marble steps, it became
+a question not solved to this hour, whether it was worse to ascend or
+descend,--each ordeal in its turn seemed so much more terrible than
+the other.
+
+At last I resolved to come to an understanding with the driver, and
+I spent what little breath I had left--it was dry and hot as the
+simoom--in blowing up that infamous man. "You are a great driver," I
+said, "not to know your own city. What are you good for if you can't
+take a foreigner to his consul's?" "Signore," answered the driver
+patiently, "you would have to get a book in two volumes by heart,
+in order to be able to find everybody in Genoa. This city is a
+labyrinth."
+
+Truly, it had so proved, and I could scarcely believe in my good luck
+when I actually found my friend, and set out with him on a ramble
+through its toils.
+
+A very great number of the streets in Genoa are footways merely,
+and these are as narrow, as dark, as full of jutting chimney-places,
+balconies, and opened window-shutters, and as picturesque as the
+little alleys in Venice. They wander at will around the bases of the
+gloomy old stone palaces, and seem to have a vagabond fondness for
+creeping down to the port, and losing themselves there in a certain
+cavernous arcade which curves round the water with the flection of the
+shore, and makes itself a twilight at noonday. Under it are clangorous
+shops of iron-smiths, and sizzling shops of marine cooks, and, looking
+down its dim perspective, one beholds chiefly sea-legs coming and
+going, more or less affected by strong waters; and as the faces to
+which these sea-legs belong draw near, one discerns sailors from all
+parts of the world,--tawny men from Sicily and Norway, as diverse in
+their tawniness as olive and train-oil; sharp faces from Nantucket
+and from the Piraeus, likewise mightily different in their sharpness;
+blonde Germans and blonde Englishmen; and now and then a colored
+brother also in the seafaring line, with sea-legs, also, more or less
+affected by strong waters like the rest.
+
+What curious people are these seafarers! They coast the whole world,
+and know nothing of it, being more ignorant and helpless than children
+on shore. I spoke with the Yankee mate of a ship one day at Venice,
+and asked him how he liked the city.
+
+Well, he had not been ashore yet.
+
+He was told he had better go ashore; that the Piazza San Marco was
+worth seeing.
+
+Well, he knew it; he had seen pictures of it; but he guessed he
+wouldn't go ashore.
+
+Why not, now he was here?
+
+Well, he laid out to go ashore the next time he came to Venice.
+
+And so, bless his honest soul, he lay three weeks at Venice with his
+ship, after a voyage of two months, and he sailed away without ever
+setting his foot on that enchanted ground.
+
+I should have liked to stop some of those seafarers and ask them what
+they thought of Genoa.
+
+It must have been in the little streets--impassable for horses--that
+the people sat and talked, as Heine fabled, in their doorways, and
+touched knees with the people sitting and talking on the thresholds
+of the opposite side. But we saw no gossipers there on our Sunday in
+Genoa; and I think the domestic race of Heine's day no longer lives in
+Genoa, for every body we saw on the streets was gayly dressed in the
+idea of the last fashions, and was to be met chiefly in the public
+promenades. The fashions were French; but here still lingers the
+lovely phantom of the old national costume of Genoa, and snow-white
+veils fluttered from many a dark head, and caressed many an olive
+cheek. It is the kindest and charitablest of attirements, this white
+veil, and, while decking beauty to the most perilous effect, befriends
+and modifies age and ugliness.
+
+The pleasure with which I look at the splendor of an Italian crowd in
+winter is always touched with melancholy. I know that, at the time
+of its noonday promenade, it has nothing but a cup of coffee in its
+stomach; that it has emerged from a house as cold and dim as a cellar;
+and that it will presently go home to dine on rice and boiled beef. I
+know that chilblains secretly gnaw the hands inside of its kid gloves,
+and I see in the rawness of its faces the anguish of winter-long
+suffering from cold. But I also look at many in this crowd with the
+eye of the economist, and wonder how people practicing even so great
+self-denial as they can contrive to make so much display on their
+little means,--how those clerks of public offices, who have rarely an
+income of five hundred dollars a year, can dress with such peerless
+gorgeousness. I suppose the national instinct teaches them ways and
+means unknown to us. The passion for dress is universal: the men are
+as fond of it as the women; and, happily, clothes are comparatively
+cheap. It is no great harm in itself, this display: it is only a pity
+that there is often nothing, or worse than nothing, under the shining
+surface.
+
+We walked with the brilliant Genoese crowd upon the hill where the
+public promenade overlooks a landscape of city and country, houses and
+gardens, vines and olives, which it makes the heart ache to behold, it
+is so faultlessly beautiful. Behind us the fountain was--
+
+  "Shaking its loosened silver in the sun;"
+
+the birds were singing; and there were innumerable fair girls going
+by, about whom one might have made romances if one had not known
+better. Our friend pointed out to us the "pink jail" in which Dickens
+lived while at Genoa; and showed us on the brow of a distant upland
+the villa, called _Il Paradiso_, which Byron had occupied. I dare
+say this Genoese joke is already in print: That the Devil reentered
+Paradise when Byron took this villa. Though, in loveliest Italy, one
+is half-persuaded that the Devil had never left Paradise.
+
+After lingering a little longer on that delicious height, we turned
+and went down for a stroll through the city.
+
+My note-book says that Genoa is the most magnificent city I ever saw,
+and I hold by my note-book, though I hardly know how to prove it.
+Venice is, and remains, the most beautiful city in the world; but her
+ancient rival impresses you with greater splendor. I suppose that
+the exclusively Renaissance architecture, which Ruskin declares the
+architecture of pride, lends itself powerfully to this effect in
+Genoa. It is here in its best mood, and there is little grotesque
+Renaissance to be seen, though the palaces are, as usual, loaded with
+ornament. The Via Nuova is the chief thoroughfare of the city, and the
+crowd pours through this avenue between long lines of palaces. Height
+on height rise the stately, sculptured facades, colonnaded, statued,
+pierced by mighty doorways and lofty windows; and the palaces seem to
+gain a kind of aristocratic _hauteur_ from the fact that there are for
+the most part no sidewalks, and that the carriages, rolling insolently
+through the crowd, threaten constantly to grind the pedestrian up
+against their carven marbles, and immolate him to their stony pride.
+There is something gracious and gentle in the grandeur of Venice,
+and much that the heart loves to cling to; but in Genoa no sense of
+kindliness is touched by the magnificence of the city.
+
+It was an unspeakable relief, after such a street, to come, on a
+sudden, upon the Duomo, one of the few Gothic buildings in Genoa, and
+rest our jaded eyes on that architecture which Heaven seems truly to
+have put into the thoughts of man together with the Christian faith.
+O beloved beauty of aspiring arches, of slender and clustered columns,
+of flowering capitals and window-traceries, of many-carven breadths
+and heights, wherein all Nature breathes and blossoms again! There is
+neither Greek perfection, nor winning Byzantine languor, nor insolent
+Renaissance opulence, which may compare with this loveliness of yours!
+Alas that the interior of this Gothic temple of Genoa should abound in
+the abomination of rococo restoration! They say that the dust of St.
+John the Baptist lies there within a costly shrine; and I wonder that
+it can sleep in peace amid all that heathenish show of bad taste. But
+the poor saints have to suffer a great deal in Italy.
+
+Outside, in the piazza before the church, there was an idle, cruel
+crowd, amusing itself with the efforts of a blind old man to find
+the entrance. He had a number of books which he desperately laid down
+while he ran his helpless hands over the clustered columns, and which
+he then desperately caught up again, in fear of losing them. At other
+times he paused, and wildly clasped his hands upon his eyes, or wildly
+threw up his arms; and then began to run to and fro again uneasily,
+while the crowd laughed and jeered. Doubtless a taint of madness
+afflicted him; but not the less he seemed the type of a blind soul
+that gropes darkly about through life, to find the doorway of some
+divine truth or beauty,--touched by the heavenly harmonies from
+within, and miserably failing, amid the scornful cries and bitter glee
+of those who have no will but to mock aspiration.
+
+The girl turning somersaults in another place had far more popular
+sympathy than the blind madman at the temple door, but she was hardly
+a more cheerful spectacle. For all her festive spangles and fairy-like
+brevity of skirts, she had quite a work-a-day look upon her honest,
+blood-red face, as if this were business though it looked like sport,
+and her part of the diversion were as practical as that of the famous
+captain of the waiters, who gave the act of peeling a sack of potatoes
+a playful effect by standing on his head. The poor damsel was going
+over and over, to the sound of most dismal drumming and braying,
+in front of the immense old palace of the Genoese Doges,--a classic
+building, stilted on a rustic base, and quite worthy of Palladio, if
+any body thinks that is praise.
+
+There was little left of our day when we had dined; but having seen
+the outside of Genoa, and not hoping to see the inside, we found even
+this little heavy on our hands, and were glad as the hour drew near
+when we were to take the steamer for Naples.
+
+It had been one of the noisiest days spent during several years in
+clamorous Italy, whose voiceful uproar strikes to the summits of her
+guardian Alps, and greets the coming stranger, and whose loud Addio
+would stun him at parting, if he had not meanwhile become habituated
+to the operatic pitch of her every-day tones. In Genoa, the hotels,
+taking counsel of the vagabond streets, stand about the cavernous
+arcade already mentioned, and all the noise of the shipping reaches
+their guests. We rose early that Sunday morning to the sound of a
+fleet unloading cargoes of wrought-iron, and of the hard swearing of
+all nations of seafaring men. The whole day long the tumult followed
+us, and seemed to culminate at last in the screams of a parrot, who
+thought it fine to cry, "_Piove! piove! piove_!"--"It rains! it
+rains! it rains!"--and had, no doubt, a secret interest in some
+umbrella-shop. This unprincipled bird dwelt somewhere in the
+neighborhood of the street where you see the awful tablet in the wall
+devoting to infamy the citizens of the old republic that were false to
+their country. The sight of that pitiless stone recalls with a thrill
+the picturesque, unhappy past, with all the wandering, half-benighted
+efforts of the people to rend their liberty from now a foreign and now
+a native lord. At best, they only knew how to avenge their wrongs; but
+now, let us hope, they have learnt, with all Italy, to prevent them.
+The will was never wanting of old to the Ligurian race, and in this
+time they have done their full share to establish Italian freedom.
+
+I do not know why it should have been so surprising to hear the
+boatman who rowed us to the steamer's anchorage speak English; but,
+after his harsh Genoese profanity in getting his boat into open water,
+it was the last thing we expected from him. It had somehow the effect
+of a furious beast addressing you in your native tongue, and
+telling you it was "Wary poordy wedder;" and it made us cling to his
+good-nature with the trembling solicitude of Little Red-Riding-Hood,
+when she begins to have the first faint suspicions of her grandmother.
+However, our boatman was no wild beast, but took our six cents of
+_buonamano_ with the base servility of a Christian man, when he had
+put our luggage in the cabin of the steamer. I wonder how he should
+have known us for Americans? He did so know us, and said he had been
+at New York in better days, when he voyaged upon higher seas than
+those he now navigated.
+
+On board, we watched with compassion an old gentleman in the cabin
+making a hearty meal of sardines and fruit-pie, and I asked him if
+he had ever been at sea. No, he said. I could have wept over that
+innocent old gentleman's childlike confidence of appetite, and
+guileless trust of the deep.
+
+We went on deck, where one of the gentle beings of our party declared
+that she would remain as long as Genoa was in sight; and to tell the
+truth, the scene was worthy of the promised devotion. There, in a
+half-circle before us, blazed the lights of the quay; above these
+twinkled the lamps of the steep streets and climbing palaces; over
+and behind all hung the darkness on the heights,--a sable cloud dotted
+with ruddy points of flame burning in the windows of invisible houses.
+
+  "Merrily did we drop"
+
+down the bay, and presently caught the heavy swell of the open sea.
+The other gentle being of our party then clutched my shoulder with a
+dreadful shudder, and after gasping, "O Mr. Scribbler, why _will_ the
+ship roll so?" was meekly hurried below by her sister, who did not
+return for a last glimpse of Genoa the Proud.
+
+In a moment heaven's sweet pity flapped away as with the sea-gull's
+wings, and I too felt that there was no help for it, and that I must
+go and lie down in the cabin. With anguished eyes I beheld upon the
+shelf opposite to mine the innocent old gentleman who had lately
+supped so confidently on sardines and fruit-pie. He lay upon his back,
+groaning softly to himself.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES.
+
+I.
+
+Like the Englishman who had no prejudices, I do hate a Frenchman; and
+there were many Frenchmen among our passengers on the _Messina_, in
+whose company I could hardly have been happy, had I not seen them
+horribly sea-sick. After the imprudent old gentleman of the sardines
+and fruit-pie, these wretched Gauls were the first to be seized with
+the malady, which became epidemic, and were miserable up to the last
+moment on board. To the enormity of having been born Frenchmen, they
+added the crime of being commercial travellers,--a class of fellow-men
+of whom we know little at home, but who are met everywhere in European
+travel. They spend more than half their lives in movement from place
+to place, and they learn to snatch from every kind of travel its
+meagre comforts, with an insolent disregard of the rights and feelings
+of other passengers. They excuse an abominable trespass with a cool
+"Pardon!" take the best seat everywhere, and especially treat women
+with a savage rudeness, to which an American vainly endeavors to
+accustom his temper. I have seen commercial travellers of all nations,
+and I think I must award the French nation the discredit of producing
+the most odious commercial travellers in the world. The Englishman
+of this species wraps himself in his rugs, and rolls into his corner,
+defiantly, but not aggressively, boorish; the Italian is almost a
+gentleman; the German is apt to take sausage out of a newspaper and
+eat it with his penknife; the Frenchman aggravates human nature beyond
+endurance by his restless ill-breeding, and his evident intention not
+only to keep all his own advantages, but to steal some of yours upon
+the first occasion. There were three of these monsters on our
+steamer: one a slight, bloodless young man, with pale blue eyes and
+an incredulous grin; another, a gigantic full-bearded animal in
+spectacles; the third an infamous plump little creature, in absurdly
+tight pantaloons, with a cast in his eye, and a habit of sucking his
+teeth at table. When this wretch was not writhing in the agonies of
+sea-sickness, he was on deck with his comrades, lecturing them upon
+various things, to which the bloodless young man listened with his
+incredulous grin, and the bearded giant in spectacles attended with a
+choked look about the eyes, like a suffering ox. They were constantly
+staggering in and out of their state-room, which, for my sins, was
+also mine; and opening their abominable commodious travelling bags, or
+brushing their shaggy heads at the reeling mirror, and since they
+were born into the world, I think they had never cleaned their
+finger-nails. They wore their hats at dinner, but always went away,
+after soup, deadly pale.
+
+
+II.
+
+In contrast with these cattle, what polished and courtly gentlemen
+were the sailors and firemen! As for our captain, he would in any
+company have won notice for his gentle and high-bred way; in his place
+at the head of the table among these Frenchmen, he seemed to me the
+finest gentleman I had ever seen. He had spent his whole life at sea,
+and had voyaged in all parts of the world except Japan, where he meant
+some day, he said, to go. He had been first a cabin-boy on a little
+Genoese schooner, and he had gradually risen to the first place on
+a sailing-vessel, and now he had been selected to fill a commander's
+post on this line of steamers. (It is an admirable line of boats,
+not belonging I believe to the Italian government, but much under its
+control, leaving Genoa every day for Leghorn, Naples, Palermo, and
+Ancona, on the Adriatic coast.) The captain had sailed a good deal in
+American waters, but chiefly on the Pacific coast, trading from the
+Spanish republican ports to those of California. He had been in that
+State during its effervescent days, when every thing foul floated
+to the top, and I am afraid he formed there but a bad opinion of our
+people, though he was far too courteous to say outright any thing of
+this sort.
+
+He had very fine, shrewd blue eyes, a lean, weather-beaten, kindly
+face, and a cautious way of saying things. I hardly expected him to
+turn out so red-hot a Democrat as he did on better acquaintance, but
+being a warm friend of man myself, I was not sorry. Garibaldi was
+the beginning and ending of his political faith, as he is with every
+enthusiastic Italian. The honest soul's conception of all concrete
+evil was brought forth in two words, of odd enough application. In
+Europe, and Italy more particularly, true men have suffered chiefly
+from this form of evil, and the captain evidently could conceive of
+no other cause of suffering anywhere. We were talking of the American
+war, and when the captain had asked the usual question, "_Quando
+finira mai questa guerra_?" and I had responded as usual, "_Ah, ci
+vuol pazienza_!" the captain gave a heavy sigh, and turning his head
+pensively aside, plucked his grapes from the cluster a moment in
+silence.
+
+Then he said: "You Americans are in the habit of attributing this war
+to slavery. The cause is not sufficient."
+
+I ventured to demur and explain. "No," said the captain, "the cause is
+not sufficient. We Italians know the only cause which could produce a
+war like this."
+
+I was naturally anxious to be instructed in the Italian theory, hoping
+it might be profounder than the English notion that we were fighting
+about tariffs.
+
+The captain frowned, looked at me carefully, and then said:--
+
+"In this world there is but one cause of mischief--the Jesuits."
+
+
+III.
+
+The first night out, from Genoa to Leghorn, was bad enough, but that
+which succeeded our departure from the latter port was by far the
+worst of the three we spent in our voyage to Naples. How we envied the
+happy people who went ashore at Leghorn! I think we even envied the
+bones of the Venetians, Pisans, and Genoese who met and slew each
+other in the long-forgotten sea-fights, and sank too deeply through
+the waves to be stirred by their restless tumult. Every one has
+heard tell of how cross and treacherous a sea the Mediterranean is in
+winter, and my own belief is, that he who has merely been sea-sick on
+the Atlantic should give the Mediterranean a trial before professing
+to have suffered every thing of which human nature is capable. Our
+steamer was clean enough and staunch enough, but she was not large--no
+bigger, I thought, than a gondola, that night as the waves tossed her
+to and fro, till unwinged things took flight all through her cabins
+and over her decks. My berth was placed transversely instead of
+lengthwise with the boat,--an ingenious arrangement to heighten
+sea-sick horrors, and dash the blood of the sufferer from brain to
+boots with exaggerated violence at each roll of the boat; and I begged
+the steward to let me sleep upon one of the lockers in the cabin.
+I found many of my agonized species already laid out there; and the
+misery of the three French commercial travellers was so great, that,
+in the excess of my own dolor, it actually afforded me a kind of
+happiness, and I found myself smiling at times to see the giant, with
+the eyes of a choked ox, rise up and faintly bellow. Indeed, there was
+something eldritch and unearthly in the whole business, and I think a
+kind of delirium must have resulted from the sea-sickness. Otherwise,
+I shall not know how to account for having attributed a kind of
+consciousness and individuality to the guide-book of a young American
+who had come aboard at Leghorn. He turned out afterward to be the
+sweetest soul in the world, and I am sorry now that I regarded with
+amusement his failure to smoke off his sickness. He was reading his
+guide-book with great diligence and unconcern, when suddenly I marked
+him lay it softly, softly down, with that excessive deliberation which
+men use at such times, and vanish with great dignity from the
+scene. Thus abandoned to its own devices, this guide-book began its
+night-long riots, setting out upon a tour of the cabin with the first
+lurch of the boat that threw it from the table upon the floor. I heard
+it careen at once wildly to the cabin door, and knock to get out; and
+failing in this, return more deliberately to the stern of the boat,
+interrogating the tables and chairs, which had got their sea-legs on,
+and asking them how they found themselves. Arrived again at the point
+of starting, it seemed to pause a moment, and then I saw it setting
+forth on a voyage of pleasure in the low company of a French hat,
+which, being itself a French book, I suppose it liked. In these
+travels they both ran under the feet of one of the stewards and were
+replaced by an immense _tour de force_ on the table, from which the
+book eloped again,--this time in company with an overcoat; but it
+seemed the coat was too miserable to go far: it stretched itself at
+full length on the floor, and suffered the book to dance over it, back
+and forth, I know not how many times. At last, as the actions of
+the book were becoming unendurable, and the general sea-sickness was
+waxing into a frenzy, a heavy roll, that made the whole ship shriek
+and tremble, threw us all from our lockers; and gathering myself up,
+bruised and sore in every fibre, I lay down again and became sensible
+of a blissful, blissful lull; the machinery had stopped, and with
+the mute hope that we were all going to the bottom, I fell tranquilly
+asleep.
+
+
+IV.
+
+It appeared that the storm had really been dangerous. Instead of being
+only six hours from Naples, as we ought to be at this time, we were
+got no further than Porto Longone, in the Isle of Elba. We woke in a
+quiet, sheltered little bay, whence we could only behold, not feel,
+the storm left far out upon the open sea. From this we turned our
+heavy eyes gladly to the shore, where a white little town was settled,
+like a flight of gulls upon the beach, at the feet of green and
+pleasant hills, whose gentle lines rhymed softly away against the sky.
+At the end of either arm of the embracing land in which we lay, stood
+gray, placid old forts, with peaceful sentries pacing their bastions,
+and weary ships creeping round their feet, under guns looking out so
+kindly and harmlessly, that I think General ---- himself would not
+have hesitated (except, perhaps, from a profound sentiment of regret
+for offering the violence) to attack them. Our port was full of
+frightened shipping--steamers, brigs, and schooners--of all sizes and
+nations; and since it was our misfortune that Napoleon spent his exile
+in Elba at Porto Ferrato instead of Porto Longone, we amused ourselves
+with looking at the vessels and the white town and the soft hills,
+instead of hunting up dead lion's tracks.
+
+Our fellow-passengers began to develop themselves: the regiment of
+soldiers whom we were transporting picturesquely breakfasted forward,
+and the second-cabin people came aft to our deck, while the English
+engineer (there are English engineers on all the Mediterranean
+steamers) planted a camp-stool in a sunny spot, and sat down to read
+the "Birmingham Express."
+
+Our friends of the second cabin were chiefly officers with their wives
+and families, and they talked for the most part of their sufferings
+during the night. They spoke such exquisite Italian that I thought
+them Tuscans, but they told me they were of Sicily, where their
+beautiful speech first had life. Let us hear what they talked of in
+their divine language, and with that ineffable _tonic_ accent which
+no foreigner perfectly acquires, and let us for once translate the
+profanities Pagan and Christian, which adorn common parlance in
+Italy:--
+
+"Ah, my God! how much I suffered!" says a sweet little woman with
+gentle brown eyes, red, red lips, and blameless Greek lines of face.
+"I broke two basins!"
+
+"There were ten broken in all, by Diana!" says this lady's sister.
+
+"Presence of the Devil!" says her husband; and
+
+"Body of Bacchus!" her young brother, puffing his cigar.
+
+"And you, sir," said the lady, turning to a handsome young fellow in
+civil dress, near her, "how did you pass this horrible night?"
+
+"Oh!" says the young man, twirling his heavy blond mustache, "mighty
+well, mighty well!"
+
+"Oh mercy of God! You were not sick?"
+
+"I, signora, am never sea-sick. I am of the navy."
+
+At which they all cry oh, and ah, and declare they are glad of it,
+though why they should have been I don't know to this day.
+
+"I have often wished," added the young man meditatively, and in a
+serious tone, as if he had indeed given the subject much thought,
+"that it might please God to let me be sea-sick once, if only that I
+might know how it feels. But no!" He turned the conversation, as
+if his disappointment were too sore to dwell upon; and hearing our
+English, he made out to let us know that he had been at New York, and
+could spik our language, which he proceeded to do, to the great pride
+of his countrymen, and our own astonishment at the remarkable forms of
+English speech to which he gave utterance.
+
+
+V.
+
+We set out from Porto Longone that night at eight o'clock, and next
+evening, driving through much-abated storm southward into calm waters
+and clear skies, reached Naples. At noon, Monte Circeo where Circe
+led her disreputable life, was a majestic rock against blue heaven
+and broken clouds; after nightfall, and under the risen moon, Vesuvius
+crept softly up from the sea, and stood a graceful steep, with wreaths
+of lightest cloud upon its crest, and the city lamps circling far
+round its bay.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES.
+
+I.
+
+Perhaps some reader of mine who visited Naples under the old disorder
+of things, when the Bourbon and the Camorra reigned, will like to hear
+that the pitched battle which travellers formerly fought, in landing
+from their steamer, is now gone out of fashion. Less truculent boatmen
+I never saw than those who rowed us ashore at Naples; they were so
+quiet and peaceful that they harmonized perfectly with that tranquil
+scene of drowsy-twinkling city lights, slumbrous mountains, and
+calm sea, and, as they dipped softly toward us in the glare of the
+steamer's lamps, I could only think of Tennyson's description:--
+
+  "And round about the keel with faces pale,
+  Dark faces pale against the rosy flame,
+  The mild-eyed melancholy lotus-eaters came."
+
+The mystery of this placidity had been already solved by our captain,
+whom I had asked what price I should bargain to pay from the steamer
+to the shore. "There is a tariff," said he, "and the boatmen keep to
+it. The Neapolitans are good people, (_buona gente_,) and only needed
+justice to make them obedient to the laws." I must say that I found
+this to be true. The fares of all public conveyances are now fixed,
+and the attempts which drivers occasionally make to cheat you, seem
+to be rather the involuntary impulses of old habit than deliberate
+intentions to do you wrong. You pay what is due, and as your man
+merely rumbles internally when you turn away, you must be a very timid
+_signorin_, indeed, if you buy his content with any thing more. I
+fancy that all these things are now much better managed in Italy than
+in America, only we grumble at them there and stand them in silence at
+home. Every one can recall frightful instances of plunder, in which
+he was the victim, at New York--in which the robbery had none of the
+neatness of an operation, as it often has in Italy, but was a brutal
+mutilation. And then as regards civility from the same kind of people
+in the two countries, there is no comparison that holds in favor of
+us. All questions are readily and politely answered in Italian travel,
+and the servants of companies are required to be courteous to the
+public whereas, one is only too glad to receive a silent snub from
+such people at home.
+
+
+II.
+
+The first sun that rose after our arrival in Naples was mild and warm
+as a May sun, though we were quite in the heart of November. We early
+strolled out under it into the crowded ways of the city, and drew near
+as we might to that restless, thronging, gossiping southern life,
+in contrast with which all northern existence seems only a sort of
+hibernation. The long Toledo, on which the magnificence of modern
+Naples is threaded, is the most brilliant and joyous street in
+the world; but I think there is less of the quaintness of Italian
+civilization to be seen in its vivacious crowds than anywhere else
+in Italy. One easily understands how, with its superb length and
+straightness, and its fine, respectable, commonplace-looking houses,
+it should be the pride of a people fond of show; but after Venice and
+Genoa it has no picturesque charm; nay, even busy Milan seems less
+modern and more picturesque. The lines of the lofty palaces on the
+Toledo are seldom broken by the facade of a church or other public
+edifice; and when this does happen, the building is sure to be coldly
+classic or frantically baroque.
+
+You weary of the Toledo's perfect repair, of its monotonous iron
+balconies, its monotonous lofty windows; and it would be insufferable
+if you could not turn out from it at intervals into one of those
+wondrous little streets which branch up on one hand and down on the
+other, rising and falling with flights of steps between the high,
+many-balconied walls. They ring all day with the motleyest life of
+fishermen, fruit-venders, chestnut-roasters, and idlers of every age
+and sex; and there is nothing so full of local color, unless it be the
+little up-and-down-hill streets in Genoa. Like those, the by-streets
+of Naples are only meant for foot-passengers, and a carriage never
+enters them; but sometimes, if you are so blest, you may see a mule
+climbing the long stairways, moving solemnly under a stack of straw,
+or tinkling gayly down-stairs, bestridden by a swarthy, handsome
+peasant--all glittering teeth and eyes and flaming Phrygian cap. The
+rider exchanges lively salutations and sarcasms with the by-standers
+in his way, and perhaps brushes against the bagpipers who bray
+constantly in those hilly defiles. They are in Neapolitan costume,
+these _pifferari_, and have their legs incomprehensibly tied up in the
+stockings and garters affected by the peasantry of the provinces,
+and wear brave red sashes about their waists. They are simple,
+harmless-looking people, and would no doubt rob and kill in the most
+amiable manner, if brigandage came into fashion in their neighborhood.
+
+Sometimes the student of men may witness a Neapolitan quarrel in these
+streets, and may pick up useful ideas of invective from the remarks of
+the fat old women who always take part in the contests. But, though
+we were ten days in Naples, I only saw one quarrel, and I could have
+heard much finer violence of language among the gondoliers at any
+ferry in Venice than I heard in this altercation.
+
+The Neapolitans are, of course, furious in traffic. They sell a great
+deal, and very boisterously, the fruit of the cactus, which is about
+as large as an egg, and which they peel to a very bloody pulp, and lay
+out, a sanguinary presence, on boards for purchase. It is not good
+to the uncultivated taste; but the stranger may stop and drink, with
+relish and refreshment, the orangeade and lemonade mixed with snow and
+sold at the little booths on the street-corners. These stands looks
+much like the shrines of the Madonna in other Italian cities, and a
+friend of ours was led, before looking carefully into their office,
+to argue immense Neapolitan piety from the frequency of their
+ecclesiastical architecture. They are, indeed, the shrines of a god
+much worshiped during the long Neapolitan summers; and it was the
+profound theory of the Bourbon kings of Naples, that, if they kept
+their subjects well supplied with snow to cool their drink, there was
+no fear of revolution. It shows how liable statesmen are to err, that,
+after all, the Neapolitans rose, drove out the Bourbons, and welcomed
+Garibaldi.
+
+The only part of the picturesque life of the side streets which seems
+ever to issue from them into the Toledo is the goatherd with his
+flock of milch-goats, which mingle with the passers in the avenues as
+familiarly as with those of the alley, and thrust aside silk-hidden
+hoops, and brush against dandies' legs, in their course, but keep on
+perfect terms with every body. The goatherd leads the eldest of the
+flock, and the rest follow in docile order and stop as he stops to ask
+at the doors if milk is wanted. When he happens to have an order, one
+of the goats is haled, much against her will, into the entry of a,
+house, and there milked, while the others wait outside alone, nibbling
+and smelling thoughtfully about the masonry. It is noticeable that
+none of the good-natured passers seem to think these goats a great
+nuisance in the crowded street; but all make way for them as if they
+were there by perfect right, and were no inconvenience.
+
+On the Toledo people keep upon the narrow sidewalks, or strike out
+into the carriage-way, with an indifference to hoofs and wheels which
+one, after long residence in tranquil Venice, cannot acquire, in
+view of the furious Neapolitan driving. That old comprehensive gig of
+Naples, with which many pens and pencils have familiarized the reader,
+is nearly as hard to find there now as the _lazzaroni_, who have gone
+out altogether. You may still see it in the remoter quarters of
+the city, with its complement of twelve passengers to one horse,
+distributed, two on each thill, four on the top seats, one at each
+side, and two behind; but in the Toledo it has given place to much
+finer vehicles. Slight buggies, which take you anywhere for half a
+franc, are the favorite means of public conveyance, and the private
+turn-outs are of every description and degree. Indeed, all the
+Neapolitans take to carriages, and the Strand in London at six o'clock
+in the evening is not a greater jam of wheels than the Toledo in the
+afternoon. Shopping feels the expansive influence of the out-of-doors
+life, and ladies do most of it as they sit in their open carriages
+at the shop-doors, ministered to by the neat-handed shopmen. They are
+very languid ladies, as they recline upon their carriage cushions;
+they are all black-eyed, and of an olive pallor, and have gloomy rings
+about their fine eyes, like the dark-faced dandies who bow to them.
+This Neapolitan look is very curious, and I have not seen it elsewhere
+in Italy; it is a look of peculiar pensiveness, and comes, no doubt,
+from the peculiarly heavy growth of lashes which fringes the lower
+eyelid. Then there is the weariness in it of all peoples whose summers
+are fierce and long.
+
+As the Italians usually dress beyond their means, the dandies of
+Naples are very gorgeous. If it is now, say, four o'clock in the
+afternoon, they are all coming down the Toledo with the streams
+of carriages bound for the long drive around the bay. But our
+foot-passers go to walk in the beautiful Villa Reale, between this
+course and the sea. The Villa is a slender strip of Paradise, a mile
+long; it is rapture to walk in it, and it comes, in description, to
+be a garden-grove, with feathery palms, Greekish temples, musical
+fountains, white statues of the gods, and groups of fair girls in
+spring silks. If I remember aright, the sun is always setting on the
+bay, and you cannot tell whether this sunset is cooled by the water
+or the water is warmed by the golden light upon it, and upon the city,
+and upon all the soft mountain-heights around.
+
+
+III.
+
+Walking westward through the whole length of the Villa Reale, and
+keeping with the crescent shore of the bay, you come, after a while,
+to the Grot of Posilippo, which is not a grotto but a tunnel cut for
+a carriage-way under the hill. It serves, however, the purpose of a
+grotto, if a grotto has any, and is of great length and dimness, and
+is all a-twinkle night and day with numberless lamps. Overlooking the
+street which passes into it is the tomb of Virgil, and it is this
+you have come to see. To reach it, you knock first at the door of a
+blacksmith, who calls a species of custodian, and, when this
+latter has opened a gate in a wall, you follow him up-stairs into a
+market-garden.
+
+In one corner, and standing in a leafy and grassy shelter somewhat
+away from the vegetables, is the poet's tomb, which has a kind of
+claim to genuineness by virtue of its improbable appearance. It looks
+more like a bake-oven than even the Pompeian tombs; the masonry is
+antique, and is at least in skillful imitation of the fine Roman work.
+The interior is a small chamber with vaulted or wagon-roof ceiling,
+under which a man may stand upright, and at the end next the street
+is a little stone commemorating the place as Virgil's tomb, which was
+placed there by the Queen of France in 1840, and said by the custodian
+(a singularly dull ass) to be an exact copy of the original, whatever
+the original may have been. This guide could tell us nothing more
+about it, and was too stupidly honest to pretend to know more. The
+laurel planted by Petrarch at the door of the tomb, and renewed
+in later times by Casimir Delavigne, has been succeeded by a third
+laurel. The present twig was so slender, and looked so friendless and
+unprotected, that even enthusiasm for the memory of two poets could
+not be brought to rob it of one of its few leaves; and we contented
+ourselves with plucking some of the grass and weeds that grew
+abundantly on the roof of the tomb.
+
+There was a dusty quiet within the tomb, and a grassy quiet without,
+that pleased exceedingly; but though the memories of the place were
+so high and epic, it only suggested bucolic associations, and, sunken
+into that nook of hill-side verdure, made me think of a spring-house
+on some far-away Ohio farm; a thought that, perhaps, would not have
+offended the poet, who loved and sang of humble country things, and,
+drawing wearily to his rest here, no doubt turned and remembered
+tenderly the rustic days before the excellent veterans of Augustus
+came to exile him from his father's farm at Mantua, and banish him to
+mere glory. But I believe most travellers have much nobler sensations
+in Virgil's tomb, and there is a great deal of testimony borne to
+their lofty sentiments on every scribbleable inch of its walls. Valery
+reminded me that Boccaccio, standing near it of old, first felt his
+fate decided for literature. Did he come there, I wonder, with poor
+Fiammetta, and enter the tomb with her tender hand in his, before ever
+he thought of that cruel absence she tells of? "O donne pietose!" I
+hope so, and that this pilgrimage, half of love and half of letters,
+took place, "nel tempo nel quale la rivestita terra piu che tutto
+l'altro anno si mostra bella."
+
+If you ascend from the tomb and turn Naplesward from the crest of the
+hill, you have the loveliest view in the world of the sea and of the
+crescent beach, mightily jeweled at its further horn with the black
+Castel dell' Ovo. Fishermen's children are playing all along the
+foamy border of the sea, and boats are darting out into the surf. The
+present humble muse is not above saying also that the linen which the
+laundresses hang to dry upon lines along the beach takes the sun like
+a dazzling flight of white birds, and gives a breezy life to the scene
+which it could not spare.
+
+
+IV.
+
+There was a little church on our way back from Posilippo, into which
+we lounged a moment, pausing at the altar of some very successful
+saint near the door. Here there were great numbers of the usual
+offerings from the sick whom the saint had eased of their various
+ills,--waxen legs and arms from people who had been in peril of
+losing their limbs, as well as eyes, noses, fingers, and feet, and the
+crutches of those cured of lameness; but we were most amused with the
+waxen effigies of several entire babies hung up about the altar, which
+the poor souls who had been near losing the originals had brought
+there in gratitude to the saint.
+
+Generally, however, the churches of Naples are not very interesting,
+and one who came away without seeing them would have little to regret.
+The pictures are seldom good, and though there are magnificent
+chapels in St. Januarius, and fine Gothic tombs at Santa Chiara,
+the architecture is usually rococo. I fancy that Naples has felt the
+damage of Spanish taste in such things as well as Spanish tyranny in
+others. Indeed, I saw much there which reminded me of what I had read
+about Spain rather than what I had seen in Italy; and all Italian
+writers are agreed in attributing the depravation of Naples to the
+long Spanish dominion. It is well known how the Spaniards rule their
+provinces, and their gloomy despotism was probably never more cruelly
+felt than in Italy, where the people were least able to bear it. I
+had a heart-felt exultation in walking through the quarter of the city
+where the tumults of Massaniello had raged, and, if only for a few
+days, struck mortal terror to the brutal pride of the viceroy; but
+I think I had a better sense of the immense retribution which has
+overtaken all memory of Spanish rule in Naples as we passed through
+the palace of Capo di Monte. This was the most splendid seat of the
+Spanish Bourbon, whose family, inheriting its power from the violence
+of other times, held it with violence in these; and in one of the
+chief saloons of the palace, which is now Victor Emanuel's, were
+pictures representing scenes of the revolution of 1860, while the
+statuette of a Garibaldino, in his red shirt and all his heroic
+rudeness, was defiantly conspicuous on one of the tables.
+
+
+V.
+
+There was nothing else that pleased me as well in the palace, or in
+the grounds about it. These are all laid out in pleasant successions
+of grove, tangled wilderness, and pasture-land, and were thronged,
+the Saturday afternoon of our visit, with all ranks of people, who
+strolled through the beautiful walks and enjoyed themselves in the
+peculiarly peaceful Italian way. Valery says that the Villa Reale in
+the Bourbon time was closed, except for a single day in the year,
+to all but the nobles; and that on this occasion it was filled with
+pretty peasant women, who made it a condition of their marriage
+bargains that their husbands should bring them to the Villa Reale on
+St. Mary's Day. It is now free to all on every day of the year, and
+the grounds of the Palace Capo di Monte are opened every Saturday. I
+liked the pleasant way in which sylvan Nature and Art had made friends
+in these beautiful grounds, in which Nature had consented to overlook
+even the foolish vanity of the long aisles of lime, cut and trimmed in
+formal and fantastic shapes, according to the taste of the silly times
+of bagwigs and patches. On every side wild birds fluttered through
+these absurd trees, and in the thickets lurked innumerable pheasants,
+which occasionally issued forth and stalked in stately, fearless
+groups over the sunset-crimsoned lawns. There was a brown gamekeeper
+for nearly every head of game, wearing a pheasant's wing in his hat
+and carrying a short, heavy sword; and our driver told us, with an
+awful solemnity in his bated breath, that no one might kill this game
+but the king, under penalty of the galleys.
+
+
+VI.
+
+We went one evening to the opera at San Carlo. It is one of the three
+theatres--San Carlo of Naples, La Scala of Milan, and Fenice of
+Venice--on which the Italians pride themselves; and it is certainly
+very large and imposing. The interior has a _bel colpo d'occhio_,
+which is what many Italians chiefly value in morals, manners, and
+architecture; but after this comes great shabbiness of detail. The
+boxes, even of the first order, are paved with brick tiles, and the
+red velvet border of the box which the people see from the pit is not
+supported in style by the seats within, which are merely covered with
+red oil-cloth. The opera we saw was also second-rate, and was to the
+splendor of the scenic arrangements what the oil-cloth was to the
+velvet. The house was full of people, but the dress of the audience
+was not so fine as we had expected in Naples. The evening dress is not
+_de rigueur_ at Italian theatres, and people seemed to have come to
+San Carlo in any pleasant carelessness of costume.
+
+
+VII.
+
+The Italians are simple and natural folks, pleased through all
+their show of conventionality with little things, and as easy and
+unconscious as children in their ways. There happened to be a new
+caffe opened in Naples while we were there, and we had the pleasure
+of seeing all ranks of people affected by its magnificence. Artless
+throngs blocked the sidewalk day and night before its windows, gazing
+upon its mirrors, fountains, and frescos, and regarding the persons
+over their coffee within as beings lifted by sudden magic out of the
+common orbit of life and set dazzling in a higher sphere. All the
+waiters were uniformed and brass-buttoned to blinding effect, and the
+head waiter was a majestic creature in a long blue coat reaching to
+his feet, and armed with a mighty silver-headed staff. This gorgeous
+apparition did nothing but walk up and down, and occasionally advance
+toward the door, as if to disperse the crowds. At such times, however,
+before executing his purpose, he would glance round on the splendors
+they were admiring, and, as if smitten with a sense of the enormous
+cruelty he had meditated in thinking to deprive them of the sight,
+would falter and turn away, leaving his intent unfulfilled.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+A DAY IN POMPEII.
+
+I.
+
+On the second morning after our arrival in Naples, we took the seven
+o'clock train, which leaves the Nineteenth Century for the first cycle
+of the Christian Era, and, skirting the waters of the Neapolitan bay
+almost the whole length of our journey, reached the railway station
+of Pompeii in an hour. As we rode along by that bluest sea, we saw
+the fishing-boats go out, and the foamy waves (which it would be an
+insolent violence to call breakers) come in; we saw the mountains
+slope their tawny and golden manes caressingly downward to the waters,
+where the islands were dozing yet; and landward, on the left, we saw
+Vesuvius, with his brown mantle of ashes drawn close about his throat,
+reclining on the plain, and smoking a bland and thoughtful morning
+pipe, of which the silver fumes curled lightly, lightly upward in the
+sunrise.
+
+We dismounted at the station, walked a few rods eastward through a
+little cotton-field, and found ourselves at the door of Hotel Diomed,
+where we took breakfast for a number of sesterces which I am sure
+it would have made an ancient Pompeian stir in his urn to think of
+paying. But in Italy one learns the chief Italian virtue, patience,
+and we paid our account with the utmost good nature. There was
+compensation in store for us, and the guide whom we found at the gate
+leading up the little hill to Pompeii inclined the disturbed balance
+in favor of our happiness. He was a Roman, spoke Italian that Beatrice
+might have addressed to Dante, and was numbered Twenty-six. I suppose
+it is known that the present Italian Government forbids people to
+be pillaged in any way on its premises, and that the property of the
+State is no longer the traffic of custodians and their pitiless
+race. At Pompeii each person pays two francs for admission, and is
+rigorously forbidden by recurrent sign-boards to offer money to the
+guides. Ventisei (as we shall call him) himself pointed out one of
+these notices in English, and did his duty faithfully without asking
+or receiving fees in money. He was a soldier, like all the other
+guides, and was a most intelligent, obliging fellow, with a
+self-respect and dignity worthy of one of our own volunteer soldiers.
+
+Ventisei took us up the winding slope, and led us out of this living
+world through the Sea-gate of Pompeii back into the dead past--the
+past which, with all its sensuous beauty and grace, and all its
+intellectual power, I am not sorry to have dead, and for the most
+part, buried. Our feet had hardly trodden the lava flagging of the
+narrow streets when we came in sight of the laborers who were exhuming
+the inanimate city. They were few in number, not perhaps a score, and
+they worked tediously, with baskets to carry away the earth from the
+excavation, boys and girls carrying the baskets, and several athletic
+old women plying picks, while an overseer sat in a chair near by, and
+smoked, and directed their exertions.
+
+They dig down about eight or ten feet, uncovering the walls and
+pillars of the houses, and the mason, who is at hand, places little
+iron rivets in the stucco to prevent its fall where it is weak, while
+an artist attends to wash and clean the frescos as fast as they are
+exposed. The soil through which the excavation first passes is not
+of great depth; the ashes which fell damp with scalding rain, in the
+second eruption, are perhaps five feet thick; the rest is of that
+porous stone which descended in small fragments during the first
+eruption. A depth of at least two feet in this stone is always left
+untouched by the laborers till the day when the chief superintendent
+of the work comes out from Naples to see the last layers removed;
+and it is then that the beautiful mosaic pavements of the houses are
+uncovered, and the interesting and valuable objects are nearly always
+found.
+
+The wonder was, seeing how slowly the work proceeded, not that
+two thirds of Pompeii were yet buried, but that one third had been
+exhumed. We left these hopeless toilers, and went down-town into the
+Forum, stepping aside on the way to look into one of the Pompeian
+Courts of Common Pleas.
+
+
+II.
+
+Now Pompeii is, in truth, so full of marvel and surprise, that it
+would be unreasonable to express disappointment with Pompeii in
+fiction. And yet I cannot help it. An exuberant carelessness of phrase
+in most writers and talkers who describe it had led me to expect much
+more than it was possible to find there. In my Pompeii I confess that
+the houses had no roofs--in fact, the rafters which sustained the
+tiles being burnt, how could the roofs help falling in? But otherwise
+my Pompeii was a very complete affair: the walls all rose to their
+full height; doorways and arches were perfect; the columns were all
+unbroken and upright; putting roofs on my Pompeii, you might have
+lived in it very comfortably. The real Pompeii is different. It is
+seldom that any wall is unbroken; most columns are fragmentary; and
+though the ground-plans are always distinct, very few rooms in the
+city are perfect in form, and the whole is much more ruinous than I
+thought.
+
+But this ruin once granted, and the idle disappointment at its
+greatness overcome, there is endless material for study, instruction,
+and delight. It is the revelation of another life, and the utterance
+of the past is here more perfect than anywhere else in the world.
+Indeed, I think that the true friend of Pompeii should make it a
+matter of conscience, on entering the enchanted city, to cast out of
+his knowledge all the rubbish that has fallen into it from novels and
+travels, and to keep merely the facts of the town's luxurious life
+and agonizing death, with such incidents of the eruption as he can
+remember from the description of Pliny. These are the spells to
+which the sorcery yields, and with these in your thought you can
+rehabilitate the city until Ventisei seems to be a _valet de place_ of
+the first century, and yourselves a set of blond barbarians to whom he
+is showing off the splendors of one of the most brilliant towns of the
+empire of Titus. Those sad furrows in the pavement become vocal with
+the joyous rattle of chariot-wheels on a sudden, and you prudently
+step up on the narrow sidewalks and rub along by the little shops
+of wine, and grain, and oil, with which the thrifty voluptuaries of
+Pompeii flanked their street-doors. The counters of these shops run
+across their fronts, and are pierced with round holes on the top,
+through which you see dark depths of oil in the jars below, and not
+sullen lumps of ashes; those stately _amphorae_ behind are full of
+wine, and in the corners are bags of wheat.
+
+"This house, with a shop on either side, whose is it, XXVI.?"
+
+"It is the house of the great Sallust, my masters. Would you like his
+autograph? I know one of his slaves who would sell it."
+
+You are a good deal stared at, naturally, as you pass by, for people
+in Pompeii have not much to do, and, besides, a Briton is not an
+every-day sight there, as he will be one of these centuries. The skins
+of wild beasts are little worn in Pompeii; and those bold-eyed Roman
+women think it rather odd that we should like to powder our shaggy
+heads with brick-dust. However, these are matters of taste. We, for
+our part, cannot repress a feeling of disgust at the loungers in the
+street, who, XXVI. tells us, are all going to soak themselves half the
+day in the baths yonder; for, if there is in Pompeii one thing more
+offensive than another to our savage sense of propriety, it is the
+personal cleanliness of the inhabitants. We little know what a change
+for the better will be wrought in these people with the lapse of time,
+and that they will yet come to wash themselves but once a year, as we
+do.
+
+(The reader may go on doing this sort of thing at some length for
+himself; and may imagine, if he pleases, a boastful conversation among
+the Pompeians at the baths, in which the barbarians hear how Agricola
+has broken the backbone of a rebellion in Britain; and in which all
+the speakers begin their observations with "Ho! my Lepidus!" and "Ha!
+my Diomed!" In the mean time we return to the present day, and step
+down the Street of Plenty along with Ventisei.)
+
+
+III.
+
+It is proper, after seeing the sites of some of the principal temples
+in Pompeii (such as those of Jupiter and Venus), to cross the fields
+that cover a great breadth of the buried city, and look into the
+amphitheatre, where, as every body knows, the lions had no stomach
+for Glaucus on the morning of the fatal eruption. The fields are now
+planted with cotton, and of course we thought those commonplaces about
+the wonder the Pompeians would feel could they come back to see that
+New-World plant growing above their buried homes. We might have told
+them, the day of our visit, that this cruel plant, so long watered
+with the tears of slaves, and fed with the blood of men, was now an
+exile from its native fields, where war was plowing with sword and
+shot the guilty land, and rooting up the subtlest fibres of the
+oppression in which cotton had grown king. And the ghosts of wicked
+old Pompeii, remembering the manifold sins that called the fires of
+hell to devour her, and thinking on this exiled plant, the latest
+witness of God's unforgetting justice, might well have shuddered,
+through all their shadow, to feel how terribly He destroys the enemies
+of Nature and man.
+
+But the only Pompeian presences which haunted our passage of the
+cotton-field were certain small
+
+  "Phantoms of delight,"
+
+with soft black eyes and graceful ways, who ran before us and plucked
+the bolls of the cotton and sold them to us. Embassies bearing red and
+white grapes were also sent out of the cottages to our excellencies;
+and there was some doubt of the currency of the coin which we gave
+these poor children in return.
+
+There are now but few peasants living on the land over the head of
+Pompeii, and the Government allows no sales of real estate to be made
+except to itself. The people who still dwell here can hardly be said
+to own their possessions, for they are merely allowed to cultivate
+the soil. A guard stationed night and day prevents them from making
+excavations, and they are severely restricted from entering the
+excavated quarters of the city alone.
+
+The cotton whitens over two thirds of Pompeii yet interred: happy the
+generation that lives to learn the wondrous secrets of that sepulchre!
+For, when you have once been at Pompeii, this phantasm of the past
+takes deeper hold on your imagination than any living city, and
+becomes and is the metropolis of your dreamland forever. O marvelous
+city! who shall reveal the cunning of your spell? Something not
+death, something not life--something that is the one when you turn
+to determine its essence as the other! What is it comes to me at this
+distance of that which I saw in Pompeii? The narrow and curving, but
+not crooked streets, with the blazing sun of that Neapolitan November
+falling into them, or clouding their wheel-worn lava with the black,
+black shadows of the many-tinted walls; the houses, and the gay
+columns of white, yellow, and red; the delicate pavements of mosaic;
+the skeletons of dusty cisterns and dead fountains; inanimate garden
+spaces with pygmy statues suited to their littleness; suites of fairy
+bed-chambers, painted with exquisite frescos; dining-halls with
+joyous scenes of hunt and banquet on their walls; the ruinous sites
+of temples; the melancholy emptiness of booths and shops and jolly
+drinking-houses; the lonesome tragic theatre, with a modern Pompeian
+drawing water from a well there; the baths with their roofs perfect
+yet, and the stucco bass-reliefs all but unharmed; around the whole,
+the city wall crowned with slender poplars; outside the gates, the
+long avenue of tombs, and the Appian Way stretching on to Stabiae;
+and, in the distance, Vesuvius, brown and bare, with his fiery breath
+scarce visible against the cloudless heaven;--these are the things
+that float before my fancy as I turn back to look at myself walking
+those enchanted streets, and to wonder if I could ever have been so
+blest.
+
+For there is nothing on the earth, or under it, like Pompeii.
+
+The amphitheatre, to which we came now, after our stroll across the
+cotton-fields, was small, like the vastest things in Pompeii, and had
+nothing of the stately magnificence of the Arena at Verona, nor any
+thing of the Roman Coliseum's melancholy and ruinous grandeur. But its
+littleness made it all the more comfortable and social, and, seated
+upon its benches under a cool awning, one could have almost chatted
+across the arena with one's friends; could have witnessed the
+spectacle on the sands without losing a movement of the quick
+gladiators, or an agony of the victim given to the beasts--which must
+have been very delightful to a Pompeian of companionable habits
+and fine feelings. It is quite impossible, however, that the bouts
+described by Bulwer as taking place all at the same time on the arena
+should really have done so: the combatants would have rolled and
+tumbled and trampled over each other an hundred times in the narrow
+space.
+
+Of all the voices with which it once rang the poor little amphitheatre
+has kept only an echo. But this echo is one of the most perfect ever
+heard: prompt clear, startling, it blew back the light chaff we threw
+to it with amazing vehemence, and almost made us doubt if it were not
+a direct human utterance. Yet how was Ventisei to know our names? And
+there was no one else to call them but ourselves. Our "_dolce duca_"
+gathered a nosegay from the crumbling ledges, and sat down in the cool
+of the once-cruel cells beneath, and put it prettily together for the
+ladies. When we had wearied ourselves with the echo he arose and led
+us back into Pompeii.
+
+
+IV.
+
+The plans of nearly all the houses in the city are alike: the
+entrance-room next the door; the parlor or drawing-room next that;
+then the _impluvium_, or unroofed space in the middle of the house,
+where the rains were caught and drained into the cistern, and where
+the household used to come to wash itself, primitively, as at a pump;
+the little garden, with its painted columns, behind the _impluvium_,
+and, at last, the dining-room. There are minute bed-chambers on either
+side, and, as I said, a shop at one side in front, for the sale of the
+master's grain, wine, and oil. The pavements of all the houses are of
+mosaic, which, in the better sort, is very delicate and beautiful, and
+is found sometimes perfectly uninjured. An exquisite pattern, often
+repeated, is a ground of tiny cubes of white marble with dots of black
+dropped regularly into it. Of course there were many picturesque and
+fanciful designs, of which the best have been removed to the Museum
+in Naples; but several good ones are still left, and (like that of the
+Wild Boar) give names to the houses in which they are found.
+
+But, after all, the great wonder, the glory, of these Pompeian houses
+is in their frescos. If I tried to give an idea of the luxury of color
+in Pompeii, the most gorgeous adjectives would be as poorly able to
+reproduce a vivid and glowing sense of those hues as the photography
+which now copies the drawing of the decorations; so I do not try.
+
+I know it is a cheap and feeble thought, and yet, let the reader
+please to consider: A workman nearly two thousand years laying upon
+the walls those soft lines that went to make up fauns and satyrs,
+nymphs and naiads, heroes and gods and goddesses; and getting weary
+and lying down to sleep, and dreaming of an eruption of the mountain;
+of the city buried under a fiery hail, and slumbering in its bed of
+ashes seventeen centuries; then of its being slowly exhumed, and,
+after another lapse of years, of some one coming to gather the shadow
+of that dreamer's work upon a plate of glass, that he might infinitely
+reproduce it and sell it to tourists at from five francs to fifty
+centimes a copy--I say, consider such a dream, dreamed in the hot
+heart of the day, after certain cups of Vesuvian wine! What a piece of
+_Katzenjaemmer_ (I can use no milder term) would that workman think it
+when he woke again! Alas! what is history and the progress of the arts
+and sciences but one long _Katzenjaemmer_!
+
+Photography cannot give, any more than I, the colors of the frescos,
+but it can do the drawing better, and, I suspect, the spirit also. I
+used the word workman, and not artist, in speaking of the decoration
+of the walls, for in most cases the painter was only an artisan, and
+did his work probably by the yard, as the artisan who paints walls and
+ceilings in Italy does at this day. But the old workman did his work
+much more skillfully and tastefully than the modern--threw on expanses
+of mellow color, delicately paneled off the places for the scenes, and
+penciled in the figures and draperies (there are usually more of the
+one than the other) with a deft hand. Of course, the houses of the
+rich were adorned by men of talent; but it is surprising to see the
+community of thought and feeling in all this work, whether it be from
+cunninger or clumsier hands. The subjects are nearly always chosen
+from the fables of the gods, and they are in illustration of the
+poets, Homer and the rest. To suit that soft, luxurious life which
+people led in Pompeii, the themes are commonly amorous, and sometimes
+not too chaste; there is much of Bacchus and Ariadne, much of Venus
+and Adonis, and Diana bathes a good deal with her nymphs,--not to
+mention frequent representations of the toilet of that beautiful
+monster which the lascivious art of the time loved to depict. One of
+the most pleasing of all the scenes is that in one of the houses, of
+the Judgment of Paris, in which the shepherd sits upon a bank in
+an attitude of ineffable and flattered importance, with one leg
+carelessly crossing the other, and both hands resting lightly on his
+shepherd's crook, while the goddesses before him await his sentence.
+Naturally the painter has done his best for the victress in this
+rivalry, and you see
+
+  "Idalian Aphrodite beautiful,"
+
+as she should be, but with a warm and piquant spice of girlish
+resentment in her attitude, that Paris should pause for an instant,
+which is altogether delicious.
+
+  "And I beheld great Here's angry eyes."
+
+Awful eyes! How did the painter make them? The wonder of all these
+pagan frescos is the mystery of the eyes--still, beautiful, unhuman.
+You cannot believe that it is wrong for those tranquil-eyed men and
+women to do evil, they look so calm and so unconscious in it all; and
+in the presence of the celestials, as they bend upon you those eternal
+orbs, in whose regard you are but a part of space, you feel that here
+art has achieved the unearthly. I know of no words in literature which
+give a _sense_ (nothing gives the idea) of the _stare_ of these gods,
+except that magnificent line of Kingsley's, describing the advance
+over the sea toward Andromeda of the oblivious and unsympathizing
+Nereids. They floated slowly up, and their eyes
+
+  "Stared on her, silent and still, like the eyes in the house
+  of the idols."
+
+The colors of this fresco of the Judgment of Paris are still so fresh
+and bright, that it photographs very well, but there are other frescos
+wherein there is more visible perfection of line, but in which the
+colors are so dim that they can only be reproduced by drawings. One of
+these is the Wounded Adonis cared for by Venus and the Loves; in which
+the story is treated with a playful pathos wonderfully charming.
+The fair boy leans in the languor of his hurt toward Venus, who sits
+utterly disconsolate beside him, while the Cupids busy themselves
+with such slight surgical offices as Cupids may render: one prepares a
+linen bandage for the wound, another wraps it round the leg of Adonis,
+another supports one of his heavy arms, another finds his own emotions
+too much for him and pauses to weep. It is a pity that the colors of
+this beautiful fresco are grown so dim, and a greater pity that most
+of the other frescos in Pompeii must share its fate, and fade away.
+The hues are vivid when the walls are first uncovered, and the ashes
+washed from the pictures, but then the malice of the elements begins
+anew, and rain and sun draw the life out of tints which the volcano
+failed to obliterate. In nearly all cases they could be preserved
+by throwing a roof above the walls, and it is a wonder that the
+Government does not take this slight trouble to save them.
+
+Among the frescos which told no story but their own, we were most
+pleased with one in a delicately painted little bed-chamber. This
+represented an alarmed and furtive man, whom we at once pronounced The
+Belated Husband, opening a door with a night-latch. Nothing could have
+been better than this miserable wretch's cowardly haste and cautious
+noiselessness in applying his key; apprehension sat upon his brow,
+confusion dwelt in his guilty eye. He had been out till two o'clock
+in the morning, electioneering for Pansa, the friend of the people
+("Pansa, and Roman gladiators," "Pansa, and Christians to the Beasts,"
+was the platform), and he had left his _placens uxor_ at home alone
+with the children, and now within this door that _placens uxor_
+awaited him!
+
+
+V.
+
+You have read, no doubt, of their discovering, a year or two since,
+in making an excavation in a Pompeian street, the molds of four human
+bodies, three women and a man, who fell down, blind and writhing, in
+the storm of fire eighteen hundred years ago; whose shape the settling
+and hardening ashes took; whose flesh wasted away, and whose bones lay
+there in the hollow of the matrix till the cunning of this time found
+them, and, pouring liquid plaster round the skeletons, clothed them
+with human form again, and drew them forth into the world once more.
+There are many things in Pompeii which bring back the gay life of the
+city, but nothing which so vividly reports the terrible manner of her
+death as these effigies of the creatures that actually shared it. The
+man in the last struggle has thrown himself upon his back and taken
+his doom sturdily--there is a sublime calm in his rigid figure. The
+women lie upon their faces, their limbs tossed and distorted, their
+drapery tangled and heaped about them, and in every fibre you see how
+hard they died. One presses her face into her handkerchief to draw
+one last breath unmixed with scalding steam; another's arms are wildly
+thrown abroad to clutch at help; another's hand is appealingly raised,
+and on her slight fingers you see the silver hoops with which her poor
+dead vanity adorned them.
+
+The guide takes you aside from the street into the house where they
+lie, and a dreadful shadow drops upon your heart as you enter their
+presence. Without, the hell-storm seems to fall again, and the whole
+sunny plain to be darkened with its ruin, and the city to send up the
+tumult of her despair.
+
+What is there left in Pompeii to speak of after this? The long street
+of tombs outside the walls? Those that died before the city's burial
+seem to have scarcely a claim to the solemnity of death.
+
+Shall we go see Diomed's Villa, and walk through the freedman's long
+underground vaults, where his friends thought to be safe, and were
+smothered in heaps? The garden-ground grows wild among its broken
+columns with weeds and poplar saplings; in one of the corridors they
+sell photographs, on which, if you please, Ventisei has his bottle,
+or drink-money. So we escape from the doom of the calamity, and so, at
+last, the severely forbidden _buonamano_ is paid. A dog may die many
+deaths besides choking with butter.
+
+We return slowly through the city, where we have spent the whole day,
+from nine till four o'clock. We linger on the way, imploring Ventisei
+if there is not something to be seen in this or that house; we make
+our weariness an excuse for sitting down, and cannot rend ourselves
+from the bliss of being in Pompeii.
+
+At last we leave its gates, and swear each other to come again many
+times while in Naples, and never go again.
+
+Perhaps it was as well. You cannot repeat great happiness.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM.
+
+I.
+
+The road from Naples to Herculaneum is, in fact, one long street; it
+hardly ceases to be city in Naples till it is town at Portici, and in
+the interval it is suburb, running between palatial lines of villas,
+which all have their names ambitiously painted over their doors. Great
+part of the distance this street is bordered by the bay, and, as far
+as this is the case, it is picturesque, as every thing is belonging to
+marine life in Italy. Sea-faring people go lounging up and down among
+the fishermen's boats drawn up on the shore, and among the fishermen's
+wives making nets, while the fishermen's children play and clamber
+everywhere, and over all flap and flutter the clothes hung on poles
+to dry. In this part of the street there are, of course, oysters, and
+grapes, and oranges, and cactus-pulps, and cutlery, and iced drinks
+to sell at various booths; and Commerce is exceedingly dramatic and
+boisterous over the bargains she offers; and equally, of course,
+murderous drinking shops lurk at intervals along the pavement, and
+lure into their recesses mariners of foreign birth, briefly ashore
+from their ships. The New York Coffee House is there to attract my
+maritime fellow-countrymen, and I know that if I look into that place
+of refreshment I shall see their honest, foolish faces flushed with
+drink, and with the excitement of buying the least they can for the
+most money. Poor souls! they shall drink that pleasant morning away
+in the society of Antonino the best of Neapolitans, and at midnight,
+emptied of every soldo, shall arise, wrung with a fearful suspicion
+of treachery, and wander away under Antonino's guidance to seek the
+protection of the Consul; or, taking the law into their own hands,
+shall proceed to clean out, _more Americano_, the New York Coffee
+House, when Antonino shall develop into one of the landlords, and
+deal them the most artistic stab in Naples: handsome, worthy Antonino;
+tender-eyed, subtle, pitiless!
+
+
+II.
+
+Where the road to Herculaneum leaves the bay and its seafaring life,
+it enters, between the walls of lofty, fly-blown houses, a world of
+maccaroni haunted by foul odors, beggars, poultry, and insects. There
+were few people to be seen on the street, but through the open doors
+of the lofty fly-blown houses we saw floury legions at work making
+maccaroni; grinding maccaroni, rolling it, cutting it, hanging it
+in mighty skeins to dry, and gathering it when dried, and putting it
+away. By the frequency of the wine-shops we judged that the legions
+were a thirsty host, and by the number of the barber-surgeons' shops,
+that they were a plethoric and too full-blooded host. The latter shops
+were in the proportion of one to five of the former; and the artist
+who had painted their signs had indulged his fancy in wild excesses of
+phlebotomy. We had found that, as we came south from Venice, science
+grew more and more sanguinary in Italy, and more and more disposed to
+let blood. At Ferrara, even, the propensity began to be manifest on
+the barbers' signs, which displayed the device of an arm lanced at
+the elbow, and jetting the blood by a neatly described curve into a
+tumbler. Further south the same arm was seen to bleed at the wrist
+also; and at Naples an exhaustive treatment of the subject appeared,
+the favorite study of the artist being to represent a nude figure
+reclining in a genteel attitude on a bank of pleasant greensward, and
+bleeding from the elbows, wrists, hands, ankles, and feet.
+
+
+III.
+
+In Naples everywhere one is surprised by the great number of English
+names which appear on business houses, but it was entirely bewildering
+to read a bill affixed to the gate of one of the villas on this road:
+"This Desirable Property for Sale." I should scarcely have cared to
+buy that desirable property, though the neighborhood seemed to be a
+favorite summer resort, and there were villas, as I said, nearly the
+whole way to Portici. Those which stood with their gardens toward the
+bay would have been tolerable, no doubt, if they could have kept their
+windows shut to the vile street before their doors; but the houses
+opposite could have had no escape from its stench and noisomeness. It
+was absolutely the filthiest street I have seen anywhere outside of
+New York, excepting only that little street which, in Herculaneum,
+leads from the theatre to the House of Argo.
+
+This pleasant avenue has a stream of turbid water in its centre,
+bordered by begging children, and is either fouler or cleaner for the
+water, but I shall never know which. It is at a depth of some fifty or
+sixty feet below the elevation on which the present city of Portici is
+built, and is part of the excavation made long ago to reach the plain
+on which Herculaneum stands, buried under its half-score of successive
+layers of lava, and ashes, and Portici. We had the aid of all the
+virtuous poverty and leisure of the modern town--there was a vast
+deal of both, we found--in our search for the staircase by which you
+descend to the classic plain, and it proved a discovery involving the
+outlay of all the copper coin about us, while the sight of the famous
+theatre of Herculaneum was much more expensive than it would have been
+had we come there in the old time to see a play of Plautus or Terence.
+
+As for the theatre, "the large and highly ornamented theatre" of which
+I read, only a little while ago, in an encyclopedia, we found it, by
+the light of our candles, a series of gloomy hollows, of the general
+complexion of coal-bins and potato-cellars. It was never perfectly
+dug out of the lava, and, as is known, it was filled up in the last
+century, together with other excavations, when they endangered the
+foundations of worthless Portici overhead. (I am amused to find myself
+so hot upon the poor property-holders of Portici. I suppose I should
+not myself, even for the cause of antiquity and the knowledge of
+classic civilization, like to have my house tumbled about my ears.)
+But though it was impossible in the theatre of Herculaneum to gain
+any idea of its size or richness, I remembered there the magnificent
+bronzes which had been found in it, and did a hasty reverence to
+the place. Indeed, it is amazing, when one sees how small a part of
+Herculaneum has been uncovered, to consider the number of fine works
+of art in the Museo Borbonico which were taken thence, and which argue
+a much richer and more refined community than that of Pompeii. A third
+of the latter city has now been restored to the light of day; but
+though it has yielded abundance of all the things that illustrate the
+domestic and public life, and the luxury and depravity of those old
+times, and has given the once secret rooms of the museum their worst
+attraction, it still falls far below Herculaneum in the value of its
+contributions to the treasures of classic art, except only in the
+variety and beauty of its exquisite frescos.
+
+The effect of this fact is to stimulate the imagination of the visitor
+to that degree that nothing short of the instant destruction of
+Portici and the excavation of all Herculaneum will satisfy him. If the
+opening of one theatre, and the uncovering of a basilica and two
+or three houses, have given such richness to us, what delight and
+knowledge would not the removal of these obdurate hills of ashes and
+lava bestow!
+
+Emerging from the coal-bins and potato-cellars, the visitor
+extinguishes his candle with a pathetic sigh, profusely rewards the
+custodian (whom he connects in some mysterious way with the ancient
+population of the injured city about him), and, thoughtfully removing
+the tallow from his fingers, follows the course of the vile stream
+already sung, and soon arrives at the gate opening into the exhumed
+quarter of Herculaneum. And there he finds a custodian who enters
+perfectly into his feelings; a custodian who has once been a guide in
+Pompeii, but now despises that wretched town, and would not be
+guide there for any money since he has known the superior life of
+Herculaneum; who, in fine, feels toward Pompeii as a Bostonian feels
+toward New York. Yet the reader would be wrong to form the idea that
+there is bitterness in the disdain of this custodian. On the contrary,
+he is one of the best-natured men in the world. He is a mighty mass of
+pinguid bronze, with a fat lisp, and a broad, sunflower smile, and
+he lectures us with a vast and genial breadth of manner on the
+ruins, contradicting all our guesses at things with a sweet "Perdoni,
+signori! ma----." At the end, we find that he has some medallions of
+lava to sell: there is Victor Emanuel, or, if we are of the _partito
+d'azione_, there is Garibaldi; both warm yet from the crater of
+Vesuvius, and of the same material which destroyed Herculaneum. We
+decline to buy and the custodian makes the national shrug and grimace
+(signifying that we are masters of the situation, and that he washes
+his hands of the consequence of our folly) on the largest scale that
+we have ever seen: his mighty hands are rigidly thrust forth, his
+great lip protruded, his enormous head thrown back to bring his
+face on a level with his chin. The effect is tremendous, but we
+nevertheless feel that he loves us the same.
+
+
+IV.
+
+The afternoon on which we visited Herculaneum was in melancholy
+contrast to the day we spent in Pompeii. The lingering summer had at
+last saddened into something like autumnal gloom, and that blue, blue
+sky of Naples was overcast. So, this second draught of the spirit
+of the past had not only something of the insipidity of custom, but
+brought rather a depression than a lightness to our hearts. There was
+so little of Herculaneum: only a few hundred yards square are exhumed,
+and we counted the houses easily on the fingers of one hand, leaving
+the thumb to stand for the few rods of street that, with its flagging
+of lava and narrow border of foot-walks, lay between; and though the
+custodian, apparently moved at our dejection, said that the excavation
+was to be resumed the very next week, the assurance did little to
+restore our cheerfulness. Indeed, I fancy that these old cities must
+needs be seen in the sunshine by those who would feel what gay lives
+they once led; by dimmer light they are very sullen spectres, and
+their doom still seems to brood upon them. I know that even Pompeii
+could not have been joyous that sunless afternoon, for what there was
+to see of mournful Herculaneum was as brilliant with colors as any
+thing in the former city. Nay, I believe that the tints of the frescos
+and painted columns were even brighter, and that the walls of the
+houses were far less ruinous than those of Pompeii. But no house was
+wholly freed from lava, and the little street ran at the rear of the
+buildings which were supposed to front on some grander avenue not yet
+exhumed. It led down, as the custodian pretended, to a wharf, and he
+showed an iron ring in the wall of the House of Argo, standing at the
+end of the street, to which, he said, his former fellow-citizens used
+to fasten their boats, though it was all dry enough there now.
+
+There is evidence in Herculaneum of much more ambitious domestic
+architecture than seems to have been known in Pompeii. The ground-plan
+of the houses in the two cities is alike; but in the former there was
+often a second story, as was proven by the charred ends of beams still
+protruding from the walls, while in the latter there is only one house
+which is thought to have aspired to a second floor. The House of Argo
+is also much larger than any in Pompeii, and its appointments were
+more magnificent. Indeed, we imagined that in this more purely
+Greek town we felt an atmosphere of better taste in every thing than
+prevailed in the fashionable Roman watering-place, though this, too,
+was a summer resort of the "best society" of the empire. The mosaic
+pavements were exquisite, and the little bed-chambers dainty and
+delicious in their decorations. The lavish delight in color found
+expression in the vividest hues upon the walls, and not only were the
+columns of the garden painted, but the foliage of the capitals was
+variously tinted. The garden of the House of Argo was vaster than any
+of the classic world which we had yet seen, and was superb with a
+long colonnade of unbroken columns. Between these and the walls of
+the houses was a pretty pathway of mosaic, and in the midst once stood
+marble tables, under which the workmen exhuming the city found certain
+crouching skeletons. At one end was the dining-room, of course, and
+painted on the wall was a lady with a parasol.
+
+I thought all Herculaneum sad enough, but the profusion of flowers
+growing wild in this garden gave it a yet more tender and pathetic
+charm. Here--where so long ago the flowers had bloomed, and perished
+in the terrible blossoming of the mountain that sent up its fires
+in the awful similitude of Nature's harmless and lovely forms, and
+showered its destroying petals all abroad--was it not tragic to find
+again the soft tints, the graceful shapes, the sweet perfumes of the
+earth's immortal life? Of them that planted and tended and plucked and
+bore in their bosoms and twined in their hair these fragile children
+of the summer, what witness in the world? Only the crouching skeletons
+under the tables. Alas and alas!
+
+
+V.
+
+The skeletons went with us throughout Herculaneum, and descended
+into the cell, all green with damp, under the basilica, and lay down,
+fettered and manacled in the place of those found there beside the big
+bronze kettle in which the prisoners used to cook their dinners. How
+ghastly the thought of it was! If we had really seen this kettle and
+the skeletons there--as we did not--we could not have suffered more
+than we did. They took all the life out of the House of Perseus, and
+the beauty from his pretty little domestic temple to the Penates, and
+this was all there was left in Herculaneum to see.
+
+"Is there nothing else?" we demand of the custodian.
+
+"Signori, this is all."
+
+"It is mighty little."
+
+"Perdoni, signori! ma----."
+
+"Well," we say sourly to each other, glancing round at the walls of
+the pit, on the bottom of which the bit of city stands, "it is a good
+thing to know that Herculaneum amounts to nothing."
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES.
+
+I.
+
+I have no doubt
+
+  "Calm Capri waits,"
+
+where we left it, in the Gulf of Salerno, for any traveller who may
+choose to pay it a visit; but at the time we were there we felt that
+it was on exhibition for that day only, and would, when we departed,
+disappear in its sapphire sea, and be no more; just as Niagara ceases
+to play as soon as your back is turned, and Venice goes out like a
+pyrotechnic display, and all marvelously grand and lovely things make
+haste to prove their impermanence.
+
+We delayed some days in Naples in hopes of fine weather, and at last
+chose a morning that was warm and cloudy at nine o'clock, and burst
+into frequent passions of rain before we reached Sorrento at noon
+The first half of the journey was made by rail, and brought us to
+Castellamare, whence we took carriage for Sorrento, and oranges, and
+rapture,--winding along the steep shore of the sea, and under the
+brows of wooded hills that rose high above us into the misty weather,
+and caught here and there the sunshine on their tops. In that heavenly
+climate no day can long be out of humor, and at Sorrento we found
+ours very pleasant, and rode delightedly through the devious streets,
+looking up to the terraced orange-groves on one hand, and down to the
+terraced orange-groves on the other, until at a certain turning of the
+way we encountered Antonino Occhio d'Argento, whom fate had appointed
+to be our boatman to Capri. We had never heard of Antonino before, and
+indeed had intended to take a boat from one of the hotels; but when
+this corsair offered us his services, there was that guile in his
+handsome face, that cunning in his dark eyes, that heart could not
+resist, and we halted our carriage and took him at once.
+
+He kept his boat in one of those caverns which honey-comb the cliff
+under Sorrento, and afford a natural and admirable shelter for such
+small craft as may be dragged up out of reach of the waves, and here I
+bargained with him before finally agreeing to go with him to Capri.
+In Italy it is customary for a public carrier when engaged to give
+his employer as a pledge the sum agreed upon for the service, which is
+returned with the amount due him, at the end, if the service has been
+satisfactory; and I demanded of Antonino this _caparra_, as it is
+called. "What _caparra_?" said he, lifting the lid of his wicked eye
+with his forefinger, "this is the best _caparra_," meaning a face
+as honest and trustworthy as the devil's. The stroke confirmed my
+subjection to Antonino, and I took his boat without further parley,
+declining even to feel the muscle of his boatmen's arms, which he
+exposed to my touch in evidence that they were strong enough to row us
+swiftly to Capri. The men were but two in number, but they tossed the
+boat lightly into the surf, and then lifted me aboard, and rowed to
+the little pier from which the ladies and T. got in.
+
+The sun shone, the water danced and sparkled, and presently we raised
+our sail, and took the gale that blew for Capri--an oblong height
+rising ten miles beyond out of the heart of the azure gulf. On the way
+thither there was little interest but that of natural beauty in the
+bold, picturesque coast we skirted for some distance; though on
+one mighty rock there were the ruins of a seaward-looking Temple of
+Hercules, with arches of the unmistakable Roman masonry, below
+which the receding waves rushed and poured over a jetting ledge in a
+thunderous cataract.
+
+Antonino did his best to entertain us, and lectured us unceasingly
+upon his virtue and his wisdom, dwelling greatly on the propriety and
+good policy of always speaking the truth. This spectacle of veracity
+became intolerable after a while, and I was goaded to say: "Oh then,
+if you never tell lies, you expect to go to Paradise." "Not at all,"
+answered Antonino compassionately, "for I have sinned much. But the
+lie doesn't go ahead" (_non va avanti_), added this Machiavelli of
+boatmen; yet I think he was mistaken, for he deceived us with perfect
+ease and admirable success. All along, he had pretended that we could
+see Capri, visit the Blue Grotto, and return that day; but as we drew
+near the island, painful doubts began to trouble him, and he feared
+the sea would be too rough for the Grotto part of the affair. "But
+there will be an old man," he said, with a subtile air of prophecy,
+"waiting for us on the beach. This old man is one of the Government
+guides to the Grotto, and he will say whether it is to be seen
+to-day."
+
+And certainly there was the old man on the beach--a short patriarch,
+with his baldness covered by a kind of bloated woolen sock--a
+blear-eyed sage, and a bare-legged. He waded through the surf toward
+the boat, and when we asked him whether the Grotto was to be seen, he
+paused knee-deep in the water, (at a secret signal from Antonino, as
+I shall always believe,) put on a face of tender solemnity, threw back
+his head a little, brought his hand to his cheek, expanded it, and
+said, "No; to-day, no! To-morrow, yes!" Antonino leaped joyously
+ashore, and delivered us over to the old man, to be guided to the
+Hotel di Londra, while he drew his boat upon the land. He had reason
+to be contented, for this artifice of the patriarch of Capri relieved
+him from the necessity of verifying to me the existence of an officer
+of extraordinary powers in the nature of a consul, who, he said, would
+not permit boats to leave Capri for the main-land after five o'clock
+in the evening.
+
+When it was decided that we should remain on the island till the
+morrow, we found so much time on our hands, after bargaining for
+our lodging at the Hotel di Londra, that we resolved to ascend the
+mountain to the ruins of the palaces of Tiberius, and to this end we
+contracted for the services of certain of the muletresses that had
+gathered about the inn-gate, clamorously offering their beasts. The
+muletresses chosen were a matron of mature years and of a portly habit
+of body; her daughter, a mere child; and her niece, a very pretty girl
+of eighteen, with a voice soft and sweet as a bird's. They placed
+the ladies, one on each mule, and then, while the mother and daughter
+devoted themselves to the hind-quarters of the foremost animal,
+the lovely niece brought up the rear of the second beast, and the
+patriarch went before, and T. and I trudged behind. So the cavalcade
+ascended; first, from the terrace of the hotel overlooking the bit
+of shipping village on the beach, and next from the town of Capri,
+clinging to the hill-sides, midway between sea and sky, until at last
+it reached the heights on which the ruins stand. Our way was through
+narrow lanes, bordered by garden walls; then through narrow streets
+bordered by dirty houses; and then again by gardens, but now of a
+better sort than the first, and belonging to handsome villas.
+
+On the road our pretty muletress gossiped cheerfully, and our
+patriarch gloomily, and between the two we accumulated a store of
+information concerning the present inhabitants of Capri, which, I am
+sorry to say, has now for the most part failed me. I remember that
+they said most of the land-owners at Capri were Neapolitans, and that
+these villas were their country-houses; though they pointed out one
+of the stateliest of the edifices as belonging to a certain English
+physician who had come to visit Capri for a few days, and had now been
+living on the island twenty years, having married (said the
+muletress) the prettiest and poorest girl in the town, from this
+romance--something like which the muletress seemed to think might
+well happen concerning herself--we passed lightly to speak of kindred
+things, the muletress responding gayly between the blows she bestowed
+upon her beast. The accent of these Capriotes has something of German
+harshness and heaviness: they say _non bosso_ instead of _non posso_,
+and _monto_ instead of _mondo_, and interchange the _t_ and _d_ a good
+deal; and they use for father the Latin _pater_, instead of _padre_.
+But this girl's voice, as I said, was very musical, and the island's
+accent was sweet upon her tongue.
+
+_I_.--What is your name?
+
+_She_.--Caterina, little sir (signorin).
+
+_I_.--And how old are you, Caterina?
+
+_She_.--Eighteen, little sir.
+
+_I_.--And you are betrothed?
+
+She feigns not to understand; but the patriarch, who has dropped
+behind to listen to our discourse, explains,--"He asks if you are in
+love."
+
+_She_.--Ah, no! little sir, not yet.
+
+_I_.--No? A little late, it seems to me. I think there must be some
+good-looking youngster who pleases you--no?
+
+_She_.--Ah, no! one must work, one cannot think of marrying. We are
+four sisters, and we have only the _buonamano_ from hiring these
+mules, and we must spin and cook.
+
+_The Patriarch_.--Don't believe her; she has two lovers.
+
+_She._--Ah, no! It isn't true. He tells a fib--he!
+
+But, nevertheless, she seemed to love to be accused of lovers,--such
+is the guile of the female heart in Capri,--and laughed over the
+patriarch's wickedness. She confided that she ate maccaroni once
+a day, and she talked constantly of eating it just as the Northern
+Italians always talk of _polenta._ She was a true daughter of the
+isle, and had never left it but once in her life, when she went to
+Naples. "Naples was beautiful, yes; but one always loves one's own
+country the best." She was very attentive and good, but at the end was
+rapacious of more and more _buonamano_. "Have patience with her, sir,"
+said the blameless Antonino, who witnessed her greediness; "they do
+not understand certain matters here, poor little things!"
+
+As for the patriarch, he was full of learning relative to himself and
+to Capri; and told me with much elaboration that the islanders lived
+chiefly by fishing, and gained something also by their vineyards. But
+they were greatly oppressed by taxes, and the strict enforcement
+of the conscriptions, and they had little love for the Italian
+Government, and wished the Bourbons back again. The Piedmontese,
+indeed, misgoverned them horribly. There was the Blue Grotto, for
+example: formerly travellers paid the guides five, six, ten francs for
+viewing it; but now the Piedmontese had made a tariff, and the poor
+guides could only exact a franc from each person. Things were in a
+ruinous condition.
+
+By this we had arrived at a little inn on the top of the mountain,
+very near the ruins of the palaces, "Here," said the patriarch, "it is
+customary for strangers to drink a bottle of the wine of Tiberius." We
+obediently entered the hostelry, and the landlord--a white-toothed,
+brown-faced, good-humored peasant--gallantly ran forward and presented
+the ladies with bouquets of roses. We thought it a pretty and graceful
+act, but found later that it was to be paid for, like all pretty and
+graceful things in Italy; for when we came to settle for the wine, and
+the landlord wanted more than justice, he urged that he had presented
+the ladies with flowers,--yet he equally gave me his benediction when
+I refused to pay for his politeness.
+
+"Now here," again said the patriarch in a solemn whisper, "you can see
+the Tarantella danced for two francs; whereas down at your inn, if you
+hire the dancers through your landlord, it will cost you five or six
+francs." The difference was tempting, and decided us in favor of an
+immediate Tarantella. The muletresses left their beasts to browse
+about the door of the inn and came into the little public room, where
+were already the wife and sister of the landlord, and took their
+places _vis-a-vis_, while the landlord seized his tambourine and
+beat from it a wild and lively measure. The women were barefooted
+and hoopless, and they gave us the Tarantella with all the beauty of
+natural movement and free floating drapery, and with all that splendid
+grace of pose which animates the antique statues and pictures of
+dancers. They swayed themselves in time with the music; then, filled
+with its passionate impulse, advanced and retreated and whirled
+away;--snapping their fingers above their heads, and looking over
+their shoulders with a gay and a laughing challenge to each other,
+they drifted through the ever-repeated figures of flight and wooing,
+and wove for us pictures of delight that remained upon the brain like
+the effect of long-pondered vivid colors, and still return to illumine
+and complete any representation of that indescribable dance. Heaven
+knows what peril there might have been in the beauty and grace of the
+pretty muletress but for the spectacle of her fat aunt, who, I must
+confess, could only burlesque some of her niece's airiest movements,
+and whose hard-bought buoyancy was at once pathetic and laughable. She
+earned her share of the spoils certainly, and she seemed glad when the
+dance was over, and went contentedly back to her mule.
+
+The patriarch had early retired from the scene as from a vanity with
+which he was too familiar for enjoyment, and I found him, when the
+Tarantella was done, leaning on the curb of the precipitous rock
+immediately behind the inn, over which the Capriotes say Tiberius used
+to cast the victims of his pleasures after he was sated with them.
+These have taken their place in the insular imagination as Christian
+martyrs, though it is probable that the poor souls were any thing but
+Nazarenes. It took a stone thrown from the brink of the rock twenty
+seconds to send back a response from the water below, and the depth
+was too dizzying to look into. So we looked instead toward Amalfi,
+across the Gulf of Salerno, and toward Naples, across her bay. On
+every hand the sea was flushed with sunset, and an unspeakable calm
+dwelt upon it, while the heights rising from it softened and softened
+in the distance, and withdrew themselves into dreams of ghostly
+solitude and phantom city. His late majesty the Emperor Tiberius is
+well known to have been a man of sentiment, and he may often have
+sought this spot to enjoy the evening hour. It was convenient to his
+palace, and he could here give a fillip to his jaded sensibilities
+by popping a boon companion over the cliff, and thus enjoy the fine
+poetic contrast which his perturbed and horrible spirit afforded to
+that scene of innocence and peace. Later he may have come hither also,
+when lust failed, when all the lewd plays and devices of his fancy
+palled upon his senses, when sin had grown insipid and even murder
+ceased to amuse, and his majesty uttered his despair to the Senate in
+that terrible letter: "What to write to you, or how to write, I
+know not; and what not to write at this time, may all the gods and
+goddesses torment me wore than I daily feel that I suffer if I do
+know."
+
+The poor patriarch was also a rascal in his small way, and he
+presently turned to me with a countenance full of cowardly trouble and
+base remorse, "I pray you, little sir, not to tell the landlord
+below there that you have seen the Tarantella danced here; for he has
+daughters and friends to dance it for strangers, and gets a deal of
+money by it. So, if he asks you to see it, do me the pleasure to say,
+lest he should take on (_pigliarsi_) with me about it: 'Thanks, but we
+saw the Tarantella at Pompeii!'" It was the last place in Italy where
+we were likely to have seen the Tarantella; but these simple people
+are improvident in lying, as in every thing else.
+
+The patriarch had a curious spice of malice in him, which prompted
+him to speak evil of all, and to as many as he dared. After we had
+inspected the ruins of the emperor's villa, a clownish imbecile of
+a woman, professing to be the wife of the peasant who had made the
+excavations, came forth out of a cleft in the rock and received
+tribute of us--why, I do not know. The patriarch abetted the
+extortion, but Parthianly remarked, as we turned away, "Her husband
+ought to be here; but this is a _festa_, and he is drinking and gaming
+in the village," while the woman protested that he was sick at home.
+There was also a hermit living in great publicity among the ruins, and
+the patriarch did not spare him a sneering comment. [This hermit I
+have heard was not brought up to the profession of anchorite, but was
+formerly a shoemaker, and according to his own confession abandoned
+his trade because he could better indulge a lethargic habit in the
+character of religious recluse.] He had even a bad word for Tiberius,
+and reproached the emperor for throwing people over the cliff, though
+I think it a sport in which he would himself have liked to join. The
+only human creatures with whom he seemed to be in sympathy were the
+brigands of the main-land, of whom he spoke poetically as exiles and
+fugitives.
+
+As for the palace of Tiberius, which we had come go far and so
+toilsomely to see, it must be confessed there was very little left
+of it. When that well-meaning but mistaken prince died, the Senate
+demolished his pleasure-houses at Capri, and left only those
+fragments of the beautiful brick masonry which yet remain, clinging
+indestructible to the rocks, and strewing the ground with rubbish. The
+recent excavations have discovered nothing besides the uninteresting
+foundations of the building, except a subterranean avenue leading
+from one part of the palace to another: this is walled with delicate
+brickwork, and exquisitely paved with white marble mosaic; and this
+was all that witnessed of the splendor of the wicked emperor. Nature,
+the all-forgetting, all-forgiving, that takes the red battle-field
+into her arms and hides it with blossom and harvest, could not
+remember his iniquity, greater than the multitudinous murder of war.
+The sea, which the despot's lust and fear had made so lonely, slept
+with the white sails of boats secure upon its breast; the little bays
+and inlets, the rocky clefts and woody dells, had forgotten their
+desecration; and the gathering twilight, the sweetness of the
+garden-bordered pathway, and the serenity of the lonely landscape,
+helped us to doubt history.
+
+We slowly returned to the inn by the road we had ascended, noting
+again the mansion of the surprising Englishman who had come to Capri
+for three months and had remained thirty years; passed through the
+darkness of the village,--dropped here and there with the vivid red of
+a lamp,--and so reached the inn at last, where we found the landlord
+ready to have the Tarantella danced for us. We framed a discreeter
+fiction than that prepared for us by the patriarch, and went in to
+dinner, where there were two Danish gentlemen in dispute with as many
+rogues of boatmen, who, having contracted to take them back that night
+to Naples, were now trying to fly their bargain and remain at Capri
+till the morrow. The Danes beat them, however, and then sat down
+to dinner, and to long stories of the imposture and villany of the
+Italians. One of them chiefly bewailed himself that the day before,
+having unwisely eaten a dozen oysters without agreeing first with the
+oyster-man upon the price, he had been obliged to pay this scamp's
+extortionate demand to the full, since he was unable to restore him
+his property. We thought that something like this might have happened
+to an imprudent man in any country, but we did not the less join him
+in abusing the Italians--the purpose for which foreigners chiefly
+visit Italy.
+
+
+II.
+
+Standing on the height among the ruins of Tiberius's palace, the
+patriarch had looked out over the waters, and predicted for the morrow
+the finest weather that had ever been known in that region; but in
+spite of this prophecy the day dawned stormily, and at breakfast time
+we looked out doubtfully on waves lashed by driving rain. The entrance
+to the Blue Grotto, to visit which we had come to Capri, is by a
+semicircular opening, some three feet in width and two feet in height,
+and just large enough to admit a small boat. One lies flat in the
+bottom of this, waits for the impulse of a beneficent wave, and is
+carried through the mouth of the cavern, and rescued from it in like
+manner by some receding billow. When the wind is in the wrong quarter,
+it is impossible to enter the grot at all; and we waited till nine
+o'clock for the storm to abate before we ventured forth. In the mean
+time one of the Danish gentlemen, who--after assisting his companion
+to compel the boatmen to justice the night before--had stayed at
+Capri, and had risen early to see the grotto, returned from it, and we
+besieged him with a hundred questions concerning it. But he preserved
+the wise silence of the boy who goes in to see the six-legged calf,
+and comes out impervious to the curiosity of all the boys who are
+doubtful whether the monster is worth their money. Our Dane would
+merely say that it was now possible to visit the Blue Grotto; that he
+had seen it; that he was glad he _had_ seen it. As to its blueness,
+Messieurs--yes, it is blue. _C'est i dire_....
+
+The ladies had been amusing themselves with a perusal of the hotel
+register, and the notes of admiration or disgust with which the
+different sojourners at the inn had filled it. As a rule, the English
+people found fault with the poor little hostelry and the French people
+praised it. Commander Joshing and Lieutenant Prattent, R.N., of
+the former nation, "were cheated by the donkey women, and thought
+themselves extremely fortunate to have escaped with their lives from
+the effects of Capri vintage. The landlord was an old Cossack." On the
+other hand, we read, "J. Cruttard, homme de lettres, a passe quinze
+jours ici, et n'a eu que des felicites du patron de cet hotel et de sa
+famille." Cheerful man of letters! His good-natured record will keep
+green a name little known to literature. Who are G. Bradshaw, Duke
+of New York, and Signori Jones and Andrews, Hereditary Princes of the
+United States? Their patrician names followed the titles of several
+English nobles in the register. But that which most interested the
+ladies in this record was the warning of a terrified British matron
+against any visit to the Blue Grotto except in the very calmest
+weather. The British matron penned her caution after an all but fatal
+experience. The ladies read it aloud to us, and announced that for
+themselves they would be contented with pictures of the Blue Grotto
+and our account of its marvels.
+
+On the beach below the hotel lay the small boats of the guides to the
+Blue Grotto, and we descended to take one of them. The fixed rate is a
+franc for each person. The boatmen wanted five francs for each of us.
+We explained that although not indigenous to Capri, or even Italy,
+we were not of the succulent growth of travellers, and would not be
+eaten. We retired to our vantage ground on the heights. The guides
+called us to the beach again. They would take us for three francs
+apiece, or say six francs for both of us. We withdrew furious to the
+heights again, where we found honest Antonino, who did us the pleasure
+to yell to his fellow-scoundrels on the beach, "You had better take
+these signori for a just price. They are going to the syndic to
+complain of you." At which there arose a lamentable outcry among the
+boatmen, and they called with one voice for us to come down and go
+for a franc apiece. This fable teaches that common-carriers are rogues
+everywhere; but that whereas we are helpless in their hands at home,
+we may bully them into rectitude in Italy, where they are afraid of
+the law.
+
+We had scarcely left the landing of the hotel in the boat of the
+patriarch--for I need hardly say he was first and most rapacious of
+the plundering crew--when we found ourselves in very turbulent waters,
+in the face of mighty bluffs, rising inaccessible from the sea. Here
+and there, where their swarthy fronts were softened with a little
+verdure, goat-paths wound up and down among the rocks; and midway
+between the hotel and the grotto, in a sort of sheltered nook, we saw
+the Roman masonry of certain antique baths--baths of Augustus, says
+Valery; baths of Tiberius, say the Capriotes, zealous for the honor
+of their infamous hero. Howbeit, this was all we saw on the way to
+the Blue Grotto. Every moment the waves rose higher, emulous of the
+bluffs, which would not have afforded a foothold, or any thing to
+cling to, had we been upset and washed against them--and we began
+to talk of the immortality of the soul. As we neared the grotto, the
+patriarch entertained us with stories of the perilous adventures of
+people who insisted upon entering it in stormy weather,--especially
+of a French painter who had been imprisoned in it four days, and kept
+alive only on rum, which the patriarch supplied him, swimming into
+the grotto with a bottle-full at a time. "And behold us arrived,
+gentlemen!" said he, as he brought the boat skillfully around in front
+of the small semicircular opening at the base of the lofty bluff. We
+lie flat on the bottom of the boat, and complete the immersion of that
+part of our clothing which the driving torrents of rain had spared.
+The wave of destiny rises with us upon its breast--sinks, and we are
+inside of the Blue Grotto. Not so much blue as gray, however, and the
+water about the mouth of it green rather than azure. They say that
+on a sunny day both the water and the roof of the cavern are of the
+vividest cerulean tint--and I saw the grotto so represented in the
+windows of the paint-shops at Naples. But to my own experience it did
+not differ from other caves in color or form: there was the customary
+clamminess in the air; the sound of dropping water; the sense of dull
+and stupid solitude,--a little relieved in this case by the mighty
+music of the waves breaking against the rocks outside. The grot is not
+great in extent, and the roof in the rear shelves gradually down to
+the water. Valery says that some remains of a gallery have caused
+the supposition that the grotto was once the scene of Tiberius's
+pleasures; and the Prussian painter who discovered the cave was led
+to seek it by something he had read of a staircase by which Barbarossa
+used to descend into a subterranean retreat from the town of Anacapri
+on the mountain top. The slight fragment of ruin which we saw in one
+corner of the cave might be taken in confirmation of both theories;
+but the patriarch attributed the work to Barbarossa, being probably
+tired at last of hearing Tiberius so much talked about.
+
+We returned, soaked and disappointed, to the hotel, where we found
+Antonino very doubtful about the possibility of getting back that day
+to Sorrento, and disposed, when pooh-poohed out of the notion of bad
+weather, to revive the fiction of a prohibitory consul. He was staying
+in Capri at our expense, and the honest fellow would willingly have
+spent a fortnight there.
+
+We summoned the landlord to settlement, and he came with all his
+household to present the account,--each one full of visible longing,
+yet restrained from asking _buonamano_ by a strong sense of previous
+contract. It was a deadly struggle with them, but they conquered
+themselves, and blessed us as we departed. The pretty muletress took
+leave of us on the beach, and we set sail for Sorrento, the ladies
+crouching in the bottom of the boat, and taking their sea-sickness in
+silence. As we drew near the beautiful town, we saw how it lay on
+a plateau, at the foot of the mountains, but high above the sea.
+Antonino pointed out to us the house of Tasso,--in which the novelist
+Cooper also resided when in Sorrento,--a white house not handsomer nor
+uglier than the rest, with a terrace looking out over the water. The
+bluffs are pierced by numerous arched caverns, as I have said,
+giving shelter to the fishermen's boats, and here and there a devious
+stairway mounts to their crests. Up one of these we walked, noting how
+in the house above us the people, with that puerility usually
+mixed with the Italian love of beauty, had placed painted busts of
+terra-cotta in the windows to simulate persons looking out. There was
+nothing to blame in the breakfast we found ready at the Hotel Rispoli;
+and as for the grove of slender, graceful orange-trees in the midst
+of which the hotel stood, and which had lavished the fruit in every
+direction on the ground, why, I would willingly give for it all the
+currant-bushes, with their promises of jelly and jam, on which I gaze
+at this moment.
+
+Antonino attended us to our carriage when we went away. He had kept
+us all night at Capri, it is true, and he had brought us in at the end
+for a prodigious _buonamano_; yet I cannot escape the conviction that
+he parted from us with an unfulfilled purpose of greater plunder, and
+I have a compassion, which I here declare, for the strangers who fell
+next into his hands. He was good enough at the last moment to say that
+his name, Silver-Eye, was a nickname given him according to a custom
+of the Sorrentines; and he made us a farewell bow that could not be
+bought in America for money.
+
+At the station of Castellamare sat a curious cripple on the stones,--a
+man with little, short, withered legs, and a pleasant face. He showed
+us the ticket-office, and wanted nothing for the politeness. After we
+had been in the waiting-room a brief time, he came swinging himself in
+upon his hands, followed by another person, who, when the cripple had
+planted himself finally and squarely on the ground, whipped out a
+tape from his pocket and took his measure for a suit of clothes,
+the cripple twirling and twisting himself about in every way for the
+tailor's convenience. Nobody was surprised or amused at the sight, and
+when his measure was thus publicly taken, the cripple gravely swung
+himself out as he had swung himself in.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+THE PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES.
+
+I had the pleasure one day of visiting nearly all the free schools
+which the wise philanthropy of the Protestant residents of Naples has
+established in that city. The schools had a peculiar interest for me,
+because I had noticed (in an uncareful fashion enough, no doubt) the
+great changes which had taken place in Italy under its new national
+government, and was desirous to see for myself the sort of progress
+the Italians of the south were making in avenues so long closed to
+them. I believe I have no mania for missionaries; I have heard of the
+converted Jew-and-a-half, and I have thought it a good joke; but
+I cannot help offering a very cordial homage to the truth that the
+missionaries are doing a vast deal of good in Naples, where they are
+not only spreading the gospel, but the spelling-book, the arithmetic,
+and the geography.
+
+It is not to be understood from the word missionaries, that this work
+is done by men especially sent from England or America to perform it.
+The free Protestant schools in Naples are conducted under the auspices
+of the Evangelical Aid Committee,--composed of members of the English
+Church, the Swiss Church, and the Presbyterian Church; the President
+of this committee is Dr. Strange, an Englishman, and the Treasurer
+is Mr. Rogers, the American banker. The missionaries in Naples,
+therefore, are men who have themselves found out their work and
+appointed themselves to do it. The gentleman by whose kindness I was
+permitted to visit the schools was one of these men,--the Rev. Mr.
+Buscarlet, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Naples, a Swiss by
+birth, who had received his education chiefly in Scotland.
+
+He accompanied me to the different schools, and as we walked up the
+long Toledo, and threaded our way through the sprightly Neapolitan
+crowd, he told me of the origin of the schools, and of the peculiar
+difficulties encountered in their foundation and maintenance. They
+are no older than the union of Naples with the Kingdom of Italy, when
+toleration of Protestantism was decreed by law; and from the first,
+their managers proceeded upon a principle of perfect openness and
+candor with the parents who wished to send their children to them.
+They announced that the children would be taught certain branches of
+learning, and that the whole Bible would be placed in their hands,
+to be studied and understood. In spite of this declaration of the
+Protestant character of the schools, the parents of the children
+were so anxious to secure them the benefits of education, that
+they willingly ran the risk of their becoming heretics. They
+were principally people of the lower classes,--laborers, hackmen,
+fishermen, domestics, and very small shopkeepers, but occasionally
+among them were parents able to send their children to other schools,
+yet preferring the thorough and conscientious system practiced in
+these. So the children came, and thanks to the peaceful, uncombative
+nature of Italian boys, who get on with much less waylaying and
+thumping and bullying than boys of northern blood, they have not
+been molested by their companions who still live the wild life of the
+streets, and they have only once suffered through interference of
+the priests. On complaint to the authorities the wrong was promptly
+redressed, and was not again inflicted. Of course these poor little
+people, picked up out of the vileness and ignorance of a city that
+had suffered for ages the most degrading oppression, are by no means
+regenerate yet, but there seems to be great hope for them. Now at
+least they are taught a reasonable and logical morality--and who can
+tell what wonders the novel instruction may not work? They learn for
+the first time that it is a foolish shame to lie and cheat, and it
+would scarcely be surprising if some of them were finally persuaded
+that Honesty is the best Policy--a maxim that few Italians believe.
+And here lies the trouble,--in the unfathomable, disheartening
+duplicity of the race. The children are not quarrelsome, nor cruel,
+nor brutal; but the servile defect of falsehood fixed by long
+generations of slavery in the Italians, is almost ineradicable. The
+fault is worse in Naples than elsewhere in Italy; but how bad it is
+everywhere, not merely travellers, but all residents in Italy, must
+bear witness.
+
+The first school which we visited was a girls' school, in which some
+forty-four little women of all ages, from four to fifteen years,
+were assembled under the charge of a young Corfute girl, an Italian
+Protestant, who had delegated her authority to different children
+under her. The small maidens gathered around their chiefs in groups,
+and read from the book in which they were studying when we appeared.
+Some allowance must be made for difference of the languages, Italian
+being logically spelled and easily pronounced; but I certainly never
+heard American children of their age read nearly so well. They seemed
+also to have a lively understanding of what they read, and to be
+greatly interested in the scriptural stories of which their books were
+made up. They repeated verses from the Bible, and stanzas of poetry,
+all very eagerly and prettily. As bashfulness is scarcely known
+to their race, they had no hesitation in showing off their
+accomplishments before a stranger, and seemed quite delighted with
+his applause. They were not particularly quiet; perhaps with young
+Neapolitans that would be impossible. I saw their copy-books, in which
+the writing was very good, (I am sure the printer would like mine to
+be as legible,) and the books were kept neat and clean, as were the
+hands and faces of the children. Taking the children as one goes in
+the streets of Naples, it would require a day perhaps to find as many
+clean ones as I saw in these schools, where cleanliness is resolutely
+insisted upon. Many of the children were ragged; here and there
+was one hideous with _ophthalmia_; but there was not a clouded
+countenance, nor a dirty hand among them. We should have great hopes
+for a nation of which the children can be taught to wash themselves.
+
+There were fourteen pupils in the boys' superior school, where
+geography, mathematics, linear drawing, French, Italian history, and
+ancient history were taught. A brief examination showed the boys to
+be well up in their studies;--indeed they furnished some recondite
+information about Baffin's Bay for which I should not myself have
+liked to be called on suddenly. Their drawing-books were prodigies of
+neatness, and betrayed that aptness for form and facility of execution
+which are natural to the Italians. Some of these boys had been in the
+schools nearly three years; they were nearly all of the class which
+must otherwise have grown up to hopeless vagabondage; but here they
+were receiving gratis an education that would fit them for employments
+wherein trained intellectual capacity is required. If their education
+went no higher than this, what an advance it would be upon their
+original condition!
+
+In the room devoted to boys of lower grade, I entangled myself in
+difficulties with a bright-eyed young gentleman, whom I asked if he
+liked Italian history better than ancient history. He said he liked
+the latter, especially that of the Romans, much better. "Why, that
+is strange. I should think an Italian boy would like Italian history
+best." "But were not the Romans also Italians, Signore?" I blush to
+say that I basely sneaked out of this trouble by answering that they
+were not like the Italians of the present day,--whatever that meant.
+But indeed all these young persons were startlingly quick with their
+information, and knowing that I knew very little on any subject with
+certainty, I think I was wise to refuse all offers to examine them in
+their studies.
+
+We left this school and returned to the Toledo by one of those
+wonderful little side streets already mentioned, which are forever
+tumultuous with the oddest Neapolitan life--with men quarreling
+themselves purple over small quantities of fish--with asses braying
+loud and clear above their discord--with women roasting pine-cones
+at charcoal fires--with children in the agonies of having their hair
+combed--with degraded poultry and homeless dogs--with fruit-stands
+and green groceries, and the little edifices of ecclesiastical
+architecture for the sale of lemonade--with wandering bag-pipers, and
+herds of nonchalant goats--with horses, and grooms currying them--and
+over all, from vast heights of balcony, with people lazily hanging
+upon rails and looking down on the riot. Reentering the stream of the
+Toledo, it carried us almost to the Museo Borbonico before we again
+struck aside into one of the smaller streets, whence we climbed quite
+to the top of one of those incredibly high Neapolitan houses. Here,
+crossing an open terrace on the roof, we visited three small rooms, in
+which there were altogether some hundred boys in the first stages
+of reclamation. They were under the immediate superintendence of Mr.
+Buscarlet and he seemed to feel the fondest interest in them. Indeed,
+there was sufficient reason for this: up to a certain point, the
+Neapolitan children learn so rapidly and willingly that it can hardly
+be other than a pleasure to teach them. After this, their zeal flags;
+they know enough; and their parents and friends, far more ignorant
+than they, are perfectly satisfied with their progress. Then the
+difficulties of their teachers begin; but here, in these lowest grade
+schools, they had not yet begun. The boys were still eager to learn,
+and were ardently following the lead of their teachers. They were
+little fellows, nearly all, and none of them had been in school more
+than a year and a half, while some had been there only three or four
+months. They rose up with "_Buon giorno, signori_," as we entered, and
+could hardly be persuaded to lapse back to the duties of life during
+our stay. They had very good faces, indeed, for the most part, and
+even the vicious had intellectual brightness. Just and consistent
+usage has the best influence on them; and one boy was pointed out
+as quite docile and manageable, whose parents had given him up as
+incorrigible before he entered the school. As it was, there was
+something almost pathetic in his good behavior, as being possible to
+him, but utterly alien to his instincts. The boys of these schools
+seldom play truant, and they are never severely beaten in school; when
+quite intractable, notice is given to their parents, and they usually
+return in a more docile state. It sometimes happens that the boys are
+taken away by their parents, from one motive or another; but they find
+their way back again, and are received as if nothing had happened.
+
+The teacher in the first room here is a handsome young Calabrian,
+with the gentlest face and manner,--one of the most efficient teachers
+under Mr. Buscarlet. The boys had out their Bibles when we entered,
+and one after another read passages to us. There were children of
+seven, eight, and nine years, who had been in the school only three
+months, and who read any part of their Bibles with facility and
+correctness; of course, before coming to school they had not known one
+letter from another. The most accomplished scholar was a youngster,
+named Saggiomo, who had received eighteen months' schooling. He was
+consequently very quick indeed, and wanted to answer all the hard
+questions put to the other boys. In fact, all of them were ready
+enough, and there was a great deal of writhing and snapping of fingers
+among those who longed to answer some hesitator's question--just as
+you see in schools at home. They were examined in geography, and
+then in Bible history--particularly Joseph's story. They responded
+in chorus to all demands on this part of study, and could hardly be
+quieted sufficiently to give Saggiomo's little brother, aged five, a
+chance to tell why Joseph's brethren sold him. As soon as he could
+be heard he piped out: "_Perche Giuseppe aveva dei sogni_!" (Because
+Joseph had dreams.) It was not exactly the right answer, but nobody
+laughed at the little fellow, though they all roared out in correction
+when permitted.
+
+In the next room, boys somewhat older were examined in Italian
+history, and responded correctly and promptly. They were given a
+sum which they performed in a miraculously short time; and their
+copy-books, when shown, were equally creditable to them. Their teacher
+was a Bolognese,--a naturalized Swiss,--who had been a soldier,
+and who maintained strict discipline among his irregulars, without,
+however, any perceptible terrorism.
+
+The amount of work these teachers accomplish in a day is incredible:
+the boys' school opens at eight in the morning and closes at four,
+with intermission of an hour at noon. Then in the evening the same
+men teach a school for adults, and on Sunday have their classes in the
+Sunday-schools. And this the whole year round. Their pay is not great,
+being about twenty dollars a month, and they are evidently not wholly
+self-interested from this fact. The amount of good they accomplish
+under the direction of their superiors is in proportion to the work
+done. To appreciate it, the reader must consider that they take the
+children of the most ignorant and degraded of all the Italians; that
+they cause them to be washed corporeally, first of all, and then set
+about cleansing them morally; and having cleared away as much of the
+inherited corruption of ages as possible, they begin to educate them
+in the various branches of learning. There is no direct proselyting
+in the schools, but the Bible is the first study, and the children
+are constantly examined in it; and the result is at least not
+superstition. The advance upon the old condition of things is
+incalculably great; for till the revolution under Garibaldi in 1860,
+the schools of Naples were all in the hands of the priests or their
+creatures, and the little learning there imparted was as dangerous as
+it could well be made. Now these schools are free, the children
+are honestly and thoroughly taught, and if they are not directly
+instructed in Protestantism, are at least instructed to associate
+religion with morality, probably for the first time in their lives.
+Too much credit cannot be given to the Italian government which has
+acted in such good faith with the men engaged in this work, protecting
+them from all interruption and persecution; but after all, the great
+praise is due to their own wise, unflagging zeal. They have worked
+unostentatiously, making no idle attacks on time-honored prejudices,
+but still having a purpose of enlightenment which they frankly avowed.
+The people whom they seek to benefit judge them by their works, and
+the result is that they have quite as much before them as they can do.
+Their discouragements are great. The day's teaching is often undone at
+home; the boys forget as aptly as they learn; and from the fact that
+only the baser feelings of fear and interest have ever been appealed
+to before in the Neapolitans, they have often to build in treacherous
+places without foundation of good faith or gratitude. Embarrassments
+for want of adequate funds are sometimes felt also. But no one can
+study their operations without feeling that success must attend their
+efforts, with honor to them, and with inestimable benefits to the
+generation which shall one day help to govern free Italy.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES.
+
+One day it became plain even to our reluctance that we could not stay
+in Naples forever, and the next morning we took the train for Rome.
+The Villa Reale put on its most alluring charm to him that ran down
+before breakfast to thrid once more its pathways bordered with palms
+and fountains and statues; the bay beside it purpled and twinkled in
+the light that made silver of the fishermen's sails; far away rose
+Vesuvius with his nightcap of mist still hanging about his shoulders;
+all around rang and rattled Naples. The city was never so fair before,
+nor could ever have been so hard to leave; and at the last moment
+the landlord of the Hotel Washington must needs add a supreme pang by
+developing into a poet, and presenting me with a copy of a comedy
+he had written. The reader who has received at parting from the
+gentlemanly proprietor of one of our palatial hotels his "Ode on the
+Steam Elevator," will conceive of the shame and regret with which I
+thought of having upbraided our landlord about our rooms, of having
+stickled at small preliminaries concerning our contract for board, and
+for having altogether treated him as one of the uninspired. Let me do
+him the tardy justice to say that he keeps, after the Stella d'Oro at
+Ferrara, the best hotel in Italy, and that his comedy was really very
+sprightly. It is no small thing to know how to keep a hotel, as we
+know, and a poet who does it ought to have a double acclaim.
+
+Nobody who cares to travel with decency and comfort can take the
+second-class cars on the road between Naples and Rome, though these
+are perfectly good everywhere else in Italy. The Papal city makes her
+influence felt for shabbiness and uncleanliness wherever she can, and
+her management seems to prevail on this railway. A glance into
+the second-class cars reconciled us to the first-class,--which in
+themselves were bad,--and we took our places almost contentedly.
+
+The road passed through the wildest country we had seen in Italy; and
+presently a rain began to fall and made it drearier than ever. The
+land was much grown up with thickets of hazel, and was here and there
+sparsely wooded with oaks. Under these, hogs were feeding upon the
+acorns, and the wet swine-herds were steaming over fires built at their
+roots. In some places the forest was quite dense; in other places it
+fell entirely away, and left the rocky hill-sides bare, and solitary
+but for the sheep that nibbled at the scanty grass, and the shepherds
+that leaned upon their crooks and motionlessly stared at us as we
+rushed by. As we drew near Rome, the scenery grew lonelier yet; the
+land rose into desolate, sterile, stony heights, without a patch of
+verdure on their nakedness, and at last abruptly dropped into the
+gloomy expanse of the Campagna.
+
+The towns along the route had little to interest us in their looks,
+though at San Germano we caught a glimpse of the famous old convent of
+Monte-Cassino, perched aloft on its cliff and looking like a part of
+the rock on which it was built. Fancy now loves to climb that steep
+acclivity, and wander through the many-volumed library of the ancient
+Benedictine retreat, and on the whole finds it less fatiguing and
+certainly less expensive than actual ascent and acquaintance with
+the monastery would have been. Two Croatian priests, who shared our
+compartment of the railway carriage, first drew our notice to the
+place, and were enthusiastic about it for many miles after it was
+out of sight. What gentle and pleasant men they were, and how hard it
+seemed that they should be priests and Croats! They told us all about
+the city of Spalato, where they lived, and gave us such a glowing
+account of Dalmatian poets and poetry that we began to doubt at last
+if the seat of literature were not somewhere on the east coast of the
+Adriatic; and I hope we left them the impression that the literary
+centre of the world was not a thousand miles from the horse-car office
+in Harvard Square.
+
+Here and there repairs were going forward on the railroad, and most
+of the laborers were women. They were straight and handsome girls,
+and moved with a stately grace under the baskets of earth balanced on
+their heads. Brave black eyes they had, such as love to look and to
+be looked at; they were not in the least hurried by their work, but
+desisted from it to gaze at the passengers whenever the train stopped.
+They all wore their beautiful peasant costume,--the square white linen
+head-dress falling to the shoulders, the crimson bodice, and the red
+scant skirt; and how they contrived to keep themselves so clean at
+their work, and to look so spectacular in it all, remains one of the
+many Italian mysteries.
+
+Another of these mysteries we beheld in the little beggar-boy at
+Isoletta. He stood at the corner of the station quite mute and
+motionless during our pause, and made no sign of supplication or
+entreaty. He let his looks beg for him. He was perfectly beautiful
+and exceedingly picturesque. Where his body was not quite naked, his
+jacket and trousers hung in shreds and points; his long hair grew
+through the top of his hat, and fell over like a plume. Nobody could
+resist him; people ran out of the cars, at the risk of being left
+behind, to put coppers into the little dirty hand held languidly out
+to receive them. The boy thanked none, smiled on none, but looked
+curiously and cautiously at all, with the quick perception and the
+illogical conclusions of his class and race. As we started he did not
+move, but remained in his attitude of listless tranquillity. As we
+glanced back, the mystery of him seemed to be solved for a moment: he
+would stand there till he grew up into a graceful, prayerful, pitiless
+brigand, and then he would rend from travel the tribute now go freely
+given him. But after all, though his future seemed clear, and he
+appeared the type of a strange and hardly reclaimable people, he was
+not quite a solution of the Neapolitan puzzle.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+ROMAN PEARLS.
+
+I.
+
+The first view of the ruins in the Forum brought a keen sense of
+disappointment. I knew that they could only be mere fragments and
+rubbish, but I was not prepared to find them so. I learned that I
+had all along secretly hoped for some dignity of neighborhood, some
+affectionate solicitude on the part of Nature to redeem these works of
+Art from the destruction that had befallen them. But in hollows below
+the level of the dirty cowfield, wandered over by evil-eyed buffaloes,
+and obscenely defiled by wild beasts of men, there stood here an
+arch, there a pillar, yonder a cluster of columns crowned by a bit
+of frieze; and yonder again, a fragment of temple, half-gorged by
+the facade of a hideous Renaissance church; then a height of vaulted
+brick-work, and, leading on to the Coliseum, another arch, and then
+incoherent columns overthrown and mixed with dilapidated walls--mere
+phonographic consonants, dumbly representing the past, out of which
+all vocal glory had departed. The Coliseum itself does not much better
+express a certain phase of Roman life than does the Arena at Verona;
+it is larger only to the foot-rule, and it seemed not grander
+otherwise, while it is vastly more ruinous. Even the Pantheon failed
+to impress me at first sight, though I found myself disposed to return
+to it again and again, and to be more and more affected by it.
+
+Modern Rome appeared, first and last, hideous. It is the least
+interesting town in Italy, and the architecture is hopelessly
+ugly--especially the architecture of the churches. The Papal city
+contrives at the beginning to hide the Imperial city from your
+thought, as it hides it in such a great degree from your eye, and old
+Rome only occurs to you in a sort of stupid wonder over the depth at
+which it is buried. I confess that I was glad to get altogether away
+from it after a first look at the ruins in the Forum, and to take
+refuge in the Conservatorio delle Mendicanti, where we were charged
+to see the little Virginia G. The Conservatorio, though a charitable
+institution, is not so entirely meant for mendicants as its name would
+imply, but none of the many young girls there were the children of
+rich men. They were often enough of parentage actually hungry and
+ragged, but they were often also the daughters of honest poor folk,
+who paid a certain sum toward their maintenance and education in the
+Conservatorio. Such was the case with little Virginia, whose father
+was at Florence, doubly impeded from seeing her by the fact that he
+had fought against the Pope for the Republic of 1848, and by the
+other fact that he had since wrought the Pope a yet deadlier injury by
+turning Protestant.
+
+Ringing a garrulous bell that continued to jingle some time after we
+were admitted, we found ourselves in a sort of reception-room, of the
+general quality of a cellar, and in the presence of a portress who was
+perceptibly preserved from mold only by the great pot of coals that
+stood in the centre of the place. Some young girls, rather pretty than
+not, attended the ancient woman, and kindly acted as the ear-trumpet
+through which our wishes were conveyed to her mind. The Conservatorio
+was not, so far, as conventual as we had imagined it; but as the
+gentleman of the party was strongly guarded by female friends, and
+asked at once to see the Superior, he concluded that there was,
+perhaps, something so unusually reassuring to the recluses in his
+appearance and manner that they had not thought it necessary to behave
+very rigidly. It later occurred to this gentleman that the promptness
+with which the pretty mendicants procured him an interview with the
+Superior had a flavor of self-interest in; and that he who came to the
+Conservatorio in the place of a father might have been for a moment
+ignorantly viewed as a yet dearer and tenderer possibility. From
+whatever danger there was in this error the Superior soon appeared to
+rescue him, and we were invited into a more ceremonious apartment on
+the first floor, and the little Virginia was sent for. The visit
+of the strangers caused a tumult and interest in the quiet old
+Conservatorio of which it is hard to conceive now, and the excitement
+grew tremendous when it appeared that, the signori were Americani and
+Protestanti. We imparted a savor of novelty and importance to Virginia
+herself, and when she appeared, the Superior and her assistant looked
+at her with no small curiosity and awe, of which the little maiden
+instantly became conscious, and began to take advantage. Accompanying
+us over the building and through the grounds, she cut her small
+friends wherever she met them, and was not more than respectful to the
+assistant.
+
+It was from an instinct of hospitality that we were shown the
+Conservatorio, and instructed in regard to all its purposes. We saw
+the neat dormitories with their battalions of little white beds; the
+kitchen with its gigantic coppers for boiling broth, and the refectory
+with the smell of the frugal dinners of generations of mendicants in
+it. The assistant was very proud of the neatness of every thing, and
+was glad to talk of that, or, indeed, any thing else. It appeared that
+the girls were taught reading, writing, and plain sewing when they
+were young, and that the Conservatorio was chiefly sustained by pious
+contributions and bequests. Any lingering notion of the conventual
+character of the place was dispelled by the assistant's hurrying to
+say, "And when we can get the poor things well married, we are glad to
+do so."
+
+"But how does any one ever see them?"
+
+"Eh! well, that is easily managed. Once a month we dress the
+marriageable girls in their best, and take them for a walk in the
+street. If an honest young man falls in love with one of them going
+by, he comes to the Superior, and describes her as well as he can,
+and demands to see her. She is called, and if both are pleased, the
+marriage is arranged. You see it is a very simple affair."
+
+And there was, to the assistant's mind, nothing odd in the whole
+business, insomuch that I felt almost ashamed of marveling at it.
+
+Issuing from the backdoor of the convent, we ascended by stairs and
+gateways into garden spaces, chiefly planted with turnips and the like
+poor but respectable vegetables, and curiously adorned with fragments
+of antique statuary, and here and there a fountain in a corner,
+trickling from moss-grown rocks, and falling into a trough of
+travertine, about the feet of some poor old goddess or Virtue who had
+forgotten what her name was.
+
+Once, the assistant said, speaking as if the thing had been within
+her recollection, though it must have been centuries before, the
+antiquities of the Conservatorio were much more numerous and striking;
+but they were now removed to the different museums. Nevertheless they
+had still a beautiful prospect left, which we were welcome to enjoy if
+we would follow her; and presently, to our surprise, we stepped from
+the garden upon the roof of the Temple of Peace. The assistant had not
+boasted without reason: away before us stretched the Campagna, a level
+waste, and empty, but for the umbrella-palms that here and there
+waved like black plumes upon it, and for the arched lengths of
+the acqueducts that seemed to stalk down from the ages across the
+melancholy expanse like files of giants, with now and then a ruinous
+gap in the line, as if one had fallen out weary by the way. The city
+all around us glittered asleep in the dim December sunshine, and
+far below us,--on the length of the Forum over which the Appian Way
+stretched from the Capitoline Hill under the Arch of Septimius Severus
+and the Arch of Titus to the Arch of Constantine, leaving the Coliseum
+on the left, and losing itself in the foliage of the suburbs,--the
+Past seemed struggling to emerge from the ruins, and to reshape and
+animate itself anew. The effort was more successful than that which we
+had helped the Past to make when standing on the level of the Forum;
+but Antiquity must have been painfully conscious of the incongruity of
+the red-legged Zouaves wandering over the grass, and of the bewildered
+tourists trying to make her out with their Murrays.
+
+In a day or two after this we returned again to our Conservatorio,
+where we found that the excitement created by our first visit had been
+kept fully alive by the events attending the photographing of Virginia
+for her father. Not only Virginia was there to receive us, but her
+grandmother also--an old, old woman, dumb through some infirmity of
+age, who could only weep and smile in token of her content. I think
+she had but a dim idea, after all, of what went on beyond the visible
+fact of Virginia's photograph, and that she did not quite understand
+how we could cause it to be taken for her son. She was deeply
+compassionated by the Superior, who rendered her pity with a great
+deal of gesticulation, casting up her eyes, shrugging her shoulders,
+and sighing grievously. But the assistant's cheerfulness could not be
+abated even by the spectacle of extreme age; and she made the most of
+the whole occasion, recounting with great minuteness all the incidents
+of the visit to the photographer's, and running to get the dress
+Virginia sat in, that we might see how exactly it was given in the
+picture. Then she gave us much discourse concerning the Conservatorio
+and its usages, and seemed not to wish us to think that life there
+was altogether eventless. "Here we have a little amusement also," she
+said. "The girls have their relatives to visit them sometimes, and
+then in the evening they dance. Oh, they enjoy themselves! I am half
+old (_mezzo-vecchia_). I am done with these things. But for youth,
+always kept down, something lively is wanted."
+
+When we took leave of these simple folks, we took leave of almost the
+only natural and unprepared aspect of Italian life which we were to
+see in Rome; but we did not know this at the time.
+
+
+II.
+
+Indeed, it seems to me that all moisture of romance and adventure has
+been wellnigh sucked out of travel in Italy, and that compared with
+the old time, when the happy wayfarer journeyed by vettura through the
+innumerable little states of the Peninsula,--halted every other mile
+to show his passport, and robbed by customs officers in every color of
+shabby uniform and every variety of cocked hat,--the present railroad
+period is one of but stale and insipid flavor. Much of local life and
+color remains, of course; but the hurried traveller sees little of it,
+and, passed from one grand hotel to another, without material change
+in the cooking or the methods of extortion, he might nearly as well
+remain at Paris. The Italians, who live to so great extent by the
+travel through their country, learn our abominable languages and
+minister to our detestable comfort and propriety, till we have slight
+chance to know them as we once could,--musical, picturesque, and full
+of sweet, natural knaveries, graceful falsehood, and all uncleanness.
+Rome really belongs to the Anglo-Saxon nations, and the Pope and the
+past seem to be carried on entirely for our diversion. Every thing is
+systematized as thoroughly as in a museum where the objects are all
+ticketed; and our prejudices are consulted even down to alms-giving,
+Honest Beppo is gone from the steps in the Piazza di Spagna, and now
+the beggars are labeled like policemen, with an immense plate bearing
+the image of St. Peter, so that you may know you give to a worthy
+person when you bestow charity on one of them, and not, alas! to some
+abandoned impostor, as in former days. One of these highly recommended
+mendicants gave the last finish to the system, and begged of us in
+English! No custodian will answer you, if he can help it, in the
+Italian which he speaks so exquisitely, preferring to speak bad French
+instead, and in all the shops on the Corso the English tongue is _de
+rigueur_.
+
+After our dear friends at the Conservatorio, I think we found one of
+the most simple and interesting of Romans in the monk who showed us
+the Catacombs of St. Sebastian. These catacombs, he assured us, were
+not restored like those of St. Calixtus, but were just as the martyrs
+left them; and, as I do not remember to have read anywhere that
+they are formed merely of long, low, narrow, wandering underground
+passages, lined on either side with tombs in tiers like berths on
+a steamer, and expanding here and there into small square chambers,
+bearing the traces of ancient frescos, and evidently used as
+chapels,--I venture to offer the information here. The reader is to
+keep in his mind a darkness broken by the light of wax tapers, a
+close smell, and crookedness and narrowness, or he cannot realize the
+catacombs as they are in fact. Our monkish guide, before entering the
+passage leading from the floor of the church to the tombs, in which
+there was still some "fine small dust" of the martyrs, warned us that
+to touch it was to incur the penalty of excommunication, and then
+gently craved pardon for having mentioned the fact. But, indeed, it
+was only to persons who showed a certain degree of reverence that
+these places were now exhibited; for some Protestants who had been
+permitted there had stolen handfuls of the precious ashes, merely to
+throw away. I assured him that I thought them beasts to do it; and I
+was afterwards puzzled to know what should attract their wantonness in
+the remnants of mortality, hardly to be distinguished from the common
+earth out of which the catacombs were dug.
+
+
+III.
+
+Returning to the church above we found, kneeling before one of the
+altars, two pilgrims,--a man and a woman. The latter was habited in
+a nun-like dress of black, and the former in a long pilgrim's coat of
+coarse blue stuff. He bore a pilgrim's staff in his hand, and showed
+under his close hood a fine, handsome, reverent face, full of a sort
+of tender awe, touched with the pathos of penitence. In attendance
+upon the two was a dapper little silk-hatted man, with rogue so
+plainly written in his devotional countenance that I was not surprised
+to be told that he was a species of spiritual _valet de place_,
+whose occupation it was to attend pilgrims on their tour to the Seven
+Churches at which these devotees pray in Rome, and there to direct
+their orisons and join in them.
+
+It was not to the pilgrims, but to the heretics that the monk now
+uncovered the precious marble slab on which Christ stood when he met
+Peter flying from Rome and turned him back. You are shown the prints
+of the divine feet, which the conscious stone received and keeps
+forever; and near at hand is one of the arrows with which St.
+Sebastian was shot. We looked at these things critically, having to
+pay for the spectacle; but the pilgrims and their guide were all faith
+and wonder.
+
+I remember seeing nothing else so finely superstitious at Rome. In a
+chapel near the Church of St. John Lateran are, as is well known,
+the marble steps which once belonged to Pilate's house, and which the
+Saviour is said to have ascended when he went to trial before Pilate.
+The steps are protected against the wear and tear of devotion by a
+stout casing of wood, and they are constantly covered with penitents,
+who ascend and descend them upon their knees. Most of the pious people
+whom I saw in this act were children, and the boys enjoyed it with a
+good deal of giggling, as a very amusing feat. Some old and haggard
+women gave the scene all the dignity which it possessed; but certain
+well-dressed ladies and gentlemen were undeniably awkward and absurd,
+and I was led to doubt if there were not an incompatibility between
+the abandon of simple faith and the respectability of good clothes.
+
+
+IV.
+
+In all other parts of Italy one hears constant talk among travellers
+of the malaria at Rome, and having seen a case of Roman fever, I know
+it is a thing not to be trifled with. But in Rome itself the malaria
+is laughed at by the foreign residents,--who, nevertheless, go out of
+the city in midsummer. The Romans, to the number of a hundred thousand
+or so, remain there the whole year round, and I am bound to say I
+never saw a healthier, robuster-looking population. The cheeks of the
+French soldiers, too, whom we met at every turn, were red as their
+trousers, and they seemed to flourish on the imputed unwholesomeness
+of the atmosphere. All at Rome are united in declaring that the fever
+exists at Naples, and that sometimes those who have taken it there
+come and die in Rome, in order to give the city a bad name; and I
+think this very likely.
+
+Rome is certainly dirty, however, though there is a fountain in every
+square, and you are never out of the sound of falling water. The Corso
+and some of the principal streets do not so much impress you with
+their filth as with their dullness; but that part of the city where
+some of the most memorable relics of antiquity are to be found is
+unimaginably vile. The least said of the state of the archways of the
+Coliseum the soonest mended; and I have already spoken of the Forum.
+The streets near the Theatre of Pompey are almost impassable, and the
+so-called House of Rienzi is a stable, fortified against approach by
+a _fosse_ of excrement. A noisome smell seems to be esteemed the most
+appropriate offering to the memory of ancient Rome, and I am not sure
+that the moderns are mistaken in this. In the rascal streets in the
+neighborhood of the most august ruins, the people turn round to stare
+at the stranger as he passes them; they are all dirty, and his decency
+must be no less a surprise to them than the neatness of the French
+soldiers amid all the filth is a puzzle to him. We wandered about a
+long time in such places one day, looking for the Tarpeian Rock, less
+for Tarpeia's sake than for the sake of Miriam and Donatello and the
+Model. There are two Tarpeian rocks, between which the stranger takes
+his choice; and we must have chosen the wrong one, for it seemed but
+a shallow gulf compared to that in our fancy. We were somewhat
+disappointed; but then Niagara disappoints one; and as for Mont
+Blanc....
+
+
+V.
+
+It is worth while for every one who goes to Rome to visit the Church
+of St. Peter's; but it is scarcely worth while for me to describe
+it, or for every one to go up into the bronze globe on the top of the
+cupola. In fact, this is a great labor, and there is nothing to
+be seen from the crevices in the ball which cannot be far more
+comfortably seen from the roof of the church below.
+
+The companions of our ascent to the latter point were an English lady
+and gentleman, brother and sister, and both Catholics, as they at once
+told us. The lady and myself spoke for some time in the Tuscan tongue
+before we discovered that neither of us was Italian, after which we
+paid each other some handsome compliments upon fluency and perfection
+of accent. The gentleman was a pleasant purple porpoise from the
+waters of Chili, whither he had wandered from the English coasts in
+early youth. He had two leading ideas: one concerned the Pope, to
+whom he had just been presented, and whom he viewed as the best and
+blandest of beings; the other related to his boy, then in England,
+whom he called Jack Spratt, and considered the grandest and greatest
+of boys. With the view from the roof of the church this gentleman did
+not much trouble himself. He believed Jack Spratt could ride up to the
+roof where we stood on his donkey. As to the great bronze globe which
+we were hurrying to enter he seemed to regard it merely as a rival in
+rotundity, and made not the slightest motion to follow us.
+
+I should be loth to vex the reader with any description of the scene
+before us and beneath us, even if I could faithfully portray it. But I
+recollect, with a pleasure not to be left unrecorded, the sweetness
+of the great fountain playing in the square before the church, and
+the harmony in which the city grew in every direction from it, like
+an emanation from its music, till the last house sank away into
+the pathetic solitude of the Campagna, with nothing beyond but the
+snow-capped mountains lighting up the remotest distance. At the same
+moment I experienced a rapture in reflecting that I had underpaid
+three hackmen during my stay in Rome, and thus contributed to avenge
+my race for ages of oppression.
+
+The vastness of St. Peter's itself is best felt in looking down upon
+the interior from the gallery that surrounds the inside of the dome,
+and in comparing one's own littleness with the greatness of all the
+neighboring mosaics. But as to the beauty of the temple, I could not
+find it without or within.
+
+
+VI.
+
+In Rome one's fellow-tourists are a constant source of gratification
+and surprise. I thought that American travellers were by no means the
+most absurd among those we saw, nor even the loudest in their approval
+of the Eternal City. A certain order of German greenness affords,
+perhaps, the pleasantest pasturage for the ruminating mind. For
+example, at the Villa Ludovisi there was, beside numerous Englishry
+in detached bodies, a troop of Germans, chiefly young men, frugally
+pursuing the Sehenswuerdigkeiten in the social manner of their nation.
+They took their enjoyment very noisily, and wrangled together with
+furious amiability as they looked at Guercino's "Aurora." Then two of
+them parted from the rest, and went to a little summer-house in the
+gardens, while the others followed us to the top of the Casino. There
+they caught sight of their friends in the arbor, and the spectacle
+appeared to overwhelm them. They bowed, they took off their hats, they
+waved their handkerchiefs. It was not enough: one young fellow mounted
+on the balustrade of the roof at his neck's risk, lifted his hat on
+his cane and flourished it in greeting to the heart's-friends in the
+arbor, from whom he had parted two minutes before.
+
+In strange contrast to the producer of this enthusiasm, so pumped and
+so unmistakably mixed with beer, a fat and pallid Englishwoman sat
+in a chair upon the roof and coldly, coldly sketched the lovely
+landscape. And she and the blonde young English girl beside her
+pronounced a little dialogue together, which I give, because I saw
+that they meant it for the public:
+
+_The Young Girl_.--I wonder, you knoa, you don't draw-ow St. Petuh's!
+
+_The Artist_.--O ah, you knoa, I can draw-ow St. Petuh's from so
+mennee powints.
+
+I am afraid that the worst form of American greenness appears abroad
+in a desire to be perfectly up in critical appreciation of the arts,
+and to approach the great works in the spirit of the connoisseur. The
+ambition is not altogether a bad one. Still I could not help laughing
+at a fellow-countryman when he told me that he had not yet seen
+Raphael's "Transfiguration," because he wished to prepare his mind for
+understanding the original by first looking at all the copies he could
+find.
+
+
+VII.
+
+The Basilica San Paolo fuori le Mura surpasses every thing in splendor
+of marble and costly stone--porphyry, malachite, alabaster--and luxury
+of gilding that is to be seen at Rome. But I chiefly remember it
+because on the road that leads to it, through scenes as quiet and
+peaceful as if history had never known them, lies the Protestant
+graveyard in which Keats is buried. Quite by chance the driver
+mentioned it, pointing in the direction of the cemetery with his whip.
+We eagerly dismounted and repaired to the gate, where we were met by
+the son of the sexton, who spoke English through the beauteous line of
+a curved Hebrew nose. Perhaps a Christian could not be found in Rome
+to take charge of these heretic graves, though Christians can be got
+to do almost any thing there for money. However, I do not think
+a Catholic would have kept the place in better order, or more
+intelligently understood our reverent curiosity. It was the new
+burial-ground which we had entered, and which is a little to the right
+of the elder cemetery. It was very beautiful and tasteful in every
+way; the names upon the stones were chiefly English and Scotch,
+with here and there an American's. But affection drew us only to the
+prostrate tablet inscribed with the words, "Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cor
+Cordium," and then we were ready to go to the grave of him for whom we
+all feel so deep a tenderness. The grave of John Keats is one of
+few in the old burying-ground, and lies almost in the shadow of the
+pyramid of Caius Cestius; and I could not help thinking of the wonder
+the Roman would have felt could he have known into what unnamable
+richness and beauty his Greek faith had ripened in the heart of the
+poor poet, where it was mixed with so much sorrow. Doubtless, in his
+time, a prominent citizen like Caius Cestius was a leading member of
+the temple in his neighborhood, and regularly attended sacrifice: it
+would have been but decent; and yet I fancied that a man immersed like
+him in affairs might have learned with surprise the inner and more
+fragrant meaning of the symbols with the outside of which his life was
+satisfied; and I was glad to reflect that in our day such a thing is
+impossible.
+
+The grave of our beloved poet is sunken to the level of the common
+earth, and is only marked by the quaintly lettered, simple stone
+bearing the famous epitaph. While at Rome I heard talk of another and
+grander monument which some members of the Keats family were to place
+over the dust of their great kinsman. But, for one, I hope this may
+never be done, even though the original stone should also be left
+there, as was intended. Let the world still keep unchanged this
+shrine, to which it can repair with at once pity and tenderness and
+respect.
+
+A rose-tree and some sweet-smelling bushes grew upon the grave, and
+the roses were in bloom. We asked leave to take one of them; but at
+last could only bring ourselves to gather some of the fallen petals.
+Our Hebrew guide was willing enough, and unconsciously set us a little
+example of wantonness; for while he listened to our explanation of
+the mystery which had puzzled him ever since he had learned English,
+namely, why the stone should say "_writ_ on water," and not _written_,
+he kept plucking mechanically at one of the fragrant shrubs, pinching
+away the leaves, and rending the tender twig, till I, remembering the
+once-sensitive dust from which it grew, waited for the tortured
+tree to cry out to him with a voice of words and blood, "Perche mi
+schianti?"
+
+
+VIII.
+
+It seems to me that a candid person will wish to pause a little
+before condemning Gibson's colored statues. They have been grossly
+misrepresented. They do not impress one at all as wax-work, and there
+is great wrong in saying that their tinted nakedness suggests impurity
+any more than the white nakedness of other statues. The coloring
+is quite conventional; the flesh is merely warmed with the hue
+representing life; the hair is always a very delicate yellow, the eyes
+a tender violet, and there is no other particularization of color; a
+fillet binding the hair may be gilded,--the hem of a robe traced
+in blue. I, who had just come from seeing the fragments of antique
+statuary in Naples Museum, tinted in the same way, could not feel
+that there was any thing preposterous in Gibson's works, and I am not
+ashamed to say that they gave me pleasure.
+
+As we passed, in his studio, from one room to another, the workman who
+showed the marbles surprised and delighted us by asking if we would
+like to see the sculptor, and took us up into the little room where
+Gibson worked. He was engaged upon a bass-relief,--a visit of Psyche
+to the Zephyrs, or something equally aerial and mythological,--and
+received us very simply and naturally, and at once began with some
+quaint talk about the subject in hand. When we mentioned our pleasure
+in his colored marbles we touched the right spring, and he went on to
+speak of his favorite theory with visible delight, making occasional
+pauses to bestow a touch on the bass-relief, and coming back to his
+theme with that self-corroborative "Yes!" of his, which Hawthorne
+has immortalized. He was dressed with extraordinary slovenliness and
+indifference to clothes, had no collar, I think, and evidently did
+not know what he had on. Every thing about him bespoke the utmost
+unconsciousness and democratic plainness of life, so that I could
+readily believe a story I heard of him. Having dined the greater part
+of his life in Roman restaurants where it is but wholesome to go over
+your plate, glass, spoon, and knife and fork with your napkin before
+using them, the great sculptor had acquired such habits of
+neatness that at table in the most aristocratic house in England
+he absent-mindedly went through all that ceremony of cleansing
+and wiping. It is a story they tell in Rome, where every body is
+anecdoted, and not always so good-naturedly.
+
+
+IX.
+
+One Sunday afternoon we went with some artistic friends to visit the
+studio of the great German painter, Overbeck; and since I first read
+Uhland I have known no pleasure so illogical as I felt in looking at
+this painter's drawings. In the sensuous heart of objective Italy he
+treats the themes of mediaeval Catholicism with the most subjective
+feeling, and I thought I perceived in his work the enthusiasm which
+led many Protestant German painters and poets of the romantic school
+back into the twilight of the Romish faith, in the hope that they
+might thus realize to themselves something of the earnestness which
+animated the elder Christian artists. Overbeck's work is beautiful,
+but it is unreal, and expresses the sentiment of no time; as the work
+of the romantic German poets seems without relation to any world men
+ever lived in.
+
+Walking from the painter's house, two of us parted with the rest
+on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, and pursued our
+stroll through the gate of San Lorenzo out upon the Campagna, which
+tempts and tempts the sojourner at Rome, until at last he must go
+and see--if it will give him the fever. And, alas! there I caught the
+Roman fever--the longing that burns one who has once been in Rome to
+go again--that will not be cured by all the cool contemptuous things
+he may think or say of the Eternal City; that fills him with fond
+memories of its fascination, and makes it forever desired.
+
+We walked far down the dusty road beyond the city walls, and then
+struck out from the highway across the wild meadows of the Campagna.
+They were weedy and desolate, seamed by shaggy grass-grown ditches,
+and deeply pitted with holes made in search for catacombs. There was
+here and there a farm-house amid the wide lonesomeness, but oftener
+a round, hollow, roofless tomb, from which the dust and memory of the
+dead had long been blown away, and through the top of which--fringed
+and overhung with grasses, and opening like a great eye--the evening
+sky looked marvelously sad. One of the fields was full of grim,
+wide-horned cattle, and in another there were four or five buffaloes
+lying down and chewing their cuds,--holding their heads horizontally
+in the air, and with an air of gloomy wickedness which nothing could
+exceed in their cruel black eyes, glancing about in visible pursuit
+of some object to toss and gore. There were also many canebrakes,
+in which the wind made a mournful rustling after the sun had set in
+golden glitter on the roofs of the Roman churches and the transparent
+night had fallen upon the scene.
+
+In all our ramble we met not a soul, and I scarcely know what it is
+makes this walk upon the Campagna one of my vividest recollections
+of Rome, unless it be the opportunity it gave me to weary myself upon
+that many-memoried ground as freely as if it had been a woods-pasture
+in Ohio. Nature, where history was so august, was perfectly simple
+and motherly, and did so much to make me at home, that, as the night
+thickened and we plunged here and there into ditches and climbed
+fences, and struggled, heavy-footed, back through the suburbs to
+the city gate, I felt as if half my boyhood had been passed upon the
+Campagna.
+
+
+X.
+
+Pasquino, like most other great people, is not very interesting upon
+close approach. There is no trace now in his aspect to show that he
+has ever been satirical; but the humanity that the sculptor gave him
+is imperishable, though he has lost all character as a public censor.
+The torso is at first glance nothing but a shapeless mass of stone,
+but the life can never die out of that which has been shaped by art
+to the likeness of a man, and a second look restores the lump to
+full possession of form and expression. For this reason I lament that
+statues should ever be restored except by sympathy and imagination.
+
+
+XI.
+
+Regarding the face of Pompey's statue in the Spada Palace, I was more
+struck than ever with a resemblance to American politicians which I
+had noted in all the Roman statues. It is a type of face not now to be
+found in Rome, but frequent enough here, and rather in the South
+than in the North. Pompey was like the pictures of so many Southern
+Congressmen that I wondered whether race had not less to do with
+producing types than had similarity of circumstances; whether a
+republicanism based upon slavery could not so far assimilate character
+as to produce a common aspect in people widely separated by time and
+creeds, but having the same unquestioned habits of command, and the
+same boundless and unscrupulous ambition.
+
+
+XII.
+
+When the Tiber, according to its frequent habit, rises and inundates
+the city, the Pantheon is one of the first places to be flooded--the
+sacristan told us. The water climbs above the altar-tops, sapping,
+in its recession, the cement of the fine marbles which incrust the
+columns, so that about their bases the pieces have to be continually
+renewed. Nothing vexes you so much in the Pantheon as your
+consciousness of these and other repairs. Bad as ruin is, I think I
+would rather have the old temple ruinous in every part than restored
+as you find it. The sacristan felt the wrongs of the place keenly, and
+said, referring to the removal of the bronze roof, which took place
+some centuries ago, "They have robbed us of every thing" (_Ci hanno
+levato tutto_); as if he and the Pantheon were of one blood, and he
+had suffered personal hurt in its spoliation.
+
+What a sense of the wildness everywhere lurking about Rome we had
+given us by that group of peasants who had built a fire of brushwood
+almost within the portico of the Pantheon, and were cooking their
+supper at it, the light of the flames luridly painting their swarthy
+faces!
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Poor little Numero Cinque Via del Gambero has seldom, I imagine, known
+so violent a sensation as that it experienced when, on the day of the
+Immaculate Conception, the Armenian Archbishop rolled up to the door
+in his red coach. The master of the house had always seemed to like
+us; now he appeared with profound respect suffusing, as it were, his
+whole being, and announced, "Signore, it is Monsignore come to take
+you to the Sistine Chapel in his carriage," and drew himself up in a
+line, as much like a series of serving-men as possible, to let us
+pass out. There was a private carriage for the ladies near that of
+Monsignore, for he had already advertised us that the sex were not
+permitted to ride in the red coach. As they appeared, however, he
+renewed his expressions of desolation at being deprived of their
+company, and assured them of his good-will with a multiplicity of
+smiles and nods, intermixed with shrugs of recurrence to his poignant
+regret. But! In fine, it was forbidden!
+
+Monsignore was in full costume, with his best ecclesiastical clothes
+on, and with his great gold chain about his neck. The dress was richer
+than that of the western archbishops; and the long white beard of
+Monsignore made him look much more like a Scriptural monsignore than
+these. He lacked, perhaps, the fine spiritual grace of his brother,
+the Archbishop at Venice, to whose letter of introduction we owed his
+acquaintance and untiring civilities; but if a man cannot be plump and
+spiritual, he can be plump and pleasant, as Monsignore was to the last
+degree. He enlivened our ride with discourse about the Armenians at
+Venice, equally beloved of us; and, arrived at the Sistine Chapel, he
+marshaled the ladies before him, and won them early entrance through
+the crowd of English people crushing one another at the door. Then
+he laid hold upon the captain of the Swiss Guard, who was swift to
+provide them with the best places; and in nowise did he seem one of
+the uninfluential and insignificant priests that About describes the
+archbishops at Rome to be. According to this lively author, a Swiss
+guard was striking back the crowd on some occasion with the butt of
+his halberd, and smote a cardinal on the breast. He instantly
+dropped upon his knees, with "Pardon, Eminenza! I thought it was a
+monsignore!" Even the chief of these handsome fellows had nothing but
+respect and obedience for our Archbishop.
+
+The gentlemen present were separated from the ladies, and in a very
+narrow space outside of the chapel men of every nation were penned up
+together. All talked--several priests as loudly as the rest. But the
+rudest among them were certain Germans, who not only talked but stood
+upon a seat to see better, and were ordered down by one of the Swiss
+with a fierce "_Giu, signore, giu_!" Otherwise the guard kept good
+order in the chapel, and were no doubt as useful and genuine as any
+thing about the poor old Pope. What gorgeous fellows they were, and,
+as soldiers, how absurd! The weapons they bore were as obsolete as the
+excommunication. It was amusing to pass one of these play-soldiers on
+guard at the door of the Vatican--tall, straight, beautiful, superb,
+with his halberd on his shoulder--and then come to a real warrior
+outside, a little, ugly, red-legged French sentinel, with his Minie on
+his arm.
+
+Except for the singing of the Pope's choir--which was angelically
+sweet, and heavenly far above all praise--the religious ceremonies
+affected me, like all others of that faith, as tedious and empty. Each
+of the cardinals, as he entered the chapel, blew a sonorous nose; and
+was received standing by his brother prelates--a grotesque company
+of old-womanish old men in gaudy gowns. One of the last to come was
+Antonelli, who has the very wickedest face in the world. He sat with
+his eyes fastened upon his book, but obviously open at every pore
+to all that went on about him. As he passed out he cast gleaming,
+terrible, sidelong looks upon the people, full of hate and guile.
+
+From where I stood I saw the Pope's face only in profile: it was
+gentle and benign enough, but not great in expression, and the smile
+on it almost degenerated into a simper. His Holiness had a cold; and
+his _recitative_, though full, was not smooth. He was all priest
+when, in the midst of the service, he hawked, held his handkerchief up
+before his face, a little way off, and ruthlessly spat in it!
+
+
+
+
+FORZA MAGGIORE.
+
+I imagine that Grossetto is not a town much known to travel, for it is
+absent from all the guide-books I have looked at. However, it is chief
+in the Maremma, where sweet Pia de' Tolommei languished and perished
+of the poisonous air and her love's cruelty, and where, so many mute
+centuries since, the Etrurian cities flourished and fell. Further, one
+may say that Grossetto is on the diligence road from Civita Vecchia
+to Leghorn, and that in the very heart of the place there is a lovely
+palm-tree, rare, if not sole, in that latitude. This palm stands in a
+well-sheltered, dull little court, out of every thing's way, and turns
+tenderly toward the wall that shields it on the north. It has no other
+company but a beautiful young girl, who leans out of a window high
+over its head, and I have no doubt talks with it. At the moment we
+discovered the friends, the maiden was looking pathetically to the
+northward, while the palm softly stirred and opened its plumes, as a
+bird does when his song is finished; and there is very little question
+but it had just been singing to her that song of which the palms are
+so fond,--
+
+  "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
+  Im Norden auf kahler Hoeh'."
+
+Grossetto does her utmost to hide the secret of this tree's
+existence, as if a hard, matter-of-fact place ought to be ashamed of
+a sentimentality of the kind. It pretended to be a very worldly town,
+and tried to keep us in the neighborhood of its cathedral, where the
+caffe and shops are, and where, in the evening, four or five officers
+of the garrison clinked their sabres on the stones, and promenaded up
+and down, and as many ladies shopped for gloves; and as many citizens
+sat at the principal caffe and drank black coffee. This was lively
+enough; and we knew that the citizens were talking of the last week's
+news and the Roman question; that the ladies were really looking for
+loves, not gloves; that such of the officers as had no local intrigue
+to keep their hearts at rest were terribly bored, and longed for
+Florence or Milan or Turin.
+
+Besides the social charms of her piazza, Grossetto put forth others
+of an artistic nature. The cathedral was very old and very
+beautiful,--built of alternate lines of red and white marble, and
+lately restored in the best spirit of fidelity and reverence. But
+it was not open, and we were obliged to turn from it to the group of
+statuary in the middle of the piazza, representative of the Maremma
+and Family returning thanks to the Grand Duke Leopold III. of Tuscany
+for his goodness in causing her swamps to be drained. The Maremma and
+her children are arrayed in the scant draperies of Allegory, but
+the Grand Duke is fully dressed, and is shown looking down with some
+surprise at their figures, and with a visible doubt of the propriety
+of their public appearance in that state.
+
+There was also a Museum at Grossetto, and I wonder what was in it?
+
+The wall of the town was perfect yet, though the moat at its feet had
+been so long dry that it was only to be known from the adjacent fields
+by the richness of its soil. The top of the wall had been leveled, and
+planted with shade, and turned into a peaceful promenade, like most of
+such mediaeval defenses in Italy; though I am not sure that a little
+military life did not still linger about a bastion here and there.
+From somewhere, when we strolled out early in the morning, to walk
+upon the wall, there came to us a throb of drums; but I believe that
+the only armed men we saw, beside the officers in the piazza, were
+the numerous sportsmen resorting at that season to Grossetto for
+the excellent shooting in the marshes. All the way to Florence we
+continued to meet them and their dogs; and our inn at Grossetto
+overflowed with abundance of game. On the kitchen floor and in the
+court were heaps of larks, pheasants, quails, and beccafichi, at which
+a troop of scullion-boys constantly plucked, and from which the great,
+noble, beautiful, white-aproned cook forever fried, stewed, broiled,
+and roasted. We lived chiefly upon these generous birds during our
+sojourn, and found, when we attempted to vary our bill of fare, that
+the very genteel waiter attending us had few distinct ideas beyond
+them. He was part of the repairs and improvements which that
+hostelry had recently undergone, and had evidently come in with
+the four-pronged forks, the chromo-lithographs of Victor Emanuel,
+Garibaldi, Solferino, and Magenta in the large dining-room, and the
+iron stove in the small one. He had nothing, evidently, in common with
+the brick floors of the bed-chambers, and the ancient rooms with
+great fire-places. He strove to give a Florentine blandishment to the
+rusticity of life in the Maremma; and we felt sure that he must know
+what beefsteak was. When we ordered it, he assumed to be perfectly
+conversant with it, started to bring it, paused, turned, and, with a
+great sacrifice of personal dignity, demanded, "_Bifsteca di manzo, o
+bifsteca di motone_?"--"Beefsteak of beef, or beefsteak of mutton?"
+
+Of Grossetto proper, this is all I remember, if I except a boy whom I
+heard singing after dark in the streets,--
+
+  "Camicia rossa, O Garibaldi!"
+
+The cause of our sojourn there was an instance of _forza maggiore_, as
+the agent of the diligence company defiantly expressed it, in refusing
+us damages for our overturn into the river. It was in the early
+part of the winter when we started from Rome for Venice, and we were
+travelling northward by diligence because the railways were still more
+or less interrupted by the storms and floods predicted of Matthieu
+de la Drome,--the only reliable prophet France has produced since
+Voltaire;--and if our accident was caused by an overruling Providence,
+the company, according to the very law of its existence, was not
+responsible. To be sure, we did not see how an overruling Providence
+was to blame for loading upon our diligence the baggage of two
+diligences, or for the clumsiness of our driver; but on the other
+hand, it is certain that the company did not make it rain or cause
+the inundation. And, in fine, although we could not have travelled
+by railway, we were masters to have taken the steamer instead of the
+diligence at Civita Vecchia.
+
+The choice of either of these means of travel had presented itself in
+vivid hues of disadvantage all the way from Rome to the Papal port,
+where the French steamer for Leghorn lay dancing a hornpipe upon the
+short, chopping waves, while we approached by railway. We had
+leisure enough to make the decision, if that was all we wanted. Our
+engine-driver had derived his ideas of progress from an Encyclical
+Letter, and the train gave every promise of arriving at Civita Vecchia
+five hundred years behind time. But such was the desolating and
+depressing influence of the weather and the landscape, that we reached
+Civita Vecchia as undecided as we had left Rome. On the one hand,
+there had been the land, soaked and sodden,--wild, shagged with
+scrubby growths of timber and brooded over by sullen clouds, and
+visibly inhabited only by shepherds, leaning upon their staves at
+an angle of forty-five degrees, and looking, in their immovable
+dejection, with their legs wrapped in long-haired goat-skins, like
+satyrs that had been converted, and were trying to do right; turning
+dim faces to us, they warned us with every mute appeal against the
+land, as a waste of mud from one end of Italy to the other. On
+the other hand, there was the sea-wind raving about our train and
+threatening to blow it over, and whenever we drew near the coast,
+heaping the waves upon the beach in thundering menace.
+
+We weakly and fearfully remembered our former journeys by diligence
+over broken railway routes; we recalled our cruel voyage from Genoa to
+Naples by sea; and in a state of pitiable dismay we ate five francs'
+worth at the restaurant of the Civita Vecchia station before we knew
+it, and long before we had made up our minds. Still we might have
+lingered and hesitated, and perhaps returned to Rome at last, but for
+the dramatic resolution of the old man who solicited passengers for
+the diligence, and carried their passports for a final Papal _visa_
+at the police-office. By the account he gave of himself, he was one of
+the best men in the world, and unique in those parts for honesty and
+truthfulness; and he besought us, out of that affectionate interest
+with which our very aspect had inspired him, not to go by steamer, but
+to go by diligence, which in nineteen hours would land us safe,
+and absolutely refreshed by the journey, at the railway station in
+Follonica. And now, once, would we go by diligence? twice, would we
+go? three times, would we go?
+
+"Signore," said our benefactor, angrily, "I lose my time with you;"
+and ran away, to be called back in the course of destiny, as he knew
+well enough, and besought to take us as a special favor.
+
+From the passports he learned that there was official dignity among
+us, and addressed the unworthy bearer of public honors as Eccellenza,
+and, at parting bequeathed his advantage to the conductor, commending
+us all in set terms to his courtesy. He hovered caressingly about us
+as long as we remained, straining politeness to do us some last little
+service; and when the diligence rolled away, he did all that one man
+could to give us a round of applause.
+
+We laughed together at this silly old man, when out of sight; but we
+confessed that, if travel in our own country ever came, with advancing
+corruption, to be treated with the small deceits practiced upon it in
+Italy, it was not likely to be treated with the small civilities also
+there attendant on it,--and so tried to console ourselves.
+
+At the moment of departure, we were surprised to have enter the
+diligence a fellow-countryman, whom we had first seen on the road from
+Naples to Rome. He had since crossed our path with that iteration of
+travel which brings you again and again in view of the same trunks
+and the same tourists in the round of Europe, and finally at Civita
+Vecchia he had turned up, a silent spectator of our scene with the
+agent of the diligence, and had gone off apparently a confirmed
+passenger by steamer. Perhaps a nearer view of the sailor's hornpipe,
+as danced by that vessel in the harbor, shook his resolution. At
+any rate, here he was again, and with his ticket for Follonica,--a
+bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked man, and we will say a citizen of Portland,
+though he was not. For the first time in our long acquaintance with
+one another's faces, we entered into conversation, and wondered
+whether we should find brigands or any thing to eat on the road,
+without expectation of finding either. In respect of robbers, we were
+not disappointed; but shortly after nightfall we stopped at a lonely
+post-house to change horses, and found that the landlord had so far
+counted on our appearance as to have, just roasted and fragrantly
+fuming, a leg of lamb, with certain small fried fish, and a
+sufficiency of bread. It was a very lonely place as I say; the sky was
+gloomy overhead; and the wildness of the landscape all about us gave
+our provision quite a gamy flavor; and brigands could have added
+nothing to our sense of solitude.
+
+The road creeps along the coast for some distance from Civita Vecchia,
+within hearing of the sea, and nowhere widely forsakes it, I believe,
+all the way to Follonica. The country is hilly, and we stopped every
+two hours to change horses; at which times we looked out, and, seeing
+that it was a gray and windy night, though not rainy, exulted that we
+had not taken the steamer. With very little change, the wisdom of
+our decision in favor of the diligence formed the burden of our talk
+during the whole night; and to think of eluded sea-sickness requited
+us in the agony of our break-neck efforts to catch a little sleep, as,
+mounted upon our nightmares, we rode steeple-chases up and down the
+highways and by-ways of horror. Any thing that absolutely awakened us
+was accounted a blessing; and I remember few things in life with so
+keen a pleasure as the summons that came to us to descend from our
+places and cross a river in one boat, while the two diligences of
+our train followed in another. Here we had time to see our
+fellow-passengers, as the pulsating light of their cigars illumined
+their faces, and to discover among them that Italian, common to all
+large companies, who speaks English, and is very eager to practice
+it with you,--who is such a benefactor if you do not know his own
+language, and such a bore if you do. After this, being landed, it was
+rapture to stroll up and down the good road, and feel it hard and real
+under our feet, and not an abysmal impalpability, while all the
+grim shapes of our dreams fled to the spectral line of small boats
+sustaining the ferry-barge, and swaying slowly from it as the drowned
+men at their keels tugged them against the tide.
+
+"_S' accommodino, Signori_!" cries the cheerful voice of the
+conductor, and we ascend to our places in the diligence. The
+nightmares are brought out again; we mount, and renew the
+steeple-chase as before.
+
+Suddenly, it all comes to an end, and we sit wide awake in the
+diligence, amid a silence only broken by the hiss of rain against the
+windows, and the sweep of gusts upon the roof. The diligence stands
+still; there is no rattle of harness, nor other sound to prove that we
+have arrived at the spot by other means than dropping from the clouds.
+The idea that we are passengers in the last diligence destroyed
+before the Deluge, and are now waiting our fate on the highest ground
+accessible to wheels, fades away as the day dimly breaks, and we find
+ourselves planted, as the Italians say, on the banks of another
+river. There is no longer any visible conductor, the horses have been
+spirited away, the driver has vanished.
+
+The rain beats and beats upon the roof, and begins to drop through
+upon us in great, wrathful tears, while the river before us rushes
+away with a momently swelling flood. Enter now from the depths of
+the storm a number of rainy peasants, with our conductor and driver
+perfectly waterlogged, and group themselves on the low, muddy shore,
+near a flat ferry-barge, evidently wanting but a hint of _forza
+maggiore_ to go down with any thing put into it. A moment they
+dispute in pantomime, sending now and then a windy tone of protest
+and expostulation to our ears, and then they drop into a motionless
+silence, and stand there in the tempest, not braving it, but enduring
+it with the pathetic resignation of their race, as if it were some
+form of hopeless political oppression. At last comes the conductor to
+us and says, It is impossible for our diligences to cross in the
+boat, and he has sent for others to meet us on the opposite shore.
+He expected them long before this, but we see! They are not come.
+Patience and malediction!
+
+Remaining planted in these unfriendly circumstances from four o'clock
+till ten, we have still the effrontery to be glad that we did not
+take the steamer. What a storm that must be at sea! When at last
+our connecting diligences appear on the other shore, we are almost
+light-hearted, and make a jest of the Ombrone, as we perilously pass
+it in the ferry-boat too weak for our diligences. Between the landing
+and the vehicles there is a space of heavy mud to cross, and when we
+reach them we find the _coupe_ appointed us occupied by three young
+Englishmen, who insist that they shall be driven to the boat. With
+that graceful superiority which endears their nation to the world, and
+makes the travelling Englishman a universal favorite, they keep
+the seats to which they have no longer any right, while the tempest
+drenches the ladies to whom the places belong; and it is only by the
+_forza maggiore_ of our conductor that they can be dislodged. In
+the mean time the Portland man exchanges with them the assurances of
+personal and national esteem, which that mighty bond of friendship,
+the language of Shakespeare and Milton, enables us to offer so
+idiomatically to our transatlantic cousins.
+
+What Grossetto was like, as we first rode through it, we scarcely
+looked to see. In four or five hours we should strike the railroad at
+Follonica; and we merely asked of intermediate places that they
+should not detain us. We dined in Grossetto at an inn of the Larthian
+period,--a cold inn and a damp, which seemed never to have been
+swept since the broom dropped from the grasp of the last Etrurian
+chambermaid,--and we ate with the two-pronged iron forks of an extinct
+civilization. All the while we dined, a boy tried to kindle a fire
+to warm us, and beguiled his incessant failures with stories of
+inundation on the road ahead of us. But we believed him so little,
+that when he said a certain stream near Grossetto was impassable, our
+company all but hissed him.
+
+When we left the town and hurried into the open country, we perceived
+that he had only too great reason to be an alarmist. Every little
+rill was risen, and boiling over with the pride of harm, and the broad
+fields lay hid under the yellow waters that here and there washed over
+the road. Yet the freshet only presented itself to us as a pleasant
+excitement; and even when we came to a place where the road itself
+was covered for a quarter of a mile, we scarcely looked outside the
+diligence to see how deep the water was. We were surprised when our
+horses were brought to a stand on a rising ground, and the conductor,
+cap in hand, appeared at the door. He was a fat, well-natured man,
+full of a smiling goodwill; and he stood before us in a radiant
+desperation.
+
+Would Eccellenza descend, look at the water in front, and decide
+whether to go on? The conductor desired to content; it displeased him
+to delay,--_ma, in somma_!--the rest was confided to the conductor's
+eloquent shoulders and eyebrows.
+
+Eccellenza, descending, beheld but a disheartening prospect. On every
+hand the country was under water. The two diligences stood on a stone
+bridge spanning the stream, that, now swollen to an angry torrent,
+brawled over a hundred yards of the road before us. Beyond, the ground
+rose, and on its slope stood a farm-house up to its second story in
+water. Without the slightest hope in his purpose and merely as an
+experiment, Eccellenza suggested that a man should be sent in on
+horseback; which being done, man and horse in a moment floundered into
+swimming depths.
+
+The conductor, vigilantly regarding Eccellenza, gave a great shrug of
+desolation.
+
+Eccellenza replied with a foreigner's broken shrug,--a shrug of
+sufficiently correct construction, but wanting the tonic accent,
+as one may say, though expressing, however imperfectly, an equal
+desolation.
+
+It appeared to be the part of wisdom not to go ahead, but to go back
+if we could; and we reentered the water we had just crossed. It had
+risen a little meanwhile, and the road could now be traced only by the
+telegraph-poles. The diligence before us went safely through; but our
+driver, trusting rather to inspiration than precedent, did not follow
+it carefully, and directly drove us over the side of a small viaduct.
+All the baggage of the train having been lodged upon the roof of our
+diligence, the unwieldy vehicle now lurched heavily, hesitated, as if
+preparing, like Caesar, to fall decently, and went over on its side
+with a stately deliberation that gave us ample time to arrange our
+plans for getting out.
+
+The torrent was only some three feet deep, but it was swift and muddy,
+and it was with a fine sense of shipwreck that Eccellenza felt his
+boots filling with water, while a conviction that it would have been
+better, after all, to have taken the steamer, struck coldly home to
+him. We opened the window in the top side of the diligence, and
+lifted the ladies through it and the conductor, in the character of
+life-boat, bore them ashore; while the driver cursed his horses in
+a sullen whisper, and could with difficulty be diverted from that
+employment to cut the lines and save one of them from drowning.
+
+Here our compatriot, whose conversation with the Englishman at the
+Ombrone we had lately admired, showed traits of strict and severe
+method which afterward came into even bolder relief. The ladies being
+rescued, he applied himself to the rescue of their hats, cloaks,
+rubbers, muffs, books, and bags, and handed them up through the window
+with tireless perseverance, making an effort to wring or dry each
+article in turn. The other gentleman on top received them all rather
+grimly, and had not perhaps been amused by the situation but for the
+exploit of his hat. It was of the sort called in Italian as in English
+slang a stove-pipe (_canna_), and having been made in Italy, it was
+of course too large for its wearer. It had never been any thing but a
+horror and reproach to him, and he was now inexpressibly delighted
+to see it steal out of the diligence in company with one of the
+red-leather cushions, and glide darkly down the flood. It nodded and
+nodded to the cushion with a superhuman tenderness and elegance, and
+had a preposterous air of whispering, as it drifted out of sight,--
+
+  "It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles,--
+  It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down."
+
+The romantic interest of this episode had hardly died away, when our
+adventure acquired an idyllic flavor from the appearance on the scene
+of four peasants in an ox-cart. These the conductor tried to engage to
+bring out the baggage and right the fallen diligence; and they, after
+making him a little speech upon the value of their health, which
+might be injured, asked him, tentatively, two hundred francs for
+the service. The simple incident enforced the fact already known to
+us,--that, if Italians sometimes take advantage of strangers, they
+are equally willing to prey upon each other; but I doubt if any thing
+could have taught a foreigner the sweetness with which our conductor
+bore the enormity, and turned quietly from those brigands to carry the
+Portland man from the wreck, on which he lingered, to the shore.
+
+Here in the gathering twilight the passengers of both diligences
+grouped themselves, and made merry over the common disaster. As the
+conductor and the drivers brought off the luggage our spirits rose
+with the arrival of each trunk, and we were pleased or not as we found
+it soaked or dry. We applauded and admired the greater sufferers among
+us: a lady who opened a dripping box was felt to have perpetrated a
+pleasantry; and a Brazilian gentleman, whose luggage dropped to pieces
+and was scattered in the flood about the diligence, was looked upon as
+a very subtile humorist. Our own contribution to these witty passages
+was the epigrammatic display of a reeking trunk full of the pretty
+rubbish people bring away from Rome and Naples,--copies of Pompeian
+frescos more ruinous than the originals; photographs floating loose
+from their cards; little earthen busts reduced to the lumpishness of
+common clay; Roman scarfs stained and blotted out of all memory of
+their recent hues; Roman pearls clinging together in clammy masses.
+
+We were a band of brothers and sisters, as we all crowded into one
+diligence and returned to Grossetto. Arrived there, our party, knowing
+that a public conveyance in Italy--and everywhere else--always stops
+at the worst inn in a place, made bold to seek another, and found it
+without ado, though the person who undertook to show it spoke of it
+mysteriously and as of difficult access, and tried to make the simple
+affair as like a scene of grand opera as he could.
+
+We took one of the ancient rooms in which there was a vast fire-place,
+as already mentioned, and we there kindled such a fire as could not
+have been known in that fuel-sparing land for ages. The drying of the
+clothes was an affair that drew out all the energy and method of our
+compatriot, and at a late hour we left him moving about among the
+garments that dangled and dripped from pegs and hooks and lines,
+dealing with them as a physician with his sick, and tenderly nursing
+his dress-coat, which he wrung and shook and smoothed and pulled this
+way and that with a never-satisfied anxiety. At midnight, he hired
+a watcher to keep up the fire and turn the steaming raiment, and,
+returning at four o'clock, found his watcher dead asleep before the
+empty fire-place. But I rather applaud than blame the watcher for
+this. He must have been a man of iron nerve to fall asleep amid all
+that phantasmal show of masks and disguises. What if those reeking
+silks had forsaken their nails, and, decking themselves with the
+blotted Roman scarfs and the slimy Roman pearls, had invited the
+dress-coats to look over the dripping photographs? Or if all those
+drowned garments had assumed the characters of the people whom they
+had grown to resemble, and had sat down to hear the shade of Pia de'
+Tolommei rehearse the story of her sad fate in the Maremma? I say, if
+a watcher could sleep in such company, he was right to do so.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the third day after our return to Grossetto, we gathered together
+our damaged effects, and packed them into refractory trunks. Then
+we held the customary discussion with the landlord concerning the
+effrontery of his account, and drove off once more toward Follonica.
+We could scarcely recognize the route for the one we had recently
+passed over; and it was not until we came to the scene of our wreck,
+and found the diligence stranded high and dry upon the roadside, that
+we could believe the whole landscape about us had been flooded three
+days before. The offending stream had shrunk back to its channel, and
+now seemed to feign an unconsciousness of its late excess, and had
+a virtuous air of not knowing how in the world to account for that
+upturned diligence. The waters, we learned, had begun to subside the
+night after our disaster; and the vehicle might have been righted
+and drawn off--for it was not in the least injured--forty-eight hours
+previously; but I suppose it was not _en regle_ to touch it without
+orders from Rome. I picture it to myself still lying there, in the
+heart of the marshes, and thrilling sympathetic travel with the
+spectacle of its ultimate ruin:
+
+  "Disfecemi Maremma."
+
+We reached Follonica at last, and then the cars hurried us to Leghorn.
+We were thoroughly humbled in spirit, and had no longer any doubt
+that we did ill to take the diligence at Civita Vecchia instead of
+the steamer; for we had been, not nineteen hours, but four days on the
+road, and we had suffered as aforementioned.
+
+But we were destined to be partially restored to our self-esteem, if
+not entirely comforted for our losses, when we sat down to dinner in
+the Hotel Washington, and the urbane head-waiter, catching the drift
+of our English discourse, asked us,--
+
+"Have the signori heard that the French steamer, which left Civita
+Vecchia the same day with their diligence, had to put back and lie in
+port more than two days on account of the storm? She is but now come
+into Leghorn, after a very dangerous passage."
+
+
+
+
+AT PADUA
+
+I.
+
+Those of my readers who have frequented the garden of Doctor
+Rappaccini no doubt recall with perfect distinctness the quaint
+old city of Padua. They remember its miles and miles of dim arcade
+over-roofing the sidewalks everywhere, affording excellent opportunity
+for the flirtation of lovers by day and the vengeance of rivals by
+night. They have seen the now-vacant streets thronged with maskers,
+and the Venetian Podesta going in gorgeous state to and from the vast
+Palazzo della Ragione. They have witnessed ringing tournaments in
+those sad empty squares, and races in the Prato della Valle, and
+many other wonders of different epochs, and their pleasure makes me
+half-sorry that I should have lived for several years within an hour
+by rail from Padua, and should know little or nothing of these great
+sights from actual observation. I take shame to myself for having
+visited Padua so often and so familiarly as I used to do,--for having
+been bored and hungry there,--for having had toothache there, upon one
+occasion,--for having rejoiced more in a cup of coffee at Pedrocchi's
+than in the whole history of Padua,--for having slept repeatedly in
+the bad-bedded hotels of Padua and never once dreamt of Portia,--for
+having been more taken by the _salti mortali_[_Salti mortali_ are
+those prodigious efforts of mental arithmetic by which Italian
+waiters, in verbally presenting your account, arrive at six as the
+product of two and two.] of a waiter who summed up my account at a
+Paduan restaurant, than by all the strategies with which the city has
+been many times captured and recaptured. Had I viewed Padua only over
+the wall of Doctor Rappaccini's garden, how different my impressions
+of the city would now be! This is one of the drawbacks of actual
+knowledge. "Ah! how can you write about Spain when once you have been
+there?" asked Heine of Theophile Gautier setting out on a journey
+thither.
+
+Nevertheless it seems to me that I remember something about Padua with
+a sort of romantic pleasure. There was a certain charm which I can
+dimly recall, in sauntering along the top of the old wall of the
+city, and looking down upon the plumy crests of the Indian corn that
+flourished up so mightily from the dry bed of the moat. At such times
+I could not help figuring to myself the many sieges that the wall had
+known, with the fierce assault by day, the secret attack by night, the
+swarming foe upon the plains below, the bristling arms of the besieged
+upon the wall, the boom of the great mortars made of ropes and leather
+and throwing mighty balls of stone, the stormy flight of arrows, the
+ladders planted against the defenses and staggering headlong into the
+moat, enriched for future agriculture not only by its sluggish waters,
+but by the blood of many men. I suppose that most of these visions
+were old stage spectacles furbished up anew, and that my armies
+were chiefly equipped with their obsolete implements of warfare from
+museums of armor and from cabinets of antiquities; but they were very
+vivid for all that.
+
+I was never able, in passing a certain one of the city gates, to
+divest myself of an historic interest in the great loads of hay
+waiting admission on the outside. For an instant they masked again the
+Venetian troops that, in the War of the League of Cambray, entered the
+city in the hay-carts, shot down the landsknechts at the gates, and,
+uniting with the citizens, cut the German garrison to pieces. But it
+was a thing long past. The German garrison was here again; and the
+heirs of the landsknechts went clanking through the gate to the
+parade-ground, with that fierce clamor of their kettle-drums which is
+so much fiercer because unmingled with the noise of fifes. Once more
+now the Germans are gone, and, let us trust, forever; but when I
+saw them, there seemed little hope of their going. They had a great
+Biergarten on the top of the wall, and they had set up the altars of
+their heavy Bacchus in many parts of the city.
+
+I please myself with thinking that, if I walked on such a spring
+day as this in the arcaded Paduan streets, I should catch glimpses,
+through the gate-ways of the palaces, of gardens full of vivid bloom,
+and of fountains that tinkle there forever. If it were autumn, and
+I were in the great market-place before the Palazzo della Ragione, I
+should hear the baskets of amber-hued and honeyed grapes humming with
+the murmur of multitudinous bees, and making a music as if the wine
+itself were already singing in their gentle hearts. It is a great
+field of succulent verdure, that wide old market-place; and fancy
+loves to browse about among its gay stores of fruits and vegetables,
+brought thither by the world-old peasant-women who have been bringing
+fruits and vegetables to the Paduan market for so many centuries. They
+sit upon the ground before their great panniers, and knit and doze,
+and wake up with a drowsy "_Comandala_?" as you linger to look
+at their grapes. They have each a pair of scales,--the emblem of
+Injustice,--and will weigh you out a scant measure of the fruit if you
+like. Their faces are yellow as parchment, and Time has written them
+so full of wrinkles that there is not room for another line. Doubtless
+these old parchment visages are palimpsests, and would tell the whole
+history of Padua if you could get at each successive inscription.
+Among their primal records there must be some account of the Roman
+city, as each little contadinella remembered it on market-days; and
+one might read of the terror of Attila's sack, a little later, with
+the peasant-maid's personal recollections of the bold Hunnish trooper
+who ate up the grapes in her basket, and kissed her hard, round red
+cheeks,--for in that time she was a blooming girl,--and paid nothing
+for either privilege. What wild and confused reminiscences on the
+wrinkled visage we should find thereafter of the fierce republican
+times, of Ecelino, of the Carraras, of the Venetian rule! And is it
+not sad to think of systems and peoples all passing away, and these
+ancient women lasting still, and still selling grapes in front of the
+Palazzo della Ragione? What a long mortality!
+
+The youngest of their number is a thousand years older than the
+palace, which was begun in the twelfth century, and which is much the
+same now as it was when first completed. I know that, if I entered it,
+I should be sure of finding the great hall of the palace--the vastest
+hall in the world--dim and dull and dusty and delightful, with nothing
+in it except at one end Donatello's colossal marble-headed wooden
+horse of Troy, stared at from the other end by the two dog-faced
+Egyptian women in basalt placed there by Belzoni.
+
+Late in the drowsy summer afternoons I should have the Court of the
+University all to myself, and might study unmolested the blazons of
+the noble youth who have attended the school in different centuries
+ever since 1200, and have left their escutcheons on the walls to
+commemorate them. At the foot of the stairway ascending to the schools
+from the court is the statue of the learned lady who was once a
+professor in the University, and who, if her likeness belie not her
+looks, must have given a great charm to student life in other times.
+At present there are no lady professors at Padua any more than at
+Harvard; and during late years the schools have suffered greatly from
+the interference of the Austrian government, which frequently closed
+them for months, on account of political demonstrations among the
+students. But now there is an end of this and many other stupid
+oppressions; and the time-honored University will doubtless regain
+its ancient importance. Even in 1864 it had nearly fifteen hundred
+students, and one met them everywhere under the arcades, and could
+not well mistake them, with that blended air of pirate and dandy which
+these studious young men loved to assume. They were to be seen a good
+deal on the promenades outside the walls, where the Paduan ladies are
+driven in their carriages in the afternoon, and where one sees the
+blood-horses and fine equipages for which Padua is famous. There used
+once to be races in the Prato della Valle, after the Italian notion of
+horse-races; but these are now discontinued, and there is nothing to
+be found there but the statues of scholars and soldiers and statesmen,
+posted in a circle around the old race-course. If you strolled thither
+about dusk on such a day as this, you might see the statues unbend a
+little from their stony rigidity, and in the failing light nod to each
+other very pleasantly through the trees. And if you stayed in Padua
+over night, what could be better to-morrow morning than a stroll
+through the great Botanical Garden,--the oldest botanical garden in
+the world,--the garden which first received in Europe the strange
+and splendid growths of our hemisphere,--the garden where Doctor
+Rappaccini doubtless found the germ of his mortal plant?
+
+On the whole, I believe I would rather go this moment to Padua than to
+Lowell or Lawrence, or even to Worcester; and as to the disadvantage
+of having seen Padua, I begin to think the whole place has now assumed
+so fantastic a character in my mind that I am almost as well qualified
+to write of it as if I had merely dreamed it.
+
+The day that we first visited the city was very rainy, and we spent
+most of the time in viewing the churches. These, even after the
+churches of Venice, one finds rich in art and historic interest, and
+they in no instance fall into the maniacal excesses of the Renaissance
+to which some of the temples of the latter city abandon themselves.
+Their architecture forms a sort of border-land between the Byzantine
+of Venice and the Lombardic of Verona. The superb domes of St.
+Anthony's emulate those of St. Mark's; and the porticos of other
+Paduan churches rest upon the backs of bird-headed lions and leopards
+that fascinate with their mystery and beauty.
+
+It was the wish to see the attributive Giottos in the Chapter which
+drew us first to St. Anthony's, and we saw them with the satisfaction
+naturally attending the contemplation of frescos discovered only since
+1858, after having been hidden under plaster and whitewash for many
+centuries; but we could not believe that Giotto's fame was destined
+to gain much by their rescue from oblivion. They are in nowise to
+be compared with this master's frescos in the Chapel of the
+Annunziata,--which, indeed, is in every way a place of wonder and
+delight. You reach it by passing through a garden lane bordered with
+roses, and a taciturn gardener comes out with clinking keys, and lets
+you into the chapel, where there is nobody but Giotto and Dante, nor
+seems to have been for ages. Cool it is, and of a pulverous smell, as
+a sacred place should be; a blessed benching goes round the walls, and
+you sit down and take unlimited comfort in the frescos. The gardener
+leaves you alone to the solitude and the silence, in which the talk
+of the painter and the exile is plain enough. Their contemporaries and
+yours are cordial in their gay companionship: through the half-open
+door falls, in a pause of the rain, the same sunshine that they saw
+lie there; the deathless birds that they heard sing out in the garden
+trees; it is the fresh sweetness of the grass mown so many hundred
+years ago that breathes through all the lovely garden grounds.
+
+But in the midst of this pleasant communion with the past, you have
+a lurking pain; for you have hired your brougham by the hour; and you
+presently quit the Chapel of Giotto on this account.
+
+We had chosen our driver from among many other drivers of broughams in
+the vicinity of Pedrocchi's, because he had such an honest look, and
+was not likely, we thought, to deal unfairly with us.
+
+"But first," said the signor who had selected him, "how much is your
+brougham an hour?"
+
+So and so.
+
+"Show me the tariff of fares."
+
+"There is no tariff."
+
+"There is. Show it to me."
+
+"It is lost, signor."
+
+"I think not. It is here in this pocket. Get it out."
+
+The tariff appears, and with it the fact that he had demanded just
+what the boatman of the ballad received in gift,--thrice his fee.
+
+The driver mounted his seat, and served us so faithfully that day in
+Padua that we took him the next day for Arqua. At the end, when he
+had received his due, and a handsome _mancia_ besides, he was still
+unsatisfied, and referred to the tariff in proof that he had been
+under-paid. On that confronted and defeated, he thanked us very
+cordially, gave us the number of his brougham, and begged us to ask
+for him when we came next to Padua and needed a carriage.
+
+From the Chapel of the Annunziata he drove us to the Church of Santa
+Giustina, where is a very famous and noble picture by Romanino. But as
+this writing has nothing in the world to do with art, I here dismiss
+that subject, and with a gross and idle delight follow the sacristan
+down under the church to the prison of Santa Giustina.
+
+Of all the faculties of the mind there is none so little fatiguing to
+exercise as mere wonder; and, for my own sake, I try always to wonder
+at things without the least critical reservation. I therefore, in the
+sense of deglutition, bolted this prison at once, though subsequent
+experiences led me to look with grave indigestion upon the whole idea
+of prisons, their authenticity, and even their existence.
+
+As far as mere dimensions are concerned, the prison of Santa Giustina
+was not a hard one to swallow, being only three feet wide by about
+ten feet in length. In this limited space, Santa Giustina passed five
+years of the paternal reign of Nero (a virtuous and a long-suffering
+prince, whom, singularly enough, no historic artist has yet arisen to
+whitewash), and was then brought out into the larger cell adjoining,
+to suffer a blessed martyrdom. I am not sure now whether the sacristan
+said she was dashed to death on the stones, or cut to pieces with
+knives; but whatever the form of martyrdom, an iron ring in the
+ceiling was employed in it, as I know from seeing the ring,--a
+curiously well-preserved piece of iron-mongery. Within the narrow
+prison of the saint, and just under the grating, through which the
+sacristan thrust his candle to illuminate it, was a mountain of
+candle-drippings,--a monument to the fact that faith still largely
+exists in this doubting world. My own credulity, not only with regard
+to this prison, but also touching the coffin of St. Luke, which I saw
+in the church, had so wrought upon the esteem of the sacristan, that
+he now took me to a well, into which, he said, had been cast the bones
+of three thousand Christian martyrs. He lowered a lantern into the
+well, and assured me that, if I looked through a certain screenwork
+there, I could see the bones. On experiment I could not see the
+bones, but this circumstance did not cause me to doubt their presence,
+particularly as I did see upon the screen a great number of coins
+offered for the repose of the martyrs' souls. I threw down some
+_soldi_, and thus enthralled the sacristan.
+
+If the signor cared to see prisons, he said, the driver must take him
+to those of Ecelino, at present the property of a private gentleman
+near by. As I had just bought a history of Ecelino, at a great
+bargain, from a second-hand book-stall, and had a lively interest in
+all the enormities of that nobleman, I sped the driver instantly to
+the villa of the Signor P----.
+
+It depends here altogether upon the freshness or mustiness of the
+reader's historical reading whether he cares to be reminded more
+particularly who Ecelino was. He flourished balefully in the early
+half of the thirteenth century as lord of Vicenza, Verona, Padua, and
+Brescia, and was defeated and hurt to death in an attempt to possess
+himself of Milan. He was in every respect a remarkable man for
+that time,--fearless, abstemious, continent, avaricious, hardy,
+and unspeakably ambitious and cruel. He survived and suppressed
+innumerable conspiracies, escaping even the thrust of the assassin
+whom the fame of his enormous wickedness had caused the Old Man of the
+Mountain to send against him. As lord of Padua he was more incredibly
+severe and bloody in his rule than as lord of the other cities, for
+the Paduans had been latest free, and conspired the most frequently
+against him. He extirpated whole families on suspicion that a single
+member had been concerned in a meditated revolt. Little children and
+helpless women suffered hideous mutilation and shame at his hands.
+Six prisons in Padua were constantly filled by his arrests. The whole
+country was traversed by witnesses of his cruelties,--men and women
+deprived of an arm or leg, and begging from door to door. He had long
+been excommunicated; at last the Church proclaimed a crusade against
+him, and his lieutenant and nephew--more demoniacal, if possible,
+than himself--was driven out of Padua while he was operating against
+Mantua. Ecelino retired to Verona, and maintained a struggle against
+the crusade for nearly two years longer, with a courage which never
+failed him. Wounded and taken prisoner, the soldiers of the victorious
+army gathered about him, and heaped insult and reproach upon him;
+and one furious peasant, whose brother's feet had been cut off by
+Ecelino's command, dealt the helpless monster four blows upon the head
+with a scythe. By some, Ecelino is said to have died of these wounds
+alone; but by others it is related that his death was a kind of
+suicide, inasmuch as he himself put the case past surgery by tearing
+off the bandages from his hurts, and refusing all medicines.
+
+
+II.
+
+Entering at the enchanted portal of the Villa P----, we found
+ourselves in a realm of wonder. It was our misfortune not to see the
+magician who compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but
+for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his
+greatness. Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but
+lugubrious fancy, which everywhere tended to a monumental and mortuary
+effect. A sort of vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped
+and glimmered the garden. The walls of the vestibule were covered with
+inscriptions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety
+of all ages concerning life and death; we began with Confucius, and
+we ended with Benjamino Franklino. But as if these ideas of mortality
+were not sufficiently depressing, the funereal Signor P---- had
+collected into earthen _amphorae_ the ashes of the most famous men of
+ancient and modern times, and arranged them so that a sense of their
+number and variety should at once strike his visitor. Each jar was
+conspicuously labeled with the name its illustrious dust had borne
+in life; and if one escaped with comparative cheerfulness from the
+thought that Seneca had died, there were in the very next pot the
+cinders of Napoleon to bully him back to a sense of his mortality.
+
+We were glad to have the gloomy fascination of these objects broken by
+the custodian, who approached to ask if we wished to see the prisons
+of Ecelino, and we willingly followed him into the rain out of our
+sepulchral shelter.
+
+Between the vestibule and the towers of the tyrant lay that garden
+already mentioned, and our guide led us through ranks of weeping
+statuary, and rainy bowers, and showery lanes of shrubbery, until we
+reached the door of his cottage. While he entered to fetch the key
+to the prisons, we noted that the towers were freshly painted and
+in perfect repair; and indeed the custodian said frankly enough, on
+reappearing, that they were merely built over the prisons on the site
+of the original towers. The storied stream of the Bacchiglione sweeps
+through the grounds, and now, swollen by the rainfall, it roared, a
+yellow torrent, under a corner of the prisons. The towers rise from
+masses of foliage, and form no unpleasing feature of what must be, in
+spite of Signor P----, a delightful Italian garden in sunny weather.
+The ground is not so flat as elsewhere in Padua, and this inequality
+gives an additional picturesqueness to the place. But as we were
+come in search of horrors, we scorned these merely lovely things, and
+hastened to immure ourselves in the dungeons below. The custodian,
+lighting a candle, (which ought, we felt, to have been a torch,) went
+before.
+
+We found the cells, though narrow and dark, not uncomfortable, and the
+guide conceded that they had undergone some repairs since Ecelino's
+time. But all the horrors for which we had come were there in perfect
+grisliness, and labeled by the ingenious Signor P---- with Latin
+inscriptions.
+
+In the first cell was a shrine of the Virgin, set in the wall. Beneath
+this, while the wretched prisoner knelt in prayer, a trap-door opened
+and precipitated him upon the points of knives, from which his body
+fell into the Bacchiglione below. In the next cell, held by some rusty
+iron rings to the wall, was a skeleton, hanging by the wrists.
+
+"This," said the guide, "was another punishment of which Ecelino was
+very fond."
+
+A dreadful doubt seized my mind. "Was this skeleton found here?" I
+demanded.
+
+Without faltering an instant, without so much as winking an eye, the
+custodian replied, "_Appunto_."
+
+It was a great relief, and restored me to confidence in the
+establishment. I am at a loss to explain how my faith should have been
+confirmed afterwards by coming upon a guillotine--an awful instrument
+in the likeness of a straw-cutter, with a decapitated wooden figure
+under its blade--which the custodian confessed to be a modern
+improvement placed there by Signor P----. Yet my credulity was so
+strengthened by his candor, that I accepted without hesitation the
+torture of the water-drop when we came to it. The water-jar was as
+well preserved as if placed there but yesterday, and the skeleton
+beneath it--found as we saw it--was entire and perfect.
+
+In the adjoining cell sat a skeleton--found as we saw it--with its
+neck in the clutch of the garrote, which was one of Ecelino's more
+merciful punishments; while in still another cell the ferocity of
+the tyrant appeared in the penalty inflicted upon the wretch whose
+skeleton had been hanging for ages--as we saw it--head downwards from
+the ceiling.
+
+Beyond these, in a yet darker and drearier dungeon, stood a heavy
+oblong wooden box, with two apertures near the top, peering through
+which we found that we were looking into the eyeless sockets of a
+skull. Within this box Ecelino had immured the victim we beheld there,
+and left him to perish in view of the platters of food and goblets of
+drink placed just beyond the reach of his hands. The food we saw was
+of course not the original food.
+
+At last we came to the crowning horror of Villa P----, the supreme
+excess of Ecelino's cruelty. The guide entered the cell before us,
+and, as we gained the threshold, threw the light of his taper vividly
+upon a block that stood in the middle of the floor. Fixed to the
+block by an immense spike driven through from the back was the little
+slender hand of a woman, which lay there just as it had been struck
+from the living arm, and which, after the lapse of so many centuries,
+was still as perfectly preserved as if it had been embalmed. The sight
+had a most cruel fascination; and while one of the horror-seekers
+stood helplessly conjuring to his vision that scene of unknown
+dread,--the shrinking, shrieking woman dragged to the block, the wild,
+shrill, horrible screech following the blow that drove in the spike,
+the merciful swoon after the mutilation,--his companion, with a sudden
+pallor, demanded to be taken instantly away.
+
+In their swift withdrawal, they only glanced at a few detached
+instruments of torture,--all original Ecelinos, but intended for the
+infliction of minor and comparatively unimportant torments,--and then
+they passed from that place of fear.
+
+
+III.
+
+In the evening we sat talking at the Caffe Pedrocchi with an abbate,
+an acquaintance of ours, who was a Professor in the University of
+Padua. Pedrocchi's is the great caffe of Padua, a granite edifice
+of Egyptian architecture, which is the mausoleum of the proprietor's
+fortune. The pecuniary skeleton at the feast, however, does not much
+trouble the guests. They begin early in the evening to gather into the
+elegant saloons of the caffe,--somewhat too large for so small a city
+as Padua,--and they sit there late in the night over their cheerful
+cups and their ices, with their newspapers and their talk. Not so many
+ladies are to be seen as at the caffe in Venice, for it is only in the
+greater cities that they go much to these public places. There are few
+students at Pedrocchi's, for they frequent the cheaper caffe; but you
+may nearly always find there some Professor of the University, and
+on the evening of which I speak there were two present besides our
+abbate. Our friend's great passion was the English language, which
+he understood too well to venture to speak a great deal. He had been
+translating from that tongue into Italian certain American poems, and
+our talk was of these at first. Then we began to talk of distinguished
+American writers, of whom intelligent Italians always know at least
+four, in this succession,--Cooper, Mrs. Stowe, Longfellow, and Irving.
+Mrs. Stowe's _Capanna di Zio Tom_ is, of course universally read; and
+my friend had also read _Il Fiore di Maggio_,--"The May-flower."
+Of Longfellow, the "Evangeline" is familiar to Italians, through a
+translation of the poem; but our abbate knew all the poet's works,
+and one of the other professors present that evening had made such
+faithful study of them as to have produced some translations rendering
+the original with remarkable fidelity and spirit. I have before
+me here his _brochure_, printed last year at Padua, and containing
+versions of "Enceladus," "Excelsior," "A Psalm of Life," "The
+Old Clock on the Stairs," "Sand of the Desert in an Hour-Glass,"
+"Twilight," "Daybreak," "The Quadroon Girl," and "Torquemada,"--pieces
+which give the Italians a fair notion of our poet's lyrical range, and
+which bear witness to Professor Messadaglia's sympathetic and
+familiar knowledge of his works. A young and gifted lady of Parma,
+now unhappily no more, lately published a translation of "The Golden
+Legend;" and Professor Messadaglia, in his Preface, mentions a version
+of another of our poet's longer works on which the translator of the
+"Evangeline" is now engaged.
+
+At last, turning from literature, we spoke with the gentle abbate of
+our day's adventures, and eagerly related that of the Ecelino prisons.
+To have seen them was the most terrific pleasure of our lives.
+
+"Eh!" said our friend, "I believe you."
+
+"We mean those under the Villa P----."
+
+"Exactly."
+
+There was a tone of politely suppressed amusement in the abbate's
+voice; and after a moment's pause, in which we felt our awful
+experience slipping and sliding away from us, we ventured to say, "You
+don't mean that those are _not_ the veritable Ecelino prisons?"
+
+"Certainly they are nothing of the kind. The Ecelino prisons were
+destroyed when the Crusaders took Padua, with the exception of the
+tower, which the Venetian Republic converted into an observatory."
+
+"But at least these prisons are on the site of Ecelino's castle?"
+
+"Nothing of the sort. His castle in that case would have been outside
+of the old city walls."
+
+"And those tortures and the prisons are all"--
+
+"Things got up for show. No doubt, Ecelino used such things, and many
+worse, of which even the ingenuity of Signor P---- cannot conceive.
+But he is an eccentric man, loving the horrors of history, and what he
+can do to realize them he has done in his prisons."
+
+"But the custodian--how could he lie so?"
+
+Our friend shrugged his shoulders. "Eh! easily. And perhaps he even
+believed what he said."
+
+The world began to assume an aspect of bewildering ungenuineness,
+and there seemed to be a treacherous quality of fiction in the ground
+under our feet. Even the play at the pretty little Teatro Sociale
+where we went to pass the rest of the evening appeared hollow and
+improbable. We thought the hero something of a bore, with his patience
+and goodness; and as for the heroine, pursued by the attentions of the
+rich profligate, we doubted if she were any better than she should be.
+
+
+
+
+A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH'S HOUSE AT ARQUA.
+
+I.
+
+We said, during summer days at Venice, when every _campo_ was a
+furnace seven times heated, and every canal was filled with boiling
+bathers, "As soon as it rains we will go to Arqua." Remembering the
+ardors of an April sun on the long, level roads of plain, we could not
+think of them in August without a sense of dust clogging every pore,
+and eyes that shrank from the vision of their blinding whiteness. So
+we stayed in Venice, waiting for rain, until the summer had almost
+lapsed into autumn; and as the weather cooled before any rain reached
+us, we took the moisture on the main-land for granted, and set out
+under a cloudy and windy sky.
+
+We had to go to Padua by railway, and take carriage thence to Arqua
+upon the road to Ferrara. I believe no rule of human experience was
+violated when it began to rain directly after we reached Padua,
+and continued to rain violently the whole day. We gave up this day
+entirely to the rain, and did not leave Padua until the following
+morning when we count that our pilgrimage to Petrarch's house actually
+began.
+
+The rain had cooled and freshened the air, but it was already too
+late in the season for the summer to recover herself with the elastic
+brilliancy that follows the rain of July or early August; and there
+was I know not what vague sentiment of autumn in the weather. There
+was not yet enough of it to stir the
+
+  "Tears from the depth of some divine despair;"
+
+but in here and there a faded leaf (for in Europe death is not
+glorified to the foliage as in our own land), in the purple of the
+ripening grapes, and in the tawny grass of the pastures, there was
+autumn enough to touch our spirits, and while it hardly affected the
+tone of the landscape, to lay upon us the gentle and pensive spell of
+its presence. Of all the days in the year I would have chosen this to
+go pilgrim to the house of Petrarch.
+
+The Euganean Hills, on one of which the poet's house is built, are
+those mellow heights which you see when you look southwest across the
+lagoon at Venice. In misty weather they are blue, and in clear weather
+silver, and the October sunset loves them. They rise in tender azure
+before you as you issue from the southern gate of Padua, and grow in
+loveliness as you draw nearer to them from the rich plain that washes
+their feet with endless harvests of oil and wine.
+
+Oh beauty that will not let itself be told! Could I not take warning
+from another, and refrain from this fruitless effort of description? A
+friend in Padua had lent me Disraeli's "Venetia," because a passage
+of the story occurs in Petrarch's house at Arqua, and we carried the
+volumes with us on our pilgrimage. I would here quote the description
+of the village, the house, and the hills from this work, as
+faultlessly true, and as affording no just idea of either; but nothing
+of it has remained in my mind except the geological fact that the
+hills are a volcanic range. To tell the truth, the landscape, as we
+rode along, continually took my mind off the book, and I could
+not give that attention either to the elegant language of its
+descriptions, or the adventures of its well-born characters, which
+they deserved. I was even more interested in the disreputable-looking
+person who mounted the box beside our driver directly we got out of
+the city gate, and who invariably commits this infringement upon your
+rights in Italy, no matter how strictly and cunningly you frame your
+contract that no one else is to occupy any part of the carriage but
+yourself. He does not seem to be the acquaintance of the driver, for
+they never exchange a word, and he does not seem to pay any thing for
+the ride. He got down, in this instance, just before we reached the
+little town at which our driver stopped, and asked us if we wished
+to drink a glass of the wine of the country. We did not, but his own
+thirst seemed to answer equally well, and he slaked it cheerfully at
+our cost.
+
+The fields did not present the busy appearance which had delighted
+us on the same road in the spring, but they had that autumnal charm
+already mentioned. Many of the vine-leaves were sear; the red grapes
+were already purple, and the white grapes pearly ripe, and they formed
+a gorgeous necklace for the trees, around which they clung in opulent
+festoons. Then, dearer to our American hearts than this southern
+splendor, were the russet fields of Indian corn, and, scattered among
+the shrunken stalks, great nuggets of the "harmless gold" of pumpkins.
+
+At Battaglia (the village just beyond which you turn off to go to
+Arqua) there was a fair, on the blessed occasion of some saint's day,
+and there were many booths full of fruits, agricultural implements,
+toys, clothes, wooden ware, and the like. There was a great crowd
+and a noise, but, according to the mysterious Italian custom, nobody
+seemed to be buying or selling. I am in the belief that a small
+purchase of grapes we made here on our return was the great
+transaction of the day, unless, indeed, the neat operation in alms
+achieved at our expense by a mendicant villager may be classed
+commercially.
+
+When we turned off from the Rovigo road at Battaglia we were only
+three miles from Arqua.
+
+
+II.
+
+Now, all the way from this turning to the foot of the hill on which
+the village was stretched asleep in the tender sunshine, there was on
+either side of the road a stream of living water. There was no other
+barrier than this between the road and the fields (unless the vines
+swinging from tree to tree formed a barrier), and, as if in graceful
+excuse for the interposition of even these slender streams, Nature
+had lavished such growth of wild flowers and wild berries on the banks
+that it was like a garden avenue, through the fragrance and beauty of
+which we rolled, delighted to silence, almost to sadness.
+
+When we began to climb the hill to Arqua, and the driver stopped to
+breathe his horse, I got out and finished the easy ascent on foot. The
+great marvel to me is that the prospect of the vast plain below, on
+which, turning back, I feasted my vision, should be there yet, and
+always. It had the rare and saddening beauty of evanescence, and awoke
+in me the memory of all beautiful scenery, so that I embroidered the
+landscape with the silver threads of western streams, and bordered it
+with Ohio hills. Ohio hills? When I looked again it was the storied
+Euganean group. But what trans-oceanic bird, voyaging hither, dropped
+from its mouth the blackberry which took root and grew and blossomed
+and ripened, that I might taste Home in it on these classic hills?
+
+I wonder did Petrarch walk often down this road from his house just
+above? I figured him coming to meet me with his book in his hand, in
+his reverend poetic robes, and with his laurel on, over that curious
+kind of bandaging which he seems to have been fond of--looking, in a
+word, for all the world like the neuralgic Petrarch in the pictures.
+
+Drawing nearer, I discerned the apparition to be a robeless, laureless
+lout, who belonged at the village inn. Yet this lout, though not
+Petrarch, had merits. His face and hands, and his legs, as seen from
+his knees down, had the tone of the richest bronze; he wore a mountain
+cap with a long tasseled fall to the back of it; his face was comely
+and his eye beautiful; and he was so nobly ignorant of every thing
+that a colt or young bullock could not have been better company. He
+merely offered to guide us to Petrarch's house, and was silent, except
+when spoken to, from that instant.
+
+I am here tempted to say: Arqua is in the figure of a man stretched
+upon the hill slope. The head, which is Petrarch's house, rests upon
+the summit. The carelessly tossed arms lie abroad from this in one
+direction, and the legs in the opposite quarter. It is a very lank
+and shambling figure, without elegance or much proportion, and the
+attitude is the last wantonness of loafing. We followed our lout
+up the right leg, which is a gentle and easy ascent in the general
+likeness of a street. World-old stone cottages crouch on either side;
+here and there is a more ambitious house in decay; trees wave over
+the street, and down its distance comes an occasional donkey-cart very
+musically and leisurely. By all odds, Arqua and its kind of villages
+are to be preferred to those hamlets of the plain which in Italy cling
+to the white-hot highway without a tree to shelter them, and bake and
+burn there in the merciless sun. Their houses of stuccoed stone are
+crowded as thickly together as city houses, and these wretched little
+villages do their worst to unite the discomforts of town and country
+with a success dreadful to think of. In all countries villages are
+hateful to the heart of civilized man. In the Lombard plains I wonder
+that one stone of them rests upon another.
+
+We reached Petrarch's house before the custodian had arrived to admit
+us, and stood before the high stone wall which shuts in the front of
+the house, and quite hides it from those without. This wall bears
+the inscription, _Casa Petrarca_, and a marble tablet lettered to the
+following effect:--
+
+         SE TI AGITA
+    SACRO AMORE DI PATRIA,
+   T'INCHINA A QUESTE MURA
+  OVE SPIRO LA GRAND' ANIMA,
+   IL CANTOR DEI SCIPIONI
+         E DI LAURA.
+
+Which may be translated: "If thou art stirred by love of country,
+bow to these walls, whence passed the great soul, the singer of the
+Scipios and of Laura."
+
+Meanwhile we became the centre of a group of the youths of Arqua, who
+had kindly attended our progress in gradually increasing numbers from
+the moment we had entered the village. They were dear little girls and
+boys, and mountain babies, all with sunburnt faces and the gentle and
+the winning ways native to this race, which Nature loves better than
+us of the North. The blonde pilgrim seemed to please them, and they
+evidently took us for _Tedeschi_. You learn to submit to this fate
+in Northern Italy, however ungracefully, for it is the one that
+constantly befalls you outside of the greatest cities. The people know
+about two varieties of foreigners--the Englishman and the German. If,
+therefore, you have not _rosbif_ expressed in every lineament of your
+countenance; if the soles of your boots are less than an inch thick,
+and your clothes are not reduced in color to the invariable and
+maddening tone of the English tweed,--you must resign yourself to be
+a German. All this is grievous to the soul which loves to spread its
+eagle in every land and to be known as American, with star-spangled
+conspicuousness all over the world: but it cannot be helped. I vainly
+tried to explain the geographical, political, and natural difference
+between Tedeschi and Americani to the custodian of Petrarch's house.
+She listened with amiability, shrugged her shoulders hopelessly, and
+said, in her rude Venetian, "_Mi no so miga_" (I don't know at all).
+
+Before she came, I had a mind to prove the celebrity of a poet on the
+spot where he lived and died,--on his very hearthstone, as it were.
+So I asked the lout, who stood gnawing a stick and shifting his weight
+from one foot to the other,--
+
+"When did Petrarch live here?"
+
+"Ah! I don't remember him."
+
+"Who was he?"
+
+"A poet, signor."
+
+Certainly the first response was not encouraging, but the last
+revealed that even to the heavy and clouded soul of this lout the
+divine fame of the poet had penetrated--and he a lout in the village
+where Petrarch lived and ought to be first forgotten. He did not
+know when Petrarch had lived there,--a year ago, perhaps, or many
+centuries,--but he knew that Petrarch was a poet. A weight of
+doubt was lifted from my spirit, and I responded cheerfully to
+some observations on the weather offered by a rustic matron who was
+pitching manure on the little hill-slope near the house. When, at
+last, the custodian came and opened the gate to us, we entered a
+little grassy yard from which a flight of steps led to Petrarch's
+door. A few flowers grew wild among the grass, and a fig-tree leaned
+its boughs against the wall. The figs on it were green, though they
+hung ripe and blackening on every other tree in Arqua. Some ivy clung
+to the stones, and from this and the fig-tree, as we came away, we
+plucked memorial leaves, and blended them with flowers which the youth
+of Arqua picked and forced upon us for remembrance.
+
+A quaint old door opened into the little stone house, and admitted us
+to a kind of wide passage-way with rooms on either side; and at the
+end opposite to which we entered, another door opened upon a balcony.
+From this balcony we looked down on Petrarch's garden, which,
+presently speaking, is but a narrow space with more fruit than flowers
+in it. Did Petrarch use to sit and meditate in this garden? For me I
+should better have liked a chair on the balcony, with the further and
+lovelier prospect on every hand of village-roofs, sloping hills all
+gray with olives, and the broad, blue Lombard plain, sweeping from
+heaven to heaven below.
+
+The walls of the passage-way are frescoed (now very faintly) in
+illustration of the loves of Petrarch and Laura, with verses from the
+sonnets inscribed to explain the illustrations. In all these Laura
+prevails as a lady of a singularly long waist and stiff movements, and
+Petrarch, with his face tied up and a lily in his hand, contemplates
+the flower in mingled botany and toothache. There is occasionally a
+startling literalness in the way the painter has rendered some of
+the verses. I remember with peculiar interest the illustration of a
+lachrymose passage concerning a river of tears, wherein the weeping
+Petrarch, stretched beneath a tree, had already started a small creek
+of tears, which was rapidly swelling to a flood with the torrent from
+his eyes. I attribute these frescos to a later date than that of the
+poet's residence, but the portrait over the door of the bedroom inside
+of the chamber, was of his own time, and taken from him--the custodian
+said. As it seemed to look like all the Petrarchian portraits, I did
+not remark it closely, but rather turned my attention to the walls of
+the chamber, which were thickly over-scribbled with names. They were
+nearly all Italian, and none English so far as I saw. This passion for
+allying one's self to the great, by inscribing one's name on places
+hallowed by them, is certainly very odd; and (I reflected as I added
+our names to the rest) it is, without doubt, the most impertinent and
+idiotic custom in the world. People have thus written themselves down,
+to the contempt of sensible futurity, all over Petrarch's house.
+
+The custodian insisted that the bedroom was just as in the poet's
+time; some rooms beyond it had been restored; the kitchen at its
+side was also repaired. Crossing the passage-way, we now entered the
+dining-room, which was comparatively large and lofty, with a mighty
+and generous fire-place at one end, occupying the whole space left by
+a balcony-window. The floor was paved with tiles, and the window-panes
+were round and small, and set in lead--like the floors and
+window-panes of all the other rooms. A gaudy fresco, representing some
+indelicate female deity, adorned the front of the fire-place, which
+sloped expanding from the ceiling and terminated at the mouth without
+a mantel-piece. The chimney was deep, and told of the cold winters
+in the hills, of which, afterward, the landlady of the village inn
+prattled less eloquently.
+
+From this dining-room opens, to the right, the door of the room which
+they call Petrarch's library; and above the door, set in a marble
+frame, with a glass before it, is all that is mortal of Petrarch's
+cat, except the hair. Whether or not the fur was found incompatible
+with the process of embalming, and therefore removed, or whether it
+has slowly dropped away with the lapse of centuries, I do not know;
+but it is certain the cat is now quite hairless, and has the effect
+of a wash-leather invention in the likeness of a young lamb. On the
+marble slab below there is a Latin inscription, said to be by the
+great poet himself, declaring this cat to have been "second only
+to Laura." We may, therefore, believe its virtues to have been rare
+enough; and cannot well figure to ourselves Petrarch sitting before
+that wide-mouthed fire-place, without beholding also the gifted cat
+that purrs softly at his feet and nestles on his knees, or, with
+thickened tail and lifted back, parades, loftily round his chair in
+the haughty and disdainful manner of cats.
+
+In the library, protected against the predatory enthusiasm of visitors
+by a heavy wire netting, are the desk and chair of Petrarch, which I
+know of no form of words to describe perfectly. The front of the
+desk is of a kind of mosaic in cubes of wood, most of which have been
+carried away. The chair is wide-armed and carved, but the bottom is
+gone, and it has been rudely repaired. The custodian said Petrarch
+died in this chair while he sat writing at his desk in the little nook
+lighted by a single window opening on the left from his library. He
+loved to sit there. As I entered I found he had stepped out for a
+moment, but I know he returned directly after I withdrew.
+
+On one wall of the library (which is a simple oblong room, in nowise
+remarkable) was a copy of verses in a frame, by Cesarotti, and on the
+wall opposite a tribute from Alfieri, both _manu propria_. Over and
+above these are many other scribblings; and hanging over the door of
+the poet's little nook was a criminal French lithograph likeness of
+"Petrarque" when young.
+
+Alfieri's verses are written in ink on the wall, while those of
+Cesarotti are on paper, and framed, I do not remember any reference to
+his visit to Petrarch's house in Alfieri's autobiography, though the
+visit must have taken place in 1783, when he sojourned at Padua, and
+"made the acquaintance of the celebrated Cesarotti, with whose lively
+and courteous manners he was no less satisfied than he had always been
+in reading his (Cesarotti's) most masterly version of 'Ossian.'" It is
+probable that the friends visited the house together. At any rate,
+I care to believe that while Cesarotti sat "composing" his tribute
+comfortably at the table, Alfieri's impetuous soul was lifting his
+tall body on tiptoe to scrawl its inspirations on the plastering.
+
+Do you care, gentle reader, to be reminded that just before this visit
+Alfieri had heard in Venice of the "peace between England and the
+United Colonies," and that he then and there "wrote the fifth ode of
+the 'America Libera,'" and thus finished that poem?
+
+After copying these verses we returned to the dining-room, and while
+one pilgrim strayed idly through the names in the visitor's book,
+the other sketched Petrarch's cat, before mentioned, and Petrarch's
+inkstand of bronze--a graceful little thing, having a cover surmounted
+by a roguish cupid, while the lower part is supported on three lion's
+claws, and just above the feet, at either of the three corners, is an
+exquisite little female bust and head. Thus sketching and idling,
+we held spell-bound our friends the youth of Arqua, as well as our
+driver, who, having brought innumerable people to see the house of
+Petrarch, now for the first time, with great astonishment, beheld the
+inside of it himself.
+
+As to the authenticity of the house I think there can be no doubt, and
+as to the genuineness of the relics there, nothing in the world could
+shake my faith in them, though Muratori certainly characterizes them
+as "superstitions." The great poet was sixty-five years old when he
+came to rest at Arqua, and when, in his own pathetic words, "there
+remained to him only to consider and to desire how to make a good
+end." He says further, at the close of his autobiography: "In one of
+the Euganean hills, near to ten miles from the city of Padua, I have
+built me a house, small but pleasant and decent, in the midst of
+slopes clothed with vines and olives, abundantly sufficient for a
+family not large and discreet. Here I lead my life, and although, as I
+have said, infirm of body, yet tranquil of mind, without excitements,
+without distractions, without cares, reading always, and writing and
+praising God, and thanking God as well for evil as for good; which
+evil, if I err not, is trial merely and not punishment. And all the
+while I pray to Christ that he make good the end of my life, and
+have mercy on me, and forgive me, and even forget my youthful sins;
+wherefore, in this solitude, no words are so sweet to my lips as
+these of the psalm: '_Delicta juventutis meoe, et ignorantias meas ne
+memineris_.' And with every feeling of the heart I pray God, when it
+please Him, to bridle my thoughts, so long unstable and erring; and
+as they have vainly wandered to many things, to turn them all to
+Him--only true, certain, immutable Good."
+
+I venerate the house at Arqua because these sweet and solemn words
+were written in it. We left its revered shelter (after taking a final
+look from the balcony down upon "the slopes clothed with vines and
+olives") and returned to the lower village, where, in the court of the
+little church, we saw the tomb of Petrarch--"an ark of red stone, upon
+four columns likewise of marble." The epitaph is this:--
+
+  "Frigida Francisci lapis hic tegit ossa Petrarcae;
+  Suscipe, Virgo parens, animam; sate Virgine, parce
+  Fessaque jam terris Coeli requiescat in arce."
+
+A head of the poet in bronze surmounts the ark. The housekeeper of the
+parish priest, who ran out to enjoy my admiration and bounty, told me
+a wild local tradition of an attempt on the part of the Florentines
+to steal the bones of Petrarch away from Arqua, in proof of which
+she showed me a block of marble set into the ark, whence she said a
+fragment had been removed by the Florentines. This local tradition I
+afterwards found verified, with names and dates, in a little "Life of
+Petrarch," by F. Leoni, published at Padua in 1843. It appears that
+this curious attempt of the Florentines to do doubtful honor to the
+great citizen whose hereditary civic rights they restored too late
+(about the time he was drawing nigh his "good end" at Arqua), was made
+for them by a certain monk of Portagruaro named Tommaso Martinelli. He
+had a general instruction from his employers to bring away from Arqua
+"any important thing of Petrarch's" that he could; and it occurred to
+this ill-advised friar to "move his bones." He succeeded on a night of
+the year 1630 in stealing the dead poet's arm. The theft being at once
+discovered, the Venetian Republic rested not till the thief was also
+discovered; but what became of the arm or of the sacrilegious monk
+neither the Signor Leoni nor the old women of Arqua give any account.
+The Republic removed the rest of Petrarch's body, which is now said to
+be in the Royal Museum of Madrid.
+
+I was willing to know more of this quaint village of Arqua, and I rang
+at the parish priest's door to beg of him some account of the place,
+if any were printed. But already at one o'clock he had gone to bed for
+a nap, and must on no account be roused till four. It is but a quiet
+life men lead in Arqua, and their souls are in drowsy hands. The
+amount of sleep which this good man gives himself (if he goes to bed
+at 9 P.M. and rises at 9 A.M., with a nap of three hours during the
+day) speaks of a quiet conscience, a good digestion, and uneventful
+days. As I turned this notion over in my mind, my longing to behold
+his reverence increased, that I might read life at Arqua in the smooth
+curves of his well-padded countenance. I thought it must be that
+his "bowels of compassion were well-rounded," and, making sure of
+absolution, I was half-minded, if I got speech with him, to improve
+the occasion by confessing one or two of my blackest sins.
+
+Ought I to say here that, on the occasion of a second visit to Arqua,
+I succeeded in finding this excellent ecclesiastic wide awake at two
+o'clock in the afternoon, and that he granted me an interview at that
+hour? Justice to him, I think, demands this admission of me. He was
+not at all a fat priest, as I had prefigured him, but rather of a
+spare person, and of a brisk and lively manner. At the village inn,
+after listening half an hour to a discourse on nothing but white wine
+from a young priest, who had stopped to drink a glass of it, I was
+put in the way of seeing the priest of Arqua by the former's courtesy.
+Happily enough, his reverence chanced to have the very thing I wanted
+to see--no other than Leoni's "Life of Petrarch," to which I have
+already referred. Courtesy is the blood in an Italian's veins, and I
+need not say that the ecclesiastic of Arqua, seeing my interest in
+the place, was very polite and obliging. But he continued to sleep
+throughout our first stay in Arqua, and I did not see him then.
+
+I strolled up and down the lazy, rambling streets, and chiefly devoted
+myself to watching the young women who were washing clothes at the
+stream running from the "Fountain of Petrarch." Their arms and legs
+were bronzed and bare, and they chattered and laughed gayly at their
+work. Their wash-tubs were formed by a long marble conduit from the
+fountain; their wash-boards, by the inward-sloping conduit-sides; and
+they thrashed and beat the garments clean upon the smooth stone. To
+a girl, their waists were broad and their ankles thick. Above their
+foreheads the hair was cut short, and their "back hair" was gathered
+into a mass, and held together by converging circle of silver pins.
+
+The Piazza della Fontana, in Arqua, is a place some fifty feet in
+length and breadth, and seems to be a favorite place of public resort.
+In the evening, doubtless, it is alive with gossipers, as now with
+workers. It may be that then his reverence, risen from his nap,
+saunters by, and pauses long enough to chuck a pretty girl under the
+chin or pinch an urchin's cheek.
+
+Our dinner was ready by the time I got back to the inn, and we sat
+down to a chicken stewed in oil and a stoup of the white wine of
+Arqua. It was a modest feast, but, being a friend to oil, I found it
+savory, and the wine was both good and strong. While we lingered
+over the repast we speculated somewhat carelessly whether Arqua had
+retained among its simplicities the primitive Italian cheapness of
+which you read much. When our landlord leaned over the table and made
+out our account on it with a bit of chalk, the bill was as follows:--
+
+          Soldi.
+  Chicken   70
+  Bread      8
+  Wine      20
+            --
+  Total     98
+
+It surely was not a costly dinner, yet I could have bought the same
+chicken in Venice for half the money; which is but another proof that
+the demand of the producer is often much larger than the supply of
+the consumer, and that to buy poultry cheaply you must not purchase it
+where raised,--
+
+  ..."On misty mountain ground,
+  Its own vast shadow glory crowned,"--
+
+but rather in a large city after it has been transported forty miles
+or more. Not that we begrudged the thrifty inn-keeper his fee. We paid
+it cheerfully, as well for his own sake as for that of his pleasant
+and neat little wife, who kept the whole inn so sweet and clean; and
+we bade them a most cordial farewell as we drove away from their door.
+
+
+III.
+
+Returning, we stopped at the great castle of the Obizzi (now the
+property of the Duke of Modena), through which we were conducted by a
+surly and humorous _custode_, whose pride in life was that castle and
+its treasures, so that he resented as a personal affront the slightest
+interest in any thing else. He stopped us abruptly in the midst of the
+museum, and, regarding the precious antiques and curiosities around
+him, demanded:
+
+"Does this castle please you?" Then, with a scornful glance at us,
+"Your driver tells me you have been at Arqua? And what did you see at
+Arqua? A shabby little house and a cat without any hair on. I would
+not," said this disdainful _custode_, "go to Arqua if you gave me a
+lemonade."
+
+
+
+
+A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI.
+
+I had often heard in Venice of that ancient people, settled in the
+Alpine hills about the pretty town of Bassano, on the Brenta, whom
+common fame declares to be a remnant of the Cimbrian invaders of Rome,
+broken up in battle, and dispersed along the borders of North Italy,
+by Marius, many centuries ago. So when the soft September weather
+came, last year, we sallied out of Venice, in three, to make
+conquest of whatever was curious in the life and traditions of these
+mountaineers, who dwell in seven villages, and are therefore called
+the people of the Sette Communi among their Italian neighbors. We
+went fully armed with note-book and sketch-book, and prepared to take
+literary possession of our conquest.
+
+From Venice to the city of Vicenza by railroad, it is two hours; and
+thence one must take a carriage to Bassano (which is an opulent and
+busy little grain mart, of some twelve thousand souls, about thirty
+miles north of Venice). We were very glad of the ride across the
+country. By the time we reached the town it was nine o'clock, and
+moonlight, and as we glanced out of our windows we saw the quaint
+up-and-down-hill streets peopled with promenaders, and every body
+in Bassano seemed to be making love. Young girls strolled about the
+picturesque ways with their lovers, and tender couples were cooing
+at the doorways and windows, and the scene had all that surface
+of romance with which the Italians contrive to varnish the real
+commonplaceness of their life. Our ride through the twilight landscape
+had prepared us for the sentiment of Bassano; we had pleased ourselves
+with the spectacle of the peasants returning from their labor in the
+fields, led in troops of eight or ten by stalwart, white-teethed,
+bare-legged maids; and we had reveled in the momentary lordship of
+an old walled town we passed, which at dusk seemed more Gothic and
+Middle-Age than any thing after Verona, with a fine church, and
+turrets and battlements in great plenty. What town it was, or what it
+had been doing there so many ages, I have never sought to know, and I
+should be sorry to learn any thing about it.
+
+The next morning we began those researches for preliminary information
+concerning the Cimbri which turned out so vain. Indeed, as we drew
+near the lurking-places of that ancient people, all knowledge relating
+to them diffused itself into shadowy conjecture. The barber and the
+bookseller differed as to the best means of getting to the Sette
+Communi, and the _caffetiere_ at whose place we took breakfast knew
+nothing at all of the road, except that it was up the mountains, and
+commanded views of scenery which verily, it would not grieve us to
+see. As to the Cimbri, he only knew that they had their own language,
+which was yet harder than the German. The German was hard enough, but
+the Cimbrian! _Corpo_!
+
+At last, hearing of a famous cave there is at Oliero, a town some
+miles further up the Brenta, we determined to go there, and it was a
+fortunate thought, for there we found a nobleman in charge of the cave
+who told us exactly how to reach the Sette Communi. You pass a bridge
+to get out of Bassano--a bridge which spans the crystal swiftness of
+the Brenta, rushing down to the Adriatic from the feet of the Alps on
+the north, and full of voluble mills at Bassano. All along the road to
+Oliero was the finest mountain scenery, Brenta-washed, and picturesque
+with ever-changing lines. Maize grows in the bottom-lands, and
+tobacco, which is guarded in the fields by soldiers for the monopolist
+government. Farm-houses dot the valley, and now and then we passed
+villages, abounding in blonde girls, so rare elsewhere in Italy, but
+here so numerous as to give Titian that type from which he painted.
+
+At Oliero we learned not only which was the road to the Sette Communi,
+but that we were in it, and it was settled that we should come the
+next day and continue in it, with the custodian of the cave, who
+for his breakfast and dinner, and what else we pleased, offered to
+accompany us. We were early at Oliero on the following morning, and
+found our friend in waiting; he mounted beside our driver, and we rode
+up the Brenta to the town of Valstagna where our journey by wheels
+ended, and where we were to take mules for the mountain ascent. Our
+guide, Count Giovanni Bonato (for I may as well give him his title,
+though at this stage of our progress we did not know into what
+patrician care we had fallen), had already told us what the charge
+for mules would be, but it was necessary to go through the ceremony of
+bargain with the muleteer before taking the beasts. Their owner was a
+Cimbrian, with a broad sheepish face, and a heavy, awkward accent of
+Italian which at once more marked his northern race, and made us feel
+comparatively secure from plunder in his hands. He had come down from
+the mountain top the night before, bringing three mules laden with
+charcoal, and he had waited for us till the morning. His beasts were
+furnished with comfortable pads, covered with linen, to ride upon, and
+with halters instead of bridles, and we were prayed to let them have
+their heads in the ascent, and not to try to guide them.
+
+The elegant leisure of Valstagna (and in an Italian town nearly the
+whole population is elegantly at leisure) turned out to witness the
+departure of our expedition; the pretty little blonde wife of our
+inn-keeper, who was to get dinner ready against our return, held up
+her baby to wish us _boun viaggio_, and waved us adieu with the infant
+as with a handkerchief; the chickens and children scattered to right
+and left before our advance; and with Count Giovanni going splendidly
+ahead on foot, and the Cimbrian bringing up the rear, we struck on
+the broad rocky valley between the heights, and presently began the
+ascent. It was a lovely morning; the sun was on the heads of the
+hills, and the shadows clothed them like robes to their feet; and
+I should be glad to feel here and now the sweetness, freshness,
+and purity of the mountain air, that seemed to bathe our souls in a
+childlike delight of life. A noisy brook gurgled through the valley;
+the birds sang from the trees; the Alps rose, crest on crest, around
+us; and soft before us, among the bald peaks showed the wooded
+height where the Cimbrian village of Fozza stood, with a white chapel
+gleaming from the heart of the lofty grove. Along the mountain sides
+the smoke curled from the lonely huts of shepherds, and now and then
+we came upon one of those melancholy refuges which are built in
+the hills for such travellers as are belated in their ways, or are
+overtaken there by storms.
+
+The road for the most part winds by the brink of precipices,--walled
+in with masonry of small stones, where Nature has not shored it up
+with vast monoliths,--and is paved with limestone. It is, of course,
+merely a mule-path, and it was curious to see, and thrilling to
+experience, how the mules, vain of the safety of their foothold, kept
+as near the border of the precipices as possible. For my own part, I
+abandoned to my beast the entire responsibility involved by this line
+of conduct; let the halter hang loose upon his neck, and gave him no
+aid except such slight service as was occasionally to be rendered
+by shutting my eyes and holding my breath. The mule of the fairer
+traveller behind me was not only ambitious of peril like my own, but
+was envious of my beast's captaincy, and continually tried to pass him
+on the outside of the path, to the great dismay of the gentle rider;
+while half-suppressed wails of terror from the second lady in the
+train gave evidence of equal vanity and daring in her mule. Count
+Giovanni strode stolidly before, the Cimbrian came behind, and we
+had little coherent conversation until we stopped under a spreading
+haw-tree, half-way up the mountain, to breathe our adventurous beasts.
+
+Here two of us dismounted, and while one of the ladies sketched the
+other in her novel attitude of cavalier, I listened to the talk of
+Count Giovanni and the Cimbrian. This Cimbrian's name in Italian
+was Lazzaretti, and in his own tongue Brueck, which, pronouncing less
+regularly, we made Brick, in compliment to his qualities of good
+fellowship. His broad, honest visage was bordered by a hedge of red
+beard, and a light of dry humor shone upon it: he looked, we thought,
+like a Cornishman, and the contrast between him and the _viso sciolto,
+pensieri stretti_ expression of Count Giovanni was curious enough.
+
+Concerning his people, he knew little; but the Capo-gente of Fozza
+could tell me everything. Various traditions of their origin were
+believed among them; Brick himself held to one that they had first
+come from Denmark. As we sat there under the spreading haw-tree,
+Count Giovanni and I made him give us the Cimbrian equivalent of some
+Italian phrases, which the curious may care to see in correspondence
+with English and German. Of course, German pronunciation must be given
+to the words:--
+
+  _English.         Cimbrian.               German._
+
+  I go,            I gehe,                 Ich gehe.
+  Thou goest,      Du gehst,               Du gehst.
+  He goes,         Ar geht,                Er geht.
+  We go,           Hamish gehen,           Wir gehen.
+  You go,          Hamish setender gehnt,  Ihr geht.
+  They go,         Dandern gehnt,          Sie gehen.
+  I went,          I bin gegehnt,          Ich bin gegangen.
+  Thou wentest,    Du bist gegehnt,        Du bist gegangen.
+  He went,         Der iganget,            Er ist gegangen
+  Good day,        Uter tag,               Guten Tag.
+  Good night,      Uter nast,              Gute Nacht.
+  How do you do?   Bie estater?            Wie steht's?
+  How goes it?     Bie gehts?              Wie geht's?
+  I,               I,                      Ich.
+  Thou,            Du,                     Du.
+  He, she,         Di,                     Er, sie.
+  We,              Borandern,              Wir.
+  You,             Ihrt,                   Ihr.
+  They,            Dandern,                Sie.
+  The head,        Da kof,                 Der Kopf.
+  Breast,          Petten,                 Brust (_Italian_ petto)
+  Face,            Denne,                  Gesicht.
+  Arm,             Arm,                    Arm.
+  Foot,            Vuss,                   Fuss.
+  Finger,          Vinger,                 Finger.
+  Hand,            Hant,                   Hand.
+  Tree,            Pom,                    Baum.
+  Hat,             Hoit,                   Hut.
+  God,             Got,                    Gott.
+  Heaven,          Debelt,                 Himmel.
+  Earth,           Erda,                   Erde.
+  Mountain,        Perk,                   Berg.
+  Valley,          Tal,                    Thal.
+  Man,             Mann,                   Mann.
+  Woman,           Beip,                   Weib.
+  Lady,            Vrau,                   Frau.
+  Child,           Hint,                   Kind.
+  Brother,         Pruder,                 Bruder.
+  Father,          Vada,                   Vater.
+  Mother,          Muter,                  Mutter.
+  Sister,          Schwester,              Schwester,
+  Stone,           Stone,                  Stein.
+
+A general resemblance to German and English will have been observed in
+these fragments of Cimbrian, while other words will have been noticed
+as quite foreign to either.
+
+There was a poor little house of refreshment beside our spreading haw,
+and a withered old woman came out of it and refreshed us with clear
+spring water, and our guides and friends with some bitter berries of
+the mountain, which they admitted were unpleasant to the taste, but
+declared were very good for the blood. When they had sufficiently
+improved their blood, we mounted our mules again, and set out with the
+journey of an hour and a quarter still between us and Fozza.
+
+As we drew near the summit of the mountain our road grew more level,
+and instead of creeping along by the brinks of precipices, we began
+to wind through bits of meadow and pleasant valley walled in by lofty
+heights of rock.
+
+Though September was bland as June at the foot of the mountain, we
+found its breath harsh and cold on these heights; and we remarked that
+though there were here and there breadths of wheat, the land was
+for the most part in sheep pasturage, and the grass looked poor and
+stinted of summer warmth. We met, at times, the shepherds, who seemed
+to be of Italian race, and were of the conventional type of shepherds,
+with regular faces, and two elaborate curls trained upon their cheeks,
+as shepherds are always represented in stone over the gates of villas.
+They bore staves, and their flocks went before them. Encountering us,
+they saluted us courteously, and when we had returned their greeting,
+they cried with one voice,--"Ah, lords! is not this a miserable
+country? The people are poor and the air is cold. It is an unhappy
+land!" And so passed on, profoundly sad; but we could not help smiling
+at the vehement popular desire to have the region abused. We answered
+cheerfully that it was a lovely country. If the air was cold, it was
+also pure.
+
+We now drew in sight of Fozza, and, at the last moment, just before
+parting with Brick, we learned that he had passed a whole year in
+Venice, where he had brought milk from the main-land and sold it in
+the city. He declared frankly that he counted that year worth all the
+other years of his life, and that he would never have come back to his
+native heights but that his father had died, and left his mother and
+young brothers helpless. He was an honest soul, and I gave him two
+florins, which I had tacitly appointed him over and above the bargain,
+with something for the small Brick-bats at home, whom he presently
+brought to kiss our hands at the house of the Capo-gente.
+
+The village of Fozza is built on a grassy, oblong plain on the crest
+of the mountain, which declines from it on three sides, and on the
+north rises high above it into the mists in bleaker and ruggeder
+acclivities. There are not more than thirty houses in the village, and
+I do not think it numbers more than a hundred and fifty souls, if
+it numbers so many. Indeed, it is one of the smallest of the Sette
+Communi, of which the capital, Asiago, contains some thousands of
+people, and lies not far from Vicenza. The poor Fozzatti had a church,
+however, in their village, in spite of its littleness, and they had
+just completed a fine new bell tower, which the Capo-gente deplored,
+and was proud of when I praised it. The church, like all the other
+edifices, was built of stone; and the village at a little distance
+might look like broken crags of rock, so well it consorted with the
+harsh, crude nature about it. Meagre meadowlands, pathetic with tufts
+of a certain pale-blue, tearful flower, stretched about the village
+and southward as far as to that wooded point which had all day been
+our landmark in the ascent.
+
+Our train drew up at the humble door of the Capo-gente (in Fozza all
+doors are alike humble), and, leaving our mules, we entered by his
+wife's invitation, and seated ourselves near the welcome fire of the
+kitchen--welcome, though we knew that all the sunny Lombard plain
+below was purple with grapes and black with figs. Again came from
+the women here the wail of the shepherds: "Ah, lords! is it not a
+miserable land?" and I began to doubt whether the love which I had
+heard mountaineers bore to their inclement heights was not altogether
+fabulous. They made haste to boil us some eggs, and set them before us
+with some unhappy wine, and while we were eating, the Capo-gente came
+in.
+
+He was a very well-mannered person, but had, of course, the
+bashfulness naturally resulting from lonely life at that altitude,
+where contact with the world must be infrequent. His fellow-citizens
+seemed to regard him with a kind of affectionate deference, and some
+of them came in to hear him talk with the strangers. He stood till we
+prayed him to sit down, and he presently consented to take some wine
+with us.
+
+After all, however, he could not tell us much of his people which we
+had not heard before. A tradition existed among them, he said, that
+their ancestors had fled to these Alps from Marius, and that they
+had dwelt for a long time in the hollows and caves of the mountains,
+living and burying their dead in the same secret places. At what time
+they had been converted to Christianity he could not tell; they
+had, up to the beginning of the present century, had little or no
+intercourse with the Italian population by which they were surrounded
+on all sides. Formerly, they did not intermarry with that race, and it
+was seldom that any Cimbrian knew its language. But now intermarriage
+is very frequent; both Italian and Cimbrian are spoken in nearly all
+the families, and the Cimbrian is gradually falling into disuse. They
+still, however, have books of religious instruction in their ancient
+dialect, and until very lately the services of their church were
+performed in Cimbrian.
+
+I begged the Capo to show us some of their books and he brought us
+two,--one a catechism for children, entitled "Dar Kloane Catechism
+vor z' Beloseland vortraghet in z' gaprecht von siben Komuenen, un vier
+Halghe Gasang. 1842. Padova." The other book it grieved me to see, for
+it proved that I was not the only one tempted in recent times to
+visit these ancient people, ambitious to bear to them the relation of
+discoverer, as it were. A High-Dutch Columbus, from Vienna, had been
+before me, and I could only come in for Amerigo Vespucci's tempered
+glory. This German savant had dwelt a week in these lonely places,
+patiently compiling a dictionary of their tongue, which, when it was
+printed, he had sent to the Capo. I am magnanimous enough to give
+the name of his book, that the curious may buy it if they like. It
+is called "Johann Andreas Schweller's Cimbrisches Woerterbuch. Joseph
+Bergman. Vienna, 1855."
+
+Concerning the present Cimbri, the Capo said that in his community
+they were chiefly hunters, wood-cutters, and charcoal-burners, and
+that they practiced their primitive crafts in those gloomier and
+wilder heights we saw to the northward, and descended to the towns
+of the plain to make sale of their fagots, charcoal, and wild-beast
+skins. In Asiago and the larger communities they were farmers and
+tradesmen like the Italians; and the Capo believed that the Cimbri, in
+all their villages, numbered near ten thousand. He could tell me of
+no particular customs or usages, and believed they did not differ from
+the Italians now except in race and language. [The English traveller
+Rose, who (to my further discomfiture, I find) visited Asiago in 1817,
+mentions that the Cimbri have the Celtic custom of _waking_ the dead.
+"If a traveller dies by the way, they plant a cross upon the spot,
+and all who pass by cast a stone upon his cairn. Some go in certain
+seasons in the year to high places and woods, where it is supposed
+they worshiped their divinities, but the origin of the custom is
+forgot amongst themselves." If a man dies by violence, they lay him
+out with his hat and shoes on, as if to give him the appearance of a
+wayfarer, and "symbolize one surprised in the great journey of life."
+A woman dying in childbed is dressed for the grave in her bridal
+ornaments. Mr. Rose is very scornful of the notion that these people
+are Cimbri, and holds that it is "more consonant to all the evidence
+of history to say, that the flux and reflux of Teutonic invaders
+at different periods deposited this backwater of barbarians" in the
+district they now inhabit. "The whole space, which in addition to
+the seven burghs contains twenty-four villages, is bounded by rivers,
+alps, and hills. Its most precise limits are the Brenta to the east,
+and the Astico to the west."] They are, of course, subject to the
+Austrian Government, but not so strictly as the Italians are; and
+though they are taxed and made to do military service, they are
+otherwise left to regulate their affairs pretty much at their
+pleasure.
+
+The Capo ended his discourse with much polite regret that he had
+nothing more worthy to tell us; and, as if to make us amends for
+having come so far to learn so little, he said there was a hermit
+living near, whom we might like to see, and sent his son to conduct us
+to the hermitage. It turned out to be the white object which we had
+seen gleaming in the wood on the mountain from so great distance
+below, and the wood turned out to be a pleasant beechen grove, in
+which we found the hermit cutting fagots. He was warmly dressed in
+clothes without rent, and wore the clerical knee-breeches. He saluted
+us with a cricket-like chirpiness of manner, and was greatly amazed to
+hear that we had come all the way from America to visit him. His
+hermitage was built upon the side of a white-washed chapel to St.
+Francis, and contained three or four little rooms or cupboards, in
+which the hermit dwelt and meditated. They opened into the chapel, of
+which the hermit had the care, and which he kept neat and clean like
+himself. He told us proudly that once a year, on the day of the
+titular saint, a priest came and said mass in that chapel, and it was
+easy to see that this was the great occasion of the old man's life.
+For forty years, he said, he had been devout; and for twenty-five he
+had dwelt in this place, where the goodness of God and the charity of
+the poor people around had kept him from want. Altogether, he was a
+pleasant enough hermit, not in the least spiritual, but gentle,
+simple, and evidently sincere. We gave some small coins of silver to
+aid him to continue his life of devotion, and Count Giovanni bestowed
+some coppers with the stately blessing, "_Iddio vi benedica, padre
+mio_."
+
+So we left the hermitage, left Fozza, and started down the mountain
+on foot, for no one may ride down those steeps. Long before we reached
+the bottom, we had learned to loathe mountains and to long for dead
+levels during the rest of life. Yet the descent was picturesque, and
+in some things even more interesting than the ascent had been. We
+met more people: now melancholy shepherds with their flocks; now
+swine-herds and swine-herdesses with herds of wild black pigs of the
+Italian breed; now men driving asses that brayed and woke long, loud,
+and most musical echoes in the hills; now whole peasant families
+driving cows, horses, and mules to the plains below. On the way
+down, fragments of autobiography began, with the opportunities of
+conversation, to come from the Count Giovanni, and we learned that he
+was a private soldier at home on that _permesso_ which the Austrian
+Government frequently gives its less able-bodied men in times of
+peace. He had been at home some years, and did not expect to be again
+called into the service. He liked much better to be in charge of the
+cave at Oliero than to carry the musket, though he confessed that he
+liked to see the world, and that soldiering brought one acquainted
+with many places. He had not many ideas, and the philosophy of his
+life chiefly regarded deportment toward strangers who visited the
+cave. He held it an error in most custodians to show discontent when
+travellers gave them little; and he said that if he received never
+so much, he believed it wise not to betray exultation. "Always be
+contented, and nothing more," said Count Giovanni.
+
+"It is what you people always promise beforehand," I said, "when you
+bargain with strangers, to do them a certain service for what they
+please; but afterward they must pay what you please or have trouble. I
+know you will not be content with what I give you."
+
+"If I am not content," cried Count Giovanni, "call me the greatest ass
+in the world!"
+
+And I am bound to say that, for all I could see through the mask of
+his face, he was satisfied with what I gave him, though it was not
+much.
+
+He had told us casually that he was nephew of a nobleman of a certain
+rich and ancient family in Venice, who sent him money while in the
+army, but this made no great impression on me; and though I knew there
+was enough noble poverty in Italy to have given rise to the proverb,
+_Un conte che non conta, non conta niente_, yet I confess that it was
+with a shock of surprise I heard our guide and servant saluted by
+a lounger in Valstagna with "_Sior conte, servitor suo_!" I looked
+narrowly at him, but there was no ray of feeling or pride visible in
+his pale, languid visage as he responded, "_Buona sera, caro_."
+
+Still, after that revelation we simple plebeians, who had been all day
+heaping shawls and guide-books upon Count Giovanni, demanding menial
+offices from him, and treating him with good-natured slight, felt
+uncomfortable in his presence, and welcomed the appearance of our
+carriage with our driver, who, having started drunk from Bassano in
+the morning, had kept drunk all day at Valstagna, and who now drove us
+back wildly over the road, and almost made us sigh for the security of
+mules ambitious of the brinks of precipices.
+
+
+
+
+MINOR TRAVELS.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+PISA.
+
+I am afraid that the talk of the modern railway traveller, if he is
+honest, must be a great deal of the custodians, the vetturini, and the
+facchini, whose agreeable acquaintance constitutes his chief knowledge
+of the population among which he journeys. We do not nowadays carry
+letters recommending us to citizens of the different places. If we
+did, consider the calamity we should be to the be-travelled Italian
+communities we now bless! No, we buy our through-tickets, and we put
+up at the hotels praised in the hand-book, and are very glad of a
+little conversation with any native, however adulterated he be by
+contact with the world to which we belong. I do not blush to own that
+I love the whole rascal race which ministers to our curiosity and
+preys upon us, and I am not ashamed to have spoken so often in this
+book of the lowly and rapacious but interesting porters who opened to
+me the different gates of that great realm of wonders, Italy. I doubt
+if they can be much known to the dwellers in the land, though they
+are the intimates of all sojourners and passengers; and if I have any
+regret in the matter, it is that I did not more diligently study them
+when I could. The opportunity once lost, seldom recurs; they are all
+but as transitory as the Object of Interest itself, I remember
+that years ago when I first visited Cambridge, there was an old man
+appeared to me in the character of Genius of the College Grounds, who
+showed me all the notable things in our city,--its treasures of art,
+its monuments,--and ended by taking me into his wood-house, and sawing
+me off from a wind-fallen branch of the Washington Elm a bit of the
+sacred wood for a remembrancer. Where now is that old man? He
+no longer exists for me, neither he nor his wood-house nor his
+dwelling-house. Let me look for a month about the College Grounds, and
+I shall not see him. But somewhere in the regions of traveller's faery
+he still lives, and he appears instantly to the new-comer; he has an
+understanding with the dryads, who keep him supplied with boughs from
+the Washington Elm, and his wood-house is full of them.
+
+Among memorable custodians in Italy was one whom we saw at Pisa, where
+we stopped on our way from Leghorn after our accident in the Maremma,
+and spent an hour in viewing the Quattro Fabbriche. The beautiful old
+town, which every one knows from the report of travellers, one yet
+finds possessed of the incommunicable charm which keeps it forever
+novel to the visitor. Lying upon either side of the broad Arno, it
+mirrors in the flood architecture almost as fair and noble as that
+glassed in the Canalazzo, and its other streets seemed as tranquil
+as the canals of Venice. Those over which we drove, on the day of
+our visit, were paved with broad flag-stones, and gave out scarcely a
+sound under our wheels. It was Sunday, and no one was to be seen. Yet
+the empty and silent city inspired us with no sense of desolation. The
+palaces were in perfect repair; the pavements were clean; behind those
+windows we felt that there must be a good deal of easy, comfortable
+life. It is said that Pisa is one of the few places in Europe where
+the sweet, but timid spirit of Inexpensiveness--everywhere pursued by
+Railways--still lingers, and that you find cheap apartments in those
+well-preserved old palaces. No doubt it would be worth more to live in
+Pisa than it would cost, for the history of the place would alone be
+to any reasonable sojourner a perpetual recompense, and a princely
+income far exceeding his expenditure. To be sure, the Tower of Famine,
+with which we chiefly associate the name of Pisa, has been long razed
+to the ground, and built piecemeal into the neighboring palaces, but
+you may still visit the dead wall which hides from view the place
+where it stood; and you may thence drive on, as we did, to the great
+Piazza where stands the unrivaledest group of architecture in
+the world, after that of St. Mark's Place in Venice. There is the
+wonderful Leaning Tower, there is the old and beautiful Duomo,
+there is the noble Baptistery, there is the lovely Campo-Santo, and
+there--somewhere lurking in portal or behind pillar, and keeping
+out an eagle-eye for the marveling stranger--is the much-experienced
+cicerone who shows you through the edifices. Yours is the
+fourteen-thousandth American family to which he has had the honor of
+acting as guide, and he makes you feel an illogical satisfaction in
+thus becoming a contribution to statistics.
+
+We entered the Duomo, in our new friend's custody, and we saw the
+things which it was well to see. There was mass, or some other
+ceremony, transacting; but as usual it was made as little obtrusive as
+possible, and there was not much to weaken the sense of proprietorship
+with which travellers view objects of interest. Then we ascended the
+Leaning Tower, skillfully preserving its equilibrium as we went by
+an inclination of our persons in a direction opposed to the tower's
+inclination, but perhaps not receiving a full justification of the
+Campanile's appearance in pictures, till we stood at its base, and saw
+its vast bulk and height as it seemed to sway and threaten in the
+blue sky above our heads. There the sensation was too terrible for
+endurance,--even the architectural beauty of the tower could not save
+it from being monstrous to us,--and we were glad to hurry away from it
+to the serenity and solemn loveliness of the Campo Santo.
+
+Here are the frescos painted five hundred years ago to be ruinous and
+ready against the time of your arrival in 1864, and you feel that you
+are the first to enjoy the joke of the Vergognosa, that cunning jade
+who peers through her fingers at the shameful condition of deboshed
+father Noah, and seems to wink one eye of wicked amusement at you.
+Turning afterward to any book written about Italy during the time
+specified, you find your impression of exclusive possession of the
+frescos erroneous, and your muse naturally despairs, where so many
+muses have labored in vain, to give a just idea of the Campo Santo.
+Yet it is most worthy celebration. Those exquisitely arched and
+traceried colonnades seem to grow like the slim cypresses out of the
+sainted earth of Jerusalem; and those old paintings, made when Art
+was--if ever--a Soul, and not as now a mere Intelligence, enforce
+more effectively than their authors conceived the lessons of life and
+death; for they are themselves becoming part of the triumphant decay
+they represent. If it was awful once to look upon that strange scene
+where the gay lords and ladies of the chase come suddenly upon three
+dead men in their coffins, while the devoted hermits enjoy the peace
+of a dismal righteousness on a hill in the background, it is yet more
+tragic to behold it now when the dead men are hardly discernible in
+their coffins, and the hermits are but the vaguest shadows of gloomy
+bliss. Alas! Death mocks even the homage done him by our poor fears
+and hopes: with dust he wipes out dust, and with decay he blots the
+image of decay.
+
+I assure the reader that I made none of these apt reflections in
+the Campo Santo at Pisa, but have written them out this morning in
+Cambridge because there happens to be an east wind blowing. No
+one could have been sad in the company of our cheerful and patient
+cicerone, who, although visibly anxious to get his fourteen-thousandth
+American family away, still would not go till he had shown us that
+monument to a dead enmity which hangs in the Campo Santo. This is the
+mighty chain which the Pisans, in their old wars with the Genoese,
+once stretched across the mouth of their harbor to prevent the
+entrance of the hostile galleys. The Genoese with no great trouble
+carried the chain away, and kept it ever afterward till 1860, when
+Pisa was united to the kingdom of Italy. Then the trophy was restored
+to the Pisans, and with public rejoicings placed in the Campo Santo,
+an emblem of reconciliation and perpetual amity between ancient
+foes. [I read in Mr. Norton's _Notes of Travel and Study in Italy_,
+that he saw in the Campo Santo, as long ago as 1856, "the chains that
+marked the servitude of Pisa, now restored by Florence," and it is
+of course possible that our cicerone may have employed one of those
+chains for the different historical purpose I have mentioned. It would
+be a thousand pities, I think, if a monument of that sort should be
+limited to the commemoration of one fact only.] It is not a very good
+world,--_e pur si muove_.
+
+The Baptistery stands but a step away from the Campo Santo, and our
+guide ushered us into it with the air of one who had till now held in
+reserve his great stroke and was ready to deliver it. Yet I think he
+waited till we had looked at some comparatively trifling sculptures
+by Nicolo Pisano before he raised his voice, and uttered a melodious
+species of howl. While we stood in some amazement at this, the
+conscious structure of the dome caught the sound and prolonged it with
+a variety and sweetness of which I could not have dreamed. The man
+poured out in quick succession his musical wails, and then ceased,
+and a choir of heavenly echoes burst forth in response. There was a
+supernatural beauty in these harmonies of which I despair of giving
+any true idea: they were of such tender and exalted rapture that
+we might well have thought them the voices of young-eyed cherubim,
+singing as they passed through Paradise over that spot of earth where
+we stood. They seemed a celestial compassion that stooped and soothed,
+and rose again in lofty and solemn acclaim, leaving us poor and
+penitent and humbled.
+
+We were long silent, and then broke forth with cries of admiration of
+which the marvelous echo made eloquence.
+
+"Did you ever," said the cicerone after we had left the building,
+"hear such music as that?"
+
+"The papal choir does not equal it," we answered with one voice.
+
+The cicerone was not to be silenced even with such a tribute, and he
+went on:
+
+"Perhaps, as you are Americans, you know Moshu Feelmore, the
+President? No? Ah, what a fine man! You saw that he had his heart
+actually in his hand! Well, one day he said to me here, when I told
+him of the Baptistery echo, 'We have the finest echo in the world in
+the Hall of Congress.' I said nothing, but for answer I merely howled
+a little,--thus! Moshu Feelmore was convinced. Said he, 'There is no
+other echo in the world besides this. You are right.' I am unique,"
+pursued the cicerone, "for making this echo. But," he added with
+a sigh, "it has been my ruin. The English have put me in all the
+guide-books, and sometimes I have to howl twenty times a day. When our
+Victor Emanuel came here I showed him the church, the tower, and the
+Campo Santo. Says the king, 'Pfui!'"--here the cicerone gave that
+sweeping outward motion with both hands by which Italians dismiss a
+trifling subject--"'make me the echo!' I was forced," concluded the
+cicerone with a strong sense of injury in his tone, "to howl half an
+hour without ceasing."
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+THE FERRARA ROAD.
+
+The delight of one of our first journeys over the road between Padua
+and Ferrara was a Roman _cameriere_ out of place, who got into the
+diligence at Ponte Lagoscuro. We were six in all: The Englishman who
+thought it particularly Italian to say "Si" three times for every
+assent; the Veneto (as the citizen of the province calls himself, the
+native of the city being Veneziano) going home to his farm near Padua;
+the German lady of a sour and dreadful countenance; our two selves,
+and the Roman _cameriere_. The last was worth all the rest--being a
+man of vast general information acquired in the course of service
+with families of all nations, and agreeably communicative. A brisk
+and lively little man, with dancing eyes, beard cut to the mode of the
+Emperor Napoleon, and the impressive habit of tapping himself on the
+teeth with his railroad-guide, and lifting his eyebrows when he
+says any thing specially worthy of remark. He, also, long after the
+conclusion of an observation, comes back to himself approvingly,
+with "_Si_!" "_Vabene_!" "_Ecco_!" He speaks beautiful Italian and
+constantly, and in a little while we know that he was born at
+Ferrara, bred at Venice, and is now a citizen of Rome. "St. Peter's,
+Signori,--have you ever seen it?--is the first church of the world.
+At Ferrara lived Tasso and Ariosto. Venice is a lovely city. Ah! what
+beauty! But unique. My second country. _Si, Signori, la mia seconda
+patria_." After a pause, "_Va bene_."
+
+We hint to him that he is extremely fortunate in having so many
+countries, and that it will be difficult to exile so universal a
+citizen, which he takes as a tribute to his worth, smiles and says,
+"Ecco!"
+
+Then he turns to the Veneto, and describes to him the English manner
+of living. "Wonderfully well they eat--the English. Four times a day.
+With rosbif at the dinner. Always, always, always! And tea in the
+evening, with rosbif cold. _Mangiano sempre. Ma bene, dico_." After
+a pause, "_Si_!" "And the Venetians, they eat well, too. Whence the
+proverb: '_Sulla Riva degli Schiavoni, si mangiano bei bocconi_.'
+('On the Riva degli Schiavoni, you eat fine mouthfuls.') Signori, I am
+going to Venice," concludes the cameriere.
+
+He is the politest man in the world, and the most attentive to ladies.
+The German lady has not spoken a word, possibly not knowing the
+language. Our good cameriere cannot bear this, and commiserates her
+weariness with noble elegance and originality. "_La Signora si trova
+un poco sagrificata_?" ("The lady feels slightly sacrificed!") We all
+smile, and the little man very gladly with us.
+
+"An elegant way of expressing it," we venture to suggest. The Veneto
+roars and roars again, and we all shriek, none louder than the Roman
+himself. We never can get over that idea of being slightly sacrificed,
+and it lasts us the whole way to Padua; and when the Veneto gets down
+at his farm-gate, he first "reverences" us, and then says, "I am very
+sorry for you others who must be still more slightly sacrificed."
+
+At Venice, a week or two later, I meet our cameriere. He is not so
+gay, quite, as he was, and I fancy that he has not found so many _bei
+bocconi_ on the Riva degli Schiavoni, as the proverb and a sanguine
+temperament led him to expect. Do I happen to know, he asks, any
+American family going to Rome and desiring a cameriere?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I write, the Spring is coming in Cambridge, and I cannot help
+thinking, with a little heartache, of how the Spring came to meet us
+once as we rode southward from Venice toward Florence on that road
+from Padua to Ferrara. It had been May for some time in Tuscany,
+and all through the wide plains of Venetia this was the railroad
+landscape: fields tilled and tended as jealously as gardens, and
+waving in wheat, oats, and grass, with here and there the hay cut
+already, and here and there acres of Indian corn. The green of the
+fields was all dashed with the bloody red of poppies; the fig-trees
+hung full of half-grown fruit; the orchards were garlanded with vines,
+which they do not bind to stakes in Italy, but train from tree to
+tree, leaving them to droop in festoons and sway in the wind, with the
+slender native grace of vines. Huge stone farm-houses shelter under
+the same roof the family and all the live stock of the farm; thatched
+cottages thickly dotting the fields, send forth to their cultivation
+the most picturesque peasants,--men and women, pretty young girls in
+broad hats, and wonderful old brown and crooked crones, who seem never
+to have been younger nor fairer. Country roads, level, straight, and
+white, stretch away on either hand, and the constant files of poplars
+escort them wherever they go. All about, the birds sing, and the
+butterflies dance. The milk-white oxen dragging the heavy carts turn
+up their patient heads, with wide-spreading horns and mellow eyes,
+at the passing train; the sunburnt lout behind them suspends the
+application of the goad; unwonted acquiescence stirs in the bosom of
+the firm-minded donkey, and even the matter-of-fact locomotive seems
+to linger as lovingly as a locomotive may along these plains of
+Spring.
+
+At Padua we take a carriage for Ponte Lagoscuro, and having fought the
+customary battle with the vetturino before arriving at the terms of
+contract; having submitted to the successive pillage of the man who
+had held our horses a moment, of the man who tied on the trunk, and
+of the man who hovered obligingly about the carriage, and desired to
+drink our health--with prodigious smacking of whip, and banging of
+wheels, we rattle out of the Stella d'Oro, and set forth from the gate
+of the old city.
+
+I confess that I like posting. There is a freedom and a fine sense of
+proprietorship in that mode of travel, combined with sufficient
+speed, which you do not feel on the railroad. For twenty francs and
+_buonamano_, I had bought my carriage and horses and driver for the
+journey of forty miles, and I began to look round on the landscape
+with a cumulative feeling of ownership in everything I saw. For me,
+old women spinning in old-world fashion, with distaff and spindle,
+flax as white as their own hair, came to roadside doors, or moved
+back and forth under orchard trees. For me, the peasants toiled in the
+fields together, wearing for my sake wide straw hats, or gay ribbons,
+or red caps. The white oxen were willing to mass themselves in
+effective groups, as the ploughman turned the end of his furrow; young
+girls specially appointed themselves to lead horses to springs as we
+passed; children had larger eyes and finer faces and played more
+about the cottage doors, on account of our posting. As for the
+vine-garlanded trees in the orchards, and the opulence of the endless
+fertile plain; the white distance of the road before us with its
+guardian poplars,--I doubt if people in a diligence could have got so
+much of these things as we. Certainly they could not have had all to
+themselves the lordly splendor with which we dashed through gaping
+villages, taking the street from everybody, and fading magnificently
+away upon the road.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+TRIESTE.
+
+If you take the midnight steamer at Venice you reach Trieste by six
+o'clock in the morning, and the hills rise to meet you as you enter
+the broad bay dotted with the sail of fishing-craft. The hills are
+bald and bare, and you find, as you draw near, that the city lies at
+their feet under a veil of mist, or climbs earlier into view along
+their sides. The prospect is singularly devoid of gentle and pleasing
+features, and looking at those rugged acclivities, with their aspect
+of continual bleakness, you readily believe all the stories you have
+heard of that fierce wind called the Bora which sweeps from them
+through Trieste at certain seasons. While it blows, ladies walking
+near the quays are sometimes caught up and set afloat, involuntary
+Galateas, in the bay, and people keep in-doors as much as possible.
+But the Bora, though so sudden and so savage, does give warning of its
+rise, and the peasants avail themselves of this characteristic. They
+station a man on one of the mountain tops, and when he feels the first
+breath of the Bora, he sounds a horn, which is a signal for all within
+hearing to lay hold of something that cannot be blown away, and cling
+to it till the wind falls. This may happen in three days or in nine,
+according to the popular proverbs. "The spectacle of the sea," says
+Dall' Ongaro, in a note to one of his ballads, "while the Bora blows,
+is sublime, and when it ceases the prospect of the surrounding hills
+is delightful. The air, purified by the rapid current, clothes them
+with a rosy veil, and the temperature is instantly softened, even in
+the heart of winter."
+
+The city itself, as you penetrate it, makes good with its stateliness
+and picturesqueness your loss through the grimness of its environs. It
+is in great part new, very clean, and full of the life and movement
+of a prosperous port; but, better than this, so far as the mere
+sight-seer is concerned, it wins a novel charm from the many public
+staircases by which you ascend and descend its hillier quarters, and
+which are made of stone, and lightly railed and balustraded with iron.
+
+Something of all this I noticed in my ride from the landing of the
+steamer to the house of friends in the suburbs, and there I grew
+better disposed toward the hills, which, as I strolled over them,
+I found dotted with lovely villas, and everywhere traversed by
+perfectly-kept carriage-roads, and easy and pleasant foot-paths. It
+was in the spring-time, and the peach-trees and almond-trees hung
+full of blossoms and bees, the lizards lay in the walks absorbing the
+vernal sunshine, the violets and cowslips sweetened all the grassy
+borders. The scene did not want a human interest, for the peasant
+girls were going to market at that hour, and I met them everywhere,
+bearing heavy burdens on their own heads, or hurrying forward with
+their wares on the backs of donkeys. They were as handsome as heart
+could wish, and they wore that Italian costume which is not to be seen
+anywhere in Italy except at Trieste and in the Roman and Neapolitan
+provinces,--a bright bodice and gown, with the head-dress of dazzling
+white linen, square upon the crown, and dropping lightly to the
+shoulders. Later I saw these comely maidens crouching on the ground in
+the market-place, and selling their wares, with much glitter of eyes,
+teeth, and earrings, and a continual babble of bargaining.
+
+It seemed to me that the average of good looks was greater among the
+women of Trieste than among those of Venice, but that the instances of
+striking and exquisite beauty were rarer. At Trieste, too, the Italian
+type, so pure at Venice, is lost or continually modified by the mixed
+character of the population, which perhaps is most noticeable at the
+Merchants' Exchange. This is a vast edifice roofed with glass, where
+are the offices of the great steam navigation company, the Austrian
+Lloyds,--which, far more than the favor of the Imperial government,
+has contributed to the prosperity of Trieste,--and where the
+traffickers of all races meet daily to gossip over the news and the
+prices. Here a Greek or Dalmat talks with an eager Italian or a slow,
+sure Englishman; here the hated Austrian button-holes the Venetian
+or the Magyar; here the Jew meets the Gentile on common ground; here
+Christianity encounters the hoary superstitions of the East, and makes
+a good thing out of them in cotton or grain. All costumes are seen
+here, and all tongues are heard, the native Triestines contributing
+almost as much to the variety of the latter as the foreigners. "In
+regard to language," says Cantu, "though the country is peopled by
+Slavonians, yet the Italian tongue is spreading into the remotest
+villages where a few years since it was not understood. In the city it
+is the common and familiar language; the Slavonians of the North use
+the German for the language of ceremony; those of the South, as well
+as the Israelites, the Italian; while the Protestants use the German,
+the Greeks the Hellenic and Illyric, the _employes_ of the civil
+courts the Italian or the German, the schools now German and now
+Italian, the bar and the pulpit Italian. Most of the inhabitants,
+indeed, are bi-lingual, and very many tri-lingual, without counting
+French, which is understood and spoken from infancy. Italian, German,
+and Greek are written, but the Slavonic little, this having remained
+in the condition of a vulgar tongue. But it would be idle to
+distinguish the population according to language, for the son adopts a
+language different from the father's, and now prefers one language and
+now another; the women incline to the Italian; but those of the upper
+class prefer now German, now French, now English, as, from one decade
+to another, affairs, fashions, and fancies change. This in the salons;
+in the squares and streets, the Venetian dialect is heard."
+
+And with the introduction of the Venetian dialect, Venetian discontent
+seems also to have crept in, and I once heard a Triestine declaim
+against the Imperial government quite in the manner of Venice. It
+struck me that this desire for union with Italy, which he declared
+prevalent in Trieste, must be of very recent growth, since even so
+late as 1848, Trieste had refused to join Venice in the expulsion of
+the Austrians. Indeed, the Triestines have fought the Venetians from
+the first; they stole the Brides of Venice in one of their piratical
+cruises in the lagoons; gave aid and comfort to those enemies of
+Venice, the Visconti, the Carraras, and the Genoese; revolted from St.
+Mark whenever subjected to his banner, and finally, rather than remain
+under his sway, gave themselves five centuries ago to Austria.
+
+The objects of interest in Trieste are not many. There are remains of
+an attributive temple of Jupiter under the Duomo, and there is near
+at hand the Museum of Classical Antiquities founded in honor of
+Winckelmann, murdered at Trieste by that ill-advised Pistojese,
+Ancangeli, who had seen the medals bestowed on the antiquary by Maria
+Theresa and believed him rich. There is also a scientific museum
+founded by the Archduke Maximilian, and, above all, there is the
+beautiful residence of that ill-starred prince,--the Miramare, where
+the half-crazed Empress of the Mexicans vainly waits her husband's
+return from the experiment of paternal government in the New World. It
+would be hard to tell how Art has charmed rock and wave at Miramare,
+until the spur of those rugged Triestine hills, jutting into the sea,
+has been made the seat of ease and luxury, but the visitor is aware of
+the magic as soon as he passes the gate of the palace grounds. These
+are in great part perpendicular, and are over clambered with airy
+stairways climbing to pensile arbors. Where horizontal, they are
+diversified with mimic seas for swans to sail upon, and summer-houses
+for people to lounge in and look at the swans from. On the point of
+land furthest from the acclivity stands the Castle of Miramare, half
+at sea, and half adrift in the clouds above:--
+
+  "And fain it would stoop downward
+  To the mirrored wave below;
+  And fain it would soar upward
+  In the evening's crimson glow."
+
+I remember that a little yacht lay beside the pier at the castle's
+foot, and lazily flapped its sail, while the sea beat inward with as
+languid a pulse. That was some years ago, before Mexico was dreamed of
+at Miramare: now, perchance, she who is one of the most unhappy among
+women looks down distraught from those high windows, and finds in the
+helpless sail and impassive wave the images of her baffled hope, and
+that immeasurable sea which gives back its mariners neither to love
+nor sorrow. I think though she be the wife and daughter of princes, we
+may pity this poor Empress at least as much as we pity the Mexicans to
+whom her dreams have brought so many woes.
+
+It was the midnight following my visit to Miramare when the fiacre
+in which I had quitted my friend's house was drawn up by its greatly
+bewildered driver on the quay near the place where the steamer for
+Venice should be lying. There was no steamer for Venice to be seen.
+The driver swore a little in the polyglot profanities of his native
+city, and descending from his box, went and questioned different
+lights--blue lights, yellow lights, green lights--to be seen at
+different points. To a light, they were ignorant, though eloquent, and
+to pass the time, we drove up and down the quay, and stopped at the
+landings of all the steamers that touch at Trieste. It was a snug
+fiacre enough, but I did not care to spend the night in it, and I
+urged the driver to further inquiry. A wanderer whom we met, declared
+that it was not the night for the Venice steamer; another admitted
+that it might be; a third conversed with the driver in low tones, and
+then leaped upon the box. We drove rapidly away, and before I had, in
+view of this mysterious proceeding, composed a fitting paragraph for
+the _Fatti Diversi_ of the _Osservatore Triestino_, descriptive of the
+state in which the Guardie di Polizia should find me floating in the
+bay, exanimate and evidently the prey of a _triste evvenimento_--the
+driver pulled up once more, and now beside a steamer. It was the
+steamer for Venice, he said, in precisely the tone which he would
+have used had he driven me directly to it without blundering. It was
+breathing heavily, and was just about to depart, but even in the hurry
+of getting on board, I could not help noticing that it seemed to have
+grown a great deal since I had last voyaged in it. There was not
+a soul to be seen except the mute steward who took my satchel, and
+guiding me below into an elegant saloon, instantly left me alone.
+Here again the steamer was vastly enlarged. These were not the narrow
+quarters of the Venice steamer, nor was this lamp, shedding a soft
+light on cushioned seats and paneled doors and wainscotings the sort
+of illumination usual in that humble craft. I rang the small silver
+bell on the long table, and the mute steward appeared.
+
+_Was_ this the steamer for Venice?
+
+_Sicuro_!
+
+All that I could do in comment was to sit down; and in the mean time
+the steamer trembled, groaned, choked, cleared its throat, and we were
+under way.
+
+"The other passengers have all gone to bed, I suppose," I argued
+acutely, seeing none of them. Nevertheless, I thought it odd, and
+it seemed a shrewd means of relief to ring the bell, and pretending
+drowsiness, to ask the steward which was my state-room.
+
+He replied with a curious smile that I could have any of them. Amazed,
+I yet selected a state-room, and while the steward was gone for the
+sheets and pillow-cases, I occupied my time by opening the doors of
+all the other state-rooms. They were empty.
+
+"Am I the only passenger?" I asked, when he returned, with some
+anxiety.
+
+"Precisely," he answered.
+
+I could not proceed and ask if he composed the entire crew--it seemed
+too fearfully probable that he did.
+
+I now suspected that I had taken passage with the Olandese Volante.
+There was nothing in the world for it, however, but to go to bed, and
+there, with the accession of a slight sea-sickness, my views of the
+situation underwent a total change. I had gone down into the Maelstrom
+with the Ancient Mariner--I was a Manuscript Found in a Bottle!
+
+Coming to the surface about six o'clock A.M., I found a daylight as
+cheerful as need be upon the appointments of the elegant cabin, and
+upon the good-natured face of the steward when he brought me the caffe
+latte, and the buttered toast for my breakfast. He said "_Servitor
+suo_!" in a loud and comfortable voice, and I perceived the
+absurdity of having thought that he was in any way related to the
+Nightmare-Death-in-life-that-thicks-man's-blood-with-cold.
+
+"This is not the regular Venice steamer, I suppose," I remarked to the
+steward as he laid my breakfast in state upon the long table.
+
+No. Properly, no boat should have left for Venice last night, which
+was not one of the times of the tri-weekly departure. This was one of
+the steamers of the line between Trieste and Alexandria, and it was
+going at present to take on an extraordinary freight at Venice for
+Egypt. I had been permitted to come on board because my driver said I
+had a return ticket, and would go.
+
+Ascending to the deck I found nothing whatever mysterious in the
+management of the steamer. The captain met me with a bow in the
+gangway; seamen were coiling wet ropes at different points, as they
+always are; the mate was promenading the bridge, and taking the rainy
+weather as it came, with his oil-cloth coat and hat on. The wheel of
+the steamer was as usual chewing the sea, and finding it unpalatable,
+and making vain efforts at expectoration.
+
+We were in sight of the breakwater outside Malamocco, and a pilot-boat
+was making us from the land. Even at this point the innumerable
+fortifications of the Austrians began, and they multiplied as we
+drew near Venice, till we entered the lagoon, and found it a nest of
+fortresses one with another.
+
+Unhappily the day being rainy, Venice did not spring resplendent from
+the sea, as I had always read she would. She rose slowly and languidly
+from the water,--not like a queen, but like the gray, slovenly,
+bedrabbled, heart-broken old slave she really was.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+BASSANO.
+
+I have already told, in recounting the story of our visit to the
+Cimbri, how full of courtship we found the little city of Bassano on
+the evening of our arrival there. Bassano is the birthplace of the
+painter Jacopo da Ponte, who was one of the first Italian painters to
+treat scriptural story as accessory to mere landscape, and who had a
+peculiar fondness for painting Entrances into the Ark, for in these he
+could indulge without stint the taste for pairing-off early acquired
+from observation of local customs in his native town. This was
+the theory offered by one who had imbibed the spirit of subtile
+speculation from Ruskin, and I think it reasonable. At least it does
+not conflict with the fact that there is at Bassano a most excellent
+gallery of paintings entirely devoted to the works of Jacopo da Ponte,
+and his four sons, who are here to be seen to better advantage than
+anywhere else. As few strangers visit Bassano, the gallery is little
+frequented. It is in charge of a very strict old man, who will not
+allow people to look at the pictures till he has shown them the
+adjoining cabinet of geological specimens. It is in vain that you
+assure him of your indifference to these scientific _seccature_; he is
+deaf and you are not suffered to escape a single fossil. He asked us a
+hundred questions, and understood nothing in reply, insomuch that when
+he came to his last inquiry, "Have the Protestants the same God as the
+Catholics?" we were rather glad that he should be obliged to settle
+the fact for himself.
+
+Underneath the gallery was a school of boys, whom as we entered we
+heard humming over the bitter honey which childhood is obliged to
+gather from the opening flowers of orthography. When we passed out,
+the master gave these poor busy bees an atom of holiday, and they all
+swarmed forth together to look at the strangers. The teacher was a
+long, lank man, in a black threadbare coat, and a skull-cap--exactly
+like the schoolmaster in "The Deserted Village." We made a pretense of
+asking him our way to somewhere, and went wrong, and came by accident
+upon a wide flat space, bare as a brick-yard, beside which was
+lettered on a fragment of the old city wall, "Giuoco di Palla." It
+was evidently the playground of the whole city, and it gave us a
+pleasanter idea of life in Bassano than we had yet conceived, to think
+of its entire population playing ball there in the spring afternoons.
+We respected Bassano as much for this as for her diligent remembrance
+of her illustrious dead, of whom she has very great numbers. It
+appeared to us that nearly every other house bore a tablet announcing
+that "Here was born," or "Here died," some great or good man of whom
+no one out of Bassano ever heard. There is enough celebrity in Bassano
+to supply the world; but as laurel is a thing that grows anywhere, I
+covet rather from Bassano the magnificent ivy that covers the portions
+of her ancient wall yet standing. The wall, where visible, is seen to
+be of a pebbly rough-cast, but it is clad almost from the ground
+in glossy ivy, that glitters upon it like chain-mail upon the vast
+shoulders of some giant warrior. The moat beneath is turned into a
+lovely promenade bordered by quiet villas, with rococo shepherds and
+shepherdesses in marble on their gates; where the wall is built to the
+verge of the high ground on which the city stands, there is a swift
+descent to the wide valley of the Brenta waving in corn and vines and
+tobacco.
+
+We went up the Brenta one day as far as Oliero, to visit the famous
+cavern already mentioned, out of which, from the secret heart of the
+hill, gushes one of the foamy affluents of the river. It is reached
+by passing through a paper-mill, fed by the stream, and then through
+a sort of ante-grot, whence stepping-stones are laid in the brawling
+current through a succession of natural compartments with dome-like
+roofs. From the hill overhead hang stalactites of all grotesque and
+fairy shapes, and the rock underfoot is embroidered with fantastic
+designs wrought by the water in the silence and darkness of the
+endless night. At a considerable distance from the mouth of the cavern
+is a wide lake, with a boat upon it, and voyaging to the centre of the
+pool your attention is drawn to the dome above you, which contracts
+into a shaft rising upward to a height as yet unmeasured and even
+unpierced by light. From somewhere in its mysterious ascent, an
+auroral boy, with a tallow candle, produces a so-called effect of
+sunrise, and sheds a sad, disheartening radiance on the lake and the
+cavern sides, which is to sunlight about as the blind creatures of
+subterranean waters are to those of waves that laugh and dance above
+ground. But all caverns are much alike in their depressing and gloomy
+influences, and since there is so great opportunity to be wretched on
+the surface of the earth, why do people visit them? I do not know that
+this is more dispiriting or its stream more Stygian than another.
+
+The wicked memory of the Ecelini survives everywhere in this part of
+Italy, and near the entrance of the Oliero grotto is a hollow in the
+hill something like the apsis of a church, which is popularly believed
+to have been the hiding-place of Cecilia da Baone, one of the many
+unhappy wives of one of the many miserable members of the Ecelino
+family. It is not quite clear when Cecilia should have employed this
+as a place of refuge, and it is certain that she was not the wife of
+Ecelino da Romano, as the neighbors believe at Oliero, but of Ecelino
+il Monaco, his father; yet since her name is associated with the grot,
+let us have her story, which is curiously illustrative of the life of
+the best society in Italy during the thirteenth century. She was the
+only daughter of the rich and potent lord, Manfredo, Count of Baone
+and Abano, who died leaving his heiress to the guardianship of
+Spinabello da Xendrico. When his ward reached womanhood, Spinabello
+cast about him to find a suitable husband for her, and it appeared to
+him that a match with the son of Tiso du Camposampiero promised
+the greatest advantages. Tiso, to whom he proposed the affair, was
+delighted, but desiring first to take counsel with his friends upon
+so important a matter, he confided it for advice to his brother-in-law
+and closest intimate, Ecelino Balbo. It had just happened that Balbo's
+son, Ecelino il Monaco, was at that moment disengaged, having
+been recently divorced from his first wife, the lovely but light
+Speronella; and Balbo falsely went to the greedy guardian of Cecilia,
+and offering him better terms than he could hope for from Tiso,
+secured Cecilia for his son. At this treachery the Camposampieri were
+furious; but they dissembled their anger till the moment of revenge
+arrived, when Cecilia's rejected suitor encountering her upon a
+journey beyond the protection of her husband, violently dishonored his
+successful rival. The unhappy lady returning to Ecelino at Bassano,
+recounted her wrong, and was with a horrible injustice repudiated and
+sent home, while her husband arranged schemes of vengeance in due time
+consummated. Cecilia next married a Venetian noble, and being in
+due time divorced, married yet again, and died the mother of a large
+family of children.
+
+This is a very old scandal, yet I think there was an _habitue_ of the
+caffe in Bassano who could have given some of its particulars from
+personal recollection. He was an old and smoothly shaven gentleman, in
+a scrupulously white waistcoat, whom we saw every evening in a corner
+of the caffe playing solitaire. He talked with no one, saluted no
+one. He drank his glasses of water with anisette, and silently played
+solitaire. There is no good reason to doubt that he had been doing the
+same thing every evening for six hundred years.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+POSSAGNO, CANOVA'S BIRTHPLACE.
+
+It did not take a long time to exhaust the interest of Bassano, but we
+were sorry to leave the place because of the excellence of the inn at
+which we tarried. It was called "Il Mondo," and it had everything
+in it that heart could wish. Our rooms were miracles of neatness and
+comfort; they had the freshness, not the rawness, of recent repair,
+and they opened into the dining-hall, where we were served with
+indescribable salads and risotti. During our sojourn we simply enjoyed
+the house; when we were come away we wondered that so much perfection
+of hotel could exist in so small a town as Bassano. It is one of
+the pleasures of by-way travel in Italy, that you are everywhere
+introduced in character, that you become fictitious and play a part as
+in a novel. To this inn of The World, our driver had brought us with a
+clamor and rattle proportioned to the fee received from us, and
+when, in response to his haughty summons, the cameriere, who had been
+gossiping with the cook, threw open the kitchen door, and stood out to
+welcome us in a broad square of forth-streaming ruddy light, amid the
+lovely odors of broiling and roasting, our driver saluted him with,
+"Receive these gentle folks, and treat them to your very best. They
+are worthy of anything." This at once put us back several centuries,
+and we never ceased to be lords and ladies of the period of Don
+Quixote as long as we rested in that inn.
+
+It was a bright and breezy Sunday when we left "Il Mondo," and gayly
+journeyed toward Treviso, intending to visit Possagno, the birthplace
+of Canova, on our way. The road to the latter place passes through a
+beautiful country, that gently undulates on either hand till in the
+distance it rises into pleasant hills and green mountain heights.
+Possagno itself lies upon the brink of a declivity, down the side of
+which drops terrace after terrace, all planted with vines and figs and
+peaches, to a watercourse below. The ground on which the village is
+built, with its quaint and antiquated stone cottages, slopes gently
+northward, and on a little rise upon the left hand of us coming from
+Bassano, we saw that stately edifice with which Canova has honored his
+humble birthplace. It is a copy of the Pantheon, and it cannot help
+being beautiful and imposing, but it would be utterly out of place in
+any other than an Italian village. Here, however, it consorted well
+enough with the lingering qualities of the old pagan civilization
+still perceptible in Italy. A sense of that past was so strong with
+us as we ascended the broad stairway leading up the slope from the
+village to the level on which the temple stands at the foot of a
+mountain, that we might well have believed we approached an altar
+devoted to the elder worship: through the open doorway and between the
+columns of the portico we could see the priests moving to and fro, and
+the voice of their chanting came out to us like the sound of hymns to
+some of the deities long disowned; and I remembered how Padre L----
+had said to me in Venice, "Our blessed saints are only the old gods
+baptized and christened anew." Within as without, the temple resembled
+the Pantheon, but it had little to show us. The niches designed by
+Canova for statues of the saints are empty yet; but there are busts by
+his own hand of himself and his brother, the Bishop Canova. Among the
+people was the sculptor's niece, whom our guide pointed out to us, and
+who was evidently used to being looked at. She seemed not to dislike
+it, and stared back at us amiably enough, being a good-natured, plump,
+comely dark-faced lady of perhaps fifty years.
+
+Possagno is nothing if not Canova, and our guide, a boy, knew
+all about him,--how, more especially, he had first manifested his
+wonderful genius by modeling a group of sheep out of the dust of the
+highway, and how an Inglese happening along in his carriage, saw the
+boy's work and gave him a plateful of gold napoleons. I dare say
+this is as near the truth as most facts. And is it not better for the
+historic Canova to have begun in this way than to have poorly picked
+up the rudiments of his art in the workshop of his father, a maker of
+altar-pieces and the like for country churches? The Canova family was
+intermarried with the Venetian nobility, and will not credit those
+stories of Canova's beginnings which his townsmen so fondly cherish.
+I believe they would even distrust the butter-lion with which the
+boy-sculptor is said to have adorned the table of the noble Falier,
+and first won his notice.
+
+Besides the temple at Possagno, there is a very pretty gallery
+containing casts of all Canova's works. It is an interesting place,
+where Psyches and Cupids flutter, where Venuses present themselves
+in every variety of attitude, where Sorrows sit upon hard,
+straight-backed classic chairs, and mourn in the society of faithful
+Storks; where the Bereft of this century surround death-beds in Greek
+costume appropriate to the scene; where Muses and Graces sweetly pose
+themselves and insipidly smile, and where the Dancers and Passions,
+though nakeder, are no wickeder than the Saints and Virtues. In all,
+there are a hundred and ninety-five pieces in the gallery, and among
+the rest the statue named George Washington, which was sent to America
+in 1820, and afterwards destroyed by fire in the Capitol. The figure
+is in a sitting posture; naturally, it is in the dress of a Roman
+general; and if it does not look much like George Washington, it does
+resemble Julius Caesar.
+
+The custodian of the gallery had been Canova'a body-servant, and he
+loved to talk of his master. He had so far imbibed the family spirit
+that he did not like to allow that Canova had ever been other than
+rich and grand, and he begged us not to believe the idle stories of
+his first essays in art. He was delighted with our interest in the
+imperial Washington, and our pleasure in the whole gallery, which we
+viewed with the homage due to the man who had rescued the world from
+Swaggering in sculpture. When we were satisfied, he invited us, with
+his mistress's permission, into the house of the Canovas adjoining
+the gallery; and there we saw many paintings by the sculptor,--pausing
+longest in a lovely little room decorated after the Pompeian manner
+with _scherzi_ in miniature panels representing the jocose classic
+usualities: Cupids escaping from cages, and being sold from them, and
+playing many pranks and games with Nymphs and Graces.
+
+Then Canova was done, and Possagno was finished; and we resumed our
+way to Treviso, a town nearly as much porticoed as Padua, and having a
+memory and hardly any other consciousness. The Duomo, which is perhaps
+the ugliest duomo in the world, contains an "Annunciation," by Titian,
+one of his best paintings; and in the Monte di Pieta is the grand and
+beautiful "Entombment," by which Giorgione is perhaps most worthily
+remembered. The church of San Nicolo is interesting from its quaint
+and pleasing frescos by the school of Giotto. At the railway station
+an admirable old man sells the most delicious white and purple grapes.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+COMO.
+
+My visit to Lake Como has become to me a dream of summer,--a vision
+that remains faded the whole year round, till the blazing heats of
+July bring out the sympathetic tints in which it was vividly painted.
+Then I behold myself again in burning Milan, amidst noises and
+fervors and bustle that seem intolerable after my first six months
+in tranquil, cool, mute Venice. Looking at the great white Cathedral,
+with its infinite pinnacles piercing the cloudless blue, and gathering
+the fierce sun upon it, I half expect to see the whole mass calcined
+by the heat, and crumbling, statue by statue, finial by finial, arch
+by arch, into a vast heap of lime on the Piazza, with a few charred
+English tourists blackening here and there upon the ruin, and
+contributing a smell of burnt leather and Scotch tweed to the horror
+of the scene. All round Milan smokes the great Lombard plain, and
+to the north rises Monte Rosa, her dark head coifed with tantalizing
+snows as with a peasant's white linen kerchief. And I am walking out
+upon that fuming plain as far as to the Arco della Pace, on which
+the bronze horses may melt any minute; or I am sweltering through the
+city's noonday streets, in search of Sant' Ambrogio, or the Cenacolo
+of Da Vinci, or what know I? Coming back to our hotel, "Alla Bella
+Venezia," and greeted on entering by the immense fresco which covers
+one whole side of the court, it appeared to my friend and me no wonder
+that Garibaldi should look so longingly from the prow of a gondola
+toward the airy towers and balloon-like domes that swim above the
+unattainable lagoons of Venice, where the Austrian then lorded it in
+coolness and quietness, while hot, red-shirted Italy was shut out
+upon the dusty plains and stony hills. Our desire for water became
+insufferable; we paid our modest bills, and at six o'clock we took
+the train for Como, where we arrived about the hour when Don Abbondio,
+walking down the lonely path with his book of devotions in his hand,
+gave himself to the Devil on meeting the bravos of Don Rodrigo. I
+counsel the reader to turn to _I Promessi Sposi_, if he would know
+how all the lovely Como country looks at that hour. For me, the ride
+through the evening landscape, and the faint sentiment of pensiveness
+provoked by the smell of the ripening maize, which exhales the same
+sweetness on the way to Como that it does on any Ohio bottom-land,
+have given me an appetite, and I am to dine before wooing the
+descriptive Muse.
+
+After dinner, we find at the door of the hotel an English architect
+whom we know, and we take a boat together for a moonlight row upon the
+lake, and voyage far up the placid water through air that bathes our
+heated senses like dew. How far we have left Milan behind! On the lake
+lies the moon, but the hills are held by mysterious shadows, which for
+the time are as substantial to us as the hills themselves. Hints of
+habitation appear in the twinkling lights along the water's edge, and
+we suspect an alabaster lamp in every casement, and in every invisible
+house a villa such as Claude Melnotte described to Pauline,--and some
+one mouths that well-worn fustian. The rags of sentimentality flutter
+from every crag and olive-tree and orange-tree in all Italy--like the
+wilted paper collars which vulgar tourists leave by our own mountains
+and streams, to commemorate their enjoyment of the landscape.
+
+The town of Como lies, a swarm of lights, behind us; the hills and
+shadows gloom around; the lake is a sheet of tremulous silver. There
+is no telling how we get back to our hotel, or with what satisfied
+hearts we fall asleep in our room there. The steamer starts for the
+head of the lake at eight o'clock in the morning, and we go on board
+at that hour.
+
+There is some pretense of shelter in the awning stretched over the
+after part of the boat; but we do not feel the need of it in the fresh
+morning air, and we get as near the bow as possible, that we may be
+the very first to enjoy the famous beauty of the scenes opening
+before us. A few sails dot the water, and everywhere there are small,
+canopied row-boats, such as we went pleasuring in last night. We reach
+a bend in the lake, and all the roofs and towers of the city of Como
+pass from view, as if they had been so much architecture painted on
+a scene and shifted out of sight at a theatre. But other roofs and
+towers constantly succeed them, not less lovely and picturesque than
+they, with every curve of the many-curving lake. We advance over
+charming expanses of water lying between lofty hills; and as the lake
+is narrow, the voyage is like that of a winding river,--like that of
+the Ohio, but for the primeval wildness of the acclivities that guard
+our Western stream, and the tawniness of its current. Wherever the
+hills do not descend sheer into Como, a pretty town nestles on the
+brink, or, if not a town, then a villa, or else a cottage, if there is
+room for nothing more. Many little towns climb the heights half-way,
+and where the hills are green and cultivated in vines or olives,
+peasants' houses scale them to the crest. They grow loftier and
+loftier as we leave our starting-place farther behind, and as we
+draw near Colico they wear light wreaths of cloud and snow. So cool
+a breeze has drawn down between them all the way that we fancy it to
+have come from them till we stop at Colico, and find that, but for the
+efforts of our honest engine, sweating and toiling in the dark
+below, we should have had no current of air. A burning calm is in
+the atmosphere, and on the broad, flat valley,--out of which a marshy
+stream oozes into the lake,--and on the snow-crowned hills upon the
+left, and on the dirty village of Colico upon the right, and on the
+indolent beggars waiting to welcome us, and sunning their goitres at
+the landing.
+
+The name Colico, indeed, might be literally taken in English as
+descriptive of the local insalubrity. The place was once large, but it
+has fallen away much from sickness, and we found a bill posted in its
+public places inviting emigrants to America on the part of a German
+steamship company. It was the only advertisement of the kind I
+ever saw in Italy, and I judged that the people must be notoriously
+discontented there to make it worth the while of a steamship company
+to tempt from home any of the home-keeping Italian race. And
+yet Colico, though undeniably hot, and openly dirty, and tacitly
+unhealthy, had merits, though the dinner we got there was not among
+its virtues. It had an accessible country about it; that is, its woods
+and fields were not impenetrably walled in from the vagabond foot;
+and after we had dined we went and lay down under some greenly waving
+trees beside a field of corn, and heard the plumed and panoplied maize
+talking to itself of its kindred in America. It always has a welcome
+for tourists of our nation wherever it finds us in Italy; and
+sometimes its sympathy, expressed in a rustling and clashing of its
+long green blades, or in its strong sweet perfume, has, as already
+hinted, made me homesick, though I have been uniformly unaffected by
+potato-patches and tobacco-fields. If only the maize could impart to
+the Italian cooks the beautiful mystery of roasting-ears! Ah! then
+indeed it might claim a full and perfect fraternization from its
+compatriots abroad.
+
+From where we lay beside the corn-field, we could see, through the
+twinkling leaves and the twinkling atmosphere, the great hills across
+the lake, taking their afternoon naps, with their clouds drawn like
+handkerchiefs over their heads. It was very hot, and the red and
+purple ooze of the unwholesome river below "burnt like a witch's
+oils." It was indeed but a fevered joy we snatched from Nature there;
+and I am afraid that we got nothing more comfortable from sentiment,
+when, rising, we wandered off through the unguarded fields toward a
+ruined tower on a hill. It must have been a relic of feudal times,
+and I could easily believe it had been the hold of one of those wicked
+lords who used to rule in the terror of the people beside peaceful and
+happy Como. But the life, good or bad, was utterly gone out of it
+now, and what was left of the tower was a burden to the sense. A few
+scrawny blackberries and other brambles grew out of its fallen stones;
+harsh, dust-dry mosses painted its weather-worn walls with their
+blanched gray and yellow. From its foot, looking out over the valley,
+we saw the road to the Spluegen Pass lying white-hot in the valley; and
+while we looked, the diligence appeared, and dashed through the dust
+that rose like a flame before. After that it was a relief to stroll
+in dirty by-ways, past cottages of saffron peasants, and poor stony
+fields that begrudged them a scanty vegetation, back to the steamer
+blistering in the sun.
+
+Now indeed we were glad of the awning, under which a silent crowd of
+people with sunburnt faces waited for the departure of the boat. The
+breeze rose again as the engine resumed its unappreciated labors, and,
+with our head toward Como, we pushed out into the lake. The company
+on board was such as might be expected. There was a German
+landscape-painter, with three heart's-friends beside him; there
+were some German ladies; there were the unfailing Americans and
+the unfailing Englishman; there were some French people; there were
+Italians from the meridional provinces, dark, thin, and enthusiastic,
+with fat silent wives, and a rhythmical speech; there were Milanese
+with their families, out for a holiday,--round-bodied men, with blunt
+square features, and hair and vowels clipped surprisingly short, there
+was a young girl whose face was of the exact type affected in rococo
+sculpture, and at whom one gazed without being able to decide whether
+she was a nymph descended from a villa gate, or a saint come from
+under a broken arch in a Renaissance church. At one of the little
+towns two young Englishmen in knickerbockers came on board, who were
+devoured by the eyes of their fellow-passengers, and between whom and
+our kindly architect there was instantly ratified the tacit treaty of
+non-intercourse which travelling Englishmen observe.
+
+Nothing further interested us on the way to Como, except the gathering
+coolness of the evening air; the shadows creeping higher and higher
+on the hills; the songs of the girls winding yellow silk on the reels
+that hummed through the open windows of the factories on the shore;
+and the appearance of a flag that floated from a shallop before the
+landing of a stately villa. The Italians did not know this banner, and
+the Germans loudly debated its nationality. The Englishmen grinned,
+and the Americans blushed in silence. Of all my memories of that hot
+day on Lake Como, this is burnt the deepest; for the flag was that
+insolent banner which in 1862 proclaimed us a broken people, and
+persuaded willing Europe of our ruin. It has gone down long ago from
+ship and fort and regiment, as well as from the shallop on the
+fair Italian lake. Still, I say, it made Como too hot for us that
+afternoon, and even breathless Milan was afterwards a pleasant
+contrast.
+
+
+
+
+STOPPING AT VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA.
+
+I.
+
+It was after sunset when we arrived in the birthplace of Palladio,
+which we found a fair city in the lap of caressing hills. There are
+pretty villas upon these slopes, and an abundance of shaded walks and
+drives about the houses which were pointed out to us, by the boy who
+carried our light luggage from the railway station, as the property of
+rich citizens "but little less than lords" in quality. A lovely grove
+lay between the station and the city, and our guide not only took us
+voluntarily by the longest route through this, but, after reaching
+the streets, led us by labyrinthine ways to the hotel, in order, he
+afterwards confessed, to show us the city. He was a poet, though in
+that lowly walk of life, and he had done well. No other moment of our
+stay would have served us so well for a first general impression of
+Vicenza as that twilight hour. In its uncertain glimmer we seemed
+to get quite back to the dawn of feudal civilization, when Theodoric
+founded the great Basilica of the city; and as we stood before
+the famous Clock Tower, which rises light and straight as a mast
+eighty-two metres into the air from a base of seven metres, the
+wavering obscurity enhanced the effect by half concealing the tower's
+crest, and letting it soar endlessly upward in the fancy. The Basilica
+is greatly restored by Palladio, and the cold hand of that friend of
+virtuous poverty in architecture lies heavy upon his native city in
+many places. Yet there is still a great deal of Lombardic architecture
+in Vicenza; and we walked through one street of palaces in which
+Venetian Gothic prevailed, so that it seemed as if the Grand Canal had
+but just shrunk away from their bases. When we threw open our window
+at the hotel, we found that it overlooked one of the city gates, from
+which rose a Ghibelline tower with a great bulging cornice, full of
+the beauty and memory of times long before Palladio.
+
+They were rather troublous times, and not to be recalled here in all
+their circumstance; but I think it due to Vicenza, which is now little
+spoken of, even in Italy, and is scarcely known in America, where her
+straw-braid is bought for that of Leghorn, to remind the reader
+that the city was for a long time a republic of very independent and
+warlike stomach. Before she arrived at that state, however, she had
+undergone a great variety of fortunes. The Gauls founded the city
+(as I learn from "The Chronicles of Vicenza," by Battista Pagliarino,
+published at Vicenza in 1563) when Gideon was Judge in Israel, and
+were driven out by the Romans some centuries later. As a matter of
+course, Vicenza was sacked by Attila and conquered by Alboin; after
+which she was ruled by some lords of her own, until she was made
+an imperial city by Henry I. Then she had a government more or less
+republican in form till Frederick Barbarossa burnt her, and "wrapped
+her in ashes," and gave her to his vicar Ecelino da Romano, who "held
+her in cruel tyranny" from 1236 to 1259. The Paduans next ruled
+her forty years, and the Veronese seventy-seven, and the Milanese
+seventeen years; then she reposed in the arms of the Venetian Republic
+till these fell weak and helpless from all the Venetian possessions
+at the threat of Napoleon. Vicenza belonged again to Venice during the
+brief Republic of 1848, but the most memorable battle of that heroic
+but unhappy epoch gave her back to Austria. Now at last, and for the
+first time, she is Italian. Vicenza is
+
+  "Of kindred that have greatly expiated
+  And greatly wept,"
+
+and but that I so long fought against Ecelino da Romano, and the
+imperial interest in Italy, I could readily forgive her all her past
+errors. To us of the Lombard League, it was grievous that she should
+remain so doggishly faithful to her tyrant; though it is to be granted
+that perhaps fear had as much to do with her devotion as favor. The
+defense of 1848 was greatly to her honor, and she took an active part
+in that demonstration against the Austrians which endured from 1859
+till 1866.
+
+Of the demonstration we travellers saw an amusing phase at the
+opera which we attended the evening of our arrival in Vicenza.
+"Nabucodonosor" was the piece to be given in the new open-air theatre
+outside the city walls, whither we walked under the starlight. It
+was a pretty structure of fresh white stucco, oval in form, with some
+graceful architectural pretensions without, and within very charmingly
+galleried; while overhead it was roofed with a blue dome set with such
+starry mosaic as never covered temple or theatre since they used to
+leave their houses of play and worship open to the Attic skies. The
+old Hebrew story had, on this stage brought so near to Nature, effects
+seldom known to opera, and the scene evoked from far-off days the
+awful interest of the Bible histories,--the vague, unfigured oriental
+splendor--the desert--the captive people by the waters of the river of
+Babylon--the shadow and mystery of the prophecies. When the Hebrews,
+chained and toiling on the banks of the Euphrates, lifted their voices
+in lamentation, the sublime music so transfigured the commonplaceness
+of the words, that they meant all deep and unutterable affliction, and
+for a while swept away whatever was false and tawdry in the show, and
+thrilled our hearts with a rapture rarely felt. Yet, as but a moment
+before we had laughed to see Nebuchadnezzar's crown shot off his head
+by a squib visibly directed from the side scenes,--at the point when,
+according to the libretto, "the thunder roars, and a bolt descends
+upon the head of the king,"--so but a moment after some new absurdity
+marred the illusion, and we began to look about the theatre at the
+audience. We then beheld that act of _dimostrazioni_ which I have
+mentioned. In one of the few boxes sat a young and very beautiful
+woman in a dress of white, with a fan which she kept in constant
+movement. It was red on one side, and green on the other, and gave,
+with the white dress, the forbidden Italian colors, while, looked
+at alone, it was innocent of offense. I do not think a soul in the
+theatre was ignorant of the demonstration. A satisfied consciousness
+was reflected from the faces of the Italians, and I saw two Austrian
+officers exchange looks of good-natured intelligence, after a glance
+at the fair patriot. I wonder what those poor people do, now they
+are free, and deprived of the sweet, perilous luxury of defying their
+tyrants by constant acts of subtle disdain? Life in Venetia must be
+very dull: no more explosion of pasteboard petards; no more treason
+in bouquets; no more stealthy inscriptions on the walls--it must be
+insufferably dull. _Ebbene, pazienza_! Perhaps Victor Emanuel may
+betray them yet.
+
+A spirit of lawless effrontery, indeed, seemed to pervade the whole
+audience in the theatre that night at Vicenza, and to extend to the
+ministers of the law themselves. There were large placards everywhere
+posted, notifying the people that it was forbidden to smoke in the
+theatre, and that smokers were liable to expulsion; but except for
+ourselves, and the fair patriot in the box, I think every body there
+was smoking and the policemen set the example of anarchy by smoking
+the longest and worst cigars of all. I am sure that the captive
+Hebrews all held lighted cigarettes behind their backs, and that
+Nebuchadnezzar, condemned to the grass of the field, conscientiously
+gave himself up to the Virginia weed behind the scenes.
+
+Before I fell asleep that night, the moon rose over the top of the
+feudal tower, in front of our hotel, and produced some very pretty
+effects with the battlements. Early in the morning a regiment of
+Croats marched through the gate below the tower, their band playing
+"The Young Recruit." These advantages of situation were not charged in
+our bill; but, even if they had been, I should still advise my reader
+to go, when in Vicenza, if he loves a pleasant landlord and a good
+dinner, to the Hotel de la Ville, which he will find almost at his
+sole disposition for however long time he may stay. His meals will be
+served him in a vast dining-hall, as bare as a barn or a palace, but
+for the pleasant, absurd old paintings on the wall, representing, as
+I suppose, Cleopatra applying the Asp, Susannah and the Elders, the
+Roman Lucrezia, and other moral and appetizing histories. I take it
+there is a quaint side-table or two lost midway of the wall, and that
+an old woodcut picture of the Most Noble City of Venice hangs over
+each. I know that there is a screen at one end of the apartment behind
+which the landlord invisibly assumes the head waiter; and I suspect
+that at the moment of sitting down at meat, you hear two Englishmen
+talking--as they pass along the neighboring corridor--of wine, in
+dissatisfied chest-tones. This hotel is of course built round a court,
+in which there is a stable and--exposed to the weather--a diligence,
+and two or three carriages and a driver, and an ostler chewing straw,
+and a pump and a grape-vine. Why the hotel, therefore, does not smell
+like a stable, from garret to cellar, I am utterly at a loss to know.
+I state the fact that it does not, and that every other hotel in Italy
+does smell of stable as if cattle had been immemorially pastured in
+its halls, and horses housed in its bed-chambers,--or as if its only
+guests were centaurs on their travels.
+
+From the Museo Civico, whither we repaired first in the morning, and
+where there are some beautiful Montagnas, and an assortment of good
+and bad works by other masters, we went to the Campo Santo, which is
+worthy to be seen, if only because of the beautiful Laschi monument by
+Vela, one of the greatest modern sculptors. It is nothing more than
+a very simple tomb, at the door of which stands a figure in
+flowing drapery, with folded hands and uplifted eyes in an attitude
+exquisitely expressive of grief. The figure is said to be the portrait
+statue of the widow of him within the tomb, and the face is very
+beautiful. We asked if the widow was still young, and the custodian
+answered us in terms that ought to endear him to all women, if not
+to our whole mortal race,--"Oh quite young, yet. She is perhaps fifty
+years old."
+
+After the Campo Santo one ought to go to that theatre which Palladio
+built for the representation of classic tragedy, and which is perhaps
+the perfectest reproduction of the Greek theatre in the world. Alfieri
+is the only poet of modern times, whose works have been judged worthy
+of this stage, and no drama has been given on it since 1857, when the
+"Oedipus Tyrannus" of Sophocles was played. We found it very silent
+and dusty, and were much sadder as we walked through its gayly
+frescoed, desolate anterooms than we had been in the Campo Santo. Here
+used to sit, at coffee and bassett, the merry people who owned the now
+empty seats of the theatre,--lord, and lady, and abbe--who affected
+to be entertained by the scenes upon the stage. Upon my word, I
+should like to know what has become, in the other world, of those poor
+pleasurers of the past whose memory makes one so sad upon the scenes
+of their enjoyment here! I suppose they have something quite as
+unreal, yonder, to satisfy them as they had on earth, and that they
+still play at happiness in the old rococo way, though it is hard to
+conceive of any fiction outside of Italy so perfect and so entirely
+suited to their unreality as this classic theatre. It is a Greek
+theatre, for Greek tragedies; but it could never have been for
+popular amusement, and it was not open to the air, though it had a
+sky skillfully painted in the centre of the roof. The proscenium is a
+Greek facade, in three stories, such as never was seen in Greece;
+and the architecture of the three streets running back from the
+proscenium, and forming the one unchangeable scene of all the dramas,
+is--like the statues in the niches and on the gallery inclosing the
+auditorium--Greek in the most fashionable Vicentine taste. It must
+have been but an operatic chorus that sang in the semicircular space
+just below the stage and in front of the audience. Admit and forget
+these small blemishes and aberrations, however, and what a marvelous
+thing Palladio's theatre is! The sky above the stage is a wonderful
+trick, and those three streets--one in the centre and serving as
+entrance for the royal persons of the drama, one at the right for
+the nobles, and one at the left for the citizens--present unsurpassed
+effects of illusion. They are not painted, but modeled in stucco. In
+perspective they seem each half a mile long, but entering them you
+find that they run back from the proscenium only some fifteen feet,
+the fronts of the houses and the statues upon them decreasing in
+recession with a well-ordered abruptness. The semicircular gallery
+above the auditorium is of stone, and forty statues of marble crown
+its colonnade, or occupy niches between the columns.
+
+
+II.
+
+It was curious to pass, with the impression left by this costly and
+ingenious toy upon our minds, at once to the amphitheatre in Verona,
+which, next to the Coliseum, has, of all the works bequeathed us
+by the ancient Roman world, the greatest claim upon the wonder and
+imagination. Indeed, it makes even a stronger appeal to the fancy. We
+know who built the Coliseum, but in its unstoried origin, the Veronese
+arena has the mystery of the Pyramids. Was its founder Augustus,
+or Vitellus, or Antoninus, or Maximian, or the Republic of Verona?
+Nothing is certain but that it was conceived and reared by some mighty
+prince or people, and that it yet remains in such perfection that the
+great shows of two thousand years ago might take place in it to-day.
+It is so suggestive of the fierce and splendid spectacles of Roman
+times that the ring left by a modern circus on the arena, and absurdly
+dwarfed by the vast space of the oval, had an impertinence which
+we hotly resented, looking down on it from the highest grade of the
+interior. It then lay fifty feet below us, in the middle of an ellipse
+five hundred feet in length and four hundred in breadth, and capable
+of holding fifty thousand spectators. The seats that the multitudes
+pressed of old are perfect, yet; scarce a stone has been removed from
+the interior; the aedile and the prefect might take their places again
+in the balustraded tribunes above the great entrance at either end of
+the arena, and scarcely see that they were changed. Nay, the victims
+and the gladiators might return to the cells below the seats of the
+people, and not know they had left them for a day; the wild beasts
+might leap into the arena from dens as secure and strong as when first
+built. The ruin within seems only to begin with the aqueduct, which
+was used to flood the arena for the naval shows, but which is now
+choked with the dust of ages. Without, however, is plain enough the
+doom which is written against all the work of human hands, and which,
+unknown of the builders, is among the memorable things placed in the
+corner-stone of every edifice. Of the outer wall that rose high over
+the highest seats of the amphitheatre, and encircled it with stately
+corridors, giving it vaster amplitude and grace, the earthquake of six
+centuries ago spared only a fragment that now threatens above one of
+the narrow Veronese streets. Blacksmiths, wagon-makers, and workers
+in clangorous metals have made shops of the lower corridors of the old
+arena, and it is friends and neighbors with the modern life about it,
+as such things usually are in Italy. Fortunately for the stranger, the
+Piazza Bra flanks it on one hand, and across this it has a magnificent
+approach. It is not less happy in being little known to sentiment, and
+the traveller who visits it by moonlight, has a full sense of grandeur
+and pathos, without any of the sheepishness attending homage to that
+battered old coquette, the Coliseum, which so many emotional people
+have sighed over, kissing and afterwards telling.
+
+But he who would know the innocent charm of a ruin as yet almost
+wholly uncourted by travel, must go to the Roman theatre in Verona.
+It is not a favorite of the hand-books; and we were decided to see it
+chiefly by a visit to the Museum, where, besides an admirable gallery
+of paintings, there is a most interesting collection of antiques in
+bronze and marble found in excavating the theatre. The ancient edifice
+had been completely buried, and a quarter of the town was built over
+it, as Portici is built over Herculaneum, and on the very top stood a
+Jesuit convent. One day, some children, playing in the garden of one
+of the shabby houses, suddenly vanished from sight. Their mother ran
+like one mad (I am telling the story in the words of the peasant who
+related it to me) to the spot where they had last been seen, and fell
+herself into an opening of the earth there. The outcry raised by these
+unfortunates brought a number of men to their aid, and in digging to
+get them out, an old marble stairway was discovered. This was about
+twenty-five years ago. A certain gentleman named Monga owned the land,
+and he immediately began to make excavations. He was a rich man, but
+considered rather whimsical (if my peasant represented the opinion
+of his neighbors), and as the excavation ate a great deal of money
+(_mangiava molti soldi_), his sons discontinued the work after his
+death, and nothing has been done for some time, now. The peasant
+in charge was not a person of imaginative mind, though he said the
+theatre (supposed to have been built in the time of Augustus)
+was completed two thousand years before Christ. He had a purely
+conventional admiration of the work, which he expressed at regular
+intervals, by stopping short in his course, waving both hands over the
+ruins, and crying in a sepulchral voice, "_Qual' opera_!" However,
+as he took us faithfully into every part of it, there is no reason to
+complain of him.
+
+We crossed three or four streets, and entered at several different
+gates, in order to see the uncovered parts of the work, which could
+have been but a small proportion of the whole. The excavation has been
+carried down thirty and forty feet below the foundations of the modern
+houses, revealing the stone seats of the auditorium, the corridors
+beneath them, and the canals and other apparatus for naval shows, as
+in the great Amphitheatre. These works are even more stupendous than
+those of the Amphitheatre, for in many cases they are not constructed,
+but hewn out of the living rock, so that in this light the theatre is
+a gigantic sculpture. Below all are cut channels to collect and carry
+off the water of the springs in which the rock abounds. The depth of
+one of these channels near the Jesuit convent must be fifty feet below
+the present surface. Only in one place does the ancient edifice rise
+near the top of the ground, and there is uncovered the arched front
+of what was once a family-box at the theatre, with the owner's name
+graven upon the arch. Many poor little houses have of course been
+demolished to carry on the excavations, and to the walls that joined
+them cling memorials of the simple life that once inhabited them. To
+one of the buildings hung a melancholy fire-place left blackened with
+smoke, and battered with use, but witnessing that it had once been the
+heart of a home. It was far more touching than any thing in the
+elder ruin; and I think nothing could have so vividly expressed the
+difference which, in spite of all the resemblances noticeable in
+Italy, exists between the ancient and modern civilization, as that
+family-box at the theatre and this simple fireside.
+
+I do not now remember what fortunate chance it was that discovered
+to us the house of the Capulets, and I incline to believe that we
+gravitated toward it by operation of well-known natural principles
+which bring travellers acquainted with improbabilities wherever they
+go. We found it a very old and time-worn edifice, built round an
+ample court, and we knew it, as we had been told we should, by the cap
+carven in stone above the interior of the grand portal. The family,
+anciently one of the principal of Verona, has fallen from much of its
+former greatness. On the occasion of our visit, Juliet, very dowdily
+dressed, looked down from the top of a long, dirty staircase which
+descended into the court, and seemed interested to see us; while her
+mother caressed with one hand a large yellow mastiff, and distracted
+it from its first impulse to fly upon us poor children of sentiment.
+There was a great deal of stable litter, and many empty carts standing
+about in the court; and if I might hazard the opinion formed upon
+these and other appearances, I should say that old Capulet has now
+gone to keeping a hotel, united with the retail liquor business, both
+in a small way.
+
+Nothing could be more natural, after seeing the house of the Capulets,
+than a wish to see Juliet's Tomb, which is visited by all strangers,
+and is the common property of the hand-books. It formerly stood in a
+garden, where, up to the beginning of this century, it served, says my
+"Viaggio in Italia," "for the basest uses,"--just as the sacred prison
+of Tasso was used for a charcoal bin. We found the sarcophagus under
+a shed in one corner of the garden of the Orfanotrofio delle
+Franceschine, and had to confess to each other that it looked like a
+horse-trough roughly hewn out of stone. The garden, said the boy
+in charge of the moving monument, had been the burial-place of the
+Capulets, and this tomb being found in the middle of the garden, was
+easily recognized as that of Juliet. Its genuineness, as well as its
+employment in the ruse of the lovers, was proven beyond cavil by a
+slight hollow cut for the head to rest in, and a hole at the foot "to
+breathe through," as the boy said. Does not the fact that this relic
+has to be protected from the depredations of travellers, who could
+otherwise carry it away piecemeal, speak eloquently of a large amount
+of vulgar and rapacious innocence drifting about the world?
+
+It is well to see even such idle and foolish curiosities, however, in
+a city like Verona, for the mere going to and fro in search of them
+through her streets is full of instruction and delight. To my mind, no
+city has a fairer place than she that sits beside the eager Adige, and
+breathes the keen air of mountains white with snows in winter, green
+and purple with vineyards in summer, and forever rich with marble.
+Around Verona stretch those gardened plains of Lombardy, on which
+Nature, who dotes on Italy, and seems but a step-mother to all
+transalpine lands, has lavished every gift of beauty and fertility.
+Within the city's walls, what store of art and history! Her
+market-places have been the scenes of a thousand tragic or ridiculous
+dramas; her quaint and narrow streets are ballads and legends full
+of love-making and murder; the empty, grass-grown piazzas before
+her churches are tales that are told of municipal and ecclesiastical
+splendor. Her nobles sleep in marble tombs so beautiful that the dust
+in them ought to be envied by living men in Verona; her lords lie in
+perpetual state in the heart of the city, in magnificent sepulchres of
+such grace and opulence, that, unless a language be invented full
+of lance-headed characters, and Gothic vagaries of arch and finial,
+flower and fruit, bird and beast, they can never be described. Sacred
+be their rest from pen of mine, Verona! Nay, while I would fain bring
+the whole city before my reader's fancy, I am loath and afraid to
+touch any thing in it with my poor art: either the tawny river,
+spanned with many beautiful bridges, and murmurous with mills afloat
+and turned by the rapid current; or the thoroughfares with their
+passengers and bright shops and caffes; or the grim old feudal towers;
+or the age-embrowned palaces, eloquent in their haughty strength of
+the times when they were family fortresses; or the churches with the
+red pillars of their porticos resting upon the backs of eagle-headed
+lions; or even the white-coated garrison (now there no more), with its
+heavy-footed rank and file, its handsome and resplendent officers,
+its bristling fortifications, its horses and artillery, crowding the
+piazzas of churches turned into barracks. All these things haunt my
+memory, but I could only at best thinly sketch them in meagre black
+and white. Verona is an almost purely Gothic city in her architecture,
+and her churches are more worthy to be seen than any others in North
+Italy, outside of Venice. San Zenone, with the quaint bronzes on its
+doors representing in the rudeness of the first period of art the
+incidents of the Old Testament and the miracles of the saints--with
+the allegorical sculptures surrounding the interior and exterior of
+the portico, and illustrating, among other things, the creation of
+Eve with absolute literalness--with its beautiful and solemn crypt
+in which the dust of the titular saint lies entombed--with its minute
+windows, and its vast columns sustaining the roof upon capitals of
+every bizarre and fantastic device--is doubtless most abundant in that
+Gothic spirit, now grotesque and now earnest, which somewhere appears
+in all the churches of Verona; which has carven upon the facade of
+the Duomo the statues of Orlando and Olliviero, heroes of romance, and
+near them has placed the scandalous figure of a pig in a monk's robe
+and cowl, with a breviary in his paw; which has reared the exquisite
+monument of Guglielmo da Castelbarco before the church of St.
+Anastasia, and has produced the tombs of the Scaligeri before the
+chapel of Santa Maria Antica.
+
+I have already pledged myself not to attempt any description of these
+tombs, and shall not fall now. But I bought in the. English tongue, as
+written at Verona, some "Notices," kept for sale by the sacristan,
+"of the Ancient Churg of Our Lady, and of the Tombs of the most
+illustrious Family Della-Scala," and from these I think it no
+dereliction to quote _verbatim_. First is the tomb of San Francesco,
+who was "surnamed the Great by reason of his valor." "With him the
+Great Alighieri and other exiles took refuge. We see his figure
+extended upon a bed, and above his statue on horsebac with the vizor
+down, and his crest falling behind his shoulders, his horse covered
+with mail. The columns and capitals are wonderful." "Within the
+Cemetery to the right leaning against the walls of the church is the
+tomb of John Scaliger." "In the side of this tomb near the wall of
+Sacristy, you see the urn that encloses the ashes of Martin I.," "who
+was traitorously killed on the 17th of October 1277 by Scaramello of
+the Scaramelli, who wished to revenge the honor of a young lady of his
+family." "The Mausoleum that is in the side facing the Place encloses
+the Martin II.'s ashes.... This building is sumptuous and wonderful
+because it stands on four columns, each of which has an architrave
+of nine feet. On the beams stands a very large square of marble that
+forms the floor, on which stands the urn of the Defunct. Four other
+columns support the vault that covers the urn; and the rest is adorned
+by facts of Old Testament. Upon the Summit is the equestrian statue as
+large as life." Of "Can Signorius," whose tomb is the most splendid
+of all, the "Notices" say: "He spent two thousand florins of gold,
+in order to prepare his own sepulchre while he was yet alive, and
+to surpass the magnificence of his predecessors. The monument is as
+magnificent as the contracted space allows. Six columns support the
+floor of marble on which it stands covered with figures. Six other
+columns support the top, on that is the Scaliger's statues....
+The monument is surrounded by an enclosure of red marble, with six
+pillars, on which are square capitols with armed Saints. The rails of
+iron with the Arms of the Scala, are worked with a beauty wonderful
+for that age," or, I may add, for any age. These "rails" are an
+exquisite net-work of iron wrought by hand, with an art emulous of
+that of Nicolo Caparra at Florence. The chief device employed is a
+ladder (_scala_) constantly repeated in the centres of quatre-foils;
+and the whole fabric is still so flexible and perfect, after the lapse
+of centuries, that the net may be shaken throughout by a touch. Four
+other tombs of the Scaligeri are here, among which the "Notices"
+particularly mention that of Alboin della Scala: "He was one of the
+Ghibelline party, as the arms on his urn schew, that is a staircase
+risen by an eagle--wherefore Dante said, _In sulla Scala porta il
+santo Uccello_."
+
+I should have been glad to meet the author of these delightful
+histories, but in his absence we fared well enough with the sacristan.
+When, a few hours before we left Verona, we came for a last look it
+the beautiful sepulchres, he recognized us, and seeing a sketch-book
+in the party, he invited us within the inclosure again, and then ran
+and fetched chairs for us to sit upon--nay, even placed chairs for
+us to rest our feet on. Winning and exuberant courtesy of the Italian
+race! If I had never acknowledged it before, I must do homage to it
+now, remembering the sweetness of the sacristans and custodians of
+Verona. They were all men of the most sympathetic natures. He at San
+Zenone seemed never to have met with real friends till we expressed
+pleasure in the magnificent Mantegna, which is the pride of his
+church. "What coloring!" he cried, and then triumphantly took us into
+the crypt: "What a magnificent crypt! What works they executed
+in those days, there!" At San Giorgio Maggiore, where there are a
+Tintoretto and a Veronese, and four horrible swindling big pictures by
+Romanino, I discovered to my great dismay that I had in my pocket but
+five soldi, which I offered with much abasement and many apologies
+to the sacristan; but he received them as if they had been so many
+napoleons, prayed me not to speak of embarrassment, and declared that
+his labors in our behalf had been nothing but pleasure. At Santa
+Maria in Organo, where are the wonderful _intagli_ of Fra Giovanni da
+Verona, the sacristan fully shared our sorrow that the best pictures
+could not be unveiled as it was Holy Week. He was also moved with us
+at the gradual decay of the _intagli_, and led us to believe that, to
+a man of so much sensibility, the general ruinous state of the church
+was an inexpressible affliction; and we rejoiced for his sake that it
+should possess at least one piece of art in perfect repair. This was
+a modern work, that day exposed for the first time, and it represented
+in a group of wooden figures The Death of St. Joseph. The Virgin and
+Christ supported the dying saint on either hand; and as the whole was
+vividly colored, and rays of glory in pink and yellow gauze descended
+upon Joseph's head, nothing could have been more impressive.
+
+
+III.
+
+Parma is laid out with a regularity which may be called characteristic
+of the great ducal cities of Italy, and which it fully shares with
+Mantua, Ferrara, and Bologna. The signorial cities, Verona, Vicenza,
+Padua, and Treviso, are far more picturesque, and Parma excels only in
+the number and beauty of her fountains. It is a city of gloomy aspect,
+says Valery, who possibly entered it in a pensive frame of mind, for
+its sadness did not impress us. We had just come from Modena, where
+the badness of our hotel enveloped the city in an atmosphere of
+profound melancholy. In fact, it will not do to trust to travellers in
+any thing. I, for example, have just now spoken of the many beautiful
+fountains in Parma because I think it right to uphold the statement
+of M. Richard's hand-book; but I only remember seeing one fountain,
+passably handsome, there. My Lord Corke, who was at Parma in 1754,
+says nothing of fountains, and Richard Lasells, Gent., who was there a
+century earlier, merely speaks of the fountains in the Duke's
+gardens, which, together with his Grace's "wild beasts" and "exquisite
+coaches," and "admirable Theater to exhibit Operas in," "the Domo,
+whose Cupola was painted by the rare hand of Corregio," and the church
+of the Capuchins, where Alexander Farnese is buried, were "the Chief
+thing to be seen in Parma" at that day.
+
+The wild beasts have long ago run away with the exquisite coaches, but
+the other wonders named by Master Lasells are still extant in Parma,
+together with some things he does not name. Our minds, in going
+thither, were mainly bent upon Correggio and his works, and while our
+dinner was cooking at the admirable Albergo della Posta, we went
+off to feast upon the perennial Hash of Frogs in the dome of the
+Cathedral. This is one of the finest Gothic churches in Italy, and
+vividly recalls Verona, while it has a quite unique and most beautiful
+feature in the three light-columned galleries, that traverse the
+facade one above another. Close at hand stands the ancient Baptistery,
+hardly less peculiar and beautiful; but, after all, it is the work of
+the great painter which gives the temple its chief right to wonder and
+reverence. We found the fresco, of course, much wasted, and at first
+glance, before the innumerable arms and legs had time to order and
+attribute themselves to their respective bodies, we felt the
+justice of the undying spite which called this divinest of frescos a
+_guazzetto di rane_. But in another moment it appeared to us the most
+sublime conception of the Assumption ever painted, and we did not find
+Caracci's praise too warm where he says: "And I still remain stupefied
+with the sight of so grand a work--every thing so well conceived--so
+well seen from below--with so much severity, yet with so much judgment
+and so much grace; with a coloring which is of very flesh." The height
+of the fresco above the floor of the church is so vast that it
+might well appear like a heavenly scene to the reeling sense of the
+spectator. Brain, nerve, and muscle were strained to utter exhaustion
+in a very few minutes, and we came away with our admiration only
+half-satisfied, and resolved to ascend the cupola next day, and see
+the fresco on something like equal terms. In one sort we did thus
+approach it, and as we looked at the gracious floating figures of the
+heavenly company through the apertures of the dome, they did seem to
+adopt us and make us part of the painting. But the tremendous depth,
+over which they drifted so lightly, it dizzied us to look into; and
+I am not certain that I should counsel travellers to repeat our
+experience. Where still perfect, the fresco can only gain from
+close inspection,--it is painted with such exquisite and jealous
+perfection,--yet the whole effect is now better from below, for the
+decay is less apparent; and besides, life is short, and the stairway
+by which one ascends to the dome is in every way too exigent. It is
+with the most astounding sense of contrast that you pass from the
+Assumption to the contemplation of that other famous roof frescoed by
+Correggio, in the Monastero di San Paolo. You might almost touch
+the ceiling with your hand, it hovers so low with its counterfeit of
+vine-clambered trellis-work, and its pretty boys looking roguishly
+through the embowering leaves. It is altogether the loveliest room
+in the world; and if the Diana in her car on the chimney is truly a
+portrait of the abbess for whom the chamber was decorated, she was
+altogether worthy of it, and one is glad to think of her enjoying life
+in the fashion amiably permitted to nuns in the fifteenth century.
+What curious scenes the gayety of this little chamber conjures up, and
+what a vivid comment it is upon the age and people that produced it!
+This is one of the things that makes a single hour of travel worth
+whole years of historic study, and which casts its light upon all
+future reading. Here, no doubt, the sweet little abbess, with the
+noblest and prettiest of her nuns about her, received the polite
+world, and made a cheerful thing of devotion, while all over
+transalpine Europe the sour-hearted Reformers were destroying pleasant
+monasteries like this. The light-hearted lady-nuns and their gentlemen
+friends looked on heresy as a deadly sin, and they had little reason
+to regard it with favor. It certainly made life harder for them in
+time, for it made reform within the Church as well as without, so that
+at last the lovely Chamber of St. Paul was closed against the public
+for more than two centuries.
+
+All Parma is full of Correggio, as Venice is of Titian and Tintoretto,
+as Naples of Spagnoletto, as Mantua of Giulio Romano, as Vicenza of
+Palladio, as Bassano of Da Ponte, as Bologna of Guido Reni. I have
+elsewhere noticed how ineffaceably and exclusively the manner of the
+masters seems to have stamped itself upon the art of the cities where
+they severally wrought,--how at Parma Correggio yet lives in all the
+sketchy mouths of all the pictures painted there since his time. One
+might almost believe, hearing the Parmesans talk, that his manner had
+infected their dialect, and that they fashioned their lazy, incomplete
+utterance with the careless lips of his nymphs and angels. They almost
+entirely suppress the last syllable of every word, and not with
+a quick precision, as people do in Venice or Milan, but with an
+ineffable languor, as if language were not worth the effort of
+enunciation; while they rise and lapse several times in each sentence,
+and sink so sweetly and sadly away upon the closing vocable that the
+listener can scarcely repress his tears. In this melancholy
+rhythm, one of the citizens recounted to me the whole story of the
+assassination of the last Duke of Parma in 1850; and left me as softly
+moved as if I had been listening to a tale of hapless love. Yet it was
+an ugly story, and after the enchantment of the recital passed away, I
+perceived that when the Duke was killed justice was done on one of the
+maddest and wickedest tyrants that ever harassed an unhappy city.
+
+The Parmesans remember Maria Louisa, Napoleon's wife, with pleasant
+enough feelings, and she seems to have been good to them after the
+manner of sovereigns, enriching their city with art, and beautifying
+it in many ways, besides doing works of private charity and
+beneficence. Her daughter by a second marriage, the Countess
+Sanvitali, still lives in Parma; and in one of the halls of the
+Academy of Fine Arts the Duchess herself survives in the marble of
+Canova. It was she who caused the two great pictures of Correggio,
+the St. Jerome and the Madonna della Scodella, to be placed alone in
+separate apartments hung with silk, in which the painter's initial A
+is endlessly interwoven. "The Night," to which the St. Jerome is "The
+Day," is in the gallery at Dresden, but Parma could have kept nothing
+more representative of her great painter's power than this "Day." It
+is "the bridal of the earth and sky," and all sweetness, brightness,
+and tender shadow are in it. Many other excellent works of Correggio,
+Caracci, Parmigianino, and masters of different schools are in this
+gallery, but it is the good fortune of travellers, who have to see so
+much, that the memory of the very best alone distinctly remains. Nay,
+in the presence of prime beauty nothing else exists, and we found
+that the church of the Steccata, where Parmigianino's sublime "Moses
+breaking the Tables of the Law" is visible in the midst of a multitude
+of other figures on the vault, really contained nothing at last but
+that august and awful presence.
+
+Undoubtedly the best gallery of classical antiquities in North Italy
+is that of Parma, which has derived all its precious relics from the
+little city of Valleja alone. It is a fine foretaste of Pompeii
+and the wonders of the Museo Borbonico at Naples, with its antique
+frescos, and marble, and bronzes. I think nothing better has come out
+of Herculaneum than the comic statuette of "Hercules Drunk." He is in
+bronze, and the drunkest man who has descended to us from the elder
+world; he reels backward, and leers knowingly upon you, while one hand
+hangs stiffly at his side, and the other faintly clasps a wine-cup--a
+burly, worthless, disgraceful demigod.
+
+The great Farnese Theatre was, as we have seen, admired by Lasells;
+but Lord Corke found it a "useless structure" though immense. "The
+same spirit that raised the Colossus at Rhodes," he says, "raised the
+theatre at Parma; that insatiable spirit and lust of Fame which would
+brave the Almighty by fixing eternity to the name of a perishable
+being." If it was indeed this spirit, I am bound to say that it did
+not build so wisely at Parma as at Rhodes. The play-house that Ranuzio
+I. constructed in 1628, to do honor to Cosmo II. de' Medici (pausing
+at Parma on his way to visit the tomb of San Carlo Borromeo), and that
+for a century afterward was the scene of the most brilliant spectacles
+in the world, is now one of the dismalest and dustiest of ruins. This
+_Theatrum orbis miraculum_ was built and ornamented with the
+most perishable materials, and even its size has shrunken as the
+imaginations of men have contracted under the strong light of later
+days. When it was first opened, it was believed to hold fourteen
+thousand spectators; at a later _fete_ it held only ten thousand; the
+last published description fixes its capacity at five thousand; and
+it is certain that for many and many a year it has held only the stray
+tourists who have looked in upon its desolation. The gay paintings
+hang in shreds and tatters from the roof; dust is thick upon the seats
+and in the boxes, and on the leads that line the space once flooded
+for naval games. The poor plaster statues stand naked and forlorn amid
+the ruin of which they are part; and the great stage, from which
+the curtain has rotted away, yawns dark and empty before the empty
+auditorium.
+
+
+
+
+DUCAL MANTUA.
+
+In that desperate depth of Hell where Dante beholds the Diviners
+doomed to pace with backward-twisted faces, and turn forever on the
+past the rainy eyes once bent too daringly on the future, the sweet
+guide of the Tuscan poet points out among the damned the daughter of a
+Theban king, and discourses to his charge:--
+
+  Manto was she: through many lands she went
+    Seeking, and paused where I was born, at last.
+    Therefore I choose thou be on me intent
+  A little. When from life her father passed,
+    And they of Bacchus' city became slaves,
+    Long time about the world the daughter cast.
+  Up in fair Italy is a lake that laves
+    The feet of Alps that lock in Germany:
+    Benaco called....
+  And Peschiera in strong harness sits
+    To front the Brescians and the Bergamasques,
+    Where one down-curving shore the other meets.
+  There all the gathered waters outward flow
+    That may not in Benaco's bosom rest,
+    And down through, pastures green a river go.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    As far as to Governo, where, its quest
+  Ended at last, it falls into me Po.
+    But far it has not sought before a plain
+    It finds and floods, out-creeping wide and slow
+  To be the steaming summer's offense and bane.
+    Here passing by, the fierce, unfriendly maid
+    Saw land in the middle of the sullen main,
+  Wild and unpeopled, and here, unafraid
+    Of human neighborhood, she made her lair,
+    Rested, and with her menials wrought her trade,
+  And lived, and left her empty body there.
+    Then the sparse people that were scattered near
+    Gathered upon that island, everywhere
+  Compassed about with swamps and kept from fear.
+    They built their city above the witch's grave,
+    And for her sake that first made dwelling there
+  The name of Mantua to their city gave.
+
+To this account of the first settlement of Mantua Virgil adds a
+warning to his charge to distrust all other histories of the city's
+foundation; and Dante is so thoroughly persuaded of its truth, that
+he declares all other histories shall be to him as so many lifeless
+embers. Nevertheless, divers chroniclers of Mantua reject the
+tradition here given as fabulous; and the carefullest and most
+ruthless of these traces the city's origin, not to the unfriendly
+maid, but to the Etruscan King Ocno, fixing the precise date of its
+foundation at thirty years before the Trojan war, one thousand five
+hundred and thirty-nine years after the creation of the world, three
+hundred years before Rome, and nine hundred and fifteen years after
+the flood, while Abimelech was judge in Israel. "And whoever," says
+the compiler of the "Flower of the Mantuan Chroniclers" (it is a very
+dry and musty flower, indeed), citing doughty authorities for all his
+facts and figures,--"whoever wishes to understand this more curiously,
+let him read the said authors, and he will be satisfied."
+
+But I am as little disposed to unsettle the reader's faith in
+the Virgilian tradition, as to part with my own; and I therefore
+uncandidly hold back the names of the authorities cited. This
+tradition was in fact the only thing concerning Mantuan history
+present to my thoughts as I rode toward the city, one afternoon of a
+pleasant Lombard spring; and when I came in sight of the ancient hold
+of sorcery, with the languid waters of its lagoons lying sick at
+its feet, I recognized at least the topographical truth of Virgil's
+description. But old and mighty walls now surround the spot which
+Manto found sterile and lonely in the heart of the swamp formed by the
+Mincio, no longer Benaco; and the dust of the witch is multitudinously
+hidden under the edifices of a city whose mighty domes, towers, and
+spires make its approach one of the stateliest in the world. It is a
+prospect on which you may dwell long as you draw toward the city, for
+the road from the railway station winds through some two miles of flat
+meadow-land before it reaches the gate of the stronghold which the
+Italians call the first hope of the winner of the land, and the last
+hope of the loser of Italy. Indeed, there is no haste in any of the
+means of access to Mantua. It lies scarce forty miles south of Verona,
+and you are three hours in journeying this distance in the placid
+railway train,--a distance which Romeo, returning to Verona from his
+exile in Mantua, no doubt travelled in less time. There is abundant
+leisure to study the scenery on the way; but it scarcely repays the
+perusal, for it lacks the beauty of the usual Lombard landscape.
+The soil is red, stony, and sterile; the orchard-trees are scant and
+slender, and not wedded with the caressing vines which elsewhere in
+North Italy garland happier trees and stretch gracefully from trunk to
+trunk. Especially the landscape looks sad and shabby about the little
+village of Villafranca, where, in 1864, the dejected prospect seemed
+incapable of a smile even in spring; as if it had lost all hope and
+cheerfulness since the peace was made which confirmed Venetia to the
+alien. It said as plainly as real estate could express the national
+sentiment, "Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!" and crept sullenly out of
+sight, as our pensive train resumed its meditative progress. No doubt
+this poor landscape _was_ imbued, in its dull, earthy way, with a
+feeling that the coming of Garibaldi would irrigate and fertilize it
+into a paradise; as at Venice the gondoliers believed that his army
+would bring in its train cheap wine and hordes of rich and helpless
+Englishmen bent on perpetual tours of the Grand Canal without
+understanding as to price.
+
+But within and without Mantua was a strong argument against
+possibility of change in the political condition of this part of
+Italy. Compassed about by the corruption of the swamps and the
+sluggish breadth of the river, the city is no less mighty in her
+artificial defenses than in this natural strength of her position;
+and the Croats of her garrison were as frequent in her sad, handsome
+streets, as the priests in Rome. Three lakes secure her from approach
+upon the east, north, and south; on the west is a vast intrenched
+camp, which can be flooded at pleasure from one of the lakes; while
+the water runs three fathoms deep at the feet of the solid brick walls
+all round the city. There are five gates giving access by drawbridges
+from the town to the fortressed posts on every side, and commanding
+with their guns the roads that lead to them. The outlying forts, with
+the citadel, are four in number, and are each capable of holding
+from two to three thousand men. The intrenched camp, for cavalry and
+artillery, and the barracks of the city itself, can receive a garrison
+of from thirty to forty thousand men; and the measureless depths of
+the air are full of the fever that fights in defense of Mantua, and
+serves with equal zeal whoever is master of the place, let him be
+French, Italian, or Austrian, so only that he have an unacclimated
+enemy before him.
+
+I confess that little of this formidable military knowledge burdened
+me on the occasion of my visit to Mantua, and I have already confessed
+that I was but very imperfectly informed of the history of the city.
+But indeed, if the reader dealt candidly with himself, how much
+could he profess to know of Mantuan history? The ladies all have
+some erudite associations with the place as giving the term of
+_mantua-making_ to the art of dress, and most persons have heard that
+Mantua's law was once death to any he that uttered mortal drugs there,
+and that the place was till a few years since an Austrian fortress
+on the Mincio. Of Giulio Romano, and his works to Mantua, a good
+many have heard; and there is something known to the reader of the
+punctuated edition of Browning about Sordello. But of the Gonzagas of
+Mantua, and their duchy, what do you know, gentle reader?
+
+For myself, when in Mantua, I tried to make a virtue of my want of
+information, and fancied that a sort of general ignorance was
+more favorable to my enjoyment of what I saw there than thorough
+acquaintance with the city's history would have been. It certainly
+enabled me to accept all the poetic fiction of the custodians, and
+to embroider with their pleasing improbabilities the business-like
+succinctness of the guide-books; to make out of the twilight which
+involved all impressions a misty and heroic picture of the Mantuan
+past, wherein her great men appeared with a stately and gigantic
+uncertainty of outline, and mixed with dim scenes of battle, intrigue,
+and riot, and were gone before Fact could lay her finger on any shape,
+and swear that it was called so, and did so and so. But even if there
+had been neither pleasure nor profit in this ignorance, the means of
+dispelling it are so scant in modern literature that it might well
+have been excused in a far more earnest traveller. The difficulty,
+indeed, which I afterwards experienced in trying to learn something of
+Mantua, is my best excuse for writing of its history here.
+
+I fancy that the few recent books on the subject are not in the hands
+of most readers, and I have a comforting belief that scarcely a
+reader of mine has been a reader of the "Grande Illustrazione de
+Lombardo-Veneto."[Mantova e Sua Provincia, per 'Avvocato Bartolomeo
+Arrighi: _Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto, ossia Storia delle
+Citta, des Borghi, Communi, Castelli, etc., fino ai Tempi moderni.
+Per Cura di Cesare Cantu, e a' altri Literati_. Milano, 1859.] Yet
+I suppose that he forms some notion of this work from its title, and
+figures to himself a physical bulk of six volumes,--large, abounding
+in ill-printed wood-cuts, and having the appalling features which
+repel our race from pictorial history-books generally.
+
+The "Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto" includes notice of all
+those dear and famous cities of North Italy which we know,--of Verona,
+Vicenza, Padua, Venice, Mantua, Modena, Brescia, Bergamo, and the
+rest; but here we have only to do with the part which concerns Mantua.
+This is written by the advocate Bartolomeo Arrighi, whose ingenious
+avoidance of all that might make his theme attractive could not
+be sufficiently celebrated here, and may therefore be left to the
+reader's fancy. There is little in his paper to leaven statistical
+heaviness; and in recounting one of the most picturesque histories,
+he contrives to give merely a list of the events and a diagram of
+the scenes. Whatever illustrated character in princes or people he
+carefully excludes, and the raciness of anecdote and the flavor
+of manner and epoch distil not into his compilation from the elder
+historiographers. I have therefore to go back, in my present purpose,
+to the authors whose substance he has desiccated; and with their help,
+and that of one or two antiquated authors of this century, I shall try
+to rehabilitate the ducal state of Mantua,
+
+  "Which was an image of the mighty world,"
+
+and present some shadow of its microcosmal life. The story has the
+completeness of a tragedy; but it runs over many centuries, and it
+ends like a farce, though it ends with a death. One feels, indeed,
+almost as great satisfaction in the catastrophe as the Mantuans
+themselves, who terminated their national existence and parted from
+their last Duke with something like exultation.
+
+As I recall my own impressions of the city, I doubt if any good or bad
+fortune could rouse her to such positive emotion now. She seemed
+sunken, that dull April evening of our visit, into an abiding lethargy;
+as if perfect repose, and oblivion from the many-troubled past,--from
+the renown of all former famine, fire, intrigue, slaughter, and
+sack,--were to be preferred by the ghost of a once populous and haughty
+capital to the most splendid memories of national life. Certainly, the
+phantom of bygone Mantuan greatness did not haunt the idle tourists who
+strolled through her wide streets, enjoying their quiet beauty and
+regularity, and finding them, despite their empty, melancholy air, full
+of something that reminded of home. Coming from a land where there is a
+vast deal of length, breadth, and rectitude in streets, as well as human
+nature, they could not, of course, feel that wonder in the Mantuan
+avenues which inspired a Venetian ambassador, two centuries since, to
+write the Serenest Senate in praise of their marvelous extent and
+straightness; but they were still conscious of a certain expansive
+difference from Gothic Verona and narrow Venice. The windows of the
+ground-floors were grated to the prison-like effect common throughout
+Italy; but people evidently lived upon the ground-floors, and at many of
+the iron-barred windows fair young prisoners sat and looked out upon the
+streets, or laughed and chatted together. About the open doorways,
+moreover, people lounged gossiping; and the interiors of the
+entry-halls, as they appeared to the passing glance, were clean, and had
+not that forbidding, inhospitable air characteristic of most
+house-entrances in North Italy. But sculptured Venice and Verona had
+unfitted the travellers for pleasure in the stucco of Mantua; and they
+had an immense scorn for the large and beautiful palaces of which the
+before-quoted ambassador speaks, because they found them faced with
+cunningly-moulded plaster instead of carven stone. Nevertheless, they
+could not help a kind of half-tender respect for the old town. It shares
+the domestic character of its scenes with the other ducal cities,
+Modena, Parma, and Ferrara; and this character is, perhaps, proper to
+all long and intensely municipalized communities. But Mantua has a
+ghostly calm wholly its own; and this was not in the least broken that
+evening by chatters at thresholds, and pretty laughers at grated
+windows. It was very, very quiet. Perhaps half a score of carriages
+rumbled by us in our long walk, and we met some scattered promenaders.
+But for the most part the streets were quite empty; and even in the
+chief piazza, where there was still some belated show of buying and
+selling, and about the doors of the caffes, where there was a good deal
+of languid loafing, there was no indecency of noise or bustle There were
+visibly few people in the place, and it was in decay; but it was not
+squalid in its lapse. The streets were scrupulously neat and clean, and
+the stuccoed houses were all painted of that pale saffron hue which
+gives such unquestionable respectability to New England towns. Before we
+returned to our lodgings, Mantua had turned into twilight; and we walked
+homeward through a placid and dignified gloom, nowhere broken by the
+flare of gas, and only remotely affected, here and there, by the light
+of lamps of oil, faintly twinkling in a disheartened Mantuan fashion.
+
+If you turn this pensive light upon the yellow pages of those old
+chronicles of which I spoke, it reveals pictures fit to raise both
+pity and wonder for the past of this city,--pictures full of the glory
+of struggles for freedom, of the splendor of wise princes, of the
+comfort of a prosperous and contented people, of the grateful fruits
+of protected arts and civilization; but likewise stained with images
+of unspeakable filth and wickedness, baseness and cruelty, incredible
+shame, suffering, and sin.
+
+Long before the birth of Christ, the Gauls drive out the Etruscans
+from Mantua, and aggrandize and beautify the city, to be in their turn
+expelled by the Romans, under whom Mantua again waxes strong and fair.
+In this time, the wife of a farmer not far from the city dreams a
+marvelous dream of bringing forth a laurel-bough, and in due time
+bears into the world the chiefest of all Mantuans, with a smile upon
+his face. This is a poet, and they call his name Virgil. He goes from
+his native city to Rome, when ripe for glory, and has there the good
+fortune to win back his father's farm, which the greedy veterans of
+Augustus, then settled in the Cremonese, had annexed to the spoils
+bestowed upon them by the Emperor. Later in this Roman time, and only
+three years after the death of Him whom the poet all but prophesied,
+another grand event marks an epoch in Mantuan history. According to
+the pious legend, the soldier Longinus, who pierced the side of Christ
+as he hung upon the cross, has been converted by a miracle; wiping
+away that costly blood from his spear-head, and then drawing his hand
+across his eyes, he is suddenly healed of his near-sightedness, and
+stricken with the full wonder of conviction. He gathers anxiously the
+precious drops of blood from his weapon into the phial from which
+the vinegar mixed with gall was poured, and, forsaking his life of
+soldier, he wanders with his new-won faith and his priceless treasure
+to Mantua, where it is destined to work famous miracles, and to be
+the most valued possession of the city to all after-time. The saint
+himself, preaching the Gospel of Christ, suffers martyrdom under
+Tiberius; his tongue is cut out, and his body is burnt; and his ashes
+are buried at Mantua, forgotten, and found again in after ages
+with due signs and miraculous portents. The Romans give a civil
+tranquillity to Mantua; but it is not till three centuries after
+Christ that the persecutions of the Christians cease. Then the temples
+of the gods are thrown down, and churches are built; and the city goes
+forward to share the destinies of the Christianized empire, and be
+spoiled by the barbarians. In 407 the Goths take it, and the Vandals
+in their turn sack and waste it, and scatter its people, who return
+again after the storm, and rebuild their city. Attila, marching to
+destroy it, is met at Governo (as you see in Raphael's fresco in
+the Vatican) by Pope Leo I., who conjures him to spare the city, and
+threatens him with Divine vengeance if he refuse; above the pontiff's
+head two wrathful angels, bearing drawn swords, menace the Hun with
+death if he advance; and, thus miraculously admonished, he turns aside
+from Mantua and spares it. The citizens successfully resist an attack
+of Alboin; but the Longobards afterwards, unrestrained by the visions
+of Attila, beat the Mantuans and take the city. From the Lombards the
+Greeks, sent thither by the Exarch of Ravenna, captured Mantua
+about the end of the sixth century; and then, the Lombards turning
+immediately to besiege it again, the Greeks defend their prize long
+and valiantly, but in the end are overpowered. They are allowed to
+retire with their men and arms to Ravenna, and the Lombards dismantle
+the city.
+
+Concerning our poor Mantua under Lombard rule there is but little
+known, except that she went to war with the Cremonese; and it may be
+fairly supposed that she was, like her neighbors, completely involved
+in foreign and domestic discords of every kind. That war with the
+Cremonese was about the possession of the river Ollio; and the
+Mantuans came off victors in it, slaying immense numbers of the enemy,
+and taking some thousands of them prisoners, whom their countrymen
+ransomed on condition of building one of the gates of Mantua with
+materials from the Cremonese territory, and mortar mixed with water
+from the disputed Ollio. The reader easily conceives how bitter a pill
+this must have been for the high-toned Cremonese gentlemen of that
+day.
+
+When Charlemagne made himself master of Italy, the Mantuan lands and
+Mantuan men were divided up among the brave soldiers who had helped to
+enslave the country. These warriors of Charlemagne became counts; and
+the _contadini_, or inhabitants of each _contado_ (county), became
+absolutely dependent on their will and pleasure. It is recorded (to
+the confusion of those who think primitive barbarism is virtue) that
+the corruption of those rude and brutal old times was great, that all
+classes were sunk in vice, and that the clergy were especially venal
+and abominable. After the death of Charlemagne, in the ninth century,
+wars broke out all over Italy between the factions supporting
+different aspirants to his power; and we may be sure that Mantua had
+some share in the common quarrel. As I have found no explicit record
+of this period, I distribute to the city, as her portion of the
+calamities, at least two sieges, one capture and sack, and a
+decimation by famine and pestilence. We certainly read that, fifty
+years later, the Emperor Rudolph attacked it with his Hungarians, took
+it, pillaged it, and put great part of its people to the sword. During
+the siege, some pious Mantuans had buried (to save them from the
+religious foe) the blood of Christ, and part of the sponge which had
+held the gall and vinegar, together with the body of St. Longinus.
+Most unluckily, however, these excellent men were put to the sword,
+and all knowledge of the place of sepulture perished with them.
+
+At the end of these wars Mantua received a lord, by appointment of the
+Emperor, and the first lord's son married the daughter of the Duke
+of Lorraine, from which union was born the great Countess Matilda.
+Boniface was the happy bridegroom's name, and the wedding had a wild
+splendor and profuse barbaric jollity about it, which it is pleasant
+enough to read of after so much cutting and slashing. The viands were
+passed round on horseback to the guests, and the horses were shod
+with silver shoes loosely nailed on, that they might drop off and be
+scrambled for by the people. Oxen were roasted whole, as at a Kentucky
+barbecue; and wine was drawn from wells with buckets hung on silver
+chains. It was the first great display of that magnificence of which
+after princes of Mantua were so fond; and the wretched hinds out of
+whose sweat it came no doubt thought it very fine.
+
+Of course Lord Boniface had his wars. There was a plot to depose
+him discovered in Mantua, and the plotters fled to Verona. Boniface
+demanded them; but the Veronese answered stoutly that theirs was
+a free city, and no man should be taken from it against his will.
+Boniface marched to attack them; and the Veronese were such fools as
+to call the Duke of Austria to their aid, promising submission to his
+government in return for his help. It was then that Austria first put
+her finger into the Italian _pasticcio_, where she kept it so many
+centuries. But the Austrian governor whom the Duke set over the
+Veronese made himself intolerable,--the Austrian governor always
+does,--and they drove him out of the city. On this the Duke turns
+about, unites with Boniface, takes Verona and sacks it.
+
+An altogether pleasanter incident of Boniface's domination was the
+miraculous discovery of the sacred relics, buried and lost during the
+sack of Mantua by the Hungarians. The place of sepulture was revealed
+thrice to a blind pauper in a dream. People dug where he bade them
+and found the relics. Immediately on its exhumation the Blood wrought
+innumerable miracles; and the fame of it grew so great, that the Pope
+came to see it, attended by such concourse of the people that they
+were obliged to sleep in the streets. It was an age that drew the
+mantle of exterior devotion and laborious penances and pilgrimages
+over the most hideous crimes and unnatural sins. But perhaps the poor
+believers who slept in the streets of Mantua on that occasion were
+none the worse for their faith when the Pope pronounced the Blood
+genuine and blessed it. I am sure that for some days of enthusiasm
+they abstained from the violence of war, and paused a little in that
+career of vice and wickedness of which one reads in Italian history,
+with the full conviction that Sodom and Gomorrah also were facts, and
+not merely allegory. I have no doubt that the blind beggar believed
+that Heaven had revealed to him the place where the Blood was buried,
+that the Pope believed in the verity of the relic, and that the devout
+multitudes were helped and uplifted in their gross faith by this
+visible witness to the truth that Christ had died for them upon the
+bloody tree. Poor souls! they had much to contend with in the way to
+any good. The leaven of the old pleasure-making pagan civilization
+was in them yet (it is in the Italians to this day); and centuries
+of Northern invasion had made them fierce and cruel, without teaching
+them Northern virtues. Nay, I question much if their invaders had so
+many rugged virtues to teach as some people would have us think. They
+seem to have liked well the sweet corruptions of the land, and the
+studied debaucheries of ages of sin, and to have enjoyed them as
+furiously and clumsily as bears do the hoarded honey of civilized
+bees.
+
+After the death of Boniface the lordship of Mantua fell to his famous
+daughter, Matilda, of whom most have heard. She was a woman of strong
+will and strong mind; she held her own, and rent from others with a
+mighty hand, till she had united nearly all Lombardy under her
+rule. She was not much given to the domestic affections; she had two
+husbands (successively), and, if the truth must be told, divorced them
+both: one because he wished to share her sovereignty, perhaps usurp
+it; and the other because he was not warm enough friend of religion.
+She had no children, and, indeed, in her last marriage contract it was
+expressly provided that the spouses were to live in chastity together,
+and as much asunder as possible, Matilda having scruples. She was
+a great friend to learning,--founded libraries, established the
+law schools at Bologna, caused the codification of the canon law,
+corresponded with distant nations, and spoke all the different
+languages of her soldiers. More than literature, however, she loved
+the Church; and fought on the side of Pope Gregory VII in his wars
+with the Emperor Henry IV. Henry therefore took Mantua from her in
+1091, and up to the year 1111 the city enjoyed a kind of republican
+government under his protection. In that year Henry made peace with
+Matilda, and appointed her his vice-regent in Italy; but the Mantuans,
+after twenty years of freedom, were in no humor to feel the weight of
+the mailed hand of this strong-minded lady. She was then, moreover,
+nigh to her death; and, hearing that her physicians had given her up,
+the Mantuans refused submission. The great Countess rose irefully from
+her deathbed, and, gathering her army, led it in person, as she always
+did, laid siege to Mantua by land and water, entered the city in 1114,
+and did not die till a year after. Such is female resolution.
+
+The Mantuans now founded a republican government, having unlimited
+immunities and privileges from the Emperor, whose power over them
+extended merely to the investure of their consuls. Their republic was
+democratic, the legislative council of nine rectors and three curators
+being elective by the whole people. This government, or something like
+it, endured for more than a century, during which period the Mantuans
+seem to have done nothing but war with their neighbors in every
+direction,--with the Veronese chiefly, with the Cremonese a good
+deal, with the Paduans, with the Ferrarese, with the Modenese and the
+Bolognese: indeed, we count up twelve of these wars. Like the English
+of their time, the Mantuans were famous bowmen, and their shafts took
+flight all over Lombardy. At the same time they did not omit to fight
+each other at home; and it must have been a dullish kind of day
+in Mantua when there was no street-battle between families of the
+factious nobility. Dante has peopled his Hell from the Italy of this
+time, and he might have gone farther and fared worse for a type of
+the infernal state. The spectacle of these countless little Italian
+powers, racked, and torn, and blazing with pride, aggression,
+and disorder, within and without,--full of intrigue, anguish, and
+shame,--each with its petty thief or victorious faction making war
+upon the other, and bubbling over with local ambitions, personal
+rivalries, and lusts,--is a spectacle which the traveller of to-day,
+passing over the countless forgotten battle-fields, and hurried from
+one famous city to another by railroad, can scarcely conjure up.
+Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, Mantua Vicenza, Verona,
+Bassano,--all are now at peace with each other, and firmly united in
+the national sentiment that travellers were meant to be eaten alive
+by Italians. Poor old cities! it is hard to conceive of their bygone
+animosities; still harder to believe that all the villages squatting
+on the long white roads, and waking up to beg of you as your diligence
+passes, were once embroiled in deadly and incessant wars. Municipal
+pride is a good thing, and discentralization is well; and we have to
+thank these intensely local little states for genius triply crowned
+with the glories of literature, art, and science, which Italy might
+not have produced if she had been united, and if the little states had
+loved themselves less and Italy more. Though, after all, there is
+the doubt whether it is not better to bless one's obscure and happy
+children with peace and safety, than to give to the world a score of
+great names at the cost to millions of incalculable misery.
+
+Besides their local wars and domestic feuds the Mantuans had
+troubles on a much larger scale,--troubles, indeed, which the Emperor
+Barbarossa laid out for all Italy. In Carlyle's History of Frederick
+the Great you can read a pleasanter account of the Emperor's business
+at Roncaglia about this time than our Italian chroniclers will give
+you. Carlyle loves a tyrant; and if the tyrant is a ruffian and bully,
+and especially a German, there are hardly any lengths to which that
+historian will not go in praise of him. Truly, one would hardly
+guess, from that picture of Frederick Redbeard at Roncaglia, with
+the standard set before his tent, inviting all men to come and have
+justice done them, that the Emperor was actually at Roncaglia for
+the purpose of conspiring with his Diet to take away every vestige
+of liberty and independence from miserable Italy. Among other cities
+Mantua lost her freedom at this Diet, and was ruled by an imperial
+governor and by consuls of Frederick's nomination till 1167, when she
+joined the famous Lombard League against him. The leagued cities
+beat the Emperor at Legnano, and received back their liberties by the
+treaty of Costanza in 1183; after which, Frederick having withdrawn to
+Germany, they fell to fighting among themselves again with redoubled
+zeal, and rent their league into as many pieces as there had been
+parties to it. In 1236 the Germans again invaded Lombardy, under
+Frederick II.; and aided by the troops of the Ghibelline cities,
+Verona, Padua, Vicenza, and Treviso, besieged Mantua, which
+surrendered to this formidable union of forces, thus becoming once
+more an imperial city, and irreparably fracturing the Lombard League.
+It does not appear, however, that her ancient liberties were withdrawn
+by Frederick II.; and we read that the local wars went on after this
+with as little interruption as before. The wars went on as usual, and
+on the old terms with Verona and Cremona; and there is little in
+their history to interest us. But in 1256 the famous tyrant of Padua,
+Eccelino da Romano, who aspired to the dominion of Lombardy, gathered
+his forces, and went and sat down before Mantua. The Mantuans refused
+to surrender at his summons; and Eccelino, who had very little notion
+of what the Paduans were doing in his absence, swore that he would cut
+down the vines in those pleasant Mantuan vineyards, plant new ones,
+and drink the wine of their grapes before ever he raised the siege.
+But meantime that conspiracy which ended in Eccelino's ruin had
+declared itself in Padua, and the tyrant was forced to abandon the
+siege and look to his dominion of other cities.
+
+After which there was something like peace in Mantua for twenty years,
+and the city waxed prosperous. Indeed, neither industry nor learning
+had wholly perished during the wars of the republic, and the people
+built grist-mills on the Mincio, and cultivated belles-lettres to
+some degree. Men of heavier science likewise nourished, and we read of
+jurists and astronomers born in those troublous days, as well as of a
+distinguished physician, who wrote a ponderous dictionary of simples,
+and dedicated it to King Robert of Naples. But by far the greatest
+Mantuan of this time was he of whom readers have heard something from
+a modern poet. He is the haughty Lombard soul, "in the movement of the
+eyes honest and slow," whom Dante, ascending the inexplicable heights
+of Purgatory, beheld; and who, summoning all himself, leaped to the
+heart of Virgil when he named Mantua: "O Mantuan! I am Sordello, of
+thine own land!"
+
+Of Virgil the superstition of the Middle Ages had made a kind of
+wizard, and of Sordello the old writers fable all manner of wonders;
+he is both knight and poet, and has adventures scarcely less
+surprising than those of Amadis of Gaul. It is pretty nearly certain
+that he was born in 1189 of the Visconti di Goito, in the Mantuan
+country, and that he married Beatrice, a sister of Eccelino, and had
+amours with the youngest sister of this tyrant, the pretty Cunizza,
+whom Dante places in his "Paradiso." This final disposition of
+Cunizza, whom we should hardly think now of assigning a place among
+the blest, surprised some people even in that day, it seems; for an
+old commentator defends it, saying: "Cunizza was always, it is true,
+tender and amorous, and properly called a daughter of Venus; but she
+was also compassionate, benign, and merciful toward those unhappy ones
+whom her brother cruelly tormented. Therefore the poet is right
+in feigning to find her in the sphere of Venus. _For if the gentle
+Cyprians deified their Venus, and the Romans their Flora, how much
+more honestly may a Christian poet save Cunizza_." The lady, whose
+salvation is on these grounds inexpugnably accomplished, was married
+to Count Sanbonifazio of Padua, in her twenty-fourth year; and
+Sordello was early called to this nobleman's court, having already
+given proofs of his poetic genius. He fell in love with Cunizza, whom
+her lord, becoming the enemy of the Eccelini, began to ill-treat. A
+curious glimpse of the manners and morals of that day is afforded by
+the fact, that the brothers of Cunizza conspired to effect her escape
+with Sordella from her husband's court, and that, under the protection
+of Eccelino da Romano, the lovers were left unmolested to their
+amours. Eccelino, indeed, loved this weak sister with extraordinary
+tenderness, and we read of a marvelous complaisance to her amorous
+intrigues by a man who cared nothing himself for women. Cunizza lived
+in one of her brother's palaces at Verona, and used to receive there
+the visits of Sordello after Eccelino had determined to separate them.
+The poet entered the palace by a back door, to reach which he must
+pass through a very filthy alley; and a servant was stationed there to
+carry Sordello to and fro upon his back. One night Eccelino took the
+servant's place, bore the poet to the palace door, and on his return
+carried him back to the mouth of the alley, where he revealed
+himself, to the natural surprise and pain of Sordello, who could have
+reasonably expected anything but the mild reproof and warning given
+him by his truculent brother-in-law: "Ora ti basti, Sordello. Non
+venir piu per questa vile strada ad opere ancor piu vili."--"Let this
+suffice thee, Sordello. Come no more by this vile path to yet viler
+deeds."
+
+It was probably after this amour ended that Sordello sat out upon his
+travels, visiting most courts, and dwelling long in Provence, where
+he learned to poetize in the Provencal tongue, in which he thereafter
+chiefly wrote, and composed many songs. He did not, however, neglect
+his Lombard language, but composed in it a treatise on the art of
+defending towns. The Mantuan historian, Volta, says that some of
+Sordello's Provencal poems exist in manuscript in the Vatican and
+Chigi libraries at Rome, in the Laurentian at Florence, and the
+Estense at Modena. He was versed in arms as well as letters, and
+he caused Mantua to be surrounded with fosses five miles beyond her
+walls; and the republic having lodged sovereign powers in his hands
+when Eccelino besieged the city, Sordello conducted the defense with
+great courage and ability, and did not at all betray the place to his
+obliging brother-in-law, as the latter expected. Verci, from whose
+"History of the Eccelini" we have drawn the account of Sordello's
+intrigue with Cunizza, says: "The writers represent this Sordello as
+the most polite, the most gentle, the most generous man of his time,
+of middle stature, of beautiful aspect and fine person, of lofty
+bearing, agile and dexterous, instructed in letters, and a good poet,
+as his Provencal poems manifest. To these qualities he united military
+valor in such degree that no knight of his time could stand before
+him." He was properly the first Lord of Mantua, and the republic seems
+to have died with him in 1284.
+
+The madness which comes upon a people about to be enslaved commonly
+makes them the agents of their own undoing. The time had now come for
+the destruction of the last vestiges of liberty in Mantua, and the
+Mantuans, in their assembly of the Four Hundred and Ninety, voted full
+power into the hands of the destroyer. That Pinamonte Bonacolsi whom
+Dante mentions in the twentieth canto of the "Inferno," had been
+elected captain of the republic, and, feigning to fear aggression from
+the Marquis of Ferrara, he demanded of the people the right to banish
+all enemies of the state. This reasonable demand was granted, and
+the captain banished, as is well known, all enemies of Pinamonte
+Bonacolsi. After that, having things his own way, he began to favor
+public tranquillity, abolished family feuds and the ancient amusement
+of street-battles, and led his enslaved country in the paths of
+material prosperity; for which he was no doubt lauded in his day
+by those who thought the Mantuans were not prepared for freedom.
+He resolved to make the captaincy of the republic hereditary in the
+Bonacolsi family; and when he died, in 1293, his power descended to
+his son Bordellone. This Bordellone seems to have been a generous and
+merciful captain enough, but he loved ease and pleasure; and a rough
+nephew of his, Guido Botticella, conspired against him to that degree
+that Bordellone thought best, for peace and quietness' sake, to
+abdicate in his favor. Guido had the customary war with the Marquis of
+Ferrara, and then died, and was succeeded by his brother Passerino, a
+very bad person, whose son at last brought his whole family to grief.
+The Emperor made him vicar of Modena; and he used the Modenese very
+cruelly, and shut up Francesco Pico and his sons in a tower, where he
+starved them, as the Pisans did Ugolino. In those days, also, the Pope
+was living at Avignon, and people used to send him money and other
+comforts there out of Italy. An officer of Passerino's, being of
+Ghibelline politics, attacked one of these richly laden emissaries,
+and took his spoils, dividing them with Passerino. For this the Pope
+naturally excommunicated the captain of Mantua, and thereupon his
+neighbors made a great deal of pious war upon him. But he beat the
+Bolognese, the most pious of his foes, near Montevoglio, and with his
+Modenese took from them that famous bucket, about which Tassoni
+made his great Bernesque epic, "The Rape of the Bucket" (_La Secchia
+Rapita_), and which still hangs in the tower of the Duomo at Modena.
+Meantime, while Passerino had done everything to settle himself
+comfortably and permanently in the tyranny of Mantua, his worthless
+son Francesco fell in love with the wife of Filippino Gonzaga.
+
+According to the old Mantuan chronicles the Gonzagas were of a royal
+German line, and had fixed themselves in the Mantuan territory in 770
+where they built a castle beyond Po, and began at once to take part in
+public affairs. They had now grown to be a family of such consequence
+that they could not be offended with impunity, and it was a great
+misfortune to the Bonacolsi that Francesco happened to covet Filippino
+Gonzaga's wife. As to the poor lady herself, it is of infinite
+consequence to her eternal health whether she was guilty or no, but to
+us still on earth, it seems scarcely worth while to inquire, after so
+great lapse of time. History, however, rather favors the notion of
+her innocence; and it is said that Francesco, unable to overcome her
+virtue, took away her good fame by evil reports. At the same time he
+was greatly wroth--it is scarcely possible to write seriously of these
+ridiculous, wicked old shadows--that this lady's husband should have
+fallen in love with a pretty concubine of his, Bonacolsi's; and, after
+publicly defaming Filippino's wife, he threatened to kill him for this
+passion. The insult and the menace sank deep into the bitter hearts
+of the Gonzagas; and the head of that proud race, Filippino's uncle,
+Luigi Gonzaga, resolved to avenge the family dishonor. He was a secret
+and taciturn man, and a pious adulator of his line has praised him
+for the success with which he dissembled his hatred of the Bonacolsi,
+while conspiring to sweep them and their dominion away. He won over
+adherents among the Mantuans, and then made a league with Can Grande
+of Verona to divide the spoils of the Bonacolsi; and so, one morning,
+having bribed the guards to open the city gates, he entered Mantua
+at the head of the banded forces. The population was roused with
+patriotic cries of "Long live the Mantuan people!" and, as usual,
+believed, poor souls, that some good was meant them by those who came
+to overthrow their tyrants. The Bonacolsi were dreaming that pleasant
+morning of anything but ruin, and they offered no resistance to the
+insurrection till it burst out in the great square before the Castello
+di Corte. They then made a feeble sally from the castle, but were
+swiftly driven back, and Passerino, wounded to death under the great
+Gothic archway of the palace, as he retreated, dropped from his
+languid hands the bridle-rein of his charger and the reins of that
+government with which he had so long galled Mantua. The unhappy
+Francesco fled to the cathedral for protection; but the Gonzagas slew
+him at the foot of the altar, with tortures so hideous and incredible,
+that I am glad to have our friend, the advocate Arrighi, deny the fact
+altogether. Passerino's brother, a bishop, was flung into a tower to
+starve, that the Picos might be avenged; and the city of Mantua was
+liberated.
+
+In that day, when you freed a city from a tyrant, you gave it up to be
+pillaged by the army of liberation; and Mantua was now sacked by
+her deliverers. Can Grande's share of the booty alone amounted to a
+hundred thousand gold florins (about two hundred and fifty thousand
+dollars). The Mantuans, far from imitating the ungrateful Paduans,
+who, when the Crusaders liberated them from Eccelino, grudged these
+brave fellows three days' pillage of their city, and even wished back
+their old tyrant,--the Mantuans, we say, seemed not in the least
+to mind being devoured, but gratefully elected the Gonzaga their
+captain-general, and purchased him absolution from the Pope for his
+crimes committed in the sack. They got this absolution for twenty
+thousand gold florins; and the Pope probably sold it cheap,
+remembering his old grudge against the Bonacolsi, whom the Gonzaga had
+overthrown. All this was in the year of grace 1328.
+
+I confess that I am never weary of reading of these good, heroic,
+virtuous old times in Italy, and that I am here tempted to digress
+into declamation about them. There is no study more curious and
+interesting, and I am fond of tracing the two elements of character
+visible in Italian society, and every individual Italian, as they flow
+down from the remotest times to these: the one element, that capacity
+for intellectual culture of the highest degree; the other element,
+that utter untamableness of passion and feeling. The presence of these
+contradictory elements seems to influence every relation of Italian
+life;--to make it capable of splendor, but barren of comfort; to
+endear beauty, but not goodness, to the Italian; to lead him to
+recognize and celebrate virtues, but not to practice them; to produce
+a civilization of the mind, and not of the soul.
+
+When Luigi Gonzaga was made lord of Mantua, he left his castle beyond
+Po, to dwell in the city. In this castle he had dwelt, like other
+lords of his time, in the likeness of a king, spending regally and
+keeping state and open house in an edifice strongly built about with
+walls, encircled with ditches passable by a single drawbridge, and
+guarded day and night, from castle moat to castle crest, by armed
+vassals. Hundreds ate daily at his board, which was heaped with a rude
+and rich profusion, and furnished with carven goblets and plate of
+gold and silver. In fair weather the banquet-hall stood open to all
+the winds that blew; in foul, the guests were sheltered from the storm
+by curtains of oiled linen, and the place was lighted with torches
+borne by splendidly attired pages. The great saloons of the castle
+were decked with tapestries of Flanders and Damascus, and the floor
+was strewn with straw or rushes. The bed in which the lord and lady
+slept was the couch of a monarch; the household herded together in the
+empty chambers, and lay upon the floor like swine. The garden-fields
+about the castle smiled with generous harvests; the peasant lay
+down after his toil, at night, in deadly fear of invasion from some
+neighboring state, which should rob him of everything, dishonor his
+wife and daughters, and slay him upon the smoking ruins of his home.
+
+In the city to which this lord repaired, the houses were built
+here and there at caprice, without numbers or regularity, and only
+distinguished by the figure of a saint, or some pious motto painted
+above the door. Cattle wandered at will through the crooked, narrow,
+and filthy streets, which rang with the clamor of frequent feud, and
+reeked with the blood of the embattled citizens; over all the squalor
+and wickedness rose the loveliest temples that ever blossomed from
+man's love of the beautiful, to the honor and glory of God.
+
+In this time Crusaders went to take the Lord's sepulchre from the
+infidel, while their brothers left at home rose against one another,
+each petty state against its neighbor, in unsparing wars of rapine
+and devastation,--wars that slew, or, less mercifully, mutilated
+prisoners,--that snatched the babe from the embrace of its violated
+mother, and dashed out its brains upon the desolated hearth. A
+hopeless, hellish time of sack, plunder, murder, famine, plague, and
+unnatural crime; a glorious age, in which flourished the gentlest and
+sweetest poet that ever sang, and the grimmest and grandest that ever
+upbraided a godless generation for its sins,--in which Petrarch was
+crowned with laurel at Rome, and Dante wandered in despair from court
+to court, learning in the bitterness of his exile's heart,
+
+  "come sa di sale
+  Lo pane altrui, e come e duro calle
+  Lo scendere e il salir per l'altrui scale."
+
+It was a time ignorant of the simplest comfort, but debauched with the
+vices of luxury; in which cities repressed the license of their people
+by laws regulating the length of women's gowns and the outlays
+at weddings and funerals. Every wild misdeed and filthy crime was
+committed, and punished by terrible penalties, or atoned for by fines.
+A fierce democracy reigned, banishing nobles, razing their palaces,
+and ploughing up the salt-sown sites; till at last, in the uttermost
+paroxysm of madness, it delivered itself up to lords to be defended
+from itself, and was crushed into the abjectest depths of slavery.
+Literature and architecture flourished, and the sister arts were born
+amid the struggles of human nature convulsed with every abominable
+passion.
+
+For nearly four hundred years the Gonzagas continued to rule the city,
+which the first prince of their line, having well-nigh destroyed,
+now rebuilt and restored to greater splendor than ever; and it is the
+Mantua of the Gonzagas which travellers of this day look upon when
+they visit the famous old city. Their pride and their wealth adorned
+it; their wisdom and prudence made it rich and prosperous; their
+valor glorified it; their crimes stain its annals with infamy; their
+wickedness and weakness ruined it and brought it low. They were a
+race full of hereditary traits of magnificence, but one reads their
+history, and learns to love, of all their long succession, only one or
+two in their pride, learns to pity only one or two in their fall. They
+were patriotic, but the patriotism of despotic princes is self-love.
+They were liberal--in spending the revenues of the state for the glory
+of their family. They were brave, and led many nameless Mantuans
+to die in forgotten battles for alien quarrels which they never
+understood.
+
+The succession of the Gonzagas was of four captains, ending in 1407;
+four marquises, ending in 1484; and ten dukes, ending in 1708.
+
+The first of the captains was Luigi, as we know. In his time the great
+Gothic fabric of the Castello di Corte was built; and having rebuilt
+the portions of the city wasted by the sack, he devoted himself,
+as far as might be in that age, to the arts of peace; and it is
+remembered of him that he tried to cure the Mantuan air of its
+feverish unwholesomeness by draining the swampy environs. During his
+time, Petrarch, making a sentimental journey to the birthplace of
+Virgil, was splendidly entertained and greatly honored by him. For the
+rest, Can Grande of Verona was by no means content with his hundred
+thousand golden florins of spoil from the sack of the city, but
+aspired to its seigniory, declaring that he had understood Gonzaga
+to have promised him it as the condition of alliance against the
+Bonacolsi. Gonzaga construed the contract differently, and had so
+little idea of parting with his opinion, that he fought the Scaligero
+on this point of difference till he died, which befell thirty years
+after his election to the captaincy.
+
+Him his son Guido succeeded,--a prince already old at the time of his
+father's death, and of feeble spirit. He shared his dominion with his
+son Ugolino, excluding the younger brothers from the dominion. These,
+indignant at the partiality, one night slew their brother Ugolino at a
+supper he was giving; and being thereupon admitted to a share in their
+father's government, had no trouble in obtaining the pardon of the
+Pope and Emperor. One of the murderers died before the father; the
+other, named Ludovico, was, on the death of Guido, in 1370, elected to
+the captaincy, and ruled long, wisely, and well. He loved a peaceful
+life; and though the Emperor confirmed him in the honors conferred on
+him by the Mantuans, and made him Vicar imperial, Ludovico declined to
+take part with Ghibellines against Guelphs, remained quietly at home,
+and spent himself much in good works, as if he would thus expiate his
+bloody crime. He gathered artists, poets, and learned men about him,
+and did much to foster all arts. In his time, Mantua had rest from
+war, and grew to have twenty-eight thousand inhabitants; but it was
+not in the nature of a city of the Middle Ages to be long without a
+calamity of some sort, and it is a kind of relief to know that Mantua,
+under this peaceful prince, was well-nigh depopulated by a pestilence.
+
+In 1381 he died, and with his son Francesco the blood-letting began
+again. Indeed, this captain spent nearly his whole life in war with
+those pleasant people, the Visconti of Milan. He had married the
+daughter of Barnabo Visconti, but discovering her to be unfaithful to
+him, or believing her so, he caused her to be put to death, refusing
+all her family's intercessions for mercy. After that, a heavy sadness
+fell upon him, and he wandered aimlessly about in many Italian
+cities, and at last married a second time, taking to wife Margherita
+Malatesta. He was a prince of high and generous soul and of manly
+greatness rare in his time. There came once a creature of the Visconti
+to him, with a plot for secretly taking off his masters; but the
+Gonzaga (he must have been thought an eccentric man by his neighbors)
+dismissed the wretch with scornful horror. I am sure the reader will
+be glad to know that he finally beat the Visconti in fair fight, and
+(the pest still raging in Mantua) lived to make a pilgrimage to the
+Holy Land. When he returned, he compiled the city's statutes, divided
+the town into four districts, and named its streets. So he died.
+
+And after this prince had made his end, there came another Francesco,
+or Gianfrancesco, who was created Marquis of Mantua by the Emperor
+Sigismund. He was a friend of war, and having been the ward of
+the Venetian Republic (Venice was fond of this kind of trust, and
+sometimes adopted princely persons as her children, among whom the
+reader will of course remember the Queen of Cyprus, and the charming
+Bianca Capello, whose personal attractions and singularly skillful
+knowledge of the use of poisons made her Grand Duchess of Tuscany
+some years after she eloped from Venice), he became the leader of
+her armies on the death of Carmagnola, who survived the triumphal
+reception given him by the Serenest Senate only a very short time. [It
+seems scarcely worth while to state the fact that Carmagnola,
+suspected of treasonable correspondence with the Visconti, was
+recalled to Venice to receive distinguished honors from the republic.
+The Senate was sitting in the hall of the Grand Council when he
+appeared, and they detained him there with various compliments till
+night fell. Then instead of lights, the Sbirri appeared, and seized
+Carmagnola. "I am a dead man," he exclaimed, on beholding them. And
+so indeed he was; for, three days after, he was led out of prison,
+and beheaded between the pillars of the Piazzetta.] The Gonzaga
+took Verona and Padua for the republic, and met the Milanese in many
+battles. Venice was then fat and insolently profuse with the spoils
+of the Orient, and it is probable that the Marquis of Mantua acquired
+there that taste for splendor which he introduced into his hitherto
+frugal little state. We read of his being in Venice in 1414, when the
+Jewelers and Goldsmiths' Guild gave a tournament in the Piazza San
+Marco, offering as prizes to the victorious lances a collar enriched
+with pearls and diamonds, the work of the jewelers, and two helmets
+excellently wrought by the goldsmiths. On this occasion the Gonzaga,
+with two hundred and sixty Mantuan gentlemen, mounted on superb
+horses, contested the prizes with the Marquis of Ferrara, at the
+head of two hundred Ferrarese, equally mounted, and attended by their
+squires and pages, magnificently dressed. There were sixty thousand
+spectators of the encounter. "Both the Marquises," says Mutinelli
+in his "Annali Urbani," "being each assisted by fourteen well-armed
+cavaliers, combated valorously at the barrier, and were both judged
+worthy of the first prize: a Mantuan cavalier took the second."
+
+The Marquis Gonzaga was the first of his line who began that royal
+luxury of palaces with which Mantua was adorned. He commenced the
+Ducal Palace; but before he went far with the work, he fell a prey to
+the science then much affected by Italian princes, but still awaiting
+its last refinement from the gifted Lucrezia Borgia. The poor Marquis
+was poisoned by his wife's paramour, and died in the year 1444.
+Against this prince, our advocate Arrighi records the vandalism of
+causing to be thrown down and broken in pieces the antique statue
+of Virgil, which stood in one of the public places of Mantua, and of
+which the head is still shown in the Museum of the city. In all times,
+the Mantuans had honored, in diverse ways, their great poet, and at
+certain epochs had coined money bearing his face. With the common
+people he had a kind of worship (more likely as wizard than as poet),
+and they celebrated annually some now-forgotten event by assembling
+with songs and dances about the statue of Virgil, which was destroyed
+by the uncle of the Marquis, Malatesta, rather than by the Marquis's
+own order. This ill-conditioned person is supposed to have been
+"vexed because our Mantuan people thought it their highest glory to be
+fellow-citizens of the prince of poets." We can better sympathize with
+the advocate's indignation at this barbarity, than with his blame of
+Francesco for having consented, by his acceptance of the marquisate,
+to become a prince of the Roman Empire. Mantua was thus subjected
+to the Emperors, but liberty had long been extinguished; and the
+voluntary election of the Council, which bestowed the captaincy on
+each succeeding generation of the Gonzagas, was a mere matter of form,
+and of course.
+
+The next prince, Lodovico Gonzaga, was an austere man, and had been
+bred in a hard school, if I may believe some of our old chroniclers,
+whom, indeed, I sometimes suspect of being not altogether faithful. It
+is said that his father loved his younger brother better than him,
+and that Lodovico ran away in his boyhood, and took refuge with his
+father's hereditary enemies, the Visconti. To make dates agree,
+it must have been the last of these, for the line failed during
+Lodovico's time, and he had wars with the succeeding Sforza. In the
+day of his escapade, Milan was at war with Mantua and with Venice, and
+the Marquis Gonzaga was at the head of the united armies, as we have
+already seen. So the father and son met in several battles; though
+the Visconti, out of love for the boy, and from a sentiment of piety
+somewhat amazing in them, contrived that he should never actually
+encounter his parent face to face. Lodovico came home after the wars,
+wearing a long beard; and his mother called her son "the Turk," a
+nickname that he never lost.
+
+Il Turco was a lover of the arts and of letters, and he did many
+works to enrich and beautify the city. He established the first
+printing-office in Mantua, where the first book printed was the
+"Decamerone" of Boccaccio. He founded a college of advocates, and he
+dug canals for irrigation; and the prosperity of Mantuan manufacturers
+in his time may be inferred from the fact that, when the King of
+Denmark paid him a visit, in 1474, the merchants decked their shops
+with five thousand pieces of fine Mantuan cloth.
+
+The Marquis made his brilliant little court the resort of the arts and
+letters; and hither from Florence came once the elegant Politian, who
+composed his tragedy of "Orfeo" in Mantua, and caused it to be first
+represented before Lodovico. But it must be confessed that this was
+a soil in which art flourished better than literature, and that even
+born Mantuan poets went off, after a while, and blossomed in other
+air. The painter Mantegna, whom the Marquis invited from Padua, passed
+his whole life here, painting for the Marquis in the palaces and
+churches. The prince loved him, and gave him a house, and bestowed
+other honors upon him; and Mantegna executed for Lodovico his famous
+pictures representing the Triumph of Julius Caesar. [Now at Hamilton
+Court, in England.] It was divided into nine compartments, and, as a
+frieze, went round the upper part of Lodovico's newly erected palace
+of San Sebastian. Mantegna also painted a hall in the Castello di
+Corte, called the Stanza di Mantegna, and there, among other subjects
+of fable and of war, made the portraits of Lodovico and his wife. It
+was partly the wish to see such works of Mantegna as still remained in
+Mantua that took us thither; and it was chiefly this wish that carried
+us, the morning after our arrival, to the Castello di Corte, or the
+Ducal Palace. Our thirst for Mantegnas was destined to be in no degree
+satisfied in this pile, but it was full of things to tempt us to
+forget Mantegna, and to make us more and more interested in the
+Gonzagas and their Mantua.
+
+It is taken for granted that no human being ever yet gained an idea of
+any building from the most artful description of it; but if the reader
+cares to fancy a wide piazza, or open square, with a church upon the
+left hand, immense, uninteresting edifices on the right, and an ugly
+bishop's palace of Renaissance taste behind him, he may figure before
+him as vastly and magnificently as he pleases the superb Gothic front
+of the Castello di Corte. This facade is the only one in Italy that
+reminds you of the most beautiful building in the world, the Ducal
+Palace at Venice; and it does this merely by right of its short
+pillars and deep Gothic arches in the ground story, and the great
+breadth of wall that rises above them, unbroken by the second line of
+columns which relieves and lightens this wall in the Venetian palace.
+It stands at an extremity of the city, upon the edge of the broad
+fresh-water lagoon, and is of such extent as to include within its
+walls a whole court-city of theatre, church, stables, playground,
+course for riding, and several streets. There is a far older edifice
+adjoining the Castello di Corte, which Guido Bonacolsi began, and
+which witnessed the bloody end of his line, when Louis Gonzaga
+surprised and slew his last successor. But the palace itself is all
+the work of the Gonzagas, and it remains the monument of their kingly
+state and splendid pride.
+
+It was the misfortune of the present writer to be recognized by the
+_employe_ (formerly of Venice) who gives the permissions to travellers
+to visit the palace, and to be addressed in the presence of the
+_Custode_ by the dignified title to which his presence did so little
+honor. This circumstance threw upon the Custode, a naturally tedious
+and oppressive old man, the responsibility of being doubly prolix and
+garrulous. He reveled in his office of showing the palace, and did
+homage to the visitor's charge and nation by an infinite expansion
+upon all possible points of interest, lest he should go away
+imperfectly informed of anything. By dint of frequent encounter with
+strangers, this Custode had picked up many shreds and fragments
+of many languages, and did not permit the travellers to consider
+themselves as having at all understood him until he had repeated
+everything in Italian, English, French, and German. He led the
+way with his polyglot babble through an endless number of those
+magnificent and uninteresting chambers which palaces seem specially
+built to contain, that men may be content to dwell in the humbler
+dullness of their own houses; and though the travellers often prayed
+him to show them the apartments containing the works of Mantegna,
+they really got to see nothing of this painter's in the Ducal Palace,
+except, here and there, some evanescent frescoes, which the Custode
+would not go beyond a _si crede_ in attributing to him. Indeed, it is
+known that the works of Mantegna suffered grievously in the wars of
+the last century, and his memory has faded so dim in this palace where
+he wrought, that the guide could not understand the curiosity of the
+foreigners concerning the old painter; and certainly Giulio Romano has
+stamped himself more ineffaceably than Mantegna upon Mantua.
+
+In the Ducal Palace are seen vividly contrasted the fineness and
+strength, the delicacy and courage of the fancy, which, rather than
+the higher gift of imagination, characterize Giulio's work. There is
+such an airy refinement and subtile grace in the pretty grotesques
+with which he decorates a chamber; there is such daring luxury of
+color and design in the pictures for which his grand halls are merely
+the frames. No doubt I could make fine speeches about these paintings;
+but who, not seeing them, would be the wiser, after the best
+description and the choicest critical disquisition? In fact, our
+travellers themselves found it pleasanter, after a while, to yield to
+the guidance of the Custode, and to enjoy the stupider marvels of the
+place, than to do the set and difficult admiration of the works of
+art. So, passing the apartments in good preservation (the Austrian
+Emperors had taken good care of some parts of the palace of one of
+their first Italian possessions), they did justice to the splendor
+of the satin beds and the other upholstery work; they admired rich
+carpentering and costly toys; they dwelt on marvelous tapestries
+(among which the tapestry copies of Raphael's cartoons, woven at
+Mantua in the fifteenth century, are certainly worthy of wonder);
+and they expressed the proper amazement at the miracles of art which
+caused figures frescoed in the ceilings to turn with them, and follow
+and face them from whatever part of the room they chose to look. Nay,
+they even enjoyed the Hall of the Rivers, on the sides of which the
+usual river-gods were painted, in the company of the usual pottery,
+from which they pour their founts, and at the end of which there
+was an abominable little grotto of what people call, in modern
+landscape-gardening, rock-work, out of the despair with which its
+unmeaning ugliness fills them. There were busts of several Mantuan
+duchesses in the gallery, which were interesting, and the pictures
+were so bad as to molest no one. There was, besides all this, a
+hanging garden in this small Babylon, on which the travellers looked
+with a doleful regret that they were no longer of the age when a
+hanging garden would have brought supreme comfort to the soul. It
+occupied a spacious oblong, had a fountain and statues, trees and
+flowers, and would certainly have been taken for the surface of the
+earth, had not the Custode proudly pointed out that it was on a level
+with the second floor, on which they stood.
+
+After that they wandered through a series of unused, dismantled
+apartments and halls, melancholy with faded fresco, dropping stucco,
+and mutilated statues of plaster, and came at last upon a balcony
+overlooking the Cavallerizza, which one of the early dukes built after
+a design by the inevitable Giulio Romano. It is a large square, and
+was meant for the diversion of riding on horseback. Balconies go all
+found it between those thick columns, finely twisted, as we see
+them in that cartoon of Raphael, "The Healing of the Lame Man at the
+Beautiful Gate of the Temple"; and here once stood the jolly dukes and
+the jolly ladies of their light-hearted court, and there below rode
+the gay, insolent, intriguing courtiers, and outside groaned the
+city under the heavy extortions of the tax-gatherers. It is all in
+weather-worn stucco, and the handsome square is planted with trees.
+The turf was now cut and carved by the heavy wheels of the Austrian
+baggage-wagons constantly passing through the court to carry munitions
+to the fortress outside, whose black guns grimly overlook the dead
+lagoon. A sense of desolation had crept over the sight-seers, with
+that strange sickness of heart which one feels in the presence of ruin
+not to be lamented, and which deepened into actual pain as the Custode
+clapped his hands and the echo buffeted itself against the forlorn
+stucco, and up from the trees rose a score of sullen, slumberous owls,
+and flapped heavily across the lonesome air with melancholy cries. It
+only needed, to crush these poor strangers, that final touch which the
+Custode gave, as they passed from the palace through the hall in which
+are painted the Gonzagas, and in which he pointed out the last Duke of
+Mantua, saying he was deposed by the Emperor for felony, and somehow
+conveying the idea of horse-stealing and counterfeiting on the part of
+his Grace.
+
+A very different man from this rogue was our old friend Lodovico, who
+also, however, had his troubles. He was an enemy of the Ghibellines,
+and fought them a great deal. Of course he had the habitual wars with
+Milan, and he was obliged to do battle with his own brother Carlo
+to some extent. This Gonzaga had been taken prisoner by Sforza; and
+Lodovico, having paid for him a ransom of sixty thousand florins of
+gold (which Carlo was scarcely worth), seized the fraternal lands, and
+held them in pledge of repayment. Carlo could not pay, and tried
+to get back his possessions by war. Vexed with these and other
+contentions, Lodovico was also unhappy in his son, whose romance I
+may best tell in the words of the history [Volta: _Storia di Mantova_.],
+from which I take it:
+
+    "Lodovico Gonzaga, having agreed with the Duke of Bavaria to
+    take his daughter Margherita as wife for his (Lodovico's)
+    first-born, Federico, and the young man having refused her,
+    Lodovico was so much enraged that he sought to imprison him;
+    but the Marchioness Barbara, mother of Federico, caused him to
+    fly from the city till his father's anger should be abated.
+    Federico departed with six attendants [The _Fioretto delle
+    Cronache_ says "persons of gentle condition."]; but this flight
+    caused still greater displeasure to his father, who now
+    declared him banished, and threatened with heavy penalties any
+    one who should give him help or favor. Federico, therefore,
+    wandered about with these six attendants in diverse places, and
+    finally arrived in Naples; but having already spent all his
+    substance, and not daring to make himself known for fear of his
+    father, he fell into great want, and so into severe sickness.
+    His companions having nothing wherewith to live, and not
+    knowing any trade by which to gain their bread, did menial
+    services fit for day-laborers, and sustained their lord with
+    their earnings, he remaining hidden in a poor woman's house
+    where they all dwelt.
+
+    "The Marchioness had sent many messengers in divers provinces
+    with money to find her son, but they never heard any news of
+    him; so that they thought him dead, not hearing anything,
+    either, of his attendants. Now it happened that one of those
+    who sought Federico came to Naples, and presented himself to
+    the king with a letter from the said lady, praying that he
+    should make search in his territory for a company of seven men,
+    giving the name and description of each. The king caused this
+    search to be made by the heads of the district; and one of
+    these heads told how in his district there were six Lombard men
+    (not knowing of Federico, who lay ill), but that they were
+    laborers and of base condition. The king determined to see
+    them; and they being come before him, he demanded who they
+    were, and how many; as they were not willing to discover their
+    lord, on being asked their names they gave others, so that the
+    king, not being able to learn anything, would have dismissed
+    them. But the messenger sent by the Marchioness knew them, and
+    said to the king, 'Sire, these are the attendants of him whom I
+    seek; but they have changed their names.' The king caused them
+    to be separated one from another, and then asked them of their
+    Lord; and they, finding themselves separated, minutely narrated
+    everything; and the king immediately sent for Federico, whom
+    his officers found miserably ill on a heap of straw. He was
+    brought to the palace, where the king ordered him to be cared
+    for, sending the messenger back to his mother to advise her how
+    the men had been found and in what great misery. The
+    Marchioness went to her husband, and, having cast herself at
+    his feet, besought him of a grace. The Marquis answered that he
+    would grant everything, so it did not treat of Federico. Then
+    the lady opened him the letter of the king of Naples, which had
+    such effect that it softened the soul of the Marquis, showing
+    him in how great misery his son had been; and so, giving the
+    letter to the Marchioness, he said, 'Do that which pleases
+    you.' The Marchioness straightway sent the prince money, and
+    clothes to clothe him, in order that he should return to
+    Mantua; and having come, the son cast himself at his father's
+    feet, imploring pardon for himself and for his attendants; and
+    he pardoned them, and gave those attendants enough to live
+    honorably and like noblemen, and they were called The Faithful
+    of the House of Gonzaga, and from them come the _Fedeli_ of
+    Mantua.
+
+    "The Marquis then, not to break faith, caused Federico to take
+    Margherita, daughter of the Duke of Bavaria, for his wife, and
+    celebrated the nuptials splendidly; so that there remained the
+    greatest love between father and son."
+
+The son succeeded to the father's dominion in 1478; and it is recorded
+of him in the "Flower of the Chronicles," that he was a hater of
+idleness, and a just man, greatly beloved by his people. They chiefly
+objected to him that he placed a Jew, Eusebio Malatesta, at the head
+of civil affairs; and this Jew was indeed the cause of great mischief:
+for Ridolfo Gonzaga coming to reside with his wife for a time at the
+court of his brother, the Marquis, Malatesta fell in love with
+her. She repelled him, and the bitter Jew thereupon so poisoned her
+husband's mind with accusations against her chastity, that he took her
+home to his town of Lazzaro, and there put the unhappy and innocent
+lady to death by the headsman's hand in the great square of the city.
+
+Federico was Marquis only six years, and died in 1484, leaving
+his marquisate to his son Francesco, the most ambitious, warlike,
+restless, splendid prince of his magnificent race. This Gonzaga wore a
+beard, and brought the custom into fashion in Italy again. He founded
+the famous breed of Mantuan horses, and gave them about free-handedly
+to other sovereigns of his acquaintance. To the English king he
+presented a steed which, if we may trust history, could have been sold
+for almost its weight in gold. He was so fond of hunting that he kept
+two hundred dogs of the chase, and one hundred and fifty birds of
+prey.
+
+Of course this Gonzaga was a soldier, and indeed he loved war better
+even than hunting, and delighted so much in personal feats of arms
+that, concealing his name and quality, in order that the combat should
+be in all things equal, he was wont to challenge renowned champions
+wherever he heard of them, and to meet them in the lists. Great part
+of his life was spent in the field; and he fought in turn on nearly
+all sides of the political questions then agitating Italy. In 1495
+he was at the head of the Venetian and other Italian troops when they
+beat the French under Charles VIII. at Taro, and made so little use
+of their victory as to let their vanquished invaders escape from them
+after all. Nevertheless, if the Gonzaga did not here show himself a
+great general, he did great feats of personal valor, penetrating to
+the midst of the French forces, wounding the king, and with his own
+hand taking prisoner the great Bastard of Bourbon. Venice paid him
+ten thousand ducats for gaining the victory, such as it was, and when
+peace was made he went to visit the French king at Vercelli; and there
+Charles gave his guest a present of two magnificent horses, which the
+Gonzaga returned yet more splendidly in kind. About five years later
+he was again at war with the French, and helped the Aragonese drive
+them out of Naples. In 1506, Pope Julius II. made him leader of the
+armies of the Church (for he had now quitted the Venetian service),
+and he reduced the city of Bologna to obedience to the Holy See. In
+1509 he joined the League of Cambray against Venice, and, being made
+Imperial Captain-General, was taken prisoner by the Venetians. They
+liberated him, however, the following year; and in 1513 we find him at
+the head of the league against the French.
+
+A curious anecdote of this Gonzaga's hospitality is also illustrative
+of the anomalous life of those times, when good faith had as little
+to do with the intercourse of nations as at present; but good fortune,
+when she appeared in the world, liked to put on a romantic and
+melodramatic guise. An ambassador from the Grand Turk on his way to
+Rome was taken by an enemy of the Pope, despoiled of all his money,
+and left planted, as the Italians expressively say, at Ancona.
+This ambassador was come to concert with Alexander VI. the death of
+Bajazet's brother, prisoner in the Pope's hands, and he bore the Pope
+a present of 50,000 gold ducats. It was Gian Della Rovere who seized
+and spoiled him, and sent the papers (letters of the Pope and Sultan)
+to Charles VIII. of France, to whom Alexander had been obliged to give
+the Grand Turk's brother. The magnificent Gonzaga hears of the Turk's
+embarrassing mischance, sends and fetches him to Mantua, clothes him,
+puts abundant money in his purse, and dispatches him on his way. The
+Sultan, in reward of this courtesy to his servant, gave a number of
+fine horses to the Marquis, who, possibly being tired of presenting
+his own horses, returned the Porte a ship-load of excellent Mantuan
+cheeses. This interchange of compliments seems to have led to a kind
+of romantic friendship between the Gonzaga and the Grand Turk, who did
+occasionally interest himself in the affairs of the Christian dogs;
+and who, when Francesco lay prisoner at Venice, actually wrote to the
+Serenest Senate, and asked his release as a personal grace to him, the
+Grand Turk. And Francesco was, thereupon, let go; the canny republic
+being willing to do the Sultan any sort of cheap favor.
+
+This Gonzaga, being so much engaged in war, seems to have had little
+time for the adornment of his capital. The Church of Our Lady of
+Victory is the only edifice which he added to it; and this was merely
+in glorification of his own triumph over the French at Taro. Mantegna
+painted an altar-piece for it, representing the Marquis and his wife
+on their knees before the Virgin, in act of rendering her thanks for
+the victory. The French nation avenged itself for whatever wrong was
+done its pride in this picture by stealing it away from Mantua in
+Napoleon's time; and it now hangs in the gallery of the Louvre.
+
+Francesco died in 1519; and after him his son, Federico II., the first
+Duke of Mantua, reigned some twenty-one years, and died in 1540. The
+marquisate in his time was made a duchy by the Emperor Charles V.,
+to whom the Gonzaga had given efficient aid in his wars against the
+French. This was in the year 1530; and three years later, when the
+Duke of Monferrato died, and the inheritance of his opulent little
+state was disputed by the Duke of Savoy, by the Marquis of Saluzzo,
+and by the Gonzaga, who had married the late Duke's daughter,
+Charles's influence secured it to the Mantuan. The dominions of the
+Gonzagas had now reached their utmost extent, and these dominions
+were not curtailed till the deposition of Fernando Carlo in 1708, when
+Monferrato was adjudged to the Duke of Savoy, and afterwards confirmed
+to him by treaty. It was separated from the capital of the Gonzagas by
+a wide extent of alien territory, but they held it with a strong
+hand, embellished the city, and founded there the strongest citadel in
+Italy.
+
+Federico, after his wars for the Emperor, appears to have reposed in
+peace for the rest of his days, and to have devoted himself to the
+adornment of Mantua and the aggrandizing of his family. His court
+was the home of many artists; and Titian painted for him the Twelve
+Caesars, which the Germans stole when they sacked the city in 1630.
+But his great agent and best beloved genius was Giulio Pippi, called
+Romano, who was conducted to Mantua by pleasant Count Baldassare
+Castiglione.
+
+Pleasant Count Baldassare Castiglione! whose incomparable book of the
+"Cortigiano" succeeded in teaching his countrymen every gentlemanly
+grace but virtue. He was born at Casatico in the Mantovano, in the
+year 1476, and went in his boyhood to be schooled at Milan, where he
+learnt the profession of arms. From Milan he went to Rome, where
+he exercised his profession of arms till the year 1504, when he was
+called to gentler uses at the court of the elegant Dukes of Urbino. He
+lived there as courtier and court-poet, and he returned to Rome as the
+ambassador from Urbino. Meantime his liege, Francesco Gonzaga, was but
+poorly pleased that so brilliant a Mantuan should spend his life in
+the service and ornament of other princes, and Castiglione came back
+to his native country about the year 1516. He married in Mantua, and
+there finished his famous book of "The Courtier," and succeeded in
+winning back the favor of his prince. Federico, the Duke, made him
+ambassador to Rome in 1528; and Baldassare did his master two signal
+services there,--he procured him to be named head of all the Papal
+forces, and he found him Giulio Romano. So the Duke suffered him to
+go as the Pope's Nuncio to Spain, and Baldassare finished his courtly
+days at Toledo in 1529.
+
+The poet made a detour to Mantua on his way to Spain, taking with
+him the painter, whom the Duke received with many caresses, as Vasari
+says, presented him a house honorably furnished, ordered provision for
+him and his pupils, gave them certain brave suits of velvet and satin,
+and, seeing that Giulio had no horse, called for his own favorite
+Luggieri, and bestowed it on him. Ah! they knew how to receive
+painters, those fine princes, who had merely to put their hands into
+their people's pocket, and take out what florins they liked. So the
+Duke presently set the artist to work, riding out with him through the
+gate of San Bastiano to some stables about a bow-shot from the walls,
+in the midst of a flat meadow, where he told Giulio that he would be
+glad (if it could be done without destroying the old walls) to have
+such buildings added to the stables as would serve him for a kind of
+lodge, to come out and merrily sup in when he liked. Whereupon Giulio
+began to think out the famous Palazzo del T.
+
+This painter is an unlucky kind of man, to whom all criticism seems
+to have agreed to attribute great power and deny great praise.
+Castiglione had found him at Rome, after the death of his master
+Raphael, when his genius, for good or for ill, began for the first
+time to find original expression. At Mantua, where he spent all the
+rest of his busy life, it is impossible not to feel in some degree
+the force of this genius. As in Venice all the Madonnas in the
+street-corner shrines have some touch of color to confess the
+painter's subjection to Titian or Tintoretto; as in Vicenza the
+edifices are all in Greekish taste, and stilted upon pedestals in
+honor and homage to Palladio; as in Parma Correggio has never died,
+but lives to this day in the mouths and chiaroscuro effects of all the
+figures in all the pictures painted there;--so in Mantua Giulio Romano
+is to be found in the lines of every painting and every palace. It is
+wonderful to see, in these little Italian cities which have been the
+homes of great men, how no succeeding generation has dared to wrong
+the memory of them by departing in the least from their precepts
+upon art. One fancies, for instance, the immense scorn with which the
+Vicentines would greet the audacity of any young architect who dared
+to think Gothic instead of Palladian Greek, and how they would put
+him to shame by asking him if he knew more than Palladio about
+architecture! It seems that original art cannot arise in the presence
+of the great virtues and the great errors of the past; and Italian art
+of this day seems incapable of even the feeble, mortal life of other
+modern art, in the midst of so much immortality.
+
+Giulio Romano did a little of everything for the Dukes of
+Mantua,--from painting the most delicate and improper little fresco
+for a bed-chamber to restraining the Po and the Mincio with immense
+dikes, restoring ancient edifices and building new ones, draining
+swamps and demolishing and reconstructing whole streets, painting
+palaces and churches, and designing the city slaughter-house. He grew
+old and very rich in the service of the Gonzagas; but though Mrs.
+Jameson says he commanded respect by a sense of his own dignity as an
+artist, the Bishop of Casale, who wrote the "Annali di Mantova," says
+that the want of nobility and purity in his style, and his "gallant
+inventions, were conformable to his own sensual life, and that he did
+not disdain to prostitute himself to the infamies of Aretino."
+
+His great architectural work in Mantua is the Palazzo del T, or Te,
+as it is now written. It was first called Palazzo del T, from the
+convergence of roads there in the form of that letter; and the modern
+Mantuans call it Del Te, from the superstition, transmitted to us by
+the Custode of the Ducal Palace, that the Gonzagas merely used it
+on pleasant afternoons to take tea in! so curiously has latter-day
+guidemanship interpreted the jolly purpose expressed by the Duke to
+Giulio. I say nothing to control the reader's choice between T and Te,
+and merely adhere to the elder style out of reverence for the past.
+It is certain that the air of the plain on which the palace stands
+is most unwholesome; and it may have been true that the dukes never
+passed the night there. Federico did not intend to build more than
+a lodge in this place; but fascinated with the design offered him
+by Giulio, he caused the artist to go on, and contrive him a palace
+instead. It stands, as Vasari says, about a good bow-shot from one of
+the city's gates; and going out to see the palace on our second day
+in Mantua, we crossed a drawbridge guarded by Austrian soldiers. Below
+languished a bed of sullen ooze, tangled and thickly grown with long,
+villainous grasses, and sending up a damp and deathly stench, which
+made all the faces we saw look feverish and sallow. Already at that
+early season the air was foul and heavy, and the sun, faintly making
+himself seen through the dun sky of the dull spring day, seemed sick
+to look upon the place, where indeed the only happy and lively things
+were the clouds of gnats that danced before us, and welcomed us to the
+Palazzo del T. Damp ditches surround the palace, in which these gnats
+seemed to have peculiar pleasure; and they took possession of the
+portico of the stately entrance of the edifice as we went in, and held
+it faithfully till we returned.
+
+In one of the first large rooms are the life-size portraits of the
+six finest horses of the Gonzaga stud, painted by the pupils of Giulio
+Romano, after the master's designs. The paintings attest the beauty of
+the Mantuan horses, and the pride and fondness of their ducal owners;
+and trustworthy critics have praised their eminent truth. But it is
+only the artist or the hippanthrop who can delight in them long; and
+we presently left them for the other chambers, in which the invention
+of Giulio had been used to please himself rather than his master.
+I scarcely mean to name the wonders of the palace, having, indeed,
+general associations with them, rather than particular recollections
+of them.
+
+One of the most famous rooms is the Chamber of Psyche (the apartments
+are not of great size), of which the ceiling is by Giulio and the
+walls are by his pupils. The whole illustrates, with every variety
+of fantastic invention, the story of Psyche, as told by Apuleius, and
+deserves to be curiously studied as a part of the fair outside of a
+superb and corrupt age, the inside of which was full of rottenness.
+The civilization of Italy, as a growth from the earliest Pagan times,
+and only modified by Christianity and the admixture of Northern blood
+and thought, is yet to be carefully analyzed; and until this analysis
+is made, discussion of certain features must necessarily be incomplete
+and unsatisfactory. No one, however, can stand in this Chamber of
+Psyche, and not feel how great reality the old mythology must still
+have had, not only for the artists who painted the room, but for
+the people who inhabited it and enjoyed it. I do not say that they
+believed it as they believed in the vital articles of Christian faith,
+but that they accepted it with the same spirit as they accepted the
+martyrology of the Church; and that to the fine gentlemen and ladies
+of the court, those jolly satyrs and careless nymphs, those Cupids
+and Psyches, and Dianas and Venuses, were of the same verity as the
+Fathers of the Desert, the Devil, and the great body of the saints.
+If they did not pray to them, they swore by them, and their names were
+much oftener on their lips; and the art of the time was so thoroughly
+Pagan, that it forgot all Christian holiness, and clung only to
+heathen beauty. When it had not actually a mythologic subject to deal
+with, it paganized Christian themes. St. Sebastian was made to look
+like Apollo, and Mary Magdalene was merely a tearful, triste Venus.
+There is scarcely a ray of feeling in Italian art since Raphael's
+time which suggests Christianity in the artist, or teaches it to the
+beholder. In confessedly Pagan subjects it was happiest, as in
+the life of Psyche, in this room; and here it inculcated a gay and
+spirited license, and an elegant absence of delicacy, which is still
+observable in Italian life. It would be instructive to know in what
+spirit the common Mantuans of his day looked upon the inventions of
+the painter, and how far the courtly circle which frequented this room
+went in discussion and comment on its subjects; they were not
+nice people, and probably had no nasty ideas about the unspeakable
+indecency of some of the scenes. [The ruin in the famous room frescoed
+with the Fall of the Giants commences on the very door-jambs, which
+are painted in broken and tumbling brick-work; and throughout there is
+a prodigiousness which does not surprise, and a bigness which does not
+impress; and the treatment of the subject can only be expressed by
+the Westernism _powerfully weak_. In Kugler's _Hand-book of Italian
+Painting_ are two illustrations, representing parts of the fresco,
+which give a fair idea of the whole.]
+
+Returning to the city we visited the house of Giulio Romano, which
+stands in one of the fine, lonesome streets, and at the outside
+of which we looked. The artist designed it himself; and it is very
+pretty, with delicacy of feeling in the fine stucco ornamentation, but
+is not otherwise interesting.
+
+We passed it, continuing our way toward the Arsenal, near which we had
+seen the women at work washing the linen coats of the garrison in the
+twilight of the evening before; and we now saw them again from the
+bridge, on which we paused to look at a picturesque bit of modern
+life in Mantua. The washing-machine (when the successful instrument
+is invented) may do its work as well, but not so charmingly, as these
+Mantuan girls did. They washed the linen in a clear, swift-running
+stream, diverted from the dam of the Mincio to furnish mill-power
+within the city wall; and we could look down the watercourse past
+old arcades of masonry half submerged in it, past pleasant angles of
+houses and a lazy mill-wheel turning slowly, slowly, till our view
+ended in the gallery of a time-worn palace, through the columns of
+which was seen the blue sky. Under the bridge the stream ran very
+strong and lucid, over long, green, undulating water-grasses, which it
+loved to dimple over and play with. On the right were the laundresses
+under the eaves of a wooden shed, each kneeling, as their custom is,
+in a three-sided box, and leaning forward over the washboard that
+sloped down into the water. As they washed they held the linen in one
+hand, and rubbed it with the other; then heaped it into a mass upon
+the board and beat it with great two-handed blows of a stick. They
+sang, meanwhile, one of those plaintive airs of which the Italian
+peasants are fond, and which rose in indescribable pathos, pulsing
+with their blows, and rhythmic with the graceful movement of their
+forms. Many of the women were young,--though they were of all
+ages,--and the prettiest among them was third from where we stood
+upon the bridge. She caught sight of the sketch-book which one of the
+travellers carried, and pointed it out to the rest, who could hardly
+settle to their work to be sketched. Presently an idle baker, whose
+shop adjoined the bridge, came out and leaned upon the parapet, and
+bantered the girls. "They are drawing the prettiest," he said, at
+which they all bridled a little; and she who knew herself to be
+prettiest hung her head and rubbed furiously at the linen. Long before
+the artist had finished the sketch, the lazy, good-humored crowd which
+the public practice of the fine arts always attract in Italy, had
+surrounded the strangers, and were applauding, commenting, comparing,
+and absorbing every stroke as it was made. When the book was closed
+and they walked away, a number of boys straggled after them some
+spaces, inspired by a curious longing and regret, like that which
+leads boys to the eager inspection of fireworks when they have gone
+out. We lost them at the first turning of the street, whither the
+melancholy chorus of the women's song had also followed us, and where
+it died pathetically away.
+
+In the evening we walked to the Piazza Virgiliana, the beautiful space
+laid out and planted with trees by the French, at the beginning of
+this century in honor of the great Mantuan poet. One of its bounds is
+the shore of the lake which surrounds the city, and from which now
+rose ghostly vapors on the still twilight air. Down the slow, dull
+current moved one of the picturesque black boats of the Po; and
+beyond, the level landscape had a pleasant desolation that recalled
+the scenery of the Middle Mississippi. It might have been here in this
+very water that the first-born of our first Duke of Mantua fell from
+his boat while hunting water-fowl in 1550, and took a fever of which
+he died only a short time after his accession to the sovereignty of
+the duchy. At any rate, the fact of the accident brings me back from
+lounging up and down Mantua to my grave duty of chronicler.
+Francesco's father had left him in childhood to the care of his uncle,
+the Cardinal Hercules, who ruled Mantua with a firm and able hand,
+increasing the income of the state, spending less upon the ducal stud,
+and cutting down the number of mouths at the ducal table from eight
+hundred to three hundred and fifty-one. His justice tended to severity
+rather than mercy; but reformers of our own time will argue well of
+his heart, that he founded in that time a place of refuge and
+retirement for abandoned women. Good Catholics will also be pleased to
+know that he was very efficient in suppressing the black heresy of
+Calvin, which had crept into Mantua in his day,--probably from
+Ferrara, where the black heretic himself was then, or about then, in
+hiding under the protection of the ill-advised Marchioness Renee. The
+good Cardinal received the Pope's applause for his energy in this
+matter, and I doubt not his hand fell heavily on the Calvinists. Of
+the Duke who died so young, the Venetian ambassador thought it worth
+while to write what I think it worth while to quote, as illustrating
+the desire of the Senate to have careful knowledge of its neighbors:
+"He is a boy of melancholy complexion. His eyes are full of spirit,
+but he does not delight in childish things, and seems secretly proud
+of being lord. He has an excellent memory, and shows much inclination
+for letters."
+
+His brother Guglielmo, who succeeded him in 1550, seems to have
+had the same affection for learning; but he was willful, harsh, and
+cruelly ambitious, and cared, an old writer says, for nothing so
+much as perpetuating the race of the Gonzagas in Mantua. He was a
+hunchback, and some of his family (who could not have understood his
+character) tried to persuade him not to assume the ducal dignity; but
+his haughty temper soon righted him in their esteem, and it is said
+that all the courtiers put on humps in honor of the Duke. He was not
+a great warrior, and there are few picturesque incidents in his reign.
+Indeed, nearly the last of these in Mantuan history was the coronation
+at Mantua of the excellent poet Lodovico Ariosto, by Charles V., in
+1532, Federico II. reigning. But the Mantuans of Guglielmo's day were
+not without their sensations, for three Japanese ambassadors passed
+through their city on the way to Rome. They were also awakened to
+religious zeal by the reappearance of Protestantism among them. The
+heresy was happily suppressed by the Inquisition, acting under Pius
+V., though with small thanks to Duke William, who seems to have taken
+no fervent part in the persecutions. "The proceedings," says Cantu,
+writing before slavery had been abolished, "were marked by those
+punishments which free America inflicts upon the negroes to-day,
+and which a high conception of the mission of the Church moves us
+to deplore." The Duke must have made haste after this to reconcile
+himself with the Church; for we read that two years later he was
+permitted to take a particle of the blood of Christ from the church of
+St. Andrea to that of Sta. Barbara, where he deposited it in a box of
+crystal and gold, and caused his statue to be placed before the shrine
+in the act of adoring the relic.
+
+Duke William managed his finances so well as to leave his spendthrift
+son Vincenzo a large sum of money to make away with after his death.
+Part of this, indeed, he had earned by obedience to his father's
+wishes in the article of matrimony. The prince was in love with the
+niece of the Duke of Bavaria, very lovely and certainly high-born
+enough, but having unhappily only sixty thousand crowns to her
+portion. So she was not to be thought of, and Vincenzo married the
+sister of the Duke of Parma, of whom he grew so fond, that, though
+two years of marriage brought them no children, he could scarce
+be persuaded to suffer her divorce on account of sterility. This
+happened, however, and the prince's affections were next engaged by
+the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The lady had a portion
+of three hundred thousand crowns, which entirely charmed the
+frugal-minded Duke William, and Vincenzo married her, after certain
+diplomatic preliminaries demanded by the circumstances, which scarcely
+bear statement in English, and which the present history would blush
+to give even in Italian.
+
+Indeed, he was a great beast, this splendid Vincenzo, both by his own
+fault and that of others; but it ought to be remembered of him, that
+at his solicitation the most clement lord of Ferrara liberated from
+durance in the hospital of St. Anna his poet Tasso, whom he had kept
+shut in that mad-house seven years. On his delivery, Tasso addressed
+his "Discorso" to Vincenzo's kinsman, the learned Cardinal Scipio
+Gonzaga; and to this prelate he submitted for correction the
+"Gerusalemme," as did Guarini his "Pastor Fido."
+
+When Vincenzo came to power he found a fat treasury, which he enjoyed
+after the fashion of the time, and which, having a princely passion
+for every costly pleasure, he soon emptied. He was crowned in 1587;
+and on his coronation day rode through the streets throwing gold to
+the people, after the manner of the Mantuan Dukes. He kept up an army
+of six thousand men, among a population of eighty thousand all told;
+and maintained as his guard "fifty archers on horseback, who also
+served with the arquebuse, and fifty light-horsemen for the guard of
+his own person, who were all excellently mounted, the Duke possessing
+such a noble stud of horses that he always had five hundred at
+his service, and kept in stable one hundred and fifty of marvelous
+beauty." He lent the Spanish king two hundred thousand pounds out
+of his father's sparings; and when the Archduchess of Austria,
+Margherita, passed through Mantua on her way to wed Philip II. of
+Spain, he gave her a diamond ring worth twelve thousand crowns. Next
+after women, he was madly fond of the theatre, and spent immense sums
+for actors. He would not, indeed, cede in splendor to the greatest
+monarchs, and in his reign of fifteen years he squandered fifty
+million crowns! No one will be surprised to learn from a contemporary
+writer in Mantua, that this excellent prince was adorned with all
+the Christian virtues; nor to be told by a later historian, that in
+Vincenzo's time Mantua was the most corrupt city in Europe. A satire
+of the year 1601, which this writer (Maffei) reduces to prose, says
+of that period: "Everywhere in Mantua are seen feasts, jousts, masks,
+banquets, plays, music, balls, delights, dancing. To these, the
+young girls," an enormity in Italy, "as well as the matrons, go in
+magnificent dresses; and even the churches are scenes of love-making.
+Good mothers, instead of teaching their daughters the use of the
+needle, teach them the arts of rouging, dressing, singing, and
+dancing. Naples and Milan scarcely produce silk enough, or India and
+Peru gold and gems enough, to deck out female impudence and pride.
+Courtiers and warriors perfume themselves as delicately as ladies;
+and even the food is scented, that the mouth may exhale fragrance.
+The galleries and halls of the houses are painted full of the loves
+of Mars and Venus, Leda and the Swan, Jove and Danae, while the
+devout solace themselves with such sacred subjects as Susannah and the
+Elders. The flower of chastity seems withered in Mantua. No longer in
+Lydia nor in Cyprus, but in Mantua, is fixed the realm of pleasure."
+The Mantuans were a different people in the old republican times, when
+a fine was imposed for blasphemy, and the blasphemer put into a basket
+and drowned in the lake, if he did not pay within fifteen days; which
+must have made profanity a luxury even to the rich. But in that day
+a man had to pay twenty soldi (seventy-five cents) if he spoke to
+a woman in church; and women were not allowed even the moderate
+diversion of going to funerals, and could not wear silk lace about the
+neck, nor have dresses that dragged more than a yard, nor crowns of
+pearls or gems, nor belts worth more than ten livres (twenty-five
+dollars), nor purses worth more than fifteen soldi (fifty cents.)
+
+Possibly as an antidote for the corruption brought into the world with
+Vincenzo, there was another Gonzaga born about the same period, who
+became in due time Saint Louis Gonzaga, and remains to this day one of
+the most powerful friends of virtue to whom a good Catholic can pray.
+He is particularly recommended by his biographer, the Jesuit Father
+Cesari, in cases of carnal temptation, and improving stories are told
+Italian youth of the miracles he works under such circumstances. He
+vowed chastity for his own part at an age when most children do not
+know good from evil, and he carried the fulfillment of this vow to
+such extreme, that, being one day at play of forfeits with other
+boys and girls, and being required to kiss--not one of the little
+maidens--but her _shadow_ on the wall, he would not, preferring to
+lose his pawn. Everybody, I think, will agree with Father Cesari that
+it would be hard to draw chastity finer than this.
+
+San Luigi Gonzaga descended from that Ridolfo who put his wife to
+death, and his father was Marquis of Castiglione delle Stivere. He was
+born in 1568, and, being the first son, was heir to the marquisate;
+but from his earliest years he had a call to the Church. His family
+did everything possible to dissuade him--his father with harshness,
+and his uncle, Duke William of Mantua, with tenderness--from his
+vocation. The latter even sent a "bishop of rare eloquence" to labor
+with the boy at Castiglione; but everything was done in vain. In due
+time Luigi joined the Company of Jesus, renounced this world, and
+died at Rome in the odor of sanctity, after doing such good works as
+surprised every one. His brother Ridolfo succeeded to the marquisate,
+and fell into a quarrel with Duke William about lands, which dispute
+Luigi composed before his death. About all which the reverend Jesuit
+Father Tolomei has shown how far heaviness can go in the dramatic
+form, and has written a pitiless play, wherein everybody goes into a
+convent with the fall of the curtain. Till the reader has read this
+play, he has never (properly speaking) been bored. For the happiness
+of mankind, it has not been translated out of the original Italian.
+
+From the time of the first Vincenzo's death, there are only two tragic
+events which lift the character of Mantuan history above the quality
+of _chronique scandaleuse_, namely, the Duke Ferdinand's repudiation
+of Camilla Faa di Casale, and the sack of Mantua in 1630. The first of
+these events followed close upon the demise of the splendid Vincenzo;
+for his son Francesco reigned but a short time, and died, leaving a
+little daughter of three years to the guardianship of her uncle,
+the Cardinal Ferdinand. The law of the Mantuan succession excluded
+females; and Ferdinand, dispensed from his ecclesiastical functions
+by the Pope, ascended the ducal throne. In 1615, not long after his
+accession, as the chronicles relate, in passing through a chamber
+of the palace he saw a young girl playing upon a cithern, and being
+himself young, and of the ardent temper of the Gonzagas, he fell in
+love with the fair minstrel. She was the daughter of a noble servant
+of the Duke, who had once been his ambassador to the court of the Duke
+of Savoy, and was called Count Ardizzo Faa Monferrino di Casale; but
+his Grace did not on that account hesitate to attempt corrupting her;
+indeed, a courtly father of that day might well be supposed to have
+few scruples that would interfere with a gracious sovereign's designs
+upon his daughter. Singularly enough, the chastity of Camilla was
+so well guarded that the ex-cardinal was at last forced to propose
+marriage. It seems that the poor girl loved her ducal wooer; and
+besides, the ducal crown was a glittering temptation, and she
+consented to a marriage which, for state and family reasons, was made
+secret. When the fact was bruited, it raised the wrath and ridicule
+of Ferdinand's family, and the Duke's sister Margaret, Duchess of
+Ferrara, had so lofty a disdain of his _mesalliance_ with an inferior,
+that she drove him to desperation with her sarcasms. About this time
+Camilla's father died, with strong evidences of poisoning; and the
+wife being left helpless and friendless, her noble husband resorted to
+the artifice of feigning that there had never been any marriage, and
+thus sought to appease his family. Unhappily, however, he had given
+her a certificate of matrimony, which she refused to surrender when
+he put her away, so that the Duke, desiring afterwards to espouse
+the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was obliged to present
+a counterfeit certificate to his bride, who believed it the real
+marriage contract, and destroyed it. When the Duchess discovered the
+imposition, she would not rest till she had wrung the real document
+from Camilla, under the threat of putting her son to death. The
+miserable mother then retired to a convent, and died of a broken
+heart, while Ferdinand bastardized his only legitimate son, a noble
+boy, whom his mother had prettily called Jacinth. After this, a
+kind of retribution, amid all his political successes, seems to have
+pursued the guilty Duke. His second wife was too fat to bear children,
+but not to bear malice; and she never ceased to distrust and reproach
+the Duke, whom she could not believe in anything since the affair
+of the counterfeit marriage contract. She was very religious, and
+embittered Ferdinand's days with continued sermons and reproofs,
+and made him order, in the merry Mantuan court, all the devotions
+commanded by her confessor.
+
+So Ferdinand died childless, and, it is said, in sore remorse, and was
+succeeded in 1626 by his brother Vincenzo, another hope of the faith
+and light of the Church. His brief reign lasted but one year, and
+was ignoble as it was brief, and fitly ended the direct line of the
+Gonzagas. Vincenzo, though an ecclesiastic, never studied anything,
+and was disgracefully ignorant. Lacking the hereditary love of
+letters, he had not the warlike boldness of his race; and resembled
+his ancestors only in the love he bore to horses, hunting, and women.
+He was enamored of the widow of one of his kinsmen, a woman no longer
+young, but of still agreeable person, strong will, and quick wit,
+and of a fascinating presence, which Vincenzo could not resist. The
+excellent prince was wooing her, with a view to seduction, when he
+received the nomination of cardinal from Pope Paul V. He pressed his
+suit, but the lady would consent to nothing but marriage, and Vincenzo
+bundled up the cardinal's purple and sent it back, with a very
+careless and ill-mannered letter to the ireful Pope, who swore never
+to make another Gonzaga cardinal. He then married the widow, but soon
+wearied of her, and spent the rest of his days in vain attempts
+to secure a divorce, in order to be restored to his ecclesiastical
+benefices. And one Christmas morning _he_ died childless; and three
+years later the famous sack of Mantua took place. The events leading
+to this crime are part of one of the most complicated episodes of
+Italian history.
+
+Ferdinand, as guardian of his brother's daughter Maria, claimed
+the Duchy of Monferrato as part of his dominion; but his claim was
+disputed by Maria's grandfather, the Duke of Savoy, who contended that
+it reverted to him, on the death of his daughter, as a fief which had
+been added to Mantua merely by the intermarriage of the Gonzagas with
+his family. He was supported in this claim by the Spaniards, then at
+Milan. The Venetians and the German Emperor supported Ferdinand, and
+the French advanced the claim of a third, a descendant of Lodovico
+Gonzaga, who had left Mantua a century before, and entered upon the
+inheritance of the Duchy of Nevers-Rethel. The Duke of Savoy was one
+of the boldest of his warlike race; and the Italians had great hopes
+of him as one great enough to drive the barbarians out of Italy. But
+nearly three centuries more were wanted to raise his family to the
+magnitude of a national purpose; and Carlo Emanuel spent his greatness
+in disputes with the petty princes about him. In this dispute for
+Monferrato he was worsted; for at the treaty of Pavia, Monferrato was
+assured to Duke Ferdinand of Mantua.
+
+Ferdinand afterwards died without issue, and Vincenzo likewise died
+childless; and Charles Gonzaga of Nevers-Rethel, who had married
+Maria, Ferdinand's ward, became heir to the Duchy of Mantua, but his
+right was disputed by Ferrante Gonzaga of Guastalla. Charles hurriedly
+and half secretly introduced himself into Mantua without consultation
+with Venetian, Spaniard, or German. While Duke Olivares of Spain was
+meditating his recognition, his officer at Milan tried to seize Mantua
+and failed; but the German Emperor had been even more deeply offended,
+and claimed the remission of Charles's rights as a feudatory of the
+Roman Empire, until he should have regularly invested him. Charles
+prepared for defense. Meanwhile Spain and Savoy seized Monferrato, but
+they were afterwards defeated by the French, and the Spanish Milanese
+was overrun by the Venetians and Mantuans. The German Emperor then
+sent down his Landsknechts, and in 1630 besieged Mantua, while the
+French promised help and gave none, and the Pope exhorted Charles
+to submit. The Venetians, occupied with the Uskok pirates, could do
+little in his defense. To the horrors of this unequal and desperate
+war were added those of famine; and the Jews, passing between the camp
+and the city, brought a pest from the army into Mantua, which raged
+with extraordinary violence among the hungry and miserable people. In
+vain they formed processions, and carried the blood of Christ about
+the city. So many died that there were not boats enough to bear them
+away to their sepulture in the lakes, and the bodies rotted in the
+streets. There was not wanting at this time the presence of a traitor
+in the devoted city; and that this wretch was a Swiss will be a
+matter of no surprise. The despicable valor of these republicans has
+everywhere formed the best defense of tyrants, and their fidelity has
+always been at the service of the highest bidder. The recreant was
+a lieutenant in the Swiss Guard of the Duke; and when he had led the
+Germans into Mantua, and received the reward of his infamy, two German
+soldiers, placed over him for his protection, killed him and plundered
+him of his spoil.
+
+The sack now began, and lasted three days, with unspeakable horrors.
+The Germans (then the most slavish and merciless of soldiers) violated
+Mantuan women, and buried their victims alive. The harlots of their
+camp cast off their rags, and robing themselves in the richest spoils
+they could find, rioted with brutal insult through the streets, and
+added the shame of drunken orgies to the dreadful scene of blood and
+tears. The Jews were driven forth almost naked from the Ghetto. The
+precious monuments of ages were destroyed; or such as the fury of the
+soldiers spared, the avarice of their generals consumed; and pictures,
+statues, and other works of art were stolen and carried away. The
+churches were plundered, the sacred houses of religion were sacked,
+and the nuns who did not meet a worse fate went begging through the
+streets.
+
+The imperial general, Aldringher, had, immediately upon entering the
+city, appropriated the Ducal Palace to himself as his share of the
+booty. He placed a strong guard around it, and spoiled it at leisure
+and systematically, and gained fabulous sums from the robbery. After
+the sack was ended, he levied upon the population (from whom his
+soldiers had forced everything that terror and torture could wring
+from them) four contributions, amounting to a hundred thousand
+doubloons. This population had, during the siege and sack, been
+reduced from thirty to twelve thousand; and Aldringher had so
+thoroughly accomplished his part of the spoliation, that the Duke
+Charles, returning after the withdrawal of the Germans, could not find
+in the Ducal Palace so much as a bench to sit upon. He and his family
+had fled half naked from their beds on the entry of the Germans, and,
+after a pause in the citadel, had withdrawn to Ariano, whence the
+Duke sent ambassadors to Vienna to expose his miserable fate to
+the Emperor. The conduct of Aldringher was severely rebuked at the
+capital; and the Empress sent Carlo's wife ten thousand zecchini, with
+which they returned at length to Mantua. It is melancholy to read how
+his neighbors had to compassionate his destitution: how the Grand Duke
+of Tuscany sent him upholstery for two state chambers; how the Duke
+of Parma supplied his table-service; how Alfonso of Modena gave him
+a hundred pairs of oxen, and as many peasants to till his desolated
+lands. His people always looked upon him with evil eyes, as the cause
+of their woes; and after a reign of ten years he died of a broken
+heart, or, as some thought, of poison.
+
+Carlo had appointed as his successor his nephew and namesake, who
+succeeded to the throne ten years after his uncle's death, the
+princess Maria Gonzaga being regent during his minority. Carlo II.
+early manifested the amorous disposition of his blood, but his
+reign was not distinguished by remarkable events. He was of imperial
+politics during those interminable French-Austrian wars, and the
+French desolated his dominions more or less. In the time of this
+Carlo II., we read of the Jews being condemned to pay the wages of
+the Duke's archers for the extremely improbable crime of killing some
+Hebrews who had been converted; and there is account of the Duchess
+going on foot to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Grace, to render thanks
+for her son's recovery from a fever, and her daughter's recovery from
+the bite of a monkey. Mantua must also have regained something of its
+former gayety; for in 1652 the Austrian Archdukes and the Medici spent
+Carnival there. Carlo II. died, like his father, with suspicions of
+poisoning, and undoubted evidences of debauchery. He was a generous
+and amiable prince; and, though a shameless profligate, was beloved by
+his subjects, with whom, no doubt, his profligacy was not a reproach.
+
+Ferdinand Carlo, whose ignoble reign lasted from 1665 to 1708, was
+the last and basest of his race. The histories of his country do not
+attribute a single virtue to this unhappy prince, who seems to have
+united in himself all the vices of all the Gonzagas. He was licentious
+and depraved as the first Vincenzo, and he had not Vincenzo's
+courage; he was luxurious as the second Francesco, but had none of
+his generosity; he taxed his people heavily that he might meanly enjoy
+their substance without making them even the poor return of national
+glory; he was grasping as Guglielmo, but saved nothing to the state;
+he was as timid as the second Vincenzo, and yet made a feint of making
+war, and went to Hungary at one time to fight against the Turk. But he
+loved far better to go to Venice in his gilded barge, and to spend his
+Carnivals amid the infinite variety of that city's dissoluteness. He
+was so ignorant as scarcely to be able to write his name; but he knew
+all vicious things from his cradle, as if, indeed, he had been gifted
+to know them by instinct through the profligacy of his parents. It is
+said that even the degraded Mantuans blushed to be ruled by so dull
+and ignorant a wretch; but in his time, nevertheless, Mantua was all
+rejoicings, promenades, pleasure-voyages, and merry-makings. "The
+Duke recruited women from every country to stock his palace," says an
+Italian author, "where they played, sang, and made merry at his will
+and theirs." "In Venice," says Volta, "he surrendered himself to such
+diversions without shame, or stint of expense. He not only took part
+in all public entertainments and pleasures of that capital, but he
+held a most luxurious and gallant court of his own; and all night long
+his palace was the scene of theatrical representations by dissolute
+women, with music and banqueting, so that he had a worse name than
+Sardanapalus of old." He sneaked away to these gross delights in 1700,
+while the Emperor was at war with the Spaniards, and left his Duchess
+(a brave and noble woman, the daughter of Ferrante Gonzaga, Duke of
+Guastalla) to take care of the duchy, then in great part occupied by
+Spanish and French forces. This was the War of the Spanish Succession;
+and it used up poor Ferdinand, who had not a shadow of interest in
+it. He had sold the fortress of Casale to the French in 1681, feigning
+that they had taken it from him by fraud: and now he declared that
+he was forced to admit eight thousand French and Spanish troops into
+Mantua. Perhaps indeed he was, but the Emperor never would believe it;
+and he pronounced Ferdinand guilty of felony against the Empire, and
+deposed him from his duchy. The Duke appealed against this sentence to
+the Diet of Ratisbon, and, pending the Diet's decision, made a journey
+of pleasure to France, where the Grand Monarch named him generalissimo
+of the French forces in Italy, though he never commanded them. He
+came back to Mantua after a little, and built himself a splendid
+theatre,--the cheerful Duke.
+
+But his end was near. The French and Austrians made peace in 1707; and
+next year, Monferrato having fallen to Savoy, the Austrians entered
+Mantua, whence the Duke promptly fled. The Austrians marched into
+Mantua on the 29th of February, that being leap-year, and Ferdinand
+came back no more. Indeed, trusting in false hopes of restoration
+held out to him by Venice and France, he died on the 5th of the July
+following, at Padua,--it was said by poison, but more probably of sin
+and sorrow. So ended Ducal Mantua.
+
+The Austrians held the city till 1797. The French Revolution took
+it and kept it till 1799, and then left it to the Austrians for two
+years. Then the Cisalpine Republic possessed it till 1802; and then it
+was made part of the Kingdom of Italy, and so continued twelve years;
+after which it fell again to Austria. In 1848, there was a revolution,
+and the Austrian soldiers stole the precious silver case that held
+the phial of the true blood. Now at last it belongs to the Kingdom
+of Italy, with the other forts of the Quadrilateral--thanks to the
+Prussian needle-gun.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Italian Journeys, by William Dean Howells
+
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