SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN ITALY AND GREECE, COMPLETE

 BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

 AUTHOR OF "RENAISSANCE IN ITALY", "STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS, " ETC

 NEW EDITION

 LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 1914

 FIRST SERIES

PREFATORY NOTE

In preparing this new edition of the late J. A. Symonds's three volumesof travels, 'Sketches in Italy and Greece, ' 'Sketches and Studiesin Italy, ' and 'Italian Byways, ' nothing has been changed except theorder of the Essays. For the convenience of travellers a topographicalarrangement has been adopted. This implied a new title to cover thecontents of all three volumes, and 'Sketches and Studies in Italyand Greece' has been chosen as departing least from the author's ownphraseology. 

HORATIO F. BROWN. Venice: _June_ 1898. 

 CONTENTS

 THE LOVE OF THE ALPS

 WINTER NIGHTS AT DAVOS

 BACCHUS IN GRAUBÜNDEN

 OLD TOWNS OF PROVENCE

 THE CORNICE

 AJACCIO

 MONTE GENEROSO

 LOMBARD VIGNETTES

 COMO AND IL MEDEGHINO

 BERGAMO AND BARTOLOMMEO COLLEONI

 CREMA AND THE CRUCIFIX

 CHERUBINO AT THE SCALA THEATRE

 A VENETIAN MEDLEY

 THE GONDOLIER'S WEDDING

 A CINQUE CENTO BRUTUS

 TWO DRAMATISTS OF THE LAST CENTURY

 SKETCHES AND STUDIES

 IN

 ITALY AND GREECE

_THE LOVE OF THE ALPS_[1]

Of all the joys in life, none is greater than the joy of arriving onthe outskirts of Switzerland at the end of a long dusty day's journeyfrom Paris. The true epicure in refined pleasures will never travelto Basle by night. He courts the heat of the sun and the monotonyof French plains, --their sluggish streams and never-ending poplartrees--for the sake of the evening coolness and the gradual approachto the great Alps, which await him at the close of the day. It isabout Mulhausen that he begins to feel a change in the landscape. The fields broaden into rolling downs, watered by clear and runningstreams; the green Swiss thistle grows by riverside and cowshed; pinesbegin to tuft the slopes of gently rising hills; and now the sun hasset, the stars come out, first Hesper, then the troop of lesser lights;and he feels--yes, indeed, there is now no mistake--the well-known, well-loved magical fresh air, that never fails to blow from snowymountains and meadows watered by perennial streams. The last hour isone of exquisite enjoyment, and when he reaches Basle, he scarcelysleeps all night for hearing the swift Rhine beneath the balconies, and knowing that the moon is shining on its waters, through the town, beneath the bridges, between pasture-lands and copses, up the stillmountain-girdled valleys to the ice-caves where the water springs. There is nothing in all experience of travelling like this. We maygreet the Mediterranean at Marseilles with enthusiasm; on enteringRome by the Porta del Popolo, we may reflect with pride that wehave reached the goal of our pilgrimage, and are at last amongworld-shaking memories. But neither Rome nor the Riviera wins ourhearts like Switzerland. We do not lie awake in London thinking ofthem; we do not long so intensely, as the year comes round, to revisitthem. Our affection is less a passion than that which we cherish forSwitzerland. 

Why, then, is this? What, after all, is the love of the Alps, and whenand where did it begin? It is easier to ask these questions than toanswer them. The classic nations hated mountains. Greek and Romanpoets talk of them with disgust and dread. Nothing could have beenmore depressing to a courtier of Augustus than residence at Aosta, even though he found his theatres and triumphal arches there. Whereverclassical feeling has predominated, this has been the case. Cellini'sMemoirs, written in the height of pagan Renaissance, well expressthe aversion which a Florentine or Roman felt for the inhospitablewildernesses of Switzerland. [2] Dryden, in his dedication to 'TheIndian Emperor, ' says, 'High objects, it is true, attract the sight;but it looks up with pain on craggy rocks and barren mountains, andcontinues not intent on any object which is wanting in shades andgreen to entertain it. ' Addison and Gray had no better epithets than'rugged, ' 'horrid, ' and the like for Alpine landscape. The classicspirit was adverse to enthusiasm for mere nature. Humanity was tooprominent, and city life absorbed all interests, --not to speak of whatperhaps is the weightiest reason--that solitude, indifferentaccommodation, and imperfect means of travelling, rendered mountainouscountries peculiarly disagreeable. It is impossible to enjoy art ornature while suffering from fatigue and cold, dreading the attacks ofrobbers, and wondering whether you will find food and shelter at theend of your day's journey. Nor was it different in the Middle Ages. Then individuals had either no leisure from war or strife with theelements, or else they devoted themselves to the salvation of theirsouls. But when the ideas of the Middle Ages had decayed, whenimproved arts of life had freed men from servile subjection to dailyneeds, when the bondage of religious tyranny had been thrown off andpolitical liberty allowed the full development of tastes andinstincts, when, moreover, the classical traditions had lost theirpower, and courts and coteries became too narrow for the activity ofman, --then suddenly it was discovered that Nature in herself possessedtranscendent charms. It may seem absurd to class them all together;yet there is no doubt that the French Revolution, the criticism of theBible, Pantheistic forms of religious feeling, landscape-painting, Alpine travelling, and the poetry of Nature, are all signs of the samemovement--of a new Renaissance. Limitations of every sort have beenshaken off during the last century; all forms have been destroyed, allquestions asked. The classical spirit loved to arrange, model, preserve traditions, obey laws. We are intolerant of everything thatis not simple, unbiassed by prescription, liberal as the wind, andnatural as the mountain crags. We go to feed this spirit of freedomamong the Alps. What the virgin forests of America are to theAmericans, the Alps are to us. What there is in these huge blocks andwalls of granite crowned with ice that fascinates us, it is hard toanalyse. Why, seeing that we find them so attractive, they should haverepelled our ancestors of the fourth generation and all the worldbefore them, is another mystery. We cannot explain what rapport thereis between our human souls and these inequalities in the surface ofthe earth which we call Alps. Tennyson speaks of

 Some vague emotion of delight In gazing up an Alpine height, and its vagueness eludes definition. The interest which physicalscience has created for natural objects has something to do with it. Curiosity and the charm of novelty increase this interest. No towns, no cultivated tracts of Europe however beautiful, form such a contrastto our London life as Switzerland. Then there is the health and joythat comes from exercise in open air; the senses freshened by goodsleep; the blood quickened by a lighter and rarer atmosphere. Ourmodes of life, the breaking down of class privileges, the extension ofeducation, which contribute to make the individual greater and societyless, render the solitude of mountains refreshing. Facilities oftravelling and improved accommodation leave us free to enjoy thenatural beauty which we seek. Our minds, too, are prepared tosympathise with the inanimate world; we have learned to look on theuniverse as a whole, and ourselves as a part of it, related by closeties of friendship to all its other members Shelley's, Wordsworth's, Goethe's poetry has taught us this; we are all more or lessPantheists, worshippers of 'God in Nature, ' convinced of theomnipresence of the informing mind. 

Thus, when we admire the Alps, we are after all but children ofthe century. We follow its inspiration blindly; and while we thinkourselves spontaneous in our ecstasy, perform the part for which wehave been trained from childhood by the atmosphere in which we live. It is this very unconsciousness and universality of the impulse weobey which makes it hard to analyse. Contemporary history is difficultto write; to define the spirit of the age in which we live is stillmore difficult; to account for 'impressions which owe all their forceto their identity with themselves' is most difficult of all. We mustbe content to feel, and not to analyse. 

Rousseau has the credit of having invented the love of Nature. Perhapshe first expressed, in literature, the pleasures of open life amongthe mountains, of walking tours, of the '_école buissonnière_, 'away from courts, and schools, and cities, which it is the fashion nowto love. His bourgeois birth and tastes, his peculiar religiousand social views, his intense self-engrossment, --all favoured thedevelopment of Nature-worship. But Rousseau was not alone, nor yetcreative, in this instance. He was but one of the earliest to seizeand express a new idea of growing humanity. For those who seem to bethe most original in their inauguration of periods are only suchas have been favourably placed by birth and education to imbibe thefloating creeds of the whole race. They resemble the first cases of anepidemic, which become the centres of infection and propagate disease. At the time of Rousseau's greatness the French people were initiative. In politics, in literature, in fashions, and in philosophy, they hadfor some time led the taste of Europe. But the sentiment which firstreceived a clear and powerful expression in the works of Rousseau, soon declared itself in the arts and literature of other nations. Goethe, Wordsworth, and the earlier landscape-painters, proved thatGermany and England were not far behind the French. In England thislove of Nature for its own sake is indigenous, and has at all timesbeen peculiarly characteristic of our genius. Therefore it is notsurprising that our life and literature and art have been foremostin developing the sentiment of which we are speaking. Our poets, painters, and prose writers gave the tone to European thought in thisrespect. Our travellers in search of the adventurous and picturesque, our Alpine Club, have made of Switzerland an English playground. 

The greatest period in our history was but a foreshadowing of this. To return to Nature-worship was but to reassume the habits of theElizabethan age, altered indeed by all the changes of religion, politics, society, and science which the last three centuries havewrought, yet still, in its original love of free open life among thefields and woods, and on the sea, the same. Now the French nationalgenius is classical. It reverts to the age of Louis XIV. , andRousseauism in their literature is as true an innovation andparenthesis as Pope-and-Drydenism was in ours. As in the age of theReformation, so in this, the German element of the modern characterpredominates. During the two centuries from which we have emerged, theLatin element had the upper hand. Our love of the Alps is a Gothic, aTeutonic, instinct; sympathetic with all that is vague, infinite, andinsubordinate to rules, at war with all that is defined and systematicin our genius. This we may perceive in individuals as well as in thebroader aspects of arts and literatures. The classically minded man, the reader of Latin poets, the lover of brilliant conversation, the frequenter of clubs and drawing-rooms, nice in his personalrequirements, scrupulous in his choice of words, averse to unnecessaryphysical exertion, preferring town to country life, _cannot_deeply feel the charm of the Alps. Such a man will dislike German art, and however much he may strive to be Catholic in his tastes, will findas he grows older that his liking for Gothic architecture and modernpainting diminish almost to aversion before an increasing admirationfor Greek peristyles and the Medicean Venus. If in respect ofspeculation all men are either Platonists or Aristotelians, in respectof taste all men are either Greek or German. 

At present the German, the indefinite, the natural, commands; theGreek, the finite, the cultivated, is in abeyance. We who talk somuch about the feeling of the Alps, are creatures, not creators of our_cultus_, --a strange reflection, proving how much greater man isthan men, the common reason of the age in which we live than our ownreasons, its constituents and subjects. 

Perhaps it is our modern tendency to 'individualism' which makes theAlps so much to us. Society is there reduced to a vanishing point--noclaims are made on human sympathies--there is no need to toil inyoke-service with our fellows. We may be alone, dream our owndreams, and sound the depths of personality without the reproach ofselfishness, without a restless wish to join in action or money-makingor the pursuit of fame. To habitual residents among the Alps thisabsence of social duties and advantages may be barbarising, evenbrutalising. But to men wearied with too much civilisation, and deafened by the noise of great cities, it is beyond measurerefreshing. Then, again, among the mountains history finds no place. The Alps have no past nor present nor future. The human beings wholive upon their sides are at odds with nature, clinging on for bareexistence to the soil, sheltering themselves beneath protecting rocksfrom avalanches, damming up destructive streams, all but annihilatedevery spring. Man, who is paramount in the plain, is nothing here. Hisarts and sciences, and dynasties, and modes of life, and mighty works, and conquests and decays, demand our whole attention in Italy orEgypt. But here the mountains, immemorially the same, which were, which are, and which are to be, present a theatre on which the soulbreathes freely and feels herself alone. Around her on all sides isGod, and Nature, who is here the face of God and not the slave of man. The spirit of the world hath here not yet grown old. She is as youngas on the first day; and the Alps are a symbol of the self-creating, self-sufficing, self-enjoying universe which lives for its own ends. For why do the slopes gleam with flowers, and the hillsides deckthemselves with grass, and the inaccessible ledges of black rock beartheir tufts of crimson primroses and flaunting tiger-lilies? Why, morning after morning, does the red dawn flush the pinnacles of MonteRosa above cloud and mist unheeded? Why does the torrent shout, theavalanche reply in thunder to the music of the sun, the trees androcks and meadows cry their 'Holy, Holy, Holy'? Surely not for us. We are an accident here, and even the few men whose eyes are fixedhabitually upon these things are dead to them--the peasants do noteven know the names of their own flowers, and sigh with envy when youtell them of the plains of Lincolnshire or Russian steppes. 

But indeed there is something awful in the Alpine elevation abovehuman things. We do not love Switzerland merely because we associateits thought with recollections of holidays and joyfulness. Some ofthe most solemn moments of life are spent high up above among themountains, on the barren tops of rocky passes, where the soul hasseemed to hear in solitude a low controlling voice. It is almostnecessary for the development of our deepest affections that some sadand sombre moments should be interchanged with hours of merriment andelasticity. It is this variety in the woof of daily life which endearsour home to us; and perhaps none have fully loved the Alps who havenot spent some days of meditation, or it may be of sorrow, among theirsolitudes. Splendid scenery, like music, has the power to make 'ofgrief itself a fiery chariot for mounting above the sources of grief, 'to ennoble and refine our passions, and to teach us that our livesare merely moments in the years of the eternal Being. There are many, perhaps, who, within sight of some great scene among the Alps, uponthe height of the Stelvio or the slopes of Mürren, or at night inthe valley of Courmayeur, have felt themselves raised above caresand doubts and miseries by the mere recognition of unchangeablemagnificence; have found a deep peace in the sense of their ownnothingness. It is not granted to us everyday to stand upon thesepinnacles of rest and faith above the world. But having once stoodthere, how can we forget the station? How can we fail, amid thetumult of our common cares, to feel at times the hush of that far-offtranquillity? When our life is most commonplace, when we are ill orweary in city streets, we can remember the clouds upon the mountainswe have seen, the sound of innumerable waterfalls, and the scent ofcountless flowers. A photograph of Bisson's or of Braun's, the name ofsome well-known valley, the picture of some Alpine plant, rouses thesacred hunger in our souls, and stirs again the faith in beauty andin rest beyond ourselves which no man can take from us. We owe adeep debt of gratitude to everything which enables us to rise abovedepressing and enslaving circumstances, which brings us nearer in someway or other to what is eternal in the universe, and which makes usknow that, whether we live or die, suffer or enjoy, life and gladnessare still strong in the world. On this account, the proper attitudeof the soul among the Alps is one of silence. It is almost impossiblewithout a kind of impiety to frame in words the feelings they inspire. Yet there are some sayings, hallowed by long usage, which throngthe mind through a whole summer's day, and seem in harmony with itsemotions--some portions of the Psalms or lines of greatest poets, inarticulate hymns of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, waifs and strays notalways apposite, but linked by strong and subtle chains of feelingwith the grandeur of the mountains. This reverential feeling forthe Alps is connected with the Pantheistic form of our religioussentiments to which I have before alluded. It is a trite remark, thateven devout men of the present generation prefer temples _not_made with hands to churches, and worship God in the fields morecontentedly than in their pews. What Mr. Ruskin calls 'the instinctivesense of the divine presence not formed into distinct belief' lies atthe root of our profound veneration for the nobler aspects of mountainscenery. This instinctive sense has been very variously expressed byGoethe in Faust's celebrated confession of faith, by Shelley in thestanzas of 'Adonais, ' which begin 'He is made one with nature, ' byWordsworth in the lines on Tintern Abbey, and lately by Mr. Roden Noelin his noble poems of Pantheism. It is more or less strongly felt byall who have recognised the indubitable fact that religious belief isundergoing a sure process of change from the dogmatic distinctness ofthe past to some at present dimly descried creed of the future. Suchperiods of transition are of necessity full of discomfort, doubt, andanxiety, vague, variable, and unsatisfying. The men in whose spiritsthe fermentation of the change is felt, who have abandoned theirold moorings, and have not yet reached the haven for which they aresteering, cannot but be indistinct and undecided in their faith. Theuniverse of which they form a part becomes important to them in itsinfinite immensity. The principles of beauty, goodness, order and law, no longer connected in their minds with definite articles of faith, find symbols in the outer world. They are glad to fly at certainmoments from mankind and its oppressive problems, for which religionno longer provides a satisfactory solution, to Nature, where theyvaguely localise the spirit that broods over us controlling all ourbeing. To such men Goethe's hymn is a form of faith, and born of sucha mood are the following far humbler verses:--

 At Mürren let the morning lead thee out To walk upon the cold and cloven hills, To hear the congregated mountains shout Their pæan of a thousand foaming rills. Raimented with intolerable light The snow-peaks stand above thee, row on row Arising, each a seraph in his might; An organ each of varied stop doth blow. Heaven's azure dome trembles through all her spheres, Feeling that music vibrate; and the sun Raises his tenor as he upward steers, And all the glory-coated mists that run Below him in the valley, hear his voice, And cry unto the dewy fields, Rejoice!

There is a profound sympathy between music and fine scenery: they bothaffect us in the same way, stirring strong but undefined emotions, which express themselves in 'idle tears, ' or evoking thoughts 'whichlie, ' as Wordsworth says, 'too deep for tears, ' beyond the reachof any words. How little we know what multitudes of minglingreminiscences, held in solution by the mind, and colouring its fancywith the iridescence of variable hues, go to make up the sentimentswhich music or which mountains stir! It is the very vagueness, changefulness, and dreamlike indistinctness of these feelings whichcause their charm; they harmonise with the haziness of our beliefs andseem to make our very doubts melodious. For this reason it is obviousthat unrestrained indulgence in the pleasures of music or of scenerymay tend to destroy habits of clear thinking, sentimentalise the mind, and render it more apt to entertain embryonic fancies than to bringideas to definite perfection. 

If hours of thoughtfulness and seclusion are necessary to thedevelopment of a true love for the Alps, it is no less essential to aright understanding of their beauty that we should pass some wet andgloomy days among the mountains. The unclouded sunsets and sunriseswhich often follow one another in September in the Alps, havesomething terrible. They produce a satiety of splendour, and oppressthe mind with a sense of perpetuity. I remember spending such a seasonin one of the Oberland valleys, high up above the pine-trees, ina little châlet. Morning after morning I awoke to see the sunbeamsglittering on the Eiger and the Jungfrau; noon after noon thesnow-fields blazed beneath a steady fire; evening after evening theyshone like beacons in the red light of the setting sun. Then peak bypeak they lost the glow; the soul passed from them, and they stoodpale yet weirdly garish against the darkened sky. The stars came out, the moon shone, but not a cloud sailed over the untroubled heavens. Thus day after day for several weeks there was no change, till I wasseized with an overpowering horror of unbroken calm. I left the valleyfor a time; and when I returned to it in wind and rain, I found thatthe partial veiling of the mountain heights restored the charm whichI had lost and made me feel once more at home. The landscape takes agraver tone beneath the mist that hides the higher peaks, andcomes drifting, creeping, feeling, through the pines upon theirslopes--white, silent, blinding vapour-wreaths around the sablespires. Sometimes the cloud descends and blots out everything. Againit lifts a little, showing cottages and distant Alps beneath itsskirts. Then it sweeps over the whole valley like a veil, just brokenhere and there above a lonely châlet or a thread of distant danglingtorrent foam. Sounds, too, beneath the mist are more strange. Thetorrent seems to have a hoarser voice and grinds the stones morepassionately against its boulders. The cry of shepherds through thefog suggests the loneliness and danger of the hills. The bleatingof penned sheep or goats, and the tinkling of the cowbells, aremysteriously distant and yet distinct in the dull dead air. Then, again, how immeasurably high above our heads appear the domes andpeaks of snow revealed through chasms in the drifting cloud; howdesolate the glaciers and the avalanches in gleams of light thatstruggle through the mist! There is a leaden glare peculiar to clouds, which makes the snow and ice more lurid. Not far from the house whereI am writing, the avalanche that swept away the bridge last winter islying now, dripping away, dank and dirty, like a rotting whale. I cansee it from my window, green beech-boughs nodding over it, forlornlarches bending their tattered branches by its side, splinters ofbroken pine protruding from its muddy caves, the boulders on itsflank, and the hoarse hungry torrent tossing up its tongues to lickthe ragged edge of snow. Close by, the meadows, spangled with yellowflowers and red and blue, look even more brilliant than if the sunwere shining on them. Every cup and blade of grass is drinking. Butthe scene changes; the mist has turned into rain-clouds, and thesteady rain drips down, incessant, blotting out the view. Then, too, what a joy it is if the clouds break towards evening with a northwind, and a rainbow in the valley gives promise of a bright to-morrow!We look up to the cliffs above our heads, and see that they have justbeen powdered with the snow that is a sign of better weather. 

Such rainy days ought to be spent in places like Seelisberg andMürren, at the edge of precipices, in front of mountains, or above alake. The cloud-masses crawl and tumble about the valleys like a broodof dragons; now creeping along the ledges of the rock with sinuousself-adjustment to its turns and twists; now launching out intothe deep, repelled by battling winds, or driven onward in a coil oftwisted and contorted serpent curls. In the midst of summer these wetseasons often end in a heavy fall of snow. You wake some morning tosee the meadows which last night were gay with July flowers huddledup in snow a foot in depth. But fair weather does not tarry long toreappear. You put on your thickest boots and sally forth to find thegreat cups of the gentians full of snow, and to watch the rising ofthe cloud-wreaths under the hot sun. Bad dreams or sickly thoughts, dissipated by returning daylight or a friend's face, do not fly awaymore rapidly and pleasantly than those swift glory-coated mists thatlose themselves we know not where in the blue depths of the sky. 

In contrast with these rainy days nothing can be more perfect thanclear moonlight nights. There is a terrace upon the roof of the inn atCourmayeur where one may spend hours in the silent watches, when allthe world has gone to sleep beneath. The Mont Chétif and the Montde la Saxe form a gigantic portal not unworthy of the pile that liesbeyond. For Mont Blanc resembles a vast cathedral; its countlessspires are scattered over a mass like that of the Duomo at Milan, rising into one tower at the end. By night the glaciers glitter in thesteady moon; domes, pinnacles, and buttresses stand clear of clouds. Needles of every height and most fantastic shapes rise from thecentral ridge, some solitary, like sharp arrows shot against the sky, some clustering into sheaves. On every horn of snow and bank of grassyhill stars sparkle, rising, setting, rolling round through the longsilent night. Moonlight simplifies and softens the landscape. Coloursbecome scarcely distinguishable, and forms, deprived of half theirdetail, gain in majesty and size. The mountains seem greater far bynight than day--higher heights and deeper depths, more snowy pyramids, more beetling crags, softer meadows, and darker pines. The wholevalley is hushed, but for the torrent and the chirping grasshopper andthe striking of the village clocks. The black tower and the houses ofCourmayeur in the foreground gleam beneath the moon until she reachesthe edge of the Cramont, and then sinks quietly away, once moreto reappear among the pines, then finally to leave the valley darkbeneath the shadow of the mountain's bulk. Meanwhile the heights ofsnow still glitter in the steady light: they, too, will soon be dark, until the dawn breaks, tinging them with rose. 

But it is not fair to dwell exclusively upon the more sombre aspect ofSwiss beauty when there are so many lively scenes of which to speak. The sunlight and the freshness and the flowers of Alpine meadows formmore than half the charm of Switzerland. The other day we walked to apasture called the Col de Checruit, high up the valley of Courmayeur, where the spring was still in its first freshness. Gradually weclimbed, by dusty roads and through hot fields where the grass hadjust been mown, beneath the fierce light of the morning sun. Not abreath of air was stirring, and the heavy pines hung overhead upontheir crags, as if to fence the gorge from every wandering breeze. There is nothing more oppressive than these scorching sides of narrowrifts, shut in by woods and precipices. But suddenly the valleybroadened, the pines and larches disappeared, and we found ourselvesupon a wide green semicircle of the softest meadows. Little rills ofwater went rushing through them, rippling over pebbles, rustling underdock leaves, and eddying against their wooden barriers. Far and wide'you scarce could see the grass for flowers, ' while on every sidethe tinkling of cow-bells, and the voices of shepherds calling to oneanother from the Alps, or singing at their work, were borne across thefields. As we climbed we came into still fresher pastures, where thesnow had scarcely melted. There the goats and cattle were collected, and the shepherds sat among them, fondling the kids and calling themby name. When they called, the creatures came, expecting salt andbread. It was pretty to see them lying near their masters, playing andbutting at them with their horns, or bleating for the sweet rye-bread. The women knitted stockings, laughing among themselves, and singingall the while. As soon as we reached them, they gathered round totalk. An old herdsman, who was clearly the patriarch of this Arcadia, asked us many questions in a slow deliberate voice. We told him whowe were, and tried to interest him in the cattle-plague, which heappeared to regard as an evil very unreal and far away--like themurrain upon Pharaoh's herds which one reads about in Exodus. Buthe was courteous and polite, doing the honours of his pasture withsimplicity and ease. He took us to his châlet and gave us bowls ofpure cold milk. It was a funny little wooden house, clean and dark. The sky peeped through its tiles, and if shepherds were not in thehabit of sleeping soundly all night long, they might count the settingand rising stars without lifting their heads from the pillow. He toldus how far pleasanter they found the summer season than the long coldwinter which they have to spend in gloomy houses in Courmayeur. This, indeed, is the true pastoral life which poets have described--a happysummer holiday among the flowers, well occupied with simple cares, andharassed by 'no enemy but winter and rough weather. '

Very much of the charm of Switzerland belongs to simple things--togreetings from the herdsmen, the 'Guten Morgen, ' and 'Guten Abend, 'that are invariably given and taken upon mountain paths; to the tamecreatures, with their large dark eyes, who raise their heads onemoment from the pasture while you pass; and to the plants that growbeneath your feet. The latter end of May is the time when springbegins in the high Alps. Wherever sunlight smiles away a patch ofsnow, the brown turf soon becomes green velvet, and the velvet starsitself with red and white and gold and blue. You almost see the grassand lilies grow. First come pale crocuses and lilac soldanellas. Thesebreak the last dissolving clods of snow, and stand upon an island, with the cold wall they have thawed all round them. It is the fateof these poor flowers to spring and flourish on the very skirtsof retreating winter; they soon wither--the frilled chalice of thesoldanella shrivels up and the crocus fades away before the grasshas grown; the sun, which is bringing all the other plants to life, scorches their tender petals. Often when summer has fairly come, you still may see their pearly cups and lilac bells by the side ofavalanches, between the chill snow and the fiery sun, blooming andfading hour by hour. They have as it were but a Pisgah view of thepromised land, of the spring which they are foremost to proclaim. Nextcome the clumsy gentians and yellow anemones, covered with softdown like fledgling birds. These are among the earliest and hardiestblossoms that embroider the high meadows with a diaper of blue andgold. About the same time primroses and auriculas begin to tuft thedripping rocks, while frail white fleur-de-lis, like flakes ofsnow forgotten by the sun, and golden-balled ranunculuses join withforget-me-nots and cranesbill in a never-ending dance upon the grassyfloor. Happy, too, is he who finds the lilies-of-the-valley clusteringabout the chestnut boles upon the Colma, or in the beechwood bythe stream at Macugnaga, mixed with garnet-coloured columbines andfragrant white narcissus, which the people of the villages call'Angiolini. ' There, too, is Solomon's seal, with waxen bells andleaves expanded like the wings of hovering butterflies. But theselists of flowers are tiresome and cold; it would be better to drawthe portrait of one which is particularly fascinating. I think thatbotanists have called it _Saxifraga cotyledon_; yet, in spiteof its long name, it is beautiful and poetic. London-pride is thecommonest of all the saxifrages; but the one of which I speak is asdifferent from London-pride as a Plantagenet upon his throne from thatlast Plantagenet who died obscure and penniless some years ago. It isa great majestic flower, which plumes the granite rocks of Monte Rosain the spring. At other times of the year you see a little tuft offleshy leaves set like a cushion on cold ledges and dark places ofdripping cliffs. You take it for a stonecrop--one of those weedsdoomed to obscurity, and safe from being picked because they are souninviting--and you pass it by incuriously. But about June it putsforth its power, and from the cushion of pale leaves there springs astrong pink stem, which rises upward for a while, and then curvesdown and breaks into a shower of snow-white blossoms. Far away thesplendour gleams, hanging like a plume of ostrich-feathers from theroof of rock, waving to the wind, or stooping down to touch the waterof the mountain stream that dashes it with dew. The snow at evening, glowing with a sunset flush, is not more rosy-pure than this cascadeof pendent blossoms. It loves to be alone--inaccessible ledges, chasmswhere winds combat, or moist caverns overarched near thundering falls, are the places that it seeks. I will not compare it to a spirit of themountains or to a proud lonely soul, for such comparisons desecratethe simplicity of nature, and no simile can add a glory to the flower. It seems to have a conscious life of its own, so large and gloriousit is, so sensitive to every breath of air, so nobly placed upon itsbending stem, so royal in its solitude. I first saw it years ago onthe Simplon, feathering the drizzling crags above Isella. Then wefound it near Baveno, in a crack of sombre cliff beneath the mines. The other day we cut an armful opposite Varallo, by the Sesia, andthen felt like murderers; it was so sad to hold in our hands thetriumph of those many patient months, the full expansive life ofthe flower, the splendour visible from valleys and hillsides, thedefenceless creature which had done its best to make the gloomy placesof the Alps most beautiful. 

After passing many weeks among the high Alps it is a pleasure todescend into the plains. The sunset, and sunrise, and the stars ofLombardy, its level horizons and vague misty distances, are a sourceof absolute relief after the narrow skies and embarrassed prospects ofa mountain valley. Nor are the Alps themselves ever more imposing thanwhen seen from Milan or the church-tower of Chivasso or the terraceof Novara, with a foreground of Italian cornfields and old city towersand rice-ground, golden-green beneath a Lombard sun. Half veiledby clouds, the mountains rise like visionary fortress walls of acelestial city--unapproachable, beyond the range of mortal feet. But those who know by old experience what friendly châlets, and coolmeadows, and clear streams are hidden in their folds and valleys, send forth fond thoughts and messages, like carrier-pigeons, from themarble parapets of Milan, crying, 'Before another sun has set, I tooshall rest beneath the shadow of their pines!' It is in truth not morethan a day's journey from Milan to the brink of snow at Macugnaga. Butvery sad it is to _leave_ the Alps, to stand upon the terracesof Berne and waft ineffectual farewells. The unsympathising Aarrushes beneath; and the snow-peaks, whom we love like friends, abideuntroubled by the coming and the going of the world. The clouds driftover them--the sunset warms them with a fiery kiss. Night comes, andwe are hurried far away to wake beside the Seine, remembering, with apang of jealous passion, that the flowers on Alpine meadows are stillblooming, and the rivulets still flowing with a ceaseless song, whileParis shops are all we see, and all we hear is the dull clatter of aParis crowd. 

_THE ALPS IN WINTER_

The gradual approach of winter is very lovely in the high Alps. Thevalley of Davos, where I am writing, more than five thousand feetabove the sea, is not beautiful, as Alpine valleys go, though it hasscenery both picturesque and grand within easy reach. But when summeris passing into autumn, even the bare slopes of the least romanticglen are glorified. Golden lights and crimson are cast over thegrey-green world by the fading of innumerable plants. Then the larchesbegin to put on sallow tints that deepen into orange, burning againstthe solid blue sky like amber. The frosts are severe at night, and themeadow grass turns dry and wan. The last lilac crocuses die upon thefields. Icicles, hanging from watercourse or mill-wheel, glitter inthe noonday sunlight. The wind blows keenly from the north, and nowthe snow begins to fall and thaw and freeze, and fall and thaw again. The seasons are confused; wonderful days of flawless purity areintermingled with storm and gloom. At last the time comes when a greatsnowfall has to be expected. There is hard frost in the early morning, and at nine o'clock the thermometer stands at 2°. The sky is clear, but it clouds rapidly with films of cirrus and of stratus in the southand west. Soon it is covered over with grey vapour in a level sheet, all the hill-tops standing hard against the steely heavens. The coldwind from the west freezes the moustache to one's pipe-stem. By noonthe air is thick with a coagulated mist; the temperature meanwhile hasrisen, and a little snow falls at intervals. The valleys are filledwith a curious opaque blue, from which the peaks rise, phantom-likeand pallid, into the grey air, scarcely distinguishable from theirbackground. The pine-forests on the mountain-sides are of darkestindigo. There is an indescribable stillness and a sense of incubation. The wind has fallen. Later on, the snow-flakes flutter silently andsparely through the lifeless air. The most distant landscape is quiteblotted out. After sunset the clouds have settled down upon the hills, and the snow comes in thick, impenetrable fleeces. At night our haircrackles and sparkles when we brush it. Next morning there is a footand a half of finely powdered snow, and still the snow is falling. Strangely loom the châlets through the semi-solid whiteness. Yet theair is now dry and singularly soothing. The pines are heavy with theirwadded coverings; now and again one shakes himself in silence, and hisburden falls in a white cloud, to leave a black-green patch upon thehillside, whitening again as the imperturbable fall continues. Thestakes by the roadside are almost buried. No sound is audible. Nothingis seen but the snow-plough, a long raft of planks with a heavy stoneat its stem and a sharp prow, drawn by four strong horses, and drivenby a young man erect upon the stem. 

So we live through two days and nights, and on the third a north windblows. The snow-clouds break and hang upon the hills in scatteredfleeces; glimpses of blue sky shine through, and sunlight glints alongthe heavy masses. The blues of the shadows are everywhere intense. Asthe clouds disperse, they form in moulded domes, tawny like sunburnedmarble in the distant south lands. Every châlet is a miracle offantastic curves, built by the heavy hanging snow. Snow lies moundedon the roads and fields, writhed into loveliest wreaths, or outspreadin the softest undulations. All the irregularities of the hills aresoftened into swelling billows like the mouldings of Titanic statuary. 

It happened once or twice last winter that such a clearing aftersnowfall took place at full moon. Then the moon rose in a swirl offleecy vapour--clouds above, beneath, and all around. The sky wasblue as steel, and infinitely deep with mist-entangled stars. The hornabove which she first appears stood carved of solid black, and throughthe valley's length from end to end yawned chasms and clefts of liquiddarkness. As the moon rose, the clouds were conquered, and massed intorolling waves upon the ridges of the hills. The spaces of open skygrew still more blue. At last the silver light came flooding over all, and here and there the fresh snow glistened on the crags. There ismovement, palpitation, life of light through earth and sky. To walkout on such a night, when the perturbation of storm is over and theheavens are free, is one of the greatest pleasures offered by thiswinter life. It is so light that you can read the smallest print withease. The upper sky looks quite black, shading by violet and sapphireinto turquoise upon the horizon. There is the colour of ivory uponthe nearest snow-fields, and the distant peaks sparkle like silver, crystals glitter in all directions on the surface of the snow, white, yellow, and pale blue. The stars are exceedingly keen, but only a fewcan shine in the intensity of moonlight. The air is perfectly still, and though icicles may be hanging from beard and moustache to the fursbeneath one's chin, there is no sensation of extreme cold. 

During the earlier frosts of the season, after the first snows havefallen, but when there is still plenty of moisture in the ground, the loveliest fern-fronds of pure rime may be found in myriads on themeadows. They are fashioned like perfect vegetable structures, openingfan-shaped upon crystal stems, and catching the sunbeams with thebrilliancy of diamonds. Taken at certain angles, they decompose lightinto iridescent colours, appearing now like emeralds, rubies, ortopazes, and now like Labrador spar, blending all hues in a wondroussheen. When the lake freezes for the first time, its surface is ofcourse quite black, and so transparent that it is easy to see thefishes swimming in the deep beneath; but here and there, where rimehas fallen, there sparkle these fantastic flowers and ferns and mossesmade of purest frost. Nothing, indeed, can be more fascinating thanthe new world revealed by frost. In shaded places of the valley youmay walk through larches and leafless alder thickets by silent farms, all silvered over with hoar spangles--fairy forests, where the flowersand foliage are rime. The streams are flowing half-frozen over rockssheeted with opaque green ice. Here it is strange to watch the swirlof water freeing itself from these frost-shackles, and to see iteddying beneath the overhanging eaves of frailest crystal-frostedsnow. All is so silent, still, and weird in this white world, that onemarvels when the spirit of winter will appear, or what shrill voicesin the air will make his unimaginable magic audible. Nothing happens, however, to disturb the charm, save when a sunbeam cuts the chain ofdiamonds on an alder bough, and down they drift in a thin cloud ofdust. It may be also that the air is full of floating crystals, like tiniest most restless fire-flies rising and falling and passingcrosswise in the sun-illumined shade of tree or mountain-side. 

It is not easy to describe these beauties of the winter-world; and yetone word must be said about the sunsets. Let us walk out, therefore, towards the lake at four o'clock in mid-December. The thermometer isstanding at 3°, and there is neither breath of wind nor cloud. Venusis just visible in rose and sapphire, and the thin young moon isbeside her. To east and south the snowy ranges burn with yellow fire, deepening to orange and crimson hues, which die away and leave agreenish pallor. At last, the higher snows alone are livid with a lastfaint tinge of light, and all beneath is quite white. But the tideof glory turns. While the west grows momently more pale, the easternheavens flush with afterglow, suffuse their spaces with pink andviolet. Daffodil and tenderest emerald intermingle; and these coloursspread until the west again has rose and primrose and sapphirewonderfully blent, and from the burning skies a light is cast upon thevalley--a phantom light, less real, more like the hues of moltengems, than were the stationary flames of sunset. Venus and the moonmeanwhile are silvery clear. Then the whole illumination fades likemagic. 

All the charms of which I have been writing are combined in asledge-drive. With an arrowy gliding motion one passes through thesnow-world as through a dream. In the sunlight the snow surfacesparkles with its myriad stars of crystals. In the shadow it ceasesto glitter, and assumes a blueness scarcely less blue than the sky. So the journey is like sailing through alternate tracts of lightirradiate heavens, and interstellar spaces of the clearest and mostflawless ether. The air is like the keen air of the highest glaciers. As we go, the bells keep up a drowsy tinkling at the horse's head. The whole landscape is transfigured--lifted high up out ofcommonplaceness. The little hills are Monte Rosas and Mont Blancs. Scale is annihilated, and nothing tells but form. There is hardlyany colour except the blue of sky and shadow. Everything is traced invanishing tints, passing from the almost amber of the distant sunlightthrough glowing white into pale greys and brighter blues and deepethereal azure. The pines stand in black platoons upon the hillsides, with a tinge of red or orange on their sable. Some carry masses ofsnow. Others have shaken their plumes free. The châlets are like fairyhouses or toys, waist-deep in stores of winter fuel. With their mellowtones of madder and umber on the weather-beaten woodwork relievedagainst the white, with fantastic icicles and folds of snow dependingfrom their eaves, or curled like coverlids from roof and window-sill, they are far more picturesque than in the summer. Colour, wherever itis found, whether in these cottages or in a block of serpentine bythe roadside, or in the golden bulrush blades by the lake shore, takesmore than double value. It is shed upon the landscape like a spiritualand transparent veil. Most beautiful of all are the sweeping lines ofpure untroubled snow, fold over fold of undulating softness, billowingalong the skirts of the peaked hills. There is no conveying thecharm of immaterial, aërial, lucid beauty, the feeling of purity andaloofness from sordid things, conveyed by the fine touch on all oursenses of light, colour, form, and air, and motion, and rare tinklingsound. The magic is like a spirit mood of Shelley's lyric verse. And, what is perhaps most wonderful, this delicate delight may be enjoyedwithout fear in the coldest weather. It does not matter how low thetemperature may be, if the sun is shining, the air dry, and the windasleep. 

Leaving the horse-sledges on the verge of some high hill-road, andtrusting oneself to the little hand-sledge which the people of theGrisons use, and which the English have christened by the Canadianterm 'toboggan, ' the excitement becomes far greater. The hand-sledgeis about three feet long, fifteen inches wide, and half a foot abovethe ground, on runners shod with iron. Seated firmly at the back, and guiding with the feet in front, the rider skims down precipitousslopes and round perilous corners with a rapidity that beats a horse'space. Winding through sombre pine-forests, where the torrent roarsfitfully among caverns of barbed ice, and the glistening mountainstower above in their glory of sun-smitten snow, darting round thefrozen ledges at the turnings of the road, silently gliding at a speedthat seems incredible, it is so smooth, he traverses two or threemiles without fatigue, carried onward by the mere momentum of hisweight. It is a strange and great joy. The toboggan, under theseconditions, might be compared to an enchanted boat shooting the rapidsof a river; and what adds to its fascination is the entire lonelinessin which the rider passes through those weird and ever-shifting scenesof winter radiance. Sometimes, when the snow is drifting up the pass, and the world is blank behind, before, and all around, it seems likeplunging into chaos. The muffled pines loom fantastically throughthe drift as we rush past them, and the wind, ever and anon, detachesgreat masses of snow in clouds from their bent branches. Or again atnight, when the moon is shining, and the sky is full of flamingstars, and the snow, frozen to the hardness of marble, sparkles withinnumerable crystals, a new sense of strangeness and of joy is givento the solitude, the swiftness, and the silence of the exercise. No other circumstances invest the poetry of rapid motion with morefascination. Shelley, who so loved the fancy of a boat inspired withits own instinct of life, would have delighted in the game, and wouldprobably have pursued it recklessly. At the same time, as practisedon a humbler scale nearer home, in company, and on a run selected forconvenience rather than for picturesqueness, tobogganing is a veryBohemian amusement. No one who indulges in it can count on avoidinghard blows and violent upsets, nor will his efforts to maintain hisequilibrium at the dangerous corners be invariably graceful. 

Nothing, it might be imagined, could be more monotonous than an Alpinevalley covered up with snow. And yet to one who has passed many monthsin that seclusion Nature herself presents no monotony; for the changesconstantly wrought by light and cloud and alternations of weatheron this landscape are infinitely various. The very simplicity of theconditions seems to assist the supreme artist. One day is wonderfulbecause of its unsullied purity; not a cloud visible, and the pinesclothed in velvet of rich green beneath a faultless canopy of light. The next presents a fretwork of fine film, wrought by the south windover the whole sky, iridescent with delicate rainbow tints within theinfluences of the sun, and ever-changing shape. On another, when theturbulent Föhn is blowing, streamers of snow may be seen flying fromthe higher ridges against a pallid background of slaty cloud, whilethe gaunt ribs of the hills glisten below with fitful gleams of luridlight. At sunrise, one morning, stealthy and mysterious vapours clothethe mountains from their basement to the waist, while the peaks areglistening serenely in clear daylight. Another opens with silentlyfalling snow. A third is rosy through the length and breadth of thedawn-smitten valley. It is, however, impossible to catalogue theindescribable variety of those beauties, which those who love naturemay enjoy by simply waiting on the changes of the winter in a singlestation of the Alps. 

 * * * * *

_WINTER NIGHTS AT DAVOS_

I

Light, marvellously soft yet penetrating, everywhere diffused, everywhere reflected without radiance, poured from the moon high aboveour heads in a sky tinted through all shades and modulations of blue, from turquoise on the horizon to opaque sapphire at the zenith--_dolcecolor_. (It is difficult to use the word _colour_ for this scenewithout suggesting an exaggeration. The blue is almost indefinable, yet felt. But if possible, the total effect of the night landscapeshould be rendered by careful exclusion of tints from theword-palette. The art of the etcher is more needed than that of thepainter. ) Heaven overhead is set with stars, shooting intensely, smouldering with dull red in Aldeboran, sparkling diamond-like inSirius, changing from orange to crimson and green in the swart fire ofyonder double star. On the snow this moonlight falls tenderly, not inhard white light and strong black shadow, but in tones of cream andivory, rounding the curves of drift. The mountain peaks alone glistenas though they were built of silver burnished by an agate. Far awaythey rise diminished in stature by the all-pervading dimness of brightlight, that erases the distinctions of daytime. On the path before ourfeet lie crystals of many hues, the splinters of a thousand gems. Inthe wood there are caverns of darkness, alternating with spaces ofstar-twinkled sky, or windows opened between russet stems and solidbranches for the moony sheen. The green of the pines is felt, althoughinvisible, so soft in substance that it seems less like velvet thansome materialised depth of dark green shadow. 

II

Snow falling noiseless and unseen. One only knows that it is fallingby the blinking of our eyes as the flakes settle on their lids andmelt. The cottage windows shine red, and moving lanterns of belatedwayfarers define the void around them. Yet the night is far from dark. The forests and the mountain-bulk beyond the valley loom softly largeand just distinguishable through a pearly haze. The path is puresttrackless whiteness, almost dazzling though it has no light. This waswhat Dante felt when he reached the lunar sphere:

 Parova a me, che nube ne coprisse Lucida, spessa, solida e pulita. 

Walking silent, with insensible footfall, slowly, for the snow is deepabove our ankles, we wonder what the world would be like if this wereall. Could the human race be acclimatised to this monotony (we say)perhaps emotion would be rarer, yet more poignant, suspended broodingon itself, and wakening by flashes to a quintessential mood. Thenfancy changes, and the thought occurs that even so must be a planet, not yet wholly made, nor called to take her place among the sisterhoodof light and song. 

III

Sunset was fading out upon the Rhætikon and still reflected from theSeehorn on the lake, when we entered the gorge of the Fluela--densepines on either hand, a mounting drift of snow in front, and faintpeaks, paling from rose to saffron, far above, beyond. There wasno sound but a tinkling stream and the continual jingle of oursledge-bells. We drove at a foot's pace, our horse finding his ownpath. When we left the forest, the light had all gone except for somealmost imperceptible touches of primrose on the eastern horns. It wasa moonless night, but the sky was alive with stars, and now and thenone fell. The last house in the valley was soon passed, and we enteredthose bleak gorges where the wind, fine, noiseless, penetrating likean edge of steel, poured slantwise on us from the north. As we rose, the stars to west seemed far beneath us, and the Great Bear sprawledupon the ridges of the lower hills outspread. We kept slowly movingonward, upward, into what seemed like a thin impalpable mist, butwas immeasurable tracts of snow. The last cembras were left behind, immovable upon dark granite boulders on our right. We entered aformless and unbillowed sea of greyness, from which there rose dimmountain-flanks that lost themselves in air. Up, ever up, andstill below us westward sank the stars. We were now 7500 feet abovesea-level, and the December night was rigid with intensity of frost. The cold, and movement, and solemnity of space, drowsed every sense. 

IV

The memory of things seen and done in moonlight is like the memory ofdreams. It is as a dream that I recall the night of our tobogganing toKlosters, though it was full enough of active energy. The moon was inher second quarter, slightly filmed with very high thin clouds, thatdisappeared as night advanced, leaving the sky and stars in all theirlustre. A sharp frost, sinking to three degrees above zero Fahrenheit, with a fine pure wind, such wind as here they call 'the mountainbreath. ' We drove to Wolfgang in a two-horse sledge, four of usinside, and our two Christians on the box. Up there, where the Alps ofDeath descend to join the Lakehorn Alps, above the Wolfswalk, thereis a world of whiteness--frozen ridges, engraved like cameos of aërialonyx upon the dark, star-tremulous sky; sculptured buttresses of snow, enclosing hollows filled with diaphanous shadow, and sweeping aloftinto the upland fields of pure clear drift. Then came the swiftdescent, the plunge into the pines, moon-silvered on their frostedtops. The battalions of spruce that climb those hills defined thedazzling snow from which they sprang, like the black tufts upon anermine robe. At the proper moment we left our sledge, and the bigChristian took his reins in hand to follow us. Furs and greatcoatswere abandoned. Each stood forth tightly accoutred, with short coat, and clinging cap, and gaitered legs for the toboggan. Off we startedin line, with but brief interval between, at first slowly, thenglidingly, and when the impetus was gained, with darting, bounding, almost savage swiftness--sweeping round corners, cutting the hardsnow-path with keen runners, avoiding the deep ruts, trusting tochance, taking advantage of smooth places, till the rush and swing anddownward swoop became mechanical. Space was devoured. Into the massyshadows of the forest, where the pines joined overhead, we piercedwithout a sound, and felt far more than saw the great rocks with theiricicles; and out again, emerging into moonlight, met the valley spreadbeneath our feet, the mighty peaks of the Silvretta and the vast bluesky. On, on, hurrying, delaying not, the woods and hills rushed by. Crystals upon the snow-banks glittered to the stars. Our souls wouldfain have stayed to drink these marvels of the moon-world, but ourlimbs refused. The magic of movement was upon us, and eight minutesswallowed the varying impressions of two musical miles. The villagelights drew near and nearer, then the sombre village huts, and soonthe speed grew less, and soon we glided to our rest into the sleepingvillage street. 

V

It was just past midnight. The moon had fallen to the western horns. Orion's belt lay bar-like on the opening of the pass, and Sirius shotflame on the Seehorn. A more crystalline night, more full of fulgentstars, was never seen, stars everywhere, but mostly scattered in largesparkles on the snow. Big Christian went in front, tugging toboggansby their strings, as Gulliver, in some old woodcut, drew the fleetsof Lilliput. Through the brown wood-châlets of Selfrangr, up to theundulating meadows, where the snow slept pure and crisp, he led us. There we sat awhile and drank the clear air, cooled to zero, butinnocent and mild as mother Nature's milk. Then in an instant, down, down through the hamlet, with its châlets, stables, pumps, and logs, the slumbrous hamlet, where one dog barked, and darkness dwelt uponthe path of ice, down with the tempest of a dreadful speed, thatshot each rider upward in the air, and made the frame of the toboggantremble--down over hillocks of hard frozen snow, dashing and bounding, to the river and the bridge. No bones were broken, though the race wasthrice renewed, and men were spilt upon the roadside by some furiousplunge. This amusement has the charm of peril and the unforeseen. Inno wise else can colder, keener air be drunken at such furious speed. The joy, too, of the engine-driver and the steeplechaser is upon us. Alas, that it should be so short! If only roads were better made forthe purpose, there would be no end to it; for the toboggan cannot losehis wind. But the good thing fails at last, and from the silence ofthe moon we pass into the silence of the fields of sleep. 

VI

The new stable is a huge wooden building, with raftered lofts to stowthe hay, and stalls for many cows and horses. It stands snugly in anangle of the pine-wood, bordering upon the great horse-meadow. Hereat night the air is warm and tepid with the breath of kine. Returningfrom my forest walk, I spy one window yellow in the moonlight with alamp. I lift the latch. The hound knows me, and does not bark. I enterthe stable, where six horses are munching their last meal. Upon thecorn-bin sits a knecht. We light our pipes and talk. He tells me ofthe valley of Arosa (a hawk's flight westward over yonder hills), howdeep in grass its summer lawns, how crystal-clear its stream, how blueits little lakes, how pure, without a taint of mist, 'too beautiful topaint, ' its sky in winter! This knecht is an Ardüser, and the valleyof Arosa lifts itself to heaven above his Langwies home. It is hisduty now to harness a sleigh for some night-work. We shake hands andpart--I to sleep, he for the snow. 

VII

The lake has frozen late this year, and there are places in it wherethe ice is not yet firm. Little snow has fallen since it froze--aboutthree inches at the deepest, driven by winds and wrinkled like theribbed sea-sand. Here and there the ice-floor is quite black andclear, reflecting stars, and dark as heaven's own depths. Elsewhere itis of a suspicious whiteness, blurred in surface, with jagged cracksand chasms, treacherously mended by the hand of frost. Moving slowly, the snow cries beneath our feet, and the big crystals tinkle. Theseare shaped like fern-fronds, growing fan-wise from a point, and setat various angles, so that the moonlight takes them with capricioustouch. They flash, and are quenched, and flash again, light darting tolight along the level surface, while the sailing planets and the starslook down complacent at this mimicry of heaven. Everything above, around, beneath, is very beautiful--the slumbrous woods, the snowyfells, and the far distance painted in faint blue upon the tenderbackground of the sky. Everything is placid and beautiful; and yet theplace is terrible. For, as we walk, the lake groans, with throttledsobs, and sudden cracklings of its joints, and sighs that shiver, undulating from afar, and pass beneath our feet, and die away indistance when they reach the shore. And now and then an upper crustof ice gives way; and will the gulfs then drag us down? We are inthe very centre of the lake. There is no use in thinking or in takingheed. Enjoy the moment, then, and march. Enjoy the contrast betweenthis circumambient serenity and sweetness, and the dreadful sense ofinsecurity beneath. Is not, indeed, our whole life of this nature?A passage over perilous deeps, roofed by infinity and sempiternalthings, surrounded too with evanescent forms, that like thesecrystals, trodden underfoot, or melted by the Föhn-wind into dew, flash, in some lucky moment, with a light that mimics stars! But toallegorise and sermonise is out of place here. It is but the expedientof those who cannot etch sensation by the burin of their art of words. 

VIII

It is ten o'clock upon Sylvester Abend, or New Year's Eve. Herr Buolsits with his wife at the head of his long table. His family andserving folk are round him. There is his mother, with little Ursula, his child, upon her knee. The old lady is the mother of four comelydaughters and nine stalwart sons, the eldest of whom is now a grizzledman. Besides our host, four of the brothers are here to-night; thehandsome melancholy Georg, who is so gentle in his speech; Simeon, with his diplomatic face; Florian, the student of medicine; andmy friend, colossal-breasted Christian. Palmy came a little later, worried with many cares, but happy to his heart's core. No optimistwas ever more convinced of his philosophy than Palmy. After them, below the salt, were ranged the knechts and porters, the marmitonfrom the kitchen, and innumerable maids. The board was tesselated withplates of birnen-brod and eier-brod, küchli and cheese and butter; andGeorg stirred grampampuli in a mighty metal bowl. For the uninitiated, it may be needful to explain these Davos delicacies. Birnen-brodis what the Scotch would call a 'bun, ' or massive cake, composed ofsliced pears, almonds, spices, and a little flour. Eier-brod is asaffron-coloured sweet bread, made with eggs; and küchli is a kindof pastry, crisp and flimsy, fashioned into various devices of cross, star, and scroll. Grampampuli is simply brandy burnt with sugar, themost unsophisticated punch I ever drank from tumblers. The frugalpeople of Davos, who live on bread and cheese and dried meat all theyear, indulge themselves but once with these unwonted dainties in thewinter. 

The occasion was cheerful, and yet a little solemn. The scene wasfeudal. For these Buols are the scions of a warrior race:

 A race illustrious for heroic deeds; Humbled, but not degraded. 

During the six centuries through which they have lived nobles inDavos, they have sent forth scores of fighting men to foreign lands, ambassadors to France and Venice and the Milanese, governors toChiavenna and Bregaglia and the much-contested Valtelline. Members oftheir house are Counts of Buol-Schauenstein in Austria, Freiherrs ofMuhlingen and Berenberg in the now German Empire. They keep the patentof nobility conferred on them by Henri IV. Their ancient coat--partedper pale azure and argent, with a dame of the fourteenth centurybearing in her hand a rose, all counterchanged--is carved in wood andmonumental marble on the churches and old houses hereabouts. And fromimmemorial antiquity the Buol of Davos has sat thus on Sylvester Abendwith family and folk around him, summoned from alp and snowy field todrink grampampuli and break the birnen-brod. 

These rites performed, the men and maids began to sing--brown armslounging on the table, and red hands folded in white aprons--seriousat first in hymn-like cadences, then breaking into wilder measureswith a jodel at the close. There is a measured solemnity in theperformance, which strikes the stranger as somewhat comic. But thesinging was good; the voices strong and clear in tone, no hesitationand no shirking of the melody. It was clear that the singers enjoyedthe music for its own sake, with half-shut eyes, as they take dancing, solidly, with deep-drawn breath, sustained and indefatigable. Buteleven struck; and the two Christians, my old friend, and Palmy, saidwe should be late for church. They had promised to take me with themto see bell-ringing in the tower. All the young men of the villagemeet, and draw lots in the Stube of the Rathhaus. One party tolls theold year out; the other rings the new year in. He who comes last issconced three litres of Veltliner for the company. This jovial finewas ours to pay to-night. 

When we came into the air, we found a bitter frost; the whole skyclouded over; a north wind whirling snow from alp and forest throughthe murky gloom. The benches and broad walnut tables of the Bathhauswere crowded with men, in shaggy homespun of brown and grey frieze. Its low wooden roof and walls enclosed an atmosphere of smoke, denserthan the external snow-drift. But our welcome was hearty, and we founda score of friends. Titanic Fopp, whose limbs are Michelangelesque inlength; spectacled Morosani; the little tailor Kramer, with a Frenchhorn on his knees; the puckered forehead of the Baumeister; theTroll-shaped postman; peasants and woodmen, known on far excursionsupon pass and upland valley. Not one but carried on his face thememory of winter strife with avalanche and snow-drift, of horsesstruggling through Fluela whirlwinds, and wine-casks tugged acrossBernina, and haystacks guided down precipitous gullies at thunderingspeed 'twixt pine and pine, and larches felled in distant glens besidethe frozen watercourses. Here we were, all met together for one hourfrom our several homes and occupations, to welcome in the year withclinked glasses and cries of _Prosit Neujahr!_

The tolling bells above us stopped. Our turn had come. Out into thesnowy air we tumbled, beneath the row of wolves' heads that adorn thepent-house roof. A few steps brought us to the still God's acre, where the snow lay deep and cold upon high-mounded graves of manygenerations. We crossed it silently, bent our heads to the low Gothicarch, and stood within the tower. It was thick darkness there. Butfar above, the bells began again to clash and jangle confusedly, withvolleys of demonic joy. Successive flights of ladders, each ending ina giddy platform hung across the gloom, climb to the height of somehundred and fifty feet; and all their rungs were crusted with frozensnow, deposited by trampling boots. For up and down these stairs, ascending and descending, moved other than angels--the friezejacketedBürschen, Grisons bears, rejoicing in their exercise, exhilarated withthe tingling noise of beaten metal. We reached the first room safely, guided by firm-footed Christian, whose one candle just defined therough walls and the slippery steps. There we found a band of boys, pulling ropes that set the bells in motion. But our destinationwas not reached. One more aërial ladder, perpendicular in darkness, brought us swiftly to the home of sound. It is a small square chamber, where the bells are hung, filled with the interlacement of enormousbeams, and pierced to north and south by open windows, from whoseparapets I saw the village and the valley spread beneath. The fiercewind hurried through it, charged with snow, and its narrow space wasthronged with men. Men on the platform, men on the window-sills, men grappling the bells with iron arms, men brushing by to reach thestairs, crossing, recrossing, shouldering their mates, drinkingred wine from gigantic beakers, exploding crackers, firing squibs, shouting and yelling in corybantic chorus. They yelled and shouted, one could see it by their open mouths and glittering eyes; but nota sound from human lungs could reach our ears. The overwhelmingincessant thunder of the bells drowned all. It thrilled the tympanum, ran through the marrow of the spine, vibrated in the inmost entrails. Yet the brain was only steadied and excited by this sea of brazennoise. After a few moments I knew the place and felt at home in it. Then I enjoyed a spectacle which sculptors might have envied. For theyring the bells in Davos after this fashion:--The lads below set themgoing with ropes. The men above climb in pairs on ladders to the beamsfrom which they are suspended. Two mighty pine-trees, roughly squaredand built into the walls, extend from side to side across the belfry. Another from which the bells hang, connects these massive trunksat right angles. Just where the central beam is wedged into thetwo parallel supports, the ladders reach them from each side of thebelfry, so that, bending from the higher rung of the ladder, andleaning over, stayed upon the lateral beam, each pair of men can keepone bell in movement with their hands. Each comrade plants one legupon the ladder, and sets the other knee firmly athwart the horizontalpine. Then round each other's waist they twine left arm and right. Thetwo have thus become one man. Right arm and left are free to grasp thebell's horns, sprouting at its crest beneath the beam. With a graverhythmic motion, bending sideward in a close embrace, swaying andreturning to their centre from the well-knit loins, they drive theforce of each strong muscle into the vexed bell. The impact is earnestat first, but soon it becomes frantic. The men take something fromeach other of exalted enthusiasm. This efflux of their combinedenergies inspires them and exasperates the mighty resonance of metalwhich they rule. They are lost in a trance of what approximates todervish passion--so thrilling is the surge of sound, so potent are therhythms they obey. Men come and tug them by the heels. One graspsthe starting thews upon their calves. Another is impatient for theirplace. But they strain still, locked together, and forgetful of theworld. At length they have enough: then slowly, clingingly unclasp, turn round with gazing eyes, and are resumed, sedately, into thediurnal round of common life. Another pair is in their room upon thebeam. 

The Englishman who saw these things stood looking up, enveloped in hisulster with the grey cowl thrust upon his forehead, like a monk. Onecandle cast a grotesque shadow of him on the plastered wall. And whenhis chance came, though he was but a weakling, he too climbed and forsome moments hugged the beam, and felt the madness of the swingingbell. Descending, he wondered long and strangely whether heascribed too much of feeling to the men he watched. But no, that wasimpossible. There are emotions deeply seated in the joy of exercise, when the body is brought into play, and masses move in concert, ofwhich the subject is but half conscious. Music and dance, and thedelirium of battle or the chase, act thus upon spontaneous natures. The mystery of rhythm and associated energy and blood tinglingin sympathy is here. It lies at the root of man's most tyrannousinstinctive impulses. 

It was past one when we reached home, and now a meditative man mightwell have gone to bed. But no one thinks of sleeping on SylvesterAbend. So there followed bowls of punch in one friend's room, whereEnglish, French, and Germans blent together in convivial Babel; andflasks of old Montagner in another. Palmy, at this period, wore anarchdeacon's hat, and smoked a churchwarden's pipe; and neither werehis own, nor did he derive anything ecclesiastical or Anglican fromthe association. Late in the morning we must sally forth, they said, and roam the town. For it is the custom here on New Year's night togreet acquaintances, and ask for hospitality, and no one maydeny these self-invited guests. We turned out again into the greysnow-swept gloom, a curious Comus--not at all like Greeks, for we hadneither torches in our hands nor rose-wreaths to suspend upon a lady'sdoor-posts. And yet I could not refrain, at this supreme momentof jollity, in the zero temperature, amid my Grisons friends, fromhumming to myself verses from the Greek Anthology:--

 The die is cast! Nay, light the torch! I'll take the road! Up, courage, ho! Why linger pondering in the porch? Upon Love's revel we will go!

 Shake off those fumes of wine! Hang care And caution! What has Love to do With prudence? Let the torches flare! Quick, drown the doubts that hampered you!

 Cast weary wisdom to the wind! One thing, but one alone, I know: Love bent e'en Jove and made him blind Upon Love's revel we will go!

And then again:--

 I've drunk sheer madness! Not with wine, But old fantastic tales, I'll arm My heart in heedlessness divine, And dare the road, nor dream of harm!

 I'll join Love's rout! Let thunder break, Let lightning blast me by the way! Invulnerable Love shall shake His ægis o'er my head to-day. 

This last epigram was not inappropriate to an invalid about to beginthe fifth act in a roystering night's adventure. And still oncemore:--

 Cold blows the winter wind; 'tis Love, Whose sweet eyes swim with honeyed tears, That bears me to thy doors, my love, Tossed by the storm of hopes and fears. 

 Cold blows the blast of aching Love; But be thou for my wandering sail, Adrift upon these waves of love, Safe harbour from the whistling gale!

However, upon this occasion, though we had winter-wind enough, andcold enough, there was not much love in the business. My arm wasfirmly clenched in Christian Buol's, and Christian Palmy camebehind, trolling out songs in Italian dialect, with still recurring_canaille_ choruses, of which the facile rhymes seemed mostlymade on a prolonged _amu-u-u-r_. It is noticeable that Italianditties are specially designed for fellows shouting in the streets atnight. They seem in keeping there, and nowhere else that I could eversee. And these Davosers took to them naturally when the time for Comuscame. It was between four and five in the morning, and nearly all thehouses in the place were dark. The tall church-tower and spire loomedup above us in grey twilight. The tireless wind still swept thinsnow from fell and forest. But the frenzied bells had sunk into theirtwelvemonth's slumber, which shall be broken only by decorous tollingsat less festive times. I wondered whether they were tingling stillwith the heart-throbs and with the pressure of those many arms? Wastheir old age warmed, as mine was, with that gust of life--the youngmen who had clung to them like bees to lily-bells, and shaken alltheir locked-up tone and shrillness into the wild winter air? Alas!how many generations of the young have handled them; and they arestill there, frozen in their belfry; and the young grow middle-aged, and old, and die at last; and the bells they grappled in their lustof manhood toll them to their graves, on which the tireless wind will, winter after winter, sprinkle snow from alps and forests which theyknew. 

'There is a light, ' cried Christian, 'up in Anna's window!' 'A light!a light!' the Comus shouted. But how to get at the window, which ispretty high above the ground, and out of reach of the most ardentrevellers? We search a neighbouring shed, extract a stable-ladder, andin two seconds Palmy has climbed to the topmost rung, while Christianand Georg hold it firm upon the snow beneath. Then begins a passagefrom some comic opera of Mozart's or Cimarosa's--an escapade familiarto Spanish or Italian students, which recalls the stage. It is anepisode from 'Don Giovanni, ' translated to this dark-etched sceneof snowy hills, and Gothic tower, and mullioned windows deep embayedbeneath their eaves and icicles. _Deh vieni alla finestra!_ singsPalmy-Leporello; the chorus answers: _Deh vieni! Perchè non vieniancora?_ pleads Leporello; the chorus shouts: _Perchè? Mioamu-u-u-r_, sighs Leporello; and Echo cries, _amu-u-u-r!_ Allthe wooing, be it noticed, is conducted in Italian. But the actorsmurmur to each other in Davoser Deutsch, 'She won't come, Palmy! It isfar too late; she is gone to bed. Come down; you'll wake the villagewith your caterwauling!' But Leporello waves his broad archdeacon'shat, and resumes a flood of flexible Bregaglian. He has a shrewdsuspicion that the girl is peeping from behind the window curtain;and tells us, bending down from the ladder, in a hoarse stage-whisper, that we must have patience; 'these girls are kittle cattle, who takelong to draw: but if your lungs last out, they're sure to show. ' AndLeporello is right. Faint heart ne'er won fair lady. From the summitof his ladder, by his eloquent Italian tongue, he brings the shy birddown at last. We hear the unbarring of the house door, and a comelymaiden, in her Sunday dress, welcomes us politely to her ground-floorsitting-room. The Comus enters, in grave order, with set speeches, handshakes, and inevitable _Prosits_! It is a large low chamber, with a huge stone stove, wide benches fixed along the walls, and agreat oval table. We sit how and where we can. Red wine is produced, and eier-brod and küchli. Fräulein Anna serves us sedately, holdingher own with decent self-respect against the inrush of the revellers. She is quite alone; but are not her father and mother in bed above, and within earshot? Besides, the Comus, even at this abnormal hour andafter an abnormal night, is well conducted. Things seem slipping intoa decorous wine-party, when Leporello readjusts the broad-brimmedhat upon his head, and very cleverly acts a little love-scene for ourbenefit. Fräulein Anna takes this as a delicate compliment, and thething is so prettily done in truth, that not the sternest taste couldbe offended. Meanwhile another party of night-wanderers, attracted byour mirth, break in. More _Prosits_ and clinked glasses follow;and with a fair good-morning to our hostess, we retire. 

It is too late to think of bed. 'The quincunx of heaven, ' as SirThomas Browne phrased it on a dissimilar occasion, 'runs low. .. . Thehuntsmen are up in America; and not in America only, for the huntsmen, if there are any this night in Graubünden, have long been out upon thesnow, and the stable-lads are dragging the sledges from their shedsto carry down the mails to Landquart. We meet the porters from thevarious hotels, bringing letter-bags and luggage to the post. It istime to turn in and take a cup of black coffee against the rising sun. 

IX

Some nights, even in Davos, are spent, even by an invalid, in bed. A leaflet, therefore, of 'Sleep-chasings' may not inappropriatelybe flung, as envoy to so many wanderings on foot and sledge upon thewinter snows. 

The first is a confused medley of things familiar and things strange. I have been dreaming of far-away old German towns, with gabled housesdeep in snow; dreaming of châlets in forgotten Alpine glens, wherewood-cutters come plunging into sleepy light from gloom, and sinkingdown beside the stove to shake the drift from their rough shoulders;dreaming of vast veils of icicles upon the gaunt black rocks in placeswhere no foot of man will pass, and where the snow is weaving eyebrowsover the ledges of grey whirlwind-beaten precipices; dreamingof Venice, forlorn beneath the windy drip of rain, the gas lampsflickering on the swimming piazzetta, the barche idle, the gondolierwrapped in his thread-bare cloak, alone; dreaming of Apennines, withworld-old cities, brown, above the brown sea of dead chestnut boughs;dreaming of stormy tides, and watchers aloft in lighthouses when dayis finished; dreaming of dead men and women and dead children in theearth, far down beneath the snow-drifts, six feet deep. And thenI lift my face, awaking, from my pillow; the pallid moon is on thevalley, and the room is filled with spectral light. 

I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is a hospice in an unfrequentedpass, between sad peaks, beside a little black lake, overdrifted withsoft snow. I pass into the house-room, gliding silently. An old manand an old woman are nodding, bowed in deepest slumber, by the stove. A young man plays the zither on a table. He lifts his head, stillmodulating with his fingers on the strings. He looks right through mewith wide anxious eyes. He does not see me, but sees Italy, I know, and some one wandering on a sandy shore. 

I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is S. Stephen's Church in Wien. Inside, the lamps are burning dimly in the choir. There is fog in theaisles; but through the sleepy air and over the red candles flies awild soprano's voice, a boy's soul in its singing sent to heaven. 

I sleep, and change my dreaming. From the mufflers in which hisfather, the mountebank, has wrapped the child, to carry him acrossthe heath, a little tumbling-boy emerges in soiled tights. He is halfasleep. His father scrapes the fiddle. The boy shortens his red belt, kisses his fingers to us, and ties himself into a knot among theglasses on the table. 

I sleep, and change my dreaming. I am on the parapet of a hugecircular tower, hollow like a well, and pierced with windows atirregular intervals. The parapet is broad, and slabbed with redVerona marble. Around me are athletic men, all naked, in the strangestattitudes of studied rest, down-gazing, as I do, into the depthsbelow. There comes a confused murmur of voices, and the tower isthreaded and rethreaded with great cables. Up these there climb to usa crowd of young men, clinging to the ropes and flinging their bodiessideways on aërial trapezes. My heart trembles with keen joy andterror. For nowhere else could plastic forms be seen more beautiful, and nowhere else is peril more apparent. Leaning my chin upon theutmost verge, I wait. I watch one youth, who smiles and soars to me;and when his face is almost touching mine, he speaks, but what he saysI know not. 

I sleep, and change my dreaming. The whole world rocks to itsfoundations. The mountain summits that I know are shaken. They bowtheir bristling crests. They are falling, falling on us, and the earthis riven. I wake in terror, shouting: INSOLITIS TREMUERUNT MOTIBUSALPES! An earthquake, slight but real, has stirred the ever-wakefulVesta of the brain to this Virgilian quotation. 

I sleep, and change my dreaming. Once more at night I sledge aloneupon the Klosters road. It is the point where the woods close over itand moonlight may not pierce the boughs. There come shrill cries ofmany voices from behind, and rushings that pass by and vanish. Thenon their sledges I behold the phantoms of the dead who died in Davos, longing for their homes; and each flies past me, shrieking in thestill cold air; and phosphorescent like long meteors, the pageantturns the windings of the road below and disappears. 

I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is the top of some highmountain, where the crags are cruelly tortured and cast in enormoussplinters on the ledges of cliffs grey with old-world ice. A ravine, opening at my feet, plunges down immeasurably to a dim and distantsea. Above me soars a precipice embossed with a gigantic ice-boundshape. As I gaze thereon, I find the lineaments and limbs of a Titanicman chained and nailed to the rock. His beard has grown for centuries, and flowed this way and that, adown his breast and over to the stoneon either side; and the whole of him is covered with a greenish ice, ancient beyond the memory of man. 'This is Prometheus, ' I whisper tomyself, 'and I am alone on Caucasus. '

 * * * * *

BACCHUS IN GRAUBÜNDEN

I

Some years' residence in the Canton of the Grisons made me familiarwith all sorts of Valtelline wine; with masculine but rough _Inferno_, generous _Forzato_, delicate _Sassella_, harsher _Montagner_, theraspberry flavour of _Grumello_, the sharp invigorating twang of_Villa_. The colour, ranging from garnet to almandine or ruby, told methe age and quality of wine; and I could judge from the crust it formsupon the bottle, whether it had been left long enough in wood toripen. I had furthermore arrived at the conclusion that the bestValtelline can only be tasted in cellars of the Engadine or Davos, where this vintage matures slowly in the mountain air, and takes aflavour unknown at lower levels. In a word, it had amused my leisureto make or think myself a connoisseur. My literary taste was tickledby the praise bestowed in the Augustan age on Rhætic grapes by Virgil:

 Et quo te carmine dicam, Rhætica? nec cellis ideo contende Falernis. 

I piqued myself on thinking that could the poet but have drankone bottle at Samaden--where Stilicho, by the way, in his famousrecruiting expedition may perhaps have drank it--he would have beenless chary in his panegyric. For the point of inferiority on which heseems to insist, namely, that Valtelline wine does not keep wellin cellar, is only proper to this vintage in Italian climate. Suchmeditations led my fancy on the path of history. Is there truth, then, in the dim tradition that this mountain land was colonisedby Etruscans? Is _Ras_ the root of Rhætia? The Etruscans wereaccomplished wine-growers, we know. It was their Montepulciano whichdrew the Gauls to Rome, if Livy can be trusted. Perhaps they firstplanted the vine in Valtelline. Perhaps its superior culture in thatdistrict may be due to ancient use surviving in a secluded Alpinevalley. One thing is certain, that the peasants of Sondrio and Tiranounderstand viticulture better than the Italians of Lombardy. 

Then my thoughts ran on to the period of modern history, when theGrisons seized the Valtelline in lieu of war-pay from the Dukes ofMilan. For some three centuries they held it as a subject province. From the Rathhaus at Davos or Chur they sent their nobles--VonSalis and Buol, Planta and Sprecher von Bernegg--across the hills asgovernors or podestàs to Poschiavo, Sondrio, Tirano, and Morbegno. In those old days the Valtelline wines came duly every winter oversnow-deep passes to fill the cellars of the Signori Grigioni. Thatquaint traveller Tom Coryat, in his so-called 'Crudities, ' notesthe custom early in the seventeenth century. And as that customthen obtained, it still subsists with little alteration. Thewine-carriers--Weinführer, as they are called--first scaledthe Bernina pass, halting then as now, perhaps at Poschiavo andPontresina. Afterwards, in order to reach Davos, the pass of theScaletta rose before them--a wilderness of untracked snow-drifts. Thecountry-folk still point to narrow, light hand-sledges, on which thecasks were charged before the last pitch of the pass. Some wine came, no doubt, on pack-saddles. A meadow in front of the Dischma-Thal, where the pass ends, still bears the name of the Ross-Weid, orhorse-pasture. It was here that the beasts of burden used for thiswine-service, rested after their long labours. In favourable weatherthe whole journey from Tirano would have occupied at least four days, with scanty halts at night. 

The Valtelline slipped from the hands of the Grisons early in thiscentury. It is rumoured that one of the Von Salis family negotiatedmatters with Napoleon more for his private benefit than for theinterests of the state. However this may have been, when theGraubünden became a Swiss Canton, after four centuries of sovereignindependence, the whole Valtelline passed to Austria, and soeventually to Italy. According to modern and just notions ofnationality, this was right. In their period of power, the Grisonsmasters had treated their Italian dependencies with harshness. TheValtelline is an Italian valley, connected with the rest ofthe peninsula by ties of race and language. It is, moreover, geographically linked to Italy by the great stream of the Adda, whichtakes its rise upon the Stelvio, and after passing through the Lake ofComo, swells the volume of the Po. 

But, though politically severed from the Valtelline, the Engadinersand Davosers have not dropped their old habit of importing its bestproduce. What they formerly levied as masters, they now acquire bypurchase. The Italian revenue derives a large profit from the frontierdues paid at the gate between Tirano and Poschiavo on the Berninaroad. Much of the same wine enters Switzerland by another route, travelling from Sondrio to Chiavenna and across the Splügen. But untilquite recently, the wine itself could scarcely be found outside theCanton. It was indeed quoted upon Lombard wine-lists. Yet no one drankit; and when I tasted it at Milan, I found it quite unrecognisable. The fact seems to be that the Graubündeners alone know how to dealwith it; and, as I have hinted, the wine requires a mountain climatefor its full development. 

II

The district where the wine of Valtellina is grown extends, roughlyspeaking, from Tirano to Morbegno, a distance of some fifty-fourmiles. The best sorts come from the middle of this region. High upin the valley, soil and climate are alike less favourable. Low downa coarser, earthier quality springs from fat land where the valleybroadens. The northern hillsides to a very considerable height abovethe river are covered with vineyards. The southern slopes on the leftbank of the Adda, lying more in shade, yield but little. Inferno, Grumello, and Perla di Sassella are the names of famous vineyards. Sassella is the general name for a large tract. Buying an Inferno, Grumello, or Perla di Sassella wine, it would be absurd to supposethat one obtained it precisely from the eponymous estate. But as eachof these vineyards yields a marked quality of wine, which is takenas standard-giving, the produce of the whole district may be broadlyclassified as approaching more or less nearly to one of these acceptedtypes. The Inferno, Grumello, and Perla di Sassella of commerce aretherefore three sorts of good Valtelline, ticketed with famous namesto indicate certain differences of quality. Montagner, as thename implies, is a somewhat lighter wine, grown higher up in thehill-vineyards. And of this class there are many species, someapproximating to Sassella in delicacy of flavour, others approachingthe tart lightness of the Villa vintage. This last takes its titlefrom a village in the neighbourhood of Tirano, where a table-wine ischiefly grown. 

Forzato is the strongest, dearest, longest-lived of this whole familyof wines. It is manufactured chiefly at Tirano; and, as will beunderstood from its name, does not profess to belong to any one of thefamous localities. Forzato or Sforzato, forced or enforced, is in facta wine which has undergone a more artificial process. In German thepeople call it Strohwein, which also points to the method of itspreparation. The finest grapes are selected and dried in the sun(hence the _Stroh_) for a period of eight or nine weeks. Whenthey have almost become raisins, they are pressed. The must is heavilycharged with sugar, and ferments powerfully. Wine thus made requiresseveral years to ripen. Sweet at first, it takes at last a very finequality and flavour, and is rough, almost acid, on the tongue. Itscolour too turns from a deep rich crimson to the tone of tawny port, which indeed it much resembles. 

Old Forzato, which has been long in cask, and then perhaps three yearsin bottle, will fetch at least six francs, or may rise to even tenfrancs a flask. The best Sassella rarely reaches more than fivefrancs. Good Montagner and Grumello can be had perhaps for fourfrancs; and Inferno of a special quality for six francs. Thus theaverage price of old Valtelline wine may be taken as five francs abottle. These, I should observe, are hotel prices. 

Valtelline wines bought in the wood vary, of course, according totheir age and year of vintage. I have found that from 2. 50 fr. To 3. 50fr. Per litre is a fair price for sorts fit to bottle. The new wine of1881 sold in the following winter at prices varying from 1. 05 fr. To1. 80 fr. Per litre. 

It is customary for the Graubünden wine-merchants to buy up the wholeproduce of a vineyard from the peasants at the end of the vintage. They go in person or depute their agents to inspect the wine, maketheir bargains, and seal the cellars where the wine is stored. Then, when the snow has fallen, their own horses with sleighs and trustedservants go across the passes to bring it home. Generally they havesome local man of confidence at Tirano, the starting-point for thehomeward journey, who takes the casks up to that place and sees themduly charged. Merchants of old standing maintain relations with thesame peasants, taking their wine regularly; so that from Lorenz Gredigat Pontresina or Andreas Gredig at Davos Dörfli, from Fanconi atSamaden, or from Giacomi at Chiavenna, special qualities of wine, theproduce of certain vineyards, are to be obtained. Up to the presenttime this wine trade has been conducted with simplicity and honesty byboth the dealers and the growers. One chief merit of Valtelline wineis that it is pure. How long so desirable a state of things willsurvive the slow but steady development of an export business may bequestioned. 

III

With so much practical and theoretical interest in the produce ofthe Valtelline to stimulate my curiosity, I determined to visit thedistrict at the season when the wine was leaving it. It was the winterof 1881-82, a winter of unparalleled beauty in the high Alps. Daysucceeded day without a cloud. Night followed night with steadystars, gliding across clear mountain ranges and forests of dark pinesunstirred by wind. I could not hope for a more prosperous season; andindeed I made such use of it, that between the months of January andMarch I crossed six passes of the Alps in open sleighs--the FluelaBernina, Splügen, Julier, Maloja, and Albula--with less difficulty anddiscomfort in mid-winter than the traveller may often find on them inJune. 

At the end of January, my friend Christian and I left Davos longbefore the sun was up, and ascended for four hours through theinterminable snow-drifts of the Fluela in a cold grey shadow. Thesun's light seemed to elude us. It ran along the ravine through whichwe toiled; dipped down to touch the topmost pines above our heads;rested in golden calm upon the Schiahorn at our back; capriciouslyplayed here and there across the Weisshorn on our left, and made theprecipices of the Schwartzhorn glitter on our right. But athwart ourpath it never fell until we reached the very summit of the pass. Then we passed quietly into the full glory of the winter morning--atranquil flood of sunbeams, pouring through air of crystalline purity, frozen and motionless. White peaks and dark brown rocks soared up, cutting a sky of almost purple blueness. A stillness that might befelt brooded over the whole world; but in that stillness there wasnothing sad, no suggestion of suspended vitality. It was the stillnessrather of untroubled health, of strength omnipotent but unexerted. 

From the Hochspitz of the Fluela the track plunges at one bound intothe valley of the Inn, following a narrow cornice carved from thesmooth bank of snow, and hung, without break or barrier, athousand feet or more above the torrent. The summer road is lost insnow-drifts. The galleries built as a protection from avalanches, which sweep in rivers from those grim, bare fells above, are blockedwith snow. Their useless arches yawn, as we glide over or outsidethem, by paths which instinct in our horse and driver traces. As a flymay creep along a house-roof, slanting downwards we descend. One whiskfrom the swinged tail of an avalanche would hurl us, like a fly, intothe ruin of the gaping gorge. But this season little snow has fallenon the higher hills; and what still lies there, is hard frozen. Therefore we have no fear, as we whirl fast and faster from thesnow-fields into the black forests of gnarled cembras and wind-weariedpines. Then Süss is reached, where the Inn hurries its shallow watersclogged with ice-floes through a sleepy hamlet. The stream is pure andgreen; for the fountains of the glaciers are locked by winter frosts;and only clear rills from perennial sources swell its tide. At Süsswe lost the sun, and toiled in garish gloom and silence, nipped by theever-deepening cold of evening, upwards for four hours to Samaden. 

The next day was spent in visiting the winter colony at San Moritz, where the Kulm Hotel, tenanted by some twenty guests, presented in itsvastness the appearance of a country-house. One of the prettiest spotsin the world is the ice-rink, fashioned by the skill of Herr CasparBadrutt on a high raised terrace, commanding the valley of the Inn andthe ponderous bulwarks of Bernina. The silhouettes of skaters, definedagainst that landscape of pure white, passed to and fro beneath acloudless sky. Ladies sat and worked or read on seats upon the ice. Not a breath of wind was astir, and warm beneficent sunlight floodedthe immeasurable air. Only, as the day declined, some iridescent filmsoverspread the west; and just above Maloja the apparition of amock sun--a well-defined circle of opaline light, broken at regularintervals by four globes--seemed to portend a change of weather. Thisforecast fortunately proved delusive. We drove back to Samaden acrossthe silent snow, enjoying those delicate tints of rose and violet andsaffron which shed enchantment for one hour over the white monotony ofAlpine winter. 

At half-past eight next morning, the sun was rising from behind PitzLanguard, as we crossed the Inn and drove through Pontresina in theglorious light, with all its huge hotels quite empty and none but afew country-folk abroad. Those who only know the Engadine in summerhave little conception of its beauty. Winter softens the hard detailsof bare rock, and rounds the melancholy grassless mountain flanks, suspending icicles to every ledge and spangling the curved surfacesof snow with crystals. The landscape gains in purity, and, what soundsunbelievable, in tenderness. Nor does it lose in grandeur. Lookingup the valley of the Morteratsch that morning, the glaciers weredistinguishable in hues of green and sapphire through their veil ofsnow; and the highest peaks soared in a transparency of amethystinelight beneath a blue sky traced with filaments of windy cloud. Somestorm must have disturbed the atmosphere in Italy, for fan-shapedmists frothed out around the sun, and curled themselves above themountains in fine feathery wreaths, melting imperceptibly into air, until, when we had risen above the cembras, the sky was one deep solidblue. 

All that upland wilderness is lovelier now than in the summer; and onthe morning of which I write, the air itself was far more summery thanI have ever known it in the Engadine in August. We could scarcelybear to place our hands upon the woodwork of the sleigh because ofthe fierce sun's heat. And yet the atmosphere was crystalline withwindless frost. As though to increase the strangeness of thesecontrasts, the pavement of beaten snow was stained with red dropsspilt from wine-casks which pass over it. 

The chief feature of the Bernina--what makes it a dreary pass enoughin summer, but infinitely beautiful in winter--is its breadth;illimitable undulations of snow-drifts; immensity of open sky;unbroken lines of white, descending in smooth curves from glitteringice-peaks. 

A glacier hangs in air above the frozen lakes, with all its green-blueice-cliffs glistening in intensest light. Pitz Palu shoots aloftlike sculptured marble, delicately veined with soft aërial shadows oftranslucent blue. At the summit of the pass all Italy seems to burstupon the eyes in those steep serried ranges, with their craggy crests, violet-hued in noonday sunshine, as though a bloom of plum or grapehad been shed over them, enamelling their jagged precipices. 

The top of the Bernina is not always thus in winter. It has a badreputation for the fury of invading storms, when falling snowhurtles together with snow scooped from the drifts in eddies, and theweltering white sea shifts at the will of whirlwinds. The Hospice thenmay be tenanted for days together by weather-bound wayfarers; and aline drawn close beneath its roof shows how two years ago the wholebuilding was buried in one snow-shroud. This morning we lounged aboutthe door, while our horses rested and postillions and carters pledgedone another in cups of new Veltliner. 

The road takes an awful and sudden dive downwards, quite irrespectiveof the carefully engineered post-track. At this season the path isbadly broken into ruts and chasms by the wine traffic. In some placesit was indubitably perilous: a narrow ledge of mere ice skirtingthinly clad hard-frozen banks of snow, which fell precipitatelysideways for hundreds of sheer feet. We did not slip over thisparapet, though we were often within an inch of doing so. Had ourhorse stumbled, it is not probable that I should have been writingthis. 

When we came to the galleries which defend the road from avalanches, we saw ahead of us a train of over forty sledges ascending, allcharged with Valtelline wine. Our postillions drew up at the innerside of the gallery, between massive columns of the purest icedependent from the rough-hewn roof and walls of rock. A sort of open_loggia_ on the farther side framed vignettes of the Valtellinemountains in their hard cerulean shadows and keen sunlight. Betweenus and the view defiled the wine-sledges; and as each went by, themen made us drink out of their _trinketti_. These are oblong, hexagonal wooden kegs, holding about fourteen litres, which the carterfills with wine before he leaves the Valtelline, to cheer him on thehomeward journey. You raise it in both hands, and when the bung hasbeen removed, allow the liquor to flow stream-wise down your throat. It was a most extraordinary Bacchic procession--a pomp which, thoughundreamed of on the banks of the Ilissus, proclaimed the deity ofDionysos in authentic fashion. Struggling horses, grappling at theice-bound floor with sharp-spiked shoes; huge, hoarse drivers, someclad in sheepskins from Italian valleys, some brown as bears in roughGraubünden homespun; casks, dropping their spilth of red wine on thesnow; greetings, embracings; patois of Bergamo, Romansch, and Germanroaring around the low-browed vaults and tingling ice pillars;pourings forth of libations of the new strong Valtelline on breastsand beards;--the whole made up a scene of stalwart jollity andmanful labour such as I have nowhere else in such wild circumstanceswitnessed. Many Davosers were there, the men of Andreas Gredig, Valär, and so forth; and all of these, on greeting Christian, forced us todrain a _Schluck_ from their unmanageable cruses. Then on theywent, crying, creaking, struggling, straining through the corridor, which echoed deafeningly, the gleaming crystals of those hard Italianmountains in their winter raiment building a background of stillbeauty to the savage Bacchanalian riot of the team. 

How little the visitors who drink Valtelline wine at S. Moritz orDavos reflect by what strange ways it reaches them. A sledge canscarcely be laden with more than one cask of 300 litres on the ascent;and this cask, according to the state of the road, has many times tobe shifted from wheels to runners and back again before the journeyis accomplished. One carter will take charge of two horses, andconsequently of two sledges and two casks, driving them both by voiceand gesture rather than by rein. When they leave the Valtelline, thecarters endeavour, as far as possible, to take the pass in gangs, lestbad weather or an accident upon the road should overtake them singly. At night they hardly rest three hours, and rarely think of sleeping, but spend the time in drinking and conversation. The horses are fedand littered; but for them too the night-halt is little better thana baiting-time. In fair weather the passage of the mountain is notdifficult, though tiring. But woe to men and beasts alike if theyencounter storms! Not a few perish in the passes; and it frequentlyhappens that their only chance is to unyoke the horses and leave thesledges in a snow-wreath, seeking for themselves such shelter asmay possibly be gained, frost-bitten, after hours of battling withimpermeable drifts. The wine is frozen into one solid mass of rosy icebefore it reaches Pontresina. This does not hurt the young vintage, but it is highly injurious to wine of some years' standing. The perilsof the journey are aggravated by the savage temper of the drivers. Jealousies between the natives of rival districts spring up; and thereare men alive who have fought the whole way down from Fluela Hospiceto Davos Platz with knives and stones, hammers and hatchets, woodenstaves and splintered cart-wheels, staining the snow with blood, andbringing broken pates, bruised limbs, and senseless comrades home totheir women to be tended. 

Bacchus Alpinus shepherded his train away from us to northward, and wepassed forth into noonday from the gallery. It then seemed clear thatboth conductor and postillion were sufficiently merry. The plunge theytook us down those frozen parapets, with shriek and _jauchzen_and cracked whips, was more than ever dangerous. Yet we reached LaRosa safely. This is a lovely solitary spot, beside a rushing stream, among grey granite boulders grown with spruce and rhododendron: averitable rose of Sharon blooming in the desert. The wastes of theBernina stretch above, and round about are leaguered some of the mostforbidding sharp-toothed peaks I ever saw. Onwards, across the silentsnow, we glided in immitigable sunshine, through opening valleys andpine-woods, past the robber-huts of Pisciadella, until at evenfall werested in the roadside inn at Poschiavo. 

IV

The snow-path ended at Poschiavo; and when, as usual, we started onour journey next day at sunrise, it was in a carriage upon wheels. Yet even here we were in full midwinter. Beyond Le Prese the lakepresented one sheet of smooth black ice, reflecting every peak andchasm of the mountains, and showing the rocks and water-weeds in theclear green depths below. The glittering floor stretched away foracres of untenanted expanse, with not a skater to explore those darkmysterious coves, or strike across the slanting sunlight pouredfrom clefts in the impendent hills. Inshore the substance of theice sparkled here and there with iridescence like the plumelets ofa butterfly's wing under the microscope, wherever light happened tocatch the jagged or oblique flaws that veined its solid crystal. 

From the lake the road descends suddenly for a considerable distancethrough a narrow gorge, following a torrent which rushes among graniteboulders. Chestnut trees begin to replace the pines. The sunnierterraces are planted with tobacco, and at a lower level vines appearat intervals in patches. One comes at length to a great red gateacross the road, which separates Switzerland from Italy, and where theexport dues on wine are paid. The Italian custom-house isromantically perched above the torrent. Two courteous and elegant_finanzieri_, mere boys, were sitting wrapped in their militarycloaks and reading novels in the sun as we drove up. Though they madesome pretence of examining the luggage, they excused themselves withsweet smiles and apologetic eyes--it was a disagreeable duty!

A short time brought us to the first village in the Valtelline, where the road bifurcates northward to Bormio and the Stelvio pass, southward to Sondrio and Lombardy. It is a little hamlet, known bythe name of La Madonna di Tirano, having grown up round a pilgrimagechurch of great beauty, with tall Lombard bell-tower, pierced withmany tiers of pilastered windows, ending in a whimsical spire, anddominating a fantastic cupola building of the earlier Renaissance. Taken altogether, this is a charming bit of architecture, picturesquely set beneath the granite snow-peaks of the Valtelline. The church, they say, was raised at Madonna's own command to stay thetide of heresy descending from the Engadine; and in the year 1620, thebronze statue of S. Michael, which still spreads wide its wings abovethe cupola, looked down upon the massacre of six hundred Protestantsand foreigners, commanded by the patriot Jacopo Robustelli. 

From Madonna the road leads up the valley through a narrow avenue ofpoplar-trees to the town of Tirano. We were now in the district whereForzato is made, and every vineyard had a name and history. In Tiranowe betook ourself to the house of an old acquaintance of the Buolfamily, Bernardo da Campo, or, as the Graubündeners call him, BernardCampbèll. We found him at dinner with his son and grandchildren in avast, dark, bare Italian chamber. It would be difficult to find a moretypical old Scotchman of the Lowlands than he looked, with his cleanclose-shaven face, bright brown eyes, and snow-white hair escapingfrom a broad-brimmed hat. He might have sat to a painter for someCovenanter's portrait, except that there was nothing dour about him, or for an illustration to Burns's 'Cotter's Saturday Night. ' The airof probity and canniness combined with a twinkle of dry humour wascompletely Scotch; and when he tapped his snuff-box, telling storiesof old days, I could not refrain from asking him about his pedigree. It should be said that there is a considerable family of Campèlls orCampbèlls in the Graubünden, who are fabled to deduce their stock froma Scotch Protestant of Zwingli's time; and this made it irresistibleto imagine that in our friend Bernardo I had chanced upon a notablespecimen of atavism. All he knew, however, was, that his firstancestor had been a foreigner, who came across the mountains to Tiranotwo centuries ago. [3]

This old gentleman is a considerable wine-dealer. He sent us with hisson, Giacomo, on a long journey underground through his cellars, wherewe tasted several sorts of Valtelline, especially the new Forzato, made a few weeks since, which singularly combines sweetness withstrength, and both with a slight effervescence. It is certainly thesort of wine wherewith to tempt a Polyphemus, and not unapt to turn agiant's head. 

Leaving Tirano, and once more passing through the poplars by Madonna, we descended the valley all along the vineyards of Villa and the vastdistrict of Sassella. Here and there, at wayside inns, we stopped todrink a glass of some particular vintage; and everywhere it seemed asthough god Bacchus were at home. The whole valley on the right side ofthe Adda is one gigantic vineyard, climbing the hills in tiers andterraces, which justify its Italian epithet of _Teatro di Bacco_. Therock is a greyish granite, assuming sullen brown and orange tintswhere exposed to sun and weather. The vines are grown on stakes, nottrellised over trees or carried across boulders, as is the fashion atChiavenna or Terlan. Yet every advantage of the mountain is adroitlyused; nooks and crannies being specially preferred, where the sun'srays are deflected from hanging cliffs. The soil seems deep, and is ofa dull yellow tone. When the vines end, brushwood takes up the growth, which expires at last in crag and snow. Some alps and chalets, dimlytraced against the sky, are evidences that a pastoral life prevailsabove the vineyards. Pan there stretches the pine-thyrsus down tovine-garlanded Dionysos. 

The Adda flows majestically among willows in the midst, and the valleyis nearly straight. The prettiest spot, perhaps, is at Tresenda orS. Giacomo, where a pass from Edolo and Brescia descends from thesouthern hills. But the Valtelline has no great claim to beauty ofscenery. Its chief town, Sondrio, where we supped and drank somespecial wine called _il vino de' Signori Grigioni_, has beenmodernised in dull Italian fashion. 

V

The hotel at Sondrio, La Maddalena, was in carnival uproar ofmasquers, topers, and musicians all night through. It was as much aswe could do to rouse the sleepy servants and get a cup of coffeeere we started in the frozen dawn. 'Verfluchte Maddalena!' grumbledChristian as he shouldered our portmanteaus and bore them in hot hasteto the post. Long experience only confirms the first impression, that, of all cold, the cold of an Italian winter is most penetrating. Aswe lumbered out of Sondrio in a heavy diligence, I could have fanciedmyself back once again at Radicofani or among the Ciminian hills. Thefrost was penetrating. Fur-coats would not keep it out; and we longedto be once more in open sledges on Bernina rather than enclosed inthat cold coupé. Now we passed Grumello, the second largest of therenowned vine districts; and always keeping the white mass of Monte diDisgrazia in sight, rolled at last into Morbegno. Here the Valtellinevintage properly ends, though much of the ordinary wine is probablysupplied from the inferior produce of these fields. It was pastnoon when we reached Colico, and saw the Lake of Como glittering insunlight, dazzling cloaks of snow on all the mountains, which look asdry and brown as dead beech-leaves at this season. Our Bacchic journeyhad reached its close; and it boots not here to tell in detail how wemade our way across the Splügen, piercing its avalanches by low-archedgalleries scooped from the solid snow, and careering in our sledgesdown perpendicular snow-fields, which no one who has crossed thatpass from the Italian side in winter will forget. We left the refugestation at the top together with a train of wine-sledges, and passedthem in the midst of the wild descent. Looking back, I saw two oftheir horses stumble in the plunge and roll headlong over. Unluckilyin one of these somersaults a man was injured. Flung ahead into thesnow by the first lurch, the sledge and wine-cask crossed him like agarden-roller. Had his bed not been of snow, he must have been crushedto death; and as it was, he presented a woeful appearance when heafterwards arrived at Splügen. 

VI

Though not strictly connected with the subject of this paper, I shallconclude these notes of winter wanderings in the high Alps with anepisode which illustrates their curious vicissitudes. 

It was late in the month of March, and nearly all the mountain roadswere open for wheeled vehicles. A carriage and four horses came tomeet us at the termination of a railway journey in Bagalz. We spentone day in visiting old houses of the Grisons aristocracy at Mayenfeldand Zizers, rejoicing in the early sunshine, which had spread thefields with spring flowers--primroses and oxlips, violets, anemones, and bright blue squills. At Chur we slept, and early next morningstarted for our homeward drive to Davos. Bad weather had declareditself in the night. It blew violently, and the rain soon changed tosnow, frozen by a bitter north blast. Crossing the dreary heath ofLenz was both magnificent and dreadful. By the time we reached Wiesen, all the forests were laden with snow, the roads deep in snow-drifts, the whole scene wintrier than it had been the winter through. 

At Wiesen we should have stayed, for evening was fast setting in. Butin ordinary weather it is only a two hours drive from Wiesen to Davos. Our coachman made no objections to resuming the journey, and our fourhorses had but a light load to drag. So we telegraphed for supper tobe prepared, and started between five and six. 

A deep gorge has to be traversed, where the torrent cleaves its waybetween jaws of limestone precipices. The road is carried along ledgesand through tunnels in the rock. Avalanches, which sweep this passageannually from the hills above, give it the name of Züge, or theSnow-Paths. As we entered the gorge darkness fell, the horses draggedmore heavily, and it soon became evident that our Tyrolese driver washopelessly drunk. He nearly upset us twice by taking sharp turns inthe road, banged the carriage against telegraph posts and juttingrocks, shaved the very verge of the torrent in places where therewas no parapet, and, what was worst of all, refused to leave his boxwithout a fight. The darkness by this time was all but total, and ablinding snow-storm swept howling through the ravine. At length wegot the carriage to a dead-stop, and floundered out in deep wetsnow toward some wooden huts where miners in old days made theirhabitation. The place, by a curious, perhaps unconscious irony, iscalled Hoffnungsau, or the Meadow of Hope. Indeed, it is not illnamed; for many wanderers, escaping, as we did, from the dreadfulgorge of Avalanches on a stormy night, may have felt, as we now felt, their hope reviving when they reached this shelter. 

There was no light; nothing above, beneath, around, on any side, buttearing tempest and snow whirled through the ravine. The horseswere taken out of the carriage; on their way to the stable, whichfortunately in these mountain regions will be always found beside thepoorest habitation, one of them fell back across a wall and nearlybroke his spine. Hoffnungsau is inhabited all through the year. In itsdismal dark kitchen we found a knot of workmen gathered together, andheard there were two horses on the premises besides our own. It thenoccurred to us that we might accomplish the rest of the journey withsuch sledges as they bring the wood on from the hills in winter, ifcoal-boxes or boxes of any sort could be provided. These should belashed to the sledges and filled with hay. We were only four persons;my wife and a friend should go in one, myself and my little girl inthe other. No sooner thought of than put into practice. These originalconveyances were improvised, and after two hours' halt on the Meadowof Hope, we all set forth again at half-past eight. 

I have rarely felt anything more piercing than the grim cold of thatjourney. We crawled at a foot's pace through changeful snow-drifts. The road was obliterated, and it was my duty to keep a petroleumstable-lamp swinging to illuminate the untracked wilderness. My littlegirl was snugly nested in the hay, and sound asleep with a deep whitecovering of snow above her. Meanwhile, the drift clave in frozenmasses to our faces, lashed by a wind so fierce and keen that itwas difficult to breathe it. My forehead-bone ached, as though withneuralgia, from the mere mask of icy snow upon it, plastered on withfrost. Nothing could be seen but millions of white specks, whirledat us in eddying concentric circles. Not far from the entrance to thevillage we met our house-folk out with lanterns to look for us. It waspast eleven at night when at last we entered warm rooms and refreshedourselves for the tiring day with a jovial champagne supper. Horses, carriage, and drunken driver reached home next morning. 

 * * * * *

OLD TOWNS OF PROVENCE

Travellers journeying southward from Paris first meet with olive-treesnear Montdragon or Monsélimart--little towns, with old historic names, upon the road to Orange. It is here that we begin to feel ourselveswithin the land of Provence, where the Romans found a second Italy, and where the autumn of their antique civilisation was followed, almost without an intermediate winter of barbarism, by the light anddelicate springtime of romance. Orange itself is full of Rome. Indeed, the ghost of the dead empire seems there to be more real and livingthan the actual flesh and blood of modern time, as represented bynarrow dirty streets and mean churches. It is the shell of the hugetheatre, hollowed from the solid hill, and fronted with a wall thatseems made rather to protect a city than to form a sounding-board fora stage, which first tells us that we have reached the old Arausio. Ofall theatres this is the most impressive, stupendous, indestructible, the Colosseum hardly excepted; for in Rome herself we are preparedfor something gigantic, while in the insignificant Arausio--a sortof antique Tewkesbury--to find such magnificence, durability, andvastness, impresses one with a nightmare sense that the old lionessof Empire can scarcely yet be dead. Standing before the colossal, towering, amorphous precipice which formed the background of thescena, we feel as if once more the 'heart-shaking sound of ConsulRomanus' might be heard; as if Roman knights and deputies, arisen fromthe dead, with faces hard and stern as those of the warriors carved onTrajan's frieze, might take their seats beneath us in the orchestra, and, after proclamation made, the mortmain of imperial Rome be laidupon the comforts, liberties, and little gracefulnesses of our modernlife. Nor is it unpleasant to be startled from such reverie by thevoice of the old guardian upon the stage beneath, sonorously devolvingthe vacuous Alexandrines with which he once welcomed his ephemeralFrench emperor from Algiers. The little man is dim with distance, eclipsed and swallowed up by the shadows and grotesque fragments ofthe ruin in the midst of which he stands. But his voice--thanks to theinimitable constructive art of the ancient architect, which, evenin the desolation of at least thirteen centuries, has not lost itscunning-emerges from the pigmy throat, and fills the whole vast hollowwith its clear, if tiny, sound. Thank heaven, there is no danger ofRoman resurrection here! The illusion is completely broken, and weturn to gather the first violets of February, and to wonder at thequaint postures of a praying mantis on the grass grown tiers andporches fringed with fern. 

The sense of Roman greatness which is so oppressive in Orange and inmany other parts of Provence, is not felt at Avignon. Here we exchangethe ghost of Imperial for the phantom of Ecclesiastical Rome. Thefixed epithet of Avignon is Papal; and as the express train rushesover its bleak and wind-tormented plain, the heavy dungeon-walls andbattlemented towers of its palace fortress seem to warn us off, andbid us quickly leave the Babylon of exiled impious Antichrist. Avignonpresents the bleakest, barest, greyest scene upon a February morning, when the incessant mistral is blowing, and far and near, upon desolatehillside and sandy plain, the scanty trees are bent sideways, thecrumbling castle turrets shivering like bleached skeletons in the dryungenial air. Yet inside the town, all is not so dreary. The Papalpalace, with its terrible Glacière, its chapel painted by SimoneMemmi, its endless corridors and staircases, its torture-chamber, funnel-shaped to drown and suffocate--so runs tradition--the shrieksof wretches on the rack, is now a barrack, filled with lively littleFrench soldiers, whose politeness, though sorely taxed, is neverruffled by the introduction of inquisitive visitors into theirdormitories, eating-places, and drill-grounds. And strange, indeed, it is to see the lines of neat narrow barrack beds, between which thered-legged little men are shaving, polishing their guns, or mendingtheir trousers, in those vaulted halls of popes and cardinals, thosevast presence-chambers and audience-galleries, where Urban entertainedS. Catherine, where Rienzi came, a prisoner, to be stared at. Pass bythe Glacière with a shudder, for it has still the reek of blood aboutit; and do not long delay in the cheerless dungeon of Rienzi. Time andregimental whitewash have swept these lurking-places of old crime verybare; but the parable of the seven devils is true in more senses thanone, and the ghosts that return to haunt a deodorised, disinfected, garnished sepulchre are almost more ghastly than those which havenever been disturbed from their old habitations. 

Little by little the eye becomes accustomed to the bareness andgreyness of this Provençal landscape; and then we find that thescenery round Avignon is eminently picturesque. The view from LesDoms--which is a hill above the Pope's palace, the Acropolis, as itwere, of Avignon--embraces a wide stretch of undulating champaign, bordered by low hills, and intersected by the flashing waters of themajestic Rhone. Across the stream stands Villeneuve, like a castleof romance, with its round stone towers fronting the gates andbattlemented walls of the Papal city. A bridge used to connect the twotowns, but it is now broken. The remaining fragment is of solid build, resting on great buttresses, one of which rises fantastically abovethe bridge into a little chapel. Such, one might fancy, was thebridge which Ariosto's Rodomonte kept on horse against the Paladins ofCharlemagne, when angered by the loss of his love. Nor is it difficultto imagine Bradamante spurring up the slope against him with her magiclance in rest, and tilting him into the tawny waves beneath. 

On a clear October morning, when the vineyards are taking their lasttints of gold and crimson, and the yellow foliage of the poplars bythe river mingles with the sober greys of olive-trees and willows, every square inch of this landscape, glittering as it does with lightand with colour, the more beautiful for its subtlety and rarity, wouldmake a picture. Out of many such vignettes let us choose one. We areon the shore close by the ruined bridge, the rolling muddy Rhone infront; beyond it, by the towing-path, a tall strong cypress-tree risesbeside a little house, and next to it a crucifix twelve feet or morein height, the Christ visible afar, stretched upon His red cross;arundo donax is waving all around, and willows near; behind, far off, soar the peaked hills, blue and pearled with clouds; past the cypress, on the Rhone, comes floating a long raft, swift through the stream, its rudder guided by a score of men: one standing erect upon the prowbends forward to salute the cross; on flies the raft, the tall reedsrustle, and the cypress sleeps. 

For those who have time to spare in going to or from the south itis worth while to spend a day or two in the most comfortable andcharacteristic of old French inns, the Hôtel de l'Europe, at Avignon. Should it rain, the museum of the town is worth a visit. It containsHorace Vernet's not uncelebrated picture of Mazeppa, and another, lessfamous, but perhaps more interesting, by swollen-cheeked David, the'genius in convulsion, ' as Carlyle has christened him. His canvasis unfinished. Who knows what cry of the Convention made the painterfling his palette down and leave the masterpiece he might havespoiled? For in its way the picture is a masterpiece. There lies JeanBarrad, drummer, aged fourteen, slain in La Vendée, a true patriot, who, while his life-blood flowed away, pressed the tricolor cockadeto his heart, and murmured 'Liberty!' David has treated his subjectclassically. The little drummer-boy, though French enough in featureand in feeling, lies, Greek-like, naked on the sand--a very Hyacinthof the Republic, La Vendée's Ilioneus. The tricolor cockade and thesentiment of upturned patriotic eyes are the only indications of hisbeing a hero in his teens, a citizen who thought it sweet to die forFrance. 

In fine weather a visit to Vaucluse should by no means be omitted, not so much, perhaps, for Petrarch's sake as for the interest of thedrive, and for the marvel of the fountain of the Sorgues. For sometime after leaving Avignon you jog along the level country betweenavenues of plane-trees; then comes a hilly ridge, on which the olives, mulberries, and vineyards join their colours and melt subtly intodistant purple. After crossing this we reach L'Isle, an islandvillage girdled by the gliding Sorgues, overshadowed with giganticplane-boughs, and echoing to the plash of water dripped from mossyfern-tufted millwheels. Those who expect Petrarch's Sorgues to besome trickling poet's rill emerging from a damp grotto, may well beastounded at the rush and roar of this azure river so close uponits fountain-head. It has a volume and an arrow-like rapidity thatcommunicate the feeling of exuberance and life. In passing, let it notbe forgotten that it was somewhere or other in this 'chiaro fondo diSorga, ' as Carlyle describes, that Jourdain, the hangman-hero of theGlacière, stuck fast upon his pony when flying from his foes, and hadhis accursed life, by some diabolical providence, spared for futurebutcheries. On we go across the austere plain, between fields ofmadder, the red roots of the 'garance' lying in swathes along thefurrows. In front rise ash-grey hills of barren rock, here and therecrimsoned with the leaves of the dwarf sumach. A huge cliff stands upand seems to bar all passage. Yet the river foams in torrents at ourside. Whence can it issue? What pass or cranny in that precipice iscloven for its escape? These questions grow in interest as we enterthe narrow defile of limestone rocks which leads to the cliff-barrier, and find ourselves among the figs and olives of Vaucluse. Here is thevillage, the little church, the ugly column to Petrarch's memory, the inn, with its caricatures of Laura, and its excellent trout, thebridge and the many-flashing, eddying Sorgues, lashed by millwheels, broken by weirs, divided in its course, channelled and dyked, yetflowing irresistibly and undefiled. Blue, purple, greened by moss andwater-weeds, silvered by snow-white pebbles, on its pure smooth bedthe river runs like elemental diamond, so clear and fresh. The rockson either side are grey or yellow, terraced into oliveyards, with hereand there a cypress, fig, or mulberry tree. Soon the gardens cease, and lentisk, rosemary, box, and ilex--shrubs of Provence--with hereand there a sumach out of reach, cling to the hard stone. And so atlast we are brought face to face with the sheer impassable precipice. At its basement sleeps a pool, perfectly untroubled; a lakelet inwhich the sheltering rocks and nestling wild figs are glassed as in amirror--a mirror of blue-black water, like amethyst or fluor-spar--sopure, so still, that where it laps the pebbles you can scarcely saywhere air begins and water ends. This, then, is Petrarch's 'grotto;'this is the fountain of Vaucluse. Up from its deep reservoirs, fromthe mysterious basements of the mountain, wells the silent stream;pauseless and motionless it fills its urn, rises unruffled, glidesuntil the brink is reached, then overflows, and foams, and dashesnoisily, a cataract, among the boulders of the hills. Nothing atVaucluse is more impressive than the contrast between the tranquilsilence of the fountain and the roar of the released impetuous river. Here we can realise the calm clear eyes of sculptured water-gods, their brimming urns, their gushing streams, the magic of themountain-born and darkness-cradled flood. Or again, looking up at thesheer steep cliff, 800 feet in height, and arching slightly roofwise, so that no rain falls upon the cavern of the pool, we seem to see thestroke of Neptune's trident, the hoof of Pegasus, the force of Moses'rod, which cleft rocks and made water gush forth in the desert. Thereis a strange fascination in the spot. As our eyes follow the whitepebble which cleaves the surface and falls visibly, until the veilof azure is too thick for sight to pierce, we feel as if some glamourwere drawing us, like Hylas, to the hidden caves. At least, we long toyield a prized and precious offering to the spring, to grace the nymphof Vaucluse with a pearl of price as token of our reverence and love. 

Meanwhile nothing has been said about Petrarch, who himself said muchabout the spring, and complained against those very nymphs to whom wehave in wish, at least, been scattering jewels, that they broke hisbanks and swallowed up his gardens every winter. At Vaucluse Petrarchloved, and lived, and sang. He has made Vaucluse famous, and willnever be forgotten there. But for the present the fountain is evenmore attractive than the memory of the poet. [4]

The change from Avignon to Nismes is very trying to the latter place;for Nismes is not picturesquely or historically interesting. It is aprosperous modern French town with two almost perfect Romanmonuments--Les Arènes and the Maison Carrée. The amphitheatre is acomplete oval, visible at one glance. Its smooth white stone, evenwhere it has not been restored, seems unimpaired by age; and CharlesMartel's conflagration, when he burned the Saracen hornet's nestinside it, has only blackened the outer walls and arches venerably. Utility and perfect adaptation of means to ends form the beauty ofRoman buildings. The science of construction and large intelligencedisplayed in them, their strength, simplicity, solidity, and purpose, are their glory. Perhaps there is only one modern edifice--Palladio'sPalazzo della Ragione at Vicenza--which approaches the dignity andloftiness of Roman architecture; and this it does because of itsabsolute freedom from ornament, the vastness of its design, and thedurability of its material. The temple, called the Maison Carrée, atNismes, is also very perfect, and comprehended at one glance. Light, graceful, airy, but rather thin and narrow, it reminds one of thetemple of Fortuna Virilis at Rome. 

But if Nismes itself is not picturesque, its environs contain thewonderful Pont du Gard. A two or three hours' drive leads through adesolate country to the valley of the Cardon, where suddenly, at aturn of the road, one comes upon the aqueduct. It is not within thescope of words to describe the impression produced by those vastarches, row above row, cutting the deep blue sky. The domed summerclouds sailing across them are comprehended in the gigantic span oftheir perfect semicircles, which seem rather to have been describedby Miltonic compasses of Deity than by merely human mathematics. Yet, standing beneath one of the vaults and looking upward, you may readRoman numerals in order from I. To X. , which prove their human originwell enough. Next to their strength, regularity, and magnitude, themost astonishing point about this triple tier of arches, piled oneabove the other to a height of 180 feet above a brawling streambetween two barren hills, is their lightness. The arches are notthick; the causeway on the top is only just broad enough for three mento walk abreast. So smooth and perpendicular are the supporting wallsthat scarcely a shrub or tuft of grass has grown upon the aqueductin all these years. And yet the huge fabric is strengthened by nobuttress, has needed no repair. This lightness of structure, combinedwith such prodigious durability, produces the strongest sense ofscience and self-reliant power in the men who designed it. None butRomans could have built such a monument, and have set it in such aplace--a wilderness of rock and rolling hill, scantily covered withlow brushwood, and browsed over by a few sheep--for such a purpose, too, in order to supply Nemausus with pure water. The modern town doespretty well without its water; but here subsists the civilisationof eighteen centuries past intact: the human labour yet remains, the measuring, contriving mind of man, shrinking from no obstacles, spanning the air, and in one edifice combining gigantic strength andperfect beauty. It is impossible not to echo Rousseau's words in sucha place, and to say with him: 'Le retentissement de mes pas dans cesimmenses voûtes me faisait croire entendre la forte voix de ceuxqui les avaient bâties. Je me perdais comme un insecte dans cetteimmensité. Je sentais, tout en me faisant petit, je ne sais quoiqui m'élevait l'âme; et je me disais en soupirant, Que ne suis-je néRomain!'

There is nothing at Arles which produces the same deep and indelibleimpression. Yet Arles is a far more interesting town than Nismes, partly because of the Rhone delta which begins there, partly becauseof its ruinous antiquity, and partly also because of the strong localcharacter of its population. The amphitheatre of Arles is vaster andmore sublime in its desolation than the tidy theatre at Nismes; thecrypts, and dens, and subterranean passages suggest all manner ofspeculation as to the uses to which they may have been appropriated;while the broken galleries outside, intricate and black and cavernous, like Piranesi's etchings of the 'Carceri, ' present the wildestpictures of greatness in decay, fantastic dilapidation. The ruins ofthe smaller theatre, again, with their picturesquely grouped fragmentsand their standing columns, might be sketched for a frontispiece tosome dilettante work on classical antiquities. For the rest, perhapsthe Aliscamps, or ancient Roman burial-ground, is the most interestingthing at Arles, not only because of Dante's celebrated lines in thecanto of 'Farinata:'--

 Si come ad Arli ove 'l Rodano stagna, Fanno i sepolcri tutto 'l loco varo;

but also because of the intrinsic picturesqueness of this avenue ofsepulchres beneath green trees upon a long soft grassy field. 

But as at Avignon and Nismes, so also at Arles, one of the chiefattractions of the place lies at a distance, and requires a specialexpedition. The road to Les Baux crosses a true Provençal desert whereone realises the phrase, 'Vieux comme les rochers de Provence, '--awilderness of grey stone, here and there worn into cart-tracks, andtufted with rosemary, box, lavender, and lentisk. On the way it passesthe Abbaye de Mont Majeur, a ruin of gigantic size, embracing allperiods of architecture; where nothing seems to flourish now buthenbane and the wild cucumber, or to breathe but a mumble-toothed andterrible old hag. The ruin stands above a desolate marsh, its vastItalian buildings of Palladian splendour looking more forlorn in theirdecay than the older and austerer mediæval towers, which rise up proudand patient and defiantly erect beneath the curse of time. When atlength what used to be the castle town of Les Baux is reached, youfind a naked mountain of yellow sandstone, worn away by nature intobastions and buttresses and coigns of vantage, sculptured by ancientart into palaces and chapels, battlements and dungeons. Now art andnature are confounded in one ruin. Blocks of masonry lie cheek by jowlwith masses of the rough-hewn rock; fallen cavern vaults are heapedround fragments of fan-shaped spandrel and clustered column-shaft; thedoors and windows of old pleasure-rooms are hung with ivy and wild figfor tapestry; winding staircases start midway upon the cliff, and leadto vacancy. High overhead suspended in mid-air hang chambers--lady'sbower or poet's singing-room--now inaccessible, the haunt of hawks andswallows. Within this rocky honeycomb--'cette ville en monolithe, 'as it has been aptly called, for it is literally scooped out of onemountain block--live about two hundred poor people, foddering theirwretched goats at carved piscina and stately sideboards, erecting mudbeplastered hovels in the halls of feudal princes. Murray is wrong incalling the place a mediæval town in its original state, for anythingmore purely ruinous, more like a decayed old cheese, cannot possiblybe conceived. The living only inhabit the tombs of the dead. Atthe end of the last century, when revolutionary effervescence wasbeginning to ferment, the people of Arles swept all its feudalityaway, defacing the very arms upon the town gate, and trampling thepalace towers to dust. 

The castle looks out across a vast extent of plain over Arles, thestagnant Rhone, the Camargue, and the salt pools of the lingering sea. In old days it was the eyrie of an eagle race called Seigneurs of LesBaux; and whether they took their title from the rock, or whether, as genealogists would have it, they gave the name of OrientalBalthazar--their reputed ancestor, one of the Magi--to the rockitself, remains a mystery not greatly worth the solving. 

Anyhow, here they lived and flourished, these feudal princes, bearingfor their ensign a silver comet of sixteen rays upon a field ofgules--themselves a comet race, baleful to the neighbouring lowlands, blazing with lurid splendour over wide tracts of country, a burning, raging, fiery-souled, swift-handed tribe, in whom a flame unquenchableglowed from son to sire through twice five hundred years until, inthe sixteenth century, they were burned out, and nothing remained butcinders--these broken ruins of their eyrie, and some outworn and dustytitles. Very strange are the fate and history of these same titles:King of Arles, for instance, savouring of troubadour and high romance;Prince of Tarentum, smacking of old plays and Italian novels; Princeof Orange, which the Nassaus, through the Châlons, seized in all itsemptiness long after the real principality had passed away, and cametherewith to sit on England's throne. 

The Les Baux in their heyday were patterns of feudal nobility. Theywarred incessantly with Counts of Provence, archbishops and burghersof Arles, Queens of Naples, Kings of Aragon. Crusading, pillaging, betraying, spending their substance on the sword, and buying it againby deeds of valour or imperial acts of favour, tuning troubadourharps, presiding at courts of love, --they filled a large page in thehistory of Southern France. The Les Baux were very superstitious. Inthe fulness of their prosperity they restricted the number of theirdependent towns, or _places baussenques_, to seventy-nine, because these numbers in combination were thought to be of good omento their house. Beral des Baux, Seigneur of Marseilles, was one daystarting on a journey with his whole force to Avignon. He met an oldwoman herb-gathering at daybreak, and said, 'Mother, hast thou seena crow or other bird?' 'Yea, ' answered the crone, 'on the trunk of adead willow. ' Beral counted upon his fingers the day of the year, andturned bridle. With troubadours of name and note they had dealings, but not always to their own advantage, as the following storytestifies. When the Baux and Berengers were struggling for thecountship of Provence, Raymond Berenger, by his wife's counsel, went, attended by troubadours, to meet the Emperor Frederick at Milan. There he sued for the investiture and ratification of Provence. Histroubadours sang and charmed Frederick; and the Emperor, for the joyhe had in them, wrote his celebrated lines beginning--

 Plas mi cavalier Francez. 

And when Berenger made his request he met with no refusal. Hearingthereof, the lords of Baux came down in wrath with a clangour of armedmen. But music had already gained the day; and where the Phoebus ofProvence had shone, the Æolus of storm-shaken Les Baux was powerless. Again, when Blacas, a knight of Provence, died, the great Sordellochanted one of his most fiery hymns, bidding the princes ofChristendom flock round and eat the heart of the dead lord. 'LetRambaude des Baux, ' cries the bard, with a sarcasm that is clearlymeant, but at this distance almost unintelligible, 'take also a goodpiece, for she is fair and good and truly virtuous; let her keep itwell who knows so well to husband her own weal. ' But the poets werenot always adverse to the house of Baux. Fouquet, the beautiful andgentle melodist whom Dante placed in paradise, served Adelaisie, wifeof Berald, with long service of unhappy love, and wrote upon herdeath 'The Complaint of Berald des Baux for Adelaisie. ' Guillaume deCabestan loved Berangère des Baux, and was so loved by her that shegave him a philtre to drink, whereof he sickened and grew mad. Manymore troubadours are cited as having frequented the castle of LesBaux, and among the members of the princely house were several poets. 

Some of them were renowned for beauty. We hear of a Cécile, calledPasse Rose, because of her exceeding loveliness; also of an unhappyFrançois, who, after passing eighteen years in prison, yet won thegrace and love of Joan of Naples by his charms. But the real temper ofthis fierce tribe was not shown among troubadours, or in the courts oflove and beauty. The stern and barren rock from which they sprang, andthe comet of their scutcheon, are the true symbols of their nature. History records no end of their ravages and slaughters. It is atedious catalogue of blood--how one prince put to fire and sword thewhole town of Courthezon; how another was stabbed in prison by hiswife; how a third besieged the castle of his niece, and sought toundermine her chamber, knowing her the while to be in childbed; how afourth was flayed alive outside the walls of Avignon. There is nothingterrible, splendid, and savage, belonging to feudal history, of whichan example may not be found in the annals of Les Baux, as narrated bytheir chronicler, Jules Canonge. 

However abrupt may seem the transition from these memories ofthe ancient nobles of Les Baux to mere matters of travel andpicturesqueness, it would be impossible to take leave of the oldtowns of Provence without glancing at the cathedrals of S. Trophimeat Arles, and of S. Gilles--a village on the border of the drearyflamingo-haunted Camargue. Both of these buildings have porchessplendidly encrusted with sculptures, half classical, half mediæval, marking the transition from ancient to modern art. But that of S. Gilles is by far the richer and more elaborate. The whole façade ofthis church is one mass of intricate decoration; Norman archesand carved lions, like those of Lombard architecture, minglingfantastically with Greek scrolls of fruit and flowers, with elegantCorinthian columns jutting out upon the church steps, and with the oldconventional wave-border that is called Etruscan in our modern jargon. From the midst of florid fret and foliage lean mild faces of saintsand Madonnas. Symbols of evangelists with half-human, half-animaleyes and wings, are interwoven with the leafy bowers of cupids. Graveapostles stand erect beneath acanthus wreaths that ought to crisp theforehead of a laughing Faun or Bacchus. And yet so full, exuberant, and deftly chosen are these various elements, that there remains nosense of incongruity or discord. The mediæval spirit had much troubleto disentangle itself from classic reminiscences; and fortunately forthe picturesqueness of S. Gilles, it did not succeed. How strangelydifferent is the result of this transition in the south from thosesevere and rigid forms which we call Romanesque in Germany andNormandy and England!

 * * * * *

THE CORNICE

It was a dull afternoon in February when we left Nice, and droveacross the mountains to Mentone. Over hill and sea hung a thick mist. Turbia's Roman tower stood up in cheerless solitude, wreathed roundwith driving vapour, and the rocky nest of Esa seemed suspended ina chaos between sea and sky. Sometimes the fog broke and showed usVillafranca, lying green and flat in the deep blue below: sometimes adistant view of higher peaks swam into sight from the shifting cloud. But the whole scene was desolate. Was it for this that we had left ourEnglish home, and travelled from London day and night? At length wereached the edge of the cloud, and jingled down by Roccabruna and theolive-groves, till one by one Mentone's villas came in sight, and atlast we found ourselves at the inn door. That night, and all next dayand the next night, we heard the hoarse sea beat and thunder on thebeach. The rain and wind kept driving from the south, but we consoledourselves with thinking that the orange-trees and every kind of flowerwere drinking in the moisture and waiting to rejoice in sunlight whichwould come. 

It was a Sunday morning when we woke and found that the rain had gone, the sun was shining brightly on the sea, and a clear north wind wasblowing cloud and mist away. Out upon the hills we went, not caringmuch what path we took; for everything was beautiful, and hilland vale were full of garden walks. Through lemon-groves, --pale, golden-tender trees, --and olives, stretching their grey boughs againstthe lonely cottage tiles, we climbed, until we reached the pines andheath above. Then I knew the meaning of Theocritus for the first time. We found a well, broad, deep, and clear, with green herbs growing atthe bottom, a runlet flowing from it down the rocky steps, maidenhair, black adiantum, and blue violets, hanging from the brink and mirroredin the water. This was just the well in _Hylas_. Theocritushas been badly treated. They call him a court poet, dead to Nature, artificial in his pictures. Yet I recognised this fountain by hisverse, just as if he had showed me the very spot. Violets groweverywhere, of every shade, from black to lilac. Their stalks arelong, and the flowers 'nod' upon them, so that I see how the Greekscould make them into chaplets--how Lycidas wore his crown of whiteviolets[5] lying by the fireside elbow-deep in withered asphodel, watching the chestnuts in the embers, and softly drinking deep healthsto Ageanax far off upon the waves. It is impossible to go wrong inthese valleys. They are cultivated to the height of about five hundredfeet above the sea, in terraces laboriously built up with walls, earthed and manured, and irrigated by means of tanks and aqueducts. Above this level, where the virgin soil has not been yet reclaimed, or where the winds of winter bring down freezing currents from themountains through a gap or gully of the lower hills, a tangled growthof heaths and arbutus, and pines, and rosemarys, and myrtles, continuethe vegetation, till it finally ends in bare grey rocks and peaks somethousand feet in height. Far above all signs of cultivation on thesearid peaks, you still may see villages and ruined castles, builtcenturies ago for a protection from the Moorish pirates. To thesemountain fastnesses the people of the coast retreated when theydescried the sails of their foes on the horizon. In Mentone, not verylong ago, old men might be seen who in their youth were said to havebeen taken captive by the Moors; and many Arabic words have foundtheir way into the patois of the people. 

There is something strangely fascinating in the sight of these ruinson the burning rocks, with their black sentinel cypresses, immenselytall and far away. Long years and rain and sunlight have made thesecastellated eyries one with their native stone. It is hard to tracein their foundations where Nature's workmanship ends and where man'sbegins. What strange sights the mountain villagers must see! The vastblue plain of the unfurrowed deep, the fairy range of Corsica hungmidway between the sea and sky at dawn or sunset, the stars so closeabove their heads, the deep dew-sprinkled valleys, the green pines! Onpenetrating into one of these hill-fortresses, you find that it isa whole village, with a church and castle and piazza, some few feetsquare, huddled together on a narrow platform. We met one day threemagnates of Gorbio taking a morning stroll backwards and forwards, up and down their tiny square. Vehemently gesticulating, loudlychattering, they talked as though they had not seen each other for tenyears, and were but just unloading their budgets of accumulated news. Yet these three men probably had lived, eaten, drunk, and talkedtogether from the cradle to that hour: so true it is that useand custom quicken all our powers, especially of gossiping andscandal-mongering. S. Agnese is the highest and most notable of allthese villages. The cold and heat upon its absolutely barren rockmust be alike intolerable. In appearance it is not unlike the Etruscantowns of Central Italy; but there is something, of course, far moreimposing in the immense antiquity and the historical associations ofa Narni, a Fiesole, a Chiusi, or an Orvieto. Sea-life and rusticitystrike a different note from that of those Apennine-girdled seats ofdead civilisation, in which nations, arts, and religions have gone byand left but few traces, --some wrecks of giant walls, some excavatedtombs, some shrines, where monks still sing and pray above the relicsof the founders of once world-shaking, now almost forgotten, orders. Here at Mentone there is none of this; the idyllic is the true note, and Theocritus is still alive. 

We do not often scale these altitudes, but keep along the terracedglades by the side of olive-shaded streams. The violets, instead ofpeeping shyly from hedgerows, fall in ripples and cascades over mossywalls among maidenhair and spleen-worts. They are very sweet, and thesound of trickling water seems to mingle with their fragrance in amost delicious harmony. Sound, smell, and hue make up one chord, thesense of which is pure and perfect peace. The country-people arekind, letting us pass everywhere, so that we make our way along theiraqueducts and through their gardens, under laden lemon-boughs, thepale fruit dangling at our ears, and swinging showers of scented dewupon us as we pass. Far better, however, than lemon or orange trees, are the olives. Some of these are immensely old, numbering, it issaid, five centuries, so that Petrarch may almost have rested beneaththeir shade on his way to Avignon. These veterans are cavernous withage: gnarled, split, and twisted trunks, throwing out arms that breakinto a hundred branches; every branch distinct, and feathered withinnumerable sparks and spikelets of white, wavy, greenish light. These are the leaves, and the stems are grey with lichens. The sky andsea--two blues, one full of sunlight and the other purple--set thesefountains of perennial brightness like gems in lapis-lazuli. At adistance the same olives look hoary and soft--a veil of woven lightor luminous haze. When the wind blows their branches all one way, they ripple like a sea of silver. But underneath their covert, inthe shade, grey periwinkles wind among the snowy drift of allium. Thenarcissus sends its arrowy fragrance through the air, while, far andwide, red anemones burn like fire, with interchange of blue and lilacbuds, white arums, orchises, and pink gladiolus. Wandering there, andseeing the pale flowers, stars white and pink and odorous, we dreamof Olivet, or the grave Garden of the Agony, and the trees seem alwayswhispering of sacred things. How people can blaspheme against theolives, and call them imitations of the willow, or complain that theyare shabby shrubs, I do not know. [6]

This shore would stand for Shelley's Island of Epipsychidion, orthe golden age which Empedocles describes, when the mild nationsworshipped Aphrodite with incense and the images of beasts andyellow honey, and no blood was spilt upon her altars--when 'the treesflourished with perennial leaves and fruit, and ample crops adornedtheir boughs through all the year. ' This even now is literally true ofthe lemon-groves, which do not cease to flower and ripen. Everythingfits in to complete the reproduction of Greek pastoral life. The goatseat cytisus and myrtle on the shore; a whole flock gathered round meas I sat beneath a tuft of golden green euphorbia the other day, andnibbled bread from my hands. The frog still croaks by tank andfountain, 'whom the Muses have ordained to sing for aye, ' inspite of Bion's death. The narcissus, anemone, and hyacinth still telltheir tales of love and death. Hesper still gazes on the shepherdfrom the mountain-head. The slender cypresses still vibrate, the pinesmurmur. Pan sleeps in noontide heat, and goat-herds and wayfaringmen lie down to slumber by the roadside, under olive-boughs in whichcicadas sing. The little villages high up are just as white, themountains just as grey and shadowy when evening falls. Nothing ischanged--except ourselves. I expect to find a statue of Priapus orpastoral Pan, hung with wreaths of flowers--the meal cake, honey, andspilt wine upon his altar, and young boys and maidens dancing round. Surely, in some far-off glade, by the side of lemon-grove or garden, near the village, there must be still a pagan remnant of gladNature-worship. Surely I shall chance upon some Thyrsis piping in thepine-tree shade, or Daphne flying from the arms of Phoebus. So I dreamuntil I come upon the Calvary set on a solitary hillock, with itsprayer-steps lending a wide prospect across the olives and theorange-trees, and the broad valleys, to immeasurable skies and purpleseas. There is the iron cross, the wounded heart, the spear, the reed, the nails, the crown of thorns, the cup of sacrificial blood, thetitle, with its superscription royal and divine. The other day wecrossed a brook and entered a lemon-field, rich with blossomsand carpeted with red anemones. Everything basked in sunlight andglittered with exceeding brilliancy of hue. A tiny white chapel stoodin a corner of the enclosure. Two iron-grated windows let mesee inside: it was a bare place, containing nothing but a woodenpraying-desk, black and worm-eaten, an altar with its candles and noflowers, and above the altar a square picture brown with age. On thefloor were scattered several pence, and in a vase above the holy-watervessel stood some withered hyacinths. As my sight became accustomed tothe gloom, I could see from the darkness of the picture a pale Christnailed to the cross with agonising upward eyes and ashy aureole abovethe bleeding thorns. Thus I stepped suddenly away from the outwardpomp and bravery of nature to the inward aspirations, agonies, and martyrdoms of man--from Greek legends of the past to the realChristian present--and I remembered that an illimitable prospect hasbeen opened to the world, that in spite of ourselves we must turn oureyes heavenward, inward, to the infinite unseen beyond us and withinour souls. Nothing can take us back to Phoebus or to Pan. Nothingcan again identify us with the simple natural earth. '_Une immenseespérance a traversé la terre_, ' and these chapels, with their deepsignificances, lurk in the fair landscape like the cares of real lifeamong our dreams of art, or like a fear of death and the hereafter inthe midst of opera music. It is a strange contrast. The worship of menin those old times was symbolised by dances in the evening, banquets, libations, and mirth-making. 'Euphrosyne' was alike the goddess ofthe righteous mind and of the merry heart. Old withered women tellingtheir rosaries at dusk; belated shepherds crossing themselves beneaththe stars when they pass the chapel; maidens weighed down withMargaret's anguish of unhappy love; youths vowing their life tocontemplation in secluded cloisters, --these are the human forms whichgather round such chapels; and the motto of the worshippers consistsin this, 'Do often violence to thy desire. ' In the Tyrol we have seenwhole villages praying together at daybreak before their day's work, singing their _Miserere_ and their _Gloria_ and their _Dies Iræ_, tothe sound of crashing organs and jangling bells; appealing in themidst of Nature's splendour to the Spirit which is above Nature, whichdwells in darkness rather than light, and loves the yearnings andcontentions of our soul more than its summer gladness and peace. Eventhe olives here tell more to us of Olivet and the Garden than of theoil-press and the wrestling-ground. The lilies carry us to the Sermonon the Mount, and teach humility, instead of summoning up some legendof a god's love for a mortal. The hillside tanks and running streams, and water-brooks swollen by sudden rain, speak of Palestine. We callthe white flowers stars of Bethlehem. The large sceptre-reed; thefig-tree, lingering in barrenness when other trees are full of fruit;the locust-beans of the Caruba:--for one suggestion of Greek idyllsthere is yet another, of far deeper, dearer power. 

But who can resist the influence of Greek ideas at the Cap S. Martin?Down to the verge of the sea stretch the tall, twisted stems of Levantpines, and on the caverned limestone breaks the deep blue water. Dazzling as marble are these rocks, pointed and honeycombed withconstant dashing of the restless sea, tufted with corallines and greyand purple seaweeds in the little pools, but hard and dry and roughabove tide level. Nor does the sea always lap them quietly; for thelast few days it has come tumbling in, roaring and raging on the beachwith huge waves crystalline in their transparency, and maned withfleecy spray. Such were the rocks and such the swell of breakers whenUlysses grasped the shore after his long swim. Samphire, very salt andfragrant, grows in the rocky honeycomb; then lentisk and beach-lovingmyrtle, both exceeding green and bushy; then rosemary and euphorbiaabove the reach of spray. Fishermen, with their long reeds, sit lazilyperched upon black rocks above blue waves, sunning themselves as muchas seeking sport. One distant tip of snow, seen far away behind thehills, reminds us of an alien, unremembered winter. While dreamingthere, this fancy came into my head: Polyphemus was born yonder inthe Gorbio Valley. There he fed his sheep and goats, and on the hillsfound scanty pasture for his kine. He and his mother lived in thewhite house by the cypress near the stream where tulips grow. YoungGalatea, nursed in the caverns of these rocks, white as the foam, andshy as the sea fishes, came one morning up the valley to pick mountainhyacinths, and little Polyphemus led the way. He knew where violetsand sweet narcissus grew, as well as Galatea where pink corallineand spreading sea-flowers with their waving arms. But Galatea, havingfilled her lap with bluebells, quite forgot the leaping kids, andpiping Cyclops, and cool summer caves, and yellow honey, and blackivy, and sweet vine, and water cold as Alpine snow. Down the swiftstreamlet she danced laughingly, and made herself once more bitterwith the sea. But Polyphemus remained, --hungry, sad, gazing on thebarren sea, and piping to the mockery of its waves. 

Filled with these Greek fancies, it is strange to come upon a littlesandstone dell furrowed by trickling streams and overgrown withEnglish primroses; or to enter the village of Roccabruna, with itsmediæval castle and the motto on its walls, _Tempora labunturtacitisque senescimus annis_. A true motto for the town, where thebutcher comes but once a week, and where men and boys, and dogs, andpalms, and lemon-trees grow up and flourish and decay in the samehollow of the sunny mountain-side. Into the hard conglomerate of thehill the town is built; house walls and precipices mortised into oneanother, dovetailed by the art of years gone by, and riveted byage. The same plants grow from both alike--spurge, cistus, rue, andhenbane, constant to the desolation of abandoned dwellings. From thecastle you look down on roofs, brown tiles and chimney-pots, set oneabove the other like a big card-castle. Each house has its foot on aneighbour's neck, and its shoulder set against the native stone. Thestreets meander in and out, and up and down, overarched and balconied, but very clean. They swarm with children, healthy, happy, littlemonkeys, who grow fat on salt fish and yellow polenta, with oil andsun _ad libitum_. 

At night from Roccabruna you may see the flaring gas-lamps of thegaming-house at Monaco, that Armida's garden of the nineteenthcentury. It is the sunniest and most sheltered spot of all the coast. Long ago Lucan said of Monaco, '_Non Corus in illum jus habet autZephyrus_;' winter never comes to nip its tangled cactuses, andaloes, and geraniums. The air swoons with the scent of lemon-groves;tall palm-trees wave their graceful branches by the shore; music ofthe softest and the loudest swells from the palace; cool corridorsand sunny seats stand ready for the noontide heat or evening calm;without, are olive-gardens, green and fresh and full of flowers. Butthe witch herself holds her high court and never-ending festival ofsin in the painted banquet-halls and among the green tables. 

Let us leave this scene and turn with the country-folk of Roccabrunato S. Michael's Church at Mentone. High above the sea it stands, and from its open doors you look across the mountains with theirolive-trees. Inside the church is a seething mass of country-folk andtownspeople, mostly women, and these almost all old, but picturesquebeyond description; kerchiefs of every colour, wrinkles of every shapeand depth, skins of every tone of brown and yellow, voices of everygruffness, shrillness, strength, and weakness. Wherever an emptycorner can be found, it is soon filled by tottering babies andmischievous children. The country-women come with their large danglingearrings of thin gold, wearing pink tulips or lemon-buds in theirblack hair. A low buzz of gossiping and mutual recognition keeps theair alive. The whole service seems a holiday--a general enjoyment ofgala dresses and friendly greetings, very different from thesilence, immobility, and _noli me tangere_ aspect of an Englishcongregation. Over all drones, rattles, snores, and shrieks the organ;wailing, querulous, asthmatic, incomplete, its everlasting nasalchant--always beginning, never ending, through a range of two or threenotes ground into one monotony. The voices of the congregationrise and sink above it. These southern people, like the Arabs, theApulians, and the Spaniards, seem to find their music in a hurdy-gurdyswell of sound. The other day we met a little girl, walking andspinning, and singing all the while, whose song was just anotherversion of this chant. It has a discontented plaintive wail, as if itcame from some vast age, and were a cousin of primeval winds. 

At first sight, by the side of Mentone, San Remo is sadly prosaic. Thevalleys seem to sprawl, and the universal olives are monotonously greyupon their thick clay soil. Yet the wealth of flowers in the fatearth is wonderful. One might fancy oneself in a weedy farm flower-bedinvaded by stray oats and beans and cabbages and garlic from thekitchen-garden. The country does not suggest a single Greek idea. It has no form or outline--no barren peaks, no spare and difficultvegetation. The beauty is rich but tame--valleys green with oats andcorn, blossoming cherry-trees, and sweet bean-fields, figs coming intoleaf, and arrowy bay-trees by the side of sparkling streams: here andthere a broken aqueduct or rainbow bridge hung with maidenhair andbriar and clematis and sarsaparilla. 

In the cathedral church of San Siro on Good Friday they hang thecolumns and the windows with black; they cover the pictures and defacethe altar; above the high altar they raise a crucifix, and below theyplace a catafalque with the effigy of the dead Christ. To this sadsymbol they address their prayers and incense, chant their 'litaniesand lurries, ' and clash the rattles, which commemorate their rageagainst the traitor Judas. So far have we already passed away from theGreek feeling of Mentone. As I listened to the hideous din, I couldnot but remember the Theocritean burial of Adonis. Two funeral bedsprepared: two feasts recurring in the springtime of the year. What adifference beneath this superficial similarity--[Greek: kalos nekusoia katheudôn]--_attritus ægrâ macie_. But the fast of GoodFriday is followed by the festival of Easter. That, after all, is thechief difference. 

After leaving the cathedral we saw a pretty picture in a dull oldstreet of San Remo--three children leaning from a window, blowingbubbles. The bubbles floated down the street, of every colour, roundand trembling, like the dreams of life which children dream. The townis certainly most picturesque. It resembles a huge glacier of housespoured over a wedge of rock, running down the sides and along theridge, and spreading itself into a fan between two torrents on theshore below. House over house, with balcony and staircase, conventturret and church tower, palm-trees and olives, roof gardens andclinging creepers--this white cataract of buildings streams downwardfrom the lazar-house, and sanctuary, and sandstone quarries on thehill. It is a mass of streets placed close above each other, andlinked together with arms and arches of solid masonry, as a protectionfrom the earthquakes, which are frequent at San Remo. The walls aretall, and form a labyrinth of gloomy passages and treacherous blindalleys, where the Moors of old might meet with a ferocious welcome. Indeed, San Remo is a fortress as well as a dwelling-place. Over itsgateways may still be traced the pipes for molten lead, and on itswalls the eyeloops for arrows, with brackets for the feet of archers. Masses of building have been shaken down by earthquakes. The ruins ofwhat once were houses gape with blackened chimneys and dark forlorncellars; mazes of fungus and unhealthy weeds among the still securehabitations. Hardly a ray of light penetrates the streets; one learnsthe meaning of the Italian word _uggia_ from their cold andgloom. During the day they are deserted by every one but babies andwitchlike old women--some gossiping, some sitting vacant at the housedoor, some spinning or weaving, or minding little children--ugly andancient as are their own homes, yet clean as are the streets. Theyounger population goes afield; the men on mules laden for the hills, the women burdened like mules with heavy and disgusting loads. It isan exceptionally good-looking race; tall, well-grown, and strong. --Butto the streets again. The shops in the upper town are few, chieflywine-booths and stalls for the sale of salt fish, eggs, and bread, or cobblers' and tinkers' ware. Notwithstanding the darkness of theirdwellings, the people have a love of flowers; azaleas lean from theirwindows, and vines, carefully protected by a sheath of brickwork, climb the six stories, to blossom out into a pergola upon the roof. Look at that mass of greenery and colours, dimly seen from beneath, with a yellow cat sunning herself upon the parapet! To reach such agarden and such sunlight who would not mount six stories and threada labyrinth of passages? I should prefer a room upon the east side ofthe town, looking southward to the Molo and the sea, with a soundof water beneath, and a palm soaring up to fan my window with hisfeathery leaves. 

The shrines are little spots of brightness in the gloomy streets. Madonna with a sword; Christ holding His pierced and bleeding heart;l'Eterno Padre pointing to the dead Son stretched upon His knee; somesouls in torment; S. Roch reminding us of old plagues by the spot uponhis thigh;--these are the symbols of the shrines. Before them standrows of pots filled with gillyflowers, placed there by pious, simple, praying hands--by maidens come to tell their sorrows to our Lady richin sorrow, by old women bent and shrivelled, in hopes of paradise orgratitude for happy days, when Madonna kept Cecchino faithful to hishome, or saved the baby from the fever. 

Lower down, between the sea and the hill, is the municipal, aristocratic, ecclesiastical quarter of San Remo. There stands thePalace Borea--a truly princely pile, built in the last Renaissancestyle of splendour, with sea-nymphs and dolphins, and satyric heads, half lips, half leafage, round about its doors and windows. Once itformed the dwelling of a feudal family, but now it is a roomyanthill of a hundred houses, shops, and offices, the Boreas of to-dayretaining but a portion of one flat, and making profit of the rest. There, too, are the barracks and the syndic's hall; the Jesuits'school, crowded with boys and girls; the shops for clothes, confectionery, and trinkets; the piazza, with its fountain andtasselled planes, and flowery chestnut-trees, a mass of greenery. Under these trees the idlers lounge, boys play at leap-frog, men atbowls. Women in San Remo work all day, but men and boys play for themost part at bowls or toss-penny or leap-frog or morra. San Siro, thecathedral, stands at one end of the square. Do not go inside; it hasa sickly smell of immemorial incense and garlic, undefinable andhorrible. Far better looks San Siro from the parapet above thetorrent. There you see its irregular half-Gothic outline across atangle of lemon-trees and olives. The stream rushes by through highwalls, covered with creepers, spanned by ferny bridges, feathered byone or two old tufty palms. And over all rises the ancient turret ofSan Siro, like a Spanish giralda, a minaret of pinnacles and pyramidsand dome bubbles, with windows showing heavy bells, old clocks, andsundials painted on the walls, and a cupola of green and yellow tileslike serpent-scales, to crown the whole. The sea lies beyond, andthe house-roofs break it with grey horizontal lines. Then there areconvents, legions of them, large white edifices, Jesuitical apparentlyfor the most part, clanging importunate bells, leaning rose-blossomsand cypress-boughs over their jealous walls. 

Lastly, there is the port--the mole running out into the sea, the quayplanted with plane-trees, and the fishing-boats--by which San Remo isconnected with the naval glory of the past--with the Riviera that gavebirth to Columbus--with the Liguria that the Dorias ruled--with thegreat name of Genoa. The port is empty enough now; but from the pieryou look back on San Remo and its circling hills, a jewelled townset in illimitable olive greyness. The quay seems also to be thecattle-market. There the small buff cows of North Italy repose aftertheir long voyage or march, kneeling on the sandy ground or rubbingtheir sides against the wooden cross awry with age and shorn of allits symbols. Lambs frisk among the boats; impudent kids nibblethe drooping ears of patient mules. Hinds in white jackets andknee-breeches made of skins, lead shaggy rams and fiercely beardedgoats, ready to butt at every barking dog, and always seekingopportunities of flight. Farmers and parish priests in blackpetticoats feel the cattle and dispute about the price, or whet theirbargains with a draught of wine. Meanwhile the nets are brought onshore glittering with the fry of sardines, which are cooked likewhitebait, with cuttlefish--amorphous objects stretching shiny feelerson the hot dry sand--and prickly purple eggs of the sea-urchin. Womengo about their labour through the throng, some carrying stones upontheir heads, or unloading boats and bearing planks of wood in singlefile, two marching side by side beneath one load of lime, othersscarcely visible under a stack of oats, another with her baby in itscradle fast asleep. 

San Remo has an elder brother among the hills, which is called SanRomolo, after one of the old bishops of Genoa. Who San Remo was isburied in remote antiquity; but his town has prospered, while of SanRomolo nothing remains but a ruined hill-convent among pine-trees. Theold convent is worth visiting. Its road carries you into the heart ofthe sierra which surrounds San Remo, a hill-country something likethe Jura, undulating and green to the very top with maritime pines andpinasters. Riding up, you hear all manner of Alpine sounds; brawlingstreams, tinkling cowbells, and herdsmen calling to each other on theslopes. Beneath you lies San Remo, scarcely visible; and over it thegreat sea rises ever so far into the sky, until the white sails hangin air, and cloud and sea-line melt into each other indistinguishably. Spanish chestnuts surround the monastery with bright blue gentians, hepaticas, forget-me-nots, and primroses about their roots. The houseitself is perched on a knoll with ample prospect to the sea and tothe mountains, very near to heaven, within a theatre of noblecontemplations and soul-stirring thoughts. If Mentone spoke to me ofthe poetry of Greek pastoral life, this convent speaks of mediævalmonasticism--of solitude with God, above, beneath, and all around, ofsilence and repose from agitating cares, of continuity in prayer, andchangelessness of daily life. Some precepts of the _Imitatio_came into my mind: 'Be never wholly idle; read or write, pray ormeditate, or work with diligence for the common needs. ' 'Praiseworthyis it for the religious man to go abroad but seldom, and to seem toshun, and keep his eyes from men. ' 'Sweet is the cell when it is oftensought, but if we gad about, it wearies us by its seclusion. ' Then Ithought of the monks so living in this solitude; their cell windowslooking across the valley to the sea, through summer and winter, undersun and stars. Then would they read or write, what long melodioushours! or would they pray, what stations on the pine-clad hills! orwould they toil, what terraces to build and plant with corn, whatflowers to tend, what cows to milk and pasture, what wood to cut, what fir-cones to gather for the winter fire! or should they yearn forsilence, silence from their comrades of the solitude, what whisperinggalleries of God, where never human voice breaks loudly, but windsand streams and lonely birds disturb the awful stillness! In such ahermitage as this, only more wild, lived S. Francis of Assisi, amongthe Apennines. [7] It was there that he learned the tongues of beastsand birds, and preached them sermons. Stretched for hours motionlesson the bare rocks, coloured like them and rough like them in his brownpeasant's serge, he prayed and meditated, saw the vision of Christcrucified, and planned his order to regenerate a vicious age. So stillhe lay, so long, so like a stone, so gentle were his eyes, so kindand low his voice, that the mice nibbled breadcrumbs from his wallet, lizards ran over him, and larks sang to him in the air. There, too, inthose long, solitary vigils, the Spirit of God came upon him, and thespirit of Nature was even as God's Spirit, and he sang: 'Laudato siaDio mio Signore, con tutte le creature, specialmente messer lo fratesole; per suor luna, e per le stelle; per frate vento e per l'aire, enuvolo, e sereno e ogni tempo. ' Half the value of this hymn wouldbe lost were we to forget how it was written, in what solitudes andmountains far from men, or to ticket it with some abstract wordlike Pantheism. Pantheism it is not; but an acknowledgment of thatbrotherhood, beneath the love of God, by which the sun and moon andstars, and wind and air and cloud, and clearness and all weather, andall creatures, are bound together with the soul of man. 

Few, of course, were like S. Francis. Probably no monk of San Romolowas inspired with his enthusiasm for humanity, or had his revelationof the Divine Spirit inherent in the world. Still fewer can have feltthe æsthetic charm of Nature but most vaguely. It was as much as theycould boast, if they kept steadily to the rule of their order, andattended to the concerns each of his own soul. A terrible selfishness, if rightly considered; but one which accorded with the delusion thatthis world is a cave of care, the other world a place of torture orundying bliss, death the prime object of our meditation, and lifelongabandonment of our fellow-men the highest mode of existence. Why, then, should monks, so persuaded of the riddle of the earth, haveplaced themselves in scenes so beautiful? Why rose the Camaldolis andChartreuses over Europe? white convents on the brows of lofty hills, among the rustling boughs of Vallombrosas, in the grassy meadows ofEngelbergs, --always the eyries of Nature's lovers, men smitten withthe loveliness of earth? There is surely some meaning in these poeticstations. 

Here is a sentence of the _Imitatio_ which throws some light uponthe hymn of S. Francis and the sites of Benedictine monasteries, byexplaining the value of natural beauty for monks who spent their lifein studying death: 'If thy heart were right, then would every creaturebe to thee a mirror of life, and a book of holy doctrine. There is nocreature so small and vile that does not show forth the goodnessof God. ' With this sentence bound about their foreheads, walked FraAngelico and S. Francis. To men like them the mountain valleys and theskies, and all that they contained, were full of deep significance. Though they reasoned '_de conditione humanæ miseriæ_, ' and '_decontemptu mundi_, ' yet the whole world was a pageant of God'sglory, a testimony to His goodness. Their chastened senses, purehearts, and simple wills were as wings by which they soared above thethings of earth, and sent the music of their souls aloft with everyother creature in the symphony of praise. To them, as to Blake, thesun was no mere blazing disc or ball, but 'an innumerable companyof the heavenly host singing, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord GodAlmighty. "' To them the winds were brothers, and the streams weresisters--brethren in common dependence upon God their Father, brethrenin common consecration to His service, brethren by blood, brethren byvows of holiness. Unquestioning faith rendered this world no puzzle;they overlooked the things of sense because the spiritual thingswere ever present, and as clear as day. Yet did they not forgetthat spiritual things are symbolised by things of sense; and so thesmallest herb of grass was vital to their tranquil contemplations. We who have lost sight of the invisible world, who set our affectionsmore on things of earth, fancy that because these monks despised theworld, and did not write about its landscapes, therefore they weredead to its beauty. This is mere vanity: the mountains, stars, seas, fields, and living things were only swallowed up in the one thought ofGod, and made subordinate to the awfulness of human destinies. Weto whom hills are hills, and seas are seas, and stars are ponderablequantities, speak, write, and reason of them as of objects interestingin themselves. The monks were less ostensibly concerned about suchthings, because they only found in them the vestibules and symbols ofa hidden mystery. 

The contrast between the Greek and mediæval modes of regardingNature is not a little remarkable. Both Greeks and monks, judged bynineteenth-century standards, were unobservant of natural beauties. They make but brief and general remarks upon landscapes and the like. The [Greek: pontiôn te kumatôn anêrithmon gelasma] is veryrare. But the Greeks stopped at the threshold of Nature; the forcesthey found there, the gods, were inherent in Nature, and distinct. They did not, like the monks, place one spiritual power, omnipotentand omnipresent, above all, and see in Nature lessons of Divinegovernment. We ourselves having somewhat overstrained the latter pointof view, are now apt to return vaguely to Greek fancies. Perhaps, too, we talk so much about scenery because it is scenery to us, and thelife has gone out of it. 

I cannot leave the Cornice without one word about a place which liesbetween Mentone and San Remo. Bordighera has a beauty which is quitedistinct from both. Palms are its chief characteristics. They leanagainst the garden walls, and feather the wells outside the town, where women come with brazen pitchers to draw water. In some of themarshy tangles of the plain, they spring from a thick undergrowth ofspiky leaves, and rear their tall aërial arms against the deep bluebackground of the sea or darker purple of the distant hills. Whitepigeons fly about among their branches, and the air is loud withcooings and with rustlings, and the hoarser croaking of innumerablefrogs. Then, in the olive-groves that stretch along the level shore, are labyrinths of rare and curious plants, painted tulips and whiteperiwinkles, flinging their light of blossoms and dark glossy leavesdown the swift channels of the brawling streams. On each side of therivulets they grow, like sister cataracts of flowers instead of spray. At night fresh stars come out along the coast, beneath the starsof heaven; for you can see the lamps of Ventimiglia and Mentoneand Monaco, and, far away, the lighthouses upon the promontories ofAntibes and the Estrelles. At dawn, a vision of Corsica grows fromthe sea. The island lies eighty miles away, but one can trace thedark strip of irregular peaks glowing amid the gold and purple of therising sun. If the air is clear and bright, the snows and overvaultingclouds which crown its mountains shine all day, and glitter like anapparition in the bright blue sky. 'Phantom fair, ' half raised abovethe sea, it stands, as unreal and transparent as the moon when seen inApril sunlight, yet not to be confounded with the shape of any cloud. If Mentone speaks of Greek legends, and San Romolo restores themonastic past, we feel ourselves at Bordighera transported to theEast; and lying under its tall palms can fancy ourselves at Tyre orDaphne, or in the gardens of a Moslem prince. 

 Note. --Dec. 1873. My old impressions are renewed and confirmed by a third visit, after seven years, to this coast. For purely idyllic loveliness, the Cornice is surpassed by nothing in the South. A very few spots in Sicily, the road between Castellammare and Amalfi, and the island of Corfu, are its only rivals in this style of scenery. From Cannes to Sestri is one continuous line of exquisitely modulated landscape beauty, which can only be fully appreciated by travellers in carriage or on foot. 

 * * * * *

_AJACCIO_

It generally happens that visitors to Ajaccio pass over from theCornice coast, leaving Nice at night, and waking about sunrise to findthemselves beneath the frowning mountains of Corsica. The differencebetween the scenery of the island and the shores which they haveleft is very striking. Instead of the rocky mountains of the Cornice, intolerably dry and barren at their summits, but covered at their basewith villages and ancient towns and olive-fields, Corsica presents ascene of solitary and peculiar grandeur. The highest mountain-tops arecovered with snow, and beneath the snow-level to the sea they areas green as Irish or as English hills, but nearly uninhabited anduncultivated. Valleys of almost Alpine verdure are succeeded bytracts of chestnut wood and scattered pines, or deep and flowerybrushwood--the 'maquis' of Corsica, which yields shelter to itstraditional outlaws and bandits. Yet upon these hillsides thereare hardly any signs of life; the whole country seems abandoned toprimeval wildness and the majesty of desolation. Nothing can possiblybe more unlike the smiling Riviera, every square mile of which iscultivated like a garden, and every valley and bay dotted over withwhite villages. After steaming for a few hours along this savagecoast, the rocks which guard the entrance to the bay of Ajaccio, murderous-looking teeth and needles ominously christened Sanguinari, are passed, and we enter the splendid land-locked harbour, on thenorthern shore of which Ajaccio is built. About three centuries agothe town, which used to occupy the extreme or eastern end of the bay, was removed to a more healthy point upon the northern coast, so thatAjaccio is quite a modern city. Visitors who expect to find in itthe picturesqueness of Genoa or San Remo, or even of Mentone, willbe sadly disappointed. It is simply a healthy, well-appointed town ofrecent date, the chief merits of which are, that it has wide streets, and is free, externally at least, from the filth and rubbish of mostsouthern seaports. 

But if Ajaccio itself is not picturesque, the scenery whichit commands, and in the heart of which it lies, is of the mostmagnificent. The bay of Ajaccio resembles a vast Italian lake--a LagoMaggiore, with greater space between the mountains and the shore. From the snow-peaks of the interior, huge granite crystals clothed inwhite, to the southern extremity of the bay, peak succeeds peak andridge rises behind ridge in a line of wonderful variety and beauty. The atmospheric changes of light and shadow, cloud and colour, on thisupland country, are as subtle and as various as those which lend theirbeauty to the scenery of the lakes, while the sea below is blue andrarely troubled. One could never get tired with looking at this view. Morning and evening add new charms to its sublimity and beauty. In theearly morning Monte d'Oro sparkles like a Monte Rosa with its freshsnow, and the whole inferior range puts on the crystal blueness ofdawn among the Alps. In the evening, violet and purple tints andthe golden glow of Italian sunset lend a different lustre to thefairyland. In fact, the beauties of Switzerland and Italy arecuriously blended in this landscape. 

In soil and vegetation the country round Ajaccio differs much from theCornice. There are very few olive-trees, nor is the cultivated groundbacked up so immediately by stony mountains; but between the seashoreand the hills there is plenty of space for pasture-land, and orchardsof apricot and peach-trees, and orange gardens. This undulatingchampaign, green with meadows and watered with clear streams, is veryrefreshing to the eyes of Northern people, who may have wearied of thebareness and greyness of Nice or Mentone. It is traversed by excellentroads, recently constructed on a plan of the French Government, whichintersect the country in all directions, and offer an infinite varietyof rides or drives to visitors. The broken granite of which theseroads are made is very pleasant for riding over. Most of the hillsthrough which they strike, after starting from Ajaccio, areclothed with a thick brushwood of box, ilex, lentisk, arbutus, and laurustinus, which stretches down irregularly into vineyards, olive-gardens, and meadows. It is, indeed, the native growth of theisland; for wherever a piece of ground is left untilled, the macchigrow up, and the scent of their multitudinous aromatic blossoms is sostrong that it may be smelt miles out at sea. Napoleon, at S. Helena, referred to this fragrance when he said that he should know Corsicablindfold by the smell of its soil. Occasional woods of holm oak makedarker patches on the landscape, and a few pines fringe the side ofenclosure walls or towers. The prickly pear runs riot in and outamong the hedges and upon the walls, diversifying the colours of thelandscape with its strange grey-green masses and unwieldy fans. Inspring, when peach and almond trees are in blossom, and when theroadside is starred with asphodels, this country is most beautiful inits gladness. The macchi blaze with cistus flowers of red and silver. Golden broom mixes with the dark purple of the great French lavender, and over the whole mass of blossom wave plumes of Mediterranean heathand sweet-scented yellow coronilla. Under the stems of the ilex peepcyclamens, pink and sweet; the hedgerows are a tangle of vetches, convolvuluses, lupines, orchises, and alliums, with here and there apurple iris. It would be difficult to describe all the rare and lovelyplants which are found here in a profusion that surpasses even theflower-gardens of the Cornice, and reminds one of the most favouredAlpine valleys in their early spring. 

Since the French occupied Corsica they have done much for the islandby improving its harbours and making good roads, and endeavouringto mitigate the ferocity of the people. But they have many things tocontend against, and Corsica is still behind the other provinces ofFrance. The people are idle, haughty, umbrageous, fiery, quarrelsome, fond of gipsy life, and retentive through generations of old feuds andprejudices to an almost inconceivable extent. Then the nature of thecountry itself offers serious obstacles to its proper colonisationand cultivation. The savage state of the island and its internal feudshave disposed the Corsicans to quit the seaboard for their mountainvillages and fortresses, so that the great plains at the foot of thehills are unwholesome for want of tillage and drainage. Again, the mountains themselves have in many parts been stripped of theirforests, and converted into mere wildernesses of macchi stretchingup and down their slopes for miles and miles of useless desolation. Another impediment to proper cultivation is found in the old habit ofwhat is called free pasturage. The highland shepherds are allowedby the national custom to drive down their flocks and herds to thelowlands during the winter, so that fences are broken, young cropsare browsed over and trampled down, and agriculture becomes a mereimpossibility. The last and chief difficulty against which the Frenchhave had to contend, and up to this time with apparent success, isbrigandage. The Corsican system of brigandage is so very differentfrom that of the Italians, Sicilians, and Greeks, that a word may besaid about its peculiar character. In the first place, it has nothingat all to do with robbery and thieving. The Corsican bandit took to afree life among the macchi, not for the sake of supporting himself bylawless depredation, but because he had put himself under a legal andsocial ban by murdering some one in obedience to the strict code ofhonour of his country. His victim may have been the hereditary foe ofhis house for generations, or else the newly made enemy of yesterday. But in either case, if he had killed him fairly, after a duenotification of his intention to do so, he was held to have fulfilleda duty rather than to have committed a crime. He then betook himselfto the dense tangles of evergreens which I have described, where helived upon the charity of countryfolk and shepherds. In the eyes ofthose simple people it was a sacred duty to relieve the necessities ofthe outlaws, and to guard them from the bloodhounds of justice. Therewas scarcely a respectable family in Corsica who had not one or moreof its members thus _alla campagna_, as it was euphemisticallystyled. The Corsicans themselves have attributed this miserable stateof things to two principal causes. The first of these was the ancientbad government of the island: under its Genoese rulers no justice wasadministered, and private vengeance for homicide or insult became anecessary consequence among the haughty and warlike families ofthe mountain villages. Secondly, the Corsicans have been from timeimmemorial accustomed to wear arms in everyday life. They used to sitat their house doors and pace the streets with musket, pistol, dagger, and cartouch-box on their persons; and on the most trivial occasionof merriment or enthusiasm they would discharge their firearms. Thishabit gave a bloody termination to many quarrels, which might haveended more peaceably had the parties been unarmed; and so the seedsof _vendetta_ were constantly being sown. Statistics publishedby the French Government present a hideous picture of the state ofbloodshed in Corsica even during this century. In one period of thirtyyears (between 1821 and 1850) there were 4319 murders in the island. Almost every man was watching for his neighbour's life, or seeking howto save his own; and agriculture and commerce were neglected for thisgrisly game of hide-and-seek. In 1853 the French began to take strongmeasures, and, under the Prefect Thuillier, they hunted the banditsfrom the macchi, killing between 200 and 300 of them. At the same timean edict was promulgated against bearing arms. It is forbidden to sellthe old Corsican stiletto in the shops, and no one may carry a gun, even for sporting purposes, unless he obtains a special licence. Theselicences, moreover, are only granted for short and precisely measuredperiods. 

In order to appreciate the stern and gloomy character of theCorsicans, it is necessary to leave the smiling gardens of Ajaccio, and to visit some of the more distant mountain villages--Vico, Cavro, Bastelica, or Bocognano, any of which may easily be reached from thecapital. Immediately after quitting the seaboard, we enter a countryaustere in its simplicity, solemn without relief, yet dignified by itsmajesty and by the sense of freedom it inspires. As we approach themountains, the macchi become taller, feathering man-high above theroad, and stretching far away upon the hills. Gigantic masses ofgranite, shaped like buttresses and bastions, seem to guard theapproaches to these hills; while, looking backward over the greenplain, the sea lies smiling in a haze of blue among the rocky hornsand misty headlands of the coast. There is a stateliness about theabrupt inclination of these granite slopes, rising from their frowningportals by sharp _arêtes_ to the snows piled on their summits, which contrasts in a strange way with the softness and beauty ofthe mingling sea and plain beneath. In no landscape are more variousqualities combined; in none are they so harmonised as to produce sostrong a sense of majestic freedom and severe power. Suppose that weare on the road to Corte, and have now reached Bocognano, the firstconsiderable village since we left Ajaccio. Bocognano might be chosenas typical of Corsican hill-villages, with its narrow street, andtall tower-like houses of five or six stories high, faced withrough granite, and pierced with the smallest windows and very narrowdoorways. These buildings have a mournful and desolate appearance. There is none of the grandeur of antiquity about them; no sculpturedarms or castellated turrets, or balconies or spacious staircases, such as are common in the poorest towns of Italy. The signs of warlikeoccupation which they offer, and their sinister aspect of vigilance, are thoroughly prosaic. They seem to suggest a state of society inwhich feud and violence were systematised into routine. There is norelief to the savage austerity of their forbidding aspect; no signsof wealth or household comfort; no trace of art, no liveliness andgracefulness of architecture. Perched upon their coigns of vantage, these villages seem always menacing, as if Saracen pirates, or Genoesemarauders, or bandits bent on vengeance, were still for ever on thewatch. Forests of immensely old chestnut-trees surround Bocognano onevery side, so that you step from the village streets into the shadeof woods that seem to have remained untouched for centuries. Thecountry-people support themselves almost entirely upon the fruit ofthese chestnuts; and there is a large department of Corsica calledCastagniccia, from the prevalence of these trees and the sustenancewhich the inhabitants derive from them. Close by the village brawlsa torrent, such as one may see in the Monte Rosa valleys or theApennines, but very rarely in Switzerland. It is of a pure greencolour, absolutely like Indian jade, foaming round the graniteboulders, and gliding over smooth slabs of polished stone, and eddyinginto still, deep pools fringed with fern. Monte d'Oro, one of thelargest mountains of Corsica, soars above, and from his snows thepurest water, undefiled by glacier mud or the _débris_ ofavalanches, melts away. Following the stream, we rise through themacchi and the chestnut woods, which grow more sparely by degrees, until we reach the zone of beeches. Here the scene seems suddenlytransferred to the Pyrenees; for the road is carried along abruptslopes, thickly set with gigantic beech-trees, overgrown with pink andsilver lichens. In the early spring their last year's leaves are stillcrisp with hoar-frost; one morning's journey has brought us from thesummer of Ajaccio to winter on these heights, where no flowers arevisible but the pale hellebore and tiny lilac crocuses. Snow-driftsstretch by the roadside, and one by one the pioneers of the vastpine-woods of the interior appear. A great portion of the pine-forest(_Pinus larix_, or Corsican pine, not larch) between Bocognanoand Corte had recently been burned by accident when we passed by. Nothing could be more forlorn than the black leafless stems andbranches emerging from the snow. Some of these trees were mast-high, and some mere saplings. Corte itself is built among the mountainfastnesses of the interior. The snows and granite cliffs of MonteRotondo overhang it to the north-west, while two fair valleys leaddownward from its eyrie to the eastern coast. The rock on which itstands rises to a sharp point, sloping southward, and commanding thevalleys of the Golo and the Tavignano. Remembering that Corte was theold capital of Corsica, and the centre of General Paoli's government, we are led to compare the town with Innsprück, Meran, or Grenoble. In point of scenery and situation it is hardly second to any of thesemountain-girdled cities; but its poverty and bareness are scarcelyless striking than those of Bocognano. 

The whole Corsican character, with its stern love of justice, itsfurious revengefulness and wild passion for freedom, seems to beillustrated by the peculiar elements of grandeur and desolation inthis landscape. When we traverse the forest of Vico or the rockypasture-lands of Niolo, the history of the Corsican national heroes, Giudice della Rocca and Sampiero, becomes intelligible, nor do we failto understand some of the mysterious attraction which led the moredaring spirits of the island to prefer a free life among the macchiand pine-woods to placid lawful occupations in farms and villages. The lives of the two men whom I have mentioned are so prominent inCorsican history, and are so often still upon the lips of the commonpeople, that it may be well to sketch their outlines in the foregroundof the Salvator Rosa landscape just described. Giudice was thegovernor of Corsica, as lieutenant for the Pisans, at the end of thethirteenth century. At that time the island belonged to the republicof Pisa, but the Genoese were encroaching on them by land and sea, and the whole life of their brave champion was spent in a desperatestruggle with the invaders, until at last he died, old, blind, and inprison, at the command of his savage foes. Giudice was the title whichthe Pisans usually conferred upon their governor, and Della Roccadeserved it by right of his own inexorable love of justice. Indeed, justice seems to have been with him a passion, swallowing up all otherfeelings of his nature. All the stories which are told of him turnupon this point in his character; and though they may not be strictlytrue, they illustrate the stern virtues for which he was celebratedamong the Corsicans, and show what kind of men this harsh and gloomynation loved to celebrate as heroes. This is not the place either tocriticise these legends or to recount them at full length. The mostfamous and the most characteristic may, however, be briefly told. Onone occasion, after a victory over the Genoese, he sent a messagethat the captives in his hands should be released if their wives andsisters came to sue for them. The Genoese ladies embarked, andarrived in Corsica, and to Giudice's nephew was intrusted the dutyof fulfilling his uncle's promise. In the course of executing hiscommission, the youth was so smitten with the beauty of one of thewomen that he dishonoured her. Thereupon Giudice had him at once putto death. Another story shows the Spartan justice of this hero ina less savage light. He was passing by a cowherd's cottage, when heheard some young calves bleating. On inquiring what distressed them, he was told that the calves had not enough milk to drink after thefarm people had been served. Then Giudice made it a law that thecalves throughout the land should take their fill before the cows weremilked. 

Sampiero belongs to a later period of Corsican history. After a longcourse of misgovernment the Genoese rule had become unbearable. Therewas no pretence of administering justice, and private vengeance hadfull sway in the island. The sufferings of the nation were so greatthat the time had come for a new judge or saviour to rise among them. Sampiero was the son of obscure parents who lived at Bastelica. Buthis abilities very soon declared themselves, and made a way for him inthe world. He spent his youth in the armies of the Medici and of theFrench Francis, gaining great renown as a brave soldier. Bayard becamehis friend, and Francis made him captain of his Corsican bands. ButSampiero did not forget the wrongs of his native land while thus onforeign service. He resolved, if possible, to undermine the powerof Genoa, and spent the whole of his manhood and old age in onelong struggle with their great captain, Stephen Doria. Of his sternpatriotism and Roman severity of virtue the following story is aterrible illustration. Sampiero, though a man of mean birth, hadmarried an heiress of the noble Corsican house of the Ornani. Hiswife, Vannina, was a woman of timid and flexible nature, who, thoughdevoted to her husband, fell into the snares of his enemies. Duringhis absence on an embassy to Algiers the Genoese induced her to leaveher home at Marseilles and to seek refuge in their city, persuadingher that this step would secure the safety of her child. She wasstarting on her journey when a friend of Sampiero arrested her, andbrought her back to Aix, in Provence. Sampiero, when he heard of theseevents, hurried to France, and was received by a relative of his, who hinted that he had known of Vannina's projected flight. 'E tu haitaciuto?' was Sampiero's only answer, accompanied by a stroke of hispoignard that killed the lukewarm cousin. Sampiero now brought hiswife from Aix to Marseilles, preserving the most absolute silence onthe way, and there, on entering his house, he killed her with his ownhand. It is said that he loved Vannina passionately; and when she wasdead, he caused her to be buried with magnificence in the church of S. Francis. Like Giudice, Sampiero fell at last a prey to treachery. Themurder of Vannina had made the Ornani his deadly foes. In order toavenge her blood, they played into the hands of the Genoese, and laida plot by which the noblest of the Corsicans was brought to death. First, they gained over to their scheme a monk of Bastelica, calledAmbrogio, and Sampiero's own squire and shield-bearer, Vittolo. Bymeans of these men, in whom he trusted, he was drawn defenceless andunattended into a deeply wooded ravine near Cavro, not very far fromhis birthplace, where the Ornani and their Genoese troops surroundedhim. Sampiero fired his pistols in vain, for Vittolo had loaded themwith the shot downwards. Then he drew his sword, and began to layabout him, when the same Vittolo, the Judas, stabbed him frombehind, and the old lion fell dead by his friend's hand. Sampiero wassixty-nine when he died, in the year 1567. It is satisfactory to knowthat the Corsicans have called traitors and foes to their countryVittoli for ever. These two examples of Corsican patriots are enough;we need not add to theirs the history of Paoli--a milder and morehumane, but scarcely less heroic leader. Paoli, however, in thehour of Corsica's extremest peril, retired to England, and died inphilosophic exile. Neither Giudice nor Sampiero would have acted thus. The more forlorn the hope, the more they struggled. 

Among the old Corsican customs which are fast dying out, butwhich still linger in the remote valleys of Niolo and Vico, is the_vócero_, or funeral chant, improvised by women at funerals overthe bodies of the dead. Nothing illustrates the ferocious temper andsavage passions of the race better than these _vóceri_, many ofwhich have been written down and preserved. Most of them are songsof vengeance and imprecation, mingled with hyperbolical laments andutterances of extravagant grief, poured forth by wives and sisters atthe side of murdered husbands and brothers. The women who sing themseem to have lost all milk of human kindness, and to have exchangedthe virtues of their sex for Spartan fortitude and the rage of furies. While we read their turbid lines we are carried in imagination to oneof the cheerless houses of Bastelica or Bocognano, overshadowed by itsmournful chestnut-tree, on which the blood of the murdered man is yetred. The _gridata_, or wake, is assembled in a dark room. On thewooden board, called _tola_, the corpse lies stretched; and roundit are women, veiled in the blue-black mantle of Corsican costume, moaning and rocking themselves upon their chairs. The _pasto_ or_conforto_, food supplied for mourners, stands upon a side table, and round the room are men with savage eyes and bristling beards, armed to the teeth, keen for vengeance. The dead man's musket andpocket-pistol lie beside him, and his bloody shirt is hung up at hishead. Suddenly, the silence, hitherto only disturbed by suppressedgroans and muttered curses, is broken by a sharp cry. A woman rises:it is the sister of the dead man; she seizes his shirt, and holdingit aloft with Mænad gestures and frantic screams, gives rhythmicutterance to her grief and rage. 'I was spinning, when I heard a greatnoise: it was a gunshot, which went into my heart, and seemed a voicethat cried, "Run, thy brother is dying. " I ran into the room above;I took the blow into my breast; I said, "Now he is dead, there isnothing to give me comfort. Who will undertake thy vengeance? When Ishow thy shirt, who will vow to let his beard grow till the murdereris slain? Who is there left to do it? A mother near her death? Asister? Of all our race there is only left a woman, without kin, poor, orphan, and a girl. Yet, O my brother! never fear. For thy vengeancethy sister is enough!

 '"Ma per fà la to bindetta, Sta siguru, basta anch ella!

Give me the pistol; I will shoulder the gun; I will away to thehills. My brother, heart of thy sister, thou shalt be avenged!"' A_vócero_ declaimed upon the bier of Giammatteo and Pasquale, two cousins, by the sister of the former, is still fiercer and moreenergetic in its malediction. This Erinnys of revenge prays Christ andall the saints to extirpate the murderer's whole race, to shrivel itup till it passes from the earth. Then, with a sudden and vehementtransition to the pathos of her own sorrow, she exclaims:--

 'Halla mai bista nissunu Tumbà l'omi pe li canti?'

It appears from these words that Giammatteo's enemies had killed himbecause they were jealous of his skill in singing. Shortly after, she curses the curate of the village, a kinsman of the murderer, forrefusing to toll the funeral bells; and at last, all other threads ofrage and sorrow being twined and knotted into one, she gives looseto her raging thirst for blood: 'If only I had a son, to train likea sleuth-hound, that he might track the murderer! Oh, if I had a son!Oh, if I had a lad!' Her words seem to choke her, and she swoons, andremains for a short time insensible. When the Bacchante of revengeawakes, it is with milder feelings in her heart: 'O brother mine, Matteo! art thou sleeping? Here I will rest with thee and weep tilldaybreak. ' It is rare to find in literature so crude and intensean expression of fiery hatred as these untranslatable _vóceri_present. The emotion is so simple and so strong that it becomessublime by mere force, and affects us with a strange pathos whencontrasted with the tender affection conveyed in such terms ofendearment as 'my dove, ' 'my flower, ' 'my pheasant, ' 'my brightpainted orange, ' addressed to the dead. In the _vóceri_ it oftenhappens that there are several interlocutors: one friend questions andanother answers; or a kinswoman of the murderer attempts to justifythe deed, and is overwhelmed with deadly imprecations. Passionateappeals are made to the corpse: 'Arise! Do you not hear the women cry?Stand up. Show your wounds, and let the fountains of your blood flow!Alas! he is dead; he sleeps; he cannot hear!' Then they turn again totears and curses, feeling that no help or comfort can come from theclay-cold form. The intensity of grief finds strange language for itsutterance. A girl, mourning over her father, cries:--

 'Mi l'hannu crucifissatu Cume Ghiesu Cristu in croce. '

Once only, in Viale's collection, does any friend of the dead remembermercy. It is an old woman, who points to the crucifix above the bier. 

But all the _vóceri_ are not so murderous. Several are composedfor girls who died unwedded and before their time, by their mothersor companions. The language of these laments is far more tender andornate. They praise the gentle virtues and beauty of the girl, herpiety and helpful household ways. The most affecting of these dirgesis that which celebrates the death of Romana, daughter of DariolaDanesi. Here is a pretty picture of the girl: 'Among the best andfairest maidens you were like a rose among flowers, like the moonamong stars; so far more lovely were you than the loveliest. Theyouths in your presence were like lighted torches, but full ofreverence; you were courteous to all, but with none familiar. Inchurch they gazed at you, but you looked at none of them; and aftermass you said, "Mother, let us go. " Oh! who will console me for yourloss? Why did the Lord so much desire you? But now you rest in heaven, all joy and smiles; for the world was not worthy of so fair a face. Oh, how far more beautiful will Paradise be now!' Then follows apiteous picture of the old bereaved mother, to whom a year will seema thousand years, who will wander among relatives without affection, neighbours without love; and who, when sickness comes, will have noone to give her a drop of water, or to wipe the sweat from her brow, or to hold her hand in death. Yet all that is left for her is to waitand pray for the end, that she may join again her darling. 

But it is time to return to Ajaccio itself. At present the attractionsand ornaments of the town consist of a good public library, CardinalFesch's large but indifferent collection of pictures, two monumentserected to Napoleon, and Napoleon's house. It will always be the chiefpride of Ajaccio that she gave birth to the great emperor. Close tothe harbour, in a public square by the sea-beach, stands an equestrianstatue of the conqueror, surrounded by his four brothers on foot. Theyare all attired in Roman fashion, and are turned seaward, to the west, as if to symbolise the emigration of this family to subdue Europe. There is something ludicrous and forlorn in the stiffness of thegroup--something even pathetic, when we think how Napoleon gazedseaward from another island, no longer on horseback, no longerlaurel-crowned, an unthroned, unseated conqueror, on S. Helena. Hisfather's house stands close by. An old Italian waiting-woman, who hadbeen long in the service of the Murats, keeps it and shows it. Shehas the manners of a lady, and can tell many stories of the variousmembers of the Buonaparte family. Those who fancy that Napoleon wasborn in a mean dwelling of poor parents will be surprised to find somuch space and elegance in these apartments. Of course his family wasnot rich by comparison with the riches of French or English nobles. But for Corsicans they were well-to-do, and their house has an air ofantique dignity. The chairs of the entrance-saloon have been literallystripped of their coverings by enthusiastic visitors; the horse-hairstuffing underneath protrudes itself with a sort of comic pride, asif protesting that it came to be so tattered in an honourable service. Some of the furniture seems new; but many old presses, inlaid withmarbles, agates, and lapis-lazuli, such as Italian families preservefor generations, have an air of respectable antiquity about them. Noris there any doubt that the young Napoleon led his minuets beneaththe stiff girandoles of the formal dancing-room. There, too, in adark back chamber, is the bed in which he was born. At its foot is aphotograph of the Prince Imperial sent by the Empress Eugénie, who, when she visited the room, wept much _pianse molto_ (to use theold lady's phrase)--at seeing the place where such lofty destiniesbegan. On the wall of the same room is a portrait of Napoleon himselfas the young general of the republic--with the citizen's unkempthair, the fierce fire of the Revolution in his eyes, a frown upon hisforehead, lips compressed, and quivering nostrils; also one of hismother, the pastille of a handsome woman, with Napoleonic eyesand brows and nose, but with a vacant simpering mouth. Perhapsthe provincial artist knew not how to seize the expression of thisfeature, the most difficult to draw. For we cannot fancy that Letiziahad lips without the firmness or the fulness of a majestic nature. 

The whole first story of this house belonged to the Buonaparte family. The windows look out partly on a little court and partly on narrowstreets. It was, no doubt, the memory of this home that made Napoleon, when emperor, design schemes for the good of Corsica--schemes thatmight have brought him more honour than many conquests, but whichhe had no time or leisure to carry out. On S. Helena his mind oftenreverted to them, and he would speak of the gummy odours of the macchiwafted from the hillsides to the seashore. 

 * * * * *

_MONTE GENEROSO_

The long hot days of Italian summer were settling down on plain andcountry when, in the last week of May, we travelled northward fromFlorence and Bologna seeking coolness. That was very hard to find inLombardy. The days were long and sultry, the nights short, without arespite from the heat. Milan seemed a furnace, though in the Duomo andthe narrow shady streets there was a twilight darkness which at leastlooked cool. Long may it be before the northern spirit of improvementhas taught the Italians to despise the wisdom of their forefathers, who built those sombre streets of palaces with overhanging eaves, that, almost meeting, form a shelter from the fiercest sun. The lakecountry was even worse than the towns; the sunlight lay all day asleepupon the shining waters, and no breeze came to stir their surface orto lift the tepid veil of haze, through which the stony mountains, with their yet unmelted patches of winter snow, glared as if inmockery of coolness. 

Then we heard of a new inn, which had just been built by anenterprising Italian doctor below the very top of Monte Generoso. There was a picture of it in the hotel at Cadenabbia, but this gavebut little idea of any particular beauty. A big square house, with many windows, and the usual ladies on mules, and guides withalpenstocks, advancing towards it, and some round bushes growing near, was all it showed. Yet there hung the real Monte Generoso above ourheads, and we thought it must be cooler on its height than by thelake-shore. To find coolness was the great point with us just then. Moreover, some one talked of the wonderful plants that grew among itsrocks, and of its grassy slopes enamelled with such flowers as makeour cottage gardens at home gay in summer, not to speak of othersrarer and peculiar to the region of the Southern Alps. Indeed, theGeneroso has a name for flowers, and it deserves it, as we presentlyfound. 

This mountain is fitted by its position for commanding one of thefinest views in the whole range of the Lombard Alps. A glance at themap shows that. Standing out pre-eminent among the chain of lowerhills to which it belongs, the lakes of Lugano and Como with theirlong arms enclose it on three sides, while on the fourth the plain ofLombardy with its many cities, its rich pasture-lands and cornfieldsintersected by winding river-courses and straight interminableroads, advances to its very foot. No place could be better chosen forsurveying that contrasted scene of plain and mountain, which formsthe great attraction of the outlying buttresses of the central Alpinemass. The superiority of the Monte Generoso to any of the similareminences on the northern outskirts of Switzerland is great. Inrichness of colour, in picturesqueness of suggestion, in sublimity andbreadth of prospect, its advantages are incontestable. The reasons forthis superiority are obvious. On the Italian side the transition frommountain to plain is far more abrupt; the atmosphere being clearer, a larger sweep of distance is within our vision; again, the sunlightblazes all day long upon the very front and forehead of the distantAlpine chain, instead of merely slanting along it, as it does upon thenorthern side. 

From Mendrisio, the village at the foot of the mountain, an easymule-path leads to the hotel, winding first through English-lookinghollow lanes with real hedges, which are rare in this country, and English primroses beneath them. Then comes a forest region ofluxuriant chestnut-trees, giants with pink boles just bursting intolate leafage, yellow and tender, but too thin as yet for shade. A little higher up, the chestnuts are displaced by wild laburnumsbending under their weight of flowers. The graceful branches meetabove our heads, sweeping their long tassels against our faces as weride beneath them, while the air for a good mile is full of fragrance. It is strange to be reminded in this blooming labyrinth of the dustysuburb roads and villa gardens of London. The laburnum is pleasantenough in S. John's Wood or the Regent's Park in May--a tamedomesticated thing of brightness amid smoke and dust. But it isanother joy to see it flourishing in its own home, clothing acres ofthe mountain-side in a very splendour of spring-colour, mingling itspaler blossoms with the golden broom of our own hills, and withthe silver of the hawthorn and wild cherry. Deep beds oflilies-of-the-valley grow everywhere beneath the trees; and in themeadows purple columbines, white asphodels, the Alpine spiræa, tall, with feathery leaves, blue scabious, golden hawkweeds, turkscaplilies, and, better than all, the exquisite narcissus poeticus, withits crimson-tipped cup, and the pure pale lilies of San Bruno, arecrowded in a maze of dazzling brightness. Higher up the laburnumsdisappear, and flaunting crimson peonies gleam here and there uponthe rocks, until at length the gentians and white ranunculuses of thehigher Alps displace the less hardy flowers of Italy. 

About an hour below the summit of the mountain we came upon the inn, a large clean building, with scanty furniture and snowy wooden floors, guiltless of carpets. It is big enough to hold about a hundred guests;and Doctor Pasta, who built it, a native of Mendrisio, was giftedeither with much faith or with a real prophetic instinct. [8] Anyhow hedeserves commendation for his spirit of enterprise. As yet the houseis little known to English travellers: it is mostly frequented byItalians from Milan, Novara, and other cities of the plain, who callit the Italian Righi, and come to it, as cockneys go to Richmond, for noisy picnic excursions, or at most for a few weeks'_villeggiatura_ in the summer heats. When we were there in Maythe season had scarcely begun, and the only inmates besides ourselveswere a large party from Milan, ladies and gentlemen in holiday guise, who came, stayed one night, climbed the peak at sunrise, and departedamid jokes and shouting and half-childish play, very unlike the doingsof a similar party in sober England. After that the stillness ofnature descended on the mountain, and the sun shone day after day uponthat great view which seemed created only for ourselves. And whata view it was! The plain stretching up to the high horizon, where amisty range of pink cirrus-clouds alone marked the line where earthended and the sky began, was islanded with cities and villagesinnumerable, basking in the hazy shimmering heat. Milan, seen throughthe doctor's telescope, displayed its Duomo perfect as a microscopicshell, with all its exquisite fretwork, and Napoleon's arch of triumphsurmounted by the four tiny horses, as in a fairy's dream. Far off, long silver lines marked the lazy course of Po and Ticino, whilelittle lakes like Varese and the lower end of Maggiore spreadthemselves out, connecting the mountains with the plain. Five minutes'walk from the hotel brought us to a ridge where the precipice fellsuddenly and almost sheer over one arm of Lugano Lake. Sullenlyoutstretched asleep it lay beneath us, coloured with the tints offluor-spar, or with the changeful green and azure of a peacock'sbreast. The depth appeared immeasurable. San Salvadore had recededinto insignificance: the houses and churches and villas of Luganobordered the lake-shore with an uneven line of whiteness. And over allthere rested a blue mist of twilight and of haze, contrasting with theclearness of the peaks above. It was sunset when we first came here;and, wave beyond wave, the purple Italian hills tossed their crestedsummits to the foot of a range of stormy clouds that shrouded the highAlps. Behind the clouds was sunset, clear and golden; but themountains had put on their mantle for the night, and the hem of theirgarment was all we were to see. And yet--over the edge of the topmostridge of cloud, what was that long hard line of black, too solid andimmovable for cloud, rising into four sharp needles clear and welldefined? Surely it must be the familiar outline of Monte Rosa itself, the form which every one who loves the Alps knows well by heart, whichpicture-lovers know from Ruskin's woodcut in the 'Modern Painters. 'For a moment only the vision stayed: then clouds swept over it again, and from the place where the empress of the Alps had been, a pillar ofmist shaped like an angel's wing, purple and tipped with gold, shot upagainst the pale green sky. That cloud-world was a pageant in itself, as grand and more gorgeous perhaps than the mountains would have been. Deep down through the hollows of the Simplon a thunderstorm wasdriving; and we saw forked flashes once and again, as in a distantworld, lighting up the valleys for a moment, and leaving the darknessblacker behind them as the storm blurred out the landscape forty milesaway. Darkness was coming to us too, though our sky was clear and thestars were shining brightly. At our feet the earth was folding itselfto sleep; the plain was wholly lost; little islands of white mist hadformed themselves, and settled down upon the lakes and on their marshyestuaries; the birds were hushed; the gentian-cups were filling to thebrim with dew. Night had descended on the mountain and the plain; theshow was over. 

The dawn was whitening in the east next morning, when we againscrambled through the dwarf beechwood to the precipice above the lake. Like an ink-blot it lay, unruffled, slumbering sadly. Broad sheets ofvapour brooded on the plain, telling of miasma and fever, of which weon the mountain, in the pure cool air, knew nothing. The Alps wereall there now--cold, unreal, stretching like a phantom line of snowypeaks, from the sharp pyramids of Monte Viso and the Grivola in thewest to the distant Bernina and the Ortler in the east. Supreme amongthem towered Monte Rosa--queenly, triumphant, gazing down in proudpre-eminence, as she does when seen from any point of the Italianplain. There is no mountain like her. Mont Blanc himself is scarcelyso regal; and she seems to know it, for even the clouds sweep humbledround her base, girdling her at most, but leaving her crown clear andfree. Now, however, there were no clouds to be seen in all the sky. The mountains had a strange unshriven look, as if waiting to beblessed. Above them, in the cold grey air, hung a low black archof shadow, the shadow of the bulk of the huge earth, which stillconcealed the sun. Slowly, slowly this dark line sank lower, till, one by one, at last, the peaks caught first a pale pink flush; thena sudden golden glory flashed from one to the other, as they leaptjoyfully into life. It is a supreme moment this first burst of lifeand light over the sleeping world, as one can only see it on rare daysand in rare places like the Monte Generoso. The earth--enough of it atleast for us to picture to ourselves the whole--lies at our feet; andwe feel as the Saviour might have felt, when from the top of thathigh mountain He beheld the kingdoms of the world and all the glory ofthem. Strangely and solemnly may we image to our fancy the lives thatare being lived down in those cities of the plain: how many are wakingat this very moment to toil and a painful weariness, to sorrow, or to'that unrest which men miscall delight;' while we upon our mountainbuttress, suspended in mid-heaven and for a while removed from dailycares, are drinking in the beauty of the world that God has made sofair and wonderful. From this same eyrie, only a few years ago, thehostile armies of France, Italy, and Austria might have been watchedmoving in dim masses across the plains, for the possession of whichthey were to clash in mortal fight at Solferino and Magenta. All ispeaceful now. It is hard to picture the waving cornfields troddendown, the burning villages and ransacked vineyards, all the horrors ofreal war to which that fertile plain has been so often the prey. Butnow these memories of

 Old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago, do but add a calm and beauty to the radiant scene that lies before us. And the thoughts which it suggests, the images with which it storesour mind, are not without their noblest uses. The glory of the worldsinks deeper into our shallow souls than we well know; and the spiritof its splendour is always ready to revisit us on dark and dreary daysat home with an unspeakable refreshment. Even as I write, I seem tosee the golden glow sweeping in broad waves over the purple hillsnearer and nearer, till the lake brightens at our feet, and thewindows of Lugano flash with sunlight, and little boats creep forthacross the water like spiders on a pond, leaving an arrowy track oflight upon the green behind them, while Monte Salvadore with its tinychapel and a patch of the further landscape are still kept in darknessby the shadow of the Generoso itself. The birds wake into song as thesun's light comes; cuckoo answers cuckoo from ridge to ridge; dogsbark; and even the sounds of human life rise up to us: children'svoices and the murmurs of the market-place ascending faintly from themany villages hidden among the chestnut-trees beneath our feet; whilethe creaking of a cart we can but just see slowly crawling along thestraight road by the lake, is heard at intervals. 

The full beauty of the sunrise is but brief. Already the low lakelikemists we saw last night have risen and spread, and shaken themselvesout into masses of summer clouds, which, floating upward, threaten toenvelop us upon our vantage-ground. Meanwhile they form a changefulsea below, blotting out the plain, surging up into the valleys withthe movement of a billowy tide, attacking the lower heights like theadvance-guard of a besieging army, but daring not as yet to invade thecold and solemn solitudes of the snowy Alps. These, too, in time, whenthe sun's heat has grown strongest, will be folded in their middaypall of sheltering vapour. 

The very summit of Monte Generoso must not be left without a word ofnotice. The path to it is as easy as the sheep-walks on an Englishdown, though cut along grass-slopes descending at a perilously sharpangle. At the top the view is much the same, as far as the grandfeatures go, as that which is commanded from the cliff by the hotel. But the rocks here are crowded with rare Alpine flowers--delicategolden auriculas with powdery leaves and stems, pale yellow cowslips, imperial purple saxifrages, soldanellas at the edge of lingeringpatches of the winter snow, blue gentians, crocuses, and the frail, rosy-tipped ranunculus, called glacialis. Their blooming time isbrief. When summer comes the mountain will be bare and burned, likeall Italian hills. The Generoso is a very dry mountain, silent andsolemn from its want of streams. There is no sound of falling waterson its crags; no musical rivulets flow down its sides, led carefullyalong the slopes, as in Switzerland, by the peasants, to keep theirhay-crops green and gladden the thirsty turf throughout the heatand drought of summer. The soil is a Jurassic limestone: the rainpenetrates the porous rock, and sinks through cracks and fissures, toreappear above the base of the mountain in a full-grown stream. Thisis a defect in the Generoso, as much to be regretted as the want ofshade upon its higher pastures. Here, as elsewhere in Piedmont, theforests are cut for charcoal; the beech-scrub, which covers largetracts of the hills, never having the chance of growing into treesmuch higher than a man. It is this which makes an Italian mountainat a distance look woolly, like a sheep's back. Among the brushwood, however, lilies-of-the-valley and Solomon's seals delight to grow;and the league-long beds of wild strawberries prove that when thelaburnums have faded, the mountain will become a garden of feasting. 

It was on the crest of Monte Generoso, late one afternoon in May, thatwe saw a sight of great beauty. The sun had yet about an hour beforeit sank behind the peaks of Monte Rosa, and the sky was clear, exceptfor a few white clouds that floated across the plain of Lombardy. Thenas we sat upon the crags, tufted with soldanellas and auriculas, we could see a fleecy vapour gliding upward from the hollows of themountain, very thin and pale, yet dense enough to blot the landscapeto the south and east from sight. It rose with an imperceptiblemotion, as the Oceanides might have soared from the sea to comfortPrometheus in the tragedy of Æschylus. Already the sun had touched itsupper edge with gold, and we were expecting to be enveloped in a mist;when suddenly upon the outspread sheet before us there appeared twoforms, larger than life, yet not gigantic, surrounded with haloes ofsuch tempered iridescence as the moon half hidden by a summer cloud iswont to make. They were the glorified figures of ourselves; and whatwe did, the phantoms mocked, rising or bowing, or spreading wide theirarms. Some scarce-felt breeze prevented the vapour from passing acrossthe ridge to westward, though it still rose from beneath, and keptfading away into thin air above our heads. Therefore the vision lastedas long as the sun stayed yet above the Alps; and the images withtheir aureoles shrank and dilated with the undulations of the mist. I could not but think of that old formula for an anthropomorphicDeity--'the Brocken-spectre of the human spirit projected on the mistsof the Non-ego. ' Even like those cloud-phantoms are the gods made inthe image of man, who have been worshipped through successive ages ofthe world, gods dowered with like passions to those of the raceswho have crouched before them, gods cruel and malignant and lustful, jealous and noble and just, radiant or gloomy, the counterparts of menupon a vast and shadowy scale. But here another question rose. Ifthe gods that men have made and ignorantly worshipped be reallybut glorified copies of their own souls, where is the sun in thisparallel? Without the sun's rays the mists of Monte Generoso couldhave shown, no shadowy forms. Without some other power than the mindof man, could men have fashioned for themselves those ideals that theynamed their gods? Unseen by Greek, or Norseman, or Hindoo, the potentforce by which alone they could externalise their image, existedoutside them, independent of their thought. Nor does the trite epigramtouch the surface of the real mystery. The sun, the human beings onthe mountain, and the mists are all parts of one material universe:the transient phenomenon we witnessed was but the effect of a chancecombination. Is, then, the anthropomorphic God as momentary and asaccidental in the system of the world as that vapoury spectre? TheGod in whom we live and move and have our being must be far moreall-pervasive, more incognisable by the souls of men, who doubt notfor one moment of His presence and His power. Except for purposes ofrhetoric the metaphor that seemed so clever fails. Nor, when once suchthoughts have been stirred in us by such a sight, can we do betterthan repeat Goethe's sublime profession of a philosophic mysticism. This translation I made one morning on the Pasterze Gletscher beneaththe spires of the Gross Glockner:--

 To Him who from eternity, self-stirred, Himself hath made by His creative word! To Him, supreme, who causeth Faith to be, Trust, Hope, Love, Power, and endless Energy! To Him, who, seek to name Him as we will, Unknown within Himself abideth still!

 Strain ear and eye, till sight and sense be dim; Thou'lt find but faint similitudes of Him: Yea, and thy spirit in her flight of flame Still strives to gauge the symbol and the name: Charmed and compelled thou climb'st from height to height, And round thy path the world shines wondrous bright; Time, Space, and Size, and Distance cease to be, And every step is fresh infinity. What were the God who sat outside to scan The spheres that 'neath His finger circling ran? God dwells within, and moves the world and moulds, Himself and Nature in one form enfolds: Thus all that lives in Him and breathes and is, Shall ne'er His puissance, ne'er His spirit miss. 

 The soul of man, too, is an universe: Whence follows it that race with race concurs In naming all it knows of good and true God, --yea, its own God; and with homage due Surrenders to His sway both earth and heaven; Fears Him, and loves, where place for love is given. 

 * * * * *

_LOMBARD VIGNETTES_

ON THE SUPERGA

This is the chord of Lombard colouring in May. Lowest in the scale:bright green of varied tints, the meadow-grasses mingling with willowsand acacias, harmonised by air and distance. Next, opaque blue--theblue of something between amethyst and lapis-lazuli--that belongsalone to the basements of Italian mountains. Higher, the roseatewhiteness of ridged snow on Alps or Apennines. Highest, the blue ofthe sky, ascending from pale turquoise to transparent sapphire filledwith light. A mediæval mystic might have likened this chord to thespiritual world. For the lowest region is that of natural life, ofplant and bird and beast, and unregenerate man; it is the place offaun and nymph and satyr, the plain where wars are fought and citiesbuilt, and work is done. Thence we climb to purified humanity, themountains of purgation, the solitude and simplicity of contemplativelife not yet made perfect by freedom from the flesh. Higher comes thatthin white belt, where are the resting places of angelic feet, thepoints whence purged souls take their flight toward infinity. Aboveall is heaven, the hierarchies ascending row on row to reach the lightof God. 

This fancy occurred to me as I climbed the slope of the Superga, gazing over acacia hedges and poplars to the mountains bare in morninglight. The occasional occurrence of bars across this chord--poplarsshivering in sun and breeze, stationary cypresses as black as night, and tall campanili with the hot red shafts of glowing brick--adds justenough of composition to the landscape. Without too much straining ofthe allegory, the mystic might have recognised in these aspiring barsthe upward effort of souls rooted in the common life of earth. 

The panorama, unrolling as we ascend, is enough to overpower a loverof beauty. There is nothing equal to it for space and breadth andmajesty. Monte Rosa, the masses of Mont Blanc blent with the GrandParadis, the airy pyramid of Monte Viso, these are the battlements ofthat vast Alpine rampart, in which the vale of Susa opens like a gate. To west and south sweep the Maritime Alps and the Apennines. Beneath, glides the infant Po; and where he leads our eyes, the plain is onlylimited by pearly mist. 

A BRONZE BUST OF CALIGULA AT TURIN

The Albertina bronze is one of the most precious portraits ofantiquity, not merely because it confirms the testimony of the greenbasalt bust in the Capitol, but also because it supplies an even moreemphatic and impressive illustration to the narrative of Suetonius. 

Caligula is here represented as young and singularly beautiful. It isindeed an ideal Roman head, with the powerful square modelling, thecrisp short hair, low forehead and regular firm features, proper tothe noblest Roman type. The head is thrown backward from the throat;and there is a something of menace or defiance or suffering in thesuggestion of brusque movement given to the sinews of the neck. Thisattitude, together with the tension of the forehead, and the fixedexpression of pain and strain communicated by the lines of themouth--strong muscles of the upper lip and abruptly chiselled underlip--in relation to the small eyes, deep set beneath their cavernousand level brows, renders the whole face a monument of spiritualanguish. I remember that the green basalt bust of the Capitol has thesame anxious forehead, the same troubled and overburdened eyes; butthe agony of this fretful mouth, comparable to nothing but the mouthof Pandolfo Sigismondo Malatesta, and, like that, on the vergeof breaking into the spasms of delirium, is quite peculiar to theAlbertina bronze. It is just this which the portrait of the Capitollacks for the completion of Caligula. The man who could be sorepresented in art had nothing wholly vulgar in him. The brutalityof Caracalla, the overblown sensuality of Nero, the effeminacy ofCommodus or Heliogabalus, are all absent here. This face idealisesthe torture of a morbid soul. It is withal so truly beautiful that itmight easily be made the poem of high suffering or noble passion. If the bronze were plastic, I see how a great sculptor, by but fewstrokes, could convert it into an agonising Stephen or Sebastian. Asit is, the unimaginable touch of disease, the unrest of madness, madeCaligula the genius of insatiable appetite; and his martyrdom was thetorment of lust and ennui and everlasting agitation. The accident ofempire tantalised him with vain hopes of satisfying the Charybdisof his soul's sick cravings. From point to point he passed of emptypleasure and unsatisfying cruelty, for ever hungry; until the maladyof his spirit, unrestrained by any limitations, and with the rightmedium for its development, became unique--the tragic type ofpathological desire. What more than all things must have plagued a manwith that face was probably the unavoidable meanness of his career. When we study the chapters of Suetonius, we are forced to feel that, though the situation and the madness of Caligula were dramaticallyimpressive, his crimes were trivial and, small. In spite of the vastscale on which he worked his devilish will, his life presents a totalpicture of sordid vice, differing only from pot-house dissipation andschoolboy cruelty in point of size. And this of a truth is the Nemesisof evil. After a time, mere tyrannous caprice must become commonplaceand cloying, tedious to the tyrant, and uninteresting to the studentof humanity: nor can I believe that Caligula failed to perceive thisto his own infinite disgust. 

Suetonius asserts that he was hideously ugly. How are we to squarethis testimony with the witness of the bronze before us? What changedthe face, so beautiful and terrible in youth, to ugliness that shrankfrom sight in manhood? Did the murderers find it blurred in its finelineaments, furrowed with lines of care, hollowed with the soul'shunger? Unless a life of vice and madness had succeeded in makingCaligula's face what the faces of some maniacs are--the bloated ruinof what was once a living witness to the soul within--I could fancythat death may have sanctified it with even more beauty than thisbust of the self-tormented young man shows. Have we not all seen theanguish of thought-fretted faces smoothed out by the hands of theDeliverer?

FERRARI AT VERCELLI

It is possible that many visitors to the Cathedral of Como havecarried away the memory of stately women with abundant yellow hair anddraperies of green and crimson, in a picture they connect thereafterwith Gaudenzio Ferrari. And when they come to Milan, they are probablyboth impressed and disappointed by a Martyrdom of S. Catherine in theBrera, bearing the same artist's name. If they wish to understand thispainter, they must seek him at Varallo, at Saronno, and at Vercelli. In the Church of S. Cristoforo in Vercelli, Gaudenzio Ferrari at thefull height of his powers showed what he could do to justify Lomazzo'stitle chosen for him of the Eagle. He has indeed the strong wing andthe swiftness of the king of birds. And yet the works of few reallygreat painters--and among the really great we place Ferrari--leaveupon the mind a more distressing sense of imperfection. Extraordinaryfertility of fancy, vehement dramatic passion, sincere study ofnature, and great command of technical resources are here (aselsewhere in Ferrari's frescoes) neutralised by an incurable defect ofthe combining and harmonising faculty, so essential to a masterpiece. There is stuff enough of thought and vigour and imagination to makea dozen artists. And yet we turn away disappointed from the crowded, dazzling, stupefying wilderness of forms and faces on these mightywalls. 

All that Ferrari derived from actual life--the heads of singlefigures, the powerful movement of men and women in excited action, themonumental pose of two praying nuns--is admirably rendered. His angelstoo, in S. Cristoforo as elsewhere, are quite original; not only intheir type of beauty, which is terrestrial and peculiar to Ferrari, without a touch of Correggio's sensuality; but also in the intensityof their emotion, the realisation of their vitality. Those which hoverround the Cross in the fresco of the 'Crucifixion' are as passionateas any angels of the Giottesque masters in Assisi. Those again whichcrowd the Stable of Bethlehem in the 'Nativity' yield no point ofidyllic charm to Gozzoli's in the Riccardi Chapel. 

The 'Crucifixion' and the 'Assumption of Madonna' are very talland narrow compositions, audacious in their attempt to fill almostunmanageable space with a connected action. Of the two frescoes the'Crucifixion, ' which has points of strong similarity to the samesubject at Varallo, is by far the best. Ferrari never painted anythingat once truer to life and nobler in tragic style than the faintingVirgin. Her face expresses the very acme of martyrdom--not exaggeratednor spasmodic, but real and sublime--in the suffering of a statelymatron. In points like this Ferrari cannot be surpassed. Raphael couldscarcely have done better; besides, there is an air of sincerity, astamp of popular truth, in this episode, which lies beyond Raphael'ssphere. It reminds us rather of Tintoretto. 

After the 'Crucifixion, ' I place the 'Adoration of the Magi, ' fullof fine mundane motives and gorgeous costumes; then the 'Sposalizio'(whose marriage, I am not certain), the only grandly composed pictureof the series, and marked by noble heads; then the 'Adoration ofthe Shepherds, ' with two lovely angels holding the bambino. The'Assumption of the Magdalen'--for which fresco there is a valuablecartoon in the Albertina Collection at Turin--must have been a finepicture; but it is ruined now. An oil altar-piece in the choir of thesame church struck me less than the frescoes. It represents Madonnaand a crowd of saints under an orchard of apple-trees, with cherubscuriously flung about almost at random in the air. The motive of theorchard is prettily conceived and carried out with spirit. 

What Ferrari possessed was rapidity of movement, fulness and richnessof reality, exuberance of invention, excellent portraiture, dramaticvehemence, and an almost unrivalled sympathy with the swift andpassionate world of angels. What he lacked was power of composition, simplicity of total effect, harmony in colouring, control over hisown luxuriance, the sense of tranquillity. He seems to have soughtgrandeur in size and multitude, richness, éclat, contrast. Being thedisciple of Lionardo and Raphael, his defects are truly singular. Asa composer, the old leaven of Giovenone remained in him; but he feltthe dramatic tendencies of a later age, and in occasional episodes herealised them with a force and _furia_ granted to very few of theItalian painters. 

LANINI AT VERCELLI

The Casa Mariano is a palace which belonged to a family of that name. Like many houses of the sort in Italy, it fell to vile uses; andits hall of audience was turned into a lumber-room. The Operai ofVercelli, I was told, bought the palace a few years ago, restored thenoble hall, and devoted a smaller room to a collection of picturesvaluable for students of the early Vercellese style of painting. Ofthese there is no need to speak. The great hall is the gem of the CasaMariano. It has a coved roof, with a large flat oblong space inthe centre of the ceiling. The whole of this vault and the lunettesbeneath were painted by Lanini; so runs the tradition of thefresco-painter's name; and though much injured by centuries ofoutrage, and somewhat marred by recent restoration, these frescoesform a precious monument of Lombard art. The object of the painter'sdesign seems to have been the glorification of Music. In the centralcompartment of the roof is an assembly of the gods, obviously borrowedfrom Raphael's 'Marriage of Cupid and Psyche' in the Farnesinaat Rome. The fusion of Roman composition with Lombard executionconstitutes the chief charm of this singular work, and makes it, sofar as I am aware, unique. Single figures of the goddesses, and thewhole movement of the scene upon Olympus, are transcribed withoutattempt at concealment. And yet the fresco is not a barefaced copy. The manner of feeling and of execution is quite different from that ofRaphael's school. The poetry and sentiment are genuinely Lombard. Noneof Raphael's pupils could have carried out his design with a delicacyof emotion and a technical skill in colouring so consummate. What, we think, as we gaze upward, would the Master have given for such acraftsman? The hardness, coarseness, and animal crudity of the RomanSchool are absent: so also is their vigour. But where the grace ofform and colour is so soft and sweet, where the high-bred calm ofgood company is so sympathetically rendered, where the atmosphere ofamorous languor and of melody is so artistically diffused, we cannotmiss the powerful modelling and rather vulgar _tours de force_ ofGiulio Romano. The scale of tone is silvery golden. There are no hardblues, no coarse red flesh-tints, no black shadows. Mellow lights, the morning hues of primrose, or of palest amber, pervade the wholesociety. It is a court of gentle and harmonious souls; and thoughthis style of beauty might cloy, at first sight there is somethingravishing in those yellow-haired white-limbed, blooming deities. Nomovement of lascivious grace as in Correggio, no perturbation ofthe senses as in some of the Venetians, disturbs the rhythm of theirmusic; nor is the pleasure of the flesh, though felt by the painterand communicated to the spectator, an interruption to their divinecalm. The white, saffron-haired goddesses are grouped togetherlike stars seen in the topaz light of evening, like daffodils halfsmothered in snowdrops, and among them, Diana, with the crescenton her forehead, is the fairest. Her dream-like beauty need fearno comparison with the Diana of the Camera di S. Paolo. Apollo andBacchus are scarcely less lovely in their bloom of earliest manhood;honey-pale, as Greeks would say; like statues of living electron;realising Simaetha's picture of her lover and his friend:

[Greek:

 tois d' ên xanthotera men elichrysoio geneias, stêthea de stilbonta poly pleon ê tu Selana. [9]]

It was thus that the almost childlike spirit of the Milanese paintersfelt the antique: how differently from their Roman brethren! It wasthus that they interpreted the lines of their own poets:--

 E i tuoi capei più volte ho somigliati Di Cerere a le paglie secche o bionde Dintorno crespi al tuo capo legati. [10]

Yet the painter of this hall--whether we are to call him Lanini oranother--was not a composer. Where he has not robbed the motives andthe distribution of the figures from Raphael, he has nothing left butgrace of detail. The intellectual feebleness of his style may be seenin many figures of women playing upon instruments of music, rangedaround the walls. One girl at the organ is graceful; another with atambourine has a sort of Bassarid beauty. But the group of Apollo, Pegasus, and a Muse upon Parnassus, is a failure in its meaninglessfrigidity, while few of these subordinate compositions show power ofconception or vigour of design. 

Lanini, like Sodoma, was a native of Vercelli; and though he wasFerrari's pupil, there is more in him of Luini or of Sodoma than ofhis master. He does not rise at any point to the height of thesethree great masters, but he shares some of Luini's and Sodoma's finequalities, without having any of Ferrari's force. A visit to themangled remnants of his frescoes in S. Caterina will repay the studentof art. This was once, apparently, a double church, or a church withthe hall and chapel of a _confraternita_ appended to it. One portionof the building was painted with the history of the Saint; and verylovely must this work have been, to judge by the fragments which haverecently been rescued from whitewash, damp, and ruthless mutilation. What wonderful Lombard faces, half obliterated on the broken wall andmouldering plaster, smile upon us like drowned memories swimming upfrom the depths of oblivion! Wherever three or four are groupedtogether, we find an exquisite little picture--an old woman and twoyoung women in a doorway, for example, telling no story, but touchingus with simple harmony of form. Nothing further is needed to rendertheir grace intelligible. Indeed, knowing the faults of the school, wemay seek some consolation by telling ourselves that these incompletefragments yield Lanini's best. In the coved compartments of the roof, above the windows, ran a row of dancing boys; and these are still mostbeautifully modelled, though the pallor of recent whitewash is uponthem. All the boys have blonde hair. They are naked, with scrolls orribbons wreathed around them, adding to the airiness of theircontinual dance. Some of the loveliest are in a room used to stow awaythe lumber of the church--old boards and curtains, broken lanterns, candle-ends in tin sconces, the musty apparatus of festivaladornments, and in the midst of all a battered, weather-beaten bier. 

THE PIAZZA OF PIACENZA

The great feature of Piacenza is its famous piazza--romantically, picturesquely perfect square, surpassing the most daring attemptsof the scene-painter, and realising a poet's dreams. The space isconsiderable, and many streets converge upon it at irregular angles. Its finest architectural feature is the antique Palace of the Commune:Gothic arcades of stone below, surmounted by a brick building withwonderfully delicate and varied terra-cotta work in the round-archedwindows. Before this façade, on the marble pavement, prance the bronzeequestrian statues of two Farnesi--insignificant men, exaggeratedhorses, flying drapery--as _barocco_ as it is possible to bein style, but so splendidly toned with verdigris, so superb in their_bravura_ attitude, and so happily placed in the line of twostreets lending far vistas from the square into the town beyond, thatit is difficult to criticise them seriously. They form, indeed, animportant element in the pictorial effect, and enhance the terra-cottawork of the façade by the contrast of their colour. 

The time to see this square is in evening twilight--that wonderfulhour after sunset--when the people are strolling on the pavement, polished to a mirror by the pacing of successive centuries, andwhen the cavalry soldiers group themselves at the angles under thelamp-posts or beneath the dimly lighted Gothic arches of the Palace. This is the magical mellow hour to be sought by lovers of thepicturesque in all the towns of Italy, the hour which, by its tenderblendings of sallow western lights with glimmering lamps, casts theveil of half shadow over any crudeness and restores the injuriesof Time; the hour when all the tints of these old buildings areintensified, etherealised, and harmonised by one pervasive glow. WhenI last saw Piacenza, it had been raining all day; and ere sundown aclearing had come from the Alps, followed by fresh threatenings ofthunderstorms. The air was very liquid. There was a tract of yellowsunset sky to westward, a faint new moon half swathed in mist above, and over all the north a huge towered thundercloud kept flashingdistant lightnings. The pallid primrose of the West, forced down andreflected back from that vast bank of tempest, gave unearthly beautyto the hues of church and palace--tender half-tones of violet andrusset paling into greys and yellows on what in daylight seemed butdull red brick. Even the uncompromising façade of S. Francesco helped;and the Dukes were like statues of the 'Gran Commendatore, ' waitingfor Don Giovanni's invitation. 

MASOLINO AT CASTIGLIONE D'OLONA

Through the loveliest Arcadian scenery of woods and fields andrushing waters the road leads downward from Varese to Castiglione. The Collegiate Church stands on a leafy hill above the town, with fairprospect over groves and waterfalls and distant mountains. Here in thechoir is a series of frescoes by Masolino da Panicale, the masterof Masaccio, who painted them about the year 1428. 'Masolinus deFlorentia pinxit' decides their authorship. The histories of theVirgin, S. Stephen and S. Lawrence, are represented: but the injuriesof time and neglect have been so great that it is difficult to judgethem fairly. All we feel for certain is that Masolino had not yetescaped from the traditional Giottesque mannerism. Only a group ofJews stoning Stephen, and Lawrence before the tribunal, remind us bydramatic energy of the Brancacci Chapel. 

The Baptistery frescoes, dealing with the legend of S. John, show aremarkable advance; and they are luckily in better preservation. Asoldier lifting his two-handed sword to strike off the Baptist's headis a vigorous figure, full of Florentine realism. Also in the Baptismin Jordan we are reminded of Masaccio by an excellent group ofbathers--one man taking off his hose, another putting them on again, a third standing naked with his back turned, and a fourth shiveringhalf-dressed with a look of curious sadness on his face. The nude hasbeen carefully studied and well realised. The finest composition ofthis series is a large panel representing a double action--Salome atHerod's table begging for the Baptist's head, and then presentingit to her mother Herodias. The costumes are quattrocento Florentine, exactly rendered. Salome is a graceful slender creature; the two womenwho regard her offering to Herodias with mingled curiosity and horror, are well conceived. The background consists of a mountain landscapein Masaccio's simple manner, a rich Renaissance villa, and an openloggia. The architecture perspective is scientifically accurate, anda frieze of boys with garlands on the villa is in the best manner ofFlorentine sculpture. On the mountain side, diminished in scale, isa group of elders, burying the body of S. John. These are massedtogether and robed in the style of Masaccio, and have his viriledignity of form and action. Indeed this interesting wall-paintingfurnishes an epitome of Florentine art, in its intentions andachievements, during the first half of the fifteenth century. Thecolour is strong and brilliant, and the execution solid. 

The margin of the Salome panel has been used for scratching theChronicle of Castiglione. I read one date, 1568, several of thenext century, the record of a duel between two gentlemen, and manyinscriptions to this effect, 'Erodiana Regina, ' 'Omnia praetereunt, '&c. A dirty one-eyed fellow keeps the place. In my presence he sweptthe frescoes over with a scratchy broom, flaying their upper surfacein profound unconsciousness of mischief. The armour of the executionerhas had its steel colours almost rubbed off by this infernal process. Damp and cobwebs are far kinder. 

THE CERTOSA

The Certosa of Pavia leaves upon the mind an impression of bewilderingsumptuousness: nowhere else are costly materials so combined with alavish expenditure of the rarest art. Those who have only once beendriven round together with the crew of sightseers, can carry littleaway but the memory of lapis-lazuli and bronze-work, inlaid agates andlabyrinthine sculpture, cloisters tenantless in silence, fair paintedfaces smiling from dark corners on the senseless crowd, trim gardenswith rows of pink primroses in spring, and of begonia in autumn, blooming beneath colonnades of glowing terra-cotta. The strikingcontrast between the Gothic of the interior and the Renaissancefaçade, each in its own kind perfect, will also be remembered; andthoughts of the two great houses, Visconti and Sforza, to whose prideof power it is a monument, may be blended with the recollection ofart-treasures alien to their spirit. 

Two great artists, Ambrogio Borgognone and Antonio Amadeo, are thepresiding genii of the Certosa. To minute criticism, based upon theaccurate investigation of records and the comparison of styles, must be left the task of separating their work from that of numerouscollaborators. But it is none the less certain that the keynote ofthe whole music is struck by them, Amadeo, the master of the Colleonichapel at Bergamo, was both sculptor and architect. If the façadeof the Certosa be not absolutely his creation, he had a hand in thedistribution of its masses and the detail of its ornaments. The onlyfault in this otherwise faultless product of the purest quattrocentoinspiration, is that the façade is a frontispiece, with hardly anystructural relation to the church it masks: and this, though seriousfrom the point of view of architecture, is no abatement of itssculpturesque and picturesque refinement. At first sight it seemsa wilderness of loveliest reliefs and statues--of angel faces, fluttering raiment, flowing hair, love-laden youths, and stationaryfigures of grave saints, mid wayward tangles of acanthus and wild vineand cupid-laden foliage; but the subordination of these decorativedetails to the main design, clear, rhythmical, and lucid, like achaunt of Pergolese or Stradella, will enrapture one who has thesense for unity evoked from divers elements, for thought subduing allcaprices to the harmony of beauty. It is not possible elsewhere inItaly to find the instinct of the earlier Renaissance, so amorous inits expenditure of rare material, so lavish in its bestowal of thecostliest workmanship on ornamental episodes, brought into truerkeeping with a pure and simple structural effect. 

All the great sculptor-architects of Lombardy worked in successionon this miracle of beauty; and this may account for the sustainedperfection of style, which nowhere suffers from the languor ofexhaustion in the artist or from repetition of motives. It remains thetriumph of North Italian genius, exhibiting qualities of tendernessand self-abandonment to inspiration, which we lack in the severermasterpieces of the Tuscan school. 

To Borgognone is assigned the painting of the roof in nave andchoir--exceeding rich, varied, and withal in sympathy with statelyGothic style. Borgognone again is said to have designed the saints andmartyrs worked in _tarsia_ for the choir-stalls. His frescoes arein some parts well preserved, as in the lovely little Madonna at theend of the south chapel, while the great fresco above the window inthe south transept has an historical value that renders it interestingin spite of partial decay. Borgognone's oil pictures throughoutthe church prove, if such proof were needed after inspection of thealtar-piece in our National Gallery, that he was one of the mostpowerful and original painters of Italy, blending the repose of theearlier masters and their consummate workmanship with a profoundsensibility to the finest shades of feeling and the rarest forms ofnatural beauty. He selected an exquisite type of face for his youngmen and women; on his old men he bestowed singular gravity anddignity. His saints are a society of strong, pure, restful, earnestsouls, in whom the passion of deepest emotion is transfigured byhabitual calm. The brown and golden harmonies he loved, are gainedwithout sacrifice of lustre: there is a self-restraint in hiscolouring which corresponds to the reserve of his emotion; and thougha regret sometimes rises in our mind that he should have modelled thelight and shade upon his faces with a brusque, unpleasing hardness, their pallor dwells within our memory as something delicately soughtif not consummately attained. In a word, Borgognone was a true Lombardof the best time. The very imperfection of his flesh-painting repeatsin colour what the greatest Lombard sculptors sought in stone--asharpness of relief that passes over into angularity. This brusquenesswas the counterpoise to tenderness of feeling and intensity of fancyin these northern artists. Of all Borgognone's pictures in the CertosaI should select the altar-piece of S. Siro with S. Lawrence and S. Stephen and two Fathers of the Church, for its fusion of this master'squalities. 

The Certosa is a wilderness of lovely workmanship. From Borgognone'smajesty we pass into the quiet region of Luini's Christian grace, ormark the influence of Lionardo on that rare Assumption of Madonna byhis pupil, Andrea Solari. Like everything touched by the Lionardesquespirit, this great picture was left unfinished: yet Northern Italyhas nothing finer to show than the landscape, outspread in itsimmeasurable purity of calm, behind the grouped Apostles and theascendant Mother of Heaven. The feeling of that happy region betweenthe Alps and Lombardy, where there are many waters--_et tacitos sinelabe laous sine murmure rivos_--and where the last spurs of themountains sink in undulations to the plain, has passed into this azurevista, just as all Umbria is suggested in a twilight background ofyoung Raphael or Perugino. 

The portraits of the Dukes of Milan and their families carry us intoa very different realm of feeling. Medallions above the doors ofsacristy and chancel, stately figures reared aloft beneath giganticcanopies, men and women slumbering with folded hands upon their marblebiers--we read in all those sculptured forms a strange record of humanrestlessness, resolved into the quiet of the tomb. The iniquities ofGian Galeazzo Visconti, _il gran Biscione_, the blood-thirstof Gian Maria, the dark designs of Filippo and his secret vices, Francesco Sforza's treason, Galeazzo Maria's vanities and lusts;their tyrants' dread of thunder and the knife; their awful deaths bypestilence and the assassin's poignard; their selfishness, oppression, cruelty and fraud; the murders of their kinsmen; their labyrinthineplots and acts of broken faith;--all is tranquil now, and we cansay to each what Bosola found for the Duchess of Malfi ere herexecution:--

 Much you had of land and rent; Your length in clay's now competent: A long war disturbed your mind; Here your perfect peace is signed!

Some of these faces are commonplace, with _bourgeois_ cunningwritten on the heavy features; one is bluff, another stolid, a thirdbloated, a fourth stately. The sculptors have dealt fairly withall, and not one has the lineaments of utter baseness. To CristoforoSolari's statues of Lodovico Sforza and his wife, Beatrice d'Este, thepalm of excellence in art and of historical interest must be awarded. Sculpture has rarely been more dignified and true to life than here. The woman with her short clustering curls, the man with his strongface, are resting after that long fever which brought woe to Italy, toEurope a new age, and to the boasted minion of Fortune a slow deathin the prison palace of Loches. Attired in ducal robes, they lie instate; and the sculptor has carved the lashes on their eyelids, heavywith death's marmoreal sleep. He at least has passed no judgmenton their crimes. Let us too bow and leave their memories to thehistorian's pen, their spirits to God's mercy. 

After all wanderings in this Temple of Art, we return to AntonioAmadeo, to his long-haired seraphs playing on the lutes of Paradise, to his angels of the Passion with their fluttering robes and armsoutspread in agony, to his saints and satyrs mingled on pilasters ofthe marble doorways, his delicate _Lavabo_ decorations, and hishymns of piety expressed in noble forms of weeping women and deadChrists. Wherever we may pass, this master-spirit of the Lombard styleenthralls attention. His curious treatment of drapery as though it¦were made of crumpled paper, and his trick of enhancing relief bysharp angles and attenuated limbs, do not detract from his peculiarcharm. That is his way, very different from Donatello's, of attainingto the maximum of life and lightness in the stubborn vehicle ofstone. Nor do all the riches of the choir--those multitudes of singingangels, those Ascensions and Assumptions, and innumerablebasreliefs of gleaming marble moulded into softest wax by mastery ofart--distract our eyes from the single round medallion, not largerthan a common plate, inscribed by him upon the front of the highaltar. Perhaps, if one who loved Amadeo were bidden to point outhis masterpiece, he would lead the way at once to this. The space issmall: yet it includes the whole tragedy of the Passion. Christ islying dead among the women on his mother's lap, and there are pityingangels in the air above. One woman lifts his arm, another makes herbreast a pillow for his head. Their agony is hushed, but felt inevery limb and feature; and the extremity of suffering is seen in eacharticulation of the worn and wounded form just taken from the cross. It would be too painful, were not the harmony of art so rare, theinterlacing of those many figures in a simple round so exquisite. Thenoblest tranquillity and the most passionate emotion are here fused ina manner of adorable naturalness. 

From the church it is delightful to escape into the cloisters, floodedwith sunlight, where the swallows skim, and the brown hawks circle, and the mason bees are at work upon their cells among the carvings. The arcades of the two cloisters are the final triumph of Lombardterra-cotta. The memory fails before such infinite invention, suchfacility and felicity of execution. Wreaths of cupids gliding roundthe arches among grape-bunches and bird-haunted foliage of vine; rowsof angels, like rising and setting planets, some smiling andsome grave, ascending and descending by the Gothic curves; saintsstationary on their pedestals, and faces leaning from the roundsabove; crowds of cherubs, and courses of stars, and acanthus leaves inwoven lines, and ribands incessantly inscribed with Ave Maria! Then, over all, the rich red light and purple shadows of the brick, thanwhich no substance sympathises more completely with the sky of solidblue above, the broad plain space of waving summer grass beneath ourfeet. 

It is now late afternoon, and when evening comes, the train will takeus back to Milan. There is yet a little while to rest tired eyes andstrained spirits among the willows and the poplars by the monasterywall. Through that grey-green leafage, young with early spring, the pinnacles of the Certosa leap like flames into the sky. Therice-fields are under water, far and wide, shining like burnishedgold beneath the level light now near to sun-down. Frogs are croaking;those persistent frogs, whom the Muses have ordained to sing for aye, in spite of Bion and all tuneful poets dead. We sit and watch thewater-snakes, the busy rats, the hundred creatures swarming in the fatwell-watered soil. Nightingales here and there, new-comers, tune theirtimid April song: but, strangest of all sounds in such a place, mycomrade from the Grisons jodels forth an Alpine cowherd's melody. _Auf den Alpen droben ist ein herrliches Leben!_

Did the echoes of Gian Galeazzo's convent ever wake to such a tune asthis before?

SAN MAURIZIO

The student of art in Italy, after mastering the characters ofdifferent styles and epochs, finds a final satisfaction in thecontemplation of buildings designed and decorated by one master, orby groups of artists interpreting the spirit of a single period. Suchsupreme monuments of the national genius are not very common, and theyare therefore the more precious. Giotto's Chapel at Padua; the VillaFarnesina at Rome, built by Peruzzi and painted in fresco by Raphaeland Sodoma; the Palazzo del Te at Mantua, Giulio Romano's masterpiece;the Scuola di San Rocco, illustrating the Venetian Renaissance at itsclimax, might be cited among the most splendid of these achievements. In the church of the Monastero Maggiore at Milan, dedicated to S. Maurizio, Lombard architecture and fresco-painting may be studiedin this rare combination. The monastery itself, one of the oldest inMilan, formed a retreat for cloistered virgins following the rule ofS. Benedict. It may have been founded as early as the tenth century;but its church was rebuilt in the first two decades of the sixteenth, between 1503 and 1519, and was immediately afterwards decorated withfrescoes by Luini and his pupils. Gian Giacomo Dolcebono, architectand sculptor, called by his fellow-craftsmen _magistro di taliarepietre_, gave the design, at once simple and harmonious, which wascarried out with hardly any deviation from his plan. The church is along parallelogram, divided into two unequal portions, the first andsmaller for the public, the second for the nuns. The walls are piercedwith rounded and pilastered windows, ten on each side, four of whichbelong to the outer and six to the inner section. The dividing wall orseptum rises to the point from which the groinings of the roof spring;and round three sides of the whole building, north, east, and south, runs a gallery for the use of the convent. The altars of the inner andouter church are placed against the septum, back to back, with certaindifferences of structure that need not be described. Simple andsevere, S. Maurizio owes its architectural beauty wholly and entirelyto purity of line and perfection of proportion. There is a prevailingspirit of repose, a sense of space, fair, lightsome, and adaptedto serene moods of the meditative fancy in this building, which issingularly at variance with the religious mysticism and imaginativegrandeur of a Gothic edifice. The principal beauty of the church, however, is its tone of colour. Every square inch is covered withfresco or rich woodwork, mellowed by time into that harmony of tintswhich blends the work of greater and lesser artists in one goldenhue of brown. Round the arcades of the convent-loggia run delicatearabesques with faces of fair female saints--Catherine, Agnes, Lucy, Agatha, --gem-like or star-like, gazing from their gallery upon thechurch below. The Luinesque smile is on their lips and in their eyes, quiet, refined, as though the emblems of their martyrdom brought backno thought of pain to break the Paradise of rest in which they dwell. There are twenty-six in all, a sisterhood of stainless souls, thelilies of Love's garden planted round Christ's throne. Soldier saintsare mingled with them in still smaller rounds above the windows, chosen to illustrate the virtues of an order which renounced theworld. To decide whose hand produced these masterpieces of Lombardsuavity and grace, or whether more than one, would not be easy. Nearthe altar we can perhaps trace the style of Bartolommeo Suardi in anAnnunciation painted on the spandrils--that heroic style, large andnoble, known to us by the chivalrous S. Martin and the glorifiedMadonna of the Brera frescoes. It is not impossible that the malesaints of the loggia may be also his, though a tenderer touch, asomething more nearly Lionardesque in its quietude, must be discernedin Lucy and her sisters. The whole of the altar in this inner churchbelongs to Luini. Were it not for darkness and decay, we shouldpronounce this series of the Passion in nine great compositions, withsaints and martyrs and torch-bearing genii, to be one of his mostambitious and successful efforts. As it is, we can but judge in part;the adolescent beauty of Sebastian, the grave compassion of S. Rocco, the classical perfection of the cupid with lighted tapers, thegracious majesty of women smiling on us sideways from their Lombardeyelids--these remain to haunt our memory, emerging from the shadowsof the vault above. 

The inner church, as is fitting, excludes all worldly elements. Weare in the presence of Christ's agony, relieved and tempered by thesunlight of those beauteous female faces. All is solemn here, still asthe convent, pure as the meditations of a novice. We pass the septum, and find ourselves in the outer church appropriated to the laity. Above the high altar the whole wall is covered with Luini's loveliestwork, in excellent light and far from ill preserved. The space dividesinto eight compartments. A Pietà, an Assumption, Saints and Foundersof the church, group themselves under the influence of Luini'sharmonising colour into one symphonious whole. But the places ofdistinction are reserved for two great benefactors of the convent, Alessandro de' Bentivogli and his wife, Ippolita Sforza. When theBentivogli were expelled from Bologna by the Papal forces, Alessandrosettled at Milan, where he dwelt, honoured by the Sforzas and alliedto them by marriage, till his death in 1532. He was buried in themonastery by the side of his sister Alessandra, a nun of the order. Luini has painted the illustrious exile in his habit as he lived. Heis kneeling, as though in ever-during adoration of the altar mystery, attired in a long black senatorial robe trimmed with furs. In his lefthand he holds a book; and above his pale, serenely noble face is alittle black berretta. Saints attend him, as though attesting to hisact of faith. Opposite kneels Ippolita, his wife, the brilliant queenof fashion, the witty leader of society, to whom Bandello dedicatedhis Novelle, and whom he praised as both incomparably beautiful andsingularly learned. Her queenly form is clothed from head to foot inwhite brocade, slashed and trimmed with gold lace, and on her foreheadis a golden circlet. She has the proud port of a princess, the beautyof a woman past her prime but stately, the indescribable dignity ofattitude which no one but Luini could have rendered so majesticallysweet. In her hand is a book; and she, like Alessandro, has hersaintly sponsors, Agnes and Catherine and S. Scolastica. 

Few pictures bring the splendid Milanese Court so vividly before us asthese portraits of the Bentivogli: they are, moreover, very preciousfor the light they throw on what Luini could achieve in the secularstyle so rarely touched by him. Great, however, as are these frescoes, they are far surpassed both in value and interest by his paintings inthe side chapel of S. Catherine. Here more than anywhere else, moreeven than at Saronno or Lugano, do we feel the true distinctionof Luini--his unrivalled excellence as a colourist, his power overpathos, the refinement of his feeling, and the peculiar beauty of hisfavourite types. The chapel was decorated at the expense of a Milaneseadvocate, Francesco Besozzi, who died in 1529. It is he who iskneeling, grey-haired and bareheaded, under the protection of S. Catherine of Alexandria, intently gazing at Christ unbound from thescourging pillar. On the other side stand S. Lawrence and S. Stephen, pointing to the Christ and looking at us, as though their lips wereframed to say: 'Behold and see if there be any sorrow like untohis sorrow. ' Even the soldiers who have done their cruel work, seemsoftened. They untie the cords tenderly, and support the faintingform, too weak to stand alone. What sadness in the lovely faces of S. Catherine and Lawrence! What divine anguish in the loosened limbsand bending body of Christ; what piety in the adoring old man! All themoods proper to this supreme tragedy of the faith are touched as insome tenor song with low accompaniment of viols; for it was Luini'sspecial province to feel profoundly and to express musically. The verydepth of the Passion is there; and yet there is no discord. 

Just in proportion to this unique faculty for yielding a melodiousrepresentation of the most intense moments of stationary emotion, washis inability to deal with a dramatic subject. The first episode of S. Catherine's execution, when the wheel was broken and the executionersstruck by lightning, is painted in this chapel without energy and witha lack of composition that betrays the master's indifference to hissubject. Far different is the second episode when Catherine is aboutto be beheaded. The executioner has raised his sword to strike. She, robed in brocade of black and gold, so cut as to display the curve ofneck and back, while the bosom is covered, leans her head aboveher praying hands, and waits the blow in sweetest resignation. Twosoldiers stand at some distance in a landscape of hill and meadow; andfar up are seen the angels carrying her body to its tomb upon MountSinai. I cannot find words or summon courage to describe the beautyof this picture; its atmosphere of holy peace, the dignity of itscomposition, the golden richness of its colouring. The most tragicsituation has here again been alchemised by Luini's magic into apure idyll, without the loss of power, without the sacrifice ofedification. 

S. Catherine in this incomparable fresco is a portrait, the history ofwhich so strikingly illustrates the relation of the arts to religionon the one hand, and to life on the other, in the age of theRenaissance, that it cannot be omitted. At the end of his fourthNovella, having related the life of the Contessa di Cellant, Bandellosays: 'And so the poor woman was beheaded; such was the end of herunbridled desires; and he who would fain see her painted to the life, let him go to the Church of the Monistero Maggiore, and there will hebehold her portrait. ' The Contessa di Cellant was the only child of arich usurer who lived at Casal Monferrato. Her mother was a Greek;and she was a girl of such exquisite beauty, that, in spite of herlow origin, she became the wife of the noble Ermes Visconti in hersixteenth year. He took her to live with him at Milan, where shefrequented the house of the Bentivogli, but none other. Her husbandtold Bandello that he knew her temper better than to let her visitwith the freedom of the Milanese ladies. Upon his death, while shewas little more than twenty, she retired to Casale and led a gaylife among many lovers. One of these, the Count of Cellant in the Vald'Aosta, became her second husband, conquered by her extraordinaryloveliness. They could not, however, agree together. She left him, andestablished herself at Pavia. Rich with her father's wealth and stillof most seductive beauty, she now abandoned herself to a life ofprofligacy. Three among her lovers must be named: Ardizzino Valperga, Count of Masino; Roberto Sanseverino, of the princely Naples family;and Don Pietro di Cardona, a Sicilian. With each of the two first shequarrelled, and separately besought each to murder the other. Theywere friends and frustrated her plans by communicating them to oneanother. The third loved her with the insane passion of a very youngman. What she desired, he promised to do blindly; and she bade himmurder his two predecessors in her favour. At this time she was livingat Milan, where the Duke of Bourbon was acting as viceroy for theEmperor. Don Pietro took twenty-five armed men of his household, andwaylaid the Count of Masino, as he was returning with his brother andeight or nine servants, late one night from supper. Both the brothersand the greater part of their suite were killed: but Don Pietro wascaught. He revealed the atrocity of his mistress; and she was sentto prison. Incapable of proving her innocence, and prevented fromescaping, in spite of 15, 000 golden crowns with which she hoped tobribe her jailors, she was finally beheaded. Thus did a vulgar andinfamous Messalina, distinguished only by rare beauty, furnish Luiniwith a S. Catherine for this masterpiece of pious art! The thing seemsscarcely credible. Yet Bandello lived in Milan while the Church ofS. Maurizio was being painted; nor does he show the slightest sign ofdisgust at the discord between the Contessa's life and her artisticpresentation in the person of a royal martyr. 

A HUMANIST'S MONUMENT

In the Sculpture Gallery of the Brera is preserved a fair white marbletomb, carved by that excellent Lombard sculptor, Agostino Busti. Theepitaph runs as follows:--

 En Virtutem Mortis nesciam. Vivet Lancinus Curtius Sæcula per omnia Quascunque lustrans oras, Tantum possunt Camoenæ. 

'Look here on Virtue that knows nought of Death! Lancinus Curtiusshall live through all the centuries, and visit every shore of earth. Such power have the Muses. ' The timeworn poet reclines, as thoughsleeping or resting, ready to be waked; his head is covered withflowing hair, and crowned with laurel; it leans upon his left hand. Oneither side of his couch stand cupids or genii with torches turned toearth. Above is a group of the three Graces, flanked by winged Pegasi. Higher up are throned two Victories with palms, and at the top a nakedFame. We need not ask who was Lancinus Curtius. He is forgotten, andhis virtue has not saved him from oblivion; though he strove in hislifetime, _pro virili parte_, for the palm that Busti carved uponhis grave. Yet his monument teaches in short compass a deep lesson;and his epitaph sums up the dream which lured the men of Italy in theRenaissance to their doom. We see before us sculptured in this marblethe ideal of the humanistic poet-scholar's life: Love, Grace, theMuse, and Nakedness, and Glory. There is not a single intrusivethought derived from Christianity. The end for which the man livedwas Pagan. His hope was earthly fame. Yet his name survives, if thisindeed be a survival, not in those winged verses which were to carryhim abroad across the earth, but in the marble of a cunning craftsman, scanned now and then by a wandering scholar's eye in the half-darknessof a vault. 

THE MONUMENT OF GASTON DE FOIX IN THE BRERA

The hero of Ravenna lies stretched upon his back in the hollow ofa bier covered with laced drapery; and his head rests on richlyornamented cushions. These decorative accessories, together with theminute work of his scabbard, wrought in the fanciful mannerism of the_cinquecento_, serve to enhance the statuesque simplicity of theyoung soldier's effigy. The contrast between so much of richness inthe merely subordinate details, and this sublime severity of treatmentin the person of the hero, is truly and touchingly dramatic. There isa smile as of content in death, upon his face; and the features areexceedingly beautiful--with the beauty of a boy, almost of a woman. The heavy hair is cut straight above the forehead and straight overthe shoulders, falling in massive clusters. A delicately sculpturedlaurel branch is woven into a victor's crown, and laid lightly on thetresses it scarcely seems to clasp. So fragile is this wreath thatit does not break the pure outline of the boy-conqueror's head. Thearmour is quite plain. So is the surcoat. Upon the swelling bust, that seems fit harbour for a hero's heart, there lies the collar of anorder composed of cockle-shells; and this is all the ornament givento the figure. The hands are clasped across a sword laid flat upon thebreast, and placed between the legs. Upon the chin is a little tuft ofhair, parted, and curling either way; for the victor of Ravenna, likethe Hermes of Homer, was [Greek: prôton hypênêtês], 'a youth ofprincely blood, whose beard hath just begun to grow, for whom theseason of bloom is in its prime of grace. ' The whole statue is theidealisation of _virtù_--that quality so highly prized by theItalians and the ancients, so well fitted for commemoration in thearts. It is the apotheosis of human life resolved into undying memorybecause of one great deed. It is the supreme portrait in modern timesof a young hero, chiselled by artists belonging to a race no longerheroic, but capable of comprehending and expressing the æsthetic charmof heroism. Standing before it, we may say of Gaston what Arrian wroteto Hadrian of Achilles:--'That he was a hero, if hero ever lived, I cannot doubt; for his birth and blood were noble, and he wasbeautiful, and his spirit was mighty, and he passed in youth'sprime away from men. ' Italian sculpture, under the condition of the_cinquecento_, had indeed no more congenial theme than thisof bravery and beauty, youth and fame, immortal honour and untimelydeath; nor could any sculptor of death have poetised the theme morethoroughly than Agostino Busti, whose simple instinct, unlike that ofMichelangelo, led him to subordinate his own imagination to the pathosof reality. 

SARONNO

The church of Saronno is a pretty building with a Bramantesque cupola, standing among meadows at some distance from the little town. Itis the object of a special cult, which draws pilgrims from theneighbouring country-side; but the concourse is not large enough toload the sanctuary with unnecessary wealth. Everything is very quietin the holy place, and the offerings of the pious seem to have beenonly just enough to keep the building and its treasures of art inrepair. The church consists of a nave, a central cupola, a vestibuleleading to the choir, the choir itself, and a small tribune behind thechoir. No other single building in North Italy can boast so much thatis first-rate of the work of Luini and Gandenzio Ferrari. 

The cupola is raised on a sort of drum composed of twelve pieces, perforated with round windows and supported on four massive piers. Onthe level of the eye are frescoes by Luini of S. Rocco, S. Sebastian, S. Christopher, and S. Antony--by no means in his best style, andinferior to all his other paintings in this church. The Sebastian, for example, shows an effort to vary the traditional treatment of thissaint. He is tied in a sprawling attitude to a tree; and little ofLuini's special pathos or sense of beauty--the melody of idyllic gracemade spiritual--appears in him. These four saints are on the piers. Above are frescoes from the early Bible history by Lanini, painted incontinuation of Ferrari's medallions from the story of Adam expelledfrom Paradise, which fill the space beneath the cupola, leading theeye upward to Ferrari's masterpiece. 

The dome itself is crowded with a host of angels singing and playingupon instruments of music. At each of the twelve angles of the drumstands a coryphæus of this celestial choir, full length, with wavingdrapery. Higher up, the golden-haired, broad-winged, divine creaturesare massed together, filling every square inch of the vault withcolour. Yet there is no confusion. The simplicity of the selectedmotive and the necessities of the place acted like a check onFerrari, who, in spite of his dramatic impulse, could not tell a storycoherently or fill a canvas with harmonised variety. There is no traceof his violence here. Though the motion of music runs through thewhole multitude like a breeze, though the joy expressed is a real_tripudio celeste_, not one of all these angels flings his armsabroad or makes a movement that disturbs the rhythm. We feel that theyare keeping time and resting quietly, each in his appointed seat, asthough the sphere was circling with them round the throne of God, whois their centre and their source of gladness. Unlike Correggio and hisimitators, Ferrari has introduced no clouds, and has in no case madethe legs of his angels prominent. It is a mass of noble faces andvoluminously robed figures, emerging each above the other like flowersin a vase. Bach too has specific character, while all are robust andfull of life, intent upon the service set them. Their instrumentsof music are all the lutes and viols, flutes, cymbals, drums, fifes, citherns, organs, and harps that Ferrari's day could show. The scaleof colour, as usual with Ferrari, is a little heavy; nor are the tintssatisfactorily harmonised. But the vigour and invention of the wholework would atone for minor defects of far greater consequence. 

It is natural, beneath this dome, to turn aside and think onemoment of Correggio at Parma. Before the _macchinisti_ of theseventeenth century had vulgarised the motive, Correggio's boldattempt to paint heaven in flight from earth--earth left behind in thepersons of the Apostles standing round the empty tomb, heaven soaringupward with a spiral vortex into the abyss of light above--had anoriginality which set at nought all criticism. There is such ecstasyof jubilation, such rapturous rapidity of flight, that we who strainour eyes from below, feel we are in the darkness of the grave whichMary left. A kind of controlling rhythm for the composition is gainedby placing Gabriel, Madonna, and Christ at three points in the swirlof angels. Nevertheless, composition--the presiding all-controllingintellect--is just what makes itself felt by absence; and Correggio'sspecial qualities of light and colour have now so far vanishedfrom the cupola of the Duomo that the, constructive poverty isnot disguised. Here if anywhere in painting, we may apply Goethe'swords--_Gefühl ist Alles. _

If then we return to Ferrari's angels at Saronno, we find that thepainter of Varallo chose a safer though a far more modest theme. Nordid he expose himself to that most cruel of all degradations which theethereal genius of Correggio has suffered from incompetent imitators. To daub a tawdry and superficial reproduction of those Parmesefrescoes, to fill the cupolas of Italy with veritable _guazzettidi rane_, was comparatively easy; and between our intelligenceand what remains of that stupendous masterpiece of boldness, crowd athousand memories of such ineptitude. On the other hand, nothing butsolid work and conscientious inspiration could enable any workman, however able, to follow Ferrari in the path struck out by him atSaronno. His cupola has had no imitator; and its only rival is thenoble pendant painted at Varallo by his own hand, of angels in adoringanguish round the Cross. 

In the ante-choir of the sanctuary are Luini's priceless frescoes ofthe 'Marriage of the Virgin, ' and the 'Dispute with the Doctors. '[11]Their execution is flawless, and they are perfectly preserved. Ifcriticism before such admirable examples of so excellent a masterbe permissible, it may be questioned whether the figures are not toocrowded, whether the groups are sufficiently varied and connected byrhythmic lines. Yet the concords of yellow and orange with blue inthe 'Sposalizio, ' and the blendings of dull violet and red in the'Disputa, ' make up for much of stiffness. Here, as in the Chapel ofS. Catherine at Milan, we feel that Luini was the greatest colouristamong _frescanti. _ In the 'Sposalizio' the female heads are singularlynoble and idyllically graceful. Some of the young men too have Luini'sspecial grace and abundance of golden hair. In the 'Disputa' thegravity and dignity of old men are above all things striking. 

Passing into the choir, we find on either hand the 'Adorationof the Magi' and the 'Purification of the Virgin, ' two of Luini'sdivinest frescoes. Above them in lunettes are four Evangelists andfour Latin Fathers, with four Sibyls. Time and neglect have done nodamage here: and here, again, perforce we notice perfect mastery ofcolour in fresco. The blues detach themselves too much, perhaps, fromthe rest of the colouring; and that is all a devil's advocate couldsay. It is possible that the absence of blue makes the S. Catherinefrescoes in the Monastero Maggiore at Milan surpass all other works ofLuini. But nowhere else has he shown more beauty and variety in detailthan here. The group of women led by Joseph, the shepherd carryingthe lamb upon his shoulder, the girl with a basket of white doves, the child with an apple on the altar-steps, the lovely youth in theforeground heedless of the scene; all these are idyllic incidentstreated with the purest, the serenest, the most spontaneous, thetruest, most instinctive sense of beauty. The landscape includes aview of Saronno, and an episodical picture of the 'Flight into Egypt'where a white-robed angel leads the way. All these lovely thingsare in the 'Purification, ' which is dated _Bernardinus Lovinuspinxit_, MDXXV. 

The fresco of the 'Magi' is less notable in detail, and in generaleffect is more spoiled by obtrusive blues. There is, however, oneyoung man of wholly Lionardesque loveliness, whose divine innocenceof adolescence, unalloyed by serious thought, unstirred by passions, almost forces a comparison with Sodoma. The only painter whoapproaches Luini in what may be called the Lombard, to distinguish itfrom the Venetian idyll, is Sodoma; and the work of his which comesnearest to Luini's masterpieces is the legend of S. Benedict, atMonte Oliveto, near Siena. Yet Sodoma had not all Luini's innocence or_naïveté. _ If he added something slightly humorous which has anindefinite charm, he lacked that freshness as of 'cool, meek-bloodedflowers' and boyish voices, which fascinates us in Luini. Sodomawas closer to the earth, and feared not to impregnate what he sawof beauty with the fiercer passions of his nature. If Luini had feltpassion, who shall say? It appears nowhere in his work, where life istoned to a religious joyousness. When Shelley compared the poetry ofthe Theocritean amourists to the perfume of the tuberose, and that ofthe earlier Greek poets to 'a meadow-gale of June, which minglesthe fragrance of all the flowers of the field, ' he supplied uswith critical images which may not unfairly be used to point thedistinction between Sodoma at Monte Oliveto and Luini at Saronno. 

THE CASTELLO OF FERRARA

Is it possible that the patron saints of cities should mould thetemper of the people to their own likeness? S. George, the chivalrous, is champion of Ferrara. His is the marble group above the Cathedralporch, so feudal in its medieval pomp. He and S. Michael are paintedin fresco over the south portcullis of the Castle. His lustrous armourgleams with Giorgionesque brilliancy from Dossi's masterpiece inthe Pinacoteca. That Ferrara, the only place in Italy where chivalrystruck any root, should have had S. George for patron, is at any ratesignificant. 

The best preserved relic of princely feudal life in Italy isthis Castello of the Este family, with its sombre moat, chaineddrawbridges, doleful dungeons, and unnumbered tragedies, each one ofwhich may be compared with Parisina's history. I do not want to dwellon these things now. It is enough to remember the Castello, built ofruddiest brick, time-mellowed with how many centuries of sun and softsea-air, as it appeared upon the close of one tempestuous day. Justbefore evening the rain-clouds parted and the sun flamed out acrossthe misty Lombard plain. The Castello burned like a hero's funeralpyre, and round its high-built turrets swallows circled in the warmblue air. On the moat slept shadows, mixed with flowers of sunset, tossed from pinnacle and gable. Then the sky changed. A roof ofthunder-cloud spread overhead with the rapidity of tempest. The dyingsun gathered his last strength against it, fretting those steel-bluearches with crimson; and all the fierce light, thrown from vault tovault of cloud, was reflected back as from a shield, and cast inblots and patches on the buildings. The Castle towered up rosy-redand shadowy sombre, enshrined, embosomed in those purple clouds; andmomently ran lightning forks like rapiers through the growing mass. Everything around, meanwhile, was quiet in the grass-grown streets. The only sound was a high, clear boy's voice chanting an opera tune. 

PETRARCH'S TOMB AT ARQUA

The drive from Este along the skirts of the Euganean Hills to Arquatakes one through a country which is tenderly beautiful, because ofits contrast between little peaked mountains and the plain. It isnot a grand landscape. It lacks all that makes the skirts of Alpsand Apennines sublime. Its charm is a certain mystery andrepose--an undefined sense of the neighbouring Adriatic, a pervadingconsciousness of Venice unseen, but felt from far away. From theterraces of Arqua the eye ranges across olive-trees, laurels, andpomegranates on the southern slopes, to the misty level land thatmelts into the sea, with churches and tall campanili like giganticgalleys setting sail for fairyland over 'the foam of perilous seasforlorn. ' Let a blue-black shadow from a thunder-cloud be castupon this plain, and let one ray of sunlight strike a solitarybell-tower;--it burns with palest flame of rose against the steelydark, and in its slender shaft and shell-like tint of pink all Veniceis foreseen. 

The village church of Arqua stands upon one of these terraces, with afull stream of clearest water flowing by. On the little square beforethe church-door, where the peasants congregate at mass-time--open tothe skies with all their stars and storms, girdled by the hills, and within hearing of the vocal stream--is Petrarch's sepulchre. Fitresting-place for what remains to earth of such a poet's clay! It isas though archangels, flying, had carried the marble chest and set itdown here on the hillside, to be a sign and sanctuary for after-men. Asimple rectilinear coffin, of smooth Verona _mandorlato_, raisedon four thick columns, and closed by a heavy cippus-cover. Withoutemblems, allegories, or lamenting genii, this tomb of the great poet, the great awakener of Europe from mental lethargy, encircled by thehills, beneath the canopy of heaven, is impressive beyond the power ofwords. Bending here, we feel that Petrarch's own winged thoughtsand fancies, eternal and aërial, 'forms more real than living man, nurslings of immortality, ' have congregated to be the ever-ministeringand irremovable attendants on the shrine of one who, while he lived, was purest spirit in a veil of flesh. 

ON A MOUNTAIN

Milan is shining in sunset on those purple fields; and a score ofcities flash back the last red light, which shows each inequalityand undulation of Lombardy outspread four thousand feet beneath. Bothranges, Alps and Apennines, are clear to view; and all the silverylakes are over-canopied and brought into one picture by flame-littenmists. Monte Rosa lifts her crown of peaks above a belt of clouds intolight of living fire. The Mischabelhörner and the Dom rest stationaryangel-wings upon the rampart, which at this moment is the wall ofheaven. The pyramid of distant Monte Viso burns like solid amethystfar, far away. Mont Cervin beckons to his brother, the giganticFinsteraarhorn, across tracts of liquid ether. Bells are rising fromthe villages, now wrapped in gloom, between me and the glimmeringlake. A hush of evening silence falls upon the ridges, cliffs, andforests of this billowy hill, ascending into wave-like crests, andtoppling with awful chasms over the dark waters of Lugano. It is goodto be alone here at this hour. Yet I must rise and go--passing throughmeadows, where white lilies sleep in silvery drifts, and asphodel ispale with spires of faintest rose, and narcissus dreams of his ownbeauty, loading the air with fragrance sweet as some love-music ofMozart. These fields want only the white figure of Persephone to makethem poems: and in this twilight one might fancy that the queen hadleft her throne by Pluto's side, to mourn for her dead youth among theflowers uplifted between earth and heaven. Nay, they are poems now, these fields; with that unchanging background of history, romance, and human life--the Lombard plain, against whose violet breadth theblossoms bend their faint heads to the evening air. Downward wehurry, on pathways where the beeches meet, by silent farms, by meadowshoney-scented, deep in dew. The columbine stands tall and still onthose green slopes of shadowy grass. The nightingale sings now, andnow is hushed again. Streams murmur through the darkness, where thegrowth of trees, heavy with honeysuckle and wild rose, is thickest. Fireflies begin to flit above the growing corn. At last the plain isreached, and all the skies are tremulous with starlight. Alas, thatwe should vibrate so obscurely to these harmonies of earth andheaven! The inner finer sense of them seems somehow unattainable--thatspiritual touch of soul evoking soul from nature, which shouldtransfigure our dull mood of self into impersonal delight. Man needsto be a mytho-poet at some moments, or, better still, to be a mysticsteeped through half-unconsciousness in the vast wonder of the world. Gold and untouched to poetry or piety by scenes that ought to blendthe spirit in ourselves with spirit in the world without, we can butwonder how this phantom show of mystery and beauty will pass away fromus--how soon--and we be where, see what, use all our sensibilities onaught or nought?

SIC GENIUS

In the picture-gallery at Modena there is a masterpiece of DossoDossi. The frame is old and richly carved; and the painting, borderedby its beautiful dull gold, shines with the lustre of an emerald. Inhis happy moods Dosso set colour upon canvas, as no other painter outof Venice ever did; and here he is at his happiest. The picture is theportrait of a jester, dressed in courtly clothes and with a featheredcap upon his head. He holds a lamb in his arms, and carries thelegend, _Sic Genius_. Behind him is a landscape of exquisitebrilliancy and depth. His face is young and handsome. Dosso has madeit one most wonderful laugh. Even so perhaps laughed Yorick. Nowhereelse have I seen a laugh thus painted: not violent, not loud, althoughthe lips are opened to show teeth of dazzling whiteness;--but fine anddelicate, playing over the whole face like a ripple sent up from thedepths of the soul within. Who was he? What does the lamb mean? Howshould the legend be interpreted? We cannot answer these questions. Hemay have been the court-fool of Ferrara; and his genius, the spiritualessence of the man, may have inclined him to laugh at all things. That at least is the value he now has for us. He is the portrait ofperpetual irony, the spirit of the golden Sixteenth Century whichdelicately laughed at the whole world of thoughts and things, thequintessence of the poetry of Ariosto, the wit of Berni, all condensedinto one incarnation and immortalised by truthfullest art. With theGaul, the Spaniard, and the German at her gates, and in her cities, and encamped upon her fields, Italy still laughed; and when the voiceof conscience sounding through Savonarola asked her why, she onlysmiled--_Sic Genius_. 

One evening in May we rowed from Venice to Torcello, and at sunsetbroke bread and drank wine together among the rank grasses justoutside that ancient church. It was pleasant to sit in the so-calledchair of Attila and feel the placid stillness of the place. Then therecame lounging by a sturdy young fellow in brown country clothes, witha marvellous old wide-awake upon his head, and across his shoulders abunch of massive church-keys. In strange contrast to his uncouth garbhe flirted a pink Japanese fan, gracefully disposing it to cool hissunburned olive cheeks. This made us look at him. He was not ugly. Nay, there was something of attractive in his face--the smooth-curvedchin, the shrewd yet sleepy eyes, and finely cut thin lips--a curiousmixture of audacity and meekness blent upon his features. Yet thisimpression was but the prelude to his smile. When that first dawned, some breath of humour seeming to stir in him unbidden, the truemeaning was given to his face. Each feature helped to make a smilethat was the very soul's life of the man expressed. I broadened, showing brilliant teeth, and grew into a noiseless laugh; and then Isaw before me Dosso's jester, the type of Shakspere's fools, the lifeof that wild irony, now rude, now fine, which once delighted Courts. The laughter of the whole world and of all the centuries was silent inhis face. What he said need not be repeated. The charm was less in hiswords than in his personality; for Momus-philosophy lay deep in everylook and gesture of the man. The place lent itself to irony: partiesof Americans and English parsons, the former agape for anyrubbishy old things, the latter learned in the lore of obsoleteChurch-furniture, had thronged Torcello; and now they were all gone, and the sun had set behind the Alps, while an irreverent strangerdrank his wine in Attila's chair, and nature's jester smiled--_SicGenius_. 

When I slept that night I dreamed of an altar-piece in the Temple ofFolly. The goddess sat enthroned beneath a canopy hung with bellsand corals. On her lap was a beautiful winged smiling genius, whoflourished two bright torches. On her left hand stood the man ofModena with his white lamb, a new S. John. On her right stood the manof Torcello with his keys, a new S. Peter. Both were laughing aftertheir all-absorbent, divine, noiseless fashion; and under both waswritten, _Sic Genius_. Are not all things, even profanity, permissible in dreams?

 * * * * *

COMO AND IL MEDEGHINO

To which of the Italian lakes should the palm of beauty be accorded?This question may not unfrequently have moved the idle minds oftravellers, wandering through that loveliest region from Orta toGarda--from little Orta, with her gemlike island, rosy granite crags, and chestnut-covered swards above the Colma; to Garda, bluest of allwaters, surveyed in majestic length from Desenzano or poetic Sirmione, a silvery sleeping haze of hill and cloud and heaven and clear wavesbathed in modulated azure. And between these extreme points whatvaried lovelinesses lie in broad Maggiore, winding Como, Varese withthe laughing face upturned to heaven, Lugano overshadowed by thecrested crags of Monte Generoso, and Iseo far withdrawn among therocky Alps! He who loves immense space, cloud shadows slowly sailingover purple slopes, island gardens, distant glimpses of snow-cappedmountains, breadth, air, immensity, and flooding sunlight, will chooseMaggiore. But scarcely has he cast his vote for this, the Juno of thedivine rivals, when he remembers the triple lovelinesses of theLarian Aphrodite, disclosed in all their placid grace from VillaSerbelloni;--the green blue of the waters, clear as glass, opaquethrough depth; the _millefleurs_ roses clambering into cypressesby Cadenabbia; the laburnums hanging their yellow clusters from theclefts of Sasso Eancio; the oleander arcades of Varenna; the wildwhite limestone crags of San Martiuo, which he has climbed to feasthis eyes with the perspective, magical, serene, Lionardesquelyperfect, of the distant gates of Adda. Then while this modern Parisis yet doubting, perhaps a thought may cross his mind of sterner, solitary Lake Iseo--the Pallas of the three. She offers her ownattractions. The sublimity of Monte Adamello, dominating Lovere andall the lowland like Hesiod's hill of Virtue reared aloft above theplain of common life, has charms to tempt heroic lovers. Nor canVarese be neglected. In some picturesque respects, Varese is the mostperfect of the lakes. Those long lines of swelling hills that leadinto the level, yield an infinite series of placid foregrounds, pleasant to the eye by contrast with the dominant snow-summits, fromMonte Viso to Monte Leone: the sky is limitless to southward; the lowhorizons are broken by bell-towers and farmhouses; while armaments ofclouds are ever rolling in the interval of Alps and plain. 

Of a truth, to decide which is the queen of the Italian lakes, is butan _infinita quæstio_; and the mere raising of it is folly. Stilleach lover of the beautiful may give his vote; and mine, like that ofshepherd Paris, is already given to the Larian goddess. Words failin attempting to set forth charms which have to be enjoyed, or can atbest but lightly be touched with most consummate tact, even as greatpoets have already touched on Como Lake--from Virgil with his 'Larimaxume, ' to Tennyson and the Italian Manzoni. The threshold of theshrine is, however, less consecrated ground; and the Cathedral of Comomay form a vestibule to the temple where silence is more golden thanthe speech of a describer. 

The Cathedral of Como is perhaps the most perfect building in Italyfor illustrating the fusion of Gothic and Renaissance styles, both ofa good type and exquisite in their sobriety. The Gothic ends with thenave. The noble transepts and the choir, each terminating in a roundedtribune of the same dimensions, are carried out in a simple anddecorous Bramantesque manner. The transition from the one style to theother is managed so felicitously, and the sympathies between them areso well developed, that there is no discord. What we here callGothic, is conceived in a truly southern spirit, without fantasticefflorescence or imaginative complexity of multiplied parts; whilethe Renaissance manner, as applied by Tommaso Rodari, has not yetstiffened into the lifeless neo-Latinism of the later _cinquecento_:it is still distinguished by delicate inventiveness, and beautifulsubordination of decorative detail to architectural effect. Underthese happy conditions we feel that the Gothic of the nave, with itssuperior severity and sombreness, dilates into the lucid harmonies ofchoir and transepts like a flower unfolding. In the one the mind istuned to inner meditation and religious awe; in the other theworshipper passes into a temple of the clear explicit faith--as aninitiated neophyte might be received into the meaning of themysteries. 

After the collapse of the Roman Empire the district of Como seemsto have maintained more vividly than the rest of Northern Italy somememory of classic art. _Magistri Comacini_ is a title frequentlyinscribed upon deeds and charters of the earlier middle ages, assynonymous with sculptors and architects. This fact may help toaccount for the purity and beauty of the Duomo. It is the work of arace in which the tradition of delicate artistic invention hadnever been wholly interrupted. To Tommaso Rodari and his brothers, Bernardino and Jacopo, the world owes this sympathetic fusion of theGothic and the Bramantesque styles; and theirs too is the sculpturewith which the Duomo is so richly decorated. They were natives ofMaroggia, a village near Mendrisio, beneath the crests of MonteGeneroso, close to Campione, which sent so many able craftsmen outinto the world between the years 1300 and 1500. Indeed the name ofCampionesi would probably have been given to the Rodari, had they lefttheir native province for service in Eastern Lombardy. The body of theDuomo had been finished when Tommaso Rodari was appointed master ofthe fabric in 1487. To complete the work by the addition of a tribunewas his duty. He prepared a wooden model and exposed it, after thefashion of those times, for criticism in his _bottega_; andthe usual difference of opinion arose among the citizens of Comoconcerning its merits. Cristoforo Solaro, surnamed Il Gobbo, wascalled in to advise. It may be remembered that when Michelangelo firstplaced his Pietà in S. Peter's, rumour gave it to this celebratedLombard sculptor, and the Florentine was constrained to set his ownsignature upon the marble. The same Solaro carved the monument ofBeatrice Sforza in the Certosa of Pavia. He was indeed in allpoints competent to criticise or to confirm the design of hisfellow-craftsman. Il Gobbo disapproved of the proportions chosen byRodari, and ordered a new model to be made; but after much discussion, and some concessions on the part of Rodari, who is said to haveincreased the number of the windows and lightened the orders of hismodel, the work was finally entrusted to the master of Maroggia. 

Not less creditable than the general design of the tribune isthe sculpture executed by the brothers. The north side door is amaster-work of early Renaissance chiselling, combining mixed Christianand classical motives with a wealth of floral ornament. Inside, overthe same door, is a procession of children seeming to represent theTriumph of Bacchus, with perhaps some Christian symbolism. Opposite, above the south door, is a frieze of fighting Tritons--horsed seadeities pounding one another with bunches of fish and splashing thewater, in Mantegna's spirit. The doorways of the façade are decoratedwith the same rare workmanship; and the canopies, supported by nakedfauns and slender twisted figures, under which the two Plinies areseated, may be reckoned among the supreme achievements of delicateRenaissance sculpture. The Plinies are not like the work of the samemaster. They are older, stiffer, and more Gothic. The chief interestattaching to them is that they are habited and seated after thefashion of Humanists. This consecration of the two Pagan saints besidethe portals of the Christian temple is truly characteristic ofthe fifteenth century in Italy. Beneath, are little basreliefsrepresenting scenes from their respective lives, in the style ofcarved predellas on the altars of saints. 

The whole church is peopled with detached statues, among which aSebastian in the Chapel of the Madonna must be mentioned as singularlybeautiful. It is a finely modelled figure, with the full life andexuberant adolescence of Venetian inspiration. A peculiar feature ofthe external architecture is the series of Atlantes, bearing on theirshoulders urns, heads of lions, and other devices, and standing onbrackets round the upper cornice just below the roof. They are of allsorts; young and old, male and female; classically nude, and boldlyoutlined. These water-conduits, the work of Bernardo Bianco andFrancesco Rusca, illustrate the departure of the earlier Renaissancefrom the Gothic style. They are gargoyles; but they have lost thegrotesque element. At the same time the sculptor, while discardingGothic tradition, has not betaken himself yet to a servile imitationof the antique. He has used invention, and substituted for grinningdragons' heads something wild and bizarre of his own in harmony withclassic taste. 

The pictures in the chapels, chiefly by Luini and Ferrari--an idyllicNativity, with faun-like shepherds and choirs of angels--a sumptuousadoration of the Magi--a jewelled Sposalizio with abundance of goldenhair flowing over draperies of green and crimson--will interestthose who are as yet unfamiliar with Lombard painting. Yet theirarchitectural setting, perhaps, is superior to their intrinsic meritas works of art; and their chief value consists in adding rare dimflakes of colour to the cool light of the lovely church. More curious, because less easily matched, is the gilded woodwork above the altar ofS. Abondio, attributed to a German carver, but executed for themost part in the purest Luinesque manner. The pose of the enthronedMadonna, the type and gesture of S. Catherine, and the treatment ofthe Pietà above, are thoroughly Lombard, showing how Luini's ideal ofbeauty could be expressed in carving. Some of the choicest figures inthe Monastero Maggiore at Milan seem to have descended from the wallsand stepped into their tabernacles on this altar. Yet the style is notmaintained consistently. In the reliefs illustrating the life of S. Abondio we miss Luini's childlike grace, and find instead a somethingthat reminds us of Donatello--a seeking after the classical in dress, carriage, and grouping of accessory figures. It may have been that thecarver, recognising Luini's defective composition, and finding nothingin that master's manner adapted to the spirit of relief, had the goodtaste to render what was Luinesquely lovely in his female figures, andto fall back on a severer model for his basreliefs. 

The building-fund for the Duomo was raised in Como and its districts. Boxes were placed in all the churches to receive the alms of those whowished to aid the work. The clergy begged in Lent, and preached theduty of contributing on special days. Presents of lime and bricksand other materials were thankfully received. Bishops, canons, andmunicipal magistrates were expected to make costly gifts on takingoffice. Notaries, under penalty of paying 100 soldi if they neglectedtheir engagement, were obliged to persuade testators, _cum bonismodis dulciter_, to inscribe the Duomo on their wills. Fines forvarious offences were voted to the building by the city. Each newburgher paid a certain sum; while guilds and farmers of the taxesbought monopolies and privileges at the price of yearly subsidies. A lottery was finally established for the benefit of the fabric. Of course each payment to the good work carried with it spiritualprivileges; and so willingly did the people respond to the call of theChurch, that during the sixteenth century the sums subscribed amountedto 200, 000 golden crowns. Among the most munificent donators arementioned the Marchese Giacomo Gallio, who bequeathed 290, 000 lire, and a Benzi, who gave 10, 000 ducats. 

While the people of Como were thus straining every nerve to completea pious work, which at the same time is one of the most perfectmasterpieces of Italian art, their lovely lake was turned into apirate's stronghold, and its green waves stained with slaughter ofconflicting navies. So curious is this episode in the history of theLarian lake that it is worth while to treat of it at some length. Moreover, the lives of few captains of adventure offer matter morerich in picturesque details and more illustrative of their times thanthat of Gian Giacomo de' Medici, the Larian corsair, long known andstill remembered as Il Medeghino. He was born in Milan in 1498, atthe beginning of that darkest and most disastrous period of Italianhistory, when the old fabric of social and political existence went toruin under the impact of conflicting foreign armies. He lived on untilthe year 1555, witnessing and taking part in the dismemberment of theMilanese Duchy, playing a game of hazard at high stakes for his ownprofit with the two last Sforzas, the Empire, the French, and theSwiss. At the beginning of the century, while he was still a youth, the rich valley of the Valtelline, with Bormio and Chiavenna, hadbeen assigned to the Grisons. The Swiss Cantons at the same time hadpossessed themselves of Lugano and Bellinzona. By these two acts ofrobbery the mountaineers tore a portion of its fairest territory fromthe Duchy; and whoever ruled in Milan, whether a Sforza, or a Spanishviceroy, or a French general, was impatient to recover the lost jewelof the ducal crown. So much has to be premised, because the scene ofour hero's romantic adventures was laid upon the borderland betweenthe Duchy and the Cantons. Intriguing at one time with the Duke ofMilan, at another with his foes the French or Spaniards, Il Medeghinofound free scope for his peculiar genius in a guerilla warfare, carried on with the avowed purpose of restoring the Valtelline toMilan. To steer a plain course through that chaos of politics, inwhich the modern student, aided by the calm clear lights of historyand meditation, cannot find a clue, was of course impossible for anadventurer whose one aim was to gratify his passions and exalt himselfat the expense of others. It is therefore of little use to seekmotives of statecraft or of patriotism in the conduct of Il Medeghino. He was a man shaped according to Machiavelli's standard of politicalmorality--self-reliant, using craft and force with cold indifferenceto moral ends, bent only upon wringing for himself the largest shareof this world's power for men who, like himself, identified virtuewith unflinching and immitigable egotism. 

Il Medeghino's father was Bernardo de' Medici, a Lombard, who neitherclaimed nor could have proved cousinship with the great Mediceanfamily of Florence. His mother was Cecilia Serbelloni. The boy waseducated in the fashionable humanistic studies, nourishing his youngimagination with the tales of Roman heroes. The first exploit by whichhe proved his _virtù_, was the murder of a man he hated, at theage of sixteen. This 'virile act of vengeance, ' as it was called, brought him into trouble, and forced him to choose the congenialprofession of arms. At a time when violence and vigour passed formanliness, a spirited assassination formed the best of introductionsto the captains of mixed mercenary troops. Il Medeghino rose infavour with his generals, helped to reinstate Francesco Sforza in hiscapital, and, returning himself to Milan, inflicted severe vengeanceon the enemies who had driven him to exile. It was his ambition, atthis early period of his life, to be made governor of the Castle ofMusso, on the Lake of Como. While fighting in the neighbourhood, hehad observed the unrivalled capacities for defence presented by itssite; and some pre-vision of his future destinies now urged him toacquire it, as the basis for the free marauding life he planned. Theheadland of Musso lies about halfway between Gravedona and Menaggio, on the right shore of the Lake of Como. Planted on a pedestal ofrock, and surmounted by a sheer cliff, there then stood a very ancienttower, commanding this promontory on the side of the land. Between itand the water the Visconti, in more recent days, had built a squarefort; and the headland had been further strengthened by the additionof connecting walls and bastions pierced for cannon. Combiningprecipitous cliffs, strong towers, and easy access from the lakebelow, this fortress of Musso was exactly the fit station for apirate. So long as he kept the command of the lake, he had littleto fear from land attacks, and had a splendid basis for aggressiveoperations. Il Medeghino made his request to the Duke of Milan; butthe foxlike Sforza would not grant him a plain answer. At length hehinted that if his suitor chose to rid him of a troublesome subject, the noble and popular Astore Visconti, he should receive Mussofor payment. Crimes of bloodshed and treason sat lightly on theadventurer's conscience. In a short time he compassed the youngVisconti's death, and claimed his reward. The Duke despatched himthereupon to Musso, with open letters to the governor, commanding himto yield the castle to the bearer. Private advice, also entrusted toIl Medeghino, bade the governor, on the contrary, cut the bearer'sthroat. The young man, who had the sense to read the Duke's letter, destroyed the secret document, and presented the other, or, as oneversion of the story goes, forged a ducal order in his own favour. [12]At any rate, the castle was placed in his hands; and affecting to knownothing of the Duke's intended treachery, Il Medeghino took possessionof it as a trusted servant of the ducal crown. 

As soon as he was settled in his castle, the freebooter devoted allhis energies to rendering it still more impregnable by strengtheningthe walls and breaking the cliffs into more horrid precipices. In thiswork he was assisted by his numerous friends and followers; for Mussorapidly became, like ancient Rome, an asylum for the ruffians andoutlaws of neighbouring provinces. It is even said that his sisters, Clarina and Margherita, rendered efficient aid with manual labour. Themention of Clarina's name justifies a parenthetical side-glance at IlMedeghino's pedigree, which will serve to illustrate the exceptionalconditions of Italian society during this age. She was married tothe Count Giberto Borromeo, and became the mother of the pious CarloBorromeo, whose shrine is still adored at Milan in the Duomo. IlMedeghino's brother, Giovan Angelo, rose to the Papacy, assuming thetitle of Pius IV. Thus this murderous marauder was the brother of aPope and the uncle of a Saint; and these three persons of one familyembraced the various degrees and typified the several characters whichflourished with peculiar lustre in Renaissance Italy--the captain ofadventure soaked in blood, the churchman unrivalled for intrigue, andthe saint aflame with holiest enthusiasm. Il Medeghino was short ofstature, but well made and powerful; broad-chested; with a penetratingvoice and winning countenance. He dressed simply, like one of his ownsoldiers; slept but little; was insensible to carnal pleasure; andthough he knew how to win the affection of his men by jovial speech, he maintained strict discipline in his little army. In all points hewas an ideal bandit chief, never happy unless fighting or planningcampaigns, inflexible of purpose, bold and cunning in the execution ofhis schemes, cruel to his enemies, generous to his followers, sacrificing all considerations, human and divine, to the one aim ofhis life, self-aggrandisement by force and intrigue. He knew well howto make himself both feared and respected. One instance of his dealingwill suffice. A gentleman of Bellano, Polidoro Boldoni, in return tohis advances, coldly replied that he cared for neither amity norrelationship with thieves and robbers; whereupon Il Medeghinoextirpated his family, almost to a man. 

Soon after his settlement in Musso, Il Medeghino, wishing to securethe gratitude of the Duke, his master, began war with the Grisons. From Coire, from the Engadine, and from Davos, the Alpine pikemen werenow pouring down to swell the troops of Francis I. ; and their road laythrough the Lake of Como. Il Medeghino burned all the boats upon thelake, except those which he took into his own service, and thus madehimself master of the water passage. He then swept the 'length oflordly Lario' from Colico to Lecco, harrying the villages uponthe shore, and cutting off the bands of journeying Switzers at hispleasure. Not content with this guerilla, he made a descent uponthe territory of the Trepievi, and pushed far up towards Chiavenna, forcing the Grisons to recall their troops from the Milanese. Theseacts of prowess convinced the Duke that he had found a strong allyin the pirate chief. When Francis I. Continued his attacks upon theDuchy, and the Grisons still adhered to their French paymaster, theSforza formally invested Gian Giacomo de' Medici with the perpetualgovernorship of Musso, the Lake of Como, and as much as he could wrestfrom the Grisons above the lake. Furnished now with a just title forhis depredations, Il Medeghino undertook the siege of Chiavenna. Thattown is the key to the valleys of the Splügen and Bregaglia. Stronglyfortified and well situated for defence, the burghers of the Grisonswell knew that upon its possession depended their power in the Italianvalleys. To take it by assault was impossible, Il Medeghino usedcraft, entered the castle, and soon had the city at his disposition. Nor did he lose time in sweeping Val Bregaglia. The news of thisconquest recalled the Switzers from the Duchy; and as they hurriedhomeward just before the battle of Pavia, it may be affirmed that GianGiacomo de' Medici was instrumental in the defeat and capture of theFrench King. The mountaineers had no great difficulty in dislodgingtheir pirate enemy from Chiavenna, the Valtelline, and Val Bregaglia. But he retained his hold on the Trepievi, occupied the Valsassina, took Porlezza, and established himself still more strongly in Musso asthe corsair monarch of the lake. 

The tyranny of the Sforzas in Milan was fast going to pieces betweenFrance and Spain; and in 1526 the Marquis of Pescara occupied thecapital in the name of Charles V. The Duke, meanwhile, remained aprisoner in his Castello. Il Medeghino was now without a master; forhe refused to acknowledge the Spaniards, preferring to watch eventsand build his own power on the ruins of the dukedom. At the head of4, 000 men, recruited from the lakes and neighbouring valleys, heswept the country far and wide, and occupied the rich champaign of theBrianza. He was now lord of the lakes of Como and Lugano, and absolutein Lecco and the adjoining valleys. The town of Como itself alonebelonged to the Spaniards; and even Como was blockaded by the navy ofthe corsair. Il Medeghino had a force of seven big ships, with threesails and forty-eight oars, bristling with guns and carrying marines. His flagship was a large brigantine, manned by picked rowers, fromthe mast of which floated the red banner with the golden palle of theMedicean arms. Besides these larger vessels, he commanded a flotillaof countless small boats. It is clear that to reckon with him was anecessity. If he could not be put down with force, he might be boughtover by concessions. The Spaniards adopted the second course, and IlMedeghino, judging that the cause of the Sforza family was desperate, determined in 1528 to attach himself to the Empire. Charles V. Invested him with the Castle of Musso and the larger part of ComoLake, including the town of Lecco. He now assumed the titles ofMarquis of Musso and Count of Lecco: and in order to prove hissovereignty before the world, he coined money with his own name anddevices. 

It will be observed that Gian Giacomo de' Medici had hitherto actedwith a single-hearted view to his own interests. At the age of thirtyhe had raised himself from nothing to a principality, which, thoughpetty, might compare with many of some name in Italy--with Carpi, forexample, or Mirandola, or Camerino. Nor did he mean to remain quietin the prime of life. He regarded Como Lake as the mere basis for morearduous undertakings. Therefore, when the whirligig of events restoredFrancesco Sforza to his duchy in 1529, Il Medeghino refused to obeyhis old lord. Pretending to move under the Duke's orders, but reallyacting for himself alone, he proceeded to attack his ancientenemies, the Grisons. By fraud and force he worked his way intotheir territory, seized Morbegno, and overran the Valtelline. Hewas destined, however, to receive a serious check. Twelve thousandSwitzers rose against him on the one hand, on the other the Duke ofMilan sent a force by land and water to subdue his rebel subject, while Alessandro Gonzaga marched upon his castles in the Brianza. Hewas thus assailed by formidable forces from three quarters, convergingupon the Lake of Como, and driving him to his chosen element, thewater. Hastily quitting the Valtelline, he fell back to the Castle ofMandello on the lake, collected his navy, and engaged the ducal shipsin a battle off Menaggio. In this battle he was worsted. But he didnot lose his courage. From Bellagio, from Varenna, from Bellano hedrove forth his enemies, rolled the cannon of the Switzers into thelake, regained Lecco, defeated the troops of Alessandro Gonzaga, andtook the Duke of Mantua prisoner. Had he but held Como, it is probablethat he might have obtained such terms at this time as would haveconsolidated his tyranny. The town of Como, however, now belongedto the Duke of Milan, and formed an excellent basis for operationsagainst the pirate. Overmatched, with an exhausted treasury and brokenforces, Il Medeghino was at last compelled to give in. Yet he retiredwith all the honours of war. In exchange for Musso and the lake, theDuke agreed to give him 35, 000 golden crowns, together with the feudand marquisate of Marignano. A free pardon was promised not onlyto himself and his brothers, but to all his followers; and the Dukefurther undertook to transport his artillery and munitions of war athis own expense to Marignano. Having concluded this treaty under theauspices of Charles V. And his lieutenant, Il Medeghino, in March1532, set sail from Musso, and turned his back upon the lake forever. The Switzers immediately destroyed the towers, forts, walls, andbastions of the Musso promontory, leaving in the midst of their ruinsthe little chapel of S. Eufemia. 

Gian Giacomo de' Medici, henceforth known to Europe as the Marquisof Marignano, now took service under Spain; and through the favourof Anton de Leyva, Viceroy for the Duchy, rose to the rank ofField Marshal. When the Marquis del Vasto succeeded to the Spanishgovernorship of Milan in 1536, he determined to gratify an old grudgeagainst the ex-pirate, and, having invited him to a banquet, made himprisoner. II Medeghino was not, however, destined to languish in adungeon. Princes and kings interested themselves in his fate. Hewas released, and journeyed to the court of Charles V. In Spain. The Emperor received him kindly, and employed him first in the LowCountries, where he helped to repress the burghers of Ghent, and atthe siege of Landrecy commanded the Spanish artillery against otherItalian captains of adventure: for, Italy being now dismembered andenslaved, her sons sought foreign service where they found best payand widest scope for martial science. Afterwards the Medici ruledBohemia as Spanish Viceroy; and then, as general of the league formedby the Duke of Florence, the Emperor, and the Pope to repress theliberties of Tuscany, distinguished himself in that cruel war ofextermination, which turned the fair Contado of Siena into a poisonousMaremma. To the last Il Medeghino preserved the instincts and thepassions of a brigand chief. It was at this time that, acting for theGrand Duke of Tuscany, he first claimed open kinship with the Mediciof Florence. Heralds and genealogists produced a pedigree, whichseemed to authorise this pretension; he was recognised, together withhis brother, Pius IV. , as an offshoot of the great house which hadalready given Dukes to Florence, Kings to France, and two Popes tothe Christian world. In the midst of all this foreign service he neverforgot his old dream of conquering the Valtelline; and in 1547 hemade proposals to the Emperor for a new campaign against the Grisons. Charles V. Did not choose to engage in a war, the profits of whichwould have been inconsiderable for the master of half the civilisedworld, and which might have proved troublesome by stirring up thetameless Switzers. Il Medeghino was obliged to abandon a projectcherished from the earliest dawn of his adventurous manhood. 

When Gian Giacomo died in 1555, his brother Battista succeeded to hisclaims upon Lecco and the Trepievi. His monument, magnificent withfive bronze figures, the masterpiece of Leone Lioni, from Menaggio, Michelangelesque in style, and of consummate workmanship, still adornsthe Duomo of Milan. It stands close by the door that leads to theroof. This mausoleum, erected to the memory of Gian Giacomo andhis brother Gabrio, is said to have cost 7800 golden crowns. On theoccasion of the pirate's funeral the Senate of Milan put on mourning, and the whole city followed the great robber, the hero of Renaissance_virtù_, to the grave. 

Between the Cathedral of Como and the corsair Medeghino there is buta slight link. Yet so extraordinary were the social circumstances ofRenaissance Italy, that almost at every turn, on her seaboard, in hercities, from her hill-tops, we are compelled to blend our admirationfor the loveliest and purest works of art amid the choicest scenesof nature with memories of execrable crimes and lawless characters. Sometimes, as at Perugia, the _nexus_ is but local. At others, one single figure, like that of Cellini, unites both points of view ina romance of unparalleled dramatic vividness. Or, again, beneaththe vaults of the Certosa, near Pavia, a masterpiece of the serenestbeauty carries our thoughts perforce back to the hideous crueltiesand snake-like frauds of its despotic founder. This is the excusefor combining two such diverse subjects in one study. 

 * * * * *

_BERGAMO AND BARTOLOMMEO COLLEONI_

From the new town of commerce to the old town of history upon thehill, the road is carried along a rampart lined, with horse-chestnuttrees--clumps of massy foliage, and snowy pyramids of bloom, expandedin the rapture of a southern spring. Each pair of trees between theirstems and arch of intermingling leaves includes a space of plain, checkered with cloud-shadows, melting blue and green in amethystinehaze. To right and left the last spurs of the Alps descend, juttinglike promontories, heaving like islands from the misty breadth below:and here and there are towers, half-lost in airy azure; and citiesdwarfed to blots; and silvery lines where rivers flow; and distant, vapour-drowned, dim crests of Apennines. The city walls above us wavewith snapdragons and iris among fig-trees sprouting from the rivenstones. There are terraces over-rioted with pergolas of vine, andhouses shooting forward into balconies and balustrades, from which aRomeo might launch himself at daybreak, warned by the lark's song. A sudden angle in the road is turned, and we pass from airspace andfreedom into the old town, beneath walls of dark brown masonry, wherewild valerians light their torches of red bloom in immemorial shade. Squalor and splendour live here side by side. Grand Renaissanceportals grinning with Satyr masks are flanked by tawdry frescoesshamming stonework, or by doorways where the withered bush hangs outa promise of bad wine. The Cappella Colleoni is our destination, thatmasterpiece of the sculptor-architect's craft, with its variegatedmarbles, --rosy and white and creamy yellow and jet-black, --inpatterns, basreliefs, pilasters, statuettes, encrusted on the fancifuldomed shrine. Upon the façade are mingled, in the true Renaissancespirit of genial acceptance, motives Christian and Pagan with supremeimpartiality. Medallions of emperors and gods alternate with virtues, angels and cupids in a maze of loveliest arabesque; and round thebase of the building are told two stories--the one of Adam from hiscreation to his fall, the other of Hercules and his labours. Italiancraftsmen of the _quattrocento_ were not averse to settingthus together, in one framework, the myths of our first parents andAlemena's son: partly perhaps because both subjects gave scope tothe free treatment of the nude; but partly also, we may venture tosurmise, because the heroism of Hellas counterbalanced the sin ofEden. Here then we see how Adam and Eve were made and tempted andexpelled from Paradise and set to labour, how Cain killed Abel, andLamech slew a man to his hurt, and Isaac was offered on the mountain. The tale of human sin and the promise of redemption are epitomisedin twelve of the sixteen basreliefs. The remaining four show Herculeswrestling with Antæus, taming the Nemean lion, extirpating the Hydra, and bending to his will the bull of Crete. Labour, appointed for apunishment to Adam, becomes a title to immortality for the hero. The dignity of man is reconquered by prowess for the Greek, as it isrepurchased for the Christian by vicarious suffering. Many may thinkthis interpretation of Amadeo's basreliefs far-fetched; yet, such asit is, it agrees with the spirit of Humanism, bent ever on harmonisingthe two great traditions of the past. Of the workmanship little needbe said, except that it is wholly Lombard, distinguished from thesimilar work of Della Quercia at Bologna and Siena by a more imperfectfeeling for composition, and a lack of monumental gravity, yetgraceful, rich in motives, and instinct with a certain wayward_improvvisatore_ charm. 

This Chapel was built by the great Condottiere Bartolommeo Colleoni, to be the monument of his puissance even in the grave. It had beenthe Sacristy of S. Maria Maggiore, which, when the Consiglio dellaMisericordia refused it to him for his half-proud, half-pious purpose, he took and held by force. The structure, of costliest materials, reared by Gian Antonio Amadeo, cost him 50, 000 golden florins. Anequestrian statue of gilt wood, voted to him by the town of Bergamo, surmounts his monument inside the Chapel. This was the work of twoGerman masters, called 'Sisto figlio di Enrico Syri da Norimberga'and 'Leonardo Tedesco. ' The tomb itself is of marble, executed for themost part in a Lombard style resembling Amadeo's, but scarcelyworthy of his genius. The whole effect is disappointing. Five figuresrepresenting Mars, Hercules, and three sons-in-law of Colleoni, whosurround the sarcophagus of the buried general, are indeed almostgrotesque. The angularity and crumpled draperies of the Milanesemanner, when so exaggerated, produce an impression of caricature. Yetmany subordinate details--a row of _putti_ in a _cinquecento_ frieze, for instance--and much of the low relief work--especially theCrucifixion with its characteristic episodes of the fainting Mariesand the soldiers casting dice--are lovely in their unaffectedLombardism. 

There is another portrait of Colleoni in a round above the great door, executed with spirit, though in a _bravura_ style that curiouslyanticipates the decline of Italian sculpture. Gaunt, hollow-eyed, with prominent cheek bones and strong jaws, this animated, half-lengthstatue of the hero bears the stamp of a good likeness; but when or bywhom it was made, I do not know. 

Far more noteworthy than Colleoni's own monument is that of hisdaughter Medea. She died young in 1470, and her father caused hertomb, carved of Carrara marble, to be placed in the Dominican Churchof Basella, which he had previously founded. It was not until 1842that this most precious masterpiece of Antonio Amadeo's skill wastransferred to Bergamo. _Hic jacet Medea virgo. _ Her hands areclasped across her breast. A robe of rich brocade, gathered to thewaist and girdled, lies in simple folds upon the bier. Her throat, exceedingly long and slender, is circled with a string of pearls. Her face is not beautiful, for the features, especially the nose, are large and prominent; but it is pure and expressive of vividindividuality. The hair curls in crisp short clusters, and the ear, fine and shaped almost like a Faun's, reveals the scrupulous fidelityof the sculptor. Italian art has, in truth, nothing more exquisitethan this still sleeping figure of the girl, who, when she lived, mustcertainly have been so rare of type and lovable in personality. IfBusti's Lancinus Curtius be the portrait of a humanist, careworn withstudy, burdened by the laurel leaves that were so dry and dusty--ifGaston de Foix in the Brera, smiling at death and beautiful inthe cropped bloom of youth, idealise the hero of romance--ifMichelangelo's Penseroso translate in marble the dark broodings of adespot's soul--if Della Porta's Julia Farnese be the Roman courtesanmagnificently throned in nonchalance at a Pope's footstool--ifVerocchio's Colleoni on his horse at Venice impersonate the pompand circumstance of scientific war--surely this Medea exhales theflower-like graces, the sweet sanctities of human life, that even inthat turbid age were found among high-bred Italian ladies. Such powerhave mighty sculptors, even in our modern world, to make the mutestone speak in poems and clasp the soul's life of a century in somefive or six transcendent forms. 

The Colleoni, or Coglioni, family were of considerable antiquity andwell-authenticated nobility in the town of Bergamo. Two lions' headsconjoined formed one of their canting ensigns; another was borrowedfrom the vulgar meaning of their name. Many members of the house heldimportant office during the three centuries preceding the birth of thefamous general, Bartolommeo. He was born in the year 1400 at Solza, inthe Bergamasque Contado. His father Paolo, or Pùho as he was commonlycalled, was poor and exiled from the city, together with the rest ofthe Guelf nobles, by the Visconti. Being a man of daring spirit, andlittle inclined to languish in a foreign state as the dependent onsome patron, Pùho formed the bold design of seizing the Castle ofTrezzo. This he achieved in 1405 by fraud, and afterwards held it ashis own by force. Partly with the view of establishing himself morefirmly in his acquired lordship, and partly out of family affection, Pùho associated four of his first-cousins in the government of Trezzo. They repaid his kindness with an act of treason and cruelty, only toocharacteristic of those times in Italy. One day while he was playingat draughts in a room of the Castle, they assaulted him and killedhim, seized his wife and the boy Bartolommeo, and flung them intoprison. The murdered Pùho had another son, Antonio, who escaped andtook refuge with Giorgio Benzone, the tyrant of Crema. After a shorttime the Colleoni brothers found means to assassinate him also;therefore Bartolommeo alone, a child of whom no heed was taken, remained to be his father's avenger. He and his mother lived togetherin great indigence at Solza, until the lad felt strong enough to enterthe service of one of the numerous petty Lombard princes, and tomake himself if possible a captain of adventure. His name alone was asufficient introduction, and the Duchy of Milan, dismembered upon thedeath of Gian Maria Visconti, was in such a state that all the minordespots were increasing their forces and preparing to defend by armsthe fragments they had seized from the Visconti heritage. Bartolommeotherefore had no difficulty in recommending himself to Filippod'Arcello, sometime general in the pay of the Milanese, but now thenew lord of Piacenza. With this master he remained as page for two orthree years, learning the use of arms, riding, and training himselfin the physical exercises which were indispensable to a young Italiansoldier. Meanwhile Filippo Maria Visconti reacquired his hereditarydominions; and at the age of twenty, Bartolommeo found it prudentto seek a patron stronger than d'Arcello. The two great Condottieri, Sforza Attendolo and Braccio, divided the military glories of Italy atthis period; and any youth who sought to rise in his profession, had to enrol himself under the banners of the one or the other. Bartolommeo chose Braccio for his master, and was enrolled among hismen as a simple trooper, or _ragazzo_, with no better prospectsthan he could make for himself by the help of his talents and hisborrowed horse and armour. Braccio at this time was in Apulia, prosecuting the war of the Neapolitan Succession disputed betweenAlfonso of Aragon and Louis of Anjou under the weak sovereignty ofQueen Joan. On which side of a quarrel a Condottiere fought matteredbut little: so great was the confusion of Italian politics, and socomplete was the egotism of these fraudful, violent, and treacherousparty leaders. Yet it may be mentioned that Braccio had espousedAlfonso's cause. Bartolommeo Colleoni early distinguished himselfamong the ranks of the Bracceschi. But he soon perceived that hecould better his position by deserting to another camp. Accordinglyhe offered his services to Jacopo Caldora, one of Joan's generals, andreceived from him a commission of twenty men-at-arms. It may herebe parenthetically said that the rank and pay of an Italian captainvaried with the number of the men he brought into the field. His title'Condottiere' was derived from the circumstance that he was said tohave received a _Condotta di venti cavalli_, and so forth. Each _cavallo_ was equal to one mounted man-at-arms and twoattendants, who were also called _ragazzi_. It was his businessto provide the stipulated number of men, to keep them in gooddiscipline, and to satisfy their just demands. Therefore an Italianarmy at this epoch consisted of numerous small armies varying insize, each held together by personal engagements to a captain, and alldependent on the will of a general-in-chief, who had made a bargainwith some prince or republic for supplying a fixed contingent offighting-men. The _Condottiere_ was in other words a contractoror _impresario_, undertaking to do a certain piece of work for acertain price, and to furnish the requisite forces for the businessin good working order. It will be readily seen upon this system howimportant were the personal qualities of the captain, and what greatadvantages those Condottieri had, who, like the petty princesof Romagna and the March, the Montefeltri, Ordelaffi, Malatesti, Manfredi, Orsini, and Vitelli, could rely upon a race of hardy vassalsfor their recruits. 

It is not necessary to follow Colleoni's fortunes in the Regno, atAquila, Ancona, and Bologna. He continued in the service of Caldora, who was now General of the Church, and had his _Condotta_gradually increased. Meanwhile his cousins, the murderers of hisfather, began to dread his rising power, and determined, if possible, to ruin him. He was not a man to be easily assassinated; so they senta hired ruffian to Caldora's camp to say that Bartolommeo had takenhis name by fraud, and that he was himself the real son of PùhoColleoni. Bartolommeo defied the liar to a duel; and this would havetaken place before the army, had not two witnesses appeared, who knewthe fathers of both Colleoni and the _bravo_, and who gave suchevidence that the captains of the army were enabled to ascertain thetruth. The impostor was stripped and drummed out of the camp. 

At the conclusion of a peace between the Pope and the Bolognese, Bartolommeo found himself without occupation. He now offered himselfto the Venetians, and began to fight again under the great Carmagnolaagainst Filippo Visconti. His engagement allowed him forty men, which, after the judicial murder of Carmagnola at Venice in 1432, wereincreased to eighty. Erasmo da Narni, better known as Gattamelata, wasnow his general-in-chief--a man who had risen from the lowest fortunesto one of the most splendid military positions in Italy. Colleonispent the next years of his life, until 1443, in Lombardy, manoeuvringagainst Il Piccinino, and gradually rising in the Venetian service, until his Condotta reached the number of 800 men. Upon Gattamelata'sdeath at Padua in 1440, Colleoni became the most important of thegenerals who had fought with Caldora in the March. The lordships ofRomano in the Bergamasque and of Covo and Antegnate in the Cremonesehad been assigned to him; and he was in a position to make independentengagements with princes. What distinguished him as a general, was acombination of caution with audacity. He united the brilliant systemof his master Braccio with the more prudent tactics of the Sforzeschi;and thus, though he often surprised his foes by daring stratagemsand vigorous assaults, he rarely met with any serious check. He was acaptain who could be relied upon for boldly seizing an advantage, no less than for using a success with discretion. Moreover he hadacquired an almost unique reputation for honesty in dealing with hismasters, and for justice combined with humane indulgence to his men. His company was popular, and he could always bring capital troops intothe field. 

In the year 1443 Colleoni quitted the Venetian service on account of aquarrel with Gherardo Dandolo, the Provoditore of the Republic. Henow took a commission from Filippo Maria Visconti, who received him atMilan with great honour, bestowed on him the Castello Adorno at Pavia, and sent him into the March of Ancona upon a military expedition. Ofall Italian tyrants this Visconti was the most difficult to serve. Constitutionally timid, surrounded with a crowd of spies and baseinformers, shrinking from the sight of men in the recesses of hispalace, and controlling the complicated affairs of his Duchy by meansof correspondents and intelligencers, this last scion of the Milanesedespots lived like a spider in an inscrutable network of suspicionand intrigue. His policy was one of endless plot and counterplot. Hetrusted no man; his servants were paid to act as spies on one another;his bodyguard consisted of mutually hostile mercenaries; his captainsin the field were watched and thwarted by commissioners appointed tocheck them at the point of successful ambition or magnificent victory. The historian has a hard task when he tries to fathom the Visconti'sschemes, or to understand his motives. Half the Duke's time seems tohave been spent in unravelling the webs that he had woven, in undoinghis own work, and weakening the hands of his chosen ministers. Conscious that his power was artificial, that the least breath mightblow him back into the nothingness from which he had arisen on thewrecks of his father's tyranny, he dreaded the personal eminence ofhis generals above all things. His chief object was to establish asystem of checks, by means of which no one whom he employed shouldat any moment be great enough to threaten him. The most formidableof these military adventurers, Francesco Sforza, had been secured bymarriage with Bianca Maria Visconti, his master's only daughter, in1441; but the Duke did not even trust his son-in-law. The last sixyears of his life were spent in scheming to deprive Sforza of hislordships; and the war in the March, on which he employed Colleoni, had the object of ruining the principality acquired by this daringcaptain from Pope Eugenius IV. In 1443. 

Colleoni was by no means deficient in those foxlike qualities whichwere necessary to save the lion from the toils spread for him byItalian intriguers. He had already shown that he knew how to push hisown interests, by changing sides and taking service with the highestbidder, as occasion prompted. Nor, though his character for probityand loyalty stood exceptionally high among the men of his profession, was he the slave to any questionable claims of honour or of duty. Inthat age of confused politics and extinguished patriotism, therewas not indeed much scope for scrupulous honesty. But Filippo MariaVisconti proved more than a match for him in craft. While Colleoniwas engaged in pacifying the revolted population of Bologna, the Dukeyielded to the suggestion of his parasites at Milan, who whisperedthat the general was becoming dangerously powerful. He recalled him, and threw him without trial into the dungeons of the Forni at Monza. Here Colleoni remained a prisoner more than a year, until theDuke's death in 1447, when he made his escape, and profited by thedisturbance of the Duchy to reacquire his lordships in the Bergamasqueterritory. The true motive for his imprisonment remains still buriedin obscure conjecture. Probably it was not even known to the Visconti, who acted on this, as on so many other occasions, by a mere spasm ofsuspicious jealousy, for which he could have given no account. 

From the year 1447 to the year 1455, it is difficult to followColleoni's movements, or to trace his policy. First, we findhim employed by the Milanese Republic, during its brief space ofindependence; then he is engaged by the Venetians, with a commissionfor 1500 horse; next, he is in the service of Francesco Sforza; oncemore in that of the Venetians, and yet again in that of the Duke ofMilan. His biographer relates with pride that, during this period, he was three times successful against French troops in Piedmont andLombardy. It appears that he made short engagements, and changed hispaymasters according to convenience. But all this time he rose inpersonal importance, acquired fresh lordships in the Bergamasque, andaccumulated wealth. He reached the highest point of his prosperityin 1455, when the Republic of S. Mark elected him General-in-Chief oftheir armies, with the fullest powers, and with a stipend of 100, 000florins. For nearly twenty-one years, until the day of his death, in1475, Colleoni held this honourable and lucrative office. In his willhe charged the Signory of Venice that they should never again commitinto the hands of a single captain such unlimited control over theirmilitary resources. It was indeed no slight tribute to Colleoni'sreputation for integrity, that the jealous Republic, which hadsignified its sense of Carmagnola's untrustworthiness by capitalpunishment, should have left him so long in the undisturbed disposalof their army. The Standard and the Bâton of S. Mark were conveyed toColleoni by two ambassadors, and presented to him at Brescia on June24, 1455. Three years later he made a triumphal entry into Venice, andreceived the same ensigns of military authority from the hands of thenew Doge, Pasquale Malipiero. On this occasion his staff consisted ofsome two hundred officers, splendidly armed, and followed by a trainof serving-men. Noblemen from Bergamo, Brescia, and other cities ofthe Venetian territory, swelled the cortege. When they embarked on thelagoons, they found the water covered with boats and gondolas, bearingthe population of Venice in gala attire, to greet the illustriousguest with instruments of music. Three great galleys of the Republic, called Bucentaurs, issued from the crowd of smaller craft. On thefirst was the Doge in his state robes, attended by the government inoffice, or the Signoria of S. Mark. On the second were members of theSenate and minor magistrates. The third carried the ambassadors offoreign powers. Colleoni was received into the first state-galley, and placed by the side of the Doge. The oarsmen soon cleared thespace between the land and Venice, passed the small canals, andswept majestically up the Canalozzo among the plaudits of the crowdsassembled on both sides to cheer their General. Thus they reached thepiazzetta, where Colleoni alighted between the two great pillars, and, conducted by the Doge in person, walked to the Church of S. Mark. Here, after Mass had been said, and a sermon had been preached, kneeling before the high altar he received the truncheon from theDoge's hands. The words of his commission ran as follows:--

'By authority and decree of this most excellent City of Venice, ofus the Prince, and of the Senate, you are to be Commander and CaptainGeneral of all our forces and armaments on terra firma. Take fromour hands this truncheon, with good augury and fortune, as sign andwarrant of your power. Be it your care and effort, with dignity andsplendour to maintain and to defend the Majesty, the Loyalty, and thePrinciples of this Empire. Neither provoking, not yet provoked, unlessat our command, shall you break into open warfare with our enemies. Free jurisdiction and lordship over each one of our soldiers, exceptin cases of treason, we hereby commit to you. '

After the ceremony of his reception, Colleoni was conducted withno less pomp to his lodgings, and the next ten days were spent infestivities of all sorts. 

The commandership-in-chief of the Venetian forces was perhaps thehighest military post in Italy. It placed Colleoni on the pinnacleof his profession, and made his camp the favourite school of youngsoldiers. Among his pupils or lieutenants we read of Ercole d'Este, the future Duke of Ferrara; Alessandro Sforza, lord of Pesaro;Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat; Cicco and Pino Ordelaffi, princesof Forli; Astorre Manfredi, the lord of Faenza; three Counts ofMirandola; two princes of Carpi; Deifobo, the Count of Anguillara;Giovanni Antonio Caldora, lord of Jesi in the March; and many othersof less name. Honours came thick upon him. When one of the manyineffectual leagues against the infidel was formed in 1468, during thepontificate of Paul II. , he was named Captain-General for the Crusade. Pius II. Designed him for the leader of the expedition he had plannedagainst the impious and savage despot, Sigismondo Malatesta. King Renéof Anjou, by special patent, authorised him to bear his name andarms, and made him a member of his family. The Duke of Burgundy, bya similar heraldic fiction, conferred upon him his name and armorialbearings. This will explain why Colleoni is often styled 'di Andegaviae Borgogna. ' In the case of René, the honour was but a barren show. But the patent of Charles the Bold had more significance. In 1473 heentertained the project of employing the great Italian General againsthis Swiss foes; nor does it seem reasonable to reject a statement madeby Colleoni's biographer, to the effect that a secret compact had beendrawn up between him and the Duke of Burgundy, for the conquest andpartition of the Duchy of Milan. The Venetians, in whose serviceColleoni still remained, when they became aware of this project, metit with peaceful but irresistible opposition. 

Colleoni had been engaged continually since his earliest boyhood inthe trade of war. It was not therefore possible that he should havegained a great degree of literary culture. Yet the fashion of thetimes made it necessary that a man in his position should seek thesociety of scholars. Accordingly his court and camp were crowded withstudents, in whose wordy disputations he is said to have delighted. Itwill be remembered that his contemporaries, Alfonso the Magnanimous, Francesco Sforza, Federigo of Urbino, and Sigismondo PandolfoMalatesta, piqued themselves at least as much upon their patronage ofletters, as upon their prowess in the field. 

Colleoni's court, like that of Urbino, was a model of good manners. Asbecame a soldier, he was temperate in food and moderate in slumber. Itwas recorded of him that he had never sat more than one hour at meatin his own house, and that he never overslept the sunrise. Afterdinner he would converse with his friends, using commonly his nativedialect of Bergamo, and entertaining the company now with stories ofadventure, and now with pithy sayings. In another essential point heresembled his illustrious contemporary, the Duke of Urbino; for he wassincerely pious in an age which, however it preserved the decenciesof ceremonial religion, was profoundly corrupt at heart. His principallordships in the Bergamasque territory owed to his munificence theirfairest churches and charitable institutions. At Martinengo, forexample, he rebuilt and re-endowed two monasteries, the one dedicatedto S. Chiara, the other to S. Francis. In Bergamo itself he founded anestablishment named' La Pieta, ' for the good purpose of dowering andmarrying poor girls. This house he endowed with a yearly income of3000 ducats. The Sulphur baths of Trescorio, at some distance from thecity, were improved and opened to poor patients by a hospital whichhe provided. At Rumano he raised a church to S. Peter, and erectedbuildings of public utility, which on his death he bequeathed tothe society of the Misericordia in that town. All the places of hisjurisdiction owed to him such benefits as good water, new walls, andirrigation works. In addition to these munificent foundations mustbe mentioned the Basella, or Monastery of Dominican friars, which heestablished not far from Bergamo, upon the river Serio, in memory ofhis beloved daughter Medea. Last, not least, was the Chapel of S. Johnthe Baptist, attached to the Church of S. Maria Maggiore, which heendowed with fitting maintenance for two priests and deacons. 

The one defect acknowledged by his biographer was his partialityfor women. Early in life he married Tisbe, of the noble house of theBrescian Martinenghi, who bore him one daughter, Caterina, wedded toGasparre Martinengo. Two illegitimate daughters, Ursina and Isotta, were recognised and treated by him as legitimate. The first he gave inmarriage to Gherardo Martinengo, and the second to Jacopo of thesame family. Two other natural children, Doratina and Ricardona, werementioned in his will: he left them four thousand ducats a piece fordowry. Medea, the child of his old age (for she was born to him whenhe was sixty), died before her father, and was buried, as we haveseen, in the Chapel of Basella. 

Throughout his life he was distinguished for great physical strengthand agility. When he first joined the troop of Braccio, he could race, with his corselet on, against the swiftest runner of the army; andwhen he was stripped, few horses could beat him in speed. Far on intoold age he was in the habit of taking long walks every morning for thesake of exercise, and delighted in feats of arms and jousting matches. 'He was tall, straight, and full of flesh, well proportioned, andexcellently made in all his limbs. His complexion inclined somewhat tobrown, but was coloured with sanguine and lively carnation. His eyeswere black; in look and sharpness of light, they were vivid, piercing, and terrible. The outlines of his nose and all his countenanceexpressed a certain manly nobleness, combined with goodness andprudence. ' Such is the portrait drawn of Colleoni by his biographer;and it well accords with the famous bronze statue of the general atVenice. 

Colleoni lived with a magnificence that suited his rank. His favouriteplace of abode was Malpaga, a castle built by him at the distance ofabout an hour's drive from Bergamo. The place is worth a visit, thoughits courts and gates and galleries have now been turned into a monsterfarm, and the southern rooms, where Colleoni entertained his guests, are given over to the silkworms. Half a dozen families, employed upona vast estate of the Martinengo family, occupy the still substantialhouse and stables. The moat is planted with mulberry-trees; the upperrooms are used as granaries for golden maize; cows, pigs, and horseslitter in the spacious yard. Yet the walls of the inner court and ofthe ancient state rooms are brilliant with frescoes, executed by somegood Venetian hand, which represent the chief events of Colleoni'slife--his battles, his reception by the Signory of Venice, his tournaments and hawking parties, and the great series ofentertainments with which he welcomed Christiern of Denmark. This kinghad made his pilgrimage to Rome and was returning westward, when thefame of Colleoni and his princely state at Malpaga induced him to turnaside and spend some days as the general's guest. In order to dohim honour, Colleoni left his castle at the king's disposal andestablished himself with all his staff and servants in a camp at somedistance from Malpaga. The camp was duly furnished with tents andtrenches, stockades, artillery, and all the other furniture of war. Onthe king's approach, Colleoni issued with trumpets blowing and bannersflying to greet his guest, gratifying him thus with a spectacle of thepomp and circumstance of war as carried on in Italy. The visitwas further enlivened by sham fights, feats of arms, and trials ofstrength. When it ended, Colleoni presented the king with one ofhis own suits of armour, and gave to each of his servants a completelivery of red and white, his colours. Among the frescoes at Malpaganone are more interesting, and none, thanks to the silkworms ratherthan to any other cause, are fortunately in a better state ofpreservation, than those which represent this episode in the historyof the Castle. 

Colleoni died in the year 1475, at the age of seventy-five. Since heleft no male representative, he constituted the Republic of S. Markhis heir-in-chief, after properly providing for his daughters and hisnumerous foundations. The Venetians received under this testament asum of 100, 000 ducats, together with all arrears of pay due to him, and 10, 000 ducats owed him by the Duke of Ferrara. It set forth thetestator's intention that this money should be employed in defence ofthe Christian faith against the Turk. One condition was attached tothe bequest. The legatees were to erect a statue to Colleoni on thePiazza of S. Mark. This, however, involved some difficulty; for theproud Republic had never accorded a similar honour, nor did theychoose to encumber their splendid square with a monument. They evadedthe condition by assigning the Campo in front of the Scuola di S. Marco, where also stands the Church of S. Zanipolo, to the purpose. Here accordingly the finest bronze equestrian statue in Italy, if weexcept the Marcus Aurelius of the Capitol, was reared upon its marblepedestal by Andrea Verocchio and Alessandro Leopardi. 

Colleoni's liberal expenditure of wealth found its reward in theimmortality conferred by art. While the names of Braccio, his masterin the art of war, and of Piccinino, his great adversary, are familiarto few but professed students, no one who has visited either Bergamoor Venice can fail to have learned something about the founder of theChapel of S. John and the original of Leopardi's bronze. The annalsof sculpture assign to Verocchio, of Florence, the principal share inthis statue: but Verocchio died before it was cast; and even grantingthat he designed the model, its execution must be attributed to hiscollaborator, the Venetian Leopardi. For my own part, I am loth toadmit that the chief credit of this masterpiece belongs to a man whoseundisputed work at Florence shows but little of its living spirit andsplendour of suggested motion. That the Tuscan science of Verocchiosecured conscientious modelling for man and horse may be assumed; butI am fain to believe that the concentrated fire which animates themboth is due in no small measure to the handling of his northernfellow-craftsman. 

While immersed in the dreary records of crimes, treasons, cruelties, and base ambitions, which constitute the bulk of fifteenth-centuryItalian history, it is refreshing to meet with a character so frankand manly, so simply pious and comparatively free from stain, asColleoni. The only general of his day who can bear comparison withhim for purity of public life and decency in conduct, was Federigo diMontefeltro. Even here, the comparison redounds to Colleoni's credit;for he, unlike the Duke of Urbino, rose to eminence by his ownexertion in a profession fraught with peril to men of ambition andenergy. Federigo started with a principality sufficient to satisfyhis just desires for power. Nothing but his own sense of right andprudence restrained Colleoni upon the path which brought FrancescoSforza to a duchy by dishonourable dealings, and Carmagnola to thescaffold by questionable practice against his masters. 

 * * * * *

_CREMA AND THE CRUCIFIX_

Few people visit Crema. It is a little country town of Lombardy, between Cremona and Treviglio, with no historic memories but verymisty ones belonging to the days of the Visconti dynasty. On everyside around the city walls stretch smiling vineyards and rich meadows, where the elms are married to the mulberry-trees by long festoons offoliage hiding purple grapes, where the sunflowers droop their heavygolden heads among tall stems of millet and gigantic maize, and hereand there a rice-crop ripens in the marshy loam. In vintage timethe carts, drawn by their white oxen, come creaking townward inthe evening, laden with blue bunches. Down the long straight roads, between rows of poplars, they creep on; and on the shafts beneaththe pyramid of fruit lie contadini stained with lees of wine. Far offacross that 'waveless sea' of Lombardy, which has been the battlefieldof countless generations, rise the dim grey Alps, or else pearleddomes of thunder-clouds in gleaming masses over some tall solitarytower. Such backgrounds, full of peace, suggestive of almost infinitedistance, and dignified with colours of incomparable depth andbreadth, the Venetian painters loved. No landscape in Europe is morewonderful than this--thrice wonderful in the vastness of its archingheavens, in the stillness of its level plain, and in the bulwark ofhuge crested mountains, reared afar like bastions against the northernsky. The little town is all alive in this September weather. At everycorner of the street, under rustling abeles and thick-foliaged planes, at the doors of palaces and in the yards of inns, men, naked from thethighs downward, are treading the red must into vats and tuns; whiletheir mild-eyed oxen lie beneath them in the road, peaceably chewingthe cud between one journey to the vineyard and another. It must notbe imagined that the scene of Alma Tadema's 'Roman Vintage, ' or whatwe fondly picture to our fancy of the Athenian Lenaea, is repeated inthe streets of Crema. This modern treading of the wine-press is avery prosaic affair. The town reeks with a sour smell of old casks andcrushed grape-skins, and the men and women at work bear no resemblancewhatever to Bacchus and his crew. Yet even as it is, the Lombardvintage, beneath floods of sunlight and a pure blue sky, is beautiful;and he who would fain make acquaintance with Crema, should time hisentry into the old town, if possible, on some still golden afternoonof autumn. It is then, if ever, that he will learn to love the glowingbrickwork of its churches and the quaint terra-cotta traceries thatform its chief artistic charm. 

How the unique brick architecture of the Lombard cities took itsorigin--whether from the precepts of Byzantine aliens in the earliestmiddle ages, or from the native instincts of a mixed race composed ofGallic, Ligurian, Roman, and Teutonic elements, under the leadershipof Longobardic rulers--is a question for antiquarians to decide. There can, however, be no doubt that the monuments of the Lombardstyle, as they now exist, are no less genuinely local, no lesscharacteristic of the country they adorn, no less indigenous to thesoil they sprang from, than the Attic colonnades of Mnesicles andIctinus. What the marble quarries of Pentelicus were to the Athenianbuilders, the clay beneath their feet was to those Lombard craftsmen. From it they fashioned structures as enduring, towers as majestic, andcathedral aisles as solemn, as were ever wrought from chiselled stone. There is a true sympathy between those buildings and the Lombardlandscape, which by itself might suffice to prove the originalityof their almost unknown architects. The rich colour of the bakedclay--finely modulated from a purplish red, through russet, crimson, pink, and orange, to pale yellow and dull grey--harmonises with thebrilliant greenery of Lombard vegetation and with the deep azureof the distant Alpine range. Reared aloft above the flat expanse ofplain, those square _torroni_, tapering into octagons andcrowned with slender cones, break the long sweeping lines andinfinite horizons with a contrast that affords relief, and yields aresting-place to tired eyes; while, far away, seen haply from somebridge above Ticino, or some high-built palace loggia, they gleam likecolumns of pale rosy fire against the front of mustering storm-cloudsblue with rain. In that happy orchard of Italy, a pergola of vinesin leaf, a clump of green acacias, and a campanile soaring above itschurch roof, brought into chance combination with the reaches of theplain and the dim mountain range, make up a picture eloquent in itssuggestive beauty. 

Those ancient builders wrought cunningly with their material. Thebricks are fashioned and fixed to last for all time. Exposed to theicy winds of a Lombard winter, to the fierce fire of a Lombard summer, and to the moist vapours of a Lombard autumn; neglected by unheedinggenerations; with flowers clustering in their crannies, and birdsnesting in their eaves, and mason-bees filling the delicate network oftheir traceries--they still present angles as sharp as when they werebut finished, and joints as nice as when the mortar dried in the firstmonths of their building. This immunity from age and injury they owepartly to the imperishable nature of baked clay; partly to the care ofthe artists who selected and mingled the right sorts of earth, burnedthem with scrupulous attention, and fitted them together with apatience born of loving service. Each member of the edifice wasdesigned with a view to its ultimate place. The proper curve wasascertained for cylindrical columns and for rounded arches. Largerbricks were moulded for the supporting walls, and lesser pieces wereadapted to the airy vaults and lanterns. In the brickfield and thekiln the whole church was planned and wrought out in its details, before the hands that made a unity of all these scattered elementswere set to the work of raising it in air. When they came to put thepuzzle together, they laid each brick against its neighbour, fillingup the almost imperceptible interstices with liquid cement composedof quicklime and fine sand in water. After five centuries the seamsbetween the layers of bricks that make the bell-tower of S. Gottardoat Milan, yield no point of vantage to the penknife or the chisel. 

Nor was it in their welding of the bricks alone that these craftsmenshowed their science. They were wont to enrich the surface withmarble, sparingly but effectively employed--as in those slenderdetached columns, which add such beauty to the octagon of S. Gottardo, or in the string-courses of strange beasts and reptiles that adorn thechurch fronts of Pavia. They called to their aid the _mandorlato_of Verona, supporting their porch pillars on the backs of couchantlions, inserting polished slabs on their façades, and building hugesarcophagi into their cloister alleys. Between terra-cotta and thismarble of Verona there exists a deep and delicate affinity. It tookthe name of _mandorlato_, I suppose, from a resemblance to almondblossoms. But it is far from having the simple beauty of a single hue. Like all noble veined stones, it passes by a series of modulations andgradations through a gamut of associated rather than contrasted tints. Not the pink of the almond blossom only, but the creamy whiteness ofthe almond kernel, and the dull yellow of the almond nut may be foundin it; and yet these colours are so blent and blurred to all-pervadingmellowness, that nowhere is there any shock of contrast or violence ofa preponderating tone. The veins which run in labyrinths of crossing, curving, and contorted lines all over its smooth surface add, nodoubt, to this effect of unity. The polish, lastly, which it takes, makes the _mandorlato_ shine like a smile upon the sober faceof the brickwork: for, serviceable as terra-cotta is for nearly allartistic purposes, it cannot reflect light or gain the illuminationwhich comes from surface brightness. 

What the clay can do almost better than any crystalline material, maybe seen in the mouldings so characteristic of Lombard architecture. Geometrical patterns of the rarest and most fanciful device; scrollsof acanthus foliage, and traceries of tendrils; Cupids swinging infestoons of vines; angels joining hands in dance, with flutteringskirts and windy hair, and mouths that symbol singing; grave faces ofold men and beautiful profiles of maidens leaning from medallions;wide-winged genii filling the spandrils of cloister arches, andcherubs clustered in the rondure of rose-windows--ornaments likethese, wrought from the plastic clay, and adapted with true taste tothe requirements of the architecture, are familiar to every one whohas studied the church front of Crema, the cloisters of the Certosa, the courts of the Ospedale Maggiore at Milan, or the public palace ofCremona. 

If the _mandorlato_ gives a smile to those majestic Lombardbuildings, the terra-cotta decorations add the element of lifeand movement. The thought of the artist in its first freshnessand vivacity is felt in them. They have all the spontaneity ofimprovisation, the seductive melody of unpremeditated music. Moulding the supple earth with 'hand obedient to the brain, ' the_plasticatore_ has impressed his most fugitive dreams of beautyon it without effort; and what it cost him but a few fatiguelesshours to fashion, the steady heat of the furnace has gifted withimperishable life. Such work, no doubt, has the defects of itsqualities. As there are few difficulties to overcome, it suffersfrom a fatal facility--_nec pluteum coedit nec demorsos sapitungues_. It is therefore apt to be unequal, touching at times thehighest point of inspiration, as in the angels of Guccio at Perugia, and sinking not unfrequently into the commonplace of easygoingtriviality, as in the common floral traceries of Milanese windows. But it is never laboured, never pedantic, never dulled by the painfuleffort to subdue an obstinate material to the artist's will. If marbleis required to develop the strength of the few supreme sculptors, terra-cotta saves intact the fancies of a crowd of lesser men. 

When we reflect that all the force, solemnity, and beauty of theLombard buildings was evoked from clay, we learn from them thislesson: that the thought of man needs neither precious material noryet stubborn substance for the production of enduring masterpieces. The red earth was enough for God when He made man in His own image;and mud dried in the sun suffices for the artist, who is next to Godin his creative faculty--since _non merita nome di creatore senon Iddio ed il poeta_. After all, what is more everlasting thanterra-cotta? The hobnails of the boys who ran across the brickfieldsin the Roman town of Silchester, may still be seen, mingled withthe impress of the feet of dogs and hoofs of goats, in the tilesdiscovered there. Such traces might serve as a metaphor for thefootfall of artistic genius, when the form-giver has stamped histhought upon the moist clay, and fire has made that imprint permanent. 

Of all these Lombard edifices, none is more beautiful than theCathedral of Crema, with its delicately finished campanile, builtof choicely tinted yellow bricks, and ending in a lantern of thegracefullest, most airily capricious fancy. This bell-tower does notdisplay the gigantic force of Cremona's famous torrazzo, shooting396 feet into blue ether from the city square; nor can it rival theoctagon of S. Gottardo for warmth of hue. Yet it has a character ofelegance, combined with boldness of invention, that justifies thecitizens of Crema in their pride. It is unique; and he who has notseen it does not know the whole resources of the Lombard style. Thefaçade of the Cathedral displays that peculiar blending of Byzantineor Romanesque round arches with Gothic details in the windows, and with the acute angle of the central pitch, which forms thecharacteristic quality of the late _trecento_ Lombard manner. Inits combination of purity and richness it corresponds to the best ageof decorated work in English Gothic. What, however, strikes a Northernobserver is the strange detachment of this elaborate façade from themain structure of the church. Like a frontispiece cut out of cardboardand pierced with ornamental openings, it shoots far above the lowroof of the nave; so that at night the moon, rising above the southernaisle, shines through its topmost window, and casts the shadow ofits tracery upon the pavement of the square. This is a constructiveblemish to which the Italians in no part of the peninsula weresensitive. They seem to have regarded their church fronts asindependent of the edifice, capable of separate treatment, and worthyin themselves of being made the subject of decorative skill. 

In the so-called Santuario of Crema--a circular church dedicated toS. Maria della Croce, outside the walls--the Lombard style has beenadapted to the manner of the Mid-Renaissance. This church was raisedin the last years of the fifteenth century by Gian Battista Battagli, an architect of Lodi, who followed the pure rules of taste, bequeathedto North Italian builders by Bramante. The beauty of the edificeis due entirely to its tranquil dignity and harmony of parts, thelightness of its circling loggia, and the just proportion maintainedbetween the central structure and the four projecting porticoes. Thesharp angles of these vestibules afford a contrast to the simplicityof the main building, while their clustered cupolas assist the generaleffect of roundness aimed at by the architect. Such a church asthis proves how much may be achieved by the happy distribution ofarchitectural masses. It was the triumph of the best Renaissance styleto attain lucidity of treatment, and to produce beauty by geometricalproportion. When Leo Battista Alberti complained to his friend, Matteodi Bastia, that a slight alteration of the curves in his design forS. Francesco at Rimini would 'spoil his music, ' _ciò che tu mutidiscorda tutta quella musica_, this is what he meant. The melodyof lines and the harmony of parts made a symphony to his eyes no lessagreeable than a concert of tuned lutes and voices to his ears; and tothis concord he was so sensitive that any deviation was a discord. 

After visiting the churches of Crema and sauntering about the streetsawhile, there is nothing left to do but to take refuge in the oldAlbergo del Pozzo. This is one of those queer Italian inns, whichcarry you away at once into a scene of Goldoni. It is part of somepalace, where nobles housed their _bravi_ in the sixteenthcentury, and which the lesser people of to-day have turned into adozen habitations. Its great stone staircase leads to a saloon uponwhich the various bedchambers open; and round its courtyard runs anopen balcony, and from the court grows up a fig-tree poking ripe fruitagainst a bedroom window. Oleanders in tubs and red salvias in pots, and kitchen herbs in boxes, flourish on the pavement, where the ostlercomes to wash his carriages, and where the barber shaves the poodle ofthe house. Visitors to the Albergo del Pozzo are invariably asked ifthey have seen the Museo; and when they answer in the negative, theyare conducted with some ceremony to a large room on the ground-floorof the inn, looking out upon the courtyard and the fig-tree. It washere that I gained the acquaintance of Signor Folcioni, and becamepossessor of an object that has made the memory of Crema doublyinteresting to me ever since. 

When we entered the Museo, we found a little old man, gentle, grave, and unobtrusive, varnishing the ugly portrait of some Signor of the_cinquecento_. Round the walls hung pictures, of mediocre value, in dingy frames; but all of them bore sounding titles. Titians, Lionardos, Guido Renis, and Luinis, looked down and waited for apurchaser. In truth this museum was a _bric-à-brac_ shop of asort that is common enough in Italy, where treasures of old lace, glass, armour, furniture, and tapestry, may still be met with. SignorFolcioni began by pointing out the merits of his pictures; and aftermaking due allowance for his zeal as amateur and dealer, it waspossible to join in some of his eulogiums. A would-be Titian, forinstance, bought in Verona from a noble house in ruins, showedVenetian wealth of colour in its gemmy greens and lucid crimsonsshining from a background deep and glowing. Then he led us to awalnut-wood bureau of late Renaissance work, profusely carved withnymphs and Cupids, and armed men, among festoons of fruits embossedin high relief. Deeply drilled worm-holes set a seal of antiquity uponthe blooming faces and luxuriant garlandslike the touch of Time who'delves the parallels in beauty's brow. ' On the shelves of an ebonycabinet close by he showed us a row of cups cut out of rock-crystaland mounted in gilt silver, with heaps of engraved gems, oldsnuff-boxes, coins, medals, sprays of coral, and all the indescribablelumber that one age flings aside as worthless for the next to pickup from the dust-heap and regard as precious. Surely the genius ofculture in our century might be compared to a chiffonnier of Paris, who, when the night has fallen, goes into the streets, bag on backand lantern in hand, to rake up the waifs and strays a day of whirlinglife has left him. 

The next curiosity was an ivory carving of S. Anthony preaching to thefishes, so fine and small you held it on your palm, and used a lensto look at it. Yet there stood the Santo gesticulating, and therewere the fishes in rows--the little fishes first, and then themiddle-sized, and last of all the great big fishes almost out at sea, with their heads above the water and their mouths wide open, just asthe _Fioretti di San Francesco_ describes them. After thiscame some original drawings of doubtful interest, and then a case offifty-two _nielli_. These were of unquestionable value; for hasnot Cicognara engraved them on a page of his classic monograph?The thin silver plates, over which once passed the burin of MasoFiniguerra, cutting lines finer than hairs, and setting here a shadowin dull acid-eaten grey, and there a high light of exquisite polish, were far more delicate than any proofs impressed from them. Thesefrail masterpieces of Florentine art--the first beginnings of lineengraving--we held in our hands while Signor Folcioni read outCicognara's commentary in a slow impressive voice, breaking off nowand then to point at the originals before us. 

The sun had set, and the room was almost dark, when he laid his bookdown, and said: 'I have not much left to show--yet stay! Here arestill some little things of interest. ' He then opened the doorinto his bedroom, and took down from a nail above his bed awooden Crucifix. Few things have fascinated me more than thisCrucifix--produced without parade, half negligently, from the dregs ofhis collection by a dealer in old curiosities at Crema. The cross was, or is--for it is lying on the table now before me--twenty-one inchesin length, made of strong wood, covered with coarse yellow parchment, and shod at the four ends with brass. The Christ is roughly hewn inreddish wood, coloured scarlet, where the blood streams from the fivewounds. Over the head an oval medallion, nailed into the cross, servesas framework to a miniature of the Madonna, softly smiling with aCorreggiesque simper. The whole Crucifix is not a work of art, butsuch as may be found in every convent. Its date cannot be earlier thanthe beginning of the eighteenth century. As I held it in my hand, Ithought--perhaps this has been carried to the bedside of the sickand dying; preachers have brandished it from the pulpit overconscience-stricken congregations; monks have knelt before it on thebrick floor of their cells, and novices have kissed it in the vaindesire to drown their yearnings after the relinquished world; perhapsit has attended criminals to the scaffold, and heard the secretsof repentant murderers; but why should it be shown me as a thing ofrarity? These thoughts passed through my mind, while Signor Folcioniquietly remarked: 'I bought this Cross from the Frati when theirconvent was dissolved in Crema. ' Then he bade me turn it round, andshowed a little steel knob fixed into the back between the arms. Thiswas a spring. He pressed it, and the upper and lower parts of thecross came asunder; and holding the top like a handle, I drew out asfrom a scabbard a sharp steel blade, concealed in the thickness of thewood, behind the very body of the agonising Christ. What had been acrucifix became a deadly poniard in my grasp, and the rust upon it inthe twilight looked like blood. 'I have often wondered, ' said SignorFolcioni, 'that the Frati cared to sell me this. '

There is no need to raise the question of the genuineness of thisstrange relic, though I confess to having had my doubts about it, or to wonder for what nefarious purposes the impious weapon wasdesigned--whether the blade was inserted by some rascal monk who nevertold the tale, or whether it was used on secret service by thefriars. On its surface the infernal engine carries a dark certainty oftreason, sacrilege, and violence. Yet it would be wrong to incriminatethe Order of S. Francis by any suspicion, and idle to seek the actualhistory of this mysterious weapon. A writer of fiction could indeedproduce some dark tale in the style of De Stendhal's 'Nouvelles, ' andchristen it 'The Crucifix of Crema. ' And how delighted would Websterhave been if he had chanced to hear of such a sword-sheath! He mighthave placed it in the hands of Bosola for the keener torment of hisDuchess. Flamineo might have used it; or the disguised friars, whomade the deathbed of Bracciano hideous, might have plunged it in theDuke's heart after mocking his eyes with the figure of the sufferingChrist. To imagine such an instrument of moral terror mingled withmaterial violence, lay within the scope of Webster's sinister andpowerful genius. But unless he had seen it with his eyes, what poetwould have ventured to devise the thing and display it even in thedumb show of a tragedy? Fact is more wonderful than romance. Noapocalypse of Antichrist matches what is told of Roderigo Borgia; andthe crucifix of Crema exceeds the sombre fantasy of Webster. 

Whatever may be the truth about this cross, it has at any rate thevalue of a symbol or a metaphor. The idea which it materialises, thehistorical events of which it is a sign, may well arrest attention. Asword concealed in the crucifix--what emblem brings more forciblyto mind than this that two-edged glaive of persecution which Dominicunsheathed to mow down the populations of Provence and to make Spaindestitute of men? Looking upon the crucifix of Crema, we may seemto see pestilence-stricken multitudes of Moors and Jews dying on thecoasts of Africa and Italy. The Spaniards enter Mexico; and this isthe cross they carry in their hands. They take possession of Peru; andwhile the gentle people of the Incas come to kiss the bleeding browsof Christ, they plunge this dagger in their sides. What, again, wasthe temporal power of the Papacy but a sword embedded in a cross?Each Papa Rè, when he ascended the Holy Chair, was forced to take thecrucifix of Crema and to bear it till his death. A long procession ofwar-loving Pontiffs, levying armies and paying captains with the penceof S. Peter, in order to keep by arms the lands they had acquired byfraud, defiles before our eyes. First goes the terrible Sixtus IV. , who died of grief when news was brought him that the Italian princeshad made peace. He it was who sanctioned the conspiracy to murderthe Medici in church, at the moment of the elevation of the Host. The brigands hired to do this work refused at the last moment. Thesacrilege appalled them. 'Then, ' says the chronicler, 'was found apriest, who, being used to churches, had no scruple. ' The poignardthis priest carried was this crucifix of Crema. After Sixtus came theblood-stained Borgia; and after him Julius II. , whom the Romansin triumphal songs proclaimed a second Mars, and who turned, asMichelangelo expressed it, the chalices of Rome into swords and helms. Leo X. , who dismembered Italy for his brother and nephew; and ClementVII. , who broke the neck of Florence and delivered the Eternal City tothe spoiler, follow. Of the antinomy between the Vicariate of Christand an earthly kingdom, incarnated by these and other Holy Fathers, what symbol could be found more fitting than a dagger with a crucifixfor case and covering?

It is not easy to think or write of these matters without rhetoric. When I laid my head upon my pillow that night in the Albergo del Pozzoat Crema, it was full of such thoughts; and when at last sleep came, it brought with it a dream begotten doubtless by the perturbation ofmy fancy. For I thought that a brown Franciscan, with hollow cheeks, and eyes aflame beneath his heavy cowl, sat by my bedside, and, as heraised the crucifix in his lean quivering hands, whispered a tale ofdeadly passion and of dastardly revenge. His confession carried meaway to a convent garden of Palermo; and there was love in the story, and hate that is stronger than love, and, for the ending of the wholematter, remorse which dies not even in the grave. Each new possessorof the crucifix of Crema, he told me, was forced to hear from him indreams his dreadful history. But, since it was a dream and nothingmore, why should I repeat it? I have wandered far enough alreadyfrom the vintage and the sunny churches of the little Lombard town. 

 * * * * *

_CHERUBINO AT THE SCALA THEATRE_

I

It was a gala night. The opera-house of Milan was one blaze of lightand colour. Royalty in field-marshal's uniform and diamonds, attendedby decorated generals and radiant ladies of the court, occupied thegreat box opposite the stage. The tiers from pit to gallery werefilled with brilliantly dressed women. From the third row, where wewere fortunately placed, the curves of that most beautiful of theatrespresented to my gaze a series of retreating and approaching lines, composed of noble faces, waving feathers, sparkling jewels, sculpturedshoulders, uniforms, robes of costly stuffs and every conceivablebright colour. Light poured from the huge lustre in the centre of theroof, ran along the crimson velvet cushions of the boxes, and flashedupon the gilded frame of the proscenium--satyrs and acanthus scrollscarved in the manner of a century ago. Pit and orchestra scarcelycontained the crowd of men who stood in lively conversation, theirbacks turned to the stage, their lorgnettes raised from time to timeto sweep the boxes. This surging sea of faces and sober costumesenhanced by contrast the glitter, variety, and luminous tranquillityof the theatre above it. 

No one took much thought of the coming spectacle, till the conductor'srap was heard upon his desk, and the orchestra broke into the overtureto Mozart's _Nozze_. Before they were half through, it was clearthat we should not enjoy that evening the delight of perfect musicadded to the enchantment of so brilliant a scene. The execution of theoverture was not exactly bad. But it lacked absolute precision, thecomplete subordination of all details to the whole. In renderingGerman music Italians often fail through want of discipline, orthrough imperfect sympathy with a style they will not take the painsto master. Nor, when the curtain lifted and the play began, was thevocalisation found in all parts satisfactory. The Contessa had ameagre _mezza voce_. Susanna, though she did not sing false, hovered on the verge of discords, owing to the weakness of an organwhich had to be strained in order to make any effect on that enormousstage. On the other hand, the part of Almaviva was played withdramatic fire, and Figaro showed a truly Southern sense of comicfun. The scenes were splendidly mounted, and something of a princelygrandeur--the largeness of a noble train of life--was added to thedrama by the vast proportions of the theatre. It was a performancewhich, in spite of drawbacks, yielded pleasure. 

And yet it might have left me frigid but for the artist who playedCherubino. This was no other than Pauline Lucca, in the prime of youthand petulance. From her first appearance to the last note she sang, she occupied the stage. The opera seemed to have been written for her. The mediocrity of the troupe threw her commanding merits--the richnessof her voice, the purity of her intonation, her vivid conception ofcharacter, her indescribable brusquerie of movement and emotion--intothat relief which a sapphire gains from a setting of pearls. I can seeher now, after the lapse of nearly twenty years, as she stood theresinging in blue doublet and white mantle, with the slouched Spanishhat and plume of ostrich feathers, a tiny rapier at her side, and bluerosettes upon her white silk shoes! The _Nozze di Figaro_ wasfollowed by a Ballo. This had for its theme the favourite legend ofa female devil sent from the infernal regions to ruin a young man. Instead of performing the part assigned her, Satanella falls in lovewith the hero, sacrifices herself, and is claimed at last by thepowers of goodness. _Quia multum amavit_, her lost soul is saved. If the opera left much to be desired, the Ballo was perfection. Thatvast stage of the Scala Theatre had almost overwhelmed the actorsof the play. Now, thrown open to its inmost depths, crowded withglittering moving figures, it became a fairyland of fantasticloveliness. Italians possess the art of interpreting a seriousdramatic action by pantomime. A Ballo with them is no mere affair ofdancing--fine dresses, evolutions performed by brigades of pink-leggedwomen with a fixed smile on their faces. It takes the rank of highexpressive art. And the motive of this Ballo was consistently workedout in an intelligible sequence of well-ordered scenes. To moraliseupon its meaning would be out of place. It had a conflict of passions, a rhythmical progression of emotions, a tragic climax in the triumphof good over evil. 

II

At the end of the performance there were five persons in our box--thebeautiful Miranda, and her husband, a celebrated English man ofletters; a German professor of biology; a young Milanese gentleman, whom we called Edoardo; and myself. Edoardo and the professor hadjoined us just before the ballet. I had occupied a seat behind Mirandaand my friend the critic from the commencement. We had indeed dinedtogether first at their hotel, the Rebecchino; and they now proposedthat we should all adjourn together there on foot for supper. From theScala Theatre to the Rebecchino is a walk of some three minutes. 

When we were seated at the supper-table and had talked some while uponindifferent topics, the enthusiasm roused in me by Pauline Lucca burstout. I broke a moment's silence by exclaiming, 'What a wonder-worldmusic creates! I have lived this evening in a sphere of intellectualenjoyment raised to rapture. I never lived so fast before!' 'Doyou really think so?' said Miranda. She had just finished a_beccafico_, and seemed disposed for conversation. 'Do you reallythink so? For my part, music is in a wholly different region fromexperience, thought, or feeling. What does it communicate to you?' Andshe hummed to herself the _motif_ of Cherubino's 'Non so piùcosa son cosa faccio. '--'What does it teach me?' I broke in upon themelody. 'Why, to-night, when I heard the music, and saw her there, andfelt the movement of the play, it seemed to me that a new existencewas revealed. For the first time I understood what love might be inone most richly gifted for emotion. ' Miranda bent her eyes on thetable-cloth and played with her wineglass. 'I don't follow you at all. I enjoyed myself to-night. The opera, indeed, might have been betterrendered. The ballet, I admit, was splendid. But when I remember themusic--even the best of it--even Pauline Lucca's part'--here shelooked up, and shot me a quick glance across the table--'I have meremusic in my ears. Nothing more. Mere music!' The professor ofbiology, who was gifted with, a sense of music and had studied itscientifically, had now crunched his last leaf of salad. Wiping hislips with his napkin, he joined our _tête-à-tête_. 'Graciousmadam, I agree with you. He who seeks from music more than musicgives, is on the quest--how shall I put it?--of the Holy Grail. ' 'Andwhat, ' I struck in, 'is this minimum or maximum that music gives?''Dear young friend, ' replied the professor, 'music gives melodies, harmonies, the many beautiful forms to which sound shall be fashioned. Just as in the case of shells and fossils, lovely in themselves, interesting for their history and classification, so is it withmusic. You must not seek an intellectual meaning. No; there is no_Inhalt_ in music' And he hummed contentedly the air of 'Voiche sapete. ' While he was humming, Miranda whispered to me across thetable, 'Separate the Lucca from the music. ' 'But, ' I answered ratherhotly, for I was nettled by Miranda's argument _ad hominem_, 'Butit is not possible in an opera to divide the music from the words, thescenery, the play, the actor. Mozart, when he wrote the score to DaPonte's libretto, was excited to production by the situations. He didnot conceive his melodies out of connection with a certain cast ofcharacters, a given ethical environment. ' 'I do not know, my dearyoung friend, ' responded the professor, 'whether you have readMozart's Life and letters. It is clearly shown in them how he composedairs at times and seasons when he had no words to deal with. These heafterwards used as occasion served. Whence I conclude that music wasfor him a free and lovely play of tone. The words of our excellentDa Ponte were a scaffolding to introduce his musical creations to thepublic. But without that carpenter's work, the melodies of Cherubinoare _Selbst-ständig_, sufficient in themselves to vindicate theirplace in art. Do I interpret your meaning, gracious lady?' This hesaid bending to Miranda. 'Yes, ' she replied. But she still played withher wineglass, and did not look as though she were quite satisfied. I meanwhile continued: 'Of course I have read Mozart's Life, and knowhow he went to work. But Mozart was a man of feeling, of experience, of ardent passions. How can you prove to me that the melodies he gaveto Cherubino had not been evolved from situations similar to thosein which Cherubino finds himself? How can you prove he did not feela natural appropriateness in the _motifs_ he selected from hismemory for Cherubino? How can you be certain that the part itself didnot stimulate his musical faculty to fresh and still more appropriatecreativeness? And if we must fall back on documents, do you rememberwhat he said himself about the love-music in _Die Entführung?_ Ithink he tells us that he meant it to express his own feeling for thewoman who had just become his wife. ' Miranda looked up as though shewere almost half-persuaded. Yet she hummed again 'Non so più, ' thensaid to herself, 'Yes, it is wiser to believe with the professor thatthese are sequences of sounds, and nothing more. ' Then she sighed. Inthe pause which followed, her husband, the famous critic, filled hisglass, stretched his legs out, and began: 'You have embarked, I see, upon the ocean of æsthetics. For my part, to-night I was thinkinghow much better fitted for the stage Beaumarchais' play was than thismusical mongrel--this operatic adaptation. The wit, observe, is lost. And Cherubino--that sparkling little _enfant terrible_--becomes asentimental fellow--a something I don't know what--between a girl anda boy--a medley of romance and impudence--anyhow a being quite unlikethe sharply outlined playwright's page. I confess I am not a musician;the drama is my business, and I judge things by their fitness forthe stage. My wife agrees with me to differ. She likes music, I likeplays. To-night she was better pleased than I was; for she got goodmusic tolerably well rendered, while I got nothing but a mangledcomedy. '

We bore the critic's monologue with patience. But once again thespirit, seeking after something which neither Miranda, nor herhusband, nor the professor could be got to recognise, moved within me. I cried out at a venture, 'People who go to an opera must forgetmusic pure and simple, must forget the drama pure and simple. Youmust welcome a third species of art, in which the play, the music, thesingers with their voices, the orchestra with its instruments--PaulineLucca, if you like, with her fascination' (and here I shot aside-glance at Miranda), 'are so blent as to create a world beyond thescope of poetry or music or acting taken by themselves. I give Mozartcredit for having had insight into this new world, for having broughtit near to us. And I hold that every fresh representation of his workis a fresh revelation of its possibilities. '

To this the critic answered, 'You now seem to me to be confounding thelimits of the several arts. ' 'What!' I continued, 'is the drama butemotion presented in its most external forms as action? And what ismusic but emotion, in its most genuine essence, expressed by sound?Where then can a more complete artistic harmony be found than in theopera?'

'The opera, ' replied our host, 'is a hybrid. You will probably learnto dislike artistic hybrids, if you have the taste and sense I giveyou credit for. My own opinion has been already expressed. In the_Nozze_, Beaumarchais' _Mariage de Figaro_ is simply spoiled. Myfriend the professor declares Mozart's music to be sufficient byitself, and the libretto to be a sort of machinery for its display. Miranda, I think, agrees with him. You plead eloquently for thehybrid. You have a right to your own view. These things are matters, in the final resort, of individual taste rather than of demonstrableprinciples. But I repeat that you are very young. ' The critic drainedhis Lambrusco, and smiled at me. 

'Yes, he is young, ' added Miranda. 'He must learn to distinguishbetween music, his own imagination, and a pretty woman. At present hemixes them all up together. It is a sort of transcendental omelette. But I think the pretty woman has more to do with it than metaphysics!'

All this while Edoardo had bestowed devout attention on his supper. But it appeared that the drift of our discourse had not been lost byhim. 'Well, ' he said, 'you finely fibred people dissect and analyse. I am content with the _spettacolo_. That pleases. What does a manwant more? The _Nozze_ is a comedy of life and manners. The musicis adorable. To-night the women were not bad to look at--the Luccawas divine; the scenes--ingenious. I thought but little. I came awaydelighted. You could have a better play, Caro Signore!' (with a bowto our host). 'That is granted. You might have better music, CaraSignora!' (with a bow to Miranda). 'That too is granted. But when theplay and the music come together--how shall I say?--the music helpsthe play, and the play helps the music; and we--well we, I suppose, must help both!'

Edoardo's little speech was so ingenuous, and, what is more, so trueto his Italian temperament, that it made us all laugh and leave theargument just where we found it. The bottles of Lambrusco supplied useach with one more glass; and while we were drinking them, Miranda, woman-like, taking the last word, but contradicting herself, softlyhummed 'Non so più cosa son, ' and 'Ah!' she said, 'I shall dream oflove to-night!'

We rose and said good-night. But when I had reached my bedroom in theHôtel de la Ville, I sat down, obstinate and unconvinced, and pennedthis rhapsody, which I have lately found among papers of nearly twentyyears ago. I give it as it stands. 

III

Mozart has written the two melodramas of love--the one a melo-tragedy, the other a melo-comedy. But in really noble art, Comedy and Tragedyhave faces of equal serenity and beauty. In the Vatican thereare marble busts of the two Muses, differing chiefly in theirhead-dresses: that of Tragedy is an elaborately built-up structure offillets and flowing hair, piled high above the forehead and descendingin long curls upon the shoulders; while Comedy wears a similaradornment, with the addition of a wreath of vine-leaves andgrape-bunches. The expression of the sister goddesses is no lessfinely discriminated. Over the mouth of Comedy plays a subtle smile, and her eyes are relaxed in a half-merriment. A shadow rests uponthe slightly heavier brows of Tragedy, and her lips, though notcompressed, are graver. So delicately did the Greek artist indicatethe division between two branches of one dramatic art. And since allgreat art is classical, Mozart's two melodramas, _Don Giovanni_and the _Nozze di Figaro_, though the one is tragic and the othercomic, are twin-sisters, similar in form and feature. 

The central figure of the melo-tragedy is Don Juan, the heroof unlimited desire, pursuing the unattainable through tortuousinterminable labyrinths, eager in appetite yet never satisfied, 'forever following and for ever foiled. ' He is the incarnation of lustthat has become a habit of the soul--rebellious, licentious, selfish, even cruel. His nature, originally noble and brave, has assumed thequalities peculiar to lust--rebellion, license, cruelty, defiantegotism. Yet, such as he is, doomed to punishment and execration, Don Juan remains a fit subject for poetry and music, because he iscomplete, because he is impelled by some demonic influence, spurred onby yearnings after an unsearchable delight. In his death, the spiritof chivalry survives, metamorphosed, it is true, into the spirit ofrevolt, yet still tragic, such as might animate the desperate sinnerof a haughty breed. 

The central figure of the melo-comedy is Cherubino, the genius oflove, no less insatiable, but undetermined to virtue or to vice. Thisis the point of Cherubino, that the ethical capacities in him arestill potential. His passion still hovers on the borderland of goodand bad. And this undetermined passion is beautiful because of extremefreshness; of infinite, immeasurable expansibility. Cherubino is theepitome of all that belongs to the amorous temperament in a state ofstill ascendant adolescence. He is about sixteen years of age--a boyyesterday, a man to-morrow--to-day both and neither--somethingbeyond boyhood, but not yet limited by man's responsibility and man'sabsorbing passions. He partakes of both ages in the primal awakeningto self-consciousness. Desire, which in Don Juan has become a fiend, hovers before him like a fairy. His are the sixteen years, not of aNorthern climate, but of Spain or Italy, where manhood appears in aflash, and overtakes the child with sudden sunrise of new faculties. _Nondum amabam, sed amare amabam, quaerebam quod amarem, amansamare_--'I loved not yet, but was in love with loving; I soughtwhat I should love, being in love with loving. ' That sentence, pennedby S. Augustine and consecrated by Shelley, describes the mood ofCherubino. He loves at every moment of his life, with every pulse ofhis being. His object is not a beloved being, but love itself--thesatisfaction of an irresistible desire, the paradise of bliss whichmerely loving has become for him. What love means he hardly knows. Heonly knows that he must love. And women love him--half as a playthingto be trifled with, half as a young god to be wounded by. This risingof the star of love as it ascends into the heaven of youthful fancy, is revealed in the melodies Mozart has written for him. How shall wedescribe their potency? Who shall translate those curiously perfectwords to which tone and rhythm have been indissolubly wedded? _Epur mi piace languir cosi. .. . E se non ho chi m' oda, parlo d'amor conme. _

But if this be so, it may be asked, Who shall be found worthy to actCherubino on the stage? You cannot have seen and heard Pauline Lucca, or you would not ask this question. 

Cherubino is by no means the most important person in the plot of the_Nozze_. But he strikes the keynote of the opera. His love is thestandard by which we measure the sad, retrospective, stately love ofthe Countess, who tries to win back an alienated husband. By Cherubinowe measure the libertine love of the Count, who is a kind of Don Juanwithout cruelty, and the humorous love of Figaro and his sprightlybride Susanna. Each of these characters typifies one of the manyspecies of love. But Cherubino anticipates and harmonises all. Theyare conscious, experienced, world-worn, disillusioned, trivial. He isall love, foreseen, foreshadowed in a dream of life to be; all love, diffused through brain and heart and nerves like electricity; alllove, merging the moods of ecstasy, melancholy, triumph, regret, jealousy, joy, expectation, in a hazy sheen, as of some Venetiansunrise. What will Cherubino be after three years? A Romeo, aLovelace, a Lothario, a Juan? a disillusioned rake, a sentimentalist, an effete fop, a romantic lover? He may become any one of these, forhe contains the possibilities of all. As yet, he is the dear gladangel of the May of love, the nightingale of orient emotion. This moment in the unfolding of character Mozart has arrested andeternalised for us in Cherubino's melodies; for it is the privilege ofart to render things most fugitive and evanescent fixed imperishablyin immortal form. 

IV

This is indeed a rhapsodical production. Miranda was probably right. Had it not been for Pauline Lucca, I might not have philosophised the_Nozze_ thus. Yet, in the main, I believe that my instinct waswell grounded. Music, especially when wedded to words, more especiallywhen those words are dramatic, cannot separate itself from emotion. Itwill not do to tell us that a melody is a certain sequence of sounds;that the composer chose it for its beauty of rhythm, form, and tune, and only used the words to get it vocalised. We are forced to gofarther back, and ask ourselves, What suggested it in the first placeto the composer? why did he use it precisely in connection withthis dramatic situation? How can we answer these questions except bysupposing that music was for him the utterance through art of someemotion? The final fact of human nature is emotion, crystallisingitself in thought and language, externalising itself in action andart. 'What, ' said Novalis, 'are thoughts but pale dead feelings?'Admitting this even in part, we cannot deny to music an emotionalcontent of some kind. I would go farther, and assert that, while amerely mechanical musician may set inappropriate melodies to words, and render music inexpressive of character, what constitutes a musicaldramatist is the conscious intention of fitting to the words of hislibretto such melody as shall interpret character, and the power to dothis with effect. 

That the Cherubino of Mozart's _Nozze_ is quite different fromBeaumarchais' Cherubin does not affect this question. He is a newcreation, just because Mozart could not, or would not, conceive thecharacter of the page in Beaumarchais' sprightly superficial spirit. He used the part to utter something unutterable except by music aboutthe soul of the still adolescent lover. The libretto-part and themelodies, taken together, constitute a new romantic ideal, consistentwith experience, but realised with the intensity and universalitywhereby art is distinguished from life. Don Juan was a myth beforeMozart touched him with the magic wand of music. Cherubino becamea myth by the same Prospero's spell. Both characters have theuniversality, the symbolic potency, which belongs to legendary beings. That there remains a discrepancy between the boy-page and the musicmade for him, can be conceded without danger to my theory; forthe music made for Cherubino is meant to interpret his psychicalcondition, and is independent of his boyishness of conduct. 

This further explains why there may be so many renderings ofCherubino's melodies. Mozart idealised an infinite emotion. Thesinger is forced to define; the actor also is forced to define. Eachintroduces his own limit on the feeling. When the actor and the singermeet together in one personality, this definition of emotion becomesof necessity doubly specific. The condition of all music is that itdepends in a great measure on the temperament of the interpreter forits momentary shade of expression, and this dependence is of courseexaggerated when the music is dramatic. Furthermore, the subjectivityof the audience enters into the problem as still another element ofdefinition. It may therefore be fairly said that, in estimating anyimpression produced by Cherubino's music, the original character ofthe page, transplanted from French comedy to Italian opera, Mozart'sconception of that character, Mozart's specific quality of emotionand specific style of musical utterance, together with the contralto'sinterpretation of the character and rendering of the music, accordingto her intellectual capacity, artistic skill, and timbre of voice, have collaborated with the individuality of the hearer. Some of theconstituents of the ever-varying product--a product which is new eachtime the part is played--are fixed. Da Ponte's Cherubino and Mozart'smelodies remain unalterable. All the rest is undecided; the singer andthe listener change on each occasion. 

To assert that the musician Mozart meant nothing by his music, toassert that he only cared about it _quâ_ music, is the same asto say that the painter Tintoretto, when he put the Crucifixion uponcanvas, the sculptor Michelangelo, when he carved Christ upon the lapof Mary, meant nothing, and only cared about the beauty of theirforms and colours. Those who take up this position prove, not that theartist has no meaning to convey, but that for them the artist's natureis unintelligible, and his meaning is conveyed in an unknown tongue. It seems superfluous to guard against misinterpretation by saying thatto expect clear definition from music--the definition which belongsto poetry--would be absurd. The sphere of music is in sensuousperception; the sphere of poetry is in intelligence. Music, dealingwith pure sound, must always be vaguer in significance than poetry, dealing with words. Nevertheless, its effect upon the sentient subjectmay be more intense and penetrating for this very reason. We cannotfail to understand what words are intended to convey; we may veryeasily interpret in a hundred different ways the message of sound. But this is not because words are wider in their reach and more alive;rather because they are more limited, more stereotyped, more dead. They symbolise something precise and unmistakable; but this precisionis itself attenuation of the something symbolised. The exact value ofthe counter is better understood when it is a word than when it is achord, because all that a word conveys has already become a thought, while all that musical sounds convey remains within the region ofemotion which has not been intellectualised. Poetry touches emotionthrough the thinking faculty. If music reaches the thinking faculty atall, it is through fibres of emotion. But emotion, when it has becomethought, has already lost a portion of its force, and has taken toitself a something alien to its nature. Therefore the message of musiccan never rightly be translated into words. It is the very largenessand vividness of the sphere of simple feeling which makes itssymbolical counterpart in sound so seeming vague. But in spite of thisincontestable defect of seeming vagueness, emotion expressed by musicis nearer to our sentient self, if we have ears to take it in, thanthe same emotion limited by language. It is intenser, it is moreimmediate, as compensation for being less intelligible, lessunmistakable in meaning. It is an infinite, an indistinct, where eachconsciousness defines and sets a limitary form. 

V

A train of thought which begins with the concrete not unfrequentlyfinds itself finishing, almost against its will, in abstractions. Thisis the point to which the performance of Cherubino's part by PaulineLucca at the Scala twenty years ago has led me--that I have to settlewith myself what I mean by art in general, and what I take to be theproper function of music as one of the fine arts. 

'Art, ' said Goethe, 'is but form-giving. ' We might vary thisdefinition, and say, 'Art is a method of expression or presentation. 'Then comes the question: If art gives form, if it is a method ofexpression or presentation, to what does it give form, what does itexpress or present? The answer certainly must be: Art gives form tohuman consciousness; expresses or presents the feeling or the thoughtof man. Whatever else art may do by the way, in the communicationof innocent pleasures, in the adornment of life and the softening ofmanners, in the creation of beautiful shapes and sounds, this, at allevents, is its prime function. 

While investing thought, the spiritual subject-matter of all art, withform, or finding for it proper modes of presentation, each of the artsemploys a special medium, obeying the laws of beauty proper to thatmedium. The vehicles of the arts, roughly speaking, are materialsubstances (like stone, wood, metal), pigments, sounds, and words. The masterly handling of these vehicles and the realisation oftheir characteristic types of beauty have come to be regarded as thecraftsman's paramount concern. And in a certain sense this is a rightconclusion; for dexterity in the manipulation of the chosen vehicleand power to create a beautiful object, distinguish the successfulartist from the man who may have had like thoughts and feelings. Thisdexterity, this power, are the properties of the artist _quâ_artist. Yet we must not forget that the form created by the artistfor the expression of a thought or feeling is not the final end of artitself. That form, after all, is but the mode of presentation throughwhich the spiritual content manifests itself. Beauty, in like manner, is not the final end of art, but is the indispensable condition underwhich the artistic manifestation of the spiritual content must hemade. It is the business of art to create an ideal world, in whichperception, emotion, understanding, action, all elements of human lifesublimed by thought, shall reappear in concrete forms as beauty. Thisbeing so, the logical criticism of art demands that we should notonly estimate the technical skill of artists and their faculty forpresenting beauty to the æsthetic sense, but that we should also askourselves what portion of the human spirit he has chosen to investwith form, and how he has conceived his subject. It is not necessarythat the ideas embodied in a work of art should be the artist'sown. They may be common to the race and age: as, for instance, theconception of sovereign deity expressed in the Olympian Zeus ofPheidias, or the conception of divine maternity expressed in Raphael's'Madonna di San Sisto. ' Still the personality of the artist, hisown intellectual and moral nature, his peculiar way of thinking andfeeling, his individual attitude towards the material given to him inideas of human consciousness, will modify his choice of subject andof form, and will determine his specific type of beauty. To take anexample: supposing that an idea, common to his race and age, is givento the artist for treatment; this will be the final end of the workof art which he produces. But his personal qualities and technicalperformance determine the degree of success or failure to which heattains in presenting that idea and in expressing it with beauty. Signorelli fails where Perugino excels, in giving adequate and lovelyform to the religious sentiment. Michelangelo is sure of the sublime, and Raphael of the beautiful. 

Art is thus the presentation of the human spirit by the artist to hisfellow-men. The subject-matter of the arts is commensurate with whatman thinks and feels and does. It is as deep as religion, as wide aslife. But what distinguishes art from religion or from life is, thatthis subject-matter must assume beautiful form, and must be presenteddirectly or indirectly to the senses. Art is not the school or thecathedral, but the playground, the paradise of humanity. It does notteach, it does not preach. Nothing abstract enters into art's domain. Truth and goodness are transmuted into beauty there, just as inscience beauty and goodness assume the shape of truth, and inreligion truth and beauty become goodness. The rigid definitions, theunmistakable laws of science, are not to be found in art. Whatever arthas touched acquires a concrete sensuous embodiment, and thus ideaspresented to the mind in art have lost a portion of their purethought-essence. It is on this account that the religious conceptionsof the Greeks were so admirably fitted for the art of sculpture, andcertain portions of the mediæval Christian mythology lent themselvesso well to painting. For the same reason the metaphysics ofecclesiastical dogma defy the artist's plastic faculty. Art, in aword, is a middle term between reason and the senses. Its secondaryaim, after the prime end of presenting the human spirit in beautifulform has been accomplished, is to give tranquil and innocentenjoyment. 

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From what has gone before it will be seen that no human being canmake or mould a beautiful form without incorporating in that form someportion of the human mind, however crude, however elementary. In otherwords, there is no work of art without a theme, without a motive, without a subject. The presentation of that theme, that motive, thatsubject, is the final end of art. The art is good or bad according asthe subject has been well or ill presented, consistently with the lawsof beauty special to the art itself. Thus we obtain two standardsfor æsthetic criticism. We judge a statue, for example, both bythe sculptor's intellectual grasp upon his subject, and also by histechnical skill and sense of beauty. In a picture of the Last Judgmentby Fra Angelico we say that the bliss of the righteous has been moresuccessfully treated than the torments of the wicked, because theformer has been better understood, although the painter's skill ineach is equal. In the Perseus of Cellini we admire the sculptor'sspirit, finish of execution, and originality of design, while wedeplore that want of sympathy with the heroic character which makeshis type of physical beauty slightly vulgar and his facial expressionvacuous. If the phrase 'Art for art's sake' has any meaning, thismeaning is simply that the artist, having chosen a theme, thinksexclusively in working at it of technical dexterity or the quality ofbeauty. There are many inducements for the artist thus to narrow hisfunction, and for the critic to assist him by applying the canons ofa soulless connoisseurship to his work; for the conception of thesubject is but the starting-point in art-production, and the artist'sdifficulties and triumphs as a craftsman lie in the region oftechnicalities. He knows, moreover, that, however deep or noble hisidea may be, his work of art will be worthless if it fail in skillor be devoid of beauty. What converts a thought into a statue ora picture, is the form found for it; and so the form itself seemsall-important. The artist, therefore, too easily imagines that he mayneglect his theme; that a fine piece of colouring, a well-balancedcomposition, or, as Cellini put it, 'un bel corpo ignudo, ' is enough. And this is especially easy in an age which reflects much upon thearts, and pursues them with enthusiasm, while its deeper thoughts andfeelings are not of the kind which translate themselves readilyinto artistic form. But, after all, a fine piece of colouring, awell-balanced composition, a sonorous stanza, a learned essay incounterpoint, are not enough. They are all excellent good things, yielding delight to the artistic sense and instruction to the student. Yet when we think of the really great statues, pictures, poems, musicof the world, we find that these are really great because of somethingmore--and that more is their theme, their presentation of a nobleportion of the human soul. Artists and art-students may be satisfiedwith perfect specimens of a craftsman's skill, independent of histheme; but the mass of men will not be satisfied; and it is as wrongto suppose that art exists for artists and art-students, as to talkof art for art's sake. Art exists for humanity. Art transmutes thoughtand feeling into terms of beautiful form. Art is great and lastingin proportion as it appeals to the human consciousness at large, presenting to it portions of itself in adequate and lovely form. 

VI

It was necessary in the first place firmly to apprehend the truth thatthe final end of all art is the presentation of a spiritual content;it is necessary in the next place to remove confusions by consideringthe special circumstances of the several arts. 

Each art has its own vehicle of presentation. What it can present andhow it must present it, depends upon the nature of this vehicle. Thus, though architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, meet uponthe common ground of spiritualised experience--though the works of artproduced by the architect, sculptor, painter, musician, poet, emanatefrom the spiritual nature of the race, are coloured by the spiritualnature of the men who make them, and express what is spiritual inhumanity under concrete forms invented for them by the artist--yet itis certain that all of these arts do not deal exactly with the sameportions of this common material in the same way or with the sameresults. Each has its own department. Each exhibits qualities ofstrength and weakness special to itself. To define these severaldepartments, to explain the relation of these several vehiclesof presentation to the common subject-matter, is the next step incriticism. 

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Of the fine arts, architecture alone subserves utility. We build foruse. But the geometrical proportions which the architect observes, contain the element of beauty and powerfully influence the soul. Intothe language of arch and aisle and colonnade, of cupola and façade andpediment, of spire and vault, the architect translates emotion, vagueperhaps but deep, mute but unmistakable. When we say that a buildingis sublime or graceful, frivolous or stern, we mean that sublimityor grace, frivolity or sternness, is inherent in it. The emotionsconnected with these qualities are inspired in us when we contemplateit, and are presented to us by its form. Whether the architectdeliberately aimed at the sublime or graceful--whether the dignifiedserenity of the Athenian genius sought to express itself in theParthenon, and the mysticism of mediæval Christianity in the gloom ofChartres Cathedral--whether it was Renaissance paganism which gave itsmundane pomp and glory to S. Peter's, and the refined selfishness ofroyalty its specious splendour to the palace of Versailles--need notbe curiously questioned. The fact that we are impelled to raise thesepoints, that architecture more almost than any art connects itselfindissolubly with the life, the character, the moral being of a nationand an epoch, proves that we are justified in bringing it beneathour general definition of the arts. In a great measure because itsubserves utility, and is therefore dependent upon the necessities oflife, does architecture present to us through form the human spirit. Comparing the palace built by Giulio Romano for the Dukes of Mantuawith the contemporary castle of a German prince, we cannot fail atonce to comprehend the difference of spiritual conditions, as thesedisplayed themselves in daily life, which then separated Italy fromthe Teutonic nations. But this is not all. Spiritual quality inthe architect himself finds clear expression in his work. Coldnesscombined with violence marks Brunelleschi's churches; a certainsuavity and well-bred taste the work of Bramante; while Michelangeloexhibits wayward energy in his Library of S. Lorenzo, and Amadeoself-abandonment to fancy in his Lombard chapels. I have chosenexamples from one nation and one epoch in order that the point I seekto make, the demonstration of a spiritual quality in buildings, may befairly stated. 

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Sculpture and painting distinguish themselves from the other finearts by the imitation of concrete existences in nature. They copy thebodies of men and animals, the aspects of the world around us, and thehandiwork of men. Yet, in so far as they are rightly arts, they donot make imitation an object in itself. The grapes of Zeuxis at whichbirds pecked, the painted dog at which a cat's hair bristles--if suchgrapes or such a dog were ever put on canvas--are but evidences of theartist's skill, not of his faculty as artist. These two plastic, or, as I prefer to call them, figurative arts, use their imitation ofthe external world for the expression, the presentation of internal, spiritual things. The human form is for them the outward symbol of theinner human spirit, and their power of presenting spirit is limited bythe means at their disposal. 

Sculpture employs stone, wood, clay, the precious metals, to modelforms, detached and independent, or raised upon a flat surfacein relief. Its domain is the whole range of human character andconsciousness, in so far as these can be indicated by fixed facialexpression, by physical type, and by attitude. If we dwell for aninstant on the greatest historical epoch of sculpture, we shallunderstand the domain of this art in its range and limitation. At acertain point of Greek development the Hellenic Pantheon began to betranslated by the sculptors into statues; and when the genius of theGreeks expired in Rome, the cycle of their psychological conceptionshad been exhaustively presented through this medium. During that longperiod of time, the most delicate gradations of human personality, divinised, idealised, were presented to the contemplation of theconsciousness which gave them being, in appropriate types. Strengthand swiftness, massive force and airy lightness, contemplative reposeand active energy, voluptuous softness and refined grace, intellectualsublimity and lascivious seductiveness--the whole rhythm of qualitieswhich can be typified by bodily form--were analysed, selected, combined in various degrees, to incarnate the religious conceptions ofZeus, Aphrodite, Herakles, Dionysus, Pallas, Fauns and Satyrs, Nymphsof woods and waves, Tritons, the genius of Death, heroes and hunters, lawgivers and poets, presiding deities of minor functions, man'slustful appetites and sensual needs. All that men think, or do, orare, or wish for, or imagine in this world, had found exact corporealequivalents. Not physiognomy alone, but all the portions of the bodyupon which the habits of the animating soul are wont to stampthemselves, were studied and employed as symbolism. Uranian Aphroditewas distinguished from her Pandemic sister by chastened lust-repellingloveliness. The muscles of Herakles were more ponderous than the tensesinews of Achilles. The Hermes of the palæstra bore a torso ofmajestic depth; the Hermes, who carried messages from heaven, hadlimbs alert for movement. The brows of Zeus inspired awe; the breastsof Dionysus breathed delight. 

A race accustomed, as the Greeks were, to read this symbolism, accustomed, as the Greeks were, to note the individuality of nakedform, had no difficulty in interpreting the language of sculpture. Nor is there now much difficulty in the task. Our surest guide tothe subject of a basrelief or statue is study of the physical typeconsidered as symbolical of spiritual quality. From the fragment ofa torso the true critic can say whether it belongs to the athletic orthe erotic species. A limb of Bacchus differs from a limb of Poseidon. The whole psychological conception of Aphrodite Pandemos enters intoevery muscle, every joint, no less than into her physiognomy, herhair, her attitude. 

There is, however, a limit to the domain of sculpture. This art dealsmost successfully with personified generalities. It is also strong inthe presentation of incarnate character. But when it attempts to tella story, we often seek in vain its meaning. Battles of Amazons orCentaurs upon basreliefs, indeed, are unmistakable. The subject isindicated here by some external sign. The group of Laocoon appealsat once to a reader of Virgil, and the divine vengeance of Leto'schildren upon Niobe is manifest in the Uffizzi marbles. But who arethe several heroes of the Æginetan pediment, and what was the subjectof the Pheidian statues on the Parthenon? Do the three gracefulfigures of a basrelief which exists at Naples and in the Villa Albani, represent Orpheus, Hermes, and Eurydice, or Antiope and her two sons?Was the winged and sworded genius upon the Ephesus column meant for agenius of Death or a genius of Love?

This dimness of significance indicates the limitation of sculpture, and inclines some of those who feel its charm to assert that thesculptor seeks to convey no intellectual meaning, that he is satisfiedwith the creation of beautiful form. There is sense in this revoltagainst the faith which holds that art is nothing but a mode ofspiritual presentation. Truly the artist aims at producing beauty, issatisfied if he conveys delight. But it is impossible to escape fromthe certainty that, while he is creating forms of beauty, he meanssomething; and that something, that theme for which he finds the form, is part of the world's spiritual heritage. Only the crudest works ofplastic art, capricci and arabesques, have no intellectual content;and even these are good in so far as they convey the playfulness offancy. 

Painting employs colours upon surfaces--walls, panels, canvas. Whathas been said about sculpture will apply in a great measure to thisart. The human form, the world around us, the works of man's hands, are represented in painting, not for their own sake merely, but witha view to bringing thought, feeling, action, home to the consciousnessof the spectator from the artist's consciousness on which they havebeen impressed. Painting can tell a story better than sculpture, canrepresent more complicated feelings, can suggest thoughts of a subtlerintricacy. Through colour, it can play, like music, directly onpowerful but vague emotion. It is deficient in fulness and roundnessof concrete reality. A statue stands before us, the soul incarnate inideal form, fixed and frozen for eternity. The picture is a reflectioncast upon a magic glass; not less permanent, but reduced to a shadowof reality. To follow these distinctions farther would be alien fromthe present purpose. It is enough to repeat that, within their severalspheres, according to their several strengths and weaknesses, bothsculpture and painting present the spirit to us only as the spiritshows itself immersed in things of sense. The light of a lamp enclosedwithin an alabaster vase is still lamplight, though shorn of lustreand toned to coloured softness. Even thus the spirit, immersed inthings of sense presented to us by the figurative arts, is stillspirit, though diminished in its intellectual clearness and investedwith hues not its own. To fashion that alabaster form of art withutmost skill, to make it beautiful, to render it transparent, is theartist's function. But he will have failed of the highest if thelight within burns dim, or if he gives the world a lamp in which nospiritual flame is lighted. 

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Music transports us to a different region. It imitates nothing. Ituses pure sound, and sound of the most wholly artificial kind--soartificial that the musical sounds of one race are unmusical, andtherefore unintelligible, to another. Like architecture, music reliesupon mathematical proportions. Unlike architecture, music serves noutility. It is the purest art of pleasure--the truest paradise andplayground of the spirit. It has less power than painting, even lesspower than sculpture, to tell a story or to communicate an idea. Forwe must remember that when music is married to words, the words, andnot the music, reach our thinking faculty. And yet, in spite of all, music presents man's spirit to itself through form. The domain of thespirit over which music reigns, is emotion--not defined emotion, notfeeling even so defined as jealousy or anger--but those broad bases ofman's being out of which emotions spring, defining themselves throughaction into this or that set type of feeling. Architecture, we havenoticed, is so connected with specific modes of human existence, thatfrom its main examples we can reconstruct the life of men who usedit. Sculpture and painting, by limiting their presentation to theimitation of external things, have all the help which experienceand, association render. The mere artificiality of music's vehicleseparates it from life and makes its message untranslatable. Yet, as Ihave already pointed out, this very disability under which it laboursis the secret of its extraordinary potency. Nothing intervenes betweenthe musical work of art and the fibres of the sentient being itimmediately thrills. We do not seek to say what music means. We feelthe music. And if a man should pretend that the music has not passedbeyond his ears, has communicated nothing but a musical delight, hesimply tells us that he has not felt music. The ancients on this pointwere wiser than some moderns when, without pretending to assign anintellectual significance to music, they held it for an axiom thatone type of music bred one type of character, another type another. A change in the music of a state, wrote Plato, will be followed bychanges in its constitution. It is of the utmost importance, saidAristotle, to provide in education for the use of the ennobling andthe fortifying moods. These philosophers knew that music creates aspiritual world, in which the spirit cannot live and move withoutcontracting habits of emotion. In this vagueness of significance butintensity of feeling lies the magic of music. A melody occurs to thecomposer, which he certainly connects with no act of the reason, whichhe is probably unconscious of connecting with any movement of hisfeeling, but which nevertheless is the form in sound of an emotionalmood. When he reflects upon the melody secreted thus impromptu, heis aware, as we learn from his own lips, that this work hascorrespondence with emotion. Beethoven calls one symphony Heroic, another Pastoral; of the opening of another he says, 'Fate knocks atthe door. ' Mozart sets comic words to the mass-music of a friend, inorder to mark his sense of its inaptitude for religious sentiment. Allcomposers use phrases like Maestoso, Pomposo, Allegro, Lagrimoso, ConFuoco, to express the general complexion of the mood their music oughtto represent. 

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Before passing to poetry, it may be well to turn aside and considertwo subordinate arts, which deserve a place in any system ofæsthetics. These are dancing and acting. Dancing uses the living humanform, and presents feeling or action, the passions and the deeds ofmen, in artificially educated movements of the body. The element ofbeauty it possesses, independently of the beauty of the dancer, isrhythm. Acting or the art of mimicry presents the same subject-matter, no longer under the conditions of fixed rhythm but as an idealreproduction of reality. The actor is what he represents, and theelement of beauty in his art is perfection of realisation. It is hisduty as an artist to show us Orestes or Othello, not perhaps exactlyas Othello and Orestes were, but as the essence of their tragedies, ideally incorporate in action, ought to be. The actor can do thisin dumb show. Some of the greatest actors of the ancient world weremimes. But he usually interprets a poet's thought, and attempts topresent an artistic conception in a secondary form of art, which hasfor its advantage his own personality in play. 

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The last of the fine arts is literature; or, in the narrower sphereof which it will be well to speak here only, is poetry. Poetry employswords in fixed rhythms, which we call metres. Only a small portion ofits effect is derived from the beauty of its sound. It appeals to thesense of hearing far less immediately than music does. It makes noappeal to the eyesight, and takes no help from the beauty of colour. It produces no tangible object. But language being the storehouseof all human experience, language being the medium whereby spiritcommunicates with spirit in affairs of life, the vehicle whichtransmits to us the thoughts and feelings of the past, and on which werely for continuing our present to the future, it follows that, of allthe arts, poetry soars highest, flies widest, and is most at home inthe region of the spirit. What poetry lacks of sensuous fulness, itmore than balances by intellectual intensity. Its significance isunmistakable, because it employs the very material men use in theirexchange of thoughts and correspondence of emotions. To the bounds ofits empire there is no end. It embraces in its own more abstractbeing all the arts. By words it does the work in turn of architecture, sculpture, painting, music. It is the metaphysic of the fine arts. Philosophy finds place in poetry; and life itself, refined to its lastutterance, hangs trembling on this thread which joins our earthto heaven, this bridge between experience and the realms whereunattainable and imperceptible will have no meaning. 

If we are right in defining art as the manifestation of the humanspirit to man by man in beautiful form, poetry, more incontestablythan any other art, fulfils this definition and enables us to gaugeits accuracy. For words are the spirit, manifested to itself insymbols with no sensual alloy. Poetry is therefore the presentation, through words, of life and all that life implies. Perception, emotion, thought, action, find in descriptive, lyrical, reflective, dramatic, and epical poetry their immediate apocalypse. In poetry we are nolonger puzzled with problems as to whether art has or has not ofnecessity a spiritual content. There cannot be any poetry whatsoeverwithout a spiritual meaning of some sort: good or bad, moral, immoral, or non-moral, obscure or lucid, noble or ignoble, slight orweighty--such distinctions do not signify. In poetry we are not met byquestions whether the poet intended to convey a meaning when he madeit. Quite meaningless poetry (as some critics would fain find melodyquite meaningless, or a statue meaningless, or a Venetian picturemeaningless) is a contradiction in terms. In poetry, life, or aportion of life, lives again, resuscitated and presented to our mentalfaculty through art. The best poetry is that which reproduces the mostof life, or its intensest moments. Therefore the extensive species ofthe drama and the epic, the intensive species of the lyric, have beenever held in highest esteem. Only a half-crazy critic flaunts theparadox that poetry is excellent in so far as it assimilates thevagueness of music, or estimates a poet by his power of translatingsense upon the borderland of nonsense into melodious words. Wherepoetry falls short in the comparison with other arts, is in thequality of form-giving, in the quality of sensuous concreteness. Poetry can only present forms to the mental eye and to theintellectual sense, stimulate the physical senses by indirectsuggestion. Therefore dramatic poetry, the most complicated kind ofpoetry, relies upon the actor; and lyrical poetry, the intensest kindof poetry, seeks the aid of music. But these comparative deficienciesare overbalanced, for all the highest purposes of art, by thewidth and depth, the intelligibility and power, the flexibility andmultitudinous associations, of language. The other arts are limited inwhat they utter. There is nothing which has entered into the life ofman which poetry cannot express. Poetry says everything in man's ownlanguage to the mind. The other arts appeal imperatively, each in itsown region, to man's senses; and the mind receives art's messageby the help of symbols from the world of sense. Poetry lacks thisimmediate appeal to sense. But the elixir which it offers to the mind, its quintessence extracted from all things of sense, reacts throughintellectual perception upon all the faculties that make men what theyare. 

VII

I used a metaphor in one of the foregoing paragraphs to indicate thepresence of the vital spirit, the essential element of thought orfeeling, in the work of art. I said it radiated through the form, aslamplight through an alabaster vase. Now the skill of the artist isdisplayed in modelling that vase, in giving it shape, rich and rare, and fashioning its curves with subtlest workmanship. In so far as heis a craftsman, the artist's pains must be bestowed upon this preciousvessel of the animating theme. In so far as he has power over beauty, he must exert it in this plastic act. It is here that he displaysdexterity; here that he creates; here that he separates himself fromother men who think and feel. The poet, more perhaps than any otherartist, needs to keep this steadily in view; for words being our dailyvehicle of utterance, it may well chance that the alabaster vase oflanguage should be hastily or trivially modelled. This is the truereason why 'neither gods nor men nor the columns either suffermediocrity in singers. ' Upon the poet it is specially incumbent to seethat he has something rare to say and some rich mode of saying it. Thefigurative arts need hardly be so cautioned. They run their risk inquite a different direction. For sculptor and for painter, the dangeris lest he should think that alabaster vase his final task. He may tooeasily be satisfied with moulding a beautiful but empty form. 

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The last word on the topic of the arts is given in one sentence. Letus remember that every work of art enshrines a spiritual subject, andthat the artist's power is shown in finding for that subject a form ofideal loveliness. Many kindred points remain to be discussed; as whatwe mean by beauty, which is a condition indispensable to noble art;and what are the relations of the arts to ethics. These questionscannot now be raised. It is enough in one essay to have tried tovindicate the spirituality of art in general. 

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_A VENETIAN MEDLEY_

I. --FIRST IMPRESSIONS AND FAMILIARITY

It is easy to feel and to say something obvious about Venice. Theinfluence of this sea-city is unique, immediate, and unmistakable. Butto express the sober truth of those impressions which remain when thefirst astonishment of the Venetian revelation has subsided, when thespirit of the place has been harmonised through familiarity with ourhabitual mood, is difficult. 

Venice inspires at first an almost Corybantic rapture. From ourearliest visits, if these have been measured by days rather thanweeks, we carry away with us the memory of sunsets emblazoned in goldand crimson upon cloud and water; of violet domes and bell-towersetched against the orange of a western sky; of moonlight silveringbreeze-rippled breadths of liquid blue; of distant islands shimmeringin sun-litten haze; of music and black gliding boats; of labyrinthinedarkness made for mysteries of love and crime; of statue-frettedpalace fronts; of brazen clangour and a moving crowd; of pictures byearth's proudest painters, cased in gold on walls of council chamberswhere Venice sat enthroned a queen, where nobles swept the floors withrobes of Tyrian brocade. These reminiscences will be attended by anever-present sense of loneliness and silence in the world around; thesadness of a limitless horizon, the solemnity of an unbroken arch ofheaven, the calm and greyness of evening on the lagoons, the pathos ofa marble city crumbling to its grave in mud and brine. 

These first impressions of Venice are true. Indeed they areinevitable. They abide, and form a glowing background for allsubsequent pictures, toned more austerely, and painted in more lastinghues of truth upon the brain. Those have never felt Venice at all whohave not known this primal rapture, or who perhaps expected more ofcolour, more of melodrama, from a scene which nature and the art ofman have made the richest in these qualities. Yet the mood engenderedby this first experience is not destined to be permanent. It containsan element of unrest and unreality which vanishes upon familiarity. From the blare of that triumphal bourdon of brass instruments emergethe delicate voices of violin and clarinette. To the contrastedpassions of our earliest love succeed a multitude of sweet andfanciful emotions. It is my present purpose to recapture some of theimpressions made by Venice in more tranquil moods. Memory mightbe compared to a kaleidoscope. Far away from Venice I raise thewonder-working tube, allow the glittering fragments to settle as theyplease, and with words attempt to render something of the patterns Ibehold. 

II. --A LODGING IN SAN VIO

I have escaped from the hotels with their bustle of tourists andcrowded _tables-d'hôte_. My garden stretches down to the GrandCanal, closed at the end with a pavilion, where I lounge and smoke andwatch the cornice of the Prefettura fretted with gold in sunset light. My sitting-room and bed-room face the southern sun. There is a canalbelow, crowded with gondolas, and across its bridge the good folkof San Vio come and go the whole day long--men in blue shirts withenormous hats, and jackets slung on their left shoulder; women inkerchiefs of orange and crimson. Barelegged boys sit upon the parapet, dangling their feet above the rising tide. A hawker passes, balancinga basket full of live and crawling crabs. Barges filled with Brentawater or Mirano wine take up their station at the neighbouring steps, and then ensues a mighty splashing and hurrying to and fro of men withtubs upon their heads. The brawny fellows in the wine-barge are redfrom brows to breast with drippings of the vat. And now there is abustle in the quarter. A _barca_ has arrived from S. Erasmo, theisland of the market-gardens. It is piled with gourds and pumpkins, cabbages and tomatoes, pomegranates and pears--a pyramid of gold andgreen and scarlet. Brown men lift the fruit aloft, and women bendingfrom the pathway bargain for it. A clatter of chaffering tongues, aring of coppers, a Babel of hoarse sea-voices, proclaim the sharpnessof the struggle. When the quarter has been served, the boat sheersoff diminished in its burden. Boys and girls are left seasoning theirpolenta with a slice of _zucca_, while the mothers of a score offamilies go pattering up yonder courtyard with the material for theirhusbands' supper in their handkerchiefs. Across the canal, or morecorrectly the _Rio_, opens a wide grass-grown court. It islined on the right hand by a row of poor dwellings, swarming withgondoliers' children. A garden wall runs along the other side, overwhich I can see pomegranate-trees in fruit and pergolas of vines. Farbeyond are more low houses, and then the sky, swept with sea-breezes, and the masts of an ocean-going ship against the dome and turrets ofPalladio's Redentore. 

This is my home. By day it is as lively as a scene in_Masaniello_. By night, after nine o'clock, the whole stir of thequarter has subsided. Far away I hear the bell of some church tellthe hours. But no noise disturbs my rest, unless perhaps a belatedgondolier moors his boat beneath the window. My one maid, Catina, sings at her work the whole day through. My gondolier, Francesco, acts as valet. He wakes me in the morning, opens the shutters, bringssea-water for my bath, and takes his orders for the day. 'Will it dofor Chioggia, Francesco?' 'Sissignore! The Signorino has set off inhis _sandolo_ already with Antonio. The Signora is to go with usin the gondola. ' 'Then get three more men, Francesco, and see that allof them can sing. '

III. --TO CHIOGGIA WITH OAR AND SAIL

The _sandolo_ is a boat shaped like the gondola, but smallerand lighter, without benches, and without the high steel prow or_ferro_ which distinguishes the gondola. The gunwale is only justraised above the water, over which the little craft skims with a rapidbounding motion, affording an agreeable variation from the statelyswanlike movement of the gondola. In one of these boats--called byhim the _Fisolo_ or Seamew--my friend Eustace had started withAntonio, intending to row the whole way to Chioggia, or, if the breezefavoured, to hoist a sail and help himself along. After breakfast, when the crew for my gondola had been assembled, Francesco and Ifollowed with the Signora. It was one of those perfect mornings whichoccur as a respite from broken weather, when the air is windless andthe light falls soft through haze on the horizon. As we broke into thelagoon behind the Redentore, the islands in front of us, S. Spirito, Poveglia, Malamocco, seemed as though they were just lifted from thesea-line. The Euganeans, far away to westward, were bathed in mist, and almost blent with the blue sky. Our four rowers put their backsinto their work; and soon we reached the port of Malamocco, where abreeze from the Adriatic caught us sideways for a while. This isthe largest of the breaches in the Lidi, or raised sand-reefs, whichprotect Venice from the sea: it affords an entrance to vessels ofdraught like the steamers of the Peninsular and Oriental Company. Wecrossed the dancing wavelets of the port; but when we passed under thelee of Pelestrina, the breeze failed, and the lagoon was once again asheet of undulating glass. At S. Pietro on this island a halt was madeto give the oarsmen wine, and here we saw the women at their cottagedoorways making lace. The old lace industry of Venice has recentlybeen revived. From Burano and Pelestrina cargoes of hand-madeimitations of the ancient fabrics are sent at intervals to Jesurun'smagazine at S. Marco. He is the chief _impresario_ of the trade, employing hundreds of hands, and speculating for a handsome profit inthe foreign market on the price he gives his workwomen. 

Now we are well lost in the lagoons--Venice no longer visible behind;the Alps and Euganeans shrouded in a noonday haze; the lowlands at themouth of Brenta marked by clumps of trees ephemerally faint in silversilhouette against the filmy, shimmering horizon. Form and colourhave disappeared in light-irradiated vapour of an opal hue. And yetinstinctively we know that we are not at sea; the different qualityof the water, the piles emerging here and there above the surface, thesuggestion of coast-lines scarcely felt in this infinity of lustre, all remind us that our voyage is confined to the charmed limits of aninland lake. At length the jutting headland of Pelestrina was reached. We broke across the Porto di Chioggia, and saw Chioggia itselfahead--a huddled mass of houses low upon the water. One by one, aswe rowed steadily, the fishing-boats passed by, emerging from theirharbour for a twelve hours' cruise upon the open sea. In a longline they came, with variegated sails of orange, red, and saffron, curiously chequered at the corners, and cantled with devices incontrasted tints. A little land-breeze carried them forward. Thelagoon reflected their deep colours till they reached the port. Then, slightly swerving eastward on their course, but still in single file, they took the sea and scattered, like beautiful bright-plumaged birds, who from a streamlet float into a lake, and find their way at largeaccording as each wills. 

The Signorino and Antonio, though want of wind obliged them to row thewhole way from Venice, had reached Chioggia an hour before, and stoodwaiting to receive us on the quay. It is a quaint town this Chioggia, which has always lived a separate life from that of Venice. Languageand race and customs have held the two populations apart from thosedistant years when Genoa and the Republic of S. Mark fought their duelto the death out in the Chioggian harbours, down to these days, whenyour Venetian gondolier will tell you that the Chioggoto loves hispipe more than his _donna_ or his wife. The main canal is linedwith substantial palaces, attesting to old wealth and comfort. Butfrom Chioggia, even more than from Venice, the tide of modern luxuryand traffic has retreated. The place is left to fishing folk andbuilders of the fishing craft, whose wharves still form the liveliestquarter. Wandering about its wide deserted courts and _calli_, we feel the spirit of the decadent Venetian nobility. Passages fromGoldoni's and Casanova's Memoirs occur to our memory. It seems easy torealise what they wrote about the dishevelled gaiety and lawlesslicense of Chioggia in the days of powder, sword-knot, and _soprani_. Baffo walks beside us in hypocritical composure of bag-wig andsenatorial dignity, whispering unmentionable sonnets in his dialect of_Xe_ and _Ga_. Somehow or another that last dotage of S. Mark'sdecrepitude is more recoverable by our fancy than the heroism ofPisani in the fourteenth century. From his prison in blockaded Venicethe great admiral was sent forth on a forlorn hope, and blockedvictorious Doria here with boats on which the nobles of the GoldenBook had spent their fortunes. Pietro Doria boasted that with his ownhands he would bridle the bronze horses of S. Mark. But now he foundhimself between the navy of Carlo Zeno in the Adriatic and theflotilla led by Vittore Pisani across the lagoon. It was in vain thatthe Republic of S. George strained every nerve to send him succourfrom the Ligurian sea; in vain that the lords of Padua kept openingcommunications with him from the mainland. From the 1st of January1380 till the 21st of June the Venetians pressed the blockade evercloser, grappling their foemen in a grip that if relaxed one momentwould have hurled him at their throats. The long and breathlessstruggle ended in the capitulation at Chioggia of what remained ofDoria's forty-eight galleys and fourteen thousand men. 

These great deeds are far away and hazy. The brief sentences ofmediæval annalists bring them less near to us than the _chroniquesscandaleuses_ of good-for-nothing scoundrels, whose vulgar adventuresmight be revived at the present hour with scarce a change of setting. Such is the force of _intimité_ in literature. And yet Baffo andCasanova are as much of the past as Doria and Pisani. It is onlyperhaps that the survival of decadence in all we see around us, formsa fitting framework for our recollections of their vividly describedcorruption. 

Not far from the landing-place a balustraded bridge of ample breadthand large bravura manner spans the main canal. Like everything atChioggia, it is dirty and has fallen from its first estate. Yetneither time nor injury can obliterate style or wholly degrade marble. Hard by the bridge there are two rival inns. At one of these weordered a seadinner--crabs, cuttlefishes, soles, and turbots--whichwe ate at a table in the open air. Nothing divided us from the streetexcept a row of Japanese privet-bushes in hooped tubs. Our banquetsoon assumed a somewhat unpleasant similitude to that of Dives; forthe Chioggoti, in all stages of decrepitude and squalor, crowded roundto beg for scraps--indescribable old women, enveloped in their ownpetticoats thrown over their heads; girls hooded with sombre blackmantles; old men wrinkled beyond recognition by their nearestrelatives; jabbering, half-naked boys; slow, slouching fishermen withclay pipes in their mouths and philosophical acceptance on their soberforeheads. 

That afternoon the gondola and sandolo were lashed together sideby side. Two sails were raised, and in this lazy fashion we stolehomewards, faster or slower according as the breeze freshened orslackened, landing now and then on islands, sauntering along thesea-walls which bulwark Venice from the Adriatic, and singing--thoseat least of us who had the power to sing. Four of our Venetians hadtrained voices and memories of inexhaustible music. Over the levelwater, with the ripple plashing at our keel, their songs went abroad, and mingled with the failing day. The barcaroles and serenadespeculiar to Venice were, of course, in harmony with the occasion. But some transcripts from classical operas were even more attractive, through the dignity with which these men invested them. By thepeculiarity of their treatment the _recitativo_ of the stageassumed a solemn movement, marked in rhythm, which removed it fromthe commonplace into antiquity, and made me understand how cultivatedmusic may pass back by natural, unconscious transition into the realmof popular melody. 

The sun sank, not splendidly, but quietly in banks of clouds abovethe Alps. Stars came out, uncertainly at first, and then in strength, reflected on the sea. The men of the Dogana watch-boat challenged usand let us pass. Madonna's lamp was twinkling from her shrine upon theharbour-pile. The city grew before us. Stealing into Venice in thatcalm--stealing silently and shadowlike, with scarce a ruffle of thewater, the masses of the town emerging out of darkness into twilight, till San Giorgio's gun boomed with a flash athwart our stern, and thegas-lamps of the Piazzetta swam into sight; all this was like a longenchanted chapter of romance. And now the music of our men had sunk toone faint whistling from Eustace of tunes in harmony with whispers atthe prow. 

Then came the steps of the Palazzo Venier and the deep-scenteddarkness of the garden. As we passed through to supper, I plucked aspray of yellow Banksia rose, and put it in my buttonhole. The dew wason its burnished leaves, and evening had drawn forth its perfume. 

IV. --MORNING RAMBLES

A story is told of Poussin, the French painter, that when he was askedwhy he would not stay in Venice, he replied, 'If I stay here, Ishall become a colourist!' A somewhat similar tale is reported of afashionable English decorator. While on a visit to friends in Venice, he avoided every building which contains a Tintoretto, averring thatthe sight of Tintoretto's pictures would injure his carefully trainedtaste. It is probable that neither anecdote is strictly true. Yetthere is a certain epigrammatic point in both; and I have oftenspeculated whether even Venice could have so warped the genius ofPoussin as to shed one ray of splendour on his canvases, or whethereven Tintoretto could have so sublimed the prophet of Queen Anne as tomake him add dramatic passion to a London drawing-room. Anyhow, it isexceedingly difficult to escape from colour in the air of Venice, orfrom Tintoretto in her buildings. Long, delightful mornings may bespent in the enjoyment of the one and the pursuit of the other by folkwho have no classical or pseudo-mediæval theories to oppress them. 

Tintoretto's house, though changed, can still be visited. It formedpart of the Fondamenta dei Mori, so called from having been thequarter assigned to Moorish traders in Venice. A spirited carving of aturbaned Moor leading a camel charged with merchandise, remains abovethe waterline of a neighbouring building; and all about the crumblingwalls sprout flowering weeds--samphire and snapdragon and the spikedcampanula, which shoots a spire of sea-blue stars from chinks ofIstrian stone. 

The house stands opposite the Church of Santa Maria dell' Orto, whereTintoretto was buried, and where four of his chief masterpieces areto be seen. This church, swept and garnished, is a triumph of modernItalian restoration. They have contrived to make it as commonplace ashuman ingenuity could manage. Yet no malice of ignorant industry canobscure the treasures it contains--the pictures of Cima, Gian Bellini, Palma, and the four Tintorettos, which form its crowning glory. Herethe master may be studied in four of his chief moods: as the painterof tragic passion and movement, in the huge 'Last Judgment;' as thepainter of impossibilities, in the 'Vision of Moses upon Sinai;'as the painter of purity and tranquil pathos, in the 'Miracle of S. Agnes;' as the painter of Biblical history brought home to daily life, in the 'Presentation of the Virgin. ' Without leaving the Madonna dell'Orto, a student can explore his genius in all its depth and breadth;comprehend the enthusiasm he excites in those who seek, as theessentials of art, imaginative boldness and sincerity; understand whatis meant by adversaries who maintain that, after all, Tintoretto wasbut an inspired Gustave Doré. Between that quiet canvas of the'Presentation, ' so modest in its cool greys and subdued gold, and thetumult of flying, running? doesn't make much sense, but can't figureout a plausible alternative, ascending figures in the 'Judgment, ' whatan interval there is! How strangely the white lamb-like maiden, kneeling beside her lamb in the picture of S. Agnes, contrasts withthe dusky gorgeousness of the Hebrew women despoiling themselves ofjewels for the golden calf! Comparing these several manifestations ofcreative power, we feel ourselves in the grasp of a painter who wasessentially a poet, one for whom his art was the medium for expressingbefore all things thought and passion. Each picture is executed in themanner suited to its tone of feeling, the key of its conception. 

Elsewhere than in the Madonna dell' Orto there are more distinguishedsingle examples of Tintoretto's realising faculty. The 'Last Supper'in San Giorgio, for instance, and the 'Adoration of the Shepherds'in the Scuola di San Rocco illustrate his unique power of presentingsacred history in a novel, romantic framework of familiar things. The commonplace circumstances of ordinary life have been employed toportray in the one case a lyric of mysterious splendour; in the other, an idyll of infinite sweetness. Divinity shines through the raftersof that upper chamber, where round a low large table the Apostlesare assembled in a group translated from the social customs of thepainter's days. Divinity is shed upon the straw-spread manger, whereChrist lies sleeping in the loft, with shepherds crowding through theroom beneath. 

A studied contrast between the simplicity and repose of the centralfigure and the tumult of passions in the multitude around, may beobserved in the 'Miracle of S. Agnes. ' It is this which gives dramaticvigour to the composition. But the same effect is carried to itshighest fulfilment, with even a loftier beauty, in the episode ofChrist before the judgment-seat of Pilate, at San Rocco. Of allTintoretto's religious pictures, that is the most profoundly felt, themost majestic. No other artist succeeded as he has here succeeded inpresenting to us God incarnate. For this Christ is not merely thejust man, innocent, silent before his accusers. The stationary, white-draped figure, raised high above the agitated crowd, withtranquil forehead slightly bent, facing his perplexed and fussy judge, is more than man. We cannot say perhaps precisely why he is divine. But Tintoretto has made us feel that he is. In other words, histreatment of the high theme chosen by him has been adequate. 

We must seek the Scuola di San Rocco for examples of Tintoretto'sliveliest imagination. Without ceasing to be Italian in his attentionto harmony and grace, he far exceeded the masters of his nation in thepower of suggesting what is weird, mysterious, upon the borderlandof the grotesque. And of this quality there are three remarkableinstances in the Scuola. No one but Tintoretto could have evokedthe fiend in his 'Temptation of Christ. ' It is an indescribablehermaphroditic genius, the genius of carnal fascination, withoutspread downy rose-plumed wings, and flaming bracelets on the fullbut sinewy arms, who kneels and lifts aloft great stones, smilingentreatingly to the sad, grey Christ seated beneath a ruggedpent-house of the desert. No one again but Tintoretto could havedashed the hot lights of that fiery sunset in such quivering flakesupon the golden flesh of Eve, half hidden among laurels, as shestretches forth the fruit of the Fall to shrinking Adam. No one butTintoretto, till we come to Blake, could have imagined yonder Jonah, summoned by the beck of God from the whale's belly. The monstrousfish rolls over in the ocean, blowing portentous vapour from histrump-shaped nostril. The prophet's beard descends upon his nakedbreast in hoary ringlets to the girdle. He has forgotten the pastperil of the deep, although the whale's jaws yawn around him. Betweenhim and the outstretched finger of Jehovah calling him again to life, there runs a spark of unseen spiritual electricity. 

To comprehend Tintoretto's touch upon the pastoral idyll we must turnour steps to San Giorgio again, and pace those meadows by therunning river in company with his Manna-Gatherers. Or we may seek theAccademia, and notice how he here has varied the 'Temptation of Adamby Eve, ' choosing a less tragic motive of seduction than the one sopowerfully rendered at San Rocco. Or in the Ducal Palace we maytake our station, hour by hour, before the 'Marriage of Bacchus andAriadne. ' It is well to leave the very highest achievements of artuntouched by criticism, undescribed. And in this picture we have themost perfect of all modern attempts to realise an antique myth--moreperfect than Raphael's 'Galatea, ' or Titian's 'Meeting of Bacchuswith Ariadne, ' or Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus from the Sea. ' It maysuffice to marvel at the slight effect which melodies so powerful andso direct as these produce upon the ordinary public. Sitting, as is mywont, one Sunday morning, opposite the 'Bacchus, ' four Germans with acicerone sauntered by. The subject was explained to them. They waitedan appreciable space of time. Then the youngest opened his lips andspake: 'Bacchus war der Wein-Gott. ' And they all moved heavily away. _Bos locutus est_. 'Bacchus was the wine-god!' This, apparently, is what a picture tells to one man. To another it presents divineharmonies, perceptible indeed in nature, but here by the painter-poetfor the first time brought together and cadenced in a work of art. Foranother it is perhaps the hieroglyph of pent-up passions and desiredimpossibilities. For yet another it may only mean the unapproachableinimitable triumph of consummate craft. 

Tintoretto, to be rightly understood, must be sought all overVenice--in the church as well as the Scuola di San Rocco; inthe 'Temptation of S. Anthony' at S. Trovaso no less than in theTemptations of Eve and Christ; in the decorative pomp of the Sala delSenato, and in the Paradisal vision of the Sala del Gran Consiglio. Yet, after all, there is one of his most characteristic moods, toappreciate which fully we return to the Madonna dell' Orto. I havecalled him 'the painter of impossibilities. ' At rare moments herendered them possible by sheer imaginative force. If we wish torealise this phase of his creative power, and to measure our ownsubordination to his genius in its most hazardous enterprise, wemust spend much time in the choir of this church. Lovers of art whomistrust this play of the audacious fancy--aiming at sublimity insupersensual regions, sometimes attaining to it by stupendous effortor authentic revelation, not seldom sinking to the verge of bathos, and demanding the assistance of interpretative sympathy in thespectator--such men will not take the point of view required of themby Tintoretto in his boldest flights, in the 'Worship of the GoldenCalf' and in the 'Destruction of the World by Water. ' It is for themto ponder well the flying archangel with the scales of judgment in hishand, and the seraph-charioted Jehovah enveloping Moses upon Sinai inlightnings. 

The gondola has had a long rest. Were Francesco but a little moreimpatient, he might be wondering what had become of the padrone. I bidhim turn, and we are soon gliding into the Sacca della Misericordia. This is a protected float, where the wood which comes from Cadoreand the hills of the Ampezzo is stored in spring. Yonder square whitehouse, standing out to sea, fronting Murano and the Alps, they callthe Oasa degli Spiriti. No one cares to inhabit it; for here, in olddays, it was the wont of the Venetians to lay their dead for a night'srest before their final journey to the graveyard of S. Michele. Somany generations of dead folk had made that house their inn, that itis now no fitting home for living men. San Michele is the island closebefore Murano, where the Lombardi built one of their most romanticallygraceful churches of pale Istrian stone, and where the Campo Santo hasfor centuries received the dead into its oozy clay. The cemetery is atpresent undergoing restoration. Its state of squalor and abandonmentto cynical disorder makes one feel how fitting for Italians would bethe custom of cremation. An island in the lagoons devoted to funeralpyres is a solemn and ennobling conception. This graveyard, withits ruinous walls, its mangy riot of unwholesome weeds, its corpsesfestering in slime beneath neglected slabs in hollow chambers, and themephitic wash of poisoned waters that surround it, inspires the horrorof disgust. 

The morning has not lost its freshness. Antelao and Tofana, guardingthe vale above Cortina, show faint streaks of snow upon theiramethyst. Little clouds hang in the still autumn sky. There are mendredging for shrimps and crabs through shoals uncovered by the ebb. Nothing can be lovelier, more resting to eyes tired with pictures thanthis tranquil, sunny expanse of the lagoon. As we round the point ofthe Bersaglio, new landscapes of island and Alp and low-lying mainlandmove into sight at every slow stroke of the oar. A luggage-traincomes lumbering along the railway bridge, puffing white smoke intothe placid blue. Then we strike down Cannaregio, and I muse uponprocessions of kings and generals and noble strangers, entering Veniceby this water-path from Mestre, before the Austrians built theircauseway for the trains. Some of the rare scraps of fresco upon housefronts, still to be seen in Venice, are left in Cannaregio. Theyare chiaroscuro allegories in a bold bravura manner of the sixteenthcentury. From these and from a few rosy fragments on the Fondacodei Tedeschi, the Fabbriche Nuove, and precious fading figures in acertain courtyard near San Stefano, we form some notion how Venicelooked when all her palaces were painted. Pictures by Gentile Bellini, Mansueti, and Carpaccio help the fancy in this work of restoration. And here and there, in back canals, we come across coloured sectionsof old buildings, capped by true Venetian chimneys, which for a momentseem to realise our dream. 

A morning with Tintoretto might well be followed by a morning withCarpaccio or Bellini. But space is wanting in these pages. Nor wouldit suit the manner of this medley to hunt the Lombardi through palacesand churches, pointing out their singularities of violet and yellowpanellings in marble, the dignity of their wide-opened arches, or thedelicacy of their shallow chiselled traceries in cream-whiteIstrian stone. It is enough to indicate the goal of many a pleasantpilgrimage: warrior angels of Vivarini and Basaiti hidden in a darkchapel of the Frari; Fra Francesco's fantastic orchard of fruits andflowers in distant S. Francesco della Vigna; the golden Gian Belliniin S. Zaccaria; Palma's majestic S. Barbara in S. Maria Formosa; SanGiobbe's wealth of sculptured frieze and floral scroll; the Pontedi Paradiso, with its Gothic arch; the painted plates in the MuseoCivico; and palace after palace, loved for some quaint piece oftracery, some moulding full of mediæval symbolism, some fierceimpossible Renaissance freak of fancy. 

Bather than prolong this list, I will tell a story which drew me oneday past the Public Gardens to the metropolitan Church of Venice, SanPietro di Castello. The novella is related by Bandello. It has, aswill be noticed, points of similarity to that of 'Romeo and Juliet. '

V. --A VENETIAN NOVELLA

At the time when Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini were painting thosehandsome youths in tight jackets, parti-coloured hose, and littleround caps placed awry upon their shocks of well-combed hair, therelived in Venice two noblemen, Messer Pietro and Messer Paolo, whosepalaces fronted each other on the Grand Canal. Messer Paolo was awidower, with one married daughter, and an only son of twenty years orthereabouts, named Gerardo. Messer Pietro's wife was still living; andthis couple had but one child, a daughter, called Elena, of exceedingbeauty, aged fourteen. Gerardo, as is the wont of gallants, was payinghis addresses to a certain lady; and nearly every day he had to crossthe Grand Canal in his gondola, and to pass beneath the house of Elenaon his way to visit his Dulcinea; for this lady lived some distanceup a little canal on which the western side of Messer Pietro's palacelooked. 

Now it so happened that at the very time when the story opens, MesserPietro's wife fell ill and died, and Elena was left alone at home withher father and her old nurse. Across the little canal of which I spokethere dwelt another nobleman, with four daughters, between the yearsof seventeen and twenty-one. Messer Pietro, desiring to provideamusement for poor little Elena, besought this gentleman that hisdaughters might come on feast-days to play with her. For you must knowthat, except on festivals of the Church, the custom of Venice requiredthat gentlewomen should remain closely shut within the privateapartments of their dwellings. His request was readily granted; and onthe next feast-day the five girls began to play at ball together forforfeits in the great saloon, which opened with its row of Gothicarches and balustraded balcony upon the Grand Canal. The four sisters, meanwhile, had other thoughts than for the game. One or other of them, and sometimes three together, would let the ball drop, and run to thebalcony to gaze upon their gallants, passing up and down in gondolasbelow; and then they would drop flowers or ribands for tokens. Whichnegligence of theirs annoyed Elena much; for she thought only of thegame. Wherefore she scolded them in childish wise, and one of themmade answer, 'Elena, if you only knew how pleasant it is to play as weare playing on this balcony, you would not care so much for ball andforfeits!'

On one of those feast-days the four sisters were prevented fromkeeping their little friend company. Elena, with nothing to do, andfeeling melancholy, leaned upon the window-sill which overlooked thenarrow canal. And it chanced that just then Gerardo, on his way toDulcinea, went by; and Elena looked down at him, as she had seen thosesisters look at passers-by. Gerardo caught her eye, and glances passedbetween them, and Gerardo's gondolier, bending from the poop, saidto his master, 'O master! methinks that gentle maiden is better worthyour wooing than Dulcinea. ' Gerardo pretended to pay no heed to thesewords; but after rowing a little way, he bade the man turn, and theywent slowly back beneath the window. This time Elena, thinking to playthe game which her four friends had played, took from her hair a clovecarnation and let it fall close to Gerardo on the cushion of thegondola. He raised the flower and put it to his lips, acknowledgingthe courtesy with a grave bow. But the perfume of the clove and thebeauty of Elena in that moment took possession of his heart together, and straightway he forgot Dulcinea. 

As yet he knew not who Elena was. Nor is this wonderful; for thedaughters of Venetian nobles were but rarely seen or spoken of. But the thought of her haunted him awake and sleeping; and everyfeast-day, when there was the chance of seeing her, he rowed hisgondola beneath her windows. And there she appeared to him in companywith her four friends; the five girls clustering together like sisterroses beneath the pointed windows of the Gothic balcony. Elena, on herside, had no thought of love; for of love she had heard no one speak. But she took pleasure in the game those friends had taught her, ofleaning from the balcony to watch Gerardo. He meanwhile grew love-sickand impatient, wondering how he might declare his passion. Until oneday it happened that, talking through a lane or _calle_ whichskirted Messer Pietro'a palace, he caught sight of Elena's nurse, whowas knocking at the door, returning from some shopping she hadmade. This nurse had been his own nurse in childhood; therefore heremembered her, and cried aloud, 'Nurse, Nurse!' But the old woman didnot hear him, and passed into the house and shut the door behind her. Whereupon Gerardo, greatly moved, still called to her, and when hereached the door, began to knock upon it violently. And whether itwas the agitation of finding himself at last so near the wish of hisheart, or whether the pains of waiting for his love had weakened him, I know not; but, while he knocked, his senses left him, and he fellfainting in the doorway. Then the nurse recognised the youth to whomshe had given suck, and brought him into the courtyard by the help ofhandmaidens, and Elena came down and gazed upon him. The house was nowfull of bustle, and Messer Pietro heard the noise, and seeing the sonof his neighbour in so piteous a plight, he caused Gerardo to be laidupon a bed. But for all they could do with him, he recovered not fromhis swoon. And after a while force was that they should place him ina gondola and ferry him across to his father's house. The nurse wentwith him, and informed Messer Paolo of what had happened. Doctors weresent for, and the whole family gathered round Gerardo's bed. Aftera while he revived a little; and thinking himself still upon thedoorstep of Pietro's palace, called again, 'Nurse, Nurse!' She wasnear at hand, and would have spoken to him. But while he summoned hissenses to his aid, he became gradually aware of his own kinsfolkand dissembled the secret of his grief. They beholding him in bettercheer, departed on their several ways, and the nurse still sat alonebeside him. Then he explained to her what he had at heart, and how hewas in love with a maiden whom he had seen on feast-days in thehouse of Messer Pietro. But still he knew not Elena's name; and she, thinking it impossible that such a child had inspired this passion, began to marvel which of the four sisters it was Gerardo loved. Thenthey appointed the next Sunday, when all the five girls should betogether, for Gerardo by some sign, as he passed beneath the window, to make known to the old nurse his lady. 

Elena, meanwhile, who had watched Gerardo lying still and pale inswoon beneath her on the pavement of the palace, felt the stirringof a new unknown emotion in her soul. When Sunday came, she devisedexcuses for keeping her four friends away, bethinking her that shemight see him once again alone, and not betray the agitation which shedreaded. This ill suited the schemes of the nurse, who neverthelesswas forced to be content. But after dinner, seeing how restless wasthe girl, and how she came and went, and ran a thousand times to thebalcony, the nurse began to wonder whether Elena herself were not inlove with some one. So she feigned to sleep, but placed herself withinsight of the window. And soon Gerardo came by in his gondola; andElena, who was prepared, threw to him her nosegay. The watchful nursehad risen, and peeping behind the girl's shoulder, saw at a glance howmatters stood. Thereupon she began to scold her charge, and say, 'Isthis a fair and comely thing, to stand all day at balconies and throwflowers at passers-by? Woe to you if your father should come to knowof this! He would make you wish yourself among the dead!' Elena, soretroubled at her nurse's rebuke, turned and threw her arms about herneck, and called her 'Nanna!' as the wont is of Venetian children. Then she told the old woman how she had learned that game from thefour sisters, and how she thought it was not different, but farmore pleasant, than the game of forfeits; whereupon her nurse spokegravely, explaining what love is, and how that love should lead tomarriage, and bidding her search her own heart if haply she couldchoose Gerardo for her husband. There was no reason, as she knew, whyMesser Paolo's son should not mate with Messer Pietro's daughter. Butbeing a romantic creature, as many women are, she resolved to bringthe match about in secret. 

Elena took little time to reflect, but told her nurse that she waswilling, if Gerardo willed it too, to have him for her husband. Thenwent the nurse and made the young man know how matters stood, andarranged with him a day, when Messer Pietro should be in the Councilof the Pregadi, and the servants of the palace otherwise employed, for him to come and meet his Elena. A glad man was Gerardo, nor didhe wait to think how better it would be to ask the hand of Elena inmarriage from her father. But when the day arrived, he sought thenurse, and she took him to a chamber in the palace, where there stoodan image of the Blessed Virgin. Elena was there, pale and timid; andwhen the lovers clasped hands, neither found many words to say. Butthe nurse bade them take heart, and leading them before Our Lady, joined their hands, and made Gerardo place his ring on his bride'sfinger. After this fashion were Gerardo and Elena wedded. And for somewhile, by the assistance of the nurse, they dwelt together in muchlove and solace, meeting often as occasion offered. 

Messer Paolo, who knew nothing of these things, took thought meanwhilefor his son's career. It was the season when the Signiory of Venicesends a fleet of galleys to Beirut with merchandise; and the noblemenmay bid for the hiring of a ship, and charge it with wares, andsend whomsoever they list as factor in their interest. One of thesegalleys, then, Messer Paolo engaged, and told his son that he hadappointed him to journey with it and increase their wealth. 'On thyreturn, my son, ' he said, 'we will bethink us of a wife for thee. 'Gerardo, when he heard these words, was sore troubled, and first hetold his father roundly that he would not go, and flew off in thetwilight to pour out his perplexities to Elena. But she, who wasprudent and of gentle soul, besought him to obey his father in thisthing, to the end, moreover, that, having done his will and increasedhis wealth, he might afterwards unfold the story of their secretmarriage. To these good counsels, though loth, Gerardo consented. His father was overjoyed at his son's repentance. The galley wasstraightway laden with merchandise, and Gerardo set forth on hisvoyage. 

The trip to Beirut and back lasted usually six months or at the mostseven. Now when Gerardo had been some six months away, Messer Pietro, noticing how fair his daughter was, and how she had grown intowomanhood, looked about him for a husband for her. When he had found ayouth suitable in birth and wealth and years, he called for Elena, andtold her that the day had been appointed for her marriage. She, alas!knew not what to answer. She feared to tell her father that she wasalready married, for she knew not whether this would please Gerardo. For the same reason she dreaded to throw herself upon the kindness ofMesser Paolo. Nor was her nurse of any help in counsel; for the oldwoman repented her of what she had done, and had good cause to believethat, even if the marriage with Gerardo were accepted by the twofathers, they would punish her for her own part in the affair. Therefore she bade Elena wait on fortune, and hinted to her that, ifthe worst came to the worst, no one need know she had been wedded withthe ring to Gerardo. Such weddings, you must know, were binding; buttill they had been blessed by the Church, they had not taken the forceof a religious sacrament. And this is still the case in Italy amongthe common folk, who will say of a man, 'Si, è ammogliato; ma ilmatrimonio non è stato benedetto. ' 'Yes, he has taken a wife, but themarriage has not yet been blessed. '

So the days flew by in doubt and sore distress for Elena. Then on thenight before her wedding, she felt that she could bear this life nolonger. But having no poison, and being afraid to pierce her bosomwith a knife, she lay down on her bed alone, and tried to die byholding in her breath. A mortal swoon came over her; her senses fled;the life in her remained suspended. And when her nurse came nextmorning to call her, she found poor Elena cold as a corpse. MesserPietro and all the household rushed, at the nurse's cries, into theroom, and they all saw Elena stretched dead upon her bed undressed. Physicians were called, who made theories to explain the cause ofdeath. But all believed that she was really dead, beyond all helpof art or medicine. Nothing remained but to carry her to church forburial instead of marriage. Therefore, that very evening, a funeralprocession was formed, which moved by torchlight up the Grand Canal, along the Riva, past the blank walls of the Arsenal, to the Campobefore San Pietro in Castello. Elena lay beneath the black felzein one gondola, with a priest beside her praying, and other boatsfollowed bearing mourners. Then they laid her in a marble chestoutside the church, and all departed, still with torches burning, totheir homes. 

Now it so fell out that upon that very evening Gerardo's galley hadreturned from Syria, and was anchoring within the port of Lido, whichlooks across to the island of Castello. It was the gentle custom ofVenice at that time that, when a ship arrived from sea, the friends ofthose on board at once came out to welcome them, and take and give thenews. Therefore many noble youths and other citizens were on the deckof Gerardo's galley, making merry with him over the safe conductof his voyage. Of one of these he asked, 'Whose is yonder funeralprocession returning from San Pietro?' The young man made answer, 'Alas, for poor Elena, Messer Pietro's daughter! She should have beenmarried this day. But death took her, and to-night they buried herin the marble monument outside the church. ' A woeful man was Gerardo, hearing suddenly this news, and knowing what his dear wife musthave suffered ere she died. Yet he restrained himself, daring not todisclose his anguish, and waited till his friends had left the galley. Then he called to him the captain of the oarsmen, who was his friend, and unfolded to him all the story of his love and sorrow, and saidthat he must go that night and see his wife once more, if even heshould have to break her tomb. The captain tried to dissuade him, butin vain. Seeing him so obstinate, he resolved not to desert Gerardo. The two men took one of the galley's boats, and rowed together towardSan Pietro. It was past midnight when they reached the Campo and brokethe marble sepulchre asunder. Pushing back its lid, Gerardo descendedinto the grave and abandoned himself upon the body of his Elena. Onewho had seen them at that moment could not well have said which of thetwo was dead and which was living--Elena or her husband. Meantime thecaptain of the oarsmen, fearing lest the watch (set by the Masters ofthe Night to keep the peace of Venice) might arrive, was calling onGerardo to come back. Gerardo heeded him no whit. But at the last, compelled by his entreaties, and as it were astonied, he arose, bearing his wife's corpse in his arms, and carried her clasped againsthis bosom to the boat, and laid her therein, and sat down by herside and kissed her frequently, and suffered not his friend'sremonstrances. Force was for the captain, having brought himself intothis scrape, that he should now seek refuge by the nearest way fromjustice. Therefore he hoved gently from the bank, and plied his oar, and brought the gondola apace into the open waters. Gerardo stillclasped Elena, dying husband by dead wife. But the sea-breezefreshened towards daybreak; and the captain, looking down upon thatpair, and bringing to their faces the light of his boat's lantern, judged their case not desperate at all. On Elena's cheek there was aflush of life less deadly even than the pallor of Gerardo's forehead. Thereupon the good man called aloud, and Gerardo started from hisgrief; and both together they chafed the hands and feet of Elena; and, the sea-breeze aiding with its saltness, they awoke in her the sparkof life. 

Dimly burned the spark. But Gerardo, being aware of it, became a managain. Then, having taken counsel with the captain, both resolvedto bear her to that brave man's mother's house. A bed was soon madeready, and food was brought; and after due time, she lifted up herface and knew Gerardo. The peril of the grave was past, but thoughthad now to be taken for the future. Therefore Gerardo, leaving hiswife to the captain's mother, rowed back to the galley and prepared tomeet his father. With good store of merchandise and with great gainsfrom his traffic, he arrived in that old palace on the Grand Canal. Then having opened to Messer Paolo the matters of his journey, andshown him how he had fared, and set before him tables of disbursementsand receipts, he seized the moment of his father's gladness. 'Father, 'he said, and as he spoke he knelt upon his knees, 'Father, I bring younot good store of merchandise and bags of gold alone; I bring you alsoa wedded wife, whom I have saved this night from death. ' And whenthe old man's surprise was quieted, he told him the whole story. NowMesser Paolo, desiring no better than that his son should wed theheiress of his neighbour, and knowing well that Messer Pietro wouldmake great joy receiving back his daughter from the grave, badeGerardo in haste take rich apparel and clothe Elena therewith, andfetch her home. These things were swiftly done; and after evenfallMesser Pietro was bidden to grave business in his neighbour's palace. With heavy heart he came, from a house of mourning to a house ofgladness. But there, at the banquet-table's head he saw his dead childElena alive, and at her side a husband. And when the whole truth hadbeen declared, he not only kissed and embraced the pair who kneltbefore him, but of his goodness forgave the nurse, who in herturn came trembling to his feet. Then fell there joy and bliss inovermeasure that night upon both palaces of the Canal Grande. And withthe morrow the Church blessed the spousals which long since had beenon both sides vowed and consummated. 

VI. --ON THE LAGOONS

The mornings are spent in study, sometimes among pictures, sometimesin the Marcian Library, or again in those vast convent chambers ofthe Frari, where the archives of Venice load innumerable shelves. Theafternoons invite us to a further flight upon the water. Both sandoloand gondola await our choice, and we may sail or row, according as thewind and inclination tempt us. 

Yonder lies San Lazzaro, with the neat red buildings of the Armenianconvent. The last oleander blossoms shine rosy pink above its wallsagainst the pure blue sky as we glide into the little harbour. Boatspiled with coal-black grapes block the landing-place, for the Padriare gathering their vintage from the Lido, and their presses runwith new wine. Eustace and I have not come to revive memories ofByron--that curious patron saint of the Armenian colony--or toinspect the printing-press, which issues books of little value forour studies. It is enough to pace the terrace, and linger half anhour beneath the low broad arches of the alleys pleached with vines, through which the domes and towers of Venice rise more beautiful bydistance. 

Malamocco lies considerably farther, and needs a full hour of stoutrowing to reach it. Alighting there, we cross the narrow strip ofland, and find ourselves upon the huge sea-wall--block piledon block--of Istrian stone in tiers and ranks, with cunningbreathing-places for the waves to wreak their fury on and foam theirforce away in fretful waste. The very existence of Venice may be saidto depend sometimes on these _murazzi_, which were finished atan immense cost by the Republic in the days of its decadence. Theenormous monoliths which compose them had to be brought across theAdriatic in sailing vessels. Of all the Lidi, that of Malamocco is theweakest; and here, if anywhere, the sea might effect an entrance intothe lagoon. Our gondoliers told us of some places where the _murazzi_were broken in a gale, or _sciroccale_, not very long ago. Lying awakein Venice, when the wind blows hard, one hears the sea thundering uponits sandy barrier, and blesses God for the _murazzi_. On such a nightit happened once to me to dream a dream of Venice overwhelmed bywater. I saw the billows roll across the smooth lagoon like a giganticEager. The Ducal Palace crumbled, and San Marco's domes went down. TheCampanile rocked and shivered like a reed. And all along the GrandCanal the palaces swayed helpless, tottering to their fall, whileboats piled high with men and women strove to stem the tide, and savethemselves from those impending ruins. It was a mad dream, born of thesea's roar and Tintoretto's painting. But this afternoon no suchvisions are suggested. The sea sleeps, and in the moist autumn air webreak tall branches of the seeded yellowing samphire from hollows ofthe rocks, and bear them homeward in a wayward bouquet mixed with cobsof Indian-corn. 

Fusina is another point for these excursions. It lies at the mouthof the Canal di Brenta, where the mainland ends in marsh andmeadows, intersected by broad renes. In spring the ditches bloom withfleurs-de-lys; in autumn they take sober colouring from lilac daisiesand the delicate sea-lavender. Scores of tiny plants are turningscarlet on the brown moist earth; and when the sun goes down behindthe Euganean hills, his crimson canopy of cloud, reflected on theseshallows, muddy shoals, and wilderness of matted weeds, converts thecommon earth into a fairyland of fabulous dyes. Purple, violet, androse are spread around us. In front stretches the lagoon, tintedwith a pale light from the east, and beyond this pallid mirror shinesVenice--a long low broken line, touched with the softest roseateflush. Ere we reach the Giudecca on our homeward way, sunset hasfaded. The western skies have clad themselves in green, barred withdark fire-rimmed clouds. The Euganean hills stand like stupendouspyramids, Egyptian, solemn, against a lemon space on the horizon. Thefar reaches of the lagoons, the Alps, and islands assume those tonesof glowing lilac which are the supreme beauty of Venetian evening. Then, at last, we see the first lamps glitter on the Zattere. Thequiet of the night has come. 

Words cannot be formed to express the endless varieties of Venetiansunset. The most magnificent follow after wet stormy days, when thewest breaks suddenly into a labyrinth of fire, when chasms of clearturquoise heavens emerge, and horns of flame are flashed to thezenith, and unexpected splendours scale the fretted clouds, step overstep, stealing along the purple caverns till the whole dome throbs. Or, again, after a fair day, a change of weather approaches, andhigh, infinitely high, the skies are woven over with a web ofhalf-transparent cirrus-clouds. These in the afterglow blush crimson, and through their rifts the depth of heaven is of a hard and gemlikeblue, and all the water turns to rose beneath them. I remember onesuch evening on the way back from Torcello. We were well out at seabetween Mazzorbo and Murano. The ruddy arches overhead were reflectedwithout interruption in the waveless ruddy lake below. Our black boatwas the only dark spot in this sphere of splendour. We seemed to hangsuspended; and such as this, I fancied, must be the feeling of aninsect caught in the heart of a fiery-petalled rose. Yet not thesemelodramatic sunsets alone are beautiful. Even more exquisite, perhaps, are the lagoons, painted in monochrome of greys, with justone touch of pink upon a western cloud, scattered in ripples here andthere on the waves below, reminding us that day has passed and eveningcome. And beautiful again are the calm settings of fair weather, whensea and sky alike are cheerful, and the topmost blades of the lagoongrass, peeping from the shallows, glance like emeralds upon thesurface. There is no deep stirring of the spirit in a symphony oflight and colour; but purity, peace, and freshness make their way intoour hearts. 

VII. --AT THE LIDO

Of all these afternoon excursions, that to the Lido is most frequent. It has two points for approach. The more distant is the little stationof San Nicoletto, at the mouth of the Porto. With an ebb-tide, thewater of the lagoon runs past the mulberry gardens of this hamlet likea river. There is here a grove of acacia-trees, shadowy and dreamy, above deep grass, which even an Italian summer does not wither. TheRiva is fairly broad, forming a promenade, where one may conjureup the personages of a century ago. For San Nicoletto used to be afashionable resort before the other points of Lido had been occupiedby pleasure-seekers. An artist even now will select its old-worldquiet, leafy shade, and prospect through the islands of Vignole andSant' Erasmo to snow-touched peaks of Antelao and Tofana, rather thanthe glare and bustle and extended view of Venice which its rival Sant'Elisabetta offers. 

But when we want a plunge into the Adriatic, or a stroll along smoothsands, or a breath of genuine sea-breeze, or a handful of hornedpoppies from the dunes, or a lazy half-hour's contemplation of alimitless horizon flecked with russet sails, then we seek Sant'Elisabetta. Our boat is left at the landing-place. We saunter acrossthe island and back again. Antonio and Francesco wait and order wine, which we drink with them in the shade of the little _osteria's_wall. 

A certain afternoon in May I well remember, for this visit to the Lidowas marked by one of those apparitions which are as rare as they arewelcome to the artist's soul. I have always held that in our modernlife the only real equivalent for the antique mythopoeic sense--thatsense which enabled the Hellenic race to figure for themselves thepowers of earth and air, streams and forests, and the presiding geniiof places, under the forms of living human beings, is supplied bythe appearance at some felicitous moment of a man or woman whoimpersonates for our imagination the essence of the beauty thatenvirons us. It seems, at such a fortunate moment, as though we hadbeen waiting for this revelation, although perchance the want of ithad not been previously felt. Our sensations and perceptions testthemselves at the touchstone of this living individuality. The keynoteof the whole music dimly sounding in our ears is struck. A melodyemerges, clear in form and excellent in rhythm. The landscapes we havepainted on our brain, no longer lack their central figure. The lifeproper to the complex conditions we have studied is discovered, andevery detail, judged by this standard of vitality, falls into itsright relations. 

I had been musing long that day and earnestly upon the mystery of thelagoons, their opaline transparencies of air and water, their fretfulrisings and sudden subsidence into calm, the treacherousness of theirshoals, the sparkle and the splendour of their sunlight. I had askedmyself how would a Greek sculptor have personified the elemental deityof these salt-water lakes, so different in quality from the Ægeanor Ionian sea? What would he find distinctive of their spirit? TheTritons of these shallows must be of other form and lineage than thefierce-eyed youth who blows his conch upon the curled crest of a wave, crying aloud to his comrades, as he bears the nymph away to cavernswhere the billows plunge in tideless instability. 

We had picked up shells and looked for sea-horses on the Adriaticshore. Then we returned to give our boatmen wine beneath the vine-clad_pergola_. Four other men were there, drinking, and eating from adish of fried fish set upon the coarse white linen cloth. Two ofthem soon rose and went away. Of the two who stayed, one was a large, middle-aged man; the other was still young. He was tall and sinewy, but slender, for these Venetians are rarely massive in their strength. Each limb is equally developed by the exercise of rowing upright, bending all the muscles to their stroke. Their bodies are elasticallysupple, with free sway from the hips and a mercurial poise upon theankle. Stefano showed these qualities almost in exaggeration. The typein him was refined to its artistic perfection. Moreover, he wasrarely in repose, but moved with a singular brusque grace. A blackbroad-brimmed hat was thrown back upon his matted _zazzera_ ofdark hair tipped with dusky brown. This shock of hair, cut in flakes, and falling wilfully, reminded me of the lagoon grass when it darkensin autumn upon uncovered shoals, and sunset gilds its sombre edges. Fiery grey eyes beneath it gazed intensely, with compulsive effluenceof electricity. It was the wild glance of a Triton. Short blondemoustache, dazzling teeth, skin bronzed, but showing white andhealthful through open front and sleeves of lilac shirt. The dashingsparkle of this animate splendour, who looked to me as though thesea-waves and the sun had made him in some hour of secret and unquietrapture, was somehow emphasised by a curious dint dividing his squarechin--a cleft that harmonised with smile on lip and steady flame ineyes. I hardly know what effect it would have upon a reader to compareeyes to opals. Yet Stefano's eyes, as they met mine, had the vitreousintensity of opals, as though the colour of Venetian waters werevitalised in them. This noticeable being had a rough, hoarse voice, which, to develop the parallel with a sea-god, might have screamed instorm or whispered raucous messages from crests of tossing billows. 

I felt, as I looked, that here, for me at least, the mythopoem of thelagoons was humanised; the spirit of the saltwater lakes had appearedto me; the final touch of life emergent from nature had been given. Iwas satisfied; for I had seen a poem. 

Then we rose, and wandered through the Jews' cemetery. It is a quietplace, where the flat grave-stones, inscribed in Hebrew and Italian, lie deep in Lido sand, waved over with wild grass and poppies. I wouldfain believe that no neglect, but rather the fashion of this folk, hadleft the monuments of generations to be thus resumed by nature. Yet, knowing nothing of the history of this burial-ground, I dare notaffirm so much. There is one outlying piece of the cemetery whichseems to contradict my charitable interpretation. It is not far fromSan Nicoletto. No enclosure marks it from the unconsecrated dunes. Acacia-trees sprout amid the monuments, and break the tablets withtheir thorny shoots upthrusting from the soil. Where patriarchs andrabbis sleep for centuries, the fishers of the sea now wander, anddefile these habitations of the dead:

 Corruption most abhorred Mingling itself with their renownèd ashes. 

Some of the grave-stones have been used to fence the towing-path; andone I saw, well carved with letters legible of Hebrew on fair Istrianmarble, which roofed an open drain leading from the stable of aChristian dog. 

VIII. --A VENETIAN RESTAURANT

At the end of a long glorious day, unhappy is that mortal whom theHermes of a cosmopolitan hotel, white-chokered and white-waistcoated, marshals to the Hades of the _table-d'hôte_. The world has oftenbeen compared to an inn; but on my way down to this common meal Ihave, not unfrequently, felt fain to reverse the simile. From theirseparate stations, at the appointed hour, the guests like ghosts flitto a gloomy gas-lit chamber. They are of various speech and race, preoccupied with divers interests and cares. Necessity and thewaiter drive them all to a sepulchral syssition, whereof the cook toofrequently deserves that old Greek comic epithet--[Greek: hadoumageiros]--cook of the Inferno. And just as we are told that inCharon's boat we shall not be allowed to pick our society, so herewe must accept what fellowship the fates provide. An English spinsterretailing paradoxes culled to-day from Ruskin's handbooks; an Americancitizen describing his jaunt in a gondóla from the railway station;a German shopkeeper descanting in one breath on Baur's Bock and thebeauties of the Marcusplatz; an intelligent æsthete bent on workinginto clearness his own views of Carpaccio's genius: all these in turn, or all together, must be suffered gladly through well-nigh two longhours. Uncomforted in soul we rise from the expensive banquet; and howoften rise from it unfed!

Far other be the doom of my own friends--of pious bards and genialcompanions, lovers of natural and lovely things! Nor for these doI desire a seat at Florian's marble tables, or a perch in Quadri'swindow, though the former supply dainty food, and the latter commanda bird's-eye view of the Piazza. Rather would I lead them to a certainhumble tavern on the Zattere. It is a quaint, low-built, unpretendinglittle place, near a bridge, with a garden hard by which sends acataract of honeysuckles sunward over a too-jealous wall. In frontlies a Mediterranean steamer, which all day long has been dischargingcargo. Gazing westward up Giudecca, masts and funnels bar thesunset and the Paduan hills; and from a little front room of the_trattoria_ the view is so marine that one keeps fancying oneselfin some ship's cabin. Sea-captains sit and smoke beside their glassof grog in the pavilion and the _caffé_. But we do not seek theircompany at dinner-time. Our way lies under yonder arch, and up thenarrow alley into a paved court. Here are oleanders in pots, andplants of Japanese spindle-wood in tubs; and from the walls beneaththe window hang cages of all sorts of birds--a talking parrot, awhistling blackbird, goldfinches, canaries, linnets. Athos, the fatdog, who goes to market daily in a _barchetta_ with his master, snuffs around. 'Where are Porthos and Aramis, my friend?' Athos doesnot take the joke; he only wags his stump of tail and pokes his noseinto my hand. What a Tartufe's nose it is! Its bridge displays thefull parade of leather-bound brass-nailed muzzle. But beneath, thismuzzle is a patent sham. The frame does not even pretend to closeon Athos' jaw, and the wise dog wears it like a decoration. A littlefarther we meet that ancient grey cat, who has no discoverable name, but is famous for the sprightliness and grace with which she bears hereighteen years. Not far from the cat one is sure to find Carlo--thebird-like, bright-faced, close-cropped Venetian urchin, whose dutyit is to trot backwards and forwards between the cellar and thedining-tables. At the end of the court we walk into the kitchen, wherethe black-capped little _padrone_ and the gigantic white-cappedchef are in close consultation. Here we have the privilege ofinspecting the larder--fish of various sorts, meat, vegetables, several kinds of birds, pigeons, tordi, beccafichi, geese, wildducks, chickens, woodcock, &c. , according to the season. We selectour dinner, and retire to eat it either in the court among the birdsbeneath the vines, or in the low dark room which occupies one side ofit. Artists of many nationalities and divers ages frequent this house;and the talk arising from the several little tables, turns upon pointsof interest and beauty in the life and landscape of Venice. Therecan be no difference of opinion about the excellence ofthe _cuisine_, or about the reasonable charges of this_trattoria_. A soup of lentils, followed by boiled turbot orfried soles, beefsteak or mutton cutlets, tordi or beccafichi, witha salad, the whole enlivened with good red wine or Florio's SicilianMarsala from the cask, costs about four francs. Gas is unknown in theestablishment. There is no noise, no bustle, no brutality of waiters, no _ahurissement_ of tourists. And when dinner is done, we cansit awhile over our cigarette and coffee, talking until the nightinvites us to a stroll along the Zattere or a _giro_ in thegondola. 

IX. --NIGHT IN VENICE

Night in Venice! Night is nowhere else so wonderful, unless it be inwinter among the high Alps. But the nights of Venice and the nights ofthe mountains are too different in kind to be compared. 

There is the ever-recurring miracle of the full moon rising, beforeday is dead, behind San Giorgio, spreading a path of gold on thelagoon which black boats traverse with the glow-worm lamp upon theirprow; ascending the cloudless sky and silvering the domes of theSalute; pouring vitreous sheen upon the red lights of the Piazzetta;flooding the Grand Canal, and lifting the Rialto higher in etherealwhiteness; piercing but penetrating not the murky labyrinth of_rio_ linked with _rio_, through which we wind in light andshadow, to reach once more the level glories and the luminous expanseof heaven beyond the Misericordia. 

This is the melodrama of Venetian moonlight; and if a singleimpression of the night has to be retained from one visit to Venice, those are fortunate who chance upon a full moon of fair weather. YetI know not whether some quieter and soberer effects are not morethrilling. To-night, for example, the waning moon will rise latethrough veils of _scirocco_. Over the bridges of San Cristoforoand San Gregorio, through the deserted Calle di Mezzo, my friend andI walk in darkness, pass the marble basements of the Salute, and pushour way along its Riva to the point of the Dogana. We are out at seaalone, between the Canalozzo and the Giudecca. A moist wind rufflesthe water and cools our forehead. It is so dark that we can only seeSan Giorgio by the light reflected on it from the Piazzetta. The samelight climbs the Campanile of S. Mark, and shows the golden angel ina mystery of gloom. The only noise that reaches us is a confused humfrom the Piazza. Sitting and musing there, the blackness of the waterwhispers in our ears a tale of death. And now we hear a plash of oars, and gliding through the darkness comes a single boat. One man leapsupon the landing-place without a word and disappears. There is anotherwrapped in a military cloak asleep. I see his face beneath me, paleand quiet. The _barcaruolo_ turns the point in silence. From thedarkness they came; into the darkness they have gone. It is only anordinary incident of coastguard service. But the spirit of the nighthas made a poem of it. 

Even tempestuous and rainy weather, though melancholy enough, is neversordid here. There is no noise from carriage traffic in Venice, andthe sea-wind preserves the purity and transparency of the atmosphere. It had been raining all day, but at evening came a partial clearing. I went down to the Molo, where the large reach of the lagoon was allmoon-silvered, and San Giorgio Maggiore dark against the bluish sky, and Santa Maria della Salute domed with moon-irradiated pearl, and thewet slabs of the Riva shimmering in moonlight, the whole misty sky, with its clouds and stellar spaces, drenched in moonlight, nothing butmoonlight sensible except the tawny flare of gas-lamps and the orangelights of gondolas afloat upon the waters. On such a night the veryspirit of Venice is abroad. We feel why she is called Bride of theSea. 

Take yet another night. There had been a representation of Verdi's'Forza del Destino' at the Teatro Malibran. After midnight we walkedhomeward through the Merceria, crossed the Piazza, and dived into thenarrow _calle_ which leads to the _traghetto_ of the Salute. It was a warm moist starless night, and there seemed no air to breathein those narrow alleys. The gondolier was half asleep. Eustace calledhim as we jumped into his boat, and rang our _soldi_ on thegunwale. Then he arose and turned the _ferro_ round, and stoodacross towards the Salute. Silently, insensibly, from the oppressionof confinement in the airless streets to the liberty and immensityof the water and the night we passed. It was but two minutes ere wetouched the shore and said good-night, and went our way and leftthe ferryman. But in that brief passage he had opened our souls toeverlasting things--the freshness, and the darkness, and the kindnessof the brooding, all-enfolding night above the sea. 

 * * * * *

_THE GONDOLIER'S WEDDING_

The night before the wedding we had a supper-party in my rooms. Wewere twelve in all. My friend Eustace brought his gondolier Antoniowith fair-haired, dark-eyed wife, and little Attilio, their eldestchild. My own gondolier, Francesco, came with his wife and twochildren. Then there was the handsome, languid Luigi, who, in his bestclothes, or out of them, is fit for any drawing-room. Two gondoliers, in dark blue shirts, completed the list of guests, if we exclude themaid Catina, who came and went about the table, laughing and joiningin the songs, and sitting down at intervals to take her share of wine. The big room looking across the garden to the Grand Canal had beenprepared for supper; and the company were to be received in thesmaller, which has a fine open space in front of it to southwards. Butas the guests arrived, they seemed to find the kitchen and the cookingthat was going on quite irresistible. Catina, it seems, had lost herhead with so many cuttlefishes, _orai_, cakes, and fowls, andcutlets to reduce to order. There was, therefore, a great bustle belowstairs; and I could hear plainly that all my guests were lending theirmaking, or their marring, hands to the preparation of the supper. Thatthe company should cook their own food on the way to the dining-room, seemed a quite novel arrangement, but one that promised well for theircontentment with the banquet. Nobody could be dissatisfied with whatwas everybody's affair. 

When seven o'clock struck, Eustace and I, who had been entertainingthe children in their mothers' absence, heard the sound of steps uponthe stairs. The guests arrived, bringing their own _risotto_ withthem. Welcome was short, if hearty. We sat down in carefully appointedorder, and fell into such conversation as the quarter of San Vio andour several interests supplied. From time to time one of the matronsleft the table and descended to the kitchen, when a finishing strokewas needed for roast pullet or stewed veal. The excuses they madetheir host for supposed failure in the dishes, lent a certain graceand comic charm to the commonplace of festivity. The entertainmentwas theirs as much as mine; and they all seemed to enjoy what took theform by degrees of curiously complicated hospitality. I do not thinka well-ordered supper at any _trattoria_, such as at firstsuggested itself to my imagination, would have given any of us anequal pleasure or an equal sense of freedom. The three children hadbecome the guests of the whole party. Little Attilio, propped upon anair-cushion, which puzzled him exceedingly, ate through his supper anddrank his wine with solid satisfaction, opening the large brown eyesbeneath those tufts of clustering fair hair which promise much beautyfor him in his manhood. Francesco's boy, who is older and begins toknow the world, sat with a semi-suppressed grin upon his face, asthough the humour of the situation was not wholly hidden from him. Little Teresa, too, was happy, except when her mother, a severePomona, with enormous earrings and splendid _fazzoletto_ ofcrimson and orange dyes, pounced down upon her for some supposedinfraction of good manners--_creanza_, as they vividly express ithere. Only Luigi looked a trifle bored. But Luigi has been a soldier, and has now attained the supercilious superiority of young-manhood, which smokes its cigar of an evening in the piazza and knows themerits of the different cafés. The great business of the evening beganwhen the eating was over, and the decanters filled with new wine ofMirano circulated freely. The four best singers of the party drewtogether; and the rest prepared themselves to make suggestions, humtunes, and join with fitful effect in choruses. Antonio, who is apowerful young fellow, with bronzed cheeks and a perfect tempest ofcoal-black hair in flakes upon his forehead, has a most extraordinarysoprano--sound as a bell, strong as a trumpet, well trained, andtrue to the least shade in intonation. Piero, whose rugged Neptunianfeatures, sea-wrinkled, tell of a rough water-life, boasts a bass ofresonant, almost pathetic quality. Francesco has a _mezzo voce_, which might, by a stretch of politeness, be called baritone. Piero'scomrade, whose name concerns us not, has another of these nondescriptvoices. They sat together with their glasses and cigars before them, sketching part-songs in outline, striking the keynote--now higher andnow lower--till they saw their subject well in view. Then they burstinto full singing, Antonio leading with a metal note that thrilledone's ears, but still was musical. Complicated contrapuntal pieces, such as we should call madrigals, with ever-recurring refrains of'Venezia, gemma Triatica, sposa del mar, ' descending probably fromancient days, followed each other in quick succession. Barcaroles, serenades, love-songs, and invitations to the water were interwovenfor relief. One of these romantic pieces had a beautiful burden, 'Dormi, o bella, o fingi di dormir, ' of which the melody was fullyworthy. But the most successful of all the tunes were two with a sadmotive. The one repeated incessantly 'Ohimé! mia madre morì;' theother was a girl's love lament: 'Perchè tradirmi, perchè lasciarmi!prima d'amarmi non eri così!' Even the children joined in these; andCatina, who took the solo part in the second, was inspired to a greatdramatic effort. All these were purely popular songs. The people ofVenice, however, are passionate for operas. Therefore we had duetsand solos from 'Ernani, ' the 'Ballo in Maschera, ' and the 'Forza delDestino, ' and one comic chorus from 'Boccaccio, ' which seemed to makethem wild with pleasure. To my mind, the best of these more formalpieces was a duet between Attila and Italia from some opera unknown tome, which Antonio and Piero performed with incomparable spirit. Itwas noticeable how, descending to the people, sung by them for loveat sea, or on excursions to the villages round Mestre, these operaticreminiscences had lost something of their theatrical formality, andassumed instead the serious gravity, the quaint movement, and markedemphasis which belong to popular music in Northern and Central Italy. An antique character was communicated even to the recitative of Verdiby slight, almost indefinable, changes of rhythm and accent. There wasno end to the singing. 'Siamo appassionati per il canto, ' frequentlyrepeated, was proved true by the profusion and variety of songsproduced from inexhaustible memories, lightly tried over, brilliantlyperformed, rapidly succeeding each other. Nor were gestureswanting--lifted arms, hands stretched to hands, flashing eyes, hairtossed from the forehead--unconscious and appropriate action--whichshowed how the spirit of the music and words alike possessed the men. One by one the children fell asleep. Little Attilio and Teresa weretucked up beneath my Scotch shawl at two ends of a great sofa; and noteven his father's clarion voice, in the character of Italia defyingAttila to harm 'le mie superbe città, ' could wake the little boy up. The night wore on. It was past one. Eustace and I had promised to bein the church of the Gesuati at six next morning. We therefore gavethe guests a gentle hint, which they as gently took. With exquisite, because perfectly unaffected, breeding they sank for a few momentsinto common conversation, then wrapped the children up, and tooktheir leave. It was an uncomfortable, warm, wet night of sullen_scirocco_. 

The next day, which was Sunday, Francesco called me at five. Therewas no visible sunrise that cheerless damp October morning. Grey dawnstole somehow imperceptibly between the veil of clouds and leadenwaters, as my friend and I, well sheltered by our _felze_, passedinto the Giudecca, and took our station before the church of theGesuati. A few women from the neighbouring streets and courts crossedthe bridges in draggled petticoats on their way to first mass. A fewmen, shouldering their jackets, lounged along the Zattere, opened thegreat green doors, and entered. Then suddenly Antonio cried out thatthe bridal party was on its way, not as we had expected, in boats, buton foot. We left our gondola, and fell into the ranks, after shakinghands with Francesco, who is the elder brother of the bride. There wasnothing very noticeable in her appearance, except her large dark eyes. Otherwise both face and figure were of a common type; and her bridaldress of sprigged grey silk, large veil and orange blossoms, reducedher to the level of a _bourgeoise_. It was much the same withthe bridegroom. His features, indeed, proved him a true Venetiangondolier; for the skin was strained over the cheekbones, and themuscles of the throat beneath the jaws stood out like cords, and thebright blue eyes were deep-set beneath a spare brown forehead. Buthe had provided a complete suit of black for the occasion, and worea shirt of worked cambric, which disguised what is really splendid inthe physique of these oarsmen, at once slender and sinewy. Both brideand bridegroom looked uncomfortable in their clothes. The light thatfell upon them in the church was dull and leaden. The ceremony, whichwas very hurriedly performed by an unctuous priest, did not appear toimpress either of them. Nobody in the bridal party, crowding togetheron both sides of the altar, looked as though the service was of theslightest interest and moment. Indeed, this was hardly to be wonderedat; for the priest, so far as I could understand his gabble, tookthe larger portion for read, after muttering the first words of therubric. A little carven image of an acolyte--a weird boy who seemed tomove by springs, whose hair had all the semblance of painted wood, and whose complexion was white and red like a clown's--did not makematters more intelligible by spasmodically clattering responses. 

After the ceremony we heard mass and contributed to three distinctoffertories. Considering how much account even two _soldi_ are tothese poor people, I was really angry when I heard the copper shower. Every member of the party had his or her pennies ready, and droppedthem into the boxes. Whether it was the effect of the bad morning, orthe ugliness of a very ill-designed _barocco_ building, or thefault of the fat oily priest, I know not. But the _sposalizio_struck me as tame and cheerless, the mass as irreverent and vulgarlyconducted. At the same time there is something too impressive inthe mass for any perfunctory performance to divest its symbolism ofsublimity. A Protestant Communion Service lends itself more easily todegradation by unworthiness in the minister. 

We walked down the church in double file, led by the bride andbridegroom, who had knelt during the ceremony with the bestman--_compare_, as he is called--at a narrow _prie-dieu_ before thealtar. The _compare_ is a person of distinction at these weddings. Hehas to present the bride with a great pyramid of artificial flowers, which is placed before her at the marriage-feast, a packet of candles, and a box of bonbons. The comfits, when the box is opened, are foundto include two magnificent sugar babies lying in their cradles. I wastold that a _compare_, who does the thing handsomely, must be preparedto spend about a hundred francs upon these presents, in addition tothe wine and cigars with which he treats his friends. On this occasionthe women were agreed that he had done his duty well. He was a fat, wealthy little man, who lived by letting market-boats for hire on theRialto. 

From the church to the bride's house was a walk of some three minutes. On the way we were introduced to the father of the bride--a verymagnificent personage, with points of strong resemblance to VittorioEmmanuele. He wore an enormous broad-brimmed hat and emerald-greenearrings, and looked considerably younger than his eldest son, Francesco. Throughout the _nozze_ he took the lead in a grandimperious fashion of his own. Wherever he went, he seemed to fill theplace, and was fully aware of his own importance. In Florence I thinkhe would have got the nickname of _Tacchin_, or turkey-cock. Here at Venice the sons and daughters call their parent briefly_Vecchio_. I heard him so addressed with a certain amount of awe, expecting an explosion of bubbly-jock displeasure. But he took it, asthough it was natural, without disturbance. The other _Vecchio_, father of the bridegroom, struck me as more sympathetic. He was agentle old man, proud of his many prosperous, laborious sons. They, like the rest of the gentlemen, were gondoliers. Both the_Vecchi_, indeed, continue to ply their trade, day and night, atthe _traghetto_. 

_Traghetti_ are stations for gondolas at different points of thecanals. As their name implies, it is the first duty of the gondoliersupon them to ferry people across. This they do for the fixed fee offive centimes. The _traghetti_ are in fact Venetian cab-stands. And, of course, like London cabs, the gondolas may be taken off themfor trips. The municipality, however, makes it a condition, underpenalty of fine to the _traghetto_, that each station shouldalways be provided with two boats for the service of the ferry. Whenvacancies occur on the _traghetti_, a gondolier who owns or hiresa boat makes application to the municipality, receives a number, andis inscribed as plying at a certain station. He has now entered a sortof guild, which is presided over by a _Capo-traghetto_, electedby the rest for the protection of their interests, the settlement ofdisputes, and the management of their common funds. In the old actsof Venice this functionary is styled _Gastaldo di traghetto_. Themembers have to contribute something yearly to the guild. This paymentvaries upon different stations, according to the greater or lessamount of the tax levied by the municipality on the _traghetto_. The highest subscription I have heard of is twenty-five francs; thelowest, seven. There is one _traghetto_, known by the nameof Madonna del Giglio or Zobenigo, which possesses near its_pergola_ of vines a nice old brown Venetian picture. Somestranger offered a considerable sum for this. But the guild refused topart with it. 

As may be imagined, the _traghetti_ vary greatly in the amountand quality of their custom. By far the best are those in theneighbourhood of the hotels upon the Grand Canal. At any one of thesea gondolier during the season is sure of picking up some foreigner orother who will pay him handsomely for comparatively light service. A _traghetto_ on the Giudecca, on the contrary, depends uponVenetian traffic. The work is more monotonous, and the pay is reducedto its tariffed minimum. So far as I can gather, an industriousgondolier, with a good boat, belonging to a good _traghetto_, maymake as much as ten or fifteen francs in a single day. But this cannotbe relied on. They therefore prefer a fixed appointment with a privatefamily, for which they receive by tariff five francs a day, or byarrangement for long periods perhaps four francs a day, with certainperquisites and small advantages. It is great luck to get such anengagement for the winter. The heaviest anxieties which beset agondolier are then disposed of. Having entered private service, theyare not allowed to ply their trade on the _traghetto_, exceptby stipulation with their masters. Then they may take their place onenight out of every six in the rank and file. The gondoliers havetwo proverbs, which show how desirable it is, while taking a fixedengagement, to keep their hold on the _traghetto_. One is to thiseffect: _il traghetto è un buon padrone_. The other satirisesthe meanness of the poverty-stricken Venetian nobility: _pompa diservitù, misera insegna_. When they combine the _traghetto_with private service, the municipality insists on their retainingthe number painted on their gondola; and against this their employersfrequently object. It is therefore a great point for a gondolier tomake such an arrangement with his master as will leave him free toshow his number. The reason for this regulation is obvious. Gondoliersare known more by their numbers and their _traghetti_ thantheir names. They tell me that though there are upwards of athousand registered in Venice, each man of the trade knows thewhole confraternity by face and number. Taking all things intoconsideration, I think four francs a day the whole year round arevery good earnings for a gondolier. On this he will marry and rear afamily, and put a little money by. A young unmarried man, working attwo and a half or three francs a day, is proportionately well-to-do. If he is economical, he ought upon these wages to save enough intwo or three years to buy himself a gondola. A boy from fifteen tonineteen is called a _mezz' uomo_, and gets about one franc a day. Anew gondola with all its fittings is worth about a thousand francs. Itdoes not last in good condition more than six or seven years. At theend of that time the hull will fetch eighty francs. A new hull can behad for three hundred francs. The old fittings--brass sea-horses or_cavalli_, steel prow or _ferro_, covered cabin or _felze_, cushionsand leather-covered back-board or _stramazetto_, maybe transferred toit. When a man wants to start a gondola, he will begin by buying onealready half past service--a _gondola da traghetto_ or _di mezza età_. This should cost him something over two hundred francs. Little bylittle, he accumulates the needful fittings; and when his firstpurchase is worn out, he hopes to set up with a well-appointedequipage. He thus gradually works his way from the rough trade whichinvolves hard work and poor earnings to that more profitable industrywhich cannot be carried on without a smart boat. The gondola is asource of continual expense for repairs. Its oars have to be replaced. It has to be washed with sponges, blacked, and varnished. Its bottomneeds frequent cleaning. Weeds adhere to it in the warm brackishwater, growing rapidly through the summer months, and demanding to bescrubbed off once in every four weeks. The gondolier has no placewhere he can do this for himself. He therefore takes his boat to awharf, or _squero_, as the place is called. At these _squeri_ gondolasare built as well as cleaned. The fee for a thorough setting to rightsof the boat is five francs. It must be done upon a fine day. Thus inaddition to the cost, the owner loses a good day's work. 

These details will serve to give some notion of the sort of peoplewith whom Eustace and I spent our day. The bride's house is in anexcellent position on an open canal leading from the Canalozzo to theGiudecca. She had arrived before us, and received her friends in themiddle of the room. Each of us in turn kissed her cheek and murmuredour congratulations. We found the large living-room of the housearranged with chairs all round the walls, and the company weremarshalled in some order of precedence, my friend and I taking placenear the bride. On either hand airy bedrooms opened out, and twolarge doors, wide open, gave a view from where we sat of a good-sizedkitchen. This arrangement of the house was not only comfortable, butpretty; for the bright copper pans and pipkins ranged on shelvesalong the kitchen walls had a very cheerful effect. The walls werewhitewashed, but literally covered with all sorts of pictures. A greatplaster cast from some antique, an Atys, Adonis, or Paris, looked downfrom a bracket placed between the windows. There was enough furniture, solid and well kept, in all the rooms. Among the pictures werefull-length portraits in oils of two celebrated gondoliers--one inantique costume, the other painted a few years since. The original ofthe latter soon came and stood before it. He had won regatta prizes;and the flags of four discordant colours were painted round him by theartist, who had evidently cared more to commemorate the triumphs ofhis sitter and to strike a likeness than to secure the tone of his ownpicture. This champion turned out a fine fellow--Corradini--with oneof the brightest little gondoliers of thirteen for his son. 

After the company were seated, lemonade and cakes were handed roundamid a hubbub of chattering women. Then followed cups of black coffeeand more cakes. Then a glass of Cyprus and more cakes. Then a glassof curaçoa and more cakes. Finally, a glass of noyau and still morecakes. It was only a little after seven in the morning. Yet politenesscompelled us to consume these delicacies. I tried to shirk my duty;but this discretion was taken by my hosts for well-bred modesty; andinstead of being let off, I had the richest piece of pastry and thelargest maccaroon available pressed so kindly on me, that, had theybeen poisoned, I would not have refused to eat them. The conversationgrew more, and more animated, the women gathering together in theirdresses of bright blue and scarlet, the men lighting cigars andpuffing out a few quiet words. It struck me as a drawback that thesepicturesque people had put on Sunday-clothes to look as much likeshopkeepers as possible. But they did not all of them succeed. Twohandsome women, who handed the cups round--one a brunette, the othera blonde--wore skirts of brilliant blue, with a sort of white jacket, and white kerchief folded heavily about their shoulders. The brunettehad a great string of coral, the blonde of amber, round her throat. Gold earrings and the long gold chains Venetian women wear, of allpatterns and degrees of value, abounded. Nobody appeared withoutthem; but I could not see any of an antique make. The men seemed to becontented with rings--huge, heavy rings of solid gold, worked witha rough flower pattern. One young fellow had three upon his fingers. This circumstance led me to speculate whether a certain portion atleast of this display of jewellery around me had not been borrowed forthe occasion. 

Eustace and I were treated quite like friends. They called us _ISignori_. But this was only, I think, because our English namesare quite unmanageable. The women fluttered about us and keptasking whether we really liked it all? whether we should come to the_pranzo_? whether it was true we danced? It seemed to give themunaffected pleasure to be kind to us; and when we rose to go away, thewhole company crowded round, shaking hands and saying: 'Si divertiràbene stasera!' Nobody resented our presence; what was better, no oneput himself out for us. 'Vogliono veder il nostro costume, ' I heardone woman say. 

We got home soon after eight, and, as our ancestors would have said, settled our stomachs with a dish of tea. It makes me shudder now tothink of the mixed liquids and miscellaneous cakes we had consumed atthat unwonted hour. 

At half-past three, Eustace and I again prepared ourselves for action. His gondola was in attendance, covered with the _felze_, to take us tothe house of the _sposa_. We found the canal crowded with poor peopleof the quarter--men, women, and children lining the walls along itsside, and clustering like bees upon the bridges. The water itself wasalmost choked with gondolas. Evidently the folk of San Vio thought ourwedding procession would be a most exciting pageant. We entered thehouse, and were again greeted by the bride and bridegroom, whoconsigned each of us to the control of a fair tyrant. This is the mostfitting way of describing our introduction to our partners of theevening; for we were no sooner presented, than the ladies swooped uponus like their prey, placing their shawls upon our left arms, whilethey seized and clung to what was left available of us for locomotion. There was considerable giggling and tittering throughout the companywhen Signora Fenzo, the young and comely wife of a gondolier, thustook possession of Eustace, and Signora dell' Acqua, the widow ofanother gondolier, appropriated me. The affair had been arrangedbeforehand, and their friends had probably chaffed them with thedifficulty of managing two mad Englishmen. However, they proved equalto the occasion, and the difficulties were entirely on our side. Signora Fenzo was a handsome brunette, quiet in her manners, who meantbusiness. I envied Eustace his subjection to such a reasonable being. Signora dell' Acqua, though a widow, was by no means disconsolate; andI soon perceived that it would require all the address and diplomacy Ipossessed, to make anything out of her society. She laughedincessantly; darted in the most diverse directions, dragging me alongwith her; exhibited me in triumph to her cronies; made eyes at me overa fan, repeated my clumsiest remarks, as though they gave herindescribable amusement; and all the while jabbered Venetian atexpress rate, without the slightest regard for my incapacity to followher vagaries. The _Vecchio_ marshalled us in order. First went the_sposa_ and _comare_ with the mothers of bride and bridegroom. Thenfollowed the _sposo_ and the bridesmaid. After them I was made to leadmy fair tormentor. As we descended the staircase there arose a hubbubof excitement from the crowd on the canals. The gondolas movedturbidly upon the face of the waters. The bridegroom kept muttering tohimself, 'How we shall be criticised! They will tell each other whowas decently dressed, and who stepped awkwardly into the boats, andwhat the price of my boots was!' Such exclamations, murmured atintervals, and followed by chest-drawn sighs, expressed a deeppreoccupation. With regard to his boots, he need have had no anxiety. They were of the shiniest patent leather, much too tight, and withouta speck of dust upon them. But his nervousness infected me with acruel dread. All those eyes were going to watch how we comportedourselves in jumping from the landing-steps into the boat! If thisoperation, upon a ceremonious occasion, has terrors even for agondolier, how formidable it ought to be to me! And here is theSignora dell' Acqua's white cachemire shawl dangling on one arm, andthe Signora herself languishingly clinging to the other; and thegondolas are fretting in a fury of excitement, like corks, upon thechurned green water! The moment was terrible. The _sposa_ and herthree companions had been safely stowed away beneath their _felze_. The _sposo_ had successfully handed the bridesmaid into the secondgondola. I had to perform the same office for my partner. Off shewent, like a bird, from the bank. I seized a happy moment, followed, bowed, and found myself to my contentment gracefully ensconced in acorner opposite the widow. Seven more gondolas were packed. Theprocession moved. We glided down the little channel, broke away intothe Grand Canal, crossed it, and dived into a labyrinth from which wefinally emerged before our destination, the Trattoria di San Gallo. The perils of the landing were soon over; and, with the rest of theguests, my mercurial companion and I slowly ascended a long flight ofstairs leading to a vast upper chamber. Here we were to dine. 

It had been the gallery of some palazzo in old days, was above onehundred feet in length, fairly broad, with a roof of wooden raftersand large windows opening on a courtyard garden. I could see the topsof three cypress-trees cutting the grey sky upon a level with us. A long table occupied the centre of this room. It had been laid forupwards of forty persons, and we filled it. There was plenty oflight from great glass lustres blazing with gas. When the ladies hadarranged their dresses, and the gentlemen had exchanged a few politeremarks, we all sat down to dinner--I next my inexorable widow, Eustace beside his calm and comely partner. The first impressionwas one of disappointment. It looked so like a public dinner ofmiddle-class people. There was no local character in costume orcustoms. Men and women sat politely bored, expectant, trifling withtheir napkins, yawning, muttering nothings about the weather or theirneighbours. The frozen commonplaceness of the scene was made forme still more oppressive by Signora dell' Acqua. She was evidentlysatirical, and could not be happy unless continually laughing at orwith somebody. 'What a stick the woman will think me!' I kept sayingto myself. 'How shall I ever invent jokes in this strange land? Icannot even flirt with her in Venetian! And here I have condemnedmyself--and her too, poor thing--to sit through at least three hoursof mortal dulness!' Yet the widow was by no means unattractive. Dressed in black, she had contrived by an artful arrangement of laceand jewellery to give an air of lightness to her costume. She hada pretty little pale face, a _minois chiffonné_, with slightlyturned-up nose, large laughing brown eyes, a dazzling set of teeth, and a tempestuously frizzled mop of powdered hair. When I managed toget a side-look at her quietly, without being giggled at or drivenhalf mad by unintelligible incitements to a jocularity I couldnot feel, it struck me that, if we once found a common term ofcommunication we should become good friends. But for the moment that_modus vivendi_ seemed unattainable. She had not recovered fromthe first excitement of her capture of me. She was still showingme off and trying to stir me up. The arrival of the soup gave mea momentary relief; and soon the serious business of the afternoonbegan. I may add that before dinner was over, the Signora dell' Acquaand I were fast friends. I had discovered the way of making jokes, andshe had become intelligible. I found her a very nice, though flighty, little woman; and I believe she thought me gifted with the faculty ofuttering eccentric epigrams in a grotesque tongue. Some of my remarkswere flung about the table, and had the same success as uncouthLombard carvings have with connoisseurs in _naïvetés_ of art. By thattime we had come to be _compare_ and _comare_ to each other--thesequel of some clumsy piece of jocularity. 

It was a heavy entertainment, copious in quantity, excellent inquality, plainly but well cooked. I remarked there was no fish. Thewidow replied that everybody present ate fish to satiety at home. Theydid not join a marriage feast at the San Gallo, and pay their ninefrancs, for that! It should be observed that each guest paid for hisown entertainment. This appears to be the custom. Therefore attendanceis complimentary, and the married couple are not at ruinous chargesfor the banquet. A curious feature in the whole proceeding had itsorigin in this custom. I noticed that before each cover lay an emptyplate, and that my partner began with the first course to heap uponit what she had not eaten. She also took large helpings, and keptadvising me to do the same. I said: 'No; I only take what I want toeat; if I fill that plate in front of me as you are doing, it will begreat waste. ' This remark elicited shrieks of laughter from all whoheard it; and when the hubbub had subsided, I perceived an apparentlyofficial personage bearing down upon Eustace, who was in the sameperplexity. It was then circumstantially explained to us that theempty plates were put there in order that we might lay aside what wecould not conveniently eat, and take it home with us. At the endof the dinner the widow (whom I must now call my _comare_) hadaccumulated two whole chickens, half a turkey, and a large assortmentof mixed eatables. I performed my duty and won her regard by placingdelicacies at her disposition. 

Crudely stated, this proceeding moves disgust. But that is onlybecause one has not thought the matter out. In the performance therewas nothing coarse or nasty. These good folk had made a contract atso much a head--so many fowls, so many pounds of beef, &c, to besupplied; and what they had fairly bought, they clearly had a rightto. No one, so far as I could notice, tried to take more than hisproper share; except, indeed, Eustace and myself. In our firsteagerness to conform to custom, we both overshot the mark, and grabbedat disproportionate helpings. The waiters politely observed that wewere taking what was meant for two; and as the courses followed ininterminable sequence, we soon acquired the tact of what was due tous. 

Meanwhile the room grew warm. The gentlemen threw off their coats--apleasant liberty of which I availed myself, and was immediately moreat ease. The ladies divested themselves of their shoes (strangeto relate!) and sat in comfort with their stockinged feet upon the_scagliola_ pavement. I observed that some cavaliers by specialpermission were allowed to remove their partners' slippers. This wasnot my lucky fate. My _comare_ had not advanced to that point ofintimacy. Healths began to be drunk. The conversation took a livelyturn; and women went fluttering round the table, visiting theirfriends, to sip out of their glass, and ask each other how theywere getting on. It was not long before the stiff veneer of_bourgeoisie_ which bored me had worn off. The people emerged intheir true selves: natural, gentle, sparkling with enjoyment, playful. Playful is, I think, the best word to describe them. They played withinfinite grace and innocence, like kittens, from the old men of sixtyto the little boys of thirteen. Very little wine was drunk. Each guesthad a litre placed before him. Many did not finish theirs; and forvery few was it replenished. When at last the dessert arrived, and thebride's comfits had been handed round, they began to sing. It was verypretty to see a party of three or four friends gathering round somepopular beauty, and paying her compliments in verse--they groupedbehind her chair, she sitting back in it and laughing up to them, and joining in the chorus. The words, 'Brunetta mia simpatica, ti amosempre più, ' sung after this fashion to Eustace's handsome partner, who puffed delicate whiffs from a Russian cigarette, and smiled herthanks, had a peculiar appropriateness. All the ladies, it may beobserved in passing, had by this time lit their cigarettes. The menwere smoking Toscani, Sellas, or Cavours, and the little boys weredancing round the table breathing smoke from their pert nostrils. 

The dinner, in fact, was over. Other relatives of the guests arrived, and then we saw how some of the reserved dishes were to be bestowed. Aside-table was spread at the end of the gallery, and these late-comerswere regaled with plenty by their friends. Meanwhile, the big tableat which we had dined was taken to pieces and removed. The_scagliola_ floor was swept by the waiters. Musicians camestreaming in and took their places. The ladies resumed their shoes. Every one prepared to dance. 

My friend and I were now at liberty to chat with the men. He knewsome of them by sight, and claimed acquaintance with others. Therewas plenty of talk about different boats, gondolas, and sandolos andtopos, remarks upon the past season, and inquiries as to chances ofengagements in the future. One young fellow told us how he had beendrawn for the army, and should be obliged to give up his trade justwhen he had begun to make it answer. He had got a new gondola, andthis would have to be hung up during the years of his service. Thewarehousing of a boat in these circumstances costs nearly one hundredfrancs a year, which is a serious tax upon the pockets of a private inthe line. Many questions were put in turn to us, but all of the sametenor. 'Had we really enjoyed the _pranzo_? Now, really, were weamusing ourselves? And did we think the custom of the wedding _unbel costume_?' We could give an unequivocally hearty response toall these interrogations. The men seemed pleased. Their interest inour enjoyment was unaffected. It is noticeable how often the word_divertimento_ is heard upon the lips of the Italians. They havea notion that it is the function in life of the _Signori_ toamuse themselves. 

The ball opened, and now we were much besought by the ladies. I had todeny myself with a whole series of comical excuses. Eustace performedhis duty after a stiff English fashion--once with his pretty partnerof the _pranzo_, and once again with a fat gondolier. The bandplayed waltzes and polkas, chiefly upon patriotic airs--the MarciaReale, Garibaldi's Hymn, &c. Men danced with men, women with women, little boys and girls together. The gallery whirled with a laughingcrowd. There was plenty of excitement and enjoyment--not an unseemlyor extravagant word or gesture. My _comare_ careered about with alight mænadic impetuosity, which made me regret my inability to accepther pressing invitations. She pursued me into every corner of theroom, but when at last I dropped excuses and told her that my realreason for not dancing was that it would hurt my health, she waivedher claims at once with an _Ah, poverino!_

Some time after midnight we felt that we had had enough of_divertimento_. Francesco helped us to slip out unobserved. Withmany silent good wishes we left the innocent playful people who hadbeen so kind to us. The stars were shining from a watery sky as wepassed into the piazza beneath the Campanile and the pinnacles ofS. Mark. The Riva was almost empty, and the little waves fretted theboats moored to the piazzetta, as a warm moist breeze went flutteringby. We smoked a last cigar, crossed our _traghetto_, and weresoon sound asleep at the end of a long pleasant day. The ball, weheard next morning, finished about four. 

Since that evening I have had plenty of opportunities for seeing myfriends the gondoliers, both in their own homes and in my apartment. Several have entertained me at their mid-day meal of fried fishand amber-coloured polenta. These repasts were always cooked withscrupulous cleanliness, and served upon a table covered with coarselinen. The polenta is turned out upon a wooden platter, and cut witha string called _lassa_. You take a large slice of it on thepalm of the left hand, and break it with the fingers of the right. Wholesome red wine of the Paduan district and good white bread werenever wanting. The rooms in which we met to eat looked out on narrowlanes or over pergolas of yellowing vines. Their whitewashed wallswere hung with photographs of friends and foreigners, many of themsouvenirs from English or American employers. The men, in broadblack hats and lilac shirts, sat round the table, girt with the redwaist-wrapper, or _fascia_, which marks the ancient faction ofthe Castellani. The other faction, called Nicolotti, are distinguishedby a black _assisa_. The quarters of the town are dividedunequally and irregularly into these two parties. What was once aformidable rivalry between two sections of the Venetian populace, still survives in challenges to trials of strength and skill upon thewater. The women, in their many-coloured kerchiefs, stirred polenta atthe smoke-blackened chimney, whose huge pent-house roof projects twofeet or more across the hearth. When they had served the table theytook their seat on low stools, knitted stockings, or drank out ofglasses handed across the shoulder to them by their lords. Some ofthese women were clearly notable housewives, and I have no reason tosuppose that they do not take their full share of the housework. Boysand girls came in and out, and got a portion of the dinner to consumewhere they thought best. Children went tottering about upon thered-brick floor, the playthings of those hulking fellows, who handledthem very gently and spoke kindly in a sort of confidential whisperto their ears. These little ears were mostly pierced for earrings, andthe light blue eyes of the urchins peeped maliciously beneath shocksof yellow hair. A dog was often of the party. He ate fish like hismasters, and was made to beg for it by sitting up and rowing withhis paws. _Voga, Azzò, voga!_ The Anzolo who talked thus tohis little brown Spitz-dog has the hoarse voice of a Triton and themovement of an animated sea-wave. Azzo performed his trick, swallowedhis fish-bones, and the fiery Anzolo looked round approvingly. 

On all these occasions I have found these gondoliers the samesympathetic, industrious, cheery affectionate folk. They live in manyrespects a hard and precarious life. The winter in particular is atime of anxiety, and sometimes of privation, even to the well-to-doamong them. Work then is scarce, and what there is, is rendereddisagreeable to them by the cold. Yet they take their chance withfacile temper, and are not soured by hardships. The amenities of theVenetian sea and air, the healthiness of the lagoons, the cheerfulbustle of the poorer quarters, the brilliancy of this Southernsunlight, and the beauty which is everywhere apparent, must bereckoned as important factors in the formation of their character. Andof that character, as I have said, the final note is playfulness. In spite of difficulties, their life has never been stern enough tosadden them. Bare necessities are marvellously cheap, and the pinchof real bad weather--such frost as locked the lagoons in ice two yearsago, or such south-western gales as flooded the basement floors ofall the houses on the Zattere--is rare and does not last long. On theother hand, their life has never been so lazy as to reduce them tothe savagery of the traditional Neapolitan lazzaroni. They have hadto work daily for small earnings, but under favourable conditions, and their labour has been lightened by much good-fellowship amongthemselves, by the amusements of their _feste_ and their singingclubs. 

Of course it is not easy for a stranger in a very different socialposition to feel that he has been admitted to their confidence. Italians have an ineradicable habit of making themselves externallyagreeable, of bending in all indifferent matters to the whims andwishes of superiors, and of saying what they think _Signori_like. This habit, while it smoothes the surface of existence, raisesup a barrier of compliment and partial insincerity, against which themore downright natures of us Northern folk break in vain efforts. Ouradvances are met with an imperceptible but impermeable resistance bythe very people who are bent on making the world pleasant to us. Itis the very reverse of that dour opposition which a Lowland Scot ora North English peasant offers to familiarity; but it is hardly lessinsurmountable. The treatment, again, which Venetians of the lowerclass have received through centuries from their own nobility, makesattempts at fraternisation on the part of gentlemen unintelligible tothem. The best way, here and elsewhere, of overcoming these obstaclesis to have some bond of work or interest in common--of service on theone side rendered, and goodwill on the other honestly displayed. Themen of whom I have been speaking will, I am convinced, not shirk theirshare of duty or make unreasonable claims upon the generosity of theiremployers. 

 * * * * *

_A CINQUE CENTO BRUTUS_

I. --THE SESTIERE DI SAN POLO

There is a quarter of Venice not much visited by tourists, lying asit does outside their beat, away from the Rialto, at a considerabledistance from the Frari and San Rocco, in what might almost pass for acity separated by a hundred miles from the Piazza. This is the quarterof San Polo, one corner of which, somewhere between the back ofthe Palazzo Foscari and the Campo di San Polo, was the scene ofa memorable act of vengeance in the year 1546. Here Lorenzino de'Medici, the murderer of his cousin Alessandro, was at last trackeddown and put to death by paid cut-throats. How they succeeded in theirpurpose, we know in every detail from the narrative dictated by thechief assassin. His story so curiously illustrates the conditions oflife in Italy three centuries ago, that I have thought it worthy ofabridgment. But, in order to make it intelligible, and to paint themanners of the times more fully, I must first relate the series ofevents which led to Lorenzino's murder of his cousin Alessandro, andfrom that to his own subsequent assassination. Lorenzino de' Medici, the Florentine Brutus of the sixteenth century, is the hero of thetragedy. Some of his relatives, however, must first appear upon thescene before he enters with a patriot's knife concealed beneath acourt-fool's bauble. 

II. --THE MURDER OF IPPOLITO DE' MEDICI

After the final extinction of the Florentine Republic, the hopes ofthe Medici, who now aspired to the dukedom of Tuscany, rested on threebastards--Alessandro, the reputed child of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino;Ippolito, the natural son of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours; and Giulio, the offspring of an elder Giuliano, who was at this time Pope, withthe title of Clement VII. Clement had seen Rome sacked in 1527 by ahorde of freebooters fighting under the Imperial standard, and hadused the remnant of these troops, commanded by the Prince of Orange, to crush his native city in the memorable siege of 1529-30. He nowdetermined to rule Florence from the Papal chair by the help of thetwo bastard cousins I have named. Alessandro was created Duke ofCività di Penna, and sent to take the first place in the city. Ippolito was made a cardinal; since the Medici had learned that Romewas the real basis of their power, and it was undoubtedly in Clement'spolicy to advance this scion of his house to the Papacy. The solesurviving representative of the great Lorenzo de' Medici's legitimateblood was Catherine, daughter of the Duke of Urbino by Madeleine de laTour d'Auvergne. She was pledged in marriage to the Duke of Orleans, who was afterwards Henry II. Of France. A natural daughter ofthe Emperor Charles V. Was provided for her putative half-brotherAlessandro. By means of these alliances the succession of Ippolitoto the Papal chair would have been secured, and the strength of theMedici would have been confirmed in Tuscany, but for the disasterswhich have now to be related. 

Between the cousins Alessandro and Ippolito there was no love lost. Asboys, they had both played the part of princes in Florence under theguardianship of the Cardinal Passerini da Cortona. The higher rankhad then been given to Ippolito, who bore the title of Magnifico, andseemed thus designated for the lordship of the city. Ippolito, thoughonly half a Medici, was of more authentic lineage than Alessandro; forno proof positive could be adduced that the latter was even a spuriouschild of the Duke of Urbino. He bore obvious witness to his mother'sblood upon his mulatto's face; but this mother was the wife of agroom, and it was certain that in the court of Urbino she had not beenchary of her favours. The old magnificence of taste, the patronageof art and letters, and the preference for liberal studies whichdistinguished Casa Medici, survived in Ippolito; whereas Alessandromanifested only the brutal lusts of a debauched tyrant. It wastherefore with great reluctance that, moved by reasons of state anddomestic policy, Ippolito saw himself compelled to accept the scarlethat. Alessandro having been recognised as a son of the Duke of Urbino, had become half-brother to the future Queen of France. To treat him asthe head of the family was a necessity thrust, in the extremity ofthe Medicean fortunes, upon Clement. Ippolito, who more entirelyrepresented the spirit of the house, was driven to assume the positionof a cadet, with all the uncertainties of an ecclesiastical career. 

In these circumstances Ippolito had not strength of character tosacrifice himself for the consolidation of the Medicean power, whichcould only have been effected by maintaining a close bond of unionbetween its members. The death of Clement in 1534 obscured hisprospects in the Church. He was still too young to intrigue for thetiara. The new Pope, Alessandro Farnese, soon after his election, displayed a vigour which was unexpected from his age, together witha nepotism which his previous character had scarcely warranted. TheCardinal de' Medici felt himself excluded and oppressed. He joined theparty of those numerous Florentine exiles, headed by Filippo Strozzi, and the Cardinals Salviati and Ridolfi, all of whom were connectedby marriage with the legitimate Medici, and who unanimously hated andwere jealous of the Duke of Cività di Penna. On the score of policy itis difficult to condemn this step. Alessandro's hold upon Florence wasstill precarious, nor had he yet married Margaret of Austria. PerhapsIppolito was right in thinking he had less to gain from his cousinthan from the anti-Medicean faction and the princes of the Church whofavoured it. But he did not play his cards well. He quarrelled withthe new Pope, Paul III. , and by his vacillations led the Florentineexiles to suspect he might betray them. 

In the summer of 1535 Ippolito was at Itri, a little town not farfrom Gaeta and Terracina, within easy reach of Fondi, where dwelt thebeautiful Giulia Gonzaga. To this lady the Cardinal paid assiduouscourt, passing his time with her in the romantic scenery of thatworld-famous Capuan coast. On the 5th of August his seneschal, Giovann' Andrea, of Borgo San Sepolcro, brought him a bowl ofchicken-broth, after drinking which he exclaimed to one of hisattendants, 'I have been poisoned, and the man who did it is Giovann'Andrea. ' The seneschal was taken and tortured, and confessed that hehad mixed a poison with the broth. Four days afterwards the Cardinaldied, and a post-mortem examination showed that the omentum had beeneaten by some corrosive substance. Giovann' Andrea was sent in chainsto Rome; but in spite of his confession, more than once repeated, thecourt released him. He immediately took refuge with Alessandro de'Medici in Florence, whence he repaired to Borgo San Sepolcro, andwas, at the close of a few months, there murdered by the people of theplace. From these circumstances it was conjectured, not without goodreason, that Alessandro had procured his cousin's death; and a certainCaptain Pignatta, of low birth in Florence, a bravo and a coward, was believed to have brought the poison to Itri from the Duke. TheMedicean courtiers at Florence did not disguise their satisfaction;and one of them exclaimed, with reference to the event, 'We know howto brush flies from our noses!'

III. --THE MURDER OF ALESSANDRO DE' MEDICI

Having removed his cousin and rival from the scene, Alessandro de'Medici plunged with even greater effrontery into the cruelties anddebaucheries which made him odious in Florence. It seemed as thoughfortune meant to smile on him; for in this same year (1535) CharlesV. Decided at Naples in his favour against the Florentine exiles, who were pleading their own cause and that of the city injured by histyrannies; and in February of the following year he married Margaretof Austria, the Emperor's natural daughter. Francesco Guicciardini, the first statesman and historian of his age, had undertaken hisdefence, and was ready to support him by advice and countenance inthe conduct of his government. Within the lute of this prosperity, however, there was one little rift. For some months past he hadclosely attached to his person a certain kinsman, Lorenzo de' Medici, who was descended in the fourth generation from Lorenzo, the brotherof Cosimo Pater Patriæ. This Lorenzo, or Lorenzino, or Lorenzaccio, as his most intimate acquaintances called him, was destined to murderAlessandro; and it is worthy of notice that the Duke had receivedfrequent warnings of his fate. A Perugian page, for instance, whosuffered from some infirmity, saw in a dream that Lorenzino would killhis master. Astrologers predicted that the Duke must die by having histhroat cut. One of them is said to have named Lorenzo de' Medici asthe assassin; and another described him so accurately that there wasno mistaking the man. Moreover, Madonna Lucrezia Salviati wrote to theDuke from Rome that he should beware of a certain person, indicatingLorenzino; and her daughter, Madonna Maria, told him to his faceshe hated the young man, 'because I know he means to murder you, and murder you he will. ' Nor was this all. The Duke's favouritebody-servants mistrusted Lorenzino. On one occasion, when Alessandroand Lorenzino, attended by a certain Giomo, were escalading a wall atnight, as was their wont upon illicit love-adventures, Giomo whisperedto his master: 'Ah, my lord, do let me cut the rope, and rid ourselvesof him!' To which the Duke replied: 'No, I do not want this; but if hecould, I know he'd twist it round my neck. '

In spite, then, of these warnings and the want of confidence he felt, the Duke continually lived with Lorenzino, employing him as pander inhis intrigues, and preferring his society to that of simpler men. Whenhe rode abroad, he took this evil friend upon his crupper; althoughhe knew for certain that Lorenzino had stolen a tight-fitting vest ofmail he used to wear, and, while his arms were round his waist, wasalways meditating how to stick a poignard in his body. He trusted, so it seems, to his own great strength and to the other's physicalweakness. 

At this point, since Lorenzino is the principal actor in the two-actdrama which follows, it will be well to introduce him to the reader inthe words of Varchi, who was personally acquainted with him. Born atFlorence in 1514, he was left early by his father's death to thesole care of his mother, Maria Soderini, 'a lady of rare prudenceand goodness, who attended with the utmost pains and diligence to hiseducation. No sooner, however, had he acquired the rudiments of humanelearning, which, being of very quick parts, he imbibed with incrediblefacility, than he began to display a restless mind, insatiable andappetitive of vice. Soon afterwards, under the rule and discipline ofFilippo Strozzi, he made open sport of all things human and divine;and preferring the society of low persons, who not only flattered himbut were congenial to his tastes, he gave free rein to his desires, especially in affairs of love, without regard for sex or age orquality, and in his secret soul, while he lavished feigned caressesupon every one he saw, felt no esteem for any living being. Hethirsted strangely for glory, and omitted no point of deed or wordthat might, he thought, procure him the reputation of a man of spiritor of wit. He was lean of person, somewhat slightly built, and onthis account people called him Lorenzino. He never laughed, but had asneering smile; and although he was rather distinguished by grace thanbeauty, his countenance being dark and melancholy, still in the flowerof his age he was beloved beyond all measure by Pope Clement; in spiteof which he had it in his mind (according to what he said himselfafter killing the Duke Alessandro) to have murdered him. He broughtFrancesco di Raffaello de' Medici, the Pope's rival, who was a youngman of excellent attainments and the highest hope, to such extremitythat he lost his wits, and became the sport of the whole court atRome, and was sent back, as a lesser evil, as a confirmed madman toFlorence. ' Varchi proceeds to relate how Lorenzino fellinto disfavour with the Pope and the Romans by chopping the heads offstatues from the arch of Constantine and other monuments; for whichact of vandalism Molsa impeached him in the Roman Academy, and a pricewas set upon his head. Having returned to Florence, he proceededto court Duke Alessandro, into whose confidence he wormed himself, pretending to play the spy upon the exiles, and affecting a personaltimidity which put the Prince off his guard. Alessandro called him'the philosopher, ' because he conversed in solitude with his ownthoughts and seemed indifferent to wealth and office. But all thiswhile Lorenzino was plotting how to murder him. 

Giovio's account of this strange intimacy may be added, since itcompletes the picture I have drawn from Varchi:--'Lorenzo made himselfthe accomplice and instrument of those amorous amusements for whichthe Duke had an insatiable appetite, with the object of deceiving him. He was singularly well furnished with all the scoundrelly arts andtrained devices of the pander's trade; composed fine verses to inciteto lust; wrote and represented comedies in Italian; and pretendedto take pleasure only in such tricks and studies. Therefore he nevercarried arms like other courtiers, and feigned to be afraid of blood, a man who sought tranquillity at any price. Besides, he bore a pallidcountenance and melancholy brow, walking alone, talking very littleand with few persons. He haunted solitary places apart from the city, and showed such plain signs of hypochondria that some began covertlyto pass jokes on him. Certain others, who were more acute, suspectedthat he was harbouring and devising in his mind some terribleenterprise. ' The Prologue to Lorenzino's own comedy of 'Aridosiso'brings the sardonic, sneering, ironical man vividly before us. He calls himself 'un certo omiciatto, che non è nessun di voi cheveggendolo non l'avesse a noia, pensando che egli abbia fatto unacommedia;' and begs the audience to damn his play to save him thetedium of writing another. Criticised by the light of his subsequentactions, this prologue may even be understood to contain a covertpromise of the murder he was meditating. 

'In this way, ' writes Varchi, 'the Duke had taken such familiaritywith Lorenzo, that, not content with making use of him as a ruffianin his dealings with women, whether religious or secular, maidensor wives or widows, noble or plebeian, young or elderly, as it mighthappen, he applied to him to procure for his pleasure a half-sister ofLorenzo's own mother, a young lady of marvellous beauty, but not lesschaste than beautiful, who was the wife of Lionardo Ginori, and livednot far from the back entrance to the palace of the Medici. ' Lorenzinoundertook this odious commission, seeing an opportunity to work hisdesigns against the Duke. But first he had to form an accomplice, since he could not hope to carry out the murder without help. A bravo, called Michele del Tavolaccino, but better known by the nickname ofScoronconcolo, struck him as a fitting instrument. He had procuredthis man's pardon for a homicide, and it appears that the fellowretained a certain sense of gratitude. Lorenzino began by telling theman there was a courtier who put insults upon him, and Scoronconcoloprofessed his readiness to kill the knave. 'Sia chi si voglia; iol'ammazzerò, se fosse Cristo. ' Up to the last minute the name ofAlessandro was not mentioned. Having thus secured his assistant, Lorenzino chose a night when he knew that Alessandro Vitelli, captainof the Duke's guard, would be from home. Then, after supper, hewhispered in Alessandro's ear that at last he had seduced his auntwith an offer of money, and that she would come to his, Lorenzo'schamber at the service of the Duke that night. Only the Duke mustappear at the rendezvous alone, and when he had arrived, the ladyshould be fetched. 'Certain it is, ' says Varchi, 'that the Duke, having donned a cloak of satin in the Neapolitan style, lined withsable, when he went to take his gloves, and there were some of mailand some of perfumed leather, hesitated awhile and said: "Which shallI choose, those of war, or those of love-making?"' He took the latterand went out with only four attendants, three of whom he dismissedupon the Piazza di San Marco, while one was stationed just oppositeLorenzo's house, with strict orders not to stir if he should see folkenter or issue thence. But this fellow, called the Hungarian, afterwaiting a great while, returned to the Duke's chamber, and there wentto sleep. 

Meanwhile Lorenzino received Alessandro in his bedroom, where therewas a good fire. The Duke unbuckled his sword, which Lorenzino took, and having entangled the belt with the hilt, so that it should notreadily be drawn, laid it on the pillow. The Duke had flung himselfalready on the bed, and hid himself among the curtains--doing this, itis supposed, to save himself from the trouble of paying compliments tothe lady when she should arrive. For Caterina Ginori had the fame ofa fair speaker, and Alessandro was aware of his own incapacity to playthe part of a respectful lover. Nothing could more strongly point theman's brutality than this act, which contributed in no small measureto his ruin. 

Lorenzino left the Duke upon the bed, and went at once forScoronconcolo. He told him that the enemy was caught, and bade himonly mind the work he had to do. 'That will I do, ' the bravo answered, 'even though it were the Duke himself. ' 'You've hit the mark, ' saidLorenzino with a face of joy; 'he cannot slip through our fingers. Come!' So they mounted to the bedroom, and Lorenzino, knowing wherethe Duke was laid, cried: 'Sir, are you asleep?' and therewith ranhim through the back. Alessandro was sleeping, or pretending tosleep, face downwards, and the sword passed through his kidneys anddiaphragm. But it did not kill him. He slipped from the bed, andseized a stool to parry the next blow. Scoronconcolo now stabbed himin the face, while Lorenzino forced him back upon the bed; and thenbegan a hideous struggle. In order to prevent his cries, Lorenzinodoubled his fist into the Duke's mouth. Alessandro seized the thumbbetween his teeth, and held it in a vice until he died. This disabledLorenzino, who still lay upon his victim's body, and Scoronconcolocould not strike for fear of wounding his master. Between the writhingcouple he made, however, several passes with his sword, which onlypierced the mattress. Then he drew a knife and drove it into theDuke's throat, and bored about till he had severed veins and windpipe. 

IV. --THE FLIGHT OF LORENZINO DE' MEDICI

Alessandro was dead. His body fell to earth. The two murderers, drenched with blood, lifted it up, and placed it on the bed, wrappedin the curtains, as they had found him first. Then Lorenzino went tothe window, which looked out upon the Via Larga, and opened it to restand breathe a little air. After this he called for Scoronconcolo'sboy, Il Freccia, and bade him look upon the dead man. Il Frecciarecognised the Duke. But why Lorenzino did this, no one knew. Itseemed, as Varchi says, that, having planned the murder with greatability, and executed it with daring, his good sense and good luckforsook him. He made no use of the crime he had committed; and fromthat day forward till his own assassination, nothing prospered withhim. Indeed, the murder of Alessandro appears to have been almostmotiveless, considered from the point of view of practical politics. Varchi assumes that Lorenzino's burning desire of glory prompted thedeed; and when he had acquired the notoriety he sought, there was anend to his ambition. This view is confirmed by the Apology he wroteand published for his act. It remains one of the most pregnant, bold, and brilliant pieces of writing which we possess in favour oftyrannicide from that epoch of insolent crime and audacious rhetoric. So energetic is the style, and so biting the invective of thismasterpiece, in which the author stabs a second time his victim, thatboth Giordani and Leopardi affirmed it to be the only true monument ofeloquence in the Italian language. If thirst for glory was Lorenzino'sprincipal incentive, immediate glory was his guerdon. He escaped thatsame night with Scoronconcolo and Freccia to Bologna, where he stayedto dress his thumb, and then passed forward to Venice. Filippo Strozzithere welcomed him as the new Brutus, gave him money, and promised tomarry his two sons to the two sisters of the tyrant-killer. Poems werewritten and published by the most famous men of letters, includingBenedetto Varchi and Francesco Maria Molsa, in praise of the TuscanBrutus, the liberator of his country from a tyrant. A bronze medalwas struck bearing his name, with a profile copied from Michelangelo'sbust of Brutus. On the obverse are two daggers and a cup, and the dateviii. Id. Jan. 

The immediate consequence of Alessandro's murder was the elevationof Cosimo, son of Giovanni delle Bande Nere, and second cousin ofLorenzino, to the duchy. At the ceremony of his investiture withthe ducal honours, Cosimo solemnly undertook to revenge Alessandro'smurder. In the following March he buried his predecessor with pompin San Lorenzo. The body was placed beside the bones of the Duke ofUrbino in the marble chest of Michelangelo, and here not many yearsago it was discovered. Soon afterwards Lorenzino was declared a rebel. His portrait was painted according to old Tuscan precedent, headdownwards, and suspended by one foot, upon the wall of the fort builtby Alessandro. His house was cut in twain from roof to pavement, anda narrow lane was driven through it, which received the title ofTraitor's Alley, _Chiasso del Traditore_. The price of fourthousand golden florins was put upon his head, together with thefurther sum of one hundred florins per annum in perpetuity to be paidto the murderer and his direct heirs in succession, by the Otto diBalia. Moreover, the man who killed Lorenzino was to enjoy all civicprivileges; exemption from all taxes, ordinary and extraordinary; theright of carrying arms, together with two attendants, in the city andthe whole domain of Florence; and the further prerogative of restoringten outlaws at his choice. If Lorenzino could be captured and broughtalive to Florence, the whole of this reward would be doubled. 

This decree was promulgated in April 1537, and thenceforward Lorenzinode' Medici lived a doomed man. The assassin, who had been proclaimed aBrutus by Tuscan exiles and humanistic enthusiasts, was regarded as aJudas by the common people. Ballads were written on him with the titleof the 'Piteous and sore lament made unto himself by Lorenzino de'Medici, who murdered the most illustrious Duke Alessandro. ' He hadbecome a wild beast, whom it was honourable to hunt down, a pest whichit was righteous to extirpate. Yet fate delayed nine years to overtakehim. What remains to be told about his story must be extractedfrom the narrative of the bravo who succeeded, with the aid of anaccomplice, in despatching him at Venice. [13] So far as possible, I shall use the man's own words, translating them literally, andomitting only unimportant details. The narrative throws brilliantlight upon the manners and movements of professional cut-throats atthat period in Italy. It seems to have been taken down from the heroFrancesco, or Cecco, Bibboni's lips; and there is no doubt that wepossess in it a valuable historical document for the illustration ofcontemporary customs. It offers in all points a curious parallelto Cellini's account of his own homicides and hair-breadth escapes. Moreover, it is confirmed in its minutest circumstances by the recordsof the criminal courts of Venice in the sixteenth century. This I canattest from recent examination of MSS. Relating to the _Signoridi Notte_ and the _Esecutori contro la Bestemmia_, which arepreserved among the Archives at the Frari. 

V. --THE MURDER OF LORENZINO DE' MEDICI

'When I returned from Germany, ' begins Bibboni, 'where I had been inthe pay of the Emperor, I found at Vicenza Bebo da Volterra, who wasstaying in the house of M. Antonio da Roma, a nobleman of that city. This gentleman employed him because of a great feud he had; and he wasmighty pleased, moreover, at my coming, and desired that I too shouldtake up my quarters in his palace. '

This paragraph strikes the keynote of the whole narrative, andintroduces us to the company we are about to keep. The noblemen ofthat epoch, if they had private enemies, took into their servicesoldiers of adventure, partly to protect their persons, but also tomake war, when occasion offered, on their foes. The _bravi_, asthey were styled, had quarters assigned them in the basement ofthe palace, where they might be seen swaggering about the door orflaunting their gay clothes behind the massive iron bars of thewindows which opened on the streets. When their master went abroadat night they followed him, and were always at hand to perform secretservices in love affairs, assassination, and espial. For the rest, they haunted taverns, and kept up correspondence with prostitutes. AnItalian city had a whole population of such fellows, the offscouringsof armies, drawn from all nations, divided by their allegiance of thetime being into hostile camps, but united by community of interest andoccupation, and ready to combine against the upper class, upon whosevices, enmities, and cowardice they throve. 

Bibboni proceeds to say how another gentleman of Vicenza, M. FrancescoManente, had at this time a feud with certain of the Guazzi and theLaschi, which had lasted several years, and cost the lives of manymembers of both parties and their following. M. Francesco being afriend of M. Antonio, besought that gentleman to lend him Bibboni andBebo for a season; and the two _bravi_ went together with theirnew master to Celsano, a village in the neighbourhood. 'There bothparties had estates, and all of them kept armed men in their houses, so that not a day passed without feats of arms, and always there wassome one killed or wounded. One day, soon afterwards, the leaders ofour party resolved to attack the foe in their house, where we killedtwo, and the rest, numbering five men, entrenched themselves ina ground-floor apartment; whereupon we took possession of theirharquebuses and other arms, which forced them to abandon the villa andretire to Vicenza; and within a short space of time this great feudwas terminated by an ample peace. ' After this Bebo took service withthe Rector of the University in Padua, and was transferred by his newpatron to Milan. Bibboni remained at Vicenza with M. Galeazzo dellaSeta, who stood in great fear of his life, notwithstanding the peacewhich had been concluded between the two factions. At the end of tenmonths he returned to M. Antonio da Roma and his six brothers, 'all ofwhom being very much attached to me, they proposed that I shouldlive my life with them, for good or ill, and be treated as one of thefamily; upon the understanding that if war broke out and I wanted totake part in it, I should always have twenty-five crowns and arms andhorse, with welcome home, so long as I lived; and in case I did notcare to join the troops, the same provision for my maintenance. '

From these details we comprehend the sort of calling which a bravoof Bibboni's species followed. Meanwhile Bebo was at Milan. 'There ithappened that M. Francesco Vinta, of Volterra, was on embassy fromthe Duke of Florence. He saw Bebo, and asked him what he was doing inMilan, and Bebo answered that he was a knight errant. ' This phrase, derived no doubt from the romantic epics then in vogue, was a prettyeuphemism for a rogue of Bebo's quality. The ambassador now begancautiously to sound his man, who seems to have been outlawed from theTuscan duchy, telling him he knew a way by which he might return withfavour to his home, and at last disclosing the affair of Lorenzo. Bebowas puzzled at first, but when he understood the matter, he professedhis willingness, took letters from the envoy to the Duke of Florence, and, in a private audience with Cosimo, informed him that he was readyto attempt Lorenzino's assassination. He added that 'he had a comradefit for such a job, whose fellow for the business could not easily befound. '

Bebo now travelled to Vicenza, and opened the whole matter to Bibboni, who weighed it well, and at last, being convinced that the Duke'scommission to his comrade was _bona fide_, determined to take hisshare in the undertaking. The two agreed to have no accomplices. They went to Venice, and 'I, ' says Bibboni, 'being most intimatelyacquainted with all that city, and provided there with many friends, soon quietly contrived to know where Lorenzino lodged, and took a roomin the neighbourhood, and spent some days in seeing how we best mightrule our conduct. ' Bibboni soon discovered that Lorenzino never lefthis palace; and he therefore remained in much perplexity, until, bygood luck, Ruberto Strozzi arrived from France in Venice, bringing inhis train a Navarrese servant, who had the nickname of Spagnoletto. This fellow was a great friend of the bravo. They met, and Bibbonitold him that he should like to go and kiss the hands of MesserRuberto, whom he had known in Rome. Strozzi inhabited the same palaceas Lorenzino. 'When we arrived there, both Messer Ruberto and Lorenzowere leaving the house, and there were around them so many gentlemenand other persons, that I could not present myself, and bothstraightway stepped into the gondola. Then I, not having seen Lorenzofor a long while past, and because he was very quietly attired, couldnot recognise the man exactly, but only as it were between certaintyand doubt. Wherefore I said to Spagnoletto, "I think I know thatgentleman, but don't remember where I saw him. " And Messer Ruberto wasgiving him his right hand. Then Spagnoletto answered, "You know himwell enough; he is Messer Lorenzo. But see you tell this to nobody. Hegoes by the name of Messer Dario, because he lives in great fearfor his safety, and people don't know that he is now in Venice. " Ianswered that I marvelled much, and if I could have helped him, wouldhave done so willingly. Then I asked where they were going, and hesaid, to dine with Messer Giovanni della Casa, who was the Pope'sLegate. I did not leave the man till I had drawn from him all Irequired. '

Thus spoke the Italian Judas. The appearance of La Casa on thescene is interesting. He was the celebrated author of the scandalous'Capitolo del Forno, ' the author of many sublime and melancholysonnets, who was now at Venice, prosecuting a charge of heresy againstPier Paolo Vergerio, and paying his addresses to a noble lady of theQuirini family. It seems that on the territory of San Marco he madecommon cause with the exiles from Florence, for he was himself bybirth a Florentine, and he had no objection to take Brutus-Lorenzinoby the hand. 

After the noblemen had rowed off in their gondola to dine with theLegate, Bibboni and his friend entered their palace, where he foundanother old acquaintance, the house-steward, or _spenditore_ ofLorenzo. From him he gathered much useful information. Pietro Strozzi, it seems, had allowed the tyrannicide one thousand five hundred crownsa year, with the keep of three brave and daring companions (_trecompagni bravi e facinorosi_), and a palace worth fifty crowns onlease. But Lorenzo had just taken another on the Campo di San Polo atthree hundred crowns a year, for which swagger (_altura_) PietroStrozzi had struck a thousand crowns off his allowance. Bibboni alsolearned that he was keeping house with his uncle, Alessandro Soderini, another Florentine outlaw, and that he was ardently in love with acertain beautiful Barozza. This woman was apparently one of the grandcourtesans of Venice. He further ascertained the date when he wasgoing to move into the palace at San Polo, and, 'to put it briefly, knew everything he did, and, as it were, how many times a day hespit. ' Such were the intelligences of the servants' hall, and of suchvalue were they to men of Bibboni's calling. 

In the Carnival of 1546 Lorenzo meant to go masqued in the habit ofa gipsy woman to the square of San Spirito, where there was to be ajoust. Great crowds of people would assemble, and Bibboni hoped todo his business there. The assassination, however, failed on thisoccasion, and Lorenzo took up his abode in the palace he had hiredupon the Campo di San Polo. This Campo is one of the largest openplaces in Venice, shaped irregularly, with a finely curving line uponthe western side, where two of the noblest private houses in the cityare still standing. Nearly opposite these, in the south-western angle, stands, detached, the little old church of San Polo. One of its sideentrances opens upon the square; the other on a lane, which leadseventually to the Frari. There is nothing in Bibboni's narrative tomake it clear where Lorenzo hired his dwelling. But it would seemfrom certain things which he says later on, that in order to enter thechurch his victim had to cross the square. Meanwhile Bibboni took theprecaution of making friends with a shoemaker, whose shop commandedthe whole Campo, including Lorenzo's palace. In this shop he began tospend much of his time; 'and oftentimes I feigned to be asleep;but God knows whether I was sleeping, for my mind, at any rate, waswide-awake. '

A second convenient occasion for murdering Lorenzo soon seemed tooffer. He was bidden to dine with Monsignor della Casa; and Bibboni, putting a bold face on, entered the Legate's palace, having leftBebo below in the loggia, fully resolved to do the business. 'But wefound, ' he says, 'that, they had gone to dine at Murano, so that weremained with our tabors in their bag. ' The island of Murano at thatperiod was a favourite resort of the Venetian nobles, especially ofthe more literary and artistic, who kept country-houses there, wherethey enjoyed the fresh air of the lagoons and the quiet of theirgardens. 

The third occasion, after all these weeks of watching, brought successto Bibboni's schemes. He had observed how Lorenzo occasionally so farbroke his rules of caution as to go on foot, past the church of SanPolo, to visit the beautiful Barozza; and he resolved, if possible, to catch him on one of these journeys. 'It so chanced on the 28th ofFebruary, which was the second Sunday of Lent, that having gone, aswas my wont, to pry out whether Lorenzo would give orders for goingabroad that day, I entered the shoemaker's shop, and stayed awhile, until Lorenzo came to the window with a napkin round his neck for hewas combing his hair--and at the same moment I saw a certain GiovanBattista Martelli, who kept his sword for the defence of Lorenzo'sperson, enter and come forth again. Concluding that they wouldprobably go abroad, I went home to get ready and procure the necessaryweapons, and there I found Bebo asleep in bed, and made him get up atonce, and we came to our accustomed post of observation, by the churchof San Polo, where our men would have to pass. ' Bibboni now retired tohis friend the shoemaker's, and Bebo took up his station at one ofthe side-doors of San Polo; 'and, as good luck would have it, GiovanBattista Martelli came forth, and walked a piece in front, and thenLorenzo came, and then Alessandro Soderini, going the one behind theother, like storks, and Lorenzo, on entering the church, and liftingup the curtain of the door, was seen from the opposite door by Bebo, who at the same time noticed how I had left the shop, and so we metupon the street as we had agreed, and he told me that Lorenzo wasinside the church. '

To any one who knows the Campo di San Polo, it will be apparent thatLorenzo had crossed from the western side of the piazza and enteredthe church by what is technically called its northern door. Bebo, stationed at the southern door, could see him when he pushed the heavy_stoia_ or leather curtain aside, and at the same time couldobserve Bibboni's movements in the cobbler's shop. Meanwhile Lorenzowalked across the church and came to the same door where Bebo had beenstanding. 'I saw him issue from the church and take the main street;then came Alessandro Soderini, and I walked last of all; and whenwe reached the point we had determined on, I jumped in frontof Alessandro with the poignard in my hand, crying, "Hold hard, Alessandro, and get along with you in God's name, for we are not herefor you!" He then threw himself around my waist, and grasped my arms, and kept on calling out. Seeing how wrong I had been to try to sparehis life, I wrenched myself as well as I could from his grip, and withmy lifted poignard struck him, as God willed, above the eyebrow, and alittle blood trickled from the wound. He, in high fury, gave me such athrust that I fell backward, and the ground besides was slipperyfrom having rained a little. Then Alessandro drew his sword, which hecarried in its scabbard, and thrust at me in front, and struck me onthe corslet, which for my good fortune was of double mail. Before Icould get ready I received three passes, which, had I worn a doubletinstead of that mailed corslet, would certainly have run me through. At the fourth pass I had regained my strength and spirit, and closedwith him, and stabbed him four times in the head, and being so closehe could not use his sword, but tried to parry with his hand and hilt, and I, as God willed, struck him at the wrist below the sleeve ofmail, and cut his hand off clean, and gave him then one last stroke onhis head. Thereupon he begged for God's sake spare his life, and I, introuble about Bebo, left him in the arms of a Venetian nobleman, whoheld him back from jumping into the canal. '

Who this Venetian nobleman, found unexpectedly upon the scene, was, does not appear. Nor, what is still more curious, do we hear anythingof that Martelli, the bravo, 'who kept his sword for the defence ofLorenzo's person. ' The one had arrived accidentally, it seems. Theother must have been a coward and escaped from the scuffle. 

'When I turned, ' proceeds Bibboni, 'I found Lorenzo on his knees. Heraised himself, and I, in anger, gave him a great cut across the head, which split it in two pieces, and laid him at my feet, and he neverrose again. '

VI. --THE ESCAPE OF THE BRAVI

Bebo, meanwhile, had made off from the scene of action. And Bibboni, taking to his heels, came up with him in the little square of SanMarcello. They now ran for their lives till they reached the traghettodi San Spirito, where they threw their poignards into the water, remembering that no man might carry these in Venice under penaltyof the galleys. Bibboni's white hose were drenched with blood. Hetherefore agreed to separate from Bebo, having named a rendezvous. Left alone, his ill luck brought him face to face with twentyconstables (_sbirri_). 'In a moment I conceived that they kneweverything, and were come to capture me, and of a truth I saw that itwas over with me. As swiftly as I could I quickened pace and got intoa church, near to which was the house of a Compagnia, and the oneopened into the other, and knelt down and prayed, commending myselfwith fervour to God for my deliverance and safety. Yet while I prayed, I kept my eyes well open and saw the whole band pass the church, except one man who entered, and I strained my sight so that I seemedto see behind as well as in front, and then it was I longed for mypoignard, for I should not have heeded being in a church. ' But theconstable, it soon appeared, was not looking for Bibboni. So hegathered up his courage, and ran for the Church of San Spirito, wherethe Padre Andrea Volterrano was preaching to a great congregation. He hoped to go in by one door and out by the other, but the crowdprevented him, and he had to turn back and face the _sbirrí_. Oneof them followed him, having probably caught sight of the blood uponhis hose. Then Bibboni resolved to have done with the fellow, andrushed at him, and flung him down with his head upon the pavement, and ran like mad and came at last, all out of breath, to San Marco. Itseems clear that before Bibboni separated from Bebo they had crossedthe water, for the Sestiere di San Polo is separated from the Sestieredi San Marco by the Grand Canal. And this they must have done at thetraghetto di San Spirito. Neither the church nor the traghetto arenow in existence, and this part of the story is therefore obscure. [14]Having reached San Marco, he took a gondola at the Ponte della Paglia, where tourists are now wont to stand and contemplate the Ducal Palaceand the Bridge of Sighs. First, he sought the house of a woman of thetown who was his friend; then changed purpose, and rowed to the palaceof the Count Salici da Collalto. 'He was a great friend and intimateof ours, because Bebo and I had done him many and great services intimes passed. There I knocked; and Bebo opened the door, and when hesaw me dabbled with blood, he marvelled that I had not come to griefand fallen into the hands of justice, and, indeed, had feared as muchbecause I had remained so long away. ' It appears, therefore, that thePalazzo Collalto was their rendezvous. 'The Count was from home; butbeing known to all his people, I played the master and went into thekitchen to the fire, and with soap and water turned my hose, which hadbeen white, to a grey colour. ' This is a very delicate way of sayingthat he washed out the blood of Alessandro and Lorenzo!

Soon after the Count returned, and 'lavished caresses' upon Bebo andhis precious comrade. They did not tell him what they had achievedthat morning, but put him off with a story of having settled a_sbirro_ in a quarrel about a girl. Then the Count invited them todinner; and being himself bound to entertain the first physician ofVenice, requested them to take it in an upper chamber. He and hissecretary served them with their own hands at table. When thephysician arrived, the Count went downstairs; and at this moment amessenger came from Lorenzo's mother, begging the doctor to go at onceto San Polo, for that her son had been murdered and Soderini woundedto the death. It was now no longer possible to conceal their doingsfrom the Count, who told them to pluck up courage and abide inpatience. He had himself to dine and take his siesta, and then toattend a meeting of the Council. 

About the hour of vespers, Bibboni determined to seek better refuge. Followed at a discreet distance by Bebo, he first called at theirlodgings and ordered supper. Two priests came in and fell intoconversation with them. But something in the behaviour of one ofthese good men roused his suspicions. So they left the house, took agondola, and told the man to row hard to S. Maria Zobenigo. On the wayhe bade him put them on shore, paid him well, and ordered him to waitfor them. They landed near the palace of the Spanish embassy; and hereBibboni meant to seek sanctuary. For it must be remembered that thehouses of ambassadors, no less than of princes of the Church, wereinviolable. They offered the most convenient harbouring-places torascals. Charles V. , moreover, was deeply interested in the vengeancetaken on Alessandro de' Medici's murderer, for his own naturaldaughter was Alessandro's widow and Duchess of Florence. In the palacethey were met with much courtesy by about forty Spaniards, who showedconsiderable curiosity, and told them that Lorenzo and AlessandroSoderini had been murdered that morning by two men whose descriptionanswered to their appearance. Bibboni put their questions by and askedto see the ambassador. He was not at home. In that case, said Bibboni, take us to the secretary. Attended by some thirty Spaniards, 'withgreat joy and gladness, ' they were shown into the secretary's chamber. He sent the rest of the folk away, 'and locked the door well, and thenembraced and kissed us before we had said a word, and afterwards badeus talk freely without any fear. ' When Bibboni had told the wholestory, he was again embraced and kissed by the secretary, whothereupon left them and went to the private apartment of theambassador. Shortly after he returned and led them by a windingstaircase into the presence of his master. The ambassador greetedthem with great honour, told them he would strain all the power ofthe empire to hand them in safety over to Duke Cosimo, and that he hadalready sent a courier to the Emperor with the good news. 

So they remained in hiding in the Spanish embassy; and in ten days'time commands were received from Charles himself that everythingshould be done to convey them safely to Florence. The difficulty washow to smuggle them out of Venice, where the police of the Republicwere on watch, and Florentine outlaws were mounting guard on sea andshore to catch them. The ambassador began by spreading reports on theRialto every morning of their having been seen at Padua, at Verona, inFriuli. He then hired a palace at Malghera, near Mestre, and went outdaily with fifty Spaniards, and took carriage or amused himself withhorse exercise and shooting. The Florentines, who were on watch, couldonly discover from his people that he did this for amusement. Whenhe thought that he had put them sufficiently off their guard, theambassador one day took Bibboni and Bebo out by Canaregio and Mestreto Malghera, concealed in his own gondola, with the whole train ofSpaniards in attendance. And though, on landing, the Florentineschallenged them, they durst not interfere with an ambassador or cometo battle with his men. So Bebo and Bibboni were hustled into a coach, and afterwards provided with two comrades and four horses. They rodefor ninety miles without stopping to sleep, and on the day followingthis long journey reached Trento, having probably threaded themountain valleys above Bassano, for Bibboni speaks of a certainvillage where the people talked half German. The Imperial Ambassadorat Trento forwarded them next day to Mantua; from Mantua they came toPiacenza; thence, passing through the valley of the Taro, crossingthe Apennines at Cisa, descending on Pontremoli, and reaching Pisa atnight, the fourteenth day after their escape from Venice. 

When they arrived at Pisa, Duke Cosimo was supping. So they went toan inn, and next morning presented themselves to his Grace. Cosimoreceived them kindly, assured them of his gratitude, confirmed themin the enjoyment of their rewards and privileges, and swore that theymight rest secure of his protection in all parts of his dominion. Wemay imagine how the men caroused together after this reception. AsBibboni adds, 'We were now able for the whole time of life left usto live splendidly, without a thought or care. ' The last words of hisnarrative are these: 'Bebo from Pisa, at what date I know not, wenthome to Volterra, his native town, and there finished his days; whileI abode in Florence, where I have had no further wish to hear of wars, but to live my life in holy peace. '

So ends the story of the two _bravi_. We have reason to believe, from some contemporary documents which Cantù has brought to light, that Bibboni exaggerated his own part in the affair. Luca Martelli, writing to Varchi, says that it was Bebo who clove Lorenzo's skullwith a cutlass. He adds this curious detail, that the weapons ofboth men were poisoned, and that the wound inflicted by Bibboni onSoderini's hand was a slight one. Yet, the poignard being poisoned, Soderini died of it. In other respects Martelli's brief account agreeswith that given by Bibboni, who probably did no more, his comradebeing dead, than claim for himself, at some expense of truth, thelion's share of their heroic action. 

VII. --LORENZINO BRUTUS

It remains to ask ourselves, What opinion can be justly formed ofLorenzino's character and motives? When he murdered his cousin, washe really actuated by the patriotic desire to rid his country of amonster? Did he imitate the Roman Brutus in the noble spirit ofhis predecessors, Olgiati and Boscoli, martyrs to the creed oftyrannicide? Or must this crowning action of a fretful life beexplained, like his previous mutilation of the statues on the Archof Constantine, by a wild thirst for notoriety? Did he hope that theexiles would return to Florence, and that he would enjoy an honourablelife, an immortality of glorious renown? Did envy for his cousin'sgreatness and resentment of his undisguised contempt--the passions ofone who had been used for vile ends--conscious of self-degradation andthe loss of honour, yet mindful of his intellectual superiority--didthese emotions take fire in him and mingle with a scholar'sreminiscences of antique heroism, prompting him to plan a deedwhich should at least assume the show of patriotic zeal, and proveindubitable courage in its perpetrator? Did he, again, perhapsimagine, being next in blood to Alessandro and direct heir to theducal crown by the Imperial Settlement of 1530, that the city wouldelect her liberator for her ruler? Alfieri and Niccolini, havingtaken, as it were, a brief in favour of tyrannicide, praised Lorenzinoas a hero. De Musset, who wrote a considerable drama on his story, painted him as a _roué_ corrupted by society, enfeebled bycircumstance, soured by commerce with an uncongenial world, who hidesat the bottom of his mixed nature enough of real nobility to make himthe leader of a forlorn hope for the liberties of Florence. This isthe most favourable construction we can put upon Lorenzo's conduct. Yet some facts of the case warn us to suspend our judgment. He seemsto have formed no plan for the liberation of his fellow-citizens. Hegave no pledge of self-devotion by avowing his deed and abiding by itsissues. He showed none of the qualities of a leader, whether in thecause of freedom or of his own dynastic interests, after the murder. He escaped as soon as he was able, as secretly as he could manage, leaving the city in confusion, and exposing himself to the obviouscharge of abominable treason. So far as the Florentines knew, hisassassination of their Duke was but a piece of private spite, executedwith infernal craft. It is true that when he seized the pen in exile, he did his best to claim the guerdon of a patriot, and to throw theblame of failure on the Florentines. In his Apology, and in a letterwritten to Francesco de' Medici, he taunts them with lacking thespirit to extinguish tyranny when he had slain the tyrant. He summonsplausible excuses to his aid--the impossibility of taking persons ofimportance into his confidence, the loss of blood he suffered fromhis wound, the uselessness of rousing citizens whom events provedover-indolent for action. He declares that he has nothing to regret. Having proved by deeds his will to serve his country, he has savedhis life in order to spend it for her when occasion offered. But thesearguments, invented after the catastrophe, these words, so bravelypenned when action ought to have confirmed his resolution, do notmeet the case. It was no deed of a true hero to assassinate a despot, knowing or half knowing that the despot's subjects would immediatelyelect another. Their languor could not, except rhetorically, beadvanced in defence of his own flight. 

The historian is driven to seek both the explanation and palliation ofLorenzo's failure in the temper of his times. There was enoughdaring left in Florence to carry through a plan of brilliant treason, modelled on an antique Roman tragedy. But there was not moral forcein the protagonist to render that act salutary, not public energysufficient in his fellow-citizens to accomplish his drama ofdeliverance. Lorenzo was corrupt. Florence was flaccid. Evil mannershad emasculated the hero. In the state the last spark of independencehad expired with Ferrucci. 

Still I have not without forethought dubbed this man a Cinque CentoBrutus. Like much of the art and literature of his century, his actionmay be regarded as a _bizarre_ imitation of the antique manner. Without the force and purpose of a Roman, Lorenzo set himself to copyPlutarch's men--just as sculptors carved Neptunes and Apollos withoutthe dignity and serenity of the classic style. The antique faithwas wanting to both murderer and craftsman in those days. Even asRenaissance work in art is too often aimless, decorative, vacant ofintention, so Lorenzino's Brutus tragedy seems but the snapping ofa pistol in void air. He had the audacity but not the ethicalconsistency of his crime. He played the part of Brutus like a Roscius, perfect in its histrionic details. And it doubtless gave to thisskilful actor a supreme satisfaction--salving over many wounds ofvanity, quenching the poignant thirst for things impossible anddraughts of fame--that he could play it on no mimic stage, but onthe theatre of Europe. The weakness of his conduct was the centralweakness of his age and country. Italy herself lacked moral purpose, sense of righteous necessity, that consecration of self to a noblecause, which could alone have justified Lorenzo's perfidy. Confusedmemories of Judith, Jael, Brutus, and other classical tyrannicides, exalted his imagination. Longing for violent emotions, jaded withpleasure which had palled, discontented with his wasted life, jealousof his brutal cousin, appetitive to the last of glory, he conceivedhis scheme. Having conceived, he executed it with that which neverfailed in Cinque Cento Italy--the artistic spirit of perfection. Whenit was over, he shrugged his shoulders, wrote his magnificent Apologywith a style of adamant upon a plate of steel, and left it for theoutlaws of Filippo Strozzi's faction to deal with the crisis hehad brought about. For some years he dragged out an ignoble lifein obscurity, and died at last, as Varchi puts it, more by his owncarelessness than by the watchful animosity of others. Over the wild, turbid, clever, incomprehensible, inconstant hero-artist's grave wewrite our _Requiescat_. Clio, as she takes the pen in hand torecord this prayer, smiles disdainfully and turns to graver business. 

 * * * * *

_TWO DRAMATISTS OF THE LAST CENTURY_

There are few contrasts more striking than that which is presentedby the memoirs of Goldoni and Alfieri. Both of these men bore nameshighly distinguished in the history of Italian literature. Both ofthem were framed by nature with strongly marked characters, and fittedto perform a special work in the world. Both have left behind themrecords of their lives and literary labours, singularly illustrativeof their peculiar differences. There is no instance in which we seemore clearly the philosophical value of autobiographies, than in thesevivid pictures which the great Italian tragedian and comic author havedelineated. Some of the most interesting works of Lionardo da Vinci, Giorgione, Albert Dürer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Andrea del Sarto, aretheir portraits painted by themselves. These pictures exhibit not onlythe lineaments of the masters, but also their art. The hand which drewthem was the hand which drew the 'Last Supper, ' or the 'Madonna ofthe Tribune:' colour, method, chiaroscuro, all that makes up manner inpainting, may be studied on the same canvas as that which faithfullyrepresents the features of the man whose genius gave his style itsspecial character. We seem to understand the clear calm majesty ofLionardo's manner, the silver-grey harmonies and smooth facility ofAndrea's Madonnas, the better for looking at their faces drawn bytheir own hands at Florence. And if this be the case with a dumbpicture, how far higher must be the interest and importance of thewritten life of a known author! Not only do we recognise in itscomposition the style and temper and habits of thought which arefamiliar to us in his other writings; but we also hear from hisown lips how these were formed, how his tastes took their peculiardirection, what circumstances acted on his character, what hopes hehad, and where he failed. Even should his autobiography not bearthe marks of uniform candour, it probably reveals more of the actualtruth, more of the man's real nature in its height and depth, thanany memoir written by friend or foe. Its unconscious admissions, itsgeneral spirit, and the inferences which we draw from its perusal, are far more valuable than any mere statement of facts or externalanalysis, however scientific. When we become acquainted withthe series of events which led to the conception or attended theproduction of some masterpiece of literature, a new light is thrownupon its beauties, fresh life bursts forth from every chapter, and weseem to have a nearer and more personal interest in its success. Whata powerful sensation, for instance, is that which we experience when, after studying the 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ' Gibbontells us how the thought of writing it came to him upon the Capitol, among the ruins of dead Rome, and within hearing of the mutter of themonks of Ara Coeli, and how he finished it one night by Lake Geneva, and laid his pen down and walked forth and saw the stars above histerrace at Lausanne!

The memoirs of Alfieri and Goldoni are not deficient in any of thecharacteristics of good autobiography. They seem to bear upon theirface the stamp of truthfulness, they illustrate their authors' liveswith marvellous lucidity, and they are full of interest as stories. But it is to the contrast which they present that our attention shouldbe chiefly drawn. Other biographies may be as interesting and amusing. None show in a more marked manner two distinct natures endowed withgenius for one art, and yet designed in every possible particular fordifferent branches of that art. Alfieri embodies Tragedy; Goldoniis the spirit of Comedy. They are both Italians: their tragedies andcomedies are by no means cosmopolitan; but this national identity ofcharacter only renders more remarkable the individual divergences bywhich they were impelled into their different paths. Thalia seems tohave made the one, body, soul, and spirit; and Melpomene the other;each goddess launched her favourite into circumstances suited to theevolution of his genius, and presided over his development, so that athis death she might exclaim, --Behold the living model of my Art!

Goldoni was born at Venice in the year 1707; he had already reachedcelebrity when Alfieri saw the light for the first time, in 1749, atAsti. Goldoni's grandfather was a native of Modena, who had settledin Venice, and there lived with the prodigality of a rich andostentatious 'bourgeois. ' 'Amid riot and luxury did I enter theworld, ' says the poet, after enumerating the banquets and theatricaldisplays with which the old Goldoni entertained his guests in hisVenetian palace and country-house. Venice at that date was certainlythe proper birthplace for a comic poet. The splendour of theRenaissance had thoroughly habituated her nobles to pleasures of thesense, and had enervated their proud, maritime character, while thegreat name of the republic robbed them of the caution for which theyused to be conspicuous. Yet the real strength of Venice was almostspent, and nothing remained but outward insolence and prestige. Everything was gay about Goldoni in his earliest childhood. Puppet-shows were built to amuse him by his grandfather. 'Mymother, ' he says, 'took charge of my education, and my father of myamusements. ' Let us turn to the opening scene in Alfieri's life, and mark the difference. A father above sixty, 'noble, wealthy, andrespectable, ' who died before his son had reached the age of one yearold. A mother devoted to religion, the widow of one marquis, and afterthe death of a second husband, Alfieri's father, married for the thirdtime to a nobleman of ancient birth. These were Alfieri's parents. Hewas born in a solemn palazzo in the country town of Asti, and at theage of five already longed for death as an escape from disease andother earthly troubles. So noble and so wealthy was the youthful poetthat an abbé was engaged to carry out his education, but not to teachhim more than a count should know. Except this worthy man he had nocompanions whatever. Strange ideas possessed the boy. He ruminated onhis melancholy, and when eight years old attempted suicide. At thisage he was sent to the academy at Turin, attended, as befitted a ladof his rank, by a man-servant, who was to remain and wait on him atschool. Alfieri stayed here several years without revisiting his home, tyrannised over by the valet who added to his grandeur, constantlysubject to sickness, and kept in almost total ignorance by hisincompetent preceptors. The gloom and pride and stoicism of histemperament were augmented by this unnatural discipline. His spiritdid not break, but took a haughtier and more disdainful tone. Hebecame familiar with misfortunes. He learned to brood over andintensify his passions. Every circumstance of his life seemed strungup to a tragic pitch. This at least is the impression which remainsupon our mind after reading in his memoirs the narrative of what mustin many of its details have been a common schoolboy's life at thattime. 

Meanwhile, what had become of young Goldoni? His boyhood was asthoroughly plebeian, various, and comic as Alfieri's had beenpatrician, monotonous, and tragical. Instead of one place ofresidence, we read of twenty. Scrape succeeds to scrape, adventure toadventure. Knowledge of the world, and some book learning also, flowin upon the boy, and are eagerly caught up by him and heterogeneouslyamalgamated in his mind. Alfieri learned nothing, wrote nothing, inhis youth, and heard his parents say--'A nobleman need never strive tobe a doctor of the faculties. ' Goldoni had a little medicine and muchlaw thrust upon him. At eight he wrote a comedy, and ere long beganto read the plays of Plautus, Terence, Aristophanes, and Machiavelli. Between the nature of the two poets there was a marked andcharacteristic difference as to their mode of labour and of acquiringknowledge. Both of them loved fame, and wrought for it; but Alfieridid so from a sense of pride and a determination to excel;while Goldoni loved the approbation of his fellows, sought theircompliments, and basked in the sunshine of smiles. Alfieri wrote withlabour. Each tragedy he composed went through a triple process ofcomposition, and received frequent polishing when finished. Goldonidashed off his pieces with the greatest ease on every possiblesubject. He once produced sixteen comedies in one theatrical season. Alfieri's were like lion's whelps--brought forth with difficulty, and at long intervals; Goldoni's, like the brood of a hare--many, frequent, and as agile as their parent. Alfieri amassed knowledgescrupulously, but with infinite toil. He mastered Greek and Hebrewwhen he was past forty. Goldoni never gave himself the least troubleto learn anything, but trusted to the ready wit, good memory, andnatural powers, which helped him in a hundred strange emergencies. Power of will and pride sustained the one; facility and agood-humoured vanity the other. This contrast was apparent at a veryearly age. We have seen how Alfieri passed his time at Turin, ina kind of aristocratic prison of educational ignorance. Goldoni'sgrandfather died when he was five years old, and left his family ingreat embarrassment. The poet's father went off to practise medicineat Perugia. His son followed him, acquired the rudiments of knowledgein that town, and then proceeded to study philosophy alone at Rimini. There was no man-servant or academy in his case. He was far tooplebeian and too free. The boy lodged with a merchant, and got somesmattering of Thomas Aquinas and the Peripatetics into his smallbrain, while he contrived to form a friendship with an acting company. They were on the wing for Venice in a coasting boat, which would touchat Chiozza, where Goldoni's mother then resided. The boy pleased them. Would he like the voyage? This offer seemed too tempting, and awayhe rushed, concealed himself on board, and made one of a merry motleyshipload. 'Twelve persons, actors as well as actresses, a prompter, a machinist, a storekeeper, eight domestics, four chambermaids, twonurses, children of every age, cats, dogs, monkeys, parrots, birds, pigeons, and a lamb; it was another Noah's ark. ' The young poet feltat home; how could a comic poet feel otherwise? They laughed, theysang, they danced; they ate and drank, and played at cards. 'Macaroni!Every one fell on it, and three dishes were devoured. We had alsoalamode beef, cold fowl, a loin of veal, a dessert, and excellentwine. What a charming dinner! No cheer like a good appetite. ' Theirharmony, however, was disturbed. The 'première amoureuse, ' who, inspite of her rank and title, was ugly and cross, and required to becoaxed with cups of chocolate, lost her cat. She tried to kill thewhole boat-load of beasts--cats, dogs, monkeys, parrots, pigeons, eventhe lamb stood in danger of her wrath. A regular quarrel ensued, wassomehow set at peace, and all began to laugh again. This is a sampleof Goldoni's youth. Comic pleasures, comic dangers; nothing deep orlasting, but light and shadow cheerfully distributed, clouds loweringwith storm, a distant growl of thunder, then a gleam of light andsunshine breaking overhead. He gets articled to an attorney at Venice, then goes to study law at Pavia; studies society instead, and flirts, and finally is expelled for writing satires. Then he takes a turn atmedicine with his father in Friuli, and acts as clerk to the criminalchancellor at Chiozza. 

Every employment seems easy to him, but he really cares for none butliterature. He spends all his spare time in reading and in amusements, and begins to write a tragic opera. This proves, however, eminentlyunsuccessful, and he burns it in a comic fit of anger. One laughablelove-affair in which he engaged at Udine exhibits his adventuresin their truly comic aspect. It reminds us of the scene in 'DonGiovanni, ' where Leporello personates the Don and deceives DonnaElvira. Goldoni had often noticed a beautiful young lady at churchand on the public drives: she was attended by a waiting-maid, who soonperceived that her mistress had excited the young man's admiration, and who promised to befriend him in his suit. Goldoni was told torepair at night to the palace of his mistress, and to pour his passionforth beneath her window. Impatiently he waited for the trystinghour, conned his love-sentences, and gloried in the romance of theadventure. When night came, he found the window, and a veiled figureof a lady in the moonlight, whom he supposed at once to be hismistress. Her he eloquently addressed in the true style of Romeo'srapture, and she answered him. Night after night this happened, but sometimes he was a little troubled by a sound of ill-suppressedlaughter interrupting the _tête-à-tête_. Meanwhile Teresa, the waiting-maid, received from his hands costly presents for hermistress, and made him promises on her part in exchange. As she provedunable to fulfil them, Goldoni grew suspicious, and at last discoveredthat the veiled figure to whom he had poured out his tale of love wasnone other than Teresa, and that the laughter had proceeded fromher mistress, whom the faithless waiting-maid regaled at her lover'sexpense. Thus ended this ridiculous matter. Goldoni was not, however, cured by his experience. One other love-affair rendered Udine too hotto hold him, and in consequence of a third he had to fly from Venicejust when he was beginning to flourish there. At length he marriedcomfortably and suitably, settling down into a quiet life with a womanwhom, if he did not love her with passion, he at least respected andadmired. Goldoni, in fact, had no real passion in his nature. 

Alfieri, on the other hand, was given over to volcanic ebullitions ofthe most ungovernable hate and affection, joy and sorrow. The chainsof love which Goldoni courted so willingly, Alfieri regarded withthe greatest shyness. But while Goldoni healed his heart of all itsbruises in a week or so, the tragic poet bore about him wounds thatwould not close. He enumerates three serious passions which possessedhis whole nature, and at times deprived him almost of his reason. ADutch lady first won his heart, and when he had to leave her, Alfierisuffered so intensely that he never opened his lips during the courseof a long journey through Germany, Switzerland, and Piedmont. Fevers, and suicides attempted but interrupted, marked the termination of thistragic amour. His second passion had for its object an English lady, with whose injured husband he fought a duel, although his collarbonewas broken at the time. The lady proved unworthy of Alfieri as wellas of her husband, and the poet left her in a most deplorable stateof hopelessness and intellectual prostration. At last he formeda permanent affection for the wife of Prince Charles Edward, theCountess of Albany, in close friendship with whom he lived after herhusband's death. The society of this lady gave him perfect happiness;but it was founded on her lofty beauty, the pathos of her situation, and her intellectual qualities. Melpomene presided at this union, while Thalia blessed the nuptials of Goldoni. How characteristicalso were the adventures which these two pairs of lovers encountered!Goldoni once carried his wife upon his back across two rivers in theirflight from the Spanish to the Austrian camp at Rimini, laughing andgroaning, and perceiving the humour of his situation all the time. Alfieri, on an occasion of even greater difficulty, was stopped withhis illustrious friend at the gates of Paris in 1792. They were flyingin post-chaises, with their servants and their baggage, from thedevoted city, when a troop of _sansculottes_ rushed on them, surged around the carriage, called them aristocrats, and tried to dragthem off to prison. Alfieri, with his tall gaunt figure, pallid face, and red voluminous hair, stormed, raged, and raised his deep bassvoice above the tumult. For half an hour he fought with them, thenmade his coachmen gallop through the gates, and scarcely halted tillthey got to Gravelines. By this prompt movement they escaped arrestand death at Paris. These two scenes would make agreeable companionpictures: Goldoni staggering beneath his wife across the muddy bedof an Italian stream--the smiling writer of agreeable plays, with hishalf-tearful helpmate ludicrous in her disasters; Alfieri mad withrage among Parisian Mænads, his princess quaking in her carriage, theair hoarse with cries, and death and safety trembling in the balance. It is no wonder that the one man wrote 'La Donna di Garbo' and the'Cortese Veneziano, ' while the other was inditing essays on Tyrannyand dramas of 'Antigone, ' 'Timoleon, ' and 'Brutus. '

The difference between the men is seen no less remarkably in regardto courage. Alfieri was a reckless rider, and astonished even Englishhuntsmen by his desperate leaps. In one of them he fell and brokehis collar-bone, but not the less he held his tryst with a fair lady, climbed her park gates, and fought a duel with her husband. Goldoniwas a pantaloon for cowardice. In the room of an inn at Desenzanowhich he occupied together with a female fellow-traveller, an attemptwas made to rob them by a thief at night. All Goldoni was able to doconsisted in crying out for help, and the lady called him 'M. L'Abbé'ever after for his want of pluck. Goldoni must have been by far themore agreeable of the two. In all his changes from town to town ofItaly he found amusement and brought gaiety. The sights, the theatres, the society aroused his curiosity. He trembled with excitement at theperformance of his pieces, made friends with the actors, taught them, and wrote parts to suit their qualities. At Pisa he attended asa stranger the meeting of the Arcadian Academy, and at its closeattracted all attention to himself by his clever improvisation. He wasin truth a ready-witted man, pliable, full of resource, bred half avalet, half a Roman _græculus_. Alfieri saw more of Europe thanGoldoni. France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, England, Spain, allparts of Italy he visited with restless haste. From land to land heflew, seeking no society, enjoying nothing, dashing from one inn doorto another with his servants and his carriages, and thinking chieflyof the splendid stud of horses which he took about with him upon histravels. He was a lonely, stiff, self-engrossed, indomitable man. Hecould not rest at home: he could not bear to be the vassal of a kingand breathe the air of courts. So he lived always on the wing, andended by exiling himself from Sardinia in order to escape the trammelsof paternal government. As for his tragedies, he wrote them to winlaurels from posterity. He never cared to see them acted; he bulliedeven his printers and correctors; he cast a glove down in defianceof his critics. Goldoni sought the smallest meed of approbation. Itpleased him hugely in his old age to be Italian master to a Frenchprincess. Alfieri openly despised the public. Goldoni wrote because heliked to write; Alfieri, for the sake of proving his superior powers. Against Alfieri's hatred of Turin and its trivial solemnities, wehave to set Goldoni's love of Venice and its petty pleasures. He wouldwillingly have drunk chocolate and played at dominoes or picquet allhis life on the Piazza di San Marco, when Alfieri was crossing thesierras on his Andalusian horse, and devouring a frugal meal of ricein solitude. Goldoni glided through life an easy man, with genial, venial thoughts; with a clear, gay, gentle temper; a true sense ofwhat is good and just; and a heart that loved diffusively, if not toowarmly. Many were the checks and obstacles thrown on his path; butround them or above them he passed nimbly, without scar or scathe. Poverty went close behind him, but he kept her off, and never feltthe pinch of need. Alfieri strained and strove against the barriersof fate; a sombre, rugged man, proud, candid, and self-confident, whobroke or bent all opposition; now moving solemnly with tragic pomp, now dashing passionately forward by the might of will. Goldoni drewhis inspirations from the moment and surrounding circumstances. Alfieri pursued an ideal, slowly formed, but strongly fashioned andresolutely followed. Of wealth he had plenty and to spare, buthe disregarded it, and was a Stoic in his mode of life. He was anunworldly man, and hated worldliness. Goldoni, but for his authorship, would certainly have grown a prosperous advocate, and died of goutin Venice. Goldoni liked smart clothes; Alfieri went always inblack. Goldoni's fits of spleen--for he _was_ melancholy now andthen--lasted a day or two, and disappeared before a change of place. Alfieri dragged his discontent about with him all over Europe, and letit interrupt his work and mar his intellect for many months together. Alfieri was a patriot, and hated France. Goldoni never speaksof politics, and praises Paris as a heaven on earth. The genialmoralising of the latter appears childish by the side of Alfieri'sterse philosophy and pregnant remarks on the development of character. What suits the page of Plautus would look poor in 'Oedipus' or'Agamemnon. ' Goldoni's memoirs are diffuse and flippant in their lightFrench dress. They seem written to please. Alfieri's Italian stylemarches with dignity and Latin terseness. He rarely condescends tosmile. He writes to instruct the world and to satisfy himself. Grimhumour sometimes flashes out, as when he tells the story of the Orderof Homer, which he founded. How different from Goldoni's naïve accountof his little ovation in the theatre at Paris!

But it would be idle to carry on this comparison, already tedious. Thelife of Goldoni was one long scene of shifts and jests, of frequenttriumphs and some failures, of lessons hard at times, but kindly. Passions and _ennui_, flashes of heroic patriotism, constantsuffering and stoical endurance, art and love idealised, fill up thelife of Alfieri. Goldoni clung much to his fellow-men, and sharedtheir pains and pleasures. Alfieri spent many of his years in almostabsolute solitude. On the whole character and deeds of the one man wasstamped Comedy: the other was own son of Tragedy. 

If, after reading the autobiographies of Alfieri and Goldoni, we turnto the perusal of their plays, we shall perceive that there is nobetter commentary on the works of an artist than his life, and nobetter life than one written by himself. The old style of criticism, which strove to separate an author's productions from his life, andeven from the age in which he lived, to set up an arbitrary canonof taste, and to select one or two great painters or poets as idealsbecause they seemed to illustrate that canon, has passed away. We arebeginning to feel that art is a part of history and of physiology. That is to say, the artist's work can only be rightly understood bystudying his age and temperament. Goldoni's versatility and want ofdepth induced him to write sparkling comedies. The merry life menpassed at Venice in its years of decadence proved favourable to hisgenius. Alfieri's melancholy and passionate qualities, fostered insolitude, and aggravated by a tyranny he could not bear, led himirresistibly to tragic composition. Though a noble, his nobility onlyadded to his pride, and insensibly his intellect had been imbued withthe democratic sentiments which were destined to shake Europe in hislifetime. This, in itself, was a tragic circumstance, bringing himinto close sympathy with the Brutus, the Prometheus, the Timoleon ofancient history. Goldoni's _bourgeoisie_, in the atmosphere ofwhich he was born and bred, was essentially comic. The true comedyof manners, which is quite distinct from Shakspere's fancy or fromAristophanic satire, is always laid in middle life. Though Goldonitried to write tragedies, they were unimpassioned, dull, and tame. Helacked altogether the fire, high-wrought nobility of sentiment, andsense of form essential for tragic art. On the other hand, Alfiericomposed some comedies before his death which were devoid of humour, grace, and lightness. A strange elephantine eccentricity is theirutmost claim to comic character. Indeed, the temper of Alfieri, everin extremes, led him even to exaggerate the qualities of tragedy. He carried its severity to a pitch of dulness and monotony. Hischiaroscuro was too strong; virtue and villany appearing in pureblack and white upon his pages. His hatred of tyrants induced him totransgress the rules of probability, so that it has been well saidthat if his wicked kings had really had such words of scorn and hatredthrown at them by their victims, they were greatly to be pitied. Onthe other hand, his pithy laconisms have often a splendidly tragicaleffect. There is nothing in the modern drama more rhetoricallyimpressive, though spasmodic, than the well-known dialogue betweenAntigone and Creon:--

'_Cr_. Scegliesti?

'_Ant_. Ho scelto. 

'_Cr_. Emon?

'_Ant_. Morte. 

'_Cr_. L'avrai!'

Goldoni's comedies, again, have not enough of serious thought or oftrue creative imagination to be works of high art. They lean too muchto the side of farce; they have none of the tragic salt which givesa dignity to Tartuffe. They are, in a word, almost too enethisticallycomic. 

The contrast between these authors might lead us to raise the questionlong ago discussed by Socrates at Agathon's banquet--Can the same manwrite both comedies and tragedies? We in England are accustomed toread the serious and comic plays of Shakspere, Fletcher, Jonson, andto think that one poet could excel in either branch. The custom ofthe Elizabethan theatre obliged this double authorship; yet it must beconfessed that Shakspere's comedies are not such comedies as Greekor Romnan or French critics would admit. They are works of the purestimagination, wholly free from the laws of this world; while thetragedies of Fletcher have a melodramatic air equally at variance withthe classical Melpomene. It may very seriously be doubted whether thesame mind could produce, with equal power, a comedy like the 'CorteseVeneziano' and a tragedy like Alfieri's 'Brutus. ' At any rate, returning to our old position, we find in these two men the veryopposite conditions of dramatic genius. They are, as it were, specimens prepared by Nature for the instruction of those who analysegenius in its relations to temperament, to life, and to externalcircumstances. 

 * * * * *

 FOOTNOTES:

 [Footnote 1: This Essay was written in 1866, and published in 1867. Reprinting it in 1879, after eighteen months spent continuously in one high valley of the Grisons, I feel how slight it is. For some amends, I take this opportunity of printing at the end of it a description of Davos in winter. ]

 [Footnote 2: See, however, what is said about Leo Battista Alberti in the sketch of Rimini in the second series. ]

 [Footnote 3: The Grisons surname Campèll may derive from the Romansch Campo Bello. The founder of the house was one Kaspar Campèll, who in the first half of the sixteenth century preached the Reformed religion in the Engadine. ]

 [Footnote 4: I have translated and printed at the end of the second volume some sonnets of Petrarch as a kind of palinode for this impertinence. ]

 [Footnote 5: This begs the question whether [Greek: leukoion] does not properly mean snowflake, or some such flower. Violets in Greece, however, were often used for crowns: [Greek: iostephanos] is the epithet of Homer for Aphrodite, and of Aristophanes for Athens. ]

 [Footnote 6: Olive-trees must be studied at Mentone or San Remo, in Corfu, at Tivoli, on the coast between Syracuse and Catania, or on the lowlands of Apulia. The stunted but productive trees of the Rhone valley, for example, are no real measure of the beauty they can exhibit. ]

 [Footnote 7: Dante, Par. Xi. 106. ]

 [Footnote 8: It is but just to Doctor Pasta to remark that the above sentence was written more than ten years ago. Since then he has enlarged and improved his house in many ways, furnished it more luxuriously, made paths through the beechwoods round it, and brought excellent water at a great cost from a spring near the summit of the mountain. A more charming residence from early spring to late autumn can scarcely be discovered. ]

 [Footnote 9: 'The down upon their cheeks and chin was yellower than helichrysus, and their breasts gleamed whiter far than thou, O Moon. ']

 [Footnote 10: 'Thy tresses have I oftentimes compared to Ceres' yellow autumn sheaves, wreathed in curled bands around thy head. ']

 [Footnote 11: Both these and the large frescoes in the choir have been chromolithographed by the Arundel Society. ]

 [Footnote 12: I cannot see clearly through these transactions, the muddy waters of decadent Italian plot and counterplot being inscrutable to senses assisted by nothing more luminous than mere tradition. ]

 [Footnote 13: Those who are interested in such matters may profitably compare this description of a planned murder in the sixteenth century with the account written by Ambrogio Tremazzi of the way in which he tracked and slew Troilo Orsini in Paris in the year 1577. It is given by Gnoli in his _Vittoria Accoramboni_, pp. 404-414. ]

 [Footnote 14: So far as I can discover, the only church of San Spirito in Venice was a building on the island of San Spirito, erected by Sansavino, which belonged to the Sestiere di S. Croce, and which was suppressed in 1656. Its plate and the fine pictures which Titian painted there were transferred at that date to S. M. Della Salute. I cannot help inferring that either Bibboni's memory failed him, or that his words were wrongly understood by printer or amanuensis. If for S. Spirito we substitute S. Stefano, the account would be intelligible. ]

 * * * * *

SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN ITALY AND GREECE

BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

AUTHOR OF "RENAISSANCE IN ITALY" "STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS, " ETC

SECOND SERIES

LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 

1914

_All rights reserved_

 FIRST EDITION (_Smith, Elder & Co. _) _October, 1898_ _Reprinted_ _May, 1900_ _Reprinted_ _June, 1902_ _Reprinted_ _November, 1905_ _Reprinted_ _December, 1907_ _Reprinted_ _February, 1914_ _Taken over by John Murray_ _January, 1917_

_Printed in Great Britain at_ THE BALLANTYNE PRESS _by_ SPOTTISWOODE, BALLANTYNE & Co. LTD. _Colchester, London & Eton_

CONTENTS

 PAGE

 RAVENNA 1 RIMINI 14 MAY IN UMBRIA 32 THE PALACE OF URBINO 50 VITTORIA ACCORAMBONI 88 AUTUMN WANDERINGS 127 PARMA 147 CANOSSA 163 FORNOVO 180 FLORENCE AND THE MEDICI 201 THE DEBT OF ENGLISH TO ITALIAN LITERATURE 258 POPULAR SONGS OF TUSCANY 276 POPULAR ITALIAN POETRY OF THE RENAISSANCE 305 THE 'ORFEO' OF POLIZIANO 345 EIGHT SONNETS OF PETRARCH 365

SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN ITALY AND GREECE

_RAVENNA_

The Emperor Augustus chose Ravenna for one of his two naval stations, and in course of time a new city arose by the sea-shore, whichreceived the name of Portus Classis. Between this harbour and themother city a third town sprang up, and was called Cæsarea. Time andneglect, the ravages of war, and the encroaching powers of Nature havedestroyed these settlements, and nothing now remains of the threecities but Ravenna. It would seem that in classical times Ravennastood, like modern Venice, in the centre of a huge lagune, the freshwaters of the Ronco and the Po mixing with the salt waves of theAdriatic round its very walls. The houses of the city were built onpiles; canals instead of streets formed the means of communication, and these were always filled with water artificially conducted fromthe southern estuary of the Po. Round Ravenna extended a vast morass, for the most part under shallow water, but rising at intervals intolow islands like the Lido or Murano or Torcello which surround Venice. These islands were celebrated for their fertility: the vines andfig-trees and pomegranates, springing from a fat and fruitful soil, watered with constant moisture, and fostered by a mild sea-wind andliberal sunshine, yielded crops that for luxuriance and qualitysurpassed the harvests of any orchards on the mainland. All theconditions of life in old Ravenna seem to have resembled those ofmodern Venice; the people went about in gondolas, and in the earlymorning barges laden with fresh fruit or meat and vegetables flockedfrom all quarters to the city of the sea. [1] Water also had to beprocured from the neighbouring shore, for, as Martial says, a well atRavenna was more valuable than a vineyard. Again, between the city andthe mainland ran a long low causeway all across the lagune like thaton which the trains now glide into Venice. Strange to say, the air ofRavenna was remarkably salubrious: this fact, and the ease of lifethat prevailed there, and the security afforded by the situation ofthe town, rendered it a most desirable retreat for the monarchs ofItaly during those troublous times in which the empire nodded to itsfall. Honorius retired to its lagunes for safety; Odoacer, whodethroned the last Cæsar of the West, succeeded him; and was in turn, supplanted by Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Ravenna, as we see it now, recalls the peaceful and half-Roman rule of the great Gothic king. Hispalace, his churches, and the mausoleums in which his daughterAmalasuntha laid the hero's bones, have survived the sieges ofBelisarius and Astolphus, the conquest of Pepin, the bloody quarrelsof Iconoclasts with the children of the Roman Church, the mediævalwars of Italy, the victory of Gaston de Foix, and still stand gorgeouswith marbles and mosaics in spite of time and the decay of all aroundthem. 

As early as the sixth century, the sea had already retreated to such adistance from Ravenna that orchards and gardens were cultivated onthe spot where once the galleys of the Cæsars rode at anchor. Grovesof pines sprang up along the shore, and in their lofty tops the musicof the wind moved like the ghost of waves and breakers plunging upondistant sands. This Pinetum stretches along the shore of the Adriaticfor about forty miles, forming a belt of variable width between thegreat marsh and the tumbling sea. From a distance the bare stems andvelvet crowns of the pine-trees stand up like palms that cover anoasis on Arabian sands; but at a nearer view the trunks detachthemselves from an inferior forest-growth of juniper and thorn and ashand oak, the tall roofs of the stately firs shooting their breadth ofsheltering greenery above the lower and less sturdy brushwood. It ishardly possible to imagine a more beautiful and impressive scene thanthat presented by these long alleys of imperial pines. They grow sothickly one behind another, that we might compare them to the pipes ofa great organ, or the pillars of a Gothic church, or the basalticcolumns of the Giant's Causeway. Their tops are evergreen and ladenwith the heavy cones, from which Ravenna draws considerable wealth. Scores of peasants are quartered on the outskirts of the forest, whosebusiness it is to scale the pines and rob them of their fruit atcertain seasons of the year. Afterwards they dry the fir-cones in thesun, until the nuts which they contain fall out. The empty husks aresold for firewood, and the kernels in their stony shells reserved forexportation. You may see the peasants, men, women, and boys, sortingthem by millions, drying and sifting them upon the open spaces of thewood, and packing them in sacks to send abroad through Italy. The_pinocchi_ or kernels of the stone-pine are largely used in cookery, and those of Ravenna are prized for their good quality and aromaticflavour. When roasted or pounded, they taste like a softer and moremealy kind of almonds. The task of gathering this harvest is not alittle dangerous. Men have to cut notches in the straight shafts, andhaving climbed, often to the height of eighty feet, to lean upon thebranches, and detach the fir-cones with a pole--and this for everytree. Some lives, they say, are yearly lost in the business. 

As may be imagined, the spaces of this great forest form the haunt ofinnumerable living creatures. Lizards run about by myriads in thegrass. Doves coo among the branches of the pines, and nightingalespour their full-throated music all day and night from thickets ofwhite-thorn and acacia. The air is sweet with aromatic scents: theresin of the pine and juniper, the mayflowers and acacia-blossoms, theviolets that spring by thousands in the moss, the wild roses and fainthoneysuckles which throw fragrant arms from bough to bough of ash ormaple, join to make one most delicious perfume. And though the airupon the neighbouring marsh is poisonous, here it is dry, and spreadsa genial health. The sea-wind murmuring through these thickets atnightfall or misty sunrise, conveys no fever to the peasants stretchedamong their flowers. They watch the red rays of sunset flaming throughthe columns of the leafy hall, and flaring on its fretted rafters ofentangled boughs; they see the stars come out, and Hesper gleam, aneye of brightness, among dewy branches; the moon walks silver-footedon the velvet tree-tops, while they sleep beside the camp-fires; freshmorning wakes them to the sound of birds and scent of thyme andtwinkling of dewdrops on the grass around. Meanwhile ague, fever, anddeath have been stalking all night long about the plain, within a fewyards of their couch, and not one pestilential breath has reached thecharmed precincts of the forest. 

You may ride or drive for miles along green aisles between the pinesin perfect solitude; and yet the creatures of the wood, the sunlightand the birds, the flowers and tall majestic columns at your side, prevent all sense of loneliness or fear. Huge oxen haunt thewilderness--grey creatures, with mild eyes and spreading horns andstealthy tread. Some are patriarchs of the forest, the fathers andthe mothers of many generations who have been carried from their sidesto serve in ploughs or waggons on the Lombard plain. Others areyearling calves, intractable and ignorant of labour. In order tosubdue them to the yoke, it is requisite to take them very early fromtheir native glades, or else they chafe and pine away with weariness. Then there is a sullen canal, which flows through the forest from themarshes to the sea; it is alive with frogs and newts and snakes. Youmay see these serpents basking on the surface among thickets of theflowering rush, or coiled about the lily leaves and flowers--lithemonsters, slippery and speckled, the tyrants of the fen. 

It is said that when Dante was living at Ravenna he would spend wholedays alone among the forest glades, thinking of Florence and her civilwars, and meditating cantos of his poem. Nor have the influences ofthe pine-wood failed to leave their trace upon his verse. The charm ofits summer solitude seems to have sunk into his soul; for when hedescribes the whispering of winds and singing birds among the boughsof his terrestrial paradise, he says:--

 Non però dal lor esser dritto sparte Tanto, che gli augelletti per le cime Lasciasser d' operare ogni lor arte: Ma con piena letizia l' aure prime, Cantando, ricevano intra le foglie, Che tenevan bordone alle sue rime Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie Per la pineta in sul lito di Chiassi Quand' Eolo Scirocco fuor discioglie. 

With these verses in our minds, while wandering down the grassyaisles, beside the waters of the solitary place, we seem to meet thatlady singing as she went, and plucking flower by flower, 'likeProserpine when Ceres lost a daughter, and she lost her spring. 'There, too, the vision of the griffin and the car, of singingmaidens, and of Beatrice descending to the sound of Benedictus and offalling flowers, her flaming robe and mantle green as grass, and veilof white, and olive crown, all flashed upon the poet's inner eye, andhe remembered how he bowed before her when a boy. There is yet anotherpassage in which it is difficult to believe that Dante had not thepine-forest in his mind. When Virgil and the poet were waiting inanxiety before the gates of Dis, when the Furies on the wall weretearing their breasts and crying, 'Venga Medusa, e si 'l farem dismalto, ' suddenly across the hideous river came a sound like thatwhich whirlwinds make among the shattered branches and bruised stemsof forest-trees; and Dante, looking out with fear upon the foam andspray and vapour of the flood, saw thousands of the damned flyingbefore the face of one who forded Styx with feet unwet. 'Like frogs, 'he says, 'they fled, who scurry through the water at the sight oftheir foe, the serpent, till each squats and hides himself close tothe ground. ' The picture of the storm among the trees might well haveoccurred to Dante's mind beneath the roof of pine-boughs. Nor is thereany place in which the simile of the frogs and water-snake attainssuch dignity and grandeur. I must confess that till I saw the pondsand marshes of Ravenna, I used to fancy that the comparison wassomewhat below the greatness of the subject; but there so grave a noteof solemnity and desolation is struck, the scale of Nature is solarge, and the serpents coiling in and out among the lily leaves andflowers are so much in their right place, that they suggest a scene byno means unworthy of Dante's conception. 

Nor is Dante the only singer who has invested this wood with poeticalassociations. It is well known that Boccaccio laid his story of'Honoria' in the pine-forest, and every student of English literaturemust be familiar with the noble tale in verse which Dryden has foundedon this part of the 'Decameron. ' We all of us have followed Theodore, and watched with him the tempest swelling in the grove, and seen thehapless ghost pursued by demon hounds and hunter down the glades. Thisstory should be read while storms are gathering upon the distant sea, or thunderclouds descending from the Apennines, and when the pinesbegin to rock and surge beneath the stress of labouring winds. Thenruns the sudden flash of lightning like a rapier through the boughs, the rain streams hissing down, and the thunder 'breaks like a wholesea overhead. '

With the Pinetum the name of Byron will be for ever associated. Duringhis two years' residence in Ravenna he used to haunt its wilderness, riding alone or in the company of friends. The inscription placedabove the entrance to the house he occupied alludes to it as one ofthe objects which principally attracted the poet to the neighbourhoodof Ravenna: 'Impaziente di visitare l' antica selva, che inspirò giàil Divino e Giovanni Boccaccio. ' We know, however, that a morepowerful attraction, in the person of the Countess Guiccioli, maintained his fidelity to 'that place of old renown, once in theAdrian Sea, Ravenna. '

Between the Bosco, as the people of Ravenna call this pine-wood, andthe city, the marsh stretches for a distance of about three miles. Itis a plain intersected by dykes and ditches, and mapped out intoinnumerable rice-fields. For more than half a year it lies underwater, and during the other months exhales a pestilential vapour, which renders it as uninhabitable as the Roman Campagna; yet inspringtime this dreary flat is even beautiful. The young blades of therice shoot up above the water, delicately green and tender. Theditches are lined with flowering rush and golden flags, while whiteand yellow lilies sleep in myriads upon the silent pools. Tamariskswave their pink and silver tresses by the road, and wherever a plot ofmossy earth emerges from the marsh, it gleams with purple orchises andflaming marigolds; but the soil beneath is so treacherous and spongy, that these splendid blossoms grow like flowers in dreams or fairystories. You try in vain to pick them; they elude your grasp, andflourish in security beyond the reach of arm or stick. 

Such is the sight of the old town of Classis. Not a vestige of theRoman city remains, not a dwelling or a ruined tower, nothing but theancient church of S. Apollinare in Classe. Of all desolate buildingsthis is the most desolate. Not even the deserted grandeur of S. Paolobeyond the walls of Rome can equal it. Its bare round campanile gazesat the sky, which here vaults only sea and plain--a perfect dome, star-spangled like the roof of Galla Placidia's tomb. Ravenna lies lowto west, the pine-wood stretches away in long monotony to east. Thereis nothing else to be seen except the spreading marsh, bounded by dimsnowy Alps and purple Apennines, so very far away that the level rackof summer clouds seem more attainable and real. What sunsets andsunrises that tower must see; what glaring lurid afterglows in August, when the red light scowls upon the pestilential fen; what sheets ofsullen vapour rolling over it in autumn; what breathless heats, andrainclouds big with thunder; what silences; what unimpeded blasts ofwinter winds! One old monk tends this deserted spot. He has the hugechurch, with its echoing aisles and marble columns and giddybell-tower and cloistered corridors, all to himself. At rareintervals, priests from Ravenna come to sing some special mass atthese cold altars; pious folk make vows to pray upon their mouldysteps and kiss the relics which are shown on great occasions. But noone stays; they hurry, after muttering their prayers, from thefever-stricken spot, reserving their domestic pieties and customarydevotions for the brighter and newer chapels of the fashionablechurches in Ravenna. So the old monk is left alone to sweep the marshwater from his church floor, and to keep the green moss from growingtoo thickly on its monuments. A clammy conferva covers everythingexcept the mosaics upon tribune, roof, and clerestory, which defy thecourse of age. Christ on His throne _sedet aternumque sedebit_: thesaints around him glitter with their pitiless uncompromising eyes andwooden gestures, as if twelve centuries had not passed over them, andthey were nightmares only dreamed last night, and rooted in a sickman's memory. For those gaunt and solemn forms there is no change oflife or end of days. No fever touches them; no dampness of the windand rain loosens their firm cement. They stare with senseless faces inbitter mockery of men who live and die and moulder away beneath. Theirpoor old guardian told us it was a weary life. He has had the feverthree times, and does not hope to survive many more Septembers. Thevery water that he drinks is brought him from Ravenna; for the vastfen, though it pours its overflow upon the church floor, and spreadslike a lake around, is death to drink. The monk had a gentle woman'svoice and mild brown eyes. What terrible crime had consigned him tothis living tomb? For what past sorrow is he weary of his life? Whatanguish of remorse has driven him to such a solitude? Yet he lookedsimple and placid; his melancholy was subdued and calm, as if lifewere over for him, and he were waiting for death to come with afriend's greeting upon noiseless wings some summer night across thefen-lands in a cloud of soft destructive fever-mist. 

Another monument upon the plain is worthy of a visit. It is theso-called Colonna dei Francesi, a _cinquecento_ pillar of Ionicdesign, erected on the spot where Gaston de Foix expired victoriousafter one of the bloodiest battles ever fought. The Ronco, a straightsluggish stream, flows by the lonely spot; mason bees have coveredwith laborious stucco-work the scrolls and leafage of its ornaments, confounding epitaphs and trophies under their mud houses. A fewcypress-trees stand round it, and the dogs and chickens of aneighbouring farmyard make it their rendezvous. Those mason bees arelike posterity, which settles down upon the ruins of a Baalbec or aLuxor, setting up its tents, and filling the fair spaces of Hellenicor Egyptian temples with clay hovels. Nothing differs but the scale;and while the bees content themselves with filling up and covering, man destroys the silent places of the past which he appropriates. 

In Ravenna itself, perhaps what strikes us most is the abrupttransition everywhere discernible from monuments of vast antiquity tobuildings of quite modern date. There seems to be no interval betweenthe marbles and mosaics of Justinian or Theodoric and theinsignificant frippery of the last century. The churches ofRavenna--S. Vitale, S. Apollinare, and the rest--are too well known, and have been too often described by enthusiastic antiquaries, to needa detailed notice in this place. Every one is aware that theecclesiastical customs and architecture of the early Church can bestudied in greater perfection here than elsewhere. Not even thebasilicas and mosaics of Rome, nor those of Palermo and Monreale, areequal for historical interest to those of Ravenna. Yet there is notone single church which remains entirely unaltered and unspoiled. Theimagination has to supply the atrium or outer portico from onebuilding, the vaulted baptistery with its marble font from another, the pulpits and ambones from a third the tribune from a fourth, theround brick bell-tower from a fifth, and then to cover all the concaveroofs and chapel walls with grave and glittering mosaics. 

There is nothing more beautiful in decorative art than the mosaics ofsuch tiny buildings as the tomb of Galla Placidia or the chapel of theBishop's Palace. They are like jewelled and enamelled cases; not aninch of wall can be seen which is not covered with elaborate patternsof the brightest colours. Tall date-palms spring from the floor withfruit and birds among their branches, and between them stand thepillars and apostles of the Church. In the spandrels and lunettesabove the arches and the windows angels fly with white extended wings. On every vacant place are scrolls and arabesques of foliage, --birdsand beasts, doves drinking from the vase, and peacocks spreadinggorgeous plumes--a maze of green and gold and blue. Overhead, thevault is powdered with stars gleaming upon the deepest azure, and inthe midst is set an aureole embracing the majestic head of Christ, orelse the symbol of the sacred fish, or the hand of the Creatorpointing from a cloud. In Galla Placidia's tomb these storied vaultsspring above the sarcophagi of empresses and emperors, each lying inthe place where he was laid more than twelve centuries ago. The lightwhich struggles through the narrow windows serves to harmonise thebrilliant hues and make a gorgeous gloom. 

Besides these more general and decorative subjects, many of thechurches are adorned with historical mosaics, setting forth the Biblenarrative or incidents from the life of Christian emperors and kings. In S. Apollinare Nuovo there is a most interesting treble series ofsuch mosaics extending over both walls of the nave. On the left hand, as we enter, we see the town of Classis; on the right the palace ofTheodoric, its doors and loggie rich with curtains, and its friezesblazing with coloured ornaments. From the city gate of Classis virginsissue, and proceed in a long line until they reach Madonna seated on athrone, with Christ upon her knees, and the three kings in adorationat her feet. From Theodoric's palace door a similar procession ofsaints and martyrs carry us to Christ surrounded by archangels. Abovethis double row of saints and virgins stand the fathers and prophetsof the Church, and highest underneath the roof are pictures from thelife of our Lord. It will be remembered in connection with thesesubjects that the women sat upon the left and the men upon the rightside of the church. Above the tribune, at the east end of the church, it was customary to represent the Creative Hand, or the monogram ofthe Saviour, or the head of Christ with the letters A and [Greek Ô]. Moses and Elijah frequently stand on either side to symbolise thetransfiguration, while the saints and bishops specially connected withthe church appeared upon a lower row. Then on the side walls weredepicted such subjects as Justinian and Theodora among theircourtiers, or the grant of the privileges of the church to its firstfounder from imperial patrons, with symbols of the old Hebraicritual--Abel's lamb, the sacrifice of Isaac, Melchisedec's offering ofbread and wine, --which were regarded as the types of Christianceremonies. The baptistery was adorned with appropriate mosaicsrepresenting Christ's baptism in Jordan. 

Generally speaking, one is struck with the dignity of these designs, and especially with the combined majesty and sweetness of the face ofChrist. The sense for harmony of hue displayed in their composition ismarvellous. It would be curious to trace in detail the remnants ofclassical treatment which may be discerned--Jordan, for instance, pours his water from an urn like a river-god crowned with sedge--or toshow what points of ecclesiastical tradition are established theseancient monuments. We find Mariolatry already imminent, the names ofthe three kings, Kaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, the four evangelistsas we now recognise them, and many of the rites and vestments whichRitualists of all denominations regard with superstitious reverence. 

There are two sepulchral monuments in Ravenna which cannot be passedover unnoticed. The one is that of Theodoric the Goth, crowned by itssemisphere of solid stone, a mighty tomb, well worthy of the conquerorand king. It stands in a green field, surrounded by acacias, where thenightingales sing ceaselessly in May. The mason bees have covered it, and the water has invaded its sepulchral vaults. In spite of manytrials, it seems that human art is unable to pump out the pond andclear the frogs and efts from the chamber where the great Goth waslaid by Amalasuntha. 

The other is Dante's temple, with its basrelief and withered garlands. The story of his burial, and of the discovery of his real tomb, isfresh in the memory of every one. But the 'little cupola, more neatthan solemn, ' of which Lord Byron speaks, will continue to be the goalof many a pilgrimage. For myself--though I remember Chateaubriand'sbareheaded genuflection on its threshold, Alfieri's passionateprostration at the altar-tomb, and Byron's offering of poems on thepoet's shrine--I confess that a single canto of the 'Inferno, ' asingle passage of the 'Vita Nuova, ' seems more full of soul-stirringassociations than the place where, centuries ago, the mighty dust waslaid. It is the spirit that lives and makes alive. And Dante's spiritseems more present with us under the pine-branches of the Bosco thanbeside his real or fancied tomb. 'He is risen, '--'Lo, I am with youalway'--these are the words that ought to haunt us in aburying-ground. There is something affected and self-conscious inoverpowering grief or enthusiasm or humiliation at a tomb. 

 * * * * *

_RIMINI_

SIGISMONDO PANDOLFO MALATESTA AND LEO BATTISTA ALBERTI

Rimini is a city of about 18, 000 souls, famous for its Stabilmento de'Bagni and its antiquities, seated upon the coast of the Adriatic, alittle to the south-east of the world-historical Rubicon. It is ourduty to mention the baths first among its claims to distinction, since the prosperity and cheerfulness of the little town depend onthem in a great measure. But visitors from the north will fly fromthese, to marvel at the bridge which Augustus built and Tiberiuscompleted, and which still spans the Marecchia with five giganticarches of white Istrian limestone, as solidly as if it had not bornethe tramplings of at least three conquests. The triumphal arch, too, erected in honour of Augustus, is a notable monument of Romanarchitecture. Broad, ponderous, substantial, tufted here and therewith flowering weeds, and surmounted with mediaeval machicolations, proving it to have sometimes stood for city gate or fortress, itcontrasts most favourably with the slight and somewhat gimcrack archof Trajan in the sister city of Ancona. Yet these remains of theimperial pontifices, mighty and interesting as they are, sink intocomparative insignificance beside the one great wonder of Rimini, thecathedral remodelled for Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta by Leo BattistaAlberti in 1450. This strange church, one of the earliest extantbuildings in which the Neopaganism of the Renaissance showed itself infull force, brings together before our memory two men who might bechosen as typical in their contrasted characters of the transitionalage which gave them birth. 

No one with any tincture of literary knowledge is ignorant of the fameat least of the great Malatesta family--the house of the Wrongheads, as they were rightly called by some prevision of their future part inLombard history. The readers of the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighthcantos of the 'Inferno' have all heard of

 E il mastin vecchio e il nuovo da Verucchio Che fecer di Montagna il mal governo, while the story of Francesca da Polenta, who was wedded to thehunchback Giovanni Malatesta and murdered by him with her lover Paolo, is known not merely to students of Dante, but to readers of Byron andLeigh Hunt, to admirers of Flaxman, Ary Scheffer, Doré--to all, infact, who have of art and letters any love. 

The history of these Malatesti, from their first establishment underOtho III. As lieutenants for the Empire in the Marches of Ancona, downto their final subjugation by the Papacy in the age of theRenaissance, is made up of all the vicissitudes which could befall amediaeval Italian despotism. Acquiring an unlawful right over thetowns of Rimini, Cesena, Sogliano, Ghiacciuolo, they ruled their pettyprincipalities like tyrants by the help of the Guelf and Ghibellinefactions, inclining to the one or the other as it suited their humouror their interest, wrangling among themselves, transmitting thesuccession of their dynasty through bastards and by deeds of force, quarrelling with their neighbours the Counts of Urbino, alternatelydefying and submitting to the Papal legates in Romagna, serving ascondottieri in the wars of the Visconti and the state of Venice, andby their restlessness and genius for military intrigues contributingin no slight measure to the general disturbance of Italy. TheMalatesti were a race of strongly marked character: more, perhaps, than any other house of Italian tyrants, they combined for generationsthose qualities of the fox and the lion, which Machiavelli thoughtindispensable to a successful despot. Son after son, brother withbrother, they continued to be fierce and valiant soldiers, cruel inpeace, hardy in war, but treasonable and suspicious in alltransactions that could not be settled by the sword. Want of union, with them as with the Baglioni and many other of the minor noblefamilies in Italy, prevented their founding a substantial dynasty. Their power, based on force, was maintained by craft and crime, andtransmitted through tortuous channels by intrigue. While false intheir dealings with the world at large, they were diabolical in theperfidy with which they treated one another. No feudal custom, nostandard of hereditary right, ruled the succession in their family. Therefore the ablest Malatesta for the moment clutched what he couldof the domains that owned his house for masters. Partitions among sonsor brothers, mutually hostile and suspicious, weakened the wholestock. Yet they were great enough to hold their own for centuriesamong the many tyrants who infested Lombardy. That the other princelyfamilies of Romagna, Emilia, and the March were in the same state ofinternal discord and dismemberment, was probably one reason why theMalatesti stood their ground so firmly as they did. 

So far as Rimini is concerned, the house of Malatesta culminated inSigismondo Pandolfo, son of Gian Galeazzo Visconti's general, theperfidious Pandolfo. It was he who built the Rocca, or castle of thedespots, which stands a little way outside the town, commanding a fairview of Apennine tossed hill-tops and broad Lombard plain, and whoremodelled the Cathedral of S. Francis on a plan suggested by thegreatest genius of the age. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was one ofthe strangest products of the earlier Renaissance. To enumerate thecrimes which he committed within the sphere of his own family, mysterious and inhuman outrages which render the tale of the Cencicredible, would violate the decencies of literature. A thoroughlybestial nature gains thus much with posterity that its worst qualitiesmust be passed by in silence. It is enough to mention that he murderedthree wives in succession, [2] Bussoni di Carmagnuola, Guiniperad'Este, and Polissena Sforza, on various pretexts of infidelity, andcarved horns upon his own tomb with this fantastic legendunderneath:--

 Porto le corna ch' ognuno le vede, E tal le porta che non se lo crede. 

He died in wedlock with the beautiful and learned Isotta degli Atti, who had for some time been his mistress. But, like most of theMalatesti, he left no legitimate offspring. Throughout his life he wasdistinguished for bravery and cunning, for endurance of fatigue andrapidity of action, for an almost fretful rashness in the execution ofhis schemes, and for a character terrible in its violence. He wasacknowledged as a great general; yet nothing succeeded with him. Thelong warfare which he carried on against the Duke of Montefeltro endedin his discomfiture. Having begun by defying the Holy See, he wasimpeached at Rome for heresy, parricide, incest, adultery, rape, andsacrilege, burned in effigy by Pope Pius II. , and finally restored tothe bosom of the Church, after suffering the despoliation of almostall his territories, in 1463. The occasion on which this fierce andturbulent despiser of laws human and divine was forced to kneel as apenitent before the Papal legate in the gorgeous temple dedicated tohis own pride, in order that the ban of excommunication might beremoved from Rimini, was one of those petty triumphs, interestingchiefly for their picturesqueness, by which the Popes confirmed theirquestionable rights over the cities of Romagna. Sigismondo, shorn ofhis sovereignty, took the command of the Venetian troops against theTurks in the Morea, and returned in 1465, crowned with laurels, to dieat Rimini in the scene of his old splendour. 

A very characteristic incident belongs to this last act of his life. Dissolute, treacherous, and inhuman as he was, the tyrant of Riminihad always encouraged literature, and delighted in the society ofartists. He who could brook no contradiction from a prince or soldier, allowed the pedantic scholars of the sixteenth century to dictate tohim in matters of taste, and sat with exemplary humility at the feetof Latinists like Porcellio, Basinio, and Trebanio. Valturio, theengineer, and Alberti, the architect, were his familiar friends; andthe best hours of his life were spent in conversation with these men. Now that he found himself upon the sacred soil of Greece, he wasdetermined not to return to Italy empty-handed. Should he bringmanuscripts or marbles, precious vases or inscriptions in half-legibleGreek character? These relics were greedily sought for by thepotentates of Italian cities; and no doubt Sigismondo enriched hislibrary with some such treasures. But he obtained a noblerprize--nothing less than the body of a saint of scholarship, theauthentic bones of the great Platonist, Gemisthus Pletho. [3] These heexhumed from their Greek grave and caused them to be deposited in astone sarcophagus outside the cathedral of his building in Rimini. TheVenetians, when they stole the body of S. Mark from Alexandria, werescarcely more pleased than was Sigismondo with the acquisition of thisFather of the Neopagan faith. Upon the tomb we still may read thislegend: 'Jemisthii Bizantii philosopher sua temp principis reliquumSig. Pan. Mal. Pan. F. Belli Pelop adversus Turcor regem Imp obingentem eruditorum quo flagrat amorem huc afferendum introquemittendum curavit MCCCCLXVI. ' Of the Latinity of the inscription muchcannot be said; but it means that 'Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, having served as general against the Turks in the Morea, induced bythe great love with which he burns for all learned men, brought andplaced here the remains of Gemisthus of Byzantium, the prince of thephilosophers of his day. '

Sigismondo's portrait, engraved on medals, and sculptured upon everyfrieze and point of vantage in the Cathedral of Rimini, well denotesthe man. His face is seen in profile. The head, which is low and flatabove the forehead, rising swiftly backward from the crown, carries athick bushy shock of hair curling at the ends, such as the Italianscall a _zazzera_. The eye is deeply sunk, with long venomous flateyelids, like those which Leonardo gives to his most wicked faces. Thenose is long and crooked, curved like a vulture's over a petulantmouth, with lips deliberately pressed together, as though it werenecessary to control some nervous twitching. The cheek is broad, andits bone is strongly marked. Looking at these features in repose, wecannot but picture to our fancy what expression they might assumeunder a sudden fit of fury, when the sinews of the face werecontracted with quivering spasms, and the lips writhed in sympathywith knit forehead and wrinkled eyelids. 

Allusion has been made to the Cathedral of S. Francis at Rimini, asthe great ornament of the town, and the chief monument of Sigismondo'sfame. It is here that all the Malatesti lie. Here too is the chapelconsecrated to Isotta, 'Divæ Isottæ Sacrum;' and the tombs of theMalatesta ladies, 'Malatestorum domûs heroidum sepulchrum;' andSigismondo's own grave with the cuckold's horns and scornful epitaph. Nothing but the fact that the church is duly dedicated to S. Francis, and that its outer shell of classic marble encases an old Gothicedifice, remains to remind us that it is a Christian place ofworship. [4] It has no sanctity, no spirit of piety. The pride of thetyrant whose legend--'Sigismundus Pandulphus Malatesta Pan. F. FecitAnno Gratiæ MCCCCL'--occupies every arch and stringcourse of thearchitecture, and whose coat-of-arms and portrait in medallion, withhis cipher and his emblems of an elephant and a rose, are wrought inevery piece of sculptured work throughout the building, seems so tofill this house of prayer that there is no room left for God. Yet theCathedral of Rimini remains a monument of first-rate importance forall students who seek to penetrate the revived Paganism of thefifteenth century. It serves also to bring a far more interestingItalian of that period than the tyrant of Rimini himself, before ournotice. 

In the execution of his design, Sigismondo received the assistance ofone of the most remarkable men of this or any other age. Leo BattistaAlberti, a scion of the noble Florentine house of that name, bornduring the exile of his parents, and educated in the Venetianterritory, was endowed by nature with aptitudes, faculties, andsensibilities so varied, as to deserve the name of universal genius. Italy in the Renaissance period was rich in natures of this sort, towhom nothing that is strange or beautiful seemed unfamiliar, and who, gifted with a kind of divination, penetrated the secrets of the worldby sympathy. To Pico della Mirandola, Lionardo da Vinci, and MichelAgnolo Buonarroti may be added Leo Battista Alberti. That he achievedless than his great compeers, and that he now exists as the shadow ofa mighty name, was the effect of circumstances. He came half a centurytoo early into the world, and worked as a pioneer rather than asettler of the realm which Lionardo ruled as his demesne. Very earlyin his boyhood Alberti showed the versatility of his talents. The useof arms, the management of horses, music, painting, modelling forsculpture, mathematics, classical and modern literature, physicalscience as then comprehended, and all the bodily exercises proper tothe estate of a young nobleman, were at his command. His biographerasserts that he was never idle, never subject to ennui or fatigue. Heused to say that books at times gave him the same pleasure asbrilliant jewels or perfumed flowers: hunger and sleep could not keephim from them then. At other times the letters on the page appeared tohim like twining and contorted scorpions, so that he preferred to gazeon anything but written scrolls. He would then turn to music orpainting, or to the physical sports in which he excelled. The languagein which this alternation of passion and disgust for study isexpressed, bears on it the stamp of Alberti's peculiar temperament, his fervid and imaginative genius, instinct with subtle sympathies andstrange repugnances. Flying from his study, he would then betakehimself to the open air. No one surpassed him in running, inwrestling, in the force with which he cast his javelin or dischargedhis arrows. So sure was his aim and so skilful his cast, that he couldfling a farthing from the pavement of the square, and make it ringagainst a church roof far above. When he chose to jump, he put hisfeet together and bounded over the shoulders of men standing erectupon the ground. On horseback he maintained perfect equilibrium, andseemed incapable of fatigue. The most restive and vicious animalstrembled under him and became like lambs. There was a kind ofmagnetism in the man. We read, besides these feats of strength andskill, that he took pleasure in climbing mountains, for no otherpurpose apparently than for the joy of being close to nature. 

In this, as in many other of his instincts, Alberti was before hisage. To care for the beauties of landscape unadorned by art, and tosympathise with sublime or rugged scenery, was not in the spirit ofthe Renaissance. Humanity occupied the attention of poets andpainters; and the age was yet far distant when the pantheistic feelingfor the world should produce the art of Wordsworth and of Turner. Yeta few great natures even then began to comprehend the charm andmystery which the Greeks had imaged in their Pan, the sense of anall-pervasive spirit in wild places, the feeling of a hidden want, theinvisible tie which makes man a part of rocks and woods and streamsaround him. Petrarch had already ascended the summit of Mont Ventoux, to meditate, with an exaltation of the soul he scarcely understood, upon the scene spread at his feet and above his head. Æneas SylviusPiccolomini delighted in wild places for no mere pleasure of thechase, but for the joy he took in communing with nature. How S. Francis found God in the sun and the air, the water and the stars, weknow by his celebrated hymn; and of Dante's acute observation, everycanto of the 'Divine Comedy' is witness. 

Leo Alberti was touched in spirit by even a deeper and a strangerpathos than any of these men: 'In the early spring, when he beheld themeadows and hills covered with flowers, and saw the trees and plantsof all kinds bearing promise of fruit, his heart became exceedingsorrowful; and when in autumn he looked on fields heavy with harvestand orchards apple-laden, he felt such grief that many even saw himweep for the sadness of his soul. ' It would seem that he scarcelyunderstood the source of this sweet trouble: for at such times hecompared the sloth and inutility of men with the industry andfertility of nature; as though this were the secret of his melancholy. A poet of our century has noted the same stirring of the spirit, andhas striven to account for it:--

 Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy autumn fields, And thinking of the days that are no more. 

Both Alberti and Tennyson have connected the _mal du pays_ of thehuman soul for that ancient country of its birth, the mild Saturnianearth from which we sprang, with a sense of loss. It is the waste ofhuman energy that affects Alberti; the waste of human life touches themodern poet. Yet both perhaps have scarcely interpreted their ownspirit; for is not the true source of tears deeper and more secret?Man is a child of nature in the simplest sense; and the stirrings ofthe secular breasts that gave him suck, and on which he even now musthang, have potent influences over his emotions. 

Of Alberti's extraordinary sensitiveness to all such impressions manycurious tales are told. The sight of refulgent jewels, of flowers, andof fair landscapes, had the same effect upon his nerves as the soundof the Dorian mood upon the youths whom Pythagoras cured of passion bymusic. He found in them an anodyne for pain, a restoration fromsickness. Like Walt Whitman, who adheres to nature by closer and morevital sympathy than any other poet of the modern world, Alberti feltthe charm of excellent old age no less than that of florid youth. 'Onold men gifted with a noble presence and hale and vigorous, he gazedagain and again, and said that he revered in them the delights ofnature (_naturæ delitias_). ' Beasts and birds and all living creaturesmoved him to admiration for the grace with which they had been gifted, each in his own kind. It is even said that he composed a funeraloration for a dog which he had loved and which died. 

To this sensibility for all fair things in nature, Alberti added thecharm of a singularly sweet temper and graceful conversation. Theactivity of his mind, which was always being exercised on subjects ofgrave speculation, removed him from the noise and bustle ofcommonplace society. He was somewhat silent, inclined to solitude, and of a pensive countenance; yet no man found him difficult ofaccess: his courtesy was exquisite, and among familiar friends he wasnoted for the flashes of a delicate and subtle wit. Collections weremade of his apophthegms by friends, and some are recorded by hisanonymous biographer. [5] Their finer perfume, as almost always happenswith good sayings which do not certain the full pith of a proverb, butowe their force, in part at least, to the personality of their author, and to the happy moment of their production, has evanesced. Here, however, is one which seems still to bear the impress of Alberti'sgenius: 'Gold is the soul of labour, and labour the slave ofpleasure. ' Of women he used to say that their inconstancy was anantidote to their falseness; for if a woman could but persevere inwhat she undertook, all the fair works of men would be ruined. One ofhis strongest moral sentences is aimed at envy, from which he sufferedmuch in his own life, and against which he guarded with a curiousamount of caution. His own family grudged the distinction which histalents gained for him, and a dark story is told of a secret attemptmade by them to assassinate him through his servants. Alberti metthese ignoble jealousies with a stately calm and a sweet dignity ofdemeanour, never condescending to accuse his relatives, never seekingto retaliate, but acting always for the honour of his illustrioushouse. In the same spirit of generosity he refused to enter into wordywarfare with detractors and calumniators, sparing the reputation evenof his worst enemy when chance had placed him in his power. Thismoderation both of speech and conduct was especially distinguished inan age which tolerated the fierce invectives of Filelfo, and applaudedthe vindictive courage of Cellini. To money Alberti showed a calmindifference. He committed his property to his friends and shared withthem in common. Nor was he less careless about vulgar fame, spendingfar more pains in the invention of machinery and the discovery oflaws, than in their publication to the world. His service was toknowledge, not to glory. Self-control was another of his eminentqualities. With the natural impetuosity of a large heart, and thevivacity of a trained athlete, he yet never allowed himself to besubdued by anger or by sensual impulses, but took pains to preservehis character unstained and dignified before the eyes of men. A storyis told of him which may remind us of Goethe's determination toovercome his giddiness. In his youth his head was singularly sensitiveto changes of temperature; but by gradual habituation he broughthimself at last to endure the extremes of heat and cold bareheaded. Inlike manner he had a constitutional disgust for onions and honey; sopowerful, that the very sight of these things made him sick. Yet byconstantly viewing and touching what was disagreeable, he conqueredthese dislikes; and proved that men have a complete mastery over whatis merely instinctive in their nature. His courage corresponded to hissplendid physical development. When a boy of fifteen, he severelywounded himself in the foot. The gash had to be probed and then sewnup. Alberti not only bore the pain of this operation without a groan, but helped the surgeon with his own hands; and effected a cure of thefever which succeeded by the solace of singing to his cithern. Formusic he had a genius of the rarest order; and in painting he is saidto have achieved success. Nothing, however, remains of his work andfrom what Vasari says of it, we may fairly conclude that he gave lesscare to the execution of finished pictures, than to drawingssubsidiary to architectural and mechanical designs. His biographerrelates that when he had completed a painting, he called children andasked them what it meant. If they did not know, he reckoned it afailure. He was also in the habit of painting from memory. While atVenice, he put on canvas the faces of friends at Florence whom he hadnot seen for months. That the art of painting was subservient in hisestimation to mechanics, is indicated by what we hear about thecamera, in which he showed landscapes by day and the revolutions ofthe stars by night, so lively drawn that the spectators were affectedwith amazement. The semi-scientific impulse to extend man's masteryover nature, the magician's desire to penetrate secrets, which sopowerfully influenced the development of Lionardo's genius, seems tohave overcome the purely æsthetic instincts of Alberti, so that hebecame in the end neither a great artist like Raphael, nor a greatdiscoverer like Galileo, but rather a clairvoyant to whom the miraclesof nature and of art lie open. 

After the first period of youth was over, Leo Battista Alberti devotedhis great faculties and all his wealth of genius to the study of thelaw--then, as now, the quicksand of the noblest natures. The industrywith which he applied himself to the civil and ecclesiastical codesbroke his health. For recreation he composed a Latin comedy called'Philodoxeos, ' which imposed upon the judgment of scholars, and wasascribed as a genuine antique to Lepidus, the comic poet. Feelingstronger, Alberti returned at the age of twenty to his law studies, and pursued them in the teeth of disadvantages. His health was stilluncertain, and the fortune of an exile reduced him to the utmost want. It was no wonder that under these untoward circumstances even hisHerculean strength gave way. Emaciated and exhausted, he lost theclearness of his eyesight, and became subject to arterialdisturbances, which filled his ears with painful sounds. This nervousillness is not dissimilar to that which Rousseau describes in theconfessions of his youth. In vain, however, his physicians warnedAlberti of impending peril. A man of so much stanchness, accustomedto control his nature with an iron will, is not ready to acceptadvice. Alberti persevered in his studies, until at last the very seatof intellect was invaded. His memory began to fail him for names, while he still retained with wonderful accuracy whatever he had seenwith his eyes. It was now impossible to think of law as a profession. Yet since he could not live without severe mental exercise, he hadrecourse to studies which tax the verbal memory less than theintuitive faculties of the reason. Physics and mathematics became hischief resource; and he devoted his energies to literature. His'Treatise on the Family' may be numbered among the best of thosecompositions on social and speculative subjects in which the Italiansof the Renaissance sought to rival Cicero. His essays on the arts arementioned by Vasari with sincere approbation. Comedies, interludes, orations, dialogues, and poems flowed with abundance from his facilepen. Some were written in Latin, which he commanded more than fairly;some in the Tuscan tongue, of which owing to the long exile of hisfamily in Lombardy, he is said to have been less a master. It wasowing to this youthful illness, from which apparently his constitutionnever wholly recovered, that Alberti's genius was directed toarchitecture. 

Through his friendship with Flavio Biondo, the famous Roman antiquary, Alberti received an introduction to Nicholas V. At the time when this, the first great Pope of the Renaissance, was engaged in rebuilding thepalaces and fortifications of Rome. Nicholas discerned the genius ofthe man, and employed him as his chief counsellor in all matters ofarchitecture. When the Pope died, he was able, while reciting his longLatin will upon his deathbed, to boast that he had restored the HolySee to its due dignity, and the Eternal City to the splendour worthyof the seat of Christendom. The accomplishment of the second part ofhis work he owed to the genius of Alberti. After doing thus much forRome under Thomas of Sarzana, and before beginning to beautifyFlorence at the instance of the Rucellai family, Alberti entered theservice of the Malatesta, and undertook to remodel the Cathedral of S. Francis at Rimini. He found it a plain Gothic structure with apse andside chapels. Such churches are common enough in Italy, where pointedarchitecture never developed its true character of complexity andrichness, but was doomed to the vast vacuity exemplified in S. Petronio of Bologna. He left it a strange medley of mediæval andRenaissance work, a symbol of that dissolving scene in the world'spantomime, when the spirit of classic art, as yet but littlecomprehended, was encroaching on the early Christian taste. Perhapsthe mixture of styles so startling in S. Francesco ought not to belaid to the charge of Alberti, who had to execute the task of turninga Gothic into a classic building. All that he could do was to alterthe whole exterior of the church, by affixing a screen-work of Romanarches and Corinthian pilasters, so as to hide the old design and yetto leave the main features of the fabric, the windows and doorsespecially, _in statu quo_. With the interior he dealt upon the samegeneral principle, by not disturbing its structure, while he coveredevery available square inch of surface with decorations alien to theGothic manner. Externally, S. Francesco is perhaps the most originaland graceful of the many attempts made by Italian builders to fuse themediæval and the classic styles. For Alberti attempted nothing less. Acentury elapsed before Palladio, approaching the problem from adifferent point of view, restored the antique in its purity, anderected in the Palazzo della Ragione of Vicenza an almost uniquespecimen of resuscitated Roman art. 

Internally, the beauty of the church is wholly due to its exquisitewall-ornaments. These consist for the most part of low reliefs in asoft white stone, many of them thrown out upon a blue ground in thestyle of Della Robbia. Allegorical figures designed with the purity ofoutline we admire in Botticelli, draperies that Burne-Jones mightcopy, troops of singing boys in the manner of Donatello, great angelstraced upon the stone so delicately that they seem to be rather drawnthan sculptured, statuettes in niches, personifications of all artsand sciences alternating with half-bestial shapes of satyrs andsea-children:--such are the forms which fill the spaces of the chapelwalls, and climb the pilasters, and fret the arches, in such abundancethat had the whole church been finished as it was designed, it wouldhave presented one splendid though bizarre effect of incrustation. Heavy screens of Verona marble, emblazoned in open arabesques with theciphers of Sigismondo and Isotta, with coats-of-arms, emblems, andmedallion portraits, shut the chapels from the nave. Who produced allthis sculpture it is difficult to say. Some of it is very good: muchis indifferent. We may hazard the opinion that, besides BernardoCiuffagni, of whom Vasari speaks, some pupils of Donatello andBenedetto da Majano worked at it. The influence of the sculptors ofFlorence is everywhere perceptible. 

Whatever be the merit of these reliefs, there is no doubt that theyfairly represent one of the most interesting moments in the history ofmodern art. Gothic inspiration had failed; the early Tuscan style ofthe Pisani had been worked out; Michelangelo was yet far distant, andthe abundance of classic models had not overwhelmed originality. Thesculptors of the school of Ghiberti and Donatello, who are representedin this church, were essentially pictorial, preferring low to highrelief, and relief in general to detached figures. Their style, likethe style of Boiardo in poetry, of Botticelli in painting, is specificto Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century. Mediæval standards oftaste were giving way to classical, Christian sentiment to Pagan; yetthe imitation of the antique had not been carried so far as to effacethe spontaneity of the artist, and enough remained of Christianfeeling to tinge the fancy with a grave and sweet romance. Thesculptor had the skill and mastery to express his slightest shade ofthought with freedom, spirit, and precision. Yet his work showed nosign of conventionality, no adherence to prescribed rules. Everyoutline, every fold of drapery, every attitude was pregnant, to theartist's own mind at any rate, with meaning. In spite of itssymbolism, what he wrought was never mechanically figurative, butgifted with the independence of its own beauty, vital with aninbreathed spirit of life. It was a happy moment, when art had reachedconsciousness, and the artist had not yet become self-conscious. Thehand and the brain then really worked together for the procreation ofnew forms of grace, not for the repetition of old models, or for theinvention of the strange and startling. 'Delicate, sweet, andcaptivating, ' are good adjectives to express the effect produced uponthe mind by the contemplation even of the average work of this period. 

To study the flowing lines of the great angels traced upon the wallsof the Chapel of S. Sigismund in the Cathedral of Rimini, to followthe undulations of their drapery that seems to float, to feel thedignified urbanity of all their gestures, is like listening to one ofthose clear early Italian compositions for the voice, which surpassesin suavity of tone and grace of movement all that Music in herfull-grown vigour has produced. There is indeed something infinitelycharming in the crepuscular moments of the human mind. Whether it bethe rathe loveliness of an art still immature, or the beauty of artupon the wane--whether, in fact, the twilight be of morning or ofevening, we find in the masterpieces of such periods a placid calm andchastened pathos, as of a spirit self-withdrawn from vulgar cares, which in the full light of meridian splendour is lacking. In theChurch of S. Francesco at Rimini the tempered clearness of the dawn isjust about to broaden into day. 

 * * * * *

_MAY IN UMBRIA_

FROM ROME TO TERNI

We left Rome in clear sunset light. The Alban Hills defined themselveslike a cameo of amethyst upon a pale blue distance; and over theSabine Mountains soared immeasurable moulded domes of alabasterthunderclouds, casting deep shadows, purple and violet, across theslopes of Tivoli. To westward the whole sky was lucid, like somehalf-transparent topaz, flooded with slowly yellowing sunbeams. TheCampagna has often been called a garden of wild-flowers. Just nowpoppy and aster, gladiolus and thistle, embroider it with patternsinfinite and intricate beyond the power of art. They have already mownthe hay in part; and the billowy tracts of greyish green, where noflowers are now in bloom, supply a restful groundwork to thosebrilliant patches of diapered _fioriture_. These are likepraying-carpets spread for devotees upon the pavement of a mosquewhose roof is heaven. In the level light the scythes of the mowersflash as we move past. From their bronzed foreheads the men tossmasses of dark curls. Their muscular flanks and shoulders swaysideways from firm yet pliant reins. On one hill, fronting the sunset, there stands a herd of some thirty huge grey oxen, feeding and raisingtheir heads to look at us, with just a flush of crimson on theirhorns and dewlaps. This is the scale of Mason's and of Costa'scolouring. This is the breadth and magnitude of Rome. 

Thus, through dells of ilex and oak, yielding now a glimpse of Tiberand S. Peter's, now opening on a purple section of the distant SabineHills, we came to Monte Rotondo. The sun sank; and from the flameswhere he had perished, Hesper and the thin moon, very white and keen, grew slowly into sight. Now we follow the Tiber, a swollen, hurrying, turbid river, in which the mellowing Western sky reflects itself. Thischangeful mirror of swift waters spreads a dazzling foreground tovalley, hill, and lustrous heaven. There is orange on the far horizon, and a green ocean above, in which sea-monsters fashioned from theclouds are floating. Yonder swims an elf with luminous hair astrideupon a sea-horse, and followed by a dolphin plunging through the fierywaves. The orange deepens into dying red. The green divides intodaffodil and beryl. The blue above grows fainter, and the moon andstars shine stronger. 

Through these celestial changes we glide into a landscape fit forFrancia and the early Umbrian painters. Low hills to right and left;suavely modelled heights in the far distance; a very quiet width ofplain, with slender trees ascending into the pellucid air; and down inthe mystery of the middle distance a glimpse of heaven-reflectingwater. The magic of the moon and stars lends enchantment to thisscene. No painting could convey their influences. Sometimes bothluminaries tremble, all dispersed and broken, on the swirling river. Sometimes they sleep above the calm cool reaches of a rush-grown mere. And here and there a ruined turret, with a broken window and a tuftof shrubs upon the rifted battlement, gives value to the fading pallorof the West. The last phase in the sunset is a change to blue-greymonochrome, faintly silvered with starlight; hills, Tiber, fields andwoods, all floating in aërial twilight. There is no definition ofoutline now. The daffodil of the horizon has faded into scarcelyperceptible pale greenish yellow. 

We have passed Stimigliano. Through the mystery of darkness we hurrypast the bridges of Augustus and the lights of Narni. 

THE CASCADES OF TERNI

The Velino is a river of considerable volume which rises in thehighest region of the Abruzzi, threads the upland valley of Rieti, andprecipitates itself by an artificial channel over cliffs about sevenhundred feet in height into the Nera. The water is densely chargedwith particles of lime. This calcareous matter not only tendscontinually to choke its bed, but clothes the precipices over whichthe torrent thunders with fantastic drapery of stalactite; and, carried on the wind in foam, incrusts the forests that surround thefalls with fine white dust. These famous cascades are undoubtedly themost sublime and beautiful which Europe boasts; and their situation isworthy of so great a natural wonder. We reach them through a noblemid-Italian landscape, where the mountain forms are austere and boldlymodelled, but the vegetation, both wild and cultivated, has somethingof the South-Italian richness. The hillsides are a labyrinth of boxand arbutus, with coronilla in golden bloom. The turf is starred withcyclamens and orchises. Climbing the staircase paths beside the fallsin morning sunlight, or stationed on the points of vantage thatcommand their successive cataracts, we enjoyed a spectacle which mightbe compared in its effect upon the mind to the impression left by asymphony or a tumultuous lyric. The turbulence and splendour, theswiftness and resonance, the veiling of the scene in smoke ofshattered water-masses, the withdrawal of these veils according as thevolume of the river slightly shifted in its fall, the rainbowsshimmering on the silver spray, the shivering of poplars hung aboveimpendent precipices, the stationary grandeur of the mountains keepingwatch around, the hurry and the incoherence of the cataracts, theimmobility of force and changeful changelessness in nature, were allfor me the elements of one stupendous poem. It was like an ode ofShelley translated into symbolism, more vivid through inarticulateappeal to primitive emotion than any words could be. 

MONTEFALCO

The rich land of the Clitumnus is divided into meadows by transparentwatercourses, gliding with a glassy current over swaying reeds. Through this we pass, and leave Bevagna to the right, and ascend oneof those long gradual roads which climb the hills where all the citiesof the Umbrians perch. The view expands, revealing Spello, Assisi, Perugia on its mountain buttress, and the far reaches northward of theTiber valley. Then Trevi and Spoleto came into sight, and the severehill-country above Gubbio in part disclosed itself. Over Spoleto thefierce witch-haunted heights of Norcia rose forbidding. This is thekind of panorama that dilates the soul. It is so large, so dignified, so beautiful in tranquil form. The opulent abundance of the plaincontrasts with the severity of mountain ranges desolately grand; andthe name of each of all those cities thrills the heart with memories. 

The main object of a visit to Montefalco is to inspect its manyexcellent frescoes; painted histories of S. Francis and S. Jerome, byBenozzo Gozzoli; saints, angels, and Scripture episodes by the gentleTiberio d'Assisi. Full justice had been done to these, when a littleboy, seeing us lingering outside the church of S. Chiara, askedwhether we should not like to view the body of the saint. Thisprivilege could be purchased at the price of a small fee. It was onlynecessary to call the guardian of her shrine at the high altar. Indolent, and in compliant mood, with languid curiosity and half anhour to spare, we assented. A handsome young man appeared, whoconducted us with decent gravity into a little darkened chamber behindthe altar. There he lighted wax tapers, opened sliding doors in whatlooked like a long coffin, and drew curtains. Before us in the dimlight there lay a woman covered with a black nun's dress. Only herhands, and the exquisitely beautiful pale contour of her face(forehead, nose, mouth, and chin, modelled in purest outline, asthough the injury of death had never touched her) were visible. Herclosed eyes seemed to sleep. She had the perfect peace of Luini's S. Catherine borne by the angels to her grave on Sinai. I have rarelyseen anything which surprised and touched me more. The religiousearnestness of the young custode, the hushed adoration of thecountry-folk who had silently assembled round us, intensified thesympathy-inspiring beauty of the slumbering girl. Could Julia, daughter of Claudius, have been fairer than this maiden, when theLombard workmen found her in her Latin tomb, and brought her to beworshipped on the Capitol? S. Chiara's shrine was hung round with herrelics; and among these the heart extracted from her body wassuspended. Upon it, apparently wrought into the very substance of themummied flesh, were impressed a figure of the crucified Christ, thescourge, and the five stigmata. The guardian's faith in thismiraculous witness to her sainthood, the gentle piety of the men andwomen who knelt before it, checked all expressions of incredulity. Weabandoned ourselves to the genius of the place; forgot even to askwhat Santa Chiara was sleeping here; and withdrew, toned to a notunpleasing melancholy. The world-famous S. Clair, the spiritual sisterof S. Francis, lies in Assisi. I have often asked myself, Who, then, was this nun? What history had she? And I think now of this girl as ofa damsel of romance, a Sleeping Beauty in the wood of time, secludedfrom intrusive elements of fact, and folded in the love and faith ofher own simple worshippers. Among the hollows of Arcadia, how manyrustic shrines in ancient days held saints of Hellas, apocryphal, perhaps, like this, but hallowed by tradition and enduring homage![6]

FOLIGNO

In the landscape of Raphael's votive picture, known as the Madonna diFoligno, there is a town with a few towers, placed upon a broad plainat the edge of some blue hills. Allowing for that license as todetails which imaginative masters permitted themselves in matters ofsubordinate importance, Raphael's sketch is still true to Foligno. Theplace has not materially changed since the beginning of the sixteenthcentury. Indeed, relatively to the state of Italy at large, it isstill the same as in the days of ancient Rome. Foligno forms a stationof commanding interest between Rome and the Adriatic upon the greatFlaminian Way. At Foligno the passes of the Apennines debouch into theUmbrian plain, which slopes gradually toward the valley of the Tiber, and from it the valley of the Nera is reached by an easy ascentbeneath the walls of Spoleto. An army advancing from the north by theMetaurus and the Furlo Pass must find itself at Foligno; and the levelchampaign round the city is well adapted to the maintenance andexercises of a garrison. In the days of the Republic and the Empire, the value of this position was well understood; but Foligno'simportance, as the key to the Flaminian Way, was eclipsed by twoflourishing cities in its immediate vicinity, Hispellum and Mevania, the modern Spello and Bevagna. We might hazard a conjecture that theLombards, when they ruled the Duchy of Spoleto, following their usualpolicy of opposing new military centres to the ancient Romanmunicipia, encouraged Fulginium at the expense of her two neighbours. But of this there is no certainty to build upon. All that can beaffirmed with accuracy is that in the Middle Ages, while Spello andBevagna declined into the inferiority of dependent burghs, Folignogrew in power and became the chief commune of this part of Umbria. Itwas famous during the last centuries of struggle between the Italianburghers and their native despots, for peculiar ferocity in civilstrife. Some of the bloodiest pages in mediæval Italian history arethose which relate the vicissitudes of the Trinci family, theexhaustion of Foligno by internal discord, and its final submission tothe Papal power. Since railways have been carried from Rome throughNarni and Spoleto to Ancona and Perugia, Foligno has gainedconsiderably in commercial and military status. It is the point ofintersection for three lines; the Italian government has made it agreat cavalry depôt, and there are signs of reviving traffic in itsdecayed streets. Whether the presence of a large garrison has alreadymodified the population, or whether we may ascribe something to theabsence of Roman municipal institutions in the far past, and to thesavagery of the mediæval period, it is difficult to say. Yet theimpression left by Foligno upon the mind is different from that ofAssisi, Spello, and Montefalco, which are distinguished for a certaingrace and gentleness in their inhabitants. 

My window in the city wall looks southward across the plain toSpoleto, with Montefalco perched aloft upon the right, and Trevi onits mountain-bracket to the left. From the topmost peaks of the SabineApennines, gradual tender sloping lines descend to find their quiet inthe valley of Clitumnus. The space between me and that distance isinfinitely rich with every sort of greenery, dotted here and therewith towers and relics of baronial houses. The little town is incommotion; for the working men of Foligno and its neighbourhood haveresolved to spend their earnings on a splendid festa--horse-races, andtwo nights of fireworks. The acacias and paulownias on the rampartsare in full bloom of creamy white and lilac. In the glare of Bengallights these trees, with all their pendulous blossoms, surpassed themost fantastic of artificial decorations. The rockets sent aloft intothe sky amid that solemn Umbrian landscape were nowise out of harmonywith nature. I never sympathised with critics who resent the intrusionof fireworks upon scenes of natural beauty. The Giessbach, lighted upat so much per head on stated evenings, with a band playing and acrowd of cockneys staring, presents perhaps an incongruous spectacle. But where, as here at Foligno, a whole city has made itself afestival, where there are multitudes of citizens and soldiers andcountry-people slowly moving and gravely admiring, with the decencyand order characteristic of an Italian crowd, I have nothing but asense of satisfaction. 

It is sometimes the traveller's good fortune in some remote place tomeet with an inhabitant who incarnates and interprets for him the_genius loci_ as he has conceived it. Though his own subjectivity willassuredly play a considerable part in such an encounter, transferringto his chance acquaintance qualities he may not possess, andconnecting this personality in some purely imaginative manner withthoughts derived from study, or impressions made by nature; yet thestranger will henceforth become the meeting-point of many memories, the central figure in a composition which derives from him itsvividness. Unconsciously and innocently he has lent himself to thecreation of a picture, and round him, as around the hero of a myth, have gathered thoughts and sentiments of which he had himself noknowledge. On one of these nights I had been threading the aisles ofacacia-trees, now glaring red, now azure, as the Bengal lights keptchanging. My mind instinctively went back to scenes of treachery andbloodshed in the olden time, when Gorrado Trinci paraded the mangledremnants of three hundred of his victims, heaped on mule-back, throughFoligno, for a warning to the citizens. As the procession moved alongthe ramparts, I found myself in contest with a young man, who readilyfell into conversation. He was very tall, with enormous breadth ofshoulders, and long sinewy arms, like Michelangelo's favourite models. His head was small, curled over with crisp black hair. Low forehead, and thick level eyebrows absolutely meeting over intensely brightfierce eyes. The nose descending straight from the brows, as in astatue of Hadrian's age. The mouth full-lipped, petulant, andpassionate above a firm round chin. He was dressed in the shirt, whitetrousers, and loose white jacket of a contadino; but he did not movewith a peasant's slouch, rather with the elasticity and alertness ofan untamed panther. He told me that he was just about to join acavalry regiment; and I could well imagine, when military dignity wasadded to that gait, how grandly he would go. This young man, of whom Iheard nothing more after our half-hour's conversation among thecrackling fireworks and roaring cannon, left upon my mind anindescribable impression of dangerousness--of 'something fierce andterrible, eligible to burst forth. ' Of men like this, then, wereformed the Companies of Adventure who flooded Italy with villany, ambition, and lawlessness in the fifteenth century. Gattamelata, whobegan life as a baker's boy at Narni and ended it with a bronze statueby Donatello on the public square in Padua, was of this breed. Likethis were the Trinci and their bands of murderers. Like this were thebravi who hunted Lorenzaccio to death at Venice. Like this was PietroPaolo Baglioni, whose fault, in the eyes of Machiavelli, was that hecould not succeed in being 'perfettamente tristo. ' Beautiful, butinhuman; passionate, but cold; powerful, but rendered impotent forfirm and lofty deeds by immorality and treason; how many centuries ofmen like this once wasted Italy and plunged her into servitude! Yetwhat material is here, under sterner discipline, and with a noblernational ideal, for the formation of heroic armies. Of such stuff, doubtless, were the Roman legionaries. When will the Italians learn touse these men as Fabius or as Cæsar, not as the Vitelli and the Trinciused them? In such meditations, deeply stirred by the meeting of myown reflections with one who seemed to represent for me in life andblood the spirit of the place which had provoked them, I said farewellto Cavallucci, and returned to my bedroom on the city wall. The lastrockets had whizzed and the last cannons had thundered ere I fellasleep. 

SPELLO

Spello contains some not inconsiderable antiquities--the remains of aRoman theatre, a Roman gate with the heads of two men and a womanleaning over it, and some fragments of Roman sculpture scatteredthrough its buildings. The churches, especially those of S. M. Maggioreand S. Francesco, are worth a visit for the sake of Pinturicchio. Nowhere, except in the Piccolomini Library at Siena, can that master'swork in fresco be better studied than here. The satisfaction withwhich he executed the wall paintings in S. Maria Maggiore is testifiedby his own portrait introduced upon a panel in the decoration of theVirgin's chamber. The scrupulously rendered details of books, chairs, window seats, &c. , which he here has copied, remind one of Carpaccio'sstudy of S. Benedict at Venice. It is all sweet, tender, delicate, andcarefully finished; but without depth, not even the depth ofPerugino's feeling. In S. Francesco, Pinturicchio, with the samemeticulous refinement, painted a letter addressed to him by GentileBaglioni. It lies on a stool before Madonna and her court of saints. Nicety of execution, technical mastery of fresco as a medium for Dutchdetail-painting, prettiness of composition, and cheerfulness ofcolouring, are noticeable throughout his work here rather than eitherthought or sentiment. S. Maria Maggiore can boast a fresco of Madonnabetween a young episcopal saint and Catherine of Alexandria from thehand of Perugino. The rich yellow harmony of its tones, and thegraceful dignity of its emotion, conveyed no less by a certainRaphaelesque pose and outline than by suavity of facial expression, enable us to measure the distance between this painter and hisquasi-pupil Pinturicchio. 

We did not, however, drive to Spello to inspect either Romanantiquities or frescoes, but to see an inscription on the city wallsabout Orlando. It is a rude Latin elegiac couplet, saying that, 'fromthe sign below, men may conjecture the mighty members of Roland, nephew of Charles; his deeds are written in history. ' Three agreeableold gentlemen of Spello, who attended us with much politeness, andwere greatly interested in my researches, pointed out a markwaist-high upon the wall, where Orlando's knee is reported to havereached. But I could not learn anything about a phallic monolith, which is said by Guerin or Panizzi to have been identified with theRoland myth at Spello. Such a column either never existed here, orhad been removed before the memory of the present generation. 

EASTER MORNING AT ASSISI

We are in the lower church of S. Francesco. High mass is being sung, with orchestra and organ and a choir of many voices. Candles arelighted on the altar, over-canopied with Giotto's allegories. From thelow southern windows slants the sun, in narrow bands, upon themany-coloured gloom and embrowned glory of these painted aisles. Womenin bright kerchiefs kneel upon the stones, and shaggy men from themountains stand or lean against the wooden benches. There is no movingfrom point to point. Where we have taken our station, at thenorth-western angle of the transept, there we stay till mass be over. The whole low-vaulted building glows duskily; the frescoed roof, thestained windows, the figure-crowded pavements blending their rich butsubdued colours, like hues upon some marvellous moth's wings, or likea deep-toned rainbow mist discerned in twilight dreams, or like suchtapestry as Eastern queens, in ancient days, wrought for the pavilionof an empress. Forth from this maze of mingling tints, indefinite inshade and sunbeams, lean earnest, saintly faces--ineffablypure--adoring, pitying, pleading; raising their eyes in ecstasy toheaven, or turning them in ruth toward earth. Men and women of whomthe world was not worthy--at the hands of those old painters they havereceived the divine grace, the dovelike simplicity, whereof Italiansin the fourteenth century possessed the irrecoverable secret. Eachface is a poem; the counterpart in painting to a chapter from theFioretti di San Francesco. Over the whole scene--in the architecture, in the frescoes, in the coloured windows, in the gloom, on thepeople, in the incense, from the chiming bells, through themusic--broods one spirit: the spirit of him who was 'the co-espoused, co-transforate with Christ;' the ardent, the radiant, the beautiful insoul; the suffering, the strong, the simple, the victorious over selfand sin; the celestial who trampled upon earth and rose on wings ofecstasy to heaven; the Christ-inebriated saint of visions supersensualand life beyond the grave. Far down below the feet of those whoworship God through him, S. Francis sleeps; but his soul, theincorruptible part of him, the message he gave the world, is in thespaces round us. This is his temple. He fills it like an unseen god. Not as Phoebus or Athene, from their marble pedestals; but as anabiding spirit, felt everywhere, nowhere seized, absorbing in itselfall mysteries, all myths, all burning exaltations, all abasements, alllove, self-sacrifice, pain, yearning, which the thought of Christ, sweeping the centuries, hath wrought for men. Let, therefore, choirand congregation raise their voices on the tide of prayers andpraises; for this is Easter morning--Christ is risen! Our sister, Death of the Body, for whom S. Francis thanked God in his hymn, isreconciled to us this day, and takes us by the hand, and leads us tothe gate whence floods of heavenly glory issue from the faces of amultitude of saints. Pray, ye poor people; chant and pray. If all bebut a dream, to wake from this were loss for you indeed!

PERUSIA AUGUSTA

The piazza in front of the Prefettura is my favourite resort on thesenights of full moon. The evening twilight is made up partly of sunsetfading over Thrasymene and Tuscany; partly of moonrise from themountains of Gubbio and the passes toward Ancona. The hills are cappedwith snow, although the season is so forward. Below our parapets thebulk of S. Domenico, with its gaunt perforated tower, and the finergroup of S. Pietro, flaunting the arrowy 'Pennacchio di Perugia, ' jutout upon the spine of hill which dominates the valley of the Tiber. Asthe night gloom deepens, and the moon ascends the sky, these buildingsseem to form the sombre foreground to some French etching. Beyond themspreads the misty moon-irradiated plain of Umbria. Over all riseshadowy Apennines, with dim suggestions of Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Montefalco, and Spoleto on their basements. Little thin whiffs ofbreezes, very slight and searching, flit across, and shiver as theypass from Apennine to plain. The slowly moving population--women inveils, men winter-mantled--pass to and fro between the buildings andthe grey immensity of sky. Bells ring. The bugles of the soldiers blowretreat in convents turned to barracks. Young men roam the streetsbeneath, singing May songs. Far, far away upon the plain, red throughthe vitreous moonlight ringed with thundery gauze, fires of unnamedcastelli smoulder. As we lean from ledges eighty feet in height, gasvies with moon in chequering illuminations on the ancient walls;Etruscan mouldings, Roman letters, high-piled hovels, suburbanworld-old dwellings plastered like martins' nests against the masonry. 

Sunlight adds more of detail to this scene. To the right of Subasio, where the passes go from Foligno towards Urbino and Ancona, heavymasses of thundercloud hang every day; but the plain andhill-buttresses are clear in transparent blueness. First comes Assisi, with S. M. Degli Angeli below; then Spello; then Foligno; then Trevi;and, far away, Spoleto; with, reared against those misty battlements, the village height of Montefalco--the 'ringhiera dell' Umbria, ' asthey call it in this country. By daylight, the snow on yonder peaks isclearly visible, where the Monti della Sibilla tower up above thesources of the Nera and Velino from frigid wastes of Norcia. The lowerranges seem as though painted, in films of airiest and palest azure, upon china; and then comes the broad green champaign, flecked withvillages and farms. Just at the basement of Perugia winds Tiber, through sallows and grey poplar-trees, spanned by ancient arches ofred brick, and guarded here and there by castellated towers. The millsbeneath their dams and weirs are just as Raphael drew them; and thefeeling of air and space reminds one, on each coign of vantage, ofsome Umbrian picture. Every hedgerow is hoary with May-bloom andhoneysuckle. The oaks hang out their golden-dusted tassels. Waysideshrines are decked with laburnum boughs and iris blossoms plucked fromthe copse-woods, where spires of purple and pink orchis variegate thethin, fine grass. The land waves far and wide with young corn, emeraldgreen beneath the olive-trees, which take upon their under-foliagetints reflected from this verdure or red tones from the naked earth. Afine race of _contadini_, with large, heroically graceful forms, andbeautiful dark eyes and noble faces, move about this garden, intent onancient, easy tillage of the kind Saturnian soil. 

LA MAGIONE

On the road from Perugia to Cortona, the first stage ends at LaMagione, a high hill-village commanding the passage from the Umbrianchampaign to the lake of Thrasymene. 

It has a grim square fortalice above it, now in ruins, and a statelycastle to the south-east, built about the time of Braccio. Here tookplace that famous diet of Cesare Borgia's enemies, when the son ofAlexander VI. Was threatening Bologna with his arms, and bidding fairto make himself supreme tyrant of Italy in 1502. It was the policy ofCesare to fortify himself by reducing the fiefs of the Church tosubmission, and by rooting out the dynasties which had acquired asort of tyranny in Papal cities. The Varani of Camerino and theManfredi of Faenza had been already extirpated. There was only toogood reason to believe that the turn of the Vitelli at Città diCastello, of the Baglioni at Perugia, and of the Bentivogli at Bolognawould come next. Pandolfo Petrucci at Siena, surrounded on all sidesby Cesare's conquests, and specially menaced by the fortification ofPiombino, felt himself in danger. The great house of the Orsini, whoswayed a large part of the Patrimony of S. Peter's, and were closelyallied to the Vitelli, had even graver cause for anxiety. But such wasthe system of Italian warfare, that nearly all these noble familieslived by the profession of arms, and most of them were in the pay ofCesare. When, therefore, the conspirators met at La Magione, they wereplotting against a man whose money they had taken, and whom they hadhitherto aided in his career of fraud and spoliation. 

The diet consisted of the Cardinal Orsini, an avowed antagonist ofAlexander VI. ; his brother Paolo, the chieftain of the clan;Vitellozzo Vitelli, lord of Città di Castello; Gian-Paolo Baglioni, made undisputed master of Perugia by the recent failure of his cousinGrifonetto's treason; Oliverotto, who had just acquired the March ofFermo by the murder of his uncle Giovanni da Fogliani; ErmesBentivoglio, the heir of Bologna; and Antonio da Venafro, thesecretary of Pandolfo Petrueci. These men vowed hostility on the basisof common injuries and common fear against the Borgia. But they werefor the most part stained themselves with crime, and dared not trusteach other, and could not gain the confidence of any respectable powerin Italy except the exiled Duke of Urbino. Procrastination was thefirst weapon used by the wily Cesare, who trusted that time would sowamong his rebel captains suspicion and dissension. He next madeovertures to the leaders separately, and so far succeeded in hisperfidious policy as to draw Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, Paolo Orsini, and Francesco Orsini, Duke of Gravina, into his nets atSinigaglia. Under pretext of fair conference and equitable settlementof disputed claims, he possessed himself of their persons, and hadthem strangled--two upon December 31, and two upon January 18, 1503. Of all Cesare's actions, this was the most splendid for its successfulcombination of sagacity and policy in the hour of peril, of persuasivediplomacy, and of ruthless decision when the time to strike his blowarrived. 

CORTONA

After leaving La Magione, the road descends upon the lake ofThrasymene through oak-woods full of nightingales. The lake laybasking, leaden-coloured, smooth and waveless, under a misty, rain-charged, sun-irradiated sky. At Passignano, close beside itsshore, we stopped for mid-day. This is a little fishing village ofvery poor people, who live entirely by labour on the waters. Theyshowed us huge eels coiled in tanks, and some fine specimens of thesilver carp--Reina del Lago. It was off one of the eels that we madeour lunch; and taken, as he was, alive from his cool lodging, hefurnished a series of dishes fit for a king. 

Climbing the hill of Cortona seemed a quite interminable business. Itpoured a deluge. Our horses were tired, and one lean donkey, who, after much trouble, was produced from a farmhouse and yoked in frontof them, rendered but little assistance. 

Next day we duly saw the Muse and Lamp in the Museo, the FraAngelicos, and all the Signorellis. One cannot help thinking that toomuch fuss is made nowadays about works of art--running after them fortheir own sakes, exaggerating their importance, and detaching them asobjects of study, instead of taking them with sympathy andcarelessness as pleasant or instructive adjuncts to our actual life. Artists, historians of art, and critics are forced to isolatepictures; and it is of profit to their souls to do so. But simplefolk, who have no aesthetic vocation, whether creative or critical, suffer more than is good for them by compliance with mere fashion. Sooner or later we shall return to the spirit of the ages whichproduced these pictures, and which regarded them with less of anindustrious bewilderment than they evoke at present. 

I am far indeed from wishing to decry art, the study of art, or thebenefits to be derived from its intelligent enjoyment. I only mean tosuggest that we go the wrong way to work at present in this matter. Picture and sculpture galleries accustom us to the separation of artfrom life. Our methods of studying art, making a beginning ofart-study while traveling, tend to perpetuate this separation. It isonly on reflection, after long experience, that we come to perceivethat the most fruitful moments in our art education have been casualand unsought, in quaint nooks and unexpected places, where nature, art, and life are happily blent. 

The Palace of the Commune at Cortona is interesting because of theshields of Florentine governors, sculptured on blocks of grey stone, and inserted in its outer walls--Peruzzi, Albizzi, Strozzi, Salviati, among the more ancient--de' Medici at a later epoch. The revolutionsin the Republic of Florence may be read by a herald from thesecoats-of-arms and the dates beneath them. 

The landscape of this Tuscan highland satisfies me more and more withsense of breadth and beauty. From S. Margherita above the town theprospect is immense and wonderful and wild--up into those brown, forbidding mountains; down to the vast plain; and over to the citiesof Chiusi, Montepulciano, and Foiano. The jewel of the view isTrasimeno, a silvery shield encased with serried hills, and set uponone corner of the scene, like a precious thing apart and meant forseparate contemplation. There is something in the singularity andcircumscribed completeness of the mountain-girded lake, diminished bydistance, which would have attracted Lionardo da Vinci's pencil, hadhe seen it. 

Cortona seems desperately poor, and the beggars are intolerable. Onelittle blind boy, led by his brother, both frightfully ugly and raggedurchins, pursued us all over the city, incessantly whining 'SignorePadrone!' It was only on the threshold of the inn that I ventured togive them a few coppers, for I knew well that any public beneficencewould raise the whole swarm of the begging population round us. Sitting later in the day upon the piazza of S. Domenico, I saw thesame blind boy taken by his brother to play. The game consists, in thelittle creature throwing his arms about the trunk of a big tree, andrunning round and round it, clasping it. This seemed to make him quiteinexpressibly happy. His face lit up and beamed with that innerbeatitude blind people show--a kind of rapture shining over it, asthough nothing could be more altogether delightful. This little boyhad the smallpox at eight months, and has never been able to seesince. He looks sturdy, and may live to be of any age--doomed always, is that possible, to beg?

CHIUSI

What more enjoyable dinner can be imagined than a flask of excellentMontepulciano, a well-cooked steak, and a little goat's cheese in theinn of the Leone d'Oro at Chiusi? The windows are open, and the sun issetting. Monte Cetona bounds the view to the right, and the woodedhills of Città della Pieve to the left. The deep green dimpled valleygoes stretching away toward Orvieto; and at its end a purple mountainmass, distinct and solitary, which may peradventure be Soracte! Thenear country is broken into undulating hills, forested with fineolives and oaks; and the composition of the landscape, with itscrowning villages, is worthy of a background to an Umbrian picture. The breadth and depth and quiet which those painters loved, the spaceof lucid sky, the suggestion of winding waters in verdant fields, allare here. The evening is beautiful--golden light streaming softly frombehind us on this prospect, and gradually mellowing to violet and bluewith stars above. 

At Chiusi we visited several Etruscan tombs, and saw their red andblack scrawled pictures. One of the sepulchres was a well-jointedvault of stone with no wall-paintings. The rest had been scooped outof the living tufa. This was the excuse for some pleasant hours spentin walking and driving through the country. Chiusi means for me themingling of grey olives and green oaks in limpid sunlight; deep leafylanes; warm sandstone banks; copses with nightingales and cyclamensand cuckoos; glimpses of a silvery lake; blue shadowy distances; thebristling ridge of Monte Cetona; the conical towers, Becca di Questoand Becca di Quello, over against each other on the borders; wayswinding among hedgerows like some bit of England in June, but not sofull of flowers. It means all this, I fear, for me far more thantheories about Lars Porsenna and Etruscan ethnology. 

GUBBIO

Gubbio ranks among the most ancient of Italian hill-towns. With itsback set firm against the spine of central Apennines, and piled, houseover house, upon the rising slope, it commands a rich tract of uplandchampaign, bounded southward toward Perugia and Foligno by peaked androlling ridges. This amphitheatre, which forms its source of wealthand independence, is admirably protected by a chain of naturaldefences; and Gubbio wears a singularly old-world aspect of antiquityand isolation. Houses climb right to the crests of gaunt bare peaks;and the brown mediæval walls with square towers which protected themupon the mountain side, following the inequalities of the ground, arestill a marked feature in the landscape. It is a town of steep streetsand staircases, with quaintly framed prospects, and solemn vistasopening at every turn across the lowland. One of these views might beselected for especial notice. In front, irregular buildings losingthemselves in country as they straggle by the roadside; then the openpost-road with a cypress to the right; afterwards, the rich greenfields, and on a bit of rising ground an ancient farmhouse with itsbrown dependencies; lastly, the blue hills above Fossato, and far awaya wrack of tumbling clouds. All this enclosed by the heavy archway ofthe Porta Romana, where sunlight and shadow chequer the mellow tonesof a dim fresco, indistinct with age, but beautiful. 

Gubbio has not greatly altered since the middle ages. But poor peopleare now living in the palaces of noblemen and merchants. These newinhabitants have walled up the fair arched windows and slender portalsof the ancient dwellers, spoiling the beauty of the streets withoutmaterially changing the architectural masses. In that witching hourwhen the Italian sunset has faded, and a solemn grey replaces theglowing tones of daffodil and rose, it is not difficult, here dreamingby oneself alone, to picture the old noble life--the ladies movingalong those open loggias, the young men in plumed caps and curlinghair with one foot on those doorsteps, the knights in armour and thesumpter mules and red-robed Cardinals defiling through those gatesinto the courts within. The modern bricks and mortar with which thatpicturesque scene has been overlaid, the ugly oblong windows andbright green shutters which now interrupt the flowing lines of archand gallery; these disappear beneath the fine remembered touch of asonnet sung by Folgore, when still the Parties had their day, and thisdeserted city was the centre of great aims and throbbing aspirations. 

The names of the chief buildings in Gubbio are strongly suggestive ofthe middle ages. They abut upon a Piazza de' Signori. One of them, thePalazzo del Municipio, is a shapeless unfinished block of masonry. Itis here that the Eugubine tables, plates of brass with Umbrian andRoman incised characters, are shown. The Palazzo de' Consoli hashigher architectural qualities, and is indeed unique among Italianpalaces for the combination of massiveness with lightness in asituation of unprecedented boldness. Rising from enormoussubstructures mortised into the solid hillside, it rears its vastrectangular bulk to a giddy height above the town; airy loggiasimposed on great forbidding masses of brown stone, shooting aloft intoa light aërial tower. The empty halls inside are of fair proportionsand a noble size, and the views from the open colonnades in alldirections fascinate. But the final impression made by the building isone of square, tranquil, massive strength--perpetuity embodied inmasonry--force suggesting facility by daring and successful additionof elegance to hugeness. Vast as it is, this pile is not forbidding, as a similarly weighty structure in the North would be. The finequality of the stone and the delicate though simple mouldings of thewindows give it an Italian grace. 

These public palaces belong to the age of the Communes, when Gubbiowas a free town, with a policy of its own, and an important part toplay in the internecine struggles of Pope and Empire, Guelf andGhibelline. The ruined, deserted, degraded Palazzo Ducale reminds usof the advent of the despots. It has been stripped of all itstarsia-work and sculpture. Only here and there a Fe. D. , with thecupping-glass of Federigo di Montefeltro, remains to show that Gubbioonce became the fairest fief of the Urbino duchy. S. Ubaldo, who gavehis name to this duke's son, was the patron of Gubbio, and to him thecathedral is dedicated--one low enormous vault, like a cellar orfeudal banqueting hall, roofed with a succession of solid Gothicarches. This strange old church, and the House of Canons, buttressedon the hill beside it, have suffered less from modernisation than mostbuildings in Gubbio. The latter, in particular, helps one tounderstand what this city of grave palazzi must have been, and how themere opening of old doors and windows would restore it to itsprimitive appearance. The House of the Canons has, in fact, not yetbeen given over to the use of middle-class and proletariate. 

At the end of a day in Gubbio, it is pleasant to take our ease in theprimitive hostelry, at the back of which foams a mountain-torrent, rushing downward from the Apennines. The Gubbio wine is very fragrant, and of a rich ruby colour. Those to whom the tints of wine and jewelsgive a pleasure not entirely childish, will take delight in itsspecific blending of tawny hues with rose. They serve the table still, at Gubbio, after the antique Italian fashion, covering it with acream-coloured linen cloth bordered with coarse lace--the creases ofthe press, the scent of old herbs from the wardrobe, are still uponit--and the board is set with shallow dishes of warm, whiteearthenware, basket-worked in open lattice at the edge, which containlittle separate messes of meat, vegetables, cheese, and comfits. Thewine stands in strange, slender phials of smooth glass, with stoppers;and the amber-coloured bread lies in fair round loaves upon the cloth. Dining thus is like sitting down to the supper at Emmaus, in somepicture of Gian Bellini or of Masolino. The very bareness of theroom--its open rafters, plastered walls, primitive settees, andred-brick floor, on which a dog sits waiting for a bone--enhances theimpression of artistic delicacy in the table. 

FROM GUBBIO TO FANO

The road from Gubbio, immediately after leaving the city, enters anarrow Alpine ravine, where a thin stream dashes over dark, red rocks, and pendent saxifrages wave to the winds. The carriage in which wetravelled at the end of May, one morning, had two horses, which ourdriver soon supplemented with a couple of white oxen. Slowly andtoilsomely we ascended between the flanks of barren hills--gauntmasses of crimson and grey crag, clothed at their summits with shortturf and scanty pasture. The pass leads first to the little town ofScheggia, and is called the Monte Calvo, or bald mountain. AtScheggia, it joins the great Flaminian Way, or North road of the Romanarmies. At the top there is a fine view over the conical hills thatdominate Gubbio, and, far away, to noble mountains above the Furlo andthe Foligno line of railway to Ancona. Range rises over range, crossing at unexpected angles, breaking into sudden precipices, andstretching out long, exquisitely modelled outlines, as only Apenninescan do, in silvery sobriety of colours toned by clearest air. Everysquare piece of this austere, wild landscape forms a varied picture, whereof the composition is due to subtle arrangements of lines alwaysdelicate; and these lines seem somehow to have been determined intheir beauty by the vast antiquity of the mountain system, as thoughthey all had taken time to choose their place and wear down intoharmony. The effect of tempered sadness was heightened for us bystormy lights and dun clouds, high in air, rolling vapours and flyingshadows, over all the prospect, tinted in ethereal grisaille. 

After Scheggia, one enters a land of meadow and oak-trees. This is thesacred central tract of Jupiter Apenninus, whose fane--

 Delubra Jovis saxoque minantes Apenninigenis cultae pastoribus arae

--once rose behind us on the bald Iguvian summits. A second littlepass leads from this region to the Adriatic side of the Italianwatershed, and the road now follows the Barano downward toward thesea. The valley is fairly green with woods, where mistletoe may hereand there be seen on boughs of oak, and rich with cornfields. Cagli isthe chief town of the district, and here they show one of the bestpictures left to us by Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi. It is aMadonna, attended by S. Peter, S. Francis, S. Dominic, S. John, andtwo angels. One of the angels is traditionally supposed to have beenpainted from the boy Raphael, and the face has something which remindsus of his portraits. The whole composition, excellent in modelling, harmonious in grouping, soberly but strongly coloured, with a peculiarblending of dignity and sweetness, grace and vigour, makes one wonderwhy Santi thought it necessary to send his son from his own workshopto study under Perugino. He was himself a master of his art, and this, perhaps the most agreeable of his paintings, has a masculine sinceritywhich is absent from at least the later works of Perugino. 

Some miles beyond Cagli, the real pass of the Furlo begins. It owesits name to a narrow tunnel bored by Vespasian in the solid rock, where limestone crags descend on the Barano. The Romans called thisgallery Petra Pertusa, or Intercisa, or more familiarly Forulus, whence comes the modern name. Indeed, the stations on the oldFlaminian Way are still well marked by Latin designations; for Cagliis the ancient Calles, and Fossombrone is Forum Sempronii, and Fanothe Fanum Fortunæ. Vespasian commemorated this early achievement inengineering by an inscription carved on the living stone, which stillremains; and Claudian, when he sang the journey of his EmperorHonorius from Rimini to Rome, speaks thus of what was even then anobject of astonishment to travellers:--

 Laetior hinc fano recipit fortuna vetusto, Despiciturque vagus praerupta valle Metaurus, Qua mons arte patens vivo se perforat arcu Admittitque viam sectae per viscera rupis. 

The Forulus itself may now be matched, on any Alpine pass, by severaltunnels of far mightier dimensions; for it is narrow, and does notextend more than 126 feet in length. But it occupies a fine positionat the end of a really imposing ravine. The whole Furlo Pass might, without too much exaggeration, be described as a kind of Cheddar onthe scale of the Via Mala. The limestone rocks, which rise on eitherhand above the gorge to an enormous height, are noble in form andsolemn, like a succession of gigantic portals, with stupendousflanking obelisks and pyramids. Some of these crag-masses rival thefantastic cliffs of Capri, and all consist of that southern mountainlimestone which changes from pale yellow to blue grey and duskyorange. A river roars precipitately through the pass, and theroadsides wave with many sorts of campanulas--a profusion of azure andpurple bells upon the hard white stone. Of Roman remains there isstill enough (in the way of Roman bridges and bits of broken masonry)to please an antiquary's eye. But the lover of nature will dwellchiefly on the picturesque qualities of this historic gorge, so aliento the general character of Italian scenery, and yet so remote fromanything to which Swiss travelling accustoms one. 

The Furlo breaks out into a richer land of mighty oaks and wavingcornfields, a fat pastoral country, not unlike Devonshire in detail, with green uplands, and wild-rose tangled hedgerows, and much runningwater, and abundance of summer flowers. At a point above Fossombrone, the Barano joins the Metauro, and here one has a glimpse of farawayUrbino, high upon its mountain eyrie. It is so rare, in spite ofimmemorial belief, to find in Italy a wilderness of wild flowers, thatI feel inclined to make a list of those I saw from our carriagewindows as we rolled down lazily along the road to Fossombrone. Broom, and cytisus, and hawthorn mingled with roses, gladiolus, and sainfoin. There were orchises, and clematis, and privet, and wild-vine, vetchesof all hues, red poppies, sky-blue cornflowers, and lilac pimpernel. In the rougher hedges, dogwood, honeysuckle, pyracanth, and acaciamade a network of white bloom and blushes. Milk-worts of all brightand tender tints combined with borage, iris, hawkweeds, harebells, crimson clover, thyme, red snap-dragon, golden asters, and dreamylove-in-a-mist, to weave a marvellous carpet such as the looms ofShiraz or of Cashmere never spread. Rarely have I gazed on Flora insuch riot, such luxuriance, such self-abandonment to joy. The air wasfilled with fragrances. Songs of cuckoos and nightingales echoed fromthe copses on the hillsides. The sun was out, and dancing over all thelandscape. 

After all this, Fano was very restful in the quiet sunset. It has asandy stretch of shore, on which the long, green-yellow rollers of theAdriatic broke into creamy foam, beneath the waning saffron light overPesaro and the rosy rising of a full moon. This Adriatic sea carriesan English mind home to many a little watering-place upon our coast. In colour and the shape of waves it resembles our Channel. 

The sea-shore is Fano's great attraction; but the town has manychurches, and some creditable pictures, as well as Roman antiquities. Giovanni Santi may here be seen almost as well as at Cagli; and ofPerugino there is one truly magnificent altar-piece--lunette, greatcentre panel, and predella--dusty in its present condition, butsplendidly painted, and happily not yet restored or cleaned. It isworth journeying to Fano to see this. Still better would the journeybe worth the traveller's while if he could be sure to witness such agame of _Pallone_ as we chanced upon in the Via dell' Arco diAugusto--lads and grown-men, tightly girt, in shirt sleeves, drivingthe great ball aloft into the air with cunning bias and calculation ofprojecting house-eaves. I do not understand the game; but it wasclearly played something after the manner of our football, that is tosay; with sides, and front and back players so arranged as to coverthe greatest number of angles of incidence on either wall. 

Fano still remembers that it is the Fane of Fortune. On the fountainin the market-place stands a bronze Fortuna, slim and airy, offeringher veil to catch the wind. May she long shower health and prosperityupon the modern watering-place of which she is the patron saint!

 * * * * *

_THE PALACE OF URBINO_

I

At Rimini, one spring, the impulse came upon my wife and me to makeour way across San Marino to Urbino. In the Piazza, calledapocryphally after Julius Cæsar, I found a proper _vetturino_, with agood carriage and two indefatigable horses. He was a splendid fellow, and bore a great historic name, as I discovered when our bargain wascompleted. 'What are you called?' I asked him. '_Filippo Visconti, perservirla!_' was the prompt reply. Brimming over with the darkestmemories of the Italian Renaissance, I hesitated when I heard thisanswer. The associations seemed too ominous. And yet the man himselfwas so attractive--tall, stalwart, and well looking--no feature of hisface or limb of his athletic form recalling the gross tyrant whoconcealed worse than Caligula's ugliness from sight in secretchambers--that I shook this preconception from my mind. As it turnedout, Filippo Visconti had nothing in common with his infamous namesakebut the name. On a long and trying journey, he showed neither sullennor yet ferocious tempers; nor, at the end of it, did he attempt byany master-stroke of craft to wheedle from me more than his fair pay;but took the meerschaum pipe I gave him for a keepsake, with the frankgoodwill of an accomplished gentleman. The only exhibition of his hotItalian blood which I remember did his humanity credit. 

While we were ascending a steep hillside, he jumped from his box tothrash a ruffian by the roadside for brutal treatment to a little boy. He broke his whip, it is true, in this encounter; risked a dangerousquarrel; and left his carriage, with myself and wife inside it, to themercy of his horses in a somewhat perilous position. But when he cameback, hot and glowing, from this deed of justice, I could only applaudhis zeal. 

An Italian of this type, handsome as an antique statue, with therefinement of a modern gentleman and that intelligence which is innatein a race of immemorial culture, is a fascinating being. He may beabsolutely ignorant in all book-learning. He may be as ignorant as aBersagliere from Montalcino with whom I once conversed at Rimini, whogravely said that he could walk in three months to North America, andthought of doing it when his term of service was accomplished. But hewill display, as this young soldier did, a grace and ease of addresswhich are rare in London drawing-rooms; and by his shrewd remarks uponthe cities he has visited, will show that he possesses a fine naturaltaste for things of beauty. The speech of such men, drawn from thecommon stock of the Italian people, is seasoned with proverbialsayings, the wisdom of centuries condensed in a few nervous words. When emotion fires their brain, they break into spontaneous eloquence, or suggest the motive of a poem by phrases pregnant with imagery. 

For the first stage of the journey out of Rimini, Filippo's two horsessufficed. The road led almost straight across the level betweenquickset hedges in white bloom. But when we reached the long steephill which ascends to San Marino, the inevitable oxen were called out, and we toiled upwards leisurely through cornfields bright with redanemones and sweet narcissus. At this point pomegranate hedgesreplaced the May-thorns of the plain. In course of time our _bovi_brought us to the Borgo, or lower town, whence there is a furtherascent of seven hundred feet to the topmost hawk's-nest or acropolisof the republic. These we climbed on foot, watching the view expandaround us and beneath. Crags of limestone here break down abruptly tothe rolling hills, which go to lose themselves in field and shore. Misty reaches of the Adriatic close the world to eastward. Cesena, Rimini, Verucchio, and countless hill-set villages, each isolated onits tract of verdure conquered from the stern grey soil, define thepoints where Montefeltri wrestled with Malatestas in long bygoneyears. Around are marly mountain-flanks in wrinkles and gnarledconvolutions like some giant's brain, furrowed by rivers crawlingthrough dry wasteful beds of shingle. Interminable ranges of gauntApennines stretch, tier by tier, beyond; and over all this landscape, a grey-green mist of rising crops and new-fledged oak-trees lies likea veil upon the nakedness of Nature's ruins. 

Nothing in Europe conveys a more striking sense of geologicalantiquity than such a prospect. The denudation and abrasion ofinnumerable ages, wrought by slow persistent action of weather andwater on an upheaved mountain mass, are here made visible. Every wavein that vast sea of hills, every furrow in their worn flanks, tellsits tale of a continuous corrosion still in progress. The dominantimpression is one of melancholy. We forget how Romans, countermarchingCarthaginians, trod the land beneath us. The marvel of San Marino, retaining independence through the drums and tramplings of the lastseven centuries, is swallowed in a deeper sense of wonder. We turninstinctively in thought to Leopardi's musings on man's destiny at warwith unknown nature-forces and malignant rulers of the universe. 

 Omai disprezza Te, la natura, il brutto Poter che, ascoso, a comun danno impera, E l' infinita vanità del tutto. 

And then, straining our eyes southward, we sweep the dim blue distancefor Recanati, and remember that the poet of modern despair anddiscouragement was reared in even such a scene as this. 

The town of San Marino is grey, narrow-streeted, simple; with a great, new, decent, Greek-porticoed cathedral, dedicated to the eponymoussaint. A certain austerity defines it from more picturesquehill-cities with a less uniform history. There is a marble statue ofS. Marino in the choir of his church; and in his cell is shown thestone bed and pillow on which he took austere repose. One narrowwindow near the saint's abode commands a proud but melancholylandscape of distant hills and seaboard. To this, the great absorbingcharm of San Marino, our eyes instinctively, recurrently, takeflight. It is a landscape which by variety and beauty thrallsattention, but which by its interminable sameness might grow almostoverpowering. There is no relief. The gladness shed upon far humblerNorthern lands in May is ever absent here. The German word_Gemüthlichkeit_, the English phrase 'a home of ancient peace, ' arehere alike by art and nature untranslated into visibilities. And yet(as we who gaze upon it thus are fain to think) if peradventure theintolerable _ennui_ of this panorama should drive a citizen of SanMarino into out-lands, the same view would haunt him whithersoever hewent--the swallows of his native eyrie would shrill through hissleep--he would yearn to breathe its fine keen air in winter, and towatch its iris-hedges deck themselves with blue in spring;--likeVirgil's hero, dying, he would think of San Marino: _Aspicit, etdulces moriens reminiscitur Argos_. Even a passing stranger may feelthe mingled fascination and oppression of this prospect--the monotonywhich maddens, the charm which at a distance grows upon the mind, environing it with memories. 

Descending to the Borgo, we found that Filippo Visconti had ordered aluncheon of excellent white bread, pigeons, and omelette, with thebest red muscat wine I ever drank, unless the sharp air of the hillsdeceived my appetite. An Italian history of San Marino, including itsstatutes, in three volumes, furnished intellectual food. But I confessto having learned from these pages little else than this: first, thatthe survival of the Commonwealth through all phases of Europeanpolitics had been semi-miraculous; secondly, that the most eminent SanMarinesi had been lawyers. It is possible on a hasty deduction fromthese two propositions (to which, however, I am far from wishing tocommit myself), that the latter is a sufficient explanation of theformer. 

From San Marino the road plunges at a break-neck pace. We are now inthe true Feltrian highlands, whence the Counts of Montefeltro issuedin the twelfth century. Yonder eyrie is San Leo, which formed the keyof entrance to the duchy of Urbino in campaigns fought many hundredyears ago. Perched on the crest of a precipitous rock, this fortresslooks as though it might defy all enemies but famine. And yet San Leowas taken and re-taken by strategy and fraud, when Montefeltro, Borgia, Malatesta, Rovere, contended for dominion in these valleys. Yonder is Sta. Agata, the village to which Guidobaldo fled by nightwhen Valentino drove him from his dukedom. A little farther towersCarpegna, where one branch of the Montefeltro house maintained acountship through seven centuries, and only sold their fief to Rome in1815. Monte Coppiolo lies behind, Pietra Rubia in front: two othereagles' nests of the same brood. What a road it is!

It beats the tracks on Exmoor. The uphill and downhill of Devonshirescorns compromise or mitigation by _détour_ and zigzag. But heregeography is on a scale so far more vast, and the roadway is so farworse metalled than with us in England--knotty masses of talc andnodes of sandstone cropping up at dangerous turnings--that onlyDante's words describe the journey:--

 Vassi in Sanleo, e discendesi in Noli, Montasi su Bismantova in cacume Con esso i piè; ma qui convien ch' uom voli. 

Of a truth, our horses seemed rather to fly than scramble up and downthese rugged precipices; Visconti cheerily animating them with thebrave spirit that was in him, and lending them his wary driver's helpof hand and voice at need. 

We were soon upon a cornice-road between the mountains and theAdriatic: following the curves of gulch and cleft ravine; windinground ruined castles set on points of vantage; the sea-line highabove their grass-grown battlements, the shadow-dappled champaigngirdling their bastions mortised on the naked rock. Except for theblue lights across the distance, and the ever-present sea, theseearthy Apennines would be too grim. Infinite air and this spare veilof spring-tide greenery on field and forest soothe their sternness. Two rivers, swollen by late rains, had to be forded. Through one ofthese, the Foglia, bare-legged peasants led the way. The horses wadedto their bellies in the tawny water. Then more hills and vales; greennooks with rippling corn-crops; secular oaks attired in goldenleafage. The clear afternoon air rang with the voices of a thousandlarks overhead. The whole world seemed quivering with light anddelicate ethereal sound. And yet my mind turned irresistibly tothoughts of war, violence, and pillage. How often has thisintermediate land been fought over by Montefeltro and Brancaleoni, byBorgia and Malatesta, by Medici and Della Rovere! Its _contadini_ arerobust men, almost statuesque in build, and beautiful of feature. Nowonder that the Princes of Urbino, with such materials to draw from, sold their service and their troops to Florence, Rome, S. Mark, andMilan. The bearing of these peasants is still soldierly and proud. Yetthey are not sullen or forbidding like the Sicilians, whose habits oflife, for the rest, much resemble theirs. The villages, there as here, are few and far between, perched high on rocks, from which the folkdescend to till the ground and reap the harvest. But the southern_brusquerie_ and brutality are absent from this district. The men havesomething of the dignity and slow-eyed mildness of their own hugeoxen. As evening fell, more solemn Apennines upreared themselves tosouthward. The Monte d'Asdrubale, Monte Nerone, and Monte Catria hoveinto sight. At last, when light was dim, a tower rose above theneighbouring ridge, a broken outline of some city barred the sky-line. Urbino stood before us. Our long day's march was at an end. 

The sunset was almost spent, and a four days' moon hung above thewestern Apennines, when we took our first view of the palace. It is afancy-thralling work of wonder seen in that dim twilight; like somecastle reared by Atlante's magic for imprisonment of Ruggiero, orpalace sought in fairyland by Astolf winding his enchanted horn. Whereshall we find its like, combining, as it does, the buttressedbattlemented bulk of mediæval strongholds with the airy balconies, suspended gardens, and fantastic turrets of Italian pleasure-houses?This unique blending of the feudal past with the Renaissance spirit ofthe time when it was built, connects it with the art of Ariosto--ormore exactly with Boiardo's epic. Duke Federigo planned his palace atUrbino just at the moment when the Count of Scandiano had began tochaunt his lays of Roland in the Castle of Ferrara. Chivalry, transmuted by the Italian genius into something fanciful and quaint, survived as a frail work of art. The men-at-arms of the Condottieristill glittered in gilded hauberks. Their helmets waved with plumesand bizarre crests. Their surcoats blazed with heraldries; theirvelvet caps with medals bearing legendary emblems. The pomp andcircumstance of feudal war had not yet yielded to the cannon of theGascon or the Switzer's pike. The fatal age of foreign invasions hadnot begun for Italy. Within a few years Charles VIII. 's holidayexcursion would reveal the internal rottenness and weakness of herrival states, and the peninsula for half a century to come would bedrenched in the blood of Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, fighting forher cities as their prey. But now Lorenzo de' Medici was still alive. The famous policy which bears his name held Italy suspended for agolden time in false tranquillity and independence. The princes whoshared his culture and his love of art were gradually passing intomodern noblemen, abandoning the savage feuds and passions of morevirile centuries, yielding to luxury and scholarly enjoyments. Thecastles were becoming courts, and despotisms won by force weresettling into dynasties. 

It was just at this epoch that Duke Federigo built his castle atUrbino. One of the ablest and wealthiest Condottieri of his time, oneof the best instructed and humanest of Italian princes, he combined inhimself the qualities which mark that period of transition. And thesehe impressed upon his dwelling-house, which looks backward to themediæval fortalice and forward to the modern palace. This makes it thejust embodiment in architecture of Italian romance, the perfectanalogue of the 'Orlando Innamorato. ' By comparing it with the castleof the Estes at Ferrara and the Palazzo del Te of the Gonzagas atMantua, we place it in its right position between mediæval andRenaissance Italy, between the age when principalities arose upon theruins of commercial independence and the age when they became dynasticunder Spain. 

The exigencies of the ground at his disposal forced Federigo to givethe building an irregular outline. The fine façade, with its embayed_loggie_ and flanking turrets, is placed too close upon the cityramparts for its due effect. We are obliged to cross the deep ravinewhich separates it from a lower quarter of the town, and take ourstation near the Oratory of S. Giovanni Battista, before we canappreciate the beauty of its design, or the boldness of the group itforms with the cathedral dome and tower and the square masses ofnumerous out-buildings. Yet this peculiar position of the palace, though baffling to a close observer of its details, is one of singularadvantage to the inhabitants. Set on the verge of Urbino's toweringeminence, it fronts a wave-tossed sea of vales and mountain summitstoward the rising and the setting sun. There is nothing butillimitable air between the terraces and loggias of the Duchess'sapartments and the spreading pyramid of Monte Catria. 

A nobler scene is nowhere swept from palace windows than this, whichCastiglione touched in a memorable passage at the end of his'Cortegiano. ' To one who in our day visits Urbino, it is singular howthe slight indications of this sketch, as in some silhouette, bringback the antique life, and link the present with the past--a hint, perhaps, for reticence in our descriptions. The gentlemen and ladiesof the court had spent a summer night in long debate on love, risingto the height of mystical Platonic rapture on the lips of Bembo, whenone of them exclaimed, 'The day has broken!' 'He pointed to the lightwhich was beginning to enter by the fissures of the windows. Whereuponwe flung the casements wide upon that side of the palace which lookstoward the high peak of Monte Catria, and saw that a fair dawn of rosyhue was born already in the eastern skies, and all the stars hadvanished except the sweet regent of the heaven of Venus, who holds theborderlands of day and night; and from her sphere it seemed as thougha gentle wind were breathing, filling the air with eager freshness, and waking among the numerous woods upon the neighbouring hills thesweet-toned symphonies of joyous birds. '

II

The House of Montefeltro rose into importance early in the twelfthcentury. Frederick Barbarossa erected their fief into a county in1160. Supported by imperial favour, they began to exercise anundefined authority over the district, which they afterwards convertedinto a duchy. But, though Ghibelline for several generations, theMontefeltri were too near neighbours of the Papal power to freethemselves from ecclesiastical vassalage. Therefore in 1216 theysought and obtained the title of Vicars of the Church. Urbinoacknowledged them as semi-despots in their double capacity of Imperialand Papal deputies. Cagli and Gubbio followed in the fourteenthcentury. In the fifteenth, Castel Durante was acquired from theBrancaleoni by warfare, and Fossombrone from the Malatestas bypurchase. Numerous fiefs and villages fell into their hands upon theborders of Rimini in the course of a continued struggle with the Houseof Malatesta: and when Fano and Pesaro were added at the opening ofthe sixteenth century, the domain over which they ruled was a compactterritory, some forty miles square, between the Adriatic and theApennines. From the close of the thirteenth century they bore thetitle of Counts of Urbino. The famous Conte Guido, whom Dante placedamong the fraudulent in hell, supported the honours of the house andincreased its power by his political action, at this epoch. But it wasnot until the year 1443 that the Montefeltri acquired their ducaltitle. This was conferred by Eugenius IV. Upon Oddantonio, over whosealleged crimes and indubitable assassination a veil of mystery stillhangs. He was the son of Count Guidantonio, and at his death theMontefeltri of Urbino were extinct in the legitimate line. A naturalson of Guidantonio had been, however, recognised in his father'slifetime, and married to Gentile, heiress of Mercatello. This wasFederigo, a youth of great promise, who succeeded his half-brother in1444 as Count of Urbino. It was not until 1474 that the ducal titlewas revived for him. 

Duke Frederick was a prince remarkable among Italian despots forprivate virtues and sober use of his hereditary power. He spent hisyouth at Mantua, in that famous school of Vittorino da Feltre, wherethe sons and daughters of the first Italian nobility received a modeleducation in humanities, good manners, and gentle physicalaccomplishments. More than any of his fellow-students Frederickprofited by this rare scholar's discipline. On leaving school headopted the profession of arms, as it was then practised, and joinedthe troop of the Condottiere Niccolò Piccinino. Young men of his ownrank, especially the younger sons and bastards of ruling families, sought military service under captains of adventure. If theysucceeded they were sure to make money. The coffers of the Church andthe republics lay open to their not too scrupulous hands; the wealthof Milan and Naples was squandered on them in retaining-fees andsalaries for active service. There was always the further possibilityof placing a coronet upon their brows before they died, if haply theyshould wrest a town from their employers, or obtain the cession of aprovince from a needy Pope. The neighbours of the Montefeltri inUmbria, Romagna, and the Marches of Ancona were all of themCondottieri. Malatestas of Rimini and Pesaro, Vitelli of Città diCastello, Varani of Camerino, Baglioni of Perugia, to mention only afew of the most eminent nobles, enrolled themselves under the bannersof plebeian adventurers like Piccinino and Sforza Attendolo. Thoughtheir family connections gave them a certain advantage, the system wasessentially democratic. Gattamelata and Carmagnola sprang fromobscurity by personal address and courage to the command of armies. Colleoni fought his way up from the grooms to princely station and the_bâton_ of S. Mark. Francesco Sforza, whose father had begun life as atiller of the soil, seized the ducal crown of Milan, and founded ahouse which ranked among the first in Europe. 

It is not needful to follow Duke Frederick in his military career. Wemay briefly remark that when he succeeded to Urbino by his brother'sdeath in 1444, he undertook generalship on a grand scale. His owndominions supplied him with some of the best troops in Italy. He wascareful to secure the goodwill of his subjects by attending personallyto their interests, relieving them of imposts, and executing equaljustice. He gained the then unique reputation of an honest prince, paternally disposed toward his dependents. Men flocked to hisstandards willingly, and he was able to bring an important contingentinto any army. These advantages secured for him alliances withFrancesco Sforza, and brought him successively into connection withMilan, Venice, Florence, the Church of Naples. As a tactician in thefield he held high rank among the generals of the age, and soconsiderable were his engagements that he acquired great wealth in theexercise of his profession. We find him at one time receiving 8000ducats a month as war-pay from Naples, with a peace pension of 6000. While Captain-General of the League, he drew for his own use in war45, 000 ducats of annual pay. Retaining-fees and pensions in the nameof past services swelled his income, the exact extent of which hasnot, so far as I am aware, been estimated, but which must have madehim one of the richest of Italian princes. All this wealth he spentupon his duchy, fortifying and beautifying its cities, drawing youthsof promise to his court, maintaining a great train of life, andkeeping his vassals in good-humour by the lightness of a rule whichcontrasted favourably with the exactions of needier despots. 

While fighting for the masters who offered him _condotta_ in thecomplicated wars of Italy, Duke Frederick used his arms, when occasionserved, in his own quarrels. Many years of his life were spent in aprolonged struggle with his neighbour Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the bizarre and brilliant tyrant of Rimini, who committed the fatalerror of embroiling himself beyond all hope of pardon with the Church, and who died discomfited in the duel with his warier antagonist. Urbino profited by each mistake of Sigismondo, and the history of thislong desultory strife with Rimini is a history of gradualaggrandisement and consolidation for the Montefeltrian duchy. 

In 1459 Duke Frederick married his second wife, Battista, daughter ofAlessandro Sforza, Lord of Pesaro. Their portraits, painted by Pierodella Francesca, are to be seen in the Uffizzi at Florence. Some yearsearlier, Frederick lost his right eye and had the bridge of his nosebroken in a jousting match outside the town-gate of Urbino. After thisaccident, he preferred to be represented in profile--the profile sowell known to students of Italian art on medals and basreliefs. It wasnot without medical aid and vows fulfilled by a mother'sself-sacrifice to death, if we may trust the diarists of Urbino, thatthe ducal couple got an heir. In 1472, however, a son was born tothem, whom they christened Guido Paolo Ubaldo. He proved a youth ofexcellent parts and noble nature--apt at study, perfect in allchivalrous accomplishments. But he inherited some fatal physicaldebility, and his life was marred with a constitutional disease, whichthen received the name of gout, and which deprived him of the free useof his limbs. After his father's death in 1482, Naples, Florence, andMilan continued Frederick's war engagements to Guidobaldo. The princewas but a boy of ten. Therefore these important _condotte_ must beregarded as compliments and pledges for the future. They prove to whata pitch Duke Frederick had raised the credit of his state and warestablishment. Seven years later, Guidobaldo married Elisabetta, daughter of Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. This union, though ahappy one, was never blessed with children; and in the certainty ofbarrenness, the young Duke thought it prudent to adopt a nephew asheir to his dominions. He had several sisters, one of whom, Giovanna, had been married to a nephew of Sixtus IV. , Giovanni della Rovere, Lord of Sinigaglia and Prefect of Rome. They had a son, FrancescoMaria, who, after his adoption by Guidobaldo, spent his boyhood atUrbino. 

The last years of the fifteenth century were marked by the sudden riseof Cesare Borgia to a power which threatened the liberties of Italy. Acting as General for the Church, he carried his arms against thepetty tyrants of Romagna, whom he dispossessed and extirpated. Hisnext move was upon Camerino and Urbino. He first acquired Camerino, having lulled Guidobaldo into false security by treacherousprofessions of goodwill. Suddenly the Duke received intelligence thatthe Borgia was marching on him over Cagli. This was in the middle ofJune 1502. It is difficult to comprehend the state of weakness inwhich Guidobaldo was surprised, or the panic which then seized him. Hemade no efforts to rouse his subjects to resistance, but fled by nightwith his nephew through rough mountain roads, leaving his capital andpalace to the marauder. Cesare Borgia took possession without strikinga blow, and removed the treasures of Urbino to the Vatican. Hisoccupation of the duchy was not undisturbed, however; for the peoplerose in several places against him, proving that Guidobaldo hadyielded too hastily to alarm. By this time the fugitive was safe inMantua, whence he returned, and for a short time succeeded inestablishing himself again at Urbino. But he could not hold his ownagainst the Borgias, and in December, by a treaty, he resigned hisclaims and retired to Venice, where he lived upon the bounty of S. Mark. It must be said, in justice to the Duke, that his constitutionaldebility rendered him unfit for active operations in the field. Perhaps he could not have done better than thus to bend beneath thestorm. 

The sudden death of Alexander VI. And the election of a Della Rovereto the Papacy in 1503 changed Guidobaldo's prospects. Julius II. Wasthe sworn foe of the Borgias and the close kinsman of Urbino's heir. It was therefore easy for the Duke to walk into his empty palace onthe hill, and to reinstate himself in the domains from which he had sorecently been ousted. The rest of his life was spent in the retirementof his court, surrounded with the finest scholars and the noblestgentlemen of Italy. The ill-health which debarred him from the activepleasures and employments of his station, was borne with uniformsweetness of temper and philosophy. 

When he died, in 1508, his nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere, succeeded to the duchy, and once more made the palace of Urbino theresort of men-at-arms and captains. He was a prince of very violenttemper: of its extravagance history has recorded three remarkableexamples. He murdered the Cardinal of Pavia with his own hand in thestreets of Ravenna; stabbed a lover of his sister to death at Urbino;and in a council of war knocked Francesco Guicciardini down with ablow of his fist. When the history of Italy came to be written, Guicciardini was probably mindful of that insult, for he paintedFrancesco Maria's character and conduct in dark colours. At the sametime this Duke of Urbino passed for one of the first generals of theage. The greatest stain upon his memory is his behaviour in the year1527, when, by dilatory conduct of the campaign in Lombardy, hesuffered the passage of Frundsberg's army unopposed, and afterwardshesitated to relieve Rome from the horrors of the sack. He was thelast Italian Condottiere of the antique type; and the vices whichMachiavelli exposed in that bad system of mercenary warfare wereillustrated on these occasions. During his lifetime, the conditions ofItaly were so changed by Charles V. 's imperial settlement in 1530, that the occupation of Condottiere ceased to have any meaning. Strozziand Farnesi, who afterwards followed this profession, enlisted in theranks of France or Spain, and won their laurels in Northern Europe. 

While Leo X. Held the Papal chair, the duchy of Urbino was for a whilewrested from the house of Della Rovere, and conferred upon Lorenzo de'Medici. Francesco Maria made a better fight for his heritage thanGuidobaldo had done. Yet he could not successfully resist the power ofRome. The Pope was ready to spend enormous sums of money on this pettywar; the Duke's purse was shorter, and the mercenary troops he wasobliged to use, proved worthless in the field. Spaniards, for themost part, pitted against Spaniards, they suffered the campaigns todegenerate into a guerilla warfare of pillage and reprisals. In 1517the duchy was formally ceded to Lorenzo. But this Medici did not livelong to enjoy it, and his only child Catherine, the future Queen ofFrance, never exercised the rights which had devolved upon her byinheritance. The shifting scene of Italy beheld Francesco Mariareinstated in Urbino after Leo's death in 1522. 

This Duke married Leonora Gonzaga, a princess of the House of Mantua. Their portraits, painted by Titian, adorn the Venetian room of theUffizzi. Of their son, Guidobaldo II. , little need be said. He wastwice married, first to Giulia Varano, Duchess by inheritance ofCamerino; secondly, to Vittoria Farnese, daughter of the Duke ofParma. Guidobaldo spent a lifetime in petty quarrels with hissubjects, whom he treated badly, attempting to draw from their pocketsthe wealth which his father and the Montefeltri had won in militaryservice. He intervened at an awkward period of Italian politics. Theold Italy of despots, commonwealths, and Condottieri, in which hispredecessors played substantial parts, was at an end. The new Italy ofPopes and Austro-Spanish dynasties had hardly settled into shape. Between these epochs, Guidobaldo II. , of whom we have a dim and hazypresentation on the page of history, seems somehow to have fallenflat. As a sign of altered circumstances, he removed his court toPesaro, and built the great palace of the Della Roveres upon thepublic square. 

Guidobaldaccio, as he was called, died in 1574, leaving an only son, Francesco Maria II. , whose life and character illustrate the new agewhich had begun for Italy. He was educated in Spain at the court ofPhilip II. , where he spent more than two years. When he returned, hisSpanish haughtiness, punctilious attention to etiquette, andsuperstitious piety attracted observation. The violent temper of theDella Roveres, which Francesco Maria I. Displayed in acts ofhomicide, and which had helped to win his bad name for Guidobaldaccio, took the form of sullenness in the last Duke. The finest episode inhis life was the part he played in the battle of Lepanto, under hisold comrade, Don John of Austria. His father forced him to anuncongenial marriage with Lucrezia d'Este, Princess of Ferrara. Sheleft him, and took refuge in her native city, then honoured by thepresence of Tasso and Guarini. He bore her departure withphilosophical composure, recording the event in his diary as somethingto be dryly grateful for. Left alone, the Duke abandoned himself tosolitude, religious exercises, hunting, and the economy of hisimpoverished dominions. He became that curious creature, a man ofnarrow nature and mediocre capacity, who, dedicated to the cult ofself, is fain to pass for saint and sage in easy circumstances. Hemarried, for the second time, a lady, Livia della Rovere, who belongedto his own family, but had been born in private station. She broughthim one son, the Prince Federigo-Ubaldo. This youth might havesustained the ducal honours of Urbino, but for his sage-saint father'swant of wisdom. The boy was a spoiled child in infancy. Inflated withSpanish vanity from the cradle, taught to regard his subjects asdependents on a despot's will, abandoned to the caprices of his ownungovernable temper, without substantial aid from the paternal pietyor stoicism, he rapidly became a most intolerable princeling. Hisfather married him, while yet a boy, to Claudia de' Medici, andvirtually abdicated in his favour. Left to his own devices, Federigochose companions from the troupes of players whom he drew from Venice. He filled his palaces with harlots, and degraded himself upon thestage in parts of mean buffoonery. The resources of the duchy wereracked to support these parasites. Spanish rules of etiquette andceremony were outraged by their orgies. His bride brought him onedaughter, Vittoria, who afterwards became the wife of Ferdinand, GrandDuke of Tuscany. Then in the midst of his low dissipation andoffences against ducal dignity, he died of apoplexy at the early ageof eighteen--the victim, in the severe judgment of history, of hisfather's selfishness and want of practical ability. 

This happened in 1623. Francesco Maria was stunned by the blow. Hiswithdrawal from the duties of the sovereignty in favour of such a sonhad proved a constitutional unfitness for the duties of his station. The life he loved was one of seclusion in a round of pious exercises, petty studies, peddling economies, and mechanical amusements. Apowerful and grasping Pope was on the throne of Rome. Urban at thisjuncture pressed Francesco Maria hard; and in 1624 the last Duke ofUrbino devolved his lordships to the Holy See. He survived the formalact of abdication seven years; when he died, the Pontiff added hisduchy to the Papal States, which thenceforth stretched from Naples tothe bounds of Venice on the Po. 

III

Duke Frederick began the palace at Urbino in 1454, when he was stillonly Count. The architect was Luziano of Lauranna, a Dalmatian; andthe beautiful white limestone, hard as marble, used in theconstruction, was brought from the Dalmatian coast. This stone, likethe Istrian stone of Venetian buildings, takes and retains the chiselmark with wonderful precision. It looks as though, when fresh, it musthave had the pliancy of clay, so delicately are the finest curves inscroll or foliage scooped from its substance. And yet it preserveseach cusp and angle of the most elaborate pattern with the crispnessand the sharpness of a crystal. 

When wrought by a clever craftsman, its surface has neither thewaxiness of Parian, nor the brittle edge of Carrara marble; and itresists weather better than marble of the choicest quality. This maybe observed in many monuments of Venice, where the stone has been longexposed to sea-air. These qualities of the Dalmatian limestone, noless than its agreeable creamy hue and smooth dull polish, adapt it todecoration in low relief. The most attractive details in the palace atUrbino are friezes carved of this material in choice designs of earlyRenaissance dignity and grace. One chimney-piece in the Sala degliAngeli deserves especial comment. A frieze of dancing Cupids, withgilt hair and wings, their naked bodies left white on a ground ofultramarine, is supported by broad flat pilasters. These are engravedwith children holding pots of flowers; roses on one side, carnationson the other. Above the frieze another pair of angels, one at eachend, hold lighted torches; and the pyramidal cap of the chimney iscarved with two more, flying, and supporting the eagle of theMontefeltri on a raised medallion. Throughout the palace we noticeemblems appropriate to the Houses of Montefeltro and Della Rovere:their arms, three golden bends upon a field of azure: the Imperialeagle, granted when Montefeltro was made a fief of the Empire: theGarter of England, worn by the Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo: theermine of Naples: the _ventosa_, or cupping-glass, adopted for aprivate badge by Frederick: the golden oak-tree on an azure field ofDella Rovere: the palm-tree, bent beneath a block of stone, with itsaccompanying motto, _Inclinata Resurgam_: the cipher, FE DX. Profilemedallions of Federigo and Guidobaldo, wrought in the lowest possiblerelief, adorn the staircases. Round the great courtyard runs a friezeof military engines and ensigns, trophies, machines, and implements ofwar, alluding to Duke Frederick's profession of Condottiere. Thedoorways are enriched with scrolls of heavy-headed flowers, acanthusfoliage, honeysuckles, ivy-berries, birds and boys and sphinxes, inall the riot of Renaissance fancy. 

This profusion of sculptured _rilievo_ is nearly all that remains toshow how rich the palace was in things of beauty. Castiglione, writingin the reign of Guidobaldo, says that 'in the opinion of many it isthe fairest to be found in Italy; and the Duke filled it so well withall things fitting its magnificence, that it seemed less like a palacethan a city. Not only did he collect articles of common use, vesselsof silver, and trappings for chambers of rare cloths of gold and silk, and suchlike furniture, but he added multitudes of bronze and marblestatues, exquisite pictures, and instruments of music of all sorts. There was nothing but was of the finest and most excellent quality tobe seen there. Moreover, he gathered together at a vast cost a largenumber of the best and rarest books in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, allof which he adorned with gold and silver, esteeming them the chiefesttreasure of his spacious palace. ' When Cesare Borgia entered Urbino asconqueror in 1502, he is said to have carried off loot to the value of150, 000 ducats, or perhaps about a quarter of a million sterling. Vespasiano, the Florentine bookseller, has left us a minute account ofthe formation of the famous library of manuscripts, which he valued atconsiderably over 30, 000 ducats. Yet wandering now through thesedeserted halls, we seek in vain for furniture or tapestry or works ofart. The books have been removed to Rome. The pictures are gone, noman knows whither. The plate has long been melted down. Theinstruments of music are broken. If frescoes adorned the corridors, they have been whitewashed; the ladies' chambers have been stripped oftheir rich arras. Only here and there we find a raftered ceiling, painted in fading colours, which, taken with the stonework of thechimney, and some fragments of inlaid panel-work on door or window, enables us to reconstruct the former richness of these princely rooms. 

Exception must be made in favour of two apartments between the towersupon the southern facade. These were apparently the private rooms ofthe Duke and Duchess, and they are still approached by a great windingstaircase in one of the _torricini_. Adorned in indestructible orirremovable materials, they retain some traces of their ancientsplendour. On the first floor, opening on the vaulted loggia, we finda little chapel encrusted with lovely work in stucco and marble;friezes of bulls, sphinxes, sea-horses, and foliage; with a low reliefof Madonna and Child in the manner of Mino da Fiesole. Close by is asmall study with inscriptions to the Muses and Apollo. The cabinetconnecting these two cells has a Latin legend, to say that Religionhere dwells near the temple of the liberal arts:

 Bina vides parvo discrimine juncta sacella, Altera pars Musis altera sacra Deo est. 

On the floor above, corresponding in position to this apartment, is asecond, of even greater interest, since it was arranged by the DukeFrederick for his own retreat. The study is panelled in tarsia ofbeautiful design and execution. Three of the larger compartments showFaith, Hope, and Charity; figures not unworthy of a Botticelli or aFilippino Lippi. The occupations of the Duke are represented on asmaller scale by armour, _bâtons_ of command, scientific instruments, lutes, viols, and books, some open and some shut. The Bible, Homer, Virgil, Seneca, Tacitus, and Cicero, are lettered; apparently toindicate his favourite authors. The Duke himself, arrayed in his staterobes, occupies a fourth great panel; and the whole of this elaboratecomposition is harmonised by emblems, badges, and occasional devicesof birds, articles of furniture, and so forth. The tarsia, or inlaidwood of different kinds and colours, is among the best in this kind ofart to be found in Italy, though perhaps it hardly deserves to rankwith the celebrated choir-stalls of Bergamo and Monte Oliveto. Hard byis a chapel, adorned, like the lower one, with excellent reliefs. Theloggia to which these rooms have access looks across the Apennines, and down on what was once a private garden. It is now enclosed andpaved for the exercise of prisoners who are confined in one part ofthe desecrated palace!

A portion of the pile is devoted to more worthy purposes; for theAcademy of Raphael here holds its sittings, and preserves a collectionof curiosities and books illustrative of the great painter's life andworks. They have recently placed in a tiny oratory, scooped byGuidobaldo II. From the thickness of the wall, a cast of Raphael'sskull, which will be studied with interest and veneration. It has thefineness of modelling combined with shapeliness of form and smallnessof scale which is said to have characterised Mozart and Shelley. 

The impression left upon the mind after traversing this palace in itslength and breadth is one of weariness and disappointment. How shallwe reconstruct the long-past life which filled its rooms with sound, the splendour of its pageants, the thrill of tragedies enacted here?It is not difficult to crowd its doors and vacant spaces with liveriedservants, slim pages in tight hose, whose well-combed hair escapesfrom tiny caps upon their silken shoulders. We may even replace thetapestries of Troy which hung one hall, and build again the sideboardswith their embossed gilded plate. But are these chambers really thosewhere Emilia Pia held debate on love with Bembo and Castiglione; whereBibbiena's witticisms and Fra Serafino's pranks raised smiles oncourtly lips; where Bernardo Accolti, 'the Unique, ' declaimed hisverses to applauding crowds? Is it possible that into yonder hall, where now the lion of S. Mark looks down alone on staring desolation, strode the Borgia in all his panoply of war, a gilded glitteringdragon, and from the dais tore the Montefeltri's throne, and from thearras stripped their ensigns, replacing these with his own Bull andValentinus Dux? Here Tasso tuned his lyre for Francesco Maria'swedding-feast, and read 'Aminta' to Lucrezia d'Este. Here Guidobaldolistened to the jests and whispered scandals of the Aretine. HereTitian set his easel up to paint; here the boy Raphael, cap in hand, took signed and sealed credentials from his Duchess to the Gonfalonierof Florence. Somewhere in these huge chambers, the courtiers satbefore a torch-lit stage, when Bibbiena's 'Calandria' andCaetiglione's 'Tirsi, ' with their miracles of masques and mummers, whiled the night away. Somewhere, we know not where, Giuliano de'Medici made love in these bare rooms to that mysterious mother ofill-fated Cardinal Ippolito; somewhere, in some darker nook, thebastard Alessandro sprang to his strange-fortuned life of tyranny andlicense, which Brutus-Lorenzino cut short with a traitor'spoignard-thrust in Via Larga. How many men, illustrious for arts andletters, memorable by their virtues or their crimes, have trod thesesilent corridors, from the great Pope Julius down to James III. , self-titled King of England, who tarried here with Clementina Sobieskithrough some twelve months of his ex-royal exile! The memories of allthis folk, flown guests and masters of the still-abidingpalace-chambers, haunt us as we hurry through. They are but filmyshadows. We cannot grasp them, localise them, people surroundingemptiness with more than withering cobweb forms. 

Death takes a stronger hold on us than bygone life. Therefore, returning to the vast Throne-room, we animate it with one scene itwitnessed on an April night in 1508. Duke Guidobaldo had died atFossombrone, repeating to his friends around his bed these lines ofVirgil:

 Me circum limus niger et deformis arundo Cocyti tardaque palus inamabilis unda Alligat, et novies Styx interfusa coercet. 

His body had been carried on the shoulders of servants through thosemountain ways at night, amid the lamentations of gathering multitudesand the baying of dogs from hill-set farms alarmed by flaringflambeaux. Now it is laid in state in the great hall. The dais and thethrone are draped in black. The arms and _bâtons_ of his father hangabout the doorways. His own ensigns are displayed in groups andtrophies, with the banners of S. Mark, the Montefeltrian eagle, andthe cross keys of S. Peter. The hall itself is vacant, save for thehigh-reared catafalque of sable velvet and gold damask, surroundedwith wax candles burning steadily. Round it passes a ceaseless streamof people, coming and going, gazing at their Duke. He is attired incrimson hose and doublet of black damask. Black velvet slippers are onhis feet, and his ducal cap is of black velvet. The mantle of theGarter, made of dark-blue Alexandrine velvet, hooded with crimson, lined with white silk damask, and embroidered with the badge, drapesthe stiff sleeping form. 

It is easier to conjure up the past of this great palace, strollinground it in free air and twilight; perhaps because the landscape andthe life still moving on the city streets bring its exterior intoharmony with real existence. The southern façade, with its vaultedbalconies and flanking towers, takes the fancy, fascinates the eye, and lends itself as a fit stage for puppets of the musing mind. Oncemore imagination plants trim orange-trees in giant jars of Gubbio wareupon the pavement where the garden of the Duchess lay--the pavementpaced in these bad days by convicts in grey canvas jackets--thatpavement where Monsignor Bombo courted 'dear dead women' withPlatonic phrase, smothering the Menta of his natural man in lettuceculled from Academe and thyme of Mount Hymettus. In yonder loggia, lifted above the garden and the court, two lovers are in earnestconverse. They lean beneath the coffered arch, against the marble ofthe balustrade, he fingering his dagger under the dark velvet doublet, she playing with a clove carnation, deep as her own shame. The man isGiannandrea, broad-shouldered bravo of Verona, Duke Guidobaldo'sfavourite and carpet-count. The lady is Madonna Maria, daughter ofRome's Prefect, widow of Venanzio Varano, whom the Borgia strangled. On their discourse a tale will hang of woman's frailty and man'sboldness--Camerino's Duchess yielding to a low-born suitor's stalwartcharms. And more will follow, when that lady's brother, furiousFrancesco Maria della Rovere, shall stab the bravo in torch-littenpalace rooms with twenty poignard strokes 'twixt waist and throat, andtheir Pandarus shall be sent down to his account by a varlet's_coltellata_ through the midriff. Imagination shifts the scene, andshows in that same loggia Rome's warlike Pope, attended by hiscardinals and all Urbino's chivalry. The snowy beard of Julius flowsdown upon his breast, where jewels clasp the crimson mantle, as inRaphael's picture. His eyes are bright with wine; for he has come togaze on sunset from the banquet-chamber, and to watch the line oflamps which soon will leap along that palace cornice in his honour. Behind him lies Bologna humbled. The Pope returns, a conqueror, toRome. Yet once again imagination is at work. A gaunt, bald man, close-habited in Spanish black, his spare, fine features carved inpurest ivory, leans from that balcony. Gazing with hollow eyes, hetracks the swallows in their flight, and notes that winter is at hand. This is the last Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria II. , he whose youngwife deserted him, who made for himself alone a hermit-pedant's roundof petty cares and niggard avarice and mean-brained superstition. Hedrew a second consort from the convent, and raised up seed unto hisline by forethought, but beheld his princeling fade untimely in thebloom of boyhood. Nothing is left but solitude. To the mortmain of theChurch reverts Urbino's lordship, and even now he meditates the termsof devolution. Jesuits cluster in the rooms behind, with comfort forthe ducal soul and calculations for the interests of Holy See. 

A farewell to these memories of Urbino's dukedom should be taken inthe crypt of the cathedral, where Francesco Maria II. , the last Duke, buried his only son and all his temporal hopes. The place is scarcelysolemn. Its dreary _barocco_ emblems mar the dignity of death. A bulky_Pietà_ by Gian Bologna, with Madonna's face unfinished, towers up andcrowds the narrow cell. Religion has evanished from this lateRenaissance art, nor has the afterglow of Guido Reni's hectic pietyyet overflushed it. Chilled by the stifling humid sense of an extinctrace here entombed in its last representative, we gladly emerge fromthe sepulchral vault into the air of day. 

Filippo Visconti, with a smile on his handsome face, is waiting for usat the inn. His horses, sleek, well fed, and rested, toss their headsimpatiently. We take our seats in the carriage, open wide beneath asparkling sky, whirl past the palace and its ghost-like recollections, and are halfway on the road to Fossombrone in a cloud of dust andwhirr of wheels before we think of looking back to greet Urbino. Thereis just time. The last decisive turning lies in front. We standbareheaded to salute the grey mass of buildings ridged along the sky. Then the open road invites us with its varied scenery and movement. From the shadowy past we drive into the world of human things, forever changefully unchanged, unrestfully the same. This interchangebetween dead memories and present life is the delight of travel. 

 * * * * *

_VITTORIA ACCORAMBONI_

AND THE TRAGEDY OF WEBSTER

I

During the pontificate of Gregory XIII. (1572-85), Papal authority inRome reached its lowest point of weakness, and the ancient splendourof the Papal court was well-nigh eclipsed. Art and learning had diedout. The traditions of the days of Leo, Julius, and Paul III. Wereforgotten. It seemed as though the genius of the Renaissance hadmigrated across the Alps. All the powers of the Papacy were directedto the suppression of heresies and to the re-establishment ofspiritual supremacy over the intellect of Europe. Meanwhile society inRome returned to mediæval barbarism. The veneer of classicalrefinement and humanistic urbanity, which for a time had hidden thenatural savagery of the Roman nobles, wore away. The Holy City becamea den of bandits; the territory of the Church supplied a battle-groundfor senseless party strife, which the weak old man who wore the triplecrown was quite unable to control. It is related how a robberchieftain, Marianazzo, refused the offer of a general pardon from thePope, alleging that the profession of brigand was far more lucrative, and offered greater security of life, than any trade within the wallsof Rome. The Campagna, the ruined citadels about the basements of theSabine and Ciminian hills, the quarters of the aristocracy within thecity, swarmed with bravos, who were protected by great nobles and fedby decent citizens for the advantages to be derived from theassistance of abandoned and courageous ruffians. Life, indeed, hadbecome impossible without fixed compact with the powers oflawlessness. There was hardly a family in Rome which did not numbersome notorious criminal among the outlaws. Murder, sacrilege, the loveof adventure, thirst for plunder, poverty, hostility to the ascendantfaction of the moment, were common causes of voluntary or involuntaryoutlawry; nor did public opinion regard a bandit's calling as otherthan honourable. 

It may readily be imagined that in such a state of society thegrisliest tragedies were common enough in Rome. The history of some ofthese has been preserved to us in documents digested from publictrials and personal observation by contemporary writers. That of theCenci, in which a notorious act of parricide furnished the plot of apopular novella, is well known. And such a tragedy, even more rife incharacteristic incidents, and more distinguished by the quality of its_dramatis personæ_, is that of Vittoria Accoramboni. 

Vittoria was born in 1557, of a noble but impoverished family, atGubbio, among the hills of Umbria. Her biographers are rapturous intheir praises of her beauty, grace, and exceeding charm of manner. Notonly was her person most lovely, but her mind shone at first with allthe amiable lustre of a modest, innocent, and winning youth. Herfather, Claudio Accoramboni, removed to Rome, where his numerouschildren were brought up under the care of their mother, Tarquinia, anambitious and unscrupulous woman, bent on rehabilitating the decayedhonours of their house. Here Vittoria in early girlhood soon becamethe fashion. She exercised an irresistible influence over all who sawher, and many were the offers of marriage she refused. At length asuitor appeared whose condition and connection with the Romanecclesiastical nobility rendered him acceptable in the eyes of theAccoramboni. Francesco Peretti was welcomed as the successfulcandidate for Vittoria's hand. His mother, Camilla, was sister toFelice, Cardinal of Montalto; and her son, Francesco Mignucci, hadchanged his surname in compliment to this illustrious relative. ThePeretti were of humble origin. The cardinal himself had tended swinein his native village; but, supported by an invincible belief in hisown destinies, and gifted with a powerful intellect and determinedcharacter, he passed through all grades of the Franciscan Order to itsgeneralship, received the bishoprics of Fermo and S. Agata, andlastly, in the year 1570, assumed the scarlet with the title ofCardinal Montalto. He was now upon the high way to the Papacy, amassing money by incessant care, studying the humours of surroundingfactions, effacing his own personality, and by mixing but little inthe intrigues of the court, winning the reputation of a prudent, inoffensive old man. These were his tactics for securing the Papalthrone; nor were his expectations frustrated; for in 1585 he waschosen Pope, the parties of the Medici and the Farnesi agreeing toaccept him as a compromise. When Sixtus V. Was once firmly seated onS. Peter's chair, he showed himself in his true colours. An implacableadministrator of severest justice, a rigorous economist, aniconoclastic foe to paganism, the first act of his reign was todeclare a war of extirpation against the bandits who had reduced Romein his predecessor's rule to anarchy. 

It was the nephew, then, of this man, whom historians have judged thegreatest personage of his own times, that Vittoria Accoramboni marriedon the 28th of June 1573. For a short while the young couple livedhappily together. According to some accounts of their married life, the bride secured the favour of her powerful uncle-in-law, whoindulged her costly fancies to the full. It is, however, more probablethat the Cardinal Montalto treated her follies with a grudgingparsimony; for we soon find the Peretti household hopelessly involvedin debt. Discord, too, arose between Vittoria and her husband on thescore of a certain levity in her behaviour; and it was rumoured thateven during the brief space of their union she had proved a faithlesswife. Yet she contrived to keep Francesco's confidence, and it iscertain that her family profited by their connection with the Peretti. Of her six brothers, Mario, the eldest, was a favourite courtier ofthe great Cardinal d'Este. Ottavio was in orders, and throughMontalto's influence obtained the See of Fossombrone. The sameeminent protector placed Scipione in the service of the CardinalSforza. Camillo, famous for his beauty and his courage, followed thefortunes of Filibert of Savoy, and died in France. Flaminio was stilla boy, dependent, as the sequel of this story shows, upon his sister'sdestiny. Of Marcello, the second in age and most important in theaction of this tragedy, it is needful to speak with moreparticularity. He was young, and, like the rest of his breed, singularly handsome--so handsome, indeed, that he is said to havegained an infamous ascendency over the great Duke of Bracciano, whoseprivy chamberlain he had become. Marcello was an outlaw for the murderof Matteo Pallavicino, the brother of the Cardinal of that name. Thisdid not, however, prevent the chief of the Orsini house from makinghim his favourite and confidential friend. Marcello, who seems to haverealised in actual life the worst vices of those Roman courtiersdescribed for us by Aretino, very soon conceived the plan of exaltinghis own fortunes by trading on his sister's beauty. He worked upon theDuke of Bracciano's mind so cleverly, that he brought this haughtyprince to the point of an insane passion for Peretti's young wife; andmeanwhile so contrived to inflame the ambition of Vittoria and hermother, Tarquinia, that both were prepared to dare the worst of crimesin expectation of a dukedom. The game was a difficult one to play. Notonly had Francesco Peretti first to be murdered, but the inequality ofbirth and wealth and station between Vittoria and the Duke ofBracciano rendered a marriage almost impossible. It was also an affairof delicacy to stimulate without satisfying the Duke's passion. YetMarcello did not despair. The stakes were high enough to justify greatrisks; and all he put in peril was his sister's honour, the fame ofthe Accoramboni, and the favour of Montalto. Vittoria, for her part, trusted in her power to ensnare and secure the noble prey both had inview. 

Paolo Giordano Orsini, born about the year 1537, was reigning Duke ofBracciano. Among Italian princes he ranked at least upon a par withthe Dukes of Urbino, and his family, by its alliances, was moreillustrious than any of that time in Italy. He was a man of giganticstature, prodigious corpulence, and marked personal daring; agreeablein manners, but subject to uncontrollable fits of passion, andincapable of self-restraint when crossed in any whim or fancy. Uponthe habit of his body it is needful to insist, in order that the parthe played in this tragedy of intrigue, crime, and passion may be welldefined. He found it difficult to procure a charger equal to hisweight, and he was so fat that a special dispensation relieved himfrom the duty of genuflexion in the Papal presence. Though lord of alarge territory, yielding princely revenues, he laboured under heavydebts; for no great noble of the period lived more splendidly, withless regard for his finances. In the politics of that age and country, Paolo Giordano leaned toward France. Yet he was a grandee of Spain, and had played a distinguished part in the battle of Lepanto. Now theDuke of Bracciano was a widower. He had been married in 1553 toIsabella de' Medici, daughter of the Grand Duke Cosimo, sister ofFrancesco, Bianca Capello's lover, and of the Cardinal Ferdinando. Suspicion of adultery with Troilo Orsini had fallen on Isabella, andher husband, with the full concurrence of her brothers, removed her in1576 from this world. [7] No one thought the worse of Bracciano forthis murder of his wife. In those days of abandoned vice and intricatevillany, certain points of honour were maintained with scrupulousfidelity. A wife's adultery was enough to justify the most savage andlicentious husband in an act of semi-judicial vengeance; and the shameshe brought upon his head was shared by the members of her own house, so that they stood by, consenting to her death. Isabella, it may besaid, left one son, Virginio, who became in due time Duke ofBracciano. 

It appears that in the year 1581, four years after Vittoria'smarriage, the Duke of Bracciano had satisfied Marcello of hisintention to make her his wife, and of his willingness to countenanceFrancesco Peretti's murder. Marcello, feeling sure of his game, introduced the Duke in private to his sister, and induced her toovercome any natural repugnance she may have felt for the unwieldy andgross lover. Having reached this point, it was imperative to pushmatters quickly on toward matrimony. 

But how should the unfortunate Francesco be entrapped? They caught himin a snare of peculiar atrocity, by working on the kindly feelingswhich his love for Vittoria had caused him to extend to all theAcooramboni. Marcello, the outlaw, was her favourite brother, andMarcello at that time lay in hiding, under the suspicion of more thanordinary crime, beyond the walls of Rome. Late in the evening of the18th of April, while the Peretti family were retiring to bed, amessenger from Marcello arrived, entreating Francesco to repair atonce to Monte Cavallo. Marcello had affairs of the utmost importanceto communicate, and begged his brother-in-law not to fail him at agrievous pinch. The letter containing this request was borne by oneDominico d'Aquaviva, _alias_ Il Mancino, a confederate of Vittoria'swaiting-maid. This fellow, like Marcello, was an outlaw; but when heventured into Rome he frequented Peretti's house, and had made himselffamiliar with its master as a trusty bravo. Neither in the message, therefore, nor in the messenger was there much to rouse suspicion. Thetime, indeed, was oddly chosen, and Marcello had never made a similarappeal on any previous occasion. Yet his necessities might surely haveobliged him to demand some more than ordinary favour from a brother. Francesco immediately made himself ready to set out, armed only withhis sword and attended by a single servant. It was in vain that hiswife and his mother reminded him of the dangers of the night, theloneliness of Monte Cavallo, its ruinous palaces and robber-hauntedcaves. He was resolved to undertake the adventure, and went forth, never to return. As he ascended the hill, he fell to earth, shot withthree harquebuses. His body was afterwards found on Monte Cavallo, stabbed through and through, without a trace that could identify themurderers. Only, in the course of subsequent investigations, IlMancino (on the 24th of February 1582) made the followingstatements:--That Vittoria's mother, assisted by the waiting woman, had planned the trap; that Marchionne of Gubbio and Paolo Barca ofBracciano, two of the Duke's men, had despatched the victim. Marcellohimself, it seems, had come from Bracciano to conduct the wholeaffair. Suspicion fell immediately upon Vittoria and her kindred, together with the Duke of Bracciano; nor was this diminished when theAccoramboni, fearing the pursuit of justice, took refuge in a villa ofthe Duke's at Magnanapoli a few days after the murder. 

A cardinal's nephew, even in those troublous times, was not killedwithout some noise being made about the matter. Accordingly PopeGregory XIII. Began to take measures for discovering the authors ofthe crime. Strange to say, however, the Cardinal Montalto, notwithstanding the great love he was known to bear his nephew, beggedthat the investigation might be dropped. The coolness with which hefirst received the news of Francesco Peretti's death, thedissimulation with which he met the Pope's expression of sympathy in afull consistory, his reserve in greeting friends on ceremonial visitsof condolence, and, more than all, the self-restraint he showed in thepresence of the Duke of Bracciano, impressed the society of Rome withthe belief that he was of a singularly moderate and patient temper. Itwas thought that the man who could so tamely submit to his nephew'smurder, and suspend the arm of justice when already raised forvengeance, must prove a mild and indulgent ruler. When, therefore, inthe fifth year after this event, Montalto was elected Pope, menascribed his elevation in no small measure to his conduct at thepresent crisis. Some, indeed, attributed his extraordinary moderationand self-control to the right cause. _'Veramente costui è un granfrate!_' was Gregory's remark at the close of the consistory whenMontalto begged him to let the matter of Peretti's murder rest. '_Of atruth, that fellow is a consummate hypocrite!_' How accurate thisjudgment was, appeared when Sixtus V. Assumed the reins of power. Thesame man who, as monk and cardinal, had smiled on Bracciano, though heknew him to be his nephew's assassin, now, as Pontiff and sovereign, bade the chief of the Orsini purge his palace and dominions of thescoundrels he was wont to harbour, adding significantly, that ifFelice Peretti forgave what had been done against him in a privatestation, he would exact uttermost vengeance for disobedience to thewill of Sixtus. The Duke of Bracciano judged it best, after thatwarning, to withdraw from Rome. 

Francesco Peretti had been murdered on the 16th of April 1581. SixtusV. Was proclaimed on the 24th of April 1585. In this interval Vittoriaunderwent a series of extraordinary perils and adventures. First ofall, she had been secretly married to the Duke in his gardens ofMagnanapoli at the end of April 1581. That is to say, Marcello and shesecured their prize, as well as they were able, the moment afterFrancesco had been removed by murder. But no sooner had the marriagebecome known, than the Pope, moved by the scandal it created, no lessthan by the urgent instance of the Orsini and Medici, declared itvoid. After some while spent in vain resistance, Bracciano submitted, and sent Vittoria back to her father's house. By an order issued underGregory's own hand, she was next removed to the prison of CorteSavella, thence to the monastery of S. Cecilia in Trastevere, andfinally to the Castle of S. Angelo. Here, at the end of December 1581, she was put on trial for the murder of her first husband. In prisonshe seems to have borne herself bravely, arraying her beautiful personin delicate attire, entertaining visitors, exacting from her friendsthe honours due to a duchess, and sustaining the frequent examinationsto which she was submitted with a bold, proud front. In the middle ofthe month of July her constancy was sorely tried by the receipt of aletter in the Duke's own handwriting, formally renouncing hismarriage. It was only by a lucky accident that she was prevented onthis occasion from committing suicide. The Papal court meanwhile kepturging her either to retire to a monastery or to accept anotherhusband. She firmly refused to embrace the religious life, anddeclared that she was already lawfully united to a living husband, theDuke of Bracciano. It seemed impossible to deal with her; and at last, on the 8th of November, she was released from prison under thecondition of retirement to Gubbio. The Duke had lulled his enemies torest by the pretence of yielding to their wishes. But Marcello wascontinually beside him at Bracciano, where we read of a mysteriousGreek enchantress whom he hired to brew love-philters for thefurtherance of his ambitious plots. Whether Bracciano was stimulatedby the brother's arguments or by the witch's potions need not be toocuriously questioned. But it seems in any case certain that absenceinflamed his passion instead of cooling it. 

Accordingly, in September 1583, under the excuse of a pilgrimage toLoreto, he contrived to meet Vittoria at Trevi, whence he carried herin triumph to Bracciano. Here he openly acknowledged her as his wife, installing her with all the splendour due to a sovereign duchess. Onthe 10th of October following, he once more performed the marriageceremony in the principal church of his fief; and in the January of1584 he brought her openly to Rome. This act of contumacy to the Pope, both as feudal superior and as supreme Pontiff, roused all the formeropposition to his marriage. Once more it was declared invalid. Oncemore the Duke pretended to give way. But at this juncture Gregorydied; and while the conclave was sitting for the election of the newPope, he resolved to take the law into his own hands, and to ratifyhis union with Vittoria by a third and public marriage in Rome. On themorning of the 24th of April 1585, their nuptials were accordinglyonce more solemnised in the Orsini palace. Just one hour after theceremony, as appears from the marriage register, the news arrived ofCardinal Montalto's election to the Papacy, Vittoria lost no time inpaying her respects to Camilla, sister of the new Pope, her formermother-in-law. The Duke visited Sixtus V. In state to compliment himon his elevation. But the reception which both received proved thatRome was no safe place for them to live in. They consequently made uptheir minds for flight. 

A chronic illness from which Bracciano had lately suffered furnished asufficient pretext. This seems to have been something of the nature ofa cancerous ulcer, which had to be treated by the application of rawmeat to open sores. Such details are only excusable in the presentnarrative on the ground that Bracciano's disease considerably affectsour moral judgment of the woman who could marry a man thus physicallytainted, and with her husband's blood upon his hands. At any rate, the Duke's _lupa_ justified his trying what change of air, togetherwith the sulphur waters of Abano, would do for him. 

The Duke and Duchess arrived in safety at Venice, where they hadengaged the Dandolo palace on the Zuecca. There they only stayed a fewdays, removing to Padua, where they had hired palaces of the Foscariin the Arena and a house called De' Cavalli. At Salò, also, on theLake of Garda, they provided themselves with fit dwellings for theirprincely state and their large retinues, intending to divide theirtime between the pleasures which the capital of luxury afforded andthe simpler enjoyments of the most beautiful of the Italian lakes. But_la gioia dei profani è un fumo passaggier_. Paolo Giordano Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, died suddenly at Salò on the 10th of November 1585, leaving the young and beautiful Vittoria helpless among enemies. Whatwas the cause of his death? It is not possible to give a clear andcertain answer. We have seen that he suffered from a horrible andvoracious disease, which after his removal from Rome seems to havemade progress. Yet though this malady may well have cut his lifeshort, suspicion of poison was not, in the circumstances, quiteunreasonable. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, the Pope, and the Orsinifamily were all interested in his death. Anyhow, he had time to make awill in Vittoria's favour, leaving her large sums of money, jewels, goods, and houses--enough, in fact, to support her ducal dignity withsplendour. His hereditary fiefs and honours passed by right to hisonly son, Virginio. 

Vittoria, accompanied by her brother, Marcello, and the whole court ofBracciano, repaired at once to Padua, where she was soon after joinedby Flaminio, and by the Prince Lodovico Orsini. Lodovico Orsiniassumed the duty of settling Vittoria's affairs under her deadhusband's will. In life he had been the Duke's ally as well asrelative. His family pride was deeply wounded by what seemed to him anignoble, as it was certainly an unequal, marriage. He now showedhimself the relentless enemy of the Duchess. Disputes arose betweenthem as to certain details, which seem to have been legally decided inthe widow's favour. On the night of the 22nd of December, however, forty men disguised in black and fantastically tricked out to eludedetection, surrounded her palace. Through the long galleries andchambers hung with arras, eight of them went, bearing torches, insearch of Vittoria and her brothers. Marcello escaped, having fled thehouse under suspicion of the murder of one of his own followers. Flaminio, the innocent and young, was playing on his lute and singing_Miserere_ in the great hall of the palace. The murderers surprisedhim with a shot from one of their harquebuses. He ran, wounded in theshoulder, to his sister's room. She, it is said, was telling her beadsbefore retiring for the night. When three of the assassins entered, she knelt before the crucifix, and there they stabbed her in the leftbreast, turning the poignard in the wound, and asking her with savageinsults if her heart was pierced. Her last words were, 'Jesus, Ipardon you. ' Then they turned to Flaminio, and left him pierced withseventy-four stiletto wounds. 

The authorities of Padua identified the bodies of Vittoria andFlaminio, and sent at once for further instructions to Venice. Meanwhile it appears that both corpses were laid out in one opencoffin for the people to contemplate. The palace and the church of theEremitani, to which they had been removed, were crowded all throughthe following day with a vast concourse of the Paduans. Vittoria'swonderful dead body, pale yet sweet to look upon, the golden hairflowing around her marble shoulders, the red wound in her breastuncovered, the stately limbs arrayed in satin as she died, maddenedthe populace with its surpassing loveliness. '_Dentibus fremebant_, 'says the chronicler, when they beheld that gracious lady stiff indeath. And of a truth, if her corpse was actually exposed in thechapel of the Eremitani, as we have some right to assume, thespectacle must have been impressive. Those grim gaunt frescoes ofMantegna looked down on her as she lay stretched upon her bier, solemnand calm, and, but for pallor, beautiful as though in life. No wonderthat the folk forgot her first husband's murder, her less than comelymarriage to the second. It was enough for them that this flower ofsurpassing loveliness had been cropped by villains in its bloom. Gathering in knots around the torches placed beside the corpse, theyvowed vengeance against the Orsini; for suspicion, not unnaturally, fell on Prince Lodovico. 

The Prince was arrested and interrogated before the court of Padua. Heentered their hall attended by forty armed men, responded haughtily totheir questions, and demanded free passage for his courier to VirginioOrsini, then at Florence. To this demand the court acceded; but theprecaution of way-laying the courier and searching his person wasvery wisely taken. Besides some formal dispatches which announcedVittoria's assassination, they found in this man's boot a compromisingletter, declaring Virginio a party to the crime, and asserting thatLodovico had with his own poignard killed their victim. Padua placeditself in a state of defence, and prepared to besiege the palace ofPrince Lodovico, who also got himself in readiness for battle. Engines, culverins, and firebrands were directed against thebarricades which he had raised. The militia was called out and theBrenta was strongly guarded. Meanwhile the Senate of S. Mark haddispatched the Avogadore, Aloisio Bragadin, with full power to thescene of action. Lodovico Orsini, it may be mentioned, was in theirservice; and had not this affair intervened, he would in a few weekshave entered on his duties as Governor for Venice of Corfu. 

The bombardment of Orsini's palace began on Christmas Day. Three ofthe Prince's men were killed in the first assault; and since theartillery brought to bear upon him threatened speedy ruin to the houseand its inhabitants, he made up his mind to surrender. 'The PrinceLuigi, ' writes one-chronicler of these events, 'walked attired inbrown, his poignard at his side, and his cloak slung elegantly underhis arm. The weapon being taken from him, he leaned upon a balustrade, and began to trim his nails with a little pair of scissors he happenedto find there. ' On the 27th he was strangled in prison by order of theVenetian Republic. His body was carried to be buried, according to hisown will, in the church of S. Maria dell' Orto at Venice. Two of hisfollowers were hung next day. Fifteen were executed on the followingMonday; two of these were quartered alive; one of them, the ContePaganello, who confessed to having slain Vittoria, had his left sideprobed with his own cruel dagger. Eight were condemned to the galleys, six to prison, and eleven were acquitted. Thus ended this terribleaffair, which brought, it is said, good credit and renown to the lordsof Venice through all nations of the civilised world. It only remainsto be added that Marcello Accoramboni was surrendered to the Pope'svengeance and beheaded at Ancona, where also his mysteriousaccomplice, the Greek sorceress, perished. 

II

This story of Vittoria Accoramboni's life and tragic ending is drawn, in its main details, from a narrative published by Henri Beyle in his'Chroniques et Novelles. '[8] He professes to have translated itliterally from a manuscript communicated to him by a nobleman ofMantua; and there are strong internal evidences of the truth of thisassertion. Such compositions are frequent in Italian libraries, nor isit rare for one of them to pass into the common market--as Mr. Browning's famous purchase of the tale on which he based his 'Ringand the Book' sufficiently proves. These pamphlets were produced, inthe first instance, to gratify the curiosity of the educated public inan age which had no newspapers, and also to preserve the memory offamous trials. How far the strict truth was represented, or whether, as in the case of Beatrice Cenci, the pathetic aspect of the tragedywas unduly dwelt on, depended, of course, upon the mental bias of thescribe, upon his opportunities of obtaining exact information, andupon the taste of the audience for whom he wrote. Therefore, intreating such documents as historical data, we must be upon ourguard. Professor Gnoli, who has recently investigated the whole ofVittoria's eventful story by the light of contemporary documents, informs us that several narratives exist in manuscript, all dealingmore or less accurately with the details of the tragedy. One of thesewas published in Italian at Brescia in 1586. A Frenchman, De Rosset, printed the same story in its main outlines at Lyons in 1621. Our owndramatist, John Webster, made it the subject of a tragedy, which hegave to the press in 1612. What were his sources of information we donot know for certain. But it is clear that he was well acquainted withthe history. He has changed some of the names and redistributed someof the chief parts. Vittoria's first husband, for example, becomesCamillo; her mother, named Cornelia instead of Tarquinia, is so farfrom abetting Peretti's murder and countenancing her daughter's shame, that she acts the _rôle_ of a domestic Cassandra. Flaminio and notMarcello is made the main instrument of Vittoria's crime andelevation. The Cardinal Montalto is called Monticelso, and his papaltitle is Paul IV. Instead of Sixtus V. These are details ofcomparative indifference, in which a playwright may fairly use hisliberty of art. On the other hand, Webster shows a curious knowledgeof the picturesque circumstances of the tale. The garden in whichVittoria meets Bracciano is the villa of Magnanapoli; Zanche, theMoorish slave, combines Vittoria's waiting-woman, Caterina, and theGreek sorceress who so mysteriously dogged Marcello's footsteps to thedeath. The suspicion of Bracciano's murder is used to introduce aquaint episode of Italian poisoning. 

Webster exercised the dramatist's privilege of connecting variousthreads of action in one plot, disregarding chronology, and hazardingan ethical solution of motives which mere fidelity to fact hardlywarrants. He shows us Vittoria married to Camillo, a low-born andwitless fool, whose only merit consists in being nephew to theCardinal Monticelso, afterwards Pope Paul IV. [9] Paulo GiordanoUrsini, Duke of Brachiano, loves Vittoria, and she suggests to himthat, for the furtherance of their amours, his wife, the DuchessIsabella, sister to Francesco de' Medici, Grand Duke of Florence, should be murdered at the same time as her own husband, Camillo. Brachiano is struck by this plan, and with the help of Vittoria'sbrother, Flamineo, he puts it at once into execution. Flamineo hires adoctor who poisons Brachiano's portrait, so that Isabella dies afterkissing it. He also with his own hands twists Camillo's neck during avaulting-match, making it appear that he came by his deathaccidentally. Suspicion of the murder attaches, however, to Vittoria. She is tried for her life before Monticelso and De' Medici; acquitted, and relegated to a house of Convertites or female reformatory. Brachiano, on the accession of Monticelso to the Papal throne, resolves to leave Rome with Vittoria. They escape, together with hermother Cornelia, and her brothers Flamineo and Marcello, to Padua; andit is here that the last scenes of the tragedy are laid. 

The use Webster made of Lodovico Orsini deserves particular attention. He introduces this personage in the very first scene as a spendthrift, who, having run through his fortune, has been outlawed. CountLodovico, as he is always called, has no relationship with the Orsini, but is attached to the service of Francesco de' Medici, and is an oldlover of the Duchess Isabella. When, therefore, the Grand Dukemeditates vengeance on Brachiano, he finds a fitting instrument in thedesperate Lodovico. Together, in disguise, they repair to Padua. Lodovico poisons the Duke of Brachiano's helmet, and has thesatisfaction of ending his last struggles by the halter. Afterwards, with companions, habited as a masquer, he enters Vittoria's palace andputs her to death together with her brother Flamineo. Just when thedeed of vengeance has been completed, young Giovanni Orsini, heir ofBrachiano, enters and orders the summary execution of Lodovico forthis deed of violence. Webster's invention in this plot is confined tothe fantastic incidents attending on the deaths of Isabella, Camillo, and Brachiano, and to the murder of Marcello by his brother Flamineo, with the further consequence of Cornelia's madness and death. He hasheightened our interest in Isabella, at the expense of Brachiano'scharacter, by making her an innocent and loving wife instead of anadulteress. He has ascribed different motives from the real ones toLodovico in order to bring this personage into rank with the chiefactors, though this has been achieved with only moderate success. Vittoria is abandoned to the darkest interpretation. She is a womanwho rises to eminence by crime, as an unfaithful wife, the murderessof her husband, and an impudent defier of justice. Her brother, Flamineo, becomes under Webster's treatment one of those worst humaninfamies--a court dependent; ruffian, buffoon, pimp, murderer byturns. Furthermore, and without any adequate object beyond that ofcompleting this study of a type he loved, Webster makes him murder hisown brother Marcello by treason. The part assigned to Marcello, itshould be said, is a genial and happy one; and Cornelia, the mother ofthe Accoramboni, is a dignified character, pathetic in her suffering. Webster, it may be added, treats the Cardinal Monticelso as allied insome special way to the Medici. Yet certain traits in his character, especially his avoidance of bloodshed and the tameness of his temperafter Camillo has been murdered, seem to have been studied from thehistorical Sixtus. 

III

The character of the 'White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona, ' is perhapsthe most masterly creation of Webster's genius. Though her history isa true one in its leading incidents, the poet, while portraying a realpersonage, has conceived an original individuality. It is impossibleto know for certain how far the actual Vittoria was guilty of herfirst husband's murder. Her personality fails to detach itself fromthe romance of her biography by any salient qualities. But Webster, with true playwright's instinct, casts aside historical doubts, anddelineates in his heroine a woman of a very marked and terriblenature. Hard as adamant, uncompromising, ruthless, Vittoria followsambition as the loadstar of her life. It is the ambition to reign asDuchess, far more than any passion for a paramour, which makes herplot Camillo's and Isabella's murders, and throws her before marriageinto Brachiano's arms. Added to this ambition, she is possessed withthe cold demon of her own imperial and victorious beauty. She has thecourage of her criminality in the fullest sense; and much of thefascination with which Webster has invested her, depends upon herdreadful daring. Her portrait is drawn with full and firm touches. Although she appears but five times on the scene, she fills it fromthe first line of the drama to the last. Each appearance addseffectively to the total impression. We see her first during acriminal interview with Brachiano, contrived by her brother Flamineo. The plot of the tragedy is developed in this scene; Vittoriasuggesting, under the metaphor of a dream, that her lover shouldcompass the deaths of his duchess and her husband. The dream is toldwith deadly energy and ghastly picturesqueness. The cruel sneer at itsconclusion, murmured by a voluptuous woman in the ears of animpassioned paramour, chills us with the sense of concentrated vice. Her next appearance is before the court, on trial for her husband'smurder. The scene is celebrated, and has been much disputed bycritics. Relying on her own dauntlessness, on her beauty, and on theprotection of Brachiano, Vittoria hardly takes the trouble to pleadinnocence or to rebut charges. She stands defiant, arrogant, vigilant, on guard; flinging the lie in the teeth of her arraigners; quick toseize the slightest sign of feebleness in their attack; protesting herguiltlessness so loudly that she shouts truth down by brazen strengthof lung; retiring at the close with taunts; blazing throughout withthe intolerable lustre of some baleful planet. When she enters for thethird time, it is to quarrel with her paramour. He has been stung tojealousy by a feigned love-letter. She knows that she has given him nocause; it is her game to lure him by fidelity to marriage. Thereforeshe resolves to make his mistake the instrument of her exaltation. Beginning with torrents of abuse, hurling reproaches at him for herown dishonour and the murder of his wife, working herself by studieddegrees into a tempest of ungovernable rage, she flings herself uponthe bed, refuses his caresses, spurns and tramples on him, till shehas brought Brachiano, terrified, humbled, fascinated, to her feet. Then she gradually relents beneath his passionate protestations andrepeated promises of marriage. At this point she speaks but little. We only feel her melting humour in the air, and long to see the sceneplayed by such an actress as Madame Bernhardt. When Vittoria nextappears, it is as Duchess by the deathbed of the Duke, her husband. Her attendance here is necessary, but it contributes little to thedevelopment of her character. We have learned to know her, and expectneither womanish tears nor signs of affection at a crisis whichtouches her heart less than her self-love. Webster, among his otherexcellent qualities, knew how to support character by reticence. Vittoria's silence in this act is significant; and when she retiresexclaiming, 'O me! this place is hell!' we know that it is the outcry, not of a woman who has lost what made life dear, but of one who seesthe fruits of crime imperilled by a fatal accident. The last scene ofthe play is devoted to Vittoria. It begins with a notable altercationbetween her and Flamineo. She calls him 'ruffian' and 'villain, 'refusing him the reward of his vile service. This quarrel emerges inone of Webster's grotesque contrivances to prolong a poignantsituation. Flamineo quits the stage and reappears with pistols. Heaffects a kind of madness; and after threatening Vittoria, who neverflinches, he proposes they should end their lives by suicide. Shehumours him, but manages to get the first shot. Flamineo falls, wounded apparently to death. Then Vittoria turns and tramples on himwith her feet and tongue, taunting him in his death agony with theenumeration of his crimes. Her malice and her energy are equallyinfernal. Soon, however, it appears that the whole device was but atrick of Flamineo's to test his sister. The pistol was not loaded. Henow produces a pair which are properly charged, and proceeds in goodearnest to the assassination of Vittoria. But at this critical momentLodovico and his masquers appear; brother and sister both dieunrepentant, defiant to the end. Vittoria's customary pride and herfamiliar sneers impress her speech in these last moments with atrenchant truth to nature:

 _You_ my death's-man! Methinks thou dost not look horrid enough, Thou hast too good a face to be a hangman: If thou be, do thy office in right form; Fall down upon thy knees, and ask forgiveness!

 * * * * *

 I will be waited on in death; my servant Shall never go before me. 

 * * * * *

 Yes, I shall welcome death As princes do some great ambassadors: I'll meet thy weapon half-way. 

 * * * * *

 'Twas a manly blow! The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant; And then thou wilt be famous. 

So firmly has Webster wrought the character of this white devil, thatwe seem to see her before us as in a picture. 'Beautiful as theleprosy, dazzling as the lightning, ' to use a phrase of herenthusiastic admirer Hazlitt, she takes her station like a lady insome portrait by Paris Bordone, with gleaming golden hair twisted intosnakelike braids about her temples, with skin white as cream, brightcheeks, dark dauntless eyes, and on her bosom, where it has beenchafed by jewelled chains, a flush of rose. She is luxurious, but notso abandoned to the pleasures of the sense as to forget the purpose ofher will and brain. Crime and peril add zest to her enjoyment. Whenarraigned in open court before the judgment-seat of deadly andunscrupulous foes, she conceals the consciousness of guilt, and standserect, with fierce front, unabashed, relying on the splendour of herirresistible beauty and the subtlety of her piercing wit. Chafing withrage, the blood mounts and adds a lustre to her cheek. It is no flushof modesty, but of rebellious indignation. The Cardinal, who hatesher, brands her emotion with the name of shame. She rebukes him, hurling a jibe at his own mother. And when they point with spitefuleagerness to the jewels blazing on her breast, to the silks and satinsthat she rustles in, her husband lying murdered, she retorts:

 Had I foreknown his death, as you suggest, I would have bespoke my mourning. 

She is condemned, but not vanquished, and leaves the court with astinging sarcasm. They send her to a house of Convertites:

 _V. C_. A house of Convertites! what's that?

 _M_. A house of penitent whores. 

 _V. C_. Do the noblemen of Rome Erect it for their wives, that I am sent To lodge there?

Charles Lamb was certainly in error? when he described Vittoria'sattitude as one of 'innocence-resembling boldness. ' In the trialscene, no less than in the scenes of altercation with Brachiano andFlamineo, Webster clearly intended her to pass for a magnificentvixen, a beautiful and queenly termagant. Her boldness is the audacityof impudence, which does not condescend to entertain the thought ofguilt. Her egotism is so hard and so profound that the very victimswhom she sacrifices to ambition seem in her sight justly punished. OfCamillo and Isabella, her husband and his wife, she says to Brachiano:

 And both were struck dead by that sacred yew, In that base shallow grave that was their due. 

IV

It is tempting to pass from this analysis of Vittoria's life to aconsideration of Webster's drama as a whole, especially in a bookdedicated to Italian byways. For that mysterious man of genius hadexplored the dark and devious paths of Renaissance vice, and hadpenetrated the secrets of Italian wickedness with truly appallinglucidity. His tragedies, though worthless as historical documents, have singular value as commentaries upon history, as revelations to usof the spirit of the sixteenth century in its deepest gloom. 

Webster's plays, owing to the condensation of their thought and thecompression of their style, are not easy to read for the first time. He crowds so many fantastic incidents into one action, and burdens hisdiscourse with so much profoundly studied matter, that we rise fromthe perusal of his works with a blurred impression of the fables, adeep sense of the poet's power and personality, and an ineffaceablerecollection of one or two resplendent scenes. His Roman history-playof 'Appius and Virginia' proves that he understood the value of asimple plot, and that he was able, when he chose, to work one out withconscientious calmness. But the two Italian dramas upon which his fameis justly founded, by right of which he stands alone among theplaywrights of all literatures, are marked by a peculiar and waywardmannerism. Each part is etched with equal effort after luminous effectupon a back-ground of lurid darkness; and the whole play is made upof these parts, without due concentration on a master-motive. Thecharacters are definite in outline, but, taken together in the conductof a single plot, they seem to stand apart, like figures in a _tableauvivant_; nor do they act and react each upon the other in the play ofinterpenetrative passions. That this mannerism was deliberatelychosen, we have a right to believe. 'Willingly, and not ignorantly, inthis kind have I faulted, ' is the answer Webster gives to such as mayobject that he has not constructed his plays upon the classic model. He seems to have had a certain sombre richness of tone and intricacyof design in view, combining sensational effect and sententiouspregnancy of diction in works of laboured art, which, when adequatelyrepresented to the ear and eye upon the stage, might at a touch obtainthe animation they now lack for chamber-students. 

When familiarity has brought us acquainted with his style, when wehave disentangled the main characters and circumstances from theiradjuncts, we perceive that he treats poignant and tremendoussituations with a concentrated vigour special to his genius; that hehas studied each word and trait of character, and that he has preparedby gradual approaches and degrees of horror for the culmination of histragedies. The sentences which seem at first sight copied from acommonplace book, are found to be appropriate. Brief lightning flashesof acute perception illuminate the midnight darkness of his all butunimaginably depraved characters. Sharp unexpected touches evokehumanity in the _fantoccini_ of his wayward art. No dramatist hasshown more consummate ability in heightening terrific effects, inlaying bare the innermost mysteries of crime, remorse, and pain, combined to make men miserable. It has been said of Webster that, feeling himself deficient in the first poetic qualities, heconcentrated his powers upon one point, and achieved success by sheerforce of self-cultivation. There is perhaps some truth in this. At anyrate, his genius was of a narrow and peculiar order, and he knew wellhow to make the most of its limitations. Yet we must not forget thathe felt a natural bias toward the dreadful stuff with which he deals. The mystery of iniquity had an irresistible attraction for his mind. He was drawn to comprehend and reproduce abnormal elements ofspiritual anguish. The materials with which he builds his tragediesare sought for in the ruined places of lost souls, in the agonies ofmadness and despair, in the sarcasms of criminal and reckless atheism, in slow tortures, griefs beyond endurance, the tempests of remorsefuldeath, the spasms of fratricidal bloodshed. He is often melodramaticin the means employed to bring these psychological conditions home tous. He makes too free use of poisoned engines, daggers, pistols, disguised murderers, and so forth. Yet his firm grasp upon theessential qualities of diseased and guilty human nature saves him, even at his wildest, from the unrealities and extravagances into whichless potent artists of the _drame sanglant_--Marston, forexample--blundered. 

With Webster, the tendency to brood on horrors was no result ofcalculation. It belonged to his idiosyncrasy. He seems to have beensuckled from birth at the breast of that _Mater Tenebrarum_, our Ladyof Darkness, whom De Quincey in one of his 'Suspiria de Profundis'describes among the Semnai Theai, the august goddesses, the mysteriousfoster-nurses of suffering humanity. He cannot say the simplest thingwithout giving it a ghastly or sinister turn. If one of his charactersdraws a metaphor from pie-crust, he must needs use language of thechurchyard:

 You speak as if a man Should know what fowl is coffined in a baked meat Afore you cut it open. 

Hideous similes are heaped together in illustration of the commonestcircumstances:

 Places at court are but like beds in the hospital, where this man's head lies at that man's foot, and so lower and lower. 

 When knaves come to preferment, they rise as gallowses are raised in the Low Countries, one upon another's shoulders. 

 I would sooner eat a dead pigeon taken from the soles of the feet of one sick of the plague than kiss one of you fasting. 

A soldier is twitted with serving his master:

 As witches do their serviceable spirits, Even with thy prodigal blood. 

An adulterous couple get this curse:

 Like mistletoe on sear elms spent by weather, Let him cleave to her, and both rot together. 

A bravo is asked:

 Dost thou imagine thou canst slide on blood, And not be tainted with a shameful fall? Or, like the black and melancholic yew-tree, Dost think to root thyself in dead men's graves, And yet to prosper?

It is dangerous to extract philosophy of life from any dramatist. YetWebster so often returns to dark and doleful meditations, that we mayfairly class him among constitutional pessimists. Men, according tothe grimness of his melancholy, are:

 Only like dead walls or vaulted graves, That, ruined, yield no echo. O this gloomy world! In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!

 * * * * *

 We are merely the stars' tennis-balls, struck and banded Which way please them. 

 * * * * *

 Pleasure of life! what is't? only the good hours of an ague. 

A Duchess is 'brought to mortification, ' before her strangling by theexecutioner, in this high fantastical oration:

 Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What's this flesh? A little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste, &c. &c. 

Man's life in its totality is summed up with monastic cynicism inthese lyric verses:

 Of what is't fools make such vain keeping? Sin their conception, their birth weeping, Their life a general mist of error, Their death a hideous storm of terror. 

The greatness of the world passes by with all its glory:

 Vain the ambition of kings, Who seek by trophies and dead things To leave a living name behind, And weave but nets to catch the wind. 

It would be easy to surfeit criticism with similar examples; whereWebster is writing in sarcastic, meditative, or deliberatelyterror-stirring moods. The same dark dye of his imagination showsitself even more significantly in circumstances where, in the work ofany other artist, it would inevitably mar the harmony of the picture. A lady, to select one instance, encourages her lover to embrace her atthe moment of his happiness. She cries:

 Sir, be confident! What is't distracts you? This is flesh and blood, sir; 'Tis not the figure cut in alabaster, Kneels at my husband's tomb. 

Yet so sustained is Webster's symphony of sombre tints, that we do notfeel this sepulchral language, this 'talk fit for a charnel' (to useone of his own phrases), to be out of keeping. It sounds like apresentiment of coming woes, which, as the drama grows to itsconclusion, gather and darken on the wretched victims of his bloodyplot. 

It was with profound sagacity, or led by some deep-rooted instinct, that Webster sought the fables of his two great tragedies, 'The WhiteDevil' and 'The Duchess of Malfi, ' in Italian annals. Whether he hadvisited Italy in his youth, we cannot say; for next to nothing isknown about Webster's life. But that he had gazed long and earnestlyinto the mirror held up by that enchantress of the nations in his age, is certain. Aghast and fascinated by the sins he saw there flauntingin the light of day--sins on whose pernicious glamour Ascham, Greene, and Howell have insisted with impressive vehemence--Webster discernedin them the stuff he needed for philosophy and art. Withdrawing fromthat contemplation, he was like a spirit 'loosed out of hell to speakof horrors. ' Deeper than any poet of the time, deeper than any even ofthe Italians, he read the riddle of the sphinx of crime. He foundthere something akin to his own imaginative mood, something which healone could fully comprehend and interpret. From the superficialnarratives of writers like Bandello he extracted a spiritual essencewhich was, if not the literal, at least the ideal, truth involved inthem. 

The enormous and unnatural vices, the domestic crimes of cruelty, adultery, and bloodshed, the political scheming and the subtle arts ofvengeance, the ecclesiastical tyranny and craft, the cynicalscepticism and lustre of luxurious godlessness, which made Italy inthe midst of her refinement blaze like 'a bright and ominous star'before the nations; these were the very elements in which the geniusof Webster--salamander-like in flame--could live and flourish. Onlythe incidents of Italian history, or of French history in itsItalianated epoch, were capable of supplying him with the proper typeof plot. It was in Italy alone, or in an Italianated country, such asEngland for a brief space in the reign of the first Stuart threatenedto become, that the well-nigh diabolical wickedness of his charactersmight have been realised. An audience familiar with Italian novelsthrough Belleforest and Painter, inflamed by the long struggle of theReformation against the scarlet abominations of the Papal See, outraged in their moral sense by the political paradoxes ofMachiavelli, horror-stricken at the still recent misdoings of Borgiasand Medici and Farnesi, alarmed by that Italian policy which hadconceived the massacre of S. Bartholomew in France, and infuriated bythat ecclesiastical hypocrisy which triumphed in the same; such anaudience were at the right point of sympathy with a poet who undertookto lay the springs of Southern villany before them bare in a dramaticaction. But, as the old proverb puts it, 'Inglese Italianato è undiavolo incarnato. ' 'An Englishman assuming the Italian habit is adevil in the flesh. ' The Italians were depraved, but spirituallyfeeble. The English playwright, when he brought them on the stage, arrayed with intellectual power and gleaming with the lurid splendourof a Northern fancy, made them tenfold darker and more terrible. Tothe subtlety and vices of the South he added the melancholy, meditation, and sinister insanity of his own climate. He deepened thecomplexion of crime and intensified lawlessness by robbing the Italiancharacter of levity. Sin, in his conception of that character, wascomplicated with the sense of sin, as it never had been in aFlorentine or a Neapolitan. He had not grasped the meaning of theMachiavellian conscience, in its cold serenity and disengagement fromthe dread of moral consequence. Not only are his villains stealthy, frigid, quick to evil, merciless, and void of honour; but they broodupon their crimes and analyse their motives. In the midst of theiraudacity they are dogged by dread of coming retribution. At the crisisof their destiny they look back upon their better days withintellectual remorse. In the execution of their bloodiest schemes theygroan beneath the chains of guilt they wear, and quake before thephantoms of their haunted brains. 

Thus passion and reflection, superstition and profanity, deliberateatrocity and fear of judgment, are united in the same nature; and tomake the complex still more strange, the play-wright has gifted thesetremendous personalities with his own wild humour and imaginativeirony. The result is almost monstrous, such an ideal of character asmakes earth hell. And yet it is not without justification. To theItalian text has been added the Teutonic commentary, and both arefused by a dramatic genius into one living whole. 

One of these men is Flamineo, the brother of Vittoria Corombona, uponwhose part the action of the 'White Devil' depends. He has been bredin arts and letters at the university of Padua; but being poor and ofluxurious appetites, he chooses the path of crime in courts for hisadvancement. A duke adopts him for his minion, and Flamineo acts thepander to this great man's lust. He contrives the death of hisbrother-in-law, suborns a doctor to poison the Duke's wife, andarranges secret meetings between his sister and the paramour who is tomake her fortune and his own. His mother appears like a warning Até toprevent her daughter's crime. In his rage he cries:

 What fury raised _thee_ up? Away, away!

And when she pleads the honour of their house he answers:

 Shall I, Having a path so open and so free To my preferment, still retain your milk In my pale forehead?

Later on, when it is necessary to remove another victim, he runs hisown brother through the body and drives his mother to madness. Yet, inthe midst of these crimes, we are unable to regard him as a simplecut-throat. His irony and reckless courting of damnation open-eyed toget his gust of life in this world, make him no common villain. He canbe brave as well as fierce. When the Duke insults him he bandies tauntfor taunt:

 _Brach_. No, you pander?

 _Flam_. What, me, my lord? Am I your dog?

 _B_. A bloodhound; do you brave, do you stand me?

 _F_. Stand you! let those that have diseases run; I need no plasters. 

 _B_. Would you be kicked?

 _F_. Would you have your neck broke? I tell you, duke, I am not in Russia; My shins must be kept whole. 

 _B_. Do you know me?

 _F_. Oh, my lord, methodically: As in this world there are degrees of evils, So in this world there are degrees of devils. You're a great duke, I your poor secretary. 

When the Duke dies and his prey escapes him, the rage ofdisappointment breaks into this fierce apostrophe:

 I cannot conjure; but if prayers or oaths. Will get the speech of him, though forty devils Wait on him in his livery of flames, I'll speak to him and shake him by the hand, Though I be blasted. 

As crimes thicken round him, and he still despairs of the reward forwhich he sold himself, conscience awakes:

 I have lived Riotously ill, like some that live in court, And sometimes when my face was full of smiles Have felt the maze of conscience in my breast. 

The scholar's scepticism, which lies at the root of his perversity, finds utterance in this meditation upon death:

 Whither shall I go now? O Lucian, thy ridiculous purgatory! to find Alexander the Great cobbling shoes, Pompey tagging points, and Julius Cæsar making hair-buttons!

 Whether I resolve to fire, earth, water, air, or all the elements by scruples, I know not, nor greatly care. 

At the last moment he yet can say:

 We cease to grieve, cease to be Fortune's slaves, Nay, cease to die, by dying. 

And again, with the very yielding of his spirit:

 My life was a black charnel. 

It will be seen that in no sense does Flamineo resemble Iago. He isnot a traitor working by craft and calculating ability towell-considered ends. He is the desperado frantically clutching at anuncertain and impossible satisfaction. Webster conceives him as aself-abandoned atheist, who, maddened by poverty and tainted byvicious living, takes a fury to his heart, and, because the goodnessof the world has been for ever lost to him, recklessly seeks the bad. 

Bosola, in the 'Duchess of Malfi, ' is of the same stamp. He too hasbeen a scholar. He is sent to the galleys 'for a notorious murder, 'and on his release he enters the service of two brothers, the Duke ofCalabria and the Cardinal of Aragon, who place him as theirintelligencer at the court of their sister. 

 _Bos_. It seems you would create me One of your familiars. 

 _Ferd_. Familiar! what's that?

 _Bos_. Why, a very quaint invisible devil in flesh, An intelligencer. 

 _Ferd_. Such a kind of thriving thing I would wish thee; and ere long thou may'st arrive At a higher place by it. 

Lured by hope of preferment, Bosola undertakes the office of spy, tormentor, and at last of executioner. For:

 Discontent and want Is the best clay to mould a villain of. 

But his true self, though subdued to be what he quaintly styles 'thedevil's quilted anvil, ' on which 'all sins are fashioned and the blowsnever heard, ' continually rebels against this destiny. Compared withFlamineo, he is less unnaturally criminal. His melancholy is morefantastic, his despair more noble. Throughout the course of craft andcruelty on which he is goaded by a relentless taskmaster, his nature, hardened as it is, revolts. 

At the end, when Bosola presents the body of the murdered Duchess toher brother, Webster has wrought a scene of tragic savagery thatsurpasses almost any other that the English stage can show. Thesight, of his dead sister maddens Ferdinand, who, feeling the eclipseof reason gradually absorb his faculties, turns round with frenziedhatred on the accomplice of his fratricide. Bosola demands the priceof guilt. Ferdinand spurns him with the concentrated eloquence ofdespair and the extravagance of approaching insanity. The murderertaunts his master coldly and laconically, like a man whose life iswrecked, who has waded through blood to his reward, and who at thelast moment discovers the sacrifice of his conscience and masculinefreedom to be fruitless. Remorse, frustrated hopes, and thirst forvengeance convert Bosola from this hour forward into an instrument ofretribution. The Duke and his brother the Cardinal are both brought tobloody deaths by the hand which they had used to assassinate theirsister. 

It is fitting that something should be said about Webster's conceptionof the Italian despot. Brachiano and Ferdinand, the employers ofFlamineo and Bosola, are tyrants such as Savonarola described, and aswe read of in the chronicles of petty Southern cities. Nothing issuffered to stand between their lust and its accomplishment. Theyoverride the law by violence, or pervert its action to their ownadvantage:

 The law to him Is like a foul black cobweb to a spider; He makes it his dwelling and a prison To entangle those shall feed him. 

They are eaten up with parasites, accomplices, and all the creaturesof their crimes:

 He and his brother are like plum-trees that grow crooked over standing pools; they are rich and over-laden with fruit, but none but crows, pies, and caterpillars feed on them. 

In their lives they are without a friend; for society in guilt bringsnought of comfort, and honours are but emptiness:

 Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright; But looked to near, have neither heat nor light. 

Their plots and counterplots drive repose far from them:

 There's but three furies found in spacious hell; But in a great man's breast three thousand dwell. 

Fearful shapes afflict their fancy; shadows of ancestral crime orghosts of their own raising:

 For these many years None of our family dies, but there is seen The shape of an old woman; which is given By tradition to us to have been murdered By her nephews for her riches. 

Apparitions haunt them:

 How tedious is a guilty conscience! When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden, Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake That seems to strike at me. 

Continually scheming against the objects of their avarice and hatred, preparing poisons or suborning bravoes, they know that these same artswill be employed against them. The wine-cup hides arsenic; theheadpiece is smeared with antimony; there is a dagger behind everyarras, and each shadow is a murderer's. When death comes, they meet ittrembling. What irony Webster has condensed in Brachiano's outcry:

 On pain of death, let no man name death to me; It is a word infinitely horrible. 

And how solemn are the following reflections on the death of princes:

 O thou soft natural death, that art joint-twin To sweetest slumber! no rough-bearded comet Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl Beats not against thy casement, the hoarse wolf Scents not thy carrion: pity winds thy corse, Whilst horror waits on princes. 

After their death, this is their epitaph:

 These wretched eminent things Leave no more fame behind'em than should one Fall in a frost and leave his print in snow. 

Of Webster's despots, the finest in conception and the firmest inexecution is Ferdinand of Aragon. Jealousy of his sister and avaricetake possession of him and torment him like furies. The flash ofrepentance over her strangled body is also the first flash ofinsanity. He survives to present the spectacle of a crazed lunatic, and to be run through the body by his paid assassin. In the Cardinalof Aragon, Webster paints a profligate Churchman, no less voluptuous, blood-guilty, and the rest of it, than his brother the Duke ofCalabria. It seems to have been the poet's purpose in each of hisItalian tragedies to unmask Rome as the Papal city really was. In thelawless desperado, the intemperate tyrant, and the godlessecclesiastic, he portrayed the three curses from which Italian societywas actually suffering. 

It has been needful to dwell upon the gloomy and fantastic side ofWebster's genius. But it must not be thought that he could touch nofiner chord. Indeed, it might be said that in the domain of pathos heis even more powerful than in that of horror. His mastery in thisregion is displayed in the creation of that dignified and beautifulwoman, the Duchess of Malfi, who, with nothing in her nature, had shebut lived prosperously, to divide her from the sisterhood of gentleladies, walks, shrined in love and purity and conscious rectitude, amid the snares and pitfalls of her persecutors, to die at last thevictim of a brother's fevered avarice and a desperado's egotisticalambition. The apparatus of infernal cruelty, the dead man's hand, thesemblances of murdered sons and husband, the masque of madmen, thedirge and doleful emblems of the tomb with which she is environed inher prison by the torturers who seek to goad her into lunacy, areinsufficient to disturb the tranquillity and tenderness of her nature. When the rope is being fastened to her throat, she does not spend herbreath in recriminations, but turns to the waiting-woman and says:

 Farewell, Cariola! I pray thee look thou givest my little boy Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl Say her prayers ere she sleep. 

In the preceding scenes we have had enough, nay, over-much, ofmadness, despair, and wrestling with doom. This is the calm that comeswhen death is present, when the tortured soul lays down its burden ofthe flesh with gladness. But Webster has not spared another touch ofthrilling pathos. 

The death-struggle is over; the fratricide has rushed away, a maddenedman; the murderer is gazing with remorse upon the beautiful dead bodyof his lady, wishing he had the world wherewith to buy her back tolife again; when suddenly she murmurs 'Mercy!' Our interest, alreadyoverstrained, revives with momentary hope. But the guardians of thegrave will not be exorcised; and 'Mercy!' is the last groan of theinjured Duchess. 

Webster showed great skill in his delineation of the Duchess. He hadto paint a woman in a hazardous situation: a sovereign stooping in herwidowhood to wed a servant; a lady living with the mystery of thisunequal marriage round her like a veil. He dowered her with no salientqualities of intellect or heart or will; but he sustained our sympathywith her, and made us comprehend her. To the last she is a Duchess;and when she has divested state and bowed her head to enter the lowgate of heaven--too low for coronets--her poet shows us, in the linesalready quoted, that the woman still survives. 

The same pathos surrounds the melancholy portrait of Isabella in'Vittoria Corombona. ' But Isabella, in that play, serves chiefly toenhance the tyranny of her triumphant rival. The main difficulty underwhich these scenes of rarest pathos would labour, were they broughtupon the stage, is their simplicity in contrast with the ghastly andcontorted horrors that envelop them. A dialogue abounding in thepassages I have already quoted--a dialogue which bandies 'O youscreech-owl!' and 'Thou foul black cloud!'--in which a sister'sadmonition to her brother to think twice of suicide assumes a form soweird as this:

 I prithee, yet remember, Millions are now in graves, which at last day Like mandrakes shall rise shrieking. --

such a dialogue could not be rendered save by actors strung up to apitch of almost frenzied tension. To do full justice to what inWebster's style would be spasmodic were it not so weighty, and at thesame time to maintain the purity of outline and melodious rhythm ofsuch characters as Isabella, demands no common histrionic power. 

In attempting to define Webster's touch upon Italian tragic story, Ihave been led perforce to concentrate attention on what is painful andshocking to our sense of harmony in art. He was a vigorous andprofoundly imaginative playwright. But his most enthusiastic admirerswill hardly contend that good taste or moderation determined themovement of his genius. Nor, though his insight into the essentialdreadfulness of Italian tragedy was so deep, is it possible tomaintain that his portraiture of Italian life was true to its moresuperficial aspects. What place would there be for a Correggio or aRaphael in such a world as Webster's? Yet we know that the art ofRaphael and Correggio is in exact harmony with the Italian temperamentof the same epoch which gave birth to Cesare Borgia and BiancaGapello. The comparatively slighter sketch of Iachimo in 'Cymbeline'represents the Italian as he felt and lived, better than the labouredportrait of Flamineo. Webster's Italian tragedies are consequentlytrue, not so much to the actual conditions of Italy, as to the moralimpression made by those conditions on a Northern imagination. 

 * * * * *

_AUTUMN WANDERINGS_

I. --ITALIAM PETIMUS

_Italiam Petimus!_ We left our upland home before daybreak on a clearOctober morning. There had been a hard frost, spangling the meadowswith rime-crystals, which twinkled where the sun's rays touched them. Men and women were mowing the frozen grass with thin short Alpinescythes; and as the swathes fell, they gave a crisp, an almosttinkling sound. Down into the gorge, surnamed of Avalanche, our horsesplunged; and there we lost the sunshine till we reached the Bear'sWalk, opening upon the vales of Albula, and Julier, and Schyn. But upabove, shone morning light upon fresh snow, and steep torrent-clovenslopes reddening with a hundred fading plants; now and then it caughtthe grey-green icicles that hung from cliffs where summer streams haddripped. There is no colour lovelier than the blue of an autumn sky inthe high Alps, defining ridges powdered with light snow, and meltingimperceptibly downward into the warm yellow of the larches and thecrimson of the bilberry. Wiesen was radiantly beautiful: those aërialranges of the hills that separate Albula from Julier soaredcrystal-clear above their forests; and for a foreground, on the greenfields starred with lilac crocuses, careered a group of children ontheir sledges. Then came the row of giant peaks--Pitz d'Aela, Tinzenhorn, and Michelhorn, above the deep ravine of Albula--all seenacross wide undulating golden swards, close-shaven and awaitingwinter. Carnations hung from cottage windows in full bloom, castingsharp angular black shadows on white walls. 

_Italiam petimus!_ We have climbed the valley of the Julier, followingits green, transparent torrent. A night has come and gone at Mühlen. The stream still leads us up, diminishing in volume as we rise, upthrough the fleecy mists that roll asunder for the sun, disclosingfar-off snowy ridges and blocks of granite mountains. The lifeless, soundless waste of rock, where only thin winds whistle out of silenceand fade suddenly into still air, is passed. Then comes the descent, with its forests of larch and cembra, golden and dark green upon aground of grey, and in front the serried shafts of the Bernina, andhere and there a glimpse of emerald lake at turnings of the road. Autumn is the season for this landscape. Through the fading ofinnumerable leaflets, the yellowing of larches, and somethingvaporous in the low sun, it gains a colour not unlike that of thelands we seek. By the side of the lake at Silvaplana the light wasstrong and warm, but mellow. Pearly clouds hung over the Maloja, andfloating overhead cast shadows on the opaque water, which mayliterally be compared to chrysoprase. The breadth of golden, brown, and russet tints upon the valley at this moment adds softness to itslines of level strength. Devotees of the Engadine contend that itpossesses an austere charm beyond the common beauty of Swisslandscape; but this charm is only perfected in autumn. The fresh snowon the heights that guard it helps. And then there are the forests ofdark pines upon those many knolls and undulating mountain-flanksbeside the lakes. Sitting and dreaming there in noonday sun, I keptrepeating to myself _Italiam petimus!_

A hurricane blew upward from the pass as we left Silvaplana, rufflingthe lake with gusts of the Italian wind. By Silz Maria we came insight of a dozen Italian workmen, arm linked in arm in two rows, tramping in rhythmic stride, and singing as they went. Two of themwere such nobly built young men, that for a moment the beauty of thelandscape faded from my sight, and I was saddened. They moved to theirsinging, like some of Mason's or Frederick Walker's figures, with thefree grace of living statues, and laughed as we drove by. And yet, with all their beauty, industry, sobriety, intelligence, theseItalians of the northern valleys serve the sterner people of theGrisons like negroes, doing their roughest work at scanty wages. 

So we came to the vast Alpine wall, and stood on a bare granite slab, and looked over into Italy, as men might lean from the battlements ofa fortress. Behind lies the Alpine valley, grim, declining slowlynorthward, with wind-lashed lakes and glaciers sprawling fromstorm-broken pyramids of gneiss. Below spread the unfathomable depthsthat lead to Lombardy, flooded with sunlight, filled with swirlingvapour, but never wholly hidden from our sight. For the blast keptshifting the cloud-masses, and the sun streamed through in spears andbands of sheeny rays. Over the parapet our horses dropped, downthrough sable spruce and amber larch, down between tangles of rowanand autumnal underwood. Ever as we sank, the mountains rose--thosesharp embattled precipices, toppling spires, impendent chasms blurredwith mist, that make the entrance into Italy sublime. Nowhere do theAlps exhibit their full stature, their commanding puissance, with suchmajesty as in the gates of Italy; and of all those gates I think thereis none to compare with Maloja, none certainly to rival it inabruptness of initiation into the Italian secret. Below Vico Sopranowe pass already into the violets and blues of Titian's landscape. Thencome the purple boulders among chestnut trees; then the doubledolomite-like peak of Pitz Badin and Promontogno. 

It is sad that words can do even less than painting could to bringthis window-scene at Promontogno before another eye. The casement justframes it. In the foreground are meadow slopes, thinly, capriciouslyplanted with chestnut trees and walnuts, each standing with its shadowcast upon the sward. A little farther falls the torrent, foaming downbetween black jaws of rain-stained granite, with the wooden buildingsof a rustic mill set on a ledge of rock. Suddenly above this landscapesoars the valley, clothing its steep sides on either hand with pines;and there are emerald isles of pasture on the wooded flanks; and thencliffs, where the red-stemmed larches glow; and at the summit, shooting into ether with a swathe of mist around their basement, soarthe double peaks, the one a pyramid, the other a bold broken crystalnot unlike the Finsteraarhorn seen from Furka. These are connected bya snowy saddle, and snow is lying on their inaccessible crags inpowdery drifts. Sunlight pours between them into the ravine. The greenand golden forests now join from either side, and now recede, according as the sinuous valley brings their lines together ordisparts them. There is a sound of cow-bells on the meadows; and theroar of the stream is dulled or quickened as the gusts of this Octoberwind sweep by or slacken. _Italiam petimus!_

_Tangimus Italiam!_ Chiavenna is a worthy key to this great gateItalian. We walked at night in the open galleries of the cathedralcloister--white, smoothly curving, well-proportioned loggie, enclosinga green space, whence soars the campanile to the stars. The moon hadsunk, but her light still silvered the mountains that stand at watchround Chiavenna; and the castle rock was flat and black against thatdreamy background. Jupiter, who walked so lately for us on the longridge of the Jacobshorn above our pines, had now an ample space of skyover Lombardy to light his lamp in. Why is it, we asked each other, aswe smoked our pipes and strolled, my friend and I;--why is it thatItalian beauty does not leave the spirit so untroubled as an Alpinescene? Why do we here desire the flower of some emergent feeling togrow from the air, or from the soil, or from humanity to greet us?This sense of want evoked by Southern beauty is perhaps the antiquemythopœic yearning. But in our perplexed life it takes another form, and seems the longing for emotion, ever fleeting, ever new, unrealised, unreal, insatiable. 

II. --OVER THE APENNINES

At Parma we slept in the Albergo della Croce Bianca, which is more abric-à-brac shop than an inn; and slept but badly, for the good folkof Parma twanged guitars and exercised their hoarse male voices allnight in the street below. We were glad when Christian called us, at 5A. M. , for an early start across the Apennines. This was the day of aright Roman journey. In thirteen and a half hours, leaving Parma at 6, and arriving in Sarzana at 7. 30, we flung ourselves across the spineof Italy, from the plains of Eridanus to the seashore of EtruscanLuna. I had secured a carriage and extra post-horses the night before;therefore we found no obstacles upon the road, but eager drivers, quick relays, obsequious postmasters, change, speed, perpetualmovement. The road itself is a noble one, and nobly entertained in allthings but accommodation for travellers. At Berceto, near the summitof the pass, we stopped just half an hour, to lunch off a mouldy henand six eggs; but that was all the halt we made. 

As we drove out of Parma, striking across the plain to the _ghiara_ ofthe Taro, the sun rose over the austere autumnal landscape, with itswithered vines and crimson haws. Christian, the mountaineer, who athome had never seen the sun rise from a flat horizon, stooped from thebox to call attention to this daily recurring miracle, which on theplain of Lombardy is no less wonderful than on a rolling sea. From thevillage of Fornovo, where the Italian League was camped awaitingCharles VIII. Upon that memorable July morn in 1495, the road strikessuddenly aside, gains a spur of the descending Apennines, and keepsthis vantage till the pass of La Cisa is reached. Many windings areoccasioned by thus adhering to arêtes, but the total result is agradual ascent with free prospect over plain and mountain. TheApennines, built up upon a smaller scale than the Alps, perplexed indetail and entangled with cross sections and convergent systems, lendthemselves to this plan of carrying highroads along their ridgesinstead of following the valley. 

What is beautiful in the landscape of that northern watershed is thesubtlety, delicacy, variety, and intricacy of the mountain outlines. There is drawing wherever the eye falls. Each section of the vastexpanse is a picture of tossed crests and complicated undulations. Andover the whole sea of stationary billows, light is shed like anethereal raiment, with spare colour--blue and grey, and parsimoniousgreen--in the near foreground. The detail is somewhat dry andmonotonous; for these so finely moulded hills are made up of washedearth, the immemorial wrecks of earlier mountain ranges. Brownvillages, not unlike those of Midland England, low houses built ofstone and tiled with stone, and square-towered churches, occur at rareintervals in cultivated hollows, where there are fields and fruittrees. Water is nowhere visible except in the wasteful river-beds. Aswe rise, we break into a wilder country, forested with oak, where oxenand goats are browsing. The turf is starred with lilac gentian andcrocus bells, but sparely. Then comes the highest village, Berceto, with keen Alpine air. After that, broad rolling downs of yellowinggrass and russet beech-scrub lead onward to the pass La Cisa. Thesense of breadth in composition is continually satisfied through thisascent by the fine-drawn lines, faint tints, and immense air-spaces ofItalian landscape. Each little piece reminds one of England; but thegeographical scale is enormously more grandiose, and the effect ofmajesty proportionately greater. 

From La Cisa the road descends suddenly; for the southern escarpmentof the Apennine, as of the Alpine, barrier is pitched at a far steeperangle than the northern. Yet there is no view of the sea. That isexcluded by the lower hills which hem the Magra. The upper valley isbeautiful, with verdant lawns and purple hillsides breaking down intothick chestnut woods, through which we wound at a rapid pace fornearly an hour. The leaves were still green, mellowing to golden; butthe fruit was ripe and heavy, ready at all points to fall. In thestill October air the husks above our heads would loosen, and thebrown nuts rustle through the foliage, and with a dull short thud, like drops of thunder-rain, break down upon the sod. At the foot ofthis rich forest, wedged in between huge buttresses, we foundPontremoli, and changed our horses here for the last time. It wasSunday, and the little town was alive with country-folk; tall stalwartfellows wearing peacock's feathers in their black slouched hats, andnut-brown maids. 

From this point the valley of the Magra is exceeding rich with fruittrees, vines, and olives. The tendrils of the vine are yellow now, andin some places hued like generous wine; through their thick leaves thesun shot crimson. In one cool garden, as the day grew dusk, I noticedquince trees laden with pale fruit entangled with pomegranates--greenspheres and ruddy amid burnished leaves. By the roadside too were manyberries of bright hues; the glowing red of haws and hips, the amber ofthe pyracanthus, the rose tints of the spindle-wood. These make autumneven lovelier than spring. And then there was a wood of chestnutscarpeted with pale pinkling, a place to dream of in the twilight. Butthe main motive of this landscape was the indescribable Carrara range, an island of pure form and shooting peaks, solid marble, crystallinein shape and texture, faintly blue against the blue sky, from whichthey were but scarce divided. These mountains close the valley tosouth-east, and seem as though they belonged to another and morecelestial region. 

Soon the sunlight was gone, and moonrise came to close the day, as werolled onward to Sarzana, through arundo donax and vine-girdled olivetrees and villages, where contadini lounged upon the bridges. Therewas a stream of sound in our ears, and in my brain a rhythmic dance ofbeauties caught through the long-drawn glorious golden autumn-day. 

III. --FOSDINOVO

The hamlet and the castle of Fosdinovo stand upon a mountain-spurabove Sarzana, commanding the valley of the Magra and the plains ofLuni. This is an ancient fief of the Malaspina House, and is still inthe possession of the Marquis of that name. 

The road to Fosdinovo strikes across the level through an avenue ofplane trees, shedding their discoloured leaves. It then takes to theopen fields, bordered with tall reeds waving from the foss on eitherhand, where grapes are hanging to the vines. The country-folk allowtheir vines to climb into the olives, and these golden festoons are agreat ornament to the grey branches. The berries on the trees arestill quite green, and it is a good olive season. Leaving the mainroad, we pass a villa of the Malaspini, shrouded in immense thicketsof sweet bay and ilex, forming a grove for the Nymphs or Pan. Here mayyou see just such clean stems and lucid foliage as Gian Bellinipainted, inch by inch, in his Peter Martyr picture. The place isneglected now; the semicircular seats of white Carrara marble arestained with green mosses, the altars chipped, the fountains chokedwith bay leaves; and the rose trees, escaped from what were once trimgarden alleys, have gone wandering a-riot into country hedges. Thereis no demarcation between the great man's villa and the neighbouringfarms. From this point the path rises, and the barren hillside isa-bloom with late-flowering myrtles. Why did the Greeks consecratethese myrtle-rods to Death as well as Love? Electra complained thather father's tomb had not received the honour of the myrtle branch;and the Athenians wreathed their swords with myrtle in memory ofHarmodius. Thinking of these matters, I cannot but remember lines ofGreek, which have themselves the rectitude and elasticity of myrtlewands:

(Greek:)

 kai prospesôn eklaus' erêmias tuchôn spondas te lusas askon hon pherô xenois espeisa tumbô d'amphethêka mursinas. 

As we approach Fosdinovo, the hills above us gain sublimity; theprospect over plain and sea--the fields where Luna was, the wideningbay of Spezzia--grows ever grander. The castle is a ruin, stillcapable of partial habitation, and now undergoing repair--the state inwhich a ruin looks most sordid and forlorn. How strange it is, too, that, to enforce this sense of desolation, sad dishevelled weeds clingever to such antique masonry! Here are the henbane, the sow-thistle, the wild cucumber. At Avignon, at Orvieto, at Dolce Acqua, at LesBaux, we never missed them. And they have the dusty courtyards, themassive portals, where portcullises still threaten, of Fosdinovo tothemselves. Over the gate, and here and there on corbels, are carvedthe arms of Malaspina--a barren thorn-tree, gnarled with thegeometrical precision of heraldic irony. 

Leaning from the narrow windows of this castle, with the spacious viewto westward, I thought of Dante. For Dante in this castle was theguest of Moroello Malaspina, what time he was yet finishing the'Inferno. ' There is a little old neglected garden, full to south, enclosed upon a rampart which commands the Borgo, where we found frailcanker-roses and yellow amaryllis. Here, perhaps, he may have satwith ladies--for this was the Marchesa's pleasaunce; or may havewatched through a short summer's night, until he saw that _tremolardella marina_, portending dawn, which afterwards he painted in the'Purgatory. '

From Fosdinovo one can trace the Magra work its way out seaward, notinto the plain where once the _candentia moenia Lunae_ flashed sunrisefrom their battlements, but close beside the little hills which backthe southern arm of the Spezzian gulf. At the extreme end of thatpromontory, called Del Corvo, stood the Benedictine convent of S. Croce; and it was here in 1309, if we may trust to tradition, thatDante, before his projected journey into France, appeared and left thefirst part of his poem with the Prior. Fra Ilario, such was the goodfather's name, received commission to transmit the 'Inferno' toUguccione della Faggiuola; and he subsequently recorded the fact ofDante's visit in a letter which, though its genuineness has beencalled in question, is far too interesting to be left withoutallusion. The writer says that on occasion of a journey into landsbeyond the Riviera, Dante visited this convent, appearing silent andunknown among the monks. To the Prior's question what he wanted, hegazed upon the brotherhood, and only answered, 'Peace!' Afterwards, inprivate conversation, he communicated his name and spoke about hispoem. A portion of the 'Divine Comedy' composed in the Italian tonguearoused Ilario's wonder, and led him to inquire why his guest had notfollowed the usual course of learned poets by committing his thoughtsto Latin. Dante replied that he had first intended to write in thatlanguage, and that he had gone so far as to begin the poem inVirgilian hexameters. Reflection upon the altered conditions ofsociety in that age led him, however, to reconsider the matter; and hewas resolved to tune another lyre, 'suited to the sense of modernmen. ' 'For, ' said he, 'it is idle to set solid food before the lipsof sucklings. '

If we can trust Fra Ilario's letter as a genuine record, which isunhappily a matter of some doubt, we have in this narration not only apicturesque, almost a melodramatically picturesque glimpse of thepoet's apparition to those quiet monks in their seagirt house ofpeace, but also an interesting record of the destiny which presidedover the first great work of literary art in a distinctly modernlanguage. 

IV. --LA SPEZZIA

While we were at Fosdinovo the sky filmed over, and there came a haloround the sun. This portended change; and by evening, after we hadreached La Spezzia, earth, sea, and air were conscious of a comingtempest. At night I went down to the shore, and paced the sea-wallthey have lately built along the Rada. The moon was up, but overdrivenwith dry smoky clouds, now thickening to blackness over the whole bay, now leaving intervals through which the light poured fitfully andfretfully upon the wrinkled waves; and ever and anon they shudderedwith electric gleams which were not actual lightning. Heaven seemed tobe descending on the sea; one might have fancied that some powerfulcharms were drawing down the moon with influence malign upon thosestill resisting billows. For not as yet the gulf was troubled to itsdepth, and not as yet the breakers dashed in foam against themoonlight-smitten promontories. There was but an uneasy murmuring ofwave to wave; a whispering of wind, that stooped its wing and hissedalong the surface, and withdrew into the mystery of clouds again; amomentary chafing of churned water round the harbour piers, subsidinginto silence petulant and sullen. I leaned against an iron stanchionand longed for the sea's message. But nothing came to me, and thedrowned secret of Shelley's death those waves which were his graverevealed not. 

 Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea!

Meanwhile the incantation swelled in shrillness, the electric shuddersdeepened. Alone in this elemental overture to tempest I took no noteof time, but felt, through self-abandonment to the symphonicinfluence, how sea and air, and clouds akin to both, were dealing witheach other complainingly, and in compliance to some maker of unrestwithin them. A touch upon my shoulder broke this trance; I turned andsaw a boy beside me in a coastguard's uniform. Francesco was on patrolthat night; but my English accent soon assured him that I was no_contrabbandiere_, and he too leaned against the stanchion and told mehis short story. He was in his nineteenth year, and came fromFlorence, where his people live in the Borgo Ognissanti. He had allthe brightness of the Tuscan folk, a sort of innocent malice mixedwith _espieglerie_. It was diverting to see the airs he gave himselfon the strength of his new military dignity, his gun, and uniform, andnight duty on the shore. I could not help humming to myself _Non piùandrai_; for Francesco was a sort of Tuscan Cherubino. We talked aboutpicture galleries and libraries in Florence, and I had to hear hisfavourite passages from the Italian poets. And then there came theplots of Jules Verne's stories and marvellous narrations about _l'uomo cavallo, l' uomo volante, l' uomo pesce_. The last of thesepersonages turned out to be Paolo Boÿnton (so pronounced), who hadswam the Arno in his diving dress, passing the several bridges, andwhen he came to the great weir 'allora tutti stare con bocca aperta. 'Meanwhile the storm grew serious, and our conversation changed. Francesco told me about the terrible sun-stricken sand shores of theRiviera, burning in summer noon, over which the coast-guard has totramp, their perils from falling stones in storm, and the trains thatcome rushing from those narrow tunnels on the midnight line of march. It is a hard life; and the thirst for adventure which drove thisboy--'il più matto di tutta la famiglia'--to adopt it, seems well-nighquenched. And still, with a return to Giulio Verne, he talkedenthusiastically of deserting, of getting on board a merchant ship, and working his way to southern islands where wonders are. 

A furious blast swept the whole sky for a moment almost clear. Themoonlight fell, with racing cloud-shadows, upon sea and hills, thelights of Lerici, the great _fanali_ at the entrance of the gulf, andFrancesco's upturned handsome face. Then all again was whirled in mistand foam; one breaker smote the sea wall in a surge of froth, anotherplunged upon its heels; with inconceivable swiftness came rain;lightning deluged the expanse of surf, and showed the windy trees bentlandward by the squall. It was long past midnight now, and the stormwas on us for the space of three days. 

V. --PORTO VENERE

For the next three days the wind went worrying on, and a line of surfleapt on the sea-wall always to the same height. The hills all aroundwere inky black and weary. 

At night the wild libeccio still rose, with floods of rain andlightning poured upon the waste. I thought of the Florentine patrol. Is he out in it, and where?

At last there came a lull. When we rose on the fourth morning, thesky was sulky, spent and sleepy after storm--the air as soft and tepidas boiled milk or steaming flannel. We drove along the shore to PortoVenere, passing the arsenals and dockyards, which have changed theface of Spezzia since Shelley knew it. This side of the gulf is not sorich in vegetation as the other, probably because it lies open to thewinds from the Carrara mountains. The chestnuts come down to the shorein many places, bringing with them the wild mountain-side. To make upfor this lack of luxuriance, the coast is furrowed with a successionof tiny harbours, where the fishing-boats rest at anchor. There aremany villages upon the spurs of hills, and on the headlands navalstations, hospitals, lazzaretti, and prisons. A prickly bindweed (the_Smilax Sarsaparilla_) forms a feature in the near landscape, with itscreamy odoriferous blossoms, coral berries, and glossy thorned leaves. 

A turn of the road brought Porto Venere in sight, and on its greywalls flashed a gleam of watery sunlight. The village consists of onelong narrow street, the houses on the left side hanging sheer abovethe sea. Their doors at the back open on to cliffs which drop aboutfifty feet upon the water. A line of ancient walls, with mediaevalbattlements and shells of chambers suspended midway between earth andsky, runs up the rock behind the town; and this wall is pierced with adeep gateway above which the inn is piled. We had our lunch in a roomopening upon the town-gate, adorned with a deep-cut Pisan archenclosing images and frescoes--a curious episode in a place devoted tothe jollity of smugglers and seafaring folk. The whole house was suchas Tintoretto loved to paint--huge wooden rafters; open chimneys withpent-house canopies of stone, where the cauldrons hung above logs ofchestnut; rude low tables spread with coarse linen embroidered at theedges, and laden with plates of fishes, fruit, quaint glass, big-bellied jugs of earthenware, and flasks of yellow wine. The peopleof the place were lounging round in lazy attitudes. There were oddnooks and corners everywhere; unexpected staircases with windowsslanting through the thickness of the town-wall; pictures of saints;high-zoned serving women, on whose broad shoulders lay big coralbeads; smoke-blackened roofs, and balconies that opened on the sea. The house was inexhaustible in motives for pictures. 

We walked up the street, attended by a rabble rout of boys--_diavoliscatenati_--clean, grinning, white-teethed, who kept incessantlyshouting, 'Soldo, soldo!' I do not know why these sea-urchins are sofar more irrepressible than their land brethren. But it is always thusin Italy. They take an imperturbable delight in noise and mereannoyance. I shall never forget the sea-roar of Porto Venere, withthat shrill obligate, 'Soldo, soldo, soldo!' rattling like a droppingfire from lungs of brass. 

At the end of Porto Venere is a withered and abandoned city, climbingthe cliffs of S. Pietro; and on the headland stands the ruined church, built by Pisans with alternate rows of white and black marble, uponthe site of an old temple of Venus. This is a modest and pure piece ofGothic architecture, fair in desolation, refined and dignified, andnot unworthy in its grace of the dead Cyprian goddess. Through itsbroken lancets the sea-wind whistles and the vast reaches of theTyrrhene gulf are seen. Samphire sprouts between the blocks of marble, and in sheltered nooks the caper hangs her beautiful purpureal snowybloom. 

The headland is a bold block of white limestone stained with red. Ithas the pitch of Exmoor stooping to the sea near Lynton. To north, asone looks along the coast, the line is broken by Porto Fino'samethystine promontory; and in the vaporous distance we could tracethe Riviera mountains, shadowy and blue. The sea came roaring, rollingin with tawny breakers; but, far out, it sparkled in pure azure, andthe cloud-shadows over it were violet. Where Corsica should have beenseen, soared banks of fleecy, broad-domed alabaster clouds. 

This point, once dedicated to Venus, now to Peter--both, be itremembered, fishers of men--is one of the most singular in Europe. Theisland of Palmaria, rich in veined marbles, shelters the port; so thatoutside the sea rages, while underneath the town, reached by a narrowstrait, there is a windless calm. It was not without reason that ourLady of Beauty took this fair gulf to herself; and now that she haslong been dispossessed, her memory lingers yet in names. For PortoVenere remembers her, and Lerici is only Eryx. There is a grotto here, where an inscription tells us that Byron once 'tempted the Ligurianwaves. ' It is just such a natural sea-cave as might have inspiredEuripides when he described the refuge of Orestes in 'Iphigenia. '

VI. --LERICI

Libeccio at last had swept the sky clear. The gulf was ridged withfoam-fleeced breakers, and the water churned into green, tawny wastes. But overhead there flew the softest clouds, all silvery, dispersed inflocks. It is the day for pilgrimage to what was Shelley's home. 

After following the shore a little way, the road to Lerici breaks intothe low hills which part La Spezzia from Sarzana. The soil is red, andovergrown with arbutus and pinaster, like the country around Cannes. Through the scattered trees it winds gently upwards, with frequentviews across the gulf, and then descends into a land rich witholives--a genuine Riviera landscape, where the mountain-slopes arehoary, and spikelets of innumerable light-flashing leaves twinkleagainst a blue sea, misty-deep. The walls here are not unfrequentlyadorned with basreliefs of Carrara marble--saints and madonnas verydelicately wrought, as though they were love-labours of sculptors whohad passed a summer on this shore. San Terenzio is soon discovered lowupon the sands to the right, nestling under little cliffs; and thenthe high-built castle of Lerici comes in sight, looking across, the bayto Porto Venere--one Aphrodite calling to the other, with the foambetween. The village is piled around its cove with tall andpicturesquely coloured houses; the molo and the fishing-boats lie justbeneath the castle. There is one point of the descending carriage roadwhere all this gracefulness is seen, framed by the boughs of olivebranches, swaying, wind-ruffled, laughing the many-twinkling smiles ofocean back from their grey leaves. Here _Erycina ridens_ is at home. And, as we stayed to dwell upon the beauty of the scene, came womenfrom the bay below--barefooted, straight as willow wands, withburnished copper bowls upon their heads. These women have the port ofgoddesses, deep-bosomed, with the length of thigh and springing anklesthat betoken strength no less than elasticity and grace. The hair ofsome of them was golden, rippling in little curls around brown browsand glowing eyes. Pale lilac blent with orange on their dress, andcoral beads hung from their ears. 

At Lerici we took a boat and pushed into the rolling breakers. Christian now felt the movement of the sea for the first time. Thiswas rather a rude trial, for the grey-maned monsters played, as itseemed, at will with our cockle-shell, tumbling in dolphin curves toreach the shore. Our boatmen knew all about Shelley and the CasaMagni. It is not at Lerici, but close to San Terenzio, upon the southside of the village. Looking across the bay from the molo, one couldclearly see its square white mass, tiled roof, and terrace built onrude arcades with a broad orange awning. Trelawny's description hardlyprepares one for so considerable a place. I think the English exilesof that period must have been exacting if the Casa Magni seemed tothem no better than a bathing-house. 

We left our boat at the jetty, and walked through some gardens to thevilla. There we were kindly entertained by the present occupiers, who, when I asked them whether such visits as ours were not a greatannoyance, gently but feelingly replied: 'It is not so bad now as itused to be. ' The English gentleman who rents the Casa Magni has knownit uninterruptedly since Shelley's death, and has used it for_villeggiatura_ during the last thirty years. We found him in thecentral sitting-room, which readers of Trelawny's 'Recollections' haveso often pictured to themselves. The large oval table, the setteesround the walls, and some of the pictures are still unchanged. As wesat talking, I laughed to think of that luncheon party, when Shelleylost his clothes, and came naked, dripping with sea-water, into theroom, protected by the skirts of the sympathising waiting-maid. Andthen I wondered where they found him on the night when he stoodscreaming in his sleep, after the vision of his veiled self, with itsquestion, '_Siete soddisfatto_?'

There were great ilexes behind the house in Shelley's time, which havebeen cut down, and near these he is said to have sat and written the'Triumph of Life. ' Some new houses, too, have been built between thevilla and the town; otherwise the place is unaltered. Only an awninghas been added to protect the terrace from the sun. I walked out onthis terrace, where Shelley used to listen to Jane's singing. The seawas fretting at its base, just as Mrs. Shelley says it did when theDon Juan disappeared. 

From San Terenzio we walked back to Lerici through olive woods, attended by a memory which toned the almost overpowering beauty of theplace to sadness. 

VII. --VIAREGGIO

The same memory drew us, a few days later, to the spot whereShelley's body was burned. Viareggio is fast becoming a fashionablewatering-place for the people of Florence and Lucca, who seek fresherair and simpler living than Livorno offers. It has the usual new innsand improvised lodging-houses of such places, built on the outskirtsof a little fishing village, with a boundless stretch of noble sands. There is a wooden pier on which we walked, watching the long roll ofwaves, foam-flaked, and quivering with moonlight. The Apennines fadedinto the grey sky beyond, and the sea-wind was good to breathe. Thereis a feeling of 'immensity, liberty, action' here, which is not commonin Italy. It reminds us of England; and to-night the Mediterranean hadthe rough force of a tidal sea. 

Morning revealed beauty enough in Viareggio to surprise even one whoexpects from Italy all forms of loveliness. The sand-dunes stretch formiles between the sea and a low wood of stone pines, with the Carrarahills descending from their glittering pinnacles by long lines to theheadlands of the Spezzian Gulf. The immeasurable distance was allpainted in sky-blue and amethyst; then came the golden green of thedwarf firs; and then dry yellow in the grasses of the dunes; and thenthe many-tinted sea, with surf tossed up against the furthest cliffs. It is a wonderful and tragic view, to which no painter but the RomanCosta has done justice; and he, it may be said, has made thislandscape of the Carrarese his own. The space between sand andpine-wood was covered with faint, yellow, evening primroses. Theyflickered like little harmless flames in sun and shadow, and thespires of the Carrara range were giant flames transformed to marble. The memory of that day described by Trelawny in a passage of immortalEnglish prose, when he and Byron and Leigh Hunt stood beside thefuneral pyre, and libations were poured, and the 'Cor Cordium' wasfound inviolate among the ashes, turned all my thoughts to flamebeneath the gentle autumn sky. 

Still haunted by these memories, we took the carriage road to Pisa, over which Shelley's friends had hurried to and fro through those lastdays. It passes an immense forest of stone-pines--aisles and avenues;undergrowth of ilex, laurustinus, gorse, and myrtle; the crowdedcyclamens, the solemn silence of the trees; the winds hushed in theirvelvet roof and stationary domes of verdure. 

 * * * * *

_PARMA_

Parma is perhaps the brightest _Residenzstadt_ of the second class inItaly. Built on a sunny and fertile tract of the Lombard plain, withinview of the Alps, and close beneath the shelter of the Apennines, itshines like a well-set gem with stately towers and cheerful squares inthe midst of verdure. The cities of Lombardy are all like largecountry houses: walking out of their gates, you seem to be steppingfrom a door or window that opens on a trim and beautiful garden, wheremulberry-tree is married to mulberry by festoons of vines, and wherethe maize and sunflower stand together in rows between patches of flaxand hemp. But it is not in order to survey the union of well-orderedhusbandry with the civilities of ancient city-life that we break thejourney at Parma between Milan and Bologna. We are attracted rather bythe fame of one great painter, whose work, though it may be studiedpiecemeal in many galleries of Europe, in Parma has a fulness, largeness, and mastery that can nowhere else be found. In Parma aloneCorreggio challenges comparison with Raphael, with Tintoret, with allthe supreme decorative painters who have deigned to make their art thehandmaid of architecture. Yet even in the cathedral and the church ofS. Giovanni, where Correggio's frescoes cover cupola and chapel wall, we could scarcely comprehend his greatness now--so cruelly have timeand neglect dealt with those delicate dream-shadows of celestialfairyland--were it not for an interpreter, who consecrated a lifetimeto the task of translating his master's poetry of fresco into theprose of engraving. That man was Paolo Toschi--a name to be evervenerated by all lovers of the arts; since without his guidance weshould hardly know what to seek for in the ruined splendours of thedomes of Parma, or even seeking, how to find the object of our search. Toschi's labour was more effectual than that of a restorer howeverskilful, more loving than that of a follower however faithful. Herespected Correggio's handiwork with religious scrupulousness, addingnot a line or tone or touch of colour to the fading frescoes; but helived among them, aloft on scaffoldings, and face to face with theoriginals which he designed to reproduce. By long and closefamiliarity, by obstinate and patient interrogation, he divinedCorreggio's secret, and was able at last to see clearly through themist of cobweb and mildew and altar smoke, and through the still morecruel travesty of so-called restoration. What he discovered, hefaithfully committed first to paper in water colours, and then tocopperplate with the burin, so that we enjoy the privilege of seeingCorreggio's masterpieces as Toschi saw them, with the eyes of geniusand of love and of long scientific study. It is not too much to saythat some of Correggio's most charming compositions--for example, thedispute of S. Augustine and S. John--have been resuscitated from thegrave by Toschi's skill. The original offers nothing but a moulderingsurface from which the painter's work has dropped in scales. Theengraving presents a design which we doubt not was Correggio's, for itcorresponds in all particulars to the style and spirit of the master. To be critical in dealing with so successful an achievement ofrestoration and translation is difficult. Yet it may be admitted onceand for all that Toschi has not unfrequently enfeebled his original. Under his touch Correggio loses somewhat of his sensuous audacity, hisdithyrambic ecstasy, and approaches the ordinary standard ofprettiness and graceful beauty. The Diana of the Camera di S. Paolo, for instance, has the strong calm splendour of a goddess: the sameDiana in Toschi's engraving seems about to smile with girlish joy. Ina word, the engraver was a man of a more common stamp--more timid andmore conventional than the painter. But this is after all a triflingdeduction from the value of his work. 

Our debt to Paolo Toschi is such that it would be ungrateful not toseek some details of his life. The few that can be gathered even atParma are brief and bald enough. The newspaper articles and funeralpanegyrics which refer to him are as barren as all such occasionalnotices in Italy have always been; the panegyrist seeming more anxiousabout his own style than eager to communicate information. Yet a bareoutline of Toschi's biography may be supplied. He was born at Parma in1788. His father was cashier of the post-office, and his mother's namewas Anna Maria Brest. Early in his youth he studied painting at Parmaunder Biagio Martini; and in 1809 he went to Paris, where he learnedthe art of engraving from Bervic and of etching from Oortman. In Parishe contracted an intimate friendship with the painter Gérard. Butafter ten years he returned to Parma, where he established a companyand school of engravers in concert with his friend Antonio Isac. MariaLouisa, the then Duchess, under whose patronage the arts flourished atParma (witness Bodoni's exquisite typography), soon recognised hismerit, and appointed him Director of the Ducal Academy. He then formedthe project of engraving a series of the whole of Correggio'sfrescoes. The undertaking was a vast one. Both the cupolas of S. Johnand the cathedral, together with the vault of the apse of S. Giovanni[10] and various portions of the side aisles, and theso-called Camera di S. Paolo, are covered by frescoes of Correggio andhis pupil Parmegiano. These frescoes have suffered so much fromneglect and time, and from unintelligent restoration, that it isdifficult in many cases to determine their true character. Yet Toschidid not content himself with selections, or shrink from the task ofdeciphering and engraving the whole. He formed a school of disciples, among whom were Carlo Raimondi of Milan, Antonio Costa of Venice, Edward Eichens of Berlin, Aloisio Juvara of Naples, Antonio Dalcò, Giuseppe Magnani, and Lodovico Bisola of Parma, and employed them asassistants in his work. Death overtook him in 1854, before it wasfinished, and now the water-colour drawings which are exhibited in theGallery of Parma prove to what extent the achievement fell short ofhis design. Enough, however, was accomplished to place the chiefmasterpieces of Correggio beyond the possibility of utter oblivion. 

To the piety of his pupil Carlo Raimondi, the bearer of a nameillustrious in the annals of engraving, we owe a striking portrait ofToschi. The master is represented on his seat upon the scaffold in thedizzy half-light of the dome. The shadowy forms of saints and angelsare around him. He has raised his eyes from his cartoon to study oneof these. In his right hand is the opera-glass with which hescrutinises the details of distant groups. The upturned face, with itsexpression of contemplative intelligence, is like that of anastronomer accustomed to commerce with things above the sphere ofcommon life, and ready to give account of all that he has gatheredfrom his observation of a world not ours. In truth the world createdby Correggio and interpreted by Toschi is very far removed from thatof actual existence. No painter has infused a more distinctindividuality into his work, realising by imaginative force andpowerful projection an order of beauty peculiar to himself, beforewhich it is impossible to remain quite indifferent. We must eitheradmire the manner of Correggio, or else shrink from it with thedistaste which sensual art is apt to stir in natures of a severe orsimple type. 

What, then, is the Correggiosity of Correggio? In other words, what isthe characteristic which, proceeding from the personality of theartist, is impressed on all his work? The answer to this question, though by no means simple, may perhaps be won by a process of gradualanalysis. The first thing that strikes us in the art of Correggio is, that he has aimed at the realistic representation of pure unrealities. His saints and angels are beings the like of whom we have hardly seenupon the earth. Yet they are displayed before us with all the movementand the vivid truth of nature. Next we feel that what constitutes thesuperhuman, visionary quality of these creatures, is their uniformbeauty of a merely sensuous type. They are all created for pleasure, not for thought or passion or activity or heroism. The uses of theirbrains, their limbs, their every feature, end in enjoyment; innocentand radiant wantonness is the condition of their whole existence. Correggio conceived the universe under the one mood of sensuous joy:his world was bathed in luxurious light; its inhabitants were capableof little beyond a soft voluptuousness. Over the domain of tragedy hehad no sway, and very rarely did he attempt to enter on it: nothing, for example, can be feebler than his endeavour to express anguish inthe distorted features of Madonna, S. John, and the Magdalen, who arebending over the dead body of a Christ extended in the attitude oflanguid repose. In like manner he could not deal with subjects whichdemand a pregnancy of intellectual meaning. He paints the three Fateslike young and joyous Bacchantes, places rose-garlands andthyrsi in their hands instead of the distaff and the thread of humandestinies, and they might figure appropriately upon the panels of abanquet-chamber in Pompeii. In this respect Correggio might be termedthe Rossini of painting. The melodies of the 'Stabat Mater'--_Fac utportem_ or _Quis est homo_--are the exact analogues in music ofCorreggio's voluptuous renderings of grave or mysterious motives. Nor, again, did he possess that severe and lofty art of composition whichsubordinates the fancy to the reason, and which seeks for the highestintellectual beauty in a kind of architectural harmony supreme abovethe melodies of gracefulness in detail. The Florentines and those whoshared their spirit--Michelangelo and Lionardo and Raphael--derivingthis principle of design from the geometrical art of the Middle Ages, converted it to the noblest uses in their vast well-orderedcompositions. But Correggio ignored the laws of scientificconstruction. It was enough for him to produce a splendid andbrilliant effect by the life and movement of his figures, and by theintoxicating beauty of his forms. His type of beauty, too, is by nomeans elevated. Lionardo painted souls whereof the features and thelimbs are but an index. The charm of Michelangelo's ideal is like aflower upon a tree of rugged strength. Raphael aims at the lovelinesswhich cannot be disjoined from goodness. But Correggio is contentedwith bodies 'delicate and desirable. ' His angels are geniidisimprisoned from the perfumed chalices of flowers, houris of anerotic paradise, elemental spirits of nature wantoning in Eden in herprime. To accuse the painter of conscious immorality or of what isstigmatised as sensuality, would be as ridiculous as to class hisseraphic beings among the products of the Christian imagination. Theybelong to the generation of the fauns; like fauns, they combine acertain savage wildness, a dithyrambic ecstasy of inspiration, adelight in rapid movement as they revel amid clouds or flowers, withthe permanent and all-pervading sweetness of the master's style. Wheninfantine or childlike, these celestial sylphs are scarcely to bedistinguished for any noble quality of beauty from Murillo's cherubs, and are far less divine than the choir of children who attend Madonnain Titian's 'Assumption. ' But in their boyhood and their prime ofyouth, they acquire a fulness of sensuous vitality and a radiance thatare peculiar to Correggio. The lily-bearer who helps to support S. Thomas beneath the dome of the cathedral at Parma, the groups ofseraphs who crowd behind the Incoronata of S. Giovanni, and the twowild-eyed open-mouthed S. Johns stationed at each side of thecelestial throne, are among the most splendid instances of theadolescent loveliness conceived by Correggio. Where the painter foundtheir models may be questioned but not answered; for he has made themof a different fashion from the race of mortals: no court of Romanemperor or Turkish sultan, though stocked with the flowers ofBithynian and Circassian youth, have seen their like. Mozart'sCherubino seems to have sat for all of them. At any rate theyincarnate the very spirit of the songs he sings. 

As a consequence of this predilection for sensuous and voluptuousforms, Correggio had no power of imagining grandly or severely. Satisfied with material realism in his treatment even of sublimemysteries, he converts the hosts of heaven into a 'fricassee offrogs, ' according to the old epigram. His apostles, gazing after theVirgin who has left the earth, are thrown into attitudes so violentand so dramatically foreshortened, that seen from below upon thepavement of the cathedral, little of their form is distinguishableexcept legs and arms in vehement commotion. Very different is Titian'sconception of this scene. To express the spiritual meaning, theemotion of Madonna's transit, with all the pomp which colour andsplendid composition can convey, is Titian's sole care; whereasCorreggio appears to have been satisfied with realising the tumult ofheaven rushing to meet earth, and earth straining upwards to ascend toheaven in violent commotion--a very orgasm of frenetic rapture. Theessence of the event is forgotten: its external manifestation alone ispresented to the eye; and only the accessories of beardless angels andcloud-encumbered cherubs are really beautiful amid a surge of limbs inrestless movement. More dignified, because designed with more repose, is the Apocalypse of S. John painted upon the cupola of S. Giovanni. The apostles throned on clouds, with which the dome is filled, gazeupward to one point. Their attitudes are noble; their form is heroic;in their eyes there is the strange ecstatic look by which Correggiointerpreted his sense of supernatural vision: it is a gaze not ofcontemplation or deep thought, but of wild half-savage joy, as ifthese saints also had become the elemental genii of cloud and air, spirits emergent from ether, the salamanders of an empyreanintolerable to mortal sense. The point on which their eyes converge, the culmination of their vision, is the figure of Christ. Here all theweakness of Correggio's method is revealed. He had undertaken torealise by no ideal allegorical suggestion, by no symbolism ofarchitectural grouping, but by actual prosaic measurement, bycorporeal form in subjection to the laws of perspective andforeshortening, things which in their very essence admit of only afigurative revelation. Therefore his Christ, the centre of all thoseearnest eyes, is contracted to a shape in which humanity itself ismean, a sprawling figure which irresistibly reminds one of a frog. Theclouds on which the saints repose are opaque and solid; cherubs incountless multitudes, a swarm of merry children, crawl about uponthese feather-beds of vapour, creep between the legs of the apostles, and play at bopeep behind their shoulders. There is no propriety intheir appearance there. They take no interest in the beatific vision. They play no part in the celestial symphony; nor are they capable ofmore than merely infantine enjoyment. Correggio has sprinkled themlavishly like living flowers about his cloudland, because he could notsustain a grave and solemn strain of music, but was forced by histemperament to overlay the melody with roulades. Gazing at thesefrescoes, the thought came to me that Correggio was like a manlistening to sweetest flute-playing, and translating phrase afterphrase as they passed through his fancy into laughing faces, breezytresses, and rolling mists. Sometimes a grander cadence reached hisear; and then S. Peter with the keys, or S. Augustine of the mightybrow, or the inspired eyes of S. John, took form beneath his pencil. But the light airs returned, and rose and lily faces bloomed again forhim among the clouds. It is not therefore in dignity or sublimity thatCorreggio excels, but in artless grace and melodious tenderness. TheMadonna della Scala clasping her baby with a caress which the littlechild returns, S. Catherine leaning in a rapture of ecstatic love towed the infant Christ, S. Sebastian in the bloom of almost boyishbeauty, are the so-called sacred subjects to which the painter wasadequate, and which he has treated with the voluptuous tenderness wefind in his pictures of Leda and Danae and Io. Could these saints andmartyrs descend from Correggio's canvas, and take flesh, and breathe, and begin to live; of what high action, of what grave passion, of whatexemplary conduct in any walk of life would they be capable? That isthe question which they irresistibly suggest; and we are forced toanswer, None! The moral and religious world did not exist forCorreggio. His art was but a way of seeing carnal beauty in a dreamthat had no true relation to reality. 

Correggio's sensibility to light and colour was exactly on a par withhis feeling for form. He belongs to the poets of chiaroscuro and thepoets of colouring; but in both regions he maintains the individualityso strongly expressed in his choice of purely sensuous beauty. Tintoretto makes use of light and shade for investing his greatcompositions with dramatic intensity. Rembrandt interprets sombre andfantastic moods of the mind by golden gloom and silvery irradiation, translating thought into the language of penumbral mystery. Lionardostudies the laws of light scientifically, so that the proper roundnessand effect of distance should be accurately rendered, and all thesubtleties of nature's smiles be mimicked. Correggio is content withfixing on his canvas the [Greek: anêrithmon gelasma], themany-twinkling laughter of light in motion, rained down through fleecyclouds or trembling foliage, melting into half-shadows, bathing andilluminating every object with a soft caress. There are no tragiccontrasts of splendour sharply defined on blackness, no mysteries ofhalf-felt and pervasive twilight, no studied accuracies of noondayclearness in his work. Light and shadow are woven together on hisfigures like an impalpable Coan gauze, aërial and transparent, enhancing the palpitations of voluptuous movement which he loved. Hiscolouring, in like manner, has none of the superb and mundane pompwhich the Venetians affected; it does not glow or burn or beat thefire of gems into our brain; joyous and wanton, it seems to be exactlysuch a beauty-bloom as sense requires for its satiety. There isnothing in his hues to provoke deep passion or to stimulate theyearnings of the soul: the pure blushes of the dawn and the crimsonpyres of sunset are nowhere in the world that he has painted. But thatchord of jocund colour which may fitly be married to the smiles oflight, the blues which are found in laughing eyes, the pinks thattinge the cheeks of early youth, and the warm yet silvery tones ofhealthy flesh, mingle as in a marvellous pearl-shell on his pictures. Both chiaroscuro and colouring have this supreme purpose in art, toeffect the sense like music, and like music to create a mood in thesoul of the spectator. Now the mood which Correggio stimulates is oneof natural and thoughtless pleasure. To feel his influence, and at thesame moment to be the subject of strong passion, or fierce lust, orheroic resolve, or profound contemplation, or pensive melancholy, isimpossible. Wantonness, innocent because unconscious of sin, immoralbecause incapable of any serious purpose, is the quality whichprevails in all that he has painted. The pantomimes of a Mohammedanparadise might be put upon the stage after patterns supplied by thisleast spiritual of painters. 

It follows from this analysis that the Correggiosity of Correggio, that which sharply distinguished him from all previous artists, wasthe faculty of painting a purely voluptuous dream of beautiful beingsin perpetual movement, beneath the laughter of morning light, in aworld of never-failing April hues. When he attempts to depart from thefairyland of which he was the Prospero, and to match himself with themasters of sublime thought or earnest passion, he proves his weakness. But within his own magic circle he reigns supreme, no other artisthaving blended the witcheries of colouring, chiaroscuro, and faunlikeloveliness of form into a harmony so perfect in its sensuous charm. Bewitched by the strains of the siren, we pardon affectations ofexpression, emptiness of meaning, feebleness of composition, exaggerated and melodramatic attitudes. There is what Goethe called ademonic influence in the art of Correggio: 'In poetry, ' said Goethe toEckermann, 'especially in that which is unconscious, before whichreason and understanding fall short, and which therefore produceseffects so far surpassing all conception, there is always somethingdemonic. ' It is not to be wondered that Correggio, possessed of thisdemonic power in the highest degree, and working to a purely sensuousend, should have exercised a fatal influence over art. His successors, attracted by an intoxicating loveliness which they could not analyse, which had nothing in common with the reason or the understanding, butwas like a glamour cast upon the soul in its most secretsensibilities, threw themselves blindly into the imitation ofCorreggio's faults. His affectation, his want of earnest thought, hisneglect of composition, his sensuous realism, his all-pervadingsweetness, his infantine prettiness, his substitution ofthaumaturgical effects for conscientious labour, admitted only tooeasy imitation, and were but too congenial with the spirit of the lateRenaissance. Cupolas through the length and breadth of Italy began tobe covered with clouds and simpering cherubs in the convulsions ofartificial ecstasy. The attenuated elegance of Parmigiano, theattitudinising of Anselmi's saints and angels, and a general sacrificeof what is solid and enduring to sentimental gewgaws on the part ofall painters who had submitted to the magic of Correggio, proved howeasy it was to go astray with the great master. Meanwhile no one couldapproach him in that which was truly his own--the delineation of atransient moment in the life of sensuous beauty, the painting of asmile on Nature's face, when light and colour tremble in harmony withthe movement of joyous living creatures. Another demonic nature of afar more powerful type contributed his share to the ruin of art inItaly. Michelangelo's constrained attitudes and muscular anatomy wereimitated by painters and sculptors, who thought that the grand stylelay in the presentation of theatrical athletes, but who could notseize the secret whereby the great master made even the bodies of menand women--colossal trunks and writhen limbs--interpret the meaningsof his deep and melancholy soul. 

It is a sad law of progress in art, that when the æsthetic impulse ison the wane, artists should perforce select to follow the weaknessrather than the vigour, of their predecessors. While painting was inthe ascendant, Raphael could take the best of Perugino and discard theworst; in its decadence Parmigiano reproduces the affectations ofCorreggio, and Bernini carries the exaggerations of Michelangelo toabsurdity. All arts describe a parabola. The force which producesthem causes them to rise throughout their growth up to a certainpoint, and then to descend more gradually in a long and slanting lineof regular declension. There is no real break of continuity. The endis the result of simple exhaustion. Thus the last of our Elizabethandramatists, Shirley and Crowne and Killigrew, pushed to its ultimateconclusion the principle inherent in Marlowe, not attempting to breaknew ground, nor imitating the excellences so much as the defects oftheir forerunners. Thus too the Pointed style of architecture inEngland gave birth first to what is called the Decorated, next to thePerpendicular, and finally expired in the Tudor. Each step was a stepof progress--at first for the better--at last for the worse--butlogical, continuous, necessitated. [11]

It is difficult to leave Correggio without at least posing thequestion of the difference between moralised and merely sensual art. Is all art excellent in itself and good in its effect that isbeautiful and earnest? There is no doubt that Correggio's work is in away most beautiful; and it bears unmistakable signs of the masterhaving given himself with single-hearted devotion to the expression ofthat phase of loveliness which he could apprehend. In so far we mustadmit that his art is both excellent and solid. Yet we are unable toconceive that any human being could be made better--stronger forendurance, more fitted for the uses of the world, more sensitive towhat is noble in nature--by its contemplation. At the best Correggiodoes but please us in our lighter moments, and we are apt to feel thatthe pleasure he has given is of an enervating kind. To expect obviousmorality of any artist is confessedly absurd. It is not the artist'sprovince to preach, or even to teach, except by remote suggestion. Yetthe mind of the artist may be highly moralised, and then he takes ranknot merely with the ministers to refined pleasure, but also with theeducators of the world. He may, for example, be penetrated with a justsense of humanity like Shakspere, or with a sublime temperance likeSophocles, instinct with prophetic intuition like Michelangelo, orwith passionate experience like Beethoven. The mere sight of the workof Pheidias is like breathing pure health-giving air. Milton and Dantewere steeped in religious patriotism; Goethe was pervaded withphilosophy, and Balzac with scientific curiosity. Ariosto, Cervantes, and even Boccaccio are masters in the mysteries of common life. In allthese cases the tone of the artist's mind is felt throughout his work:what he paints, or sings, or writes, conveys a lesson while itpleases. On the other hand, depravity in an artist or a poetpercolates through work which has in it nothing positive of evil, anda very miasma of poisonous influence may rise from the apparentlyinnocuous creations of a tainted soul. Now Correggio is moralised inneither way--neither as a good nor as a bad man, neither as an acutethinker nor as a deliberate voluptuary. He is simply sensuous. On hisown ground he is even very fresh and healthy: his delineation ofyouthful maternity, for example, is as true as it is beautiful; andhis sympathy with the gleefulness of children is devoid ofaffectation. We have then only to ask ourselves whether the defect inhim of all thought and feeling which is not at once capable ofgraceful fleshly incarnation, be sufficient to lower him in the scaleof artists. This question must of course be answered according to ourdefinition of the purposes of art. There is no doubt that the mosthighly organised art--that which absorbs the most numerous humanqualities and effects a harmony between the most complex elements--isthe noblest. Therefore the artist who combines moral elevation andpower of thought with a due appreciation of sensual beauty, is moreelevated and more beneficial than one whose domain is simply that ofcarnal loveliness. Correggio, if this be so, must take a comparativelylow rank. Just as we welcome the beautiful athlete for the radiantlife that is in him, but bow before the personality of Sophocles, whose perfect form enshrined a noble and highly educated soul, so wegratefully accept Correggio for his grace, while we approach theconsummate art of Michelangelo with reverent awe. It is necessary inæsthetics as elsewhere to recognise a hierarchy of excellence, thegrades of which are determined by the greater or lesscomprehensiveness of the artist's nature expressed in his work. At thesame time, the calibre of the artist's genius must be estimated; foreminent greatness even of a narrow kind will always command ouradmiration: and the amount of his originality has also to be takeninto account. What is unique has, for that reason alone, a claim onour consideration. Judged in this way, Correggio deserves a place, say, in the sweet planet Venus, above the moon and above Mercury, among the artists who have not advanced beyond the contemplationswhich find their proper outcome in love. Yet, even thus, he aids theculture of humanity. 'We should take care, ' said Goethe, apropos ofByron, to Eckermann, 'not to be always looking for culture in thedecidedly pure and moral. Everything that is great promotescultivation as soon as we are aware of it. '

 * * * * *

_CANOSSA_

Italy is less the land of what is venerable in antiquity, than ofbeauty, by divine right young eternally in spite of age. This is duepartly to her history and art and literature, partly to the temper ofthe races who have made her what she is, and partly to her naturaladvantages. Her oldest architectural remains, the temples of Paestumand Girgenti, or the gates of Perugia and Volterra, are so adapted toItalian landscape and so graceful in their massive strength, that weforget the centuries which have passed over them. We leap as by asingle bound from the times of Roman greatness to the new birth ofhumanity in the fourteenth century, forgetting the many years duringwhich Italy, like the rest of Europe, was buried in what our ancestorscalled Gothic barbarism. The illumination cast upon the classic periodby the literature of Rome and by the memory of her great men is sovivid, that we feel the days of the Republic and the Empire to be nearus; while the Italian Renaissance is so truly a revival of that formersplendour, a resumption of the music interrupted for a season, that itis extremely difficult to form any conception of the five longcenturies which elapsed between the Lombard invasion in 568 and theaccession of Hildebrand to the Pontificate in 1073. So true is it thatnothing lives and has reality for us but what is spiritual, intellectual, self-possessed in personality and consciousness. Whenthe Egyptian priest said to Solon, 'You Greeks are always children, 'he intended a gentle sarcasm, but he implied a compliment; for thequality of imperishable youth belonged to the Hellenic spirit, and hasbecome the heritage of every race which partook of it. And this spiritin no common degree has been shared by the Italians of the earlier andthe later classic epoch. The land is full of monuments pertaining tothose two brilliant periods; and whenever the voice of poet has spokenor the hand of artist has been at work, that spirit, as distinguishedfrom the spirit of mediaevalism, has found expression. 

Yet it must be remembered that during the five centuries abovementioned Italy was given over to Lombards, Franks, and Germans. Feudal institutions, alien to the social and political ideals of theclassic world, took a tolerably firm hold on the country. The Latinelement remained silent, passive, in abeyance, undergoing an importanttransformation. It was in the course of those five hundred years thatthe Italians as a modern people, separable from their Roman ancestors, were formed. At the close of this obscure passage in Italian history, their communes, the foundation of Italy's future independence, and thesource of her peculiar national development, appeared in all thevigour and audacity of youth. At its close the Italian geniuspresented Europe with its greatest triumph of constructive ability, the Papacy. At its close again the series of supreme artisticachievements, starting with the architecture of churches and publicpalaces, passing on to sculpture and painting, and culminating inmusic, which only ended with the temporary extinction of nationalvitality in the seventeenth century, was simultaneously begun in allthe provinces of the peninsula. 

So important were these five centuries of incubation for Italy, and solittle is there left of them to arrest the attention of the student, dazzled as he is by the ever-living glories of Greece, Rome, and theRenaissance, that a visit to the ruins of Canossa is almost a duty. There, in spite of himself, by the very isolation and forlornabandonment of what was once so formidable a seat of feudal despotismand ecclesiastical tyranny, he is forced to confront the obscure butmighty spirit of the middle ages. There, if anywhere, the men of thoseiron-hearted times anterior to the Crusades will acquire distinctnessfor his imagination, when he recalls the three main actors in thedrama enacted on the summit of Canossa's rock in the bitter winter of1077. 

Canossa lies almost due south of Reggio d'Emilia, upon the slopes ofthe Apennines. Starting from Reggio, the carriage-road keeps to theplain for some while in a westerly direction, and then bends awaytowards the mountains. As we approach their spurs, the ground beginsto rise. The rich Lombard tilth of maize and vine gives place toEnglish-looking hedgerows, lined with oaks, and studded with handsomedark tufts of green hellebore. The hills descend in melancholyearth-heaps on the plain, crowned here and there with ruined castles. Four of these mediaeval strongholds, called Bianello, Montevetro, Monteluzzo, and Montezano, give the name of Quattro Castelli to thecommune. The most important of them, Bianello, which, next to Canossa, was the strongest fortress possessed by the Countess Matilda and herancestors, still presents a considerable mass of masonry, roofed andhabitable. The group formed a kind of advance-guard for Canossaagainst attack from Lombardy. After passing Quattro Castelli we enterthe hills, climbing gently upwards between barren slopes of ashy greyearth--the _débris_ of most ancient Apennines--crested at favourablepoints with lonely towers. In truth the whole country bristles withruined forts, making it clear that during the middle ages Canossa wasbut the centre of a great military system, the core and kernel of afortified position which covered an area to be measured by scores ofsquare miles, reaching far into the mountains, and buttressed on theplain. As yet, however, after nearly two hours' driving, Canossa hasnot come in sight. At last a turn in the road discloses an opening inthe valley of the Enza to the left: up this lateral gorge we see firstthe Castle of Rossena on its knoll of solid red rock, flaming in thesunlight; and then, further withdrawn, detached from all surroundingobjects, and reared aloft as though to sweep the sea of waved andbroken hills around it, a sharp horn of hard white stone. That isCanossa--the _alba Canossa_, the _candida petra_ of its rhymingchronicler. There is no mistaking the commanding value of itssituation. At the same time the brilliant whiteness of Canossa'srocky hill, contrasted with the red gleam of Rossena, and outlinedagainst the prevailing dulness of these earthy Apennines, secures apicturesque individuality concordant with its unique history andunrivalled strength. 

There is still a journey of two hours before the castle can bereached: and this may be performed on foot or horseback. The pathwinds upward over broken ground; following the _arête_ of curiouslyjumbled and thwarted hill-slopes; passing beneath the battlements ofRossena, whence the unfortunate Everelina threw herself in order toescape the savage love of her lord and jailor; and then skirting thosehorrid earthen _balze_ which are so common and so unattractive afeature of Apennine scenery. The most hideous _balze_ to be found inthe length and breadth of Italy are probably those of Volterra, fromwhich the citizens themselves recoil with a kind of terror, and whichlure melancholy men by intolerable fascination on to suicide. For evercrumbling, altering with frost and rain, discharging gloomy glaciersof slow-crawling mud, and scarring the hillside with tracts ofbarrenness, these earth-precipices are among the most ruinous anddiscomfortable failures of nature. They have not even so much ofwildness or grandeur as forms, the saving merit of nearly all wastefulthings in the world, and can only be classed with the desolate_ghiare_ of Italian river-beds. 

Such as they are, these _balze_ form an appropriate preface to thegloomy and repellent isolation of Canossa. The rock towers from anarrow platform to the height of rather more than 160 feet from itsbase. The top is fairly level, forming an irregular triangle, of whichthe greatest length is about 260 feet, and the width about 100 feet. Scarcely a vestige of any building can be traced either upon theplatform or the summit, with the exception of a broken wall andwindows supposed to belong to the end of the sixteenth century. Theancient castle, with its triple circuit of walls, enclosing barracksfor the garrison, lodgings for the lord and his retainers, a statelychurch, a sumptuous monastery, storehouses, stables, workshops, andall the various buildings of a fortified stronghold, have utterlydisappeared. The very passage of approach cannot be ascertained; forit is doubtful whether the present irregular path that scales thewestern face of the rock be really the remains of some old staircase, corresponding to that by which Mont S. Michel in Normandy is ascended. One thing is tolerably certain--that the three walls of which we hearso much from the chroniclers, and which played so picturesque a partin the drama of Henry IV. 's penance, surrounded the cliff at its base, and embraced a large acreage of ground. The citadel itself must havebeen but the acropolis or keep of an extensive fortress. 

There has been plenty of time since the year 1255, when the people ofReggio sacked and destroyed Canossa, for Nature to resume herundisputed sway by obliterating the handiwork of men; and at presentNature forms the chief charm of Canossa. Lying one afternoon of May onthe crisp short grass at the edge of a precipice purple with iris infull blossom, I surveyed, from what were once the battlements ofMatilda's castle, a prospect than which there is none morespirit-stirring by reason of its beauty and its manifold associationsin Europe. The lower castle-crowded hills have sunk. Reggio lies atour feet, shut in between the crests of Monte Carboniano and Montedelle Celle. Beyond Reggio stretches Lombardy--the fairest and mostmemorable battlefield of nations, the richest and most highlycultivated garden of civilised industry. Nearly all the Lombard citiesmay be seen, some of them faint like bluish films of vapour, someclear with dome and spire. There is Modena and her Ghirlandina. Carpi, Parma, Mirandola, Verona, Mantua, lie well defined and russet on theflat green map; and there flashes a bend of lordly Po; and there theEuganeans rise like islands, telling us where Padua and Ferrara nestlein the amethystine haze Beyond and above all to the northward sweepthe Alps, tossing their silvery crests up into the cloudless sky fromthe violet mist that girds their flanks and drowns their basements. Monte Adamello and the Ortler, the cleft of the Brenner, and the sharppeaks of the Venetian Alps are all distinctly visible. An eagle flyingstraight from our eyrie might traverse Lombardy and light among thesnow-fields of the Valtelline between sunrise and sundown. Nor is theprospect tame to southward. Here the Apennines roll, billow abovebillow, in majestic desolation, soaring to snow summits in thePellegrino region. As our eye attempts to thread that labyrinth ofhill and vale, we tell ourselves that those roads wind to Tuscany, andyonder stretches Garfagnana, where Ariosto lived and mused inhonourable exile from the world he loved. 

It was by one of the mountain passes that lead from Lucca northwardthat the first founder of Canossa is said to have travelled early inthe tenth century. Sigifredo, if the tradition may be trusted, wasvery wealthy; and with his money he bought lands and signorial rightsat Reggio, bequeathing to his children, when he died about 945, apatrimony which they developed into a petty kingdom. Azzo, his secondson, fortified Canossa, and made it his principal place of residence. When Lothair, King of Italy, died in 950, leaving his beautiful widowto the ill-treatment of his successor, Berenger, Adelaide found aprotector in this Azzo. She had been imprisoned on the Lake of Garda;but managing to escape in man's clothes to Mantua, she thence sentnews of her misfortunes to Canossa. Azzo lost no time in riding withhis knights to her relief, and brought her back in safety to hismountain fastness. It is related that Azzo was afterwards instrumentalin calling Otho into Italy and procuring his marriage with Adelaide, in consequence of which events Italy became a fief of the Empire. Owing to the part he played at this time, the Lord of Canossa wasrecognised as one of the most powerful vassals of the German Emperorin Lombardy. Honours were heaped upon him; and he grew so rich andformidable that Berenger, the titular King of Italy, laid siege to hisfortress of Canossa. The memory of this siege, which lasted for threeyears and a half, is said still to linger in the popular traditions ofthe place. When Azzo died at the end of the tenth century, he left tohis son Tedaldo the title of Count of Reggio and Modena; and thistitle was soon after raised to that of Marquis. The Marches governedas Vicar of the Empire by Tedaldo included Reggio, Modena, Ferrara, Brescia, and probably Mantua. They stretched, in fact, across thenorth of Italy, forming a quadrilateral between the Alps andApennines. Like his father, Tedaldo adhered consistently to theImperial party; and when he died and was buried at Canossa, he in histurn bequeathed to his son Bonifazio a power and jurisdictionincreased by his own abilities. Bonifazio held the state of asovereign at Canossa, adding the duchy of Tuscany to his father'sfiefs, and meeting the allied forces of the Lombard barons in thefield of Coviolo like an independent potentate. His power andsplendour were great enough to rouse the jealousy of the Emperor; butHenry III. Seems to have thought it more prudent to propitiate thisproud vassal, and to secure his kindness, than to attempt hishumiliation. Bonifazio married Beatrice, daughter of Frederick, Dukeof Lorraine--her whose marble sarcophagus in the Campo Santo at Pisais said to have inspired Niccola Pisano with his new style ofsculpture. Their only child, Matilda, was born, probably at Lucca, in1046; and six years after her birth, Bonifazio, who had swayed hissubjects like an iron-handed tyrant, was murdered. To the great Houseof Canossa, the rulers of one-third of Italy, there now remained onlytwo women, Bonifazio's widow Beatrice, and his daughter Matilda. Beatrice married Godfrey, Duke of Lorraine, who was recognised byHenry IV. As her husband and as feudatory of the Empire in the fullplace of Boniface. He died about 1070; and in this year Matilda wasmarried by proxy to his son, Godfrey the Hunchback, whom, however, she did not see till the year 1072. The marriage was not a happy one;and the question has even been disputed among Matilda's biographerswhether it was ever consummated. At any rate it did not last long; forGodfrey was killed at Antwerp in 1076. In this year Matilda also losther mother, Beatrice, who died at Pisa, and was buried in thecathedral. 

By this rapid enumeration of events it will be seen how the power andhonours of the House of Canossa, including Tuscany, Spoleto, and thefairest portions of Lombardy, had devolved upon a single woman of theage of thirty at the moment when the fierce quarrel between Pope andEmperor began in the year 1076. Matilda was destined to play a great, a striking, and a tragic part in the opening drama of Italian history. Her decided character and uncompromising course of action have won forher the name of 'la gran donna d'Italia, ' and have caused her memoryto be blessed or execrated, according as the temporal pretensions andspiritual tyranny of the Papacy may have found supporters or opponentsin posterity. She was reared from childhood in habits of austerity andunquestioning piety. Submission to the Church became for her notmerely a rule of conduct, but a passionate enthusiasm. She identifiedherself with the cause of four successive Popes, protected her idol, the terrible and iron-hearted Hildebrand, in the time of hisadversity; remained faithful to his principles after his death; andhaving served the Holy See with all her force and all that shepossessed through all her lifetime, she bequeathed her vast dominionsto it on her deathbed. Like some of the greatest mediaevalcharacters--like Hildebrand himself--Matilda was so thoroughly of onepiece, that she towers above the mists of ages with the massivegrandeur of an incarnated idea. She is for us the living statue of asingle thought, an undivided impulse, the more than woman born torepresent her age. Nor was it without reason that Dante symbolised inher the love of Holy Church; though students of the 'Purgatory' willhardly recognise the lovely maiden, singing and plucking flowersbeside the stream of Lethe, in the stern and warlike chatelaine ofCanossa. Unfortunately we know but little of Matilda's personalappearance. Her health was not strong; and it is said to have beenweakened, especially in her last illness, by ascetic observances. Yetshe headed her own troops, armed with sword and cuirass, avoidingneither peril nor fatigue in the quarrels of her master Gregory. Up tothe year 1622 two strong suits of mail were preserved at QuattroCastelli, which were said to have been worn by her in battle, andwhich were afterwards sold on the market-place at Reggio. This habitof donning armour does not, however, prove that Matilda wasexceptionally vigorous; for in those savage times she could hardlyhave played the part of heroine without participating personally inthe dangers of warfare. 

No less monumental in the plastic unity of his character was the monkHildebrand, who for twenty years before his elevation to the Papacyhad been the maker of Popes and the creator of the policy of Rome. When he was himself elected in the year 1073, and had assumed the nameof Gregory VII. , he immediately began to put in practice the plans forChurch aggrandisement he had slowly matured during the previousquarter of a century. To free the Church from its subservience to theEmpire, to assert the Pope's right to ratify the election of theEmperor and to exercise the right of jurisdiction over him, to placeecclesiastical appointments in the sole power of the Roman See, and torender the celibacy of the clergy obligatory, were the points he hadresolved to carry. Taken singly and together, these chief aims ofHildebrand's policy had but one object--the magnification of theChurch at the expense both of the people and of secular authorities, and the further separation of the Church from the ties and sympathiesof common life that bound it to humanity. To accuse Hildebrand ofpersonal ambition would be but shallow criticism, though it is clearthat his inflexible and puissant nature found a savage selfishpleasure in trampling upon power and humbling pride at warfare withhis own. Yet his was in no sense an egotistic purpose like that whichmoved the Popes of the Renaissance to dismember Italy for theirbastards. Hildebrand, like Matilda, was himself the creature of agreat idea. These two potent personalities completely understood eachother, and worked towards a single end. Tho mythopoeic fancy mightconceive of them as the male and female manifestations of one dominantfaculty, the spirit of ecclesiastical dominion incarnate in a man andwoman of almost super-human mould. 

Opposed to them, as the third actor in the drama of Canossa, was a manof feebler mould. Henry IV. , King of Italy, but not yet crownedEmperor, had none of his opponents' unity of purpose or monumentaldignity of character. At war with his German feudatories, browbeatenby rebellious sons, unfaithful and cruel to his wife, vacillating inthe measures he adopted to meet his divers difficulties, at one timetormented by his conscience into cowardly submission, and at anothertreasonably neglectful of the most solemn obligations, Henry was nomatch for the stern wills against which he was destined to break inunavailing passion. Early disagreements with Gregory had culminated inhis excommunication. The German nobles abandoned his cause; and Henryfound it expedient to summon a council in Augsburg for the settlementof matters in dispute between the Empire and the Papacy. Gregoryexpressed his willingness to attend this council, and set forth fromRome accompanied by the Countess Matilda in December 1076. He did not, however, travel further than Vercelli, for news here reached him thatHenry was about to enter Italy at the head of a powerful army. Matildahereupon persuaded the Holy Father to place himself in safety amongher strongholds of Canossa. Thither accordingly Gregory retired beforethe ending of that year; and bitter were the sarcasms uttered by theimperial partisans in Italy upon this protection offered by a faircountess to the monk who had been made a Pope. The foul calumnies ofthat bygone age would be unworthy of even so much as this notice, ifwe did not trace in them the ineradicable Italian tendency to cynicalinsinuation--a tendency which has involved the history of theRenaissance Popes in an almost impenetrable mist of lies andexaggerations. Henry was in truth upon his road to Italy, but with avery different attendance from that which Gregory expected. Accompanied by Bertha, his wife, and his boy son Conrad, the Emperorelect left Spires in the condition of a fugitive, crossed Burgundy, spent Christmas at Besançon, and journeyed to the foot of Mont Cenis. It is said that he was followed by a single male servant of meanbirth; and if the tale of his adventures during the passage of theAlps can be credited, history presents fewer spectacles morepicturesque than the straits to which this representative of theCæsars, this supreme chief of feudal civility, this ruler destinedstill to be the leader of mighty armies and the father of a line ofmonarchs, was exposed. Concealing his real name and state, he inducedsome shepherds to lead him and his escort through the thick snows tothe summit of Mont Cenis; and by the help of these men the imperialparty were afterwards let down the snow-slopes on the further side bymeans of ropes. Bertha and her women were sewn up in hides and draggedacross the frozen surface of the winter drifts. It was a yearmemorable for its severity. Heavy snow had fallen in October, whichcontinued ice-bound and unyielding till the following April. 

No sooner had Henry reached Turin, than he set forward again in thedirection of Canossa. The fame of his arrival had preceded him, andhe found that his party was far stronger in Italy than he had venturedto expect. Proximity to the Church of Rome divests its fulminations ofhalf their terrors. The Italian bishops and barons, less superstitiousthan the Germans, and with greater reason to resent the domineeringgraspingness of Gregory, were ready to espouse the Emperor's cause. Henry gathered a formidable force as he marched onward acrossLombardy; and some of the most illustrious prelates and nobles of theSouth were in his suite. A more determined leader than Henry provedhimself to be, might possibly have forced Gregory to someaccommodation, in spite of the strength of Canossa and the Pope'sinvincible obstinacy, by proper use of these supporters. Meanwhile theadherents of the Church were mustered in Matilda's fortress; amongwhom may be mentioned Azzo, the progenitor of Este and Brunswick;Hugh, Abbot of Clugny; and the princely family of Piedmont. 'I ambecome a second Rome, ' exclaims Canossa, in the language of Matilda'srhyming chronicler; 'all honours are mine; I hold at once both Popeand King, the princes of Italy and those of Gaul, those of Rome, andthose from far beyond the Alps. ' The stage was ready; the audience hadassembled; and now the three great actors were about to meet. Immediately upon his arrival at Canossa, Henry sent for his cousin, the Countess Matilda, and besought her to intercede for him withGregory. He was prepared to make any concessions or to undergo anyhumiliations, if only the ban of excommunication might be removed;nor, cowed as he was by his own superstitious conscience, and by thememory of the opposition he had met with from his German vassals, doeshe seem to have once thought of meeting force with force, and ofreturning to his northern kingdom triumphant in the overthrow ofGregory's pride. Matilda undertook to plead his cause before thePontiff. But Gregory was not to be moved so soon to mercy. 'If Henryhas in truth repented, ' he replied, 'let him lay down crown andsceptre, and declare himself unworthy of the name of king. ' The onlypoint conceded to the suppliant was that he should be admitted in thegarb of a penitent within the precincts of the castle. Leaving hisretinue outside the walls, Henry entered the first series of outworks, and was thence conducted to the second, so that between him and thecitadel itself there still remained the third of the surroundingbastions. Here he was bidden to wait the Pope's pleasure; and here, inthe midst of that bitter winter weather, while the fierce winds of theApennines were sweeping sleet upon him in their passage from MontePellegrino to the plain, he knelt barefoot, clothed in sackcloth, fasting from dawn till eve, for three whole days. On the morning ofthe fourth day, judging that Gregory was inexorable, and that his suitwould not be granted, Henry retired to the Chapel of S. Nicholas, which stood within this second precinct. There he called to his aidthe Abbot of Clugny and the Countess, both of whom were his relations, and who, much as they might sympathise with Gregory, could hardly besupposed to look with satisfaction on their royal kinsman's outrage. The Abbot told Henry that nothing in the world could move the Pope;but Matilda, when in turn he fell before her knees and wept, engagedto do for him the utmost. She probably knew that the moment forunbending had arrived, and that her imperious guest could not witheither decency or prudence prolong the outrage offered to the civilchief of Christendom. It was the 25th of January when the Emperorelect was brought, half dead with cold and misery, into the Pope'spresence. There he prostrated himself in the dust, crying aloud forpardon. It is said that Gregory first placed his foot upon Henry'sneck, uttering these words of Scripture: 'Super aspidem et basiliscumambulabis, et conculcabis leonem et draconem, ' and that then he raisedhim from the earth and formally pronounced his pardon. The prelatesand nobles who took part in this scene were compelled to guaranteewith their own oaths the vows of obedience pronounced by Henry; sothat in the very act of reconciliation a new insult was offered tohim. After this Gregory said mass, and permitted Henry to communicate;and at the close of the day a banquet was served, at which the Kingsat down to meat with the Pope and the Countess. 

It is probable that, while Henry's penance was performed in the castlecourts beneath the rock, his reception by the Pope, and all thatsubsequently happened, took place in the citadel itself. But of thiswe have no positive information. Indeed the silence of the chroniclesas to the topography of Canossa is peculiarly unfortunate for loversof the picturesque in historic detail, now that there is nopossibility of tracing the outlines of the ancient building. Had theauthor of the 'Vita Mathildis' (Muratori, vol. V. ) foreseen that hisbeloved Canossa would one day be nothing but a mass of native rock, hewould undoubtedly have been more explicit on these points; and muchthat is vague about an event only paralleled by our Henry II. 'spenance before Becket's shrine at Canterbury, might now be clear. 

Very little remains to be told about Canossa. During the same year, 1077, Matilda made the celebrated donation of her fiefs to HolyChurch. This was accepted by Gregory in the name of S. Peter, and itwas confirmed by a second deed during the pontificate of Urban IV. In1102. Though Matilda subsequently married Guelfo d'Este, son of theDuke of Bavaria, she was speedily divorced from him; nor was there anyheir to a marriage ridiculous by reason of disparity of age, thebridegroom being but eighteen, while the bride was forty-three in theyear of her second nuptials. During one of Henry's descents intoItaly, he made an unsuccessful attack upon Canossa, assailing it atthe head of a considerable force one October morning in 1092. Matilda's biographer informs us that the mists of autumn veiled hisbeloved fortress from the eyes of the beleaguerers. They had not eventhe satisfaction of beholding the unvanquished citadel; and, what wasmore, the banner of the Emperor was seized and dedicated as a trophyin the Church of S. Apollonio. In the following year the Countessopened her gates of Canossa to an illustrious fugitive, Adelaide, thewife of her old foeman, Henry, who had escaped with difficulty fromthe insults and the cruelty of her husband. After Henry's death, hisson, the Emperor Henry V. , paid Matilda a visit in her castle ofBianello, addressed her by the name of mother, and conferred upon herthe vice-regency of Liguria. At the age of sixty-nine she died, in1115, at Bondeno de' Roncori, and was buried, not among her kinsmen atCanossa, but in an abbey of S. Benedict near Mantua. With her expiredthe main line of the noble house she represented; though Canossa, nowmade a fief of the Empire in spite of Matilda's donation, was given toa family which claimed descent from Bonifazio's brother Conrad--ayoung man killed in the battle of Coviolo. This family, in its turn, was extinguished in the year 1570; but a junior branch still exists atVerona. It will be remembered that Michelangelo Buonarroti claimedkinship with the Count of Canossa; and a letter from the Count isextant acknowledging the validity of his pretension. 

As far back as 1255 the people of Reggio destroyed the castle; nor didthe nobles of Canossa distinguish themselves in subsequent historyamong those families who based their despotisms on the _débris_ of theImperial power in Lombardy. It seemed destined that Canossa and allbelonging to it should remain as a mere name and memory of theoutgrown middle ages. Estensi, Carraresi, Visconti, Bentivogli, andGonzaghi belong to a later period of Lombard history, and mark thedawn of the Renaissance. 

As I lay and mused that afternoon of May upon the short grass, croppedby two grey goats, whom a little boy was tending, it occurred to me toask the woman who had served me as guide, whether any legend remainedin the country concerning the Countess Matilda. She had often, probably, been asked this question by other travellers. Therefore shewas more than usually ready with an answer, which, as far as I couldunderstand her dialect, was this. Matilda was a great and potentwitch, whose summons the devil was bound to obey. One day she aspired, alone of all her sex, to say mass; but when the moment came forsacring the elements, a thunderbolt fell from the clear sky, andreduced her to ashes. [12] That the most single-hearted handmaid of theHoly Church, whose life was one long devotion to its ordinances, should survive in this grotesque myth, might serve to point a satireupon the vanity of earthly fame. The legend in its very extravaganceis a fanciful distortion of the truth. 

 * * * * *

_FORNOVO_

In the town of Parma there is one surpassingly strange relic of thepast. The palace of the Farnesi, like many a haunt of upstart tyrannyand beggared pride on these Italian plains, rises misshapen anddisconsolate above the stream that bears the city's name. The squalorof this grey-brown edifice of formless brick, left naked like thepalace of the same Farnesi at Piacenza, has something even horrid init now that only vague memory survives of its former uses. Theprincely _sprezzatura_ of its ancient occupants, careless of theseunfinished courts and unroofed galleries amid the splendour of theirpurfled silks and the glitter of their torchlight pageantry, hasyielded to sullen cynicism--the cynicism of arrested ruin andunreverend age. All that was satisfying to the senses and distractingto the eyesight in their transitory pomp has passed away, leaving asinister and naked shell. Remembrance can but summon up the crimes, the madness, the trivialities of those dead palace-builders. Anatmosphere of evil clings to the dilapidated walls, as though thetainted spirit of the infamous Pier Luigi still possessed the spot, onwhich his toadstool brood of princelings sprouted in the mud of theirmisdeeds. Enclosed in this huge labyrinth of brickwork is the relic ofwhich I spoke. It is the once world-famous Teatro Farnese, raised inthe year 1618 by Ranunzio Farnese for the marriage of Odoardo Farnesewith Margaret of Austria. Giambattista Aleotti, a native ofpageant-loving Ferrara, traced the stately curves and noble orders ofthe galleries, designed the columns that support the raftered roof, marked out the orchestra, arranged the stage, and breathed into thewhole the spirit of Palladio's most heroic neo-Latin style. Vast, built of wood, dishevelled, with broken statues and blurred coats ofarms, with its empty scene, its uncurling frescoes, its hangings allin rags, its cobwebs of two centuries, its dust and mildew anddiscoloured gold--this theatre, a sham in its best days, and now thatugliest of things, a sham unmasked and naked to the light of day, isyet sublime, because of its proportioned harmony, because of its grandRoman manner. The sight and feeling of it fasten upon the mind andabide in the memory like a nightmare, --like one of Piranesi's weirdestand most passion-haunted etchings for the _Carceri_. Idling there atnoon in the twilight of the dust-bedarkened windows, we fill the tiersof those high galleries with ladies, the space below with grooms andpages; the stage is ablaze with torches, and an Italian Masque, suchas our Marlowe dreamed of, fills the scene. But it is impossible todower these fancies with even such life as in healthier, happierruins phantasy may lend to imagination's figments. This theatre islike a maniac's skull, empty of all but unrealities and mockeries ofthings that are. The ghosts we raise here could never have been livingmen and women: _questi sciaurati non fur mai vivi. _ So clinging is thesense of instability that appertains to every fragment of that dry-rottyranny which seized by evil fortune in the sunset of her golden dayon Italy. 

In this theatre I mused one morning after visiting Fornovo; and thethoughts suggested by the battlefield found their proper atmosphere inthe dilapidated place. What, indeed, is the Teatro Farnese but asymbol of those hollow principalities which the despot and thestranger built in Italy after the fatal date of 1494, when nationalenthusiasm and political energy were expiring in a blaze of art, andwhen the Italians as a people had ceased to be; but when the phantomof their former life, surviving in high works of beauty, was stillsuperb by reason of imperishable style! How much in Italy of theRenaissance was, like this plank-built plastered theatre, a glorioussham! The sham was seen through then; and now it stands unmasked: andyet, strange to say, so perfect is its form that we respect the shamand yield our spirits to the incantation of its music. 

The battle of Fornovo, as modern battles go, was a paltry affair; andeven at the time it seemed sufficiently without result. Yet thetrumpets which rang on July 6, 1495, for the onset, sounded the_réveil_ of the modern world; and in the inconclusive termination ofthe struggle of that day, the Italians were already judged andsentenced as a nation. The armies who met that morning representedItaly and France, --Italy, the Sibyl of Renaissance; France, the Sibylof Revolution. At the fall of evening Europe was already lookingnorthward; and the last years of the fifteenth century were openingan act which closed in blood at Paris on the ending of the eighteenth. 

If it were not for thoughts like these, no one, I suppose, would takethe trouble to drive for two hours out of Parma to the little villageof Fornovo--a score of bare grey hovels on the margin of a pebblyriver-bed beneath the Apennines. The fields on either side, as far aseye can see, are beautiful indeed in May sunlight, painted here withflax, like shallow sheets of water reflecting a pale sky, and therewith clover red as blood. Scarce unfolded leaves sparkle likeflamelets of bright green upon the knotted vines, and the young cornis bending all one way beneath a western breeze. But not lessbeautiful than this is the whole broad plain of Lombardy; nor are thenightingales louder here than in the acacia trees around Pavia. As wedrive, the fields become less fertile, and the hills encroach upon thelevel, sending down their spurs upon that waveless plain like bluntrocks jutting out into a tranquil sea. When we reach the bed of theTaro, these hills begin to narrow on either hand, and the road rises. Soon they open out again with gradual curving lines, forming a kind ofamphitheatre filled up from flank to flank with the _ghiara_ or pebblybottom of the Taro. The Taro is not less wasteful than any other ofthe brotherhood of streams that pour from Alp or Apennine to swell thePo. It wanders, an impatient rivulet, through a wilderness ofboulders, uncertain of its aim, shifting its course with the season ofthe year, unless the jaws of some deep-cloven gully hold it tight andshow how insignificant it is. As we advance, the hills approach again;between their skirts there is nothing but the river-bed; and now onrising ground above the stream, at the point of juncture between theCeno and the Taro, we find Fornovo. Beyond the village the valleybroadens out once more, disclosing Apennines capped with winter snow. To the right descends the Ceno. To the left foams the Taro, followingwhose rocky channel we should come at last to Pontremoli and theTyrrhenian sea beside Sarzana. On a May-day of sunshine like thepresent, the Taro is a gentle stream. A waggon drawn by two white oxenhas just entered its channel, guided by a contadino with goat-skinleggings, wielding a long goad. The patient creatures stem the water, which rises to the peasant's thighs and ripples round the creakingwheels. Swaying to and fro, as the shingles shift upon the river-bed, they make their way across; and now they have emerged upon the stones;and now we lose them in a flood of sunlight. 

It was by this pass that Charles VIII. In 1495 returned from Tuscany, when the army of the League was drawn up waiting to intercept andcrush him in the mousetrap of Fornovo. No road remained for Charlesand his troops but the rocky bed of the Taro, running, as I havedescribed it, between the spurs of steep hills. It is true that thevalley of the Baganza leads, from a little higher up among themountains, into Lombardy. But this pass runs straight to Parma; and tofollow it would have brought the French upon the walls of a strongcity. Charles could not do otherwise than descend upon the village ofFornovo, and cut his way thence in the teeth of the Italian army overstream and boulder between the gorges of throttling mountain. Thefailure of the Italians to achieve what here upon the ground appearsso simple, delivered Italy hand-bound to strangers. Had they butsucceeded in arresting Charles and destroying his forces at Fornovo, it is just possible that then--even then, at the eleventh hour--Italymight have gained the sense of national coherence, or at least haveproved herself capable of holding by her leagues the foreigner at bay. As it was, the battle of Fornovo, in spite of Venetian bonfires andMantuan Madonnas of Victory, made her conscious of incompetence andconvicted her of cowardice. After Fornovo, her sons scarcely dared tohold their heads up in the field against invaders; and the battlesfought upon her soil were duels among aliens for the prize of Italy. 

In order to comprehend the battle of Fornovo in its bearings onItalian history, we must go back to the year 1492, and understand theconditions of the various States of Italy at that date. On April 8 inthat year, Lorenzo de' Medici, who had succeeded in maintaining apolitical equilibrium in the peninsula, expired, and was succeeded byhis son Piero, a vain and foolhardy young man, from whom no guidancecould be expected. On July 25, Innocent VIII. Died, and was succeededby the very worst Pope who has ever occupied S. Peter's chair, Roderigo Borgia, Alexander VI. It was felt at once that the old orderof things had somehow ended, and that a new era, the destinies ofwhich as yet remained incalculable, was opening for Italy. The chiefItalian powers, hitherto kept in equipoise by the diplomacy of Lorenzode' Medici, were these--the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Florence, the Papacy, and the kingdom of Naples. Minor States, such as the Republics of Genoa and Siena, the Duchies ofUrbino and Ferrara, the Marquisate of Mantua, the petty tyrannies ofRomagna, and the wealthy city of Bologna, were sufficiently importantto affect the balance of power, and to produce new combinations. Forthe present purpose it is, however, enough to consider the five greatPowers. 

After the peace of Constance, which freed the Lombard Communes fromImperial interference in the year 1183, Milan, by her geographicalposition, rose rapidly to be the first city of North Italy. Withoutnarrating the changes by which she lost her freedom as a Commune, itis enough to state that, earliest of all Italian cities, Milan passedinto the hands of a single family. The Visconti managed to convertthis flourishing commonwealth, with all its dependencies, into theirprivate property, ruling it exclusively for their own profit, usingits municipal institutions as the machinery of administration, andemploying the taxes which they raised upon its wealth for purelyselfish ends. When the line of the Visconti ended in the year 1447, their tyranny was continued by Francesco Sforza, the son of a poorsoldier of adventure, who had raised himself by his military genius, and had married Bianca, the illegitimate daughter of the lastVisconti. On the death of Francesco Sforza in 1466, he left two sons, Galeazzo Maria and Lodovico, surnamed Il Moro, both of whom weredestined to play a prominent part in history. Galeazzo Maria, dissolute, vicious, and cruel to the core, was murdered by his injuredsubjects in the year 1476. His son, Giovanni Galeazzo, aged eight, would in course of time have succeeded to the Duchy, had it not beenfor the ambition of his uncle Lodovico. Lodovico contrived to namehimself as Regent for his nephew, whom he kept, long after he had comeof age, in a kind of honourable prison. Virtual master in Milan, butwithout a legal title to the throne, unrecognised in his authority bythe Italian powers, and holding it from day to day by craft and fraud, Lodovico at last found his situation untenable; and it was thisdifficulty of an usurper to maintain himself in his despotism which, as we shall see, brought the French into Italy. 

Venice, the neighbour and constant foe of Milan, had become a closeoligarchy by a process of gradual constitutional development, whichthrew her government into the hands of a few nobles. She waspractically ruled by the hereditary members of the Grand Council. Eversince the year 1453, when Constantinople fell beneath the Turk, theVenetians had been more and more straitened in their Orientalcommerce, and were thrown back upon the policy of territorialaggrandisement in Italy, from which they had hitherto refrained asalien to the temperament of the Republic. At the end of the fifteenthcentury Venice therefore became an object of envy and terror to theItalian States. They envied her because she alone was tranquil, wealthy, powerful, and free. They feared her because they had goodreason to suspect her of encroachment; and it was foreseen that if shegot the upper hand in Italy, all Italy would be the property of thefamilies inscribed upon the Golden Book. It was thus alone that theItalians comprehended government. The principle of representationbeing utterly unknown, and the privileged burghers in each city beingregarded as absolute and lawful owners of the city and of everythingbelonging to it, the conquest of a town by a republic implied thepolitical extinction of that town and the disfranchisement of itsinhabitants in favour of the conquerors. 

Florence at this epoch still called itself a Republic; and of allItalian commonwealths it was by far the most democratic. Its history, unlike that of Venice, had been the history of continual and brusquechanges, resulting in the destruction of the old nobility, in theequalisation of the burghers, and in the formation of a newaristocracy of wealth. Prom this class of _bourgeois_ nobles sprangthe Medici, who, by careful manipulation of the State machinery, bythe creation of a powerful party devoted to their interests, byflattery of the people, by corruption, by taxation, and by constantscheming, raised themselves to the first place in the commonwealth, and became its virtual masters. In the year 1492 Lorenzo de' Medici, the most remarkable chief of this despotic family, died, bequeathinghis supremacy in the Republic to a son of marked incompetence. 

Since the Pontificate of Nicholas V. The See of Rome had entered upona new period of existence. The Popes no longer dreaded to reside inRome, but were bent upon making the metropolis of Christendom bothsplendid as a seat of art and learning, and also potent as the capitalof a secular kingdom. Though their fiefs in Romagna and the March werestill held but loosely, though their provinces swarmed with pettydespots who defied the Papal authority, and though the princely Romanhouses of Colonna and Orsini were still strong enough to terrorise theHoly Father in the Vatican, it was now clear that the Papal See mustin the end get the better of its adversaries, and consolidate itselfinto a first-rate Power. The internal spirit of the Papacy at thistime corresponded to its external policy. It was thoroughlysecularised by a series of worldly and vicious pontiffs, who had cleanforgotten what their title, Vicar of Christ, implied. Theyconsistently used their religious prestige to enforce their secularauthority, while by their temporal power they caused their religiousclaims to be respected. Corrupt and shameless, they indulgedthemselves in every vice, openly acknowledged their children, andturned Italy upside down in order to establish favourites and bastardsin the principalities they seized as spoils of war. 

The kingdom of Naples differed from any other state of Italy. Subjectcontinually to foreign rulers since the decay of the Greek Empire, governed in succession by the Normans, the Hohenstauffens, and theHouse of Anjou, it had never enjoyed the real independence, or thefree institutions, of the northern provinces; nor had it beenItalianised in the same sense as the rest of the peninsula. Despotism, which assumed so many forms in Italy, was here neither the tyranny ofa noble house, nor the masked autocracy of a burgher, nor yet theforceful sway of a condottiere. It had a dynastic character, resembling the monarchy of one of the great European nations, butmodified by the peculiar conditions of Italian statecraft. Owing tothis dynastic and monarchical complexion of the Neapolitan kingdom, semi-feudal customs flourished in the south far more than in the northof Italy. The barons were more powerful; and the destinies of theRegno often turned upon their feuds and quarrels with the Crown. Atthe same time the Neapolitan despots shared the uneasy circumstancesof all Italian potentates, owing to the uncertainty of their tenure, both as conquerors and aliens, and also as the nominal vassals of theHoly See. The rights of suzerainty which the Normans had yielded tothe Papacy over their southern conquests, and which the Popes hadarbitrarily exercised in favour of the Angevine princes, proved aconstant source of peril to the rest of Italy by rendering thesuccession to the crown of Naples doubtful. On the extinction of theAngevine line, however, the throne was occupied by a prince who had novalid title but that of the sword to its possession. Alfonso of Aragonconquered Naples in 1442, and neglecting his hereditary dominion, settled in his Italian capital. Possessed with the enthusiasm forliterature which was then the ruling passion of the Italians, and veryliberal to men of learning, Alfonso won for himself the surname ofMagnanimous. On his death, in 1458, he bequeathed his Spanishkingdom, together with Sicily and Sardinia, to his brother, and leftthe fruits of his Italian conquest to his bastard, Ferdinand. ThisFerdinand, whose birth was buried in profound obscurity, was thereigning sovereign in the year 1492. Of a cruel and sombretemperament, traitorous and tyrannical, Ferdinand was hated by hissubjects as much as Alfonso had been loved. He possessed, however, toa remarkable degree, the qualities which at that epoch constituted aconsummate statesman; and though the history of his reign is thehistory of plots and conspiracies, of judicial murders and forcibleassassinations, of famines produced by iniquitous taxation, and ofevery kind of diabolical tyranny, Ferdinand contrived to hold his own, in the teeth of a rebellious baronage or a maddened population. Hispolitical sagacity amounted almost to a prophetic instinct in the lastyears of his life, when he became aware that the old order wasbreaking up in Italy, and had cause to dread that Charles VIII. OfFrance would prove his title to the kingdom of Naples by force ofarms. [13]

Such were the component parts of the Italian body politic, with theaddition of numerous petty principalities and powers, adhering more orless consistently to one or other of the greater States. The wholecomplex machine was bound together by no sense of common interest, animated by no common purpose, amenable to no central authority. Evensuch community of feeling as one spoken language gives, was lacking. And yet Italy distinguished herself clearly from the rest of Europe, not merely as a geographical fact, but also as a people intellectuallyand spiritually one. The rapid rise of humanism had aided in producingthis national self-consciousness. Every State and every city wasabsorbed in the recovery of culture and in the development of art andliterature. Far in advance of the other European nations, the Italiansregarded the rest of the world as barbarous, priding themselves thewhile, in spite of mutual jealousies and hatreds, on their Italiccivilisation. They were enormously wealthy. The resources of the Papaltreasury, the private fortunes of the Florentine bankers, the richesof the Venetian merchants might have purchased all that France orGermany possessed of value. The single Duchy of Milan yielded to itsmasters 700, 000 golden florins of revenue, according to thecomputation of De Comines. In default of a confederative system, theseveral States were held in equilibrium by diplomacy. By far the mostimportant people, next to the despots and the captains of adventure, were ambassadors and orators. War itself had become a matter ofarrangement, bargain, and diplomacy. The game of stratagem was playedby generals who had been friends yesterday and might be friends againto-morrow, with troops who felt no loyalty whatever for the standardsunder which they listed. To avoid slaughter and to achieve the ends ofwarfare by parade and demonstration was the interest of every oneconcerned. Looking back upon Italy of the fifteenth century, takingaccount of her religious deadness and moral corruption, estimating theabsence of political vigour in the republics and the noxious tyrannyof the despots, analysing her lack of national spirit, and comparingher splendid life of cultivated ease with the want of martial energy, we can see but too plainly that contact with a simpler and strongerpeople could not but produce a terrible catastrophe. The Italiansthemselves, however, were far from comprehending this. Centuries ofundisturbed internal intrigue had accustomed them to play the game offorfeits with each other, and nothing warned them that the time wascome at which diplomacy, finesse, and craft would stand them in illstead against rapacious conquerors. 

The storm which began to gather over Italy in the year 1492 had itsfirst beginning in the North. Lodovico Sforza's position in the Duchyof Milan was becoming every day more difficult, when a slight and toall appearances insignificant incident converted his apprehension ofdanger into panic. It was customary for the States of Italy tocongratulate a new Pope on his election by their ambassadors; and thisceremony had now to be performed for Roderigo Borgia. Lodovicoproposed that his envoys should go to Rome together with those ofVenice, Naples, and Florence; but Piero de' Medici, whose vanity madehim wish to send an embassy in his own name, contrived that Lodovico'sproposal should be rejected both by Florence and the King of Naples. So strained was the situation of Italian affairs that Lodovico saw inthis repulse a menace to his own usurped authority. Feeling himselfisolated among the princes of his country, rebuffed by the Medici, andcoldly treated by the King of Naples, he turned in his anxiety toFrance, and advised the young king, Charles VIII. , to make good hisclaim upon the Regno. It was a bold move to bring the foreigner thusinto Italy; and even Lodovico, who prided himself upon his sagacity, could not see how things would end. He thought his situation sohazardous, however, that any change must be for the better. Moreover, a French invasion of Naples would tie the hands of his natural foe, King Ferdinand, whose granddaughter, Isabella of Aragon, had marriedGiovanni Galeazzo Sforza, and was now the rightful Duchess of Milan. When the Florentine ambassador at Milan asked him how he had thecourage to expose Italy to such peril, his reply betrayed the egotismof his policy: 'You talk to me of Italy; but when have I looked Italyin the face? No one ever gave a thought to my affairs. I have, therefore, had to give them such security as I could. '

Charles VIII. Was young, light-brained, romantic, and ruled by_parvenus_, who had an interest in disturbing the old order of themonarchy. He lent a willing ear to Lodovico's invitation, backed asthis was by the eloquence and passion of numerous Italian refugees andexiles. Against the advice of his more prudent counsellors, he taxedall the resources of his kingdom, and concluded treaties ondisadvantageous terms with England, Germany, and Spain, in order thathe might be able to concentrate all his attention upon the Italianexpedition. At the end of the year 1493, it was known that theinvasion was resolved upon. Gentile Becchi, the Florentine envoy atthe Court of France, wrote to Piero de' Medici: 'If the King succeeds, it is all over with Italy--_tutta a bordello. _' The extraordinaryselfishness of the several Italian States at this critical momentdeserves to be noticed. The Venetians, as Paolo Antonio Soderinidescribed them to Piero de' Medici, 'are of opinion that to keepquiet, and to see other potentates of Italy spending and suffering, cannot but be to their advantage. They trust no one, and feel surethey have enough money to be able at any moment to raise sufficienttroops, and so to guide events according to their inclinations. ' Asthe invasion was directed against Naples, Ferdinand of Aragondisplayed the acutest sense of the situation. 'Frenchmen, ' heexclaimed, in what appears like a prophetic passion when contrastedwith the cold indifference of others no less really menaced, 'havenever come into Italy without inflicting ruin; and this invasion, ifrightly considered, cannot but bring universal ruin, although it seemsto menace us alone. ' In his agony Ferdinand applied to Alexander VI. But the Pope looked coldly upon him, because the King of Naples, withrare perspicacity, had predicted that his elevation to the Papacywould prove disastrous to Christendom. Alexander preferred to allyhimself with Venice and Milan. Upon this Ferdinand wrote as follows:'It seems fated that the Popes should leave no peace in Italy. We arecompelled to fight; but the Duke of Bari (_i. E. _ Lodovico Sforza)should think what may ensue from the tumult he is stirring up. He whoraises this wind will not be able to lay the tempest when he likes. Let him look to the past, and he will see how every time that ourinternal quarrels have brought Powers from beyond the Alps into Italy, these have oppressed and lorded over her. '

Terribly verified as these words were destined to be, --and they wereno less prophetic in their political sagacity than Savonarola'sprediction of the Sword and bloody Scourge, --it was now too late toavert the coming ruin. On March 1, 1494, Charles was with his army atLyons. Early in September he had crossed the pass of Mont Genêvre andtaken up his quarters in the town of Asti. There is no need todescribe in detail the holiday march of the French troops throughLombardy, Tuscany, and Rome, until, without having struck a blow ofconsequence, the gates of Naples opened to receive the conqueror uponFebruary 22, 1495. Philippe de Comines, who parted from the King atAsti and passed the winter as his envoy at Venice, has more than oncerecorded his belief that nothing but the direct interposition ofProvidence could have brought so mad an expedition to so successful aconclusion. 'Dieu monstroit conduire l'entreprise, ' No sooner, however, was Charles installed in Naples than the States of Italybegan to combine against him. Lodovico Sforza had availed himself ofthe general confusion consequent upon the first appearance of theFrench, to poison his nephew. He was, therefore, now the titular, aswell as virtual, Lord of Milan. So far, he had achieved what hedesired, and had no further need of Charles. The overtures he now madeto the Venetians and the Pope terminated in a League between thesePowers for the expulsion of the French from Italy. Germany and Spainentered into the same alliance; and De Comines, finding himselftreated with marked coldness by the Signory of Venice, despatched acourier to warn Charles in Naples of the coming danger. After a stayof only fifty days in his new capital, the French King hurriednorthward. Moving quickly through the Papal States and Tuscany, heengaged his troops in the passes of the Apennines near Pontremoli, andon July 5, 1495, took up his quarters in the village of Fornovo. DeComines reckons that his whole fighting force at this time did notexceed 9, 000 men, with fourteen pieces of artillery. Against him atthe opening of the valley was the army of the League, numbering some35, 000 men, of whom three-fourths were supplied by Venice, the rest byLodovico Sforza and the German Emperor. Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis ofMantua, was the general of the Venetian forces; and on him, therefore, fell the real responsibility of the battle. 

De Comines remarks on the imprudence of the allies, who allowedCharles to advance as far as Fornovo, when it was their obvious policyto have established themselves in the village and so have caught theFrench troops in a trap. It was a Sunday when the French marched downupon Fornovo. Before them spread the plain of Lombardy, and beyond itthe white crests of the Alps. 'We were, ' says De Comines, 'in a valleybetween two little mountain flanks, and in that valley ran a riverwhich could easily be forded on foot, except when it is swelled withsudden rains. The whole valley was a bed of gravel and big stones, very difficult for horses, about a quarter of a league in breadth, andon the right bank lodged our enemies. ' Any one who has visited Fornovocan understand the situation of the two armies. Charles occupied thevillage on the right bank of the Taro. On the same bank, extendingdownward toward the plain, lay the host of the allies; and in orderthat Charles should escape them, it was necessary that he should crossthe Taro, just below its junction with the Ceno, and reach Lombardy bymarching in a parallel line with his foes. 

All through the night of Sunday it thundered and rained incessantly;so that on the Monday morning the Taro was considerably swollen. Atseven o'clock the King sent for De Comines, who found him alreadyarmed and mounted on the finest horse he had ever seen. The name ofthis charger was _Savoy_. He was black, one-eyed, and of middlingheight; and to his great courage, as we shall see, Charles owed lifeupon that day. The French army, ready for the march, now took to thegravelly bed of the Taro, passing the river at a distance of about aquarter of a league from the allies. As the French left Fornovo, thelight cavalry of their enemies entered the village and began to attackthe baggage. At the same time the Marquis of Mantua, with the flowerof his men-at-arms, crossed the Taro and harassed the rear of theFrench host; while raids from the right bank to the left wereconstantly being made by sharpshooters and flying squadrons. 'At thismoment, ' says De Comines, 'not a single man of us could have escapedif our ranks had once been broken. ' The French army was divided intothree main bodies. The vanguard consisted of some 350 men-at-arms, 3000 Switzers, 300 archers of the Guard, a few mounted crossbow-men, and the artillery. Next came the Battle, and after this the rearguard. At the time when the Marquis of Mantua made his attack, the Frenchrearguard had not yet crossed the river. Charles quitted the van, puthimself at the head of his chivalry, and charged the Italian horsemen, driving them back, some to the village and others to their camp. DeComines observes, that had the Italian knights been supported in thispassage of arms by the light cavalry of the Venetian force, calledStradiots, the French must have been outnumbered, thrown intoconfusion, and defeated. As it was, these Stradiots were engaged inplundering the baggage of the French; and the Italians, accustomed tobloodless encounters, did not venture, in spite of their immensesuperiority of numbers, to renew the charge. In the pursuit ofGonzaga's horsemen Charles outstripped his staff, and was left almostalone to grapple with a little band of mounted foemen. It was herethat his noble horse, Savoy, saved his person by plunging and chargingtill assistance came up from the French, and enabled the King toregain his van. 

It is incredible, considering the nature of the ground and the numberof the troops engaged, that the allies should not have returned to theattack and have made the passage of the French into the plainimpossible. De Comines, however, assures us that the actual engagementonly lasted a quarter of an hour, and the pursuit of the Italiansthree quarters of an hour. After they had once resolved to fly, theythrew away their lances and betook themselves to Reggio and Parma. Socomplete was their discomfiture, that De Comines gravely blames thewant of military genius and adventure in the French host. If, insteadof advancing along the left bank of the Taro and there taking up hisquarters for the night, Charles had recrossed the stream and pursuedthe army of the allies, he would have had the whole of Lombardy at hisdiscretion. As it was, the French army encamped not far from the sceneof the action in great discomfort and anxiety. De Comines had tobivouac in a vineyard, without even a mantle to wrap round him, havinglent his cloak to the King in the morning; and as it had been pouringall day, the ground could not have afforded very luxurious quarters. The same extraordinary luck which had attended the French in theirwhole expedition, now favoured their retreat; and the samepusillanimity which the allies had shown at Fornovo, prevented themfrom re-forming and engaging with the army of Charles upon the plain. One hour before daybreak on Tuesday morning, the French broke up theircamp and succeeded in clearing the valley. That night they lodged atFiorenzuola, the next at Piacenza, and so on; till on the eighth daythey arrived at Asti without having been so much as incommoded by thearmy of the allies in their rear. 

Although the field of Fornovo was in reality so disgraceful to theItalians, they reckoned it a victory upon the technical pretence thatthe camp and baggage of the French had been seized. Illuminations andrejoicings made the piazza of S. Mark in Venice gay, and Francesco daGonzaga had the glorious Madonna della Vittoria painted for him byMantegna, in commemoration of what ought only to have been rememberedwith shame. 

A fitting conclusion to this sketch, connecting its close with thecommencement, may be found in some remarks upon the manner of warfareto which the Italians of the Renaissance had become accustomed, andwhich proved so futile on the field of Fornovo. During the middleages, and in the days of the Communes, the whole male population ofItaly had fought light-armed on foot. Merchant and artisan left thecounting-house and the workshop, took shield and pike, and salliedforth to attack the barons in their castles, or to meet the Emperor'stroops upon the field. It was with this national militia that thecitizens of Florence freed their _Contado_ of the nobles, and theburghers of Lombardy gained the battle of Legnano. In course of time, by a process of change which it is not very easy to trace, heavilyarmed cavalry began to take the place of infantry in mediæval warfare. Men-at-arms, as they were called, encased from head to foot in iron, and mounted upon chargers no less solidly caparisoned, drove thefoot-soldiers before them at the points of their long lances. Nowherein Italy do they seem to have met with the fierce resistance which thebears of the Swiss Oberland and the bulls of Uri offered to theknights of Burgundy. No Tuscan Arnold von Winkelried clasped a dozenlances to his bosom that the foeman's ranks might thus be broken atthe cost of his own life; nor did it occur to the Italian burghers tomeet the charge of the horsemen with squares protected by bristlingspears. They seem, on the contrary, to have abandoned military servicewith the readiness of men whose energies were already absorbed in theaffairs of peace. To become a practised and efficient man-at-armsrequired long training and a life's devotion. So much time theburghers of the free towns could not spare to military service, whilethe petty nobles were only too glad to devote themselves to sohonourable a calling. Thus it came to pass that a class ofprofessional fighting-men was gradually formed in Italy, whoseservices the burghers and the princes bought, and by whom the wars ofthe peninsula were regularly farmed by contract. Wealth and luxury inthe great cities continued to increase; and as the burghers grew morecomfortable, they were less inclined to take the field in their ownpersons, and more disposed to vote large sums of money for thepurchase of necessary aid. At the same time this system suited thedespots, since it spared them the peril of arming their own subjects, while they taxed them to pay the services of foreign captains. Warthus became a commerce. Romagna, the Marches of Ancona, and otherparts of the Papal dominions, supplied a number of petty nobles whosewhole business in life it was to form companies of trained horsemen, and with these bands to hire themselves out to the republics and thedespots. Gain was the sole purpose of these captains. They sold theirservice to the highest bidder, fighting irrespectively of principle orpatriotism, and passing with the coldest equanimity from the camp ofone master to that of his worst foe. It was impossible that truemilitary spirit should survive this prostitution of the art of war. Aspecies of mock warfare prevailed in Italy. Battles were fought with aview to booty more than victory; prisoners were taken for the sake ofransom; bloodshed was carefully avoided, for the men who fought oneither side in any pitched field had been comrades with their presentfoemen in the last encounter, and who could tell how soon the generalof the one host might not need his rival's troops to recruit his ownranks? Like every genuine institution of the Italian Renaissance, warfare was thus a work of fine art, a masterpiece of intellectualsubtlety; and like the Renaissance itself, this peculiar form ofwarfare was essentially transitional. The cannon and the musket werealready in use; and it only required one blast of gunpowder to turnthe sham-fight of courtly, traitorous, finessing captains of adventureinto something terribly more real. To men like the Marquis of Mantuawar had been a highly profitable game of skill; to men like theMaréchal de Gié it was a murderous horseplay; and this difference theItalians were not slow to perceive. When they cast away their lancesat Fornovo, and fled--in spite of their superior numbers--never toreturn, one fair-seeming sham of the fifteenth century became a visionof the past. 

 * * * * *

_FLORENCE AND THE MEDICI_

 Di Firenze in prima si divisono intra loro i nobili, dipoi i nobili e il popolo, e in ultimo il popolo e la plebe; e molte volte occorse che una di queste parti rimasa superiore, si divise in due. --MACHIAVELLI. 

I

Florence, like all Italian cities, owed her independence to the duelof the Papacy and Empire. The transference of the imperial authoritybeyond the Alps had enabled the burghs of Lombardy and Tuscany toestablish a form of self-government. This government was based uponthe old municipal organisation of duumvirs and decemvirs. It was, infact, nothing more or less than a survival from the ancient Romansystem. The proof of this was, that while vindicating their rights astowns, the free cities never questioned the validity of the imperialtitle. Even after the peace of Constance in 1183, when FrederickBarbarossa acknowledged their autonomy, they received within theirwalls a supreme magistrate, with power of life and death and ultimateappeal in all decisive questions, whose title of Potestà indicatedthat he represented the imperial power--Potestas. It was not by theassertion of any right, so much as by the growth of custom, and by theweakness of the Emperors, that in course of time each city became asovereign State. The theoretical supremacy of the Empire prevented anyother authority from taking the first place in Italy. On the otherhand, the practical inefficiency of the Emperors to play their partencouraged the establishment of numerous minor powers amenable to nocontrolling discipline. 

The free cities derived their strength from industry, and had nothingin common with the nobles of the surrounding country. Broadlyspeaking, the population of the towns included what remained in Italyof the old Roman people. This Roman stock was nowhere stronger than inFlorence and Venice--Florence defended from barbarian incursions byher mountains and marshes, Venice by the isolation of her lagoons. Thenobles, on the contrary, were mostly of foreign origin--Germans, Franks, and Lombards, who had established themselves as feudal lordsin castles apart from the cities. The force which the burghs acquiredas industrial communities was soon turned against these nobles. Thelarger cities, like Milan and Florence, began to make war upon thelords of castles, and to absorb into their own territory the smalltowns and villages around them. Thus in the social economy of theItalians there were two antagonistic elements ready to rangethemselves beneath any banners that should give the form of legitimatewarfare to their mutual hostility. It was the policy of the Church inthe twelfth century to support the cause of the cities, using them asa weapon against the Empire, and stimulating the growing ambition ofthe burghers. In this way Italy came to be divided into the twoworld-famous factions known as Guelf and Ghibelline. The strugglebetween Guelf and Ghibelline was the struggle of the Papacy for thedepression of the Empire, the struggle of the great burghs face toface with feudalism, the struggle of the old Italie stock enclosed incities with the foreign nobles established in fortresses. When theChurch had finally triumphed by the extirpation of the House ofHohenstaufen, this conflict of Guelf and Ghibelline was really ended. Until the reign of Charles V. No Emperor interfered to any purpose inItalian affairs. At the same time the Popes ceased to wield aformidable power. Having won the battle by calling in the French, theysuffered the consequences of this policy by losing their hold on Italyduring the long period of their exile at Avignon. The Italians, leftwithout either Pope or Emperor, were free to pursue their course ofinternal development, and to prosecute their quarrels amongthemselves. But though the names of Guelf and Ghibelline lost theirold significance after the year 1266 (the date of King Manfred'sdeath), these two factions had so divided Italy that they continued toplay a prominent part in her annals. Guelf still meant constitutionalautonomy, meant the burgher as against the noble, meant industry asopposed to feudal lordship. Ghibelline meant the rule of the few overthe many, meant tyranny, meant the interest of the noble as againstthe merchant and the citizen. These broad distinctions must be bornein mind, if we seek to understand how it was that a city like Florencecontinued to be governed by parties, the European force of which hadpassed away. 

II

Florence first rose into importance during the papacy of Innocent III. Up to this date she had been a town of second-rate distinction even inTuscany. Pisa was more powerful by arms and commerce. Lucca was theold seat of the dukes and marquises of Tuscany. But between the years1200 and 1250 Florence assumed the place she was to holdthenceforward, by heading the league of Tuscan cities formed tosupport the Guelf party against the Ghibellines. Formally adopting theGuelf cause, the Florentines made themselves the champions ofmunicipal liberty in Central Italy; and while they declared waragainst the Ghibelline cities, they endeavoured to stamp out the veryname of noble in their State. It is not needful to describe thevarying fortunes of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, the burghers and thenobles, during the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenthcenturies. Suffice it to say that through all the vicissitudes of thatstormy period the name Guelf became more and more associated withrepublican freedom in Florence. At last, after the final triumph ofthat party in 1253, the Guelfs remained victors in the city. Associating the glory of their independence with Guelf principles, thecitizens of Florence perpetuated within their State a faction that, inits turn, was destined to prove perilous to liberty. 

When it became clear that the republic was to rule itself henceforthuntrammelled by imperial interference, the people divided themselvesinto six districts, and chose for each district two Ancients, whoadministered the government in concert with the Potestà and theCaptain of the People. The Ancients were a relic of the old Romanmunicipal organisation. The Potestà who was invariably a nobleforeigner selected by the people, represented the extinct imperialright, and exercised the power of life and death within the city. TheCaptain of the People, who was also a foreigner, headed the burghersin their military capacity, for at that period the troops were leviedfrom the citizens themselves in twenty companies. The body of thecitizens, or the _popolo_, were ultimately sovereigns in the State. Assembled under the banners of their several companies, they formed a_parlamento_ for delegating their own power to each successivegovernment. Their representatives, again, arranged in two councils, called the Council of the People and the Council of the Commune, underthe presidency of the Captain of the People and the Potestà, ratifiedthe measures which had previously been proposed and carried by theexecutive authority or Signoria. Under this simple State system theFlorentines placed themselves at the head of the Tuscan League, foughtthe battles of the Church, asserted their sovereignty by issuing thegolden florin of the republic, and flourished until 1266. 

III

In that year an important change was effected in the Constitution. The whole population of Florence consisted, on the one hand, of noblesor Grandi, as they were called in Tuscany, and on the other hand ofworking people. The latter, divided into traders and handicraftsmen, were distributed in guilds called Arti; and at that time there wereseven Greater and five Lesser Arti, the most influential of all beingthe Guild of the Wool Merchants. These guilds had their halls formeeting, their colleges of chief officers, their heads, called Consolior Priors, and their flags. In 1266 it was decided that theadministration of the commonwealth should be placed simply and whollyin the hands of the Arti, and the Priors of these industrial companiesbecame the lords or Signory of Florence. No inhabitant of the city whohad not enrolled himself as a craftsman in one of the guilds couldexercise any function of burghership. To be _scioperato_, or withoutindustry, was to be without power, without rank or place of honour inthe State. The revolution which placed the Arts at the head of therepublic had the practical effect of excluding the Grandi altogetherfrom the government. Violent efforts were made by these noblefamilies, potent through their territorial possessions and foreignconnections, and trained from boyhood in the use of arms, to recoverthe place from which the new laws thrust them: but their menacingattitude, instead of intimidating the burghers, roused their anger anddrove them to the passing of still more stringent laws. In 1293, afterthe Ghibellines had been defeated in the great battle of Campaldino, aseries of severe enactments, called the Ordinances of Justice, weredecreed against the unruly Grandi. All civic rights were taken fromthem; the severest penalties were attached to their slightestinfringement of municipal law; their titles to land were limited; theprivilege of living within the city walls was allowed them only undergalling restrictions; and, last not least, a supreme magistrate, namedthe Gonfalonier of Justice, was created for the special purpose ofwatching them and carrying out the penal code against them. Henceforward Florence was governed exclusively by merchants andartisans. The Grandi hastened to enrol themselves in the guilds, exchanging their former titles and dignities for the solid privilegeof burghership. The exact parallel to this industrial constitution fora commonwealth, carrying on wars with emperors and princes, holdinghaughty captains in its pay, and dictating laws to subject cities, cannot, I think, be elsewhere found in history. It is as unique as theFlorence of Dante and Giotto is unique. While the people was guardingitself thus stringently against the Grandi, a separate body wascreated for the special purpose of extirpating the Ghibellines. Apermanent committee of vigilance, called the College or the Captainsof the Guelf Party, was established. It was their function toadminister the forfeited possessions of Ghibelline rebels, to hunt outsuspected citizens, to prosecute them for Ghibellinism, to judge them, and to punish them as traitors to the commonwealth. This body, like alittle State within the State, proved formidable to the republicitself through the unlimited and undefined sway it exercised overburghers whom it chose to tax with treason. In course of time itbecame the oligarchical element within the Florentine democracy, andthreatened to change the free constitution of the city into agovernment conducted by a few powerful families. 

There is no need to dwell in detail on the internal difficulties ofFlorence during the first half of the fourteenth century. Two maincircumstances, however, require to be briefly noticed. These are (i)the contest of the Blacks and Whites, so famous through the partplayed in it by Dante; and (ii) the tyranny of the Duke[1] of Athens, Walter de Brienne. The feuds of the Blacks and Whites broke up thecity into factions, and produced such anarchy that at last it wasfound necessary to place the republic under the protection of foreignpotentates. Charles of Valois was first chosen, and after him the Dukeof Athens, who took up his residence in the city. Entrusted withdictatorial authority, he used his power to form a military despotism. Though his reign of violence lasted rather less than a year, it boreimportant fruits; for the tyrant, seeking to support himself upon thefavour of the common people, gave political power to the Lesser Artsat the expense of the Greater, and confused the old State-system byenlarging the democracy. The net result of these events for Florencewas, first, that the city became habituated to rancorous party-strife, involving exiles and proscriptions; and, secondly, that it lost itsprimitive social hierarchy of classes. 

IV

After the Guelfs had conquered the Ghibellines, and the people hadabsorbed the Grandi in their guilds, the next chapter in the troubledhistory of Florence was the division of the Popolo against itself. Civil strife now declared itself as a conflict between labour andcapital. The members of the Lesser Arts, craftsmen who plied tradessubordinate to those of the Greater Arts, rose up against their socialand political superiors, demanding a larger share in the government, amore equal distribution of profits, higher wages, and privileges thatshould place them on an absolute equality with the wealthy merchants. It was in the year 1378 that the proletariate broke out intorebellion. Previous events had prepared the way for this revolt. Firstof all, the republic had been democratised through the destruction ofthe Grandi and through the popular policy pursued to gain his own endsby the Duke of Athens. Secondly, society had been shaken to its veryfoundation by the great plague of 1348. Both Boccaccio and MatteoVillani draw lively pictures of the relaxed morality and loss of orderconsequent upon this terrible disaster; nor had thirty years sufficedto restore their relative position to grades and ranks confounded byan overwhelming calamity. We may therefore reckon the great plague of1348 among the causes which produced the anarchy of 1378. Rising in amass to claim their privileges, the artisans ejected the Signory fromthe Public Palace, and for awhile Florence was at the mercy of themob. It is worthy of notice that the Medici, whose name is scarcelyknown before this epoch, now came for one moment to the front. Salvestro de' Medici was Gonfalonier of Justice at the time when thetumult first broke out. He followed the faction of the handicraftsmen, and became the hero of the day. I cannot discover that he did morethan extend a sort of passive protection to their cause. Yet there isno doubt that the attachment of the working classes to the House ofMedici dates from this period. The rebellion of 1378 is known inFlorentine history as the Tumult of the Ciompi. The name Ciompistrictly means the Wool-Carders. One set of operatives in the city, and that the largest, gave its title to the whole body of thelabourers. For some months these craftsmen governed the republic, appointing their own Signory and passing laws in their own interest;but, as is usual, the proletariate found itself incapable of sustainedgovernment. The ambition and discontent of the Ciompi foamedthemselves away, and industrious working men began to see that tradewas languishing and credit on the wane. By their own act at last theyrestored the government to the Priors of the Greater Arti. Still themovement had not been without grave consequences. It completed thelevelling of classes, which had been steadily advancing from the firstin Florence. After the Ciompi riot there was no longer not only anydistinction between noble and burgher, but the distinction betweengreater and lesser guilds was practically swept away. The classes, parties, and degrees in the republic were so broken up, ground down, and mingled, that thenceforth the true source of power in the Statewas wealth combined with personal ability. In other words, the properpolitical conditions had been formed for unscrupulous adventurers. Florence had become a democracy without social organisation, whichmight fall a prey to oligarchs or despots. What remained of deeplyrooted feuds or factions--animosities against the Grandi, hatred forthe Ghibellines, jealousy of labour and capital--offered so manypoints of leverage for stirring the passions of the people and forcovering personal ambition with a cloak of public zeal. The time wascome for the Albizzi to attempt an oligarchy, and for the Medici tobegin the enslavement of the State. 

V

The Constitution of Florence offered many points of weakness to theattacks of such intriguers. In the first place it was in its originnot a political but an industrial organisation--a simple group ofguilds invested with the sovereign authority. Its two most powerfulengines, the Gonfalonier of Justice and the Guelf College, had beenformed, not with a view to the preservation of the government, butwith the purpose of quelling the nobles and excluding a detestedfaction. It had no permanent head, like the Doge of Venice; no fixedsenate like the Venetian Grand Council; its chief magistrates, theSignory, were elected for short periods of two months, and their modeof election was open to the gravest criticism. Supposed to be chosenby lot, they were really selected from lists drawn up by the factionsin power from time to time. These factions contrived to exclude thenames of all but their adherents from the bags, or _borse_, in whichthe burghers eligible for election had to be inscribed. Furthermore, it was not possible for this shifting Signory to conduct affairsrequiring sustained effort and secret deliberation; therefore recoursewas being continually had to dictatorial Commissions. The people, summoned in parliament upon the Great Square, were asked to conferplenipotentiary authority upon a committee called _Balia_, whoproceeded to do what they chose in the State, and who retained powerafter the emergency for which they were created passed away. The sameinstability in the supreme magistracy led to the appointment ofspecial commissioners for war, and special councils, or _Pratiche_, for the management of each department. Such supplementary commissionsnot only proved the weakness of the central authority, but they werealways liable to be made the instruments of party warfare. The GuelfCollege was another and a different source of danger to the State. Notacting under the control of the Signory, but using its own initiative, this powerful body could proscribe and punish burghers on the meresuspicion of Ghibellinism. Though the Ghibelline faction had become anempty name, the Guelf College excluded from the franchise all andevery whom they chose on any pretext to admonish. Under this mildphrase, _to admonish_, was concealed a cruel exercise of tyranny--itmeant to warn a man that he was suspected of treason, and that he hadbetter relinquish the exercise of his burghership. By free use of thisengine of Admonition, the Guelf College rendered their enemiesvoiceless in the State, and were able to pack the Signory and thecouncils with their own creatures. Another important defect in theFlorentine Constitution was the method of imposing taxes. This wasdone by no regular system. The party in power made what estimate itchose of a man's capacity to bear taxation, and called upon him forextraordinary loans. In this way citizens were frequently driven intobankruptcy and exile; and since to be a debtor to the State deprived aburgher of his civic rights, severe taxation was one of the best waysof silencing and neutralising a dissentient. 

I have enumerated these several causes of weakness in the FlorentineState-system, partly because they show how irregularly theConstitution had been formed by the patching and extension of a simpleindustrial machine to suit the needs of a great commonwealth; partlybecause it was through these defects that the democracy mergedgradually into a despotism. The art of the Medici consisted in ascientific comprehension of these very imperfections, a methodic useof them for their own purposes, and a steady opposition to anyattempts made to substitute a stricter system. The Florentines haddetermined to be an industrial community, governing themselves on theco-operative principle, dividing profits, sharing losses, and exposingtheir magistrates to rigid scrutiny. All this in theory was excellent. Had they remained an unambitious and peaceful commonwealth, engaged inthe wool and silk trade, it might have answered. Modern Europe mighthave admired the model of a communistic and commercial democracy. Butwhen they engaged in aggressive wars, and sought to enslavesister-cities like Pisa and Lucca, it was soon found that their simpletrading constitution would not serve. They had to piece it out withsubordinate machinery, cumbrous, difficult to manage, ill-adapted tothe original structure. Each limb of this subordinate machinery, moreover, was a _point d'appui_ for insidious and self-seeking partyleaders. 

Florence, in the middle of the fourteenth century, was a vast beehiveof industry. Distinctions of rank among burghers, qualified to voteand hold office, were theoretically unknown. Highly educated men, ofmore than princely wealth, spent their time in shops andcounting-houses, and trained their sons to follow trades. Militaryservice at this period was abandoned by the citizens; they preferredto pay mercenary troops for the conduct of their wars. Nor was there, as in Venice, any outlet for their energies upon the seas. Florencehad no navy, no great port--she only kept a small fleet for theprotection of her commerce. Thus the vigour of the commonwealth wasconcentrated on itself; while the influence of the citizens, throughtheir affiliated trading-houses, correspondents, and agents, extendedlike a network over Europe. In a community of this kind it was naturalthat wealth--rank and titles being absent--should alone conferdistinction. Accordingly we find that out of the very bosom of thepeople a new plutocratic aristocracy begins to rise. The Grandi areno more; but certain families achieve distinction by their riches, their numbers, their high spirit, and their ancient place of honour inthe State. These nobles of the purse obtained the name of _PopolaniNobili_; and it was they who now began to play at high stakes for thesupreme power. In all the subsequent vicissitudes of Florence everychange takes place by intrigue and by clever manipulation of thepolitical machine. Recourse is rarely had to violence of any kind, andthe leaders of revolutions are men of the yard-measure, never of thesword. The despotism to which the republic eventually succumbed was noless commercial than the democracy had been. Florence in the days ofher slavery remained a _Popolo_. 

VI

The opening of the second half of the fourteenth century had beensignalised by the feuds of two great houses, both risen from thepeople. These were the Albizzi and the Ricci. At this epoch there hadbeen a formal closing of the lists of burghers;--henceforth no newfamilies who might settle in the city could claim the franchise, votein the assemblies, or hold magistracies. The Guelf College used theirold engine of admonition to persecute _novi homines_, whom theydreaded as opponents. At the head of this formidable organisation theAlbizzi placed themselves, and worked it with such skill that theysucceeded in driving the Ricci out of all participation in thegovernment. The tumult of the Ciompi formed but an episode in theircareer toward oligarchy; indeed, that revolution only rendered thepolitical material of the Florentine republic more plastic in thehands of intriguers, by removing the last vestiges of classdistinctions and by confusing the old parties of the State. 

When the Florentines in 1387 engaged in their long duel with GianGaleazzo Visconti, the difficulty of conducting this war without somepermanent central authority still further confirmed the power of therising oligarchs. The Albizzi became daily more autocratic, until in1393 their chief, Maso degli Albizzi, a man of strong will and prudentpolicy, was chosen Gonfalonier of Justice. Assuming the sway of adictator he revised the list of burghers capable of holding office, struck out the private opponents of his house, and excluded all namesbut those of powerful families who were well affected towards anaristocratic government. The great house of the Alberti were exiled ina body, declared rebels, and deprived of their possessions, for noreason except that they seemed dangerous to the Albizzi. It was invain that the people murmured against these arbitrary acts. The newrulers were omnipotent in the Signory, which they packed with theirown men, in the great guilds, and in the Guelf College. All themachinery invented by the industrial community for its self-managementand self-defence was controlled and manipulated by a close body ofaristocrats, with the Albizzi at their head. It seemed as thoughFlorence, without any visible alteration in her forms of government, was rapidly becoming an oligarchy even less open than the Venetianrepublic. Meanwhile the affairs of the State were most flourishing. The strong-handed masters of the city not only held the Duke of Milanin check, and prevented him from turning Italy into a kingdom; theyfurthermore acquired the cities of Pisa, Livorno, Arezzo, Montepulciano, and Cortona, for Florence, making her the mistress ofall Tuscany, with the exception of Siena, Lucca, and Volterra. Masodegli Albizzi was the ruling spirit of the commonwealth, spending theenormous sum of 11, 500, 000 golden florins on war, raising sumptuousedifices, protecting the arts, and acting in general like a powerfuland irresponsible prince. 

In spite of public prosperity there were signs, however, that thisrule of a few families could not last. Their government was onlymaintained by continual revision of the lists of burghers, byelimination of the disaffected, and by unremitting personal industry. They introduced no new machinery into the Constitution whereby thepeople might be deprived of its titular sovereignty, or their owndictatorship might be continued with a semblance of legality. Again, they neglected to win over the new nobles (_nobili popolani_) in abody to their cause; and thus they were surrounded by rivals ready tospring upon them when a false step should be made. The Albizzioligarchy was a masterpiece of art, without any force to sustain itbut the craft and energy of its constructors. It had not grown up, like the Venetian oligarchy, by the gradual assimilation to itself ofall the vigour in the State. It was bound, sooner or later, to yieldto the renascent impulse of democracy inherent in Florentineinstitutions. 

VII

Maso degli Albizzi died in 1417. He was succeeded in the government byhis old friend, Niccolo da Uzzano, a man of great eloquence andwisdom, whose single word swayed the councils of the people as helisted. Together with him acted Maso's son, Rinaldo, a youth of evenmore brilliant talents than his father, frank, noble, andhigh-spirited, but far less cautious. 

The oligarchy, which these two men undertook to manage, hadaccumulated against itself the discontent of overtaxed, disfranchised, jealous burghers. The times, too, were bad. Pursuing the policy ofMaso, the Albizzi engaged the city in a tedious and unsuccessful warwith Filippo Maria Visconti, which cost 350, 000 golden florins, andbrought no credit. In order to meet extraordinary expenses they raisednew public loans, thereby depreciating the value of the old Florentinefunds. "What was worse, they imposed forced subsidies with grievousinequality upon the burghers, passing over their friends andadherents, and burdening their opponents with more than could beborne. This imprudent financial policy began the ruin of the Albizzi. It caused a clamour in the city for a new system of more justtaxation, which was too powerful to be resisted. The voice of thepeople made itself loudly heard; and with the people on this occasionsided Giovanni de' Medici. This was in 1427. 

It is here that the Medici appear upon that memorable scene where inthe future they are to play the first part. Giovanni de' Medici didnot belong to the same branch of his family as the Salvestro whofavoured the people at the time of the Ciompi Tumult. But he adoptedthe same popular policy. To his sons Cosimo and Lorenzo he bequeathedon his deathbed the rule that they should invariably adhere to thecause of the multitude, found their influence on that, and avoid thearts of factious and ambitious leaders. In his own life he had pursuedthis course of conduct, acquiring a reputation for civic moderationand impartiality that endeared him to the people and stood hischildren in good stead. Early in his youth Giovanni found himselfalmost destitute by reason of the imposts charged upon him by theoligarchs. He possessed, however, the genius for money-making to arare degree, and passed his manhood as a banker, amassing the largestfortune of any private citizen in Italy. In his old age he devotedhimself to the organisation of his colossal trading business, andabstained, as far as possible, from political intrigues. Men observedthat they rarely met him in the Public Palace or on the Great Square. 

Cosimo de' Medici was thirty years old when his father Giovanni died, in 1429. During his youth he had devoted all his time and energy tobusiness, mastering the complicated affairs of Giovanni'sbanking-house, and travelling far and wide through Europe to extendits connections. This education made him a consummate financier; andthose who knew him best were convinced that his ambition was set ongreat things. However quietly he might begin, it was clear that heintended to match himself, as a leader of the plebeians, against theAlbizzi. The foundations he prepared for future action were equallycharacteristic of the man, of Florence, and of the age. Commanding theenormous capital of the Medicean bank he contrived, at any sacrificeof temporary convenience, to lend money to the State for war expenses, engrossing in his own hands a large portion of the public debt ofFlorence. At the same time his agencies in various European capitalsenabled him to keep his own wealth floating far beyond the reach offoes within the city. A few years of this system ended in so completea confusion between Cosimo's trade and the finances of Florence thatthe bankruptcy of the Medici, however caused, would have compromisedthe credit of the State and the fortunes of the fund-holders. Cosimo, in a word, made himself necessary to Florence by the wise use of hisriches. Furthermore, he kept his eye upon the list of burghers, lending money to needy citizens, putting good things in the way ofstruggling traders, building up the fortunes of men who were disposedto favour his party in the State, ruining his opponents by thelegitimate process of commercial competition, and, when occasionoffered, introducing new voters into the Florentine Council by payingoff the debts of those who were disqualified by poverty from using thefranchise. While his capital was continually increasing he livedfrugally, and employed his wealth solely for the consolidation of hispolitical influence. By these arts Cosimo became formidable to theoligarchs and beloved by the people. His supporters were numerous, andheld together by the bonds of immediate necessity or personalcupidity. The plebeians and the merchants were all on his side. TheGrandi and the Ammoniti, excluded from the State by the practices ofthe Albizzi, had more to hope from the Medicean party than from thefew families who still contrived to hold the reins of government. Itwas clear that a conflict to the death must soon commence between theoligarchy and this new faction. 

VIII

At last, in 1433, war was declared. The first blow was struck byRinaldo degli Albizzi, who put himself in the wrong by attacking acitizen indispensable to the people at large, and guilty of nounconstitutional act. On September 7th of that year, a year decisivefor the future destinies of Florence, he summoned Cosimo to the PublicPalace, which he had previously occupied with troops at his command. There he declared him a rebel to the State, and had him imprisoned ina little square room in the central tower. The tocsin was sounded; thepeople were assembled in parliament upon the piazza. The Albizzi heldthe main streets with armed men, and forced the Florentines to placeplenipotentiary power for the administration of the commonwealth atthis crisis in the hands of a Balia, or committee selected bythemselves. It was always thus that acts of high tyranny were effectedin Florence. A show of legality was secured by gaining the compulsorysanction of the people, driven by soldiery into the public square, andhastily ordered to recognise the authority of their oppressors. 

The bill of indictment against the Medici accused them of sedition inthe year 1378--that is, in the year of the Ciompi Tumult--and oftreasonable practice during the whole course of the Albizziadministration. It also strove to fix upon them the odium of theunsuccessful war against the town of Lucca. As soon as the Albizzi hadunmasked their batteries, Lorenzo de' Medici managed to escape fromthe city, and took with him his brother Cosimo's children to Venice. Cosimo remained shut up within the little room called Barberia inArnolfo's tower. From that high eagle's nest the sight can rangeValdarno far and wide. Florence with her towers and domes lies below;and the blue peaks of Carrara close a prospect westward thanwhich, with its villa-jewelled slopes and fertile gardens, there isnought more beautiful upon the face of earth. The prisoner can havepaid but little heed to this fair landscape. He heard the frequentringing of the great bell that called the Florentines to council, thetramp of armed men on the piazza, the coming and going of the burghersin the palace halls beneath. On all sides lurked anxiety and fear ofdeath. Each mouthful he tasted might be poisoned. For many days hepartook of only bread and water, till his gaoler restored hisconfidence by sharing all his meals. In this peril he abodetwenty-four days. The Albizzi, in concert with the Balia they hadformed, were consulting what they might venture to do with him. Somevoted for his execution. Others feared the popular favour, and thoughtthat if they killed Cosimo this act would ruin their own power. Thenobler natures among them determined to proceed by constitutionalmeasures. At last, upon September 29th, it was settled that Cosimoshould be exiled to Padua for ten years. The Medici were declaredGrandi, by way of excluding them from political rights. But theirproperty remained untouched; and on October 3rd, Cosimo was released. 

On the same day Cosimo took his departure. His journey northwardresembled a triumphant progress. He left Florence a simple burgher; heentered Venice a powerful prince. Though the Albizzi seemed to havegained the day, they had really cut away the ground beneath theirfeet. They committed the fatal mistake of doing both too much and toolittle--too much because they declared war against an innocent man, and roused the sympathies of the whole people in his behalf; toolittle, because they had not the nerve to complete their act bykilling him outright and extirpating his party. Machiavelli, in one ofhis profoundest and most cynical critiques, remarks that few men knowhow to be thoroughly bad with honour to themselves. Their will isevil; but the grain of good in them--some fear of public opinion, some repugnance to committing a signal crime--paralyses their arm atthe moment when it ought to have been raised to strike. He instancesGian Paolo Baglioni's omission to murder Julius II. , when that Popeplaced himself within his clutches at Perugia. He might also haveinstanced Rinaldo degli Albizzi's refusal to push things toextremities by murdering Cosimo. It was the combination of despoticviolence in the exile of Cosimo with constitutional moderation in thepreservation of his life, that betrayed the weakness of the oligarchsand restored confidence to the Medicean party. 

IX

In the course of the year 1434 this party began to hold up its head. Powerful as the Albizzi were, they only retained the government byartifice; and now they had done a deed which put at nought theirformer arts and intrigues. A Signory favourable to the Medici cameinto office, and on September 26th, 1434, Rinaldo in his turn wassummoned to the palace and declared a rebel. He strove to raise theforces of his party, and entered the piazza at the head of eighthundred men. The menacing attitude of the people, however, maderesistance perilous. Rinaldo disbanded his troops, and placed himselfunder the protection of Pope Eugenius IV. , who was then resident inFlorence. This act of submission proved that Rinaldo had not thecourage or the cruelty to try the chance of civil war. Whatever hismotives may have been, he lost his hold upon the State beyondrecovery. On September 29th, a new parliament was summoned; on October2nd, Cosimo was recalled from exile and the Albizzi were banished. Theintercession of the Pope procured for them nothing but the liberty toleave Florence unmolested. Einaldo turned his back upon the city hehad governed, never to set foot in it again. On October 6th, Cosimo, having passed through Padua, Ferrara, and Modena like a conqueror, reentered the town amid the plaudits of the people, and took up hisdwelling as an honoured guest in the Palace of the Republic. Thesubsequent history of Florence is the history of his family. In afteryears the Medici loved to remember this return of Cosimo. Histriumphal reception was painted in fresco on the walls of their villaat Cajano under the transparent allegory of Cicero's entrance intoRome. 

X

By their brief exile the Medici had gained the credit of injuredinnocence, the fame of martyrdom in the popular cause. Their foes hadstruck the first blow, and in striking at them had seemed to aimagainst the liberties of the republic. The mere failure of theiradversaries to hold the power they had acquired, handed over thispower to the Medici; and the reprisals which the Medici began to takehad the show of justice, not of personal hatred, or petty vengeance. Cosimo was a true Florentine. He disliked violence, because he knewthat blood spilt cries for blood. His passions, too, were cool andtemperate. No gust of anger, no intoxication of success, destroyed hisbalance. His one object, the consolidation of power for his family onthe basis of popular favour, was kept steadily in view; and he woulddo nothing that might compromise that end. Yet he was neither generousnor merciful. We therefore find that from the first moment of hisreturn to Florence he instituted a system of pitiless and unforgivingpersecution against his old opponents. The Albizzi were banished, rootand branch, with all their followers, consigned to lonely and often tounwholesome stations through the length and breadth of Italy. If theybroke the bonds assigned them, they were forthwith declared traitorsand their property was confiscated. After a long series of years, bymerely keeping in force the first sentence pronounced upon them, Cosimo had the cruel satisfaction of seeing the whole of that proudoligarchy die out by slow degrees in the insufferable tedium ofsolitude and exile. Even the high-souled Palla degli Strozzi, who hadstriven to remain neutral, and whose wealth and talents were devotedto the revival of classical studies, was proscribed because to Cosimohe seemed too powerful. Separated from his children, he died inbanishment at Padua. In this way the return of the Medici involved theloss to Florence of some noble citizens, who might perchance havechecked the Medicean tyranny if they had stayed to guide the State. The plebeians, raised to wealth and influence by Cosimo before hisexile, now took the lead in the republic. He used these men ascatspaws, rarely putting himself forward or allowing his own name toappear, but pulling the wires of government in privacy by means ofintermediate agents. The Medicean party was called at first _Puccini_from a certain Puccio, whose name was better known in caucus orcommittee than that of his real master. 

To rule through these creatures of his own making taxed all theingenuity of Cosimo; but his profound and subtle intellect was suitedto the task, and he found unlimited pleasure in the exercise of hisconsummate craft. We have already seen to what extent he used hisriches for the acquisition of political influence. Now that he hadcome to power, he continued the same method, packing the Signory andthe Councils with men whom he could hold by debt between his thumb andfinger. His command of the public moneys enabled him to wink atpeculation in State offices; it was part of his system to bindmagistrates and secretaries to his interest by their consciousness ofguilt condoned but not forgotten. Not a few, moreover, owed theirliving to the appointments he procured for them. While he thuscontrolled the wheel-work of the commonwealth by means of organisedcorruption, he borrowed the arts of his old enemies to oppressdissentient citizens. If a man took an independent line in voting, and refused allegiance to the Medicean party, he was marked out forpersecution. No violence was used; but he found himself hampered inhis commerce--money, plentiful for others, became scarce for him; hiscompetitors in trade were subsidised to undersell him. And while theavenues of industry were closed, his fortune was taxed above itsvalue, until he had to sell at a loss in order to discharge his publicobligations. In the first twenty years of the Medicean rule, seventyfamilies had to pay 4, 875, 000 golden florins of extraordinary imposts, fixed by arbitrary assessment. 

The more patriotic members of his party looked with dread and loathingon this system of corruption and exclusion. To their remonstrancesCosimo replied in four memorable sayings: 'Better the State spoiledthan the State not ours. ' 'Governments cannot be carried on withpaternosters. ' 'An ell of scarlet makes a burgher. ' 'I aim at finiteends. ' These maxims represent the whole man, --first, in his egotism, eager to gain Florence for his family, at any risk of her ruin;secondly, in his cynical acceptance of base means to selfish ends;thirdly, in his bourgeois belief that money makes a man, and fineclothes suffice for a citizen; fourthly, in his worldly ambition benton positive success. It was, in fact, his policy to reduce Florence tothe condition of a rotten borough: nor did this policy fail. Onenotable sign of the influence he exercised was the change which nowcame over the foreign relations of the republic. Up to the date of hisdictatorship Florence had uniformly fought the battle of freedom inItaly. It was the chief merit of the Albizzi oligarchy that theycontinued the traditions of the mediæval State, and by their vigorousaction checked the growth of the Visconti. Though they engrossed thegovernment they never forgot that they were first of all thingsFlorentines, and only in the second place men who owed their power andinfluence to office. In a word, they acted like patriotic Tories, likerepublican patricians. Therefore they would not ally themselves withtyrants or countenance the enslavement of free cities by armeddespots. Their subjugation of the Tuscan burghs to Florence was itselfpart of a grand republican policy. Cosimo changed all this. When theVisconti dynasty ended by the death of Filippo Maria in 1447, therewas a chance of restoring the independence of Lombardy. Milan ineffect declared herself a republic, and by the aid of Florence shemight at this moment have maintained her liberty. Cosimo, however, entered into treaty with Francesco Sforza, supplied him with money, guaranteed him against Florentine interference, and saw withsatisfaction how he reduced the duchy to his military tyranny. TheMedici were conscious that they, selfishly, had most to gain bysupporting despots who in time of need might help them to confirmtheir own authority. With the same end in view, when the legitimateline of the Bentivogli was extinguished, Cosimo hunted out a bastardpretender of that family, presented him to the chiefs of theBentivogli faction, and had him placed upon the seat of his supposedancestors at Bologna. This young man, a certain Santi da Cascese, presumed to be the son of Ercole de' Bentivogli, was an artisan in awool factory when Cosimo set eyes upon him. At first Santi refused thedangerous honour of governing a proud republic; but the intrigues ofCosimo prevailed, and the obscure craftsman ended his days a powerfulprince. 

By the arts I have attempted to describe, Cosimo in the course of hislong life absorbed the forces of the republic into himself. While heshunned the external signs of despotic power he made himself themaster of the State. His complexion was of a pale olive; his statureshort; abstemious and simple in his habits, affable in conversation, sparing of speech, he knew how to combine that burgher-like civilityfor which the Romans praised Augustus, with the reality of a despotismall the more difficult to combat because it seemed nowhere and waseverywhere. When he died, at the age of seventy-five, in 1464, thepeople whom he had enslaved, but whom he had neither injured norinsulted, honoured him with the title of _Pater Patriæ_. This wasinscribed upon his tomb in S. Lorenzo. He left to posterity the fameof a great and generous patron, [14] the infamy of a cynical, self-seeking, bourgeois tyrant. Such combinations of contradictoryqualities were common enough at the time of the Renaissance. Did notMachiavelli spend his days in tavern-brawls and low amours, his nightsamong the mighty spirits of the dead, with whom, when he had changedhis country suit of homespun for the habit of the Court, he foundhimself an honoured equal?

XI

Cosimo had shown consummate skill by governing Florence through aparty created and raised to influence by himself. The jealousy ofthese adherents formed the chief difficulty with which his son Pierohad to contend. Unless the Medici could manage to kick down the ladderwhereby they had risen, they ran the risk of losing all. As on aformer occasion, so now they profited by the mistakes of theirantagonists. Three chief men of their own party, Diotisalvi Neroni, Agnolo Acciaiuoli, and Luca Pitti, determined to shake off the yoke oftheir masters, and to repay the Medici for what they owed by leadingthem to ruin. Niccolo Soderini, a patriot, indignant at the slowenslavement of his country, joined them. At first they strove toundermine the credit of the Medici with the Florentines by inducingPiero to call in the moneys placed at interest by his father in thehands of private citizens. This act was unpopular; but it did notsuffice to move a revolution. To proceed by constitutional measuresagainst the Medici was judged impolitic. Therefore the conspiratorsdecided to take, if possible, Piero's life. The plot failed, chieflyowing to the coolness and the cunning of the young Lorenzo, Piero'seldest son. Public sympathy was strongly excited against theaggressors. Neroni, Acciaiuoli, and Soderini were exiled. Pitti wasallowed to stay, dishonoured, powerless, and penniless, in Florence. Meanwhile, the failure of their foes had only served to strengthen theposition of the Medici. The ladder had saved them the trouble ofkicking it down. 

The congratulations addressed on this occasion to Piero and Lorenzo bythe ruling powers of Italy show that the Medici were already regardedas princes outside Florence. Lorenzo and Giuliano, the two sons ofPiero, travelled abroad to the Courts of Milan and Ferrara with thestyle and state of more than simple citizens. At home they occupiedthe first place on all occasions of public ceremony, receiving royalvisitors on terms of equality, and performing the hospitalities of therepublic like men who had been born to represent its dignities. Lorenzo's marriage to Clarice Orsini, of the noble Roman house, wasanother sign that the Medici were advancing on the way towarddespotism. Cosimo had avoided foreign alliances for his children. Hisdescendants now judged themselves firmly planted enough to risk theodium of a princely match for the sake of the support outside the citythey might win. 

XII

Piero de' Medici died in December 1469. His son Lorenzo was thenbarely twenty-two years of age. The chiefs of the Medicean party, all-powerful in the State, held a council, in which they resolved toplace him in the same position as his father and grandfather. Thisresolve seems to have been formed after mature deliberation, on theground that the existing conditions of Italian politics rendered itimpossible to conduct the government without a presidential head. Florence, though still a democracy, required a permanent chief totreat on an equality with the princes of the leading cities. Here wemay note the prudence of Cosimo's foreign policy. When he helped toestablish despots in Milan and Bologna he was rendering the presidencyof his own family in Florence necessary. 

Lorenzo, having received this invitation, called attention to hisyouth and inexperience. Yet he did not refuse it; and, after agraceful display of diffidence, he accepted the charge, entering thusupon that famous political career, in the course of which he not onlyestablished and maintained a balance of power in Italy, with Florencefor the central city, but also contrived to remodel the government ofthe republic in the interest of his own family and to strengthen theMedici by relations with the Papal See. 

The extraordinary versatility of this man's intellectual and socialgifts, his participation in all the literary and philosophicalinterests of his century, his large and liberal patronage of art, andthe gaiety with which he joined the people of Florence in theirpastimes--Mayday games and Carnival festivities--strengthened his holdupon the city in an age devoted to culture and refined pleasure. Whatever was most brilliant in the spirit of the Italian Benaissanceseemed to be incarnate in Lorenzo. Not merely as a patron and adilettante, but as a poet and a critic, a philosopher and scholar, heproved himself adequate to the varied intellectual ambitions of hiscountry. Penetrated with the passion for erudition which distinguishedFlorence in the fifteenth century, familiar with her painters and hersculptors, deeply read in the works of her great poets, he conceivedthe ideal of infusing the spirit of antique civility into modern life, and of effecting for society what the artists were performing in theirown sphere. To preserve the native character of the Florentine genius, while he added the grace of classic form, was the aim to which histastes and instincts led him. At the same time, while he made himselfthe master of Florentine revels and the Augustus of Renaissanceliterature, he took care that beneath his carnival masks andball-dress should be concealed the chains which he was forging for therepublic. 

What he lacked, with so much mental brilliancy, was moral greatness. The age he lived in was an age of selfish despots, treacherousgenerals, godless priests. It was an age of intellectual vigour andartistic creativeness; but it was also an age of mean ambition, sordidpolicy, and vitiated principles. Lorenzo remained true in all respectsto the genius of this age: true to its enthusiasm for antique culture, true to its passion for art, true to its refined love of pleasure; buttrue also to its petty political intrigues, to its cynicalselfishness, to its lack of heroism. For Florence he looked no higherand saw no further than Cosimo had done. If culture was his pastime, the enslavement of the city by bribery and corruption was the hardwork of his manhood. As is the case with much Renaissance art, hislife was worth more for its decorative detail than for itsconstructive design. In richness, versatility, variety, andexquisiteness of execution, it left little to be desired; yet, viewedat a distance, and as a whole, it does not inspire us with a sense ofarchitectonic majesty. 

XIII

Lorenzo's chief difficulties arose from the necessity under which, like Cosimo, he laboured of governing the city through its oldinstitutions by means of a party. To keep the members of this party ingood temper, and to gain their approval for the alterations heeffected in the State machinery of Florence, was the problem of hislife. The successful solution of this problem was easier now, aftertwo generations of the Medicean ascendency, than it had been at first. Meanwhile the people were maintained in good humour by public shows, ease, plenty, and a general laxity of discipline. The splendour ofLorenzo's foreign alliances and the consideration he received from allthe Courts of Italy contributed in no small measure to his popularityand security at home. By using his authority over Florence to inspirerespect abroad, and by using his foreign credit to impose upon theburghers, Lorenzo displayed the tact of a true Italian diplomatist. His genius for statecraft, as then understood, was indeed of a rareorder, equally adapted to the conduct of a complicated foreign policyand to the control of a suspicious and variable Commonwealth. In onepoint alone he was inferior to his grandfather. He neglected commerce, and allowed his banking business to fall into disorder so hopelessthat in course of time he ceased to be solvent. Meanwhile his personalexpenses, both as a prince in his own palace, and as therepresentative of majesty in Florence, continually increased. Thebankruptcy of the Medici, it had long been foreseen, would involve thepublic finances in serious confusion. And now, in order to retrievehis fortunes, Lorenzo was not only obliged to repudiate his debts tothe exchequer, but had also to gain complete disposal of the Statepurse. It was this necessity that drove him to effect theconstitutional revolution of 1480, by which he substituted a PrivyCouncil of seventy members for the old Councils of the State, absorbing the chief functions of the commonwealth into this singlebody, whom he practically nominated at pleasure. The same want ofmoney led to the great scandal of his reign--the plundering of theMonte delle Doti, or State Insurance Office Fund for securing dowersto the children of its creditors. 

XIV

While tracing the salient points of Lorenzo de' Medici'sadministration I have omitted to mention the important events whichfollowed shortly after his accession to power in 1469. What happenedbetween that date and 1480 was not only decisive for the futurefortunes of the Casa Medici, but it was also eminently characteristicof the perils and the difficulties which beset Italian despots. Theyear 1471 was signalised by a visit by the Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforzaof Milan, and his wife Bona of Savoy, to the Medici in Florence. Theycame attended by their whole Court--body guards on horse and foot, ushers, pages, falconers, grooms, kennel-varlets, and huntsmen. Omitting the mere baggage service, their train counted two thousandhorses. To mention this incident would be superfluous, had not soacute an observer as Machiavelli marked it out as a turning-point inFlorentine history. Now, for the first time, the democraticcommonwealth saw its streets filled with a mob of courtiers. Masques, balls, and tournaments succeeded each other with magnificent variety;and all the arts of Florence were pressed into the service of thesefestivals. Machiavelli says that the burghers lost the last remnant oftheir old austerity of manners, and became, like the degenerateRomans, ready to obey the masters who provided them with brilliantspectacles. They gazed with admiration on the pomp of Italianprinces, their dissolute and godless living, their luxury and prodigalexpenditure; and when the Medici affected similar habits in the nextgeneration, the people had no courage to resist the invasion of theirpleasant vices. 

In the same year, 1471, Volterra was reconquered for the Florentinesby Frederick of Urbino. The honours of this victory, disgraced by abrutal sack of the conquered city, in violation of its articles ofcapitulation, were reserved for Lorenzo, who returned in triumph toFlorence. More than ever he assumed the prince, and in his personundertook to represent the State. 

In the same year, 1471, Francesco della Rovere was raised to thePapacy with the memorable name of Sixtus IV. Sixtus was a man ofviolent temper and fierce passions, restless and impatientlyambitious, bent on the aggrandisement of the beautiful and wantonyouths, his nephews. Of these the most aspiring was Girolamo Riario, for whom Sixtus bought the town of Imola from Taddeo Manfredi, inorder that he might possess the title of count and the nucleus of atyranny in the Romagna. This purchase thwarted the plans of Lorenzo, who wished to secure the same advantages for Florence. Smarting withthe sense of disappointment, he forbade the Roman banker, FrancescoPazzi, to guarantee the purchase-money. By this act Lorenzo made twomortal foes--the Pope and Francesco Pazzi. Francesco was a thin, pale, atrabilious fanatic, all nerve and passion, with a monomaniacintensity of purpose, and a will inflamed and guided by imagination--aman formed by nature for conspiracy, such a man, in fact, as Shaksperedrew in Cassius. Maddened by Lorenzo's prohibition, he conceived thenotion of overthrowing the Medici in Florence by a violent blow. Girolamo Riario entered into his views. So did Francesco Salviati, Archbishop of Pisa, who had private reasons for hostility. These menfound no difficulty in winning over Sixtus to their plot; nor is itpossible to purge the Pope of participation in what followed. I neednot describe by what means Francesco drew the other members of hisfamily into the scheme, and how he secured the assistance of armedcut-throats. Suffice it to say that the chief conspirators, with theexception of the Count Girolamo, betook themselves to Florence, andthere, after the failure of other attempts, decided to murder Lorenzoand his brother Giuliano in the cathedral on Sunday, April 26th, 1478. The moment when the priest at the high altar finished the mass, wasfixed for the assassination. Everything was ready. The conspirators, by Judas kisses and embracements, had discovered that the young menwore no protective armour under their silken doublets. Pacing theaisle behind the choir, they feared no treason. And now the lives ofboth might easily have been secured, if at the last moment the courageof the hired assassins had not failed them. Murder, they said, waswell enough; but they could not bring themselves to stab men beforethe newly consecrated body of Christ. In this extremity a priest wasfound who, 'being accustomed to churches, ' had no scruples. He andanother reprobate were told off to Lorenzo. Francesco de' Pazzihimself undertook Giuliano. The moment for attack arrived. Francescoplunged his dagger into the heart of Giuliano. Then, not satisfiedwith this death-blow, he struck again, and in his heat of passionwounded his own thigh. Lorenzo escaped with a flesh-wound from theponiard of the priest, and rushed into the sacristy, where his friendPoliziano shut and held the brazen door. The plot had failed; forGiuliano, of the two brothers, was the one whom the conspirators wouldthe more willingly have spared. The whole church was in an uproar. Thecity rose in tumult. Rage and horror took possession of the people. They flew to the Palazzo Pubblico and to the houses of the Pazzi, hunted the conspirators from place to place, hung the archbishop bythe neck from the palace windows, and, as they found fresh victimsfor their fury, strung them one by one in a ghastly row at his sideabove the Square. About one hundred in all were killed. None who hadjoined in the plot escaped; for Lorenzo had long arms, and one man, who fled to Constantinople, was delivered over to his agents by theSultan. Out of the whole Pazzi family only Guglielmo, the husband ofBianca de' Medici, was spared. When the tumult was over, Andrea delCastagno painted the portraits of the traitors head-downwards upon thewalls of the Bargello Palace, in order that all men might know whatfate awaited the foes of the Medici and of the State of Florence. [15]Meanwhile a bastard son of Giuliano's was received into the Mediceanhousehold, to perpetuate his lineage. This child, named Giulio, wasdestined to be famous in the annals of Italy and Florence under thetitle of Pope Clement VII. 

XV

As is usual when such plots miss their mark, the passions excitedredounded to the profit of the injured party. The commonwealth feltthat the blow struck at Lorenzo had been aimed at their majesty. Sixtus, on the other hand, could not contain his rage at the failureof so ably planned a _coup de main_. Ignoring that he had sanctionedthe treason, that a priest had put his hand to the dagger, that theimpious deed had been attempted in a church before the very Sacramentof Christ, whose vicar on earth he was, the Pope now excommunicatedthe republic. The reason he alleged was, that the Florentines haddared to hang an archbishop. 

Thus began a war to the death between Sixtus and Florence. The Popeinflamed the whole of Italy, and carried on a ruinous campaign inTuscany. It seemed as though the republic might lose her subjectcities, always ready to revolt when danger threatened the sovereignState. Lorenzo's position became critical. Sixtus made no secret ofthe hatred he bore him personally, declaring that he fought less withFlorence than with the Medici. To support the odium of this long warand this heavy interdict alone, was more than he could do. His alliesforsook him. Naples was enlisted on the Pope's side. Milan and theother States of Lombardy were occupied with their own affairs, andheld aloof. In this extremity he saw that nothing but a bold stepcould save him. The league formed by Sixtus must be broken up at anyrisk, and, if possible, by his own ability. On December 6th, 1479, Lorenzo left Florence, unarmed and unattended, took ship at Leghorn, and proceeded to the court of the enemy, King Ferdinand, at Naples. Ferdinand was a cruel and treacherous sovereign, who had murdered hisguest, Jacopo Piccinino, at a banquet given in his honour. ButFerdinand was the son of Alfonso, who, by address and eloquence, hadgained a kingdom from his foe and jailor, Filippo Maria Visconti. Lorenzo calculated that he too, following Alfonso's policy, mightprove to Ferdinand how little there was to gain from an alliance withRome, how much Naples and Florence, firmly united together for offenceand defence, might effect in Italy. 

Only a student of those perilous times can appreciate the courage andthe genius, the audacity combined with diplomatic penetration, displayed by Lorenzo at this crisis. He calmly walked into the lion'sden, trusting he could tame the lion and teach it, and all in a fewdays. Nor did his expectation fail. Though Lorenzo was rather uglythan handsome, with a dark skin, heavy brows, powerful jaws, and nosesharp in the bridge and broad at the nostrils, without grace ofcarriage or melody of voice, he possessed what makes up for personaldefects--the winning charm of eloquence in conversation, a subtle wit, profound knowledge of men, and tact allied to sympathy, which placedhim always at the centre of the situation. Ferdinand received himkindly. The Neapolitan nobles admired his courage and were fascinatedby his social talents. On March 1st, 1480, he left Naples again, having won over the King by his arguments. When he reached Florence hewas able to declare that he brought home a treaty of peace andalliance signed by the most powerful foe of the republic. The successof this bold enterprise endeared Lorenzo more than ever to hiscountrymen. In the same year they concluded a treaty with Sixtus, whowas forced against his will to lay down arms by the capture of Otrantoand the extreme peril of Turkish invasion. After the year 1480 Lorenzoremained sole master in Florence, the arbiter and peacemaker of therest of Italy. 

XVI

The conjuration of the Pazzi was only one in a long series of similarconspiracies. Italian despots gained their power by violence andwielded it with craft. Violence and craft were therefore used againstthem. When the study of the classics had penetrated the nation withantique ideas of heroism, tyrannicide became a virtue. Princes weremurdered with frightful frequency. Thus Gian Maria Visconti was put todeath at Milan in 1412; Galeazzo Maria Sforza in 1484; the Chiarelliof Fabriano were massacred in 1435; the Baglioni of Perugia in 1500;Girolamo Gentile planned the assassination of Galeazzo Sforza at Genoain 1476; Niccolo d'Este conspired against his uncle Ercole in 1476;Stefano Porcari attempted the life of Nicholas V. At Rome in 1453;Lodovico Sforza narrowly escaped a violent death in 1453. I mightmultiply these instances beyond satiety. As it is, I have selectedbut a few examples falling, all but one, within the second half of thefifteenth century. Nearly all these attempts upon the lives of princeswere made in church during the celebration of sacred offices. Therewas no superfluity of naughtiness, no wilful sacrilege, in this choiceof an occasion. It only testified to the continual suspicion andguarded watchfulness maintained by tyrants. To strike at them exceptin church was almost impossible. Meanwhile the fate of thetyrannicides was uniform. Successful or not, they perished. Yet sogrievous was the pressure of Italian despotism, so glorious was theideal of Greek and Roman heroism, so passionate the temper of thepeople, that to kill a prince at any cost to self appeared the crownof manliness. This bloodshed exercised a delirious fascination: pureand base, personal and patriotic motives combined to add intensity offixed and fiery purpose to the murderous impulse. Those then who, likethe Medici, aspired to tyranny and sought to found a dynasty ofprinces, entered the arena against a host of unknown and unseengladiators. 

XVII

On his deathbed, in 1492, Lorenzo lay between two men--AngeloPoliziano and Girolamo Savonarola. Poliziano incarnated the genial, radiant, godless spirit of fifteenth-century humanism. Savonarolarepresented the conscience of Italy, self-convicted, amid all hergreatness, of crimes that called for punishment. It is said that whenLorenzo asked the monk for absolution, Savonarola bade him firstrestore freedom to Florence. Lorenzo, turned his face to the wall andwas silent. How indeed could he make this city in a moment free, aftersixty years of slow and systematic corruption? Savonarola left him, and he died unshriven. This legend is doubtful, though it rests onexcellent if somewhat partial authority. It has, at any rate, thevalue of a mythus, since it epitomises the attitude assumed by thegreat preacher to the prince. Florence enslaved, the soul of Lorenzocannot lay its burden down, but must go with all its sins upon it tothe throne of God. 

The year 1492 was a memorable year for Italy. In this year Lorenzo'sdeath removed the keystone of the arch that had sustained the fabricof Italian federation. In this year Roderigo Borgia was elected Pope. In this year Columbus discovered America; Vasco de Gama soon afteropened a new way to the Indies, and thus the commerce of the worldpassed from Italy to other nations. In this year the conquest ofGranada gave unity to the Spanish nation. In this year France, throughthe lifelong craft of Louis XI. , was for the first time united under ayoung hot-headed sovereign. On every side of the political horizonstorms threatened. It was clear that a new chapter of European historyhad been opened. Then Savonarola raised his voice, and cried that thecrimes of Italy, the abominations of the Church, would speedily bepunished. Events led rapidly to the fulfilment of this prophecy. Lorenzo's successor, Piero de' Medici, was a vain, irresolute, andhasty princeling, fond of display, proud of his skill in fencing andfootball-playing, with too much of the Orsini blood in his hot veins, with too little of the Medicean craft in his weak head. The Italiandespots felt they could not trust Piero, and this want of confidencewas probably the first motive that impelled Lodovico Sforza to callCharles VIII. Into Italy in 1494. 

It will not be necessary to dwell upon this invasion of the French, except in so far as it affected Florence. Charles passed rapidlythrough Lombardy, engaged his army in the passes of the Apennines, anddebouched upon the coast where the Magra divided Tuscany from Liguria. Here the fortresses of Sarzana and Pietra Santa, between the marblebulwark of Carrara and the Tuscan sea, stopped his further progress. The keys were held by the Florentines. To force these strong positionsand to pass beyond them seemed impossible. It might have beenimpossible if Piero de' Medici had possessed a firmer will. As it was, he rode off to the French camp, delivered up the forts to Charles, bound the King by no engagements, and returned not otherwise thanproud of his folly to Florence. A terrible reception awaited him. TheFlorentines, in their fury, had risen and sacked the Medicean palace. It was as much as Piero, with his brothers, could do to escape beyondthe hills to Venice. The despotism of the Medici, so carefully builtup, so artfully sustained and strengthened, was overthrown in a singleday. 

XVIII

Before considering what happened in Florence after the expulsion ofthe Medici, it will be well to pause a moment and review the state inwhich Lorenzo had left his family. Piero, his eldest son, recognisedas chief of the republic after his father's death, was married toAlfonsina Orsini, and was in his twenty-second year. Giovanni, hissecond son, a youth of seventeen, had just been made cardinal. Thishonour, of vast importance for the Casa Medici in the future, he owedto his sister Maddalena's marriage to Franceschetto Cybo, son ofInnocent VIII. The third of Lorenzo's sons, named Giuliano, was a boyof thirteen. Giulio, the bastard son of the elder Giuliano, wasfourteen. These four princes formed the efficient strength of theMedici, the hope of the house; and for each of them, with theexception of Piero, who died in exile, and of whom no more notice needbe taken, a brilliant destiny was still in store. In the year 1495, however, they now wandered, homeless and helpless, through the citiesof Italy, each of which was shaken to its foundations by the Frenchinvasion. 

XIX

Florence, left without the Medici, deprived of Pisa and other subjectcities by the passage of the French army, with no leader but the monkSavonarola, now sought to reconstitute her liberties. During thedomination of the Albizzi and the Medici the old order of thecommonwealth had been completely broken up. The Arti had lost theirprimitive importance. The distinctions between the Grandi and thePopolani had practically passed away. In a democracy that hassubmitted to a lengthened course of tyranny, such extinction of itsold life is inevitable. Yet the passion for liberty was stillpowerful; and the busy brains of the Florentines were stored withexperience gained from their previous vicissitudes, from \ the studyof antique history, and from the observation of existing constitutionsin the towns of Italy. They now determined to reorganise the Stateupon the model of the Venetian republic. The Signory was to remain, with its old institution of Priors, Gonfalonier, and College, electedfor brief periods. These magistrates were to take the initiative indebate, to propose measures, and to consider plans of action. The realpower of the State, for voting supplies and ratifying the measures ofthe Signory, was vested in a senate of one thousand members, calledthe Grand Council, from whom a smaller body of forty, acting asintermediates between the Council and the Signory, were elected. It issaid that the plan of this constitution originated with Savonarola;nor is there any doubt that he used all his influence in the pulpit ofthe Duomo to render it acceptable to the people. Whoever may have beenresponsible for its formation, the new government was carried in1495, and a large hall for the assembly of the Grand Council wasopened in the Public Palace. 

Savonarola, meanwhile, had become the ruling spirit of Florence. Hegained his great power as a preacher: he used it like a monk. Themotive principle of his action was the passion for reform. To bringthe Church back to its pristine state of purity, without altering itsdoctrine or suggesting any new form of creed; to purge Italy ofungodly customs; to overthrow the tyrants who encouraged evil living, and to place the power of the State in the hands of sober citizens:these were his objects. Though he set himself in bold opposition tothe reigning Pope, he had no desire to destroy the spiritual supremacyof S. Peter's see. Though he burned with an enthusiastic zeal forliberty, and displayed rare genius for administration, he had noambition to rule Florence like a dictator. Savonarola was neither areformer in the northern sense of the word, nor yet a politicaldemagogue. His sole wish was to see purity of manners and freedom ofself-government re-established. With this end in view he bade theFlorentines elect Christ as their supreme chief; and they did so. Forthe same end he abstained from appearing in the State Councils, andleft the Constitution to work by its own laws. His personal influencehe reserved for the pulpit; and here he was omnipotent. The peoplebelieved in him as a prophet. They turned to him as the man who knewwhat he wanted--as the voice of liberty, the soul of the new régime, the genius who could breathe into the commonwealth a breath of freshvitality. When, therefore, Savonarola preached a reform of manners, hewas at once obeyed. Strict laws were passed enforcing sobriety, condemning trades of pleasure, reducing the gay customs of Florence topuritanical austerity. 

Great stress has been laid upon this reaction of the monk-led populaceagainst the vices of the past. Yet the historian is bound to pronouncethat the reform effected by Savonarola was rather picturesque thanvital. Like all violent revivals of pietism, it produced a no lessviolent reaction. The parties within the city who resented theinterference of a preaching friar, joined with the Pope in Rome, whohated a contumacious schismatic in Savonarola. Assailed by these twoforces at the same moment, and driven upon perilous ground by his ownfebrile enthusiasm, Savonarola succumbed. He was imprisoned, tortured, and burned upon the public square in 1498. 

What Savonarola really achieved for Florence was not a permanentreform of morality, but a resuscitation of the spirit of freedom. Hisfollowers, called in contempt _I Piagnoni_, or the Weepers, formed thepath of the commonwealth in future; and the memory of their martyrserved as a common bond of sympathy to unite them in times of trial. It was a necessary consequence of the peculiar part he played that thecity was henceforth divided into factions representing mutuallyantagonistic principles. These factions were not created bySavonarola; but his extraordinary influence accentuated, as it were, the humours that lay dormant in the State. Families favourable to theMedici took the name of _Palleschi_. Men who chafed againstpuritanical reform, and who were eager for any government that shouldsecure them their old licence, were known as _Compagnacci_. Meanwhilethe oligarchs, who disliked a democratic Constitution, and thought itpossible to found an aristocracy without the intervention of theMedici, came to be known as _Gli Ottimati_. Florence held withinitself, from this epoch forward to the final extinction of liberty, four great parties: the _Piagnoni_, passionate for political freedomand austerity of life; the _Palleschi_, favourable to the Mediceancause, and regretful of Lorenzo's pleasant rule; the _Compagnacci_, intolerant of the reformed republic, neither hostile nor loyal to theMedici, but desirous of personal licence; the _Ottimati_, astute andselfish, watching their own advantage, ever-mindful to form a narrowgovernment of privileged families, disinclined to the Medici, exceptwhen they thought the Medici might be employed as instruments in theirintrigues. 

XX

During the short period of Savonarola's ascendency, Florence was inform at least a Theocracy, without any titular head but Christ; and aslong as the enthusiasm inspired by the monk lasted, as long as hispersonal influence endured, the Constitution of the Grand Councilworked well. After his death it was found that the machinery was toocumbrous. While adopting the Venetian form of government, theFlorentines had omitted one essential element--the Doge. By referringmeasures of immediate necessity to the Grand Council, the republiclost precious time. Dangerous publicity, moreover, was incurred; andso large a body often came to no firm resolution. There was nopermanent authority in the State; no security that what had beendeliberated would be carried out with energy; no titular chief, whocould transact affairs with foreign potentates and their ambassadors. Accordingly, in 1502, it was decreed that the Gonfalonier should holdoffice for life--should be in fact a Doge. To this important post ofpermanent president Piero Soderini was appointed; and in his handswere placed the chief affairs of the republic. 

At this point Florence, after all her vicissitudes, had won her way tosomething really similar to the Venetian Constitution. Yet thesimilarity existed more in form than in fact. The government ofburghers in a Grand Council, with a Senate of forty, and a Gonfalonierfor life, had not grown up gradually and absorbed into itself thevital forces of the commonwealth. It was a creation of inventiveintelligence, not of national development, in Florence. It had againstit the jealousy of the Ottimati, who felt themselves overshadowed bythe Gonfalonier; the hatred of the Palleschi, who yearned for theMedici; the discontent of the working classes, who thought thepresence of a Court in Florence would improve trade; last, but notleast, the disaffection of the Compagnacci, who felt they could notflourish to their heart's content in a free commonwealth. Moreover, though the name of liberty was on every lip, though the Florentinestalked, wrote, and speculated more about constitutional independencethan they had ever done, the true energy of free institutions hadpassed from the city. The corrupt government of Cosimo and Lorenzobore its natural fruit now. Egotistic ambition and avarice supplantedpatriotism and industry. It is necessary to comprehend thesecircumstances, in order that the next revolution may be clearlyunderstood. 

XXI

During the ten years which elapsed between 1502 and 1512, PieroSoderini administered Florence with an outward show of greatprosperity. He regained Pisa, and maintained an honourable foreignpolicy in the midst of the wars stirred up by the League of Cambray. Meanwhile the young princes of the House of Medici had grown tomanhood in exile. The Cardinal Giovanni was thirty-seven in 1512. Hisbrother Giuliano was thirty-three. Both of these men were betterfitted than their brother Piero to fight the battles of the family. Giovanni, in particular, had inherited no small portion of theMedicean craft. During the troubled reign of Julius II. He kept veryquiet, cementing his connections with powerful men in Rome, but makingno effort to regain his hold on Florence. Now the moment for strikinga decisive blow had come. After the battle of Ravenna in 1512, theFrench were driven out of Italy, and the Sforzas returned to Milan;the Spanish troops, under the Viceroy Cardona, remained masters of thecountry. Following the camp of these Spaniards, Giovanni de' Medicientered Tuscany in August, and caused the restoration of the Medicito be announced in Florence. The people, assembled by Soderini, resolved to resist to the uttermost. No foreign army should force themto receive the masters whom they had expelled. Yet their couragefailed on August 29th, when news reached them of the capture and thesack of Prato. Prato is a sunny little city a few miles distant fromthe walls of Florence, famous for the beauty of its women, therichness of its gardens, and the grace of its buildings. Into this gemof cities the savage soldiery of Spain marched in the bright autumnalweather, and turned the paradise into a hell. It is even nowimpossible to read of what they did in Prato without shuddering. [16]Cruelty and lust, sordid greed for gold, and cold delight inbloodshed, could go no further. Giovanni de' Medici, by nature mildand voluptuous, averse to violence of all kinds, had to smileapproval, while the Spanish Viceroy knocked thus with mailed hand forhim at the door of Florence. The Florentines were paralysed withterror. They deposed Soderini and received the Medici. Giovanni andGiuliano entered their devastated palace in the Via Larga, abolishedthe Grand Council, and dealt with the republic as they listed. 

XXII

There was no longer any medium in Florence possible between eithertyranny or some such government as the Medici had now destroyed. TheState was too rotten to recover even the modified despotism ofLorenzo's days. Each transformation had impaired some portion of itsframework, broken down some of its traditions, and sowed new seeds ofegotism in citizens who saw all things round them change butself-advantage. Therefore Giovanni and Giuliano felt themselves securein flattering the popular vanity by an empty parade of the oldinstitutions. They restored the Signory and the Gonfalonier, electedfor intervals of two months by officers appointed for this purpose bythe Medici. Florence had the show of a free government. But the Medicimanaged all things; and soldiers, commanded by their creature, PaoloVettori, held the Palace and the Public Square. The tyranny thusestablished was less secure, inasmuch as it openly rested uponviolence, than Lorenzo's power had been; nor were there signs wantingthat the burghers could ill brook their servitude. The conspiracy ofPietro Paolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi proved that the Mediceanbrothers ran daily risk of life. Indeed, it is not likely that theywould have succeeded in maintaining their authority--for they werepoor and ill-supported by friends outside the city--except for onemost lucky circumstance: that was the election of Giovanni de' Medicito the Papacy in 1513. 

The creation of Leo X. Spread satisfaction throughout Italy. Politicians trusted that he would display some portion of his father'sability, and restore peace to the nation. Men of arts and lettersexpected everything from a Medicean Pope, who had already acquired thereputation of polite culture and open-handed generosity. They at anyrate were not deceived. Leo's first words on taking his place in theVatican were addressed to his brother Giuliano: 'Let us enjoy thePapacy, now that God has given it to us;' and his notion of enjoymentwas to surround himself with court-poets, jesters, and musicians, toadorn his Roman palaces with frescoes, to collect statues andinscriptions, to listen to Latin speeches, and to pass judgment uponscholarly compositions. Any one and every one who gave him sensual orintellectual pleasure, found his purse always open. He lived in theutmost magnificence, and made Rome the Paris of the Renaissance forbrilliance, immorality, and self-indulgent ease. The politicians hadless reason to be satisfied. Instead of uniting the Italians andkeeping the great Powers of Europe in check, Leo carried on a seriesof disastrous petty wars, chiefly with the purpose of establishing theMedici as princes. He squandered the revenues of the Church, and leftenormous debts behind him--an exchequer ruined and a foreign policy soconfused that peace for Italy could only be obtained by servitude. 

Florence shared in the general rejoicing which greeted Leo's accessionto the Papacy. He was the first Florentine citizen who had receivedthe tiara, and the popular vanity was flattered by this honour to therepublic. Political theorists, meanwhile, began to speculate whatgreatness Florence, in combination with Rome, might rise to. The Popewas young; he ruled a large territory, reduced to order by his warlikepredecessors. It seemed as though the republic, swayed by him, mightmake herself the first city in Italy, and restore the glories of herGuelf ascendency upon the platform of Renaissance statecraft. Therewas now no overt opposition to the Medici in Florence. How to governthe city from Rome, and how to advance the fortunes of his brotherGiuliano and his nephew Lorenzo (Piero's son, a young man oftwenty-one), occupied the Pope's most serious attention. For LorenzoLeo obtained the Duchy of Urbino and the hand of a French princess. Giuliano was named Gonfalonier of the Church. He also received theFrench title of Duke of Nemours and the hand of Filiberta, Princess ofSavoy. Leo entertained a further project of acquiring the crown ofSouthern Italy for his brother, and thus of uniting Rome, Florence, and Naples under the headship of his house. Nor were the Mediceaninterests neglected in the Church. Giulio, the Pope's bastard cousin, was made cardinal. He remained in Rome, acting as vice-chancellor anddoing the hard work of the Papal Government for the pleasure-lovingpontiff. 

To Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, the titular head of the family, wascommitted the government of Florence. During their exile, wanderingfrom court to court in Italy, the Medici had forgotten what it was tobe burghers, and had acquired the manners of princes. Leo aloneretained enough of caution to warn his nephew that the Florentinesmust still be treated as free people. He confirmed the constitution ofthe Signory and the Privy Council of seventy established by hisfather, bidding Lorenzo, while he ruled this sham republic, to avoidthe outer signs of tyranny. The young duke at first behaved withmoderation, but he could not cast aside his habits of a great lord. Florence now for the first time saw a regular court established in hermidst, with a prince, who, though he bore a foreign title, was in facther master. The joyous days of Lorenzo the Magnificent returned. Masquerades and triumphs filled the public squares. Two clubs ofpleasure, called the Diamond and the Branch--badges adopted by theMedici to signify their firmness in disaster and their power ofself-recovery--were formed to lead the revels. The best sculptors andpainters devoted their genius to the invention of costumes and cars. The city affected to believe that the age of gold had come again. 

XXIII

Fortune had been very favourable to the Medici. They had returned asprinces to Florence. Giovanni was Pope. Giuliano was Gonfalonier ofthe Church. Giulio was Cardinal and Archbishop of Florence. Lorenzoruled the city like a sovereign. But this prosperity was no less briefthan it was brilliant. A few years sufficed to sweep off all thechiefs of the great house. Giuliano died in 1516, leaving only abastard son Ippolito. Lorenzo died in 1519, leaving a bastard sonAlessandro, and a daughter, six days old, who lived to be the Queen ofFrance. Leo died in 1521. There remained now no legitimate maledescendants from the stock of Cosimo. The honours and pretensions ofthe Medici devolved upon three bastards--on the Cardinal Giulio, andthe two boys, Alessandro and Ippolito. Of these, Alessandro was amulatto, his mother having been a Moorish slave in the Palace ofUrbino; and whether his father was Giulio, or Giuliano, or a basegroom, was not known for certain. To such extremities were the Medicireduced. In order to keep their house alive, they were obliged toadopt this foundling. It is true that the younger branch of thefamily, descended from Lorenzo, the brother of Cosimo, stillflourished. At this epoch it was represented by Giovanni, the greatgeneral known as the Invincible, whose bust so strikingly resemblesthat of Napoleon. But between this line of the Medici and the elderbranch there had never been true cordiality. The Cardinal mistrustedGiovanni. It may, moreover, be added, that Giovanni was himself doomedto death in the year 1526. 

Giulio de' Medici was left in 1521 to administer the State of Florencesingle-handed. He was archbishop, and he resided in the city, holdingit with the grasp of an absolute ruler. Yet he felt his positioninsecure. The republic had no longer any forms of self-government; norwas there a magistracy to whom the despot could delegate his power inhis absence. Giulio's ambition was fixed upon the Papal crown. Thebastards he was rearing were but children. Florence had therefore tobe furnished with some political machinery that should work of itself. The Cardinal did not wish to give freedom to the city, but clockwork. He was in the perilous situation of having to rule a commonwealthwithout life, without elasticity, without capacity of self-movement, yet full of such material as, left alone, might ferment, and breed arevolution. In this perplexity, he had recourse to advisers. The mostexperienced politicians, philosophical theorists, practicaldiplomatists, and students of antique history were requested tofurnish him with plans for a new constitution, just as you ask anarchitect to give you the plan of a new house. This was the field-dayof the doctrinaires. Now was seen how much political sagacity theFlorentines had gained while they were losing liberty. We possessthese several drafts of constitutions. Some recommend tyranny; someincline to aristocracy, or what Italians called _Governo Stretto_;some to democracy, or _Governo Largo_; some to an eclectic compound ofthe other forms, or _Governo Misto_. More consummate masterpieces ofconstructive ingenuity can hardly be imagined. What is omitted in all, is just what no doctrinaire, no nostrum can communicate--the breath oflife, the principle of organic growth. Things had come, indeed, to amelancholy pass for Florence when her tyrant, in order to confirm hishold upon her, had to devise these springs and irons to support hertottering limbs. 

XXIV

While the archbishop and the doctors were debating, a plot washatching in the Rucellai Gardens. It was here that the FlorentineAcademy now held their meetings. For this society Machiavelli wrotehis 'Treatise on the Art of War, ' and his 'Discourses upon Livy. ' Theformer was an exposition of Machiavelli's scheme for creating anational militia, as the only safeguard for Italy, exposed at thisperiod to the invasions of great foreign armies. The latter is one ofthe three or four masterpieces produced by the Florentine school ofcritical historians. Stimulated by the daring speculations ofMachiavelli, and fired to enthusiasm by their study of antiquity, theyounger academicians formed a conspiracy for murdering Giulio de'Medici, and restoring the republic on a Roman model. An interceptedletter betrayed their plans. Two of the conspirators were taken andbeheaded. Others escaped. But the discovery of this conjuration put astop to Giulio's scheme of reforming the State. Henceforth he ruledFlorence like a despot, mild in manners, cautious in the exercise ofarbitrary power, but firm in his autocracy. The Condottiere. Alessandro Vitelli, with a company of soldiers, was taken into servicefor the protection of his person and the intimidation of the citizens. 

In 1523, the Pope, Adrian VI. , expired after a short papacy, fromwhich he gained no honour and Italy no profit. Giulio hurried to Rome, and, by the clever use of his large influence, caused himself to beelected with the title of Clement VII. In Florence he left SilvioPasserini, Cardinal of Cortona, as his vicegerent and the guardian ofthe two boys Alessandro and Ippolito. The discipline of many years hadaccustomed the Florentines to a government of priests. Still theburghers, mindful of their ancient liberties, were galled by the yokeof a Cortonese, sprung up from one of their subject cities; nor couldthey bear the bastards who were being reared to rule them. Foreignersthrew it in their teeth that Florence, the city glorious of art andfreedom, was become a stable for mules--_stalla da muli_, in theexpressive language of popular sarcasm. Bastardy, it may be said inpassing, carried with it small dishonour among the Italians. TheEstensi were all illegitimate; the Aragonese house in Naples sprangfrom Alfonso's natural son; and children of Popes ranked among theprinces. Yet the uncertainty of Alessandro's birth and the basecondition of his mother made the prospect of this tyrant peculiarlyodious; while the primacy of a foreign cardinal in the midst ofcitizens whose spirit was still unbroken, embittered the cup ofhumiliation. The Casa Medici held its authority by a slender thread, and depended more upon the disunion of the burghers than on any powerof its own. It could always reckon on the favour of the lowerpopulace, who gained profit and amusement from the presence of acourt. The Ottimati again hoped more from a weak despotism than from acommonwealth, where their privileges would have been merged in themass of the Grand Council. Thus the sympathies of the plebeians andthe selfishness of the rich patricians prevented the republic fromasserting itself. On this meagre basis of personal cupidity the Medicisustained themselves. What made the situation still more delicate, andat the same time protracted the feeble rule of Clement, was thatneither the Florentines nor the Medici had any army. Face to face witha potentate so considerable as the Pope, a free State could not beestablished without military force. On the other hand, the Medici, supported by a mere handful of mercenaries, had no power to resist apopular rising if any external event should inspire the middle classeswith a hope of liberty. 

XXV

Clement assumed the tiara at a moment of great difficulty. Leo hadruined the finance of Rome. France and Spain were still contending forthe possession of Italy. While acting as Vice-Chancellor, Giulio de'Medici had seemed to hold the reins with a firm grasp, and menexpected that he would prove a powerful Pope; but in those days he hadLeo to help him; and Leo, though indolent, was an abler man than hiscousin. He planned, and Giulio executed. Obliged to act now forhimself, Clement revealed the weakness of his nature. That weaknesswas irresolution, craft without wisdom, diplomacy without knowledge ofmen. He raised the storm, and showed himself incapable of guiding it. This is not the place to tell by what a series of crooked schemes andcross purposes he brought upon himself the ruin of the Church andRome, to relate his disagreement with the Emperor, or to describeagain the sack of the Eternal City by the rabble of the Constable deBourbon's army. That wreck of Rome in 1527 was the closing scene ofthe Italian Renaissance--the last of the Apocalyptic tragediesforetold by Savonarola--the death of the old age. 

When the Florentines knew what was happening in Rome, they rose andforced the Cardinal Passerini to depart with the Medicean bastardsfrom the city. The youth demanded arms for the defence of the town, and they received them. The whole male population was enrolled in amilitia. The Grand Council was reformed, and the republic was restoredupon the basis of 1495. Niccolo Capponi was elected Gonfalonier. Thename of Christ was again registered as chief of the commonwealth--tosuch an extent did the memory of Savonarola still sway the popularimagination. The new State hastened to form an alliance with France, and Malatesta Baglioni was chosen as military Commander-in-Chief. Meanwhile the city armed itself for siege--Michel Angelo Buonarrotiand Francesco da San Gallo undertaking the construction of new fortsand ramparts. These measures were adopted with sudden decision, because it was soon known that Clement had made peace with theEmperor, and that the army which had sacked Rome was going to bemarched on Florence. 

XXVI

In the month of August 1529 the Prince of Orange assembled his forcesat Terni, and thence advanced by easy stages into Tuscany. As heapproached, the Florentines laid waste their suburbs, and threw downtheir wreath of towers, in order that the enemy might have noharbourage or points of vantage for attack. Their troops wereconcentrated within the city, where a new Gonfalonier, FrancescoCarducci, furiously opposed to the Medici, and attached to thePiagnoni party, now ruled. On September 4th the Prince of Orangeappeared before the walls, and opened the memorable siege. It lastedeight months, at the end of which time, betrayed by their generals, divided among themselves, and worn out with delays, the Florentinescapitulated. Florence was paid as compensation for the insult offeredto the pontiff in the sack of Rome. 

The long yoke of the Medici had undermined the character of theFlorentines. This, their last glorious struggle for liberty, was but aflash in the pan--a final flare-up of the dying lamp. The city was notsatisfied with slavery; but it had no capacity for united action. TheOttimati were egotistic and jealous of the people. The Palleschidesired to restore the Medici at any price--some of them franklywishing for a principality, others trusting that the oldquasi-republican government might still be reinstated. The RedRepublicans, styled Libertini and Arrabbiati, clung together in blindhatred of the Medicean party; but they had no further policy to guidethem. The Piagnoni, or Frateschi, stuck to the memory of Savonarola, and believed that angels would descend to guard the battlements whenhuman help had failed. These enthusiasts still formed the true nerveof the nation--the class that might have saved the State, if salvationhad been possible. Even as it was, the energy of their fanaticismprolonged the siege until resistance seemed no longer physicallypossible. The hero developed by the crisis was Francesco Ferrucci, aplebeian who had passed his youth in manual labour, and who nowdisplayed rare military genius. He fell fighting outside the walls ofFlorence. Had he commanded the troops from the beginning, and remainedinside the city, it is just possible that the fate of the war mighthave been less disastrous. As it was, Malatesta Baglioni, theCommander-in-Chief, turned out an arrant scoundrel. He held secretcorrespondence with Clement and the Prince of Orange. It was he whofinally sold Florence to her foes, 'putting on his head, ' as the Dogeof Venice said before the Senate, 'the cap of the biggest traitor uponrecord. '

XXVII

What remains of Florentine history may be briefly told. Clement, nowthe undisputed arbiter of power and honour in the city, choseAlessandro de' Medici to be prince. Alessandro was created Duke ofCività di Penna, and married to a natural daughter of Charles V. Ippolito was made a cardinal. Ippolito would have preferred a secularto a priestly kingdom; nor did he conceal his jealousy for his cousin. Therefore Alessandro had him poisoned. Alessandro in his turn wasmurdered by his kinsman, Lorenzino de' Medici. Lorenzino paid theusual penalty of tyrannicide some years later. When Alessandro waskilled in 1539, Clement had himself been dead five years. Thus thewhole posterity of Cosimo de' Medici, with the exception of Catherine, Queen of France, was utterly extinguished. But the Medici had struckroot so firmly in the State, and had so remodelled it upon the type oftyranny, that the Florentines were no longer able to do without them. The chiefs of the Ottimati selected Cosimo, the representative ofGiovanni the Invincible, for their prince, and thus the line of theelder Lorenzo came at last to power. This Cosimo was a boy ofeighteen, fond of field-sports, and unused to party intrigues. WhenFrancesco Guicciardini offered him a privy purse of one hundred andtwenty thousand ducats annually, together with the presidency ofFlorence, this wily politician hoped that he would rule the Statethrough Cosimo, and realise at last that dream of the Ottimati, a_Governo Stretto_ or _di Pochi_. He was notably mistaken in hiscalculations. The first days of Cosimo's administration showed thathe possessed the craft of his family and the vigour of his immediateprogenitors, and that he meant to be sole master in Florence. He itwas who obtained the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany from the Pope--atitle confirmed by the Emperor, fortified by Austrian alliances, andtransmitted through his heirs to the present century. 

XXVIII

In this sketch of Florentine history, I have purposely omitted alldetails that did not bear upon the constitutional history of therepublic, or on the growth of the Medici as despots; because I wantedto present a picture of the process whereby that family contrived tofasten itself upon the freest and most cultivated State in Italy. Thissuccess the Medici owed mainly to their own obstinacy, and to theweakness of republican institutions in Florence. Their power wasfounded upon wealth in the first instance, and upon the ingenuity withwhich they turned the favour of the proletariate to use. It wasconfirmed by the mistakes and failures of their enemies, by Rinaldodegli Albizzi's attack on Cosimo, by the conspiracy of Neroni andPitti against Piero, and by Francesco de' Pazzi's attempt toassassinate Lorenzo. It was still further strengthened by the Mediceansympathy for arts and letters--a sympathy which placed both Cosimo andLorenzo at the head of the Renaissance movement, and made them worthyto represent Florence, the city of genius, in the fifteenth century. While thus founding and cementing their dynastic influence upon thebasis of a widespread popularity, the Medici employed persistentcunning in the enfeeblement of the Republic. It was their policy notto plant themselves by force or acts of overt tyranny, but to corruptambitious citizens, to secure the patronage of public officers, and torender the spontaneous working of the State machinery impossible. Bypursuing this policy over a long series of years they made the revivalof liberty in 1494, and again in 1527, ineffectual. While exiled fromFlorence, they never lost the hope of returning as masters, so long asthe passions they had excited, and they alone could gratify, remainedin full activity. These passions were avarice and egotism, the greedof the grasping Ottimati, the jealousy of the nobles, theself-indulgence of the proletariate. Yet it is probable they mighthave failed to recover Florence, on one or other of these twooccasions, but for the accident which placed Giovanni de' Medici onthe Papal chair, and enabled him to put Giulio in the way of the samedignity. From the accession of Leo in 1513 to the year 1527 the Mediciruled Florence from Rome, and brought the power of the Church into theservice of their despotism. After that date they were still furtheraided by the imperial policy of Charles V. , who chose to govern Italythrough subject princes, bound to himself by domestic alliances andpowerful interests. One of these was Cosimo, the first Grand Duke ofTuscany. 

 * * * * *

_THE DEBT OF ENGLISH TO ITALIAN LITERATURE_

To an Englishman one of the chief interests of the study of Italianliterature is derived from the fact that, between England and Italy, an almost uninterrupted current of intellectual intercourse has beenmaintained throughout the last five centuries. The English have never, indeed, at any time been slavish imitators of the Italians; but Italyhas formed the dreamland of the English fancy, inspiring poets withtheir most delightful thoughts, supplying them with subjects, andimplanting in their minds that sentiment of Southern beauty which, engrafted on our more passionately imaginative Northern nature, hasborne rich fruit in the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakspere, Milton, and the poets of this century. 

It is not strange that Italy should thus in matters of culture havebeen the guide and mistress of England. Italy, of all the Europeannations, was the first to produce high art and literature in the dawnof modern civilisation. Italy was the first to display refinement indomestic life, polish of manners, civilities of intercourse. In Italythe commerce of courts first developed a society of men and women, educated by the same traditions of humanistic culture. In Italy theprinciples of government were first discussed and reduced to theory. In Italy the zeal for the classics took its origin; and scholarship, to which we owe our mental training, was at first the possession ofnone almost but Italians. It therefore followed that during the age ofthe Renaissance any man of taste or genius, who desired to share thenewly discovered privileges of learning, had to seek Italy. Every onewho wished to be initiated into the secrets of science or philosophy, had to converse with Italians in person or through books. Every onewho was eager to polish his native language, and to render it theproper vehicle of poetic thought, had to consult the masterpieces ofItalian literature. To Italians the courtier, the diplomatist, theartist, the student of statecraft and of military tactics, thepolitical theorist, the merchant, the man of laws, the man of arms, and the churchman turned for precedents and precepts. The nations ofthe North, still torpid and somnolent in their semi-barbarism, neededthe magnetic touch of Italy before they could awake to intellectuallife. Nor was this all. Long before the thirst for culture possessedthe English mind, Italy had appropriated and assimilated all thatLatin literature contained of strong or splendid to arouse the thoughtand fancy of the modern world; Greek, too, was rapidly becoming thepossession of the scholars of Florence and Rome; so that English menof letters found the spirit of the ancients infused into a modernliterature; models of correct and elegant composition existed for themin a language easy, harmonious, and not dissimilar in usage to theirown. 

The importance of this service, rendered by Italians to the rest ofEurope, cannot be exaggerated. By exploring, digesting, andreproducing the classics, Italy made the labour of scholarshipcomparatively light for the Northern nations, and extended to us theprivilege of culture without the peril of losing originality in theenthusiasm for erudition. Our great poets could handle lightly, andyet profitably, those masterpieces of Greece and Rome, beneath theweight of which, when first discovered, the genius of the Italians hadwavered. To the originality of Shakspere an accession of wealthwithout weakness was brought by the perusal of Italian works, in whichthe spirit of the antique was seen as in a modern mirror. Then, inaddition to this benefit of instruction, Italy gave to England a giftof pure beauty, the influence of which, in refining our nationaltaste, harmonising the roughness of our manners and our language, andstimulating our imagination, has been incalculable. It was a notunfrequent custom for young men of ability to study at the Italianuniversities, or at least to undertake a journey to the principalItalian cities. From their sojourn in that land of loveliness andintellectual life they returned with their Northern brains mostpowerfully stimulated. To produce, by masterpieces of the imagination, some work of style that should remain as a memento of that gloriouscountry, and should vie on English soil with the art of Italy, wastheir generous ambition. Consequently the substance of the storiesversified by our poets, the forms of our metres, and the cadences ofour prose periods reveal a close attention to Italian originals. 

This debt of England to Italy in the matter of our literature beganwith Chaucer. Truly original and national as was the framework of the'Canterbury Tales, ' we can hardly doubt but that Chaucer wasdetermined in the form adopted for his poem by the example ofBoccaccio. The subject-matter, also, of many of his tales was takenfrom Boccaccio's prose or verse. For example, the story of PatientGrizzel is founded upon one of the legends of the 'Decameron, ' whilethe Knight's Tale is almost translated from the 'Teseide' ofBoccaccio, and Troilus and Creseide is derived from the 'Filostrato'of the same author. The Franklin's Tale and the Reeve's Taleare also based either on stories of Boccaccio or else on French'Fabliaux, ' to which Chaucer, as well as Boccaccio, had access. I donot wish to lay too much stress upon Chaucer's direct obligations toBoccaccio, because it is incontestable that the French 'Fabliaux, 'which supplied them both with subjects, were the common property ofthe mediæval nations. But his indirect debt in all that concernselegant handling of material, and in the fusion of the romantic withthe classic spirit, which forms the chief charm of such tales as thePalamon and Arcite, can hardly be exaggerated. Lastly, the seven-linedstanza, called _rime royal_, which Chaucer used with so much effect innarrative poetry, was probably borrowed from the earlier Florentine'Ballata, ' the last line rhyming with its predecessor beingsubstituted for the recurrent refrain. Indeed, the stanza itself, asused by our earliest poets, may be found in Guido Cavalcanti's'Ballatetta, ' beginning, _Posso degli occhi miei_. 

Between Chaucer and Surrey the Muse of England fell asleep; but whenin the latter half of the reign of Henry VIII. She awoke again, it wasas a conscious pupil of the Italian that she attempted new strains andessayed fresh metres. 'In the latter end of Henry VIII. 's reign, ' saysPuttenham, 'sprang up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir T. Wyatt the elder, and Henry Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains, who, having travelled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet andstately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newlycrept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatlypolished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy, from that it hadbeen before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformersof our English metre and style. ' The chief point in which Surreyimitated his 'master, Francis Petrarcha, ' was in the use of thesonnet. He introduced this elaborate form of poetry into ourliterature; and how it has thriven with us, the masterpieces ofSpenser, Shakspere, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Rossetti attest. Aspractised by Dante and Petrarch, the sonnet is a poem of fourteenlines, divided into two quatrains and two triplets, so arranged thatthe two quatrains repeat one pair of rhymes, while the two tripletsrepeat another pair. Thus an Italian sonnet of the strictest form iscomposed upon four rhymes, interlaced with great art. But muchdivergence from this rigid scheme of rhyming was admitted even byPetrarch, who not unfrequently divided the six final lines of thesonnet into three couplets, interwoven in such a way that the two lastlines never rhymed. [17]

It has been necessary to say thus much about the structure of theItalian sonnet, in order to make clear the task which lay beforeSurrey and Wyatt, when they sought to transplant it into English. Surrey did not adhere to the strict fashion of Petrarch: his sonnetsconsist either of three regular quatrains concluded with a couplet, or else of twelve lines rhyming alternately and concluded with acouplet. Wyatt attempted to follow the order and interlacement of theItalian rhymes more closely, but he too concluded his sonnet with acouplet. This introduction of the final couplet was a violation of theItalian rule, which may be fairly considered as prejudicial to theharmony of the whole structure, and which has insensibly caused theEnglish sonnet to terminate in an epigram. The famous sonnet of Surreyon his love, Geraldine, is an excellent example of the metricalstructure as adapted to the supposed necessities of English rhyming, and as afterwards adhered to by Shakspere in his long series oflove-poems. Surrey, while adopting the form of the sonnet, kept quiteclear of the Petrarchist's mannerism. His language is simple anddirect: there is no subtilising upon far-fetched conceits, nowire-drawing of exquisite sentimentalism, although he celebrates inthis, as in his other sonnets, a lady for whom he appears to haveentertained no more than a Platonic or imaginary passion. Surrey was agreat experimentalist in metre. Besides the sonnet, he introduced intoEngland blank verse, which he borrowed from the Italian _versisciolti_, fixing that decasyllable iambic rhythm for Englishversification in which our greatest poetical triumphs have beenachieved. 

Before quitting the subject of the sonnet it would, however, be wellto mention the changes which were wrought in its structure by earlypoets desirous of emulating the Italians. Shakspere, as alreadyhinted, adhered to the simple form introduced by Surrey: his stanzasinvariably consist of three separate quatrains followed by a couplet. But Sir Philip Sidney, whose familiarity with Italian literature wasintimate, and who had resided long in Italy, perceived that without agreater complexity and interweaving of rhymes the beauty of the poemwas considerably impaired. He therefore combined the rhymes of the twoquatrains, as the Italians had done, leaving himself free to followthe Italian fashion in the conclusion, or else to wind up afterEnglish usage with a couplet. Spenser and Drummond follow the rule ofSidney; Drayton and Daniel, that of Surrey and Shakspere. It was notuntil Milton that an English poet preserved the form of the Italiansonnet in its strictness; but, after Milton, the greatestsonnet-writers--Wordsworth, Keats, and Rossetti--have aimed atproducing stanzas as regular as those of Petrarch. 

The great age of our literature--the age of Elizabeth--was essentiallyone of Italian influence. In Italy the Renaissance had reached itsheight: England, feeling the new life which had been infused into artsand letters, turned instinctively to Italy, and adopted her canons oftaste. 'Euphues' has a distinct connection with the Italian discoursesof polite culture. Sidney's 'Arcadia' is a copy of what Boccaccio hadattempted in his classical romances, and Sanazzaro in hispastorals. [18] Spenser approached the subject of the 'Faery Queen'with his head full of Ariosto and the romantic poets of Italy. Hissonnets are Italian; his odes embody the Platonic philosophy of theItalians. [19] The extent of Spenser's deference to the Italians inmatters of poetic art may be gathered from this passage in thededication to Sir Walter Raleigh of the 'Faery Queen:'

 I have followed all the antique poets historical: first Homer, who in the persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good governor and a virtuous man, the one in his Ilias, the other in his Odysseis; then Virgil, whose like intention was to do in the person of Æneas; after him Ariosto comprised them both in his Orlando; and lately Tasso dissevered them again, and formed both parts in two persons, namely, that part which they in Philosophy call Ethice, or virtues of a private man, coloured in his Rinaldo, the other named Politico in his Goffredo. 

From this it is clear that, to the mind of Spenser, both Ariosto andTasso were authorities of hardly less gravity than Homer and Virgil. Raleigh, in the splendid sonnet with which he responds to thisdedication, enhances the fame of Spenser by affecting to believe thatthe great Italian, Petrarch, will be jealous of him in the grave. Tosuch an extent were the thoughts of the English poets occupied withtheir Italian masters in the art of song. 

It was at this time, again, that English literature was enriched bytranslations of Ariosto and Tasso--the one from the pen of Sir JohnHarrington, the other from that of Fairfax. Both were produced in themetre of the original--the octave stanza, which, however, did not atthat period take root in England. At the same period the works of manyof the Italian novelists, especially Bandello and Cinthio andBoccaccio, were translated into English; Painter's 'Palace ofPleasure' being a treasure-house of Italian works of fiction. ThomasHoby translated Castiglione's 'Courtier' in 1561. As a proof of theextent to which Italian books were read in England at the end of thesixteenth century, we may take a stray sentence from a letter ofHarvey, in which he disparages the works of Robert Greene:--'EvenGuicciardine's silver histories and Ariosto's golden cantos grow outof request: and the Countess of Pembroke's "Arcadia" is not greenenough for queasy stomachs; but they must have seen Greene's"Arcadia, " and I believe most eagerly longed for Greene's "FaeryQueen. "'

Still more may be gathered on the same topic from the indignantprotest uttered by Roger Ascham in his 'Schoolmaster' (pp. 78-91, date1570) against the prevalence of Italian customs, the habit of Italiantravel, and the reading of Italian books translated into English. Selections of Italian stories rendered into English were extremelypopular; and Greene's tales, which had such vogue that Nash says ofthem, 'glad was that printer that might be so blest to pay him dearfor the very dregs of his wit, ' were all modelled on the Italian. Theeducation of a young man of good family was not thought completeunless he had spent some time in Italy, studied its literature, admired its arts, and caught at least some tincture of its manners. Our rude ancestors brought back with them from these journeys manySouthern vices, together with the culture they had gone to seek. Thecontrast between the plain dealing of the North and the refinedMachiavellism of the South, between Protestant earnestness in religionand Popish scepticism, between the homely virtues of England and thecourtly libertinism of Venice or Florence, blunted the moral sense, while it stimulated the intellectual activity of the Englishtravellers, and too often communicated a fatal shock to theirprinciples. _Inglese Italianato è un diavolo incarnato_ passed into aproverb: we find it on the lips of Parker, of Howell, of Sidney, ofGreene, and of Ascham; while Italy itself was styled by severemoralists the court of Circe. In James Howell's 'Instructions forforreine travell' we find this pregnant sentence: 'And being now inItaly, that great limbique of working braines, he must be verycircumspect in his carriage, for she is able to turne a Saint into adevill, and deprave the best natures, if one will abandon himselfe, and become a prey to dissolut courses and wantonesse. ' Italy, intruth, had already become corrupt, and the fruit of her contact withthe nations of the North was seen in the lives of such scholars asRobert Greene, who confessed that he returned from his travelsinstructed 'in all the villanies under the sun. ' Many of the scandalsof the Court of James might be ascribed to this aping of Southernmanners. 

Yet, together with the evil of depraved morality, the advantage ofimproved culture was imported from Italy into England; and theconstitution of the English genius was young and healthy enough topurge off the mischief, while it assimilated what was beneficial. Thisis very manifest in the history of our drama, which, taking italtogether, is at the same time the purest and the most varied thatexists in literature; while it may be affirmed without exaggerationthat one of the main impulses to free dramatic composition in Englandwas communicated by the attraction everything Italian possessed forthe English fancy. It was in the drama that the English displayed therichness and the splendour of the Renaissance, which had blazed sogorgeously and at times so balefully below the Alps. The Italy of theRenaissance fascinated our dramatists with a strange wild glamour--thecontrast of external pageant and internal tragedy, the alternations ofradiance and gloom, the terrible examples of bloodshed, treason, andheroism emergent from ghastly crimes. Our drama began with atranslation of Ariosto's 'Suppositi' and ended with Davenant's 'JustItalian. ' In the very dawn of tragic composition Greene versified aportion of the 'Orlando Furioso, ' and Marlowe devoted one of his mostbrilliant studies to the villanies of a Maltese Jew. Of Shakspere'splays five are incontestably Italian: several of the rest arefurnished with Italian names to suit the popular taste. Ben Jonsonlaid the scene of his most subtle comedy of manners, 'Volpone, ' inVenice, and sketched the first cast of 'Every Man in his Humour' forItalian characters. Tourneur, Ford, and Webster were so dazzled by thetragic lustre of the wickedness of Italy that their finest dramas, without exception, are minute and carefully studied psychologicalanalyses of great Italian tales of crime. The same, in a less degree, is true of Middleton and Dekker. Massinger makes a story of the Sforzafamily the subject of one of his best plays. Beaumont and Fletcherdraw the subjects of comedies and tragedies alike from the Italiannovelists. Fletcher in his 'Faithful Shepherdess' transfers thepastoral style of Tasso and Guarini to the North. So close is theconnection between our tragedy and Italian novels that Marston andFord think fit to introduce passages of Italian dialogue into theplays of 'Giovanni and Annabella' and 'Antonio and Mellida. ' But thebest proof of the extent to which Italian life and literature hadinfluenced our dramatists, may be easily obtained by taking downHalliwell's 'Dictionary of Old Plays, ' and noticing that about everythird drama has an Italian title. Meanwhile the poems composed by thechief dramatists--Shakspere's 'Venus and Adonis, ' Marlowe's 'Hero andLeander, ' Marston's 'Pygmalion, ' and Beaumont's 'Hermaphrodite'--areall of them conceived in the Italian style, by men who had eitherstudied Southern literature, or had submitted to its powerful æstheticinfluences. The Masques, moreover, of Jonson, of Lyly, of Fletcher, and of Chapman are exact reproductions upon the English court theatresof such festival pageants as were presented to the Medici at Florenceor to the Este family at Ferrara. [20] Throughout our drama theinfluence of Italy, direct or indirect, either as supplying ourplaywrights with subjects or as stimulating their imagination, maythus be traced. Yet the Elizabethan drama is in the highest senseoriginal. As a work of art pregnant with deepest wisdom, andsplendidly illustrative of the age which gave it birth, it fartranscends anything that Italy produced in the same department. Ourpoets have a more masculine judgment, more fiery fancy, noblersentiment, than the Italians of any age but that of Dante. What Italygave, was the impulse toward creation, not patterns to beimitated--the excitement of the imagination by a spectacle of so muchgrandeur, not rules and precepts for production--the keen sense oftragic beauty, not any tradition of accomplished art. 

The Elizabethan period of our literature was, in fact, the periodduring which we derived most from the Italian nation. 

The study of the Italian language went hand in hand with the study ofGreek and Latin, so that the three together contributed to form theEnglish taste. Between us and the ancient world stood the genius ofItaly as an interpreter. Nor was this connection broken until far oninto the reign of Charles II. What Milton owed to Italy is clear notonly from his Italian sonnets, but also from the frequent mention ofDante and Petrarch in his prose works, from his allusions to Boiardoand Ariosto in the 'Paradise Lost, ' and from the hints which heprobably derived from Pulci, Tasso and Andreini. It would, indeed, beeasy throughout his works to trace a continuous vein of Italianinfluence in detail. But, more than this, Milton's poetical taste ingeneral seems to have been formed and ripened by familiarity with theharmonies of the Italian language. In his Tractate on Educationaddressed to Mr. Hartlib, he recommends that boys should be instructedin the Italian pronunciation of vowel sounds, in order to givesonorousness and dignity to elocution. This slight indication suppliesus with a key to the method of melodious structure employed by Miltonin his blank verse. Those who have carefully studied the harmonies ofthe 'Paradise Lost, ' know how all-important are the assonances of thevowel sounds of _o_ and _a_ in its most musical passages. It is justthis attention to the liquid and sonorous recurrences of open vowelsthat we should expect from a poet who proposed to assimilate hisdiction to that of the Italians. 

After the age of Milton the connection between Italy and England isinterrupted. In the seventeenth century Italy herself had sunk intocomparative stupor, and her literature was trivial. France not onlyswayed the political destinies of Europe, but also took the lead inintellectual culture. Consequently, our poets turned from Italy toFrance, and the French spirit pervaded English literature throughoutthe period of the Restoration and the reigns of William and Queen Anne. Yet during this prolonged reaction against the earlier movement ofEnglish literature, as manifested in Elizabethanism, the influence ofItaly was not wholly extinct. Dryden's 'Tales from Boccaccio' are noinsignificant contribution to our poetry, and his 'Palamon andArcite, ' through Chaucer, returns to the same source. But when, at thebeginning of this century, the Elizabethan tradition was revived, thenthe Italian influence reappeared more vigorous than ever. The metre of'Don Juan, ' first practised by Frere and then adopted by Lord Byron, is Pulci's octave stanza; the manner is that of Berni, Folengo, andthe Abbé Casti, fused and heightened by the brilliance of Byron'sgenius into a new form. The subject of Shelley's strongest work of artis Beatrice Cenci. Rogers's poem is styled 'Italy. ' Byron's dramas arechiefly Italian. Leigh Hunt repeats the tale of Francesca da Rimini. Keats versifies Boccaccio's 'Isabella. ' Passing to contemporary poets, Rossetti has acclimatised in English the metres and the manner of theearliest Italian lyrists. Swinburne dedicates his noblest song to thespirit of liberty in Italy. Even George Eliot and Tennyson have eachof them turned stories of Boccaccio into verse. The best of Mrs. Browning's poems, 'Casa Guidi Windows' and 'Aurora Leigh, ' are steepedin Italian thought and Italian imagery. Browning's longest poem is atale of Italian crime; his finest studies in the 'Men and Women' areportraits of Italian character of the Renaissance period. But there ismore than any mere enumeration of poets and their work can set forth, in the connection between Italy and England. That connection, so faras the poetical imagination is concerned, is vital. As poets in thetruest sense of the word, we English live and breathe through sympathywith the Italians. The magnetic touch which is required to inflame theimagination of the North, is derived from Italy. The nightingales ofEnglish song who make our oak and beech copses resonant in spring withpurest melody, are migratory birds, who have charged their souls inthe South with the spirit of beauty, and who return to warble nativewood-notes in a tongue which is their own. 

What has hitherto been said about the debt of the English poets toItaly, may seem to imply that our literature can be regarded as tosome extent a parasite on that of the Italians. Against such aconclusion no protest too energetic could be uttered. What we havederived directly from the Italian poets are, first, somemetres--especially the sonnet and the octave stanza, though the latterhas never taken firm root in England. 'Terza rima, ' attempted byShelley, Byron, Morris, and Mrs. Browning, has not yet becomeacclimatised. Blank verse, although originally remodelled by Surreyupon the _versi sciolti_ of the Italians, has departed widely fromItalian precedent, first by its decasyllabic structure, whereasItalian verse consists of hendecasyllables; and, secondly, by itsgreater force, plasticity, and freedom. The Spenserian stanza, again, is a new and original metre peculiar to our literature; though it ispossible that but for the complex structures of Italian lyric verse, it might not have been fashioned for the 'Faery Queen. ' Lastly, theso-called heroic couplet is native to England; at any rate, it is inno way related to Italian metre. Therefore the only true Italianexotic adopted without modification into our literature is the sonnet. 

In the next place, we owe to the Italians the subject-matter of manyof our most famous dramas and our most delightful tales in verse. Butthe English treatment of these histories and fables has been uniformlyindependent and original. Comparing Shakspere's 'Romeo and Juliet'with Bandello's tale, Webster's 'Duchess of Malfy' with the versiongiven from the Italian in Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure, ' andChaucer's Knight's Tale with the 'Teseide' of Boccaccio, we perceiveat once that the English poets have used their Italian models merelyas outlines to be filled in with freedom, as the canvas to beembroidered with a tapestry of vivid groups. Nothing is more manifestthan the superiority of the English genius over the Italian in alldramatic qualities of intense passion, profound analysis, and livingportrayal of character in action. The mere rough detail of Shakspere's'Othello' is to be found in Cinthio's Collection of Novelle; but letan unprejudiced reader peruse the original, and he will be no moredeeply affected by it than by any touching story of treachery, jealousy, and hapless innocence. The wily subtleties of Iago, thesoldierly frankness of Cassio, the turbulent and volcanic passions ofOthello, the charm of Desdemona, and the whole tissue of vividincidents which make 'Othello' one of the most tremendous extanttragedies of characters in combat, are Shakspere's, and onlyShakspere's. This instance, indeed, enables us exactly to indicatewhat the English owed to Italy and what was essentially their own. From that Southern land of Circe about which they dreamed, and whichnow and then they visited, came to their imaginations aspirit-stirring breath of inspiration. It was to them the country ofmarvels, of mysterious crimes, of luxurious gardens and splendidskies, where love was more passionate and life more picturesque, andhate more bloody and treachery more black, than in our Northernclimes. Italy was a spacious grove of wizardry, which mighty poets, onthe quest of fanciful adventure, trod with fascinated senses andquickened pulses. But the strong brain which converted what they heardand read and saw of that charmed land into the stuff of golden romanceor sable tragedy, was their own. 

English literature has been defined a literature of genius. 

Our greatest work in art has been achieved not so much by inspiration, subordinate to sentiments of exquisite good taste or guided byobservance of classical models, as by audacious sallies of pureinventive power. This is true as a judgment of that constellationwhich we call our drama, of the meteor Byron, of Milton and Dryden, who are the Jupiter and Mars of our poetic system, and of the starswhich stud our literary firmament under the names of Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Chatterton, Scott, Coleridge, Clough, Blake, Browning, Swinburne, Tennyson. There are only a very few of the English poets, Pope and Gray, for example, in whom the free instincts of genius arekept systematically in check by the laws of the reflectiveunderstanding. Now Italian literature is in this respect all unlikeour own. It began, indeed, with Dante, as a literature pre-eminentlyof genius; but the spirit of scholarship assumed the sway as early asthe days of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and after them Italian has beenconsistently a literature of taste. By this I mean that even thegreatest Italian poets have sought to render their style correct, haveendeavoured to subordinate their inspiration to what they consideredthe rules of sound criticism, and have paid serious attention to theirmanner as independent of the matter they wished to express. Thepassion for antiquity, so early developed in Italy, delivered thelater Italian poets bound hand and foot into the hands of Horace. Poliziano was content to reproduce the classic authors in a mosaicwork of exquisite translations. Tasso was essentially a man of talent, producing work of chastened beauty by diligent attention to the ruleand method of his art. Even Ariosto submitted the liberty of his swiftspirit to canons of prescribed elegance. While our English poets haveconceived and executed without regard for the opinion of the learnedand without obedience to the usages of language--Shakspere, forexample, producing tragedies which set Aristotle at defiance, andMilton engrafting Latinisms on the native idiom--the Italian poetsthought and wrote with the fear of Academies before their eyes, andstudied before all things to maintain the purity of the Tuscan tongue. The consequence is that the Italian and English literatures areeminent for very different excellences. All that is forcible in thedramatic presentation of life and character and action, all that isaudacious in imagination and capricious in fancy, whatever strengthstyle can gain from the sallies of original and untrammelledeloquence, whatever beauty is derived from spontaneity and nativegrace, belong in abundant richness to the English. On the other hand, the Italian poets present us with masterpieces of correct and studieddiction, with carefully elaborated machinery, and with a stylemaintained at a uniform level of dignified correctness. The weaknessof the English proceeds from inequality and extravagance; it is theweakness of self-confident vigour, intolerant of rule, rejoicing inits own exuberant resources. The weakness of the Italian is due totimidity and moderation; it is the weakness that springs not so muchfrom a lack of native strength as from the over-anxious expenditure ofstrength upon the attainment of finish, polish, and correctness. Hencethe two nations have everything to learn from one another. ModernItalian poets may seek by contact with Shakspere and Milton to gain afreedom from the trammels imposed upon them by the slavish followersof Petrarch; while the attentive perusal of Tasso should berecommended to all English people who have no ready access to themasterpieces of Greek and Latin literature. 

Another point of view may be gained by noticing the pre-dominant toneof the two literatures. Whenever English poetry is really great, itapproximates to the tragic and the stately; whereas the Italians arepeculiarly felicitous in the smooth and pleasant style, which combinespathos with amusement, and which does not trespass beyond the regionof beauty into the domain of sublimity or terror. Italian poetry isanalogous to Italian painting and Italian music: it bathes the soul ina plenitude of charms, investing even the most solemn subjects withloveliness. Rembrandt and Albert Dürer depict the tragedies of theSacred History with a serious and awful reality: Italian painters, with a few rare but illustrious exceptions, shrink from approachingthem from any point of view but that of harmonious melancholy. Even sothe English poets stir the soul to its very depths by their profoundand earnest delineations of the stern and bitter truths of the world:Italian poets environ all things with the golden haze of an artisticharmony; so that the soul is agitated by no pain at strife with thepersuasions of pure beauty. 

 * * * * *

_POPULAR SONGS OF TUSCANY_

It is a noticeable fact about the popular songs of Tuscany that theyare almost exclusively devoted to love. The Italians in general haveno ballad literature resembling that of our Border or that of Spain. The tragic histories of their noble families, the great deeds of theirnational heroes, and the sufferings of their country during centuriesof warfare, have left but few traces in their rustic poetry. It istrue that some districts are less utterly barren than others in theserecords of the past. The Sicilian people's poetry, for example, preserves a memory of the famous Vespers; and one or two terriblestories of domestic tragedy, like the tale of Rosmunda in 'La DonnaLombarda, ' the romance of the Baronessa di Carini, and the so-calledCaso di Sciacca, may still be heard upon the lips of the people. Butthese exceptions are insignificant in comparison with the vast mass ofsongs which deal with love; and I cannot find that Tuscany, where thelanguage of this minstrelsy is purest, and where the artisticinstincts of the race are strongest, has anything at all approachingto our ballads. [21] Though the Tuscan contadini are always singing, itrarely happens that

 The plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago. 

On the contrary, we may be sure, when we hear their voices ringingthrough the olive-groves or macchi, that they are chanting

 Some more humble lay, Familiar matter of to-day, -- Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, That has been, and may be again;

or else, since their melodies are by no means uniformly sad, someditty of the joyousness of springtime or the ecstasy of love. 

This defect of anything corresponding to our ballads of 'Chevy Chase, 'or 'Sir Patrick Spens, ' or 'Gil Morrice, ' in a poetry which is stillso vital with the life of past centuries, is all the more remarkablebecause Italian history is distinguished above that of other nationsby tragic episodes peculiarly suited to poetic treatment. Many ofthese received commemoration in the fourteenth century from Dante;others were embodied in the _novelle_ of Boccaccio and Cinthio andBandello, whence they passed into the dramas of Shakspere, Webster, Ford, and their contemporaries. But scarcely an echo can be tracedthrough all the volumes of the recently collected popular songs. Wemust seek for an explanation of this fact partly in the conditions ofItalian life, and partly in the nature of the Italian imagination. Nowhere in Italy do we observe that intimate connection between thepeople at large and the great nobles which generates the sympathy ofclanship. Politics in most parts of the peninsula fell at a veryearly period into the hands either of irresponsible princes, who ruledlike despots, or else of burghers, who administered the state withinthe walls of their Palazzo Pubblico. The people remained passivespectators of contemporary history. The loyalty of subjects to theirsovereign which animates the Spanish ballads, the loyalty of retainersto their chief which gives life to the tragic ballads of the Border, did not exist in Italy. Country-folk felt no interest in the doings ofVisconti or Medici or Malatesti sufficient to arouse the enthusiasm oflocal bards or to call forth the celebration of their princelytragedies in verse. Amid the miseries of foreign wars and homeoppression, it seemed better to demand from verse and song somemitigation of the woes of life, some expression of personal emotion, than to record the disasters which to us at a distance appear poeticin their grandeur. 

These conditions of popular life, although unfavourable to theproduction of ballad poetry, would not, however, have been sufficientby themselves to check its growth, if the Italians had been stronglyimpelled to literature of this type by their nature. The real reasonwhy their _Volkslieder_ are amorous and personal is to be found in thequality of their imagination. The Italian genius is not creativelyimaginative in the highest sense. The Italians have never, either inthe ancient or the modern age, produced a great drama or a nationalepic, the 'Æneid' and the 'Divine Comedy' being obviously of differentspecies from the 'Iliad' or the 'Nibelungen Lied. ' Modern Italians, again, are distinguished from the French, the Germans, and the Englishin being the conscious inheritors of an older, august, and strictlyclassical civilisation. The great memories of Rome weigh down theirfaculties of invention. It would also seem as though they shrank intheir poetry from the representation of what is tragic andspirit-stirring. They incline to what is cheerful, brilliant, orpathetic. The dramatic element in human life, external to thepersonality of the poet, which exercised so strong a fascination overour ballad-bards and playwrights, has but little attraction for theItalian. When he sings, he seeks to express his own individualemotions--his love, his joy, his jealousy, his anger, his despair. Thelanguage which he uses is at the same time direct in its intensity, and hyperbolical in its display of fancy; but it lacks thoseimaginative touches which exalt the poetry of personal passion into asublimer region. Again, the Italians are deficient in a sense of thesupernatural. The wraiths that cannot rest because their love is stillunsatisfied, the voices which cry by night over field and fell, thewater-spirits and forest fairies, the second-sight of coming woes, thepresentiment of death, the warnings and the charms and spells, whichfill the popular poetry of all Northern nations, are absent in Italiansongs. In the whole of Tigri's collection I only remember one mentionof a ghost. It is not that the Italians are deficient in superstitionsof all kinds. Every one has heard of their belief in the evil eye, forinstance. But they do not connect this kind of fetichism with theirpoetry; and even their greatest poets, with the exception of Dante, have shown no capacity or no inclination for enhancing the imaginativeeffect of their creations by an appeal to the instinct of mysteriousawe. 

The truth is that the Italians as a race are distinguished as much bya firm grasp upon the practical realities of existence as by powerfulemotions. They have but little of that dreamy _Schwärmerei_ with whichthe people of the North are largely gifted. The true sphere of theirgenius is painting. What appeals to the imagination through the eyes, they have expressed far better than any other modern nation. Buttheir poetry, like their music, is deficient in tragic sublimity andin the higher qualities of imaginative creation. 

It may seem paradoxical to say this of the nation which producedDante. But we must remember not to judge races by single andexceptional men of genius. Petrarch, the Troubadour of exquisiteemotions, Boccaccio, who touches all the keys of life so lightly, Ariosto, with the smile of everlasting April on his lips, and Tasso, excellent alone when he confines himself to pathos or the picturesque, are no exceptions to what I have just said. Yet these poets pursuedtheir art with conscious purpose. The tragic splendour of Greece, themajesty of Rome, were not unknown to them. Far more is it true thatpopular poetry in Italy, proceeding from the hearts of uncultivatedpeasants and expressing the national character in its simplicity, displays none of the stuff from which the greatest works of art inverse, epics and dramas, can be wrought. But within its own sphere ofpersonal emotion, this popular poetry is exquisitely melodious, inexhaustibly rich, unique in modern literature for the directexpression which it has given to every shade of passion. 

Signor Tigri's collection, [22] to which I shall confine my attentionin this paper, consists of eleven hundred and eighty-five _rispetti_, with the addition of four hundred and sixty-one _stornelli_. Rispetto, it may be said in passing, is the name commonly given throughout Italyto short poems, varying from six to twelve lines, constructed on theprinciple of the octave stanza. That is to say, the first part of therispetto consists of four or six lines with alternate rhymes, whileone or more couplets, called the _ripresa_, complete the poem. [23]The stornello, or ritournelle, never exceeds three lines, and owesits name to the return which it makes at the end of the last line tothe rhyme given by the emphatic word of the first. Browning, in hispoem of 'Fra Lippo Lippi, ' has accustomed English ears to one commonspecies of the stornello, [24] which sets out with the name of aflower, and rhymes with it, as thus:

 Fior di narciso. Prigionero d'amore mi son reso, Nel rimirare il tuo leggiadro viso. 

The divisions of those two sorts of songs, to which Tigri gives nameslike The Beauty of Women, The Beauty of Men, Falling in Love, Serenades, Happy Love, Unhappy Love, Parting, Absence, Letters, Returnto Home, Anger and Jealousy, Promises, Entreaties and Reproaches, Indifference, Treachery and Abandonment, prove with what fulness thevarious phases of the tender passion are treated. Through the wholefifteen hundred the one theme of Love is never relinquished. Only twopersons, 'I' and 'thou, ' appear upon the scene; yet so fresh and sovarious are the moods of feeling, that one can read them from first tolast without too much satiety. 

To seek for the authors of these ditties would be useless. Some ofthem may be as old as the fourteenth century; others may have beenmade yesterday. Some are the native product of the Tuscan mountainvillages, especially of the regions round Pistoja and Siena, where onthe spurs of the Apennines the purest Italian is vernacular. Some, again, are importations from other provinces, especially from Sicilyand Naples, caught up by the peasants of Tuscany and adapted to theirtaste and style; for nothing travels faster than a _Volkslied_. Bornsome morning in a noisy street of Naples, or on the solitary slopes ofRadicofani, before the week is out, a hundred voices are repeating it. Waggoners and pedlars carry it across the hills to distant towns. Itfloats with the fishermen from bay to bay, and marches with theconscript to his barrack in a far-off province. Who was the first togive it shape and form? No one asks, and no one cares. A student wellacquainted with the habits of the people in these matters says, 'Ifthey knew the author of a ditty, they would not learn it, far less ifthey discovered that it was a scholar's. ' If the cadence takes theirear, they consecrate the song at once by placing it upon the honouredlist of 'ancient lays. ' Passing from lip to lip and from district todistrict, it receives additions and alterations, and becomes theproperty of a score of provinces. Meanwhile the poet from whose soulit blossomed that first morning like a flower, remains contented withobscurity. The wind has carried from his lips the thistledown of song, and sown it on a hundred hills and meadows, far and wide. After suchwise is the birth of all truly popular compositions. Who knows, forinstance, the veritable author of many of those mighty German choralswhich sprang into being at the period of the Reformation? The firstinspiration was given, probably, to a single mind; but the melody, asit has reached us, is the product of a thousand. This accounts for thevariations which in different dialects and districts the same songpresents. Meanwhile, it is sometimes possible to trace the authorshipof a ballad with marked local character to an improvisatore famous inhis village, or to one of those professional rhymesters whom thecountry-folk employ in the composition of love-letters to theirsweethearts at a distance. [25] Tommaseo, in the preface to his 'CantiPopolari, ' mentions in particular a Beatrice di Pian degli Ontani, whose poetry was famous through the mountains of Pistoja; and Tigrirecords by name a little girl called Cherubina, who made rispetti bythe dozen as she watched her sheep upon the hills. One of the songs inhis collection (p. 181) contains a direct reference to the villageletter-writer:--

 Salutatemi, bella, lo scrivano; Non lo conosco e non so chi si sia. A me mi pare un poeta sovrano, Tanto gli è sperto nella poesia. [26]

While I am writing thus about the production and dissemination ofthese love-songs, I cannot help remembering three days and nightswhich I once spent at sea between Genoa and Palermo, in the company ofsome conscripts who were going to join their regiment in Sicily. Theywere lads from the Milanese and Liguria, and they spent a greatportion of their time in composing and singing poetry. One of them hada fine baritone voice; and when the sun had set, his comrades gatheredround him and begged him to sing to them 'Con quella patetica tuavoce. ' Then followed hours of singing, the low monotonous melodies ofhis ditties harmonising wonderfully with the tranquillity of night, soclear and calm that the sky and all its stars were mirrored on thesea, through which we moved as if in a dream. Sometimes the songsprovoked conversation, which, as is usual in Italy, turned mostly upon'le bellezze delle donne. ' I remember that once an animated discussionabout the relative merits of blondes and brunettes nearly ended in aquarrel, when the youngest of the whole band, a boy of aboutseventeen, put a stop to the dispute by theatrically raising his eyesand arms to heaven and crying, 'Tu sei innamorato d' una grande Dianacacciatrice nera, ed io d' una bella Venere bionda. ' Though they werebut village lads, they supported their several opinions with argumentsnot unworthy of Firenzuola, and showed the greatest delicacy offeeling in the treatment of a subject which could scarcely have failedto reveal any latent coarseness. 

The purity of all the Italian love-songs collected by Tigri is veryremarkable. [27] Although the passion expressed in them is Oriental inits vehemence, not a word falls which could offend a virgin's ear. Theone desire of lovers is lifelong union in marriage. The _damo_--for soa sweetheart is termed in Tuscany--trembles until he has gained theapproval of his future mother-in-law, and forbids the girl he iscourting to leave her house to talk to him at night:--

 Dice che tu tì affacci alia finestra; Ma non tì dice che tu vada fuora, Perchè, la notte, è cosa disonesta. 

All the language of his love is respectful. _Signore_, or master of mysoul, _madonna, anima mia, dolce mio ben, nobil persona, _ are theterms of adoration with which he approaches his mistress. Theelevation of feeling and perfect breeding which Manzoni has so welldelineated in the loves of Renzo and Lucia are traditional amongItalian country-folk. They are conscious that true gentleness is nomatter of birth or fortune:--

 E tu non mi lasciar per poverezza, Chè povertà non guasta gentilezza. [28]

This in itself constitutes an important element of culture, andexplains to some extent the high romantic qualities of theirimpassioned poetry. The beauty of their land reveals still more. 'Ofortunatos nimium sua si bona norint!' Virgil's exclamation is as truenow as it was when he sang the labours of Italian country-folk somenineteen centuries ago. To a traveller from the north there is apathos even in the contrast between the country in which thesechildren of a happier climate toil, and those bleak, winter-beatenfields where our own peasants pass their lives. The cold nights andwarm days of Tuscan springtime are like a Swiss summer. They make richpasture and a hardy race of men. Tracts of corn and oats and ryealternate with patches of flax in full flower, with meadows yellowwith buttercups or pink with ragged robin; the young vines, runningfrom bough to bough of elm and mulberry, are just coming into leaf. The poplars are fresh with bright green foliage. On the verge of thisblooming plain stand ancient cities ringed with hills, some rising tosnowy Apennines, some covered with white convents and sparkling withvillas. Cypresses shoot, black and spirelike, amid grey clouds ofolive-boughs upon the slopes; and above, where vegetation borders onthe barren rock, are masses of ilex and arbutus interspersed withchestnut-trees not yet in leaf. Men and women are everywhere at work, ploughing with great white oxen, or tilling the soil with spades sixfeet in length--Sabellian ligones. The songs of nightingales amongacacia-trees, and the sharp scream of swallows wheeling in air, minglewith the monotonous chant that always rises from the country-people attheir toil. Here and there on points of vantage, where the hill-slopessink into the plain, cluster white villages with flower-likecampanili. It is there that the veglia, or evening rendezvous oflovers, the serenades and balls and feste, of which one hears so muchin the popular minstrelsy, take place. Of course it would not bedifficult to paint the darker shades of this picture. Autumn comes, when the contadini of Lucca and Siena and Pistoja go forth to work inthe unwholesome marshes of the Maremma, or of Corsica and Sardinia. Dismal superstitions and hereditary hatreds cast their blight over alife externally so fair. The bad government of centuries has pervertedin many ways the instincts of a people naturally mild and cheerful andpeace-loving. But as far as nature can make men happy, thesehusbandmen are surely to be reckoned fortunate, and in their songs wefind little to remind us of what is otherwise than sunny in their lot. 

A translator of these _Volkslieder_ has to contend with difficultiesof no ordinary kind. The freshness of their phrases, the spontaneityof their sentiments, and the melody of their unstudied cadences, areinimitable. So again is the peculiar effect of their frequenttransitions from the most fanciful imagery to the language of prose. No mere student can hope to rival, far less to reproduce, in a foreigntongue, the charm of verse which sprang untaught from the hearts ofsimple folk, which lives unwritten on the lips of lovers, and whichshould never be dissociated from singing. [29] There are, besides, peculiarities in the very structure of the popular rispetto. Theconstant repetition of the same phrase with slight variations, especially in the closing lines of the _ripresa_ of the Tuscanrispetto, gives an antique force and flavour to these ditties, likethat which we appreciate in our own ballads, but which may easily, inthe translation, degenerate into weakness and insipidity. The Tuscanrhymester, again, allows himself the utmost licence. It is usual tofind mere assonances like _bene_ and _piacere, oro_ and _volo, ala_and _alata_, in the place of rhymes; while such remote resemblances ofsound as _colli_ and _poggi_, _lascia_ and _piazza_, are far fromuncommon. To match these rhymes by joining 'home' and 'alone, ' 'time'and 'shine, ' &c, would of course be a matter of no difficulty; but ithas seemed to me on the whole best to preserve, with some exceptions, such accuracy as the English ear requires. I fear, however, that, after all, these wild-flowers of song, transplanted to another climateand placed in a hothouse, will appear but pale and hectic by the sideof their robuster brethren of the Tuscan hills. 

In the following serenade many of the peculiarities whichI have just noticed occur. I have also adhered to the irregularity ofrhyme which may be usually observed about the middle of the poem (p. 103):--

 Sleeping or waking, thou sweet face, Lift up thy fair and tender brow: List to thy love in this still place; He calls thee to thy window now: But bids thee not the house to quit, Since in the night this were not meet. Come to thy window, stay within; I stand without, and sing and sing: Come to thy window, stay at home; I stand without, and make my moan. 

Here is a serenade of a more impassioned character (p. 99):--

 I come to visit thee, my beauteous queen, Thee and the house where thou art harboured: All the long way upon my knees, my queen, I kiss the earth where'er thy footsteps tread. I kiss the earth, and gaze upon the wall, Whereby thou goest, maid imperial! I kiss the earth, and gaze upon the house, Whereby thou farest, queen most beauteous!

In the next the lover, who has passed the whole night beneath hissweetheart's window, takes leave at the break of day. The feeling ofthe half-hour before dawn, when the sound of bells rises to meet thegrowing light, and both form a prelude to the glare and noise of day, is expressed with much unconscious poetry (p. 105):--

 I see the dawn e'en now begin to peer: Therefore I take my leave, and cease to sing, See how the windows open far and near, And hear the bells of morning, how they ring! Through heaven and earth the sounds of ringing swell; Therefore, bright jasmine flower, sweet maid, farewell! Through heaven and Rome the sound of ringing goes; Farewell, bright jasmine flower, sweet maiden rose!The next is more quaint (p. 99):--

 I come by night, I come, my soul aflame; I come in this fair hour of your sweet sleep; And should I wake you up, it were a shame. I cannot sleep, and lo! I break your sleep. To wake you were a shame from your deep rest; Love never sleeps, nor they whom Love hath blest. 

A very great many rispetti are simple panegyrics of the beloved, tofind similitude for whose beauty heaven and earth are ransacked. Thecompliment of the first line in the following song is perfect (p. 23):--

 Beauty was born with you, fair maid: The sun and moon inclined to you; On you the snow her whiteness laid The rose her rich and radiant hue: Saint Magdalen her hair unbound, And Cupid taught you how to wound-- How to wound hearts Dan Cupid taught: Your beauty drives me love-distraught. 

The lady in the next was December's child (p. 25):--

 O beauty, born in winter's night, Born in the month of spotless snow: Your face is like a rose so bright; Your mother may be proud of you! She may be proud, lady of love, Such sunlight shines her house above: She may be proud, lady of heaven, Such sunlight to her home is given. 

The sea wind is the source of beauty to another (p. 16):--

 Nay, marvel not you are so fair; For you beside the sea were born: The sea-waves keep you fresh and fair, Like roses on their leafy thorn. If roses grow on the rose-bush, Your roses through midwinter blush; If roses bloom on the rose-bed, Your face can show both white and red. 

The eyes of a fourth are compared, after quite a new and originalfashion, to stars (p. 210):--

 The moon hath risen her plaint to lay Before the face of Love Divine. Saying in heaven she will not stay, Since you have stolen what made her shine: Aloud she wails with sorrow wan, -- She told her stars and two are gone: They are not there; you have them now; They are the eyes in your bright brow. 

Nor are girls less ready to praise their lovers, but that they do notdwell so much on physical perfection. Here is a pleasant greeting (p. 124):--

 O welcome, welcome, lily white, Thou fairest youth of all the valley! When I'm with you, my soul is light; I chase away dull melancholy. I chase all sadness from my heart: Then welcome, dearest that thou art! I chase all sadness from my side: Then welcome, O my love, my pride! I chase all sadness far away: Then welcome, welcome, love, to-day!

The image of a lily is very prettily treated in the next (p 79):--

 I planted a lily yestreen at my window; I set it yestreen, and to-day it sprang up: When I opened the latch and leaned out of my window, It shadowed my face with its beautiful cup. O lily, my lily, how tall you are grown! Remember how dearly I loved you, my own. O lily, my lily, you'll grow to the sky! Remember I love you for ever and aye. 

The same thought of love growing like a flower receives another turn(p. 69):--

 On yonder hill I saw a flower; And, could it thence be hither borne, I'd plant it here within my bower, And water it both eve and morn. Small water wants the stem so straight; 'Tis a love-lily stout as fate. Small water wants the root so strong: 'Tis a love-lily lasting long. Small water wants the flower so sheen: 'Tis a love-lily ever green. 

Envious tongues have told a girl that her complexion is not good. Shereplies, with imagery like that of Virgil's 'Alba ligustra cadunt, vaccinia nigra leguntur' (p. 31):--

 Think it no grief that I am brown, For all brunettes are born to reign: White is the snow, yet trodden down; Black pepper kings need not disdain: White snow lies mounded on the vales Black pepper's weighed in brazen scales. 

Another song runs on the same subject (p. 38):--

 The whole world tells me that I'm brown, The brown earth gives us goodly corn: The clove-pink too, however brown, Yet proudly in the hand 'tis borne. They say my love is black, but he Shines like an angel-form to me: They say my love is dark as night; To me he seems a shape of light. 

The freshness of the following spring song recalls the ballads of theVal de Vire in Normandy (p. 85):--

 It was the morning of the first of May, Into the close I went to pluck a flower; And there I found a bird of woodland gay, Who whiled with songs of love the silent hour. O bird, who fliest from fair Florence, how Dear love begins, I prithee teach me now!-- Love it begins with music and with song, And ends with sorrow and with sighs ere long. 

Love at first sight is described (p. 79):--

 The very moment that we met, That moment love began to beat: One glance of love we gave, and swore Never to part for evermore; We swore together, sighing deep, Never to part till Death's long sleep. 

Here too is a memory of the first days of love (p. 79):--

 If I remember, it was May When love began between us two: The roses in the close were gay, The cherries blackened on the bough. O cherries black and pears so green! Of maidens fair you are the queen. Fruit of black cherry and sweet pear! Of sweethearts you're the queen, I swear. 

The troth is plighted with such promises as these (p. 230):--

 Or ere I leave you, love divine, Dead tongues shall stir and utter speech, And running rivers flow with wine, And fishes swim upon the beach; Or ere I leave or shun you, these Lemons shall grow on orange-trees. 

The girl confesses her love after this fashion (p. 86):--

 Passing across the billowy sea, I let, alas, my poor heart fall; I bade the sailors bring it me; They said they had not seen it fall. I asked the sailors, one and two; They said that I had given it you. I asked the sailors, two and three; They said that I had given it thee. It is not uncommon to speak of love as a sea. Here is a curious playupon this image (p. 227):--

 Ho, Cupid! Sailor Cupid, ho! Lend me awhile that bark of thine; For on the billows I will go, To find my love who once was mine: And if I find her, she shall wear A chain around her neck so fair, Around her neck a glittering bond, Four stars, a lily, a diamond. 

It is also possible that the same thought may occur in the second lineof the next ditty (p. 120):--

 Beneath the earth I'll make a way To pass the sea and come to you. People will think I'm gone away; But, dear, I shall be seeing you. People will say that I am dead; But we'll pluck roses white and red: People will think I'm lost for aye; But we'll pluck roses, you and I. 

All the little daily incidents are beautified by love. Here is alover who thanks the mason for making his window so close upon theroad that he can see his sweetheart as she passes (p. 118):--

 Blest be the mason's hand who built This house of mine by the roadside, And made my window low and wide For me to watch my love go by. And if I knew when she went by, My window should be fairly gilt; And if I knew what time she went, My window should be flower-besprent. 

Here is a conceit which reminds one of the pretty epistle ofPhilostratus, in which the footsteps of the beloved are called_[Greek: erêreismena philêmpta]_ (p. 117):--

 What time I see you passing by; I sit and count the steps you take: You take the steps; I sit and sigh: Step after step, my sighs awake. Tell me, dear love, which more abound, My sighs or your steps on the ground? Tell me, dear love, which are the most, Your light steps or the sighs they cost?

A girl complains that she cannot see her lover's house (p. 117):-

 I lean upon the lattice, and look forth To see the house where my lover dwells. There grows an envious tree that spoils my mirth: Cursed be the man who set it on these hills! But when those jealous boughs are all unclad, I then shall see the cottage of my lad: When once that tree is rooted from the hills, I'll see the house wherein my lover dwells. 

In the same mood a girl who has just parted from her sweetheart isangry with the hill beyond which he is travelling (p. 167):--

 I see and see, yet see not what I would: I see the leaves atremble on the tree: I saw my love where on the hill he stood, Yet see him not drop downward to the lea. O traitor hill, what will you do? I ask him, live or dead, from you. O traitor hill, what shall it be? I ask him, live or dead, from thee. 

All the songs of love in absence are very quaint. Here is one whichcalls our nursery rhymes to mind (p. 119):--

I would I were a bird so free, That I had wings to fly away:Unto that window I would flee, Where stands my love and grinds all day. Grind, miller, grind; the water's deep!I cannot grind; love makes me weep. Grind, miller, grind; the waters flow!I cannot grind; love wastes me so. 

The next begins after the same fashion, but breaks into a very showerof benedictions (p. 118):--

 Would God I were a swallow free, That I had wings to fly away: Upon the miller's door I'd be, Where stands my love and grinds all day: Upon the door, upon the sill, Where stays my love;--God bless him still! God bless my love, and blessed be His house, and bless my house for me; Yea, blest be both, and ever blest My lover's house, and all the rest!

The girl alone at home in her garden sees a wood-dove flying by andcalls to it (p. 179):--

 O dove, who fliest far to yonder hill, Dear dove, who in the rock hast made thy nest, Let me a feather from thy pinion pull, For I will write to him who loves me best. And when I've written it and made it clear, I'll give thee back thy feather, dove so dear: And when I've written it and sealed it, then I'll give thee back thy feather love-laden. 

A swallow is asked to lend the same kind service (p. 179):--

 O swallow, swallow, flying through the air, Turn, turn, I prithee, from thy flight above! Give me one feather from thy wing so fair, For I will write a letter to my love. When I have written it and made it clear, I'll give thee back thy feather, swallow dear; When I have written it on paper white, I'll make, I swear, thy missing feather right; When once 'tis written on fair leaves of gold, I'll give thee back thy wing and flight so bold. 

Long before Tennyson's song in the 'Princess, ' it would seem thatswallows were favourite messengers of love. In the next song which Itranslate, the repetition of one thought with delicate variation isfull of character (p. 178):--

 O swallow, flying over hill and plain, If thou shouldst find my love, oh bid him come! And tell him, on these mountains I remain Even as a lamb who cannot find her home: And tell him, I am left all, all alone, Even as a tree whose flowers are overblown: And tell him, I am left without a mate Even as a tree whose boughs are desolate: And tell him, I am left uncomforted Even as the grass upon the meadows dead. 

The following is spoken by a girl who has been watching the lads ofthe village returning from their autumn service in the plain, andwhose damo comes the last of all (p. 240):--

 O dear my love, you come too late! What found you by the way to do? I saw your comrades pass the gate, But yet not you, dear heart, not you! If but a little more you'd stayed, With sighs you would have found me dead; If but a while you'd keep me crying, With sighs you would have found me dying. 

The _amantium irae_ find a place too in these rustic ditties. A girlexplains to her sweetheart (p. 240):--

 'Twas told me and vouchsafed for true, Your kin are wroth as wroth can be; For loving me they swear at you, They swear at you because of me; Your father, mother, all your folk, Because you love me, chafe and choke! Then set your kith and kin at ease; Set them at ease and let me die: Set the whole clan of them at ease; Set them at ease and see me die!

Another suspects that her damo has paid his suit to a rival (p. 200):--

 On Sunday morning well I knew Where gaily dressed you turned your feet; And there were many saw it too, And came to tell me through the street: And when they spoke, I smiled, ah me! But in my room wept privately; And when they spoke, I sang for pride, But in my room alone I sighed. 

Then come reconciliations (p. 223):--

 Let us make peace, my love, my bliss! For cruel strife can last no more. If you say nay, yet I say yes: 'Twixt me and you there is no war. Princes and mighty lords make peace; And so may lovers twain, I wis: Princes and soldiers sign a truce; And so may two sweethearts like us: Princes and potentates agree; And so may friends like you and me. 

There is much character about the following, which is spoken by thedamo (p. 223):--

 As yonder mountain height I trod, I chanced to think of your dear name; I knelt with clasped hands on the sod, And thought of my neglect with shame: I knelt upon the stone, and swore Our love should bloom as heretofore. 

Sometimes the language of affection takes a more imaginative tone, asin the following (p. 232):--

 Dearest, what time you mount to heaven above, I'll meet you holding in my hand my heart: You to your breast shall clasp me full of love, And I will lead you to our Lord apart. 

 Our Lord, when he our love so true hath known, Shall make of our two hearts one heart alone; One heart shall make of our two hearts, to rest In heaven amid the splendours of the blest. 

This was the woman's. Here is the man's (p. 113):--

 If I were master of all loveliness, I'd make thee still more lovely than thou art: If I were master of all wealthiness, Much gold and silver should be thine, sweetheart: If I were master of the house of hell, I'd bar the brazen gates in thy sweet face; Or ruled the place where purging spirits dwell, I'd free thee from that punishment apace. Were I in paradise and thou shouldst come, I'd stand aside, my love, to make thee room; Were I in paradise, well seated there, I'd quit my place to give it thee, my fair!

Sometimes, but very rarely, weird images are sought to clothe passion, as in the following (p. 136):--

 Down into hell I went and thence returned: Ah me! alas! the people that were there! I found a room where many candles burned, And saw within my love that languished there. When as she saw me, she was glad of cheer, And at the last she said: Sweet soul of mine; Dost thou recall the time long past, so dear, When thou didst say to me, Sweet soul of mine? Now kiss me on the mouth, my dearest, here; Kiss me that I for once may cease to pine! So sweet, ah me, is thy dear mouth, so dear, That of thy mercy prithee sweeten mine! Now, love, that thou hast kissed me, now, I say, Look not to leave this place again for aye. 

Or again in this (p. 232):--

 Methinks I hear, I hear a voice that cries: Beyond the hill it floats upon the air. It is my lover come to bid me rise, If I am fain forthwith toward heaven to fare. But I have answered him, and said him No! I've given my paradise, my heaven, for you: Till we together go to paradise, I'll stay on earth and love your beauteous eyes. 

But it is not with such remote and eerie thoughts that the rustic museof Italy can deal successfully. Far better is the followinghalf-playful description of love-sadness (p. 71):--

 Ah me, alas! who know not how to sigh! Of sighs I now full well have learned the art: Sighing at table when to eat I try, Sighing within my little room apart, Sighing when jests and laughter round me fly, Sighing with her and her who know my heart: I sigh at first, and then I go on sighing; 'Tis for your eyes that I am ever sighing: I sigh at first, and sigh the whole year through; And 'tis your eyes that keep me sighing so. 

The next two rispetti, delicious in their naïveté, might seem to havebeen extracted from the libretto of an opera, but that they lack thesympathising chorus, who should have stood at hand, ready to chime inwith 'he, ' 'she, ' and 'they, ' to the 'I, ' 'you, ' and 'we' of thelovers (p. 123):--

 Ah, when will dawn that glorious day When you will softly mount my stair? My kin shall bring you on the way; I shall be first to greet you there. Ah, when will dawn that day of bliss When we before the priest say Yes?

 Ah, when will dawn that blissful day When I shall softly mount your stair, Your brothers meet me on the way, And one by one I greet them there? When comes the day, my staff, my strength, To call your mother mine at length? When will the day come, love of mine, I shall be yours and you be mine?

Hitherto the songs have told only of happy love, or of love returned. Some of the best, however, are unhappy. Here is one, for instance, steeped in gloom (p. 142):--

 They have this custom in fair Naples town; They never mourn a man when he is dead: The mother weeps when she has reared a son To be a serf and slave by love misled; The mother weeps when she a son hath born To be the serf and slave of galley scorn; The mother weeps when she a son gives suck To be the serf and slave of city luck. 

The following contains a fine wild image, wrought out with strangepassion in detail (p. 300):--

 I'll spread a table brave for revelry, And to the feast will bid sad lovers all. For meat I'll give them my heart's misery; For drink I'll give these briny tears that fall. Sorrows and sighs shall be the varletry, To serve the lovers at this festival: The table shall be death, black death profound; Weep, stones, and utter sighs, ye walls around! The table shall be death, yea, sacred death; Weep, stones, and sigh as one that sorroweth!

Nor is the next a whit less in the vein of mad Jeronimo (p. 304):--

 High up, high up, a house I'll rear, High up, high up, on yonder height; At every window set a snare, With treason, to betray the night; With treason, to betray the stars, Since I'm betrayed by my false feres; With treason, to betray the day, Since Love betrayed me, well away!

The vengeance of an Italian reveals itself in the energetic song whichI quote next (p. 303):--

 I have a sword; 'twould cut a brazen bell, Tough steel 'twould cut, if there were any need: I've had it tempered in the streams of hell By masters mighty in the mystic rede: I've had it tempered by the light of stars; Then let him come whose skin is stout as Mars; I've had it tempered to a trenchant blade; Then let him come who stole from me my maid. 

More mild, but brimful of the bitterness of a soul to whom the wholeworld has become but ashes in the death of love, is the followinglament (p. 143):--

 Call me the lovely Golden Locks no more, But call me Sad Maid of the golden hair. If there be wretched women, sure I think I too may rank among the most forlorn. I fling a palm into the sea; 'twill sink: Others throw lead, and it is lightly borne. What have I done, dear Lord, the world to cross? Gold in my hand forthwith is turned to dross. How have I made, dear Lord, dame Fortune wroth? Gold in my hand forthwith is turned to froth. What have I done, dear Lord, to fret the folk? Gold in my hand forthwith is turned to smoke. 

Here is pathos (p. 172):--

 The wood-dove who hath lost her mate, She lives a dolorous life, I ween; She seeks a stream and bathes in it, And drinks that water foul and green: With other birds she will not mate, Nor haunt, I wis, the flowery treen; She bathes her wings and strikes her breast; Her mate is lost: oh, sore unrest!

And here is fanciful despair (p. 168):--

 I'll build a house of sobs and sighs, With tears the lime I'll slack; And there I'll dwell with weeping eyes Until my love come back: And there I'll stay with eyes that burn Until I see my love return. 

The house of love has been deserted, and the lover comes to moanbeneath its silent eaves (p. 171):--

 Dark house and window desolate! Where is the sun which shone so fair? 'Twas here we danced and laughed at fate: Now the stones weep; I see them there. They weep, and feel a grievous chill: Dark house and widowed window-sill!

And what can be more piteous than this prayer? (p. 809):--

 Love, if you love me, delve a tomb, And lay me there the earth beneath; After a year, come see my bones, And make them dice to play therewith. But when you're tired of that game, Then throw those dice into the flame; But when you're tired of gaming free, Then throw those dice into the sea. 

The simpler expression of sorrow to the death is, as usual, moreimpressive. A girl speaks thus within sight of the grave (p. 808):--

 Yes, I shall die: what wilt thou gain? The cross before my bier will go; And thou wilt hear the bells complain, The _Misereres_ loud and low. Midmost the church thou'lt see me lie With folded hands and frozen eye; Then say at last, I do repent!-- Nought else remains when fires are spent. 

Here is a rustic Oenone (p. 307):--

 Fell death, that fliest fraught with woe! Thy gloomy snares the world ensphere: Where no man calls, thou lov'st to go; But when we call, thou wilt not hear. Fell death, false death of treachery, Thou makest all content but me. 

Another is less reproachful, but scarcely less sad (p. 308):--

 Strew me with blossoms when I die, Nor lay me 'neath the earth below; Beyond those walls, there let me lie, Where oftentimes we used to go. There lay me to the wind and rain; Dying for you, I feel no pain: There lay me to the sun above; Dying for you, I die of love. 

Yet another of these pitiful love-wailings displays much poetry ofexpression (p. 271):--

 I dug the sea, and delved the barren sand: I wrote with dust and gave it to the wind: Of melting snow, false Love, was made thy band, Which suddenly the day's bright beams unbind. Now am I ware, and know my own mistake-- How false are all the promises you make; Now am I ware, and know the fact, ah me! That who confides in you, deceived will be. 

It would scarcely be well to pause upon these very doleful ditties. Take, then, the following little serenade, in which the lover on hisway to visit his mistress has unconsciously fallen on the same thoughtas Bion (p. 85):--

 Yestreen I went my love to greet, By yonder village path below: Night in a coppice found my feet; I called the moon her light to show-- O moon, who needs no flame to fire thy face, Look forth and lend me light a little space!

Enough has been quoted to illustrate the character of the Tuscanpopular poetry. These village rispetti bear the same relation to thecanzoniere of Petrarch as the 'savage drupe' to the 'suave plum. ' Theyare, as it were, the wild stock of that highly artificial flower ofart. Herein lies, perhaps, their chief importance. As in our balladliterature we may discern the stuff of the Elizabethan dramaundeveloped, so in the Tuscan people's songs we can trace the crudeform of that poetic instinct which produced the sonnets to Laura. Itis also very probable that some such rustic minstrelsy preceded theIdylls of Theocritus and the Bucolics of Virgil; for coincidences ofthought and imagery, which can scarcely be referred to any consciousstudy of the ancients, are not a few. Popular poetry has this greatvalue for the student of literature: it enables him to trace thoseforms of fancy and of feeling which are native to the people, andwhich must ultimately determine the character of national art, howevermuch that may be modified by culture. 

 * * * * *

_POPULAR ITALIAN POETRY OF THE RENAISSANCE_

The semi-popular poetry of the Italians in the fifteenth centuryformed an important branch of their national literature, andflourished independently of the courtly and scholastic studies whichgave a special character to the golden age of the revival. While thelatter tended to separate the people from the cultivated classes, theformer established a new link of connection between them, differentindeed from that which existed when smiths and carters repeated theCanzoni of Dante by heart in the fourteenth century, but stillsufficiently real to exercise a weighty influence over the nationaldevelopment. Scholars like Angelo Poliziano, princes like Lorenzo de'Medici, men of letters like Feo Belcari and Benivieni, borrowed fromthe people forms of poetry, which they handled with refined taste, andappropriated to the uses of polite literature. The most important ofthese forms, native to the people but assimilated by the learnedclasses, were the Miracle Play or 'Sacra Rappresentazione;' the'Ballata' or lyric to be sung while dancing; the 'CantoCarnascialesco' or Carnival Chorus; the 'Rispetto' or shortlove-ditty; the 'Lauda' or hymn; the 'Maggio' or May-song; and the'Madrigale' or little part-song. 

At Florence, where even under the despotism of the Medici a show ofrepublican life still lingered, all classes joined in the amusementsof carnival and spring time; and this poetry of the dance, thepageant, and the villa flourished side by side with the more seriousefforts of the humanistic muse. It is not my purpose in this place toinquire into the origins of each lyrical type, to discuss thealterations they may have undergone at the hands of educatedversifiers, or to define their several characteristics; but only tooffer translations of such as seem to me best suited to represent thegenius of the people and the age. 

In the composition of the poetry in question, Angelo Poliziano wasindubitably the most successful. This giant of learning, who filledthe lecture-rooms of Florence with students of all nations, and whosecritical and rhetorical labours marked an epoch in the history ofscholarship, was by temperament a poet, and a poet of the people. Nothing was easier for him than to throw aside his professor's mantle, and to improvise 'Ballate' for the girls to sing as they danced their'Carola' upon the Piazza di Santa Trinità in summer evenings. Thepeculiarity of this lyric is that it starts with a couplet, which alsoserves as refrain, supplying the rhyme to each successive stanza. Thestanza itself is identical with our rime royal, if we count thecouplet in the place of the seventh line. The form is in itself sograceful and is so beautifully treated by Poliziano that I cannotcontent myself with fewer than four of his _Ballate_. [30] The first iswritten on the world-old theme of 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. '

 I went a roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May. 

 Violets and lilies grew on every side Mid the green grass, and young flowers wonderful, Golden and white and red and azure-eyed; Toward which I stretched my hands, eager to pull Plenty to make my fair curls beautiful, To crown my rippling curls with garlands gay. 

 I went a roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May. 

 But when my lap was full of flowers I spied Roses at last, roses of every hue; Therefore I ran to pluck their ruddy pride, Because their perfume was so sweet and true That all my soul went forth with pleasure new, With yearning and desire too soft to say. 

 I went a roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May. 

 I gazed and gazed. Hard task it were to tell How lovely were the roses in that hour: One was but peeping from her verdant shell, And some were faded, some were scarce in flower: Then Love said: Go, pluck from the blooming bower Those that thou seest ripe upon the spray. 

 I went a roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May. 

 For when the full rose quits her tender sheath, When she is sweetest and most fair to see, Then is the time to place her in thy wreath, Before her beauty and her freshness flee. Gather ye therefore roses with great glee, Sweet girls, or ere their perfume pass away. 

 I went a roaming, maidens, one bright day, In a green garden in mid month of May. 

The next Ballata is less simple, but is composed with the sameintention. It may here be parenthetically mentioned that the courtlypoet, when he applied himself to this species of composition, inventeda certain rusticity of incident, scarcely in keeping with the spiritof his art. It was in fact a conventional feature of this species ofverse that the scene should be laid in the country, where the burgher, on a visit to his villa, is supposed to meet with a rustic beauty whocaptivates his eyes and heart. Guido Cavalcanti, in his celebratedBallata, 'In un boschetto trovai pastorella, ' struck the keynote ofthis music, which, it may be reasonably conjectured, was imported intoItaly through Provençal literature from the pastorals of NorthernFrance. The lady so quaintly imaged by a bird in the following Ballataof Poliziano is supposed to have been Monna Ippolita Leoncina ofPrato, white-throated, golden-haired, and dressed in crimson silk. 

 I found myself one day all, all alone, For pastime in a field with blossoms strewn. 

 I do not think the world a field could show With herbs of perfume so surpassing rare; But when I passed beyond the green hedge-row, A thousand flowers around me flourished fair, White, pied and crimson, in the summer air; Among the which I heard a sweet bird's tone. 

 I found myself one day all, all alone, For pastime in a field with blossoms strewn. 

 Her song it was so tender and so clear That all the world listened with love; then I With stealthy feet a-tiptoe drawing near, Her golden head and golden wings could spy, Her plumes that flashed like rubies 'neath the sky, Her crystal beak and throat and bosom's zone. 

 I found myself one day all, all alone, For pastime in a field with blossoms strewn. 

 Fain would I snare her, smit with mighty love; But arrow-like she soared, and through the air Fled to her nest upon the boughs above; Wherefore to follow her is all my care, For haply I might lure her by some snare Forth from the woodland wild where she is flown. 

 I found myself one day all, all alone, For pastime in a field with blossoms strewn. 

 Yea, I might spread some net or woven wile; But since of singing she doth take such pleasure, Without or other art or other guile I seek to win her with a tuneful measure; Therefore in singing spend I all my leisure, To make by singing this sweet bird my own. 

 I found myself one day all, all alone, For pastime in a field with blossoms strewn. 

The same lady is more directly celebrated in the next Ballata, wherePoliziano calls her by her name, Ippolita. I have taken the liberty ofsubstituting Myrrha for this somewhat unmanageable word. 

 He who knows not what thing is Paradise, Let him look fixedly on Myrrha's eyes. 

 From Myrrha's eyes there flieth, girt with fire, An angel of our lord, a laughing boy, Who lights in frozen hearts a flaming pyre, And with such sweetness doth the soul destroy, That while it dies, it murmurs forth its joy; Oh blessed am I to dwell in Paradise!

 He who knows not what thing is Paradise, Let him look fixedly on Myrrha's eyes. 

 From Myrrha's eyes a virtue still doth move, So swift and with so fierce and strong a flight, That it is like the lightning of high Jove, Riving of iron and adamant the might; Nathless the wound doth carry such delight That he who suffers dwells in Paradise. 

 He who knows not what thing is Paradise, Let him look fixedly on Myrrha's eyes. 

 From Myrrha's eyes a lovely messenger Of joy so grave, so virtuous, doth flee, That all proud souls are bound to bend to her; So sweet her countenance, it turns the key Of hard hearts locked in cold security: Forth flies the prisoned soul to Paradise. 

 He who knows not what thing is Paradise, Let him look fixedly on Myrrha's eyes. 

 In Myrrha's eyes beauty doth make her throne, And sweetly smile and sweetly speak her mind: Such grace in her fair eyes a man hath known As in the whole wide world he scarce may find: Yet if she slay him with a glance too kind, He lives again beneath her gazing eyes. 

 He who knows not what thing is Paradise, Let him look fixedly on Myrrha's eyes. 

The fourth Ballata sets forth the fifteenth-century Italian code oflove, the code of the Novelle, very different in its avowed laxityfrom the high ideal of the trecentisti poets. 

 I ask no pardon if I follow Love; Since every gentle heart is thrall thereof. 

 From those who feel the fire I feel, what use Is there in asking pardon? These are so Gentle, kind-hearted, tender, piteous, That they will have compassion, well I know. From such as never felt that honeyed woe, I seek no pardon: nought they know of Love. 

 I ask no pardon if I follow Love; Since every gentle heart is thrall thereof. 

 Honour, pure love, and perfect gentleness, Weighed in the scales of equity refined, Are but one thing: beauty is nought or less, Placed in a dame of proud and scornful mind. Who can rebuke me then if I am kind So far as honesty comports and Love?

 I ask no pardon if I follow Love; Since every gentle heart is thrall thereof. 

 Let him rebuke me whose hard heart of stone Ne'er felt of Love the summer in his vein! I pray to Love that who hath never known Love's power, may ne'er be blessed with Love's great gain; But he who serves our lord with might and main, May dwell for ever in the fire of Love!

 I ask no pardon if I follow Love; Since every gentle heart is thrall thereof. 

 Let him rebuke me without cause who will; For if he be not gentle, I fear nought: My heart obedient to the same love still Hath little heed of light words envy-fraught: So long as life remains, it is my thought To keep the laws of this so gentle Love. 

 I ask no pardon if I follow Love; Since every gentle heart is thrall thereof. 

This Ballata is put into a woman's mouth. Another, ascribed to Lorenzode' Medici, expresses the sadness of a man who has lost the favour ofhis lady. It illustrates the well-known use of the word _Signore_ formistress in Florentine poetry. 

 How can I sing light-souled and fancy-free, When my loved lord no longer smiles on me?

 Dances and songs and merry wakes I leave To lovers fair, more fortunate and gay; Since to my heart so many sorrows cleave That only doleful tears are mine for aye: Who hath heart's ease, may carol, dance, and play While I am fain to weep continually. 

 How can I sing light-souled and fancy-free, When my loved lord no longer smiles on me?

 I too had heart's ease once, for so Love willed, When my lord loved me with love strong and great: But envious fortune my life's music stilled, And turned to sadness all my gleeful state. Ah me! Death surely were less desolate Than thus to live and love-neglected be!

 How can I sing light-souled and fancy-free, When my loved lord no longer smiles on me?

 One only comfort soothes my heart's despair, And mid this sorrow lends my soul some cheer; Unto my lord I ever yielded fair Service of faith untainted pure and clear; If then I die thus guiltless, on my bier It may be she will shed one tear for me. 

 How can I sing light-souled and fancy-free, When my loved lord no longer smiles on me?

The Florentine _Rispetto_ was written for the most part in octavestanzas, detached or continuous. The octave stanza in Italianliterature was an emphatically popular form; and it is still largelyused in many parts of the peninsula for the lyrical expression ofemotion. [31] Poliziano did no more than treat it with his ownfacility, sacrificing the unstudied raciness of his popular models toliterary elegance. 

Here are a few of these detached stanzas or _Rispetti Spicciolati_:--

 Upon that day when first I saw thy face, I vowed with loyal love to worship thee. Move, and I move; stay, and I keep my place: Whate'er thou dost, will I do equally. 

 In joy of thine I find most perfect grace, And in thy sadness dwells my misery: Laugh, and I laugh; weep, and I too will weep. Thus Love commands, whose laws I loving keep. 

 Nay, be not over-proud of thy great grace, Lady! for brief time is thy thief and mine. White will he turn those golden curls, that lace Thy forehead and thy neck so marble-fine. Lo! while the flower still flourisheth apace, Pluck it: for beauty but awhile doth shine. Fair is the rose at dawn; but long ere night Her freshness fades, her pride hath vanished quite. 

 Fire, fire! Ho, water! for my heart's afire! Ho, neighbours! help me, or by God I die! See, with his standard, that great lord, Desire! He sets my heart aflame: in vain I cry. Too late, alas! The flames mount high and higher. Alack, good friends! I faint, I fail, I die. Ho! water, neighbours mine! no more delay I My heart's a cinder if you do but stay. 

 Lo, may I prove to Christ a renegade, And, dog-like, die in pagan Barbary; Nor may God's mercy on my soul be laid, If ere for aught I shall abandon thee: Before all-seeing God this prayer be made-- When I desert thee, may death feed on me: Now if thy hard heart scorn these vows, be sure That without faith none may abide secure. 

 I ask not, Love, for any other pain To make thy cruel foe and mine repent, Only that thou shouldst yield her to the strain Of these my arms, alone, for chastisement; Then would I clasp her so with might and main, That she should learn to pity and relent, And, in revenge for scorn and proud despite, A thousand times I'd kiss her forehead white. 

 Not always do fierce tempests vex the sea, Nor always clinging clouds offend the sky; Cold snows before the sunbeams haste to flee, Disclosing flowers that 'neath their whiteness lie; The saints each one doth wait his day to see, And time makes all things change; so, therefore, I Ween that 'tis wise to wait my turn, and say, That who subdues himself, deserves to sway. 

It will be observed that the tone of these poems is not passionate norelevated. Love, as understood in Florence of the fifteenth century, was neither; nor was Poliziano the man to have revived Platonicmysteries or chivalrous enthusiasms. When the octave stanzas, writtenwith this amorous intention, were strung together into a continuouspoem, this form of verse took the title of _Rispetto Gontinuato_. Inthe collection of Poliziano's poems there are several examples of thelong Rispetto, carelessly enough composed, as may be gathered from therecurrence of the same stanzas in several poems. All repeat the oldarguments, the old enticements to a less than lawful love. The onewhich I have chosen for translation, styled _Serenata ovvero Letterain Istrambotti_, might be selected as an epitome of Florentineconvention in the matter of love-making. 

 O thou of fairest fairs the first and queen, Most courteous, kind, and honourable dame, Thine ear unto thy servant's singing lean, Who loves thee more than health, or wealth, or fame; For thou his shining planet still hast been, And day and night he calls on thy fair name: First wishing thee all good the world can give, Next praying in thy gentle thoughts to live. 

 He humbly prayeth that thou shouldst be kind To think upon his pure and perfect faith, And that such mercy in thy heart and mind Should reign, as so much beauty argueth: A thousand, thousand hints, or he were blind, Of thy great courtesy he reckoneth: Wherefore thy loyal subject now doth sue Such guerdon only as shall prove them true. 

 He knows himself unmeet for love from thee, Unmeet for merely gazing on thine eyes; Seeing thy comely squires so plenteous be, That there is none but 'neath thy beauty sighs: Yet since thou seekest fame and bravery, Nor carest aught for gauds that others prize, And since he strives to honour thee alway, He still hath hope to gain thy heart one day. 

 Virtue that dwells untold, unknown, unseen, Still findeth none to love or value it; Wherefore his faith, that hath so perfect been, Not being known, can profit him no whit: He would find pity in thine eyes, I ween, If thou shouldst deign to make some proof of it; The rest may flatter, gape, and stand agaze; Him only faith above the crowd doth raise. 

 Suppose that he might meet thee once alone, Face unto face, without or jealousy, Or doubt or fear from false misgiving grown, And tell his tale of grievous pain to thee, Sure from thy breast he'd draw full many a moan. And make thy fair eyes weep right plenteously: Yea, if he had but skill his heart to show, He scarce could fail to win thee by its woe. 

 Now art thou in thy beauty's blooming hour; Thy youth is yet in pure perfection's prime: Make it thy pride to yield thy fragile flower, Or look to find it paled by envious time: For none to stay the flight of years hath power, And who culls roses caught by frosty rime? Give therefore to thy lover, give, for they Too late repent who act not while they may. 

 Time flies: and lo! thou let'st it idly fly: There is not in the world a thing more dear; And if thou wait to see sweet May pass by, Where find'st thou roses in the later year? He never can, who lets occasion die: Now that thou canst, stay not for doubt or fear; But by the forelock take the flying hour, Ere change begins, and clouds above thee lower. 

 Too long 'twixt yea and nay he hath been wrung; Whether he sleep or wake he little knows, Or free or in the bands of bondage strung: Nay, lady, strike, and let thy lover loose! What joy hast thou to keep a captive hung? Kill him at once, or cut the cruel noose: No more, I prithee, stay; but take thy part: Either relax the bow, or speed the dart. 

 Thou feedest him on words and windiness, On smiles, and signs, and bladders light as air; Saying, thou fain wouldst comfort his distress, But dar'st not, canst not: nay, dear lady fair, All things are possible beneath the stress Of will, that flames above the soul's despair! Dally no longer: up, set to thy hand; Or see his love unclothed and naked stand. 

 For he hath sworn, and by this oath will bide, E'en though his life be lost in the endeavour, To leave no way, nor art, nor wile untried, Until he pluck the fruit he sighs for ever: And, though he still would spare thy honest pride, The knot that binds him he must loose or sever; Thou too, O lady, shouldst make sharp thy knife, If thou art fain to end this amorous strife. 

 Lo! if thou lingerest still in dubious dread, Lest thou shouldst lose fair fame of honesty, Here hast thou need of wile and warihead, To test thy lover's strength in screening thee; Indulge him, if thou find him well bestead, Knowing that smothered love flames outwardly: Therefore, seek means, search out some privy way; Keep not the steed too long at idle play. 

 Or if thou heedest what those friars teach, I cannot fail, lady, to call thee fool: Well may they blame our private sins and preach; But ill their acts match with their spoken rule; The same pitch clings to all men, one and each. There, I have spoken: set the world to school With this true proverb, too, be well acquainted The devil's ne'er so black as he is painted. 

 Nor did our good Lord give such grace to thee That thou shouldst keep it buried in thy breast, But to reward thy servant's constancy, Whose love and loyal faith thou hast repressed: Think it no sin to be some trifle free, Because thou livest at a lord's behest; For if he take enough to feed his fill, To cast the rest away were surely ill. 

 They find most favour in the sight of heaven Who to the poor and hungry are most kind; A hundred-fold shall thus to thee be given By God, who loves the free and generous mind; Thrice strike thy breast, with pure contrition riven, Crying: I sinned; my sin hath made me blind!-- He wants not much: enough if he be able To pick up crumbs that fall beneath thy table. 

 Wherefore, O lady, break the ice at length; Make thou, too, trial of love's fruits and flowers: When in thine arms thou feel'st thy lover's strength, Thou wilt repent of all these wasted hours; Husbands, they know not love, its breadth and length, Seeing their hearts are not on fire like ours: Things longed for give most pleasure; this I tell thee: If still thou doubtest let the proof compel thee. 

 What I have spoken is pure gospel sooth; I have told all my mind, withholding nought: And well, I ween, thou canst unhusk the truth, And through the riddle read the hidden thought: Perchance if heaven still smile upon my youth, Some good effect for me may yet be wrought: Then fare thee well; too many words offend: She who is wise is quick to comprehend. 

The levity of these love-declarations and the fluency of their vowsshow them to be 'false as dicers' oaths, ' mere verses of the moment, made to please a facile mistress. One long poem, which cannot bestyled a Rispetto, but is rather a Canzone of the legitimate type, stands out with distinctness from the rest of Poliziano's love-verses. It was written by him for Giuliano de' Medici, in praise of the fairSimonetta. The following version attempts to repeat its metricaleffects in some measure:--

 My task it is, since thus Love wills, who strains And forces all the world beneath his sway, In lowly verse to say The great delight that in my bosom reigns. For if perchance I took but little pains To tell some part of all the joy I find, I might be deem'd unkind By one who knew my heart's deep happiness. He feels but little bliss who hides his bliss; Small joy hath he whose joy is never sung; And he who curbs his tongue Through cowardice, knows but of love the name. Wherefore to succour and augment the fame Of that pure, virtuous, wise, and lovely may, Who like the star of day Shines mid the stars, or like the rising sun, Forth from my burning heart the words shall run. Far, far be envy, far be jealous fear, With discord dark and drear, And all the choir that is of love the foe. -- The season had returned when soft winds blow, The season friendly to young lovers coy, Which bids them clothe their joy In divers garbs and many a masked disguise. Then I to track the game 'neath April skies Went forth in raiment strange apparellèd, And by kind fate was led Unto the spot where stayed my soul's desire. The beauteous nymph who feeds my soul with fire, I found in gentle, pure, and prudent mood, In graceful attitude, Loving and courteous, holy, wise, benign. So sweet, so tender was her face divine, So gladsome, that in those celestial eyes Shone perfect paradise, Yea, all the good that we poor mortals crave. Around her was a band so nobly brave Of beauteous dames, that as I gazed at these Methought heaven's goddesses That day for once had deigned to visit earth. But she who gives my soul sorrow and mirth, Seemed Pallas in her gait, and in her face Venus; for every grace And beauty of the world in her combined. Merely to think, far more to tell my mind Of that most wondrous sight, confoundeth me, For mid the maidens she Who most resembled her was found most rare. Call ye another first among the fair; Not first, but sole before my lady set: Lily and violet And all the flowers below the rose must bow. Down from her royal head and lustrous brow The golden curls fell sportively unpent, While through the choir she went With feet well lessoned to the rhythmic sound. Her eyes, though scarcely raised above the ground, Sent me by stealth a ray divinely fair; But still her jealous hair Broke the bright beam, and veiled her from my gaze. She, born and nursed in heaven for angels' praise, No sooner saw this wrong, than back she drew, With hand of purest hue, Her truant curls with kind and gentle mien. Then from her eyes a soul so fiery keen, So sweet a soul of love she cast on mine, That scarce can I divine How then I 'scaped from burning utterly. These are the first fair signs of love to be, That bound my heart with adamant, and these The matchless courtesies Which, dreamlike, still before mine eyes must hover. This is the honeyed food she gave her lover, To make him, so it pleased her, half-divine; Nectar is not so fine, Nor ambrosy, the fabled feast of Jove. Then, yielding proofs more clear and strong of love, As though to show the faith within her heart, She moved, with subtle art, Her feet accordant to the amorous air. But while I gaze and pray to God that ne'er Might cease that happy dance angelical, O harsh, unkind recall! Back to the banquet was she beckonèd. She, with her face at first with pallor spread, Then tinted with a blush of coral dye, 'The ball is best!' did cry, Gentle in tone and smiling as she spake. But from her eyes celestial forth did break Favour at parting; and I well could see Young love confusedly Enclosed within the furtive fervent gaze, Heating his arrows at their beauteous rays, For war with Pallas and with Dian cold. Fairer than mortal mould, She moved majestic with celestial gait; And with her hand her robe in royal state Raised, as she went with pride ineffable. Of me I cannot tell, Whether alive or dead I there was left. Nay, dead, methinks! since I of thee was reft, Light of my life! and yet, perchance, alive-- Such virtue to revive My lingering soul possessed thy beauteous face, But if that powerful charm of thy great grace Could then thy loyal lover so sustain, Why comes there not again More often or more soon the sweet delight? Twice hath the wandering moon with borrowed light Stored from her brother's rays her crescent horn, Nor yet hath fortune borne Me on the way to so much bliss again. Earth smiles anew; fair spring renews her reign: The grass and every shrub once more is green; The amorous birds begin, From winter loosed, to fill the field with song. See how in loving pairs the cattle throng; The bull, the ram, their amorous jousts enjoy: Thou maiden, I a boy, Shall we prove traitors to love's law for aye? Shall we these years that are so fair let fly? Wilt thou not put thy flower of youth to use? Or with thy beauty choose To make him blest who loves thee best of all? Haply I am some hind who guards the stall, Or of vile lineage, or with years outworn, Poor, or a cripple born, Or faint of spirit that you spurn me so? Nay, but my race is noble and doth grow With honour to our land, with pomp and power; My youth is yet in flower, And it may chance some maiden sighs for me. My lot it is to deal right royally With all the goods that fortune spreads around, For still they more abound, Shaken from her full lap, the more I waste. My strength is such as whoso tries shall taste; Circled with friends, with favours crowned am I: Yet though I rank so high Among the blest, as men may reckon bliss, Still without thee, my hope, my happiness, It seems a sad, and bitter thing to live! Then stint me not, but give That joy which holds all joys enclosed in one. Let me pluck fruits at last, not flowers alone!

With much that is frigid, artificial, and tedious in thisold-fashioned love-song, there is a curious monotony of sweetnesswhich commends it to our ears; and he who reads it may remember theprofile portrait of Simonetta from the hand of Piero della Francescain the Pitti Palace at Florence. 

It is worth comparing Poliziano's treatment of popular or semi-popularverse-forms with his imitations of Petrarch's manner. For this purposeI have chosen a _Canzone_, clearly written in competition with thecelebrated 'Chiare, fresche e dolci acque, ' of Laura's lover. Whileclosely modelled upon Petrarch's form and similar in motive, thisCanzone preserves Poliziano's special qualities of fluency andemptiness of content. 

 Hills, valleys, caves and fells, With flowers and leaves and herbage spread; Green meadows; shadowy groves where light is low; Lawns watered with the rills That cruel Love hath made me shed, Cast from these cloudy eyes so dark with woe; Thou stream that still dost know What fell pangs pierce my heart, So dost thou murmur back my moan; Lone bird that chauntest tone for tone, While in our descant drear Love sings his part: Nymphs, woodland wanderers, wind and air; List to the sound out-poured from my despair! Seven times and once more seven The roseate dawn her beauteous brow Enwreathed with orient jewels hath displayed; Cynthia once more in heaven Hath orbed her horns with silver now; While in sea waves her brother's light was laid; Since this high mountain glade Felt the white footsteps fall Of that proud lady, who to spring Converts whatever woodland thing She may o'ershadow, touch, or heed at all. Here bloom the flowers, the grasses spring From her bright eyes, and drink what mine must bring. Yea, nourished with my tears Is every little leaf I see, And the stream rolls therewith a prouder wave. Ah me! through what long years Will she withhold her face from me, Which stills the stormy skies howe'er they rave? Speak! or in grove or cave If one hath seen her stray, Plucking amid those grasses green Wreaths for her royal brows serene, Flowers white and blue and red and golden gay! Nay, prithee, speak, if pity dwell Among these woods, within this leafy dell! O Love! 'twas here we saw, Beneath the new-fledged leaves that spring From this old beech, her fair form lowly laid:-- The thought renews my awe! How sweetly did her tresses fling Waves of wreathed gold unto the winds that strayed Fire, frost within me played, While I beheld the bloom Of laughing flowers--O day of bliss!-- Around those tresses meet and kiss, And roses in her lap of Love the home! Her grace, her port divinely fair, Describe it, Love! myself I do not dare. In mute intent surprise I gazed, as when a hind is seen To dote upon its image in a rill; Drinking those love-lit eyes, Those hands, that face, those words serene, That song which with delight the heaven did fill, That smile which thralls me still, Which melteth stones unkind, Which in this woodland wilderness Tames every beast and stills the stress Of hurrying waters. Would that I could find Her footprints upon field or grove! I should not then be envious of Jove. Thou cool stream rippling by, Where oft it pleased her to dip Her naked foot, how blest art thou! Ye branching trees on high, That spread your gnarled roots on the lip Of yonder hanging rock to drink heaven's dew! She often leaned on you, She who is my life's bliss! Thou ancient beech with moss o'ergrown, How do I envy thee thy throne, Found worthy to receive such happiness! Ye winds, how blissful must ye be, Since ye have borne to heaven her harmony! The winds that music bore, And wafted it to God on high, That Paradise might have the joy thereof. Flowers here she plucked, and wore Wild roses from the thorn hard by: This air she lightened with her look of love: This running stream above, She bent her face!--Ah me! Where am I? What sweet makes me swoon? What calm is in the kiss of noon? Who brought me here? Who speaks? What melody? Whence came pure peace into my soul? What joy hath rapt me from my own control?

Poliziano's refrain is always: 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. It isspring-time now and youth. Winter and old age are coming!' A _Maggio_, or May-day song, describing the games, dances, and jousting matches ofthe Florentine lads upon the morning of the first of May, expressesthis facile philosophy of life with a quaintness that recalls Herrick. It will be noticed that the Maggio is built, so far as rhymes go, onthe same system as Poliziano's Ballata. It has considerable historicalinterest, for the opening couplet is said to be Guido Cavalcanti's, while the whole poem is claimed by Roscoe for Lorenzo de' Medici, andby Carducci with better reason for Poliziano. 

 Welcome in the May And the woodland garland gay!

 Welcome in the jocund spring Which bids all men lovers be! Maidens, up with carolling, With your sweethearts stout and free, With roses and with blossoms ye Who deck yourselves this first of May!

 Up, and forth into the pure Meadows, mid the trees and flowers! Every beauty is secure With so many bachelors: Beasts and birds amid the bowers Burn with love this first of May. 

 Maidens, who are young and fair, Be not harsh, I counsel you; For your youth cannot repair Her prime of spring, as meadows do: None be proud, but all be true To men who love, this first of May. 

 Dance and carol every one Of our band so bright and gay! See your sweethearts how they run Through the jousts for you to-day! She who saith her lover nay, Will deflower the sweets of May, Lads in love take sword and shield To make pretty girls their prize: Yield ye, merry maidens, yield To your lovers' vows and sighs: Give his heart back ere it dies: Wage not war this first of May. 

 He who steals another's heart, Let him give his own heart too: Who's the robber? 'Tis the smart Little cherub Cupid, who Homage comes to pay with you, Damsels, to the first of May. 

 Love comes smiling; round his head Lilies white and roses meet: 'Tis for you his flight is sped. Fair one, haste our king to greet: Who will fling him blossoms sweet Soonest on this first of May?

 Welcome, stranger! welcome, king! Love, what hast thou to command? That each girl with wreaths should ring Her lover's hair with loving hand, That girls small and great should band In Love's ranks this first of May. 

The _Canto Carnascialesco_, for the final development if not for theinvention of which all credit must be given to Lorenzo de' Medici, does not greatly differ from the Maggio in structure. It admitted, however, of great varieties, and was generally more complex in itsinterweaving of rhymes. Yet the essential principle of an exordiumwhich should also serve for a refrain, was rarely, if ever, departedfrom. Two specimens of the Carnival Song will serve to bring intoclose contrast two very different aspects of Florentine history. Theearlier was composed by Lorenzo de' Medici at the height of his powerand in the summer of Italian independence. It was sung by masquersattired in classical costume, to represent Bacchus and his crew. 

 Fair is youth and void of sorrow; But it hourly flies away. -- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Nought ye know about to-morrow. 

 This is Bacchus and the bright Ariadne, lovers true! They, in flying time's despite, Each with each find pleasure new; These their Nymphs, and all their crew Keep perpetual holiday. -- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Nought ye know about to-morrow. 

 These blithe Satyrs, wanton-eyed, Of the Nymphs are paramours: Through the caves and forests wide They have snared them mid the flowers; Warmed with Bacchus, in his bowers, Now they dance and leap alway. -- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Nought ye know about to-morrow. 

 These fair Nymphs, they are not loth To entice their lovers' wiles. None but thankless folk and rough Can resist when Love beguiles. Now enlaced, with wreathèd smiles, All together dance and play. -- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Nought ye know about to-morrow. 

 See this load behind them plodding On the ass! Silenus he, Old and drunken, merry, nodding, Full of years and jollity; Though he goes so swayingly, Yet he laughs and quaffs alway. -- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Nought ye know about to-morrow. 

 Midas treads a wearier measure: All he touches turns to gold: If there be no taste of pleasure, What's the use of wealth untold? What's the joy his fingers hold, When he's forced to thirst for aye?-- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Nought ye know about to-morrow. 

 Listen well to what we're saying; Of to-morrow have no care! Young and old together playing, Boys and girls, be blithe as air! Every sorry thought forswear! Keep perpetual holiday. --- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Nought ye know about to-morrow. 

 Ladies and gay lovers young! Long live Bacchus, live Desire! Dance and play; let songs be sung; Let sweet love your bosoms fire; In the future come what may!--- Youths and maids, enjoy to-day! Nought ye know about to-morrow. 

 Fair is youth and void of sorrow; But it hourly flies away. 

The next, composed by Antonio Alamanni, after Lorenzo's death and theominous passage of Charles VIII. , was sung by masquers habited asskeletons. The car they rode on, was a Car of Death designed by Pierodi Cosimo, and their music was purposely gloomy. If in the jovial daysof the Medici the streets of Florence had rung to the thoughtlessrefrain, 'Nought ye know about to-morrow, ' they now re-echoed with acry of 'Penitence;' for times had strangely altered, and the heedlesspast had brought forth a doleful present. The last stanza ofAlamanni's chorus is a somewhat clumsy attempt to adapt the too realmoral of his subject to the customary mood of the Carnival. 

 Sorrow, tears, and penitence Are our doom of pain for aye; This dead concourse riding by Hath no cry but penitence!

 E'en as you are, once were we: You shall be as now we are: We are dead men, as you see: We shall see you dead men, where Nought avails to take great care, After sins, of penitence. 

 We too in the Carnival Sang our love-songs through the town; Thus from sin to sin we all Headlong, heedless, tumbled down:-- Now we cry, the world around, Penitence! oh, Penitence!

 Senseless, blind, and stubborn fools! Time steals all things as he rides: Honours, glories, states, and schools, Pass away, and nought abides; Till the tomb our carcase hides, And compels this penitence. 

 This sharp scythe you see us bear, Brings the world at length to woe: But from life to life we fare; And that life is joy or woe: All heaven's bliss on him doth flow Who on earth does penitence. 

 Living here, we all must die; Dying, every soul shall live: For the King of kings on high This fixed ordinance doth give: Lo, you all are fugitive! Penitence! Cry Penitence!

 Torment great and grievous dole Hath the thankless heart mid you; But the man of piteous soul Finds much honour in our crew: Love for loving is the due That prevents this penitence. 

 Sorrow, tears, and penitence Are our doom of pain for aye: This dead concourse riding by Hath no cry but Penitence!

One song for dancing, composed less upon the type of the Ballata thanon that of the Carnival Song, may here be introduced, not only inillustration of the varied forms assumed by this style of poetry, butalso because it is highly characteristic of Tuscan town-life. Thispoem in the vulgar style has been ascribed to Lorenzo de' Medici, butprobably without due reason. It describes the manners and customs offemale street gossips. 

 Since you beg with such a grace, How can I refuse a song, Wholesome, honest, void of wrong, On the follies of the place?

 Courteously on you I call; Listen well to what I sing: For my roundelay to all May perchance instruction bring, And of life good lessoning. -- When in company you meet, Or sit spinning, all the street Clamours like a market-place. 

 Thirty of you there may be; Twenty-nine are sure to buzz, And the single silent she Racks her brains about her coz:-- Mrs. Buzz and Mrs. Huzz, Mind your work, my ditty saith; Do not gossip till your breath Fails and leaves you black of face!

 Governments go out and in:-- You the truth must needs discover. Is a girl about to win A brave husband in her lover?-- Straight you set to talk him over: 'Is he wealthy?' 'Does his coat Fit?' 'And has he got a vote?' 'Who's his father?' 'What's his race?'

 Out of window one head pokes; Twenty others do the same:-- Chatter, clatter!--creaks and croaks All the year the same old game!-- 'See my spinning!' cries one dame, 'Five long ells of cloth, I trow!' Cries another, 'Mine must go, Drat it, to the bleaching base!'

 'Devil take the fowl!' says one: 'Mine are all bewitched, I guess; Cocks and hens with vermin run, Mangy, filthy, featherless. ' Says another: 'I confess Every hair I drop, I keep-- Plague upon it, in a heap Falling off to my disgrace!'

 If you see a fellow walk Up or down the street and back, How you nod and wink and talk, Hurry-skurry, cluck and clack!-- 'What, I wonder, does he lack Here about?'--'There's something wrong!' Till the poor man's made a song For the female populace. 

 It were well you gave no thought To such idle company; Shun these gossips, care for nought But the business that you ply. You who chatter, you who cry, Heed my words; be wise, I pray: Fewer, shorter stories say: Bide at home, and mind your place. 

 Since you beg with such a grace, How can I refuse a song, Wholesome, honest, void of wrong, On the follies of the place?

The _Madrigale_, intended to be sung in parts, was another species ofpopular poetry cultivated by the greatest of Italian writers. Withoutseeking examples from such men as Petrarch, Michelangelo, or Tasso, who used it as a purely literary form, I will content myself with afew Madrigals by anonymous composers, more truly popular in style, andmore immediately intended for music. [32] The similarity both of mannerand matter, between these little poems and the Ballate, is obvious. There is the same affectation of rusticity in both. 

 _Cogliendo per un prato. _

 Plucking white lilies in a field I saw Fair women, laden with young Love's delight: Some sang, some danced; but all were fresh and bright. Then by the margin of a fount they leaned, And of those flowers made garlands for their hair-- Wreaths for their golden tresses quaint and rare. Forth from the field I passed, and gazed upon Their loveliness, and lost my heart to one. 

 _Togliendo l' una all' altra. _

 One from the other borrowing leaves and flowers, I saw fair maidens 'neath the summer trees, Weaving bright garlands with low love-ditties. Mid that sweet sisterhood the loveliest Turned her soft eyes to me, and whispered, 'Take!' Love-lost I stood, and not a word I spake. My heart she read, and her fair garland gave: Therefore I am her servant to the grave. 

 _Appress' un fiume chiaro_. 

 Hard by a crystal stream Girls and maids were dancing round A lilac with fair blossoms crowned. Mid these I spied out one So tender-sweet, so love-laden, She stole my heart with singing then: Love in her face so lovely-kind And eyes and hands my soul did bind. 

 _Di riva in riva_. 

 From lawn to lea Love led me down the valley, Seeking my hawk, where 'neath a pleasant hill I spied fair maidens bathing in a rill. Lina was there all loveliness excelling; The pleasure of her beauty made me sad, And yet at sight of her my soul was glad. Downward I cast mine eyes with modest seeming, And all a tremble from the fountain fled: For each was naked as her maidenhead. Thence singing fared I through a flowery plain, Where bye and bye I found my hawk again!

 _Nel chiaro fiume_. 

 Down a fair streamlet crystal-clear and pleasant I went a fishing all alone one day, And spied three maidens bathing there at play. Of love they told each other honeyed stories, While with white hands they smote the stream, to wet Their sunbright hair in the pure rivulet. Gazing I crouched among thick flowering leafage, Till one who spied a rustling branch on high, Turned to her comrades with a sudden cry, And 'Go! Nay, prithee go!' she called to me: 'To stay were surely but scant courtesy. '

 _Quel sole che nutrica. _

 The sun which makes a lily bloom, Leans down at times on her to gaze-- Fairer, he deems, than his fair rays: Then, having looked a little while, He turns and tells the saints in bliss How marvellous her beauty is. Thus up in heaven with flute and string Thy loveliness the angels sing. 

 _Di novo è giunt'. _

 Lo: here hath come an errant knight On a barbed charger clothed in mail: His archers scatter iron hail. At brow and breast his mace he aims; Who therefore hath not arms of proof, Let him live locked by door and roof; Until Dame Summer on a day That grisly knight return to slay. 

Poliziano's treatment of the octave stanza for Rispetti wascomparatively popular. But in his poem of 'La Giostra, ' written tocommemorate the victory of Giuliano de' Medici in a tournament and tocelebrate his mistress, he gave a new and richer form to the metrewhich Boccaccio had already used for epic verse. The slight anduninteresting framework of this poem, which opened a new sphere forItalian literature, and prepared the way for Ariosto's golden cantos, might be compared to one of those wire baskets which children steep inalum water, and incrust with crystals, sparkling, artificial, beautiful with colours not their own. The mind of Poliziano held, asit were, in solution all the images and thoughts of antiquity, all theriches of his native literature. In that vast reservoir of poems andmythologies and phrases, so patiently accumulated, so tenaciouslypreserved, so thoroughly assimilated, he plunged the trivial subjecthe had chosen, and triumphantly presented to the world the _spoliaopima_ of scholarship and taste. What mattered it that the theme wasslight? The art was perfect, the result splendid. One canto of 125stanzas describes the youth of Giuliano, who sought to pass his lifeamong the woods, a hunter dead to love, but who was doomed to beensnared by Cupid. The chase, the beauty of Simonetta, the palace ofVenus, these are the three subjects of a book as long as the firstIliad. The second canto begins with dreams and prophecies of glory tobe won by Giuliano in the tournament. But it stops abruptly. Thetragic catastrophe of the Pazzi Conjuration cut short Poliziano'spanegyric by the murder of his hero. Meanwhile the poet had achievedhis purpose. His torso presented to Italy a model of style, a piece ofwritten art adequate to the great painting of the Renaissance period, a double star of poetry which blent the splendours of the ancient andthe modern world. To render into worthy English the harmonies ofPoliziano is a difficult task. Yet this must be attempted if anEnglish reader is to gain any notion of the scope and substance of theItalian poet's art. In the first part of the poem we are placed, as itwere, at the mid point between the 'Hippolytus' of Euripides andShakspere's 'Venus and Adonis. ' The cold hunter Giuliano is to seeSimonetta, and seeing, is to love her. This is how he first discoversthe triumphant beauty:[33]

 White is the maid, and white the robe around her, With buds and roses and thin grasses pied; Enwreathèd folds of golden tresses crowned her, Shadowing her forehead fair with modest pride:

 The wild wood smiled; the thicket where he found her, To ease his anguish, bloomed on every side: Serene she sits, with gesture queenly mild, And with her brow tempers the tempests wild. 

After three stanzas of this sort, in which the poet's style is moreapparent than the object he describes, occurs this charming picture:--

 Reclined he found her on the swarded grass In jocund mood; and garlands she had made Of every flower that in the meadow was, Or on her robe of many hues displayed; But when she saw the youth before her pass, Raising her timid head awhile she stayed; Then with her white hand gathered up her dress, And stood, lap-full of flowers, in loveliness. 

 Then through the dewy field with footstep slow The lingering maid began to take her way, Leaving her lover in great fear and woe, For now he longs for nought but her alway: The wretch, who cannot bear that she should go, Strives with a whispered prayer her feet to stay; And thus at last, all trembling, all afire, In humble wise he breathes his soul's desire:

 'Whoe'er thou art, maid among maidens queen, Goddess, or nymph--nay, goddess seems most clear-- If goddess, sure my Dian I have seen; If mortal, let thy proper self appear! Beyond terrestrial beauty is thy mien; I have no merit that I should be here! What grace of heaven, what lucky star benign Yields me the sight of beauty so divine?'

A conversation ensues, after which Giuliano departs utterly lovesick, and Cupid takes wing exultingly for Cyprus, where his mother's palacestands. In the following picture of the house of Venus, who shall sayhow much of Ariosto's Alcina and Tasso's Armida is contained? Cupidarrives, and the family of Love is filled with joy at Giuliano'sconquest. From the plan of the poem it is clear that its beauties arechiefly those of detail. They are, however, very great. How perfect, for example, is the richness combined with delicacy of the followingdescription of a country life:--

BOOK I. STANZAS 17-21. 

 How far more safe it is, how far more fair, To chase the flying deer along the lea; Through ancient woods to track their hidden lair, Far from the town, with long-drawn subtlety: To scan the vales, the hills, the limpid air, The grass and flowers, clear ice, and streams so free; To hear the birds wake from their winter trance, The wind-stirred leaves and murmuring waters dance. 

 How sweet it were to watch the young goats hung From toppling crags, cropping the tender shoot, While in thick pleachèd shade the shepherd sung His uncouth rural lay and woke his flute; To mark, mid dewy grass, red apples flung, And every bough thick set with ripening fruit, The butting rams, kine lowing o'er the lea, And cornfields waving like the windy sea. 

 Lo! how the rugged master of the herd Before his flock unbars the wattled cote; Then with his rod and many a rustic word He rules their going: or 'tis sweet to note The delver, when his toothèd rake hath stirred The stubborn clod, his hoe the glebe hath smote; Barefoot the country girl, with loosened zone, Spins, while she keeps her geese 'neath yonder stone. 

 After such happy wise, in ancient years, Dwelt the old nations in the age of gold; Nor had the fount been stirred of mothers' tears For sons in war's fell labour stark and cold; Nor trusted they to ships the wild wind steers, Nor yet had oxen groaning ploughed the wold; Their houses were huge oaks, whose trunks had store Of honey, and whose boughs thick acorns bore. 

 Nor yet, in that glad time, the accursèd thirst Of cruel gold had fallen on this fair earth: Joyous in liberty they lived at first; Unploughed the fields sent forth their teeming birth; Till fortune, envious of such concord, burst The bond of law, and pity banned and worth; Within their breasts sprang luxury and that rage Which men call love in our degenerate age. 

We need not be reminded that these stanzas are almost a cento fromVirgil, Hesiod, and Ovid. The merits of the translator, adapter, andcombiner, who knew so well how to cull their beauties and adorn themwith a perfect dress of modern diction, are so eminent that we cannotdeny him the title of a great poet. It is always in picture-paintingmore than in dramatic presentation that Poliziano excels. Here is abasrelief of Venus rising from the Ocean foam:--

STANZAS 99-107. 

 In Thetis' lap, upon the vexed Egean, The seed deific from Olympus sown, Beneath dim stars and cycling empyrean Drifts like white foam across the salt waves blown; Thence, born at last by movements hymenean, Rises a maid more fair than man hath known; Upon her shell the wanton breezes waft her; She nears the shore, while heaven looks down with laughter

 Seeing the carved work you would cry that real Were shell and sea, and real the winds that blow; The lightning of the goddess' eyes you feel, The smiling heavens, the elemental glow: White-vested Hours across the smooth sands steal, With loosened curls that to the breezes flow; Like, yet unlike, are all their beauteous faces, E'en as befits a choir of sister Graces. 

 Well might you swear that on those waves were riding The goddess with her right hand on her hair, And with the other the sweet apple hiding; And that beneath her feet, divinely fair, Fresh flowers sprang forth, the barren sands dividing; Then that, with glad smiles and enticements rare, The three nymphs round their queen, embosoming her, Threw the starred mantle soft as gossamer. 

 The one, with hands above her head upraised, Upon her dewy tresses fits a wreath, With ruddy gold and orient gems emblazed; The second hangs pure pearls her ears beneath; The third round shoulders white and breast hath placed Such wealth of gleaming carcanets as sheathe Their own fair bosoms, when the Graces sing Among the gods with dance and carolling. 

 Thence might you see them rising toward the spheres, Seated upon a cloud of silvery white; The trembling of the cloven air appears Wrought in the stone, and heaven serenely bright; The gods drink in with open eyes and ears Her beauty, and desire her bed's delight; Each seems to marvel with a mute amaze-- Their brows and foreheads wrinkle as they gaze. 

The next quotation shows Venus in the lap of Mars, and Visited byCupid:--

 STANZAS 122--124. 

 Stretched on a couch, outside the coverlid, Love found her, scarce unloosed from Mars' embrace; He, lying back within her bosom, fed His eager eyes on nought but her fair face;

 Roses above them like a cloud were shed, To reinforce them in the amorous chace; While Venus, quick with longings unsuppressed, A thousand times his eyes and forehead kissed. 

 Above, around, young Loves on every side Played naked, darting birdlike to and fro; And one, whose plumes a thousand colours dyed, Fanned the shed roses as they lay arow; One filled his quiver with fresh flowers, and hied To pour them on the couch that lay below; Another, poised upon his pinions, through The falling shower soared shaking rosy dew:

 For, as he quivered with his tremulous wing, The wandering roses in their drift were stayed;-- Thus none was weary of glad gambolling; Till Cupid came, with dazzling plumes displayed, Breathless; and round his mother's neck did fling His languid arms, and with his winnowing made Her heart burn:--very glad and bright of face, But, with his flight, too tired to speak apace. 

These pictures have in them the very glow of Italian painting. Sometimes we seem to see a quaint design of Piero di Cosimo, withbright tints and multitudinous small figures in a spacious landscape. Sometimes it is the languid grace of Botticelli, whose soul becamepossessed of classic inspiration as it were in dreams, and who haspainted the birth of Venus almost exactly as Poliziano imagined it. Again, we seize the broader beauties of the Venetian masters, or thevehemence of Giulio Romano's pencil. To the last class belong the twonext extracts:--

 STANZAS 104--107. 

 In the last square the great artificer Had wrought himself crowned with Love's perfect palm; Black from his forge and rough, he runs to her, Leaving all labour for her bosom's calm: Lips joined to lips with deep love-longing stir, Fire in his heart, and in his spirit balm; Far fiercer flames through breast and marrow fly Than those which heat his forge in Sicily. 

 Jove, on the other side, becomes a bull, Goodly and white, at Love's behest, and rears His neck beneath his rich freight beautiful: She turns toward the shore that disappears, With frightened gesture; and the wonderful Gold curls about her bosom and her ears Float in the wind; her veil waves, backward borne; This hand still clasps his back, and that his horn. 

 With naked feet close-tucked beneath her dress, She seems to fear the sea that dares not rise: So, imaged in a shape of drear distress, In vain unto her comrades sweet she cries; They left amid the meadow-flowers, no less For lost Europa wail with weeping eyes: Europa, sounds the shore, bring back our bliss But the bull swims and turns her feet to kiss. 

 Here Jove is made a swan, a golden shower, Or seems a serpent, or a shepherd-swain, To work his amorous will in secret hour; Here, like an eagle, soars he o'er the plain, Love-led, and bears his Ganymede, the flower Of beauty, mid celestial peers to reign; The boy with cypress hath his fair locks crowned, Naked, with ivy wreathed his waist around. 

 STANZAS 110--112. 

 Lo! here again fair Ariadne lies, And to the deaf winds of false Theseus plains. And of the air and slumber's treacheries; Trembling with fear even as a reed that strain. And quivers by the mere 'neath breezy skies: Her very speechless attitude complains-- No beast there is so cruel as thou art, No beast less loyal to my broken heart. 

 Throned on a car, with ivy crowned and vine, Rides Bacchus, by two champing tigers driven: Around him on the sand deep-soaked with brine Satyrs and Bacchantes rush; the skies are riven With shouts and laughter; Fauns quaff bubbling wine From horns and cymbals; Nymphs, to madness driven, Trip, skip, and stumble; mixed in wild enlacements, Laughing they roll or meet for glad embracements. 

 Upon his ass Silenus, never sated, With thick, black veins, wherethrough the must is soaking, Nods his dull forehead with deep sleep belated; His eyes are wine-inflamed, and red, and smoking: Bold Mænads goad the ass so sorely weighted, With stinging thyrsi; he sways feebly poking The mane with bloated fingers; Fauns behind him, E'en as he falls, upon the crupper bind him. 

We almost seem to be looking at the frescoes in some Trasteverinepalace, or at the canvas of one of the sensual Genoese painters. Thedescription of the garden of Venus has the charm of somewhatartificial elegance, the exotic grace of style, which attracts us inthe earlier Renaissance work:--

 The leafy tresses of that timeless garden Nor fragile brine nor fresh snow dares to whiten; Frore winter never comes the rills to harden, Nor winds the tender shrubs and herbs to frighten; Glad Spring is always here, a laughing warden; Nor do the seasons wane, but ever brighten; Here to the breeze young May, her curls unbinding, With thousand flowers her wreath is ever winding. 

Indeed it may be said with truth that Poliziano's most eminent facultyas a descriptive poet corresponded exactly to the genius of thepainters of his day. To produce pictures radiant with Renaissancecolouring, and vigorous with Renaissance passion, was the function ofhis art, not to express profound thought or dramatic situations. Thisremark might be extended with justice to Ariosto, and Tasso, andBoiardo. The great narrative poets of the Renaissance in Italy werenot dramatists; nor were their poems epics: their forte lay in theinexhaustible variety and beauty of their pictures. 

Of Poliziano's plagiarism--if this be the right word to apply to theprocess of assimilation and selection, by means of which thepoet-scholar of Florence taught the Italians how to use the riches ofthe ancient languages and their own literature--here are somespecimens. In stanza 42 of the 'Giostra' he says of Simonetta:--

 E 'n lei discerne un non so che divino. 

Dante has the line:--

 Vostri risplende un non so che divino. 

In the 44th he speaks about the birds:--

 E canta ogni augelletto in suo latino. 

This comes from Cavalcanti's:--

 E cantinne gli augelli. Ciascuno in suo latino. 

Stanza 45 is taken bodily from Claudian, Dante, and Cavalcanti. Itwould seem as though Poliziano wished to show that the classic andmedieval literature of Italy was all one, and that a poet of theRenaissance could carry on the continuous tradition in his own style. A, line in stanza 54 seems perfectly original:--

 E già dall'alte ville il fumo esala. 

It comes straight from Virgil:--

 Et jam summa pocul villarum culmina fumant. 

In the next stanza the line--

 Tal che 'l ciel tutto rasserenò d'intorno, is Petrarch's. So in the 56th, is the phrase 'il dolce andarceleste. ' In stanza 57--

 Par che 'l cor del petto se gli schianti, belongs to Boccaccio. In stanza 60 the first line:--

 La notte che le cose ci nasconde, together with its rhyme, 'sotto le amate fronde, ' is borrowed from the23rd canto of the 'Paradiso. ' In the second line, 'Stellato ammanto'is Claudian's 'stellantes sinus' applied to the heaven. When we reachthe garden of Venus we find whole passages translated from Claudian's'Marriage of Honorius, ' and from the 'Metamorphoses' of Ovid. 

Poliziano's second poem of importance, which indeed may historicallybe said to take precedence of 'La Giostra, ' was the so-called tragedyof 'Orfeo. ' The English version of this lyrical drama must be reservedfor a separate study: yet it belongs to the subject of this, inasmuchas the 'Orfeo' is a classical legend treated in a form alreadyfamiliar to the Italian people. Nearly all the popular kinds of poetryof which specimens have been translated in this chapter, will be foundcombined in its six short scenes. 

 * * * * *

_ORFEO_

The 'Orfeo' of Messer Angelo Poliziano ranks amongst the mostimportant poems of the fifteenth century. It was composed at Mantua inthe short space of two days, on the occasion of Cardinal FrancescoGonzaga's visit to his native town in 1472. But, though so hastily puttogether, the 'Orfeo' marks an epoch in the evolution of Italianpoetry. It is the earliest example of a secular drama, containingwithin the compass of its brief scenes the germ of the opera, thetragedy, and the pastoral play. In form it does not greatly differfrom the 'Sacre Rappresentazioni' of the fifteenth century, as thosemiracle plays were handled by popular poets of the earlierRenaissance. But while the traditional octave stanza is used for themain movement of the piece, Poliziano has introduced episodes of_terza rima_, madrigals, a carnival song, a _ballata_, and, above all, choral passages which have in them the future melodrama of the musicalItalian stage. The lyrical treatment of the fable, its capacity forbrilliant and varied scenic effects, its combination of singing withaction, and the whole artistic keeping of the piece, which neverpasses into genuine tragedy, but stays within the limits of romanticpathos, distinguish the 'Orfeo' as a typical production of Italiangenius. Thus, though little better than an improvisation, it combinesthe many forms of verse developed by the Tuscans at the close of theMiddle Ages, and fixes the limits beyond which their dramatic poets, with a few exceptions, were not destined to advance. Nor was thechoice of the fable without significance. Quitting the Bible storiesand the Legends of Saints, which supplied the mediaeval playwrightwith material, Poliziano selects a classic story: and this story mightpass for an allegory of Italy, whose intellectual development thescholar-poet ruled. Orpheus is the power of poetry and art, softeningstubborn nature, civilising men, and prevailing over Hades for aseason. He is the right hero of humanism, the genius of theRenaissance, the tutelary god of Italy, who thought she could resistthe laws of fate by verse and elegant accomplishments. To press thiskind of allegory is unwise; for at a certain moment it breaks in ourhands. And yet in Eurydice the fancy might discover Freedom, the truespouse of poetry and art; Orfeo's last resolve too vividly depicts thevice of the Renaissance; and the Mænads are those barbarous armiesdestined to lay waste the plains of Italy, inebriate with wine andblood, obeying a new lord of life on whom the poet's harp exerts nocharm. But a truce to this spinning of pedantic cobwebs. Let Mercuryappear, and let the play begin. 

_THE FABLE OF ORPHEUS_

 MERCURY _announces the show_. 

 Ho, silence! Listen! There was once a hind, Son of Apollo, Aristaeus hight, Who loved with so untamed and fierce a mind Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus wight, That chasing her one day with will unkind He wrought her cruel death in love's despite; For, as she fled toward the mere hard by, A serpent stung her, and she had to die. 

 Now Orpheus, singing, brought her back from hell, But could not keep the law the fates ordain: Poor wretch, he backward turned and broke the spell; So that once more from him his love was ta'en. Therefore he would no more with women dwell, And in the end by women he was slain. 

 _Enter_ A SHEPHERD, _who says_--

 Nay, listen, friends! Fair auspices are given, Since Mercury to earth hath come from heaven. 

 SCENE I

 MOPSUS, _an old shepherd_. 

 Say, hast thou seen a calf of mine, all white Save for a spot of black upon her front, Two feet, one flank, and one knee ruddy-bright?

 ARISTAEUS, _a young shepherd_. 

 Friend Mopsus, to the margin of this fount No herds have come to drink since break of day; Yet may'st thou hear them low on yonder mount. Go, Thyrsis, search the upland lawn, I pray! Thou Mopsus shalt with me the while abide; For I would have thee listen to my lay. 

 _[Exit_ THYRSIS. 

 'Twas yester morn where trees yon cavern hide, I saw a nymph more fair than Dian, who Had a young lusty lover at her side: But when that more than woman met my view, The heart within my bosom leapt outright, And straight the madness of wild Love I knew. Since then, dear Mopsus, I have no delight; But weep and weep: of food and drink I tire, And without slumber pass the weary night. 

 MOPSUS. 

 Friend Aristaeus, if this amorous fire Thou dost not seek to quench as best may be, Thy peace of soul will vanish in desire. Thou know'st that love is no new thing to me: I've proved how love grown old brings bitter pain: Cure it at once, or hope no remedy; For if thou find thee in Love's cruel chain, Thy bees, thy blossoms will be out of mind, Thy fields, thy vines, thy flocks, thy cotes, thy grain

 ARISTAEUS. 

 Mopsus, thou speakest to the deaf and blind: Waste not on me these wingèd words, I pray, Lest they be scattered to the inconstant wind, I love, and cannot wish to say love nay; Nor seek to cure so charming a disease: They praise Love best who most against him say. Yet if thou fain wouldst give my heart some ease, Forth from thy wallet take thy pipe, and we Will sing awhile beneath the leafy trees; For well my nymph is pleased with melody. 

 THE SONG. 

 Listen, ye wild woods, to my roundelay; Since the fair nymph will hear not, though I pray. 

 The lovely nymph is deaf to my lament, Nor heeds the music of this rustic reed; Wherefore my flocks and herds are ill content, Nor bathe their hoof where grows the water weed, Nor touch the tender herbage on the mead; So sad, because their shepherd grieves, are they. 

 Listen, ye wild woods, to my roundelay; Since the fair nymph will hear not, though I pray. 

 The herds are sorry for their master's moan; The nymph heeds not her lover though he die, The lovely nymph, whose heart is made of stone-- Nay steel, nay adamant! She still doth fly Far, far before me, when she sees me nigh, Even as a lamb flies fern the wolf away. 

 Listen, ye wild woods, to my roundelay; Since the fair nymph will hear not, though I pray. 

 Nay, tell her, pipe of mine, how swift doth flee Beauty together with our years amain; Tell her how time destroys all rarity, Nor youth once lost can be renewed again; Tell her to use the gifts that yet remain: Roses and violets blossom not alway. 

 Listen, ye wild woods, to my roundelay; Since the fair nymph will hear not, though I pray. 

 Carry, ye winds, these sweet words to her ears, Unto the ears of my loved nymph, and tell How many tears I shed, what bitter tears! Beg her to pity one who loves so well: Say that my life is frail and mutable, And melts like rime before the rising day. 

 Listen, ye wild woods, to my roundelay; Since the fair nymph will hear not, though I pray. 

 MOPSUS. 

 Less sweet, methinks the voice of waters falling From cliffs that echo back their murmurous song; Less sweet the summer sound of breezes calling Through pine-tree tops sonorous all day long; Than are thy rhymes, the soul of grief enthralling, Thy rhymes o'er field and forest borne along: If she but hear them, at thy feet she'll fawn. -- Lo, Thyrsis, hurrying homeward from the lawn!

 [_Re-enters_ THYRSIS. 

 ARISTAEUS. 

 What of the calf? Say, hast thou seen her now?

 THYRSIS, _the cowherd_. 

 I have, and I'd as lief her throat were cut! She almost ripped my bowels up, I vow, Running amuck with horns well set to butt: Nathless I've locked her in the stall below: She's blown with grass, I tell you, saucy slut!

 ARISTAEUS. 

 Now, prithee, let me hear what made you stay So long upon the upland lawns away?

 THYRSIS. 

 Walking, I spied a gentle maiden there, Who plucked wild flowers upon the mountain side: I scarcely think that Venus is more fair, Of sweeter grace, most modest in her pride: She speaks, she sings, with voice so soft and rare, That listening streams would backward roll their tide: Her face is snow and roses; gold her head; All, all alone she goes, white-raimented, ARISTAEUS. 

 Stay, Mopsus! I must follow: for 'tis she Of whom I lately spoke. So, friend, farewell!

 MOPSUS. 

 Hold, Aristaeus, lest for her or thee Thy boldness be the cause of mischief fell!

 ARISTAEUS. 

 Nay, death this day must be my destiny, Unless I try my fate and break the spell. Stay therefore, Mopsus, by the fountain stay! I'll follow her, meanwhile, yon mountain way. 

 [_Exit_ ARISTAEUS. 

 MOPSUS. 

 Thyrsis, what thinkest thou of thy loved lord? See'st thou that all his senses are distraught? Couldst thou not speak some seasonable word, Tell him what shame this idle love hath wrought?

 THYRSIS. 

 Free speech and servitude but ill accord, Friend Mopsus, and the hind is folly-fraught Who rates his lord! He's wiser far than I. To tend these kine is all my mastery. 

 SCENE II

 ARISTAEUS, _in pursuit of_ EURYDICE. 

 Flee not from me, maiden! Lo, I am thy friend! Dearer far than life I hold thee. List, thou beauty-laden, To these prayers attend: Flee not, let my arms enfold thee! Neither wolf nor bear will grasp thee: That I am thy friend I've told thee: Stay thy course then; let me clasp thee!-- Since thou'rt deaf and wilt not heed me, Since thou'rt still before me flying, While I follow panting, dying, Lend me wings, Love, wings to speed me!

 [_Exit_ ARISTAEUS, _pursuing_ EURYDICE. 

 SCENE III

 A DRYAD. 

 Sad news of lamentation and of pain, Dear sisters, hath my voice to bear to you: I scarcely dare to raise the dolorous strain. Eurydice by yonder stream lies low; The flowers are fading round her stricken head, And the complaining waters weep their woe. The stranger soul from that fair house hath fled; And she, like privet pale, or white May-bloom Untimely plucked, lies on the meadow, dead. Hear then the cause of her disastrous doom! A snake stole forth and stung her suddenly. I am so burdened with this weight of gloom That, lo, I bid you all come weep with me!

 CHORUS OF DRYADS. 

 Let the wide air with our complaint resound! For all heaven's light is spent. Let rivers break their bound, Swollen with tears outpoured from our lament!

 Fell death hath ta'en their splendour from the skies: The stars are sunk in gloom. Stern death hath plucked the bloom Of nymphs:--Eurydice down-trodden lies. Weep, Love! The woodland cries. Weep, groves and founts; Ye craggy mounts; you leafy dell, Beneath whose boughs she fell, Bend every branch in time with this sad sound. 

 Let the wide air with our complaint resound!

 Ah, fortune pitiless! Ah, cruel snake! Ah, luckless doom of woes! Like a cropped summer rose, Or lily cut, she withers on the brake. Her face, which once did make Our age so bright With beauty's light, is faint and pale; And the clear lamp doth fail, Which shed pure splendour all the world around

 Let the wide air with our complaint resound!

 Who e'er will sing so sweetly, now she's gone? Her gentle voice to hear, The wild winds dared not stir; And now they breathe but sorrow, moan for moan: So many joys are flown, Such jocund days Doth Death erase with her sweet eyes! Bid earth's lament arise, And make our dirge through heaven and sea rebound!

 Let the wide air with our complaint resound!

 A DRYAD. 

 'Tis surely Orpheus, who hath reached the hill, With harp in hand, glad-eyed and light of heart! He thinks that his dear love is living still. My news will stab him with a sudden smart: An unforeseen and unexpected blow Wounds worst and stings the bosom's tenderest part. Death hath disjoined the truest love, I know, That nature yet to this low world revealed, And quenched the flame in its most charming glow. Go, sisters, hasten ye to yonder field, Where on the sward lies slain Eurydice; Strew her with flowers and grasses! I must yield This man the measure of his misery. 

 [_Exeunt_ DRYADS. _Enter_ ORPHEUS, _singing_. 

 ORPHEUS. 

 _Musa, triumphales titulos et gesta canamus Herculis, et forti monstra subacta manu; Ut timidae malri pressos ostenderit angues, Intrepidusque fero riserit ore puer. _

 A DRYAD. 

 Orpheus, I bring thee bitter news. Alas! Thy nymph who was so beautiful, is slain! flying from Aristaeus o'er the grass, What time she reached yon stream that threads the plain, A snake which lurked mid flowers where she did pass, Pierced her fair foot with his envenomed bane: So fierce, so potent was the sting, that she Died in mid course. Ah, woe that this should be!

 [ORPHEUS _turns to go in silence. _

 MNESILLUS, _the satyr_. 

 Mark ye how sunk in woe The poor wretch forth doth pass, And may not answer, for his grief, one word? On some lone shore, unheard, Far, far away, he'll go, And pour his heart forth to the winds, alas! I'll follow and observe if he Moves with his moan the hills to sympathy. 

 [_Follows_ ORPHEUS. 

 ORPHEUS. 

 Let us lament, O lyre disconsolate! Our wonted music is in tune no more. Lament we while the heavens revolve, and let The nightingale be conquered on Love's shore! O heaven, O earth, O sea, O cruel fate! How shall I bear a pang so passing sore? Eurydice, my love! O life of mine! On earth I will no more without thee pine! I will go down unto the doors of Hell, And see if mercy may be found below: Perchance we shall reverse fate's spoken spell With tearful songs and words of honeyed woe: Perchance will Death be pitiful; for well With singing have we turned the streams that flow; Moved stones, together hind and tiger drawn, And made trees dance upon the forest lawn. 

 [_Passes from sight on his way to Hades. _

 MNESILLUS. 

 The staff of Fate is strong And will not lightly bend, Nor yet the stubborn gates of steely Hell. Nay, I can see full well His life will not be long: Those downward feet no more will earthward wend. What marvel if they lose the light, Who make blind Love their guide by day and night!

 SCENE IV

 ORPHEUS, _at the gate of Hell. _

 Pity, nay pity for a lover's moan! Ye Powers of Hell, let pity reign in you! To your dark regions led me Love alone: Downward upon his wings of light I flew. Hush, Cerberus! Howl not by Pluto's throne! For when you hear my tale of misery, you, Nor you alone, but all who here abide In this blind world, will weep by Lethe's tide. There is no need, ye Furies, thus to rage; To dart those snakes that in your tresses twine: Knew ye the cause of this my pilgrimage, Ye would lie down and join your moans with mine. Let this poor wretch but pass, who war doth wage With heaven, the elements, the powers divine! I beg for pity or for death. No more! But open, ope Hell's adamantine door!

 [ORPHEUS _enters Hell. _

 PLUTO. 

 What man is he who with his golden lyre Hath moved the gates that never move, While the dead folk repeat his dirge of love? The rolling stone no more doth tire Swart Sisyphus on yonder hill; And Tantalus with water slakes his fire; The groans of mangled Tityos are still; Ixion's wheel forgets to fly; The Danaids their urns can fill: I hear no more the tortured spirits cry; But all find rest in that sweet harmony. 

 PROSERPINE. 

 Dear consort, since, compelled by love of thee, I left the light of heaven serene, And came to reign in hell, a sombre queen; The charm of tenderest sympathy Hath never yet had power to turn My stubborn heart, or draw forth tears from me. Now with desire for yon sweet voice I yearn; Nor is there aught so dear As that delight. Nay, be not stern To this one prayer! Relax thy brows severe, And rest awhile with me that song to hear!

 [ORPHEUS _stands before the throne. _

 ORPHEUS. 

 Ye rulers of the people lost in gloom, Who see no more the jocund light of day! Ye who inherit all things that the womb Of Nature and the elements display! Hear ye the grief that draws me to the tomb! Love, cruel Love, hath led me on this way: Not to chain Cerberus I hither come, But to bring back my mistress to her home. A serpent hidden among flowers and leaves Stole my fair mistress--nay, my heart--from me: Wherefore my wounded life for ever grieves, Nor can I stand against this agony. Still, if some fragrance lingers yet and cleaves Of your famed love unto your memory, If of that ancient rape you think at all, Give back Eurydice!--On you I call. All things ere long unto this bourne descend: All mortal lives to you return at last: Whate'er the moon hath circled, in the end Must fade and perish in your empire vast: Some sooner and some later hither wend; Yet all upon this pathway shall have passed: This of our footsteps is the final goal; And then we dwell for aye in your control. Therefore the nymph I love is left for you When nature leads her deathward in due time: But now you've cropped the tendrils as they grew, The grapes unripe, while yet the sap did climb: Who reaps the young blades wet with April dew, Nor waits till summer hath o'erpassed her prime? Give back, give back my hope one little day!-- Not for a gift, but for a loan I pray. I pray not to you by the waves forlorn Of marshy Styx or dismal Acheron, By Chaos where the mighty world was born, Or by the sounding flames of Phlegethon; But by the fruit which charmed thee on that morn When thou didst leave our world for this dread throne! O queen! if thou reject this pleading breath, I will no more return, but ask for death!

 PROSERPINE. 

 Husband, I never guessed That in our realm oppressed Pity could find a home to dwell: But now I know that mercy teems in Hell. I see Death weep; her breast Is shaken by those tears that faultless fell. Let then thy laws severe for him be swayed By love, by song, by the just prayers he prayed!

 PLUTO. 

 She's thine, but at this price: Bend not on her thine eyes, Till mid the souls that live she stay. See that thou turn not back upon the way! Check all fond thoughts that rise! Else will thy love be torn from thee away. I am well pleased that song so rare as thine The might of my dread sceptre should incline. 

 SCENE V

 ORPHEUS, _sings. _

 _Ite tritumphales circum mea tempora lauri. Vicimus Eurydicen: reddita vita mihi est, Haec mea praecipue victoria digna coronâ. Oredimus? an lateri juncta puella meo?_

 EURYDICE. 

 All me! Thy love too great Hath lost not thee alone! I am torn from thee by strong Fate. No more I am thine own. In vain I stretch these arms. Back, back to Hell I'm drawn, I'm drawn. My Orpheus, fare thee well!

 [EURYDICE _disappears. _

 ORPHEUS. 

 Who hath laid laws on Love? Will pity not be given For one short look so full thereof? Since I am robbed of heaven, Since all my joy so great is turned to pain, I will go back and plead with Death again!

 [TISIPHONE _blocks his way. _

 TISIPHONE. 

 Nay, seek not back to turn! Vain is thy weeping, all thy words are vain. Eurydice may not complain Of aught but thee--albeit her grief is great. Vain are thy verses 'gainst the voice of Fate! How vain thy song! For Death is stern! Try not the backward path: thy feet refrain! The laws of the abyss are fixed and firm remain. 

 SCENE VI

 ORPHEUS. 

 What sorrow-laden song shall e'er be found To match the burden of my matchless woe? How shall I make the fount of tears abound, To weep apace with grief's unmeasured flow? Salt tears I'll waste upon the barren ground, So long as life delays me here below; And since my fate hath wrought me wrong so sore, I swear I'll never love a woman more! Henceforth I'll pluck the buds of opening spring, The bloom of youth when life is loveliest, Ere years have spoiled the beauty which they bring: This love, I swear, is sweetest, softest, best! Of female charms let no one speak or sing; Since she is slain who ruled within my breast. He who would seek my converse, let him see That ne'er he talk of woman's love to me! How pitiful is he who changes mind For woman! for her love laments or grieves! Who suffers her in chains his will to bind, Or trusts her words lighter than withered leaves, Her loving looks more treacherous than the wind! A thousand times she veers; to nothing cleaves: Follows who flies; from him who follows, flees; And comes and goes like waves on stormy seas! High Jove confirms the truth of what I said, Who, caught and bound in love's delightful snare, Enjoys in heaven his own bright Ganymed: Phoebus on earth had Hyacinth the fair: Hercules, conqueror of the world, was led Captive to Hylas by this love so rare. -- Advice for husbands! Seek divorce, and fly Far, far away from female company!

 [_Enter a_ MAENAD _leading a train of_ BACCHANTES. 

 A MAENAD. 

 Ho! Sisters! Up! Alive! See him who doth our sex deride! Hunt him to death, the slave! Thou snatch the thyrsus! Thou this oak-tree rive! Cast down this doeskin and that hide! We'll wreak our fury on the knave! Yea, he shall feel our wrath, the knave! He shall yield up his hide Riven as woodmen fir-trees rive! No power his life can save; Since women he hath dared deride! Ho! To him, sisters! Ho! Alive!

 [ORPHEUS _is chased off the scene and slain: the_ MAENADS _then return. _

 A MAENAD. 

 Ho! Bacchus! Ho! I yield thee thanks for this! Through all the woodland we the wretch have borne: So that each root is slaked with blood of his: Yea, limb from limb his body have we torn Through the wild forest with a fearful bliss: His gore hath bathed the earth by ash and thorn!-- Go then! thy blame on lawful wedlock fling! Ho! Bacchus! take the victim that we bring!

 CHORUS OF MAENADS. 

 Bacchus! we all must follow thee! Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohé! Ohé!

 With ivy coronals, bunch and berry, Crown we our heads to worship thee! Thou hast bidden us to make merry Day and night with jollity! Drink then! Bacchus is here! Drink free, And hand ye the drinking-cup to me! Bacchus! we all must follow thee! Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohé! Ohé!

 See, I have emptied my horn already: Stretch hither your beaker to me, I pray: Are the hills and the lawns where we roam unsteady? Or is it my brain that reels away? Let every one run to and fro through the hay, As ye see me run! Ho! after me! Bacchus! we all must follow thee! Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohé! Ohé!

 Methinks I am dropping in swoon or slumber: Am I drunken or sober, yes or no? What are these weights my feet encumber? You too are tipsy, well I know! Let every one do as ye see me do, Let every one drink and quaff like me! Bacchus! we all must follow thee! Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohé! Ohé!

 Cry Bacchus! Cry Bacchus! Be blithe and merry, Tossing wine down your throats away! Let sleep then come and our gladness bury: Drink you, and you, and you, while ye may! Dancing is over for me to-day. Let every one cry aloud Evohé! Bacchus! we all must follow thee! Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohé! Ohé!

Though an English translation can do little toward rendering thefacile graces of Poliziano's style, that 'roseate fluency' for whichit has been praised by his Italian admirers, the main qualities of the'Orfeo' as a composition may be traced in this rough copy. Of dramaticpower, of that mastery over the deeper springs of human nature whichdistinguished the first effort of the English muse in Marlowe'splays, there is but little. A certain adaptation of the language tothe characters, as in the rudeness of Thyrsis when contrasted with therustic elegance of Aristæus, a touch of simple feeling in Eurydice'slyrical outcry of farewell, a discrimination between the tendersympathy of Proserpine and Pluto's stern relenting, a spiritedpresentation of the Bacchanalian _furore_ in the Mænads, an attempt tomodel the Satyr Mnesillus as apart from human nature and yetsympathetic to its anguish, these points constitute the chief dramaticfeatures of the melodrama. Orpheus himself is a purely lyricalpersonage. Of character, he can scarcely be said to have anythingmarked; and his part rises to its height precisely in that passagewhere the lyrist has to be displayed. Before the gates of Hades andthe throne of Proserpine he sings, and his singing is the rightoutpouring of a poet's soul; each octave resumes the theme of the laststanza with a swell of utterance, a crescendo of intonation thatrecalls the passionate and unpremeditated descant of a bird upon theboughs alone. To this true quality of music is added thepersuasiveness of pleading. That the violin melody of his incomparablesong is lost, must be reckoned a great misfortune. We have good reasonto believe that the part of Orpheus was taken by Messer BaccioUgolini, singing to the viol. Here too it may be mentioned that a_tondo_ in monochrome, painted by Signorelli among the arabesques atOrvieto, shows Orpheus at the throne of Plato, habited as a poet withthe laurel crown and playing on a violin of antique form. It would beinteresting to know whether a rumour of the Mantuan pageant hadreached the ears of the Cortonese painter. 

If the whole of the 'Orfeo' had been conceived and executed with thesame artistic feeling as the chief act, it would have been a reallyfine poem independently of its historical interest. But we have onlyto turn the page and read the lament uttered for the loss of Eurydice, in order to perceive Poliziano's incapacity for dealing with his heroin a situation of greater difficulty. The pathos which might have madeus sympathise with Orpheus in his misery, the passion, approaching tomadness, which might have justified his misogyny, are absent. It isdifficult not to feel that in this climax of his anguish he was a poorcreature, and that the Mænads served him right. Nothing illustratesthe defect of real dramatic imagination better than this failure todignify the catastrophe. Gifted with a fine lyrical inspiration, Poliziano seems to have already felt the Bacchic chorus which forms sobrilliant a termination to his play, and to have forgotten his dutyto the unfortunate Orpheus, whose sorrow for Eurydice is stultifiedand made unmeaning by the prosaic expression of a base resolve. It mayindeed be said in general that the 'Orfeo' is a good poem only wherethe situation is not so much dramatic as lyrical, and that its finestpassage--the scene in Hades--was fortunately for its author one inwhich the dramatic motive had to be lyrically expressed. In thisrespect, as in many others, the 'Orfeo' combines the faults and meritsof the Italian attempts at melo-tragedy. To break a butterfly upon thewheel is, however, no fit function of criticism: and probably no onewould have smiled more than the author of this improvisation, at thethought of its being gravely dissected just four hundred years afterthe occasion it was meant to serve had long been given over tooblivion. 

_NOTE_

Poliziano's 'Orfeo' was dedicated to Messer Carlo Canale, the husbandof that famous Vannozza who bore Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia toAlexander VI. As first published in 1494, and as republished from timeto time up to the year 1776, it carried the title of 'La Favola diOrfeo, ' and was not divided into acts. Frequent stage-directionssufficed, as in the case of Florentine 'Sacre Rappresentazioni, ' forthe indication of the scenes. In this earliest redaction of the'Orfeo' the chorus of the Dryads, the part of Mnesillus, the lyricalspeeches of Proserpine and Pluto, and the first lyric of the Mænadsare either omitted or represented by passages in _ottava rima_. In theyear 1776 the Padre Ireneo Affò printed at Venice a new version of'Orfeo, Tragedia di Messer Angelo Poliziano, ' collated by him from twoMSS. This play is divided into five acts, severally entitled'Pastoricus, ' 'Nymphas Habet, ' 'Heroïcus, ' 'Necromanticus, ' and'Bacchanalis. ' The stage-directions are given partly in Latin, partlyin Italian; and instead of the 'Announcement of the Feast' by Mercury, a prologue consisting of two octave stanzas is appended. A LatinSapphic ode in praise of the Cardinal Gonzaga, which was interpolatedin the first version, is omitted, and certain changes are made in thelast soliloquy of Orpheus. There is little doubt, I think, that thesecond version, first given to the press by the Padre Affò, wasPoliziano's own recension of his earlier composition. I have thereforefollowed it in the main, except that I have not thought it necessaryto observe the somewhat pedantic division into acts, and havepreferred to use the original 'Announcement of the Feast, ' whichproves the integral connection between this ancient secular play andthe Florentine Mystery or 'Sacra Rappresentazione. ' The last soliloquyof Orpheus, again, has been freely translated by me from both versionsfor reasons which will be obvious to students of the original. I haveyet to make a remark upon one detail of my translation. In line 390(part of the first lyric of the Mænads) the Italian gives us:--

 Spezzata come il fabbro il cribro spezza. 

This means literally: 'Riven as a blacksmith rives a sieve orboulter. ' Now sieves are made in Tuscany of a plate of iron, piercedwith holes; and the image would therefore be familiar to an Italian. Ihave, however, preferred to translate thus:--

 Riven as woodmen fir-trees rive, instead of giving:--

 Riven as blacksmiths boulters rive, because I thought that the second and faithful version would beunintelligible as well as unpoetical for English readers. 

 * * * * *

_EIGHT SONNETS OF PETRARCH_

ON THE PAPAL COURT AT AVIGNON

 Fountain of woe! Harbour of endless ire! Thou school of errors, haunt of heresies! Once Rome, now Babylon, the world's disease, That maddenest men with fears and fell desire! O forge of fraud! O prison dark and dire, Where dies the good, where evil breeds increase! Thou living Hell! Wonders will never cease If Christ rise not to purge thy sins with fire. Founded in chaste and humble poverty, Against thy founders thou dost raise thy horn, Thou shameless harlot! And whence flows this pride? Even from foul and loathed adultery, The wage of lewdness. Constantine, return! Not so: the felon world its fate must bide. 

 * * * * *

TO STEFANO COLONNA

WRITTEN FROM VAUCLUSE

 Glorius Colonna, thou on whose high head Rest all our hopes and the great Latin name, Whom from the narrow path of truth and fame The wrath of Jove turned not with stormful dread: Here are no palace-courts, no stage to tread; But pines and oaks the shadowy valleys fill Between the green fields and the neighbouring hill, Where musing oft I climb by fancy led. These lift from earth to heaven our soaring soul, While the sweet nightingale, that in thick bowers Through darkness pours her wail of tuneful woe, Doth bend our charmed breast to love's control; But thou alone hast marred this bliss of ours, Since from our side, dear lord, thou needs must go. 

IN VITA DI MADONNA LAURA. XI

ON LEAVING AVIGNON

 Backward at every weary step and slow These limbs I turn which with great pain I bear; Then take I comfort from the fragrant air That breathes from thee, and sighing onward go. But when I think how joy is turned to woe, Remembering my short life and whence I fare, I stay my feet for anguish and despair, And cast my tearful eyes on earth below. At times amid the storm of misery This doubt assails me: how frail limbs and poor Can severed from their spirit hope to live. Then answers Love: Hast thou no memory How I to lovers this great guerdon give, Free from all human bondage to endure?

 * * * * *

IN VITA DI MADONNA LAURA. XII

THOUGHTS IN ABSENCE

 The wrinkled sire with hair like winter snow Leaves the beloved spot where he hath passed his years, Leaves wife and children, dumb with bitter tears, To see their father's tottering steps and slow. Dragging his aged limbs with weary woe, In these last days of life he nothing fears, But with stout heart his fainting spirit cheers, And spent and wayworn forward still doth go; Then comes to Rome, following his heart's desire, To gaze upon the portraiture of Him Whom yet he hopes in heaven above to see: Thus I, alas! my seeking spirit tire, Lady, to find in other features dim The longed for, loved, true lineaments of thee. 

IN VITA DI MADONNA LAURA. LII

OH THAT I HAD WINGS LIKE A DOVE!

 I am so tired beneath the ancient load Of my misdeeds and custom's tyranny, That much I fear to fail upon the road And yield my soul unto mine enemy. 'Tis true a friend from whom all splendour flowed, To save me came with matchless courtesy: Then flew far up from sight to heaven's abode, So that I strive in vain his face to see. Yet still his voice reverberates here below: Oh ye who labour, lo! the path is here; Come unto me if none your going stay! What grace, what love, what fate surpassing fear Shall give me wings like dove's wings soft as snow, That I may rest and raise me from the clay?

 * * * * *

IN MORTE DI MADONNA LAURA. XXIV

 The eyes whereof I sang my fervid song, The arms, the hands, the feet, the face benign, Which severed me from what was rightly mine, And made me sole and strange amid the throng, The crispèd curls of pure gold beautiful, And those angelic smiles which once did shine Imparadising earth with joy divine, Are now a little dust--dumb, deaf, and dull. And yet I live! wherefore I weep and wail, Left alone without the light I loved so long, Storm-tossed upon a bark that hath no sail. Then let me here give o'er my amorous song; The fountains of old inspiration fail, And nought but woe my dolorous chords prolong. 

IN MORTE DI MADONNA LAURA. XXXIV

 In thought I raised me to the place where she Whom still on earth I seek and find not, shines; There 'mid the souls whom the third sphere confines, More fair I found her and less proud to me. She took my hand and said: Here shalt thou be With me ensphered, unless desires mislead; Lo! I am she who made thy bosom bleed, Whose day ere eve was ended utterly: My bliss no mortal heart can understand; Thee only do I lack, and that which thou So loved, now left on earth, my beauteous veil. Ah! wherefore did she cease and loose my hand? For at the sound of that celestial tale I all but stayed in paradise till now. 

 * * * * *

IN MORTE DI MADONNA LAURA. LXXIV

 The flower of angels and the spirits blest, Burghers of heaven, on that first day when she Who is my lady died, around her pressed Fulfilled with wonder and with piety. What light is this? What beauty manifest? Marvelling they cried: for such supremacy Of splendour in this age to our high rest Hath never soared from earth's obscurity. She, glad to have exchanged her spirit's place, Consorts with those whose virtues most exceed; At times the while she backward turns her face To see me follow--seems to wait and plead: Therefore toward heaven my will and soul I raise, Because I hear her praying me to speed. 

 * * * * *

 FOOTNOTES:

 [Footnote 1: We may compare with Venice what is known about the ancient Hellenic city of Sybaris. Sybaris and Ravenna were the Greek and Roman Venice of antiquity. ]

 [Footnote 2: His first wife was a daughter of the great general of the Venetians against Francesco Sforza. Whether Sigismondo murdered her, as Sansovino seems to imply in his _Famiglie Illustri_, or whether he only repudiated her after her father's execution on the Piazza di San Marco, admits of doubt. About the question of Sigismondo's marriage with Isotta there is also some uncertainty. At any rate she had been some time his mistress before she became his wife. ]

 [Footnote 3: For the place occupied in the evolution of Italian scholarship by this Greek sage, see my 'Revival of Learning, ' _Renaissance in Italy_, part 2. ]

 [Footnote 4: The account of this church given by Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pii Secondi, Comment. , ii. 92) deserves quotation: 'Ædificavit tamen nobile templum Arimini in honorem divi Francisci, verum ita gentilibus operibus implevit, ut non tam Christianorum quam infidelium dæmones adorantium templum esse videatur. ']

 [Footnote 5: Almost all the facts of Alberti's life are to be found in the Latin biography included in Muratori. It has been conjectured, and not without plausibility, by the last editor of Alberti's complete works, Bonucci, that this Latin life was penned by Alberti himself. ]

 [Footnote 6: There is in reality no doubt or problem about this Saint Clair. She was born in 1275, and joined the Augustinian Sisterhood, dying young, in 1308, as Abbess of her convent. Continual and impassioned meditation on the Passion of our Lord impressed her heart with the signs of His suffering which have been described above. I owe this note to the kindness of an anonymous correspondent, whom I here thank. ]

 [Footnote 7: The balance of probability leans against Isabella in this affair. At the licentious court of the Medici she lived with unpardonable freedom. Troilo Orsini was himself assassinated in Paris by Bracciano's orders a few years afterwards. ]

 [Footnote 8: I have amplified and corrected this chronicle by the light of Professor Gnoli's monograph, _Vittoria Accoramboni_, published by Le Monnier at Florence in 1870. ]

 [Footnote 9: In dealing with Webster's tragedy, I have adhered to his use and spelling of names. ]

 [Footnote 10: The fresco of the Coronation of the Virgin upon the semi-dome of S. Giovanni is the work of a copyist, Cesare Aretusi. But part of the original fresco, which was removed in 1684, exists in a good state of preservation at the end of the long gallery of the library. ]

 [Footnote 11: See the chapter on Euripides in my _Studies of Greek Poets_, First Series, for a further development of this view of artistic evolution. ]

 [Footnote 12: I find that this story is common in the country round Canossa. It is mentioned by Professor A. Ferretti in his monograph entitled _Canossa, Studi e Ricerche_, Reggio, 1876, a work to which I am indebted, and which will repay careful study. ]

 [Footnote 13: Charles claimed under the will of René of Anjou, who in turn claimed under the will of Joan II. ]

 [Footnote 14: For an estimate of Cosimo's services to art and literature, his collection of libraries, his great buildings, his generosity to scholars, and his promotion of Greek studies, I may refer to my _Renaissance in Italy_: 'The Revival of Learning, ' chap. Iv. ]

 [Footnote 15: Giottino had painted the Duke of Athens, in like manner, on the same walls. ]

 [Footnote 16: See _Archivio Storico_. ]

 [Footnote 17: The order of rhymes runs thus: _a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a, c, d, c, d, c, d_; or in the terzets, _c, d, e, c, d, e_, or _c, d, e, d, c, e_, and so forth. ]

 [Footnote 18: It has extraordinary interest for the student of our literary development, inasmuch as it is full of experiments in metres, which have never thriven on English soil. Not to mention the attempt to write in asclepiads and other classical rhythms, we might point to Sidney's _terza rima_, poems with _sdrucciolo_ or treble rhymes. This peculiar and painful form he borrowed from Ariosto and Sanazzaro; but even in Italian it cannot be handled without sacrifice of variety, without impeding the metrical movement and marring the sense. ]

 [Footnote 19: The stately structure of the _Prothalamion_ and _Epithalamion_ is a rebuilding of the Italian Canzone. His Eclogues, with their allegories, repeat the manner of Petrarch's minor Latin poems. ]

 [Footnote 20: Marlowe makes Gaveston talk of 'Italian masques. ' At the same time, in the prologue to _Tamburlaine_, he shows that he was conscious of the new and nobler direction followed by the drama in England. ]

 [Footnote 21: This sentence requires some qualification. In his _Poesia Popolare Italiana_, 1878, Professor d'Ancona prints a Pisan, a Venetian, and two Lombard versions of our Border ballad 'Where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son, ' so close in general type and minor details to the English, German, Swedish, and Finnish versions of this Volkslied as to suggest a very ancient community of origin. It remains as yet, however, an isolated fact in the history of Italian popular poetry. ]

 [Footnote 22: _Canti Popolari Toscani_, raccolti e annotati da Giuseppe Tigri. Volume unico. Firenze: G. Barbèra, 1869. ]

 [Footnote 23: This is a description of the Tuscan rispetto. In Sicily the stanza generally consists of eight lines rhyming alternately throughout, while in the North of Italy it is normally a simple quatrain. The same poetical material assumes in Northern, Central, and Southern Italy these diverge but associated forms. ]

 [Footnote 24: This song, called Ciure (Sicilian for _fiore_) in Sicily, is said by Signor Pitré to be in disrepute there. He once asked an old dame of Palermo to repeat him some of these ditties. Her answer was, 'You must get them from light women; I do not know any. They sing them in bad houses and prisons, where, God be praised, I have never been. ' In Tuscany there does not appear to be so marked a distinction between the flower song and the rispetto. ]

 [Footnote 25: Much light has lately been thrown on the popular poetry of Italy; and it appears that contemporary improvisatori trust more to their richly stocked memories and to their power of recombination than to original or novel inspiration. It is in Sicily that the vein of truly creative lyric utterance is said to flow most freely and most copiously at the present time. ]

 [Footnote 26: 'Remember me, fair one, to the scrivener. I do not know him or who he is, but he seems to me a sovereign poet, so cunning is he in his use of verse. ']

 [Footnote 27: It must be remarked that Tigri draws a strong contrast in this respect between the songs of the mountain districts which he has printed and those of the towns, and that Pitrè, in his edition of Sicilian _Volkslieder_, expressly alludes to the coarseness of a whole class which he had omitted. The MSS. Of Sicilian and Tuscan songs, dating from the fifteenth century and earlier, yield a fair proportion of decidedly obscene compositions. Yet the fact stated above is integrally correct. When acclimatised in the large towns, the rustic Muse not unfrequently assumes a garb of grossness. At home, among the fields and on the mountains, she remains chaste and romantic. ]

 [Footnote 28: In a rispetto, of which I subjoin a translation, sung by a poor lad to a mistress of higher rank, love itself is pleaded as the sign of a gentle soul:--

 My state is poor: I am not meet To court so nobly born a love; For poverty hath tied my feet, Trying to climb too far above. Yet am I gentle, loving thee; Nor need thou shun my poverty. 

 [Footnote 29: When the Cherubina, of whom mention has been made above, was asked by Signor Tigri to dictate some of her rispetti, she answered, 'O signore! ne dico tanti quando li canto! . . . Ma ora . . . Bisognerebbe averli tutti in visione; se no, proprio non vengono. ']

 [Footnote 30: I need hardly guard myself against being supposed to mean that the form of _Ballata_ in question was the only one of its kind in Italy. ]

 [Footnote 31: See my _Sketches in Italy and Greece_, p. 114. ]

 [Footnote 32: The originals will be found in Carducci's _Studi Letterari_, p. 273 _et seq. _ I have preserved their rhyming structure. ]

 [Footnote 33: Stanza XLIII. All references are made to Carducci's excellent edition, _Le Stanze, l'Orfeo e le Rime di Messer Angelo Ambrogini Poliziano. _ Firenze: G. Barbéra. 1863. ]

SKETCHES AND STUDIES

IN ITALY AND GREECE

BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

AUTHOR OF "RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, " "STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS, " ETC. 

THIRD SERIES

WITH A FRONTISPIECE

LONDON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 

1910

First Edition (Smith, Elder & Co. ) _December 1898__Reprinted December 1907__Reprinted October 1910_Taken Over by John Murray _January 1917_

_All rights reserved_

_Printed in Great Britain by_

Spottiswoode, Ballantyne & Co. Ltd. 

_London, Colchester & Eton_

CONTENTS

FOLGORE DA SAN GEMIGNANO

THOUGHTS IN ITALY ABOUT CHRISTMAS

SIENA

MONTE OLIVETO

MONTEPULCIANO

PERUGIA

ORVIETO

LUCRETIUS

ANTINOUS

SPRING WANDERINGS

AMALFI, PÆSTUM, CAPRI

ETNA

PALERMO

SYRACUSE AND GIRGENTI

ATHENS

INDEX

The Ildefonso Group _Frontispiece_

SKETCHES AND STUDIES

IN

ITALY AND GREECE

_FOLGORE DA SAN GEMIGNANO_

Students of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translations from the earlyItalian poets (_Dante and his Circle_. Ellis & White, 1874) will notfail to have noticed the striking figure made among those jejuneimitators of Provençal mannerism by two rhymesters, Cecco Angiolieriand Folgore da San Gemignano. Both belong to the school of Siena, and both detach themselves from the metaphysical fashion of theirepoch by clearness of intention and directness of style. The sonnetsof both are remarkable for what in the critical jargon of to-daymight be termed realism. Cecco is even savage and brutal. Heanticipates Villon from afar, and is happily described by Mr. Rossetti as the prodigal, or 'scamp' of the Dantesque circle. Thecase is different with Folgore. There is no poet who breathes afresher air of gentleness. He writes in images, dealing but littlewith ideas. Every line presents a picture, and each picture has thecharm of a miniature fancifully drawn and brightly coloured on amissal-margin. Cecco and Folgore alike have abandoned the mediævalmysticism which sounds unreal on almost all Italian lips butDante's. True Italians, they are content to live for life's sake, and to take the world as it presents itself to natural senses. ButCecco is perverse and impious. His love has nothing delicate; hishatred is a morbid passion. At his worst or best (for his bestwriting is his worst feeling) we find him all but rabid. IfCaligula, for instance, had written poetry, he might have piquedhimself upon the following sonnet; only we must do Cecco the justiceof remembering that his rage is more than half ironical andhumorous:--

 An I were fire, I would burn up the world; An I were wind, with tempest I'd it break; An I were sea, I'd drown it in a lake; An I were God, to hell I'd have it hurled; An I were Pope, I'd see disaster whirled O'er Christendom, deep joy thereof to take; An I were Emperor, I'd quickly make All heads of all folk from their necks be twirled; An I were death, I'd to my father go; An I were life, forthwith from him I'd fly; And with my mother I'd deal even so; An I were Cecco, as I am but I, Young girls and pretty for myself I'd hold, But let my neighbours take the plain and old. 

Of all this there is no trace in Folgore. The worst a moralist couldsay of him is that he sought out for himself a life of pureenjoyment. The famous Sonnets on the Months give particulardirections for pastime in a round of pleasure suited to each season. The Sonnets on the Days are conceived in a like hedonistic spirit. But these series are specially addressed to members of the GladBrigades and Spending Companies, which were common in the greatmercantile cities of mediæval Italy. Their tone is doubtless due tothe occasion of their composition, as compliments to Messer Nicholòdi Nisi and Messer Guerra Cavicciuoli. 

The mention of these names reminds me that a word need be said aboutthe date of Folgore. Mr. Rossetti does not dispute the commonlyassigned date of 1260, and takes for granted that the Messer Nicolòof the Sonnets on the Months was the Sienese gentleman referred toby Dante in a certain passage of the 'Inferno':[1]--

 And to the Poet said I: 'Now was ever So vain a people as the Sienese? Not for a certainty the French by far. ' Whereat the other leper, who had heard me, Replied unto my speech: 'Taking out Stricca, Who knew the art of moderate expenses, And Nicolò, who the luxurious use Of cloves discovered earliest of all Within that garden where such seed takes root. And taking out the band, among whom squandered Caccia d' Ascian his vineyards and vast woods, And where his wit the Abbagliato proffered. '

Now Folgore refers in his political sonnets to events of the years1314 and 1315; and the correct reading of a line in his last sonneton the Months gives the name of Nicholò di Nisi to the leader ofFolgore's 'blithe and lordly Fellowship. ' The first of these factsleads us to the conclusion that Folgore flourished in the firstquarter of the fourteenth, instead of in the third quarter of thethirteenth century. The second prevents our identifying Nicholò diNisi with the Niccolò de' Salimbeni, who is thought to have been thefounder of the Fellowship of the Carnation. Furthermore, documentshave recently been brought to light which mention at San Gemignano, in the years 1305 and 1306, a certain Folgore. There is nosufficient reason to identify this Folgore with the poet; but thename, to say the least, is so peculiar that its occurrence in therecords of so small a town as San Gemignano gives some confirmationto the hypothesis of the poet's later date. Taking these severalconsiderations together, I think we must abandon the old view thatFolgore was one of the earliest Tuscan poets, a view which is, moreover, contradicted by his style. Those critics, at any rate, whostill believe him to have been a predecessor of Dante's, are forcedto reject as spurious the political sonnets referring to MonteCatini and the plunder of Lucca by Uguccione della Faggiuola. Yetthese sonnets rest on the same manuscript authority as the Monthsand Days, and are distinguished by the same qualities. [2]

 [1] _Inferno_, xxix. 121. --_Longfellow_. 

 [2] The above points are fully discussed by Signor Giulio Navone, in his recent edition of _Le Rime di Folgore da San Gemignano e di Cene da la Chitarra d' Arezzo_. Bologna: Romagnoli, 1880. I may further mention that in the sonnet on the Pisans, translated on p. 18, which belongs to the political series, Folgore uses his own name. 

Whatever may be the date of Folgore, whether we assign his period tothe middle of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenthcentury, there is no doubt but that he presents us with a verylively picture of Italian manners, drawn from the point of view ofthe high bourgeoisie. It is on this account that I have thought itworth while to translate five of his Sonnets on Knighthood, whichform the fragment that remains to us from a series of seventeen. Fewpoems better illustrate the temper of Italian aristocracy when thecivil wars of two centuries had forced the nobles to enrollthemselves among the burghers, and when what little chivalry hadtaken root in Italy was fast decaying in a gorgeous over-bloom ofluxury. The institutions of feudal knighthood had lost their sternermeaning for our poet. He uses them for the suggestion of delicateallegories fancifully painted. Their mysterious significance isturned to gaiety, their piety to amorous delight, their grimness torefined enjoyment. Still these changes are effected with perfectgood taste and in perfect good faith. Something of the perfume oftrue chivalry still lingered in a society which was fast becomingmercantile and diplomatic. And this perfume is exhaled by the petalsof Folgore's song-blossom. He has no conception that to readers ofMort Arthur, or to Founders of the Garter, to Sir Miles Stapleton, Sir Richard Fitz-Simon, or Sir James Audley, his ideal knight wouldhave seemed but little better than a scented civet-cat. Such knightsas his were all that Italy possessed, and the poet-painter wasjustly proud of them, since they served for finished pictures of thebeautiful in life. 

The Italians were not a feudal race. During the successive reigns ofLombard, Frankish, and German masters, they had passively accepted, stubbornly resisted feudalism, remaining true to the conviction thatthey themselves were Roman. In Roman memories they sought thetraditions which give consistency to national consciousness. Andwhen the Italian communes triumphed finally over Empire, counts, bishops, and rural aristocracy; then Roman law was speedilysubstituted for the 'asinine code' of the barbarians, and Romancivility gave its tone to social customs in the place of Teutonicchivalry. Yet just as the Italians borrowed, modified, andmisconceived Gothic architecture, so they took a feudal tincturefrom the nations of the North with whom they came in contact. Theirnoble families, those especially who followed the Imperial party, sought the honour of knighthood; and even the free cities arrogatedto themselves the right of conferring this distinction by diploma ontheir burghers. The chivalry thus formed in Italy was a decorativeinstitution. It might be compared to the ornamental frontispiecewhich masks the structural poverty of such Gothic buildings as theCathedral of Orvieto. 

On the descent of the German Emperor into Lombardy, the greatvassals who acknowledged him, made knighthood, among titles of moresolid import, the price of their allegiance. [1] Thus the chronicleof the Cortusi for the year 1354 tells us that when Charles IV. 'wasadvancing through the March, and had crossed the Oglio, and was atthe borders of Cremona, in his camp upon the snow, he, sitting uponhis horse, did knight the doughty and noble man, Francesco daCarrara, who had constantly attended him with a great train, andsmiting him upon the neck with his palm, said: "Be thou a goodknight, and loyal to the Empire. " Thereupon the noble German peersdismounted, and forthwith buckled on Francesco's spurs. To them theLord Francesco gave chargers and horses of the best he had. 'Immediately afterwards Francesco dubbed several of his own retainersknights. And this was the customary fashion of these Lombard lords. For we read how in the year 1328 Can Grande della Scala, after thecapture of Padua, 'returned to Verona, and for the furthercelebration of his victory upon the last day of October held acourt, and made thirty-eight knights with his own hand of the diversdistricts of Lombardy. ' And in 1294 Azzo d'Este 'was knighted byGerardo da Camino, who then was Lord of Treviso, upon the piazza ofFerrara, before the gate of the Bishop's palace. And on the same dayat the same hour the said Lord Marquis Azzo made fifty-two knightswith his own hand, namely, the Lord Francesco, his brother, andothers of Ferrara, Modena, Bologna, Florence, Padua, and Lombardy;and on this occasion was a great court held in Ferrara. ' Anotherchronicle, referring to the same event, says that the whole expensesof the ceremony, including the rich dresses of the new knights, wereat the charge of the Marquis. It was customary, when a noble househad risen to great wealth and had abundance of fighting men, toincrease its prestige and spread abroad its glory by a wholesalecreation of knights. Thus the Chronicle of Rimini records a highcourt held by Pandolfo Malatesta in the May of 1324, when he and histwo sons, with two of his near relatives and certain strangers fromFlorence, Bologna, and Perugia, received this honour. At Siena, inlike manner, in the year 1284, 'thirteen of the house of Salimbeniwere knighted with great pomp. '

 [1] The passages used in the text are chiefly drawn from Muratori's fifty-third Dissertation. 

It was not on the battlefield that the Italians sought this honour. They regarded knighthood as a part of their signorial parade. Therefore Republics, in whom perhaps, according to strict feudalnotions, there was no fount of honour, presumed to appointprocurators for the special purpose of making knights. Florence, Siena, and Arezzo, after this fashion gave the golden spurs to menwho were enrolled in the arts of trade or commerce. The usage wasseverely criticised by Germans who visited Italy in the Imperialtrain. Otto Frisingensis, writing the deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, speaks with bitterness thereof: 'To the end that they may not lackmeans of subduing their neighbours, they think it no shame to girdas knights young men of low birth, or even handicraftsmen indespised mechanic arts, the which folk other nations banish like theplague from honourable and liberal pursuits. ' Such knights, amid thechivalry of Europe, were not held in much esteem; nor is it easy tosee what the cities, which had formally excluded nobles from theirgovernment, thought to gain by aping institutions which had theirtrue value only in a feudal society. We must suppose that theItalians were not firmly set enough in their own type to resist anenthusiasm which inflamed all Christendom. At the same time theywere too Italian to comprehend the spirit of the thing theyborrowed. The knights thus made already contained within themselvesthe germ of those Condottieri who reduced the service of arms to acommercial speculation. But they lent splendour to the Commonwealth, as may be seen in the grave line of mounted warriors, steel-clad, with open visors, who guard the commune of Siena in AmbrogioLorenzetti's fresco. Giovanni Villani, in a passage of his Chroniclewhich deals with the fair state of Florence just before the outbreakof the Black and White parties, says the city at that epoch numbered'three hundred Cavalieri di Corredo, with many clubs of knights andsquires, who morning and evening went to meat with many men of thecourt, and gave away on high festivals many robes of vair. ' It isclear that these citizen knights were leaders of society, and didtheir duty to the commonwealth by adding to its joyous cheer. Uponthe battlefields of the civil wars, moreover, they sustained attheir expense the charges of the cavalry. 

Siena was a city much given to parade and devoted to the Imperialcause, in which the institution of chivalry flourished. Not only didthe burghers take knighthood from their procurators, but the moreinfluential sought it by a special dispensation from the Emperor. Thus we hear how Nino Tolomei obtained a Cæsarean diploma ofknighthood for his son Giovanni, and published it with great pomp tothe people in his palace. This Giovanni, when he afterwards enteredreligion, took the name of Bernard, and founded the Order of MonteOliveto. 

Owing to the special conditions of Italian chivalry, it followedthat the new knight, having won his spurs by no feat of arms uponthe battlefield, was bounden to display peculiar magnificence in theceremonies of his investiture. His honour was held to be less thereward of courage than of liberality. And this feeling is stronglyexpressed in a curious passage of Matteo Villani's Chronicle. 'Whenthe Emperor Charles had received the crown in Rome, as we have said, he turned towards Siena, and on the 19th day of April arrived atthat city; and before he entered the same, there met him people ofthe commonwealth with great festivity upon the hour of vespers; inthe which reception eight burghers, given to display but miserly, tothe end they might avoid the charges due to knighthood, did causethemselves then and there to be made knights by him. And no soonerhad he passed the gates than many ran to meet him without order intheir going or provision for the ceremony, and he, being aware ofthe vain and light impulse of that folk, enjoined upon the Patriarchto knight them in his name. The Patriarch could not withstay fromknighting as many as offered themselves; and seeing the thing socheap, very many took the honour, who before that hour had neverthought of being knighted, nor had made provision of what isrequired from him who seeketh knighthood, but with light impulse didcause themselves to be borne upon the arms of those who were aroundthe Patriarch; and when they were in the path before him, theseraised such an one on high, and took his customary cap off, andafter he had had the cheek-blow which is used in knighting, put agold-fringed cap upon his head, and drew him from the press, and sohe was a knight. And after this wise were made four-and-thirty onthat evening, of the noble and lesser folk. And when the Emperor hadbeen attended to his lodging, night fell, and all returned home; andthe new knights without preparation or expense celebrated theirreception into chivalry with their families forthwith. He whoreflects with a mind not subject to base avarice upon the coming ofa new-crowned Emperor into so famous a city, and bethinks him how somany noble and rich burghers were promoted to the honour ofknighthood in their native land, men too by nature fond of pomp, without having made any solemn festival in common or in private tothe fame of chivalry, may judge this people little worthy of thedistinction they received. '

This passage is interesting partly as an instance of Florentinespite against Siena, partly as showing that in Italy greatmunificence was expected from the carpet-knights who had not wontheir spurs with toil, and partly as proving how the GermanEmperors, on their parade expeditions through Italy, debased theinstitutions they were bound to hold in respect. Enfeebled by theextirpation of the last great German house which really reigned inItaly, the Empire was now no better than a cause of corruption anddemoralisation to Italian society. The conduct of a man like Charlesdisgusted even the most fervent Ghibellines; and we find Fazio degliUberti flinging scorn upon his avarice and baseness in such lines asthese:--

 Sappi ch' i' son Italia che ti parlo, Di Lusimburgo _ignominioso Carlo_ . .. Veggendo te aver tese tue arti _A tór danari e gir con essi a casa_ . .. Tu dunque, Giove, perche 'l Santo uccello Da questo Carlo quarto Imperador non togli e dalle mani _Degli altri, lurchi moderni Germani_ _Che d' aquila un allocco n' hanno fatto_?

From a passage in a Sienese chronicle we learn what ceremonies ofbravery were usual in that city when the new knights understoodtheir duty. It was the year 1326. Messer Francesco Bandinelli wasabout to be knighted on the morning of Christmas Day. The friends ofhis house sent peacocks and pheasants by the dozen, and huge pies ofmarchpane, and game in quantities. Wine, meat, and bread weredistributed to the Franciscan and other convents, and a fair andnoble court was opened to all comers. Messer Sozzo, father of thenovice, went, attended by his guests, to hear high mass in thecathedral; and there upon the marble pulpit, which the Pisanscarved, the ceremony was completed. Tommaso di Nello bore his swordand cap and spurs before him upon horseback. Messer Sozzo girded thesword upon the loins of Messer Francesco, his son aforesaid. MesserPietro Ridolfi, of Rome, who was the first vicar that came to Siena, and the Duke of Calabria buckled on his right spur. The Captain ofthe People buckled on his left. The Count Simone da Battifolle thenundid his sword and placed it in the hands of Messer Giovanni diMesser Bartolo de' Fibenzi da Rodi, who handed it to Messer Sozzo, the which sword had previously been girded by the father on his son. After this follows a list of the illustrious guests, and aninventory of the presents made to them by Messer Francesco. We findamong these 'a robe of silken cloth and gold, skirt, and fur, andcap lined with vair, with a silken cord. ' The description of themany costly dresses is minute; but I find no mention of armour. Thesingers received golden florins, and the players upon instruments'good store of money. ' A certain Salamone was presented with theclothes which the novice doffed before he took the ceremonial bath. The whole catalogue concludes with Messer Francesco's furniture andoutfit. This, besides a large wardrobe of rich clothes and furs, contains armour and the trappings for charger and palfrey. The_Corte Bandita_, or open house held upon this occasion, lasted foreight days, and the charges on the Bandinelli estates must have beenconsiderable. 

Knights so made were called in Italy _Cavalieri Addobbati_, or _diCorredo_, probably because the expense of costly furniture was borneby them--_addobbo_ having become a name for decorative trappings, and _Corredo_ for equipment. The latter is still in use for abride's trousseau. The former has the same Teutonic root as our verb'to dub. ' But the Italians recognised three other kinds of knights, the _Cavalieri Bagnati_, _Cavalieri di Scudo_, and _Cavalierid'Arme_. Of the four sorts Sacchetti writes in one of hisnovels:--'Knights of the Bath are made with the greatest ceremonies, and it behoves them to be bathed and washed of all impurity. Knightsof Equipment are those who take the order with a mantle of darkgreen and the gilded garland. Knights of the Shield are such as aremade knights by commonwealths or princes, or go to investiturearmed, and with the casque upon their head. Knights of Arms arethose who in the opening of a battle, or upon a foughten field, aredubbed knights. ' These distinctions, however, though concordant withfeudal chivalry, were not scrupulously maintained in Italy. MesserFrancesco Bandinelli, for example, was certainly a _Cavaliere diCorredo_. Yet he took the bath, as we have seen. Of a truth, theItalians selected those picturesque elements of chivalry which lentthemselves to pageant and parade. The sterner intention of theinstitution, and the symbolic meaning of its various ceremonies, were neglected by them. 

In the foregoing passages, which serve as a lengthy preamble toFolgore's five sonnets, I have endeavoured to draw illustrationsfrom the history of Siena, because Folgore represents Sienesesociety at the height of mediæval culture. In the first of theseries he describes the preparation made by the aspirant afterknighthood. The noble youth is so bent on doing honour to the orderof chivalry, that he raises money by mortgage to furnish forth thebanquets and the presents due upon the occasion of his institution. He has made provision also of equipment for himself and all histrain. It will be noticed that Folgore dwells only on the fair andjoyous aspect of the ceremony. The religious enthusiasm ofknighthood has disappeared, and already, in the first decade of thefourteenth century, we find the spirit of Jehan de Saintrè prevalentin Italy. The word _donzello_, derived from the Latin _domicellus_, I have translated _squire_, because the donzel was a youth of gentlebirth awaiting knighthood. 

 This morn a young squire shall be made a knight; hereof he fain would be right worthy found, And therefore pledgeth lands and castles round To furnish all that fits a man of might. Meat, bread and wine he gives to many a wight; Capons and pheasants on his board abound, Where serving men and pages march around; Choice chambers, torches, and wax candle light. Barbed steeds, a multitude, are in his thought, Mailed men at arms and noble company, Spears, pennants, housing cloths, bells richly wrought. Musicians following with great barony And jesters through the land his state have brought, With dames and damsels whereso rideth he. 

The subject having thus been introduced, Folgore treats theceremonies of investiture by an allegorical method, which is quiteconsistent with his own preference of images to ideas. Each of thefour following sonnets presents a picture to the mind, admirablyfitted for artistic handling. We may imagine them to ourselveswrought in arras for a sumptuous chamber. The first treats of thebath, in which, as we have seen already from Sacchetti's note, theaspirant after knighthood puts aside all vice, and consecrateshimself anew. Prodezza, or Prowess, must behold him nude from headto foot, in order to assure herself that the neophyte bears noblemish; and this inspection is an allegory of internal wholeness. 

 Lo Prowess, who despoileth him straightway, And saith: 'Friend, now beseems it thee to strip; For I will see men naked, thigh and hip, And thou my will must know and eke obey; And leave what was thy wont until this day, And for new toil, new sweat, thy strength equip; This do, and thou shalt join my fellowship, If of fair deeds thou tire not nor cry nay. ' And when she sees his comely body bare, Forthwith within her arms she him doth take, And saith: 'These limbs thou yieldest to my prayer; I do accept thee, and this gift thee make, So that thy deeds may shine for ever fair; My lips shall never more thy praise forsake. '

After courage, the next virtue of the knightly character isgentleness or modesty, called by the Italians humility. It is thisquality which makes a strong man pleasing to the world, and wins himfavour. Folgore's sonnet enables us to understand the motto of thegreat Borromeo family--_Humilitas_, in Gothic letters underneath thecoronet upon their princely palace fronts. 

 Humility to him doth gently go, And saith: 'I would in no wise weary thee; Yet must I cleanse and wash thee thoroughly, And I will make thee whiter than the snow. Hear what I tell thee in few words, for so Fain am I of thy heart to hold the key; Now must thou sail henceforward after me; And I will guide thee as myself do go. But one thing would I have thee straightway leave; Well knowest thou mine enemy is pride; Let her no more unto thy spirit cleave: So leal a friend with thee will I abide That favour from all folk thou shalt receive; This grace hath he who keepeth on my side. '

The novice has now bathed, approved himself to the searching eyes ofProwess, and been accepted by Humility. After the bath, it wascustomary for him to spend a night in vigil; and this among theTeutons should have taken place in church, alone before the altar. But the Italian poet, after his custom, gives a suave turn to thesevere discipline. His donzel passes the night in bed, attended byDiscretion, or the virtue of reflection. She provides fairentertainment for the hours of vigil, and leaves him at the morningwith good counsel. It is not for nothing that he seeks knighthood, and it behoves him to be careful of his goings. The last three linesof the sonnet are the gravest of the series, showing that somethingof true chivalrous feeling survived even among the Cavalieri diCorredo of Tuscany. 

 Then did Discretion to the squire draw near, And drieth him with a fair cloth and clean, And straightway putteth him the sheets between, Silk, linen, counterpane, and minevere. Think now of this! Until the day was clear, With songs and music and delight the queen, And with new knights, fair fellows well-beseen, To make him perfect, gave him goodly cheer. Then saith she: 'Rise forthwith, for now 'tis due, Thou shouldst be born into the world again; Keep well the order thou dost take in view. ' Unfathomable thoughts with him remain Of that great bond he may no more eschew, Nor can he say, 'I'll hide me from this chain. '

The vigil is over. The mind of the novice is prepared for his newduties. The morning of his reception into chivalry has arrived. Itis therefore fitting that grave thoughts should be abandoned; andseeing that not only prowess, humility, and discretion are thevirtues of a knight, but that he should also be blithe and debonair, Gladness comes to raise him from his bed and equip him for theceremony of institution. 

 Comes Blithesomeness with mirth and merriment, All decked in flowers she seemeth a rose-tree; Of linen, silk, cloth, fur, now beareth she To the new knight a rich habiliment; Head-gear and cap and garland flower-besprent, So brave they were May-bloom he seemed to be; With such a rout, so many and such glee, That the floor shook. Then to her work she went; And stood him on his feet in hose and shoon; And purse and gilded girdle 'neath the fur That drapes his goodly limbs, she buckles on; Then bids the singers and sweet music stir, And showeth him to ladies for a boon And all who in that following went with her. 

At this point the poem is abruptly broken. The manuscript from whichthese sonnets are taken states they are a fragment. Had theremaining twelve been preserved to us, we should probably havepossessed a series of pictures in which the procession to churchwould have been portrayed, the investiture with the sword, theaccolade, the buckling on of the spurs, and the concluding sportsand banquets. It is very much to be regretted that so interesting, so beautiful, and so unique a monument of Italian chivalry survivesthus mutilated. But students of art have to arm themselvescontinually with patience, repressing the sad thoughts engendered inthem by the spectacle of time's unconscious injuries. 

It is certain that Folgore would have written at least one sonnet onthe quality of courtesy, which in that age, as we have learned fromMatteo Villani, identified itself in the Italian mind withliberality. This identification marks a certain degradation of thechivalrous ideal, which is characteristic of Italian manners. One ofFolgore's miscellaneous sonnets shows how sorely he felt thedisappearance of this quality from the midst of a society bent dailymore and more upon material aims. It reminds us of the lamentableoutcries uttered by the later poets of the fourteenth century, Sacchetti, Boccaccio, Uberti, and others of less fame, over thedecline of their age. 

 Courtesy! Courtesy! Courtesy! I call: But from no quarter comes there a reply. They who should show her, hide her; wherefore I And whoso needs her, ill must us befall. Greed with his hook hath ta'en men one and all, And murdered every grace that dumb doth lie: Whence, if I grieve, I know the reason why; From you, great men, to God I make my call: For you my mother Courtesy have cast So low beneath your feet she there must bleed; Your gold remains, but you're not made to last: Of Eve and Adam we are all the seed: Able to give and spend, you hold wealth fast: Ill is the nature that rears such a breed!

Folgore was not only a poet of occasion and compliment, but apolitical writer, who fully entertained the bitter feeling of theGuelphs against their Ghibelline opponents. 

Two of his sonnets addressed to the Guelphs have been translated byMr. Rossetti. In order to complete the list I have made freeversions of two others in which he criticised the weakness of hisown friends. The first is addressed, in the insolent impiety ofrage, to God:--

 I praise thee not, O God, nor give thee glory, Nor yield thee any thanks, nor bow the knee, Nor pay thee service; for this irketh me More than the souls to stand in purgatory; Since thou hast made us Guelphs a jest and story Unto the Ghibellines for all to see: And if Uguccion claimed tax of thee, Thou'dst pay it without interrogatory. Ah, well I wot they know thee! and have stolen St. Martin from thee, Altopascio, St. Michael, and the treasure thou hast lost; And thou that rotten rabble so hast swollen That pride now counts for tribute; even so Thou'st made their heart stone-hard to thine own cost. 

About the meaning of some lines in this sonnet I am not clear. Butthe feeling and the general drift of it are manifest. The second isa satire on the feebleness and effeminacy of the Pisans. 

 Ye are more silky-sleek than ermines are, Ye Pisan counts, knights, damozels, and squires, Who think by combing out your hair like wires To drive the men of Florence from their car. Ye make the Ghibellines free near and far, Here, there, in cities, castles, huts, and byres, Seeing how gallant in your brave attires, How bold you look, true paladins of war. Stout-hearted are ye as a hare in chase, To meet the sails of Genoa on the sea; And men of Lucca never saw your face. Dogs with a bone for courtesy are ye: Could Folgore but gain a special grace, He'd have you banded 'gainst all men that be. 

Among the sonnets not translated by Mr. Rossetti two by Folgoreremain, which may be classified with the not least considerablecontributions to Italian gnomic poetry in an age when literatureeasily assumed a didactic tone. The first has for its subject theimportance of discernment and discrimination. It is written on thewisdom of what the ancient Greeks called [Greek: Kairos], or theright occasion in all human conduct. 

 Dear friend, not every herb puts forth a flower; Nor every flower that blossoms fruit doth bear; Nor hath each spoken word a virtue rare; Nor every stone in earth its healing power: This thing is good when mellow, that when sour; One seems to grieve, within doth rest from care; Not every torch is brave that flaunts in air; There is what dead doth seem, yet flame doth shower. Wherefore it ill behoveth a wise man His truss of every grass that grows to bind, Or pile his back with every stone he can, Or counsel from each word to seek to find, Or take his walks abroad with Dick and Dan: Not without cause I'm moved to speak my mind. 

The second condemns those men of light impulse who, as Dante put it, discoursing on the same theme, 'subject reason to inclination. '[1]

 What time desire hath o'er the soul such sway That reason finds nor place nor puissance here, Men oft do laugh at what should claim a tear, And over grievous dole are seeming gay. He sure would travel far from sense astray Who should take frigid ice for fire; and near Unto this plight are those who make glad cheer For what should rather cause their soul dismay. But more at heart might he feel heavy pain Who made his reason subject to mere will, And followed wandering impulse without rein; Seeing no lordship is so rich as still One's upright self unswerving to sustain, To follow worth, to flee things vain and ill. 

The sonnets translated by me in this essay, taken together withthose already published by Mr. Rossetti, put the English reader inpossession of all that passes for the work of Folgore da SanGemignano. 

 [1] The line in Dante runs:

 'Che la ragion sommettono al talento. '

 In Folgore's sonnet we read:

 'Chi sommette rason a volontade. '

 On the supposition that Folgore wrote in the second decade of the fourteenth century, it is not impossible that he may have had knowledge of this line from the fifth canto of the _Inferno_. 

Since these words were written, England has lost the poet-painter, to complete whose work upon the sonnet-writer of mediæval Siena Iattempted the translations in this essay. One who has trodden thesame path as Rossetti, at however a noticeable interval, and hasattempted to present in English verse the works of great Italiansingers, doing inadequately for Michelangelo and Campanella what hedid supremely well for Dante, may here perhaps be allowed to lay thetribute of reverent recognition at his tomb. 

_THOUGHTS IN ITALY ABOUT CHRISTMAS_

What is the meaning of our English Christmas? What makes it seem sotruly Northern, national, and homely, that we do not like to keepthe feast upon a foreign shore? These questions grew upon me as Istood one Advent afternoon beneath the Dome of Florence. A priestwas thundering from the pulpit against French scepticism, andexalting the miracle of the Incarnation. Through the whole dimchurch blazed altar candles. Crowds of men and women knelt or satabout the transepts, murmuring their prayers of preparation for thefestival. At the door were pedlars selling little books, in whichwere printed the offices for Christmas-tide, with stories of S. Felix and S. Catherine, whose devotion to the infant Christ hadwrought them weal, and promises of the remission of four purgatorialcenturies to those who zealously observed the service of the Churchat this most holy time. I knew that the people of Florence werepreparing for Christmas in their own way. But it was not our way. Ithappened that outside the church the climate seemed as wintry as ourown--snowstorms and ice, and wind and chilling fog, suggestingNorthern cold. But as the palaces of Florence lacked our comfortablefiresides, and the greetings of friends lacked our hearty handshakesand loud good wishes, so there seemed to be a want of the homefeeling in those Christmas services and customs. Again I askedmyself, 'What do we mean by Christmas?'

The same thought pursued me as I drove to Rome: by Siena, still andbrown, uplifted, mid her russet hills and wilderness of rollingplain; by Chiusi, with its sepulchral city of a dead and unknownpeople; through the chestnut forests of the Apennines; by Orvieto'srock, Viterbo's fountains, and the oak-grown solitudes of theCiminian heights, from which one looks across the broad lake ofBolsena and the Roman plain. Brilliant sunlight, like that of a dayin late September, shone upon the landscape, and I thought--Can thisbe Christmas? Are they bringing mistletoe and holly on the countrycarts into the towns in far-off England? Is it clear and frostythere, with the tramp of heels upon the flag, or snowing silently, or foggy with a round red sun and cries of warning at the corners ofthe streets?

I reached Rome on Christmas Eve, in time to hear midnight servicesin the Sistine Chapel and S. John Lateran, to breathe the dust ofdecayed shrines, to wonder at doting cardinals begrimed with snuff, and to resent the open-mouthed bad taste of my countrymen who made amockery of these palsy-stricken ceremonies. Nine cardinals going tosleep, nine train-bearers talking scandal, twenty huge, handsomeSwitzers in the dress devised by Michelangelo, some ushers, a choircaged off by gilded railings, the insolence and eagerness ofpolyglot tourists, plenty of wax candles dripping on people's heads, and a continual nasal drone proceeding from the gilded cage, out ofwhich were caught at intervals these words, and these only, --'Sæculasæculorum, amen. ' Such was the celebrated Sistine service. Thechapel blazed with light, and very strange did Michelangelo's LastJudgment, his Sibyls, and his Prophets, appear upon the roof andwall above this motley and unmeaning crowd. 

Next morning I put on my dress-clothes and white tie, and repaired, with groups of Englishmen similarly attired, and of Englishwomen inblack crape--the regulation costume--to S. Peter's. It was aglorious and cloudless morning; sunbeams streamed in columns fromthe southern windows, falling on the vast space full of soldiers anda mingled mass of every kind of people. Up the nave stood doublefiles of the Pontifical guard. Monks and nuns mixed with the Swisscuirassiers and halberds. Contadini crowded round the sacred images, and especially round the toe of S. Peter. I saw many mothers lifttheir swaddled babies up to kiss it. Valets of cardinals, with theinvariable red umbrellas, hung about side chapels and sacristies. Purple-mantled monsignori, like emperor butterflies, floated downthe aisles from sunlight into shadow. Movement, colour, and the stirof expectation, made the church alive. We showed our dress-clothesto the guard, were admitted within their ranks, and solemnly walkedup toward the dome. There under its broad canopy stood the altar, glittering with gold and candles. The choir was carpeted and hungwith scarlet. Two magnificent thrones rose ready for the Pope:guards of honour, soldiers, attachés, and the élite of the residentsand visitors in Rome, were scattered in groups picturesquely variedby ecclesiastics of all orders and degrees. At ten a stirring tookplace near the great west door. It opened, and we saw the processionof the Pope and his cardinals. Before him marched the singers andthe blowers of the silver trumpets, making the most liquid melody. Then came his Cap of Maintenance, and three tiaras; then a companyof mitred priests; next the cardinals in scarlet; and last, aloftbeneath a canopy, upon the shoulders of men, and flanked by themystic fans, advanced the Pope himself, swaying to and fro like aLama, or an Aztec king. Still the trumpets blew most silverly, andstill the people knelt; and as he came, we knelt and had hisblessing. Then he took his state and received homage. After this thechoir began to sing a mass of Palestrina's, and the deacons robedthe Pope. Marvellous putting on and taking off of robes and tiarasand mitres ensued, during which there was much bowing and prayingand burning of incense. At last, when he had reached the higheststage of sacrificial sanctity, he proceeded to the altar, waited onby cardinals and bishops. Having censed it carefully, he took ahigher throne and divested himself of part of his robes. Then themass went on in earnest, till the moment of consecration, when itpaused, the Pope descended from his throne, passed down the choir, and reached the altar. Every one knelt; the shrill bell tinkled; thesilver trumpets blew; the air became sick and heavy with incense, sothat sun and candle light swooned in an atmosphere of odorouscloud-wreaths. The whole church trembled, hearing the strange subtlemusic vibrate in the dome, and seeing the Pope with his own handslift Christ's body from the altar and present it to the people. Anold parish priest, pilgrim from some valley of the Apennines, whoknelt beside me, cried and quivered with excess of adoration. Thegreat tombs around, the sculptured saints and angels, the dome, thevolumes of light and incense and unfamiliar melody, the hierarchyministrant, the white and central figure of the Pope, themultitude--made up an overpowering scene. What followed wascomparatively tedious. My mind again went back to England, and Ithought of Christmas services beginning in all village churches andall cathedrals throughout the land--their old familiar hymn, theiranthem of Handel, their trite and sleepy sermons. How different thetwo feasts are--Christmas in Rome, Christmas in England--Italy andthe North--the spirit of Latin and the spirit of TeutonicChristianity. 

What, then, constitutes the essence of our Christmas as differentfrom that of more Southern nations? In their origin they are thesame. The stable of Bethlehem, the star-led kings, the shepherds, and the angels--all the beautiful story, in fact, which S. Lukealone of the Evangelists has preserved for us--are what the wholeChristian world owes to the religious feeling of the Hebrews. Thefirst and second chapters of S. Luke are most important in thehistory of Christian mythology and art. They are far from containingthe whole of what we mean by Christmas; but the religious poetrywhich gathers round that season must be sought upon their pages. Angels, ever since the Exodus, played a first part in the visions ofthe Hebrew prophets and in the lives of their heroes. We know notwhat reminiscences of old Egyptian genii, what strange shadows ofthe winged beasts of Persia, flitted through their dreams. In thedesert, or under the boundless sky of Babylon, these shapes becameno less distinct than the precise outlines of Oriental scenery. Theyincarnated the vivid thoughts and intense longings of the prophets, who gradually came to give them human forms and titles. We hear ofthem by name, as servants and attendants upon God, as guardians ofnations, and patrons of great men. To the Hebrew mind the wholeunseen world was full of spirits, active, strong, and swift offlight, of various aspect, and with power of speech. It is hard toimagine what the first Jewish disciples and the early Greek andRoman converts thought of these great beings. To us, the hierarchiesof Dionysius, the services of the Church, the poetry of Dante andMilton, and the forms of art, have made them quite familiar. Northern nations have appropriated the Angels, and invested themwith attributes alien to their Oriental origin. They fly through ourpine-forests, and the gloom of cloud or storm; they ride upon ourclanging bells, and gather in swift squadrons among the arches ofGothic cathedrals; we see them making light in the cavernous depthof woods, where sun or moon beams rarely pierce, and ministering tothe wounded or the weary; they bear aloft the censers of the mass;they sing in the anthems of choristers, and live in strains ofpoetry and music; our churches bear their names; we call ourchildren by their titles; we love them as our guardians, and thewhole unseen world is made a home to us by their imagined presence. All these things are the growth of time and the work of races whosemyth-making imagination is more artistic than that of the Hebrews. Yet this rich legacy of romance is bound up in the second chapter ofS. Luke; and it is to him we must give thanks when at Christmas-tidewe read of the shepherds and the angels in English words morebeautiful than his own Greek. 

The angels in the stable of Bethlehem, the kings who came from thefar East, and the adoring shepherds, are the gift of Hebrew legendand of the Greek physician Luke to Christmas. How these strange andsplendid incidents affect modern fancy remains for us to examine; atpresent we must ask, What did the Romans give to Christmas? Thecustoms of the Christian religion, like everything that belongs tothe modern world, have nothing pure and simple in their nature. Theyare the growth of long ages, and of widely different systems, partsof which have been fused into one living whole. In this respect theyresemble our language, our blood, our literature, and our modes ofthought and feeling. We find Christianity in one sense whollyoriginal; in another sense composed of old materials; in both sensesuniversal and cosmopolitan. The Roman element in Christmas is aremarkable instance of this acquisitive power of Christianity. Thecelebration of the festival takes place at the same time as that ofthe Pagan Saturnalia; and from the old customs of that holiday, Christmas absorbed much that was consistent with the spirit of thenew religion. During the Saturnalia the world enjoyed, in thought atleast, a perfect freedom. Men who had gone to bed as slaves, rosetheir own masters. From the _ergastula_ and dismal sunless cagesthey went forth to ramble in the streets and fields. Liberty ofspeech was given them, and they might satirise those vices of theirlords to which, on other days, they had to minister. Rome on thisday, by a strange negation of logic, which we might almost call aprompting of blind conscience, negatived the philosophic dictum thatbarbarians were by law of nature slaves, and acknowledged the higherprinciple of equality. The Saturnalia stood out from the whole yearas a protest in favour of universal brotherhood, and the right thatall men share alike to enjoy life after their own fashion, withinthe bounds that nature has assigned them. We do not know how far theStoic school, which was so strong in Rome, and had so many points ofcontact with the Christians, may have connected its own theories ofequality with this old custom of the Saturnalia. But it is possiblethat the fellowship of human beings, and the temporary abandonmentof class prerogatives, became a part of Christmas through the habitof the Saturnalia. We are perhaps practising a Roman virtue to thisday when at Christmas-time our hand is liberal, and we think itwrong that the poorest wretch should fail to feel the pleasure ofthe day. 

Of course Christianity inspired the freedom of the Saturnalia with ahigher meaning. The mystery of the Incarnation, or the deificationof human nature, put an end to slavery through all the year, as wellas on this single day. What had been a kind of aimless licencebecame the most ennobling principle by which men are exalted to astate of self-respect and mutual reverence. Still in the Saturnaliawas found, ready-made, an easy symbol of unselfish enjoyment. It is, however, dangerous to push speculations of this kind to the veryverge of possibility. 

The early Roman Christians probably kept Christmas with no specialceremonies. Christ was as yet too close to them. He had not becomethe glorious creature of their fancy, but was partly an historicbeing, partly confused in their imagination with reminiscences ofPagan deities. As the Good Shepherd, and as Orpheus, we find himpainted in the Catacombs; and those who thought of him as God, lovedto dwell upon his risen greatness more than on the idyll of hisbirth. To them his entry upon earth seemed less a subject ofrejoicing than his opening of the heavens; they suffered, and lookedforward to a future happiness; they would not seem to make thisworld permanent by sharing its gladness with the Heathens. Theirs, in truth, was a religion of hope and patience, not of triumphantrecollection or of present joyfulness. 

The Northern converts of the early Church added more to the peculiarcharacter of our Christmas. Who can tell what Pagan rites were halfsanctified by their association with that season, or how much of ourcheerfulness belonged to Heathen orgies and the banquets of grimwarlike gods? Certainly nothing strikes one more in readingScandinavian poetry, than the strange mixture of Pagan and Christiansentiments which it presents. For though the missionaries of theChurch did all they could to wean away the minds of men from theirold superstitions; yet, wiser than their modern followers, they sawthat some things might remain untouched, and that even the greatoutlines of the Christian faith might be adapted to the habits ofthe people whom they studied to convert. Thus, on the one hand, theydestroyed the old temples one by one, and called the idols by thename of devils, and strove to obliterate the songs which sang greatdeeds of bloody gods and heroes; while, on the other, they taughtthe Northern sea-kings that Jesus was a Prince surrounded by twelvedukes, who conquered all the world. Besides, they left the days ofthe week to their old patrons. It is certain that the imagination ofthe people preserved more of heathendom than even such missionariescould approve; mixing up the deeds of the Christian saints with oldheroic legends; seeing Balder's beauty in Christ and the strength ofThor in Samson; attributing magic to S. John; swearing, as of old, bloody oaths in God's name, over the gilded boar's-head; burning theyule-log, and cutting sacred boughs to grace their new-builtchurches. 

The songs of choirs and sound of holy bells, and superstitiousreverence for the mass, began to tell upon the people; and soon theecho of their old religion only swelled upon the ear at intervals, attaching itself to times of more than usual sanctity. Christmas wasone of these times, and the old faith threw around its celebration afantastic light. Many customs of the genial Pagan life remained;they seemed harmless when the sense of joy was Christian. TheDruid's mistletoe graced the church porches of England and ofFrance, and no blood lingered on its berries. Christmas thus becamea time of extraordinary mystery. The people loved it as connectingtheir old life with the new religion, perhaps unconsciously, thoughevery one might feel that Christmas was no common Christian feast. On its eve strange wonders happened: the thorn that sprang atGlastonbury from the sacred crown which Joseph brought with him fromPalestine, when Avalon was still an island, blossomed on that day. The Cornish miners seemed to hear the sound of singing men arisefrom submerged churches by the shore, and others said that bells, beneath the ground where villages had been, chimed yearly on thateve. No evil thing had power, as Marcellus in 'Hamlet' tells us, andthe bird of dawning crowed the whole night through. One mightmultiply folklore about the sanctity of Christmas, but enough hasbeen said to show that round it lingered long the legendary spiritof old Paganism. It is not to Jews, or Greeks, or Romans only thatwe owe our ancient Christmas fancies, but also to those half-heathenancestors who lovingly looked back to Odin's days, and held the oldwhile they embraced the new. 

Let us imagine Christmas Day in a mediæval town of Northern England. The cathedral is only partly finished. Its nave and transepts arethe work of Norman architects, but the choir has been destroyed inorder to be rebuilt by more graceful designers and more skilfulhands. The old city is full of craftsmen, assembled to complete thechurch. Some have come as a religious duty, to work off their taleof sins by bodily labour. Some are animated by a love of art--simplemen, who might have rivalled with the Greeks in ages of morecultivation. Others, again, are well-known carvers, brought for hirefrom distant towns and countries beyond the sea. But to-day, and forsome days past, the sound of hammer and chisel has been silent inthe choir. Monks have bustled about the nave, dressing it up withholly-boughs and bushes of yew, and preparing a stage for the sacredplay they are going to exhibit on the feast day. Christmas is notlike Corpus Christi, and now the market-place stands inches deep insnow, so that the Miracles must be enacted beneath a roof instead ofin the open air. And what place so appropriate as the cathedral, where poor people may have warmth and shelter while they see theshow? Besides, the gloomy old church, with its windows darkened bythe falling snow, lends itself to candlelight effects that willenhance the splendour of the scene. Everything is ready. The incenseof morning mass yet lingers round the altar. The voice of the friarwho told the people from the pulpit the story of Christ's birth, hashardly ceased to echo. Time has just been given for a mid-daydinner, and for the shepherds and farm lads to troop in from thecountry-side. The monks are ready at the wooden stage to draw itscurtain, and all the nave is full of eager faces. There you may seethe smith and carpenter, the butcher's wife, the country priest, andthe grey cowled friar. Scores of workmen, whose home the cathedralfor the time is made, are also here, and you may know the artists bytheir thoughtful foreheads and keen eyes. That young monk carvedMadonna and her Son above the southern porch. Beside him stands themaster mason, whose strong arms have hewn gigantic images ofprophets and apostles for the pinnacles outside the choir; and thelittle man with cunning eyes between the two is he who cuts suchquaint hobgoblins for the gargoyles. He has a vein of satire in him, and his humour overflows into the stone. Many and many a grim beastand hideous head has he hidden among vine-leaves and trellis-workupon the porches. Those who know him well are loth to anger him, forfear their sons and sons' sons should laugh at them for evercaricatured in solid stone. 

Hark! there sounds the bell. The curtain is drawn, and the candlesblaze brightly round the wooden stage. What is this first scene? Wehave God in Heaven, dressed like a Pope with triple crown, andattended by his court of angels. They sing and toss up censers tillhe lifts his hand and speaks. In a long Latin speech he unfolds theorder of creation and his will concerning man. At the end of it upleaps an ugly buffoon, in goatskin, with rams' horns upon his head. Some children begin to cry; but the older people laugh, for this isthe Devil, the clown and comic character, who talks their commontongue, and has no reverence before the very throne of Heaven. Heasks leave to plague men, and receives it; then, with many a curiouscaper, he goes down to Hell, beneath the stage. The angels sing andtoss their censers as before, and the first scene closes to a soundof organs. The next is more conventional, in spite of some grotesqueincidents. It represents the Fall; the monks hurry over it quickly, as a tedious but necessary prelude to the birth of Christ. That isthe true Christmas part of the ceremony, and it is understood thatthe best actors and most beautiful dresses are to be reserved forit. The builders of the choir in particular are interested in thecoming scenes, since one of their number has been chosen, for hishandsome face and tenor voice, to sing the angel's part. He is ayoung fellow of nineteen, but his beard is not yet grown, and longhair hangs down upon his shoulders. A chorister of the cathedral, his younger brother, will act the Virgin Mary. At last the curtainis drawn. 

We see a cottage-room, dimly lighted by a lamp, and Mary spinningnear her bedside. She sings a country air, and goes on working, tilla rustling noise is heard, more light is thrown upon the stage, anda glorious creature, in white raiment, with broad golden wings, appears. He bears a lily, and cries, --'Ave Maria, Gratia Plena!' Shedoes not answer, but stands confused, with down-dropped eyes andtimid mien. Gabriel rises from the ground and comforts her, andsings aloud his message of glad tidings. Then Mary gathers courage, and, kneeling in her turn, thanks God; and when the angel and hisradiance disappears, she sings the song of the Magnificat clearlyand simply, in the darkened room. Very soft and silver sounds thishymn through the great church. The women kneel, and children arehushed as by a lullaby. But some of the hinds and 'prentice ladsbegin to think it rather dull. They are not sorry when the nextscene opens with a sheepfold and a little camp-fire. Unmistakablebleatings issue from the fold, and five or six common fellows aresitting round the blazing wood. One might fancy they had steppedstraight from the church floor to the stage, so natural do theylook. Besides, they call themselves by common names--Colin, and TomLie-a-bed, and nimble Dick. Many a round laugh wakes echoes in thechurch when these shepherds stand up, and hold debate about a stolensheep. Tom Lie-a-bed has nothing to remark but that he is verysleepy, and does not want to go in search of it to-night; Colin cutsjokes, and throws out shrewd suspicions that Dick knows something ofthe matter; but Dick is sly, and keeps them off the scent, althougha few of his asides reveal to the audience that he is the realthief. While they are thus talking, silence falls upon theshepherds. Soft music from the church organ breathes, and theyappear to fall asleep. 

The stage is now quite dark, and for a few moments the aisles echoonly to the dying melody. When, behold, a ray of light is seen, andsplendour grows around the stage from hidden candles, and in theglory Gabriel appears upon a higher platform made to look likeclouds. The shepherds wake in confusion, striving to shelter theireyes from this unwonted brilliancy. But Gabriel waves his lily, spreads his great gold wings, and bids good cheer with clarionvoice. The shepherds fall to worship, and suddenly round Gabrielthere gathers a choir of angels, and a song of 'Gloria in Excelsis'to the sound of a deep organ is heard far off. From distant aislesit swells, and seems to come from heaven. Through a long resonantfugue the glory flies, and as it ceases with complex conclusion, thelights die out, the angels disappear, and Gabriel fades into thedarkness. Still the shepherds kneel, rustically chanting a carolhalf in Latin, half in English, which begins 'In dulci Jubilo. ' Thepeople know it well, and when the chorus rises with 'Ubi suntgaudia?' its wild melody is caught by voices up and down the nave. This scene makes deep impression upon many hearts; for the beauty ofGabriel is rare, and few who see him in his angel's dress would knowhim for the lad who daily carves his lilies and broad water-flagsabout the pillars of the choir. To that simple audience heinterprets Heaven, and little children will see him in their dreams. Dark winter nights and awful forests will be trodden by his feet, made musical by his melodious voice, and parted by the rustling ofhis wings. The youth himself may return to-morrow to the workman'sblouse and chisel, but his memory lives in many minds and may form apart of Christmas for the fancy of men as yet unborn. 

The next drawing of the curtain shows us the stable of Bethlehemcrowned by its star. There kneels Mary, and Joseph leans upon hisstaff. The ox and ass are close at hand, and Jesus lies in jewelledrobes on straw within the manger. To right and left bow theshepherds, worshipping in dumb show, while voices from behind chanta solemn hymn. In the midst of the melody is heard a flourish oftrumpets, and heralds step upon the stage, followed by the threecrowned kings. They have come from the far East, led by the star. The song ceases, while drums and fifes and trumpets play a statelymarch. The kings pass by, and do obeisance one by one. Each givessome costly gift; each doffs his crown and leaves it at theSaviour's feet. Then they retire to a distance and worship insilence like the shepherds. Again the angel's song is heard, andwhile it dies away the curtain closes, and the lights are put out. 

The play is over, and evening has come. The people must go from thewarm church into the frozen snow, and crunch their homeward waybeneath the moon. But in their minds they carry a sense of light andmusic and unearthly loveliness. Not a scene of this day's pageantwill be lost. It grows within them and creates the poetry ofChristmas. Nor must we forget the sculptors who listen to the play. We spoke of them minutely, because these mysteries sank deep intotheir souls and found a way into their carvings on the cathedralwalls. The monk who made Madonna by the southern porch, willremember Gabriel, and place him bending low in lordly salutation byher side. The painted glass of the chapter-house will glow withfiery choirs of angels learned by heart that night. And who does notknow the mocking devils and quaint satyrs that the humorous sculptorwill carve among his fruits and flowers? Some of the misereres ofthe stalls still bear portraits of the shepherd thief, and of the oxand ass who blinked so blindly when the kings, by torchlight, brought their dazzling gifts. Truly these old miracle-plays, and thecarved work of cunning hands that they inspired, are worth to usmore than all the delicate creations of Italian pencils. Our homelyNorthern churches still retain, for the child who reads their bossesand their sculptured fronts, more Christmas poetry than we can findin Fra Angelico's devoutness or the liveliness of Giotto. Not thatSouthern artists have done nothing for our Christmas. Cimabue'sgigantic angels at Assisi, and the radiant seraphs of Raphael or ofSignorelli, were seen by Milton in his Italian journey. He gazed inRomish churches on graceful Nativities, into which Angelico andCredi threw their simple souls. How much they tinged his fancy wecannot say. But what we know of heavenly hierarchies we later menhave learned from Milton; and what he saw he spoke, and what hespoke in sounding verse lives for us now and sways our reason, andcontrols our fancy, and makes fine art of high theology. 

Thus have I attempted rudely to recall a scene of mediævalChristmas. To understand the domestic habits of that age is not soeasy, though one can fancy how the barons in their halls heldChristmas, with the boar's head and the jester and the greatyule-log. On the daïs sat lord and lady, waited on by knight andsquire and page; but down the long hall feasted yeomen and hinds andmen-at-arms. Little remains to us of those days, and we have outworntheir jollity. It is really from the Elizabethan poets that oursense of old-fashioned festivity arises. They lived at the end ofone age and the beginning of another. Though born to inaugurate thenew era, they belonged by right of association and sympathy to theperiod that was fleeting fast away. This enabled them to representthe poetry of past and present. Old customs and old states offeeling, when they are about to perish, pass into the realm of art. For art is like a flower, which consummates the plant and ends itsgrowth, while it translates its nature into loveliness. Thus Danteand Lorenzetti and Orcagna enshrined mediæval theology in works ofimperishable beauty, and Shakspere and his fellows made immortal thelife and manners that were decaying in their own time. Men do notreflect upon their mode of living till they are passing from onestate to another, and the consciousness of art implies a beginningof new things. Let one who wishes to appreciate the ideal of anEnglish Christmas read Shakspere's song, 'When icicles hang by thewall;' and if he knows some old grey grange, far from the high-road, among pastures, with a river flowing near, and cawing rooks inelm-trees by the garden-wall, let him place Dick and Joan and Marianthere. 

We have heard so much of pensioners, and barons of beef, andyule-logs, and bay, and rosemary, and holly boughs cut upon thehillside, and crab-apples bobbing in the wassail bowl, and masquesand mummers, and dancers on the rushes, that we need not heredescribe a Christmas Eve in olden times. Indeed, this last half ofthe nineteenth century is weary of the worn-out theme. But onecharacteristic of the age of Elizabeth may be mentioned: that is itslove of music. Fugued melodies, sung by voices without instruments, were much in vogue. We call them madrigals, and their half-merry, half-melancholy music yet recalls the time when England had her giftof art, when she needed not to borrow of Marenzio and Palestrina, when her Wilbyes and her Morlands and her Dowlands won the praise ofShakspere and the court. We hear the echo of those songs; and insome towns at Christmas or the New Year old madrigals still sound inpraise of Oriana and of Phyllis and the country life. What arecalled 'waits' are but a poor travesty of those well-sungElizabethan carols. We turn in our beds half pitying, half angeredby harsh voices that quaver senseless ditties in the fog, or bytuneless fiddles playing popular airs without propriety or interest. 

It is a strange mixture of picturesquely blended elements which theElizabethan age presents. We see it afar off like the meeting of ahundred streams that grow into a river. We are sailing on the floodlong after it has shrunk into a single tide, and the banks are dulland tame, and the all-absorbing ocean is before us. Yet sometimes wehear a murmur of the distant fountains, and Christmas is a day onwhich for some the many waters of the age of great Elizabeth soundclearest. 

The age which followed was not poetical. The Puritans restrainedfestivity and art, and hated music. Yet from this period stands outthe hymn of Milton, written when he was a youth, but bearing promiseof his later muse. At one time, as we read it, we seem to be lookingon a picture by some old Italian artist. But no picture can giveMilton's music or make the 'base of heaven's deep organ blow. ' Herehe touches new associations, and reveals the realm of poetry whichit remains for later times to traverse. Milton felt the truesentiment of Northern Christmas when he opened his poem with the'winter wild, ' in defiance of historical probability and what theFrench call local colouring. Nothing shows how wholly we people ofthe North have appropriated Christmas, and made it a creature of ourown imagination, more than this dwelling on winds and snows andbitter frosts, so alien from the fragrant nights of Palestine. ButMilton's hymn is like a symphony, embracing many thoughts andperiods of varying melody. The music of the seraphim brings to hismind the age of gold, and that suggests the judgment and theredemption of the world. Satan's kingdom fails, the false gods goforth, Apollo leaves his rocky throne, and all the dim Phoenicianand Egyptian deities, with those that classic fancy fabled, troopaway like ghosts into the darkness. What a swell of stormy sound isin those lines! It recalls the very voice of Pan, which went abroadupon the waters when Christ died, and all the utterances of God onearth, feigned in Delphian shrines, or truly spoken on the sacredhills, were mute for ever. 

After Milton came the age which, of all others, is the prosiest inour history. We cannot find much novelty of interest added toChristmas at this time. But there is one piece of poetry thatsomehow or another seems to belong to the reign of Anne and of theGeorges--the poetry of bells. Great civic corporations reigned inthose days; churchwardens tyrannised and were rich; and many agoodly chime of bells they hung in our old church-steeples. Let usgo into the square room of the belfry, where the clock ticks allday, and the long ropes hang dangling down, with fur upon their hempfor ringers' hands above the socket set for ringers' feet. There wemay read long lists of gilded names, recording mountainousbob-majors, rung a century ago, with special praise to him whopulled the tenor-bell, year after year, until he died, and left itto his son. The art of bell-ringing is profound, and requires a longapprenticeship. Even now, in some old cities, the ringers form aguild and mystery. Suppose it to be Christmas Eve in the year 1772. It is now a quarter before twelve, and the sexton has unlocked thechurch-gates and set the belfry door ajar. Candles are lighted inthe room above, and jugs of beer stand ready for the ringers. Upthey bustle one by one, and listen to the tickings of the clock thattells the passing minutes. At last it gives a click; and now theythrow off coat and waistcoat, strap their girdles tighter round thewaist, and each holds his rope in readiness. Twelve o'clock strikes, and forth across the silent city go the clamorous chimes. Thesteeple rocks and reels, and far away the night is startled. Dampturbulent west winds, rushing from the distant sea, and swirling upthe inland valleys, catch the sound, and toss it to and fro, andbear it by gusts and snatches to watchers far away, upon bleakmoorlands and the brows of woody hills. Is there not something dimand strange in the thought of these eight men meeting, in the heartof a great city, in the narrow belfry-room, to stir a mighty soundthat shall announce to listening ears miles, miles away, the birthof a new day, and tell to dancers, mourners, students, sleepers, andperhaps to dying men, that Christ is born?

Let this association suffice for the time. And of our own Christmasso much has been said and sung by better voices, that we may leaveit to the feelings and the memories of those who read the firesidetales of Dickens, and are happy in their homes. The many elementswhich I have endeavoured to recall, mix all of them in the Christmasof the present, partly, no doubt, under the form of vague andobscure sentiment; partly as time-honoured reminiscences, partly asa portion of our own life. But there is one phase of poetry which weenjoy more fully than any previous age. That is music. Music is ofall the arts the youngest, and of all can free herself most readilyfrom symbols. A fine piece of music moves before us like a livingpassion, which needs no form or colour, no interpretingassociations, to convey its strong but indistinct significance. Eachman there finds his soul revealed to him, and enabled to assume acast of feeling in obedience to the changeful sound. In this mannerall our Christmas thoughts and emotions have been gathered up for usby Handel in his drama of the 'Messiah. ' To Englishmen it is almostas well known and necessary as the Bible. But only one who has heardits pastoral episode performed year after year from childhood in thehushed cathedral, where pendent lamps or sconces make the gloom ofaisle and choir and airy column half intelligible, can invest thismusic with long associations of accumulated awe. To his mind itbrings a scene at midnight of hills clear in the starlight of theEast, with white flocks scattered on the down. The breath of windsthat come and go, the bleating of the sheep, with now and then atinkling bell, and now and then the voice of an awakened shepherd, is all that breaks the deep repose. Overhead shimmer the brightstars, and low to west lies the moon, not pale and sickly (hedreams) as in our North, but golden, full, and bathing distanttowers and tall aërial palms with floods of light. Such is a child'svision, begotten by the music of the symphony; and when he wakesfrom trance at its low silver close, the dark cathedral seemsglowing with a thousand angel faces, and all the air is tremulouswith angel wings. Then follow the solitary treble voice and theswift chorus. 

_SIENA_

After leaving the valley of the Arno at Empoli, the railway enters acountry which rises into earthy hills of no great height, andspreads out at intervals into broad tracts of cultivated lowland. Geologically speaking, this portion of Tuscany consists of loam andsandy deposits, forming the basin between two mountain-ranges--theApennines and the chalk hills of the western coast of Central Italy. Seen from the eminence of some old Tuscan turret, this champaigncountry has a stern and arid aspect. The earth is grey and dusty, the forms of hill and valley are austere and monotonous; even thevegetation seems to sympathise with the uninteresting soil fromwhich it springs. A few spare olives cast their shadows on the lowerslopes; here and there a copse of oakwood and acacia marks thecourse of some small rivulet; rye-fields, grey beneath the wind, clothe the hillsides with scanty verdure. Every knoll is crownedwith a village--brown roofs and white house-fronts clusteredtogether on the edge of cliffs, and rising into the campanile orantique tower, which tells so many stories of bygone wars anddecayed civilisations. 

Beneath these villages stand groups of stone pines clearly visibleupon the naked country, cypresses like spires beside the squarewhite walls of convent or of villa, patches of dark foliage, showingwhere the ilex and the laurel and the myrtle hide thick tangles ofrose-trees and jessamines in ancient gardens. Nothing can exceed thebarren aspect of this country in midwinter: it resembles anexaggerated Sussex, without verdure to relieve the rolling lines ofdown, and hill, and valley; beautiful yet, by reason of its frequentvillages and lucid air and infinitely subtle curves ofmountain-ridges. But when spring comes, a light and beauty breakupon this gloomy soil; the whole is covered with a delicate greenveil of rising crops and fresh foliage, and the immense distanceswhich may be seen from every height are blue with cloud-shadows, orrosy in the light of sunset. 

Of all the towns of Lower Tuscany, none is more celebrated thanSiena. It stands in the very centre of the district which I haveattempted to describe, crowning one of its most considerableheights, and commanding one of its most extensive plains. As a cityit is a typical representative of those numerous Italian towns, whose origin is buried in remote antiquity, which have formed theseat of three civilisations, and which still maintain a vigorousvitality upon their ancient soil. Its site is Etruscan, its name isRoman, but the town itself owes all its interest and beauty to theartists and the statesmen and the warriors of the middle ages. Asingle glance at Siena from one of the slopes on the northern side, will show how truly mediæval is its character. A city wall followsthe outline of the hill, from which the towers of the cathedral andthe palace, with other cupolas and red-brick campanili, spring;while cypresses and olive-gardens stretch downwards to the plain. There is not a single Palladian façade or Renaissance portico tointerrupt the unity of the effect. Over all, in the distance, risesMonte Amiata melting imperceptibly into sky and plain. 

The three most striking objects of interest in Siena maintain thecharacter of mediæval individuality by which the town is marked. They are the public palace, the cathedral, and the house of S. Catherine. The civil life, the arts, and the religious tendencies ofItaly during the ascendency of mediæval ideas, are strongly setbefore us here. High above every other building in the town soarsthe straight brick tower of the Palazzo Pubblico, the house of therepublic, the hearth of civil life within the State. It guards anirregular Gothic building in which the old government of Siena usedto be assembled, but which has now for a long time been convertedinto prisons, courts of law, and showrooms. Let us enter one chamberof the Palazzo--the Sala della Pace, where Ambrogio Lorenzetti, thegreatest, perhaps, of Sienese painters, represented the evils oflawlessness and tyranny, and the benefits of peace and justice, inthree noble allegories. They were executed early in the fourteenthcentury, in the age of allegories and symbolism, when poets andpainters strove to personify in human shape all thoughts andsentiments. The first great fresco represents Peace--the peace ofthe Republic of Siena. Ambrogio has painted the twenty-fourcouncillors who formed the Government, standing beneath the thronesof Concord, Justice, and Wisdom. From these controlling powers theystretch in a long double line to a seated figure, gigantic in size, and robed with the ensigns of baronial sovereignty. This figure isthe State and Majesty of Siena. [1] Around him sit Peace, Fortitude, and Prudence, Temperance, Magnanimity, and Justice, inalienableassessors of a powerful and righteous lord. Faith, Hope, andCharity, the Christian virtues, float like angels in the air above. Armed horsemen guard his throne, and captives show that he has laidhis enemy beneath his feet. Thus the mediæval artist expressed, bypainting, his theory of government. The rulers of the State aresubordinate to the State itself; they stand between the State andthe great animating principles of wisdom, justice, and concord, incarnating the one, and receiving inspiration from the others. Thepagan qualities of prudence, magnanimity, and courage give stabilityand greatness to good government, while the spirit of Christianitymust harmonise and rule the whole. Arms, too, are needful tomaintain by force what right and law demand, and victory in a justquarrel proclaims the power and vigour of the commonwealth. Onanother wall Ambrogio has depicted the prosperous city of Siena, girt by battlements and moat, with tower and barbican anddrawbridge, to insure its peace. Through the gates streamcountry-people, bringing the produce of their farms into the town. The streets are crowded with men and women intent on business orpleasure; craftsmen at their trade, merchants with laden mules, ahawking party, hunters scouring the plain, girls dancing, andchildren playing in the open square. A school-master watching hisclass, together with the sculptured figures of Geometry, Astronomy, and Philosophy, remind us that education and science flourish underthe dominion of well-balanced laws. The third fresco exhibits thereverse of this fair spectacle. Here Tyranny presides over a sceneof anarchy and wrong. He is a hideous monster, compounded of all thebestial attributes which indicate force, treason, lechery, and fear. Avarice and Fraud and Cruelty and War and Fury sit around him. Athis feet lies Justice, and above are the effigies of Nero, Caracalla, and like monsters of ill-regulated power. Not far fromthe castle of Tyranny we see the same town as in the other fresco;but its streets are filled with scenes of quarrel, theft, andbloodshed. Nor are these allegories merely fanciful. In the middleages the same city might more than once during one lifetime presentin the vivid colours of reality the two contrasted pictures. [2]

 [1] It is probable that the firm Ghibelline sympathies of the Sienese people for the Empire were allegorised in this figure; so that the fresco represented by form and colour what Dante had expressed in his treatise 'De Monarchiâ. ' Among the virtues who attend him, Peace distinguishes herself by rare and very remarkable beauty. She is dressed in white and crowned with olive; the folds of her drapery, clinging to the delicately modelled limbs beneath, irresistibly suggest a classic statue. So again does the monumental pose of her dignified, reclining, and yet languid figure. It seems not unreasonable to believe that Lorenzetti copied Peace from the antique Venus which belonged to the Sienese, and which in a fit of superstitious malice they subsequently destroyed and buried in Florentine soil. 

 [2] Siena, of all Italian cities, was most subject to revolutions. Comines describes it as a city which 'se gouverne plus follement que ville d'Italie. ' Varchi calls it 'un guazzabuglio ed una confusione di repubbliche piuttosto che bene ordinata e instituta repubblica. ' See my 'Age of the Despots' (_Renaissance in Italy_, Part I. ), pp. 141, 554, for some account of the Sienese constitution, and of the feuds and reconciliations of the burghers. 

Quitting the Palazzo, and threading narrow streets, paved with brickand overshadowed with huge empty palaces, we reach the highest ofthe three hills on which Siena stands, and see before us the Duomo. This church is the most purely Gothic of all Italian cathedralsdesigned by national architects. Together with that of Orvieto, itstands to show what the unassisted genius of the Italians couldproduce, when under the empire of mediæval Christianity and beforethe advent of the neopagan spirit. It is built wholly of marble, andoverlaid, inside and out, with florid ornaments of exquisite beauty. There are no flying buttresses, no pinnacles, no deep and fretteddoorways, such as form the charm of French and English architecture;but instead of this, the lines of parti-coloured marbles, thescrolls and wreaths of foliage, the mosaics and the frescoes whichmeet the eye in every direction, satisfy our sense of variety, producing most agreeable combinations of blending hues andharmoniously connected forms. The chief fault which offends againstour Northern taste is the predominance of horizontal lines, both inthe construction of the façade, and also in the internal decoration. This single fact sufficiently proves that the Italians had neverseized the true idea of Gothic or aspiring architecture. But, allowing for this original defect, we feel that the Cathedral ofSiena combines solemnity and splendour to a degree almostunrivalled. Its dome is another point in which the instinct ofItalian architects has led them to adhere to the genius of theirancestral art rather than to follow the principles of Gothic design. The dome is Etruscan and Roman, native to the soil, and only by akind of violence adapted to the character of pointed architecture. Yet the builders of Siena have shown what a glorious element ofbeauty might have been added to our Northern cathedrals, had theidea of infinity which our ancestors expressed by long continuouslines, by complexities of interwoven aisles, and by multitudinousaspiring pinnacles, been carried out into vast spaces of aërialcupolas, completing and embracing and covering the whole likeheaven. The Duomo, as it now stands, forms only part of a vastdesign. On entering we are amazed to hear that this church, whichlooks so large, from the beauty of its proportions, the intricacy ofits ornaments, and the interlacing of its columns, is but thetransept of the intended building lengthened a little, andsurmounted by a cupola and campanile. [1] Yet such is the fact. Soonafter its commencement a plague swept over Italy, nearly depopulatedSiena, and reduced the town to penury for want of men. Thecathedral, which, had it been accomplished, would have surpassed allGothic churches south of the Alps, remained a ruin. A fragment ofthe nave still stands, enabling us to judge of its extent. Theeastern wall joins what was to have been the transept, measuring themighty space which would have been enclosed by marble vaults andcolumns delicately wrought. The sculpture on the eastern door showswith what magnificence the Sienese designed to ornament this portionof their temple; while the southern façade rears itself aloft abovethe town, like those high arches which testify to the past splendourof Glastonbury Abbey; but the sun streams through the brokenwindows, and the walls are encumbered with hovels and stables andthe refuse of surrounding streets. 

 [1] The present church was begun about 1229. In 1321 the burghers fancied it was too small for the fame and splendour of their city. So they decreed a new _ecclesia pulcra, magna, et magnifica_, for which the older but as yet unfinished building was to be the transept. 

One most remarkable feature of the internal decoration is a line ofheads of the Popes carried all round the church above the lowerarches. Larger than life, white solemn faces they lean, each fromhis separate niche, crowned with the triple tiara, and labelled withthe name he bore. Their accumulated majesty brings the whole pasthistory of the Church into the presence of its living members. Abishop walking up the nave of Siena must feel as a Roman felt amongthe waxen images of ancestors renowned in council or in war. Ofcourse these portraits are imaginary for the most part; but theartists have contrived to vary their features and expression withgreat skill. 

Not less peculiar to Siena is the pavement of the cathedral. It isinlaid with a kind of _tarsia_ work in stone, setting forth avariety of pictures in simple but eminently effective mosaic. Someof these compositions are as old as the cathedral; others are thework of Beccafumi and his scholars. They represent, in the liberalspirit of mediæval Christianity, the history of the Church beforethe Incarnation. Hermes Trismegistus and the Sibyls meet us at thedoorway: in the body of the church we find the mighty deeds of theold Jewish heroes--of Moses and Samson and Joshua and Judith. Independently of the artistic beauty of the designs, of the skillwith which men and horses are drawn in the most difficult attitudes, of the dignity of some single figures, and of the vigour andsimplicity of the larger compositions, a special interest attachesto this pavement in connection with the twelfth canto of the'Purgatorio. ' Dante cannot have trodden these stones and meditatedupon their sculptured histories. Yet when we read how he journeyedthrough the plain of Purgatory with eyes intent upon its storiedfloor, how 'morti i morti, e i vivi parean vivi, ' how he saw 'Nimrodat the foot of his great work, confounded, gazing at the people whowere proud with him, ' we are irresistibly led to think of the Divinecomedy. The strong and simple outlines of the pavement correspond tothe few words of the poet. Bending over these pictures and trying tolearn their lesson, with the thought of Dante in our mind, the tonesof an organ, singularly sweet and mellow, fall upon our ears, and weremember how he heard _Te Deum_ sung within the gateway ofrepentance. 

Continuing our walk, we descend the hill on which the Duomo stands, and reach a valley lying between the ancient city of Siena and awestern eminence crowned by the church of San Domenico. In thisdepression there has existed from old time a kind of suburb orseparate district of the poorer people known by the name of theContrada d' Oca. To the Sienese it has especial interest, for hereis the birthplace of S. Catherine, the very house in which shelived, her father's workshop, and the chapel which has been erectedin commemoration of her saintly life. Over the doorway is written inletters of gold 'Sponsa Christi Katherinæ domus. ' Inside they showthe room she occupied, and the stone on which she placed her head tosleep; they keep her veil and staff and lantern and enamelledvinaigrette, the bag in which her alms were placed, the sackcloththat she wore beneath her dress, the crucifix from which she tookthe wounds of Christ. It is impossible to conceive, even after thelapse of several centuries, that any of these relics are fictitious. Every particular of her life was remembered and recorded withscrupulous attention by devoted followers. Her fame was universalthroughout Italy before her death; and the house from which she wentforth to preach and heal the sick and comfort plague-strickenwretches whom kith and kin had left alone to die, was known and wellbeloved by all her citizens. From the moment of her death it became, and has continued to be, the object of superstitious veneration tothousands. From the little loggia which runs along one portion ofits exterior may be seen the campanile and the dome of thecathedral; on the other side rises the huge brick church of SanDomenico, in which she spent the long ecstatic hours that won forher the title of Christ's spouse. In a chapel attached to the churchshe watched and prayed, fasting and wrestling with the fiends of adisordered fancy. There Christ appeared to her and gave her His ownheart, there He administered to her the sacrament with His ownhands, there she assumed the robe of poverty, and gave her Lord thesilver cross and took from Him the crown of thorns. 

To some of us these legends may appear the flimsiest web of fiction:to others they may seem quite explicable by the laws of semi-morbidpsychology; but to Catherine herself, her biographers, and hercontemporaries, they were not so. The enthusiastic saint andreverent people believed firmly in these things; and, after thelapse of five centuries, her votaries still kiss the floor and stepson which she trod, still say, 'This was the wall on which she leantwhen Christ appeared; this was the corner where she clothed Him, naked and shivering like a beggar-boy; here He sustained her withangels' food. '

S. Catherine was one of twenty-five children born in wedlock toJacopo and Lapa Benincasa, citizens of Siena. Her father exercisedthe trade of dyer and fuller. In the year of her birth, 1347, Sienareached the climax of its power and splendour. It was then that theplague of Boccaccio began to rage, which swept off 80, 000 citizens, and interrupted the building of the great Duomo. In the midst of solarge a family, and during these troubled times, Catherine grewalmost unnoticed; but it was not long before she manifested herpeculiar disposition. At six years old she already saw visions andlonged for a monastic life: about the same time she used to collecther childish companions together and preach to them. As she grew, her wishes became stronger; she refused the proposals which herparents made that she should marry, and so vexed them by herobstinacy that they imposed on her the most servile duties in theirhousehold. These she patiently fulfilled, pursuing at the same timeher own vocation with unwearied ardour. She scarcely slept at all, and ate no food but vegetables and a little bread, scourged herself, wore sackcloth, and became emaciated, weak, and half delirious. Atlength the firmness of her character and the force of herhallucinations won the day. Her parents consented to her assumingthe Dominican robe, and at the age of thirteen she entered themonastic life. From this moment till her death we see in her theecstatic, the philanthropist, and the politician combined to aremarkable degree. For three whole years she never left her cellexcept to go to church, maintaining an almost unbroken silence. Yetwhen she returned to the world, convinced at last of having won byprayer and pain the favour of her Lord, it was to preach toinfuriated mobs, to toil among men dying of the plague, to executediplomatic negotiations, to harangue the republic of Florence, tocorrespond with queens, and to interpose between kings and popes. Inthe midst of this varied and distracting career she continued to seevisions and to fast and scourge herself. The domestic virtues andthe personal wants and wishes of a woman were annihilated in her:she lived for the Church, for the poor, and for Christ, whom sheimagined to be constantly supporting her. At length she died, wornout by inward conflicts, by the tension of religious ecstasy, bywant of food and sleep, and by the excitement of political life. Tofollow her in her public career is not my purpose. It is well knownhow, by the power of her eloquence and the ardour of her piety, shesucceeded as a mediator between Florence and her native city, andbetween Florence and the Pope; that she travelled to Avignon, andthere induced Gregory XI. To put an end to the Babylonian captivityof the Church by returning to Rome; that she narrowly escapedpolitical martyrdom during one of her embassies from Gregory to theFlorentine republic; that she preached a crusade against the Turks;that her last days were clouded with sorrow for the schism whichthen rent the Papacy; and that she aided by her dying words to keepPope Urban on the Papal throne. When we consider her private andspiritual life more narrowly, it may well move our amazement tothink that the intricate politics of Central Italy, the counsels oflicentious princes and ambitious Popes, were in any measure guidedand controlled by such a woman. Alone, and aided by nothing but areputation for sanctity, she dared to tell the greatest men inEurope of their faults; she wrote in words of well-assured command, and they, demoralised, worldly, sceptical, or indifferent as theymight be, were yet so bound by superstition that they could nottreat with scorn the voice of an enthusiastic girl. 

Absolute disinterestedness, the belief in her own spiritual mission, natural genius, and that vast power which then belonged to allenergetic members of the monastic orders, enabled her to play thispart. She had no advantages to begin with. The daughter of atradesman overwhelmed with an almost fabulously numerous progeny, Catherine grew up uneducated. When her genius had attained maturity, she could not even read or write. Her biographer asserts that shelearned to do so by a miracle. Anyhow, writing became a most potentinstrument in her hands; and we possess several volumes of herepistles, as well as a treatise of mystical theology. To conquerself-love as the root of all evil, and to live wholly for others, was the cardinal axiom of her morality. She pressed this principleto its most rigorous conclusions in practice; never resting day ornight from some kind of service, and winning by her unselfish lovethe enthusiastic admiration of the people. In the same spirit ofexalted self-annihilation, she longed for martyrdom, and courteddeath. There was not the smallest personal tie or afterthought ofinterest to restrain her in the course of action which she hadmarked out. Her personal influence seems to have been immense. Whenshe began her career of public peacemaker and preacher in Siena, Raymond, her biographer, says that whole families devoted to_vendetta_ were reconciled, and that civil strifes were quelled byher letters and addresses. He had seen more than a thousand peopleflock to hear her speak; the confessionals crowded with penitents, smitten by the force of her appeals; and multitudes, unable to catchthe words which fell from her lips, sustained and animated by thelight of holiness which beamed from her inspired countenance. [1] Shewas not beautiful, but her face so shone with love, and hereloquence was so pathetic in its tenderness, that none could hear orlook on her without emotion. Her writings contain abundant proofs ofthis peculiar suavity. They are too sweet and unctuous in style tosuit our modern taste. When dwelling on the mystic love of Christshe cries, 'O blood! O fire! O ineffable love!' When intercedingbefore the Pope, she prays for 'Pace, pace, pace, babbo mio dolce;pace, e non più guerra. ' Yet clear and simple thoughts, profoundconvictions, and stern moral teaching underlie her ecstaticexclamations. One prayer which she wrote, and which the people ofSiena still use, expresses the prevailing spirit of her creed: 'OSpirito Santo, o Deità eterna Cristo Amore! vieni nel mio cuore; perla tua potenza trailo a Te, mio Dio, e concedemi carità con timore. Liberami, o Amore ineffabile, da ogni mal pensiero; riscaldami edinfiammami del tuo dolcissimo amore, sicchè ogni pena mi sembrileggiera. Santo mio Padre e dolce mio Signore, ora aiutami in ognimio ministero. Cristo amore. Cristo amore. ' The reiteration of theword 'love' is most significant. It was the key-note of her wholetheology, the mainspring of her life. In no merely figurative sensedid she regard herself as the spouse of Christ, but dwelt upon thebliss, beyond all mortal happiness, which she enjoyed insupersensual communion with her Lord. It is easy to understand howsuch ideas might be, and have been, corrupted, when impressed onnatures no less susceptible, but weaker and less gifted than S. Catherine's. 

 [1] The part played in Italy by preachers of repentance and peace is among the most characteristic features of Italian history. On this subject see the Appendix to my 'Age of the Despots, ' _Renaissance in Italy_, Part I. 

One incident related by Catherine in a letter to Raymond, herconfessor and biographer, exhibits the peculiar character of herinfluence in the most striking light. Nicola Tuldo, a citizen ofPerugia, had been condemned to death for treason in the flower ofhis age. So terribly did the man rebel against his sentence, that hecursed God, and refused the consolations of religion. Priestsvisited him in vain; his heart was shut and sealed by the despair ofleaving life in all the vigour of its prime. Then Catherine came andspoke to him: 'whence, ' she says, 'he received such comfort that heconfessed, and made me promise, by the love of God, to stand at theblock beside him on the day of his execution. ' By a few words, bythe tenderness of her manner, and by the charm which women have, shehad already touched the heart no priest could soften, and no threatof death or judgment terrify into contrition. Nor was this strange. In our own days we have seen men open the secrets of their hearts towomen, after repelling the advances of less touching sympathy. Youths, cold and cynical enough among their brethren, have stoodsubdued like little children before her who spoke to them of loveand faith and penitence and hope. The world has not lost its ladiesof the race of S. Catherine, beautiful and pure and holy, who havesuffered and sought peace with tears, and who have been appointedministers of mercy for the worst and hardest of their fellow-men. Such saints possess an efficacy even in the imposition of theirhands; many a devotee, like Tuldo, would more willingly greet deathif his S. Catherine were by to smile and lay her hands upon hishead, and cry, 'Go forth, my servant, and fear not!' The chivalrousadmiration for women mixes with religious awe to form the reverencewhich these saints inspire. Human and heavenly love, chaste andecstatic, constitute the secret of their power. Catherine thensubdued the spirit of Tuldo and led him to the altar, where hereceived the communion for the first time in his life. His onlyremaining fear was that he might not have strength to face deathbravely. Therefore he prayed Catherine, 'Stay with me, do not leaveme; so it shall be well with me, and I shall die contented;' 'and, 'says the saint, 'he laid his head in the prison on my breast, and Isaid, "Comfort thee, my brother, the block shall soon become thymarriage altar, the blood of Christ shall bathe thy sins away, and Iwill stand beside thee. "' When the hour came, she went and waitedfor him by the scaffold, meditating on Madonna and Catherine thesaint of Alexandria. She laid her own neck on the block, and triedto picture to herself the pains and ecstasies of martyrdom. In herdeep thought, time and place became annihilated; she forgot theeager crowd, and only prayed for Tuldo's soul and for herself. Atlength he came, walking 'like a gentle lamb, ' and Catherine receivedhim with the salutation of 'sweet brother. ' She placed his head uponthe block, and laid her hands upon him, and told him of the Lamb ofGod. The last words he uttered were the names of Jesus and ofCatherine. Then the axe fell, and Catherine beheld his soul borne byangels into the regions of eternal love. When she recovered from hertrance, she held his head within her hands; her dress was saturatedwith his blood, which she could scarcely bear to wash away, sodeeply did she triumph in the death of him whom she had saved. Thewords of S. Catherine herself deserve to be read. The simplicity, freedom from self-consciousness, and fervent faith in the reality ofall she did and said and saw, which they exhibit, convince us of herentire sincerity. 

The supernatural element in the life of S. Catherine may beexplained partly by the mythologising adoration of the people readyto find a miracle in every act of her they worshipped--partly by herown temperament and modes of life, which inclined her to ecstasy andfostered the faculty of seeing visions--partly by a piousmisconception of the words of Christ and Bible phraseology. 

To the first kind belong the wonders which are related of her earlyyears, the story of the candle which burnt her veil without injuringher person, and the miracles performed by her body after death. Manychildish incidents were treasured up which, had her life proveddifferent, would have been forgotten, or have found their properplace among the catalogue of common things. Thus on one occasion, after hearing of the hermits of the Thebaïd, she took it into herhead to retire into the wilderness, and chose for her dwelling oneof the caverns in the sandstone rock which abound in Siena near thequarter where her father lived. We merely see in this event a signof her monastic disposition, and a more than usual aptitude forrealising the ideas presented to her mind. But the old biographersrelate how one celestial vision urged the childish hermit to forsakethe world, and another bade her return to the duties of her home. 

To the second kind we may refer the frequent communings with Christand with the fathers of the Church, together with the other visionsto which she frequently laid claim: nor must we omit the stigmatawhich she believed she had received from Christ. Catherine wasconstitutionally inclined to hallucinations. At the age of six, before it was probable that a child should have laid claim tospiritual gifts which she did not possess, she burst into loudweeping because her little brother rudely distracted her attentionfrom the brilliant forms of saints and angels which she traced amongthe clouds. Almost all children of a vivid imagination are apt totransfer the objects of their fancy to the world without them. Goethe walked for hours in his enchanted gardens as a boy, andAlfieri tells us how he saw a company of angels in the choristers atAsti. Nor did S. Catherine omit any means of cultivating thisfaculty, and of preventing her splendid visions from fading away, asthey almost always do, beneath the discipline of intellectualeducation and among the distractions of daily life. Believing simplyin their heavenly origin, and receiving no secular trainingwhatsoever, she walked surrounded by a spiritual world, environed, as her legend says, by angels. Her habits were calculated to fosterthis disposition: it is related that she took but little sleep, scarcely more than two hours at night, and that too on the bareground; she ate nothing but vegetables and the sacred wafer of thehost, entirely abjuring the use of wine and meat. This diet, combined with frequent fasts and severe ascetic discipline, depressed her physical forces, and her nervous system was throwninto a state of the highest exaltation. Thoughts became things, andideas were projected from her vivid fancy upon the empty air aroundher. It was therefore no wonder that, after spending long hours invigils and meditating always on the thought of Christ, she shouldhave seemed to take the sacrament from His hands, to pace the chapelin communion with Him, to meet Him in the form of priest and beggar, to hear Him speaking to her as a friend. Once when the anguish ofsin had plagued her with disturbing dreams, Christ came and gave herHis own heart in exchange for hers. When lost in admiration beforethe cross at Pisa, she saw His five wounds stream with blood--fivecrimson rays smote her, passed into her soul, and left their marksupon her hands and feet and side. The light of Christ's glory shoneround about her, she partook of His martyrdom, and awaking from hertrance she cried to Raymond, 'Behold! I bear in my body the marks ofthe Lord Jesus!'

This miracle had happened to S. Francis. It was regarded as the signof fellowship with Christ, of worthiness to drink His cup, and to bebaptised with His baptism. We find the same idea at least in the oldLatin hymns:

 Fac me plagis vulnerari-- Cruce hac inebriari-- Fac ut portem Christi mortem, Passionis fac consortem, Et plagas recolere. 

These are words from the 'Stabat Mater;' nor did S. Francis and S. Catherine do more than carry into the vividness of actualhallucination what had been the poetic rapture of many lessecstatic, but not less ardent, souls. They desired to be _literally_'crucified with Christ;' they were not satisfied with metaphor orsentiment, and it seemed to them that their Lord had reallyvouchsafed to them the yearning of their heart. We need not hereraise the question whether the stigmata had ever been actuallyself-inflicted by delirious saint or hermit: it was not pretendedthat the wounds of S. Catherine were visible during her lifetime. After her death the faithful thought that they had seen them on hercorpse, and they actually appeared in the relics of her hands andfeet. The pious fraud, if fraud there must have been, should beascribed, not to the saint herself, but to devotees andrelic-mongers. [1] The order of S. Dominic would not be behind thatof S. Francis. If the latter boasted of their stigmata, the formerwould be ready to perforate the hand or foot of their dead saint. Thus the ecstasies of genius or devotion are brought to earth, andrendered vulgar by mistaken piety and the rivalry of sects. Thepeople put the most material construction on all tropes andmetaphors: above the door of S. Catherine's chapel at Siena, forexample, it is written--

 Hæc tenet ara caput Catharinæ; corda requiris? Hæc imo Christus pectore clausa tenet. 

The frequent conversations which she held with S. Dominic and otherpatrons of the Church, and her supernatural marriage, must bereferred to the same category. Strong faith, and constantfamiliarity with one order of ideas, joined with a creative power offancy, and fostered by physical debility, produced these miraculouscolloquies. Early in her career, her injured constitution, resentingthe violence with which it had been forced to serve the ardours ofher piety, troubled her with foul phantoms, haunting images of sinand seductive whisperings, which clearly revealed a morbid conditionof the nervous system. She was on the verge of insanity. The realityof her inspiration and her genius are proved by the force with whichher human sympathies, and moral dignity, and intellectual vigourtriumphed over these diseased hallucinations of the cloister, andconverted them into the instruments for effecting patriotic andphilanthropic designs. There was nothing savouring of meanpretension or imposture in her claim to supernatural enlightenment. Whatever we may think of the wisdom of her public policy with regardto the Crusades and to the Papal Sovereignty, it is impossible todeny that a holy and high object possessed her from the earliest tothe latest of her life--that she lived for ideas greater thanself-aggrandisement or the saving of her soul, for the greatest, perhaps, which her age presented to an earnest Catholic. 

 [1] It is not impossible that the stigmata may have been naturally produced in the person of S. Francis or S. Catherine. There are cases on record in which grave nervous disturbances have resulted in such modifications of the flesh as may have left the traces of wounds in scars and blisters. 

The abuses to which the indulgence of temperaments like that of S. Catherine must in many cases have given rise, are obvious. Hysterical women and half-witted men, without possessing herabilities and understanding her objects, beheld unmeaning visions, and dreamed childish dreams. Others won the reputation of sanctityby obstinate neglect of all the duties of life and of all thedecencies of personal cleanliness. Every little town in Italy couldshow its saints like the Santa Fina of whom San Gemignano boasts--agirl who lay for seven years on a back-board till her mortifiedflesh clung to the wood; or the San Bartolo, who, for hideousleprosy, received the title of the Job of Tuscany. Children wereencouraged in blasphemous pretensions to the special power ofHeaven, and the nerves of weak women were shaken by revelations inwhich they only half believed. We have ample evidence to prove howthe trade of miracles is still carried on, and how in the France ofour days, when intellectual vigour has been separated from old formsof faith, such vision-mongering undermines morality, encouragesignorance, and saps the force of individuals. But S. Catherine mustnot be confounded with those sickly shams and make-believes. Herenthusiasms were real; they were proper to her age; they inspiredher with unrivalled self-devotion and unwearied energy; theyconnected her with the political and social movements of hercountry. 

Many of the supernatural events in S. Catherine's life were foundedon a too literal acceptation of biblical metaphors. The Canticles, perhaps, inspired her with the belief in a mystical marriage. Anenigmatical sentence of S. Paul's suggested the stigmata. When thesaint bestowed her garment upon Christ in the form of a beggar andgave Him the silver cross of her rosary, she was but realising Hisown words: 'Inasmuch as ye shall do it unto the least of theselittle ones, ye shall do it unto Me. ' Charity, according to herconception, consisted in giving to Christ. He had first taught thisduty; He would make it the test of all duty at the last day. Catherine was charitable for the love of Christ. She thought less ofthe beggar than of her Lord. How could she do otherwise than see theaureole about His forehead, and hear the voice of Him who haddeclared, 'Behold, I am with you, even to the end of the world. 'Those were times of childlike simplicity when the eye of love wasstill unclouded, when men could see beyond the phantoms of thisworld, and stripping off the accidents of matter, gaze upon thespiritual and eternal truths that lie beneath. Heaven lay aroundthem in that infancy of faith; nor did they greatly differ from thesaints and founders of the Church--from Paul, who saw the vision ofthe Lord, or Magdalen, who cried, 'He is risen!' An age accustomedto veil thought in symbols, easily reversed the process anddiscerned essential qualities beneath the common or indifferentobjects of the outer world. It was therefore Christ whom S. Christopher carried in the shape of a child; Christ whom FraAngelico's Dominicans received in pilgrim's garb at their conventgate; Christ with whom, under a leper's loathsome form, the flowerof Spanish chivalry was said to have shared his couch. 

In all her miracles it will be noticed that S. Catherine showed nooriginality. Her namesake of Alexandria had already been proclaimedthe spouse of Christ. S. Francis had already received the stigmata;her other visions were such as had been granted to all ferventmystics; they were the growth of current religious ideas andunbounded faith. It is not as an innovator in religious ecstasy, oras the creator of a new kind of spiritual poetry, that we admire S. Catherine. Her inner life was simply the foundation of hercharacter, her visions were a source of strength to her in times oftrial, or the expression of a more than usually exalted mood; butthe means by which she moved the hearts of men belonged to thatwhich she possessed in common with all leaders ofmankind--enthusiasm, eloquence, the charm of a gracious nature, andthe will to do what she designed. She founded no religious order, like S. Francis or S. Dominic, her predecessors, or Loyola, hersuccessor. Her work was a woman's work--to make peace, to succourthe afflicted, to strengthen the Church, to purify the hearts ofthose around her; not to rule or organise. When she died she leftbehind her a memory of love more than of power, the fragrance of anunselfish and gentle life, the echo of sweet and earnest words. Herplace is in the heart of the humble; children belong to hersisterhood, and the poor crowd her shrine on festivals. 

Catherine died at Rome on the 29th of April 1380, in herthirty-third year, surrounded by the most faithful of her friendsand followers; but it was not until 1461 that she received the lasthonour of canonisation from the hands of Pius II. , Æneas Sylvius, her countryman. Æeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was perhaps the mostremarkable man that Siena has produced. Like S. Catherine, he wasone of a large family; twenty of his brothers and sisters perishedin a plague. The licentiousness of his early life, the astuteness ofhis intellect, and the worldliness of his aims, contrast with thesingularly disinterested character of the saint on whom he conferredthe highest honours of the Church. But he accomplished by diplomacyand skill what Catherine had begun. If she was instrumental inrestoring the Popes to Rome, he ended the schism which had cloudedher last days. She had preached a crusade; he lived to assemble thearmies of Christendom against the Turks, and died at Ancona, whileit was still uncertain whether the authority and enthusiasm of apope could steady the wavering counsels and vacillating wills ofkings and princes. The middle ages were still vital in S. Catherine;Pius II. Belonged by taste and genius to the new period ofRenaissance. The hundreds of the poorer Sienese who kneel before S. Catherine's shrine prove that her memory is still alive in thehearts of her fellow-citizens; while the gorgeous library of thecathedral, painted by the hand of Pinturicchio, the sumptuous palaceand the Loggia del Papa designed by Bernardo Rossellino and AntonioFederighi, record the pride and splendour of the greatest of thePiccolomini. But honourable as it was for Pius to fill so high aplace in the annals of his city; to have left it as a pooradventurer, to return to it first as bishop, then as pope: to have achamber in its mother church adorned with the pictured history ofhis achievements for a monument, and a triumph of Renaissancearchitecture dedicated to his family, _gentilibus suis_--yet wecannot but feel that the better part remains with S. Catherine, whose prayer is still whispered by children on their mother's knee, and whose relics are kissed daily by the simple and devout. 

Some of the chief Italian painters have represented the incidents ofS. Catherine's life and of her mystical experience. All the pathosand beauty which we admire in Sodoma's S. Sebastian at Florence, aresurpassed by his fresco of S. Catherine receiving the stigmata. Thisis one of several subjects painted by him on the walls of her chapelin San Domenico. The tender unction, the sweetness, the languor, andthe grace which he commanded with such admirable mastery, are allcombined in the figure of the saint falling exhausted into the armsof her attendant nuns. Soft undulating lines rule the composition;yet dignity of attitude and feature prevails over mere loveliness. Another of Siena's greatest masters, Beccafumi, has treated the samesubject with less pictorial skill and dramatic effect, but with anearnestness and simplicity that are very touching. Colourists alwaysliked to introduce the sweeping lines of her white robes into theircompositions. Fra Bartolommeo, who showed consummate art bytempering the masses of white drapery with mellow tones of brown oramber, painted one splendid picture of the marriage of S. Catherine, and another in which he represents her prostrate in adoration beforethe mystery of the Trinity. His gentle and devout soul sympathisedwith the spirit of the saint. The fervour of her devotion belongedto him more truly than the leonine power which he unsuccessfullyattempted to express in his large figure of S. Mark. Other artistshave painted the two Catherines together--the princess ofAlexandria, crowned and robed in purple, bearing her palm ofmartyrdom, beside the nun of Siena, holding in her hand the lanternwith which she went about by night among the sick. AmbrogioBorgognone makes them stand one on each side of Madonna's throne, while the infant Christ upon her lap extends His hands to both, intoken of their marriage. 

The traditional type of countenance which may be traced in all thesepictures is not without a real foundation. Not only does there existat Siena, in the Church of San Domenico, a contemporary portrait ofS. Catherine, but her head also, which was embalmed immediatelyafter death, is still preserved. The skin of the face is fair andwhite, like parchment, and the features have more the air of sleepthan death. We find in them the breadth and squareness of generaloutline, and the long, even eyebrows which give peculiar calm to theexpression of her pictures. This relic is shown publicly once a yearon the 6th of May. That is the Festa of the saint, when a processionof priests and acolytes, and pious people holding tapers, and littlegirls dressed out in white, carry a splendid silver image of theirpatroness about the city. Banners and crosses and censers go infront; then follows the shrine beneath a canopy: roses and leaves ofbox are scattered on the path. The whole Contrada d'Oca is deckedout with such finery as the people can muster: red cloths hung fromthe windows, branches and garlands strewn about the doorsteps, withbrackets for torches on the walls, and altars erected in the middleof the street. Troops of country-folk and townspeople and priests goin and out to visit the cell of S. Catherine; the upper and thelower chapel, built upon its site, and the hall of the_confraternità_ blaze with lighted tapers. The faithful, full ofwonder, kneel or stand about the 'santi luoghi, ' marvelling at therelics, and repeating to one another the miracles of the saint. Thesame bustle pervades the Church of San Domenico. Masses are beingsaid at one or other chapel all the morning, while women in theirflapping Tuscan hats crowd round the silver image of S. Catherine, and say their prayers with a continual undercurrent of responses tothe nasal voice of priest or choir. Others gain entrance to thechapel of the saint, and kneel before her altar. There, in the blazeof sunlight and of tapers, far away behind the gloss and gilding ofa tawdry shrine, is seen the pale, white face which spoke andsuffered so much, years ago. The contrast of its rigid stillness andhalf-concealed corruption with the noise and life and light outsideis very touching. Even so the remnant of a dead idea still stirs thesouls of thousands, and many ages may roll by before time andoblivion assert their inevitable sway. 

_MONTE OLIVETO_

I

In former days the traveller had choice of two old hostelries in thechief street of Siena. Here, if he was fortunate, he might secure aprophet's chamber, with a view across tiled houseroofs to thedistant Tuscan champaign--glimpses of russet field and olive-gardenframed by jutting city walls, which in some measure compensated formuch discomfort. He now betakes himself to the more modern Albergodi Siena, overlooking the public promenade La Lizza. Horse-chestnutsand acacias make a pleasant foreground to a prospect of considerableextent. The front of the house is turned toward Belcaro and themountains between Grosseto and Volterra. Sideways its windowscommand the brown bulk of San Domenico, and the Duomo, set like amarble coronet upon the forehead of the town. When we arrived thereone October afternoon the sun was setting amid flying clouds andwatery yellow spaces of pure sky, with a wind blowing soft and humidfrom the sea. Long after he had sunk below the hills, a fading chordof golden and rose-coloured tints burned on the city. The cathedralbell tower was glistening with recent rain, and we could see rightthrough its lancet windows to the clear blue heavens beyond. Then, as the day descended into evening, the autumn trees assumed thatwonderful effect of luminousness self-evolved, and the red brickwalls that crimson afterglow, which Tuscan twilight takes fromsingular transparency of atmosphere. 

It is hardly possible to define the specific character of eachItalian city, assigning its proper share to natural circumstances, to the temper of the population, and to the monuments of art inwhich these elements of nature and of human qualities are blended. The fusion is too delicate and subtle for complete analysis; and thetotal effect in each particular case may best be compared to thatimpressed on us by a strong personality, making itself felt in theminutest details. Climate, situation, ethnological conditions, thepolitical vicissitudes of past ages, the bias of the people tocertain industries and occupations, the emergence of distinguishedmen at critical epochs, have all contributed their quota to thecomposition of an individuality which abides long after the localityhas lost its ancient vigour. 

Since the year 1557, when Gian Giacomo de' Medici laid the countryof Siena waste, levelled her luxurious suburbs, and delivered herfamine-stricken citizens to the tyranny of the Grand Duke Cosimo, this town has gone on dreaming in suspended decadence. Yet theepithet which was given to her in her days of glory, the title of'Fair Soft Siena, ' still describes the city. She claims it by rightof the gentle manners, joyous but sedate, of her inhabitants, by thegrace of their pure Tuscan speech, and by the unique delicacy of herarchitecture. Those palaces of brick, with finely moulded lancetwindows, and the lovely use of sculptured marbles in pilasteredcolonnades, are fit abodes for the nobles who reared them fivecenturies ago, of whose refined and costly living we read in thepages of Dante or of Folgore da San Gemignano. And though thenecessities of modern life, the decay of wealth, the dwindling ofold aristocracy, and the absorption of what was once an independentstate in the Italian nation, have obliterated that large signorialsplendour of the Middle Ages, we feel that the modern Sienese arenot unworthy of their courteous ancestry. 

Superficially, much of the present charm of Siena consists in thesoft opening valleys, the glimpses of long blue hills and fertilecountry-side, framed by irregular brown houses stretching along theslopes on which the town is built, and losing themselves abruptly inolive fields and orchards. This element of beauty, which brings thecity into immediate relation with the country, is indeed notpeculiar to Siena. We find it in Perugia, in Assisi, inMontepulciano, in nearly all the hill towns of Umbria and Tuscany. But their landscape is often tragic and austere, while this isalways suave. City and country blend here in delightful amity. Neither yields that sense of aloofness which stirs melancholy. 

The most charming district in the immediate neighbourhood of Sienalies westward, near Belcaro, a villa high up on a hill. It is aregion of deep lanes and golden-green oak-woods, with cypresses andstone-pines, and little streams in all directions flowing over thebrown sandstone. The country is like some parts of ruralEngland--Devonshire or Sussex. Not only is the sandstone here, asthere, broken into deep gullies; but the vegetation is much thesame. Tufted spleenwort, primroses, and broom tangle the hedgesunder boughs of hornbeam and sweet-chestnut. This is the landscapewhich the two sixteenth-century novelists of Siena, Fortini andSermini, so lovingly depicted in their tales. Of literatureabsorbing in itself the specific character of a country, andconveying it to the reader less by description than by sustainedquality of style, I know none to surpass Fortini's sketches. Theprospect from Belcaro is one of the finest to be seen in Tuscany. The villa stands at a considerable elevation, and commands animmense extent of hill and dale. Nowhere, except Maremma-wards, alevel plain. The Tuscan mountains, from Monte Amiata westward toVolterra, round Valdelsa, down to Montepulciano and Radicofani, withtheir innumerable windings and intricacies of descending valleys, are dappled with light and shade from flying storm-clouds, sunshinehere, and there cloud-shadows. Girdling the villa stands a grove ofilex-trees, cut so as to embrace its high-built walls with darkcontinuous green. In the courtyard are lemon-trees and pomegranatesladen with fruit. From a terrace on the roof the whole wide view isseen; and here upon a parapet, from which we leaned one autumnafternoon, my friend discovered this _graffito_: '_E vidi e piansiil fato amaro!_'--'I gazed, and gazing, wept the bitterness offate. '

II

The prevailing note of Siena and the Sienese seems, as I have said, to be a soft and tranquil grace; yet this people had one of thestormiest and maddest of Italian histories. They were passionate inlove and hate, vehement in their popular amusements, almost franticin their political conduct of affairs. The luxury, for which Danteblamed them, the levity De Comines noticed in their government, found counter-poise in more than usual piety and fervour. S. Bernardino, the great preacher and peacemaker of the Middle Ages; S. Catherine, the worthiest of all women to be canonised; the blessedColombini, who founded the Order of the Gesuati or Brothers of thePoor in Christ; the blessed Bernardo, who founded that of MonteOliveto; were all Sienese. Few cities have given four such saints tomodern Christendom. The biography of one of these may serve asprelude to an account of the Sienese monastery of Oliveto Maggiore. 

The family of Tolomei was among the noblest of the Sienesearistocracy. On May 10, 1272, Mino Tolomei and his wife Fulvia, ofthe Tancredi, had a son whom they christened Giovanni, but who, whenhe entered the religious life, assumed the name of Bernard, inmemory of the great Abbot of Clairvaux. Of this child, Fulvia issaid to have dreamed, long before his birth, that he assumed theform of a white swan, and sang melodiously, and settled in theboughs of an olive-tree, whence afterwards he winged his way toheaven amid a flock of swans as dazzling white as he. The boy waseducated in the Dominican Cloister at Siena, under the care of hisuncle Cristoforo Tolomei. There, and afterwards in the fraternity ofS. Ansano, he felt that impulse towards a life of piety, which aftera short but brilliant episode of secular ambition, was destined toreturn with overwhelming force upon his nature. He was a youth ofpromise, and at the age of sixteen he obtained the doctorate inphilosophy and both laws, civil and canonical. The Tolomei upon thisoccasion adorned their palaces and threw them open to the people ofSiena. The Republic hailed with acclamation the early honours of anoble, born to be one of their chief leaders. Soon after this eventMino obtained for his son from the Emperor the title of CæsarianKnight; and when the diploma arrived, new festivities proclaimed thefortunate youth to his fellow-citizens. Bernardo cased his limbs insteel, and rode in procession with ladies and young nobles throughthe streets. The ceremonies of a knight's reception in Siena at thatperiod were magnificent. From contemporary chronicles and from thesonnets written by Folgore da San Gemignano for a similar occasion, we gather that the whole resources of a wealthy family and all theirfriends were strained to the utmost to do honour to the order ofchivalry. Open house was held for several days. Rich presents ofjewels, armour, dresses, chargers were freely distributed. Tournaments alternated with dances. But the climax of the pageantwas the novice's investiture with sword and spurs and belt in thecathedral. This, as it appears from a record of the year 1326, actually took place in the great marble pulpit carved by the Pisani;and the most illustrious knights of his acquaintance were summonedby the squire to act as sponsors for his fealty. 

It is said that young Bernardo Tolomei's head was turned to vanityby these honours showered upon him in his earliest manhood. Yet, after a short period of aberration, he rejoined his confraternityand mortified his flesh by discipline and strict attendance on thepoor. The time had come, however, when he should choose a careersuitable to his high rank. He devoted himself to jurisprudence, andbegan to lecture publicly on law. Already at the age of twenty-fivehis fellow-citizens admitted him to the highest political offices, and in the legend of his life it is written, not withoutexaggeration doubtless, that he ruled the State. There is, however, no reason to suppose that he did not play an important part in itsgovernment. Though a just and virtuous statesman, Bernardo nowforgot the special service of God, and gave himself with heart andsoul to mundane interests. At the age of forty, supported by thewealth, alliances, and reputation of his semi-princely house, he hadbecome one of the most considerable party-leaders in that age offaction. If we may trust his monastic biographer, he was aiming atnothing less than the tyranny of Siena. But in that year, when hewas forty, a change, which can only be described as conversion, cameover him. He had advertised a public disputation, in which heproposed before all comers to solve the most arduous problems ofscholastic science. The concourse was great, the assembly brilliant;but the hero of the day, who had designed it for his glory, wasstricken with sudden blindness. In one moment he comprehended theinternal void he had created for his soul, and the blindness of thebody was illumination to the spirit. The pride, power, and splendourof this world seemed to him a smoke that passes. God, penitence, eternity appeared in all the awful clarity of an authentic vision. He fell upon his knees and prayed to Mary that he might receive hissight again. This boon was granted; but the revelation which hadcome to him in blindness was not withdrawn. Meanwhile the hall ofdisputation was crowded with an expectant audience. Bernardo rosefrom his knees, made his entry, and ascended the chair; but insteadof the scholastic subtleties he had designed to treat, he pronouncedthe old text, 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. '

Afterwards, attended by two noble comrades, Patrizio Patrizzi andAmbrogio Piccolomini, he went forth into the wilderness. For thehuman soul, at strife with strange experience, betakes itselfinstinctively to solitude. Not only prophets of Israel, saints ofthe Thebaïd, and founders of religions in the mystic East have doneso; even the Greek Menander recognised, although he sneered at, thephenomenon. 'The desert, they say, is the place for discoveries. 'For the mediæval mind it had peculiar attractions. The wildernessthese comrades chose was Accona, a doleful place, hemmed in withearthen precipices, some fifteen miles to the south of Siena. Of hisvast possessions Bernardo retained but this--

 The lonesome lodge, That stood so low in a lonely glen. 

The rest of his substance he abandoned to the poor. This was in1313, the very year of the Emperor Henry VII. 's death atBuonconvento, which is a little walled town between Siena and thedesert of Accona. Whether Bernardo's retirement was in any way dueto the extinction of immediate hope for the Ghibelline party by thisevent, we do not gather from his legend. That, as is natural, refershis action wholly to the operation of divine grace. Yet we mayremember how a more illustrious refugee, the singer of the 'DivineComedy, ' betook himself upon the same occasion to the lonely conventof Fonte Avellana on the Alps of Catria, and meditated there thecantos of his Purgatory. While Bernardo Tolomei was founding theOrder of Monte Oliveto, Dante penned his letter to the cardinals ofItaly: _Quomodo sola sedet civitas plena populo: facta est quasividua domina gentium_. 

Bernardo and his friends hollowed with their own hands grottos inthe rock, and strewed their stone beds with witheredchestnut-leaves. For S. Scolastica, the sister of S. Benedict, theybuilt a little chapel. Their food was wild fruit, and their drinkthe water of the brook. Through the day they delved, for it was intheir mind to turn the wilderness into a land of plenty. By nightthey meditated on eternal truth. The contrast between their rudelife and the delicate nurture of Sienese nobles, in an age whenSiena had become a by-word for luxury, must have been cruel. But itfascinated the mediæval imagination, and the three anchorites werespeedily joined by recruits of a like temper. As yet the new-bornorder had no rules; for Bernardo, when he renounced the world, embraced humility. The brethren were bound together only by the tiesof charity. They lived in common; and under their sustained effortsAccona soon became a garden. 

The society could not, however, hold together without furtherorganisation. It began to be ill spoken of, inasmuch as vulgar mindscan recognise no good except in what is formed upon a pattern theyare familiar with. Then Bernardo had a vision. In his sleep he saw aladder of light ascending to the heavens. Above sat Jesus with OurLady in white raiment, and the celestial hierarchies around themwere attired in white. Up the ladder, led by angels, climbed men investure of dazzling white; and among these Bernardo recognised hisown companions. Soon after this dream, he called AmbrogioPiccolomini, and bade him get ready for a journey to the Pope atAvignon. 

John XXII. Received the pilgrims graciously, and gave them lettersto the Bishop of Arezzo, commanding him to furnish the newbrotherhood with one of the rules authorised by Holy Church forgovernance of a monastic order. Guido Tarlati, of the greatPietra-mala house, was Bishop and despot of Arezzo at this epoch. Aman less in harmony with coenobitical enthusiasm than this warriorprelate, could scarcely have been found. Yet attendance to suchmatters formed part of his business, and the legend even credits himwith an inspired dream; for Our Lady appeared to him, and said: 'Ilove the valley of Accona and its pious solitaries. Give them therule of Benedict. But thou shalt strip them of their mourning weeds, and clothe them in white raiment, the symbol of my virgin purity. Their hermitage shall change its name, and henceforth shall becalled Mount Olivet, in memory of the ascension of my divine Son, the which took place upon the Mount of Olives. I take this familybeneath my own protection; and therefore it is my will it should becalled henceforth the congregation of S. Mary of Mount Olivet. 'After this, the Blessed Virgin took forethought for the heraldicdesigns of her monks, dictating to Guido Tarlati the blazon theystill bear; it is of three hills or, whereof the third and highestis surmounted with a cross gules, and from the meeting-point of thethree hillocks upon either hand a branch of olive vert. This was in1319. In 1324 John XXII. Confirmed the order, and in 1344 it wasfurther approved by Clement VI. Affiliated societies sprang up inseveral Tuscan cities; and in 1347, Bernardo Tolomei, at that timeGeneral of the Order, held a chapter of its several houses. The nextyear was the year of the great plague or Black Death. Bernardo badehis brethren leave their seclusion, and go forth on works of mercyamong the sick. Some went to Florence, some to Siena, others to thesmaller hill-set towns of Tuscany. All were bidden to assemble onthe Feast of the Assumption at Siena. Here the founder addressed hisspiritual children for the last time. Soon afterwards he diedhimself, at the age of seventy-seven, and the place of his grave isnot known. He was beatified by the Church for his great virtues. 

III

At noon we started, four of us, in an open waggonette with a pair ofhorses, for Monte Oliveto, the luggage heaped mountain-high and tiedin a top-heavy mass above us. After leaving the gateway, with itsmassive fortifications and frescoed arches, the road passes into adull earthy country, very much like some parts--and not the bestparts--of England. The beauty of the Sienese contado is clearly onthe sandstone, not upon the clay. Hedges, haystacks, isolatedfarms--all were English in their details. Only the vines, andmulberries, and wattled waggons drawn by oxen, most Roman in aspect, reminded us we were in Tuscany. In such _carpenta_ may the vestalvirgins have ascended the Capitol. It is the primitive war-chariotalso, capable of holding four with ease; and Romulus may havemounted with the images of Roman gods in even such a vehicle toLatiarian Jove upon the Alban hill. Nothing changes in Italy. Thewooden ploughs are those which Virgil knew. The sight of one of themwould save an intelligent lad much trouble in mastering a certainpassage of the Georgics. 

Siena is visible behind us nearly the whole way to Buonconvento, alittle town where the Emperor Henry VII. Died, as it was supposed, of poison, in 1313. It is still circled with the wall and gatesbuilt by the Sienese in 1366, and is a fair specimen of an intactmediæval stronghold. Here we leave the main road, and break into acountry-track across a bed of sandstone, with the delicate volcaniclines of Monte Amiata in front, and the aërial pile of Montalcino toour right. The pyracanthus bushes in the hedge yield their clustersof bright yellow berries, mingled with more glowing hues of red fromhaws and glossy hips. On the pale grey earthen slopes men and womenare plying the long Sabellian hoes of their forefathers, andploughmen are driving furrows down steep hills. The labour of thehusbandmen in Tuscany is very graceful, partly, I think, because itis so primitive, but also because the people have an eminently noblecarriage, and are fashioned on the lines of antique statues. Inoticed two young contadini in one field, whom Frederick Walkermight have painted with the dignity of Pheidian form. They wereguiding their ploughs along a hedge of olive-trees, slantingupwards, the white-horned oxen moving slowly through the marl, andthe lads bending to press the plough-shares home. It was a delicatepiece of colour--the grey mist of olive branches, the warm smokingearth, the creamy flanks of the oxen, the brown limbs and dark eyesof the men, who paused awhile to gaze at us, with shadows cast uponthe furrows from their tall straight figures. Then they turned totheir work again, and rhythmic movement was added to the picture. Iwonder when an Italian artist will condescend to pluck these flowersof beauty, so abundantly offered by the simplest things in his ownnative land. Each city has an Accademia delle Belle Arti, and thereis no lack of students. But the painters, having learned theirtrade, make copies ten times distant from the truth of famousmasterpieces for the American market. Few seem to look beyond theirpicture galleries. Thus the democratic art, the art of Millet, theart of life and nature and the people, waits. 

As we mount, the soil grows of a richer brown; and there are woodsof oak where herds of swine are feeding on the acorns. Monte Olivetocomes in sight--a mass of red brick, backed up with cypresses, amongdishevelled earthy precipices, _balze_ as they are called--upon thehill below the village of Chiusure. This Chiusure was once apromising town; but the life was crushed out of it in the throes ofmediæval civil wars, and since the thirteenth century it has beendwindling to a hamlet. The struggle for existence, from which thelarger communes of this district, Siena and Montepulciano, emergedat the expense of their neighbours, must have been tragical. The_balze_ now grow sterner, drier, more dreadful. We see how delugesoutpoured from thunder-storms bring down their viscous streams ofloam, destroying in an hour the terraces it took a year to build, and spreading wasteful mud upon the scanty cornfields. The peoplecall this soil _creta_; but it seems to be less like a chalk than amarl, or _marna_. It is always washing away into ravines andgullies, exposing the roots of trees, and rendering the tillage ofthe land a thankless labour. One marvels how any vegetation has thefaith to settle on its dreary waste, or how men have the patience, generation after generation, to renew the industry, still beginning, never ending, which reclaims such wildernesses. Comparing MonteOliveto with similar districts of cretaceous soil--with the country, for example, between Pienza and San Quirico--we perceive how much isowed to the perseverance of the monks whom Bernard Tolomei plantedhere. So far as it is clothed at all with crop and wood, this istheir service. 

At last we climb the crowning hill, emerge from a copse of oak, glide along a terraced pathway through the broom, and find ourselvesin front of the convent gateway. A substantial tower of red brick, machicolated at the top and pierced with small square windows, guards this portal, reminding us that at some time or other themonks found it needful to arm their solitude against a forcedescending from Chiusure. There is an avenue of slender cypresses;and over the gate, protected by a jutting roof, shines a fresco ofMadonna and Child. Passing rapidly downwards, we are in thecourtyard of the monastery, among its stables, barns, andout-houses, with the forlorn bulk of the huge red building, spreading wide, and towering up above us. As good luck ruled ourarrival, we came face to face with the Abbate de Negro, whoadministers the domain of Monte Oliveto for the Government of Italy, and exercises a kindly hospitality to chance-comers. He was standingnear the church, which, with its tall square campanile, breaks thelong stern outline of the convent. The whole edifice, it may besaid, is composed of a red-brick inclining to purple in tone, whichcontrasts not unpleasantly with the lustrous green of the cypresses, and the glaucous sheen of olives. Advantage has been taken of asteep crest; and the monastery, enlarged from time to time throughthe last five centuries, has here and there been reared upongigantic buttresses, which jut upon the _balze_ at a sometimes giddyheight. 

The Abbate received us with true courtesy, and gave us spaciousrooms, three cells apiece, facing Siena and the western mountains. There is accommodation, he told us, for three hundred monks; butonly three are left in it. As this order was confined to members ofthe nobility, each of the religious had his own apartment--not acubicle such as the uninstructed dream of when they read of monks, but separate chambers for sleep and study and recreation. 

In the middle of the vast sad landscape, the place is still, with asilence that can be almost heard. The deserted state of thoseinnumerable cells, those echoing corridors and shadowy cloisters, exercises overpowering tyranny over the imagination. Siena is so faraway, and Montalcino is so faintly outlined on its airy parapet, that these cities only deepen our sense of desolation. It is arelief to mark at no great distance on the hillside a contadinoguiding his oxen, and from a lonely farm yon column of ascendingsmoke. At least the world goes on, and life is somewhere resonantwith song. But here there rests a pall of silence among theoak-groves and the cypresses and _balze_. As I leaned and mused, while Christian (my good friend and fellow-traveller from theGrisons) made our beds, a melancholy sunset flamed up from a rampartof cloud, built like a city of the air above the mountains ofVolterra--fire issuing from its battlements, and smiting the frettedroof of heaven above. It was a conflagration of celestial rose uponthe saddest purples and cavernous recesses of intensest azure. 

We had an excellent supper in the visitors' refectory--soup, goodbread and country wine, ham, a roast chicken with potatoes, a nicewhite cheese made of sheep's milk, and grapes for dessert. The kindAbbate sat by, and watched his four guests eat, tapping histortoiseshell snuff-box, and telling us many interesting thingsabout the past and present state of the convent. Our company wascompleted with Lupo, the pet cat, and Pirro, a woolly Corsican dog, very good friends, and both enormously voracious. Lupo in particularengraved himself upon the memory of Christian, into whose large legshe thrust his claws, when the cheese-parings and scraps were notsupplied him with sufficient promptitude. I never saw a hungrier andbolder cat. It made one fancy that even the mice had been exiledfrom this solitude. And truly the rule of the monastic order, noless than the habit of Italian gentlemen, is frugal in the matter ofthe table, beyond the conception of northern folk. 

Monte Oliveto, the Superior told us, owned thirty-two _poderi_, orlarge farms, of which five have recently been sold. They are workedon the _mezzeria_ system; whereby peasants and proprietors dividethe produce of the soil; and which he thinks inferior for developingits resources to that of _affitto_, or leaseholding. 

The contadini live in scattered houses; and he says the estate wouldbe greatly improved by doubling the number of these dwellings, andletting the subdivided farms to more energetic people. The villageof Chiusure is inhabited by labourers. The contadini are poor: adower, for instance, of fifty _lire_ is thought something: whereasnear Genoa, upon the leasehold system, a farmer may sometimesprovide a dower of twenty thousand _lire_. The country producesgrain of different sorts, excellent oil, and timber. It also yieldsa tolerable red wine. The Government makes from eight to nine percent. Upon the value of the land, employing him and his tworeligious brethren as agents. 

In such conversation the evening passed. We rested well in largehard beds with dry rough sheets. But there was a fretful windabroad, which went wailing round the convent walls and rattling thedoors in its deserted corridors. One of our party had been placed byhimself at the end of a long suite of apartments, with balconiescommanding the wide sweep of hills that Monte Amiata crowns. Heconfessed in the morning to having passed a restless night, tormented by the ghostly noises of the wind, a wanderer, 'like theworld's rejected guest, ' through those untenanted chambers. Theolives tossed their filmy boughs in twilight underneath his windows, sighing and shuddering, with a sheen in them as eerie as that ofwillows by some haunted mere. 

IV

The great attraction to students of Italian art in the convent ofMonte Oliveto is a large square cloister, covered withwall-paintings by Luca Signorelli and Giovannantonio Bazzi, surnamedIl Sodoma. These represent various episodes in the life of S. Benedict; while one picture, in some respects the best of the wholeseries, is devoted to the founder of the Olivetan Order, BernardoTolomei, dispensing the rule of his institution to a consistory ofwhite-robed monks. Signorelli, that great master of Cortona, may bestudied to better advantage elsewhere, especially at Orvieto and inhis native city. His work in this cloister, consisting of eightfrescoes, has been much spoiled by time and restoration. Yet it canbe referred to a good period of his artistic activity (the year1497) and displays much which is specially characteristic of hismanner. In Totila's barbaric train, he painted a crowd of fierceemphatic figures, combining all ages and the most varied attitudes, and reproducing with singular vividness the Italian soldiers ofadventure of his day. We see before us the long-haired followers ofBraccio and the Baglioni; their handsome savage faces; their brawnylimbs clad in the particoloured hose and jackets of that period;feathered caps stuck sideways on their heads; a splendid swagger intheir straddling legs. Female beauty lay outside the sphere ofSignorelli's sympathy; and in the Monte Oliveto cloister he was notcalled upon to paint it. But none of the Italian masters felt morekeenly, or more powerfully represented in their work, the muscularvigour of young manhood. Two of the remaining frescoes, differentfrom these in motive, might be selected as no less characteristic ofSignorelli's manner. One represents three sturdy monks, clad inbrown, working with all their strength to stir a boulder, which hasbeen bewitched, and needs a miracle to move it from its place. Thesquare and powerfully outlined drawing of these figures is beyondall praise for its effect of massive solidity. The other shows usthe interior of a fifteenth-century tavern, where two monks areregaling themselves upon the sly. A country girl, with shapely armsand shoulders, her upper skirts tucked round the ample waist towhich broad sweeping lines of back and breasts descend, is servingwine. The exuberance of animal life, the freedom of attitudeexpressed in this, the mainly interesting figure of the composition, show that Signorelli might have been a great master of realisticpainting. Nor are the accessories less effective. A wide-roofedkitchen chimney, a page-boy leaving the room by a flight of stepswhich leads to the house door, and the table at which the truantmonks are seated, complete a picture of homely Italian life. It maystill be matched out of many an inn in this hill district. 

Called to graver work at Orvieto, where he painted his giganticseries of frescoes illustrating the coming of Anti-christ, theDestruction of the World, the Resurrection, the Last Judgment, andthe final state of souls in Paradise and Hell, Signorelli left hiswork at Monte Oliveto unaccomplished. Seven years later it was takenup by a painter of very different genius. Sodoma was a native ofVercelli, and had received his first training in the Lombardschools, which owed so much to Lionardo da Vinci's influence. He wasabout thirty years of age when chance brought him to Siena. Here hemade acquaintance with Pandolfo Petrucci, who had recentlyestablished himself in a species of tyranny over the Republic. Thework he did for this patron and other nobles of Siena, brought himinto notice. Vasari observes that his hot Lombard colouring, asomething florid and attractive in his style, which contrasted withthe severity of the Tuscan school, rendered him no less agreeable asan artist than his free manners made him acceptable as ahouse-friend. Fra Domenico da Leccio, also a Lombard, was at thattime General of the monks of Monte Oliveto. On a visit to thiscompatriot in 1505, Sodoma received a commission to complete thecloister; and during the next two years he worked there, producingin all twenty-five frescoes. For his pains he seemed to havereceived but little pay--Vasari says, only the expenses of somecolour-grinders who assisted him; but from the books of the conventit appears that 241 ducats, or something over 60_l. _ of our money, were disbursed to him. 

Sodoma was so singular a fellow, even in that age of piquantpersonalities, that it may be worth while to translate a fragment ofVasari's gossip about him. We must, however, bear in mind that, forsome unknown reason, the Aretine historian bore a rancorous grudgeagainst this Lombard whose splendid gifts and great achievements hedid all he could by writing to depreciate. 'He was fond, ' saysVasari, 'of keeping in his house all sorts of strange animals:badgers, squirrels, monkeys, cat-a-mountains, dwarf-donkeys, horses, racers, little Elba ponies, jackdaws, bantams, doves of India, andother creatures of this kind, as many as he could lay his hands on. Over and above these beasts, he had a raven, which had learned sowell from him to talk, that it could imitate its master's voice, especially in answering the door when some one knocked, and this itdid so cleverly that people took it for Giovannantonio himself, asall the folk of Siena know quite well. In like manner, his otherpets were so much at home with him that they never left his house, but played the strangest tricks and maddest pranks imaginable, sothat his house was like nothing more than a Noah's Ark. ' He was abold rider, it seems; for with one of his racers, ridden by himself, he bore away the prize in that wild horse-race they run upon thePiazza at Siena. For the rest, 'he attired himself in pompousclothes, wearing doublets of brocade, cloaks trimmed with gold lace, gorgeous caps, neck-chains, and other vanities of a likedescription, fit for buffoons and mountebanks. ' In one of thefrescoes of Monte Oliveto, Sodoma painted his own portrait, withsome of his curious pets around him. He there appears as a young manwith large and decidedly handsome features, a great shock of darkcurled hair escaping from a yellow cap, and flowing down over a richmantle which drapes his shoulders. If we may trust Vasari, he showedhis curious humours freely to the monks. 'Nobody could describe theamusement he furnished to those good fathers, who christened himMattaccio (the big madman), or the insane tricks he played there. '

In spite of Vasari's malevolence, the portrait he has given us ofBazzi has so far nothing unpleasant about it. The man seems to havebeen a madcap artist, combining with his love for his profession ataste for fine clothes, and what was then perhaps rarer in people ofhis sort, a great partiality for living creatures of all kinds. Thedarker shades of Vasari's picture have been purposely omitted fromthese pages. We only know for certain, about Bazzi's private life, that he was married in 1510 to a certain Beatrice, who bore him twochildren, and who was still living with him in 1541. The furthersuggestion that he painted at Monte Oliveto subjects unworthy of areligious house, is wholly disproved by the frescoes which stillexist in a state of very tolerable preservation. They representvarious episodes in the legend of S. Benedict; all marked by thatspirit of simple, almost childish piety which is a specialcharacteristic of Italian religious history. The series forms, infact, a painted _novella_ of monastic life; its petty jealousies, its petty trials, its tribulations and temptations, and itsindescribably petty miracles. Bazzi was well fitted for theexecution of this task. He had a swift and facile brush, considerable versatility in the treatment of monotonous subjects, and a never-failing sense of humour. His white-cowled monks, some ofthem with the rosy freshness of boys, some with the handsome brownfaces of middle life, others astute and crafty, others againwrinkled with old age, have clearly been copied from real models. Heputs them into action without the slightest effort, and surroundsthem with landscapes, architecture, and furniture, appropriate toeach successive situation. The whole is done with so much grace, such simplicity of composition, and transparency of style, corresponding to the _naïf_ and superficial legend, that we feel aperfect harmony between the artist's mind and the motives he wasmade to handle. In this respect Bazzi's portion of the legend of S. Benedict is more successful than Signorelli's. It was fortunate, perhaps, that the conditions of his task confined him touncomplicated groupings, and a scale of colour in which whitepredominates. For Bazzi, as is shown by subsequent work in theFarnesina Villa at Rome, and in the church of S. Domenico at Siena, was no master of composition; and the tone, even of hismasterpieces, inclines to heat. Unlike Signorelli, Bazzi felt a deepartistic sympathy with female beauty; and the most attractive frescoin the whole series is that in which the evil monk Florentius bringsa bevy of fair damsels to the convent. There is one group, inparticular, of six women, so delicately varied in carriage of thehead and suggested movement of the body, as to be comparable only toa strain of concerted music. This is perhaps the painter'smasterpiece in the rendering of pure beauty, if we except his S. Sebastian of the Uffizzi. 

We tire of studying pictures, hardly less than of reading aboutthem! I was glad enough, after three hours spent among the frescoesof this cloister, to wander forth into the copses which surround theconvent. Sunlight was streaming treacherously from flying clouds;and though it was high noon, the oak-leaves were still a-tremblewith dew. Pink cyclamens and yellow amaryllis starred the moistbrown earth; and under the cypress-trees, where alleys had been cutin former time for pious feet, the short firm turf was soft andmossy. Before bidding the hospitable Padre farewell, and starting inour waggonette for Asciano, it was pleasant to meditate awhile inthese green solitudes. Generations of white-stoled monks who had sator knelt upon the now deserted terraces, or had slowly paced thewinding paths to Calvaries aloft and points of vantage high abovethe wood, rose up before me. My mind, still full of Bazzi'sfrescoes, peopled the wilderness with grave monastic forms, andgracious, young-eyed faces of boyish novices. 

_MONTEPULCIANO_

I

For the sake of intending travellers to this, the lordliest ofTuscan hill-towns, it will be well to state at once and withoutcircumlocution what does not appear upon the time-tables of the linefrom Empoli to Rome. Montepulciano has a station; but this railwaystation is at the distance of at least an hour and a half's drivefrom the mountain upon which the city stands. 

The lumbering train which brought us one October evening fromAsciano crawled into this station after dark, at the very momentwhen a storm, which had been gathering from the south-west, burst indeluges of rain and lightning. There was, however, a coveredcarriage going to the town. Into this we packed ourselves, togetherwith a polite Italian gentleman who, in answer to our questions, consulted his watch, and smilingly replied that a little half-hourwould bring us easily to Montepulciano. He was a native of theplace. He knew perfectly well that he would be shut up with us inthat carriage for two mortal hours of darkness and downpour. Andyet, such is the irresistible impulse in Italians to say somethingimmediately agreeable, he fed us with false hopes and had no fear ofconsequences. What did it matter to him if we were pulling out ourwatches and chattering in well-contented undertone about _vinonobile_, _biftek_, and possibly a _polio arrosto_, or a dish of_tord_? At the end of the half-hour, as he was well aware, self-congratulations and visions of a hearty supper would turn todiscontented wailings, and the querulous complaining of defraudedappetites. But the end of half an hour was still half an hour off;and we meanwhile were comfortable. 

The night was pitchy dark, and blazing flashes of lightning showed awhite ascending road at intervals. Rain rushed in torrents, splashing against the carriage wheels, which moved uneasily, asthough they could but scarcely stem the river that swept down uponthem. Far away above us to the left, was one light on a hill, whichnever seemed to get any nearer. We could see nothing but a chasm ofblackness below us on one side, edged with ghostly olive-trees, anda high bank on the other. Sometimes a star swam out of the driftingclouds; but then the rain hissed down again, and the flashes came infloods of livid light, illuminating the eternal olives and thecypresses which looked like huge black spectres. It seemed almostimpossible for the horses to keep their feet, as the mountain roadgrew ever steeper and the torrent swelled around them. Still theystruggled on. The promised half-hour had been doubled, trebled, quadrupled, when at last we saw the great brown sombre walls of acity tower above us. Then we entered one of those narrow loftyTuscan gates, and rolled upon the pavement of a street. 

The inn at Montepulciano is called Marzocco, after the Florentinelion which stands upon its column in a little square before thehouse. The people there are hospitable, and more than once onsubsequent occasions have they extended to us kindly welcome. But onthis, our first appearance, they had scanty room at their disposal. Seeing us arrive so late, and march into their dining-room, ladenwith sealskins, waterproofs, and ulsters, one of the party hugging acomplete Euripides in Didot's huge edition, they were confounded. Atlast they conducted the whole company of four into a narrow backbedroom, where they pointed to one fair-sized and one very littlebed. This was the only room at liberty, they said; and could we notarrange to sleep here? _S' accomodi, Signore! S' accomodi, Signora!_These encouraging words, uttered in various tones of cheerful andinsinuating politeness to each member of the party in succession, failed to make us comprehend how a gentleman and his wife, with alean but rather lengthy English friend, and a bulky native of theGrisons, could 'accommodate themselves' collectively and undividedlywith what was barely sufficient for their just moiety, however muchit might afford a night's rest to their worse half. Christian wassent out into the storm to look for supplementary rooms inMontepulciano, which he failed to get. Meanwhile we ordered supper, and had the satisfaction of seeing set upon the board a huge redflask of _vino nobile_. In copious draughts of this the King ofTuscan wines, we drowned our cares; and when the cloth was drawn, our friend and Christian passed their night upon the supper table. The good folk of the inn had recovered from their surprise, and fromthe inner recesses of their house had brought forth mattresses andblankets. So the better and larger half of the company enjoyed soundsleep. 

It rained itself out at night, and the morning was clear, with thetransparent atmosphere of storm-clouds hurrying in broken squadronsfrom the bad sea quarter. Yet this is just the weather in whichTuscan landscape looks its loveliest. Those immense expanses of greyundulating uplands need the luminousness of watery sunshine, thecolour added by cloud-shadows, and the pearly softness of risingvapours, to rob them of a certain awful grimness. The main street ofMontepulciano goes straight uphill for a considerable distancebetween brown palaces; then mounts by a staircase-zigzag under hugeimpending masses of masonry; until it ends in a piazza. On theascent, at intervals, the eye is fascinated by prospects to thenorth and east over Val di Chiana, Cortona, Thrasymene, Chiusi; tosouth and west over Monte Cetona, Radicofani, Monte Amiata, the Vald' Ombrone, and the Sienese Contado. Grey walls overgrown with ivy, arcades of time-toned brick, and the forbidding bulk of houses hewnfrom solid travertine, frame these glimpses of aërial space. Thepiazza is the top of all things. Here are the Duomo; the Palazzo delComune, closely resembling that of Florence, with the Marzocco onits front; the fountain, between two quaintly sculptured columns;and the vast palace Del Monte, of heavy Renaissance architecture, said to be the work of Antonio di San Gallo. 

We climbed the tower of the Palazzo del Comune, and stood at thealtitude of 2000 feet above the sea. The view is finer in its kindthan I have elsewhere seen, even in Tuscany, that land of panoramicprospects over memorable tracts of world-historic country. Suchlandscape cannot be described in words. But the worst is that, evenwhile we gaze, we know that nothing but the faintest memory of ourenjoyment will be carried home with us. The atmospheric conditionswere perfect that morning. The sun was still young; the sky sparkledafter the night's thunderstorm; the whole immensity of earth aroundlay lucid, smiling, newly washed in baths of moisture. Masses ofstorm-cloud kept rolling from the west, where we seemed to feel thesea behind those intervening hills. But they did not form in heavyblocks or hang upon the mountain summits. They hurried and dispersedand changed and flung their shadows on the world below. 

II

The charm of this view is composed of so many different elements, sosubtly blent, appealing to so many separate sensibilities; the senseof grandeur, the sense of space, the sense of natural beauty, andthe sense of human pathos; that deep internal faculty we callhistoric sense; that it cannot be defined. First comes the immensesurrounding space--a space measured in each arc of the circumferenceby sections of at least fifty miles, limited by points ofexquisitely picturesque beauty, including distant cloud-likemountain ranges and crystals of sky-blue Apennines, circumscribinglandscapes of refined loveliness in detail, always varied, alwaysmarked by objects of peculiar interest where the eye or memory maylinger. Next in importance to this immensity of space, so powerfullyaffecting the imagination by its mere extent, and by the breadth ofatmosphere attuning all varieties of form and colour to one harmonybeneath illimitable heaven, may be reckoned the episodes of rivers, lakes, hills, cities, with old historic names. For there spreads thelordly length of Thrasymene, islanded and citadelled, in hazymorning mist, still dreaming of the shock of Roman hosts withCarthaginian legions. There is the lake of Chiusi, set like a jewelunderneath the copse-clad hills which hide the dust of a dead Tuscannation. The streams of Arno start far far away, where Arezzo liesenfolded in bare uplands. And there at our feet rolls Tiber'slargest affluent, the Chiana. And there is the canal which joinstheir fountains in the marsh that Lionardo would have drained. MonteCetona is yonder height which rears its bristling ridge defiantlyfrom neighbouring Chiusi. And there springs Radicofani, the eagle'seyrie of a brigand brood. Next, Monte Amiata stretches the longlines of her antique volcano; the swelling mountain flanks, descending gently from her cloud-capped top, are russet withautumnal oak and chestnut woods. On them our eyes rest lovingly;imagination wanders for a moment through those mossy glades, wherecyclamens are growing now, and primroses in spring will peep amidanemones from rustling foliage strewn by winter's winds. The heightsof Casentino, the Perugian highlands, Volterra, far withdrawn amid awilderness of rolling hills, and solemn snow-touched ranges of theSpolentino, Sibyl-haunted fastnesses of Norcia, form the mostdistant horizon-lines of this unending panorama. And then there arethe cities placed each upon a point of vantage: Siena; olive-mantledChiusi; Cortona, white upon her spreading throne; poetic Montalcino, lifted aloft against the vaporous sky; San Quirico, nestling inpastoral tranquillity; Pienza, where Æneas Sylvius built palaces andcalled his birthplace after his own Papal name. Still closer to thetown itself of Montepulciano, stretching along the irregular ridgewhich gave it building ground, and trending out on spurs above deeporchards, come the lovely details of oak-copses, blending with greytilth and fields rich with olive and vine. The gaze, exhausted withimmensity, pierces those deeply cloven valleys, sheltered from windand open to the sun--undulating folds of brown earth, where Bacchus, when he visited Tuscany, found the grape-juice that pleased himbest, and crowned the wine of Montepulciano king. Here from oureyrie we can trace white oxen on the furrows, guided bybrown-limbed, white-shirted contadini. 

The morning glory of this view from Montepulciano, thoughirrecoverable by words, abides in the memory, and draws one back byits unique attractiveness. On a subsequent visit to the town inspringtime, my wife and I took a twilight walk, just after ourarrival, through its gloomy fortress streets, up to the piazza, where the impendent houses lowered like bastions, and all the massesof their mighty architecture stood revealed in shadow and dimlamplight. Far and wide, the country round us gleamed with bonfires;for it was the eve of the Ascension, when every contadino lights abeacon of chestnut logs and straw and piled-up leaves. Each castelloon the plain, each village on the hills, each lonely farmhouse atthe skirt of forest or the edge of lake, smouldered like a redCyclopean eye beneath the vault of stars. The flames waxed andwaned, leapt into tongues, or disappeared. As they passed from gloomto brilliancy and died away again, they seemed almost to move. Thetwilight scene was like that of a vast city, filling the plain andclimbing the heights in terraces. Is this custom, I thought, a relicof old Pales-worship?

III

The early history of Montepulciano is buried in impenetrable mistsof fable. No one can assign a date to the foundation of thesehigh-hill cities. The eminence on which it stands belongs to thevolcanic system of Monte Amiata, and must at some time have formed aportion of the crater which threw that mighty mass aloft. But sonshave passed since the _gran sasso di Maremma_ was a fire-vomitingmonster, glaring like Etna in eruption on the Tyrrhene sea; andthrough those centuries how many races may have camped upon thesummit we call Montepulciano! Tradition assigns the firstquasi-historical settlement to Lars Porsena, who is said to havemade it his summer residence, when the lower and more marshy air ofClusium became oppressive. Certainly it must have been aconsiderable town in the Etruscan period. Embedded in the walls ofpalaces may still be seen numerous fragments of sculpturedbasreliefs, the works of that mysterious people. Apropos ofMontepulciano's importance in the early years of Roman history, Ilighted on a quaint story related by its very jejune annalist, Spinello Benci. It will be remembered that Livy attributes theinvasion of the Gauls, who, after besieging Clusium, advanced onRome, to the persuasions of a certain Aruns. He was an exile fromClusium; and wishing to revenge himself upon his country-people, heallured the Senonian Gauls into his service by the promise ofexcellent wine, samples of which he had taken with him intoLombardy. Spinello Benci accepts the legend literally, andcontinues: 'These wines were so pleasing to the palate of thebarbarians, that they were induced to quit the rich and teemingvalley of the Po, to cross the Apennines, and move in battle arrayagainst Chiusi. And it is clear that the wine which Aruns selectedfor the purpose was the same as that which is produced to this dayat Montepulciano. For nowhere else in the Etruscan district canwines of equally generous quality and fiery spirit be found, soadapted for export and capable of such long preservation. '

We may smile at the historian's _naïveté_. Yet the fact remains thatgood wine of Montepulciano can still allure barbarians of this epochto the spot where it is grown. Of all Italian vintages, with theexception of some rare qualities of Sicily and the Valtellina, itis, in my humble opinion, the best. And when the time comes forItaly to develop the resources of her vineyards upon scientificprinciples, Montepulciano will drive Brolio from the field and takethe same place by the side of Chianti which Volnay occupies bycommon Macon. It will then be quoted upon wine-lists throughoutEurope, and find its place upon the tables of rich epicures inHyperborean regions, and add its generous warmth to Trans-atlanticbanquets. Even as it is now made, with very little care bestowed oncultivation and none to speak of on selection of the grape, the wineis rich and noble, slightly rough to a sophisticated palate, butclean in quality and powerful and racy. It deserves the enthusiasmattributed by Redi to Bacchus:[1]

 Fill, fill, let us all have our will! But with _what_, with _what_, boys, shall we fill. Sweet Ariadne--no, not _that_ one--_ah_ no; Fill me the manna of Montepulciano: Fill me a magnum and reach it me. --Gods! How it glides to my heart by the sweetest of roads! Oh, how it kisses me, tickles me, bites me! Oh, how my eyes loosen sweetly in tears! I'm ravished! I'm rapt! Heaven finds me admissible! Lost in an ecstasy! blinded! invisible!-- Hearken all earth! We, Bacchus, in the might of our great mirth, To all who reverence us, are right thinkers; Hear, all ye drinkers! Give ear and give faith to the edict divine; Montepulciano's the King of all wine. 

It is necessary, however, that our modern barbarian should travel toMontepulciano itself, and there obtain a flask of _manna_ or _vinonobile_ from some trusty cellar-master. He will not find it bottledin the inns or restaurants upon his road. 

 [1] From Leigh Hunt's Translation. 

IV

The landscape and the wine of Montepulciano are both well worth thetrouble of a visit to this somewhat inaccessible city. Yet moreremains to be said about the attractions of the town itself. In theDuomo, which was spoiled by unintelligent rebuilding at a dismalepoch of barren art, are fragments of one of the rarest monuments ofTuscan sculpture. This is the tomb of Bartolommeo Aragazzi. He was anative of Montepulciano, and secretary to Pope Martin V. , that_Papa_ _Martino non vale un quattrino_, on whom, during his longresidence in Florence, the street-boys made their rhymes. Twelveyears before his death he commissioned Donatello and MichelozzoMichelozzi, who about that period were working together upon themonuments of Pope John XXIII. And Cardinal Brancacci, to erect hisown tomb at the enormous cost of twenty-four thousand scudi. Thatthirst for immortality of fame, which inspired the humanists of theRenaissance, prompted Aragazzi to this princely expenditure. Yet, having somehow won the hatred of his fellow-students, he wasimmediately censured for excessive vanity. Lionardo Bruni makes hismonument the theme of a ferocious onslaught. Writing to PoggioBracciolini, Bruni tells a story how, while travelling through thecountry of Arezzo, he met a train of oxen dragging heavy waggonspiled with marble columns, statues, and all the necessary details ofa sumptuous sepulchre. He stopped, and asked what it all meant. Thenone of the contractors for this transport, wiping the sweat from hisforehead, in utter weariness of the vexatious labour, at the lastend of his temper, answered: 'May the gods destroy all poets, past, present, and future. ' I inquired what he had to do with poets, andhow they had annoyed him. 'Just this, ' he replied, 'that this poet, lately deceased, a fool and windy-pated fellow, has ordered amonument for himself; and with a view to erecting it, these marblesare being dragged to Montepulciano; but I doubt whether we shallcontrive to get them up there. The roads are too bad. ' 'But, ' criedI, 'do you believe _that_ man was a poet--that dunce who had noscience, nay, nor knowledge either? who only rose above the heads ofmen by vanity and doltishness?' 'I don't know, ' he answered, 'nordid I ever hear tell, while he was alive, about his being called apoet; but his fellow-townsmen now decide he was one; nay, if he hadbut left a few more money-bags, they'd swear he was a god. Anyhow, but for his having been a poet, I would not have cursed poets ingeneral. ' Whereupon, the malevolent Bruni withdrew, and composed ascorpion-tailed oration, addressed to his friend Poggio, on thesuggested theme of 'diuturnity in monuments, ' and false ambition. Our old friends of humanistic learning--Cyrus, Alexander, Cæsar--meet us in these frothy paragraphs. Cambyses, Xerxes, Artaxerxes, Darius, are thrown in to make the gruel of rhetoric'thick and slab. ' The whole epistle ends in a long-drawn perorationof invective against 'that excrement in human shape, ' who had hadthe ill-luck, by pretence to scholarship, by big gains from thePapal treasury, by something in his manners alien from theeasy-going customs of the Roman Court, to rouse the rancour of hisfellow-humanists. 

I have dwelt upon this episode, partly because it illustrates thepeculiar thirst for glory in the students of that time, but moreespecially because it casts a thin clear thread of actual light uponthe masterpiece which, having been transported with this difficultyfrom Donatello's workshop, is now to be seen by all lovers of fineart, in part at least, at Montepulciano. In part at least: thephrase is pathetic. Poor Aragazzi, who thirsted so for 'diuturnityin monuments, ' who had been so cruelly assaulted in the grave byhumanistic jealousy, expressing its malevolence with humanisticcrudity of satire, was destined after all to be defrauded of hiswell-paid tomb. The monument, a master work of Donatello and hiscollaborator, was duly erected. The oxen and the contractors, itappears, had floundered through the mud of Valdichiana, andstruggled up the mountain-slopes of Montepulciano. But when thechurch, which this triumph of art adorned, came to be repaired, themiracle of beauty was dismembered. The sculpture for which Aragazzispent his thousands of crowns, which Donatello touched with hisimmortalising chisel, over which the contractors vented their cursesand Bruni eased his bile; these marbles are now visible as mere_disjecta membra_ in a church which, lacking them, has little todetain a traveller's haste. 

On the left hand of the central door, as you enter, Aragazzi lies, in senatorial robes, asleep; his head turned slightly to the rightupon the pillow, his hands folded over his breast. Very noble arethe draperies, and dignified the deep tranquillity of slumber. Here, we say, is a good man fallen upon sleep, awaiting resurrection. Theone commanding theme of Christian sculpture, in an age of Paganfeeling, has been adequately rendered. Bartolommeo Aragazzi, likeIlaria led Carretto at Lucca, like the canopied doges in S. Zanipoloat Venice, like the Acciauoli in the Florentine Certosa, like theCardinal di Portogallo in Samminiato, is carved for us as he hadbeen in life, but with that life suspended, its fever all smoothedout, its agitations over, its pettinesses dignified by death. Thismarmoreal repose of the once active man symbolises for ourimagination the state into which he passed four centuries ago, butin which, according to the creed, he still abides, reserved forjudgment and re-incarnation. The flesh, clad with which he walkedour earth, may moulder in the vaults beneath. But it will one dayrise again; and art has here presented it imperishable to our gaze. This is how the Christian sculptors, inspired by the majestic calmof classic art, dedicated a Christian to the genius of repose. Amongthe nations of antiquity this repose of death was eternal; and beingunable to conceive of a man's body otherwise than for everobliterated by the flames of funeral, they were perforce led back toactual life when they would carve his portrait on a tomb. But forChristianity the rest of the grave has ceased to be eternal. Centuries may pass, but in the end it must be broken. Therefore artis justified in showing us the man himself in an imagined state ofsleep. Yet this imagined state of sleep is so incalculably long, andby the will of God withdrawn from human prophecy, that the agessweeping over the dead man before the trumpets of archangels wakehim, shall sooner wear away memorial stone than stir his slumber. Itis a slumber, too, unterrified, unentertained by dreams. Suspendedanimation finds no fuller symbolism than the sculptor here presentsto us in abstract form. 

The boys of Montepulciano have scratched Messer Aragazzi's sleepingfigure with _graffiti_ at their own free will. Yet they have had nopower to erase the poetry of Donatello's mighty style. That, inspite of Bruni's envy, in spite of injurious time, in spite of thestill worse insult of the modernised cathedral and the desecratedmonument, embalms him in our memory and secures for him thediuturnity for which he paid his twenty thousand crowns. Money, methinks, beholding him, was rarely better expended on a similarambition. And ambition of this sort, relying on the genius of such amaster to give it wings for perpetuity of time, is, _pace_ LionardoBruni, not ignoble. 

Opposite the figure of Messer Aragazzi are two square basreliefsfrom the same monument, fixed against piers of the nave. Onerepresents Madonna enthroned among worshippers; members, it may besupposed, of Aragazzi's household. Three angelic children, supporting the child Christ upon her lap, complete that pyramidalform of composition which Fra Bartolommeo was afterwards to use withsuch effect in painting. The other basrelief shows a group of gravemen and youths, clasping hands with loveliest interlacement; theplacid sentiment of human fellowship translated into harmonies ofsculptured form. Children below run up to touch their knees, andreach out boyish arms to welcome them. Two young men, withhalf-draped busts and waving hair blown off their foreheads, anticipate the type of adolescence which Andrea del Sarto perfectedin his S. John. We might imagine that this masterly panel wasintended to represent the arrival of Messer Aragazzi in his home. Itis a scene from the domestic life of the dead man, duly subordinatedto the recumbent figure, which, when the monument was perfect, wouldhave dominated the whole composition. 

Nothing in the range of Donatello's work surpasses these twobasreliefs for harmonies of line and grouping, for choice of form, for beauty of expression, and for smoothness of surface-working. Themarble is of great delicacy, and is wrought to a wax-like surface. At the high altar are three more fragments from the mutilated tomb. One is a long low frieze of children bearing garlands, whichprobably formed the base of Aragazzi's monument, and now serves fora predella. The remaining pieces are detached statues of Fortitudeand Faith. The former reminds us of Donatello's S. George; thelatter is twisted into a strained attitude, full of character, butlacking grace. What the effect of these emblematic figures wouldhave been when harmonised by the architectural proportions of thesepulchre, the repose of Aragazzi on his sarcophagus, the suavity ofthe two square panels and the rhythmic beauty of the frieze, it isnot easy to conjecture. But rudely severed from their surroundings, and exposed in isolation, one at each side of the altar, they leavean impression of awkward discomfort on the memory. A certainhardness, peculiar to the Florentine manner, is felt in them. Butthis quality may have been intended by the sculptors for the sake ofcontrast with what is eminently graceful, peaceful, and melodious inthe other fragments of the ruined masterpiece. 

V

At a certain point in the main street, rather more than halfway fromthe Albergo del Marzocco to the piazza, a tablet has been let intothe wall upon the left-hand side. This records the fact that here in1454 was born Angelo Ambrogini, the special glory of Montepulciano, the greatest classical scholar and the greatest Italian poet of thefifteenth century. He is better known in the history of literatureas Poliziano, or Politianus, a name he took from his native city, when he came, a marvellous boy, at the age of ten, to Florence, andjoined the household of Lorenzo de' Medici. He had already claimsupon Lorenzo's hospitality. For his father, Benedetto, by adoptingthe cause of Piero de' Medici in Montepulciano, had exposed himselfto bitter feuds and hatred of his fellow-citizens. To this animosityof party warfare he fell a victim a few years previously. We onlyknow that he was murdered, and that he left a helpless widow withfive children, of whom Angelo was the eldest. The Ambrogini or Ciniwere a family of some importance in Montepulciano; and theirdwelling-house is a palace of considerable size. From its easternwindows the eye can sweep that vast expanse of country, embracingthe lakes of Thrasymene and Chiusi, which has been alreadydescribed. What would have happened, we wonder, if Messer Benedetto, the learned jurist, had not espoused the Medicean cause andembroiled himself with murderous antagonists? Would the littleAngelo have grown up in this quiet town, and practised law, andlived and died a citizen of Montepulciano? In that case thelecture-rooms of Florence would never have echoed to the sonoroushexameters of the 'Rusticus' and 'Ambra. ' Italian literature wouldhave lacked the 'Stanze' and 'Orfeo. ' European scholarship wouldhave been defrauded of the impulse given to it by the 'Miscellanea. 'The study of Roman law would have missed those labours on thePandects, with which the name of Politian is honourably associated. From the Florentine society of the fifteenth century would havedisappeared the commanding central figure of humanism, which nowcontrasts dramatically with the stern monastic Prior of S. Mark. Benedetto's tragic death gave Poliziano to Italy and to posterity. 

VI

Those who have a day to spare at Montepulciano can scarcely spend itbetter than in an excursion to Pienza and San Quirico. Leaving thecity by the road which takes a westerly direction, the first objectof interest is the Church of San Biagio, placed on a fertile plateauimmediately beneath the ancient acropolis. It was erected by Antoniodi San Gallo in 1518, and is one of the most perfect specimensexisting of the sober classical style. The Church consists of aGreek square, continued at the east end into a semicircular tribune, surmounted by a central cupola, and flanked by a detachedbell-tower, ending in a pyramidal spire. The whole is built of solidyellow travertine, a material which, by its warmth of colour, ispleasing to the eye, and mitigates the mathematical severity of thedesign. Upon entering, we feel at once what Alberti called the musicof this style; its large and simple harmonies, depending for effectupon sincerity of plan and justice of balance. The square masses ofthe main building, the projecting cornices and rounded tribune, meettogether and soar up into the cupola; while the grand but austereproportions of the arches and the piers compose a symphony ofperfectly concordant lines. The music is grave and solemn, architecturally expressed in terms of measured space and outlinedsymmetry. The whole effect is that of one thing pleasant to lookupon, agreeably appealing to our sense of unity, charming us bygrace and repose; not stimulative nor suggestive, not multiform normysterious. We are reminded of the temples imagined by FrancescoColonna, and figured in his _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_. One ofthese shrines has, we feel, come into actual existence here; and thereligious ceremonies for which it is adapted are not those of theChristian worship. Some more primitive, less spiritual rites, involving less of tragic awe and deep-wrought symbolism, should behere performed. It is better suited for Polifilo's lustration byVenus Physizoe than for the mass on Easter morning. And in thisrespect, the sentiment of the architecture is exactly faithful tothat mood of religious feeling which appeared in Italy under theinfluences of the classical revival--when the essential doctrines ofChristianity were blurred with Pantheism; when Jehovah became_Jupiter Optimus Maximus_; and Jesus was the _Heros_ of Calvary, andnuns were _Virgines Vestales_. In literature this mood often strikesus as insincere and artificial. But it admitted of realisation andshowed itself to be profoundly felt in architecture. 

After leaving Madonna di San Biagio, the road strikes at once intoan open country, expanding on the right towards the woody ridge ofMonte Fallonica, on the left toward Cetona and Radicofani, withMonte Amiata full in front--its double crest and long volcanic sloperecalling Etna; the belt of embrowned forest on its flank, madeluminous by sunlight. Far away stretches the Sienese Maremma; Sienadimly visible upon her gentle hill; and still beyond, the pyramid ofVolterra, huge and cloud-like, piled against the sky. The road, asis almost invariable in this district, keeps to the highest line ofridges, winding much, and following the dimplings of the earthyhills. Here and there a solitary castello, rusty with old age, andturned into a farm, juts into picturesqueness from some point ofvantage on a mound surrounded with green tillage. But soon the dulland intolerable _creta_, ash-grey earth, without a vestige ofvegetation, furrowed by rain, and desolately breaking into gullies, swallows up variety and charm. It is difficult to believe that this_creta_ of Southern Tuscany, which has all the appearance ofbarrenness, and is a positive deformity in the landscape, can bereally fruitful. Yet we are frequently being told that it only needsassiduous labour to render it enormously productive. 

When we reached Pienza we were already in the middle of a countrywithout cultivation, abandoned to the marl. It is a little place, perched upon the ledge of a long sliding hill, which commands thevale of Orcia; Monte Amiata soaring in aërial majesty beyond. Itsold name was Cosignano. But it had the honour of giving birth toÆneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who, when he was elected to the Papacyand had assumed the title of Pius II. , determined to transform anddignify his native village, and to call it after his own name. Fromthat time forward Cosignano has been known as Pienza. 

Pius II. Succeeded effectually in leaving his mark upon the town. And this forms its main interest at the present time. We see inPienza how the most active-minded and intelligent man of his epoch, the representative genius of Italy in the middle of the fifteenthcentury, commanding vast wealth and the Pontifical prestige, workedout his whim of city-building. The experiment had to be made upon asmall scale; for Pienza was then and was destined to remain avillage. Yet here, upon this miniature piazza--in modern as inancient Italy the meeting-point of civic life, the forum--we find acathedral, a palace of the bishop, a palace of the feudal lord, anda palace of the commune, arranged upon a well-considered plan, andexecuted after one design in a consistent style. The religious, municipal, signorial, and ecclesiastical functions of the littletown are centralised around the open market-place, on which thecommon people transacted business and discussed affairs. Piusentrusted the realisation of his scheme to a Florentine architect;whether Bernardo Rossellino, or a certain Bernardo di Lorenzo, isstill uncertain. The same artist, working in the flat manner ofFlorentine domestic architecture, with rusticated basements, roundedwindows and bold projecting cornices--the manner which is so noblyillustrated by the Rucellai and Strozzi palaces atFlorence--executed also for Pius the monumental Palazzo Piccolominiat Siena. It is a great misfortune for the group of buildings hedesigned at Pienza, that they are huddled together in close quarterson a square too small for their effect. A want of space ispeculiarly injurious to the architecture of this date, 1462, which, itself geometrical and spatial, demands a certain harmony andliberty in its surroundings, a proportion between the room occupiedby each building and the masses of the edifice. The style is severeand prosaic. Those charming episodes and accidents of fancy, inwhich the Gothic style and the style of the earlier LombardRenaissance abounded, are wholly wanting to the rigid, mathematical, hard-headed genius of the Florentine quattrocento. Pienza, therefore, disappoints us. Its heavy palace frontispieces shut thespirit up in a tight box. We seem unable to breathe, and lack thatelement of life and picturesqueness which the splendid retinues ofnobles in the age of Pinturicchio might have added to the nowforlorn Piazza. 

Yet the material is a fine warm travertine, mellowing to dark red, brightening to golden, with some details, especially the tower ofthe Palazzo Comunale, in red brick. This building, by the way, isimitated in miniature from that of Florence. The cathedral is asmall church of three aisles, equally high, ending in what theFrench would call a _chevet_. Pius had observed this plan ofconstruction somewhere in Austria, and commanded his architect, Bernardo, to observe it in his plan. He was attracted by thefacilities for window-lighting which it offered; and what is verysingular, he provided by the Bull of his foundation for keeping thewalls of the interior free from frescoes and other coloureddecorations. The result is that, though the interior effect ispleasing, the church presents a frigid aspect to eyes familiarisedwith warmth of tone in other buildings of that period. The detailsof the columns and friezes are classical; and the façade, strictlycorresponding to the structure, and very honest in its decorativeelements, is also of the earlier Renaissance style. But the vaultingand some of the windows are pointed. 

The Palazzo Piccolomini, standing at the right hand of the Duomo, isa vast square edifice. The walls are flat and even, pierced atregular intervals with windows, except upon the south-west side, where the rectangular design is broken by a noble double Loggiata, gallery rising above gallery--serene curves of arches, grandlyproportioned columns, massive balustrades, a spacious corridor, aroomy vaulting--opening out upon the palace garden, and offeringfair prospect over the wooded heights of Castiglione and Rocca d'Orcia, up to Radicofani and shadowy Amiata. It was in these doubletiers of galleries, in the garden beneath and in the open innersquare of the palazzo, that the great life of Italian aristocracydisplayed itself. Four centuries ago these spaces, now so desolatein their immensity, echoed to the tread of serving-men, the songs ofpages; horse-hooves struck upon the pavement of the court; spursjingled on the staircases; the brocaded trains of ladies sweepingfrom their chambers rustled on the marbles of the loggia; knightslet their hawks fly from the garden parapets; cardinals andabbreviators gathered round the doors from which the Pope wouldissue, when he rose from his siesta to take the cool of evening inthose airy colonnades. How impossible it is to realise that sceneamid this solitude! The palazzo still belongs to the Piccolominifamily. But it has fallen into something worse than ruin--thesqualor of half-starved existence, shorn of all that justified itsgrand proportions. Partition-walls have been run up across its hallsto meet the requirements of our contracted modern customs. Nothingremains of the original decorations except one carved chimney-piece, an emblazoned shield, and a frescoed portrait of the founder. Allmovable treasures have been made away with. And yet the carvedheraldics of the exterior, the coat of Piccolomini, 'argent, on across azure five crescents or, ' the Papal ensigns, keys, and tiara, and the monogram of Pius, prove that this country dwelling of a Popemust once have been rich in details befitting its magnificence. Withthe exception of the very small portion reserved for the Signori, when they visit Pienza, the palace has become a granary for countryproduce in a starveling land. There was one redeeming point about itto my mind. That was the handsome young man, with earnest Tuscaneyes and a wonderfully sweet voice, the servant of the Piccolominifamily, who lives here with his crippled father, and who showed usover the apartments. 

We left Pienza and drove on to S. Quirico, through the same wrinkledwilderness of marl; wasteful, uncultivated, bare to every wind thatblows. A cruel blast was sweeping from the sea, and Monte Amiatadarkened with rain-clouds. Still the pictures, which formedthemselves at intervals, as we wound along these barren ridges, werevery fair to look upon, especially one not far from S. Quirico. Ithad for fore-ground a stretch of tilth--olive-trees, honeysucklehedges, and cypresses. Beyond soared Amiata in all its breadth andblue air-blackness, bearing on its mighty flanks the broken cliffsand tufted woods of Castiglione and the Rocca d'Orcia; eagles' nestsemerging from a fertile valley-champaign, into which the eye was ledfor rest. It so chanced that a band of sunlight, escaping from filmyclouds, touched this picture with silvery greys and soft greens--asuffusion of vaporous radiance, which made it for one moment aClaude landscape. 

S. Quirico was keeping _festa_. The streets were crowded withhealthy, handsome men and women from the contado. This village lieson the edge of a great oasis in the Sienese desert--an oasis formedby the waters of the Orcia and Asso sweeping down to join Ombrone, and stretching on to Montalcino. We put up at the sign of the 'TwoHares, ' where a notable housewife gave us a dinner of all we coulddesire; _frittata di cervello_, good fish, roast lamb stuffed withrosemary, salad and cheese, with excellent wine and black coffee, atthe rate of three _lire_ a head. 

The attraction of S. Quirico is its gem-like little collegiata, aLombard church of the ninth century, with carved portals of thethirteenth. It is built of golden travertine; some details in brownsandstone. The western and southern portals have pillars resting onthe backs of lions. On the western side these pillars are fourslender columns, linked by snake-like ligatures. On the southernside they consist of two carved figures--possibly S. John and theArchangel Michael. There is great freedom and beauty in thesestatues, as also in the lions which support them, recalling theearly French and German manner. In addition, one finds the usualLombard grotesques--two sea-monsters, biting each other;harpy-birds; a dragon with a twisted tail; little men grinning andsquatting in adaptation to coigns and angles of the windows. Thetoothed and chevron patterns of the north are quaintly blent withrude acanthus scrolls and classical egg-mouldings. Over the westernporch is a Gothic rose window. Altogether this church must bereckoned one of the most curious specimens of that hybridarchitecture, fusing and appropriating different manners, whichperplexes the student in Central Italy. It seems strangely out ofplace in Tuscany. Yet, if what one reads of Toscanella, a villagebetween Viterbo and Orbetello, be true, there exist examples of asimilar fantastic Lombard style even lower down. 

The interior was most disastrously gutted and 'restored' in 1731:its open wooden roof masked by a false stucco vaulting. A fewrelics, spared by the eighteenth-century Vandals, show that thechurch was once rich in antique curiosities. A marble knight inarmour lies on his back, half hidden by the pulpit stairs. And inthe choir are half a dozen rarely beautiful panels of tarsia, executed in a bold style and on a large scale. One design--a manthrowing his face back, and singing, while he plays a mandoline;with long thick hair and fanciful beretta; behind him a fine line ofcypress and other trees--struck me as singularly lovely. In anotherI noticed a branch of peach, broad leaves and ripe fruit, not onlydrawn with remarkable grace and power, but so modelled as to standout with the roundness of reality. 

The whole drive of three hours back to Montepulciano was one longbanquet of inimitable distant views. Next morning, having to takefarewell of the place, we climbed to the Castello, or _arx_ of theold city! It is a ruined spot, outside the present walls, upon thesouthern slope, where there is now a farm, and a fair space of shortsheep-cropped turf, very green and grassy, and gemmed with littlepink geraniums as in England in such places. The walls of the oldcastle, overgrown with ivy, are broken down to their foundations. This may possibly have been done when Montepulciano was dismantledby the Sienese in 1232. At that date the Commune succumbed to itsmore powerful neighbours. The half of its inhabitants were murdered, and its fortifications were destroyed. Such episodes are commonenough in the history of that internecine struggle for existencebetween the Italian municipalities, which preceded the more famousstrife of Guelfs and Ghibellines. Stretched upon the smooth turf ofthe Castello, we bade adieu to the divine landscape bathed in lightand mountain air--to Thrasymene and Chiusi and Cetona; to Amiata, Pienza, and S. Quirico; to Montalcino and the mountains of Volterra;to Siena and Cortona; and, closer, to Monte Fallonica, Madonna diBiagio, the house-roofs and the Palazzo tower of Montepulciano. 

_PERUGIA_

Perugia is the empress of hill-set Italian cities. Southward fromher high-built battlements and church towers the eye can sweep acircuit of the Apennines unrivalled in its width. From cloudlikeRadicofani, above Siena in the west, to snow-capped Monte Catria, beneath whose summit Dante spent those saddest months of solitude in1313, the mountains curve continuously in lines of austere dignityand tempered sweetness. Assisi, Spoleto, Todi, Trevi, crown lesserheights within the range of vision. Here and there the glimpse ofdistant rivers lights a silver spark upon the plain. Those hillsconceal Lake Thrasymene; and there lies Orvieto, and Ancona there:while at our feet the Umbrian champaign, breaking away into thevalley of the Tiber, spreads in all the largeness of majesticallyconverging mountain-slopes. This is a landscape which can never loseits charm. Whether it be purple golden summer, or winter with sadtints of russet woods and faintly rosy snows, or spring attired intenderest green of new-fledged trees and budding flowers, the air isalways pure and light and finely tempered here. City gates, sombreas their own antiquity, frame vistas of the laughing fields. Terraces, flanked on either side by jutting masonry, cut clearvignettes of olive-hoary slopes, with cypress-shadowed farms inhollows of the hills. Each coign or point of vantage carries abastion or tower of Etruscan, Roman, mediæval architecture, tracingthe limits of the town upon its mountain plateau. Everywhere art andnature lie side by side in amity beneath a sky so pure and delicate, that from its limpid depth the spirit seems to drink new life. Whatair-tints of lilac, orange, and pale amethyst are shed upon thosevast ethereal hills and undulating plains! What wanderingcloud-shadows sail across this sea of olives and of vines, with hereand there a fleece of vapour or a column of blue smoke from charcoalburners on the mountain flank! To southward, far away beyond thosehills, is felt the presence of eternal Rome, not seen, but clearlyindicated by the hurrying of a hundred streams that swell the Tiber. 

In the neighbourhood of the town itself there is plenty to attractthe student of antiquities, or art, or history. He may trace thewalls of the Etruscan city, and explore the vaults where the dust ofthe Volumnii lies coffered in sarcophagi and urns. Mild faces ofgrave deities lean from the living tufa above those narrow alcoves, where the chisel-marks are still fresh, and where the vigilant lampsstill hang suspended from the roof by leaden chains. Or, in theMuseum, he may read on basreliefs and vases how gloomy and morosewere the superstitions of those obscure forerunners of majesticRome. The piazza offers one of the most perfect Gothic façades, inits Palazzo Pubblico, to be found in Italy. The flight of marblesteps is guarded from above by the bronze griffin of Perugia and theBaglioni, with the bronze lion of the Guelf faction, to which thetown was ever faithful. Upon their marble brackets they ramp in allthe lean ferocity of feudal heraldry, and from their claws hang downthe chains wrested in old warfare from some barricaded gateway ofSiena. Below is the fountain, on the many-sided curves of whichGiovanni Pisano sculptured, in quaint statuettes and basreliefs, allthe learning of the middle ages, from the Bible history down tofables of Æsop and allegories of the several months. Facing the samepiazza is the Sala del Cambio, a mediæval Bourse, with its tribunalfor the settlement of mercantile disputes, and its exquisite carvedwoodwork and frescoes, the masterpiece of Perugino's school. Hard byis the University, once crowded with native and foreign students, where the eloquence of Greek Demetrius in the first dawn of theRenaissance withdrew the gallants of Perugia--those slim youths withshocks of nut-brown hair beneath their tiny red caps, whose comelylegs, encased in tight-fitting hose of two different colours, lookedso strange to modern eyes upon the canvas of Signorelli--from theirdice and wine-cups, and amours and daggers, to grave studies in thelore of Greece and Rome. 

This piazza, the scene of all the bloodiest tragedies in Perugianannals, is closed at the north end by the Cathedral, with the openpulpit in its wall from which S. Bernardino of Siena preached peacein vain. The citizens wept to hear his words: a bonfire of vanitieswas lighted on the flags beside Pisano's fountain: foe kissed foe:and the same cowl of S. Francis was set in token of repentance onheads that long had schemed destruction, each for each. But a fewdays passed, and the penitents returned to cut each other's throat. Often and often have those steps of the Duomo run with blood ofBaglioni, Oddi, Arcipreti, and La Staffa. Once the whole church hadto be washed with wine and blessed anew before the rites ofChristianity could be resumed in its desecrated aisles. It was herethat within the space of two days, in 1500, the catafalque wasraised for the murdered Astorre, and for his traitorous cousinGrifonetto Baglioni. Here, too, if more ancient tradition does noterr, were stretched the corpses of twenty-seven members of the samegreat house at the end of one of their grim combats. 

No Italian city illustrates more forcibly than Perugia the violentcontrasts of the earlier Renaissance. This is perhaps its mostessential characteristic--that which constitutes its chief æstheticinterest. To many travellers the name of Perugia suggests at oncethe painter who, more than any other, gave expression to devoutemotions in consummate works of pietistic art. They remember howRaphael, when a boy, with Pinturicchio, Lo Spagna, and Adone Doni, in the workshop of Pietro Perugino, learned the secret of that styleto which he gave sublimity and freedom in his Madonnas di San Sisto, di Foligno, and del Cardellino. But the students of mediæval historyin detail know Perugia far better as the lion's lair of one of themost ferocious broods of heroic ruffians Italy can boast. To themthe name of Perugia suggests at once the great house of theBaglioni, who drenched Umbria with blood, and gave the broad fieldsof Assisi to the wolf, and who through six successive generationsbred captains for the armies of Venice, Florence, Naples, and theChurch. [1] That the trade of Perugino in religious pictures shouldhave been carried on in the city which shared the factions of theBaglioni--that Raphael should have been painting Pietas whileAstorre and Simonetto were being murdered by the beautiful youngGrifonetto--is a paradox of the purest water in the history ofcivilisation. 

 [1] Most of the references in this essay are made to the Perugian chronicles of Graziani, Matarazzo, Bontempi, and Frolliere, in the _Archivio Storico Italiano_, vol. Xvi. Parts 1 and 2. Ariodante Fabretti's _Biografie dei Capitani Venturieri dell' Umbria_ supply some details. 

The art of Perugino implied a large number of devout and wealthypatrons, a public not only capable of comprehending him, but alsoeager to restrict his great powers within the limits of purelydevotional delineation. The feuds and passions of the Baglioni, onthe other hand, implied a society in which egregious crimes onlyneeded success to be accounted glorious, where force, cruelty, andcynical craft reigned supreme, and where the animal instinctsattained gigantic proportions in the persons of splendid youngathletic despots. Even the names of these Baglioni, Astorre, Lavinia, Zenobia, Atalanta, Troilo, Ercole, Annibale, Ascanio, Penelope, Orazio, and so forth, clash with the sweet mild forms ofPerugino, whose very executioners are candidates for Paradise, andkill their martyrs with compunction. 

In Italy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries suchcontradictions subsisted in the same place and under the conditionsof a common culture, because there was no limit to the developmentof personality. Character was far more absolute then than now. Theforce of the modern world, working in the men of those times likepowerful wine, as yet displayed itself only as a spirit of freedomand expansion and revolt. The strait laces of mediæval Christianitywere loosened. The coercive action of public opinion had not yetmade itself dominant. That was an age of adolescence, in which menwere and dared to be _themselves_ for good or evil. Hypocrisy, except for some solid, well-defined, selfish purpose, was unknown:the deference to established canons of decorum which constitutesmore than half of our so-called morality, would have been scarcelyintelligible to an Italian. The outlines of individuality weretherefore strongly accentuated. Life itself was dramatic in itsincidents and motives, its catastrophes and contrasts. Theseconditions, eminently favourable to the growth of arts and thepursuit of science, were no less conducive to the hypertrophy ofpassions, and to the full development of ferocious and inhumanpersonalities. Every man did what seemed good in his own eyes. Farless restrained than we are by the verdict of his neighbours, butbound by faith more blind and fiercer superstitions, he displayedthe contradictions of his character in picturesque chiaroscuro. Whathe could was the limit set on what he would. Therefore, consideringthe infinite varieties of human temperaments, it was not merelypossible, but natural, for Pietro Perugino and Gianpaolo Baglioni tobe inhabitants at the same time of the selfsame city, and for thepious Atalanta to mourn the bloodshed and the treason of herAchillean son, the young and terrible Grifone. Here, in a word, inPerugia, beneath the fierce blaze of the Renaissance, were broughtinto splendid contrast both the martial violence and the religioussentiment of mediævalism, raised for a moment to the elevation offine art. 

Some of Perugino's qualities can be studied better in Perugia thanelsewhere. Of his purely religious pictures--altar-pieces of Madonnaand Saints, martyrdoms of S. Sebastian, Crucifixions, Ascensions, Annunciations, and Depositions from the Cross, --fine specimens areexhibited in nearly all the galleries of Europe. A large number ofhis works and of those of his scholars may be seen assembled in thePinacoteca of Perugia. Yet the student of his pietistic style findslittle here of novelty to notice. It is in the Sala del Cambio thatwe gain a really new conception of his faculty. Upon the decorationof that little hall he concentrated all his powers of invention. Thefrescoes of the Transfiguration and the Nativity, which face thegreat door, are the triumphs of his devotional manner. On otherpanels of the chamber he has portrayed the philosophers of Greeceand Rome, the kings and generals of antiquity, the prophets and thesibyls who announced Christ's advent. The roof is covered witharabesques of delicate design and dainty execution--labyrinths offanciful improvisation, in which flowers and foliage and human formsare woven into a harmonious framework for the medallions of theseven planets. The woodwork with which the hall is lined below thefrescoes, shows to what a point of perfection the art ofintarsiatura had been carried in his school. All these decorativemasterpieces are the product of one ingenuous style. Uninfluenced bythe Roman frescoes imitated by Raphael in his Loggie of the Vatican, they breathe the spirit of the earlier Renaissance, which createdfor itself free forms of grace and loveliness without a pattern, divining by its innate sense of beauty what the classic artists hadachieved. Take for an example the medallion of the planet Jupiter. The king of gods and men, hoary-headed and mild-eyed, is seated inhis chariot drawn by eagles: before him kneels Ganymede, afair-haired, exquisite, slim page, with floating mantle and ribbandsfluttering round his tight hose and jerkin. Such were thecup-bearers of Galeazzo Sforza and Gianpaolo Baglioni. Then comparethis fresco with the Jupiter in mosaic upon the cupola of the Chigichapel in S. Maria del Popolo at Rome. A new age of experience hadpassed over Raphael between his execution of Perugino's design inthe one and his conception of the other. He had seen the marbles ofthe Vatican, and had heard of Plato in the interval: the simplegraces of the earlier Renaissance were no longer enough for him; buthe must realise the thought of classic myths in his new manner. Inthe same way we may compare this Transfiguration with Raphael's lastpicture, these sibyls with those of S. Maria della Pace, these sageswith the School of Athens, these warriors with the Battle ofMaxentius. What is characteristic of the full-grown Raphael is hisuniversal comprehension, his royal faculty for representing past andpresent, near and distant, things the most diverse, by forms idealand yet distinctive. Each phase of the world's history and of humanactivity receives from him appropriate and elevated expression. Whatis characteristic of the frescoes in the Sala del Cambio, and indeedof the whole manner of Perugino, is that all subjects, sacred orsecular, allegorical or real, are conceived in the same spirit ofrestrained and well-bred piety. There is no attempt at historicalpropriety or dramatic realism. Grave, ascetic, melancholy faces ofsaints are put on bodies of kings, generals, sages, sibyls, anddeities alike. The same ribbands and studied draperies clothe andconnect all. The same conventional attitudes of meditativegracefulness are repeated in each group. Yet, the whole effect, ifsomewhat feeble and insipid, is harmonious and thoughtful. We seethat each part has proceeded from the same mind, in the same mood, and that the master's mind was no common one, the mood itself wasnoble. Good taste is everywhere apparent: the work throughout is amasterpiece of refined fancy. 

To Perugino the representative imagination was of less importancethan a certain delicate and adequately ideal mode of feeling andconceiving. The consequent charm of his style is that everything isthought out and rendered visible in one decorous key. The worst thatcan be said of it is that its suavity inclines to mawkishness, andthat its quietism borders upon sleepiness. We find it difficult notto accuse him of affectation. At the same time we are forced toallow that what he did, and what he refrained from doing, wasdetermined by a purpose. A fresco of the Adoration of the Shepherds, and a picture of S. Sebastian in the Pinacoteca, where the archer onthe right hand is drawn in a natural attitude with force and truth, show well enough what Perugino could do when he chose. 

The best way of explaining his conventionality, in which the supremepower of a master is always verging on the facile trick of amannerist, is to suppose that the people of Perugia and the Umbrianhighlands imposed on him this narrow mode of treatment. We maypresume that he was always receiving orders for pictures to beexecuted in his well-known manner. Celestial insipidity in art wasthe fashion in that Umbria which the Baglioni and the Popes laidwaste from time to time with fire and sword. [1]

 [1] It will not be forgotten by students of Italian history that Umbria was the cradle of the _Battuti_ or Flagellants, who overspread Italy in the fourteenth century, and to whose devotion were due the _Laude_, or popular hymns of the religious confraternities, which in course of time produced the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_ of fifteenth-century Florentine literature. Umbria, and especially Perugia and Assisi, seems to have been inventive in piety between 1200 and 1400. 

Therefore the painter who had made his reputation by placing devoutyoung faces upon twisted necks, with a back-ground of limpidtwilight and calm landscape, was forced by the fervour of hispatrons, and his own desire for money, to perpetuate piousprettinesses long after he had ceased to feel them. It is just thiswidespread popularity of a master unrivalled in one line ofdevotional sentimentalism which makes the contrast between Peruginoand the Baglioni family so striking. 

The Baglioni first came into notice during the wars they carried onwith the Oddi of Perugia in the fourteenth and fifteenthcenturies. [1] This was one of those duels to the death, like that ofthe Visconti with the Torrensi of Milan, on which the fate of somany Italian cities in the middle ages hung. The nobles fought; thetownsfolk assisted like a Greek chorus, sharing the passions of theactors, but contributing little to the catastrophe. The piazza wasthe theatre on which the tragedy was played. In this contest theBaglioni proved the stronger, and began to sway the state of Perugiaafter the irregular fashion of Italian despots. They had no legalright over the city, no hereditary magistracy, no title of princelyauthority. [2] The Church was reckoned the supreme administrator ofthe Perugian commonwealth. But in reality no man could set foot onthe Umbrian plain without permission from the Baglioni. They electedthe officers of state. The lives and goods of the citizens were attheir discretion. When a Papal legate showed his face, they made thetown too hot to hold him. One of Innocent VIII. 's nephews had beenmurdered by them. [3] Another cardinal had shut himself up in a box, and sneaked on mule-back like a bale of merchandise through thegates to escape their fury. It was in vain that from time to timethe people rose against them, massacring Pandolfo Baglioni on thepublic square in 1393, and joining with Ridolfo and Braccio of thedominant house to assassinate another Pandolfo with his son Niccoloin 1460. The more they were cut down, the more they flourished. Thewealth they derived from their lordships in the duchy of Spoleto andthe Umbrian hill-cities, and the treasures they accumulated in theservice of the Italian republics, made them omnipotent in theirnative town. There they built tall houses on the site which PaulIII. Chose afterwards for his _castello_, and which is now an openplace above the Porta San Carlo. From the balconies and turrets ofthese palaces, swarming with their _bravi_, they surveyed thesplendid land that felt their force--a land which, even inmidsummer, from sunrise to sunset keeps the light of day upon itsup-turned face. And from this eyrie they issued forth to prey uponthe plain, or to take their lust of love or blood within the citystreets. The Baglioni spent but short time in the amusements ofpeace. From father to son they were warriors, and we have records offew Italian houses, except perhaps the Malatesti of Rimini, whoequalled them in hardihood and fierceness. Especially were theynoted for the remorseless _vendette_ which they carried on amongthemselves, cousin tracking cousin to death with the ferocity andcraft of sleuthhounds. Had they restrained these fratricidalpassions, they might, perhaps, by following some common policy, likethat of the Medici in Florence or the Bentivogli in Bologna, havesuccessfully resisted the Papal authority and secured dynasticsovereignty. 

 [1] The Baglioni persecuted their rivals with persistent fury to the very last. Matarazzo tells how Morgante Baglioni gave a death-wound to his nephew, the young Carlo de li Oddi, in 1501: 'Dielli una ferita nella formosa faccia: el quale era in aspetto vago e bello giovane d' anni 23 o 24, _al quale uscivano e bionde tresse sotto la bella armadura_. ' The same night his kinsman Pompeo was murdered in prison with this last lament upon his lips: 'O infelice casa degli Oddi, quale aveste tanta, fama di conduttieri, capitanie, cavaliere, speron d' oro, protonotarie, e abbate; et in uno solo tempo aveste homine quarantadue; e oggie, per me quale son ultimo, se asconde el nome de la magnifica e famosa casa degli Oddi, che mai al mondo non serà píu nominata' (p. 175). 

 [2] The Baglioni were lords of Spello, Bettona, Montalera, and other Umbrian burghs, but never of Perugia. Perugia had a civic constitution similar to that of Florence and other Guelf towns under the protection of the Holy See. The power of the eminent house was based only on wealth and prestige. 

 [3] See Matarazzo, p. 38. It is here that he relates the covert threat addressed by Guido Baglioni to Alexander VI. , who was seeking to inveigle him into his clutches. 

It is not until 1495 that the history of the Baglioni becomesdramatic, possibly because till then they lacked the pen ofMatarazzo. [1] But from this year forward to their final extinction, every detail of their doings has a picturesque and awful interest. Domestic furies, like the revel descried by Cassandra above thepalace of Mycenæ, seem to take possession of the fated house; andthe doom which has fallen on them is worked out with pitilessexactitude to the last generation. In 1495 the heads of the CasaBaglioni were two brothers, Guido and Ridolfo, who had a numerousprogeny of heroic sons. From Guido sprang Astorre, Adriano, calledfor his great strength Morgante, [2] Gismondo, Marcantonio, andGentile. Ridolfo owned Troilo, Gianpaolo, and Simonetto. The firstglimpse we get of these young athletes in Matarazzo's chronicle ison the occasion of a sudden assault upon Perugia, made by the Oddiand the exiles of their faction in September 1495. The foes of theBaglioni entered the gates, and began breaking the iron chains, _serragli_, which barred the streets against advancing cavalry. Noneof the noble house were on the alert except young Simonetto, a ladof eighteen, fierce and cruel, who had not yet begun to shave hischin. [3] In spite of all dissuasion, he rushed forth alone, bareheaded, in his shirt, with a sword in his right hand and abuckler on his arm, and fought against a squadron. There at thebarrier of the piazza he kept his foes at bay, smiting men-at-armsto the ground with the sweep of his tremendous sword, and receivingon his gentle body twenty-two cruel wounds. While thus at fearfulodds, the noble Astorre mounted his charger and joined him. Upon hishelmet flashed the falcon of the Baglioni with the dragon's tailthat swept behind. Bidding Simonetto tend his wounds, he in his turnheld the square. 

 [1] His chronicle is a masterpiece of naïve, unstudied narrative. Few documents are so important for the student of the sixteenth century in Italy. Whether it be really the work of Matarazzo or Maturanzio, the distinguished humanist, is more than doubtful. The writer seems to me as yet unspoiled by classic studies and the pedantries of imitation. 

 [2] This name, it may be incidentally mentioned, proves the wide-spread popularity of Pulci's poem, the _Morgante Maggiore_. 

 [3] 'Era costui al presente di anni 18 o 19; ancora non se radeva barba; e mostrava tanta forza e tanto ardire, e era tanto adatto nel fatto d' arme, che era gran maraveglia; e iostrava cum tanta gintilezza e gagliardia, che homo del mondo non l' aria mai creso; et aria dato con la punta de la lancia in nel fondo d' uno bicchiere da la mattina a la sera, ' &c. (p. 50). 

Listen to Matarazzo's description of the scene; it is as good as anypiece of the 'Mort Arthur:'--'According to the report of one whotold me what he had seen with his own eyes, never did anvil take somany blows as he upon his person and his steed; and they all keptstriking at his lordship in such crowds that the one prevented theother. And so many lances, partisans, and crossbow quarries, andother weapons, made upon his body a most mighty din, that aboveevery other noise and shout was heard the thud of those greatstrokes. But he, like one who had the mastery of war, set hischarger where the press was thickest, jostling now one, and nowanother; so that he ever kept at least ten men of his foes stretchedon the ground beneath his horse's hoofs; which horse was a mostfierce beast, and gave his enemies what trouble he best could. Andnow that gentle lord was all fordone with sweat and toil, he and hischarger; and so weary were they that scarcely could they any longerbreathe. '

Soon after, the Baglioni mustered in force. One by one their heroesrushed from the palaces. The enemy were driven back with slaughter;and a war ensued, which made the fair land between Assisi andPerugia a wilderness for many months. It must not be forgotten that, at the time of these great feats of Simonetto and Astorre, youngRaphael was painting in the studio of Perugino. What the whole citywitnessed with astonishment and admiration, he, the keenly sensitiveartist-boy, treasured in his memory. Therefore in the S. George ofthe Louvre, and in the mounted horseman trampling upon Heliodorus inthe Stanze of the Vatican, victorious Astorre lives for ever, immortalised in all his splendour by the painter's art. The grinninggriffin on the helmet, the resistless frown upon the forehead of thebeardless knight, the terrible right arm, and the ferocioussteed, --all are there as Raphael saw and wrote them on his brain. One characteristic of the Baglioni, as might be plentifullyillustrated from their annalist, was their eminent beauty, whichinspired beholders with an enthusiasm and a love they were far fromdeserving by their virtues. It is this, in combination with theirpersonal heroism, which gives a peculiarly dramatic interest totheir doings, and makes the chronicle of Matarazzo more fascinatingthan a novel. He seems unable to write about them without using thelanguage of an adoring lover. 

In the affair of 1495 the Baglioni were at amity among themselves. When they next appear upon the scene, they are engaged in deadlyfeud. Cousin has set his hand to the throat of cousin, and the twoheroes of the piazza are destined to be slain by foulest treacheryof their own kin. It must be premised that besides the sons of Guidoand Ridolfo already named, the great house counted among its mostdistinguished members a young Grifone, or Grifonetto, the son ofGrifone and Atalanta Baglioni. Both his father and grandfather haddied violent deaths in the prime of their youth; Galeotto, thefather of Atalanta, by poison, and Grifone by the knife at PonteRicciolo in 1477. Atalanta was left a young widow with one only son, this Grifonetto, whom Matarazzo calls 'un altro Ganimede, ' and whocombined the wealth of two chief branches of the Baglioni. In 1500, when the events about to be related took place, he was quite ayouth. Brave, rich, handsome, and married to a young wife, ZenobiaSforza, he was the admiration of Perugia. He and his wife loved eachother dearly; and how, indeed, could it be otherwise, since 'l' unoe l' altro sembravano doi angioli di Paradiso?' At the same time hehad fallen into the hands of bad and desperate counsellors. Abastard of the house, Filippo da Braccio, his half-uncle, was alwaysat his side, instructing him not only in the accomplishments ofchivalry, but also in wild ways that brought his name intodisrepute. Another of his familiars was Carlo Barciglia Baglioni, anunquiet spirit, who longed for more power than his poverty andcomparative obscurity allowed. With them associated Jeronimo dellaPenna, a veritable ruffian, contaminated from his earliest youthwith every form of lust and violence, and capable of any crime. [1]These three companions, instigated partly by the Lord of Camerinoand partly by their own cupidity, conceived a scheme for massacringthe families of Guido and Ridolfo at one blow. As a consequence ofthis wholesale murder, Perugia would be at their discretion. Seeingof what use Grifonetto by his wealth and name might be to them, theydid all they could to persuade him to join their conjuration. Itwould appear that the bait first offered him was the sovereignty ofthe city, but that he was at last gained over by being made tobelieve that his wife Zenobia had carried on an intrigue withGianpaolo Baglioni. The dissolute morals of the family gaveplausibility to an infernal trick which worked upon the jealousy ofGrifonetto. Thirsting for revenge, he consented to the scheme. Theconspirators were further fortified by the accession of Jeronimodella Staffa, and three members of the House of Corgna. It isnoticeable that out of the whole number only two, Bernardo da Corgnaand Filippo da Braccio, were above the age of thirty. Of the rest, few had reached twenty-five. At so early an age were the men ofthose times adepts in violence and treason. The execution of theplot was fixed for the wedding festivities of Astorre Baglioni withLavinia, the daughter of Giovanni Colonna and Giustina Orsini. Atthat time the whole Baglioni family were to be assembled in Perugia, with the single exception of Marcantonio, who was taking baths atNaples for his health. It was known that the members of the noblehouse, nearly all of them condottieri by trade, and eminent fortheir great strength and skill in arms, took few precautions fortheir safety. They occupied several houses close together betweenthe Porta San Carlo and the Porta Eburnea, set no regular guard overtheir sleeping chambers, and trusted to their personal bravery, andto the fidelity of their attendants. [2] It was thought that theymight be assassinated in their beds. The wedding festivities beganupon the 28th of July, and great is the particularity with whichMatarazzo describes the doings of each successive day--processions, jousts, triumphal arches, banquets, balls, and pageants. The nightof the 14th of August was finally set apart for the consummation of_el gran tradimento_: it is thus that Matarazzo always alludes tothe crime of Grifonetto with a solemnity of reiteration that is mostimpressive. A heavy stone let fall into the courtyard of GuidoBaglioni's palace was to be the signal: each conspirator was then torun to the sleeping chamber of his appointed prey. Two of theprincipals and fifteen bravi were told off to each victim: rams andcrowbars were prepared to force the doors, if needful. All happenedas had been anticipated. The crash of the falling stone was heard. The conspirators rushed to the scene of operations. Astorre, who wassleeping in the house of his traitorous cousin Grifonetto, was slainin the arms of his young bride, crying, as he vainly struggled, 'Misero Astorre che more come poltrone!' Simonetto, who lay thatnight with a lad called Paolo he greatly loved, flew to arms, exclaiming to his brother, 'Non dubitare Gismondo, mio fratello!' Hetoo was soon despatched, together with his bedfellow. Filippo daBraccio, after killing him, tore from a great wound in his side thestill quivering heart, into which he drove his teeth with savagefury. Old Guido died groaning, 'Ora è gionto il ponto mio;' andGismondo's throat was cut while he lay holding back his face that hemight be spared the sight of his own massacre. The corpses ofAstorre and Simonetto were stripped and thrown out naked into thestreets. Men gathered round and marvelled to see such heroic forms, with faces so proud and fierce even in death. In especial theforeign students likened them to ancient Romans. [3] But on theirfingers were rings, and these the ruffians of the place would fainhave hacked off with their knives. From this indignity the noblelimbs were spared; then the dead Baglioni were hurriedly consignedto an unhonoured tomb. Meanwhile the rest of the intended victimsmanaged to escape. Gianpaolo, assailed by Grifonetto andGianfrancesco della Corgna, took refuge with his squire andbedfellow, Maraglia, upon a staircase leading from his room. Whilethe squire held the passage with his pike against the foe, Gianpaoloeffected his flight over neighbouring house-roofs. He crept into theattic of some foreign students, who, trembling with terror, gave himfood and shelter, clad him in a scholar's gown, and helped him tofly in this disguise from the gates at dawn. He then joined hisbrother Troilo at Marsciano, whence he returned without delay topunish the traitors. At the same time Grifonetto's mother, Atalanta, taking with her his wife Zenobia and the two young sons ofGianpaolo, Malatesta and Orazio, afterwards so celebrated in Italianhistory for their great feats of arms and their crimes, fled to hercountry-house at Landona. Grifonetto in vain sought to see herthere. She drove him from her presence with curses for the treasonand the fratricide that he had planned. It is very characteristic ofthese wild natures, framed of fierce instincts and discordantpassions, that his mother's curse weighed like lead upon theunfortunate young man. Next day, when Gianpaolo returned to try theluck of arms, Grifonetto, deserted by the companions of his crimeand paralysed by the sense of his guilt, went out alone to meet himon the public place. The semi-failure of their scheme had terrifiedthe conspirators: the horrors of that night of blood unnerved them. All had fled except the next victim of the feud. Putting his swordto the youth's throat, Gianpaolo looked into his eyes and said, 'Artthou here, Grifonetto? Go with God's peace: I will not slay thee, nor plunge my hand in my own blood, as thou hast done in thine. 'Then he turned and left the lad to be hacked in pieces by his guard. The untranslatable words which Matarazzo uses to describe his deathare touching from the strong impression they convey of Grifonetto'sgoodliness: 'Qui ebbe sua signoria sopra sua nobile persona tanteferite che suoi membra leggiadre stese in terra. '[4] None but Greeksfelt the charm of personal beauty thus. But while Grifonetto wasbreathing out his life upon the pavement of the piazza, his motherAtalanta and his wife Zenobia came to greet him through theawe-struck city. As they approached, all men fell aside and slunkaway before their grief. None would seem to have had a share inGrifonetto's murder. Then Atalanta knelt by her dying son, andceased from wailing, and prayed and exhorted him to pardon those whohad caused his death. It appears that Grifonetto was too weak tospeak, but that he made a signal of assent, and received hismother's blessing at the last: 'E allora porse el nobil giovenettola dextra mano a la sua giovenile matre strengendo de sua matre labianca mano; e poi incontinente spirò l' anima dal formoso corpo, epassò cum infinite benedizioni de sua matre in cambio de lamaledictione che prima li aveva date. '[5] Here again the style ofMatarazzo, tender and full of tears, conveys the keenest sense ofthe pathos of beauty and of youth in death and sorrow. He hasforgotten _el gran tradimento_. He only remembers how comelyGrifonetto was, how noble, how frank and spirited, how strong inwar, how sprightly in his pleasures and his loves. And he sees thestill young mother, delicate and nobly born, leaning over theathletic body of her bleeding son. This scene, which is perhaps agenuine instance of what we may call the neo-Hellenism of theRenaissance, finds its parallel in the 'Phoenissæ' of Euripides. Jocasta and Antigone have gone forth to the battlefield and foundthe brothers Polynices and Eteocles drenched in blood:--

 From his chest Heaving a heavy breath, King Eteocles heard His mother, and stretched forth a cold damp hand On hers, and nothing said, but with his eyes Spake to her by his tears, showing kind thoughts In symbols. 

It was Atalanta, we may remember, who commissioned Raphael to paintthe so-called Borghese Entombment. Did she perhaps feel, as shewithdrew from the piazza, soaking with young Grifonetto's blood, [6]that she too had some portion in the sorrow of that mother who hadwept for Christ? The memory of the dreadful morning must haveremained with her through life, and long communion with our Lady ofSorrows may have sanctified the grief that had so bitter and soshameful a root of sin. 

 [1] Matarazzo's description of the ruffians who surrounded Grifonetto (pp. 104, 105, 113) would suit Webster's Flamineo or Bosola. In one place he likens Filippo to Achitophel and Grifonetto to Absalom. Villano Villani, quoted by Fabretti (vol. Iii. P. 125), relates the street adventures of this clique. It is a curious picture of the pranks of an Italian princeling in the fifteenth century. 

 [2] Jacobo Antiquari, the secretary of Lodovico Sforza, in a curious letter, which gives an account of the massacre, says that he had often reproved the Baglioni for 'sleeping in their beds without any guard or watch, so that they might easily be overcome by enemies. ' [3] 'Quelli che li vidino, e maxime li forastiere studiante assimigliavano el magnifico Messer Astorre così morto ad un antico Romano, perchè prima era unanissimo; tanto sua figura era degnia e magnia, ' &c. This is a touch exquisitely illustrative of the Renaissance enthusiasm for classic culture. 

 [4] Here his lordship received upon his noble person so many wounds that he stretched his graceful limbs upon the earth. 

 [5] 'And then the noble stripling stretched his right hand to his youthful mother, pressing the white hand of his mother; and afterwards forthwith he breathed his soul forth from his beauteous body, and died with numberless blessings of his mother instead of the curses she had given him before. '

 [6] See Matarazzo, p. 134, for this detail. 

After the death of Grifonetto, and the flight of the conspirators, Gianpaolo took possession of Perugia. All who were suspected ofcomplicity in the treason were massacred upon the piazza and in theCathedral. At the expense of more than a hundred murders, the chiefof the Baglioni found himself master of the city on the 17th ofJuly. First he caused the Cathedral to be washed with wine andreconsecrated. Then he decorated the Palazzo with the heads of thetraitors and with their portraits in fresco, painted hanging headdownwards, as was the fashion in Italy. [1] Next he establishedhimself in what remained of the palaces of his kindred, hanging thesaloons with black, and arraying his retainers in the deepestmourning. Sad indeed was now the aspect of Perugia. Helpless andcomparatively uninterested, the citizens had been spectators ofthese bloody broils. They were now bound to share the desolation oftheir masters. Matarazzo's description of the mournful palace andthe silent town, and of the return of Marcantonio from Naples, presents a picture striking for its vividness. [2] In the true styleof the Baglioni, Marcantonio sought to vent his sorrow not so muchin tears as by new violence. He prepared and lighted torches, meaning to burn the whole quarter of Sant' Angelo; and from thisdesign he was with difficulty dissuaded by his brother. To such madfreaks of rage and passion were the inhabitants of a mediæval townin Italy exposed! They make us understand the _ordinanze digiustizia_, by which to be a noble was a crime in Florence. 

 [1] See Varchi (ed. Lemonnier, 1857), vol. Ii. P. 265, vol. Iii. Pp. 224, 652, and Corio (Venice, 1554), p. 326, for instances of _dipinti per traditori_. 

 [2] P. 142. 'Pareva ogni cosa oscura e lacrimosa: tutte loro servitore piangevano; et le camere de lo resto de li magnifici Baglioni, e sale, e ognie cosa erano tutte intorno cum pagnie negre. E per la città non era più alcuno che sonasse nè cantasse; e poco si rideva, ' &c. 

From this time forward the whole history of the Baglioni family isone of crime and bloodshed. A curse had fallen on the house, and tothe last of its members the penalty was paid. Gianpaolo himselfacquired the highest reputation throughout Italy for his courage andsagacity both as a general and a governor. [1] It was he who heldJulius II. At his discretion in 1506, and was sneered at byMachiavelli for not consummating his enormities by killing thewarlike Pope. [2] He again, after joining the diet of La Magioneagainst Cesare Borgia, escaped by his acumen the massacre ofSinigaglia, which overthrew the other conspirators. But his name wasno less famous for unbridled lust and deeds of violence. He boastedthat his son Constantino was a true Baglioni, since he was hissister's child. He once told Machiavelli that he had it in his mindto murder four citizens of Perugia, his enemies. He looked calmly onwhile his kinsmen Eusebio and Taddeo Baglioni, who had been accusedof treason, were hewn to pieces by his guard. His wife, Ippolita de'Conti, was poignarded in her Roman farm; on hearing the news, heordered a festival in which he was engaged to proceed with redoubledmerriment. [3] At last the time came for him to die by fraud andviolence. Leo X. , anxious to remove so powerful a rival fromPerugia, lured him in 1520 to Rome under the false protection of apapal safe-conduct. After a short imprisonment he had him beheadedin the Castle of S. Angelo. It was thought that Gentile, his firstcousin, sometime Bishop of Orvieto, but afterwards the father of twosons in wedlock with Giulia Vitelli--such was the discipline of theChurch at this epoch--had contributed to the capture of Gianpaolo, and had exulted in his execution. [4] If so, he paid dear for histreachery; for Orazio Baglioni, the second son of Gianpaolo andcaptain of the Church under Clement VII. , had him murdered in 1527, together with his two nephews Fileno and Annibale. [5] This Oraziowas one of the most bloodthirsty of the whole brood. Not satisfiedwith the assassination of Gentile, he stabbed Galeotto, the son ofGrifonetto, with his own hand in the same year. [6] Afterwards hedied in the kingdom of Naples while leading the Black Bands in thedisastrous war which followed the sack of Rome. He left no son. Malatesta, his elder brother, became one of the most celebratedgenerals of the age, holding the batons of the Venetian andFlorentine republics, and managing to maintain his ascendency inPerugia in spite of the persistent opposition of successive popes. But his name is best known in history for one of the greatest publiccrimes--a crime which must be ranked with that of Marshal Bazaine. Intrusted with the defence of Florence during the siege of 1530, hesold the city to his enemy, Pope Clement, receiving for the price ofthis infamy certain privileges and immunities which fortified hishold upon Perugia for a season. All Italy was ringing with the greatdeeds of the Florentines, who for the sake of their libertytransformed themselves from merchants into soldiers, and withstoodthe united powers of Pope and Emperor alone. Meanwhile Malatesta, whose trade was war, and who was being largely paid for his servicesby the beleaguered city, contrived by means of diplomaticprocrastination, secret communication with the enemy, and all thearts that could intimidate an army of recruits, to push affairs to apoint at which Florence was forced to capitulate without inflictingthe last desperate glorious blow she longed to deal her enemies. Theuniversal voice of Italy condemned him. When Matteo Dandolo, theDoge of Venice, heard what he had done, he cried before the Pregadiin conclave, 'He has sold that people and that city, and the bloodof those poor citizens ounce by ounce, and has donned the cap of thebiggest traitor in the world. '[7] Consumed with shame, corroded byan infamous disease, and mistrustful of Clement, to whom he had soldhis honour, Malatesta retired to Perugia, and died in 1531. He leftone son, Ridolfo, who was unable to maintain himself in the lordshipof his native city. After killing the Papal legate, CinzioFilonardi, in 1534, he was dislodged four years afterwards, whenPaul III. Took final possession of the place as an appanage of theChurch, razed the houses of the Baglioni to the ground, and builtupon their site the Rocca Paolina. This fortress bore aninscription: 'Ad coercendam Perusinorum audaciam. ' The city wasgiven over to the rapacity of the abominable Pier Luigi Farnese, andso bad was this tyranny of priests and bastards, that, strange tosay, the Perugians regretted the troublous times of the Baglioni. Malatesta in dying had exclaimed, 'Help me, if you can; since afterme you will be set to draw the cart like oxen. ' Frollieri, relatingthe speech, adds, 'And this has been fulfilled to the last letter, for all have borne not only the yoke but the burden and the goad. 'Ridolfo Baglioni and his cousin Braccio, the eldest son ofGrifonetto, were both captains of Florence. The one died in battlein 1554, the other in 1559. Thus ended the illustrious family. Theyare now represented by descendants from females, and by contadiniwho preserve their name and boast a pedigree of which they have norecords. 

 [1] See Frollieri, p. 437, for a very curious account of his character. 

 [2] Fabretti (vol. Iii. Pp. 193-202. And notes) discusses this circumstance in detail. Machiavelli's critique runs thus (_Discorsi_, lib. I. Cap. 27): 'Nè si poteva credere che si fosse astenuto o per bontà, o per coscienza che lo ritenesse; perchè in un petto d'un uomo facinoroso, che si teneva la sorella, ch' aveva morti i cugini e i nipotí per regnare, non poteva scendere alcuno pietoso rispetto: ma si conchiuse che gli uomini non sanno essere onorevolmente tristi, o perfettamente buoni, ' &c. 

 [3] See Fabretti, vol. Iii. P. 230. He is an authority for the details of Gianpaolo's life. The circumstance alluded to above justifies the terrible opening scene in Shelley's tragedy, _The Cenci_. 

 [4] Fabretti, vol. Iii. P. 230, vol. Iv. P. 10. 

 [5] See Varchi, _Storie Florentine_, vol. I. P. 224. 

 [6] Ibid. 

 [7] Fabretti, vol. Iv. P. 206. 

The history of the Baglioni needs no commentary. They were not worsethan other Italian nobles, who by their passions and their partiesdestroyed the peace of the city they infested. It is with an oddmixture of admiration and discontent that the chroniclers of Perugiaallude to their ascendency. Matarazzo, who certainly cannot beaccused of hostility to the great house, describes the miseries ofhis country under their bad government in piteous terms:[1] 'As Iwish not to swerve from the pure truth, I say that from the day theOddi were expelled, our city went from bad to worse. All the youngmen followed the trade of arms. Their lives were disorderly; andevery day divers excesses were divulged, and the city had lost allreason and justice. Every man administered right unto himself, _propriâ autoritate et manu regiâ_. Meanwhile the Pope sent manylegates, if so be the city could be brought to order: but all whocame returned in dread of being hewn in pieces; for they threatenedto throw some from the windows of the palace, so that no cardinal orother legate durst approach Perugia, unless he were a friend of theBaglioni. And the city was brought to such misery, that the mostwrongous men were most prized; and those who had slain two or threemen walked as they listed through the palace, and went with sword orpoignard to speak to the podestà and other magistrates. Moreover, every man of worth was down-trodden by bravi whom the noblesfavoured; nor could a citizen call his property his own. The noblesrobbed first one and then another of goods and land. All officeswere sold or else suppressed; and taxes and extortions were sogrievous that every one cried out. And if a man were in prison forhis head, he had no reason to fear death, provided he had someinterest with a noble. ' Yet the same Matarazzo in another placefinds it in his heart to say:[2] 'Though the city suffered greatpains for these nobles, yet the illustrious house of Baglionibrought her honour throughout Italy, by reason of the great dignityand splendour of that house, and of their pomp and name. Whereforethrough them our city was often set above the rest, and notablyabove the commonwealths of Florence and Siena. ' Pride feels no pain. The gratified vanity of the Perugian burgher, proud to see his townpreferred before its neighbours, blinds the annalist to all theviolence and villany of the magnificent Casa Baglioni. So strong wasthe _esprit de ville_ which through successive centuries and amidall vicissitudes of politics divided the Italians againstthemselves, and proved an insuperable obstacle to unity. 

 [1] Pp. 102, 103. 

 [2] P. 139. 

After reading the chronicle of Matarazzo at Perugia through one winterday, I left the inn and walked at sunset to the blood-bedabbledcathedral square; for still those steps and pavements to my strainedimagination seemed reeking with the outpoured blood of Baglioni; and onthe ragged stonework of San Lorenzo red patches slanted from the dyingday. Then by one of those strange freaks of the brain to which we areall subject, for a moment I lost sight of untidy Gothic façades andgaunt unfinished church walls; and as I walked, I was in the Close ofSalisbury on a perfumed summer afternoon. The drowsy scent oflime-flowers and mignonette, the cawing of elm-cradled rooks, the hum ofbees above, the velvet touch of smooth-shorn grass, and the breathlessshadow of motionless green boughs made up one potent and absorbing moodof the charmed senses. Far overhead soared the calm grey spire into theinfinite air, and the perfection of accomplished beauty slept beneath inthose long lines of nave and choir and transepts. It was but a momentarydream, a thought that burned itself upon a fancy overtaxed by passionateimages. Once more the puppet-scene of the brain was shifted; once more Isaw the bleak bare flags of the Perugian piazza, the forlorn front ofthe Duomo, the bronze griffin, and Pisano's fountain, with here andthere a flake of that tumultuous fire which the Italian sunset sheds. Who shall adequately compare the two pictures? Which shall weprefer--the Close of Salisbury, with its sleepy bells and cushioned easeof immemorial Deans--or this poor threadbare passion of Perugia, whereevery stone is stained with blood, and where genius in painters andscholars and prophets and ecstatic lovers has throbbed itself away tonothingness? It would be foolish to seek an answer to this question, idle to institute a comparison, for instance, between those tall youngmen with their broad winter cloaks who remind me of Grifonetto, and thevergers pottering in search of shillings along the gravel paths ofSalisbury. It is more rational, perhaps, to reflect of what strangestuff our souls are made in this age of the world, when æstheticpleasures, full, genuine, and satisfying, can be communicated alike byPerugia with its fascination of a dead irrevocable dramatic past, andSalisbury, which finds the artistic climax of its English comfort in the'Angel in the House. ' From Matarazzo, smitten with a Greek love for thebeautiful Grifonetto, to Mr. Patmore, is a wide step. 

_ORVIETO_

On the road from Siena to Rome, halfway between Ficulle and Viterbo, is the town of Orvieto. Travellers often pass it in the night-time. Few stop there, for the place is old and dirty, and its inns aresaid to be indifferent. But none who see it even from a distance canfail to be struck with its imposing aspect, as it rises from thelevel plain upon that mass of rock among the Apennines. 

Orvieto is built upon the first of those huge volcanic blocks whichare found like fossils embedded in the more recent geologicalformations of Central Italy, and which stretch in an irregular butunbroken line to the Campagna of Rome. Many of them, like that onwhich Civita Castellana is perched, are surrounded by rifts andchasms and ravines and fosses, strangely furrowed and twisted by theforce of fiery convulsions. But their advanced guard, Orvieto, stands up definite and solid, an almost perfect cube, with wallsprecipitous to north and south and east, but slightly sloping to thewestward. At its foot rolls the Paglia, one of those barren streamswhich swell in winter with the snows and rains of the Apennines, butwhich in summer-time shrink up, and leave bare beds of sand andpestilential canebrakes to stretch irregularly round their dwindledwaters. 

The weary flatness and utter desolation of this valley present asinister contrast to the broad line of the Apennines, swelling tieron tier, from their oak-girdled basements set with villages andtowers, up to the snow and cloud that crown their topmost crags. Thetime to see this landscape is at sunrise; and the traveller shouldtake his stand upon the rising ground over which the Roman road iscarried from the town--the point, in fact, which Turner has selectedfor his vague and misty sketch of Orvieto in our Gallery. Thence hewill command the whole space of the plain, the Apennines, and theriver creeping in a straight line at the base; while the sun, risingto his right, will slant along the mountain flanks, and gild theleaden stream, and flood the castled crags of Orvieto with a haze oflight. From the centre of this glory stand out in bold relief oldbastions built upon the solid tufa, vast gaping gateways black inshadow, towers of churches shooting up above a medley ofdeep-corniced tall Italian houses, and, amid them all, the marblefront of the Cathedral, calm and solemn in its unfamiliar Gothicstate. Down to the valley from these heights there is a sudden fall;and we wonder how the few spare olive-trees that grow there cansupport existence on the steep slope of the cliff. 

Our mind, in looking at this landscape, is carried by the force ofold association to Jerusalem. We could fancy ourselves to bestanding on Mount Olivet, with the valley of Jehoshaphat between usand the Sacred City. As we approach the town, the difficulty ofscaling its crags seems insurmountable. The road, though carriedskilfully along each easy slope or ledge of quarried rock, stillwinds so much that nearly an hour is spent in the ascent. Those whocan walk should take a footpath, and enter Orvieto by the mediævalroad, up which many a Pope, flying from rebellious subjects orforeign enemies, has hurried on his mule. [1]

 [1] Clement VII. , for example, escaped from Rome disguised as a gardener after the sack in 1527, and, to quote the words of Varchi (St. Flor. , v. 17), 'Entrò agli otto di dicembre a due ore di notte in Orvieto, terra di sito fortissimo, per lo essere ella sopra uno scoglio pieno di tufi posta, d' ogni intorno scosceso e dirupato, ' &c. 

To unaccustomed eyes there is something forbidding and terribleabout the dark and cindery appearance of volcanic tufa. Where it isbroken, the hard and gritty edges leave little space for vegetation;while at intervals the surface spreads so smooth and straight thatone might take it for solid masonry erected by the architect ofPandemonium. Rubbish and shattered bits of earthenware and ashes, thrown from the city walls, cling to every ledge and encumber thebroken pavement of the footway. Then as we rise, the castlebattlements above appear more menacing, toppling upon the rough edgeof the crag, and guarding each turn of the road with jealousloopholes or beetle-browed machicolations, until at last the gatewayand portcullis are in view. 

On first entering Orvieto, one's heart fails to find so terrible adesolation, so squalid a solitude, and so vast a difference betweenthe present and the past, between the beauty of surrounding natureand the misery of this home of men. A long space of unoccupiedground intervenes between the walls and the hovels which skirt themodern town. This, in the times of its splendour, may have servedfor oliveyards, vineyards, and pasturage, in case of siege. Thereare still some faint traces of dead gardens left upon its aridwilderness, among the ruins of a castellated palace, decorated withthe cross-keys and tiara of an unremembered pope. But now it lies amere tract of scorched grass, insufferably hot and dry and sandy, intersected by dirty paths, and covered with the loathliest offal ofa foul Italian town. Should you cross this ground at mid-day, underthe blinding sun, when no living thing, except perhaps somepoisonous reptile, is about, you would declare that Orvieto had beenstricken for its sins by Heaven. Your mind would dwell mechanicallyon all that you have read of Papal crimes, of fratricidal wars, ofPagan abominations in the high places of the Church, of tempestuouspassions and refined iniquity--of everything, in fact, which rendersItaly of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance dark and ominous amidthe splendours of her art and civilisation. This is the naturalresult; this shrunken and squalid old age of poverty andself-abandonment is the end of that strong, prodigal, and viciousyouth. Who shall restore vigour to these dead bones? we cry. IfItaly is to live again, she must quit her ruined palace towers tobuild fresh dwellings elsewhere. Filth, lust, rapacity, treason, godlessness, and violence have made their habitation here; ghostshaunt these ruins; these streets still smell of blood and echo tothe cries of injured innocence; life cannot be pure, or calm, orhealthy, where this curse has settled. 

Occupied with such reflections, we reach the streets of Orvieto. They are not very different from those of most Italian villages, except that there is little gaiety about them. Like Assisi or Siena, Orvieto is too large for its population, and merriment flows betterfrom close crowding than from spacious accommodation. Very dark, andbig, and dirty, and deserted, is the judgment we pronounce upon thehouses; very filthy and malodorous each passage; very long thiscentral street; very few and sad and sullen the inhabitants; andwhere, we wonder, is the promised inn? In search of this one walksnearly through the city, until one enters the Piazza, where there ismore liveliness. Here cafés may be found; soldiers, strong andsturdy, from the north, lounge at the corners; the shops presentmore show; and a huge hotel, not bad for such a place, andappropriately dedicated to the Belle Arti, standing in a courtyardof its own, receives the traveller weary with his climb. As soon ashe has taken rooms, his first desire is to go forth and visit theCathedral. 

The great Duomo was erected at the end of the thirteenth century tocommemorate the Miracle of Bolsena. The value of this miracleconsisted in its establishing unmistakably the truth oftransubstantiation. The story runs that a young Bohemian priest whodoubted the dogma was performing the office of the mass in a churchat Bolsena, when, at the moment of consecration, blood issued fromfive gashes in the wafer, which resembled the five wounds of Christ. The fact was evident to all the worshippers, who saw blood fallingon the linen of the altar; and the young priest no longer doubted, but confessed the miracle, and journeyed straightway with theevidence thereof to Pope Urban IV. The Pope, who was then atOrvieto, came out with all his retinue to meet the convert and dohonour to the magic-working relics. The circumstances of thismiracle are well known to students of art through Raphael'scelebrated fresco in the Stanze of the Vatican. And it will beremembered by the readers of ecclesiastical history that Urban hadin 1264 promulgated by a bull the strict observance of the CorpusChristi festival in connection with his strong desire tore-establish the doctrine of Christ's presence in the elements. Norwas it without reason that, while seeking miraculous support forthis dogma, he should have treated the affair of Bolsena soseriously as to celebrate it by the erection of one of the mostsplendid cathedrals in Italy; for the peace of the Church hadrecently been troubled by the reforming ardour of the Fraticelli andby the promulgation of Abbot Joachim's Eternal Gospel. This newevangelist had preached the doctrine of progression in religiousfaith, proclaiming a kingdom of the Spirit which should transcendthe kingdom of the Son, even as the Christian dispensation hadsuperseded the Jewish supremacy of the Father. Nor did he fail atthe same time to attack the political and moral abuses of thePapacy, attributing its degradation to the want of vitality whichpervaded the old Christian system, and calling on the clergy to leadmore simple and regenerate lives, consistently with the spiritualdoctrine which he had received by inspiration. The theories ofJoachim were immature and crude; but they were among the first signsof that liberal effort after self-emancipation which eventuallystirred all Europe at the time of the Renaissance. It was, therefore, the obvious policy of the Popes to crush so dangerous anopposition while they could; and by establishing the dogma oftransubstantiation, they were enabled to satisfy the cravingmysticism of the people, while they placed upon a firmer basis thecardinal support of their own religious power. 

In pursuance of his plan, Urban sent for Lorenzo Maitani, the greatSienese architect, who gave designs for a Gothic church in the samestyle as the Cathedral of Siena, though projected on a smallerscale. These two churches, in spite of numerous shortcomingsmanifest to an eye trained in French or English architecture, arestill the most perfect specimens of Pointed Gothic produced by theItalian genius. The Gottico Tedesco had never been received withfavour in Italy. Remains of Roman architecture, then far morenumerous and perfect than they are at present, controlled the mindsof artists, and induced them to adopt the rounded rather than thepointed arch. Indeed, there would seem to be something peculiarlyNorthern in the spirit of Gothic architecture: its intricacies suitthe gloom of Northern skies, its massive exterior is adapted to theseverity of Northern weather, its vast windows catch the fleetingsunlight of the North, and the pinnacles and spires which constituteits beauty are better expressed in rugged stone than in the marblesof the South. Northern cathedrals do not depend for their effectupon the advantages of sunlight or picturesque situations. Many ofthem are built upon broad plains, over which for more than half theyear hangs fog. But the cathedrals of Italy owe their charm tocolour and brilliancy: their gilded sculpture and mosaics, thevariegated marbles and shallow portals of their façades, the lightaërial elegance of their campanili, are all adapted to the luminousatmosphere of a smiling land, where changing effects of naturalbeauty distract the attention from solidity of design and permanenceof grandeur in the edifice itself. [1]

 [1] In considering why Gothic architecture took so little root in mediæval Italy, we must remember that the Italians had maintained an unbroken connection with Pagan Rome, and that many of their finest churches were basilicas appropriated to Christian rites. Add to this that the commerce of their cities, which first acquired wealth in the twelfth century, especially Pisa and Venice, kept them in communication with the Levant, where they admired the masterpieces of Byzantine architecture, and whence they imported Greek artists in mosaic and stonework. Against these external circumstances, taken in connection with the hereditary leanings of an essentially Latin race, and with the natural conditions of landscape and climate alluded to above, the influence of a few imported German architects could not have had sufficient power to effect a thorough metamorphosis of the national taste. For further treatment of this subject see my 'Fine Arts, ' _Renaissance in Italy_, Part III. Chap. Ii. 

The Cathedral of Orvieto will illustrate these remarks. Its designis very simple. It consists of a parallelogram, from which threechapels of equal size project, one at the east end, and one at thenorth and south. The windows are small and narrow, the columnsround, and the roof displays none of that intricate groining we findin English churches. The beauty of the interior depends on surfacedecoration, on marble statues, woodwork, and fresco-paintings. Outside, there is the same simplicity of design, the same elaboratedlocal ornament. The sides of the Cathedral are austere, their narrowwindows cutting horizontal lines of black and white marble. But thefaçade is a triumph of decorative art. It is strictly what has oftenbeen described as a 'frontispiece;' for it bears no sincere relationto the construction of the building. The three gables rise highabove the aisles. The pinnacles and parapets and turrets are stuckon to look agreeable. It is a screen such as might be completed orleft unfinished at will by the architect. Finished as it is, thefaçade of Orvieto presents a wilderness of beauties. Its pure whitemarble has been mellowed by time to a rich golden hue, in which areset mosaics shining like gems or pictures of enamel. A statue standson every pinnacle; each pillar has a different design; round some ofthem are woven wreaths of vine and ivy; acanthus leaves curl overthe capitals, making nests for singing birds or Cupids; the doorwaysare a labyrinth of intricate designs, in which the utmost eleganceof form is made more beautiful by incrustations of precious agatesand Alexandrine glasswork. On every square inch of this wonderfulfaçade have been lavished invention, skill, and precious material. But its chief interest centres in the sculptures executed byGiovanni and Andrea, sons and pupils of Nicola Pisano. The names ofthese three men mark an era in the history of art. They firstrescued Italian sculpture from the grotesqueness of the Lombard andthe wooden monotony of the Byzantine styles. Sculpture takes thelead of all the arts. And Nicola Pisano, before Cimabue, beforeDuccio, even before Dante, opened the gates of beauty, which for athousand years had been shut up and overgrown with weeds. As Danteinvoked the influence of Virgil when he began to write his mediævalpoem, and made a heathen bard his hierophant in Christian mysteries, just so did Nicola Pisano draw inspiration from a Græco-Romansarcophagus. He studied the basrelief of Phædra and Hippolytus, which may still be seen upon the tomb of Countess Beatrice in theCampo Santo, and so learned by heart the beauty of its lines and thedignity expressed in its figures, that in all his subsequent workswe trace the elevated tranquillity of Greek sculpture. Thisimitation never degenerated into servile copying; nor, on the otherhand, did Nicola attain the perfect grace of an Athenian artist. Heremained a truly mediæval carver, animated with a Christian insteadof a Pagan spirit, but caring for the loveliness of form which artin the dark ages failed to realise. [1]

 [1] I am not inclined to reject the old legend mentioned above about Pisano's study of the antique. For a full discussion of the question see my 'Fine Arts, ' _Renaissance in Italy_, Part III. Chap. Iii. 

Whether it was Nicola or his scholars who designed the basreliefs atOrvieto is of little consequence. Vasari ascribes them to thefather; but we know that he completed his pulpit at Pisa in 1230, and his death is supposed to have taken place fifteen years beforethe foundation of the cathedral. At any rate, they are imbued withhis genius, and bear the strongest affinity to his sculptures atPisa, Siena, and Bologna. To estimate the influence they exercisedover the arts of sculpture and painting in Italy would be adifficult task. Duccio and Giotto studied here; Ghiberti closelyfollowed them. Signorelli and Raphael made drawings from theircompositions. And the spirit which pervades these sculptures may betraced in all succeeding works of art. It is not classic; it ismodern, though embodied in a form of beauty modelled on the Greek. 

The basreliefs are carved on four marble tablets placed beside theporches of the church, and corresponding in size and shape with thechief doorways. They represent the course of Biblical history, beginning with the creation of the world, and ending with the lastjudgment. If it were possible here to compare them in detail withthe similar designs of Ghiberti, Michel Angelo, and Raphael, itmight be shown that the Pisani established modes of treating sacredsubjects from which those mighty masters never deviated, though eachstamped upon them his peculiar genius, making them more perfect astime added to the power of art. It would also be not withoutinterest to show that, in their primitive conceptions of theearliest events in history, the works of the Pisan artists closelyresemble some sculptures executed on the walls of Northerncathedrals, as well as early mosaics in the South of Italy. We mighthave noticed how all the grotesque elements which appear in NicolaPisano, and which may still be traced in Ghiberti, are entirely lostin Michel Angelo, how the supernatural is humanised, how thesymbolical receives an actual expression, and how intellectual typesare substituted for mere local and individual representations. Forinstance, the Pisani represent the Creator as a young man standingon the earth, with a benign and dignified expression, and attendedby two ministering angels. He is the Christ of the Creed, 'by whomall things were made. ' In Ghiberti we find an older man, sometimesappearing in a whirlwind of clouds and attendant spirits, sometimeswalking on the earth, but still far different in conception from theCreative Father of Michel Angelo. The latter is rather the PlatonicDemiurgus than the Mosaic God. By every line and feature of his faceand flowing hair, by each movement of his limbs, whether he ride onclouds between the waters and the firmament, or stand alone creatingby a glance and by a motion of his hand Eve, the full-formed andconscious woman, he is proclaimed the Maker who from all eternityhas held the thought of the material universe within his mind. Raphael does not depart from this conception. The profoundabstraction of Michel Angelo ruled his intellect, and received fromhis genius a form of perhaps greater grace. A similar growth fromthe germinal designs of the Pisani may be traced in many groups. 

But we must not linger at the gate. Let us enter the cathedral andsee some of the wonders it contains. Statues of gigantic size adornthe nave. Of these, the most beautiful 151 are the work of IppolitoScalza, an artist whom Orvieto claims with pride as one of her ownsons. The long line of saints and apostles whom they representconduct us to the high altar, surrounded by its shadowy frescoes, and gleaming with the work of carvers in marble and bronze andprecious metals. But our steps are drawn toward the chapel of thesouth transept, where now a golden light from the autumnal sunsetfalls across a crowd of worshippers. From far and near the poorpeople are gathered. Most of them are women. They kneel upon thepavement and the benches, sunburnt faces from the vineyards and thecanebrakes of the valley. The old look prematurely aged andwithered--their wrinkled cheeks bound up in scarlet andorange-coloured kerchiefs, their skinny fingers fumbling on therosary, and their mute lips moving in prayer. The younger women havegreat listless eyes and large limbs used to labor. Some of themcarry babies trussed up in tight swaddling-clothes. One kneelsbeside a dark-browed shepherd, on whose shoulder falls his shaggyhair; and little children play about, half hushed, half heedless ofthe place, among old men whose life has dwindled down into aceaseless round of prayers. We wonder why this chapel, alone in theempty cathedral, is so crowded with worshippers. They surely are notturned towards that splendid Pietà of Scalza--a work in which themarble seems to live a cold, dead, shivering life. They do not heedAngelico's and Signorelli's frescoes on the roof and walls. Theinterchange of light and gloom upon the stalls and carved work ofthe canopies can scarcely rivet so intense a gaze. All eyes seemfixed upon a curtain of red silk above the altar. Votive pictures, and glass cases full of silver hearts, wax babies, hands and limbsof every kind, are hung round it. A bell rings. A jingling organplays a little melody in triple time; and from the sacristy comesforth the priest. With much reverence, and with a show ofpreparation, he and the acolytes around him mount the altar stepsand pull a string which draws the curtain. Behind the silken veil webehold Madonna and her child--a faint, old, ugly picture, blackenedwith the smoke and incense of five hundred years, a wonder-workingimage, cased in gold, and guarded from the common air by glass anddraperies. Jewelled crowns are stuck upon the heads of the motherand the infant. In the efficacy of Madonna di San Brizio to ward offagues, to deliver from the pangs of childbirth or the fury of thestorm, to keep the lover's troth and make the husband faithful tohis home, these pious women of the marshes and the mountains put asimple trust. 

While the priest sings, and the people pray to the dance-music ofthe organ, let us take a quiet seat unseen, and picture to our mindshow the chapel looked when Angelico and Signorelli stood before itsplastered walls, and thought the thoughts with which they coveredthem. Four centuries have gone by since those walls were white andeven to their brushes; and now you scarce can see the goldenaureoles of saints, the vast wings of the angels, and the flowingrobes of prophets through the gloom. Angelico came first, in monk'sdress, kneeling before he climbed the scaffold to paint the angryjudge, the Virgin crowned, the white-robed army of the Martyrs, andthe glorious company of the Apostles. These he placed upon the roof, expectant of the Judgment. Then he passed away, and Luca Signorelli, the rich man who 'lived splendidly and loved to dress himself innoble clothes, ' the liberal and courteous gentleman, took his placeupon the scaffold. For all the worldliness of his attire and theworldliness of his living, his brain teemed with stern and terriblethoughts. He searched the secrets of sin and of the grave, ofdestruction and of resurrection, of heaven and hell. All these hehas painted on the walls beneath the saints of Fra Angelico. Firstcome the troubles of the last days, the preaching of Antichrist, andthe confusion of the wicked. In the next compartment we see theResurrection from the tomb; and side by side with that is paintedHell. Paradise occupies another portion of the chapel. On each sideof the window, beneath the Christ of Fra Angelico, are delineatedscenes from the Judgment. A wilderness of arabesques, enclosingmedallion portraits of poets and chiaroscuro episodes selected fromDante and Ovid, occupies the lower portions of the chapel wallsbeneath the great subjects enumerated above; and here Signorelli hasgiven free vein to his fancy and his mastery over anatomical design, accumulating naked human figures in the most fantastic and audaciousvariety of pose. 

Look at the 'Fulminati'--so the group of wicked men are called whosedeath precedes the Judgment. Huge naked angels, sailing upon vanlikewings, breathe columns of red flame upon a crowd of wicked men andwomen. In vain these sinners avoid the descending fire. It pursuesand fells them to the earth. As they fly, their eyes are turnedtowards the dreadful faces in the air. Some hurry through a portico, huddled together, falling men, and women clasping to their arms deadbabies scorched with flame. One old man stares straightforward, doggedly awaiting death. One woman scowls defiance as she dies. Ayouth has twisted both hands in his hair, and presses them againsthis ears to drown the screams and groans and roaring thunder. Theytrample upon prostrate forms already stiff. Every shape and attitudeof sudden terror and despairing guilt are here. Next comes theResurrection. Two angels of the Judgment--gigantic figures, with theplumeless wings that Signorelli loves--are seen upon the clouds. They blow trumpets with all their might, so that each naked muscleseems strained to make the blast, which bellows through the air andshakes the sepulchres beneath the earth. Thence rise the dead. Allare naked, and a few are seen like skeletons. With painful effortthey struggle from the soil that clasps them round, as if obeying anirresistible command. Some have their heads alone above the ground. Others wrench their limbs from the clinging earth; and as each manrises, it closes under him. One would think that they were beingborn again from solid clay, and growing into form with labour. Thefully risen spirits stand and walk about, all occupied with theexpectation of the Judgment; but those that are yet in the act ofrising, have no thought but for the strange and toilsome process ofthis second birth. Signorelli here, as elsewhere, proves himself oneof the greatest painters by the simple means with which he producesthe most marvellous effects. His composition sways our souls withall the passion of the terrible scenes that he depicts. Yet whatdoes it contain? Two stern angels on the clouds, a blank grey plain, and a multitude of naked men and women. In the next compartment Hellis painted. This is a complicated picture, consisting of a mass ofhuman beings entangled with torturing fiends. Above hover demonsbearing damned spirits, and three angels see that justice takes itscourse. Signorelli here degenerates into no mediæval ugliness andmere barbarity of form. His fiends are not the bestial creatures ofPisano's basreliefs, but models of those monsters which Duppa hasengraved from Michel Angelo's 'Last Judgment'--lean naked men, inwhose hollow eyes glow the fires of hate and despair, whose nailshave grown to claws, and from whose ears have started horns. Theysail upon bats' wings; and only by their livid hue, which changesfrom yellow to the ghastliest green, and by the cruelty of theirremorseless eyes, can you know them from the souls they torture. InHell ugliness and power of mischief come with length of years. Continual growth in crime distorts the form which once was human;and the interchange of everlasting hatred degrades the tormentor andhis victim to the same demoniac ferocity. To this design the scienceof foreshortening, and the profound knowledge of the human form inevery posture, give its chief interest. Paradise is not lesswonderful. Signorelli has contrived to throw variety and grace intothe somewhat monotonous groups which this subject requires. Aboveare choirs of angels, not like Fra Angelico's, but tall malecreatures clothed in voluminous drapery, with grave features andstill, solemn eyes. Some are dancing, some are singing to the lute, and one, the most gracious of them all, bends down to aid asuppliant soul. The men beneath, who listen in a state of bliss, areall undraped. Signorelli, in this difficult composition, remainstemperate, serene, and simple; a Miltonic harmony pervades themovement of his angelic choirs. Their beauty is the product of theirstrength and virtue. No floral ornaments or cherubs, or soft clouds, are found in his Paradise; yet it is fair and full of grace. HereLuca seems to have anticipated Raphael. 

It may be parenthetically observed, that Signorelli has introducedhimself and Niccolo Angeli, treasurer of the cathedral buildingfund, in the corner of the fresco representing Antichrist, with thedate 1503. They stand as spectators and solemn witnesses of thetragedy, set forth in all its acts by the great master. 

After viewing these frescoes, we muse and ask ourselves whySignorelli's fame is so inadequate to his deserts? Partly, no doubt, because he painted in obscure Italian towns, and left feweasel-pictures. [1] Besides, the artists of the sixteenth centuryeclipsed all their predecessors, and the name of Signorelli has beenswallowed up in that of Michel Angelo. Vasari said that 'esso MichelAngelo imitò l'andar di Luca, come può vedere ognuno. ' Nor is ithard to see that what the one began at Orvieto the other completedin the Vatican. These great men had truly kindred spirits. Bothstruggled to express their intellectual conceptions in the simplestand most abstract forms. The works of both are distinguished bycontempt for adventitious ornaments and for the grace of positivecolour. Both chose to work in fresco, and selected subjects of thegravest and most elevated character. The study of anatomy, and thescientific drawing of the naked body, which Luca practised, werecarried to perfection by Michel Angelo. Sublimity of thought andself-restraint pervade their compositions. He who would understandBuonarroti must first appreciate Signorelli. The latter, it is true, was confined to a narrower circle in his study of the beautiful andthe sublime. He had not ascended to that pure idealism, superior toall the accidents of place and time, which is the chief distinctionof Michel Angelo's work. At the same time, his manner had notsuffered from too fervid an enthusiasm for the imperfectlycomprehended antique. He painted the life he saw around him, andclothed his men and women in the dress of Italy. 

 [1] The Uffizzi and Pitti Galleries at Florence contain one or two fine specimens of Luca Signorelli's Holy Families, which show his influence over the early manner of Michel Angelo. Into the background of one circular picture he has introduced a group of naked figures, which was imitated by Buonarroti in the Holy Family of the Tribune. The Accademia has also a picture of saints and angels illustrative of his large style and crowded composition. The Brera at Milan can boast of a very characteristic Flagellation, where the nude has been carefully studied, and the brutality of an insolent officer is forcibly represented. But perhaps the most interesting of his works out of Orvieto are those in his native place, Cortona. In the Church of the Gesù in that town there is an altar-piece representing Madonna in glory with saints, which also contains on a smaller scale than the principal figures a little design of the Temptation in Eden. You recognise the master's individuality in the muscular and energetic Adam. The Duomo has a Communion of the Apostles which shows Signorelli's independence of tradition. It is the Cenacolo treated with freedom. Christ stands in the midst of the twelve, who are gathered around him, some kneeling and some upright, upon a marble pavement. The whole scene is conceived in a truly grand style--noble attitudes, broad draperies, sombre and rich colouring, masculine massing of the figures in effective groups. The Christ is especially noble. Swaying a little to the right, he gives the bread to a kneeling apostle. The composition is marked by a dignity and self-restraint which Raphael might have envied. San Niccolo, again, has a fine picture by this master. It is a Deposition with saints and angels--those large-limbed and wide-winged messengers of God whom none but Signorelli realised. The composition of this picture is hazardous, and at first sight it is even displeasing. The figures seem roughly scattered in a vacant space. The dead Christ has but little dignity, and the passion of S. Jerome in the foreground is stiff in spite of its exaggeration. But long study only serves to render this strange picture more and more attractive. Especially noticeable is the youthful angel clad in dark green who sustains Christ. He is a young man in the bloom of strength and beauty, whose long golden hair falls on each side of a sublimely lovely face. Nothing in painting surpasses the modelling of the vigorous but delicate left arm stretched forward to support the heavy corpse. This figure is conceived and executed in a style worthy of the Orvietan frescoes. Signorelli, for whose imagination angels had a special charm, has shown here that his too frequent contempt for grace was not the result of insensibility to beauty. Strength is the parent of sweetness in this wonderful winged youth. But not a single sacrifice is made in the whole picture to mere elegance. --Cortona is a place which, independently of Signorelli, well deserves a visit. Like all Etruscan towns, it is perched on the top of a high hill, whence it commands a wonderful stretch of landscape--Monte Amiata and Montepulciano to the south, Chiusi with its lake, the lake of Thrasymene, and the whole broad Tuscan plain. The city itself is built on a projecting buttress of the mountain, to which it clings so closely that, in climbing to the terrace of S. Margarita, you lose sight of all but a few towers and house-roofs. One can almost fancy that Signorelli gained his broad and austere style from the habitual contemplation of a view so severe in outline, and so vacant in its width. This landscape has none of the variety which distinguishes the prospect from Perugia, none of the suavity of Siena. It is truly sympathetic in its bare simplicity to the style of the great painter of Cortona. Try to see it on a winter morning, when the mists are lying white and low and thin upon the plain, when distant hills rise islanded into the air, and the outlines of lakes are just discernible through fleecy haze. --Next to Cortona in importance is the Convent of Monte Oliveto in the neighbourhood of Siena, where Signorelli painted eight frescoes from the story of S. Benedict, distinguished by his customary vigour of conception, masculine force of design, and martial splendour in athletic disdainful young men. One scene in this series, representing the interior of a country inn, is specially interesting for a realism not usual in the work of Signorelli. The frescoes painted for Petruccio at Siena, one of which is now in the National Gallery, the fresco in the Sistine Chapel, which has suffered sadly from retouching, and the magnificent classical picture called the 'School of Pan, ' executed for Lorenzo de' Medici, and now at Berlin, must not be forgotten, nor yet the church-pictures scattered over Loreto, Arcevia, Città di Castello, Borgo San Sepolcro, Volterra, and other cities of the Tuscan-Umbrian district. Arezzo, it may be added in conclusion, has two altar-pieces of Signorelli's in its Pinacoteca, neither of which adds much to our conception of this painter's style. Noticeable as they may be among the works of that period, they prove that his genius was hampered by the narrow and traditional treatment imposed on him in pictures of this kind. Students may be referred to Robert Vischer's _Luca Signorelli_ (Leipzig, 1879) for a complete list of the master's works and an exhaustive biography. I have tried to estimate his place in the history of Italian art in my volume on the 'Fine Arts, ' _Renaissance in Italy_, Part III. I may also mention two able articles by Professor Colvin published a few years since in the _Cornhill Magazine_. 

Such reflections, and many more, pass through our mind as we sit andponder in the chapel, which the daylight has deserted. The countrypeople are still on their knees, still careless of the frescoedforms around them, still praying to Madonna of the Miracles. Theservice is well-nigh done. The benediction has been given, theorganist strikes up his air of Verdi, and the congregation shufflesoff, leaving the dimly lighted chapel for the vast sonorous duskynave. How strange it is to hear that faint strain of a feeble operasounding where, a short while since, the trumpet-blast ofSignorelli's angels seemed to thrill our ears!

_LUCRETIUS_

In seeking to distinguish the Roman from the Greek genius we canfind no surer guide than Virgil's famous lines in the Sixth Æneid. Virgil lived to combine the traditions of both races in a work ofprofoundly meditated art, and to their points of divergence he wassensitive as none but a poet bent upon resolving them could be. Thereal greatness of the Romans consisted in their capacity forgovernment, law, practical administration. What they willed, theycarried into effect with an iron indifference to everything but theobject in view. What they acquired, they held with the firm grasp offorce, and by the might of organised authority. Their architecture, in so far as it was original, subserved purposes of public utility. Philosophy with them ceased to be speculative, and applied itself tothe ethics of conduct. Their religious conceptions--in so far asthese were not adopted together with general culture from theGreeks, or together with sensual mysticism from the East--werepractical abstractions. The Latin ideal was to give form to thestate by legislation, and to mould the citizen by moral discipline. The Greek ideal was contained in the poetry of Homer, the sculptureof Pheidias, the heroism of Harmodius, the philosophy of Socrates. Hellas was held together by no system, but by the Delphic oracle andthe Olympian games. The Greeks depended upon culture, as the Romansupon law. The national character determined by culture, and thatdetermined by discipline, eventually broke down: but the ruin ineither case was different. The Greek became servile, indolent, andslippery; the Roman became arrogant, bloodthirsty, tyrannous, andbrutal. The Greeks in their best days attained to [Greek:sôphrosynê], their regulative virtue, by a kind of instinct; andeven in their worst debasement they never exhibited the extravaganceof lust and cruelty and pompous prodigality displayed by Rome. TheRomans, deficient in the æsthetic instinct, whether applied tomorals or to art, were temperate upon compulsion; and when thestrain of law relaxed, they gave themselves unchecked to profligacy. The bad taste of the Romans made them aspire to the huge andmonstrous. Nero's whim to cut through the isthmus, Caligula's villabuilt upon the sea at Baiæ, the acres covered by imperial palaces inRome, are as Latin as the small scale of the Parthenon is Greek. Athens annihilates our notions of mere magnitude by the predominanceof harmony and beauty, to which size is irrelevant. Rome dilatesthem to the full: it is the colossal greatness, the mechanicalpride, of her monuments that win our admiration. By comparing theDionysian theatre at Athens, during a representation of the'Antigone, ' with the Flavian amphitheatre at Rome, while thegladiators sang their _Ave Cæsar!_ we gain at once a measure for thedifferences between Greek and Latin taste. In spiritual matters, again, Rome, as distinguished from Hellas, was omnivorous. Thecosmopolitan receptivity of Roman sympathies, absorbing Egypt andthe Orient wholesale, is as characteristic as the exclusiveness ofthe Greeks, their sensitive anxiety about the [Greek: êthos]. Wefeel that it was in a Roman rather than a Greek atmosphere, where nomiddle term of art existed like a neutral ground between the morallaw and sin, where no delicate intellectual sensibilities interferedwith the assimilation of new creeds, that Christianity was destinedto strike root and flourish. 

These remarks, familiar to students, form a proper prelude to thecriticism of Lucretius: for in Lucretius the Roman character foundits most perfect literary incarnation. He is at all points a trueRoman, gifted with the strength, the conquering temper, theuncompromising haughtiness, and the large scale of his race. Holding, as it were, the thought of Greece in fee, he administersthe Epicurean philosophy as though it were a province, marshallinghis arguments like legionaries, and spanning the chasms ofspeculative insecurity with the masonry of hypotheses. As the archesof the Pont du Gard, suspended in their power amid that solitude, produce an overmastering feeling of awe; so the huge fabric of theLucretian system, hung across the void of Nihilism, inspires a senseof terror, not so much on its own account as for the Roman sternnessof the mind that made it. 'Le retentissement de mes pas dans cesimmenses voûtes me faisait croire entendre la forte voix de ceux quiles avait bâties. Je me perdais comme un insecte dans cetteimmensité. ' This is what Rousseau wrote about the aqueduct ofNismes. This is what we feel in pacing the corridors of theLucretian poem. Sometimes it seems like walking through resoundingcaves of night and death, where unseen cataracts keep plunging downuncertain depths, and winds 'thwarted and forlorn' swell from anunknown distance, and rush by, and wail themselves to silence in theunexplored beyond. At another time the impression left upon thememory is different. We have been following a Roman road from thegate of the Eternal City, through field and vineyard, by lake andriver-bed, across the broad intolerable plain and the barren tops ofAlps, down into forests where wild beasts and barbarian tribeswander, along the marge of Rhine or Elbe, and over frozen fens, inone perpetual straight line, until the sea is reached and the roadends because it can go no further. All the while, the ironwheel-rims of our chariot have jarred upon imperishable paved work;there has been no stop nor stay; the visions of things beautiful andstrange and tedious have flown past; at the climax we look forthacross a waste of waves and tumbling wilderness of surf and foam, where the storm sweeps and hurrying mists drive eastward close aboveour heads. The want of any respite, breathing-space, or intermissionin the poem, helps to force this image of a Roman journey on ourmind. From the first line to the last there is no turning-point, nopause of thought, scarcely a comma, and the whole breaks off:--

 rixantes potius quam corpora desererentur:

as though a scythe-sweep from the arm of Death had cut the thread ofsinging short. 

Is, then, this poem truly song? Indeed it is. The brazen voice ofRome becomes tunable; a majestic rhythm sustains the progress of thesinger, who, like Milton's Satan, O'er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings or feet, pursues his way, And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies. 

It is only because, being so much a Roman, he insists on moving everonward with unwavering march, that Lucretius is often wearisome andrough. He is too disdainful to care to mould the whole stuff of hispoem to one quality. He is too truth-loving to condescend torhetoric. The scoriæ, the grit, the dross, the quartz, the gold, thejewels of his thought are hurried onward in one mighty lava-flood, that has the force to bear them all with equal ease--not altogetherunlike that hurling torrent of the world painted by Tintoretto inhis picture of the Last Day, which carries on its breast cities andforests and men with all their works, to plunge them in a bottomlessabyss. 

Poems of the perfect Hellenic type may be compared to bronzestatues, in the material of which many divers metals have beenfused. Silver and tin and copper and lead and gold are there: eachsubstance adds a quality to the mass; yet the whole is bronze. Thefurnace of the poet's will has so melted and mingled all these ores, that they have run together and filled the mould of his imagination. It is thus that Virgil chose to work. He made it his glory torealise artistic harmony, and to preserve a Greek balance in hisstyle. Not so Lucretius. In him the Roman spirit, disdainful, uncompromising, and forceful, had full sway. We can fancy himaccosting the Greek masters of the lyre upon Parnassus, deferring tonone, conceding nought, and meeting their arguments with proudindifference:--

 tu regere imperio populos Romane memento. 

The Roman poet, swaying the people of his thoughts, will stoop to nopersuasion, adopt no middle course. It is not his business toplease, but to command; he will not wait upon the [Greek: kairos], or court opportunity; Greeks may surprise the Muses in relentingmoods, and seek out 'mollia tempora fandi;' all times and seasonsmust serve him; the terrible, the discordant, the sublime, and themagnificent shall drag his thundering car-wheels, as he lists, alongthe road of thought. 

At the very outset of the poem we feel ourselves within the grasp ofthe Roman imagination. It is no Aphrodite, risen from the waves andwhite as the sea-foam, that he invokes:--

 Æneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas, alma Venus. 

This Venus is the mother of the brood of Rome, and at the same timean abstraction as wide as the universe. See her in the arms ofMavors:--

 in gremium qui sæpe tuum se reicit æterno devictus volnere amoris, atque ita suspiciens tereti cervice reposta pascit amore avidos inhians in te, dea, visus, eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore. Hunc tu, diva, tuo recubantem corpore sancto circumfusa super, suavis ex ore loquelas funde petens placidam Romanis, incluta, pacem. 

In the whole Lucretian treatment of love there is nothing reallyGreek. We do not hear of Eros, either as the mystic mania of Plato, or as the winged boy of Meleager. Love in Lucretius is somethingdeeper, larger, and more elemental than the Greeks conceived; afierce and overmastering force, a natural impulse which men share incommon with the world of things. [1] Both the pleasures and the painsof love are conceived on a gigantic scale, and described with anirony that has the growl of a roused lion mingled with itslaughter:--

 ulcus enim vivescit et inveterascit alendo inque dies gliscit furor atque aerumna gravescit. 

The acts of love and the insanities of passion are viewed from nostandpoint of sentiment or soft emotion, but always in relation tophilosophical ideas, or as the manifestation of something terriblein human life. Yet they lose nothing thereby in the voluptuousimpression left upon the fancy:--

 sic in amore Venus simulacris ludit amantis, nec satiare queunt spectando corpora coram nec manibus quicquam teneris abradere membris possunt errantes incerti corpore toto. Denique cum membris conlatis flore fruuntur ætatis, iam cum præsagit gaudia corpus atque in eost Venus ut muliebria conserat arva, adfigunt avide corpus iunguntque salivas oris et inspirant pressantes dentibus ora, nequiquam, quoniam nil inde abradere possunt nec penetrare et abire in corpus corpore toto. 

The master-word in this passage is _nequiquam_. 'To desire theimpossible, ' says the Greek proverb, 'is a disease of the soul. 'Lucretius, who treats of physical desire as a torment, asserts theimpossibility of its perfect satisfaction. There is something almosttragic in these sighs and pantings and pleasure-throes, andincomplete fruitions of souls pent up within their frames of flesh. We seem to see a race of men and women such as have never lived, except perhaps in Rome or in the thought of Michel Angelo, [2]meeting in leonine embracements that yield pain, whereof the climaxis, at best, relief from rage and respite for a moment fromconsuming fire. There is a life dæmonic rather than human in thosemighty limbs; and the passion that bends them on the marriage bedhas in it the stress of storms, the rampings and the roarings ofleopards at play. Or, take again this single line:--

 et Venus in silvis iungebat corpora amantum. 

What a picture of primeval breadth and vastness! The _viceégrillard_ of Voltaire, the coarse animalism of Rabelais, even thelarge comic sexuality of Aristophanes, are in another region: forthe forest is the world, and the bodies of the lovers are thingsnatural and unashamed, and Venus is the tyrannous instinct thatcontrols the blood in spring. Only a Roman poet could have conceivedof passion so mightily and so impersonally, expanding its sensualityto suit the scale of Titanic existences, and purging from it bothsentiment and spirituality as well as all that makes it mean. 

 [1] A fragment preserved from the _Danaides_ of Æschylus has the thought of Aphrodite as the mistress of love in earth and sky and sea and cloud; and this idea finds a philosophical expression in Empedocles. But the tone of these Greek poets is as different from that of Lucretius as a Greek Hera is from a Roman Juno. 

 [2] See, for instance, his meeting of Ixion with the phantom of Juno, or his design for Leda and the Swan. 

In like manner, the Lucretian conception of Ennui is wholly Roman:--

 Si possent homines, proinde ac sentire videntur pondus inesse animo quod se gravitate fatiget, e quibus id fiat causis quoque noscere et unde tanta mali tamquam moles in pectore constet, haut ita vitam agerent, ut nunc plerumque videmus quid sibi quisque velit nescire et quærere semper commutare locum quasi onus deponere possit. Exit sæpe foras magnis ex ædibus ille, esse domi quem pertæsumst, subitoque revertit, quippe foris nilo melius qui sentiat esse. Currit agens mannos ad villam præcipitanter, auxilium tectis quasi ferre ardentibus instans; oscitat extemplo, tetigit cum limina villæ, aut abit in somnum gravis atque oblivia quærit, aut etiam properans urbem petit atque revisit, hoc se quisque modo fugit (at quem scilicet, ut fit, effugere haut potis est, ingratis hæret) et odit propterea, morbi quia causam non tenet æger; quam bene si videat, iam rebus quisque relictis naturam primum studeat cognoscere rerum, temporis æterni quoniam, non unius horæ, ambigitur status, in quo sit mortalibus omnis ætas, post mortem quæ restat cumque manenda. 

Virgil would not have written these lines. A Greek poet could nothave conceived them: unless we imagine to ourselves what Æschylus orPindar, oppressed by long illness, and forgetful of the gods, mightpossibly have felt. In its sense of spiritual vacancy, when theworld and all its uses have become flat, stale, unprofitable, andthe sentient soul oscillates like a pendulum between wearifulextremes, seeking repose in restless movement, and hurling the ruinsof a life into the gulf of its exhausted cravings, we perceivealready the symptoms of that unnamed malady which was the plague ofimperial Rome. The tyrants and the suicides of the Empire expandbefore our eyes a pageant of their lassitude, relieved in vain byfestivals of blood and orgies of unutterable lust. It is not that_ennui_ was a specially Roman disease. Under certain conditions itis sure to afflict all overtaxed civilisation; and for the modernworld no one has expressed its nature better than the slight andfeminine De Musset. [1] Indeed, the Latin language has no one phrasedenoting Ennui;--_livor_ and _fastidium_, and even _tædium vitæ_, meaning something more specific and less all-pervasive as a moralagency. This in itself is significant, since it shows theunconsciousness of the race at large, and renders the intuition ofLucretius all the more remarkable. But in Rome there were theconditions favourable to its development--imperfect culture, vehement passions unabsorbed by commerce or by political life, thehabituation to extravagant excitement in war and in the circus, andthe fermentation of an age foredestined to give birth to newreligious creeds. When the infinite but ill-assured power of theEmpire was conferred on semi-madmen, Ennui in Rome assumed colossalproportions. Its victims sought for palliatives in cruelty and crimeelsewhere unknown, except perhaps in Oriental courts. Lucretius, inthe last days of the Republic, had discovered its deep significancefor human nature. To all the pictures of Tacitus it forms a solemntragic background, enhancing, as it were, by spiritual gloom thecarnival of passions which gleam so brilliantly upon his canvas. Inthe person of Caligula, Ennui sat supreme upon the throne of theterraqueous globe. The insane desires and the fantastic deeds of theautocrat who wished one head for humanity that he might cut it off, sufficiently reveal the extent to which his spirit had beengangrened by this ulcer. There is a simple paragraph in Suetoniuswhich lifts the veil from his imperial unrest more ruthlessly thanany legend:--'Incitabatur insomniis maxime; neque enim plus tribushoris nocturnis quiescebat, ac ne his quidem placidâ quiete, atpavidâ, miris rerum imaginibus . .. Ideoque magnâ parte noctis, vigiliæ cubandique tædio, nunc toro residens, nunc per longissimasporticus vagus, invocare identidem atque expectare lucemconsueverat. ' This is the very picture of Ennui that has becomemortal disease. Nor was Nero different. 'Néron, ' says Victor Hugo, 'cherche tout simplement une distraction. Poëte, comédien, chanteur, cocher, épuisant la férocité pour trouver la volupté, essayant lechangement de sexe, époux de l'eunuque Sporus et épouse de l'esclavePythagore, et se promenant dans les rues de Rome entre sa femme etson mari; ayant deux plaisirs: voir le peuple se jeter sur lespièces d'or, les diamants et les perles, et voir les lions se jetersur le peuple; incendiaire par curiosité et parricide pardésoeuvrement. ' Nor need we stop at Nero. Over Vitellius at hisbanquets, over Hadrian in his Tiburtine villa calling in vain onDeath, over Commodus in the arena, and Heliogabalus among therose-leaves, the same livid shadow of imperial Ennui hangs. We caneven see it looming behind the noble form of Marcus Aurelius, who, amid the ruins of empire and the revolutions of belief, penned inhis tent among the Quadi those maxims of endurance which werepowerless to regenerate the world. 

 [1] See the prelude to _Les Confessions d'un Enfant du Siècle_ and _Les Nuits_. 

Roman again, in the true sense of the word, is the Lucretianphilosophy of Conscience. Christianity has claimed the celebratedimprecation of Persius upon tyrants for her own, as though to heralone belonged the secret of the soul-tormenting sense of guilt. Yetit is certain that we owe to the Romans that conception of sinbearing its own fruit of torment which the Latin Fathers--Augustineand Tertullian--imposed with such terrific force upon the mediævalconsciousness. There is no need to conclude that Persius was aChristian because he wrote--

 Magne pater divum, sævos punire tyrannos, etc. , when we know that he had before his eyes that passage in the thirdbook of the 'De Rerum Naturâ, ' (978-1023) which reduces the myths ofTityos and Sisyphus and Cerberus and the Furies to facts of thehuman soul:--

 sed metus in vita poenarum pro male factis est insignibus insignis, scelerisque luella, carcer et horribilis de saxo iactu' deorsum, verbera carnifices robur pix lammina tædæ; quæ tamen etsi absunt, at mens sibi conscia facti præmetuens adhibet stimulos terretque flagellis nec videt interea qui terminus esse malorum possit nec quæ sit poenarum denique finis atque eadem metuit magis hæc ne in morte gravescant. 

The Greeks, by personifying those secret terrors, had removed theminto a region of existences separate from man. They became dreadgoddesses, who might to some extent be propitiated by exorcisms orexpiatory rites. This was in strict accordance with the mythopoeicand artistic quality of the Greek intellect. The stern and somewhatprosaic rectitude of the Roman broke through such figments of thefancy, and exposed the sore places of the soul itself. The theory ofthe Conscience, moreover, is part of the Lucretian polemic againstfalse notions of the gods and the pernicious belief in hell. 

Positivism and Realism were qualities of Roman as distinguished fromGreek culture. There was no self-delusion in Lucretius--no attempt, however unconscious, to compromise unpalatable truth, or to investphilosophy with the charm of myth. A hundred illustrations might bechosen to prove his method of setting forth thought with unadornedsimplicity. These, however, are familiar to any one who has butopened the 'De Rerum Naturâ. ' It is more profitable to trace thisRoman ruggedness in the poet's treatment of the subject which morethan any other seems to have preoccupied his intellect andfascinated his imagination--that is Death. His poem has been calledby a great critic the 'poem of Death. ' Shakspere's line--

 And Death once dead, there's no more dying then, might be written as a motto on the title-page of the book, which isfull of passages like this:--

 scire licet nobis nil esse in morte timendum nec miserum fieri qui non est posse neque hilum differre anne ullo fuerit iam tempore natus, mortalem vitam mors cum immortalis ademit. 

His whole mind was steeped in the thought of death; and though hecan hardly be said to have written 'the words that shall make deathexhilarating, ' he devoted his genius, in all its energy, to removingfrom before men the terror of the doom that waits for all. Sometimes, in his attempt at consolation, he adduces images which, like the Delphian knife, are double-handled, and cut both ways:--

 hinc indignatur se mortalem esse creatum nec videt in vera nullum fore morte alium se qui possit vivus sibi se lugere peremptum stansque iacentem se lacerari urive dolere. 

This suggests, by way of contrast, Blake's picture of the soul thathas just left the body and laments her separation. As we read, weare inclined to lay the book down, and wonder whether the argumentis, after all, conclusive. May not the spirit, when she has quittedher old house, be forced to weep and wring her hands, and stretchvain shadowy arms to the limbs that were so dear? No one has feltmore profoundly than Lucretius the pathos of the dead. The intensitywith which he realised what we must lose in dying and what we leavebehind of grief to those who loved us, reaches a climax ofrestrained passion in this well-known paragraph:--

 'iam iam non domus accipiet te læta, neque uxor optima nec dulces occurrent oscula nati præripere et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent. Non poteris factis florentibus esse, tuisque præsidium. Misero misere' aiunt 'omnia ademit una dies infesta tibi tot præmia vitæ. ' illud in his rebus non addunt 'nec tibi earum iam desiderium rerum super insidet una. ' quod bene si videant animo dictisque sequantur, dissoluant animi magno se angore metuque. 'tu quidem ut es leto sopitus, sic eris ævi quod superest cunctis privatu' doloribus ægris. At nos horrifico cinefactum te prope busto insatiabiliter deflevimus, æternumque nulla dies nobis mærorem e pectore demet. '

Images, again, of almost mediæval grotesqueness, rise in his mindwhen he contemplates the universality of Death. Simonides had daredto say: 'One horrible Charybdis waits for all. ' That was as near adiscord as a Greek could venture on. Lucretius describes the opengate and 'huge wide-gaping maw' which must devour heaven, earth, andsea, and all that they contain:--

 haut igitur leti præclusa est ianua cælo nec soli terræque neque altis æquoris undis, sed patet immani et vasto respectat hiatu. 

The ever-during battle of life and death haunts his imagination. Sometimes he sets it forth in philosophical array of argument. Sometimes he touches on the theme with elegiac pity:--

 miscetur funere vagor quem pueri tollunt visentis luminis oras; nec nox ulla diem neque noctem aurora secutast quæ non audierit mixtos vagitibus ægris ploratus mortis comites et funeris atri. 

Then again he returns, with obstinate persistence, to describe howthe dread of death, fortified by false religion, hangs like a pallover humanity, and how the whole world is a cemetery overshadowed bycypresses. The most sustained, perhaps, of these passages is at thebeginning of the third book (lines 31 to 93). The most profoundlymelancholy is the description of the new-born child (v. 221):--

 quare mors immatura vagatur? tum porro puer, ut sævis proiectus ab undis navita, nudus humi iacet, infans, indigus omni vitali auxilio, cum primum in luminis oras nixibus ex alvo matris natura profudit, vagituque locum lugubri complet, ut æcumst cui tantum in vita restet transire malorum. 

Disease and old age, as akin to Death, touch his imagination withthe same force. He rarely alludes to either without some lines asterrible as these (iii. 472, 453):--

 nam dolor ac morbus leti fabricator uterquest. Claudicat ingenium, delirat lingua, labat mens. 

Another kindred subject affects him with an equal pathos. He seesthe rising and decay of nations, age following after age, like waveshurrying to dissolve upon a barren shore, and writes (ii. 75):--

 sic rerum summa novatur semper, et inter se mortales mutua vivunt, augescunt aliæ gentes, aliæ minuuntur, inque brevi spatio mutantur sæcla animantum et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt. 

Although the theme is really the procession of life throughcountless generations, it obtains a tone of sadness from the senseof intervenient decay and change. No Greek had the heart thus todilate his imagination with the very element of death. What theGreeks commemorated when they spoke of Death was the loss of thelyre and the hymeneal chaunt, and the passage across dim waves to asunless land. Nor indeed does Lucretius, like the modern poet ofDemocracy, ascend into the regions of ecstatic trance:--

 Lost in the loving, floating ocean of thee, Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death. 

He keeps his reason cool, and sternly contemplates the thought ofthe annihilation which awaits all perishable combinations of eternalthings. Like Milton, Lucretius delights in giving the life of hisimagination to abstractions. Time, with his retinue of ages, sweepsbefore his vision, and he broods in fancy over the illimitable oceanof the universe. The fascination of the infinite is the qualitywhich, more than any other, separates Lucretius as a Roman poet fromthe Greeks. 

Another distinctive feature of his poetry Lucretius inherited aspart of his birthright. This is the sense of Roman greatness. Itpervades the poem, and may be felt in every part; although toAthens, and the Greek sages, Democritus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, and Epicurus, as the fountain-heads of soul-deliveringculture, he reserves his most magnificent periods of panegyric. Yetwhen he would fain persuade his readers that the fear of death isnugatory, and that the future will be to them even as the past, itis the shock of Rome with Carthage that he dwells upon as thecritical event of the world's history (iii. 830):--

 Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum, quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur. Et velut anteacto nil tempore sensimus ægri, ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis, omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu horrida contremuere sub altis ætheris oris, _in dubioque fuere utrorum ad regna cadendum omnibus humanis esset terraque marique_, sic:

The lines in italics could have been written by none but a Romanconscious that the conflict with Carthage had decided the absoluteempire of the habitable world. In like manner the description of amilitary review (ii. 323) is Roman: so, too, is that of theamphitheatre (iv. 75):--

 et volgo faciunt id lutea russaque vela et ferrugina, cum magnis intenta theatris per malos volgata trabesque trementia flutant. Namque ibi consessum caveai supter et omnem scænai speciem, patrum coetumque decorum inficiunt coguntque suo fluitare colore. 

The imagination of Lucretius, however, was habitually less affectedby the particular than by the universal. He loved to dwell upon thelarge and general aspects of things--on the procession of theseasons, for example, rather than upon the landscape of the Campagnain spring or autumn. Therefore it is only occasionally and byaccident that we find in his verse touches peculiarly characteristicof the manners of his country. Therefore, again, it has happenedthat modern critics have detected a lack of patriotic interest inthis most Roman of all Latin poets. Also may it here be remembered, that the single line which sums up all the history of Rome in onesoul-shaking hexameter, is not Lucretian but Virgilian:--

 Tantæ molis erat Romanam condere gentem. 

The custode of the Baths of Titus, when he lifts his torch toexplore those ruined arches, throws the wan light upon one placewhere a Roman hand has scratched that verse in gigantic letters onthe cement. The colossal genius of Rome seems speaking to us, anoracle no lapse of time can render dumb. 

But Lucretius is not only the poet _par excellence_ of Rome. He willalways rank also among the first philosophical poets of the world:and here we find a second standpoint for inquiry. The question howfar it is practicable to express philosophy in verse, and to combinethe accuracy of scientific language with the charm of rhythm and theornaments of the fancy, is one which belongs rather to modern thanto ancient criticism. In the progress of culture there has been anever-growing separation between the several spheres of intellectualactivity. What Livy said about the Roman Empire is true now ofknowledge: _magnitudine laborat suâ_; so that the labour ofspecialising and distinguishing has for many centuries beenall-important. Not only do we disbelieve in the desirability ofsmearing honey upon the lip of the medicine-glass through which thedraught of erudition has to be administered; but we know for certainthat it is only at the meeting-points between science and emotionthat the philosophic poet finds a proper sphere. Whateversubject-matter can be permeated or penetrated with strong humanfeeling is fit for verse. Then the rhythms and the forms of poetryto which high passions naturally move, become spontaneous. Theemotion is paramount, and the knowledge conveyed is valuable assupplying fuel to the fire of feeling. There are, were, and alwayswill be high imaginative points of vantage commanding the broadfields of knowledge, upon which the poet may take his station tosurvey the world and all that it contains. But it has long ceased tobe his function to set forth, in any kind of metre, systems ofspeculative thought or purely scientific truths. This was not thecase in the old world. There was a period in the development of theintellect when the abstractions of logic appeared like intuitions, and guesses about the structure of the universe still wore the garbof fancy. When physics and metaphysics were scarcely distinguishedfrom mythology, it was natural to address the Muses at the outset ofa treatise of ontology, and to cadence a theory of elementalsubstances in hexameter verse. Thus the philosophical poems ofXenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles belonged essentially to atransitional stage of human culture. 

There is a second species of poetry to which the name ofphilosophical may be given, though it better deserves that ofmystical. Pantheism occupies a middle place between a scientifictheory of the universe and a form of religious enthusiasm. Itsupplies an element in which the poetic faculty can move withfreedom: for its conclusions, in so far as they pretend tophilosophy, are large and general, and the emotions which it excitesare co-extensive with the world. Therefore, Pantheistic mysticism, from the Bhagavadgita of the far East, through the Persian Soofis, down to the poets of our own century, Goethe, and Shelley, andWordsworth, and Whitman, and many more whom it would be tedious toenumerate, has generated a whole tribe of philosophic singers. 

Yet a third class may be mentioned. Here we have to deal with whatare called didactic poems. These, like the metaphysical epic, beganto flourish in early Greece at the moment when exact thought wasdividing itself laboriously from myths and fancies. Hesiod with hispoem on the life of man leads the way; and the writers of moralsentences in elegiac verse, among whom Solon and Theognis occupy thefirst place, follow. Latin literature contributes highly artificialspecimens of this kind in the 'Georgics' of Virgil, the stoicaldiatribes of Persius, and the 'Ars Poetica' of Horace. Didacticverse had a special charm for the genius of the Latin race. The nameof such poems in the Italian literature of the Renaissance islegion. The French delighted in the same style under the sameinfluences; nor can we fail to attribute the 'Essay on Man' and the'Essay on Criticism' of our own Pope to a similar revival in Englandof Latin forms of art. The taste for didactic verse has declined. Yet in its stead another sort of philosophical poetry has grown upin this century, which, for the want of a better term, may be calledpsychological. It deserves this title, inasmuch as themotive-interest of the art in question is less the passion or theaction of humanity than the analysis of the same. The 'Faust' ofGoethe, the 'Prelude' and 'Excursion' of Wordsworth, Browning's'Sordello' and Mrs. Browning's 'Aurora Leigh, ' together with the'Musings' of Coleridge and the 'In Memoriam' of Tennyson, may beroughly reckoned in this class. It will be noticed that nothing hasbeen said about professedly religious poetry, much of which attachesitself to mysticism, while some, like the 'Divine Comedy' of Dante, is philosophic in the truest sense of the word. 

Where, then, are we to place Lucretius? He was a Roman, imbued withthe didactic predilections of the Latin race; and the didacticquality of the 'De Rerum Naturâ' is unmistakable. Yet it would beuncritical to place this poem in the class which derives fromHesiod. It belongs really to the succession of Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles. As such it was an anachronism. Thespecific moment in the development of thought at which theParmenidean Epic was natural has been already described. The Romansof the age of Lucretius had advanced far beyond it. The idealisticmetaphysics of the Socratic school, the positive ethics of theStoics, and the profound materialism of Epicurus, had accustomed themind to habits of exact and subtle thinking, prolonged fromgeneration to generation upon the same lines of speculative inquiry. Philosophy expressed in verse was out of date. Moreover, the verymyths had been rationalised. Euhemerus had even been translated intoLatin by Ennius, and his prosaic explanations of Greek legend hadfound acceptance with the essentially positive Roman intellect. Lucretius himself, it may be said in passing, thought it worth whileto offer a philosophical explanation of the Greek mythology. TheCybele of the poets is shown in one of his sublimest passages (ii. 600-645) to be Earth. To call the sea Neptune, corn Ceres, and wineBacchus, seems to him a simple folly (ii. 652-657). We have alreadyseen how he reduces the fiends and spectres of the Greek Hades tofacts of moral subjectivity (iii. 978-1023). In another place heattacks the worship of Phoebus and the stars (v. 110); in yetanother he upsets the belief in the Centaurs, Scylla, and Chimæra(v. 877-924) with a gravity which is almost comic. Such argumentsformed a necessary element in his polemic against foul religion(foeda religio--turpis religio); to deliver men from which (i. 62-112), by establishing firmly in their minds the conviction thatthe gods exist far away from this world in unconcerned tranquillity(ii. 646), and by substituting the notion of Nature for that ofdeity (ii. 1090), was the object of his scientific demonstration. 

Lucretius, therefore, had outgrown mythology, was hostile toreligion, and burned with unsurpassable enthusiasm to indoctrinatehis Roman readers with the weighty conclusions of systematisedmaterialism. Yet he chose the vehicle of hexameter verse, andtrammelled his genius with limitations which Empedocles, fourhundred years before, must have found almost intolerable. It neededthe most ardent intellectual passion and the loftiest inspiration tosustain on his far flight a poet who had forged a hoplite's panoplyfor singing robes. Both passion and inspiration were granted toLucretius in full measure. And just as there was somethingcontradictory between the scientific subject-matter and the poeticalform of his masterpiece, so the very sources of his poetic strengthwere such as are usually supposed to depress the soul. His passionwas for death, annihilation, godlessness. It was not the eloquence, but the force of logic in Epicurus that roused his enthusiasm:--

 ergo vivida vis animi pervicit et extra processit longe flammantia moenia mundi. 

No other poet who ever lived in any age, or any shore, drewinspiration from founts more passionless and more impersonal. 

The 'De Rerum Naturâ' is therefore an attempt, unique in its kind, to combine philosophical exposition and poetry in an age when therequirements of the former had already outgrown the resources of thelatter. Throughout the poem we trace a discord between the matterand the form. The frost of reason and the fire of fancy war indeadly conflict; for the Lucretian system destroyed nearlyeverything with which the classical imagination loved to play. Itwas only in some high ethereal region, before the majestic thoughtof Death or the new Myth of Nature, that the two faculties of thepoet's genius met for mutual support. Only at rare intervals did heallow himself to make artistic use of mere mythology, as in thecelebrated exordium of the first book, or the description of theSeasons in the fifth book (737-745). For the most part reason andfancy worked separately: after long passages of scientificexplanation, Lucretius indulged his readers with those pictures ofunparalleled sublimity and grace which are the charm of the wholepoem; or dropping the phraseology of atoms, void, motion, chance, hespoke at times of Nature as endowed with reason and a will (v. 186, 811, 846). 

It would be beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the particularform given by Lucretius to the Democritean philosophy. He believedthe universe to be composed of atoms, infinite in number, andvariable, to a finite extent, in form, which drift slantinglythrough an infinite void. Their combinations under the conditions ofwhat we call space and time are transitory, while they remainthemselves imperishable. Consequently, as the soul itself iscorporeally constituted, and as thought and sensation depend on merematerial idola, men may divest themselves of any fear of thehereafter. There is no such thing as providence, nor do the godsconcern themselves with the kaleidoscopic medley of atoms intransient combination which we call our world. The latter werepoints of supreme interest to Lucretius. He seems to have cared forthe cosmology of Epicurus chiefly as it touched humanity throughethics and religion. To impartial observers, the identity or thedivergence of the forms assumed by scientific hypothesis atdifferent periods of the world's history is not a matter of muchimportance. Yet a peculiar interest has of late been given to theLucretian materialism by the fact that physical speculation hasreturned to what is substantially the same ground. The most moderntheories of evolution and of molecular structure may be stated inlanguage which, allowing for the progress made by exact thoughtduring the last twenty centuries, is singularly like that ofLucretius. The Roman poet knew fewer facts than are familiar to ourmen of science, and was far less able to analyse one puzzle into awhole group of unexplained phenomena. He had besides but a feeblegrasp upon those discoveries which subserve the arts of life andpractical utility. But as regards _absolute knowledge_--knowledge, that is to say, of what the universe really is, and of how it becamewhat it seems to us to be--Lucretius stood at the same point ofignorance as we, after the labours of Darwin and of Spencer, ofHelmholtz and of Huxley, still do. Ontological speculation is asbarren now as then, and the problems of existence still remaininsoluble. The chief difference indeed between him and moderninvestigators is that they have been lessoned by the experience ofthe last two thousand years to know better the depths of humanignorance, and the directions in which it is possible to sound them. 

It may not be uninteresting to collect a few passages in which theRoman poet has expressed in his hexameters the lines of thoughtadopted by our most advanced theorists. Here is the generalconception of Nature, working by her own laws toward the achievementof that result which we apprehend through the medium of the senses(ii. 1090):--

 Quæ bene cognita si teneas, natura videtur libera continuo dominis privata superbis ipsa sua per se sponte omnia dis agere expers. 

Here again is a demonstration of the absurdity of supposing that theworld was made for the use of men (v. 156):--

 dicere porro hominum causa voluisse parare præclaram mundi naturam proptereaque adlaudabile opus divom laudare decere æternumque putare atque inmortale futurum nec fas esse, deum quod sit ratione vetusta gentibus humanis fundatum perpetuo ævo, sollicitare suis ulla vi ex sedibus umquam nec verbis vexare et ab imo evertere summa, cetera de genere hoc adfingere et addere, Memmi desiperest. 

A like cogent rhetoric is directed against the arguments oftoleology (iv. 823):--

 Illud in his rebus vitium vementer avessis effugere, errorem vitareque præmetuenter, lumina ne facias oculorum clara creata, prospicere ut possemus, et ut proferre queamus proceros passus, ideo fastigia posse surarum ac feminum pedibus fundata plicari, bracchia tum porro validis ex apta lacertis esse manusque datas utraque ex parte ministras, ut facere ad vitam possemus quæ foret usus. Cetera de genere hoc inter quæcumque pretantur omnia perversa præpostera sunt ratione, nil ideo quoniam natumst in corpore ut uti possemus, sed quod natumst id procreat usum. Nec fuit ante videre oculorum lumina nata nec dictis orare prius quam lingua creatast, sed potius longe linguæ præcessit origo sermonem multoque creatæ sunt prius aures quam sonus est auditus, et omnia denique membra ante fuere, ut opinor, eorum quam foret usus. Haud igitur potuere utendi crescere causa. 

The ultimate dissolution and the gradual decay of the terrestrialglobe is set forth in the following luminous passage (ii. 1148):--

 Sic igitur magni quoque circum moenia mundi expugnata dabunt labem putrisque ruinas. Iamque adeo fracta est ætas effetaque tellus vix animalia parva creat quæ cuncta creavit sæcla deditque ferarum ingentia corpora partu. [1]

The same mind which recognised these probabilities knew also thatour globe is not single, but that it forms one among an infinity ofsister orbs (ii. 1084):--

 quapropter cælum simili ratione fatendumst terramque et solem lunam mare, cetera quæ sunt non esse unica, sed numero magis innumerali. [2]

When Lucretius takes upon himself to describe the process ofbecoming which made the world what it now is, he seems to incline toa theory not at all dissimilar to that of unassisted evolution (v. 419):--

 nam certe neque consilio primordia rerum ordine se suo quæque sagaci mente locarunt nec quos quæque darent motus pepigere profecto, sed quia multa modis multis primordia rerum ex infinito iam tempore percita plagis ponderibusque suis consuerunt concita ferri omnimodisque coire atque omnia pertemptare, quæcumque inter se possent congressa creare, propterea fit uti magnum volgata per ævom omne genus coetus et motus experiundo tandem conveniant ea quæ convecta repente magnarum rerum fiunt exordia sæpe, terrai maris et cæli generisque animantum. 

 [1] Compare book v. 306-317 on the evidences of decay continually at work in the fabric of the world. 

 [2] The same truth is insisted on with even greater force of language in vi. 649-652. 

Entering into the details of the process, he describes the manyill-formed, amorphous beginnings of organised life upon the globe, which came to nothing, 'since nature set a ban upon their increase'(v. 837-848); and then proceeds to explain how, in the struggle forexistence, the stronger prevailed over the weaker (v. 855-863). Whatis really interesting in this exposition is that Lucretius ascribesto nature the volition ('convertebat ibi natura foramina terræ;''quoniam natura absterruit auctum') which has recently beenattributed by materialistic speculators to the same maternal power. 

To press these points, and to neglect the gap which separatesLucretius from thinkers fortified by the discoveries of modernchemistry, astronomy, physiology, and so forth, would be childish. All we can do is to point to the fact that the circumambientatmosphere of human ignorance, with reference to the main matters ofspeculation, remains undissipated. The mass of experience acquiredsince the age of Lucretius is enormous, and is infinitely valuable;while our power of tabulating, methodising, and extending the sphereof experimental knowledge seems to be unlimited. Only ontologicaldeductions, whether negative or affirmative, remain pretty muchwhere they were then. 

The fame of Lucretius, however, rests not on this foundation ofhypothesis. In his poetry lies the secret of a charm which he willcontinue to exercise as long as humanity chooses to read Latinverse. No poet has created a world of larger and nobler images, designed with the _sprezzatura_ of indifference to meregracefulness, but all the more fascinating because of the artist'snegligence. There is something monumental in the effect produced byhis large-sounding single epithets and simple names. We are at homewith the dæmonic life of nature when he chooses to bring Pan and hisfollowing before our eyes (iv. 580). Or, again, the Seasons passlike figures on some frieze of Mantegna, to which, by divineaccident, has been added the glow of Titian's colouring[1] (v. 737):--

 it ver et Venus, et veris prænuntius ante pennatus graditur zephyrus, vestigia propter Flora quibus mater præspargens ante viai cuncta coloribus egregiis et odoribus opplet. Inde loci sequitur calor aridus et comes una pulverulenta Ceres et etesia flabra aquilonum, inde antumnus adit, graditur simul Eubius Euan, inde aliæ tempestates ventique secuntur, altitonans Volturnus et auster fulmine pollens. Tandem bruma nives adfert pigrumque rigorem, prodit hiemps, sequitur crepitans hanc dentibus algor. 

With what a noble style, too, are the holidays of the primevalpastoral folk described (v. 1379-1404). It is no mere celebration ofthe _bell' età dell' oro_: but we see the woodland glades, and hearthe songs of shepherds, and feel the hush of summer among rustlingforest trees, while at the same time all is far away, in a better, simpler, larger age. The sympathy of Lucretius for every form ofcountry life was very noticeable. It belonged to that which was mostdeeply and sincerely poetic in the Latin genius, whence Virgil drewhis sweetest strain of melancholy, and Horace his most unaffectedpictures, and Catullus the tenderness of his best lines on Sirmio. No Roman surpassed the pathos with which Lucretius described theseparation of a cow from her calf (ii. 352-365). The same noteindeed was touched by Virgil in his lines upon the forlornnightingale, and in the peroration to the third 'Georgic. ' But thestyle of Virgil is more studied, the feeling more artisticallyelaborated. It would be difficult to parallel such Lucretianpassages in Greek poetry. The Greeks lacked an undefinable somethingof rusticity which dignified the Latin race. This quality was notaltogether different from what we call homeliness. Looking at thebusts of Romans, and noticing their resemblance to English countrygentlemen, I have sometimes wondered whether the Latin genius, justin those points where it differed from the Greek, was notapproximated to the English. 

 [1] The elaborate illustration of the first four lines of this passage, painted by Botticelli (in the Florence Academy of Fine Arts), proves Botticelli's incapacity or unwillingness to deal with the subject in the spirit of the original. It is graceful and 'subtle' enough, but not Lucretian. 

All subjects needing a large style, brief and rapid, but at the sametime luminous with imagination, were sure of the right treatmentfrom Lucretius. This is shown by his enumeration of the celestialsigns (v. 1188):--

 in cæloque deum sedes et templa locarunt, per cælum volvi quia nox et luna videtur, luna dies et nox et noctis signa severa noctivagæque faces cæli flammæque volantes, nubila sol imbres nix venti fulmina grando et rapidi fremitus et murmura magna minarum. 

Again, he never failed to rise to an occasion which required thedisplay of fervid eloquence. The Roman eloquence, which in itsenergetic volubility was the chief force of Juvenal, added a tidalstrength and stress of storm to the quick gathering thoughts of thegreater poet. The exordia to the first and second books, theanalysis of Love in the fourth, the praises of Epicurus in the thirdand fifth, the praises of Empedocles and Ennius in the first, theelaborate passage on the progress of civilisation in the fifth, andthe description of the plague at Athens which closes the sixth, arenoble instances of the sublimest poetry sustained and hurried onwardby the volume of impassioned improvisation. It is difficult toimagine that Lucretius wrote slowly. The strange word _vociferari_, which he uses so often, and which the Romans of the Augustan agealmost dropped from their poetic vocabulary, seems exactly made tosuit his utterance. Yet at times he tempers the full torrent ofresonant utterance with divine tranquillity, and leaves upon ourmind that sense of powerful aloofness from his subject, which onlybelongs to the mightiest poets in their most majestic moments. Oneinstance of this rare felicity of style shall end the list of ourquotations (v. 1194):--

 O genus infelix humanum, talia divis cum tribuit facta atque iras adiunxit acerbas! quantos tum gemitus ipsi sibi, quantaque nobis volnera, quas lacrimas peperere minoribu' nostris! nec pietas ullast velatum sæpe videri vertier ad lapidem atque omnis accedere ad aras nec procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas ante deum delubra nec aras sanguine multo spargere quadrupedum nec votis nectere vota, sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri. Nam cum suspicimus magni cælestia mundi templa, super stellisque micantibus æthera fixum, et venit in mentem solis lunæque viarum, tunc aliis oppressa malis in pectora cura illa quoque expergefactum caput erigere infit, ne quæ forte deum nobis inmensa potestas sit, vario motu quæ candida sidera verset. Temptat enim dubiam mentem rationis egestas, ecquænam fuerit mundi genitalis origo, et simul ecquæ sit finis, quoad moenia mundi solliciti motus hunc possint ferre laborem, an divinitus æterna donata salute perpetuo possint ævi labentia tractu inmensi validas ævi contemnere viris. 

It would be impossible to adduce from any other poet a passage inwhich the deepest doubts and darkest terrors and most vexingquestions that beset the soul, are touched with an eloquence morestately and a pathos more sublime. Without losing the sense ofhumanity, we are carried off into the infinite. Such poetry is asimperishable as the subject of which it treats. 

_ANTINOUS_

Visitors to picture and sculpture galleries are haunted by the formsof two handsome young men--Sebastian and Antinous. Both were saints:the one of decadent Paganism, the other of mythologisingChristianity. According to the popular beliefs to which they owedtheir canonisation, both suffered death in the bloom of earliestmanhood for the faith that burned in them. There is, however, thisdifference between the two--that whereas Sebastian is a shadowycreature of the pious fancy, Antinous preserves a marked andunmistakable personality. All his statues are distinguished byunchanging characteristics. The pictures of Sebastian vary accordingto the ideal of adolescent beauty conceived by each successiveartist. In the frescoes of Perugino and Luini he shines with thepale pure light of saintliness. On the canvas of Sodoma hereproduces the voluptuous charm of youthful Bacchus, with so much ofanguish in his martyred features as may serve to heighten hisdæmonic fascination. On the richer panels of the Venetian masters heglows with a flame of earthly passion aspiring heavenward. UnderGuido's hand he is a model of mere carnal comeliness. And so forththrough the whole range of the Italian painters. We know Sebastianonly by his arrows. The case is very different with Antinous. Depicted under diverse attributes--as Hermes of thewrestling-ground, as Aristæus or Vertumnus, as Dionysus, asGanymede, as Herakles, or as a god of ancient Egypt--hisindividuality is always prominent. No metamorphosis of divinity canchange the lineaments he wore on earth. And this difference, somarked in the artistic presentation of the two saints, is no lessstriking in their several histories. The legend of Sebastian tellsus nothing to be relied upon, except that he was a Roman soldierconverted to the Christian faith, and martyred. In spite of theperplexity and mystery that involve the death of Antinous inimpenetrable gloom, he is a true historic personage, no phantom ofmyth, but a man as real as Hadrian, his master. 

Antinous, as he appears in sculpture, is a young man of eighteen ornineteen years, almost faultless in his form. His beauty is not of apure Greek type. Though perfectly proportioned and developed bygymnastic exercises to the true athletic fulness, his limbs areround and florid, suggesting the possibility of early over-ripeness. The muscles are not trained to sinewy firmness, but yielding andelastic; the chest is broad and singularly swelling; and theshoulders are placed so far back from the thorax that the breastsproject beyond them in a massive arch. It has been asserted that oneshoulder is slightly lower than the other. Some of the busts seem tojustify this statement; but the appearance is due probably to thedifferent position of the two arms, one of which, if carried out, would be lifted and the other be depressed. The legs and arms aremodelled with exquisite grace of outline; yet they do not show thatreadiness for active service which is noticeable in the statues ofconverging so closely as almost to meet above the deep-cut eyes. Thenose is straight, but blunter than is consistent with the Greekideal. Both cheeks and chin are delicately formed, but fuller than asevere taste approves: one might trace in their rounded contourseither a survival of infantine innocence and immaturity, or else thesign of rapidly approaching over-bloom. The mouth is one of theloveliest ever carved; but here again the blending of the Greek andOriental types is visible. The lips, half parted, seem to pout; andthe distance between mouth and nostrils is exceptionally short. Theundefinable expression of the lips, together with the weight of thebrows and slumberous half-closed eyes, gives a look of sulkiness orvoluptuousness to the whole face. This, I fancy, is the firstimpression which the portraits of Antinous produce; and Shelley haswell conveyed it by placing the two following phrases, 'eager andimpassioned tenderness' and 'effeminate sullenness, ' in closejuxtaposition. [1] But, after longer familiarity with the whole rangeof Antinous's portraits, and after study of his life, we are broughtto read the peculiar expression of his face and form somewhatdifferently. A prevailing melancholy, sweetness of temperamentovershadowed by resignation, brooding reverie, the innocence ofyouth, touched and saddened by a calm resolve or an accepteddoom--such are the sentences we form to give distinctness to a stillvague and uncertain impression. As we gaze, Virgil's lines upon theyoung Marcellus recur to our mind: what seemed sullen, becomesmournful; the unmistakable voluptuousness is transfigured intranquillity. 

 [1] Fragment, _The Coliseum_. 

After all is said and written, the statues of Antinous do not renderup their secret. Like some of the Egyptian gods with whom he wasassociated, he remains for us a sphinx, secluded in the shade of a'mild mystery. ' His soul, like the Harpocrates he personated, seemsto hold one finger on closed lips, in token of eternal silence. Onething, however, is certain. We have before us no figment of theartistic imagination, but a real youth of incomparable beauty, justas nature made him, with all the inscrutableness of undevelopedcharacter, with all the pathos of a most untimely doom, with thealmost imperceptible imperfections that render choice reality morepermanently charming than the ideal. It has been disputed whetherthe Antinous statues are portraits or idealised works of inventiveart; and it is usually conceded that the sculptors of Hadrian's agewere not able to produce a new ideal type. Critics, therefore, likeHelbig and Overbeck, arrive at the conclusion that Antinous was oneof nature's masterpieces, modelled in bronze, marble, and granitewith almost flawless technical dexterity. Without attaching too muchweight to this kind of criticism, it is well to find the decisionsof experts in harmony with the instincts of simple observers. Antinous is as real as any man who ever sat for his portrait to amodern sculptor. 

But who was Antinous, and what is known of him? He was a native ofBithynium or Claudiopolis, a Greek town claiming to have been acolony from Arcadia, which was situated near the Sangarius, in theRoman province of Bithynia; therefore he may have had pure Hellenicblood in his veins, or, what is more probable, his ancestry may havebeen hybrid between the Greek immigrants and the native populationsof Asia Minor. Antinous was probably born in the first decade of thesecond century of our era. About his youth and education we knownothing. He first appears upon the scene of the world's history asHadrian's friend. Whether the Emperor met with him during histravels in Asia Minor, whether he found him among the students ofthe University at Athens, or whether the boy had been sent to Romein his childhood, must remain matter of the merest conjecture. We donot even know for certain whether Antinous was free or a slave. Thereport that he was one of the Emperor's pages rests upon thetestimony of Hegesippus, quoted by a Christian Father, and cannottherefore be altogether relied upon. It receives, however, someconfirmation from the fact that Antinous is more than oncerepresented in the company of Hadrian and Trajan in a page's huntingdress upon the basreliefs which adorn the Arch of Constantine. Theso-called Antinous-Castor of the Villa Albani is probably of asimilar character. Winckelmann, who adopted the tradition astrustworthy, pointed out the similarity between the portraits ofAntinous and some lines in Phædrus, which describe a curly-haired_atriensis_. If Antinous took the rank of _atriensis_ in theimperial _pædagogium_, his position would have been, to say theleast, respectable; for to these upper servants was committed thecharge of the _atrium_, where the Romans kept their family archives, portraits, and works of art. Yet he must have quitted this kind ofservice some time before his death, since we find him in the companyof Hadrian upon one of those long journeys in which an _atriensis_would have had no _atrium_ to keep. By the time of Hadrian's visitto Egypt, Antinous had certainly passed into the closestrelationship with his imperial master; and what we know of theEmperor's inclination towards literary and philosophical societyperhaps justifies the belief that the youth he admitted to hisfriendship had imbibed Greek culture, and had been initiated intothose cloudy metaphysics which amused the leisure of semi-Orientalthinkers in the last age of decaying Paganism. 

It was a moment in the history of the human mind when East and Westwere blending their traditions to form the husk of Christian creedsand the fantastic visions of neo-Platonism. Rome herself hadreceived with rapture the strange rites of Nilotic and of Syriansuperstition. Alexandria was the forge of fanciful imaginations, themajority of which were destined to pass like vapours and leave not awrack behind, while a few fastened with the force of dogma on theconscience of awakening Christendom. During Hadrian's reign it wasstill uncertain which among the many hybrid products of that motleyage would live and flourish; and the Emperor, we know, dreamedfondly of reviving the cults and restoring the splendour ofdegenerate Hellas. At the same time he was not averse to the moremystic rites of Egypt: in his villa at Tivoli he built a Serapeum, and named one of its quarters Canopus. What part Antinous may havetaken in the projects of his friend and master we know not; yet, when we come to consider the circumstances of his death, it may notbe superfluous to have thus touched upon the intellectual conditionsof the world in which he lived. The mixed blood of the boy, born andbred in a Greek city near the classic ground of Dindymean rites, andhis beauty, blent of Hellenic and Eastern qualities, may also notunprofitably be remembered. In such a youth, nurtured between Greeceand Asia, admitted to the friendship of an emperor for whomneo-Hellenism was a life's dream in the midst of grave state-cares, influenced by the dark and symbolical creeds of a dimly apprehendedEast, might there not have lurked some spark of enthusiasm combiningthe impulses of Atys and Aristogeiton, pathetic even in itsinefficiency when judged by the light of modern knowledge, butheroic at that moment in its boundless vista of great deeds to beaccomplished?

After journeying through Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, andArabia, Hadrian, attended by Antinous, came to Egypt. He thererestored the tomb of Pompey, near Pelusium, with great magnificence, and shortly afterwards embarked from Alexandria upon the Nile, proceeding on his journey through Memphis into the Thebaïd. When hehad arrived near an ancient city named Besa, on the right bank ofthe river, he lost his friend. Antinous was drowned in the Nile. Hehad thrown himself, it was believed, into the water; seeking thus bya voluntary death to substitute his own life for Hadrian's, and toavert predicted perils from the Roman Empire. What these perilswere, and whether Hadrian was ill, or whether an oracle hadthreatened him with approaching calamity, we do not know. Evensupposition is at fault, because the date of the event is stilluncertain; some authorities placing Hadrian's Egyptian journey inthe year 122, and others in the year 130 A. D. Of the two dates, thesecond seems the more probable. We are left to surmise that, if theEmperor was in danger, the recent disturbances which followed a newdiscovery of Apis, may have exposed him to fanatical conspiracy. Thesame doubt affects an ingenious conjecture that rumours whichreached the Roman court of a new rising in Judæa had disturbed theEmperor's mind, and led to the belief that he was on the verge of amysterious doom. He had pacified the Empire and established itsadministration on a solid basis. Yet the revolt of the indomitableJews--more dreaded since the days of Titus than any otherperturbation of the imperial economy--would have been enough, especially in Egypt, to engender general uneasiness. However thismay have been, the grief of the Emperor, intensified either bygratitude or remorse, led to the immediate canonisation of Antinous. The city where he died was rebuilt, and named after him. His worshipas a hero and as a god spread far and wide throughout the provincesof the Mediterranean. A new star, which appeared about the time ofhis decease, was supposed to be his soul received into the companyof the immortals. Medals were struck in his honour, and countlessworks of art were produced to make his memory undying. Great citieswore wreaths of red lotos on his feast-day in commemoration of themanner of his death. Public games were celebrated in his honour atthe city Antinoë, and also in Arcadian Mantinea. This canonisationmay probably have taken place in the fourteenth year of Hadrian'sreign, A. D. 130. [1] Antinous continued to be worshipped until thereign of Valentinian. 

 [1] Overbeck, Hausrath, and Mommsen, following apparently the conclusions arrived at by Flemmer in his work on Hadrian's journeys, place it in 130 A. D. This would leave an interval of only eight years between the deaths of Antinous and Hadrian. It may here be observed that two medals of Antinous, referred by Rasche with some hesitation to the Egyptian series, bear the dates of the eighth and ninth years of Hadrian's reign. If these coins are genuine, and if we accept Flemmer's conclusions, they must have been struck in the lifetime of Antinous. Neither of them represents Antinous with the insignia of deity: one gives the portrait of Hadrian upon the reverse. 

Thus far I have told a simple story, as though the details of theyouth's last days were undisputed. Still we are as yet but on thethreshold of the subject. All that we have any right to take foruncontested is that Antinous passed from this life near the city ofBesa, called thereafter Antinoopolis or Antinoë. Whether he wasdrowned by accident, whether he drowned himself in order to saveHadrian by vicarious suffering, or whether Hadrian sacrificed him inorder to extort the secrets of fate from blood-propitiated deities, remains a question buried in the deepest gloom. With a view tothrowing such light as is possible upon the matter, we must proceedto summon in their order the most trustworthy authorities among theancients. 

Dion Cassius takes precedence. In compiling his life of Hadrian, hehad beneath his eyes the Emperor's own 'Commentaries, ' publishedunder the name of the freedman Phlegon. We therefore learn from himat least what the friend of Antinous wished the world to know abouthis death; and though this does not go for much, since Hadrian ishimself an accused person in the suit before us, yet the whole RomanEmpire may be said to have accepted his account, and based on it apious cult that held its own through the next three centuries ofgrowing Christianity. Dion, in the abstract of his history compiledby Xiphilinus, speaks then to this effect: 'In Egypt he also builtthe city named after Antinous. Now Antinous was a native ofBithynium, a city of Bithynia, which we also call Claudiopolis. Hewas Hadrian's favourite, and he died in Egypt: whether by havingfallen into the Nile, as Hadrian writes, or by having beensacrificed, as the truth was. For Hadrian, as I have said, was ingeneral over-much given to superstitious subtleties, and practisedall kinds of sorceries and magic arts. At any rate he so honouredAntinous, whether because of the love he felt for him, or because hedied voluntarily, since a willing victim was needed for his purpose, that he founded a city in the place where he met this fate, andcalled it after him, and dedicated statues, or rather images, of himin, so to speak, the whole inhabited world. Lastly, he affirmed thata certain star which he saw was the star of Antinous, and listenedwith pleasure to the myths invented by his companions about thisstar having really sprung from the soul of his favourite, and havingthen for the first time appeared. For which things he was laughedat. '

We may now hear what Spartian, in his 'Vita Hadriani, ' has to say:'He lost his favourite, Antinous, while sailing on the Nile, andlamented him like a woman. About Antinous reports vary, for some saythat he devoted his life for Hadrian, while others hint what hiscondition seems to prove, as well as Hadrian's excessive inclinationto luxury. Some Greeks, at the instance of Hadrian, canonised him, asserting that oracles were given by him, which Hadrian himself issupposed to have made up. '

In the third place comes Aurelius Victor: 'Others maintain that thissacrifice of Antinous was both pious and religious; for when Hadrianwas wishing to prolong his life, and the magicians required avoluntary vicarious victim, they say that, upon the refusal of allothers, Antinous offered himself. '

These are the chief authorities. In estimating them we must rememberthat, though Dion Cassius wrote less than a century after the eventnarrated, he has come down to us merely in fragments and in theepitome of a Byzantine of the twelfth century, when everything thatcould possibly be done to discredit the worship of Antinous, and toblacken the memory of Hadrian, had been attempted by the ChristianFathers. On the other hand, Spartianus and Aurelius Victor compiledtheir histories at too distant a date to be of first-rate value. Taking the three reports together, we find that antiquity differedabout the details of Antinous's death. Hadrian himself averred thathis friend was drowned; and it was surmised that he had drownedhimself in order to prolong his master's life. The courtiers, however, who had scoffed at Hadrian's fondness for his favourite, and had laughed to see his sorrow for his death, somewhatillogically came to the conclusion that Antinous had been immolatedby the Emperor, either because a victim was needed to prolong hislife, or because some human sacrifice was required in order tocomplete a dark mysterious magic rite. Dion, writing not very longafter the event, believed that Antinous had been immolated for somesuch purpose with his own consent. Spartian, who wrote at thedistance of more than a century, felt uncertain about the questionof self-devotion; but Aurelius Victor, following after the intervalof another century, unhesitatingly adopted Dion's view, and gave ita fresh colour. This opinion he summarised in a compact, authoritative form, upon which we may perhaps found an assumptionthat the belief in Antinous, as a self-devoted victim, had beengradually growing through two centuries. 

There are therefore three hypotheses to be considered. The first isthat Antinous died an accidental death by drowning; the second is, that Antinous, in some way or another, gave his life willingly forHadrian's; the third is, that Hadrian ordered his immolation in theperformance of magic rites. 

For the first of the three hypotheses we have the authority ofHadrian himself, as quoted by Dion. The simple words [Greek: eis tonNeilon ekpesôn] imply no more than accidental death; and yet, if theEmperor had believed the story of his favourite's self-devotion, itis reasonable to suppose that he would have recorded it in his'Memoirs. ' Accepting this view of the case, we must refer thedeification of Antinous wholly to Hadrian's affection; and the talesof his _devotio_ may have been invented partly to flatter theEmperor's grief, partly to explain its violence to the Roman world. This hypothesis seems, indeed, by far the most natural of the three;and if we could strip the history of Antinous of its mysterious andmythic elements, it is rational to believe that we should find hisdeath a simple accident. Yet our authorities prove that writers ofhistory among the ancients wavered between the two other theories of(i) Self-Devotion and (ii) Immolation, with a bias toward thelatter. These, then, have now to be considered with some attention. Both, it may parenthetically be observed, relieve Antinous from amoral stigma, since in either case a pure untainted victim wasrequired. 

If we accept the former of the two remaining hypotheses, we canunderstand how love and gratitude, together with sorrow, led Hadrianto canonise Antinous. If we accept the latter, Hadrian's sorrowitself becomes inexplicable; and we must attribute the foundation ofAntinoë and the deification of Antinous to remorse. It may be added, while balancing these two solutions of the problem, that cynicalsophists, like Hadrian's Græculi, were likely to have put the worstconstruction on the Emperor's passion, and to have invented theworst stories concerning the favourite's death. To perpetuate thesecalumnious reports was the real interest of the Christianapologists, who not unnaturally thought it scandalous that ahandsome page should be deified. Thus, at first sight, the balanceof probability inclines toward the former of the two solutions, while the second may be rejected as based upon court-gossip andreligious animosity. Attention may also again be called to the factthat Hadrian ventured to publish an account of Antinous quiteinconsistent with what Dion chose to call the truth, and thatvirtuous Emperors like the Antonines did not interfere with a cult, which, had it been paid to the mere victim of Hadrian's passion andhis superstition, would have been an infamy even in Rome. Moreover, that cult was not, like the creations of the impious emperors, forgotten or destroyed by public acclamation. It took root andflourished apparently, as we shall see, because it satisfied somecraving of the popular religious sense, and because the peoplebelieved that this man had died for his friend. It will not, however, do to dismiss the two hypotheses so lightly. 

The alternative of self-devotion presents itself under a doubleaspect. Antinous may either have committed suicide by drowning withthe intention of prolonging the Emperor's life, or he may haveoffered himself as a voluntary victim to the magicians, who requireda sacrifice for a similar purpose. Spartian's brief phrase, _aliiseum devotum pro Hadriano_, may seem to point to the first form ofself-devotion; the testimony of Aurelius Victor clearly supports thesecond: yet it does not much matter which of the two explanations weadopt. The point is whether Antinous gave his life willingly to savethe Emperor's, or whether he was murdered for the satisfaction ofsome superstitious curiosity. It was absolutely necessary that thevicarious victim should make a free and voluntary oblation ofhimself. That the notion of vicarious suffering was familiar to theancients is sufficiently attested by the phrases [Greek:antipsychoi], [Greek: antandroi], and _hostia succidanea_. We findtraces of it in the legend of Alcestis, who died for Admetus, and ofCheiron, who took the place of Prometheus in Hades. Suetoniusrecords that in the first days of Caligula's popularity, when he waslabouring under dangerous illness, many Romans of both sexes vowedtheir lives for his recovery in temples of the gods. That thissuperstition retained a strong hold on the popular imagination inthe time of Hadrian is proved by the curious affirmation ofAristides, a contemporary of that Emperor. He says that once, whenhe was ill, a certain Philumene offered her soul for his soul, herbody for his body, and that, upon his own recovery, she died. On thesame testimony it appears that her brother Hermeas had also died forAristides. This faith in the efficacy of substitution is persistentin the human race. Not long ago a Christian lady was supposed tohave vowed her own life for the prolongation of that of Pope PiusIX. , and good Catholics inclined to the belief that the sacrificehad been accepted. We shall see that in the first centuries ofChristendom the popular conviction that Antinous had died forHadrian brought him into inconvenient rivalry with Christ, whosevicarious suffering was the cardinal point of the new creed. 

The alternative of immolation has next to be considered. Thequestion before us here is, Did Hadrian sacrifice Antinous for thesatisfaction of a superstitious curiosity, and in the performance ofmagic rites? Dion Cassius uses the word [Greek: hierourgêtheis], andexplains it by saying that Hadrian needed a voluntary human victimfor the accomplishment of an act of divination in which he wasengaged. Both Spartian and Dion speak emphatically of the Emperor'sproclivities to the black art; and all antiquity agreed about thistrait in his character. Ammianus Marcellinus spoke of him as'_futurorum sciscitationi nimiæ deditum_. ' Tertullian described himas '_curiositatum omnium exploratorem_. ' To multiply such phraseswould, however, be superfluous, for they are probably mererepetitions from the text of Dion. That human victims were used bythe Romans of the Empire seems certain. Lampridius, in the 'Life ofHeliogabalus, ' records his habit of slaying handsome and nobleyouths, in order that he might inspect their entrails. Eusebius, inhis 'Life of Maxentius, ' asserts the same of that Emperor. _Quuminspiceret exta puerilia_, [Greek: neognôn splagchna brephôndiereunomenou], are the words used by Lampridius and Eusebius. Justin Martyr speaks of [Greek: epopteuseis paidôn adiaphthorôn]. Caracalla and Julian are credited with similar bloody sacrifices. Indeed, it may be affirmed in general that tyrants have ever beeneager to foresee the future and to extort her secrets from Fate, stopping short at no crime in the attempt to quiet a corrodinganxiety for their own safety. What we read about Italiandespots--Ezzelino da Romano, Sigismondo Malatesta, Filippo MariaVisconti, and Pier Luigi Farnese--throws light upon the practice oftheir Imperial predecessors; while the mysterious murder of thebeautiful Astorre Manfredi by the Borgias in Hadrian's Mausoleum hasbeen referred by modern critics of authority to the same unholycuriosity. That Hadrian laboured under this moral disease, and thathe deliberately used the body of Antinous for _extispicium_, is, Ithink, Dion's opinion. But are we justified in reckoning Hadrianamong these tyrants? That must depend upon our view of hischaracter. 

Hadrian was a man in whom the most conflicting qualities were blent. In his youth and through his whole life he was passionately fond ofhunting; hardy, simple in his habits, marching bareheaded with hislegions through German frost and Nubian heat, sharing the food ofhis soldiers, and exercising the most rigid military discipline. Atthe same time he has aptly been described as 'the most sumptuouscharacter of antiquity. ' He filled the cities of the empire withshowy buildings, and passed his last years in a kind of classicMunich, where he had constructed imitations of every celebratedmonument in Europe. He was so far fond of nature that, anticipatingthe most recently developed of modern tastes, he ascended Mount Ætnaand the Mons Casius, in order to enjoy the spectacle of sunrise. Inhis villa at Tivoli he indulged a trivial fancy by christening onegarden Tempe and another the Elysian Fields; and he had his namecarved on the statue of the vocal Memnon with no less gusto than amodern tourist: _audivi voces divinas_. His memory was prodigious, his eloquence in the Latin language studied and yet forcible, hisknowledge of Greek literature and philosophy far from contemptible. He enjoyed the society of Sophists and distinguished rhetoricians, and so far affected authorship as to win the unenviable title of_Græculus_ in his own lifetime: yet he never neglected stateaffairs. Owing to his untiring energy and vast capacity forbusiness, he not only succeeded in reorganising every department ofthe empire, social, political, fiscal, military, and municipal; buthe also held in his own hands the threads of all its complicatedmachinery. He was strict in matters of routine, and appears to havebeen almost a martinet among his legions: yet in social intercoursehe lived on terms of familiarity with inferiors, combining thegraces of elegant conversation with the _bonhomie_ of booncompanionship, displaying a warm heart to his friends, and usingmagnificent generosity. He restored the domestic as well as themilitary discipline of the Roman world; and his code of laws lastedtill Justinian. Among many of his useful measures of reform heissued decrees restricting the power of masters over their slaves, and depriving them of their old capital jurisdiction. Hisbiographers find little to accuse him of beyond a singular avidityfor fame, addiction to magic arts and luxurious vices: yet theyadduce no proof of his having, at any rate before the date of hisfinal retirement to his Tiburtine villa, shared the crimes of a Neroor a Commodus. On the whole, we must recognise in Hadrian a natureof extraordinary energy, capacity for administrative government, andmental versatility. A certain superficiality, vulgarity, andcommonplaceness seems to have been forced upon him by thecircumstances of his age, no less than by his special temperament. This quality of the immitigable commonplace is clearly written onhis many portraits. Their chief interest consists in a fixedexpression of fatigue--as though the man were weary with muchseeking and with little finding. In all things, he was somewhat of adilettante; and the Nemesis of that sensibility to impressions whichdistinguishes the dilettante, came upon him ere he died. He endedhis days in an appalling and persistent paroxysm of _ennui_, desiring the death which would not come to his relief. 

The whole creative and expansive force of Hadrian's century layconcealed in the despised Christian sect. Art was expiring in asunset blaze of gorgeous imitation, tasteless grandeur, technicalelaboration. Philosophy had become sophistical or mystic; its reallife survived only in the phrase 'entbehren sollst du, sollstentbehren' of the Stoics. Literature was repetitive and scholastic. Tacitus, Suetonius, Plutarch, and Juvenal indeed were living; buttheir works formed the last great literary triumph of the age. Religion had degenerated under the twofold influences of scepticismand intrusive foreign cults. It was, in truth, an age in which, fora sound heart and manly intellect, there lay no proper choice exceptbetween the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius and the Christianity of theCatacombs. All else had passed into shams, unrealities, and visions. Now Hadrian was neither stoical nor Christian, though he so farcoquetted with Christianity as to build temples dedicated to noPagan deity, which passed in after times for unfinished churches. Hewas a _Græculus_. In that contemptuous epithet, stripping it of itsopprobrious significance, we find the real key to his character. Ina failing age he lived a restless-minded, many-sided soldier-prince, whose inner hopes and highest aspirations were for Hellas. Hellas, her art, her history, her myths, her literature, her lovers, heryoung heroes filled him with enthusiasm. To rebuild her ruinedcities, to restore her deities, to revive her golden life of blendedpoetry and science, to reconstruct her spiritual empire as he hadre-organised the Roman world, was Hadrian's dream. It was indeed adream; one which a far more creative genius than Hadrian's could nothave realised. 

But now, returning to the two alternatives regarding his friend'sdeath: was this philo-Hellenic Emperor the man to have immolatedAntinous for _extispicium_ and then deified him? Probably not. Thediscord between this bloody act and subsequent hypocrisy upon theone hand, and Hadrian's Greek sympathies upon the other, must bereckoned too strong for even such a dipsychic character as his. There is nothing in either Spartian or Dion to justify the opinionthat he was naturally cruel or fantastically deceitful. On the otherhand, Hadrian's philo-Hellenic, splendour-loving, somewhat tawdry, fame-desiring nature was precisely of the sort to jump eagerly atthe deification of a favourite who had either died a natural deathor killed himself to save his master. Hadrian had loved Antinouswith a Greek passion in his lifetime. The Roman Emperor was half agod. He remembered how Zeus had loved Ganymede, and raised him toOlympus; how Achilles had loved Patroclus, and performed his funeralrites at Troy; how the demi-god Alexander had loved Hephæstion, andlifted him into a hero's seat on high. He, Hadrian, would do thelike, now that death had robbed him of his comrade. The Roman, whosurrounded himself at Tivoli with copies of Greek temples, and whocalled his garden Tempe, played thus at being Zeus, Achilles, Alexander; and the civilised world humoured his whim. Though theSophists scoffed at his real grief and honourable tears, theyconsecrated his lost favourite, found out a star for him, carved himin breathing brass, and told tales about his sacred flower. Pancrates was entertained in Alexandria at the public cost for hisfable of the lotos; and the lyrist Mesomedes received so liberal apension for his hymn to Antinous that Antoninus Pius found itneedful to curtail it. 

After weighing the authorities, considering the circumstances of theage, and estimating Hadrian's character, I am thus led to reject thealternative of immolation. Spartian's own words, _quem muliebriterflevit_, as well as the subsequent acts of the Emperor and theacquiescence of the whole world in the new deity, prove to my mindthat in the suggestion of _extispicium_ we have one of those covertcalumnies which it is impossible to set aside at this distance oftime, and which render the history of Roman Emperors and Popesalmost impracticable. 

The case, then, stands before us thus. Antinous was drowned in theNile, near Besa, either by accident or by voluntary suicide to savehis master's life. Hadrian's love for him had been unmeasured, sowas his grief. Both of them were genuine; but in the nature of theman there was something artificial. He could not be content to loveand grieve alone; he must needs enact the part of Alexander, andrealise, if only by a sort of makebelieve, a portion of his Greekideal. Antinous, the beautiful servant, was to take the place ofGanymede, of Patroclus, of Hephæstion; never mind if Hadrian was aRoman and his friend a Bithynian, and if the love between them, asbetween an emperor of fifty and a boy of nineteen, had been lessthan heroic. The opportunity was too fair to be missed; the _rôle_too fascinating to be rejected. The world, in spite of covertsneers, lent itself to the sham, and Antinous became a god. 

The uniformly contemptuous tone of antique authorities almostobliges us to rank this deification of Antinous, together with theTiburtine villa and the dream of a Hellenic Renaissance, among thepart-shams, part-enthusiasms of Hadrian's 'sumptuous' character. Spartian's account of the consecration, and his hint that Hadriancomposed the oracles delivered at his favourite's tomb; Arrian'sletter to the Emperor describing the island Leukè and flattering himby an adroit comparison with Achilles; the poem by Pancratesmentioned in the 'Deipnosophistæ, ' which furnished the myth of a newlotos dedicated to Antinous; the invention of the star, andHadrian's conversations with his courtiers on this subject--allconverge to form the belief that something of consciously unrealmingled with this act of apotheosis by Imperial decree. Hadriansought to assuage his grief by paying his favourite illustrioushonours after death; he also desired to give the memory of his ownlove the most congenial and poetical environment, to feed upon it inthe daintiest places, and to deck it with the prettiest flowers offancy. He therefore canonised Antinous, and took measures fordisseminating his cult throughout the world, careless of the elementof imposture which might seem to mingle with the consecration of histrue affection. Hadrian's superficial taste was not offended by thegimcrack quality of the new god; and Antinous was saved from being amerely pinchbeck saint by his own charming personality. 

This will not, however, wholly satisfy the conditions of theproblem; and we are obliged to ask ourselves whether there was notsomething in the character of Antinous himself, something divinelyinspired and irradiate with spiritual beauty, apparent to hisfellows and remembered after his mysterious death, which justifiedhis canonisation, and removed it from the region of Imperialmakebelieve. If this was not the case, if Antinous died like aflower cropped from the seraglio garden of the court-pages, howshould the Emperor in the first place have bewailed him with'unhusbanded passion, ' and the people afterwards have received himas a god? May it not have been that he was a youth of more thanordinary promise, gifted with intellectual enthusiasms proportionedto his beauty and endowed with something of Phoebean inspiration, who, had he survived, might have even inaugurated a new age for theworld, or have emulated the heroism of Hypatia in a hopeless cause?Was the link between him and Hadrian formed less by the boy's beautythan by his marvellous capacity for apprehending and his fitness forrealising the Emperor's Greek dreams? Did the spirit ofneo-Platonism find in him congenial incarnation? At any rate, wasthere not enough in the then current beliefs about the future of thesoul, as abundantly set forth in Plutarch's writings, to justify aconviction that after death he had already passed into the lunarsphere, awaiting the final apotheosis of purged spirits in the sun?These questions may be asked--indeed, they must be asked--for, without suggesting them, we leave the worship of Antinous an almostinexplicable scandal, an almost unintelligible blot on human nature. Unless we ask them, we must be content to echo the coarse andviolent diatribes of Clemens Alexandrinus against the vigils of thedeified _exoletus_. But they cannot be answered, for antiquity isaltogether silent about him; only here and there, in the indignantutterance of a Christian Father, stung to the quick by Paganparallels between Antinous and Christ, do we catch a perverted echoof the popular emotion upon which his cult reposed, which recognisedhis godhood or his vicarious self-sacrifice, and which paid enduringtribute to the sublimity of his young life untimely quenched. 

The _senatus consultum_ required for the apotheosis of an Emperorwas not, so far as we know, obtained in the case of Antinous. Hadrian's determination to exalt his favourite sufficed; and this isperhaps one of the earliest instances of those informal deificationswhich became common in the later Roman period. Antinous wascanonised according to Greek ritual and by Greek priests: _Græciquidam volente Hadriano eum consecraverunt_. How this wasaccomplished we know not; but forms of canonisation must have beenin common usage, seeing that emperors and members of the Imperialfamily received the honour in due course. The star which wassupposed to have appeared soon after his death, and whichrepresented his soul admitted to Olympus, was somewhere near theconstellation Aquila, according to Ptolemy, but not part of it. Ibelieve the letters [Greek: ê. Th. I. K. L. ] of Aquila now bear the nameof Antinous; but this appropriation dates only from the time ofTycho Brahe. It was also asserted that as a new star had appeared inthe skies, so a new flower had blossomed on the earth, at the momentof his death. This was the lotos, of a peculiar red colour, whichthe people of Lower Egypt used to wear in wreaths upon his festival. It received the name Antinoeian; and the Alexandrian sophist, Pancrates, seeking to pay a double compliment to Hadrian and hisfavourite, wrote a poem in which he pretended that this lily wasstained with the blood of a Libyan lion slain by the Emperor. AsArrian compared his master to Achilles, so Pancrates flattered himwith allusions to Herakles. The lotos, it is well known, was asacred flower in Egypt. Both as a symbol of the all-nourishingmoisture of the earth and of the mystic marriage of Isis and Osiris, and also as an emblem of immortality, it appeared on all the sacredplaces of the Egyptians, especially on tombs and funeral utensils. To dignify Antinous with the lotos emblem was to consecrate him; tofind a new species of the revered blossom and to wear it in hishonour, calling it by his name, was to exalt him to the company ofgods. Nothing, as it seems, had been omitted that could secure forhim the patent of divinity. 

He met his death near the city Besa, an ancient Egyptian town uponthe eastern bank of the Nile, almost opposite to Hermopolis. Besawas the name of a local god, who gave oracles and predicted futureevents. But of this Besa we know next to nothing. Hadrian determinedto rebuild the city, change its name, and let his favourite take theplace of the old deity. Accordingly, he raised a splendid new townin the Greek style; furnished it with temples, agora, hippodrome, gymnasium, and baths; filled it with Greek citizens; gave it a Greekconstitution, and named it Antinoë. This new town, whether calledAntinoë, Antinoopolis, Antinous, Antinoeia, or even Besantinous (forits titles varied), continued long to flourish, and was mentioned byAmmianus Marcellinus, together with Copton and Hermopolis, as one ofthe three most distinguished cities of the Thebaïd. In the age ofJulian these three cities were perhaps the only still thriving townsof Upper Egypt. It has even been maintained on Ptolemy's authoritythat Antinoë was the metropolis of a nome, called Antinoeitis; butthis is doubtful, since inscriptions discovered among the ruins ofthe town record no name of nomarch or strategus, while they provethe government to have consisted of a Boulè and a Prytaneus, who wasalso the Eponymous Magistrate. Strabo reckons it, together withPtolemais and Alexandria, as governed after the Greek municipalsystem. 

In this city Antinous was worshipped as a god. Though a Greek god, and the eponym of a Greek city, he inherited the place and functionsof an Egyptian deity, and was here represented in the hieratic styleof Ptolemaic sculpture. A fine specimen of this statuary ispreserved in the Vatican, showing how the neo-Hellenic sculptors hadsucceeded in maintaining the likeness of Antinous withoutsacrificing the traditional manner of Egyptian piety. The sacredemblems of Egyptian deities were added: we read, for instance, inone passage, that his shrine contained a boat. This boat, like themystic egg of Erôs or the cista of Dionysos, symbolised the embryoof cosmic life. It was specially appropriated to Osiris, andsuggested collateral allusions doubtless to immortality and thesoul's journey in another world. Antinous had a college of priestsappointed to his service; and oracles were delivered from thecenotaph inside his temple. The people believed him to be a geniusof warning, gracious to his suppliants, but terrible to evil-doers, combining the qualities of the avenging and protective deities. Annual games were celebrated in Antinoë on his festival, withchariot races and gymnastic contests; and the fashion of keeping hisday seems, from Athenæus's testimony, to have spread through Egypt. An inscription in Greek characters discovered at Rome upon theCampus Martius entitles Antinous a colleague of the gods in Egypt--

 [Greek: ANTINOÔI SYNTHRONÔI TÔN EN AIGUÊTÔI THEÔN]. 

The worship of Antinous spread rapidly through the Greek and Asianprovinces, especially among the cities which owed debts of gratitudeto Hadrian or expected from him future favours. At Athens, forexample, the Emperor, attended perhaps by Antinous, had presided asArchon during his last royal progress, had built a suburb calledafter his name, and raised a splendid temple to Olympian Jove. TheAthenians, therefore, founded games and a priesthood in honour ofthe new divinity. Even now, in the Dionysiac theatre, among thechairs above the orchestra assigned to priests of elder deities andmore august tradition, may be found one bearing the name ofAntinous--[Greek: IEREÔS ANTINOOU]. A marble tablet has also beendiscovered inscribed with the names of agonothetai for the gamescelebrated in honour of Antinous; and a stele exists engraved withthe crown of these contests together with the crowns of Severus, Commodus, and Antoninus. It appears that the games in honour ofAntinous took place both at Eleusis and at Athens; and that theagonothetai, as also the priest of the new god, were chosen from theEphebi. The Corinthians, the Argives, the Achaians, and the Epirots, as we know from coins issued by the priests of Antinous, adopted hiscult;[1] but the region of Greece proper where it flourished mostwas Arcadia, the mother state of his Bithynian birthplace. Pausanias, who lived contemporaneously with Antinous, and might haveseen him, though he tells us that he had not chanced to meet theyouth alive, mentions the temple of Antinous at Mantinea as thenewest in that city. 'The Mantineans, ' he says, 'reckon Antinousamong their gods. ' He then describes the yearly festival andmysteries connected with his cult, the quinquennial gamesestablished in his honour, and his statues. The gymnasium had a celldedicated to Antinous, adorned with pictures and fair stone-work. The new god was in the habit of Dionysus. 

 [1] For example: [Greek: OSTILIOS MARKELLOSOIEREUSTOU ANTINOOU ANETHÊKE TOIS ACHAIOIS] and a similar inscription for Corinth. 

As was natural, his birthplace paid him special observance. Coinsdedicated by the province of Bithynia, as well as by the townBithynium, are common, with the epigraphs, [Greek: ANTINOOU ÊPATRIS] and [Greek: ANTINOON THEON Ê PATRIS]. Among the cities ofAsia Minor and the vicinity the new cult seems to have been widelyspread. Adramyttene in Mysia, Alabanda, Ancyra in Galatia, Chalcedon, Cuma in Æolis, Cyzicum in Mysia, the Ciani, theHadrianotheritæ of Bithynia, Hierapolis in Phrygia, Nicomedia, Philadelphia, Sardis, Smyrna, Tarsus, the Tianians of Paphlagonia, and a town Rhesæna in Mesopotamia, all furnish their quota ofmedals. On the majority of these medals he is entitled Herôs, but onothers he has the higher title of god; and he seems to have beenassociated in each place with some deity of local fame. 

Being essentially a Greek hero, or divinised man received into thecompany of immortals and worshipped with the attributes of god, hiscult took firmer root among the neo-Hellenic provinces of the empirethan in Italy. Yet there are signs that even in Italy he found hisvotaries. Among these may first be mentioned the comparativefrequency of his name in Roman inscriptions, which have no immediatereference to him, but prove that parents gave it to their children. The discovery of his statues in various cities of the Roman Campagnashows that his cult was not confined to one or two localities. Naples in particular, which remained in all essential points a Greekcity, seems to have received him with acclamation. A quarter of thetown was called after his name, and a phratria of priests wasfounded in connection with his worship. The Neapolitans owed much tothe patronage of Hadrian, and they repaid him after this fashion. Atthe beginning of the last century Raffaello Fabretti discovered aninscription near the Porta S. Sebastiano at Rome, which throws somelight on the matter. It records the name of a Roman knight, Sufenas, who had held the office of Lupercus and had been a fellow of theNeapolitan phratria of Antinous--_fretriaco Neapoli Antinoiton etEunostidon_. Eunostos was a hero worshipped at Tanagra in Boeotia, where he had a sacred grove no female foot might enter; and thewording of the inscription leaves it doubtful whether the Eunostidæand Antinoitæ of Naples were two separate colleges; or whether theheroes were associated as the common patrons of one brotherhood. 

A valuable inscription discovered in 1816 near the Baths at Lanuviumor Lavigna shows that Antinous was here associated with Diana as thesaint of a benefit club. The rules of the confraternity prescribethe payments and other contributions of its members, provide fortheir assembling on the feast days of their patrons, fix certainfines, and regulate the ceremonies and expenses of their funerals. This club seems to have resembled modern burial societies, as knownto us in England; or still more closely to have been formed upon thesame model as Italian confraternitè of the Middle Ages. The Lex, ortable of regulations, was drawn up in the year 133 A. D. It fixes thebirthday of Antinous as v. K. Decembr. , and alludes to the temple ofAntinous--_Tetrastylo Antinoi_. Probably we cannot build much on thebirthday as a genuine date, for the same table gives the birthday ofDiana; and what was wanted was not accuracy in such matters, but asettled anniversary for banquets and pious celebrations. When wecome to consider the divinity of Antinous, it will be of service toremember that at Lanuvium, together with Diana of the nether world, he was reckoned among the saints of sepulture. Could this thoughthave penetrated the imagination of his worshippers: that sinceAntinous had given his life for his friend, since he had faced deathand triumphed over it, winning immortality and godhood for himselfby sacrifice, the souls of his votaries might be committed to hischarge and guidance on their journey through the darkness of thetomb? Could we venture to infer thus much from his selection by aconfraternity existing for the purpose of securing decent burial orpious funeral rites, the date of its formation, so soon after hisdeath, would confirm the hypothesis that he was known to havedevoted his life for Hadrian. 

While speaking of Antinous as a divinised man, adscript to the godsof Egypt, accepted as hero and as god in Hellas, Italy, and AsiaMinor, we have not yet considered the nature of his deity. Thequestion is not so simple as it seems at first sight: and the nextstep to take, with a view to its solution, is to consider thevarious forms under which he was adored--the phases of his divinity. The coins already mentioned, and the numerous works of glyptic artsurviving in the galleries of Europe, will help us to placeourselves at the same point of view as the least enlightened of hisantique votaries. Reasoning upon these data by the light of classictexts, may afterwards enable us to assign him his true place in thePantheon of decadent and uninventive Paganism. 

In Egypt, as we have already seen, Antinous was worshipped by theneo-Hellenes of Antinoopolis as their Eponymous Hero; but he tookthe place of an elder native god, and was represented in artaccording to the traditions of Egyptian sculpture. The marble statueof the Vatican is devoid of hieratic emblems. Antinous is attiredwith the Egyptian head-dress and waistband: he holds a shorttruncheon firmly clasped in each hand; and by his side is apalm-stump, such as one often finds in statues of the Greek Hermes. Two colossal statues of red granite discovered in the ruins ofHadrian's villa, at Tivoli, represent him in like manner with theusual Egyptian head-dress. They seem to have been designed forpillars supporting the architrave of some huge portal; and the wandsgrasped firmly in both hands are supposed to be symbolical of thegenii called Dii Averrunci. Von Levezow, in his monograph uponAntinous in art, catalogues five statues of a similar description tothe three already mentioned. From the indistinct character of all ofthem, it would appear that Antinous was nowhere identified with anyone of the great Egyptian deities, but was treated as a Dæmonpowerful to punish and protect. This designation corresponds to thecontemptuous rebuke addressed by Origen to Celsus, where he arguesthat the new saint was only a malignant and vengeful spirit. HisEgyptian medals are few and of questionable genuineness: themajority of them seem to be purely Hellenic; but on one he bears acrown like that of Isis, and on another a lotos wreath. The dimrecords of his cult in Egypt, and the remnants of Græco-Egyptianart, thus mark him out as one of the Averruncan deities, associatedperhaps with Kneph or the Agathodæmon of Hellenic mythology, orapproximated to Anubis, the Egyptian Hermes. Neither statues norcoins throw much light upon his precise place among those gods ofNile whose throne he is said to have ascended. Egyptian piety maynot have been so accommodating as that of Hellas. 

With the Græco-Roman world the case is different. We obtain aclearer conception of the Antinous divinity, and recognise himalways under the mask of youthful gods already honoured with fixedritual. To worship even living men under the names and attributes ofwell-known deities was no new thing in Hellas. We may remember theIthyphallic hymn with which the Athenians welcomed DemetriusPoliorkêtes, the marriage of Anthony as Dionysus to Athenè, and thedeification of Mithridates as Bacchus. The Roman Emperors hadalready been represented in art with the characteristics ofgods--Nero, for example, as Phoebus, and Hadrian as Mars. Suchcompliments were freely paid to Antinous. On the Achaian coins wefind his portrait on the obverse, with different types of Hermes onthe reverse, varied in one case by the figure of a ram, in anotherby the representation of a temple, in a third by a nude herograsping a spear. One Mysian medal, bearing the epigraph 'AntinousIacchus, ' represents him crowned with ivy, and exhibits Demeter onthe reverse. A single specimen from Ancyra, with the legend'Antinous Herôs, ' depicts the god Lunus carrying a crescent moonupon his shoulder. The Bithynian coins generally give youthfulportraits of Antinous upon the obverse, with the title of 'Herôs' or'Theos;' while the reverse is stamped with a pastoral figure, sometimes bearing the talaria, sometimes accompanied by a feeding oxor a boar or a star. This youth is supposed to be Philesius, the sonof Hermes. In one specimen of the Bithynian series the reverseyields a head of Proserpine crowned with thorns. A coin of Chalcedonornaments the reverse with a griffin seated near a naked figure. Another, from Corinth, bears the sun-god in a chariot; another, fromCuma, presents an armed Pallas. Bulls, with the crescent moon, occurin the Hadrianotheritan medals: a crescent moon in that ofHierapolis: a ram and star, a female head crowned with towers, astanding bull, and Harpocrates placing one finger on his lips, inthose of Nicomedia; a horned moon and star in that of EpirotNicopolis. One Philadelphian coin is distinguished by Antinous in atemple with four columns; another by an Aphrodite in her cella. TheSardian coins give Zeus with the thunderbolt, or Phoebus with thelyre; those of Smyrna are stamped with a standing ox, a ram, and thecaduceus, a female panther and the thyrsus, or a hero recliningbeneath a plane-tree; those of Tarsus with the Dionysian cista, thePhoebean tripod, the river Cydnus, and the epigraphs 'NeosPuthios, ' 'Neos Iacchos;' those of the Tianians with Antinous asBacchus on a panther, or, in one case, as Poseidôn. 

It would be unsafe to suppose that the emblems of the reverse ineach case had a necessary relation to Antinous, whose portrait isalmost invariably represented on the obverse. They may refer, as inthe case of the Tarsian river-god, to the locality in which themedal was struck. Yet the frequent occurrence of the well-known typewith the attributes and sacred animals of various deities, and theepigraphs 'Neos Puthios' or 'Neos Iacchos, ' justify us in assumingthat he was associated with divinities in vogue among the people whoaccepted his cult--especially Apollo, Dionysus, and Hermes. On morethan one coin he is described as Antinous-Pan, showing that hisArcadian compatriots of Peloponnese and Bithynia paid him thecompliment of placing him beside their great local deity. In a Latininscription discovered at Tibur, he is connected with the sun-god ofNoricia, Pannonia and Illyria, who was worshipped under the title ofBelenus:--

 Antinoo et Beleno par ætas famaque par est; Cur non Antinous sit quoque qui Belenus?

This couplet sufficiently explains the ground of his adscription tothe society of gods distinguished for their beauty. Both Belenus andAntinous are young and beautiful: why, therefore, should notAntinous be honoured equally with Belenus? The same reasoning wouldapply to all his impersonations. The pious imagination or theæsthetic taste tricked out this favourite of fortune in masqueradecostumes, just as a wealthy lover may amuse himself by dressing hismistress after the similitude of famous beauties. The analogy ofstatues confirms this assumption. A considerable majority representhim as Dionysus Kisseus: in some of the best he is conceived asHermes of the Palæstra or a simple hero: in one he is probablyDionysus Antheus; in another Vertumnus or Aristæus; yet again he isthe Agathos Daimon: while a fine specimen preserved in England showshim as Ganymede raising a goblet of wine: a little statue in theLouvre gives him the attributes of youthful Herakles; a basrelief ofsomewhat doubtful genuineness in the Villa Albani exhibits him withRomanised features in the character perhaps of Castor. Again, I amnot sure whether the Endymion in the celebrated basrelief of theCapitol does not yield a portrait of Antinous. 

This rapid enumeration will suffice to show that Antinous wasuniversally conceived as a young deity in bloom, and that preferencewas given to Phoebus and Iacchus, the gods of divination andenthusiasm, for his associates. In some cases he appears to havebeen represented as a simple hero without the attributes of anydeity. Many of his busts, and the fine nude statues of the Capitoland the Neapolitan Museum, belong to this class, unless we recognisethe two last as Antinous under the form of a young Hercules, or ofthe gymnastic Hermes. But when he comes before us with the title ofPuthios, or with the attributes of Dionysus, distinct reference isprobably intended in the one case to his oracular quality, in theother to the enthusiasm which led to his death. Allusions toHarpocrates, Lunus, Aristæus, Philesius, Vertumnus, Castor, Herakles, Ganymedes, show how the divinising fancy played around thebeauty of his youth, and sought to connect him with myths alreadyhonoured in the pious conscience. Lastly, though it would behazardous to strain this point, we find in his chief impersonationsa Chthonian character, a touch of the mystery that is shrouded inthe world beyond the grave. The double nature of his Athenian cultmay perhaps confirm this view. But, over and above all thesesymbolic illustrations, one artistic motive of immortal lovelinesspervades and animates the series. 

It becomes at this point of some moment to determine what was therelation of Antinous to the gods with whom he blended, and whoseattributes he shared. It seems tolerably certain that he had nospecial legend which could be idealised in art. The mythopoeicfancy invented no fable for him. His cult was parasitic upon eldercults. He was the colleague of greater well-established deities, from whom he borrowed a pale and evanescent lustre. Speakingaccurately, he was a hero or divinised mortal, on the same grade asHelen immortalised for her beauty, as Achilles for his prowess, oras Herakles for his great deeds. But having no poet like Homer tosing his achievements, no myth fertile in emblems, he dwelt beneaththe shadow of superior powers, and crept into a place with them. What was this place worth? What was the meaning attached by hisvotaries to the title [Greek: synthronos] or [Greek: paredrostheos]? According to the simple meaning of both epithets, heoccupied a seat together with or by the side of the genuineOlympians. In this sense Pindar called Dionysus the [Greek:paredros] of Demeter, because the younger god had been admitted toher worship on equal terms at Eleusis. In this sense Sophocles spokeof Himeros as [Greek: paredros] of the eternal laws, and of Justiceas [Greek: synoikos] with the Chthonian deities. In this senseEuripides makes Helen [Greek: xynthakos] with her brethren, theDioscuri. In this sense the three chief Archons at Athens were saidto have two [Greek: paredroi] apiece. In this sense, again, Hephæstion was named a [Greek: theos paredros], and Alexander in hislifetime was voted a thirteenth in the company of the twelveOlympians. The divinised emperors were [Greek: paredroi] or [Greek:synthronoi]; nor did Virgil hesitate to flatter Augustus byquestioning into which college of the immortals he would be adscriptafter death--

 Tuque adeo, quem mox quæ sint habitura deorum Concilia, incertum est. 

Conscript deities of this heroic order were supposed to avert evilsfrom their votaries, to pursue offenders with calamity, to inspireprophetic dreams, and to appear, as the phantom of Achilles appearedto Apollonius of Tyana, and answer questions put to them. Theycorresponded very closely and exactly to the saints of mediævalism, acting as patrons of cities, confraternities, and persons, andinterposing between the supreme powers of heaven and their especialdevotees. As a [Greek: paredros] of this exalted quality, Antinouswas the associate of Phoebus, Bacchus, and Hermes among theOlympians, and a colleague with the gods of Nile. The principaldifficulty of grasping his true rank consists in the variety of hisemblems and divine disguises. 

It must here be mentioned that the epithet [Greek: paredros] had asecondary and inferior signification. It was applied by laterauthors to the demons or familiar spirits who attended uponenchanters like Simon Magus or Apollonius; and such satellites werebelieved to be supplied by the souls of innocent young personsviolently slain. Whether this secondary meaning of the titleindicates a degeneration of the other, and forms the first step ofthe process whereby classic heroes were degraded into the foulfiends of mediæval fancy, or whether we find in it a wholly newapplication of the word, is questionable. I am inclined to believethat, while [Greek: paredros theos] in the one case means anassociate of the Olympian gods, [Greek: paredros daimôn] in theother means a fellow-agent and assessor of the wizard. In otherwords, however they may afterwards have been confounded, the twouses of the same epithet were originally distinct: so that not every[Greek: paredros theos], Achilles, or Hephæstion or Antinous, wassupposed to haunt and serve a sorcerer, but only some inferiorspirit over whom his black art gave him authority. The [Greek:paredros theos] was so called because he sat with the great gods. The [Greek: paredros daimôn] was so called because he sat beside themagician. At the same time there seems sufficient evidence that thetwo meanings came to be confounded; and as the divinities of Hellas, with all their lustrous train, paled before the growing splendour ofChrist, they gradually fell beneath the necromantic ferule of thewitch. 

Returning from this excursion, and determining that Antinous was ahero or divinised mortal, adscript to the college of the greatergods, and invested with many of their attributes, we may next askthe question, why this artificial cult, due in the first place toimperial passion and caprice, and nourished by the adulation offawning provinces, was preserved from the rapid dissolution to whichthe flimsy products of court-flattery are subject. The mythopoeticfaculty was extinct, or in its last phase of decadent vitality. There was nothing in the life of Antinous to create a legend or tostimulate the sense of awe; and yet this worship persisted longafter the fear of Hadrian had passed away, long after the benefitsto be derived by humouring a royal fancy had been exhausted, longafter anything could be gained by playing out the farce. It isclear, from a passage in Clemens Alexandrinus, that the sacrednights of Antinous were observed, at least a century after the dateof his deification, with an enthusiasm that roused the anger of theChristian Father. Again, it is worthy of notice that, while many ofthe noblest works of antiquity have perished, the statues ofAntinous have descended to us in fair preservation and in very largenumbers. From the contemptuous destruction which erased themonuments of base men in the Roman Empire they were safe; and thestate in which we have them shows how little they had suffered fromneglect. The most rational conclusion seems to be that Antinousbecame in truth a popular saint, and satisfied some new need inPaganism, for which none of the elder and more respectable deitiessufficed. The novelty of his cult had, no doubt, something to dowith the fascination it exercised; and something may be attributedto the impulse art received from the introduction of so rare andoriginal a type of beauty into the exhausted cycle of mythicalsubjects. The blending of Greek and Egyptian elements was alsoattractive to an age remarkable for its eclecticism. But afterallowing for the many adventitious circumstances which concurred tomake Antinous the fashion, it is hardly unreasonable to assume thatthe spirit of poetry in the youth's story, the rumour of hisself-devoted death, kept him alive in the memory of the people. Itis just that element of romance in the tale of his last hours, thatpreservative association with the pathos of self-sacrifice, whichforms the interest we still feel for him. 

The deified Antinous was therefore for the Roman world a charmingbut dimly felt and undeveloped personality, made perfect bywithdrawal into an unseen world of mystery. The belief in the valueof vicarious suffering attached itself to his beautiful andmelancholy form. His sorrow borrowed something of the universalworld-pain, more pathetic than the hero-pangs of Herakles, theanguish of Prometheus, or the passion of Iacchus-Zagreus, becausemore personal and less suggestive of a cosmic mystery. The ancientcries of Ah Linus, Ah Adonis, found in him an echo. For votariesready to accept a new god as simply as we accept a new poet, he wasthe final manifestation of an old-world mystery, the rejuvenescenceof a well-known incarnation, the semi-Oriental realisation of arecurring Avatar. And if we may venture on so bold a surmise, thislast flower of antique mythology had taken up into itself a portionof the blood outpoured on Calvary. Planted in the conservatory ofsemi-philosophical yearnings, faintly tinctured with the colours ofmisapprehended Christianity, without inherent stamina, without thepowerful nutrition which the earlier heroic fables had derived fromthe spiritual vigour of a truly mythopoeic age, the cult ofAntinous subsisted as an echo, a reflection, the last serious effortof deifying but no longer potent Paganism, the last reverberation ofits oracles, an æsthetic rather than a religious product, viewedeven in its origin with sarcasm by the educated, and yetsufficiently attractive to enthral the minds of simple votaries, andto survive the circumstances of its first creation. It may beremembered that the century which witnessed the canonisation ofAntinous, produced the myth of Cupid and Psyche--or, if this be toosweeping an assertion, gave it final form, and handed it, in itssuggestive beauty, to the modern world. Thus at one and the samemoment the dying spirit of Hellas seized upon those doctrines ofself-devotion and immortality which, through the triumph ofChristian teaching, were gaining novel and incalculable value forthe world. According to its own laws of inspiration, it stamped bothlegends of Love victorious over Death, with beautiful form in mythand poem and statuary. 

That we are not altogether unjustified in drawing this conclusionmay be gathered from the attitude assumed by the Christianapologists toward Antinous. There is more than the mere hatred of aPagan hero, more than the bare indignation at a public scandal, intheir acrimony. Accepting the calumnious insinuations of DionCassius, these gladiators of the new faith found a terriblerhetorical weapon ready to their hands in the canonisation of acourt favourite. Prudentius, Clemens Alexandrinus, Tertullian, Eusebius, Justin Martyr, Athanasius, Tatian--all inveigh, in nearlythe same terms, against the Emperor's Ganymede, exalted to theskies, and worshipped with base fear and adulation by abject slaves. But in Origen, arguing with Celsus, we find a somewhat differentkeynote struck. Celsus, it appears, had told the story of Antinous, and had compared his cult with that of Christ. Origen repliesjustly, that there was nothing in common between the lives ofAntinous and of Christ, and that his supposed divinity is a fiction. We can discern in this response an echo of the faith which endearedAntinous to his Pagan votaries. Antinous was hated by the Christiansas a rival; insignificant, it is true, and unworthy, but still ofsufficient force to be regarded and persecuted. If Antinous had beenutterly contemptible, if he had not gained some firm hold upon thepiety of Græco-Roman Paganism, Celsus could hardly have ventured torest an argument upon his worship, nor would Origen have chosen totraverse that argument with solid reasoning, instead of passing itby in rhetorical silence. Nothing is more difficult than tounderstand the conditions of that age or to sympathise with itsdominant passions. Educated as we have been in the traditions of thefinally triumphant Christian faith, warmed through and through as weare by its summer glow and autumn splendour, believing as we do inthe adequacy of its spirit to satisfy the cravings of the humanheart, how can we comprehend a moment in its growth when thedivinised Antinous was not merely an object offensive to the moralsense, but also a parody dangerous to the pure form of Christ?

It remains to say somewhat of Antinous as he appears in art. Hisplace in classic sculpture corresponds to his position in antiquemythology. The Antinous statues and coins are reflections of earlierartistic masterpieces, executed with admirable skill, but lackingoriginal faculty for idealisation in the artists. Yet there is somuch personal attraction in his type, his statues are so manifestlyfaithful portraits, and we find so great a charm of novelty in hisdelicately perfect individuality, that the life-romance which theyreveal, as through a veil of mystery, has force enough to make themrank among the valuable heirlooms of antiquity. We could almostbelieve that, while so many gods and heroes of Greece have perished, Antinous has been preserved in all his forms and phases for his ownmost lovely sake; as though, according to Ghiberti's exquisitesuggestion, gentle souls in the first centuries of Christianity hadspared this blameless youth, and hidden him away with tender hands, in quiet places, from the fury of iconoclasts. Nor is it impossiblethat the great vogue of his worship was due among the Pagan laity tothis same fascination of pure beauty. Could a more graceful templeof the body have been fashioned, after the Platonic theory, for thehabitation of a guileless, god-inspired, enthusiastic soul? Thepersonality of Antinous, combined with the suggestion of hisself-devoted death, made him triumphant in art as in the affectionsof the pious. 

It would be an interesting task to compose a _catalogue raisonné_ ofAntinous statues and basreliefs, and to discuss the question oftheir mythological references. This is, however, not the place forsuch an inquiry. And yet I cannot quit Antinous without someretrospect upon the most important of his portraits. Among thesimple busts, by far the finest, to my thinking, are the colossalhead of the Louvre, and the ivy-crowned bronze at Naples. The latteris not only flawless in its execution, but is animated with apensive beauty of expression. The former, though praised byWinckelmann, as among the two or three most precious masterpieces ofantique art, must be criticised for a certain vacancy andlifelessness. Of the heroic statues, the two noblest are those ofthe Capitol and Naples. The identity of the Capitoline Antinous hasonly once, I think, been seriously questioned; and yet it may bereckoned more than doubtful. The head is almost certainly not his. How it came to be placed upon a body presenting so much resemblanceto the type of Antinous I do not know. Careful comparison of thetorso and the arms with an indubitable portrait will even raise thequestion whether this fine statue is not a Hermes or a hero of anearlier age. Its attitude suggests Narcissus or Adonis; and undereither of these forms Antinous may properly have been idealised. TheNeapolitan marble, on the contrary, yields the actual Antinous inall the exuberant fulness of his beauty. Head, body, pose, alikebring him vividly before us, forming an undoubtedly authenticportrait. The same personality, idealised, it is true, but rathersuffering than gaining by the process, is powerfully impressed uponthe colossal Dionysus of the Vatican. What distinguishes this greatwork is the inbreathed spirit of divinity, more overpowering herethan in any other of the extant [Greek: andriantes kai agalmata]. The basrelief of the Villa Albani, restored to suit the conceptionof a Vertumnus, has even more of florid beauty; but whether therestoration was wisely made may be doubted. It is curious to comparethis celebrated masterpiece of technical dexterity with anotherbasrelief in the Villa Albani, representing Antinous as Castor. Heis standing, half clothed with the chlamys, by a horse. His hair isclose-cropped, after the Roman fashion, cut straight above theforehead, but crowned with a fillet of lotos-buds. The whole facehas a somewhat stern and frowning Roman look of resolution, contrasting with the mild benignity of the Bacchus statues, and thealmost sulky voluptuousness of the busts. In the Lateran MuseumAntinous appears as a god of flowers, holding in his lap a multitudeof blossoms, and wearing on his head a wreath. The conception ofthis statue provokes comparison with the Flora of the NeapolitanMuseum. I should like to recognise in it a Dionysus Antheus, ratherthan one of the more prosy Roman gods of horticulture. Not unworthyto rank with these first-rate portraits of Antinous is a Ganymede, engraved by the Dilettante Society, which represents him standingalert, in one hand holding the wine-jug and in the other lifting acup aloft. It will be seen from even this brief enumeration of a fewamong the statues of Antinous, how many and how various they are. One, however, remains still to be discussed, which, so far asconcerns the story of Antinous, is by far the most interesting ofall. As a work of art, to judge by photographs, it is inferior toothers in execution and design. Yet could we but understand itsmeaning clearly, the mystery of Antinous would be solved: the key tothe whole matter probably lies here; but, alas! we know not how touse it. I speak of the Ildefonso Group at Madrid. [1]

 [1] See Frontispiece. 

On one pedestal there are three figures in white marble. To theextreme right of the spectator stands a little female statue of agoddess, in archaistic style, crowned with the calathos, and holdinga sphere, probably of pomegranate fruit, to her breast. To the leftof this image are two young men, three times the height of thegoddess, quite naked, standing one on each side of a low altar. Bothare crowned with a wreath of leaves and berries--laurel or myrtle. The youth to the right, next the image, holds a torch in eitherhand: with the right he turns the flaming point downwards, till itlies upon the altar; with the left he lifts the other torch aloft, and rests it on his shoulder. He has a beautiful Græco-Roman face, touched with sadness or ineffable reflection. The second youth leansagainst his comrade, resting his left arm across the other's back, and this hand is lightly placed upon the shoulder, close to thelifted torch. His right arm is bent, and so placed that the handjust cuts the line of the pelvis a little above the hip. The weightof his body is thrown principally upon the right leg; the left footis drawn back, away from the altar. It is the attitude of the ApolloSauroctonos. His beautiful face, bent downward, is intently gazingwith a calm, collected, serious, and yet sad cast of earnestmeditation. His eyes seem fixed on something beyond him and beneathhim--as it were on an inscrutable abyss; and in this direction alsolooks his companion. The face is unmistakably the face of Antinous;yet the figure, and especially the legs, are not characteristic. They seem modelled after the conventional type of the Greek Ephebus. Parts of the two torches and the lower half of the right arm ofAntinous are restorations. 

Such is the Ildefonso marble; and it may be said that its executionis hard and rough--the arms of both figures are carelessly designed;the hands and fingers are especially angular, elongated, andill-formed. But there is a noble feeling in the whole group, notwithstanding. F. Tieck, the sculptor and brother of the poet, wasthe first to suggest that we have here Antinous, the Genius ofHadrian, and Persephone. [1] He also thought that the self-immolationof Antinous was indicated by the loving, leaning attitude of theyounger man, and by his melancholy look of resolution. The sameview, in all substantial points, is taken by Friedrichs, author of awork on Græco-Roman sculpture. But Friedrichs, while admitting theidentity of the younger figure with Antinous, and recognisingPersephone in the archaic image, is not prepared to accept the elderas the Genius of Hadrian; and it must be confessed that this facedoes not bear any resemblance to the portraits of the Emperor. According to his interpretation, the Dæmon is kindling the fire uponthe sacrificial altar with the depressed torch; and the second orlifted torch must be supposed to have been needed for theperformance of some obscure rite of immolation. What Friedrichsfails to elucidate is the trustful attitude of Antinous, who couldscarcely have been conceived as thus affectionately reclining on theshoulder of a merely sacrificial dæmon; nor is there anything uponthe altar to kindle. It must, however, be conceded that theimperfection of the marble at this point leaves the restoration ofthe altar and the torch upon it doubtful. 

 [1] See the article on Antinous, by Victor Rydberg, in the _Svensk Tidskrift för Litteratur, Politik, och Ekonomi_. 1875, Stockholm. Also Karl Bötticher, _Königliches Museum, Erklärendes Verzeichniss_. Berlin, 1871. 

Charles Bötticher started a new solution of the principal problem. According to him, it was executed in the lifetime of Antinous; andit represents not a sacrifice of death, but a sacrifice of fidelityon the part of the two friends, Hadrian and Antinous, who have mettogether before Persephone to ratify a vow of love till death. Hesuggests that the wreaths are of stephanotis, that large-leavedmyrtle, which was sacred to the Chthonian goddesses after theliberation of Semele from Hades by her son Dionysus. With referenceto such ceremonies between Greek comrades, Bötticher cites a vaseupon which Theseus and Peirithous are sacrificing in the temple ofPersephone; and he assumes that there may have existed Atheniangroups in marble representing similar vows of friendship, from whichHadrian had this marble copied. He believes that the Genius ofHadrian is kindling one torch at the sacred fire, which he willreach to Antinous, while he holds the other in readiness to kindlefor himself. This explanation is both ingenious and beautiful. Ithas also the great merit of explaining the action of the right armof Antinous. Yet it is hardly satisfactory. It throws no light uponthe melancholy and solemnity of both figures, which irresistiblysuggest a funereal rather than a joyous rite. Antinous is not evenlooking at the altar, and the meditative curves of his beautifulreclining form indicate anything rather than the spirited alacritywith which a friend would respond to his comrade's call at such amoment. Besides, why should not the likeness of Hadrian have beenpreserved as well as that of Antinous, if the group commemorated anact of their joint will? On the other hand, we must admit that thealtar itself is not dressed for a funereal sacrifice. 

It has been pointed out that in the British Museum there exists abasrelief of Homer's apotheosis where we notice a figure holding twotorches. Is it, then, possible that the Ildefonso marble mayexpress, not the sacrifice, but the apotheosis of Antinous, and thatthe Genius who holds the two torches is conferring on himimmortality? The lifted torch would symbolise his new life, and thedepressed torch would stand for the life he had devoted. Accordingto this explanation, the sorrowful expression of Antinous mustindicate the agony of death through which he passed into the companyof the undying. Against this interpretation is the fact that we haveno precise authority for the symbolism of the torches, except onlythe common inversion of the life-brand by the Genius of Death. 

Yet another solution may be suggested. Assuming that we have beforeus a sacrificial ceremony, and that the group was executed after theself-devotion of Antinous had passed into the popular belief, we mayregard the elder youth as either the Genius of the Emperor, separatein spirit from Hadrian himself and presiding over his destinies, whoaccepts the offer of Antinous with solemn calmness suited to sogreat a gift; or else as the Genius of the Roman people, witnessingthe same act in the same majestic spirit. This view finds somesupport in the abstract ideality of the torch-bearer, who is clearlyno historical personage as Antinous himself is, but rather a powercontrolling his fate. The interpretation of the two torches remainsvery difficult. In the torch flung down upon the flameless andbarren altar we might recognise a symbol of Hadrian's life upon thepoint of extinction, but not yet extinguished; and in the torchlifted aloft we might find a metaphor of life resuscitated andexalted. Nor is it perhaps without significance that the arm of theself-immolating youth meets the upraised torch, as though to touchthe life which he will purchase with his death. There is, however, the objection stated above to this bold use of symbolism. 

In support of any explanation which ascribes this group to a periodlater than the canonisation of Antinous, it may be repeated that theexecution is inferior to that of almost all the other statues of thehero. Is it possible, then, that it belongs to a subsequent date, when art was further on the wane, but when the self-devotion ofAntinous had become a dogma of his cult?

After all is said, the Ildefonso marble, like the legend ofAntinous, remains a mystery. Only hypotheses, more or lessingenious, more or less suited to our sympathies, varying betweenCasaubon's coarse vilification and Rydberg's roseate vision, areleft us. 

As a last note on the subject of Antinous let me refer to Raphael'sstatue of Jonah in the Chigi Chapel of S. Maria del Popolo at Rome. Raphael, who handled the myth of Cupid and Psyche so magnificentlyin the Villa Farnesina of his patron Agostino Chigi, dedicated astatue of Antinous--the only statue he ever executed inmarble--under the title of a Hebrew prophet in a Christiansanctuary. The fact is no less significant than strange. During theearly centuries of Christianity, as is amply proved by thesarcophagi in the Lateran Museum, Jonah symbolised self-sacrificeand immortality. He was a type of Christ, an emblem of theChristian's hope beyond the grave. During those same centuriesAntinous represented the same ideas, however inadequately, howeverdimly, for the unlettered laity of Paganism. It could scarcely havebeen by accident, or by mere admiration for the features ofAntinous, that Raphael, in his marble, blent the Christian and thePagan traditions. To unify and to transcend the double views ofChristianity and Paganism in a work of pure art was Raphael'sinstinctive, if not his conscious, aim. Nor is there a more strikinginstance of this purpose than the youthful Jonah with the head ofHadrian's favourite. Leonardo's Dionysus-John-the-Baptist seems buta careless _jeu d'esprit_ compared with this profound and studiedsymbol of renascent humanism. Thus to regard the Jonah-Antinous ofthe Cappella Chigi as a type of immortality and self-devotion, fusing Christian and Græco-Roman symbolism in one work of modernart, is the most natural interpretation; but it would not beimpossible to trace in it a metaphor of the resurgent Pagan spiritalso--as though, leaving Jonah and his Biblical associations in thebackground, the artist had determined that from the mouth of themonstrous grave should issue not a bearded prophet, but thevictorious youth who had captivated with his beauty and his heroismthe sunset age of the classic world. At any rate, whatever may havebeen Raphael's intention, the legend of Antinous, that last creationof antique mythology, shines upon us in this marble, just as thetale of Hero and Leander, that last blossom of antique literature, flowers afresh in the verses of our Marlowe. It would appear asthough the Renaissance poets, hastening to meet the classic worldwith arms of welcome, had embraced its latest saints, as nearest tothem, in the rapture of their first enthusiasm. 

Over all these questions, over all that concerns Antinous, thererests a cloud of darkness and impenetrable doubt. To pierce thatcloud is now impossible. The utmost we can do is to indulge ourfancy in dreams of greater or less probability, and to mark outclearly the limitations of the subject. It is indeed something tohave shown that the stigma of slavery and disgrace attaching to hisname has no solid historical justification, and something to havesuggested plausible reasons for conjecturing that his worship had agenuine spiritual basis. Yet the sincere critic, at the end of thewhole inquiry, will confess that he has only cast a plummet into theunfathomable sea of ignorance. What remains, immortal, indestructible, victorious, is Antinous in art. Against the gloomybackground of doubt, calumny, contention, terrible surmise, hisstatues are illuminated with the dying glory of the classicgenius--even as the towers and domes of a marble city shine forthfrom the purple banks of a thunder-cloud in sunset light. Here andhere only does reality emerge from the chaos of conflictingphantoms. Front to front with them, it is allowed us to forget allelse but the beauty of one who died young because the gods lovedhim. But when we question those wonderful mute features and beg themfor their secret, they return no answer. There is not even a smileupon the parted lips. So profound is the mystery, so insoluble theenigma, that from its most importunate interrogation we derivenothing but an attitude of deeper reverence. This in itself, however, is worth the pains of study. [1]

 [1] I must here express my indebtedness to my friend H. F. Brown for a large portion of the materials used by me in this essay on Antinous, which I had no means at Davos Platz of accumulating for myself, and which he unearthed from the libraries of Florence in the course of his own work, and generously placed at my disposal. 

_SPRING WANDERINGS_

Ana-Capri

The storm-clouds at this season, though it is the bloom of May, aredaily piled in sulky or menacing masses over Vesuvius and theAbruzzi, frothing out their curls of moulded mist across the bay, and climbing the heavens with toppling castle towers and domes ofalabaster. 

We made the most of a tranquil afternoon, when there was anarmistice of storm, to climb the bluff of Mount Solaro. A ruinedfort caps that limestone bulwark; and there we lay together, drinking the influences of sea, sun, and wind. Immeasurably deepbeneath us plunged the precipices, deep, deep descending to a baywhere fisher boats were rocking, diminished to a scale that made thefishermen in them invisible. Low down above the waters wheeled whitegulls, and higher up the hawks and ospreys of the cliff sailed outof sunlight into shadow. Immitigable strength is in the moulding ofthis limestone, and sharp, clear definiteness marks yon clothing ofscant brushwood where the fearless goats are browsing. The sublimeof sculpturesque in crag structure is here, refined and modulated bythe sweetness of sea distances. For the air came pure and yieldingto us over the unfooted sea; and at the basement of thosefortress-cliffs the sea was dreaming in its caves; and far away, toeast and south and west, soft light was blent with mist upon thesurface of the shimmering waters. 

The distinction between prospects viewed from a mountain overlookinga great plain, or viewed from heights that, like this, dominate thesea, principally lies in this: that while the former only offercloud shadows cast upon the fields below our feet, in the latterthese shadows are diversified with cloud reflections. This givessuperiority in qualities of colour, variety of tone, and luminouseffect to the sea, compensating in some measure for the lack ofthose associations which render the outlook over a wide extent ofpopulated land so thrilling. The emergence of towered cities intosunlight at the skirts of moving shadows, the liquid lapse of rivershalf disclosed by windings among woods, the upturned mirrors ofunruffled lakes, are wanting to the sea. For such episodes the whitesails of vessels, with all their wistfulness of going to and fro onthe mysterious deep, are but a poor exchange. Yet the sea-lover mayjustify his preference by appealing to the beauty of empurpledshadows, toned by amethyst or opal, or shining with violet light, reflected from the clouds that cross and find in those dark shieldsa mirror. There are suggestions, too, of immensity, of liberty, ofaction, presented by the boundless horizons and the changefulchangeless tracts of ocean which no plain possesses. 

It was nigh upon sunset when we descended to Ana-Capri. That eveningthe clouds assembled suddenly. The armistice of storm was broken. They were terribly blue, and the sea grew dark as steel beneaththem, till the moment when the sun's lip reached the last edge ofthe waters. Then a courier of rosy flame sent forth from him passedswift across the gulf, touching, where it trod, the waves withaccidental fire. The messenger reached Naples; and in a moment, asby some diabolical illumination, the sinful city kindled into lightlike glowing charcoal. From Posilippo on the left, along the palacesof the Chiaja, up to S. Elmo on the hill, past Santa Lucia, down onthe Marinella, beyond Portici, beyond Torre del Greco, whereVesuvius towered up aloof, an angry mount of amethystine gloom, theconflagration spread and reached Pompeii, and dwelt on Torre dell'Annunziata. Stationary, lurid, it smouldered while the day diedslowly. The long, densely populated sea-line from Pozzuoli toCastellammare burned and smoked with intensest incandescence, sending a glare of fiery mist against the threatening blue behind, and fringing with pomegranate-coloured blots the water where nolight now lingered. It is difficult to bend words to the userequired. The scene, in spite of natural suavity and grace, hadbecome like Dante's first glimpse of the City of Dis--like Sodom andGomorrah when fire from heaven descended on their towers before theycrumbled into dust. 

From Capri to Ischia

After this, for several days, Libeccio blew harder. No boats couldleave or come to Capri. From the piazza parapet we saw the windscooping the surface of the waves, and flinging spray-fleeces insheets upon the churning water. As they broke on Cape Campanella, the rollers climbed in foam--how many feet?--and blotted out theolive-trees above the headland. The sky was always dark with hangingclouds and masses of low-lying vapour, very moist, but scarcelyraining--lightning without thunder in the night. 

Such weather is unexpected in the middle month of May, especiallywhen the olives are blackened by December storms, and theorange-trees despoiled of foliage, and the tendrils of the vinesyellow with cold. The walnut-trees have shown no sign of makingleaves. Only the figs seem to have suffered little. 

It had been settled that we should start upon the first seafaringdawn for Ischia or Sorrento, according as the wind might set; and Iwas glad when, early one morning, the captain of the _Serena_announced a moderate sirocco. When we reached the little quay wefound the surf of the Libeccio still rolling heavily into the gulf. A gusty south-easter crossed it, tearing spray-crests from the swellas it went plunging onward. The sea was rough enough; but we madefast sailing, our captain steering with a skill which it wasbeautiful to watch, his five oarsmen picturesquely grouped beneaththe straining sail. The sea slapped and broke from time to time onour windward quarter, drenching the boat with brine; and now andthen her gunwale scooped into the shoulder of a wave as she shotsidling up it. Meanwhile enormous masses of leaden-coloured cloudsformed above our heads and on the sea-line; but these were alwaysshifting in the strife of winds, and the sun shone through thempetulantly. As we climbed the rollers, or sank into their trough, the outline of the bay appeared in glimpses, shyly revealed, suddenly withdrawn from sight; the immobility and majesty ofmountains contrasted with the weltering waste of water round us--nowblue and garish where the sunlight fell, now shrouded in squallyrain-storms, and then again sullen beneath a vaporous canopy. Eachof these vignettes was photographed for one brief second on thebrain, and swallowed by the hurling drift of billows. The painter'sart could but ill have rendered that changeful colour in the sea, passing from tawny cloud-reflections and surfaces of glowing violetto bright blue or impenetrable purple flecked with boiling foam, according as a light-illuminated or a shadowed facet of the movingmass was turned to sight. 

Halfway across the gulf the sirocco lulled; the sail was lowered, and we had to make the rest of the passage by rowing. Under the leeof Ischia we got into comparatively quiet water; though here thebeautiful Italian sea was yellowish green with churned-up sand, likean unripe orange. We passed the castle on its rocky island, with thedomed church which has been so often painted in _gouache_ picturesthrough the last two centuries, and soon after noon we came toCasamicciola. 

La Piccola Sentinella

Casamicciola is a village on the north side of the island, in itscentre, where the visitors to the mineral baths of Ischia chieflycongregate. One of its old-established inns is called La PiccolaSentinella. The first sight on entrance is an open gallery, with apink wall on which bloom magnificent cactuses, sprays ofthick-clustering scarlet and magenta flowers. This is a ramblinghouse, built in successive stages against a hill, with terraces andverandahs opening on unexpected gardens to the back and front. Beneath its long irregular façade there spreads a wilderness oforange-trees and honeysuckles and roses, verbenas, geraniums andmignonette, snapdragons, gazanias and stocks, exceeding bright andfragrant, with the green slopes of Monte Epomeo for a background andVesuvius for far distance. There are wonderful bits of detail inthis garden. One dark, thick-foliaged olive, I remember, leaningfrom the tufa over a lizard-haunted wall, feathered waist-high inhuge acanthus leaves. The whole rich orchard ground of Casamicciolais dominated by Monte Epomeo, the extinct volcano which may becalled the _raison d'être_ of Ischia; for this island is nothing buta mountain lifted by the energy of fire from the sea-basement. Itsfantastic peaks and ridges, sulphur-coloured, dusty grey, and tawny, with brushwood in young leaf upon the cloven flanks, form a singularpendant to the austere but more artistically modelled limestonecrags of Capri. No two islands that I know, within so short a spaceof sea, offer two pictures so different in style and quality ofloveliness. The inhabitants are equally distinct in type. Here, inspite of what De Musset wrote somewhat affectedly about the peasantgirls--

 Ischia! c'est là qu'on a des yeux, C'est là qu'un corsage amoureux Serre la hanche. Sur un bas rouge bien tiré Brille, sous le jupon doré, La mule blanche--

in spite of these lines I did not find the Ischian women eminent, asthose of Capri are, for beauty. But the young men have fine, loose, faun-like figures, and faces that would be strikingly handsome butfor too long and prominent noses. They are a singular race, gracefulin movement. 

Evening is divine in Ischia. From the topmost garden terrace of theinn one looks across the sea towards Terracina, Gaeta, and thosedescending mountain buttresses, the Phlegræan plains, and thedistant snows of the Abruzzi. Rain-washed and luminous, the sunsetsky held Hesper trembling in a solid green of beryl. Firefliesflashed among the orange blossoms. Far away in the obscurity ofeastern twilight glared the smouldering cone of Vesuvius--a crimsonblot upon the darkness--a Cyclops' eye, bloodshot and menacing. 

The company in the Piccola Sentinella, young and old, were decrepit, with an odd, rheumatic, shrivelled look upon them. The dining-roomreminded me, as certain rooms are apt to do, of a ship's saloon. Ifelt as though I had got into the cabin of the _Flying Dutchman_, and that all these people had been sitting there at meat a hundredyears, through storm and shine, for ever driving onward over immensewaves in an enchanted calm. 

Ischia and Forio

One morning we drove along the shore, up hill, and down, by thePorto d'Ischia to the town and castle. This country curiouslycombines the qualities of Corfu and Catania. The near distance, sorichly cultivated, with the large volcanic slopes of Monte Epomeorising from the sea, is like Catania. Then, across the gulf, are thebold outlines and snowy peaks of the Abruzzi, recalling Albanianranges. Here, as in Sicily, the old lava is overgrown with pricklypear and red valerian. Mesembrianthemums--I must be pardoned thisword; for I cannot omit those fleshy-leaved creepers, with theirwealth of gaudy blossoms, shaped like sea anemones, coloured likestrawberry and pineapple cream-ices--mesembrianthemums, then, tumblein torrents from the walls, and large-cupped white convolvulusescurl about the hedges. The Castle Rock, with Capri's refinedsky-coloured outline relieving its hard profile on the horizon, isone of those exceedingly picturesque objects just too theatrical tobe artistic. It seems ready-made for a back scene in 'Masaniello, 'and cries out to the chromo-lithographer, 'Come and make the most ofme!' Yet this morning all things, in sea, earth, and sky, were sodelicately tinted and bathed in pearly light that it was difficultto be critical. 

In the afternoon we took the other side of the island, drivingthrough Lacca to Forio. One gets right round the bulk of Epomeo, andlooks up into a weird region called Le Falange, where white lavastreams have poured in two broad irregular torrents among brokenprecipices. Forio itself is placed at the end of a flat headland, boldly thrust into the sea; and its furthest promontory bears apilgrimage church, intensely white and glaring. 

There is something arbitrary in the memories we make of placescasually visited, dependent as they are upon our mood at the moment, or on an accidental interweaving of impressions which the _geniusloci_ blends for us. Of Forio two memories abide with me. The one isof a young woman, with very fair hair, in a light blue dress, standing beside an older woman in a garden. There was a flourishingpomegranate-tree above them. The whiteness and the dreamy smile ofthe young woman seemed strangely out of tune with her strong-tonedsouthern surroundings. I could have fancied her a daughter of somemoist north-western isle of Scandinavian seas. My other memory is ofa lad, brown, handsome, powerfully featured, thoughtful, lyingcurled up in the sun upon a sort of ladder in his house-court, profoundly meditating. He had a book in his hand, and his fingerstill marked the place where he had read. He looked as though aColumbus or a Campanella might emerge from his earnest, fervent, steadfast adolescence. Driving rapidly along, and leaving Forio inall probability for ever, I kept wondering whether those two lives, discerned as though in vision, would meet--whether she was destinedto be his evil genius, whether posterity would hear of him andjourney to his birthplace in this world-neglected Forio. Suchreveries are futile. Yet who entirely resists them?

Monte Epomeo

About three on the morning which divides the month of May into twoequal parts I woke and saw the waning moon right opposite my window, stayed in her descent upon the slope of Epomeo. Soon afterwardsChristian called me, and we settled to ascend the mountain. Threehorses and a stout black donkey, with their inevitable grooms, wereordered; and we took for guide a lovely faun-like boy, goat-faced, goat-footed, with gentle manners and pliant limbs swaying beneaththe breath of impulse. He was called Giuseppe. 

The way leads past the mineral baths and then strikes uphill, atfirst through lanes cut deep in the black lava. The trees meetalmost overhead. It is like Devonshire, except that one half hopesto see tropical foxgloves with violet bells and downy leavessprouting among the lush grasses and sweet-scented ferns upon thosegloomy, damp, warm walls. After this we skirted a thicket ofarbutus, and came upon the long volcanic ridge, with divinestoutlook over Procida and Miseno toward Vesuvius. Then once more wehad to dive into brown sandstone gullies, extremely steep, where thehorses almost burst their girths in scrambling, and the groomsscreamed, exasperating their confusion with encouragements andcurses. Straight or bending as a willow wand, Giuseppe kept infront. I could have imagined he had stepped to life from one ofLionardo's fancy-sprighted studies. 

After this fashion we gained the spine of mountain which composesIschia--the smooth ascending ridge that grows up from those easternwaves to what was once the apex of fire-vomiting Inarime, and breaksin precipices westward, a ruin of gulfed lava, tortured by theviolence of pent Typhoeus. Under a vast umbrella pine wedismounted, rested, and saw Capri. Now the road skirts slanting-wisealong the further flank of Epomeo, rising by muddy earth-heaps andsandstone hollows to the quaint pinnacles which build the summit. There is no inconsiderable peril in riding over this broken ground;for the soil crumbles away, and the ravines open downward, treacherously masked with brushwood. 

On Epomeo's topmost cone a chapel dedicated to S. Niccolo da Bari, the Italian patron of seamen, has been hollowed from the rock. Attached to it is the dwelling of two hermits, subterranean, withlong dark corridors and windows opening on the western seas. Churchand hermitage alike are scooped, with slight expenditure of mason'sskill, from solid mountain. The windows are but loopholes, leaningfrom which the town of Forio is seen, 2500 feet below; and thejagged precipices of the menacing Falange toss their contortedhorror forth to sea and sky. Through gallery and grotto we wound intwilight under a monk's guidance, and came at length upon the faceof the crags above Casamicciola. A few steps upward, cut like aladder in the stone, brought us to the topmost peak--a slender spireof soft, yellowish tufa. It reminded me (with differences) of theway one climbs the spire at Strasburg, and stands upon that temple'sfinal crocket, with nothing but a lightning conductor to steadyswimming senses. Different indeed are the views unrolled beneath thepeak of Epomeo and the pinnacle of Strasburg! Vesuvius, with thebroken lines of Procida, Miseno, and Lago Fusaro for foreground; thesculpturesque beauty of Capri, buttressed in everlasting calm uponthe waves; the Phlegræan plains and champaign of Volturno, stretching between smooth seas and shadowy hills; the mighty sweepof Naples' bay; all merged in blue; aërial, translucent, exquisitelyfrail. In this ethereal fabric of azure the most real of realities, the most solid of substances, seem films upon a crystal sphere. 

The hermit produced some flasks of amber-coloured wine from hisstores in the grotto. These we drank, lying full-length upon thetufa in the morning sunlight. The panorama of sea, sky, andlong-drawn lines of coast, breathless, without a ripple or a taintof cloud, spread far and wide around us. Our horses and donkeycropped what little grass, blent with bitter herbage, grew on thatbarren summit. Their grooms helped us out with the hermit's wine, and turned to sleep face downward. The whole scene was very quiet, islanded in immeasurable air. Then we asked the boy, Giuseppe, whether he could guide us on foot down the cliffs of Monte Epomeo toCasamicciola. This he was willing and able to do; for he told methat he had spent many months each year upon the hillside, tendinggoats. When rough weather came, he wrapped himself in a blanket fromthe snow that falls and melts upon the ledges. In summer time hebasked the whole day long, and slept the calm ambrosial nights away. Something of this free life was in the burning eyes, long clusteringdark hair, and smooth brown bosom of the faun-like creature. Hisgraceful body had the brusque, unerring movement of the goats heshepherded. Human thought and emotion seemed a-slumber in this youthwho had grown one with nature. As I watched his careless incarnateloveliness I remembered lines from an old Italian poem of romance, describing a dweller of the forest, who

 Haunteth the woodland aye 'neath verdurous shade, Eateth wild fruit, drinketh of running stream; And such-like is his nature, as 'tis said, That ever weepeth he when clear skies gleam, Seeing of storms and rain he then hath dread, And feareth lest the sun's heat fail for him; But when on high hurl winds and clouds together, Full glad is he and waiteth for fair weather. 

Giuseppe led us down those curious volcanic _balze_, where the soilis soft as marl, with tints splashed on it of pale green and roseand orange, and a faint scent in it of sulphur. They break away intowild chasms, where rivulets begin; and here the narrow watercoursesmade for us plain going. The turf beneath our feet was starred withcyclamens and wavering anemones. At last we reached the chestnutwoods, and so by winding paths descended on the village. Giuseppetold me, as we walked, that in a short time he would be obliged tojoin the army. He contemplated this duty with a dim and undefineddislike. Nor could I, too, help dreading and misliking it for him. The untamed, gentle creature, who knew so little but his goats asyet, whose nights had been passed from childhood _à la belleétoile_, whose limbs had never been cumbered with broadcloth orbelt--for him to be shut up in the barrack of some Lombard city, packed in white conscript's sacking, drilled, taught to read andwrite, and weighted with the knapsack and the musket! There wassomething lamentable in the prospect. But such is the burden ofman's life, of modern life especially. United Italy demands of herchildren that by this discipline they should be brought into thatharmony which builds a nation out of diverse elements. 

From Ischia to Naples

Ischia showed a new aspect on the morning of our departure. Asea-mist passed along the skirts of the island, and rolled in heavymasses round the peaks of Monte Epomeo, slowly condensing intosummer clouds, and softening each outline with a pearly haze, through which shone emerald glimpses of young vines and fig-trees. 

We left in a boat with four oarsmen for Pozzuoli. For about an hourthe breeze carried us well, while Ischia behind grew ever lovelier, soft as velvet, shaped like a gem. The mist had become a great whiteluminous cloud--not dense and alabastrine, like the clouds ofthunder; but filmy, tender, comparable to the atmosphere of Dante'smoon. Porpoises and sea-gulls played and fished about our bows, dividing the dark brine in spray. The mountain distances weredrowned in bluish vapour--Vesuvius quite invisible. About noon theair grew clearer, and Capri reared her fortalice of sculptured rock, aërially azure, into liquid ether. I know not what effect ofatmosphere or light it is that lifts an island from the sea byinterposing that thin edge of lustrous white between it and thewater. But this phenomenon to-day was perfectly exhibited. Like amirage on the wilderness, like Fata Morgana's palace ascending fromthe deep, the pure and noble vision stayed suspense 'twixt heavenand ocean. At the same time the breeze failed, and we rowed slowlybetween Procida and Capo Miseno--a space in old-world historyathrong with Cæsar's navies. When we turned the point, and came insight of Baiæ, the wind freshened and took us flying into Pozzuoli. The whole of this coast has been spoiled by the recent upheaval ofMonte Nuovo with its lava floods and cindery deluges. Nothingremains to justify its fame among the ancient Romans and theNeapolitans of Boccaccio's and Pontano's age. It is quite wrecked, beyond the power even of hendecasyllables to bring again its breathof beauty:--

 Mecum si sapies, Gravina, mecum Baias, et placidos coles recessus, Quos ipsæ et veneres colunt, et illa Quæ mentes hominum regit voluptas. Hic vina et choreæ jocique regnant, Regnant et charites facetiæque. Has sedes amor, has colit cupido. His passim juvenes puellulæque Ludunt, et tepidis aquis lavantur, Coenantque et dapibus leporibusque Miscent delitias venustiores: Miscent gaudia et osculationes, Atque una sociis toris foventur, Has te ad delitias vocant camoenæ; Invitat mare, myrteumque littus; Invitant volueres canoræ, et ipse Gaurus pampineas parat corollas. [1]

 [1] These verses are extracted from the second book of Pontano's _Hendecasyllabi_ (Aldus, 1513, p. 208). They so vividly paint the amusements of a watering-place in the fifteenth century that I have translated them:--

 With me, let but the mind be wise, Gravina, With me haste to the tranquil haunts of Baiæ, Haunts that pleasure hath made her home, and she who Sways all hearts, the voluptuous Aphrodite. Here wine rules, and the dance, and games and laughter; Graces reign in a round of mirthful madness; Love hath built, and desire, a palace here too, Where glad youths and enamoured girls on all sides Play and bathe in the waves in sunny weather, Dine and sup, and the merry mirth of banquets Blend with dearer delights and love's embraces, Blend with pleasures of youth and honeyed kisses, Till, sport-tired, in the couch inarmed they slumber. Thee our Muses invite to these enjoyments; Thee those billows allure, the myrtled seashore, Birds allure with a song, and mighty Gaurus Twines his redolent wreath of vines and ivy. 

At Pozzuoli we dined in the Albergo del Ponte di Caligola (Heavensave the mark!), and drank Falernian wine of modern and indifferentvintage. Then Christian hired two open carriages for Naples. He andI sat in the second. In the first we placed the two ladies of ourparty. They had a large, fat driver. Just after we had all passedthe gate a big fellow rushed up, dragged the corpulent coachman fromhis box, pulled out a knife, and made a savage thrust at the man'sstomach. At the same moment a _guardia-porta_, with drawn cutlass, interposed and struck between the combatants. They were separated. Their respective friends assembled in two jabbering crowds, and thewhole party, uttering vociferous objurgations, marched off, as Iimagined, to the watch-house. A very shabby lazzarone, without moreado, sprang on the empty box, and we made haste for Naples. Beingonly anxious to get there, and not at all curious about the squabblewhich had deprived us of our fat driver, I relapsed intoindifference when I found that neither of the men to whose lot wehad fallen was desirous of explaining the affair. It was sufficientcause for self-congratulation that no blood had been shed, and thatthe Procuratore del Rè would not require our evidence. 

The Grotta di Posilippo was a sight of wonder, with the afternoonsun slanting on its festoons of creeping plants above the westernentrance--the gas lamps, dust, huge carts, oxen, and _contadini_ inits subterranean darkness--and then the sudden revelation of the bayand city as we jingled out into the summery air again by Virgil'stomb. 

Night at Pompeii

On to Pompeii in the clear sunset, falling very lightly uponmountains, islands, little ports, and indentations of the bay. 

From the railway station we walked above half a mile to the Albergodel Sole under a lucid heaven of aqua-marine colour, with Venuslarge in it upon the border line between the tints of green andblue. 

The Albergo del Sole is worth commemorating. We stepped, without theintervention of courtyard or entrance hall, straight from the littleinn garden into an open, vaulted room. This was divided into twocompartments by a stout column supporting round arches. Wooden gatesfurnished a kind of fence between the atrium and what an oldPompeian would have styled the triclinium. For in the further part atable was laid for supper and lighted with suspended lamps. And herea party of artists and students drank and talked and smoked. A greatlive peacock, half asleep and winking his eyes, sat perched upon aheavy wardrobe watching them. The outer chamber, where we waited inarmchairs of ample girth, had its _loggia_ windows and doors open tothe air. There were singing-birds in cages; and plants of rosemary, iris, and arundo sprang carelessly from holes in the floor. A hugevase filled to overflowing with oranges and lemons, the very symbolof generous prodigality, stood in the midst, and several dogs werelounging round. The outer twilight, blending with the dim sheen ofthe lamps, softened this pretty scene to picturesqueness. Altogetherit was a strange and unexpected place. Much experienced as thenineteenth-century nomad may be in inns, he will rarely receive amore powerful and refreshing impression, entering one at evenfall, than here. 

There was no room for us in the inn. We were sent, attended by a boywith a lantern, through fields of dew-drenched barley and foldedpoppies, to a farmhouse overshadowed by four spreading pines. Exceedingly soft and grey, with rose-tinted weft of steam upon itssummit, stood Vesuvius above us in the twilight. Something in therecent impression of the dimly lighted supper-room, and in theidyllic simplicity of this lantern-litten journey through thebarley, suggested, by one of those inexplicable stirrings ofassociation which affect tired senses, a dim, dreamy thought ofPalestine and Bible stories. The feeling of the _cenacolo_ blenthere with feelings of Ruth's cornfields, and the white square houseswith their flat roofs enforced the illusion. Here we slept in themiddle of a _contadino_ colony. Some of the folk had made way forus; and by the wheezing, coughing, and snoring of several sorts andages in the chamber next me, I imagine they must have enduredconsiderable crowding. My bed was large enough to have contained afamily. Over its bead there was a little shrine, hollowed in thethickness of the wall, with several sacred emblems and a shallowvase of holy water. On dressers at each end of the room stood glassshrines, occupied by finely dressed Madonna dolls and pots ofartificial flowers. Above the doors S. Michael and S. Francis, roughly embossed in low relief and boldly painted, gave dignity andgrandeur to the walls. These showed some sense for art in the firstbuilders of the house. But the taste of the inhabitants could not bepraised. There were countless gaudy prints of saints, and exactlyfive pictures of the Bambino, very big, and sprawling in a fieldalone. A crucifix, some old bottles, a gun, old clothes suspendedfrom pegs, pieces of peasant pottery and china, completed thefurniture of the apartment. 

But what a view it showed when Christian next morning opened thedoor! From my bed I looked across the red-tiled terrace to thestone-pines with their velvet roofage and the blue-peaked hills ofStabiæ. 

San Germano

No one need doubt about his quarters in this country town. TheAlbergo di Pompeii is a truly sumptuous place. Sofas, tables, andchairs in our sitting-room are made of buffalo horns, very cleverlypieced together, but torturing the senses with suggestions ofimpalement. Sitting or standing, one felt insecure. When would thepoints run into us? when should we begin to break theseincrustations off? and would the whole fabric crumble at a touchinto chaotic heaps of horns?

It is market day, and the costumes in the streets are brilliant. Thewomen wear a white petticoat, a blue skirt made straight and tightlybound above it, a white richly worked bodice, and the whitesquare-folded napkin of the Abruzzi on their heads. Their jacket isof red or green--pure colour. A rug of striped red, blue, yellow, and black protects the whole dress from the rain. There is a verynoble quality of green--sappy and gemmy--like some of Titian's orGiorgione's--in the stuffs they use. Their build and carriage areworthy of goddesses. 

Rain falls heavily, persistently. We must ride on donkeys, inwaterproofs, to Monte Cassino. Mountain and valley, oak wood andilex grove, lentisk thicket and winding river-bed, are drowned alikein soft-descending, soaking rain. Far and near the landscape swimsin rain, and the hillsides send down torrents through theirwatercourses. 

The monastery is a square, dignified building, of vast extent andprincely solidity. It has a fine inner court, with sumptuousstaircases of slabbed stone leading to the church. This publicportion of the edifice is both impressive and magnificent, withoutsacrifice of religious severity to parade. We acknowledge asuccessful compromise between the austerity of the order and thegrandeur befitting the fame, wealth, prestige, and power of itsparent foundation. The church itself is a tolerable structure of theRenaissance--costly marble incrustations and mosaics, meaninglessNeapolitan frescoes. One singular episode in the mediocrity of artadorning it, is the tomb of Pietro de' Medici. Expelled fromFlorence in 1494, he never returned, but was drowned in theGarigliano. Clement VII. Ordered, and Duke Cosimo I. Erected, thismarble monument--the handicraft, in part at least, of Francesco diSan Gallo--to their relative. It is singularly stiff, ugly, out ofplace--at once obtrusive and insignificant. 

A gentle old German monk conducted Christian and me over theconvent--boys' school, refectory, printing press, lithographicworkshop, library, archives. We then returned to the church, fromwhich we passed to visit the most venerable and sacred portion ofthe monastery. The cell of S. Benedict is being restored and paintedin fresco by the Austrian Benedictines; a pious but somewhat frigidprocess of re-edification. This so-called cell is a many-chamberedand very ancient building, with a tower which is now embedded in themassive superstructure of the modern monastery. The German artistsadorning it contrive to blend the styles of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Egypt, and Byzance, not without force and a kind of intense frozenpietism. S. Mauro's vision of his master's translation toheaven--the ladder of light issuing between two cypresses, and theangels watching on the tower walls--might even be styled poetical. But the decorative angels on the roof and other places, beingadapted from Egyptian art, have a strange, incongruous appearance. 

Monasteries are almost invariably disappointing to one who goes insearch of what gives virtue and solidity to human life; and evenMonte Cassino was no exception. This ought not to be otherwise, seeing what a peculiar sympathy with the monastic institution isrequired to make these cloisters comprehensible. The atmosphere ofoperose indolence, prolonged through centuries and centuries, stifles; nor can antiquity and influence impose upon a mind whichresents monkery itself as an essential evil. That Monte Cassinosupplied the Church with several potentates is incontestable. Thatmediæval learning and morality would have suffered more without thisbrotherhood cannot be doubted. Yet it is difficult to name men ofvery eminent genius whom the Cassinesi claim as their alumni; nor, with Boccaccio's testimony to their carelessness, and with theevidence of their library before our eyes, can we rate theirservices to civilised erudition very highly. I longed to possess thespirit, for one moment, of Montalembert. I longed for what is calledhistorical imagination, for the indiscriminate voracity of those mento whom world-famous sites are in themselves soul-stirring. 

_AMALFI, PÆSTUM, CAPRI_

The road between Vietri and Amalfi is justly celebrated as one ofthe most lovely pieces of coast scenery in Italy. Its only rivalsare the roads from Castellammare to Sorrento, from Genoa to Sestri, and from Nice to Mentone. Each of these has its own charm; and yettheir similarity is sufficient to invite comparison: under the spellof each in turn, we are inclined to say, This then, at all events, is the most beautiful. On first quitting Vietri, Salerno is left lowdown upon the sea-shore, nestling into a little corner of the baywhich bears its name, and backed up by gigantic mountains. With eachonward step these mountain-ranges expand in long aërial line, revealing reaches of fantastic peaks, that stretch away beyond theplain of Pæstum, till they end at last in mist and sunbeamsshimmering on the sea. On the left hand hangs the cliff above thedeep salt water, with here and there a fig-tree spreading fanlikeleaves against the blue beneath. On the right rises the hillside, clothed with myrtle, lentisk, cistus, and pale yellow coronilla--atangle as sweet with scent as it is gay with blossom. Over theparapet that skirts the precipice lean heavy-foliaged locust-trees, and the terraces in sunny nooks are set with lemon-orchards. Thereare but few olives, and no pines. Meanwhile each turn in the roadbrings some change of scene--now a village with its little beach ofgrey sand, lapped by clearest sea-waves, where bare-legged fishermenmend their nets, and naked boys bask like lizards in the sun--nowtowering bastions of weird rock, broken into spires and pinnacleslike those of Skye, and coloured with bright hues of red andorange--then a ravine, where the thin thread of a mountain streamletseems to hang suspended upon ferny ledges in the limestone--or aprecipice defined in profile against sea and sky, with a lad, halfdressed in goat-skin, dangling his legs into vacuity and singing--ora tract of cultivation, where the orange, apricot, and lemon treesnestle together upon terraces with intermingled pergolas of vines. 

Amalfi and Atrani lie close together in two of these ravines, themountains almost arching over them, and the sea washing their veryhouse-walls. Each has its crowning campanile; but that of Amalfi isthe stranger of the two, like a Moorish tower at the top, andcoloured with green and yellow tiles that glitter in the sunlight. The houses are all dazzling white, plastered against the naked rock, rising on each other's shoulders to get a glimpse of earth andheaven, jutting out on coigns of vantage from the toppling cliff, and pierced with staircases as dark as night at noonday. Somefrequented lanes lead through the basements of these houses; and asthe donkeys pick their way from step to step in the twilight, bare-chested macaroni-makers crowd forth like ants to see usstrangers pass. A myriad of swallows or a swarm of mason bees mightbuild a town like this. 

It is not easy to imagine the time when Amalfi and Atrani were onetown, with docks and arsenals and harbourage for their associatedfleets, and when these little communities were second in importanceto no naval power of Christian Europe. The Byzantine Empire lost itshold on Italy during the eighth century; and after this time thehistory of Calabria is mainly concerned with the republics of Naplesand Amalfi, their conflict with the Lombard dukes of Benevento, their opposition to the Saracens, and their final subjugation by theNorman conquerors of Sicily. Between the year 839 A. D. , when Amalfifreed itself from the control of Naples and the yoke of Benevento, and the year 1131, when Roger of Hauteville incorporated therepublic in his kingdom of the Two Sicilies, this city was theforemost naval and commercial port of Italy. The burghers of Amalfielected their own doge; founded the Hospital of Jerusalem, whencesprang the knightly order of S. John; gave their name to the richestquarter in Palermo; and owned trading establishments or factories inall the chief cities of the Levant. Their gold coinage of _tari_formed the standard of currency before the Florentines had stampedthe lily and S. John upon the Tuscan florin. Their shippingregulations supplied Europe with a code of maritime laws. Theirscholars, in the darkest depth of the dark ages, prized and conned afamous copy of the Pandects of Justinian; and their seamen deservedthe fame of having first used, if they did not actually invent, thecompass. 

To modern visitors those glorious centuries of Amalfitan power andindependence cannot but seem fabulous; so difficult is it for us toimagine the conditions of society in Europe when a tiny city, shutin between barren mountains and a tideless sea, without acircumjacent territory, and with no resources but piracy or trade, could develop maritime supremacy in the Levant and produce the firstfine flowers of liberty and culture. 

If the history of Amalfi's early splendour reads like a brilliantlegend, the story of its premature extinction has the interest of atragedy. The republic had grown and flourished on the decay of theGreek Empire. When the hard-handed race of Hauteville absorbed theheritage of Greeks and Lombards and Saracens in Southern Italy, these adventurers succeeded in annexing Amalfi. But it was not theirinterest to extinguish the state. On the contrary, they relied forassistance upon the navies and the armies of the littlecommonwealth. New powers had meanwhile arisen in the North of Italy, who were jealous of rivalry upon the open seas; and when theNeapolitans resisted King Roger in 1135, they called Pisa to theiraid, and sent her fleet to destroy Amalfi. The ships of Amalfi wereon guard with Roger's navy in the Bay of Naples. The armed citizenswere, under Roger's orders, at Aversa. Meanwhile the home of therepublic lay defenceless on its mountain-girdled seaboard. ThePisans sailed into the harbour, sacked the city, and carried off thefamous Pandects of Justinian as a trophy. Two years later theyreturned, to complete the work of devastation. Amalfi neverrecovered from the injuries and the humiliation of these twoattacks. It was ever thus that the Italians, like the children ofthe dragon's teeth which Cadmus sowed, consumed each other. Pisa cutthe throat of her sister-port Amalfi, and Genoa gave a mortal woundto Pisa, when the waters of Meloria were dyed with blood in 1284. Venice fought a duel to the death with Genoa in the succeedingcentury; and what Venice failed to accomplish was completed by Milanand the lords of the Visconti dynasty, who crippled and enslaved thehaughty queen of the Ligurian Riviera. 

The naval and commercial prosperity of Amalfi was thus put an end toby the Pisans in the twelfth century. But it was not then that thetown assumed its present aspect. What surprises the student ofhistory more than anything is the total absence of fortifications, docks, arsenals, and breakwaters, bearing witness to the ancientgrandeur of a city which numbered 50, 000 inhabitants, and tradedwith Alexandria, Syria, and the far East. Nothing of the sort, withthe exception of a single solitary tower upon the Monte Aureo, isvisible. Nor will he fail to remember that Amalfi and Atrani, whichare now divided by a jutting mountain buttress, were once joined bya tract of sea-beach, where the galleys of the republic rested aftersweeping the Levant, and where the fishermen drew up their boatsupon the smooth grey sand. That also has disappeared. The violenceof man was not enough to reduce Amalfi to its present state ofinsignificance. The forces of nature aided--partly by the gradualsubsidence of the land, which caused the lower quarters of the cityto be submerged, and separated Amalfi from her twin-port by coveringthe beach with water--partly by a fearful tempest, accompanied byearthquake, in 1343. Petrarch, then resident at Naples, witnessedthe destructive fury of this great convulsion, and the descriptionhe wrote of it soon after its occurrence is so graphic that somenotice may well be taken of it here. 

His letter, addressed to the noble Roman, Giovanni Colonna, beginswith a promise to tell something of a storm which deserved the titleof 'poetic, ' and in a degree so superlative that no epithet but'Homeric' would suffice to do it justice. This exordium issingularly characteristic of Petrarch, who never forgot that he wasa literary man, and lost no opportunity of dragging the great namesof antiquity into his rhetorical compositions. The catastrophe washardly unexpected; for it had been prophesied by an astrologicalbishop, whom Petrarch does not name, that Naples would beoverwhelmed by a terrible disaster in December 1343. The people weretherefore in a state of wild anxiety, repenting of their sins, planning a total change of life under the fear of imminent death, and neglecting their ordinary occupations. On the day of thepredicted calamity women roamed in trembling crowds through thestreets, pressing their babies to their breasts, and besieging thealtars of the saints with prayers. Petrarch, who shared the generaldisquietude, kept watching the signs of the weather; but nothinghappened to warrant an extraordinary panic. At sunset the sky wasquieter than usual; and he could discern none of the symptoms ofapproaching tempest, to which his familiarity with the mountains ofVaucluse accustomed him. After dusk he stationed himself at a windowto observe the moon until she went down, before midnight, obscuredby clouds. Then he betook himself to bed; but scarcely had he falleninto his first sleep when a most horrible noise aroused him. Thewhole house shook; the night-light on his table was extinguished;and he was thrown with violence from his couch. He was lodging in aconvent; and soon after this first intimation of the tempest heheard the monks calling to each other through the darkness. Fromcell to cell they hurried, the ghastly gleams of lightning fallingon their terror-stricken faces. Headed by the Prior, and holdingcrosses and relics of the saints in their hands, they now assembledin Petrarch's chamber. Thence they proceeded in a body to thechapel, where they spent the night in prayer and expectation ofimpending ruin. It would be impossible, says the poet, to relate theterrors of that hellish night--the deluges of rain, the screaming ofthe wind, the earthquake, the thunder, the howling of the sea, andthe shrieks of agonising human beings. All these horrors wereprolonged, as though by some magician's spell, for what seemed twicethe duration of a natural night. It was so dark that at last byconjecture rather than the testimony of their senses they knew thatday had broken. A hurried mass was said. Then, as the noise in thetown above them began to diminish, and a confused clamour from thesea-shore continually increased, their suspense became unendurable. They mounted their horses, and descended to the port--to see andperish. A fearful spectacle awaited them. The ships in the harbourhad broken their moorings, and were crashing helplessly together. The strand was strewn with mutilated corpses. The breakwaters weresubmerged, and the sea seemed gaining momently upon the solid land. A thousand watery mountains surged up into the sky between the shoreand Capri; and these massive billows were not black or purple, buthoary with a livid foam. After describing some picturesqueepisodes--such as the gathering of the knights of Naples to watchthe ruin of their city, the procession of court ladies headed by thequeen to implore the intercession of Mary, and the wreck of a vesselfreighted with convicts bound for Sicily--Petrarch concludes with afervent prayer that he may never have to tempt the sea, of whosefury he had seen so awful an example. 

The capital on this occasion escaped the ruin prophesied. But Amalfiwas inundated; and what the waters then gained has never beenrestored to man. This is why the once so famous city ranks now upona level with quiet little towns whose names are hardly heard inhistory--with San Remo, or Rapallo, or Chiavari--and yet it is stillas full of life as a wasp's nest, especially upon the molo, orraised piazza paved with bricks, in front of the Albergo de'Cappuccini. The changes of scene upon this tiny square are sofrequent as to remind one of a theatre. Looking down from theinn-balcony, between the glazy green pots gay with scarletamaryllis-bloom, we are inclined to fancy that the whole has beenprepared for our amusement. In the morning the corn for themacaroni-flour, after being washed, is spread out on the bricks todry. In the afternoon the fishermen bring their nets for the samepurpose. In the evening the city magnates promenade and whisper. Dark-eyed women, with orange or crimson kerchiefs for headgear, cross and re-cross, bearing baskets on their shoulders. Great lazylarge-limbed fellows, girt with scarlet sashes and finished off withdark blue nightcaps (for a contrast to their saffron-colouredshirts, white breeches, and sunburnt calves), slouch about or sleepface downwards on the parapets. On either side of this same molostretches a miniature beach of sand and pebble, covered with nets, which the fishermen are always mending, and where the big boats ladeor unlade, trimming for the sardine fishery, or driving in to shorewith a whirr of oars and a jabber of discordant voices. As theland-wind freshens, you may watch them set off one by one, likepigeons taking flight, till the sea is flecked with twenty sail, allscudding in the same direction. The torrent runs beneath the molo, and finds the sea beyond it; so that here too are the washerwomen, chattering like sparrows; and everywhere the naked boys, like brownsea-urchins, burrow in the clean warm sand, or splash the shallowbrine. If you like the fun, you may get a score of them to divetogether and scramble for coppers in the deeper places, their lithebodies gleaming wan beneath the water in a maze of interlacing armsand legs. 

Over the whole busy scene rise the grey hills, soaring into bluenessof air-distance, turreted here and there with ruined castles, cappedwith particoloured campanili and white convents, and tufted throughtheir whole height with the orange and the emerald of the greattree-spurge, and with the live gold of the blossoming broom. It isdifficult to say when this picture is most beautiful--whether in theearly morning, when the boats are coming back from their night-toilupon the sea, and along the headlands in the fresh light lie swathesof fleecy mist, betokening a still, hot day--or at noontide, whenthe houses on the hill stand, tinted pink and yellow, shadowlesslike gems, and the great caruba-trees above the tangles of vines andfigs are blots upon the steady glare--or at sunset, when violet androse, reflected from the eastern sky, make all these terraces andpeaks translucent with a wondrous glow. The best of all, perhaps, isnight, with a full moon hanging high overhead. Who shall describethe silhouettes of boats upon the shore or sleeping on the mistysea? On the horizon lies a dusky film of brownish golden haze, between the moon and the glimmering water; and here and there a lampor candle burns with a deep red. Then is the time to take a boat androw upon the bay, or better, to swim out into the waves and troublethe reflections from the steady stars. The mountains, clear andcalm, with light-irradiated chasms and hard shadows cast upon therock, soar up above a city built of alabaster, or sea-foam, orsummer clouds. The whole is white and wonderful: no similes suggestan analogue for the lustre, solid and transparent, of Amalfinestling in moonlight between the grey-blue sea and lucid hills. Stars stand on all the peaks, and twinkle, or keep gliding, as theboat moves, down the craggy sides. Stars are mirrored on the marbleof the sea, until one knows not whether the oar has struck sparksfrom a star image or has scattered diamonds of phosphorescent brine. 

All this reads like a rhapsody; but indeed it is difficult not to berhapsodical when a May night of Amalfi is in the memory, with theecho of rich baritone voices chanting Neapolitan songs to amandoline. It is fashionable to complain that these Italian airs areopera-tunes; but this is only another way of saying that the Italianopera is the genuine outgrowth of national melody, and that Weberwas not the first, as some German critics have supposed, to stringtogether Volkslieder for the stage. Northerners, who have never seenor felt the beauty of the South, talk sad nonsense about thesuperiority of German over Italian music. It is true that muchItalian music is out of place in Northern Europe, where we seem toneed more travail of the intellect in art. But the Italians arerightly satisfied with such facile melody and such simple rhythms asharmonise with sea and sky and boon earth sensuously beautiful. 'Perchè pensa? Pensando s' invecchia, ' expresses the same habit ofmind as another celebrated saying, 'La musica è il lamento dell'amore o la preghiera agli Dei. ' Whatever may be the value of Italianmusic, it is in concord with such a scene as Amalfi by moon-light;and he who does not appreciate this no less than some moreartificial combination of sights and sounds in Wagner's theatre atBayreuth, has scarcely learned the first lesson in the lore ofbeauty. 

There is enough and to spare for all tastes at Amalfi. The studentof architecture may spend hours in the Cathedral, pondering over itshigh-built western front, and wondering whether there is more ofMoorish or of Gothic in its delicate arcades. The painter maytransfer its campanile, glittering like dragon's scales, to hiscanvas. The lover of the picturesque will wander through its aisleat mass-time, watching the sunlight play upon those upturnedSouthern faces with their ardent eyes; and happy is he who seesyoung men and maidens on Whit Sunday crowding round the chancelrails, to catch the marigolds and gillyflowers scattered frombaskets which the priest has blessed. Is this a symbol of the HolySpirit's gifts, or is it some quaint relic of Pagan _sparsiones_?This question, with the memory of Pompeian _graffiti_ in our mind, may well suggest itself in Southern Italy, where old and new faithsare so singularly blended. Then there is Ravello on the hills above. The path winds upward between stone walls tufted with maidenhair;and ever nearer grow the mountains, and the sea-line soars into thesky. An Englishman has made his home here in a ruined Moorish villa, with cool colonnaded cloisters and rose-embowered terraces, lendingfar prospect over rocky hills and olive-girdled villages to Pæstum'splain. The churches of Ravello have rare mosaics, and bronze doors, and marble pulpits, older perhaps than those of Tuscany, which temptthe archæologist to ask if Nicholas the Pisan learned his secrethere. But who cares to be a sober antiquary at Amalfi? Farpleasanter is it to climb the staircase to the Capuchins, and lingerin those caverns of the living rock, and pluck the lemons hanging bythe mossy walls; or to row from cove to cove along the shore, watching the fishes swimming in the deeps beneath, and the medusasspreading their filmy bells; to land upon smooth slabs of rock, where corallines wave to and fro; or to rest on samphire-tuftedledges, when the shadows slant beneath the westering sun. 

There is no point in all this landscape which does not make apicture. Painters might even complain that the pictures are too easyand the poetry too facile, just as the musicians find the melodiesof this fair land too simple. No effect, carefully sought andstrenuously seized, could enhance the mere beauty of Amalfi bathedin sunlight. You have only on some average summer day to sit downand paint the scene. Little scope is afforded for suggestions offar-away weird thoughts, or for elaborately studied motives. Daubigny and Corot are as alien here as Blake or Dürer. 

What is wanted, and what no modern artist can successfully recapturefrom the wasteful past, is the mythopoeic sense--the apprehension ofprimeval powers akin to man, growing into shape and substance on theborderland between the world and the keen human sympathies it stirsin us. Greek mythology was the proper form of art for scenery likethis. It gave the final touch to all its beauties, and added to itssensuous charm an inbreathed spiritual life. No exercise of thepoetic faculty, far less that metaphysical mood of the reflectiveconsciousness which 'leads from nature up to nature's God, ' can nowsupply this need. From sea and earth and sky, in those creative ageswhen the world was young, there leaned to greet the men whose fancymade them, forms imagined and yet real--human, divine--thearchetypes and everlasting patterns of man's deepest sense of whatis wonderful in nature. Feeling them there, for ever there, inalienable, ready to start forth and greet successivegenerations--as the Hamadryad greeted Rhaicos from his father'soak--those mythopoets called them by immortal names. All theirpent-up longings, all passions that consume, all aspirations thatinflame--the desire for the impossible, which is disease, theday-dreams and visions of the night, which are spontaneouspoems--were thus transferred to nature. And nature, responsive tothe soul that loves her, gave them back transfigured and translatedinto radiant beings of like substance with mankind. It was thus, wefeel, upon these southern shores that the gods of Greece came intobeing. The statues in the temples were the true fine flower of allthis beauty, the culmination of the poetry which it evoked in heartsthat feel and brains that think. 

In Italy, far more than in any other part of Europe, the life of thepresent is imposed upon the strata of successive past lives. Greek, Latin, Moorish, and mediæval civilisations have arisen, flourished, and decayed on nearly the same soil; and it is common enough to findone city, which may have perished twenty centuries ago, neighbour toanother that enjoyed its brief prosperity in the middle of our era. There is not, for example, the least sign of either Greek or Romanat Amalfi. Whatever may have been the glories of the republic in theearly middle ages, they had no relation to the classic past. Yet afew miles off along the bay rise the ancient Greek temples ofPæstum, from a desert--with no trace of any intervening occupants. Poseidonia was founded in the sixth century before Christ, bycolonists from Sybaris. Three centuries later the Hellenic elementin this settlement, which must already have become a town of nolittle importance, was submerged by a deluge of recurrent barbarism. Under the Roman rule it changed its name to Pæstum, and wasprosperous. The Saracens destroyed it in the ninth century of ourera; and Robert Guiscard carried some of the materials of itsbuildings to adorn his new town of Salerno. Since then the ancientsite has been abandoned to malaria and solitude. The very existenceof Pæstum was unknown, except to wandering herdsmen and fisherscoasting near its ruined colonnades, until the end of the lastcentury. Yet, strange to relate, after all these revolutions, and inthe midst of this total desolation, the only relics of the antiquecity are three Greek temples, those very temples where the Hellenes, barbarised by their Lucanian neighbours, met to mourn for their lostliberty. It is almost impossible to trace more than the mere circuitof the walls of Poseidonia. Its port, if port it had in Roman days, has disappeared. Its theatre is only just discernible. Still not acolumn of the great hypæthral temple, built by the Sybaritecolonists two thousand and five hundred years ago, to be a house forZeus or for Poseidon, has been injured. The accidents that erasedfar greater cities, like Syracuse, from the surface of theearth--pillage, earthquake, the fury of fanatics, the slow decay ofperishable stone, or the lust of palace builders in the middleages--have spared those three houses of the gods, over whom, in thedays of Alexander, the funeral hymn was chanted by the enslavedHellenes. 

'We do the same, ' said Aristoxenus in his Convivial Miscellanies, 'as the men of Poseidonia, who dwell on the Tyrrhenian Gulf. Itbefell them, having been at first true Hellenes, to be utterlybarbarised, changing to Tyrrhenes or Romans, and altering theirlanguage, together with their other customs. Yet they still observeone Hellenic festival, when they meet together and call toremembrance their old names and bygone institutions; and havinglamented one to the other, and shed bitter tears, they afterwardsdepart to their own homes. Even thus a few of us also, now that ourtheatres have been barbarised, and this art of music has gone toruin and vulgarity, meet together and remember what once musicwas. '[1]

 [1] _Athenæus_, xiv. 632. 

This passage has a strange pathos, considering how it was penned, and how it has come down to us, tossed by the dark indifferentstream of time. The Aristoxenus who wrote it was a pupil of thePeripatetic School, born at Tarentum, and therefore familiar withthe vicissitudes of Magna Græcia. The study of music was his chiefpreoccupation; and he used this episode in the agony of an enslavedGreek city, to point his own conservative disgust for innovations inan art of which we have no knowledge left. The works of Aristoxenushave perished, and the fragment I have quoted is embedded in thegossip of Egyptian Athenæus. In this careless fashion has beenopened for us, as it were, a little window on a grief now buried inthe oblivion of a hundred generations. After reading his words oneMay morning, beneath the pediment of Pæstum's noblest ruin, I couldnot refrain from thinking that if the spirits of those captiveHellenes were to revisit their old habitations, they would changetheir note of wailing into a thin ghostly pæan, when they found thatRomans and Lucanians had passed away, that Christians and Saracenshad left alike no trace behind, while the houses of their own[Greek: antêlioi theoi]--dawn-facing deities--were still abiding inthe pride of immemorial strength. Who knows whether buffalo-driveror bandit may not ere now have seen processions of these Poseidonianphantoms, bearing laurels and chaunting hymns on the spot where oncethey fell each on the other's neck to weep? Gathering his cloakaround him and cowering closer to his fire of sticks, thenight-watcher in those empty colonnades may have mistaken theHellenic outlines of his shadowy visitants for fevered dreams, andthe melody of their evanished music for the whistling of night windsor the cry of owls. So abandoned is Pæstum in its solitude that weknow not even what legends may have sprung up round those relics ofa mightier age. 

 The shrine is ruined now; and far away To east and west stretch olive groves, whose shade Even at the height of summer noon is grey. 

 Asphodels sprout upon the plinth decayed Of these low columns, and the snake hath found Her haunt 'neath altar-steps with weeds o'erlaid. 

 Yet this was once a hero's temple, crowned With myrtle-boughs by lovers, and with palm By wrestlers, resonant with sweetest sound

 Of flute and fife in summer evening's calm, And odorous with incense all the year, With nard and spice, and galbanum and balm. 

These lines sufficiently express the sense of desolation felt atPæstum, except that the scenery is more solemn and mournful, and thetemples are too august to be the shrine of any simple hero. Thereare no olives. The sea plunges on its sandy shore within the spaceof half a mile to westward. Far and wide on either hand stretchdreary fever-stricken marshes. The plain is bounded to the north, and east, and south, with mountains, purple, snow-peaked, serrated, and grandly broken like the hills of Greece. Driving over this vastlevel where the Silarus stagnates, the monotony of the landscape isbroken now and then by a group of buffaloes standing up to theirdewlaps in reeds, by peasants on horseback, with goads in theirhands, and muskets slung athwart their backs, or by patrols ofItalian soldiers crossing and re-crossing on the brigand-hauntedroads. Certain portions have been reclaimed from the swamp, and heremay be seen white oxen in herds of fifty grazing; or gangs of womenat field-labour, with a man to oversee them, cracking a longhunting-whip; or the mares and foals of a famous stud-farm browsingunder spreading pines. There are no villages, and the few farmhousesare so widely scattered as to make us wonder where the herdsmen andfield-workers, scanty as they are, can possibly be lodged. 

At last the three great temples come in sight. The rich orange ofthe central building contrasts with the paler yellow of its twocompanions, while the glowing colour of all three is splendidlyrelieved against green vegetation and blue mountain-flanks. Theirmaterial is travertine--a calcareous stone formed by the deposit ofpetrifying waters, which contains fragments of reeds, spiral shells, and other substances, embedded in the porous limestone. In theflourishing period of old Poseidonia these travertine columns werecoated with stucco, worked to a smooth surface, and brilliantlytinted to harmonise with the gay costumes of a Greek festival. Evennow this coating of fine sand, mingled with slaked lime and water, can be seen in patches on the huge blocks of the masonry. Thustreated, the travertine lacked little of the radiance of marble, forit must be remembered that the Greeks painted even the Penteliccornice of the Parthenon with red and blue. Nor can we doubt thatthe general effect of brightness suited the glad and genialconditions of Greek life. 

All the surroundings are altered now, and the lover of thepicturesque may be truly thankful that the hand of time, bystripping the buildings of this stucco, without impairing theirproportions, has substituted a new harmony of tone between thenative stone and the surrounding landscape, no less sympathetic tothe present solitude than the old symphony of colours was to theanimated circumstances of a populous Greek city. In this way thosecritics who defend the polychrome decorations of the classicarchitects, and those who contend that they cannot imagine anyalteration from the present toning of Greek temples for the better, are both right. 

In point of colour the Pæstum ruins are very similar to those ofGirgenti; but owing to their position on a level plain, in front ofa scarcely indented sea-shore, we lack the irregularity which addsso much charm to the row of temples on their broken cliff in the oldtown of Agrigentum. In like manner the celebrated _asymmetreia_ ofthe buildings of the Athenian Acropolis, which causes so muchvariety of light and shade upon the temple-fronts, and offers somany novel points of view when they are seen in combination, seemsto have been due originally to the exigencies of the ground. AtPæstum, in planning out the city, there can have been no utilitarianreasons for placing the temples at odd angles, either to each otheror the shore. Therefore we see them now almost exactly in line andparallel, though at unequal distances. If something of picturesqueeffect is thus lost at Pæstum through the flatness of the ground, something of impressive grandeur on the other hand is gained by thevery regularity with which those phalanxes of massive Doric columnsare drawn up to face the sea. 

Poseidonia, as the name betokens, was dedicated to the god of thesea; and the coins of the city are stamped with his effigy bearing atrident, and with his sacred animal, the bull. It has therefore beenconjectured that the central of the three temples--which washypæthral and had two entrances, east and west--belonged toPoseidon; and there is something fine in the notion of the god beingthus able to pass to and fro from his cella through those sunnyperistyles, down to his chariot, yoked with sea-horses, in thebrine. Yet hypæthral temples were generally consecrated to Zeus, andit is therefore probable that the traditional name of this vastedifice is wrong. The names of the two other temples, _Tempio diCerere_ and _Basilica_, are wholly unsupported by any proof orprobability. The second is almost certainly founded on a mistake;and if we assign the largest of the three shrines to Zeus, one orother of the lesser belonged most likely to Poseidon. 

The style of the temples is severe and primitive. In general effecttheir Doric architecture is far sterner than that adapted by Ictinusto the Parthenon. The entablature seems somewhat disproportioned tothe columns and the pediment; and, owing to this cause, there is ageneral effect of heaviness. The columns, again, are thick-set; noris the effect of solidity removed by their gradual narrowing fromthe base upwards. The pillars of the _Neptune_ are narrowed in astraight line; those of the _Basilica_ and _Ceres_ by a gentlecurve. Study of these buildings, so sublime in their massiveness, sonoble in the parsimony of their decoration, so dignified in theiremployment of the simplest means for the attainment of anindestructible effect of harmony, heightens our admiration for theAttic genius which found in this grand manner of the elder Doricarchitects resources as yet undeveloped; creating, by slight andsubtle alterations of outline, proportion, and rhythm of parts, whatmay fairly be classed as a style unique, because exemplified in onlyone transcendent building. 

It is difficult not to return again and again to the beauty ofcolouring at Pæstum. Lying basking in the sun upon a flat slab ofstone, and gazing eastward, we overlook a foreground of dappledlight and shadow, across which the lizards run--quick streaks ofliving emerald--making the bunches of yellow rue and little whiteserpyllum in the fissures of the masonry nod as they hurry past. Then come two stationary columns, built, it seems, of solid gold, where the sunbeams strike along their russet surface. Between themlies the landscape, a medley first of brakefern and asphodel andfeathering acanthus and blue spikes of bugloss; then a white farm inthe middle distance, roofed with the reddest tiles and sheltered bya velvety umbrella pine. Beyond and above the farm, a glimpse ofmountains purple almost to indigo with cloud shadows, and fleckedwith snow. Still higher--but for this we have to raise our head alittle--the free heavens enclosed within the frame-work of the tawnytravertine, across which sail hawks and flutter jackdaws, sharplycut against the solid sky. Down from the architrave, to make thevignette perfect, hang tufts of crimson snapdragons. Each opening inthe peristyle gives a fresh picture. 

The temples are overgrown with snapdragons and mallows, yellowasters and lilac gillyflowers, white allium and wild fig. When abreeze passes, the whole of this many-coloured tapestry waves gentlyto and fro. The fields around are flowery enough; but where are theroses? I suppose no one who has read his Virgil at school, crossesthe plain from Salerno to Pæstum without those words of the'Georgics' ringing in his ears: _biferique rosaria Pæsti_. They havethat wonderful Virgilian charm which, by a touch, transforms meredaily sights and sounds, and adds poetic mystery to common things. The poets of ancient Rome seem to have felt the magic of thisphrase; for Ovid has imitated the line in his 'Metamorphoses, 'tamely substituting _tepidi_ for the suggestive _biferi_, whileagain in his 'Elegies' he uses the same termination with _odorati_for his epithet. Martial sings of _Pæstanæ rosæ_ and _Pæstani gloriaruris_. Even Ausonius, at the very end of Latin literature, drawsfrom the rosaries of Pæstum a pretty picture of beauty doomed topremature decline:--

 Vidi Pæstano gaudere rosaria cultu Exoriente novo roscida Lucifero. 

 'I have watched the rose-beds that luxuriate on Pæstum's well-tilled soil, all dewy in the young light of the rising dawn-star. '

What a place indeed was this for a rose-garden, spreading far andwide along the fertile plain, with its deep loam reclaimed fromswamps and irrigated by the passing of perpetual streams! But whereare the roses now? As well ask, _où sont les neiges d'antan?_

We left Amalfi for Capri in the freshness of an early morning at theend of May. As we stepped into our six-oared boat the sun rose abovethe horizon, flooding the sea with gold and flashing on the terracesabove Amalfi. High up along the mountains hung pearly and empurpledmists, set like resting-places between a world too beautiful andheaven too far for mortal feet. Not a breath of any wind wasstirring. The water heaved with a scarcely perceptible swell, andthe vapours lifted gradually as the sun's rays grew in power. Herethe hills descend abruptly on the sea, ending in cliffs where lightreflected from the water dances. Huge caverns open in the limestone;on their edges hang stalactites like beards, and the sea withinsleeps dark as night. For some of these caves the maidenhair fernmakes a shadowy curtain; and all of them might be the home ofProteus, or of Calypso, by whose side her mortal lover passed hisnights in vain home-sickness:--

 [Greek: en spessi glaphyroisi par' ouk ethelôn ethelousê]. 

This is a truly Odyssean journey. Soon the islands of the Sirens come insight, --bare bluffs of rock, shaped like galleys taking flight for thebroad sea. As we row past in this ambrosial weather, the oarsmen keepingtime and ploughing furrows in the fruitless fields of Nereus, it is notdifficult to hear the siren voices--for earth and heaven and sea makemelodies far above mortal singing. The water round the Galli--so theislands are now called, as antiquaries tell us, from an ancient fortressnamed Guallo--is very deep, and not a sign of habitation is to be seenupon them. In bygone ages they were used as prisons; and many doges ofAmalfi languished their lives away upon those shadeless stones, watchingthe sea around them blaze like a burnished shield at noon, and the peaksof Capri deepen into purple when the west was glowing after sunset withthe rose and daffodil of Southern twilight. 

The end of the Sorrentine promontory, Point Campanella, is absolutelybarren--grey limestone, with the scantiest over-growth of rosemary andmyrtle. A more desolate spot can hardly be imagined. But now the morningbreeze springs up behind; sails are hoisted, and the boatmen ship theiroars. Under the albatross wings of our lateen sails we scud across thefreshening waves. The precipice of Capri soars against the sky, and theBay of Naples expands before us with those sweeping curves and azureamplitude that all the poets of the world have sung. Even thus themariners of ancient Hellas rounded this headland when the world wasyoung. Rightly they named yon rising ground, beneath Vesuvius, Posilippo--rest from grief. Even now, after all those centuries of toil, though the mild mountain has been turned into a mouth of murderous fire, though Roman emperors and Spanish despots have done their worst to marwhat nature made so perfect, we may here lay down the burden of ourcares, gaining tranquillity by no mysterious lustral rites, nopenitential prayers or offerings of holocausts, but by the influence ofbeauty in the earth and air, and by sympathy with a people unspoiled intheir healthful life of labour alternating with simple joy. 

The last hour of the voyage was beguiled by stories of our boatmen, someof whom had seen service on distant seas, while others could tell ofrisks on shore and love adventures. They showed us how the tunny-netswere set, and described the solitary life of the tunny-watchers, intheir open boats, waiting to spear the monsters of the deep entangled inthe chambers made for them beneath the waves. How much of Æschyleanimagery, I reflected, is drawn from this old fisher's art--the toils ofClytemnestra and the tragedy of Psyttaleia rising to my mind. One of thecrew had his little son with him, a child of six years old; and when theboy was restless, his father spoke of Barbarossa and Timberio (_sic_) tokeep him quiet; for the memory of the Moorish pirate and the mightyemperor is still alive here. The people of Capri are as familiar withTiberius as the Bretons with King Arthur; and the hoof-mark ofillustrious crime is stamped upon the island. 

Capri offers another example of the versatility of Southern Italy. IfAmalfi brings back to us the naval and commercial prosperity of theearly middle ages; if Pæstuni remains a monument of the oldest Helleniccivilisation; Capri, at a few miles' distance, is dedicated to the Romanemperor who made it his favourite residence, when, life-weary with theworld and all its shows, he turned these many peaks and slumbering cavesinto a summer palace for the nursing of his brain-sick phantasy. Alreadyon landing, we are led to remember that from this shore was loosed thegalley bearing that great letter--_verbosa et grandis epistola_--whichundid Sejanus and shook Rome. Riding to Ana-Capri and the Salto diTiberio, exploring the remains of his favourite twelve villas, andgliding over the smooth waters paved with the white marbles of hisbaths, we are for ever attended by the same forbidding spectre. Here, perchance, were the _sedes arcanarum libidinum_ whereof Suetoniusspeaks; the Spintrian medals, found in these recesses, still bearwitness that the biographer trusted no mere fables for the picture hehas drawn. Here, too, below the Villa Jovis, gazing 700 feet sheer downinto the waves, we tread the very parapet whence fell the victims ofthat maniac lust for blood. 'After long and exquisite torments, ' saysthe Roman writer, 'he ordered condemned prisoners to be cast into thesea before his eyes; marines were stationed near to pound the fallencorpses with poles and oars, lest haply breath should linger in theirlimbs. ' The Neapolitan Museum contains a little basrelief representingTiberius, with the well-known features of the Claudian house, seatedastride upon a donkey, with a girl before him. A slave is leading thebeast and its burden to a terminal statue under an olive-tree. Thiscurious relic, discovered some while since at Capri, haunted my fancy asI climbed the olive-planted slopes to his high villa on the Arx Tiberii. It is some relief, amid so much that is tragic in the associations ofthis place, to have the horrible Tiberius burlesqued and brought intodonkey-riding relation with the tourist of to-day. And what an ironicalrevenge of time it is that his famous Salto should be turned into arestaurant, where the girls dance tarantella for a few coppers; that atoothless hermit should occupy a cell upon the very summit of his VillaJovis; and that the Englishwoman's comfortable hotel should be called_Timberio_ by the natives! A spiritualist might well believe that theemperor's ghost was forced to haunt the island, and to expiate his oldatrocities by gazing on these modern vulgarisms. 

Few problems suggested by history are more darkly fascinating than themadness of despots; and of this madness, whether inherent in their bloodor encouraged by the circumstance of absolute autocracy, the emperors ofthe Claudian and Julian houses furnish the most memorable instance. [1]It is this that renders Tiberius ever present to our memory at Capri. Nor will the student of Suetonius forget his even more memorablegrand-nephew Caligula. The following passage is an episode from thebiography of that imperial maniac, whose portrait in green basalt, withthe strain of dire mental tension on the forehead, is still so beautifulthat we are able at this distance of time to pity more than loathe him. 'Above all, he was tormented with nervous irritation, by sleeplessness;for he enjoyed not more than three hours of nocturnal repose, nor eventhese in pure untroubled rest, but agitated by phantasmata of portentousaugury; as, for example, upon one occasion, among other spectralvisions, he fancied that he saw the sea, under some definiteimpersonation, conversing with himself. Hence it was, and from thisincapacity of sleeping, and from weariness of lying awake, that he hadfallen into habits of ranging all night long through the palace, sometimes throwing himself on a couch, sometimes wandering along thevast corridors, watching for the earliest dawn, and anxiously wishingits approach. ' Those corridors, or loggie, where Caligula spent hiswakeful hours, opened perchance upon this Bay of Naples, if not upon thesea-waves of his favourite Porto d'Anzio; for we know that one of hisgreat follies was a palace built above the sea on piles at Baiæ; andwhere else could _Pelagus_, with his cold azure eyes and briny locks, have more appropriately terrified his sleep with prophecy conveyed indreams? The very nature of this vision, selected for such specialcomment by Suetonius as to show that it had troubled Caligulaprofoundly, proves the fantastic nature of the man, and justifies thehypothesis of insanity. 

 [1] De Quincey, in his essay on _The Cæsars_, has worked out this subject with such artistic vividness that no more need be said. From his pages I have quoted the paraphrastic version of Suetonius that follows. 

But it is time to shake off the burden of the past. Only students, carrying superfluity of culture in their knapsacks, will ponder over theimperial lunatics who made Capri and Baiæ fashionable in the days ofancient Rome. Neither Tiberius nor Caligula, nor yet Ferdinand of Aragonor Bomba for that matter, has been able to leave trace of vice or scarof crime on nature in this Eden. A row round the island, or asupper-party in the loggia above the sea at sunset-time, is no lesscharming now, in spite of Roman or Spanish memories, than when the worldwas young. 

Sea-mists are frequent in the early summer mornings, swathing thecliffs of Capri in impenetrable wool and brooding on the perfectlysmooth water till the day-wind rises. Then they disappear likemagic, rolling in smoke-wreaths from the surface of the sea, condensing into clouds and climbing the hillsides like Oceanides inquest of Prometheus, or taking their station on the watch-towers ofthe world, as in the chorus of the _Nephelai_. Such a morning may bechosen for the _giro_ of the island. The blue grotto loses nothingof its beauty, but rather gains by contrast, when passing from densefog you find yourself transported to a world of wavering subaqueoussheen. It is only through the opening of the very topmost arch thata boat can glide into this cavern; the arch itself spreads downwardthrough the water, so that all the light is transmitted from beneathand coloured by the sea. The grotto is domed in many chambers; andthe water is so clear that you can see the bottom, silvery, withblack-finned fishes diapered upon the blue white sand. The flesh ofa diver in this water showed like the faces of children playing atsnapdragon; all around him the spray leapt up with living fire; andwhen the oars struck the surface, it was as though a phosphorescentsea had been smitten, and the drops ran from the blades in bluepearls. I have only once seen anything (outside the magic-world of apantomime) to equal these effects of blue and silver; and that waswhen I made my way into an ice-cave in the Great Aletschglacier--not an artificial gallery such as they cut at Grindelwald, but a natural cavern, arched, hollowed into fanciful recesses, andhung with stalactites of pendent ice. The difference between theglacier-cavern and the sea-grotto was that in the former all thelight was transmitted through transparent sides, so that the wholewas one uniform azure, except in rare places where little chinksopened upwards to the air, and the light of day came glancing with aroseate flush. In the latter the light sent from beneath through thewater played upon a roof of rock; reflections intermingled withtranslucence; and a greater variety of light and shadow compensatedthe lack of that strange sense of being shut within a solid gem. 

Numberless are the caves at Capri. The so-called green grotto hasthe beauty of moss-agate in its liquid floor; the red grotto shows awarmer chord of colour; and where there is no other charm to notice, endless beauty may be found in the play of sunlight upon roofs oflimestone, tinted with yellow, orange, and pale pink, mossed over, hung with fern, and catching tones of blue or green from the stilldeeps beneath. 

Sheets of water, wherever found, are the most subtle heighteners ofcolour. To those who are familiar with Venetian or Mantuan sunsets, who have seen the flocks of flamingoes reflected on the lagoons ofTunis, or who have watched stormy red flakes tossed from crest tocrest of great Atlantic waves on our own coasts, this need hardly besaid. Yet I cannot leave this beauty of the sea at Capri withouttouching on a melodrama of light and colour I once saw atCastellammare. It was a festa night, when the people sent up rocketsand fireworks of every hue from the harbour-breakwater. The surfrolled shoreward like a bath of molten metals, all confused of blue, and red, and green, and gold--dying dolphin tints that burnedstrangely beneath the purple skies and tranquil stars. Boats at seahung out their crimson cressets, flickering in long lines on thebay; and larger craft moved slowly with rows of lamps defining theircurves; while the full moon shed over all her 'vitreous pour, justtinged with blue. ' To some tastes this mingling of natural andartificial effects would seem unworthy of sober notice; but Iconfess to having enjoyed it with childish eagerness like musicnever to be forgotten. 

After a day upon the water it is pleasant to rest at sunset in theloggia above the sea. The Bay of Naples stretches far and wide infront, beautiful by reason chiefly of the long fine line descendingfrom Vesuvius, dipping almost to a level and then gliding up to jointhe highlands of the north. Now sun and moon begin to mingle: waningand waxing splendours. The cliffs above our heads are still blushinga deep flame-colour, like the heart of some tea-rose; when lo, thetouch of the huntress is laid upon those eastern pinnacles, and thehorizon glimmers with her rising. Was it on such a night thatFerdinand of Aragon fled from his capital before the French, witheyes turned ever to the land he loved, chanting, as he leaned fromhis galley's stern, that melancholy psalm--'Except the Lord keep thecity, the watchman waketh but in vain'--and seeing Naples dwindle toa white blot on the purple shore?

Our journey takes the opposite direction. Farewell to Capri, welcometo Sorrento! The roads are sweet with scent of acacia and orangeflowers. When you walk in a garden at night, the white specksbeneath your feet are fallen petals of lemon blossoms. Over thewalls hang cataracts of roses, honey-pale clusters of the Banksiarose, and pink bushes of the China rose, growing as we never seethem grow with us. The grey rocks wave with gladiolus--feathers ofcrimson, set amid tufts of rosemary, and myrtle, and tree-spurge. Inthe clefts of the sandstone, and behind the orchard walls, sleeps adark green night of foliage, in the midst of which gleam globedoranges, and lemons dropping like great pearls of palest amber dew. It is difficult to believe that the lemons have not grown intolength by their own weight, as though mere hanging on the boughprevented them from being round--so waxen are they. Overhead soarstone-pines--a roof of sombre green, a lattice-work of strong redbranches, through which the moon peers wonderfully. One part of thismarvellous _piano_ is bare rock tufted with keen-scented herbs, andsparsely grown with locust-trees and olives. Another waves from seato summit with beech-copses and oak-woods, as verdant as the mostabundant English valley. Another region turns its hoary raiment ofolive-gardens to the sun and sea, or flourishes with fig and vine. Everywhere, the houses of men are dazzling white, perched on naturalcoigns of vantage, clustered on the brink of brown cliffs, nestlingunder mountain eaves, or piled up from the sea-beach in ascendingtiers, until the broad knees of the hills are reached, and greatPan, the genius of solitude in nature, takes unto himself a regionyet untenanted by man. The occupations of the sea and land are blenttogether on this shore; and the people are both blithe and gentle. It is true that their passions are upon the surface, and that theknife is ready to their hand. But the combination of fierceness andsoftness in them has an infinite charm when one has learned byobservation that their lives are laborious and frugal, and thattheir honesty is hardly less than their vigour. Happy indeed arethey--so happy that, but for crimes accumulated through successivegenerations by bad governors, and but for superstitions cankeringthe soul within, they might deserve what Shelley wrote of hisimagined island in 'Epipsychidion. '

_ETNA_

The eruptions of Etna have blackened the whole land for miles inevery direction. That is the first observation forced upon one inthe neighbourhood of Catania, or Giarre, or Bronte. From whateverpoint of view you look at Etna, it is always a regular pyramid, withlong and gradually sloping sides, broken here and there by theexcrescence of minor craters and dotted over with villages; thesummit crowned with snow, divided into peak and cone, girdled withclouds, and capped with smoke, that shifts shape as the wind veers, dominates a blue-black monstrous mass of outpoured lava. From thetop of Monte Rosso, a subordinate volcano which broke into eruptionin 1669, you can trace the fountain from which 'the unapproachableriver of purest fire, ' that nearly destroyed Catania, issued. Yousee it still, bubbling up like a frozen geyser from the flank of themountain, whence the sooty torrent spreads, or rather sprawls, withjagged edges to the sea. The plain of Catania lies at your feet, threaded by the Simeto, bounded by the promontory of Syracuse andthe mountains of Castro Giovanni. This huge amorphous blot upon thelandscape may be compared to an ink-stain on a variegatedtablecloth, or to the coal districts marked upon a geological atlas, or to the heathen in a missionary map--the green and red and greycolours standing for Christians and Mahommedans and Jews ofdifferent shades and qualities. The lava, where it has beencultivated, is reduced to fertile sand, in which vines and fig-treesare planted--their tender green foliage contrasting strangely withthe sinister soil that makes them flourish. All the roads are blackas jet, like paths leading to coal-pits, and the country-folk onmule-back plodding along them look like Arabs on an infernal Sahara. The very lizards which haunt the rocks are swart and smutty. Yet theflora of the district is luxuriant. The gardens round Catania, nestling into cracks and ridges of the stiffened flood, aremarvellously brilliant with spurge and fennel and valerian. It isimpossible to form a true conception of flower-brightness till onehas seen these golden and crimson tints upon their ground of ebony, or to realise the blueness of the Mediterranean except in contrastwith the lava where it breaks into the sea. Copses of frail oak andash, undergrown with ferns of every sort; cactus-hedges, orange-trees grafted with lemons and laden with both fruits; olivesof scarce two centuries' growth, and fig-trees knobbed with theirsweet produce, overrun the sombre soil, and spread their boughsagainst the deep blue sea and the translucent amethyst of theCalabrian mountains. Underfoot, a convolvulus with large whiteblossoms, binding dingy stone to stone, might be compared to a ropeof Desdemona's pearls upon the neck of Othello. 

The villages are perhaps the most curious feature of this scenery. Their houses, rarely more than one story high, are walled, paved, and often roofed with the inflexible material which once was ruinousfire, and is now the servant of the men it threatened to destroy. The churches are such as might be raised in Hades to implacableProserpine, such as one might dream of in a vision of the worldturned into hell, such as Baudelaire in his fiction of a metalliclandscape might have imagined under the influence of hasheesh. Theirflights of steps are built of sharply cut black lava blocks no feetcan wear. Their door-jambs and columns and pediments and carved workare wrought and sculptured of the same gloomy masonry. Howforbidding are the acanthus scrolls, how grim the skulls andcross-bones on these portals! The bell-towers, again, are ribbed andbeamed with black lava. A certain amount of the structure iswhitewashed, which serves to relieve the funereal solemnity of therest. In an Indian district each of these churches would be atemple, raised in vain propitiation to the demon of the fire aboveand below. Some pictures made by their spires in combination withthe sad village-hovels, the snowy dome of Etna, and the ever-smilingsea, are quite unique in their variety of suggestion and wildbeauty. 

The people have a sorrow-smitten and stern aspect. Some of the menin the prime of life are grand and haughty, with the cast-bronzecountenance of Roman emperors. But the old men bear rigid faces ofcarved basalt, gazing fixedly before them as though at some time orother in their past lives they had met Medusa: and truly Etna ineruption is a Gorgon, which their ancestors have oftentimes seenshuddering, and fled from terror-frozen. The white-haired old women, plying their spindle or distaff, or meditating in grim solitude, sitwith the sinister set features of Fates by their doorways. The youngpeople are very rarely seen to smile: they open hard, black, beadedeyes upon a world in which there is little for them but endurance orthe fierceness of passions that delight in blood. Strangelydifferent are these dwellers on the sides of Etna from the voluble, lithe sailors of Sciacca or Mazara, with their sunburnt skins andmany-coloured garments. 

The Val del Bove--a vast chasm in the flank of Etna, where the veryheart of the volcano has been riven and its entrails bared--is themost impressive spot of all this region. The road to it leads fromZafferana (so called because of its crocus-flowers) along what lookslike a series of black moraines, where the lava torrents pouringfrom the craters of Etna have spread out, and reared themselves instiffened ridges against opposing mountain buttresses. After toilingfor about three hours over the dismal waste, a point between thenative rock of Etna and the dead sea of lava is reached, whichcommands a prospect of the cone with its curling smoke surmounting acaldron of some four thousand feet in depth and seemingly very wide. The whole of this space is filled with billows of blackness, wave onwave, crest over crest, and dyke by dyke, precisely similar to agigantic glacier, swarthy and immovable. The resemblance of the lavaflood to a glacier is extraordinarily striking. One can fancyoneself standing on the Belvedere at Macugnaga, or the Tacul pointupon the Mer de Glace, in some nightmare, and finding to one'shorror that the radiant snows and river-breeding ice-fields havebeen turned by a malignant deity to sullen, stationary cinders. Itis a most hideous place, like a pit in Dante's Hell, disused forsome unexplained reason, and left untenanted by fiends. The sceneryof the moon, without atmosphere and without life, must be of thissort; and such, rolling round in space, may be some planet that hassurvived its own combustion. When the clouds, which almost alwayshang about the Val del Bove, are tumbling at their awful play aroundits precipices, veiling the sweet suggestion of distant sea andhappier hills that should be visible, the horror of this view isaggravated. Breaking here and there, the billows of mist discloseforlorn tracts of jet-black desolation, wicked, unutterable, hatefulin their hideousness, with patches of smutty snow above, anddownward-rolling volumes of murky smoke. Shakspere, when he imaginedthe damned spirits confined to 'thrilling regions of thick-ribbedice, ' divined the nature of a glacier; but what line could he havecomposed, adequate to shadow forth the tortures of a soul condemnedto palpitate for ever between the ridges of this thirsty andintolerable sea of dead fire? If the world-spirit chose to assumefor itself the form and being of a dragon, of like substance tothis, impenetrable, invulnerable, unapproachable would be its hide. It requires no great stretch of the imagination to picture theselava lakes glowing, as they must have been, when first outpoured, the bellowing of the crater, the heaving and surging of the solidearth, the air obstructed with cinders and whizzing globes of moltenrock. Yet in these throes of devilish activity, the Val del Bovewould be less insufferable than in its present state of suspension, asleep, but threatening, ready to regurgitate its flame, but for amoment inert. 

An hour's drive from Nicolosi or Zafferana, seaward, brings one intothe richest land of 'olive and aloe and maize and vine' to be foundupon the face of Europe. Here, too, are laughing little towns, white, prosperous, and gleeful, the very opposite of those sadstations on the mountain-flank. Every house in Aci Reale has itscourtyard garden filled with orange-trees, and nespole, andfig-trees, and oleanders. From the grinning corbels that support thebalconies hang tufts of gem-bright ferns and glowing clove-pinks. Pergolas of vines, bronzed in autumn, and golden green likechrysoprase beneath an April sun, fling their tendrils over whitewalls and shady loggie. Gourds hang ripening in the steady blaze. Far and wide stretches a landscape rich with tilth and husbandry, boon Nature paying back to men tenfold for all their easy toil. Theterrible great mountain sleeps in the distance innocent of fire. Iknow not whether this land be more delightful in spring or autumn. The little flamelike flakes of brightness upon vines and fig-treesin April have their own peculiar charm. But in November the wholevast flank of Etna glows with the deep-blue tone of steel; therusset woods are like a film of rust; the vine-boughs thrust livingcarbuncles against the sun. To this season, when the peculiarearth-tints of Etna, its strong purples and tawny browns, areharmonised with the decaying wealth of forest and of orchard, Ithink the palm of beauty must be given in this land. 

The sea is an unchangeable element of charm in all this landscape. Aci Castello should be visited, and those strange rocks, called theCiclopidi, forced by volcanic pressure from beneath the waves. Theyare made of black basalt like the Giant's Causeway; and on their topcan be traced the caps of calcareous stone they carried with them inthe fret and fury of their upheaval from the sea-bed. Samphire, wildfennel, cactus, and acanthus clothe them now from crest to basementwhere the cliff is not too sheer. By the way, there are few plantsmore picturesque than the acanthus in full flower. Its pale lilacspikes of blossom stand waist-high above a wilderness of feathering, curving, delicately indented, burnished leaves--deep, glossy, cool, and green. 

This is the place for a child's story of the one-eyed giantPolyphemus, who fed his flocks among the oak-woods of Etna, and who, strolling by the sea one summer evening, saw and loved the fair girlGalatea. She was afraid of him, and could not bear his shaggy-browedround rolling eye. But he forgot his sheep and goats, and sat uponthe cliffs and piped to her. Meanwhile she loved the beautiful boyAcis, who ran down from the copse to play with her upon thesea-beach. They hid together from Polyphemus in a fern-curtainedcavern of the shore. But Polyphemus spied them out and heard themlaughing together at their games. Then he grew wroth, and stampedwith his huge feet upon the earth, and made it shake and quiver. Heroared and bellowed in his rage, and tore up rocks and flung them atthe cavern where the children were in hiding, and his eye shot firebeneath the grisly pent-house of his wrinkled brows. They, in theirsore distress, prayed to heaven; and their prayers were heard:Galatea became a mermaid, so that she might swim and sport like foamupon the crests of the blue sea; and Acis was changed into a streamthat leapt from the hills to play with her amid bright waters. ButPolyphemus, in punishment for his rage, and spite, and jealousy, wasforced to live in the mid-furnaces of Etna. There he growled andgroaned and shot forth flame in impotent fury; for though heremembered the gladness of those playfellows, and sought to harmthem by tossing red-hot rocks upon the shore, yet the light sea everlaughed, and the radiant river found its way down from the copsewoodto the waves. The throes of Etna in convulsion are the pangs of hisgreat giant's heart, pent up and sick with love for the bright seaand gladsome sun; for, as an old poet sings:--

 There's love when holy heaven doth wound the earth; And love still prompts the land to yearn for bridals: The rain that falls in rivers from the sky, Impregnates earth: and she brings forth for men The flocks and herds and life of teeming Ceres. 

To which let us add:--

 But sometimes love is barren, when broad hills, Rent with the pangs of passion, yearn in vain, Pouring fire tears adown their furrowed cheeks, And heaving in the impotence of anguish. 

There are few places in Europe where the poetic truth of Greekmythology is more apparent than here upon the coast between Etna andthe sea. Of late, philosophers have been eager to tell us that thebeautiful legends of the Greeks, which contain in the coloured hazeof fancy all the thoughts afterwards expressed by that divine racein poetry and sculpture, are but decayed phrases, dead sentences, and words whereof the meaning was forgotten. In this theory there isa certain truth; for mythology stands midway between the firstlispings of a nation in its language, and its full-developedutterances in art. Yet we have only to visit the scenes which gavebirth to some Hellenic myth, and we perceive at once that, whateverphilology may affirm, the legend was a living poem, a drama of lifeand passion transferred from human experience to the inanimate worldby those early myth-makers, who were the first and the most fertileof all artists. Persephone was the patroness of Sicily, because amidthe billowy cornfields of her mother Demeter and the meadow flowersshe loved in girlhood, are ever found sulphurous ravines and chasmsbreathing vapour from the pit of Hades. What were the Cyclops--thatrace of one-eyed giants--but the many minor cones of Etna? Observedfrom the sea by mariners, or vaguely spoken of by the natives, whohad reason to dread their rage, these hillocks became lawless anddevouring giants, each with one round burning eye. Afterwards thetales of Titans who had warred with Zeus were realised in this spot. Typhoeus or Enceladus made the mountain heave and snort; whileHephæstus not unnaturally forged thunder-bolts in the centralcaverns of a volcano that never ceased to smoke. To the student ofart and literature, mythology is chiefly interesting in its lateststages, when, the linguistic origin of special legends being utterlyforgotten, the poets of the race played freely with its richmaterial. Who cares to be told that Achilles was the sun, when thechild of Thetis and the lover of Patroclus has been sung for us byHomer? Are the human agonies of the doomed house of Thebes made lessappalling by tracing back the tale of OEdipus to some prosaicsource in old astronomy? The incest of Jocasta is the subject ofsupreme tragic art. It does not improve the matter, or whitewash theimagination of the Greeks, as some have fondly fancied, to unravelthe fabric wrought by Homer and by Sophocles, into its raw materialin Aryan dialects. Indeed, this new method of criticism bids fair todestroy for young minds the human lessons of pathos and heroism inGreek poetry, and to create an obscure conviction that the greatestrace of artists the world has ever produced were but dotards, helplessly dreaming over distorted forms of speech and obsoletephraseology. 

Let us bid farewell to Etna from Taormina. All along the coastbetween Aci and Giardini the mountain towers distinct against asunset sky--divested of its robe of cloud, translucent and blue assome dark sea-built crystal. The Val del Bove is shown to be acircular crater in which the lava has boiled and bubbled over to thefertile land beneath. As we reach Giardini, the young moon isshining, and the night is alive with stars so large and bright thatthey seem leaning down to whisper in the ears of our soul. The seais calm, touched here and there on the fringes of the bays andheadlands with silvery light; and impendent crags loom black andsombre against the feeble azure of the moonlit sky. _Quale perincertam lunam et sub luce malignâ_: such is our journey, with Etna, a grey ghost, behind our path, and the reflections of stars upon thesea, and glow-worms in the hedges, and the mystical still splendourof the night, that, like Death, liberates the soul, raising it aboveall common things, simplifying the outlines of the earth as well asour own thoughts to one twilight hush of aërial tranquillity. It isa strange compliment to such a landscape to say that it recalls ascene from an opera. Yet so it is. What the arts of thescene-painter and the musician strive to suggest is here realised infact; the mood of the soul created by music and by passion isnatural here, spontaneous, prepared by the divine artists of earth, air, and sea. 

Was there ever such another theatre as this of Taormina? Turned tothe south, hollowed from the crest of a promontory 1000 feet abovethe sea, it faces Etna with its crown of snow: below, the coastsweeps onward to Catania and the distant headland of Syracuse. Fromthe back the shore of Sicily curves with delicately indented baystowards Messina: then come the straits, and the blunt mass of theCalabrian mountains terminating Italy at Spartivento. Every spot onwhich the eye can rest is rife with reminiscences. It was there, wesay, looking northward to the straits, that Ulysses tossed betweenScylla and Charybdis; there, turning towards the flank of Etna, thathe met with Polyphemus and defied the giant from his galley. Fromyonder snow-capped eyrie, [Greek: Aitnas skopia], the rocks werehurled on Acis. And all along that shore, after Persephone was lost, went Demeter, torch in hand, wailing for the daughter she could nomore find among Sicilian villages. Then, leaving myths for history, we remember how the ships of Nikias set sail from Reggio, andcoasted the forelands at our feet, past Naxos, on their way toCatania and Syracuse. Gylippus afterwards in his swift galley tookthe same course: and Dion, when he came to destroy his nephew'sempire. Here too Timoleon landed, resolute in his firm will to purgethe isle of tyrants. 

What scenes, more spirit-shaking than any tragic shows--pageants offire and smoke, and mountains in commotion--are witnessed from thesegrassy benches, when the earth rocks, and the sea is troubled, andthe side of Etna flows with flame, and night grows horrible withbellowings that forebode changes in empires!--

 Quoties Cyclopum effervere in agros Vidimus undantem ruptis fornacibus Ætnam, Flammarumque globos liquefactaque volvere saxa. 

The stage of these tremendous pomps is very calm and peaceful now. Lying among acanthus leaves and asphodels, bound together by wreathsof white and pink convolvulus, we only feel that this is theloveliest landscape on which our eyes have ever rested or can rest. The whole scene is a symphony of blues--gemlike lapis-lazuli in thesea, aërial azure in the distant headlands, light-irradiatedsapphire in the sky, and impalpable vapour-mantled purple upon Etna. The grey tones of the neighbouring cliffs, and the glowing brickworkof the ruined theatre, through the arches of which shine sea andhillside, enhance by contrast these modulations of the oneprevailing hue. Etna is the dominant feature of thelandscape--[Greek: Aitna mater ema--polydendreos Aitna]--than whichno other mountain is more sublimely solitary, more worthy ofPindar's praise, 'The pillar of heaven, the nurse of sharp eternalsnow. ' It is Etna that gives its unique character of elevated beautyto this coast scenery, raising it to a grander and more tragic levelthan the landscape of the Cornice and the Bay of Naples. 

_PALERMO_

THE NORMANS IN SICILY

Sicily, in the centre of the Mediterranean, has been throughout allhistory the meeting-place and battle-ground of the races thatcontributed to civilise the West. It was here that the Greeksmeasured their strength against Phoenicia, and that Carthagefought her first duel with Rome. Here the bravery of Hellenestriumphed over barbarian force in the victories of Gelon andTimoleon. Here, in the harbour of Syracuse, the Athenian Empiresuccumbed to its own intemperate ambition. Here, in the end, Romelaid her mortmain upon Greek, Phoenician, and Sikeliot alike, turning the island into a granary and reducing its inhabitants toserfdom. When the classic age had closed, when Belisarius had vainlyreconquered from the Goths for the empire of the East the fairisland of Persephone and Zeus Olympius, then came the Mussulman, filling up with an interval of Oriental luxury and Arabian culturethe period of utter deadness between the ancient and the modernworld. To Islam succeeded the conquerors of the house of Hauteville, Norman knights who had but lately left their Scandinavian shores, and settled in the northern provinces of France. The Normansflourished for a season, and were merged in a line of Suabianprinces, old Barbarossa's progeny. German rulers thus came to swaythe corn-lands of Trinacria, until the bitter hatred of the Popesextinguished the house of Hohenstauffen upon the battlefield ofGrandella and the scaffold of Naples. Frenchmen had the nextturn--for a brief space only; since Palermo cried to the sound ofher tocsins, 'Mora, Mora, ' and the tyranny of Anjou was expungedwith blood. Spain, the tardy and patient power, which inherited somuch from the failure of more brilliant races, came at last, andtightened so firm a hold upon the island, that from the end of thethirteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, with onebrief exception, Sicily belonged to the princes of Aragon, Castile, and Bourbon. These vicissitudes have left their traces everywhere. The Greek temples of Segeste and Girgenti and Selinus, the Romanamphitheatre of Syracuse, the Byzantine mosaics and Saracenic villasof Palermo, the Norman cathedrals of Monreale and Cefalú, and theSpanish habits which still characterise the life of Sicilian cities, testify to the successive strata of races which have been depositedupon the island. Amid its anarchy of tongues, the Latin alone hastriumphed. In the time of the Greek colonists Sicily was polyglot. During the Saracenic occupation it was trilingual. It is now, andduring modern history it has always been, Italian. Differences oflanguage and of nationality have gradually been fused into onesubstance, by the spirit which emanates from Rome, and vivifies theLatin race. 

The geographical position of Sicily has always influenced itshistory in a very marked way. The eastern coast, which is turnedtowards Greece and Italy, has been the centre of Aryan civilisationin the island, so that during Greek and Roman ascendency Syracusewas held the capital. The western end, which projects into theAfrican sea, was occupied in the time of the Hellenes byPhoenicians, and afterwards by Mussulmans: consequently Panormus, the ancient seat of Punic colonists, now called Palermo, became thecentre of the Moslem rule, which, inherited entire by the Normanchieftains, was transmitted eventually to Spain. Palermo, devoid ofclassic monuments, and unknown except as a name to the historians ofGreek civilisation, is therefore the modern capital of the island. 'Prima sedes, corona regis, et regni caput, ' is the motto inscribedupon the cathedral porch and the archiepiscopal throne of Palermo:nor has any other city, except Messina, [1] presumed to contest thistitle. 

 [1] Messina, owing to its mercantile position between the Levant, Italy, and France, and as the key to Sicily from the mainland, might probably have become the modern capital had not the Normans found a state machinery ready to their use centralised at Palermo. 

Perhaps there are few spots upon the surface of the globe morebeautiful than Palermo. The hills on either hand descend upon thesea with long-drawn delicately broken outlines, so exquisitelytinted with aërial hues, that at early dawn or beneath the bluelight of a full moon the panorama seems to be some fabric of thefancy, that must fade away, 'like shapes of clouds we form, ' tonothing. Within the cradle of these hills, and close upon thetideless water, lies the city. Behind and around on every sidestretches the famous _Conca d'Oro_, or golden shell, a plain ofmarvellous fertility, so called because of its richness and alsobecause of its shape; for it tapers to a fine point where themountains meet, and spreads abroad, where they diverge, like acornucopia, toward the sea. The whole of this long vega is a garden, thick with olive-groves and orange-trees, with orchards of nespoleand palms and almonds, with fig-trees and locust-trees, withjudas-trees that blush in spring, and with flowers asmultitudinously brilliant as the fretwork of sunset clouds. It washere that in the days of the Kelbite dynasty, the sugar-cane andcotton-tree and mulberry supplied both East and West with producefor the banquet and the paper-mill and the silk-loom; and thoughthese industries are now neglected, vast gardens of cactuses stillgive a strangely Oriental character to the scenery of Palermo, whilethe land flows with honey-sweet wine instead of sugar. The languagein which Arabian poets extolled the charms of this fair land is evennow nowise extravagant: 'Oh how beautiful is the lakelet of the twinpalms, and the island where the spacious palace stands! The limpidwater of the double springs resembles liquid pearls, and their basinis a sea: you would say that the branches of the trees stretcheddown to see the fishes in the pool and smile at them. The greatfishes swim in those clear waters, and the birds among the gardenstune their songs. The ripe oranges of the island are like fire thatburns on boughs of emerald; the pale lemon reminds me of a lover whohas passed the night in weeping for his absent darling. The twopalms may be compared to lovers who have gained an inaccessibleretreat against their enemies, or raise themselves erect in pride toconfound the murmurs and ill thoughts of jealous men. O palms of thetwo lakelets of Palermo, may ceaseless, undisturbed, and plenteousdews for ever keep your freshness!' Such is the poetry which suitsthe environs of Palermo, where the Moorish villas of La Zisa and LaCuba and La Favara still stand, and where the modern gardens, thoughwilder, are scarcely less delightful than those beneath which KingRoger discoursed with Edrisi, and Gian da Procida surprised hissleeping mistress. [1] The groves of oranges and lemons are aninexhaustible source of joy: not only because of their 'golden lampsin a green night, ' but also because of their silvery constellations, nebulæ, and drifts of stars, in the same green night, and milky waysof blossoms on the ground beneath. As in all southern scenery, thetransition from these perfumed thickly clustering gardens to thebare unirrigated hillsides is very striking. There the dwarf-palmtufts with its spiky foliage the clefts of limestone rock, and thelizards run in and out among bushes of tree-spurge and wild cactusand grey asphodels. The sea-shore is a tangle of lilac and oleanderand laurustinus and myrtle and lentisk and cytisus and geranium. Theflowering plants that make our shrubberies gay in spring withblossoms, are here wild, running riot upon the sand-heaps ofMondello or beneath the barren slopes of Monte Pellegrino. 

It was into this terrestrial paradise, cultivated through twopreceding centuries by the Arabs, who of all races were wisest inthe arts of irrigation and landscape-gardening, that the Norsemenentered as conquerors, and lay down to pass their lives. [2]

 [1] Boccaccio, Giorn. V. Nov. 6. 

 [2] The Saracens possessed themselves of Sicily by a gradual conquest, which began about 827 A. D. Disembarking on the little isle of Pantellaria and the headland of Lilyboeum, where of old the Carthaginians used to enter Sicily, they began by overrunning the island for the first four years. In 831 they took Palermo; during the next ten years they subjugated the Val di Mazara; between 841 and 859 they possessed themselves of the Val di Noto; after this they extended their conquest over the seaport towns of the Val Demone, but neglected to reduce the whole of the N. E. District. Syracuse was stormed and reduced to ruins after a desperate defence in 878, while Leo, the heir of the Greek Empire, contented himself with composing two Anacreontic elegies on the disaster at Byzantium. In 895 Sicily was wholly lost to the Greeks, by a treaty signed between the Saracens and the remaining Christian towns. The Christians during the Mussulman occupation were divided into four classes--(1) A few independent municipalities obedient loosely to the Greek Empire; (2) tributaries who paid the Arabs what they would otherwise have sent to Byzantium; (3) vassals, whose towns had fallen by arms or treaty into the hands of the conquerors, and who, though their property was respected and religion tolerated, were called 'dsimmi' or 'humbled;' (4) serfs, prisoners of war, sold as slaves or attached to the soil (_Amari_, vol. I. ). 

No chapter of history more resembles a romance than that whichrecords the sudden rise and brief splendour of the house ofHauteville. In one generation the sons of Tancred passed from thecondition of squires in the Norman vale of Cotentin, to kinghood inthe richest island of the southern sea. The Norse adventurers becameSultans of an Oriental capital. The sea-robbers assumed togetherwith the sceptre the culture of an Arabian court. The marauderswhose armies burned Rome, received at papal hands the mitre anddalmatic as symbols of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. [1] The brigandswho on their first appearance in Italy had pillaged stables andfarmyards to supply their needs, lived to mate their daughters withprinces and to sway the politics of Europe with gold. Thefreebooters, whose skill consisted in the use of sword and shield, whose brains were vigorous in strategy or statecraft, and whosepleasures were confined to the hunting-field and the wine-cup, raised villas like the Zisa and encrusted the cathedral of Monrealewith mosaics. Finally, while the race was yet vigorous, after givingtwo heroes to the first Crusade, it transmitted its titles, itstemper, and its blood to the great Emperor, who was destined tofight out upon the battlefield of Italy the strife of Empire againstPapacy, and to bequeath to mediæval Europe the tradition ofcosmopolitan culture. The physical energy of this brood of heroeswas such as can scarcely be paralleled in history. Tancred deHauteville begat two families by different wives. Of his childrentwelve were sons; two of whom stayed with their father in Normandy, while ten sought fame and found a kingdom in the south. Of these, William Iron Arm, the first Count of Apulia; Robert Guiscard, whounited Calabria and Apulia under one dukedom, and carried victoriousarms against both Emperors of East and West; and Roger the GreatCount, who added Sicily to the conquests of the Normans andbequeathed the kingdom of South Italy to his son, rose to thehighest name. But all the brothers shared the great qualities of thehouse; and two of them, Humphrey and Drogo, also wore a coronet. Large of limb and stout of heart, persevering under difficulties, crafty yet gifted with the semblance of sincerity, combining thepiety of pilgrims with the morals of highwaymen, the sturdiness ofbarbarians with the plasticity of culture, eloquent in thecouncil-chamber and the field, dear to their soldiers for theirbravery and to women for their beauty, equally eminent as generalsand as rulers, restrained by no scruples but such as policysuggested, restless in their energy, yet neither fickle nor rash, comprehensive in their views, but indefatigable in detail, theselions among men were made to conquer in the face of overwhelmingobstacles, and to hold their conquests with a grasp of iron. Whatthey wrought, whether wisely or not for the ultimate advantage ofItaly, endures to this day, while the work of so many emperors, republics, and princes has passed and shifted like the scenes in apantomime. Through them the Greeks, the Lombards, and the Moors wereextinguished in the south. The Papacy was checked in its attempt tofound a province of S. Peter below the Tiber. The republics ofNaples, Gaeta, Amalfi, which might have rivalled perchance withMilan, Genoa, and Florence, were subdued to a master's hand. Inshort, to the Normans Italy owed that kingdom of the Two Sicilieswhich formed one-third of her political balance, and which provedthe cause of all her most serious revolutions. 

 [1] King Roger in the mosaics of the Martorana Church at Palermo wears the dalmatic, and receives his crown from the hands of Christ. 

Roger, the youngest of the Hauteville family, and the founder of thekingdom of Sicily, showed by his untamable spirit and soundintellect that his father's vigour remained unexhausted. Each ofTancred's sons was physically speaking a masterpiece, and the lastwas the prime work of all. This Roger, styled the Great Count, begata second Roger, the first King of Sicily, whose son and grandson, both named William, ruled in succession at Palermo. With them thedirect line of the house of Hauteville expired. It would seem as ifthe energy and fertility of the stock had been drained by itsefforts in the first three generations. Constance, the heiress ofthe family, who married Henry VI. And gave birth to the EmperorFrederick II. , was daughter of King Roger, and therefore third indescent from Tancred. Drawing her blood more immediately from theparent stem, she thus transmitted to the princes of the race ofHohenstauffen the vigour of her Norman ancestry unweakened. This wasa circumstance of no small moment in the history of Europe. Upon thefierce and daring Suabian stem were grafted the pertinacity, thecunning, the versatility of the Norman adventurers. Young Frederick, while strong and subtle enough to stand for himself against theworld, was so finely tempered by the blended strains of hisparentage that he received the polish of an Oriental educationwithout effeminacy. Called upon to administer the affairs ofGermany, to govern Italy, to contend with the Papacy, and to settleby arms and treaties the great Oriental question of his days, Frederick, cosmopolitan from the cradle, was equal to the task. HadEurope been but ready, the Renaissance would have dated from hisreign, and a universal empire, if not of political government, yetof intellectual culture, might have been firmly instituted. 

Of the personal appearance of the Norman chiefs--their fair hair, clear eyes, and broad shoulders--we hear much from the chroniclers. One minutely studied portrait will serve to bring the whole racevividly before us. Bohemond, Prince of Tarentum, the son of RobertGuiscard, and first cousin to Tancred of Montferrat, was thusdescribed by Anna Comnena, who saw him at her father's court duringthe first Crusade: 'Neither amongst our own nation (the Greeks), noramongst foreigners, is there in our age a man equal to Bohemond. Hispresence dazzled the eyes, as his reputation the fancy. He was onecubit taller than the tallest man known. In his waist he was thin, but broad in his shoulders and chest, without being either too thinor too fat. His arms were strong, his hands full and large, his feetfirm and solid. He stooped a little, but through habit only, and noton account of any deformity. He was fair, but on his cheeks therewas an agreeable mixture of vermilion. His hair was not loose overhis shoulders, according to the fashion of the barbarians, but wascut above his ears. His eyes were blue, and full of wrath andfierceness. His nostrils were large, inasmuch as having a wide chestand a great heart, his lungs required an unusual quantity of air tomoderate the warmth of his blood. His handsome face had in itselfsomething gentle and softening, but the height of his person and thefierceness of his looks had something wild and terrible. He was moredreadful in his smiles than others in their rage. ' When we read thisdescription, remembering the romance of Bohemond's ancestry and hisown life, we do not wonder at the tales of chivalry. Those 'knightsof Logres and of Lyoness, Lancelot or Pelleas or Pellenore, ' withwhose adventures our tawny-haired magnificent Plantagenets amusedtheir leisure, become realities. The manly beauty, described by theByzantine princess in words which seem to betray a more than commoninterest in her handsome foe, was hereditary in the house ofHauteville. They transmitted it to the last of the Suabian dynasty, to Manfred and Conradin, and to the king Enzio, whose long goldenhair fell down from his shoulders to his saddle-bow as he rode, acaptive, into Bologna. 

The story of the Norman conquest is told by two chroniclers--Williamof Apulia, who received his materials from Robert Guiscard, andGodfrey Malaterra, who wrote down the oral narrative of Roger. Thuswe possess what is tantamount to personal memoirs of the Normanchiefs. Nevertheless, a veil of legendary romance obscures the firstappearance of the Scandinavian warriors upon the scene of history. William of Apulia tells how, in the course of a pilgrimage to S. Michael's shrine on Monte Gargano, certain knights of Normandy wereaccosted by a stranger of imposing aspect, who persuaded them todraw their swords in the quarrel of the Lombard towns of South Italyagainst the Greeks. This man was Melo of Bari. Whether hisinvitation were so theatrically conveyed or not, it is probable thatthe Norsemen made their first acquaintance with Apulia on apilgrimage to the Italian Michael's mount; and it is certain thatMelo, whom we dimly descry as a patriot of enlarged views andindomitable constancy, provided them with arms and horses, raisedtroops in Salerno and Benevento to assist them, and directed themagainst the Greeks. This happened in 1017. Twelve years later wefind the town of Aversa built and occupied by Normans under thecontrol of their Count Rainulf; while another band, headed byArdoin, a Lombard of Milan, lived at large upon the country, sellingits services to the Byzantine Greeks. In the anarchy of SouthernItaly at this epoch, when the decaying Empire of the East wasrelaxing its hold upon the Apulian provinces, when the Papacy wasbeginning to lift up its head after the ignominy of Theodora andMarozia, and the Lombard power was slowly dissolving upon itsill-established foundations, the Norman adventurers pursued a policywhich, however changeful, was invariably self-advantageous. Onwhatever side they fought, they took care that the profits of warshould accrue to their own colony. Quarrel as they might amongthemselves, they were always found at one against a common foe. Andsuch was their reputation in the field, that the hardiest soldierserrant of all nations joined their standard. Thus it fell out thatwhen Ardoin and his Normans had helped Maniaces to wrest the easterndistricts of Sicily from the Moors, they returned, upon an insultoffered by the Greek general, to extend the right hand of fellowshipto Rainulf and his Normans of Aversa. 'Why should you stay here likea rat in his hole, when with our help you might rule those fertileplains, expelling the women in armour who keep guard over them?' Theagreement of Ardoin and Rainulf formed the basis of the futureNorman power. Their companies joined forces. Melfi was chosen as thecentre of their federal government. The united Norman colony electedtwelve chiefs or counts of equal authority; and henceforth theythought only of consolidating their ascendency over the effete raceswhich had hitherto pretended to employ their arms. The genius oftheir race and age, however, was unfavourable to federations. In ashort time the ablest man among them, the true king, by right ofpersonal vigour and mental cunning, showed himself. It was at thispoint that the house of Hauteville rose to the altitude of itsromantic destiny. William Iron Arm was proclaimed Count of Apulia. Two of his brothers succeeded him in the same dignity. Hishalf-brother, Robert Guiscard, imprisoned one Pope, [1] Leo IX. , andwrested from another, Nicholas II. , the title of Duke of Apulia andCalabria. By the help of his youngest brother, Roger, he graduallycompleted the conquest of Italy below the Tiber, and then addressedhimself to the task of subduing Sicily. The Papacy, incapable ofopposing the military vigour of the Northmen, was distracted betweenjealousy of their growing importance and desire to utilise them forits own advantage. [2] The temptation to employ these filial piratesas a catspaw for restoring Sicily to the bosom of the Church, wastoo strong to be resisted. In spite of many ebbs and flows ofpolicy, the favour which the Popes accorded to the Normans gildedthe might and cunning of the adventurers with the specious splendourof acknowledged sanctity. The time might come for casting off thesepowerful allies and adding their conquests to the patrimony of S. Peter. Meanwhile it costs nothing to give away what does not belongto one, particularly when by doing so a title to the same isgradually formed. So the Popes reckoned. Robert and Roger went forthwith banners blessed by Rome to subjugate the island of the Greekand Moor. 

 [1] The Normans were lucky in getting hold of Popes. King Roger caught Innocent II. At San Germano in 1139, and got from him the confirmation of all his titles. 

 [2] Even the great Hildebrand wavered in his policy toward Robert Guiscard. Having raised an army by the help of the Countess Matilda in 1074, he excommunicated Robert and made war against him. Robert proved more than his match in force and craft; and Hildebrand had to confirm his title as duke, and designate him Knight of S. Peter in 1080. When Robert drove the Emperor Henry IV. From Rome, and burned the city of the Coelian, Hildebrand retired with his terrible defender to Salerno, and died there in 1085. Robert and both Rogers were good sons of the Church, deserving the titles of 'Terror of the faithless, ' 'Sword of the Lord drawn from the scabbard of Sicily, ' as long as they were suffered to pursue their own schemes of empire. They respected the Pope's person and his demesne of Benevento; they were largely liberal in donations to churches and abbeys. But they did not suffer their piety to interfere with their ambition. 

The honours of this conquest, paralleled for boldness only by theachievements of Cortes and Pizarro, belong to Roger. It is true thatsince the fall of the Kelbite dynasty Sicily had been shaken byanarchy and despotism, by the petty quarrels of princes and partyleaders, and to some extent also by the invasion of Maniaces. Yet onthe approach of Roger with a handful of Norman knights, 'the islandwas guarded, ' to quote Gibbon's energetic phrase, 'to the water'sedge. ' For some years he had to content himself with raids andharrying excursions, making Messina, which he won from the Moors bythe aid of their Christian serfs and vassals, the basis of hisoperations, and retiring from time to time across the Faro withbooty to Reggio. The Mussulmans had never thoroughly subdued thenorth-eastern highlands of Sicily. Satisfied with occupying thewhole western and southern sections of the island, with plantingtheir government firmly at Palermo, destroying Syracuse, andestablishing a military fort on the heights of Castro Giovanni, theyhad somewhat neglected the Christian populations of the Val Demone. Thus the key to Sicily upon the Italian side fell into the hands ofthe invaders. From Messina Roger advanced by Rametta and Centorbi toTroina, a hill-town raised high above the level of the sea, withinview of the solemn blue-black pyramid of Etna. There he planted agarrison in 1062, two years after his first incursion into theisland. The interval had been employed in marches andcountermarches, descents upon the vale of Catania, and hurriedexpeditions as far as Girgenti, on the southern coast. One greatbattle is recorded beneath the walls of Castro Giovanni, when sixhundred Norman knights, so say the chroniclers, engaged with fifteenthousand of the Arabian chivalry and one hundred thousand footsoldiers. However great the exaggeration of these numbers, it iscertain that the Christians fought at fearful odds that day, andthat all the eloquence of Roger, who wrought on their fanaticism inhis speech before the battle, was needed to raise their courage tothe sticking-point. The scene of the great rout of Saracens whichfollowed, is in every respect memorable. Castro Giovanni, the oldEnna of the Greeks and Romans, stands on the top of a precipitousmountain, two thousand feet above a plain which waves with corn. Asister height, Calascibetta, raised nearly to an equal altitude, keeps ward over the same valley; and from their summits the whole ofSicily is visible. Here in old days Demeter from her rock-builttemple could survey vast tracts of hill and dale, breaking downwardsto the sea and undulating everywhere with harvest. The much praisedlake and vale of Enna[1] are now a desolate sulphur district, voidof beauty, with no flowers to tempt Proserpine. Yet the landscape iseminently noble because of its breadth--bare naked hills stretchingin every direction to the sea that girdles Sicily--peak rising abovepeak and town-capped eyrie over eyrie--while Etna, wreathed withsnow, and purple with the peculiar colour of its coal-black lavaseen through light-irradiated air, sleeps far off beneath a crown ofclouds. Upon the cornfields in the centre of this landscape themultitudes of the Infidels were smitten hip and thigh by the handfulof Christian warriors. Yet the victory was by no means a decisiveone. The Saracens swarmed round the Norman fortress of Troina;where, during a severe winter, Roger and his young wife, Judith ofEvreux, whom he had loved in Normandy, and who journeyed to marryhim amid the din of battles, had but one cloak to protect them bothfrom the cold. The traveller, who even in April has experienced thechill of a high-set Sicilian village, will not be inclined to laughat the hardships revealed by this little incident. Yet the Normans, one and all, were stanch. A victory over their assailants in thespring gave them courage to push their arms as far as the riverHimera and beyond the Simeto, while a defeat of fifty thousandSaracens by four hundred Normans at Cerami opened the way at last toPalermo. Reading of these engagements, we are led to remember howGelon smote his Punic foes upon the Himera, and Timoleon arrayedGreeks by the ten against Carthaginians by the thousand on theCrimisus. The battlefields are scarcely altered; the combatants areas unequally matched, and represent analogous races. It is still thecombat of a few heroic Europeans against the hordes of Asia. In thebattle of Cerami it is said that S. George fought visibly onhorseback before the Christian band, like that wide-wingedchivalrous archangel whom Spinello Aretino painted beside Sant'Efeso in the press of men upon the walls of the Pisan Campo Santo. 

 [1] Cicero's description of Enna is still accurate: 'Enna is placed in a very lofty and exposed situation, at the top of which is a tableland and never-failing supply of springs. The whole site is cut off from access, and precipitous. ' But when he proceeds to say, 'many groves and lakes surround it and luxuriant flowers through all the year, ' we cannot follow him. The only quality which Enna has not lost is the impregnable nature of its cliffs. A few poplars and thorns are all that remain of its forests. Did we not know that the myth of Demeter and Persephone was a poem of seed-time and harvest, we might be tempted, while sitting on the crags of Castro Giovanni and looking toward the lake, to fancy that in old days a village dependent upon Enna, and therefore called her daughter, might have occupied the site of the lake, and that this village might have been withdrawn into the earth by the volcanic action which produced the cavity. Then people would have said that Demeter had lost Persephone and sought her vainly through all the cities of Sicily: and if this happened in spring Persephone might well have been thought to have been gathering flowers at the time when Hades took her to himself. So easy and yet so dangerous is it to rationalise a legend. 

The capture of Palermo cost the Normans another eight years, part ofwhich was spent according to their national tactics in plunderingexpeditions, part in the subjugation of Catania and other districts, part in the blockade of the capital by sea and land. After the fallof Palermo, it only remained for Roger to reduce isolatedcities--Taormina, Syracuse, [1] Girgenti, and Castro Giovanni--to hissway. The last-named and strongest hold of the Saracens fell intohis hands by the treason of Ibn-Hamûud in 1087, and thus, afterthirty years' continual effort, the two brothers were at last ableto divide the island between them. The lion's share, as was due, fell to Roger, who styled himself Great Count of Sicily andCalabria. In 1098, Urban II. , a politician of the school of Cluny, who well understood the scope of Hildebrand's plan for subjectingEurope to the Court of Rome, rewarded Roger for his zeal in theservice of the Church with the title of Hereditary ApostolicalLegate. The Great Count was now on a par with the most powerfulmonarchs of Europe. In riches he exceeded all; so that he was ableto wed one daughter to the King of Hungary, another to Conrad, Kingof Italy, a third to Raimond, Count of Provence and Toulouse, dowering them all with imperial munificence. 

 [1] In this siege, as in that of the Athenians, and of the Saracens 878 A. D. , decisive engagements took place in the great harbour. 

Hale and vigorous, his life was prolonged through a green old ageuntil his seventieth year; when he died in 1101, he left two sons byhis third wife, Adelaide. Roger, the younger of the two, destined tosucceed his father, and (on the death of his cousin, William, Dukeof Apulia, in 1127) to unite South Italy and Sicily under one crown, was only four years old at the death of the Great Count. Inheritingall the valour and intellectual qualities of his family, he rose toeven higher honour than his predecessors. In 1130 he assumed thestyle of King of Sicily, no doubt with the political purpose ofimpressing his Mussulman subjects; and nine years later, when hetook Innocent captive at San Germano, he forced from thehalf-willing pontiff a confirmation of this title as well as theinvestiture of Apulia, Calabria, and Capua. The extent of his swayis recorded in the line engraved upon his sword:--

 Appulus et Calaber Siculus mihi servit et Afer. 

King Roger died in 1154, and bequeathed his kingdoms to his sonWilliam, surnamed the Bad; who in his turn left them to a William, called the Good, in 1166. The second William died in 1189, transmitting his possessions by will to Constance, wife of theSuabian emperor. These two Williams, the last of the Hautevillemonarchs of Sicily, were not altogether unworthy of their Normanorigin. William the Bad could rouse himself from the sloth of hisseraglio to head an army; William the Good, though feeble in foreignpolicy, and no general, administered the state with clemency andwisdom. 

Sicily under the Normans offered the spectacle of a singularlyhybrid civilisation. Christians and Northmen, adopting the habitsand imbibing the culture of their Mussulman subjects, ruled a mixedpopulation of Greeks, Arabs, Berbers, and Italians. The language ofthe princes was French; that of the Christians in their territory, Greek and Latin; that of their Mahommedan subjects, Arabic. At thesame time the Scandinavian Sultans of Palermo did not cease to playan active part in the affairs, both civil and ecclesiastical, ofEurope. The children of the Vikings, though they spent their leisurein harems, exercised, as hereditary Legates of the Holy See, apeculiar jurisdiction in the Church of Sicily. They dispensedbenefices to the clergy, and assumed the mitre and dalmatic, together with the sceptre, and the crown, as symbols of theirauthority in Church as well as State. As a consequence of thisconfusion of nationalities in Sicily, we find French and Englishecclesiastics[1] mingling at court with Moorish freedmen andOriental odalisques, Apulian captains fraternising with Greekcorsairs, Jewish physicians in attendance on the person of theprince, and Arabian poets eloquent in his praises. The very moneywith which Roger subsidised his Italian allies was stamped withCuphic letters, [2] and there is reason to believe that the reproachagainst Frederick of being a false coiner arose from his adoptingthe Eastern device of plating copper pieces to pass for silver. Thecommander of Roger's navies and his chief minister of state wasstyled, according to Oriental usage, Emir or Ammiraglio. George ofAntioch, who swept the shores of Africa, the Morea, and the BlackSea, in his service, was a Christian of the Greek Church, who hadpreviously held an office of finance under Temin Prince of Mehdia. The workers in his silk factories were slaves from Thebes andCorinth. The pages of his palace were Sicilian or African eunuchs. His charters ran in Arabic as well as Greek and Latin. His jewellersengraved the rough gems of the Orient with Christian mottoes inSemitic characters. [3] His architects were Mussulmans who adaptedtheir native style to the requirements of Christian ritual, andinscribed the walls of cathedrals with Catholic legends in theCuphic language. The predominant characteristic of Palermo wasOrientalism. Religious toleration was extended to the Mussulmans, sothat the two creeds, Christian and Mahommedan, flourished side byside. The Saracens had their own quarters in the towns, theirmosques and schools, and Cadis for the administration of pettyjustice. French and Italian women in Palermo adopted the Orientalfashions of dress. The administration of law and government wasconducted on Eastern principles. In nothing had the Mussulmans showngreater genius than in their system of internal statecraft. CountRoger found a machinery of taxation in full working order, officersacquainted with the resources of the country, books and schedulesconstructed on the principles of strictest accuracy, a wholebureaucracy, in fact, ready to his use. By applying this machineryhe became the richest potentate in Europe, at a time when thenorthern monarchs were dependent upon feudal aids and precariousrevenues from crown lands. In the same way, the Saracens bequeathedto the Normans the court system, which they in turn had derived fromthe princes of Persia and the example of Constantinople. Roger foundit convenient to continue that organisation of pages, chamberlains, ushers, secretaries, viziers, and masters of the wardrobe, investedeach with some authority of state according to his rank, whichconfined the administration of an Eastern kingdom to the walls ofthe palace. [4] At Palermo Europe saw the first instance of a courtnot wholly unlike that which Versailles afterwards became. Theintrigues which endangered the throne and liberty of William theBad, and which perplexed the policy of William the Good, werecourt-conspiracies of a kind common enough at Constantinople. Inthis court life men of letters and erudition played a first partthree centuries before Petrarch taught the princes of Italy torespect the pen of a poet. 

 [1] The English Gualterio Offamilio, or Walter of the Mill, Archbishop of Palermo during the reign of William the Good, by his intrigues brought about the match between Constance and Henry VI. Richard Palmer at the same time was Bishop of Syracuse. Stephen des Rotrous, a Frenchman of the Counts of Perche, preceded Walter of the Mill in the Arch See of Palermo. 

 [2] Frederick Barbarossa's soldiers are said to have bidden the Romans: 'Take this German iron in change for Arab gold. This pay your master gives you, and this is how Franks win empire. '--_Amari_, vol. Iii. P. 468. 

 [3] The embroidered skullcap of Constance of Aragon, wife of Frederick II. , in the sacristy of the cathedral at Palermo, is made of gold thread thickly studded with pearls and jewels--rough sapphires and carbuncles, among which may be noticed a red cornelian engraved in Arabic with this sentence, 'In Christ, God, I put my hope. '

 [4] The Arabic title of _Kâid_, which originally was given to a subordinate captain of the guard, took a wide significance at the Norman Court. Latinised to _gaytus_, and Grecised under the form of [Greek: kaitos], it frequently occurs in chronicles and diplomas to denote a high minister of state. Matteo of Ajello, who exercised so powerful an influence over the policy of William the Good, heading the Mussulman and national party against the great ecclesiastics who were intriguing to draw Sicily into the entanglements of European diplomacy, was a Kâid. Matteo favoured the cause of Tancred, Walter of the Mill espoused that of the Germans, during the war of succession which followed upon William's death. The barons of the realm had to range themselves under these two leaders--to such an extent were the affairs of state in Sicily within the grasp of courtiers and churchmen. 

King Roger, of whom the court geographer Edrisi writes that 'he didmore sleeping than any other man waking, ' was surrounded during hisleisure moments, beneath the palm-groves of Favara, with musicians, historians, travellers, mathematicians, poets, and astrologers ofOriental breeding. At his command Ptolemy's Optics were translatedinto Latin from the Arabic. The prophecies of the Erythrean Sibylwere rendered accessible in the same way. His respect for the occultsciences was proved by his disinterring the bones of Virgil fromtheir resting-place at Posilippo, and placing them in the Casteldell' Uovo in order that he might have access through necromancy tothe spirit of the Roman wizard. It may be remembered in passing, that Palermo in one of her mosques already held suspended betweenearth and air the supposed relics of Aristotle. Such were the saintsof modern culture in its earliest dawning. While Venice was robbingAlexandria of the body of S. Mark, Palermo and Naples placedthemselves beneath the protection of a philosopher and a poet. ButRoger's greatest literary work was the compilation of a treatise ofuniversal geography. Fifteen years were devoted to the task; and themanuscript, in Arabic, drawn up by the philosopher Edrisi, appearedonly six weeks before the king's death in 1154. This book, called'The Book of Roger, or the Delight of whoso loves to make theCircuit of the World, ' was based upon the previous labours of twelvegeographers, classical and Mussulman. But aiming at greater accuracythan could be obtained by a merely literary compilation, Rogercaused pilgrims, travellers, and merchants of all countries to beassembled for conference and examination before him. Their accountswere sifted and collated. Edrisi held the pen while Rogerquestioned. Measurements and distances were carefully compared; anda vast silver disc was constructed, on which all the seas, islands, continents, plains, rivers, mountain ranges, cities, roads, andharbours of the known world were delineated. The text supplied anexplanatory description of this map, with tables of the products, habits, races, religions, and qualities, both physical and moral, ofall climates. The precious metal upon which the map was drawn provedits ruin, and the Geography remained in the libraries of Arabscholars. Yet this was one of the first great essays of practicalexploration and methodical statistic, to which the genius of theNorseman and the Arab each contributed a quota. The Arabians, bytheir primitive nomadic habits, by the necessities of their systemof taxation, by their predilection for astrology, by theirexperience as pilgrims, merchants, and poets errant, were speciallyqualified for the labour of geographical investigation. Rogersupplied the unbounded curiosity and restless energy of hisScandinavian temper, the kingly comprehensive intellect of his race, and the authority of a prince who was powerful enough to compel theservice of qualified collaborators. 

The architectural works of the Normans in Palermo reveal the sameascendency of Arab culture. San Giovanni degli Eremiti, with its lowwhite rounded domes, is nothing more or less than a little mosqueadapted to the rites of Christians. [1] The country palaces of theZisa and the Cuba, built by the two Williams, retain their ancientMoorish character. Standing beneath the fretted arches of the hallof the Zisa, through which a fountain flows within a margin ofcarved marble, and looking on the landscape from its open porch, weonly need to reconstruct in fancy the green gardens andorange-groves, where fair-haired Normans whiled away their hoursamong black-eyed odalisques and graceful singing boys from Persia. Amid a wild tangle of olive and lemon trees overgrown with scarletpassion-flowers, the pavilion of the Cubola, built of hewn stone andopen at each of its four sides, still stands much as it stood whenWilliam II. Paced through flowers from his palace of the Cuba, toenjoy the freshness of the evening by the side of its fountain. Theviews from all these Saracenic villas over the fruitful valley ofthe Golden Horn, and the turrets of Palermo, and the mountains andthe distant sea, are ineffably delightful. When the palaces werenew--when the gilding and the frescoes still shone upon theirhoneycombed ceilings, when their mosaics glittered in noondaytwilight, and their amber-coloured masonry was set in shade of pinesand palms, and the cool sound of rivulets made music in their courtsand gardens, they must have well deserved their Arab titles of'Sweet Waters' and 'The Glory' and 'The Paradise of Earth. '

 [1] Tradition asserts that the tocsin of this church gave the signal in Palermo to the massacre of the Sicilian Vespers. 

But the true splendour of Palermo, that which makes this city one ofthe most glorious of the south, is to be sought in its churches--inthe mosaics of the Cappella Palatina founded by King Roger, in thevast aisles and cloisters of Monreale built by King William the Goodat the instance of his Chancellor Matteo, [1] in the Cathedral ofPalermo begun by Offamilio, and in the Martorana dedicated by Georgethe Admiral. These triumphs of ecclesiastical architecture, none theless splendid because they cannot be reduced to rule or assigned toany single style, were the work of Saracen builders assisted byByzantine, Italian, and Norman craftsmen. The genius of LatinChristianity determined the basilica shape of the Cathedral ofMonreale. Its bronze doors were wrought by smiths of Trani and Pisa. Its walls were incrusted with the mosaics of Constantinople. Thewoodwork of its roof, and the emblazoned patterns in porphyry andserpentine and glass and smalto, which cover its whole surface, weredesigned by Oriental decorators. Norman sculptors added theirdog-tooth and chevron to the mouldings of its porches; Greeks, Frenchmen, and Arabs may have tried their skill in turn upon themultitudinous ornaments of its cloister capitals. 'The like of whichchurch, ' said Lucius III. In 1182, 'hath not been constructed by anyking even from ancient times, and such an one as must compel all mento admiration. ' These words remain literally and emphatically true. Other cathedrals may surpass that of Monreale in sublimity, simplicity, bulk, strength, or unity of plan. None can surpass it inthe strange romance with which the memory of its many artificersinvests it. None again can exceed it in richness and glory, in thegorgeousness of a thousand decorative elements subservient to onecontrolling thought. 'It is evident, ' says Fergusson in his 'Historyof Architecture, ' 'that all the architectural features in thebuilding were subordinate in the eyes of the builders to the mosaicdecorations, which cover every part of the interior, and are in factthe glory and the pride of the edifice, and alone entitle it to rankamong the finest of mediæval churches. ' The whole of the Christianhistory is depicted in this series of mosaics; but on firstentering, one form alone compels attention. The semi-dome of theeastern apse above the high altar is entirely filled with a gigantichalf-length figure of Christ. He raises His right hand to bless, andwith His left holds an open book on which is written in Greek andLatin, 'I am the Light of the world. ' His face is solemn and severe, rather than mild or piteous; and round His nimbus runs the legend[Greek: 'Iêsous Christos ho pantokratôr]. Below Him on a smallerscale are ranged the archangels and the mother of the Lord, whoholds the child upon her knees. Thus Christ appears twice upon thiswall, once as the Omnipotent Wisdom, the Word by whom all thingswere made, and once as God deigning to assume a shape of flesh anddwell with men. The magnificent image of supreme Deity seems to fillwith a single influence and to dominate the whole building. Thehouse with all its glory is His. He dwells there like Pallas in herParthenon or Zeus in his Olympian temple. To left and right overevery square inch of the cathedral blaze mosaics, which portray thestory of God's dealings with the human race from the Creationdownwards, together with those angelic beings and saints whosymbolise each in his own degree some special virtue granted tomankind. The walls of the fane are therefore an open book ofhistory, theology, and ethics for all men to read. 

 [1] Matteo of Ajello induced William to found an archbishopric at Monreale in order to spite his rival Offamilio. 

The superiority of mosaics over fresco as an architectural adjuncton this gigantic scale is apparent at a glance in Monreale. Permanency of splendour and glowing richness of tone are all on theside of the mosaics. Their true rival is painted glass. The jewelledchurches of the south are constructed for the display of colouredsurfaces illuminated by sunlight falling on them from narrowwindows, just as those of the north--Rheims, for example, or LeMans--are built for the transmission of light through a variegatedmedium of transparent hues. The painted windows of a northerncathedral find their proper counterpart in the mosaics of the south. The Gothic architect strove to obtain the greatest amount oftranslucent surface. The Byzantine builder directed his attention tosecuring just enough light for the illumination of his glisteningwalls. The radiance of the northern church was similar to that offlowers or sunset clouds or jewels. The glory of the southern templewas that of dusky gold and gorgeous needlework. The north neededacute brilliancy as a contrast to external greyness. The south foundrest from the glare and glow of noonday in these sombre splendours. Thus Christianity, both of the south and of the north, decked hershrines with colour. Not so the Paganism of Hellas. With the Greeks, colour, though used in architecture, was severely subordinated tosculpture; toned and modified to a calculated harmony with actualnature, it did not, as in a Christian church, create a world beyondthe world, a paradise of supersensual ecstasy, but remained withinthe limits of the known. Light falling upon carved forms of gods andheroes, bathing clear-cut columns and sharp basreliefs in simplelustre, was enough for the Phoebean rites of Hellas. Though weknow that red and blue and green and gilding were employed toaccentuate the mouldings of Greek temples, yet neither the gloomyglory of mosaics nor the gemmed fretwork of storied windows wasneeded to attune the souls of Hellenic worshippers to devotion. 

Less vast than Monreale, but even more beautiful, because the charmof mosaic increases in proportion as the surface it covers may becompared to the interior of a casket, is the Cappella Palatina ofthe royal palace in Palermo. Here, again, the whole design andornament are Arabo-Byzantine. Saracenic pendentives with Cuphiclegends incrust the richly painted ceiling of the nave. The roofs ofthe apses and the walls are coated with mosaics, in which the Biblehistory, from the dove that brooded over Chaos to the lives of S. Peter and S. Paul, receives a grand though formal presentation. Beneath the mosaics are ranged slabs of grey marble, edged anddivided with delicate patterns of inserted glass, resembling draperywith richly embroidered fringes. The floor is inlaid with circles ofserpentine and porphyry encased in white marble, and surrounded bywinding bands of Alexandrine work. Some of these patterns arerestricted to the five tones of red, green, white, black, and paleyellow. Others add turquoise blue, and emerald, and scarlet, andgold. Not a square inch of the surface--floor, roof, walls, orcupola--is free from exquisite gemmed work of precious marbles. Acandelabrum of fanciful design, combining lions devouring men andbeasts, cranes, flowers, and winged genii, stands by the pulpit. Lamps of chased silver hang from the roof. The cupola blazes withgigantic archangels, stationed in a ring beneath the supreme figureand face of Christ. Some of the Ravenna churches are morehistorically interesting, perhaps, than this little masterpiece ofthe mosaic art. But none is so rich in detail and lustrous ineffect. It should be seen at night, when the lamps are lighted in apyramid around the sepulchre of the dead Christ on Holy Thursday, when partial gleams strike athwart the tawny gold of the arches, andfall upon the profile of a priest declaiming in voluble Italian to alistening crowd. 

Such are a few of the monuments which still remain to show of whatsort was the mixed culture of Normans, Saracens, Italians, andGreeks at Palermo. In scenes like these the youth of Frederick II. Was passed:--for at the end, while treating of Palermo, we are boundto think again of the Emperor who inherited from his German fatherthe ambition of the Hohenstauffens, and from his Norman mother thefair fields and Oriental traditions of Sicily. The strange historyof Frederick--an intellect of the eighteenth century born out ofdate, a cosmopolitan spirit in the age of Saint Louis, the crusaderwho conversed with Moslem sages on the threshold of the HolySepulchre, the Sultan of Lucera[1] who persecuted Paterini while herespected the superstition of Saracens, the anointed successor ofCharlemagne, who carried his harem with him to the battlefields ofLombardy, and turned Infidels loose upon the provinces of Christ'sVicar--would be inexplicable, were it not that Palermo still revealsin all her monuments the _genius loci_ which gave spiritual nurtureto this phoenix among kings. From his Mussulman teachers Frederickderived the philosophy to which he gave a vogue in Europe. From hisArabian predecessors he learnt the arts of internal administrationand finance, which he transmitted to the princes of Italy. Inimitation of Oriental courts, he adopted the practice of versecomposition, which gave the first impulse to Italian literature. HisGrand Vizier, Piero Delle Vigne, set an example to Petrarch, notonly by composing the first sonnet in Italian, but also by showingto what height a low-born secretary versed in art and law mightrise. In a word, the zeal for liberal studies, the luxury of life, the religious indifferentism, the bureaucratic system of stategovernment, which mark the age of the Italian Renaissance, foundtheir first manifestation within the bosom of the Middle Ages inFrederick. While our King John was signing Magna Charta, Frederickhad already lived long enough to comprehend, at least in outline, what is meant by the spirit of modern culture. [2] It is true thatthe so-called Renaissance followed slowly and by tortuous paths uponthe death of Frederick. The Church obtained a complete victory overhis family, and succeeded in extinguishing the civilisation ofSicily. Yet the fame of the Emperor who transmitted questions ofsceptical philosophy to Arab sages, who conversed familiarly withmen of letters, who loved splendour and understood the arts ofrefined living, survived both long and late in Italy. His power, hiswealth, his liberality of soul and lofty aspirations, formed thetheme of many a tale and poem. Dante places him in hell among theheresiarchs; and truly the splendour of his supposed infidelityfound for him a goodly following. Yet Dante dated the rise ofItalian literature from the blooming period of the Sicilian court. Frederick's unorthodoxy proved no drawback to his intellectualinfluence. More than any other man of mediæval times he contributed, if only as the memory of a mighty name, to the progress of civilisedhumanity. 

 [1] Charles of Anjou gave this nickname to Manfred, who carried on the Siculo-Norman tradition. Frederick, it may here be mentioned, had transferred his Saracen subjects of the vale of Mazara to Lucera in the Capitanate. He employed them as trusty troops in his warfare with the Popes and preaching friars. Nothing shows the confusion of the century in matters ecclesiastical and religious more curiously than that Frederick, who conducted a crusade and freed the Holy Sepulchre, should not only have tolerated the religion of Mussulmans, but also have armed them against the Head of the Church. What we are apt to regard as religious questions really belonged at that period to the sphere of politics. 

 [2] It is curious to note that in this year 1215, the date of Magna Charta, Frederick took the Cross at Aix-la-Chapelle. 

Let us take leave both of Frederick and of Palermo, that centre ofconverging influences which was his cradle, in the cathedral wherehe lies gathered to his fathers. This church, though its richsunbrowned yellow[1] reminds one of the tone of Spanish buildings, is like nothing one has seen elsewhere. Here even more than atMonreale the eye is struck with a fusion of styles. The westerntowers are grouped into something like the clustered sheafs of theCaen churches: the windows present Saracenic arches: the southernporch is covered with foliated incrustations of a late anddecorative Gothic style: the exterior of the apse combines Arabicinlaid patterns of black and yellow with the Greek honeysuckle: thewestern door adds Norman dog-tooth and chevron to the Saracenicbillet. Nowhere is any one tradition firmly followed. The wholewavers and yet is beautiful--like the immature eclecticism of theculture which Frederick himself endeavoured to establish in hissouthern kingdoms. Inside there is no such harmony of blendedvoices: all the strange tongues, which speak together on theoutside, making up a music in which the far North, and ancientByzance, and the delicate East sound each a note, are hushed. Thefrigid silence of the Palladian style reigns there--simple indeedand dignified, but lifeless as the century in which it flourished. 

 [1] Nearly all cities have their own distinctive colour. That of Venice is a pearly white suggestive of every hue in delicate abeyance, and that of Florence is a sober brown. Palermo displays a rich yellow ochre passing at the deepest into orange, and at the lightest into primrose. This is the tone of the soil, of sun-stained marble, and of the rough ashlar masonry of the chief buildings. Palermo has none of the glaring whiteness of Naples, nor yet of that particoloured gradation of tints which adds gaiety to the grandeur of Genoa. 

Yet there, in a side chapel near the western door, stand theporphyry sarcophagi which shrine the bones of the Hautevilles andtheir representatives. There sleeps King Roger--'Dux strenuus etprimus Rex Siciliæ'--with his daughter Constance in her purple chestbeside him. Henry VI. And Frederick II. And Constance of Aragoncomplete the group, which surpasses for interest all sepulchralmonuments--even the tombs of the Scaligers at Verona--except only, perhaps, the statues of the nave of Innspruck. Very sombre andstately are these porphyry resting-places of princes born in thepurple, assembled here from lands so distant--from the craggyheights of Hohenstauffen, from the green orchards of Cotentin, fromthe dry hills of Aragon. They sleep, and the centuries pass by. Rudehands break open the granite lids of their sepulchres, to findtresses of yellow hair and fragments of imperial mantles, embroidered with the hawks and stags the royal hunter loved. Thechurch in which they lie changes with the change of taste inarchitecture and the manners of successive ages. But the huge stonearks remain unmoved, guarding their freight of mouldering dustbeneath gloomy canopies of stone that temper the sunlight as itstreams from the chapel windows. 

_SYRACUSE AND GIRGENTI_

The traveller in Sicily is constantly reminded of classical historyand literature. While tossing, it may be, at anchor in the port ofTrapani, and wondering when the tedious Libeccio will release him, he must perforce remember that here Æneas instituted the games forAnchises. Here Mnestheus and Gyas and Sergestus and Cloanthus racedtheir galleys: on yonder little isle the Centaur struck; and thatwas the rock which received the dripping Menoetes:--

 Illum et labentem Teucri et risere natantem, Et salsos rident revomentem pectore fluctus. 

Or crossing a broken bridge at night in the lumbering diligence, guarded by infantry with set bayonets, and wondering on which sideof the ravine the brigands are in ambush, he suddenly calls to mindthat this torrent was the ancient Halycus, the border between Greeksand Carthaginians, established of old, and ratified by Timoleonafter the battle of the Crimisus. Among the bare grey hills ofSegeste his thoughts revert to that strange story told by Herodotusof Philippus, the young soldier of Crotona, whose beauty was sogreat, that when the Segesteans found him slain among their foes, they raised the corpse and burned it on a pyre of honour, and builta hero's temple over the urn that held his ashes. The first sight ofEtna makes us cry with Theocritus, [Greek: Aitna materema . .. Polydendreos Aitna]. The solemn heights of CastroGiovanni bring lines of Ovid to our lips:--

 Haud procul Hennæis lacus est a moenibu altæ Nomine Pergus aquæ. Non illo plura Caystros Carmina cygnorum labentibus audit in undis. Silva coronat aquas, cingens latus omne; suisque Frondibus ut velo Phoebeos summovet ignes. Frigora dant rami, Tyrios humus humida flores. Perpetnum ver est. 

We look indeed in vain for the leafy covert and the purple flowersthat tempted Proserpine. The place is barren now: two solitarycypress-trees mark the road which winds downwards from a desolatesulphur mine, and the lake is clearly the crater of an extinctvolcano. Yet the voices of old poets are not mute. 'The richVirgilian rustic measure' recalls a long-since buried past. Evenamong the wavelets of the Faro we remember Homer, scanning the shoreif haply somewhere yet may linger the wild fig-tree which savedUlysses from the whirlpool of Charybdis. At any rate we cannot butexclaim with Goethe, 'Now all these coasts, gulfs, and creeks, islands and peninsulas, rocks and sand-banks, wooded hills, softmeadows, fertile fields, neat gardens, hanging grapes, cloudymountains, constant cheerfulness of plains, cliffs and ridges, andthe surrounding sea, with such manifold variety are present in mymind; now is the "Odyssey" for the first time become to me a livingworld. '

But rich as the whole of Sicily may be in classical associations, two places, Syracuse and Girgenti, are pre-eminent for the power ofbringing the Greek past forcibly before us. Their interest is of twovery different kinds. Girgenti still displays the splendour oftemples placed upon a rocky cornice between sea and olive-groves. Syracuse has nothing to show but the scene of world-importantactions. Yet the great deeds recorded by Thucydides, the conflictbetween eastern and western Hellas which ended in the annihilationof the bright, brief, brilliant reality of Athenian empire, remainso clearly written on the hills and harbours and marshlands ofSyracuse that no place in the world is topographically morememorable. The artist, whether architect, or landscape-painter, orpoet, finds full enjoyment at Girgenti. The historian must beexacting indeed in his requirements if he is not satisfied withSyracuse. 

What has become of Syracuse, 'the greatest of Greek cities and thefairest of all cities' even in the days of Cicero? Scarcely onestone stands upon another of all those temples and houses. The fivetowns which were included by the walls have now shrunk to the littleisland which the first settlers named Ortygia, where the sacredfountain of Arethusa seemed to their home-loving hearts to havefollowed them from Hellas. [1] Nothing survives but a few columns ofAthene's temple built into a Christian church, with here and therethe marble masonry of a bath or the Roman stonework of anamphitheatre. There are not even any mounds or deep deposits ofrubble mixed with pottery to show here once a town had been. [2]_Etiam periere ruinæ. _ The vast city, devastated for the last timeby the Saracens in 878 A. D. , has been reduced to dust and swept bythe scirocco into the sea. This is the explanation of its utterruin. The stone of Syracuse is friable and easily disintegrated. Thepetulant moist wind of the south-east corrodes its surface; and whenit falls, it crumbles to powder. Here, then, the elements have hadtheir will unchecked by such sculptured granite as in Egypt resiststhe mounded sand of the desert, or by such marble colonnades as inAthens have calmly borne the insults of successive sieges. What washewn out of the solid rock--the semicircle of the theatre, thestreet of the tombs with its deeply dented chariot-ruts, thegigantic quarries from which the material of the metropolis wasscooped, the catacombs which burrow for miles underground--aloneprove how mighty must have been the Syracuse of Dionysius. Truly'the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and dealswith the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. 'Standing on the beach of the Great Harbour or the Bay of Thapsus, wemay repeat almost word by word Antipater's solemn lament overCorinth:--

 Where is thy splendour now, thy crown of towers, Thy beauty visible to all men's eyes, The gold and silver of thy treasuries, Thy temples of blest gods, thy woven bowers Where long-stoled ladies walked in tranquil hours, Thy multitudes like stars that crowd the skies? All, all are gone. Thy desolation lies Bare to the night. The elemental powers Resume their empire: on this lonely shore Thy deathless Nereids, daughters of the sea, Wailing 'mid broken stones unceasingly, Like halcyons when the restless south winds roar, Sing the sad story of thy woes of yore: These plunging waves are all that's left to thee. 

Time, however, though he devours his children, cannot utterlydestroy either the written record of illustrious deeds or thetheatre of their enactment. Therefore, with Thucydides in hand, wemay still follow the events of that Syracusan siege which decidedthe destinies of Greece, and by the fall of Athens, raised Sparta, Macedonia, and finally Rome to the hegemony of the civilised world. 

 [1] The fountain of Arethusa, recently rescued from the washerwomen of Syracuse, is shut off from the Great Harbour by a wall and planted with papyrus. Taste has not been displayed in the bear-pit architecture of its circular enclosure. 

 [2] This is not strictly true of Achradina, where some _débris_ may still be found worth excavating. 

There are few students of Thucydides and Grote who would not besurprised by the small scale of the cliffs, and the gentle inclineof Epipolæ--the rising ground above the town of Syracuse, upon theslope of which the principal operations of the Athenian siege tookplace. [1] Maps, and to some extent also the language of Thucydides, who talks of the [Greek: prosbaseis] or practicable approaches toEpipolæ, and the [Greek: krêmnoi], or precipices by which it wasseparated from the plain, would lead one to suppose that the wholeregion was on each hand rocky and abrupt. In reality it is extremelydifficult to distinguish the rising ground of Epipolæ upon thesouthern side from the plain, so very gradual is the line of ascentand so comparatively even is the rocky surface of the hill. Thucydides, in narrating the night attack of Demosthenes upon thelines of Gylippus (book vii. 43-45), lays stress upon the necessityof approaching Epipolæ from the western side by Euryâlus, and againasserts that during the hurried retreat of the Athenians greatnumbers died by leaping from the cliffs, while still more had tothrow away their armour. At this time the Athenian army was encampedupon the shore of the Great Harbour, and held trenches and a wallthat stretched from that side at least halfway across Epipolæ. Itseems therefore strange that, unless their movements were impeded bycounterworks and lines of walls, of which we have no information, the troops of Demosthenes should not, at least in their retreat, have been able to pour down over the gentle descent of Epipolætoward the Anapus, instead of returning to Euryâlus. Anyhow, we canscarcely discern cliffs of more than ten feet upon the southernslope of Epipolæ, nor can we understand why the Athenians shouldhave been forced to take these in their line of retreat. There musthave been some artificial defences of which we read nothing, and ofwhich no traces now remain, but which were sufficient to preventthem from choosing their ground. Slight difficulties of this kindraise the question whether the wonderful clearness of Thucydides indetail was really the result of personal observation, or whether hisgraphic style enabled him to give the appearance of scrupulousaccuracy. I incline to think that the author of the sixth andseventh books of the History must have visited Syracuse, and that ifwe could see his own map of Epipolæ, we should better be able tounderstand the difficulties of the backward night march ofDemosthenes, by discovering that there was some imperative necessityfor not descending, as seems natural, upon the open slope of thehill to the south. The position of Euryâlus at the extreme pointcalled Mongibellisi is clear enough. Here the ground, which has beencontinually rising from the plateau of Achradina (the northernsuburb of Syracuse), comes to an abrupt finish. Between Mongibellisiand the Belvedere hill beyond there is a deep depression, and theslope to Euryâlus either from the south or north is gradual. It wasa gross piece of neglect on the part of Nikias not to have fortifiedthis spot on his first investment of Epipolæ, instead of choosingLabdalum, which, wherever we may place it, must have been lower downthe hill to the east. For Euryâlus is the key to Epipolæ. It washere that Nikias himself ascended in the first instance, and thatafterwards he permitted Gylippus to enter and raise the siege, andlastly that Demosthenes, by overpowering the insufficient Syracusanguard, got at night within the lines of the Spartan general. Thusthe three most important movements of the siege were made uponEuryâlus. Dionysius, when he enclosed Epipolæ with walls, recognisedthe value of the point, and fortified it with the castle whichremains, and to which, as Colonel Leake believes, Archimedes, at theorder of Hiero II. , made subsequent additions. This castle is one ofthe most interesting Greek ruins extant. A little repair would makeit even now a substantial place of defence, according to Greektactics. Its deep foss is cut in the solid rock, and furnished withsubterranean magazines for the storage of provisions. The threepiles of solid masonry on which the drawbridge rested, still standin the centre of this ditch. The oblique grand entrance to the fossdescends by a flight of well-cut steps. The rock itself over whichthe fort was raised is honeycombed with excavated passages forinfantry and cavalry, of different width and height, so that onesort can be assigned to mounted horsemen and another to footsoldiers. The trap-doors which led from these galleries into thefortress are provided with rests for ladders that could be let downto help a sallying force or drawn up to impede an advancing enemy. The inner court for stabled horses and the stations for thecatapults are still in tolerable preservation. Thus the wholearrangement of the stronghold can be traced not dimly butdistinctly. Being placed on the left side of the chief gate ofEpipolæ, the occupants of the fort could issue to attack a foeadvancing toward that gate in the rear. At the same time thesubterranean galleries enabled them to pour out upon the other side, if the enemy had forced an entrance, while the minor passages andtrap-doors provided a retreat in case the garrison were overpoweredin one of their offensive operations. The view from Euryâlus isextensive. To the left rises Etna, snowy, solitary, broadly vast, above the plain of Catania, the curving shore, Thapsus, and the sea. Syracuse itself, a thin white line between the harbour and the opensea, a dazzling streak between two blues, terminates the slope ofEpipolæ, and on the right hand stretch the marshes of Anapus richwith vines and hoary with olives. 

 [1] Epipolæ is in shape a pretty regular isosceles triangle, of which the apex is Mongibellisi or Euryâlus, and the base Achradina or the northern quarter of the ancient city. Thucydides describes it as [Greek: chôrion apokrêmnou te kai hyper tês poleôs euthus keimenou . .. Exêrtêtai gar to allo chôrion kai mechri tês poleôs epiklines te esti kai epiphanes pan eisô' kai ônomasta hypo tôs Syrakosiôn dia to epipolês tou allou einai Epipolai] (vi. 96). 

By far the most interesting localities of Syracuse are the GreatHarbour and the stone quarries. When the sluggish policy and faintheart of Nikias had brought the Athenians to the verge of ruin, whenGylippus had entered the besieged city, and Plemmyrium had beenwrested from the invaders, and Demosthenes had failed in his attackupon Epipolæ, and the blockading trenches had been finallyevacuated, no hope remained for the armament of Athens except onlyin retreat by water. They occupied a palisaded encampment upon theshore of the harbour, between the mouth of the Anapus and the city;whence they attempted to force their way with their galleys to theopen sea. Hitherto the Athenians had been supreme upon their ownelement; but now the Syracusans adopted tactics suited to the narrowbasin in which the engagements had to take place. Building theirvessels with heavy beaks, they crushed the lighter craft of theAthenians, which had no room for flank movements and rapidevolutions. A victory was thus obtained by the Syracusan navy; theharbour was blockaded with chains by the order of Gylippus; theAthenians were driven back to their palisades upon the fever-hauntedshore. Their only chance seemed to depend upon a renewal of thesea-fight in the harbour. The supreme moment arrived. What remainedof the Athenian fleet, in numbers still superior to that of theirenemies, steered straight for the mouth of the harbour. TheSyracusans advanced from the naval stations of Ortygia to meet them. The shore was thronged with spectators, Syracusans tremulous withthe expectation of a decisive success, Athenians on the tenter-hooksof hope and dread. In a short time the harbour became a confusedmass of clashing triremes; the water beaten into bloody surf bybanks of oars; the air filled with shouts from the combatants andexclamations from the lookers-on: [Greek: olophurmos, boê, nikôntes, kratoumenoi, alla hosa en megalô kindunô mega stratopedon polyeidêanagkaizoito phthengesthai. ] Then after a struggle, in whichdesperation gave energy to the Athenians, and ambitious hopeinspired their foes with more than wonted vigour, the fleet of theAthenians was finally overwhelmed. The whole scene can be reproducedwith wonderful distinctness; for the low shores of Plemmyrium, thecity of Ortygia, the marsh of Lysimeleia, the hills above theAnapus, and the distant dome of Etna, are the same as they were uponthat memorable day. Nothing has disappeared except the temple ofZeus Olympius and the buildings of Temenitis. 

What followed upon the night of that defeat is less easily realised. Thucydides, however, by one touch reveals the depth of despair towhich the Athenians had sunk. They neglected to rescue the bodies oftheir dead from the Great Harbour, or to ask for a truce, accordingto hallowed Greek usage, in order that they might perform thefuneral rites. To such an extent was the army demoralised. Meanwhilewithin the city the Syracusans kept high festival, honouring theirpatron Herakles, upon whose day it happened that the battle had beenfought. Nikias neglected this opportunity of breaking up his campand retiring unmolested into the interior of the island. When afterthe delay of two nights and a day he finally began to move, theSyracusans had blockaded the roads. How his own division capitulatedby the blood-stained banks of the Asinarus after a six days' marchof appalling misery, and how that of Demosthenes surrendered in theolive-field of Polyzelus, is too well known. 

One of the favourite excursions from modern Syracuse takes thetraveller in a boat over the sandy bar of the Anapus, beneath theold bridge which joined the Helorine road to the city, and up theriver to its junction with the Cyane. This is the ground traversedby the army first in their attempted flight and then in their returnas captives to Syracuse. Few, perhaps, who visit the spot, think asmuch of that last act in a world-historical tragedy, as of thepicturesque compositions made by arundo donax, castor-oil plant, yellow flags, and papyrus, on the river-banks and promontories. Likeminiature palm-groves these water-weeds stand green and goldenagainst the bright blue sky, feathering above the boat which slowlypushes its way through clinging reeds. The huge red oxen of Sicilyin the marsh on either hand toss their spreading horns and canteroff knee-deep in ooze. Then comes the fountain of Cyane, a broadround well of water, thirty feet in depth, but quite clear, so thatyou can see the pebbles at the bottom and fishes swimming to and froamong the weeds. Papyrus plants edge the pool; thick and tufted, they are exactly such as one sees carved or painted upon Egyptianarchitecture of the Ptolemaic period. 

With Thucydides still in hand, before quitting Syracuse we mustfollow the Athenian captives to their prison-grave. The Latomia de'Cappuccini is a place which it is impossible to describe in words, and of which no photographs give any notion. Sunk to the depth of ahundred feet below the level of the soil, with sides perpendicularand in many places as smooth as though the chisel had just passedover them, these vast excavations produce the impression of somehuge subterranean gallery, widening here and there into spacioushalls, the whole of which has been unroofed and opened to the air ofheaven. It is a solemn and romantic labyrinth, where no wind blowsrudely, and where orange-trees shoot upward luxuriantly to meet thelight. The wild fig bursts from the living rock, mixed withlentisk-shrubs and pendent caper-plants. Old olives split the massesof fallen cliff with their tough, snakelike, slowly corded andcompacted roots. Thin flames of pomegranate-flowers gleam amidfoliage of lustrous green; and lemons drop unheeded from femininelyfragile branches. There too the ivy hangs in long festoons, wavinglike tapestry to the breath of stealthy breezes; while under foot isa tangle of acanthus, thick curling leaves of glossiest green, surmounted by spikes of dull lilac blossoms. Wedges and columns andsharp teeth of the native rock rear themselves here and there in themidst of the open spaces to the sky, worn fantastically into notchesand saws by the action of scirocco. A light yellow calcined by thesun to white is the prevailing colour of the quarries. But in shadyplaces the limestone takes a curious pink tone of great beauty, likethe interior of some sea-shells. The reflected lights too, andhalf-shadows in their scooped-out chambers, make a wonderful naturalchiaroscuro. The whole scene is now more picturesque in a sublimeand grandiose style than forbidding. There is even one spot plantedwith magenta-coloured mesembrianthemums of dazzling brightness; andthe air is loaded with the drowsy perfume of lemon-blossoms. Yetthis is the scene of a great agony. This garden was once theGethsemane of a nation, where 9000 free men of the proudest city ofGreece were brought by an unexampled stroke of fortune to slavery, shame, and a miserable end. Here they dwindled away, worn out bywounds, disease, thirst, hunger, heat by day and cold by night, heart-sickness, and the insufferable stench of putrefying corpses. The pupils of Socrates, the admirers of Euripides, the orators ofthe Pnyx, the athletes of the Lyceum, lovers and comrades andphilosophers, died here like dogs; and the dames of Syracuse stooddoubtless on those parapets above, and looked upon them like wildbeasts. What the Gorgo of Theocritus might have said to her friendPraxinoe on the occasion would be the subject for an idyll _à la_Browning! How often, pining in those great glaring pits, which werenot then curtained with ivy or canopied by olive-trees, must theAthenians have thought with vain remorse of their own RhamnusianNemesis, the goddess who held scales adverse to the hopes of men, and bore the legend 'Be not lifted up'! How often must they havewatched the dawn walk forth fire-footed upon the edge of those barecrags, or the stars slide from east to west across the narrow spaceof sky! How they must have envied the unfettered clouds sailing inliquid ether, or traced the far flight of hawk and swallow, sighing, 'Oh that I too had the wings of a bird!' The weary eyes turnedupwards found no change or respite, save what the frost of nightbrought to the fire of day, and the burning sun to the pitiless coldconstellations. 

A great painter, combining Doré's power over space and distance withthe distinctness of Flaxman's design and the colouring of AlmaTadema, might possibly realise this agony of the Athenian captivesin the stone quarries. The time of day chosen for the picture shouldbe full noon, with its glare of light and sharply defined verticalshadows. The crannies in the straight sides of the quarry shouldhere and there be tufted with a few dusty creepers and wildfig-trees. On the edge of the sky-line stand parties of Syracusancitizens with their wives and children, shaded by umbrellas, richlydressed, laughing and triumphing over the misery beneath. In thefull foreground there are placed two figures. A young Athenian hasjust died of fever. His body lies stretched along the ground, thehead resting on a stone, and the face turned to the sky. Beside himkneels an older warrior, sunburned and dry with thirst, but full asyet of vigour. He stares with wide despair-smitten eyes straightout, as though he had lately been stretched upon the corpse, but hadrisen at the sound of movement, or some supposed word of friendsclose by. His bread lies untasted near him, and the half-pint ofwater--his day's portion--has been given to bathe the forehead ofhis dying friend. They have stood together through the festival ofleave-taking from Peiræus, through the battles of Epipolæ, throughthe retreat and the slaughter at the passage of the Asinarus. Butnow it has come to this, and death has found the younger. Perhapsthe friend beside him remembers some cool wrestling-ground infar-off Athens, or some procession up the steps of the Acropolis, where first they met. Anyhow his fixed gaze now shows that he haspassed in thought at least beyond the hell around him. Not farbehind should be ranged groups of haggard men, with tattered clothesand dulled or tigerish eyes, some dignified, some broken down bygrief; while here and there newly fallen corpses, and in one hideouscorner a great heap of abandoned dead, should point the ghastlywords of Thucydides: [Greek: tôn nekrôn homou ep angêloiszunnenêmenôn. ]

Every landscape has some moment of its own at which it should beseen for the first time. Mediæval cities, with their narrow streetsand solemn spires, demand the twilight of a summer night. Mediterranean islands show their best in the haze of afternoon, whensea and sky and headland are bathed in aërial blue, and themountains seem to be made of transparent amethyst. The first sightof the Alps should be taken at sunset from some point of vantage, like the terrace at Berne, or the castle walls of Salzburg. If thesefortunate moments be secured, all after knowledge of locality anddetail serves to fortify and deepen the impression of picturesqueharmony. The mind has then conceived a leading thought, which givesideal unity to scattered memories and invests the crude reality withan æsthetic beauty. The lucky moment for the landscape of Girgentiis half an hour past sunset in a golden afterglow. Landing at theport named after Empedocles, having caught from the sea someglimpses of temple-fronts emergent on green hill-slopes amongalmond-trees, with Pindar's epithet of 'splendour-loving' in mymind, I rode on such an evening up the path which leads across theDrago to Girgenti. The way winds through deep-sunk lanes of richamber sandstone, hedged with cactus and dwarf-palm, and set with oldgnarled olive-trees. As the sunlight faded, Venus shone forth in aluminous sky, and the deep yellows and purples overhead seemed tomingle with the heavy scent of orange-flowers from scarcely visiblegroves by the roadside. Saffron in the west and violet in the eastmet midway, composing a translucent atmosphere of mellow radiance, like some liquid gem--_dolce color d' oriental berillo_. Girgenti, far off and far up, gazing seaward, and rearing her topaz-colouredbastions into that gorgeous twilight, shone like the aërial visionof cities seen in dreams or imaged in the clouds. Hard and sharpagainst the sallow line of sunset, leaned grotesque shapes ofcactuses like hydras, and delicate silhouettes of young olive-treeslike sylphs: the river ran silver in the hollow, and themountain-side on which the town is piled was solid gold. Then camethe dirty dull interior of Girgenti, misnamed the magnificent. Butno disenchantment could destroy the memory of that vision, andPindar's [Greek: philaglaos Akragas] remains in my mind areality. [1]

 [1] Lest I should seem to have overstated the splendour of this sunset view, I must remark that the bare dry landscape of the south is peculiarly fortunate in such effects. The local tint of the Girgenti rock is yellow. The vegetation on the hillside is sparse. There is nothing to prevent the colours of the sky being reflected upon the vast amber-tinted surface, which then glows with indescribable glory. 

The temples of Girgenti are at the distance of two miles from themodern town. Placed upon the edge of an irregular plateau whichbreaks off abruptly into cliffs of moderate height below them, theystand in a magnificent row between the sea and plain on one side, and the city and the hills upon the other. Their colour is that ofdusky honey or dun amber; for they are not built of marble, but ofsandstone, which at some not very distant geological period musthave been a sea-bed. Oyster and scallop shells are embedded in theroughly hewn masonry, while here and there patches of a red deposit, apparently of broken coralline, make the surface crimson. Thevegetation against which the ruined colonnades are relieved consistsalmost wholly of almond and olive trees, the bright green foliage ofthe one mingling with the greys of the other, and both enhancing thewarm tints of the stone. This contrast of colours is very agreeableto the eye; yet when the temples were perfect it did not exist. There is no doubt that their surface was coated with a fine stucco, wrought to smoothness, toned like marble, and painted over with theblue and red and green decorations proper to the Doric style. Thisfact is a practical answer to those æsthetic critics who would fainestablish that the Greeks practised no deception in their arts. Thewhole effect of the colonnades of Selinus and Girgenti must havebeen an illusion, and their surface must have needed no lessconstant reparation than the exterior of a Gothic cathedral. Thesham jewellery frequently found in Greek tombs, and the curiousmixture of marble with sandstone in the sculptures from Selinus, areother instances that Greeks no less than modern artists condescendedto trickery for the sake of effect. In the series of the metopesfrom Selinus now preserved in the museum at Palermo, the flesh ofthe female persons is represented by white marble, while that of themen, together with the dresses and other accessories, is wrought ofcommon stone. Yet the basreliefs in which this peculiarity occursbelong to the best period of Greek sculpture, and the groups are notunworthy for spirit and design to be placed by the side of themetopes of the Parthenon. Most beautiful, for example, is thecontrast between the young unarmed Hercules and the Amazon heoverpowers. His naked man's foot grasps with the muscular energy ofan athlete her soft and helpless woman's foot, the roughness of thesandstone and the smoothness of the marble really heightening theeffect of difference. 

Though ranged in a row along the same cornice, the temples ofGirgenti, originally at least six in number, were not so disposedthat any of their architectural lines should be exactly parallel. The Greeks disliked formality; the carefully calculated_asymmetreia_ in the disposition of their groups of buildingssecured variety of effect as well as a broken surface for thedisplay of light and shadow. This is very noticeable on theAcropolis of Athens, where, however regular may be the severalbuildings, all are placed at different angles to each other and thehill. Only two of the Girgenti temples survive in any degree ofperfection--the so-called Concordia and the Juno Lacinia. The restare but mere heaps of mighty ruins, with here and there a brokencolumn, and in one place an angle of a pediment raised upon a groupof pillars. The foundations of masonry which supported them and thedrums of their gigantic columns are tufted with wild palm, aloe, asphodel, and crimson snapdragon. Yellow blossoming sage, and mint, and lavender, and mignonette, sprout in the crevices where snakesand lizards harbour. The grass around is gemmed with blue pimperneland convolvulus. Gladiolus springs amid the young corn-bladesbeneath the almond-trees; while a beautiful little iris makes themost unpromising dry places brilliant with its delicate greys andblues. In cooler and damper hollows, around the boles of old olivesand under ruined arches, flourishes the tender acanthus, and theroad-sides are gaudy with a yellow daisy flower, which may perchancebe the [Greek: elichrysos] of Theocritus. Thus the whole scene is awilderness of brightness, less radiant but more touching than whenprocessions of men and maidens bearing urns and laurel-branches, crowned with ivy or with myrtle, paced along those sandstone roads, chanting pæans and prosodial hymns, toward the glistening porchesand hypæthral cells. 

The only temple about the name of which there can be no doubt isthat of Zeus Olympius. A prostrate giant who once with nineteen ofhis fellows helped to support the roof of this enormous fane, andwho now lies in pieces among the asphodels, remains to prove thatthis was the building begun by the Agrigentines after the defeat ofthe Phoenicians at the Himera, when slaves were many and spoil wasabundant, and Hellas both in Sicily and on the mainland felt a morethan usual thrill of gratitude to their ancestral deity. Thegreatest architectural works of the island, the temples of Segesteand Selinus, as well as those of Girgenti, were begun between thisperiod and the Carthaginian invasion of 409 B. C. The victory of theHellenes over the barbarians in 480 B. C. , symbolised in the victoryof Zeus over the enslaved Titans of this temple, gave a vast impulseto their activity and wealth. After the disastrous incursion of thesame foes seventy years later, the western Greek towns of the islandreceived a check from which they never recovered. Many of theirnoblest buildings remained unfinished. The question which rises tothe lips of all who contemplate the ruins of this gigantic templeand its compeer dedicated to Herakles is this: Who wrought thedestruction of works so solid and enduring? For what purpose ofspite or interest were those vast columns--in the very flutings ofwhich a man can stand with ease--felled like forest pines? One seesthe mighty pillars lying as they sank, like swathes beneath themower's scythe. Their basements are still in line. The drums whichcomposed them have fallen asunder, but maintain their originalrelation to each other on the ground. Was it earthquake or the handof man that brought them low? Poggio Bracciolini tells us that inthe fifteenth century they were burning the marble buildings of theRoman Campagna for lime. We know that the Senator Brancaleone madehavoc among the classic monuments occupied as fortresses byFrangipani and Savelli and Orsini. We understand how the Farnesishould have quarried the Coliseum for their palace. But here, at thedistance of three miles from Girgenti, in a comparative desert, whatarmy, or what band of ruffians, or what palace-builders could havefound it worth their while to devastate mere mountains of sculpturedsandstone? The Romans invariably respected Greek temples. The earlyChristians used them for churches:--and this accounts for thecomparative perfection of the Concordia. It was in the age of theRenaissance that the ruin of Girgenti's noblest monuments occurred. The temple of Zeus Olympius was shattered in the fifteenth century, and in the next its fragments were used to build a breakwater. Thedemolition of such substantial edifices is as great a wonder astheir construction. We marvel at the energy which must have beenemployed on their overthrow, no less than at the art which raisedsuch blocks of stone and placed them in position. 

While so much remains both at Syracuse and at Girgenti to recall thepast, we are forced here, as at Athens, to feel how very little wereally know about Greek life. We cannot bring it up before our fancywith any clearness, but rather in a sort of hazy dream, from whichsome luminous points emerge. The entrance of an Olympian victorthrough the breach in the city walls of Girgenti, the procession ofcitizens conducting old Timoleon in his chariot to the theatre, theconferences of the younger Dionysius with Plato in his guardedpalace-fort, the stately figure of Empedocles presiding overincantations in the marshes of Selinus, the austerity of Dion andhis mystic dream, the first appearance of stubborn Gylippus withlong Lacedæmonian hair in the theatre of Syracuse, --such picturesquepieces of history we may fairly well recapture. But what were thedaily occupations of the Simætha of Theocritus? What was the statedress of the splendid Queen Philistis, whose name may yet be readupon her seat, and whose face adorns the coins of Syracuse? How didthe great altar of Zeus look, when the oxen were being slaughteredthere by hundreds, in a place which must have been shambles andmeat-market and temple all in one? What scene of architecturalsplendour met the eyes of the swimmers in the Piscina of Girgenti?How were the long hours of so many days of leisure occupied by theGreeks, who had each three pillows to his head in 'splendour-lovingAcragas'? Of what sort was the hospitality of Gellias? Questionslike these rise up to tantalise us with the hopelessness of evertruly recovering the life of a lost race. After all the labour ofantiquary and the poet, nothing remains to be uttered but suchmoralisings as Sir Thomas Browne poured forth over the urnsdiscovered at Old Walsingham: 'What time the persons of theseossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept withprinces and counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who werethe proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes madeup, were a question above antiquarism; not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits except we consult the provincialguardians, or tutelary observators. ' Death reigns over the peoplesof the past, and we must fain be satisfied to cry with Raleigh: 'Oeloquent, just, and mighty death! whom none could advise, thou hastpersuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all theworld hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world anddespised: thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of men, and covered it all overwith these two narrow words, _hic jacet_. ' Even so. Yet while thecadence of this august rhetoric is yet in our ears, another voice isheard as of the angel seated by a void and open tomb, 'Why seek yethe living among the dead?' The spirit of Hellas is indestructible, however much the material existence of the Greeks be lost beyondrecovery; for the life of humanity is not many but one, notparcelled into separate moments but continuous. 

_ATHENS_

Athens, by virtue of scenery and situation, was predestined to bethe motherland of the free reason of mankind, long before theAthenians had won by their great deeds the right to name their citythe ornament and the eye of Hellas. Nothing is more obvious to onewho has seen many lands and tried to distinguish their essentialcharacters, than the fact that no one country exactly resemblesanother, but that, however similar in climate and locality, eachpresents a peculiar and well-marked property belonging to itselfalone. The specific quality of Athenian landscape is light--notrichness or sublimity or romantic loveliness or grandeur of mountainoutline, but luminous beauty, serene exposure to the airs of heaven. The harmony and balance of the scenery, so varied in its details andyet so comprehensible, are sympathetic to the temperance of Greekmorality, the moderation of Greek art. The radiance with which it isilluminated has all the clearness and distinction of the Atticintellect. From whatever point the plain of Athens with itssemicircle of greater and lesser hills may be surveyed, it alwayspresents a picture of dignified and lustrous beauty. The Acropolisis the centre of this landscape, splendid as a work of art with itscrown of temples; and the sea, surmounted by the long low hills ofthe Morea, is the boundary to which the eye is irresistibly led. Mountains and islands and plain alike are made of limestone, hardening here and there into marble, broken into delicate andvaried forms, and sprinkled with a vegetation of low shrubs andbrushwood so sparse and slight that the naked rock in everydirection meets the light. This rock is grey and colourless: viewedin the twilight of a misty day, it shows the dull, tame uniformityof bone. Without the sun it is asleep and sorrowful. But by reasonof this very deadness, the limestone of Athenian landscape is alwaysready to take the colours of the air and sun. In noonday it smileswith silvery lustre, fold upon fold of the indented hills andislands melting from the brightness of the sea into the untemperedbrilliance of the sky. At dawn and sunset the same rocks arraythemselves with a celestial robe of rainbow-woven hues: islands, sea, and mountains, far and near, burn with saffron, violet, androse, with the tints of beryl and topaz, sapphire and almandine andamethyst, each in due order and at proper distances. The fableddolphin in its death could not have showed a more brilliantsuccession of splendours waning into splendours through the wholechord of prismatic colours. This sensitiveness of the Atticlimestone to every modification of the sky's light gives a peculiarspirituality to the landscape. The hills remain in form and outlineunchanged; but the beauty breathed upon them lives or dies with theemotions of the air from whence it emanates: the spirit of lightabides with them and quits them by alternations that seem to be thepulses of an ethereally communicated life. No country, therefore, could be better fitted for the home of a race gifted with exquisitesensibilities, in whom humanity should first attain the freedom ofself-consciousness in art and thought. [Greek: Aei dia lamprotatoubainontes habrôs aitheros]--ever delicately moving through mosttranslucent air--said Euripides of the Athenians: and truly thebright air of Attica was made to be breathed by men in whom thelight of culture should begin to shine. [Greek: Iostephanos] is anepithet of Aristophanes for his city; and if not crowned with otherviolets, Athens wears for her garland the air-empurpledhills--Hymettus, Lycabettus, Pentelicus, and Parnes. [1]Consequently, while still the Greeks of Homer's age were Achaians, while Argos was the titular seat of Hellenic empire, and the mythicdeeds of the heroes were being enacted in Thebes or Mycenæ, Athensdid but bide her time, waiting to manifest herself as the truegodchild of Pallas, who sprang perfect from the brain of Zeus, Pallas, who is the light of cloudless heaven emerging after storms. And Pallas, when she planted her chosen people in Attica, knew wellwhat she was doing. To the far-seeing eyes of the goddess, althoughthe first-fruits of song and science and philosophy might be reapedupon the shores of the Ægean and the islands, yet the days wereclearly descried when Athens should stretch forth her hand to holdthe lamp of all her founder loved for Europe. As the priest of Egypttold Solon: 'She chose the spot of earth in which you were born, because she saw that the happy temperament of the seasons in thatland would produce the wisest of men. Wherefore the goddess, who wasa lover both of war and wisdom, selected and first of all settledthat spot which was the most likely to produce men likest herself. 'This sentence from the 'Timæus' of Plato[2] reveals theconsciousness possessed by the Greeks of that intimate connectionwhich subsists between a country and the temper of its race. To usthe name Athenai--the fact that Athens by its title even in theprehistoric age was marked out as the appanage of her who was thepatroness of culture--seems a fortunate accident, an undesignedcoincidence of the most striking sort. To the Greeks, steeped inmythologic faith, accustomed to regard their lineage asautochthonous and their polity as the fabric of a god, nothingseemed more natural than that Pallas should have selected for herown exactly that portion of Hellas where the arts and sciences mightflourish best. Let the Boeotians grow fat and stagnant upon theirrich marshlands: let the Spartans form themselves into a race ofsoldiers in their mountain fortress: let Corinth reign, the queen ofcommerce, between her double seas: let the Arcadians in their oakwoods worship pastoral Pan: let the plains of Elis be themeeting-place of Hellenes at their sacred games: let Delphi boastthe seat of sooth oracular from Phoebus. Meanwhile the sunny butbarren hills of Attica, open to the magic of the sky, and beautifulby reason of their nakedness, must be the home of a people powerfulby might of intelligence rather than strength of limb, wealthy notso much by natural resources as by enterprise. Here, and here only, could stand the city sung by Milton:--

 Built nobly, pure the air, and light the soil, Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts And eloquence, native to famous wits Or hospitable, in her sweet recess, City or suburban, studious walks and shades. 

We who believe in no authentic Pallas, child of Zeus, may yet pauseawhile, when we contemplate Athens, to ponder whether those oldmythologic systems, which ascribed to godhead the foundation ofstates and the patronage of peoples, had not some glimpse of truthbeyond a mere blind guess. Is not, in fact, this Athenian land thepromised and predestined home of a peculiar people, in the samesense as that in which Palestine was the heritage by faith of atribe set apart by Jehovah for His own?

 [1] This interpretation of the epithet [Greek: iostephanos] is not, I think, merely fanciful. It seems to occur naturally to those who visit Athens with the language of Greek poets in their memory. I was glad to find, on reading a paper by the Dean of Westminster on the topography of Greece, that the same thought had struck him. Ovid, too, gives the adjective _purpureus_ to Hymettus. 

 [2] Jowett's translation, vol. Ii. P. 520. 

Unlike Rome, Athens leaves upon the memory one simple andineffaceable impression. There is here no conflict between Paganismand Christianity, no statues of Hellas baptised by popes into thecompany of saints, no blending of the classical and mediæval andRenaissance influences in a bewilderment of vast antiquity. Rome, true to her historical vocation, embraces in her ruins all ages, allcreeds, all nations. Her life has never stood still, but hassubmitted to many transformations, of which the traces are stillvisible. Athens, like the Greeks of history, is isolated in a sortof self-completion: she is a thing of the past, which still exists, because the spirit never dies, because beauty is a joy for ever. What is truly remarkable about the city is just this, that while themodern town is an insignificant mushroom of the present century, themonuments of Greek art in the best period--the masterpieces ofIctinus and Mnesicles, and the theatre on which the plays of thetragedians were produced--survive in comparative perfection, and areso far unencumbered with subsequent edifices that the actual Athensof Pericles absorbs our attention. There is nothing of anyconsequence intermediate between us and the fourth century B. C. Seenfrom a distance the Acropolis presents nearly the same appearance asit offered to Spartan guardsmen when they paced the ramparts ofDeceleia. Nature around is all unaltered. Except that more villages, enclosed with olive-groves and vineyards, were sprinkled over thosebare hills in classic days, no essential change in the landscape hastaken place, no transformation, for example, of equal magnitude withthat which converted the Campagna of Rome from a plain of cities toa poisonous solitude. All through the centuries which divide us fromthe age of Hadrian--centuries unfilled, as far as Athens isconcerned, with memorable deeds or national activity--the Acropolishas stood uncovered to the sun. The tones of the marble ofPentelicus have daily grown more golden; decay has here and thereinvaded frieze and capital; war too has done its work, shatteringthe Parthenon in 1687 by the explosion of a powder magazine, and thePropylæa in 1656 by a similar accident, and seaming the colonnadesthat still remain with cannon-balls in 1827. Yet in spite of timeand violence the Acropolis survives, a miracle of beauty: like aneverlasting flower, through all that lapse of years it has spreadits coronal of marbles to the air, unheeded. And now, more thanever, its temples seem to be incorporate with the rock they crown. The slabs of column and basement have grown together by longpressure or molecular adhesion into a coherent whole. Nor have weedsor creeping ivy invaded the glittering fragments that strew thesacred hill. The sun's kiss alone has caused a change from white toamber-hued or russet. Meanwhile, the exquisite adaptation of Greekbuilding to Greek landscape has been enhanced rather than impairedby that 'unimaginable touch of time, ' which has broken theregularity of outline, softened the chisel-work of the sculptor, andconfounded the painter's fretwork in one tint of glowing gold. TheParthenon, the Erechtheum, and the Propylæa have become one with thehill on which they cluster, as needful to the scenery around them asthe everlasting mountains, as sympathetic as the rest of nature tothe successions of morning and evening, which waken them topassionate life by the magic touch of colour. 

Thus there is no intrusive element in Athens to distract the mindfrom memories of its most glorious past. Walk into the theatre ofDionysus. The sculptures that support the stage--Sileni bendingbeneath the weight of cornices, and lines of graceful youths andmaidens--are still in their ancient station. [1] The pavement of theorchestra, once trodden by Athenian choruses, presents itstessellated marbles to our feet; and we may choose the seat ofpriest or archon or herald or thesmothetes, when we wish to summonbefore our mind's eye the pomp of the 'Agamemnon' or the dances ofthe 'Birds' and 'Clouds. ' Each seat still bears some carvenname--[Greek: IEREÔS TÔN MOUSÔN] or [Greek: IEREÔS ASKAÊPIOU]--andthat of the priest of Dionysus is beautifully wrought with Bacchicbasreliefs. One of them, inscribed [Greek: IEREÔS ANTINOOU], provesindeed that the extant chairs were placed here in the age ofHadrian, who completed the vast temple of Zeus Olympius, and filledits precincts with statues of his favourite, and named a new Athensafter his own name. [2] Yet we need not doubt that their positionround the orchestra is traditional, and that even in their form theydo not differ from those which the priests and officers of Athensused from the time of Æschylus downward. Probably a slave broughtcushion and footstool to complete the comfort of these statelyarmchairs. Nothing else is wanted to render them fit now for theiraugust occupants; and we may imagine the long-stoled greybearded menthroned in state, each with his wand and with appropriate fillets onhis head. As we rest here in the light of the full moon, whichsimplifies all outlines and heals with tender touch the wounds ofages, it is easy enough to dream ourselves into the belief that theghosts of dead actors may once more glide across the stage. Fiery-hearted Medea, statuesque Antigone, Prometheus silent beneaththe hammer-strokes of Force and Strength, Orestes hounded by hismother's Furies, Cassandra aghast before the palace of Mycenæ, pure-souled Hippolytus, ruthful Alcestis, the divine youth of Helen, and Clytemnestra in her queenliness, emerge like faint grey filmsagainst the bluish background of Hymettus. The night air seems vocalwith echoes of old Greek, more felt than heard, like voices waftedto our sense in sleep, the sound whereof we do not seize, though theburden lingers in our memory. 

 [1] It is true, however, that these sculptures belong to a comparatively late period, and that the theatre underwent some alterations in Roman days, so that the stage is now probably a few yards farther from the seats than in the time of Sophocles. 

 [2] It is not a little surprising to come upon this relic of the worship of the young Bithynian at Athens in the theatre still consecrated by the memories of Æschylus and Sophocles. 

In like manner, when moonlight, falling aslant upon the Propylæa, restores the marble masonry to its original whiteness, and theshattered heaps of ruined colonnades are veiled in shadow, and everyform seems larger, grander, and more perfect than by day, it is wellto sit upon the lowest steps, and looking upwards, to remember whatprocessions passed along this way bearing the sacred peplus toAthene. The Panathenaic pomp, which Pheidias and his pupils carvedupon the friezes of the Parthenon, took place once in five years, onone of the last days of July. [1] All the citizens joined in thehonour paid to their patroness. Old men bearing olive-branches, young men clothed in bronze, chapleted youths singing the praise ofPallas in prosodial hymns, maidens carrying holy vessels, aliensbending beneath the weight of urns, servants of the temple leadingoxen crowned with fillets, troops of horsemen reining in impetuoussteeds: all these pass before us in the frieze of Pheidias. But toour imagination must be left what he has refrained from sculpturing, the chariot formed like a ship, in which the most illustrious noblesof Athens sat, splendidly arrayed, beneath the crocus-colouredcurtain or peplus outspread upon a mast. Some concealed machinerycaused this car to move; but whether it passed through the Propylæa, and entered the Acropolis, admits of doubt. It is, however, certainthat the procession which ascended those steep slabs, and beforewhom the vast gates of the Propylæa swang open with the clangour ofresounding bronze, included not only the citizens of Athens andtheir attendant aliens, but also troops of cavalry and chariots; forthe mark of chariot-wheels can still be traced upon the rock. Theascent is so abrupt that this multitude moved but slowly. Splendidindeed, beyond any pomp of modern ceremonial, must have been thespectacle of the well-ordered procession, advancing through thosegiant colonnades to the sound of flutes and solemn chants--theshrill clear voices of boys in antiphonal chorus rising above theconfused murmurs of such a crowd, the chafing of horses' hoofs uponthe stone, and the lowing of bewildered oxen. 

 [1] My purpose being merely picturesque, I have ignored the grave antiquarian difficulties which beset the interpretation of this frieze. 

To realise by fancy the many-coloured radiance of the temples, andthe rich dresses of the votaries illuminated by that sharp light ofa Greek sun, which defines outline and shadow and gives value to thefaintest hue, would be impossible. All we can know for positiveabout the chromatic decoration of the Greeks is, that whitenessartificially subdued to the tone of ivory prevailed throughout thestonework of the buildings, while blue and red and green indistinct, yet interwoven patterns, added richness to the fretworkand the sculpture of pediment and frieze. The sacramental robes ofthe worshippers accorded doubtless with this harmony, wherein colourwas subordinate to light, and light was toned to softness. 

Musing thus upon the staircase of the Propylæa, we may say withtruth that all our modern art is but child's play to that of theGreeks. Very soul-subduing is the gloom of a cathedral like theMilanese Duomo, when the incense rises in blue clouds athwart thebands of sunlight falling from the dome, and the crying of choirsupborne upon the wings of organ music fills the whole vast spacewith a mystery of melody. Yet such ceremonial pomps as this are asdreams and the shapes of visions, when compared with the clearlydefined splendours of a Greek procession through marble peristylesin open air beneath the sun and sky. That spectacle combined theharmonies of perfect human forms in movement with the divine shapesof statues, the radiance of carefully selected vestments with huesinwrought upon pure marble. The rhythms and the melodies of theDoric mood were sympathetic to the proportions of the Doriccolonnades. The grove of pillars through which the pageant passedgrew from the living rock into shapes of beauty, fulfilling by theinbreathed spirit of man Nature's blind yearning after absolutecompletion. The sun himself--not thwarted by artificial gloom, ortricked with alien colours of stained glass--was made to minister inall his strength to a pomp, the pride of which was the display ofform in manifold magnificence. The ritual of the Greeks was theritual of a race at one with Nature, glorying in its affiliation tothe mighty mother of all life, and striving to add by human art thecoping-stone and final touch to her achievement. The ritual of theCatholic Church is the ritual of a race shut out from Nature, holding no communion with the powers of earth and air, but turningthe spirit inwards and aiming at the concentration of the whole soulupon an unseen God. The temple of the Greeks was the house of apresent deity; its cell his chamber; its statue his reality. TheChristian cathedral is the fane where God who is a spirit isworshipped; no statue fills the choir from wall to wall and liftsits forehead to the roof; but the vacant aisles, with theirconvergent arches soaring upwards to the dome, are made to suggestthe brooding of infinite and omnipresent Godhead. It was the objectof the Greek artist to preserve a just proportion between the god'sstatue and his house, in order that the worshipper might approachhim as a subject draws near to his monarch's throne. The Christianarchitect seeks to affect the emotions of the votary with a sense ofvastness filled with unseen power. Our cathedrals are symbols of theuniverse where God is everywhere pavilioned and invisible. The Greektemple was a practical, utilitarian dwelling-house, made beautifulenough to suit divinity. The modern church is an idea expressed instone, an aspiration of the spirit, shooting up from arch andpinnacle and spire into illimitable fields of air. 

It follows from these differences between the religious aims ofPagan and Christian architecture, that the former was far morefavourable to the plastic arts. No beautiful or simple incident ofhuman life was an inappropriate subject for the sculptor, inadorning the houses of gods who were themselves but human on ahigher level; and the ritual whereby the gods were honoured wasmerely an exhibition, in its strength and joyfulness, of mortalbeauty. Therefore the Panathenaic procession furnished Pheidias witha series of sculptural motives, which he had only to expressaccording to the principles of his art. The frieze, three feet andfour inches in height, raised forty feet above the pavement of theperistyle, ran for five hundred and twenty-four continuous feetround the outside wall of the cella of the Parthenon. The whole ofthis long line was wrought with carving of exquisite delicacy andsupreme vigour, in such low relief as its peculiar position, farabove the heads of the spectators, and only illuminated by lightreflected from below, required. Each figure, each attitude, and eachfold of drapery in its countless groups is a study; yet the wholewas a transcript from actual contemporary Athenian life. Truly inmatters of art we are but infants to the Greeks. 

The topographical certainty which invests the ruins of the Acropoliswith such peculiar interest, belongs in a less degree to the wholeof Athens. Although the most recent researches have thrown freshdoubt upon the exact site of the Pnyx, and though no traces of theagora remain, yet we may be sure that the Bema from which Periclessustained the courage of the Athenians during the Peloponnesian war, was placed upon the northern slope looking towards the Propylæa, while the wide irregular space between this hill, the Acropolis, theAreopagus, and the Theseum, must have formed the meeting-ground foramusement and discussion of the citizens at leisure. AboutAreopagus, with its tribunal hollowed in the native rock, and thedeep cleft beneath, where the shrine of the Eumenides was built, there is no question. The extreme insignificance of this littlemound may at first indeed excite incredulity and wonder; but a fewhours in Athens accustom the traveller to a smallness of scale whichat first sight seemed ridiculous. Colonus, for example, the Colonuswhich every student of Sophocles has pictured to himself in thesolitude of unshorn meadows, where groves of cypresses and olivesbent unpruned above wild tangles of narcissus flowers and crocuses, and where the nightingale sang undisturbed by city noise or labourof the husbandman, turns out to be a scarcely appreciable mound, gently swelling from the cultivated land of the Cephissus. TheCephissus even in a rainy season may be crossed dryshod by an activejumper; and the Ilissus, where it flows beneath the walls of theOlympieion, is now dedicated to washerwomen instead of water-nymphs. Nature herself remains, on the whole, unaltered. Most notable arestill the white poplars dedicated of old to Herakles, and thespreading planes which whisper to the limes in spring. In the midstof so arid and bare a landscape, these umbrageous trees aresingularly grateful to the eye and to the sense oppressed with heatand splendour. Nightingales have not ceased to crowd the gardens insuch numbers as to justify the tradition of their Attic origin, norhave the bees of Hymettus forgotten their labours: the honey ofAthens can still boast a quality superior to that of Hybla or anyother famous haunt of hives. 

Tradition points out one spot which commands a beautiful distantview of Athens and the hills, as the garden of the Academy. Theplace is not unworthy of Plato and his companions. Very old olivesgrow in abundance, to remind us of those sacred trees beneath whichthe boys of Aristophanes ran races; and reeds with which they mightcrown their foreheads are thickly scattered through the grass. Abeles interlace their murmuring branches overhead, and the planesare as leafy as that which invited Socrates and Phædrus on themorning when they talked of love. In such a place we comprehend howphilosophy went hand in hand at Athens with gymnastics, and why thepoplar and the plane were dedicated to athletic gods. For thewrestling-grounds were built in groves like these, and their coolperistyles, the meeting-places of young men and boys, supplied thesages not only with an eager audience, but also with the leisure andthe shade that learning loves. 

It was very characteristic of Greek life that speculative philosophyshould not have chosen 'to walk the studious cloister pale, ' butshould rather have sought out places where 'the busy hum of men' wasloudest, and where youthful voices echoed. The Athenian transactedno business, and pursued but few pleasures, under a private roof. Heconversed and bargained in the agora, debated on the open rocks ofthe Pnyx, and enjoyed discussion in the courts of the gymnasium. Itis also far from difficult to understand beneath this over-vaultedand grateful gloom of bee-laden branches, what part love played inthe haunts of runners and of wrestlers, why near the statue ofHermes stood that of Erôs, and wherefore Socrates surnamed hisphilosophy the Science of Love. [Greek: Philosophoumen aneumalakias] is the boast of Pericles in his description of theAthenian spirit. [Greek: Philosophia meta paiderastias] is Plato'sformula for the virtues of the most distinguished soul. These twomottoes, apparently so contradictory, found their point of meetingand their harmony in the gymnasium. 

The mere contemplation of these luxuriant groves, set in theluminous Attic landscape, and within sight of Athens, explains ahundred passages of poets and philosophers. Turn to the openingscenes of the 'Lysis' and the 'Charmides. ' The action of the latterdialogue is laid in the palæstra of Taureas. Socrates has justreturned from the camp at Potidæa, and after answering the questionsof his friends, has begun to satisfy his own curiosity:[1]--

When there had been enough of this, I, in my turn, began tomake inquiries about matters at home--about the present state ofphilosophy, and about the youth. I asked whether any of themwere remarkable for beauty or sense--or both. Critias, glancing atthe door, invited my attention to some youths who were comingin, and talking noisily to one another, followed by a crowd. 'Ofthe beauties, Socrates, ' he said, 'I fancy that you will soon be ableto form a judgment. For those who are just entering are theadvanced guard of the great beauty of the day--and he is likelynot to be far off himself. '

 'Who is he?' I said; 'and who is his father?'

 'Charmides, ' he replied, 'is his name; he is my cousin, and the son of my uncle Glaucon: I rather think that you know him, although he was not grown up at the time of your departure. '

 'Certainly I know him, ' I said; 'for he was remarkable even then when he was still a child, and now I should imagine that he must be almost a young man. '

 'You will see, ' he said, 'in a moment what progress he has made, and what he is like. ' He had scarcely said the word, when Charmides entered. 

 Now you know, my friend, that I cannot measure anything, and of the beautiful, I am simply such a measure as a white line is of chalk; for almost all young persons are alike beautiful in my eyes. But at that moment, when I saw him coming in, I must admit that I was quite astonished at his beauty and stature; all the world seemed to be enamoured of him; amazement and confusion reigned when he entered; and a troop of lovers followed him. That grown-up men like ourselves should have been affected in this way was not surprising, but I observed that there was the same feeling among the boys; all of them, down to the very least child, turned and looked at him as if he had been a statue. 

 Chaerephon called me and said: 'What do you think of him, Socrates? Has he not a beautiful face?'

 'That he has indeed, ' I said. 

 'But you would think nothing of his face, ' he replied, 'if you could see his naked form: he is absolutely perfect. '

 [1] I quote from Professor Jowett's translation. 

This Charmides is a true Greek of the perfect type. Not only is hethe most beautiful of Athenian youths; he is also temperate, modest, and subject to the laws of moral health. His very beauty is aharmony of well-developed faculties in which the mind and body areat one. How a young Greek managed to preserve this balance in themidst of the admiring crowds described by Socrates is a marvel. Modern conventions unfit our minds for realising the conditionsunder which he had to live. Yet it is indisputable that Plato hasstrained no point in the animated picture he presents of thepalæstra. Aristophanes and Xenophon bear him out in all the detailsof the scene. We have to imagine a totally different system ofsocial morality from ours, with virtues and vices, temptations andtriumphs, unknown to our young men. The next scene from the 'Lysis'introduces us to another wrestling-ground in the neighbourhood ofAthens. Here Socrates meets with Hippothales, who is a devoted loverbut a bad poet. Hippothales asks the philosopher's advice as to thebest method of pleasing the boy Lysis:--

 'Will you tell me by what words or actions I may become endeared to my love?'

 'That is not easy to determine, ' I said; 'but if you will bring your love to me, and will let me talk with him, I may perhaps be able to show you how to converse with him, instead of singing and reciting in the fashion of which you are accused. '

 'There will be no difficulty in bringing him, ' he replied; 'if you will only go into the house with Ctesippus, and sit down and talk, he will come of himself; for he is fond of listening, Socrates. And as this is the festival of the Hermæa, there is no separation of young men and boys, but they are all mixed up together. He will be sure to come. But if he does not come, Ctesippus, with whom he is familiar, and whose relation Menexenus is, his great friend, shall call him. '

 'That will be the way, ' I said. Thereupon I and Ctesippus went towards the Palæstra, and the rest followed. 

 Upon entering we found that the boys had just been sacrificing; and this part of the festival was nearly come to an end. They were all in white array, and games at dice were going on among them. Most of them were in the outer court amusing themselves; but some were in a corner of the Apodyterium playing at odd-and-even with a number of dice, which they took out of little wicker baskets. There was also a circle of lookers-on, one of whom was Lysis. He was standing among the other boys and youths, having a crown upon his head, like a fair vision, and not less worthy of praise for his goodness than for his beauty. We left them, and went over to the opposite side of the room, where we found a quiet place, and sat down; and then we began to talk. This attracted Lysis, who was constantly turning round to look at us--he was evidently wanting to come to us. For a time he hesitated and had not the courage to come alone; but first of all, his friend Menexenus came in out of the court in the interval of his play, and when he saw Ctesippus and myself, came and sat by us; and then Lysis, seeing him, followed and sat down with him; and the other boys joined. I should observe that Hippothales, when he saw the crowd, got behind them, where he thought that he would be out of sight of Lysis, lest he should anger him; and there he stood and listened. 

Enough has been quoted to show that beneath the porches of a Greekpalæstra, among the youths of Athens, who wrote no exercises in deadlanguages, and thought chiefly of attaining to perfect manhood bythe harmonious exercise of mind and body in temperate leisure, divine philosophy must indeed have been charming both to teachersand to learners:--

 Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute, And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets Where no crude surfeit reigns. 

There are no remains above ground of the buildings which made theAttic gymnasia splendid. Nor are there in Athens itself many statuesof the noble human beings who paced their porches and reclinedbeneath their shade. The galleries of Italy and the verses of thepoets can alone help us to repeople the Academy with its mixedmultitude of athletes and of sages. The language of Simætha, inTheocritus, brings the younger men before us: their cheeks areyellower than helichrysus with the down of youth, and their breastsshine brighter far than the moon, as though they had but lately leftthe 'fair toils of the wrestling-ground. ' Upon some of themonumental tablets exposed in the burying-ground of Cerameicus andin the Theseum may be seen portraits of Athenian citizens. A youngman holding a bird, with a boy beside him who carries a lamp orstrigil; a youth, naked, and scraping himself after the games; a boytaking leave with clasped hands of his mother, while a dog leaps upto fawn upon his knee; a wine-party; a soul in Charon's boat; ahusband parting from his wife: such are the simple subjects of thesemonuments; and under each is written [Greek: CHRÊSTECHAIRE]--Friend, farewell! The tombs of the women are equally plainin character: a nurse brings a baby to its mother, or a slave helpsher mistress at the toilette table. There is nothing to suggesteither the gloom of the grave or the hope of heaven in any of thesesculptures. Their symbolism, if it at all exist, is of the leastmysterious kind. Our attention is rather fixed upon the commonestaffairs of life than on the secrets of death. 

As we wander through the ruins of Athens, among temples which areall but perfect, and gardens which still keep their ancientgreenery, we must perforce reflect how all true knowledge of Greeklife has passed away. To picture to ourselves its details, so as tobecome quite familiar with the way in which an Athenian thought andfelt and occupied his time, is impossible. Such books as the'Charicles' of Becker or Wieland's 'Agathon' only increase our senseof hopelessness, by showing that neither a scholar's learning nor apoet's fancy can pierce the mists of antiquity. We know that it wasa strange and fascinating life, passed for the most part beneath thepublic eye, at leisure, without the society of free women, withoutwhat we call a home, in constant exercise of body and mind, in theduties of the law-courts and the assembly, in the toils of the campand the perils of the sea, in the amusements of the wrestling-groundand the theatre, in sportful study and strenuous play. We also knowthat the citizens of Athens, bred up under the peculiar conditionsof this artificial life, became impassioned lovers of their city;[1]that the greatest generals, statesmen, poets, orators, artists, historians, and philosophers that the world can boast, were producedin the short space of a century and a half by a city numbering about20, 000 burghers. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say with theauthor of 'Hereditary Genius, ' that the population of Athens, takenas a whole, was as superior to us as we are to the Australiansavages. Long and earnest, therefore, should be our hesitationbefore we condemn as pernicious or unprofitable the instincts andthe customs of such a race. 

 [1] [Greek: Tên tês poleôs dunamin kath' hêmeran ergô theômenous kai erastas gignomenous autês]. --Thuc. Ii. 43. 

The permanence of strongly marked features in the landscape ofGreece, and the small scale of the whole country, add a vivid charmto the scenery of its great events. In the harbour of Peiræus we canscarcely fail to picture to ourselves the pomp which went forth toSicily that solemn morning, when the whole host prayed together andmade libations at the signal of the herald's trumpet. The nation ofathletes and artists and philosophers were embarked on what seemedto some a holiday excursion, and for others bid fair to realiseunbounded dreams of ambition or avarice. Only a few wereheavy-hearted; but the heaviest of all was the general who hadvainly dissuaded his countrymen from the endeavour, and fruitlesslyrefused the command thrust upon him. That was 'the morning of amighty day, a day of crisis' for the destinies of Athens. Of allthat multitude, how few would come again; of the empire which theymade so manifest in its pride of men and arms, how little but ashadow would be left, when war and fever and the quarries ofSyracuse had done their fore-appointed work! Yet no commotion of theelements, no eclipse or authentic oracle from heaven, was interposedbetween the arrogance of Athens and sure-coming Nemesis. The sunshone, and the waves laughed, smitten by the oars of galleys racingto Ægina. Meanwhile Zeus from the watchtower of the world held upthe scales of fate, and the balance of Athens was wavering to itsfall. 

A few strokes of the oar carry us away from Peiræus to a scenefraught with far more thrilling memories. That little point of rockemergent from the water between Salamis and the mainland, bare, insignificant, and void of honour among islands to the natural eye, is Psyttaleia. A strange tightening at the heart assails us when weapproach the centre-point of the most memorable battlefield ofhistory. It was again 'the morning of a mighty day, a day of crisis'for the destinies, not of Athens alone, but of humanity, when thePersian fleet, after rowing all night up and down the channelbetween Salamis and the shore, beheld the face of Phoebus flashfrom behind Pentelicus and flood the Acropolis of Athens with fire. The Peiræius recalls a crisis in the world's drama whereof the greatactors were unconscious: fair winds and sunny waves bore lighthearts to Sicily. But Psyttaleia brings before us the heroism of ahandful of men, who knew that the supreme hour of ruin or of victoryfor their nation and themselves had come. Terrible therefore was theenergy with which they prayed and joined their pæan to thetrumpet-blast of dawn that blazed upon them from the Attic hills. And this time Zeus, when he heard their cry, saw the scale of Hellasmount to the stars. Let Æschylus tell the tale; for he was there. APersian is giving an account of the defeat of Salamis to Atossa:--

 The whole disaster, O my queen, began With some fell fiend or devil, --I know not whence: For thus it was; from the Athenian host A man of Hellas came to thy son, Xerxes, Saying that when black night shall fall in gloom, The Hellenes would no longer stay, but leap Each on the benches of his bark, and save Hither and thither by stolen flight their lives. He, when he heard thereof, discerning not The Hellene's craft, no, nor the spite of heaven, To all his captains gives this edict forth: When as the sun doth cease to light the world, And darkness holds the precincts of the sky, They should dispose the fleet in three close ranks, To guard the outlets and the water-ways; Others should compass Ajax' isle around: Seeing that if the Hellenes 'scaped grim death By finding for their ships some privy exit, It was ordained that all should lose their heads. So spake he, led by a mad mind astray, Nor knew what should be by the will of heaven. They, like well-ordered vassals, with assent Straightway prepared their food, and every sailor Fitted his oar-blade to the steady rowlock. But when the sunlight waned and night apace Descended, every man who swayed an oar Went to the boats with him who wielded armour. Then through the ship's length rank cheered rank in concert, Sailing as each was set in order due: And all night long the tyrants of the ships Kept the whole navy cruising to and fro. Night passed: yet never did the host of Hellene At any point attempt their stolen sally; Until at length, when day with her white steeds Forth shining, held the whole world under sway. First from the Hellenes with a loud clear cry Song-like, a shout made music, and therewith The echo of the rocky isle rang back Shrill triumph: but the vast barbarian host Shorn of their hope trembled; for not for flight The Hellenes hymned their solemn pæan then-- Nay, rather as for battle with stout heart. Then too the trumpet speaking fired our foes, And with a sudden rush of oars in time They smote the deep sea at that clarion cry; And in a moment you might see them all. The right wing in due order well arrayed First took the lead; then came the serried squadron Swelling against us, and from many voices One cry arose: Ho! sons of Hellenes, up! Now free your fatherland, now free your sons, Your wives, the fanes of your ancestral gods, Your fathers' tombs! Now fight you for your all. Yea, and from our side brake an answering hum Of Persian voices. Then, no more delay, Ship upon ship her beak of biting brass Struck stoutly. 'Twas a bark, I ween, of Hellas First charged, dashing from a Tyrrhenian galleon Her prow-gear; then ran hull on hull pell-mell. At first the torrent of the Persian navy Bore up: but when the multitude of ships Were straitly jammed, and none could help another, Huddling with brazen-mouthed beaks they clashed And brake their serried banks of oars together; Nor were the Hellenes slow or slack to muster And pound them in a circle. Then ships' hulks Floated keel upwards, and the sea was covered With shipwreck multitudinous and with slaughter. The shores and jutting reefs were full of corpses. In indiscriminate rout, with straining oar, The whole barbarian navy turned and fled. Our foes, like men 'mid tunnies, draughts of fishes, With splintered oars and spokes of shattered spars Kept striking, grinding, smashing us: shrill shrieks With groanings mingled held the hollow deep, Till night's dark eye set limit to the slaughter. But for our mass of miseries, could I speak Straight on for ten days, I should never sum it: For know this well, never in one day died Of men so many multitudes before. 

After a pause he resumes his narrative by describing Psyttaleia:--

 There lies an island before Salamis, Small, with scant harbour, which dance-loving Pan Is wont to tread, haunting the salt sea-beaches. There Xerxes placed his chiefs, that when the foes Chased from their ships should seek the sheltering isle, They might with ease destroy the host of Hellas, Saving their own friends from the briny straits. Ill had he learned what was to hap; for when God gave the glory to the Greeks at sea, That same day, having fenced their flesh with brass, They leaped from out their ships; and in a circle Enclosed the whole girth of the isle, that so None knew where he should turn; but many fell Crushed with sharp stones in conflict, and swift arrows Flew from the quivering bowstrings winged with murder. At last in one fierce onset with one shout They strike, hack, hew the wretches' limbs asunder, Till every man alive had fallen beneath them. Then Xerxes groaned, seeing the gulf unclose Of grief below him; for his throne was raised High in the sight of all by the sea-shore. Rending his robes, and shrieking a shrill shriek, He hurriedly gave orders to his host; Then headlong rushed in rout and heedless ruin. 

Atossa makes appropriate exclamations of despair and horror. Thenthe messenger proceeds:--

 The captains of the ships that were not shattered, Set speedy sail in flight as the winds blew. The remnant of the host died miserably, Some in Boeotia round the glimmering springs Tired out with thirst; some of us scant of breath Escaped, with bare life to the Phocian bounds, And land of Doris, and the Melian Gulf, Where with kind draughts Spercheius soaks the soil. Thence in our flight Achaia's ancient plain And Thessaly's stronghold received us worn For want of food. Most died in that fell place Of thirst and famine; for both deaths were there. Yet to Magnesia came we and the coast Of Macedonia, to the ford of Axius, And Bolbe's canebrakes and the Pangæan range, Edonian borders. Then in that grim night God sent unseasonable frost, and froze The stream of holy Strymon. He who erst Recked nought of gods, now prayed with supplication, Bowing before the powers of earth and sky. But when the hosts from lengthy orisons Surceased, it crossed the ice-incrusted ford. And he among us who set forth before The sun-god's rays were scattered, now was saved. For blazing with sharp beams the sun's bright circle Pierced the mid-stream, dissolving it with fire. There were they huddled. Happy then was he Who soonest cut the breath of life asunder. Such as survived and had the luck of living, Crossed Thrace with pain and peril manifold, 'Scaping mischance, a miserable remnant, Into the dear land of their homes. Wherefore Persia may wail, wanting in vain her darlings. This is the truth. Much I omit to tell Of woes by God wrought on the Persian race. 

Upon this triumphal note it were well, perhaps, to pause. Yet sincethe sojourner in Athens must needs depart by sea, let us advance alittle way farther beyond Salamis. The low shore of the isthmus soonappears; and there is the hill of Corinth and the site of the city, as desolate now as when Antipater of Sidon made the sea-waves uttera threnos over her ruins. 'The deathless Nereids, daughters ofOceanus, ' still lament by the shore, and the Isthmian pines are asgreen as when their boughs were plucked to bind a victor's forehead. Feathering the grey rock now as then, they bear witness to thewisdom and the moderation of the Greeks, who gave to the conquerorsin sacred games no wreath of gold, or title of nobility, or land, orjewels, but the honour of an illustrious name, the guerdon of amighty deed, and branches taken from the wild pine of Corinth, orthe olive of Olympia, or the bay that flourished like a weed atDelphi. What was indigenous and characteristic of his native soil, not rare and costly things from foreign lands, was precious to theGreek. This piety, after the lapse of centuries and the passing awayof mighty cities, still bears fruit. Oblivion cannot wholly effacethe memory of those great games while the fir-trees rustle to thesea-wind as of old. Down the gulf we pass, between mountain rangeand mountain. On one hand, two peaked Parnassus rears his cope ofsnow aloft over Delphi; on the other, Erymanthus and Hermes' home, Cyllene, bar the pastoral glades of Arcady. Greece is the land ofmountains, not of rivers or of plains. The titles of the hills ofHellas smite our ears with echoes of ancient music--Olympus andCithæron, Taygetus, Othrys, Helicon, and Ida. The headlands of themainland are mountains, and the islands are mountain summits of asubmerged continent. Austerely beautiful, not wild with an Italianluxuriance, nor mournful with Sicilian monotony of outline, nor yetagain overwhelming with the sublimity of Alps, they seem the properhome of a race which sought its ideal of beauty in distinction ofshape and not in multiplicity of detail, in light and not inrichness of colouring, in form and not in size. 

At length the open sea is reached. Past Zante and Cephalonia weglide 'under a roof of blue Ionian weather;' or, if the sky has beentroubled with storm, we watch the moulding of long glitteringcloud-lines, processions and pomps of silvery vapour, fretwork andfrieze of alabaster piled above the islands, pearled promontoriesand domes of rounded snow. Soon Santa Maura comes in sight:--

 Leucatæ nimbosa cacumina montis, Et formidatus nautis aperitur Apollo. 

Here Sappho leapt into the waves to cure love-longing, according tothe ancient story; and he who sees the white cliffs chafed withbreakers and burning with fierce light, as it was once my luck tosee them, may well with Childe Harold 'feel or deem he feels nocommon glow. ' All through the afternoon it had been raining, and thesea was running high beneath a petulant west wind. But just beforeevening, while yet there remained a hand's-breadth between the seaand the sinking sun, the clouds were rent and blown in masses aboutthe sky. Rain still fell fretfully in scuds and fleeces; but wherefor hours there had been nothing but a monotone of greyness, suddenly fire broke and radiance and storm-clouds in commotion. Then, as if built up by music, a rainbow rose and grew aboveLeucadia, planting one foot on Actium and the other on Ithaca, andspanning with a horseshoe arch that touched the zenith, the longline of roseate cliffs. The clouds upon which this bow was wovenwere steel-blue beneath and crimson above; and the bow itself wasbathed in fire--its violets and greens and yellows visibly ignitedby the liquid flame on which it rested. The sea beneath, stormilydancing, flashed back from all its crest the same red glow, shininglike a ridged lava-torrent in its first combustion. Then as the sunsank, the crags burned deeper with scarlet blushes as of blood, andwith passionate bloom as of pomegranate or oleander flowers. CouldTurner rise from the grave to paint a picture that should bear thename of 'Sappho's Leap, ' he might strive to paint it thus: and theworld would complain that he had dreamed the poetry of his picture. But who could _dream_ anything so wild and yet so definite? Only thepassion of orchestras, the fire-flight of the last movement of the Cminor symphony, can in the realms of art give utterance to thespirit of scenes like this. 

INDEX

Aar, the, i. 20

Abano, ii. 98

Abruzzi, the, ii. 34; iii. 230, 235, 236

Acciaiuoli, Agnolo, ii. 226

Acciauoli, the, iii. 98

Accolti, Bernardo, ii. 83

Accona, iii. 72, 74

Accoramboni, Camillo, ii. 91: Claudio, ii. 89: Flaminio, ii. 91, 99, 100, 103 foll. , 118 foll. , 126: Marcello, ii. 91 foll. , 99, 102, 103, 105: Mario, ii. 91: Ottavio, ii. 91: Scipione, ii. 91: Tarquinia, ii. 89, 92, 103: Vittoria, ii. 89-125

Achilles, iii. 286

Achradina, iii. 321, 324

Aci, iii. 287

Aci Castello, iii. 284

Acis and Galatea, iii. 284, 285

Acropolis, the, iii. 339, 344, 347

Actium, iii. 364

Adda, the, i. 50, 51, 62, 63, 174

Addison, i. 3

Adelaide, Queen of Lothair, King of Italy, ii. 169, 178

Adelaisie (wife of Berald des Baux), i. 80

Adrian VI. (Pope), ii. 251

Adriatic, the, ii. 1, 3, 56, 59

Æneas, iii. 319

Æschylus, iii. 162, 271, 345, 358-362

Affò, Padre Ireneo, ii. 363 _note_

Agrigentines, the, iii. 335

Agrigentum, iii. 266

Ajaccio, i. 104-120

Alamanni, Antonio, ii. 328

Alban Hills, ii. 32

Albany, Countess of, i. 352

Alberti, house of the, ii. 213

Alberti, Leo Battista, i. 216; ii. 14, 18, 21-29; iii. 102

Albizzi, the, ii. 50, 209, 213 foll. , 221, 224

Albizzi, Maso degli, ii. 213-215

Albizzi, Rinaldo degli, ii. 215, 218, 220, 221, 256

Albula, ii. 127, 128; Pass of, i. 53

Aleotti, Giambattista, ii. 180

Alexander the Great, iii. 262

Alexander VI. , ii. 47, 74, 184, 191, 193, 237, 363 _note_

Alexandria, ii. 19; iii. 189, 190, 201, 253

Alfieri, i. 342, 345-359

Alfonso of Aragon, i. 195, 203; ii. 189, 235

Alps, the, i. 1-67, 122, 123, 126, 133, 209, 258; ii. 8, 129, 168 _et passim_

Amadeo, Gian Antonio, i. 146, 150, 151, 191-193, 243

Amalasuntha, daughter of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, ii. 2, 13

Amalfi, i. 103 _note_; iii. 250-261

Ambrogini family, iii. 101

Ambrogini, Angelo. (_See_ Poliziano, Angelo)

Ambrogini, Benedetto, iii. 101, 102

Ampezzo, the, i. 268

Ana-Capri, iii. 231, 232, 271

Anapus, the, iii. 326, 328

Anchises, iii. 319

Ancona, i. 196, 198; ii. 14, 38, 45, 55, 102, 199; iii. 111

Ancona, Professor d', ii. 276 _note_

Andrea, Giovann', i. 318

Andreini, ii. 269

Angeli, Niccolo, iii. 151

Angelico, Fra, i. 100, 240; ii. 49; iii. 35, 61, 147-149, 151, 248

Angelo, S. , ii. 96

Angelo, Giovan. (_See_ Pius IV. )

Angiolieri, Cecco, iii. 1, 2

Anguillara, Deifobo, Count of, i. 202

Anjou, house of, ii. 188

Ansano, S. , iii. 70

Anselmi, ii. 158

Antegnate, i. 197

Antelao, i. 268, 283

Antibes, i. 102

Antinoë, iii. 191, 205

Antinoopolis, iii. 191, 205

Antinous, iii. 184-197, 200-229

Antipater, iii. 322, 362

Antiquari, Jacobo, iii. 126 _note_

Antonio da Venafro, ii. 47

Aosta, i. 2

Apennines, the, i. 45, 99, 133; ii. 7, 8, 37, 45, 56, 62, 65, 66, 132 foll. , 145, 168; iii. 91 _et passim_

Apollonius of Tyana, iii. 216

Apulia, i. 87 _note_; iii. 305

Aquaviva, Dominico d', ii. 94

Aquila, i. 196

Aragazzi, Bartolommeo, iii. 95-100

Aragon, Kings of, i. 79

Arausio, i. 68

Archimedes, iii. 325

Arcipreti family, the, iii. 113

Ardoin of Milan, iii. 299, 300

Aretine, the, ii. 83

Aretino, Pietro, ii. 91

Aretino, Spinello, iii. 304

Aretusi, Cesare, ii. 149 _note_

Arezzo, ii. 214; iii. 7, 91, 96, 151 _note_; Bishop of, iii. 74

Ariosto, i. 71; ii. 66, 160, 168, 261, 264, 265, 267, 269, 273, 280, 336, 343

Aristides, iii. 196

Aristophanes, i. 84 _note_; iii. 161, 341, 351, 353

Aristotle, i. 249; ii. 74; iii. 309

Aristoxenus, iii. 262, 263

Arles, i. 76-81; King of, i. 79

Arno, the, iii. 91; valley of, iii. 41

Arosa, valley of, i. 33

Arqua, i. 167, 168

Arrian, iii. 205

Aruns, iii. 94

Ascham, Roger, ii. 265, 266

Asciano, iii. 86, 87

Asinarus, iii. 327

Assisi, i. 137; ii. 35, 39, 43, 44, 46; iii. 35, 68, 111, 114, 140

Asso, the, iii. 108

Asti, i. 347, 348; ii. 193, 197

Astolphus, ii. 2

Athens, i. 243; iii. 156, 169, 182, 188, 207, 323, 339-364

Athens, Duke of, ii. 207, 208, 233 _note_

Atrani, iii. 251, 254

Attendolo, Sforza, i. 195; ii. 71

Atti, Isotta degli, ii. 17 and _note_, 20

Augustine, S. , i. 232

Augustus, Emperor, ii. 1, 14; iii. 215

Aurelius, Marcus, iii. 164, 200

Ausonias, iii. 268

Aversa, iii. 253, 299, 300

Avignon, i. 69-71, 77, 81, 86; ii. 136; iii. 51, 74

Azzo (progenitor of Este and Brunswick), ii. 175

Azzo (son of Sigifredo), ii. 169

Badrutt, Herr Caspar, i. 55

Baffo, i. 259, 260

Baganza, the, ii. 184

Baglioni, the, ii. 16, 47, 71, 236; iii. 81, 113-115, 119-136

Baglioni, Annibale, iii. 132: Astorre, iii. 113, 114, 121, 122, 125, 126: Atalanta, iii. 116, 124, 127-129: Braccio, iii. 134: Carlo Barciglia, iii. 124: Constantino, iii. 131: Eusebio, iii. 131: Filene, iii. 132: Galeotto, iii. 124, 132: Gentile, ii. 42, iii. 122, 132: Gian-Paolo, ii. 47, 220, iii. 116, 117, 122, 125, 127, 128, 130-132: Gismondo, iii. 122, 126, 127: Grifone, iii. 124: Grifonetto, ii. 47, iii. 113, 114, 124-129: Guido, iii. 121, 126, 127: Ippolita, iii. 131: Malatesta, ii. 253, 254, iii. 127, 132: Marcantonio, iii. 122, 125, 130: Morgante, iii. 119 _note_ 2: Niccolo, iii. 120: Orazio, iii. 127, 132: Pandolfo, iii. 120: Pietro Paolo, ii. 41: Ridolfo (1), iii. 120, 121: Ridolfo (2), iii. 133, 134: Simonetto, iii. 123, 124, 126: Taddeo, iii. 131: Troilo, iii. 122, 127

Baiæ, iii. 242

Balzac, ii. 160

Bandello, i. 155, 157, 158, 270; ii. 116, 265, 271, 277

Bandinelli, Messer Francesco, iii. 10-12

Barano, the, ii. 56-58

Barbarossa, Frederick, ii. 69, 201; iii. 7, 271, 290, 306 _note_ 2

Bari, Duke of. (_See_ Sforza, Lodovico)

Bartolo, San, iii. 59

Bartolommeo, Fra, iii. 63, 99

Basaiti, i. 269

Basella, i. 193

Basinio, ii. 18

Basle, i. 1, 2

Bassano, i. 340

Bastelica, i. 109, 113, 115

Bastia, Matteo di, i. 216

Battagli, Gian Battista, i. 216

Battifolle, Count Simone da, iii. 11

Baudelaire, iii. 280

Baveno, i. 19

Bayard, i. 113

Bazzi, Giovannantonio. (_See_ Sodoma)

Beatrice, Countess, iii. 144

Beatrice, Dante's, ii. 6

Beatrice of Lorraine, ii. 170

Beaumarchais, i. 228, 229, 234

Beaumont and Fletcher, ii. 267, 269

Becchi, Gentile, ii. 192

Beethoven, i. 10, 249; ii. 160

Belcari, Feo, ii. 305

Belcaro, iii. 66, 68

Belisarius, ii. 2; iii. 290

Bellagio, i. 186

Bellano, i. 186

Belleforest, ii. 116

Bellini, Gentile, i. 269, 270

Bellini, Gian, i. 263, 269; ii. 55, 135

Bellinzona, i. 180

Bembo, Pietro, ii. 82, 85

Benci, Spinello, iii. 94

Benedict, S. , iii. 73, 81, 85, 248

Benevento, iii. 251, 252, 299

Benincasa, Jacopo (father of S. Catherine of Siena), iii. 50

Benivieni, ii. 305

Bentivogli, the, ii. 47, 178, 224

Bentivogli, Alessandro de', i. 155, 156

Bentivogli, Ercole de', ii. 224

Bentivoglio, Ermes, ii. 47

Benzone, Giorgio, i. 194

Beral des Baux, i. 79, 80

Berangère des Baux, i. 80

Berceto, ii. 131, 133

Berenger, King of Italy, ii. 169

Berenger, Raymond, i. 80

Bergamo, i. 190-207; ii. 82

Bernardino, S. , iii. 69, 113

Bernardo, iii. 69-75

Bernardo da Campo, i. 61

Berne, i. 20

Bernhardt, Madame, ii. 108

Berni, ii. 270

Bernina, the, i. 37, 55-57, 60, 64, 126; ii. 128

Bernini, ii. 159

Bersaglio, i. 268

Bervic, ii. 149

Besa, iii. 190, 191, 205

Besozzi, Francesco, i. 156

Bevagna, ii. 35, 38

Beyle, Henri, ii. 102

Bianco, Bernardo, i. 177

Bibbiena, Cardinal, ii. 82, 83

Bibboni, Francesco, or Cecco, i. 327-341

Bion, i. 152; ii. 303

Biondo, Flavio, ii. 28

Bisola, Lodovico, ii. 150

Bithynia, iii. 208

Bithynium, iii. 187, 208

Blacas (a knight of Provence), i. 80

Blake, the poet, i. 101, 265; ii. 273; iii. 166, 260

Boccaccio, ii. 7, 160, 208, 260, 261, 265, 270, 272, 273, 277, 334; iii. 16, 50, 248, 293

Bocognano, i. 109-111, 115

Bohemond, Prince of Tarentum, iii. 297, 298

Boiardo, Matteo Maria, ii. 30, 66, 269, 343

Boldoni, Polidoro, i. 183

Bologna, i. 121, 155, 192, 196, 326; ii. 29, 47, 85, 185, 224

Bologna, Gian, ii. 86

Bolsena, iii. 140, 141; Lake of, iii. 22

Bona of Savoy (wife of Galeazzo Maria Sforza), ii. 230

Bondeno de' Roncori, ii. 178

Bonifazio (of Canossa), ii. 169, 170

Bordighera, i. 102, 103

Bordone, Paris, ii. 109

Borgia family, ii. 66, 117, 363 _note_

Borgia, Cesare, ii. 47, 48, 73, 74, 80, 83, 126, 363 _note_; iii. 131

Borgia, Lucrezia, ii. 363 _note_

Borgia, Roderigo, i. 220. (_See also_ Alexander VI. )

Borgognone, Ambrogio, i. 146-148; iii. 64

Bormio, i. 61, 180

Borromeo family, iii. 14

Borromeo, Carlo, i. 182

Borromeo, Count Giberto, i. 182

Boscoli, i. 341; ii. 246

Bosola, i. 149

Botticelli, Sandro, i. 266; ii. 29, 30; iii. 180 _note_

Bötticher, Charles, iii. 225

Bourbon, Duke of, i. 158; Constable of, ii. 252

Bracciano, Duke of, ii. 91 foll. , 104

Bracciano, second Duke of, ii. 93, 99, 101

Braccio, i. 195, 197, 204, 207; ii. 47; iii. 81

Braccio, Filippo da, iii. 124-126

Bracciolini, Poggio, iii. 96, 336

Bragadin, Aloisio, ii. 101

Bramante, i. 216, 243

Brancacci, Cardinal, iii. 96

Brancaleone, Senator, iii. 336

Brancaleoni family, ii. 66, 69

Bregaglia, i. 35; valley of, i. 184

Brenner, the, ii. 168

Brenta, the, i. 258

Brescia, i. 63, 200; ii. 103, 169

Brest, Anna Maria, ii. 149

Brianza, the, i. 185, 186

Brolio, iii. 94

Bronte, iii. 279

Browne, Sir Thomas, i. 44; iii. 337

Browning, Robert, ii. 102, 270, 273, 281; iii. 173

Browning, Mrs. , ii. 270, 271; iii. 173

Bruni, Lionardo, iii. 96, 98, 99

Buol family, the, i. 35, 36, 40, 41, 49, 61

Buol, Herr, i. 34-36

Buonaparte family, the, i. 119, 120

Buonarroti, Michel Angelo, i. 176, 193, 221, 236, 243, 326; ii. 21, 30, 40, 152, 158, 160, 161, 178, 253, 332; iii. 20, 22, 145, 146, 150, 154, 161

Buonconvento, iii. 72, 76

Burano, i. 258

Burgundy, Duke of, i. 202, 203

Burne-Jones, ii. 29

Busti, Agostino, i. 159, 161, 193

Byron, i. 280; ii. 7, 13, 15, 146, 162, 270, 271

Cadenabbia, i. 121, 173

Cadore, i. 267

Cæsarea, ii. 1

Cagli, ii. 56, 69, 74

Cajano, ii. 221

Calabria, iii. 305; mountains of, 288

Calabria, Duke of, iii. 11

Calascibetta, iii. 302

Caldora, Giovanni Antonio, i. 202

Caldora, Jacopo, i. 196

Caligula, i. 134-136; iii. 2, 156, 163, 197, 273, 274

Calles (Cagli), ii. 57

Camargue, the, i. 78, 81

Camerino, Duchy of, i. 185; ii. 47, 73

Campagna, the, ii. 32

Campaldino, ii. 206

Campanella, iii. 20, 270

Campèll (or Campbèll) family, the i. 61, 62 and _note_

Campione, i. 175

Canale, Messer Carlo, ii. 363 _note_

Cannaregio, i. 268, 269, 339

Cannes, i. 103 _note_; ii. 143

Canonge, Jules, i. 81

Canossa, ii. 163-179

Cantù, i. 340

Cap S. Martin, i. 90

Capello, Bianca, ii. 93, 126

Capponi, Agostino, ii. 246

Capponi, Niccolo, ii. 253

Capri, ii. 58; iii. 242, 256, 269-276

Caracalla, i. 135; iii. 197

Cardona, Viceroy, ii. 244

Carducci, Francesco, ii. 253, 325

Carini, Baronessa di, ii. 276

Carlyle (quoted), i. 72

Carmagnola, i. 197, 200, 208; ii. 71

Carmagnuola, Bussoni di, ii. 17 and _note_

Carpaccio, Vittore, i. 269, 270; ii. 42

Carpegna, ii. 64

Carpi, Duchy of, i. 185; ii. 168

Carpi, the princes of, i. 202

Carrara range, the, ii. 134, 146, 218, 238

Casamicciola, iii. 234, 239

Casanova, i. 259, 260

Cascese, Santi da, ii. 224

Casentino, iii. 92

Cassinesi, the, iii. 248

Cassius, Dion, iii. 191, 193, 195-197, 219

Castagniccia, i. 110

Castagno, Andrea del, ii. 233

Castellammare, i. 103 _note_; iii. 232, 250, 276

Casti, Abbé, ii. 270

Castiglione, i. 144, 145; ii. 68, 80, 82; iii. 106, 108

Castro Giovanni, mountains of, iii. 279, 302, 304, 320

Catania, i. 87 _note_; iii. 279, 280, 288, 302, 304, 325

Catherine, S. (of Alexandria), i. 136, 142, 153, 155-157, 178; iii. 55, 61

Catherine, S. (of Sienna), i. 70; iii. 48-65

Catria, iii. 73

Catullus, iii. 180

Cavalcanti, Guido, ii. 261, 308, 325, 343

Cavicciuoli, Messer Guerra, iii. 2

Cavro, i. 109

Cécile (Passe Rose), i. 81

Cefalú, iii. 291

Cellant, Contessa di, i. 157-159

Cellant, Count of, i. 158

Cellini, Benvenuto, i. 2, 189, 240, 241, 328; ii. 25

Celsano, i. 329

Celsus, iii. 211, 219, 220

Cenci, the, ii. 17, 89

Cenci, Beatrice, ii. 102, 270

Ceno, the, ii. 183, 195

Centorbi, iii. 302

Cephalonia, iii. 363

Cephissus, the, iii. 350

Cerami, iii. 304

Cervantes, ii. 160

Cesena, ii. 15, 62

Cetona, iii. 103

Chalcedon, iii. 212

Châlons, the, i. 79

Chapman, George, ii. 268

Charles IV. , iii. 6

Charles V. , i. 184, 185, 187, 188, 319, 338, 339; ii. 75, 202, 255, 257

Charles VIII. , ii. 67, 132, 183, 189 and _note_, 191-197, 238, 328

Charles of Anjou, iii. 315 _note_

Charles the Bold, i. 202

Charles Martel, i. 75

Charles of Valois, ii. 207

Chartres, i. 243

Chateaubriand, ii. 13

Chatterton, ii. 273

Chaucer, ii. 258, 260, 261, 270, 272

Chiana, the, iii. 91; valley of, iii. 90, 97

Chianti, iii. 94

Chiara, S. , ii. 36, 37

Chiarelli, the, of Fabriano, ii. 236

Chiavari, iii. 256

Chiavenna, i. 35, 53, 63, 180, 184; ii. 130, 131

Chioggia, i. 257-261

Chiozzia, i. 350, 351

Chiusi, i. 86; ii. 50, 51, 52; iii. 22, 90, 92; Lake of, iii. 91, 94, 101

Chiusure, iii. 77, 78, 80

Chivasso, i. 19

Christiern of Denmark, i. 205

Chur, i. 49, 65

Cicero, iii. 321

Ciclopidi rocks, iii. 284

Cima, i. 263

Cimabue, iii. 35, 144

Ciminian Hills, ii. 88; iii. 22

Cini family. (_See_ Ambrogini)

Cinthio, ii. 265, 272, 277

Ciompi, the, ii. 208, 209

Cisa, i. 340

Città della Pieve, ii. 51

Città di Castello, ii. 47, 71

Ciuffagni, Bernardo, ii. 30

Clair, S. , ii. 37 and _note_

Clairvaux, Abbot of, iii. 70

Claudian, ii. 57, 343, 344

Clemens Alexandrinus, iii. 204, 217, 219

Clement VI. , iii. 74, 132

Clement VII. , i. 221, 316, 317, 321; ii. 233, 239, 247 foll. ; iii. 138 _note_, 247

Climmnus, the, ii. 35, 39

Cloanthus, iii. 319

Clough, the poet, ii. 273

Clusium, iii. 93, 94

Coire, i. 183

Col de Checruit, the, i. 15

Coleridge, S. T. , ii. 273; iii. 173

Colico, i. 64, 183

Collalto, Count Salici da, i. 337

Colleoni family, the, i. 194

Colleoni, Bartolommeo, i. 192-208; ii. 71

Colleoni, Medea, i. 193, 204

Collona family, ii. 187

Colma, the, i. 18

Colombini, iii. 69

Colonna, Francesco, iii. 103

Colonna, Giovanni, iii. 125, 254

Colonus, the, iii. 350

Columbus, i. 97; ii. 237

Commodus, i. 135; iii. 164

Comnena, Anna, iii. 297

Como, i. 136, 174-189

Como, Lake of, i. 50, 64, 122, 173, 174, 179, 181, 183-186

Conrad (of Canossa), ii. 178

Conrad, King of Italy, iii. 305

Conradin, iii. 298

Constance, daughter of King Roger of Sicily, iii. 297, 318

Constance of Aragon, wife of Frederick II. , iii. 307 _note_

Constantinople, ii. 186; iii. 311

Contado, iii. 90

Copton, iii. 205

Corfu, i. 87 _note_, 103 _note_

Corgna, Bernardo da, iii. 125

Corinth, iii. 212, 322, 342, 362

Cormayeur, valley of, i. 9, 14-16

Correggio, i. 137, 140, 163; ii. 126, 147-162

Corsica, i. 85, 102-120; ii. 286

Corte, i. 110, 111

Corte Savella, ii. 96

Cortina, i. 268

Cortona, ii. 48-51, 214; iii. 90, 92, 151 _note_

Cortusi, the, iii. 6

Corviolo, ii. 170, 178

Coryat, Tom, i. 49

Costa (of Venice), Antonio, ii. 150

Costa (of Rome), ii. 33, 146

Courthezon, i. 81

Covo, i. 197

Cramont, the, i. 15

Credi, Lorenzo di, iii. 35

Crema, i. 194, 209-222

Cremona, i. 209, 213, 215; iii. 6

Crimisus, the, iii. 304, 319

Crotona, iii. 319

Crowne, the dramatist, ii. 159

Cuma, iii. 212

Curtius, Lancinus, i. 159, 193

Cyane, the, iii. 328

Cybo, Franceschetto, ii. 239

Dalcò, Antonio, ii. 150

Dandolo, Gherardo, i. 198

Dandolo, Matteo, iii. 133

Daniel, Samuel (the poet), ii. 263

Dante, i. 29, 80; ii. 5, 6, 13, 15, 23, 65, 70, 136, 137, 160, 170, 206, 207, 261, 262, 269, 273, 277, 305, 343; iii. 2, 19, 25, 36, 43 _note_, 67, 69, 73, 111, 144, 149, 173, 241, 317

D'Arcello, Filippo, i. 195

Davenant, Sir William, ii. 267

David, Jacques Louis, i. 71, 72

Davos, i. 20, 28-47, 49, 53, 58, 65, 183

Davos Dörfli, i. 53

De Comines, Philippe, ii. 190, 193-197; iii. 45 _note_, 69

De Gié, Maréchal, ii. 199

De Musset, iii. 163, 235

De Quincey, ii. 113; iii. 273 _note_

De Rosset, ii. 103

Dekker, Thomas, ii. 267

Del Corvo, ii. 136

Della Casa, Giovanni, i. 331, 333

Della Porta, i. 193

Della Quercia, i. 192

Della Rocca, Giudice, i. 112, 113

Della Rovere family, ii. 66 (_see also_ Rovere)

Della Seta, Galeazzo, i. 329

Demetrius, iii. 113

Demosthenes, iii. 323, 324, 326, 327

Desenzano, i. 173

Dickens, Charles, iii. 39

Dionysius, iii. 322, 325

Dischma-Thal, the, i. 49

Dolce Acqua, ii. 136

Dolcebono, Gian Giacomo, i. 153

Domenico da Leccio, Fra, iii. 83

Dominic, S. , i. 221; iii. 61

Donatello, i. 150, 178; ii. 29, 30, 41; iii. 96, 97, 100

Doni, Adone, iii. 114

Doré, Gustave, i. 264; ii. 15

Doria, Pietro, i. 260

Doria, Stephen, i. 113

Dorias, the, i. 97

Dossi, Dosso, i. 166, 170, 172

Drayton, Michael, ii. 263

Druids, the, iii. 29

Drummond, William (the poet), ii. 263

Dryden, i. 2, 6; ii. 7, 270

Duccio, iii. 144, 145

Dürer, Albert, i. 345; ii. 275; iii. 260

Eckermann, ii. 157, 162

Edolo, i. 63

Edrisi, iii. 308, 309

Egypt, iii. 189, 190, 192, 210 foll. 

Eichens, Edward, ii. 150

Eiger, the, i. 12

Electra, ii. 135

'Eliot, George, ' ii. 270

Emilia, ii. 16

Emilia Pia, ii. 82

Empedocles, i. 87; iii. 172, 173, 174, 181, 337

Empoli, iii. 41, 87

Engadine, the, i. 48, 55, 56, 61, 183; ii. 128

Enna, iii. 302, 303 and _note_

Ennius, iii. 173, 181

Enza, the, ii. 166

Enzio, King, iii. 298

Epicurus, iii. 173, 174, 181

Eridanus, ii. 131

Eryx (Lerici), ii. 142

Este, i. 167

Este family, the, i. 166; ii. 68, 251, 268

Este, Azzo d', iii. 6: Beatrice d', i. 150: Cardinal d', ii. 91: Ercole d', i. 202, ii. 236: Guelfo d', ii. 177: Guinipera d', ii. 17; Lucrezia d', ii. 77, 83: Niccolo d', ii. 236

Estrelles, the, i. 102

Etna, iii. 93, 103, 198, 279-287, 319, 325, 327

Etruscans, the, i. 49

Euganeans, the, i. 258, 281, 282; ii. 168

Eugénie, Empress, i. 119

Eugenius IV. , i. 199; ii. 70, 220

Euhemerus, iii. 173

Euripides, ii. 142, 159 _note_, 335; iii. 89, 215, 340

Eusebius, iii. 197, 219

Everelina, ii. 166

Fabretti, Raffaello, iii. 209

Faenza, ii. 47

Fairfax, Edward, translator of Tasso, ii. 265

Fano, ii. 57, 59, 69

Fanum Fortunæ (Fano), ii. 57

Farnese, Alessandro, i. 317: Julia, i. 193: Odoardo, ii. 180: Pier Luigi, iii. 133: Ranunzio, ii. 180: Vittoria, ii. 76

Farnesi family, ii. 75, 90, 117, 180; iii. 336

Faro, the, iii. 301, 320

Favara, iii. 309

Federighi, Antonio, iii. 62

Federigo of Urbino. (_See_ Urbino)

Feltre, Vittorino da, ii. 70

Ferdinand, Grand Duke of Tuscany, ii. 78

Ferdinand of Aragon, ii. 189, 191, 192, 193, 234; iii. 274, 276

Fermo, ii. 47, 90

Ferrara, i. 166, 167, 171; ii. 67, 68, 168, 169, 185, 221; iii. 6

Ferrara, Duke of, i. 206

Ferrari, Gaudenzio, i. 137-139, 141, 162-164, 177

Ferretti, Professor, ii. 179

Ferrucci, Francesco, i. 343; ii. 254

Fesch, Cardinal, i. 118

Fiesole, i. 86

Filelfo, Francesco, ii. 25

Filibert of Savoy, ii. 91

Filiberta, Princess of Savoy, ii. 247

Filippo, i. 149

Filonardi, Cinzio, iii. 133

Fina, Santa, iii. 59

Finiguerra, Maso, i. 218

Finsteraarhorn, the, ii. 136

Fiorenzuola, ii. 197, 284

Flaminian Way, ii. 55, 57

Flaxman, ii. 15

Fletcher, the dramatist, i. 358; ii. 267

Florence, i. 121, 316, 318, 319; ii. 5, 50, 145, 185, 187, 198, 201-257, 259, 305, 306; iii. 7, 10, 21, 132, 151 _note_, 317 _note_, _et passim_

Florence, Duke of, i. 187

Fluela, the, i. 29, 37, 54

Fluela Bernina Pass, the, i. 53

Fluela Hospice, i. 59

Foglia, the, ii. 65

Foiano, ii. 50

Folcioni, Signor, i. 217

Folengo, ii. 270

Folgore da San Gemignano, ii. 53; iii. 1-20, 67, 70

Foligno, ii. 37-41, 45, 46, 52

Fondi, i. 318

Ford, John (the dramatist), ii, 267, 277

Forio, iii. 236, 237

Fornovo, ii. 132, 180-200

Fortini, iii. 68

Forulus (Furlo), ii. 57

Forum Sempronii (Fossombrone), ii. 57

Foscari, the, ii. 98

Fosdinovo, ii. 134-137

Fossato, ii. 52

Fossombrone, ii. 57, 58, 69, 85, 91

Fouquet, i. 80

Francesco, Fra, i. 269

Francesco da Carrara, iii. 6

Francesco Maria I. Of Urbino. (_See_ Urbino)

Francesco Maria II. Of Urbino. (_See_ Urbino)

Francia, Francesco, ii. 33

Francis I. Of France, i. 113, 183, 184

Francis of Assisi, S. , i. 99, 100; ii. 23, 44; iii. 57, 58, 61, 113

François des Baux, i. 81

Frederick, Emperor, i. 80

Frederick II. , Emperor, iii. 297, 315 and _note_, 316-318

Frere, J. H. , ii. 270

Friedrichs, iii. 224

Frisingensis, Otto, iii. 7

Friuli, i. 351

Furka, ii. 130

Furlo, ii. 55

Furlo Pass, ii. 57, 58

Fusina, i. 281

Gaeta, i. 318; iii. 235

Galatea, i. 91

Galileo, ii. 27

Galli Islands, iii. 270

Gallio, Marchese Giacomo, i. 179

Gallo, Antonio di San, iii. 90, 102

Gallo, Francesco da San, ii. 253; iii. 247

Garda, i. 173; Lake of, ii. 98, 169

Gardon, the, valley of, i. 75

Garfagnana, ii. 168

Garigliano, iii. 247

Gaston de Foix, i. 160, 161, 193; ii. 2, 10

Gattamelata (Erasmo da Narni), i. 197; ii. 41, 71

Gellias, iii. 337

Gelon, iii. 290, 304

Genoa, i. 97, 105, 113, 259; ii. 185; iii. 250, 253, 317 _note_

Gentile, Girolamo, ii. 236

George of Antioch, iii. 307, 311

Gérard, ii. 149

Gerardo da Camino, iii. 6

Ghiacciuolo, ii. 15

Ghibellines, ii. 15, 54, 69, 202 foll. ; iii. 17, 43 _note_, 73, 110

Ghiberti, Lorenzo di Cino, ii. 30; iii. 145, 146

Giannandrea, bravo of Verona, ii. 85

Giardini, iii. 287

Giarre, iii. 279

Gibbon, Edward (cited), i. 346

Ginori, Caterina, i. 323, 324

Ginori, Lionardo, i. 323

Giordani, i. 326

Giorgione, i. 345; iii. 247

Giottino, ii. 233 _note_

Giotto, i. 152; ii. 43, 206; iii. 35, 145, 248

Giovanni da Fogliani, ii. 47

Giovenone, i. 139

Giovio, i. 322

Girgenti, iii. 266, 291, 302, 304, 320, 321, 332-338

Giulio Romano, i. 140, 152

Glastonbury, iii. 29, 47

Gnoli, Professor, i. 327 _note_; ii. 102 _note_, 103

Godfrey, the Hunchback, ii. 170

Godfrey, Duke of Lorraine, ii. 170

Goethe, i. 5, 6, 10, 11, 131, 164, 237; ii. 26, 157, 160, 162; iii. 172, 173, 320

Goldoni, i. 259, 345-359

Golo, the, valley of, i. 111

Gonfalonier of Florence, ii. 83, 206, 209, 243, 245, 253

Gonzaga family, ii. 68

Gonzaga, Alessandro, i. 186: Elisabetta, ii. 73: Francesco, ii. 73, 194, 196, 197, 345, 363 _note_: Giulia, i. 318: Leonora, ii. 76

Gorbio, i. 85, 91

Gozzoli, Benozzo, i. 137; ii. 35

Graubünden, the, i. 50

Gravedona, i. 181

Gray, the poet, i. 3; ii. 273

Greece, and the Greeks, i. 101, 102, 240, 244; ii. 18; iii. 155 foll. , 260 foll. , 285-287, 290-292, 320 foll. , 339-364

Greene, Robert, ii. 265, 266, 267

Gregory VII. , ii. 172, 173-176 (_see also_ Hildebrand)

Gregory XI. , iii. 51

Gregory XIII. , ii. 88, 95, 96, 97

Grenoble, i. 111

Grigioni, the, i. 49

Grindelwald, iii. 275

Grisons, Canton of the, i. 48, 49, 50, 183, 184, 186, 188

Grivola, the, i. 126

Grosseto, iii. 66

Grote, the historian, iii. 323

Grumello, i. 48, 64

Guarini, ii. 267

Guazzi, the, i. 329

Gubbio, ii. 35, 45, 52-55, 69, 85, 89, 97

Guelfs, ii. 15, 54, 202 foll. ; iii. 17, 110, 112

Guérin, ii. 43

Guicciardini, Francesco, i. 319; ii. 75, 255

Guiccioli, Countess, ii. 7

Guidantonio, Count, ii. 70

Guido, iii. 184

Guidobaldo I. (_See_ Urbino)

Guidobaldo II. (_See_ Urbino)

Guillaume de Cabestan, i. 80

Guiscard, Robert, iii. 262, 297, 298, 300

Gyas, iii. 319

Gylippus, iii. 323, 324, 326, 337

Hadrian, iii. 164, 185, 187-205, 208, 210, 212, 224, 225, 226, 228, 343, 345

Halycus, the, iii. 319

Handel, iii. 40

Harmodius, ii. 135; iii. 155

Harrington, Sir John, ii. 265

Harvey, Gabriel, ii. 265

Hauteville, house of, iii. 252, 253, 254, 290, 294 foll. 

Hazlitt, ii. 109

Hegesippus, iii. 188

Helbig, iii. 187

Heliogabalus, i. 135; iii. 164

Henry II. Of France, i. 316

Henry III. , ii. 170

Henry IV. , King of Italy, ii. 170, 173-177; iii. 300 _note_

Henry V. , Emperor, ii. 178

Henry VI. (of Sicily), iii. 297, 318

Henry VII. , Emperor, iii. 72, 76

Hermopolis, iii. 205

Herodotus, iii. 319

Herrick, Robert, ii. 324

Hesiod, ii. 338; iii. 172, 173

Hiero II. , iii. 325

Hildebrand, ii. 163, 171, 172; iii. 300 _note_ 2, 305

Himera, the, iii. 304

Hispellum (Spello), ii. 38

Hoby, Thomas, ii. 265

Hoffnungsau, i. 66

Hohenstauffen, house of, ii. 188, 202; iii. 290, 297, 315

Homer, i. 84 _note_; iii. 155, 226, 286, 287, 320

Honorius, Emperor, ii. 2, 57

Horace, ii. 273; iii. 180

Howell, James, ii. 266

Hugh, Abbot of Clugny, ii. 175, 176

Hugo, Victor, iii. 164

Hunt, Leigh, ii. 15, 146, 270

Hymettus, iii. 351

Ibn-Hamûd, iii. 304

Ictinus, iii. 267, 343

Il Medeghino. (_See_ Medici, Gian Giacomo de')

Ilaria del Caretto, iii. 98

Ilario, Fra, ii. 136, 137

Ilissus, the, iii. 350

Imola, ii. 231

Imperial, Prince, i. 119

Inn river, the, i, 54, 55

Innocent III. , ii. 203

Innocent VIII. , ii. 184

Innsprück, i. 111

Isabella of Aragon, ii. 192

Isac, Antonio, ii. 149

Ischia, iii. 233, 234, 236, 238, 241

Isella, i. 19

Iseo, Lake, i. 173, 174

Ithaca, iii. 364

Itri, i. 318, 319

Jacobshorn, the, ii. 131

James 'III. Of England, ' ii. 83

Joachim, Abbot, iii. 141, 142

Joan of Naples, i. 81, 195

John XXII. , iii. 74

John XXIII. , iii. 96

John of Austria, Don, ii. 77

Jonson, Ben, ii. 267, 268

Jourdain (the hangman of the Glacière), i. 72

Judith of Evreux, iii. 303

Julia, daughter of Claudius, ii. 36

Julian, iii. 197

Julier, ii. 127, 128

Julius II. , i. 221; ii. 74, 83, 220; iii. 131

Jungfrau, the, i. 12

Justin Martyr, iii. 197, 219

Justinian, ii. 10, 12

Juvara, Aloisio, ii. 150

Juvenal, iii. 181, 199

Keats, the poet, ii. 262, 263, 270, 273

Kelbite dynasty, iii. 292, 301

Killigrew, the dramatist, ii. 159

Klosters, i. 30, 46

La Cisa, the pass, ii. 132, 133

La Madonna di Tirano, i. 61, 62

La Magione, ii. 46-48

La Rosa, i. 59

La Spezzia, ii. 137-139, 143

La Staffa family, the, iii. 113

Lacca, iii. 236

Lamb, Charles, ii. 110

Lampridius, iii. 197

Landona, iii. 127

Lanini, i. 139-142, 162

Lanuvium, iii. 209

Lars Porsena, ii. 52, 93

Laschi, the, i. 329

Le Prese, i. 60

Leake, Colonel, iii. 325

Lecco, i. 183, 185, 186, 188

Legnano, ii. 198

Lenz, i. 65

Leo IX. , iii. 300

Leo X. , i. 221; ii. 75, 88, 246; iii. 132

Leonardo. (_See_ Vinci, Leonardo da)

Leoncina, Monna Ippolita, ii. 308

Leopardi, Alessandro, i. 207, 326; ii. 62

Lepanto, ii. 77, 93

Lepidus, ii. 27

Lerici, ii. 139, 142-145

Les Baux, i. 77-81; ii. 136

Leucadia, iii. 364

Levezow, Von, iii. 211

Leyva, Anton de, i. 187

Lido, the, i. 280, 283-286; ii. 1

Liguria, the, i. 97; ii. 178, 283

Lilyboeum, iii. 294 _note_

Lioni, Leone, i. 188

L'Isle, i. 72

Livorno, ii. 145, 214

Livy, iii. 94, 171

Lo Spagna, iii. 114

Lodi, i. 216

Lomazzo, i. 137

Lombardy, i. 19, 49, 61, 121, 122, 129, 133-172, 209; ii. 129, 132, 147, 165, 168, 182

Lorenzaccio, ii. 41

Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, iii. 8, 36, 43, 44

Lorenzo, Bernardo di, iii. 105

Loreto, ii. 97

Lothair, King of Italy, ii. 169

Louis XI, ii. 237

Louis of Anjou, i. 195

Lovere, i. 174

Loyola, Ignatius, iii. 61

Lucan (quoted), i. 92

Lucca, ii. 145, 168, 170, 203, 211, 214, 218, 286; iii. 4, 98

Lucca, Pauline, i. 224, 226, 227, 229, 233, 234, 237

Lucera, iii. 315 and _note_

Lucius III. , iii. 312

Lucretius, iii. 157-183

Lugano, i. 125, 128, 156, 180

Lugano, Lake, i. 122, 125, 169, 185

Luigi, Pier, ii. 180

Luini, i. 141, 148, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 162, 164-166, 177, 178; iii. 184

Luna, Etruscan, ii. 131

Luziano of Lauranna, ii. 78

Lyly, John, ii. 268

Lysimeleia, iii. 327

Macedonia, iii. 323

Machiavelli, ii. 16, 41, 75, 117, 219, 220, 225, 231, 250; iii. 131

Macugnaga, i. 18, 20; iii. 282

Madrid, iii. 223

Magenta, i. 127

Maggiore, Lake, i. 124, 173

Magnanapoli, ii. 95, 96, 103

Magnani, Giuseppe, ii. 150

Magra, the, ii. 133, 134, 136, 238

Maitani, Lorenzo, iii. 142

Majano, Benedetto da, ii. 30

Malamocco, i. 257, 280, 281

Malaspina family, ii. 134, 136

Malaspina, Moroello, ii. 136

Malaterra, Godfrey, iii. 298

Malatesta family, ii. 15-17, 62, 66, 69, 71, 278; iii. 121

Malatesta, Gian Galeazzo, ii. 16

Malatesta, Giovanni, ii. 15

Malatesta, Sigismondo Pandolfo, i. 135, 202, 203; ii. 14, 16-21, 72; iii. 7

Malfi, Duchess of, i. 149

Malghera, i. 339

Malipiero, Pasquale, i. 200

Maloja, i. 55, ii. 128, 129; the Pass of, i. 53

Malpaga, i. 205, 206

Manente, M. Francesco, i. 329

Manfred, King, ii. 203

Manfredi, the, ii. 47

Manfredi, Astorre, i. 202; iii. 197

Manfredi, Taddeo, ii. 231

Maniaces, iii. 299, 301

Mansueti, i. 269

Mantegna, i. 176; ii. 100, 197; iii. 180

Mantinea, iii. 207

Mantua, i. 340; ii. 68, 70, 74, 168, 185, 345

Mantua, Dukes of, i. 186, 243

Mantua, Marquis of, ii. 194-196, 199

Marcellinus, Ammianus, iii. 197, 205

Marcellus, iii. 186

March, the, ii. 16, 187

Marches of Ancona, ii. 199

Marecchia, the, ii. 14

Maremma, the, ii. 286; iii. 69, 103

Marenzio, iii. 37

Margaret of Austria, ii. 180

Maria, Galeazzo, i. 149

Maria, Gian, i. 149

Maria Louisa, Duchess of Parma, ii. 149

Marianazzo, robber chieftain, ii. 88

Mariano family, the, i. 139

Marignano, i. 186

Marignano, Marquis of. (_See_ Medici, Gian Giacomo de')

Mark, S. , ii. 19

Marlowe, Christopher, ii. 159, 181, 258, 267, 268 and _note_; iii. 228

Maroggia, i. 175

Marseilles, i. 2

Marston, the dramatist, ii. 113, 267, 268

Martelli, Giovan Battista, i. 334, 335

Martelli, Luca, i. 340

Martial, i. 2; iii. 268

Martin V. , iii. 95

Martinengo, i. 203

Martinengo family, i. 204

Martini, Biagio, ii. 149

Masaccio, i. 144, 145

Masolino da Panicale, i. 144, 145; ii. 55

Mason (artist), ii. 32, 129

Massinger, Philip, ii. 267

Matarazzo, iii. 121, 122, 128, 130, 134

Matilda, Countess, ii. 165, 168, 170-173, 179; iii. 300 _note_ 2

Matteo of Ajello, iii. 308 _note_, 311

Mauro, S. , iii. 248

Mayenfeld, i. 65

Mazara, iii. 281

Mazzorbo, i. 282

Medici family, i. 187, 315-344; ii. 66, 90, 117, 187, 208, 209 foll. , 245, 247, 278

Medici, Alessandro de', i. 315-327, ii. 83, 248, 251, 255: Battista de', i. 188: Bernardo de', i. 180: Bianca de', ii. 233: Casa de', i. 317: Catherine de', i. 316, ii. 76, 255: Clarina de', i. 182: Claudia de', ii. 77: Cosimo de', i. 319, ii. 225 _note_, iii. 67, 247: Cosimo (the younger) de', i. 326, 330, 340, ii. 255, 257: Ferdinand de', (Cardinal), ii. 93: Francesco di Raffaello de', i. 321, ii. 93, 104: Gabrio de', i. 188: Gian Giacomo de' (Il Medeghino), i. 179-188, iii. 67: Giovanni de', ii. 215, 216, 239, 244, 245, 246 (_see also_ Leo X. ): Giovanni de' (general), ii. 249: Giuliano, son of Piero de', ii. 83, 226, 232, 233, 239, 318, 334: Giuliano de' (Duke of Nemours), ii. 239, 244, 245, 247: Giulio dei (_see_ Clement VII. ): Ippolito de', i. 316-319, ii. 83, 248, 251, 255: Isabella de', ii. 93, 104, 105: Lorenzino de', i. 315, 319-335, 338, 341-344, ii. 83, 255: Lorenzo de' (the Magnificent), ii. 67, 184, 185, 187, 216, 218, 226 foll. , 305, 311, 325, 326, 330, iii. 101: Lorenzo de' (Duke of Urbino) (_see_ Urbino): Maddalena de', ii. 239: Piero de', ii. 184, 191, 192, 226, 227, 238, 328, iii. 101: Pietro de', iii. 247: Salvestro de', ii. 208

Mediterranean, the, i. 2; ii. 145

Melfi, iii. 300

Melo of Bari, iii. 299

Meloria, the, iii. 253

Menaggio, i. 181, 186, 188

Menander, iii. 72

Mendelssohn, i. 10

Mendrisio, i. 122, 175

Menoetes, iii. 319

Mentone, i. 83-93, 94, 98, 102, 103, 106; iii. 250

Menzoni, ii. 285

Mer de Glace, iii. 282

Meran, i. 111

Mercatello, Gentile, ii. 70

Mesomedes, iii. 201

Messina, iii. 288, 292 and _note_, 301

Mestre, i. 339

Metaurus, or Metauro, the, ii. 38, 58

Mevania (Bevagna), ii. 38

Michelangelo. (_See_ Buonarroti, Michel Angelo)

Michelhorn, ii. 127

Michelozzi, Michelozzo, iii. 96

Middleton, Thomas, ii. 267

Mignucci, Francesco, ii. 90

Milan, i. 14, 19, 20, 50, 121, 124, 136, 152-161, 168, 178, 180, 184, 195, 203, 212, 213, 223 foll. ; ii. 185, 186, 190, 191, 224; iii. 151 _note_, 253, 348

Milan, Dukes of, i. 49, 149, 180, 186, 200; ii. 214

Millet, iii. 77

Milton, ii. 160, 258, 262, 263, 269, 274; iii. 25, 35, 37, 38, 158, 169, 342

Mino da Fiesole, ii. 81

Mirandola, Duchy of, i. 185; ii. 168

Mirandola, the Counts of, i. 202

Mirandola, Pico della, ii. 21

Mirano, i. 294

Miseno, iii. 238, 239, 242

Mnesicles, iii. 343

Mnestheus, iii. 319

Modena, i. 170, 172; ii. 168, 169, 221

Molsa, Francesco Maria, i. 326

Monaco, i. 92, 102

Mondello, iii. 294

Monreale, ii. 10; iii. 291, 311-314

Mont Blanc, i. 14, 126, 134: Cenis, ii. 174: Cervin, i. 169: Chétif, i. 14: Finsteraarhorn, i. 169: Genêvre, ii. 193: S. Michel, ii. 167: de la Saxe, i. 14: Solaro, iii. 230: Ventoux, ii. 22

Montalcino, iii. 76, 79, 92

Montalembert, iii. 249

Montalto, Cardinal, ii. 90, 91, 95, 98, 103 (_see also_ Sixtus V. )

Montdragon, i. 68

Monte Adamello, i. 174, ii. 168: Amiata, iii. 42, 69, 76, 80, 90, 91, 93, 103, 104, 106, 108: d'Asdrubale, ii. 66: Aureo, iii. 253: Calvo, ii. 55: Carboniano, ii. 168: Cassino, iii. 248: Catini, iii. 4: Catria, ii. 66, 68, 69, iii. 111: Cavallo, ii. 94: Cetona, ii. 51, iii. 90, 91: Coppiolo, ii. 64: Delle Celle, ii. 168: di Disgrazia, i. 64: Epomeo, iii. 234, 236, 237-240, 241: Fallonica, iii. 103, 110: Gargano, iii. 299: Generoso, i. 121-132, 173: Leone, i. 174: Nerone, ii. 66: Nuovo, iii. 242: Oliveto, i. 166, ii. 82, iii. 8, 69, 73, 74 foll. , 151 _note_: d'Oro, i. 105, 111: Pellegrino, ii. 176, iii. 294: Rosa, i. 8, 18, 105, 125, 126, 129, 134, 169: Rosso, iii. 279: Rotondo, i. 111, ii. 33: Salvadore, i. 125, 128: Soracte, ii. 51: Viso, i. 126, 134, 169, 174

Montefalco, ii. 35-37, 39, 45, 46

Montefeltro family, ii. 62, 64, 66, 69-72

Montefeltro, Federigo di, i. 207, 208

Montefeltro, Giovanna, ii. 73

Montélimart, i. 68

Montepulciano, ii. 50, 214; iii. 68, 69, 77, 87-102, 109, 110

Montferrat, Boniface, Marquis of, i. 202

Monti della Sibilla, ii. 46

Monza, i. 199

Moors, the, i. 85, 94; iii. 296, 299, 301

Morbegno, i. 49, 51, 64, 186

Morea, the, ii. 18; iii. 339

Morris, William, ii. 271

Morteratsch, the, i. 56

Mozart, i. 223, 227, 229, 231-237, 249; ii. 153

Mühlen, ii. 128

Mulhausen, i. 1

Murano, i. 268, 282, 333; ii. 1

Murillo, ii. 153

Mürren, i. 9, 11, 14

Musset, De, i. 342

Mussulmans, iii. 290, 291, 294 _note_, 302, 305, 307, 316

Naples, ii. 185, 188, 189, 191, 193, 234, 282; iii. 221, 231, 239, 243, 253, 254, 256, 270, 276, 289, 317 _note_

Naples, Queens of, i. 79

Napoleon Buonaparte, i. 50, 106, 118, 119, 120

Narni, i. 86; ii. 34, 38

Nash, Thomas, ii. 265

Nassaus, the, i. 79

Navone, Signor Giulio, iii. 4 _note_

Naxos, iii. 288

Negro, Abbate de, iii. 78, 79

Nera, the, ii. 34, 37, 46

Nero, i. 135; iii. 156, 164

Neroni, Diotisalvi, ii. 226, 256

Niccolini, i. 342

Niccolo da Bari, S. , iii. 238

Niccolo da Uzzano, ii. 215

Nice, i. 83, 106; iii. 250

Nicholas II. , iii. 300

Nicholas V. , ii. 28, 187, 236

Nicholas the Pisan, iii. 260

Nicolosi, iii. 283

Nikias, iii. 288, 324, 326, 327

Nile, the, iii. 190, 201, 205

Niolo, i. 112, 115

Nisi, Messer Nicholò di, iii. 2, 3

Nismes, i. 74-77

Noel, Mr. Roden, i. 10

Norcia, ii. 35, 46; iii. 92

Normans (in Sicily), iii. 290 foll. 

Novara, i. 19, 124

Oberland valleys, i. 12

Oddantonio, Duke of Urbino, ii. 70

Oddi family, the, iii. 113, 119, 122, 134

Odoacer, ii. 2

Offamilio, iii. 311

Oglio, the, iii. 6

Olgiati, i. 341

Oliverotto da Fermo, ii. 47, 48

Ombrone, the, iii. 108; Val d', iii. 90

Oortman, ii. 149

Orange, i. 68, 69

Orange, Prince of, i. 79, 316; ii. 253, 254

Orcagna, iii. 36

Orcia, the, iii. 104, 108

Ordelaffi, Cicco and Pino, i. 202

Origen, iii. 211, 219, 220

Orlando, ii. 42, 43

Ornani, the, i. 114

Orpheus, ii. 346-364

Orsini, the, ii. 47, 91, 157

Orsini, Alfonsina, ii. 239: Cardinal, ii. 47: Clarice, ii. 227: Francesco, ii. 48: Giustina, iii. 125: Lodovico, ii. 99, 100, 101, 104, 105, 108: Paolo, ii. 47, 48: Paolo Giordano (_see_ Bracciano, Duke of): Troilo, i. 327 _note_, ii. 93 and _note_: Virginio (_see_ Bracciano, second Duke of)

Orta, i. 173

Ortler, the, i. 126; ii. 168

Ortygia, iii. 321, 326, 327

Orvieto, i. 86; ii. 51, 136, 362; iii. 5, 82, 111, 137-154

Otho I. , ii. 169

Otho III. , ii. 15

Otranto, ii. 235

'Ottimati, ' the, ii. 242 foll. , 251, 254, 255, 257

Overbeck, iii. 187

Ovid, ii. 338, 344; iii. 149, 268, 320, 341 _note_ 1

Padua, i. 152, 197, 260; ii. 41, 98, 99, 101, 104, 168, 218, 221; iii. 6

Pæstum, iii. 250, 259, 261-269

Paganello, Conte, ii. 102

Paglia, the, iii. 137

Painter, William, ii. 117, 265, 272

Palermo, ii. 10; iii. 252, 290-318

Palestrina, iii. 37

Palladio, i. 75, 256; ii. 29

Pallavicino, Matteo, ii. 91

Palma, i. 263, 269

Palmaria, ii. 142

Palmer, Richard, Bishop of Syracuse, iii. 306 _note_

Pancrates, iii. 201, 204, 205

Panizzi, ii. 43

Panormus, iii. 291

Pantellaria, iii. 294 _note_

Paoli, General, i. 111, 115

Paris, i. 20

Parker, ii. 266

Parma, i. 163; ii. 131, 147-162, 168, 180, 184, 196

Parma, Duke of, ii. 76

Parmegiano, ii. 150, 158, 159

Parmenides, iii. 171, 173

Passerini, Silvio (Cardinal of Cortona), ii. 251

Passerini da Cortona, Cardinal, i. 316

Passignano, ii. 48

Pasta, Dr. , i. 123, 124 _note_

Patmore, Coventry, iii. 136

Patrizzi, Patrizio, iii. 72

Paul III. , i. 318; ii. 88; iii. 120, 133

Pausanias, iii. 207

Pavia, i. 146-151, 158, 176, 184, 189, 198, 212, 351; ii. 182

Pavia, Cardinal of, ii. 75

Pazzi, Francesco, ii. 232, 233, 256, 335

Pazzi, Guglielmo, ii. 233

Peiræeus, iii. 357

Pelestrina, i. 258

Pelusium, iii. 189

Pembroke, Countess of, ii. 265

Penna, Jeronimo della, iii. 124

Pentelicus, i. 210

Pepin, ii. 2

Peretti family, ii. 90, 94

Peretti, Camilla, ii. 90, 98

Peretti, Francesco, ii. 90, 92 foll. , 103

Pericles, iii. 343, 350

Persephone, iii. 290

Persius, iii. 165, 172

Perugia, i. 188, 214, 350; ii. 35, 38, 46, 52, 163; iii. 53, 68, 92, 111-136

Perugino, i. 149, 239; ii. 42, 57, 59, 159; iii. 114, 116, 117-119, 184

Perusia Augusta, ii. 45, 46

Peruzzi, i. 152; ii. 49

Pesaro, ii. 59, 69, 76

Pescara, Marquis of, i. 184

Petrarch, i. 72, 73, 74 and _note_, 86, 168; ii. 22, 261, 262, 269, 273, 280, 303, 332, 344, 365-368; iii. 254-256, 308, 316

Petrucci, Pandolfo, ii. 47; iii. 82

Phædrus, iii. 188, 351

Pheidias, i. 239, 246; iii. 155, 346, 349

Philippus, iii. 319

Philistis, Queen, iii. 337

Philostratus, ii. 293

Phlegræan plains, iii. 235, 239

Phoenicians, iii. 290, 291, 335

Piacenza, i. 142-144, 195, 340; ii. 180, 197

'Piagnoni, ' the, ii. 253, 254

Piccinino, Jacopo, ii. 234

Piccinino, Niccolò, i. 207; ii. 70

Piccolomini family, iii. 107

Piccolomini, Æneas Sylvius, ii. 23 (_see also_ Pius II. )

Piccolomini, Ambrogio, iii. 72, 74

Piedmont, i. 129

Pienza, iii. 77, 92, 102, 104-107

Piero della Francesca, ii. 72, 322

Piero Delle Vigne, iii. 316

Pietra Rubia, ii. 64

Pietra Santa, ii. 238

Pietro di Cardona, Don, i. 158

Pignatta, Captain, i. 319

Pindar, iii. 162, 215, 289, 332

Pinturicchio, Bernardo, ii. 42; iii. 62, 105, 114

Piranesi, i. 77; ii. 181

Pisa, i. 340; ii. 170, 203, 211, 214, 239, 244; iii. 145, 253, 304, 311

Pisani, the, ii. 30; iii. 71

Pisani, Vittore, i. 259

Pisano, Andrea, iii. 144

Pisano, Giovanni, iii. 112, 144

Pisano, Niccola, ii. 170; iii. 144, 146

Pisciadella, i. 60

Pistoja, ii. 281, 283, 287

Pitré, Signor, ii. 281 _note_

Pitta, Luca, ii. 226, 256

Pitz d'Aela, ii. 127

Pitz Badin, ii. 130

Pitz Languard, i. 55

Pitz Palu, i. 56

Pius II. , i. 202; ii. 18; iii. 62, 104, 105

Pius IV. , i. 182, 188

Pius IX. , iii. 196

Placidia, Galla, ii. 8, 11

Planta, i. 49

Plato, i. 249; iii. 337, 341, 351, 352, 353

Pletho, Gemisthus, ii. 19 and _note_

Plinies, the, i. 177

Plutarch, iii. 199

Po, the, i. 50, 124, 134; ii. 1, 168; iii. 94

Poggio. (_See_ Bracciolini, Poggio)

Polenta, Francesca da, ii. 15

Politian, iii. 102

Poliziano, Angelo, ii. 233, 237, 273, 305, 306, 308, 309, 312, 314, 318, 322, 323, 324, 334, 335, 338, 340, 342-344, 345-364; iii. 101

Polyphemus, i. 91

Pompeii, iii. 232, 244

Pompey, iii. 189

Pontano, iii. 242, 243 _note_

Ponte, Da, i. 227, 236

Pontremoli, i. 340; ii. 133, 183, 194

Pontresina, i. 49, 53, 55

Pope, Alexander, i. 6; ii. 273; iii. 172

Porcari, Stefano, ii. 236

Porcellio, ii. 18

Porlezza, i. 184

Portici, iii. 232

Porto d' Anzio, iii. 273

Porto Fino, ii. 142

Porto Venere, ii. 140-142

Portogallo, Cardinal di, iii. 98

Portus Classis, ii. 1, 8, 11, 12

Poschiavo, i. 49, 60

Poseidonia, iii. 261 foll. 

Posilippo, iii. 231, 270, 309

Poussin (cited), i. 262

Poveglia, i. 257

Pozzuoli, iii. 232, 241, 242, 243

Prato, ii. 244, 245

Procida, iii. 238, 239, 242

Promontogno, ii. 130

Provence, i. 68-82

Provence, Counts of, i. 79

Psyttaleia, iii. 358

Ptolemy, iii. 205

Puccini (Medicean) party, the, ii. 222

Pulci, ii. 269, 270

Pythagoras, ii. 24

Quattro Castelli, ii. 165, 171

Quirini, the, i. 331

Rabelais, iii. 161

Radicofani, iii. 69, 90, 91, 103, 106, 111

Ragatz, i. 65

Raimond, Count of Provence, iii. 305

Raimondi, Carlo, ii. 150

Rainulf, Count, iii. 299, 300

Raleigh, Sir Walter, ii. 264

Rametta, iii. 302

Rapallo, iii. 256

Raphael, i. 138-140, 149, 152, 239, 266; ii. 27, 37, 46, 56, 82, 83, 85, 126, 147, 152, 159; iii. 35, 114, 117, 123, 129, 141, 145, 146, 227, 228

Ravello, iii. 259

Ravenna, i. 160; ii. 1-13, 75, 244; iii. 315

Raymond, iii. 52, 53

Recanati, ii. 63

Redi, iii. 95

Reggio d'Emilia, ii. 165, 167-169, 196; iii. 288

Regno, the, i. 196

Rembrandt, i. 345; ii. 156, 275

René of Anjou, King, i. 202

Reni, Guido, ii. 86

Rhætia, i. 49

Rhætikon, the, i. 29

Rhine, the, i. 2

Rhone, the, i. 70, 71, 76, 78

Riario, Girolamo, ii. 231, 232

Ricci, the, ii. 213

Ridolfi, Cardinal, i. 318

Ridolfi, Pietro, iii. 11

Rienzi, i. 70

Rieti, valley of, ii. 34

Rimini, i. 350, 353; ii. 14-31, 60, 70

Rimini, Francesca da, ii. 270

Riviera, the, i. 2, 97, 104; ii. 143

Riviera, mountains of, ii. 142

Robbia, Luca della, ii. 29

Robustelli, Jacopo, i. 61

Rocca d' Orcia, iii. 106, 108

Roccabruna, i. 83, 91, 92

Rodari, Bernardino, i. 175

Rodari, Jacopo, i. 175

Rodari, Tommaso, i. 175, 176

Roger of Hauteville, iii. 295 and _note_, 296 foll. 

Roger (the younger) of Hauteville, King of Sicily, iii. 252, 253, 293, 305, 307-311, 318

Rogers, Samuel, ii. 270

Roland, ii. 42, 43

Roma, Antonio da, i. 328, 329

Romagna, ii. 16, 73, 185, 187, 199

Romano, i. 197

Romano, Giulio, i. 243

Rome, i. 2, 49, 68, 75, 139; ii. 10, 32, 88, 89, 187, 259; iii. 22 foll. , 85, 156, 323

Ronco, the, ii. 1, 10

Rossellino, Bernardo, iii. 62, 105, 106

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, ii. 262, 263, 270; iii. 1, 3, 17 foll. 

Rousseau, i. 5, 6; ii. 27; iii. 157

Rovere, Francesco della. (_See_ Sixtus IV. )

Rovere, Francesco Maria (Duke of Urbino). (_See_ Urbino)

Rovere, Giovanni della, ii. 73

Rovere, Livia della, ii. 77

Rovere, Vittoria della, ii. 78

Rubens, i. 345

Rubicon, the, ii. 14

Rucellai family, ii. 28

Rumano, i. 204

Rusca, Francesco, i. 177

Ruskin, Mr. , i. 10, 125

Rydberg, Victor, iii. 224 _note_, 227

Sabine Mountains, ii. 32, 33, 39, 88

Sacchetti, iii. 12, 13, 16

Saintrè, Jehan de, iii. 13

Salamis, iii. 358, 362

Salerno, iii. 250, 262, 268, 299

Salimbeni, house of, iii. 7

Salimbeni, Niccolò de', iii. 3

Salis, Von, family, i. 50

Salis, Von, i. 49

Salò, ii. 98

Salviati, Cardinal, i. 318

Salviati, Francesco (Archbishop of Pisa), ii. 232, 233

Salviati (Governor of Cortona), ii. 50

Salviati, Madonna Lucrezia, i. 320

Salviati, Madonna Maria, i. 320

Samaden, i. 48, 53, 55

Samminiato, iii. 98

Sampiero, i. 112, 113-115

Sanazzaro, ii. 264 and _note_ 1

S. Agnese, i. 85

S. Erasmo, i. 256, 283

S. Gilles, i. 81, 82

S. Pietro, i. 258

S. Spirito, i. 257

San Gemignano, iii. 3, 59

San Germano, iii. 246, 305

San Giacomo, i. 63

San Lazzaro, i. 280

San Leo, ii. 64

San Marino, ii. 60, 62-64

San Martino, i. 173

San Michele, i. 268

San Moritz, i. 55, 58

San Nicoletto, i. 283, 286

San Quirico, iii. 77, 92, 102, 107-110

San Remo, i. 87 _note_, 93-98, 105; iii. 256

San Rocco, i. 265

San Romolo, i. 98-100, 103

San Terenzio, ii. 143, 144

Sangarius, the, iii. 187

Sanseverino, Roberto, i. 158

Sansovino, i. 337 _note_, ii. 17 _note_

Sant' Elisabetta, i. 283

Santa Agata, ii. 64, 90

Santa Lucia, iii. 232

Santa Maura, iii. 363. 

Santi, Giovanni, ii. 56, 59

Sappho, iii. 363

Saracens, iii. 252, 263, 294, _note_, 302 foll. , 308, 321

Sardinia, ii. 189, 286

Saronno, i. 137, 156, 161-166

Sarto, Andrea del, i. 345; iii. 100

Sarzana, ii. 131, 134, 143, 183, 238

Sassella, i. 48, 62

Sasso Rancio, i. 173

Savonarola, i. 171; ii. 122, 193, 237, 238, 239-242

Scala, Can Grande della, iii. 6

Scaletta, pass of the, i. 49

Scaligers, the, iii. 318

Scalza, Ippolito, iii. 147

Scandiano, Count of, ii. 67

Scheffer, Ary, ii. 15

Scheggia, ii. 55

Schiahorn, the, i. 54

Schwartzhorn, the, i. 54

Schyn, ii. 127

Sciacca, iii. 281

Scolastica, S. , iii. 73

Scott, Sir Walter, ii. 273

Sebastian, S. , iii. 184, 185

Seehorn, the, i. 29

Seelisberg, i. 14

Segeste, iii. 291, 319, 335

Selinus, iii. 291, 333, 335, 337

Serafino, Fra, ii. 83

Serbelloni, Cecilia, i. 180

Sergestus, iii. 319

Serio, river, i. 204

Sermini, iii. 68

Sesia, the, i. 19

Sestri, i. 103 _note_; iii. 250

Sforza family, the, i. 146, 155, 179, 184, 185, 197, 244

Sforza, Alessandro, i. 202, ii. 72: Battista, ii. 72: Beatrice, i. 176: Cardinal Ascanio, ii. 91: Francesco, i. 149, 181, 186, 198, 200, 203, 208, ii. 17 _note_, 71, 185, 224: Galeazzo, ii. 236: Galeazzo Maria, ii. 185, 230, 236, iii. 117: Giovanni Galeazzo, ii. 185, 192: Ippolita, i. 155: Lodovico, i. 149, ii. 185, 186, 191, 193, 194, 236, 238: Polissena, ii. 17: Zenobia, iii. 124, 125, 128

Shakspere, ii. 258, 262, 263, 267, 268, 271-274, 277, 335; iii. 36, 37, 166, 280, 282

Shelley, i. 5, 10, 25, 26, 87, 166, 232; ii. 138, 140, 143-145, 270, 271, 273; iii. 172, 186

Shirley, the dramatist, ii. 159

Sicily, i. 103 _note_; ii. 66, 189, 276, 281 _note_, 282; iii. 252, 279 foll. , 286, 288, 290 foll. , 319 foll. 

Sidney, Sir Philip, ii. 263, 264, 266

Siena, i. 166, 187, 192; ii. 42, 185, 214, 281, 286; iii. 1, 7, 10, 12, 41-65, 66 foll. , 92, 105 _et passim_

Sigifredo, ii. 168

Signorelli, i. 239; ii. 49, 362; iii. 35, 81, 82, 85, 145, 147-152, 154

Silarus, the, iii. 264

Silchester, i. 214

Silvaplana, ii. 128, 129

Silvretta, the, i. 31

Silz Maria, ii. 129

Simaetha, i. 140

Simeto, the, iii. 279, 304

Simon Magus, iii. 216

Simonetta, La Bella, ii. 318, 322, 335, 343

Simonides, iii. 167

Simplon, the, i. 19, 125

Sinigaglia, ii. 48; iii. 131

Sirmione, i. 173

Sixtus IV. , i. 221; ii. 73, 231, 232, 234, 235

Sixtus V. , ii. 90, 95, 98

Smyrna, iii. 212

Sobieski, Clementina, ii. 83

Socrates, iii. 155, 329, 351, 352, 353, 354

Soderini, Alessandro, i. 332, 334, 335, 338, 341

Soderini, Maria, i. 320

Soderini, Niccolo, ii. 226

Soderini, Paolo Antonio, ii. 192

Soderini, Piero, ii. 243-245

Sodoma, i. 141, 152, 165, 166; iii. 63, 81, 82-84, 184

Sogliano, ii. 15

Solari, Andrea, i. 148

Solari, Cristoforo (Il Gobbo), i. 149, 176

Solferino, i. 127

Solon, ii. 163; iii. 172, 341

Solza, i. 194

Sondrio, i. 49, 61, 63

Sophocles, ii. 160, 161; iii. 215, 287, 345 _notes_ 1 and 2, 350

Sordello, i. 80

Sorgues river, i. 72

Sorrento, iii. 233, 250, 276-278

Sozzo, Messer, iii. 10, 11

Sparta, iii. 323

Spartian, iii. 192, 193, 197

Spartivento, iii. 288

Spello, ii. 35, 38, 39, 41-43, 45, 46

Spenser, Edmund, ii. 258, 262, 264

Spezzia, Bay of, ii. 135, 146

Splügen, i. 64

Splügen, the, i. 50, 53, 64; valley of, i. 184

Spolentino, hills of, iii. 92

Spoleto, ii. 35, 38, 45, 46, 170; iii. 111, 120

Sprecher von Bernegg, i. 49

Stabiæ, iii. 246

Staffa, Jeronimo della, iii. 125

Stelvio, the, i. 9, 50, 61

Stephen des Rotrous, Archbishop of Palermo, iii. 306 _note_ 1

Stimigliano, ii. 34

Strabo, iii. 206

Strozzi family, ii. 75

Strozzi, Filippo, i. 318, 321, 326, 344

Strozzi (Governor of Cortona), ii. 50

Strozzi, Palla degli, ii. 222

Strozzi, Pietro, i. 332

Strozzi, Ruberto, i. 331

Suardi, Bartolommeo, i. 154

Subasio, ii. 45

Suetonius, i. 134-136; iii. 164, 196, 199, 272, 274

Sufenas, iii. 209

Superga, the, i. 133, 134

Surrey, Earl of, ii. 261-263, 271

Susa, vale of, i. 134

Süss, i. 55

Swinburne, Mr. , ii. 270, 273

Switzerland, i. 1-67, 105, 129

Sybaris, ancient Hellenic city of, ii. 2 _note_; iii. 261

Syracuse, i. 87 _note_; iii. 262, 279, 288, 290, 291, 294 _note_, 304, 320-331

Tacitus, iii. 199

Tadema, Alma, i. 210

Tanagra, iii. 209

Tancred de Hauteville, iii. 294, 295

Taormina, iii. 287, 288, 304

Tarentum, iii. 263

Tarentum, Prince of, i. 79

Tarlati, Guido, iii. 74

Taro, the, i. 340; ii. 132, 183, 184, 195

Tarsus, iii. 212

Tasso, ii. 83, 264, 265, 267, 269, 273, 274, 280, 332, 337, 343

Tavignano, the, valley of, i. 111

Tedaldo, Count of Reggio and Modena, ii. 169

Tennyson, Lord, i. 4; ii. 23, 270, 273, 296; iii. 173

Terlan, i. 63

Terni, ii. 34, 253

Terracina, i. 318; iii. 235

Tertullian, iii. 219

Theocritus, i. 84, 94; ii. 304, 330, 335, 337, 355; iii. 319

Theodoric the Ostrogoth, ii. 2, 10, 11, 13

Theognis, iii. 172

Thomas à Kempis (quoted), i. 98, 100

Thomas of Sarzana, ii. 28

Thrasymene, ii. 45, 46, 48; iii. 90, 91, 101, 111

Thucydides, iii. 321-324, 327, 328, 331

Thuillier, Prefect, i. 109

Tiber, the, ii. 33, 46; iii. 112

Tiberio d'Assisi, ii. 35

Tiberius, ii. 14; iii. 271-274

Ticino, the, i. 124, 211

Tieck, F. , iii. 224

Timoleon, iii. 288, 290, 304, 319, 337

Tintoretto, i. 138, 236, 262-267, 269, 281; ii. 147, 156; iii. 158

Tinzenhorn, ii. 127

Tirano, i. 49-53, 61, 62

Titian, i. 337 _note_; ii. 76, 83, 130, 153, 154; iii. 180, 247

Titus, iii. 190

Tivoli, i. 87 _note_; ii. 32; iii. 189, 198, 201, 210

Todi, iii. 111

Tofana, i. 268, 283

Tolomei family, iii. 69

Tolomei, Cristoforo, iii. 70

Tolomei, Fulvia, iii. 70

Tolomei, Giovanni, iii. 8, 70 (_see also_ Bernardo)

Tolomei, Nino, iii. 8, 70

Tommaseo, ii. 283

Tommaso di Nello, iii. 11

Torcello, i. 171, 172, 282; ii. 1

Torre dell' Annunziata, iii. 232

Torre del Greco, iii. 232

Torrensi family, the, iii. 119

Toscanella, iii. 109

Toschi, Paolo, ii. 148-150

Totila, iii. 81

Tourneur, ii. 267

Trajan, ii. 14; iii. 188

Trani, iii. 311

Trapani, iii. 319

Trasimeno, ii. 50

Trastevere, ii. 96

Trebanio, ii. 19

Trelawny, ii. 144, 146

Tremazzi, Ambrogio, i. 327 _note_

Trento, i. 340

Trepievi, the, i. 184, 188

Trescorio, i. 204

Tresenda, i. 63

Trevi, ii. 35, 39, 46, 97; iii. 111

Treviglio, i. 209

Treviso, iii. 6

Trezzo, i. 194

Trinacria, iii. 290

Trinci family, ii. 38, 41

Trinci, Corrado, ii. 40

Troina, iii. 302, 303

Tuldo, Nicola, iii. 53-55

Tunis, iii. 275

Turin, i. 134, 138, 348

Turner, J. M. W. , iii. 138, 364

Tuscany, i. 187; ii. 45, 169, 234, 244, 276 foll. ; iii. 41 foll. , 68, 104

Tuscany, Grand Duke of, ii. 99, 170, 256

Tyrol, the, i. 89

Tyrrhenian sea, the, ii. 183

Ubaldo, S. , ii. 54

Uberti, Fazio degli, iii. 10, 16

Udine, i. 351

Ugolini, Messer Baccio, ii. 362

Uguccione della Faggiuola, ii. 136; iii. 4

Ulysses, iii. 288, 320

Umbria, i. 149; ii. 32-59; iii. 68, 119 _note_ 1

Urban II. , iii. 304

Urban IV. , ii. 177; iii. 141, 142

Urban V. , i. 70; ii. 78

Urbino, i. 203; ii. 45, 58, 66-69, 74, 78-87, 185

Urbino, Counts of, ii. 15, 70

Urbino, Federigo, Duke of, i. 203, 207, 316, 317, 326; ii. 48, 66-68, 70-73, 78-81, 231

Urbino, Prince Federigo-Ubaldo of, ii. 77, 78

Urbino, Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of, ii. 73-76, 85

Urbino, Francesco Maria II. , Duke of, ii. 76-78, 86

Urbino, Guidobaldo, Duke of, ii. 73, 74, 79, 80, 83, 84

Urbino, Guidobaldo II. , Duke of, ii. 76, 82

Urbino, Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of, ii. 75, 76, 247

Valdarno, ii. 218

Valdelsa, iii. 69

Valentinian, iii. 191

Valentino, ii. 64

Valperga, Ardizzino, i. 158

Valsassina, the, i. 184

Valtelline, the, i. 35, 48-51, 53, 58, 61, 64, 180, 184, 186, 188; ii. 168; iii. 94

Valturio, ii. 18

Varallo, i. 19, 136, 138, 164

Varani, the, ii. 47, 71

Varano, Giulia, ii. 76

Varano, Madonna Maria, ii. 85

Varano, Venanzio, ii. 85

Varchi, i. 320-322, 325, 326; iii. 45 _note_

Varenna, i. 173, 186

Varese, i. 144; Lake of, i. 124, 173, 174

Vasari, Giorgio, ii. 26, 28; iii. 83, 84, 145

Vasco de Gama, ii. 237

Vasto, Marquis del, i. 187

Vaucluse, i. 72-74

Velino, the, ii. 34, 46

Venice, i. 44, 167, 171, 200, 201, 206, 254-315; ii. 1, 2 and _note_, 16, 42, 102; iii. 253, 309, 317 _note_, _et passim_

Ventimiglia, i. 102

Vercelli, i. 136-142; ii. 173; iii. 82

Vergerio, Pier Paolo, i. 331

Verne, M. Jules, ii. 139

Vernet, Horace, i. 71

Verocchio, i. 193, 207

Verona, i. 212; ii. 168; iii. 6, 318

Verucchio, ii. 62

Vespasian, ii. 57

Vespasiano, Florentine bookseller, ii. 80

Vesuvius, iii. 230, 232, 234, 235, 239, 242, 245, 276

Vettori, Paolo, ii. 245

Via Mala, the, ii. 57

Viareggio, ii. 145, 146

Vicenza, i. 75, 328-330

Vico, i. 109, 112, 115

Vico Soprano, ii. 129

Victor, Aurelius, iii. 193, 195

Vietri, iii. 250

Vignole, i. 283

Villa, i. 48, 62

Villafranca, i. 83

Villani, Giovanni, iii. 8

Villani, Matteo, ii. 208; iii. 8, 16

Villeneuve, i. 70

Villon, iii. 1

Vinci, Leonardo da, i. 139, 148, 154, 349; ii. 19, 21, 27, 50, 152, 156; iii. 82, 228, 238

Vinta, M. Francesco, i. 330

Vire, Val de, ii. 291

Virgil, i. 246; ii. 6, 63, 285, 304, 338, 343; iii. 75, 144, 155, 162, 172, 180, 181, 186, 215, 268, 309, 320

Visconti family, the, i. 146, 181, 195; ii. 16, 178, 185, 224, 278; iii. 119, 253

Visconti, Astore, i, 181, 182

Visconti, Bianca Maria, i. 199

Visconti, Ermes, i. 157

Visconti, Filippo Maria, i. 195, 197-199; ii. 215, 224, 235

Visconti, Gian Galeazzo, i. 149, 152; ii. 213

Visconti, Gian Maria, ii. 236

Vitelli, the, ii. 41, 47, 71

Vitelli, Alessandro, ii. 250

Vitelli, Giulia, iii. 132

Vitelli, Vitellozzo, ii. 47, 48

Vitellius, iii. 164

Vittoli, the, i. 114, 115

Vivarini, i. 269

Voltaire, iii. 161

Volterra, ii. 163, 214, 231; iii. 66, 69, 79, 92, 103

Volterra, Bebo da, i. 328-330, 333-341

Volterrano, Andrea, i. 336

Volturno, iii. 239

Volumnii, the, iii. 112

Walker, Frederick, ii. 129; iii. 76

Walter of Brienne. (_See_ Athens, Duke of)

Walter of the Mill, Archbishop of Palermo, iii. 306 _note_, 308

Webster, the dramatist, i. 220; ii. 103-126, 267, 271, 277

Weisshorn, the, i. 54

Whitman, Walt, ii. 24; iii. 172

Wien, i. 45

Wiesen, i. 65; ii. 127

William of Apulia, iii. 298, 299, 305

William the Bad and William the Good of Sicily, iii. 305, 306, 308, 311

Winckelman, iii. 188

Wolfgang, i. 30

Wolfswalk, the, i. 31

Wordsworth, i. 5, 6, 10, 11; ii. 262, 263, 273; iii. 172, 173

Wyatt, Sir Thomas, ii. 261, 262

Xenophanes, iii. 171, 173, 353

Xiphilinus, iii. 192

Zafferana, iii. 282, 283

Zante, iii. 363

Zeno, Carlo, i. 260

Zeus Olympius, iii. 290

Zizers, i. 65