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