e one unchangeable scene of all the dramas,
is--like the statues in the niches and on the gallery inclosing the
auditorium--Greek in the most fashionable Vicentine taste. It must
have been but an operatic chorus that sang in the semicircular space
just below the stage and in front of the audience. Admit and forget
these small blemishes and aberrations, however, and what a marvelous
thing Palladio's theatre is! The sky above the stage is a wonderful
trick, and those three streets--one in the centre and serving as
entrance for the royal persons of the drama, one at the right for
the nobles, and one at the left for the citizens--present unsurpassed
effects of illusion. They are not painted, but modeled in stucco. In
perspective they seem each half a mile long, but entering them you
find that they run back from the proscenium only some fifteen feet,
the fronts of the houses and the statues upon them decreasing in
recession with a well-ordered abruptness. The semicircular gallery
above the auditorium is of stone, and forty statues of marble crown
its colonnade, or occupy niches between the columns.

II.

It was curious to pass, with the impression left by this costly and
ingenious toy upon our minds, at once to the amphitheatre in Verona,
which, next to the Coliseum, has, of all the works bequeathed us
by the ancient Roman world, the greatest claim upon the wonder and
imagination. Indeed, it makes even a stronger appeal to the fancy. We
know who built the Coliseum, but in its unstoried origin, the Veronese
arena has the mystery of the Pyramids. Was its founder Augustus,
or Vitellus, or Antoninus, or Maximian, or the Republic of Verona?
Nothing is certain but that it was conceived and reared by some mighty
prince or people, and that it yet remains in such perfection that the
great shows of two thousand years ago might take place in it to-day.
It is so suggestive of the fierce and splendid spectacles of Roman
times that the ring left by a modern circus on the arena, and absurdly
dwarfed by the vast space of the oval, had an impertinence which
we hotly resented, looking down on it from the highest grade of the
interior. It then lay fifty feet below us, in the middle of an ellipse
five hundred feet in length and four hundred in breadth, and capable
of holding fifty thousand spectators. The seats that the multitudes
pressed of old are perfect, yet; scarce a stone has been removed from
the interior; the aedile and the prefect