or the head to rest in, and a hole at the foot "to
breathe through," as the boy said. Does not the fact that this relic
has to be protected from the depredations of travellers, who could
otherwise carry it away piecemeal, speak eloquently of a large amount
of vulgar and rapacious innocence drifting about the world?

It is well to see even such idle and foolish curiosities, however, in
a city like Verona, for the mere going to and fro in search of them
through her streets is full of instruction and delight. To my mind, no
city has a fairer place than she that sits beside the eager Adige, and
breathes the keen air of mountains white with snows in winter, green
and purple with vineyards in summer, and forever rich with marble.
Around Verona stretch those gardened plains of Lombardy, on which
Nature, who dotes on Italy, and seems but a step-mother to all
transalpine lands, has lavished every gift of beauty and fertility.
Within the city's walls, what store of art and history! Her
market-places have been the scenes of a thousand tragic or ridiculous
dramas; her quaint and narrow streets are ballads and legends full
of love-making and murder; the empty, grass-grown piazzas before
her churches are tales that are told of municipal and ecclesiastical
splendor. Her nobles sleep in marble tombs so beautiful that the dust
in them ought to be envied by living men in Verona; her lords lie in
perpetual state in the heart of the city, in magnificent sepulchres of
such grace and opulence, that, unless a language be invented full
of lance-headed characters, and Gothic vagaries of arch and finial,
flower and fruit, bird and beast, they can never be described. Sacred
be their rest from pen of mine, Verona! Nay, while I would fain bring
the whole city before my reader's fancy, I am loath and afraid to
touch any thing in it with my poor art: either the tawny river,
spanned with many beautiful bridges, and murmurous with mills afloat
and turned by the rapid current; or the thoroughfares with their
passengers and bright shops and caffes; or the grim old feudal towers;
or the age-embrowned palaces, eloquent in their haughty strength of
the times when they were family fortresses; or the churches with the
red pillars of their porticos resting upon the backs of eagle-headed
lions; or even the white-coated garrison (now there no more), with its
heavy-footed rank and file, its handsome and resplendent officers,
its bristling fortifications, its hors