gna of Guido Reni. I have
elsewhere noticed how ineffaceably and exclusively the manner of the
masters seems to have stamped itself upon the art of the cities where
they severally wrought,--how at Parma Correggio yet lives in all the
sketchy mouths of all the pictures painted there since his time. One
might almost believe, hearing the Parmesans talk, that his manner had
infected their dialect, and that they fashioned their lazy, incomplete
utterance with the careless lips of his nymphs and angels. They almost
entirely suppress the last syllable of every word, and not with
a quick precision, as people do in Venice or Milan, but with an
ineffable languor, as if language were not worth the effort of
enunciation; while they rise and lapse several times in each sentence,
and sink so sweetly and sadly away upon the closing vocable that the
listener can scarcely repress his tears. In this melancholy
rhythm, one of the citizens recounted to me the whole story of the
assassination of the last Duke of Parma in 1850; and left me as softly
moved as if I had been listening to a tale of hapless love. Yet it was
an ugly story, and after the enchantment of the recital passed away, I
perceived that when the Duke was killed justice was done on one of the
maddest and wickedest tyrants that ever harassed an unhappy city.

The Parmesans remember Maria Louisa, Napoleon's wife, with pleasant
enough feelings, and she seems to have been good to them after the
manner of sovereigns, enriching their city with art, and beautifying
it in many ways, besides doing works of private charity and
beneficence. Her daughter by a second marriage, the Countess
Sanvitali, still lives in Parma; and in one of the halls of the
Academy of Fine Arts the Duchess herself survives in the marble of
Canova. It was she who caused the two great pictures of Correggio,
the St. Jerome and the Madonna della Scodella, to be placed alone in
separate apartments hung with silk, in which the painter's initial A
is endlessly interwoven. "The Night," to which the St. Jerome is "The
Day," is in the gallery at Dresden, but Parma could have kept nothing
more representative of her great painter's power than this "Day." It
is "the bridal of the earth and sky," and all sweetness, brightness,
and tender shadow are in it. Many other excellent works of Correggio,
Caracci, Parmigianino, and masters of different schools are in this
gallery, but it is the good fortune of travellers, who have to