ory of the city.
But indeed, if the reader dealt candidly with himself, how much
could he profess to know of Mantuan history? The ladies all have
some erudite associations with the place as giving the term of
_mantua-making_ to the art of dress, and most persons have heard that
Mantua's law was once death to any he that uttered mortal drugs there,
and that the place was till a few years since an Austrian fortress
on the Mincio. Of Giulio Romano, and his works to Mantua, a good
many have heard; and there is something known to the reader of the
punctuated edition of Browning about Sordello. But of the Gonzagas of
Mantua, and their duchy, what do you know, gentle reader?

For myself, when in Mantua, I tried to make a virtue of my want of
information, and fancied that a sort of general ignorance was
more favorable to my enjoyment of what I saw there than thorough
acquaintance with the city's history would have been. It certainly
enabled me to accept all the poetic fiction of the custodians, and
to embroider with their pleasing improbabilities the business-like
succinctness of the guide-books; to make out of the twilight which
involved all impressions a misty and heroic picture of the Mantuan
past, wherein her great men appeared with a stately and gigantic
uncertainty of outline, and mixed with dim scenes of battle, intrigue,
and riot, and were gone before Fact could lay her finger on any shape,
and swear that it was called so, and did so and so. But even if there
had been neither pleasure nor profit in this ignorance, the means of
dispelling it are so scant in modern literature that it might well
have been excused in a far more earnest traveller. The difficulty,
indeed, which I afterwards experienced in trying to learn something of
Mantua, is my best excuse for writing of its history here.

I fancy that the few recent books on the subject are not in the hands
of most readers, and I have a comforting belief that scarcely a
reader of mine has been a reader of the "Grande Illustrazione de
Lombardo-Veneto."[Mantova e Sua Provincia, per 'Avvocato Bartolomeo
Arrighi: _Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto, ossia Storia delle
Citta, des Borghi, Communi, Castelli, etc., fino ai Tempi moderni.
Per Cura di Cesare Cantu, e a' altri Literati_. Milano, 1859.] Yet
I suppose that he forms some notion of this work from its title, and
figures to himself a physical bulk of six volumes,--large, abounding
in ill-printed wood-cuts, and hav