ing the appalling features which
repel our race from pictorial history-books generally.

The "Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto" includes notice of all
those dear and famous cities of North Italy which we know,--of Verona,
Vicenza, Padua, Venice, Mantua, Modena, Brescia, Bergamo, and the
rest; but here we have only to do with the part which concerns Mantua.
This is written by the advocate Bartolomeo Arrighi, whose ingenious
avoidance of all that might make his theme attractive could not
be sufficiently celebrated here, and may therefore be left to the
reader's fancy. There is little in his paper to leaven statistical
heaviness; and in recounting one of the most picturesque histories,
he contrives to give merely a list of the events and a diagram of
the scenes. Whatever illustrated character in princes or people he
carefully excludes, and the raciness of anecdote and the flavor
of manner and epoch distil not into his compilation from the elder
historiographers. I have therefore to go back, in my present purpose,
to the authors whose substance he has desiccated; and with their help,
and that of one or two antiquated authors of this century, I shall try
to rehabilitate the ducal state of Mantua,

"Which was an image of the mighty world,"

and present some shadow of its microcosmal life. The story has the
completeness of a tragedy; but it runs over many centuries, and it
ends like a farce, though it ends with a death. One feels, indeed,
almost as great satisfaction in the catastrophe as the Mantuans
themselves, who terminated their national existence and parted from
their last Duke with something like exultation.

As I recall my own impressions of the city, I doubt if any good or bad
fortune could rouse her to such positive emotion now. She seemed
sunken, that dull April evening of our visit, into an abiding lethargy;
as if perfect repose, and oblivion from the many-troubled past,--from
the renown of all former famine, fire, intrigue, slaughter, and
sack,--were to be preferred by the ghost of a once populous and haughty
capital to the most splendid memories of national life. Certainly, the
phantom of bygone Mantuan greatness did not haunt the idle tourists who
strolled through her wide streets, enjoying their quiet beauty and
regularity, and finding them, despite their empty, melancholy air, full
of something that reminded of home. Coming from a land where there is a
vast deal of length, breadth, and rectitude