in streets, as well as human
nature, they could not, of course, feel that wonder in the Mantuan
avenues which inspired a Venetian ambassador, two centuries since, to
write the Serenest Senate in praise of their marvelous extent and
straightness; but they were still conscious of a certain expansive
difference from Gothic Verona and narrow Venice. The windows of the
ground-floors were grated to the prison-like effect common throughout
Italy; but people evidently lived upon the ground-floors, and at many of
the iron-barred windows fair young prisoners sat and looked out upon the
streets, or laughed and chatted together. About the open doorways,
moreover, people lounged gossiping; and the interiors of the
entry-halls, as they appeared to the passing glance, were clean, and had
not that forbidding, inhospitable air characteristic of most
house-entrances in North Italy. But sculptured Venice and Verona had
unfitted the travellers for pleasure in the stucco of Mantua; and they
had an immense scorn for the large and beautiful palaces of which the
before-quoted ambassador speaks, because they found them faced with
cunningly-moulded plaster instead of carven stone. Nevertheless, they
could not help a kind of half-tender respect for the old town. It shares
the domestic character of its scenes with the other ducal cities,
Modena, Parma, and Ferrara; and this character is, perhaps, proper to
all long and intensely municipalized communities. But Mantua has a
ghostly calm wholly its own; and this was not in the least broken that
evening by chatters at thresholds, and pretty laughers at grated
windows. It was very, very quiet. Perhaps half a score of carriages
rumbled by us in our long walk, and we met some scattered promenaders.
But for the most part the streets were quite empty; and even in the
chief piazza, where there was still some belated show of buying and
selling, and about the doors of the caffes, where there was a good deal
of languid loafing, there was no indecency of noise or bustle There were
visibly few people in the place, and it was in decay; but it was not
squalid in its lapse. The streets were scrupulously neat and clean, and
the stuccoed houses were all painted of that pale saffron hue which
gives such unquestionable respectability to New England towns. Before we
returned to our lodgings, Mantua had turned into twilight; and we walked
homeward through a placid and dignified gloom, nowhere broken by the
flare of gas, a