se wars. Like the English
of their time, the Mantuans were famous bowmen, and their shafts took
flight all over Lombardy. At the same time they did not omit to fight
each other at home; and it must have been a dullish kind of day
in Mantua when there was no street-battle between families of the
factious nobility. Dante has peopled his Hell from the Italy of this
time, and he might have gone farther and fared worse for a type of
the infernal state. The spectacle of these countless little Italian
powers, racked, and torn, and blazing with pride, aggression,
and disorder, within and without,--full of intrigue, anguish, and
shame,--each with its petty thief or victorious faction making war
upon the other, and bubbling over with local ambitions, personal
rivalries, and lusts,--is a spectacle which the traveller of to-day,
passing over the countless forgotten battle-fields, and hurried from
one famous city to another by railroad, can scarcely conjure up.
Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, Mantua Vicenza, Verona,
Bassano,--all are now at peace with each other, and firmly united in
the national sentiment that travellers were meant to be eaten alive
by Italians. Poor old cities! it is hard to conceive of their bygone
animosities; still harder to believe that all the villages squatting
on the long white roads, and waking up to beg of you as your diligence
passes, were once embroiled in deadly and incessant wars. Municipal
pride is a good thing, and discentralization is well; and we have to
thank these intensely local little states for genius triply crowned
with the glories of literature, art, and science, which Italy might
not have produced if she had been united, and if the little states had
loved themselves less and Italy more. Though, after all, there is
the doubt whether it is not better to bless one's obscure and happy
children with peace and safety, than to give to the world a score of
great names at the cost to millions of incalculable misery.

Besides their local wars and domestic feuds the Mantuans had
troubles on a much larger scale,--troubles, indeed, which the Emperor
Barbarossa laid out for all Italy. In Carlyle's History of Frederick
the Great you can read a pleasanter account of the Emperor's business
at Roncaglia about this time than our Italian chroniclers will give
you. Carlyle loves a tyrant; and if the tyrant is a ruffian and bully,
and especially a German, there are hardly any lengths to which that
hist