nts of art in
which these elements of nature and of human qualities are blended.
The fusion is too delicate and subtle for complete analysis; and the
total effect in each particular case may best be compared to that
impressed on us by a strong personality, making itself felt in the
minutest details. Climate, situation, ethnological conditions, the
political vicissitudes of past ages, the bias of the people to
certain industries and occupations, the emergence of distinguished
men at critical epochs, have all contributed their quota to the
composition of an individuality which abides long after the locality
has lost its ancient vigour.

Since the year 1557, when Gian Giacomo de' Medici laid the country
of Siena waste, levelled her luxurious suburbs, and delivered her
famine-stricken citizens to the tyranny of the Grand Duke Cosimo,
this town has gone on dreaming in suspended decadence. Yet the
epithet which was given to her in her days of glory, the title of
'Fair Soft Siena,' still describes the city. She claims it by right
of the gentle manners, joyous but sedate, of her inhabitants, by the
grace of their pure Tuscan speech, and by the unique delicacy of her
architecture. Those palaces of brick, with finely moulded lancet
windows, and the lovely use of sculptured marbles in pilastered
colonnades, are fit abodes for the nobles who reared them five
centuries ago, of whose refined and costly living we read in the
pages of Dante or of Folgore da San Gemignano. And though the
necessities of modern life, the decay of wealth, the dwindling of
old aristocracy, and the absorption of what was once an independent
state in the Italian nation, have obliterated that large signorial
splendour of the Middle Ages, we feel that the modern Sienese are
not unworthy of their courteous ancestry.

Superficially, much of the present charm of Siena consists in the
soft opening valleys, the glimpses of long blue hills and fertile
country-side, framed by irregular brown houses stretching along the
slopes on which the town is built, and losing themselves abruptly in
olive fields and orchards. This element of beauty, which brings the
city into immediate relation with the country, is indeed not
peculiar to Siena. We find it in Perugia, in Assisi, in
Montepulciano, in nearly all the hill towns of Umbria and Tuscany.
But their landscape is often tragic and austere, while this is
always suave. City and country blend here in delightful amity.
Neithe