r yields that sense of aloofness which stirs melancholy.

The most charming district in the immediate neighbourhood of Siena
lies westward, near Belcaro, a villa high up on a hill. It is a
region of deep lanes and golden-green oak-woods, with cypresses and
stone-pines, and little streams in all directions flowing over the
brown sandstone. The country is like some parts of rural
England--Devonshire or Sussex. Not only is the sandstone here, as
there, broken into deep gullies; but the vegetation is much the
same. Tufted spleenwort, primroses, and broom tangle the hedges
under boughs of hornbeam and sweet-chestnut. This is the landscape
which the two sixteenth-century novelists of Siena, Fortini and
Sermini, so lovingly depicted in their tales. Of literature
absorbing in itself the specific character of a country, and
conveying it to the reader less by description than by sustained
quality of style, I know none to surpass Fortini's sketches. The
prospect from Belcaro is one of the finest to be seen in Tuscany.
The villa stands at a considerable elevation, and commands an
immense extent of hill and dale. Nowhere, except Maremma-wards, a
level plain. The Tuscan mountains, from Monte Amiata westward to
Volterra, round Valdelsa, down to Montepulciano and Radicofani, with
their innumerable windings and intricacies of descending valleys,
are dappled with light and shade from flying storm-clouds, sunshine
here, and there cloud-shadows. Girdling the villa stands a grove of
ilex-trees, cut so as to embrace its high-built walls with dark
continuous green. In the courtyard are lemon-trees and pomegranates
laden with fruit. From a terrace on the roof the whole wide view is
seen; and here upon a parapet, from which we leaned one autumn
afternoon, my friend discovered this _graffito_: '_E vidi e piansi
il fato amaro!_'--'I gazed, and gazing, wept the bitterness of
fate.'

II

The prevailing note of Siena and the Sienese seems, as I have said,
to be a soft and tranquil grace; yet this people had one of the
stormiest and maddest of Italian histories. They were passionate in
love and hate, vehement in their popular amusements, almost frantic
in their political conduct of affairs. The luxury, for which Dante
blamed them, the levity De Comines noticed in their government,
found counter-poise in more than usual piety and fervour. S.
Bernardino, the great preacher and peacemaker of the Middle Ages; S.
Catherine, the worthiest of all wom