sleepy bells and cushioned ease
of immemorial Deans--or this poor threadbare passion of Perugia, where
every stone is stained with blood, and where genius in painters and
scholars and prophets and ecstatic lovers has throbbed itself away to
nothingness? It would be foolish to seek an answer to this question,
idle to institute a comparison, for instance, between those tall young
men with their broad winter cloaks who remind me of Grifonetto, and the
vergers pottering in search of shillings along the gravel paths of
Salisbury. It is more rational, perhaps, to reflect of what strange
stuff our souls are made in this age of the world, when aesthetic
pleasures, full, genuine, and satisfying, can be communicated alike by
Perugia with its fascination of a dead irrevocable dramatic past, and
Salisbury, which finds the artistic climax of its English comfort in the
'Angel in the House.' From Matarazzo, smitten with a Greek love for the
beautiful Grifonetto, to Mr. Patmore, is a wide step.

_ORVIETO_

On the road from Siena to Rome, halfway between Ficulle and Viterbo,
is the town of Orvieto. Travellers often pass it in the night-time.
Few stop there, for the place is old and dirty, and its inns are
said to be indifferent. But none who see it even from a distance can
fail to be struck with its imposing aspect, as it rises from the
level plain upon that mass of rock among the Apennines.

Orvieto is built upon the first of those huge volcanic blocks which
are found like fossils embedded in the more recent geological
formations of Central Italy, and which stretch in an irregular but
unbroken line to the Campagna of Rome. Many of them, like that on
which Civita Castellana is perched, are surrounded by rifts and
chasms and ravines and fosses, strangely furrowed and twisted by the
force of fiery convulsions. But their advanced guard, Orvieto,
stands up definite and solid, an almost perfect cube, with walls
precipitous to north and south and east, but slightly sloping to the
westward. At its foot rolls the Paglia, one of those barren streams
which swell in winter with the snows and rains of the Apennines, but
which in summer-time shrink up, and leave bare beds of sand and
pestilential canebrakes to stretch irregularly round their dwindled
waters.

The weary flatness and utter desolation of this valley present a
sinister contrast to the broad line of the Apennines, swelling tier
on tier, from their oak-girdled basements set w