ases of European
politics had been semi-miraculous; secondly, that the most eminent San
Marinesi had been lawyers. It is possible on a hasty deduction from
these two propositions (to which, however, I am far from wishing to
commit myself), that the latter is a sufficient explanation of the
former.

From San Marino the road plunges at a break-neck pace. We are now in
the true Feltrian highlands, whence the Counts of Montefeltro issued
in the twelfth century. Yonder eyrie is San Leo, which formed the key
of entrance to the duchy of Urbino in campaigns fought many hundred
years ago. Perched on the crest of a precipitous rock, this fortress
looks as though it might defy all enemies but famine. And yet San Leo
was taken and re-taken by strategy and fraud, when Montefeltro,
Borgia, Malatesta, Rovere, contended for dominion in these valleys.
Yonder is Sta. Agata, the village to which Guidobaldo fled by night
when Valentino drove him from his dukedom. A little farther towers
Carpegna, where one branch of the Montefeltro house maintained a
countship through seven centuries, and only sold their fief to Rome in
1815. Monte Coppiolo lies behind, Pietra Rubia in front: two other
eagles' nests of the same brood. What a road it is!

It beats the tracks on Exmoor. The uphill and downhill of Devonshire
scorns compromise or mitigation by _detour_ and zigzag. But here
geography is on a scale so far more vast, and the roadway is so far
worse metalled than with us in England--knotty masses of talc and
nodes of sandstone cropping up at dangerous turnings--that only
Dante's words describe the journey:--

Vassi in Sanleo, e discendesi in Noli,
Montasi su Bismantova in cacume
Con esso i pie; ma qui convien ch' uom voli.

Of a truth, our horses seemed rather to fly than scramble up and down
these rugged precipices; Visconti cheerily animating them with the
brave spirit that was in him, and lending them his wary driver's help
of hand and voice at need.

We were soon upon a cornice-road between the mountains and the
Adriatic: following the curves of gulch and cleft ravine; winding
round ruined castles set on points of vantage; the sea-line high
above their grass-grown battlements, the shadow-dappled champaign
girdling their bastions mortised on the naked rock. Except for the
blue lights across the distance, and the ever-present sea, these
earthy Apennines would be too grim. Infinite air and this spare veil
of spring-tide greenery on