been shared by the Italians of the earlier and
the later classic epoch. The land is full of monuments pertaining to
those two brilliant periods; and whenever the voice of poet has spoken
or the hand of artist has been at work, that spirit, as distinguished
from the spirit of mediaevalism, has found expression.

Yet it must be remembered that during the five centuries above
mentioned Italy was given over to Lombards, Franks, and Germans.
Feudal institutions, alien to the social and political ideals of the
classic world, took a tolerably firm hold on the country. The Latin
element remained silent, passive, in abeyance, undergoing an important
transformation. It was in the course of those five hundred years that
the Italians as a modern people, separable from their Roman ancestors,
were formed. At the close of this obscure passage in Italian history,
their communes, the foundation of Italy's future independence, and the
source of her peculiar national development, appeared in all the
vigour and audacity of youth. At its close the Italian genius
presented Europe with its greatest triumph of constructive ability,
the Papacy. At its close again the series of supreme artistic
achievements, starting with the architecture of churches and public
palaces, passing on to sculpture and painting, and culminating in
music, which only ended with the temporary extinction of national
vitality in the seventeenth century, was simultaneously begun in all
the provinces of the peninsula.

So important were these five centuries of incubation for Italy, and so
little is there left of them to arrest the attention of the student,
dazzled as he is by the ever-living glories of Greece, Rome, and the
Renaissance, that a visit to the ruins of Canossa is almost a duty.
There, in spite of himself, by the very isolation and forlorn
abandonment of what was once so formidable a seat of feudal despotism
and ecclesiastical tyranny, he is forced to confront the obscure but
mighty spirit of the middle ages. There, if anywhere, the men of those
iron-hearted times anterior to the Crusades will acquire distinctness
for his imagination, when he recalls the three main actors in the
drama enacted on the summit of Canossa's rock in the bitter winter of
1077.

Canossa lies almost due south of Reggio d'Emilia, upon the slopes of
the Apennines. Starting from Reggio, the carriage-road keeps to the
plain for some while in a westerly direction, and then bends away
tow