ds of plants in bloom in the garden below.
But even were flowers absent, the character of the vegetation excludes
from northern eyes the sense of winter. The bare branches of the
fig-tree alone remind one that "summer is over and gone." Every
homestead up the torrent-valleys is embosomed in the lustrous foliage of
its lemon gardens. Every rivulet is choked with maiden-hair and delicate
ferns. The golden globes of the orange are the ornament of every garden.
The dark green masses of the olive, ruined by strong winds into sheets
of frosted silver, are the background of the whole. And right in front
from headland to headland lie the bright waters of the Mediterranean,
rising and sinking with a summer's swell, and glancing with a thousand
colours even in the gloomiest weather.

The story of San Remo begins with Saracenic inroads from Corsica and
Sardinia in the ninth century, to which Nizza, Oneglia, and Genoa owed
their walls. But before this time the wild Ligurian coast had afforded
hermitages to the earlier bishops of Genoa; to Siro who became its
apostle, to Romolo who was destined to give his name to the territory of
the town. San Romolo is indeed its invariable designation till the
fifteenth century, and it has been conjectured that its present name is
owing to no fanciful punning on Romulus and Remus but to a popular
contraction of its full ecclesiastical title, "Sancti Romuli in eremo."
It was in this "waste," left without inhabitants by the Saracenic
inroads, that Theodulf, bishop of Genoa, settled a little agricultural
colony round the Carolingian fort and lands which, though within the
feudal jurisdiction of the Counts of Ventimiglia, were the property of
his see. Two centuries passed quietly over the little town ere the
sudden rise of the Consulate here, as at Genoa and Milan, gave it
municipal liberty. The civil authority of the bishops passed to the
communal Parliament, the free assembly of the citizens in the church of
San Stefano; all civil administration, even the right of peace and war,
or of alliance, was exercised with perfect freedom from episcopal
intervention. The rights of the bishop in fact were reduced to the
nomination of the judicial magistrates of the town and the reception of
certain fees; rights which were subsequently sold to the Dorias, and
transferred by the Dorias to the Republic of Genoa.

This great communal revolution, itself a result of the wave of feeling
produced by the Crusades, le