ofessed to be.

Gradually these meetings became more and more mere social gatherings
in outward appearance, and revolutionary propagandist assemblies in
reality. As regards the former aspect of them, the different cities
strove to outdo each other in the magnificence and generosity of their
reception of their "scientific" guests. Masses of publications were
prepared, especially topographical and historical accounts of the city
which played Amphytrion for the occasion, and presented gratuitously
to the members of the association. Merely little guide-books, of which
a few hundred copies were needed in the case of the earlier meetings,
they became in the case of the latter ones at Naples, Genoa, Milan,
and Venice, large and magnificently printed tomes, prepared by the
most competent authorities and produced at a very great expense.

Venice especially outdid all her rivals, and printed an account of the
Queen of the Adriatic, embracing history, topography, science in
all its branches, and artistic story, in four huge and magnificent
volumes, which remains to the present day by far the best
topographical monograph that any city of the peninsula possesses. This
truly splendid work, which brought out in the ordinary way could not
have been sold for less than six or eight guineas, was presented,
together with much other printed matter--an enormous lithographed
panorama of Venice and her lagoons some five feet long in a handsome
roll cover, I remember among them--to every "member" on his enrolment
as such.

Then there were concerts, and excursions, and great daily dinners
the gayest and most enjoyable imaginable, at which both sexes were
considered to be equally scientific and equally welcome. The dinners
were not absolutely gratuitous, but the tickets for them were issued
at a price very much inferior to the real cost of the entertainment.
And all this it must be understood was done not by any subscription of
members scientific or otherwise, but by the city and its municipality;
the motive for such expenditure being the highly characteristic
Italian one, of rivalling and outdoing in magnificence other
cities and municipalities, or in the historical language of Italy,
"communes."

Old Rome, with her dependent cities, made no sign during all these
autumns of ever increasing festivity. Pity that they should have come
to an end before she did so; for at the rate at which things were
going, we should all at least have been crow