ory of San Marino, including its statutes,
in three volumes, furnished intellectual food. But I confess to having
learned from these pages little else than this: first, that the survival
of the Commonwealth through all phases 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 eagle's-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 girdlin