tro Farnese but a symbol
of those hollow principalities which the despot and the stranger built
in Italy after the fatal date of 1494, when national enthusiasm and
political energy were expiring in a blaze of art, and when the Italians
as a people had ceased to be; but when the phantom of their former life,
surviving in high works of beauty, was still superb by reason of
imperishable style! How much in Italy of the Renaissance was, like this
plank-built, plastered theatre, a glorious sham! The sham was seen
through then; and now it stands unmasked: and yet, strange to say, so
perfect is its form that we respect the sham and yield our spirits to
the incantation of its music.

The battle of Fornovo, as modern battles go, was a paltry affair; and
even at the time it seemed sufficiently without result. Yet the trumpets
which rang on July 6th, 1495, for the onset, sounded the _reveille_ of
the modern world; and in the inconclusive termination of the struggle of
that day the Italians were already judged and sentenced as a nation. The
armies who met that morning represented Italy and France--Italy, the
Sibyl of Renaissance; France, the Sibyl of Revolution. At the fall of
evening Europe was already looking northward; and the last years of the
fifteenth century were opening an act which closed in blood at Paris on
the ending of the eighteenth.

If it were not for thoughts like these, no one, I suppose, would take
the trouble to drive for two hours out of Parma to the little village of
Fornovo--a score of bare gray hovels on the margin of a pebbly
river-bed beneath the Apennines. The fields on either side, as far as
eye can see, are beautiful indeed in May sunlight, painted here with
flax, like shallow sheets of water reflecting a pale sky, and there with
clover red as blood. Scarce unfolded leaves sparkle like flamelets of
bright green upon the knotted vines, and the young corn is bending all
one way beneath a western breeze. But not less beautiful than this is
the whole broad plain of Lombardy; nor are the nightingales louder here
than in the acacia-trees around Pavia. As we drive, the fields become
less fertile, and the hills encroach upon the level, sending down their
spurs upon that waveless plain like blunt rocks jutting out into a
tranquil sea. When we reach the bed of the Taro, these hills begin to
narrow on either hand, and the road rises. Soon they open out again with
gradual curving lines, forming a kind of amphitheat