ing in suspended decadence. Yet the epithet which
was given to her in her days of glory, the title of "Fair Soft Siena,"
still describes the city. She claims it by right of the gentle manners,
joyous but sedate, of her inhabitants, by the grace of their pure Tuscan
speech, and by the unique delicacy of her architecture. Those palaces of
brick, with finely-moulded lancet windows, and the lovely use of
sculptured marbles in pilastered colonnades, are fit abodes for the
nobles who reared them five centuries ago, of whose refined and costly
living we read in the pages of Dante or of Folgore da San Gemignano. And
though the necessities of modern life, the decay of wealth, the
dwindling of old aristocracy, and the absorption of what was once an
independent state in the Italian nation, have obliterated that large
signorial splendour of the Middle Ages, we feel that the modern Sienese
are not unworthy of their courteous ancestry.

Superficially, much of the present charm of Siena consists in the soft
opening valleys, the glimpses of long blue hills and fertile
country-side, framed by irregular brown houses stretching along the
slopes on which the town is built, and losing themselves abruptly in
olive fields and orchards. This element of beauty, which brings the city
into immediate relation with the country, is indeed not peculiar to
Siena. We find it in Perugia, in Assisi, in Montepulciano, in nearly all
the hill towns of Umbria and Tuscany. But their landscape is often
tragic and austere, while this is always suave. City and country blend
here in delightful amity. Neither yields that sense of aloofness which
stirs melancholy.

The most charming district in the immediate neighbourhood of Siena lies
westward, near Belcaro, a villa high up on a hill. It is a region of
deep lanes and golden-green oak-woods, with cypresses and stone-pines,
and little streams in all directions flowing over the brown sandstone.
The country is like some parts of rural England--Devonshire or Sussex.
Not only is the sandstone here, as there, broken into deep gullies; but
the vegetation is much the same. Tufted spleen-wort, primroses, and
broom tangle the hedges under boughs of hornbeam and sweet-chestnut.
This is the landscape which the two sixteenth century novelists of
Siena, Fortini and Sermini, so lovingly depicted in their tales. Of
literature absorbing in itself the specific character of a country, and
conveying it to the reader less by descripti