e life. Military science has made a mailed
giant of Verona, and a silent one, save upon occasion. Its face grins
of war, like a skeleton of death; the salient image of the skull and
congregating worms was one that Italian lyrists applied naturally to
Verona.

The old Field-Marshal and chief commander of the Austrian forces in
Lombardy, prompted by the counsels of his sagacious adlatus, the chief
of the staff, was engaged at that period in adding some of those ugly
round walls and flanking bastions to Verona, upon which, when Austria
was thrown back by the first outburst of the insurrection and the
advance of the Piedmontese, she was enabled to plant a sturdy hind-foot,
daring her foes as from a rock of defence.

A group of officers, of the cavalry, with a few infantry uniforms
skirting them, were sitting in the pleasant cooling evening air, fanned
by the fresh springing breeze, outside one of the Piazza Bra caffes,
close upon the shadow of the great Verona amphitheatre. They were
smoking their attenuated long straw cigars, sipping iced lemonade or
coffee, and talking the common talk of the garrison officers, with
perhaps that additional savour of a robust immorality which a Viennese
social education may give. The rounded ball of the brilliant September
moon hung still aloft, lighting a fathomless sky as well as the fair
earth. It threw solid blackness from the old savage walls almost to a
junction with their indolent outstretched feet. Itinerant street music
twittered along the Piazza; officers walked arm-in-arm; now in moonlight
bright as day, now in a shadow black as night: distant figures twinkled
with the alternation. The light lay like a blade's sharp edge around the
massive circle. Of Italians of a superior rank, Verona sent none to
this resort. Even the melon-seller stopped beneath the arch ending the
Stradone Porta Nuova, as if he had reached a marked limit of his popular
customers.

This isolation of the rulers of Lombardy had commenced in Milan, but,
owing to particular causes, was not positively defined there as it was
in Verona. War was already rageing between the Veronese ladies and the
officers of Austria. According to the Gallic Terpsichorean code, a
lady who permits herself to make election of her partners and to reject
applicants to the honour of her hand in the dance, when that hand is
disengaged, has no just ground of complaint if a glove should smite her
cheek. The Austrians had to endure this sor