Neapolitan soldiers, no one, not even the respectable old lady who was glad to give me lodging, had much room to spare. There were no barracks; there was in her little house, she said, but one spare room besides the one she gave me; and in the other, for more than a year past, she had had two soldiers quartered, for whom she never had received a farthing, and never should; and as long as I could listen by the dim lamplight she recounted the various enormities of the rough fellows, who soon came stumbling in to bed. A new significance and value came then upon that half-forgotten and uncared-for article of our Constitution which provides that "No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner."

Part of the next morning's walk was in the casual company of a gendarme off duty. He, too, like his superior who had ridden with me yesterday, had his questions to ask, some of them about that great name with which Italy has rung loudly several times since, but which then was not so well known in Southern Italy but that its semivowels were commonly twisted into "Gallibaldi." He, too, had seen service in the '48." He was at Velletri, where Garibaldi, sallying southward from Rome, had come upon the Neapolitan army for restoring the Pope, and served them shortly as Neapolitans seem always to be served in fight; and where this worthy fellow had received a bullet-wound, of which he showed with much complacency the scar in the back of his neck! At noon, crossing the bridge of boats over the Tronto, I entered once more the States of the Church, whose frontier I had passed on my southward course at Terracina. Almost instantly the change already adverted to was not only obvious, but striking. The road was charming, though very hot. Not only were villages frequent, but the hillsides were sprinkled with gentlemen's country-seats, many of them elegant, and sometimes approaching the stately

splendor of the villas with which Rome and Naples are surrounded. Orangegardens loaded the air with their exquisite perfume, while the half-tropical effect of the near scenery, and of the sun's ardent brilliancy, was heightened by the vistas often opened up by some short valley of the snowy mountains at the left. There was no more borrowing the aid of a cart, or of the friendly shoulders of a contadino, to cross the mountain streams,—all were well bridged; while everything in the appearance of the country and of the people showed a difference so decided that it might almost be called a contrast with all that was visible south of the frontier.

So, after a day or two of walking and wagon-riding along this pleasant coast, I climbed the steep from which there shone afar the goal of so many other pilgrimages, the holy city of Loreto. It was doubtless rather curiosity than veneration which had made me look forward with some earnestness of desire to this visit; yet it was a disappointment that it should be so difficult to arouse an enthusiasm of whatever kind, even in the sanctuary itself, which, if its walls did not in very truth enclose the sublime events of the Annunciation and the Incarnation, has yet been for many centuries the object of the ardent faith, the reverent pilgrimage, and the sacrificial offerings of monarchs and pontiffs, and of their subjects by tens of millions.

Facing a broad piazza upon the utmost height of the hill city, flanked by a stately palace and a convent in the magnificent style which marks the date when the Papacy, though in the decline of its strength, was efflorescing in corruption, stands in like profuse splendor the church of the Santa Casa; and within the church, small, black, and dingy, yet at once the centre and the cause of this assemblage of church, palace, and city, the Holy House itself. Black, I have said; yet of its outer surface no one can speak but by conjecture or inference; for though you face the sanctuary, in whatever of the

four arms of the cruciform church you stand, if only you look inward from the entrance (for the House is at the intersection of them all), yet so closely incased is it in a glittering crust of sculptured marble, that the undevout visitor may well forget the doubtful miracle within for the sure marvels which are outside. The architecture of Bramante, and the patient sculpture of such as John of Bologna and Sansovino, and whatever there was greatest in their art through the first full third of the cinquecento, have hidden from sight the simple structure of Judæan shepherds, while they represent in work almost divine the events of which the House itself was witness, or the wonderful passages of its own later history. That history, too, in minute detail, including the migration from Nazareth to the coast of Dalmatia, and at last, in 1295, to the spot where it now stands, is inscribed on stone tablets in various parts of the church, in different languages, that pilgrims might be built up in the faith that brought them here; yet the only languages that considerable search discovered were English, Welsh, and what purported to be Scotch. How justly this last is published as a language distinct from the English may be judged from the heading: "The Storie of the Marvellous Flyttynge of ye Holy House of Our Ladye of Loreto."

Within, a simple curiosity, not sharpened by faith, is soon sated. A mere cell, or cabin, of rough, irregular brick, less than twenty-eight feet long, not half so high, and narrower still than its height, is black and grimy with the smoke of six centuries' incense. A single door gives entrance to humanity; one window, to all the light but what is furnished by the silver lamps that hang burning night and day before the shrine. Over a little altar is one, perhaps the most famous one, of those hideous images in black wood of which St. Luke, evangelist, physician, and sculptor, has the unenviable credit, which have been deemed the most precious treasures of more than one

Italian town; and to no one of which can this Lady and Child, of half life size, be reckoned inferior, whether in ugliness of feature or in splendor of vestment. But whatever be one's incredulity in respect to the cabin and the doll, there is no room to doubt the genuineness of the jewels that adorn the one, or of the treasures, in the form of votive offerings, that fill the other; nor, better yet, of the wide vista over land and sea which the declining sun was touching with a more splendid glory when I left the shrine of superstition, and looked forth from the lofty ramparts of the town.

Charming, but with something other than a true Italian beauty, is the region over which I looked that evening from the walls of Loreto, and through which I walked in the cool and cloudy morning: Il Giardino d'Italia, as others call it than those who live there; La Marca, — the March, or Marquisate, of Ancona. Undulating, and to a degree of irregularity sometimes that one should almost say mountainous, it is yet under high and thorough cultivation to the tops of its highest hills; while hills and vales and the winding roads and lanes are dotted or shaded by the young foliage of innumerable trees, which would alone have served to dispel the illusion to which I was tempted, to fancy myself in the Massachusetts valley of the Connecticut River. Almond-trees were blossoming in peachy fragrance; blue violets peeped from the grass along the road; un-Yankee boys in white smocks and caps, from the crowns of which hung gay colored tassels, looked up from their work, and helped to show that this was not New England: but, among them all, the eighteen miles seemed to have been no long walk, when at one o'clock I passed by the town of Ancona, - by houses, on the landward side, in whose walls were imbedded Austrian cannonballs, fired in its twenty-six days' bombardment in 1849, when revolution was suppressed for the Pope's benefit, -— around to the only entrance of the town, where its north wall joins the

port. Along the little strand, within the town, beside which my road led, were many squads of soldiers hard at drill. These, too, were Austrians; there were fifteen hundred of them here, besides those of other nativity; their flag was not the Emperor's, however, but the Pope's. They were recent volunteers, whom the annexation of the Emilian provinces, just north, and the threatening movements of "the bloody Piedmontese" upon the receding Papal frontier, had lately impelled to the defence of the few remaining jewels of the tiara. A crowd of young officers of these same dark green fellows spent the next morning, being Sunday, at their breakfast in my hotel, with such enthusiasm of champagne and warlike clamor as to belie the name of the Albergo della Pace. It was only a

few weeks later that these same blooming fields through which I had just walked were reddened by the blood of the hirelings who were now exercising or carousing about me; when Lamoricière had collected his twenty thousand mercenaries about that very hill of Castel Fidardo, which I had looked at with its little village on its crest, only to be overwhelmed and routed by Cialdini, and to see this stronghold of Ancona pass for the last time from the hands of the Roman pontiff.

Perhaps this Mount of Ancona, in a nook or "elbow" (ancōn) of whose northern base nestles the town, may be set down as the exact point where the Apennine range, pushing down from the northwest, fairly strikes the sea, and from which it presses against the sea, with its lofty side along all that coast over which I had come. From here to the north, the coast road no longer has to struggle for a narrow footing under the base of steep mountains. If it still keeps close to the shore, it is only because the shore is straight, and is the shortest line between the towns upon it. As I set out at noon in the lumbering diligence, the mountains at once receded on the left, and, instead, a range of low, monotonous hills accompanied us at a little

distance. At no more rapid rate, including frequent stoppages, than if I had been afoot, the melancholy vehicle trundled along through the afternoon and all the dismal night. Past Sinigallia, where the gloomy palace frowned over the road, where John-Mary Mastai-Ferretti began that life which he was to end, perhaps, as the last Pope with temporal dominion, and, at all events, after a reign surpassed in duration even now by not more than five of the successors of Peter; past Fano, with its triumphal arch of Augustus; after night had fallen, through Pesaro, and suffering long delay at the post-station of La Cattolica, which marked for the time the extent of Piedmontese aggression, and where the gray Sardinian uniform looked pleasantly once more under the light of the lanterns by which we were inspected; and in full daylight to Rimini, having accomplished sixty miles in seventeen hours of painful travel. Here were thousands of the new invaders from Cisalpine Gaul, who had crossed the Rubicon but a few miles back, and had passed into Rimini over a noble Roman bridge, and under a magnificent Augustan arch of triumph, on their way toward the Rome at which they arrived, but who were now busy in building great modern earthworks, as if they meant only to keep what they had got. From the ramparts, looking westward, there meets the eye, conspicuous across the plain, a dozen miles off, a long black cliff, the highest, apparently, in sight, its upper outline broken against the sky with towers, its summit and sides streaked all over with snow, which is all the territory of the Republic of San Marino, with its army of forty men, and its population of seven thousand.

If the country was now flat and uninteresting, yet even in such a region the late torment of the diligence was not better than freedom and independence on foot. So in two or three hours next morning I reached the little stream which even now is called II Rubicone, flowing "ruddy" with clay between high banks, and spanned by a wooden

bridge, it may be at the very spot where Caesar, on his way from Ravenna to seize the important fortress of Rimini, made that plunge upon which the fate of the world was to turn. The sea was near enough to the road, but hidden behind low mounds of sand. There were two or three little towns; Cervia, surrounded by a turreted wall, a square city of a couple of thousand people, through which, in its precise centre, the highway passes, broad and clean, and just three minutes' walk from gate to gate. Then, for ten or twelve miles, the road skirts the Pineta, - the grove of umbrella pines stretching along the sea in a narrow belt of wilderness. But at last the Pineta falls into the rear; the land spreads out into an utterly desolate low marsh, without house, stick, or stone to break its monotony, out of the midst of which rises, in solemn isolation, three or four miles before the gates of Ravenna are reached, and quite as far from the sea, the noble basilica of San Apollinare in Classe, stupendous monument of that Gothic empire and that Arian heresy which came near to universal sway over the souls and bodies of Christendom, and of which Ravenna was the Rome, the glorious metropolis and capital. In In this character alone, aside from all other claims, this lonely, half-deserted city, within the ample circuit of whose walls are streets overgrown with weeds and lined with vacant palaces, could never fail to excite the reverent enthusiasm of any one to whom ecclesiastical or simply historical antiquities are of interest, if only he should place himself within the circle of its attraction. Yet this is not all; for before the Goths Ravenna was great; and after orthodoxy had restored the unity of the Western Church, it needed many centuries of combined natural and ecclesiastical and political causes to reduce it from a splendid rank among the cities of Christendom. Before Venice rose upon the islands that cluster about the head of the Adriatic, but a few miles to the northward, Ravenna was Venice. This inland town, from which the sea

is distant by seven miles of dreary marsh, sat like Venice upon its clustered islands; the sea, as in those of Venice, was

"In its broad, its narrow streets, Ebbing and flowing";

countless bridges maintained communication between its isolated quarters; like Venice, its walls were impregnable and unattainable by the strong defence of the lagunes that encompassed it; while all the wealth of the East, that afterwards built the palaces of Venice, flowed into its lap, to be distributed by its merchants over all Western Europe. When Rome was shaking under the successive shocks of Northern invasion, the degenerate Cæsars fled hither to establish the still splendid court of the Western Empire. But her greatest magnificence was under the sway of that extraordinary people, that blueeyed, fair-haired race whose name is a synonyme for savage brutality, who yet conquered the conquerors of the world, and who from this capital, which they made to rival in splendor the city of Constantine itself, exercised a dominion reaching from the mouths of the Danube to the extremity of the Italian peninsula, and to the Pillars of Hercules and the Bay of Biscay. In that grand process which never ceases, however imperceptible to our vision, by which the mountains are being brought low and the valleys exalted, the Alps and the Apennines have been robbed of their substance to raise these miles upon miles of firm land from the bottom of the sea. No natural landmark points the successive stages of this vast but silent and constant change; only the names which faithful tradition has kept impressed upon the local topography serve to show how gradually the Adriatic retreated from the steps of the throne of its queen. When Rome was a republic, and Ravenna a town in its province of Cisalpine Gaul, the ships of Alexandria and Joppa discharged their cargoes in her very streets. Two miles from her walls, the lonely church of Sta. Maria in Porto shows by its name that at some early time, which

cannot be fixed, the harbor had retired so far from the city which had been built upon it; and the square light-house, which then had guided the mariner to his destination, was many centuries ago turned from its ludicrous inutility to pious uses as the bell-tower of the church. At nearly twice that distance from the gates there is nothing but the name of the magnificent church of San Apollinare (in Classe) to show that its site was once that of the suburb where the imperial "Fleet" lay moored; while between it and the sea are now four miles of black and dreary moorland, or of

"Ravenna's immemorial wood, Rooted where once the Adrian wave flowed o'er."

Thus, when the queenly city had been abandoned by her handmaid the sea, her commercial greatness fled to upstart Venice, or was shared by Venice with Genoa and Pisa; while, the Gothic sceptre having passed from the giant arm of Theodoric to successors as puny as the latest Cæsars, imperial power and ecclesiastical primacy were transported to the Rome which had so lately lost them, or went wandering and divided to Saxony or Franconia, to Paris or Aix-la-Chapelle. But though her dominion is long ago departed from her, Rome herself has not to-day such monuments of the period from Constantine to the death of Justinian, a space of two centuries and a half, as Ravenna possesses in unimpaired magnificence. Compare these dates, for example, of all existing works in mosaic, up to the time last named: in Rome, at Sta. Sabina, but almost wholly destroyed, A. D. 425; part of the mosaics at Sta. Maria Maggiore, 432; SS. Cosmo and Damian, 530; at Ravenna, at the tomb of Galla Placidia, 440; at San Giovanni in Fonte, 451; at San Vitale, 547; at Sta. Maria in Cosmedin, 553; at San Apollinare in Classe, 567; and at San Apollinare Nuovo, 570; while the superiority of these to the few Roman works is far greater in extent and splendor than in mere number. Something, perhaps, of this inequality is due to the fact that the

returning power and wealth of the Roman episcopate made possible a lavishness of reparation and improvement which left little but the name to many a venerable relic of the earlier centuries, while deserted and declining Ravenna had hardly the vigor even to destroy; but it cannot be doubted that the period in question was that which came nearest to a total eclipse of Roman splendor, and during which the heretical supremacy and the barbarian invasions that were oppressing her were building her Trans-Apennine rival into a gorgeous seat of empire.

Of all the monuments of that schismatic faith and that barbaric empire. hardly one is more impressive than this lonely basilica of San Apollinare in that dismal moorland, which was once the busy suburb of the Fleet. More than thirteen hundred years ago, the thin, flat bricks-as Roman in their shape and the fashion of their putting together as if they had not been laid by those Goths whose name imports all that is brutal and destructive-rose into its arcaded sides and clerestory, and its lofty circular campanile. Within, it is green now with damp and mould, and its lower chapels swamped in water. No worshipper kneels before its altar; a sickly looking priest or two, caring for the unused utensils of church service, is the only living thing to be seen by the visitor, except the spiritual life of thirteen centuries ago, petrified into the deathless colors that cover the great tribune and the spandrels of the arch before it. Here, with reverent boldness, the sacerdotal artist has essayed the wonderful scene of the Transfiguration. From the apex of the half-dome which roofs the tribune, the hand of the Almighty, issuing from the clouds, points to the head of Christ, in the centre of a great gemmed cross just below. Above the cross are the Greek letters IXOYC; near its arms the Alpha and Omega; and at its foot the words Salus Mundi. Resting on clouds on either side of the cross, and pointing to it, are the figures of Moses and Elias, their names inserted near them