some of his comrades of that proud army which
Vittoria thought would stand feebly against the pouring tide of Italian
patriotism.

The fairest of the cities of the plain had long been a nest of foreign
soldiery. The life of its beauty was not more visible then than now.
Within the walls there are glimpses of it, that belong rather to the
haunting spirit than to the 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