bled before our
hotel, and witnessed, with a sort of desperate cry, the departure
of the heavy-laden omnibus which bore us and our luggage from their
midst.

IV.

I doubt if, after St. Mark's in Venice, the Duomo at Parma, and the
Four Fabrics at Pisa, there is a church more worthy to be seen for
its quaint, rich architecture, than the Cathedral at Ferrara. It is
of that beloved Gothic of which eye or soul cannot weary, and we
continually wandered back to it from other more properly interesting
objects. It is horribly restored in-doors, and its Renaissance
splendors soon drove us forth, after we had looked at the Last
Judgment by Bastianino. The style of this painting is muscular and
Michelangelic, and the artist's notion of putting his friends in
heaven and his foes in hell is by no means novel; but he has achieved
fame for his picture by the original thought of making it his revenge
for a disappointment in love. The unhappy lady who refused his love
is represented in the depths, in the attitude of supplicating the pity
and interest of another maiden in Paradise who accepted Bastianino,
and who consequently has no mercy on her that snubbed him. But I
counted of far more value than this fresco the sincere old sculptures
on the facade of the cathedral, in which the same subject is treated,
beginning from the moment the archangel's trump has sounded. The
people getting suddenly out of their graves at the summons are all
admirable; but the best among them is the excellent man with one
leg over the side of his coffin, and tugging with both hands to
pull himself up, while the coffin-lid tumbles off behind. One sees
instantly that the conscience of this early riser is clean, for he
makes no miserable attempt to turn over for a nap of a few thousand
years more, with the pretense that it was not the trump of doom, but
some other and unimportant noise he had heard. The final reward of the
blessed is expressed by the repose of one small figure in the lap of
a colossal effigy, which I understood to mean rest in Abraham's bosom;
but the artist has bestowed far more interest and feeling upon the
fate of the damned, who are all boiling in rows of immense pots. It is
doubtful (considering the droll aspect of heavenly bliss as figured
in the one small saint and the large patriarch) whether the artist
intended the condition of his sinners to be so horribly comic as it
is; but the effect is just as great, for all that, and the slowe