h is still
observable in Italian life. It would be instructive to know in what
spirit the common Mantuans of his day looked upon the inventions of
the painter, and how far the courtly circle which frequented this room
went in discussion and comment on its subjects; they were not
nice people, and probably had no nasty ideas about the unspeakable
indecency of some of the scenes. [The ruin in the famous room frescoed
with the Fall of the Giants commences on the very door-jambs, which
are painted in broken and tumbling brick-work; and throughout there is
a prodigiousness which does not surprise, and a bigness which does not
impress; and the treatment of the subject can only be expressed by
the Westernism _powerfully weak_. In Kugler's _Hand-book of Italian
Painting_ are two illustrations, representing parts of the fresco,
which give a fair idea of the whole.]

Returning to the city we visited the house of Giulio Romano, which
stands in one of the fine, lonesome streets, and at the outside
of which we looked. The artist designed it himself; and it is very
pretty, with delicacy of feeling in the fine stucco ornamentation, but
is not otherwise interesting.

We passed it, continuing our way toward the Arsenal, near which we had
seen the women at work washing the linen coats of the garrison in the
twilight of the evening before; and we now saw them again from the
bridge, on which we paused to look at a picturesque bit of modern
life in Mantua. The washing-machine (when the successful instrument
is invented) may do its work as well, but not so charmingly, as these
Mantuan girls did. They washed the linen in a clear, swift-running
stream, diverted from the dam of the Mincio to furnish mill-power
within the city wall; and we could look down the watercourse past
old arcades of masonry half submerged in it, past pleasant angles of
houses and a lazy mill-wheel turning slowly, slowly, till our view
ended in the gallery of a time-worn palace, through the columns of
which was seen the blue sky. Under the bridge the stream ran very
strong and lucid, over long, green, undulating water-grasses, which it
loved to dimple over and play with. On the right were the laundresses
under the eaves of a wooden shed, each kneeling, as their custom is,
in a three-sided box, and leaning forward over the washboard that
sloped down into the water. As they washed they held the linen in one
hand, and rubbed it with the other; then heaped it into a mass upo