down for a stroll through the city.

My note-book says that Genoa is the most magnificent city I ever saw,
and I hold by my note-book, though I hardly know how to prove it.
Venice is, and remains, the most beautiful city in the world; but her
ancient rival impresses you with greater splendor. I suppose that
the exclusively Renaissance architecture, which Ruskin declares the
architecture of pride, lends itself powerfully to this effect in
Genoa. It is here in its best mood, and there is little grotesque
Renaissance to be seen, though the palaces are, as usual, loaded with
ornament. The Via Nuova is the chief thoroughfare of the city, and the
crowd pours through this avenue between long lines of palaces. Height
on height rise the stately, sculptured facades, colonnaded, statued,
pierced by mighty doorways and lofty windows; and the palaces seem to
gain a kind of aristocratic _hauteur_ from the fact that there are for
the most part no sidewalks, and that the carriages, rolling insolently
through the crowd, threaten constantly to grind the pedestrian up
against their carven marbles, and immolate him to their stony pride.
There is something gracious and gentle in the grandeur of Venice,
and much that the heart loves to cling to; but in Genoa no sense of
kindliness is touched by the magnificence of the city.

It was an unspeakable relief, after such a street, to come, on a
sudden, upon the Duomo, one of the few Gothic buildings in Genoa, and
rest our jaded eyes on that architecture which Heaven seems truly to
have put into the thoughts of man together with the Christian faith.
O beloved beauty of aspiring arches, of slender and clustered columns,
of flowering capitals and window-traceries, of many-carven breadths
and heights, wherein all Nature breathes and blossoms again! There is
neither Greek perfection, nor winning Byzantine languor, nor insolent
Renaissance opulence, which may compare with this loveliness of yours!
Alas that the interior of this Gothic temple of Genoa should abound in
the abomination of rococo restoration! They say that the dust of St.
John the Baptist lies there within a costly shrine; and I wonder that
it can sleep in peace amid all that heathenish show of bad taste. But
the poor saints have to suffer a great deal in Italy.

Outside, in the piazza before the church, there was an idle, cruel
crowd, amusing itself with the efforts of a blind old man to find
the entrance. He had a number of books which