e, the arts, empire,--all have taken their
departure, and have left behind only the vestiges of their former
presence. The Italians, living in a land which is but a sort of
sepulchre, look as if they had voted that the world cannot outlast the
present century, and that it is but a waste of labour to rebuild
anything or repair anything. Accordingly, all is allowed to go to
decay,--roads, bridges, castles, palaces; and the only thing which is in
any degree cared for are their churches. Why make provision for
posterity, when there is to be none? Why erect new houses, when those
already built will last their time and the world's? Why repair their
mouldering dwellings, or renew the falling fences of their fields, or
replace their dying olives with young trees, or even patch their own
ragged garments? The crack of doom will soon be upon them, and all will
perish in the great conflagration. They account it the part of wisdom,
then, to pass the interval in the least fatiguing and most agreeable
manner possible. They sip their coffee, and take their stroll, and watch
the shadows as they fall eastward from their purple hills. Why should
they incur the toil of labouring or thinking in a world that is soon to
pass away, and which is as good as ended already?

Of Verona I can say but little. My stay there, which was not much over
the hour, afforded me no opportunity for observation. Its famous
Amphitheatre, coeval with the great Coliseum at Rome, and the best
preserved Roman Amphitheatre in the world, I had not time to visit. Its
numerous churches, with their frescoes and paintings, I less regret not
having seen. Its _Biblioteca Capitolare_, which is said to be an
unwrought quarry of historic and patristic lore, I should have liked to
visit. There, too, the monks of the middle ages were caught tripping.
"Sophocles or Tacitus," in the words of Gibbon, "had been compelled to
resign the parchment to missals, homilies, and the golden legend." The
"Institutes of Caius," which were the foundation of the Institutes of
Justinian, were discovered in this library palimpsested. A rumour had
been spread that the author of the Pandects had reduced the "Institutes
of Caius" to ashes, that posterity might not discover the source of his
own great work. Gibbon ventured to contradict the scandal, and to point
to the monks as the probable devastators. His sagacity was justified
when Niebuhr discovered in the Biblioteca Capitolare of Verona these
very