carried off her earnings with which such things may be bought; and
she had, accordingly, to go through life in the old garments, still half
mediaeval in shape, which had been fashioned for her during the
Renaissance: apparel of the best that could then be made, beautiful and
strong in many ways, so beautiful and strong indeed as to impose on
people for a good long time, and make French, and Germans, and
Spaniards, and English believe (comparing these brilliant tissues with
the homespun they were providing for themselves) that it must be all
brand new, and of the very latest fashion. But the garments left to
Italy by those latest Middle Ages which we call Renaissance, were not
eternal: wear and tear, new occupations, and the rough usage of other
nations, rent them most sorely; their utter neglect by the long
seventeenth century, their hasty patchings up (with bits of odd stuff
and all manner of coloured thread and string, so that a harlequin's
jacket could not look queerer) by the happy-go-lucky practicalness of
the eighteenth century and the Revolution, reduced them thoroughly to
rags; and with these rags of Renaissance civilization, Italy may still
be seen to drape herself. Not perhaps in the great centres, where the
garments of modern civilization, economical, unpicturesque, intended to
be worn but a short time, have been imported from other countries; but
yet in many places. Yes, you may still see those rags of the Renaissance
as plainly as you see the tattered linen fluttering from the twisted
iron hooks (made for the display of precious brocades and carpets on
pageant days) which still remain in the stained whitewash, the seams of
battered bricks of the solid old escutcheoned palaces; see them
sometimes displayed like the worm-eaten squares of discoloured
embroidery which the curiosity dealers take out of their musty oak
presses; and sometimes dragging about mere useless and befouled odds and
ends, like the torn shreds which lie among the decaying kitchen refuse,
the broken tiles and plaster, the nameless filth and ooze which attracts
the flies under every black archway, in every steep bricked lane
descending precipitously between the high old houses. Old palaces,
almost strongholds, and which are still inhabited by those too poor to
pull them down and build some plastered bandbox instead; poems and prose
tales written or told five hundred years ago, edited and re-edited by
printers to whom there come no modern poem