I am not sure that it was worth
all our trouble. Magnificent it certainly was, but coarsely magnificent,
like so much elsewhere in Genoa; but, if we had been at ten times the
trouble we were in seeing the Palace of the Municipality, I should not
think it too much. There in the great hall are the monuments of those
Genoese notables whose munificence their country wished to remember in
the order of their generosity. I do not remember just what the maximum
was, but the Doge or other leading citizen who gave, say, twenty-five
thousand ducats to the state had a statue erected to him; one who gave
fifteen, a bust; and one who gave five, an honorary tablet. The
surprising thing is that nearly all the statues and busts, whether good
likenesses or not, are delightful art: it is as if the noble acts of the
benefactors of their country had inspired the sculptors to reproduce
them not only in true character, but in due dignity. To the American who
views them and remembers that we have now so much money that some of us
do not know what to do with it, they will suggest that our millionaires
have an unrivalled opportunity of immortality in the same sort. There is
hardly a town of ten thousand inhabitants in the country where there are
not men who could easily afford to give a hundred thousand dollars, or
fifty, or twenty to their native or adoptive place and so enter upon a
new life in bronze or marble. This would enrich us beyond the dreams of
avarice in a high-grade portrait statuary; it would give work to
hundreds of sculptors who now have little or nothing to do, and would
revive or create the supplementary industries of casting in metal or
carving in stone.

The time was in Genoa, it seems, as the time is now with us, when a
great many people did not know what to do with their money. There were
sumptuary laws which forbade their spending it, either they or their
wives or daughters, in dress; apparently they could not even wear Genoa
velvet, which had to be sold abroad for the corruption of the outside
world; and this is said to be the reason why there were so many palaces
built in Genoa in the days of the republic. People who did not wish to
figure in that hall of fame put their surplus into the immense and often
ugly edifices which we still see ministering to their pride in the wide
and narrow streets of the city. Now and then a devout family built or
rebuilt a church and gave it to the public; but by far the greater
number put