f you will, and better if you can." I need hardly
say that he received us with the utmost courtesy, and with that
genuinely unaffected simplicity of manner which is the heritage and the
specialty of genius, and is the true workman's patent of gentlemanhood.

Our talk was long and various, and the subject-matter of it did not tend
to dispel the illusion that we were by means of some strange
magic-lantern taking a peep into a resuscitated bit of the old
cinquecento art-life, so full were the mind and heart of the artist of
the special art-glories of his native city. Social philosophers have
much to say against the restricted nature of that intensely
concentrated form of patriotism in which the love and pride in one's
own native place--one's _paese_, as the old Italian phrase went--is a
species of religion. But it would not be difficult to show that the
objections these philosophers adduce would, if carried out logically, be
fatal to the reasonableness of all patriotism. Pure philanthropy no
doubt is a very grand sentiment, but, somehow or other, it has never as
a motive-power produced the great achievements that the narrower
sentiment of love of country has produced. And I am inclined to believe
that in the case, at all events, of ordinary people the love of one's
own "paese"--that church-steeple patriotism that it has become a fashion
with a certain school of politicians to deride--is very often a yet
stronger passion and a more powerful incentive to great deeds than even
the love of country in a larger sense. Such was undoubtedly the case
during the great days of Italian hegemony in literature and the arts. It
is difficult for those who have not made a special study of the subject
to conceive the strength of the tie that during the whole of the
mediaeval period, and for a couple of centuries beyond it, bound every
Italian citizen to the special community of which he was a member. The
fact and the consideration that he was an Italian in no degree stirred
his sympathies or moved his imagination, but that he was a Venetian, a
Florentine, a Pisan, or even that he was an Aretine, a Bolognese, a
Comasque, a Sienese or a Perugian, was all in all to him. The tie, save
perhaps in the cases of some of the greater of the historical families,
was a stronger one than even that of family. The Capulet or the Montague
may have felt that his place in the world was marked as such, but the
simple burgher who, had he not been entitled to ca