f Rome politically, but it is not true of it in most other
respects. To be sure, gas and railroads have got in at last; but one may
still read by a _lucerna_ and travel by _vettura_, if he like, using
Alberti as a guide-book, and putting up at the Bearas a certain
keen-eyed Gascon did three centuries ago.

Mr. Story has taken Italy with due deliberation, having lived there now
some fifteen years. He has thus been enabled to let things come to him,
instead of running after them; and his sensations have had time to ripen
slowly toward the true moment of projection, without being shaken and
hurried, or huddled one atop of the other. We doubt if the picturesque
can be profitably done by the job, for in aesthetics the proverb that
half a loaf is better than no bread does not hold. An Italian _festa_,
we suspect, if you make it a matter of business, will turn its
business-side to you, and you will go away without having been admitted
to the delightful confidence of its innocent gayety and unpremeditated
charm. Tourists must often have remarked, in making an excursion to a
ruin or bit of picturesque scenery, that what chance threw in to boot
was by far the best part of their bargain, for the most beautiful
experiences come not by observation. The crumbling temple lured them
forth, but it was only to see a sunset or to hear a nightingale.

What between winters in Rome and summers in one or the other
mountain-town, with intervals of absence now at Florence and now at
Siena, Mr. Story has had such opportunities as fall to the lot of very
few foreigners. For, in studying the ways of a people, it is as with
wild animals,--you must be long enough among them to get them _wonted_,
so that you may catch them at unawares. His book is on the whole a
delightful one, and would have been so without qualification, had he
confined it to a relation of his own experiences. Where he narrates or
describes, he is always lively and interesting; where he disserts or
grows learned, he gives up his vantage-ground, and must consent to be
dull like everybody else. Anybody can be learned, anybody except Dr.
Holmes dull; but not everybody can be a poet and artist. The chapter on
the Evil Eye is a marvel of misplaced erudition. The author has hunted
all antiquity like a policeman, and arrested high and low on the least
suspicion of a squint. Horace and Jodocus Damhouder, (to whose harmless
Dam our impatience tempts us to add an _n_,) Tibullus and Johannes