the leadership
of Longobardic rulers--is a question for antiquarians to decide.
There can, however, be no doubt that the monuments of the Lombard
style, as they now exist, are no less genuinely local, no less
characteristic of the country they adorn, no less indigenous to the
soil they sprang from, than the Attic colonnades of Mnesicles and
Ictinus. What the marble quarries of Pentelicus were to the Athenian
builders, the clay beneath their feet was to those Lombard craftsmen.
From it they fashioned structures as enduring, towers as majestic, and
cathedral aisles as solemn, as were ever wrought from chiselled stone.
There is a true sympathy between those buildings and the Lombard
landscape, which by itself might suffice to prove the originality
of their almost unknown architects. The rich colour of the baked
clay--finely modulated from a purplish red, through russet, crimson,
pink, and orange, to pale yellow and dull grey--harmonises with the
brilliant greenery of Lombard vegetation and with the deep azure
of the distant Alpine range. Reared aloft above the flat expanse of
plain, those square _torroni_, tapering into octagons and
crowned with slender cones, break the long sweeping lines and
infinite horizons with a contrast that affords relief, and yields a
resting-place to tired eyes; while, far away, seen haply from some
bridge above Ticino, or some high-built palace loggia, they gleam like
columns of pale rosy fire against the front of mustering storm-clouds
blue with rain. In that happy orchard of Italy, a pergola of vines
in leaf, a clump of green acacias, and a campanile soaring above its
church roof, brought into chance combination with the reaches of the
plain and the dim mountain range, make up a picture eloquent in its
suggestive beauty.

Those ancient builders wrought cunningly with their material. The
bricks are fashioned and fixed to last for all time. Exposed to the
icy winds of a Lombard winter, to the fierce fire of a Lombard summer,
and to the moist vapours of a Lombard autumn; neglected by unheeding
generations; with flowers clustering in their crannies, and birds
nesting in their eaves, and mason-bees filling the delicate network of
their traceries--they still present angles as sharp as when they were
but finished, and joints as nice as when the mortar dried in the first
months of their building. This immunity from age and injury they owe
partly to the imperishable nature of baked clay; partly to th