lor they will
alone be interesting, but they are more so from giving a fair specimen of
their two opposite styles of color. That of Rubens, from its gaiety, will
doubtless be more popular, but that of Titian, from its sobriety and
dignity, pleases me better. In hanging the pictures they should be placed
apart. The styles are so opposed that, were they placed near to each
other, they would mutually affect each other unfavorably. Rubens may be
placed in more obscurity, but Titian demands to be more in the light.

"I have no time to add, as I am preparing to leave Florence on Monday for
Bologna and Venice."

Travelling in Italy in those days was fraught with many annoyances, for,
in addition to the slow progress made in the _vetture_, there seems to
have been (judging from the journal) a _dogana_, or custom-house, every
few miles, where the luggage and clothing of travellers were examined,
sometimes hastily and courteously, sometimes with more rigor. And yet
this leisurely rate of progress, the travellers walking up most of the
hills, must have had a charm unknown to the present-day tourist, who is
whisked unseeing through the most characteristic parts of a foreign
country. The beautiful scenery of the Apennines was in this way enjoyed
to the full by the artist, but I shall not linger over the journey nor
shall I include any notes concerning Bologna. He found the city most
interesting--"A piece of porphyry set in verd antique"--and those to whom
he had letters of introduction more hospitable than in any other city in
Italy.

From Bologna the route lay through Ferrara and then to Pontelagoscuro on
the river Po, where he was to take the courier boat for Venice, down the
Po and through a canal. To add to the discomforts of this part of the
trip it rained steadily for several days, and, on May 22, Morse paints
this dreary picture:--

"When we waked this morning we found it still raining and, apparently, so
to continue all day. The rainy day at a country inn, so exquisitely
described by Irving in all its disagreeable features, is now before us. A
solitary inn with nothing indoors to attract; cold and damp and dark. The
prospect from the windows is a low muddy foreground, the north bank of
the muddy Po; a pile of brushwood, a heap of offal, a melancholy group of
cattle, who show no other signs of life than the occasional sly attack by
one of them upon a poor, dripping, half-starved dog, who, with tail
between his legs, now a