dew and
discoloured gold--this theatre, a sham in its best days, and now that
ugliest of things, a sham unmasked and naked to the light of day, is
yet sublime, because of its proportioned harmony, because of its grand
Roman manner. The sight and feeling of it fasten upon the mind and
abide in the memory like a nightmare,--like one of Piranesi's weirdest
and most passion-haunted etchings for the _Carceri_. Idling there at
noon in the twilight of the dust-bedarkened windows, we fill the tiers
of those high galleries with ladies, the space below with grooms and
pages; the stage is ablaze with torches, and an Italian Masque, such
as our Marlowe dreamed of, fills the scene. But it is impossible to
dower these fancies with even such life as in healthier, happier
ruins phantasy may lend to imagination's figments. This theatre is
like a maniac's skull, empty of all but unrealities and mockeries of
things that are. The ghosts we raise here could never have been living
men and women: _questi sciaurati non fur mai vivi._ So clinging is the
sense of instability that appertains to every fragment of that dry-rot
tyranny which seized by evil fortune in the sunset of her golden day
on Italy.

In this theatre I mused one morning after visiting Fornovo; and the
thoughts suggested by the battlefield found their proper atmosphere in
the dilapidated place. What, indeed, is the Teatro Farnese but a
symbol of those hollow principalities which the despot and the
stranger built in Italy after the fatal date of 1494, when national
enthusiasm and political energy were expiring in a blaze of art, and
when the Italians as a people had ceased to be; but when the phantom
of their former life, surviving in high works of beauty, was still
superb by reason of imperishable style! How much in Italy of the
Renaissance was, like this plank-built plastered theatre, a glorious
sham! The sham was seen through then; and now it stands unmasked: and
yet, strange to say, so perfect is its form that we respect the sham
and yield our spirits to the incantation of its music.

The battle of Fornovo, as modern battles go, was a paltry affair; and
even at the time it seemed sufficiently without result. Yet the
trumpets which rang on July 6, 1495, for the onset, sounded the
_reveil_ of the modern world; and in the inconclusive termination of
the struggle of that day, the Italians were already judged and
sentenced as a nation. The armies who met that morning represented