ere the tide of
human fortune is at the flood.

As you wander there now, passing the deep arch over which, hundreds
of feet above you, the ancient fortress frowns, and enter the silent
streets, you would find it somewhat difficult to believe how, a very few
years back, this was the brilliant residence of a court,--the gay resort
of strangers from every land of Europe,--that showy equipages traversed
these weed-grown squares, and highborn dames swept proudly beneath these
leafy alleys. Hard, indeed, to fancy the glittering throng of courtiers,
the merry laughter of light-hearted beauty, beneath these trellised
shades, where, moodily and slow, some solitary figure now steals along,
"pondering sad thoughts over the bygone!"

But a few, a very few years ago, and Massa was in the plenitude of its
prosperity. The revenues of the state were large,--more than sufficient
to have maintained all that such a city could require, and nearly enough
to gratify every caprice of a prince whose costly tastes ranged over
every theme, and found in each a pretext for reckless expenditure. He
was one of those men whom Nature, having gifted largely, "takes out" the
compensation by a disposition of instability and fickleness that renders
every acquirement valueless. He could have been anything,--orator,
poet, artist, soldier, statesman; and yet, in the very diversity of his
abilities there was that want of fixity of purpose that left him
ever short of success, till he himself, wearied by repeated failures,
distrusted his own powers, and ceased to exert them.

Such a man, under the hard pressure of a necessity, might have done
great things; as it was, born to a princely station, and with a vast
fortune, he became a reckless spendthrift,--a dreamy visionary at one
time, an enthusiastic dilettante at another. There was not a scheme of
government he had not eagerly embraced and abandoned in turn. He had
attracted to his little capital all that Europe could boast of artistic
excellence, and as suddenly he had thrown himself into the most
intolerant zeal of Papal persecution,--denouncing every species of
pleasure, and ordaining a more than monastic self-denial and strictness.
There was only one mode of calculating what he might be, which was,
by imagining the very opposite to what he then was. Extremes were
his delight, and he undulated between Austrian tyranny and democratic
licentiousness in politics, just as he vacillated between the darkest
bi