k with yearning on the Alps that they had crossed, they found
themselves unable to resist her smile. Forward they must march through
the garden of enchantment, henceforth taking the precaution to walk with
drawn sword, and, like Orlando in Morgana's park, to stuff their casques
with roses that they might not hear the siren's voice too clearly. It
was thus that Italy began the part she played through the Renaissance
for the people of the North. _The White Devil of Italy_ is the title of
one of Webster's best tragedies. A white Devil, a radiant daughter of
sin and death, holding in her hands the fruit of the knowledge of good
and evil, and tempting the nations to eat: this is how Italy struck the
fancy of the men of the sixteenth century. She was feminine, and they
were virile; but she could teach and they must learn. She gave them
pleasure; they brought force. The fruit of her embraces with the nations
was the spirit of modern culture, the genius of the age in which we
live.

Two terrible calamities warned the Italians with what new enemies they
had to deal. Twice at the commencement of the invasion did the French
use the sword which they had drawn to intimidate the sorceress. These
terror-striking examples were the massacres of the inhabitants of
Rapallo on the Genoese Riviera, and of Fivizzano in Lunigiana. Soldiers
and burghers, even prisoners and wounded men in the hospitals, were
butchered, first by the Swiss and German guards, and afterwards by the
French, who would not be outdone by them in energy. It was thus that the
Italians, after a century of bloodless battles and parade campaigning,
learned a new art of war, and witnessed the first act of those
Apocalyptic tragedies which were destined to drown the peninsula with
French, Spanish, German, Swiss, and native blood.

Meanwhile the French host had reached Parma, traversing, all through the
golden autumn weather, those plains where mulberry and elm are married
by festoons of vines above a billowy expanse of maize and corn. From
Parma, placed beneath the northern spurs of the Apennines, to Sarzana,
on the western coast of Italy, where the marbles of Carrara build their
barrier against the Tyrrhene Sea, there leads a winding barren mountain
pass. Charles took this route with his army, and arrived in the
beginning of November before the walls of Sarzana. Meanwhile we may well
ask what Piero de' Medici had been doing, and how he had fulfilled his
engagement with Alfo