Historical And Architectural Sketches Chiefly Italian

e with a special view to one class of subjects. As for objects of other classes, it will be well for the time being, we will not say to shut the eyes to them altogether, but certainly to look at them only as subordinate to what for the time is the main object of study. Taking Verona as an example, there is the classic Verona, the Verona of Catullus and Pliny; there is the Verona of the Nibelungen, the Bern of Theodoric; there is the mediaeval Verona, the Verona of commonwealths and tyrants, the Verona of Eccelino and Can Grande; and there is the Verona of later times, under Venetian, French, and Austrian bondage, the Verona of Congresses and fortifications. Verona, like Le Mans, is an Ecbatana, spreading, circle beyond circle, each range having its own history and its own monuments. Of one of these ranges it is at first disappointing to find so little to remind us. When we think of the fame of Verona in Teutonic romance?how the city and the hero have each taken the name of the other, and how they have been fused together on Teutonic lips?we are tempted to mourn that" Dietrich von Bern " should have left such slight traces of himself in his own Dietriehsbern. But it is perhaps well that the surviving monuments of Theodoric and his age should be gathered together round the one spot which stands by itself in the whole world. It may be well that the city which boasts of his church, his palace, and his tomb should not be exposed to rivalry from another city which, thou... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.