finds expression in the open loggie and spacious staircases of Venice.  The graceful buildings which overhang the Grand Canal are exactly fitted for an oligarchy, sure of its own authority and loved of the people.  Feudal despotism, on the contrary, reigns in the heart of Ferrara, where the Este’s stronghold, moated, draw-bridged, and portcullised, casting dense shadow over the water that protects the dungeons, still seems to threaten the public square and overawe the homes of men.

To the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, again, we owe the town halls and public palaces that form so prominent a feature in the city architecture of Italy.  The central vitality of once powerful States is symbolised in the broletti of the Lombard cities, dusty and abandoned now in spite of their clear-cut terra-cotta traceries.  There is something strangely melancholy in their desolation.  Wandering through the vast hall of the Ragione at Padua, where the very shadows seem asleep as they glide over the wide unpeopled floor, it is not easy to remember that this was once the theatre of eager intrigues, ere the busy stir of the old burgh was utterly extinguished.  Few of these public palaces have the good fortune to be distinguished, like that of the Doge at Venice, by world-historical memories and by works of art as yet unrivalled.  The spirit of the Venetian Republic still lives in that unique building.  Architects may tell us that its Gothic arcades are melodramatic; sculptors may depreciate the decorative work of Sansovino; painters may assert that the genius of Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese shines elsewhere with greater lustre.  Yet the poet clings with ever-deepening admiration to the sea-born palace of the ancient mistress of the sea, and the historian feels that here, as at Athens, art has made the past towards which he looks eternal.

Two other great Italian houses of the Commonwealth, rearing their towers above the town for tocsin and for ward, owe immortality to their intrinsic beauty.  These are the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena and the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence.  Few buildings in Europe are more picturesquely fascinating than the palace of Siena, with its outlook over hill and dale to cloud-capped Monte Amiata.  Yet, in spite of its unparalleled position on the curved and sloping piazza, where the contrade of Siena have run their palio for centuries, this palace lacks the vivid interest attaching to the home Arnolfo raised at Florence for the rulers of his native city.  During their term of office the Priors never quitted the Palace of the Signory.  All deliberations on state affairs took place within its walls, and its bell was the pulse that told how the heart of Florence throbbed.  The architect of this huge mass of masonry was Arnolfo del Cambio, one of the greatest builders of the Middle Ages, a man who may be called the Michael Angelo of the thirteenth century[16].  In 1298 he was ordered to erect a dwelling-place for the Commonwealth, to