stone.  The garden, said the boy in charge of the moving monument, had been the burial-place of the Capulets, and this tomb being found in the middle of the garden, was easily recognized as that of Juliet.  Its genuineness, as well as its employment in the ruse of the lovers, was proven beyond cavil by a slight hollow cut for the head to rest in, and a hole at the foot “to breathe through,” as the boy said.  Does not the fact that this relic has to be protected from the depredations of travellers, who could otherwise carry it away piecemeal, speak eloquently of a large amount of vulgar and rapacious innocence drifting about the world?

It is well to see even such idle and foolish curiosities, however, in a city like Verona, for the mere going to and fro in search of them through her streets is full of instruction and delight.  To my mind, no city has a fairer place than she that sits beside the eager Adige, and breathes the keen air of mountains white with snows in winter, green and purple with vineyards in summer, and forever rich with marble.  Around Verona stretch those gardened plains of Lombardy, on which Nature, who dotes on Italy, and seems but a step-mother to all transalpine lands, has lavished every gift of beauty and fertility.  Within the city’s walls, what store of art and history!  Her market-places have been the scenes of a thousand tragic or ridiculous dramas; her quaint and narrow streets are ballads and legends full of love-making and murder; the empty, grass-grown piazzas before her churches are tales that are told of municipal and ecclesiastical splendor.  Her nobles sleep in marble tombs so beautiful that the dust in them ought to be envied by living men in Verona; her lords lie in perpetual state in the heart of the city, in magnificent sepulchres of such grace and opulence, that, unless a language be invented full of lance-headed characters, and Gothic vagaries of arch and finial, flower and fruit, bird and beast, they can never be described.  Sacred be their rest from pen of mine, Verona!  Nay, while I would fain bring the whole city before my reader’s fancy, I am loath and afraid to touch any thing in it with my poor art:  either the tawny river, spanned with many beautiful bridges, and murmurous with mills afloat and turned by the rapid current; or the thoroughfares with their passengers and bright shops and caffes; or the grim old feudal towers; or the age-embrowned palaces, eloquent in their haughty strength of the times when they were family fortresses; or the churches with the red pillars of their porticos resting upon the backs of eagle-headed lions; or even the white-coated garrison (now there no more), with its heavy-footed rank and file, its handsome and resplendent officers, its bristling fortifications, its horses and artillery, crowding the piazzas of churches turned into barracks.  All these things haunt my memory, but I could only at best thinly sketch them in meagre black and white.  Verona is an