are four in number, and are each capable of holding from two to three thousand men.  The intrenched camp, for cavalry and artillery, and the barracks of the city itself, can receive a garrison of from thirty to forty thousand men; and the measureless depths of the air are full of the fever that fights in defense of Mantua, and serves with equal zeal whoever is master of the place, let him be French, Italian, or Austrian, so only that he have an unacclimated enemy before him.

I confess that little of this formidable military knowledge burdened me on the occasion of my visit to Mantua, and I have already confessed that I was but very imperfectly informed of the history of the city.  But indeed, if the reader dealt candidly with himself, how much could he profess to know of Mantuan history?  The ladies all have some erudite associations with the place as giving the term of mantua-making to the art of dress, and most persons have heard that Mantua’s law was once death to any he that uttered mortal drugs there, and that the place was till a few years since an Austrian fortress on the Mincio.  Of Giulio Romano, and his works to Mantua, a good many have heard; and there is something known to the reader of the punctuated edition of Browning about Sordello.  But of the Gonzagas of Mantua, and their duchy, what do you know, gentle reader?

For myself, when in Mantua, I tried to make a virtue of my want of information, and fancied that a sort of general ignorance was more favorable to my enjoyment of what I saw there than thorough acquaintance with the city’s history would have been.  It certainly enabled me to accept all the poetic fiction of the custodians, and to embroider with their pleasing improbabilities the business-like succinctness of the guide-books; to make out of the twilight which involved all impressions a misty and heroic picture of the Mantuan past, wherein her great men appeared with a stately and gigantic uncertainty of outline, and mixed with dim scenes of battle, intrigue, and riot, and were gone before Fact could lay her finger on any shape, and swear that it was called so, and did so and so.  But even if there had been neither pleasure nor profit in this ignorance, the means of dispelling it are so scant in modern literature that it might well have been excused in a far more earnest traveller.  The difficulty, indeed, which I afterwards experienced in trying to learn something of Mantua, is my best excuse for writing of its history here.

I fancy that the few recent books on the subject are not in the hands of most readers, and I have a comforting belief that scarcely a reader of mine has been a reader of the “Grande Illustrazione de Lombardo-Veneto."[Mantova e Sua Provincia, per ’Avvocato Bartolomeo Arrighi:  Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto, ossia Storia delle Citta, des Borghi, Communi, Castelli, etc., fino ai Tempi moderni.  Per Cura di Cesare Cantu, e a’ altri Literati.  Milano, 1859.] Yet I suppose that he forms some notion of this work from its title, and figures to himself a physical bulk of six volumes,—­large, abounding in ill-printed wood-cuts, and having the appalling features which repel our race from pictorial history-books generally.