laughed and chatted together. About the open doorways,
moreover, people lounged gossiping; and the interiors
of the entry-halls, as they appeared to the passing
glance, were clean, and had not that forbidding, inhospitable
air characteristic of most house-entrances in North
Italy. But sculptured Venice and Verona had unfitted
the travellers for pleasure in the stucco of Mantua;
and they had an immense scorn for the large and beautiful
palaces of which the before-quoted ambassador speaks,
because they found them faced with cunningly-moulded
plaster instead of carven stone. Nevertheless,
they could not help a kind of half-tender respect
for the old town. It shares the domestic character
of its scenes with the other ducal cities, Modena,
Parma, and Ferrara; and this character is, perhaps,
proper to all long and intensely municipalized communities.
But Mantua has a ghostly calm wholly its own; and
this was not in the least broken that evening by chatters
at thresholds, and pretty laughers at grated windows.
It was very, very quiet. Perhaps half a score
of carriages rumbled by us in our long walk, and we
met some scattered promenaders. But for the most
part the streets were quite empty; and even in the
chief piazza, where there was still some belated show
of buying and selling, and about the doors of the
caffes, where there was a good deal of languid loafing,
there was no indecency of noise or bustle There were
visibly few people in the place, and it was in decay;
but it was not squalid in its lapse. The streets
were scrupulously neat and clean, and the stuccoed
houses were all painted of that pale saffron hue which
gives such unquestionable respectability to New England
towns. Before we returned to our lodgings, Mantua
had turned into twilight; and we walked homeward through
a placid and dignified gloom, nowhere broken by the
flare of gas, and only remotely affected, here and
there, by the light of lamps of oil, faintly twinkling
in a disheartened Mantuan fashion.
If you turn this pensive light upon the yellow pages
of those old chronicles of which I spoke, it reveals
pictures fit to raise both pity and wonder for the
past of this city,—pictures full of the
glory of struggles for freedom, of the splendor of
wise princes, of the comfort of a prosperous and contented
people, of the grateful fruits of protected arts and
civilization; but likewise stained with images of
unspeakable filth and wickedness, baseness and cruelty,
incredible shame, suffering, and sin.
Long before the birth of Christ, the Gauls drive out
the Etruscans from Mantua, and aggrandize and beautify
the city, to be in their turn expelled by the Romans,
under whom Mantua again waxes strong and fair.
In this time, the wife of a farmer not far from the
city dreams a marvelous dream of bringing forth a
laurel-bough, and in due time bears into the world
the chiefest of all Mantuans, with a smile upon his
face. This is a poet, and they call his name Virgil.