died, but lives to this day in the mouths and chiaroscuro effects of all the figures in all the pictures painted there;—­so in Mantua Giulio Romano is to be found in the lines of every painting and every palace.  It is wonderful to see, in these little Italian cities which have been the homes of great men, how no succeeding generation has dared to wrong the memory of them by departing in the least from their precepts upon art.  One fancies, for instance, the immense scorn with which the Vicentines would greet the audacity of any young architect who dared to think Gothic instead of Palladian Greek, and how they would put him to shame by asking him if he knew more than Palladio about architecture!  It seems that original art cannot arise in the presence of the great virtues and the great errors of the past; and Italian art of this day seems incapable of even the feeble, mortal life of other modern art, in the midst of so much immortality.

Giulio Romano did a little of everything for the Dukes of Mantua,—­from painting the most delicate and improper little fresco for a bed-chamber to restraining the Po and the Mincio with immense dikes, restoring ancient edifices and building new ones, draining swamps and demolishing and reconstructing whole streets, painting palaces and churches, and designing the city slaughter-house.  He grew old and very rich in the service of the Gonzagas; but though Mrs. Jameson says he commanded respect by a sense of his own dignity as an artist, the Bishop of Casale, who wrote the “Annali di Mantova,” says that the want of nobility and purity in his style, and his “gallant inventions, were conformable to his own sensual life, and that he did not disdain to prostitute himself to the infamies of Aretino.”

His great architectural work in Mantua is the Palazzo del T, or Te, as it is now written.  It was first called Palazzo del T, from the convergence of roads there in the form of that letter; and the modern Mantuans call it Del Te, from the superstition, transmitted to us by the Custode of the Ducal Palace, that the Gonzagas merely used it on pleasant afternoons to take tea in! so curiously has latter-day guidemanship interpreted the jolly purpose expressed by the Duke to Giulio.  I say nothing to control the reader’s choice between T and Te, and merely adhere to the elder style out of reverence for the past.  It is certain that the air of the plain on which the palace stands is most unwholesome; and it may have been true that the dukes never passed the night there.  Federico did not intend to build more than a lodge in this place; but fascinated with the design offered him by Giulio, he caused the artist to go on, and contrive him a palace instead.  It stands, as Vasari says, about a good bow-shot from one of the city’s gates; and going out to see the palace on our second day in Mantua, we crossed a drawbridge guarded by Austrian soldiers.  Below languished a bed of sullen ooze, tangled and thickly grown with