on those doorsteps, the knights in armour and the sumpter mules and red-robed Cardinals defiling through those gates into the courts within.  The modern bricks and mortar with which that picturesque scene has been overlaid, the ugly oblong windows and bright green shutters which now interrupt the flowing lines of arch and gallery; these disappear beneath the fine remembered touch of a sonnet sung by Folgore, when still the Parties had their day, and this deserted city was the centre of great aims and throbbing aspirations.

The names of the chief buildings in Gubbio are strongly suggestive of the middle ages.  They abut upon a Piazza de’ Signori.  One of them, the Palazzo del Municipio, is a shapeless unfinished block of masonry.  It is here that the Eugubine tables, plates of brass with Umbrian and Roman incised characters, are shown.  The Palazzo de’ Consoli has higher architectural qualities, and is indeed unique among Italian palaces for the combination of massiveness with lightness in a situation of unprecedented boldness.  Rising from enormous substructures mortised into the solid hillside, it rears its vast rectangular bulk to a giddy height above the town; airy loggias imposed on great forbidding masses of brown stone, shooting aloft into a light aerial tower.  The empty halls inside are of fair proportions and a noble size, and the views from the open colonnades in all directions fascinate.  But the final impression made by the building is one of square, tranquil, massive strength—­perpetuity embodied in masonry—­force suggesting facility by daring and successful addition of elegance to hugeness.  Vast as it is, this pile is not forbidding, as a similarly weighty structure in the North would be.  The fine quality of the stone and the delicate though simple mouldings of the windows give it an Italian grace.

These public palaces belong to the age of the Communes, when Gubbio was a free town, with a policy of its own, and an important part to play in the internecine struggles of Pope and Empire, Guelf and Ghibelline.  The ruined, deserted, degraded Palazzo Ducale reminds us of the advent of the despots.  It has been stripped of all its tarsia-work and sculpture.  Only here and there a Fe.D., with the cupping-glass of Federigo di Montefeltro, remains to show that Gubbio once became the fairest fief of the Urbino duchy.  S. Ubaldo, who gave his name to this duke’s son, was the patron of Gubbio, and to him the cathedral is dedicated—­one low enormous vault, like a cellar or feudal banqueting hall, roofed with a succession of solid Gothic arches.  This strange old church, and the House of Canons, buttressed on the hill beside it, have suffered less from modernisation than most buildings in Gubbio.  The latter, in particular, helps one to understand what this city of grave palazzi must have been, and how the mere opening of old doors and windows would restore it to its primitive appearance.  The House of the Canons has, in fact, not yet been given over to the use of middle-class and proletariate.