Omai disprezza
  Te, la natura, il brutto
  Poter che, ascoso, a comun danno impera,
  E l’ infinita vanita del tutto.

And then, straining our eyes southward, we sweep the dim blue distance for Recanati, and remember that the poet of modern despair and discouragement was reared in even such a scene as this.

The town of San Marino is grey, narrow-streeted, simple; with a great, new, decent, Greek-porticoed cathedral, dedicated to the eponymous saint.  A certain austerity defines it from more picturesque hill-cities with a less uniform history.  There is a marble statue of S. Marino in the choir of his church; and in his cell is shown the stone bed and pillow on which he took austere repose.  One narrow window near the saint’s abode commands a proud but melancholy landscape of distant hills and seaboard.  To this, the great absorbing charm of San Marino, our eyes instinctively, recurrently, take flight.  It is a landscape which by variety and beauty thralls attention, but which by its interminable sameness might grow almost overpowering.  There is no relief.  The gladness shed upon far humbler Northern lands in May is ever absent here.  The German word Gemuethlichkeit, the English phrase ‘a home of ancient peace,’ are here alike by art and nature untranslated into visibilities.  And yet (as we who gaze upon it thus are fain to think) if peradventure the intolerable ennui of this panorama should drive a citizen of San Marino into out-lands, the same view would haunt him whithersoever he went—­the swallows of his native eyrie would shrill through his sleep—­he would yearn to breathe its fine keen air in winter, and to watch its iris-hedges deck themselves with blue in spring;—­like Virgil’s hero, dying, he would think of San Marino:  Aspicit, et dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos.  Even a passing stranger may feel the mingled fascination and oppression of this prospect—­the monotony which maddens, the charm which at a distance grows upon the mind, environing it with memories.

Descending to the Borgo, we found that Filippo Visconti had ordered a luncheon of excellent white bread, pigeons, and omelette, with the best red muscat wine I ever drank, unless the sharp air of the hills deceived my appetite.  An Italian history of San Marino, including its statutes, in three volumes, furnished intellectual food.  But I confess to having learned from these pages little else than this:  first, that the survival of the Commonwealth through all phases of European politics had been semi-miraculous; secondly, that the most eminent San Marinesi had been lawyers.  It is possible on a hasty deduction from these two propositions (to which, however, I am far from wishing to commit myself), that the latter is a sufficient explanation of the former.