The other is Dante’s temple, with its basrelief and withered garlands.  The story of his burial, and of the discovery of his real tomb, is fresh in the memory of every one.  But the ’little cupola, more neat than solemn,’ of which Lord Byron speaks, will continue to be the goal of many a pilgrimage.  For myself—­though I remember Chateaubriand’s bareheaded genuflection on its threshold, Alfieri’s passionate prostration at the altar-tomb, and Byron’s offering of poems on the poet’s shrine—­I confess that a single canto of the ‘Inferno,’ a single passage of the ‘Vita Nuova,’ seems more full of soul-stirring associations than the place where, centuries ago, the mighty dust was laid.  It is the spirit that lives and makes alive.  And Dante’s spirit seems more present with us under the pine-branches of the Bosco than beside his real or fancied tomb.  ’He is risen,’—­’Lo, I am with you alway’—­these are the words that ought to haunt us in a burying-ground.  There is something affected and self-conscious in overpowering grief or enthusiasm or humiliation at a tomb.

* * * * *

RIMINI

SIGISMONDO PANDOLFO MALATESTA AND LEO BATTISTA ALBERTI

Rimini is a city of about 18,000 souls, famous for its Stabilmento de’ Bagni and its antiquities, seated upon the coast of the Adriatic, a little to the south-east of the world-historical Rubicon.  It is our duty to mention the baths first among its claims to distinction, since the prosperity and cheerfulness of the little town depend on them in a great measure.  But visitors from the north will fly from these, to marvel at the bridge which Augustus built and Tiberius completed, and which still spans the Marecchia with five gigantic arches of white Istrian limestone, as solidly as if it had not borne the tramplings of at least three conquests.  The triumphal arch, too, erected in honour of Augustus, is a notable monument of Roman architecture.  Broad, ponderous, substantial, tufted here and there with flowering weeds, and surmounted with mediaeval machicolations, proving it to have sometimes stood for city gate or fortress, it contrasts most favourably with the slight and somewhat gimcrack arch of Trajan in the sister city of Ancona.  Yet these remains of the imperial pontifices, mighty and interesting as they are, sink into comparative insignificance beside the one great wonder of Rimini, the cathedral remodelled for Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta by Leo Battista Alberti in 1450.  This strange church, one of the earliest extant buildings in which the Neopaganism of the Renaissance showed itself in full force, brings together before our memory two men who might be chosen as typical in their contrasted characters of the transitional age which gave them birth.

No one with any tincture of literary knowledge is ignorant of the fame at least of the great Malatesta family—­the house of the Wrongheads, as they were rightly called by some prevision of their future part in Lombard history.  The readers of the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth cantos of the ‘Inferno’ have all heard of