as this cemetery has come to be of our own time.  It is the crude representation of modern Italian life that you see, realistic, unique, and precious, but for the most part base and horrible beyond words.  All the disastrous, sensual, covetous meanness, the mere baseness of the modern world, is expressed there with a naivete that is, by some miraculous transfiguration, humorous with all the grim humour of that thief death, who has gathered these poor souls with the rest because someone loved them and they were of no account.  The husk of the immortality of the poet and the hero has been thrust upon the mean and disgusting clay of the stockbroker; the grocer, horribly wrapped in everlasting marble, has put on ignominy for evermore; while the plebeian, bewildered by the tyranny of life, crouches over his dead wife, for ever afraid lest death tap him too on the shoulder.  How the wind whistles among these immortal jests, where the pure stone of the Carrara hills has been fashioned to the ugliness of the middle classes.  This is the supreme monument not of Genoa only, but of our time.  In that grotesque marble we see our likeness.  For there is gathered in indestructible stone all the fear, ostentation, and vulgar pride of our brothers.  Ah, poor souls! that for a little minute have come into the world, and are eager not altogether to be forgotten; they too, like the ancients, have desired immortality, and, seeing the hills, have sought to establish their mediocrity among them.  Therefore, with an obscene and vulgar gesture, they have set up their own image as well as they could, and, in a frenzied prayer to an unknown God, seem to ask, now that everything has fallen away and we can no longer believe in the body, that they may not be too disgusted with their own clay.  Thus in frenzy, fear, and vanity they have carved the likeness of that which was once among the gods.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] Cf.  P. Villari:  Primi due Secoli della Storia di Firenze (2^o Edizione), vol. i. p. 246.

[2] See Le Mesurier, Genoa:  Five Lectures, Genoa, A. Donath, 1889, a useful and informing book, to which I am indebted for more than one curious fact.

[3] See Le Mesurier, op. cit. p. 82.  Le Mesurier thinks that “this angel” refers to “the central figure in a bas-relief” above the inscription and below the right-hand window of the church.

[4] See Le Mesurier, op. cit. p. 98.

[5] See Le Mesurier, op. cit. p. 107.

[6] See Le Mesurier, op. cit. p. 78.

[7] See Justi, Velasquez and his Times (English translation), 1880, page 315, and Le Mesurier, op. cit., page 163.

II.  ON THE WAY