DUCAL MANTUA.

In that desperate depth of Hell where Dante beholds the Diviners

doomed to pace with backward-twisted faces, and turn forever on the

past the rainy eyes once bent too daringly on the future, the sweet

guide of the Tuscan poet points out among the damned the daughter of a

Theban king, and discourses to his charge:--

Manto was she: through many lands she went

Seeking, and paused where I was born, at last.

Therefore I choose thou be on me intent

A little. When from life her father passed,

And they of Bacchus' city became slaves,

Long time about the world the daughter cast.

Up in fair Italy is a lake that laves

The feet of Alps that lock in Germany:

Benaco called....

And Peschiera in strong harness sits

To front the Brescians and the Bergamasques,

Where one down-curving shore the other meets.

There all the gathered waters outward flow

That may not in Benaco's bosom rest,

And down through, pastures green a river go.

* * * * *

As far as to Governo, where, its quest

Ended at last, it falls into me Po.

But far it has not sought before a plain

It finds and floods, out-creeping wide and slow

To be the steaming summer's offense and bane.

Here passing by, the fierce, unfriendly maid

Saw land in the middle of the sullen main,

Wild and unpeopled, and here, unafraid

Of human neighborhood, she made her lair,

Rested, and with her menials wrought her trade,

And lived, and left her empty body there.

Then the sparse people that were scattered near

Gathered upon that island, everywhere

Compassed about with swamps and kept from fear.

They built their city above the witch's grave,

And for her sake that first made dwelling there

The name of Mantua to their city gave.

To this account of the first settlement of Mantua Virgil adds a

warning to his charge to distrust all other histories of the city's

foundation; and Dante is so thoroughly persuaded of its truth, that

he declares all other histories shall be to him as so many lifeless

embers. Nevertheless, divers chroniclers of Mantua reject the

tradition here given as fabulous; and the carefullest and most

ruthless of these traces the city's origin, not to the unfriendly

maid, but to the Etruscan King Ocno, fixing the precise date of its

foundation at thirty years before the Trojan war, one thousand five

hundred and thirty-nine years after the creation of the world, three

hundred years before Rome, and nine hundred and fifteen years after

the flood, while Abimelech was judge in Israel. "And whoever," says

the compiler of the "Flower of the Mantuan Chroniclers" (it is a very

dry and musty flower, indeed), citing doughty authorities for all his

facts and figures,--"whoever wishes to understand this more curiously,

let him read the said authors, and he will be satisfied."

But I am as little disposed to unsettle the reader's faith in

the Virgilian tradition, as to part with my own; and I therefore

uncandidly hold back the names of the authorities cited. This

tradition was in fact the only thing concerning Mantuan history

present to my thoughts as I rode toward the city, one afternoon of a

pleasant Lombard spring; and when I came in sight of the ancient hold

of sorcery, with the languid waters of its lagoons lying sick at

its feet, I recognized at least the topographical truth of Virgil's

description. But old and mighty walls now surround the spot which

Manto found sterile and lonely in the heart of the swamp formed by the

Mincio, no longer Benaco; and the dust of the witch is multitudinously

hidden under the edifices of a city whose mighty domes, towers, and

spires make its approach one of the stateliest in the world. It is a

prospect on which you may dwell long as you draw toward the city, for

the road from the railway station winds through some two miles of flat

meadow-land before it reaches the gate of the stronghold which the

Italians call the first hope of the winner of the land, and the last

hope of the loser of Italy. Indeed, there is no haste in any of the

means of access to Mantua. It lies scarce forty miles south of Verona,

and you are three hours in journeying this distance in the placid

railway train,--a distance which Romeo, returning to Verona from his

exile in Mantua, no doubt travelled in less time. There is abundant

leisure to study the scenery on the way; but it scarcely repays the

perusal, for it lacks the beauty of the usual Lombard landscape.

The soil is red, stony, and sterile; the orchard-trees are scant and

slender, and not wedded with the caressing vines which elsewhere in

North Italy garland happier trees and stretch gracefully from trunk to

trunk. Especially the landscape looks sad and shabby about the little

village of Villafranca, where, in 1864, the dejected prospect seemed

incapable of a smile even in spring; as if it had lost all hope and

cheerfulness since the peace was made which confirmed Venetia to the

alien. It said as plainly as real estate could express the national

sentiment, "Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!" and crept sullenly out of

sight, as our pensive train resumed its meditative progress. No doubt

this poor landscape _was_ imbued, in its dull, earthy way, with a

feeling that the coming of Garibaldi would irrigate and fertilize it

into a paradise; as at Venice the gondoliers believed that his army

would bring in its train cheap wine and hordes of rich and helpless

Englishmen bent on perpetual tours of the Grand Canal without

understanding as to price.

But within and without Mantua was a strong argument against

possibility of change in the political condition of this part of

Italy. Compassed about by the corruption of the swamps and the

sluggish breadth of the river, the city is no less mighty in her

artificial defenses than in this natural strength of her position;

and the Croats of her garrison were as frequent in her sad, handsome

streets, as the priests in Rome. Three lakes secure her from approach

upon the east, north, and south; on the west is a vast intrenched

camp, which can be flooded at pleasure from one of the lakes; while

the water runs three fathoms deep at the feet of the solid brick walls

all round the city. There are five gates giving access by drawbridges

from the town to the fortressed posts on every side, and commanding

with their guns the roads that lead to them. The outlying forts, with

the citadel, are four in number, and are each capable of holding

from two to three thousand men. The intrenched camp, for cavalry and

artillery, and the barracks of the city itself, can receive a garrison

of from thirty to forty thousand men; and the measureless depths of

the air are full of the fever that fights in defense of Mantua, and

serves with equal zeal whoever is master of the place, let him be

French, Italian, or Austrian, so only that he have an unacclimated

enemy before him.

I confess that little of this formidable military knowledge burdened

me on the occasion of my visit to Mantua, and I have already confessed

that I was but very imperfectly informed of the history of the city.

But indeed, if the reader dealt candidly with himself, how much

could he profess to know of Mantuan history? The ladies all have

some erudite associations with the place as giving the term of

_mantua-making_ to the art of dress, and most persons have heard that

Mantua's law was once death to any he that uttered mortal drugs there,

and that the place was till a few years since an Austrian fortress

on the Mincio. Of Giulio Romano, and his works to Mantua, a good

many have heard; and there is something known to the reader of the

punctuated edition of Browning about Sordello. But of the Gonzagas of

Mantua, and their duchy, what do you know, gentle reader?

For myself, when in Mantua, I tried to make a virtue of my want of

information, and fancied that a sort of general ignorance was

more favorable to my enjoyment of what I saw there than thorough

acquaintance with the city's history would have been. It certainly

enabled me to accept all the poetic fiction of the custodians, and

to embroider with their pleasing improbabilities the business-like

succinctness of the guide-books; to make out of the twilight which

involved all impressions a misty and heroic picture of the Mantuan

past, wherein her great men appeared with a stately and gigantic

uncertainty of outline, and mixed with dim scenes of battle, intrigue,

and riot, and were gone before Fact could lay her finger on any shape,

and swear that it was called so, and did so and so. But even if there

had been neither pleasure nor profit in this ignorance, the means of

dispelling it are so scant in modern literature that it might well

have been excused in a far more earnest traveller. The difficulty,

indeed, which I afterwards experienced in trying to learn something of

Mantua, is my best excuse for writing of its history here.

I fancy that the few recent books on the subject are not in the hands

of most readers, and I have a comforting belief that scarcely a

reader of mine has been a reader of the "Grande Illustrazione de

Lombardo-Veneto."[Mantova e Sua Provincia, per 'Avvocato Bartolomeo

Arrighi: _Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto, ossia Storia delle

Città, des Borghi, Communi, Castelli, etc., fino ai Tempi moderni.

Per Cura di Cesare Cantù, e a' altri Literati_. Milano, 1859.] Yet

I suppose that he forms some notion of this work from its title, and

figures to himself a physical bulk of six volumes,--large, abounding

in ill-printed wood-cuts, and having the appalling features which

repel our race from pictorial history-books generally.

The "Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto" includes notice of all

those dear and famous cities of North Italy which we know,--of Verona,

Vicenza, Padua, Venice, Mantua, Modena, Brescia, Bergamo, and the

rest; but here we have only to do with the part which concerns Mantua.

This is written by the advocate Bartolomeo Arrighi, whose ingenious

avoidance of all that might make his theme attractive could not

be sufficiently celebrated here, and may therefore be left to the

reader's fancy. There is little in his paper to leaven statistical

heaviness; and in recounting one of the most picturesque histories,

he contrives to give merely a list of the events and a diagram of

the scenes. Whatever illustrated character in princes or people he

carefully excludes, and the raciness of anecdote and the flavor

of manner and epoch distil not into his compilation from the elder

historiographers. I have therefore to go back, in my present purpose,

to the authors whose substance he has desiccated; and with their help,

and that of one or two antiquated authors of this century, I shall try

to rehabilitate the ducal state of Mantua,

"Which was an image of the mighty world,"

and present some shadow of its microcosmal life. The story has the

completeness of a tragedy; but it runs over many centuries, and it

ends like a farce, though it ends with a death. One feels, indeed,

almost as great satisfaction in the catastrophe as the Mantuans

themselves, who terminated their national existence and parted from

their last Duke with something like exultation.

As I recall my own impressions of the city, I doubt if any good or bad

fortune could rouse her to such positive emotion now. She seemed

sunken, that dull April evening of our visit, into an abiding lethargy;

as if perfect repose, and oblivion from the many-troubled past,--from

the renown of all former famine, fire, intrigue, slaughter, and

sack,--were to be preferred by the ghost of a once populous and haughty

capital to the most splendid memories of national life. Certainly, the

phantom of bygone Mantuan greatness did not haunt the idle tourists who

strolled through her wide streets, enjoying their quiet beauty and

regularity, and finding them, despite their empty, melancholy air, full

of something that reminded of home. Coming from a land where there is a

vast deal of length, breadth, and rectitude in streets, as well as human

nature, they could not, of course, feel that wonder in the Mantuan

avenues which inspired a Venetian ambassador, two centuries since, to

write the Serenest Senate in praise of their marvelous extent and

straightness; but they were still conscious of a certain expansive

difference from Gothic Verona and narrow Venice. The windows of the

ground-floors were grated to the prison-like effect common throughout

Italy; but people evidently lived upon the ground-floors, and at many of

the iron-barred windows fair young prisoners sat and looked out upon the

streets, or laughed and chatted together. About the open doorways,

moreover, people lounged gossiping; and the interiors of the

entry-halls, as they appeared to the passing glance, were clean, and had

not that forbidding, inhospitable air characteristic of most

house-entrances in North Italy. But sculptured Venice and Verona had

unfitted the travellers for pleasure in the stucco of Mantua; and they

had an immense scorn for the large and beautiful palaces of which the

before-quoted ambassador speaks, because they found them faced with

cunningly-moulded plaster instead of carven stone. Nevertheless, they

could not help a kind of half-tender respect for the old town. It shares

the domestic character of its scenes with the other ducal cities,

Modena, Parma, and Ferrara; and this character is, perhaps, proper to

all long and intensely municipalized communities. But Mantua has a

ghostly calm wholly its own; and this was not in the least broken that

evening by chatters at thresholds, and pretty laughers at grated

windows. It was very, very quiet. Perhaps half a score of carriages

rumbled by us in our long walk, and we met some scattered promenaders.

But for the most part the streets were quite empty; and even in the

chief piazza, where there was still some belated show of buying and

selling, and about the doors of the caffès, where there was a good deal

of languid loafing, there was no indecency of noise or bustle There were

visibly few people in the place, and it was in decay; but it was not

squalid in its lapse. The streets were scrupulously neat and clean, and

the stuccoed houses were all painted of that pale saffron hue which

gives such unquestionable respectability to New England towns. Before we

returned to our lodgings, Mantua had turned into twilight; and we walked

homeward through a placid and dignified gloom, nowhere broken by the

flare of gas, and only remotely affected, here and there, by the light

of lamps of oil, faintly twinkling in a disheartened Mantuan fashion.

If you turn this pensive light upon the yellow pages of those old

chronicles of which I spoke, it reveals pictures fit to raise both

pity and wonder for the past of this city,--pictures full of the glory

of struggles for freedom, of the splendor of wise princes, of the

comfort of a prosperous and contented people, of the grateful fruits

of protected arts and civilization; but likewise stained with images

of unspeakable filth and wickedness, baseness and cruelty, incredible

shame, suffering, and sin.

Long before the birth of Christ, the Gauls drive out the Etruscans

from Mantua, and aggrandize and beautify the city, to be in their turn

expelled by the Romans, under whom Mantua again waxes strong and fair.

In this time, the wife of a farmer not far from the city dreams a

marvelous dream of bringing forth a laurel-bough, and in due time

bears into the world the chiefest of all Mantuans, with a smile upon

his face. This is a poet, and they call his name Virgil. He goes from

his native city to Rome, when ripe for glory, and has there the good

fortune to win back his father's farm, which the greedy veterans of

Augustus, then settled in the Cremonese, had annexed to the spoils

bestowed upon them by the Emperor. Later in this Roman time, and only

three years after the death of Him whom the poet all but prophesied,

another grand event marks an epoch in Mantuan history. According to

the pious legend, the soldier Longinus, who pierced the side of Christ

as he hung upon the cross, has been converted by a miracle; wiping

away that costly blood from his spear-head, and then drawing his hand

across his eyes, he is suddenly healed of his near-sightedness, and

stricken with the full wonder of conviction. He gathers anxiously the

precious drops of blood from his weapon into the phial from which

the vinegar mixed with gall was poured, and, forsaking his life of

soldier, he wanders with his new-won faith and his priceless treasure

to Mantua, where it is destined to work famous miracles, and to be

the most valued possession of the city to all after-time. The saint

himself, preaching the Gospel of Christ, suffers martyrdom under

Tiberius; his tongue is cut out, and his body is burnt; and his ashes

are buried at Mantua, forgotten, and found again in after ages

with due signs and miraculous portents. The Romans give a civil

tranquillity to Mantua; but it is not till three centuries after

Christ that the persecutions of the Christians cease. Then the temples

of the gods are thrown down, and churches are built; and the city goes

forward to share the destinies of the Christianized empire, and be

spoiled by the barbarians. In 407 the Goths take it, and the Vandals

in their turn sack and waste it, and scatter its people, who return

again after the storm, and rebuild their city. Attila, marching to

destroy it, is met at Governo (as you see in Raphael's fresco in

the Vatican) by Pope Leo I., who conjures him to spare the city, and

threatens him with Divine vengeance if he refuse; above the pontiff's

head two wrathful angels, bearing drawn swords, menace the Hun with

death if he advance; and, thus miraculously admonished, he turns aside

from Mantua and spares it. The citizens successfully resist an attack

of Alboin; but the Longobards afterwards, unrestrained by the visions

of Attila, beat the Mantuans and take the city. From the Lombards the

Greeks, sent thither by the Exarch of Ravenna, captured Mantua

about the end of the sixth century; and then, the Lombards turning

immediately to besiege it again, the Greeks defend their prize long

and valiantly, but in the end are overpowered. They are allowed to

retire with their men and arms to Ravenna, and the Lombards dismantle

the city.

Concerning our poor Mantua under Lombard rule there is but little

known, except that she went to war with the Cremonese; and it may be

fairly supposed that she was, like her neighbors, completely involved

in foreign and domestic discords of every kind. That war with the

Cremonese was about the possession of the river Ollio; and the

Mantuans came off victors in it, slaying immense numbers of the enemy,

and taking some thousands of them prisoners, whom their countrymen

ransomed on condition of building one of the gates of Mantua with

materials from the Cremonese territory, and mortar mixed with water

from the disputed Ollio. The reader easily conceives how bitter a pill

this must have been for the high-toned Cremonese gentlemen of that

day.

When Charlemagne made himself master of Italy, the Mantuan lands and

Mantuan men were divided up among the brave soldiers who had helped to

enslave the country. These warriors of Charlemagne became counts; and

the _contadini_, or inhabitants of each _contado_ (county), became

absolutely dependent on their will and pleasure. It is recorded (to

the confusion of those who think primitive barbarism is virtue) that

the corruption of those rude and brutal old times was great, that all

classes were sunk in vice, and that the clergy were especially venal

and abominable. After the death of Charlemagne, in the ninth century,

wars broke out all over Italy between the factions supporting

different aspirants to his power; and we may be sure that Mantua had

some share in the common quarrel. As I have found no explicit record

of this period, I distribute to the city, as her portion of the

calamities, at least two sieges, one capture and sack, and a

decimation by famine and pestilence. We certainly read that, fifty

years later, the Emperor Rudolph attacked it with his Hungarians, took

it, pillaged it, and put great part of its people to the sword. During

the siege, some pious Mantuans had buried (to save them from the

religious foe) the blood of Christ, and part of the sponge which had

held the gall and vinegar, together with the body of St. Longinus.

Most unluckily, however, these excellent men were put to the sword,

and all knowledge of the place of sepulture perished with them.

At the end of these wars Mantua received a lord, by appointment of the

Emperor, and the first lord's son married the daughter of the Duke

of Lorraine, from which union was born the great Countess Matilda.

Boniface was the happy bridegroom's name, and the wedding had a wild

splendor and profuse barbaric jollity about it, which it is pleasant

enough to read of after so much cutting and slashing. The viands were

passed round on horseback to the guests, and the horses were shod

with silver shoes loosely nailed on, that they might drop off and be

scrambled for by the people. Oxen were roasted whole, as at a Kentucky

barbecue; and wine was drawn from wells with buckets hung on silver

chains. It was the first great display of that magnificence of which

after princes of Mantua were so fond; and the wretched hinds out of

whose sweat it came no doubt thought it very fine.

Of course Lord Boniface had his wars. There was a plot to depose

him discovered in Mantua, and the plotters fled to Verona. Boniface

demanded them; but the Veronese answered stoutly that theirs was

a free city, and no man should be taken from it against his will.

Boniface marched to attack them; and the Veronese were such fools as

to call the Duke of Austria to their aid, promising submission to his

government in return for his help. It was then that Austria first put

her finger into the Italian _pasticcio_, where she kept it so many

centuries. But the Austrian governor whom the Duke set over the

Veronese made himself intolerable,--the Austrian governor always

does,--and they drove him out of the city. On this the Duke turns

about, unites with Boniface, takes Verona and sacks it.

An altogether pleasanter incident of Boniface's domination was the

miraculous discovery of the sacred relics, buried and lost during the

sack of Mantua by the Hungarians. The place of sepulture was revealed

thrice to a blind pauper in a dream. People dug where he bade them

and found the relics. Immediately on its exhumation the Blood wrought

innumerable miracles; and the fame of it grew so great, that the Pope

came to see it, attended by such concourse of the people that they

were obliged to sleep in the streets. It was an age that drew the

mantle of exterior devotion and laborious penances and pilgrimages

over the most hideous crimes and unnatural sins. But perhaps the poor

believers who slept in the streets of Mantua on that occasion were

none the worse for their faith when the Pope pronounced the Blood

genuine and blessed it. I am sure that for some days of enthusiasm

they abstained from the violence of war, and paused a little in that

career of vice and wickedness of which one reads in Italian history,

with the full conviction that Sodom and Gomorrah also were facts, and

not merely allegory. I have no doubt that the blind beggar believed

that Heaven had revealed to him the place where the Blood was buried,

that the Pope believed in the verity of the relic, and that the devout

multitudes were helped and uplifted in their gross faith by this

visible witness to the truth that Christ had died for them upon the

bloody tree. Poor souls! they had much to contend with in the way to

any good. The leaven of the old pleasure-making pagan civilization

was in them yet (it is in the Italians to this day); and centuries

of Northern invasion had made them fierce and cruel, without teaching

them Northern virtues. Nay, I question much if their invaders had so

many rugged virtues to teach as some people would have us think. They

seem to have liked well the sweet corruptions of the land, and the

studied debaucheries of ages of sin, and to have enjoyed them as

furiously and clumsily as bears do the hoarded honey of civilized

bees.

After the death of Boniface the lordship of Mantua fell to his famous

daughter, Matilda, of whom most have heard. She was a woman of strong

will and strong mind; she held her own, and rent from others with a

mighty hand, till she had united nearly all Lombardy under her

rule. She was not much given to the domestic affections; she had two

husbands (successively), and, if the truth must be told, divorced them

both: one because he wished to share her sovereignty, perhaps usurp

it; and the other because he was not warm enough friend of religion.

She had no children, and, indeed, in her last marriage contract it was

expressly provided that the spouses were to live in chastity together,

and as much asunder as possible, Matilda having scruples. She was

a great friend to learning,--founded libraries, established the

law schools at Bologna, caused the codification of the canon law,

corresponded with distant nations, and spoke all the different

languages of her soldiers. More than literature, however, she loved

the Church; and fought on the side of Pope Gregory VII in his wars

with the Emperor Henry IV. Henry therefore took Mantua from her in

1091, and up to the year 1111 the city enjoyed a kind of republican

government under his protection. In that year Henry made peace with

Matilda, and appointed her his vice-regent in Italy; but the Mantuans,

after twenty years of freedom, were in no humor to feel the weight of

the mailed hand of this strong-minded lady. She was then, moreover,

nigh to her death; and, hearing that her physicians had given her up,

the Mantuans refused submission. The great Countess rose irefully from

her deathbed, and, gathering her army, led it in person, as she always

did, laid siege to Mantua by land and water, entered the city in 1114,

and did not die till a year after. Such is female resolution.

The Mantuans now founded a republican government, having unlimited

immunities and privileges from the Emperor, whose power over them

extended merely to the investure of their consuls. Their republic was

democratic, the legislative council of nine rectors and three curators

being elective by the whole people. This government, or something like

it, endured for more than a century, during which period the Mantuans

seem to have done nothing but war with their neighbors in every

direction,--with the Veronese chiefly, with the Cremonese a good

deal, with the Paduans, with the Ferrarese, with the Modenese and the

Bolognese: indeed, we count up twelve of these wars. Like the English

of their time, the Mantuans were famous bowmen, and their shafts took

flight all over Lombardy. At the same time they did not omit to fight

each other at home; and it must have been a dullish kind of day

in Mantua when there was no street-battle between families of the

factious nobility. Dante has peopled his Hell from the Italy of this

time, and he might have gone farther and fared worse for a type of

the infernal state. The spectacle of these countless little Italian

powers, racked, and torn, and blazing with pride, aggression,

and disorder, within and without,--full of intrigue, anguish, and

shame,--each with its petty thief or victorious faction making war

upon the other, and bubbling over with local ambitions, personal

rivalries, and lusts,--is a spectacle which the traveller of to-day,

passing over the countless forgotten battle-fields, and hurried from

one famous city to another by railroad, can scarcely conjure up.

Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, Mantua Vicenza, Verona,

Bassano,--all are now at peace with each other, and firmly united in

the national sentiment that travellers were meant to be eaten alive

by Italians. Poor old cities! it is hard to conceive of their bygone

animosities; still harder to believe that all the villages squatting

on the long white roads, and waking up to beg of you as your diligence

passes, were once embroiled in deadly and incessant wars. Municipal

pride is a good thing, and discentralization is well; and we have to

thank these intensely local little states for genius triply crowned

with the glories of literature, art, and science, which Italy might

not have produced if she had been united, and if the little states had

loved themselves less and Italy more. Though, after all, there is

the doubt whether it is not better to bless one's obscure and happy

children with peace and safety, than to give to the world a score of

great names at the cost to millions of incalculable misery.

Besides their local wars and domestic feuds the Mantuans had

troubles on a much larger scale,--troubles, indeed, which the Emperor

Barbarossa laid out for all Italy. In Carlyle's History of Frederick

the Great you can read a pleasanter account of the Emperor's business

at Roncaglia about this time than our Italian chroniclers will give

you. Carlyle loves a tyrant; and if the tyrant is a ruffian and bully,

and especially a German, there are hardly any lengths to which that

historian will not go in praise of him. Truly, one would hardly

guess, from that picture of Frederick Redbeard at Roncaglia, with

the standard set before his tent, inviting all men to come and have

justice done them, that the Emperor was actually at Roncaglia for

the purpose of conspiring with his Diet to take away every vestige

of liberty and independence from miserable Italy. Among other cities

Mantua lost her freedom at this Diet, and was ruled by an imperial

governor and by consuls of Frederick's nomination till 1167, when she

joined the famous Lombard League against him. The leagued cities

beat the Emperor at Legnano, and received back their liberties by the

treaty of Costanza in 1183; after which, Frederick having withdrawn to

Germany, they fell to fighting among themselves again with redoubled

zeal, and rent their league into as many pieces as there had been

parties to it. In 1236 the Germans again invaded Lombardy, under

Frederick II.; and aided by the troops of the Ghibelline cities,

Verona, Padua, Vicenza, and Treviso, besieged Mantua, which

surrendered to this formidable union of forces, thus becoming once

more an imperial city, and irreparably fracturing the Lombard League.

It does not appear, however, that her ancient liberties were withdrawn

by Frederick II.; and we read that the local wars went on after this

with as little interruption as before. The wars went on as usual, and

on the old terms with Verona and Cremona; and there is little in

their history to interest us. But in 1256 the famous tyrant of Padua,

Eccelino da Romano, who aspired to the dominion of Lombardy, gathered

his forces, and went and sat down before Mantua. The Mantuans refused

to surrender at his summons; and Eccelino, who had very little notion

of what the Paduans were doing in his absence, swore that he would cut

down the vines in those pleasant Mantuan vineyards, plant new ones,

and drink the wine of their grapes before ever he raised the siege.

But meantime that conspiracy which ended in Eccelino's ruin had

declared itself in Padua, and the tyrant was forced to abandon the

siege and look to his dominion of other cities.

After which there was something like peace in Mantua for twenty years,

and the city waxed prosperous. Indeed, neither industry nor learning

had wholly perished during the wars of the republic, and the people

built grist-mills on the Mincio, and cultivated belles-lettres to

some degree. Men of heavier science likewise nourished, and we read of

jurists and astronomers born in those troublous days, as well as of a

distinguished physician, who wrote a ponderous dictionary of simples,

and dedicated it to King Robert of Naples. But by far the greatest

Mantuan of this time was he of whom readers have heard something from

a modern poet. He is the haughty Lombard soul, "in the movement of the

eyes honest and slow," whom Dante, ascending the inexplicable heights

of Purgatory, beheld; and who, summoning all himself, leaped to the

heart of Virgil when he named Mantua: "O Mantuan! I am Sordello, of

thine own land!"

Of Virgil the superstition of the Middle Ages had made a kind of

wizard, and of Sordello the old writers fable all manner of wonders;

he is both knight and poet, and has adventures scarcely less

surprising than those of Amadis of Gaul. It is pretty nearly certain

that he was born in 1189 of the Visconti di Goito, in the Mantuan

country, and that he married Beatrice, a sister of Eccelino, and had

amours with the youngest sister of this tyrant, the pretty Cunizza,

whom Dante places in his "Paradiso." This final disposition of

Cunizza, whom we should hardly think now of assigning a place among

the blest, surprised some people even in that day, it seems; for an

old commentator defends it, saying: "Cunizza was always, it is true,

tender and amorous, and properly called a daughter of Venus; but she

was also compassionate, benign, and merciful toward those unhappy ones

whom her brother cruelly tormented. Therefore the poet is right

in feigning to find her in the sphere of Venus. _For if the gentle

Cyprians deified their Venus, and the Romans their Flora, how much

more honestly may a Christian poet save Cunizza_." The lady, whose

salvation is on these grounds inexpugnably accomplished, was married

to Count Sanbonifazio of Padua, in her twenty-fourth year; and

Sordello was early called to this nobleman's court, having already

given proofs of his poetic genius. He fell in love with Cunizza, whom

her lord, becoming the enemy of the Eccelini, began to ill-treat. A

curious glimpse of the manners and morals of that day is afforded by

the fact, that the brothers of Cunizza conspired to effect her escape

with Sordella from her husband's court, and that, under the protection

of Eccelino da Romano, the lovers were left unmolested to their

amours. Eccelino, indeed, loved this weak sister with extraordinary

tenderness, and we read of a marvelous complaisance to her amorous

intrigues by a man who cared nothing himself for women. Cunizza lived

in one of her brother's palaces at Verona, and used to receive there

the visits of Sordello after Eccelino had determined to separate them.

The poet entered the palace by a back door, to reach which he must

pass through a very filthy alley; and a servant was stationed there to

carry Sordello to and fro upon his back. One night Eccelino took the

servant's place, bore the poet to the palace door, and on his return

carried him back to the mouth of the alley, where he revealed

himself, to the natural surprise and pain of Sordello, who could have

reasonably expected anything but the mild reproof and warning given

him by his truculent brother-in-law: "Ora ti basti, Sordello. Non

venir più per questa vile strada ad opere ancor più vili."--"Let this

suffice thee, Sordello. Come no more by this vile path to yet viler

deeds."

It was probably after this amour ended that Sordello sat out upon his

travels, visiting most courts, and dwelling long in Provence, where

he learned to poetize in the Provençal tongue, in which he thereafter

chiefly wrote, and composed many songs. He did not, however, neglect

his Lombard language, but composed in it a treatise on the art of

defending towns. The Mantuan historian, Volta, says that some of

Sordello's Provençal poems exist in manuscript in the Vatican and

Chigi libraries at Rome, in the Laurentian at Florence, and the

Estense at Modena. He was versed in arms as well as letters, and

he caused Mantua to be surrounded with fosses five miles beyond her

walls; and the republic having lodged sovereign powers in his hands

when Eccelino besieged the city, Sordello conducted the defense with

great courage and ability, and did not at all betray the place to his

obliging brother-in-law, as the latter expected. Verci, from whose

"History of the Eccelini" we have drawn the account of Sordello's

intrigue with Cunizza, says: "The writers represent this Sordello as

the most polite, the most gentle, the most generous man of his time,

of middle stature, of beautiful aspect and fine person, of lofty

bearing, agile and dexterous, instructed in letters, and a good poet,

as his Provençal poems manifest. To these qualities he united military

valor in such degree that no knight of his time could stand before

him." He was properly the first Lord of Mantua, and the republic seems

to have died with him in 1284.

The madness which comes upon a people about to be enslaved commonly

makes them the agents of their own undoing. The time had now come for

the destruction of the last vestiges of liberty in Mantua, and the

Mantuans, in their assembly of the Four Hundred and Ninety, voted full

power into the hands of the destroyer. That Pinamonte Bonacolsi whom

Dante mentions in the twentieth canto of the "Inferno," had been

elected captain of the republic, and, feigning to fear aggression from

the Marquis of Ferrara, he demanded of the people the right to banish

all enemies of the state. This reasonable demand was granted, and

the captain banished, as is well known, all enemies of Pinamonte

Bonacolsi. After that, having things his own way, he began to favor

public tranquillity, abolished family feuds and the ancient amusement

of street-battles, and led his enslaved country in the paths of

material prosperity; for which he was no doubt lauded in his day

by those who thought the Mantuans were not prepared for freedom.

He resolved to make the captaincy of the republic hereditary in the

Bonacolsi family; and when he died, in 1293, his power descended to

his son Bordellone. This Bordellone seems to have been a generous and

merciful captain enough, but he loved ease and pleasure; and a rough

nephew of his, Guido Botticella, conspired against him to that degree

that Bordellone thought best, for peace and quietness' sake, to

abdicate in his favor. Guido had the customary war with the Marquis of

Ferrara, and then died, and was succeeded by his brother Passerino, a

very bad person, whose son at last brought his whole family to grief.

The Emperor made him vicar of Modena; and he used the Modenese very

cruelly, and shut up Francesco Pico and his sons in a tower, where he

starved them, as the Pisans did Ugolino. In those days, also, the Pope

was living at Avignon, and people used to send him money and other

comforts there out of Italy. An officer of Passerino's, being of

Ghibelline politics, attacked one of these richly laden emissaries,

and took his spoils, dividing them with Passerino. For this the Pope

naturally excommunicated the captain of Mantua, and thereupon his

neighbors made a great deal of pious war upon him. But he beat the

Bolognese, the most pious of his foes, near Montevoglio, and with his

Modenese took from them that famous bucket, about which Tassoni

made his great Bernesque epic, "The Rape of the Bucket" (_La Secchia

Rapita_), and which still hangs in the tower of the Duomo at Modena.

Meantime, while Passerino had done everything to settle himself

comfortably and permanently in the tyranny of Mantua, his worthless

son Francesco fell in love with the wife of Filippino Gonzaga.

According to the old Mantuan chronicles the Gonzagas were of a royal

German line, and had fixed themselves in the Mantuan territory in 770

where they built a castle beyond Po, and began at once to take part in

public affairs. They had now grown to be a family of such consequence

that they could not be offended with impunity, and it was a great

misfortune to the Bonacolsi that Francesco happened to covet Filippino

Gonzaga's wife. As to the poor lady herself, it is of infinite

consequence to her eternal health whether she was guilty or no, but to

us still on earth, it seems scarcely worth while to inquire, after so

great lapse of time. History, however, rather favors the notion of

her innocence; and it is said that Francesco, unable to overcome her

virtue, took away her good fame by evil reports. At the same time he

was greatly wroth--it is scarcely possible to write seriously of these

ridiculous, wicked old shadows--that this lady's husband should have

fallen in love with a pretty concubine of his, Bonacolsi's; and, after

publicly defaming Filippino's wife, he threatened to kill him for this

passion. The insult and the menace sank deep into the bitter hearts

of the Gonzagas; and the head of that proud race, Filippino's uncle,

Luigi Gonzaga, resolved to avenge the family dishonor. He was a secret

and taciturn man, and a pious adulator of his line has praised him

for the success with which he dissembled his hatred of the Bonacolsi,

while conspiring to sweep them and their dominion away. He won over

adherents among the Mantuans, and then made a league with Can Grande

of Verona to divide the spoils of the Bonacolsi; and so, one morning,

having bribed the guards to open the city gates, he entered Mantua

at the head of the banded forces. The population was roused with

patriotic cries of "Long live the Mantuan people!" and, as usual,

believed, poor souls, that some good was meant them by those who came

to overthrow their tyrants. The Bonacolsi were dreaming that pleasant

morning of anything but ruin, and they offered no resistance to the

insurrection till it burst out in the great square before the Castello

di Corte. They then made a feeble sally from the castle, but were

swiftly driven back, and Passerino, wounded to death under the great

Gothic archway of the palace, as he retreated, dropped from his

languid hands the bridle-rein of his charger and the reins of that

government with which he had so long galled Mantua. The unhappy

Francesco fled to the cathedral for protection; but the Gonzagas slew

him at the foot of the altar, with tortures so hideous and incredible,

that I am glad to have our friend, the advocate Arrighi, deny the fact

altogether. Passerino's brother, a bishop, was flung into a tower to

starve, that the Picos might be avenged; and the city of Mantua was

liberated.

In that day, when you freed a city from a tyrant, you gave it up to be

pillaged by the army of liberation; and Mantua was now sacked by

her deliverers. Can Grande's share of the booty alone amounted to a

hundred thousand gold florins (about two hundred and fifty thousand

dollars). The Mantuans, far from imitating the ungrateful Paduans,

who, when the Crusaders liberated them from Eccelino, grudged these

brave fellows three days' pillage of their city, and even wished back

their old tyrant,--the Mantuans, we say, seemed not in the least

to mind being devoured, but gratefully elected the Gonzaga their

captain-general, and purchased him absolution from the Pope for his

crimes committed in the sack. They got this absolution for twenty

thousand gold florins; and the Pope probably sold it cheap,

remembering his old grudge against the Bonacolsi, whom the Gonzaga had

overthrown. All this was in the year of grace 1328.

I confess that I am never weary of reading of these good, heroic,

virtuous old times in Italy, and that I am here tempted to digress

into declamation about them. There is no study more curious and

interesting, and I am fond of tracing the two elements of character

visible in Italian society, and every individual Italian, as they flow

down from the remotest times to these: the one element, that capacity

for intellectual culture of the highest degree; the other element,

that utter untamableness of passion and feeling. The presence of these

contradictory elements seems to influence every relation of Italian

life;--to make it capable of splendor, but barren of comfort; to

endear beauty, but not goodness, to the Italian; to lead him to

recognize and celebrate virtues, but not to practice them; to produce

a civilization of the mind, and not of the soul.

When Luigi Gonzaga was made lord of Mantua, he left his castle beyond

Po, to dwell in the city. In this castle he had dwelt, like other

lords of his time, in the likeness of a king, spending regally and

keeping state and open house in an edifice strongly built about with

walls, encircled with ditches passable by a single drawbridge, and

guarded day and night, from castle moat to castle crest, by armed

vassals. Hundreds ate daily at his board, which was heaped with a rude

and rich profusion, and furnished with carven goblets and plate of

gold and silver. In fair weather the banquet-hall stood open to all

the winds that blew; in foul, the guests were sheltered from the storm

by curtains of oiled linen, and the place was lighted with torches

borne by splendidly attired pages. The great saloons of the castle

were decked with tapestries of Flanders and Damascus, and the floor

was strewn with straw or rushes. The bed in which the lord and lady

slept was the couch of a monarch; the household herded together in the

empty chambers, and lay upon the floor like swine. The garden-fields

about the castle smiled with generous harvests; the peasant lay

down after his toil, at night, in deadly fear of invasion from some

neighboring state, which should rob him of everything, dishonor his

wife and daughters, and slay him upon the smoking ruins of his home.

In the city to which this lord repaired, the houses were built

here and there at caprice, without numbers or regularity, and only

distinguished by the figure of a saint, or some pious motto painted

above the door. Cattle wandered at will through the crooked, narrow,

and filthy streets, which rang with the clamor of frequent feud, and

reeked with the blood of the embattled citizens; over all the squalor

and wickedness rose the loveliest temples that ever blossomed from

man's love of the beautiful, to the honor and glory of God.

In this time Crusaders went to take the Lord's sepulchre from the

infidel, while their brothers left at home rose against one another,

each petty state against its neighbor, in unsparing wars of rapine

and devastation,--wars that slew, or, less mercifully, mutilated

prisoners,--that snatched the babe from the embrace of its violated

mother, and dashed out its brains upon the desolated hearth. A

hopeless, hellish time of sack, plunder, murder, famine, plague, and

unnatural crime; a glorious age, in which flourished the gentlest and

sweetest poet that ever sang, and the grimmest and grandest that ever

upbraided a godless generation for its sins,--in which Petrarch was

crowned with laurel at Rome, and Dante wandered in despair from court

to court, learning in the bitterness of his exile's heart,

"come sa di sale

Lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle

Lo scendere e il salir per l'altrui scale."

It was a time ignorant of the simplest comfort, but debauched with the

vices of luxury; in which cities repressed the license of their people

by laws regulating the length of women's gowns and the outlays

at weddings and funerals. Every wild misdeed and filthy crime was

committed, and punished by terrible penalties, or atoned for by fines.

A fierce democracy reigned, banishing nobles, razing their palaces,

and ploughing up the salt-sown sites; till at last, in the uttermost

paroxysm of madness, it delivered itself up to lords to be defended

from itself, and was crushed into the abjectest depths of slavery.

Literature and architecture flourished, and the sister arts were born

amid the struggles of human nature convulsed with every abominable

passion.

For nearly four hundred years the Gonzagas continued to rule the city,

which the first prince of their line, having well-nigh destroyed,

now rebuilt and restored to greater splendor than ever; and it is the

Mantua of the Gonzagas which travellers of this day look upon when

they visit the famous old city. Their pride and their wealth adorned

it; their wisdom and prudence made it rich and prosperous; their

valor glorified it; their crimes stain its annals with infamy; their

wickedness and weakness ruined it and brought it low. They were a

race full of hereditary traits of magnificence, but one reads their

history, and learns to love, of all their long succession, only one or

two in their pride, learns to pity only one or two in their fall. They

were patriotic, but the patriotism of despotic princes is self-love.

They were liberal--in spending the revenues of the state for the glory

of their family. They were brave, and led many nameless Mantuans

to die in forgotten battles for alien quarrels which they never

understood.

The succession of the Gonzagas was of four captains, ending in 1407;

four marquises, ending in 1484; and ten dukes, ending in 1708.

The first of the captains was Luigi, as we know. In his time the great

Gothic fabric of the Castello di Corte was built; and having rebuilt

the portions of the city wasted by the sack, he devoted himself,

as far as might be in that age, to the arts of peace; and it is

remembered of him that he tried to cure the Mantuan air of its

feverish unwholesomeness by draining the swampy environs. During his

time, Petrarch, making a sentimental journey to the birthplace of

Virgil, was splendidly entertained and greatly honored by him. For the

rest, Can Grande of Verona was by no means content with his hundred

thousand golden florins of spoil from the sack of the city, but

aspired to its seigniory, declaring that he had understood Gonzaga

to have promised him it as the condition of alliance against the

Bonacolsi. Gonzaga construed the contract differently, and had so

little idea of parting with his opinion, that he fought the Scaligero

on this point of difference till he died, which befell thirty years

after his election to the captaincy.

Him his son Guido succeeded,--a prince already old at the time of his

father's death, and of feeble spirit. He shared his dominion with his

son Ugolino, excluding the younger brothers from the dominion. These,

indignant at the partiality, one night slew their brother Ugolino at a

supper he was giving; and being thereupon admitted to a share in their

father's government, had no trouble in obtaining the pardon of the

Pope and Emperor. One of the murderers died before the father; the

other, named Ludovico, was, on the death of Guido, in 1370, elected to

the captaincy, and ruled long, wisely, and well. He loved a peaceful

life; and though the Emperor confirmed him in the honors conferred on

him by the Mantuans, and made him Vicar imperial, Ludovico declined to

take part with Ghibellines against Guelphs, remained quietly at home,

and spent himself much in good works, as if he would thus expiate his

bloody crime. He gathered artists, poets, and learned men about him,

and did much to foster all arts. In his time, Mantua had rest from

war, and grew to have twenty-eight thousand inhabitants; but it was

not in the nature of a city of the Middle Ages to be long without a

calamity of some sort, and it is a kind of relief to know that Mantua,

under this peaceful prince, was well-nigh depopulated by a pestilence.

In 1381 he died, and with his son Francesco the blood-letting began

again. Indeed, this captain spent nearly his whole life in war with

those pleasant people, the Visconti of Milan. He had married the

daughter of Barnabo Visconti, but discovering her to be unfaithful to

him, or believing her so, he caused her to be put to death, refusing

all her family's intercessions for mercy. After that, a heavy sadness

fell upon him, and he wandered aimlessly about in many Italian

cities, and at last married a second time, taking to wife Margherita

Malatesta. He was a prince of high and generous soul and of manly

greatness rare in his time. There came once a creature of the Visconti

to him, with a plot for secretly taking off his masters; but the

Gonzaga (he must have been thought an eccentric man by his neighbors)

dismissed the wretch with scornful horror. I am sure the reader will

be glad to know that he finally beat the Visconti in fair fight, and

(the pest still raging in Mantua) lived to make a pilgrimage to the

Holy Land. When he returned, he compiled the city's statutes, divided

the town into four districts, and named its streets. So he died.

And after this prince had made his end, there came another Francesco,

or Gianfrancesco, who was created Marquis of Mantua by the Emperor

Sigismund. He was a friend of war, and having been the ward of

the Venetian Republic (Venice was fond of this kind of trust, and

sometimes adopted princely persons as her children, among whom the

reader will of course remember the Queen of Cyprus, and the charming

Bianca Capello, whose personal attractions and singularly skillful

knowledge of the use of poisons made her Grand Duchess of Tuscany

some years after she eloped from Venice), he became the leader of

her armies on the death of Carmagnola, who survived the triumphal

reception given him by the Serenest Senate only a very short time. [It

seems scarcely worth while to state the fact that Carmagnola,

suspected of treasonable correspondence with the Visconti, was

recalled to Venice to receive distinguished honors from the republic.

The Senate was sitting in the hall of the Grand Council when he

appeared, and they detained him there with various compliments till

night fell. Then instead of lights, the Sbirri appeared, and seized

Carmagnola. "I am a dead man," he exclaimed, on beholding them. And

so indeed he was; for, three days after, he was led out of prison,

and beheaded between the pillars of the Piazzetta.] The Gonzaga

took Verona and Padua for the republic, and met the Milanese in many

battles. Venice was then fat and insolently profuse with the spoils

of the Orient, and it is probable that the Marquis of Mantua acquired

there that taste for splendor which he introduced into his hitherto

frugal little state. We read of his being in Venice in 1414, when the

Jewelers and Goldsmiths' Guild gave a tournament in the Piazza San

Marco, offering as prizes to the victorious lances a collar enriched

with pearls and diamonds, the work of the jewelers, and two helmets

excellently wrought by the goldsmiths. On this occasion the Gonzaga,

with two hundred and sixty Mantuan gentlemen, mounted on superb

horses, contested the prizes with the Marquis of Ferrara, at the

head of two hundred Ferrarese, equally mounted, and attended by their

squires and pages, magnificently dressed. There were sixty thousand

spectators of the encounter. "Both the Marquises," says Mutinelli

in his "Annali Urbani," "being each assisted by fourteen well-armed

cavaliers, combated valorously at the barrier, and were both judged

worthy of the first prize: a Mantuan cavalier took the second."

The Marquis Gonzaga was the first of his line who began that royal

luxury of palaces with which Mantua was adorned. He commenced the

Ducal Palace; but before he went far with the work, he fell a prey to

the science then much affected by Italian princes, but still awaiting

its last refinement from the gifted Lucrezia Borgia. The poor Marquis

was poisoned by his wife's paramour, and died in the year 1444.

Against this prince, our advocate Arrighi records the vandalism of

causing to be thrown down and broken in pieces the antique statue

of Virgil, which stood in one of the public places of Mantua, and of

which the head is still shown in the Museum of the city. In all times,

the Mantuans had honored, in diverse ways, their great poet, and at

certain epochs had coined money bearing his face. With the common

people he had a kind of worship (more likely as wizard than as poet),

and they celebrated annually some now-forgotten event by assembling

with songs and dances about the statue of Virgil, which was destroyed

by the uncle of the Marquis, Malatesta, rather than by the Marquis's

own order. This ill-conditioned person is supposed to have been

"vexed because our Mantuan people thought it their highest glory to be

fellow-citizens of the prince of poets." We can better sympathize with

the advocate's indignation at this barbarity, than with his blame of

Francesco for having consented, by his acceptance of the marquisate,

to become a prince of the Roman Empire. Mantua was thus subjected

to the Emperors, but liberty had long been extinguished; and the

voluntary election of the Council, which bestowed the captaincy on

each succeeding generation of the Gonzagas, was a mere matter of form,

and of course.

The next prince, Lodovico Gonzaga, was an austere man, and had been

bred in a hard school, if I may believe some of our old chroniclers,

whom, indeed, I sometimes suspect of being not altogether faithful. It

is said that his father loved his younger brother better than him,

and that Lodovico ran away in his boyhood, and took refuge with his

father's hereditary enemies, the Visconti. To make dates agree,

it must have been the last of these, for the line failed during

Lodovico's time, and he had wars with the succeeding Sforza. In the

day of his escapade, Milan was at war with Mantua and with Venice, and

the Marquis Gonzaga was at the head of the united armies, as we have

already seen. So the father and son met in several battles; though

the Visconti, out of love for the boy, and from a sentiment of piety

somewhat amazing in them, contrived that he should never actually

encounter his parent face to face. Lodovico came home after the wars,

wearing a long beard; and his mother called her son "the Turk," a

nickname that he never lost.

Il Turco was a lover of the arts and of letters, and he did many

works to enrich and beautify the city. He established the first

printing-office in Mantua, where the first book printed was the

"Decamerone" of Boccaccio. He founded a college of advocates, and he

dug canals for irrigation; and the prosperity of Mantuan manufacturers

in his time may be inferred from the fact that, when the King of

Denmark paid him a visit, in 1474, the merchants decked their shops

with five thousand pieces of fine Mantuan cloth.

The Marquis made his brilliant little court the resort of the arts and

letters; and hither from Florence came once the elegant Politian, who

composed his tragedy of "Orfeo" in Mantua, and caused it to be first

represented before Lodovico. But it must be confessed that this was

a soil in which art flourished better than literature, and that even

born Mantuan poets went off, after a while, and blossomed in other

air. The painter Mantegna, whom the Marquis invited from Padua, passed

his whole life here, painting for the Marquis in the palaces and

churches. The prince loved him, and gave him a house, and bestowed

other honors upon him; and Mantegna executed for Lodovico his famous

pictures representing the Triumph of Julius Cæsar. [Now at Hamilton

Court, in England.] It was divided into nine compartments, and, as a

frieze, went round the upper part of Lodovico's newly erected palace

of San Sebastian. Mantegna also painted a hall in the Castello di

Corte, called the Stanza di Mantegna, and there, among other subjects

of fable and of war, made the portraits of Lodovico and his wife. It

was partly the wish to see such works of Mantegna as still remained in

Mantua that took us thither; and it was chiefly this wish that carried

us, the morning after our arrival, to the Castello di Corte, or the

Ducal Palace. Our thirst for Mantegnas was destined to be in no degree

satisfied in this pile, but it was full of things to tempt us to

forget Mantegna, and to make us more and more interested in the

Gonzagas and their Mantua.

It is taken for granted that no human being ever yet gained an idea of

any building from the most artful description of it; but if the reader

cares to fancy a wide piazza, or open square, with a church upon the

left hand, immense, uninteresting edifices on the right, and an ugly

bishop's palace of Renaissance taste behind him, he may figure before

him as vastly and magnificently as he pleases the superb Gothic front

of the Castello di Corte. This façade is the only one in Italy that

reminds you of the most beautiful building in the world, the Ducal

Palace at Venice; and it does this merely by right of its short

pillars and deep Gothic arches in the ground story, and the great

breadth of wall that rises above them, unbroken by the second line of

columns which relieves and lightens this wall in the Venetian palace.

It stands at an extremity of the city, upon the edge of the broad

fresh-water lagoon, and is of such extent as to include within its

walls a whole court-city of theatre, church, stables, playground,

course for riding, and several streets. There is a far older edifice

adjoining the Castello di Corte, which Guido Bonacolsi began, and

which witnessed the bloody end of his line, when Louis Gonzaga

surprised and slew his last successor. But the palace itself is all

the work of the Gonzagas, and it remains the monument of their kingly

state and splendid pride.

It was the misfortune of the present writer to be recognized by the

_employé_ (formerly of Venice) who gives the permissions to travellers

to visit the palace, and to be addressed in the presence of the

_Custode_ by the dignified title to which his presence did so little

honor. This circumstance threw upon the Custode, a naturally tedious

and oppressive old man, the responsibility of being doubly prolix and

garrulous. He reveled in his office of showing the palace, and did

homage to the visitor's charge and nation by an infinite expansion

upon all possible points of interest, lest he should go away

imperfectly informed of anything. By dint of frequent encounter with

strangers, this Custode had picked up many shreds and fragments

of many languages, and did not permit the travellers to consider

themselves as having at all understood him until he had repeated

everything in Italian, English, French, and German. He led the

way with his polyglot babble through an endless number of those

magnificent and uninteresting chambers which palaces seem specially

built to contain, that men may be content to dwell in the humbler

dullness of their own houses; and though the travellers often prayed

him to show them the apartments containing the works of Mantegna,

they really got to see nothing of this painter's in the Ducal Palace,

except, here and there, some evanescent frescoes, which the Custode

would not go beyond a _si crede_ in attributing to him. Indeed, it is

known that the works of Mantegna suffered grievously in the wars of

the last century, and his memory has faded so dim in this palace where

he wrought, that the guide could not understand the curiosity of the

foreigners concerning the old painter; and certainly Giulio Romano has

stamped himself more ineffaceably than Mantegna upon Mantua.

In the Ducal Palace are seen vividly contrasted the fineness and

strength, the delicacy and courage of the fancy, which, rather than

the higher gift of imagination, characterize Giulio's work. There is

such an airy refinement and subtile grace in the pretty grotesques

with which he decorates a chamber; there is such daring luxury of

color and design in the pictures for which his grand halls are merely

the frames. No doubt I could make fine speeches about these paintings;

but who, not seeing them, would be the wiser, after the best

description and the choicest critical disquisition? In fact, our

travellers themselves found it pleasanter, after a while, to yield to

the guidance of the Custode, and to enjoy the stupider marvels of the

place, than to do the set and difficult admiration of the works of

art. So, passing the apartments in good preservation (the Austrian

Emperors had taken good care of some parts of the palace of one of

their first Italian possessions), they did justice to the splendor

of the satin beds and the other upholstery work; they admired rich

carpentering and costly toys; they dwelt on marvelous tapestries

(among which the tapestry copies of Raphael's cartoons, woven at

Mantua in the fifteenth century, are certainly worthy of wonder);

and they expressed the proper amazement at the miracles of art which

caused figures frescoed in the ceilings to turn with them, and follow

and face them from whatever part of the room they chose to look. Nay,

they even enjoyed the Hall of the Rivers, on the sides of which the

usual river-gods were painted, in the company of the usual pottery,

from which they pour their founts, and at the end of which there

was an abominable little grotto of what people call, in modern

landscape-gardening, rock-work, out of the despair with which its

unmeaning ugliness fills them. There were busts of several Mantuan

duchesses in the gallery, which were interesting, and the pictures

were so bad as to molest no one. There was, besides all this, a

hanging garden in this small Babylon, on which the travellers looked

with a doleful regret that they were no longer of the age when a

hanging garden would have brought supreme comfort to the soul. It

occupied a spacious oblong, had a fountain and statues, trees and

flowers, and would certainly have been taken for the surface of the

earth, had not the Custode proudly pointed out that it was on a level

with the second floor, on which they stood.

After that they wandered through a series of unused, dismantled

apartments and halls, melancholy with faded fresco, dropping stucco,

and mutilated statues of plaster, and came at last upon a balcony

overlooking the Cavallerizza, which one of the early dukes built after

a design by the inevitable Giulio Romano. It is a large square, and

was meant for the diversion of riding on horseback. Balconies go all

found it between those thick columns, finely twisted, as we see

them in that cartoon of Raphael, "The Healing of the Lame Man at the

Beautiful Gate of the Temple"; and here once stood the jolly dukes and

the jolly ladies of their light-hearted court, and there below rode

the gay, insolent, intriguing courtiers, and outside groaned the

city under the heavy extortions of the tax-gatherers. It is all in

weather-worn stucco, and the handsome square is planted with trees.

The turf was now cut and carved by the heavy wheels of the Austrian

baggage-wagons constantly passing through the court to carry munitions

to the fortress outside, whose black guns grimly overlook the dead

lagoon. A sense of desolation had crept over the sight-seers, with

that strange sickness of heart which one feels in the presence of ruin

not to be lamented, and which deepened into actual pain as the Custode

clapped his hands and the echo buffeted itself against the forlorn

stucco, and up from the trees rose a score of sullen, slumberous owls,

and flapped heavily across the lonesome air with melancholy cries. It

only needed, to crush these poor strangers, that final touch which the

Custode gave, as they passed from the palace through the hall in which

are painted the Gonzagas, and in which he pointed out the last Duke of

Mantua, saying he was deposed by the Emperor for felony, and somehow

conveying the idea of horse-stealing and counterfeiting on the part of

his Grace.

A very different man from this rogue was our old friend Lodovico, who

also, however, had his troubles. He was an enemy of the Ghibellines,

and fought them a great deal. Of course he had the habitual wars with

Milan, and he was obliged to do battle with his own brother Carlo

to some extent. This Gonzaga had been taken prisoner by Sforza; and

Lodovico, having paid for him a ransom of sixty thousand florins of

gold (which Carlo was scarcely worth), seized the fraternal lands, and

held them in pledge of repayment. Carlo could not pay, and tried

to get back his possessions by war. Vexed with these and other

contentions, Lodovico was also unhappy in his son, whose romance I

may best tell in the words of the history [Volta: _Storia di Mantova_.],

from which I take it:

"Lodovico Gonzaga, having agreed with the Duke of Bavaria to

take his daughter Margherita as wife for his (Lodovico's)

first-born, Federico, and the young man having refused her,

Lodovico was so much enraged that he sought to imprison him;

but the Marchioness Barbara, mother of Federico, caused him to

fly from the city till his father's anger should be abated.

Federico departed with six attendants [The _Fioretto delle

Cronache_ says "persons of gentle condition."]; but this flight

caused still greater displeasure to his father, who now

declared him banished, and threatened with heavy penalties any

one who should give him help or favor. Federico, therefore,

wandered about with these six attendants in diverse places, and

finally arrived in Naples; but having already spent all his

substance, and not daring to make himself known for fear of his

father, he fell into great want, and so into severe sickness.

His companions having nothing wherewith to live, and not

knowing any trade by which to gain their bread, did menial

services fit for day-laborers, and sustained their lord with

their earnings, he remaining hidden in a poor woman's house

where they all dwelt.

"The Marchioness had sent many messengers in divers provinces

with money to find her son, but they never heard any news of

him; so that they thought him dead, not hearing anything,

either, of his attendants. Now it happened that one of those

who sought Federico came to Naples, and presented himself to

the king with a letter from the said lady, praying that he

should make search in his territory for a company of seven men,

giving the name and description of each. The king caused this

search to be made by the heads of the district; and one of

these heads told how in his district there were six Lombard men

(not knowing of Federico, who lay ill), but that they were

laborers and of base condition. The king determined to see

them; and they being come before him, he demanded who they

were, and how many; as they were not willing to discover their

lord, on being asked their names they gave others, so that the

king, not being able to learn anything, would have dismissed

them. But the messenger sent by the Marchioness knew them, and

said to the king, 'Sire, these are the attendants of him whom I

seek; but they have changed their names.' The king caused them

to be separated one from another, and then asked them of their

Lord; and they, finding themselves separated, minutely narrated

everything; and the king immediately sent for Federico, whom

his officers found miserably ill on a heap of straw. He was

brought to the palace, where the king ordered him to be cared

for, sending the messenger back to his mother to advise her how

the men had been found and in what great misery. The

Marchioness went to her husband, and, having cast herself at

his feet, besought him of a grace. The Marquis answered that he

would grant everything, so it did not treat of Federico. Then

the lady opened him the letter of the king of Naples, which had

such effect that it softened the soul of the Marquis, showing

him in how great misery his son had been; and so, giving the

letter to the Marchioness, he said, 'Do that which pleases

you.' The Marchioness straightway sent the prince money, and

clothes to clothe him, in order that he should return to

Mantua; and having come, the son cast himself at his father's

feet, imploring pardon for himself and for his attendants; and

he pardoned them, and gave those attendants enough to live

honorably and like noblemen, and they were called The Faithful

of the House of Gonzaga, and from them come the _Fedeli_ of

Mantua.

"The Marquis then, not to break faith, caused Federico to take

Margherita, daughter of the Duke of Bavaria, for his wife, and

celebrated the nuptials splendidly; so that there remained the

greatest love between father and son."

The son succeeded to the father's dominion in 1478; and it is recorded

of him in the "Flower of the Chronicles," that he was a hater of

idleness, and a just man, greatly beloved by his people. They chiefly

objected to him that he placed a Jew, Eusebio Malatesta, at the head

of civil affairs; and this Jew was indeed the cause of great mischief:

for Ridolfo Gonzaga coming to reside with his wife for a time at the

court of his brother, the Marquis, Malatesta fell in love with

her. She repelled him, and the bitter Jew thereupon so poisoned her

husband's mind with accusations against her chastity, that he took her

home to his town of Lazzaro, and there put the unhappy and innocent

lady to death by the headsman's hand in the great square of the city.

Federico was Marquis only six years, and died in 1484, leaving

his marquisate to his son Francesco, the most ambitious, warlike,

restless, splendid prince of his magnificent race. This Gonzaga wore a

beard, and brought the custom into fashion in Italy again. He founded

the famous breed of Mantuan horses, and gave them about free-handedly

to other sovereigns of his acquaintance. To the English king he

presented a steed which, if we may trust history, could have been sold

for almost its weight in gold. He was so fond of hunting that he kept

two hundred dogs of the chase, and one hundred and fifty birds of

prey.

Of course this Gonzaga was a soldier, and indeed he loved war better

even than hunting, and delighted so much in personal feats of arms

that, concealing his name and quality, in order that the combat should

be in all things equal, he was wont to challenge renowned champions

wherever he heard of them, and to meet them in the lists. Great part

of his life was spent in the field; and he fought in turn on nearly

all sides of the political questions then agitating Italy. In 1495

he was at the head of the Venetian and other Italian troops when they

beat the French under Charles VIII. at Taro, and made so little use

of their victory as to let their vanquished invaders escape from them

after all. Nevertheless, if the Gonzaga did not here show himself a

great general, he did great feats of personal valor, penetrating to

the midst of the French forces, wounding the king, and with his own

hand taking prisoner the great Bastard of Bourbon. Venice paid him

ten thousand ducats for gaining the victory, such as it was, and when

peace was made he went to visit the French king at Vercelli; and there

Charles gave his guest a present of two magnificent horses, which the

Gonzaga returned yet more splendidly in kind. About five years later

he was again at war with the French, and helped the Aragonese drive

them out of Naples. In 1506, Pope Julius II. made him leader of the

armies of the Church (for he had now quitted the Venetian service),

and he reduced the city of Bologna to obedience to the Holy See. In

1509 he joined the League of Cambray against Venice, and, being made

Imperial Captain-General, was taken prisoner by the Venetians. They

liberated him, however, the following year; and in 1513 we find him at

the head of the league against the French.

A curious anecdote of this Gonzaga's hospitality is also illustrative

of the anomalous life of those times, when good faith had as little

to do with the intercourse of nations as at present; but good fortune,

when she appeared in the world, liked to put on a romantic and

melodramatic guise. An ambassador from the Grand Turk on his way to

Rome was taken by an enemy of the Pope, despoiled of all his money,

and left planted, as the Italians expressively say, at Ancona.

This ambassador was come to concert with Alexander VI. the death of

Bajazet's brother, prisoner in the Pope's hands, and he bore the Pope

a present of 50,000 gold ducats. It was Gian Della Rovere who seized

and spoiled him, and sent the papers (letters of the Pope and Sultan)

to Charles VIII. of France, to whom Alexander had been obliged to give

the Grand Turk's brother. The magnificent Gonzaga hears of the Turk's

embarrassing mischance, sends and fetches him to Mantua, clothes him,

puts abundant money in his purse, and dispatches him on his way. The

Sultan, in reward of this courtesy to his servant, gave a number of

fine horses to the Marquis, who, possibly being tired of presenting

his own horses, returned the Porte a ship-load of excellent Mantuan

cheeses. This interchange of compliments seems to have led to a kind

of romantic friendship between the Gonzaga and the Grand Turk, who did

occasionally interest himself in the affairs of the Christian dogs;

and who, when Francesco lay prisoner at Venice, actually wrote to the

Serenest Senate, and asked his release as a personal grace to him, the

Grand Turk. And Francesco was, thereupon, let go; the canny republic

being willing to do the Sultan any sort of cheap favor.

This Gonzaga, being so much engaged in war, seems to have had little

time for the adornment of his capital. The Church of Our Lady of

Victory is the only edifice which he added to it; and this was merely

in glorification of his own triumph over the French at Taro. Mantegna

painted an altar-piece for it, representing the Marquis and his wife

on their knees before the Virgin, in act of rendering her thanks for

the victory. The French nation avenged itself for whatever wrong was

done its pride in this picture by stealing it away from Mantua in

Napoleon's time; and it now hangs in the gallery of the Louvre.

Francesco died in 1519; and after him his son, Federico II., the first

Duke of Mantua, reigned some twenty-one years, and died in 1540. The

marquisate in his time was made a duchy by the Emperor Charles V.,

to whom the Gonzaga had given efficient aid in his wars against the

French. This was in the year 1530; and three years later, when the

Duke of Monferrato died, and the inheritance of his opulent little

state was disputed by the Duke of Savoy, by the Marquis of Saluzzo,

and by the Gonzaga, who had married the late Duke's daughter,

Charles's influence secured it to the Mantuan. The dominions of the

Gonzagas had now reached their utmost extent, and these dominions

were not curtailed till the deposition of Fernando Carlo in 1708, when

Monferrato was adjudged to the Duke of Savoy, and afterwards confirmed

to him by treaty. It was separated from the capital of the Gonzagas by

a wide extent of alien territory, but they held it with a strong

hand, embellished the city, and founded there the strongest citadel in

Italy.

Federico, after his wars for the Emperor, appears to have reposed in

peace for the rest of his days, and to have devoted himself to the

adornment of Mantua and the aggrandizing of his family. His court

was the home of many artists; and Titian painted for him the Twelve

Cæsars, which the Germans stole when they sacked the city in 1630.

But his great agent and best beloved genius was Giulio Pippi, called

Romano, who was conducted to Mantua by pleasant Count Baldassare

Castiglione.

Pleasant Count Baldassare Castiglione! whose incomparable book of the

"Cortigiano" succeeded in teaching his countrymen every gentlemanly

grace but virtue. He was born at Casatico in the Mantovano, in the

year 1476, and went in his boyhood to be schooled at Milan, where he

learnt the profession of arms. From Milan he went to Rome, where

he exercised his profession of arms till the year 1504, when he was

called to gentler uses at the court of the elegant Dukes of Urbino. He

lived there as courtier and court-poet, and he returned to Rome as the

ambassador from Urbino. Meantime his liege, Francesco Gonzaga, was but

poorly pleased that so brilliant a Mantuan should spend his life in

the service and ornament of other princes, and Castiglione came back

to his native country about the year 1516. He married in Mantua, and

there finished his famous book of "The Courtier," and succeeded in

winning back the favor of his prince. Federico, the Duke, made him

ambassador to Rome in 1528; and Baldassare did his master two signal

services there,--he procured him to be named head of all the Papal

forces, and he found him Giulio Romano. So the Duke suffered him to

go as the Pope's Nuncio to Spain, and Baldassare finished his courtly

days at Toledo in 1529.

The poet made a detour to Mantua on his way to Spain, taking with

him the painter, whom the Duke received with many caresses, as Vasari

says, presented him a house honorably furnished, ordered provision for

him and his pupils, gave them certain brave suits of velvet and satin,

and, seeing that Giulio had no horse, called for his own favorite

Luggieri, and bestowed it on him. Ah! they knew how to receive

painters, those fine princes, who had merely to put their hands into

their people's pocket, and take out what florins they liked. So the

Duke presently set the artist to work, riding out with him through the

gate of San Bastiano to some stables about a bow-shot from the walls,

in the midst of a flat meadow, where he told Giulio that he would be

glad (if it could be done without destroying the old walls) to have

such buildings added to the stables as would serve him for a kind of

lodge, to come out and merrily sup in when he liked. Whereupon Giulio

began to think out the famous Palazzo del T.

This painter is an unlucky kind of man, to whom all criticism seems

to have agreed to attribute great power and deny great praise.

Castiglione had found him at Rome, after the death of his master

Raphael, when his genius, for good or for ill, began for the first

time to find original expression. At Mantua, where he spent all the

rest of his busy life, it is impossible not to feel in some degree

the force of this genius. As in Venice all the Madonnas in the

street-corner shrines have some touch of color to confess the

painter's subjection to Titian or Tintoretto; as in Vicenza the

edifices are all in Greekish taste, and stilted upon pedestals in

honor and homage to Palladio; as in Parma Correggio has never 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 Tè,

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 Tè, 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 Tè,

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 long,

villainous grasses, and sending up a damp and deathly stench, which

made all the faces we saw look feverish and sallow. Already at that

early season the air was foul and heavy, and the sun, faintly making

himself seen through the dun sky of the dull spring day, seemed sick

to look upon the place, where indeed the only happy and lively things

were the clouds of gnats that danced before us, and welcomed us to the

Palazzo del T. Damp ditches surround the palace, in which these gnats

seemed to have peculiar pleasure; and they took possession of the

portico of the stately entrance of the edifice as we went in, and held

it faithfully till we returned.

In one of the first large rooms are the life-size portraits of the

six finest horses of the Gonzaga stud, painted by the pupils of Giulio

Romano, after the master's designs. The paintings attest the beauty of

the Mantuan horses, and the pride and fondness of their ducal owners;

and trustworthy critics have praised their eminent truth. But it is

only the artist or the hippanthrop who can delight in them long; and

we presently left them for the other chambers, in which the invention

of Giulio had been used to please himself rather than his master.

I scarcely mean to name the wonders of the palace, having, indeed,

general associations with them, rather than particular recollections

of them.

One of the most famous rooms is the Chamber of Psyche (the apartments

are not of great size), of which the ceiling is by Giulio and the

walls are by his pupils. The whole illustrates, with every variety

of fantastic invention, the story of Psyche, as told by Apuleius, and

deserves to be curiously studied as a part of the fair outside of a

superb and corrupt age, the inside of which was full of rottenness.

The civilization of Italy, as a growth from the earliest Pagan times,

and only modified by Christianity and the admixture of Northern blood

and thought, is yet to be carefully analyzed; and until this analysis

is made, discussion of certain features must necessarily be incomplete

and unsatisfactory. No one, however, can stand in this Chamber of

Psyche, and not feel how great reality the old mythology must still

have had, not only for the artists who painted the room, but for

the people who inhabited it and enjoyed it. I do not say that they

believed it as they believed in the vital articles of Christian faith,

but that they accepted it with the same spirit as they accepted the

martyrology of the Church; and that to the fine gentlemen and ladies

of the court, those jolly satyrs and careless nymphs, those Cupids

and Psyches, and Dianas and Venuses, were of the same verity as the

Fathers of the Desert, the Devil, and the great body of the saints.

If they did not pray to them, they swore by them, and their names were

much oftener on their lips; and the art of the time was so thoroughly

Pagan, that it forgot all Christian holiness, and clung only to

heathen beauty. When it had not actually a mythologic subject to deal

with, it paganized Christian themes. St. Sebastian was made to look

like Apollo, and Mary Magdalene was merely a tearful, triste Venus.

There is scarcely a ray of feeling in Italian art since Raphael's

time which suggests Christianity in the artist, or teaches it to the

beholder. In confessedly Pagan subjects it was happiest, as in

the life of Psyche, in this room; and here it inculcated a gay and

spirited license, and an elegant absence of delicacy, which is still

observable in Italian life. It would be instructive to know in what

spirit the common Mantuans of his day looked upon the inventions of

the painter, and how far the courtly circle which frequented this room

went in discussion and comment on its subjects; they were not

nice people, and probably had no nasty ideas about the unspeakable

indecency of some of the scenes. [The ruin in the famous room frescoed

with the Fall of the Giants commences on the very door-jambs, which

are painted in broken and tumbling brick-work; and throughout there is

a prodigiousness which does not surprise, and a bigness which does not

impress; and the treatment of the subject can only be expressed by

the Westernism _powerfully weak_. In Kugler's _Hand-book of Italian

Painting_ are two illustrations, representing parts of the fresco,

which give a fair idea of the whole.]

Returning to the city we visited the house of Giulio Romano, which

stands in one of the fine, lonesome streets, and at the outside

of which we looked. The artist designed it himself; and it is very

pretty, with delicacy of feeling in the fine stucco ornamentation, but

is not otherwise interesting.

We passed it, continuing our way toward the Arsenal, near which we had

seen the women at work washing the linen coats of the garrison in the

twilight of the evening before; and we now saw them again from the

bridge, on which we paused to look at a picturesque bit of modern

life in Mantua. The washing-machine (when the successful instrument

is invented) may do its work as well, but not so charmingly, as these

Mantuan girls did. They washed the linen in a clear, swift-running

stream, diverted from the dam of the Mincio to furnish mill-power

within the city wall; and we could look down the watercourse past

old arcades of masonry half submerged in it, past pleasant angles of

houses and a lazy mill-wheel turning slowly, slowly, till our view

ended in the gallery of a time-worn palace, through the columns of

which was seen the blue sky. Under the bridge the stream ran very

strong and lucid, over long, green, undulating water-grasses, which it

loved to dimple over and play with. On the right were the laundresses

under the eaves of a wooden shed, each kneeling, as their custom is,

in a three-sided box, and leaning forward over the washboard that

sloped down into the water. As they washed they held the linen in one

hand, and rubbed it with the other; then heaped it into a mass upon

the board and beat it with great two-handed blows of a stick. They

sang, meanwhile, one of those plaintive airs of which the Italian

peasants are fond, and which rose in indescribable pathos, pulsing

with their blows, and rhythmic with the graceful movement of their

forms. Many of the women were young,--though they were of all

ages,--and the prettiest among them was third from where we stood

upon the bridge. She caught sight of the sketch-book which one of the

travellers carried, and pointed it out to the rest, who could hardly

settle to their work to be sketched. Presently an idle baker, whose

shop adjoined the bridge, came out and leaned upon the parapet, and

bantered the girls. "They are drawing the prettiest," he said, at

which they all bridled a little; and she who knew herself to be

prettiest hung her head and rubbed furiously at the linen. Long before

the artist had finished the sketch, the lazy, good-humored crowd which

the public practice of the fine arts always attract in Italy, had

surrounded the strangers, and were applauding, commenting, comparing,

and absorbing every stroke as it was made. When the book was closed

and they walked away, a number of boys straggled after them some

spaces, inspired by a curious longing and regret, like that which

leads boys to the eager inspection of fireworks when they have gone

out. We lost them at the first turning of the street, whither the

melancholy chorus of the women's song had also followed us, and where

it died pathetically away.

In the evening we walked to the Piazza Virgiliana, the beautiful space

laid out and planted with trees by the French, at the beginning of

this century in honor of the great Mantuan poet. One of its bounds is

the shore of the lake which surrounds the city, and from which now

rose ghostly vapors on the still twilight air. Down the slow, dull

current moved one of the picturesque black boats of the Po; and

beyond, the level landscape had a pleasant desolation that recalled

the scenery of the Middle Mississippi. It might have been here in this

very water that the first-born of our first Duke of Mantua fell from

his boat while hunting water-fowl in 1550, and took a fever of which

he died only a short time after his accession to the sovereignty of

the duchy. At any rate, the fact of the accident brings me back from

lounging up and down Mantua to my grave duty of chronicler.

Francesco's father had left him in childhood to the care of his uncle,

the Cardinal Hercules, who ruled Mantua with a firm and able hand,

increasing the income of the state, spending less upon the ducal stud,

and cutting down the number of mouths at the ducal table from eight

hundred to three hundred and fifty-one. His justice tended to severity

rather than mercy; but reformers of our own time will argue well of

his heart, that he founded in that time a place of refuge and

retirement for abandoned women. Good Catholics will also be pleased to

know that he was very efficient in suppressing the black heresy of

Calvin, which had crept into Mantua in his day,--probably from

Ferrara, where the black heretic himself was then, or about then, in

hiding under the protection of the ill-advised Marchioness Renée. The

good Cardinal received the Pope's applause for his energy in this

matter, and I doubt not his hand fell heavily on the Calvinists. Of

the Duke who died so young, the Venetian ambassador thought it worth

while to write what I think it worth while to quote, as illustrating

the desire of the Senate to have careful knowledge of its neighbors:

"He is a boy of melancholy complexion. His eyes are full of spirit,

but he does not delight in childish things, and seems secretly proud

of being lord. He has an excellent memory, and shows much inclination

for letters."

His brother Guglielmo, who succeeded him in 1550, seems to have

had the same affection for learning; but he was willful, harsh, and

cruelly ambitious, and cared, an old writer says, for nothing so

much as perpetuating the race of the Gonzagas in Mantua. He was a

hunchback, and some of his family (who could not have understood his

character) tried to persuade him not to assume the ducal dignity; but

his haughty temper soon righted him in their esteem, and it is said

that all the courtiers put on humps in honor of the Duke. He was not

a great warrior, and there are few picturesque incidents in his reign.

Indeed, nearly the last of these in Mantuan history was the coronation

at Mantua of the excellent poet Lodovico Ariosto, by Charles V., in

1532, Federico II. reigning. But the Mantuans of Guglielmo's day were

not without their sensations, for three Japanese ambassadors passed

through their city on the way to Rome. They were also awakened to

religious zeal by the reappearance of Protestantism among them. The

heresy was happily suppressed by the Inquisition, acting under Pius

V., though with small thanks to Duke William, who seems to have taken

no fervent part in the persecutions. "The proceedings," says Cantù,

writing before slavery had been abolished, "were marked by those

punishments which free America inflicts upon the negroes to-day,

and which a high conception of the mission of the Church moves us

to deplore." The Duke must have made haste after this to reconcile

himself with the Church; for we read that two years later he was

permitted to take a particle of the blood of Christ from the church of

St. Andrea to that of Sta. Barbara, where he deposited it in a box of

crystal and gold, and caused his statue to be placed before the shrine

in the act of adoring the relic.

Duke William managed his finances so well as to leave his spendthrift

son Vincenzo a large sum of money to make away with after his death.

Part of this, indeed, he had earned by obedience to his father's

wishes in the article of matrimony. The prince was in love with the

niece of the Duke of Bavaria, very lovely and certainly high-born

enough, but having unhappily only sixty thousand crowns to her

portion. So she was not to be thought of, and Vincenzo married the

sister of the Duke of Parma, of whom he grew so fond, that, though

two years of marriage brought them no children, he could scarce

be persuaded to suffer her divorce on account of sterility. This

happened, however, and the prince's affections were next engaged by

the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The lady had a portion

of three hundred thousand crowns, which entirely charmed the

frugal-minded Duke William, and Vincenzo married her, after certain

diplomatic preliminaries demanded by the circumstances, which scarcely

bear statement in English, and which the present history would blush

to give even in Italian.

Indeed, he was a great beast, this splendid Vincenzo, both by his own

fault and that of others; but it ought to be remembered of him, that

at his solicitation the most clement lord of Ferrara liberated from

durance in the hospital of St. Anna his poet Tasso, whom he had kept

shut in that mad-house seven years. On his delivery, Tasso addressed

his "Discorso" to Vincenzo's kinsman, the learned Cardinal Scipio

Gonzaga; and to this prelate he submitted for correction the

"Gerusalemme," as did Guarini his "Pastor Fido."

When Vincenzo came to power he found a fat treasury, which he enjoyed

after the fashion of the time, and which, having a princely passion

for every costly pleasure, he soon emptied. He was crowned in 1587;

and on his coronation day rode through the streets throwing gold to

the people, after the manner of the Mantuan Dukes. He kept up an army

of six thousand men, among a population of eighty thousand all told;

and maintained as his guard "fifty archers on horseback, who also

served with the arquebuse, and fifty light-horsemen for the guard of

his own person, who were all excellently mounted, the Duke possessing

such a noble stud of horses that he always had five hundred at

his service, and kept in stable one hundred and fifty of marvelous

beauty." He lent the Spanish king two hundred thousand pounds out

of his father's sparings; and when the Archduchess of Austria,

Margherita, passed through Mantua on her way to wed Philip II. of

Spain, he gave her a diamond ring worth twelve thousand crowns. Next

after women, he was madly fond of the theatre, and spent immense sums

for actors. He would not, indeed, cede in splendor to the greatest

monarchs, and in his reign of fifteen years he squandered fifty

million crowns! No one will be surprised to learn from a contemporary

writer in Mantua, that this excellent prince was adorned with all

the Christian virtues; nor to be told by a later historian, that in

Vincenzo's time Mantua was the most corrupt city in Europe. A satire

of the year 1601, which this writer (Maffei) reduces to prose, says

of that period: "Everywhere in Mantua are seen feasts, jousts, masks,

banquets, plays, music, balls, delights, dancing. To these, the

young girls," an enormity in Italy, "as well as the matrons, go in

magnificent dresses; and even the churches are scenes of love-making.

Good mothers, instead of teaching their daughters the use of the

needle, teach them the arts of rouging, dressing, singing, and

dancing. Naples and Milan scarcely produce silk enough, or India and

Peru gold and gems enough, to deck out female impudence and pride.

Courtiers and warriors perfume themselves as delicately as ladies;

and even the food is scented, that the mouth may exhale fragrance.

The galleries and halls of the houses are painted full of the loves

of Mars and Venus, Leda and the Swan, Jove and Danae, while the

devout solace themselves with such sacred subjects as Susannah and the

Elders. The flower of chastity seems withered in Mantua. No longer in

Lydia nor in Cyprus, but in Mantua, is fixed the realm of pleasure."

The Mantuans were a different people in the old republican times, when

a fine was imposed for blasphemy, and the blasphemer put into a basket

and drowned in the lake, if he did not pay within fifteen days; which

must have made profanity a luxury even to the rich. But in that day

a man had to pay twenty soldi (seventy-five cents) if he spoke to

a woman in church; and women were not allowed even the moderate

diversion of going to funerals, and could not wear silk lace about the

neck, nor have dresses that dragged more than a yard, nor crowns of

pearls or gems, nor belts worth more than ten livres (twenty-five

dollars), nor purses worth more than fifteen soldi (fifty cents.)

Possibly as an antidote for the corruption brought into the world with

Vincenzo, there was another Gonzaga born about the same period, who

became in due time Saint Louis Gonzaga, and remains to this day one of

the most powerful friends of virtue to whom a good Catholic can pray.

He is particularly recommended by his biographer, the Jesuit Father

Cesari, in cases of carnal temptation, and improving stories are told

Italian youth of the miracles he works under such circumstances. He

vowed chastity for his own part at an age when most children do not

know good from evil, and he carried the fulfillment of this vow to

such extreme, that, being one day at play of forfeits with other

boys and girls, and being required to kiss--not one of the little

maidens--but her _shadow_ on the wall, he would not, preferring to

lose his pawn. Everybody, I think, will agree with Father Cesari that

it would be hard to draw chastity finer than this.

San Luigi Gonzaga descended from that Ridolfo who put his wife to

death, and his father was Marquis of Castiglione delle Stivere. He was

born in 1568, and, being the first son, was heir to the marquisate;

but from his earliest years he had a call to the Church. His family

did everything possible to dissuade him--his father with harshness,

and his uncle, Duke William of Mantua, with tenderness--from his

vocation. The latter even sent a "bishop of rare eloquence" to labor

with the boy at Castiglione; but everything was done in vain. In due

time Luigi joined the Company of Jesus, renounced this world, and

died at Rome in the odor of sanctity, after doing such good works as

surprised every one. His brother Ridolfo succeeded to the marquisate,

and fell into a quarrel with Duke William about lands, which dispute

Luigi composed before his death. About all which the reverend Jesuit

Father Tolomei has shown how far heaviness can go in the dramatic

form, and has written a pitiless play, wherein everybody goes into a

convent with the fall of the curtain. Till the reader has read this

play, he has never (properly speaking) been bored. For the happiness

of mankind, it has not been translated out of the original Italian.

From the time of the first Vincenzo's death, there are only two tragic

events which lift the character of Mantuan history above the quality

of _chronique scandaleuse_, namely, the Duke Ferdinand's repudiation

of Camilla Faa di Casale, and the sack of Mantua in 1630. The first of

these events followed close upon the demise of the splendid Vincenzo;

for his son Francesco reigned but a short time, and died, leaving a

little daughter of three years to the guardianship of her uncle,

the Cardinal Ferdinand. The law of the Mantuan succession excluded

females; and Ferdinand, dispensed from his ecclesiastical functions

by the Pope, ascended the ducal throne. In 1615, not long after his

accession, as the chronicles relate, in passing through a chamber

of the palace he saw a young girl playing upon a cithern, and being

himself young, and of the ardent temper of the Gonzagas, he fell in

love with the fair minstrel. She was the daughter of a noble servant

of the Duke, who had once been his ambassador to the court of the Duke

of Savoy, and was called Count Ardizzo Faa Monferrino di Casale; but

his Grace did not on that account hesitate to attempt corrupting her;

indeed, a courtly father of that day might well be supposed to have

few scruples that would interfere with a gracious sovereign's designs

upon his daughter. Singularly enough, the chastity of Camilla was

so well guarded that the ex-cardinal was at last forced to propose

marriage. It seems that the poor girl loved her ducal wooer; and

besides, the ducal crown was a glittering temptation, and she

consented to a marriage which, for state and family reasons, was made

secret. When the fact was bruited, it raised the wrath and ridicule

of Ferdinand's family, and the Duke's sister Margaret, Duchess of

Ferrara, had so lofty a disdain of his _mésalliance_ with an inferior,

that she drove him to desperation with her sarcasms. About this time

Camilla's father died, with strong evidences of poisoning; and the

wife being left helpless and friendless, her noble husband resorted to

the artifice of feigning that there had never been any marriage, and

thus sought to appease his family. Unhappily, however, he had given

her a certificate of matrimony, which she refused to surrender when

he put her away, so that the Duke, desiring afterwards to espouse

the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was obliged to present

a counterfeit certificate to his bride, who believed it the real

marriage contract, and destroyed it. When the Duchess discovered the

imposition, she would not rest till she had wrung the real document

from Camilla, under the threat of putting her son to death. The

miserable mother then retired to a convent, and died of a broken

heart, while Ferdinand bastardized his only legitimate son, a noble

boy, whom his mother had prettily called Jacinth. After this, a

kind of retribution, amid all his political successes, seems to have

pursued the guilty Duke. His second wife was too fat to bear children,

but not to bear malice; and she never ceased to distrust and reproach

the Duke, whom she could not believe in anything since the affair

of the counterfeit marriage contract. She was very religious, and

embittered Ferdinand's days with continued sermons and reproofs,

and made him order, in the merry Mantuan court, all the devotions

commanded by her confessor.

So Ferdinand died childless, and, it is said, in sore remorse, and was

succeeded in 1626 by his brother Vincenzo, another hope of the faith

and light of the Church. His brief reign lasted but one year, and

was ignoble as it was brief, and fitly ended the direct line of the

Gonzagas. Vincenzo, though an ecclesiastic, never studied anything,

and was disgracefully ignorant. Lacking the hereditary love of

letters, he had not the warlike boldness of his race; and resembled

his ancestors only in the love he bore to horses, hunting, and women.

He was enamored of the widow of one of his kinsmen, a woman no longer

young, but of still agreeable person, strong will, and quick wit,

and of a fascinating presence, which Vincenzo could not resist. The

excellent prince was wooing her, with a view to seduction, when he

received the nomination of cardinal from Pope Paul V. He pressed his

suit, but the lady would consent to nothing but marriage, and Vincenzo

bundled up the cardinal's purple and sent it back, with a very

careless and ill-mannered letter to the ireful Pope, who swore never

to make another Gonzaga cardinal. He then married the widow, but soon

wearied of her, and spent the rest of his days in vain attempts

to secure a divorce, in order to be restored to his ecclesiastical

benefices. And one Christmas morning _he_ died childless; and three

years later the famous sack of Mantua took place. The events leading

to this crime are part of one of the most complicated episodes of

Italian history.

Ferdinand, as guardian of his brother's daughter Maria, claimed

the Duchy of Monferrato as part of his dominion; but his claim was

disputed by Maria's grandfather, the Duke of Savoy, who contended that

it reverted to him, on the death of his daughter, as a fief which had

been added to Mantua merely by the intermarriage of the Gonzagas with

his family. He was supported in this claim by the Spaniards, then at

Milan. The Venetians and the German Emperor supported Ferdinand, and

the French advanced the claim of a third, a descendant of Lodovico

Gonzaga, who had left Mantua a century before, and entered upon the

inheritance of the Duchy of Nevers-Rethel. The Duke of Savoy was one

of the boldest of his warlike race; and the Italians had great hopes

of him as one great enough to drive the barbarians out of Italy. But

nearly three centuries more were wanted to raise his family to the

magnitude of a national purpose; and Carlo Emanuel spent his greatness

in disputes with the petty princes about him. In this dispute for

Monferrato he was worsted; for at the treaty of Pavia, Monferrato was

assured to Duke Ferdinand of Mantua.

Ferdinand afterwards died without issue, and Vincenzo likewise died

childless; and Charles Gonzaga of Nevers-Rethel, who had married

Maria, Ferdinand's ward, became heir to the Duchy of Mantua, but his

right was disputed by Ferrante Gonzaga of Guastalla. Charles hurriedly

and half secretly introduced himself into Mantua without consultation

with Venetian, Spaniard, or German. While Duke Olivares of Spain was

meditating his recognition, his officer at Milan tried to seize Mantua

and failed; but the German Emperor had been even more deeply offended,

and claimed the remission of Charles's rights as a feudatory of the

Roman Empire, until he should have regularly invested him. Charles

prepared for defense. Meanwhile Spain and Savoy seized Monferrato, but

they were afterwards defeated by the French, and the Spanish Milanese

was overrun by the Venetians and Mantuans. The German Emperor then

sent down his Landsknechts, and in 1630 besieged Mantua, while the

French promised help and gave none, and the Pope exhorted Charles

to submit. The Venetians, occupied with the Uskok pirates, could do

little in his defense. To the horrors of this unequal and desperate

war were added those of famine; and the Jews, passing between the camp

and the city, brought a pest from the army into Mantua, which raged

with extraordinary violence among the hungry and miserable people. In

vain they formed processions, and carried the blood of Christ about

the city. So many died that there were not boats enough to bear them

away to their sepulture in the lakes, and the bodies rotted in the

streets. There was not wanting at this time the presence of a traitor

in the devoted city; and that this wretch was a Swiss will be a

matter of no surprise. The despicable valor of these republicans has

everywhere formed the best defense of tyrants, and their fidelity has

always been at the service of the highest bidder. The recreant was

a lieutenant in the Swiss Guard of the Duke; and when he had led the

Germans into Mantua, and received the reward of his infamy, two German

soldiers, placed over him for his protection, killed him and plundered

him of his spoil.

The sack now began, and lasted three days, with unspeakable horrors.

The Germans (then the most slavish and merciless of soldiers) violated

Mantuan women, and buried their victims alive. The harlots of their

camp cast off their rags, and robing themselves in the richest spoils

they could find, rioted with brutal insult through the streets, and

added the shame of drunken orgies to the dreadful scene of blood and

tears. The Jews were driven forth almost naked from the Ghetto. The

precious monuments of ages were destroyed; or such as the fury of the

soldiers spared, the avarice of their generals consumed; and pictures,

statues, and other works of art were stolen and carried away. The

churches were plundered, the sacred houses of religion were sacked,

and the nuns who did not meet a worse fate went begging through the

streets.

The imperial general, Aldringher, had, immediately upon entering the

city, appropriated the Ducal Palace to himself as his share of the

booty. He placed a strong guard around it, and spoiled it at leisure

and systematically, and gained fabulous sums from the robbery. After

the sack was ended, he levied upon the population (from whom his

soldiers had forced everything that terror and torture could wring

from them) four contributions, amounting to a hundred thousand

doubloons. This population had, during the siege and sack, been

reduced from thirty to twelve thousand; and Aldringher had so

thoroughly accomplished his part of the spoliation, that the Duke

Charles, returning after the withdrawal of the Germans, could not find

in the Ducal Palace so much as a bench to sit upon. He and his family

had fled half naked from their beds on the entry of the Germans, and,

after a pause in the citadel, had withdrawn to Ariano, whence the

Duke sent ambassadors to Vienna to expose his miserable fate to

the Emperor. The conduct of Aldringher was severely rebuked at the

capital; and the Empress sent Carlo's wife ten thousand zecchini, with

which they returned at length to Mantua. It is melancholy to read how

his neighbors had to compassionate his destitution: how the Grand Duke

of Tuscany sent him upholstery for two state chambers; how the Duke

of Parma supplied his table-service; how Alfonso of Modena gave him

a hundred pairs of oxen, and as many peasants to till his desolated

lands. His people always looked upon him with evil eyes, as the cause

of their woes; and after a reign of ten years he died of a broken

heart, or, as some thought, of poison.

Carlo had appointed as his successor his nephew and namesake, who

succeeded to the throne ten years after his uncle's death, the

princess Maria Gonzaga being regent during his minority. Carlo II.

early manifested the amorous disposition of his blood, but his

reign was not distinguished by remarkable events. He was of imperial

politics during those interminable French-Austrian wars, and the

French desolated his dominions more or less. In the time of this

Carlo II., we read of the Jews being condemned to pay the wages of

the Duke's archers for the extremely improbable crime of killing some

Hebrews who had been converted; and there is account of the Duchess

going on foot to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Grace, to render thanks

for her son's recovery from a fever, and her daughter's recovery from

the bite of a monkey. Mantua must also have regained something of its

former gayety; for in 1652 the Austrian Archdukes and the Medici spent

Carnival there. Carlo II. died, like his father, with suspicions of

poisoning, and undoubted evidences of debauchery. He was a generous

and amiable prince; and, though a shameless profligate, was beloved by

his subjects, with whom, no doubt, his profligacy was not a reproach.

Ferdinand Carlo, whose ignoble reign lasted from 1665 to 1708, was

the last and basest of his race. The histories of his country do not

attribute a single virtue to this unhappy prince, who seems to have

united in himself all the vices of all the Gonzagas. He was licentious

and depraved as the first Vincenzo, and he had not Vincenzo's

courage; he was luxurious as the second Francesco, but had none of

his generosity; he taxed his people heavily that he might meanly enjoy

their substance without making them even the poor return of national

glory; he was grasping as Guglielmo, but saved nothing to the state;

he was as timid as the second Vincenzo, and yet made a feint of making

war, and went to Hungary at one time to fight against the Turk. But he

loved far better to go to Venice in his gilded barge, and to spend his

Carnivals amid the infinite variety of that city's dissoluteness. He

was so ignorant as scarcely to be able to write his name; but he knew

all vicious things from his cradle, as if, indeed, he had been gifted

to know them by instinct through the profligacy of his parents. It is

said that even the degraded Mantuans blushed to be ruled by so dull

and ignorant a wretch; but in his time, nevertheless, Mantua was all

rejoicings, promenades, pleasure-voyages, and merry-makings. "The

Duke recruited women from every country to stock his palace," says an

Italian author, "where they played, sang, and made merry at his will

and theirs." "In Venice," says Volta, "he surrendered himself to such

diversions without shame, or stint of expense. He not only took part

in all public entertainments and pleasures of that capital, but he

held a most luxurious and gallant court of his own; and all night long

his palace was the scene of theatrical representations by dissolute

women, with music and banqueting, so that he had a worse name than

Sardanapalus of old." He sneaked away to these gross delights in 1700,

while the Emperor was at war with the Spaniards, and left his Duchess

(a brave and noble woman, the daughter of Ferrante Gonzaga, Duke of

Guastalla) to take care of the duchy, then in great part occupied by

Spanish and French forces. This was the War of the Spanish Succession;

and it used up poor Ferdinand, who had not a shadow of interest in

it. He had sold the fortress of Casale to the French in 1681, feigning

that they had taken it from him by fraud: and now he declared that

he was forced to admit eight thousand French and Spanish troops into

Mantua. Perhaps indeed he was, but the Emperor never would believe it;

and he pronounced Ferdinand guilty of felony against the Empire, and

deposed him from his duchy. The Duke appealed against this sentence to

the Diet of Ratisbon, and, pending the Diet's decision, made a journey

of pleasure to France, where the Grand Monarch named him generalissimo

of the French forces in Italy, though he never commanded them. He

came back to Mantua after a little, and built himself a splendid

theatre,--the cheerful Duke.

But his end was near. The French and Austrians made peace in 1707; and

next year, Monferrato having fallen to Savoy, the Austrians entered

Mantua, whence the Duke promptly fled. The Austrians marched into

Mantua on the 29th of February, that being leap-year, and Ferdinand

came back no more. Indeed, trusting in false hopes of restoration

held out to him by Venice and France, he died on the 5th of the July

following, at Padua,--it was said by poison, but more probably of sin

and sorrow. So ended Ducal Mantua.

The Austrians held the city till 1797. The French Revolution took

it and kept it till 1799, and then left it to the Austrians for two

years. Then the Cisalpine Republic possessed it till 1802; and then it

was made part of the Kingdom of Italy, and so continued twelve years;

after which it fell again to Austria. In 1848, there was a revolution,

and the Austrian soldiers stole the precious silver case that held

the phial of the true blood. Now at last it belongs to the Kingdom

of Italy, with the other forts of the Quadrilateral--thanks to the

Prussian needle-gun.