tecture amid which they dwelt, and out of which they crept as we passed by, that one's heart grew sad. How evident was it that the immortal spirit was withered, and that the land, despite its images of grandeur and sublimity, nourished a stricken race! The Alps were still young, but the men that lived within their shadow had grown very old. Their ears had too long been familiar with the clank of chains, and their hearts were too sad to catch up the utterances of freedom which came from their mountains. The human soul was dying, and will die, unless new fire from a celestial source descend to rekindle it. Architecture, music, new constitutions, the ever glorious face of nature itself, will not prevent the approaching death of the continental nations. There is but one book in the world that can do it,-the Book of Life. Unfold its pages, and a more blessed and glorious effulgence than that which lights up the Alps at sunrise will break upon the nations; but, alas! this cannot be so long as the Jesuit and the Croat are there. We saw, too, on our journey, other things that did not tend to put us into better spirits. As we approached Milan, we met a couple of gensdarmes leading away a poor foot-sore revolutionist to the frontier. Ah! said I inly, could the Jesuits look into my breast, they would find there ideas more dangerous to their power, in all probability, than those that this man entertains ; and yet, while he is expelled, I am admitted. No thanks to them, however. I rode onwards. League followed league of the richest but the most unvaried scenery. Campanile and hamlet came and went: still Milan came not. I strained my eyes in the direction in which I expected its roofs and towers to appear, but all to no purpose. At length there rose over the green woods that covered the plain, as if evoked by enchantment, a vision of surpassing beauty. I gazed entranced. The lovely nd shot nacles in. It terday. As had gracewhich ver, or Milan, CHAPTER VIII. wned CITY AND PEOPLE OF MILAN. The Barrier-Beautiful Aspect of the City-Hotel Royale--History of Ir was an hour past noon when the diligence, with its polyglot freight, drove up to the barrier. There gathered round the vehicle a white cloud of Austrian uniforms, and straightway every compartment of the carriage bristled with a forest of hands holding passports. These the men-at-arms received; and, making them hastily up into a bundle, and tying them with a piece of cord, they despatched them by a special messenger to the Prefect; so that hardly had we entered the Porta Vercellina, till our arrival was known at head-quarters. There was handed at the same time to each passenger a printed paper, in which the same notification was four times repeated,―first in Italian, next in French, then in German, and lastly in English,-enjoining the holder, under certain penalties, to present himself within a given number o Office. It was under these conditions,-a pilgr -that I appeared at the gates of Milan. tion seemed less an annoyance here than I fore. The beauteous city, sitting so tran sublimest scenery, seemed to have something racter about it. It looked so resplendent, p the materials of which it is built, and partly sun that shone upon it as an Italian sun on none but pure men, I felt, might dwell here, a men might enter at its gates. There were w its portals; rows of white houses formed its the middle of the city, floating above it,-for i rather than to rest on foundations,-was its sno -a place too holy almost, as it seemed, for hum human worshippers; and then the city had for ba rious wall, white as alabaster, which rose to the thing conspired to cheat the visitor into the be come at last to an abode where every hurtf hushed, and where Peace had fixed her chosen "All right," shouted the passport official: t who guarded the path with naked bayonet, stepp the quick, sharp crack of the postilion's whip se moving. We skirted the spacious esplanade, an distance the beauteous form of the Arco della Pa not gone far till the drum's roll struck upon th long glittering line of Austrian bayonets was across the esplanade. It was evident that the yet come to Milan, all glorious as she seemed "shall learn war no more." We plunged into a row streets, which open on the Mercato Vecchio. the Corso, and came out upon the broad promenade that traverses Milan from the square of the Duomo to the Porta Orientale. We soon found ourselves at the diligence office; and there, our little colony of various nations breaking up, I bade adieu to the good vehicle which had carried me from Turin, and took my way to the Hotel Royale, in the Contrada dei tre Re. At the first summons of the porter's bell the gate opened. On entering, I found myself in what had been one of the palaces of Milan when the city was in its best days. But the Austrian eagle had scared the native princes and nobles of the Queen of Lombardy, who were gone, and had left their streets to be trodden by the Croat, and their palaces to be tenanted by the wayfarer. The buildings of the hotel formed a spacious quadrangle, three storeys high, with a finely paved court in the centre. I was conducted up stairs to my bed-room, which, though by no means large, and plainly furnished, presented the luxury of extreme cleanliness, with its beautifully polished wooden floor, and its delicately white napery and curtains. The saloon on the ground-floor opened sweetly into a little garden, with its fountain, its bit of rock-work, and its gods and nymphs of stone. The apartment had a peculiarly comfortable air at breakfast-time. The hissing urn, flanked by the tea-caddy; the rich brown coffee, the delicious butter, and the not less delicious bread, the produce of the plains around, not unnaturally white, as with us, but golden, like the wheat when it waves in the autumnal sun; and the guests, mostly English, which assembled morning after morning,-made the return of this hour very pleasant. Establishing myself at the Albergo Reale for this and the two following days, I sallied out, to wander everywhere and see everything. Milan is of ancient days; and few cities have seen greater |