recovery of a great city, once part of the old Italian kingdom, and
whose speech is largely, perhaps chiefly, Italian to this day. But, a
cry of "Italia Irredenta," however far it may go, must not go so far
as this. Trieste, a cosmopolitan city on a Slavonic shore, can not be
called Italian in the same sense as the lands and towns so near Verona
which yearn to be as Verona is. Let Trieste be the rival, even the
eyesore, of Venice, still Southern Germany must have a mouth.

We might, indeed, be better pleased to see Trieste a free city, the
southern fellow of Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg; but it must not be
forgotten that the Archduke of Austria and Lord of Trieste reigns at
Trieste by a far better right than that by which he reigns at Cattaro
and Spizza. The present people of Trieste did not choose him, but the
people of Trieste five hundred years back did choose the forefather of
his great-grandmother. Compared with the grounds of which kingdoms,
duchies, counties, and lordships, are commonly held in that
neighborhood, such a claim as this must be allowed to be respectable
indeed.

The great haven of Trieste may almost at pleasure be quoted as either
confirming or contradicting the rule that it is not in the great
commercial cities of Europe that we are to look for the choicest or the
most plentiful remains of antiquity. Sometimes the cities themselves
are of modern foundation; in other cases the cities themselves, as
habitations of men and seats of commerce, are of the hoariest antiquity,
but the remains of their early days have perished through their very
prosperity. Massalia,[4] with her long history, with her double wreath
of freedom, the city which withstood Cæsar and which withstood Charles
of Anjou, is bare of monuments of her early days. She has been the
victim of her abiding good fortune. We can look down from the height on