surprise at the presence of strangers spending two days in Ferrara
when they could have got away sooner, was the only emotion which the
whole population agreed in expressing with any degree of energy, but
into this they seemed to throw their whole vitality. The Italians are
everywhere an artless race, so far as concerns the gratification of
their curiosity, from which no consideration of decency deters them.
Here in Ferrara they turned about and followed us with their eyes,
came to windows to see us, lay in wait for us at street-corners, and
openly and audibly debated whether we were English or German. We might
have thought this interest a tribute to something peculiar in our
dress or manner, had it not visibly attended other strangers who
arrived with us. It rose almost into a frenzy of craving to know more
of us all, when on the third day the whole city assembled before our
hotel, and witnessed, with a sort of desperate cry, the departure
of the heavy-laden omnibus which bore us and our luggage from their
midst.


IV.

I doubt if, after St. Mark's in Venice, the Duomo at Parma, and the
Four Fabrics at Pisa, there is a church more worthy to be seen for
its quaint, rich architecture, than the Cathedral at Ferrara. It is
of that beloved Gothic of which eye or soul cannot weary, and we
continually wandered back to it from other more properly interesting
objects. It is horribly restored in-doors, and its Renaissance
splendors soon drove us forth, after we had looked at the Last
Judgment by Bastianino. The style of this painting is muscular and
Michelangelic, and the artist's notion of putting his friends in
heaven and his foes in hell is by no means novel; but he has achieved