but she is practically almost as profoundly at rest under the King of Italy.  One may walk long through the longitude and rectitude of many of her streets without the encounter of a single face:  the place, as a whole, is by no means as lively as Pompeii, where there are always strangers; perhaps the only cities in the world worthy to compete with Ferrara in point of agreeable solitude are Mantua and Herculaneum.  It is the newer part of the town—­the modern quarter built before Boston was settled or Ohio was known—­which is loneliest; and whatever motion and cheerfulness are still felt in Ferrara linger fondly about the ancient holds of life—­about the street before the castle of the Dukes, and in the elder and narrower streets branching away from the piazza of the Duomo, where, on market days, there is a kind of dreamy tumult.  In the Ghetto we were almost crowded, and people wanted to sell us things, with an enterprise that contrasted strangely with shopkeeping apathy elsewhere.  Indeed, 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 fame for his picture by the original thought of making it his revenge for a disappointment in love.  The unhappy lady who refused his love is represented in the depths, in the attitude of supplicating the pity and interest of another maiden in Paradise