says the line which comes as such a relief after the involved constructions of later Latin writers, a line which records a fact as simply worded as it could be in a mediæval chronicle, which gives us a true leonine rime, and which makes its way through six feet without a single dactyl. To the Campanian knights their Roman citizenship was doubtless pleasant enough; it may have been less so to the commons, who had the private rights only, and who were burthened with a payment to the knights. Yet we find that the revolt of Capua to Hannibal was largely the work of noble leaders. The truth doubtless is that the large amount of independence which Capua still kept only made any measure of dependence more galling. Then came the blow which made Capua for a while cease to be a city. Its lands became the property of the Roman people; its walls were left simply as a shelter for those who filled them. Yet the great city of Campania arose again, to be once more a great city till the second blow, when men of Semitic speech came not as deliverers but as destroyers, when Capua moved to Casilinum, and when all that was left of the elder city put itself under the keeping of a heavenly protectress as Santa Maria di Capua. Among those remnants of what was, the walls of Capua, the arx of Capua, are not to be found; at all events they do not strike the traveller on his first or his second visit. For something faintly answering to a Capuan arx, he takes himself to the neighbouring mountains. There, on their lowest slopes, looking out on Vesuvius and Ischia, looking down on the Campanian plain, with its river, with its older and its newer Capua, we come to a spot where a famous temple of the older faith has given way to a less famous one of the new. A journey from Caserta to the Capuan amphitheatre in the plain may well take in a journey to the slope of Tifata, the slope of the hill on which Hannibal so often pitched his camp, and where the church of Sant' Angelo in Formis has supplanted the holy place of Diana and Jupiter, which took its name from the mountain which rises above its massy tower.

V. A Church by the Camp of Hannibal.

We reach Tifata, the very centre of the marching and counter-marching of Hannibal, the spot from which we may best call up a picture of beleaguered Capua, of Fulvius waiting for his prey, of the stout fighting on either side of the enclosing lines, of Hannibal, as his last hope, turning aside to threaten Rome, in the chance that the danger of Rome might lead to the relief of Capua. The name Tifata, in some tongue, most likely in the old Oscan, describes the evergreen oaks which doubtless formed the sacred grove of Diana. The goddess had no lake here, as she had at Aricia, nor do we hear of any such grim legend on Tifata as grew round—

Yet beside the rites of Canaan, the rites of the gods who had sent forth him whose name proclaimed him as the Grace of Baal, the darkest forms into which any kind of Italian or Hellenic worship strayed might well seem mild. In tracking the career of Hannibal, we are ever disappointed at the utter lack of means to call up a picture of the man himself apart from his public acts. He had human weaknesses, for he found a mistress at Salapia. He had his sallies of merriment, for he could raise a laugh at the grave Gisgo. But the course of his inner life is hidden from us. Still we can at least see that he was, in his own belief, charged with a mission from the gods of his own city. And it needs an effort to bear in mind that the gods of Hannibal were Baal and Moloch. The goddess to whom he would have reared a temple would have been, not a Diana, but an Ashtoreth. Yet, among the many, and mostly false, charges of cruelty brought against the great Phœnician by Roman writers, we do not hear, as we do in the case of some other Carthaginian commanders, of captives being made to pass through the fire to the gods of Carthage. Hannibal, the friend of Capua, would at Capua honour Diana of Tifata; but it was not Diana that had sent him. With what thanks did he honour his own gods, when Capua, second city of all Italy, welcomed the victor of Trebia, Trasimenus, and Cannæ? Is it too bold a flight to fancy the mount of Tifata the scene of the same form of Baal-worship as the mount of Carmel?

But the gods of Italy lived on, undisturbed by the momentary presence of Semitic rivals. Diana was not the only power worshipped on Tifata; Jupiter also had his holy place. And it may be that the venerable church which now forms the chief attraction of the hill-side represents the holy place of Jupiter rather than the holy place of Diana. It is curious to see how a kind of appropriateness was often sought after in the nomenclature of Pagan temples when turned into Christian churches. Thus, at Athens, the Parthenôn remained the Parthenôn, while the temple of the warrior Thêseus or Hêraklês became the church of the warrior George. We should look for a Santa Maria or a Santa Lucia at the least, on the site of the sanctuary of Diana. Had we here a San Pietro, we should have very little doubt in setting down the prince of the Apostles as having supplanted the father of gods and men. But at Sant' Angelo in Formis we feel somewhat less certain; St. Michael suggests the Norman, and the Norman has been there. It may well be that the name is no older than his day.

But St. Michael on the slope of Tifata did carry us back in thought to a church of St. Peter seen some months before under a widely different state of outward things. We then made a somewhat difficult journey to a great and solitary Tuscan basilica in time of snow. The outward aspect of nature had certainly changed a good deal between the bleak day in January when it was found a hard task to follow the way from Pisa to the basilica of the prince of the Apostles in Grado and the sunny day in May when the same travellers found their way without difficulties of any kind to the basilica of the prince of the archangels in Formis. And there certainly can be no likeness of position, even if both were seen in January or both in May, between the basilica standing low in the flats by the mouth of Arno and the basilica which nestles against the mountains which form a wall to the rich plain of Vulturnus. But in seeing any one of these great churches, left, not ruined, like our Cistercian abbeys, but still living on a kind of life in places forsaken or nearly so, something always brings up the memory of some other of its fellows. Aquileia is perhaps the greatest case of all; but Aquileia, with its special position in the history of the world, stands by itself. If Aquileia itself is dead, it has lived on a wonderful after-life in the shape of its Venetian colony. We go to see Aquileia, because it is Aquileia; but even a well-informed traveller may know nothing of San Pietro in Grado and Sant' Angelo in Formis, till either his guide-book or some earlier visitor points them out to him as places which he ought not to pass by. Aquileia again has other things to show besides the great basilica and its surroundings. St. Apollinaris in Classe is as nearly forsaken as a church that is still kept up can be; but the basilica of Classis does not stand by itself; it forms part of the wonders of Ravenna, as St. Paul without-the-Walls forms part of the wonders of Rome. St. Peter in Grado might be looked on as standing in the same relation to Pisa; but it hardly enters into our general conception of Pisa, as the church of Classis—papal havoc hinders us from adding the church of Cæsarea—certainly enters into our general conception of Ravenna. S. Angelo in Formis at all events does not enter into our general conception of old Capua, because there is not enough of old Capua left to form any general conception of it at all. The church and the small surrounding village do form a kind of distant arx to the greater collection of houses which surrounds the amphitheatre; but among the nearer objects which catch the eye from the height, the most prominent is not old Capua with its amphitheatre, but new Capua, Casilinum that once was, with its towers and cupolas, mediæval and modern. We look on many things from the terrace in front of the portico of the archangel, but that which among artificial objects chiefly draws the eye towards it, is not the elder Capua of Hannibal and Marcellus, but the Capua which succeeded Aversa as the seat of the elder but the less famous of the Norman powers in Southern Italy. As we mark the advance of national union, no less than as we mark the advance of mere dynastic aggression, we have sometimes to think, for a moment perhaps to mourn, that "kingdoms have shrunk to provinces," though in this form of advance and incorporation, we have no longer to add that "chains clank over sceptred cities." Capua, on both its sites, once the head of an Etruscan, once of a Norman dominion, passed, in one age, under the universal rule of Rome. In another age it again sank from its separate headship to become a member of that greater Norman dominion in Apulia and Sicily which, after more shiftings, unions, divisions, transfers to distant rulers, than any other part of Europe, has in our days been merged in the realm of united Italy, with Rome as its head, but not its mistress.

We reach then the height which, whether that of Jupiter or Diana of old, is now the height of the warrior archangel. The whole history of the church belongs to the independent days of the second Capua; in its present shape it belongs to the days of independent Norman rule in the second Capua. But the days of independent Norman rule were days when the arts of the earlier rulers of the land still lived on. We see signs of the art of Byzantium, so long mistress of Southern Italy, and of the art of the Saracen, in Italy only a visitor or an invader, while in Sicily an abiding master. The portico in front of the church is Roman in its general idea; but, instead of the colonnade and entablature of the Laurentian basilica, we see an arcade whose pointed arches at once call up memories of Sicily. They have indeed little of Sicilian grace. Nowhere at Palermo or Monreale do we see such massive columns bearing such massive stilts. Columns indeed we should hardly say, as some of them are plainly mere fragments. But here, just as in Sicily, just as in Aquitaine, the pointed arch is no sign of coming Gothic; the style is still wholly Romanesque, and somewhat rude Romanesque too. And in this region of Italy we can hardly doubt as to attributing the almost accidental shape of the arches to the influence of Saracen models, perhaps to the workmanship of Saracen craftsmen. Hard by, but not joining the building, by an arrangement unlike Sicily, unlike Apulia, but the common rule of Northern Italy, rises a bell-tower, or rather the beginning of a bell-tower, which raises our wonder as to what it would have been if it had ever grown to its full height. Two stages only are finished, the lower of hewn stone, the upper of brick; but their bulk is so great that the tower, if it had ever been finished, would surely have ranked among the highest of its class, utterly overpowering even the great basilica at its side, except so far as it would have been itself overpowered by the natural heights above it. As in some other cases, the thought suggests itself, were not those who left off building the tower wiser than those who began it? The tall bell-towers of Italy look well as they rise from the Lombard plain, as they crown the hill of Fiesole, as they skirt the shores of the lake of Como. But we are not sure that a gigantic tower, which, if it was to have any kind of proportion, ought to have been carried up to a height as great as that of Venice, was in its right place when set a little way up a mountain-side, as if simply to show how small man's biggest works look in the midst of the works of nature. But the technical eye is thankful for the fragment that has been built, though mainly on a very technical ground. Professor Willis is gone, but his happy phrase of mid-wall shafts has not died with him. The custom of the elder Romanesque towers, the abiding fashion of Germany and Northern Italy, was to set the little columns which divided the coupled windows in the very middle of the wall; the latter Norman fashion, whether in Normandy, in England, or in Apulia, was to set them nearly flush with the outer wall. In this tower, Italian by geography, Norman by allegiance, two sides conform to the Italian and two to the Norman fashion. Nothing can show more clearly that even such small matters of detail as the use of a mid-wall shaft were made matters of serious thought, and that it was sometimes thought well to come to a compromise between two rival forms of taste.

The outside of this church, except so far as it forms an object in the general landscape, is perhaps chiefly attractive to the technical observer; the inside will surely appeal to every visitor, though the visitor who is technically informed in matters of painting may possibly look upon it with more of curiosity than of positive admiration. But the eye of the more general inquirer will give something like positive admiration to a basilica of eight arches, resting on ancient columns of various marbles, with its original design far less damaged than is common in Italian churches, and with every inch of available space covered with elaborate paintings of the date of the building. Like St. Peter by Pisa, the archangel by Capua trusted to painting for his enrichment and not to mosaics; and though the Campanian pictures are by far the better preserved of the two, though nearly all the subjects can be made out with the greatest ease, yet Ravenna and Venice rise to the mind to make us think that at least if endurance be the object, there is a more excellent way.

The walls of this church form almost a pictorial Bible, with a few legendary and local subjects thrown in. The Abbot Desiderius, holding, after the usual symbolical fashion, the church in his hand, is to be seen at the east end along with the archangels and evangelists. At the west end is what connoisseurs tell us is one of the very earliest pictures of the Last Judgment. On the two sides a crowd of scenes and figures from the Old and New Testament cover the whole space. The style of the painting is said to show Greek workmanship; we look toward the west end and mark, hardly above the ground, a single small shaft with a capital of strictly Byzantine character. The ruling Norman seems on this spot to have pressed into his service the artistic powers of all the inhabitants of the peninsula. Italian, Greek, Saracen, all give their help to adorn the house of the archangel. The Norman himself contributes nothing but the position of two small columns in the tower windows. We cannot even attribute to him the position of the house of the archangel, set Norman-fashion in a high place; for the first church was built before the Norman came. It is not so further east, where a distinctively Norman element is to be seen in the great churches of Apulia. But the gathering together of the best skill of the time from all quarters is a thoroughly Norman function, whether in Italy or in England.

The basilica should be compassed, so far at least as to climb the hill a little way to look at its east end. Its surrounding buildings supply an arch or two to catch the eye on the way up or down. But the essential features of Sant' Angelo are the grand display of painting and the union of elements of so many kinds. It is the first of a great series of churches at which our course will bid us to stop here and there. But before we reach them we shall pass by one point where our musings will again be mainly secular and largely pagan. A short journey will lead us from Campania into Samnium, and the valiant men of the Samnite land will claim a tribute on a spot which is Samnite beyond all others.

VI. A Glimpse of Samnium.

From Caserta and what is to be seen from Caserta, our next journey lies by the line of railway which runs right across Italy, connecting the two great lines of the east and west of the peninsula. It leads us from the Campanian plain, with at least its sheltering wall of mountains, with Tifata to guard the great city that once was from the ruder land beyond, to the great plain of Apulia from which every feature of a mountain-land has passed away. But, in so crossing from one side of Italy to the other, we pass through a striking and an historic region. We are in the land of the mightiest Italian rivals of Rome, the land of those with whom Rome had to fight, before Pyrrhos and Hannibal came, and ages after Pyrrhos and Hannibal were gone.

Our course leads us into the heart of the Samnite land, a land which may well call up endless musings on the hard fate of those "hearts of steel" who bore up so long against Rome, in the days when Rome was really at her greatest. And the memories of the same land in after days are not wholly alien to those of earlier times. Our course brings us, at not a few points, across the memories, if not of nations, yet of men, who had to bear up against the power of Rome, when the power of Rome had taken a far other form than that of the senate and the armies against which the Samnite had to strive. For the old Samnite land holds its place in later story, as the land of princes who felt what the spiritual Rome could do when the powers of the spiritual Rome were at their highest. We pass through regions which were the scene of no small part of the history of the Norman and Swabian lords of Sicily and Southern Italy. We are deep in the land of the counts, dukes, kings, and emperors of the house of Hauteville and the house of Hohenstaufen; and we are often called on to stop and track out their deeds. At not a few points do we light on some building, some inscription, which brings up the memory of Frederick, the Wonder of the World, and of Manfred, whose field of overthrow we shall presently pass by. In both periods the history of these lands has a character altogether different from that of Northern and Central Italy. In the later period this needs no proof: we are dealing with the history of a kingdom, not with the history of a system of separate cities. But something of the same difference extends to the earlier period also. If we wish to know more of Volscians and Hernicans, yet more keenly do we wish to know more of Samnites. The part which they played is greater, at all events in scale, and their dealings with Rome belong to a stage of Roman history when we feel that we have a kind of right to know more than we could hope to know in the earlier time. But while we know something of the character of the Samnite people as a whole, while we know something—though much less than in some other Italian lands—of the geography of the Samnite country, we have no clear notion of the political position or the political action of any particular Samnite city or canton, such as we ever and anon do get of particular cities of Etruria and Latium. And again, it is seldom that we can call up any distinct personal conception of any Samnite leader as a living and breathing man. This is indeed a grievance which affects Samnites along with the other Italian enemies of Rome. The personal conceptions which we do get of Etruscans and Latins largely belong to legendary times. Of historical Volscians we know very few. And we have already complained on Hernican ground that we cannot picture to ourselves the personal likeness of any single Hernican of independent Hernican days.

Still, on this particular journey we have small right to complain; for we pass by the spot which calls up the memories of the most memorable Samnites of whom we have any personal knowledge. They are men of one name, most likely therefore of one house, and men of whom we emphatically wish to know more than we do know. Leaving Caserta behind, glancing at the Campanian plain and the Campanian mountains, marking Naples only by the smoke of the distant city, we pass along through what, in our simplicity, we take to be the vale of Vulturnus, till we light on a more classical friend, armed with a more classical map, who explains that the stream which we are tracing is in strictness not Vulturnus himself, but only his tributary Calor. Anyhow we go along its course into the heart of the Samnite land, and we pass by one spot—a spot which we ought to have treated better than merely to pass it by, a spot round which the greatest memories of Samnite history gather, and where they strangely interweave themselves with wholly different memories of the history of our own land. We reach Telesia, the home of the Pontii, and we remember that Telesia was also for a moment the home of Anselm. Our guide-book provokingly fails us; but the large building on the hill-side must surely be the monastery where he sojourned. There are Roman antiquities in the place; for Samnite antiquities we do not look. But did Samnites build no walls, or do the mighty bulwarks of Cori and Segni mark an earlier state of things than the Sabellian occupation of Southern Italy? Anyhow, we are here at the place which has attached itself as a surname to the two most memorable men in the scanty personal history of Samnium. Here, on his own ground, we remember that Gaius Pontius who spared Rome's army at the Caudine Forks, and who lived to be led, twenty-seven years later, as a spectacle in a Roman triumph, to end his days, one might almost say as a martyr, by the axe of the headsman in a Roman dungeon. So we used to read the tale in our youth; so moralized the historians of our youth over the special baseness which handed over such a man to such an end. Or are we to adopt the new reading of the tale which at least saves Quintus Fabius Maximus from that special stain of blood-guiltiness which cleaves to the canonized memory of Divus Julius? It may be well if we can believe that one of the worthiest heroes of the old commonwealth, if he could not forestall the magnanimity of Pompeius and Aurelian, at least did not sink to the special and petty spite of the murderer of Vercingetorix. We are now taught that the Gaius Pontius who appears twenty-seven years after the first mention of that name, is most likely not the same man as the merciful victor of the Caudine Forks. If this be so, then Quintus Fabius, in consigning his Pontius to the axe, merely conformed to the cruel custom of his nation, without the further aggravation of slaying in cold blood one who had dealt with Rome so nobly. And after all some might hint that the oldest Pontius of all was the wisest. It may be that the sage old father of Gaius knew human nature best, when he bade his son either to massacre the whole Roman army or else to let them go free without terms. It may be that the son chose a more dangerous path than either, when he took to diplomacy and middle courses.

But if the earlier Pontius of Telesia should prove—though the guess is a simple guess—to be in truth two Pontii, perhaps a father and a son, no doubt seems to have fixed itself on the identity of the last Pontius at the Colline gate of Rome. The rising again of Samnite life at the last moment of all, when the war with the allies seemed to have lost itself in the deeper whirlpool of the war of Marius and Sulla, is really the most striking thing in the whole history, such as we have it, of the Samnite people. We are taken by surprise when, in days when Rome already seems the fully established head, not only of Italy, but of all the Mediterranean world, her power, her very being, is threatened by the leader of a nation which seemed to have been dead and buried for some centuries. But, just like the Volumnian tomb in one way, so the Samnite resurrection in another way is a witness to the real life which the other states of Italy kept on under a form of Roman dominion which made them externally dependent, which threw its influence into the scale of oligarchy in their external affairs, which ever and anon subjected them to some irregular demand, but which left the general course of their lives to be whatever they themselves chose it to be. In the days of Marius and Sulla, Etruscans and Samnites were still Etruscans and Samnites; they had not become Romans, nor had they merged their being in any common name of Italians. The Social War itself was the first attempt at forming a general Italian nationality. But the last campaign of the last Pontius shows how deep, in Samnite hearts at least, was the earlier feeling, the feeling which knew no greater whole than the federal union of Etruria or Samnium. It shows too how specially deep was the feeling of hatred for the single city which had brought down so many cities and leagues to become its helpless dependents. Against Pontius at the Colline gate Rome fought for life, as she had never fought since the old days when she had to guard herself against enemies who lived within sight of her capitol. Foreign invaders, Pyrrhos, Hannibal himself, did not come with the same fixed purpose of rooting up the wood which sheltered the wolves of Italy. We can hardly doubt that it is the hand of Sulla which from that day to this has hindered the south of Italy from being like the north. But the blow which crushed the Samnite people as the other nations of Italy were not crushed, was vengeance taken for a moment when it once more became a question whether Rome should rule over Italy, whether Rome should exist at all.

At Telesia we look out, and muse on what might have been, if one Pontius had done otherwise than he did by the forks of Caudium, if another Pontius had fared otherwise than he fared at the gates of Rome herself. At our next halting-place we are called on, not to muse on what might have been, but on what was. At Beneventum we tread the battle-ground of Pyrrhos and Manfred, the ground of two of the greatest victories of the Rome of the earlier and the Rome of the later day. There we need not strive to call up the dim figures of men, like the older and the later Pontius, known by one action of their lives. The Epeirot and the Swabian stand out as clearly discerned figures in the history of their several ages. And the places where we next halt will show us the place of overthrow for both, the place of death and utter ruin for one.

VII. Benevento.

We follow the stream of Calore till we reach a city which, without ever having been one of the great cities of the world, without having been even one of the greatest cities of Italy, has always kept up an important historic being. Beneventum is a familiar name in all ages; yet Beneventum has never been either a mighty commonwealth like Venice or Genoa, or the head of a mighty kingdom like Naples and Palermo. It has had its princes; if we never heard of them before, we should learn a good deal of them by studying the monuments of their city. That is to say, the monuments will tell us a great deal about princes nine hundred or a thousand years back; no monument that we remember in Benevento tells us anything about the last prince who bore their title. Let us suppose a wanderer who began his travels at Autun and who finds himself, in the course of the same wandering, at Benevento. He will feel it as a grotesque coincidence that, not so very long ago, a man was living who had once been Prince of Benevento and who before that had been Bishop of Autun. Benevento, among many other things that it is, is also the later city of Talleyrand, as Autun is the earlier. But there is this difference that one thinks of Talleyrand at Autun and one does not think of him at Benevento. At Autun he has his place, though a very strange place, in the long succession of Bishops of Autun; at Benevento, though he bore the style of its prince, he stands all alone; we cannot find a niche for him in the succession of the Beneventan princes. Yet a prince of Benevento whose existence marks the ending for a season of the long papal dominion in Benevento reminds us that Benevento had its princes before that papal dominion began. It reminds us of the two distinctive features in the later history of the city. Benevento was first the seat of Lombard princes who, placed on the borders of both empires, contrived to escape all practical submission to either; it was then the seat of an outlying scrap of papal dominion surrounded on all sides by the Sicilian realm. In both these characters Benevento was a kind of curiosity on the historical map of Europe. But the city had its ups and downs before those days, and amongst other things it had gone through a somewhat grotesque change of name. It is hard to believe that a city placed so far inland can really have been of Greek origin; but legend attributed it to a Greek founder, and its oldest name had a Greek sound. Greek Maloeis, Samnite Maluentum, had, when it was read into Latin Maloventum, an ill sound; so, when the Samnite stronghold was changed into the Roman colony, it took the name of Beneventum, city of welcome.

Beneventum, marked by Procopius as a strong city in a high place, stands low as compared with the true hill-cities. Still, as compared with Capua, it might itself pass for a hill-city. It has just that amount of rise above the river which there commonly is where there is a river, such a rise as may be seen in many an English town which is not as Durham or Lincoln. We miss the primæval walls of the hill-cities; but we find, on the other hand, works of Roman and mediæval art such as in the hill-cities we do not find. The arch of Trajan has vanished from Rome, except so far as it lives in the sculptures which were torn from it to enrich the arch of Constantine. But at Benevento, as at Ancona, the memorial of the conqueror of Dacia still abides. The Beneventan arch may indeed fairly take its place in the Roman series. It belongs essentially to the same class of designs as the arch of Severus and the arch of Constantine, while it has little in common with its own tall and slender fellow at Ancona. At the same time, since it has, in general effect at least, taken upon itself something of the position of a town-gate, since it bears the name of Porta aurea, to match the golden gate of Constantinople and the golden gate of Spalato, the arch of Beneventum has now a somewhat greater air of reality than triumphal arches commonly have. The weak point of that class of structures is that they are of no use. They do not, like a wall, a gateway, a house, a temple, a hall of council, serve any purpose in the ordinary economy of things. They are purely monumental, set up to commemorate something or somebody, but in no way to help on men's daily affairs, public or private. And yet they are not mere monuments, like a statue or an inscribed stone. A large building of this kind, having very much the air of a building which does serve some purpose, is a little deceptive. It is so like a real gateway that it calls up the thought of a real gateway, and leaves us a little disappointed at finding that the building, after all, never was of any use to anybody, and was set up simply to be looked at. There is, therefore, something a little unsatisfactory in the whole class of triumphal arches, and it may even be that a slightly ludicrous element is thrown in when we find that the immediate occasion for rearing this record of the life and exploits of the "fortissimus princeps" whom it commemorates was the repair of the Appian Way. But it does not become us to find fault with any built and graven monument, specially with one of a time of which we have so few written monuments as the memorable reign of Trajan. We are so much the slaves of accidental associations, so apt to draw lines at some altogether unreasonable point, that we may doubt whether the reign of Trajan holds the place which it should hold in popular imagination. Suetonius wrote the lives of Twelve Cæsars, and this mere accident has caused the notion of a break which has no real existence between the Suetonian Twelve and those who next followed them. The reign of Trajan marks the Empire at its highest pitch of extent and power, at that highest pitch which, in its own nature, comes just before the beginning of decay. His days saw, too, the highest pitch of architectural magnificence; and with Tacitus and Juvenal to adorn it, one might be inclined to say that, as an age of Latin literature, the age of Trajan might hold its own against any earlier period of the Imperial rule. For we must remember that the great writers of the early days of Augustus are in truth writers of the republican period living on into the Empire. The Flavian period, continued under Trajan, is quite as rich as the earlier days of the Empire itself. And we may notice that the arch of Beneventum marks the reign of Trajan, and with it the Roman Empire, at what was really its highest point. It was raised at a time when it could commemorate conquered Dacia and tributary Armenia. That Dacia and Armenia could be brought within the range of that Roman world which is continued in the system of modern Europe is proved by daily witnesses. But the arch of Beneventum was built too early to commemorate its hero's later victories in the further East, momentary victories in lands which neither Alexander nor Trajan could bring within the abiding range of Western influences.

The arch of Trajan is so distinctly the most famous thing in Benevento that it has carried us out of all chronological order. But the historical interest of Beneventum lies earlier and later than Trajan's day. In truth the Pax Romana forbade that the main interest of any Italian city should lie in Trajan's day. We may believe or not as we please in the presence of Diomêdês and Æneas; but Pyrrhos, Hanno, Totilas, and Manfred are visitors who cannot be forgotten. The city has looked out on many battles, from the overthrow of the Molossian to the overthrow of the Swabian. A pleasing tale in its history is when that Tiberius Gracchus who is the first of a name to appear in Roman history led back his victorious slave-soldiers to receive the reward of freedom, and to be welcomed by the rejoicing people of the faithful colony. For among the Thirty Cities of those days, the Latin colony of Beneventum was not one of the laggard twelve, but one of the faithful eighteen that were ready to endure all hardships. In later warfare the city seems to have been less steadfast. It welcomed Belisarius, and in after days Totilas took it without any trouble, and if he destroyed the walls it was not out of revenge for any resistance on the part of its inhabitants, but for fear they should supply a post of defence for an imperial army. But the greatest day of Beneventum as an historical city comes later than Totilas and earlier than Manfred. The memory of that day may be studied in the chief remaining buildings in the city, the two greatest churches and the castle. The west front of the metropolitan church, a grand example of Italian Romanesque, is furthermore a perfect chronicle of local history. There we may read, built up into the wall, a crowd of monumental records of the Lombard princes of Beneventum, with their deeds, especially their dealings with the dangerous power of the Franks, set forth at length. The bronze doors are famous, with their long array of Scriptural subjects ending in a lesson in the ecclesiastical geography of the province, the figures of the Archbishop of Beneventum and his suffragans. The harmony of the front is a little marred by the single low and massive corner-tower; but the inscription sums up the history of Beneventum, political and physical, for some ages. The city was laid waste by the Emperor Frederick in 1229 and by an earthquake in 1688. The tower was built after the first overthrow in 1279; it was restored after the second in 1690. Destruction wrought by the elements would thus seem to be more easily repaired than destruction wrought by the hand of Cæsar. But it is somewhat strange to find Frederick, in his own belief a successor of Trajan, a follower of Trajan in Eastern conquests, branded as a destroyer in the city where Trajan's memory is cherished. But Frederick had to deal with a kind of power which Trajan knew not. The wrath of the later Emperor fell on a city which was too faithful to the Roman Bishop. The course of Trajan's rule was not likely to be interfered with either by the obscure chief of the persecuted Christian sect, or by any minister of the creed of which Trajan was himself chief Pontiff.

Within the church the repairs done after the earthquake have wrought a good deal of mischief. But we can still see the four ranges of columns of a mighty basilica which must once have taken its place among the noblest of its class. Their capitals are a little nondescript; but they do not offend the eye; if they were certified to be of Trajan's day, it would doubtless be the right thing to admire them. The ambones and the Easter-light are lovely work of the early fourteenth century, the days of a real Renaissance, truer than that which followed. The treasury is rich in vestments and other precious things; but the reader of Anselm's Life looks in vain for that specially gorgeous vestment which a Beneventan Archbishop of the eleventh century bore away from Canterbury in exchange for the arm of St. Bartholomew, and which made its wearer the most splendid object among the assembled fathers at Bari. If this missing garment carries our thoughts to England, the round church of St. Sophia—hexagonal in its inner range—carries us to the Eastern world, and reminds us that there was more than one line of successors of Trajan, and that Beneventum came under the influences of both. The cloister, with its amazing series of capitals, its birds, its elephants, its hunting scenes, may rank with those of Aosta and of Arles, of which that of Aosta can supply camels to match the Beneventan elephants. The castle dates only from Pope John the Twenty-second, far away at Avignon; we look perhaps more carefully at the older fragments built up in its walls and on the lion in front of it. With the lion in our thoughts we may look out for other beasts, graven or molten or abiding in their own relics. Procopius saw there the tusks of the Kalydonian boar, as in later times he might, either at Warwick or at Bristol, have seen the ribs of the dun cow. It is for palæontologists to say what it was that the Beneventan antiquaries really showed him. Failing this natural wonder we go to pay our respects to another beast whose shape is due to man's device, in quite another part of the city. A rudely carved bovine animal, in which local patriotism sees the Samnite bull—the bull which, on the coins of revived Samnium, so proudly trampled down the Roman wolf—is now cruelly to be ruled as nothing better than a monument of intruding Apis-worship. We have less time to spend at Benevento than at some other cities; but the Roman arches and vaults of the strange building called Quaranta Santi, the grand Roman bridge below, must not be forgotten, and we must still give one more thought to the two mighty men whose hopes were shattered at Beneventum. Manfred fell with his faithful Saracens around him; Pyrrhos lived to fall by a meaner end at Argos; but Beneventum ended the real career of both. It is strange how the two were in some sort the converse of each other. Pyrrhos carried the Epeirot arms into Sicily and southern Italy; Manfred, lord of Sicily and southern Italy, established a Sicilian dominion on the coast of Epeiros. Korkyra, Corfu, the island which has seen every master except the Turk, formed part of the dominions of both alike. We leave Benevento for another city in which the East and the West of Europe, and a crowd of other elements besides, meet yet more closely than they do at Benevento. At Beneventum the eye of Horace began to be caught by the well-known mountains of Apulia; Procopius somewhat boldly speaks of inland Beneventum as being opposite to Dalmatia. The city which we take as our next chief goal, if not strictly opposite to Dalmatia, is so marked as being opposite to one Illyrian port as to have sent its name, so to speak, across the Hadriatic. We will not trouble ourselves to look out for Equotuticum, or to regale ourselves with either the bread or the water of Canusium. It is to the walls of Bari, fishy Bari, that we have to make our way; at Bari, Greek, Latin, Saracen, even Englishman, are all at home, and Bari is opposite to Antivari.

VIII. Norman Buildings in Apulia.

At Foggia the line of railway which crosses the Italian peninsula from Naples eastward joins the great European line which for the most part skirts the Western Hadriatic shore. From Rome itself the iter ad Brundisium is still made by way of Beneventum; for the great mass of mankind Bologna has in this matter supplanted Beneventum and Rome too. Our eastward course across the peninsula has done for us much the same as would be done by the like course across our own island. We have undergone the same change as if we had passed from Wales, Devonshire, or Cumberland, to Lincolnshire or East-Anglia. We need no longer look out for hill-cities, where the first element in such cities, the hills themselves, is not to be found. At Foggia we have not even the amount of hill which we have at Benevento. We are in the great Apulian plain, the plain so precious for sheep-feeding, and the occupation of which has more than once given rise to wars and treaties. Of Foggia itself many perhaps have never heard except as a railway junction. Yet Foggia has a history, and its history has monuments, though we can hardly put them on a level with the monuments and the history of Beneventum. The capital of Apulia, the representative of ancient Arpi, has a history in some respects the same as that of Beneventum, in some other respects its opposite. Both cities claimed Diomêdês as a founder, while Frederick the Second, a destroyer at Benevento, appears as a later founder at Foggia. One arch of his palace still remains, with an inscription telling us how under him Foggia became a royal and Imperial seat. There died his English Empress Isabel, on the splendour of whose passage on her way to her marriage our own historians are eloquent. Further than this, the monumental attractions of Foggia hardly go beyond what is left of its chief church. Of its front Gsell-fels, gives a somewhat ideal engraving, showing it, not as it is, but as it was before earthquakes and restorers after earthquakes had combined to mar it. It was—indeed, with all mutilations, it still is—a fine front of the later Italian Romanesque, with one of the rose or wheel windows which we must now look for wherever we go. More attractive perhaps is the crypt, with its four columns and capitals of singular beauty. They surely belong to the time of the Imperial patron of Foggia, marking as they do a kind of earlier and more healthy Renaissance, which, taking classical form as its general models, took them only as general models, and did not deem itself bound slavishly to copy every turn of a leaf or every section of a moulding. Such works of the carver's tool are akin to those noble coins of Frederick which seem ages in advance of anything that bore the image and superscription of his grandfather.

Foggia is however less likely to strike the traveller—at least the traveller who comes from the hill-towns by way of Capua and Benevento—by any remarkable store of ancient monuments, than as being the first to which he will come of a series of cities, most of which at once impress the visitor by their air of modern progress and prosperity. The heel of Italy, in its cities at least, certainly seems to be the very opposite to a decaying region, or even to a region which stands still. To be sure, the city whose name is the most familiar of all is something of an exception; Brindisi, notwithstanding its dealings with the whole world, is not as Bari or even as Trani. But most of the towns at which we tarry, or which we pass by, give quite a different impression. We cannot tarry at all. At Barletta we get only a glimpse of the Imperial colossus, and therefore we do not venture to hazard a guess whether it is Heraclius or any later prince whom it represents. Along this coast, any Cæsar of the East is in his place, if only as a memorial of the long, though half forgotten, time when Southern Italy bowed to the New Rome and not to the Old. But we do not let these earlier memories wholly shut out the thought of the later combat when the Horatii and Curiatii of legend found themselves multiplied by a process exactly opposite to decimation. The attractions of Trani are irresistible; a bell-tower rising as proudly over the waves as that of Spalato itself would force us to halt even if we knew nothing before of what church and city has to show us. The metropolitan church of Trani is certainly one of the very noblest examples of that singular mixture of Norman and more strictly Italian forms—not without a touch both of the Greek and the Saracen—which is the characteristic style of this region, the natural result of its political history. Strange, but striking in the extreme, is the effect of the east end of this church rising close above the sea; far more truly admirable is the effect of the inside, where the coupled columns of the Saracen have been boldly taught to act as the piers of the great arcades, and to bear up above them a massive triforium, which by itself would make us think ourselves in Normandy or England. All the churches of this district have a good deal of their strength underground, and the under-church of Trani is worthy of the building which it supports. The smaller church, All Saints', a charming little basilica with a portico of singular grace, as also several good pieces of domestic architecture, and the general effect of the tower skirted with its dark arcades, all join to make Trani a place which cannot be passed by, though no august form calls on us, as at Barletta, to tarry to pay Cæsar his due homage. But Trani has found something to be said for itself both by pen and by pencil in quite other company. An accident of later times gave it a right to rank, like Brindisi itself, among the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice. And Trani has peculiarities of its own. The main features of the style may be studied elsewhere. We long to see Barletta, to tarry to pay Cæsar his due. We long to stop at Bisceglia and Molfetta, of which we read attractive notices; but again we must pick and choose, and Bitonto is the only place on which we can qualify ourselves to speak at all at large, till we come to the head of the whole region at Bari.

Bitonto shares a station with San Spirito, but it lies further away from the railway, and that on the inland side, than most of the towns along this line. Its main interest is found in its cathedral church, which in some points prepares us for the buildings of Bari. First of all in point of wonder, though latest in point of date, is the treatment which it has undergone at the hands of modern improvers. A dim remembrance comes to us that we saw something of the same kind in the Dominican church at Perugia; otherwise we ask in amazement why any man should think it an improvement to cut off the whole upper part of a church as seen inside by thrusting in a roof a great deal lower than the original one, and thereby leaving the upper stages outside to stand up in the air, serving no kind of purpose. Yet this has been done both at Bitonto and at Bari. Yet perchance the improvers of modern times might retort on the original architects, and ask why, when they had made three apses at the east end, they presently built up a wall to hide them. This is the arrangement both at Bitonto and in the two great churches of Bari. The notion of Normans working in Italy would almost seem to have been to make an Italian front at one end, and something approaching to a Norman front at the other end. Thus the church of Bitonto has an excellent west front of Italian outline, with details more Italian than Norman, and with the characteristic round window evidently designed from the beginning, though the one which is actually there must be of later date. Also there either has been or has been meant to be a portico over the lower stage of the west front, a thoroughly Italian notion. But the east end takes almost the form of a Norman west front; a Norman founder, it would seem, was not happy unless he could somewhere or other get two towers with an ornamental wall between them. To this end the apses are sacrificed. Instead of the three curved projections which form the main features of so many Italian, German, and indeed Norman, east ends, the whole east end is flat. The side apses are disguised by towers, one only of which is carried up to any height, while the great apse is hidden by the wall between the towers. Herein is the difference between Bitonto and Trani. At Trani there are no eastern towers, and the apses, though of amazing external height and no less amazing slightness of projection, are still real apses with a real curve. At Bitonto no one could know from the outside that there were any apses at all. As the ordinary ranges of arcades and windows are thus made impossible, the architect, like an English architect some generations later, threw his strength into a single east window, and certainly made one as large and as rich as was possible before the invention of tracery. An elaborate round-headed opening is covered with rich devices, and has wonderful monsters to bear up its side-shafts. This too is to be seen at Trani, and we shall come again to other examples at Bari. There is something very strange in these attempts to reconcile the ideas of Normandy and of Italy in one building. But in these flat east ends the result is that we get something which is certainly neither Italian nor Norman, and which can hardly be approved according to any law of either reality or beauty.

The same spirit of compromise goes on in other parts. The endless columns of the under-church supply a rich study of capitals, largely of the grotesque kind. Men, monkeys, the original ram's horn, leaves, the Imperial eagle—better suited for the purpose than anything else—all do duty as volutes. The columns in the upper-church too give another rich collection of various kinds of human, animal, and vegetable forms. But here a soberer spirit reigns; though perhaps no one capital is strictly classical, yet the grotesque does not reign as it does below. Three arches from columns, a solid block, three more arches from columns, make up the nave. Over these Italian elements Norman taste set a triforium; modern taste has hidden the clerestory. Outside, the Italian has his way in the rich open arcades of the parapets and in the windows of various forms, filled, some of them, with that kind of pierced tracery which is neither Italian nor Norman, but distinctively Oriental, and which look as if they had come—as they possibly may have come—from a mosque.

Altogether there is something singularly interesting in this mixture of styles—more strictly this mixture of two varieties of the same style, for Italian and Norman Romanesque are after all members of one great artistic family. Nothing of the kind happened in Sicily, where the Norman kings simply set native craftsmen, Greek and Saracen, to build for them after their several native fashions. Here, in a land where Greek and Latin elements were striving for mastery, where the Saracen was a mere occasional visitor, the Norman brought in the ideas of his own land to make a new element. But, if nothing like this happened in Sicily, something a little like it did happen in England. There is no doubt that Norman architecture was influenced, though very slightly, by the earlier native style of England, a rude imitation of Italian models. That Norman architecture in Apulia should be far more deeply influenced by the Italian models themselves was but carrying out the same general process, as was only natural, in a far greater degree.

IX. Bari.

We are now at Barium, Bari, the original Bari of the West, as distinguished from the Bari, Bar, Antibaris, Antivari, which repeats its name on the opposite coast. There we can now again, as we could have done seventy years back at Cattaro, land at a Montenegrin haven. The distinction between the two bearers of the name of Bari implies an association which is not out of place. The historic interest of Bari gathers wholly round its connexion with the lands on the other side of Hadria. In earlier days the place has really no history whatever. Its most memorable day was when the powers of the Eastern and Western Empires—powers which perhaps never again worked in such harmony—were needed to dislodge a Saracen Sultan from its walls. "Emir," some one will say, not "Sultan," and certainly we are more used in Europe to Sultans of much later date than the days of Lewis the Second and Basil the First, Sultans coming from quite other lands than any that can have sent forth the Mussulman prince of Bari. But he is called Sultan as well as Emir by his one biographer, the Emperor Constantine, and we cannot appeal from those august pages which still form the best guide-book to the eastern shores of the Hadriatic. Anyhow, the Sultan of Bari was a philosopher; he never laughed, except once when he saw a wheel go round; for that reminded him of the ups and downs of his own fortunes. Then Bari passes to the rule of the Eastern Empire; instead of a Sultan it has a Katapan, representative of the Eastern Augustus in that Italian dominion which had become so small at the beginning of the ninth century, and which was so great again at its end. Threatened again at the beginning of the eleventh century by new Saracen invaders, it is guarded by the fleets of Venice, still the faithful vassal of Constantinople against a common enemy. Seventy years later the arms of Robert Wiscard added the capital of Byzantine Italy to his Norman dominion, and before the century was out, Pope Urban, the great stirrer of the West against the Mussulman East, chose Bari as the scene of the Council called to denounce at once the practical abuses of the Christian West and the dogmatic errors of the Christian East. Once more, in the next age, we find Bari looking across the sea to its old lord, and chastised by the Sicilian king for its disloyalty. Add that Bari, before all saints, still honours St. Nicolas of the Lykian Myra, and keeps his relics sacred, we are told, from Turkish desecration by the craft of merchants of her own city. Altogether Bari seems, at least in its history, as much Greek as Italian or Norman. It would seem neither unnatural nor unpleasant if Greek were still the tongue of the seafaring folk of Bari, much as a Norman in his own land often carries an air about him which would make Danish seem a much more natural speech for him than French.

But the great buildings of Bari belong to that mixed Norman and Italian style of which we have already seen something at Bitonto. The architectural attractions of the city are chiefly to be found in two great churches and one smaller one. The castle, standing by the sea, should have its landward side walked round, and the walk will reveal much of picturesque outline and a little of good detail. But it is the churches, above all the great abbey of St. Nicolas, which are the glory of Bari. They all lie in the old town by the sea, the old town of narrow and crooked streets, in which it does not much matter which way you go; you are sure to come either to the castle or to one of the churches before very long. Very different are things in the new town, which we may rejoice in as we look at it as a sign of Bari's abiding or renewed prosperity, but which can raise no feelings of pleasure on any other ground. Its streets, crossing each other at right angles, are indeed carefully dedicated to the worthies of Bari; but, unless we can always remember which of several perhaps not very familiar worthies watches over each of several angles which are exactly alike, it is easy to take a wrong turn and to put oneself under the care of Andrew of Bari when we ought rather to be commending ourselves to Robert. And under either protection we yearn in the wide straight streets for some physical shelter from the Apulian sun, and wonder why modern Rome, modern Athens, and modern Bari should have so much less common sense than Bologna, Padua, and Corfu had in days long past. Still, amid this rectangular labyrinth the sea is a help on one side, while on another the tall tower of the metropolitan church of St. Sabinus beckons us into the older streets, whose narrowness and crookedness at least supply shade. That tower, one of the tallest and stateliest of Italy, we naturally assume to be a detached campanile, without a fellow and standing apart from its confederate buildings, church and baptistery. So it doubtless would be in a purely Italian city; but here we are in the city where the Norman displaced the Greek. The two great churches of Bari, like that of Bitonto, have their towers wrought into the building in Norman fashion, and at the duomo the great round baptistery is also merged in the same mass with the church and its towers. Both of the great churches of Bari have east ends of the same kind as that at Bitonto; the apses are swallowed up; the place where the great apse should be is marked by a single splendid Romanesque window. The eastern towers of St. Nicolas have never been carried up; at St. Sabinus the southern one has perished, but the northern one still soars in all its majesty, thoroughly Italian in its conception, but rather to be called Norman in its detail. St. Nicolas has also another pair of unfinished towers at its west end, standing at once beyond the aisles as at Wells and Rouen, and in front of them as at Holyrood. They flank a grand Italian front which one would think would be finer without them. These western towers are absent in the metropolitan church; but that has a most perfect octagonal cupola over the crossing, the grouping of which with the two lofty eastern towers, if there was any point from which it could really be seen, must have been wonderful. Thus, in both churches, something of a German outline has either been consciously brought in or has been incidentally stumbled on. The four towers of St. Nicolas, the octagon and eastern tower of St. Sabinus, will easily find Rhenish fellows, though we should perhaps have to go as far as Angoulême for a single tower of equal majesty mourning over a vanished brother. In other points the external arrangements of the two great churches of Bari have much in common. The rose windows, the coupled windows, the blank arcades, are much the same in both. So is the choice of animal forms for the fanciful supports of columns. In most places the lion discharges that function—in a building designed by lions we should doubtless see something different. So we do here at Bari, where the solid forms of the pachydermata are, perhaps discreetly, preferred to the lighter carnivora. The elephant, we think, is to be found in both churches, and the huge earth-shaking beast is represented so as to remind us both of Pyrrhos and of Hannibal; some have the smaller ear of India, some the larger of Africa. The hippopotamus appears only in the west front of St. Nicolas. Had the daring shipfolk who bore away the saint's bones from Lykia made their way to the Nile also?

When we pass the threshold of the two buildings we see that their fate in modern times has been very different. St. Sabinus has suffered much as Bitonto has suffered. The upper part of the building is hidden in just the same fashion, and ugly tricks have been played with the columns and their capitals. St. Nicolas, on the other hand, has been left comparatively alone. The chief changes which it has undergone must have taken place not very long after the original building. The original plan was much the same as that of Bitonto—three arches from columns, a massive pier, then three more arches from columns. But this arrangement was disturbed at an early time by throwing three spanning arches across the nave. The effect is so striking that we can hardly regret their presence; but it is perfectly easy to see that they are insertions, and, though they are essentially of the same style, yet they differ in their details from the original columns. These last all approach more or less to the Corinthian type; in the under-church the patterns are more varied. Here are still the wonder-working relics of St. Nicolas, and the balsam or "manna" which flows from them may still be drunk. In the duomo the under-church has been restored out of all ancient character, but it still keeps an ancient Byzantine picture.

As so often happens, the secondary church of Bari altogether surpassed the mother church in historic fame and local honour. To ourselves the fact in its history which comes home most nearly is that it was here that Urban held his Council, here that Anselm, to the satisfaction of all Western minds, refuted the creed of the East, here that he interceded with the Pontiff and the assembled fathers on behalf of the king who had wronged him. Here too it was that the keen eye of English Eadmer spied out on the shoulders of the Archbishop of Beneventum the splendid cope which is no longer to be seen at Beneventum. Such little touches in those days often brought the ends of the world together in a way to which, in our days of more general intercourse, nothing answers. When French was the polite language alike at Dunfermline and at Jerusalem, when the Latin-speaking clerk was at home in any corner of the West, when the few men of the West who had learned Greek spoke it so that a Greek could understand them, when men passed to and fro between the civil services of England and Sicily, communication between distant parts of Europe was in some ways easier than it is now. Bari, one of the chief places for setting out on crusades, must for a long time have been a thoroughly cosmopolitan city. We do feel that the ends of the earth have combined to meet at Bari, when we find the place of honour in the church of St. Nicolas at Bari held by a princess of Bari, who became Queen of the greatest Slavonic kingdom. Emblematic figures of Bari and Poland support the tomb of Queen Bona, and her epitaph describes her husband Sigismund, the first of that name, as not only the mighty King of Poland, but Grand-Duke of Lithuania, Russia, Prussia, Mazovia, and Samogitia. Yet we might have lighted on Slavonic associations earlier on the road. There is a strange record of a Bulgarian settlement in the parts of Beneventum; but that would take us yet further afield: it was before Bulgarians became Slavonic. But what are we to say to the Samnite Schiavia which sheltered Anselm?

The journey is done—