VI. THE CAMPO SANTO 347

tower,¹ unmatched except at Verona: the streets clean-cheerfully inhabited, yet quiet; nor desolate, even now. Two of the churches representing the perfectest phase of round-arched building in Europe,² and one of them containing the loveliest Christian tomb in Italy.

The rampart walk, unbroken except by descents and ascents at the gates, commands every way the loveliest ranges of all the Tuscan Apennine: when I was there in 1845, besides the ruined feudal palace, there was a maintained Ducal Palace, with a living Duke in it,³ whose military band played every evening on the most floral and peaceful space of rampart. After a well-spent day, and a three-course dinner,-military band,-chains, double braided, of amethyst Apennine linked by golden clouds,-then the mountain air of April, still soft as the marble towers grew unsubstantial in the starlight,-such the monastic discipline of Lucca to my novitiate mind.

113. I must stop to think a little how it was that so early as this I could fasten on the tomb of Ilaria di Caretto with certainty of its being a supreme guide to me ever after. If I get tiresome, the reader must skip; I write, for the moment, to amuse myself, and not him. The said reader, duly sagacious, must have felt, long since, that, though very respectable people in our way, we were all of us definitely vulgar people; just as my aunt’s dog Towzer was a vulgar dog, though a very good and dear dog.⁴ Said reader should have seen also that we had not set ourselves up to have a taste in anything. There was never any question about matching colours in furniture, or having the correct pattern in china. Everything for service in the house was bought plain, and of the best; our

¹ [The Palazzo Borghi, called by Ruskin the Guinigi Palace (built in 1413 by Paolo Guinigi): Plate XXIII.]

² [For notices of S. Frediano and S. Michele, see Vol. IX. pp. 273, 429; the tomb of Ilaria is in the Duomo (S. Martino).]

³ [From 1816 to 1847 Lucca was governed as a duchy by Maria Luisa, queen of Etruria, and her son Charles Louis; in the latter year it was ceded to Tuscany.]

⁴ [See i. § 12 (above, p. 19).]

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