The Barrier--Beautiful Aspect of the City--Hotel Royale--History of Milan--Dreariness of its Streets--Decay of Art--Decay of Trade--The Cathedral--Beauty, not Sublimity, its Characteristic--Its Exterior described--The Piazza of the Cathedral--Austrian Cannon--Pamphlets on Purgatory--Punch--Punch _versus_ the Priest--Church and State in Italy--Austrian Oppression--Confiscation of Estates in Lombardy--Forced Loans--Niebuhr's Idea that the Dark Ages are returning.
It was an hour past noon when the _diligence_, with its polyglot freight, drove up to the harrier. There gathered round the vehicle a white cloud of Austrian uniforms, and straightway every compartment of the carriage bristled with a forest of hands holding passports. These the men-at-arms received; and, making them hastily up into a bundle, and tying them with a piece of cord, they despatched them by a special messenger to the Prefect; so that hardly had we entered the Porta Vercellina, till our arrival was known at head-quarters. There was handed at the same time to each passenger a printed paper, in which the same notification was four times repeated,--first in Italian, next in French, then in German, and lastly in English,--enjoining the holder, under certain penalties, to present himself within a given number of hours at the Police Office.
It was under these conditions,--a pilgrim from a far land,--that I appeared at the gates of Milan. The passport detention seemed less an annoyance here than I had ever felt it before. The beauteous city, sitting so tranquilly amidst the sublimest scenery, seemed to have something of a celestial character about it. It looked so resplendent, partly by reason of the materials of which it is built, and partly by reason of the sun that shone upon it as an Italian sun only can shine, that none but pure men, I felt, might dwell here, and none but pure men might enter at its gates. There were white sentinels at its portals; rows of white houses formed its exterior; and in the middle of the city, floating above it,--for it seemed to float rather than to rest on foundations,--was its snow-white temple,--a place too holy almost, as it seemed, for human worship and human worshippers; and then the city had for battlements a glorious wall, white as alabaster, which rose to the clouds. Everything conspired to cheat the visitor into the belief that he had come at last to an abode where every hurtful passion was hushed, and where Peace had fixed her chosen seat.