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Show remembers Virgil, born about two miles away. There is a new monument to the Latin poet. set nmony tho trees, with n sculptured gateway, with busts of other Italian poets net above noble pillars; and you may even visit Virgil's house, if you choose, with some doubts of Its authenticity. If one could believe in the Virgil house, and In relics of a lll.c date, there would be something much more awe-striking awe-striking in Mantua, for in the center of a church near the Ducal Palace there is a large, round, much-decorated apace, under which is placed a chalice supposed to contain some, drops of the blood of the founder of the Christian faith. Westminster Gazette. Ga-zette. i oo THE DUCAL PALACE AT MANTUA. What a casele and what a palace are those which are to be seen ncross the lakes in which the mosquitoes breed! They Justify the earlier Italian Ital-ian landscape painters. They make foe back-grounds of old pictures seem almost real. There cannot bo many buildings either In Italy or elsewhere, more spacious and more varied than the Ducal Palace at Mantua. It ts said that Pierpont Morgan has offered for it 1.000,000 pounds. That may be so or It may not. It would be cheap at the price. But the people of Mantua, Man-tua, to their eternal honor, are not willing to Bell. On the contrary, they are restoring the palace and making It a national monument. It is an embodiment em-bodiment of Italian history through many hundreds of years. It has been a palace of art Andrea Mantegna painted frescoes on some of its walls, and there some of them sill remain, splendidly representative of his art and his- time vilely reproduced, let It be added. In coarse and clumsy engravings, engrav-ings, hung in the neighborhood of the pictures which they label, Julio Romano Ro-mano added alike to he decorations and to the architecture, and theci canie Napoleon with his vulgar splendors, splen-dors, and later on the Austiians with thoir meretricious art. And all these periods are to be found illustrated in the spacious, inconceivable, almost. Incomprehensible Ducal Palace at Mantua, where the dwarfs had their special quarters, designed according to their own proportions, and the giants theirs, as If a dwarf could not enter a door that a giant went throuh. Such ostentatious magnificence belongs par-tlclurly par-tlclurly to to tho Middle Ages, where a great family dominated ail mankind. man-kind. Wealth Is more common nowadays, nowa-days, and perhans it Is more honestly acquired, but it has not a hundredth part of the same power over men. Like nil these Northern Italian towns. Mantua was Roman ii the first Instance. You find proofs of the fact almost everywhere, and you also discover, dis-cover, with some sorrow, that what is most ancient Is being mad? over again. Yet this small, ancient city, with arcaded fronts from which Turin may have borrowed a pattern, is naturally na-turally quite proud of its past It |