At Ferrara we were put on short allowance, and as we found remonstrance vain, we submitted in silence. We were the more mortified at this treatment, as we had begun to hope for better things; but Mr. Henry Waister, our Commissary on the occasion, was determined to make a good thing of his three Napoleons a-day; he had strained a point in procuring us a tolerable supper and breakfast at the two last stages, which must serve for some time to come; and as he would not pay for our dinner, the landlord would not let us have one, and there the matter rested. We walked out in the evening, and found Ferrara enchanting. Of all the places I have seen in Italy, it is the one by far I should most covet to live in. It is the _ideal_ of an Italian city, once great, now a shadow of itself. Whichever way you turn, you are struck with picturesque beauty and faded splendours, but with nothing squalid, mean, or vulgar. The grass grows in the well-paved streets. You look down long avenues of buildings, or of garden walls, with summer-houses or fruit-trees projecting over them, and airy palaces with dark portraits gleaming through the grated windows—you turn, and a chapel bounds your view one way, a broken arch another, at the end of the vacant, glimmering, fairy perspective. You are in a dream, in the heart of a romance; you enjoy the most perfect solitude, that of a city which was once filled with ‘the busy hum of men,’ and of which the tremulous fragments at every step strike the sense, and call up reflection. In short, nothing is to be seen of Ferrara, but the remains, graceful and romantic, of what it was—no sordid object intercepts or sullies the retrospect of the past—it is not degraded and patched up like Rome, with upstart improvements, with earthenware and oil-shops; it is a classic vestige of antiquity, drooping into peaceful decay, a sylvan suburb—
‘Where buttress, wall and tower Seem fading fast away From human thoughts and purposes, To yield to some transforming power, And blend with the surrounding trees.’
Here Ariosto lived—here Tasso occupied first a palace, and then a dungeon. Verona has even a more sounding name; boasts a finer situation, and contains the tomb of Juliet. But the same tender melancholy grace does not hang upon its walls, nor hover round its precincts as round those of Ferrara, inviting to endless leisure and pensive musing. Ferrara, while it was an independent state, was a flourishing and wealthy city, and contained 70,000 inhabitants; but from the time it fell into the hands of the Popes, in 1597, it declined, and it has now little more than an historical and poetical being.