Three hours more, through spicy fields and on a road lined with the country-houses of the Venetian nobles, brought us to _Vicenza_. It was past midnight, and not a soul stirring in the bright moonlit streets. I remember it as a kind of city of the dead. As we passed out of the opposite gate, we detained for a moment a carriage, with servants in splendid liveries, and a lady inside returning from a party, in full dress. I have rarely seen so beautiful a head. The lamps shone strongly on a broad pearl fillet on her forehead, and lighted up features such as we do not often meet even in Italy. A gentleman leaned back in the corner of the carriage, fast asleep--probably her husband!
I breakfasted at _Verona_ at seven. A humpbacked _cicerone_ there took me to "Juliet's tomb." A very high wall, green with age, surrounds what was once a cemetery, just outside the city. An old woman answered the bell at the dilapidated gate, and, without saying a word, pointed to an empty granite sarcophagus, raised upon a rude pile of stones. "Questa?" asked I, with a doubtful look. "Questa," said the old woman. "Questa!" said the hunchback. And here, I was to believe, lay the gentle Juliet! There was a raised place in the sarcophagus, with a hollowed socket for the head, and it was about the measure for a woman! I ran my fingers through the cavity, and tried to imagine the dark curls that covered the hand of Father Lawrence as he laid her down in the trance, and fitted her beautiful head softly to the place. But where was "the tomb of the Capulets?" The beldame took me through a cabbage-garden, and drove off a donkey who was feeding on an artichoke that grew on the very spot. "Ecco!" said she, pointing to one of the slightly sunken spots on the surface. I deferred my belief, and paying an extra paul for the privilege of chipping off a fragment of the stone coffin, followed the cicerone.
The _tombs of the Scaligers_ were more authentic. They stand in the centre of the town, with a highly ornamental railing about them, and are a perfect mockery of death with their splendor. If the poets and scholars whom these petty princes drew to their court had been buried in these airy tombs beside them, one would look at them with some interest. _Now_, one asks, "who were the Scaligers, that their bodies should be lifted high in air in the midst of a city, and kept for ages, in marble and precious stones?" With less ostentation, however, it were pleasant to be so disposed of after death, lifted thus into the sun, and in sight of moving and living creatures.