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Under Otho she, like many other cities of Italy, was governed by her own laws, and remained a republic till the year 1237, when she received the German yoke, afterwards broken by the Scaligers; nor was their treacherous assassination followed by less than the loss both of Verona and this city, which was found in possession of the Emperor Maximilian some years after: but when the State of Venice recovered their dominion over it in 1409, they fortified it so strongly that the confederate princes united in the league of Cambray assaulted it in vain.
We must not omit to state that under Bartolomeo, the third of the Scaligers, that tragic end was put to the rivalry of the great families, Capelletti and Montecchi, which served Bandello as the foundation of one of his most popular novels, and Shakspeare as the plot of Romeo and Juliet.
But it was in the thirteenth century that she became the queen of northern Italy, under the reign of the Scaligers, or della Scalas, who, from simple citizens, were raised, by their valour, their humanity, and the free choice of the people, to the sovereignty of the state. During one hundred and twenty-seven years, ten princes of that illustrious house reigned in Verona.
The Tombs of the Scaligers, with their soaring pinnacles, their high-poised canopies, their exquisite refinement and concentration of the Gothic idea, I can't profess, even after much worshipful gazing, to have fully comprehended and enjoyed. They seemed to me full of deep architectural meanings, such as must drop gently into the mind one by one, after infinite tranquil contemplation.
It is the fiction in Italy that it is always summer; and the people sit in the open market-place, shiver in the open doorways, crowd into corners where the sun comes, and try to keep up the beautiful pretense. The picturesque groups of idlers and traffickers were more interesting to us than the palaces with sculptured fronts and old Roman busts, or tombs of the Scaligers, and old gates.
There were four hundred performers on the stage at one time, and the play ended at "the twenty-three hours" with a gunpowder explosion that destroyed the fort, the play fort, I mean. And we looked at the tombs of the Scaligers, although I don't know any good reason for doing so; and then we came through the most beautiful country to Florence.
In the proud palaces of the Borgias, of the Orsinis, the Scaligers, the Borromeos, the art of poisoning was preserved among the last resorts of Machiavellian statecraft; and not only in palaces, but in streets of Italian cities, in solitary towers and dark recesses of the Apennines, were still to be found the lost children of science, skilful compounders of poisons, at once fatal and subtle in their operation, poisons which left not the least trace of their presence in the bodies of their victims, but put on the appearance of other and more natural causes of death.
Only to see how the town lay at the foot of the mountains of the north, was to understand its powers of defence, and its importance to the dynasties and princes of the past. With Mr. Barrymore's help, I could trace one line of fortification after another, from the earliest Roman, through Charlemagne and the Scaligers, down to the modern Austrian.
It is the fiction in Italy that it is always summer; and the people sit in the open market-place, shiver in the open doorways, crowd into corners where the sun comes, and try to keep up the beautiful pretense. The picturesque groups of idlers and traffickers were more interesting to us than the palaces with sculptured fronts and old Roman busts, or tombs of the Scaligers, and old gates.
And so, indeed, it happened with these quarrelsome Alexandrian grammarians, as it did with the Casaubons and Scaligers and Daciers of the last two centuries. As soon as they began quarrelling they lost the power of discovering. The want of the inductive faculty in their attempts at philology is utterly ludicrous.
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