THE USE OF BEAUTY.   I. One afternoon, in Rome, on the way back from the Aventine, the road-mender climbed onto the tram as it trotted slowly along, and fastened to its front, alongside of the place of the driver, a bough of budding bay. Might one not search long for a better symbol of what we may all do by our life? Bleakness, wind, squalid streets, a car full of heterogeneous people, some very dull,... more...

In preparing this volume on the Countess of Albany (which I consider as a kind of completion of my previous studies of eighteenth-century Italy), I have availed myself largely of Baron Alfred von Reumont's large work Die Gräfin von Albany (published in 1862); and of the monograph, itself partially founded on the foregoing, of M. St. René Taillandier, entitled La Comtesse d'Albany, published... more...