Neighbourhood of Verona--Vicenza: Cathedral--San Lorenzo--Santa Corona--Pallazzo della Ragione--Gothic Palaces--Palladio’s works--Teatro Olympico--Padua: Giotto’s Chapel--The Eremitani--Sant’Antonio--The Duomo. Many of the villages near Verona are remarkable for the remains of castles of the middle ages. I have never, however, been able to find time for the examination of any of them, and, judging from hurried views which I have had of three or four castles south of Verona, I suspect that they would scarcely repay a long _détour_; they seem generally to be more remarkable for their general contour, and their quaint forked battlements, than for any of that delicate detail and appliance to ordinary wants which it was especially my object to see and study. The railroad from Verona to Vicenza and Padua is not interesting; the country is beautiful and luxuriant in detail, but rather tame, flat, and over-green in the general view. The Veronese mountains, however, are in view on the north, and as one approaches Vicenza the hills throw out their spurs into the flat country, covered with vineyards, orchards, and fruit trees; village follows close upon village, each with its white church and white campanile, contrasting strangely with the rich colour above and around, and at last the towers and roofs of Vicenza are descried on our left. And is it possible, my readers will exclaim, that you, an architect, can have dared to pass within sight of Vicenza without making long sojourn there to drink in the lessons which the works of your great master Palladio are there to instil! Even so, reader; for in this world there are unhappily two views of art, two schools of artists--armies of men fighting against each other; the one numerous, working with the traditions and rules of their masters in the art, exclusive in their views, narrow in their practice, and conventional in all their proceedings, to the most painful forgetfulness of reality either in construction or in ornament; the other young and earnest, fighting for truth, small in numbers, disciples of nature, revivers of an art to all appearance but now all but defunct, yet already rising gloriously above the traditional rules of three centuries. The one class representing no new idea, breathing no new thought, faithful to no religious rule; the other rapidly endeavouring to strike out paths for themselves as yet untrodden, gathering thoughts from nature, life from an intense desire for reality and practical character, faithful moreover to a religious belief, whose propagation will be for ever the great touchstone of their work. The one class, the disciples of Palladio, journeying towards Vicenza with a shew of reverence to learn how he built palaces of compo with cornices of lath and plaster, already in two short centuries falling to decay, wretched and ruinous! the other stopping long at Verona, dreaming over the everlasting art of the monuments of the