Our talk was long and various, and the subject-matter of it did not tend to dispel the illusion that we were by means of some strange magic-lantern taking a peep into a resuscitated bit of the old cinquecento art-life, so full were the mind and heart of the artist of the special art-glories of his native city. Social philosophers have much to say against the restricted nature of that intensely concentrated form of patriotism in which the love and pride in one's own native place--one's _paese_, as the old Italian phrase went--is a species of religion. But it would not be difficult to show that the objections these philosophers adduce would, if carried out logically, be fatal to the reasonableness of all patriotism. Pure philanthropy no doubt is a very grand sentiment, but, somehow or other, it has never as a motive-power produced the great achievements that the narrower sentiment of love of country has produced. And I am inclined to believe that in the case, at all events, of ordinary people the love of one's own "paese"--that church-steeple patriotism that it has become a fashion with a certain school of politicians to deride--is very often a yet stronger passion and a more powerful incentive to great deeds than even the love of country in a larger sense. Such was undoubtedly the case during the great days of Italian hegemony in literature and the arts. It is difficult for those who have not made a special study of the subject to conceive the strength of the tie that during the whole of the mediaeval period, and for a couple of centuries beyond it, bound every Italian citizen to the special community of which he was a member. The fact and the consideration that he was an Italian in no degree stirred his sympathies or moved his imagination, but that he was a Venetian, a Florentine, a Pisan, or even that he was an Aretine, a Bolognese, a Comasque, a Sienese or a Perugian, was all in all to him. The tie, save perhaps in the cases of some of the greater of the historical families, was a stronger one than even that of family. The Capulet or the Montague may have felt that his place in the world was marked as such, but the simple burgher who, had he not been entitled to call himself so, would have been little better than a pariah, one whom all might have kicked because he had no friends, a mere waif on the turbulent current of the surging and unruly life of those days, felt in every fibre of his being, and from his cradle to his grave, that what he _was_ in the world, and what all that he cared for in the world depended on, was the fact that he was a constituent part of this, that or the other civic community. His fellow-citizens were his friends; and it but too naturally followed that the members of other, and especially of neighboring communities, were his enemies: even in the best times, and in the case of the best and largest natures, they were his rivals. The relative superiority of