as Burckhardt, Ampère and Street. But it is not to the actual traveler only that these volumes will be of use and give pleasure. They are not bad preparatory reading for those who are going abroad, suggesting what should be studied beforehand; they will be dear to those who sit within the blank limits of a home in this raw New World trying to revive the fading outlines and colors of scenes which, though unforgotten, tend to mingle with the visions of Dreamland; and they are capital wishing-carpets for those who can travel only in fancy. In the introduction there is an excellent passage on the distinctive differences between the great Italian cities: "Each has its own individual sovereignty; its own chronicles; its own politics, domestic and foreign; its own saints, peculiarly to be revered--patrons in peace and protectors in war; its own phase of architecture; its own passion in architectural material, brick or stone, marble or terra-cotta; ...its own proverbs, its own superstitions and its own ballads." Mr. Hare contrives to convey much of the characteristic impression of each town. Pretty little wood-cuts are called in to his aid, but the best illustrations of his text are the poetical quotations and exquisite prose-bits from Ruskin, Swinburne, Symonds and others whose pens sometimes turn into the pencil of a great painter. The author's own descriptions are extremely faithful and charming. To those who have made the journey from Florence to Rome a single fine page of the introduction brings back a thrill of that long ecstasy. In these few quiet words he spreads Thrasymene before us: "It has a soft, still beauty especially its own. Upon the vast expanse of shallow pale-green waters, surrounded by low-lying hills, storms have scarcely any effect, and the birds which float over it and the fishing-boats which skim across its surface are reflected as in a mirror. At Passignano and Torricella picturesque villages, chiefly occupied by fishermen, jut out into the water, but otherwise the reedy shore is perfectly desolate on this side, though beyond the lake convents and villages crown the hills which rise between us and the pale violet mountains beyond Montepulciano." Nothing can be more lifelike than the following picture of the tract around Siena: "Scarcely do we pass beyond the rose-hung walls which encircle the fortifications than we are in an upland desert, piteously bleak in winter, but most lovely when spring comes to clothe it. The volcanic nature of the soil in these parts gives a softer tint than usual to the coloring. The miles upon miles of open gray-green country, treeless, hedgeless, houseless, swoop toward one another with the strangest sinuosities and rifts and knobs of volcanic earth, till at last they sink in faint mists, only to rise again in pink and blue distances, so far off, so pale and aërial, that they can scarcely be distinguished from the atmosphere itself. Only here and there a lonely