But the foregoing presupposes the Mont-Cenis route into Italy, and leaves out three towns which must be included: Padua, Verona, and Bergamo. Padua had its university, the most-visited in Europe; Verona, its relics of Roman times, which commanded an attention that they now have to share with the romantic aspects of mediæval history, romance that sixteenth-century people were not inclined to be attracted by, having too first-hand an acquaintance with feuds to look at their picturesque side. Moreover, the visible remains of these feuds, here and in every Italian city, showed a ludicrous side, for in so far as they did not take the form of assassination by the foulest means, they consisted in the two parties of retainers parading the town, armed with an absurd completeness, each one confining itself to certain quarters of the town by tacit agreement in order to render collisions impossible. The habits dramatised in the first scene of "Romeo and Juliet" are those of Londoners, in so far as they are at all contemporary. The third town, Bergamo, thousands pass by now, year by year, within a few miles, never knowing what they miss by not stopping, but then it lay on the north-and-south road as much as any town in Italy, and not even the Frankfort fair surpassed that of Bergamo, August 25 and the following week, when lucky was he who could find sleeping-room in a stable. Yet however complete was the outfit obtainable across the Alps, there remained other countries which were factors in politics; and which possessed, moreover, histories, courts, universities, and men of learning; fewer temptations, possibly, and more "true religion." Of these France was the one the most easily accessible to a greater number. As to its boundaries, they were somewhat narrower in almost every direction than at present; especially southeastwards; Lyons was a frontier-town. Its attractions lay principally in Paris, the only city north of the Alps comparable to Milan as a centre for the training of a man for a courtly, or an international, life; and in the government, which, in its extreme centralisation and in its idealisation of monarchy, corresponded most closely with the more practicable ideals of the day.