Turin is no city of a name to conjure with, and I pay an extravagant tribute to subjective emotion in speaking of it as ancient. if the place is less bravely peninsular than Florence and Rome, at least it is more in the scenic tradition than New York Paris; and while I paced the great arcades and looked at the fourth-rate shop windows I didn't scruple to cultivate a shameless optimism. Relatively speaking, Turin touches a chord; but there is after all no reason in a large collection of shabbily-stuccoed houses, disposed in a rigidly rectangular manner, for passing a day of deep, still gaiety. The only reason, I am afraid, is the old superstition of Italy - that property in the very look of the written word, the evocation of a myriad images, that makes any lover of the arts take Italian satisfactions on easier terms than any others. The written word stands for something that eternally tricks us; we juggle to our credulity even with such inferior apparatus as is offered to our hand at Turin. I roamed all the morning under the tall porticoes, thinking it sufficient joy to take note of the soft, warm air, of that local colour of things that is at once so broken and so harmonious, and of the comings and goings, the physiognomy and manners, of the excellent Turinese. I had opened the old book again; the old charm was in the style; I was in a more delightful world. I saw nothing surpassingly beautiful or curious; but your true taster of the most seasoned of dishes finds well-nigh the whole mixture in any mouthful. Above all on the threshold of Italy he knows again the solid and perfectly definable pleasure of finding himself among the traditions of the grand style in architecture. It must be said that we have still to go there to recover the sense of the domiciliary mass. In northern cities there are beautiful houses, picturesque and curious houses; sculptured gables that hang over the street, charming bay- windows, hooded doorways, elegant proportions, a profusion of delicate ornament; but a good specimen of an old Italian palazzo has a nobleness that is all its own. We laugh at Italian "palaces," at their peeling paint, their nudity, their dreariness; but they have the great palatial quality - elevation and extent. They make of smaller things the apparent abode of pigmies; they round their great arches and interspace their huge windows with a proud indifference to the cost of materials. These grand proportions - the colossal basements, the doorways that seem meant for cathedrals, the far away cornices - impart by contrast a humble and bourgeois expression to interiors founded on the sacrifice of the whole to the part, and in which the air of grandeur depends largely on the help of the upholsterer. At Turin my first feeling was really one of renewed shame for our meaner architectural manners. If the Italians at bottom despise the rest of mankind and regard them as barbarians, disinherited of the tradition of form, the idea proceeds largely, no doubt, from our living in comparative mole-hills. They alone were really to build their civilisation.