It Is His Portrait That You See In That Old Palace (Called The Palace Of The Prince Because Charles V. Had Called Him Prince) Overlooking The Port, Where He Sits An Old, Old Man, Very Weary, In The Sole Society Of His Sarcastic Cat, As I Have Noted Before.

The cat seems to have just passed some ironical reflection on the vanity of human things and to be studying him for the effect.

Both appear indifferent to the spectator, but perhaps they are not, and you must not for all that fail of a visit to the Church of San Matteo, set round with the palaces of the Doria family - the palace which his grateful country gave the Admiral after he refused to be her master, and the palaces of his kindred neighboring it round.

I do not remember any equal space in all Europe which, through a very little knowledge, so takes the heart as the gentle little church founded by an earlier Doria, and, after four hundred years, restored by a later, and then environed with the stately homes of the race, where they could be domesticated in the honor and reverence of their countrymen because of the goodness and greatness of the loftiest of their line. It is such a place as one may revere and yet possess one's soul in self-respect, very much as one may revere Mount Vernon. The church, as well as the piazza, is full of Dorian memories, and the cloister must be visited not only for its rather damp beauty, but for the full meaning of the irony which Doria's cat in the portrait wished to convey: against the wall here are gathered the fragments of the statue of Doria which, when the French Revolution came to Genoa, the patriots threw out of the ducal palace and broke in the street below.

We were some time in finding our way into the magnificent hall of the Great Council where this statue once stood, with the statues of many other Genoese heroes and statesmen, and I am not sure that it was worth all our trouble. Magnificent it certainly was, but coarsely magnificent, like so much elsewhere in Genoa; but, if we had been at ten times the trouble we were in seeing the Palace of the Municipality, I should not think it too much. There in the great hall are the monuments of those Genoese notables whose munificence their country wished to remember in the order of their generosity. I do not remember just what the maximum was, but the Doge or other leading citizen who gave, say, twenty-five thousand ducats to the state had a statue erected to him; one who gave fifteen, a bust; and one who gave five, an honorary tablet. The surprising thing is that nearly all the statues and busts, whether good likenesses or not, are delightful art: it is as if the noble acts of the benefactors of their country had inspired the sculptors to reproduce them not only in true character, but in due dignity.

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