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.
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