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Impressions of Rome, Florence and Turin, by the Author of 'amy Herbert'.
Impressions of Rome Florence and Turin by the Author of 'amy Herbert' Author:Elizabeth Sewell General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1862 Original Publisher: Longman, Green Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can ... more »select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III. Avignon, March 8th. -- Certainly there is nothing like travelling to make one feel one's ignorance, and what perhaps is more important -- regret it. How one looks back to days of youth and leisure, when use might have been made of the memory as a storehouse for future occasions ; and how one could preach upon the subject now to young people. But it would be in vain. It seems to be an almost immutable law that no persons shall profit by any experience except their own, and so, no doubt, the world will still hobble on with the aid of " Murray," and, finding so useful a crutch at hand, will be quite satisfied without having legs of its own. " Murray," however, did not satisfy us at Avignon, being by no means so interesting as the old Sacristain who went with us over the Cathedral, and gave us a sketch of its history, which we were all inclined to believe on the principle of the Italian proverb -- " Se non e vero e ben trovato." Instead of admitting that architects and antiquaries might be puzzled as to the date of the building, and stating that the porch might have formed part of the Temple ofHercules -- but then it might not -- he asserted, with the dogmatism so pleasant to the unlearned, that we might look upon the west end as belonging to the fourth century; that the Saracens had destroyed a large portion of the edifice, and that it had been rebuilt by Charlemagne; and one assertion being just as probable as another, we accepted his word, and regarded the old walls with the reverence and admiration due both to their inassiveness and their antiquity. But ...« less