Tame, Yes, We May Now Safely Declare Canova To Have Been, But Sane We Must Allow; And We Must Never

Forget that he has been the inspiration in modern sculpture of the eternal Greek truth of repose from which the

Art had so wildly wandered, He, more than any other, stayed it in the mad career on which Michelangelo, however remotely, had started it; and we owe it to him that the best marbles now no longer strut or swagger or bully.

It was by one of those accidents which are the best fortunes of travel that I visited the Villa Papa Giulio, when I thought I was merely going to the Piazza del Popolo, to which one cannot go too often. A chance look at my guide-book beguiled me with the notion that the villa was just outside the gate; but it was a deceit which I should be glad to have practised on me every February 17th of my life. If the villa was farther off than I thought, the way to it lay for a while through a tramwayed suburban street delightfully encumbered with wide-horned oxen drawing heavy wagon-loads of grain, donkeys pulling carts laden with vegetables, and children and hens and dogs playing their several parts in a perspective through which one would like to continue indefinitely. But after awhile a dim, cool, curving lane leaves this street and irresistibly invites your cab to follow it; and sooner than you could ask you get to the villa gate. There a gatekeeper tacitly wonders at your arriving before he is well awake, and will keep you a good five minutes while he parleys with another custodian before he can bring himself to sell you a ticket and let you into the beautiful, old, orange-gray cloistered court, where there is a young architect with the T-square of his calling sketching some point of it, and a gardener gently hacking off from the parent stems such palm-leaves as have survived their usefulness. Beyond is the famous foun-tained court, and a classic temple to the right, and other structures responsive to the impulses of the good Pope Julius III., who was never tired of adding to this pleasure palace of his. It was his favorite resort, with all his court, from the Vatican, and his favorite amusement in it was the somewhat academic diversion of proverbs, which Ranke says sometimes "mingled blushes with the smiles of his guests."

Lest the reader should think I have gone direct to Ranke for this knowledge, I will own that I got it at second-hand out of Hare's _Walks in Rome,_ where he tells us also that the pope used to come to his villa every day by water, and that "the richly decorated barge, filled with venerable ecclesiastics, gliding through the osier-fringed banks of the Tiber, . . . would make a fine subject for a picture." No doubt, and if I owned such a picture I would lose no time in public-spiritedly bestowing it on the first needy gallery.

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