The Less Passionate Murray Says Merely That "A Large Slice Of This Garden Was Cut Off To Widen The River For The Tiber Embankment," And Let Us Hope That It Was No Worse.

I suppose we must have seen the villa in its glory when we went, in 1864, to see the Raphael frescos in the casino there, but in the touching melancholy of the wasted and neglected grounds we easily accepted the present as an image of the past.

For all we remembered, the weed-grown, green-mossed gravel-paths of the sort of bewildered garden that remained, with its quenched fountain, its vases of dead or dying plants, and its dishevelled shrubbery, were what had always been; and it was of such a charm that we were gratefully content with it. The truth is, one cannot do much with beauty in perfect repair; the splendor that belongs to somebody else, unless it belongs also to everybody else, wounds one's vulgar pride and inspires envious doubts of the owner's rightful possession. But when the blight of ruin has fallen upon it, when dilapidation and disintegration have begun their work of atonement and exculpation, then our hearts melt in compassion of the waning magnificence and in a soft pity for the expropriated possessor, to whom we attribute every fine and endearing quality. It is this which makes us such friends of the past and such critics of the present, and enables us to enjoy the adversity of others without a pang of the jealousy which their prosperity excites.

There was much to please a somewhat peculiar taste in our visit to the Farnesina. The gateman, being an Italian official, had not been at the gate when we arrived, but came running and smiling from his gossip with the door-keeper of the casino, and this was a good deal in itself; but the door-keeper, amiably obese, was better still in her acceptance of the joke with which the hand-mirror for the easier study of the roof frescos was accepted. "It is more convenient," she suggested, and at the counter-suggestion, "Yes, especially for people with short necks," she shook with gelatinous laughter, and burst into the generous cry, "Oh, how delightful!" Perhaps this was because she, too, had experienced the advantage of perusing the frescos in the hand-mirror's reversal. At any rate, she would not be satisfied till she had returned a Roland for that easy Oliver. Her chance came in showing a Rubens in one of the rooms, with the master's usual assortment of billowy beauties, when she could say - and she ought to have known - that they had eaten too much macaroni. It was not much of a joke; but one hears so few jokes in Rome.

Do I linger in this study of simple character because I feel myself unequal to the ecstasies which the frescos of Raphael and his school in that pleasure dome demanded of me? Something like that, I suppose, but I do not pride myself on my inability.

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