ough
I think it a sport in which he would himself have liked to join. The
only human creatures with whom he seemed to be in sympathy were the
brigands of the main-land, of whom he spoke poetically as exiles and
fugitives.

As for the palace of Tiberius, which we had come go far and so
toilsomely to see, it must be confessed there was very little left
of it. When that well-meaning but mistaken prince died, the Senate
demolished his pleasure-houses at Capri, and left only those
fragments of the beautiful brick masonry which yet remain, clinging
indestructible to the rocks, and strewing the ground with rubbish. The
recent excavations have discovered nothing besides the uninteresting
foundations of the building, except a subterranean avenue leading
from one part of the palace to another: this is walled with delicate
brickwork, and exquisitely paved with white marble mosaic; and this
was all that witnessed of the splendor of the wicked emperor. Nature,
the all-forgetting, all-forgiving, that takes the red battle-field
into her arms and hides it with blossom and harvest, could not
remember his iniquity, greater than the multitudinous murder of war.
The sea, which the despot's lust and fear had made so lonely, slept
with the white sails of boats secure upon its breast; the little bays
and inlets, the rocky clefts and woody dells, had forgotten their
desecration; and the gathering twilight, the sweetness of the
garden-bordered pathway, and the serenity of the lonely landscape,
helped us to doubt history.

We slowly returned to the inn by the road we had ascended, noting
again the mansion of the surprising Englishman who had come to Capri
for three months and had remained thirty years; passed through the
darkness of the village,--dropped here and there with the vivid red of
a lamp,--and so reached the inn at last, where we found the landlord
ready to have the Tarantella danced for us. We framed a discreeter
fiction than that prepared for us by the patriarch, and went in to
dinner, where there were two Danish gentlemen in dispute with as many
rogues of boatmen, who, having contracted to take them back that night
to Naples, were now trying to fly their bargain and remain at Capri
till the morrow. The Danes beat them, however, and then sat down
to dinner, and to long stories of the imposture and villany of the
Italians. One of them chiefly bewailed himself that the day before,
having unwisely eaten a dozen oysters without agreei