tired to Verona, and maintained
a struggle against the crusade for nearly two years longer, with a
courage which never failed him. Wounded and taken prisoner, the soldiers
of the victorious army gathered about him, and heaped insult and
reproach upon him; and one furious peasant, whose brother's feet had
been cut off by Ecelino's command, dealt the helpless monster four blows
upon the head with a scythe. By some, Ecelino is said to have died of
these wounds alone; but by others it is related that his death was a
kind of suicide, inasmuch as he himself put the case past surgery by
tearing off the bandages from his hurts, and refusing all medicines.

II.

Entering at the enchanted portal of the Villa P----, we found ourselves
in a realm of wonder. It was our misfortune not to see the magician who
compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but for that very reason,
perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his greatness. Everywhere we
beheld the evidences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy, which
everywhere tended to a monumental and mortuary effect. A sort of
vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped and glimmered the
garden. The walls of the vestibule were covered with inscriptions
setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety of all ages
concerning life and death; we began with Confucius, and we ended with
Benjamino Franklino. But as if these ideas of mortality were not
sufficiently depressing, the funereal Signor P----had collected into
earthern _amphorae_ the ashes of the most famous men of ancient and
modern times, and arranged them so that a sense of their number and
variety should at once strike his visitor. Each jar was conspicuously
labelled with the name its illustrious dust had borne in life; and if
one escaped with comparative cheerfulness from the thought that Seneca
had died, there were in the very next pot the cinders of Napoleon to
bully him back to a sense of his mortality.

We were glad to have the gloomy fascination of these objects broken by
the custodian, who approached to ask if we wished to see the prisons of
Ecelino, and we willingly followed him into the rain out of our
sepulchral shelter.

Between the vestibule and the towers of the tyrant lay that garden
already mentioned, and our guide led us through ranks of weeping
statuary, and rainy bowers, and showery lanes of shrubbery, until we
reached the door of his cottage. While he entered to fetch the key to
the priso