tern side of the Court is a series of smaller rooms, containing
further pictures and furnishings. Owing to the smallness of these
rooms, their darkness, and the fact that visitors can only pass
straight through them from door to door, close inspection of the
pictures is not easy. Along the whole length of the southern side of
the Fountain Court is the King's Gallery or Great Council Chamber--a
magnificent room in which used to hang the Raphael Cartoons now at
South Kensington. The room was, indeed, designed by Sir Christopher
Wren as a setting for those famous pictures; and the walls are now
covered by reproductions of them in tapestry. On the west side of the
Court is the Communication Gallery leading to the Queen's Great
Staircase, and it is worthy of note that from the last of the State
Rooms the visitor should carry away impressions of one of the most
splendid of Hampton Court's many splendid art treasures. Along the
wall here are the nine large tempera pictures by Mantegna--"one of the
chief heroes in the advance of painting in Italy"--in which are
represented "The Triumph of Caesar". Says Mr. William Michael Rossetti,
"these superbly invented and designed compositions, gorgeous with all
splendour of subject-matter and accessory, and with the classical
learning and enthusiasm of one of the master spirits of the age, have
always been accounted of the first rank among Mantegna's works".
Though in part restored, these paintings, by an artist who died more
than four hundred years ago, are full of interest for their vivid
presentation of a rich imagination of a great historical event. In
front of the victor--in the last of this series of paintings--is borne
a device bearing his famous words "Veni, Vidi, Vici"--and it is
worthy of recollection that one tradition places the scene of Julius
Caesar's final victory over the Britons at Kingston, not far from where
this splendid delineation of his triumphal pageant on his return to
Rome has hung for close upon three centuries. Though it is a fine
final memory to bring away from the rooms, it is perhaps to be
regretted that this series of paintings is in the last of the
galleries through which we pass; for, as I have learned from various
visitors--after going through more than a couple of dozen rooms and
galleries, housing about a thousand pictures, and tapestries besides
other articles of interest--the eye has become wearied and the mind
overcharged with an embarrassment of ric