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 fountained 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. Our author is, as usual,
terribly severe on the Italian government for some wrong done the villa,
I could not well make out what. But it seems to involve the present
disposition of the Etruscan antiquities in the upper rooms of the
casino, where these, the most precious witnesses of that rather
inarticulate civilization, must in any arrangement exhaust the most
instructed interest. Just when the amateur archaeologist, however, is
sinking under his learning, the custodian opens a window and lets him
look out on a beautiful hill beyond certain gardens, where a bird is
singing angelically. I suppose it is the same bird which sings all
through these papers, and I am sorry I do not know its name. But we will
call it a blackcap: blackcap has a sweet, saucy sound like its own note,
and is the pretty translation of _caponero,_ a name which the bird might
gladly know itself by.

[Illustration: 30 CASINO OF THE VILLA DORIA AND GARDENS]

Villa Papa Giulio is but a little place compared with something on the
scale of the Villa Pamfili Doria though from its casino it has a ch