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