veneration. It has the
fineness of modelling combined with shapeliness of form and smallness of
scale which is said to have characterised Mozart and Shelley.

The impression left upon the mind after traversing this palace in its
length and breadth is one of weariness and disappointment. How shall we
reconstruct the long-past life which filled its rooms with sound, the
splendour of its pageants, the thrill of tragedies enacted here? It is
not difficult to crowd its doors and vacant spaces with liveried
servants, slim pages in tight hose, whose well-combed hair escapes from
tiny caps upon their silken shoulders. We may even replace the
tapestries of Troy which hung one hall, and build again the sideboards
with their embossed gilded plate. But are these chambers really those
where Emilia Pia held debate on love with Bembo and Castiglione; where
Bibbiena's witticisms and Fra Serafino's pranks raised smiles on courtly
lips; where Bernardo Accolti, "the Unique," declaimed his verses to
applauding crowds? Is it possible that into yonder hall, where now the
lion of S. Mark looks down alone on staring desolation, strode the
Borgia in all his panoply of war, a gilded glittering dragon, and from
the dais tore the Montefeltri's throne, and from the arras stripped
their ensigns, replacing these with his own Bull and Valentinus Dux?
Here Tasso tuned his lyre for Francesco Maria's wedding-feast, and read
"Aminta" to Lucrezia d'Este. Here Guidobaldo listened to the jests and
whispered scandals of the Aretine. Here Titian set his easel up to
paint; here the boy Raphael, cap in hand, took signed and sealed
credentials from his Duchess to the Gonfalonier of Florence. Somewhere
in these huge chambers, the courtiers sat before a torch-lit stage, when
Bibbiena's "Calandria" and Castiglione's "Tirsi," with their miracles of
masques and mummers, whiled the night away. Somewhere, we know not
where, Giuliano de' Medici made love in these bare rooms to that
mysterious mother of ill-fated Cardinal Ippolito; somewhere, in some
darker nook, the bastard Alessandro sprang to his strange-fortuned life
of tyranny and license, which Brutus-Lorenzino cut short with a
traitor's poignard-thrust in Via Larga. How many men, illustrious for
arts and letters, memorable by their virtues or their crimes, have trod
these silent corridors, from the great Pope Julius down to James III.,
self-titled King of England, who tarried here with Clementina Sobieski
through s