leaving a sinister and naked shell.
Remembrance can but summon up the crimes, the madness, the trivialities
of those dead palace-builders. An atmosphere of evil clings to the
dilapidated walls, as though the tainted spirit of the infamous Pier
Luigi still possessed the spot, on which his toadstool brood of
princelings sprouted in the mud of their misdeeds. Enclosed in this huge
labyrinth of brickwork is the relic of which I spoke. It is the once
world-famous Teatro Farnese, raised in the year 1618 by Ranunzio
Farnese for the marriage of Odoardo Farnese with Margaret of Austria.
Giambattista Aleotti, a native of pageant-loving Ferrara, traced the
stately curves and noble orders of the galleries, designed the columns
that support the raftered roof, marked out the orchestra, arranged the
stage, and breathed into the whole the spirit of Palladio's most heroic
neo-Latin style. Vast, built of wood, dishevelled, with broken statues
and blurred coats-of-arms, with its empty scene, its uncurling frescos,
its hangings all in rags, its cobwebs of two centuries, its dust and
mildew and discolored gold--this theatre, a sham in its best days, and
now that ugliest of things, a sham unmasked and naked to the light of
day, is yet sublime, because of its proportioned harmony, because of its
grand Roman manner. The sight and feeling of it fasten upon the mind and
abide in the memory like a nightmare--like one of Piranesi's weirdest
and most passion-haunted etchings for the _Carceri_. Idling there at
noon in the twilight of the dust-bedarkened windows, we fill the tiers
of those high galleries with ladies, the space below with grooms and
pages; the stage is ablaze with torches, and an Italian Masque, such as
our Marlowe dreamed of, fills the scene. But it is impossible to dower
these fancies with even such life as in healthier, happier ruins
phantasy may lend to imagination's figments. This theatre is like a
maniac's skull, empty of all but unrealities and mockeries of things
that are. The ghosts we raise here could never have been living men and
women: _questi sciaurati non fur mai vivi_. So clinging is the sense of
instability that appertains to every fragment of that dry-rot tyranny
which seized by evil fortune in the sunset of her golden day on Italy.

In this theatre I mused one morning after visiting Fornovo; and the
thoughts suggested by the battlefield found their proper atmosphere in
the dilapidated place. What, indeed, is the Tea