forest.  To the left, as one stands at the garden-front of the house, looking toward the lake, are the hills in the midst of which the Lake of Lugano nestles, and on the right, beyond the Lago Maggiore, is a view of Monte Rosa with its eternal snows, perhaps the finest to be found anywhere.  I have seen Monte Rosa and its chain very finely from the top of the pass called the Col di Tenda, between Turin and Nice, but I think the view from the terrace in front of this house is finer.  Immediately at the back of the house we have the hills—­mountains they would be called in any other part of Europe—­of which Monte Generoso, now covered with snow, though with a hotel on the top, is the most conspicuous.  The country more immediately around us is a district of rolling hills, partly vineyard, but in a larger degree wooded, and here and there diversified by the well-cared-for gardens of some large villa.  Our outlook, it will be admitted, is pleasant enough.  The house I am speaking of, now known under the style and title of the “Excelsior Hotel,” was recently a magnificent villa of the Morosini family at Venice.  The name will not be new to any who have visited Venice; for the traveler, even if his tastes did not lead him to take any heed of such matters, will not have been allowed by the ciceroni to overlook the tombs of the doges of that family in the grand old church of the beheaded Saint John, San Giovanni decollata, or “San Zuan Degola,” as the soft-lisping Venetians call it.  Yes, the Morosini were very great men in their day:  more than one of the brightest chapters in the history of the great republic on the Adriatic is filled with their name.  But now their place knows them no more:  the family is extinct.  The last scion of the race, an old lady who died quite recently at Varese, is said to have declared that it was time for a Morosini to retire from the scene when their house was about to be turned into an inn.  Poor old lady!  One could have wished that she had vanished before that desecration had been threatened, especially as her end was so near at hand; for it would, I fear, have been too much to wish that the Excelsior Hotel should have been kept out of existence for another generation.

The Morosini had palaces among the most splendid of that city of palaces, Venice, as may be seen to the present day.  But this Varese villa was their place of delight and enjoyment.  And truly the ideas which we generally attach to the word “villa” are scarcely represented by the magnificent building to which the public are now indiscriminately invited.  It is an enormous pile of building, the vast garden-frontage of which makes considerable claims to architectural magnificence.  There are, especially in Switzerland, very magnificent and palace-like hotels which have been built for the purpose they now serve, but the fact that they were so built has very effectually prevented even the most splendid among them from rivaling, or indeed approaching, the grandiose magnificence