copies of Raphael’s cartoons, woven at Mantua in the fifteenth century, are certainly worthy of wonder); and they expressed the proper amazement at the miracles of art which caused figures frescoed in the ceilings to turn with them, and follow and face them from whatever part of the room they chose to look.  Nay, they even enjoyed the Hall of the Rivers, on the sides of which the usual river-gods were painted, in the company of the usual pottery, from which they pour their founts, and at the end of which there was an abominable little grotto of what people call, in modern landscape-gardening, rock-work, out of the despair with which its unmeaning ugliness fills them.  There were busts of several Mantuan duchesses in the gallery, which were interesting, and the pictures were so bad as to molest no one.  There was, besides all this, a hanging garden in this small Babylon, on which the travellers looked with a doleful regret that they were no longer of the age when a hanging garden would have brought supreme comfort to the soul.  It occupied a spacious oblong, had a fountain and statues, trees and flowers, and would certainly have been taken for the surface of the earth, had not the Custode proudly pointed out that it was on a level with the second floor, on which they stood.

After that they wandered through a series of unused, dismantled apartments and halls, melancholy with faded fresco, dropping stucco, and mutilated statues of plaster, and came at last upon a balcony overlooking the Cavallerizza, which one of the early dukes built after a design by the inevitable Giulio Romano.  It is a large square, and was meant for the diversion of riding on horseback.  Balconies go all found it between those thick columns, finely twisted, as we see them in that cartoon of Raphael, “The Healing of the Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple”; and here once stood the jolly dukes and the jolly ladies of their light-hearted court, and there below rode the gay, insolent, intriguing courtiers, and outside groaned the city under the heavy extortions of the tax-gatherers.  It is all in weather-worn stucco, and the handsome square is planted with trees.  The turf was now cut and carved by the heavy wheels of the Austrian baggage-wagons constantly passing through the court to carry munitions to the fortress outside, whose black guns grimly overlook the dead lagoon.  A sense of desolation had crept over the sight-seers, with that strange sickness of heart which one feels in the presence of ruin not to be lamented, and which deepened into actual pain as the Custode clapped his hands and the echo buffeted itself against the forlorn stucco, and up from the trees rose a score of sullen, slumberous owls, and flapped heavily across the lonesome air with melancholy cries.  It only needed, to crush these poor strangers, that final touch which the Custode gave, as they passed from the palace through the hall in which are painted the Gonzagas, and in which he pointed out the last Duke of Mantua, saying he was deposed by the Emperor for felony, and somehow conveying the idea of horse-stealing and counterfeiting on the part of his Grace.