As for the palace of Tiberius, which we had come go far and so toilsomely to see, it must be confessed there was very little left of it.  When that well-meaning but mistaken prince died, the Senate demolished his pleasure-houses at Capri, and left only those fragments of the beautiful brick masonry which yet remain, clinging indestructible to the rocks, and strewing the ground with rubbish.  The recent excavations have discovered nothing besides the uninteresting foundations of the building, except a subterranean avenue leading from one part of the palace to another:  this is walled with delicate brickwork, and exquisitely paved with white marble mosaic; and this was all that witnessed of the splendor of the wicked emperor.  Nature, the all-forgetting, all-forgiving, that takes the red battle-field into her arms and hides it with blossom and harvest, could not remember his iniquity, greater than the multitudinous murder of war.  The sea, which the despot’s lust and fear had made so lonely, slept with the white sails of boats secure upon its breast; the little bays and inlets, the rocky clefts and woody dells, had forgotten their desecration; and the gathering twilight, the sweetness of the garden-bordered pathway, and the serenity of the lonely landscape, helped us to doubt history.

We slowly returned to the inn by the road we had ascended, noting again the mansion of the surprising Englishman who had come to Capri for three months and had remained thirty years; passed through the darkness of the village,—­dropped here and there with the vivid red of a lamp,—­and so reached the inn at last, where we found the landlord ready to have the Tarantella danced for us.  We framed a discreeter fiction than that prepared for us by the patriarch, and went in to dinner, where there were two Danish gentlemen in dispute with as many rogues of boatmen, who, having contracted to take them back that night to Naples, were now trying to fly their bargain and remain at Capri till the morrow.  The Danes beat them, however, and then sat down to dinner, and to long stories of the imposture and villany of the Italians.  One of them chiefly bewailed himself that the day before, having unwisely eaten a dozen oysters without agreeing first with the oyster-man upon the price, he had been obliged to pay this scamp’s extortionate demand to the full, since he was unable to restore him his property.  We thought that something like this might have happened to an imprudent man in any country, but we did not the less join him in abusing the Italians—­the purpose for which foreigners chiefly visit Italy.

II.