It depends here altogether upon the freshness or mustiness of the reader’s historical reading whether he cares to be reminded more particularly who Ecelino was.  He flourished balefully in the early half of the thirteenth century as lord of Vicenza, Verona, Padua, and Brescia, and was defeated and hurt to death in an attempt to possess himself of Milan.  He was in every respect a remarkable man for that time,—­fearless, abstemious, continent, avaricious, hardy, and unspeakably ambitious and cruel.  He survived and suppressed innumerable conspiracies, escaping even the thrust of the assassin whom the fame of his enormous wickedness had caused the Old Man of the Mountain to send against him.  As lord of Padua he was more incredibly severe and bloody in his rule than as lord of the other cities, for the Paduans had been latest free, and conspired the most frequently against him.  He extirpated whole families on suspicion that a single member had been concerned in a meditated revolt.  Little children and helpless women suffered hideous mutilation and shame at his hands.  Six prisons in Padua were constantly filled by his arrests.  The whole country was traversed by witnesses of his cruelties,—­men and women deprived of an arm or leg, and begging from door to door.  He had long been excommunicated; at last the Church proclaimed a crusade against him, and his lieutenant and nephew—­more demoniacal, if possible, than himself—­was driven out of Padua while he was operating against Mantua.  Ecelino retired to Verona, and maintained a struggle against the crusade for nearly two years longer, with a courage which never failed him.  Wounded and taken prisoner, the soldiers of the victorious army gathered about him, and heaped insult and reproach upon him; and one furious peasant, whose brother’s feet had been cut off by Ecelino’s command, dealt the helpless monster four blows upon the head with a scythe.  By some, Ecelino is said to have died of these wounds alone; but by others it is related that his death was a kind of suicide, inasmuch as he himself put the case past surgery by tearing off the bandages from his hurts, and refusing all medicines.

II.

Entering at the enchanted portal of the Villa P——­, we found ourselves in a realm of wonder.  It was our misfortune not to see the magician who compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his greatness.  Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy, which everywhere tended to a monumental and mortuary effect.  A sort of vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped and glimmered the garden.  The walls of the vestibule were covered with inscriptions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety of all ages concerning life and death; we began with Confucius, and we ended with Benjamino Franklino.  But as if these ideas of mortality were not sufficiently