than a whole region, a town-in-country, with palace, temples, circus, theatres, baths amidst a tract of garden and pleasure-ground ten miles in circumference.  Even when one is familiar with the enormous height and bulk of the Coliseum or the Baths of Caracalla, the extent of the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa is overwhelming.  Numerous fragments are still standing, graceful and elegant, but a vast many more are buried deep under turf and violets and fern:  large cypresses and ilexes have struck root among their stones, and they form artificial hills and vales and great wide plateaus covered with herbage and shrubbery, hardly to be distinguished from the natural accidents of the land.  The solitude is as immense as the space.  After leaving our carriage we wandered about for hours, sometimes lying in the sunshine at the edge of a great grassy terrace which commands the Campagna and the Agro Romano—­beyond whose limits we had come—­to where, like a little bell, St. Peter’s dome hung faint and blue upon the horizon; sometimes exploring the innumerable porticoes and galleries, and replacing in fancy the Venus de Medici, the Dancing Faun, and all the other shapes of beauty which once occupied these ravished pedestals and niches; sometimes rambling about the flowery fields, and up and down among the hillocks and dells, meeting no one, until at length, when completely bewildered and lost, we fell in with a rustic belonging to the estate, who guided us back.  We left the place with the sense of having been in a separate realm, another country, belonging to another age.  The whole of that visit to Tivoli was like a dream.  The sun was sinking when we left the precincts of the villa, and twilight stole upon us, wrapping all the landscape on which we looked back in softer folds of shade, and resolving its features into large, calm masses, as the horses labored up the narrow, stony road into a mysterious wood of gigantic olives, gnarled, twisted and rent as no other tree could be and live.  The scene was wild and weird in the dying light, and it grew almost savage as we wound upward among the robber-haunted hills.  Night had fallen before we reached the mountain-town.  Our coachman dashed through the dark slits of streets, where it seemed as if our wheels must strike the houses on each side, cracking his whip and jingling the bells of the harness.  Under black archways sat groups of peasants, their swart visages lit up from below by the glow of a brazier, while a flaring torch stuck through a ring overhead threw fierce lights and shadows across the scene.  Sharp cries and shouts like maledictions rose as we passed, and as we turned into the little square on which the inn stands we wondered in what sort of den we should have to lodge.  We followed our host of the little Albergo della Regnia up the steep stone staircase with many misgivings:  he flung open a door, and we beheld a carpeted room, all furnished and hung with pink chintz covered with cupids and garlands.  There were sofas, low arm-chairs, a writing-table with appurtenances, a tea-table with snowy linen and a hissing brass tea-kettle.  Opening from this were two little white nests of bed-rooms, with tin bath-tubs and an abundance of towels.  We could not believe our eyes:  here were English comfort and French taste.  Were we in May Fair or the Rue de Rivoli?  Or was it a fairy-tale?