marble, mellowed by age, which he saw beyond the gates, was indeed
but the exquisite [19] fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa.
Two centuries of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the
mosses which lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles. Here and
there the marble plates had slipped from their places, where the
delicate weeds had forced their way. The graceful wildness which
prevailed in garden and farm gave place to a singular nicety about
the actual habitation, and a still more scrupulous sweetness and
order reigned within. The old Roman architects seem to have well
understood the decorative value of the floor--the real economy there
was, in the production of rich interior effect, of a somewhat lavish
expenditure upon the surface they trod on. The pavement of the hall
had lost something of its evenness; but, though a little rough to the
foot, polished and cared for like a piece of silver, looked, as
mosaic-work is apt to do, its best in old age. Most noticeable among
the ancestral masks, each in its little cedarn chest below the
cornice, was that of the wasteful but elegant Marcellus, with the
quaint resemblance in its yellow waxen features to Marius, just then
so full of animation and country colour. A chamber, curved
ingeniously into oval form, which he had added to the mansion, still
contained his collection of works of art; above all, that head of
Medusa, for which the villa was famous. The spoilers of one of the
old Greek towns on the coast had flung away or lost the [20] thing,
as it seemed, in some rapid flight across the river below, from the
sands of which it was drawn up in a fisherman's net, with the fine
golden laminae still clinging here and there to the bronze. It was
Marcellus also who had contrived the prospect-tower of two storeys
with the white pigeon-house above, so characteristic of the place.
The little glazed windows in the uppermost chamber framed each its
dainty landscape--the pallid crags of Carrara, like wildly twisted